The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (2 page)

I walked down through Glitter Gulch, the middle of Vegas. I stood outside the Golden Nugget looking in. There was a Rexall Drugs, closed, a neon cowboy on a building top, a golden horseshoe suspended in midair. I sat in the lobby of the MGM Grand, hoping I would see Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra. A million cars, a million people, everyone in a hurry, everyone going to places I couldn’t understand.

I wandered. I bought a Pepsi from a machine. I watched some people playing softball in a park. Moths swarmed in
the floodlights. I ate a bag of barbecued potato chips, took a leak by a bush. I chewed some bubble gum and walked past the casinos. There were so many pretty girls I nearly died on the streets of Las Vegas.

That’s what I told them, anyway. The truth as inspired by champagne.

“His head’s still turning,” Cora said. “It doesn’t have to be Las Vegas.”

“Well, whose doesn’t?” Larry said. “Name me one guy who’s immune.”

“Not John,” said Cora. She cracked a chestnut with her fingernail. “John’s got a regular rubberneck.”

“Oh Christ,” I said. “Come on.”

“It’s true,” said Cora.

“Okay, it’s true,” I said.

My sister hit me just below the shoulder. “Will you two stop it?” she said.

“Baby in the manger and all of that,” said Larry. “Cut it out, you two.”

“It
is
true,” I said. “My neck’s made out of rubber.” I dragged down the collar of my shirt to show them. “Cora’s right about me.”

“To hell with that,” said Larry.

“To hell with what?” I said.

“You’re a good enough guy,” said Larry.

“I know that,” I said.

“He’s got eyes in the back of his head,” said Cora. “He’s got eyes popping out all over.”

“They’re just
eyes
,” said my sister. She leaned forward,
making a point out of it. “Everybody
looks
, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s where it stops,” Larry added. “Everybody looks. But not everybody
does.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Cora.”

“Finish your story,” she said.

I left Vegas behind. I walked back toward the motel, sweating, then caught a bus. It was all flat, it smelled of desert; the only thing standing out was the soft purple of the mountain ranges. A hot night, sultry, windless.

Big tits. A knockout
. I began to imagine this.

I decided: pull out my copy of
Playboy
magazine, walk into the desert, look at the pictures of Raquel Welch and masturbate underneath the stars.

Instead I went up the stairs to the motel’s second floor. I was just going to peek in the window, if I could—to get an idea of what she looked like.

“Pretty juicy, John,” Larry said, filling my champagne glass again.

The curtains were pulled tight. I stood listening. I was too nervous, I guess, because the door opened then. They must have heard me panting by the window.

It was the fat man. “Glad you came,” he said. He wore safari pants, a Hawaiian print shirt unbuttoned to his navel, his hairy beer gut plunging out. His small teeth looked white
and perfectly shaped. “Come in and have a drink,” he offered.

“Excuse me,” I explained. “This is a mistake.”

The fat man pointed with his thumb at the numbers on his door.

“Room 201,” he said. “It’s what you wanted, what you came for.”

At school there were girls like this one. Nobody looked at them. Nobody noticed. I thought maybe something was wrong with me, with the way I saw them. She was like that: slender, tight, hair long and straight. She sat in a chair with a mixed drink in her hand, giving off that aura of control, of economy. An efficient, lean girl no older than twenty in a halter top, red corduroy pants, her brown navel the center of it all.

“This is Suzette,” the fat man said. “I’m Don. You’re one hell of a swimmer. Incredible.”

Whatever words I might have had to say were camouflaged from me, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there. It seemed as if I’d stepped outside the borders of the life I recognized.
Don and Suzette
, I said to myself.
Names in a porno movie
.

“To think I missed out on all this,” my sister said.

“Let him finish,” said Cora.

I watched Larry peel open a chestnut. The fire in the fireplace had smoldered down to orange coals. Outside the window the falling snowflakes looked larger, the street was covered with a thin layer of white. At one edge of the lawn
a low drift was forming—tomorrow the children would make angels in the snow.

“You couldn’t ask for better,” my sister said happily. “A good snow on Christmas Eve.”

