The Deluge, page 11
“This all looks very glamorous, I know, but we spend most of the day cleaning up Ray’s cigarette butts.”
“Does he help you pick up every woman who rents a canoe?”
“Yeah, Ray’s a model wingman. Have a good time?”
“Very. The view of the Tetons is better up here. I’m used to Jackson, but here you get a better look at the Skillet on Mount Moran.”
I was embarrassed to have already forgotten which peak Moran was.
“Do you live up here?” she asked.
I explained I had a one-bedroom in Jackson.
“Wow. You’re not Harrison Ford’s kid, are you?”
I felt a flare of embarrassment at the reference to Jackson’s most famous ranch owner. Graduation gifts from grandparents, parents, and family friends had accumulated into a healthy nest egg. Funding a one-bedroom hadn’t been a problem or something I’d even thought twice about.
Before I could retort, her eyes moved behind me, and she nodded. I glanced back and saw Buzzcut exiting the marina office, surely glaring at me behind the sunglasses.
“Nice meeting you.” She offered her hand and when I shook it, I could feel all the calluses. I felt a disappointment not commensurate with the moment.
“You too.”
“This is the part where you say your name.”
“Right. I’m Matt.”
“Kate,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Matt.” Our hands parted and she walked away, turning one last time. “You should come by the Cowboy sometime on a Saturday. I bartend.”
* * *
“You can’t go this Saturday,” Damien told me. “She’ll think you’re a fucking psycho.”
We sat on the life jacket bin watching the sun set behind the Teton Range. It spilled through the gaps in the mountains and appeared through my sunglasses in stark spikes of yellow. We’d gone to the woods after our dinner break for a bowl. Even after a month on the job, this was still breathtaking.
“I know, but I feel like I’m going to do it anyway. Which one’s Mount Moran again?”
“This one with the glacier shaped like an electric guitar.” He chucked his hand to the west. Damien never pointed at anything, just whipped fingertips in a direction like he was releasing a Frisbee. “As your friend for the summer, I can’t condone a Ted Bundy–style move like that. She has a girlfriend. She sees you as tip fodder. You’ll get a buzz on, she’ll flirt, pretty soon you’ll be tipping like it’s a strip club.”
“Shit, why’d you just tell me that? That could be exactly what she’s up to.”
Damien shrugged but his face remained stoner placid.
“Bad weed makes you paranoid, good weed makes you understand why you should be paranoid.”
The sun finally receded behind the mountains, leaving only a red glow that trailed purple to the heights of the sky where the first stars broke through. You could see every stage of twilight, like sediment layers in an exposed cliff face.
Damien finally said, “Wow, man. That’s something else.”
* * *
Of course I went to the Cowboy that Saturday.
The full name was actually the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, and inside it was everything that name implies. I passed under the sign, lit with hundreds of red, white, and yellow bulbs and a bucking rodeo cowboy above. Inside, paintings of the Tetons covered the walls, a stuffed grizzly roared from behind a glass case, and dozens of patrons competed for angles at the pool tables alongside murals of cowboys having firefights with bears and Indians. The bar itself was even busier, and there was Kate holding court while she abused a tumbler.
I found a saddle—in place of barstools, naturally—stuffed my thighs on either side in a dumb-looking straddle, and waited for her to notice me. Her bartending look was scrubbed, polished, and pinched, her bun now glossy and scalp-tight, her skirt and top serious tip fodder.
“Good. You can pretend like you’re my date.” She slammed a tumbler into the ice bin in front of me, scooping up a chunk. “This dude’s been nagging me all night like I’m carrying his baby.” Her head ticked to the other end of the bar where a muscle-bound guy in a tight white T-shirt and cowboy hat held a whiskey and stared blankly at the murals.
Before I could say anything, she thunked a Budweiser in front of me and was off, snatching the caps off bottles, collecting cash, doling out coasters with flips of her wrists.
Back a moment later, she asked, “How’s that treating you?”
“Really, a Bud?”
