Saint Joe 

Budgie wakes me up brushing lacquered nails across my cheekbone.  “Iris, baby, get up now,” she says, drawing out the letters in my name, Eyyye-ris.  “Don’t know why you wanna sleep in this tent so bad.  Colder than hell out here.  Come on inside.  I’ll get you coffee.”

            She just doesn’t understand insulation.  Or much of anything about camping, really.  Budgie lived in a city long enough to decide that camp-trailers are the only way to go, unless you want to get eaten by bears or wake up with hypothermia.  Waving her out of the tent, I wait until I hear the rusted screen door on her Airstream shriek shut before I wriggle out of the depths of my sleeping bag and struggle numbly into very, very cold Levi’s.  I had remembered to stick my flannel shirt into my pillowcase the night before though, and as I snuggle into it I remember how sleepy I still am.

            I met Budgie last fall, right after I dropped out of college.  We had both gotten jobs as tellers at US Bank in Moscow, me because I needed to pay rent, Budgie because her latest husband had died and she didn’t have anything better to do.

            Karma, the other teller on our shift, was closer to my age but had an irritating habit of constantly twirling the strand of hair behind her ear with her little finger, so that just talking to her made me dizzy.  That left Budgie, with her fake nails and Day-Glo lipstick and loud laugh.

            She loves to tell stories, and right from the start I heard about husbands and dogs and the exploits of Budgie age 10, Budgie in high school, Budgie as a baby.

            I just like to listen, really.

            From inside the tent I hadn’t been able to smell breakfast but as I unzip the flap, lazy clouds of bacon waft up to my nose.  Pancakes, too.  Budgie makes them from Bisquick. 

            When I was a kid we camped on the St. Joe River, up where fire ravaged the mountains in the early part of the century and still does some late Augusts.  The tent zipper makes the same sound as it did then, when I woke up and found my father with a tin pot of coffee on the campfire, staring deeply into the flames like they held some sort of evanescent secret that he might miss if he looked up.

He reserved a certain type of smile for this occasion, and would briefly let it fly, then return to watching.  Mom got up soon and brought the heavy iron skillet and pancake mix that came in a brown waxed-paper sack.   Dad fried pancakes in the shapes of moose and salmon and we ate off blue speckled tin plates, the same pattern as the coffee pot.   

            Budgie slides a plate across the table.  It is porcelain with cherry print, probably an old pattern she’d kept in her kitchen when she was younger.  Syrup is in a plastic bottle, and blackberry jam that her sister makes, and margarine in little yellow tubs. 

            I hop onto the cramped bench; its canvas covering has been torn up by whoever owned the trailer before Budgie.  Pete is across the table reading a magazine and doesn’t flinch when I bump his knees.  Not that I’d expect him to. 

Pete is Budgie’s son from a marriage she never talks about.  He is about my age, I think, but no words will ever confirm it.  The only story Budgie tells about Pete is how when he was a baby he didn’t have a soft spot on his head, and the doctors cut his skull open wide to fix it.  He keeps his hair long to cover the scar, messy black hair that falls over rain cloud colored eyes.  Pete does not talk to me, though sometimes I hear the low thrum of his tenor-saxophone voice when he is talking to Budgie and I am outside.

He takes his plate of pancakes outside to sit in one of the blue canvas lawn chairs that Budgie bought brand new for the trip.

“He’s just quiet,” she tells me when he’s gone.  “He’s just shy.”  No stories for Pete, just statements.  He’s a smart boy.  He knows how to take care of things.  It’s not that he doesn’t like you.  It’s just that he doesn’t have anything to say to you.

Is that supposed to explain it?  I came here for him, anyway.  I guess.

One day after work Budgie had asked if I’d like to meet her son and take a weekend trip all together, just for fun.  “You need to get out more,” she said. “Do you do anything besides work and go to lunch with old ladies?”

            I agreed on the trip before I knew where we were going.  I expected Seattle, or Vegas maybe, from a city person like Budgie.  But oh no, she said Marble Creek.

            A tributary to the St. Joe.

The Bisquick sits in the top of my stomach all morning and the bacon smell won’t get out of my head. I’m taking a walk, I tell Budgie, to get a little air, to clear my mind.  She half-waves goodbye, her concentration enveloped in a romance novel.  I can tell from the cover that she has read it before.

“Goin’ fishin?” she asks as I am almost out the door.

I tell her maybe. 

I was six the first time I went fly fishing.  Dad took me out to a stretch under a bridge where he said the water ran slow and shallow.  Uncle Nick had bought him a beautiful new fly rod for his birthday that May, and he assembled it on the shore, running his fingers over each section before he put it in place.  He carried me in one arm and the rod in the other, out to where I could stand on a smooth stone and keep my feet mostly dry while I learned.

