Mountain time, p.16
Mountain Time, page 16
“Mitch, he’s up in years now, not to mention on his last legs. You’re going to have to—”
“That’s the latest thing he’s trying to get away with. Time for sympathy for Lyle.”
“And the worst part is, you’re feeling some.”
“Yes! Damn right I am, and I don’t want to be.” He was silent a moment. “I know it sounds cruel.”
It sounded near criminal, her expression seemed to say.
Desperately Mitch delved for a way out of his divided state of mind. He knew he had to answer that look on her. But which was the real side of things? The Coast life, the fumble of marriage and the kids, the long devotion to a newspaper that was Bingford’s plaything between mountain romps, the try with Lexa, years now and still somewhere in the experimental stage? Or this born-into obligation, this confusing but unavoidable step back to—what do you even call it? Certainly it was no longer childhood, but it was offspringhood of some inescapable kind.
“He pretty much was dead, as far as I was concerned,” he explained, if it was an explanation. “Had been since I left here, as little as we had to do with each other all those years. Now it’s like he’s popped back to life. Temporarily.”
“And now you have to deal with him, and you don’t like that.”
“Both of the above, sorry to say.”
Lexa shook her head, whether wondering about his mental fitness or her own he couldn’t tell. She told him, “I came to try to help along the edges. But you’re going to have to let me know when you and your father are in the here and now, and not back there wishing each other would turn out differently.”
Rooted there at the outermost furrow of the field, Mitch did not say anything for several seconds. Then it all came.
“Lexa, I am a fifty-year-old unfeathered biped carrying too much weight. With a marriage behind me that I wouldn’t wish on an alimony lawyer. And grown children who maybe are what they are because I didn’t wage a fifteen-year war over them with their mother, and they don’t care spit about me. The only occupation I’ve ever had is about to turn into street litter. Now I’m back here where I don’t want to be, in Lyle Land. He and I have let each other down in ways we can’t even spell out. Then there’s you.”
She blinked a quick semaphore of alarm at arriving on this list.
Mitch was surging on. “I know I torpedoed Travis and you—”
“Hey, that only took a cap pistol.”
“—and I’ve only ever managed to be so-so at playing house with you, I know that, too. Why don’t you just walk out on the Roziers?”
“You are in a mood.”
“You can, you know. Give this relationship the big haircut.”
Lexa stood perfectly still. Around her she could sense dusk dropping degree by degree, the feel of the chilling field. All she knew was that she wasn’t going to surrender here on the stony ground of Mitch’s past.
“Come on, let’s get you back to town,” she resorted to. “We could both use some beauty sleep.”
• • •
Sleep was not anywhere near either of their minds, though, the darkness still fresh by the time they drove back in. She gave him a try again as they came to the outskirts of town.
“So, fullback. Going to drive me by the old high school, see if they’ve put up a statue yet of you throwing your helmet into the stands?”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” She thought she could see the area around his mouth twitch a little.
“Tsk. Here you are, legendary, and I don’t even get to see the blade of grass you first fullbacked all over, you, the Iron Tum—”
“Don’t start with that!” he commanded, but now he definitely was suppressing a provoked smile.
She watched him watch her from the corner of his eye until he finally broke out with: “Okay, Smart Mouth, you want local attractions, I’ll show you the one and only.”
He swung the pickup down a side street and pulled over at Artesia Park. They stepped onto the neglected grass, Lexa turning her nose in the direction of the springs as if investigating an aroma that had no business in her kitchen.
“You still want walking,” Mitch was saying, “four times around this mother is a mile.”
“Let’s just move our feet a little. Show me the sights, Slick.” She put her hand in his side jacket pocket, causing him to put his arm around her as they began the tour.
Even by night it was a scabby park. In the harsh bluish glow from backyard lights behind most of the nearby houses, the crusts around the side-by-side sulphur springs looked deathly alkaline, and the timeworn gazebo appeared to have fallen off the forklift from a high school production of The Music Man. Trees had a hard life here.
