Hungry for the World (14 page)

“Listen,” our sensei would whisper, “and you will hear the muscle tense, you will feel the passage a sleeve makes through air.”

Afterward we sat cross-legged on the floor, concentrating on the dark. “You must find a place to go to, where your mind can be soothed, where the wind is a comfort, the water tranquil, the air warm and sweet.” I closed my eyes and went back to the woods, to the meadow and stream, the breeze spiced with camas.

“Breathe with your stomach,” the sensei said. He touched me where my rib cage ended and the softness of my belly began. “Here,” he said, and I made my muscles tighten against his hand.

I pulled the air in, pushed the air out, until my pulse slowed and the blood that rushed through my ears was the brush of pine against pine, the sound the caddis made when I was ten and the day held still so that I might listen, my head laid back and resting in grass, the grass so high that no one could see me there, a girl stretching lean to welcome the sun.

My guns, my knives, my feet and fists—I thought I might keep myself safe. Had I forgotten the books, the stories I had learned? The fruit of the tree, ripe and unblemished, the snake. Leda beneath a summer sky, its clouds gathering low like swan’s wings. The spring’s new flowers, the ones Persephone pulled from the earth, meaning only to breathe in their sweetness. I had forgotten that things are not always
as they seem—that what catches you can come in light, bearing no weapons, open, alluring, calling your name.

D
AVID DECIDED
our next date would be to the woods. I could hardly wait to feel the cool canopy of trees, to walk the hills where bear had clawed through heart-rotted cedar in search of grubs. He picked me up in a new four-wheel-drive Ford with a matching canopy, an eight-thousand-pound Warn winch on the bumper: he was prepared for the rutted roads, the deep pockets of mud left by spring thaw. I handed him the Ithaca shotgun John had bought me for Christmas—the stock with its lovely grain, the breech so finely en-graved—and felt a moment’s regret. But its worth to me now had to do not with John but with David, who admired the gun but didn’t ask how I came to have it. There was very little he asked, and his willingness to keep our attention on the present comforted me: my teenage romances had begun to seem juvenile and embarrassing. I wanted this older man to see me as mature, a worthwhile companion.

We drove south along the edge of the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, climbing toward the summit of Winchester Grade, onto the Camas Prairie. From the high flats the land looks unbroken; only when we reached the lip of the wide, millennial cuts could we see the abrupt drop-off of long-worked fields into basalt canyons, miles of hidden draws, home to whitetail and bobcat. But it was spring, and other than a few magpies rowing through the air with their black-and-white wings, we had little on which to aim our guns. We stood at the edge of a meadow near the crossroads settlement of Melrose, and I followed David’s lead, blowing the early
monarchs and lacewings into velvet tatters. I remember being made uneasy by such casual cruelty, but I dared not protest. Just as when I’d watched John sight in the starlings and inky ravens, I knew that any emotional response on my part would compromise the place I held in the company of men.

As we drove the gravel roads, David told me he had been raised in Lewiston. Some of his family lived up north, where the best hunting could be found: deer, elk, bear, grouse, moose if you drew a tag. He said he hunted coyotes to bring in extra money, that he hoped the coming winter would be as the
Farmer’s Almanac
had promised: long and hard. Cold more than anything brought on the best pelts. Maybe, he said, he’d take me with him.

I’d done my share of varmint shooting from roadsides and pickup windows, even as I secretly longed to let the coyotes be. I admired their efficiency, the way they multiplied and prospered despite the ranchers’ poisons. I loved the way they materialized from roadside brush, the way they loped across the sage and rocks, especially the way their single voices rose together in mezzosoprano yips, raucous and joyful and pleased with the moon. Still, I said yes, I would go with him and learn how to fashion a blind of snow and branches, how to wrap my rifle in a torn white sheet, how to blend into the landscape and make the sounds of wounded prey and wait for the coyotes to come.

We talked of range and trajectory, camouflage and blinds. But if David was impressed with my woodsman’s knowledge, he didn’t say so but simply nodded, as my father might. There was, in fact, much about him to remind me of my father. He smoked with the same casual intensity, had about him the
same air of self-possession, the kind of near-arrogance backed with quietude that seems to suggest strength. Physically, he was taller, thinner, and not nearly so handsome. But their eyes were the same—clear, sapphire blue.

