“What’re you now,” Harlo cracked, “the bank examiner?”
Joe saw Harlo more clearly now, how he looked older, his face weathered, his mouth more jowly. A drinker’s red-veined nose and old timber teeth. Though obviously he could still turn up that same infectious grin. That made it hard for Joe to keep withholding his own smile, at being so glad to see him.
At which point Wade burst in, followed by Anne.
“We brought something for you, Harlo.”
Wade proffered his gift, the label-less dark filled bottle of homemade wine Marly had given him.
He had waited long enough.
ALL THE REST of the morning the four sat on the dirt in the splinters of sunlight, sipping and passing the wine. Harlo grooving the floor with his boot heel, practiced in doing time, listening to whatever there was to listen to, the breeze on the lake outside, the rustle of the newly budding red alder. Joe settling lower and lower into the dirt and its memories, forgetting why he came, if he even knew. Anne, loving the mountain air, napping then waking. Wade, resting his chin on his fists, extrapolating on the end of speech, the last word ever spoken, if there were to come a time when everyone on earth decided to wait for someone else to talk, how no one would ever talk again.
“It’s pretty chilly, right?” he said.
“Yeah, Wade; imagine it is for you city slickers. Why not let’s move outside then.”
Harlo stood. Pantomimed a stately ‘ladies first’ bow for Anne, who went out ignoring him. Walking after her, his left leg swinging limply behind the right, Wade realized Harlo must be partly lame.
Outside, Harlo hiked himself up on the woodpile. “Guess you come up to see Scotty then, Joe?”
Joe shook his head. “Nope, not why I came, Harlo.”
“So you say, but I bet ya for a fact it is.”
Harlo nudged Wade, to watch, as he reached to tickle the back of Anne’s neck. She batted him off. She seemed familiar with Harlo, but not fond of him.
“The reason I came was about the ranch. Now that Emma’s died, things’ve all changed around. Where, now, legally, I own. . .”
“Don’t waste your breath, Joe; air’s too thin. I heard all about it, and so what? I never expected nothin from that place, and was I right or was I right? Hell, what d’ya ‘xpect, when even your own mother ain’t your mother. Myself, I think, perfect end to it, The only one of us sorry assholes to get the place is the one who ran away from it. And even funnier? Even you don’t get nothin, not really. They’re goin to flood the hell out of it. So Joe, I don’t see what’s left but for you to get your money and leave again.”
“Which is why I’m here. I’m not sure that’s what’s right.”
“Rat’s ass you ain’t sure. End of the day, money is what’s right, and we all know damn well that’s what you come for. Same as ever’one else; you ain’t no different’n Leonard or me or Frances. Get right down to it, we’re all of us just jackass Meeks’s. An always will be.”
A flash of alpine air fluttered the sun-dappled aquamarine lake water. Joe dipped his hand to drink.
“What about I don’t sell it, Harlo? What about, if I had a little time. . .”
“What the hell? Sell that damn place and live it up, for Chrissake. You really want my opinion? Don’t think twice. Whatever money you can get you’re welcome to.”
“Come on. You always wanted that place. Now I’m supposed to believe you don’t anymore?”
“Damn right. What in high heaven would make me wanna go back bein a two-bit sheepkickin cowpunchin rancher? Hoo boy, Wade. Runnin off didn’t improve your old man’s sense any. He never was much good knowin which side his bread’s buttered on. Am I right?”
“I guess so.” Wade liked this, a criminal uncle, and how he teased and joked with everyone.
“Sure as shit you guess so!” Harlo laughed. “Your boy’s got your number there, Joe.”
Joe, getting exasperated, kicked loose a mound of wet moss, then went back in the cabin. Harlo stretched out his legs.
“So Anne, how’s my girl? Drinkin your fill of good wine like this here, what’re you now, eighteen or so? Wade, last time I seen Anne, she wasn’t near so filled out.”
“Harlo, just shove it.”
She walked off, away from the cabin, then reversed, and went inside after Joe.
“I guess she doesn’t like you so much?”
“Ah it ain’t nothin. Been like that with us since she was little. It’s ‘cause I never settled down with Marly like everyone kind of expected. Maybe I should of, but with all my rodeoin and wild ass ways. . .”
