East of the Mountains

  Ben had no desire to face the world. He longed to be in bed again with the heat turned high, the sheets pulled close, his head resting on a pillow. But hunger urged him forward. He limped toward town, barren fields to his right, past the cemetery, a fruit warehouse, a nursery full of apple-tree rootstock, a ditch full of roadside cattails. The night had settled the wounds of his journey into a general soreness. He felt, as he walked, each of yesterday's miles, carrying them in his bones.

  At Akins Foods, a chain-link fence kept the firewood out front from the hands of sneaks and thieves. A dozen cars were parked near the double doors, but the rest of the lot was littered with beer cans, food wrappers, broken bottles, a pair of overturned shopping carts, a brown paper bag ripped apart by dogs—the refuse of the previous night.

  Inside, at the automatic teller machine, Ben withdrew two hundred and sixty dollars to pay Ilse Petersons bill. It was warm in the store and smelled of donuts and of the bread for sale in the bakery. There was a rug-cleaning apparatus for rent and a Lotto Scratch Ticket machine beside it, bags of bulk-size dog food, toilet paper in cut-open cartons, a pyramid mound of Presto-Logs, and a display of canning jars. There were sunglasses, cigarettes, bags of ice, and a rack of romance paperbacks: men with oily, puffed-up bodies, women shorn of half their clothes, grappling together on sunny beaches or posed in front of palm trees.

  At the end of the aisle of Mexican food—pozole, mole, yucca root—a girl gawked indiscreetly at his eye as he fumbled past with his shopping cart: the bruised and swollen violence of it, he saw, aroused her curiosity and disgust. Padding about uncertainly, deliberating on what he might stomach, he selected a can of chicken soup, a box of rye crackers, a pint of vanilla yogurt, a liter of prune juice, a half gallon of spring water, a bag of fig bars, two Winesap apples, and a ripe-looking mango. He found a plastic spoon at the deli counter and hauled everything to the checkout stand, where the cashier glanced at his eye twice before asking him about it.

  "A game of croquet," Ben answered. "It got out of control."

  "What a crock," the cashier said. "Hah, hah. Very funny."

  "These people take it seriously," insisted Ben. "I got cracked with a mallet."

  "I always know when somebody's lying."

  "Croquet," said Ben, "with the wrong people."

  "If you say so."

  "All right. I'll confess. I walked into a door."

  The cashier, a girl of twenty-five, laughed derisively. There was a splotch of red between her eyebrows, and her hair had been stiffly frosted. "Oh, my God," she said to him. "You should have opened it first."

  "You're right," said Ben. "Next time."

  "It's not that hard, opening a door." The cashier shoved his things aside. "$12.78," she said.

  He limped out into the cold again with his shoddy plastic bags in tow, one in each hand. They felt heavy, heavier than they should have: his shoulders ached from carrying Rex, as did the tendons in his forearms. He passed the forlorn trailer court and a placard urging dieters to call a toll-free number for the secret to loosing thirty pounds a month, MAGIC! it read, GUARANTEED! The sky was cloudless across the broad plain, tender with morning sunlight. Beneath its expanse, Ben felt alone. The cashier had been devoid of compassion, and he took her heardessness with him. But how was she to know of his condition, his need for kinder treatment? He felt like going back to tell her that she ought to be careful about what she said, but he could not summon the strength it would take, and at any rate it would cause a scene: a crazy old man with a black eye ranting away in Akins Foods, embarrassing everybody.

  There was no way to explain himself. He felt removed from the world. Suffering suffused everything. The sadness in the October wind was also the sadness in the cashier's mouth—different notes struck from the same chord.

