The Unsettling. Peter Rock
and hoped that job could continue indefinitely, that I might persuade Marco to stay on, but those blooms are seasonal, mostly. Nothing stands still.
We were finishing up, just wiping down the shelves with the Clorox solution, when he told me the end of the story. In fact, Marco left before the job was finished, without any warning, and I handled the last few days—tearing down the plastic barriers, taking down the signs—by myself. He left that way, I believe, so he wouldn’t have to say goodbye.
It wasn’t as if he thought things between him and Louisa could have continued—he knew the balance had changed, that they couldn’t return—but he expected it all had to go somewhere, that it couldn’t just trail off into nothing.
She refused to speak about it. She was cool, not quite unfriendly. She turned down the simplest favors. She said that had been a different time, that they had been different people who needed different things.
He felt that they were the same, inside the changes. He needed her, and he couldn’t stand the way she looked at him, every day, watching him with those same eyes as he came home from work with his hood and ventilator bouncing along his back, the arms of the Tyvek suit tied off around his waist. Her gaze rested cold on him, settling so he felt it even after he was inside his house. He sat alone, shivering; it was very, very quiet on the other side of the wall.
If I ever see Marco again, I’ll tell him that I know what happened, even if she was ungrateful, even if she never understood.
He healed her.
MELISSA GETS UP on her knees, then begins pulling the damp pine needles from the bare skin of her ass and thighs. Dave had put his shirt down, under her, but somehow she’d slid off it. Now he stands ten feet away, peeling the condom loose, tying the open end in a knot. The whole time he was on top of her, a swarm of tiny insects hanging over his right shoulder, she kept the woods in her peripheral vision. Lying down in the clearing had been her idea; once they’d started, though, she was unable to relax. She expected hunters in wool coats to step out from the trees—her skin trembled, anticipating their cold shadows.
“That was nice,” Dave says. “Different.” He stands in the sun, naked except for his hiking boots and glasses. He’s not yet thirty-five, but there’s already gray in the hair on his chest; his legs are too skinny for the thickness of his trunk.
“Yes,” she says, stepping into her underwear, her shorts.
“About ready to head back?”
“How much daylight do we have?”
“No idea,” he says. “There’s the sun.” He points at it.
Melissa shivers as she follows him back under the pines, into the shadows. They’ve traveled all the way across the country for three days of this, and they both pretend to enjoy it more than they do. She’s always relieved to pack up on the last day; the rest of the time, she wonders what it would take for something to really go wrong. She knows Dave feels the same way, even as he struts ahead, whistling, the used condom swinging back and forth in his hand.
Stepping into the sun, they start across a meadow. Grasshoppers strike her bare arms and legs, their instantaneous arrivals and departures like tiny electrical shocks; she points out a bare bush, its branches just sticks, the tips of which someone has covered with spent shotgun shells—they look like red and orange fingers, and when the wind blows, it seems many bright hands are either waving her closer or warning her away.
Melissa and Dave climb a small rise and step back onto the rutted dirt road. Holding hands, they start down the road, toward the cabin; soon, they come to where a sign has been nailed straight into a tree. Sap the color of maple syrup bleeds down the bark, dark bugs stuck there. In red paint, crooked letters say, I’LL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. The area around the sign bears no scars or clues; the sign doesn’t even offer an arrow. The first time they passed it, they wondered at the message; now, hours later, they still can’t make sense of it.
“I guess this is just a day of signs,” Dave says.
“That seems to be the case,” she says.
Early that morning, on the highway, they passed a semitrailer, and high above, in the window, the driver had placed a white sign reading, WHY NOT FLIRT? LIFT YOUR SHIRT! Melissa had laughed, and Dave told her to go ahead. She wished he had meant it, but she knew he didn’t; he likes to think of himself as smoother than that, the kind of man women appreciate, more sensitive than the men he works with. He is a college football coach—not the head coach, but in charge of the quarterbacks—and it’s a rough bunch, men who greet each other by asking how they’re hanging and then grabbing to check. How’s your wife and my kids? they say. At night, Dave often tells her of them, trying to make himself look good. Secretly, she sometimes wishes he were more like them. She wanted to pull up her shirt this morning, flash her breasts through the windshield, make the trucker blow his horn.
• • •
The cabin is an A-frame, tall and thin, a cow skull wired over the doorway, fake Indian symbols painted around it. Melissa has a week’s break from dental school, and it’s off-season for Dave. He found the cabin in a guidebook—no running water or electricity, owned by the U.S. Forest Service, $15 a night, in the middle of nowhere. He is proud of the bargain. At the airport, they rented a four-wheel-drive truck, then followed the topographical maps, struggled along the logging roads. Every time a stone shot up or a branch reached out, Dave pulled over and checked for scratches or dings. She told him to keep driving—either the truck was scratched or it wasn’t.
Now he is cooking on the camping stove, cursing it. They’re back from the hike, inside the cabin, where all the windows are plastic, scratched with initials, cross-hatched; mouse droppings and melted wax cover the shelves and floor. Wooden knobs stick out from walls and rafters, and Dave’s hung up everything that could possibly be hung. He’s cooking freeze-dried lime-mango chicken. Watching him, Melissa feels an uneasy edge, almost like a headache’s coming but not quite arriving, just a dull pain creeping up the back of her skull. Maybe the cabin’s not well enough ventilated—the gas lantern’s on, as well as the camping stove—but she knows it’s not that.
“This food is vacuum-packed,” Dave says, reading the label. “Like the meals astronauts eat.”
“That’s supposed to make us feel how?” she says. “Good? You’d hope we could do a little better, down here with gravity and oxygen and everything.”
“You’d think so,” he says agreeably. He drops the foil packet into the boiling water, then picks up the camera and begins rewinding the film. Popping the lid off a plastic film canister, he spills cinnamon into the camera, open on his lap. “Damn. My fault. Should have labeled that—stupid way to pack spices.” He turns over the camera, shakes it, blows into it.
Melissa reaches to take a notebook from a shelf. Since she married Dave, she thinks, he’s become more willing to own up to his mistakes, to show his weaknesses and limitations; he believes this makes her respect him more. If she lets him see her impatience, he’ll only laugh, make a joke about her mean streak.
“Maybe we’ll eat film in the oatmeal tomorrow morning,” he says. “Just kidding. I saved some of the cinnamon.”
She opens the notebook, which is full of comments from people who have stayed in the cabin before. The handwriting varies from children’s to adults’, in black and blue and red ink, Magic Marker.
What a salvation this is. John and Busker (our Alsatian) have gone looking for water for swimming. I can see them, down below. I feel at peace.
Someone backed into the outhouse, but that was B4 we got here. 6” snow + elk down in the flats.
To her, there’s something distasteful about the messages, a combination of showing off and the pathetic desire to be remembered, to leave a mark.
Don’t you just feel lucky and blessed?