Rumors from the Lost World (16 page)

“Of course,” he said.

They brewed two cups of tea and sat in the darkness.

Sometimes I bicycle along the Platte River. The water, icy but still flowing, raises my spirits. Sometimes, when the light's soft, in the late afternoons, I see her walking on the other side of the river, near Mile-High Stadium, a slender waif-like figure, and she waves, her hair taking dominion over the last light. That's why I sway on the red hooked rug in the center of my room, my head angling toward the hallway, waiting for a voice from the invisible world.

“What is it, Doug?”

“It's a toy from the factory where I work. It has pointed ears, and it holds its head high, and it does absolutely nothing at all.”

“Is it Snoopy?”

He laughed. “If that's what you want it to be. It's yours. You can make it dance the Snoopy dance, if you wish, or sleep with it, or put it in a box.”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever.”

The muddy bayou behind her cottage, where he stayed alone, made its sluggish way through the countryside, like a great lazy serpent sloughing its skin. He stalked lush Louisiana fields, smoked cigarettes, counted the mice in the cottage. He explored deserted houses and antiquated sugar-cane mills, cautiously skirting trailers where oil-field workers lived with their families. Everywhere he heard the recoils of rifles: roughnecks, teaching their wives to shoot. When they left for rigs in the Gulf, they loaded shotguns and their wives nodded.

Before he returned to Denver, Annie danced by the bayou. Randy sat near the water and stroked Odessa. “You'll be sorry when she's gone, won't you, girl?” he asked, scratching the dog behind the ears. All men are brothers, he knew, and he tried to live by that creed, despite his quick temper and practical nature. Annie, his spiritual sister, wanted wisdom, the things the Buddha taught, and that was fine with him, so long as he could be with her. He loved her. That day, she stretched and leaped in moist grass, turned twice before touching ground. The sun sparkled on floating branches in the bayou. Two moss-draped oaks framed her stage. The three of them could have been alive anywhere.

One late afternoon, when the huge Louisiana sun was sinking like a lost world into the trees, Annie and Doug found four owl feathers next to a shotgun shell in a clearing. “Just because the shotgun shell is next to the feathers,” he said, “doesn't mean the bird is dead.”

She put her fingers to her forehead, shielding her eyes, and dropped her arms. “Maybe not, but did you have to put it into words?” They walked around the clearing and found maybe two dozen more feathers. She arranged them on her bed by order of size. “Would you like one? I'll give you one now and send you one later. We can leave the others for the mice,” she said. “You know, placate them so they don't bite you?”

“Sure,” he said, sheepish about his mouse fear. “Who else would want such a gift?”

“I don't know, though maybe mice would prefer strawberry sundaes.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

She looked incredulous, opening her mouth wide and raising her carefully-trimmed eyebrows. “Would I kid about a strawberry sundae?”

The news is on the radio—war overseas, a visit to China, the death of a celebrity. It's time to take a break. Afternoon recess is over and I haven't budged from the chair. At the toy factory, toys are products, children consumers: consistency satisfies expectations. We have a suggestion-box, though, and I tell the box, every day I work, that we should make wind-up ballerinas and provide them with all necessary accessories.

I'm taking everything too seriously.

Some nights, lights blazing, I lie awake. Is there a superior being? Is the Earth an organism, conscious of design, each of us a cell? Am I my sense of wonder, my sense of play?

I've dismanded myself, trying to become whatever my inner being dictates, trying to vibrate on the same wavelength as Annie, but I'm still waiting.

It's late afternoon. Snow flurries are falling to the street. The sidewalks will be white. Imprints of little feet will surround the school.

As the children leave the schoolyard, I know what I can do: I can walk home beside them and stop at the ice cream parlor. I can stand in line (if there's a line on a day like this) until the man with the paper hat calls my number. I can order a strawberry sundae.

Doug gathered his pack, changed the oil in his Valiant and left Louisiana. Annie stayed with Randy. She had not told Doug they were married until he had noticed Randy's ring. The idea that she could leave the marriage without exactly leaving it, that legalisms had nothing to do with the secret counterworld all of them
really
lived in, was a fiction Annie and Doug both held to be true. Randy wasn't so sure. Annie left him soon after she decided not to come to Denver, but he still wears the ring, a gold band. If she ever decides to join Doug, he'll follow. How can he know the invisible world really exists, unless he's with her?

