Though he had only left his home to walk to the cabin a few hours earlier, it already seemed that he had been gone a long time, and it seemed, also, that he had traveled a good deal farther than six miles. In a way he felt he had crossed a border, entered a new country in which the laws and customs were different from the laws and customs he had lived under all his life. Nothing about his new life was defined very clearly—not yet—but that didn’t bother him, really. His new life, after all, was still less than twenty-four hours old. It had been almost noon of the day before when he had parked his pickup in the cluttered carport and set out on foot to find peace.
It seemed to Duane, sitting in his lawn chair, warm under his poncho, watching the sun rise higher in the clear winter sky, that he had been lucky to find the contentment he felt at that moment so soon and so easily. It was only a six-mile walk from his old life to his new. He had a stove and a small refrigerator in the cabin. He could provision himself for a while with no more provisions than would fit in a backpack. The first thing he had done when he arrived that morning was disconnect the small radio. He did that immediately, before he even brewed coffee, because he knew it would be just like Karla to call the radio station and concoct some kind of emergency, a sick child or something, so that the radio station would page him.
But he didn’t want to be paged: didn’t want to be answerable. He had been answerable long enough. Now what he wanted was to sit and think, walk and think, lie in bed and think; and not to be in any hurry as he was thinking. He had done what was expected of him all his life, but he didn’t feel that he had to do the expected any longer. He wanted to establish his own priorities and then act on them. Should he go to Egypt first? Or learn to make biscuits first? He had always had the notion that it would be interesting to follow some great river from its source to the sea. Maybe that was what he should do first, take a long trip on a long river.
One thing he knew already was that he wanted to pare down, rid himself of things he didn’t need, such as his pickup. What he was doing at the moment, sitting in a lawn chair, watching the sunrise, was simple and basic. The first thing he wanted to do was eliminate what was unnecessary and excessive. The cabin he sat by was already as simple as it needed to be. There was a stove, a small fireplace, a refrigerator, a single bed, a card table, two chairs, a nail to hang a coat on, two fishing rods, an almanac, a twenty-two, an axe for cutting firewood, and some overshoes. The radio was the only thing in the cabin that he really didn’t need, and he had already unplugged the radio.
Duane knew already that simplicity was a big part of what he was seeking now, in his life. For as far back as he could remember he had spent his days wading through clutter, fighting for air in a way. His home, his office, his pickup each contained an overabundance of clutter. Just stepping into his office and seeing the piles of bills, envelopes, mail, circulars, catalogues, contracts overwhelmed him. At the cabin he had exactly what he needed: a dog, a chair, coffee, a warm poncho, and no more. He even had a small bathroom, a luxury put in at Karla’s insistence—the cabin at first had had no bathroom.
“No bathroom?” she said. “Ye gods! What if I’m paying you one of my rare visits and need to go?”
Duane shrugged. “There’s six sections of land here,” he said. “You could probably go find a place to go somewhere on it.”
“Yes, and get snakebit, ye gods!” she said.
Rather than argue about it for years he had put in the commode and the shower. But he would not allow Karla to hang curtains.
“Duane, what if somebody was to drive by and see you?” she asked.
“The only way they can drive by and see me is if they drive off this hill,” he pointed out. “And if they drive off this hill it won’t matter if they did see me, because they’ll be dead.”
Karla raged about the cabin for about a year and then gave up. The only improvements Duane had added since then was to drive two more nails in the wall, to hang coats and slickers from.
Now, so far as he was concerned, the cabin was perfect. There were windows on all four sides, to let in the light and allow him to see what the weather was doing. The windows also made it easy for him to keep an eye on the flats below. Road hunters had to be watched—they didn’t always honor the season and would sometimes pick off an unwary deer if they thought they were unobserved. From now on he meant to keep a stern watch on them.
The sun rose higher, the morning wore on; Duane finished one cup of coffee and then a second—except for the few moments it took him to pour the second cup of coffee, he didn’t leave his chair. Well to the northwest a dark layer of cloud was forming; it might be that colder weather was hurrying down the plains. It occurred to him that he probably ought to chop a little firewood that afternoon; there was a mesquite thicket a couple of hundred yards to the south that would provide him all he needed. It was too bad he had forgotten the bacon, though. With a half pound of bacon and a can or two of beans he would be set up fine, if it should happen to get sleety or wet.
After a lengthy nap Shorty got restless and decided to investigate the rocks just off the edge of the hill, where a family of ground squirrels burrowed. Shorty considered the ground squirrels intruders, and the ground squirrels considered Shorty a bothersome pest. One of the squirrels would sit on top of a boulder and scold Shorty roundly, chattering in indignation.
“Live and let live, Shorty,” Duane said. “Those squirrels got here first.”
