Something to Be Desired (2 page)

The tent was an old one, bought by mail when Lucien was in the first grade, for a trip to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, a trip they were unable to make because of the recession, or something about middle management. The tent had been treated to waterproof it, a tar smell. The moon outside revealed the weave of the cloth. Lucien watched his father’s wonderfully peaceful sleep. He couldn’t make out if he was in worse trouble at school
and would never be returned to the baseball team; or if his father’s terrific intervention canceled that world and its rules. In fact, he couldn’t exactly make out if his father was glad to be back. It was as if the same master stood over them with a stick and not only drove them but drove them in circles, around the mountains, around their camp, around their tin cans.

His father had brought a fancy Zenith radio for the trip, so that they would not be surprised by weather. Lucien got nine countries on it. He turned it as low as he could and dialed away at his sleeplessness. He got Mexico, an exciting thing in 1958. The speaker from Mexico spoke very rapidly, reminding Lucien that he was flunking Spanish. If he picked up
muy
once, he picked it up a hundred times. Then he ran the six-foot antenna out the tent flap and dialed some more: he got an English-language Baptist station right in the middle of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right where they have voodoo, talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ; not at all the way a radio Baptist would carry on stateside. You could tell the people of Haiti had put a civil tongue in his head. Then Lucien got rough northern voices he could not understand. Maybe they belonged to Russians.

He turned back to Haiti. Cold wind stirred the tent sides, a rocky wind that murmured through the imprecations of the stranded preacher in Haiti so anxious to make friends among the heathen that he pronounced their country “I.T.,” as the Haitians did; the wind murmured over the tired Peruvian traveler and a son still early in his journey.

The day broke blue and northern on the basin of gravel, a basin lined with thin glittering springs and the delicacies
of vegetation that spilled their edges all the way to the brisk willows at the creek bottom. The creek turned south till it fell off the end. Someone’s lost saddle horse stood exactly where the creek fell into pure blue sky, alternately grazing and staring across the gravelly basin to their camp. Lucien’s first thought was to catch him, ride him back to school and get to play third base again.

I could never catch him, he thought. He remade the fire for breakfast, building it in a single blast with the patented fire-starter, a flame as tall as Lucien that wavered ominously toward the tent, then shrank into the firewood peaceably. His father woke to the smell of hash and eggs, and crawled forth with a bleak squint into broad daylight.

“You left the radio on, Lucien. The battery is dead.” His father doubled over to scrutinize a blister on his heel, displacing its liquid between opposing thumbs. “God-almighty,” he said.

They breakfasted and Lucien cleaned the aluminum plates in the spring. The cold water congealed the grease to the metal, and he had to scour them with sand to make them clean. Lucien was conscious of his father staring at the peaks, plain rock jumping out of ground that looked as soft as a stream bank. “No wonder nobody lives here, no wonder they stay back in town,” his father said. “There’s no reason to be here. You come here to get something and then out you go. Look at that poor damn horse. Can you feature that?”

This gave Lucien no feeling whatsoever, not unless that in itself was a feeling. It was like hitting a baseball and having it just not come down. You could hardly call it a fielding error.

His father circled the tent slowly, digging a finger into
his disordered hair, inventorying the camp, the camp that a few days ago had been erected as a gateway to an improved world.

“We’re looking at under a hundred bucks,” said his father, standing at their camp. “Let’s walk away from it.” Lucien listened, awaiting some further information, but that was all: leave it.

They had nothing to carry, nor the struggle of climbing; Lucien’s father led the way with a jaunty step. Part of the mission was completed. The lights of Deadrock were reduced to the dimensional outlines of the little burg; and there were brief gusts of stink from the hot springs south of town. Lucien wondered why unpleasantness and healing were always connected.

“I’m afraid I feel a little guilty,” said Lucien’s father with a laugh. “A little guilty, a little hungry and a little thirsty.”

“Guilty for what?”

“Taking you away from school.”

Lucien walked on for a minute, scuffing along the dry, stony trail. “I wasn’t doing well,” he said. “You didn’t do any harm.”

