Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (27 page)

“What is it,
dochen'ka
?” he huffed out. His smoking made him short of breath. “What is it?”

She could not bring herself to say; she was too embarrassed. She only pointed at the garden.

“Are the boys stealing?”

Her face was so dusty that her tears left gray marks on Misha's white dinner shirt. Fifteen years later, she would look into the mirror after an argument with Alex, her tears streaking her mascara, and think back to crying through dirt onto Misha's shoulder. Maya forced herself to pull away—she hadn't come this far for Misha to see her crying. “It's nothing, Uncle Misha,” she said. “I'll prune tomorrow.”

He took her shoulders and they watched the violet light, now with pink threads. “It's different every time,” he said. “One season, half the seeds don't make it, and it's three feet between every plant. Another summer, every goddamn seed sprouts and it's like a train terminal in there, everyone pushing and shoving. You're good luck,
dochen'ka
: everything you sowed came up. Come, let's look.”

She hesitated for a moment but followed him. He held her hand as they walked back into the garden. She flushed with embarrassment—it was the same old garden. But she became frightened
again when Misha led her to the spot where the squash leaves clumped the hardest; inside his, her hand became clammy.

“You made this garden, little one,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Every single thing here was grown by your hand. It won't hurt you.” With that Misha lowered himself in his dinner shirt to the dusty topsoil, turned gray by the daily violence of the sun, and marveled again because the tomato vines ran so thick there really was no place for a man to lie down in his own garden. Maya had to lie down in the next row, though Misha said twice, “I'm right here, I'm right here.” And they lay like that, the fear receding from her chest, until Misha said he wished he could remember if he had turned off the gas, and she giggled. But he had remembered his
horilka
—the flask was always in his back pocket, dinner wear or not—and he let Maya have a sip, which melted the sky into a star-spangled fleece, and at first blunted but then sharpened her hunger.

“Here,” Marion said, stopping.

“Here but not there?” she smirked nervously, trying to lighten the quivering darkness. Now the leaden smear of the bathroom light seemed very desirable. The range of audible calls by unknown creatures was vaster and clearer here, and she practiced her vocabulary: yowls, hoots, shrieks, howls, and yelps. She thought she heard the earth tamped by hooves and nearly bit her tongue before clutching Marion's sleeve. “They really want nothing to do with you,” he promised her. “You're too big for them.” “Except rattlesnakes,” she reminded him. She could feel her heart aiming out from her chest. “Not at night, right, right,” she reminded herself. She hung off him like a branch.

“You are standing on the Pierre Hostetler and Marion Hostetler Time Capsule,” Marion said. “Which this year turns . . .” He thought about it. “Thirty-five years old. It's a grown-up.”

Maya stamped her feet in the cold. “Your daughter said Spanish and German. Pierre sounds French.”

“The Hostetlers are fond of sticks in the eye. German villagers
circa 1930 were not overly fond of children born out of wedlock. So my grandmother gave my father a French name. They got out before Hitler took over. That's what they said, but if you ask me, they left because she was alone and he was a bastard.

“My dad was off-season. I don't think he'd ever gone east, so he didn't know what it was to be crowded. You swim in the tank you were given—even Rapid City was like one giant hive of insanity as far as he was concerned. He'd scoop me up and we'd come here. It was always me he took, not the other boys, which made me feel pretty good, as you can imagine. I didn't understand it then, but he needed to be quit of my mother for three days. Even my mother was one person too many. Why'd he have four sons then? But he couldn't very well take off by himself—what decent man is allowed to do that? I was the cover. Don't take it the wrong way: he loved me. Once you figure out what's happening, you think, Did he take me not because he loved me but because out of the four boys, I was the easiest dupe? But he loved spending time with me. He just needed to be quit of my mother.

