The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

  “Hey, Wyman,” I said after a while. “How come your greaser buddies hate my guts?”

  “Those guys aren’t my buddies,” Wyman said. “I don’t even talk to them.”

  “Yeah, well, how come they hate me?”

  “They don’t hate you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “They don’t,” said Wyman. “They don’t even think about you. Nobody notices. Those grease monkeys don’t think about anything.”

  “They won’t talk to me,” I pointed out.

  Wyman looked over at me apologetically. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “Huh? Do you? All right it’s that fucking coat of yours. You look like a fucking clown in that thing, okay? You make a fool of yourself.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why do you hang around with me?”

  “Hell if I know,” said Wyman.

  “You don’t like my coat?”

  “No. But I don’t care. Wear the fucking thing if you think you have to.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Right,” said Wyman.

  We parked and climbed the fire escape to the roof of the Savoy Hotel: me in my overcoat, Wyman with a bottle of Ripple trapped between his underwear and the waistband of his pressed cordoroys. It was still raining just a little. We sat beneath some sort of overhang. From there the city spread out toward the salt water. There was no sense of action, of a life in the streets—Seattle seemed to exist as an addendum to the water, the sky and the listless rain, all more essential elements in the landscape.

  “Nobody likes me,” I pointed out after a while.

  “Not true,” answered Wyman firmly.

  He put his arm around my neck then, something I’d never felt from anyone before—not friendship, not love, not sex, not solace even—just the sensation of something human finally, with no selfish motive attached.

  “Forget about those guys, all right?” he said. “They’re nothing but grease monkeys. They won’t let a guy be different. Forget about them. They don’t matter.”

  “It’s not just them. It’s everybody.”

  “Then forget it all,” said Wyman. “Who cares? Forget it. Have another drink of wine.”

  “I can’t forget it. It’s not that easy.”

  “Take a drink of this.”

  I did.

  It took Dan Wyman a half-hour to convince me. But in the end I threw my coat off that roof. “For you it’s easy,” Wyman said. “Toss the fucker. Go for it.” So I stood at the edge of the city and tossed it. It floated at first, and then seemed to plummet, and at last it fell out of sight.

  “Good move,” said Wyman, clutching his bottle. “For you it’s easy. It’s just that simple.” But I wasn’t thinking of what Wyman might mean, or of why he couldn’t shed his aloneness that easily: I was thinking, as usual, about myself instead, coat or not coat—of course I was.

  This is a story with an epilogue, finally; there seems to be no other way to tell it. Wyman and I stopped being friends after a while, a thing that happened gradually, in a piecemeal fashion. There was no sudden falling off, just a gradual drift, currents dragging at us from opposite directions. It seemed to me the most normal thing in the world to move on emotionally in this manner. I wasn’t hurt, and I don’t suppose Wyman was either; we just went on becoming who we were, that’s all.

  When I was twenty-four I saw Wyman again in a bar in west Seattle. He was shooting pool with two other men, the three of them circling the table with their cues and leaning low into the smoky light there to take their shots with the utmost seriousness. It was not so much something in their appearance, or even in their manner, that suggested what I came to conclude from the scene: that Wyman was gay, a homosexual. It was rather their intimacy that suggested it, the way in which their pool game shut them off from the world and made them a society unto themselves, so that what the rest of the bar might think of them was a matter of complete insignificance. Wyman had grown a mustache. He seemed to be more of an adult than I was—he looked older, more knowledgeable about the rough-edged, seedy part of life than I would ever be. His face had gotten softer, his hair had receded, his body had thickened almost imperceptibly. But I noticed the details of his aging, of course, just as I’ve found I can’t help but notice a lot of things about people. I had come there alone at midnight from my studio apartment in order to be in proximity to others for a while. I sat at the bar with my beer and watched Wyman. Once, as he moved past one of the men on his way toward the cue ball, he very gently placed his palm on his friend’s buttock. The man smiled as he pondered the pool table. The third man leaned on his pool stick.

