Rock Springs (7 page)

I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the store for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.

This was not going to be a good day in Bobby's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail. He had written several bad checks, and before he could be sentenced for that he had robbed a convenience store with a pistol—completely gone off his mind. And everything had gone to hell, as you might expect. Arlene had put up the money for his bail, and there was some expensive talk about an appeal. But there
wasn't any use to that. He was guilty. It would cost money and then he would go to jail anyway.

Arlene had said she would drive him to the sheriffs department this morning, if I would fix him breakfast, so he could surrender on a full stomach, and that had seemed all right. Early in the morning Bobby had brought his motorcycle around to the backyard and tied up his dog to the handlebars. I had watched him from the window. He hugged the dog, kissed it on the head and whispered something in its ear, then came inside. The dog was a black Lab, and it sat beside the motorcycle now and stared with blank interest across the river at the buildings of town, where the sky was beginning to turn pinkish and the day was opening up. It was going to be our dog for a while now, I guessed.

Arlene and I had been together almost a year. She had divorced Bobby long before and had gone back to school and gotten real estate training and bought the house we lived in, then quit that and taught high school a year, and finally quit that and just went to work in a bar in town, which is where I came upon her. She and Bobby had been childhood sweethearts and run crazy for fifteen years. But when I came into the picture, things with Bobby were settled, more or less. No one had hard feelings left, and when he came around I didn't have any trouble with him. We had things we talked about—our pasts, our past troubles. It was not the worst you could hope for.

From the living room I heard Bobby say, “So how am I going to keep up my self-respect. Answer me that. That's my big problem.”

“You have to get centered,” Arlene said in an upbeat voice. “Be within yourself if you can.”

“I feel like I'm catching a cold right now,” Bobby said. “On the day I enter prison I catch cold.”

“Take Contac,” Arlene said. “I've got some somewhere.”
I heard a chair scrape the floor. She was going to get it for him.

“I already took that,” Bobby said. “I had some at home.”

“You'll feel better then,” Arlene said. “They'll have Contac in prison.”

“I put all my faith in women,” Bobby said softly. “I see now that was wrong.”

“I couldn't say,” Arlene said. And then no one spoke.

I looked out the window at Bobby's dog. It was still staring across the river at town as if it knew about something there.

The door to the back bedroom opened then, and my daughter Cherry came out wearing her little white nightgown with red valentines on it. be mine was on all the valentines. She was still asleep, though she was up. Bobby's voice had waked her up.

“Did you feed my fish?” she said and stared at me. She was barefoot and holding a doll, and looked pretty as a doll herself.

“You were asleep already,” I said.

She shook her head and looked at the open living-room door. “Who's that?” she said.

“Bobby's here,” I said. “He's talking to Arlene.”

Cherry came over to the window where I was and looked out at Bobby's dog. She liked Bobby, but she liked his dog better. “There's Buck,” she said. Buck was the dog's name. A tube of sausage was lying on the sink top and I wanted to cook it, for Bobby to eat, and then have him get out. I wanted Cherry to go to school, and for the day to flatten out and hold fewer people in it. Just Arlene and me would be enough.

“You know, Bobby, sweetheart,” Arlene said now in the other room, “in our own lifetime we'll see the last of the people who were born in the nineteenth century. They'll all be gone soon. Every one of them.”

“We should've stayed together, I think,” Bobby whispered. I was not supposed to hear that, I knew. “I wouldn't be going to prison if we'd loved each other.”

“I wanted to get divorced, though,” Arlene said.

“That was a stupid idea.”

“Not for me it wasn't,” Arlene said. I heard her stand up.

“It's water over the bridge now, I guess, isn't it?” I heard Bobby's hands hit his knees three times in a row.

“Let's watch TV,” Cherry said to me, and went and turned on the little set on the kitchen table. There was a man talking on a news show.

“Not loud,” I said. “Keep it soft.”

“Let's let Buck in,” she said. “Buck's lonely.”

