From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “Did anyone look up the poem?” Professor Jakes asked.

  Carla held up a thick volume of poetry, and everyone laughed, including her. Professor Jakes asked her to read it.

  In a soft voice she read: “ ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.…’ ” And Mike’s eyes filled with tears, though he wasn’t sure what, exactly, the poem was about. He sat low in his chair, holding his book up in front of him, trying to focus on something else. But everything hurt to think about: his father, his mother at home, Donetta alone at night in her room, writing letters to Mike that he didn’t answer.

  Behind his thoughts Carla was gently saying, “ ‘Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/Who made the eyes but I?’ ” And Mike, closing his own eyes, thought of the moon rising over the Black Hills into the wide dark sky. “ ‘And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?’ ” And Mike was thinking of the long shadows on the backyard grass, and antelope coming into the fields at dusk, and himself, always watching, always distant, always far away.

  “ ‘You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:/So I did sit and eat.’ ” That was the last line of the poem. The class was over. Mike left first, hurrying out into the hall, down the stairs, and into the sunlight.

  HE didn’t attend his other classes. Instead, he went back to Hansen Hall, put his books in his truck, and unloaded his motorcycle from the back of it. He hadn’t ridden it since he’d come to Brookings. He’d been too distracted, or even somehow too afraid. But now the only thing on his mind was getting away from Brookings and from his life there.

  He rode east on Highway 14, stopping first to buy gas. Inside, as he paid, the girl behind the counter said, “Are you a student?” She had on a South Dakota State sweatshirt. He nodded. “Me, too,” she said. “I study between customers.” She was freckled and overweight, with long, braided hair. “It’s a different world in here,” she told him. “It’s like what I read about.” She held up a psychology textbook.

  “I bet,” Mike said. Outside, two hunters in a mud-splattered pickup were pulling up to the air hose.

  “I hate hunters the most,” the girl said. “I hate when they drive in with deer strapped to their cars.”

  “Well, I don’t hunt,” Mike said.

  “That’s what I thought. I try to figure out things about the people who come in here. Only usually I never know if I’m right.” Mike stood there, waiting for his change. “Do you want to know what I think about you?”

  He didn’t. But he said, “I guess.”

  “That you’re skipping class. And you’re not very happy.”

  “I’m just worried about something,” he said.

  She gave him his change, and as he turned to leave she handed him two candy bars. “In case you’re worried because you’re hungry,” she told him.

  Outside he straddled his motorcycle, watching the highway and watching the hunters. He’d lied inside. He’d gone hunting with Josh and Josh’s father a few times, and twice with Neil and Ed Schofield. He’d shot a pheasant. His father had hunted from the age of ten, or so he’d said, but he’d never suggested doing it with Mike. He was scornful of people who did it in groups. “You have to hunt alone,” he used to say. “It’s a solitary activity.”

  That’s what Mike was thinking about when he saw, or thought he saw, Tom DeWitt’s car, traveling west. It wasn’t a distinctive car, and it wasn’t close enough for him to be sure. Mike’s hands were shaking, though, and he pulled onto the highway in the direction he’d just come from and rode, fast, through Brookings and all the way past Highway 81 without seeing Tom’s car or one like it again. It must not have been DeWitt, Mike thought, but he rode through town and through campus before deciding to just say fuck it. What would he do anyway, if he did see him?

  He headed east again, riding past the gas station and into the country. The road was bright with sun, and on either side were cow pastures and hay fields. He hadn’t brought his helmet and felt nothing but sun and wind, heard nothing but the noise of the engine. Instead of campus buildings and students he saw farmhouses and grazing cows and horses. The road unfolded in front of him as endlessly as the way he used to imagine the future.

  He turned onto a smaller highway marked SCENIC and accelerated, following the center line closely and leaning far in on the curves. In his head was a sentence from the essay they’d discussed in his writing seminar, the first sentence he’d underlined: “I always believed that the instant of death was the center and object of life.” Mike kept saying that to himself, even though he’d never believed in heaven, not even as a kid. He wished there was something he felt that sure of, that he’d always known, always understood.

