Off Course (9 page)

In L.A., thought Cress, all that leather, the fetishized hats and manicured facial hair would be giggled at; or people would assume they were off a set. But up here on the mountain, manly affectations were exhaustively on parade, what with the hunters and fishermen, the snowmobilers and cross-country skiers, rock climbers, backpackers, and mountain man reenactors, all of whom arrived studiously geared up, mostly, so far as Cress could tell, to generate admiration and envy in other men.

The motive for the brothers' careful toilette soon became clear. Quinn's wife, Cress saw with a small shock, was beautiful. Dark, petite, and slim, she had long, curly, molasses-colored hair. A sudden dazzling smile. “Wow,” Don whispered.

Caleb's wife, Cress was more interested to see, was not beautiful but snub-nosed and plump in her bulky pink sweatshirt and too-tight jeans. Her blond hair, pulled into a stubby ponytail, reminded Cress of her own mother's decree:
A ponytail is not a hairstyle.

Donna, arriving with her guitar, hollered at the Morrows with the drawl she turned on and off. “What brings you paleface townies to bear country?”

Caleb's wife grinned. Her teeth were small, with spaces between, like baby teeth. “Just checkin' on the menfolk!” she bawled.

The buffet opened, featuring Jakey's sausage lasagna and the usual salad bar. Old Jerry crooned “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Stranger in Paradise,” “Embraceable You.” The Garshes shared a booth with Tom Streeter and the pale, willowy Ondine. Every few minutes, a loud, ribald laugh rang through the room—Caleb's wife. Heads swung around to see what was so funny: something Caleb said.

“He found her in South Carolina,” Donna whispered. “Caleb used to play harmonica with me. He's seriously talented, recorded with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Vern Gosdin.” Donna lowered her voice. “Then Candy got born again and hauled him in after her and he stopped playing in bars and never comes to music nights at my house anymore. I don't know if he plays at all now.”

“He does,” Cress said. A harmonica—that's what she'd heard that night when her parents were up.

DeeDee handed out bowls of homemade blackberry ice cream, and shortly, the young families and older couples headed home. Donna came onstage. “Love, oh love,” she sang, “oh careless love.”

*   *   *

Caleb and Candy slow-danced—apparently their religion allowed them that. Franny and Brian also rose to hug and sway on the square patch of parquet.

Jakey sat beside Cress, pushed his big hot friendly body against her, and hollered to DeeDee. “Another round for Mr. Darrington and the economics professor!” He spun Cress's empty bowl. “The ice cream—what'd you think?”

Compliments, it seemed, were what he was after; receiving them, he moved on. “You could still have him,” Don said.

“No thanks.” Besides, Jakey was zeroing in on a woman Cress had met in the campground earlier that day, a thirty-seven-year-old grandmother who was taking a year to travel across the country by herself. The old green truck would rattle out of the parking lot any minute now.

Quinn Morrow and his wife stopped by the table on their way out. Quinn's hard-bitten Western affect only emphasized his wife's delicate beauty. “Don, Cress,” he said. “My wife, Sylvia.”

Cress was surprised that Quinn knew her name. “That's easy to remember,” she said to the wife. “My mother's Sylvia, too.”

This Sylvia smiled, ducked her chin.

“A fox,” whispered Don Dare when the Morrows moved on.

“So shy,” said Cress.

A loud laugh rang through the room. Caleb's wife, out on the dance floor.

 

Seven

Long before she was slain in the spirit and bathed in the light, DeeDee was a dealer in a Tahoe card room. Surely God would look the other way if she dealt a few more hands to feed her boys. Word went out: a poker night.

DeeDee's cheaply built A-frame was tucked in a dense grove of small pines, a mucky hollow plagued in warmer months by gnats and in winter by icy patches. She and her husband had bought the place early in their marriage. “It reminded me of a gingerbread house,” DeeDee told Cress. Indeed, along the eaves, the fascia boards were gaily scalloped and painted white.

During the divorce, DeeDee traded her share in their Visalia house to own this mountain home outright. She'd been living in the Meadows mortgage-free ever since, although a son's asthma, roof leaks, car problems, and chronically unpaid child support never allowed her any financial ease. Her three boys rode the school bus down to Sawyer every day, darkness to darkness. Tonight, she'd arranged to have them stay in town with friends.

