Читать книгу A Bloom of Bones - Allen Morris Jones - Страница 9

THREE THOUSAND FEET OVER Billings, she revisited her uncertainty, touched it like a loose tooth. Why Montana, of all places? Jesus. Montana? It seemed deeply incongruous. Ears popping with altitude loss, she scribbled across her crossword: Childlessness. Last year’s breast cancer scare. She wrote, “Because I can.” She was twenty-eight, and it had been far too long since she had astonished herself.

Three weeks ago, a bad breakup had ripped all the usual holes in her heart. He’d been too self-confident, too wealthy. Publishing never mixes well with Wall Street. Armani suits and Pollini loafers, and while no one could find a better restaurant, he’d had no notion of how to replace a heating element, fix a faucet. She was still attached to certain stereotypes. They should be able to open a jar, for instance. In July, he’d disappeared for a week. No phone, no texts. Turns out, he’d been visiting an old flame in Milan. “There’s no big deal here. You’re still number one on the hit list.”

So that, of course, had been that.

Studying the green-fringed ribbon of the Yellowstone River a thousand feet below, she thought, Mistake? Her father (remembering his death still emptied her heart) had argued that impetuousness kept a person young. In addition to his tight little ears and green eyes, maybe she inherited his flippancy. Not counting phone calls, she’d only met Eli Singer once. He was too old for her. How much did that matter? Just about this much.

They’d met a little over a year ago. She’d been coming from the break room dipping a tea bag, passing Leslie Gordon’s office. An up-and-coming agent, gay as a parade, hungry as a cruising shark, he’d called out, “Chloe? Sweetheart? You’re from out West, right? Someone you have to meet. Eli? Chloe’s in foreign rights. She’ll be shopping your book around London here in a few months.”

Singer stood to meet her. Only an inch or so taller than Chloe (and she’s not especially tall), she noted the long torso, narrow hips. His hair had been inexpertly cut, and still carried the indentation of the cowboy hat he’d left on the arm of his chair. Shaking hands, his palm was thick as a phone book, rough as the flip side of a carpet.

She said, “Sorry, what was your name again?”

A cowboy, twenty-three floors above midtown. He winced slightly as they shook hands, and she noted a split thumbnail. He caught her look. “Missed my dally.” As if anyone else in this entire building would know what that meant. But she did. And how had he recognized her?

He had these blue, blue eyes. She admitted an interest. She said, “I can’t wait to read your work.”

At Leslie’s encouragement (what was he doing representing a poet for Chrissakes?), she’d gone first to Singer’s most recent book. Fifty-eight poems, gentle and self-effacing but with odd, sporadic eruptions of brutality. He favored a short line, his verses tight as bread pressed into bricks (his own imagery). How could a guy who chewed Skoal come up with this? She began to see what Leslie saw. Leslie, who had a weakness for award winners. This guy could be another Wendell Berry. Or maybe Berry meets Bukowski. In a poem about Sitting Bull’s flight from General Miles, Singer described the old Indian finding a fossilized tooth in the eroded face of a clay bank: “A granite canine red and ancient / glittering dark as coals.” In fear and frustration, the Indian attacks the bluff, using the tooth to slash and stab at the clay, “biting into fleshless skin.” If Eli Singer wasn’t famous (as she’d written him in an early e-mail) it was only because he stood outside the circle jerk of gatekeeper academics. “You’d like to think that poetry could stand on its own two legs but it can’t.” The e-mails led to late night phone calls, both of them drinking. “You know what I love about your work? How you know things. Nobody else knows anything.” The suction slip of intestines from a deer, the hot wash of amniotic fluid from a heifer, the weighty obligations of an unfixed fence. “Christ, Singer. If you’d gone to grad school, no way could you be writing this shit.”

She was a profane woman. She made no apologies.

For instance: Coming off the plane now, walking down the stairs into the Billings terminal, she opened her arms. “Goddamn. Singer!”

