Stone Junction

  ‘Do you want to proceed on the basis of belief, Daniel, or should we seek some concrete information?’

  ‘Just proceed is good enough. You’re wrong about Shamus, though – but I guess that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself.’

  ‘I intend to. I’d also intended to stay through tomorrow and enjoy the good company here at the ranch, but something urgent has developed in L.A., and I must be there this evening. But I can’t leave without asking how you’re doing with Wild Bill and his odd pedagogy.’

  ‘You’d have to ask him. I have no idea.’

  Volta smiled faintly. ‘Well, just remember that from Wild Bill “maybe” is high praise.’

  After Volta left, Wild Bill walked over to Daniel’s cabin, feigning surprise when he saw Daniel sitting on the porch. ‘Still with us?’

  ‘Still here,’ Daniel said absently.

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Volta… I don’t quite ever believe him.’

  ‘He’s done right by you, near as I can tell. He is a tad slippery, but that’s because he doesn’t leap to conclusions. Likes to get a grasp of what’s going on, the big picture, before he starts mucking around.’

  Daniel said, ‘Is that why you called him last night?’

  ‘Wrong,’ Wild Bill chuckled.

  ‘Just a coincidence he shows up this morning?’

  ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that coincidence is the natural state of affairs? “As above, so below.” Only time I worry about coincidence is when it quits happening. That’s when your ass goes up for grabs. But for now, why don’t you get your little cracker ass up off itself and go fetch the shotguns and a couple o’ boxes of number eights – I told Tilly we’d stroll up the creek and see if we could find us some quail for dinner.’

  ‘What about lunch? Should I pack some sandwiches?’

  ‘Probably a coincidence, but I already did it while you were jawing with Volta.’

  The routine held through April without significant change. Daniel was restless and increasingly impatient with Wild Bill. The lovely spring weather didn’t help. Then, on the last night of April, during formal instruction, Wild Bill surprised Daniel with a question that had an answer, albeit an answer Daniel was reluctant to provide.

  ‘You know that skeleton I gave you out of my audiovisual department to help you counting bones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you call it? I mean its secret name.’

  ‘Well,’ Daniel stalled, ‘it’s sort of ridiculous.’

  ‘Let me judge that. I’m an expert.’

  ‘I call him “Mudflaps.”’

  Wild Bill laughed helplessly, catching his breath only long enough to shriek in delight, ‘Mudflaps! Mud … Flaps.’

  ‘I’m glad you find me so amusing,’ Daniel said.

  Collapsing to his knees, Wild Bill managed to gasp, ‘Me too.’

  Daniel turned and walked out the door.

  The next day Daniel ignored Wild Bill. He did his meditations and his work, but with an air of bored efficiency and chilly indifference. That night Wild Bill surprised him again.

  ‘Three holy men were traveling together. One was an Indian yoga, one a Sufi dervish, one a Zen monk. In the course of their journey, they came to a small river. There had been a bridge, but it had washed out in the winter flood. ‘Let me show you two how to cross a river,’ the yogi said – and damned if he didn’t walk across it, right on top of the water. ‘No, no, that’s not the way,’ the dervish said. ‘Let me show you guys.’ He starts whirling in a circle, faster and faster until he’s a blur of concentrated energy and all of sudden – bam! – he leaps across to the other side. The Zen monk stood there shaking his head. ‘You fools,’ he said, ‘this is how to cross the river.’ And with that, he hiked up his robes and, feeling his way carefully, waded across.’

  Daniel waited.

  ‘Now the night’s question is this: What’s the point of that story?’

  Daniel said without hesitation, ‘The river.’

  Wild Bill looked startled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He considered a moment and then repeated, ‘Maybe.’

  Daniel said, ‘Volta claims that’s high praise from you.’

  ‘He does, huh?’ Wild Bill said distractedly. ‘You know, I should piss you off more often.’ He smiled. ‘Mudflaps. It’s all I could do to keep from laughing all day.’

  Daniel smiled with him.

  The next morning Wild Bill surprised Daniel yet again, announcing, ‘It’s my turn to quit. Actually, I’m going on vacation for awhile, which means you’re on vacation too – free to do whatever you want as long as you pull your weight on the ranch.’