“Leave Buck outside,” I said.

Cherry looked at me without any interest. She left her doll on top of the TV. “Poor Buck,” she said. “Buck's crying. Do you hear him?”

“No,” I said. “I can't hear him.”

B
obby ate his eggs and stared out the window as if he was having a hard time concentrating on what he was doing. Bobby is a handsome small man with thick black hair and pale eyes. He is likable, and it is easy to see why women would like him. This morning he was dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt and boots. He looked like somebody on his way to jail.

He stared out the back window for a long time and then he sniffed and nodded. “You have to face that empty moment, Russ.” He cut his eyes at me. “How often have you done that?”

“Russ's done that, Bob,” Arlene said. “We've all done that now. We're adults.”

“Well, that's where I am right now,” Bobby said. “I'm at the empty moment here. I've lost everything.”

“You're among friends, though, sweetheart.” Arlene smiled. She was smoking a cigarette.

“I'm calling you up. Guess who I am,” Cherry said to Bobby. She had her eyes squeezed tight and her nose and mouth pinched up together. She was moving her head back and forth.

“Who are you?” Bobby said and smiled.

“I'm the bumblebee.”

“Can't you fly?” Arlene said.

“No. My wings are much too short and I'm too fat.” Cherry opened her eyes at us suddenly.

“Well, you're in big trouble then,” Arlene said.

“A turkey can go forty-five miles an hour,” Cherry said and looked shocked.

“Go change your clothes,” I said.

“Go ahead now, sweetheart.” Arlene smiled at her. “I'll come help you.”

Cherry squinted at Bobby, then went back to her room. When she opened her door I could see her aquarium in the dark against the wall, a pale green light with pink rocks and tiny dots of fish.

Bobby ran his hands back through his hair and stared up at the ceiling. “Okay,” he said, “here's the awful criminal now, ready for jail.” He looked at us then, and he looked wild, as wild and desperate as I have ever seen a man look. And it was not for no reason.

“That's off the wall,” Arlene said. “That's just completely boring. I'd never be married to a man who was a fucking criminal.” She looked at me, but Bobby looked at me too.

“Somebody ought to come take her away,” Bobby said. “You know that, Russell? Just put her in a truck and take her away. She always has such a wonderful fucking outlook. You
wonder how she got in this fix here.” He looked around the little kitchen, which was shabby and white. At one time Arlene's house had been a jewelry store, and there was a black security camera above the kitchen door, though it wasn't connected now.

“Just try to be nice, Bobby,” Arlene said.

“I just oughta slap you,” Bobby said, and I could see his jaw muscles tighten, and I thought he might slap her then. In the bedroom I saw Cherry standing naked in the dark, sprinkling food in her aquarium. The light made her skin look the color of water.

“Try to calm down, Bob,” I said and stayed put in my chair. “We're all your friends.”

“I don't know why people came out here,” Bobby said. “The West is fucked up. It's ruined. I wish somebody would take me away from here.”

“Somebody's going to, I guess,” Arlene said, and I knew she was mad at him and I didn't blame her, though I wished she hadn't said that.

Bobby's blue eyes got small, and he smiled at her in a hateful way. I could see Cherry looking in at us. She had not heard this kind of talk yet. Jail talk. Mean talk. The kind you don't forget. “Do you think I'm jealous of you two?” Bobby said. “Is that it?”

“I don't know what you are,” Arlene said.

“Well, I'm not. I'm not jealous of you two. I don't want a kid. I don't want a house. I don't want anything you got. I'd rather go to Deer Lodge.” His eyes flashed out at us.

“That's lucky, then,” Arlene said. She stubbed out her cigarette on her plate, blew smoke, then stood up to go help Cherry. “Here I am now, hon,” she said and closed the bedroom door.

