Off Course (7 page)

“Call him,” said Tillie. “Better yet, go get him. How does he know you're interested if you play it so cool?”

How interested was she, really? More than their prospects merited. She'd never marry or even live with him, but the thought of him bearing down on her in his cheap white shirt, the whole hot juicy weight of him, stopped her breath.

Two glasses of burgundy and what the hell, she phoned the lodge, ready to leave a message. Jakey picked up. The background music and laughter were loud for a weeknight. “It's me,” she said. “Feel like coming up?”

“You bet!” he barked. “Soon as I can get away.”

She put away her pastels. She drank another glass of wine. She fed the fire and walked outside onto the front deck. The Milky Way, that big galactic smudge, hogged the black sky. The wind gathered, heaved, and ceased; gathered, heaved, and ceased. Headlights flashed through the trees and did not turn up her driveway. It was fall, the world was dusty, pinched, dying back. She was not really writing or drawing, or even steeping herself in the beauty of the natural world. She was waiting for Jakey. She was waiting all the time now, suspended in the hours, poised, nose quivering in the air. Another car rounded the curve and relief rushed in. But that car, and all the others passing by that night, never turned her way.

*   *   *

She went a little frantic then and fought an almost constant urge to go to the lodge, to call Jakey, to locate him.
So this is what he did to the bims.
She held off, for pride's sake. She used the back way into the Meadows—a narrow road half a mile west of the lodge—so he wouldn't see her come and go. She avoided walking or driving past his house. She avoided the phone, and the A-frame itself, so that she wouldn't know if he called or came by—or didn't. Avoidance was her only power. She carried a falling-apart copy of
David Copperfield
to her old spot, the bench on the porch of the Bauer cabin, and read it belly down while woodpeckers bored into the trees all around her.

*   *   *

The A-frame's sliding glass door shuddered on its tracks after nine on a Sunday night. “Hullo, hullo?” He came in steaming and stamping. “I miss you something fierce. Where have I been? Goddamn, it's good to bite your gorgeous white neck.” The next Thursday, she was walking by the pond when he drove up alongside. He sweet-talked her over to his house, then hurried her back into his truck post-sex. A week after that, he found her by the back entrance and unlocked a nearby cabin. They used a bed, helped themselves to a brandy bottle.

This intermittency generated a nervous, involuntary hope.

“Just talk to him,” said Tillie. “Ask him what he wants from you!”

But she couldn't ask, because she knew: the slightest pressure, the least demand, and Jakey would vanish for good.

*   *   *

Julie Garsh said, “He's acting out. Which is perfectly predictable. After a long, failed marriage, he's in a lot of pain and grief. Then he meets someone he adores, and it scares him to death. Loss and love are equivalent to him.”

“Where does that leave me?” Cress asked.

“Just be there for him. He'll see that you're steady and come around.”

No reasonable future contained him, Cress knew. But how to relinquish the great crush of his body, the tidal pleasure when he roared her name?

*   *   *

She walked farther now, one day even made it to Globe Rock, a vast granite dome with its own three-hundred-degree view of the Spearmint watershed and the northern Sierra range. The only vehicle in the small parking area was the white Toyota pickup belonging to Don Darrington—Don Dare, he was called, the lead carpenter on her parents' new place. Cress recognized his bumper sticker:
SUPPORT SEARCH & RESCUE / GET LOST
.

She climbed onto the broad bald rock. The sun sat low on Shale Mountain and the thick sideways light glinted with dust, buzzed with gnats. The forested hills were sunk in shadow. Her family had picnicked here on the rare occasions when it occurred to them to do something together. The brown wooden sign with white grooved letters still said:

DANGER

STAY BACK FROM EDGE

DO NOT THROW OR ROLL ROCKS—HIKERS BELOW

Once, a little boy had run too far out on the rock and, unable to stop, tumbled to his death—but this might have been an apocryphal story to frighten children, and make them cautious. Still, the lure of the edge was strong; visitors invariably inched as far down the rock face as they dared, often going farther than Cress could ever stomach. Today, she sat on the warm granite facing northwest, where the four white humps of Camel Crags quavered in the late light. The tiny glass lookout Jakey had once commandeered for their pleasure flashed red and blue like a diamond. All that—that frolic and dance—was over, but when and how it had ended, she could not say. The night she didn't go to Jakey, when her mother had called out as she'd been leaving the A-frame: that seemed a turning point. He had receded ever since.

