Hungry for the World (10 page)

I painted the water-stained walls of my rooms K mart white, hung a fern in the corner. Across from my bed I nailed the walnut rifle rack my great-uncle had made for me as a graduation gift, and in it I placed the Winchester 30.06 that had once belonged to my father. I had rescued it from my grandmother’s closet, rubbed it free of rust, oiled its mechanism into fluid movement.

In the apartment above me I could hear the footsteps of Lonnie, a grayish man in his fifties who suffered from narcolepsy; he fell asleep over breakfast, during a shower, while rewiring the television sets he took in for repair. All night he walked, fell to the floor, woke up, and walked again. His face was bruised, his hands cut from catching on metal edges.

Across the hall from Lonnie lived Steve, a young man with Frankie Avalon hair who cut the lawn for partial rent, a job Lonnie had held until our landlady, Mrs. Stout, found him collapsed behind the mower, its blade still whirring only inches from his peacefully slumbering face.

Sometimes I found Steve outside my window or sitting on the step of my porch. When I asked what he needed, he shuffled and stammered, blushed and walked down the concrete stairs to the basement, where he folded his laundry and sometimes smoked pot. Later I would come with my Tide and bamboo basket and smell the sweet ghost of his presence.

Everyone in the building seemed to function outside normal
time considerations, each passing through the halls and yard with little allegiance to sun or moon: Lonnie’s nocturnal ramblings; Mrs. Stout’s midnight forays to the garage, where she stashed her Jim Beam between paint cans; Steve’s 2:00
A.M
. serenade—“If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.” I would lie awake and imagine the loneliness of their lives, and I would feel myself alone, the pleasure of solitude slipping away.

In the practice field across the street, I could watch the Lewiston High School baseball team gather for a sabbath of spring training, cursing themselves over missed throws and fast pitches. They seemed curious to me, as did the building that rose behind them, colored pink by the early light. The past seemed impossibly distant—those times during which the halls and rooms of the school had been familiar: the sharp smell of the janitor’s mop pail; the close and humid odor of lockers; the known way I traveled from one class to the next; the trophy case with its roll call of heroes. I wondered what remnant of myself I had left to what our class valedictorian had called
posterity
. National Honor Society, Thespians, Choir, German Club, editor of the literary magazine. It had seemed enough to keep me anchored in good works and moving forward into a future of successful college applications. But now that future I had imagined for myself—to become a teacher of English—was gone, replaced by my minimum-wage job as a teller at Idaho Fidelity, a ninety-five-dollar-a-month studio, a 1965 Chevrolet, Virginia Slims menthol, Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.

So much had changed since that day only a year before, when I had left home flush with new freedom, the hours bobbing before me like fruit for the picking. At first I’d
thought I might be transformed back into that girl I’d been at thirteen, who smoked and drank and let the boys who brought her drugs touch her breasts. Who hated with a loathing so pure she would have gladly given up her home, her mother and father and brother, her doting grandmother and cousins and aunts and uncles, given her soul for a chance to escape into the outside world, where dancing was not a sin, where she could listen to
Magical Mystery Tour
and wear mascara and not be cast out and down to Hell. Who had escaped for that short time, she and her dreams of California (poppies, sunshine, peace and love), only to be found and dragged back and sent away to be reborn.

I had less to prove now, less to battle against: no father to ask and answer to, no mother to frown at my clothing and hiss at the
Cosmopolitans
I hid beneath my bed. No Sunday-morning service, no communion, no choir practice or youth group or Wednesday-evening prayer meeting. No elders telling me that the music I listened to was meant to serve Satan, no preacher predicting my damnation should I fail to heed God’s word. I knew they were praying for me to see the light, to find my way back down the straight and narrow path, but I was free now, more free than I had ever been.

Yet I felt penned in, my boundaries defined by my ignorance, my uneasy acquaintance with the world. My travels had taken me to Boise, Spokane, Walla Walla. As a child, I had twice made the trip with my family to Oklahoma: once by car, missing the Yellowstone earthquake by a few hours; the second time with my mother and brother by train, relegated to our seats four endless days each way, eating from the grocery bag of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches my
mother had wisely and frugally packed. My only other ramble out of Idaho had been in 1973, when my father had driven us through one post-Christmas blizzard after another to reach his brother’s house and the monstrous wonders of Disneyland. We’d been snowbound in Long Beach for a week—a “freak” weather system, the forecasters proclaimed, that brought the city to a standstill—and I’d seen little of the metropolis that existed outside my cousin’s bedroom window.

