by Tim Sandlin
I kicked her tire. It was firm. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“That’s stupid.”
“I know.”
She looked at me, “How will you live?”
“I’ve got plenty of food.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’ll die in a week up there, Kelly.”
“Maybe.”
There wasn’t much else to say. Then something kind of peculiar happened. Cora Ann walked over and hugged me—hugged me tight. I’d known her two years, and she’d been my best friend for one, but in all that time, Cora Ann had never hugged me. In fact, except on the dance floor, I doubt she even touched me more than twice.
It felt odd. I’m not used to touching anyone I’m not trying to fuck. It felt very odd.
So—bright-blue overloaded pack on my back, Royal portable hanging from my right hand, I marched up the trail and into the mountains.
9
My life has been full of periods. I wonder if other people know the moment that their lives go from flip to flop. I imagine some future biographer compiling a ten-volume study of Kelly Palamino. I know the date and hour that each volume ends. Each chapter in each volume. The nerd period. The hippie period. The mountain man period. Each period as different as winter and summer in Wyoming.
Wednesday morning I awakened in the same bed I had awakened in for the past four years. I had every intention of sleeping, waking, and, sixty years from now, dying in that bed. Wednesday afternoon I’m a man with no home, no cat, all his possessions on his back.
The same thing occurred when I left New Orleans. At noon I walked down Esplanade, confident my whole life would revolve around the Quarter. By two, we were gone.
Julie moved in with me the afternoon we met.
I dedicated my life to Colette five seconds after I first saw her.
God, or Whoever, doesn’t nudge me toward my fate. She blows me out of a cannon.
This series of obsessions, if you want to call them that, has made me into what I consider a unique individual. Show me another man who can skin an elk, roll a joint with his eyes closed, knows every Dodger lineup from 1954 through ’63, can recite the books of the Bible backward from Revelations, tear down and put together any dish machine made, and write a four-hundred-page novel on a typewriter without a space bar.
On the other hand, how many grownups can’t check the oil on a car, tie a necktie, balance a checkbook, or remember the last time they changed underwear?
***
I set up camp along the creek about a mile and a half above the Broken Hart ranch. It was a nice, simple camp, the two-man tent and firepit hidden from the trail, yet close to water, a fine old aspen for hanging the food at night, plenty of dry firewood—ideal spot for a cigarette commercial.
Thursday dawn the birds threw a group tizzy that had me awake and blindly groping for my glasses hours earlier than what I’m accustomed to. I crawled from the tent barefoot, coughed, scratched, spit a bad taste, and pissed facing the rising sun. Indians always peed facing the sun. It has religious significance.
As the sagebrush turned from gray to pink and back to gray again, I slow-moseyed back and forth between the creek and the woods, gathering twigs, dipping water, stumbling over tent stakes. The creek played “March of the Cue Balls,” by Henry Mancini. I take it as a good omen when the water sings something I know.
Dew had tightened up the knot on my bag, and I had a hell of a time getting the food out of the tree. I started a fire by spraying the kindling with lighter fluid and throwing in a match.
Four cups of boiled coffee and a bowl of oatmeal later, I brushed my teeth and wandered deeper into the woods to squat. Obeying the rule that one big pile is less likely to be stepped in by an innocent hiker than two little piles, I crapped on old coyote droppings. Then I wiped and burned the toilet paper.
After that, I collected the binoculars, a little bag of granola, and a packet of unsweetened Kool-Aid and went to work.
Work was easy. I lay on a flat rock next to a limber pine, with the binoculars pressed against my glasses, and waited for Colette.
The rock sat at the top of a steep hill above the ranch. Behind my spot was a flat, hidden meadow, then the forested ridge continued on up to camp. If I stayed in the trees coming down the ridge, crouched low in the meadow, and slid on my stomach across the flat rock, I was perfectly safe from being seen. I even made a cardboard shade for the binoculars so they wouldn’t flash in the sun.