Kevin Yates was in the living room when Cress arrived. Taller and burlier than Jakey, he had chapped-red cheeks and an easy blush. Shy, he kept busy, replenished the wood box, moved tables together, corralled extra chairs, always with a quick glance at DeeDee for approval.

She approved; she was softer with him than with Cress, or even her boys.

A rumble and stomping on the porch: Don Dare and his crew—Freddy and River Bob—came in swinging six-packs, followed by Rick Garsh and then the Morrow brothers, all leathered up in hats and vests and hauling more beer.

DeeDee had made pot roast and an iceberg salad; Cress brought corn chowder with bacon, green beans, and homemade biscuits. The day had been cold. Everyone was hungry.

“Should bring you some of our bacon,” Quinn told Cress over the chowder. “Buy a hog every year, have the belly smoked by this old boy over in Fountain Springs. Sliced thick.”

“Where did you grow up?” Cress asked, as his accent was so backwoods.

“Orange County. Seal Beach, mostly,” he said. “And Noah Mountain. These beans are good. Almonds, and is that lemon?”

“
Haricots amandine
,” said Don Dare.

“Hey—you cook French food?” said Caleb. “We should bring you some frog. Got a freezer full. Big uns, legs on 'em like drumsticks.”

“
Frog?
” Cress said. “Where do you get frog?”

They hunted the fat amphibians along irrigation canals at night, with torches and gigs. Caleb said, “You
gig
frogs. Though I gigged Quinn once.”

“I got the scar to prove it,” Quinn said.

“We'd been out a few hours, bagged a dozen whoppers,” said Caleb. “I slipped on the canal bank and accidentally poked Quinn on his calf. Turns out frog skin is toxic. Half hour later his leg's swole up like an oozing watermelon.”

“Remember that emergency room doctor?” Quinn said. “He comes in reading the file and says, ‘So. Which one's the gigger and which the giggee?'

“Then, at the start of fishing season this year,” Quinn went on, “I'm tying hooks on leaders and holding the finished leaders in my mouth. Slowly, I notice this
sensation
.” He touched his lower lip. “Three barbed treble hooks had worked into my lip. I couldn't see to snip 'em out and Sylvia was too squeamish to try. So I went to the emergency room and who's on call? Same old sawbones. Took one look at me and said, ‘Refresh my memory—gigger or giggee?'”

Plates were cleared, cards produced. When it came to her turn, DeeDee's dealing was hypnotic, swift; her shuffle a pretty flutter. She was a pro. She didn't cheat. But she knew the game.

The brothers grumbled and joked over their cards. “Well, lookee there,” Caleb said, playing a straight. “A king
can
look at a cat.”

Cress lost almost every hand, so kept her bets low; Rick and Quinn also tended to lose. Quinn bet more recklessly. “Read 'em and weep,” he said, about a pair of tens—which cost him two tall stacks of quarters.

They played for four hours, until all the beer was gone. Luck surged and ebbed around the table. DeeDee won thirty-odd dollars, but so had Caleb.

Cress stayed to help clean up. “Get Jakey to give you a card room,” she told DeeDee. “Upstairs, in the lodge. You could have a real game. Some of those hunters'd play big money.”

“I'll stick to penny-ante stuff. And let's not invite Caleb next time.”

“I like those guys. They're characters.”

“Caleb cuts in on my take,” said DeeDee.

“Yeah, but Quinn sure bolsters it.”

“He was on some kind of a tilt, doubling with that weak hand.” DeeDee shrugged. “Not that I minded.”

“Economists call it loss aversion—when you compound losing like that.”

“Dumb is what I call it,” said DeeDee.

Clearing the table, Cress found a twenty folded under Caleb's glass.

“Well, three cheers for the gigger,” said DeeDee.

“He is adorable,” said Cress. “Too bad he's married.”

“And his wife's such a bush-Okie,” said DeeDee.

“I heard she's actually from South Carolina. And she's a born again, too.”

“A backwoods Holy Roller type. All Pentecostal and writhing on the ground, speaking in tongues, yabba dabba doo.”

“Your church doesn't go in for that.”

“Please. I'm a good old-fashioned Presbyterian. None of that charismatic Foursquare hoo-haw.”

