Crow Fair (20 page)

It was unclear whether Andy had a job, though he did have an office with a daybed for what he called “nooners.” Jessica didn’t learn this appalling term until she’d already experienced it, stumbling absently onto the daybed with him. Her previous affairs had been grueling, and she had promised herself not to do grueling ever again. She saw Andy, initially, as a kind of homeopathic remedy. But then something got under her skin. Maybe it was the karaoke machine in his bachelor apartment or his unpleasant cat or the Ping-Pong matches he pressured her into; the way he darted around in a crouch at his end of the table made it clear to her that she’d never sleep with him again.

This was something of a pattern with Jessica. Whatever interest she may have had or whatever not particularly spiritual need she felt impelled to satisfy was soon drowned by a tide of little things she would have preferred not to notice. By the time she encountered the wolf, she was sick of Andy. And that would have been that, if he hadn’t continued to pursue her and if she hadn’t had some creeping sadness to escape.

A few days after her hike to Cascade Creek, Andy invited Jessica to dinner at his father’s house, on a ridge high above the
M
north of the city. She went reluctantly. On the winding road there, a white-tailed buck trotted in front of the car, wearing its horns like a death sentence. Andy led Jessica with a slight pressure
on her elbow through the front door to his waiting father, who seemed to have positioned himself well back from the door he’d just answered.

“Dad, please meet Jessica Ramirez,” he said. And, in a get-a-load-of-this tone, “She’s an astronomer.”

Mr. Clark was a tall, thin, sallow widower in an oversize cardigan, whose pockets had been stretched by his habit of plunging his fists into them. His upper lip seemed permanently drawn down, as if he were shaving under his nose. He led them to the living room in a house that appeared to be all windows. The mountains were just visible in the last of the sunset. Mr. Clark didn’t look back or speak a word in their direction, confident that they were following appropriately.

In the living room, which had an adjoining bar, Mr. Clark made them drinks with a perfunctory “I hope that suits you.” Jessica sniffed hers, and Andy’s father aimed a hard, questioning beam at her. “Okay?”

Jessica said, “No top brands?”

My God, she thought, what is the matter with me?

Mr. Clark turned his querying look on his son, who glanced away, and by some unspoken accord the three headed over to the picture window. It was dark now, and only the lights of the city were visible. Jessica felt as if she were hovering among the constellations, and that lifted her spirits. The way that geologists are liberated in time, she thought, astronomers are freed by space. Mr. Clark touched her glass with his. He wore a piece of eight on a chain around his neck. “Well, stargazer, what’s happening in the firmament today?”

“Nothing new,” she said. “Some seasonal star clusters and nebulae. Are you interested?”

Mr. Clark said, “I’m afraid I miss out on all that. I’m a day guy or I’m in bed. Trout fishing is my thing. I have a collection of bamboo rods, by all the great makers. Would you like to see them?”

“No.”

Mr. Clark turned abruptly and left the room. Andy gazed after him thoughtfully, before saying, “He’s not coming back.”

“Seriously? Because I didn’t want to see his fishing poles?” Andy let a censorious silence fill the air. It worked. She briefly thought of ways to make amends, but it was too late now to pour love on the fishing poles.

Andy didn’t speak as they made their way back down the winding road where they’d seen the deer. Finally, he asked, “What would you like me to do, Jessica?”

“Drop me off,” she said.

Jessica’s closest friend at the university was Dr. Tsieu, a fellow astronomer, barely five feet tall in generous shoes. When Dr. Tsieu’s baby boy was born, Jessica was nearly the first to the maternity ward; Dr. Tsieu seemed too small to have accomplished such a thing. When Jessica got to her lab, Dr. Tsieu asked her out to lunch, but she said that she wanted to go for a walk, that she needed the exercise—which she did after a morning in front of her computer screen. But her walk up and down Olive Street and around the post office was so restless and agitated that it didn’t provide relief from anything. Of course, she could not possibly have pulled the trigger. Why even go over it in her mind? Why? Why again? And what on earth had made her so sullen with Andy’s father and his blasted fishing poles? She deliberated
over this transgression as though it had the same importance as her failure to shoot that man. She wondered if she was just too inflexible. In time, would she become one more peevish old spinster in the hideous rest home behind the Walmart?

