Shame and Wonder Read online

  Now that I’m into it I should call him again. To let him know I’m serious. That I’ve had to put the project aside for a while and now there’s time. So it’s been—what? Almost a year. And I should let him know I’d like to come and visit. Nancy too. She’d love to come. He seemed okay with that before. It’s taken this long just to start and then to figure out which way it’s going to go. I ring him up. And once again there seems to be a little hesitation at first but then it’s very easy, very friendly—sure, he’d love for us to come. They have a couple of extra rooms and no, the last motel in Sterling City closed four years ago. But we should come. He’ll take me varmint hunting, take down that .280, which he hasn’t fired since back there on that hillside on that morning. We should come to see the wildflowers, too. They’re everywhere. There’s been a lot of rain and now they’re everywhere and not just bluebonnets either—he can get a little tired of the bluebonnets—but other kinds as well, the Indian paintbrush and the others, lots of red and pink and yellow. It’s spectacular right now.

  —

  I DON’T GET BACK to him till February, though. Somehow. A year again almost. Or I guess I did call once but it was very brief and he was busy; grandkids coming. And by then I’d got all caught up in the novel once more, trying to find the end and taking longer than I’d hoped—an unproductive trip abroad took time, and more time to reveal itself as altogether useless. It’s a thing I seem to do—write past, way past sometimes, the proper endings of things. I hope that’s not what’s happening here. It’s hard to tell, though, when you’re not so sure what you’re up to in the first place. At the very least I’d like to get some photographs of him. Joellen, too, if she’s around. And of the coyote skull, of course. The countryside. And the location where it happened.

  Anyway, it’s February and I see I’ve got a dental checkup scheduled for the end of the month and figure maybe now is the time to call. That’s crazy, isn’t it. All this time. But who knows. Maybe there’s a process here or something. I’ll say, “Lila, spoke to your dad again,” and that will take the conversation out into the emptiness, the edge of the world, the prairie where I’d rather be in any case. I catch him puttering around in the garage. It’s cold. They’ve had a little snow. There is an echo to his voice but otherwise it’s just the same. A little slow at first. I tell him, Bet you thought you had escaped. But no, that’s fine. He’s glad to talk. And so we do—about all sorts of things. How I’d like Nancy to do a sketch of the skull if that’s okay. Of course it is. He has the hide as well. The pelt. Whatever you call it. A red-tinged one. Your bounty used to get docked for that, he says. Red-tinged, red-tinted. They prefer the lighter-colored ones. The red ones come from the east. It makes good collar fur for jackets, though there’s not much market anymore. I like the thought of red-tinged coyotes drifting down from the east, through cities even, ordinary neighborhoods, as silent as the butterflies that come through in the fall. I’m thinking next month, if the weather’s nice, might be a good time to come. He thinks so too. And stay in San Angelo maybe, just to keep things flexible. That’s not too far. But anyway I’ll call.

  It’s getting close to my appointment so I guess it’s time to floss. So I can say, Oh every now and then. Not regularly. But now and then. You know. I’ve got this implement. A sort of toothbrush handle with the earnest ergonomics of a target pistol grip and at whose working end is a little plastic bow strung with about an inch of floss. These little bow-and-floss assemblies are disposable and subtle and ingenious, with the floss acquiring tension as the bow snaps into a complicated socket so configured as to provide a perfect lockup as the limbs of the bow compress with normal use, but to release when they are pressed against a surface. It has counterintuitive angles. Asymmetrical rubber inserts. It’s as if designed by NASA to anticipate all difficulties, all extremes of temperature and atmosphere. Uncertainty, indifference. I have had it awhile and tried it once or twice. And I imagine even lying there unused it must have prophylactic properties. And yet I do not love it. I regard it with suspicion and regret. It’s unbecoming, I’ve decided. So, what makes it unbecoming? Do you think the little birds that clean the teeth of crocodiles are unbecoming? No, of course not. I’m okay with little birds.

