Potato Lake

The yellow Escort wagon climbs slowly out of the desert on Route 87, the spark plugs pinging from low octane gas.  Tom Perkins drives.  His wife, Emily, sits in the passenger seat staring at the blue-green pines that stand like a crewcut above the forehead of the Mogollon Rim.  Tom and Emily are traveling to the mountains for a much-needed vacation, both of them temporarily leaving worries behind.  For Tom it’s the graduate program in anthropology he has come to despise.  For Emily it’s her accounts-payable job at the university.  She took a two-thousand-dollar-a-year pay cut when they had moved here from Indiana several months ago.  She blames Tom for that.  But they’ve agreed not to argue this weekend.  In the back of the car, their Pekingese, Confucius, sleeps next to the pile of equipment they bought just for this trip: tent, stove, sleeping bags, aluminum mess kits–all the necessary ingredients for a good time in the woods.

On the steep sections of the ribbon road, the Escort crawls, and Tom has to stand on the accelerator to keep the car inching forward.  They’re looking for a place called Potato Lake, somewhere between the towns of Strawberry and Pine.  Michelle Forster, one of Tom’s classmates, couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but she had once found solitude there.  Emily doesn’t like Michelle.  She met her at the department pig roast at the start of the semester.  When Tom and Emily got home that night, Emily said, “Michelle Forster is one of these women who leaves the top three buttons of her blouse undone, then finds every possible excuse to bend over so men can gander at her breasts.”  No, Emily didn’t like Michelle much, and she especially didn’t like it that Tom and Michelle shared an office.

Five miles beyond Strawberry, Tom turns the car around.  They have seen no signs of the lake, and he figures they’ve come too far.  But no worries.  The cool mountain air is relaxing, and the scent of pine enters his head like a drug.  Not even Emily can disturb this tranquility.  She says, “I just knew Michelle Forster didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”

A few miles past the town of Pine he swings the car left onto a graded dirt road that snakes between dense stands of ponderosa.  “Where are you going?” Emily says.  “I didn’t see a sign.”

“What’s the difference?  We can camp anywhere around here.”

“Are you sure?  This could be private property.”

“It’s the Tonto National Forest, for Christ sake.”

About a mile into the woods, they come to a deep rut in the road that the Escort can’t navigate.  Tom pulls off into a clearing, slips the gearshift into Park, and turns off the engine.  “This is it,” he says.  “We can set the tent up over there.”  He points through the windshield at the spot.  Emily isn’t convinced, but the dog is stirring in back, and when Tom gets out, Emily does, too.

When they go for the equipment, they see that Confucius has thrown up on the tent bag.  Tom cleans the mess with paper towels while Emily carries the dog around like a baby.  “Oh, precious,” she says, burping the animal, “did we get car sick on our way up the mountain?”  Tom searches through the food box.  He wouldn’t be surprised to find barf in there, too.

It takes him an hour to set up the tent.  The directions are unintelligible.  He knew he should have practiced at home first, but their yard at the apartment complex is exposed to the eyes of nosy neighbors, and he didn’t want everybody knowing that they were going away.  While he fits aluminum poles together, Emily hauls equipment from the car.  Somehow she manages to find the small handgun he had hidden in the spare tire compartment under a rug.  “What the hell is this?” she says, holding it up by the hammer as if it were a dirty sock.

When Tom looks over, he’s gripped by sudden panic.  He doesn’t remember if the safety is on, and Michelle told him the gun has a hair trigger.  He pictures Emily dropping it against a rock, the weapon accidentally discharging.  “Be careful with that,” he says, approaching her timidly.  “Hold it with both hands.”

But she flaunts her precarious grip, waving the small-caliber pistol at arm’s length.  “Answer me.  What are you doing with this?”

“I brought it along for protection.”

“Where did you get it?”

“It belongs to Michelle.”

“I should have known,” Emily says.  “That woman doesn’t have the brains she was born with.”

He reaches her and takes the gun away, making sure the safety is on.  “What the hell’s wrong with you?  This isn’t a toy.”

“No, it isn’t,” she says, “and I’m not sleeping in that tent with it.”

 He tries to reason with her.  “What good will it do in the car?”

