We take a narrow, twisting road through sparse pines and patchy fields. We cross four cattle guards, which rattle the car loudly, as if to keep us wide awake. This time, Buzz makes no talk, small or otherwise. I’m still thankful for his awkward presence, anything to keep me from being alone.
Clem rented a mobile home on a spread that used to be a cattle ranch but was turned into a fancy lodge. On the way in, there’s a kennel of sled dogs; in the winter, guests can ride around in style. Clem said they also keep the coyotes away. As we drive through, the dogs rush to their fence and bark, but no one comes out of the lodge. It’s still light, the sun heavy and large down near the horizon. Buzz turns off the motor; we sit with the ticking for a moment. He says, “Want me to stay out here?”
“No. Unless you mind coming in.”
“Oh yeah, no, not at all,” he says.
I’ve never been in a mobile home. It feels like a train car, shipshape and economically furnished but plastered everywhere with posters of magnificently rugged places: Barrow, Patagonia, Big Sur, the Río Negro. Clem went to all these places, mostly for work, but it’s a shock to see her worldliness defining so narrow a space. Unconscious trompe l’oeil: as if she wished to trick herself out of a claustrophobia that, even in Wyoming, she couldn’t elude.
From a telephone conversation this afternoon, I know the police came out here, to look for notes. They found none. No one suspected foul play; this was just protocol. So I cannot chill myself with the thought that Clem was the last one here.
“I’m going to, um …” Buzz stands by the table in the tiny kitchen. On the table is a tiny television.
“Go ahead, please.” I’m relieved he has something to watch other than me.
At the opposite end is Clem’s bed; there, against the pillows, sits the stuffed polar bear she’s had since college. I try to remember his name. Damien? Beside the bed is a nightstand with a lamp. The lampshade is covered with a sheer green silk scarf that belongs to me, a souvenir of lost love that I thought I’d misplaced around the time of my wedding (and which should, by its lingering importance, have warned me to back out). I lift the scarf and hold it up to the last light from the window. There is a dark ring in the center where the lampshade gradually singed the delicate silk. “You little worm,” I whisper. I lay it back over the lamp and turn it on. My surroundings glow a sweet chartreuse.
I pull the one drawer out of the table, set it on the bed, sit down beside it. One by one, I remove the objects it holds:
An Indian enameled box jammed with earrings, the dangling organic kind that Clem loved, made of feathers, seashells, rough turquoise nuggets, leaves dipped in gold.
A barrette, tarnished silver, shaped like a fish.
A strip of gold condoms in see-through plastic.
A box of matches from our mother’s favorite French restaurant in Providence.
A paperback book, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.
A tiny delicate skull, jaw and teeth intact.
A pair of ebony chopsticks with abalone inlay.
A card for a dentist appointment in Jackson three weeks ago.
A photograph of Clem, grinning and tanned, seated in tall grass next to a knocked-out radio-collared grizzly bear, one hand buried in its fur.
A large copper bracelet, clearly a man’s.
There is more, but my vision is no longer clear. I pocket the condoms (I think of our parents, tomorrow, going through all these same motions, all the detective work of grief) and take the skull over to Buzz.
He examines it and smiles. “Prairie dog. Yeah. Nice specimen.”
I return it to the drawer and slide the drawer into the table.
I look again at Clem’s bed. Darius; the polar bear’s name is Darius. I pick him up and hold him close.
Now it’s dark. I ask Buzz to drive me back. I close my eyes and wait to feel us cross the cattleguards. This time, I welcome the way they jar me through and through.
“I know, I know. I’ll win the pity sweepstakes now, for sure.” This is me, wearing the brave wry face I always wear for Ray. I wore it even through my so-called treatment. (Oncologists: do us all a favor and find another word; as one of my radiationmates put it, “Ain’t no treat to none of it, hon.”) This is my fault, not Ray’s, and it’s part of why we finally knew we had to call it quits. The way I felt I had to be; the way he couldn’t be.
