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Thomas Mcguane

Something to Be Desired

For Count Guy de la Valdene

There is no question that the dog who is really ready for a big trial is on the threshold of committing grave mistakes.

— CHARLES MORGAN, On Retrievers

1

The moon lofted off the horizon to drift low over the prairie, white and imperious as a commodore. While the two walked, their shadows darted over the ground and through the sage. The boy went along, concentrating on the footing, which was secure and reliable except where the washes had undercut ledges that sloughed quickly beneath them. His father strode ahead in silence, his boots making a steady beat unmodified by the boy’s breathlessness. The boy still wore his baseball jersey and had a green sweater tied around his waist. The wind came out of the draws and breathed through them toward the lights of town.

“You out of breath?”

“No, sir. ”

“Keep moving. ” His father made forward in vengeance, then asked, “Do you feel like you’ve been stolen?”

“No, sir. ”

His father had returned after hiding from his mother, hiding in, of all places, Arequipa, Peru, where he had cooked on sheep dung and drunk too much and mailed deranged letters to his son until his son flunked his courses and got kicked off the baseball team. Then on a morning when the boy spent still another Saturday at home, away from his beloved third base, the father walked in and said, “What’ll it be, Lucien? Where do we go?”

Lucien, a small-town boy buried in Ernest Thompson Seton, said, “Up in the hills. ” He was baffled by his father’s dramatics but, more than anything, happy to see him again.

Now they were lost. They had been lost for two days. Not seriously lost, because they could see the lights of Deadrock; but they had lost their own camp on the rocky escarpment of the Crazy Mountains.

And though they could have walked to the highway in a few hours, they still hadn’t had food in days. Their feet were blistered; twice the father had curled up on the ground before walking the great circle again with fury and self-pity. When he heard the boy’s hard breathing, he said, “You’re a baseball player and I’m fifty. Keep walking. ” Lucien was silent. He thought of his books and wondered if they were still on the study-hall desk, in the nearly empty room with its clock, superintended by a history teacher one week, an English teacher another, some bored man with a paperback spending his time miserably. Lucien’s sudden fall to flunking seemed strangely permanent. One upperclassman called him a forceps baby. The light of detention fell through institutional windows upon Lucien and the books that had suddenly gone dead on him. He was homesick and there was no home, nothing to fill a caissonned heart, until the blazing satisfaction of his father’s arrival, descended from the inexplicable Arequipa, Peru, where Lucien pictured Indians and colonials circling his father through the divorce. It was the year of the vicuña scandal in Eisenhower’s administration. The profanity of his father’s departure seemed to the boy to infect national politics. Furthermore, his mother didn’t want to give the family another try. “It’s quits,” she said of the marriage.