  I didn’t speak to him. I only watched. After a half-hour I wandered back to my apartment, where a novel I would never finish writing lay strewn across my desk. I looked for Wyman’s picture in my high-school annual—searched for it with a curiosity I didn’t know I possessed. Daniel Richard Wyman it said beneath his picture, a handsome boy in a white tuxedo suit, white teeth, combed hair. Woodworking, Hunting, Automobiles.

  Wood Grouse

  on a High Promontory

  Overlooking Canada

  I went up there with my brother, Gary—up on the side of Goat Peak: a high promontory overlooking Canada.

  That day we caught no fish at Wall Lake. They were there, watching what we did, but the weather was all wrong, too sultry, and the fish stayed down in the deep water.

  That day Gary wouldn’t talk about the war he’d only just come back from. “You don’t want to know,” he said to me. “Take my word for it, Bud.” So after a while I didn’t ask anymore. But I could see Gary had seen things I hadn’t.

  I don’t know. I was fifteen. I spent a lot of time throwing rocks, I know that. Building stacks of rocks, backing off thirty yards, then throwing for as long as it took to knock the stacks of rocks apart.

  We saw a flock of sheep, a sheepdog and a shepherd, up on the Wind Pass trail. “Aren’t they beautiful?” said Gary. The shepherd was a silent Mexican on a horse, his dog a ragged mutt; the sheep flowed away from us in a slow white wave as we waded through them in the cloudless sunlight.

  There were no trout for lunch but some cheese I’d kept in the streambed and a can of sardines and some dried pears. Then—later—we smeared ourselves with jungle juice, put our sunglasses on and took the compass and the Geological Survey map up on the side of Goat Peak.

  Up there Gary spread the map out on a slab of rock, and laid the compass down and watched while it settled. “There’s Canada,” he said. “That’s Eldorado Peak way over there and that’s the Chilliwack Valley.”

  I looked up into a world of blue spruce that rolled on endlessly to a land I dreamed about. I didn’t say a thing about this dream to my brother, though—about the mountains or about living off the land. It seemed the wrong dream to tell him about, now that he was back in America.

  “This is the border,” Gary said. “We’re in Canada, Bud.”

  Driven into the scree up there we found the mounted iron border marker—number fifty-five, it read. We sat by it: a place to rest and watch the sun go down.

  “Draft-dodger heaven,” said Gary.

  We kept crossing from country to country, back and forth, reveling in the freedom of not answering to anyone about it.

  Eventually to the northwest there was no light other than a crescent of orange wavering on the horizon. The sky over our heads lit up, while the earth we sat on went cold in the last sweet twilight.

  It was in this last light that we saw them—hooters, that was the name our father used—a covey of wood grouse dodging through a broken tumble of sharp gray talus rock.

  “Look,” Gary said. “There.”

  I picked up a stone about the size of a baseball and watched them—imagining myself a hunter of wild animals.

  “They’re beautiful,” Gary said. “Just look at them.”

  I let fly hard and in the gray light the covey scattered, a drilling of buzzing wings, bir
ds tossing themselves down the mountainside, but one seemed to leap up so that for a moment it was painted like a shadow against the sky, the tips of its wings wide, a sound like whoot whoot whoot whoot whoot to-whoot aimed at the heavens, it did a half-roll in midflight and plummeted, describing an arc, headlong into the darkening scree.

  “Jesus,” Gary said. “What did you do that for?”

  I had no good answer. I said, “I didn’t think I was going to hit one, Gary.”

  We went down and stood by her where she was dying among the rocks. She was a large female—soot-colored tail feathers, some white hind shafts, a narrow, bluish band where her flanks narrowed. My stone had caught her flush in the breast. One wing had been crushed in her fall to earth.

  “Jesus,” Gary said. “Look what you did.”