But she’s adamant, and he ends up putting it back next to the spare tire.

They get everything set up in time for a late lunch–baloney and cheese sandwiches, pretzels, and pop from the cooler.  Afterwards, they go exploring.  They find a beautiful spot on a high ridge that overlooks the valley below the rim.  They can see for a hundred miles, across an ocean of green mountains rolling down to the flat plane of desert.  The forest floor beneath their feet is covered by a spongy carpet of brown needles from the pine trees that point like giant missiles into a cloudless sky.

“This is what it’s all about,” Tom says.

He and Emily sit on a log while Confucius sniffs the territory.  Tom has never seen an animal more out of place in the woods, a shaggy little dragon dog whose legs are barely long enough to keep its body from scraping the ground.  But he doesn’t mention this to Emily, who adores the animal.  He’s certain she loves it more than she loves him.  Tom never would have chosen such a dog, but she bought it when he was serving in the army.

Emily peels off her t-shirt.  Beneath it she wears a yellow bikini top.  Her cutoffs are split for several inches along the seams.  Tom remembers why he married her.  She’s delicious basking in the sun: ice-cream scoop breasts, blonde fuzz on her peach-colored thighs.

 Being in the mountains gives them an appetite, and they return to camp to get an early start on supper.  Fortunately, Tom has no trouble lighting the Coleman stove.  He can’t remember the last time he was this hungry.  Five large hamburger patties are sizzling in a skillet when the tortured sound of an internal-combustion engine fractures the mountain stillness.  A moment later, a huge white pickup truck, jacked up high enough to accommodate Caterpillar tires, comes bouncing along the road next to the campsite.  Three men with duckbill hats ride in front.  Four men stand in back, naked except for Speedo swim trunks, their bodies coffee brown.  The driver of the truck whistles shrilly and yells “Mama” at Emily, and the men in back make obnoxious kissing sounds.  Tom stands like a statue with a spatula in his hand.  After the pickup disappears into the forest, he turns to Emily, who has a small smile on her rosy lips.  “Do you have to hang around half naked?” he says.

His appetite is gone, but he forces himself to eat anyway.  He doesn’t want Emily to see he’s afraid.  After all, he just got out of the army not long ago.  But he can’t stop thinking about the men in the pickup.  What if they get drunk and return after dark?  They got a good look at the three of them: a stick-thin anthropologist with a spatula, his near-naked wife, and a ferocious Pekingese with an owl face.  No problem for seven hooligans.  Tom’s body feels rubbery, like it belongs to someone else.  He monitors Emily’s behavior to see if the men bothered her, but she washes the frying pan as if she’s doing dishes at home.

All Tom can think about is packing things into the car and leaving, but he can’t fabricate a good excuse.  And Emily might figure it out so soon after the men passed by.  One thing he’s sure of–they must stay close to the car in case they have to make an emergency getaway.  So when Emily suggests they go for a walk after the utensils are cleaned, he says he has a stomach ache.  “Then Confucius and I will go,” she says.

“Better not.”

“Why?”

“You never know what might be out there.”

 “Like what?”

“Like wild animals for one thing–mountain lions and bears.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You think I’m kidding?” he says.  “There are bears and lions in these mountains.  Haven’t you read the newspapers?  Sure, most of the time they’re pretty timid, but you never know.  I’d hate to see Confucius end up an hors-d’oeuvre for some cougar.”

This last makes her hesitate, and Tom can see the change of mind in her eyes.  She drags a small log into camp and sits on it, playing with the dog.  Tom leans against the car, whittling a piece of wood with his Swiss Army knife.  The knife makes him feel a little better, but he pictures the black handgun in the tire compartment and wonders how he’ll smuggle it into the tent.  While he’s scheming, he hears a strange noise, a loud whirring in the distance.  He looks at Emily.  She’s heard it, too.  “What is it?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

It gets louder as it approaches, an eerie humming that fills the forest.  There’s something vaguely familiar about it, something they should recognize, but don’t.  They’re still trying to identify it when the wind sweeps through the tree tops.  The noise abates.  Then it begins again, a loud moaning in the distance that crescendos into a howl by the time it reaches them.  This time when the wind sings through the trees, Tom and Emily smile at each other.  That’s it.  It’s the wind starting at the base of the rim, rattling pine trees as it advances.  The discovery makes them feel better.  But the cumulus clouds that sail like tall ships overhead soon obscure the sun, and thunder growls across the valley like a giant stomach with hunger pangs.