“It got so that I knew most of this around here with my eyes closed. But we never camped. We always stayed in a motel. He always got two rooms, always at opposite ends of the motel. Didn't understand that either until many years later—or I understood it the way a child understands, which is to say that part of you that Freud knows all about. And I guess it's because I understood it that one time that I said, ‘Dad, I want to camp this time.' And he said yes, of course we would. And we got out here and he said we have to do this time capsule. It was about this time of year, cold getting on colder like now, not many people to get in the way—would you believe fat Willy was already here then, skulking around?—and my dad dug this damn hole like he had a body to bury.
Here
, he said. ‘You put in here what you want to get rid of. You want to be quit of it, you put it in here. You got a bad habit, you put it in here. And you don't have to tell your dad about it either. Just put it in here. Like a birthday wish.' Except with a
birthday wish, you wish to get something, and this was all about getting rid.

“He made a show of putting his cigarettes in there. But they were a stand-in for: did he put my mother in there, or did he put all those other women in there? No answer to that, but I bet on the latter. He hated himself for these trips. On the way back it would always be,
Well, son, don't be mad, but we may not go again for a while.

“I smoked too, only he didn't know it. He would hang me by the collar if he knew, even if he did it himself. But I wanted so bad to be with him in that moment, to say
I got faults too, look at me
—and so I took out my pack and threw it in there, too. He looked up at me, but didn't say a word. And then pushed all that hard federally managed ground we had violated back into place. Two packs of cigarettes and a whole bunch of other invisible God knows what.

“So that's the deal here. I'm going to leave you here for a minute. I don't have a shovel but just picture it, it's right under you. Something you want to get rid of. That's my happy birthday to you.” He searched out her eyes. “You think it's hokey?” he said.

“You're still smoking.”

“Be the better version of me I never managed.”

“That's for your daughters. It's too late for me.” She wrapped herself more tightly. “What if it isn't something I want to get rid of? What if it's something I want? Will it still work then?”

“It takes all comers.”

“Don't walk away, please,” she said. “I'm too scared to stand here by myself.”

“I won't step away if you say so.”

“Just another minute, stay. It gets colder and colder?”

“People camp here through the winter. Some people seek out wildness at all costs. And God blessed you with your own supply.”

“Did your mother know?”

“I loved my mother. She never asked me, never put me on the spot like that. I don't know what all they discussed with each other.
But there was one time when she came out of the kitchen as my father was packing the car, and said, ‘Marion ain't going with you this time.' Said she needed help in the basement and whatnot. She didn't ask—she said. He looked up at her for a while—I remember that look. And then he nodded just the tiniest bit and went back to packing, not a word. I stayed back.”

“Okay, don't go far.”

“Ten steps.”

“I won't see you.”

“But you'll know I'm here. In a minute I'll come back to get you.”

Marion was eaten up by the darkness with his first step. Maya breathed a long, settling breath, in and out. Then another. At some point, the ache in her rib cage had gone. If she breathed in and out thirty times, each breath a little acquittal, Marion would return. She only had to hold out thirty times.

It was so clean up there, in the whistling emptiness where the rock peaked. She was able to imagine it effortlessly, the way a room stays lit in the mind for a moment after the light goes off, the way she knew Alex's face without needing to look. During the afternoon, she had felt rock that was as rough as sandpaper; and as knobby but lustrous as glass; rock that crumbled in her hands; and rock that looked as if a jackhammer could not take it, let alone time. What a jackhammer could not do, water could, however, over a million years.

Maya didn't know in what direction she faced, so she may very well have been giving her rump to her sunk giant, but it was intention that counted. He was watching her even when she wasn't looking. Could he really allow her to come to harm? She doubted it, and even experienced a flash of arrogance—there was nothing to fear out here, not under his gaze. She was a protected woman, a tended and prized woman.

She looked at the hole in the ground—or where she thought it must be; really, she could see nothing—where Pierre and Marion
Hostetler had deposited things they no longer wanted, and asked forgiveness for having allowed her family to dispose of something they had no right to take away from their son. Then she asked the universe if it had enough mercy for her, despite all her errors, to grant her a second sighting. Grant Marion Hostetler a second love, and grant her a second sighting of Laurel and Tim. She tried to conjure them the way she had conjured Marion out of this sorcerous earth.

Marion's voice was at her side. “Ready or more time? I didn't want you to think I had vanished.”

“I knew you wouldn't vanish,” she said. “I didn't worry about it for a moment.”

