Lost Lake

by Margo McCall

When the phone rings Monday morning, Willie says yes she'll do it. Three days later she finds herself steering Hiram's sputtering GMC down a road leading God knows where. She's startled to realize that she's towing a rickety travel trailer behind her, the same one her and Hiram dragged to mountain lakes when the boys were little before parking it under the elm to be erased by leaves. And that instead of sitting in front of the television set with her gray hair in rollers, perhaps scalding some milk for hot chocolate, enjoying her declining years in the old house in McFadden, she's trying to find her way back to Lost Lake.

Unhinged. Yes, that's the word for what's happened to her. Willie conjures up an image of the rickety storm door back in McFadden that slammed open and closed all last winter, grating on her nerves as she fed Hiram his soup and prepared his injections. During a snowstorm one night the pounding got so bad she went out in her nightgown and slippers and ripped it right off the frame. Willie threw it in a snow bank, and when spring came and melted the snow around it, the door collapsed to the muddy earth and rusted. Early summer heat cracked the window glass, but Willie let the door lay where it had fallen, having had more pressing matters, like Hiram's funeral, to attend to.

She didn't bother telling her sons Walter or Oswald she'd signed up to be a camp host. Or as her younger sister Delia put it, asked their permission. "Why in hell do I need their blessing? I raised those snot-nosed brats from diapers," Willie told Delia, who has needled Willie to sell off the house and remaining property, make a will and move into a retirement home. Everybody telling her what to do, the whole town suddenly interested in her well-being, as though now that Hiram was gone she was a loose end that needed to be snipped off.

Willie might have lay down in her grave and died like they wanted had she not run into their old friend Albert Mason in the hospital waiting room as Hiram endured his last chemo round. Albert's wife was undergoing hip surgery, and he worried that might nix their plans to be hosts at Lost Lake. When Willie told him that Lost Lake was where she and Hiram spent their honeymoon, Albert said she should put her name on the standby list just in case he and Grace didn't make it. Willie was in such a state, with Hiram growing feebler by the day and her thoughts racing about what to do next, that she made the call without thinking much about it. And so when they phoned her up last Monday Willie was just as surprised to hear herself say yes as she is now to find herself driving around in the woods looking for the place she remembered from forty odd years ago.

The scenery looks unfamiliar, but then again, some of the trees slapping the sides of the truck weren't even seedlings the last time she passed by. Willie acknowledges to her poodles, Cleo and Gypsy, that they might have taken the wrong turnoff. Somehow, their black eyes look worried.

The blue light fast fades to gray and on either side of the winding dirt road the aspens quaver and shake with rising wind. Rogue gusts toss the empty drink cups on the floorboards and tease the edges of the roadmap flapping in the passenger seat beside the dogs, who whine in their cage as the rumbling thunder tracks their curving ascent up the mountains.

Willie gave up on the tattered map some miles ago, grew tired of the dry crinkling noise it made as she carefully unfolded and refolded it, confining vast tracts of mountain into neat squares that seemed to bear little relation to the landscape she remembers. "Useless," she finally said, not knowing whether the pronouncement was intended for herself, for the dogs huddled together in their cage or for the confounded map itself. Willie has been talking to the dogs as the miles slide by, saying things like "Don't worry Gypsy, we'll be there soon," or "You think we're lost, don't you, Cleo?"

Sometimes she's been muttering to herself just to keep from drifting off and steering the truck and the travel trailer off the edge of the steep, dark canyons lining the road. Sometimes appealing to Jesus to please let there be a rest stop soon along the I-70 so she can stop and relieve herself. And now and then testing her vocal chords just to make sure she's still alive.

Willie doesn't want to admit that she's lost, but it seems she is. Life has been a dreamy coagulated mix of past and present since Hiram slipped into eternity. The edges of things blur, soft as chocolate pudding and twice as rich and oh could she go for some now, even though the doctor says she needs to lose a good thirty pounds. It's hard keeping then and now apart: worse than separating the boys to prevent a fistfight when they were little. It's all part of the same road, no beginning, no end, the turnoffs leading from four-lane divided highways to two-lane blacktop, and now, as she sees in the bluish light, bumpy gravel wagon trails.

Memories of all the trips she and Hiram and the boys took, the summer vacations in the Grand Tetons and Rockies, the forays each winter to the stock show in Denver, spread out around her, filling the cab, pressing out the open windows and radiating outward, along the ground, into the sky, seeping like unstoppable floodwaters.

In all likelihood the cab probably still harbors a pouch of Hiram's favorite chew he'd tucked in his seat to prevent it from spilling, or treasured fishing lures that spilled from his tackle box when he went around a blind curve along the Laramie River years and years ago. Willie didn't bother to clean it out after Hiram died. Like everything else, the truck is a long list of things to do: fix the broken side mirror knocked out of joint by a cottonwood branch on their driveway, flush out the radiator, rotate the tires. Ever since Hiram took sick, things have been piling up, too much for one person, better to just leave the whole mess behind.

