“Not according to Brent.”
“Brent can call me.”
“He already called you.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Lucy.”
“It’s not what Dorothy stipulated.”
“You’re in my house.”
“We’re in Dorothy’s house. Excuse me, Ginnie, I’ve got this address written out now.” She beckoned, and I stepped up and took it from her.
“A friend of John William’s,” observed Ginnie.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know he had friends.”
“He has me,” I answered.
Ginnie assessed me with greater interest after that, before squeezing her hair bun, gently. The gesture was slow and made me even more nervous. She said, “How did you get here?”
“I was bringing firewood next door.”
“And how did you meet my son?”
“I met him running track.”
Her eyes narrowed, as if this answer was suspicious. “You didn’t go to Lakeside?”
“I met him at a track meet.”
“Noted,” said Ginnie. “But where is he now? He’s dropped off the map, apparently. I haven’t heard a peep from John William.”
“Me, neither.”
“For months—silencio. Señor Silencio.”
“Same here, but more like half a year.”
Ginnie crossed her arms and held her biceps in her lovely hands. “So what do you think of my son?” she asked.
“He’s a good guy,” I told her. “You raised him well.”
Ginnie tried not to, but she laughed at that, turning her head to one side and covering her mouth with her fist. Her hoop earrings swayed a little. She said, “Bravo,” and laughed some more.
I said, “I have to go. My partner’s waiting.”
“Of course you do,” answered Ginnie.
I scratched my cheek then, which is, in the parlance of our day, passive-aggressive. Ginnie mocked me by mimicking this gesture; no doubt she wanted me to see that I couldn’t get away with it, that she read everything, and that my resistance, however minor, was as transparent as my attraction.
“Go,” said Lucy. “Can you find your way out?”
I did.
I WROTE JOHN WILLIAM. I said I’d heard about his grandmother. I explained about my firewood business and said I’d met his mother in Lucy Hatch’s study. I told him about Jamie and described my trip to Europe. I said I’d gotten his aerogrammes. I said I was sorry I didn’t get out there before it was too late—I told him getting out there hadn’t been “in the cards,” without mentioning my interlude in Portland. Finally, I asked about Reed.
I still have the two letters John William sent me from college. The first is rife with freshman mania: John William is interested in all of his classes, and, besides performing three hundred push-ups a day, five hundred sit-ups, and seventy-five chin-ups, he’s taken to late-night long-distance runs and has limited his diet to fruits and vegetables. There’s a description of the repaired mimeograph and of a zeal to change the world, or at least Reed College, by tomorrow. The urgency of this, he says, “precludes my coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, two drags anyway.” He doesn’t mention Cindy, nor is she mentioned in his second letter—written, I know now, on the heels of losing her. Instead, he urges me to drop everything immediately and devote myself strictly to the gnostic path. I should, he wrote, “confront the aspiration and restlessness of Neil Countryman’s dissatisfied soul,” and act on that, because “What else is there but this dream we endure, with all its miseries?” John William had tri-folded eight pages of cramped script. He wrote that there was “no good knowledge to be had in college,” and asked me which I preferred, “death and darkness or light and life?”
Scary, but, as far as gnosticism goes, I’m not against learning a little more. Life could indeed be nothing but a dream, and at least some of the time it does seem miserable—if that’s what Gnostics believe, if that’s what John William believed, I’m willing to look into it, though it doesn’t sound like something I agree with. Which is not to suggest I have my own metaphysics, though I do hold with, or at least have an affinity for, “There is no death, only a change of worlds,” reputedly the final words of Chief Seattle’s 1854 treaty oration. In the end, though, I would probably have to say that, in a way, my religion is home and all that attends it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling averse to that, because home is a place I eventually have to leave, and then what have I done, by giving myself to it, other than pave the way for my own suffering? No doubt I’ll pay the price for love, too, in the end. Home and love—so unwanted, and wanted, by John William. There are some lines from the Buddhist sage Shantideva on this subject that seem about right. “While I am lying in bed, / Although surrounded by my friends and relatives, / The feeling of life being severed / Will be experienced by me alone.” That’s frightening, of course, mainly because it’s true, but it might also be true that there is no death, only a change of worlds.
