“I saw you,” he said.
“You saw me? When?”
“A couple of days ago.”
My blood rose. “I’ve been looking for you nearly two weeks.”
If this bothered him, he gave no indication of it. “I haven’t been in the mood for people.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m depressed.”
“You? C’mon. You’re a mover. A shaker. You’re a dreamer. You’re the opposite of depressed.”
“The world is leaving me. Everything I’ve ever loved is gone.”
Gradually it came out. The logging industry had been in a prolonged slump. Demand for timber was a fraction of what it had been. And most of the first-growth forests were gone, and the livable land cleared. Paul couldn’t support a camp, and one by one the boys had left. Ole the Blacksmith, Slim Mullins, Blue-Nose Parker, Batiste Joe—all the old gang were gone. And then one day Babe had died. It was the hotcakes, just as Paul had always feared.
“He had an eating disorder. That’s what the vet said. And I said all right, an eating disorder, so tell me what to do. But he didn’t know, he’d never seen an ox like that.
“It got to be harder and harder to control him. The smell of me mixing the batter was enough to drive him crazy. One day he broke away and rushed the kitchen. The hotcakes were still in the oven, and he swallowed the whole thing at once, oven, burners, smokestack. Everything. Stupid ox. He burned to death, from the inside out.”
“That’s awful.”
“Saddest day of my life,” said Paul.
“When did this happen?”
“A year ago. Maybe two.”
“Did you have someone to talk to? Someone to help you through?”
He looked at me with woebegotten eyes. “Did. Then he died too.”
Randy was his name. They were lovers, and Paul nursed him to his dying day. Buried him deep and built a mountain on top for a grave stone. It was less than a year since he’d passed away.
“Seems like yesterday,” said Paul.
“I’m so sorry.”
He sighed. “I keep wondering who’s going to bury me.”
“You planning on dying?”
“I dream of it sometimes. Is dreaming planning? You tell me.”
A couple of years before, I’d had a bout of depression that responded nicely to a short course of Prozac. Fleetingly, I wondered how many truckloads of pills it would take to help Paul. I could hear the outcry from all those deprived by him of their precious drug, which made me weigh in my mind the good of the one against the good of the many, a quandary made all the more difficult by the one in this case having dedicated his whole life to the many. My brain was too weak to solve that riddle, and fortunately, Paul interrupted my attempt.
“I don’t grow old the same as you,” he said. “It may be a thousand years before I die. It may be never.”
“Everyone dies.”
“I’m as good as dead now. That’s how I feel. The rivers are cut. The forests are logged. My friends are gone. Who needs me now?”
“I do,” I said. “I need you.”
He gave me a skeptical look. “You’re being kind.”
“I’m being honest. My wife left me. I know what it’s like to feel unwanted and unloved.”
Granted, my loss paled beside his own, but misery is misery and I needed to talk. It was all he could do to listen. His attention kept wandering, drawn inward by a self-absorption that, frankly, offended me. Talking to Paul was like talking to a pit, and finally, I gave up.
The silence of the high country took over, normally a vast and soul-inspiring event. But neither of us was getting much inspiration. Paul was hopelessly withdrawn, and I felt angry at being cheated of my fair share of attention. I suggested, in lieu of conversation, a walk. Reluctantly, he agreed.
I had in mind a short stroll, something to stretch the legs and stir the blood, a constitutional. We ended up on a three-day trek to the Arctic Circle and back. Most of the time I rode on his shoulders, which he said made him feel useful. The scenery was magnificent, the land uninhabited by man. We had snow and wind and skies the color of gemstones. I thought frequently of my wife and the early years of our relationship. I missed her. The vast and untrammeled beauty in that deserted land made my heart ache to have her back.
Paul seemed happy enough to be on the move, but when we returned, his spirits again plummeted. I stayed with him a day or two more, listening to his troubles, stifling my own, growing impatient and even resentful while trying to appear otherwise. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I have to get back,” I told him.
He nodded morosely, then gave me a penetrating look. “Why did you come?”