  I didn’t speak, though. What could I say? We stood there, the two of us, watching her.

  “Jesus,” Gary said again.

  There was nothing left for her. The other birds were long gone. The one good wing only twitched along the rock. Her life flowed out of her, into the scree, back into the earth it had come from.

  “I’m going to finish this pain,” Gary said. “God forgive me.”

  There were tears in his eyes I hadn’t figured on.

  He put his boot on the dying bird’s head—the sole over one alert, clear eye—and ground it suddenly into the rock while the wings gave a last frenzied shudder. They fluttered out to their full span spasmodically in the moment just before she died.

  “That’s it,” Gary said, not ashamed of his crying—just crying now while he spoke to me. “That’s all it is. That’s all there is to it, Bud.”

  We went down the mountain and around the canyon head to Wall Lake. No trout were feeding there; not a sound except the croaking of the marsh frogs.

  After we had eaten the pinto beans with chili powder and white rice for supper we sat by the propane stove for a while.

  “How has it been?” Gary asked. “What have you been up to?”

  I told him about not making the basketball team, the fight I’d had with Mike Kizinski, other things that didn’t really matter.

  “I like hearing all this,” Gary said. “Tell me some more, Bud.”

  But I didn’t. I was young and didn’t know any better. So instead I asked him about the thing on my mind: “Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” I said.

  “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam?” said Gary.

  “Did you?”

  “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam,” said Gary. “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam.”

  And again he began to cry silently, in a way I hadn’t figured on at all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”

  But he went on crying. He cried with no shame. He cried in a way I didn’t think was possible. He didn’t rub his eyes or try to stop it. He just cried.

  Later we took down our sleeping bags from where they’d been airing over the branch of an arctic pine, and laid them out on the flat ground we’d cleared the night before. The two of us lay buried in our bags, only our faces showing, the drawstrings pulled around our heads so that the spilling of the snowmelt over the pebbles in the streambed was like a muted roar, a streaming music beginning and ending in our ears. We lay there side by side staring up at the stars, and talked about how unfathomable was the phrase light years, the possibility of life on Saturn’s seventh moon, the years that would have to pass before NASA put a man on Mars. We talked about a theory Gary read about in a book—that time and space didn’t really exist, that everything was in reality something else we didn’t know about.

  After a while we gave up on the useless things and watched for the points of light that were satellites among the forever-fixed stars. We watched them hurtling slowly to the horizon, gravity tugging them always toward the earth so that they moved in a relentless straight line out of vision. Gary said that, if need be, a satellite could take a close-up photograph of us in our sleeping bags, as soon as the sky became light enough.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s beautiful up here. I’m glad we came. I’m glad we’re here.”

  I heard him, minutes later, moving toward sleep, and I began to feel alone among all those mountains. And then I couldn’t fall asleep that night; I felt ashamed of myself. But later on I found that Gary was awake too, and then we passed the dark hours talking.

  “Two insomniacs,” he said after a while. “Crazy, Bud. Insane.”

  “At least we’ve got someone to talk to,” I said.

  “At least we’ve got that,” said Gary.

  Piranhas

  The door of Paul’s bedroom opened one evening and his parents and their dinner guests came in.

  “Paul’s room,” his mother announced. “And Paul.”

  “And is this connected to the intercom system?”

  “Certainly it is. The whole house is.”

  “So you can call him for dinner. How convenient.”

  “If there were such a thing as dinner,” said Paul’s mother. “If dinner existed, yes.”

  She laughed, airily, at her own words.

  The guests fanned out, looking at things with calm detachment, absorbed by the walls, the floor. Paul, his hands in his lap, sat on the edge of his bed and watched them silently.

  “He has his own television,” someone pointed out.

  “He has his own television, yes,” said Paul’s mother.

  “Strictly regulated,” added his father. “The homework has to get done right before the television comes on at night.”

  The guests eyed Paul with curiosity now. He thought he knew what they were thinking, though—was he the sort of boy who had trouble at school? Was his homework a family problem?

