“You remember Eddie?” said Shane. He had written Porn in the USA: A Concordance, among other things. “He’s slinging burgers in a blues bar, apparently. They call him Fast Eddie.”
Shane told me that our friend Alex, who wrote 88 Ways to Please 88 Women, was married and miserable in England. He stayed in his office until nine every night.
“It’s a matter of time until the secretary bats an eyelid,” I suggested.
“I don’t think so,” said Shane. “That’s what’s so tragic. He wants kids and stuff. She’s on medication for panic attacks. It’s like after they married they moved to opposite poles of the emotional earth.”
“Emotional earth?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Right. So someone dances around his emotional pole and that’s that.”
“I don’t think he will,” said Shane.
“Why not?”
“He wants kids, not just some hearty low roll in the hay. That’s what’s so depressing.”
“One leads to the other.” Shane was always charitable to a fault.
Once you have your paste, you put it on a cookie sheet and stick it in the oven until it becomes a black powder, about twenty minutes.
“Let’s change the subject,” I said. I felt vaguely ashamed of our callow youth. Grown men smoke banana peels, after all.
Shane told me he had taken up driving a bus in the mornings and afternoons, fitting his academic work around that. “Not a bus, a van, really. Shuttling kids to a Montessori school.” It kept him in beer.
“Rich kids,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s hilarious,” he said. “And kind of worrying. These little kids, five and six years old, get on and the first thing they say to each other is you can’t have the fucking rumble seat, you had it yesterday asshole, give me the fucking rumble seat.” He mimed kicks and punches. “You can’t tell their parents. I mean, you can, but they won’t listen. They think Dakota or Priscilla or Cheyenne or Tabitha is an angel and you must be mistaken, it was the other kids.”
“Sounds terrible,” I said.
“Well, it was. For the first week I thought, How can I defuse all this anger? I tried to get them to sing songs. They told me to fuck off. I tried to tell jokes. They ignored me. So I thought, How can I channel all this rage?”
He paused dramatically and I dutifully asked how he channeled it.
“I showed them cars that don’t signal and drivers that overtake the van when they shouldn’t, stuff like that. I said when you see those people, flip them the bird. They didn’t know what that meant so I showed them.”
“You’re showing six-year-olds how to give the finger?”
“Only to people who deserve it.”
Once your paste has browned and solidified, you crush it with a mortar and pestle, and it’s ready to smoke. Shane had loose tobacco and rolling papers, and we rolled one very fat starter joint and a couple of smaller ones in reserve.
“How is Lola, anyway?” he said. They had met a few times but they didn’t seem to like each other. Neither said so directly to me, but I gathered that Shane found her pretentious, and Lola once called him “earthy.”
“When small birds sigh, she sighs back at them,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s a poem you showed me in seventh grade. Theodore Roethke.”
“I don’t remember that,” said Shane. “What I remember,” he said, and left it hanging while he inhaled deeply from the first joint and held it in as long as he could.
“Harsh,” he said, coughing and handing it to me.
I inhaled. Banana smoke is grating and deeply unpleasant.
“What I remember,” he said, “is you finding a bucket of huge frogs in the biology lab.”
I had flung them individually down the smooth marble halls just before the bell rang, spraying formaldehyde everywhere. Boys flung them farther, girls screamed, and teachers panicked. I was a hero for the afternoon.
“What I remember,” I said, when it was his turn to smoke, “is you climbing out the window of my car into the window of Holiday Hancock’s car at forty-five miles an hour.” Holiday probably wrote The Anarchist Cookbook herself.
The cookbook promises that the effects of bananadine are felt after two or three cigarettes. We smoked eight in succession, reminiscing on the stupid, shallow, dangerous dumb things we used to do.
“It’s a hoax,” I said. Neither of us could feel a thing. “It has to be. Otherwise you could buy the stuff on the street. Banana prices would spike.”
“I thought it might be,” he said.
I looked at the clock. It was nearly five. Outside the rain continued.
“Well, that’s one afternoon shot to hell,” I said.
“No,” said Shane. “Other people are watching TV.”
VIII
How Do
I was in the forest as usual when I encountered a hunter.
“How do,” he said. I hadn’t heard that greeting in years, except passing ironically through my own lips. We had come face-to-face in a deep ravine and could not continue without making way for each other. He was about my size but twenty years older, with a pockmarked gray face, greasy gray-brown hair, and a wiry frame.
“Pretty good,” I said, stepping aside. “Seen anything worth shooting?”
He stayed where he was and glanced at the strap holding his rifle over his right shoulder. One side of his face seemed to be higher than the other, though I couldn’t have said which—only that a sort of oblique fracture ran from his forehead through his nose to his chin. Whether it inclined left or right would need careful measurement, but the effect was that it was surprising when both eyes blinked simultaneously, when he spoke with both sides of his mouth.
“No,” he said. “I carry this just in case but you don’t see much these days.”
He was wrong. I frightened deer and flushed foxes every half hour some days. But saying so might seem insulting.
