My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (26 page)

“Are you all right?” she asked. She was still holding Cleo, who was trying her best to get out from under her grasp. There was just too much happening for her to be calm. She was shifting, struggling, but silent. A dog muted from electroshock therapy.

“I think I have this solved. I'm good. How are you? You're safe here, you know.”

“There was a man who came by,” she said.

I had turned on the Jeep and I was backing up carefully as she said this.

“What?”

“A man, with a beard, he came to see what was happening and stuck his head in your window, while you were back there.”

“A man? With a beard? What ... ? Were you ... Did he ...” I wasn't sure what she was saying. Was she threatened? I didn't see anyone stop or ... wait—

“The old station wagon?” I thought I had seen an old station wagon slow down, the first car, earlier.

“Look, we stumbled into this, and I have to fix this. Nothing's going to happen to you; stay here,” I said and extracted myself and leaned against the side of the Jeep all the way to the back, where it was now just a few feet from the Pontiac.

Trevor was standing there behind the Pontiac with the other two kids.

He handed me the nylon towrope with the hooks on either side as I disentangled the mess of the cord, from earlier.

“Get out from behind this car. Get to the other side of the road or across the ditch, now.”

This is bad
, I thought. A car or truck careening around that corner hitting the Pontiac would kill five people.

I looked at the guy across the road to measure his responses and he looked as if he saw nothing, which was a gamble. These kids were idiots. Affable, but idiots.

I took a deep breath and scrambled under the Pontiac and found a structural support, looped the nylon tow cable and squirmed back out, quick.

As I stood up, I saw Trevor, the only one left, standing there and waiting to help, awaiting my next bark.

I looked him square in the eye, and he looked at me, wanting to know what to do.

I said, “It wasn't your fault about the dog. He was loose, he had no collar. That happens, in the world. Dogs get killed by cars. It was good you stopped.”

Maybe that was true about the collar. I don't remember seeing one. But it made Trevor move.

VARRRROOOOOMMMMMM!!!!
went another car behind us.

Catching my breath, I told the woman in the car that I was about to get in the Jeep and pull her out: She had to put her car in reverse and I would pull her out. We would travel a little way down the road so that she wasn't so close to the blind corner—
Do you understand what I'm saying here?

She looked back at me, scared, but understanding.

All right, then.

In a second, I scrambled along the side of the Jeep and made it into the driver's side and buckled in.

I stepped on the brake and, for a moment, everyone behind me was illuminated: the foolish, out-of-season snowboarders, the guy who stopped by to help but couldn't do anything, and the two tipsy hot chicks in the Pontiac. I put the Jeep in drive and let the towrope engage, slowly, and the car began to shift, badly, on the embankment, and then
VARROOMMM!!
another truck whipped by us when the goddamned Pontiac caught front-wheel purchase and they were on the road and began traveling with the Jeep. I dragged the car about thirty feet from the site of the accident, and I set the Jeep to park and I stepped out, undid the hitch, and Trevor was there, running up with his two pals who asked, “How did you know that the towrope was in Trevor's car?” and I said, “I have a Jetta at home; those Germans prepare for everything,” and the girls were suddenly jumping up and clapping and I said, “Look, I don't know if you're drinking or what, but it's not my responsibility from here, so just ... I don't know; it's your choice ... from here,” and I shook someone's hand who tried to pat me on the back and I left when
VARROOOOOMM!!!
once again an SUV zoomed past and I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.

I stepped back into the cab of the Jeep and Steph released Cleo, who put her cold nose in my ear and began smelling all over me. I signaled and entered back onto the highway, and I was feeling like ...
All right
...
I did something. I helped these helpless kids. Maybe they'll make an app to stop breast cancer or something
, and Steph said, “I was really scared by that man.”

“Which man?” I asked, not tracking.

“The man with the beard, who stopped and put his head in your window, while you were gone.”

“My window is up. My window has been up all this time.”

“Still,” she said. “He was there.”