He had a complicated odor about him. She detected truck transmissions, hay fields, horse shit. He stood hip cocked, hat thumbed back, lower lip surreptitiously filled with chew. “Don’t know what it is about the Billings airport, how they always takes their time with luggage. Union labor, I suppose.” He studied the airport crowd: the businessmen glancing at watches, young lovers holding hands, fathers crouching low for a hug. “Should be any minute now.”

She kept sneaking glances, fighting the urge to stare. Alone in this crowd, Singer was the one you might say was too skinny. A thumb hooked in one pocket, he had the over-large hands and swollen knuckles of a day laborer. It felt odd, hearing the familiar voice coming from this stranger’s mouth. Over so many phone conversations, she’d recited the menu of her dating catastrophes, the love/hate thing with her job, talked about her dad. Singer had mumbled assent or denial, rarely offered equivalent asides about himself. She still had only the vaguest outlines of his life. He lived alone, he’d never married. He’d done a tour in Desert Storm (“You know that John Prine song? ‘Used to bust my knuckles on a monkey wrench.’ I had that goddamn song in my head for two years”). He drove a Dodge; raised Angus-Braunvieh hybrids. “Not so hardy as a Angus but they keep a good weight.” He had theories about marbling, fertility. He kept file drawers full of breeding schedules and birth weights. “Biggest problem with most ranches, the way their dad did it is still by god the only way they should do it.” But there was so much he’d kept from her.

Her luggage trundled around on the conveyor. A single gray bag with a red ribbon. He grabbed it first. “We’re parked a good ways away,” he said, “be easier if I carry it.” She added outdated chivalry to the list of things she knew about him.

An hour later, driving past Roundup, he turned on the radio. “You mind?” He found an AM station, and sang along softly to Patsy Cline. “South of the buh-order, down Mexico wuh-ay.” She turned her face to the window. Yes, this was better. Just his voice.

Past the cracked windshield, the dusty and cluttered dashboard, nothing but flat landscape. “Everything is so brown.”

“I’ve been telling folks, we’re seven years into a twelve-year drought.”

“I see what you mean, about the ancient aboriginal steppe.”

He gave her a startled, sidelong glance.

She recited, “The ancient aboriginal steppe, thrumming still with forgotten migrations.”

He shifted. “That hadn’t happened to me before. Somebody reciting my own stuff back to me.”

“How’s it make you feel?”

“Let me think about it.” He fiddled with the radio. “Yeah, no. I don’t care for it.”

The bed of his truck was loaded with Costco boxes, industrial-sized bags of flour and sugar, canned beans, a great brick of toilet paper. But as they came into the dusty little town of Jordan—two gas stations, a pair of bars, a squat, glass-fronted IGA—he said, “Need to pick up a few things, you don’t mind. Couple gallons of milk.”

Inside the store, she found six narrow aisles and two other customers; a matronly ranch wife pushing a cart, a shrunken husband wobbling along beside her. Singer led the way to the dairy case. “Gerald. How you doin? Margie? Afternoon.” He put his hand lightly on Chloe’s waist. The couple conspicuously failed to return the greeting. The old man scowled. The woman pretended interest in breakfast cereal. Chloe would later have cause to revisit their rejection. For now, she whispered, “Am I a scandal?”

He reached into the milk case for a couple gallons of two-percent. “Got to give them some damn thing to talk about.”

“Casanova of Garfield County. How many woman have you taken for a spin through the grocery store there, Mr. Singer?”

“Three or four the last ten years or so. Counting you.”

She hadn’t expected honesty. “Really?”

“Guess I don’t get out much.”

She felt the tension. The disconnect, the . . . subtext. Was this a vacation or a seduction? Was she following her nose or her libido? She had recently trimmed her bangs, and couldn’t stop trying to hook the newly absent hair over one ear. The movement toward her ear, then the hesitation, had become a tic, a tell. She was aware of how it betrayed her nervousness but couldn’t stop herself.

They stood in a brief line at the register. “Hey, Grace. Looking well.” He leaned across the conveyer to give the cashier an awkward, one-armed hug. “This is Chloe. Came all the way from New York to see how a Montana ranch works. Chloe, Grace here used to teach me English back in high school.”