Gradually, as the morning wore on and the dark clouds to the northwest edged closer, a thought with equally stormy implications began to edge into Duane’s mind. When he walked off that morning at three-fifteen he had assumed he would take a long walk, perhaps spend most of the day at his cabin, and then walk back in and eat dinner with his family. That would be his new pattern: alone, exploring the country during the day, and a meal with his family at night. He made himself a can of tomato soup for lunch, and, while he was eating it, realized that he didn’t want to go back and have dinner with his family. He didn’t want to go back and spend the night in his home in Thalia. He didn’t want to go to his office and see what checks or bills might have come in the morning’s mail. The change he felt in himself was more profound than he had first supposed it to be. His larder was undersupplied—it consisted of three more cans of soup, a can of English peas, and some coffee. He was going to have to walk in and buy food and some toiletries at some point. He kept a toothbrush at the cabin but no razor. The stormy thought that came to him was simple enough: he didn’t want to live at the big house with his family anymore. He wanted to live in his cabin, alone except for Shorty. The process of change that began when he had locked his pickup and put the keys in the old chipped coffee cup was more serious than he had supposed. He hadn’t been just walking for amusement: he had been walking away from his life.
When the conviction struck him that he wasn’t going back, he felt again the feeling of relief that had come to him that morning when he first stepped out of his house. He had walked away from his life—and it seemed to him that he had waited until the last possible minute to do it, too. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but he did feel that way. Any later, even a few weeks, and he might not have been able to do it. He might have stayed trapped in the same strong fishnet of routine and habit that had bored him for at least the last twenty years, if not longer. As he felt himself flooded with relief for the second time that day it seemed to Duane that his legs had simply taken independent action. While he had been sitting calmly at the dinner table, explaining to his grandchildren that walking was just healthy exercise, his legs and feet had been preparing for revolutionary action, and now they had taken it. Karla, in her shock that he would leave the house on foot at three-fifteen in the morning, had been right, her instincts sound. It wasn’t just a momentary restlessness that had carried him out the door and out of town. Without exactly knowing it he had reached a point in his life where he had to live differently if he was to live at all, and his feet and legs, somehow recogniz
ing that fact before he had been able to face it consciously, had hurried him away and saved him.
Although geographically he had only gone six miles—in fact he could look out of the south window of the cabin and see not only the town of Thalia but the very roof of the house where he had slept last night—he knew that in emotional terms he might already be in Egypt or India. It had never before struck him so forcibly that distance was not really a matter of miles. His family, most of them probably just about to begin their normal day of television and fights and trips to Wichita Falls, had no idea yet that he had ceased to live among them. Only Karla knew it, and even Karla just suspected it. She couldn’t know it for sure, because he himself had just come to realize it within the last few minutes. Walking away was exactly what he had intended to do, but the intention had been so well submerged inside him, deep in his feelings, that he hadn’t realized it was there until, in the quiet of the cabin, it had suddenly surfaced, and surfaced powerfully, like a whale rising.
Then the sun vanished—the clouds from the northwest had just arrived. The little cabin was not well insulated. In a few minutes Duane felt the temperature begin to drop. He put on his coat and picked up the axe.
“Come on, Shorty, let’s go cut some firewood,” he said. “You and me had better get to work.”
Shorty, excited to be going somewhere with Duane, his favorite person, briskly led the way to the thicket of mesquite, on the slope of the hill to the south.
13
“WE AIN’T AS WELL EQUIPPED AS I THOUGHT, Shorty,” Duane said, an hour later. Despite the plummeting temperature he had worked up a good sweat cutting the abundant mesquite limbs into fireplace-size chunks. He had a respectable pile of nice burnable mesquite, but the cabin was two hundred yards away and he had no way to transport the firewood to the cabin except in his arms.
“We need a good wheelbarrow, or maybe a wagon,” he said to the dog, who was watching a hawk circle low over the hill, hoping to surprise a quail or a small rabbit or even a good-sized rat—there were plenty of rats living under the vast archipelagos of prickly pear which dotted the plain to the south. Shorty knew he couldn’t get the hawk but kept an eye on it anyway.
“Maybe I could fix up a travois—make you a sled dog,” Duane said, but, for the moment, Duane filled his arms with as much mesquite as he could carry and walked to the cabin. He came back and got three more loads before he had a pile of firewood that satisfied him. With a wheelbarrow or a small wagon he could have moved as much in one trip. It was mildly aggravating to realize how many basic tools it took just to enable one man to live a simple life.
Then he went back six more times to the woodpile he had created at the edge of the thicket. He decided his reflection about tools had been incorrect. It had been based on the premise that there was some kind of hurry, and that convenience, not simplicity, was the basic, prime good in life. He was so used to that way of thinking, had proceeded on that premise for so long, that he had to twist himself around mentally in order to see that it didn’t have to be that way. A huge abundance of firewood was only a short walk away. In an hour or less, each day, he could carry more than he could possibly burn. In a week of steady work, even without a wagon or a wheelbarrow, he could have firewood stacked almost to the roof of his cabin. There was no reason to hurry about it, or to spend money on tools, when the one tool he really needed—his axe—he already had. The one thing he needed to get, next time he was home, was a file, so he could sharpen the axe.
“An axe don’t stay sharp forever,” he said to the dog, who decided he was being told to get those ground squirrels. Shorty went flashing off. He was so happy that Duane hadn’t put him in the pickup and taken him back to Juan, Jesus, and Rafael that he couldn’t refrain from frisking as he went about his duties—or what he supposed to be his duties.
