The Company You Keep (46 page)

When your father left Rose City by the North State Forest trailhead, the little parking area was deserted. There had been rain during the week, and a couple yards in, he stopped carefully to examine a mud puddle. The mud was thick and drying and held old and new deer tracks and what could have been a coyote or large dog, but no shoes. Looking up and as far as he was able, he counted three mushrooms growing in the middle of the trail. Gingerly, he stepped into the woods and around the mud puddle. Then, still moving slowly and carefully, he made his way through the woods for perhaps two hundred yards, until he came back down to the trail and began to walk.

Mimi bushwhacked southwest from the little house in Alpena, following her compass, until she broke through onto state land and the DEC trail. Then she pocketed her compass and, examining the trail for signs of recent use, as I had done at the trailhead far to the south, moved along carefully for a time.

Unlike me, what she found was not reassuring. The mushrooms along the path, all sprung up since a recent rain, had virtually to a one been pulled, torn, and dropped. Farther down the trail a flat rock had also been turned, and on examination, four white marks showed on its side, as if scratched by nails. She stopped to consider this. Then, cautiously, she went on.

The answer came soon. Straightening out, the trail crossed a stand of
new pine, growing so thickly that it became a precise corridor through eye-level walls of green. In this corridor, in front of her, a black bear, perhaps three hundred pounds, ambled on all fours, stopping to turn rocks or taste mushrooms. Mimi stopped short and watched the bear as long as she could, until it rounded a turn. Then she went forward again, stamping her feet and whistling. As she approached the turn, she felt a high singing in her head, a high aria of danger, and closer yet, dizziness seemed to swirl behind her eyes. When she rounded the turn, however, the trail stood empty, the bear clearly having slipped into the woods. Feeling watched, she walked on.

After seeing the bear, Mimi found herself with a sense of being irretrievably deep into the forest, at the mercy of the trail. It was an unusual feeling for her: like me, Mimi feels afraid when there are people by, and safe when she’s alone. Now, however, she felt as if the forest had tricked her, trapped her, and in fact there was no turning back: already the afternoon was enough advanced that she could no longer be out of the forest before nightfall. The thought caused her unaccountable fear. Not the energizing, challenging physical fear, the kind that can be a source of energy, but a debilitating and intellectual one, a force that drains. She walked against it as long as she could, for several hours certainly, and indeed was able to push herself to the little clearing that houses the junction of the state trail and the old logging road south. Here, beyond a barbed-wire fence and a small crowd of No Trespassing signs, the road runs into the Linder estate. Only then did she sit and rest, and when she did so, she realized that she was scared of her destination, not of the forest. The forest, to the contrary, was the ultimate hiding place. The forest, to a fugitive who knows how to use it, is the next best thing to being at home behind locked doors.

Early evening, and the sun, cooling perceptibly, cast long light into the little clearing. Her breathing calmed, and silence rose around her, and for a moment there was a pause, in which she could hear a breath of wind making its way lazily through the treetops to the south, moving eastward. It shifted and came toward her, carrying with it colder air from the shadowed depth of the forest, growing in volume as it curled over her, heading north. Then, like an audience stopping clapping slowly, it faded, and the air heated again in the resounding silence under the dome of sky.

Just before sundown, your father emerged from a long stand of primary growth to a rocky vantage on the cusp of a bowl between two short ranges. The valley was heavy with darkness as the sun disappeared behind the hills. The sky, however, was still bright, as if borrowing the light from another day in another part of the world.

To one side, here, a little clearing sat next to the tree line, and in it he quickly built a fire ring, then gathered wood from the forest floor. When he had finished, the light was nearly gone, but he managed to put out a ground cloth for his sleeping bag and pitch a rainfly made out of a tarp. Then he lit a fire and warmed a can of beans. He ate hungrily, sitting by the little light, drinking from a plastic bottle of water, finishing his dinner with a Snickers bar that, he hoped, would kill his appetite until morning. Then he extinguished the fire.

A waning half-moon was up, throwing patches of silver into the woods around him. With the fire gone, the distances rose, carrying noises from miles off: a woodpecker, a deer, perhaps a squirrel chattering at danger. The eerily distorted cry of owls rose, warping through the trees and over the little hills, nearly electronic in its spookiness. With a piece of climbing cord Jason hung his backpack ten foot above the ground, then tied off the cord, leaving it swinging softly in the darkness. He felt his way back to the sleeping bag now, and climbed in.

Mimi in the morning, wrapped in her sleeping bag, opened her eyes suddenly, feeling afraid. In the chill dawn a mist hung over the forest, shortening distance and muffling sounds. For a time she tried to pierce the muffled silence with her ears. Then in fluid movements she rose, packed her sleeping bag, retrieved her backpack from its hanging place, shouldered it, and moved directly back onto the trail without peeing or having
breakfast. In a few feet she found her answer: a thin, delicately curled spoor, still steaming—perhaps coyote, perhaps wolf: an animal had been watching her sleep.

