Martin Marten (9781466843691) (20 page)

40

IT HAD BEEN A LONG WINTER
for Emma Jackson Beaton also. In December she had finally accepted the ninth invitation of the third chef for dinner, as long as no one uttered the loaded and freighted word
date
, inasmuch as she was a married woman, and they had dinner and really enjoyed each other’s company, although Emma insisted on driving herself to the restaurant so that she could drive home alone and not get into the whole chess match of who drives whom and who paid for what and who expects or hopes for what because of who is driving or paying. But that was that, undatewise, with the third chef, although he several times afterwards suggested with honest genuine interest and no agenda that they have coffee or go for a walk or catch a movie or snowboard together or drive east up onto the high sage desert where there was occasionally sunlight just to see what sunlight might feel like in winter. Probably we will get burnt a shade of red not invented yet, he said with a smile. But she declined politely each time, and after a while he got the message and went back to watching her from the window sometimes, dreaming.

Emma Jackson Beaton had also accepted the invitation of the morning waitress to go snowboarding together, and the shimmering implications of this event were a lot of the reason why she had had such a long winter, as she explained to Dave’s mother one afternoon outside the doors of the laundry service. It was actually a sunny day, almost balmy, but so much snow had fallen at the lodge and been shepherded into towering walls to clear paths and trails for guests and visitors and employees that they sat between walls of snow fully twelve feet high, each woman wrapped in a thick coat, although the light was so bright off the vast fields of snow on the mountain that they both wore sunglasses.

Was it fun?

It was a ball, which is sort of the problem, said Emma.

Which means?

I’d like to do it again.

Snowboarding?

Having such easy relaxed fun with … her.

Isn’t that easy? You just go snowboarding or have tea or whatever. What’s the problem?

I have the feeling she wants us to be more than friends, said Emma.

*   *   *

Hardly ever does a story just stop, right in the middle of the crucial moment like this one, but we had better do so now, because this is a huge moment, and Dave’s mother knows it, and she also knows she has about eight seconds to craft a gentle remark, the exact right thing to say to get Emma Jackson Beaton talking. She can’t be blunt here, not yet, because Emma will just clam up and erect heat shields and draw her curtains shut. Nor can Dave’s mom leap to conclusions or say anything wise or give cogent advice; she has to say something that will draw Emma out, let her walk into what she clearly wants to talk about but is very afraid of talking about. It turns out that having a conversation with someone you like and respect is harder as you go deeper, isn’t that so? Conversations are easy on the surface, where there’s just chaffing and chatter and burble and comment and opinion and observation and mere witticism or power play, but the more you talk about real things, the harder it gets, for any number of reasons. For one thing, we are not such good listeners as we think we are, and for another, everyone in the end is more than a little afraid of saying bluntly and clearly what they really think and feel—partly because we are nervous about how it will be received and partly because once you say something true and deep and real, it’s been
said
; it’s out of your heart and out of your mouth and loose in the world, and you cannot take it back and lock it up secret again, which is, to be honest, terrifying.

*   *   *

Do
you
want to be more than friends? says Dave’s mom.

*   *   *

You know, we spend all this time these days freezing video on our various electric devices and running it back and skipping forward, but we can’t do that with real events in real time, and we miss an awful lot of nutritious and fascinating context with real events. Like here, for example. There are two ravens overhead going south-southwest at such a clip that you have to wonder where they are going in such a hurry. There is a chipmunk behind the two women, exactly one inch from the laundry service door, which is ajar exactly one inch, which is just enough to admit a curious chipmunk. In the two seconds that it takes Dave’s mom to ask Emma her question, the earth spins approximately a thousand feet to what we call east. A tourist on the lodge portico above and to the right of the laundry service door feels a baby twitch inside her womb for the first time ever. A sharp-shinned hawk just inside the trees that the two women can see from their table slices open the breast of a downy woodpecker, whose last sight in this world is a lovely dense lattice of fir branches overhead shaped just like a nest.

*   *   *

Yes, says Emma. Yes, I do.