“But aren't you evangelical? I thought you said…”

“Evangelical means we proclaim the Good News. Not ignorant superstition. Our ministers go to school, study the Bible in Greek and stuff. They're not self-appointed, tent-show revival, open-your-wallet-for-Jesus types.”

“Sounds like there's a class divide as well,” said Cress.

DeeDee plunged glasses into soapy water, scrubbed. “You mean, like who's middle-class and who's white trash?” Her blue eyes glittered with challenge.

“Something like that.” Cress had to remind herself that DeeDee was indeed middle-class: she owned a home. She'd had some college—a community-college business course, one year. “Well, it's too bad for Caleb,” she added. “He's so funny and sharp.”

“Not so sharp he didn't dodge that bullet. Now go on home,” DeeDee said. “Kevin's coming back any minute. If he sees your car's still here, he'll be too shy to come in.”

*   *   *

Snow whirled through, floured the landscape, then vanished. The temperature dropped into the twenties at night. Days, the sun brought back T-shirt weather, although with dwindling conviction. On October 26, early in the afternoon, a gusting wind pushed the clouds together. The sky sealed shut. The temperature rose five degrees. The clouds darkened and started to churn, crowding in lower as if pressured from above until, from the ragged undersides, big wet flakes began to fall. Setting out on her walk, Cress caught them on her parka sleeve, their dainty white geometry dissolving into clear droplets on the black Gore-Tex. The snow thickened and fell faster, the largest, stickiest flakes she'd ever seen; they clumped in midair, landed with audible plops. The meadows whitened as she passed. The world shushed.

By the time she'd looped through the campground and made it to the lodge, the parking lot was full of badly parked vehicles. Jakey's snow pool had a winner and the party was under way. Rick's crews had abandoned their posts. People had driven up from Cloud Slope, Pine Corner, Hapsaw Camp. The snow pool kitty was $412. The woman who won lived fifty miles off in Tulare; she was on her way, too, but in the meantime, as per the rules—Jakey's rules—everyone drank on her tab until she walked through the door.

Cress stood by Caleb in the crush at the bar. Jakey, DeeDee, and the bartender were pouring and serving drinks as fast as they could. DeeDee took Caleb's order—Coke for him, beer for his brother. “And get her whatever she wants,” he said, tapping Cress's shoulder.

“Thanks, big spender,” she said, and ordered bourbon on ice.

“Hey, have two.” Caleb's long hound-dog face, brightened by humor, became droll and appealing.

“I've been meaning to say—I hear your harmonica at night,” said Cress. “It's so otherworldly, drifting up through the trees.”

“Otherworldly?” he said. “As in caterwauling?”

“As in haunting. You're really good.”

“Should've heard my dad and granddad.
That
was some harp playing.”

DeeDee plunked down their drinks, waved off Caleb's bill, which he left on the bar.

“I hear you draw,” he said.

“I muddle about.”

“I spent a year at Cal Arts. Drawing and illustration.”

“Just a year? Didn't you like it?”

He'd been fresh out of the Army, he said, on the GI Bill, with a kid on the way. He couldn't sit still. He was itchy to make a living, a life. When his father took a big job in Malibu with a lot of fine work, Caleb went with him.

Quinn, alone in a booth, twisted around to glower at them. Cress said, “Better take your brother his beer.”

“Join us,” said Caleb.

She slid in next to him. Quinn raised an eyebrow at her whiskey, then waved down a waitress and ordered one for himself. “Just one,” he said quietly to Caleb.

“Hey, I have a question,” said Cress, and asked if it was true, had they really worked for the movie star Brian named?

“Built him a couple of guesthouses,” Caleb said. “And a picture gallery. Quinn made him doors out of these Frank Lloyd Wright windows.”

“That must have been nerve-wracking.”

“I was very, very careful.”

Caleb said, “Have Sylvia bring up the photos to show her.”

“Did you ever see
him
?” asked Cress.

“All the time,” Caleb said. “Some mornings he'd come out, hair sticking up, eyes bloodshot, gut sagging in some dirty T-shirt, like he'd been rode hard and put away wet. He'd knock a few dozen golf balls into the canyon, all snarly, like he'd bite if you got near him. Then he'd go back in the house, and couple hours later, a long black car'd drive up, and out he'd come in these beautiful clothes, all slapped and polished into a movie star.” Caleb stuck a thumb at his brother. “He liked Quinn.”