Watershed, page 9
I had met Karen three years earlier, but it was not until one year earlier that I first went out with her. She was working at a photo lab that was trying to become an advertising agency, which no doubt was the reason they had done such a poor job developing the aerial photos I had left with them and was why I was in the office complaining.
“These are for work,” I said to the pony-tailed man. “These are not art shots. I have to be able to read these.”
“I don’t see what the problem is,” he said.
I took another photo from my case. “Look, this is a good print. See here. That’s a creek. Now, look at this piece of shit.” I put his work in front of him. “Somewhere in this mess is a river. Would you show it to me?”
“I can’t change the negative,” he said.
“They’re from the same fucking negative,” I snapped. “I just had this one done down the street at the one-hour place.”
“What’s your point?” he asked.
“I’d like my money back.”
He started to say something, but was cut off by a woman who was standing in the doorway behind him. “Give him his money,” she said, calmly.
“But Karen, you know what Rod said,” the man with the pony tail whined.
“Give it to him.”
The man gave me my money and I thanked the woman who turned out to be Karen, someone I’d met two years before, who turned out to be a good friend of the wife of one of my fishing buddies, and who turned out to be free for dinner. The dinner went well enough, full of pleasant chatter and like-minded political mindlessness, and I dropped her off thinking that she was nice enough and that I wouldn’t object to seeing her again. The next day the wife of my fishing buddy, who had learned from Karen of our date, called me and warned me off. Ellen said, “I’ve always liked you, Robert, so I’m telling you this straight out. Karen is totally crazy.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“She’s crazy. She’s obsessive, neurotic, psychotic. You name it. Do yourself a favor and stay away from her. I’m not joking, Robert. I’m not exaggerating.”
“You’re her friend.”
“I’m her only friend.”
“She seemed fine to me,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s how she seems. I’ve watched her for years. Just trust me on this.”
“It doesn’t sound fair to call somebody crazy. Maybe she’s just intense, different.” I knew how stupid it sounded when I was saying it, but having said it, I decided to stand by it.
“Call it what you want. But don’t come back later saying I didn’t warn you.”
I hung up, with a weird resolve to decide for myself who was crazy and who wasn’t. The more I thought about Ellen calling Karen crazy, the more I wanted, perhaps irrationally, to defend her. And I didn’t even know her. That was really crazy. And so the crazy man took out the allegedly crazy woman two more times; the third time ended up in my bed. We fucked the many times standard for first-time fucking and talked the usual way about how well we got along.
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” she asked, looking up from nuzzling my penis with her nose.
“No plans,” I said.
“How about driving down to Santa Fe with me to visit with my parents?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I felt rushed.
She pretended to bite my penis. “Say, yes,” she giggled. “Say, yes. Say, yes.”
I said, “Yes.”
Qs⋍bλS/d,p where Qs is the bed matter load moved through channels with equivalent water discharge, b is width, λ is wavelength, S is slope, d is sediment size, and p is sinuosity.
I left my apartment after some brief and unsatisfactory rest and went to visit my friends Hal and Ellen. I was hoping to forget about the business on the mountain and get a free meal.
Ellen and Hal always ate soup for dinner. I sat at their table staring at my bowl and trying not to fall asleep. I looked up to find the two of them studying me closely. Although Ellen was close to and no doubt in touch with Karen, I had hoped she would have the good judgment or at least the decency to not to bring up her name.
“I talked to Karen,” Ellen said. “So, we needn’t discuss any of that. Suffice it to say, I told you so.”
I nodded, appropriately cowed.
“We heard about the FBI men up there,” Hal said. “Pretty nasty business.”
“It happened on my side of the lake.”
“You’re kidding?” Hal said.
I shook my head and slurped down a spoonful of soup. It was some kind of cold soup that went down thickly, catching in my throat, and was more unsatisfying with each spoonful. “I had to talk to all sorts of cops and FBI people.”
“Ah, so we heard,” Ellen said and it sounded loaded the way she said it.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“Karen told me she caught you in bed with some inspector from the FBI,” Ellen said, wiping her mouth.
“Karen is a nut.”
Ellen and Hal nodded.
“She’s not going to let go yet,” Ellen said.
Hal caught my eyes and said, “So, how is the fishing up there?” He salted his soup for a third time.
“Not bad. The water’s pretty good.”
Ellen cleared her throat. “You never should have slept with her in the first place.”
“You’re absolutely right, Ellen,” I said.
“And you certainly shouldn’t have gone with her to visit her parents.” She slurped down a spoonful of soup. “That was the kiss of death. To meet her parents. Hell, I’ve never met her parents.”
“Did you sleep with the FBI woman?” Hal asked.
“No.”
“What was she doing in your shower?”
“Getting clean, I suppose. Or counting her bullets. I don’t know. I don’t care. Listen, she was some kind of kook who got drunk and passed out and I didn’t know what to do with her.” It sounded really bad as I said it. “Anyway, nothing happened.”
