The Croning Part 7

"We piled onto the sidewalk, stood, gaping into the black pit. The darkness was shot through with the wildly flickering light way in back. It was chilly and lonely. Damp wind swirled up from the bay. There weren't any cars moving, n.o.body walking. Just the four of us clinging together and whimpering. A pay phone across the street rang, and a tick later, the one by the old drugstore. I made the b.a.l.l.siest move of my entire life-I walked over to the door and locked it, and went through the alley and made sure the receiving door was locked too. I wouldn't have gone inside for a million bucks, but I didn't want Coolidge to skin me alive if somebody looted the place after we ran away. Which we did.

"And...that's it. I handed in my resignation the next day. Didn't give two weeks, which royally p.i.s.sed off Coolidge. Nelly dropped me like a hot rock and went steady with one of the defensive linemen, not that I cared at that point. I had nightmares until Thanksgiving and would come to in the middle of the night with the cold sweats. Don't think I got more than four hours sleep an evening during that stretch."

Lying awake later that night, Don stared into the dark. Mich.e.l.le snorted and mumbled; Thule curled on the bed at their feet, a ninety-pound lump. The dog twitched and moaned with each flash of lightning, each crack of thunder rolling down the valley. Blue-white pops and sizzles illuminated the room, sent bony shadows of tree branches raking across the ceiling, across the bedcovers and Mich.e.l.le's humped form; spectral claws intent upon peeling back the sheets to have at sweaty, naked flesh. Don counted between the stroke and the clash-one, two, three, BOOM! The jar of water on the dresser vibrated, and his dentures bobbed, distorted in the momentary glare. At least the rain had slackened and the wind died down to intermittent gusts.

His joints throbbed and he contemplated taking another pill to quiet the pain. Instead, he flopped over to spoon with Mich.e.l.le. She smelled strongly of night sweat and something deeper; a dank, earthy taint that caused him to recoil and breathe through his mouth. Her hand clamped his forearm, an unconscious gesture. Her flesh was cold, like a fish left to smother on a wet clay bank, a pike hoisted from the depths of a northern lake.

He lay there and held his breath, listening hard to the night sounds, the creaking timbers, the faint, mournful jangle of wind chimes smacking against clapboard. Someone giggled in another room; the laughter drifted through the vent and reminded him of the twins as toddlers whispering their plots and schemes. A frog croaked just outside the window, perhaps trapped in the lee of a dormer, its complaints joined by a dim chorus from the yard among the weeds and the shelter of the magnolias; a gloomy litany, magnified somehow by the acoustics of the storm. The frogs seemed disturbed of late, didn't they? Perhaps, like dogs, they sensed impending disasters. Mice skittered in the secret hollows of the walls and Don wondered if they should get a cat, then he was asleep.

The storm front pa.s.sed through before dawn and sunrise lighted the bedroom in pinks and blues. Don could not remember his dreams, but knew they'd been rough from the bags under his eyes when he shaved. His hands quivered with exhaustion and he nicked himself three times and had to stick bits of toilet paper to his face to stem the blood. Making up the bed, he discovered a muddy handprint on his pillow and clods of dirt in the sheets. He frowned and stripped the sheets and dropped them in the linen basket.

A chorus of exclamations brought him downstairs in a hurry. It seemed Kurt had gone sleepwalking during the night-probably in response to the filthy weather and his reliving that decidedly unnerving tale. This happened to him as an adolescent; he occasionally woke up in the closet or the pantry, or the attic. This time he wound up in the greenhouse, sprawled between the tomatoes and the squash. Mich.e.l.le had stumbled into the kitchen to get an early start on breakfast preparations and discovered the back door ajar.

Kurt didn't have an explanation and decided he must've tripped and knocked himself in the head; a lump swelled over his right ear and he'd received a number of sc.r.a.pes. Worst of all, a d.a.m.ned rat had bitten him in the hand and arm-nasty punctures, too. That meant X-rays, teta.n.u.s and rabies shots and the unhappy revelation rodents had invaded the green house. Don scratched his head over that one. He hadn't seen any rats around. They were obviously lurking in the cellar or the barn prior to this incursion. Oh, well, while Kurt was getting the needle, Don would nip over to the hardware store and purchase rat traps and poison.

