“There’s no room for non-essential items,” she said and turned back toward the kitchen.
“Cubby’s not a non-sential item,” my son said to her back and my front, “he’s a bear.”
“No Cubby.”
He stormed away, passing in the hall his sister carrying a collapsing dollhouse.
“No.”
This went on.
“No.”
“Non-essential.”
All this while my wife was gathering food together. Silence is a clue that either too little or too much is being done. She’d packed two baskets and a chest, all waiting for me to carry them to the raft. I lifted a basket, groaned, and felt the muscles of my face tighten.
“What do you have in here?”
“Food.”
“Are they all so heavy?”
“Probably.”
“Do we really need so much?”
“You tell me. You’re the flood authority.”
The magic was wearing thin. Well, I understood the station to lack permanence. Soon I would again be reduced to husband-father status.
“I’m not sure the raft can hold all of this.”
She hurled a can of tomato soup into the sink, then braced herself against the counter. “Then you do it. You do it.”
“I’m not being critical.”
She began to sob. I went to her, turned her around and embraced her. The children appeared and observed from the doorway. The gravity of it all was settling in.
Still, it seemed clear that we must set out. I looked at the packed baskets. We would need all of this food. A fact occurred to me which I would not mention to my family. Almost certainly, we would be unable to find our way home once sight of it was lost.
Our house looked so welcoming there on its little island. We waved to it like morons as we floated farther away. A silence came over us, the silence I usually associated with my being the focus of anger. Somehow I had become the responsible party. The flood was my fault. I seemed unafraid, so it must have been my doing. I said—
“You know, all of this is beyond my control.”
No reply.
“I’m as scared as any of you.”
Nothing.
I paddled us onward. Looking down, we could see our town through scattered debris. There was Turk’s Garage, Marietta Karper’s house, the 7-11. I think we were all expecting at any moment to come upon a floating cadaver, but we did not. We did find a good-sized rowboat manned by a large, mongrel dog. The animal seemed happy to see us, anyone. The children were delighted to see him. I, however, saw him readily as just another mouth to feed and a fairly unreliable witness to the things he had seen. Finally, the trade seemed fair, food for the sharing of his larger, more sturdy craft.
The presence of the dog did lift my family’s spirits. Being licked in the face does this. Of course, one thing was certain; if there were any fleas anywhere, they were here.
Now, instead of paddling, I rowed. My family and the dog basked in the warm sun.
I stopped rowing and studied the sleeping faces. When the kids awakened they would name this dog Noah. I’d no doubt of this. My wife would make pimento cheese sandwiches for us and we would eat them and wash them down with Cola from a two-liter bottle. We had no cups. The speck on the horizon that was our house was now gone. I was not even sure in which direction I had last seen it. I took the oars again. I would row until they were awake and the sandwiches were made. After the meal, I would row some more. The flood had made everything quite simple. I would row until I was too weak to continue. We would eat until there was no more food. We would find land and perhaps people or we would die.
My wife’s eyes opened and she looked at me calmly. “How could such a thing happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What has happened?” She sat up and gazed at the water.
“It rained real hard.”
A Good Home for Hachita
Vista. It was a view that could make you not just pause, but set up house. So thought Evan Keeler as he craned to observe more clearly the Rio Grande Gorge snaking across the plateau below, carved deeply and cleanly through earth and the ages. His eyes moved to the ochre hills, their shadows creeping in on them, as he began the roll down the other side of the mountains toward Taos.
He’d stayed in Santa Fe longer than he’d have liked, haggling over prices with a couple of gallery people. He had little to say about art peddlers that was good, except that they kept a bit of money in his pockets. In fact, he wasn’t doing so badly. His prints were popular. His canvases found homes. But he hated dealing with the owners and managers of galleries. Nor was he crazy about the kinds of people who bought his works or any work for that matter. It was unfortunate that those coughing up dollars for his paintings were wheeling and dealing, trading and bickering, anticipating in the high grass anticipating his death and a jump in the value of his signature. He liked the infrequent shows. He’d perch off in corners and watch children study his paintings, watch those with no money summon a friend to share a look, a feeling, a bit of something, anything, breathing easily or hurriedly, maybe smiling. That was rare. Too rare. It made him question himself and his talent. Such insecurity was for younger men, however. If an old man fell to such doubt, his organ would shrivel right up, like a plastic straw above a flame. And that would be it. Evan Keeler needed his organ.
Evan Keeler liked women. Loved women. Liked loving women. If the art world beat down his faith in mankind, women re-ignited a kindling flame of human possibilities. A flame, a light that his being, he thought, served more to dim than fuel.
It had been a short marriage. It had been his over-fondness of women which ruined it. There had been a spark, a flame; a belief that time was upon him. She was not beautiful. He told himself that beauty did not matter. He lied. The spark was not enough, not enough to sustain his interest, for in the end that was all it was, interest. When his wife figured out not only that he had been with other women, but why, she became what Evan Keeler termed agressively insecure. He entertained fleetingly the notion that had he married earlier in life all would have been fine. That was dismissed as excuse; a rather pitiful attempt not to seem so pitiful. Finally she left, talking to herself, taking with her the only construction of their marriage — their one-year-old daughter.
He did not know his daughter. Since her departure he had seen her but three times. Twice in two summers while he was still living in Albuquerque and once when he dropped in to visit her in Seattle. In Seattle the child’s mother had not allowed Evan Keeler to their house, but arranged a meeting in a mall. He did not blame her. He had been a shit. Better to be mad than a wimp, he had told her when they broke up, which only made her angrier.
Elaine was seventeen now and, in recent photos at least, very pretty. She was discovering boys in Seattle and they were no doubt discovering her. The only bit of advice offered to her by her father was etched on the back of a postcard with a thirsty jackass on the front. It read: Stay away from boys and men. It surely upset the girl’s mother to have to agree with him. He could hear her adding, “—men like your father.” It was sound advice. It was the very advice he offered most women both before and after he slept with them.
He wondered how his daughter imagined him, whether her mother had, sadly, painted a reasonably clear picture. Was he, in the girl’s eyes, a bum who hustled young women in galleries? Was he the artist whose work she’d seen in the several art magazines in which he’d been featured over the last ten years, vital, bright, innovative? He laughed to himself, at himself, contemplating which in fact he was. He was a little of both or all of the former. Elaine’s mother’s desire to be a liberal had certainly supported a more favorable portrayal of her father, lest her hatred of him be construed as racially rooted.