by Rich Foster
The Death of Alan Chandler
A Red Lake Series Story
The Death of Alan Chandler
by
Rich Foster
Copyright © 2012 by Richard A Foster
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
First Edition: November 2012
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 1
West of Beaumont, the evening sky flared up in a blaze of color. The sunset sprawled across the sky, a firestorm descending from the hills. It consumed everything in its path, changing the mundane into the remarkable. Lending to Beaumont those five minutes daily when it would be hard to think of a more ideal place to live. Then it collapsed upon itself. The colors rapidly ebbed to the distant horizon like a tide pulling out to sea. Lengthening shadows filled the town. Soon, the vast sky devolved into the black void of night.
Chimney smoke rose, but then faltered and settled close to the ground. Fog formed as the air cooled and its ghostly tentacles enveloped the community. People hastened their steps toward home as familiar objects mutated into something vaguely menacing. Among the twisted shapes of barren trees and pools of dark shadows lay the possibility that the monsters of childhood were not all dead, that they had not all been chased from under the bed, nor were they safely locked in the closet but were escaped to haunt the night.
For Alan Chandler, the fear followed him inside. The warmth of hearth and home failed to dispel the anxiety that roiled within his mind. Underlying his post-youthful face lay anxiety. The muscles in his jaws tended to clench. Unconsciously, he worried his hands together. He paced, and then suddenly dropped onto the edge of a kitchen chair. Grasping his head he buried the palms against his forehead attempting to squeeze back the thoughts that threatened to burst forth. Then he worried his hair, grasping clumps of it between his fingers and pulling, threatening to tear the blond locks out by their roots. Just as suddenly he leapt up and resumed pacing.
Doors and windows are easily locked; but how does one shut the portals of the mind? The terrifying anxiety attacks of his childhood, the ones he believed buried, had returned. Obsessive compulsive thoughts were freed from the fetters he and his therapist worked so hard to build, now these thoughts roamed his mind and ravaged his gut. Waves of anxiety rose up and swept over him, leaving every detail of his existence appearing foreign and strange. At these times he trembled with fear. Yet at thirty-two, he had no parent, no external super-ego, to check under the bed and say, “Everything is okay.”
Existence made Alan claustrophobic. It was an insoluble human dilemma, you either went on forever or you stopped, period! It was this dichotomy, which brought on the anxiety attacks. Worse yet, he had no choice! For Alan, life wasn’t a question of, “To be or not to be,” rather it was a condition of Sartre’s “No way out.”
Lilly Chandler calmly cooked dinner as Alan fretted beset by inner demons.
“Why worry about what you can’t change?” she asked. Though she was more exasperated that he was like this again, than interested in any answer to her question.
Alan shook his head. “You don't understand.” For his part, he no longer tried to explain the compulsion, which drove him; as though he might one day comprehend the infinite or measure nothingness.
Lilly lifted the lid, steam swirled out as she dropped the Rigatoni into boiling water. She began to speak of her day but Alan did not hear, the inner stream of thoughts resumed, a voice he was powerless to silence, “Today, I am! But tomorrow I may not be? I will be nothing,...no not even that.” Alan shifted anxiously in his chair.
Lilly placidly poured wine for dinner and aligned a crooked fork on its cloth napkin.
Alan was sick as he thought,. Or I exist, condemned to an infinity ahead, days without number, no rest, no peace, and no end.”
Neither knew their lives were coming to a boiling point.
*
Dawn moved across the sky. Venus, lingered as the stars faded in the light. Alan tightly gripped the steering wheel as his Jeep roared up the pass road toward his mountain cabin at Red Lake. He handled the car evenly but his foot pressed hard on the gas. Earlier, he drove too fast in the fog for what the police would considered “responsible and reasonable” but he was above it, the sun bright and the road clear. Now, he pressed the Jeep even harder, as if late for an appointment that waited ahead. But in fact he was fleeing. his life, A successful series of small failures! he frequently thought. He ran from from his job, his wife, himself and hopefully, even the knowledge that he existed.
