T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Her whole body was frozen now. She’d had crazies up here before—it was an occupational hazard—but there was something unnerving about this one; this one she remembered. “It’s too early,” she said finally, miming it with her hands, as if the glass were impervious to sound, and then she got up from her untouched ham and half-eaten eggs and deliberately went to the radio. The radio was just under the window where he was standing, and when she picked up the mike and depressed the talk button she was two feet from him, the thin wall of glass all that separated them.
“Needles Lookout,” she said, “this is Elaine. Zack, you there? Over.”
Zack’s voice came right back at her. He was a college student working on a degree in forestry, and he was her relief two days a week when she hiked out and went down the mountain to spend a day with her son, do her shopping and maybe hit a bar or movie with her best friend and soul mate, Cynthia Furman. “Elaine,” he said, above the crackle of static, “what’s up? See anything funny out there? Over.”
She forced herself to look up then and locate the stranger’s eyes—he was still grinning, but the grin was slack and unsteady and there was no joy in the deeps of those hard blue eyes—and she held the black plastic mike to her lips a moment longer than she had to before answering. “Nothing, Zack,” she said, “just checking in.”
His voice was tinny. “Okay,” he said. “Talk to you. Over and out.”
“Over and out,” she said.
And now what? The guy wore a hunting knife strapped to his thigh. His cheeks were caved in as if he were sucking candy, and an old-fashioned mustache, thick and reddish, hid his upper lip. Instead of a baseball cap he wore a wide-brimmed felt hat. Wyatt Earp, she thought, and she was about to turn away from the window, prepared to ignore him till he took the hint, till he counted off the hundred and fifty wooden steps and vanished down the path and out of her life, when he rapped again on the glass and said, “You got something to put these in—the flowers, I mean?”
She didn’t want his flowers. She didn’t want him on her platform. She didn’t want him in her thirteen-by-thirteen-foot sanctuary, touching her things, poking around, asking stupid questions, making small talk. “Look,” she said finally, talking to the glass but looking through him, beyond him, scanning the infinite as she’d trained herself to do, no matter what the problem, “I’ve got a job to do up here and the fact is no one’s allowed on the platform between the hours of five in the afternoon and ten in the morning”—now she came back to him and saw that his smile had collapsed—“you ought to know that. It says so in plain English right down there at the trailhead.” She looked away; it was over, she was done with him.
She went back to her breakfast, forcing herself to stare at the page before her, though her heart was going and the words meant nothing. Todd had been with her the first time the man had come. Todd was fourteen, tall like his father, blond-headed and rangy. He was a good kid, her last and final hope, and he seemed to relish the time he spent with her up here. It was a Saturday, the middle of the afternoon, and they’d had a steady stream of visitors since the morning. Todd was in the storage room below, reading comics (in its wisdom, the Forestry Service had provided this second room, twenty-five steps down, not simply for storage but for respite too—it was a box, a womb, with only a single dull high-placed window to light it, antithesis and antidote to the naked glass box above). Elaine was at her post, chopping vegetables for soup and scanning the horizon.
She hadn’t noticed him coming—there’d been so many visitors she wasn’t attuned to them in the way she was in the quiet times. She was feeling hospitable, lighthearted, the hostess of an ongoing party. There’d been a professor up earlier, an ornithologist, and they’d had a long talk about the golden eagle and the red-tailed hawk. And then there was the young girl from Merced—she couldn’t have been more than seventeen—with her baby strapped to her back, and two heavy-set women in their sixties who’d proudly made the two-and-a-half-mile trek in from the trailhead and were giddy with the thin air and the thrill of their own accomplishment. Elaine had offered them each a cup of tea, not wanting to spoil their fun and point out that it was still two and a half miles back out.
She’d felt his weight on the platform and turned to give him a smile. He was tall and powerful across the chest and shoulders and he’d tipped his hat to her and poked his head in the open door. “Enjoying the view?” he said.
There was something in his eyes that should have warned her off, but she was feeling sociable and buoyant and she saw the generosity in his shoulders and hands. “It’s nothing compared to the Ventura Freeway,” she deadpanned.
He laughed out loud at that, and he was leaning in the door now, both hands on the frame. “I see the monastic life hasn’t hurt your sense of humor any—” and then he paused, as if he’d gone too far. “Or that’s not the word I want, ‘monastic’—is there a feminine version of that?”
Pretty presumptuous. Flirtatious, too. But she was in the mood, she didn’t know what it was—maybe having Todd with her, maybe just the sheer bubbling joy of living on the crest of the sky—and at least he wasn’t dragging her through the same old tired conversation about loneliness and beauty and smoke on the horizon she had to endure about a hundred times a week. “Come in,” she said. “Take a load off your feet.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and removed his hat. He wore his hair in a modified punk style—hard irregular spikes—and that surprised her: somehow it just didn’t go with the cowboy hat. His jeans were stiff and new and his tooled boots looked as if they’d just been polished. He was studying her—she was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt, she’d washed her hair that morning in anticipation of the crowd, and her legs were good—she knew it—tanned and shaped by her treks up and down the trail. She felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time, an ice age, and she knew her cheeks were flushed. “You probably had a whole slew of visitors today, huh?” he said, and there was something incongruous in the enforced folksiness of the phrase, something that didn’t go with his accent, just as the haircut didn’t go with the hat.