*   *   *

Again, Dave’s mom knows this is a freighted instant; the wrong words in reply will make Emma huddle back inside herself; nor is silence an option, for silence will itself be a comment reeking of shock or disapproval. And again the reply must be crafted in such a manner that Emma continues to think aloud; in so many ways, this is what friends are for—to allow you to speak freely, to speak yourself toward some clarity of heart, to think aloud and thrash toward being able to say what it is you feel, for the chasm between what you feel and what you can articulate is vast and wide. And this is not even to mention how very often what we say has nothing whatsoever to do with what we truly feel.

*   *   *

Then I am delighted for you, Emma. That’s wonderful, to feel that ripple of fascination with someone, isn’t it? It’s always such a
surprise
—like a window opened suddenly, or a light clicks on where you didn’t even suspect there was a lamp. Of course, it’s always fraught with confusions and complications, but it’s such a lovely thing, the surprise, isn’t it?

*   *   *

And now the shoe is on the other foot; Emma is silent as she tries to bring the right words to her own lips. She feels six things at once: a surge of warmth for Dave’s mother, who understands how sweet and painful this is; a shiver of fright that she has actually just said the thing she felt but absolutely could not say; the urge to laugh that Dave’s mom has just perfectly encapsulated the shock and muddle of suddenly feeling something for someone you had no idea you felt something for; a thrill that the thing is spoken and out in the open; a mammalian pleasure, subtle but real, that someone has actually listened with care and attention to something you said; and the dawning realization that sometime soon now, the question will arise that she has long dodged in town and at the lodge, even while knowing somewhere deep inside that it would eventually come up somehow somewhere somewhen and could only be avoided by leaving altogether and reinventing herself once again somewhere else, as she had so many times done before.
What about Mr. Billy Beaton
?

41

MANY SILLY AND HILARIOUS
and peculiar things had happened that winter also, it must be said, and for every sad and freighted moment, there was one loaded with nuttiness and laughter. A nine-year-old girl had won the lodge’s annual open snowboard competition, defeating a former Olympian and a professional who had once been ranked fourth in the world, and at the awards ceremony, the former Olympian bent down and said something rude and dismissive to her, upon which she punched him right in the gonads, a moment which instantly went viral and registered more than ten million virtual hits around the world. A young cougar claimed an exit ramp of the highway and refused to be dislodged by firecrackers and police dogs, and finally the Department of Fish and Wildlife had to come and shoot it with a drug dart—but the first shot went awry and hit a young deputy, who was unconscious for two hours, and when resuscitated, he said that he had dreamed he was a baseball bat. A young skier trying to do flips was caught in a fir tree upside down, and it took hours to bring him down safely, during which his friends stood under him and threw peanut-butter sandwiches up to keep him
fortificated
, as one of the brothers said to a television news reporter. Six men proposed to six women on the portico of the lodge during the winter, two proposals occurring during howling snowstorms, and five of the women said yes. A brand-new refrigerator wrapped in an enormous green bow was found more than a mile deep in the woods from the highway, with no discernible evidence of how it got there. A man deep in the woods built an entire small hut out of bicycle parts, with a pedal for a door handle. At a Forest Service hearing about clear-cutting a huge new swatch of old forest, Cosmas got up to speak, and opened his mouth, and a winter wren flew out, causing a ruckus. An older man down the mountain about a mile became convinced that he was a traffic light and stood in the middle of the highway making signals with his arms until his daughter came to retrieve him. Maria and Dave got a cell phone to share, which Maria immediately commandeered and programmed to chirp like a finch rather than ring, which Dave found mortifying. Miss Moss, on a trip into the city, got two tiny tattoos on the palms of her hands, one reading
no
and the other
yes
. Moon scored his first basket of the season in the last game of the season, but at the wrong basket; the other team laughed, and Moon’s teammates started a fight that led to a flurry of technical fouls. Mr. Douglas, following his most remote trapline one morning, found evidence of more than thirty bobcats having gathered together in a clearing. By the depth of their footprints and the prevalence of scat, they must have all been there together for hours, he told Dave the next day. What could they possibly have been doing? Was it a meeting of some sort? An election? A spiritual thing? Was it some sort of conspiracy being hatched to get the guy who had a great bobcat pelt year? You never know what’s going on in the woods, I think. Whatever you are sure cannot possibly happen probably just did. Me, I am going to walk nervously for a while. You never know with bobcats. They don’t say much, but I think they are a deep tribe. They might be plotting to catch and skin me. If I vanish suddenly without a trace, you’ll know why. If that happens, I leave my estate such as it is to you. Maybe they have their own courts and prison system. Hope I get a defense attorney, you know? Maybe I should learn to speak bobcat just in case. You’d hate to not be able to converse clearly with your attorney, isn’t that so? Especially if your attorney has claws like steak knives.