Some yards below her, on the curving edge of rock, a whitened human hand clawed into view, followed by an arm, backlit blond hair, an entire, crawling man. Still twenty feet below her, he stood up, trailing bright yellow ropes: Don Dare. He raised a chalky hand to her, then whistled shrilly.

His fluffy Australian shepherd mix, white with black spots, bounded up from the side, almost colliding with Cress. “Easy there, Shim,” Don said.

Cress walked with him and the gamboling dog back over the hump of the rock to the parking lot. Don had a narrow, pitted, handsome face and a slight limp. His carabiners clanked. He climbed rocks after work every day, he said. Globe Rock. The Crags. “Ever try climbing? Ever want to?”

“I don't really get the appeal,” she said. “But I'd try it, just to see.”

“Anytime,” he said. “I'll give you lessons.”

“I like your bumper sticker,” she said at his truck. “Have you ever rescued anyone?”

“A few hikers lost near Sargent Grove. A girl with a twisted ankle.” He slung his ropes into the truck bed. “Last week, we got a call here about an Irish setter. He was off leash, and you know how hyper they are. He ran too far down and gravity took over. I had to circumnavigate the base till I found him.”

“Dead?”

“Fell about a hundred feet. Such a beautiful dog, but uncontrollable. The owners were a mess. You walked? Let me give you a lift.”

She also let him buy her a beer at the lodge. DeeDee, all business, drew their drafts. “Oh come on, DeeDee,” said Don. “Life ain't that bad.”

“You don't know the half of it. Bossy calls from town to say he forgot a hunting party of twelve coming in tonight. And major bimbology all day long.”

Cress understood this to mean that one (or more) of Jakey's old girlfriends had lingered at the bar or hogged a booth in hopes of seeing him—and they probably ran DeeDee ragged the whole time.

Don Dare said, “Anything we can do?”

“Watch the bar while I set up for the hunters?”

“No problem,” said Don. “I've done my time tending bar.”

He and Cress were the only ones in the lounge area, except for Ondine Streeter, who was at a table by the fireplace studying blueprints for her new kitchen and not even drinking.

He'd worked at the Rip Curl Tavern in Carlsbad after college, Don said. He'd been headed to law school, but took a year off to surf. He surfed all day and poured drinks at night until he broke his leg in a freak collision with his board. He kicked out his right shin. “Went through a tough little interlude with heroin then,” he said. “Had a real hard time coming back from it. Lost a couple years. Then I found climbing. Climbing saved my life. When Rick hired me, I told him I needed a couple hours of light every day to climb, just to stay sane.”

Cress hummed sympathetically and thought, First a murderer, now a heroin addict; the Meadows apparently was full of criminals walking around like ordinary people. Don's pitted face now brought to mind the word
ravaged
.

That face came in close, so close that she assumed he was going to kiss her. “I have to tell you…” His voice was husky, confiding. “I'm with someone. We're in love, and we've made a decision not to see other people.”

“Oh. Okay.” Was her white flash of shame for thinking otherwise?

“She's Donna, the singer? I know, I know,” he went on. “Don and Donna … But you've seen her here at Family Night? Jerry calls her onstage.”

“Not the Sawyer Songbird?”

“That's her! I met her last November, the first time I came to climb the Crags. She had a gig at the Sawyer Inn. It was love at first set. Anyway, Jakey's thinking of hiring her on a regular basis and giving ole embraceable Jer a break. She really needs it. As a teacher's aide in Sparkville, she makes, like, twenty cents more than minimum wage.”

“That's nothing!”

“So maybe you'll put in a good word for her.”

“Me? To Jakey? What makes you think he'd listen to me?”

“It's a tiny community, Cressida. Everybody knows you and Jakey…” Don clasped his hands and wagged them back and forth.

“It doesn't mean I have any sway,” she said. “I'm not even sure if Jakey and I are still—” She imitated the wagging handclasp.

