Off Course (18 page)

“That's not it,” said Cress. “I want to be clear about the future. When it's over, that's it. I won't be stopping by for pie or family chats.”

“I get it.”

“And she can't come up here again. Ever. This is my neck of the woods.”

He moved with a soft ruck of leather. “Fair enough.”

*   *   *

She thought that she would never again inhale that mix of soap and sawdust and tinny cologne, never clasp his work-muscled shoulders and arms, brace her forehead against that straight bar of collarbone. Never grab the coarse, black-brown hair wired with white or glimpse that roan tooth he so assiduously hid. Lovely to be flung over and around him again, his familiar, lived-in body.

 

Fourteen

They skied to the big rocks. They met again on the wicker love seat, passed a plastic cup of bourbon, climbed the stairs to the unyielding bed. He went home, as usual, with Caleb early Friday afternoon.

Over the weekend, Cress worked a Ducks Unlimited banquet, where one of the attendees set up a table to sell his tiny, elegant watercolors—his many attempts at duck stamp art. Cress spent her share of the pooled cash tip on a two-by-four-inch portrait in jewel tones of a floating red-breasted merganser. A belated Christmas present, it was small enough to keep hidden, and generic enough, should it be discovered, not to arouse suspicion. She wrapped it cleverly, in a kitchen match box, so he'd slide it open and see: quack, quack.

Only he didn't appear Sunday night at his usual time. Nor did he ski on Monday or stroll up later that night. Ditto Tuesday: no Quinn. Annoyed, yet determined not to stalk, Cress did ascertain that his truck was at the trailer. And the Rodinger house emitted the usual banging and sawing. When Wednesday passed with no sign of him, she didn't know what to think.

Thursday, she had to work a luncheon at Beech Creek. She'd pulled on green rubber boots to walk down her unplowed driveway when Quinn stepped inside the A-frame. His face was pinched, clayey. “What happened?” she said.

“Caleb's gone,” he said.

“What do you mean
gone
?” She gargled it.

“He left. Took another job, down the hill.”

She felt the blow. “I'll make some coffee,” she said. “I have time.”

She put the water on, then had trouble separating a filter from the stack, her hand trembling from the fright. “Will you go too?”

“I'll finish up here.” He still stood by the door, as if unwilling to enter. “We did a big push to finish everything I needed him for. The rest, and your folks' house, I can manage. I haven't slept more'n three hours since Sunday.”

“I was beginning to wonder…” Cress had made popcorn last night and the smell—the oil a little off—hung in the room. “I'm sorry,” she added. “You two were having such a good time.”

“For a while. Candy didn't like him being up here. Out of her clutches.”

“And he knew,” Cress said. “He came up one night and saw us.”

“I wondered,” said Quinn. “He got pretty tight-jawed when I started back skiing with you.”

As if skiing was the issue.

Guilt drearied the air. “I'm sorry,” she said again. Quinn looked drawn, old, bruised under his eyes. Her own face, she thought, so wide and flat and never beautiful in the gentlest light, must seem starkly plain. She was self-conscious, too, about her work clothes, the ivory polo shirt and dull navy skirt, the rubber boots.

“I don't want coffee,” said Quinn. “I have to get some sleep.”

He saw her to her car without touching her or kissing her goodbye.

Curling down the mountain to Beech Creek, she felt chastened and faintly ill with shame, as if she and Quinn had been on a long and merry drunk, then abruptly forced to sober up and see themselves in the harsh light of day. As Caleb saw them. Misbehaving. Incautious. Poised to cause real pain.

And she'd liked Caleb first, and more. He was sunnier, cleverer, so much closer to her age and sensibility. Whereas Quinn was like some sad old king who'd designated her for his own use.

She was glad then to be at the country club, to run for lemon slices and ice for the golf ladies, to tray out glass bowls of green sherbet that none of them would touch, to make and pour pot after pot of decaf coffee.

Heading back up the mountain through blue afternoon shadows, Cress was calmer and resigned. Love affairs, it seemed, had hidden components that, when removed, destabilized the whole. Caleb, she saw now, had served as an impediment; by being there, he'd limited the time they could spend together, which fueled their yearning but also kept them neatly in check. His defection had knocked the wind out of them; she doubted they could rally.

