The stream came straight from the Continental Divide, where water became other water, all-powerful and cold, but the trout were gone from the shallows and they could not drink the water any more than they could from the Chicago River. If they’d not sent the deposit, he would have left over it. An alpine stream, the Internet ad read. Cold, clear snow runoff. He assumed he could dip his cupped hands and drink sloppily, letting the water numb his mouth, but the rental manager dropped off two cases of Evian for the week. Screw this place, Mike said. But Susan calmed him, the way she did after the happiness about his first novel faded like a new car smell. She made him look north where the woods and the canyon walls were all one thing, like a great idea, strangely jagged and soft, but always the same. They were here to let go. They were here to wash it all away and see if they could feel clean again. Relax, she told him. She lowered her voice to say it.
At night, they wrapped themselves in one blanket and sat watching the clouds blow down from the high range. The sky turned green and the lightning splayed like fingers. They tried to make love and it went badly so they held hands and talked about getting new cats and perhaps their own house in the cornfields south of Chicago. They talked like they believed the abortion was not the sad and humiliating thing it truly was. They were cautious with each other. They never talked about the bad dreams or the weak feeling that went to their knees. Sitting still under the blanket, they would make themselves laugh by naming the new cats after cartoon characters or friends they’d had. When the jokes went, they listened to the slackening rain, holding each other, both seeing him in the waiting room with People magazine while she lay dilated before the doctor. Then later, when the clouds blew through the canyon, they would decide the farmhouse they wanted must have white clapboards and a long front porch and stained glass in the eastern windows to color the sunrise. I’ll build a fireplace from river rocks, he said. I’ll cut the wood, good hackberry. She lay her head against his shoulder, her hair wet from the leaky awning. I’ll sweep the porch and try not to wake the sleeping cats, she said.
All week they held hands and hiked trails of slate rock slick from the wet spring. They came upon elk herds sleeping in scrub meadows, ground squirrels running between holes like vaudeville comics, and one night watched a coyote nosing by the car. They stopped and studied waterfalls, shooting rapids, boulders dropped amongst birch trees like monoliths. She took pictures, holding the camera up and down to get in his height. We pick up from here, she said. One day after the next, he thought. Like walking.
They took Interstate 80 home through the stout hills of Nebraska, where cattle herds balded pastures and fat kids with sunburned legs waved from overpasses. The sunlight was low and even and white. Susan found new stations when the distance beat the signal. Outside Cheyenne, they heard Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on college radio, and listened through the static. He wished they could sing it together, let go the way dogs howl.
“I can’t believe they’re playing this song,” she said.
“Go with it,” he said.
“I didn’t like it then.”
She turned down the volume and he heard the wind over the sad, growly singer. Ian Curtis was a put-on, she said. She’d talked about dancing in the aisles at Talking Heads concerts back in college, really throwing her arms above her head, and for twelve years he tried imagining it.
Mike first saw people scrubbing their windshields with green pads at a truck stop near Kimball. The insect guts darkened the glass like window tint, but his remained clean enough to see Susan’s reflection without spots shadowed on her face. They must have hit an odd stretch of air, he thought. Smiling guys with RVs stood upon stepladders and worked their elbows, watching Susan walk for the rest room, her hand squeezing her purse strap. Look at the ass on her, their faces said.
“You can’t get the bugs all the way off with a squeegee,” a man in a cowboy hat told him. “Not out here. Go get you some green pads at the Wal-Mart in Brownson.”
Mike nodded that he’d make do and the man shrugged his shoulders. He went looking for Susan because that morning she’d cried on a Texaco toilet seat outside Cheyenne, sobbing so hard her eyes were still swollen at noon. He’d stood outside the door, his shadow broken on a propane tank, asking her what she wanted from him. My eyes are all puffy, she’d said.
“Remember,” the man called out, “it’s the bugs’ world in Nebraska and we just live in it.”
Mike drove off and set the cruise at eighty-five and read the mileage sign for North Platte, Kearny, Omaha. Sure, Tex, he thought of the man. It’s probably just like you say.
Ogalala was a hundred miles away when the bugs came out of the white sky like spilled coffee. They stitched the windshield. He looked hard through the smears and heard them hitting while Susan searched the radio for a stronger station. He couldn’t see and the bug shadows spotted her cheeks. She scanned and listened for a half second, caring more about a clear signal than the music.
In Chicago, they went on dates again. Just the two of them. They were making steps, like they talked about in the mountains, and meeting at restaurant bars, the same places from ten years ago, an Italian place on Racine, or a Lebanese bistro far north on Clark. Then, they’d drunk martinis because people were doing it again, he Stoli, she Absolut, and laughed about inside jokes with friends they last knew had moved to Seattle. Lance was Heineken, then Bombay and tonic when he bloated. Elizabeth liked Cosmopolitans. It was the pretty glass, the faded red vodka. In those days, they were all just off work, the loop or the near north side, where women swung Coach bags and pigeon feathers fell in the puddles. They sang Nat King Cole songs with the jukebox and thought things were one big wave.
Tonight, Mike and Susan ordered their martinis and sat alone at Rico’s. The bar was clean, but scratched. She played with her olive stick. Mike wanted to tell her there wasn’t enough air in their apartment for two, and it was good they left the place to fill back up. Open windows, a hard wind, the curtains pushed to the ceiling. But she would only look at him, her eyes becoming wet. We were just in Colorado for two weeks, she’d say. Air isn’t the problem. Now, they sat where they once drank grappa like they knew something special, and said nothing about him becoming a cop. She was sure he’d pull the plug, that it was already an old idea he had of himself. You wait, he thought. I can’t lose in that world.
Mike watched the waiters watch the 6 o’clock news. There was a fire west on Harrison, around Cicero, an eight-flat lit up like a wedding party. Kids aped for the news camera.
“You think Lance and Elizabeth ever married?” he said.
“No. She left him for a doctor.”
“How do you know?”
She pointed to the rest room through a doorway, by a pay phone. Two busboys looked at her where they folded silverware into cloth napkins.
“We used to talk in there. She was scared Lance’s dreams were too tied up with him going out.”
“He wanted to design computer games.”
“She said he only ever had plans on barstools beside you.”
“He knew what he wanted to do.”
“I bet the doctor dumped her after she left Lance.”
“Where’s this coming from?”
“That girl was like a monkey with men,” she said. “She always had her hand on a branch before she swung. One has had to break.”