“I can give you twenty,” I said.
“Hell,” he said, “I could always tap Sloane.”
“I’d rather give it to you myself,” I said.
“Shit,” he said, “you already done more than enough.”
I shrugged. “You’re my brother, Jack. That’s what it’s all about.” I gave him a twenty.
“Thanks, Kid,” he said. “I’ll get it back to you.”
“No rash,” I said.
“I suppose I ought to get goin’,” he said. “I’d like to make it to Portland before too late.”
“Sure, Jack. Just drop me at the gate of the trailer court, OK?”
“Right.”
We drove on back and stopped outside the court.
He held out his hand and we shook.
“I probably won’t see you for a while,” he said, “but I’ll keep in touch.”
“Sure, Jack.”
“It’s been a wild six months or so, hasn’t it?”
“Far out,” I said.
“At least we got to go huntin’ together,” he said. “That’s somethin’ anyway.”
“It was the best of it,” I told him.
He nodded and I opened the door.
“You know somethin’, Danny? What I was sayin’ about a guy bein’ afraid of things — that argument me and the Old Man had?”
“Yeah?”
“He was right, you know that?”
“He usually was, Jack.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’, and this is the straight stuff. Maybe I hide it pretty good, but to tell you the honest-to-God truth, I been afraid all my life. It just took somethin’ like this to make me realize it.”
“Everybody’s afraid, Jack, not just you. That’s what Dad was trying to tell you. You’ve just got to learn to live with it.”
He nodded. “Well,” he said, “take care now.”
“You too, Jack.”
We shook hands again, and I got out.
I stood at the side of the road watching his battered Plymouth until it disappeared around a comer about a half mile down the highway.
That evening I told Clydine about it.
“I told you a long time ago that it was going to happen,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “How did you know, anyhow?”
“I just knew, that’s all.”
“That sure isn’t much help,” I said. “I mean, if I were to suddenly go into the business of suicide prevention, it wouldn’t give me much to go on, would it?”
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, “the girl just seemed to think of herself in the past tense somehow. Even that creepy Helen talked about what she planned to do next week or next year. Sandy just never did. She didn’t have any future. A woman always thinks about the future — always. When you find one who doesn’t, watch out.”
“As simple as that?”
She nodded. “Along with a good healthy gut-feel for it. Being around her was like being at a funeral. It wasn’t anything recent, because she had gotten pretty well used to it by then. She was just waiting for the right time.”
“I should have warned Jack,” I said.
“He couldn’t have stopped her.”
“That’s not what I meant. He got tangled up in it, and it’s tearing him all up inside.”
“He’ll come out of it,” she said. “He’s too much of an egomaniac not to.”
“Why, you heartless little witch!” I said.
“Oo, poo,” she said.
“Poo?”
“All right then, shit!” she snapped. “Your brother’s got all the sensitivity of a telephone pole, and about as much compassion as a meat grinder. He’ll make out.”
There was no point pushing the issue. She didn’t like Jack, and she wasn’t about to waste any sympathy on him.
That night I had the dream again. I caught flashes of a sad-eyed old dog rolling over and over in the snow and of the white deer lying huddled at the foot of that gravel bank, the masculinity of his antlers sheared off by his fall and his deep red eye gazing reproachfully at me through the film of dust that powdered it. And Sandy was there, too, standing nude by the sink in that house out in Milton, her nudity sexless — even meaningless, and her voice echoing back to me:
“It doesn’t matter. It’s only for a little while, just a little while.”
Epilogue
I didn’t get the chance to get back up to the Methow Valley that spring. The money ran short on me. I wrote to Cap, of course, telling him how sorry I was, and through the stiff formality of his letters, I could sense his disappointment as well.
I guess I had talked up the high country to my little Bolshevik to the point that she finally got a bellyful of hearing about it because she finally put her foot down.
“This is it,” she said in early July, delivering her non-negotiable demands. “We are both going to take two weeks off and go up there. I’m going to meet the great Cap Miller and his crotchety but lovable sidekick Clint. I am also going up to look at that damned Valhalla of yours.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“Chicken-pucky we can’t. We’ve both got a steady income during the school year and good steady jobs this summer. The office I work in shuts down for the first two weeks in August so that all the regular people can take their vacations, and that crazy Swede boat builder you work for is so convinced that you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread that he’ll probably give you the two weeks with pay.”
“Chicken-pucky?”
“Oh, shut up!”
We argued about it for a week or so, but my heart wasn’t really in it.
When I approached Norstrom, my boss, he screamed for twenty minutes about how he couldn’t possibly spare me and wound up trying to convince me that I ought to go fishing up the inside passage instead.
I had to lie a little in my letter to Cap, and I didn’t like that at all. Though I knew he wouldn’t have said anything, I also knew that he probably wouldn’t have approved of the irregularity of Clydine and myself going off into the hill without benefit of clergy, as it were. I told him we were going to elope, and that this was going to be our honeymoon. It was a big mistake because he insisted on furnishing everything for our trip at no charge. I felt like a real shitheel about it.
Anyway, on the third of August, Blossom and I were batting along on the highway north to Lake Chelan, headed for Twisp. It was about eight o’clock in the morning and we were both a little sleepy.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t have slept a little later,” she complained. We’d spent the night at a motel in Cashmere.
“It takes a good long while to get up there,” I said. “It’s not exactly a roadside campground, Tulip.”
“Couldn’t we at least stop someplace? I’m starved.”
“We’ll be there in another hour,” I told her. “You’ll need all the appetite you can muster to get even partway around the kind of breakfast Clint cooks up.”
She grunted and curled back up in the seat.
I woke her when we got to Twisp, and she insisted on stopping at a gas station. I fidgeted around for the twenty minutes or so that she was in the rest room with her overnight bag, wondering what she was up to.
When she came out, she looked like a different girl. She’d put in her contact lenses, caught her hair in a loose coil at the back of her neck, and she was wearing a white blouse and tailored slacks. She’d even put on lipstick, for God’s sake!
“Wow,” I said.
“Oh, be quiet.”
“You’re gorgeous, Rosebud. I mean it.”
She looked at me to see if I were kidding her, and when she saw that I wasn’t, she actually blushed.
“All right,” she said, “let’s go meet your family.”
What she’d said didn’t really register on me until we were a ways out of town.
“Why did you say that?” I asked her.
“Say what?”
“About meeting my family?”
“Just a bad joke,” she said. “Forget it.”
We drove along the twisting, narrow road out toward Miller’s place. The road looked different with the poplar leaves all green instead of the gold I’d remembered from the preceding autumn, but the whole stretch of road was still breathtaking.
“It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” she said finally, touching nervously at her hair.
“Wait till we get up higher,” I said. “It gets even better.”
I slowed the car and turned into Miller’s driveway. The colt was a yearling now, but he still loved to run. He galloped alongside us, tossing his head.
“I didn’t know horses chased cars, too,” she said.
I laughed. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice faltering.
Cap was waiting for us out in the yard, and he looked even more rugged than I remembered him. Then he grinned and it was like the sun coming up.