America's Grasslands
Cara Chamberlain
1
They took the dirt road east. The sun would eventually be at their backs. Seemed, too, they’d passed a house not far off. Ten, twenty miles?
Their luck hadn’t run out. They were simply testing their combined courage and resourcefulness. Or so Lillian said as Sylvie nursed a deerfly bite. They both wore blue T-shirts imprinted with the motto of their organization—“Women at Home on the Range: Protecting America’s Grasslands”—and, at the crest of a low ridge, they stared back at Lillian’s truck—Jeannette, she called it, a 1975 red Toyota that had given out in the panhandle of Oklahoma where a red-headed woodpecker fussed with brittle cottonwoods fallen across the empty trace of a long-vanished creek.
“My poor Jeannette.” Lillian said, and, turning her back, went on. Soon Jeannette dropped out of sight.
Sylvie was sweating already. Only mid-morning. She conserved her energy, going steadily, keeping her arms close to her sides. It was Lillian’s idea to follow only the back routes as they scoped out proposed wilderness study areas and National Grasslands extensions, and that was where they hiked now: the backest of back roads. Lillian was a kind of maternal figure, Sylvie had explained to her own mother, whose raised eyebrows had indicated her displeasure at her daughter’s environmental activism and her proposed trip. “Then I guess you’re in good hands,” she’d said as if she didn’t really believe it. Of course, not much of what an English major did fit her practical worldview. “And anyway you’re an adult. I can’t stop you.” That adult had the ring of irony, but Sylvie hadn’t let it bother her. Now she, too, wondered at those erstwhile good hands. It was crunch time, apparently, and maybe what Sylvie’s mother had suspected was true and Lillian wasn’t proving the best judge of circumstances. Before Sylvie could internally parse her companion’s character any further, though, Lillian went off on her usual tack.
“Nothing beats exercise,” she exclaimed, flinging her walking stick forward at every step. “How my girls would have complained about this!”
Sylvie thought Lillian could have better conserved the silence and her caloric expenditure by keeping her mouth shut. Aw, but that was mean.
“Every year those girls got lazier. Pretty soon right before I retired parents were begging me to cut out the sit-ups, the soccer, the 600-meter relay, even the showers that were just too embarrassing.”
Sylvie liked the dry indignation of Lillian’s activist voice, but it made her irritable today, what with the heat and the bite on her leg that itched maddeningly if intermittently. She fell behind after a while. She’d never been the kind of young person who felt immortal. Since she was a child, she’d known death walked beside her. But instead of using that awareness to get beyond the things of this world, she always plunged into them more deeply, worrying about what was “normal,” about her looks, her lovers (or lack thereof), and the death of what people called “nature”—and what she thought of as “beauty”—because of the mucking around in it of human beings.
Couldn’t she now expect some transcendent revelation? Like Cabeza de Vaca, maybe, dancing naked across the staked plains, arms aloft, half-blind eyes trained on the sun. While she was, thank God, no conquistador and while any indigenous shamans worth their salt would undoubtedly take her for another benighted hippy wannabe and ignore her, the sun was still magnificent and the land a warping mannerist painting. Or maybe it was an overexposed surrealist analog photograph, a photograph she was walking right through, the only 3-D creature in a flattened paradise, Lillian notwithstanding. Like any surrealist, she tried shaping it into the solar-flaring image of her own thoughts as they become more and more spare. Like a physicist, she felt the interplay of magic numbers (the speed of light was…what?) crushing her into a particle that was both point and wave. She could have sworn that the sun stopped directly overhead, but what else ought she to think on a day stretching into the high nineties as she wandered a dusty road too obscure to be claimed by any county—or maybe, even, any country? There was irregular shade, miserly patches beneath junipers scattered across the hills. But the most promising spots were claimed by wild red and white cattle, grungy and dour from months on the open range. Dour, or beyond caring about such commonplaces as cowness and ruminanthood? Unattached, perhaps, even to their shady spots.
But even here Sylvie could not escape the things of this world, Augustine’s earthly city. Dreaming of ecstatic whirling in the desert, of dispensing with her clothes and her habits and her scattered college-undergraduate gen-ed cultural references, she was pulled back to the white caliche road by Lillian, who’d stopped and was waiting for her, who cursed wimps and expatiated on the exigencies of sacrificing the soul for the body’s glory. “This is when you really feel your physiology taking over, isn’t it?”
The histamines attacking Sylvie’s deerfly bite agreed. She kept walking. Might as well.
Lillian fished in the pockets of her khaki shorts for the inevitable sodium. “You look like your electrolytes are off.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Sylvie said but she felt a bit suspended.
Lillian swallowed a pill herself. Her brunette hair, gray at the roots, remained neatly pinned. Her face was mostly unlined even though she’d whisked more than 800 girls through junior high school gym classes, raised four sons as a single mother, and calmly testified at public land use hearings, her aggravating smile shaming the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and Bu Rec officials if not the radical developer set itself. Lillian cheered: “I’m having a lovely time.” She swung her hiking stick and stabbed the road in front of her.
“Don’t give me a pep talk,” Sylvie silently pleaded. “I’m not one of your girls. I’m a pilgrim to the lecheguilla, a preacher of red-headed woodpeckerishness, a poor wayfaring stranger…”
“So we press on—,” Lillian said. “Working ourselves harder and harder until we leave weakness and moodiness and defeat behind! Physical capacity fully realized—an asset to all players.”
“Rah, team,” thought Sylvie. She was still hoping to catch, in between Lillian’s oratory, a buzzing fullness, a Chihuahuan harmony, a chorus of blanched wind. Her chrysalis of habitual thoughts would thin, turn brittle and split open, especially since they were reaching more broken country with ragged arroyos, patches of cholla, and chalky stone outcroppings.
2
Chuck Blaine hunched over a rustic table on his front porch. Phoebes dove after mosquitoes in summer-tall mullein as night crawled like disillusionment around the mesas, striking the east with darkness and the west with a wispy voile of turquoise and yellow cloud. He dealt another round of solitaire then saw them coming, a long-legged girl and a full-hipped lady, both in khaki shorts and T-shirts. The girl was holding a straight line, her shoes kicking up the dry soil, and the lady swung a walking stick beside her as they barged into his Sunday evening. Chuck critiqued their progress up his driveway, past the red, white, and blue tires he’d filled with dirt and planted with yucca, now the ghosts of yucca, phantoms as mortified as the ’65 Dart he drove only on Thursdays, the corroded typewriter discarded in cheat grass, and the patch of unwatered oleander. At last, the two “women,” as their t-shirts labeled them, one gracefully late middle-aged, one winsomely twentyish, arrived below the porch, weariness widening their eyes and dulling their hair and making them look like anything but “at home on the range.” In the arroyo, coyotes kicked up when the ladies, sun-tanned and worn, lofted a twinned supplicating gaze. Chuck held the two of diamonds while the young lady stared at him with pale blue eyes and the older lady delicately cleared her throat as if she might speak. They looked spent.
“Water pump and a dipper,” Chuck offered, nodding. “Yonder. Help yourselves.” He laid the two of diamonds on its ace.
They vanished into the dark, but the pump was worked impatiently. After a while, when Chuck had lost his game, they must have had enough. Night sloped down on them, but they returned to view, and the coyotes were momentarily speechless. Then a horned owl started in cooing and the stars batted their sexy lids. The ladies whispered to each other in the dark. Chuck put the card deck in his pocket and leaned back in his wicker chair, arms folded, eyebrows raised.
