Circus

I met her seven springs ago. I was the dishwasher in a small cafe. The first time I saw her she was wearing a cotton dress and her hair was in a long, tight braid down her back. She was with three men, eating breakfast. They were talking about skiing. There was still deep snow up in the mountains and they were on their way to Lolo Pass. I heard her say, "I'll change in the car," and the four of them laughed.

Sometimes I'm woken by good dreams of her. She will be in the kitchen of the house where we lived. I smell the spices, basil, garlic, thyme. I'm standing next to her and helping - peeling onions or slicing bread. She's talking, telling me about her day. I'm listening. I start to reach for her, trying to touch her face. In the dreams she scowls and I wake up saying her name. I have to get out of bed then and turn on all the lights and turn the radio up loud. It's set to a station that plays 20 rock-and-roll songs in a row and never has any news. I go make a cup of coffee and sit at the kitchen table and look at my reflection in the window, waiting for morning.

That was a chancy Spring. The weather raged back and forth through April and May. Winter didn't give up easily. A warm, bright day would be followed by a fast storm with ice, wind and darkness. I loved that Spring, the way each morning was; waking in the dark, I would wonder what the day would be. I was always dressing wrong - on storming days my light coat and then having to run to work to stay warm. Then the next morning, in a clear dawn I would be wearing a parka and by afternoon it would be seventy degrees and sunny.

I walked everywhere then, not owning a car, and that Spring I became fond of my boots and took care of them, drying and waterproofing them carefully. The slush of melting snow, the oily puddles in the gutters, it was nothing; I leapt over what I could and splashed through what I couldn't.

Now I own a car. A Buick. I drive it everywhere. I gamble too. Poker at the Oxford everyday. All the gamblers I know own old cars and don't walk much. Hurrying to avoid details we step on the gas and rush between jobs, the cards and little else. Instead of changes in the weather we watch for changes in luck, and we smile and nod to each other as if we were friends.

She would tell me that I shouldn't do this, that I should not keep thinking of her. She would tell me to realize that six years is a vast amount of time. But I still imagine her coming back to me. Like the knowing of a good hand which must come again -- she will knock on my door some evening, or it will be her voice the next time the phone rings. Over the long-distance hiss she will ask me how I am.

I was walking home from work on a windy afternoon. The mountains were white with snow that had fallen earlier in the day, but in town the sidewalks and streets were dry. The sunlight was coming in low, beneath the Western clouds, and everything was gold as if it were Autumn instead of Spring. The air was ripe with the smell of cottonwoods and damp earth and I was very, very happy.

I lived on the North side of Missoula, near the railroad tracks and the cluster of abandoned, brick warehouses. It was a neighborhood of small, wooden homes with long, narrow back yards. I was walking in an alley, and by the corner of Sherwood and Pine I saw her. She was working in her yard, starting a garden. Because the light - the color of it - and because she was beautiful, I stopped. She was shoveling at the sod, tearing it up.

"Hello," I said.

She was startled, but when she looked at me she smiled. Hair across her face, sleeves of a faded, flannel shirt rolled up above her elbows. She said, "Hello."

A garden, a plan for it. How good the soil might be. We talked like that, with me on the outside of the yard, leaning on the fence, and her ten feet away leaning on her shovel. She recognized me from that one time in the cafe.

Once in a person's life. Once.

She tosses her head while she is rolling down her sleeves. It's grown dark and I've put on the parka I was carrying over my shoulder. She waves goodbye and goes inside.

The next morning is clear and blue like days of promise should always be. I call the cafe and tell them that I can't come to work. Then I go to her house and knock on her door. She lives alone. I'm shy, never having been so attracted. Every word she spoke with me the evening before seemed to fit. I was understanding her. It seemed silly then. It doesn't now.

She opens her door. She is surprised. I comment about the day. She's twenty years old. I'm older. The weather was perfect.

Because she had a car we drove out of town and then walked up along the snowy slopes near Mormon Peak. We found a ridge where there where huge granite boulders sixty feet high, and managed to find a way up to the top of one. In the sun, on the warm rock, we pointed at what we could recognize. There was Mount Sentinel. Over there was the city. Those green patches down below were fresh fields. But nothing else makes sense -- she's telling me this while I look away from her -- she doesn't know me, we've just met, she has a boy friend whom she expects to marry. She tells me that she's never been impulsive before, and I say, "neither have I." Then we climb down to her car and drive back to town. When she drops me off at my place she leans over and kisses me. I blush, and in the dim light that has come with the late afternoon, I see her eyes, see how the are large and dark, see that she is leaning towards me and we are kissing again.

