They left as soon as Coop
returned, and drove deep into Nevada, into the desert. They stopped whenever
they were hungry or tired, sometimes at night, sometimes during the blazing
afternoons. She bought a Polaroid camera and took a picture wherever they
stopped. She thought it would help him remember the present. She balanced the
camera on the hood of her car, set the timer, then ran to where he was, and
waited for the click to release them from their pose. The extra seconds felt
long, falsely intimate, their eyes half closed because of the bright sunlight
around them.
Do you remember how to
drive?
It looks easy.
Yeah, sure.
You can deal cards, you can drive.
They climbed out to switch seats. In the driver’s seat he
twisted
the rearview mirror so he could see his bruised face, the marks of
iodine, then repositioned it to look behind him, as if he could now clearly see
where he had come from. She leaned against the passenger door and watched him
handle the clutch and the gearshift with ease. She was
fi
fteen years old again, and he was
teaching her to drive.
She began to think where
they should go. A danger had focussed itself on Coop, and she did not know
whether it was only Tahoe that was unsafe for him. She had no knowledge of the
extent of his world. She remembered Vea’s remark about randomness and made Coop
double back, and they entered California and went north through the old gold
towns. She bought a local map and discovered a place called Hass, nestled in
the hills. They arrived there in the afternoon and checked in to a twostorey
brick hotel. There was one room available, so they shared it. When Coop removed
his shirt, she saw that the bruises on his chest and arms were now an ugly
yellow. He had not complained of pain since they’d left Tahoe. She recalled the
Absorbine horse liniment that she and Anna used to rub on each other as kids,
its smell—cowboy perfume, they called it. Claire gave Coop the bed and took the
sofa. They were silent and separate in the attempted darkness of the hotel
room, knowing that outside it was still bright daylight.
You okay?
Yeah.
The hum of the drive was still in her body.
So tell me about yourself,
Anna. How do we know each other?
She was silent.
You knew I could drive.
What?
You said I knew how to drive.
Well, yes, most people do.
I was a gambler.
Yes, you said that, the day we met.
There was a pause, and Claire tried to slip him back, into the past. Do you
remember the day with the fox?
The fox...
Then they were silent. He
must have fallen asleep. Coop’s ‘How do we know each other?’ burned in her.
Anna and Coop and Claire.
The three of them, she had always
believed, made up a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-suf
fi
cient, but revealing different qualities
or tones when placed beside the others. Those screens made more sense to her
than single-framed paintings from the West that existed without context. Their
lives, surely, remained linked, wherever they were. Coop had been adopted into
the family in much the same way that she had been taken from the hospital in
Santa Rosa and brought home beside Anna. An orphan and a changeling... they had
evolved, intimate as siblings, from that moment. She’d lived one of her
essential lives with Coop, and she could never dismantle herself from him.
She went over in the dark
to his bed and saw his face; it was sallow in the shut-away afternoon light.
Once more he opened his eyes and looked at her, looked, she thought, at
nothing. His lips were dry. There was no water in the room. No tap. The shower
was down the hall. She spat onto her
fi
ngers and rubbed them over his lips and saw him trying to swallow.
He took her wrist before she could withdraw it, and held it for a moment. Anna,
he said. No, she said.
No, not Anna.
Claire went back to the
sofa and sat across from him in the dark, trying to retrieve any other details
he’d mentioned that day when they had met in the diner. He’d suggested there
was a problem. ‘Things are dif
fi
cult for me right now,
’
he had thrown out,
almost too casually.
Do you gamble always?
she
had asked him then.
One or two games a week now.
I used to play endlessly.
I don’t understand such a world . . . what its blessings are. It’s no different
from any compulsive work. Some live a full
life
. I had one friend who was a Deadhead, but he was also involved with
local politics. He’d play cards socially in a casino in Grass Valley.
Is he your friend still?
Unfortunately no.
Sounds like you should have stuck with him.
Then she had said,
Do
you ever think of our farm? And
he
had
not said anything. And she had
let his silence fall between them.
What is your mission,
do you think?
Vea had asked her once. And she
didn’t know. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt
scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she
thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is
how we differ in our own realities from the way we are seen by others. What
Claire later remembered, for instance, of her walk with Coop back to her hotel
in Tahoe that day was her pleasure in his presence, and how invisible she
believed herself to be in their brief hour or two together. She was simply
happy to be walking beside him, nursing her tiredness, listening to him talk
about the world he lived in. This extraordinary recurrence of him back into her
life, the grandness of the names of the towns—Vegas, Grass Valley, Nevada City,
Tahoe—seemed iconic, something discovered on an adult’s map. If she had been
told that Coop mused on her brown shoulders, that he had been remembering how
she had saved his life in that ice storm, that somehow
she
was perhaps
the heroine of their meeting, she would not have believed such a truth. We
relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer
in the background keeping cadence.
There was sunlight in
their room when Claire woke. Coop was waiting for her, already dressed. ‘We
need to visit Grass Valley, to
fi
nd someone,
’
she said.
‘
We need to go back the way we came.
’
So they
headed towards Nevada City and the neighbouring town of Grass Valley, where
there might still be the casino in which Coop
’
s
friend, the Deadhead, used to play. She had no idea if the man still lived
there or even what his name was.