As the others mobilized to pack Kurt into the Rover for a hospital visit-except for Argyle, who sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with liberal dollops of whiskey-Don grabbed his plaid coat off the hook and noticed that the cellar door hung open by a couple of inches, revealing a wedge of musty darkness. He resented the chill that ran through him, reduced him to a cub scout s.h.i.+vering before the campfire, and slammed the door with his hip on the way out.

Everything turned out okay-Kurt claimed to have heeded the call of nature in the predawn hours, although he must've been inebriated because he couldn't put together what had happened to him after he ascended the stairs. Don, who'd spent ten minutes running around frantically searching for the car keys, until he stuck his hand in his pocket and found them, sympathized completely.

Don saw Mich.e.l.le to the SeaTac airport on the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend. By his calculations he would be home alone with Thule and the mice for the better part of seven weeks. Luckily, his mornings and early afternoons were full with the panels and the seminars at the Museum, and though he inherently despised the insufferably dull nature of these activities, they provided a respite from his recent bouts of nerves, his spikes of nyctophobia and short-term memory loss.

Don's memory was faulty during normal operating hours, but his dreams were an entirely different matter. Though these dreams evaporated within a few minutes of waking, while in progress they unspooled in Technicolor with a grainy, yet vibrant and coherent inexorability that forced his mind's eye to rewind and play events from the ancient past.

On the night Mich.e.l.le left for Turkey, Don drank some white wine that had languished in the cabinet for the G.o.ds only knew how long-the bottle label had peeled away. It was Kurt's tale of teenage terror, the gangly apparition at the department store that triggered Don's own dream, perhaps. Whatever the cause, he dropped like a stone into a deep slumber and his consciousness was whisked back to 1980.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Exhibit in the Mountain House (1980).

Don surfaced from a nightmare of drowning in the dark, and realized somebody had called his name from the far bank as he drifted the Yukon in his leaky old Zodiac raft.

He glanced around somewhat wildly-had he even heard another human voice? This was deep, dark wilderness, miles from the nearest native village, much less the summer cabins or suburbs of white men. He was also drunk off his a.s.s. Seemed as if he'd been floating forever and anyway it was during the Luminous Period so all bets were off. Time was nebulous. Time glowed, trailed sparks.

He would not feel better on the return flight to Olympia. Looking down at the busted skulls of nameless ranges, his thoughts were lizard-thoughts. The DC-10 bucked and flexed while he peered through foggy gla.s.s at the interminable sweep of prehistoric America and pondered how it resembled the folds and c.o.c.kles of a calcified brain. Black Hills Dakota was the legendary heart of the world. This, then, the utter north, could be the brain of the world. Forward arc of the Ring of Fire, Land of Ten Thousand Smokes.

For now, he flickered between the plane and the raft, future and present; between nursing a brandy over the black and white wasteland, and sprawling s.h.i.+t-faced at the bottom of a raft, gawking across the flat muddy expanse of river to a sheer bank and its fence of cottonwood trees.

The park service boys had warned him about restless natives back at Kyntak Landing. A Gold Rush mining outpost crumbled into a historical asterisk, Kyntak Landing was comprised of a Quonset hut, a handful of outbuildings and a radio tower in the foothills of the Brooks Range. Alaska had its share of these relics; graveyards of the Frontier spirit.

The rangers suggested in not too gentle terms Don was looking to get his head blown off. The veteran of the pair, the one who did the talking, said some of the locals held a grudge that went all the way back to the days of Seward. The man doubtless knew what he was talking about, he appeared at least a quarter native himself. He couldn't grasp what possessed anyone to raft from the Yukon headwaters 1200 miles to the Canadian border if not for hunting or shooting nature photographs.

Don didn't carry a rifle or a camera. Didn't have much more than traveling clothes and a Navy sea bag jammed with C rations, a case of Wild Turkey and a genuine leather flask of rye straight from his pal Argyle Arden's bathtub back in Olympia. He declined to mention the plastic baggie of peyote b.u.t.tons tucked in his s.h.i.+rt pocket under the pack of Winston 100s. Another of Argyle's essential survival kit items. Don, my lad, if you wanna vision quest, here's your ticket. As the kids said in our day, Happy trails, m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kah! Neither did he inform them that he'd spent some months among the Yukon tribes, back when he was doing grad work, and knew a thing or two about the unpleasant side of Alaskan race relations firsthand.