If it weren’t for the hug, Chloe would have thought Grace a man. Short, thin as weeds, white hair going yellow, stray whiskers curling around her ears, the same faded jeans as Singer, the same polyester, pearl-buttoned shirt washed to near translucency. “I never taught you a thing, Eli. Unless it was spelling. You never could spell your way out of a paper bag.”

Chloe said, “He’s a magnificent poet, though, isn’t he?”

Grace, bagging their milk, snorted. “I don’t know about magnificent. But he could sure write the piss out of a term paper.” She handed Singer the bag. “You ask me, poetry should rhyme. Robert Frost, William Blake. Everything else is just . . .” she waved her hands. “Anyway, meetcha, Chloe. Eli, glad you got somebody to talk to down there on that ranch, especially these days.” She shook her head. “Good Lord, the things people will say.”

It stopped her. These days?

Singer was already heading out the door. “Thanks, Grace. We’ll see you around.” He didn’t quite glance back. “Coming?”

She’d had sex for the first time when she was seventeen. That was, what . . .? Eleven years and thirteen men ago. God, just exhausting to think about. So many first glasses of wine, so many fumbling kisses goodnight. Flirtations and numbers exchanged, first rustlings of cotton and denim, the awkward unzippings, the smell of latex and the inadvertent groans and snorts, farts and sighs. No disease or pregnancy, thank God, just her own increasingly jaded heart.

All the different varieties of men—clothes horses, computer nerds, accountants—and they all dissembled in precisely the same manner. But the act itself? In a secular world, it was her one sacrament. The notion of opening yourself to another human being. A literal opening, of course, but metaphorical as well. The spread of knees and thighs, the unpeeling of skepticism, of irony. It was not to be taken lightly.

He’d tried to clean up for her. In the thick dust of the fireplace mantel, she noted fresh swipes of a rag; the smell of wood polish. She was touched by the effort, amused by the futility of it. His drapes were smudged with dog hair, and a cobweb waved ceiling to lampshade.

She hadn’t expected wealth, but the poverty took her by surprise. In the living room, a television but no satellite. An ancient VCR the size of a hassock. No microwave in the kitchen. An overstuffed easy chair and, through a cracked door, an unmade bed and computer monitor, a small desk. And books. Everywhere, books. This, and only this, felt familiar. On the windowsills, tossed askew on the floor, stacked into twisting towers. She found a hardcover of Station Island. “Are you a Seamus Heaney fan?” Dog-eared, underlined, it was inscribed to Eli Singer. “With admiration.” Fifty miles from the nearest stop light, here was a personal inscription from a Nobel laureate.

They ate in his kitchen. She’d brought several expensive bottles of wine; downplayed their importance even while hoping he might notice. “They’re maybe a little bruised, but hey, it’s booze, right?” Her and her goddamned insecurities. His table wobbled on metal legs, laminate veneer peeling. She looked down at baked potatoes and asparagus, a buffalo steak swimming in red juice.

He tucked a cloth napkin into his shirt collar. “We got a neighbor raises buffalo. Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve gotten to where I like it over beef.”

It was so quiet, she could hear the candle burning. The wind belled at the window screens. “Smells great.” She put a small piece in her mouth. Chewed. Glanced up. She couldn’t stop being startled by the blue eyes.

He slurped carelessly at the wine.

She said, “That’s a ’98 Malconsorts.” What she didn’t mention? Hundred and twenty fucking dollars.

“French?”

“Burgundy. It’s not a La Tache, but it’s not bad, right?” She swirled her glass. “See how it opens up?”

He wiped his mouth, pretended interest in the label. “Bottle looks fancy enough.”

“Uh huh.” So that didn’t go well.

The scrape of cutlery on dishes, the tick of a grandfather clock. “What’s the story with that funny little town you’ve got there?”

“Funny?”

“I mean, does everybody just wake up in the morning all excited for another day in Jordan, Montana?”

“There’s good people in that town.”

“Yeah, and I’m not . . . it’s just. What do people do?”

“Same as whatever anybody does.”

“See, now. No. Now you’re offended.”