“I’ve counted twenty-six since this morning.” She diced a carrot and tossed it into the pan to simmer with the onions and zucchini she’d chopped a moment earlier.
He was gazing out the window, working his hands on the brim of his hat. “Hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re the best thing about this view as far as I can see. You’re pretty. Really pretty.”
This one she’d heard before. About a thousand times. Probably seventy percent of the day-trippers who made the hike out to the lookout were male, and if they were alone or with other males, about ninety percent of those tried to hit on her in some way. She resented it, but she couldn’t blame them really. There was probably something irresistible in the formula: young woman with blond hair and good legs in a glass tower in the middle of nowhere—and all alone. Rapun-zel, let down your hair. Usually she deflected the compliment—or the moves—by turning officious, standing on her authority as Forest Service employee, government servant and the chief, queen and despot of the Needles Lookout. This time she said nothing. Just lifted her head for a quick scan of the horizon and then looked back down at the knife and the cutting board and began chopping green onion and cilantro.
He was still watching her. The bed was big, a double, one of the few creature comforts the Forestry Service provided up here. There was no headboard, of course—just a big flat hard slab of mattress attached to the wall at window level, so you could be lying in bed and still do your job. Presumably, it was designed for couples. When he spoke again, she knew what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth. “Nice bed,” he said.
What did she expect? He was no different from the rest—why would he be? All of a sudden he’d begun to get on her nerves, and when she turned her face to him her voice was cold. “Have you seen the telescope,” she said, indicating the Bushnell Televar mounted on the rail of the catwalk—beyond the window and out t
He ignored her. He rose to his feet. Thirteen by thirteen: two’s a crowd. “You must get awfully lonely up here,” he said, and his voice was different now too, no attempt at folksiness or jocularity, “a pretty woman like you. A beautiful woman. You’ve got sexy legs, you know that?”
She flushed—he could see that, she was sure of it—and the flush made her angry. She was about to tell him off, to tell him to get the hell out of her house and stay out, when Todd came rumbling up the steps, wild-eyed and excited. “Mom!” he shouted, and he was out of breath, his voice high-pitched and hoarse, “there’s water leaking all over the place out there!”
Water. It took a moment to register. The water was precious up here, irreplaceable. Once a month two bearded men with Forestry Service patches on their sleeves brought her six twenty-gallon containers of it—in the old way, on the backs of mules. She husbanded that water as if she were in the middle of the Negev, every drop of it, rarely allowing herself the luxury of a quick shampoo and rinse, as she had that morning. In the next instant she was out the door and jolting down the steps behind her son. Down below, outside the storage room where the cartons were lined up in a straight standing row, she saw that the rock, face was slick with a finely spread sheen of water. She bent to the near carton. It was leaking from a thin milky stress fracture in the plastic, an inch from the bottom. “Take hold of it, Todd,” she said. “We’ve got to turn it over so the leak’s on top.”
Full, the carton weighed better than a hundred and sixty pounds, and this one was nearly full. She put her weight behind it, the power of her honed and muscular legs, but the best she could do, even with Todd’s help, was to push the thing over on its side. She was breathing hard, sweating, she’d scraped her knee and there was a stipple of blood on the skin over the kneecap. It was then that she became aware of the stranger standing there behind her. She looked up at him framed against the vastness of the sky, the sun in his face, his big hands on his hips. “Need a hand there?” he asked.
Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she’d refused—maybe it was the way Todd gaped at him in awe, maybe it was the old pretty-woman/lonely-up-here routine or the helpless-female syndrome—but before she could think she was saying “I don’t need your help: I can do it myself.”
And then his hands fell from his hips and he backed away a step, and suddenly he was apologetic, he was smooth and funny and winning and he was sorry for bothering her and he just wanted to help and he knew she was capable, he wasn’t implying anything—and just as suddenly he caught himself, dropped his shoulders and slunk off down the steps without another word.
For a long moment she watched him receding down the trail, and then she turned back to the water container. By the time she and Todd got it upended it was half empty.
Yes. And now he was here when he had no right to be, now he was intruding and he knew it, now he was a crazy defining new levels of the affliction. She’d call in an emergency in a second—she wouldn’t hesitate—and they’d have a helicopter here in less than five minutes, that’s how quick these firefighters were, she’d seen them in action. Five minutes. She wouldn’t hesitate. She kept her head down. She cut and chewed each piece of meat with slow deliberation and she read and reread the same paragraph until it lost all sense. When she looked up, he was gone.
After that, the day dragged on as if it would never end. He couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes, slouching around with his mercenary grin and his pathetic flowers, but he’d managed to ruin her day. He’d upset her equilibrium and she found that she couldn’t read, couldn’t sketch or work on the sweater she was knitting for Todd. She caught herself staring at a fixed point on the horizon, drifting, her mind a blank. She ate too much. Lunch was a ceremony, dinner a ritual. There were no visitors, though for once she longed for them. Dusk lingered in the western sky and when night fell she didn’t bother with her propane lantern but merely sat there on the corner of the bed, caught up in the wheeling immensity of the constellations and the dream of the Milky Way.
