I slithered around the willows for an hour or so, camouflaging myself as a snake. At first I heaved rocks way upstream in hopes of drawing fire, but nothing came of it. No shots, no sounds other than the whisper in the creek—the gunman seemed to have disappeared. Or never existed. Truly bizarre events always seem unreal afterwards, especially if you haven’t eaten in three days, so I finally wound up creeping back to the empty Coleman fuel can just to prove I wasn’t lost in a dream sequence.
It was real all right. The chokecherry still smoked. My nose caught a wet seaweed odor, not something you’d imagine on your own.
The forest line on both sides of the coulee showed no signs of a sniper. Up on the ridge I’d come down, a deer lowered her head, then raised it, chewing, calmly looking down at me—a standard all-clear signal to any Max Brand reader. I stood up for a better view. The deer was pretty, all innocent and brown and noble, the way wild animals are supposed to be. She stared at me with soft, wet doe-eyes. If I’d had my Ruger I could have nailed her dead.
One thing I decided for certain: Starvation is for people who don’t have food. Half this country is fasting for health or religious purposes, and I saw no reason why I should follow the crowd. If thousands of rich, beautiful Californians can’t find God on clear juice and bottled water, I wasn’t going to find him hungry. I’m too skinny to miss a meal.
• • •
Sunday morning, before setting out on my Quest, I drove to the Safeway in Jackson and drifted up and down the aisles, admiring the food, saying my good-byes, so to speak. Some was canned, some frozen, some more chemicals than dead plant or animal matter, but it was all admirable. Like freedom or electricity or legs, no one appreciates food who hasn’t unwillingly gone without it.
I pushed a basket up and down the maze of aisles, searching for the perfect post-Vision snack, something light but with nutrition, something that would jump-start my empty system. Cookies lacked substance, jerky was too much, I don’t really care for fresh fruit.
Then I saw the red and clear cellophane of the Fig Newton display and Divine Inspiration said, “Look no more.” My Divine Inspiration sounds like the guy who used to narrate the Disney nature flicks, the voice of a northeast Texan on Darvons.
He also told me to pick up a Spell-Write notebook and two Bic Clics. With my memory what it’s been lately, God might tell me what happens after we die and I’d forget.
At the checkout counter, I saw a forty-eight-point Gothic headline on the National Star, SCIENTISTS FIND DEFINITE PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH. I showed the checker girl.
“How about that,” she said.
“Do you believe it?”
“Naw, if the proof was definite, it’d be in USA Today.”
“I suppose so.”
• • •
My daypack is brown nylon with green strings and leather stitched along the bottom. It has two pockets, the big one at the top and a flat one on the back for easy access. A pair of straps hang down for securing my 100 percent fiberfill sleeping bag. I like my daypack. I bought it when I sold the first Western.
Chest heaving like an old man, sweat trickling down my forehead draining dirt into my eyes, I untied the cord around the top pocket and dumped all my stuff on the ground. An army canteen landed on top of the pile and it didn’t take long to sort out the Fig Newtons.
I sat next to the empty pack and twisted open the canteen top. As I sucked down water, a gray jay glided in and landed on two hops about eight feet up the trail.
“Hello,” I said.
The jay cocked its head right and hopped toward me.
“How’s your karmatic input-output ratio?” I asked the jay. Inside the cellophane wrapper, two lines of fig-filled pastry lay sealed in more cellophane. “Want some Fig Newton? I bet you never ate a fig.” The jay hopped a couple hops closer.
“Watch for seeds.” I stuck a whole cookie in my mouth, tore another one in half, and threw one of the halves at the jay—almost caught him in the beak. He flew into a tree and made a shrill “Jeeah, jeeah” sound.
“What’s the problem?” I threw the other half farther off the trail. The Fig Newton tasted good, so I had another and washed it down with canteen water. Since I hadn’t eaten in three days and my stomach felt odd, I figured it wouldn’t be wise to stuff myself right off. Four would be the limit now, then four more later.
The jay flew back and hopped to the farthest piece of Fig Newton. He pecked at it a couple times, then picked up the whole chunk with his bill and flew into a different tree.
