The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (7 page)

“I’m going,” Carla said in the face of this scene. She opened her door two inches and peered out. “Call me,” she said to Joan.

“Wait a sec,” Joan said. “I’m coming.”

She pushed me away from her, stared for a second into my eyes with some poor, misbegotten sense of her own grandeur in the moment—as if our brief meeting constituted high romantic tragedy—then bolted, dramatically, from the automobile.

“Thanks for the ride,” Carla said to us.

I looked at her. If I had kissed her mouth would things have been different? Perhaps the fragrance I had dreamed lived there, just behind that disdainful expression. Perhaps you could melt down that penumbra of disdain—that tiredness about all the boys she had ever met—and reveal behind it whatever feeling adults had that made sex their favorite subject.

“You’re welcome,” answered Wyman. “Good night now.”

When they were gone I tried to erase the taste of Joan from my mouth, but this was a noisy process. It seemed to me there was nothing to do with it, though; it wouldn’t leave me or fade away. “She tasted like
shit
,” I said to Wyman. “She was
fucked
. Fucking
gross.”

“Here,” he said. “Wash your mouth out with this.” And he held up a nearly full bottle of Ripple. “They forgot it,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

I rinsed with the Ripple: but nothing could eradicate what Joan had done to me. Nothing. Not even Ripple wine.

Driving, Wyman lapsed into a rigid silence I was too self-absorbed to interpret. “You should have nailed that redhead,” I kept saying to him for some reason. “She wanted you to, you know. She did.”

“No way.”

“Are you kidding, Wyman? Obviously. Fucking obvious. She wanted it.”

But he didn’t answer. He drove along with one hand on the steering wheel, the other busily grooming his immaculate hair.

“Maybe some Drano would get this smell out of my mouth,” I said. “Joan,” I said. “What a dog.”

“German Shepherd,” said Wyman. “Spayed and neutered.”

I laughed. So did Wyman. “The rain’s slowing down,” he said.

“Let’s drink this Ripple.”

“Let’s go somewhere decent.”

“Let’s drink it at the Savoy. Up on the roof. We can climb the fire escape.”

“Good idea,” said Wyman. “Great.”

He liked it for the same reasons I did: we would count on the night air, the volume of the gray sky, the misty view of the city from the roof of the hotel—we would count on all of it to wipe things clean somehow and make us undefiled once more. How were we to know such a thing was impossible? What is ever put behind you?

“Fucking
stinks,”
I said again, and rolled down my window. I turned my head and spit with the wind, but there was nothing satisfying about it.

“More Ripple,” said Wyman. “Go on.”

He was drinking himself now. He had a much finer genetic aptitude for it than I did. No doubt Wyman, wherever he is, drinks like a fish today. In any event at sixteen he could drink me under the table. And he liked to, generally speaking.

“That redhead would have spread,” I said.

“No way,” said Wyman.

“Bullshit.”

“You’re crazy.”

“She wanted it, Wyman.”

“That’s crazy.”

“How would you know?” I asked. “Huh? How would you?”

“You’re full of shit,” said Wyman.

It was a truth about myself I already recognized. But it hurt, coming from Wyman.

“Screw you,” I said. “You’re the one who’s full of shit, you know. Why didn’t you make a move on that girl? What’s the matter with you?”

But he didn’t answer. He only sucked down more wine and passed me the bottle without taking his eyes off the road.

“Drink up,” he said. “Let’s get drunk.”

“I’m already drunk,” I said.

“Get more drunk, then,” insisted Wyman. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

I took a drink of wine, but it was true, I was drunk already, and anything I drank now just made me feel worse than I already felt, more wine-sick, more unhinged.

“Hey, Wyman,” I said after a while. “How come your greaser buddies hate my guts?”

“Those guys aren’t my buddies,” Wyman said. “I don’t even talk to them.”

“Yeah, well, how come they hate me?”

“They don’t hate you.”

“Bullshit.”

“They don’t,” said Wyman. “They don’t even think about you. Nobody notices. Those grease monkeys don’t think about anything.”

“They won’t talk to me,” I pointed out.

