by Robert Stone
From the study he could hear Maggie in the laundry room off the kitchen. He put his book aside. When she went past the study with the clean wash gathered in her arms, he called her back.
“How are you, Maggie?”
“Fine,” she said. He asked her if she might put the laundry away and come back to talk. She behaved as if the request puzzled her. “Sure,” she said with a shrug.
After five minutes or so she came back down. She entered the study almost furtively, brushing her sleeve across her face like the original snot-nosed kid. She could always manage a few unlovely mannerisms for his disapproval.
“What does ‘fine’ mean?” he asked.
“I dunno,” she said. “I mean, I’m O.K. and all.”
Browne realized suddenly that he had no idea what to say to her and no words to frame the questions he wanted to ask. The session with Karen Glass had left him somehow in pursuit of communication, hungry for something beyond language.
“It’s been a crazy summer, I know,” Browne said. “Everything’s upside down. I’m sorry we couldn’t get to the island. I really wanted to.” Maybe, he thought, it was love he was after. The thing itself.
“That’s O.K., Dad.”
“So how are things on the job?” She had taken a summer job stocking shelves in a supermarket on the Post Road. Browne had not allowed her to work at the local McDonald’s, where she could have made more money. The neighborhood was bad; he worried about bandits, abductors, impulsive crackheads.
“Fine,” she said.
“I think it’s a better arrangement,” he declared. “Your mother and I don’t have to worry all the time. That’s better, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” she said. “I guess so.”
“We have to talk,” Browne told his daughter. “We’ll go out to dinner one day before you go back to school. You can pick the place. We might even go to New York.”
“O.K.,” Maggie said.
“Where,” he asked with grim persistence, “would you like to go?”
Maggie swallowed and pursed her lips. Her shrug turned into a shudder. She gave him a desperate smile.
“I don’t know.”
“No particular preference?”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Wherever you want.”
Before he could take it any further, Anne called down to them from the top of the stairs.
“Owen? Coming up?”
He and Maggie held each other’s eyes for a moment, complicit in their secret struggle.
“Yes,” he called back. “Right now.”
“I don’t know what the problem is with her,” Browne said to Anne as he undressed. “My presence seems to strike her deaf, dumb and blind. She behaves as if I’m her enemy.”
“She’ll get over it, Owen. Really.”
“I read a piece last week,” he said, “about sustained marijuana use. Apparently kids lose their vitality. They become passive. I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t the problem.”
Anne only laughed. “It isn’t. Believe me.”
“I don’t know how you can be so certain. The stuff’s all around her at school.”
Anne shook her head, climbed beneath the covers and closed her eyes. Then she asked, “How did it go with the shrink?”
“I think it was pretty bad,” he said.
She kept her head on the pillow and looked straight at the far wall. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said quickly. “I think I made a fool of myself. I have a very strong feeling of that.”
He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
“Why?” she asked him when he got into bed. “What did he ask you? What did you say?”
“It was a young woman,” he told her. “The session was very short.”
“I’m sure it went fine,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I couldn’t relax for some reason. I said the wrong thing sometimes. I felt as though I wasn’t telling the truth.”
“Owen,” she said with a laugh, “you must be the only man in the world who gives himself such a hard time.”
He shook his head gravely. Anne got up on her elbows.
“Do you think other people demand so much of themselves?” she nearly shouted. The passion in her voice surprised them both. “Do you think anyone but you cares so much about things like the truth?”
He laughed and then realized that she must have been drinking. “Don’t they?”
“Not in this country,” she said. “Not in this day and age.”
20
RUNNING ALONG the beach at the end of summer, Browne breathed a thinner, drier air. In the cooler mornings, mists rose like smoke from the Sound. Time grew shorter by the day.
The house to which he returned after each morning run had taken on the aspect of a chandlery. Half the rooms were filled with electronic gear, line and sailcloth, canned goods and charts. The reek of smoked meat, as they continued their experiments with jerky, varying the marinade to suit his taste, had seeped into the very woodwork. Its increasingly disagreeable presence left him disinclined to bring the stuff at all.
Anne had set up a computer system through which they could track the state of equipment and monitor orders and purchases. She spent most of her time in the office ordering charts, fielding requests for interviews and offers of sponsorship. For transport between the house and the yard in Staten Island, they bought a used Dodge van. Maggie had gone to a ranch in Colorado for the last weeks before school opened.
Ten days before the date set for Nona’s shakedown cruise, Anne took a call from Mary Ward. Mary and Buzz were going to a fishing lodge in Minnesota that belonged to Mary’s brother. They wondered if Anne would care to come along.
“In case you wanted to get away,” Mary said.
“Absolutely not. It’s too exciting. I’m working around the clock.”
“I told Buzz I thought you would be. He made me call.”
“Call me after Owen goes,” Anne said. “That’s when I’ll want company.” Then she added, “Maybe Owen should go for a few days. I think he’s overtrained.”
“We’d love that,” Mary said at once. “Ask him.”