They reached Nevada City
and had a meal, and afterwards Coop sat in a chair in the foyer of the National
Hotel, while Claire went out and bought some poster board. That evening she
stood outside the Gold Rush Gaming Parlor in Grass Valley, with a sign in front
of her that said are you cooper’s friend
?
At
about ten o’clock a man with shells around his neck walked up to her and asked
her who she was.
Dorn got into the car and
looked at Coop. He put his palm up to the bruised face.
A
gesture, not a touch.
He suggested they leave her car in Grass Valley.
Dorn helped Coop into his station wagon. There was a hound, alert in the front
passenger seat with no intention of moving into the back.
Dorn’s home was a modest
bungalow a mile or two from town. He began cooking a meal he called ‘broccoli
surprise,’ and a short while later Ruth arrived with their six-year-old
daughter to
fi
nd the house busy with strangers. Ruth walked over to Coop and
embraced him. Dorn explained the situation to her, and they moved some of their
daughter
’
s things out of her
bedroom so Coop and Claire could use it.
After the broccoli
surprise, in which no broccoli could be found, Ruth began to examine Coop’s
wounds. She turned to Claire. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen him, she
said.
Did you
know him well?
Yes, I was one of the boys, then. And Coop was ‘The Untouchable.’
Claire was enjoying
watching Coop, now in the context of his old friends, even if the affection and
concern
fl
owed
only one way, towards Coop
’
s
unawareness. Dorn lit a joint, passed it over to Claire, and spoke of the
incident with The Brethren, and then moved to various anecdotes in which the
well-dressed Dauphin drifted in and out. Then Claire told Dorn and Ruth about
their childhood in Petaluma. The three were slowly piecing together Coop’s life
as he sat there uninterested, studying the small movements in the room, the
billow of a curtain,
the
leather sole of Claire’s
brown shoe, tapping whenever there was music. ‘If we can stay with you a couple
more nights, that would be good,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll go.’ ‘Fine, stay longer
if you wish,’ Dorn replied. The dog was sitting on the sofa beside Dorn,
listening to him with a concerned and dutiful look.
His
Master’s Voice.
Claire was
fi
nally beginning to feel safe, with Dorn, this family man. He must
have at one time been a lean hippie, she thought, a lovely elder brother for
Coop.
That night, lying
fl
at on her back, Claire heard someone
moving in the dark around her bed. She could hear breathing close by. She
feared it might be the men who had beaten him, who had just come into the
house. There was a leap, and Dorn’s dog, who had been deciding from which side
to enter the bed, burrowed next to her under the covers, its claws towards her.
For a while it was still, and then, wanting more space, it pressed the claws
gently, then more
fi
rmly, like tuning forks into her back.
By eight the next morning,
Ruth had left for work. Dorn spread a large piece of velour over the sofa and
with Claire’s help began stitching costumes for the medieval feast that was an
annual local event. It was to be held that night in the historic Miners
Foundry, now a community centre, where everyone would be arriving in royal,
peasant, or troubadour costumes. Dorn interrupted his brutal sewing by
fl
inging a giant
fl
ank of meat, garlicked and herbed, on the
barbecue. He insisted that Claire and Coop participate in the ceremonies. It
was just a local crowd. He broke into his favourite songs all afternoon while
they worked on capes and hoods.
‘In Delaware when I was younger...’
He
sang verse after verse of that song, and made up a few others. ‘Now, that’s a
great song.
Great song!’
Ruth and their daughter
returned home at
fi
ve, and soon they were all transformed into fourteenth-century
European villagers, Dorn
’
s
nonremovable beads and shells the only hints of the contemporary. Coop and Dorn
carried the giant platter of meat, and Ruth brought a bowl of edamame beans.
But the narrow streets of Nevada City were full of war protesters amid the
music of mandolins and
fl
utes. Twelve years after the American bombing of the Gulf in 1991,
America was poised to attack Iraq again, and Paci
fi
ca and NPR stations had been updating
information all day. So Claire found herself alongside medieval monks carrying
antiwar placards to the event.
Dorn pulled his squirming
daughter out for the
fi
rst dance of the evening, and
fi
fteen minutes later dragged Claire out too, crushing her to his
doublet. She leaned against this Delawareborn (as in the song) anarchic hippie
conspiracy-theorist, now a comfortably successful poker player living like a
gentleman farmer in this town in the foothills.
The night ended with
Dorn’s breaking the time capsule of the
Middle
Ages by
persuading the high school band to play ‘Fire on the Mountain.’ But much had
happened before that. During the dinner, a
fi
ve-year-old sat beside Coop at one of the
decorated trestle tables. There was almost no conversation between them,
because the boy was listening intently to a transistor radio. Finally he
switched it off and turned to Coop and told him the Americans were bombing
Baghdad. Coop was startled. The child was speaking about it casually, and
insisted on giving him details, until Coop said, ‘Tell that man over there,’
pointing to Dorn, who was with a chiropractor, submitting himself to a complex
arm hold. So the boy went over and waited until Dorn was released, then tugged
at his arm. The two adults bent down, and the boy said something they could not
catch because of the noise around them. Dorn lifted the boy into his arms.
‘What’s up, Finnegan?’ Coop heard him say. And the boy told him.