Crow Fair (23 page)

John glanced away, pretending to look for Ethan. “Where’d he go?”

Hoagy Brown, the TV host, had lost interest in his memoirs. He let John see the sex and fart bloopers that could not be broadcast; but after the sufferings of his deprived childhood had been recounted in full, he found he hardly cared about revisiting his later life, his several wives or his son, a La Jolla Realtor. To John he seemed tired of living, having used up all the Schadenfreude that had propelled an illustrious career. He still had a dirty mind, though that too was fading, or perhaps he noticed John’s lack of enthusiasm for his tales of conquest among women, most of whom were, even by Hoagy’s account, dead anyway.

John didn’t expect to be paid now that he was leaving the project, and Hoagy never offered it. Instead, he followed John to his car and said, “You’re brushing me off, aren’t you?”

“Not in the least, Hoagy, but I don’t think at this late stage I have much to offer you.”

“What late stage? I’m just getting started.”

By then it was his time to have Ethan with him again, and he was excited about his plan for a hot-air-balloon ride, arranged and paid for at a popular “balloon ranch” in the foothills south of town. He paused before knocking on the door, a great oaken thing with a letter slot. On last year’s Christmas card it had been adorned with a splendid wreath, in front of which Linda and Lucius beamed, with Ethan in the foreground between them in a little blazer and bow tie. John had felt some incomprehension
at the assertive formality of this scene and wondered what it was about the heavy front door that even now made him feel affronted.

He knocked, and Lucius answered. “Oh, John, what a pleasure. Let me get Ethan. Ethan! It’s Dad, get your things!”

Lucius ducked out of the doorway with a small, self-effacing bob that nevertheless left John waiting on the step looking into the hall. There he remained for a long time, his impulse to shut the door against the draft suppressed at the thought of again facing the letter slot and the expanse of varnished wood.

At length Lucius reappeared, wearing a frown of concern. He faced John silently in his cardigan, one arm clasped across his waist, the other holding his chin in deep thought. “I gather, John, that last week’s experience at Canyon Ferry was pretty darn frightening for Ethan. Is that how you understand it, Linda?”

Linda answered from someplace inside. “It is.”

“Linda’s trying to watch
Mary Tyler Moore
,” Lucius explained. “Some classic episode.”

“And, what, Linda?” John called to her.

“And he doesn’t want to go with you,” came Linda’s voice in reply. “Do you mind? Why prolong this?”

“May I speak to Ethan?”

“If that’s what you require. Ethan, come speak to your father!”

Lucius seemed to be twisting with discomfort. He looked straight overhead and called out, “Please, Ethan, right now.”

Linda said, “Sorry about not coming to the door, John, but I’m not decent.”

Ethan appeared in flannel pajamas, a bathrobe, and rabbit slippers, head hung and glancing offstage in the direction of his mother. Lucius rested a hand on his head. John said in a voice
of ghastly jocularity “What d’you say, Ethan? Aren’t we going to have our day together? I’ve planned something you’ll really like.”

Ethan said, “I don’t want to go with you.”

John was amazed at his directness.

John got interviews at several papers. His record was good, and the owners all apologized for the pay. Three of the seven made the same remark: “It’s a living.” And so without great conviction, John found himself in charge of the news in Palmyra, North Dakota, which served an area identical in size to the principality of Liechtenstein, or so the
Herald
’s owner liked to say. Over the course of many years, John learned all there was to know about Palmyra, and almost nothing of the place he’d left, except that Linda had died, that Ethan had finished college and lived in Fresno, at least according to the last update he’d received quite some time ago. John assumed he was still around there somewhere—Ethan, that is. Lucifer could be anywhere.

“Anytime you’re on the Aleguketuk, you might as well be in heaven. I may never get to heaven, so the Aleguketuk will have to do—that, and plenty of beer! Beer and the river, fellows: that’s just me.

“Practical matters: chow at first light. If you ain’t in the chow line by 0-dark-thirty, your next shot is a cold sandwich on the riverbank. And don’t worry about what we’re going to do; you’ll be at your best if you leave your ideas at home.