But we’ve been apart for only a month, so he’s still the one I needed to speak with, desperately, after I heard the unbearable news. I didn’t think twice. I left messages for him in three places, even with his agent. Ray travels a lot, and sometimes he’s simply impossible to reach. Now I tell him everything. How my shell-shocked mother was the messenger, how I heard my father (a gentle man) throwing and breaking things in the background.
Everything, everything: crying in Denver, arriving in the middle of such outrageous beauty, my guilt at recognizing this beauty, the huge greasy dinner I’ve eaten, the heartburn from eating it. The people my sister worked with. The contents of that drawer.
“These are not the belongings of someone who’d kill herself!” I shout into the phone.
“What would those belongings be?” says Ray, the first thing he’s said in some time. He’s in L.A.: like me, in a hotel room.
“Dull belongings, I don’t know, just … not photographs of yourself with a bear! Not gold condoms.”
“Not gold.” He says this quietly, just to repeat it, the way a therapist would. “Well, all that glitters …”
“Her life, you mean. Gee, duh. Thanks, Ray.” Now I begin to cry.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that … you always thought she knew so much.”
“So what? So she didn’t know anything after all? Is that what you mean?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Sorry.” I stroke Darius, who lies on the hotel bed beside me.
Ray moved out after my chemo ended. Part of the reason had to be that we were apologizing way too much—that is, we were saying too many things requiring apology. We had been together for almost three years. For much of that time, I’d been pestering him about children; he didn’t want children. Funny how we broke up once I could no longer physically have them. We had been through too much strife. I think we’re both sad, but our lives are more peaceful now. When we talk, we remind each other that we made the right decision.
“I’d be glad to come up there and help you. The shoot’s been delayed a week, so I could fly up tomorrow,” he says.
“My parents will be here.”
“Gee, duh,” says Ray, and I have to laugh.
“Thanks, but I don’t think it’s a great idea.”
“No, you’re right. It would raise too many questions.” Before we say good-bye, he gives me the number of the hotel where he’s staying.
We made an odd, even talked-about couple. When they found out that Ray was a stuntman, the line among my friends was that dutiful Louisa had left Mr. Chips for Mr. T. Brains for brawn. Only that’s not how it was. Still, I let the misperception stand. I felt it gave my life more color. That was before the cancer.
I sit on the bed, wondering how I can possibly sleep. My sheets have been folded down, and three Hershey’s kisses perch on one of the pillows. When I stand, I discover that I’m sitting on the fourth, now soft and misshapen. Carrying Darius with me, I open the minifridge and see that the tiny Smirnoff I drank has been replaced with two. I like this hotel after all.
Buzz left me with the station wagon and directions to the airport. My plan was to walk down the street and have breakfast while looking at a map, then drive into Jackson and find the funeral home that has my sister’s body. Where she is, that much I know. If I survive that, I will find lunch and eat too much of it. Then I’ll pick up my parents. After that, I can’t imagine a plan of any kind.
I didn’t figure on the scruffy guy with the dogs waiting by the antler archway. “Hey,” he says pleasantly enough. The dogs, a pair of big freckled hounds, are already sniffing between my legs. B
riefly, I touch their sleek heads. I say hello but keep on walking.
“You’re Louisa,” he says, in a tone that implies I might not know it myself.
I look him over. Of all the men I’ve seen out here, he comes closest to cowboy. He wears a sweat-stained felt hat with an asymmetrically curled brim, something like a Stetson, but it’s more the way he stands that makes me think he rides horses. He needs a haircut, a mustache trim, new knees for his jeans. His incongruously clean white T-shirt reads, in big brown letters, FAUNA.
“I’m subbing for your sister,” he says. “They asked if I’d come by and see if you wanted to join us. You don’t, they’d understand.”
I touch one of the antlers. Smooth as new skin. I look at my watch. It’s ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. I don’t know what on earth he’s talking about.
“Softball,” he says. “Some folks come from two hours downstate, or I’m sure they would have canceled.” He pauses, but still I’m speechless. “They hope you don’t mind.”
“How could I mind?”
“Your sister would have minded.”
I look at the antlers again. “Doesn’t anybody find this barbaric?”
“Barbaric?”
“It’s like a great big souvenir of carnage.”