“Could we use your telephone?” the older lady asked, her voice clear and charming.
“Could if I had one,” Chuck allowed, unfolding his arms, easing himself out of the chair and strolling to the end of the porch, his boot heels striking the planks with decisive force. “No TV. No telephone.”
“Our truck’s out of commission,” said the older lady who really had a very nice way about her. “Twenty miles back.” Charming how she waved her hand toward nothing but the night. “Near a dry crossing . . .”
Meanwhile the girl was trying to see him, to read his face under the old felt sombrero he wore in the evening to keep off the bugs. Or so he flattered himself to think.
“Well now,” said Chuck.
“Could we have a lift to town?” the older lady asked.
“Could, if there was a town,” Chuck said. “Ain’t no town to speak of on Sunday night at nine o’clock, ladies.”
The two shifted their feet.
They were almost exhausted, two lost waifs the desert had washed up at his door. And what did that make him now? A freaking good Samaritan? “Sit for a while,” Chuck said, pointing to the porch steps. He went back to his chair and the ladies crumpled onto the stairs, the older one leaning back on her palms and gazing at the sky. Would it be so bad to offer charity?
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” she declared, her face attaining a certain sculpted beauty itself.
For a long time, no one spoke. The horned owls went quiet. Only wind moaned in the dry brush. Goatsuckers called from the depths of their expansive dives starting up in the wild stars, clamoring and spinning in dry air—the Milky Way a hula hoop above them—and ending in a whoosh right above his cabin. Chuck felt that the women were waiting him out, annoying him into talk. Or that the girl, especially, was out already riding her own supernova to some city person’s semblance of nirvana. He ought to know how that went.
After a while, he went inside and turned on a table lamp in the kitchen. He brought out two bottles of soda and a can of cheap store-brand lager, and flipped off the cola lids with an army knife he kept in his jeans pocket. “Cheers,” he said, handing the ladies both bottles. They sipped daintily. Chuck pulled up the tab on the beer, took a swig, and burped, alcohol stinging his sinuses. “Haven’t had guests for … what?” he said, pausing, thinking back. “A month or two.”
The girl was distant, but the lady looked at him off and on, holding the soda in one hand and leaning back on the other. When she closed her eyes, he thought that maybe she hadn’t found anything alarming about him. And that was one terrible thought. A song was going to come out of this, though, Chuck just knew. A bird-sized moth flew between them, hovering near his drink before whirling away—a stray thought, an unnoticed gesture of gallantry. A breeze arose, not dusty but sweet as well water. Past a cheap lace curtain and on into his house, the table lamp burned with a galaxy of small moths and beetles.
When they had finished their drinks, the ladies stood up, the older one dusting off the seat of her khakis with a single modest swish. “Well, thank you,” she said.
“You women,” Chuck surrendered as they turned to go, “can’t wander off tonight. Better have a sandwich and sleep here.”
The visitors looked at each other, and the older one said, “Well, if you don’t mind.”
He led them into the house, bare-floored and clean, down the hallway and into a small bedroom. A woolen blanket covered the double bed, and books were crammed into every available space except the nightstand, which held a kerosene lamp and a roll of Lifesavers. The effect pleased him. Chuck lit the lamp and turned back the covers. The cotton sheets were soft, white, lace-edged. “You’re in luck,” he said. “I just did laundry. Outhouse is in back. I’ll get the bologna and mustard.”
3
“This guy for real?” asked Sylvie, sitting on the bed.
Lillian pulled off her t-shirt and folded her shorts on top of her daypack. “I’m too damn tired to care.” She slipped beneath the covers with her underwear on, her muscles firm, only the skin, with its thinness and sun freckles, showing some age.
Sylvie took off her shorts, but left her shirt on and climbed in. The bed was not only soft but saggy and bumpy so she had to cling to the edge in order to keep from rolling against Lillian. She lay looking at the books. Every wall had a full-length shelf, and every shelf was full. “Some cowboy,” Sylvie said. “Some desert rat.”
“Maybe he’s a reclusive millionaire.” Lillian’s voice was muffled by the pillow and fatigue.
“Not to mention the diamonds in his belt buckle. Should I turn out the light?” Sylvie asked, but Lillian was asleep. So Sylvie lay on the edge of the bed, too tired and wary to doze off though the kerosene lamp calmed her. There was little decoration in the room: a picture frame with a ceramic man hanging by his hands below it, his broken trapeze inside; a gyroscope; a Pueblo pot, bright red and black with lightning zags, that held a dying cactus. In the corner, an old honey-colored guitar leaned against the wall, its strings worn at every fret. “Singing cowboy,” she surmised, and laughed to herself. Absently scratching the big fly bite and other smaller ones as well, she watched the door for a while, expecting to see their host peering in. No one was moving in the house, and soon she got up and blew out the lamp, stumbled around the bed, and climbed back in beside Lillian, who snored gently. At the open window, curtains sucked out and in. A past-full moon ratched up and in its light reared the outline of a gigantic cottonwood, its leaves whirring in the wind. Some kind of transcendent moon…
By the time Sylvie awoke, the sun was high, a flock of pinyon jays combed the tree outside the window, and Lillian had gone somewhere. Sylvie pulled on her shorts, made the bed and went outside. She looked around for last night’s outhouse or sign of a bathroom, and ended up squatting behind the big cottonwood. Its trunk completely hid her from sight. Then she poured water from the well onto her face and washed her arms and legs. The bite had become a welt the size of her thumbnail. It was fiery looking but didn’t really itch anymore. Back in the house, the ersatz cowboy and Lillian were sitting at his kitchen table eating her specialty omelet and drinking black coffee with floating grounds. Sylvie stood beside them. There was no chair for her.
“Help yourself to some grub,” the guy said, nodding his head back toward a cupboard.
Almost laughing, she was struck by the Gunsmoke word. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and ate dry cereal. “Frosted Grub Flakes,” she thought.
“Name’s Blaine,” he told her. “Chuck Blaine.”
“Cool,” she said. Blaine. Chuck Blaine.
“Why don’t we get that truck, Jeannette you say, fixed, Sylvie, and we’ll all go out looking for your American grasslands experience?”
She looked at Lillian doubtfully.
“My idea,” Lillian said.
“What the hell?” Sylvie thought. Who was this guy? Some spy for the oil industry? Why should he horn in on their expedition? Hydrated and fed, she flung her arms toward yesterday’s desert epiphany that was fading into something midway between exasperation and incredulity.
4
This time, Sylvie could drive if it made her happy. Anything to boost morale, Lil decided. They were certainly out of Oklahoma and well into New Mexico by now.
“Folsom Man site’s close by, Lil,” Chuck offered from the far right side. They were squeezed, the three of them, onto the truck’s bench seat. They had reached a place where now every horizon was wider and more fascinating by the minute.
“Folsom Woman,” Lil corrected. “It’s long past Title IX.”
“I don’t know exactly what that is,” he admitted.
“That’s all right, Chuck,” she said, twisting around to smile at him. “Why so quiet, Sylvie?” Lil faced forward again. She tried to be attentive to everyone’s mood. Teams needed that, and what were they now if not a team, ad hoc though it might be? They’d been through days of car repair—old parts sent for, greasy diner food consumed, nights of talk about the importance of the National Grasslands conservation story.