Yet frolicsome touches had been tried. Sporadic picnic tables still were around, scattered like old survivors of a shipwreck, and over by the weatherbeaten Artesia Park sign was a plywood cutout where tourists could poke their heads through holes and have jokey photos taken.
When they reached the artesian swimming holes, Mitch shifted from one foot to another then back again, studying the pair of pools with surpassing interest. “Umm, Lexa? Want to go for a euphemism?”
Lexa gazed at him, then at the springs steaming gently in the night. “Is this the point where the shy maiden says, ‘But I didn’t bring my swimsuit’?”
“I was sort of hoping she’d say, ‘Let’s shoot out the blue sodium lights and go naked.’ ”
“Welcome to Yard Light City, all right. What do these people have that they think is so worth swiping?” Eyes creased against the acetylene hover of night-lights behind most of the nearby houses, she peered around the none-too-dark park.
“There’s a corner of the big spring in behind the gazebo,” Mitch issued like a bulletin.
“How do you know this?”
“Hearsay.”
Lexa laughed down in her throat. “Her say, don’t you mean? So who was she, Rozier? The cheerleader who was easy to score on? The 4-H Club sweetiepoo?”
Mitch enwrapped her, jolting her off her footing, seeming to stagger a little himself as he gave her a kiss that could have been felt in France. After the maximum visitation back and forth by their tongues, he pulled his head back and said thickly: “She wasn’t anybody. You’re it.”
“In that case,” Lexa heard herself say in a rush, so starved for him her throat wasn’t working quite right, “you probably don’t want any more years to go by before testing out that water.”
There were a few scrawny tree shadows at the far end of the park for them to scurry to the back of the gazebo. On the spring bank there, hidden or close enough, they clutched and kissed some more. Clothing cascaded off. His large pale form loomed, her compact one emerged from a sudden circlet of blue jeans and panties. The non-bride wore moonlight. If it doesn’t suit the occasion, Mitch, I don’t know what better I can do. She steadied herself against him with an inquiring spread palm.
They plunged in, Mitch first, lifting her down. The water was coarse but warm as a zinc-tub bath. The sulphur odor might as well have been harem musk.
Hair wet, they were sleek as seals in a pocket of sea. When he lifted her a bit she rode on his thigh, rocking there, pleasure-clenched on the might of him; making love with Mitch was trying out a jungle gym, there were all these . . . dimensions to take into consideration, to play on. Her hand found him ready. She shifted, and his breath drew in. Openmouthed with need, they joined, surged together, the water of the spring lapping against the gray silver rim of bank.
“This stuff,” Mitch panted and laughed urgently at the same time, “makes your hair stand up,” he panted again, “in spikes.”
“Break my heart some more,” she growled and buried her lips into his.
• • •
“Mitch? Lexa? That you?”
“Everybody but.” Bumping her way through the kitchen maze to the refrigerator, Mariah blanched at what she found when she opened its door, but shoved enough of it aside to stash her extra film. “Just keeping my camera food cool,” she called to Lyle in the other room.
“Doing okay in the bunkhouse? Been a while since it had anybody in it.”
“It’s fine, no livestock or anything. Ta-ta.”
Woop, Mariah. You’re back dealing in American. Better go in and tell him nighty-night. She went to the living room door and saw him planted there in his chair, up close to the television.
In the ghostblue light from the screen he again studied her all he wanted to, his manners so rusty he didn’t think to invite her to take the load off her feet. No immediate “good night” forthcoming from that quarter, either. She wondered what she was getting into, inserting herself and her camera into the last days of this ironbound old man.
As she was about to murmur “See you in the morning,” Lyle nodded toward the TV screen.
“This Internet stuff is quite something. Found myself, on there.”
“No crap?” She was unwillingly drawn into the room. Her body clock was still ticking in Eskimo or some such, but she could always put off being tired long enough to be curious. “Let’s have a peek at you.” She came and hunkered by his easy chair.