IN OCTOBER OF ’74, I moved closer to campus and lived in the basement of a house. My monthly rent was equal to a cord and a half of firewood. My basement had windows, because the house was on a slope, and through them I had—like Emily Dickinson—a view of a cemetery: a spur to morbid thoughts, yes, but also a parklike vista. There were no faucet handles at my kitchen sink, but with a pair of channel locks I was able to get hold of the valve stems. I kept my chain saw just inside the door, on newspaper, because I worried that in the stakebed’s cab it might get stolen. So my little rental smelled, as I did, of wood powder and oil. Or it smelled of dinner. I ate a lot of eggs, because I could buy them at a discount from my uncle Kevin, who kept a coop in his backyard—in fact, I could take a dozen for nothing if I cleaned the coop and fed the chickens—but I also simmered turkey legs and hamhocks and beans, and tried to make an orderly evening routine out of reading textbooks and recopying lecture notes. Lonely as all this was, I enjoyed myself. The fetish of discipline agreed with me, and I began to stay on top of the housekeeping. Before I’d moved out of his house, my father frequently came to my bedroom door to say, “You’re a four-fingered typist,” followed by, for example, “I’m still having to pick up after you in the kitchen,” and I guess that now I was taking a futile revenge, or proving something to myself, by being meticulous. Mainly, though, I kept things clean because Jamie stayed with me in my basement, on weekends. She took the Greyhound to Seattle on Fridays after school and left again for Portland on Sunday afternoons. On her first visit, we took a walk in the cemetery visible from my windows as a hillside Arcadia. Jamie, as it turned out, was a reader of headstones, and called my attention to the fact that a number were inscribed with “Dum tacet, clamat,” and that all of these were shaped like tree stumps. We talked to a groundskeeper about this, who said that Dum tacet, clamat, meant “While he is silent, he shouts,” and that the stump-shaped headstones symbolized membership in the Woodsmen of the World.
“While he is silent, he shouts,” Jamie said later. “That’s got to be the Woodswomen, right? It was the Woodswomen who put that on the headstones.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s the kind of answer that makes you a Woodsman.”
At Thanksgiving, Jamie went home to Pocatello. I was toasted by one of my cousins, before we tucked into our clan’s spread feast, as “Joe College Countryman,” but then someone added, “with wood chips in his hair,” to let me off the hook. In early December, my unzippered sleeping bag caught on fire after spending too much time against a baseboard heater in the middle of a snowy night. I woke up while Jamie was throwing it out the door. We opened all the windows to let the smoke out and, with our coats on, sat on the couch watching the snow fall on the cemetery where the Woodsmen were silently shouting.
For Christmas, Jamie gave me a hundred bookplates with the words “Ex Libris” and “Death Mask of Shakespeare” just above the bard’s balding pate. Beneath was space for me to write my name after “From the library of.” I g
ave her a botanical sketch—two sprigs of currants, framed. A couple of months later, I lost the clutch in the stakebed—it went out between deliveries, and Keith had to tow it to my father’s house behind his pickup. The next afternoon, in the rain by myself, I cut my knuckles turning a wrench. It was cold, and that forced me to sit in the cab at regular intervals with my hands in my armpits in order to continue. I was doing this when John William, now bearded, got in on the passenger side, hit me on the shoulder, and said, grinning, “Countryman!”
“What?”
“Have you sold out?”
“No.”
“Are you Joe College?”
“No.”
“Is your girlfriend knocked up?”
“My fingers are dead.”
“Don’t knock her up,” he said.
It was a Saturday. We went to see a double feature—Reefer Madness and Fists of Fury. The theater was nearly empty, and we sat in the back row with our feet up on seatbacks. I hadn’t seen John William in a while, but nothing felt different. We got stoned, after the movie, in an alley, and went to a pool hall, and then we ate fat dollar burritos at a dirty table beneath posters of Acapulco and the Grateful Dead. It was 1975, but the Moody Blues were being piped in through mounted speakers. I said I was thinking of going into teaching, and John William asked, “What for?”
