The Other (24 page)

So—I stress this—we had fun up there. Yes, it was perplexing to see my friend this way—as a lonely woods-dweller, as a filthy forest troll—but we still liked to smoke dope, play cards, and, in short, treat the whole matter as a Huck Finn–like vacation. For a while, we indulged in heavy gambling and passed long nights with a deck of cards and straight faces. John William was a credible and practiced bluffer who could relax through a ruse and not betray himself. I found this to be true in our Blackjack tournaments, epic bouts in the dirt by the fire, or on cedar mats, by candlelight, in his cave. He played as if he was ahead and betting my M&M’s even when he wasn’t, and this gave him an ease I didn’t feel. He had gambler’s cool, and his confidence was natural. At first I thought I knew what was up—for example, if his eyes went to his chips on the flop, it meant he had a winning hand—but I was wrong. Fortunately, most of the time we were just playing for candy, although on one trip, determined to defeat him, I suggested we play for more meaningful stakes. We took a hundred toffee-covered peanuts each and, after settling on an ante of five, agreed that he whose stock was first depleted would suffer thusly: if I lost, I would have to dig enough cedar roots out of the ground with a yew stick to fill one of his baskets; if he lost, he would have until my next visit, two weeks hence, to memorize
The Waste Land
and recite it flawlessly. The two tasks seemed about equally abhorrent. Naturally, I got in trouble right away by bluffing. The set of my chin and the aggressive way I dropped a lot of toffee-covered peanuts into an already scary pile was about as subtle as showing him my down card. I got my expression under better control but couldn’t help shifting around a lot when investing in a paltry hand, and again John William lit me up for more peanuts. Down to nearly nothing, I started talking off the cuff, thinking this might make him waver, but instead it made things worse, because my silences now meant something. In short, John William knew what I was holding more than 50 percent of the time, and it didn’t take any more than that to clean me out. As it unfolded, digging cedar roots with a yew stick was arduous. My back couldn’t take all the stabbing at rocky soil. The roots snaked around stones, and since our deal was for straight roots—because those were the ones good for baskets—I pulled a lot of roots I couldn’t deliver. To keep my word within a reasonable duration, I had to work by the river, where the digging was easier and the roots were straighter, and so the cruel reality of my defeat was that I not only dug roots, I carried them uphill.

During three days in August, we played a lot of chess, and this tournament was notable for the gravitas that flavored it when it became apparent to John William that I’d been practicing. I beat him in our first game by making sacrifices aimed at penetrating his castled position, and then, after a loss and a draw, I beat him again by sacrificing in the early going so as to get a rook file open. We sat on cedar mats, fending off gnats, drinking cherry Kool-Aid, and, at first, deriding each other’s gambits, but by game five we’d fallen silent and were both eyeing the board as if the stakes were mortal. I won that one, too, again via sacrifice, and then we settled on twenty-one matches as appropriate to our circumstances. In this marathoner’s mood, we played a trio of draws. John William twisted his hair while he brooded. Neither of us would capitulate during lengthy endgames. The next day, I blew the morning’s first match by attacking eagerly and, as it turned out, transparently, but came back by employing my signature—sacrifice—in this case a rook for two pawns. It worked, and for the rest of that day I hit him with variations on my theme, gulling or beguiling him with irresistible giveaways. John William could be duped, I found, if I let myself look stupid—but not if I let myself look too stupid.

Day three of Barry versus Countryman. We both knew that he was the more sophisticated player but that an upset was potentially in the making. After lunch, I dared an end-game exchange sacrifice, a rook for a knight, and thereby, and roundaboutly, promoted a pawn, which I parlayed to a go-ahead victory. That closed it out, because all the remaining matches were attritional bouts, which took patience on my part, since John William knew what was happening and did everything in his power to obstruct my conservatism and force the board—but still I got the draws I desired.

When the last match was done, John William shook my hand and said, “You’ve got it dialed in, Neil.”

“What’s that?”

“Sacrifice.”

B
EFORE HIS FIRST WINTER
, I tried coaxing John William out of cave dwelling. I went to see him on the day after Thanksgiving, bringing with me leftovers packed by my aunts—including two slices each from four different pies, and a Tupperware container of mashed potatoes—plus twenty packets of dried leek soup and a hundred bouillon cubes. There was snow on the ground, but not a lot, and almost none right under the trees. The needles on the spruces looked waxen and brittle, and the canteens, when shaken, sounded sandy. In the cave, steam billowed from our mouths, and I, for one, wore a hat and kept my hands in my pockets. While John William bolted sliced turkey from a plastic bag, I emphasized that when the road got snowed in I wouldn’t be able to bring supplies. He shrugged off this news. He licked his fingers and started on the pie. I counted his remaining cans and reported the result—seventy-seven—but this made no difference to him. Nothing made a difference. All talk of winter and its meaning was useless. I decided to leave him my sleeping bag, gaiters, gloves, stove, and parka in lieu of pleading.

When fall quarter ended, three weeks later, I drove out in the stakebed with the heater on high, a pack full of food, and tire chains and a shovel, but there was no getting up the Owl Creek Road when it began to climb Huelsdonk Ridge. I tried walking it on snowshoes but gave up after four miles, in the main because I’d warned John William about this and felt that let me off the hook. It didn’t. That night, in the Forks Motel, I drank a lot of bourbon, then fell asleep with my clothes on and the thermostat at seventy-five. There were steelhead fishermen in an adjacent room, and I heard them get up at four-fifteen and drive off, snow crunching under their tires.