Wyman looked over at me apologetically. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “Huh? Do you? All right it’s that fucking
coat
of yours. You look like a fucking
clown
in that thing, okay? You make a fool of yourself.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why do
you
hang around with me?”

“Hell if I know,” said Wyman.

“You don’t like my coat?”

“No. But I don’t care. Wear the fucking thing if you think you have to.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Right,” said Wyman.

We parked and climbed the fire escape to the roof of the Savoy Hotel: me in my overcoat, Wyman with a bottle of Ripple trapped between his underwear and the waistband of his pressed cordoroys. It was still raining just a little. We sat beneath some sort of overhang. From there the city spread out toward the salt water. There was no sense of action, of a life in the streets—Seattle seemed to exist as an addendum to the water, the sky and the listless rain, all more essential elements in the landscape.

“Nobody likes me,” I pointed out after a while.

“Not true,” answered Wyman firmly.

He put his arm around my neck then, something I’d never felt from anyone before—not friendship, not love, not sex, not solace even—just the sensation of something human finally, with no selfish motive attached.

“Forget about those guys, all right?” he said. “They’re nothing but grease monkeys. They won’t let a guy be different. Forget about them. They don’t matter.”

“It’s not just them. It’s everybody.”

“Then forget it all,” said Wyman. “Who cares? Forget it. Have another drink of wine.”

“I can’t forget it. It’s not that easy.”

“Take a drink of this.”

I did.

It took Dan Wyman a half-hour to convince me. But in the end I threw my coat off that roof. “For you it’s easy,” Wyman said. “Toss the fucker. Go for it.” So I stood at the edge of the city and tossed it. It floated at first, and then seemed to plummet, and at last it fell out of sight.

“Good move,” said Wyman, clutching his bottle. “For you it’s easy. It’s just that simple.” But I wasn’t thinking of what Wyman might mean, or of why he couldn’t shed
his
aloneness that easily: I was thinking, as usual, about myself instead, coat or not coat—of course I was.

This is a story with an epilogue, finally; there seems to be no other way to tell it. Wyman and I stopped being friends after a while, a thing that happened gradually, in a piecemeal fashion. There was no sudden falling off, just a gradual drift, currents dragging at us from opposite directions. It seemed to me the most normal thing in the world to move on emotionally in this manner. I wasn’t hurt, and I don’t suppose Wyman was either; we just went on becoming who we were, that’s all.

When I was twenty-four I saw Wyman again in a bar in west Seattle. He was shooting pool with two other men, the three of them circling the table with their cues and leaning low into the smoky light there to take their shots with the
utmost seriousness. It was not so much something in their appearance, or even in their manner, that suggested what I came to conclude from the scene: that Wyman was gay, a homosexual. It was rather their intimacy that suggested it, the way in which their pool game shut them off from the world and made them a society unto themselves, so that what the rest of the bar might think of them was a matter of complete insignificance. Wyman had grown a mustache. He seemed to be more of an adult than I was—he looked older, more knowledgeable about the rough-edged, seedy part of life than I would ever be. His face had gotten softer, his hair had receded, his body had thickened almost imperceptibly. But I noticed the details of his aging, of course, just as I’ve found I can’t help but notice a lot of things about people. I had come there alone at midnight from my studio apartment in order to be in proximity to others for a while. I sat at the bar with my beer and watched Wyman. Once, as he moved past one of the men on his way toward the cue ball, he very gently placed his palm on his friend’s buttock. The man smiled as he pondered the pool table. The third man leaned on his pool stick.

I didn’t speak to him. I only watched. After a half-hour I wandered back to my apartment, where a novel I would never finish writing lay strewn across my desk. I looked for Wyman’s picture in my high-school annual—searched for it with a curiosity I didn’t know I possessed.
Daniel Richard Wyman
it said beneath his picture, a handsome boy in a white tuxedo suit, white teeth, combed hair.
Woodworking, Hunting, Automobiles
.

Wood Grouse
on a High Promontory
Overlooking Canada

I
went up there with my brother, Gary—up on the side of Goat Peak: a high promontory overlooking Canada.

That day we caught no fish at Wall Lake. They were there, watching what we did, but the weather was all wrong, too sultry, and the fish stayed down in the deep water.

