II. "Spruce Lake"
“Spruce Lake”, Colorado. October, 1984.
Of course, in the years that followed, I could always do that, close my eyes and imagine myself back at that place just over the Colorado border that we named “Spruce Lake”, a secluded place in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with forests full of aspen and spruce trees, a place that was always thick with the smell of pines and crisp autumn air.
Levi wanted a site to land the “puddle jumper” on the water. So one weekend, the three of us boarded the Grumman G-44 Widgeon and flew across the northeast corner of New Mexico into Colorado and landed the old thing in the water next to a beach front lined with spruce trees. Without hesitating, Levi pulled her in tight to the bank and we unloaded all of our camping gear and piled it just inside the tree line before dusk. I made a campfire, while Levi and Irene tried to catch whatever fish the lake held for dinner. It was a picturesque moment, like something from one of those nostalgic beer commercials shot in the Rocky Mountains throughout the 1980s. The sky was perfect, just a light string of sun lit clouds stretched out across the horizon; the trees were dark in silhouette and the water glistened in the fading light. The fire crackled and popped and the smell of fish and potatoes cooked in a skillet over burning wood completed the setting.
After dinner, Levi propped his leg up on a log beside the fire, lit a cigarillo and took a quick pull from the whiskey bottle.
“I’m thinking of calling her the ‘Blue Spruce’,” he said after a long exhale.
It was his plane, so neither Irene nor I refuted the notion.
“She’ll need a new coat of paint obviously, and for someone to come along and paint the name in script along the side.”
Irene looked across the campfire at me, made a glance at Levi sitting next to the fire and smiled.
“I wonder,” he said in his British accent, “Do they write it on the starboard side or the port? Or both? Do they even use those terms with aeroplanes?”
The whiskey bottle came to me and I passed, sending it around the campfire to Irene. Since I’d known Levi, his accent had been muddied by the west Texas drawl. The effect slowed the clipped British phrasing and gave it a thick, heavy sound, made him sound like a rugged old Tom, world weary and worn thin.
“Do either of you have an opinion on the matter?”
Irene shook her head without saying anything, and I uttered the obvious phrase, “It’s your plane, boss.”
The whiskey bottle came around to him again and he stared at its amber liquid as if it was a crystal ball and the answer to the question lay within.
“Then its name shall be the ‘Blue Spruce’,” he said with a slight flourish, and with that, he took a long pull from the bottle, wiped his chin on his sleeve and resumed his smoke, not bothering to send the whiskey around the fire again. That was Levi, eccentric, a tad insane, always self-obsessed and still wonderful, all at the same time. He was my best friend and I loved him more than any brother, but I hated almost everything he did in this life.
The following year, he married Irene, and I can’t say why he did such a thing, other than he was forty years old and he thought he should be married. He didn’t really love her, couldn’t love anyone more than or as much himself. And after the wedding, he didn’t even pretend to be faithful. The line of senoritas Mexicanas that passed through his bedroom would have impressed any other man so convinced of the need to explore the boundaries of his own virility. I do think – although I was never there to witness such an event – that he often enjoyed having them two (and perhaps three, maybe even four) at a time. What they did in the hours past midnight, I can’t even imagine, but the rest of the staff, the maids and stewards that lived at the ranch regaled me with the tales of loud Latin music, raucous screams, nude swimming, Tequila and cervezas by the dozen.
Yes, Levi had money, natural good looks, and a confident sense of bravado that any woman would find intoxicating, but if he felt anything more than a passing curiosity about this world, he never said a word; and that lack of feeling, or perhaps the inability or unwillingness to communicate what things he did feel drove Irene into my bed and my arms. Where Levi cheated with any chica older than eighteen, Irene was loyal to me in her disloyalty to Levi.
It is perhaps clichéd to say that a woman is radiant, that in a certain light, she looks like an angel, that her eyes are fetching, her hair like threads of golden silk, her lips and cheeks lightly touched with the delicate shades of rose petals. Irene was all of these and still they do her beauty a disservice because they are so inadequate. The first time I saw her, was in Levi’s bedroom, mid-morning and she had just finished brushing her hair out. She heard my boots on the hardwood floor and flipped her long curls back like Rita Hayworth in the movie, Gilda. Irene was sitting at the edge of Levi’s bed, wearing nothing more than a lacy white brassiere and a tight pair of riding pants. She made no attempt to cover herself, only called over to me as if I were one of the staff, which in a way, of course I was.
“You there,” she flicked her wrist as if trying to get my attention. “Do you speak English?”