They walked back to the campground slowly—now she wanted the way to be longer. By the time they returned, the subfusc prologue of the morning was pushing up the black sky with impatience.

After a turbulent night—turbulent for one—the Rubins awoke to a scouring beauty. The sun, risen before them, sent down blasts of light. The warmth called up from the ground a powerful mist tinted gold and rose and even, if you squinted in a particular way, aquamarine. Alex stood with his hand sleeved above his eyes, marveling. Maya stared at him, feeling a parent's vindication and a wife's penitence.

“The air smells like someone's cleaning you out with a brush.” Alex smiled hesitantly. He had coffee grounds out and set to fiddling with the portable burner that Maya had bought along with the tent, even whistling as he did so, occasionally calling out to Max for implements. Maya watched Marion climb out of his tent and pat himself down for a cigarette. He looked in her direction, stopped moving, gave a shy wave.

When Alex had woken, Max had woken, so Maya had no hope of continuing to sleep, though she had climbed into her sleeping bag only two hours before. An electric hum sounded between her eyes—two nights of bad sleep. They did experiments on this type of subject. How many days did it take to reach full-blown madness? Perceptions registered, but to form impressions about them she had to coax forward something that did not wish to be coaxed.

Little by little, the inhabitants of the stranded encampment crawled out of their tents, stretched away the kinks of the night, rubbed their eyes, and looked enviously at the energetic settler who had already started his coffee. Maya gazed on them, too, as fellow survivors who had made it through the defenselessness of the night. She fished Marion's thermos from the folds of her sleep
ing bag. She had slept with it between her legs, an obscene gesture, but its heat, after he refilled it with hot water, had bloomed through her hips and thighs and sent her to sleep.

Alex watched as she filled it with coffee, then three spoonfuls of the sugar that he had had Max hunt down in their luggage. Maya stirred endlessly, fixated on the spoon. Closing the thermos, she walked over to Max and laid a kiss on his hair. Max wriggled out—he was busy setting up breakfast: bread, butter, and jam, surrounded by utensils, napkins, and plates. Did he relish this reduced simulation of breakfast at home?

Feeling Alex's eyes on her back, she walked off toward Marion's tent. Marion tried to hide the happy surprise in his face. The fingers he closed around the thermos were crab-colored from the cold. She wanted to wrap hers around them.

Before she could warn him, Marion unscrewed the cap of the thermos and took a long swig. He shut his eyes in pain. “Sweet mother of God. Your husband knows how to boil water.”

She laughed, a bird's snort of a laugh, swift and sudden. “The girls are still sleeping?” she said.

“First to fall, last to rise. It's called youth. It's all right—they've got five hours to drive back to school. In this regard, they went after their daddy—they like the road.”

“Is there a choice?” Maya meant the vastness around them, the gray line of 377 cutting submissively through it.

“I guess not,” he said. He looked past her shoulder, and his eyes lost their mirth. “Breakfast is getting cold for you,” he said.

She wanted to stand in front of him like this and talk more, a lot more, about anything. It was so small, this want, and she couldn't have it. She felt Alex's eyes on her. He was making oatmeal, his activity drawing fresh glances of envy from the slow-moving campers, most of whom were only starting on coffee. The oatmeal's creamy aroma invaded the clean, hard air of the campground with the smell of their kitchen at home, of all the kitchens of her life. Oatmeal was made in America—she had seen an enormous pot
bubbling at the diner the previous morning and with her amateur cook's nose gave it ten minutes before it started to burn—but to Maya it remained a Russian smell, the smell of early mornings and starched school uniforms and the dinged kitchen in Kiev with its fanlight window out of which her mother smoked her first cigarette of the day while Maya put away the buttery, raisin-flecked porridge that scalded the roof of her tongue. “Slower, darling, slower,” her mother would say distractedly from the window—she was busy devouring her own satisfaction.

“On three, we'll walk away from each other,” Marion said. She had to shield her eyes from the sun to look at him. “A Western, but pacifist.”

“Sometimes I don't know what you're saying.”

