The Other (23 page)

“Where’s that?”

“In the Olympics.”

Reese said, “You must like that.”

“What?”

“That outdoor business. That getting-bit-by-bugs business.”

“Yes.”

“What you mean, yes?”

“I like it—camping.”

Reese plunged ahead and walked backward again. He said, “So who you go camping with?”

“My girlfriend.”

“The one who come out this morning, or another one?”

“The one who came out this morning.”

“What’s her name?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“What’s her name?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie what?”

“Jamie Shaw.”

We crossed 45th and went along a leafy path. There were other students, all with books, most walking fast. Reese said, “You didn’t go to California?”

“No.”

“When’s the last time you heard from your friend?”

“Last fall.”

“What he say?”

“I went to visit him where he lived.”

“Where was that?”

“Out on the Hoh River.”

“Last fall?”

“Yes.”

“What he say?”

“What do you mean?”

“What he say about
missing
?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

Reese gritted his teeth. He shook his head. He stroked his eyebrows flat. “Another white boy of few words,” he observed.

We came to the Quad. People were hurrying now to make their nine-thirties. “I have to go,” I said.

“You seeing to business,” said Reese.

“My class is in this building.”

“All business,” said Reese. “That’s smart.” And he fluffed his wild hair with a cake cutter.

I never heard from the Bledsoe Agency again. But at the time I felt cowed and, that morning, couldn’t concentrate on European explorers. After class, from a booth in the HUB, I called Jamie at work and told her that we’d gone camping on the Duckabush during spring break, in case anybody asked, but nobody did, and nobody checked our bank accounts, either. Why would they? John William had disappeared in Mexico.

6

L
OYAL
C
ITIZEN OF
H
AMBURGER
W
ORLD

I
WENT TO SEE
John William after getting back from California, setting out in the stakebed after classes on a Friday, irritated with Keith for stealing my radio and fretting that Vance Reese might be—to borrow a phrase from the PI genre—tailing me. My brakes felt too forgiving, so every half-hour I topped off the fluid and pumped up the pedal while watching, surreptitiously, my rearview mirrors, and imagining Reese just over the hill, behind the wheel of a sedan, with a cup of coffee and a glowing cigarette. I turned onto a side road and pulled over around a bend to wait for my nemesis, but he never materialized. My paranoia waned after that, and, idling by a hayfield, I ate a leftover square of cold lasagna off aluminum foil before getting back on the highway. It was the time of year when a lot of bugs die against your windshield. Twice, crows intent on roadkill refused to scatter until I loomed too large to be ignored. Around Forks, the mills were blowing smoke, and the yards beside them were decked high with logs. I laid in some groceries—I spent more of John William’s $70,000—and then drove to the South Fork Hoh trailhead, where I let my shoulders rest after battling all that friction in the steering box. The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest. It’s easy to feel trapped with your back against trees. Vulnerable to all of this, I got on the trail and tried loving my solitude, but this was a futile and self-conscious effort. I didn’t want to be there, by myself, while the sun went down. I didn’t want to be hiking in such a tense silence. The maple leaves were youthfully green, but that didn’t ameliorate my nervous view of things. Before dark, I bivouacked, tentless, by the river, banking up a fire in front of a boulder and basking in its heat with my journal and
The Collected Eliot, 1909–1962,
which an excitable professor had asked me to scour, and although all of that might sound pleasant enough, or not a bad way to pass evening hours—especially with the din of water on the gravel bars and my view of stars illuminating silhouetted hills—I didn’t enjoy being there. I suppose you could say that my aloneness got the better of me, or that I felt fear that night, by the river, by myself—but fear of life, and not of animals or the forest. “The Hollow Men” didn’t help, because I couldn’t disown its mood, or break its hold on my thoughts, as I lay in my sleeping bag by those smoking coals, and though this temper made me tired, it also left me agitated enough to prod, more often than I needed to, the sticks I was burning. I mostly felt wistful. I didn’t want to have behind me, already, some experiences I couldn’t have again. Reading Eliot by flashlight was like deciphering runes, and made it more difficult to sleep.