There was no hope of holding up the pole on my own—it was, after all, twice as tall as me—so he held his hands around mine like dads are supposed to do, and showed me how to twitch my wrists and form a smooth loop in the line, and to flick the fly off the surface of the water so you forget that it’s not really alive, and the fish forget too.

We cast for thirty minutes, or forty, and nothing hit.  He said it was because the water’s so shallow, so I thought it was my fault.  If we didn’t have to go where the water was right for me, he could catch fish, big ones.  But he didn’t.  I’m holding him back, I thought, I’m messing him up.  Six years old and already such a burden.

Dad drove a yellow Chevette, theoretically too small for our family of three, with sharp metal everything and a backseat that always smelled like hot plastic.  I ran to where it was parked up on the bridge and slammed the doors and locked them, trying to hide myself away from him, punishing me so he wouldn’t have to.  I didn’t have time to roll up both hand-cranked windows before Dad reached in and unlatched the driver’s side door.  He slid the fly rod across the seat in one long piece and tossed the case in the back.  “We’ll go upstream then,” he said.

I threw open my door and thought of places to run, but at his firm “Stay, Iris,” I slammed it shut.  Shut the door on the last three inches of the magnificent fly rod.

He sighed, and stared at me as I winced in preparation for punishment.  He opened his door again, walked around the Chevette and picked up the shard of fly rod lying on the road.  After he got back in the car he placed the pieces of pole and its severed head back in the case.  The pole stayed in the car for the remainder of that trip, and afterward was never fixed, never mourned for, never seen again. 

I haven’t fished much since then. 

I pass the time on my walk picking up oily rocks from the road and chucking them down the bank to the creek.  The road curves and there is an old bridge, with orange-striped reflectors and metal slats to support the logging trucks.  It looks familiar but I’ve never seen it before, just others like it on the St. Joe.  Piles of gravel are shoved up along the edge, and I grab handfuls, breathing in their diesel smell and imagining the soothing sound of a hundred little splashes. 

Inhale and raise my hand, exhale and drop the rocks.  I try to think of symbolism I could apply to the moment.  Everything is ruined when I hear someone cuss from underneath the bridge.

A blue trucker’s hat emerges first, tailed by the fisherman, a thin man with a gap between his front teeth.  “You trying to scare the fish away?”

I shake my head no, I’m not.  “Well that’s alright,” he says, then adds a sharper, “Then what’re you doing?”

“Walking.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “Taking a break.”

“Oh.  I was just about to anyway.”  He pulls a sandwich and can of pop from his jacket pockets, sets his pole just under the bridge and hefts himself onto the railing.  “Want half?”

“No thanks.”  I start to walk off but sense the awkward pause and turn.

“You go to school?” he asks, indicating the Lumberjacks logo on his t-shirt.  “My daughter’s a junior at St. Marie’s.  Plays basketball.  Real good.”

“I graduated three years ago.” I tell him. “From Milton.  That’s not very close to here.”

“College then?” 

“For a little while.  I work at a bank now.”

He nods, keeping his eyes half-towards me as he drinks his Coke.  “So you’re here with …parents? Friends? Boyfriend?”

“Friends.  Lady I work with, actually, and her son.”

He continues to bob his head, grunting “Uh huh, uh huh” between bites of sandwich.  “Why you with them?”

“I hadn’t been camping in a while.”

He swigs the remains of his Coke and points to his pole.  “Going back to fishing.  You watch where you throw those rocks now.” 

            For a while I thought it was the fire that woke me up early on mornings along the St. Joe.  There was something else along with it though, a soft snap and fizzle that can only be made by one thing.  As soon as Dad finished building that fire every morning, he’d open a can of Coke.  He’s the only person I’ve ever known who drank Coke at six in the morning, when the air was cold and called for coffee that was hot in its pot on the fire. 

            Sometimes I’d hear him humming between drinks, singing softly either because he didn’t want us to wake up or didn’t want us to hear.  Mostly he sang Coca-Cola theme songs--he’d like to buy the world a Coke, there’s always the real thing, always Coca-Cola.

            He kept six-packs cold in the river, nestled like bright red rocks in the running water.  I stole them sometimes and sat on the shore, listening to the rustles and burbles and whistles that filled the air, getting pleasantly caffeinated.   

I hear Budgie singing along to her radio as I approach the Airstream.  Pete is sitting outside in his lawn chair, watching the treetops.  I wave but I don’t think he sees me. 

Budgie turns when she hears me open the trailer door but doesn’t turn down the music.

“Good walk, baby?” she asks, still swinging her hips to Bonnie Raitt.  “Hear this?  Great song.  Coulda been about me, right?  You shoulda known me when I was your age!” she whoops.  “I gave ‘em something to talk about!” 