“Are you crying about a free beer, Tar Heel? It’s expired. We gotta get rid of it.”
The night went like that, with her dipping in and out of conversation.
“Just a warning: This guy does not like you.” She bobbed her head quickly at Cowboy Hat.
“Are you getting me in a bar fight?”
“Only cowards throw punches.” Then she spun away to douse four shot glasses in Jameson.
Over the next three hours while I nursed free beers, I learned about her in this piecemeal way. She breezed by to ask, “So where in North Carolina?” “Why Jackson?” “What have you hiked so far?” In turn, I got all those crucial biographical details. From Phoenix originally but moved with her mom to Portland at age thirteen when her parents divorced. She’d studied philosophy at Oregon and graduated two years ago. Her dad used to bring her to Jackson in the summers. She came to the mountains right out of college to ski, hike, climb, raft, and “do activist shit” and now worked for a group called the Bison Project.
“What’s that?”
She gave me an astonished look. “It’s a buffalo, dude.”
“No,” I laughed. “What’s the Bison Project?”
“The cattle ranchers have a lot of political pull in these parts, and they claim the bison have brucellosis and that if they don’t slaughter them by the thousands, it’ll spread to the cattle. But that’s bullshit—the truth is it’s about grazing rights. The bison graze on land the ranchers want. So a bunch of dumb, beautiful, amazing creatures get their throats cut. It’s a real playback of what the US Army did when they were getting their asses handed to them by the tribes back in the day and they had to eradicate the enemy’s food supply to make way for settler capitalism. Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.”
She blew by like she now had to deliver that same monologue to the other end of the bar.
An hour later, the lights brightened for last call. Cowboy Hat waved goodbye to her and departed.
“If you wanna stick around while I close, I’ll walk you home after,” she said.
Later, we stepped into a pleasantly cool Jackson Hole night, lit by the garish glow of the Cowboy Bar. Walking beside her, I could almost feel her internal heat radiating to the back of my hand.
“So the cowboy hat guy?”
“That’s Trent. I keep telling him I don’t date cowboys, especially Trump-voting ones, but he hasn’t gotten the picture.”
She led me south down Cache Street. We passed a neon-lit motel where a group of drunk cowboys and cowgirls stood outside smoking cigarettes and guffawing. One of them whooped as we went by.
“But he knows you’re taken?”
“Huh?” She curled a lip in semi-mock horror. “Taken?”
“You have a girlfriend.”
“What?”
“The woman at the lake.”
“Lucy?” She pshawed. “Please. Queer New Agey ski bums make for the worst dating material. We’re just friends. I mean, yeah, we fuck, but dating would mean I’d have to listen to her theories on my astrological chart or get my tarot cards read or whatever. Honestly, I’d rather go back to fucking Trent.”
I navigated some steep and rough emotional switchbacks during this explanation.
“You’re an interesting chick,” I said.
“Am I? An interesting chick? Okay. Well, on paper, you sound really dull, but I’m optimistic.”
I laughed and got self-conscious. “Does that mean we can hang out again? Maybe when you’re not running around on your job?”
“Depends on what ‘hang out’ means.”
She pulled the hair tie from her bun and slipped out a couple of bobby pins. The blond mess spilled across her shoulders, and she corralled it back.
“How about dinner? I’ve been meaning to try that Thai place everyone raves about.”
“Ugh, dinner?” she moaned. “You are going to be a total cornball, aren’t you?”
Before I could fire back, she stopped, grabbed my face, and brought her lips to mine. I wasn’t prepared, and her open mouth locked over my closed one. Then I got with the program, and her tongue corkscrewed through the tunnel of our lips.
She pulled away and said, “Phone.” Numbly, I handed it over.
She punched her number in and slapped it back in my palm. “This is me,” she said, nodding her head toward a house of separate units behind a white picket fence.
She was up the stairs before I could think of anything to say.
