Fifteen
CRANE DROVE DOWN through Ranchester and across to Dayton, continuing west on Highway 14 up the long incline that rose in ascending plateaus through the native grass and sage foothills, finally parking the cruiser in a gravel turnout in a border of pine, the evergreens draping down over the rounded crest of the Bighorns like a throw of darker, greener fabric. He’d gained fifteen hundred feet off the prairie floor and could look back east thirty miles to Sheridan and the sweep of drier, flatter land beyond.
The traffic was light. Mostly out-of-state vans and motor homes easing down off the mountain in single-line convoys, the drivers unnerved by the steep grade, geared down and traveling twenty miles under the speed limit. Occasionally a local whistled past, raising a forefinger off the steering wheel to wave. He radioed Starla.
“I’m going to catch some lunch,” he told her. “Log me out for an hour.”
“Roger that,” she said. “BBFN.”
He could hear her unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It stands for bye-bye for now. It’s text-message shorthand.”
“We aren’t texting, we’re talking.”
“That doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t intermingle our disciplines. Are you going to run for sheriff again?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Seems to me you’re losing interest in law enforcement.”
He pulled a Ziploc bag from the glovebox and slipped the sandwich out. “Why don’t you run against me?”
“LOL.”
“Laughing out loud, right?”
“You truly are the hippest of bossmen, boss.”
“Just route any calls through to Hank.”
“Word that.”
He turned the volume down on the radio. A fence ran along the south edge of the turnout, and knotted in the top strand of wire were four pairs of panties, candy-striped, flowered, white and yellow, lifting and quivering in the wind. He finished his sandwich, checked for cell reception, and she answered on the second ring.
“It’s me,” he said. She’d told him when it was likely she’d be home and Larry wouldn’t.
“Hey.”
“You doing all right?”
“I’m just fine. What about you?”
“Better now,” he said.
“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do the sweet stuff.”
“That’s your rule, not mine.”
“If I remember correctly you said you wanted a friend. We’ve both got someone to sleep with.”
“Have you told Larry we’re friends?”
He heard her let the dog out, walk back across what sounded like a tiled floor, pull a chair back, the last raising the hair on his arm. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Did you forget the number you dialed? I’m at home.”
“I mean what room.”
“I’m in the kitchen.”
A tremor started again in his left hand, so he switched the phone to the other. That whole side was worsening faster than the rest of him.
“I haven’t told Larry anything about us.”
“If we ever get around to phone sex,” he said, “do you think Larry would be better than me because his vocabulary’s bigger?”
“You must not be calling from the office.”
“I’m parked up out of Dayton. On the road that goes over the Bighorns.”
“You remember what we used to drink up there?”
“Hamm’s.”
“It still means a shitty beer was responsible for me losing my virginity and thinking that marrying you was a good idea. Hold on, someone’s buzzing through.”
The line went dead, to that flat purr he thought of as the sound wiring produced. He looked down at where his hand twitched rhythmically in his lap, then slid it under his thigh, but it wouldn’t stop.
“I’m back.”
“Do you really think our marriage was that shitty?”
“It’s easier to remember it that way.”
“It’s not how I remember things.”
“That’s because I’m the one who filed. You, sir, were the dumpee.”
“Was that Larry who buzzed through?”
“No, it was somebody else.”
“Do you remember the first time we did it?” he asked.
“Did it?”
“That’s what we used to call it. That’s what everybody called it.”
“Now I know where you’re parked.”
“About ten feet from the exact spot.”
“That’s really creepy.”
“I thought maybe you’d think it was sweet,” he said. “But that’s no doubt how dumpees view the world.”
He heard her open the refrigerator, and a semi passed. He could smell the brake pads burning.
“We shouldn’t have waited twelve years,” she said. “We didn’t have to wait until you got sick to be able to talk.”
“I needed to wait.” He heard her bite into something. It made a snapping sound. “What was that?”
“It’s a carrot, and that was Larry who beeped through. I don’t know why I said it wasn’t.”
“Does he call to say he loves you?”
“He said he was going straight to Don Clayton’s after work. A bunch of them play cards on Thursday night. He said he’d eat something there.”
“They play even in the summer?”
“All year.”
“How late?”
“Late enough,” she said. “I’ve got to go now.”
He snapped his phone shut and got out and opened the trunk. He’d been to the drugstore for shaving cream, toothpaste and the extra-strength Advil that helped take the edge off the headaches he got now in the afternoons. He shook it all out of the plastic bag and walked over to the fenceline. The ground was strewn with beer cans, the singed cardboard tubing from bottle rockets, the torn paper and plastic debris from an assortment of fireworks, condoms and their wrappers, several dozen spent shotgun shell casings. He filled the bag and emptied it in a trashcan chained to a post set back in the trees, then filled it again. When he’d picked up all the litter he cut the panties loose and trashed them too. He couldn’t remember any party he’d ever attended as a kid that had this kind of variety.
He sat against the open trunk of the cruiser watching cars pass on the highway, thinking that if he were younger, or maybe healthier, this whole scene wouldn’t seem so goddamn sad.
? ? ?