  The elevator in my dentist’s office building has a glass wall that invites you to appreciate the view on your way up. For the first few floors, you’re shown the parking garage, but five and above you’re looking over buildings, trees, and neighborhoods and then clear out to the skyline—unobstructed here, the whole expanse of downtown, east to west, though in the morning haze it flattens into blurry gray like mountains. Lila’s hair has changed from bright and cheery blond to serious brown. I think the seriousness is natural. She spent two weeks, I believe she said, as a volunteer in Africa providing dental services. A pot of boiling water for sterilization. She was amazed at all the things she took for granted.

  Spoke to your dad again, I tell her. And we talk about West Texas and the distance and the drive—not bad, she says. Five hours, maybe, if you stop for lunch. She shows me on her phone a couple of photos. One is a pencil sketch her father did of a French bulldog—the kind she’s always loved. He has an artistic side that pops out and surprises now and then, she says. The other is an old yearbook photo that she calls his Hollywood shot. And so it is. That deep-eyed, square-jawed sort of handsome that can seem a little menacing, might fight on Gary Cooper’s side or not. This time it’s a pretty easy session. All checked out and ready to go before I know it. Not a word about flossing. It’s still early. You can see the haze hanging over the city. There’s a smoky-looking layer at the horizon. She presents me with a little plastic bag of dental-hygienic odds and ends. When I get home I’ll toss the floss and keep the toothbrush. Another green one. That’s good. I don’t care for orange.

  It seems that inch or two of snow they got last month was it. They’re edging into drought. They’ve got the red flag warnings up, he says. No rain. Just wind. And dry as it can be. And once a fire gets going, there is not a whole lot you can do. But sure, come on. Just give me a call, he says. I’ll meet you on the highway. Bring some rain.

  We leave the interstate at Cisco and head south on Highway 206—a narrow, uneventful road that feels, to Nancy, like we’ve touched down from some altitude into the actual world. I imagine it’s like Google Maps to her—the way she dozes, waking now and then from smoky, smeary dreams along the virtual yellow stripe to look about. Where are the animals? she wonders at one point. She means wild animals like deer. It’s open country and you’d think there might be something other than cattle to be glimpsed out there among the scrub and scrubby-looking trees. We stop at a Dairy Queen in Cross Plains. I love Dairy Queens. You hardly see them anymore except out in the wilderness. A sort of consolation. You’re allowed a chocolate malt—or that elaborate Oreo-cookie-and-ice-cream concoction Nancy likes—because you’re out here at the edge of things where love grows thin and dust (or smoke—I’m not sure which) is blowing down the street. A small and bent (and, I can’t help but think, combustible-looking) old man walks in on what appears to be a regular errand to receive, across the counter from a girl who calls him Paw Paw, lunch all boxed and ready to go. To take to Mamaw, he announces. Nothing for him. It’s Mamaw’s lunch. Does he not feel well? Probably not. He stands outside and waits to cross the street. I’m thinking, What if the Google Maps survey vehicle were to drive by at this moment with its panoramic camera? Then he’d probably get caught like that poor white-haired lady. Standing there in the blowing dust with Mamaw’s lunch forever. Mamaw waiting. Hope departing in the red-flagged afternoon.

  I spent some time in San Angelo once when I was little but I don’t remember this part north of Highway 67 where it all goes flat and indistinct. The Chicken Farm Art Center bed-and-breakfast doesn’t proclaim itself. No flashing neon rooster in a nightshirt and beret like you’d expect. Rather, it seems to disappear out here, submerge into the natural loss of clarity and category. Just the way things tend to run tog
ether as they fade out into prairie, which I think is what you see, or certainly sense, as a kind of emptiness down there at the end of the street. We take it slowly, let the spirit voices guide us.

