Tim Horvath - Understories

At first, she figured she’d spend a year here, then return to Vitmora, ready to shake them up with new ideas, propose they soften and slacken their own streets. But she has not found Ganzoneer immune to problems; they lurk just under the veneer of bounding joy and cartoonish delight. Liberation harbors a dark side. The Ganzoneerian handshake, limp and rubbery, often precedes betrayal, sometimes by mere minutes. Ganzoneer’s columnists shift their stances daily, and politicians their positions hourly; one is scorned here for having a definite idea that one clings to for more than a week. Blood and the stench of poverty are as easily hosed off from these ductile surfaces as from more solid ones. And, in the end, the crime rate in Ganzoneer is as steep as Vitmora’s or anywhere else’s. Emila doesn’t understand exactly why, but she senses something altered in herself after a mere eight months here. Bathing in the morning, she’ll often find herself running the razor over her legs long after they are smooth, relishing the friction and pain, envying the hard, glinting edge, and even this envy has a certain palpability, that of things too long denied.

By the time I recognized Kevin Scully, “Skulky” to those who were enrolled in SAT prep classes, and “the Skull” to everyone else, he had already locked me in a mortal embrace. I extracted myself; it was him all right. Under the circumstances, there were good reasons to doubt it — I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. Also, I was dizzy and nauseous after steering the miles of switchbacks up the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, and so I didn’t trust my own perception of things.

I’d been going a little faster than I’d wanted to, spurred on by the cacophony of cries for the bathroom. The late-afternoon sun in the west seemed most blaring right at spots where the edge plummeted into oblivion. “That’s it,” I’d announced to my family, grinding the gas pedal into the floor. “No more liquids this week for anyone .” Now, the rear floor of the rental car was strewn with discarded plastic containers and crumpled juice boxes, and every so often they spat their remnants. And the four of us, my wife and two kids and I, had been peeing like rats in a dialysis lab.

Scully hadn’t followed me into the bathroom, but he must have seen me go in, since he was waiting for me when I emerged. Now I stood back and looked him over while my ribs decompressed. Once I was sure it was him, his elated response to me made even less sense. We’d been in the same circle of friends back in our New York high school, but what that really meant was that we had possessed roughly the same social rank, and we were therefore able to pick one another apart about evenly without either getting the upper hand. Another way of putting this is that we were separated by less than five points in terms of GPAs. Just standing near Scully made me want to shelter Emmett and Kelly, my two kids, from the cutthroat competitiveness that in many ways had defined me. He might have changed his outfit from a polo to a flannel shirt, and traded in his penny loafers for scuffed boots, but as far as I was concerned, he was still contagious.

“Those yours that were just twirling?” asked Scully.

“That’s what we call ‘windmilling.’” I said. “A new version called ‘Indian windmilling,’ to be exact.” They were being Indians because we’d gone to an Indian museum the day before. They had been patient for about six and a half minutes while my wife and I had looked at pottery and masks and tried to point out things like the symmetry that Kelly had just learned about in school. But as soon as we looked away for a minute, Kelly had built a fort with brochures, and Emmett kicked it over, and she began to screech. I didn’t explain all this to Scully.

Now they came out with my wife, Lena, and so I extended something in the way of introductions. Emmett grabbed onto Lena’s leg. Scully got down on one knee and clapped mittlike hands over Emmett’s tiny ones, as if he’d been getting holiday cards for years and was finally getting to meet him. When Scully released them, Emmett stuck one in his own eye.

“What did we say about that?” I said.

“Wha-ha-hut?” he whimpered.

“What did we say about putting fingers in eyes?”

“I don’t kno-ho-how. . ”

I absently told him he did know, but my attention was back on Scully now. Moving in height order, he’d risen slightly to greet Kelly next, and then made a sweeping mock-chivalrous gesture before rising fully to greet my wife. Around us, people called out to one another, milling every which way. I was trying to watch them all, like I might see someone else I knew, someone who could rescue us. Scully must’ve said something amusing — whatever it was, it made Lena smile. I smiled, too, and then the three of us made a big triangle of grinning. In his smile, I could see his chin’s firmness, its compactness; somewhere over the years, his gelatinous fleshiness had melted away.

We made our way over to the display cases. In front of the crouching skeleton of a bear with a pinched, angular cranium, I hoisted Emmett up for a better view, but he started to kick, so I put him down. It was gift shop time. Scully was showing the kids something, lecturing them about bears, from what I could gather. I watched peripherally while glancing through a couple of calendars and coffee table books about Glacier and the Continental Divide. All the picture books were alike — they were all gorgeous, but who could stop to buy one when the real thing was right behind you? One caught my eye and sucked me in, though, about the Going-to-the-Sun Road: The Pride of the Park . That road had induced two main reactions in me. Yes, I was in awe of the engineering acumen that had created a fifty-two-mile (83.69-kilometer) road at a steady 6 percent grade through a forbidding mountain range between 1921 and 1932. But that awe had turned to queasiness as the air thinned out. My ears had stopped up, and I’d heard my own voice go reedy and remote. Now, glancing at pictures, the sensation came charging back, this time made worse by the bombardment of crowds, lines, and the steady clang of the cash register.

All at once, a lot was happening: Scully was chatting with the girl behind the register, Lena had a pocket-size book on wildflowers, and Kelly came jangling through with a set of bear bells. To Kelly, I said, “Okay, but I don’t want to hear those the whole way down.” Then, to Lena: “How many times will we use it, though?” Kelly began to moan, “How could there be no food here?” Lena shrugged and went to put the book back.

Immediately I regretted the words, feeling like they’d come from some machine and not me. I knew what this trip meant to her. I hadn’t until we’d moved into our new, larger place in Brooklyn and unpacked photo albums that she hadn’t looked at in years. In the midst of all the boxes, she’d stood in a state of suspension, flipping through the binders. I’d peeked over her shoulders, loving her for her gappedtooth smile, her swimsuit, her stick with its impaled marshmallow, all against the backdrops of various rented campers. Her family had crossed the country a dozen times but somehow had never made it to Glacier. Then there were the college pictures — posing with the Outdoors Club at an elevation marker, even rappelling up the side of a cliff, something she’d done a couple of times. It didn’t exactly fit into our lifestyle, climbing up rock walls, but every so often I wondered whether she resented having filed that part of herself away.

“You know what? Get it,” I said.

“No, no, you’re right. It was an impulse thing.”

I went to pay for everything else, and Scully leaned over and whispered something to the girl behind the register. She nodded and handed me too much change, and then with a wink she said, “Not to worry — you got the discount.”