I Loved You More

by Tom Spanbauer

  A GRINDING SOUND wakes me up. I lie there with my eyes closed trying to figure out what that sound is. But I can’t place it. Hell, I don’t even know where I am. It’s cold and there’s a smell, not a bad smell, just very particular and odd.

  Then I open my eyes. The ceiling of the room is high and made of rough-cut barn wood. So are the walls. There’s a window to my left at the foot of the bed. White curtains, the kind my mother used to wash and dry out on a stretcher. Just beyond my feet, through the double rings of the wrought iron bed, an oval mirror hung on the wall. Below the mirror, a table with a white doily. A yellow water pitcher on the doily and a smooth yellow bowl. Two big wine-red curtains hanging across the doorway. To my right, over the lump of quilts next to me, George Washington on a cloud is staring me down.

  In the top corners on each side of the room at the ceiling, triangular cracks of sunlight coming through chinks in the wall. Around the room, an armoire, a steamer trunk, a wooden desk. Old books and papers on the desk.

  The particular smell is the smell of the whole room. Old wood, old wrought iron, old books, and the sheets and the old quilt on top of me. That’s when the quilted lump in the bed next to me moves.

  Holy Christ, it’s Hank Christian.

  Those black eyes under a mop of messed up hair.

  During the night, while me and Hank were sleeping in the wedding ring bed, no bears and no wolves had eaten us.

  “Mornin’ sweetheart,” Hank says. “What’s that grinding sound?”

  Inside me, all around me, on my skin. Something mysterious. Magic.

  At first I think it’s the spirits in the house, then I think it’s that I fucking woke up in the same bed with Hank Christian. But it’s something else. Some old part of me. Maybe the Most Miserable is back. I close my eyes. Take a deep breath. That old spirit ain’t nowhere around.

  Turns out that sound is Gary in the kitchen grinding coffee beans in his hand grinder. Then there’s a smell. This mysterious thing has a smell. A smell I haven’t smelled in years. Fresh coffee and bacon frying. Magic.

  THE MAJESTIC STOVE is going and it’s hot in the kitchen. Reuben and three big black iron frying pans on the stove. One with scrambled eggs and tomatoes and cheese, one with bacon, one with hash brown potatoes. Reuben’s got a white apron tied around him and doesn’t hear us at first because of all the frying. The tall wooden bookcase is full of cookbooks. On the oak table with the fancy kerosene lamp is a green bowl of red salsa. On the transistor radio, mariachi music. I walk up to Reuben, give him a kiss on top of his perfect haircut.

  “Mornin’ boys,” Reuben says. “Did you sleep all right in that lumpy old bed?”

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Yeah, fine,” Hank says.

  “Gary’s got the coffee ready outside,” Reuben says. “Just grab a cup and sit yourself down. Breakfast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  SUNLIGHT, MORNING SUNLIGHT, coming down not too hot yet, onto the backyard. The backyard is a stretch of green lawn to Gary’s barn and the outhouse. On the lawn is a wooden bench that was painted turquoise once. Tubs of water on the bench. One for washing dishes, one for rinsing, the next for rinsing too. Scattered across the yard are old porcelain pans filled with water. Half dozen or so.

  Gary and Sal are sitting with their legs over the side of the porch. Sal’s in his long-sleeved white shirt and red ballcap and Gary’s still in his PJs with a sunbonnet on. Into a big white mug, Sal pours me coffee so black and thick it looks like what Arabs drink.

  “Italian Roast,” Sal says.

  Hank gets his cup, too. I sit down on the porch between Gary and Sal, sun on my Levi’s and shoes. My face in the shade. Hank squats down on the lawn, takes two sips off his coffee, gets up and walks the twenty steps to the outhouse. The door sticks but he gets it open. Ain’t long and we hear a loud shit blast then a thud.

  “Bye Bye, Mr. Chocolate Chip Cookies,” Hank says.

  Magic. On the back porch, June morning sun, Idaho. Mile high in a ghost town. Porcelain pans of water reflecting sun. Wired on Italian Roast. Bye Bye, Mr. Chocolate Chip cookies. We’re laughing our asses off.

  That’s how the day begins.