Was he an experienced outdoorsman? He'd hiked canyons in New Mexico with a burro looking for copper veins; he'd gone camping in the Cascades a few weekends as a kid. He'd inherited several boxes of Field and Stream from his granddad. He knew how to use a John Wayne, so he figured his bases were covered.

Is it a dare, Mr. Miller? You out to prove something?

Don chuckled and promised them it wasn't a dare, wasn't a suicide ploy, nothing like that. Maybe a midlife crisis come five or six years early. He needed s.p.a.ce, needed room to breathe, needed to sort some things out. A fellow couldn't ask for much more s.p.a.ce than the interior of the Land of the Midnight Sun.

The rangers grimly dusted their tall hats and left him to his own devices, promised to send word to the family if and when he disappeared.

Actually, it was a dare, at least in part. He was here because he made a list once-the Twelve Labors. Granddad had commanded him to write down a dozen things he wanted to accomplish before he died. The Do or Die List. Granddad had been keen on that sort of thing, did the very same himself, only instead of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Debbie Harry and navigating the Yukon it was making love to Louise Brooks and climbing Mount Everest. Granddad had gone after thirty-plus years of twilight decline; then he got the twenty-one gun salute, Old Glory folded into a sandwich wedge and presented to his dry-eyed daughter, the obligatory sendoff in the Daily O.

So here Don floated, on a sabbatical from his job as a managing consultant at Pacific Geo, as it were, a.s.suming one could take a break from doing basically nothing and go on vacation, getting p.i.s.s-drunk and living out number twelve on a list of childish feats of derring-do that only grew exponentially fanciful should he happen to survive the current enterprise. Trying to impress a dead man when he didn't even believe in ghosts, trying to exorcise demons when G.o.d was the least of his manifold fears.

The first night out he beached on a gravel bar, made a bonfire from deadwood, and uncapped the Wild Turkey. He saved the good stuff, the genuine moons.h.i.+ne, for later. This was autumn in Alaska and the nights got bitter when the light finally gave up the ghost. He sat wrapped in an army blanket, slugging his booze and watching the stars burn coldly in the gulf.

His dreams were torments, full of fire and demons and reed music.

Next, there was a fuzzy period where he couldn't sleep, couldn't keep his eyelids fastened for more than a few seconds. Newtonian law was intermittently enforced, it faded in and out like a degrading radio signal. Euclidian geometry became elastic to say the least. He hallucinated natives in war bonnets stalking him from the bank. He hallucinated cottonwood logs were Nile crocs waiting for him to dip his grimy hand in the cold water. He hallucinated a spider dangled beneath the blurry white sun on a strand of razor wire. The wind whispered in an old baby's voice even when the air was still as lead. The wind's voice tickled and crooned in his bones, subsonic, subatomic. The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.

The Luminous Period.

Luminous was the entertainment industry argot of the month, the watchword for that which was all style and no substance. Prose was luminous. Film was luminous. The river, grey as a quivering lung, was luminous grey. Don suspected his brain was grey too. He didn't know if it was luminous; sure as h.e.l.l felt like it quivered with every throb of the pulse in his temple.

Alongside stark weather and mosquitoes, a man can expect bad dreams, nightmares perhaps. He knew there was a season for everything. He admitted himself as being foolhardy, but Mother hadn't whelped a fool, had she?

Certainly a man could expect bad dreams and even nightmares when he'd been swilling homemade rotgut hooch from a leather flask like the old boys in c.o.o.nskin caps did it in the 1840s. A white man was letting himself in for danger floating down the Yukon River in a rubber raft, a leaky Zodiac; drinking dirty whiskey and sucking peyote b.u.t.tons and it was no wonder he had dreams that weren't exactly bedtime stories. When they fractured at the point of consciousness he would be hurled from the saddle, rouse to the slosh of bilge water, the omnipresent nothingness that permeated the atmosphere like white static.

Problem was, as the trip progressed he couldn't always be certain when reality ended and dreams began, couldn't be certain at any given moment whether or not he'd crossed that thin black line. Couldn't stop drinking the firewater or eating the devil plants.

The motor dead as three o'clock and he wasn't particularly concerned. He was sliding toward the sea; King Arthur sans horns, hounds, or the epic pyre. He wasn't sure how to cla.s.sify his condition. A midlife crisis? Too bad, so sad it hadn't manifested as a yen for a Jaguar and a fling with a nubile secretary half his age.

