When I walked into John William’s camp, I tried acting nonchalant and said, “What happened to your scaffolding?”
“I turned it into firewood.”
“What are you doing?”
“Weaving a mat.”
“What is that stuff?”
“Cedar bark.”
He set his handwork in his lap and looked at me like someone with something to confess. His beard was growing back, and his face looked grimy. He said, “Did you find everything?”
“I did.”
“Then you ought to be south of Portland by now.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t screw things up,” said John William.
He scrambled the eggs and fried the bread in butter. We didn’t talk for a while. I let him eat. There were a lot of tin cans in his fire pit in stages of charred disintegration. I had an old packet of powdered cream-of-leek soup in my pack, and he poured that into boiling water and ate it with bread heels. “You’re a food junkie,” I said. John William had a cast-iron pan and a cowpoke’s coffeepot, both fire-stained. He ate without talking, and when he was done he poured water into the pan from the pot and, after swirling it a little, drank the water. But there was still egg in his beard.
I said, “This is sort of Robinson Crusoe.”
“Crusoe was a goatherd.”
“There’s a film called Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” I said. “He had a monkey named Mona. It had the guy who played Batman—Adam West.”
John William said, “Up yours, Neil.”
He’d made a sort of pueblo ladder, but lashed with manila cord instead of rawhide. We climbed into the cave, me with my pack on, and John William turned around and pulled the ladder up.
He’d put in adzed timbers. They were toe-nailed with spikes and shaped like mine buttresses. There were two of these frames, and along them were more spikes, spaced like coat pegs, from which hung two rows of ditty bags—dry goods out of reach of voles and shrews, or so John William must have hoped. He’d also laid in a fat store of canned food: there were cans twenty deep at the back of the cave, stacked to my height—peaches in syrup, baked beans, etc. He had jugs of white gas, extra lantern mantles, a lot of toilet paper, and a lot of C batteries. He had books, about a dozen, all practical, all manuals—tanning, flint knapping, food preservation—except for A Few Flies and I by Issa. I said, “Nuclear-bomb shelter.”
“You want anything to eat?”
“How many trips did you make?”
“Exactly ten thousand.”
I said, “How come no real books but one?”
“Only real books.”
“Why’d you bring Issa?”
“Issa’s not a sellout.”
We sat on our sleeping bags. I didn’t mention the money. I thought, at that point, that he’d stay just till winter. But in this I was like someone who believes the world is flat—I didn’t want to look at the evidence.
I said, “So what’s this San Diego?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why San Diego?”
“So they think I went to Mexico.”
“Which ‘they’?”
“Countryman, don’t be dumb. Just find a canyon or a parking lot down there and ride the bus back for me.”
I said, “Then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens next?”
“They’ll figure I’m in Mexico. That way I can stay up here without being hassled.”
“You want people to think you’re in Mexico.”
John William: “What’s your IQ?”
After a while, we climbed down. John William tried to show me how to make a mat, but I got frustrated with the slow handwork, and after a while took up a crosscut saw and made rounds of firewood instead. I split and stacked. I filled canteens. I made kindling with a maul. John William went on weaving cedar bark. I said, “Nice job cleaning out your trailer.”
“You liked that?”
“What happened to the lawn chairs?”
“I left them by the highway.”
“What about the cable drum?”
“I turned it into stove wood.”
“Your chess set?”
“Still got it,” John William answered.
In his ragged sweater with its singed, unraveled cuffs, he wove his strands of bark like a mental patient in an arts-and-crafts session. Why he preferred this to the $70,000 in my pack seemed a perfectly reasonable question, and so, with the maul in my hands, I said, “What makes this better than seventy thousand bucks?”
“Look around,” said John William.
“But you could have this and the money.”
John William stopped weaving and said, “No, you can’t. Money ruins things.”
“Then why are you giving it to me and Jamie?”
“If you don’t want it,” said John William, “give it to charity.”
“We are giving it to charity.”
“Good.”
In the morning, I put Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? next to his other books, and got my pack on without having told him the money was in it. The last thing I said before heading out of those woods was “You’ve gone off the deep end.” He looked like Ishi, the last of the Modocs, who was found in a slaughterhouse corral in 1911 wearing a covered-wagon canvas re-envisioned as a poncho. He said, “Just get my car down to San Diego, that’s all I ask.”
JAMIE AND I KEPT the $70,000. It was hard not to. In fact, it turned out to be impossible not to. And we have no regrets, because with that money we eventually bought the house we live in—or, to put it another way, we didn’t waste it. It was a little complicated not to show up at our banks with $35,000 in cash each, but by dividing it into more innocent-looking portions—amounts you might get paid for selling a car—and opening checking accounts around Seattle, we got it laundered.