* * *
Though I arrived at Teton Thai fifteen minutes early, Kate was already sitting outside under an umbrella reading a book. Wearing an airy white dress and her hair down for the first time, she looked altered, like the bartender and day at the marina had been different women, which is to say each incarnation felt like a fresh season—beautiful in its own way. She spent dinner kicking off a sandal and picking it up again with her foot.
We ordered drinks, and I asked her what she was reading.
“Rereading. Some Hannah Arendt.”
“What’s that?”
“Philosophy, I guess you could say. Suddenly she seems pretty motherfucking apropos.”
The title was Men in Dark Times. It would not be the last instance of feeling out of my depth around her. On the walk over I’d cycled through every interesting thing I’d ever thought or done. I had “studied in Paris for a summer,” “volunteered five weekends for Habitat for Humanity in high school,” and “the collected works of Jack Kerouac” in my back pocket.
“So philosophy? That’s your bag.”
“I don’t know about my bag. I was kind of one of those people just taking classes that sounded interesting, and a few of them happened to be in philosophy. It’s like I majored in a hobby. Toward the end, when you’ve had four years of ‘What is reality?’ ‘There is no reality!’ ‘Everyone just creates their own reality and nothing means anything!’—that bullshit—it got old and I kind of wished I’d done something else.”
“Like what?”
“Environmental science, probably. If I’d just gone full granola from the start.” The waiter approached. “Speaking of which, I’m also one of these militant vegans that basically can’t stand to sit across from people eating meat. I’m not saying you can’t get meat, but it’s going to make me want to stab you.”
I handed the menu to the waiter. “Vegetarian pad thai for me.”
She laughed and ordered the pad gar pow with tofu.
We went on to talk about her Left Coast upbringing: the daughter of teachers and activists trying to gut it out during the Clinton years. After her parents’ divorce, her father moved back to teach on the Navajo reservation where he’d grown up with his new wife. Kate rarely saw him more than once a year. Her mother was originally from Sweden and now worked for an Oregon nonprofit protecting the Columbia River and other waterways. Her folks had met doing antinuclear activism, and she’d grown up surrounded by heated discussions about intersectionality and the rights of nature. She also had a Jamaican grandfather, who’d been a prominent civil rights attorney. She joked that she would have rebelled by going to work for the Republican National Committee, but she doubted they served a whole lot of vegan fare.
“I’m sorry—I’m not a full-fledged PETA psycho, I swear.” She laughed with her mouth wide open so I could see the back of her throat. “Let me say, I kill flies all the time. I’m a genocidal maniac when it comes to killing flies. We can pull their wings off if you want. Wow, what a weirdo. Okay, what’s your deal, Matthew?”
I elided my family’s story, which was that my father designed and built golf courses all over the South and Mid-Atlantic. Instead, I talked about majoring in English. To my dad, who was a booster of UNC’s business school, this had been borderline mad. “I explained it to him as a stepping-stone to law school or an MBA, but I ended up falling in love with writing. That’s kind of why I came out here.” This sounded notably lame even as I said it. “To find something to write about.”
“Found anything yet?” A breeze pushed over the patio. After spending a hot day on the docks, the temperature had melted to that perfect point of equilibrium it can hit in the summer dusk.
“Tourists can be really fucking stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to drive motorboats.”
Her eyes widened, mock impressed. “National Book Award, here you come.”
A sheepish sound burped out of me. “No, I don’t know. I just started realizing that I’ve never lived outside North Carolina. I’ve never really been anywhere other than on study abroad, and this seems like the time to do it. Broke it off with my college girlfriend, packed my bags… Maybe I’ll stay out here for a few years.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It gets old faster than you think. It attracts a lot of people with simplistic narratives and epistemologies who are nevertheless very impressed with themselves. Remember Lucy?”
How could I forget.