  Ben hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door and choked down the overripe, dripping mango in an excess of appetite. He wiped his chin and, still ravenous, devoured the vanilla yogurt. Next he poured the chicken soup into the plastic ice bucket beside the sink and warmed it in the microwave oven. The bucket melted and warped slightly, but he saw no reason to worry about it and sat down in front of the television. Rifling through stations aimlessly, he ate the soup, blowing at his spoon and dropping crackers in. He tried to take an interest in something, the midday talk shows with their amicable hosts, but none of it appealed to him, it was all puerile gibberish, and he muted the sound with the remote controller and picked up the Bible on the bedside table left there by the Gideons. He had not read the Bible for a long time. He turned to the Book of Job:

  Days of affliction have taken hold upon me.

  In the night my hones are pierced and fall from me;

  And my sinews take no rest.

  By the great force of my disease is my garment disfigured;

  It bindeth me about as the collar of my coat.

  He hath cast me into the mire,

  And I am become like dust and ashes.

  It struck him how Satan and God conversed with such indifference and arrogance about their experiment. It was disturbing, too, that God punished Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite—all come to comfort Job—simply for misunderstanding Him in the course of delivering comfort. That Job himself recovered his health and lived a hundred forty years more, with fourteen thousand sheep on hand, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand she asses, three new sons—not to mention the fairest daughters in the land—seemed too much of a happy ending, until Ben came to the book's final passage, where Job died.

  He looked up from the pages of the Holy Book to find the television still on. He fumbled for a moment with the remote, then turned the volume up. A married couple sat on a stage, ordinary people, overweight, the man with a handlebar mustache and sideburns, the woman's dress revealing the cleavage of slack, pendulous breasts. They were swingers, the man was saying. They were twenty-seven and had no children. They had sex with members of a swingers association at weekend conventions and get-togethers. There were also weeknight rendezvous. They were happily married, said the man. He enjoyed the thought of his wife that way. She, too, liked the arrangement. She thought about sex all day at work. He did, too—the coming of evening. He was in marketing with an auto parts company, she a receptionist for a floral distributor. They labored, he said, to pay their bills—their real lives were all about swinging. They saw no need to change this. They saw a future of endless sex, so why should they change anything? They were the happiest people they knew of. It seemed to them they shared a secret. In restaurants full of ordinary people they groped each other under the table, as randy as seventeen-year-olds. Why would they want to be any different? Why would they want ordinary sex, the garden variety most suffered through? They held the key to living, said the man. Sex, said the woman, was the heart of things. What else was there as wonderful?

  Chewing on a Winesap, Ben changed the station. A pale man near his own age was bowling, and Ben watched him toss his ball down the lane with as much force as he could muster. The man, poised, watched the course of the ball, anguish creasing his face. For a moment the world was brought to a halt, the bowling ball arresting time, the bowler wholly unaware that elsewhere swingers were pawing each other with a desperate, blinding passion. For the bowler there were no swingers, the course of the ball was everything. He followed it with a yearning heart. Ben switched off the television.

  He called the Greyhound 800 number to get the schedule for the bus run upriver, then a Wenatchee company to reserve a rental car. His plan was to drive to Malaga, find William Hardens Wolfhound Orchard, and try to pry his gun, somehow, out of Hardens hands. After that, he would walk for grouse in the Colockum country, find a barbed-wire fence somewhere, and shoot himself in the neck.

  Ben sat mulling the difficulty of retrieving his gun from Harden. He could not present himself at the man's door and expect a hospitable reception. If he pressed his case for rightful ownership, made an entreaty invoking fair play, or ap
ologized again for the wolfhound's death, he would only be turned away. He couldn't just ask for the gun's return, though the notion of acting in some other fashion—as a burglar or thief—was beyond imagining.

  Ben thought through what he had to say, then called his daughter in Seattle. "I thought you were hunting," she said.

  "I am," said Ben. "I'm over in Quincy. What are you doing, dear?"

  "Nothing, really. Working on my screenplay. Chris said you called."

  "Working on a screenplay isn't nothing," said Ben. "What's this one about?"

  "It's a children's movie."

  "What's it about?"

  "It's complicated."

  "In a nutshell, then."