All morning the snow fell. I didn’t feel like moving and read Chekhov stories in bed. Finally, there was nothing for it but to face hamburger world. I walked down the street in someone else’s tracks and, at the café, ate pancakes and patty sausage while reading the morning paper. I did the crossword puzzle, too, and then I just sat. The thermometer outside the window read twenty-three. I walked back with the wind and snow coming toward me, and a state truck, dropping sand, went past with a muffled rumble and tire chains rattling. It was bitter getting my own chains on, but when I was done I turned the key to my room and ran hot water over my fingers.

When I got home, Jamie said, “At least you tried.” She had a head cold and was wearing the striped pajamas she’d given me for Christmas the year before, and she had her arm across the couch back behind me, a book in her lap, and a box of graham crackers on the side table. The cemetery full of Woodsmen looked Irish in the night glow, and on 55th, a car, sideways in the steep street, rested against another car while teen-agers rode inner tubes past it. I said, “I give up. I’m calling his old man.”

“Okay,” said Jamie, “but give it twenty-four hours.”

The next afternoon, we went Christmas shopping at Northgate. I got my dad a coffee-table book on the castles of Ireland, and Carol a sheepskin car-seat cover. We went to
The Last Wave
—Richard Chamberlain as an Australian lawyer going mad. Afterward, we got a table at India House, and while we were sitting there sipping mango lassis, Jamie looked at her watch and said, “Twenty-four hours.”

“Yep.”

“Are you ratting him out?”

“Nope.”

“How come?”

“He’d never speak to me again if the Park Service came for him.”

“He’ll also never speak to you dead,” said Jamie.

We ordered three curries, knowing we’d end up taking some of each back to our apartment. “He isn’t going to die,” I said. “He’s got food, two sleeping bags, water, and a hot tub.”

“When did you decide all of this?”

“During the movie. I used the whole twenty-four, Jamie.”

She said, “I always try to use the whole twenty-four, especially when the question’s a big one.”

“All right,” I said. “Will you marry me?”

“Give me forty-eight,” Jamie answered.

B
EFORE
J
OHN
W
ILLIAM
gained fame as a hermit, there was a Bulgarian near Darrington who made the news in modest fashion because he lived in the woods for seven years. According to reports, the Bulgarian inhabited a hole in the ground covered with brush and sod spread on a tarp. He also built a shelter near a creek in fishing season, and no doubt he ate berries, but his primary survival technique was serial burglary. Whenever his situation became dire, the Bulgarian would walk out of the woods and break into a cabin. He often left mud behind, on the floor and on beds. He was legendary, like Bigfoot, as far as Darrington was concerned; there were people who left canned food for him on their porches, alongside supportive notes. A tracker finally pinpointed this invisible local hero, who, it turned out, looked like Cro-Magnon man and was still fierce at sixty-eight. He was arrested after a prolonged wrestling match with two law-enforcement officers and an attack dog. Later, his hovel was located on a hillside. There was a seep nearby, and some Mason jars filled with water. He had binoculars, rope, string, bits and pieces of flashlights, several rifle barrels, a slide mechanism from a shotgun, a burned rifle forearm, a .22 Hornet, a foreign-made automatic pistol and a hundred rounds for it, a box of twelve-gauge shells, and a coffee can full of transistor-radio parts. He had three fishing spears and a lot of pencil nubs, but no paper to write on, and no books. After his arrest, he was diagnosed as paranoid. He ended up in jail.

Is there a difference? The difference is that I bought a used snowmobile which I could run up a corrugated aluminum ramp (donated by Keith, whose ATV and dirt bike were both permanently disabled) and secure to my stakebed with cargo straps. I dropped Intermediate Short Story Writing and Late 19th Century American Literature, substituting for them Renaissance Drama and Greek Lyric Poetry, so that my Fridays were free for winter quarter. Rescheduled, I drove to Forks on the second Thursday in January 1978—John William’s first winter in the Olympic Mountains—stayed in the motel, and, on Friday, at first light, drove as far as I could toward the South Fork Hoh before running my snowmobile down Keith’s ramp and blitzing toward the trailhead. This was my first ride on a motorized sled. The machine wouldn’t track. It was loaded with my pack, snowshoes, and a large box of tools, and its windshield was scratched. It kept wanting to turn sideways, and its shocks needed a rebuild. Its muffler was shot, but that didn’t matter, because no one was around in those woods but me, and I had on the earmuffs I used with my Homelite. At first, I felt precarious through every road bend, but then I discovered the foot pockets and, throttling up, found my balance. Cutting through all that untouched snow while sitting on a hot engine made me giddy. It also made me think of the scene from
Dr. Strangelove
in which Slim Pickens rides an H-bomb out of a B-52. At a midnight show a few years before, as Pickens, holding his hat and whooping like a cowboy, plummeted toward Russia, John William leaned in and told me that his father was one of the engineers responsible for the B-52’s wing design. I thought of that, too, screaming along on my snowmobile, but mostly I was busy trying not to ski off the road.

Walking in, at first, wasn’t bad. I traversed, downhill, to the riverbank, and snowshoed the gravel bars—the sort of open-country travel, in sun, near water, that is, to quote Wordsworth again, full of glimpses that would make me less forlorn. No one but me had touched that snow, other than birds, elk, and a bobcat, lynx, or cougar—I couldn’t tell which. I’m not good at reading tracks, but these, whatever they were, looked as well defined as diagrams, and the paths they took, toward the water or forest, were interwoven with, I imagined, hunger and wariness. I realized then that my tracks were graphic, too, gigantically so, and my thoughts, as I shoed, became ponderously shrewder, less inclined toward ambience and more toward evasion, though at the same time I couldn’t take seriously the prospect of someone’s tailing me. I thought of Vance Reese, James Bond–like, on skis, slipping through the woods above with binoculars, and dapper in a Swiss parka and mirrored glasses. But then back to the serious problem at hand, which was how to disappear when every step I took had a spotlight on it.