As Doug drove through Texas, a sudden blast of air from the defroster sent the owl feather drifting to the seat. Could that have been symbolic? he wondered. Maybe only symbols exist in the world, parading before us, disguised as ordinary experience. If that's true, he thought, I can wait for years. I've waited this long. Why not a little longer?

There's a dream he remembers all too clearly. Widow Annie lived with him in a ramshackle hut, surrounded by hundreds of people in hovels. Beyond the huts, they could see sugar-cane, wood-slatted trucks. Widow Annie faded. A curtain replaced her at the window. “We'll be happy here,” Doug told the girl who threw Annie's things into the street, but a hairy fist smashed the pane of glass and waved a lead pipe. He woke, sweating.

I'd like to buy a wind-up Jehovah's Witness and send it waddling down the street, saying its predictable things. Wouldn't that be nice, a toy everybody would know what to make of, that could tell us why the world is filled with trouble? In the meantime, I wait for the next dance, the next passionate longing to whirl me away from myself. I'm tired of playfulness, tired of trying to name things.

I guess I should've wanted something. Something specific, I mean. I guess I should've wanted something from the beginning. Something tangible, I mean. When I was with Annie, I pretended desire had nothing to do with the world, that love just happened. People got together according to cosmic intentions.

So. Perhaps it's not too late.

I want a strawberry sundae.

Doug bundled up. “Good-bye, Tangle. See you.”

The hallway smelled like food. The girl next door was cooking dinner and the aroma was lovely. The stairs creaked as he went down. The single bulb on the ceiling in the foyer was brightly burning. Across the street, janitors left the school—vague shadows in the dark snow.

How refreshing it was to walk alone on the streets! There were bare trees with limbs like spiderwebs, old houses two floors tall with gingerbread trim, toys on some of the porches. And footprints! They disappeared after a while in the falling snow, but he followed them as long as he could.

I
n a science-fiction story I read last year when Audrey and I were separated, an Earthling and a Martian meet in a time warp. Each believes the other's civilization is in ruins, or never existed. They stand perplexed in the Martian desert, sand swirling around them, and try finally to clasp hands in a gesture of goodwill. But their fingers slide through each other like the blades of a skate through ice.

Recendy, housebound with the two kids in the dead of a blizzard for three days, I had the television, the kids their Leggo blocks, Audrey her sewing. But how many reruns of “M*A*S*H” can you stomach, especially with the sound turned up to drown out Margaret's tantrums and Stevie's new obsession with percussion instruments? Leggos were scattered over five rooms and Audrey was reduced to thumbing through magazines.

I raised the white flag. “Let's go find the sun,” I announced, clicking off “The Dukes of Hazzard” and dropping on all fours to reach under the couch for Stevie's long-lost farm implement hat. He wouldn't travel without it. Otherwise, the world might find out about his cowlick. “Licked by a cow, licked by a cow,” he repeated, clamping the tiny hat on his head, as though capping a geyser.

“Is that what he gets at nursery school?” I asked Audrey.

“Beats me,” she said, still in her magazine. “The sun?”

“I figure we head south,” I said. “I'll check the weather channel first.”

I pulled out the big suitcase.

“Hey,” she said, Margaret half-stuffed into her snowsuit, “what's this? I thought we were going for a ride.” The plastic on our picture window had bubbled. Only an occasional pickup or four-wheel drive ventured out. A single plow worked its way down our street, wind swirling snowdust around it. Its driver had on a moonsuit of metallic silver. Long tubes as thick as a forearm led from his glass compartment to the plow's hot engine.

“I'll warm up the car and shovel the drive,” I said. “Why don't you gather up some cassettes, make a thermos of coffee?”

On the road the kids fell asleep, Stevie cuddled against Margaret's carseat. Audrey loosened their seat belts and covered them with a plaid quilt. Every time I glanced in the rearview mirror I thought of Scotland. “We're not going to stop until we find it, you know.”

