He decided to look in a window. He put his fingers to the glass on either side of his face. It was not so much being able to see a little into the darkness, finally, as it was the sense of her eyes coalescing somewhere in that interior. He lifted a hand to wave and the eyes moved away. He knew she was at the door. When it opened, she said, “My old flame,” in that deep voice from which laughter was never absent, even, apparently, in very hard times. At that moment Lucien was once again her suitor of all those years ago, probably as out of the question now as he was then, but as gripped as ever.
Her great dark looks had perhaps improved, especially to someone like Lucien, who liked crow’s-feet in women almost above all other features. She was wearing house-painter’s pants and a cowboy shirt with the tails out, and she was barefoot: she’d just gotten up. And how was Lucien different? He guessed he was losing a certain unreplenishable moisture. He went squirrelly after drink number 3 and resorted, in public places, to making a mark on his hand for each one; he never went out without a ballpoint pen. His craving for sport had become less a sign of buoyant youth than of crankiness and approaching middle age. In the nature documentaries that appeared on TV, he identified with the solitary and knowledgeable male, whether baboon or penguin; and this foolishness represented the same gap of wishful thinking that had plagued him all his life.
Emily’s greatest change, obviously, was that she was under indictment for murder. As she opened the door for Lucien, he had the extraordinary sense that her eyes were somehow focused on his entrance while her thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Then she stared down at the dog, who backed about looking for a spot to sit: nothing seemed quite right to her, and she stood crookedly next to the luggage. The luggage consisted of two tan bags from a broken set of smart luggage. When he’d been in foreign service, Lucien felt that luggage better identified the traveler than his own body.
“I’m, in effect, all alone here,” said Emily by way of laying down her requirements. “There is the hired fellow. He’s very nice and I don’t treat him as a servant. Beyond that, he knows his limits. However, the feeling that I am living by myself is something I absolutely have to have right now.” She was staring into Lucien’s face and he was getting uncomfortable. He’d gone unchallenged for too long.
“Are you sure it’s all right if I stay?”
“I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise. Besides, I obviously owe you one.”
“Not at all, I—”
“Of course I owe you one. Let’s not begin with baby talk.”
Emily showed Lucien his room upstairs, and with mutual awkwardness they ferried his belongings there. He was briefed on the food, water and towel supply, and left to his own devices. Before going to the window, Lucien transferred his clothes into the dresser, stuck his Dopp kit on top and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Then he went to the window, where the feeling of cold mountain was in the light.
Lucien could see the trail and the gate the hired man had used from up here. There was an abbreviated bench of pastureland through which a creek threaded incandescent against wild grass. Then beyond were the Crazy Mountains.
Emily was moving around downstairs. Lucien kind of tracked her at that as he tried to figure how the curiously separated range of mountains was attached to the earth. The heights of snow and light-relaying stone tied the range to sky as much as to ground. Anyway, he couldn’t see how it was done, and he set his easel up without much hope, still hearing Emily’s footfalls. At a certain age, seeing something is quite enough; breaking down those mysteries on another surface can be tiresome. Still, it seemed that trifling with paint was important.
Possibly Lucien’s eyes would open to the stony hills, the sage flats that sparkled in the morning, the thousand skies of a fall in the Crazies, once he learned why she had killed her husband. Lucien knew that he had to take a broader view than that she was single again.
He went down to the garden. It was a well-tended spot with leggy, hopeless corn and the broad leaves of squash making a tremendous effort to yield a few miserable babies. It was too far north.
Lucien didn’t see anyone moving around the yard, and there was no one on the porch or in the downstairs of the house. He was able to get his dog up to his room without using the suitcase technique he used at the hotels. She curled up under the bed and flattened her soft flews upon crossed paws. She understood this gambit instinctively. Lucien knew that in a pinch, she could handle the hunchback stunt with the overcoat.
Lucien got back upstairs just in time, because once again Emily called him from the bottom of the stairs. When he jogged down, she said, “Come outside.” Lucien went. Tied to the big cottonwood was a buckskin horse. “That’s for you to use. His name is Buck and he needs shoes.” The yard darkened in passing clouds, and Lucien saw the old buildings for the first time.
“The tack is in the partitioned half of the chicken house. Use my husband’s saddle.”
“I’m not going to try to paint today,” Lucien said.
“Nobody expects you to!” A cruel, merry laugh followed her words, cause for thought.
Immediately Lucien began seeing the surface of the ground and the ranch buildings. Then the Crazies seemed to ignite upon the gloomy sky, something he had set off with his own fuse. But it wasn’t quite enough. It had been only a month since he left Suzanne and James. He was still immobilized. He really wanted to paint because since boyhood he had associated it with peace and wholeness. In the Crazies the land stuck out in every possible way, and there was not much water visible. And rock. Lucien was really up against it; but Emily needed his help. It was all-important to preserve this sense of mission.
Lucien used to shoe his own saddle horses when he was a kid and could do it all day. Now he was merely neat, though the horse ended up standing square to the world and Lucien didn’t swallow the nails. Buck’s hoofs were the same color as the bottom of the draw Lucien could see from the bedroom and had transverse grooves under the coronal band that looked like the watercourses just below the snow line on the mountains. He had a good light source to shoe by and he was out of the wind. There were no flies.
Lucien saddled Buck and let him stand because he was cinchy and humped his back up. Then he climbed on and jogged him down the road, picked up the newspaper and came straight back up the creek bottom, right in the water, kind of floundering on the slippery rocks, approaching pools where trout fed on the projectile-clumsy grasshoppers. It was an old publicity stunt of the dude ranches to fly-fish on horseback for gullible mountain trout, a trick that had not lost its savor for Lucien; and he decided to bring some tackle for his next ride. Now he could look out through the tall wild prairie grasses on the stream bank and start to lose his sense of irony.
The telescope was on the kitchen table, secure in its tripod. It was early evening, and Emily and Lucien had their heads close together as they took turns looking at the wild goats crossing the granite ledge in the trembling mystery of magnification. There were five of them, and they moved in cautious flickers, dining on lichen and moss that only they could see. Their white was the purest opulent white, a yield from the surrounding mountains more absolute than an ounce of gold from a half million tons of gravel. One of the males stopped and looked into the deep vitreous lens, and his horns were fine and black as thorns.