And then she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of him, the stranger with the big hands and secretive eyes, kept scanning the catwalk for the sudden black shadow of him. If he came at seven in the morning, why not at three? What was to prevent him? There was no sound, nothing—the wind had died down and the night was clear and moonless. For the first time since she’d been here, for the first time in three long seasons, she felt naked and vulnerable, exposed in her glass house like a fish in a tank. The night was everything and it held her in its grip.
She thought about Mike then, about the house they’d had when he’d finished his degree and started as an assistant professor at a little state school out in the lost lush hills of Oregon. The house was an A-frame, a cabin with a loft, set down amidst the trees like a cottage in a fairy tale. It was all windows and everywhere you looked the trees bowed down and stepped into the house. The previous owner, an old widower with watery eyes and yellow hair climbing out of his ears, hadn’t bothered with blinds or curtains, and Mike didn’t like that—he was always after her to measure the windows and order blinds or buy the material for drapes. She’d balked. The openness, the light, the sense of connection and belonging: these were the things that had attracted her in the first place. They made love in the dark—Mike insisted on it—as if it were something to be ashamed of. After a while, it was.
Then she was thinking of a time before that, a time before Todd and graduate school, when Mike sat with her in the dormitory lounge, books spread out on the coffee table before them, the heat and murmur of a dozen other couples locking their mouths and bodies together. A study date. For hours she clung to him, the sofa like a boat pitching in a heavy sea, the tease of it, the fumbling innocence, the interminable foreplay that left her wet and itching while the wind screamed beyond the iced-over windows. That was something. The R.A. would flash the lights and it was quarter of one and they would fling themselves at each other, each step to the door drenched in hormones, sticky with them, desperate, until finally he was gone and she felt the loss like a war bride. Until the next night.
Finally—and it must have been two, three in the morning, the Big Dipper tugged down below the horizon, Orion looming overhead—she thought of the stranger who’d spoiled her breakfast. He’d sat there on the comer of the bed; he’d stood beyond the window with his sad bundle of flowers, devouring the sky. As she thought of him, in that very moment, there was a dull light thump on the steps, a faint rustle, movement, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The seconds pounded in her head and the rustling—it was like the sweep of a broom—was gone, something in the night, a pack rat, the fleeting touch of an owl’s wing. She thought of those hands, the eyes, the square of those shoulders, and she felt herself being drawn down into the night in relief, and finally, in gratitude.
She woke late, the sun slanting across the floor to touch her lips and mask her eyes. Zachary was on the radio with the news that Oakland had clinched the pennant and a hurricane was tearing up the East Coast. “You sound awful,” he said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Stargazing again, huh?”
She tried out a laugh for him. “I guess,” she said. There was a silence. “Jesus, you just relieved me. I’ve got four more days to put in before I come back down to the ground.”
“Just don’t get mystical on me. And leave me some granola this time, will you? And if you run out, call me. That’s my breakfast we’re talking about. And lunch. And sometimes, if I don’t feel like cooking—”
She cut him off: “Dinner. I know. I will.” She yawned. “Talk to you.”
“Yeah. Over and out.”
“Over and out.”
When she set the kettle on the grill there was gas, but when she turned her back to dig the butter out of the refrigerator, the flame was gone. She tried another match, but there was nothing. That meant she had to switch propane tanks, a minor nuisance. The tanks, which
She shrugged into her shorts, and because it was cold despite the sun—she’d seen snow as early as the fifth of September, and the month was almost gone now—she pulled on an oversized sweater that had once belonged to Mike. After she’d moved out she’d found it in a pillowcase she’d stuffed full of clothes. He hadn’t wanted it back. It was windy, and a blast knifed into her when she threw open the door and started down the steps. Big pristine tufts of cumulus hurried across the sky, swelling and attenuating and changing shape, but she didn’t see anything dark enough—or big enough—to portend a storm. Still, you could never tell. The breeze was from the north and the radio had reported a storm front moving in off the Pacific—it really wouldn’t surprise her to see snow on the ground by this time tomorrow. A good snowfall and the fire season would be over and she could go home. Early.
She thought about that—about the four walls of the little efficiency she rented on a dead street in a dead town to be near Todd during the winter—and hoped it wouldn’t snow. Not now. Not yet. In a dry year—and this had been the third dry year in a row—she could stay through mid-November. She reached the bottom of the steps and crouched over the propane tanks, two three-hundred-gallon jobs painted Forest Service green, feeling depressed over the thought of those four dull walls and the cold in the air and the storm that might or might not develop. There was gooseflesh on her legs and her breath crowded the air round her. She watched a ground squirrel, its shoulders bulky with patches of bright gray fur, dart up over the face of the overhang, and then she unfastened the coupling on the empty tank and switched the hose to the full one.