Big Bend Page 17

  Martha an athlete, Stubby had joked, and so she was: forty-seven years old, Dennis Hunter’s height and weight, and walked with the physical confidence of an athlete, looked in her shorts and stretch top as if she might jump up and fly at any moment. But in Dennis’s little rental car her folded legs seemed delicate and soft. Her skin was beautiful to him, and her smell, and her voice. “I couldn’t sleep all last night,” she said.

  “I could barely work today,” he said.

  The other talk on the hour’s drive to Hot Springs Canyon was about the landscape of the park, and they didn’t need to say much for looking at that landscape, the great buttes and cliffs and mesas miles away and unmoving. Martha read from her guidebook: “The park is 708,221 acres.”

  Dennis Hunter hadn’t known that.

  She read: “The Rio Grande was known to the Spanish conquistadors as the Great River of the North, and to the early pioneers as the River of Ghosts.”

  “I’m told this was Comanche territory,” Dennis said. Luis had said so.

  Martha nodded her head, then shook it, then nodded it. “Comanche country,” she repeated, saying it from the heart of her heart, where her laughter came from.

  Oh God, and Dennis felt his heart flowing out to her entirely, yet not leaving his rib cage at all. They drove slowly through the great basin of the River of Ghosts, past the Chisos Mountains. A pickup truck zoomed up from behind, passed easily, zoomed out of sight, New Mexico plates. Dennis thought about how easily he could declare his love and ask dear Martha her intentions. Perhaps Wences was out. Perhaps a split was imminent. How ask? Dennis said, “Chisos means something like ghostly in the Apache language.” Luis had told him that, too.

  Just quietly driving along, looking at the landscape. “Yes, it is,” Martha said. “Ghostly, all right.” She put her hands up in a gesture of amazement. She’d taken off her rings. “Living things don’t belong here. Not people certainly.”

  Dennis felt himself and the car almost lifting off the pavement. Not that he was faint, not at all; he felt more present if anything, floating car and all, with warm blood in his air-conditioned face and something humming in him, thighs to lungs. She’d taken off her rings. Dennis had never taken his ring off, not once for any reason, not since the night it went on his finger, June 11, 1947.

  He said, “I’ve seen javelina, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and a gray fox since I’ve been here. Also, Luis showed me the droppings of a bobcat and a raccoon and owls.”

  And just then a roadrunner zipped diagonally across the road in front of them, stiff posture a little comical, even somehow portentous, even to pragmatic Dennis.

  Martha Kolodny shifted a little toward him, really interested in what he’d seen and what he knew. She said, “I’ve seen a lot, too: roadrunner, elf owl, Harris’s hawk (I saw a pair), Inca dove, ladder-back and golden-fronted woodpeckers, verdin, a hooded oriole maybe, pyrrhuloxia, vermilion flycatcher, a varied bunting (I think, I hope, my prize of the trip), an ash-throated flycatcher, canyon wrens (I heard them only), other wrens, a curved-billed thrasher, sage thrashers, many sparrows, a great-tailed grackle.”

  “You’ve got the list by heart,” Dennis said, afloat in adoration.

  She smiled, plainly pleased with his fascination and infatuation. She said, “All new additions to my life list and not one of which is found in Chicago, or much of anywhere but here.”

  In the small canyon where the hot springs lay they walked in the hot sun along sea-bed cliffs, striated layers of the ages thrown up by earth forces at odd angles. Martha heard immediately a great horned owl, and got it calling to her by hooting saucily. Dennis Hunter floated, he floated along the dry path and felt that Martha floated, too.

  Together they inspected the abandoned ruins of the old hotel and store there, the hotel and store Martha had read aloud about from her booklet. Together they found the petroglyphs she’d read about, and walked along the path, a Comanche path that had become a commercial enterprise’s trail to the hot springs, now but a park path for tourists. Martha took Dennis’s hand. He wanted to declare his love. How old-fashioned he knew he was! She’d laugh at him, he thought, and this laugh would come from her teeth and not her heart.