  ‘I must have done really well or horribly poor last night,’ Daniel said, finding himself unsettled by the sudden changes.

  ‘Naw, you’re just ready for other angles, and we’re both tired and need to unbend. Like it says in the book, “Take care, from time to time, to unbend your mind from its sterner employments with some convenient recreation, otherwise your spirits may be weighed down, and you might lose heart for the continuation of the work.”’

  ‘What book is that from?’

  ‘The Ordinal of Alchemy.’

  Playfully, Daniel said, ‘I didn’t even know you could read.’

  ‘Used to all the time, but I started losing heart so bad I almost destroyed myself on the “convenient recreations.”’

  ‘Are you going to see Volta?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Jenny Sue is more like it.’

  An hour later Wild Bill set out down the dirt road, his banged-up rucksack on his back, humming a marching song for the occasion, a lyric that made up in heartfelt emotion what it lacked in scansion:

  Jenny Sue, ooooooo Jenny Sue,

  Ain’t nothing in this whole gloriously sweet and delightful world

  That little gal won’t do …

  In Wild Bill’s absence, Daniel, like most students, screwed off. He converted the morning and dream meditations into sleep, and the evening meditation was reformed into fishing. In his free time he tied trout flies, read among his promiscuous selections from the library, or played cribbage with Owen. May warmed into June and June drowsed into July without word from Wild Bill. Then, on the fourth of August, what was left of him returned.

  Daniel grimaced when he opened his cabin door and saw Wild Bill sagging against the frame. Both eyes were black, his left ear hideously swollen, a front tooth was chipped, and there was a neat row of stitches above his left eye.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Daniel blurted. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Aww,’ Wild Bill mumbled, ‘bunch of guys stomped the piss outa me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause that’s what I was trying to do to them.’

  ‘What about Jenny Sue or whatever her name is – your girlfriend?’

  ‘Last time I looked, she was helping them.’

  ‘Do you want me to take you in to the hospital?’

  Wild Bill touched the stitches on his forehead. ‘I just got out.’

  ‘You want to come in and lay down? You look like you could use some rest.’

  ‘Kid, any more rest would fucking kill me. Pack up whatever you plan to live on till next spring. We’re going to the mountains.’ He reached into his shirt pocket with a scab-knuckled hand. ‘Here’s a list of stuff you’ll probably need. Another thing – we ain’t comin’ back for visits, so you’re not gonna be hearing from Volta or anyone else. You can call Volta tomorrow to see if there’s any news. You’ll be wasting your dime,’ cause you’d of heard if anything was happening. If you don’t want to go, I’ll go without you and we’ll call the teaching done. If you want to go, be ready in the morning.’

  ‘What about Owen and Tilly? They need a hand around here.’

  ‘There’ll be folks along to take care of that.’

  ‘Why the mountains? Are we hiding out?’

  Wild Bill snapped, ‘No. We’re getting serious.’


  His vehemence startled Daniel. He didn’t reply.

  ‘You want Volta’s numbers or not?’

  ‘No,’ Daniel said, ‘it’s okay.’

  ‘Get shaggin’ then. I want to get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Not till you tell me what happened. What the fight was about.’

  ‘No secret. I said the bottle never ran dry. The bartender and his buddies said it did.’

  ‘I guess it did, huh?’

  ‘No shit,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Always.’

  Tilly drove them north the next morning to the Huta Point trailhead at the edge of the Yolla Bolly Wilderness. Along the way she and Wild Bill figured out the resupply plans, deciding on a monthly interval, with the food and equipment to be cached in two metal footlockers near the old crossing on Balm of Gilead Creek. She hugged them briefly in farewell. Tilly was the last human being Wild Bill and Daniel would see for six months – besides each other, of course. They would see plenty of each other.

  Daniel followed Wild Bill down and then up dark slopes of old-growth Douglas fir. He refused to ask where they were headed. Wild Bill didn’t offer a destination. He remained uncommonly silent, applying his breath to the trek, maintaining a steady pace.

  They camped that night on the Middle Fork of the Eel. Each had brought his own tent. Wild Bill had explained, ‘I hired on to teach you, not sleep with you. And anyway, I’ve been known to do some late-night meditating that your snoring wouldn’t encourage.’