“Will you be careful?” he said. “There's weather on its way where you're going. It doesn't snow here the way it snows back home for you. It'll put a foot down in an hour. Beautiful, but if you're looking from your house and there's a fireplace on.”

“It snowed from September to April where I grew up,” Maya said.

“Were you at seven thousand feet and did you drive through it?”

She dipped her head to say she understood. It was hard to imagine snow with the sun blazing the way that it was.

“Three,” he said. But she remained in place. Concealed from Alex by her back, she fit a hand around his and held it. “Three,” she said. Then she let go, turned, and replaced the expression on her face with another for her husband and son.

Alex watched her return. He and Max were seated on the same side of the picnic table, breakfasts started in front of them. “Everything all right?” Alex asked in his indirect way. She stared at him in disbelief. Did he prefer not to know? Was his desire for oblivion so strong? He had been more reproving the previous night.

“I had to give back his thermos,” Maya said, sitting down. She waited for Alex to ask how she'd come by it, but he didn't. She began to scrape butter on toast. They sat in an uneasy silence, nei
ther Alex nor Max touching their food, Max waiting for some kind of signal from his father. “Let's eat, Maksik,” Alex said.

They chewed without looking up at each other. Now Maya filled with guilt; she was ruining the first flicker of enthusiasm from Alex and Max. Maya felt eyes at her back again, only now Marion's. Then the singsong of his daughters, tent poles collapsing with a hollow ring, the tent scratching the ground as they folded it.

“Our plan is the same?” Alex said.

Maya looked at him questioningly.

“I am asking, we are continuing west?” he said.

“Why are you asking?” Maya said. “You don't have to ask, you can answer as well.”

Alex breathed heavily and went back to his toast. A moment later, he gave up and threw it down, half-eaten, on the porcelain plate. The Escape had lumbered a set from New Jersey.

+

The Montana state line came and went without any of the ceremony that Maya expected on crossing into the fabled Montana. The word had worked a furrow in her mind until its overuse had rendered it free of association altogether, just a gurgitation of the Rubins' astonishment, sorrow, confusion. Montana, Montana, Montana. Marion, Marion, Marion. Three, three, three.

She made Alex stop and reverse so they could pose for a timed photo of the state sign for Eugene and Raisa. The sign, its blue uncannily matched to the head-beating blue of the sky, was in the shape of the state. The circle at its heart divided, inversely, into snow-capped peaks rising above a lemony sun. But the sky was so general in every direction over the prairie they had been crossing, which was so flat it looked pressed with an iron, that she would not have been surprised to see the sun rolling along the fields rather than up in the heavens. When she piled out of the car, she nearly tipped over. Maya would mail the photo to Mishkin.
Choke on it, Mishkin
, she would write on the back.

Alex grumbled about reversing, but there wasn't a vehicle in either direction; there had not been one in some time. They had trouble with the photograph. Their surroundings functioned on an abnormal scale. You could get the Rubins and nothing else, or you could get the landscape with the Rubins as specks. The Rubins gave up on the landscape and got little more than the sign, the result looking like they could be anywhere, only that the sign did say Montana.

The landscape ahead blurred and shimmered, so that now and again Maya balanced her gaze on the undemanding gray with which the Escape was upholstered. She lowered the window and the wind rushed in like surf haranguing a beach; she watched it swirling the endless umber wheat on either side of the car. There were sharp calls from ploverlike birds up above: dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee. They were tapping out a message to her, only she couldn't decipher it. She thought of Marion. His recession with each mile felt inaccurate, false.

Once in a while, cutting the bleak sameness, a two- or even three-story home rose from the prairie, lifting Maya's spirits: other people. The care with which the plot was maintained, the emerald lawn a rebuke to the bleached land all around—it was as tended as a lot in New Jersey—reassured her. She would look away, and, upon looking back, greet the home's reappearance with a grateful surprise. She didn't see any people. She watched mournfully as the sparse settlements disappeared past her shoulder. She craned to catch the last of them, willing some inhabitant to venture outside before the house dropped out of view.

