Big Bend Page 16

  “I thought for you it was birds,” Dennis said.

  Martha put a hand to her nose, scratched. “Whatever has wings,” she said. Her other hand was on the bench close between them, and she leaned on it so her head was not a breath away from Dennis’s. He smelled her shampoo, coconut and vanilla. Her henna-red hair, braided back into a thick lariat, her strong chin, the strong slope of her nose, her deep tan, her wrinkles from laughing from the heart of her, her wide shoulders, loose white shirt—all of it, all of her, was in his peripheral vision as he watched the film, which was more truly peripheral though he stared at it, her many scents in his nostrils, inside him.

  Last night they’d taken care of the small talk: Martha Kolodny was an arts administrator, which title Dennis pretended not to understand, though he knew well enough what it meant: she was the kind of person he’d disdained in his years as marketing wizard at Pfizer (years he then told her about). He’d felt the truth talking to Martha of something Bitty had said once: he had really grown up after sixty-five. Martha had patiently explained that she ran a grantswriting office that helped provide funding—not such huge figures as Martha seemed to think—for several arts organizations, the Chicago Lyric Opera among them. Dennis Hunter could surely appreciate the Lyric Opera if not so much the private foundations that made individual grants to artists smearing excrement on flags and Bibles.

  Martha herself had once danced—modern dance—with high hopes. She was too big, she had said daintily, “My teachers always said I was too big.” And she had laughed that laugh that came from the heart of her heart and smote Dennis.

  Her husband was a medical scientist at Northwestern, both a Ph.D. and an M.D. His first name was Wences. He was first-generation Polish. He was working on neuroreceptors, about which Dennis knew a thing or two, from years with the drug company. The couple had no kids, for they’d married rather late, after (at her age) kids were impossible. Wences and she barely saw each other. For them, the passion had fled. “I’m caught,” she had said. “I’m caught in an economic arrangement.” Her eyes had been significant, Dennis thought.

  The film ended abruptly. The Ranger-scientist took the podium in the dark that followed. A spotlight hit his face. Martha sat up, looked at Dennis fondly; that was the only word for how she looked at him, like an old friend. She whispered, “One Batman joke from this boy and we’re out of here!”

  And in a television voice the Ranger said, “That’s the Bat Signal, Robin.”

  “That’s it,” Martha said, feigning great shock. She rose and took Dennis’s hand and pulled him ungently to his feet and the two of them left the natural amphitheater and were soon striding along a rough path that led into the Chisos Mountains night.

  “I knew you’d be at the talk!” Martha said.

  “I’m not there now,” Dennis said.

  She said, “I can’t get you out of my head!” She was breathless from the walk. They pulled up at the end of a looping path that looked out over the great basin of the Rio Grande under brilliant stars, under coruscating stars.

  “I shoveled sand all day with the boys. Thinking of you.”

  “I love when you grin just like that,” said Martha hotly

  But you are married, Dennis thought to say. He held the words back forcibly: what if she didn’t mean anything romantic at all? What an awful gaffe that would be!

  They looked out into the blackness of the valley and up into the depths of space and were quiet a long ten minutes. “Mexico over there,” Dennis said.

  “You know you can rent a canoe and paddle across the Rio Grande to Mexico for lunch? No customs inspection necessary.”

  He said, “Someone did say that. And at the hot springs, apparently, you can swim across pretty easily. But no lunch.”

  “Unless you brought your own,” Martha said.

  “And the hot springs are very nice, too, I hear. Nice to soak in, even in the heat, I hear.” He’d heard all this from Freddy in the grossest terms, Freddy who said it was the place he’d bring a bitch, if there were anything but stanking javelinas around here.

  “Do you hear that snorting?” Martha said, as if in league with his thoughts.

  “Javelina,” said Dennis. He couldn’t help the grin. Javelina was the Spanish for what Americans called banded peccaries, Dennis knew, like little pigs, partially tame, sturdy little wild pigs that patrolled the parking lots and restaurant dumpsters around here for scraps. They were more cute than threatening, though there were stories of mayhem among tourists as scary as the bear stories in Glacier Park.

  “There’s worse in Chicago,” said Martha, meaning just that she wasn’t afraid.