She drove to the mall and, without more of a plan than getting through the lunch hour, wandered into a shoe store. A lone customer stood at the display rack turning the shoes over, one after another, to look at their soles. Jessica recalled the proverb “Hell is a stylish shoe.” A salesman greeted her at the door, a young man with a shaved head and a black turtleneck. Too intimate from the start, he held each selection so close to her face that she had to lean back to get a better look. She felt his breath as he pressed some studded, sparkly sneakers on her. Jessica found it fascinating that he thought she would want these, or the next pair he held up—stiletto-heeled jobs that seemed lewd, as did his smirk. The salesman didn’t conceal his disappointment when she bought a pair of marked-down Vera Wang flats. She bought them because they seemed so pedestrian. Men preferred women teetering, so she chose to walk like a Neanderthal.

Traffic was thick on North Seventh, and she timed the lights wrong. Glancing at her watch, she failed to notice one turn green and heard a loud horn blast. In the mirror, she saw a cowgirl in a pickup truck giving her the finger. When she moved forward, the truck tailgated her, inches away. Jessica peered sharply into the rearview mirror, stabbed at the brakes, and the truck plowed into her. The two vehicles pulled to the side of the road.

The door of the truck burst open, and the cowgirl came wheeling toward Jessica’s car. Jessica was on the phone calmly telling the secretary at her department the reason for her delay.
She rolled the window down slightly and addressed the raging cowgirl. “Let’s wait for the police. Do you have insurance?”

The police arrived in a pageantry of flashing lights—a single officer, who got out and chatted familiarly with the cowgirl as she held her thick braid with both hands. Isn’t it nice that they’re friends? Jessica thought. There was no denying her malice, no matter how she tried to stand apart from it. Then the officer came over to Jessica’s car, hardly needing to duck in order to peer into her window. “What’d you do that for?” he barked. Jessica contemplated her steering wheel. “You caused that accident by braking suddenly!”

“You know the law. She rear-ended me.”

“Don’t you lecture me, lady,” he shouted.

Jessica gave him time to settle down before raising her eyes to his and asking, “What is this really about, Officer? Is it because you’re short?”

The next day, Jessica was silent at the department meeting but asked Dr. Tsieu, the only other woman in their group, to stay afterward. Dr. Tsieu tilted her head, hands laced over her stomach, always keen to listen. Jessica said, “I’m going to take a leave.”

“And?” Dr. Tsieu hardly seemed surprised.

“I’m losing my marbles.”

“Anger or disgust?” Dr. Tsieu asked. “Despair, malaise, detachment, loss of purpose?”

She’s trying to cheer me up, Jessica thought, complying with a grin that felt idiotic.

“It’s à la carte.”

There was an anger specialist right there in town, and Jessica arranged to see him, since anger was at least one component of what she was experiencing, and she was unaware of a therapist who specialized in disgust or any of the other things on Dr. Tsieu’s list. A friendly giant, the therapist was dressed like an outdoorsman, in Pendleton items that were far too warm for his office. Jessica had never had counseling before and was startled to find the man so interactive. She made a summary of her concerns, and he mugged through every one of them. It seemed that he intended to cure her through his facial expressions. The prickly feeling of confinement she had in his office, the colorized photograph of his wife and children, the diplomas, the complimentary pharmaceutical notepad, and his gooberish attempts to forecast calm all convinced her that this wasn’t going to work. At the end of the session, he asked her to see the receptionist, but she went sightless through the lobby.

She decided to stick to walking. If that didn’t work, she would turn herself over to some program. There were now customized rehabilitation programs that combined therapy with kayaking, weight loss, and makeovers. It was part of her problem, she thought, that she could foresee a stream of self-evident lectures and desolating group sessions with people who knew why they were angry or disgusted, while her disappointment seemed to be rooted in humanity in general. In college, she had read Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech, in which he asserted that mankind would not only endure but prevail; these days, she thought that this was the most depressing thing she’d ever come across. She no longer had any idea why she had become an astronomer. Had she expected to live in space?

