Celine slept well, better than she had maybe since those nights in Maine. She woke once needing to pee, and as she was lying there in the warm quilts summoning her will to take up the little headlamp and make the climb down, she was startled by a sweep of headlights against the canvas.
Her first thought was lightning, but then she heard the soft crunch of tires on the dirt road maybe thirty yards away. Was that what had woken her? And not her bladder, which was admittedly tiny? Well, it was now grouse or archery season or whatever in all of these states, isn’t that what Hank had told her? Some hunter was coming home late from the mountains up higher, or going out early.
She was the one with the keen nose, and none of this smelled right. She felt for the Glock in its paddle holster that she’d dutifully clipped to the edge of the bed platform, and she climbed down without the light, feeling the cabinet and then the floor with her bare feet, finding her sheepskin slippers by touch. She shrugged on a fleece jacket that she’d hung off a high cabinet handle, also at the ready. She found the latch and door handle without trouble and eased herself out into the cold damp night. The smells of sage and water and fog were even stronger now. As if the darkness had allowed them to breathe. No rain yet, but the little clearing was now in the clouds that had pushed down into the valley, she could feel their wet touch. And then she saw the blurred red glow of taillights descending out of sight through mist. Hunh. Whoever was passing was not simply traveling—the time between the first flash of headlights and the now disappearing taillights was too long. Someone was curious, or doing recon.
She peed, just squatted in the beaten grass and listened to the creek rush in the dark. Amazing how many sounds when you parsed it: gurgles and spills, a rill like a flute, gulps and drums, even deep gongs.
Amazing, she thought: the layers of anything. The constituents that reveal themselves when you stop and pay attention.
She did not mention anything to Pete until they were both fully awake. They made coffee with the door of the camper open and the smell of the French roast filling their little house. A scrim of rain outside the door. The steady hush. Celine marveled. Is that all it takes? To rearrange the world? To sense again that everything is working as it should? They sat at what Hank had called the side dinette. He couldn’t help but see Celine’s flash of skepticism when he said it.
“I never in my life thought I would entertain myself at a side dinette,” she had murmured. “Sounds like Danette.” Hank saw the slightest shudder.
But there they sat, drinking coffee at the vinyl table, and as at home in the swells of the hills as sailors on a little boat. She told Pete about the truck, she was sure it was a truck, and she said, “You know, you can tell a lot from the sound of tires on a road. Are they in a hurry or dawdling? Heedless of their surroundings or paying very close attention? You can even tell if the driver is mad. This driver was definitely not mad. Very cool. There was a distinctly surreptitious sound to the crunching of those tires.”
Pete had long ago dismissed the notion he’d had in early days that he was indulging the active imagination of his wife. He sipped his coffee. “Mmm,” he said.
“I feel something,” Celine said. “Something is off. This thing about Gabriela losing her thick file of notes.”
“She didn’t say she lost it, she said, ‘I misplaced it. I can’t find it.’ Her exact words. Seems to me there’s a difference.”
Celine chewed on the earpiece of her large tortoiseshell reading glasses. “There can be a big difference, can’t there?”
“She sounded very upset,” Pete said. “But as if she were trying to cover.”
“That’s just it. This feeling of cover. A cover-up.” Celine sipped. Delicious. Why should coffee with cream and honey be better out here? “I’m not sure of anything,” she said. “Which is almost wonderful.”
They drank their coffee slowly and Celine wrote her letter to Hank. Then they buttoned up the truck and Celine picked up an animal bone that looked like a little mask—probably a pelvis, she’d use it for something—and they drove northwest toward Jackson Hole. The rain lightened then cleared and the groves of aspen running up through the slopes of black timber seemed to be a deeper yellow and the fields of wheatgrass tinged with faint green. Fall rain. They stopped for breakfast at the Fort Washakie Diner, which was crowded with mostly Native Americans eating breakfast after what looked like maybe night shifts working at the casino. A brown spotted pit bull snoozed contentedly in a corner and a round-faced Native girl served them with four curt syllables: “Can I getchyou?” She was almost as laconic as Pete.
She took their order without a hint of smile, but when she brought coffee refills she couldn’t help herself. “You from L.A.?” she said. “He don’t look like it, but you do.” She pointed not quite accusingly with the pot.
That set them to laughing and the girl finally cracked a smile that brightened the whole room.
“New York,” they said.
“Figured,” she said.
“What’s the dog’s name?” asked Celine.
“Orchard.”
“Orchard? Why on earth do you call him Orchard?”
The girl twisted her lips, “ ’Cuz he looks like a apple.” Her eyes sparkled.
Celine looked at the muscly, lumpy, snoring dog. “Hunh. He’s about the furthest thing from an apple I think I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I said, Richard,” the girl chided.
As they got up to pay at the counter Celine noticed a youngish trim-bearded white man at a booth in the corner, wearing a creased and unfaded plaid shirt, this one red. She couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a baseball cap and he was concentrating hard on a ketchup-covered omelet, head down.
NINE
We have all seen the posters and prints of the bends of the Snake River curling beneath the sharp granite towers of the Grand Tetons. The water is black and the peaks are dusted with new snow and the cottonwoods along the banks are yellow, their smoldering ranks throwing the scale of the mountains into perspective. Because the tall trees look tiny running along the bottom of the picture. It may be morning and the river is covered in mist that moves over the water like smoke, and there may be one man fishing, his fly rod bent back mid-cast. If he is there, it is only to remind us that the grandeur and shocking beauty are not of human scale. That the most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.
Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.
Those were Celine’s thoughts as she drove along the river on just such a morning. The mist smoked and rose, the peaks towered, the cottonwoods caught the sun from the south and blazed and flamed. It was almost too grand. It could not be real.
“Look, Pete,” she said. “There’s a man fishing down there in the fog. It looks just like that poster of Hank’s.”
“Aye-yup.” Pa was speaking Maine this morning. Clearly the Washakie waitress in her reticence had reminded him of his first language.
They drove out into the open grass valley where a herd of elk in their hundreds grazed head down unafraid of bow hunters. “That’s the National Elk Refuge,” said Celine, pointing. “I remember all this. I took Mimi skiing here for her thirtieth birthday. I remember we rode a big cable car to the top—that mountain there, can you see it?—and once we got above the fog it was bright sun and blue blue sky, and as we neared the summit an announcement in the gondola said something about ‘If you are not an expert ride back down.’ It was glorious skiing up there, all those steep chutes. And down below the whole valley obscured by a layer of clouds. When we took our long run all the way to the bottom for lunch we skied right through that floor of clouds, right into mist and snow! We were like two little airplanes!”