Lava Falls Page 5

  Brian shouted again about the poker game and I wondered why he cared so much that I participate. I’d planned on going directly to bed. That yodeling had unhinged me. Like male sirens. I wanted to hear the music again, even if it broke my heart. Music can’t break your heart, though. It can only remind you of a heart already broken. Not by you. Don’t worry. I’m the one who said no. We haven’t even talked in twenty-five years. It’s only that I wanted to hear that shipboard music again, as if it could sear back together rifts long split open. Rifts that I sometimes imagine wouldn’t have ever opened if I had married you. As if there is such thing as a safe harbor. As if there is a risk-free choice, the way the TV and magazines try to tell us. As if marriage is a big padded suit one wears against the ravages of life. These words make it seem as if I’ve been thinking of you these twenty-five years, but I haven’t. Just once in a while.

  When I stepped inside the boathouse, I saw why Brian had been so insistent about inviting me. Only three others had the energy for cards. The geezers, Harvey and Phil, were there. I’m not being disrespectful, that’s what they call themselves. They’re only in their fifties or maybe early sixties—you probably can’t pass the medical much older than that—but most of the folks working here top off at around thirty-two. Except for the geezers and me.

  The last card player in the boathouse was Caitlin. Ah, Caitlin. This was her first season on the Ice and she wasn’t catching on to the culture very quickly. She’d been flirting with Brian all season, even though she knew, like everyone else knew, that he was devoted to a girlfriend back home in Washington State. Caitlin’s a beautiful girl, but something about her efforts with regard to Brian just aren’t pretty. In fact, I’d say she’s a burden on the community. She doesn’t understand about the Ice, how to carry on affairs here. It might look like high school, but it isn’t. Talk to anyone here and you’ll find they have a concrete dream, a life plan, and Antarctica is merely a part of it. Like Brian, closer to twenty than thirty, who is only having a lark before his real life begins. He isn’t in limbo. He isn’t free for the taking. This isn’t adult camp. We’re working. Most of us are trying, or had been trying, to get somewhere. Like Phil. This is his sixteenth season and he’s here for one reason: money. He often brags about the home he and his wife have bought, how they never could have done so without his Ice money, about the things they will do in their retirement.

  “You in?” Brian asked.

  “Sure.” I gave him a ten, and he counted me out a bank of red, blue, and white chips. No one complained that I’d come in the game late and was getting a full compliment of chips. I always play as long as my ten bucks lasts and then bail, have never presented a threat to more serious card players. Everyone relaxes when a woman reaches a certain age, and I find that very relaxing myself. You can do whatever you want. As long as you don’t ask anyone for anything, you’re set.

  The boathouse smells of diesel and the sea, not fecund like coastal smells stateside, but the sharp tang of sea ice, the ocean at its freshest. A pile of orange life jackets fills one corner. A loft over Brian’s desk is stacked high with survival duffels, each one containing sea rations, flares, matches in waterproof containers, a tent, a camp stove, everything anyone would need to survive if stranded on an Antarctic island. A bunch of spare motors for the Zodiacs hang from one wall, tipped as if they needed only priming and starting, and the whole boathouse would roar across the sea.

  Harvey and Phil drank steadily, and Caitlin kept pace. Brian didn’t drink at all. It occurs to me now that Brian is a lot like you were at his age. So cocksure of his life choices. It’s a wonder to observe. He always holds his head a little too high, but he doesn’t look arrogant, just darn pleased with his lot.

  I quickly lost most of my chips. I always stay in a hand too long.

  “Wife’s taking a knitting class,” Phil said.

  “Good for her,” I said.

  “Says it calms her.”

  “Wasn’t it gardening last season?” Harvey asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Good to keep busy.”

  The group was not one for engaging conversation. Still, for Harvey to talk at all was something. He’s one of the most silent men I’ve met. Brian is usually as chatty as you were, but Caitlin was making him nervous. His knee jiggled, bouncing on the spring of his foot and calf, in that way young men have. For all his apparent resolve and right living, he must have a dew point.