The road steepened. The engine dropped to a throaty rumble. and Alan nudged the gas pedal down to maintain speed. Outside Beaumont the road had been straight as an arrow, but in the foothills the road ran in long easy curves and brief straight-aways. Later the road was tortuous hairpin turns bordering precipitous drop-offs.
He enjoyed the rush of freedom as he wheeled lightly around a curve.
The air was cold, chilled by the snow pack above; it descended silently and to the valley floor. Despite the low temperature he drove with the window open, holding the chill at bay with a hot blast of climate controlled comfort by Chrysler. His cheek tingled with the cold. He savored the sensation; his core body heat was fighting the chilly onslaught. It was nature in the microcosm.
The Jeep’s tires chirped as he pulled the wheel hard over for a tighter than expected curve. He drifted wide. A cloud of dust rose and gravel nipped the undercarriage as the wheels clipped the shoulder. A hard rush of adrenaline hit his system. Better pay attention, he thought. But shortly, his mind drifted.
Lilly must be up by now, he thought. Perhaps she has already turned on the coffee maker and found the note. Did she find it hard or irritating? Perhaps a relief?. She wasn’t assailed by doubts or unanswerable questions. She was a kindred spirit to St. Francis of Assisi, “accept those things you can not change.” Lilly never chafed against life as he did. At least Alan never sensed it until last night.
For Alan life was a suspected boil. He mentally picked at it. In his psyche was the nagging fear that it would prove to be putrefied.
The anxiety attacks began during those lazy days of summer when he and other children were packed onto buses and shipped off to live in the woods. For a moment Alan smelled the stuffy warmth of the canvas tents. In his minds eye he saw the dining hall, a cavernous log structure, where he introduced his fellow campers to the glories of butter-and-sugar on white bread. At first derided, they soon joined in, sweeping the table clean of butter, bread, and sugar. The counselor banned their culinary excess, permitting two of the necessary ingredients but never again allowing all three at the same time.
“How much like life,” he thought. “So often, something was missing at the feast.”
He skirted these memories, allowing his mind to near and only to dart away from the accompanying anxiety. While other boys learned how to knock each other out by hyperventilating, or to make a lanyard, or practiced canoeing and camping skills, he learned fear.
Each evening the boys were gathered around a blazing campfire for the evening, “Circle.” Songs were sung, skits performed, and sermons preached. As young eyes grew heavy and the fire collapsed into a cauldron of red hot coals, (the headmaster’s timing had been neatly calculated), boys full of mischief were urged to contemplate the holiness of God and the fires of hell. Eternity! At age seven, an eternity is the time between recess and lunch, or the hours between landing in trouble and dad coming home from work. To appreciate fully the glories of heaven and the agonies of hell
, the children needed a metaphor.
Alan recalled the Headmaster’s face demonically illuminated by the glowing coals.
“Suppose a dove were to fly past the earth once every ten thousand years, and as he passed brush the planet with his wingtip.” (The master’s eternal dove was not bothered by the lack of air in space or by re-entry temperatures.) “When the feathers finally wear Earth away to nothing, eternity has just begun.”
The inevitable altar call followed and was heartily responded to by those wished to avoid burning in hell. Laying on his cot that night, Alan pondered the Headmaster’s concept, not of heaven and hell, but endless continuing. That’s when the fear came.
Clinically speaking, it was an anxiety attacks, an acceleration of pulse and respiration, a rush of adrenaline, causing tightness in the chest and anxiety. The fight-or-flight response, but where to fly? At seven years of age Alan felt who he was and what he perceived could not be trusted. His old reality of time and space crumbled before the idea of endless being. The inescapability of lasting forever, whether in heaven or hell, terrorized him. Fear welled up from a depth of his being he had not known he possessed. Before this onslaught he fled to the intellectual safety of an ending. Late at night he told himself, All things end! School ends, camp ends, life ends. But this refuge was short-lived, for though the thought of forever was terrible, Alan suddenly found nothingness to be worse!