It was the first genuine interest he had shown in me since I arrived.
“To see you,” I answered.
“Why?”
I thought about it. “I had an urge,” I said at length, flashing a smile. “Remember urges?”
“I do. Yes. Vividly.”
He gave me a look, beseeching, I thought, as if he wanted something, and then fell silent. As the silence grew, I began to feel defensive.
“I didn’t come to replay the past, if that’s what you’re asking.” I drew a breath. “I’m not gay, Paul.”
“Is that why you came? To tell me that?”
This irritated me. “I came because I needed a friend.”
He seemed to find this amusing. “And have I been?”
“It’s been a rough time for you. I understand. Yes. Of course you’ve been a friend.”
“Of course.” He made a parody of the words. “Just so you know, you haven’t. Not at all. You’re patronizing and self-serving. You breeze in at your whim, you breeze out. You don’t care.” He made a motion with his hand of sweeping me away. “Go away, little man. Enjoy your little life and your little troubles. Your little country. Go away and do me the pleasure of not coming back.”
That was ’91. It was the culmination of a bad stretch of time. Two years before, I had turned forty and Sheila, my wife, forty-one. We had put off having a family because that’s what our generation did, put off certain commitments in order to indulge others. We traveled. We became enlightened. We fought injustice. We didn’t have children because we were children, children of the new age. And then when we were ready, we couldn’t. The equipment just wasn’t up to snuff. Sperm without heads, ovaries without eggs. It was pathetic. We’d grown old before we’d even grown up.
We went to doctors. Took tests, hormones, injections. Tried the turkey baster, the baking soda douche, the upside-down post-coital maneuver. We charted temperature and checked mucous, fucked on schedule and the rest of the time not at all. Were we having fun? Sure we were. And just to emphasize the point, we upped our therapy to three times a week.
And those, believe it or not, were the good times. The bad started after we visited the baby broker. Met her in an unfurnished tract home on an empty street in a white bread suburb of Sacramento. Our hopes were high, but one look at her told us it was all wrong. She was a right-to-lifer, smug and self-possessed. She marched outside abortion clinics and hurled insults while on the side she gave Christian guidance to unwed mothers. She had a photo album of all the children she had placed and showed it to us like a lady selling Tupperware. Beautiful babies with angelic faces, flawless parents with milky complexions and award-winning smiles. She advised us to print up a thousand leaflets and pass them out in parking lots. Stand on street corners with placards announcing our need. Beg for babies.
She told us, in essence, that we were to blame for our childlessness and if the Lord willed us to be parents, then and only then would we be.
It just wasn’t our thing.
We paid her her two hundred dollars, then went home and puked. Two months later, Sheila moved out.
The shock of it sent me reeling, as though gravity had suddenly ceased. I cried on and off for weeks, couldn’t get a purchase on things, felt disoriented and wrack
ed by a sense of guilt, failure, and self-doubt. In retrospect, that had been my purpose in visiting Paul, to restore some degree of proportion and balance to my life. He was, if nothing else, a man with his head on his shoulders and his feet on the ground. Mr. Dependable. Or so I thought. When he turned out to be such a downer, when he gave me nothing, when in the end he accused me of being a fraud, I felt betrayed.
On my return from that ill-conceived trip, I threw myself into work, which at the time was malpractice litigation. Perhaps in reaction to being hurt myself, first by Sheila, then Paul, I went after those hospitals and doctors who had hurt others. That most of these injuries were unintentional was beside the point. Errors are errors, and in matters of law it makes no difference that all of us are guilty. I sued on behalf of a woman who’d lost her baby at birth, a man who’d lost an eye, a teenager with brain damage after being struck in the head by the plaintiff, his father. We got a huge settlement for that one, and a few months later we got a fat check in a sexual impropriety verdict against a surgeon who’d been fondling his anesthetized patients. That case made the newspapers, and my wife, who at the time was teaching a course on sexual harassment at the local community college, called to offer her congratulations. It was a little more than a year since we had separated, an anniversary that we had carefully failed to observe. The date now safely past, we felt capable of meeting for dinner. Sheila, I have to say, was ravishing. Evidently, she felt the same about me. We couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves, nor our laughter, nor delight. One thing led to another, and we ended up spending the night together. Three weeks later she called to say she was pregnant.