My dark skin was tanned from a life spent working outside, my brown hair covered by the Stetson hat I wore. I’m sure I looked like one of the servants in the passing glance she afforded me.
“Yes ma’am,” I answered.
“I could really use something to drink,” she said. “Orange juice, water, anything really.”
Our eyes met for only a fraction of a second, nothing to her, but for me, I thought I’d slipped inside a dream.
“Coffee would be absolutely wonderful!”
I nodded and started towards the door, but my feet didn’t want to move. My body seemed stuck to that spot just a few steps inside the entry way.
“Well, are you going to bring me something?” she asked again.
Before I could answer, Levi stepped out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel around his waist.
“Dale,” he called me by name, “We’re going to take the new horses out later, can you have them ready after lunch?”
***
“Spruce Lake”, Colorado. June, 1986.
The cabin was Irene’s idea. We scouted a site in late April and found a little knoll with a small clearing far enough up the hill that it afforded a good view of the lake, but not so high that it made lugging everything back and forth an overly laborious chore. We flew up again in May and cut enough trees to start the foundation, widening the circle to what we thought would be its final circumference. Irene bought a “do-it-yourself” book on cabin building and wandered the construction site, offering impractical suggestions, while Levi and I cleaned up the logs and set them in place. It was a good start, and when we left to go back to Texas for a cattle show at the end of the month, we thought another week or two would finish the job.
We ran into some weather flying up in June, encountered the kind of storm that breathes with God’s own vengeance. Thunder, lightning, high winds and torrential rain. We landed just off the shoreline and spent the night inside the plane, eating cold hot dogs and drinking too much, talking late into the night, then sleeping at odd angles around the cargo section of the plane. Morning presented blue skies and after coffee over a small campfire on the beach, we climbed the hillside to inspect the construction site.
“I’m sure it was over this way,” Levi said with a longer than usual string of curses. He lit a cigarillo and scanned the hillside for any sign of the cabin.
Standing twenty or so feet down the hill side, Irene shook her head.
“If it washed away in the storm,” I offered, “We would still be able to find the trunks of the trees we cut down to build the foundation.”
“I don’t see anything that even looks like a clearing,” Levi slapped the nearest tree and cussed again.
“Maybe it’s the wrong hill,” Irene suggested.
“No, no, no,” Levi answered. “We’ve been coming here for almost a year now. I think I know the look of the bloody hill where we always camp!”
He was right. We had the right hill, but the cabin and any trace of it was gone. Still, we searched that stretch of forest for the rest of the morning, coming up with nothing but an antique bicycle tangled in a juniper bush, beside an outcropping of rocks. The tires were flat, the chain a little rusty, but the rims were in good shape. Levi decided that after lunch he would ride the thing into town to see if anybody there knew anything about the cabin.
We ate cold cuts and canned beans, sliced cucumbers and red grapes. Irene had brought a case of some California Chardonnay she liked and between the three of us, we easily polished off two bottles of it. Noon passed and the sun began its slow descent over the western sky. In the middle of our hazy afternoon drowsiness, Levi jumped up and grabbed the bike.
“I’ll be back around dinner time,” he announced, cigarillo dangling from his lips. “Save me some fish.”
By that point in the affair, Levi must have known what he was leaving. He was a smart man, intelligent in the established sense, both educated and experienced, but he was also street wise, having fought and drunk his way around a good portion of the bars in west Texas. He tousled Irene’s hair as he rode by, giving it just a shake like a father would a daughter. Me, he slapped on the shoulder.
She was all over me the minute he rode out of sight.
“We haven’t got much time,” she said. “Who knows when he’ll be back.”
We took a blanket up the hillside, seeking the solitude and cover of the trees, spread it beneath that great sylvan canopy and made love beneath a cloudless afternoon sky. But sunset came and went without a sign of Levi. We ate and drank and sat by the campfire talking to each other, occasionally wondering – with a smile – what sort of trouble he’d gotten himself into and whether it would take his fists or wits or check book to get him out of it.
Eventually, we dozed off, a chaste scene if ever there was one. Wrapped in a blanket, Irene sat on her side of the fire, and I sat on mine. The sound of Levi stumbling through the bushes and calling to us as he climbed the hill woke us both with a start.
“Dale! Irene!,” he half-whispered, half-hissed. “Wake up, we’ve got to go.”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on my friend pulling his way up the hill to the low-burning campfire between us.
“Dale, get the stuff together,” Levi said a little louder. “We need to go.”
“What is it dear?” Irene said in almost patronizing tone.
“We’re not in Colorado,” Levi said, “At least not in the Colorado that we think of as home.”
CONTINUED…
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