“To make a living.”
“I thought you wanted to be Updike.”
“Updike wants to be me.”
“Teaching?”
“You think it’s a bad call?”
“The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you,” John William said, wiping his mouth. “But you already know that.”
“Who’s they?”
“Jehovah’s archons.”
This was irritating, but I didn’t say that, and we went to the Last Exit on Brooklyn. There was a Tarot reading going on. All the marble chess-tables were taken. We waited our turn, watching good players make authoritative moves and slap their timers in front of spectators. For some reason, someone was tuning the piano. About halfway through our first match, one of the Go players at an adjacent table looked up and said, “It’s Karpov versus Spassky over here.” “Shut up,” said John William. I lost the first, played the second to a draw, then lost again.
At midnight, there were drunks on the Ave. We sat in an alley passing another joint, and John William told me he’d dropped out of school and, with part of his inheritance money, was buying an acre and a trailer on the Hoh.
“How come?”
“I like it there.”
“You quit school?”
“I didn’t get along with anybody.”
Then, out of nowhere, he was crying again, with the heels of his palms against his eyes, and as always, I turned away from it.
THE DAY WINTER QUARTER ENDED, I drove to Portland in the stakebed. I remember that I pulled up the mat on the passenger side in order to watch the highway through the rusted floor, and that I had a battery-operated Zenith and an earphone for that trip because Keith had “borrowed” my dash radio. I also had a birthday present for Jamie, which was a very presentable set of antique dishes—or, rather, two dinner plates and two soup bowls—I’d found at a pawnshop in West Seattle. There was traffic as soon as I crossed into Oregon, and a warlike impatience on the Morrison Bridge, but at the Casablanca the mood was celebratory, because the tests and deadlines, at PSU, were just a few hours past. Music could be heard from across the courtyard—big speakers competing with each other. On the floor below Jamie’s, a banner had been taped to an apartment window, “Spring Bacchanalia,” and we went to that event after a dinner of crackers and wine, and then to a huge crowded party, where Gail Thornton had friends, and where the album on the stereo, when we walked in, was by the New York Dolls. “Are you having fun?” I yelled into Jamie’s ear at one point that night, in a room full of people passing a bottle of tequila, in the bottom of which lay a chunk of ginseng root—as opposed to an agave worm—and she yelled back into mine, “Not really!”
Jamie, who’d just graduated with a degree in sociology, went to work for the Census Bureau. All spring she took the Greyhound to Seattle on Friday evenings, after work, and left again for Portland on Sunday afternoons, just as she’d done as a student. Then, one Sunday, after swimming at Matthews Beach, we walked slowly along the abandoned railroad tracks above Sand Point Way. I finally said, “It’s after three o’clock,” but Jamie only shrugged. She wore a racing suit, zoris, and a towel around her waist. Later, we sat on tie ends in a shady spot. When I told Jamie I’d been picking blackberries here since I was six or seven, she said that didn’t mean they were native to the area; these were Himalayans, she said, doctored into their current permutation by Luther Burbank to grace English gardens, and after that, just persistent invaders. “I wrote a report on Luther Burbank in the eighth grade,” she said, “so now I’m a Luther Burbank expert.” Jamie sat with her arms against her knees, her chin in her hands. I thought she looked contemplative and said, “You’re going to miss your bus,” to which Jamie replied, “I missed it a long time ago.” I took that literally and said there must be other Portland buses that evening. “No, wait,” said Jamie. “I quit my job.”
The next morning, we took the stakebed to Portland and collected her sofa, clothes, books, and so on. Jamie, on the way down, referred to the hole in the floor on her side of the cab as “natural air conditioning.” Later, going home, I sat watching the road blur underfoot while Jamie grappled with the mortal question of steering. She clenched her teeth to change lanes, and lifted her butt off the seat like a bicyclist. She drove through a squall with the windshield wipers at high speed and once, reaching into the handbag beside her, produced some napkins, which she used to wipe the steam from the glass. A little later, she rolled down her window and, while adjusting the side mirror, said, “I used to be a trucker.”