 The inside of the tent is already dark, and Tom lights the Coleman lantern.  At home he had tied the single mantle on according to directions.  He’s not sure he got it quite right, but it’s burning now like a chunk of white phosphorus.  He and Emily sit on one sleeping bag, and Confucius curls up at the foot of the other.  Emily says, “Confucius say: ‘Mountain air make lion dog very sleepy.’” She produces their silver portable radio and scans the dial for music.  There’s a lot of static, punctuated by sharp crackling from distant lightning.

He hopes she won’t find anything because he wants to listen for noises.  Perhaps the rumble of a pickup truck.  But that’s ridiculous.  They won’t announce their arrival.  They’ll sneak through the woods in the dark like Apache Indians, carefully placing their feet so as not to snap twigs.  He pictures himself firing at the intruders with the .25-caliber weapon, throwing it at them when the shells are spent, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his Swiss Army knife.

Emily finds a country station and turns the volume up.  He makes her turn it down.  She says, “God, I can hardly hear it.”

“Can’t we enjoy the sounds of nature without the trappings of civilization?”

 The night air begins to chill.  Emily crosses to the corner of the tent and searches in one of the paper shopping bags.  When Tom asks what she’s looking for, she says, “I’m putting on my long underwear.”  She comes back and stands in the middle of the tent, wiggling out of her cutoffs.  She unfastens her bikini top and tosses it into a corner.  Her naked Amazon shadow falls across the ceiling and side of the tent.  Her body is covered with a rash of goose bumps, including two large ones at the ends of her breasts.  Before she can climb into her quilted long johns, Tom tackles her, kissing her all over while she writhes on the shiny fabric of the sleeping bag.

Since he’s been back from overseas, they haven’t made love nearly enough.  That’s all he wants to do, but Emily’s been doling it out as if she’s trying to wean him of the need.  It seems to mean less to her now, and that worries him.  He can’t help but feel that less sex can only spell trouble for their marriage in the long run.

“Stop it,” she says.  “It’s out of the question.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s that time of the month,” she says, slipping out from under him.

He knows it’s a lie.  She had her period just two weeks ago.  “Does that mean I have to suffer, too?” he says, playing with the tab on his zipper.

“That’s just like you–always thinking about yourself.  What you need is some little slut to service you on my off days.”

“Any suggestions?”

He knows what she wants to say, but she says nothing, pulling her underwear bottom on and crawling into the bag.  She turns her back toward him.

He gets up immediately and goes out to the car with the aluminum flashlight, shining it on the black handgun in the spare tire well.  He holds the pistol in full sight when he reenters the tent.  Emily turns to see what he’s doing, and when she spots the weapon, she says, “What did I tell you about that?”

“Things have changed.”

“How?”

 “You said you’re on your period, right?”

“So?”

“I read a story not long ago about a menstruating woman who was attacked by a black bear on the Mogollon Rim.  Bears are attracted to the smell of blood.  The gun stays.”

“You’re not going to kill any bear with that pea-shooter,” she says.

“Maybe not, but I can scare it off.”

She thinks for a second, then turns back onto her side.

Tom gets the radio and searches for a sports station, but after two passes up and down the dial, he gives up.  Emily hasn’t moved.  He says, “You know what time it is?  It’s not even seven-thirty.  Are you going to sleep ten or twelve hours?”

She doesn’t respond at first, but after a minute, she says, “What else is there to do?”

He plays with the joint in the pocket of his red flannel shirt.  Michelle gave it to him last week, and she said it was dynamite shit.  He’d never even smoked marijuana until he went into the service, and then only a few times.  If he can just get Emily to take a couple of puffs, she might relax, and who knows what would happen next.  But he’s scared to show it to her.  She’s adamantly against drugs.  Maybe he can prime her with a shot or two from the plastic flask of bourbon he brought along in case the weather turned cold.