Wade leaned back, basking in the high sun. “We met a guy that wanted to come up here and find you. He said you told him how great it was here.”
“Oh yeah, that scraggly barefoot homeless kid? Na, I ran him off the minute he turned up. He don’t belong here; he belongs in Warm Springs with all the retards.”
“I liked him though.”
“Well you’re somethin then, Wade.”
Harlo picked his teeth.
“Harlo, where’s that old mine up here? Joe said. . .”
“Independence? Hell, it got buried by the landslide; the whole damn shebang.” He pointed to the landslide. “One hell of a grave for a ghost town and one poor little kid, ain’t it?”
“Were there any other people here?”
“Nope, not a soul. He was the only casualty.”
Harlo jammed his stick in the dirt, bent it till it snapped and flung a divot of black dirt in the air.
“Only one that died, anyways,” he added.
ANNE FOUND JOE in the dark of the back room of the cabin, pungent of rotting wood, lit only by the small square of rusty window sun light that fell on the water. She took off her boots, rolled up her pant legs, and, ducking the jungle of tendrils hanging from the ceiling underside—roots of the mountain grasses flourishing on the roof—waded to an old rotting dresser along the far water-side wall. On it, a bouquet of tinder dry stems and thistle flowers, which became a puff of ash at her touch. Alongside, a piece of clear glassy stone. Which she held into the beam of streaming window sunlight.
“What kinda rock is this?”
Joe only then realized he wasn’t alone, and in turning to answer, didn’t; instead, in turning, he was struck silent, by Anne, by her standing in the blaze of sun, the sapphire in her eyes, the luster radiating off her skin. Struck dumb, standing still as stone and held in sway by the fullness, not just of her but of the moment, all of it, how it all at once revived resuscitated resurrected that young watershed summer so long ago, all its fear and joy and desire and passion, all that they had had then and there, here, he and Marly, in this interior of this cabin, all that for a few short months they felt and shared, and felt how it felt to share, and shared how it felt to feel. Thunderstruck by all of that, that he had left, left on that final day, in the hours and aftermath of that fatal landslide, because how it felt to him, then, on that day, was that leaving, leaving it all, was the best thing, the right thing, the only thing to do. How he felt so sure of it, that day and ever since and all this time, that it had to be done, leaving, but now, here, so stunned by all that was suddenly standing there facing him, not Marly but her flesh and blood and same aged daughter, both collapsed into the here and now and then and there. . .only now, this time, Joe standing and wondering. . .Was it? Was it the right, the best, the only thing to do? To have done? And in wondering that, for the first time ever, Joe was no longer all that sure. Not sure at all.
“Calcite,” he replied.
Anne waded toward him, the clear colored calcite flat on her extended palm.
“Look, it reflects things double.”
She held the translucent rock over her finger and Joe noticed, first, that she had put a ring on her finger, and only second, how that ring’s golden red image refracted in the calcite into a double image.
“Actually, that kind of crystal calcite, they call it refracting calcite. It’s not really a reflection. . .it’s m
ore like, you know, a window. . .”
Third, he noticed her shoulder brush his arm. And he stepped back a little, rippling the lazy sunlight so it rose prismatically rose-like from the water.
“What are you guys doing?”
Wade standing in the low door—even he had to duck—grinning, startling Anne; a highly visible blush colored her cheeks.
“Just looking around. Bout done though.”
Joe sloshed to the door, and forgetting to duck, knocked his head on the low frame as he was leaving. Wade remained with Anne; they played with the calcite, focusing it to split the sunlight and make rays of color dance on the walls.
Harlo greeted Joe when he came out again.
“I ever tell you, I put up a plaque for Scotty?”
“No,” Joe said, shaking his feet dry, rubbing his head.
“Yeah, I did. Go on up and have a look. It ain’t much, but it’s somethin. Visitin him might help get your thoughts straight better’n I ever could”
Joe looked up. In the vast blue sky, he saw two new fan-tails, one laced across the other, their intersection a solar cross, as though marking the earth where a mountain fell.
When Anne came out, Joe was already hiking up the rubble of the landslide.