My mystery companion laughs. “Doll, these antlers get molted. No blood spilled to make this bric-a-brac. Does anyone think it’s tacky is the question.”
I follow him to his truck (guns, no surprise; the dogs run ahead of us and jump in back). He tells me his name is R.B. “We’ll just stop at the station and pick up the dogs.”
I glance at his hounds, confused.
“Hot dogs,” he says. “For the barbecue after the game.”
I remember what Buzz said: how Clem took care of this task just two days ago. The usual plans. I see her putting them in the fridge at her lab, alongside petri dishes growing invisible things and tubes containing the blood of rare animals.
We ride five minutes without talking. In my head, I’m asking questions about the sights we pass. It seems shameful to be curious about them.
R.B. is friendly but quiet. Once in while he looks over at me, perhaps to check if I’m crying. What would he say? Being with the sister of his dead colleague doesn’t seem to put him on edge. At the station, a low cement building that sprawls into a grove of scrubby trees, he doesn’t ask if I want to go in. He comes out with a brown grocery bag and sets it between us.
I peer inside. On top are the Not Dogs for Sheldon. Enough silence. I say, “You can get Not Dogs in Wyoming?”
“Jackson,” says R.B. “Whether or not that’s Wyoming anymore is a matter of some debate.”
He drives back the way we came and stops at a public schoolyard.
“Anytime you want me to drive you back to the hotel, I will,” he says. “We all just want to take care of you while you’re here.”
And afterward? How about then? “Thank you,” I say.
The Fauna are one team; the other, as logic would have it, the Flora (Vern, the botanist, wears one of their T-shirts, white on green). From nearby wildlife stations, these are the personnel entitled to wear the ugly uniform I saw on Buzz and, in a photo my mother framed, on my sister.
“Rosie. June.” R.B. wedges a cooler under one arm, carries the grocery bag with the other, and starts toward the diamond. The dogs follow, and so do I. I’m grateful when he does not introduce me around. (Most of these people, I figure, knew my sister as an every-other-weekend shortstop, nothing more.) He leads the way to the bleachers. “Want to play? You can join the Floras. They’re pathetic if the prairie grasses guy don’t show.”
“Oh no. I’d only make it worse.” I can see Vern headed our way.
R.B. nods. “Just checking.”
Vern shakes my hand and asks if I’m doing okay. I say I am. People are stretching out tendons, jogging around the bases, tossing balls randomly about. Smack … smack … smack. The ball lands in glove after glove after glove. An easy rhythm. A pregnant woman and two children have the bleachers all to themselves. What am I doing here? Suddenly, I ache for Ray.
Clem’s team takes the field. The Flora sit on a long wooden bench behind home plate. A man I haven’t met is on the pitcher’s mound. He has a loose build, not the least bit athletic. Buzz is at first base, Dave at second. Sheldon stands in the outfield. After the pitcher plays catch for a bit with the catcher, he says in a ministerial tone, “This one’s for Clem.” It’s a strike. The pregnant woman applauds.
I sit at the top of the bleachers; no one joins me. I watch an inning and a half, absorbing nothing about the game except that it’s oddly businesslike, with none of the goofball camaraderie you expect in amateur sports (not that I play sports of any kind). Then I realize that the players who know about my presence have probably made an effort to mute the normal shenanigans. When R.B. comes in from the outfield, I climb down.
I don’t have to say a thing. He meets me with “I’ll just let ’em know I’m out of the order. Meet you at the truck.”
As soon as he gets in, he says, “That was definitely weird. I’m sorry.”
“Whose idea was it to invite me?”
“Mine.” He drives without looking at me. This allows me to examine his large, battered-looking nose and his big hands on the wheel. “Thought I’d give you that place.”
When I say nothing, he adds, “Clement liked the games a lot. She was a real show-off. I thought this way you’d be able to look back and see her there. Wouldn’t kick yourself later that you hadn’t asked more about her life in these parts. She told me you wanted to visit sometime.”
“So here I am. A little late.” I ask if he knew Clem well. I ask if he thinks any of the people I’ve met knew her well.