  He accelerated again and felt the candy bars fall out of his pocket. He hadn’t wanted them anyway, and it was none of that girl’s business whether he was happy or not, hungry or not. She’d wanted him to respond to her in some way, and he was tired of people wanting reactions from him. The more detached you were, the more people wanted to get attached to you. You were the center and object for them, but you didn’t have a center for yourself; you were too busy being theirs.

  A pickup rushed toward him, then past him, and then a white car. Tom DeWitt will probably come along next, Mike thought, or else Mike’s father, in a car belonging to some new woman gullible or dumb enough to help him, and as Mike downshifted on the next curve his rear wheel locked and he didn’t pull the clutch in fast enough.

  He lost control, the bike just going out from under him. It seemed prolonged, and there was a second when it felt more like being super alive than having an accident. He stayed with the bike as long as he could—too long—then jumped clear of it as it slid down into a dry ditch. He landed facedown in the grass.

  The world was suddenly still and suddenly silent. Would death feel like this? Mike wondered. But the complications of his mind and heart were already flooding in, and so was the pain he felt—in his right shoulder, and leg, and particularly in his grass-burned hands, which he must have put down first, trying to break his fall. He sat up and took stock of himself. His jeans and jacket were torn, but none of his bones seemed broken. It took him a minute to stand up. Then shakily and gingerly he slid down into the ditch to check his bike, which was less damaged than he was, and rideable.

  He slowly climbed up the other side of the embankment. The barbed-wire fence was stretched enough, in one spot, for him to get through, and he carefully lay down in the field grass, looking up at hawks gliding in the blue sky. It took a long time for his heart to stop racing. He told himself that he wouldn’t have to move until he felt like it. He could stay there all day, if he wanted to, and even into the night. He could stay there forever. After a while he fell asleep, dreaming that a car he was in, driven by his father, was speeding out of control. Mike jerked awake. Just watch the hawks, he told himself—the way they rise and fall with the air currents, the way they dip and climb.

  HE rode back to Brookings. He’d come farther than he’d realized, and now he hardly noticed the straw-colored fields or the farmhouses. He had the glare of the sun in his eyes until the sun dropped below the horizon; then the air turned substantially colder.

  At Hansen Hall he left his bike next to his truck, and up in his room he got into bed without undressing. He pretended to be asleep when Raymond came in an hour later, followed by Terry Linder, who said, “Want some dinner?”

  They left, and Mike heard Raymond say, in the hallway, “It’s like I don’t have a roommate.”

  Then Mike was left alone with his imagination: himself on his bike on that scenic road—except that this time, when he lost control, he skidded into the other lane where there was a truck, and when he collided with the truck his body was mangled like in a horror movie. The truck driver called the police, who called Mike’s mother, and though she was sad for a while she at least didn’t have to worry about him anymore; and when his father found out—assuming he ever went to that trouble—he felt bad that he’d given Mik
e leukemia, a deadly disease even if Mike was recovering from it, and maybe his father tried to kill himself, probably without success.

  The main thing was that Mike finally would be able to fuck up, fuck himself up, and in that instant be through with everything. Any other way you fucked up, you had to pay the consequences afterward. Fucking up just partway meant that you were still trying to hold things together. It was even worse, because the more you fucked up, the more pieces there were to hold together. So the only real freedom was to completely let it go—fuck your family, fuck your life, fuck yourself.

  Ideas come and settle in my mind by mistake.… He was like that writer. He thought he understood what she was saying.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IN the morning Mike stayed in bed until he was sure he would have the bathroom to himself. He hurt more today. He was better after his shower, though so tired that he sat in his desk chair for twenty minutes before getting dressed. He ate cold cereal in his room, then went to the classes he hadn’t missed already.

