I.
There is only now so I see everything in present tense. (Had is such a sad word; will have is greedy.)
Stacy, who is my housemate, drives to Old Faithful with Robert and I. I cram my bunny in the trunk of her car, and when we get there she kisses her boyfriend hard and sends us away. She is wearing a cowboy hat the last I see her, and smiling.
Robert and I rent a heritage cabin—the cheapest with discount. We laugh at the linens. I say I will dip them in mud and then send them to ourselves to receive and count with all the hundreds of other linens.
We plod in the snow, sinking to the waist, laughing. There is a phone booth in the middle of the snow and we sink down to it, to see if there is a dial tone. There is. I call my bank, I talk to the operator, I think of all the 1-800 numbers I could call on a whim.
II.
It is shadow dark and a coyote slinks past Old Faithful’s cone moments before she blows. I take ten pictures. They all come out black, like someone ran over it with a charcoal paintbrush shaped like a Rent an RV.
III.
The cabin is warm. We eat pop tarts and write. He sleeps in his sleeping bag, I take the bed and sleep medication.
IV.
We talk about Joseph Heller and bears in the morning. We see bear tracks and 3 geysers erupt. At Daisy we scream at tourists to walk on the board walk. I’m terrified I will see boiled tourist, camera melded to their blistered fists. “Natural selection,” Robert mumbles and grins at the ground.
On the way an old man with a polished cane nods his head at us. He flings his cane around like it’s an accessory, not a tool. I think about Thornstein Veblen and laugh, I wonder what Veblen would say about geysers and National Parks and tourists.
V.
Stacy gets glared at by tourists as she gases around a bison. “It’s a bison, idiots, you’re in Yellowstone, move along.” Stacy used to be a taxi cab driver from Brooklyn. She tells about it. “You’d have to be dead, not to have stories as a cab driver.” She thinks a little to herself and laughs.
I tell my hitching stories. Stacy tells her story about the drunk guy who jacked off in her car. “I stabbed him in the stomach with a carpenter’s hole punch, shoved him out, and laughed as he stood there, holding his stomach in one hand, dick in the other. Now every time he tries to take care of himself he’ll get a pain in his belly and he’ll remember me. That’s right, remember me.”
VI.
I walk with a friend up a hill and roll down. We stand at the bottom, heaving for breath and smiling.
VII.
I wear my ski mask out hitching, to see how long it will take someone to pick me up. It takes two SUV’s, two minutes.
“Now young lady, try that in summer,” someone dares me.
VIII.
I walk to a graveyard with Robert, and he steals a flower for me. I won’t take it.
It’s his, I say, and point at the slab of granite.
He’s giving it to you, Robert says. It came up out of the rocks. It wasn’t planted there on purpose. You’re not stealing.
I melt, put the flower in my hair.
IX.
At four in the morning the birds are singing and flapping their wings against the trailer full of laundry. Robert and I sit on the steps for break, breathing in sunrise. All we do, we tell each other bitterly, is work, work, work.
We want to go explore, we hate the laundry.
Robert puts in 82.55 hours. I do his time sheet and stare, and call his supervisor up to verify. Yeah, yeah. 82.55 hours. He hardly slept.
X.
When everything else is fluid and flexible I cling to the sturdy books, I can always rely on books. I get a job at the video store to get away from my head, and the things I can’t face. I don’t want to think, I tell a friend. Leave me alone.
I work from 4 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon at the laundry as a secretary. Then I work at the video store until 9. I read about wolves at the video store and wait for something to grab me up, and drag me into what passes for heaven.
I read. I keep waiting. Sometimes I think I’m not being dragged to paradise, but out of my own skin.
In the Arctic Eskimos will kill a wolf by hiding a knife under snow with a dab of seal or elk blood. The wolf, frenzied, will lick himself to shreds. In books about the Wolf Project the writers ponder why wolves are so hated. Maybe because they’re so much like humans, they theorize.
The scientists reintroducing wolves name with numbers, all the wolves are consecutive to each other, one and two and three and four, captured in Canada, let loose in Yellowstone. The higher numbers are more recent. They’re Yellowstone born.
A man with a red beard comes into the video store and says he’s with the Wolf Project. He rubs his hands together. I can’t wait to get back to work, he tells me. He rents the First season of Alias for his wife. I get back to my reading, the reading howls.