But first we drove John William’s Impala all the way to San Ysidro. Jamie told her boss she had to take a few days off to help a friend in need, which was true. Before we left, we hid the money, or most of it—$69,000—in my father’s basement, inside an old television I’d gutted, years before, to hide dope in. Jamie thought this seemed a little sordid—my pot supply and all that cash inside a television. No matter. We spent a night in Medford, Oregon, in a motel, and a second night in Fresno, also in a motel, and we made it a point to drive at or below the speed limit, because a cop stop would leave a paper trail for the private detective Rand Barry was sure to hire when the abandoned Impala, still registered in his name, was recovered near the border not long after John William withdrew $70,000 in cash from his trust-fund account. Jamie and I used our headlights and turn signals, we yielded when we were supposed to yield, we came to full stops at stop signs. But no problems, smooth sailing, air-conditioned rooms and swimming pools, restaurant meals and late-night movies, and, best of all, everything paid for with Benjamins. In the end, Jamie parked behind a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, and we walked away with our sunglasses on after wiping the fingerprints off the steering wheel, transmission lever, parking brake handle, and door handles. Two gringo kids near the border, with backpacks.
It was a hot Greyhound trip northward. We passed it in a miasma of sleep and sweat, rousing ourselves every once in a while to eat oranges and play shaky games of Gin, or to read while California went past, but then we couldn’t take it anymore, not happily, and why should we? San Francisco, hailed in song as a good town for lovers, was imminent. What an easy decision for two vagabonds on a lark. Rashly, we squinted at ginseng in Chinatown. We went to the Haight, even though this was the year, 1977, that the Village People launched. In the Haight, we visited a used-record shop where I bought a three-LP box set—The San Francisco Sound—for $6.50 as a souvenir, breaking a Benjamin to make this transaction and hearing about it from the clerk: “You’re wipin’ out my change, big spender.” So we loosened up. We went on a spree. We took our money up to Nob Hill, feeling like Bonnie and Clyde—as in John William’s trailer note—o
r, rather, like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde. We might have said, if we were going to talk about this trip, You should have seen our hotel room—Italian marble in the bath! The gilded Mark Hopkins, for which we weren’t dressed, with its terra-cotta and its uniformed doormen, was not opposed to cash when flashed, and so we waltzed in, laughing on our way through the lobby and in the elevator to the twelfth floor, where we got off, turned the key, donned the bathrobes, ordered room service, ran the bath, slept through the afternoon, woke up, drank wine, and when we went out in the dark and came back in the dark, the hotel exterior was lit like a film set.
And now that I’m confessing to all of this, let me also describe our dinner at Jack’s, with its off-the-charts prices and rarefied menu—how we asked the Mark Hopkins concierge for a recommendation, no expense spared; how he made us a reservation and ordered our cab; how Jamie wore her fake Ph.D. spectacles that night; how we drank a bottle of—this is in my journal, which I kept open on the table, as if I was an unabashed restaurant critic—a Barton & Guestier Pouilly-Fuissé after dismissing the sommelier’s California suggestions; how we paired our Pouilly-Fuissé with distinctly the wrong dishes, which in retrospect I realize ruined our act: what came to the table, for both of us that night, were entrées in rich, complicated sauces. No matter. We giggled our way through every course. It was like being in a play. We had expensive digestifs and smelly cheeses before I laid down another Benjamin, and we kept our faces straight as our waiter carted it away on a gleaming tray.
So it was all about the Benjamins in the City by the Bay. But then we were on the bus again, our spell broken, back inside our skins and jointly rueful, reading purgative paperbacks between bouts of sleep and conversation, Jamie with her Virginia Woolf and me with a new edition of Carver I’d found in a Russian Hill bookstore. Cinderella after midnight—that high, thin diesel drift, so slowly nauseating and fundamental to Greyhound; suspicious bus vagrants slumping, sulking, and leering; cigarette fumes at bathroom stops; highway droning; torpor; gum bought from a machine. In this way, California got behind us, but it took a while. Strangely, it wasn’t until Oregon that I had this regret: there I was reading Carver when I realized that, in San Francisco, I’d failed to check out the storied haunts of the Beats—Kerouac’s rail yards, Ginsberg’s Howl flat, Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, and so on. I mentioned this to Jamie, and she made a good point—she said we could always go back.
Of course we can—but we haven’t. For one reason or another. So we’ve yet to see Gary Snyder’s Zen cottage in Berkeley, or William Everson’s Kingfisher Flat near Santa Cruz, or the Six Gallery—the Six Gallery is gone, but nevertheless—where Ginsberg first read Howl. In fact, we haven’t been back to California, but that’s something we’re mulling changing soon, because it might be worthwhile to see the Joshua trees, visit friends in San Jose, and take hikes in the Sierras. At least we think it might be worthwhile.
SURE ENOUGH, a private detective found me. I came out of my basement one morning to walk to campus, and there he was, leaning against my stakebed, wearing an open leather blazer and running shoes. He had very dark skin, like Idi Amin, but a disheveled-looking salt-and-pepper shock of hair. He was athletic-looking except for a tidy paunch, and his mustache was that thin, little gigolo’s stripe certain aging Lotharios incline toward. When he saw me, he stopped leaning against my stakebed, roused himself like someone warming up to run, flashed his PI card—blurry in its bifold sleeve—and said, “Mind if I walk with you?”
It was a line from Columbo, a show my father fell asleep in front of religiously. I wanted badly to say, “It’s a public sidewalk,” in deference to my role as the guilty antagonist, but instead I said, “No.”