Bobby sat at the kitchen table for a while and did not say anything. I knew he was mad but that he was not mad at
me. Probably, in fact, he couldn't even think why I was the one here with him now—some manlie hardly knew, who slept with a woman he had loved all his life and, at that moment, thought he still loved, but who—among his other troubles—didn't love him anymore. I knew he wanted to say that and a hundred things more then. But words can seem weak. And I felt sorry for him, and wanted to be as sympathetic as I could be.

“I don't like to tell people I'm divorced, Russell,” Bobby said very clearly and blinked his eyes. “Does that make any sense to you?” He looked at me as if he thought I was going to lie to him, which I wasn't.

“That makes plenty of sense,” I said.

“You've been married, haven't you? You have your daughter.”

“That's right,” I said.

“You're divorced, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

Bobby looked up at the security camera above the kitchen door, and with his finger and thumb made a gun that he pointed at the camera, and made a soft popping with his lips, then he looked at me and smiled. It seemed to make him calmer. It was a strange thing.

“Before my mother died, okay?” Bobby said, “I used to call her on the phone. And it took her a long time to get out of bed. And I used to wait and wait and wait while it rang. And sometimes I knew she just wouldn't answer it, because she couldn't get up. Right? And it would ring forever because it was me, and I was willing to wait. Sometimes I'd just let it ring, and so would she, and I wouldn't know what the fuck was going on. Maybe she was dead, right?” He shook his head.

“I'll bet she knew it was you,” I said. “I bet it made her feel better.”

“You think?” Bobby said.

“It's possible. It seems possible.”

“What would you do, though?” Bobby said. He bit his lower lip and thought about the subject. “When would you let it stop ringing? Would you let it go twenty-five or fifty? I wanted her to have time to decide. But I didn't want to drive her crazy. Okay?”

“Twenty-five seems right,” I said.

Bobby nodded. “That's interesting. I guess we all do things different. I always did fifty.”

“That's fine.”

“Fifty's way too many, I think.”

“It's what you think
now?
I said. “But then was different.”

“There's a familiar story,” Bobby said.

“It's everybody's story,” I said. “The then-and-now story.”

“We're just short of paradise, aren't we, Russell?”

“Yes we are,” I said.

Bobby smiled at me then in a sweet way, a way to let anyone know he wasn't a bad man, no matter what he'd robbed.

“What would you do if you were me,” Bobby said, “if you were on your way to Deer Lodge for a year?”

I said, “I'd think about when I was going to get out, and what kind of day that was going to be, and that it wasn't very far in the future.”

“I'm just afraid it'll be too noisy to sleep in there,” he said and looked concerned about that.

“It'll be all right,” I said. “A year can go by quick.”

“Not if you never sleep,” he said. “That worries me.”

“You'll sleep,” I said. “You'll sleep fine.”

And Bobby looked at me then, across the kitchen table, like a man who knows half of something and who is supposed
to know everything, who sees exactly what trouble he's in and is scared to death by it.

“I feel like a dead man, you know?” And tears suddenly came into his pale eyes. “I'm really sorry,” he said. “I know you're mad at me. I'm sorry.” He put his head in his hands then and cried. And I thought: What else could he do? He couldn't avoid this now. It was all right.

“It's okay, bud,” I said.

“I'm happy for you and Arlene, Russ,” Bobby said, his face still in tears. “You have my word on that. I just wish she and I had stayed together, and I wasn't such an asshole. You know what I mean?”

“I know exactly,” I said. I did not move to touch him, though maybe I should have. But Bobby was not my brother, and for a moment I wished I wasn't tied to all this. I was sorry I had to see any of it, sorry that each of us would have to remember it.

O
n the drive to town Bobby was in better spirits. He and Cherry sat in the back, and Arlene in the front. I drove. Cherry held Bobby's hand and giggled, and Bobby let her put on his black silk Cam Ranh Bay jacket he had won playing cards, and Cherry said that she had been a soldier in some war.

The morning had started out sunny, but now it had begun to be foggy, though there was sun high up, and you could see the Bitterroots to the south. The river was cool and in a mist, and from the bridge you could not see the pulp yard or the motels a half mile away.