|
DESERT RETURN
Desert Return
Rosie Dempsey
When her husband told Marco, I knew my wife would fall in love with you, Gina was astonished. She figured Charles spoke without thinking.
That was last spring, the three of them around Marco’s dining table at a game of cards. He went right on playing his hand as though nothing had been said. Gina and Charles were temporarily living in a house down the dusty road from his, and soon after they left.
These words still play in Gina's head when they return the following spring on another contract with the BLM.
This year, the other staff houses are full and they are assigned to bunk in Marco’s spare room for their week stay. She knocks on the screen door of the pre-fab adobe ranch house, her smile a mask of indifference.
“Come on in,” he shouts. She follows his voice.
“Great to see you,” she says, standing as close to him as she dares. His lean muscularity and grin are unchanged.
“Here’s your room,” he says, and throws a pillow on a spare bed that fills the space where boxes sat last year. Gone are the long lengths of climbing rope that looped over pegs and covered a whole
wall. Now, the room is stripped, ordinary.
At dusk, Marco emerges from his bedroom on the other side of the house and stands shirtless before the stereo system. His head is bare stubble, his arms and chest brushed with brown hair.
“Here’s a hot new band,” he says.
She stays behind the kitchen counter that elbows out and says, “I thought I’d make us all dinner.”
Charles and Marco sit at either end of the table and discuss the basin and range geology that surrounds them.
“So, how long you two been married?” he says.
“Twenty years,” she says, smiling.
She feels eroded like the stone canyons they hike—weathered, carved away, but less beautiful not more. Once it was enough to be married to a good man, to be absorbed by her job in a research lab. But, after nine years, she was riffed from her federally funded position during a downturn in the economy. And during all those years wearing a white lab coat, the babies would not stay, painfully dripping out of her in deep red clots like failed experiments. After that, Charles had said, a rest, a good long rest is what you need.
He wins contracts that take them far from Denver to spend months in remote desert locals, often in the Mojave.
She hikes and counts rare plants as he does. Out on the desert, her eyes trained on the ground, she waits to discover what lies on the other side of a good rest.
After two long days helping Charles in the field on the inventory update, she stays back at the house.
With both men gone, she stares into the bathroom mirror. She sees an average woman with dull brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and tanned skin. Average is a horrible word, she thinks as she stares at the dark rings beneath her eyes. Still, she looks younger than her age. That has been tougher to achieve, let alone feel, since hitting forty and losing her job. Part of her never wants to go back to Denver. She wants to go on sliding into Charles’s arms each night in this unfamiliar bedroom, and hear Marco walk the house like a tomcat. She wants to ask him to taste the dish she is preparing when he returns from his daily run, to listen to his CDs, to hear him say, Great meal each night.
When the three of them ride into town for groceries, Marco drives his pickup fast and haphazardly on the empty road that slices through the stone-sculpted
landscape. They are jammed side-by-side on the bench seat, and she relishes him there next to her.
Under the late sun, the roadside is spotted with globemallows and prickly poppy. Marco takes the turns fast and wide and passes a lumbering tour bus with nonchalance. Her husband gives her a look she reads to mean: You’d never let me drive like this without a royal fuss. He is right, and she is surprised not to be afraid. She feels strangely liberated, as if cavalier driving were what had been missing from her life.
“I’m thirsty,” Marco says.
She hands him the water bottle she carries everywhere.
“You don’t mind?” he says.
“No, go ahead,” she says. He looks at her as he holds it up to his mouth.
He gives it back, and she places her lips where his just were and drinks before passing the water to her husband.
“I have some errands,” says Marco when they reach town.
“Sure,” she says.
He hands her a short list and a twenty in the grocery lot.
The store is shockingly cold and offers many specialty foods that cater to the European tourists who flock to the parks in the region. They stock fresh cheeses, heavy breads, pickled ginger, and seaweed. She and Charles select food for the long drive home as well as treats for their last dinners with Marco.
Heading back to the truck, she sees Marco talking to a woman. A band of her supple belly is bare.
She knows his reputation as a seducer of the young women who do a season of environmental work at the park. Last year’s housemates gossiped about him.
“Who was that?” Gina says as the young woman walks away.
“A friend,” Marco says.
“Cute friend,” says Charles, and smiles at his wife.