David, like my father, was a curious, engaged observer of the world. He’d read many of the same books on supernatural phenomena that I had, and he added to his firsthand knowledge of the ways of animals by referring to his extensive library of texts on the habits of prey, tanning techniques, big-game tales. He spent a great deal of time contemplating possibility, applying his analytical mind to various problems and projects. During the long drives across the mountains and flatlands of northern Idaho, David and I would take turns debunking each other’s theories on creation, evolution, ESP, extraterrestrial life.

Did I tell David about the miracles of my past, how I had once felt the rush of heat in my hands as I prayed for the sick, how I’d spoken in tongues and believed in the guidance of angels? Did we talk of God, Heaven, the Hell we might burn in? If so, I don’t remember, but I remember instead the games we played, badgering each other’s logic, challenging proof. And I think of how I’ve always been eager for a round of debate, how, as a girl, it was then that I felt my father’s greatest approval—when the gifts of good grades and exemplary behavior, even the gift of my child’s embrace, were not enough. What my father wanted from me were my moments of intellectual awareness, when he could see the workings of my mind. “Think,” he would say, his eyes narrowing. It was not a directive but a command. “You go
think.”
Only when I had come to a logical insight or conclusion would I come back, and then there would be the reward of his smile.

Over the next several weeks, as David and I spent more and more time together, I told him about my father, our alienation. I told him about John, how everything had changed after Brock’s accident. What little David told me of his life came in bits: he’d been married for a short while to a woman with three children; his mother and younger sisters still lived in Lewiston, in the house where he had been raised; his father had left the family years before. It had been up to him to provide, to bring home the seasonal kill to keep the long months’ hunger at bay.

David knew the old homesteads where trees still bore the dwarfish fruit whose sweet decay brought deer to feed. He could project and intersect the lope of a spooked whitetail, decide if and when a buck would come back to its favored thrashing tree. I marveled at the practiced way he moved through the rough hedges of hackberry, the way his mouth dropped open to listen for the snap of a twig, the brush of a flank against pine.

When he told me that the Corvette had been borrowed from a friend, I didn’t care; I was coming to like him much better behind the wheel of his own Ford four-wheel-drive. He took me deeper into the mountains, along the breaks of the Salmon and the Snake. I packed bologna sandwiches, and we ate them sitting on the pickup’s tailgate, looking out over Idaho to the Wallowa Range of Oregon. It was there, open to miles and miles of wilderness, that David gave me one of the few stories I would ever hear him tell—how, as a teenager, he had traveled with two schoolmates over the same rutted roads, scanning the hillsides for game. The boy in the middle, afraid to pass up a close kill, had kept his rifle in hand, balanced between his knees, barrel pointed upward.

David recalled the deafening noise of the discharge but not stopping the pickup, only that he opened the door and fell to the ground, wounded and bleeding. He understood first that the rifle had gone off, then that the blood that covered his face and arms was both his and not his: the bullet had entered under the other boy’s chin, sending out shards of bone.

I imagined the one slumped forward against the pickup’s dash, his face gone. Miles from a phone and no choice but for the two left alive to crawl back in beside their friend. I didn’t ask how it felt to do that—spattered with bits of cartilage and brain, trying to remember the familiar road that would lead them out of the forest.

I felt a new intimacy with David, as though in giving me this story he was allowing me closer to his heart. That boy who had steered the gory hearse home was now the man who taught me to trail in thick cover and listen for the language of birds, who knew the woods as a hermit might, instinctively drawn to the shadows where grouse imagined themselves safe. And that girl who had chased the grouse from their secret places and shot them with BB’s was now a woman seeking a companion, wanting a man who loved what she loved, knew what she needed to know—a man who could find his way into the woods and live there, be happy there, and stay.

W
HEN NOT IN THE MOUNTAINS
, David and I went to movies, dined on steak and lobster, had drinks at the bars, where my friends saw me and waved. At first I was embarrassed by David’s gangly, disheveled appearance and by his
age, but then I began to feel protective of him. They didn’t know how lovely it was to carry on a conversation about something other than spectacular drunks and fraternity shenanigans. I found myself laughing more, happy to be free of the foolishness of boys.