  “Ha!” Caitlin cried, tossing down three nines. “Mine.” She picked the chips from the center of the table one at a time and stacked them in her own cache. Then she threw an arm around Brian’s neck and kissed his cheek. “I’m a lucky girl tonight.”

  I saw him soften. A place right at the center of his chest actually caved a little. The bouncing knee stilled. The geezers watched too, eyes dulled like war veterans, as if they were staring only at a blank wall. Brian drew his sweatshirt across his lap.

  “Ha!” Caitlin repeated as Phil dealt. “Hit me again.”

  Then something in me caved, a tenderness toward the young woman. I know that pinball feeling of desire, the zinging crazy joy of flinging oneself. No one is immune. We all fling ourselves. Just in different directions.

  I might as well come clean. Harvey and I had a short, and I mean probably three encounters, affair some ten years ago. Okay, that’s out. It hardly means anything. It’s not even a memory, more like a hitch in my memory. But when I enter a social situation and he’s there, which isn’t that often because usually the geezers just watch videos in the lounge at night, I notice. That’s all.

  Harvey is no bigger on eye contact than he is on conversation. Being around him is easy, even comforting sometimes. In the boathouse last night I pretended that he was a sunny boulder that I could lean against. Just in my imagination.

  Harvey dealt me two pairs. Nothing much at all, just a couple of threes and sevens, but compared to my usual luck, it was something. My reasoning facility flooded with adrenaline. I refused to fold. After a few rounds of betting, the guys assumed I had a formidable hand and put down their cards. I stayed in, all revved up about my two pairs.

  Caitlin was the last to fold. She figured she had nothing to lose.

  Did I mention that Caitlin was a Stanford graduate? I think she thought that gave her an edge. Another cultural mistake. Artists and intellectuals are considered masturbators here. Traveling the highways of the mind is considered soft compared to the real labor of geographical and other physical knowledge.

  I pulled eighty-six dollars worth of blue, red, and white chips toward me, using my forearms to corral the booty, laughing, having a good time.

  “Look at that,” Phil said.

  Harvey clapped once, a gesture of generosity. The men were happy I’d won a big hand.

  “Your deal,” Harvey said. Something in him has given up. I wouldn’t say it’s sad to witness his surrender. I like his honesty. He watches videos. He plays cards. He repairs machinery. But I wouldn’t sleep with him now. I wouldn’t want to disturb the stillness that is Harvey.

  The excitement of my big win wore off quickly, even as I shuffled the cards. I’d expected my usual run of a dozen hands and then, broke, I’d go up to my tent and sleep. With all these chips, I’d be playing half the night. It was bad form to win a big pot and then leave the game.

  Luckily, I lost most of my chips in the next hour. The drinkers looked like they had settled into a long night of it, and Caitlin’s hand anchored Brian to his folding chair. Such intense attachments, I thought, so much desire.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Here.” I quickly divided my remaining chips among the other players, pushing a pile in each of four directions.

  “Don’t do that,” Brian said. “We don’t care if you take a break for a few rounds.”

  Caitlin’s hand lay on his forearm, her thumb sliding forward, back, like an accidental caress.

  “You’re coming back, right?” Brian asked when I stood up. As if I were his life raft. He gather
ed up the piles of chips I’d left for the other players and pushed them back to my spot at the table.

  I don’t know why, but I put a hand on Harvey’s shoulder. Just briefly. “Sure,” I said to Brian. “In a while.”

  It was still early enough in the season for the light to dim late at night, so that the sky was a pale orange. I picked my way out on the rocks to Gamage Point. She was still there, her animal self utterly, animally, plopped down on a patch of sand and stone.

  “Hi,” I said, sitting closer to her than the station biologists would have wanted me to. In fact, I could have scooted forward another foot and touched one of her eyelashes. Which reminds me: I wanted to tell you about her eyes. Such intelligence. That’s a surprise, even when you know better. But what reached right in and grabbed my heart was the sadness in her eyes, an intelligence of heartbreak. Huge black irises. Only a bit of the white showing, and in that white ran rivers of red, as if she’d been crying and crying. I tried closing my eyes in the way that cats say I love you. She slow-blinked back.

