Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“Have you owned it long?” Maya pleaded toward Wilfred Shade’s rump as she and Max bounded behind him on the weakly lit path back to the campsite; it was fully dark now. She meant the campground, but he could have answered for the shotgun. She cared about neither — she was hoping to distract him, separate out in his mind what was Carla and what was the rattlesnake. The shotgun rocked in Wilfred’s hand like a baby. The crisis of five minutes before, which involved only a rattlesnake and no shotgun, seemed desirable by comparison.

“It was an accident that the campground was placed where the rattlesnakes come?” she pressed, hearing no answer. To this, too, she received no reply. She lost her politeness. “My son is scared,” she blustered at Wilfred’s back. To this, too, Wilfred said nothing, but paused and waited for the two of them to catch up, a gesture.

When they reached the campsite, Alex surprised Maya by nodding solemnly at the shotgun and taking several steps back. Though, due to work, Alex despised bureaucracy, he admired all displays of authority. Acrewood’s relative affluence and isolation meant that its police was forced to channel most of its energy into traffic stops; Acrewood Police came at a pulled-over speeder guns drawn. The regional liberals were appalled but Alex applauded. His admiration passed the ultimate test when he was pulled over for going forty-seven miles in a forty-five zone. He nearly put his wrists together in ecstasy. He even paid the ticket enthusiastically, the rare time Maya saw Alex part calmly with money parting with which could have been avoided.

“Stand back, all,” Wilfred Shade said.

“I really don’t think—” Maya started to say, clutching Max’s hand and moving him behind her leg.

“Hold it, hold it,” a voice came from the shadows. She knew the voice. Its owner was vaulting through the shadows like a bear, little bits of gravel shooting out from his feet. Maya’s brain was wet moss in the morning; of course, there was more than one campground; he had sent her to the one that was his also; he and the girls were on a camping trip. A smile escaped Maya’s lips. She killed it.

“Wilfred,” Marion said, stooping to regain his breath. He gave Maya a quick look, the darkness giving them cover.

“Rattlesnake,” Wilfred said. His voice was less strident: Marion seemed to demand a greater solicitude.

“Wait now,” Marion said, holding up one hand tenderly as if reasoning with an assailant. He had the other down on his thigh, breathing heavily.

“It’s Mama’s friend from the diner,” Max said honestly.

Maya looked over at Alex and registered the change on his face even though it was too dark to actually see it. She knew the expression: His forehead rode up; his brows furred; his eyes squinted. Confronted with unwelcome information, Alex declined to certify it as such, preferring to plead incomprehension.

“Carla?” Marion said. Maya watched Wilfred’s shoulders slump in the shadows.

“One of these days,” Wilfred said, and brought the shotgun down to his side. He exhaled painfully. His drive gone, he scraped the gravel of the footpath. “I left my flashlight, Marion,” he said.

Marion dug in his jeans. Wilfred turned to Maya. “One of these days I’m gonna leave her,” he clarified. “I might shoot her, and then this conversation is going to show up in court. So I am clarifying for the record: I meant leave her.”

Marion shone a pocket light, and Wilfred swept aside the tent’s entry panel with the shotgun.

“Run it around in there, Marion, for Christ’s sake,” Wilfred said. “This your first tent rattler?”

“I am ignoring the way you are speaking to me on account of your domestic distress,” Marion said.

“A man with a shotgun is the most forgiven man in the world,” Wilfred said. He looked up at Maya. “Empty as the day you bought it. The boy saw it go in?”

“Not exactly,” Maya said.

“Good to be vigilant,” Wilfred said magnanimously. If nothing else, this ate up the final twenty minutes of his shift. He would have spent them pacing the tiny shed and biting his nails.

“You’ve been saying that for twenty years about Carla,” Marion said. “Do it already. You look like a fool.”

“I need a mercy killing,” Wilfred said. He bounced his heavy round head. “Who wants this sack of lard, Marion? I am holding on for dear life, and you cast it away.” Wilfred tamped the hardpan with the butt of the shotgun, setting off in Maya the momentary fear that after all that, the gun would go off by accident. Wilfred seemed indifferent to the rest of his audience, Alex, Maya, and Max turning their heads between him and Marion. “People laugh at you, you know,” Wilfred said. “I would laugh at you, too, if I didn’t know you my whole life.”

“Who else do I need besides Willy Shade in my corner?” Marion grinned abusively. His features were obscured by shadow, but there was a low-shouldered stoop to his posture that again made Maya think of leaves and the forest. He carried it with him.

Looking like a defeated baby, Willy Shade waved away his friend and slowly started up the drive. It had a slight incline, harder to take on the way back. Marion was left with the Rubins. The four of them stood in the gathering cold watching Wilfred labor up the path. He gave them a gift; it took him forever. “I didn’t say anything to Mama and Papa about the rattlesnake,” Alex broke the silence, reminding the intruder of what he was intruding on. He held the flap of the tent open for Max. His son moved hesitantly. “Don’t worry, son, I’ll go first,” Alex said and disappeared from view, Max following. Their sudden aloneness unacceptable, the two friends from the diner said good night to each other, loudly enough for Maya’s husband to hear.

On her back, staring at the vanishing peak of the tent, Maya’s rib cage felt corseted. She switched to her stomach; the corset switched with her. Careful to avoid noise, she sat up, but there was no way to get support in a tent without right angles. Who chose to sleep on the ground in gathering cold? Well, she did. She expelled a mirthless laugh into the frostbitten air of the tent. On either side of her, Alex and Max slept without suspicion, Max’s knees at his chest. She felt a vague irritation with her son, and a less vague irritation with herself for feeling it. She looked over at her husband and felt sympathy for him, laid out on the cold ground of a campsite in the middle of nowhere.

She tried to lie down on the thin nylon of the tent, but every pebble on earth was congregated under her. Jeremiah the black Buddhist had tried to teach her that nothing was unwelcome. He ate only macrobiotic foods, which meant that she rarely had the pleasure of feeding him, but he was smarter than anyone she had met. She had loved his name — so epic, so biblical. And the transgression of dating a black, something that would have started a long silence on the other end of the line in Kiev. So she tried very hard to understand him — to understand how nothing could be unwelcome. How would Jeremiah welcome these pebbles? Was she supposed to try to imagine the pebbles as smooth as her mattress at home, or give in in some way to their discomfort? She felt dense and laughed at herself, at the pebbles (like small animals listening to her madness), at the insane line of her thought. Shivering, she climbed out of her blanket and, wanting to do an undebatable good, positioned it around Max.

She wanted to go outside but was terrified of what she would find there. She sat in place, the time blurred by the soft gallop of her thoughts and the steady, shallow report of her breathing. Through a mesh panel in the tent flap, she could see a complete darkness save for the firelight of the cold stars, the only way to tell up. They seemed to hang by invisible thread. She shuddered at their raw cosmic terror: how resplendently indifferent they looked, how implacable. But was placation required? A star asked for nothing. Her rib cage loosed slightly before seizing again. She snorted at her absurd meditations. She wondered whether some subtly toxic element in the atmosphere was actually affecting her thinking. The altitude hadn’t bothered her as much in the afternoon — maybe she was deteriorating. Patient suffers from euphoria mixed with despair. Cardinal manifestation: mild hysteria followed by disorientation. Refers primarily in the chest. Restrain.