Still, I felt I barely knew this man with whom I was beginning to spend every available hour. His desire to be with me was clear. Why, then, hadn’t we moved beyond a simple kiss? The dance of desire I’d braced myself for never happened—not even the first step. David had kept himself from me, intentionally so, not without interest but with absolute control. I wondered if he was afraid, doing this out of old-fashioned respect or some kind of weird hang-up. I had wondered initially if he might be gay, but his attention, even from a distance, was recognizably voracious—something I could almost smell rather than see. Whatever it was, I’d gotten used to it, even comfortable, able for the first time to be alone with a man without worrying that he’d jump me the minute the pleasantries were over. I felt relief from the burden of decision, from the guilt of having given in or having said no, from disappointment and rejection. It was an incredible freedom, one I hadn’t felt since my girlhood, since before that first boy, the preacher’s son, had touched my knee in the parsonage’s dark stairway, whispered in my ear, cleaved me in two with his words of want.

As David’s celibacy continued, my initial relief grew into an intense curiosity, a hunger I had never felt for John or any other lover. It was not simply sexual; it was intellectual as well. It was a yearning I didn’t recognize but David did—a hunter trained to patience, knowing everything with his eyes.

———

W
HEN
D
AVID FIRST TOOK ME
to meet his mother, I believed that I might finally know something more about him than what I’d been able to glean from his stunted narratives. What I found was a strong-boned woman with black hair to her shoulders, a hard smoker, kind but quiet in my presence. The house she and her teenage daughters shared sat at the front of a large lot, sole holdout against the rapid commercialization that surrounded them. The rooms seemed barely inhabited. Dust and smoke had settled onto the lampshades and windowsills in an ancient way, no longer stirred by the current of wind from the doors.

There was little talk between us that I remember. Nothing seemed safe to offer or ask, as though any question or observation might open a wound, tear the fabric of the present and its fragile balance. I could not say why. There was a tenuousness about the lives lived out in those rooms, some secret kept trapped under the yellowed doilies and mud-stained rugs.

After dinner I helped David’s youngest sister wash the dishes. She was a tall girl, maybe fourteen, with long hair and glasses—her resemblance to me at her age was startling. I watched David through the window as he made a tour of the weed-ridden backyard, hands in his pockets, the bones of his elbows and shoulders sharp beneath his flannel shirt. He looked suddenly old, worn-out. He must feel responsible, I thought, the only son, the keeper of the family.

When David came back in, I asked if I could see where his room had been. He led me down a flight of dark stairs, into a small, damp space without windows. Perhaps I’d expected to see the memorabilia of his boy’s life—team posters, an old
football, deer antlers hung with baseball caps. Instead, there was a sagging bed and little else.

“Do you have any pictures?” I asked. I wanted some insight into his life, some proof that we’d walked the same high school hallways, smoked pilfered Marlboros on the same corner lots. He pulled a trunk from the shallow closet, and I felt a twinge of anticipation. He opened it slowly, and what he pulled out was not a yearbook or the stiff, embroidered letters of an athlete, but a cardboard box that jingled with what I thought must be jewelry. Inside, I found a jumble of insignia and medals. I looked at him.

“Vietnam,” he said, as though in that small container, in the name of the country itself, lay the answers to all of my questions.

I remembered the peace patches and love beads I’d worn, the POW bracelet, the soldier whose name I’d kept at my pulse. What little else I knew about Vietnam had come via the evening news I watched when visiting my grandmother and from my relatives’ rants against “Hanoi Jane” Fonda. In the church parking lot, I’d seen the bumper stickers:
AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
. I came to realize that the government, like my father and the church, did not allow dissent. I’d found that this was yet another thing I could not accept, and I’d cast in my lot with the protestors. When news came of the massacre at Kent State, I’d wept and wished that I had been there to bear witness to such horror or to die at the hands of the oppressor. I had a dramatist’s bent for the tragic—a crusader, a youth pastor once said, for all the wrong causes.