“Well?” she says.

“Let’s have a party.”

“What kind of party?”

He retrieves the flask from one of the shopping bags and pours two healthy jiggers into a pair of Styrofoam cups.  Emily doesn’t seem in the mood.  “Come on,” he says, turning the radio on to the country station.  He lifts one of the cups in a mock toast.  “To camping,” he says.

Her stony expression softens a little, and she takes the cup.

At the end of the second cup, they’re up and dancing, euphoric about being in the wilderness, and toasty warm from the antifreeze.  “This really was a good idea coming here,” she says.  “It’s so nice to get out of the city, away from that horrible job.  I wish Anna Siebert could see me now.”

“She’d probably disapprove,” Tom says.  “Supervisors don’t know how to have fun.”

“And what about that guy in the anthropology department,” Emily says, “your advisor–Dr. What’s-his-name?”

“Dr. Feret.”

She says, “He can pronounce it in that French way if he wants, but it’s Dr. Ferret to me.”

“Do you remember his wife at the pig roast?” Tom says.

“Wasn’t she the one on the spit?”

They have a drunken laugh.  While they’re at it, Tom shows her the joint.

“That’s not what I think it is?” Emily says.

“What do you think it is?”

“Marijuana.”

“Congratulations, Mrs. Perkins, you’ve just won the right to sample some loco weed.”

“Don’t you dare light that,” she says, her good mood disappearing.

“It won’t hurt you.  Just try it once.”

 “I’m not kidding, Tom, if you light that thing, I’m leaving.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll take the dog, get into the car, and drive right back down that mountain.”

“Geez,” he says, “at least give it a try.”

“I’m not fool enough to put chemicals into my brain.  Where did you get that, anyway–Michelle Forster?”

The wind picks up, shaking trees by their throats, causing pine cones to rain down on the tent roof.  The wind makes a bellows of the tent, alternately puffing it with air, then sucking the oxygen away.  Tom sulks on his sleeping bag.  The alcohol has turned against him.  He figures he needs the joint now.  He puts it between his lips, takes a match out of a matchbox and strikes the stick on the emery-board side.

“I mean it,” Emily says.  She crawls out of her bag, steps into her jeans, and dons a green flannel shirt.

The match has burned nearly to his finger and thumb, and Tom waves it out.  He lights another.  She won’t really leave.  She’ll just sit in the car for an hour or so.  To test his theory he touches the flame to the end of the joint and inhales deeply.

“That’s it,” Emily says.  “Come on, Confucius.”  She unzips the tent flap and leaves with the dog.

‘Who cares?’ Tom thinks.  ‘Let her go.’

 He’s wrecked after a couple of hits.  He keeps meaning to extinguish the joint because he’s starting to get paranoid, but he can’t put it out.  Finally, when he’s pinching nothing but a roach between finger and thumb, he tosses it into one of the whiskey cups.  When the spark touches liquid, it goes, “Pssst.”

He’s already afraid.  Just when he gets the nerve up to go out and apologize, the engine starts.  Tom unfastens the window flap and looks out.  He can’t see anything because the headlights point directly at him.  Emily backs the car slowly onto the dirt road, then heads toward the highway, the red taillights fading into the woods.  Tom stands staring through the mesh screen into darkness, praying Emily will return.  Behind him, the lantern sputters.  Before he can get over to turn up the gas, the flame dies.  He gets down on all fours, crawling toward the place he left the matches.  But he’s disoriented.  He sits down on a lump in the sleeping bag, and for a panicky moment he thinks it’s Confucius.

Tom tries to calm himself.  He knows he can find the matches through trial and error, but his scrambled thoughts won’t organize themselves.  He begins crawling blindly again, eventually putting his hand on a recognizable object–except he can’t remember what it is.  He feels it over thoroughly before realizing it’s the flashlight.  He laughs at himself when he turns it on.  He finds the matches and reignites the lantern.