  AFTER BREAKFAST WE all pile in Gary’s World War II Jeep. That kind of Jeep that doesn’t have a top, just four big wheels, a front hood, fenders, front and back seats, a steering wheel, and a gearshift. I’m riding smashed between Reuben and Sal in the back seat. Hank’s in front. Because of the sun, I’m wearing one of Sal’s ballcaps, John Deere across the front. Hank’s got on a wide-brimmed straw cowboy hat. The air smells of wood fires.

  “Where we going?” I ask.

  “Alturas Bar,” Gary says.

  I think it’s a little early for cocktails. But it’s probably past noon. Maybe a Bloody Mary. But when we get there, Alturas Bar is something else altogether. It’s an immense formation of rock. Not one big rock but millions of rocks. White rocks stacked twenty or so feet high, even higher. The valley is narrow there and the white rocks go from the base of one side of the valley all the way to the other side up to the bank of the river. Round boulders mostly, the size of, say, a bathtub or smaller. But they are all sizes and shapes. Some rocks as big as half a house. Some as big as your hand. All of them white.

  Gary tells us all about the place. The story goes something like this: back in the olden days, the gold ore was dug out of the ground and then sent down the mountain in wooden chutes that carried the gold ore to the gold mill and then all those cast iron contraptions extracted the gold out of the ore. The rubble and rock that was left over when the gold mill finished with it was sent down more wooden chutes and ended up at the river.

  The river is where the Chinese worked.

  The Chinese, at the bottom of the rung, down at the river, scoured over every single rock that descended down the mountain for any trace left of gold. Millions and millions of rocks and each rock was stacked by hand by Chinese workers over a hundred years ago.

  One big sculpture, Alturas Bar. Like the Vietnam Memorial, although there’s no name carved into every rock.

  Hank and I start walking. Walking and jumping from rock to rock. Like we’re on the surface of the moon, all that expanse of white. It’s amazing how solid the formations are. And what at first looks like a flat white rock surface turns out to be its own complicated geography of valleys and craters and hills.

  There’s a point where I’m standing on a rock shaped like the palm of a huge hand. All around me, under me, not millions – there’s a billion rocks stacked just so. White white and above, the sky is so blue it’s a blue I’ve never seen yet. And two hawks, red-tails gliding slow as a dream in all that blue. Hank’s way across the surface of the Alturas Bar moon, on the other side of a crater, over on a spire of stacked rock. A tiny man standing on something immense. For a moment I think he’s a spirit, some gold digger in a cowboy hat from another time. Just below him is the river at a place where the river bends. The river is low, mostly white water flowing shallow over rocks, but close in the bend, right below Hank’s feet, an elbow of water, a deep blue green pool.

  I spread my feet across the rock that’s shaped like the palm of a hand. It wobbles back and forth. The sun bouncing down on the white rock gets so bright I have to cover my eyes. I wave at Hank and when Hank waves back he points to the hawks. I take off my John Deere hat and wave it back and forth so he can know I’ve seen the hawks.

  Hank motions that we should head back to the Jeep.

  I’m about to turn and go when one of the hawks screeches out. It makes me stop, put my hand over my eyes. The wind is coming down the valley along the river. A big gust hits me and blows my hair around. Idaho. The wind around my ears that always makes me feel I’m not alone.

  Across the crater, Hank steps off back toward the Jeep. Just then, one rock, about the size of my head, tumbles down. It rolls down the rock hill, rolls down the century, the century and a half, rolls and rolls and bounces down against other rocks set there by hand just so by a Chine
se man, a boy, a girl, a Chinese woman, and hits the edge above the river and falls into the air down down and into the deep, dark, blue-green pool. A little splash in the afternoon.

  BACK AT THE Main Spread, on the back porch again. We’re all sitting in the shade on the north side of Gary’s back porch. Around two o’clock, after bologna sandwiches and potato chips and beer, someone mentions mushrooms, psilocybin, I forget who. Probably Sal. But then it for sure could have been Reuben. Then, maybe it was Gary.

  Myself, I’ve been around the world, and around the block, a bunch of times, but I’ve never taken an hallucinogen. I figure I haven’t really got much of a hold on this reality, let alone take off in some other one. Hank’s not up for it either. He’s got all kinds of excuses. But it ain’t more than an hour later and I’ve got three of them nasty things in my mouth and I’m trying like hell not to vomit. And Hank. Hank is in fact vomiting in the bushes.