Time, like the memories, flows in and around itself, one morning turning to twilight and again to dawn with little separating one day from the next. It seems only minutes ago that she crawled out of the travel trailer in Redstone to begin a new day, and now darkness is pressing in on all sides. "I don't know where the time goes," she says, apparently to the road ahead, for Gypsy and Cleo are looking out the side window in alarm at the wind whipping the trees.

And as the words slip out into the twilight, she's twenty five and with two small boys to chase after, and it was on an evening like this that she was hanging wash that should have been done that morning, scrambling to hold pegs in her mouth, keep the white cotton sheets off the muddy ground and Walter and Oswald close by. Feeling overwhelmed, a young mother then, with a husband gone for days at a time tending the cattle, a brawny circumspect kind of man, quiet except when he was slurping his soup. Oh, she loved him a long time ago. But things between them got all tangled up after the boys came, and in forty years neither of them made much of an effort to make them right again. But on that evening a black shape appeared on the horizon. Willie had her sons in the storm cellar seconds before it touched down in a neighbor's field, and later, as she gazed at a sheet flapping in the crown of a cottonwood, she felt her own strength for the very first time. Strong as a tornado.

Clasping the steering wheel, the white, hard plastic rubbed smooth with oil from Hiram's hands, it all seems to have drained out of her. Worn out as the old GMC, rusty from twenty-five Wyoming winters, now struggling to drag the heavy trailer up another rise. Willie wonders what she'll do if the engine seizes up. She didn't bother to hire a mechanic to see if the truck was strong enough for towing before hooking up the trailer and guiding the GMC downward from Laramie and Cheyenne.

And if Hiram were around, he'd say, Isn't that just like you? and Don't you have a brain in your head?, making her feel all small and squirmy helpless inside. But since he's not, there's only the truck's accusing squeaks and rattles to prod her into feelings of self-doubt and remorse.

The whole trip is taking on the contours of a dream, the crossing of the grassy border into Colorado, more flatness but in the distance the beckoning, blue shadow of mountains. Eyes too weak for crocheting struggling to follow the gray expanse of road, the asphalt ribbon cut with yellow dotted lines, getting further and further from home.

What was she thinking? Sixty-seven, hard of hearing, a fat, curly haired old woman with thick, round glasses and weak eyes. Not like any campground host she'd ever heard of. With all the extra weight she's packing under her sweatshirt and slacks, will she even have the strength to clean out the toilets and rake the campsites? And what if she has a heart attack or her blood pressure medication runs out? Or falls and breaks her glasses?

Lightning flashes, thunder reverberates through the trees and drops of rain smear the windshield. But the sad truth is there's nowhere to go back to. The small house where they raised the kids sags into the prairie, the well casings rusting in the sand, giving off weak dribbles of reddish water that leave streaks on the sheets.

There's no turning 'round. She's sure of that now. In the bluish dark of heavy forest rain, Willie can barely make out the sign, Lost Lake, 2 miles, pointing to a narrow, rutted road lined by dark pines.

Green light filtering through the pines. Smell of wet earth. Sound of water lapping a sandy shore. Then and now, then only the now. Outside, the lake is even glassier than she remembers. It's odd not to be moving along the road anymore. She feels alone, not like she did throughout her honeymoon, and not as she did back in McFadden. This kind of alone is different, the alone of being Willie, Wilhomena, born in the starving year of 1934, in Medicine Bow below the Shirley Mountains, daughter of a farmer and his wife, shipped off at sixteen to marry a rancher, bear him two sons then watch him die.

Sometime long after she crawls into bed in the trailer, the storm subsides. And when she wakes the next morning, the tangy pine aroma makes her feel invigorated enough to go for a swim. The elastic around the legs of her bathing suit is shot. No surprise, the thing must be twenty years old. Her threadbare beach towel is covered with pale seashells, and though she's never seen the ocean, as she steps into the cold lake water, tossing the towel on the rocky shore, Willie thinks she someday might. If this summer works out right, maybe she can coax the GMC west, follow the dotted yellow lines until they end.

Taking the plunge, her heart jumps a little but doesn't stop, for which she is grateful, and afterward, walking through the loop that in a week or so will be full of sleeping campers, Willie shivers more from excitement than cold. After putting up her hummingbird feeder and opening cans of food for the dogs, she sits at the picnic table and makes a sign for the toilet: Please close lid and door when leaving. She'd always thought her handwriting looked loopy and uncertain, but now, examining it in the spreading light of morning, it looks just fine.