Then she remembered that was the only thing he had of hers, his only evidence she existed, aside from elusive images on slowly decaying film emulsions. The little note from Roseman Bridge. It was stained and curved, as if it had been carried in a billfold for a long time.
She wondered how many times he had read it over the years, far from the hills along Middle River. She could imagine him holding the note before him in the thin light of a reading lamp on a nonstop jet to somewhere, sitting on the floor of a bamboo hut in tiger country and reading it by flashlight, folding and putting it away on a rainy night in Bellingham, then looking at photographs of a woman leaning against a fence post on a summer morning or coming out of a covered bridge at sundown.
The three boxes each contained a camera with a lens attached. They were battered, scarred. Turning one around, she could read “Nikon” on the viewfinder and, just to the upper left of the Nikon label, the letter F. It was the camera she had handed him at Cedar Bridge.
Finally she opened the letter from him. It was written in longhand on his stationery and dated August 16, 1978.
Dear Francesca,
I hope this finds you well. I don’t know when you’ll receive it. Sometime after I’m gone. I’m sixty-five now, and it’s been thirteen years ago today that we met when I came up your lane looking for directions.
I’m gambling that this package won’t upset your life in any way. I just couldn’t bear to think of the cameras sitting in a secondhand case in a camera store or in some stranger’s bands. They’ll be in pretty rough shape by the time you get them. But, I have no one else to leave them to, and I apologize for putting you at risk by sending them to you.
I was on the road almost constantly from 1965 to 1975. Just to remove some of the temptation to call you or come for you, a temptation I have virtually every waking moment of my life, I took all of the overseas assignments I could find. There have been times, many of them, when I’ve said, “The hell with it. I’m going to Winterset, Iowa, and, whatever the cost, take Francesca away with me.”
But I remember your words, and I respect your feelings. Maybe you were right; I just don’t know. I do know that driving out of your lane that hot Friday morning was the hardest thing I’ve ever done or will ever do. In fact, I doubt if few men have ever done anything more difficult than that.
I left National Geographic in 1975 and have been devoting the remainder of my shooting years mostly to things of my own choosing, picking up a little work where I can get it, local or regional stuff that keeps me away only a few days at a time. It’s been tough financially, but I get along. I always do.
Much of my work is around Puget Sound. I like it that way. It seems as men get older they turn toward the water.
Oh, yes, I have a dog now, a golden retriever. I call him “Highway,” and he travels with me most of the time, head hanging out the window, looking for good shots.
In 1972, I fell down a cliff in Maine, in Acadia National Park, and broke my ankle. The chain and medallion got torn off in the fall. Fortunately they landed close by. I found them again, and a jeweler mended the chain.
I live with dust on my heart. That’s about as well as I can put it. There were women before you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious pledge to celibacy; I’m just not interested.
I once watched a Canada goose whose mate had been shot by hunters. They mate for life, you know. The gander circled the pond for days, and more days after that. When I last saw him, he was swimming alone through the wild rice, still looking. I suppose that analogy is a little too obvious for literary tastes, but it’s pretty much the way I feel.
In my imagination, on foggy mornings or afternoons with the sun bouncing off northwest water, I try to think of where you might be in your life and what you might be doing as I’m thinking of you. Nothing complicated—going out to your garden, sitting on your front porch swing, standing at the sink in your kitchen. Things like that.
I remember everything. How you smelled, how you tasted like the summer. The feel of your skin against mine, and the sound of your whispers as I loved you.
Robert Penn Warren once used the phrase “a world that seems to be God-abandoned.” Not bad, pretty close to how I feel some of the time. But I cannot live that way always. When those feelings become too strong, I load Harry and go down the road with Highway for a few days.
I don’t like feeling sorry for myself. That’s not who I am. And most of the time I don’t feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert
P. S., I put another new engine in Harry last summer, and he’s doing fine.
The package arrived five years ago. And looking at the contents had become part of her annual birthday ritual. She kept his cameras, bracelet, and the chain with the medallion in a special chest in the closet. A local carpenter had made the box to her design, out of walnut, with dust seals and padded interior sections. “Pretty fancy box,” he had said. Francesca had only smiled.
The last part of the ritual was the manuscript. She always read it by candlelight, at the end of the day. She brought it from the living room and laid it carefully on the yellow Formica, near a candle, lit her one cigarette of the year, a Camel, took a sip of brandy, and began to read.
There are old winds I still do not understand, though I have been riding, forever it seems, along the curl of their spines. I move in Dimension Z; the world goes by somewhere else in another slice of things, parallel to me. As if, hands in my pockets and bending a little forward, I see it through a department store window, looking inward.
In Dimension Z, there are strange moments. Coming around a long, rainy, New Mexico curve west of Magdalena, the highway turns to a footpath and the path to an animal trail. A pass of my wiper blades, and the trail becomes a forest place where nothing has ever gone. Again the wiper blades and, again, something further back. Great ice, this time. I am moving through short grass, in furs, with matted hair and spear, thin and hard as the ice itself, all muscle and implacable cunning. Past the ice, still further back along the measure of things, deep salt water in which I swim, gilled and scaled. I cannot see more than that, except beyond plankton is the digit zero.
Euclid was not always right. He assumed parallelness, in constancy, right to the end of things; but a non-Euclidean way of being is also possible, where the lines come together, far out there. A vanishing point. The illusion of convergence.
Yet I know it’s more than illusion. Sometimes a coming together is possible, a spilling of one reality into another. A kind of soft enlacing. Not prim intersections loomed in a world of precision, no sound of the shuttle. Just… well… breathing. Yes, that’s the sound of it, maybe the feel of it, too. Breathing.
And I move slowly over this other reality, and beside it and underneath and around it, always with strength, always with power, yet always with a giving of myself to it. And the other senses this, coming forward with its own power, giving itself to me, in turn.
Somewhere, inside of the breathing, music sounds, and the curious spiral dance begins then, with a meter all its own that tempers the ice-man with spear and matted hair. And slowly— rolling and turning in adagio, in adagio always—ice-man falls… from Dimension Z… and into her.
At the end of her sixty-seventh birthday, when the rain had stopped, Francesca put the manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the rolltop desk. She had decided to keep it in her safe deposit box at the bank after Richard died but brought it home for a few days each year at this time. The lid on the walnut chest was shut on the cameras, and the chest was placed on the closet shelf in her bedroom.
Earlier in the afternoon, she had visited Roseman Bridge. Now she walked out on the porch, dried off the swing with a towel, and sat down. It was cold, but she would stay for a few minutes, as she always did. Then she walked to the yard gate and stood. Then to the head of the lane. Twenty-two years later, she could see him stepping from his truck in the late afternoon, trying to find his way; she could see Harry bouncing toward the county road, then stopping, and Robert Kincaid standing on the running board, looking back up the lane.