I told them what happened then. I told them what the deal was. Suzette stood up with her drink in her hand. “Why don’t you relax?” she said to me. “I don’t know if I can,” I answered. “You can,” she said. “It’s easy.” And she came to me. She kissed me. I felt her tongue jump into my throat, her breasts, her hair falling across my cheek. “Don?” she said when she was finished. I looked up: the fat man had taken off his shirt, was working on his pants, he was stepping out of his safaris at the edge of the bed, he was naked, soft, silver and hairy, the only thing left on him was his wristwatch.

“I just want to watch,” he said to me softly. “Please—don’t be frightened.”

“It’s what he likes,” explained Suzette.

“I’ll pay you,” Don said. “It’ll work out.”

Suzette took my head between her hands and kissed my cheek—flicked her tongue across it like a dragonfly. I stood there, locked up inside myself. Suzette put her fingers on the button of my shirt. She kept looking into my eyes.

“Don’t be scared,” she said to me.
“Please.”

Don had settled into a chair. A shine of tears lay against his pupils.

“Don’t be scared,” Suzette repeated.

She kissed me again, unbuttoning my shirt now. “Relax,” she suggested. “Have a good time.”

I got out of there. I don’t know how, exactly. I only know that when I found myself again I was in one of the landings leaning against an electric icemaker.

“Boo,” Larry said. “Oh, come on! I was
sure
you were going to get laid there, John.”

I said, “In answer to your question, Cora, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to having sex with a prostitute.”

But when we went up to bed she wouldn’t speak to me or look at me.

“What is it?” I said.

“You,” Cora whispered.

I didn’t know what that meant. So I asked her to explain.

Cora lay on the bed in her nightgown, speaking to the ceiling, to the darkness. “You’re driven by
sex,”
she said. “Do you know what I mean? Do you know what you’re made of? What made you go up to that motel room anyway? Can you answer without lying to yourself, to us?”

“I was sixteen,” I complained.

“Sixteen,” she answered. “That’s a lie. Sixteen—that doesn’t explain anything.”

“I got out of there, didn’t I? Before anything happened? Didn’t I get out of there?”

“You were young,” she said. “You just said that.”

She pounded the mattress with an open palm, turned away, looked through the bedroom window, where snow hung gently falling against the darkness. “What would you do
now?”
she asked. “You don’t even have to answer that.”

“I never would have been there in the first place,” I said.

“That’s a lie,” said Cora.

“Why would I lie?”

“Because you always do. And you never admit it. That’s what’s really
sleazy.”

She cradled one cheek in the palm of her hand, as though she was reading a book in bed, and stared at the snow beyond the window. Her hair, I remember thinking, was why I had married her—black hair, a lot of it.

“It’s a lie,” she said. “Sixteen—that doesn’t explain anything. I know who you are, John, better than you do. I see it in you all the time, everywhere we go.”

“Cora,” I said. But there was nothing to follow it up with. Because I knew what she was talking about. I knew exactly what it was. I knew the thing inside me she was pointing to.

I lied. I lied to her even though it was Christmas. I didn’t want to tell her about where I’d been and what I’d been, even though somehow she already knew about it. She could
feel
it; it sprang from me like some bad odor. But it was easier that way, I decided just then—easier to leave it like that than to talk about it, so I lied. It was a perfect opportunity not to, maybe, but I lied because it was easier. I said, “I was young then. It doesn’t have anything to do with me now. I’ve grown up. I’m a different person.”

The next morning the world was a fragile, white place, the branches of the spruce trees loaded down with snow, the wind blowing cold and the sun dazzling, the children opened their gifts, screaming, we went outside and threw snowballs in the yard, ate a pleasant supper, drank buttered rums, it was all a joke, the story forgotten, Christmas usurping everything else.

We made angels in the snow, Cora and myself, swept our arms through the powder, left an impression of wings that would melt before the new year.

What happened? I often ask myself that. There was a chain of things, I guess, long and confused, so that even I can’t unravel it. The last one, we were at somebody’s party. I was in a swimming pool. Kissing a woman in the shallows. We both had our clothes on, mostly. I was too drunk. After that, Cora was gone.

