Lisa Michaels

Grand Ambition

She sat on the bare box springs in the center of the boat, while Glen stood on a cross plank, working the long sweeps. They were plowing through a caramel river—thick, with a greasy sheen. It ran flat and smooth to the banks, which were bare and just high enough to block the views on either side. A deep ditch, really. A canal. Within it, the boat looked rather substantial: a flat-bottomed barge the size of a peddler's wagon, piled with supplies. A box stove, a .30-30 rifle, two cartons of bullets, crates of canned peaches and tomatoes and beans, rope and blankets. Bessie kept her things wrapped in oilskin: a box camera, twenty-seven dollars in a beaded purse—a sentimental object, frivolous for any occasion ahead—pencils, charcoal, a sketchbook, and blank diary.

The thought of that notebook made her pulse quicken. All those empty pages, which would soon be filled with accounts of days she could hardly imagine. That was the thrill of beginning: a burst of pent-up tension, mixed with curiosity. As if someone, somewhere, knew how it would end and wouldn't tell her. For a moment, she imagined that the story was already written, and she was just waiting for the words to appear.

When she looked up, Glen was tying the sweep oars out of the water with a bit of rope. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Letting us drift for a minute."

She watched him, puzzled. Then he pulled the camera from its crate. "I wanted to take your photograph."

She laughed. "While we plow into a sandbar? That's one way to make the papers. 'Expedition runs aground half a mile from launch. Captain taking girlie pictures.' "

"I never said anything about getting undressed." He pressed his lips against a smile and opened the case.

"Not yet," she said. And with one eyebrow arched, she buttoned her leather jacket to the throat.

Glen stared at her through the viewfinder. She was browned from their summer on the ranch, her bobbed hair side-parted and combed close to one cheek. He took in her dark eyes, her slim neck framed by a shearling collar. He never quite managed to tell her how lucky he felt.

Of course, she didn't think she was beautiful. She always shook her head when someone suggested it. He used to think that strange—how could someone be so blind to herself?—until he saw her portrait in an old high school annual. She was eighteen, wearing a white-collared dress with a bow, her hair in a wavy bob with a fringe in front, and though no one would have called her homely, neither would anyone have stopped to look at her twice. He remembered glancing up from the photograph. He didn't know her at that age, and the intervening five years had planed the curves from her face, bringing out the fine bones and throwing her eyes into relief. Suddenly he had understood. She still thought of herself as she looked then. Next to her name in the yearbook was a lighthearted horoscope. "You will travel in foreign countries accompanied by a blue-eyed, brown-haired young man who pays the bills. Disposition: jolly, but bashful."

Now, framing her face in the camera lens, he tried to set her at ease. "You look like you're about to get your teeth drilled."

Bessie broke into a smile, relieved to hear the shutter click. She'd never liked having her photograph taken. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps because the camera reserved judgment. Even a nickel sketch artist at an arcade showed his hand more quickly—you could peer over his shoulder and see what he'd made of you. But the camera would capture her, at good angle or bad, and it would be more than a month till she'd see the result. But that wasn't the only source of her shyness. A year after she and Glen had met, six months into their marriage, she still felt the need to hold herself in a flattering light. She supposed it was natural. In the first rush, they had shared what seemed to be everything—childhood hurts, their tiny quotidian likes and dislikes—but there were things that she still hadn't revealed to him, out of fear of what he might think. They had come together so quickly, as if they recognized one another in some physical way. Often when he was absorbed in a task she would find herself staring at the cords in his neck, the firm set of his lips, and a current of pleasure jangled her to the root. Perhaps, she thought now, the two went together: the passion and the uncertainty.

Glen wrapped the camera in oilskin and looked out at the riverbank, the soft crumbling ledges. "God, am I glad to leave that gloomy town. Did you see the way those brakemen looked at you when we were loading the boat? One of them called you 'scrappy.' "

"No, he didn't."

"Yes, he did. He said, 'That's the kind of gal you could use in a camp.'"

"Some distinction. But really, I haven't been good for much except passing you the tools."

It was true; she had felt restless in the weeks it had taken Glen to build the boat. Her drawing materials were packed away, and at first she'd spent her days sitting on a pile of grain sacks in the barn he'd borrowed for the work, keeping him company. But watching her husband hammer and plane wore thin after a while. He worked quickly and with confidence, marking the planks with a pencil and sawing through with rhythmic strokes. As she listened to the slowly rising notes of a hammer spiking a nail home, she felt a strange light-headedness steal over her. She had given up so much to make this trip, turned her life inside out like an old shirt. They had been dreaming and planning for a year, and now that the moment had nearly arrived she was anxious to set out. It was one thing to talk of adventure, another to push back from the bank and begin.

While Glen finished the boat, she decided to make it her job to examine the town. If she was going to write an account of their trip, she ought to begin with a thorough description of the launching point.

That lasted about half an hour.

Green River, Utah, was a pitiful place, huddled around a railroad stop on the Rio Grande line. Wide dirt streets without a tree to offer contour or shade, the intersections held down by squat brick buildings: the Midland Hotel & Café, Bebe and Sons Dry Goods, a bank, a barbershop. It was like a model for a place where people might one day live. No point jotting these impressions in her journal—a place of such unrelieved loneliness tends to echo in the mind. Instead she retreated to the hotel, where they had taken a room. It was early October, cold even when the sun shone. They would leave in a week. She made tea on a small burner the proprietor had loaned them and set about straightening their gear.