WHEN IT FELL, the collapsing mountain wall smothered the basin floor and mauled its way up the other side; at its furthest reach it left one particularly enormous block of dolomite. To which Joe intuitively climbed, intrigued even more by flashes of metal that the monolith appeared to emit. Nearing it, three big horn sheep, who’d been eyeing his clamber up, abruptly fled, jostling the nearby white pine, its few branches glistening of the last snow still clinging to the short needles. Reaching the boulder, he saw that the flashes were glints of sunlight off a license plate affixed to a cleft in the rock by a lariat that had been flattened into a kind of makeshift tablet, on which an epitaph was embossed with crude cuneiform lettering cudgeled by a cold chisel:
HERE DIED SCOTT M MEEKS 1959
In the shade of the monument, on less than a square foot of the thousands of tons of naked dirt and blonde rock that had shattered like a bad tooth from Mt. Contact and fell in cascades that awful morning, Joe sat estimating the magnitude of the slide at, oh, a mile long, and maybe, oh, four or five hundred yards wide, at a depth of, say, a couple hundred feet, at least. A sizable tomb measured by total cubic feet. Imagine such a thing as a spirit, and if say there is one, and a young one at that, how was it supposed to get out from under all this? You lift a small rock and under that was another, and. . .how long would it take? Some peoples didn’t use graves; they wrapped the body in animal skins and lifted it on a platform of lashed together branches. Which made sense. Being raised into the sky, that seemed a lot easier way to give up the ghost, to get free, to get away, than dig out from a pile of earth.
Though maybe, sometimes, you don’t even get away even by dying.
The platinum disk of sun encroached on his plot of shade, an emulsion of visions mixed in his head. Suns, earth, crosses, graves. In one or two eons a body melds and fuses and compresses and what’s left? Some Great Spirit, a few bones, a flattened petrified fallen down cabin, or maybe nothing; it all turns into nothing but more rock. Maybe, in the future, archeologists would dig up buried Meekses just like they did apes in Africa, millions of years old. Maybe the geologists or priests or whatever of that age would find the bony record of Scotty’s microscopic life and make theories about the existence of humans just how nowadays they took dolomite made of hard-shelled sea life and guessed about the teeming primitive life millions of years ago, from just one bone a million years old could tell how it belonged to a young male and how old he was and how it was he died.
Joe stood up. Too bad you couldn’t live that long, he thought. He watched the two jet fan-tails scatter. Too bad you weren’t airborne, in sky and brilliant sun. Too bad you didn’t know everything that was ever going to happen.
WADE WANTED TO follow after Joe, but Harlo had advised against it.
“Wait here an try this instead. You ain’t to too young to take a hit of weed, I s’pose.”
Harlo pinched some fibrous dried plant matter into a square of paper and one-hand rolled it between thumb and forefinger into a white crayon-like cigarette.
“I got me a little boo garden over in those alder there. Figure to train me a mountain lion to scare off anybody might come mess with it.”
“Mountain lion?”
Harlo lit a stick match off his muddy boot.
“I got one like to come skulkin around now and then. Checkin up on me. I leave him a little somethin in return. You just come back in a few weeks an see if we ain’t partners by then.”
He smoked and passed the bone white cigarette to Wade, who mimicked his every move. The first taste thickened his lips. His pulse skipped. He coughed. He swirled. He spun. Anne reached to take the cigarette from him, a pretty King Arthur spell-casting she-witch wordlessly thinking her thoughts, Harlo a Cheyenne brave sitting spraddle-legged against the cabin, idly peeling off dead bark from the timber wall, his prison haircut grown out into brown mongrel hair, thick as dried moss. To Wade, in no time it seemed hours sitting, the three of them, like hired hands on break, like drunk miners, like trail weary cowboys, rawhide hands sticky with pine pitch and dust.
Harlo relit and gave the cigarette a hard suck, making it pop. “Yeah,” he said, holding his breath in, “no way I’m goin back down, getting involved, nope, no way, not for nothin. Wade-ster? Too bad you’re a Meeks, though you seem kinda differnt, so let’s hope you ain’t only one.”
“Why not?”
“A Meeks is a son of a bitch. No matter what. Come whatever, he’s a son of a bitch if he stays or if he goes.”