When she asked him, he declined energetically but by evening he had changed his mind. The next afternoon he was in a commuter plane, flying north from Minneapolis, watching cloud shadows drift across the forest.
Buzz drove him from Ely airport. At the road’s end they climbed into a canoe and motored across to the west shore of a narrow lake bounded by dark pines. Night had fallen by the time they arrived at the lodge and it was cold. Mary, waiting for them, had made a fire.
The first evening went strangely. At dinner, it was as though he tried to tell them too much. Their deepening silence made him feel garrulous. He began to fill it with his own speculation—that he had offended them in some way, that they were critical of his preparations or thought him boastful or boring. He regarded them both very highly but in the past he had always been able to relax in their company. After dinner, there were embarrassing silences. Buzz had two bourbons and water, claimed fatigue and went to bed, leaving Browne and Mary together.
Mary’s brother was a cardiologist affiliated with the Mayo Clinic and his lodge was the house of a sensitive outdoorsman. There were antique stuffed birds and sheepskin rugs and Sierra Club books on the coffee table. Over the mantelpiece was an enormous grayling he had taken on a self-tied fly in the Northwest Territory.
Mary sat knitting in a rocker before the fire, her eyes lowered, a leftover smile on her face. She was exactly the same age as Anne but she had gone gray and her small-boned figure had waxed matronly. Browne watched her secretly but she caught him at it and widened her smile a moment for him and looked away.
“Mary,” he said, “what’s the matter with us?”
She laughed without looking up.
“You’re not angry,” he asked, “are you?”
Since the Wards had taken up religion, Mary’s politics had sheared leftward. She and t
he Brownes sometimes found themselves on different sides during the age of Reagan.
“Owen,” she said, laughing again, “what should I be angry about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why should things be so awkward between us?”
He watched her blush like a teenager.
“You’re very tense,” she said. “It’s natural. Anne says you’re overtrained.”
“So you think it’s me, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” she said without looking up. “You need to relax. That’s why you’re here.”
Browne sighed and took himself off to bed. On a shelf in the guest room he found Stanley Karnow’s history of the Vietnam War and began to read it. Though he had read it before, he found himself unable to put it aside. When Ward came to wake him just before dawn, he was still reading.
They went east with a light outboard powering the cardiologist’s North Star wooden canoe. In mid-morning, Ward, who was fishing with unbarbed hooks, caught a northern pike. Wearing rubber gloves, he seized it by the eyes and removed the hook. The fish shimmied to shake off the touch of humanity and dived free.
“Tough love,” said Ward.
They talked a little about their friend Teddy. Teddy was alone. He had been arrested after a drunken automobile accident. They had no ideas.
In the late afternoon, near the mouth of a stream, they caught four brookies for dinner. For the night’s camp they chose a small island, pitching the tent in a level place close to the water where they would see the sunset and get wind enough to discourage the mosquitoes. A pileated woodpecker came down to drink not twenty feet away from their camp. When the fire was going, Ward drank bourbon while Browne cleaned the fish.
“Have a drink, Owen,” Ward said.
“It’s wasted on me.”
“Have a drink, goddam it.”
So after he had finished with the trout and washed up, Browne sat down by the fire and had a cup of bourbon and lake water to oblige his friend.
“I think Mary’s pissed at me,” Browne said when he had drunk the bourbon. “Damned if I know why.”
Ward grunted. “Pissed at you? Goddam, man, Mary’s not pissed at you. Quite the contrary.”
Browne was flushed with the whiskey. He took a handful of water from a cooking pot to cool his face.
“So you’re well known now,” Ward announced. “You’re in the magazines.” Sports Illustrated had run a feature on the race with the contestants’ photographs in a box. “I suppose the women will be after you.”
“Better believe it,” said Browne.
“Well, I hope you’ll have the wherewithal to turn them away.” They cooked the fish in batter and ate them with fried canned potatoes. After dinner they washed up and slung their gear over a high limb in case there were bears out bathing. Ward kept the whiskey beside him.
“It was hard to talk last night,” Browne said as they watched the fire. “Hard to relax.”
“The pressure of great events,” Ward said. “Great deeds.”
“I almost forgot about it,” Browne said. “I put it out of my mind.”
Ward nodded silently. A loon cried on some distant lake.
“This is changing my life,” Browne said.
“I would think so.”
“The way it came about is so peculiar.”
“I guess that’s right,” Ward said.
“If I believed in providence . . .” he began, and let the thought drop. “Listen, Buzz—I’m getting something I want. It doesn’t always happen that way for me.”
“Feels good, I guess.”
Browne leaned sleepily back against a log. “Good is right.”
“Sure it does,” Ward said. “I know it does.”
“The only thing I ever wanted like this was Annie.”
“Owen,” Buzz Ward said, “I think you’re naturally good at getting what you want. Once you find out what it is.”
“That’s the trick, isn’t it?”
“That’s the trick, buddy.”
They looked into the declining fire and Browne said, “Sometimes I’m not sure I can pull this off. I don’t have that much experience.”