  And I’m thinking, Holy Fuck. What the fuck did we think we were doing.

  Of course, my biggest fear is that hallucinogenic mushrooms would open up the gates of hell. And in hell, I’d meet the Most Miserable of All, suffering down there at the bottom, dickless and without hope. Hallucinating.

  We all start out sitting around under Gary’s old apple tree. Reuben is lying with his head in Sal’s lap. Gary is leaned up against the tree rolling a joint. All of us close enough to touch. Just in the shade on a sunny day as if nothing is different. The wind blowing in the tree. The way the shade moves across our bodies. Everybody acting like you’re supposed to act when you’re tripping. Talking low and laughing. Grooving on a lazy afternoon. Hank has quit throwing up. I’m glad of that, I felt responsible. Now he’s just lying there totally relaxed in a way I’ve never seen him, on the grass, his black eyes wide-eyed, staring up through the leaves of the tree.

  I don’t know how it starts but for some reason everybody starts acting like themselves. I mean Reuben is Reuben and Sal is Sal and Gary is Gary, Hank is Hank. That’s somehow amazing to me that we each of us know how to act like we are who we are. And every time one of us does something or says something, none of the other of us who didn’t do it or say it could’ve done it or said it. Fucking remarkable. For example, how Sal is touching Reuben’s head, only Sal can move his fingers like that. No matter how hard any of the rest of us try, we’d never move our fingers like that. Just like that. Or even have fingers like that. Or Gary when he laughs. I almost shit myself when he laughs because it is so Gary. In my lifetime I could never make a sound like that. And Hank, the way his body lies on the grass. His arms, his legs, his hat hair. Totally individualistic. No possible way any of us could lie that particular way under that tree.

  It’s like there’s the cosmos, see, and it’s all one big whirling entity that perpetuates itself and each of us are a part of that cosmos, but only a particular part. As if a cookie cutter has cut out each of us into a certain form and we are stuck in this form. For example, this being called Reuben Flores. While he’s a part of everything, he’s also only what the cookie cutter has cut out for him. And he can’t do or be anything that he isn’t.

  But then something else starts creeping in. After a while, it starts to feel like we are imitating ourselves. The way, for example, Gary lights the joint is exactly how Gary would light a joint, and he knows it, so he does the perfect imitation of himself doing it. Gary Whitcombe lights the joint exactly how Gary Whitcombe would light a joint. Trippy. Then everybody isn’t just doing what they do because of who they are, but they’re doing it because they think they know who they are. They are doing what they are doing because they know that’s how they would do it and so they do it that way.

  Then I get the incredible insight that in fact we can go beyond the form of ourselves because the form isn’t a given, it’s a taken as given. The cookie-cutter cutout isn’t an objective reality. It’s only an idea, what forms us is only an idea, and all we’re doing is perpetuating this idea. Ergo, if who we are is simply a manifestation of an idea we have of ourselves, then we could change the idea and break the cookie-cutter form and fuck all.

  So all this was going on in my head. It’s when I started talking that I run into trouble. And I haven’t been talking long at all. I’d just pointed out that the way Hank was taking a pee was the way only Hank could take a pee, and that in fact, Hank in taking a pee, is doing the perfect imitation of himself taking a pee, because after all, all we are is an idea that we perpetuate about ourselves.

  It isn’t long after that’s when Gary taps me on the shoulder and says, “Ben, we’re going for a walk.”

  And I say, “Okay.”

  And Gary says, “And you’re staying here.”

  And they take off, all of them, even Hank. And leave me alone sitting under the apple tree.