Opening Day

W
e waited for morning in a sad little motel where you could smell hunters skulking in every direction. I lay listening to vague presences in the next room, strangers playing lonely rounds of five-card draw, until it seemed all right to dispense with the minor pretense of the clock and, gently, wake up my father and son. Pop couldn’t turn himself over or sit upright first thing; he wheezed once and guessed he didn’t want to be spry; everything hurt and it was no use pretending otherwise. But Sean, yawning, made a clean break from his dreams, spun from the bed, wheeled toward the bathroom, and after he had let loose a brash stream of night water, sprawled like a prince on his motel pillows stuffing shells into the pockets of his field jacket. “Come on, Pop,” he said. “Up and at them.”

Pop grunted, blinking, and fished for his glass of teeth, words leaking from the corner of his mouth, sour ire. “You
thlow down, Thawn. Take afther your damn dad. Tho damn frithky firth thing like that.”

I shook my head: they were both immoderate. “That was a long time ago,” I reminded Pop. “Besides, any other morning you couldn’t roust Sean out with anything short of TNT.”

Pop fixed his teeth in place. “Not so long,” he said, trying them out, his jaw working them over, the long crevices in his cheeks churning. “Where are we going to get breakfast?”

We drove through a silent and frosted darkness with the sage desert just beyond the pale of the road. Along the strip of autumnal, shameless motels, hunters loaded gear in lots lit by running lights, steam spewing from their mouths. The dogs circling just beyond the tires, the bald fences enclosing vacant guest pools, the last of the good willow leaves, the distant odor of the slaughterhouses, neon, all beneath lonesome heavens. “What did we forget?” Pop wondered aloud. “There’s no Seven-Eleven in this sage desert.” Everybody, all the businesses, had thrown themselves open at four o’clock in the morning, small pools of comforting light at the verge of Moses Lake, hawking last-minute wares. Faint in the west, toward the dark mountains and home, a loose, silky band of clouds wandered the long route of the horizon—Pop pointed them out to us readily. “We’ll get flurries at noon,” he predicted. “It just might help.”

At breakfast we inhabited a world solely of hunters, some of them in camouflage, all of them interested in eating swiftly, most of them younger than myself it seemed, though not as young as Sean, and most of them waxing and waning through a studied, dark calm that belied an unspeakable eagerness. Pop tried to give away his pancakes three or four times before Sean took them off his hands uncomfortably. “You need them,” Pop explained. “Eat them up. Go on, son.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Keep half.”

“Don’t want half.”

“You’ll be hungry later.”

“Take them.” Pop pushed the plate away with his knife blade. “Now eat them up. Go on.”

He watched without concealing the pleasure he took in it: an unbridled appetite was something he celebrated, for better or for worse. Sean, oblivious, clenching the tines of his fork between his big teeth, drowned everything in warm maple syrup.

Pop, with his pipe lit, had the waitress fill his thermos with sugared coffee for the day ahead. On the way out we found the tight foyer wedged with hunters, and in the parking lot more were adjusting their caps and talking to their dogs beneath the lights. “Smell that sage,” I said to Sean. “It’s the strongest smell you’ve got out here. It’s everywhere.”

“Some sage’ll live for a hundred fifty years,” Pop reflected. “Same sage Chief Joseph smelled, you’re smelling now.”

“Smells good,” Sean said. “Let’s get out into it.”

I drove out on Dodson Road. To the left, desert, to the right, irrigated wheat fields under a heaven of cold stars. Canoes were putting in where the road crossed the wasteway. The sidelots were filled with stirring hunters, campers, vans, trailers, pickup trucks, lantern lights in curtained windows. Some, distant phantoms, had already set off into the desert with their flashlights wavering at their sides. The autumn wheat had been threshed down to stubble, but still stood high enough for birds to lie in; they would run in front of you in fields like this, refusing to put up unless they had to. “A lot of grain out there,” Pop noted. “Sunny weather’s
been good to these wheatmen.” We passed a lone pintail set down on a gutter pond. “They’ve got about an hour and a half left to do that,” Sean said, swiveling to watch as we passed by.

We pulled off at the gate and began to parcel out the decoys. Pop couldn’t seem to get his load just right; Sean held the light for him while he made it up slowly, a burlap sack and two pack straps of manila cord, the same rigging he’d employed for more than fifty hunting seasons. We picked up our weapons, I dragged low the top strand of barbed wire beside the gate and the three of us stepped over the range fence into the sage desert, following the twin ruts of a fading cattle road.