Fine Just the Way It Is (15 page)

“You worry too much,” he said. The oily smell of frying banana spread through the trailer.

She sorted gear for the trip. Why did he still prefer those antique primitivo boots studded with hobnails? “Do you want a beer while you make the salad?”

“Isn’t there any of that white wine left? Whatever it was.” He was cutting a red onion—the slices too thick. If he was so continental why couldn’t he cut an onion properly? She found an opened bottle of the wine in the refrigerator, poured him a glass and stood watching as he finished slicing, waved the knife with a flourish and began hacking the lettuce.

“You didn’t wash it,” she said. “And you’re supposed to tear the leaves, not cut them.”

“Babes, it’s a clean lettuce, no dirt. Why wash it? Of course I would prefer a nice little endive, some mesclun, but what we’ve got is a big, tasteless, hard head of lettuce like a green cannonball. It deserves to be cut.” There was no doubt that he despised iceberg lettuce.

“Well, that’s all they had. It came from California. Who knows if they sprayed it, or whether the one who picked it had a disease or TB or peed on it?” Her voice spiraled upward. Catlin was inclined to an organic, vegetarian diet, a taste first professed when she was in her teens and designed to annoy her meat-and-potatoes parents, a diet even more difficult to uphold in beef-more-beef-and-potatoes Wyoming. She had considered herself sophisticated in food preferences until Marc. And although she usually gave in to him on whatever main dish he proposed, she insisted on the salad.

“Does everything have to be antiseptic? Does everything have to be done your way? It’s only a salad, agreed, it is not a very good salad as we have only the most wretched of ingredients, but I’m making it, and you’re eating it.” He, of course, would sniffily ignore the salad, gobble the bananas and chile heaped on the fish.

“Oh no. I’m not eating that salad. It’s probably full of hairs.”

He threw down the knife in exasperation.

There were a few more verbal jabs and then suddenly they were in a shouting match about fried bananas, Africa, Mexico, immigration policy, farm labor, olive trees, California. She said he was not only a filthy lettuce nonwasher but a foreign creep who would probably eat caterpillars. He was a freeloader (he was occasionally short on his share of the rent) and he couldn’t even make a simple salad. He certainly didn’t know how to slice an onion. And why wear those stupid hobnail boots that made him look like a nineteenth-century Matterhorn guide? Maybe he’d like a pair of lederhosen for his birthday? He said he
had
eaten caterpillars in Africa and they were packed with protein and tasty, that the boots had belonged to his grandfather who had been a climber on serious Himalayan expeditions after the Second World War, that she had become controlling, headstrong, egotistical, provincial and unpleasant. Then came accusations of sexual failure and repulsive habits, of ex-lovers, of cheating and lying, the horrible wholesome flax-seed cereal she favored, his addiction to smelly cheeses and bread that had to be made because it could not be bought, and again the wretched hobnail boots. It was less argument than bitter testimony, as when, on the last night of Carneval in some towns in rural Spanish Galicia, a man presents the
testamento,
the rhymed and furious catalog of the village’s sins in the past year, and fictionally apportions the body parts of a donkey to fit the sins. He had told her about this, and now he awarded her the donkey’s flatulent gut as most expressive of her raving.

Hundreds of irritations and grievances each had kept closeted spouted from the volcanoes of their injured and insulted egos. Marc threw the salad bowl on the floor, the onion slices rolling on their broad edges. She threw his shirt in the salad. She poured olive oil on the shirt and said if he liked olive oil so much, why, here was plenty of it. She raced to the stove, seized the frying pan and dumped the banana-chile mess in the sink. When he tried to stop her she delivered him a head-ringing slap. She screamed imprecations but he was suddenly very quiet. The expression on his face was peculiar and familiar; anger and—yes, pleasure.

Then he recovered and as if to goad her began again. “You American bitch!” he said, almost conversationally, but his voice sharpening with each word. “You and this constipated place of white, narrow-minded Republicans with the same right-wing opinions. There’s no diversity, there’s no decent food, there’s no conversation, there’s no ideas, there’s nothing except the scenery. And the Alps have more beautiful scenery than the Rockies.” He folded his arms and waited.