The view couldn’t be beat. It covered the creek, the jeep trail, the sloping yard, and all one side and the back of the bunkhouse. While I couldn’t see Danny and Colette’s front door, most of the yard between their place and the big house was open, so it would be difficult for anyone to come and go from the bunkhouse without my knowing. The other side of John’s big house was horse pasture and a barn, then the long driveway out to the arched gate. Beyond the gate stretched beautiful Jackson Hole, the Snake River, and the Gros Ventre Mountains.
With a good rifle, I could have pinned down a full platoon on the ranch grounds. Would have been a piece of cake to kill the whole Hart family. However, killing Harts was not my purpose. My purpose was to keep an eye on them.
I had no sooner found my position and settled in comfortably than Danny and Thor came out the front of the bunkhouse. Danny walked the hundred yards up a slight rise and went into his parents’ house without knocking. The dog spotted a ground squirrel ducking down a hole and went after it, dirt flying.
Twenty minutes later, Danny and Mr. Hart came out the back door, exchanged a few words, then each got into a look-alike Dodge four-wheel-drive Powerwagon and drove away.
Lying on my stomach, watching the Powerwagons turn right toward town and the bank, I developed a theory. I decided that Danny ate breakfast with his parents every day. I based this theory on my morning phone calls to Colette. Whenever I called before ten, I woke her up.
I made a mental note to correct this habit after we were married. Differing breakfast habits can ruin even the best of marriages.
For a while I watched Thor chase squirrels and pee on bushes, but he was boring, so I set down the binoculars and ate some granola.
Maybe an hour later, Mrs. Hart came around the front of the big house and began puttering in a little garden someone had staked out alongside the creek. If Mrs. Hart was weeding, she sure wasn’t very systematic about it. She stood with one hand touching her chin and looked at the ground, then walked a couple of steps, bent over and pulled something up, then she stood straight with her hand under her chin and repeated the process. It looked more like picking lint off a large wool sweater than weeding a garden.
I could see Mrs. Hart clearly through the binoculars. She didn’t seem alert—not dumb, necessarily, just gone to pasture. Her hair was short and brown. Her mouth neither smiled nor frowned. It just sat there above her one and a half chins as if it had nothing else to do. She wore cotton gardening gloves that hid her fingers, so I couldn’t really judge her for quality. Fingers are the only way I have of judging a woman’s quality—other than sleeping with her.
Colette has nice fingers.
Mrs. Hart didn’t putter around the garden long, ten minutes tops, before she walked down to Colette’s house and went in without knocking.
Mrs. Hart stayed in the bunkhouse a long time. I got hot and moved to the shade, then cool and moved back. A light spray of clouds drifted south from the Yellowstone Plateau, a sure sign that it would rain in a few days. A red-tailed hawk wheeled clockwise above me, checking to see if I was dead or deteriorating.
As it turned out, the unsweetened Kool-Aid proved useless because my lookout post was way above the creek. The creek bounced down from my camp and left the ridge a quarter-mile south of the ranch, where it curled along the base of the hill until, behind the bunkhouse, it cut east to the river.
I should have known about the curl from my hang-
gliding adventure, but I wasn’t thinking well. I hardly ever think well.
Around noon, I belly-slid off the rock to search for lunch. My living-off-the-land plant-identification menu is real limited. I can safely eat two things: berries—service, blue, and huckle—and the root of the Everts’ thistle. Since June is a month early for berry season, I was stuck with roots. Everts’ thistle tastes like a cross between a raw potato and cardboard. If I hadn’t been so stubborn about the pure hermit-on-the-mountain experience, I’d have stocked up on Twinkies and transcended bushes and berries.
Anyhow, after a hearty lunch of dirty roots, I crawled back onto the rock in time to see Colette bounce out of the house wearing nothing but a tube top and a pair of cut-off jeans. She looked beautiful—posture, hair, eyes, fingers, tattoo, the whole works. With the binoculars, I focused down close enough to eat her. Made me so hard I had trouble lying on my stomach.