“Oh God,
love
.” Don came in close and husky again. Why was it never easy? he said. Donna wouldn't even
talk
about moving in with him till they'd been together a year. She'd made him rent his own place in Sawyer, though every night he was there, he spent at her house. She constantly accused him of seeing other women—which was why he'd told Cress right off the bat that he was involved, unavailable. “So you know, if I'm flirty, it doesn't mean jack.”

“Understood.”

“You two would really like each other. You and Donna. Maybe we'll have you over to camp some night. I've got this big outfitter's tent set up by Spearmint Creek. I ordered it when Boots Stahl was buying them for his pack station. Donna's made it into this lush Bedouin-boudoir-bower sort of thing.”

Cress had already enjoyed the Bedouin-boudoir-bower with Jakey, but she didn't admit that to Don Dare.

*   *   *

DeeDee phoned. “Bossy and Kevin have gone down the hill together, so we might as well keep each other company.”

In DeeDee's smaller, darker A-frame, they made popcorn and vodka drinks, and turned on the television. DeeDee had a big antenna on her roof, hence reception. The
Million Dollar Movie
starred Peter Lorre, but she lowered the sound to talk.

“After Connie left? Jakey had two dates a night,” DeeDee said. “At six and at ten. Every female who walked in the door, just about. Though he never made a pass at
me
. I finally said, ‘Hey, do I have leprosy or something?' He said I was too valuable. He couldn't afford to make me mad.”

DeeDee put in fifty hours a week at the lodge; she also cleaned cabins and ran Jakey's caretaking services. All things his wife had done.

“I should tell you,” DeeDee said, “that he's been seeing Honor for years. You know her. Who owns Hapsaw Lodge?”

“Not that old gal with the pageboy?”

“Even before the dee-vorce,” said DeeDee.

“I should give him up. I know I should,” said Cress. “But I can't. I'm stuck. Every time he comes around, I succumb.”

“Jakey's a jerk,” said DeeDee. “But whenever my child support is late, he finds me extra work. And lets me and the boys eat at the lodge for free.”

*   *   *

“If you're not getting your work done,” Tillie said, “forget the old man of the mountain. Come back to Braithway.”

“Not yet,” Cress said weakly. “And I have to get off the phone now.”

She had to get off because Jakey was at her door, brandishing a bottle of Yukon Jack.

“Bear with me, Hartley,” he said. “Once the snow starts falling, things quiet down a lot. I'll be around more.”

They were in bed. He held her flush against his baking chest. For the first time, she'd been glum, unresponsive.

“I just don't know what to think about us,” she said.

“Me neither! No idea! Just hang on till winter. I'd hate for you to miss it. Once the snow comes, everything changes. We'll have a cozy time, you'll see.”

*   *   *

DeeDee's October child support hadn't arrived by the tenth, so Jakey paid her to deep clean his house. She showed up afterward at Cress's sliding glass door. “I've brought the cure!” DeeDee held up a small blue book. “I found this stuck between his mattress and headboard.” A diary. The cover was padded corduroy, with a plastic daisy on the hasp. The ex-wife's diary. Or rather, an evidentiary record, diligently kept, of the last twenty months of their marriage.

Connie Yates had crept up to windows. She put her ears to walls and doors. She came home early (or never actually left), noted whose car was parked down by the creek, in that spot hidden from the road.
He's so obvious and predictable
, she wrote. She lurked among the aspens to see whom her home disgorged.
I don't care if he catches me. What could he say?

The goal was not to catch him, but to convince herself. She got so she could tell. The way he joked with the checker at Younts. The change of voice in a weekender wife she'd waited on for years. How a strange woman sat at the bar alone, nursing a glass of wine, surreptitiously eyeing the cook's window where Jakey manned the grill.

Connie Yates unscrolled the register's journal tape to see what he charged Sandi White for a dollar bag of spaghetti. Fifteen cents. Bottle of rosé, a dime.

Connie pined for the day her youngest would graduate. She harangued herself not to sink back into self-deceit.
My eyes have been opened and I have to keep them open … He's not going to change … Only I can change. He's mental and can't stop himself, and he doesn't even want to.