  They finished pitching their tents as the last light faded. Daniel, ravenous, was eager for dinner, but Wild Bill told him that they hadn’t done their sunset meditation, which they were now adding to the other three. Its purpose was simply to sit and let the river roll. While he was on the subject, he informed Daniel that meditations, by ancient tradition, were doubled in duration while in the mountains.

  ‘That’s six hours a day!’

  ‘Eight for me. I normally do a half-hour at midnight and another at two. You probably should be doing eight hours yourself, but I’m easy.’

  ‘Does the question-time get doubled to ten minutes?’

  Wild Bill ignored the sarcasm. ‘No. Five minutes is already too much work.’

  Daniel had tried not to anticipate the question, but he had assumed it would be perceptual, not personal, and was caught slightly off guard when Wild Bill poked the fire and said, ‘Why haven’t you asked where we’re going?’

  ‘Because it makes no difference,’ Daniel replied.

  Wild Bill rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, bullshit. When has that ever stopped you? I think it’s adolescent perversity myself. It’s wasted on the mountains. Just be real, that’s all it takes. And since you haven’t asked where we’re going, I’ll tell you.’

  Their destination was a geomorphological anomaly called Blacktail Basin. In the center of the basin was a twenty-acre lake. Wild Bill claimed he’d never seen the lake on any map, thus giving credence to the local Indian legend that a Nomlaki shaman had cast a spell of invisibility on it after his first encounter with a white man. Since the lake was spring-fed – ‘filled from within,’ as the Nomlaki described it – they considered it a place of great power, and thus a place to be protected. Although Wild Bill had discovered it independently some fifteen years earlier, he contacted the Nomlaki elders whenever he planned to go there. They always let him. In their view, he had ‘seen through’ the spell, which could only mean the place had chosen to reveal itself to him. Who were they to grant a permission that was already so clearly given?

  Since the lake was under the spell of invisibility and therefore didn’t exist, it couldn’t have a name – a referential problem the Nomlaki had neatly solved by calling it Nameless Lake.

  Wild Bill spoke highly of Nomlaki culture. ‘The Nomlaki were known out to the coast and up to the Klamath for their shamanistic powers, healing and sorcery in particular, which are two of the tougher arts. And you’ve got to like a culture where the most precious thing you can own or trade is a black bear hide to be buried in.’

  They crested the lower rim of Blacktail Basin late the next afternoon and headed down toward what Wild Bill assured Daniel was the lake, though it wasn’t visible. Daniel had expected the basin would be dramatic, but in fact it was quite shallow, with less than a four-hundred-foot elevation drop from the low southern rim to the center. The basin was heavily forested along its upper slopes. As they made their way downhill, the trees grew farther apart, and the fern and gooseberry understory gradually thinned away. Despite the change in density, the flora seemed arranged in such a way that while you had a feeling of open forest, you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of yourself. Daniel almost walked into the lake before he saw it.

  Daniel followed Wild Bill around the lake to a terracelike meadow. Sheltered by the steeper northern rim, nicely oriented to the sun, with an unobstructed view of the lake, the meadow was a perfect campsite.

  Wild Bill slung off his pack. ‘Goddamn! It’s a pleasure to get out from under this load.’

  ‘How high is this lake?’

  ‘High as you wanna get.’

  ‘I meant elevation.’

  ‘Close to three thousand feet,’ said Wild Bill.

  ‘We’ll probably get some snow then, right?’

  ‘Just enough to occasionally change the view.’

  Stretching, Daniel looked around. ‘I can see why the Indians think it’s under some spell – the trees are a natural screen.’

  ‘What you don’t see,’ Wild Bill told him, ‘is that the shaman moved the trees.’

  With a playfulness that both allowed and protected his mild disrespect, Daniel said, ‘Whatever you say, Teach.’

  ‘You’re learning. And I say we set up camp and then jump on the chores.’

  When camp was squared away, Wild Bill announced, ‘All right, we’re home. Now to the chores. There’s only two: fishing for dinner and gathering firewood. Take your choice.’

  Daniel said, ‘I’ll fish.’

  ‘That’s my choice, too,’ Wild Bill told him.

  ‘So I lose, right?’