A sudden crash of thunder makes him duck.  Then a tidal wave of rain assaults the tent.  Wind gets under the floor, lifting it everyplace except where Tom kneels.  He has to hold the lantern to keep it from toppling over.  Then the lightning starts, exploding in the forest around him as it angles toward the ground.  The wind and rain are relentless.  Inside, water drips from ceiling to floor, wending its way between the sleeping bags.  The lightning strikes draw nearer.  One bolt whizzes overhead, raising the hair on the nape of his neck.  The yellow pine closest to the tent is a lightning rod, poking into the supercharged atmosphere.  If that takes a hit, he’s a goner.  The current will travel down the trunk, arc to the metal tent pole, jump to the water and broil him like a whole chicken.  Lightning blasts a nearby tree.  The thunder is simultaneous.  Tom sits at the side of the tent, his head between his knees.  Being high on dope doesn’t help, so he gets the plastic flask and takes a couple of hearty swallows to knock the edge off.  There was only one other time he was this scared, on the flight from New York to Indianapolis, when he was getting out of the service.

The entire trip from Germany to the states had gone without incident.  He was so anxious to see Emily again, he had called from Frankfurt to say when he’d be home.  He thought about calling again from New York, but decided against it.  After all, in a few more hours he’d be safe in her loving arms.  Then the commercial flight he was taking was delayed forty minutes for an engine repair.  When it finally did take off, a cold front had moved into the city, and the ascent into steel-gray clouds took his breath away.  The pilot banked hard left–too hard, as far as Tom was concerned–and that set the tone for the whole nightmare.

Somewhere over Ohio the plane got caught in a terrible thunderstorm, black clouds turning day into night.  Lightning stabbed around them like giant pitchforks, and the jet rocked like a model airplane in the hands of a maniacal boy.  The passengers were jostled into deathly silence until a temporary power failure brought shrieks from men and women alike.  Tom wasn’t a religious person, but he prayed to God for his life, thinking how tragic it would be to die this way, after spending six safe months in a war zone.  Then, miraculously, the storm passed.  When they touched down in Indianapolis, the sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky.

He never thought he’d be so happy to see that rusty town again.  He took a taxi to his mother-in-law’s place–Emily was living there while he was away–put on a big smile, and knocked on the door.  Nobody was home.  He walked up to a phone booth on Oak Street and called Emily at work.  She couldn’t even get off for lunch today, she said, and she didn’t know where her parents were.

The thought of sitting on the porch for hours depressed him, so he dropped into Flo’s Place, a neighborhood beer garden he had frequented in younger days.  Seeing him in uniform, Flo bought him a beer.  The old men at the bar liked his army stories, and they bought him beers, too.  When he should have been heading off to meet Emily, he was playing pool with one of the regular customers.  It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that he finally got there, drunk and defiant.  What should have been a cheerful welcome home turned into one of their biggest fights.

Now, as he tilts the flask to his lips, he thinks about how drunk he is.  But he’s not just drunk–he’s drunk and stoned.  The worst of the storm seems to have passed, though lightning still lights up the tent, and thunder echoes like distant mortar rounds.  He’s mopping up the floor with Emily’s t-shirt when he hears the rumble of the truck exhaust.  He can tell by the way the sound approaches that they’re driving slowly in his direction.  His first reaction is to get the gun.  Then he crosses to the lantern and turns it off.  He steps over to the front flap, unzips it, and looks out.  He holds his breath as the truck comes closer.  It stops in the road across from the tent.  It’s the pickup all right.  He can discern the outline, see the amber parking lamps reflected in the muddy pools beneath the tires.  The exhaust rumbles and pops, making an occasional gargling sound.  Then a door slams.  Tom can hear the men’s voices, loud and aggressive, but he can’t understand their words.