He didn't give a d.a.m.n about fancy cars, or manly adventures, not even this one, really. As for nubile young women, well, as he'd muttered a time or two during his long marriage-I didn't go blind when I put on the ring, baby! That said, Mich.e.l.le was the only woman for him. G.o.d knew, he could barely handle her. The idea of an affair was laughable, exhausting, depressing, and knowing Mich.e.l.le as he did, scary.

She'd inhabited his dreams the past two nights. A younger version of herself from college days that truly wasn't much different on the surface from the woman of fifty. Mich.e.l.le was possessed of an ageless charm reminiscent of great cla.s.sical beauties such as Sophia Loren, Jacqueline Bisset, or Elizabeth Taylor. Her skin remained flawless and taut, her hair sleek and dark as the proverbial raven's wing. For her, age burned from the inside. Gazing into her eyes, there was no mistaking her for a naive girl. He wasn't entirely sure that such a girl ever existed.

He'd met Mich.e.l.le Mock in the spring of 1950. This was during their junior year at university. Don's cla.s.smate and best friend Custer Bane was pursuing a coed majoring in sculpture and she'd invited him to a show in the Ballard neighborhood; a house near the water, currently rented by a professor named Louis Plimpton, a man Don would come to know quite well. At that juncture, he was just another faceless instructor Don had heard speak once and estimated as dry as the chalk he scratched on the board. Custer explained that Professor Plimpton was a scientist, but had eclectic sensibilities when it came to art and culture. Scuttleb.u.t.t was the prof dipped his toe into all kinds of exotic sensations.

In any event, Custer needed a wingman, and so Don rode across town in the fellow's jalopy along with four other guys from school. Somebody pa.s.sed around a bottle of vodka and the lot of them were toasted and singing bawdy roadhouse ditties when they piled from the car and descended on the wine and cheese event.

Don remembered the clapboard house being dark as a pit, illuminated by candles and a couple of paper lamps tinted red like a boardwalk brothel. Many of the windows were blocked with plywood; stars glinted through a hole in the roof. There was a cold hearth, some rickety furniture, and a natty couple entwined on the couch. A man in a dinner jacket slouched in a doorway. A gla.s.s of absinthe dangled from his left hand. He grinned and patted Don's cheek, pointed him toward the bead curtain and a claustrophobia-inducing stairwell that led to the real party.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was a labyrinth of subdivided cubbyholes and closets, exposed pipes and chipped cement; cobwebs and dust and lots of shadows, and an overwhelming smell of mildew. The guests, a mix of college kids and their off-campus pals and some creepy-types that gravitated to such spectacles, had gathered in a long, skinny L-shaped section to admire a handful of wax sculptures and oil and charcoal paintings that resembled lousy Pica.s.so imitations. A flautist sat cross-legged on a mat and played. The air was heavy with smoke from the candles and cigarettes.

Professor Plimpton stood at the heart of the gathering next to a display of rusted bedsprings, wax drippings, and copper tubing with his arms clasped behind his back. A short, wiry man in a blue suit. He kept his gray hair tied in a pony tail. He ignored the trio of undergraduate supplicates arrayed before him and nodded at Don. His smile was quick and sharp; much sharper than the softness of his features or voice would indicate. "Young master Miller. Glad you could tear yourself away from the quarry."

Don was exactly buzzed enough to second-guess his own recollection-they hadn't met, had they? He grinned noncommittally at the professor and waved the way a man does from a speeding car, or from the deck of a boat to acquaintances on the sh.o.r.e.

"We meet again," a beautiful girl in a mohair sweater said to Don, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s flattened against his shoulder as she leaned in to fix him with her dark, dark eyes. Those eyes belonged to a much older, more worldly soul than fresh-faced Mich.e.l.le Mock, however precocious she might've been in stodgy 1950.

A magical moment, in a black way. It was as if they'd known each other forever. Don was neck deep in trouble before he even opened his mouth to stammer his name. She smiled and held his hand and said she already knew, they'd taken a philosophy cla.s.s together. He didn't believe it-surely he'd remember sitting in a room with this gorgeous woman, and she grinned in a s.e.xy, feral manner and said maybe she'd worn gla.s.ses and a sweater.