  In his biology class he sat in a back corner and tried writing a letter to Donetta, getting as far as, “I know I haven’t written much” and “I don’t have much to say,” before giving up and looking out the window. There was a strong wind blowing, and torn-looking clouds were moving fast from the west. The temperature was twenty degrees colder than it had been the day before.

  While the professor at the lectern talked about Darwin, Mike drew pictures in the margins of his notebook—nothing you could recognize, he knew, nothing as good as Donetta’s drawings, which always had a feeling to them; you could tell what she felt by what she drew. The high school art teacher had told her, “Be disciplined. Use your brain.” Mike thought that he was wrong. Donetta had her own way of being intelligent. He looked down at his letter, thinking that if he never saw her again, how would she know that he’d finally understood that?

  He reread his sentences and crossed out the three I’s. They said and meant nothing, and drew too much attention to themselves. They were like black lines of paint on a white wall. As long as he had to use that word, he thought, there was no point in writing letters to anyone.

  IT was four o’clock when he returned to his room and discovered a note on his desk from Raymond: “Dr. Boyd called. He wants you to come by Solberg Hall. He said it was important.”

  As Mike hurried across campus, he told himself what must have happened: Either his father had shown up in Brookings and been arrested, or worse; or Tom DeWitt was setting a trap for Mike’s father right now, one that he was involving Mike and Dr. Boyd in as well. Mike should have stayed home in Wheatley, as he’d wanted to, no matter what his mother had said. His father’s belongings were already out of her way, in the basement. She’d never have to see Glenn again unless she wanted to. For Mike it was different.

  Dr. Boyd’s door was open, but he was with a student. He looked up and said, “Give me five minutes.”

  Too jittery to wait in the hall, Mike walked outside and stood on the top step, shifting from one foot to the other. The wind in the elms was shaking loose the leaves, and dark clouds sailed past overhead. Students were walking along the sidewalks and cutting across the grass. The gap between himself and them had grown too wide for Mike to cross.

  “Mike?” Dr. Boyd was holding open the door for him.

  “What’s wrong?” Mike said.

  “Come on in first.” He led Mike down the hall and into his office. The building was old and the room was large, with a casement window that overlooked the street. He closed the door and asked Mike to sit down. “It’s not an emergency,” he told him then. “I just thought we could talk.”

  Mike took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “About what?” he said.

  “I thought we could talk about a few things,” Dr. Boyd said again. He sat at his desk, looking down at an open folder. “Grades, for one thing.”

  “They’ll get better,” Mike said. “I got off to a slow start.”

  “It’s not just that. You’ve missed classes. You’ve been late to the ones you do attend. I’m concerned about how you’re doing in general.”

  “I’m all right,” Mike said.

  Dr. Boyd closed the folder and rested his arms on it. “Your mother phoned me before the semester started,” he told Mike. “But I already knew. I’d read about it in the paper.”

  “When?” Mike said.

  “When it happened. Not lately. I haven’t seen anything about it since then.”

  Mike was too upset to speak. He looked out the window at traffic passing by in the street. “I don’t want people to know,” he said finally. “It’s private.”

  “I can understand that,” Dr. Boyd said. “But maybe you and I could talk about it. About the effect it’s having on your schoolwork.”

  “It’s not having an effect,” Mike said.

  “Have you discussed your grades with your professors?”

  Mike shook his head, feeling tears rising. He put his hand over his mouth, pretending to cough, and remembered too late about the bruises.

  “How did you hurt yourself?” Dr. Boyd asked.

  “A bike accident,” Mike said. “No big deal.” He looked away again, this time at a filing cabinet, on which there was a framed photograph: a woman and two boys on the front porch of a two-story house.

  “My family,” Dr. Boyd said kindly.

  “Your house reminds me of ours,” Mike said, humiliated to hear his voice catch on the “ours.”

