God's Gym (21 page)

I hadn't thought much about Roger or Molly for years. For some reason never paired them, though they knew each other well and were linked by the obvious fact of suicide. I'd been long gone from Wyoming when I heard they'd taken their lives, Roger first, then Molly, each death a kind of postscript to a portion of my life I thought I'd laid to rest until these painful footnotes forced me to raise my eyes to a text that hadn't disappeared just because I'd stopped reading it.

Let's just say, without specifying why or which one, a hunting party in the Snowies fits here, now, in a blank space I need to fill, the ground giving way beneath my feet, no warning, the wet snow instead of packing hard under my strides goes mushy and
oh shit
I start to slide and might not ever stop. Always winter and white when I remember hunting in the mountains, though once a preseason scouting outing at the end of july, only month you can be nearly certain it won't snow, the old-timers
say, hot July days and the high country perfect as Eden, the Alibi Bar crew with families tagging along, a big camp pitched on the bank of a stream, yes, cleansed and starting over is how it felt on that summer weekend I didn't expect to surface here, my wife and kids, borrowed tent and sleeping bags, finding bones on a hike with my two boys, whole lot of bleached bones scattered on a flat boulder at the mouth of a cave we decided had to be a cougar's den, sunlight polishing stones that bedded the talking stream, at night absolute blackness inside our tent, old canvas funky as a gym, everybody blind, whispering as we settled down to sleep, the tent could be empty or full, you needed to touch to see, your own hand invisible until it gropes out someone.

No, not that July. Let it go. I'm trekking through serious snow, high-stepping into someone else's deep tracks. I don't want to discover a bottomless drift or treacherous crevice or the thin ice of a black-hole lake hidden just below the snow, ever-present possibilities up here, especially in spring when the season seems to change after you slog thigh-deep in snow for a mile then topping a rise see a meadow below scoured clean except for frozen puddles of whiteness with dark stubble poking through or dried swirls of snow trapped here and there in coils of spiky sagebrush. I'm not alone. Had been warned against it—tales of foolish people, their bones picked clean by the time a hiker stumbles over them in May—so I never tried the Snowies alone in winter. Didn't own a four-wheel drive anyway to get me close enough once passes barricaded in November. Not alone, not able to say whom I'm with. Could be my best buddy John, rifle cradled in his arms, out there on point plowing ahead of me, John's tracks my boots trace, or I could be with Alex and Sarah, Molly's older sister, or with brown Chris and Harry or white Max, Walt, Fred, Herb, and John again, the Alibi Bar crew, each group distinct, every person a small-town character of sorts with his or her story you wouldn't hear in the Snowies
since hunting parties organized so nobody would have to tell their tale, nobody have to listen. A particular chemistry and energy defined each combination of personalities, yet as I look back, one group blurs into the other. Only fragments return, random bits and pieces effortlessly more real than this fading present. Details I can hear, see, touch, smell, taste, my senses so sure of themselves they expect more, desire more, but there is no center. I'm here, not in Wyoming, and each promising detail bodiless, the network of memories it spins out cannot hold, evaporates, brings back everything, nothing.

Hunting simplifies and clarifies like war. Pleases like war. Not only because humans are predators who enjoy stalking and killing. In fact, for the hunters I knew the fun seemed less in killing than in getting ready to kill. Imagining themselves killing. Gathering their hunting gear. Anticipating themselves dressed to kill. Lies afterward about kills that never happened. All of it—beginning with purchase of a license in September at the little Fish and Game shed behind Albertson's in West Laramie—frees them. Hunters can't wait for the season to start, but they must, and waiting's a welcome clock counting down their ordinary lives, rendering everyday duties slightly less demeaning.

It's no coincidence that hunts begin in the hour of the wolf. In the
taint—
taint night, taint day, taint neither one, so it's just
taint.
Town left behind, hunters shamble along in semilight, semidark, grumpy, surly, not speaking if grunt or gesture will do. Play at being animals. Beg for the animal's complicity. Hope the animals love them as much as they love the animals. Hunters wish they lived in the mountains. Wish they could devour human trespassers. Beasts
and
men. Hunters
and
hunted. As if they have a choice. As if they can remain both. As if it's not death but miraculous exchange waiting in the mountains. As if, like kids playing war, they can squeeze the trigger, then holler and crumple in slow motion, have fun groaning and twisting on the ground after their bullets strike.

Of course it doesn't work that way. We're always the hunted. At the moment of truth, when the coincidence of hunter and hunted occurs, we don't possess the writer's prerogative to sort out who's who and decide where the story's going.