  It’s all here, though. Even a restaurant they’ve installed in an old feed silo. And what must have once been henhouses given over to artists and craftsmen whose products appear to issue forth about as easily and automatically as those of the former residents. There are available rooms. A couple of importuning cats. It’s pretty active on the weekends, we are told. But this is Monday. Not much going on. One studio is open. We peek in. A little girl is taking lessons in mosaic—somewhat incongruously from a painter of dramatic and spontaneous sumi-e horses who seems oblivious to her difficulties. I don’t think it’s going very well. She stands at a table pushing colorful shards of tile around. Her teacher nods and smiles at us. The pieces are too big. She’s got this delicate little diagram—a flower or an animal or something—and the tiles are way too big to make any sense. Perhaps it’s sumi-e mosaic, but I don’t think so. It’s a problem of resolution. In the courtyard there are glass-topped tables here and there opacified by a layer of dust. There’s been a lot of dust, our hostess says. We get the Santa Fe Room, a poster of a painting of a pueblo scene confirms. It’s from an Arizona gallery Nancy showed in, very briefly, years ago. The cats are out there all night long. Sometimes we hear them at the window.

  In the morning the cats have joined me at the table I have dusted off to share my blueberry scone (which is the breakfast part of the bed-and-breakfast deal) and help me wait till nine o’clock, when I’ve decided I should call. I am reluctant. I think maybe I’m imposing too much on this whole thing. A pretty simple, even delicate sort of thing. But come on out, he says. I scribble down directions. He will meet us at the turnoff.

  Nancy loves to travel anywhere. Especially on exploratory missions where you get to take your time and look around. And look around is what there is to do out here. Your eye goes way out to the hazy edge of things. You’re like a panoramic camera. The periphery is everything. When she and I first met, I told her stories of how Dallas used to be. How, in the sixties, you could drive north past the edge of it and find yourself in farmland, open country. Now, of course, you can’t. The city and the suburbs have expanded and there isn’t any north edge anymore, although I told her we might try to find a remnant if she’d like. And so we did. It took an afternoon—like trying to find a childhood scar that’s drifted, over the years, across the body. It wasn’t much. No more than twenty acres, near some railroad tracks, that seemed to have been under cultivation until recently, or maybe just a haying field—I think there was a tractor under some trees. But we got out and all around you could hear traffic and we thought, Well, this is it, the ancient shoreline where the Greeks made camp outside the walls of Troy, where you could stand and gaze upon the empty world.

  We get to the turnoff but we’re early. He’s not here yet. So we park just off the highway next to the white caliche road that leads dead straight out into nothing as if that were its intention. We get out. It seems like how the world must look when you’re not looking. Settled back to fundamentals. Like that Englishman who, awakened in the middle of the night, will have no accent, speaks like anybody else. I find a .270 Winchester cartridge case on the ground and show it to Nancy. Somebody must have spotted a deer, I guess. She holds it to her ear. She is listening to it whistle in the wind. I want a picture of the road before he comes. Before a cloud of dust suggests there’s something out there after all. Right now it makes a perfect diagram—converging lines transferable to a warning sign: watch out, this road goes on and on forever. Now he’s here. A huge dark pickup truck has pulled in off the highway. Not the way I was expecting. Cloud of dust as he emerges—massive, smiling, cowboy-hatted, gray-goateed, tooled leather suspenders. Later, Nancy will decide he has Roy Rogers eyes. She always loved Roy Rogers and that squinty, soft amusement in his eyes. I’m going to say the English actor Oliver Reed—though Oliver Reed awakened suddenly in the middle of the night because the cows are loose or something and he hasn’t time to change into an Englishman. My hand is gripped, enveloped, and within about a minute I am offered chewing tobacco—which I actually consider for a second as a test I’m likely to fail—and then a nickel-plated, lavishly engraved Colt .44 for our protection. I believe Roy’s having fun, but I don’t care. It’s nice engraving. Not as good as factory, though, he says. It’d be worth more with factory engraving. Here we go. I run to the car to get my hunting knife. A good one, too. Handmade with a nice stag grip. So, see? I’m armed. And rather stylishly, in fact. We follow him out the white caliche road to nowhere. Nancy’s laughing. What? Five minutes and you start comparing weapons. She keeps laughing. And they’re both such beautiful weapons, dear. Shut up, I try to explain. No, you shut up. No, you shut up.