“You better decide,” Ward said.
“Do you think I can do it?”
“I don’t know,” Ward said. “If you doubt yourself, maybe you shouldn’t go.”
“It’s too late,” Browne said, and laughed.
“You have commitments,” Ward said. “You have a responsibility to Anne and Maggie.”
“Yes, I know.” He poured a little more of the bourbon into his cup and drank it, grimacing. “I have responsibilities in every direction. Never mind,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Drunk again,” Ward muttered, and stood up a little stiffly. “Wait a minute, Buzz,” Browne said. Ward leaned back against a tree trunk. Browne was looking up at him across the fire. “You got through five years of those camps in Nam. How’d you do it?” Ward eased himself back down to the ground along the tree trunk. “You’re such a goddam romantic,” he said to Browne. “What do you want me to say?”
“Just tell me how. I’ve never asked before.”
“Well,” Ward said, “I always had a stick to clean my teeth with. I believe that was a large part of it.”
“It made you,” Browne said.
“Aw shit, Owen. What the hell you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You don’t understand,” Ward said.
“You always had something. People admired you. We did, Teddy and I. But you came back from over there and you had taken on a power. It was unbelievable.”
“Is that the way it looks to you?”
“Not only to me, Buzz.”
“I lost it all there, buddy,” Ward said. “I didn’t die. That was my only power. Most people don’t realize what not dying can entail.”
“You have no idea how shitty my life has been,” Browne said suddenly. “How fucking pedestrian and dishonorable. I would like to command such a power.”
Ward sighed. “Owen, you’re just the same as you’ve always been, buddy. You haven’t learned a thing in twenty years.”
“I haven’t given up hope,” Browne said, “if that’s what you mean.”
Ward fixed an eye on him. “Want me to tell you the secret of life, goodbuddy?”
“Damn right I do, preacher.”
“Value your life. Shitty as it may be. Value your family. The war’s over and you’re alive. Do it in honor of the men who aren’t.” He stood up again. “That’s it. That’s all she wrote. I hope you don’t think it’s too pedestrian.”
“Buzz,” Browne said quickly when Ward started away, “what should I do? Should I go on this voyage or not?”
Ward looked away from him.
“I’m asking you that because you know the outer limits,” Browne said. “And you know me.”
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that,” Ward said.
“What’s your answer?”
“I won’t answer now,” Ward told him. “I might be wrong. If I think I know, I’ll write.”
“Thanks, Buzz.”
“Ask Annie,” Ward said.
Browne shook his head. “I don’t ask Annie questions like that. She expects me to know my mind. She doesn’t want to hear my chickenshit doubts and ponderings.”
“I’ll tell you one thing I’m sure of, fella. Your wife knows you better than you think.”
Browne laughed.
Late in the night, Browne woke to a strange chilling sound, a howling close by. He realized almost at once that he was alone in the tent. Then he heard it again, an agonized baying somewhere along the lakeshore. He climbed out of his sleeping bag, grabbed a flashlight and crawled out of the tent.
The fire was reduced to faint embers but the risen quarter-moon had light enough to reflect on the water and outline the far shore. When the sound came again, Browne saw that his friend Ward was making it. Standing ankle-deep in the lake, Ward turned his face to the sky and
crooned.
“What the hell are you doing?” Browne demanded.
He knew that Ward had turned to face him. He could only see the man’s outline, not his face.
“Shut up!” Ward said sternly. “Shut up and listen.”
From far across the lake, from some unmeasurable distance, came the cry of a wolf—first one, then others. It was a sound out of time, pale and haggard as the moonlight.
“Thank you, Lord,” Buzz Ward said. He stepped onto the shore unsteadily, and at close quarters Browne could see that he was grinning with pleasure. “What do you say to that, my friend?”
“Amen?” Browne asked.
The next morning they paddled south.
“I’m really sorry about last night,” Browne told Ward. “I seem to have come unglued. You know I’m not much of a drinker.”
He heard Ward’s engaging guffaw from the stern of the canoe. “I shouldn’t have insisted. Don’t know why I did. Anyway, you didn’t say anything out of line.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You spoke your heart, man. You can do that with me.”
“I’ve spent so much energy being positive about this thing. The minute I took a day off and broke the rhythm I started to unravel.”
“I understand, buddy.”
“A weak moment,” Browne said. “There must be a way to utilize negative energy.”
“Well,” Ward said, “you could be on to something there, Owen.”
On the morning Browne was due back in Connecticut he helped the Wards cut winter logs for the doctor’s house. He had first turn at the saw. When Buzz took over, he and Mary carried the cut wood to the woodshed. Once Mary waited for him in the doorway of the shed.
“Buzz said you thought I was angry.”
“I did. I guess I was wrong.”
“It would be very hard for me to be really angry at you, Owen. You were such a good friend to me.”
He understood that she was talking about the time during the war when Buzz had been in the camp and Browne back in the States. As she spoke to him, he realized suddenly that she had been in love with him then, and he with her. They had been people of principle together.