That day Gary wouldn’t talk about the war he’d only just come back from. “You don’t want to know,” he said to me. “Take my word for it, Bud.” So after a while I didn’t ask anymore. But I could see Gary had seen things I hadn’t.

I don’t know. I was fifteen. I spent a lot of time throwing rocks, I know that. Building stacks of rocks, backing off thirty yards, then throwing for as long as it took to knock the stacks of rocks apart.

We saw a flock of sheep, a sheepdog and a shepherd, up on the Wind Pass trail. “Aren’t they beautiful?” said Gary. The shepherd was a silent Mexican on a horse, his dog a ragged mutt; the sheep flowed away from us in a slow white
wave as we waded through them in the cloudless sunlight.

There were no trout for lunch but some cheese I’d kept in the streambed and a can of sardines and some dried pears. Then—later—we smeared ourselves with jungle juice, put our sunglasses on and took the compass and the Geological Survey map up on the side of Goat Peak.

Up there Gary spread the map out on a slab of rock, and laid the compass down and watched while it settled. “There’s Canada,” he said. “That’s Eldorado Peak way over there and that’s the Chilliwack Valley.”

I looked up into a world of blue spruce that rolled on endlessly to a land I dreamed about. I didn’t say a thing about this dream to my brother, though—about the mountains or about living off the land. It seemed the wrong dream to tell him about, now that he was back in America.

“This is the border,” Gary said. “We’re in Canada, Bud.”

Driven into the scree up there we found the mounted iron border marker—number fifty-five, it read. We sat by it: a place to rest and watch the sun go down.

“Draft-dodger heaven,” said Gary.

We kept crossing from country to country, back and forth, reveling in the freedom of not answering to anyone about it.

Eventually to the northwest there was no light other than a crescent of orange wavering on the horizon. The sky over our heads lit up, while the earth we sat on went cold in the last sweet twilight.

It was in this last light that we saw them—
hooters
, that was the name our father used—a covey of wood grouse dodging through a broken tumble of sharp gray talus rock.

“Look,” Gary said. “There.”

I picked up a stone about the size of a baseball and
watched them—imagining myself a hunter of wild animals.

“They’re beautiful,” Gary said. “Just look at them.”

I let fly hard and in the gray light the covey scattered, a drilling of buzzing wings, birds tossing themselves down the mountainside, but one seemed to leap up so that for a moment it was painted like a shadow against the sky, the tips of its wings wide, a sound like
whoot whoot whoot whoot whoot to-whoot
aimed at the heavens, it did a half-roll in midflight and plummeted, describing an arc, headlong into the darkening scree.

“Jesus,” Gary said. “What did you do that for?”

I had no good answer. I said, “I didn’t think I was going to hit one, Gary.”

We went down and stood by her where she was dying among the rocks. She was a large female—soot-colored tail feathers, some white hind shafts, a narrow, bluish band where her flanks narrowed. My stone had caught her flush in the breast. One wing had been crushed in her fall to earth.

“Jesus,” Gary said. “Look what you did.”

I didn’t speak, though. What could I say? We stood there, the two of us, watching her.

“Jesus,” Gary said again.

There was nothing left for her. The other birds were long gone. The one good wing only twitched along the rock. Her life flowed out of her, into the scree, back into the earth it had come from.

“I’m going to finish this pain,” Gary said. “God forgive me.”

There were tears in his eyes I hadn’t figured on.

He put his boot on the dying bird’s head—the sole over one alert, clear eye—and ground it suddenly into the rock while the wings gave a last frenzied shudder. They fluttered
out to their full span spasmodically in the moment just before she died.

“That’s it,” Gary said, not ashamed of his crying—just crying now while he spoke to me. “That’s all it is. That’s all there is to it, Bud.”

We went down the mountain and around the canyon head to Wall Lake. No trout were feeding there; not a sound except the croaking of the marsh frogs.

After we had eaten the pinto beans with chili powder and white rice for supper we sat by the propane stove for a while.

“How has it been?” Gary asked. “What have you been up to?”

I told him about not making the basketball team, the fight I’d had with Mike Kizinski, other things that didn’t really matter.

“I like hearing all this,” Gary said. “Tell me some more, Bud.”