The tent appears to be empty, but they can hear a scritching sound from inside it. “Hello?” Justin says and then says it again, this time raising his voice to make sure he is heard over the river, its waters hissing. The scritching stops.
They set down their gear and slowly approach the tent and draw aside the flap to peer into its shadowy interior. A dark shape comes at them and takes to the air shrieking—a crow, he realizes when his senses overtake his alarm.
The dog barks wildly. His son runs off a few paces before turning around with his hands raised protectively before his face. His father simply stares after the bird—still visible but departing from them like a curl of ash blown by the breeze—before regarding the tent once again.
“Should we camp somewhere else?” Justin asks when his heart settles. “Is there somebody else staying here?”
His father continues to stare at the tent for a minute and then lays a hand on it, as if checking for a pulse. “No,” he says. “There’s nobody here.”
“How can you be sure?”
He raises his hand. Its palm is coated with pollen.
“Why would they just leave their tent?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Right now Justin hears silence. It’s like a mistake in music—the way it makes him cock his head and listen—like a finger losing its place on a guitar, the wrong note so much more striking than the right note. The steady sigh of the wind, the intermittent birdsong, the chipmunks rustling for pine nuts, has stopped. There is only the river, murmuring in the background.
Then, from the nearby forest, a mass of swallows starts up into the sky, frightened by something. They wheel overhead and their shadows speckle the meadow and their frantic chirping fills the air. With that the spell is broken.
His father wipes his hand on his thigh and inspects the palm.
By this time Graham has returned to the campsite. “Did you know pollen never deteriorates?” He is always saying things like this, listing off trivia he has committed to memory when surfing the Internet or reading the encyclopedia. “It’s one of the few naturally secreted substances that lasts indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely,” his grandfather says and snorts, amused by the word.
“Do you know what that word means?” Graham says, not condescending, but eager to explain.
“Do you know what it means to be a know-it-all?”
“Did you know that certain types of plants can eat meat?”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“I read it.”
“Where?” The beginnings of a sneer grow beneath his grandfather’s beard. “On the Internet?” He enunciates it like a foreign dish that once gave him indigestion.
“No,” Graham says. “The back of a cereal box.”
“Oh.” The sneer turns into a smile and his grandfather lifts his arms and lets them fall, defeated.
They make their camp fifty yards upstream from the other tent. Even though they understand it to be empty, there is something about it that makes them uneasy, so that camping beside it is a little like picnicking downwind from the rotting husk of a beached whale.
While Boo splashes along the banks of the South Fork, chasing the silvery flashes of fish, Justin sets to work digging a new fire pit. His father and Graham make another trip to the Bronco, carrying the cooler and a duffel bag and lawn chairs and his old army-issue canvas tent. It leaks and smells like mothballs and mildew. Every night Justin has ever spent in it, he wakes up swollen and sneezing.
Last Christmas he bought his father a new tent from REI—one of those fancy waterproof, windproof four-man deals with a lifetime guarantee and a screened-in moonroof. “What happened to the new tent I bought you?”
“This has been a good tent for us.” His father pats it fondly. “I like this tent.” He does not look at Justin but sets to work unfolding the canvas and planting the stakes.
His voice goes high and he tries to control it. “That tent cost me nearly three hundred dollars. You’re just going to let it rot in the attic?”
Paul finishes hammering a stake into the ground and stands up and straightens his posture to accentuate his six-foot frame. Beneath his stare Justin feels as if he has shrunk a good five inches, as if his chest hair and muscles have receded—and he becomes twelve all over again.
His father eyes Justin with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing. And I didn’t want it.” He begins to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”
“Graham has allergies, you know. I hope they don’t get set off by the mold.”
“Graham has allergies.” He sniffs his amusement. “More like you’ve got allergies.”
“We’ve both got allergies.”
Paul sniffs again. He has never suffered from the watery eyes or shortness of breath that come with fall and spring, so he always views allergy symptoms with suspicion, as though they were invented for sympathy. He passes the hammer to Graham forcefully enough to make him stagger back a step. “Here’s a job for you. Pound in the rest of the stakes.”
Along the banks of the South Fork, willows crowd together. The world tries to reflect itself in the water but can’t. The clouds and trees and sun fall into the surface and vanish, swept away by the white water, along with their faces when they stand at twenty-yard intervals along the rocky bank and plop their spinners in the water. They have to be careful not to tangle their lines in the branches, snapping their wrists with short sidearm casts.
Justin watches his son. He can see in his face a certain excitement he recognizes. There was a time when, upon entering the woods and following a game trail to the river, with the sun falling through the trees in angled shafts, with the air cool and pine-smelling, with his fishing pole in one hand and tackle box in the other, he would dream about trout with freckled backs and bright white bellies and feel his heart turn over with excitement.