"I blend in when I want to," she said. "I'm the hidden figure in the grotesque of a tapestry. Look closely and I'm the one sitting in the background under a tree, naked, drinking from a horn."

He still didn't believe it. A sweater and schoolmarm gla.s.ses wouldn't do much to obscure her erotic lushness. He nodded and went along with it, determined to get the real story at a more opportune time; say after she'd had a few drinks. This never occurred.

Three dates later they were in her apartment experimenting with Tantric s.e.x, and a month after that they got engaged and eventually eloped for a civil ceremony in Eastern Was.h.i.+ngton. Professor Plimpton got wind of the news and wired Mich.e.l.le, his favorite student, some cash, and directions to his farmhouse in Wenatchee so the couple had a honeymoon retreat. There were hills and trails for romantic hikes, a clear, cold lake, vineyards...

Amidst the confusion and excitement, it completely slipped Don's mind that he meant to ask his bride to confess where and when she'd actually seen him before.

Don had achieved quasi-sobriety when he b.u.mped into the rotting docks of Ruby, an Athabascan village that had sunk deep into a curve of the mighty river. Fish wheels languidly churned the water, although the kings had long-since sp.a.w.ned; now the machines dredged for pinks and whitefish; dented Smokercraft skiffs bobbed at the end of slimy tethers and the air was ripe with cottonwood smoke and the stringent musk of curing chum salmon. The only modern buildings were the school and the armory-all else dated to the 1930s or further back in the dim prehistory of territorial conquest. Satellite dishes perched atop s.h.i.+ngle roofs, incongruous and alien as deep sea flora.

People parted like smoke when he limped up the sodden dirt path of the cutback. The villagers observed him with flat-eyed stoicism he recalled too well from previous visits. They would, according to his experience of their traditions, suspect he was a demon, or demon-inhabited. Considering the volume of alcohol saturating his liver, that ancient gateway of spirits, of course they were at least somewhat correct. His skull whispered, whispered in the tongues of burning leaves, the corrosive drone of carcinogens metastasizing to membrane. The world enveloped him in shades of jaundice and bruises.

He paid ten dollars to borrow the radio phone in the post office and check his messages. He imagined he cut a melodramatic figure, leaning into the low, rude wall with its scaly-yellow flyers and disjointed wanted-posters from faraway lands, receiver tucked in the crook of his neck and ear, a mostly-drained bottle of brown liquor clutched in his free hand.

Mich.e.l.le crackled on the line, or, her day-old echo, melancholy and wan. She said, -Lou's dead-come home.

Mich.e.l.le awaited him at the Olympia house, freshly returned from her latest expedition to the Congo, burnt to a crisp and with new lines around her eyes and mouth. If anything, she appeared tougher and more hard-bitten than Don did after his odyssey of self-destruction on the Yukon. They made love with pa.s.sion sufficient to leave marks. Then, they fought for two days, and it was time for the funeral of a man Don scarcely knew despite the scientist's presence in Mich.e.l.le's life for close to thirty years.

Louis Plimpton had pa.s.sed away at a rented farmhouse near Wenatchee, Was.h.i.+ngton, but the Plimpton family plot was in nearby Levitte Cemetery where Tumwater and Olympia overlapped.

Don finally dragged Mich.e.l.le out the door twenty minutes before the service began and he had to drive like h.e.l.l to make the opening ceremonies, which included a bl.u.s.tery oration delivered by the Dean of Columbia who'd been flown in thanks to the largesse of Barry Rourke; the eulogy, delivered by Lou's surviving brother, Terrance-a h.o.a.ry octogenarian stricken with Parkinson's; and the requisite bagpipe dirge courtesy of a quartet of ruddy Scots from the VFW hall. Lou had never set foot within a hundred yards of a recruiting office, much less gotten s.h.i.+pped overseas to pump old-fas.h.i.+oned American lead into the enemies of the Republic, but n.o.body seemed to notice the discrepancy.

The pavilion was reserved for family and close friends, colleagues and a.s.sociates, and there weren't many folding seats. Don and Mich.e.l.le stood in the rear, fanning themselves with programs in the sweltering heat. Don had hastily shaved and doused himself with cologne, dusted off his funeral suit, a Windsor tie, the nice shoes and everything.