“Man,” Hal muttered.
“You shouldn’t have slept with her,” Ellen said again.
The next morning, after a rough night—the soup had affected me badly—I called the big post office, the one out by the airport, the one where people went deaf from the machines and the employees had to walk through metal detectors ever since a disgruntled class-D zipcode sort assistant step II went berserk with an AK converted to full automatic. “Used to be a nice place to work,” a twenty-year postal worker shouted at the television camera responding to the question “Did you see it happen?” After twenty minutes the hesitant and cautious voice of Florence St. John was on the other end.
“Ms. St. John?”
“Yes?”
“My name is Robert Hawks and I’m a friend of your cousin, Louise Yellow Calf.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’m trying to find Louise,” I said.
“There’s no Louise here,” she said and hung up, sharply.
So I drove out to the large post-office building. It wasn’t the post office, I discovered, but some kind of regional office or distribution center and so there really wasn’t a place for customers, but I found a small section set aside for visitors to park their cars. Then I entered through one door and then another until I was standing at a window talking to a fat man.
“I’m looking for a woman who works here by the name of Florence St. John,” I said.
“What section does she work in?” he asked. He was laboring over a big ham-and-cheese sandwich with mayonnaise oozing from its edges.
“I don’t know. I called earlier and whomever I was talking to was able to find her.”
“And you’re implying that I ain’t able to find her, is that it?” the fat man said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have said it.”
“Florence St. John,” I repeated the name.
“I can find anybody in this fucking place,” he said, wiping mayonnaise from his mouth with a paper napkin and looking at it before he put it down beside his sandwich. “I know my damn business,” he groaned as he grabbed a clipboard from under his phone. “Nobody in this damn place can find people the way I can find people. And it sure as hell ain’t that bastard Johnson. He don’t know shit, telling me I ain’t got no merit increase coming. What was that name?”
“Florence St. John.”
“Damn right. Nobody can’t find a sum-bitch in this fucking place the way I can.” He picked up the phone. “Leroy, you got a Frances St. John working over there? No? Well, fuck you, too.” He hung up. “Fucking bastard.” He studied the clipboard and picked up the phone again. “You got a Frances St. John over there.”
“Florence,” I said softly, but he didn’t hear me.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Florence, yeah, that’s the one. What’s your section number? Q-9? Thanks.” He hung up and looked at me. “Q-9.”
“Where’s that?”
“How the fuck should I know?” He buzzed the door unlocked and nodded for me to use it. “Just ask back there. You’ll find it.” As I passed through the door into the corridor I could still hear him. “Fucking bastards, every one of them.”
I followed the corridor to a door that led outside, followed a sidewalk to another building, and entered. I stopped a smiling man and asked if he could tell me where Q-9 was.
“Building Q is two buildings over, through this building and out and it’s the next one.”
“Thanks.”
I found building Q, and when I opened the door I was struck with an enormous and frightening wall of noise—roaring low groans, staccato chirps, and a constant high-pitched whining. The outside door opened into a huge open warehouse, filled with machines and exposed girders, hanging wires, people driving carts, people driving forklifts, and everyone wearing ear protection, huge yellow muffs with eagles painted on the sides. I walked to a man near me who was standing by a rapidly moving conveyer watching letters and packages go by.
“Excuse me!” I shouted, but he didn’t hear me. I tapped his shoulder and he turned to face me. His eyes were red and tired looking. “Excuse me,” I said.
“What!?”
“Excuse me!” I looked behind him and saw all that mail zipping by on the black pad of the conveyer while he wasn’t watching. He didn’t switch the machine off. He didn’t glance back. “I’m trying to find somebody!”
“What!?”
“Florence St. John! Flo-rence Saint-John!” The passing mail made me feel nervous, anxious, agitated.
“Florence?!” he asked.
I nodded.
He pointed with his thumb to the near corner where a tall woman was sitting on a high stool tossing mail into several bins. She was finishing a handful of letters as I approached, and although I didn’t think she saw me, she got up and headed for the exit door behind her. I trotted and caught the door before it could swing completely shut. I walked behind her, glad to be out of the din of the big room. Her ear protectors were around her neck like a choker. The women’s rest room was another several steps away from her.
“Florence,” I said.
She turned around and looked at me suspiciously, her brown eyes narrow, her arms tense, her hands forming into fists at her sides, not combatively but in a manner of withdrawal.
“I’m Robert Hawks. I’m a friend of Louise.”
Florence St. John looked up past me to the door and then behind herself down the corridor.
“I called earlier. Mary Brown wants me to contact Louise.” I looked at her eyes, tried to hold them, tried to have her trust me. “Mary Brown told me she was here in Denver with you.”
“She told you wrong. I haven’t seen Louise in a long time. Last I heard she was in Seattle.”