I am! Someday I won’t be!
Alan felt the abyss of anxiety open. He focused on his driving and thus his fears at bay, But emotionally he was only a Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, a time would come when the dam burst and fear carry him away.
Along the road the newly leafed deciduous trees gave way to the pines of higher elevations. Their scent wafted in the open car window; not the captive pine smell of Christmas, this bore the scent of the earth, humus, and decaying vegetation. The sun, barely above the horizon, left long sections of roadway in deep shadow, though the treetops were brilliantly green in the morning sun. Light, dark, light, dark, the shadows flicked by. He reached over and pressed the scan button on the radio, the digital numbers flashed by in rapid succession, stopping only twice, once at a Mexican station and then on a raspy country western song.
With a nasal twang a singer bemoaned his lover’s cheating heart.
And, presumably, other disloyal body parts.! Alan mused. I wonder if Lilly has ever cheated? Alan dismissed the thought; that simply was not in her character.
Alan’s mind drifted. They met his senior year in college when taking a psychology class. He was intense, whereas she was passive. He was given to argument and discussion, she to long silences and acceptance. Alan had never encountered someone so at peace with life. Hers was not the bliss of the ignorance, she was well informed, it was her ability to let things go that intrigued and horrified him, her total lack of need or desire to defend her positions.
During their seven years of marriage, he never asked Lilly what attracted her to him. He knew he made the usual efforts to charm. He avoided taking her to action flicks when they first dated, brought flowers and repressed the urge to speak of his fears. And once they were married, he scrupulously remembered birthdays and anniversaries. But why was she drawn to him in the first place? And, why did he choose not ask?
Silently he worried it wasn’t a spark but simple familiarity that finally brought them together. He never successfully plumbed the depths of Lilly’s soul. When he tried, his intellectual lead line endlessly played out in her bottomless depth.. He had given up dissecting Lilly and accepted her, as she had accepted hi Or perhaps she is so shallow the line merely coils on the bottom?
The road tightened up and the curves harder. Alan took one too fast and the Jeep drifted to the side. Tapping his brakes he avoided the shoulder, but the shock sent a rush of adrenaline through him. He let the Jeep lose its momentum on the steepness of the hill and settled himself to a more leisurely pace. Gradually the pine trees became stunted and thinly spaced on the rocky terrain. Between them crags and granite boulders studded the hills, their quartz bits glittered in the sunlight.
Ahead the road disappeared into the sky. It was the first of many switchbacks. He braked as the road made an 180-degree right turn, and pulled unto the shoulder. He stepped out and stretched his back to release the tightness. The land fell away in a steep slanting plain toward the valley below. Sunlight glinted on pieces of the asphalt ribbon. In the last half- hour he passed only two vehicles, both logging trucks heading down from the mountains. This was true wilderness. No paved roads branched off the highway, no homes studded the landscape, and no persons were afoot
Alan rummaged in his rucksack and found the thermos of coffee he made at home, and a package of doughnuts he bought at a fuel stop. “Last gas for 80 miles,” the sign warned, though Alan knew that. Many times he passed it on his way to the cabin. The station was old and an air of lassitude clung to it, accentuated by the faded sign, peeling paint and amid autos abandoned to rust after being mangled in accidents on the grade. The station's pumps were those of his childhood, no credit card scanners. One paid inside.
He tried to make idle chitchat the clerk. The youth was gaunt, grungy and wiry, Alan overweight, tidy, and soft. They found nothing in common. To each, the other was unmemorable. To Alan's vexation, the kid moved slowly. As he took Alan’s Visa card and placed it on an old manual machine, slam to the right, slam to the left, to make a carbon copy of the card. The youth tore off Alan’s copy with fingers caked with dirt, he handed Alan one and flipped the station copy into the open till. Two cartons of cigarettes and Alan’s supply of junk food were piled beside the register. He stopped for the gas and cigarettes the remainder was impulse shopping. Donuts, candy, nuts, and a piece of questionable fruit The clerk put the smokes in a one plastic bag and the other items in another, but the youth’s cuticles made Alan wish he had packed it himself.