He was fanning himself with his hat when he noticed two men in off-the-rack suits staring at him and Mich.e.l.le. Both wore dark gla.s.ses and serious expressions; one had an impressive mustache. The men loitered on the periphery, making no secret of their presence as outsiders, interlopers. Mich.e.l.le was oblivious to them, busy as she was wiping her eyes and blowing her nose into a hanky. Don decided not to point them out and after a few minutes they climbed into a black car and drove away.

When it was a wrap, he and Mich.e.l.le shook hands with a few people who noticed them lurking, and afterward, beelined for the parking lot and had nearly made their escape when Paul Wolverton intercepted them behind the street-side hedge and attempted to extract a promise to appear at a special reception in one week's time for a round of do you remember when's, and for he's a jolly good fellow, and to pay obeisance to the Widow Plimpton, a self-made royal. Paul Wolverton, middle son of the famed playboy Marcus Wolverton, was taller than Don, and only a few years junior, although he was what Mama Miller would've called "well-preserved", and unlike the oft-accepted characterization of bankers as porcine, Wolverton was gaunt and urbanely boisterous, if stereotypically fas.h.i.+onable in his double-breasted suits. Don promised to consider attending the reception.

Once they were alone in the car, Mich.e.l.le responded to Wolverton's invitation with a rather p.r.o.nounced lack of equanimity, exclaiming, "Oh, sweet baby Jesus, Paul's cousin Connor Wolverton was Lou's benefactor. There's a museum in that house. It's incredible. We're going!" She explained that Connor Wolverton was sort of a northwest Howard Hughes who made like a hermit in rural eastern Was.h.i.+ngton on a huge estate. The man was rabidly pa.s.sionate regarding the sciences, collecting everything from pottery to the bones of obscure war leaders and unusual animals. While not formally trained or inclined, Connor Wolverton did what rich, obsessed patrons were best at-contributed enormous sums to various foundations and projects. Mich.e.l.le, via her longstanding a.s.sociation with Doc Plimpton, had benefited magnificently from that largesse.

"But, um, my sweet, that's in Spokane," Don tried.

"Ho, ho, nowhere so civilized. It's at least sixty miles south of the city. Nowhere near an airport, either. Completely in the sticks."

"By car? Egad, sweetheart."

"Six-hour drive, tops."

"More like ten on those roads and with someone behind the wheel who doesn't have a death wish."

It went like that all the way back to the farm. Upon arriving at the house, Mich.e.l.le tabled the discussion and made a few phone inquiries before engaging Don for round two.

She said, "Naomi and Paul are hosting. She's doing all the legwork. They're tight with the Wolvertons."

"Our vacation...relaxing, screwdrivers on the veranda, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g..."

"Don't be unseemly. Show proper respect to our dead colleague."

"Whom we've spoken to half a dozen times since the Moon Landing."

"Wrongo. I corresponded with Lou plenty. Our interests coincided. Who do you think put me in touch with Tos.h.i.+ and Campbell? Why do you suppose they agreed to help me secure funding, charts, maps? h.e.l.ls bells, Howard lent me his data for the Pyrenees expedition."

"Oh, right-the tour of exotic wh.o.r.ehouses and Plimpton family reunions. Honestly, hon, I just figured you flashed your lovely gams and those lecherous swine fell all over themselves securing the dough." He was no fan of Ryoko or Campbell, a pair of crackpot scientists who'd kept tinfoil manufacturers busy for the better part of a decade. He suspected it was their ilk who'd infected Mich.e.l.le with the whole Hollow Earth delusion, and later that duo fostered and fed it with praise and monetary support. He'd met them way back when during a visit to Bangkok. Vainglorious frauds who'd made a fortune by peddling quack science to the gullible public. The evening was a disaster. Don lost his temper and engaged in fisticuffs with someone, though as usual the details slipped away.

In any event, somehow the fools hadn't managed to torpedo Mich.e.l.le's career as he'd seen befall other, less fortunate researchers caught in their draft.

Mich.e.l.le closed the book on the debate. "We are going."

She was correct, as ever. So correct, in fact, that she'd prevailed upon Argyle Arden to emerge from his badger burrow, otherwise known as the Arden House, and to join them for the excursion. Argyle declined the offer to hitch a ride, preferring to be driven by his own das.h.i.+ng chauffeur in a Rolls Royce.

"Argyle's coming?" Don had said, annoyed as if his friend had betrayed him, albeit unwittingly. On second thought, Argyle was hardly unwitting and he unerringly took Mich.e.l.le's side in political matters.