He feels something similar now. The dark forest. The green meadow. The pitted, unscalable walls of the canyon surrounding them. Seeing it, he realizes he has actually longed for this place. It is like hearing an old song on the radio. One you loved but forgot existed. Rediscovering it made you happy.
He wonders what his wife is doing. Maybe crunches on the living room floor while watching a DVR recording of Survivor. He has not thought of her since they left that morning, when she hugged Graham tightly to her chest and then gave Justin a quick squeeze that felt more like a handshake and said, “Take care of our boy.”
There had been an argument earlier. He can’t remember exactly where the anger came from—something trivial—maybe his carelessness with his bowl, chipping it in the sink when he went to splash the milk from it. But before long each of them was slamming cupboards, heaving sighs, looking for a way to cut the other with a sharp word or glare. “Fucking excuse me,” he can remember saying as he pushed past her with the cooler.
He hadn’t wanted to leave like that—with their anger unresolved. He remembered their wedding day, when the line of family and friends had exited the sanctuary to tearily offer them hugs and handshakes in the breezeway, his grandmother had whispered to him, “Never go to bed angry. Best advice I can give.” That’s what driving away this morning felt like, like going to bed with their backs to each other, anger spoiling their dreams. He had thought about calling from the road, had even fingered the phone. But then he thought of his father listening in on the conversation and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He was ashamed to call because there was something to be ashamed about. There was history here: no matter what the situation, even if he felt completely innocent, he would always apologize, always, just to end it, to put a stop to the tension that made him so distracted and headachy. Not this time.
There was a time when they would make up with sex—no, fucking was the word for it. In the middle of a screaming mat
ch, one of them would get a hungry look and shove the other against a wall or to the floor, ripping off clothes, enough to bare a breast, to bite a thigh, their kissing more like eating. Any bared skin would go red from carpet burn and the crosshatching of fingernails. And then their grunts would rise into mewls and their mewls into the best kind of screams and they would collapse, emptied, satisfied, breathing heavily. He missed those days.
His attention drifts to the river, from which he pulls three rainbow trout, each the size of his forearm. When he stares into their pearly eyes and rips the hook from their mouths, he cannot help but feel a strange pleasure even as he recognizes a thing yanked from its home into a cold white space it did not know existed until that very second. They gut the fish and throw their heads in the river.
When they return to camp, Graham goes to the tent to get a jacket. From inside comes a fierce buzzing, like a dozen maracas violently shaken. He jumps away with a scream and Justin hurries toward him.
“There’s something in there,” Graham says. There comes a sound like the thump of a stick against the canvas.
“It’s a snake,” his grandfather says. “It’s a goddamned rattler is what it is.”
His father retrieves a long stick from the forest and with his knife hurriedly whittles its end into a yellow point. With this he beats at the outside of the tent. “Hey! Hey, snake! Get out of there, you snake!”
Eventually a western rattler slides from the tent, pausing to taste the air with its tongue, and then begins its fast slither through the ankle-high grass. Justin’s father chases after it, hooting with excitement, and Justin chases after him, certain someone will be bitten. At the sound of their footsteps, the snake coils up like a pile of rope to face them. Its tail buzzes out another warning that Justin’s father silences by whipping the spear forward as though it were an extension of his arm. It pierces the rattler cleanly through the head and tacks it to the ground.
He gives Justin a big grin before uprooting the spear and holding it out before him. From its tip hangs the rattler. It twists into an S and slumps into a diamond-backed line more than five feet long. Its beaded tail drops down to zigzag a trail in the dirt.
Justin must look spooked—he is spooked—because his father laughs a little when he toes the snake off the end of his spear, its head now a peculiar saddle shape with a hole through its middle. A lot of blood and clear fluid comes out of it.
Graham says, “If that isn’t the biggest rattler in the entire universe, I’d be surprised,” and his grandfather smiles at him like a big dumb cat with a mouse in its jaws.
The snake refuses to die. It does a dance instead, twisting and knotting itself into calligraphic designs, its tail rattling, its mouth sometimes closed, sometimes open and as bright as bubblegum. Justin believes it is staring at him. As if it can open its mouth that wide.
Minutes pass and the snake continues to knot itself into an ever-moving tangle. Every now and then Justin’s father pokes it with the spear. “Can I try?” Graham says and for a while he and his grandfather trade the spear back and forth, stabbing, prodding.
Watching a snake die is like watching a campfire, a controlled menace. A long half hour passes and then it is done moving, no matter how hard Justin’s father pokes it. The sunlight has begun to retreat from the canyon when he carries the snake to the campfire and lays it out on a log and goes to work with a boning knife, chopping off its head and setting it aside. Then he pries open the body to eviscerate it and strip off its skin and dice its meat into cubes and put them in a pan to cook with a slice of bacon.
