Mountain time, p.3
Mountain Time, page 3
• • •
She was competing at Cheyenne when she met Travis Mudd. That season on the circuit, in her third and winningest year at barrel racing for the college rodeo team, she was cruising through Colorado State U. majoring in beer and high times, already wistful that her elementary ed degree was waiting on the far side of the Fort Collins haze of fun. As usual at big-deal Cheyenne, the brass band for the grand entry played on and on, but this year each batch of riders into the arena was greeted with a skin-prickling bullfight solo from the trumpet, the giddy ascent of notes putting the crowd in a whooping mood. With the kind of buzz on that she always got from competing, everything slightly slow motion and sharp edged, she naturally took notice of this trumpet player, the type of all-legs Western kid called a long drink of water.
When she rode, her horse Margarita shied off slightly at the first barrel, costing them the shade of a second and any prize money right here. To teach malingering Margarita a lesson, Lexa leathered the mare without letup around the next two barrels and across the line in a steaming finish.
She reined up hard and heard, lofty but with that Jimmy Buffett trace of flirty wooziness to it, a trumpet riff of “Margaritaville.”
Of course she looked up the trumpet player. As shy as he was tall, but shoulders broad enough to eat off of, and a face like a puppy’s that invited nuzzling.
“Pretty funny,” she commended his razzing tribute to Margarita.
“Pretty good ride,” he had ready, “except having to drag that horse along under you.”
“She knows how to be a real shy whore,” Lexa said conversationally.
Travis’s grin slipped a little. Then and as their courtship heated up, he looked at Lexa as if he couldn’t get enough of her and listened to her in continual mild alarm.
Travis finished his wildlife management degree at Northern Colorado the next year, and Lexa, who would have come at you with a hammer if you had hinted she was in college to land her M.R.S. degree, found herself married to him the week after graduation. The education of Lexa McCaskill began then.
• • •
As the last of the seaplane flock droned into the distance, Lexa headed back along her route, trying to calculate how long she could stretch the outdoors part of today and yet not have to end up handing around Snickers bars for tonight’s dessert. She resolved to drive rather than walk to her docent hours at the zoo, and use the car phone to remind her crew when and where to show up. And leave Mister Mitch the news that he’s been elected bartender.
Now that she’d given herself the guilty pleasure of a little extra time, she stopped to play tourist at the ship canal, where the big lock was lowering several work-stained fishing boats to meet the tide of Puget Sound. As usual Lexa drew a lot of looking from the fishboat crews—that hat and the unfeigned ranch-born way she parked her hands in the top of her front pockets, only the thumbs out. Cowgirls need love too; wasn’t there even a song to that effect? She knew that if she was aboard with any of the leering crews there would be no such reckless eyeballing, no suggestive kidding, and above all no touching: those were the sea rules that protected her when she had cooked on the Bella Hammond, the Arctic Dancer and other trawlers of the Sitka fishing fleet, her and half a dozen men in close quarters for weeks at a time in the lonely Gulf of Alaska. And husband Travis had never said anything, Travis and his blind trust in rules.
Perhaps men weren’t meant to be heard from. Mitch hadn’t called from the Berkeley trip. Telephones disagreed with him, he claimed; they were absolutely full of stuff that his ear found hard to take. So he never called from out of town, or much of anywhere else. You could draw up quite a list of Mitch’s nevers, Lexa knew by now.
The sonofabitch, I love him.
That thought spun her on her heels, her hiking boots resounding on the steel walkway of the lock gate as she crossed back over and headed to the fish ladder.
Lexa fully knew—Mitch had told her this enough times—that the fish ladder was a public relations plaything. Ninety-nine percent of the migrating salmon and steelhead into the rivers feeding Lake Washington rode up through the canal locks as the boats made their passage. Still, she liked to visit the one percent, the fish that had fought their way up the stair-step rapids.
The glass-walled viewing area was dim, grottolike, which meant she could walk right up to the fish in their transparent channel. Today it was the spring run of steelhead, silver dirigible trout hanging there in the greenish water, seeming to pant, to muster themselves.