Charles and Marco are animatedly discussing water evaporation as they stare in the direction of the receding woman.
She sits amidst their laughter. She notices that the men have tied bandanas on their heads, pirate-style. She props her legs on the dash, where they look sleeker.
Marco turns onto the highway, and pops in more music-- another band she has never heard before. Their desert return is honey-colored by the waning sun.
They pass through towering limestone formations and slowly climb the road. The moon grazes the edge of the cliff. There is not a building in sight until they turn down the dusty road towards the housing. The truck unloaded, they sit at the table eating the Nutella spread and fresh strawberries that were on Marco’s list. He opens the windows and breeze courses through the house. He licks a spoonful of hazelnut chocolate and then hands her a fresh dip with a grin.
Charles looks up from the editorial page of The LA Times. “One more for me,” he says.
She wipes the spoon across her tongue with her eyes on Marco before scooping more onto a strawberry for her husband.
That night, she poses seductively for Charles as she removes her clothes. Neither acknowledges that the statistics on their sex life have dramatically improved since arriving: three times in five
days, three times above par.
“You be careful, now,” he says grabbing at her as if he has lion’s paws.
She moves just out of reach. It is an old game they have not played in a while.
“Don’t get in over your head, except with me,” he says, his face close to hers, his hands gripping her soft flesh.
The next evening, Charles persuades Marco to show his slides.
So far, he has been reticent about the details of his job as a ranger. He hangs a large sheet on the paneled living room wall, and sets up the projector. They sit in the dark on the couch. In the slides he is twenty-five instead of thirty-five, and scaling vertical walls of blond and chocolate stone. He hangs from colored cords tied through pitons driven into rock a thousand feet up. Then, a royal blue parka fills the screen, brilliant against the dusty soil. “We have to document every recovery,” Marco says. She recognizes the soft curves of the Granite Mountains.
“A recovery versus a rescue?” Charles says.
“You don’t rescue the dead,” he says flatly.
Only then does she recognize the blood on the rock near the facedown climber. Marco keeps clicking, wordlessly. The body, bagged, is carried away.
“I did the report,” he says. “He was a German tourist. Lost his footing. A hiker saw him.”
She imagines herself stranded on an outcrop, her ankle twisted, Marco finding her, and the clutch of intimacy that bonds the rescued with the rescuer. In the dark, Gina sits frozen on the couch.
All she can hear is the whirling fan of the slide projector cooling the bulb, and Marco walking away, the slide show over.
On their last full day, the afternoon sky is strangely clouded. Around five they lie down for a nap.
Her husband will do all the driving so she is glad he falls asleep immediately. She lies quietly and holds her own hand. No matter how much moisturizer she slathers on daily, these months in the desert, moving from one location to the next, like a pilgrimage, have crackled her skin and made her hands look like an old woman’s. Well after eight o’clock, with her husband still snoring beside her, Marco has not returned and she is disappointed. When the front door clicks, she rises.
“Electricity’s off,” she says. He hangs up his gear.
“You still leaving tomorrow?” he says from somewhere inside his room. “There’s weather expected where you’re heading.”
He walks out with his chest bare, as usual, and locates candles, setting them around on plates and bowls. He has promised to show her how to make sushi. She gets out the cold cooked rice they
had made the night before. They work side by side their hips against the counter.
Her hands reach and scoop globs of the sticky rice onto the paper-thin sheet of nori, following his lead. He slices into slivers the fresh carrots, scallions, and smoked trout, then presses a combination into the center. She rolls the tube of seaweed and seals it with a bead of wetness, just as he does. The fat roll of sushi lays in her palm.
“You need a really good edge,” Marco says as he slides the blade along a sharpening stone.
He takes the roll from her and slices it. They fill the platter with the wedges of bound rice. She puts out the special condiments—pickled ginger and wasabi, and pours water into three glasses.
“Dinner’s ready,” she sings out to Charles, who is up and coming out of the bathroom.
“Great, I’m starving,” he says.
Marco sets down a bottle of Sambucca on the table and pours his water onto a potted cactus.
Anise flavors the air as he drinks. The storm gusts loudly as they dip sushi into individual bowls of soy mixed with the lime green hot paste. Gina loves the taste of the pink ginger.
“Here’s to you, buddy. Thanks for your hospitality.” Charles raises his glass of water. “You’re always welcome at our place.”