He had an upbeat gait. He said his name was Vance Reese. He said that he worked for someone named Bledsoe, and that this Bledsoe had been hired by “your friend John William Barry’s next of kin” because John Barry was “of late a missing person.” I said, “You’re kidding,” and he said, “Do I look like I’m kidding?” We walked past a sorority and a lot of beer cans in a gutter, and Vance Reese said, “Do I?”
“No.”
“So where is he?”
“I couldn’t say.”
PI Reese nodded. He picked up his pace and walked backward in front of me, skipping a little. He said, “Y’all see Mr. Bojangles?”
“No.”
“Y’all see Buckwheat?”
“No.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “All right, then.”
He fell in at my shoulder. I had the impression he was giving me time to think it over, but I didn’t say anything.
“What class you going to?”
“History class.”
“History of what?”
“European Exploration of North America.”
“What week is this?”
“First week of the quarter.”
“First week of the quarter,” said Reese. “So what you do with spring break?”
“I went camping.”
“Where at?”
“The Duckabush River.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the Olympics.”
Reese said, “You must like that.”
“What?”
“That outdoor business. That getting-bit-by-bugs business.”
“Yes.”
“What you mean, yes?”
“I like it—camping.”
Reese plunged ahead and walked backward again. He said, “So who you go camping with?”
“My girlfriend.”
“The one who come out this morning, or another one?”
“The one who came out this morning.”
“What’s her name?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“What’s her name?”
“Jamie.”
“Jamie what?”
“Jamie Shaw.”
We crossed 45th and went along a leafy path. There were other students, all with books, most walking fast. Reese said, “You didn’t go to California?”
“No.”
“When’s the last time you heard from your friend?”
“Last fall.”
“What he say?”
“I went to visit him where he lived.”
“Where was that?”
“Out on the Hoh River.”
“Last fall?”
“Yes.”
“What he say?”
“What do you mean?”
“What he say about missing?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
Reese gritted his teeth. He shook his head. He stroked his eyebrows flat. “Another white boy of few words,” he observed.
We came to the Quad. People were hurrying now to make their nine-thirties. “I have to go,” I said.
“You seeing to business,” said Reese.
“My class is in this building.”
“All business,” said Reese. “That’s smart.” And he fluffed his wild hair with a cake cutter.
I never heard from the Bledsoe Agency again. But at the time I felt cowed and, that morning, couldn’t concentrate on European explorers. After class, from a booth in the HUB, I called Jamie at work and told her that we’d gone camping on the Duckabush during spring break, in case anybody asked, but nobody did, and nobody checked our bank accounts, either. Why would they? John William had disappeared in Mexico.
6
LOYAL CITIZEN OF HAMBURGER WORLD
I WENT TO SEE John William after getting back from California, setting out in the stakebed after classes on a Friday, irritated with Keith for stealing my radio and fretting that Vance Reese might be—to borrow a phrase from the PI genre—tailing me. My brakes felt too forgiving, so every half-hour I topped off the fluid and pumped up the pedal while watching, surreptitiously, my rearview mirrors, and imagining Reese just over the hill, behind the wheel of a sedan, with a cup of coffee and a glowing cigarette. I turned onto a side road and pulled over around a bend to wait for my
nemesis, but he never materialized. My paranoia waned after that, and, idling by a hayfield, I ate a leftover square of cold lasagna off aluminum foil before getting back on the highway. It was the time of year when a lot of bugs die against your windshield. Twice, crows intent on roadkill refused to scatter until I loomed too large to be ignored. Around Forks, the mills were blowing smoke, and the yards beside them were decked high with logs. I laid in some groceries—I spent more of John William’s $70,000—and then drove to the South Fork Hoh trailhead, where I let my shoulders rest after battling all that friction in the steering box. The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest. It’s easy to feel trapped with your back against trees. Vulnerable to all of this, I got on the trail and tried loving my solitude, but this was a futile and self-conscious effort. I didn’t want to be there, by myself, while the sun went down. I didn’t want to be hiking in such a tense silence. The maple leaves were youthfully green, but that didn’t ameliorate my nervous view of things. Before dark, I bivouacked, tentless, by the river, banking up a fire in front of a boulder and basking in its heat with my journal and The Collected Eliot, 1909–1962, which an excitable professor had asked me to scour, and although all of that might sound pleasant enough, or not a bad way to pass evening hours—especially with the din of water on the gravel bars and my view of stars illuminating silhouetted hills—I didn’t enjoy being there. I suppose you could say that my aloneness got the better of me, or that I felt fear that night, by the river, by myself—but fear of life, and not of animals or the forest. “The Hollow Men” didn’t help, because I couldn’t disown its mood, or break its hold on my thoughts, as I lay in my sleeping bag by those smoking coals, and though this temper made me tired, it also left me agitated enough to prod, more often than I needed to, the sticks I was burning. I mostly felt wistful. I didn’t want to have behind me, already, some experiences I couldn’t have again. Reading Eliot by flashlight was like deciphering runes, and made it more difficult to sleep.
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