For a time she walked thoughtlessly, feeling the familiar weight of the pack, the welcome exertion of her legs. For a time, she managed to forget what she was doing here, in these woods of her childhood. The sun came up, warming the air, and intensely she felt the distances around her. She crossed a stream and stopped, using a tiny butane stove and a tin cup from her backpack, boiled water, then mixed in instant oatmeal. A whippoorwill was singing, and without realizing, she began to supply words to the song.
It’s really real, Betsy. It’s really really real, Bet-sy.
Finished eating, she washed out the tin cup carefully in the running stream, watching the sun reflected in the silvery little rocks at the bottom, the water brilliantly clear and purely cold. Crouching, she dipped her hand into the water, holding it until her bones ached. The words to the bird’s song had come to her from her father, her father who was always playing with his adopted language, who’d invented the birdsong’s words years in the past.
It’s really real, Bet-sy, it’s really really real.
To her surprise, she found herself crying.
It’s really real, Betsy.
But why hadn’t it seemed real? The years passing, one after the other.
They were really really real.
The irrevocable things that had happened, each one making her a different person than she had ever wanted to be. God, she had loved him. She had loved him. She had loved him. Like her hand ached in the cold water, she had loved him, that thoughtful man with his frail body and whitening hair making play with words all the while he was implacably being destroyed by men working for the government, deliberately, his work, his home, his life being removed, one by one. What had he ever done other than try to be decent? Even his famous communism had been nothing but decency, the idea that the gross inequities of the world must have some redress, that there must be a better way. America had saved him from the Nazis, for Christ sake, by VE Day he had put every penny—every single penny—he owned into war bonds. But decency, mere decency, it turned out not to be a right but a privilege, didn’t it? Decency, it turns out, you can die just for it and nothing more: not for justice, not for patriotism,
not for truth, just for the chance to be a little fucking decent, that too was only for the rich in America.

For a long time, Mimi Lurie watched her tears fall onto the surface of the stream and be carried away while in the ice cold water her hand ached, and ached, and ached. The whippoorwill, as if shunning her too, moved off farther from perch to perch, its song—
It’s really real, really real, Bet-sy
—tracking its passage as it grew fainter and fainter. Then she stood and, cherishing her bloodless hand, began to walk again.

Your father crossed onto the Linder estate from the south, and began following the old logging road in. The dusk thickened, like a syrupy substance poured into the space between the trees. He walked until he could no longer be sure he was on the trail. Then with real reluctance he finally gave into the imminence of night and made a camp, using the last few minutes of night to gather twigs for a tiny fire. That was unfortunate, because it gave him only the barest of light to open a can of chickpeas and one of sardines, which he washed down with water he’d taken from a stream that afternoon. Then, again, he climbed into his sleeping bag and lay awake, staring at the moon, which was no longer discernibly a half, while still days away from a quarter.

Tomorrow he would reach the Linder cabin. Tomorrow. Tomorrow the question would be decided.

Saturday morning at ten o’clock Mimi looked up from the mantra of her boot steps on the trail to see the blue of Linder Pond. Gingerly she stepped around it, watching the big midsummer tadpoles flick away frenetically. At the south edge of the pond lay a field of high grass, at the edge of which she saw emerge the roof of the cabin.

She lay down on the trail and watched for a long time. Then, leaving her pack next to the pond, she made her way to the front door and swung it open on its rusted hinge.

Two of the four windows had lost their glass. The wooden floor had sagged in at the middle, and the doors of the cabinets in the little kitchen all hung askew with the slope of the walls.

Piles of leaves were collected in the corners. A nest had been made, and long deserted, on a rafter, and a decomposed raccoon lay against the wall, under it a leather-bound Goethe, chewed nearly beyond recognition by sharp animal teeth.

The door swung shut on the breeze. With careful step she circled the room. When the door opened she turned and saw, first a shaft of thick, nearly autumnal midsummer light falling into the cabin, defining a corridor of swirling dust particles as it fell and splashing onto the wooden floor, and second, standing in the doorway, holding a shovel, a middle-aged man with, in his unshaven, wondering face, what was left of Jason Sinai, that is, me.

“Don’t clean up. We won’t be here long enough to bother.”

Those were her first words, and she said them in response to my first movement, when I broke the stare we held each other in and moved to scoop up the raccoon’s decomposed body with a rusted shovel I had just found on the other side of the lake from where I had watched her come in. A half hour before, when I had arrived, I had noticed the dead raccoon also. When she spoke, I paused in mid-action, listening without looking at her. Then I continued, deliberately, to shovel up the body and carry it outside.

I found him standing, leaning his forehead onto the shovel handle, outside in the tall grass where he’d buried the raccoon. The sun, falling unimpeded through miles and miles of blue sky, showed him in cinematic composition. Now, watching him, I saw more of the child I’d known in the middle-aged man. His body had, of course, thickened, but
so had his muscles grown. His hair, under his baseball cap, was black—dyed, I assumed—and thinned. And a fine set of wrinkles spilled down his face from his eyes. None of that mattered, however, when he looked up, and showed in his brown eyes that in no essential way had he changed at all. It was a surprise—a noticeable one, apparently, because he now spoke.

“What?”

I hesitated. “I’m just surprised.”

“How little difference the time makes, right?”

“How’d you know?”

He shrugged and looked away, and while he did, a line of poetry came back to me:
But across the open countryside/The grass is waving its good-bye/To someone waving his good-bye to us.

When I could, I answered her question. “I’ve seen Jeddy, and I’ve seen Donal James. I noticed it with them. The age is like a disguise.”

“That’s not the case with everyone.” Her voice sounded faint in my ears, in the distances of the field around the cabin.

“We always did think we were better than everyone else, didn’t we?” I spoke, leaning on my shovel, looking at her with helplessness.

Now it was her turn to shrug. “Time’s been on our side on that one.”

“Has it?”

“You tell me, Jasey. Name the neo-con from Weather. Who ratted who out? Who went corporate?”

I squinted at her now. “Is that a fact?”

“As far as I know, it is.”

“You see someone, then.”

She answered carefully, and I remembered how she was when skirting something she couldn’t say. “I don’t. I read the papers. I’ve seen some people act like jerks, but I haven’t seen one of us ever, in any profound way, betray anyone.”