30 October
So this is a hangover. I don’t think I’ll ever take another drop. My last couple drinks were a little strong, I think. I stumbled to bed after writing that last part, and the tent was spinning around like a flying saucer. I woke in the gray dawn with a terrific thirst and the need to pee.
Went back to sleep, but I’m still thirsty now, and not sure I feel much better. I’ll try a couple or three ibus and breakfast.
Ugh. I want to go home. Coffee seemed to help the old hangover for a while, but forget about breakfast. I felt like puking again after I got about three steps out of the tent, and I left the food down on the ground last night anyway. Most of it’s gone or spoiled by animals. There’s about half a tortilla and some jelly. The coffee, tea, and sugar were safe in their jars, but everything else, which wasn’t much anyway—leftover beans, soy cheese, bread, fruit—is gone.
I’m going back to bed. I’ll decide what to do later.
I woke up still homesick and whiskey-sick. It’s not just physical either—I feel totally polluted. Right down to the soul.
Outside, I found a change in the weather. Clouds have come, hanging down over the southern ridge. It’s turned cold, and there’s a snowy feeling in the air. It’s beautiful, but gloomy and lonesome. I want the wood floors and lamplight of home.
It’s going to snow for sure, which fits because tomorrow is Halloween, and it always snows on Halloween.
Memories of Hallowe’en—All Hallows Eve:
Night falls early, hot cider steams on the stove, pumpkin seeds toast in the oven, and a big bowl of candy waits by the door. Little kids’ costumes are all puffed up with coats underneath, and Dad gives big handfuls of candy because there won’t be too many this year.
I really should be home, not hiding up here. What am I doing? All my mental ramblings last night haven’t gotten me anywhere. Or maybe they have. I felt that huge nothing again, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I want my blood warm and red, I don’t care how much it hurts.
So I’m going home. I’ll stay one more night, and tomorrow I’ll go back to face what I left behind and the messes I made by leaving. I don’t know what I’m going to do about anything, but I’m going home.
And for now, I’ll take advantage of my final hours alone. I’m going outside to lay a big bonfire, then I’ll walk, or stagger, up the ridge to where the clouds meet the trees and the ground. I’ll breathe cloud-air and mist, and then I’ll light my fire and celebrate Hallows Eve at midnight, sending sparks up to heaven.
And then, I’ll go to sleep, and wake up, and walk down the mountain.
That’s when it’s calling me,
That’s when it’s calling me,
Back ho-o-ome.
By the time I wrote that and came outside, the clouds were even lower. I was, and am, covered over, socked in with misty clouds hanging like a ceiling over my little valley. Earlier, I half-imagined I heard people calling for me, voices drifting in through the mist. But even if Mom and Dad hiked up to the high ridge, they couldn’t see me down here now. And I don’t think the voices would carry through the weather. I laid my fire and took my walk, stopping every so often to listen, hearing nothing above the sound of my breath and the thumping of my pulse in my throat. Then, because it was getting cold and dark and I wanted fire, I came back to camp.
I’m sitting now in the warm space between the rocks and my blaze. No dinner—I couldn’t face the half a stale tortilla and leftover peanut butter, but the tea is sweet and spicy, and I’m bringing the rest of the whiskey home to Dad.
Last night, bright with stars, the valley held a faint glimmer, but tonight I’m blanketed with cloud-darkness and cocooned in the cold. I wonder how I’m going to get home. I wonder if maybe I’ll find Mom or Dad at the cabin. I wonder what they’re doing now, if they’re scared for me, mad at me.
Both.
I don’t suppose they’ll want to let me avoid the shrink after this. I think they’ll keep me on a pretty tight tether when I get back. I guess, like DJ, I’ll be on groundation for a while.
Sigh …
Gaze into the fire …
I wonder what DJ is up to and what we’re going to do. I have to at least talk to him. They can’t keep us apart forever, though Mommy will try to keep us apart until it’s too late.
It can’t end like this—with no ending at all, no goodbye, nothing. It’s as if all the time the two of us spent together has been thrown away. And not just the time but the us, the DJ and me—because we became us, like Ally and I were, like Ally and Sean were: two people becoming part of one another. And now it’s as if we’ve been tossed into the great vacuum of space, the capital N-nothing, and all the life is being sucked out of us until we won’t exist anymore.
Maybe Mom and Dad can help us to at least say goodbye. Because it can’t be nothing. I refuse to accept nothing.
Oh, but it hurts anyway. It’s like the ache I felt when Ally and Sean broke up, only worse. I want him, and I can’t do anything about it.
It hurts to think of Mom and Dad too, and what I’m doing to them. I wish I were back home now. I don’t need to be here anymore. I’ve done it. I’ve done the poem I read way back in August, “When One has Lived a Long Time Alone.” It took me only two days, and I’m ready to go back.