“I don’t even bring my skinning knife anymore,” he added. “Rifle’s mostly for devil dogs.” He meant coyotes, and I liked them.
“Good luck,” I said, and made to squeeze past.
“What I’m really after,” he said quickly, his brown eyes in a wild, almost bovine flush, “is morels. They went for twelve dollars a pound last year in town. If I wanted to shoot shit I prolly woulda brought the shotgun.”
“Afraid you’re not the only one looking,” I said. I always meant to collect them myself; twelve dollars a pound is an attractive proposition to a man on birdwatcher’s pay. But those morels also drew expeditions of gourmands and hippies, so you’d have to gather quickly.
“I know,” he said, “but you look like you might know where to find them.”
“I’m not a ranger,” I said.
“I can see that. Ranger wears a uniform. You’re wearing three coats of mud and a couple of Christmas wreaths.”
I laughed. “I study birds,” I said. “I don’t know much about morels except they grow best after a forest fire, and fortunately we haven’t had one of those.”
“You must spend a lot of time out here,” he said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“So you could at least tell me where you’ve seen people searching for morels.”
Any direction would do. I pointed vaguely east.
“But now does that mean I should follow them since that’s where the morels are at? Or does that mean they’ve already cleaned that quadrant out?”
“You might scare them if you follow,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“Most mushroom pickers don’t carry guns.”
He laughed, with yellow inconsecutive teeth.
“Mushroom ain’t got much defense,” he said. I couldn’t help picturing him taking aim at an unsuspecting fungus.
“You could come with me,” he added. “They’ll never see you coming. Them other mushroomers. They might smell you, though.” He clapped my shoulder and grinned.
“I’m afr
aid I have work to do,” I said.
“Don’t they have birds where the morels is at?”
“Yeah, but not my birds.”
“Your birds?”
“Yeah. I keep track of the same ones, more or less.”
He pondered that. “So if they run into trouble you help them out?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t interfere.”
His forehead knotted and his eyebrows formed a single gray line.
“You spend all your time on one bird and then it meets a snake and you just watch?”
“I’m not usually around,” I said. “I look every day to see if a snake’s been visiting.”
“Bird ain’t got much defense,” he said. Against my better judgment I felt pulled into the argument.
“They can fly,” I said.
“Eggs can’t fly,” he said. “Not no more than mushrooms can.”
I couldn’t think of a refutation for that. I peered at him and he at me and it seemed we had reached our first major disagreement.
“They both fry pretty good though,” he exclaimed, clapping my shoulder again.
“I used to dress just like you,” he added, stepping closer so that I was pinned against the bank of the ravine. “I trained in North Carolina near Asheville. Thrash around in the mud three times and clip some rhododendron on your helmet, you’re ready to roll.”
I knew that he was telling the truth. I have been to North Carolina near Asheville, where the rhododendron is an ecological catastrophe.
Abruptly he stepped back. “But you don’t want to hear all that,” he said, and changed the subject. “I don’t even like morels. But where else am I going to find twelve dollars a pound just lying around?”
“Out of interest,” I said, “where would you sell them?”
“Restaurants. Buddy of mine did it last year. What I really want to do is go to restaurant B with a hatful and tell ’em what restaurant A offered. See if I can work up a bidding war.”
“Well,” I said. “Don’t try west, I guess. Younger trees.” We were surrounded by enormous pin oaks and poplars, but some sections of the forest had been logged during the Depression. They were mature now but less favorable, I thought, to morels.
“Do you like your job?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Pay’s a joke, but I enjoy it.”
“I’m fixin’ to retire,” he said. “Look at these hands.” He held them out splayed, palms down, and I could see that they were scarred horribly to the wrist, as if he had plunged them into a bucket of glass shards long ago. I thought this might have something to do with what came after that training in North Carolina, which made me uneasy at the likely turn of conversation. But he surprised me.
“Recycling,” he said. “See, you have a good job. I had skills like yours once, but people want to know if you can touch type or drive a forklift. I wound up sorting through people’s beer bottles and pizza boxes for a living. I can tell you how far away a man is if I can work out his height. That don’t shift mortgages or televisions, though, does it?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I didn’t want to know, but professional pride intervened. “Triangulation,” I said. “I do that, too.”
“I bet you do. That’s why I said it.”
“How long have you had your recycling job?” I said, getting anxious.
“Twelve years. I moved up from garbage collection. I can tell you the average width of a human head and the average length between two average human shoulders, too.”
I did not want to know why he knew these things, so I tried again to change the subject.
“I’m not particularly suited to any other trade, myself.”
“I’m sure you got a college degree,” he said. “Can’t study birds without a college degree.”
“It helps,” I said.
“If you wanted a job stuffing envelopes in the bank they’d give it to you. You could tell all the bankers about your bird job and they’d lap it up.”
“I guess I’m glad to have my office out here,” I said.
“I didn’t study birds, that’s my problem. I studied little gremlins in black pyjamas, straw woks upside down on their little heads. Studied ’em real good, too. Forty-six of ’em. Bankers aren’t interested in that kind of thing.”