He found his snoose can. “People are just people. That’s my opinion. Good ones, bad ones. Scrape out a living here instead of there. Every decision has a price tag. Don’t assume people are less than you just because they made decisions you wouldn’t have made.”

“That’s the most you’ve talked all day. I think I punched a button.”

He stood up with his plate. “Ice cream?”

His living room was narrow as a rail car. A floral-patterned couch and tarnished-brass floor lamps and family photos framed in stamped leather. Such an odd little house. They went from wine to whiskey, from the kitchen to his couch, a cushion’s worth of space between them. He played LPs on an ancient turntable. Dave Brubeck, Coltrane, Lefty Frizzell. He held the vinyl reverently with fingertips. She said, “New York’s got all these vintage record shops showing up. It’s kind of a thing. You get me a list, I’ll go shopping.” Not quite drunk, she felt a tension between them. A guitar string of eventual sex vibrating in a rising note. If they were sleeping with each sooner or later, why not sooner? She stood, touching the arm of the couch to steady herself. “I should get to bed.” Her fingertips went to his shoulder, the back of his neck.

His hand briefly covered hers. And if he’d kept it there . . .? But he took it away. “Good night, Chloe.”

She’d brought her own coffee beans (a favorite roaster in Brooklyn), and the next morning she sat with a mug on his back porch, eyes closed against the sun. Fifty yards off, blackbirds flitted through the reeds of a stock pond. A killdeer tiptoed around the fringe. Singer’s dogs dozed beside her. He’d said, “Dante’s the big one, but Beckett’s the one you got to watch out for. Just give him a kick if he gets too close.” They were cow dogs, inclined to bite, but she found them charming. She missed dogs. Her fingers found Beckett’s head, his ears.

If she lived here, she would take up painting. She would bake, she would read Dostoyevsky. She would plant a garden, shoot a gun. Two thousand miles to the east, New York was waking up to its daily allotments of acquisition and betrayal, reconciliation and violence. The intricate, intestinal movement of eight million people over bridges, through tunnels.

Deep within the house, the phone rang. She jumped slightly. The dogs raised their heads. She clearly heard Singer say hello, pleasantly greet someone named Grady. He paused. And when he spoke again, his voice occupied a lower register, somewhere down next to reluctance. “Well, sure. You think you need to do that, I’m around. You can come on down. I’ll . . . eh? He’s down in Miles . . . Okay, well. Let me know.”

Her coffee turned tepid. The sun touched her shins. Singer emerged in yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt.

“Just think,” she said, “twenty-four hours ago I was calling a car for JFK.”

“The thing about jet travel. It takes our souls a few days to catch up.”

She liked him least of all like this—when he was aware of himself as a poet, when he played to the crowd. She gestured with her mug back toward the house. “Company?”

“Grady Fisk,” he said. Discomfited, he pulled out his snoose can. “Guess you’d call him county sheriff. He’s the coroner, too. Just a kid, basically. I knew him back when.” He shrugged, maneuvering tobacco around in his lip. “Anyway.”

“Sheriff?”

He looked at the pond. “It’s bow season. You know that, right? Early September?”

“I think so?”

“Bow season for elk. Well, we had a couple hunters trespassing down on the south side a while back. Turns out, they found a body. This old guy just eroding straight out of the hillside. Damnedest thing.”

He was so dismissive, so . . . flippant. It took her a moment. “I’m sorry . . . A body?”

“Back in seventy-nine, one of our neighbors went missing. Everybody figured he just kind of skipped out on alimony. Pete was such a massive sonofabitch, would have been typical. But now they’re saying this is likely him. Dental records and whatnot.” He watched her try to do the math. “I was twelve.”

“Huh.”

“They got a chunk of my ground all roped off with that police tape.”

“So do they know who killed him?”

“This guy, Pete. Biggest liar in the world. My old stepdad used to say Pete would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. Guy was despised pretty much up and down the county. Could have been about anybody.”

“So they don’t know who killed him?”

“I don’t guess.”

“Is that what the sheriff wants to talk about?”

“What I’d want to talk about if I was him.”

She flashed back to the grocery store, to the old couple’s shunning of Singer. “People think you might have had something to do with it?”