Now we have a two-year-old son. He’s got the build of an ox and the temperament, alternately, of a rabbit and a mule. Lately, he’s been constructing tall and elaborate towers of blocks that he subsequently reduces to rubble with a kick. In other games he is equally omnipotent, digging a hole in the sandbox, for example, which he then fills with water and proclaims an ocean, before draining it completely a minute later and naming it, triumphantly, a desert.
Paul was once like that, making lakes with his footsteps, straightening rivers with a tug of his massive arms, causing tidal waves when he sneezed. A creator and a destroyer. I’ve been thinking of him a lot lately.
The anger and hurt I felt after that last visit lessened with time, and as sometimes happens, my feelings actually reversed themselves, so that I started to blame myself and not him for being insensitive and unsympathetic. Now, with a good marriage, a happy child, a successful job—in short, with everything going my way, I felt up to the task of braving whatever resentment he might still harbor toward me. I wanted to make peace.
This time I called first. Got the phone number of the Ross River post office and asked the postmaster, who’d lived there his whole life, if he’d had wind of Paul. He hadn’t, not in a year or two. He told me to try farther north, up around Mayo, but instead I called Carlton, where, after getting nowhere with one lackey after another, I ended up talking to the head of the Chamber of Commerce. He knew nothing of Paul, although he had heard reports, strictly off the record, of some sort of creature on the loose. A Bigfoot, the locals were saying, which he discounted as a hopelessly crass ploy by the environmentalist cabal to keep the latest ski resort from being built. Bigfoot, he explained, had been listed by some joker in the state senate as an endangered species. It was a pretext to stymie development. What had happened could have been the result of almost anything.
I asked what he was talking about.
“Oh,” he said off-handedly. “A thirty-foot anchoring tower disappeared from the top of one of our mountains the other day. Reappeared the next day in the same spot, but upside down.”
That sounded promising. I asked if he had any theories.
“It’s been a heavy winter.” There was a pause on the line. “You one of those ecology nuts?”
I assured him I was not. “I’m looking for my friend. It’s strictly personal.”
There was another pause, as if he were calculating whether my actually finding this person would be to the Chamber’s benefit or not. Apparently, he decided it would be, because he told me by all means to come up and have a look.
That was in May. In July I took a week off work, promising Sheila to be careful and my son Jonah to bring back a present, and headed to the mountains west of Carlton and north of Lake Chelan.
It had, indeed, been a heavy winter. There was still snow across many of the trails, and the streams and rivers were running full. Penstemon and buttercup bloomed in the meadows, and the young trees looked plump and green. I made camp the first night near the base of a burnt-out pine and the next day hiked to the waterfall. There was a level spot about fifty feet from the water’s edge where I pitched my tent, laid out my bedroll and promptly fell asleep.
When I woke, Paul was standing in the pool. He was facing upstream, so that I saw him in profile. It was truly a shock.
His arms, once so massive, were the size of twigs; his legs, barely as big as saplings. His beard was moth-eaten; his skin, blotchy and pale. He splashed some water on his naked chest and neck, then cupped his hands to get a drink from the waterfall itself. But he lacked the strength, so that the force of the water kept pushing his arms away. He tried again and again, and then for a minute he seemed to forget what he was doing. When he remembered, he sank to his knees and drank directly from the pool. Then he crawled onto the shore, at which point he caught sight of me.
His eyes narrowed, then he quickly tried to cover his naked body with his hands. Just as quickly, I turned away to give him his privacy.
When he had dressed, he told me I could turn around. I apologized for taking him by surprise.
He gave a little shrug. “It’s all right. I expect I’m quite a sight.”
I found myself nodding. “What’s happened to you?”
“Clothes don’t fit too well, do they?” Grinning, he hitched up his suspenders. “Good thing I don’t wear a belt. My pants would be down by my ankles. Then where would I be?”