In a small, isolated town like Laramie—maybe anywhere you reside long enough to establish the routine of your habits—you become unbearably transparent. People look through you. Your presence confirms the town's presence, the town's bottomless capacity to level and consume. A town's gaze—its curiosity about my color, my pretensions to write a novel, for instance—never innocent. It's sizing up the lump it intends to swallow. Hey, how you doing and go away, leave me alone. Love and hate in one quick, hungry, breakaway glance.

You can go a little insane trying to find something new about yourself. Try on a different life to convince yourself one might exist just beyond the horizon of familiar routines. You take up a hobby, steal a chocolate bar from Albertson's, screw your best buddy's wife, or you drive up into the Snowies, lock yourself into your pickup, and blow out your brains with a shotgun, or run away and fatten up in another Wyoming feedlot town, snuff out your life one day like Molly snuffed hers I can't even say how.

But you can't inch closer to what's unreachable. The unknown remains precisely that—unknown. All those tabloid descriptions of near-death experiences bullshit because no pilgrim has returned and reported how it feels to die. You can't grasp the unknown even when it's pissing in your face. That's the dirty joke hunters go to the mountains to laugh at. Werewolf with other werewolves, furry clothes, furry faces, stomachs bloated with jelly doughnuts and beer.

Though certain scenes are attached indelibly to one group or another—high-butt Chris's long-legged country-boy strides in no hurry as they tirelessly consume miles of rugged terrain, Harry's head bobbing and weaving, his ghetto shoulder swagger efficiently stylized so he keeps pace side by side with Chris in open country or pushes out when his turn to cut trail through deep snow, Sarah shivering, a blue Michelin lady, the chubby arms of her parka hugging the jacket's roly-poly bulk, her eyes pleading, demanding an answer, and when I have none she stares at Alex, silhouetted on the next ridge, his fine brain at half mast since the day it bounced helmetless along a dirt road for twenty yards beyond his overturned Suzuki, blue-eyed Alex emptying his rifle, pow-pow-pow-pow, slowly, methodically, into a pocket meadow where a dozen or so pronghorns had been browsing, spooked and long gone before he got off his first shot—these scenes, distinct as the crack of a Coors opened at dawn in the mountains, also blend into one seamless hunt, a work-in-progress, everybody out there still wandering the Snowies, me bowing my head as near as I can get to the roots of a solitary clump of dwarf pines, last trees before we climb too high for trees, kneeling so I can hear what sounds like a fast river a mile underground or the fierce, baffled moaning and whistling of a windstorm miniaturized within tangles of brush and skinny tree trunks the way the sea echoes in a shell clamped to your ear, kneeling, listening, amazed by the black roots' howl but I can't say who told me to kneel, can't say why I feel ambushed by coincidence.

Imagine seeing a familiar face forming in a bank of clouds or an incredible mix of color, light, and motion blazing on the horizon. Imagine needing someone who will recognize the face or amen the sunset, but you're sure that if you turn away to find someone, when you turn back, with or without your witness, the sky will have changed.

Last week a flock of honking Canada geese suddenly passed over my head, so low I felt their wind, the chill of their fluttering shadow spreading over me, a net that just might snatch me wherever they were flying, remembering only after the geese had disappeared that I'd heard them startled up by I don't
know what from a pond near the road I was jogging on, the clatter, splash, and panicked cries of their lifting, their wake strong enough to whiplash the pond, decapitate me if I didn't duck fast.

One day I see Roger in the department office, next day Molly's voice over the phone. A day or so after, on my next commute to UMass, I overhear a blond woman on the train yammering excitedly to her cell phone about foxes in the woods behind her house, red foxes—one standing guard, the other, one cub at a time in her mouth, moving to a new den. No idea foxes back there, she exclaims, and then one, two, a whole cute little fox family ... and I see Molly's orphaned baby fox, crazier each day she tries to keep it for a pet, dart red under her mom's new sofa, nip blood from Molly's finger with its tiny needle teeth when she tries to scoop it out.

I don't believe past explains present, nor present explains past, and certainly coincidence doesn't explain anything, but peculiar, disruptive spaces I'm calling
coincidences,
for want of a better word, open almost daily. Past and present chat, maybe, or maybe refuse to speak to each other, who knows, but their convergence seems to uncover crucial information just beyond my grasp. At these moments my life feels crowded and empty. I'm stalled at a crossroads with lots of traffic in many directions whirring around me and I can't regain my bearings, don't know how to step back into the flow.