Sylvie clung to the steering wheel and studied the road intently. This one even had a county number. It was a good graded surface and hardly required such care. Clearly, Sylvie was tuning everything out but the driving.
Lil fiddled with the radio, but no stations came through. Maybe Sylvie was disappointed about having Chuck along. Sometimes she did not seem part of the group spirit. Any group. Maybe all twenty-somethings were like that. Lil couldn’t really remember being any different than she was now—perhaps a bit more toned—and the girls she taught had been teens. They’d been, to a woman, less adventurous than her! Wimpy girls! So she took chances? What good was ever gained by maintaining a pretense of safety in a world that was never and could never be safe? That’s what she’d told her sons. And they were confident, successful men. “What about this park—Capulin Mountain?” Lil asked Chuck as a brown, federal lands sign approached. “We ought to see that!”
Sylvie took the turnoff, and they rode higher and higher above the New Mexico steppes. Jeannette was purring along. Chuck’s mechanic friend from the reservation really was a genius.
“It’s an old cinder cone,” Chuck said when they got to the end of the road. “You can see the flows from on top.”
They packed a practical lunch of cheese sandwiches, grabbed a can of stewed tomatoes, and set off along the trail up the cone. The rock was volcanic, and little grew in the soil. Horned lizards of a species Lil had never seen rushed out from beneath sage roots and hissed and puffed. At the top, the crater gaped, and four states breached the distance: Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas. Islands of junipers grew amid the grass. Vultures flew at eye level, and below.
Lil, Sylvie, and Chuck ate quietly and passed around the can of tomatoes. Lil was glad no one took more than their share. There was nothing for miles around as high as they were. She calculated the sweep of land and history. “Two-hundred-mile view if I’m not mistaken, Chuck.”
“I reckon.”
She pointed. “So you think it’s out in there, the Folsom site?”
Chuck nodded. “About. See that wash?” He pointed vaguely.
“Just imagine those ancient hunters with their stone arrow tips!” Lil hoped her
enthusiasm was contagious. Wind blew stray wisps of hair off Sylvie’s face. Her features, Lil had always thought, were very fine and clear-cut, especially in daylight. She had her jaw set, though, that spoiled-brat broodiness smoldering. But how could anyone be annoyed? “And thirty thousand years of geologic time here—visible!” Lil exclaimed.
“At least,” Chuck said.
Sylvie was still quiet.
Lil remembered her pre-trip research. Folsom man was the prototype of the New World explorer, dashing 10,000 years ago from the Bering land bridge to the Yucatan, killing mammoths and smilodons as he literally raced down the continent. And here—somewhere—his toolkit had been uncovered. Lil liked that term—toolkit—and imagined cave-man plumbers and mechanics. But if Folsom man was a knapper of giant arrowheads and a sprinter of fearsome ability, what of Folsom woman? Did she stay bent over her roots and digging stick? Or was she way out ahead of him—itching to reach Tierra del Fuego first, to get as far as she could go? “I wonder what those early people thought?” she said out loud. “The first humans, the Folsom-point people. Like Adam and Eve. Only they had to worry about surviving.”
Chuck laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”
“Someone should write a song about it,” Lil mused. Was that an eye roll from Sylvie? Just like a junior high school kid.
“There’s an idea,” Chuck snorted. He grabbed a handful of pebbles, tossed them back at his feet. “But you ever hear this one?” he asked, as if he’d been mulling over the subject for a long time and finally summoned his courage now that an opening had presented itself. He hummed a tune Lil found vaguely familiar. “Here’s the words.” And he sang quite charmingly in a bass voice--
Don’t fear the heart’s death,
Fear the heart’s revival.
Don’t fear the still street,
Fear the storm’s arrival.
The only thing we have to fear
Is our own survival.”
Lil snapped her fingers. “Randy Travis, right?”
“Glenn Pettit and the Oklahoma Tornadoes. Back in ’64. My first country
chart topper. I was a young cowboy. Fresh from Montana. Ten brothers. I’ve got a hundred nieces and nephews but no kids of my own. It was the guitar that seduced me.”
Sylvie suppressed a laugh, Lil noticed.
Chuck blushed under his tan. “Well,” he said.
Sylvie stood up and walked away to look off at distant Colorado.
“It has very good rhymes, your song,” Lil said.
“You think so?”
But she wasn’t going to get sucked into a compliment-fishing expedition, as much as Chuck might crave her encouragement. No, Lil thrust her mind out into the wonder of ten thousand-year-old lava flows that still showed black on the grasslands. Deciding, as always, that action was the best recourse, she stood up, brushed off her clothes, and announced that she was hiking down into the crater. She looked back once, after she’d started. “Coming, Chuck?”
He shook his head, wimping out.
Let Sylvie and him pout. It might do them good.
The deeper Lil descended, the happier and sweatier she got. Crater heat was almost locker-room stuffy with not a whiff of a breeze, the few bushes crackling brown, a green-tailed towhee scratching on the pumice looking for seeds, God help him. If any place was ripe for inducing spontaneous human combustion this crater was it. Lil might just burst into flame. It was still cooler under her skin, though, than in the ambient air, even if blood pounded at her temples. She welcomed the effort of her heart, the constriction of her muscles. This was how she knew she was alive. Nothing ever could pass into and become part of her. She was a flint and traced her lineage straight back to hunters like Folsom woman. She knew who she was. A finely toned body with functioning organs. It remained the reassuring theme of her life never to be lost in something larger, always to know her own ligaments, tendons, and muscles.
5
Chuck realized they’d misplaced New Mexico again. Sylvie would insist on driving, and because of that he’d been vigilant. To no avail. They argued like caged possums about the best turnoff to Raton, and, in the end, chose the wrong one. So they stood by a heaving and clicking Jeannette in an overgrazed section of must-be-Colorado-by-now, wild cattle strung on the hillsides and in the valleys, the few derelict windmills weakly drawing up water for rusting troughs, a rumble of oil pumps from an invisible field worrying at their nerves.
Chuck studied his USGS map. The road they’d chosen wasn’t drawn in, of course, but he thought he could follow the spring down that canyon and out onto the open grassland.
“Whatever you want to try,” said Lil. “I’m game.”
“If you were to ask me …” Sylvie began, but finishing wasn’t necessary because she was standing undecidedly beside the truck, and anyone could have seen that she was at a loss. Lil looked at him expectantly. Had he stopped believing in that desperate call from Johnny Cash for trenchant lyrics or in that Belfry, Montana, homestead birth of his, tamarisk-choked and creosote-scented?
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said.
Lil smiled, as she always seemed to. “You’re a songwriter,” she assured him, “not a cartographer.”
“That’s putting a little positive spin on it, Lil.”
“Heavens!”
Sweat made his head itch beneath the rim of his hat. He took the heavy felt off and wiped his brow with his arm, and smiled at the Hollywood quality of the gesture. His voice came out as urban Western as you please. “I do know the Denver suburbs like the back of my hand. Aurora, Cherry Hills, Littleton, Lakewood, Wheat Ridge, Arvada, Westminster, Northglenn, Commerce City, and back again to Aurora.”
Sylvie burst out in what seemed a long-repressed laugh. “Good for you, Blaine. Chuck Blaine.”