So why am I losing him, the sonofabitch.
Only a bit at a time, and there was more than a handful of Mitch left, for sure. But as a spousal equivalent, lately, he seemed to be evaporating, coming home edgy instead of eager, in a cat-kicking mood. She herself did not know why, in this loose jangly era of dosie doe and everybody change partners again and again, she thought a ceremony would bring a more sturdy commitment to each other. (Mariah had considered it cause for congratulations when given the news merely about her moving in with Mitch: “Finally going to try shacking up, huh?”) Or was commitment overload his malady already? He was the kind who waded into his work up to his neck, then was always surprised when some rogue wave tossed unpleasantness up his nose. She could imagine other cutouts of life Mitch once could have fit, running a bookstore in Missoula or teaching high school English in Moab, working the job to death in sorrowless surroundings. But “Coastwatch” had been his existence ever since environmental reporters were thick on the earth.
She stayed longer than she intended watching the exhausted steelhead, survivors paused behind the glass wall.
Five
“SEEN MITCH?”
“I thought he’s in Birkenstockley, doing the green thing.”
“He’s supposed to be back for this morning.” Bingford retracted his head into his office impatiently.
• • •
The Cascopia building was in Seattle’s Fremont district, where the Sixties still roamed. The hempen necessities of life were available there, as were cafes with good rowdy names such as The Longshoreman’s Daughter, plus deluxe junk shops, plus bars that were museum pieces from the days when hair was Hair. Indeed, the neighborhood merrily ran the gamut from Lennon to Lenin, a twenty-foot-high bronze Eastern European clearance sale item depicting Vladimir Ilyich forging into the future with rifles stacked slyly beside him, but now peacefully surveying traffic at a particularly funky Fremont intersection.
In such environs, employment at the weekly newspaper Cascopia was a lot like manning the drawbridge against the slick downtown Seattle skyline to the south, for the building squatted at the north edge of the old steel bridge over the ship canal; only the bridgetender, making the twin halves yawn open by means of counterbalances, sat closer to the moat. Both Bingford and Mitch liked the racket of the Fremont Bridge’s traffic gates clanging down and its girdered halves groaning and humming as they labored upward, on the best days many, many times. Others on the staff either quit in a hurry or made a major aural adjustment; the “Cityscape” columnist, Moira Mason, had been wearing earplugs for ten years now.
At the moment the bridge was up on its haunches, letting a single sailboat putter through while cars stacked up, and Mitch was killing time and dietary intentions at the Espresso A Go Go stand, waiting until he could stroll across to the office. He was in the fetching mute company of Trixie, the mannequin in her powder blue miniskirt and white go-go boots lounging with the stand’s espresso! sign bandoliered across her shapely form. Mitch would gratefully have spent the rest of this day hanging out with Trixie.
Thinking and frowning, he sipped coffee and tore into a bagel; he was going to have to work through lunch. Distill something out of the Berkeley conference vapors. His mind sometimes sneaked up on an idea for his column while he did other things, so now he studied the familiar upended bridge and the views east and west of it, the white froth of mountains cresting over the streeted hills of the city. As Mitch had written so many times even he was tired of hearing it, Seattle in its rapid career had spread itself as a freehand Brasilia, a capital of enterprise installed in the middle of a timber jungle. The two-hundred-foot cedars and Doug firs originally prickled so thick along Puget Sound that the first sawmillers made their fortunes right there on the shore. By now enough of the great forest had been thinned away to let in a metropolis of two million people, and still coming. Seattle, the consummate doodler on the margin of America. The place had given the world some dervishes of the electric guitar, connoisseur lessons in coffee, The Far Side, airplanes by the stratosphereful, and now the alchemies of software. Twenty-five years ago it had given him “Coastwatch” to write, then ever since yawned, “So what?”