“Mary Brown wants her to call home,” I said.
She looked at me as if I were an enemy. “I don’t know where Louise is, but if she calls me I’ll give her the message.”
I nodded.
She turned and entered the rest room.
“I really am a friend of hers,” I said as the door closed.
7
Article 15. A primary object of this instrument being to advance the interests and welfare of the Plata people, it is agreed that, if it prove insufficient to effect these ends from causes that cannot be foreseen, Congress may hereafter make such further provision, by law, not inconsistent herewith, as experience may prove to be necessary to promote the interests, peace, and happiness of the Plata people.
The rain was letting up as I stared ahead through the windshield of my grandfather’s Buick. The water came in frequent enough drops that he left on the wipers but they were infrequent enough that they made an awful noise against the glass. I didn’t know where we were going. My grandfather’d picked me up from school, the way he always did on Tuesdays: my father never allowed me to take the bus and certainly never to walk, ever since he had received threatening calls from rednecks expressing concern about my safety. I found out about the calls some years later; at the time I was simply confused and a bit put out by what I considered irrational, overprotective behavior.
“Where are we going?” I asked my grandfather.
“I’ve got to make a house call.”
I nodded. I was used to it.
We drove over to Reynolds Road, a section of town that was talked about as being bad. The houses were smaller and there seemed to be more clotheslines, but that was all the difference I could make out. We parked in front of a one-story house with a screened porch, and my grandfather said, “You’d better come in with me.”
I followed him to the door and it opened. We were let in by a woman with a large Afro who, after we had passed, remained by the door, peeking out through the curtains. The house smelled like our attic, stale and dusty, and I smelled a stale beer that was sitting half drunk in a glass on the counter next to me. I followed my grandfather into the next room where a man and two women were attending to a man who was covered with blood. There was blood on the floor and blood all over the cushions of the chair on which the injured man sat. The man’s chest was bare and I could see that the hands helping him were trying to stop the flow of blood from the hole just above his right nipple. The wounded man was fairly conscious, muttering and groaning.
“Get him up here on this table,” my grandfather said.
The two women, the man, and my grandfather lifted the bloody man and put him up there on his back. His left shoe fell off, and for some reason I picked it up and held it for him. It was a big black shoe like the ones bus drivers wore, with new leather laces. My grandfather leaned in and examined the wound, peeling through the layers of towels that had been applied. One of the women looked at me and offered a slight and nervous although friendly smile.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” my grandfather said.
“Fucking pigs,” the standing man said. “He wasn’t doing shit and them pigs shot him. All he was doing was delivering sandwiches to the shelter. Delivering sandwiches.”
“He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” the woman who had smiled at me asked.
“He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“We can’t take him to the hospital,” the man said. “They’ll come get him and they’ll kill him. You know it. They’ll take him to jail and let him bleed to death.”
My grandfather was so much older than these people. He was wearing his usual herringbone jacket and his striped tie and they were dressed in fatigues with bandanas tied around legs or heads.
“Bring me a big pot of boiling water and some clean towels or rags,” my grandfather said.
Blood was dripping off the table and onto the floor. I backed up and was standing near the window.
“Hey, come away from there, little brother,” the man said to me, indicating the window.
I liked the way he called me little brother, as if I weren’t little.
My grandfather worked over the man, digging into his wound and pulling out the bullet as the man’s body tightened in response to the pressure and pain of the extraction. Grandfather was bloody up to his elbows, and sighing frequently. Then, as he was closing the wound, the woman from the front room stepped in.
“Somebody’s at the door,” she said.
“Shit,” the uninjured man said.
He pulled a pistol from his trouser pocket and stood quietly. The woman who had smiled picked up a pump-action shotgun with a shortened barrel from behind a bookcase. My grandfather looked at me, breathing hard, his age showing on his face. He was listening. We were all listening. The knocking came again. Then once more. Then there was nothing.
The drive down to Santa Fe was long and uneventful and I was feeling, much as Ellen had warned me I’d feel with Karen, pursued. We stopped in a couple of places to eat and she told me some things about her parents. Her father, James Reskin, was a born-again endocrinologist, the son of Jewish parents and an avid hunter of upland game. Edith, her mother, was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who had fantasies about FDR—and she was still a Jew.
“That’s her last line in any argument with my father,” Karen said, drinking from the red plastic water glass at our lunch stop in Trinidad. “‘At least, I’m still a Jew,’ she says.” Karen smiled.
We arrived late that evening and I was surprised to find that we would be sharing a room and a bed. Certainly, I knew that they knew we slept together, but still . . . And after small talk, of course Karen wanted to make love. I could think only about her mother and father in the room next door, but she wouldn’t stop. She grabbed me and sucked me and so I made love to her with my hand cupped over her mouth, which served only to excite her more. She screamed into my hand and the bed banged against the wall. I imagined Dr. Reskin on his knees praying for all of us.