“We’ll try this way,” Chuck decided for them and pointed westward like a scout in Wagon Train, that old TV show his mother used to watch while ironing.
They climbed back into Jeannette, and Chuck took the wheel. He whisked them around gullies and through dry washes and they topped out on a plateau with a grin-wide view. The wind wouldn’t die, the grass bending almost in half. Nothing marred the horizon but a few dog-shaped clouds. The heat was searing. Jeannette meandered back onto the map, through Sugarite Canyon State Park, going as best she could into Chuck’s worst predicament in five years. Being in company. Found out. Forgiven. Laughed with. How he’d wanted to be someone! If not famous then at least unique. And now all he was was a goddamned taxi driver. He slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting a bull snake stretched like Beelzebub in the road and rearing now to do its rattlesnake impression. Perfectly harmless. Bless its heart, as Lil herself would say. Adam and Eve and a goddamn bull snake. And Sylvie.
6
Sylvie hung onto the window crank. Blaine-Chuck-Blaine was driving like a maniac. Once, Jeannette actually left the road with all four wheels. Sylvie dared look at Lillian in the middle seat, straddling the gear shift, but Lillian was impassive. The guy had cast some sort of spell on her, maybe. But, then again, Lillian had probably been the kind of gym teacher who enjoyed bouncing on the back of her neck on a trampoline. One of the most humiliating moments of Sylvie’s life had come at the hands of just such an instructor. “You, Sylvie. Show them the new uneven bars routine,” that task master had said.
Sylvie stared at the leotarded girls who were so much more skilled at tumbles and skinning the snake and dismounts than she was. But there was no recourse. She dutifully stepped up, powdered her hands with flour, and went through the various terrifying positions as if in slow motion while the acrobatic girls watched in what seemed like disbelief. The instructor betrayed not a hint of compassion.
And here she was now, all but skinning the snake with two older (if not old!) people she barely knew. It was as if they’d forgotten about saving the grasslands and were intent on salvaging something about themselves, and they watched her like she was some odd specimen of the youth they’d lost. Some talisman. Their enthusiasm for the scenery was just a bit strained. Well, fine. Maybe that’s what most old people did. Sylvie felt grumpy and childish. The bite on her leg had collapsed into a purple crater. Maybe it was suppurating. Maybe it was healing. She didn’t know.
7
Day after day it was the same thing. Chuck displaying his incompetence. Setting out boldly in the morning then having to backtrack to the last small town for gas and motel rooms. Sometimes, they camped in some remote public lands backwater that didn’t appear on the map. Finally, he’d had enough. “What the hell do you want?” Chuck asked near dark as he slammed the truck into park on a dry wash it seemed they’d never be able to get across. There were jumbled rocks and something that looked like quicksand. The old timers had warned him about that.
The women were quiet.
“I’m lost as usual. Okay? I don’t know the country.”
“What’s the rush?” Lil said and put her hand on his arm. “Remember those Folsom people? We’re just like them. Imagine this is the emptiest the world will ever be.”
It was the first time anyone had touched him in many years, and he was as amazed as he’d been when he finally mastered his first bass run. Of course, there was no Glenn Pettit. No Oklahoma Tornadoes. And that’s exactly why he’d left a two-million-dollar ranch house, a BMW, a membership at the Cherry Hills Country Club, a senior partnership in a corporate law firm, and a wife who wanted nothing to do with his “conversion” as she called it, as if country music were some sort of cult. He let Lil’s hand rest on his arm for a while before starting Jeannette again. Maybe you had to touch bottom before bobbing to the surface. Three times, though, and you’d be dead. And this was his second. But maybe that was hooey, too. You could as easily drown in dust as in water. And then some enterprising archeologist would dig you up again. “Something’s bound to work out,” Lil said. “Heart’s Revival.”
It was the heat, but Chuck could now picture those university scholars Lil had described picking at bones and stone hunting points with tiny knives and spoons. It was a painful and wonderful thing to think about. He backed up and they retraced their route for several miles until another road took off south and west toward a twinkling Venus.
8
Sylvie refused to sit on the bare, bird-dropping- and rust-encrusted metal of a lounger outside the Motel del Bosque in Raton. She was using her “Women at Home on the Range” T-shirt these days as an all-purpose rag. And now a chair cover. The advertised “grass courtyard” was an interesting collection of exotic weeds. According to the local radio station, there was a rabies outbreak in town. Someone had just stolen hundreds from the Seven-Eleven and come close to killing the clerk on duty. Bubonic plague was on the upswing. The highway, steady but not crowded, ran by on the other side of a barren yellow ditch. What a town! She ought to call her mother.
Lillian and Chuck had gone off to the IGA to buy more supplies. Then, finally, they said, they were determined to reach the Kiowa Grasslands, to camp, to look for scaled and Gambel’s quail and Chihuahuan ravens, and talking points for the next land-use review and travel plan. Sylvie knew what it would be like, moon rising over the endless plain, a few prickly pear, mesquite, and yucca reaching for it. Lillian and Chuck trading pretend song lyrics, an amusing twosome. The diner where they’d eaten, the motel, their plans for Save the Grasslands rallies. All of it was their idea, none of it hers. Why begrudge them a whirlwind affair? Literally. Dust devils rose and convulsed every afternoon. Still it turned Sylvie back on herself where, she realized, she usually lived, unattached and disgruntled and uncertain. Who was she to judge anyone but herself? “Unrealized,” as Lillian would say—maybe unrealizable. But, as for that, Lillian had probably never not been realized, and now Blaine-Chuck-Blaine was freed of pretense, threatening to be authentic. His Gunsmoke drawl was pleasant enough, his potential donorship intriguing, his songs actually not that bad, and maybe they’d be the real deal, too, someday. Sylvie vowed to keep all judgments to herself. Better not to make them in the first place. You couldn’t exert control over anything. Why even try? Maybe that’s what growing up meant—late bloomer that she was, it had taken her a long time to come to that conclusion.
The wind walloped the old motel’s loose sidings and shouted in her ears. She spread her feet wide for balance and thought about the grasslands, those unformed and unforming, raw and mostly arid plains where unwieldy herds of buffalo, flocks of antelope and geese, and hordes of locusts had once swarmed and died. It was a day scathingly bright, bouncing electrically off the Russian olives, the Coca-Cola sign at the drugstore. Its atomic intensity and precision snapped her apart, leaving her blessedly unmade.
Without planning to, she crossed the motel’s weed patch and stood at the freeway on-ramp, thumbing a ride. I could be killed, she thought. I could die this way. My mother will eventually kill me, at least. But the deerfly bite had healed to a bluish scar, and she hadn’t gotten salmonella from the bad food they’d been eating. She seemed on a mediocre roll. She kept near the traffic, not even blinking when a white sport utility vehicle almost swerved into her. She held her ground. As soon as she waved a five-dollar bill instead of her thumb, a PIE trucker stopped for her. She climbed into the passenger’s side. “Thanks,” she said.
The driver grunted, stuffing her money into his shirt pocket. He was blond, with heavy features and primitive, small-nailed hands. Way more prototypical than Folsom Man. But, right there was a judgment about another person. Sylvie bit her metaphorical tongue. “Going down Las Cruces way,” the driver said. Still, if there was a fine line between not judging and being stupid, she wasn’t sure yet where it was.
The highway led out of town, toward hills covered with dry golden grass, long stalks that held a metallic glow she could not describe.