Sitting up on my knees, I arranged all the stuff in a line. Normally, whatever Loren carried would have been whatever Lana Sue packed, but this time I was pretty sure he put the things in the daypack himself. Lana Sue hadn’t been in the mood. The only other possibility was Marcie VanHorn, but that didn’t seem likely because my relationship with her hadn’t reached the helpless stage yet. I generally have to sleep with a woman before she starts treating me like a child.
The gray jay swooped down and landed next to the other half Newton. I watched him a minute while chewing another one myself. By then I’d lost count and couldn’t remember if I’d eaten three or four, so I ate two more.
Okay—far left of the lineup. Neat’s-foot oil. That showed Loren wasn’t particularly practical because I wore running shoes—Adidas three stripers. The bottle had a picture of a bearded man on the front. I assumed he was Mr. Neat.
Two fishing lures. One green and white, the other red and white with an imprint of a devil figure stamped on the gold back.
Toilet paper. Good sign. Toothbrush—red, but no toothpaste. The possibility began to dawn on me that, as Loren walked out of the cabin, he picked up the old daypack and put it, and whatever happened to be in it, on his back.
Three paperback books. Black Elk Speaks, Panama by Tom McGuane, and a phone directory for all the Holiday Inns in America. Waiting for a sign, I flipped through Panama, stopped and read an italicized sentence. This time the pus is everywhere.
Because of its bugles and groans, the Sioux Indians thought the elk was the sex animal. In their religion, the color black symbolized wisdom. Black Elk literally translates as Wise Fuck. I’d love to publish a book under that pen name: Wise Fuck Speaks. It’d be a lock for a book club selection.
I found no message in the Holiday Inn directory. There was also a comic book put out by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Spell-Write spiral notebook. The comic book showed a sinner who was outraged at waking up and finding himself in Hell. The flames looked tacky and lacked credibility. The sinner hoped to do life over again from the perspective of knowing what Hell was like, but God, or a Jehovah’s Witness spokesman, said, “Nope, you should have listened when I knocked on your door.” All God’s lines were footnoted.
I flipped open the notebook and read, Being happy is nicer, and Outer circumstances are irrelevant to inner peace. On the second page it said, Nothing matters but loss and Love is a train. It may be jumped, but not chased.
All these sayings were in my handwriting, but someone else must have written them because I don’t remember and, if I’m ever deep in a clairvoyant trance, I hope I can do better than that. I didn’t starve, drive myself manic, and lose Lana Sue to come up with Being happy is nicer.
I pulled a pen from my back pocket and, turning to page 3, wrote, Nothing worth knowing can be expressed in words.
To the notebook’s right lay a USGS quadmap of Sleeping Indian Mountain. This was the most important piece of evidence yet because, hopefully, I was squatting somewhere on the backside of the Sleeping Indian, and if so, Loren had planned ahead. Together with the toilet paper, the map showed foresight.
I tore off a piece of Fig Newton and threw it to the gray jay. Slipping the rest into my mouth, I continued the inventory: Boy Scout knife, three blades—long, short, and can opener. Matches wrapped in a plastic bag. A tiny pencil sharpener shaped like the Washington Monument. An unopened letter from Kearney, Nebraska—Christmas seal on the back. A plastic first aid kit—empty. An army canteen—metal liner with a green cloth cover, U.S. ARMY stenciled on one side, DO NOT HOLD NEAR FLAME on the other. A card for a drug rehabilitation clinic in Houston. A phone number on a slip of yellow-lined paper—no name or identifying characteristic. An aspirin. A blue Trojan-Enz prophylactic.
Lana Sue was protected by a copper coil, which makes me wonder what Loren had in mind.
A Sierra Club cup. And last, on the far right of this mess, one row of a double-row pack of Fig Newtons. What did it all mean? When you’re on a Search everything means something. There’s no such thing as a medium without a message.
I opened the letter from Kearney, Nebraska.
Dear Stoolhead, it read.
I spent $4.95 on that book of yours, Disappearance, and I want my money back. You should be in jail. You’re so smug, so frigging perfect. You should be sent to Russia. I hope your father is ashamed.