Mitch fired a bank shot of his crumpled coffee container into the recycle bin, the ghost chorus of his trade keening at him. Ed Abbey smoldering in his grave in the slickrock desert, Stegner magisterially whopping the nail on the head in every sentence of his hallowed “wilderness letter.” Feverish Bob Marshall, the Thomas Wolfe of the Forest Service, writing and hiking himself to death in the mountains he so adored, his epitaph theirs: “How much wilderness do we need? How many Brahms symphonies do we need?” And back beyond them the sweet ponds of Thoreauvia. The whispering pines of Muirland. St. feathered Francis, if you really want to go back. Whatever all else Spaceship Earth was running out of, it didn’t lack for old soaring planetary anthems. Although, in Berkeley, in this time on the cusp of the next millennium, academic bigfoots had just spent three days in airless rooms arguing about the nature of the word nature.
Clanging announced that the drawbridge was going down. Mitch headed across, envying Trixie her job.
• • •
Wishing himself on a mountain wall of granite somewhere, Bingford looked down at Mitch through his office window. Huge color photos of mountain climbers spidered onto crags covered the office’s other three walls. Look closely and in every case the wiry dangling man with a flaming sunburned face was Bingford. Successions of Cascopia staffers, where a generation amounted to around three years, had been stunned to see their editor/publisher arrive back from Denali or Aconcagua or Everest with a face like a camp-stove victim. Gradually the effects of sun glare, cold, and wind at extreme elevations would peel away, and the freckles would crop out again. Watching this over the years, Mitch had wondered if Bing added a freckle for each conquered mountain, the way fighter-plane aces painted downed opponents on their cowlings.
At this moment Bingford hesitated, not something he was used to. What good would it do to call Mitch in? By now the two of them knew each other’s lines of argument like sailors knew rope knots.
Still, something kept him at the window, unable to tear his eyes from Mitch coming across the bridge in that peculiar tender-toed floating way he moved. Heft trained into grace, like the Lippizaner stallions Bingford had seen perform in Vienna during his trip to climb the Eiger. He’s always had some moves, the editor in Bingford speaking now. At his best, Mitch could write a column with a skateboarder’s eye for odd angles and fast surfaces. But he was a considerable way from his best, these days.
“Old times, guy,” Bingford said quietly.
• • •
Spired and wooded and not a little stoned, the campus sprawled amid the 1960s like a disassembled cathedral. The University of Washington, thirty thousand students strong and restive as a mutinous barracks, was the upper left corner of the battle banner that was writhing through Berkeley and Madison and Morningside Heights and a hundred other bastions of learning, wafted by the highs of drugs and dorm sex and soon to be blown jetstream-high by the storm of opposition to the Vietnam war.
Mitch Rozier had come for football.
He was raw then, but he knew it and figured there might be a cure for it in a place like Seattle. His athletic scholarship had come like a bingo jackpot—the big kid from a small town playing his one card in life and having it pay off at the Shrine game, the high school all-stars on the other side of the line strewn like train-wreck victims in the wake of Mitch’s three touchdown runs. In the stands was Washington’s most junior assistant coach, assigned to recruit the longshots, and even though this fired-up running back was from some dinkyville, he liked the kid’s unexpectedness on the field, the quicksilver quality you didn’t often see in a fullback. So Mitch arrived to the green-and-gray city, the Elysian campus, and the boot-camp-like football practices of the Washington Huskies. The industrial brand of football played in the Pacific Coast Conference was savage compared to what he was used to, but he did not back off from it. Mitch was very sizable, and as determined as he was large. He knew a free ride to a college degree when he saw one.