Cara Chamberlain
1
They took the dirt road east. The sun would eventually be at their backs. Seemed, too, they’d passed a house not far off. Ten, twenty miles?
Their luck hadn’t run out. They were simply testing their combined courage and resourcefulness. Or so Lillian said as Sylvie nursed a deerfly bite. They both wore blue T-shirts imprinted with the motto of their organization—“Women at Home on the Range: Protecting America’s Grasslands”—and, at the crest of a low ridge, they stared back at Lillian’s truck—Jeannette, she called it, a 1975 red Toyota that had given out in the panhandle of Oklahoma where a red-headed woodpecker fussed with brittle cottonwoods fallen across the empty trace of a long-vanished creek.
“My poor Jeannette.” Lillian said, and, turning her back, went on. Soon Jeannette dropped out of sight.
Sylvie was sweating already. Only mid-morning. She conserved her energy, going steadily, keeping her arms close to her sides. It was Lillian’s idea to follow only the back routes as they scoped out proposed wilderness study areas and National Grasslands extensions, and that was where they hiked now: the backest of back roads. Lillian was a kind of maternal figure, Sylvie had explained to her own mother, whose raised eyebrows had indicated her displeasure at her daughter’s environmental activism and her proposed trip. “Then I guess you’re in good hands,” she’d said as if she didn’t really believe it. Of course, not much of what an English major did fit her practical worldview. “And anyway you’re an adult. I can’t stop you.” That adult had the ring of irony, but Sylvie hadn’t let it bother her. Now she, too, wondered at those erstwhile good hands. It was crunch time, apparently, and maybe what Sylvie’s mother had suspected was true and Lillian wasn’t proving the best judge of circumstances. Before Sylvie could internally parse her companion’s character any further, though, Lillian went off on her usual tack.
“Nothing beats exercise,” she exclaimed, flinging her walking stick forward at every step. “How my girls would have complained about this!”
Sylvie thought Lillian could have better conserved the silence and her caloric expenditure by keeping her mouth shut. Aw, but that was mean.
“Every year those girls got lazier. Pretty soon right before I retired parents were begging me to cut out the sit-ups, the soccer, the 600-meter relay, even the showers that were just too embarrassing.”
Sylvie liked the dry indignation of Lillian’s activist voice, but it made her irritable today, what with the heat and the bite on her leg that itched maddeningly if intermittently. She fell behind after a while. She’d never been the kind of young person who felt immortal. Since she was a child, she’d known death walked beside her. But instead of using that awareness to get beyond the things of this world, she always plunged into them more deeply, worrying about what was “normal,” about her looks, her lovers (or lack thereof), and the death of what people called “nature”—and what she thought of as “beauty”—because of the mucking around in it of human beings.
Couldn’t she now expect some transcendent revelation? Like Cabeza de Vaca, maybe, dancing naked across the staked plains, arms aloft, half-blind eyes trained on the sun. While she was, thank God, no conquistador and while any indigenous shamans worth their salt would undoubtedly take her for another benighted hippy wannabe and ignore her, the sun was still magnificent and the land a warping mannerist painting. Or maybe it was an overexposed surrealist analog photograph, a photograph she was walking right through, the only 3-D creature in a flattened paradise, Lillian notwithstanding. Like any surrealist, she tried shaping it into the solar-flaring image of her own thoughts as they become more and more spare. Like a physicist, she felt the interplay of magic numbers (the speed of light was…what?) crushing her into a particle that was both point and wave. She could have sworn that the sun stopped directly overhead, but what else ought she to think on a day stretching into the high nineties as she wandered a dusty road too obscure to be claimed by any county—or maybe, even, any country? There was irregular shade, miserly patches beneath junipers scattered across the hills. But the most promising spots were claimed by wild red and white cattle, grungy and dour from months on the open range. Dour, or beyond caring about such commonplaces as cowness and ruminanthood? Unattached, perhaps, even to their shady spots.
But even here Sylvie could not escape the things of this world, Augustine’s earthly city. Dreaming of ecstatic whirling in the desert, of dispensing with her clothes and her habits and her scattered college-undergraduate gen-ed cultural references, she was pulled back to the white caliche road by Lillian, who’d stopped and was waiting for her, who cursed wimps and expatiated on the exigencies of sacrificing the soul for the body’s glory. “This is when you really feel your physiology taking over, isn’t it?”
The histamines attacking Sylvie’s deerfly bite agreed. She kept walking. Might as well.
Lillian fished in the pockets of her khaki shorts for the inevitable sodium. “You look like your electrolytes are off.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Sylvie said but she felt a bit suspended.
Lillian swallowed a pill herself. Her brunette hair, gray at the roots, remained neatly pinned. Her face was mostly unlined even though she’d whisked more than 800 girls through junior high school gym classes, raised four sons as a single mother, and calmly testified at public land use hearings, her aggravating smile shaming the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and Bu Rec officials if not the radical developer set itself. Lillian cheered: “I’m having a lovely time.” She swung her hiking stick and stabbed the road in front of her.
“Don’t give me a pep talk,” Sylvie silently pleaded. “I’m not one of your girls. I’m a pilgrim to the lecheguilla, a preacher of red-headed woodpeckerishness, a poor wayfaring stranger…”
“So we press on—,” Lillian said. “Working ourselves harder and harder until we leave weakness and moodiness and defeat behind! Physical capacity fully realized—an asset to all players.”
“Rah, team,” thought Sylvie. She was still hoping to catch, in between Lillian’s oratory, a buzzing fullness, a Chihuahuan harmony, a chorus of blanched wind. Her chrysalis of habitual thoughts would thin, turn brittle and split open, especially since they were reaching more broken country with ragged arroyos, patches of cholla, and chalky stone outcroppings.
2
Chuck Blaine hunched over a rustic table on his front porch. Phoebes dove after mosquitoes in summer-tall mullein as night crawled like disillusionment around the mesas, striking the east with darkness and the west with a wispy voile of turquoise and yellow cloud. He dealt another round of solitaire then saw them coming, a long-legged girl and a full-hipped lady, both in khaki shorts and T-shirts. The girl was holding a straight line, her shoes kicking up the dry soil, and the lady swung a walking stick beside her as they barged into his Sunday evening. Chuck critiqued their progress up his driveway, past the red, white, and blue tires he’d filled with dirt and planted with yucca, now the ghosts of yucca, phantoms as mortified as the ’65 Dart he drove only on Thursdays, the corroded typewriter discarded in cheat grass, and the patch of unwatered oleander. At last, the two “women,” as their t-shirts labeled them, one gracefully late middle-aged, one winsomely twentyish, arrived below the porch, weariness widening their eyes and dulling their hair and making them look like anything but “at home on the range.” In the arroyo, coyotes kicked up when the ladies, sun-tanned and worn, lofted a twinned supplicating gaze. Chuck held the two of diamonds while the young lady stared at him with pale blue eyes and the older lady delicately cleared her throat as if she might speak. They looked spent.
“Water pump and a dipper,” Chuck offered, nodding. “Yonder. Help yourselves.” He laid the two of diamonds on its ace.
They vanished into the dark, but the pump was worked impatiently. After a while, when Chuck had lost his game, they must have had enough. Night sloped down on them, but they returned to view, and the coyotes were momentarily speechless. Then a horned owl started in cooing and the stars batted their sexy lids. The ladies whispered to each other in the dark. Chuck put the card deck in his pocket and leaned back in his wicker chair, arms folded, eyebrows raised.
