SOMETIME IN the night I capped what was left of a twenty-six of Wild Turkey and stood and fell back into my chair and stood again and then walked through the dark and out the back door into sounds of distant gunfire and headed down to the two o’clock break in the trees. From that spot I lobbed the bottle with a painful grenade toss and lost it in mid-flight. I couldn’t hear it hit the water. Clearly a river goddess had caught it on the fly. I shouted to her, “An offering. Apologies from my plundering species. Here’s to the quiet life of greenness. I mean greenery.” Winds were strong out of the northwest.
Now I’m riding the ferry cable across the river and expecting an afternoon of difficult climbs in a half-mile stretch I’ve not yet searched. I used to bring along an extra helping of home-baked goodies in my lunch to give to Jim, the ferry operator, but I don’t bake much any more. I hand him a few sticks of licorice which he puts in his shirt pocket. He tells me there’s a huge herd of antelope somewhere north of the sand hills though there’s no way of seeing them today, if a person had that in mind, what with the dirt roads in those parts having been washed out in the storm and then dried hard again faster than is locally natural. My narrow-angled imagination comes up with a jumbled African scene, a Serengeti bounty wandering atop the Sahara, but then that’s the surreal way things are going. Jim drops the gate and ties up. He taps his shirt pocket and says thanks as I drive by. I try one stick myself but it has been annealed to industrial strength, so I remove it from my mouth and polish my teeth with my tongue until I find the turnoff to the severely potholed ranch track that I follow to its clifftop end.
The hill-faces have already started to burn off on my side of the river, but here the generally north-facing drops are greener. I’ve diagrammed the valley on both sides of today’s search area, which is mostly flat and obvious but for one long isthmus, an inverted wedge that runs east-west with steep grades on both sides meeting in a narrow, peaked crest. The sort of hill a person shouldn’t climb alone, I know full well. Especially when hung over. Especially now that the holidays are here. Extra-especially for the sake of a long shot. I’m startled by the scream of a killdeer a few feet beyond the truck. It walks awkwardly, faking a broken wing. I must be very near its nest so I walk with particular care through the scrub, towards the wedge, which happens to be the killdeer’s direction. When it’s led me far enough it flutters up and circles far behind me into the grass beyond the truck. The joke is very much on me, more so if I fall and break myself.
When the drop is this steep it’s best to start from the bottom and work up but there’s no easy way down that doesn’t involve a half-hour’s drive and walk. At least if I can get down I can no doubt get back. Traversing will be impossible so I choose a route passing nearest the two deep ledges on the north side that are visible from the top. Assuming I make it back up I might then try the south side, though as I walk the length of the crest I see nothing worth investigating.
It’s one thing to choose a point of entry and another to have confidence in it. I see a way into the first ten feet and begin, not so much stepping down as launching off. To control the slide, to keep your weight low with your legs bent, to keep your feet parallel to the grade, every so often stilling yourself with your inside hand to the wall-face like a surfer in the tube. Then the controlled jumps. In getting the best of the fall line I’ve taken myself too far to the side of the first ledge, so I attempt a daring 180-degree jump-turn and land on one foot and a single clump of speargrass. Two bunnyhops to the first ledge. Of course there’s nothing much to find, only a few small holes in the back wall, the work of some burrowing creature, likely a gopher, and long ago abandoned to birds who have better places to be in mid-afternoon. The prospect is lovely but it’s not the sort of place you’d bury someone and certainly nowhere to bring a girl. I sit and let my feet dangle. A peculiar feeling something like déjà vu presents itself but the sense is less that I’ve been here before than that I’ve seen an Imax film of this view, a great vista in which everything is in focus and not much is happening. The hills are nearing the colour of deer. The sage and grasses are already bleaching to yellow-white. Only the silver leaves of bullberries are distinct from any distance, the colour and texture of the grey felt hat that Eugene wore long ago. The smell of cap guns as a kid. We claimed the most unlikely hits, and took to carrying bean-gun pistols as side-arms for stalking close and actually shooting one another. The cap sound travelled farther but the line of fire was visible with bean guns. There was nothing to negotiate.
Not long ago, this land was in the easternmost range of grizzlies. Now even cougars and rattlesnakes are rare. What has replaced our innate and now mostly useless respect for animal menace? Like people in most parts of the continent we watch a lot of tv and every so often change our diets.