“I’m sure I did a
lot
of harm,” said his father. Lucien wondered why he always made his father feel so guilty. They had had so very few adventures together, but each one of them made his father burn with guilt. Maybe they shouldn’t try to have adventures; the thought choked Lucien with sadness, but maybe it was true. Not if the adventures were just going to make his father burn with guilt. They had gone to Cabo San Lucas, and his father burned like a martyr because it was the first trip they had made that reflected the deterioration of Lucien’s parents’ marriage. That trip at least had been on a school
vacation, so the sense of irresponsibility had not been so hard on his father as this time. Lucien knew that this time his father felt more like a kidnapper than an adventurer.

For the last half mile the trail was only a ledge in the granite. Beyond the ledge, soaring birds were seen from above, now and then diving feetfirst into the prairie. Their car could be discerned too: an almost vertical view, a rectangle of paint, like the toy car Lucien used to scuff one-handed on the carpet at home. That was back when his mother and father had had famous parties where they displayed their outstanding dancing and where Lucien, already dying to please, had trained himself to be a perfect bartender, silent and friendly, willing to overrule the jigger for family friends, later listening through the floor for the bellowed jokes and the Valkyrian laughs of the wives. It was when the census bureau harried Lucien’s father for declaring himself an entrepreneur; Lucien still wasn’t sure what that was, but all the adults banded together to throw parties to fight the census bureau, to pass the hat, to declare their faith in entrepreneurs, a category that the census bureau would not accept. It was exciting. Lucien was the pubescent speedy bartender, who bracketed new people in town, the probational ones, with his strict jigger. Then suddenly things got so exciting that his father tore off to Peru with the man who sold him his last car: a car different from the plain business model the trail wound toward; the car Art Clancy sold his father was a Thunderbird, and now his mother had it. She had the house and she had the assets. Plus she had done something Lucien couldn’t quite fathom—she had let the memberships go. And now they
were gone, his father had said dolorously: the memberships are gone.

They drove toward Deadrock, where they had rented the car. They weren’t going to turn the rental in today; his father promised over and over that they wouldn’t turn it in today, as though Lucien cared. “We’ve had this car for nearly half a week,” his father crowed, “and it’s got less than fifty miles on it!” As they drove, Lucien listened to stories of the living descendants of the Incas, how they hid gold in lakes, cut out hearts, sacrificed virgins. He heard of the astonishment of these small people, with their great Andean chests and earflaps, at the sight of Art Clancy’s Corvette. Peru had been quite a deal. The Indians tried to put their hands all over the car. Art Clancy spoke to them in a kind of imitation Khrushchev. “Hands off,” he told the little Incas. “Gives a shot in the head.” The year of Cabo San Lucas there had been a long aftermath of Mexican. “Eees good!” stood for approval. When Lucien hooked a trout in the ditch back of the house, his mother cried out, “Feesh! Eees good!”

Lucien suspected that his mother was as much on his father’s mind as she was on his own. It was his father’s quietness as he made his way across the river bridge, then the railroad tracks. Maybe Lucien’s mother should have thrown his father out; but when she did, she threw everything out and maybe she shouldn’t have done that. Who would ever know? Nobody. It infected everything from daybreak to baseball. It infected all things. It was a pestilence.

They drove into Deadrock. They were traveling light. The town crouched in front of the terrific mountains to
the south, great wildly irregular peaks that seemed to say to the little town, Don’t try anything. No one strolled the streets as Lucien and his father sat in the parked rental car. There were plenty of people visible but they just emerged from one store or bar and darted into another, short sudden arcs, escaping the same general gaze. This irresolute air suited Lucien and his father perfectly. The day felt too early and too late. Before the divorce, this had been his father’s hometown too.

“We better get a room,” his father said.

He restarted the car and began to hunt for a place. There were a couple of satisfactory hotels which they cruised past at very low speed. His father looked at them critically, then leaned out into the warm air to crane up at their higher stories either to evaluate their height and substance or to hope for an anomalous penthouse, more satisfactory than the lower rooms, rooms to which Lucien was sure his father referred when he uttered the single word “dandruff.”