  Once, a neighbor of mine in Oregon, where I live in the off-season on my own piece of land with Douglas firs and a stream, had lost a cat. She hired an animal communicator to find the cat. I didn’t judge my neighbor for this. I don’t know if humans can communicate with animals. Obviously, we can make dogs sit and some people can make tigers jump through hoops. Chimps use American Sign Language. But the animal communicator, according to my neighbor, could carry on entire conversations with dogs, cats, birds, even lizards, about what they were feeling, what their surroundings looked like, what they wanted from the other creatures, usually humans, in their environment.

  This animal communicator needed only a picture of Snookums, the lost cat, and she was able to telepathically talk to him. Snookums described his whereabouts—he mentioned a pond and grazing cattle, a red barn, an unusual fence made of a combination of stone and wood. It was the fence, in the end, that helped my neighbor locate Snookums. Ponds and grazing cattle and red barns are quite common in the rural part of Oregon where I live, but this fence was not. My neighbor drove the back roads until she saw a fence that matched Snookums’s description. She found a pond and a red barn near this fence. She called and called for Snookums one day at dusk. Nothing. But she went back at dawn, and this time the cat came when he was called. The animal communicator spoke with him some more and learned that he’d chased a rabbit out of his own territory, and when a sudden storm came up he’d become disoriented. He couldn’t find his way back home. He’d been living on field mice all those weeks. Finding the pond had saved his life, for he knew he needed to drink. He was very, very relieved to be home with my neighbor. She doesn’t let him out of the house anymore. He spends his days on a cushion in the window, and my neighbor says he doesn’t even want to go out anymore. He’s had enough of the wild.

  I wonder now why I haven’t had enough of the wild. I wonder why I couldn’t have had the domesticated wild with you.

  “Love,” I told the seal, “is something that comes to me rarely.”

  She blinked.

  “Not at all in a long time.”

  Blink.

  I got carried away and told the elephant seal all about the unending wars beyond this continent, and then of the absence I feel when I think of love. Her fur looked bristly, but quite comfortable, and her face pushed out from the fat of her elliptical body as if it were just emerging. I can only say that she listened.

  When I finished telling her everything, she spoke of enough. For her, the rocky point was enough. Clearly, she’d had enough fish. Her posture, a softened blob, sighed comfort. Her solitariness suited her just fine.

  When I returned to the boathouse and my waiting booty of chips, Caitlin was laughing too hard, as if she’d lost at more than cards.

  “Deal me in,” I said.

  “Atta girl,” Phil said.

  The cards flashed from Harvey’s hands onto the table.

  “Give me another hand like the last one you dealt,” I told him.

  “Pair of threes,” he snorted.

  “We gotta watch Jo now,” Brian said. A hint of patronizing, younger man to older woman. “She never used to bluff.”

  “Old dog, new tricks,” I said.

  Caitlin’s face showed frustration. She didn’t like my easy banter with the guys, the way I made it obvious it didn’t matter to me one way or another if they found me attractive. She’s a smart girl and I think she sensed what I know about Brian. That he lacks something essential. He’s too sweet. No hide, no scars, no rivers of red in the whites of his eyes. He believes humans are separated from other animals by a divine line, that we have a higher capacity for morally correct behavior, for art, for reasoning.

  “I have a neighbor at home,” I said, fanning out my cards and having a look, “who hired an animal communicator.”

  “I believe in that,” Phil said.

  “Come on,” Caitlin chastised.

  “Her cat was three miles away and the animal communicator located him.”

  Busy with betting, no one said anything for a while. I had three aces. I turned in the other two other cards for two more, and got the fourth ace. “Ha!” I said, forgetting to bluff. “I’ll raise you five.”