  The path descended between thick reeds and willows and the canyon wall. Soon Martha stopped, put a finger in the air. “Hear the river?”

  Yes, Dennis heard it, a rushing sound ahead. Martha’s hand in his, dry hands casually clasped, pressure of fingers in a small rhythm, a pulse of recognition: something profound between them.

  A group of four British-sounding tourists with wet hair and mussed clothing came up the path. Their presence explained the one other car back at the end of the dusty and eroded canyon road. Dennis let go Martha’s hand, oh, casually.

  Approaching, a tall man with wire glasses said, “There’s an owl up in the cliff.” He pointed high in the sandstone bluff. “Just there.”

  Martha saw the big bird immediately, and pointed to it for Dennis’s sake. When he saw it he was amazed at its size. He’d been seeking something smaller.

  “Bloke’s calling a mate,” said the tall Britisher. His friends nodded.

  A pretty young woman said, “We’ve heard her response.”

  And the owl, on cue, hooted spookily. Across the river came another bird’s hoot.

  Martha took Dennis’s hand and pulled him along. “River of British Ghosts,” she said.

  Dennis couldn’t get the words as the Rio Grande came into view: “Doesn’t it … isn’t it … doesn’t this just … tickle you?” That was pathetic. He thought and tried again: “This little sprite of a muddy river, this ancient flow, this reed-bound oasis? That this is the famous border?”

  “Dennis, I don’t know what to do.”

  “That that is Mexico over there?”

  “May I see you in Atlanta?”

  They stopped there on the plain and dusty rock—flat, polished sandstone, solidified mud really—they stopped and held hands and looked at the river and could not look at each other.

  She said, “What is this between us?”

  Dennis could think of a word for what was between them. It was passion, nothing less, on the one hand, and her husband, nothing less, on the other, both between them and no way to say a word at this moment about either. He let a long squeeze of her hand say what it could, then pulled her along. Brightly, he said, “I expected gun turrets and chainlink fence and border stations.”

  “Well, there’s nothing but desert for hundreds of miles. They just don’t watch much here.”

  Pleasingly, no other soul occupied the hot springs, a steady gush of very hot water rising up out of a deteriorated square culvert built a century past. The buildings were gone, swept away by floods, they must have been. But one foundation remained, and formed a sort of large bathtub, well, enormous, maybe the size of a patio. In the hot air of the day the water didn’t steam at all. A kind of soft moss grew in there.

  Martha sat on a rock and took her shoes off. Dennis liked her feet. He wondered if Wences liked her feet. He liked her knees very much. He liked that she was so strong and big, he did very much, so unlike Bitty, who was a bone. He liked the fatty dimpling of Martha’s thighs in her black shorts. She dipped her feet in. “Wow, hot,” she said.

  “Maybe too hot for today?” Dennis said.

  “No, no, it’s wonderful! And then the river will feel cold,” she said. “A blessing,” she said. Then: “Well, no one’s around.” And she pulled off her shirt, just like that, and clicked something between her breasts to make her bra come loose, and shed it, then stepped out of her shorts and then her lacy panties (worn for him, he was startled to realize) and slipped into the hot water in a fluid motion, Dennis more or less looking away, looking more or less upward at the cliff (cliff swallows up there).

  “I’m not sitting here alone,” Martha said.

  So Dennis tried a fluid kind of stripping like hers, but ended up hopping on one foot, trying to get his pants past his ankles, but strippe
d and hopped, and slid into the hot water, self-conscious about his old body, the way his skin had got loose, the spots of him.

  “It’s love between us,” he said, which was not the same as declaring love. “And that you are married,” he said.

  “No touching in Texas,” said Martha, far too lightly.

  The water was shallow and she sat up to her waist and bare-breasted in the hot water and not exactly young herself. The hot water was gentle and very hot and melted them both, turned them red like lobsters.