It was a feeble attempt at humor and took more breath than he had. Several seconds passed before he got it back.
“What was I saying?”
“Your pants . . .”
He glanced at them and brushed away some dirt. Then he looked at me. “I’m dying.”
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t die.”
He pointed to a purple lump on his arm as big as a grapefruit. And another under his beard. “They’re all over. It’s how my lover died. Now I will too.”
This was unacceptable to me. “Have you been to doctors? Have you seen anyone for this?”
“What would they do? Give me medicine? I know about that. It’s in short supply as it is. And besides, I don’t mind dying. I’ve been alive long enough. Longer than I care to be.”
“Legends don’t die,” I stammered.
He smiled, a look less of the sun as it used to be and more now of the moon. A reflective smile. A sad, sweet one.
“It’s too cold for me up north. That’s why I’m here. Stay with me. Will you?”
I couldn’t refuse. And am forever glad that I didn’t. I stayed with him more than a week, almost two, sending word to Sheila through a passing hiker that I’d be delayed. After a few days, we moved to the high country, which was deserted. Paul was forgetful but otherwise remarkably sunny, an effect, I suppose, of the illness, although I couldn’t ignore the other truth, which was that he had lived his life and now was ready, even eager, to die. He was also weak as a kitten, and one morning he fell while we were traversing a snow field and ended up sliding down the icy slope into a glacial lake at the bottom. He laughed at his ineptitude, but the next day he developed a cough. The following morning it was worse, and by that evening he could barely breathe.
We were in the drainage of a semi-circle of tall peaks, at the foot of which was a meadow fed by snowmelt. He dragged himself there, then collapsed, face up, eyes closed. Between labored breaths, he asked to be cr
emated, his ashes scattered. He whispered something else I didn’t hear, then fell silent.
I made a pallet by his head and to pass the time told him stories, tales of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, how they plowed the land into valleys and rivers, moved the mountains and logged the forests. I told him the story of the Blue Winter, and the popcorn blizzard that froze the cattle. And the one about the killer bees, and the carving of Puget Sound. Some time later he opened his eyes.
“I have loved,” he said, with emphasis on the have, as though he were debating some point, or answering a question. And then he died.
It took me two days to gather enough wood for the pyre. The blaze lit the sky. And his ashes, when they cooled, made such a pile that to scatter them took two days and a wind out of Heaven, and as far away as Spokane the sky turned dark and people spoke of a new volcano, though no one ever found a trace.
REVENGE
The burial took place at Our Lady of Tears in Colma, and Luis stayed until the others had gone, until the diminutive grave was filled and tamped with dirt and the gravediggers had shouldered their shovels and gone on to dig elsewhere. He stayed until he was alone, and so it was that he alone saw the child ascend. Barely a week old when she died, she looked slightly older now, a child of perhaps three months of age, driven by hunger and other primal urges and forced to look outside herself for help. Her eyes wandered this way and that, unfocused, until at last they fixed on her father. She seemed to recognize him. Her face, which up to that moment had been a minor chaos of muscle contraction and relaxation, became still.
She told him she had died too soon. She blamed the doctor. “The blood is on his hands, Father.”
Luis believed the same. “What should I do?”
“Blood for blood,” she said.
Luis nodded. This, too, he believed. “How?” he asked.
“Man to man. And do not wait too long. The sooner the better.”
Luis, who had been floundering since her death, agreed. He was happy at last for a way to channel his grief, and with more hope than he had felt in weeks, he rejoined his wife Rosa, who was being comforted by her family. At his arrival she took his hand, which was cold, and by that, and the look on his face, she knew immediately what was in his heart. Despairing, she beseeched him otherwise. She begged him, she kissed his hand, she pressed his palm to her heart. But Luis could not be moved. His hand stayed cold, and Rosa, foreseeing another tragedy, broke down in fresh tears. Dutifully, Luis took her in his arms. One of her sisters muttered a blessing. An aunt, wringing a tear-stained handkerchief, invoked the love of God. Someone keened.
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