In the morning, I ascended to John William’s cave, feeling, strangely, like a supplicant. It seemed to me I had a plea to make without knowing what it was. John William greeted me with a rock that missed my head by inches. Standing by the fire pit, holding another rock beside his ear, barefoot and grinning, wide-eyed with feigned malice, he looked more disheveled and bedraggled than before, but his teeth were still conspicuously white, and he still had that upright, English fell runner look, that ebullient physicality and stalwart expression I’d loathed on that May afternoon, five years earlier, when he’d gripped my hand earnestly after beating me in the half-mile. Now his wool pants and limp sweater both had burn holes, brown-edged and smaller than dimes, that must have been made by flying cinders, and the ash in his hair, beard, and eyebrows made him look ghostly, or ceremonial in the tribal sense, as if this ash was ritually cosmetic, but he also resembled a downed RAF flyboy surviving on wits, derring-do, and a stiff upper lip, maybe in the Schwarzwald. My friend had no mirror and didn’t know, probably, that with his stains of leaden ash, his smudges and grime, he further brought to mind a Day of the Dead celebrant, an Ash Wednesday penitent, or—especially with that rock in his hand—a character from
Lord of the Flies.
“You missed,” I said.

“Same old Countryman.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re here.”

I got out of my pack and threw the Eliot at him. He caught it, looked at the cover, and said, “I overdosed on T.S. in Althea’s class,” meaning the Mrs. Mastroianni who’d given him an F for forty-seven opulent if misguided pages on “Cosmology of the Gnostics: Penetrating God’s Illusion,” the Mrs. Mastroianni who’d petted her Abyssinian while discussing Chomsky with him in her apartment, the Mrs. Mastroianni who believed all her Lakeside students should read, reverently, as John William put it, “that most overrated poem of all time, ‘The Outhouse.’”

“I don’t know ‘The Outhouse.’”

“It’s also called
The Waste Land.
”

I’d brought T-bones, catsup, mayonnaise, and iceberg lettuce. Within ten minutes of my arrival, John William was frying the meat in mayonnaise while packing his mouth with all the lettuce it could handle. He ate that head the way other people eat an apple, by cleaving it in two, except that he poured catsup and mayonnaise into the exposed leaf folds and doused them with salt, pepper, and cayenne. He doused the burning steaks as well, and flipped them repeatedly with darting fingers, and after slopping more mayonnaise—also with his fingers—into his smoking and spitting skillet, cut a chunk of half-cooked beef, charred and fat-rimed, and ate it from the spear point on his pocketknife. I noticed, again, that dozens of flattened cans lined his fire pit, slipped under one another like roofing tiles—clever heat-reflectors that, with time, were degrading into rust-hued powder—and that some of his fire-ring rocks were heat-cracked. His camp, nevertheless, retained its vaguely military fastidiousness. His canteens were neatly hung. Socks were drying on a line. The heads of his hand tools sat on stone, not dirt. The limestone chips that were the refuse of his cave building had been swept under trees, and the hot tub, enlarged, now included a flat, stone bench.

“Hey,” John William said, “how was San Diego?”

“San Diego? I thought you said Vegas. I thought you wanted me to sell your car in Vegas. Didn’t you say Vegas?”

John William, who’d finished off the lettuce already, said, “These steaks are done enough,” stabbed one on his knife, and tore into it. “What’s T.S. say about meat?” he asked, close to unintelligibly, because he wouldn’t take time away from chewing.

I said, “Eat both.”

While he did so—noisily and with shiny chin whiskers—I discovered cedar bark floating in the hot tub, rolls of inner bark knotted with their tapers, and dangled my feet among them. These packets suggested my friend’s woodland prowess and occasioned in me a glandular resentment. They were so neatly done, so adroitly crafted, that I felt bad about myself just looking at them. Here he’d been going competently native, under these trees and in these woods, while I’d been analyzing “Gerontion” in a college library carrel.