I don’t remember that I longed to experience the urban adventures that lay beyond the Lewiston city limits, yet, along with my friends, I complained bitterly about there being nothing to do in the mill town we called home. A few movie houses; a skating rink where the junior-high kids went to smoke dope and gaze lovingly at the mirrored crystal ball; any number of bars that wouldn’t card, believing that anyone who could mouth the words “Harvey Wallbanger” was at least the legal drinking age of nineteen. You worked at the mill, the bullet factory, the stockyards, the Hilltop Cafe. You were a parts runner for Napa Auto, a tire grunt for Les Schwab. Summers you worked the peas—a backbreaking, money-making job, twelve hours a day, seven days a week—for as long as the annual harvest and processing of legumes would last.

My position as a teller at Idaho Fidelity was glamorous by comparison—$2.75 an hour, plus full benefits and two weeks paid vacation. My friends were envious and imagined that I would embrace job security and work my way up the teller line, but the work dulled me: often I found myself, dollars in hand, staring blindly past the walls of my cubicle, forgetting
my count, remembering some afternoon spent fishing Reeds Creek, wondering what insects were singing, whether the lupine had yet begun to bloom.

Like my father, whose tales of danger in the woods excited me, I believed some risks heroic and, with a good mind and strong will, most often manageable. But now, in the city, what lay out there beyond the doors of my apartment bore a definable threat. At night the old building snapped and moaned in the wind, and I jerked awake, my heart racing until I could convince myself it was not someone who had followed me home, one of the men who had seen me at the bar, where I went with girlfriends to drink sloe gin. I wore makeup and high heels; I drank and danced with men I didn’t know. In the teachings of the church, this would be enough to prove my immorality: how could I expect men to remain untempted? “The kind of bait you put out,” a preacher once warned, “is the kind of fish you’re going to catch.”

I no longer believed in any of it, not the sin or the punishment. My break from such religious doctrine had been simultaneous with my break from my father, and I’d begun to wonder what morality I possessed that had not been implanted, grafted to my soul. Having been taught that there was only one defined way to embrace spirituality, I believed that my choice was either to follow or to fall away. I could not reject part of it without rejecting the whole. “Are you
in
or are you
out
?” the preachers demanded. “Will it be Heaven, or will it be Hell?” If what it took to gain salvation was obedience to the rigid restriction of my father and the church, then I was doomed anyway. I’d dress as I wanted, do as I pleased. And then I would come home, take the Winchester
from its rack, and snug it close beneath the covers, feeling its promise of safety, its hard, metallic coolness against my side.

M
ANY EVENINGS
I spent with John, the boy I’d been dating since graduation. I had known him for several years as a classmate, but I might never have seen past his wrestler’s walk, jock talk, and shyness if it hadn’t been for Thane’s encouragement.

Thane and John had picked me up one Saturday morning the spring of our senior year, and we’d headed for Winchester Lake for a day of fishing. This was one of the reasons I was attracted to Thane: he took me with him out of the city, back into the woods, where I could cast my line to the water, sit for hours breathing in the peppery smell of cattails and bull thistle, listening for the liquid trill of red-winged blackbirds. I would forego any number of trips to the mall for a few hours in the woods—the one place where I could feel my soul settle, where I could feel I might be home.

I’d heard stories of John’s expertise as an outdoorsman, and I was eager to be part of the day’s expedition. Wedged between the two boys, thigh against thigh, the new summer wind catching my hair, I’d been happy, always happy to be with Thane, though I’d come to know that, along with his girlfriend, I was only one of many who shared his affection. I’d learned this and more about Thane—how he’d lost his virginity in seventh grade, how the older girls had spoiled him silly with quickies behind the gym. I’d given up my visions of velvet evening gowns and pink corsages. Even a moment of his time seemed like a gift.