  Some friends. As soon as they walk out of the front gate and they’re out of sight, immediately the worst thing that could possibly happen, happens. I get that fear. I am really high on a hallucinogen and all alone in a ghost town in the middle of the Sawtooths and anything in the fucking world could happen to me. A bear or a wolf. But it isn’t even something real I’m afraid of. Fear is fear is fear and what I am afraid of is being afraid. My whole life, everything I’ve ever done, everything I do, even the way I walk down the street, I walk that way, so this fucked up giant fear that is always sleeping somewhere inside me don’t wake up. Walking on eggs, being quiet in the house, mother with her migraines that could hit her like lightning or sudden murder and you had to be really quiet or father in the saddle room with his belt and my bare ass, or dreams when you have a fever and your hand was as big as the world and you could grab the world, fucked up stuff that makes no sense that’s happening to you. Hallucinations. Or the bullies on the bus, or the bullies at school. I couldn’t even form a fist, let alone stand and fight. Or those two weeks after Psycho I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t tell anyone I couldn’t sleep because it was just a fucking movie.

  DNA fear.

  Original Sin.

  I was a sinner, I was detestable and ugly and weak and deformed, one of those untouchables, not a man, and God the Father fucking hated me when I was born, because I was born, because I was conceived in sin. And he’s hated me ever since and there’s no place to get away from him, only way’s to walk around him, to not wake him up, the Giant, the Catholic, the almighty God.

  Ben The Most Miserable of All Grunewald. Dickless, powerless, alone at the bottom of hell. Without salvation, without hope. The cry that never ceases.

  And on a bright sunny day here he is, the Most Miserable of All, the Fear Giant, sitting with me under the apple tree.

  Sitting inside me. Death, man. Red fringe and all. Fucking death.

  I’m curled up into a ball. Sweat pouring off me. My belly full of lead, full of dread. The only way to breathe, big gasps.

  WHEN I FINALLY open my eyes, I can only see my hand. And just at the moment when I open my eyes, my thumb moves from against the knuckle of my hand to the tip of my index finger. I start moving my thumb back and forth like that, the way a child would, distracting himself while he sits in the hard chair under the crucifix in the outer office of Mother Superior. Perhaps if I can pay attention to this thumb long enough, the Giant will go back to sleep.

  And an amazing thing begins to happen.

  When I put my thumb against the knuckle of my index finger the fear goes away. Completely. That first time I move my thumb, it happens so quickly, so I move my thumb back to the tip of my index finger where it was, and there he is again, the blaring fucker Fear Giant.

  So I quick move my thumb back to the knuckle and hold it there.

  No fear. The Giant is gone and the sunny day and the apple tree are back.

  The wind in the tree and the shade of the leaves moving over me. I sit up. I can breathe, my stomach isn’t shit spray. I’ve stopped sweating.

  I sit there like that for a good long time, my thumb up against the knuckle. I don’t dare move my thumb. Not until Reuben and S
al and Gary and Hank get back. Then I get to thinking about earlier, when I had the insight that all we’re doing is imitating ourselves because it’s simply the only way we’ve learned how to do it. Form is only the idea of form, and since we are only ideas of ourselves we could change and fuck all.

  I move my thumb back to the top of my index finger.

  Fear like hell.

  I move my thumb back to the knuckle.

  A beautiful Idaho day under an apple tree.

  I move my thumb to the top of my index.

  Horror, terror, the dark angel, the worst.

  I move my thumb back to the knuckle.

  Under the apple tree. Peace and tranquility.

  Fuck.

  The Fear Giant is only an idea of mine. Dickless Most Miserable alone at the bottom of hell without hope, another idea.

  We create our own reality. And since we create it, we can change it.

  Under Gary’s apple tree, tripping on mushrooms, that I was an idea of myself, a story that I continued to repeat, that insight, finally got me to lift my thumb off my knuckle and let it go free, holding back, holding off nothing. I was alone and fucked up and out of control hallucinating in the middle of nowhere and I was doing fine. More than fine.

  About that time is when I start looking, I mean really looking, at Gary’s porcelain pans of water sitting on his back lawn. The sunlight on them. How the water and the porcelain and the sun all come together to make one thing.

  A vessel of light. Hard smooth white with a chip now and then down to black. Made you want to stick your hands in, or your face, wash the water onto the back of your neck. Then just sit there on the grass, the cold water running down your back, letting the sun off the water flicker onto your closed eyes.

  That’s what I’m doing, letting that light flicker against my eyes, then pouring porcelain pans of water over my head, when I hear people laughing.

  “What we want to know,” Reuben says, “Is Ben Grunewald back?”