The next ledge is only a few feet below me but I’m sure there’s nothing there. To go back without a look, though, would render this whole exercise a half-assed waste of time, and even time wasting should be performed with heart. I shove off and immediately see that my next foothold is a cactus, so I come down early and entirely off balance, and when my instep catches the cactus anyway I’m tossed horizontal and then nose first. The ledge is upon me before I can fully extend my left arm and I drive into the ground with my shoulder and roll into my life’s first cartwheel, which disintegrates into an acutely painful confusion of rolls and bounces.
What I recognize—sucking air because the wind has been knocked from my lungs, the sharp penetrations of cactus spines along my left side and in one foot. What I don’t—a pain sharper than that of a pulled hamstring in the latissimus under my left arm, and a still-rising outrage in my shoulder. On an embedded rock near my face a grasshopper sits beside the stains of petrified moss. Nothing looks pretty. My right hand is useful enough to remove most of the spines. For some reason I’m too embarrassed to moan.
The long and indirect walk back to the truck provides time to contemplate my recent tendency towards self-immolation, the very signature of the old Toss and those bad times immediately before and after the breakup. The last time I drank heavily and alone on two consecutive nights must have been during my aimless escape to the road only days after learning Alan had skipped out on Wanda and all their domestic bitterness. Because I hadn’t the forethought to tell Cora I was leaving, people naturally supposed I’d left in pursuit of Alan or Marcie or both, though at least I knew they weren’t together. If I’d had enough faith in the dramatic potential of my pain the idea of a chase might have occurred to me, but I didn’t, and it didn’t, and I aimed only for targets visible from the moon—the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I drank every night in the bars of motels squared to service roads and set beside gas station cafeterias with faded green canvas awnings inscribed with white suggestions like “EAT” and “GASUP,” meant to work subliminally on high-speed passers-by. But I drove sober and quite by accident found that the road signs triggered memories of grim news stories from the years since I’d last gone that route. The trailer park where a family was murdered in their camper, the mountain road where a trucker lost his brakes and took eleven people with him, the town where an airline bomber lived while planning his murder. In four nights I’d made it only as far as Chilliwack. In the lounge of the inner courtyard of a Best Western, I explained to the waitress that for people like us, the name Vancouver would always bring on dangerous notions. She didn’t know what I meant. The next day I started back home. I could smell the salt air and that was enough.
I hurt badly and need a doctor. There are people who truly aren’t bothered by a degree of pain that would make most others faint, and then there are those people, usually men, who pretend they don’t notice the pain. Here in the national birthplace of free medical attention the second kind of person exists for no good reason. We’ve fallen for the stupidest of mythologies. I decide to go home and have a bath. Then the ultimate masochism of grading papers while sterilizing my wounds. Meantime I drive in agony and hate myself for the inconsequential sorrows in my life of wasted pursuits, pronouncing by rote the list of all that tires me: the Canada geese on my fully personalized cheques; complaints after all these years about the metric system, though I admit buying lumber to renovate is a wasteful experience for everyone; asshole drivers everywhere; elected officials who are known wife-abusers; people who nod when listening to the lyrics of top-twenty songs but only dance at social gatherings designated for the purpose; closet malcontents like myself, who live greyly in hypocrisy.
Incoming calls. Hours added to days and years I spend alone in conversation.
“What’s this I hear about your being a werewolf?”
“Fine thanks, Karen, and yourself?”
“I thought you might be here at the party.”
“I don’t know what party you’re talking about and I can never find Earl’s place anyway. Have you met his wife yet?”
“Which one is she?”
“Filipina. Exotic in the gorgeous way. A fashion genius.”
“Oh, with the shoes. She’s what all the fighting was about. Her husband practically killed one of those American ball players.”
“How did you get there?”
“Drove myself. I know this part of the land. It’s a little awkward, though. Eldon’s here and he’s introducing me to people I should already know. They know me. Someone said Zinvalena might show up after work. Dewey probably won’t if you’re not coming, and everyone would just be embarrassed if he showed ’cause it’d remind us all this monster thing might’ve been a hoax. There have been rumours to that effect.”
“How is it you can leave your mom alone?”
“She’s moved to the cabin for a couple weeks. I’m staying with her at the park tonight. You’re invited to drop by any time.”
“Thank you.”
“No pressure.”
“Thanks.”
“You haven’t said you will but some time or other you should meet her. Whenever you feel the time’s right. No rush. Maybe check your horoscope.” She pronounces her words carefully, no elision, like someone trying to sound sober.
“I don’t believe in the stars. I hope you’re not one of the New Age crystal-sucking types.”