We put her sofa by my windows with their view of the cemetery. I explained about the channel locks at the kitchen sink, and the next day, while I was cutting firewood, Jamie bought handles. She also put her box frame and mattress out near the sidewalk with a sign, on a piece of cardboard, reading “Take Me.” She got a part-time job in Youth Services for the Seattle Parks Department, and another part-time job filing reports for King County’s Eviction Prevention Program. Riding buses to work, she carried her lunch in a box we found at Value Village and, most of the time, a paperback. We still didn’t have a shower curtain, and we slept beneath a cheap and fire-retardant blanket. Jamie’s shoes sat by the door, next to the saw. One evening, my father came by, and when I let him in, there was Jamie reading on the couch with her legs tucked under her. Dressed like a housepainter in white coveralls and a white T-shirt, my father told me he needed my splitting maul because he’d lost track of his sledgehammer. “I knew some Shaws growing up,” he said, which prompted Jamie to tell him she was from Pocatello. “Or Poke,” she said. “A lot of people call it Poke.”
“These Shaws were fish people,” my father answered.
I WENT TO SEE John William early in June. Near Lake Crescent, in the shadows, the sky was clear and the wind was blowing. There was still a little snow on Pyramid Mountain, but just enough to coat the trees. The logging trucks coming toward me looked caked with old mud. I had, on the passenger seat, Aubrey Williams’ Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, and was supposed to be reading The Rape of the Lock and An Essay on Criticism, but the epic style of the former and the heroic couplets of the latter were both deadly to me, and I appreciated neither as I sat by a creek giving each a pale effort. There was no stomaching such a rigorous versifier in those particular mountains. I suppose there was too much wit packed into those cantos and couplets for my taste—at any rate, I wanted to throw Pope into a riffle, but it was too late now to drop the course without a penalty.
In the valley of the Sol Duc there was sunlight in the clear-cuts. I thought of driving onto a landing and scrounging cedar butts to sell as kindling, but I didn’t, becaus
e my hair was too long for me to take the risk. Instead, I drove through Forks without stopping and turned east on the Hoh Road, where there were farms and pastures. I’m not going to say that this valley feels pastoral, but at least it’s inhabited, if sparsely. There was even a general store, green with age, where a naked bulb was lit already, in the late afternoon, outside double doors. I stress again—this is not a place of country charms. The Hoh, despite its marketing by river-rafting companies and fishing guides, resembles mostly the scar of an excavation. The channels and cobbled islands on its floodplain have the sterile cast of an open mining operation. For long stretches, its gray pallor and gravel bars are broken only by logjams, and the root wads half buried in its silt look washed of color. Genteel it isn’t, even where there are cows near its bank to make a case for that. The Hoh doesn’t even have the attractions of rural dilapidation. There’s bald destructiveness in the path it takes. Along its shores, the rocks sit like debris, and the cutbanks, of which there are many, suggest raw and open gashes. It often seems as if a storm has wreaked recent havoc on the river, or freshly rearranged its course. It looks, in sum, just short of appalling. There’s too much evocative and obvious geology to be borne there happily by a visitor.
In this valley, upriver from the general store, after crawling up and down the road and peering down the potholed lanes, I located John William’s mobile home, because his Impala was parked in front of it. There was also a lot of cordwood stacked close to its door, under a tarp. He’d bought a single-wide of the sort you sometimes see on the highway with a chase car behind it, and it probably goes without saying that its siding was mildewed, and that moss grew on its roof; anyway, it had been sitting there for a while, not catching sun. It was unskirted, so I could see what was stored under it: pipe, buckets, plastic sheeting, and lumber, all looking sodden and archeological. I also saw the shimmed piers the house was set on. The adjacent pasture had been chewed to the nubs and then stove in by hooves, and on this day it was hard mud with fog low against it, and behind that, beyond strands of cattle wire, was the kind of brush that grows in river silt for a few years before starving.