“That so?” Audrey said. “That means we never go back.” The interstate was dry and plowed, with great dirty drifts tilting toward us on either side, snow swirling across in fine sandy layers. Everything was white.

We went west. The weather channel had mentioned a warmer front in that direction. The temperature did rise a few degrees, but after three hours the sky was still slate-gray, the horizon still the color of dirty laundry.

At a gas station an attendant, stocky as a steer, grunted when I asked his advice. “Let me get this straight,” he said, lips downtumed, gruffness quick-frozen, shipped from the Scandinavian tundra. “You not going anywhere? You just looking for the sun?”

“You bet,” I said, signing the credit slip. “Am I going to find it?”

He considered my question. “Not once it gets dark.”

At the motel I pulled out the map and spread it on one of the two rumpled beds. For a few minutes I talked about routes, figuring mileage and driving time, leaning close to the unfolded, crinkled paper to make out place names: Medina, Williston, Miles City, towns of mud engineers, farm implement manufacturers, owners of greasy diners.

I folded the map and jammed it into the slip pocket of the nylon suitcase. Stevie, twice Margaret's age, was teaching her how to turn the second bed into a trampoline. Audrey had her hair down, one arm outstretched like a guard rail near Margaret, who landed on her back and squealed.

“Maybe we ought to forget about it,” I said.

Neither of us fell in love with anyone else. “We don't have a marriage anymore,” I remembered shouting. “We have a family.” In some ways an affair would have made sense. But Audrey was busy with two kids and I was too tired to be interested. Instead, I rented an apartment near the plant where I worked.

“I have one baby crying for a bottle and another screaming for a bath,” Audrey would say over the phone. “When the hell you coming home?” The line would go quiet. “You're deserting me, aren't you?”

“No,” I would say, tapping the windowsill. “I've been working fourteen hours. Don't you appreciate that?”

I sat on the balcony, some nights, once it got warm, and drank, and watched the stars.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Did I disappear in the middle of your plans?”

“No, it's not that.” I shrugged, running my fingers over the pasteboard cover of a Gideon Bible. I opened it at random: “Will you judge them?” I read. “Will you judge them, son of man? Then confront them with the detestable practices of their father and say hem.” Stevie took Margaret into one comer of the motel room. Beneath a picture of mountains, all rosy in the late afternoon, he tried to change her disposable diaper. She started crying when he snatched it and waved it like a flag. “Hey!” I shouted.

“Were you serious?” Audrey asked later, the kids asleep. She rested her chin on her knees, still steaming from the shower. “Because the trip is a good idea, Rod. The weather's okay now, not dangerous. What the hell.”

The empty thermos floated in the basin. Water dripped from the faucet. “Thinking about it makes it weird,” I said. “Going after the sun is something a kid might do.”

She shifted on the bed. “So what? Weird is good. People up here, they're afraid to be weird. You start to think the Nazis won the war.” She sipped the last of the day's hot coffee. “Let's move,” she said. “Let's get back down South, maybe Louisiana, where people aren't so bored with their lives.”

The next day we passed a couple of old missile silos, concrete slabs in the middle of nowhere surrounded by heavy-duty fences. We peered into the heavens now and then, beyond the snow and stufeble, but the flat fields stretched for miles. We could hardly tell in the mist where ground stopped and sky began.

“Audrey?”

“Hmm?” A magazine jostled on her lap.

“What happened with us?”

“You want an answer?” she asked. Far ahead, on the road, someone flailed his arms, as though doing side-straddle hops. “What the heck is that?” Stevie wondered. “A midget?”

“He's just far away,” I said, slowing down. A car had its hood up a half mile or so beyond the waving figure. And then I saw the hair falling from her knitted cap. “She's had a breakdown.” On the upper plains, you feel you've fallen off the edge of the world. Houses, grain silos, even people take on a two-dimensional tiltiness. The sight of a polar bear lumbering across desolate fields would be disorienting but not entirely unexpected, while the woman, snowsuited, waving her arms, shocked me to attention.