“But you’re a birdwatcher. In ancient Rome they’d say you had the auspices. They’d make you an augur.”
“Mayford has nothing in common with ancient Rome. Ask Zinvalena. Nothing.”
“Except birds.” The party sounds are suddenly muffled but I can hear her say “No thanks” to someone.
“What are you wearing?”
“Maybe see you at the cabin some evening. It’s the little red and fuchsia one in the loop of the east court.” She hangs up.
With too much to assimilate I venture again into my accrual of thought-terminal devices. Memories of a swimsuit issue provide exactly the sort of warped perspective that gives fantasy a bad name. The Brazilian-looking girl in the orange one-piece. The anonymous bounty held in fishnet. What an interesting use of contrast. Notice the lovely fringe that harks back to the stylized beachwear of the American twenties. No, don’t. Time to take measures, stomp on all varieties of avoidance. It almost ruins my resolve that at the moment I must stomp while wearing the powder-blue velour slippers Marcie gave me one Christmas. While I dial the Palace, my eye catches the black badge on top of my injured right instep, the gold stitching. What I’d always thought were lions turn out to be stylized initials. Not mine but the slipper company’s.
Zinvalena. “He’s not accepting calls. Can I take a message?”
“Tell him it’s me.”
“Is this you, Mr. Ray? Have you got my grade?”
“You’ve nothing to worry about unless you can’t get him to the phone. Certain of your exam answers require a generous reading.”
“You can’t threaten me, you know.” I hear her calling Dewey. She tells him it’s an emergency. There are cactus spines in my toes. She tells him it’s me.
He tells me, “The film’s running, I can’t talk.”
“That’s not like you. Word is you started these monster stories.”
“Look, I know what you’re gonna say. I’ve taken a drop in the polls—”
“And you’ve taken me with you. I don’t need this just now.”
“Just picture this,” he says. “T-shirts. Front and back is a set of fangs and inside the mouth it says, ‘I’ve seen Blank, the Mayford Wolf.’ I need a name for the wolf. We stock a big order and sell them here at the Palace. Five bucks with admission, fourteen without.”
“You make another killing.”
“I need you to draw me a prototype.”
“Try Karen, she’s the artist.”
“She declined.”
“Does it matter to you that some people suspect you of demented jokerism?”
“This town is way too in control of its emotions. We need our outlets, it’s only healthy. Here’s a departure from the usual gloom about repossessions and fixed grain markets. My work might even give you more space to blow up the homes of people you don’t like.”
“But you admit to starting the rumours?”
“Marty.”
“What?”
“Marty the Mayford Wolf. Or Clyde.”
“Fine,” I say. “Clyde’s fine.” There’s no reasoning with the spirit of windfall. I hang up.
The hedging language tells me Dewey has more invested in these stories than entrepreneurial verve. Alarm bells are sounding and, for once, they’re not warning me off myself. It never occurred to me until now just how much is possible once you find the courage to behave aberrantly. Dewey has failed to understand the congruity in Mayford between how we appear to live and how we do live. The congruity is an illusion, of course, but an inviolable one.
Into my eagle-claw tub. How to lower myself without my left arm? Turn and kneel and sit and turn. Then the phone rings again from the kitchen for nine and a half counts. When Marcie and I first moved here we were still on a party line. Two long, one short. The only other party was Alan and Wanda. Even then, before Marcie knew anyone and after I’d been out of town for five years, we received twice as many calls as did the Nashes. For a while Marcie thought this was very sad, and those few times they visited she was even uncomfortable using the phone and reminding us all of our relative popularity. Maybe her earliest attraction to Alan grew from falsely based pathos. Then again, pathos never worked in my favour. The lesson of seducing kind hearts—sadly stupid works better than drunkenly stupored. But these are unprofitable thoughts—Marcie is innocent.
My wounds look bigger under water, as does my waist. When I think of all the hard work I put into quashing expansionist tendencies of the stomach. It’s true that everything is political, vanity being merely an impulse to reform the system and sell it. I do my best with an undisciplined regimen—the pattern goes haywire for two months every summer and then restores itself. So there is a larger scheme, as Dewey would be quick to note. It’s just that when soaping my scars I’m not a good advertisement for myself.
Two long, one short. A sound that approximates nothing when you hear it but when remembered makes me think of a bird. I’m not sure which one sounds that rhythm. Maybe it doesn’t nest around here, but if I hear it again I’ll take pleasure in listening and not having to respond.