I got up and left the fire’s circle to answer nature’s call, and I stood for a while in the cold, blind night, facing away from the fire. Scary to be so alone in the bigness of it all, but good. It would have been a perfectly ironic time for a lion to hit me, or a random accident like fictional Cassie and the sneaker wave, and yet I wasn’t really afraid—not of anything happening. Going home is what scares me: the future, as dark and unknowable as the mountain night.
And the night held comfort, too, as well as fear. I wasn’t looking for some big answer from the life all around me—an answer from God—but it was there. Not that I had a big “experience” like that night on the Carrock, but it was enough to hear and feel and smell and imagine the living land: all the plants and rocks, and the trickle of water, and the water of my own body, water that I took from the creek, now soaking into the ground, carrying bits of me into this place …
I get lost in it all. I follow one thread and get lost in the connections. But here it is: alive and working together. Enough said.
I got some more water from the creek and put another kettle on the fire. The smoke had been deviling me, swirling around on a wind that eddied in the space between the rock and the fire, but when I came back to my place it was rising straight up.
I’m not tired in the least, so I figure I’ll be up for another pot of tea. I could go into the tent and read, probably will soon, but for now I’m content to sit here, alternately looking into the fire and writing sentences. My daydreams—up here on my lonesome, but with home on my mind—fill the space with the people who are home to me. I hear Liz’s big laugh, and Quill’s silly voices. Ally and Sean join me by the fire, and Mom and Dad. And DJ.
Like an answer to wishful thinking, maybe, I see a flashlight bobbing down out of the mist across the way. Like a lamp from some wandering company of Elves, a lamp made of captured starlight, it fades in and out of the mist and the trees. And is that another? It’s definitely not Elves, and it’s not the search and rescue. But it looks like more people than just Dad and Mom—people between the lights.
Lower now, almost on my level, the lights disappear, lost in the trees, then they fade in and out and do not reappear. I expect to see the lights again, they had been coming straight for me, but maybe they’ve turned them off.
To ease my nervousness and prepare for company, I take the boiling water off the fire, drop teabags in, and set it within reach. Then I put the other pot of water right in the coals. And I wait.
“Wishful thinking,” I say to myself. “The trick of a poisoned brain and a day
without food.” I stand up, squint through the trees into the darkness, and sit down again.
The wind sends a gust of smoke at me, and snow begins to fall, blowing in swirls of small flakes all around the fire. A few strike my face and melt, and finally the lights reappear, coming toward me, lighting the ground as people come walking.
“Cassie,” I hear a voice.
“Dad?” I say.
“Cassie!” he says.
He comes into the firelight first, followed by Mom. Then Sean, then Ally, turning off her flashlight, and beside her, DJ. To say I’m surprised doesn’t begin to explain. Blown away? Flabbergasted? I expected Mom and Dad, but what are the others doing here?
I stand as Dad strides up to the fire and takes hold of me. Mom grabs me, too, and we stand there holding on to each other. I catch a glimpse of Ally smiling and leaning against Sean, and DJ looks into the fire, his hands jammed into his pockets.
“Damn you, child,” says Dad. “Never do anything like this again.”
Mom doesn’t say anything, just hangs on.
Ally comes in and puts her arms around all of us, and Mom and Dad let go. “We were just a little worried,” she says. “So we came out here to join the search.”
“Littless,” says Sean, pulling me from Ally. “You were supposed to tell me when you found ‘The Last Good Country.’”
“Sorry,” I say.
“It took your boyfriend to find you,” he says. “He told us about your secret place.”
DJ is still standing there looking into the fire. I take a step toward him and he looks up. Then we’re in one another’s arms. His neck is warm against my lips and he smells like DJ as I drink in the air that surrounds him, part fresh snow and part wood-smoke and part him and all warm.
Then I remember everyone else.
“Would anybody like some tea?” I ask, and everybody begins to laugh. Dad stops, catches his breath, looks at me, and cracks up again. “I would love some tea,” he says.
I pull the other pot out of the coals and throw in some tea-bags while Mom fishes a set of nesting cups out of her pack.
“We decided,” she says, “not to give you hell tonight, if we—when we—found you. We decided to enjoy the reunion.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I say, and I sit down in my spot by the fire and pour tea.
“Take the place of honor, son,” Dad tells DJ, pointing to the space at my left. Ally sits next to him, flanked by Sean. Mom sits at my right, with Dad next to her.
He takes up the whiskey bottle, doctors his tea, and pours a slug into Mom’s.
“Share, please,” says Ally. Mom passes it around me and DJ.
I’m dying to hear details—of how they managed to pry DJ away from his mommy, for example—but I am so relieved to be found, to have my home come to me before I can even come home, that I am happy just to sit.
Everybody else must feel the same way because nobody says anything for a long time except “I hate rabbits” when the smoke blows our way. Soon the flakes became bigger and the wind dies. Then they become huge, falling from the darkness into the firelight, vanishing into the flames or settling on the ground, on my friend the limber pine, and on my family. We are covered in a matter of minutes, as we sit quietly and watch the fire and the darkness and the snow and each other, leaning out or in every once in a while as if to check that the others are still sitting down the line—the six of us in a line, slightly curved into the fire, between the warmth and the light and the rocks behind.