“I knew her pretty well. I did,” he says. “She was good company. Nobody didn’t think so, I can tell you that. Even people who found her … a challenge.”
Who was in love with her? That’s the question I really want to ask. Because everywhere she went, somebody fell in love with Clem. It seemed to be a rule of physics. And what, I think, will rush to fill the void?
“You don’t have to talk,” says R.B.
“I know.” Do I sound angry? (Does it matter?)
I look for and see his wedding ring. But on his right wrist, I see a band of paler skin, the ghost of a bracelet.
“Who was the pitcher?” I say. “The guy who mentioned her.”
“Dung-beetle paper-pusher up from Cheyenne, the guy they all report to. He’s here on account of her death. He’ll want to make nice with your parents. He liked your sister fine, but he’s got lawsuits on the brain.”
I could assure him that my parents are too Old World to sue, but right now I can’t bear to think about them. “You’re a biologist, too? A bear guy?”
He hesitates. “My job’s to track whatever animal I get told to track. Rosie and June do a lot of the work. I chaperone.” He raps a knuckle on the window behind us; his dogs snuffle and lick the glass where he touched it.
We reach the hotel. “How did she kill herself?”
He parks. “Leavin’ no doubt she meant to get the job done.” Now he does look at me. “You mean method?” He reaches across the space between us and puts a big hand on my knee. “She gassed herself in the fieldwork Rover whilst overdosing on the anesthetic they stocked for that little cub’s surgery. Rigged an IV from the rearview mirror. She was always learning things. Stupid ingenuity. She was hours dead when Dave showed up next day and opened the garage.” He slowly pulls his hand away. He gives me a worried, tender look, which goes against the grain of his weather-beaten face. “I’m the first to tell you that?”
“Yes,” I say. “So then, if I …”
He puts the hand back on my knee. “If you want to see her body, it’s sure to be nice and tidy.” He has Clem’s sense of humor.
“Well. That’s good to know. How considerate.”
“Ain’t it,” he says. “I’d go now, if I was you. I can give a call, l
et the funeral home know you’ll be along.”
“Would you?” Tears start, but I will them back. I had planned to show up without telling anyone.
As I reach to open the door, he says, “You’ll be here a day or two. Yes?” When I nod, he nods, too. “I have a few things of hers. I’ll get them to you later.” He looks at his watch. I understand that he doesn’t want to talk anymore right now, doesn’t want to answer more questions—though if I asked him, I know he would.
“You’d better get back to the game,” I say.
“Game doesn’t matter,” he says.
Never again will the scent of hyacinths touch me as sublime. In this place, it’s become a virulent stench, with a purpose obscure to no one. Turns out that even in an airy town like Jackson, the funeral home has no windows. Secret society of death.
The director murmurs his scripted condolences; she could have died of a stroke, in a plane crash, gunned down on the street. He sits me on a tweed couch facing a table with an open Bible. I fix my gaze on a small painting of mountain scenery, homely but safe. When the director returns, he tells me that bodies to be cremated are kept in the garage; would I mind viewing her there? No, I tell him. After all, I think but keep to myself, she died in a garage.
Without a word, a teenage boy leads me across the parking lot. The doors to the garage are wide open. Though it’s empty now, it has space for three hearses. Once we are inside this place, the boy tells me to wait. I obey, standing in one of the concrete bays, next to a dark oil stain. I watch him unlock a heavy door at the back; as he pulls it open, a cloud of frigid air spills out around him.
He wheels out a gurney carrying an oblong cardboard box, like a florist box, only six feet long. He removes the lid and leans it against a wall. He walks past me and says, “I’ll be out there.” Numb, I watch him leave. I’m glad he leaves the garage door ajar. He stands on the sunny pavement and lights a cigarette.
Clem is my first dead body. I’ve heard again and again—mostly from friends who’ve lost other friends to AIDS—that it’s essential to see the corpse of someone you love, especially someone who’s died undeservedly young; how it will confirm the way nothing else can that he or she is no longer here. The body won’t look like the person you know, the self of that person, at all. This tells you there has to be a soul because something’s missing; what else could that something be?