She walked day after day in the hills and mountains around town, in the Bridgers, the Bangtails, and the Tobacco Roots. It was autumn now, and the chokecherry thickets and hawthorn breaks were changing color. Sometimes she went with other hikers, but she rarely spoke to them. At night, she treated her blisters and planned the next day’s walk. Once, she fell asleep with her shoes on, to the static of a radio station gone off the air. The phone messages piled up until her voice-mail box was full. Ho, ho, ho, she thought, this is a crisis. Before sunrise, she lay in bed staring at the window for the first signs of light. Andy’s last message suggested that she go to hell. She saved that one, suspecting that she might already be there.

She ran into Dr. Tsieu at the food co-op and, feeling comradely, told her about the hikes. Dr. Tsieu smiled supportively and said, “I feel sorry for your shoes.” By that time she was traveling to more-remote areas to walk, distant prairie hills and wilderness foothills. She got lost more than once and only just made it out of the hills, in flight from hypothermia. Her eyesight grew exceptionally sharp, and she could see ravens in the dark, the shadows of animals in brush, and the old footprints of her predecessors. In this state, her own hands seemed to glow, the stars fierce and the moon more than usually banal.

Jessica kept walking into winter. Twice, Andy tried to join her, jumping out of his little car at the trailhead, but the chill drove him back, shivering and waving her on in disgust. It was only a matter of time before she came to her senses, he told her the second time. He yelled something else, but he was too far away by then for her to hear.

In the gathering dark and the swirling snow, she began to
imagine voices and distantly wondered if she could still see the trail. She stopped to listen more closely, hoping to hear something new through the wind. A pure singing note rose, high and sustained, then another, in a kind of courtly diction.

Wolves.

The Rileys lived on a small piece of land, the remains of a much-bigger property that had been diminished over the generations; but what was left was a lovely place: the two-story clapboard house, built in 1911 in an old grove of cottonwoods, was fed crystalline water by a hillside spring and graced by morning sun in the kitchen and a shelter belt of chokecherry and caragana. On the benches above the creek, the evening sun revealed old tepee rings from when the land had been Indian country. The door-stop at the front entrance was a stone hammer for cracking buffalo bones. Good hard coal from Roundup filled the shed, and on a painted iron flagpole the American flag popped in the west wind until it was in ribbons and had to be replaced. The house had a hidden fireplace vented by a center chimney, in which, during Prohibition, Pat Riley’s grandfather had made whiskey, which he sold from the trunk of his Plymouth at country dances. He was thus able to reverse the contraction of the property, for the time being, which soon resumed under Pat’s father, a small-time grain trader, usually described as “a fine fellow, never made a dime.” The Plymouth remained, with two rusty bullet holes, the shots fired from the inside during a hijacking attempt, and was now embedded in an irrigation dam serving two neighbors,
since the Rileys had lost the water rights. The property, Pat’s birthright, was the Rileys’ pride and joy. The point of all their work, however tedious, was to keep them on the place.

Pat was a physical therapist who made the rounds of the small hospitals and rest homes and clinics in southwest Montana. Pat loved his job, feeling that he helped people every day he worked, mostly with postoperative rehabilitation and the debilities of age. He found the residents at the rest homes especially interesting: old cowboys, state politicians, a veteran of the Women’s Army Air Corps, and so on. His wife Juanita’s job at the courthouse was tiresome: reconciling ledgers, posting journal entries for accruals and transfers, tracking grant revenues and expenditures, and filing, filing, filing! So it was that, on the occasion of Pat’s overnight trip for a case in Lewistown, Juanita was ripe for the visit of the shaman. As a point of fact, she fancied him before even knowing he was a shaman. She just figured he was looking for a ranch job, but she never found a chance to tell him there hadn’t been a cow on the place in forty years.