  ‘Well … given my experience and all, I should fish – I’m a fish-catching fool – but don’t ever say Wild Bill ran you over by abusing his natural authority on almost anything that matters. Tell you what: I’ll fish for about an hour while you collect wood, and then you fish for an hour while I sit there and laugh. Whoever catches the most fish, he’s the Official Camp Fisherman for a month – the loser can practice when the rod ain’t required by the champ for survival protein production.’

  ‘You’re on,’ Daniel said.

  Wild Bill winked. ‘That’s just what I tell them fish when I set the hook.’

  Wild Bill caught two.

  Daniel didn’t catch any. He couldn’t understand it – he was fishing off the same overhanging boulder where Wild Bill had caught his, and he could see the surface swirls of feeding fish. He was concentrating so deeply that he was startled to hear Wild Bill at his shoulder. ‘Count your catch, the hour’s up.’

  ‘Okay,’ Daniel sighed, ‘what’s the secret?’

  ‘Give me the pole and I’ll show you how it’s done.’

  Daniel reluctantly surrendered the rod.

  ‘Now pay close attention,’ Wild Bill said.

  When Daniel turned slightly to watch, Wild Bill put a hand on his chest and pushed him backward off the boulder into the lake. The shock of cold water brought him gasping to the surface.

  Wild Bill was pointing down into the water. ‘See them rocks there in the shallows? Now see them black dots? Those are the stick-and-stone houses of caddis fly larvae, which is what the fish are feeding on today.’

  Teeth chattering, Daniel waded to shore. He was furious, but he had to know. ‘Okay, what kind of fly were you using to imitate them?’

  ‘Well shit,’ Wild Bill said, putting his arm around Daniel’s wet shoulders, ‘I took my pocketknife and sliced that goony looking batch of feathers off the hook and put on some of those real caddis fly l
arvae. That’s what the fish are eating – not a bunch of feathers and tinsel and such.’

  Daniel shivered. ‘That’s cheating.’

  ‘You got to fish ’em real slow,’ Wild Bill explained. ‘Sort of let ’em swirl up easy from the bottom. I tell ya, takes tons of patience and a pretty good sense of humor to get it right.’

  The regimen was much like that at the ranch: meditation, daily work, nightly question. The only significant change was the addition of what Wild Bill called teaching, which amounted to Daniel listening to him tell stories around the campfire.

  ‘My dad saw something over on the Middle Fork that I doubt either of us ever will. He saw two full-grown male bears fighting over a she-bear. That ain’t so unusual, of course, but the thing of it was, one of the bears was a black bear and the other was a grizzly bear. Quite a tussle.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Well, like daddy always said’ – Wild Bill paused to spit emphatically in the fire – ‘“Son, if you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.”’

  ‘What kind of bear was the female?’ Daniel said.

  ‘You know what, Daniel? You could fuck up a steel ball.’

  Daniel bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it ain’t easy to fuck up a steel ball.’

  Although the regimen was basically the same, the quality of the days was different. They existed quite easily. Along with the food they’d packed in – heavy on rice and beans – there were fish, edible plants and fungi in season, and birds, small game, and an occasional deer that fell to the .222/.410 they’d brought. To preserve ammo, they only took one shell in each chamber while hunting, a practice, Daniel soon discovered, that greatly increased his accuracy. On average, they spent less than an hour a day on food.

  Daniel used his free time to explore the basin, day-dream, or work on various projects, most of which failed. He could hardly hit the hillside with the bow and arrows he made. His hand-carved duck call hastened mallards on their way. His fish traps didn’t.

  Wild Bill was no help and less solace. ‘You can usually trace failure back to one of two things: design or execution. Looks to me like both of ’em got you.’

  At the end of each month they hiked back to the Balm of Gilead crossing and picked up their month’s supplies from the two hidden footlockers. Tilly or Owen always left a note with any important news. There had been one message from Volta to say there was nothing to report. It took them ten hours to walk down with empty packs, and a tough sixteen going back. Twice during the winter they had to use ropes to cross the rain-swollen Eel. At first Daniel despised the overnight treks, but by winter he was actually beginning to enjoy the grueling all-day push back to the lake; the sheer physical exertion seemed to cleanse him of a rancid congestion that he could feel but not locate.