He closed his eyes, and the long exhale smoothed the unshaved crags and creases in his face. Smoke streamed out between the gap in his front teeth like waterfalls.
“What happened there, Harlo?” Wade indicating the bulbous contortion on Harlo’s forearm.
“That there? Must be where I broke it, years ago, fallin off my horse.”
“Does it still work okay?”
“Works better’n ever, actually.”
“As opposed to the rest of you.” Anne’s first comment in some time, an exit line, as she stood up and meandered off into the trees.
“How’d you fall off your horse? He bucked you?”
“Na, hell no. My beat up old saddle had got so wore out, the goddamn cinch broke. Matter of fact, it happened right up on the divide there. Crossin Slough Creek. Gizzard, that was my horse then, he just all up and stopped. I give him a good kick in the flank, and he goes, okay, you’re the boss, and takes but one step, then, Bam. That saddle spin upside down, just like that, an next thing you know I’m flat on my back lookin at my the wrist end of my arm twisted near perpendicular to my elbow part, wonderin what the hell. See, Gizzard known the whole time the cinch had broke.”
“What did you do?”
“I look up and see Scotty’s took off like a banshee to get Joe, who’d got way out ahead’a me. Damn kid, I remember how he’d been mopin around weeks, barely doin chores, not ever sayin a word—which I admit I kinda liked, up to a point; hell, I near had to tie him on his own horse to get him to come up movin the herd, then we’re no sooner up here and he’s gone. I found out later, what happened was, he’d spotted young Marly, up here watchin out over them rat-ass sheep of her crazy old man, an off he took.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Not bad. Times like that, the body takes over, you go into a bit of shock, take a step outside yourself. Some ways I kinda enjoyed it, just lyin there. Wouldn’t a been a bad way to go at that. Someday way down the road some hiker or hunter or alien finds me. Wonder what become a me. How’d I get here?”
Harlo rubbing his thumb against his chipped front teeth, Wade loved how they sparked when he talked.
“Goddamn Joe. After that, he come up here near ever’ day for Marly, couldn’t keep him away, her and that maverick ge
ologist up here lookin for chromite. Scotty too, followed Joe up here like a damn sheepdog. Hadn’t been for that, Scotty probly still. . .”
A cool wind whipped eddies across the lake. They were in shade now; Harlo stood and stretched his arms. “I feel like havin me a hot bath on mother nature. What d’you say, Wade-ster?”
“What about Joe? And Anne?”
“They’ll show up. C’mon.”
Harlo headed out into the field of newly forming bear grass bulbs.
“Ugh. It smells like rotten egg stuff,” Wade said when they came to a quietly steaming hot springs pool.
“Last one in is a rotten egg then.”
Harlo shucked his clothes and picked his way whimpering about the stony accretions surrounding the pool. His naked mangled muscle-y limbs the story of his life, Wade wondered if his own body would ever harden manlike like that.
“C’mon, Wade, what’re you waitin for?” Harlo walrused into the simmering turquoise water; steam bubbles frothing his torso of graying fur. “Oh man, if this ain’t the life.”
Wade hesitating, seeing Anne who had appeared, did not want to strip, and show his own body, with no muscle, no tone, no hair. So he just sat.
“How come you limp, Harlo?”
“Too much rodeoin. And that black ass Brahma which’t got a hoof in my groin and did me some damage.” He stretched wide. “Man, lookit me. Gimp leg, busted teeth, broke arms. Bet there ain’t much left that’s not been broke.” He shook his head at his reflection. “How’d I ever make such a wreck of my own self?”
Anne moved closer, sitting against a young dappled aspen.
Harlo sank to his neck. “These last couple days, thinkin about things. All that time gone in the big house. Then bang, I’m out. An my life more’n half over. Now what?”
“Maybe kill yourself,” Anne suggested.
“Hah. Yeah, maybe so. Do the world a favor.”
“How about the ranch,” Wade said. “You don’t want it either?”
“Oh man I sure used to. Ask Joe. I was younger, I’d go on and on, how if it were mine I’d do this, do that, gravel the roads, fertilize, rotate the fields, buy out the Burchard place. I had big plans, and Joe loved to hear em. Till that last summer. Marly took over after that.”