He doesn’t know what to do.  Perhaps he can reason with them.  They’re really after Emily, anyway.  Or are they?  Maybe they’ll rob and murder him, wait for her to come back.  He hopes she’d have sense enough to turn around if she saw the white truck.  What are his options, he wonders.  He can make a run for it, dash through the woods, try to reach the highway.  They might not follow him in the rain.  Or he could fire a warning shot into the air, let them know they have something to worry about.  He holds the pistol against the mesh fabric at the opening, trying to judge where he’d fire it.  In this weather, with the truck exhaust roaring away, they probably wouldn’t hear the shot.  If they did hear it, no doubt it would sound like a cap-gun retort.  No, firing in the air won’t do.  Maybe he can shoot a taillight out.  He points the gun in that direction.  He was a pretty good shot on the rifle range.  He might be able to hit the light from here.  He can see one of the men near the tailgate taking a leak, his face red from the brake lights.  You can tell he’s in a hurry to get back in the cab because of the rain.  When he finishes, he runs alongside the truck, slipping in the mud, but saving himself from falling by grabbing onto the open door.  The door slams shut.  Gears grind until the driver gets it into first.  Then the truck rolls slowly down the road toward the highway.  Tom lets out his breath, sinking to the floor to sit and think.

 About an hour later, while he lies in his sleeping bag trying to stay awake, headlights splay across the front of the tent.  He jumps up, listening for the truck exhaust.  But what he hears is the familiar pinging of the Escort’s spark plugs.  He’s instantly enraged.  He puts his shoes on, unzips the front flap, and wades through the mud to the passenger door of the car, which is locked.  Rain continues to fall.  He pounds on the window.  “Open up,” he says.

Emily reaches over and opens the lock.  He crawls in, so infuriated he speaks in a whisper.  “Where the hell have you been?”

The green glow of the dashboard light is on her face, and he can see her submissive look.  “I had to wait out the storm in a Payson bar.”

He hammers the dashboard with his fist, making her jump.  “Great,” he says, noticing the smell of beer on her breath.  “I just sat through the worst lightning storm I’ve ever been in, almost getting electrocuted twice, and you’re out having a good old time.  Did you meet anyone interesting?”

She says nothing.

“Well, don’t bother getting out,” he says.  “We’re not staying.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re going home.”

“Oh–Tom.”

He makes several trips, throwing equipment into the rear compartment.  Confucius growls at him from the passenger seat.  Tom haphazardly dismantles the tent, stuffing it into the car and slamming the back door, which doesn’t close until the second try.  Though the rain has slowed to a drizzle, he’s soaked to the skin when he comes to the driver’s side.  “Move over,” he says.  She slides across to the other seat, putting the dog on her lap.

 He backs out, then drives recklessly down the muddy road.  Before he reaches the highway he taps the brakes.  They lock.  The car slides wildly through slippery clay, careening into a ditch and hitting something that slams hard against the undercarriage.  He has to rock the car back and forth a few times to get it on the road again.  Right away he knows that the muffler is gone.  The car sounds like the white pickup truck.  Through the corner of his eye he can see Emily staring straight ahead.

They drive along the highway through the black forest, south on 87.  He turns the windshield wipers off when the rain stops.  They ride all the way to Payson without talking.  The lights of the small businesses along the strip are reflected in the wet, dark road, making the street look like an airport runway.  They’re almost through town when Tom spots a bar at the right side of the highway, a neon wagon wheel above the front door.  “Is that the place?” he says, looking at her for the first time in twenty minutes.

She nods.

When they pass, Tom inspects the packed parking lot.  He can’t believe his eyes.  In the last spot on the left, furthest from the entrance, is the white pickup truck.  He jams on the brakes.  The Escort fishtails for thirty feet before the brakes release and he’s able to turn around in a fast-food restaurant.  Emily says, “Jesus–what are you doing?”

He heads back to the bar, drives straight through the lot to the white truck, and leaves the car idling when he gets out.  He removes his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and extracts the longest blade.  He takes a quick look around.  Then he stabs the left rear tire, twisting once to insure a good puncture.  The air whistles out like an escaped balloon.  When he climbs back into the car and speeds off, Emily is staring at him with an open mouth.  She shakes her head for a full minute before saying, “I don’t know you anymore, Tom.”

“You never knew me.”

Coming down from the rim, they see the lights of the big city, thousands of stars in a black velvet sky.  One of those lights is The Pithouse, the campus bar where the anthropologists meet every Friday night.  Tom pictures Michelle Forster sharing a pitcher with a couple of the guys, doubled over in laughter at one of their jokes.  Her blouse is half open, and the round, white mounds of her breasts are exposed.  Next time–Tom has already decided–he’s going to have a good long gander at those babies.