  "A boy on a journey."

  "What happens to him?"

  "He loses his dog and goes after it. A lot of things. It's complicated."

  "Well," said Ben. "What a coincidence. That's the reason I called."

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. He could hear Renee breathing into the receiver. "What?" she said. "I don't get it.

  "I had an accident," Ben told her. "Saturday morning. I crashed the car."

  "You what?"

  "I crashed the car in Snoqualmie Pass. But I'm fine, I didn't get injured."

  "You crashed the car? Your four-wheel-drive car?"

  "That's the one," said Ben.

  "You're kidding, Dad. Did you hit anyone?"

  "I hit a tree. In the summit exit. The road was wet, and I lost control. It could have been much worse."

  "You didn't get hurt?"

  "One eye is swollen and bruised a little. Other than that, nothing."

  "You ought to have it checked, Dad. You don't want to take a chance."

  "It's fine," said Ben. "It's nothing."

  "Wait a second," Renee said. "How did you get up to Quincy?"

  "Some people stopped and gave me a ride. A couple of very nice people."

  "You hitchhiked?"

  "No."

  "Who were they, then?"

  "Two kids in a Volkswagen van."

  "You're kidding me."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "That's just so funny. Its hard to imagine. That's so funny," she repeated.

  "Anyway," said Ben, "they took me to Vantage."

  "I thought you said you're in Quincy."

  "I am in Quincy."

  "So how did you get there?"

  "Believe it or not," Ben said, "I ended up walking from Vantage to George. Cross country. Hunting chukars."

  "Hunting what?"

  "Little birds. Chukars."

  "You walked all that way to hunt little birds?"

  "Not exactly. I had some problems. There was a fellow out there chasing coyotes, and my dogs got tangled up with his dogs. And Tristan got himself killed."

  "No," said Renee.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "Wait a minute. What happened?"

  "A dog fight, a bad fight. His dogs attacked mine, and I found Tristan killed."

  "Dad," said Renee. "That's terrible."

  "What can you do?" Ben asked.

  "You can sue the guy. He killed your dog."

  "I don't even know who he is, though. Besides, it wouldn't bring Tris back."

  "That's terrible," Renee said again.

  "I hate to think about it," said Ben.

  There was another pause, a long one. Ben shifted the receiver to his right ear because his arm was falling asleep.

  "This is a really weird story," said Renee. "I can't believe I'm hearing this."

  "I know," said Ben. "It's weird."

  "So you walked from Vantage all the way to George? That's fifteen miles, uphill."

  "Not quite. Not really."

  "Dad, this is so crazy."

  "There's more," said Ben. "Rex was injured. I brought him up here to the vet."

  "What?"

  "Those coyote dogs went after Rex. But he made it through. He's all right. I got him up here to the vet."

  "Rex—that's your other dog, the one you got last year?"

  "You know Rex," Ben said.

  "Now wait," said Renee. "Wait a minute. How did you get up to Quincy?"

  "A trucker," said Ben. "At Martha's Inn. I met him at Martha's Inn."

  "A trucker took you from George to Quincy?"

  "That's how it went, yes."

  "You rode with a trucker."

  "Rex, too. We got him up here to an excellent vet. His wounds were mostly skin wounds."

  "This is bizarre," said Renee.

  "It is," said Ben. "It's crazy."

  "So where are you?"

  "I'm at a motel."

  "That's good," she said.

  Ben sat rubbing his side as he spoke. He had eaten too much, and his stomach was in turmoil. He was curled on the bed with the jar of prune juice open on the nightstand.

  "What are you going to do?" asked Renee. "Dad, this is just so crazy."

  "I don't know," he said. "I'm so far into this thing now, there's no reason not to continue. So my plan is to wander a little and see if I can find some blue grouse."

  "You're nuts, Dad. You're completely nuts. You ought to go home and rest."

  "I don't want to go home and rest. I came over here to hunt."