  It’s a large and handsome limestone house on top of a hill. I think it might be the one we noticed from the highway coming out, way in the distance. Who lives there, we thought. I’m sure we thought. What must that life be like? And now we’re there. We’re here. A little brown dog named Scout is running around and trying to make its yapping heard above the wind. The wind is steady. As it ought to be, I guess. There’s nothing out here to discourage or inflect it. You can see the distant hazy edge of everything from here. And then so strangely way out there to the north and west and barely emergent from the haze (I think they use a haze-gray paint), as if belonging to those fundamental properties of things you never see except when things reduce like this to fundamentals, are the giant wind turbines, the really huge ones with the football-field-long blades. So that’s where wind comes from, you’d think if you didn’t know. Of course, it has to come from somewhere.

  Everything up here on top of the hill is new. They built the house about four years ago. The heavy, limestone-founded, iron-railed fence. And, so precariously it seems, on a lower terrace on the west side near the fence where the hill drops suddenly away, a beautiful playground for the grandkids. Tent-roofed structures—we would have called them forts—on stilts with slides descending, one a giant twisty yellow plastic tube. Suspended tire. Rope-ladder rigging. And a swing set with three swings, each plastic seat a different color—not-yet-faded yellow, blue, and red. A choice. And then which way to face: the house across the drive just up the hill or that great emptiness toward which the hill drops off right there, not twenty feet away. To which you’d sense yourself presented every time at the top of the arc, where letting go—to a child especially, I imagine—always seems a possibility. In the big high-ceilinged living room are all the animals Nancy didn’t see on the way down. All the ones she’d periodically wake herself to look for out in the scrub along the highway. Here they are. The biggest elk I’ve ever seen above the fireplace. On the floor, a brown bear rug. And on the wall across the room above the bookcase is a group of horned and antlered beasts so fully and expansively themselves they lose significance as trophies. They are specimens. All “fair chase,” though, I’m told. “I wouldn’t use a blind. That’s bullshit.” And the meat, where appropriate, consumed. So they are cleanly, self-sufficiently here. The animal representatives. And here and there among them, family photographs. A needlepoint genealogy. I think the newness throws me just a bit. He says his family has been ranching for a hundred years out here. And yet it’s like they’ve just arrived. Or maybe just arrived again. To build a house like this, a big receptive house like this out here, must be a different sort of undertaking. Not like in the city, where the concept is established, no particular risk involved. Out here you probably need to know a lot more clearly what you’re doing. How to situate yourself. You’ve got your basics here to deal with after all. Your wind, your emptiness, your animals, your house. He stands in the middle of the living room and looks wherever I look, seems to reappreciate these things. One photograph I return to is a black and white of Courtney and his brother from the fifties, each boy posed identically dressed in cowboy hat, fleece-collared jacket, jea
ns, and boots behind his fat prizewinning sheep. It looks like Courtney wears his older brother’s jeans, the cuffs rolled up. It’s perfect somehow, in that fragile-yet-momentous way that some Walker Evans photographs are perfect. Courtney’s brother—you can’t quite make out, so must infer, his freckles—grins at something off to the right beyond the field of view. While Courtney and his sheep—their faces calm and close together at the center of the picture as he hugs her about the neck to hold her still—gaze out at us. They make an emblem against the dead white-painted clapboard barn behind. I take a picture of the picture. Of the elk. The other creatures on the walls. A massive grizzly skull he shows me. And at some point—I had hoped to wait for this, I think, to put it off, to try to settle back into what I imagined I was doing here—he’s standing there holding the coyote skull. So small in all of this. A tiny thing. Like something lost and found—Oh, here it is. He holds it out. He holds it very lightly like it’s glass. I hear the women in the kitchen. Lila’s mom, Elaine, looks very much like Lila. In a group of Walker Evans faces, she would be the pretty one. The wind is really kicking up out there. I take a picture of him standing there like that. And then a close-up. And he has the hide too, right? He does. He brings it out. The whole thing—dangly legs and tail and everything. The superficial coyote. Like a ghost. Where are the scars, I ask. He shows me on the legs the smooth black marks left by the snares. I ask Elaine to come outside on the porch and hold it for a picture. In the wind it flaps like paper. Like it wants to blow away.