  “In Atlanta we have bombers and disgruntled office workers,” said Dennis.

  “Somehow I knew you’d be here,” said Martha softly.

  “I would like to kiss you,” Dennis said. He’d forgotten entirely how this sort of thing was done, knowing just that now—this he’d read—now in the twenty-first century, one got permission for everything, each step, before proceeding.

  “I told my husband I wouldn’t mess around with anyone while I was in Texas,” Martha said. Then, less lightly: “That’s the shambles our marriage is in.”

  “Well, Martha, darling, a kiss is certainly not necessary to a good friendship,” Dennis said, glad he’d asked and not just acted to a rebuff and embarrassment, though he was embarrassed enough.

  But Martha kissed him, full on the lips, and he was glad for the Listerine he’d swilled and glad life hadn’t ended and glad to remember all the electrical connections and brightened cells and glowing nerves he indeed was remembering from the bottom of his feet to the tip of his tongue as he kissed her and was kissed.

  They talked and necked—no better expression for it—for an hour under the stars.

  “Well,” Dennis said, “I’m afraid, despite best intentions, you have kissed in Texas.” He felt badly for Wences Kolodny.

  “But I have not messed around,” breathed Martha.

  “On technicalities are the great cases won.”

  She said, “Do you want to take a little swim to Mexico tomorrow?”

  “I’ll unpack my swimming trunks.”

  “I said nothing to Wences about messing around in Mexico.”

  “That isn’t funny to me,” Dennis said.

  But they kissed till near eleven, when the Chicago birders’ bus loaded quickly and headed back to the birders’ hotel on the outskirts of the enormous national park.

  Dennis walked back to the workers’ dorm with feelings he hadn’t had in fifty years, pain both physical and metaphysical, elation sublime, ambivalence scratching and snarling like some enraged animal under his squeaky cot.

  Mr. Hunter no longer had the physical strength of his estimable colleagues on the work detail, but they had not his old man’s stamina. With his steady work all day he outperformed the college boys, though Stubby could do more than the whole crew did all of most days in a single hour when he got inspired, which he did just before lunch this day, Friday. Stubby worked like a dog and demon and an ox, worked as if possessed: every cliché applied. He said, “We don’t want Luis in trouble if this sand ain’t up and off the road, boys!” They’d got about a quarter of it up the day previous, and already by noon this day two quarters more.

  And this day, my God, it was hot. Plain, blazing sun. Mr. Hunter wore $400 chinos and a Gramicci T-shirt. His enormous Mexican straw hat (two hours pay at the tourist store in Terlingua) bobbed about his head to general hilarity, a foolish hat, but it kept him from falling over with heatstroke. The rest of the boys wore shorts and baseball caps, no shirts, and roasted in the sun, all of them except Dylan, who covered himself well against skin cancer years hence and advised the same for all, daily. Freddy the Homecoming King was going to be one spotted and speckled and scarred old geezer if he ever got past forty running his car dealership or his insurance agency: already he was burned crimson and sweating angrily. Stubby’s Herculean flinging of sand into the little dump truc
k seemed to have caught the corner of Freddy’s competitive instinct, and Freddy’s competitive instinct trumped his more general laggardly nature every time. The kid worked, he actually worked. He said, “Fucking say-and!”

  Luis shoveled too: that sand really did need to be up today, for Monday they started trail maintenance, and no excuses. Mr. Hunter got to sit in the truck and roll it forward down the slight hill in tiny and perfect increments, pumping the heavy clutch, worrying about his knee, then sitting there in the dry heat, no breeze, drinking from the great cooler of water, dispensing water to the other men when they came to his door.

  At lunchtime the younger crew climbed on top of the damp load of sand for the ride back up into the mountain. Mr. Hunter slid over so Luis could drive. And the wind was pleasant, if hot, and the view was spectacular: otherworldly landscape, baked sand, a plane of cactus, bright cliffs of sandstone and limestone, old reefs in yellows and purples and blues and reds.

  Mr. Hunter said, “Before I leave here, Luis, I would like to commission Cleopatra to do a large painting along the lines of the one you showed me in the Boquillas chapel. With that hunched angel hovering over Mary, do you know? And the little bald man.”