“First thing is, get rid of Dugout Doug here.” Lyle peered down into the keyboard on the TV tray table, struck something, and General MacArthur and his corncob pipe vanished back into history. “So you just been everywhere. What was that like?” She was surprised he could make conversation as he hunted and pecked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. What fits with what, in the book I’m doing.”
Peering up at the screen and frowning down at the keyboard with every stroke, Lyle mashed away at keys with two fingers stiff as drill presses. “Does that pay good, a book?”
“There’s no telling.”
“You’re gonna be putting the whole world in a book, hadn’t you ought to be able to charge plenty?”
“My stuff, you can’t sell by the cubic yard.”
We Who Were the Jungleers arrived on the screen, with the cartoon of a Sad Sack soldier wearing the patch of the Forty-first Infantry Division where Superman wore his S.
“Progress,” Lyle announced, and stopped to take stock of the menu. He brought up onto the screen Australia—the Queensland training, frowned harder and zapped it. “That kid Matthew can squirrel around in this stuff like nobody’s business. Takes me some hit and miss.” He managed to find New Guinea—the jungle war. Mariah watching, he began a fresh search through zones of combat.
“The world.” The word came from him as if he considered it an interesting affliction. “I’ve never much budged, myself. Not that you’ll be overly surprised to hear so.” He indicated the crammed room shadowed around them. She felt a bit guilty for equating his house with the quake-shaken museum, but the resemblance was still there.
“Had to go when they sent me to fight Tojo,” Lyle said as if thinking it over. “But that was different. See the world from under a helmet.”
Very much as if he had timed it, combat photography arrived onto the screen. Smudges of landing craft, and bomb geysers in the water. Dead bodies on a grainy beach.
Mariah was the third generation of McCaskill women tired of hearing about it from men who had gone to war, as if women’s lives weren’t some level of combat.
“That was my father’s story, too,” she let him know. “Came back from the Aleutians with his leg shot up. Then there was my uncle who didn’t come back at all.”
Lyle paused a moment over what she had said. “Don’t know how, but the ones I went with all stayed in one piece.”
His next stab brought them. The trio of young soldiers, himself in the middle. Helmets with camouflage netting, rifles slung on their shoulders, a bazooka in their possession, too; younger-than-springtime smiles at odds with all that. Central as he and his sergeant stripes were in the grouping, Lyle in particular looked convinced he was bulletproof. Mariah could tell it was confidence put on for the camera, but even so. A face like that came from the climate inside the person.
He must have been a heartbreaker when they came home in uniform, she thought to herself. War hero, or what passed for one, here. Mariah was veteran enough about men to know halo sheen when she saw it.
“This business of pictures for nothing,” he was saying. “They can just put me up on there?”
“Seems like,” she said, intent on the set of faces on the screen. “Good-looking bunch of devils you were.”
“Yeah, well, two out of three isn’t bad.” They chortled together at the pug-faced bazooka man, his smile a bit lopsided and loose around the edges, posing shoulder to shoulder with Lyle.
“Buddies of mine,” Lyle identified, even though their countenances were speaking for themselves on the screen. Fritz Mannion, prima facie dumb. Joe Ferragamo, noble as some statue in the middle of Rome.
“And then the next thing I knew,” he said as if still caught off balance by it, “I was back here in the Springs, family man and all. You ever tie the knot?”
“You bet.” Mariah grinned with fond scorn for the marriage to Riley. “Turned out to be a slipknot, lucky for me.”
The old man sharpened his tone on that answer of hers.
“Divorce has gotten kind of contagious, yeah.”
One thing Mariah never liked was sermonettes on marriage from people who were not current in the field. By whatever hole card of fate, this man was a loner, she could tell, and she decided to call him on it.
“Your wife—what’s that wimpy way they put it now—predeceased you some time ago, did she?”
Lyle jerked a fit-to-kill look at her. But of course she had no way of knowing about Adele, flying along on black ice until here came the bridge abutment. He sat there forcibly swallowing ire and memory, while Mariah watched him from only a few feet away. Women these days didn’t give you much ground to maneuver on.