“Could we use your telephone?” the older lady asked, her voice clear and charming.
“Could if I had one,” Chuck allowed, unfolding his arms, easing himself out of the chair and strolling to the end of the porch, his boot heels striking the planks with decisive force. “No TV. No telephone.”
“Our truck’s out of commission,” said the older lady who really had a very nice way about her. “Twenty miles back.” Charming how she waved her hand toward nothing but the night. “Near a dry crossing . . .”
Meanwhile the girl was trying to see him, to read his face under the old felt sombrero he wore in the evening to keep off the bugs. Or so he flattered himself to think.
“Well now,” said Chuck.
“Could we have a lift to town?” the older lady asked.
“Could, if there was a town,” Chuck said. “Ain’t no town to speak of on Sunday night at nine o’clock, ladies.”
The two shifted their feet.
They were almost exhausted, two lost waifs the desert had washed up at his door. And what did that make him now? A freaking good Samaritan? “Sit for a while,” Chuck said, pointing to the porch steps. He went back to his chair and the ladies crumpled onto the stairs, the older one leaning back on her palms and gazing at the sky. Would it be so bad to offer charity?
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” she declared, her face attaining a certain sculpted beauty itself.
For a long time, no one spoke. The horned owls went quiet. Only wind moaned in the dry brush. Goatsuckers called from the depths of their expansive dives starting up in the wild stars, clamoring and spinning in dry air—the Milky Way a hula hoop above them—and ending in a whoosh right above his cabin. Chuck felt that the women were waiting him out, annoying him into talk. Or that the girl, especially, was out already riding her own supernova to some city person’s semblance of nirvana. He ought to know how that went.
After a while, he went inside and turned on a table lamp in the kitchen. He brought out two bottles of soda and a can of cheap store-brand lager, and flipped off the cola lids with an army knife he kept in his jeans pocket. “Cheers,” he said, handing the ladies both bottles. They sipped daintily. Chuck pulled up the tab on the beer, took a swig, and burped, alcohol stinging his sinuses. “Haven’t had guests for … what?” he said, pausing, thinking back. “A month or two.”
The girl was distant, but the lady looked at him off and on, holding the soda in one hand and leaning back on the other. When she closed her eyes, he thought that maybe she hadn’t found anything alarming about him. And that was one terrible thought. A song was going to come out of this, though, Chuck just knew. A bird-sized moth flew between them, hovering near his drink before whirling away—a stray thought, an unnoticed gesture of gallantry. A breeze arose, not dusty but sweet as well water. Past a cheap lace curtain and on into his house, the table lamp burned with a galaxy of small moths and beetles.
When they had finished their drinks, the ladies stood up, the older one dusting off the seat of her khakis with a single modest swish. “Well, thank you,” she said.
“You women,” Chuck surrendered as they turned to go, “can’t wander off tonight. Better have a sandwich and sleep here.”
The visitors looked at each other, and the older one said, “Well, if you don’t mind.”
He led them into the house, bare-floored and clean, down the hallway and into a small bedroom. A woolen blanket covered the double bed, and books were crammed into every available space except the nightstand, which held a kerosene lamp and a roll of Lifesavers. The effect pleased him. Chuck lit the lamp and turned back the covers. The cotton sheets were soft, white, lace-edged. “You’re in luck,” he said. “I just did laundry. Outhouse is in back. I’ll get the bologna and mustard.”
3
“This guy for real?” asked Sylvie, sitting on the bed.
Lillian pulled off her t-shirt and folded her shorts on top of her daypack. “I’m too damn tired to care.” She slipped beneath the covers with her underwear on, her muscles firm, only the skin, with its thinness and sun freckles, showing some age.
Sylvie took off her shorts, but left her shirt on and climbed in. The bed was not only soft but saggy and bumpy so she had to cling to the edge in order to keep from rolling against Lillian. She lay looking at the books. Every wall had a full-length shelf, and every shelf was full. “Some cowboy,” Sylvie said. “Some desert rat.”
“Maybe he’s a reclusive millionaire.” Lillian’s voice was muffled by the pillow and fatigue.
“Not to mention the diamonds in his belt buckle. Should I turn out the light?” Sylvie asked, but Lillian was asleep. So Sylvie lay on the edge of the bed, too tired and wary to doze off though the kerosene lamp calmed her. There was little decoration in the room: a picture frame with a ceramic man hanging by his hands below it, his broken trapeze inside; a gyroscope; a Pueblo pot, bright red and black with lightning zags, that held a dying cactus. In the corner, an old honey-colored guitar leaned against the wall, its strings worn at every fret. “Singing cowboy,” she surmised, and laughed to herself. Absently scratching the big fly bite and other smaller ones as well, she watched the door for a while, expecting to see their host peering in. No one was moving in the house, and soon she got up and blew out the lamp, stumbled around the bed, and climbed back in beside Lillian, who snored gently. At the open window, curtains sucked out and in. A past-full moon ratched up and in its light reared the outline of a gigantic cottonwood, its leaves whirring in the wind. Some kind of transcendent moon…
By the time Sylvie awoke, the sun was high, a flock of pinyon jays combed the tree outside the window, and Lillian had gone somewhere. Sylvie pulled on her shorts, made the bed and went outside. She looked around for last night’s outhouse or sign of a bathroom, and ended up squatting behind the big cottonwood. Its trunk completely hid her from sight. Then she poured water from the well onto her face and washed her arms and legs. The bite had become a welt the size of her thumbnail. It was fiery looking but didn’t really itch anymore. Back in the house, the ersatz cowboy and Lillian were sitting at his kitchen table eating her specialty omelet and drinking black coffee with floating grounds. Sylvie stood beside them. There was no chair for her.
“Help yourself to some grub,” the guy said, nodding his head back toward a cupboard.
Almost laughing, she was struck by the Gunsmoke word. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and ate dry cereal. “Frosted Grub Flakes,” she thought.
“Name’s Blaine,” he told her. “Chuck Blaine.”
“Cool,” she said. Blaine. Chuck Blaine.
“Why don’t we get that truck, Jeannette you say, fixed, Sylvie, and we’ll all go out looking for your American grasslands experience?”
She looked at Lillian doubtfully.
“My idea,” Lillian said.
“What the hell?” Sylvie thought. Who was this guy? Some spy for the oil industry? Why should he horn in on their expedition? Hydrated and fed, she flung her arms toward yesterday’s desert epiphany that was fading into something midway between exasperation and incredulity.
4
This time, Sylvie could drive if it made her happy. Anything to boost morale, Lil decided. They were certainly out of Oklahoma and well into New Mexico by now.
“Folsom Man site’s close by, Lil,” Chuck offered from the far right side. They were squeezed, the three of them, onto the truck’s bench seat. They had reached a place where now every horizon was wider and more fascinating by the minute.
“Folsom Woman,” Lil corrected. “It’s long past Title IX.”
“I don’t know exactly what that is,” he admitted.
“That’s all right, Chuck,” she said, twisting around to smile at him. “Why so quiet, Sylvie?” Lil faced forward again. She tried to be attentive to everyone’s mood. Teams needed that, and what were they now if not a team, ad hoc though it might be? They’d been through days of car repair—old parts sent for, greasy diner food consumed, nights of talk about the importance of the National Grasslands conservation story.