  “We’ve lived in it since our sons were born,” Dr. Boyd said. “Fourteen years.” He smiled at Mike. “Time goes by faster as you get older. It helps you put things in perspective.”

  From the hallway came the sound of doors closing, and footsteps. “Friday,” somebody said. “Time to party.” The cheerfulness of the voice sounded alien to Mike, almost inconceivable. The room was growing dim, the light outside less bright. Dr. Boyd reached toward his desk lamp, then seemed to reconsider.

  “You should talk with your professors, Mike,” he said. “Or I could, with your permission.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “You can come over here anytime, just to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or I could refer you to someone—a psychologist, for example. I don’t mean right now. But if you ever think it might be useful.”

  Mike shook his head, keeping it down, keeping Dr. Boyd from seeing his eyes. “Is that it, then?” he asked.

  “I’d like to help.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Maybe there’s something else I could do that I haven’t thought of.”

  “No,” Mike told him. “I’m okay.”

  Dr. Boyd looked at him, not speaking. Mike concentrated on the window, then the office floor, which was clean and wavy with wax—like the kitchen floor at home. Then Dr. Boyd rose, walked to the door, and opened it. He said good-bye to Mike, and Mike felt himself being watched as he walked down the hallway toward the double glass doors and went outside.

  The sun was down, and the wind was blowing carpets of leaves into the street. Mike’s shoulder and leg were sore; he hadn’t worn his jacket, and he was cold. He walked past couples holding hands, past small groups of talkative girls. Unexpectedly, pieces of “Fern Hill” came into his mind: “rivers of the windfall light,” and “nightly under the simple stars.” He didn’t know what came before, in between, or after, but the poem was about time, he knew—how it kept you captive, because you were always dying, even from the beginning, even before you realized it.

  IN Mike’s dorm room, Raymond was sitting on the rug beneath the beds, with three books open in front of him, working on a paper. “Do you want to get dinner?” he asked Mike.

  “I don’t think so. I’m not hungry.” Mike walked around him.

  Raymond said, “You know, you should eat sometimes. You should call people back, too. You’ve got five messages.”

  “I’ll listen to them later.”

  Raymond pushed back his limp hair. “Look
,” he said. “People are worried about you.”

  “Like who?” Mike said.

  “I don’t know. Your mom. Your girlfriend, if that’s who she is.” He gestured to the phone machine with his pen, which flew out of his hand. He didn’t move to retrieve it.

  “I have things on my mind,” Mike said.

  “What things?”

  “Just some private things.”

  “Well, I can’t make you tell me,” Raymond said. “But I know what it’s like to feel bad. I didn’t talk about it either. I just waited for it to get better.”

  Mike nodded.

  “It takes a long time that way,” Raymond said.

  Mike retrieved Raymond’s pen. “Okay,” he said. “I know.”

  “So let’s go eat,” Raymond said insistently. “We’ll just go to Medary Commons.” He stood up and got his jacket. He opened the door without giving Mike a chance to say no.

  The night had grown wintry. They walked down Eleventh Street with their hands in their pockets, into the wind, which blew in gusts. “It’s supposed to snow tonight or tomorrow,” Raymond told Mike. “Can you believe that? It’s a good thing we don’t have to go anywhere.”

  At Medary Commons they got their food and chose a table against the far wall. Mike, not hungry to start with, was too tired to eat. He tried hard to act normal. “How are your classes?” he asked Raymond.

  “Pretty good except chemistry. At this point I’m hoping for a B.”

  “Everybody says that honors chemistry is a bitch.”

  “How are yours?”

  “I’ve screwed up some tests,” Mike said, with difficulty. “I think I can make up for them later.”

  Raymond focused on people coming through the cafeteria line, then said, “I asked Carla Beeker out. We went to eat one night.”

  “How was it?”

  “Tense,” Raymond said. “I mean for me. But she’s easy to talk to,” he told Mike. “She thinks I’m smart. And she knows what sad is.”