About once per five of these homes appeared the loser in whatever game of survival was being played out here: a derelict home, the roof caved in, the windows broken, every shape that was once at right angles now off-center. The survival rate was 80 percent. She wondered why people lived in such barrenness. It made them frightening to her. She wanted to know the reason. It would be less frightening then.

The roadside was suddenly full of commemorative crosses twined with plastic flowers. One dead, two dead, then so many dead she couldn't count all of them in the short time the Escape took to sail past. They had entered an Indian reservation. There were no walls or fences on it—perhaps because you could not fence this land adequately. She strained her eyes for evidence of the distinct kind of living that went on here, but nothing had changed from before: the dominion of wheat. What were a dozen Indians doing on this road all at once when she hadn't seen a dozen drivers all day? Getting killed. The crosses grew out of the road's meager shoulder like cattails. If you weren't wheat and you wanted to grow here, you had to be a death-marking cross.

The state line had given her twenty minutes of distracting activity, backing up, photos, rechecking of Max's seat belt, all wonderful. But now there was no escaping the landscape. The mountains had gone, correcting her expectation that there was no flat land in the West. She understood why the sky seemed so sovereign—nothing cleaved it. For some reason, peaks had been less frightening to her than all this flat nothing. First shock, and then pancaked by nothingness: It was not unlike adoptive mothering, the American West. The sun burned the prairie with summertime force; it was impossible to imagine the weather of which Marion had warned, though she enjoyed thinking of its threat because it was a reminder of him. All at once, she hated Montana, flat, featureless, and demonic, and wished instead for South Dakota, which felt familiar and settled, and also had Marion in it. If the rest of Montana was like this, she would understand very well why Laurel and Tim would have wanted to save their son from it. She tried, and failed, to keep her mind off Marion. She chewed on the cud of his name. She imagined living with him in one of the homes they passed. What did they do in those homes that remained standing and pretty, what correct choices had they made? And what had those who'd lived in the other homes done wrong?

She flicked on the radio, but there was only static. She turned
the dial with infinitesimal slowness, but still nothing. She was dizzy. She turned to Alex and asked him to pull over so she could pee.

“Where?” he said.

She raised her hands in exasperation—up and down this prairie all of China could pee. “There.” She pointed to an unpaved turnoff, the roadway raised above the lip of a field. Beneath the slope, she could be private. Alex slowed down. “Not too far,” she admonished him as they turned off the main road. The side road was badly rutted; a rainstorm would have sunk anything but a tractor with balloon tires. A sign from the Montana Department of Agriculture said it was a winter wheat field, experimental because a seed specimen from North Dakota had been grafted with one from Montana. Maya had paid for the experiment with her taxes. Alex unlocked the doors.

Maya scrambled down the slight incline like an animal without adequate prehensility. She had not been brought up by this landscape and had not evolved the necessary adaptations. She did not have to pee. Assured she was out of view, she lay down on the itchy young wheat and closed her eyes, trying to steady herself. With a welling of guilt, Maya wished that no Alex and Max awaited her on the brow of the hill. She would hold out her thumb—didn't people do that here—and get a ride back to the Badlands. Then she remembered that Marion would be long gone. Well, it didn't have to be so in her mind. She saw why her mother liked to tell stories.

For steadiness, she spread her arms. A little better. She closed her eyes and counted, one, two, three, three, three, and carefully opened them. All was still rolling. She shut them again. She ran her arms up and down through the wheat, nausea in her stomach. Flecks of wheat stubbled her arms, making her itch. From far away, Marion asked her to get calm. Again, she opened her eyes. This time, there was a little more steadiness. Close, open, close, open, until her heart was beating less badly.

She made quite a sight rising above the slope, winter wheat
clinging to her hair, sweater, and cheeks. Alex and Max, a window per man, eyed her with worried antipathy.

They had been playing tic-tac-toe. Alex was careful to lose.

“Are you all right, Mama?” Max said cautiously.

From the front seat, she made herself pull his ear. “Of course, Mama's all right,” she said. She wanted them gone. But there was nowhere here to go away from each other. Here, where there was more space to disappear than anywhere she had known—a mother with a felonious heart could ask for no better place than the prairie of eastern Montana—you huddled together, your protections against the surroundings already so meager.