She turns the volume up full blast on her radio, shouting, “It’s so empty out here I can listen as loud as I wanna!”  She spins an awkward pirouette in the thin walkway of the trailer, and reaches for my hand.  “Dance with me, Iris, you’ll feel like a new woman!”

I sail out the door before I can get caught in her mad dancing.  Pete’s not in his lawn chair anymore so I sit down and try to see what is so interesting about the trees. 

Soon the radio goes dead and Budgie yells, still inside, “Wanna go get some sodas for me?  Pete had the last one!”

I lean in the door and she hands me a ten-dollar bill.  “You know which kind I like, right?”

“Pepsi?”

“Diet, diet!   Just go on down to the gas station.  Take the car!”

Budgie pulls the Airstream with a Cadillac, and driving it is how I imagine captaining an oil rig must feel like.  Still I make it to the paved road again, and to the Conoco on the corner.  Pepsi costs $4.39, and I spend the rest on gas, just in case.  I don’t know what kind of mileage a car like this gets.

There is a piece of grey plywood tipped over in the trees.  On it is faded writing: “Eat at the Big Creek Inn.  Fish-of-the-day every day.  8 miles east of Calder.” 

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Calder.

Calder who?

Calder and she wasn’t home.

Dad told that joke every time we passed Calder, a crummy little backwoods town along the St. Joe.  I thought it was hilarious, and I repeated it to store clerks and my parents’ friends, never understanding why they didn’t get it.  Doesn’t everyone know about Calder?  Don’t they all go to the river?  Maybe I just wasn’t as funny as Dad, I thought.

There was one billboard in Calder, big and white with red letters: “Future Home of the Calder Quick Stop.”  “See that, Iris?” Dad always said as we drove by.  “That sign’s been there longer’n you’ve been here.”  We’d laugh and dream up fantastical reasons for the nonexistence of the Quick Stop.

Every time they start to build it, we said, some Californian takes the lumber for firewood.

Some big old chipmunk crawls out of the woods and chews it up.

There’s a curse and someone dies.

Once after the ritual jokes, my father stopped laughing and looked at me and said, “When I win the lottery we’re gonna build that Calder Quick Stop.  Just the three of us, Iris, and we’ll be famous.” 

“Knock knock,” I say to Budgie.

“Come in,” she says, even though I’m already inside, setting the Diet Pepsi on the counter.

“Knock knock.”

“Oh! A joke! Sorry baby, you lost me there,” she waves her hands wildly above her head.  “I got one for ya.  Knock knock.”

She wouldn’t have understood the Calder one anyway.  “Who’s there?”

“Gorilla!”

“Gorilla who?”

“Gorilla me a hamburger, I’m starving!” She laughs with all the wild abandon of a five-year-old.  I force a slight smile.  Driving makes me tired.

It is lunchtime though, and I want to cook over the fire but all Budgie has are frozen fish sticks and Tater-Tots—not exactly fire food.  I try anyway, holding the edge of a cookie sheet with two potholders, dangling the rest over low flames.  They should be turning golden brown, I think, and wait. 

When I finally get around to peeling lunch off its sheet, I’ve learned that there’s a good reason most people make Tater-Tots in the oven.  The bottoms are burned black, the tops still squishy white potato.  The fish sticks are even worse off, soggy and smelling like charcoal. 

Budgie doesn’t say anything about my disaster, and Pete never says anything about anything.  I’m sure Budgie chalks another one up to the benefits of camp-trailers in her head—we could have used the oven.  She digs through a cupboard and finds a waffle iron and a bottle of huckleberry wine.  The waffle iron is used for leftover Bisquick mix from the morning, and the wine I suspect she really found much earlier on in the day.  I stick to Diet Pepsi.

We eat lunch in the sunlight by the ashes of my fire. 

One morning on the St. Joe, in late July just before my eighth birthday, I woke up to air the color of ashes.  Thick fog had seeped in through the zippers of the tent, permeated my sleeping bag, snuck into my eyes and ears and throat.  It had been so cold the night before I slept with shoes and coat on, and my stocking cap rolled over my ears, but the fog invaded. 

There was no sound when I opened my eyes.  No crackling kindling, no morning birds, no snapping pop cap.  The fog caught me up and out the tent flap, spun me into the dirt outside and told me to wake up but nothing happened.

 I wanted to be warm by the fire but there were ashes, and more ashes, and my dad staring into them like nothing was different.  Daddy, Daddy where’s the fire…he looked up at me with eyes the color of ashes.  I heard my mom scream from behind me, and watched him fall into the cold, empty pit. 

 It is unusually cool that afternoon after lunch, and I fall asleep while Budgie is telling us about the 1910 St. Joe fire she read about in a library book.  I wake up alone awhile later, and there is light, wet fog sticking to my face and hands, mixing with frosted breath, settling in my hair.