Standing roadside, Alan poured himself coffee, hot, black, and burnt. He favored strong roasts, Lilly called his coffee mud. He bit into a powdered doughnut and sent a small cascade of powdered sugar down his shirt. For the moment he was at peace. Five minutes late he finished his coffee, shoved the thermos into his rucksack, and climbed back into the Jeep. With a glance to check if the road was clear, he pulled out. Patsy Klein’s voice crackled and then failed as he lost the radio station. He turned the dial and picked up the F.M. station in Red Lake.
Alan thought of their cabin on the lake. It was a stretch to buy it but at the time they thought of themselves as upwardly mobile. Then prices began to fall and he wished they waited. The drive proved further than was convenient. During the winter, the pass was often closed by snow which meant a long detour to the west. Consequently, in the winter they visited less often. There were happy moments! he thought, lazy evenings before the stone fireplace on a cold night or swimming in the lake during idyllic summer days. However those moments of peace became less frequent, until they dwindled to a trickle. At home, they all but disappeared after “the incident” at the office. That is when he entered therapy.
Whether therapy was helping him he could not say. Alan saw the extremely religious finding shelter in the dogma of their faith, the stronger the dogma the fewer the doubts. The atheist apparently accepted or found comfort in eventual nothingness. Yet, he chafed at both extremes and found no refuge in their answers. Life left him paralyzed. Self-awareness, the trait, which set man above the animals, was the very thing on which he tripped.
He had gained a great deal of altitude during the past twenty minutes. The mountains were now heavily forested. Facing south the granite rocks gathered the sun, channeling the spring melt. Here the road straightened out for a bit, running easily along the ridge. Above to the left there rose a range of higher peaks still clad in white. The snow would retreat with summer but the peaks would always remain hidden. On his right the road fell away into thick forests. Soon the ridge petered out and the road twisted to begin another ascent. Here at the turn was a spectacular view
that always amazed Alan.
He stopped the car. The shoulder of the road dropped away so hard that it made his stomach twitch. In the cleft between two mountains a river descended into the gorge at the bottom. He saw white cataracts where the water smashed and spilled down the stony face. A rainbow shimmered in the mist above the water.. By late summer it would be a lazy stream, but for now, it carried the force and violence of youth. Even at this distance, he could hear the rush of water over and against the rocks as it made its course down the mountain.
As he continued the road became all cut-and-fill clinging to the side of the hill. Nature had left no little level land here. The cuts exposed steep hillsides of loose rip rap. Small mounds of rocky rubble lay beside the road where the gravel hillside shifted. On the other side of the car the ground fell away so steeply that Alan only saw the tops of the fir trees. Occasionally when they thinned out he was able to see the canyon's hard scar in the landscape. Above the canyon a buzzard circled in the sky. Buzzards were the faithful undertaker of the wilderness. They were scavengers of carrion, thriving off the death of others. Up close they were large ugly birds but in the sky riding the thermal winds they were all grace and beauty. The bird rose higher. With a tilt of its wings it silently glided across the canyon easily covering what would take a man a day to do on foot.
The winter freezes and spring thaw had bitten into the road. The jeep made an occasional heart-wrenching thump on fresh potholes. His coffee cup made a hop across the dash. He saved it and slowed his pace. Alan listened to his car, the motor ran slightly rough, the carburetor being set for a lower altitude. His large tires whined on the pavement.
In twenty minutes I'll be at the saddle between the mountains and should see Red Lake.
Alan loved that first glimpse of the shimmering pool of liquid silver nestled between granite boulders. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. As the Red Lake radio station faded, blocked by the hills. He gave up and pushed the button for the CD. The Eagles filled the jeep singing, “Get Over It!”