"He's certainly breathing hard," she'd said and pecked his cheek.

The following week, husband and wife cruised through Seattle and out into rugged country toward the Cascades in a sedan Don had borrowed from an intern at Evergreen who was a little sweet on him and would be for maybe another semester before she too whiffed the scent of unshakable loyalty to his often absent wife of thirty years.

The thermometer at the rustic gas station where they serviced the car read 99 in the stifling shade of the awning. This was late August and rain hadn't fallen for the better part of two weeks. Don bought fuel and a six-pack of c.o.ke and an ice cream bar, and rambled on, rambled on. Mich.e.l.le licked the ice cream bar, h.o.a.rding it with mischievously selfish pleasure.

She went down on Don after he took the East Valley exit off I-5 and rolled through terrain that alternated between fields and hills verging on low mountains. He nearly crashed the sedan in surprise at his pants b.u.t.tons being expertly undone and her red lips closing on his manhood. Her tongue was hot beneath a veneer of ice cream chill as it circled and pressed. He glanced at the speedometer and noticed the needle had jumped to the 70 mark.

"Well, all right," he said. "I concede: this is a wonderful plan. You are right as always, my dove. Let's pray I can keep us pointed between the ditches..."

She chuckled and nipped him. Then she sat up and smoothed her hair and casually reapplied her lipstick in the side mirror. Her hair whipping about her tanned cheeks lent her an aspect of unearthliness, a beautiful, ambivalent creature, half woman, half G.o.ddess of the brambles, with the requisite affection and cruelty of both halves.

"Hey, uh...I was joking," he said, gloomily trying to figure out how a man went about b.u.t.toning his pants with one hand while sporting a considerable erection.

"Better safe than wrapped around a tree," she said, and smiled.

"Really. I think it's proper to finish what you start."

"Don't be such a tough guy."

"You love it."

"I love you. I also know a few tough guys. Real hard cases. Don't tread in those waters-you'll catch cold, dear."

He sighed and she smiled a secret smile and tuned the radio to a blues station. The country road wound before them, often narrow and unpaved, margined by wild forest and marsh and creeks, and occasionally a house or a farm. Golden fantail dust rose in their wake and drifted toward an enamel-blue sky. Late afternoon came down upon the land and occasionally, he slowed to avoid a cow or a string of goats wandering the road. The beasts sought the deep blue shade of overhanging willow limbs. She rolled the window down and trailed her bronzed arm against the rus.h.i.+ng wind.

Even though the nest was empty going on five years, Don felt a pang whenever he glanced in the rearview at a blank seat and no children pulling one another's hair, or causing him to pull the last of his own in exasperation at incessant yammering questions, or the interminable monotone naming of things kids were wont to undertake.

He swerved around a black Labrador and hoped all concerned were having a swell time traveling on his dime. Kurt in Cape Cod with a gaggle of affluent chums he'd met in college, Holly abroad in Europe with a girl named Carrie. Backpacks and a stack of travelers checks and mommy's bank number were all the ladies needed-Holly had promised to drop a postcard in the mail when they hit Rome.

He smiled with fondness and melancholy. None of this felt right. The family shouldn't be scattered to the wind, yet there it was.

Dinner was a leisurely affair at the quaintly named Satan's Bung tavern in Ransom Hollow, a venerable chain of valley settlements and home to several of Mich.e.l.le's ancestors on the Mock side. Allegedly cousins of the Mocks (she couldn't recall the family name) had settled hereabouts before the Gold Rush and founded a lodge; the family had owned half the valley during their heyday.

The couple knocked back a few rounds and devoured exquisite venison steaks and held hands while the Blackwood Boys, a highly polished local jug band, play several sets. Matters came to a head when, as the entire taproom crowd was clogging in unison to a drawn-out fiddle solo, Mich.e.l.le drained her gla.s.s of whiskey (it was whiskey, beer or water at Satan's Bung) and leaped atop the table and danced a jig she'd learned in a similar backwater village in Ireland. The men hooted and cheered and Don laughed and covered his eyes as she swished her leopard stole under his nose. Mich.e.l.le had bagged the cat herself with one clean shot from a borrowed Winchester. She was no Jane Goodall, that was for sure. Were a seal hunter to toss her a club, Don suspected she'd cheerfully march for the beach.