  “Swim,” said Martha. And she climbed out of the pool down old steps into the river and dropped herself into the current. Stroke stroke out of the current and she was standing on the bottom again, waist deep. She was forty-seven and married and standing waist deep and naked in the Rio Grande River not twenty feet from Mexico. Dennis felt her gaze, thought of his knee, considered Wences, heard Luis’s stern voice, heard Freddy’s (Go for it), heard Bitty’s funny laugh, thought of his three children, heard his daughter Candy (Daddy, I know mother would want you to date) and followed Martha, climbed in the river after her, enjoying the cold of it after the scalding spring. Stroke, stroke, stroke, he was being swept away in the current, pictured himself washed up on a flat rock dead and naked miles downstream. But Martha got hold of his hand laughing and they stood waist deep together in the stream rushing past, silty, sweetly warm water.

  “I’ll get our stuff,” Martha said.

  She swam back and bundled everything—large towels, clothes, binoculars, bottle of wine—and easily swam with one arm in the air till she was back by Dennis Hunter’s side, holding the bundle all in front of her chest, dry, and if not absolutely dry, what difference? It would dry in seconds in the sun and parched air.

  Suddenly she said, “The American Association of Arts Administrators conference is in Atlanta this June.” They stood in the flow of the river. “I could stay a week with you,” she said. “Maybe more. It’s June. Two months from now, only.”

  “After that?” Dennis said.

  Solemnly: “We shall see what we shall see.” Then she laughed from the heart of the heart of her and Dennis laughed and stumbled and they made their way through the water to Mexico.

  “I hope no one shoots us going back,” Dennis said.

  They made the rocky shore in Mexico and walked, not far, walked in Mexico until they were out of sight of the hot springs across the river, and right there under the late sun she spread the blanket and right there hugged him naked and the two older Americans in Mexico kissed and Dennis Hunter was a young man again—no, really—a boy in love, a tanned and buff shoveler of sand, a repairer of trails, a knower of animals, a listener to birds, anything but a widower alone in Atlanta the rest of his miserable days, miserable days alone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the University of Maine at Farmington and to the Ohio State University for crucial release time. Warm thanks to the MacDowell Colony for time to think and write. Fondest thanks to my friends and colleagues and teachers and editors and agents and especially to my parents and siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews—none of them anything like the people imagined in this book.

  Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of the publications in which these stories first appeared: Fourteen Hills: “Thanksgiving”; Whetstone: “Blues Machine”; Harper’s: “A Job at Little Henry’s”; Witness: “Taughannock Falls”; Missouri Review: “Fredonia”; Whetstone: “Loneliness”; Another Chicago Magazine: “Fog”; American Literary Review: “Anthropology”; Atlantic Monthly: “Big Bend.”

  THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

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  Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups

  Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight

  Mary Hood, How Far She Went

  François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women

  Molly Giles, Rough Translations

  Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes

  Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner

  Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News

  Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst

  Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures

  Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats

  Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order

  Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts

  Antonya Nelson, The Expendables

  Nancy Zafris, The People I Know

  Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble

  Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps

  T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft

  Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure

  Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire

  Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket

  Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

  Christopher McIlroy, All My Relations

  Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing

  Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer

  C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido

  Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life

  Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love

  Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry

  Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag

  Andy Plattner, Winter Money

  Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory

  Mary Clyde, Survival Rates

  Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage

  Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees

  Robert Anderson, Ice Age

  Bill Roorbach, Big Bend

  Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down

  Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall

  Kellie Wells, Compression Scars

  Eric Shade, Eyesores

  Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love

  Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway

  Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You

  Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl

  David Crouse, Copy Cats

  Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

  Greg Downs, Spit Baths

  Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

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  Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement

  Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter

  Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons

  Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis

  Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

  Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots

  Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back to Me

  Amina Gautier, At-Risk

  Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North

  E. J. Levy, Love, in Theory

  Hugh Sheehy, The Invisibles