  "You can hunt anytime."

  "No, I can't."

  "You shouldn't hunt anyway. Go hiking with Chris."

  "I like hunting."

  "It's awful. It's blood sport."

  "Let's change the subject," said Ben.

  At the end, and in an easy way, he told Renee that he loved her. He sent his best to his son-in-law and grandson. He told her not to worry about things. He wished her the best of luck with her screenplay. He convinced her he was all right.

  Afterward, he curled up but, seized by nausea, hurried to the bathroom. He sat on the toilet passing fluid from his bowels, waves of peristaltic cramping seizing his abdomen. The mango, he thought, had been too acidic. Or perhaps it was the Winesap he'd eaten. The obstruction in his colon was growing, swelling, narrowing the path of ordinary digestion—he was in need of palliative surgery; either that or stop eating altogether. But especially, he should stay away from fruit. He could not afford to eat fruit anymore. His apple days were over.

  Ben left his room key by the bathroom sink and set out with his rucksack on his back, his carabiner around his neck, a traveler once more. His respite at the motel lay behind him. It was time to push toward his destination. He trudged down the road with his face to the asphalt, the wind slinging grit and sand. He passed the Custom Apple Packers warehouse, where bins were stacked six high outside and forklifts scurried about. It was the height of harvest season in the river country. The wind would shake loose apples from the trees. In a week the limbs would be bare of fruit. The orchards would look desolate, unsettling.

  In five minutes he came to the veterinary clinic: inside a woman held a cat in her lap, while another clutched a small white terrier. A man sat rubbing his beard stubble, yawned, licked his lips, and stretched dramatically, twining his arms above his head. The receptionist seated behind the counter wore a sleeveless denim shirt with pearl buttons and a necklace made of rhinestones—a woman of thirty or thirty-five who was not afraid to show her shoulders and arms and whose river-country beauty had started to fade, which made her all the more beguiling. "My God," she said. "How nasty."

  "Don't ask," said Ben. "I'm here to see Rex. The Brittany, in back there."

  He paid for Rex's surgery. She stood, and he took her immediately for a horsewoman, a dusty horsewoman who actually rode, who curried, combed, and lived among horses. It was in the way she moved, the economical fit of her jeans as she transferred a file from one place to another and paper-clipped ledger sheets. He followed her to the recovery room, where they stood looking into Rex's kennel. The dog twitched and shivered in his dreams, and there was something depleted in his sleeping face, something vulnerable. Reaching through the wire mesh of the kennel, Ben lay two fingers on Rex's head. "It's all
right," he whispered.

  Calmly examining her fingernails, the lengths of her arms sleek and honey brown, the receptionist said that Rex had been awake when she opened the clinic at eight-thirty, had taken water and food readily with every sign of returning health, but now he slept as might be expected, given all he'd been through. Dr. Peterson had examined his stitches, and things were as they might expect. Meat, she added, was good for a black eye. A thawing slab of red meat would draw the bruise right out.

  "Listen," said Ben. "I can't take him right now. I have to go up to Wenatchee."

  The receptionist slid her fingertips into the rear pockets of her jeans. It caused her shoulders to rotate back and exposed the blue veins branching in them. "Not a problem," she said to Ben. "He can stay with us today."

  "I appreciate that."

  "Its not a problem."

  "I'm heading up there now," said Ben. "I'll be back before you close."

  "We're open 'til five, but I'm here 'til five-thirty, so swing by when you get back." She stood with her fists against her hips and again appraised his swollen eye. "Did you see a doctor?" she asked.

  "I am a doctor."

  "I'm surprised you didn't take a stitch or two. Looks like you could have used it."

  He followed her out of the recovery room. She was long-legged and well curved, the small of her back a deep, dark secret, and the shadow of her bra beneath her denim shirt inspired in him not desire but sadness. One of the bra's straps with its little adjuster had slipped into the open and ran over her brown shoulder in a delicate, taut white line.