Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

Smart would have much preferred to stay in town; it was a tight squeeze in the trailer with John and Rowan. On the other hand, she would be insulted and there would probably be drinking and it was a long dark way from the park back to Deerdrum. Just before the turnoff he stopped at a state store and bought two bottles of Rioja. Then he drove on and took the left that led west toward the lava beds.

He felt no excitement or anticipation as he approached the park, and this was a little surprising. On the way, in pursuit of his poem, he had managed to make himself forget the storms that raged about Rowan and the terrible energy between the two of them. Old regrets troubled him as he got farther from town and deeper into the volcanic desert around the Temple. A sense of excitement and dread. You do what you want in the end, he thought, forget what you need to forget. You follow your bliss, as the man said. More than anything he wanted another drink. One of the things he had almost forgotten was the pitiless loneliness of the place.

“Shit,” Rowan said when John met her in the yard of the trailer “he’s not here yet?”

John looked up the highway and shrugged. “Not yet.”

“I was really hoping he would be,” she said and began to pace back and forth in the yard. A faded striped sunshade protected part of the trailer yard, and even though the hot weather was over they had not yet taken it down.

“You were hoping but you were scared, right?” John asked.

“For God’s sake,” she said after she had paced outside for a few minutes, “I need a drink. How much wine did you buy?”

“Two of them big bottles. That’ll make one for each of you,” he said, “because I guess you know I’m not having any.”

“I’m gonna have some now.”

“You know,” John said, “could be hours before he gets here. You start drinking now, you’re like to be passed out by the time he shows up.”

“Ah,” she said, brushing past him toward the aluminum door “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m spinning my wheels. I sort of ate into that crank.”

In the kitchen, she took a bottle of the Georges Deboeuf out of a paper sack and commenced drawing the cork with a Swiss Army knife corkscrew. John watched from outside the open door.

“What did you do that for?”

“What did I do it for? Let’s see. Because Max was on my case because he thought my pants were too tight. Because I had a brace of pilgrims to instruct. Two braces actually.”

When she had opened the wine she took her guitar out of the broom closet, dusted it off with her uniform cuff and sat on a plastic kitchen chair to tune it.

“So you gave your park tours on crank?”

She put the instrument aside and poured some claret into a jaunty breakfast juice glass and sipped it delicately.

“Not for the first time, old sport.”

“I know it,” John said. He stepped up into the trailer went past her to the sofa and sat down wearily. “I suppose you made up a lot of hoodoo about Indian people. The way you do.”

“I don’t make things up,” she said. “I never make things up.”

“I’ve heard you. I wonder your nose don’t get long as Pinocchio’s out there sometimes.” He looked her up and down, lazy-eyed. “And Max is right about your pants.”

“I haven’t heard any complaints from the public. You complaining?”

“Not me. I think you look good.”

” Good? How about beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful regardless,” John said. “Don’t hurt to be more modest. Your face is all red from that shit. And how about removing your weapon? Or are you going to have your supper that way?”

Rowan took a deep drink of wine and grimaced.

“Christ, it feels good though,” she said. She turned to him on the sofa and put his hand on the buckle of her gun belt.

” You gonna give him speed?”

“Are you kidding? He’s an old doper from the great age of dope. He could do half a kilo while other people were doing a gram.”

John looked at the trailer deck for a moment, his fingers interlaced.

“I’m not comfortable,” he said, “when you been drinking and doing drugs. You know that, don’t you? When we’re intimate and you been drinking…”

Rowan picked up the guitar and began to sing: “When we’re intimate, and I’ve been drinking, I get to thinking…”

“Oh shut up,” John said. “Don’t be so smart.”

“Smart’s my name, baby. Smart’s my nature.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” John said, “you’ve got in real trouble on that crank. I’ve seen you crazier than all get-out.”

Rowan nodded. “You can never tell how strong it is or what’s in it,” she agreed, and strummed a few chords. “I guess that’s because it’s made by the Hell’s Angels and not the Red Cross.”

John picked up the afternoon paper and leafed through it.

“I don’t know, kid. I ain’t gonna have a good time tonight. I should go see my mother.” He put the paper aside and stood up. His younger brother was making trouble for the old lady, hanging with a gang. John’s mother had a drinking problem of her own. “Anyway, I want to buy a lottery ticket in town.”

“Oh God,” Rowan said, sounding truly frightened, “he’s coming! I think I see his car.”

Her friend looked stoically straight ahead.

“You gotta forget, Rowan. You have to realize what drunks are like. He won’t remember you that way. If he does … it’s not good.”

“What do I care what citizens and pilgrims think?” she demanded of him. “You yourself told me you thought it was all right.”

“Some Indian people think it’s all right. If it’s what the spirit world wants.”

“Well, I happen to think it is.”

“Well, I happen to think it isn’t,” John Hears the Sun Come Up said. “I think that crank will take your life someday.”

“Jesus,” Rowan said, “it’s him.”

“I ought to stay,” he said. “But only if you let me.” When he looked at her she was licking the crystal from her fingertips.

“I hope God helps you. You should ask him.”

“I’ll ask him to stay too.”

“Rowan…”

She put her hands over her ears, still staring out at the road.

“I’m not hearing you.”

“Yes you are,” he said. “You are.”

Smart parked beside their cars at the end of the dirt road that led to the trailer. Hers was a Volvo from the mid-eighties. John’s was a Dodge pickup, suggesting commercials from vanished Super Bowl Sundays, the Spirit of America. They had the Park Service cart parked there too.

There were sprouts and carrots still growing in their garden. The carrots, he remembered, sometimes came round as medallions, from the shallow layer of soil above the igneous rock, flattened out against it.

He walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. He had promised John Hears the Sun Come Up a new poem. Maybe he would magically remember the salmon poem. He might remember it word for word, he thought. Suddenly he found himself wondering what exactly he had been feeling that night beside the Tanana. Whatever it was, that was the subject of the poem. If he could bring that back, the words might follow.

Rowan stood in the doorway looking down at him. When he’d last seen her she had been flabby with drink but now her face was lean and tanned, although of course she was older now and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes. She was in her uniform, slim and sleek. Her face was red and her blue eyes looked a little unsound. Along with mounting excitement in his chest he felt a quickening of caution.

Their kiss was brief and distant and they avoided each other’s eyes. John stood and shook hands with Smart. Then they sat in the center compartment of the trailer. Smart, as guest of honor, took the small gray sofa. Rowan and John sat in plastic armchairs. The rest of the space was occupied by cases full of Rowan’s books. There were more books in an adjoining stage closet. She had even jammed a tiny desk into the space. Looking around the small room, he saw a couple of yellow pads with what looked like verse in his daughter’s handwriting.