The hawk that had been hunting near the mesquite thicket had been joined by its mate. Just as Duane was stacking his last armload of firewood the two hawks sailed by him and dipped off the edge of the hill. He looked down on their backs as they rode the wind and scanned the valley below.
The only paper in the cabin was a little notepad that dated from the year the cabin had been built. In the first months he had occasionally had two or three of his fishing buddies in—once or twice they played cards, using the notepad to keep score, if they were playing a card game that involved a score. Such visits had only occurred a few times. Duane soon discovered that what he came to the cabin for was solitude.
But it was good that he had the notepad, and two or three ballpoint pens. Now that he intended to walk to town when he needed something, and would only have a small backpack to carry his supplies in, it behooved him to make careful lists before he went shopping. His first list only consisted of four items: matches, bacon, chili, and a file. He stood for a long time, looking out at the scudding clouds, trying to think of something else he might need on his trip in. Finally he added one more item to the list: twenty-two shells. He debated in his mind whether to bring a short shotgun back with him. Quail, duck, and wild turkey were all still in season—and the wild pigs were always in season. With a shotgun he could provide himself with a variety of succulent fowl, at least until bird season closed.
But in the end he decided against the shotgun. He wasn’t a back-to-nature crank, after all. He didn’t have to kill everything he ate—canned goods would suit him fine, for the most part. If he developed a sudden hunger for game he would just have to sneak up close enough to something to kill it with the twenty-two.
The clouds lay so low above his hill now that he could no longer see the buildings of Thalia, or, indeed, much of anything. It would be dark in a few hours. Between his relaxing and his wood chopping he had used up much of the day. If he intended to walk to town to pick up the file and a few groceries he had better get started. He couldn’t tell what the clouds intended. If it started to sleet or snow everyone at home would freak out all the more when he told them he was going to walk back to the cabin and spend the night.
Then, watching the two hawks scout the valley, he sat down in his lawn chair again and covered himself—to the chin this time—with the thick poncho. It was a little too cold to be sitting out on a hill in a lawn chair; the heat that he had generated with all his wood chopping had begun to leave him: better to go inside and build a fire with some of the wood he had chopped. Shorty, by dint of frantic effort, had managed to scramble up on the boulder where the old ground squirrel had sat when it scolded him—but the old ground squirrel, at the moment, was snug in its burrow. Shorty stood triumphantly on top of the boulder, yipping at nothing. Then a jackrabbit appeared, well west on the hill, and Shorty was off in hot pursuit.
After a time Duane went inside and built a good fire in the little fireplace. There wasn’t going to be a sunset to watch that evening—just a slow fade from dim to dark. The moment for hiking into Thalia had passed. There was nothing he needed that he couldn’t do without until the next day. He still had the soup, the can of English peas, some crackers, and plenty of coffee. The axe was thoroughly dulled, but then he didn’t need to chop any more firewood for a while. He had an abundance, stacked right by his door. If part of what he was attempting to do was free himself from habit, then making a habit of walking to town every single day was no way to start.
After a time Shorty came back, rabbitless, and Duane let him in and brought the lawn chair in too. He realized well enough that there were still a few impediments to his enjoyment of the simple life—a few barriers that still had to be removed, the main one being his family. When he left that morning to walk to his cabin it hadn’t dawned on him that what he really wanted to do was live in the cabin permanently. He just told Karla he was going for a walk. He didn’t tell her he was leaving her because he hadn’t realized it himself until he had sat in the lawn chair for a few hours and thought about things. She may have had her apprehensions but she didn’t really know what was going on with him, since he didn’t know himself, really. The one thin
g he knew for certain was that he didn’t want to live even a single day as he had been living, driving around in his pickup and going through the motions of a life that had long since ceased to interest him. Other than Karla, no one at his house had a clue about his feelings. His little speech about walking for his health had seemed to satisfy whatever concerns the others might have. They wouldn’t particularly miss him if he didn’t show up for supper, probably wouldn’t particularly miss him for a week or two. They would just assume he was on a fishing trip or a business trip or something. Willy and Bubbles would eventually begin to wonder what had become of Pa-Pa—but that wouldn’t occur for a while.
When he tried to think of what he might say to Karla, to make her realize that he was unlikely to be coming back, his brain felt as dull as the axe he had just used to cut the mesquite. The fact was, he felt a little tired—more tired than hungry. He couldn’t really be expected to rethink his whole life—not in one day.
He didn’t imagine Karla would show up looking for him, either. She had had a wary look in her eyes, when he left the house that morning. Though by nature a confronter, Karla had been married to him a long time; she mostly knew when to test him and when to let be. Of course, she was also impatient—she never let be for long, but she was not so impatient that she couldn’t let a day or two slide by before she decided to bring some crisis to a head. It was not particularly unusual for him to spend a night in his cabin. His failure to appear at suppertime wouldn’t cause too much comment—less, probably, than if he showed up, got a file, and walked away in the night. Karla, once she had had time to think about it, would probably lay back, leave him alone, let him have a day or two to come to his senses.