“Well, it’s good to hear what you really think. Why don’t you clear out. Go fuck old fat-legs Julia!” Her voice was a diabolic screech. Yet even as she yelled she was embarrassed by the florid theatricality of the scene. And he wondered how could she know anything about Julia. He had never mentioned her. Julia was his mother.

His lips infolded, he stalked through the rooms collecting his remaining clothes, his books, the maligned hobnail boots, his GPS unit and climbing gear, his skis, his African mask collection, coldly packing everything into his truck. He said nothing while she continued to make caustic taunts. Striding through the kitchen he slipped on the olive oil and nearly fell. Humiliation deepened his anger. She noticed the bandage on his left hand was stained with pus and blood. A few days earlier, trying to strike flakes from a gleaming lump of obsidian Ed Glide had given him, he had driven a sliver deep into his hand. It must be infected, she thought with malicious joy.

The last thing he did was to rip down her poster of Big Train Johnson, the centerpiece of her Shrine to Idaho Baseball, showing the pitcher just after he’d hurled the ball, right-hand knuckles bent, an expression of mild curiosity on his plain face. Marc glared at her. It seemed to her he was presenting his face to get smacked again. She didn’t move and abruptly he left.

Through the window she saw him get in his truck and drive away. South. Toward Denver, where, as he had said, there was more than one skin color, a cultural mix and an international airport.

She cleaned up the salad with his ruined shirt, crammed the greasy mess into a trash bag. Slowly she calmed and a brilliant thought came; she would hike the Jade trail without him. She didn’t need him.

She slept only a few hours, waking twice to the knowledge that they had broken up. She got up with the first light, boiled a dozen eggs—good hiking trip food—and packed the Jeep. The phone rang as she was carrying out the last load.

“Catlin,” he said quietly. “I’ve got two tickets to Athens on a flight tomorrow morning. I’m going to fight the wildfires in Greece. Will you come?”

“I’ve got other plans.” She hung up, then pulled out the phone cord. She tossed her watch and cell phone in the silverware drawer and rushed out the door. Somewhere along the way, not from
him,
she had learned that discarding the technology sharpened the senses, led to deeper awareness.

On the road driving north she felt she was once again in her own life. For miles she listened to music by groups he despised, reveling in the sense of liberation. He favored Alpha Blondy or monotonous talking-drum music on long drives. She could not stop thinking about the breakup, and after a while even her favorite tunes seemed to develop talking-drum backgrounds. Silence was better. She recalled the strangely pleased expression on Marc’s face after she hit him, familiar but impossible to place in context.

It was dusk when she reached the town at the edge of the Big Bison National Forest. She found a motel. She did not want to miss the signless trailhead in evening gloom. The wind came up in the night, occasionally lifting her from sleep. Each time she stretched, thinking how wonderful it was to have the whole bed to herself. It was not until the morning that she discovered she had left the topo map back at the trailer in her haste to get out. At the local hardware store she found another, compiled from aerial photographs taken in 1958. It was better than the forgotten map as the Jade trail was clearly marked.

She found some paper in the glove compartment—the receipt for the last oil change—and with an old pencil stub that had rolled around on the dash for a year she scrawled her name, “Jade Trail” and the date and left it on the seat.

Even in broad daylight the abandoned trail was difficult to find. Years before, the Forest Service had uprooted the sign and blocked off the entrance with fallen pines and boulders. Young lodgepole had grown up to shoulder height. The map showed that six miles north the trail flanked an unnamed mountain, then curled around half a dozen small glacier lakes. Marc had planned to fish those lakes. A disturbing thought came to her. He might not go to Athens but return to the trailer and find her gone, notice that all her camping gear was missing. He would know immediately that she had come up to hike the trail without him. He would follow her. She would have to watch and dodge.

The first mile was unpleasant; the trail was rocky and the soil a fine dust half an inch deep. It was clear that many hikers ignored the “Trail Closed” legend on the forest map and ventured up it for a mile or two before turning back. They had marked their passage with broken branches which clawed her arms.