Then impatiently he gunned out onto Parkway and found Deadrock’s only motel, a new place. In 1958 a motel was a pretty exciting thing, comfort and life alongside your car. Now Lucien saw that his father was okay once again, that there was volition and not a mind wandering through things spoilt. And the reproachful presence of your own child. Yes, Lucien felt that now.

Lucien’s father went inside to get them a room. He came out with a ballpoint, wrote down the license number and went back inside. Then he came back and jumped in the car heartily. “Fifteen B, I love it! ‘B’! They only have one floor! You ought to see the owner. Get the feeling you don’t take a room and the bank pounces on him.” His father smiled wide with charity. Lucien
glanced over and saw the motel lady, drawing back the venetian blinds, caught. He waved a little.

The room was another world: up-to-date, lightless. There were little things on the bedspread you could pick at. Lucien’s father made his way sideways to each reproduction on the wall, thrummed his fingers on top of the TV, counted out ten dollars and weighted them with an ashtray. “I’m going out for a belt. I’m late and you get hungry, here’s ten bucks.” He was gone in a shudder of daylight.

Lucien read the welcome to Big Sky and thumbed the motel Bible. Kukla, Fran and Ollie wouldn’t be on television for a while. He pulled the curtain and saw their car was gone: he’d never heard it start up. He wondered if anyone would get some use out of their tent; maybe the owner of that horse—it would make a good combination for a man wanting to travel out in all those hills and mountains. He lay down for a moment trying to get control of himself. Very soon he wasn’t moving.

He woke up in the middle of the night. His father was standing bolt upright in his shorts, arm outstretched, finger pointing, a dynamo of rejection, a god casting someone out. “Go!” he roared.

Indeed, someone was being cast out; but she felt very strongly that she had not been given time to dress. She complained with acid bitterness as she crawled through her own clothing, holding individual articles up toward the bathroom light for rough identification.

“
Go
!” roared his father.

“I’m
gone
,” she whined. “But not like this.”

She struggled a bit more, stood and slanted through the small opening Lucien’s father made for her into the night.

Lucien listened to his father walking around, stopping only for long sighs. Finally:

“Lucien?”

“I’m awake.”

“I’m sorry …?”

“I’m awake, sir.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“Not long,” Lucien said.

“Lucien, when you were a small boy, I let you have lots of pets, hamsters, rabbits and so on. Do you remember I allowed that?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“That was so you could learn about animals, about how we are all animals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now I want to call Momma.”

He got the night operator or the morning operator, whichever, and revealed to Lucien’s mother that they were no longer out in the mountains. “Momma,” he said. “I’m with Lucien. We want to come home to you, Momma.” Lucien could not devise an attitude toward this. His father suddenly fell to listening. He repeated “uh huh” a number of times in a deeper and flatter voice. He waved Lucien into the bathroom, then waved the door shut behind him. Lucien leaned on the faucet, turning it microscopically until a drop of water came out, shut it off, and did it again. Then he heard his father call for him.

When he went into the bedroom the reading lamp was on and his father sat right next to it, weeping, silently with heaving shoulders.

“What’s the matter, Pop, can’t we go home?” Lucien was scared.

“It’s not that—” He sobbed for a few more minutes
and composed himself carefully. “Art Clancy was shot and killed by his girlfriend,” he sobbed. “In Arequipa, Peru.”

Lucien’s father had coached him carefully as they walked across town from the motel. They stood in front of their house while his father ran a finger around the inside of his collar, then gave Lucien a quick, conspiratorial nod. He knocked. In a moment the door opened and there was his mother, all dressed up.

“When’s lunch!” Lucien and his father cried together.

She looked from one to the other. “That hungry gang of mine,” she said with a warm smile and turned into the house for her men to follow.

Chili was gone. He knew very well that his mother might have disposed of the small, blue, merry bird; or at least given the bird away, purely on the basic of its Hispanic name. Lucien was sure she pictured Clancy of Peru in his shantung suits, his Corvette and his bad Spanish in a way that made a parakeet named Chili look bad. He already suspected that her greeting was camouflage, so the crack of his mother’s hand against his father’s face came as not much of a surprise. His father just took it. There was little else he could do. Raising his hands in self-defense would have made him a pantywaist in the eyes of his own son.