For some reason, Holly liked to toy with the idea of her parents’ great and irreversible ancientness. She loved anecdotes about the sixties, which she associated with her father; she viewed him as a romantic rebel of ambiguity. She knew that he not only wasn’t fighting or protesting, he was demolishing the mansions and heirlooms of unguarded America. He was furnishing franchises with salad bars — and he never ate salad. He hated salad. He liked T-bones and potatoes. He even tried to tear down Mama’s indigo plantation! This last was a shared family-origin tale, though Mama owned no such plantation. Daddy the opportunist appears on the levee with a wrecking bar in his hand and a Los Angeles restaurant-chain contract in his hip pocket like a four-shot derringer. Gracie allowed a barbaric rakishness to seep into her version of Frank’s fomenting the spread of neon down the Mississippi. Holly always wanted to hear little stories of how they met and married.
“What would you like to eat?”
“Are you cooking for me?”
“Have I ever not?”
Holly puzzled through the tense, then said, “No, you’ve never not.”
Frank had already started her favorite, a monster of calories and simplicity known as New England boiled dinner, featuring corned beef, rutabaga, new potatoes, hot mustard and coarse grain bread he got from the Blue Moon bakery, whose sweet-smelling baked goods were proscribed by every responsible doctor. And beer. He loved to guzzle yellow cans of Coors with his beautiful daughter and talk football, school work, America, money, romance, the evolving life of the Great American West.
She always asked about his fishing. Sometimes he showed her a new rod or an English reel or curious flies like sparkle duns and olive emergers and flashabou woolly buggers. They’d pull open his desk drawer at home and peer into the pewter-colored fly boxes with their exotic mysteries of silk and steel and feathers. He’d mention favorite river names: the Sixteen, the Ruby, the Madison, the Jefferson, the Bow, the Crow’s Nest, the Skykomish, the Dean. When she was a little girl, he would make up stories that took place in the great drainages like the Columbia or the Skeena or the Missouri, and the place names would restore their years together. He could still thrill her with the story about the time the great brown trout towed his canoe past the city of Helena in the middle of the night, past the glow of its lights on the night sky of August, a fish he had to break off at the head of thundering rapids whose standing waves curved five feet high in the cold white moonlight.
They listened to the local news and weather as Frank finished cooking and Holly set the table. She laid out the utensils and napkins; she centered the hot pad and then Frank served the meal and poured the beer. They sat down and Holly sighed.
“This is it,” said Frank.
“No food on the plane. I’m ready.”
Frank gazed with pride at his own cooking. Most of the time, he ate Lean Cuisine microwave dinners, Campbell’s tomato soup or leftovers dumped into half-limp taco shells while fixated on the livestock reports, the index of leading indicators, new home starts, west Texas intermediate crude or some other fool thing that seemed to connect him with the economics games there were to be played. In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power — as the Chrysler ads used to say — like the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Also, he was good at it and always had been. His mother had said he had his father’s nose: he could pick up the scent of a deal from a good ways off, as sharks are said to do with blood. He actually had the knack to a greater degree than his father.
“I regard this as a quality family atmosphere,” Frank said to Holly.
The superb golden light of evening came down through the leaves of the Norwegian silver maple and through the windows of the dining room and lit up their faces and the things on the table.
“Who’s your current boyfriend?”
“A fellow named Mark Plante.”
“I don’t like the sound of this. What’s he like?”
“Kind of a comical little nitwit. He won’t be around long.”
“I like this guy more and more.”
“There’s plenty where he came from. They’re like fleas on a dog. I’ve had several lunches with the leader of a citizens’ group. I’ve also had a few attentions from a young history professor.”
“They’ve begun preying on the students, have they?”
“I thought they always have.”
“Well, with these bountiful federal grants, there’s more time for dalliance than there was in my day.”
“They had other problems in your time — keeping you people from breaking into the president’s office and smoking the cigars, burning the flag, describing the pink spiders crawling out of your desks to the biology professor who can’t seem to make them out.”
“Don’t ridicule, Holly. That stuff’s coming back. What about this bird from the citizens’ group? Haven’t I heard of him?”
“He gets in the papers from time to time. He wants to keep Montana for Montanans.” Holly smiled with a new potato rakishly poised on a fork. “Would you ever let your hair grow again?”
“No. I don’t think any of us would. It’s better to hide these secrets. To infiltrate. To duly note the action of the scavengers who have followed us down the great American highway.”
“The secret drifter.”
“The secret drifter.”
“You are a drifter, aren’t you, Daddy? In your heart?”
“A drifter.”
“But you don’t move much anymore.”
“This is my home. Recently, though, I visited the Eskimos.”
“And?”
“About what you would expect, sans igloos. They’re in a place that’s hard to live and it seems to get them down. They have TV. They know what’s going on. They want to know why they got dealt the permafrost. There are anthropologists and sociologists up there teaching them to curse their fate and cast their blame in a wide circle.”
“I don’t understand what you were doing there.”
“I wanted to get away. Remember Mama’s friend Lucy? She’s a travel agent. I told her to just put a little trip together for me that would really be a break. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me.”
“How is Lucy, anyway?”
“She’s bored, a fine person. She sits under the posters of tropic isles and doesn’t really care if anyone goes anywhere or not. You hear it in her voice. She doesn’t have that big belief, that Kathie Lee Gifford sort of booming view of people getting out and about on a cruise ship. She doesn’t really see why anyone bothers. And of course this pops up on the balance sheet as self-fulfilling prophecy —” He stopped abruptly. He could hear himself talking exactly as he would if he were talking to Gracie. When he looked at Holly, who was not eating but simply gazing both fondly and reflectively at him, he knew she was having the same thought, or something very much like the same thought.
“Do you know why I stopped talking?” he inquired.
“Yup.”
“I thought so. Well, what can you do.”
Holly said, “I’ll wash, you dry.”
He turned on the radio, the oldies station, and Van Morrison sang while they worked.
You can take all the tea in China,
Put it in a big brown bag for me,
Sail right round all the seven oceans,