  “Santo Sebastiano,” said Luis, crossing himself. “I will suggest it to her.”

  “I mean truly, the same size as the one you showed me in the chapel.”

  “That is large, Mr. Hunter. Where in your room could it go? And this would be a hard work for Cleopatra, weeks of time. For the chapel it was a gift, but you are not Jesus.” He smiled like the only visitor to a hospital bedside: pity and sorrow and self-satisfaction.

  “I am only a man, it’s true. But I will pay five thousand for the painting, and extra to pack it and arrange for shipping to Atlanta.”

  “Did you rob a bank?” Luis loved to probe Mr. Hunter’s wealth. He alone among the crew had noted the cut of the clothing, the whiter skin where an embarrassingly rich watch had lain, the quality of even the work shoes Mr. Hunter wore on detail, the gold covering all his back teeth, the tidy precision of his knee scars, this mystery of a rich man at common labor.

  Mr. Hunter smiled with Luis: “Your wife’s paintings are worth no less.”

  The crew dumped the small truck’s twelve yards of sand at the head of the Gorge Trail, where next week they’d make use of it repairing a season of washouts and collapses and violated switchbacks. And one hundred yards up the trail, in the shade of a juniper tree, sitting each upon his own rock and looking out over the long gorge to a sliver of the Rio Grande and thence into Mexico, the crew ate lunch, each in his style: Stubby a huge sandwich of cheeses and sprouts and peppers and who knew what vegetarian excesses on thick bread he’d baked himself; Dylan a plain tortilla wrapped around beans; Luis a small feast packed in a series of paper bundles by Cleopatra, tortillas and three kinds of beans and slivers of meat and roasted peppers and whole tiny avocados and an orange and several whole tomatoes and tamales in cornhusks and more, always more; Freddy, poor bigoted kid, a single enormous bag of barbecue potato chips from the PX and his usual ungrateful snacking from Luis’s bounty. Mr. Hunter didn’t eat lunch, not anymore, but had a few samples of Cleopatra’s cooking, marvelous.

  As the crew settled down into what should normally have been something like a siesta, Stubby turned to Mr. Hunter. He said, “Where did you and the bird lady go last night when you left the lecture so early?”

  “Why is it you ask?” Mr. Hunter said wryly, as the attention of the crew fell pleasingly upon him.

  “I was only worried, is all,” said Stubby, even more wryly.

  After a long silence Luis grinned and said, “Tell us, Sophocles, old poet, what of love?”

  “Love!” Stubby said. “You should have smelled our room in the night! What perfume! And perfume, my brothers, does not rub off without some rubbing!”

  Still wryly—there was no other safe tack to take—Mr. Hunter said, “Do you imply that it is wrong for an old man to seek romance?”

  “Not s’long as it’s with an old lady,” Freddy said.

  “She’s not as old as all that,” said Stubby. “She’s not yet my age, and I’m a youth, as you can see.”

  “Is she over forty?” Dylan said helpfully. He got embarrassed, bit into his burrito, looked out over the dry valley of the Rio Grande.

  “Ah, forty!” Stubby said. “Forty is the youth of old age and the old age of youth!”

  Freddy said equably, “How old are y’all, anyway, Mr. Hunter?” He leaned a long way, gave a short smile, reached and took another of Luis’s tortillas.

  “Three score and fourteen,” Mr. Hunter said. “Seventy-four. The youth of death, I would say, if pressed.”

  “Y’all? No way. You don’t fucking look it!” Freddy said.

  And Dylan, too: “You don’t even look sixty!”

  And Stubby: “You do to me! You look sixty as hell, and that’s a compliment!”

  “What of love, Sophocles?” Luis said again.

  Mr. Hunter could not help himself. He beamed. He said, “Do any of you really believe my private hours are any of your business?”

  Stubby: “Do we not have the right to learn from those older than us and do you, Mr. Hunter, not have the duty to teach us?”

  “Tay-ake her to Viagra Falls,” Freddy said.

  “Mr. Hunter has twice the cactus you have, hombre,” said Luis.

  “It’s not all about sex,” Dylan said.

  “Thank you, Dylan,” said Stubby. “And do tell us: What is it all about?”