31 October
I awoke to sunlight penetrating the fabric of my tent, and I blew steam into the green interior. As cozy as it was in my sleeping bag, I didn’t linger, but pulled my cold jeans inside and began to dress.
Packing up my little camp didn’t take long, and I hurried, inspired by the rumblings in my stomach and the cold, which by now has softened under the sun. Just a few inches of snow fell last night, but it was enough to turn my valley into a world of white. The sky is very blue, the cornices of the high ridge icy-clear, and the still air here on the valley floor carries the close, soft sounds of warming snow falling from trees, the calls of chickadees, and the trickle of water in the creek.
I could use some coffee to start me on my way, but I don’t want to take time to set up my stove and heat water—I am only lingering now to write a little before climbing up, down, and home.
But now that it’s time to put my boots to the trail … it’s not so easy to do. I close my eyes and feel the sun on my face while the cold seeps into my writing hand.
Suddenly I hear a call from the high ridge, small but clear in the wide valley:
“Cassie!”
Could it be a figment of last night’s fiction? I keep my eyes closed, clenched now, afraid that if I open them, I’ll break the spell, and the call will be just a dream. But I open them, and I see a small figure in the snow, far away and above.
“Dad?”
“Cassie!”
“I’m here!”
The End
Alone
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone …
—Edgar Allen Poe
Acknowledgments
First thanks go to my wife, Lee Hillhouse, for living with me while I wrote this novel. And all that entails. Next thanks to Sarah Scarlett “Spottedstar” Mandabach for patience and inspiration: you’re a true Warrior and the hope of our clan. Also to Andy “Candy” Mandabach for forcing the issue by giving me a due date on my first draft: your due date.
And I thank my big brothers for their support and influence: Paul III, Mark, Keith, and Carl Mandabach.
I’m grateful for the guidance of Gary Heidt, free-jazz agent, Rhiannon Ross, Fleetwood Mac editor, and especially Andrew Karre, post-grunge editor.
I’ve learned so much from my students, ALL of you. Special mention goes to my Lunch in Middle Earth and Three-Broomsticks groups and my writing clubs, including the Society of the Flaming Dagger of L’au Willi-Willi Nuka-Nuka Oi-Oi. Which groups included: Erica Colon (I did not say dagger!), Samster Haeussner, Megan Anderson, Sarah Weiger, Becca Donaldson, Mara Baker, Jared Butterfield, Brian Wallis, Laura Arrington, Holly Tate, Maria Kim, Alex Colerick, Sarah Lovell, Devin Carpenter, Amy Crockett, Rachel Case, PJ Friend, Leah “Not-allowed-to-write-anything-that-doesn’t-have-horses-in-it” Simon, Lauren “I <3 Constructed Response Paragraphs” Handlon, Hannah-hannaH Weems, Kaylah “The Devil” Weeres, Hannah “the female George Carlin” Duke, Kacee Eddinger, David Schmidt, Jake “One for the Punks” Schmitz, Danny “Big G” and Emmy “Liddle G” Gradisar, Brandon Shuemaker, Carson Hiltbrand, Nicki Carroll, Gen “Gwenaveevla” Peek, Dakota Myers-Moore, Bethany Barden-Way, Jessica “Tré Jewell”-Armstrong, Jessica Pigeon, Taylor “Liberal Princess” McQlluham, Katy Peek (special inspiration), and Suzie Avant (formerly Avant-Way). I know I’ve missed a few—sorry!
Thanks also to the great educators I’ve had the pleasure to work with, who are not at all like the meanie-heads in my book. But especially the best team-mate, mentor, and friend I could hope to have, Nancy Haley. And her husband Tim, who sets the gold standard of silliness.
And great teachers: Dale Griffith, Mr. Nelson, Solace Hotz, Robert Behn, Kent Bowers, Jim Studholme, Joe Gordon, and Ann Haymond Zwinger.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to my chief reader, Samuel Ligon, who keeps the Oak Street Restaurant Vow of our Steppenwolfe Trip to the Art Institute and Anarchist’s Theatre. (Not for everyone: for madmen only!)
Ralph Kisberg read a couple
drafts of this book and steadfastly encouraged me. Catherine Spicer read a draft, too. Lee read and edited several drafts, most notably the first, at which juncture she steered me away from some of my most serious blunders.
My teen readers were also an invaluable source of wisdom and love: Willyum “Bill” Rivett, Paddy Quinlan, and the Incomparable Becky Simon, who read several drafts and made herself indispensable.
In memorium, thanks to my father, Paul Mandabach, Jr, my sister Janice Allen, and W. Mark Harty, who prefered a feast of friends to the giant family.
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