He tongued at his chew, glanced away. “We moved here when I was twelve. You knew that, right?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“I’ve lived here most of my life, but I’m still from Billings.”

“I don’t . . .”

“I’m not from here. That’s the crux of it. Pete Fahler—sonofabitch that he was—he was a homegrown kind of sonofabitch. They’ll want to think I had something to do with it. Even if I didn’t.”

“So did you?”

He’d drifted away. “Eh? What now?”

“Have something to do with it?”

“Of course not. Hell no.”

Sipping a perfectly civilized cup of coffee, she indulged in a moment of romantic decoupling, a little self-conscious reverie. Chloe on the frontier. Her best friend in New York, Helen, recently divorced, had lately taken to browsing through her men like shirts spinning on a rack. “A little advice, Chloe? Keep the numbers on your phone. You need to know whose call you’re dodging.” They were precise opposites. Chloe knew her pantsuits and had earned her promotions. Helen was a squash player and aesthete of bottled waters. Her money was old. She knew how to cross her legs on a barstool. In high school, Helen had trailed fistfights and flowers; an English teacher had been fired for making advances. She had a carelessness common to beautiful women. She expected to be indulged. “So you think I’m crazy?” Chloe had asked her. “Going off to Montana like this?”

“Absolutely.” Helen had Singer’s chapbook, and was flipping back and forth between the poems and the author photo. They sat in City Hall Park, by the fountain. “But sweetie, for this man?” She held up the book. “If you don’t get on that plane, I will.”

“I know, right? But what is it.”

“Me, I like complicated men. Remember Ronnie? Good lord god, no, don’t remind me. Anyway, whoever wrote this? I wouldn’t want to pay his therapy bills, but he’s got more going on than fantasy football.”

A few days from now they were due to have drinks at a favorite Scotch bar in the East Village. Concrete floors and a chalkboard drink menu. It would be a chance for Helen to slum it with Village Voice freelancers. Chloe had hoped to walk into that bar with the slight swagger that comes from having been pursued and caught. But maybe this was better. A body! Chloe, here in the midst of her own little spaghetti western. Let’s hum a lonesome tune. “Quite the vacation you’re giving me here, Mr. Singer.”

He touched her hand. Those blue eyes. Were they piercing? Why not. “We can get the horses out later, if you want. Go for a ride.”

At the beginning of Singer’s second book of poems, he had a line: “I want to write about how the knife can turn in your hand.” In three volumes, he’d written 192 poems, 2,145 lines. His first chapbook, An Ax to Earth (published on cheap newsprint under a truly dogshit cover: wheat stems and a cowboy hat) contained poetry good enough to sporadically astonish. The title poem, a reconsideration of cultural culpability and inherited sin, took the square peg of Günter Grass and pounded him into a western hole.

Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickock, Custer,

idolized by toddlers with plastic pistols

disparaged by mothers, but me and you, all

of us, we’re still rooted in soil fed under their

festering wounds.

She supposed, but wasn’t entirely sure, that he was arguing that children can be morally culpable for the sins of their fathers.

In preparing for their ride, she found him out in the round corral, cleaning hooves. His head was bare, and as he bent over, she could see sun damage through the start of a bald spot. He worked with the confidence of familiarity.

She mentioned the poem by name, said, “That one kicked me in the balls, I got to be honest. How do you even start with a poem like that? Did you know, for instance, that you were writing a great poem?”

“If it weren’t for that book, you wouldn’t be here.”

“How so?”

“I self-published that one.” He straightened, grimacing and touching his lower back, moved over to the next hoof. “Got hold of this little outfit out of Portland. Found them in Poets and Writers. Anyway, guy there knew Jim Harrison, and sent him a copy. Jim, he liked a few of the poems, sent the book to Sam Hamill at Copper Canyon. Sam, he liked a couple of them. Especially that one you just mentioned. Volunteered to publish the next one, which ended up being Heartwood. Which is how Leslie found me, which is how you and me got introduced.” He spat. “Big accident, really. Me being a poet.”

“Lucky me.”

He touched his forehead with the back of his work glove. Half grinned. “Hope so.”