“She’s the textbook example. These folks work seasonal jobs and then spend all their time skiing and climbing—which is cool, don’t get me wrong. Part of why I came out here was to bag peaks and break my arm on a slope. But they’re the surf bums of the mountains. Not engaged with the world, just passengers who figure as long as the train’s running, what’s the point of paying attention to how it operates? Enjoy the scenery. It’s an attitude…” She paused and put her fingers to her temples. “It makes me insane. Lucy and I had it out about that while she was yapping bullshit about chakras. They ski down these beautiful slopes and don’t care about why the snowpack is vanishing beneath them.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so I said, “Interesting.” And picked at a cuticle.
She bugged out her eyes again—what I’d come to know as a very Kate expression. “And the men—ugh!—they have a real fucking holier than thou attitude about it.” She lowered her voice. “ ‘Bro, I could never be one of those robots working in a cubicle all day. I gotta live for my maker!’ ” She smirked. “Jesus. Okay, I’m done with self-righteous monologues. Don’t let me sit here and yak at you, Tar Heel. Give me more of your deal. How ’bout that ex?”
The waiter came with our meals, sliding gleaming white plates piled high with photogenic Thai food beneath our conversation. I sped through my ex, Candace, and our amicable breakup that took her to Atlanta to work in finance. She pressed me for more: My older sister now working in Charlotte, my mother’s role in running charity golf tournaments, and then out came the family business. I could feel myself sounding so dull. I searched to change this narrative I could feel developing.
“I saw all my friends getting ready to keep doing the same things we’d been doing in Chapel Hill, and with Candace going to Atlanta, I saw what that path looked like and just wanted to try anything else. See where it goes with no expectations. And hey, I’m friends with a Macedonian guy, so I’m already feeling more worldly.”
I stared at the peaks of the Tetons, afraid to meet her bored gaze.
“Does all that sound so stupid?”
“No.” And when I looked, she was not bored. Her smile reached to her eyes. “You’re cute, kid.”
* * *
After that night, she really got into my head in that way a new person does, making you feel buoyant. After dinner we’d spent hours in a bar drinking cheap beer and pumping quarters into the jukebox until Kate said she had to go home, citing an early drive to Yellowstone the next morning for work.
“Was this like a onetime polite dinner thing or can I ask you out again?”
“I don’t go on dates,” she said, picking up her pint glass with a heartachingly small amount of beer left at the bottom. “And I don’t do boyfriends. The last time I had a boyfriend was in middle school.”
“What I’m asking is can we hang out again?”
“Sure. But we’re doing something fun next time.” She threw back the last of her beer, slammed the glass down, and straight up shouted in my face, “None of this bitch stuff!” before erupting into her husky giggles.
She suggested the Paintbrush Canyon-Cascade Canyon Loop, her favorite hike in the Tetons. It was just under twenty miles. She’d reserved a campsite on the Paintbrush and we’d finish on the back side of the Teton Range in Cascade Canyon. I wanted to leap right out of my skin and wave it around my head like a victory towel.
What I did not anticipate when we began the Paintbrush Trail, hiking up steep switchbacks, the path like a tunnel through the towering pines, was how goddamn exhausting this “date” would be. We set out at 9:30 a.m., Kate in the lead. Twenty minutes after that I’d broken my first sweat. An hour later, I’d stripped out of my flannel shirt and soaked through my T-shirt. I’d volunteered to take the first shift carrying the tent. Kate had warned me that it was heavy and that we should probably switch off every couple hours, but I’d planned to forge ahead the whole day with the yellow bundle strapped to the bottom of my pack. Two hours in, my shoulders and back were throbbing, and I was checking my phone to determine an appropriate time to let her take it. I’d caddied every summer for ten years. I’d thought I was in fine shape.
She finally suggested we break. I unstrapped my backpack and let it clatter to the dirt with relief.
“How you doing?” she asked, pulling an apple and a Clif Bar from her pack.
“You can leave me here for the wolves,” I gasped, then took a long pull from my water bottle.
“We’re doing about a four-thousand-foot gain. If this is your first hike since you got here, it’s probably not the best place to start. Just don’t collapse. I can’t carry you and the tent.”