Molly Ritello, who's never called in the ten years we've been colleagues at UMass, phoned me at home. John ... hello, John. It's me, Molly ... the voice not belonging here, an unmistakable sore-throat huskiness, a nasal twang at the ends of words and phrases, singsong almost, the pixels of it visibly wobbly, as if forming words a precarious business, not to be taken for granted, a girl's voice trying on adult sound effects, pumping itself up with grown-up bluster, sentences chipping away at the edges of what she's meaning to articulate, just give her a little
time and patience, the young-forever voice of Molly, my first Molly high up in a tree I'm standing at the foot of while she climbs, agile as a monkey, me the adult on duty in the back yard to watch her, to caution and slow her, catch her if need be, sent to do the job by her anxious mom, martini in hand at the kitchen's French doors, Christina in a goofy tuxedo apron watching me watch her Molly climb, my eyes with no choice except to fix themselves on Molly's round little bottom, the white cotton drawers, twist of glen-plaid skirt, her bare legs as they scissor and stretch up the gnarled tree's rungs to a shelf near the top she and Sarah call the Fairy Queen throne, Molly's tight, neat buns years later when I get up to pee at 3:00
A.M.
and catch her walking naked back down the hallway connecting bathroom to guest room to her and Sarah's room and she doesn't miss a step, proud I'm sure of her taut athlete's body, unselfconscious about my eyes as she'd been at ten scampering up a tree, and though neither of us utters a word, she knows I'm behind her, probably guesses I'm hung over from all the margaritas and wine knocked back with her mom and John and I guess she might be half asleep, probably still half stoned because it's a weekend and she'd split the grownup slooshing early for her own partying, she knows I'm there in the hall and knows her young woman's body glows in the darkness, knows I can't help seeing, appraising, admiring her and it's okay, fine, she likes the accident, the coincidence, understands how it might please me she says in the look she flashes over a bare shoulder, isn't that what she's telling me with her slow strides, the casual slap, slap of naked feet on the tile, saying, Yes, I'm a woman now, I've caught up with your being a man, and it's kinda nice, huh, hello, goodbye, let's get some sleep, Molly gone before I'm positive whom I've seen, gone though her pale shape hovers after her door clicks shut, Molly gone but not before I understand, stopped there in the darkness, that the moment stirred me and shouldn't have, and why does that moment come back, Molly's young, naked body like Roger's pained face returning here, now, as if nothing else about either of them mattered, my failures, guilt, my dead greeting me, testing me, reminding me there won't be another time, not with Molly, not with Roger, no second chance to do better, to do more than watch, never more than one time, one chance, and maybe once way more than enough, wouldn't I choose every time to be whoever I thought I wanted to be instead of friend or guardian, an unforgiving once, as if a father borrowed once and only once for three seconds the eyes of his daughter's brand-new groom beholding the perfect naked female creature the father had loved into the world, Hi, John, Molly here ... speaking from the grave and I didn't dare answer. It's me, Molly, she says again and I'm on the other end of the line listening, unable to speak, green socks all I can think of, green socks and wanting to ask Molly what she'd done with them, green socks to match green blazer and green glen-plaid skirt, knee socks rolled down to her ankles when she climbed the tree or did you race off the school minivan directly into the room you shared with Sarah, chuck the monogrammed blazer across your bed, snatch the green tie from around your neck, plop down and whip off socks and shoes, or were you wearing shoes, am I making up curly white monkey toes gripping rough bark like fingers, Sure, I'll phone Jim—soon as we hang up—Thursday at 10:00, right, in your office—Thanks for setting everything up, and thanks for calling—See you Thursday. I don't remember how the conversation with Molly Ritello ended, what I've written above close enough, but I do remember saying to dead Molly's mother,
Done deal.
You keep an eye out for mine, I'll keep an eye out for yours, meaning whichever one survived the other would be an unofficial guardian of the dead friend's kids. I'd said those exact words,
Done deal,
and have wondered about them since. Christina's girls around nine and eleven, my boys four and six when we exchanged our little vow. A lighthearted, hugging, feel-good reassurance at the time,
the kids young and we felt young too, maybe younger with the pledge between us that seemed to guarantee a certain immortality as much as it acknowledged the possibility of fatal accidents, because Christina and I, as well as the partners we spoke for, expected lots more life ahead, natural and full life, more or less owed to us, and now even in the unlikely event one of us might be struck down, the others would be left standing, a permanent safety net for the worst circumstances.