There was a sense of relief in the darkened cab of the Jeep, after we put some distance between it and the scene of the earlier accident, and I drove us farther into the mountains and into the primordial darkness. We were quiet for some time as we drove on, and the cars that were in front of us or behind us may or may not have been the other participants of that entanglement, may or may not have been the station wagon that had frightened Steph, and as the possibilities grew thinner, she became more open, and talkative, as eventually did I, until we were positively garrulous from nervous energy, and we recounted the experience of those ten dangerous minutes to one another from our different points of view until we agreed on a convergence of narrative, and were able to understand, individually and together, what the hell had just happened back there.

Eventually our ascending and winding path brought us to the strangest, most unsettling manufactured village in the mountain range, this incredible verdant and brightly lit town that felt half like a military base and half like a set from an apocalyptic film, after the town has been abandoned. It was the control area for a huge dam, right in the middle of nowhere, lit up like an airstrip, and I had just about hit my limit of things that were unnatural and abnormal for the evening. I was actually frightened at this point, because things had become foreign and nonsensical, a lot like what I imagine my being in Belgium would be like. Except with the precision of 1950s American engineering. Like Boeing, with waffles, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

After the eventful four-hour drive that we'd had to this point, I was flooded with anxiety and at full emotional capacity with the sense of imminent . . . weirdness. Doom. Change. Religious iconography. I don't know what it was, but my Catholic sensibilities were just humming by this point, and if I was a smaller sort of mammal, I'd have bolted for the nearest burrow and hunkered down for a day. Maybe nibbled on a carrot, for comfort. As a thirty-nine-year-old human male in an urban environment, I would have normally replaced that burrow with a bar, but here I was, a Gulf Coast flatlander in a mountain land, a foreigner in a foreign land, and in a car with a woman who disapproved of my drinking, so that idea was out.

Three ominous car wrecks in two hours, and now this creepy isolated town lit up like a militarized installation, and if I had been thinking more clearly, I would have rented a hotel room, said good-bye to Steph, rented a car in the morning, and made it the hell back home.

But instead I had to pull over and have Steph drive the rest of the way, which was inexplicably just around a corner and then down a steep descent to the valley floor on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. Twisp, Washington: a land devoid of cell phone towers, but with more than a few illuminated crosses on surrounding hilltops. Oh, yeah.

We followed the instructions in the hiking book, which had now become an invaluable guide through the old, retired logging concern, and it directed us basically into people's farms and driveways, navigating around goats and annoyed cows, standing and chewing in the middle of unlit dirt roads in the deep darkness. These weren't mentioned in the guidebook, but we did the best we could in driving around them, and eventually found the trailhead we sought, designated by someone's hand-painted sign, then rolled up the Jeep to a stop, an elevated bivouac that would keep us from being cold, we thought, as we created a nest for the night in the back of the Jeep, for three. Or two and a half. Two legs good, four legs bad.

The Jeep, after two hours sitting in that mountain valley in darkest October, was like a refrigeration unit set to “Viking.”

It was a miserable night, made more so by the mania of the dog, who was now smelling deer and bear all around her and demanded a pee every two hours.

The next morning could not arrive soon enough, and when it finally dawned, I was packed and loaded and ready to head on our further misadventure into the Cascade trail by 6:00 a.m., with only minimal kvetching and a good bit of huffing, and some puffing: I was the load-bearing wall on the hike, the pack animal, because, well, that's what we do, where I come from. Here was an expression of my Gramma's people: You need something carried? I can carry anything—bring it on.

So I had this fantastic rig complete with aluminum infrastructure and multiple holds, compartments, and lofts—all reinforced with zippers and sexiness—and I was John Marion Wayne, baby: Let's conquer this land, for Texas.

I looked like a tortoise, and I had about seventy pounds of extraneous gear on my back—multiple tins of soup, dry foods, dog food, ground coffee, a camping coffee-making kit, a BB gun with accessories, pots and pans, silverware, socks, extra clothes, the tent, sleeping bag, foam mats, full water bottles, paperbacks in case we became bored—it was like a ten-year-old had packed it, because that's kind of what I was: a kid living out what he thought was the fantasy of camping. I even had a utility belt, where I had a machete in a scabbard (in case of jungle vines, duh) and one of those retractable police truncheons—in case of bears: I wasn't going against a bear with just a machete.

And we might have even made it to the hidden lake and the raw, natural camping ground we were attempting to reach, if we hadn't taken a wrong turn within the first fifty feet of the trailhead.