The only problem was that he’d turned strange on her. They came together, flesh to flesh, invigorated by a new sense of purpose and hope of fulfillment, ecstatic once again, and it lasted a week. If that. Next thing she knew, he was gone. She came to the cabin early, to surprise him, and he wasn’t there. He’s fishing, she thought, he’s checking his traps and he’s lost track of the time, and she settled in to wait for him. It was a long wait. For he’d gone back to Jamestown, back to One Bird.
After a week — an interminable week, an eternal week, a week during which she neither slept nor ate and haunted the cabin like one of the unappeased spirits that were said to brood over the place in never-ending torment — she loaded up the station wagon with eighteen cartons of Happy Face potholders and came looking for him. She found him on One Bird’s porch, shirtless, a necklace of polished bone dangling from his throat, the terrible freight of his years caught in the saraband of his scars, in the sullen slump of his shoulders, in the reptilian gaze of his eyes. He was cleaning fish and his hands were wet with blood. He looked as savage in that moment as any of his savage ancestors. But no more so than One Bird, all two hundred fifty pounds of her, who sat glaring at his side.
Joanna was unimpressed. She jerked the station wagon to a halt out front, flung open the door and tore up the path like an avenging demon. She was wearing the leggings, the jacket, the rawhide shift, and she’d darkened her skin with bloodroot till it was the color of a penny scooped from the gutter. Half a dozen strides and she was on him, her nails sunk like talons in the meat of his arm, and then she was leading him down the steps and around the corner of the house, oblivious to the unbroken skein of One Bird’s threats and insults. When she got him out back, out behind the drooping clothesline hung with One Bird’s gently undulating sheets and massive underdrawers, she flogged him with the sharp edge of her tongue. She began with the bloodcurdling philippic she’d rehearsed all the lonely way up Route 17, and ended with a rhetorical question delivered in a shriek so keen it would have driven eagles from their kilclass="underline" “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? Huh?”
He was twice her size, and he looked down on her out of the green slits of his eyes. “Cleaning perch,” he said.
She gave it a minute, rocking back on the balls of her feet, and then she lashed out and slapped him. Hard. So hard the tips of her fingers went numb.
Just as quickly, and with twice the force, he slapped her back.
“You bastard,” she hissed, her stony eyes wet with the sting of his blow. “You’re leaving me, is that it? To live up here with that — that fat old woman?”
He said nothing, but he was wearing a little smile now. One Bird’s great innocent bloomers floated on the breeze.
“You’re not sleeping with her,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
He didn’t tell her anything. The smile spread.
“Because if you are …” she trailed off. “Jeremy,” she whispered, so softly, so passionately she might have been praying. “Jeremy.”
He took her hands. “I want to fuck you,” he said, “so bad.”
Later, after he’d led her away from the dumb show of those billowing bloomers and they’d wound up making love in a clump of milkweed behind Dick Fourtrier’s place, he answered her question. “I’m thinking things over, that’s what I’m doing,” he said.
“What things?”
“Boats.”
“Boats?” she echoed, as bewildered as if he’d said “pomeranians,” “sputniks” or “saxophones.”
Boats. He was giving up the cabin — at least until their son was born, and by the way, was she, uh—? No? Well, they’d keep trying. Anyway, what he wanted was a change of scene. All of this ancestral soil business was beginning to wear on him — he could feel the spirits of Sachoes and the first doomed Jeremy Mohonk pressing in on him, and he needed a break, something different, did she know what he meant? He thought he’d like to live on a boat — off his feet, off the land that was draining him day by day of the little strength he had left. He’d seen a ketch for sale at the Peterskill marina. He needed fifteen hundred dollars.
She didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. For one thing, her husband had a boat at the marina, and how could she visit Jeremy there without arousing suspicion? And for another, Indians didn’t live on boats. They lived in longhouses, in lodges and wickiups and tar-paper shacks, they lived on land. And why in God’s name would he want to spoil the setup they already had? The way it was, she could visit him any time the spirit moved her — through the woods, direct to his bed, a fifteen-minute walk that got her juices flowing and put the sparkle back in her eyes. No, she didn’t like it, but she gave him the money all the same. And now, in the grimmest month of her life, in the penultimate month of her pregnancy, in the dismal, disastrous October of a year of riots in the streets, assassinations and men on the moon, now, after two years of trysts in the secret swaying darkness of that damp and fishy boat, she knew why he’d done it — to get away from her, that’s why. To mock her. To punish her.
It was an old story, a sad story, and it went like this: three weeks ago, gravid, swollen with his child, weighed down by this alien presence within her and yet lighter than air too, she went to him, full of the future, wanting only to hold him, touch him, rock with him in the cramped bunk of the Kitchawank as it rode the translucent skin of the river. As usual, she parked in the lot of Fagnoli’s restaurant and took a cab to the marina, and as usual, she found him below decks, reading. (He was going through two or three books a day — anything from Marcuse, Malcolm X or Mao Tse Tung to James Fenimore Cooper and the fantasies of Vonnegut, Tolkien or Salmón.) On this particular day — she remembered it distinctly — he was reading a paperback with a cover that featured a busty half-clad woman cowering before a liver-colored reptilian creature with teeth like nail files and an unmistakable genital bulge in the crotch of his silver jumpsuit. “Hello,” she said softly, ducking low to avoid the insidious beam on which she’d cracked her head a hundred times in the past.
He didn’t return her greeting. And when she made as if to squeeze in beside him on the bunk — stooped awkwardly, the baby swinging like a pendulum — he didn’t move. She felt the boat lurch beneath her and she sat heavily on the edge of the bunk across from him, a distance of perhaps three feet in those cramped quarters. For a long while she just sat there, glowing, beaming at him, drinking in the sight of him, and then, when she felt she wanted him so badly she couldn’t take it another second, she broke the silence with a soft amiable inquiry: “Good book?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even so much as grunt.
Another moment passed. The air coming down the gangway was cool, salt, smelling of the mélange of things that ran through the river’s veins — fish, of course, and seaweed. But other things too, things that weren’t so pleasant. Or natural. Who was it had told her they were dumping sewage upriver? She peered out the grimy porthole behind Jeremy and pictured the gray chop awash with human excrement, with toilet paper and sanitary napkins, and all at once she felt depressed. “Jeremy,” she said suddenly, and the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m going to leave Depeyster.”
For the first time, he looked at her. The hooded eyes she knew so well lifted themselves from the page and focused their green squint on hers.
“I don’t care what he thinks or my parents or the neighbors or anyone else either. Even if he won’t give me a divorce. What I mean is, I want to be with you”—she reached out to squeeze his hand—“always.” Now it was said, now it was out in the open and there was no turning back.