She trudged up her snow-choked driveway to find a folded note stuck on the glass door with blue masking tape:
Come to trailer for pork chops
.

*   *   *

Quinn had slept all day. He puttered at the stove, clattered pans, hummed. The word for him was
chipper
. She sat at the table and tried to catch up. But being in the trailer raised another specter: it was impossible not to think of Sylvia. The scanty, stiff brown-and-white gingham curtains might have been original to the trailer, but Sylvia had surely selected the Melmac plates, the flowered pillowcases, and maybe even the double-flannel sleeping bag. Who knew how many nights she'd slept encased in that crass American toile of pointing setters, gun-toting hunters, and flying mallards. Had Quinn spent so many nights alone here that he no longer registered Sylvia's claim? Cress would not jeopardize his chipperness by asking.

He fed her chops and eggs, crusty potatoes, bourbon-spiked coffee. She presented the merganser miniature, which he propped up against the salt shaker so he could admire it all evening. They played cribbage with competitive intensity—she won by a full length; he was truly lousy at games. Victory, finally, made her chipper too. He showed her how to light the little propane lamp by the bed and crank the window, “or we'll be found entwined and asphyxiated in the morning.”

Quinn rose when it was still dark. He turned on a shuddering little heater and brewed coffee in an aluminum drip pot, brought her a cup in bed. He fried bacon and made toast, hummed as he basted eggs, and called her to the table.

Such was their first full night together, and it became a favorite, often visited memory.

*   *   *

Late in January, snow fell a foot a day for a week. The webbed aluminum deck furniture—a chaise and two chairs—went from blanketed to overstuffed, and finally to wholly abstract, Brancusian. “Welcome to your first real Sierra dump,” Don Dare called to her from the new house.

They awoke one morning to find footprints on both of the A-frame's porches; they looked almost human, but were larger and clawed. “Your bear.” Quinn crouched to examine the prints. “Big fella.” The bear had gone to every door, the sliders on the front and side porches, then around back to the never-opened door by the kitchen. He had paused, too, at each of the downstairs bedroom windows.

He'd tried the basement door, as well, they discovered that afternoon when they went to put on their skis. Quinn said, “You know my mother once baited, killed, butchered, and canned a bear.”

“Your mom?” said Cress.

They snapped down their boot toes and moved off, into the trees toward the meadow. The snow was soft and deep.

The first time his family moved up to Noah Mountain, Quinn said, his father took a disaster relief job in Mississippi. Before he left, Lew cleaned out all the bank accounts, even the one his wife kept secret from him, for emergencies.

“But that's criminal!” Cress said. “Robbing his own family!”

“He was going through Vegas. He thought he'd double or triple it.”

One night after dinner, Quinn said, his mother took the compost bucket and tossed food scraps into the yard. She loaded two deer slugs in the twelve-gauge, opened the kitchen window, and sat on the counter with her feet in the sink, the barrels resting on her knees.

Outside, an icy snow was falling.

The boys could sit at the kitchen table, she said, but they had to be completely quiet. Quinn was around twelve then, Caleb three. The kitchen was soon freezing from the open window. Quinn crept off and brought their hats and heavy coats and helped his brother bundle up.

They dozed and woke, dozed and woke, and each time found themselves still in the cold silent kitchen. And then Quinn opened his eyes just as his mother lifted her gun. Without making a sound, he stood on his chair, and Caleb did too. They didn't see anything at first, then just a thickening in the sleet that grew darker and, coming into the barn light, became a bear.

This was an old trash-pillaging campsite marauder that Fish and Game had airlifted from Yosemite and deposited south of Mineral King. Eventually, his nose drew him to the small scattered community of Noah Mountain, where he resumed his old vocation. All summer, he'd raided smoke shacks, gardens, and henhouses.

In the cold mercury vapor glow, he glittered as if covered with glass beads. He entered the yard on all fours, but when he got twenty-five, thirty feet away, he rose up, stuck his blunt old snout in the air, sniffing and sniffing, his head in a bright cloud of steam from his own breath. They got a big whiff of him then—man! was he rank!—and Quinn's mother fired both barrels.

