“About midnight. I think that was Nigel. What can he be doing? He drove right up over the curb.”
Kevin yawns. “That guy. Who knows? Probably drunk. You know he’s been sleeping in his car in back of the shop? He gets up early. Thinks Lyle doesn’t know.”
“I don’t think Lyle would care. At least, not as long as Nigel’s working on the garden. It’s a long drive back out to Tyhee.”
I let the curtain drop. I raise the blankets high and stick one cold foot into the bed, planting it firmly on Kevin’s warm ass. He swats the covers down over my leg. “Hey! Are you crazy? Get in, and don’t put your feet on me. They’re like ice.”
I laugh and settle in the bed. Kevin scoots a few inches away, toward his side. He exhales forcefully, his way of indicating annoyance. I turn toward him on my side and sneak my arm around his waist. There’s a brief, token resistance, then he lets me pull him close, in spoon position. I put my face into his thick hair and breathe into it warmly. I match my breathing to his, and soon we’re both asleep.
Next morning, I see that Kevin’s right: Nigel is sleeping in his car. It’s six a.m., the coffee’s on, and from our back porch, I can see him curled up in the back of his faded-orange Rambler station wagon. That has to be uncomfortable, but then, Nigel often looks uncomfortable. He’s got pink, freckled, Scottish skin that blisters and peels all summer long, even though he’s the most covered-up person in town, cold weather or hot. His rusty, greying hair is usually plastered under a hat, his weathered throat strangled by both top shirt button and knotted neckerchief, and the backs of his calloused hands are blistered through tattered gardening gloves. Even his voice is uncomfortable--certainly to hear and surely to use. His words yank themselves up and down the register, jolting and grating on the listener’s ear, as if he were perpetually afflicted with a case of strep throat.
I realize that Nigel must sleep in his car a lot. He has a house out on the reservation, but he spends most of his time in town, traveling a spider web of routes between the Oasis Bar, the Whitman Cafe, and the many gardens he creates and tends.
Nigel’s married. At least that’s what he told me last summer when we drove up into Portneuf Gap to cut wild daisies and larkspur. His wife is a Shoshone-Bannock woman--that’s why the house out on tribal land--and they have some kids, too. “Half our kids are pink, and half are brown,” he said. I don’t know how brown his wife is, but it’s hard to imagine anyone pinker than Nigel. I remember wondering at the time What could Mrs. Nigel be like? Nigel says they don’t see each other much anymore, that the kids are pretty much grown, and his wife is content to spend her time visiting with her sisters and playing bingo several nights a week at the reservation casino. He goes home once a month or so, but the rest of the time he spends in town, gardening and sleeping at Trey’s or in his car. Nigel and his wife have a pretty casual marriage, and I gathered that was all right with both of them.
My mind was on couples and weddings that day. My daughter was about to be married from our house--a garden wedding, if it didn’t rain. Nigel was doing the flowers. Even though A Cut Above’s yard was crammed with every standard variety and experimental Nigel could steal from gardens around town, that wasn’t enough for him; the day before the wedding, he and I drove into the foothills south of town with buckets and clippers and the Weed Scourge. Nigel knew where there were whole hillsides of larkspur, ditchbanks glutted with ferns, roadside stands of hollyhocks. We harvested gullies and the edges of farmers’ fields. All morning we cut and bagged and twist-tied, until the bed of my pickup was full.
Then Nigel flipped open a burlap bundle he’d loaded in the front seat earlier that morning and pulled out still-cold bottles of beer. We sat in the sun and looked down through the Gap where the Portneuf River slices the hills just wide enough to fit Pocatello in between, and we drank our beer and talked about marriage. I wasn’t too happy about my daughter’s choice. They didn’t have much money and neither did I, so the wedding was going to be one of those home-grown affairs, where everyone pretends that love is what really matters, as if that’s enough to keep couples together.
I remember telling Nigel a little about my failed attempt at marriage, and he told me about his wife. He also told me--not for the first time--about Trey, the guy he’s with now, about how it surprises some people that an old queer like him managed to attract a beautiful young creature like Trey. I’ve seen Trey, and I didn’t say so to Nigel, but I’m one of those surprised people. Nigel explained it by saying that guys like Trey don’t want someone soft and unblemished like themselves; they want a really masculine man, one who acts and talks and smells “unvarnished,” I think his word was. I don’t remember what I said in reply, probably just swigged my beer and looked down the Portneuf Gap.