I hate you,
Patsy Holt
I tried to picture Patsy Holt. I decided she was fifty-six and parted her iron-black hair down the middle and ate frozen dinners every night. Probably drank buttermilk by the gallon. Maybe I should move to Nebraska and meet her and not tell her who I am. We could fall in love and have oral sex orgasms and later, after we married, I’d pull out the letter and we’d have a big laugh.
The jay cried “Jeeah” as the sun dipped behind a cloud. An awful lot of clouds had drifted in while I was wallowing around the willow thicket. The breeze on my face suddenly felt cooler. Starting on the right, I began stuffing items into the daypack. I was sure Loren’s—my—crux lay in that pile of junk somewhere, but it was beyond me to figure where. He carried an unneeded rubber and wasn’t popular in Nebraska. Not much to go on when the goal is perfect truth.
Time to move up the mountain. Packed, fed, and anxious to hit the trail, I stood on the side of the coulee to look one last time at the burned chokecherry next to the bubbling creek. It was real. I wasn’t paranoid.
• • •
Confession time. I have this semidisgusting personality flaw in that, at times, many times, I act stupider than I am. For years I blamed the habit on Mom—as she took my clunkiness for granted, I grew into it—but Mom’s over fifteen years back down the road so the rationale should have petered out by now.
My ignorance of the unused rubber is just the sort of false innocence that drives Lana Sue nuts. I know damn well the intentions of that condom—Marcie VanHorn. I’d like a witness here that the offending item lay snuggled in my daypack, still sealed in aluminum foil. Although unfulfillment won’t help much if Lana Sue catches on. She’s as likely to kick ass over what I wanted to do as what I did.
Marcie VanHorn and her father, Lee, are our closest neighbors. They live a half mile down the town road in a barn they’ve converted into a house next to a house they’ve converted into a barn. Marcie is a winner. At sixteen, with a ripe body, high energy, and a trust fund, what could you expect? She’s the image of those teenage girls in the JC Penney catalog who model shortie nighties in poses of slumber-party pillow fights—tight butt, long legs, small breasts, eyes that challenge.
Things would have remained totally theoretical if Lee VanHorn hadn’t organized a welcome-to-the-valley pack trip the summer we moved to Jackson Hole. Lana Sue hated her horse, didn’t like the mosquitoes, and missed her cigarettes, all of which got taken out on me. Meanwhile, Marcie read Yeast Infection, bought the sensitive-poet-at-heart inference, and fell into instant, if temporary, adoration. I eat up adoration.
Even then, things could have stayed on a level of a guilt-inducing wet dream, but the second night out, Lana Sue didn’t hobble the hated horse properly and he gimped off up the canyon. Lee discovered the escape and he and Lana Sue gave chase, which left Marcie and me tending the fire. There, in the orange flicker of the campsite, the little hardbody offered herself to me.
Side by side, we sat on stumps, staring into the burning coals. Marcie touched my hand with fingers hot from holding a cup of fresh-made instant cocoa. “Virginity is too big a deal,” she said. “It’s awful pressure, but I can’t see cracking it with a boy from school. He might get all hung up.”
I sipped chocolate with my free hand. “I see your problem, Marcie.”
“I need an older man, someone experienced, who would be gentle and teaching, then afterwards, not bother me anymore.”
“Maybe if we think hard, we’ll come up with someone.” False stupidity again. I knew Marcie’s bottom line.
She looked at me with those pale, pale eyes and that blossoming sixteen-year-old body. “Will you make love to me, Loren?”
I sipped and stared into the fire. She was a child, Lana Sue and I had only been married two months, Lee had a room full of guns and every right to use one. But then, look at the trust in her eyes and the promise in those tangerine breasts. Yes or no, I would live to regret the answer.
“No.”
Marcie sighed. “Wish we had some schnapps for the chocolate.”
“Not that I wouldn’t be honored. Maybe someday, after I’ve been married longer.”
She smiled. “You know where I live.”
Two years later, ten minutes after Lana Sue called the marriage quits, I grabbed fifty cents off her bureau and drove the Chevelle to the Cowboy Joe Service Station MEN’S room.