Sylvie clung to the steering wheel and studied the road intently. This one even had a county number. It was a good graded surface and hardly required such care. Clearly, Sylvie was tuning everything out but the driving.
Lil fiddled with the radio, but no stations came through. Maybe Sylvie was disappointed about having Chuck along. Sometimes she did not seem part of the group spirit. Any group. Maybe all twenty-somethings were like that. Lil couldn’t really remember being any different than she was now—perhaps a bit more toned—and the girls she taught had been teens. They’d been, to a woman, less adventurous than her! Wimpy girls! So she took chances? What good was ever gained by maintaining a pretense of safety in a world that was never and could never be safe? That’s what she’d told her sons. And they were confident, successful men. “What about this park—Capulin Mountain?” Lil asked Chuck as a brown, federal lands sign approached. “We ought to see that!”
Sylvie took the turnoff, and they rode higher and higher above the New Mexico steppes. Jeannette was purring along. Chuck’s mechanic friend from the reservation really was a genius.
“It’s an old cinder cone,” Chuck said when they got to the end of the road. “You can see the flows from on top.”
They packed a practical lunch of cheese sandwiches, grabbed a can of stewed tomatoes, and set off along the trail up the cone. The rock was volcanic, and little grew in the soil. Horned lizards of a species Lil had never seen rushed out from beneath sage roots and hissed and puffed. At the top, the crater gaped, and four states breached the distance: Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas. Islands of junipers grew amid the grass. Vultures flew at eye level, and below.
Lil, Sylvie, and Chuck ate quietly and passed around the can of tomatoes. Lil was glad no one took more than their share. There was nothing for miles around as high as they were. She calculated the sweep of land and history. “Two-hundred-mile view if I’m not mistaken, Chuck.”
“I reckon.”
She pointed. “So you think it’s out in there, the Folsom site?”
Chuck nodded. “About. See that wash?” He pointed vaguely.
“Just imagine those ancient hunters with their stone arrow tips!” Lil hoped her
enthusiasm was contagious. Wind blew stray wisps of hair off Sylvie’s face. Her features, Lil had always thought, were very fine and clear-cut, especially in daylight. She had her jaw set, though, that spoiled-brat broodiness smoldering. But how could anyone be annoyed? “And thirty thousand years of geologic time here—visible!” Lil exclaimed.
“At least,” Chuck said.
Sylvie was still quiet.
Lil remembered her pre-trip research. Folsom man was the prototype of the New World explorer, dashing 10,000 years ago from the Bering land bridge to the Yucatan, killing mammoths and smilodons as he literally raced down the continent. And here—somewhere—his toolkit had been uncovered. Lil liked that term—toolkit—and imagined cave-man plumbers and mechanics. But if Folsom man was a knapper of giant arrowheads and a sprinter of fearsome ability, what of Folsom woman? Did she stay bent over her roots and digging stick? Or was she way out ahead of him—itching to reach Tierra del Fuego first, to get as far as she could go? “I wonder what those early people thought?” she said out loud. “The first humans, the Folsom-point people. Like Adam and Eve. Only they had to worry about surviving.”
Chuck laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”
“Someone should write a song about it,” Lil mused. Was that an eye roll from Sylvie? Just like a junior high school kid.
“There’s an idea,” Chuck snorted. He grabbed a handful of pebbles, tossed them back at his feet. “But you ever hear this one?” he asked, as if he’d been mulling over the subject for a long time and finally summoned his courage now that an opening had presented itself. He hummed a tune Lil found vaguely familiar. “Here’s the words.” And he sang quite charmingly in a bass voice--
Don’t fear the heart’s death,
Fear the heart’s revival.
Don’t fear the still street,
Fear the storm’s arrival.
The only thing we have to fear
Is our own survival.”
Lil snapped her fingers. “Randy Travis, right?”
“Glenn Pettit and the Oklahoma Tornadoes. Back in ’64. My first country
chart topper. I was a young cowboy. Fresh from Montana. Ten brothers. I’ve got a hundred nieces and nephews but no kids of my own. It was the guitar that seduced me.”
Sylvie suppressed a laugh, Lil noticed.
Chuck blushed under his tan. “Well,” he said.
Sylvie stood up and walked away to look off at distant Colorado.
“It has very good rhymes, your song,” Lil said.
“You think so?”
But she wasn’t going to get sucked into a compliment-fishing expedition, as much as Chuck might crave her encouragement. No, Lil thrust her mind out into the wonder of ten thousand-year-old lava flows that still showed black on the grasslands. Deciding, as always, that action was the best recourse, she stood up, brushed off her clothes, and announced that she was hiking down into the crater. She looked back once, after she’d started. “Coming, Chuck?”
He shook his head, wimping out.
Let Sylvie and him pout. It might do them good.
The deeper Lil descended, the happier and sweatier she got. Crater heat was almost locker-room stuffy with not a whiff of a breeze, the few bushes crackling brown, a green-tailed towhee scratching on the pumice looking for seeds, God help him. If any place was ripe for inducing spontaneous human combustion this crater was it. Lil might just burst into flame. It was still cooler under her skin, though, than in the ambient air, even if blood pounded at her temples. She welcomed the effort of her heart, the constriction of her muscles. This was how she knew she was alive. Nothing ever could pass into and become part of her. She was a flint and traced her lineage straight back to hunters like Folsom woman. She knew who she was. A finely toned body with functioning organs. It remained the reassuring theme of her life never to be lost in something larger, always to know her own ligaments, tendons, and muscles.
5
Chuck realized they’d misplaced New Mexico again. Sylvie would insist on driving, and because of that he’d been vigilant. To no avail. They argued like caged possums about the best turnoff to Raton, and, in the end, chose the wrong one. So they stood by a heaving and clicking Jeannette in an overgrazed section of must-be-Colorado-by-now, wild cattle strung on the hillsides and in the valleys, the few derelict windmills weakly drawing up water for rusting troughs, a rumble of oil pumps from an invisible field worrying at their nerves.
Chuck studied his USGS map. The road they’d chosen wasn’t drawn in, of course, but he thought he could follow the spring down that canyon and out onto the open grassland.
“Whatever you want to try,” said Lil. “I’m game.”
“If you were to ask me …” Sylvie began, but finishing wasn’t necessary because she was standing undecidedly beside the truck, and anyone could have seen that she was at a loss. Lil looked at him expectantly. Had he stopped believing in that desperate call from Johnny Cash for trenchant lyrics or in that Belfry, Montana, homestead birth of his, tamarisk-choked and creosote-scented?
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said.
Lil smiled, as she always seemed to. “You’re a songwriter,” she assured him, “not a cartographer.”
“That’s putting a little positive spin on it, Lil.”
“Heavens!”
Sweat made his head itch beneath the rim of his hat. He took the heavy felt off and wiped his brow with his arm, and smiled at the Hollywood quality of the gesture. His voice came out as urban Western as you please. “I do know the Denver suburbs like the back of my hand. Aurora, Cherry Hills, Littleton, Lakewood, Wheat Ridge, Arvada, Westminster, Northglenn, Commerce City, and back again to Aurora.”
Sylvie burst out in what seemed a long-repressed laugh. “Good for you, Blaine. Chuck Blaine.”