But something different came of this day. Thane had
nudged me, nodded toward John. “I should share,” he whispered.

“What?” I could hardly hear him over Creedence Clearwater Revival blaring from the eight-track.

“He likes you.”

For the first time I really looked at John, and what I saw enticed me: brown eyes, straight dark hair that fell across his forehead in the back rush of wind through the car. Thane moved his knee from beneath my hand, once again nodded toward John. I hesitated, then, as Thane watched, I slid my fingers up the denim seam of John’s Levi’s. He looked at me quickly, then at Thane, who smiled. John didn’t move toward me or away, but sat there, letting me touch him, and I felt a wild exhilaration, riding between these two men, feeling their hotness and the quickness of their breathing, knowing I had this power, believing I did this not for Thane or for John but for myself: I was making my own rules, taking all that I could before the hours of my freedom ended.

And when, that May, my father had disallowed such freedom, it was John who waited for me. His mother, Viv, had taken me in like a hatchling, getting me my job at Idaho Fidelity, where she had worked for years. I’d tend my window from nine to five, counting, stacking, banding money, then come to her kitchen and watch as she tenderized roundsteak with the edge of a saucer or added a second can of mushrooms to the spaghetti sauce, smoking all the while.

Viv was a tall, dark-haired woman, once a professional model, who still credited Pond’s cold cream for the fineness of her skin. I marveled at her control of fire and ash, at how elegantly she held the cigarette, elbow bent, palm up, even as she went about her domestic duties. She took her time with
things, wiping the smudges from each coil of the telephone cord, peeling a carrot in smooth, considered strokes as though she were carving a child’s whistle.

Walt, John’s father, most often sat at the table, pushing an ashtray across the Formica with the tip of his low-tar True. He was a large, loose-jowled man given to bouts of sulking and general gruffness, a beer drinker who lightened each night around ten and spun off story after story about his days as a World War II bomber and Alaskan bush pilot. He had been my eighth-grade science teacher, and I feared he might resent that girl I had once been—smoking, cursing, setting my desk on fire with the Bunsen burner while singing Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”—but in his memory my rebellion was less the sinister workings of a bad spirit than the simple boundary-testing of a teenager. I loved him for that.

Like his father, John was a man’s man—a high school football star, now a running back for the university. His thighs were thicker than my waist. He had an undercut jaw and a barrel chest. Tall and lumbering, he possessed an uncommon strength, which I felt held back each time he embraced me. I loved that he was a hunter, that he knew the ravines and streams of the surrounding mountains, their secret roads and hidden meadows. I loved that he took me there, back to where I believed I could not go alone. The first time we made love was in a farmer’s field, sheltered by hackberry and wild plums. I remember the warm earth beneath me, the way the magpies dipped and sculled around us, yellow pine riming the sun.

My life with John was defined by our time spent together in the outdoors. For Christmas he gave me the Ithaca 20-gauge
semiautomatic I’d seen in the window of Lolo Sporting Goods. For his birthday I bought him a Weatherby .22-250. Bolt-action, lever-action, single-shot, pump, Leupold Gold Ring 3×9 power: here was the language of my father, the numbers and names I’d heard all my life. It was all familiar to me—the rifles in the pickup’s rear window, the smell of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning fluid, the dank odor of downed deer, their guts pulled out in a pile, glistening and steaming, the rasp of a saw through pelvic bone as an elk was quartered and sacked to be carried. When I brought the shotgun to my cheek, the movement came to me fluid and easy—all those seasons of watching and yearning, dreaming that someday I, too, might walk the mountain and come home rich with provision.

Sometimes, after a hunt, I would stop by my parents’ house, mottled with blood and feathers, still shouldering my gun, smug with success. I took a perverse pleasure in my mother’s dismay. She could not understand such masculine endeavor. But it wasn’t my mother I hoped to impress; it was the man who sat in his easy chair, facing the television, hardly looking my way.

My father seemed only to tolerate my presence, the few bits of speech he offered brittle and empty, hulls, husks, and chaff. From the kitchen, where I sat while my mother fried chicken in Crisco, I would ramble loudly about the shot I’d taken to bring the pheasant down, the deer I intended to hunt come October.