“A lot of time ago,” he said and left it at that.
Mariah stood. “I’d better call it a night. Always have to get up early for good light for shooting. Thanks for the loan of the bunkhouse.” She glanced again at the image of the three young GIs on the screen. Leaving, she wished him “Happy World War Two,” seeming to mean it.
• • •
Alone again except for the tired feeling which was pretty much with him all the time now, Lyle had to debate whether to bed down here in the chair and have to justify that to Mitch and Lexa when they came in, or drag himself off to his bedroom. Dying wore on you after a while.
Yet it had taken all these years for the one with his name on it to catch up with him, hadn’t it. This was what he kept finding intriguing, that he was being handed time enough to know he was a goner, to think through the disposition of things. Settle accounts.
Not that he was deluding himself about knowing how to handle death; he was still trying on the one brought back again by that “predeceased” crack of Mariah’s. (She and that Lexa had the sort of mouths that needed holsters, didn’t they.) He had been secretly relieved when Mitch’s mother went out of his life—went out of life, period—in that car wreck. Secret didn’t begin to say enough, about a reaction like that. A person could never admit to that kind of thing even to himself. But deep down Lyle knew that was what his feeling toward Adele’s death amounted to, a lifting of what he had blindly brought on himself. He figured he might be particularly conscious of this because he was a man with only a few such things buried out of sight that way, and there had been his scare when one of those had half got out, that summer of Mitch’s leg accident and all the commotion after.
Adele had been touchy. (Mitch got that quality from her. Mama’s boy without a mama; maybe that accounted for Mitch breaking away from him, back there.) Any number of times she utterly did not want to go along with the program, his ventures to try to make something of the Springs country and this family along with it. It still burned him, Adele’s lack of trust. Watch your chance and take a gamble every so often on a deal like the Rozier Bench and that was your reward at home, arguments. He had been amazed the first time Adele pulled out of here and spun gravel halfway to the Sweetgrass Hills. Then when she came back, that time and every time, and the household would settle down for a while, the word turned to more like amused.
It was Mitch they stayed together for, of course.
He hadn’t known jack-squat about having a kid. Or even wanting one. Cravings a person never suspected before had built up throughout the war, though; had they ever. Kids poured forth, from the ex-sergeant Lyle Roziers and the ripe and waiting Adele Conlons. Like probably any number of people then, they had got themselves caught, barely started going together when Adele missed her time of the month. But she went up to her people in the Sweetgrass Hills to have the baby, and when Mitch was born a bit overdue, even the bookkeeping on that looked pretty close to balanced.
Lyle shifted in the chair in the semi-dark. It wasn’t the life he’d thought he would lead. Whose is?
He hesitated, listening to make sure Mitch and Lexa weren’t on their way in, then keyboarded back to the war-scarred beachhead on the Web.
• • •
New Guinea was a sonofagun of a place to go to war unless you had a taste for vines, mosquitoes, snakes, sopping horse-blanket heat, tropical diseases severe enough to make your bones rattle and the likelihood of Japanese snipers up every mangrove. Not even to mention being ushered in to the Guinea shore the way they were, aboard a disabled landing craft lying there on Tambu Bay like an engraved invitation to the Japanese air force for target practice. Some idiot on his last cigarette had crumpled the empty pack and tossed it onto the floor of the landing craft instead of over the side and the wad went into the sump pump like silk drawers up a vacuum cleaner. Sergeant Lyle Rozier’s natural tendency was to suspect Fritz Mannion, but he lacked total evidence and besides there was the more pressing matter of the water leaking in fast around the landing ramp without the sump pump to draw it back out. Half a mile short of the beach, the coxswain had to dead-stop the already half-swamped vessel or risk driving it under the waves. And so there Lyle and his cherished platoon of Company C were, invasion-force soldiers bailing like madmen with their helmets.