“Now, a word or two about innovation and technique. You can look at these tomorrow in better light, but they started out life as common, ordinary craft-shop dolls’ eyes. I’ve tumbled them in a color solution, along with a few scent promulgators distilled from several sources. You will be issued six of these impregnated dolls’ eyes, and any you don’t lose in the course of action will be returned to me upon your departure. I don’t want these in circulation, plain and simple.

“The pup tent upwind of the toilet pit is for anyone who snores. That you will have to work out for yourselves. I remove my hearing aid at exactly nine o’clock, so snoring means no more to me than special requests. From nine until daybreak, a greenhorn can be seen but not heard.

“Lastly, the beautiful nudes featured on the out-of-date welding-supplies calendar in the cook tent are photographs of my bride at twenty-two. Therefore that is a 1986 calendar and will not serve for trip planning.”

Marvin “Eldorado” Hewlitt backed his huge bulk out of the tent flap, making a sight gag of withdrawing his long gray beard from the slit as he closed it. Sitting on top of their sleeping bags, the surgeon Tony Capoletto and his brother-in-law Jack Spear turned to look at each other. Tony said, “My God. How many days do we have this guy? And why the six-shooter?”

Tony, the more dapper of the two, wore a kind of angler’s ensemble: a multipocketed shirt with tiny brass rings from which to suspend fishing implements, quick-dry khaki pants that he’d turned into shorts by unzipping them at the knee, and wraparound shades that dangled from a Croakie at his chest. His pale, sharp-featured face and neatly combed hair were somewhat at odds with this costume.

“I have no idea,” Jack said. His own flannel shirt hung loose over his baggy jeans. “He seemed so reasonable on the Internet.”

Some sharp, if not violent, sounds could be heard from outside. Tony crawled forward in his shorts, carefully parting the entry to the tent to look out. Jack considered his friend’s taut physique and tried to remember how long he’d had his own potbelly. Tony was always in shape—part handball, part just being a surgeon.

“What’s he doing, Ton’?”

“Looks like he’s chopping firewood. I can barely see him in the dark. Not much of the fire left, now.”

“What was that stuff he made for dinner?”

“God only knows.”

The tent smelled like camphor, mothballs; the scent was pretty strong. When Jack let his hand rest outside his sleeping bag, the grass still felt wet. It made him want to take a leak, but he didn’t care to leave the tent as long as Hewlitt was out there.

Tony went back to his sleeping bag. It was quiet. A moment later his face lit up with blue light.

“You get a signal?”

“Are you kidding?” said Tony. “That would only inspire hope.”

Tony’s wife—Jack’s sister—was divorcing him. There were no kids, and Tony said the whole thing was a relief, said that he was not bitter. Jack was quite sure Tony was bitter; it was Jack’s sister who was not bitter. Jack had seen Gerri at the IGA, and she’d been decidedly unbitter—cheerful if not manic. She’d hoped they would have an “outtasight” trip. This was part of Gerri’s routine, hip and lively for a tank town. Tony might have been a bit serious for her, in the end. Maybe he needed to lighten up. Jack certainly thought so.

Jack’s wife, Jan, was one of the sad stories: having starred, in her small world, as a staggeringly hot eighteen-year-old when Jack, half cowboy and half high-school wide receiver, had swept her out of circulation, she had since gone into a rapid glide toward what could be identified at a thousand yards as a frump, and at close range as an angry frump. Gerri and Jan had driven “the boys” to the airport for their adventure together, each dreading the ride home, when in the absence of their men they would discover how little they had to talk about. In any case, they could hardly have suspected that they would never see their husbands again.

But the divorce wasn’t the reason that Tony was so bent on a
trip. He’d made some sort of mistake in surgery, professionally not a big deal—no one had even noticed—but Tony couldn’t get it out of his mind. He’d talked about it in vague terms to Jack, the loss of concentration, and had reached this strange conclusion: “Why should I think I’ll get it back?”

“You will, Ton’. It’s who you are.”