When John William was meat-sated, we climbed his pueblo ladder. He’d driven two spikes over his cave entrance to support a stripped sapling on the horizontal, and wrapped around this, like a roll-blind, was a cedar mat he could unfurl like a curtain. He left it where it was, though, to let forest light in. We sat on cedar mats and under cedar mats: three were hung, from spikes and cord, like banners. They weren’t so much festive as civilizing, though the work was crude and absent of design—not the sort of thing you’d see in a gallery alongside ceremonial masks, but not bad, either, tightly woven and, in the main, square. Sprawled under them, I rested while John William tried unraveling his rat’s nest with a 59-cent comb I’d brought.

He was eagerly talkative. No doubt he hadn’t spoken for a while, except to birds who didn’t answer, or to squirrels who squeaked at him from trees. He tried to show me how to make three-ply rope out of cedar bark by twisting to the right, but I told him I didn’t need to know about this, since I could buy rope. A few minutes later, he put in my hands a cedar basket he’d woven, delineating his technique as if he was guest basket-maker on a Sunday-afternoon public-television show, and stressing how useful this item would be for gathering whatever he was gathering. Not changing my tune, I reminded John William that five-gallon plastic buckets were free for the taking behind paint stores.

His cave felt improved. The subterranean gloom of those limestone facets was now concealed by the warp and weft of his mats, which insulated, too, dispelling drafts. You could loll meditatively without feeling claustrophobic, because the banners, in squaring off what was shaped like a mine shaft, hid tomblike indentations and made the air less dank. This was not so much a dungeon now as a room in one of those Japanese teahouses I’d seen in
National Geographic.
This was the secure, well-stocked, and shipshape nest of a survivalist whose bona fides were apparent in his mats, baskets, canned-goods larder, how-to manuals, and ditty bags of sundries hung like pelts. It was easy to be impressed by my friend’s industriousness and preparatory efforts—he’d been making like a squirrel getting ready for winter—but I couldn’t help thinking, at the same time, that things would change when his food ran out.

I said, “So what happens when the cans are gone?”

“I’ll have more room.”

“You’ll walk out of here.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You’ll go up to Forks for bacon and eggs.”

“No.”

“You’ll start thinking about hamburgers and have to come out.”

“That’s you,” said John William. “You’re thinking of yourself. You’re a loyal citizen of hamburger world.”

I
DID WHAT
I had to do—which is to say, I visited my friend a lot, hauling offerings on my back—powdered milk, toothpaste, Fritos, shampoo—none of it, I stress, at his behest. At the same time, he didn’t reject these artifacts from the real world the way he’d once rejected Christmas presents, because in the end he couldn’t reject them and go on with his hermitry. Was that hypocrisy? I brought him gloves, socks, lantern mantles, and white gas. I brought him
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
I brought him chocolate malted-milk balls, weed, scissors, a deck of cards, and M&M’s. He knew, of course, what all this meant—that, like everyone else, he was dependent on hamburger world—but what could he do about the fact that he was human? Nothing except try to get supremely woods-wise, which is what he spent his time doing. My visits, though, were vacations from this regime: we played Blackjack with M&M’s in the pot, drank Jack Daniel’s, and turned the pages of
Penthouse
and
Playboy.
Occasionally, John William would blurt something like “Miss June’s most recently read book is
All Things Wise and Wonderful,
” or “Miss July likes to listen to KC and the Sunshine Band while washing her Corvette.” If I laughed, he’d say, “She also likes to listen to the love theme from
A Star Is Born
while pleasuring her dog,” or “In her spare time, she repairs sluggish vibrators.” In other words, he could be as puerile as any twenty-one-year-old boy in the exercising of his wit. And so could I.