*   *   *

Martin had seen many odd and interesting things in his travels that winter, but nothing as odd and haunted as the empty timber camp he found one afternoon, so deep in the woods that even he was not quite sure where he was in relation to his den. He was, that day, more than thirty miles from home and filled with some strange energy that forced him through the woods like a headlong verb in a forest of crowded nouns.

Even Martin, sharp as his senses were, didn’t realize at first what the strangely shaped clearing used to be before the forest took it back from the human animals; it was only when he noticed a peculiarly hollow sound underfoot, as he trotted along what had seemed to be a hillock, that he knew. It turned out this was the old camp barracks, now completely overgrown with wild vines, moss, and grass; time and weather and the woods had slowly turned what was probably once a neat wooden structure into a large green swell or ripple. Martin, curious, explored inside, and found a few shards of old axes and saws, probably left behind as useless when the men cleared out, and long ago rusted almost to anonymity. He also found a cooking pan so thoroughly worn in the middle that it was nearly translucent, and one logging boot (providentially filled with nesting mice, which provided lunch), and several frail dry sheets of paper still nailed to the walls. These he smelled carefully, hoping for salt, a feature of many old human animal things, especially paper and cloth; he could smell nothing after so many years of dust. Many a man’s eyes had been upon those calendar pages and pinup posters, but not so many fingers, and those fingers now long dead.

Martin explored the rest of the abandoned camp, finding an outhouse and a cook shed but no more evidence of the presence of thousands of men than a knife handle and, curiously, a stack of thimbles nested in each other many years ago and now rusted together permanently. It was interesting to think that this place for many years had been a hive and a hotbed for men, men singing and brawling and eating and snoring and marching in and out of the woods six days a week and often quietly on Sundays too—men arguing and patching up arguments, men fighting with fists and shovels and sometimes with knives, men burying some companions and sticking up for others, men counting their money and men weeping for loneliness, men eventually packing up the camp equipment and cleaning out the barracks and the cook shed, men leading laden horses and mules away down the trails and never coming back, so that the camp that for years thrummed and bustled woke up the next morning after the closure silent as a chapel. Animals must have crept slowly back into what was once dense woods and then was a clearing in the ancient timber and then a humming camp of men, with the whine of saws and thunk of axes and rattle of plates and swirls of cigar and pipe and cigarette smoke and clink of forbidden surreptitious bottles. First the spiders, delighted at being left alone to build their cities, and then other insects and then chipmunks and squirrels and mice and birds, claiming territory for themselves, and then the animals who preyed upon those animals, but never again a human animal, never again for eighty years, not a scavenger nor a hiker nor a hermit nor a trapper nor kids looking for secret places to lose their consciousness or virginity. Though men in the city had maps with the old timber camp marked, though men in office buildings had records of the ownership of the site, though men in government recorded taxes paid for the right to ignore the site, no man ever again set foot in that clearing, and year by year, it grew less human and more sylvan, less a clearing and more a green pause in the thick forest. The alders and bushes and grasses loved it for the sunlight, and they leapt from the soil as if called to attention by the sun and rain; and no man would set foot in that place again for another twenty years, which is long past the end of this book, so that we have nothing to say of that young man when he does arrive, or the small green-eyed child he carries humming on his back.