“Oh, really? I have never before lost concentration with the knife in my hand. Fucking never.”

“Tony, if you can’t do your work in the face of self-doubt, you may as well just quit now.”

“Jack, you think you’ve ever experienced the kind of pressure that’s my daily diet?”

Jack felt this but let it go.

Marvin Eldorado Hewlitt was now their problem. Jack had tried plenty of other guides, but they were all either booked or at a sportsmen’s show in Oakland. He’d talked to some dandies after that, including a safari outfitter booking giraffe hunts. At the bottom of the barrel was Hewlitt, and now it was getting clearer why. So many of the things they would have thought to be either essential or irrelevant were subject to extra charges: fuel for the motor, a few vegetables, bear spray, trip insurance, lures, the gluten-free sandwich bread.

“But Marvin, we brought lures.”

“You brought the wrong lures.”

“I’ll fish with my own lures.”

“Not in my boat.”

Lures: $52.50. Those would be the dolls’ eyes.

“Marvin, I don’t think we want trip insurance. I’m just glancing at these papers—well, are you really also an insurance agent?”

“Who else is gonna do it? I require trip insurance. I’m not God, but acts of God produce client whining I can’t deal with.”

Trip insurance: $384.75.

“Tony, give it up. There’s no signal.”

Tony looked up. “Was that a wolf?”

“I don’t think it was a wolf. I think it was that crazy bastard.”

The howl came again, followed by Marvin’s chuckle.

“You see?”

Tony got out of his sleeping bag and peered through the tent flap.

“He’s still up. Sitting by the fire. He’s boiling something in some kind of a big cauldron. And he’s talking to himself, it looks like. Or it’s more like he’s talking to someone else, but there’s no one there that I can see. We’re in the hands of a lunatic, Jack.”

“Nowhere to go but up.”

“You could say that. You could pitch that as reasonable commentary.”

Jack felt heat come to his face. “Tony?”

“What?”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Ah, consistency. How many times have I prayed for you to smarten up?”

Jack thought, I’ve got him by forty pounds. That’s got to count.

The two fell silent. They were reviewing their relationship. So far, Tony had come up only with “loser,” based on Jack’s modest income; Jack had settled for “prick,” which he based on
the entitlement he thought all doctors felt in their interactions with others. This standoff was a long time coming, a childhood friendship that had hardened. Probably neither of them wanted it like this; the trip was supposed to be an attempt to recapture an earlier stage, when they were just friends, just boys. But the harm had been done. Maybe they had absorbed the town’s view of success and let it spoil something. Or maybe it was the other thing again.

Outside, by the fire, Marvin was singing in a pleasant tenor. There was some accompaniment. Jack said, “See if he’s got an instrument.” Tony sighed and climbed out from his sleeping bag again. At the tent flap, he said, “It’s a mandolin.” And in fact at that moment a lyrical solo filled the air. Tony returned to his bag, and the two lay quietly, absorbing first some embellishment of the song Marvin had been singing and then a long venture into musical space.

Shortly after the music stopped, Marvin’s voice came through the tent flap.

“Boys, that’s all I can do for you. Now let’s be nice to one another. We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us.”

In a matter of minutes, the camp was silent. Stars rose high over the tents and their sleepers.

Morning arrived as a stab of light through the tent flap and the abrupt smell of trampled grass and mothballs. A round, pink face poked through at them, eyes twinkling unpleasantly, and shouted, “Rise and shine!”

“Is that you, Marvin?” Tony asked, groggily.

“Last time I looked.”

“What happened to the beard?”

“Shaved it off and threw it in the fire. When you go through the pearly gates, you want to be clean-shaven. Everybody else up there has a beard.”

The flap closed, and Jack said, “I smelled it. Burning.” Then he pulled himself up.

Jack fished his clothes out of the pile he’d made in the middle of the tent. Tony glanced at this activity and shook his head; his own clothes were hung carefully on a tent peg. He wore his unlaced hiking shoes as he dressed. Jack was briefly missing a shoe, but it turned up under his sleeping bag, explaining some of the previous night’s discomfort.