Colette jogged across the lawn, climbed into an off-white Subaru, and drove away. I didn’t see her again for six hours.
***
Every now and then, spread on that rock and watching an empty house, life seemed a bit monotonous. The clouds were great. Birds are always interesting, and I know just feeling the sun should be enough, but, much as I pretend I don’t need them, I missed being near people. I mean, I’m used to spending most of my time alone, but I never completely removed myself from the human race before. In my most intense times of solitude, I could walk to the Cowboy and sit on a saddle and be surrounded by the smells and sounds of people.
Total withdrawal was odd. I lay with my cheek on the rock, studying the tree trunk next to me, and one stupid, meaningless phrase started up in my head and circled round and round, searching for a way out.
The phrase was “modicum of potatoes.” Where did that come from, anyway? I must have thought “modicum of potatoes” a thousand times before Colette returned.
Several days later, after I caught flu and became feverish and my diet and sleeping habits slid, the phrases grew louder, lasted longer, made less sense. The last couple of days camping out, I felt like giant shells were Scotch-taped to my ears, but instead of the ocean, the shells roared “Smorgasbord slips by,” over and over.
It was enough to drive me crazy.
The first day, though, “modicum of potatoes” felt kind of nice. A pleasant break from the water singing the blues, quoting The Canterbury Tales, and rerunning Sergeant Bilko TV shows.
The weather was perfect. The clouds drifted, the hawk drifted, I drifted. As I hugged the warm rock, all nature seemed about as stable and real as nondairy coffee creamer. Nothing mattered. I was happy again.
“Modicum of potatoes,” I thought, staring at the rock.
I was almost disappointed when they returned home, first John, then, a couple of hours later, Danny followed Colette up the drive and into the family parking area. Danny got out first and walked over and opened Colette’s door. When she stepped from the car, Colette was wearing sandals. She had been barefoot that afternoon, so I figured she either bought some sandals, borrowed them, or had them in the car all along. Or maybe she found them.
Arm in arm, Colette and Danny walked into the house. I waited until way after dark, but they never came back outside.
***
Back at the camp, I hauled water, built a fire, and cooked my macaroni and cheese, usual camp busywork. As I busied around the campfire, the creek bubbled and babbled, “It is not worth the while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
“Thoreau,” I said. “Conclusion of Walden.”
“Right,” the creek answered.
The creek answered. In two years of listening to running water, the water had never listened to me. I had either dropped off the edge or made a major breakthrough in personified-object communication.
“Come again?” I said, but the creek went off on another train of thought.
“If a chicken is killed and it is not cooked properly, that chicken has died in vain.”
“That one’s easy,” I said. “Lin Yutang by way of Alan Watts.”
The creek wouldn’t say whether I was right or not. It probably read the original and didn’t realize Alan Watts used it later.
My camp was pitched just inside the border of Grand Teton National Park, which means I was highly illegal—federal-offense illegal. I had to keep the fire squaw-size so no one in the valley below would see it and come investigating. A ridge blocked direct view, and the spot was sheltered by Douglas fir on one side and Mertensia on the other, but I still wasn’t taking any chances.
Even with this tiny fire, by the time the mac and cheese was cooked and eaten and the evening hot chocolate nice and hot, a fair mound of coals glowed pink and red against the dark circle of stones. I lay on my side next to the fire, watching the embers pulsate, thinking the same thoughts that men and women watching a dying fire have thought for centuries.
I thought about God and death and Colette and my books. The things I thought frightened me. Doubt crept in concerning all four. What if they weren’t all they had been built up to be?
The inspired fanatic cannot afford doubt. The only possible way to continue an unrealistic life is to shut off all doubts, all qualms and compromises. Otherwise, you realize everything is a meaningless pile of shit and you kill yourself.
***
Wednesday and Thursday constituted the longest stretch I’d gone without alcohol abuse since Julie left, which may account for why I overslept Friday. Late that morning, sunlight on the nylon caused an oven effect in the tent, and I awoke in a puddle of sweat. Rolling over, I put on my glasses and stared at blue breeze ripples in the ceiling. Something was wrong. None of my joints ached. My stomach was nothing but a little hungry. I touched my head—no pain.