Every morning she is coming into the cafe. Sitting at the counter by herself, waiting until I have time to sit down with her and talk.

Then one night I can't sleep. I go and knock on her door, wake her up, and ask if she will forget about her garden and her boy friend and spend the summertime walking with me. Just like that. She looks closely at me, questioning. I tell her that I want to be alone with her, walking -- backpacking -- from Stephen's Pass, North, to Canada. She laughs and is away and now she is unbelieving and almost scared, but she says, "Yes." She does, she looks at me closer, knows I am asking her truthfully, and knows how wild a plan it is, how different and impossible it is for her, and she says again, meaning it, "Yes."

And we did spend those three months together, walking along the Continental Divide, though no one understood. Not her parents, or her boyfriend whom she said goodbye to, or any of them, those people who were her friends and couldn't understand where I had come from.

Once in a lifetime.

After we come back from that summer's long walk we moved into a house together. I worked and she went to school. That was an easy time. We'd come home to each other in the evenings and talk. We took turns cooking meals and sometimes we would go out dancing. Her long hair, which she would untie, made all the other men look. But I was proud and sure. We had been alone with each other in the mountains. We would stay together.

Then in October she started coming home late each evening. One night after she had come in, I followed her into the bathroom were she was undressing, and put my hand on her shoulder. She spun around and faced me. "Your rough hands," she yelled, "put your rough hands somewhere else."

She had met someone else, someone who wasn't just a worker. She said to me, when everything was ending, the morning she was loading her car with clothes and books, "I'm so bored. I'm bored with you." It was winter then, the sky was flat and empty. I was standing near her, not understanding. She got into the car. She drove away.

Now she lives in Portland, Oregon. I heard that she is married.

Thunderheads over the Scapegoats. Cold, clear streams in the Swan range. What we saw together comes to me when I can't sleep.

Times in the kitchen. We would be baking bread and while waiting for it to finish, drinking beer. Her arm resting across the table next to coffee mugs. A vase of dried flowers. Her hand in mine. One, dim lamp. Not rushing. We'd tell each other stories and make plans. Land. A home. Children. More long walks. We'd laugh and take the bread out from the oven. Breaking off large, hot pieces, we'd eat them with butter and look at each other while outside the darkness was perfect.

She's arching her back, pushing me into herself. Hair wildly messed, the sheets and blankets on the floor. It's cold in the room but we are both sweating. "Harder, Sam," she says, "harder." Then she's holding me so tightly that I almost can't breath, but I do. Four in the afternoon. A Tuesday. I'm laughing and saying, "You." She's wearing socks. I still have my shirt on, and now she's laughing too, letting me go, looking at me. "Tell me a story" she says. I reach down and toss a wool blanket over us and curl into a ball under it. Camping out. Hot fires on raining nights. Dry sleeping bags. Dripping Spruce trees spiraling upwards a hundred feet. Under the blanket I turn to her. She finds my mouth and I taste salt on her lips. Where are we? In a rented room where I lived alone and where she first came to visit me, brining me simple gifts; a new shirt, a bottle of wine, a crystal to hang in the window to catch that Spring sunlight? Or in a tent, forty miles from any road, by the Danahear river? Or screaming at each other in the parking lot of a shopping mall on a cold day in February, me jealous and accusing, her saying, "So what."

When I touch these memories I ache, trapped in sad metaphors, in Spring.

A Great Blue Heron ins flying above the Clark Fork, upstream. It's early evening, the sun is behind the Bitterroots and I'm looking out my window again. What is the chance that another heron will be flying above the Willamette, above tall cottonwoods? There's a full moon low in the East, just clearing Mount Jumbo. In Portland it will soon be large over the cascades. Will she look out too and see both? Will her heron cross in front of that great silver penny, as mine just did?

Tomorrow I shall clean this apartment. My clothes stink and the food in the fridge is going bad. When I'm done I'll write a letter and take it over to the freight yards where they put together the trains. I'll find an empty boxcar and read my letter to it, putting just the sounds of the words on the train. West-bound. Spokane by noon. Seattle by night. The trains often turn South at Seattle. With luck, my words will make it to Portland, where a wind coming inland from the ocean might carry them out of the boxcar and mix them with the foggy morning. She'll be getting up, looking outside, opening a window. Breathing the moist, orange air, perhaps she'll think of me, here in this concrete world where there are no safety nets.