  “What grade are you in, Paul?” somebody asked.

  “Seventh,” his mother said. “We started him early.”

  “Look at this,” one of the guests insisted. “The dial on this intercom’s turned all the way down. How can he hear anything?”

  “He can’t,” said Paul’s mother. “We never use that, really. It’s just there.”

  “I’ve always thought that about intercoms. You can’t justify the expense.”

  “Oh, come on,” answered Paul’s mother. “Let me tell you something. It came in handy when Paul was a baby. We could monitor his crying from upstairs.”

  “Well how much is an intercom system? Let’s hear some figures on this.”

  “I don’t remember,” Paul’s mother answered.

  “It came with the house,” said Paul’s father.

  “Well, what good is it if you don’t use it?” said the guest. “It’s just a lot of useless wires running through the walls.”

  “That’s it,” said Paul’s mother. “Useless wires.”

  For some reason everybody laughed at these words. Then, as if by some unspoken agreement, it was time for the house tour to move on.

  “Hey, Paul,” somebody said. “You’re one lucky guy living in a place like this. And I bet you don’t even appreciate it.”

  Once again, everybody stared at Paul. They stood together in a group near the doorway, drinks in their hands, bored.

  “He’s the silent type,” explained Paul’s mother. “Say goodbye to everybody, Paul.”

  “Good-bye,” Paul said. “See you.”

  They went out. He could hear them in the hall. “Let me show you my new hot tub,” his mother was saying. “It’s wonderful.”

  Walking home in the rain on Monday afternoon, Paul slipped into the pet shop on Sixty-fifth Street.

  “Wet out,” the man at the counter said in greeting. “You know what I’m saying? Wet.”

  The man wore a square mustache and black plastic glasses. He stood at the cash register with a pencil behind his ear eating popcorn from a brown paper bag, and looking, to Paul, a little sinister for some reason. His shop had the vaguely menacing aura of a laboratory set up in a cave. Four rows of aquariums stretched away into the darkness. Only they were lit—nothing else. T
he fish hovered as if in a dream, secure in their lit glass houses. The place smelled of jungle; vapor fogged all its windows. In another room caged birds sang.

  “Wow,” Paul said. “It’s neat in here.”

  “Look around,” the man advised. “Go ahead. Dry off. Put your books down and look some.”

  “Okay,” Paul said. “Thanks.”

  He wandered between the rows, peering into each tank with his hands on his knees, feeling immense suddenly. The man had hung a placard over each aquarium: PARADISEFISH—FROM TAIWAN; CHOCOLATE GOURAMI—THE MALAY PENINSULA; BANDED CLIMBING PERCH—THE ZAIRE BASIN. The imprisoned fish appeared to lead effortless and aimless lives. They hung suspended in corners, one eye to the glass, or tipped themselves toward the membrane of the surface. Some swam diligently, but most seemed to understand there was no point to that. They went wherever the water took them as it bubbled up from the filters.

  Paul watched them for some time. He decided—though he had no words for it—that they lived in a private and trivial universe, subject to currents of thought so removed from their lives that their identities as individual fish had been submerged. Perhaps they had known all the miseries of capture; perhaps in transport from some exotic home the unassailable loneliness of the world had been revealed to them. Now they swung about in watery cages, forgetting or remembering, uncertain if what occurred in the course of their hours constituted an actual existence. Paul, with a conscious exertion of the imagination, thought of them as they might have been in their other lives—free, inhabiting a warm and boundless ocean, darting joyfully, their hearts light, feeding, in conquest, at liberty to live. He thought of them as cultivating a preordained singularity, nurtured by forces that were rightfully in effect, according to the universe’s grand plan.

  When he looked up the man at the counter was watching him suspiciously. He still stood behind his cash register stuffing his mouth with popcorn.

  “You’re interested,” he said to Paul. “I can tell.”