  “Blow jobs,” Freddy said animatedly.

  Dylan shrugged Freddy’s coarseness off. He thought of Juanita (this you could see in his reverent face). He said slowly, “Closeness. Is what it’s about.”

  But Mr. Hunter didn’t mind that some part of this was indeed about sex, and that sex was certainly perhaps some of the closeness he was missing, and further, had the enlivening notion that sex and he might be in the same place this evening if he got off work early enough. But then there was the trouble, the trouble that had awakened him so early this morning and that would not be shut off in its compartment: “Gentlemen, let me state the problem: Martha is married. And my conscience tells me not to proceed, even as my heart says go.”

  “And what of thy pecker?” said Stubby, triply wry.

  “My pecker says go,” said Mr. Hunter, which made everyone laugh. He had never spoken like this to them and indeed not in his life.

  “Then listen, brainiac,” said Freddy: “Go for it!”

  No laughter at this. Just an expectant turning to Mr. Hunter, who said nothing, sagging a little.

  “Listen to your conscience,” said Luis. “Listen well. If you spoke this way of Cleopatra, I would kill you just for speaking. For the doing I’d kill her, as well.”

  “Then y’all’d be single again, at least,” Freddy said.

  “Hey, I don’t know,” Stubby said. “This woman, this bird-watcher, Mothra, obviously she’s looking for something her marriage isn’t giving her. She’s taking power here. She’s taking care of her needs. She’s unfulfilled. Who’s to say she should honor this husband, who apparently does not honor her?”

  Dylan said, “But she made a promise.”

  “What is the nature of the promise we make in marriage?” Mr. Hunter said. He tried to sound wry, playing Socrates, but this was too close to the heart of his worry, even under a tree in hot shade.

  Dylan said, “That we should love, honor, and obey.”

  “The flesh is weak,” Luis said opprobriously.

  “The flesh has a job to do,” Stubby said.

  “I say, go for it,” Freddy said.

  A long silence in the windless day, punctuated erratically by the squawks of Mexican jays.

  “I don’t see how,” said Mr. Hunter.

  Freddy: “Well, the boy kisses the girl … “

  And the crew, except for Luis, laughed. He said, “And what of your wife in heaven? What will happen when you see her there?”

>   “You’re not really saying that,” Stubby said, incredulous. “It’s till death do you part. Man, come on.”

  “I agree with Stubby,” Dylan said. “But still, the woman you’re talking about is married!”

  “Y’all should just go up to Juarez,” Freddy said helpfully. “Soak that nut.”

  “It’s not sex he’s after,” Dylan said bravely.

  “Sure it is,” Stubby said. He picked up a stone, weighed it, then flung it with an elegant arm into the chasm below them. “Get real. A man alone, a woman who likes him. I’m with Freddy: go for it.”

  “I notice that you say ‘it,’” Dylan said. “But what of the woman, who is not an ‘it’?”

  “Go for her,” Stubby said, conceding Dylan’s point.

  “I don’t see how I really can,” Mr. Hunter said.

  “There are many women in the world,” Luis said. “You do not need to break God’s law.”

  The others, except Mr. Hunter, hadn’t seen Luis as religious till now. The air grew more serious. Everyone stared off, each in his own thoughts.

  Until this from Stubby: “Actually, there’s probably more here than the moral question. You’ve really fallen for this chick, you know? How are you going to feel if it goes further and then—boom—she’s off to Chicago and back to her husband? Leaves you alone! That’s going to be a blow, Dennis!”

  “When Tina broke up with me …” Freddy said. The others waited, but that was all he managed. Freddy looked off into the sky, and for the first time you could see his heart in his face and think of him as tender.

  “There might be that kind of price,” Stubby said.

  “This is good advice,” said Mr. Hunter. “I don’t know if I could stand the aftermath of any one-night stand.”

  Stubby slid off his rock, leaned back against it, closed his eyes. Dylan lay down, chewing a twig. Luis stood, stretched, patted Mr. Hunter’s shoulder, walked up the path to be alone. Luis prayed after lunch, Mr. Hunter knew. Freddy you might think was softly weeping if you didn’t know what a tough customer he was.

  Mr. Hunter had made up his mind: no married woman for him.