I had expected something like that, and I began to look around frantically for a bird doing something that I should observe. But as he had earlier, he switched tactics on me abruptly.
“Do you have a favorite bird?” he said.
“Wood thrush, I suppose.”
“They’re real pretty. Beautiful song,” he said. “I bet I can tell you something about birds you don’t know.”
I waited.
“In British India three hundred years ago it was the highest distinction in marksmanship to hit a snipe. If you could do that you got the softest bed in the barracks and the biggest bowl of soup in the mess hall. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I told you something about birds that you didn’t know,” he exclaimed, clasping my shoulder again.
I felt that further conversation, further intimacy, would lead to disclosures I did not want to hear, troubles I could not understand, and horrors I did not want to contemplate.
“Thank you, but I have work to do,” I said. I pulled a notebook and pen from my shirt pocket and pretended to consult it.
Daily skirmishes between RV4 and NC22, I read. This had resulted in RV4’s death a month previous—the RV, or red-eyed vireo, is a small and feeble if spirited bird; and the NC, or northern cardinal, is fierce. But I studied my page as though some mystery lay therein, and the hunter fell silent.
“Well, I don’t want to trouble you,” he said eventually, and the friendliness was gone from his voice. “You got a good job. You get on with it.”
He began to walk down the ravine in the direction I’d come from.
“I just come for the mushrooms,” he called over his shoulder.
I was back in my truck driving home hours later when a memory overwhelmed me with shame. I am not normally given to shame, by the way. And I do not know why this memory took so long to surface when so many things he had said might have triggered it.
I had done my own training in North Carolina at the age of seventeen—a year younger than he was, I suppose, and I didn’t know then that it was training. Moreover, he was probably drafted, while my parents paid handsomely for my own experience: I spent twenty-eight days in the same mountains outside Asheville with twelve other teenagers as part of an Outward Bound course; hiking and orienteering through the same rhododendron thickets, so dense they resembled an Asian jungle, and learning field skills that proved handy much later. I could make a perfect coffee with even rudimentary equipment afterward, and, of course, I still can. I capsized a canoe in white water twelve times in two days, but that is a mistake I have not repeated since. I led all twelve of my companions in the wrong direction and bivouacked late at night near a fetid stream from which we drank, cooked, and washed dishes while our adult instructor chuckled nearby; in the morning we all had diarrhea. Trying desperately to redeem myself, I led everyone straight over a ground hornet’s nest, and though I was unscathed one girl proved allergic. The instructor required me to administer the syringe myself. In another ill-fated expedition a companion and I decided to “scout ahead” in the twilight; he fell twelve feet down a cliff face of about sixty, fortunately fetching up on a narrow ledge. I had to find the group and return with rope later. The same companion stepped on something on a gravel road near midnight; shining my flashlight down we saw that the heel of his boot had broken a cottonmouth’s jaw.
Outward Bound still operates, of course, but I suspect within much stricter parameters.
One of our twenty-eight days was set aside for a service project. It was the only day we saw structures with roofs and walls. (There are scattered hiking pavilions and other crude structures in the area, but we were not permitted to use them,
regardless of weather. The instructor boasted that he had not slept under a roof for twelve years, himself).
I suppose that Outward Bound still runs service projects, too, but my own experience was one that no parent would wish on a child, and I suspect that these have changed, too.
We were taken in a muddy white van to the Vet Center in Greenville—a ramshackle complex where veterans could seek counseling, claim benefits, look one another up for coffee, and so on. Attached to this complex was a sort of rest home or sanatorium with a permanent population of about twenty, all suffering to various degrees from wounds or trauma incurred in service to the United States Armed Forces.
I was assigned for the day to a quadriplegic named Darby. We were not given instructions of any kind; our mission was to provide “companionship” for six hours. You could see that Darby had once been handsome: his hair was still jet black and his square jaw was at odds with the mound of flesh that occupied his wheelchair. One arm of that wheelchair had an ashtray affixed to it with a cylindrical cigarette holder inside and a tube with a mouthpiece that rested over Darby’s shoulder when not in use.
“Hi, Darby,” I said as brightly as I could. “I’m Nathan.”
He did not reply.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” I said. He said nothing.
“It’s a nice day,” I added.
“I do not want to go for a fucking walk,” he said.
“Well, we could play checkers,” I said. “I can move the pieces for you.”
“I do not want to play fucking checkers,” he said.
I changed tactics. I sat down. I tried to read from the newspaper but he cut me off.
“I do not want to hear about the fucking government.”
“How about the sports page?”
“Fuck off.”
“What do you want to do, Darby?”
“I want you to light a cigarette and hold it up to my lips,” he said. Almost as an apology he added, “I hate this damn tube.”
I lit one of his Lucky Strikes and held it to his mouth. He inhaled deeply, held it in, and then spoke with smoke seething from his lips.
“Nurses get uglier every year. This is all I got left.” He inhaled again. “And why did they give me your skinny ass and not that little girl with big tits?”
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