“Get inside, you lazy baby!” shouts Budgie out the Airstream door.  “You’ll get pneumonia!  You prolly already got frostbite!”

I am laughing too hard at this to move from my lawn chair, and Budgie eventually runs out and starts pulling on my arms.  “Iris, Iris, get inside already!  We got coffee, we got blankets, come on!”

My sides ache but I manage to make it into the trailer, and collapse on the bench.  “My gosh, the way you talk you’d think I was almost dead!”

Budgie gets serious.  “Well you coulda been, you know.  You don’t know how cold it got.  You don’t know what’s out in them woods.”

“Yeah, I coulda gotten attacked by chipmunks!” I am once again reduced to giggles, and look up just long enough to catch the side of a smile from Pete.

“There are rabid chipmunks,” insists Budgie through my hysterics.  She can’t contain herself for too much longer, though, and soon is leaning back against the tiny stove, gasping between guffaws. 

“I don’t think you should go camping anymore,” I squeak out. “It’s just too hard on an old lady like you!”

“Now, Iris, that wasn’t nice,” she says, and grabs the pancake spatula out of the sink.  She swoops it in a big arc over her head like a brandished sword.  As she strikes a fighting stance she stops suddenly and shudders, and her head jerks back.

“Budgie?”

Blank eyes look at me, and I know them.

Her knees give out but I am gone before she hits the trailer floor. 

Dad had a heart attack before he could build the fire.  It was sudden, they said, and violent, and everything gave way with it. 

Mom had dragged him to the back seat of the Chevette and yelled my name but I was gone.  She had to leave without me, she told me, she didn’t know what else to do.  She didn’t know where I was.  She sent Uncle Nick up as soon as she could.

They said I hadn’t run far before I tripped, and my chin and knees were scraped and bleeding.  Uncle Nick found me curled up under a bush, sleeping with tears running down my cheeks.

Dad died before they got to the hospital.  Probably while he was by the fire pit, the doctor said.  It didn’t make sense because he was so young.  It was a disease they hadn’t seen.  Mom said they ran tests on me later, to make sure I wouldn’t inherit it.  She said I never complained through the whole thing.

I remember one small glimpse of Uncle Nick picking me up, whispering that it would be okay, someday. 

I am running.  My feet have memories that I don’t, and are desperately dodging the ruts and rocks of the road.  I get to the bridge where I’d met the fisherman and can’t go anymore.  My lungs threaten to abandon ship, my knees sound like the Airstream door.  I let myself drop into the grass along the creek, to stop and breathe or cry or something. 

Soon an engine roars and a door slams, and hot arms are gathering me up, setting me on the front seat of the Cadillac.  Pete drives back to the campsite and hooks up the trailer without a noise.

Where’s Budgie?  Is she dead there, back in the trailer?  Are her eyes still open, is she just left there on the floor, or shoved up onto the bench by the table?  Was there something wrong that no one saw?

Pete stops at the Conoco, and gets out to use the phone. “Hello,” he says, “this is Peter Michaels…I need to make an appointment for my mother…Bridgette Michaels…yes, Budgie…she forgot to take her medication again…No, not too serious…she’s sleeping.  I’m taking her home.”

Pete gets back in the Caddy and starts the engine.  

We spread Dad’s ashes in the St. Joe.  Watched them float away while the birds sang and the wind blew. 

“Everything’s alright,” Pete says after we’ve been driving awhile.

I don’t say anything back.  “Mom never told you she was epileptic, did she?”  he asks.

“Why would she?  I just work with her.”

He takes his eyes off the road and stares at me for a fleeting second.  “No, no don’t say that.  You’re her friend, Iris.  She needs you.  She needs people to take care of.”

“She’s got you, doesn’t she?”

“I take care of her,” he says, softly, and changes the subject.  “She was really excited when you said you’d come camping with us.  She told me you said you hadn’t been camping since you were little.”

“Since I was eight.  My…”

“Your what?”

“My dad died.  While we were camping.”

“Oh…I’m…sorry.” 

“It’s okay.”

“No.  I’m really sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”  Talking.  Pete.  Huh.

“For kind of avoiding…ignoring…well, for not really saying anything to you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Mom says you’re a smart girl, real funny and all.  Lots of life.  But most of the time here you seem so…dead.”  He pauses.  “Oh, god.”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean that.  I’m sorry.”  We sit in nervous silence for a few moments.

“Pete?” I ask.

A beat.  “Yes?”

Why did you come get me?  Why do you talk to me now?  Why do you take care of your mom?  Why do you feel like you have to be sorry?  What do you see in the treetops?  What do I ask you, anyway? 

“Can we get a little fresh air?” I say.

He rolls down the windows and we listen to the birds sing and the wind rush by, to the echo of a creek up the road and the memory of a river that runs where there are fish and fires and ashes.