So this is what it’s like not to have a hangover, I thought. To someone who’s in pain most of the time, absence of pain is a creepy sensation. I felt guilty, like I was getting away with something nasty.
***
Saturday was the most exciting day of my time on the rock. They threw another cookout like the one on Memorial Day, and Colette stayed in sight all afternoon. She wore a dark pullover shirt, jeans, and Nike running shoes. She drank seven beers from the keg and played a mean game of volleyball. Her serves weren’t worth much, but Colette’s true talent was the desperate defensive save. Several times she set Danny up for killer spike shots.
After lunch, Danny and most of the men threw horseshoes while the women cleaned up the mess. Colette tried to relax in a lawn chair, but Mrs. Hart coerced her and one of the girls I recognized from the Cowboy into a round of croquet. I don’t think Colette wanted to play. As Mrs. Hart dragged her by the hand toward the mallet rack, Colette kept glancing south. I think she was hoping me and my hang glider would swoop around the bend and save her from a game with Danny’s mother. Before Mrs. Hart led off, Colette ran into the bunkhouse and came back with a bottle of Grand Marnier, which she held on to, tipping drinks as they circled the wickets.
The game progressed through the first five wickets without much fuss. The girl from the Cowboy was ahead, with Colette close on her heels. In front of the double wicket turnaround post, Mrs. Hart caught up and hit Colette’s ball. Mrs. Hart put the balls together so they were touching, and with one foot on her ball, she walloped Colette’s ball clear off the course and into a rut behind a lodgepole pine. I didn’t see any way for Colette to get back in the game in less than two or three strokes.
But then Thor started a fight with a malamute, and Danny jumped in to break it up. People yelled and shouted, and while everyone but me was watching the action, Colette kicked her ball out of the rut, around the tree, and ten feet closer to the post.
I was shocked. Two rules are sacred to me: first, never cheat at games, and second, whenever a cashier gives you too much change, always give the extra money back. That’s a simple code of ethics, if you
ask me. I can live by it. Why couldn’t Colette?
Setting the binoculars aside, I lay on my back and faced the clouds. Colette—the beautiful, the ideal, my chosen partner for life—was a cheater. A gyp. How could that be? Doubts swirled in the air over my lookout rock. Who was Colette, anyway? Why did I love her? She punted a football and looked at me with pitiful eyes, and instantly I knew her for the perfect woman.
Right now, that seemed like a rash assumption. Perfect women don’t cheat. She was playing against her own mother-in-law, for Chrissake.
Turning back over on my stomach, I searched the lawn with the binoculars until I found Colette sitting next to her bottle on the bunkhouse steps. Her posture wasn’t as perfect as usual. Her eyes appeared kind of flat and glassy, nostalgic, maybe, or full of melancholy.
She looked like a lost little girl. I felt a moment of terrible sadness. She was probably thinking about her brother and how he was gone. And me, she must wonder where I am, why I left her alone.
For a moment, I almost walked down the hill to hold and comfort her, but Danny and John would have caused a scene—which was their right. Besides, Colette might not want comfort. Her body leaned at an odd angle. The melancholy face could have more to do with beer and Grand Marnier than any yearning for a fulfilling existence. Even so, I knew her thoughts and secrets were with me.
***
Sunday the weather turned cold, the wind blew, and the rain came down in sheets. I lay on my rock all day, exposed to rain, lightning, hail, and everything else imaginable. It’s a wonder I didn’t die. And not once, even for a second, did Colette or anyone related to her show themselves. All day I hunched up against the elements and watched the driveway fill with water. I would have thought they were all dead if somebody hadn’t kicked Thor out and let him back in twice.
That night my wood was soaked and my fingers stiff, so I couldn’t build a fire. I started shivering. I couldn’t stop. In my wet clothes, I crawled into the sleeping bag and lay on my back and shook until morning.