After where he had come from, college was Coney Island. As best Mitch could determine, he was undergoing something like hourly evolution. Hurrying from class to class, he would have sworn he could feel one part of his brain grow, then another. He was like that example of the chickadee they talked about in Biology 101, able to expand one lobe when winter came and a greater number of feeding spots had to be remembered. For a while it surprised him every time, and then the surprise became reliable, that he all at once could stretch his mind around some bigger thing. Just then the UW campus had some hot departments. History—God, man, over in History one of the profs had kicked William F. Buckley’s fancy butt in a debate over Vietnam. And in English, to his and the department’s mutual astonishment, Mitch found home. The white but Afroed instructor for his writing skills section openly winced when he bulked into her classroom, but as soon as she discovered this was one football jock who seemed incurably curious about the insides of sentences and would rework a piece of writing until the paper gave out, she fed him books. A nature freak herself, she turned him on to Thoreau, inspector-general of the seasons: “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” To the tidal force of Rachel Carson: “I tell here the story of how the young planet Earth acquired an ocean . . .” To the University of Washington’s own just-dead nova, Theodore Roethke, who had held forth in this exact classroom; greenhouse ghost that he always was—it did not hurt that he had been a father fighter, too—Roethke ranted great whispers of poems through the window-panes to Mitch’s tuned-up ear. “At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower/where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert”—Mitch knew that field. And to the human hawk of Big Sur, Robinson Jeffers—Mitch practically groaned sexually when he encountered the lines “the old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers. . . . Love that, not man apart from that.” It was a time when zinger sentences walked the earth.
Football, though. What the University of Washington coaching staff wanted at fullback was a kamikaze short-gainer and what they rather quickly realized they had in Mitch Rozier was an excess of IQ for that role. Kranski, the starting fullback, was barely organized enough to put his socks on, yet turn him loose on third down and short yardage and he would ram into the line like a runaway ox. The second-string fullback, Buford, ran those plunges in his own can’t-hurt-me-if-I-don’t-think-about-it fashion. But Mitch, to his own revelation and certainly the coaches’, always tried to fine-tune that situation of fighting for inches of gridiron; his timing was too fine, hitting the hole over left guard with precision, but if the defensive line delayed the guard any—if an atom of dirt delayed him—the guard would find Mitch running up his backbone in the pigskin equivalent of a rear-end collision. It became apparent to all concerned: the only chance for the name Rozier to be inserted in the University of Washington starting lineup was if Kranski and Buford collided in the shower room and both fractured their tibias. For precisely such a possibility, of course, a major football program needed a battalion of bodies, and nobody much minded Mitch being kept on the team as backup to the backup fullback, especially Mitch.
Busy lighting up in every way he could think of, came the day when he went to football practice after his first experience with marijuana half scared to death that it would somehow show on him, he’d be singled out of the warm-up drill by one of the assistant coaches screeching, “Hey you, dope fiend, outta here!” When no such thing occurred, it quite rapidly dawned on Mitch: these old white-socks guys were afraid to know! Within days he confirmed this by showing up in the locker room wearing a Levi’s jacket with a peace symbol painted on the back and the coaches stared very hard but not one of them said a word to him.
There he sat, then, on into his junior year, all-conference scholastically and benchwarmer into eternity, until the pivotal Saturday afternoon when the Huskies were playing at home against Southern California. Much to the disappointment of the mud-oriented Washington coaching staff, no drop of rain was falling on Seattle, the world capital of H2O. On the dry field Southern Cal tailbacks were taking turns romping around the end of the elephantine Washington line. Bored, the Husky third-stringers were sneaking peeks at the cheerleading squad, envying the yell leader, a gymnastic imp named Mancini whose duty was to put his hands under the purple pleated skirts of the female cheerleaders and boost their pretty butts onto his shoulder.
Mitch in particular was engrossed in watching this activity when Bingford, the freckled and notorious editor of the UW Daily, detached himself from the sidelines press and said something at length into Mancini’s ear.
Lit up like a jack-o’-lantern with inspiration, Mancini grabbed his bullhorn and yelped:
“All right! Listen up, everybody. Just had a request to do a ‘Go’ cheer for an institution that’s dear to us all—North Dakota Agricultural and Scientific! Got it? Go, N-A-D-S!”
Even before the student section woke up brightly to the opportunity to roar “GONADS!” Mitch was laughing fit to rupture and lurched up off the bench. He dashed over, picked up Mancini under the arms, and held him in mid-air like a squirming cat, and shouted:
