by Meghan Daum
“Get the lay of the land before you become the lay of the land!” Elena said. “Stick with the lesbians,” she said.
“I’m going to have them over for dinner,” I said. I would do this as soon as I got a ceramic Italian swirl-style salad bowl from Pier One.
“Good,” she said. “And after you’ve done that you can come back to New York and resume the thong underwear beat. This is madness.”
Mason showed up around 3:30. I could hear him coming from a block away. The engine in his pickup was competing for volume with the Neil Young tape. I watched him as he pulled up in front of the house and drove the left side of the truck onto the curb. The last few bars of “Down by the River” petered out as he idled for a minute and finally turned off the ignition. He was wearing the same tank top, cut-offs, and flip-flops he’d worn both in the park and in the bar. I let him in the house. He smelled like a campfire.
“Great woodwork,” he said.
Mason suggested we get dinner first because we’d be hungry later and he didn’t have much to eat at the cabin. It turned out this meant going to the drive-through at Jack in the Box and eating in the truck. When I couldn’t finish my hamburger he took it from me, stuffed the wrapper in the ashtray, and threw the food out the window onto the country road.
“Some opossum or deer’s gonna love that,” he said.
We drove past grain silos and cornfields and acres of natural prairie grasses. Mason pointed out red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures. He told me that in December bald eagles gathered by the dozens on the river in front of his cabin. An eagle feather on a leather string dangled from his rearview mirror. “It’s illegal to have these,” he said, “but I find them all over the place near the cabin. Indians are allowed to have them. I always wished I was an Indian.”
“I used to wish I was Jewish,” I said.
“Huh?”
The cabin seemed much farther away than twenty miles. On the other hand, Mason said he hated driving on the highway and only took back roads and rarely went more than forty miles per hour. The closer we got, the more I realized that if this guy tied me to a chair and raped me before murdering me with the ax I noticed he had in the back of the truck, no jury would convict on the basis of the victim’s sheer stupidity. He turned off the main road onto a gravel road and then a dirt road. Trees were closing in around us. We passed ramshackle cabins and trailers onto which people had built shaky screened-in porches. We reached a gate. Mason climbed out of the truck, unlocked it, got back in and drove it forward a few feet, and got out and locked it back up. I was surely going to be killed out here, I thought. Except that I knew I wouldn’t be. At least probably not. Somehow he seemed implicitly trustworthy, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
The evidence to the contrary grew further when I saw the cabin. It was a tiny A-frame surrounded by huge driftwood sculptures under which he had placed fluorescent lights. Animal bones had been placed strategically on several of the sculptures, deer skulls and snake spines and coyote pelvises, all of which he claimed he’d found over the course of twenty years of hiking around the Flatwater River. Inside the cabin, giant paintings of herons and eagles and demonic, tortured human faces hung from the rafters. Indian relics were every where. An entire wall was covered with feathers and bird’s nests and tattered brown photos of Indian chiefs and cowboys and settlers standing in front of their homesteads. Books and cassettes were spilling from shelves. He had Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey and no fewer than twenty paperbacks by Edward Abbey. There was an old cast-iron woodstove in one corner, a television, VCR, and small refrigerator in the other. He opened the refrigerator and took out two beers.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“It’s just like my apartment in New York!”
“Really?” he said.
“No,” I said. “But it’s about the same size.”
“And you haven’t even seen the outhouse yet,” he said, handing me a beer. “How are you with heights?”
“Is the outhouse in a tree?”
“No, I want to take you on the bridge,” he said. “There’s an abandoned railroad trestle a little ways down the river,” he said. “You’ll love it.”
He was going to push me off. But wouldn’t he rape me first? I figured it was too early in the game for him to try to kill me. So I walked with him along the riverbank to the bridge. It must have been a mile long. It rose about twenty-five feet above the river, the ties splintered and worn down. The end had literally collapsed where it had once met the bank, so we had to climb up the side of one of the pilings, which was covered with tar.
“It’s an advanced-level skill to do this with a beer in your hand,” Mason said, pulling me up as I tried to avoid the tar and keep my shoes from falling off. “Even more so in the dark. Or during a storm.”
“You come up here during storms?” I asked, crouching on all fours when I reached the top. There were huge gaps between many of the railroad ties. Looking down through them I could see large rocks, jagged pieces of driftwood, and broken beer bottles.
“Sure,” he said. “I was nearly struck by lightning once. More than once actually.”
The sun was going down and the sky was turning red. I had no choice but to hold on to Mason’s arm as we walked along the bridge. He pointed out a blue heron landing on a sandbar. He pointed out a beaver swimming in the river. I saw neither of them as I had to look directly at my feet to avoid falling through the holes between the railroad ties.
“You’re going to miss every thing if you’re so worried about falling,” Mason said.
We walked along the bridge for about half an hour, then we climbed off in the dark and went back to the cabin. I ventured into the outhouse. It had a blue light inside that illuminated a small painting of a crow encircled by yellow rings. A bottle of air freshener and a stack of National Geographics sat on the floor. Back in the cabin, Mason had put on a James Taylor tape and was shoving an old copy of Rolling Stone in the woodstove to get the fire lit.
“Do you smoke pot?” he asked.
I hadn’t smoked pot in years and even then I could never get it to do anything for me. Lucinda Trout preferred the drink. Two glasses of wine and I was usually blitzed. This was an economic advantage.
“Well,” I said, “if you’re having some.”
He took a small bag of pot out of a drawer and gingerly packed it into an intricately carved wooden pipe. He sang along to the James Taylor song about the cowboy living on the range. He took a hunk of smoked sausage out of the refrigerator and sliced off a few pieces. I couldn’t believe he had smoked sausage, one of my top five favorite foods. I told him this and he seemed pleased.
“What else do you like?” he asked. “I make a tremendous meat loaf.”
We sat around for another hour. I took two hits of the pot, which had no effect, and told him I didn’t want to waste his stash and then immediately felt adolescent for using the word “stash.” He talked about his kids and about camping and about Neil Young, his favorite musician of all time. He talked about his ex-wife, who was remarried and with whom he now got along better than he ever had. He talked about his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his second son, with whom he had a so-so relationship. He mentioned only in passing the mother of his daughter, saying, “Accidents happen, but sometimes they’re happy accidents. For the most part.”
I talked about my job at Up Early and how I did stories about thong underwear. I talked about Daphne and Elena and my old apartment with Bob downstairs and Yuri upstairs. Though Mason listened, I felt like I was describing a television show. Outside, there was a sudden cacophony of high shrieks, a yip yipping, like a siren in a European city.
“Coyotes,” Mason said. He pronounced it “kie-oates.”
“Do they attack?” I asked.
“Not unless you’re a rabbit or a Maltese dog,” he said.
I suddenly wanted him to kiss me. I’d never kissed a bearded man before.
“We’d better get you home,” he s
aid.
He put the pot and sausage away, tamped out the fire, and locked up the cabin. We got in the truck and drove through the small path between the trees, the leaves of which were now glistening and looked wet under the full moon.
“If we’re lucky we might see an owl,” Mason said. “Or a skunk.”
For the first time in thirty days I felt the distance I was from home. There were no lights out here, no telephone wires, no pavement for at least ten miles. Mason hummed along to Neil Young. The eagle feather dangling from the mirror made a shadow on the dashboard, like a bird gesticulating to make a point. When we got to the gate, Mason got out of the truck to unlock it. In the glow of the headlights, as his plaid flannel shirt flapped in the breeze and his lanky body leaned over the padlock, I caught a glimpse of his profile and gasped. From that angle, framed by the rusty fence posts and the flat gravel road that stretched out behind him, I could have sworn he was Sam Shepard.
A Sociocultural Analysis of the Margin of Error
Here, briefly, is the history of Mason. He’d grown up in a small town in the opposite corner of the state, come to Prairie City ostensibly to attend school, and, upon dropping out almost immediately, insinuated himself into the community until he seemed to have been there all his life. Like a genuine local, Mason married the woman he happened to be dating when he was twenty-four. Susannah was smart but not yet ambitious, the kind of girl who baked bread and grew vegetables but also got stoned a little too often and sometimes got out of her car without turning off the ignition. Three years after the birth of Sebastian, she decided she wanted a life that extended beyond the boundaries of Effie’s Tavern and the drafty farmhouse that she and Mason had bought with money loaned from her parents. On a cold Sunday just before the Christmas of 1988, right after Mason had quit his third job in six months—this time at the Firestone tire plant, where he claimed to be having hallucinations on the rubber hose line—Susannah announced that she was going back to school to get her degree, moving in with her sister, and divorcing him. She’d had hopes that Mason would also return to college to finish the art degree he’d abandoned after one semester; consequently she asked for no child support, merely an amicable parting and regular visits with Sebastian. Mason was devoted to his boy. When the child was born, Susannah worked at a used-book store and Mason stayed home and cared for him during the day, an arrangement he claimed made more economic sense than holding a job. Upon the divorce, despite Susannah’s protestations, the court ordered that he pay child support. Mason managed to build his cabin using materials he’d collected from abandoned farmhouses. It was a veritable fort for his son and him. He made rafts and floated with Sebastian down the river. He cooked wieners for him on the woodstove. And a year or so later, while drinking at Effie’s Tavern during the Friday afternoon happy hour, he met Jill and more or less repeated the whole scenario over again.
Jill, to her credit, had managed to steer Mason toward a job he could tolerate. Her third cousin, Frank Fussell, was the supervisor at a relatively low-traffic grain elevator. A borderline schizophrenic, Frank fancied himself a healer and spiritual guru. He liked the fact that Mason was an artist and, as he did with his four other employees, made fruitless attempts to convert Mason to his own form of mystical wellness. Frank practiced tai chi in the small office attached to the elevator. He also drank his own urine, a ritual he claimed prevented both cancer and hiccups. When a train did happen to pull into the elevator, which was infrequent except during harvest season, Frank stood by the tracks that ran underneath the head house and chanted commands to his staff like a yoga instructor. There was no way they could hear him. The farmers who came in to unload their grain all knew he was crazy, although rumor had it that Frank had once talked one of their wives into drinking her urine.
Despite Frank’s eccentricities, this was a good job for Mason. Though he made little more than minimum wage, he managed to keep up with his child support payments and take both Jill and Sebastian on regular outdoor excursions. In fact, he was such an enthusiastic father that in the summer of 1990, Jill, who wanted a baby but did not want to get married, at least not to Mason, found herself pregnant in a not altogether accidental manner. By this time, Mason had moved in with her, keeping his cabin as a weekend getaway spot, and was ensconced in the renovation of Jill’s kitchen. When Peter was born the following spring, a time when the grain elevator’s major concern was the storyline of Days of Our Lives, Mason again cared for the child during the day while Jill worked as a nurse practitioner at a doctor’s office. As Peter grew older, he found a loyal older brother in Sebastian. On weekends Mason took them both to his cabin, where they caught frogs and constructed the teepee, sometimes with Jill, more often without her. It was in the fall of 1995, when Peter was five, that Jill decided she wanted a life that extended beyond the boundaries of Mason’s cabin, Neil Young, and the small house that had felt considerably smaller since Mason had begun sleeping on the sofa in the den. On Halloween night, when Mason returned from trick or treating with Peter, Jill asked him to move out. Mason, stunned but also relieved, proceeded directly to Effie’s Tavern, where a woman in an elaborate cat costume bought him no fewer than ten Leinenkugels, took him back to her condo near the Homestead Mall, and, six months later, called him with the news that his third child (most likely his child, anyway) would arrive in the summer.
Mason, because he couldn’t think of what to say, had asked the one-time wearer of the cat costume if she needed a Lamaze coach. She had answered with a blunt “No, but you’ll be hearing from me.” And despite Mason’s efforts to call her back and say he intended to be in the child’s life, it wasn’t until two days after Erin’s birth that Mason actually saw the woman, whose name was Julie, without the cat costume. Other than the one phone call at the beginning of her third trimester, Mason had had no contact with Julie other than a court order for a DNA test “upon the birth of the child of the petitioner, Ms. Malacek.” The court order had been delivered to him at the grain elevator by the county sheriff and he’d studied it in bewilderment for several minutes before realizing that he’d never even learned Julie’s last name. Like Jill, Julie had insisted that the child take her last name instead of Mason’s. The result was that even three years later—a period during which Mason had seen the child at least once a week (as soon as she stopped nursing, it was three overnights a week)—Mason still had trouble remembering the precise spelling of his daughter’s surname.
“Guess it’s funny how things go,” Mason had said when he finally got around to telling the whole story. We were at the cabin, where it was beginning to rain. Mason was mending a hole in my sock with a needle and thread.
“But I don’t understand how she can just hand over the kid to you when she barely even knows you,” I said. “That’s just insane.”
“I guess I have a reputation around Effie’s as a good dad,” he said. “It’s better than being known as a drunk or a pervert.”
IN RETROSPECT, I saw that Mason’s life was the way it was largely because of the sheer amount of space that surrounded him. Prairie City was for him, as it was for many of its citizens, a place in which the margin for error was as wide as land and sky itself. The blitheness and lack of prescience that Mason carried with him was something I could only begin to understand during moments when I was a passenger on a plane making a final descent into Prairie City Municipal Airport. Normally, I was a nervous flier. I tapped the aluminum twice before boarding. Every variation in engine noise or change in altitude usually had me gripping the spine of a book I’d been pretending to read while monitoring the flight. But descending into Prairie City had a way of making me feel that there was virtually no chance of crashing. There was so much space, so many miles of flat, open fields that landing a plane seemed less a matter of hitting a target than of simply getting close enough.
In New York, this had not been the case. At LaGuardia, the smallest error—an extra few degrees of bank to the right, a misheard syllable from a rapid-fire controller—w
ould land you in Flushing Bay. The same principle applied down on the ground. There, the margin for error was so narrow it was hardly there at all. In New York you looked to the left and the right and back again, your head spinning from fear and indecision. The wrong college, the wrong job, the wrong direction on the A train could overturn you. We were so careful in the city. We checked ourselves at every corner. We were careful whom we lent things to, whom we invited inside, whom we fell in love with. Like planes stacked up over the airports, we didn’t make a move until we knew we were cleared. We dated for years before risking cohabitation. We didn’t marry until we were sure we couldn’t do better. We didn’t have children until it was almost too late. To act sooner, to not agonize over every option until they all practically lost their appeal, would have been to risk disaster. We were packed so tightly and moving so rapidly that one misstep could knock us permanently off course. We always seemed an instant away from losing every thing.
In Prairie City, it seemed nearly impossible to screw up significantly. You could get pretty far getting close enough. A pasture was as good as a runway. The runway at the airport was so long that it was an alternative landing site for the space shuttle (I learned this from Joel). In a sky like that you could swerve and skid and lose your vectors and still get on the ground safely. A house was affordable, a marriage reversible, a minimum wage sustainable. People married young—the wedding pages in the newspaper looked like a high school yearbook—and then divorced young and married young again. There were left turn lanes with arrows on the traffic lights so you wouldn’t have to negotiate intersections on your own. The supermarket aisles were wide. The shopping carts were large enough to fit four children, which, by the way, were every where. Everyone seemed to have at least one kid, more likely three or four or five, a couple of kids for each marriage—or lack of marriage. This was what amazed me. Mason’s situation, however aberrant in my mind, fell squarely within the norm. For every white-bread nuclear family I spotted in the cereal aisle at the Hinky Dinky, there seemed even more households that had been broken and reconfigured many times over. Everyone seemed to have embarked on various permutations of couplehood and cohabitation and custody. Never in my life had I seen such a mishmash of ex-spouses and new lovers and half siblings and stepparents. Just as I had never seen so much wedlock, I had never seen so much out of wedlock.