It was like a bomb went off. In such close quarters, the sound blasts right through your bones. All the dishes in the cupboards jumped. Caleb started howling. Quinn's ears rang so much he got dizzy and had to sit down. But his mother made him get up and help her drag the dead bear into the barn.

They could move him only a few inches at a time. Four hundred pounds of dead weight. He smelled sour and rotten, like week-old garbage. Quinn's mother knew what to do, she was a librarian. She'd done research. She skinned him and dressed him out, hung him in the barn, and, after a couple days, butchered the whole carcass. She froze some meat, ground and canned the rest.

“Canned it? Canned bear? And you ate it?” said Cress.

“All year long.”

“What did it taste like?”

Quinn shrugged. “Like meat in chili. Meat in spaghetti. Every so often I got a hint of that garbagey smell. Like with a pig raised on a small farm, you can sometimes taste barnyard in the meat? I could taste the trash scavenger in that bear. Or thought I could. Never had much taste for bear after that.”

“Who could blame you.”

Yeah. And maybe ten years after that night, Quinn said, he was in a hut up north of Whitney, with his dad and his uncle Evan. They were in bed and heard the door scrape open, and in came that same hot sour stink. His uncle Evan shone a torch on him—he already had his nose in their supplies. “I got him,” Quinn said, being the nearest, and the only one with a clear shot.

“I had this old Ruger pistol, and I shot six times at point-blank range and didn't hit him once. Unconsciously, I think I never wanted to eat bear again. Old guy finally did get the hint and lumbered out. Took his time, though. I never lived it down. Bear comes in and all but asks to be shot, and I couldn't oblige.”

*   *   *

Cress, browning onions and chunks of pork, answered the phone.

“Cress? It's Julie, Julie Garsh. I'm wondering if I can stop by around eleven?”

They hadn't spoken for at least two months. In her surprise, Cress feigned enthusiasm. “Come for lunch! I'm making posole.”

“No, no. I'll only have a minute.”

Since it was the first week in February, Cress thought, her father must be contesting the latest invoice and Julie probably wanted to talk about that. The last time he was up, Sam Hartley had seen plans for Rick's next custom home, and although it lacked the Hartleys' glassed-in porch and there was a slight difference in scale, the two floor plans were identical. “I paid him a full architect's fee and not for a set of rescalable plans,” Sam said and, for the first time, used the word
lawsuit.
Perhaps Julie wanted to talk about that, too.

In Sparkville, Cress had bought yellow and purple hominy and chipotle peppers from the Mexican grocery. The posole was simmering when Julie came in huffing from her climb up the driveway. “Sure I can't interest you?” Cress lifted the lid, loosing a cloud of meaty steam.

Julie seemed startled. “I have to feed Rick lunch. I can only stay a sec.”

“At least sit.” Cress motioned to the love seat and pulled out a chair from the kitchen table for herself.

Neither sat. Julie had gained weight, her chin was now farther adrift in her softening neck—fond of her own cooking, as Jakey once said. Not enough time spent stretching her legs in God's grandeur. “How are you?” said Cress.

“Rick's got three more houses starting in the spring, so I'm up to my ears getting plans to the county.” Julie gazed out the front window, where Shale Mountain presided over the whitened world. “This really is the best view…,” she said. “You know, Rick and I were so glad when you moved here, Cress. We were really hoping to be friends. We were as disappointed as you were that things didn't work out with you and Jakey…”

“No great tragedy,” said Cress. “Considering—”

“And I can see that you were probably pretty lonely then—”

“Not so bad. But if anyone else you know falls for Jakey, you might warn her that he's a compulsive—”

“I can't speak to that—”

“I can,” said Cress. “Take my word for it. He's got 'em coming and—”

Julie's voice rose. “I am not here to talk about Jakey, Cress.”

“Oh. Okay.” Cress waited.

Julie drew herself up and looked at Cress for the first time. “I just can't sit by while you destroy another woman's life.”

Cress's mind went white, even before she fully grasped what Julie meant.

“Sylvia Morrow doesn't deserve this,” Julie added.