Gradually the head-high trees disappeared as the trail led into the old forest. She walked soundlessly on the thick needle duff. The trail bent and opened onto views of forested slopes, showing thousands of deep red-orange trees killed by the mountain pine beetle infestation and drought. In open areas the trail was choked with seedlings reclaiming the ground. The young trees looked healthy and green, still untouched by the beetles. She wondered if the world was seeing the last of the lodgepole forests. If Marc had been with her they would have talked about this. The memory of his stained bandage came to her. He had determined to learn how to make stone projectile points. They had talked about prehistoric stone tools, and when he told her their edges were only a few microns thick and sharper than razors, she idly wondered aloud why terrorists did not arm themselves with chert knives that would escape airport detection.

“That’s stupid,” he said.

After several miles of level ground the trail began to climb and twist in a steep stairway of roots and rocks. Snowmelt had scoured it out to slick earth packed around bony flints. Around noon the trail broke into an explosion of wildflowers—columbine, penstemon, beautiful Clarkia, chickweed and Indian paintbrush. Delighted by the alpine meadow and a few banks of snow packed into clefts on the north sides of slopes, she looked down at a small lake. The scene was exquisitely beautiful. But even here it was not as cool as she had expected. The sun was strong and a cloud of gnats and mosquitoes warped around her in elliptical flight. She ate her lunch sitting in the shade of a giant boulder. She did not miss Marc.

She looked west at Buffalo Hunter, the highest peak in the range. Its year-round snow cover was gone and the peak stood obscenely bare, a pale grey summit quivering in radiant heat. Rock that had not seen sunlight in hundreds of years lay exposed. Another hot, dry summer, the sky filling with wind-torn clouds and lightning but no rain. Occasionally a few drops rattled the air before the clouds dragged them away. Next month the Arizona monsoon would move in with blessed rain, but now the flatland below was parched, the grasses seeded out and withered to a brittle tan wire that cracked underfoot. In the mountains the heat was almost as intense as at lower elevations, and the earth lifeless gravel.

By late afternoon she was tired and reckoned she had hiked thirteen or fourteen miles. The Jade trail ran for another sixty-odd miles and came out on a dead trailhead near a mining ghost town. From the ruins to the main road was another four or five miles. She was sure she could do it easily in ten days. She pitched the little tent beside an unnamed glacier-melt lake. As she ate her hydrated tomato soup she watched trout rise to an evening hatch, the perfect circles spreading outward on the water, coalescing with other spreading circles. The setting sun illuminated the millions of flying insects as a glittering haze over the lake. Marc would have been down there matching the evening hatch, but he was probably in Greece by now. A grey jay, remembering the good old days when hikers had scattered bread crusts and potato chips along the trail, watched expectantly. She crumbled a cracker for him and gave him a name—Johnson, in honor of Big Train Johnson. The day left her a sky veneered with pink pearl, the black ridge against it serrated with pine tops like obsidian spear blades. She was not afraid of the dark and sat up listening to the night sounds until the last liquid smear of light in the west was gone. There was no moon.

She had slept on a stone and wakened stiff and aching in the vague morning. As soon as the sun came up the mountains began to heat, the few remaining snowdrifts melting to feed the gurgling rivulets that twisted through the alpine meadows. The snow patches lay in fantastic shapes, maps of remote archipelagoes, splatters of spilled yogurt, dirty legs, swan wings. There was no wind and the gnats and mosquitoes were bad enough that she slathered on insect repellent. She limbered up with a few bends and stretches, boiled water for tea, ate two of the boiled eggs in her pack and started off again. The eggs had picked up insect repellent from her fingers and the nasty smarting taste stayed in her mouth for a long time.

She hiked past half a dozen small lakes dimpled with rings from rising trout and thought of Marc. She could hear but not see a rushing stream under the willows, a stream that cascaded from the high melting snowbanks. Obscurant mountain willow grew thick wherever the water trickled. The shallow lakes, the color of brown khaki and denim blue, reflected the peaks and shrinking snowfields above. Some lakes were a profound, saturated blue shading out from tawny boulders at the edge to depths where the big fish rested in the coolest water. The waterlines marking shore boulders told that the lake levels once had been four or five feet higher.