  “What do you got this time? Pair of twos?”

  “I have four aces.”

  The men laughed. Caitlin tried laughing, too. I stared her down.

  The pot was driven up to a hundred and twenty-six dollars this time. I scooped the chips my way. Then said, “Anyone see that elephant seal on Gamage Point?”

  “Been there all day,” Harvey said.

  “I was communicating with her.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Phil said.

  I omitted a bit about Harvey when I mentioned our affair earlier. I left out that we did it again two seasons ago. I guess I was already changing by then. It wasn’t something wanton. It wasn’t some drunken mistake. It’s more that now, after these choices I’ve made and these years that have passed, I live closer to the planet. He and I found ourselves alone one day, quite by accident, in the aquarium, the cold, wet room where fish tanks hold anemones and krill and cod. I can’t say who started it, or how long it took. Short, quick. Even sweet. I doubt he thought of a repeat any more than I have. The animal chance of it.

  Suddenly I felt stifled by all of them—Brian and Caitlin, the geezers.

  “I’m done,” I said, again distributing my chips and ignoring Brian’s protests.

  I paused outside the boathouse and looked out to the edge of Gamage Point. She looked like a huge contented slug. I would leave my companion be for the night. I passed around the sides of the two buildings of Palmer Station and began climbing toward the glacier. When I’d reached the top of a slight rise, I turned. The geezers were just leaving the boathouse, making their way across the ice to the entrance of the building where they were housed. I waited a few moments for Caitlin to emerge, too, but she didn’t. I imagined Brian fumbling with words of sincerity about why he couldn’t.

  Then, in the transcendent peachy light that I’ve known only in Antarctica, I saw Harvey turn and make his way to Gamage Point. I could tell, by the two triangles at his sides, that he stood with his hands on his hips, his elbows cocked out. I could have walked back down the hill to join him. But I didn’t. I walked up the glacier to my tent. From there, I can see most of Arthur Harbor and the craggy wall of ice where the continent meets the sea.

  Inside my tent, I undressed quickly and slid into the two sleeping bags. I listened to the glacier calve, the explosive crack of the ice splitting. I could see in my mind’s eye the tilting block of ice and the slow motion collapse. Then the splash. Of course there were penguins too, squawking. Best of all were the wings of giant petrels thumping the air as they flew over me.

  So many nests, so much chance. The cormorants build cake-like thrones on rocky buttes overhanging the sea. The silly penguins and their nests of stone. And my elephant seal on her own rocky beach. I thought of Br
ian, too, who in spite of his sincere protests surely now flailed on a bed of orange life jackets, dead center in the heat of himself.

  My nest was a tent on the edge of a glacier, outfitted with a floor of woolen army blankets, two down sleeping bags, a pillow, and the comfort of books, a jug of water, and a bottle of ibuprofen. I had the ethereal music of an Antarctic summer night. Sometime after I fell asleep, my tent flew off the edge of the continent, out over the sea, with me in it. I dream a lot out here, but never of you. I save you for waking moments.

  Tonight, I sit inside the station with my glass of wine, again contemplating my tent, but not yet going there. The two girls who were chatting on the couch have now opened a backgammon board. Brian still cradles his guitar, his fingers working hard to play out his melancholy. He won’t meet my eyes. I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter. Whatever hand you draw, however you bet on the cards. There are no safe harbors. There is only enough.

  Wildcat

  Leon could smell the wildcat. The windows gaped open at night and the ripe August air moved inside, carrying a trace of damp feline fur. He had smelled the cat every night this week. It came because of the deer, and the deer came because of the roses. They nosed the satin petals right off the stickery stalks. Leon had heard that roses were like ice cream to deer. These flowers, and other herbaceous treats, brought them out of the large regional park abutting the neighborhood and into people’s yards. The wildcat followed.

  “I smelled the wildcat again last night,” Leon told his daughter while she made breakfast for Justin and lunch for herself. “I think we should keep the windows closed.” He didn’t really think that, he just wanted their reaction.