“We’ll try this way,” Chuck decided for them and pointed westward like a scout in Wagon Train, that old TV show his mother used to watch while ironing.
They climbed back into Jeannette, and Chuck took the wheel. He whisked them around gullies and through dry washes and they topped out on a plateau with a grin-wide view. The wind wouldn’t die, the grass bending almost in half. Nothing marred the horizon but a few dog-shaped clouds. The heat was searing. Jeannette meandered back onto the map, through Sugarite Canyon State Park, going as best she could into Chuck’s worst predicament in five years. Being in company. Found out. Forgiven. Laughed with. How he’d wanted to be someone! If not famous then at least unique. And now all he was was a goddamned taxi driver. He slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting a bull snake stretched like Beelzebub in the road and rearing now to do its rattlesnake impression. Perfectly harmless. Bless its heart, as Lil herself would say. Adam and Eve and a goddamn bull snake. And Sylvie.
6
Sylvie hung onto the window crank. Blaine-Chuck-Blaine was driving like a maniac. Once, Jeannette actually left the road with all four wheels. Sylvie dared look at Lillian in the middle seat, straddling the gear shift, but Lillian was impassive. The guy had cast some sort of spell on her, maybe. But, then again, Lillian had probably been the kind of gym teacher who enjoyed bouncing on the back of her neck on a trampoline. One of the most humiliating moments of Sylvie’s life had come at the hands of just such an instructor. “You, Sylvie. Show them the new uneven bars routine,” that task master had said.
Sylvie stared at the leotarded girls who were so much more skilled at tumbles and skinning the snake and dismounts than she was. But there was no recourse. She dutifully stepped up, powdered her hands with flour, and went through the various terrifying positions as if in slow motion while the acrobatic girls watched in what seemed like disbelief. The instructor betrayed not a hint of compassion.
And here she was now, all but skinning the snake with two older (if not old!) people she barely knew. It was as if they’d forgotten about saving the grasslands and were intent on salvaging something about themselves, and they watched her like she was some odd specimen of the youth they’d lost. Some talisman. Their enthusiasm for the scenery was just a bit strained. Well, fine. Maybe that’s what most old people did. Sylvie felt grumpy and childish. The bite on her leg had collapsed into a purple crater. Maybe it was suppurating. Maybe it was healing. She didn’t know.
7
Day after day it was the same thing. Chuck displaying his incompetence. Setting out boldly in the morning then having to backtrack to the last small town for gas and motel rooms. Sometimes, they camped in some remote public lands backwater that didn’t appear on the map. Finally, he’d had enough. “What the hell do you want?” Chuck asked near dark as he slammed the truck into park on a dry wash it seemed they’d never be able to get across. There were jumbled rocks and something that looked like quicksand. The old timers had warned him about that.
The women were quiet.
“I’m lost as usual. Okay? I don’t know the country.”
“What’s the rush?” Lil said and put her hand on his arm. “Remember those Folsom people? We’re just like them. Imagine this is the emptiest the world will ever be.”
It was the first time anyone had touched him in many years, and he was as amazed as he’d been when he finally mastered his first bass run. Of course, there was no Glenn Pettit. No Oklahoma Tornadoes. And that’s exactly why he’d left a two-million-dollar ranch house, a BMW, a membership at the Cherry Hills Country Club, a senior partnership in a corporate law firm, and a wife who wanted nothing to do with his “conversion” as she called it, as if country music were some sort of cult. He let Lil’s hand rest on his arm for a while before starting Jeannette again. Maybe you had to touch bottom before bobbing to the surface. Three times, though, and you’d be dead. And this was his second. But maybe that was hooey, too. You could as easily drown in dust as in water. And then some enterprising archeologist would dig you up again. “Something’s bound to work out,” Lil said. “Heart’s Revival.”
It was the heat, but Chuck could now picture those university scholars Lil had described picking at bones and stone hunting points with tiny knives and spoons. It was a painful and wonderful thing to think about. He backed up and they retraced their route for several miles until another road took off south and west toward a twinkling Venus.
8
Sylvie refused to sit on the bare, bird-dropping- and rust-encrusted metal of a lounger outside the Motel del Bosque in Raton. She was using her “Women at Home on the Range” T-shirt these days as an all-purpose rag. And now a chair cover. The advertised “grass courtyard” was an interesting collection of exotic weeds. According to the local radio station, there was a rabies outbreak in town. Someone had just stolen hundreds from the Seven-Eleven and come close to killing the clerk on duty. Bubonic plague was on the upswing. The highway, steady but not crowded, ran by on the other side of a barren yellow ditch. What a town! She ought to call her mother.
Lillian and Chuck had gone off to the IGA to buy more supplies. Then, finally, they said, they were determined to reach the Kiowa Grasslands, to camp, to look for scaled and Gambel’s quail and Chihuahuan ravens, and talking points for the next land-use review and travel plan. Sylvie knew what it would be like, moon rising over the endless plain, a few prickly pear, mesquite, and yucca reaching for it. Lillian and Chuck trading pretend song lyrics, an amusing twosome. The diner where they’d eaten, the motel, their plans for Save the Grasslands rallies. All of it was their idea, none of it hers. Why begrudge them a whirlwind affair? Literally. Dust devils rose and convulsed every afternoon. Still it turned Sylvie back on herself where, she realized, she usually lived, unattached and disgruntled and uncertain. Who was she to judge anyone but herself? “Unrealized,” as Lillian would say—maybe unrealizable. But, as for that, Lillian had probably never not been realized, and now Blaine-Chuck-Blaine was freed of pretense, threatening to be authentic. His Gunsmoke drawl was pleasant enough, his potential donorship intriguing, his songs actually not that bad, and maybe they’d be the real deal, too, someday. Sylvie vowed to keep all judgments to herself. Better not to make them in the first place. You couldn’t exert control over anything. Why even try? Maybe that’s what growing up meant—late bloomer that she was, it had taken her a long time to come to that conclusion.
The wind walloped the old motel’s loose sidings and shouted in her ears. She spread her feet wide for balance and thought about the grasslands, those unformed and unforming, raw and mostly arid plains where unwieldy herds of buffalo, flocks of antelope and geese, and hordes of locusts had once swarmed and died. It was a day scathingly bright, bouncing electrically off the Russian olives, the Coca-Cola sign at the drugstore. Its atomic intensity and precision snapped her apart, leaving her blessedly unmade.
Without planning to, she crossed the motel’s weed patch and stood at the freeway on-ramp, thumbing a ride. I could be killed, she thought. I could die this way. My mother will eventually kill me, at least. But the deerfly bite had healed to a bluish scar, and she hadn’t gotten salmonella from the bad food they’d been eating. She seemed on a mediocre roll. She kept near the traffic, not even blinking when a white sport utility vehicle almost swerved into her. She held her ground. As soon as she waved a five-dollar bill instead of her thumb, a PIE trucker stopped for her. She climbed into the passenger’s side. “Thanks,” she said.
The driver grunted, stuffing her money into his shirt pocket. He was blond, with heavy features and primitive, small-nailed hands. Way more prototypical than Folsom Man. But, right there was a judgment about another person. Sylvie bit her metaphorical tongue. “Going down Las Cruces way,” the driver said. Still, if there was a fine line between not judging and being stupid, she wasn’t sure yet where it was.
The highway led out of town, toward hills covered with dry golden grass, long stalks that held a metallic glow she could not describe.