“Me cross the continental divide?” Marco says with surprise.
“Not if I can help it, but thanks.” He is on his third glass of Sambucca when suddenly lights come back on and the appliances click to life, humming.
“It’s time for the Carnavál CD,” Marco bellows. He flips the light switches off.
“Dance?” her husband says, but does not rise to join her. She wills herself to relax as she holds two candles set in shallow bowls, raising and
lowering them in a seesaw motion. “Lovely,” he shouts over the pounding music.
He drums on the tabletop in rhythm. When Marco and Charles join in, their shadows play on the paneled walls like animals at a nocturnal watering hole, gathering while the world sleeps. When Marco lurches off balance, he catches himself against the wall and sets his candle down.
The rain finally pelts the windows, and when it thunders, Charles rests, his outline framed by the red of the leather chair.
She had expected dry rain, but this is the real thing. Marco stands steady in the center of the rug as the next song begins. Her free hand reaches out to him, and his arms go over his head in a diver’s pose. The soft inside of her arm, fingertips to bicep, slides against his torso as she glides around him in a circle. Her outside arm is extended like a wing, lit by the beacon of candle. When the CD ends, she peels herself away and collapses dizzy on the couch.
Now the thumping is her heart not the wind. She looks for Charles who is gone. In the silence, Marco saunters off.
She hears the front door creak and sees Charles standing there. The air outside is quiet and clear. He turns to her.
“You all right, Honey?” He stands behind the couch kneading her shoulders.
“Hmmm,” she says.
“It’s getting late,” he says. He turns on the overhead and begins to clear the dishes. She is desperately thirsty from the salty food and wet with sweat. She looks for her water.
“Oh, my, gosh,” she exclaims. Marco emerges from his room. She points.
The spots splatter the rug and go up the wall onto the large sheet that held the images of the dead climber last night. She squats and rubs the weave of the loop carpet. The wax is deeply embedded. “Oh, Marco,” she says, scraping with her nail, “It’s going to be so difficult to get this out.”
“Don’t,” he says. “Leave it. I like it.”
She smiles with satisfaction that Marco will see these marks long after she is gone.
“It’s eleven,” Charles says.
“The night is still young,” says Marco.
“We leave at dawn,” Charles says. “We have a long day ahead of us.”
“I told you, precip’ expected where you’re heading. Believe me, man,” he says drunkenly and turns away.
Charles walks down the hall.
She looks at Marco’s back, then follows her husband to their bedroom, and falls asleep in spite of hearing Marco doing chin ups on the bar wedged in the hallway. His small grunts remind her of the possums of her childhood who wandered through their yard in the night.
In the soft light she waves at Marco’s solitary figure. He stands there in a bathrobe, coffee cup in hand, seemingly indifferent to their departure.
Their wheels churn dust into the air as they pull away. “You had a really good time,” her husband says as he drives them away. She stares out the window at the curves and plains of endless desert.
Near dusk she smells the wet in the air as the highway climbs the mountains under a muted sky. The forest greenery is a wonderful shock.
“I want things to be different between us,” she says.
“I know,” he says. “It’ll happen, be patient.”
She considers whether she might work her way back into animal biology, wolves or pupfish, a field research job?
A few flakes start to fall. It’s coming down heavily. Charles leans forward as if to increase his visibility. She calls out their nearness to other cars and when trucks are coming up fast from behind, telling him when to move right or left. They pass a vehicle that has gone off into a ditch.
“It’s more dangerous to stop than it is to drive on,” he says.
They are entombed.
At the very center of their existence are her husband’s hands gripping the wheel, and on the edge of their vision, the highway he must navigate with few clues to its boundaries. The sound of their vehicle becomes eerily loud as the snow muffles everything else. She hums, barely audibly.
She keeps looking out the front and back windows, scanning the blur, then focusing on the familiar profile of her husband’s face. After fifteen minutes that pass like an hour, the snow thins.
Finally, visibility returns.
Gina reaches across and rubs Charles’ neck. It will be a relief to make it to a motel, to climb between sheets with him, his body heat warming her, to be alone, together.
They can recover from the tension of driving blind and settle back into one another. “Let’s not go too far,” she says. He breathes deeply as her fingers press into his taut muscles. The snow disappears from the ground as they descend the mountain.
|