After dinner he showered and dressed in jeans and a clean shirt and told Jean he had to go back in to work.
“Is there a crime wave I haven’t noticed?” She was tearing open a red Netflix envelope, pulling the DVD out.
“Paperwork,” he said. “What’d you get?”
“Rome,” she said. “I missed some episodes.” She finished her bourbon and poured another at the kitchen counter. Her neck was reddened from the sun.
“How’d it go in your garden today?”
“It grew,” she said.
He kissed her on the cheek.
“You could stay. We could watch some TV, and you wouldn’t have to say a thing to me. It’d be like you weren’t even here.”
“Duty calls,” he said.
She turned toward the living room with her drink and the DVD, and he figured she must’ve started on the bourbon around four, four-thirty. That was the stage she was in, this quiet, distracted mood. She’d be ready for a fight in an hour and ready for bed an hour after that, and if she remembered what they’d fought about the next morning she never mentioned it. Mornings were her best time. He stopped on the sunporch and called back into the house, “I love you,” but heard no reply.
He drove his ’92 Dodge pickup out north on Highway 345 with the windows down and when he cleared the last little subdivision of pricey new five-acre ranchettes he turned the lights off, continuing in the waxing twilight and faint starlight. The pale roadway seemed to rise up out of the landscape, gripping him with the sensation of not having to steer at all, as though he were effortlessly lifting off a runway, but his right front tire bit into the gravel off the shoulder and he overcorrected across the center line, then straightened and switched the headlights back on. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe killing himself would be just the ticket, just not tonight.
He turned onto a graded ranch road by the Montana line and drove west for a mile before pulling over. He shut off the lights and killed the engine, the night sounds swelling, and with them an expectation of disappointment. She wasn’t here and he now doubted she’d come. He looked at the lighted dial of his wrist-watch—not yet ten-thirty—and laid his head back against the headrest, shutting his eyes, focusing lightly on the low, rounded whistling of a screech owl, and then there was the sound of something collapsing around him and he snapped his head up as she cranked her SUV in a U-turn through the gravel and parked in front of him, bumper to bumper. He looked at his watch again, slowly understanding he’d been asleep for half an hour.
She climbed in, closing the door and exhaling as though she’d run the whole distance from Sheridan. She held a brown paper sack on her lap, the top folded down.
“I about gave up on you,” he said.
She was staring straight ahead out the windshield. “The first time I got about a mile out of town and lost my nerve. I turned around and drove right back home. The second time I just slowed down when I thought about turning around.”
He reached over to take her hand but she hunched forward, staring in the side mirror.
“Isn’t this kind of public?”
He glanced in the rearview mirror. There weren’t any lights, nothing but the weak, cloud-cast shadows. “I guess it would be if somebody came by.”
He drove another mile before finding a two-track heading south. He opened and closed the barbed-wire gate behind them, idling out across a pasture of a dozen sections or more. They parked on a rise with a view across the foothills to the south, and up toward Montana in the other direction, sitting for a moment listening to the engine tick as it cooled.
“I’m not unhappy.”
“I am,” he said.
She looked at him. “Can we get out?”
They walked toward the mountains until they came to a sandstone outcropping and scooted out on their butts to the weathered edge, sitting there with their feet dangling. There was enough light so that the sage still appeared to have some color to it, a kind of blanched moss, and the sky held a band of royal blue around the horizon.
She unrolled the top of the sack and pulled out a six-pack of Miller Lite, popping the tab on one and then another. “I couldn’t find any Hamm’s,” she said. “I don’t know whether they even make it anymore.”
There was a muted scraping to their right, nothing more than hearing your neck scratch against a corduroy collar, and they both turned toward the sound.
“Are there rattlesnakes out here?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, there probably are.”
She slid around behind him, settling again on his other side. “Are you very frightened?”
“Mostly I’m worried about the end of it. About what it’ll do to Jean if I last a long time.”
“Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
“Maybe she will. I’ve been surprised by lots of things.”
They put the empty cans in the sack and opened new ones.
“I don’t think I would have wanted a divorce if we’d been older,” she said. “If we were as old as we are now.”
He could make out the rise of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, but not the color of her hair or eyes. She was staring straight at him.
“I was still young enough then to think my life could change,” she said. “I’m over that now.”
“I thought you said you weren’t unhappy.”
“There’s a difference.”
She leaned into him and he draped an arm across her shoulders, holding her tight. It was his better arm.
“I guess I’ve never expected anything to change,” he said. “But then I’ll eat the same goddamn thing for lunch every day, and never once think about ordering something different.”
She laughed softly, and he stroked her hair.
“I’m not going to leave Larry. I know better. That’s where I’m going with this.”
“I never thought you would.”
She looked away, sipping her beer. “When I think about you dying, I get that same feeling of wanting to run. Like when I was young.” The slight palsy in his arm set up a vibration in her shoulders and neck, enough to make her voice quaver, and he brought it back into his lap.
“That’s about how I feel too,” he said.
She set her beer down and pressed against him, wrapping herself around the arm as a girl might cling to a vine, as a woman might if she thought the warmth of her body could heal.