They stand around the campfire and watch the meat hiss in the bacon fat. It smells fungal.
“Did you know,” Graham says, the initial nervousness of his voice giving way to an academic tenor. “Did you know that when you see a dead snake you’re supposed to bury it, because the yellow jackets and wasps will eat the poison and when they do it becomes their poison so that when they sting you they sting you to death?”
“You read that on the back of a box of cereal?”
“No.” He purses his lips, terribly serious. “I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”
His grandfather picks up the head, a soft jewel, with his thumb and forefinger and squeezes. Its mouth opens. Little clear beads hang off its fangs’ tips. “Did you know the Chinese believe venom is an aphrodisiac? And that the Indians believe it has healing powers?”
“Indians?” Graham says. “Or Indian Indians?”
“Both.”
With his knife Paul widens the snake’s smile and removes the poison sacs. A see-through whitish yellowish color, they appear made from spider filaments. He drops them into a bottle of Jack Daniels. “A snack for later.”
Once cooked, the meat turns bright pink, like plastic. He seasons it with salt and pepper before forking it onto a dish. “Dig in.” They fill their mouths with the snake and the snake is so good—like a rougher sort of pork—it creates in them an appetite. They feel it uncoiling in their bellies and rattling and asking for more. So they feed it.
They throw the trout filets in the pan where they sizzle as if angry. Justin’s father turns them with a telescoping spatula, cooking them through in less than five minutes, serving them up on tin plates already dampened by the snake. They eat the crumbly meat with their fingers and spit out the splinters of bones while the canyon darkens all around them.
For a long time the only sound is the rushing of the river and the occasional crack of a Coors can being opened. “I thought Dad told me your doctor said you weren’t supposed to drink anymore,” Graham says and his grandfather says, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to drink any less.” He settles into his own separate silence and appears like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached expression.
Justin collects the dishes and carries them to the river and goes to work scrubbing with sand and a dash of biodegradable soap that goes frothing downstream. Back at camp, he packs the cooking materials into a large canvas bag they will later hang from a tree.
By this time the air has grown heavy with the shadows that come with early evening, earlier each day now that fall is deepening into winter. A great bunch of honking draws Justin’s eyes skyward where he observes a flock of geese, arranged in a capital V, headed south. One of them appears drunk, swooping and circling away from the rest who continue along their determined course. He realizes it is an owl, snatching moths from the air.
And then he spots another. And another still. He takes his beer and wanders away from camp and in the deepening gloom watches the owls as they fly in and out of the high branches where they make their roosts.
His father appears beside him. “What are you doing?”
“Just looking. At the owls and the trees and everything else.”
“You always liked trees,” he says. Justin can smell beer in his breath and can hear it in his voice, the friendlier, looser tone of it. “I remember when you were a baby. One night you wouldn’t stop crying. So I took you outside and we stood underneath a tree and you fell right asleep.”
Justin looks at him as if for the first time. “I’ve never heard that story before.”
“You always liked trees.”
“I did?”
“Sure.”
The darkness comes right up to the fire. Justin’s father sits on a lawn chair while Graham and Justin take to the logs they dragged earlier from the forest. The pyramidal arrangement of firewood glows yellow at its top and orange in its middle while the charcoal at its bottom gleams with the black, glassy quality of obsidian. The flames throw shadows upon the willows surrounding them and toss sparks into the air and the night becomes a flickering vision of orange gleams and shifting black shapes. From way off in the distance comes a mournful scream that interrupts all other sounds in the canyon.
Graham stands up. “What’s that?”
“That’s an owl,” Justin says.
“It sounded like a dinosaur. I mean, like the din
osaurs in the movies.”
Boo moves to the periphery of the camp and huffs once. Having proved himself, he hurries back.
Graham lowers himself to the log. A few minutes pass before the screeching begins again. From the forest sounds another owl, then another, some of them with voices like a metallic rasp, others a twittering hoot. Graham looks over his shoulder, perhaps wondering if later tonight he will wake to find some phantom looming over him. “They sound sad,” he finally says.
His grandfather nods and pulls from his beer. “That they do.”
For a time they sit there, listening to the owls sing, their remote wailing.
“If I could sing a song like that,” his grandfather says and pokes at the fire with a stick and the sparks float up and grow smaller and smaller until the darkness encloses them. “A song about the way I feel. Well, it would be quite a song.”
From his belt he pulls a Gerber buck knife and flicks open its seven-inch blade, the blade stained and chipped from so many years of skinning animals and gutting fish and carving wood. With it he begins to whittle his stick down to a point. “You got any stories, Graham? Scary ones?”
Graham thinks about it for a while and then launches into a story he heard at school. It’s about an old hunchback who lives underneath the city and pulls boys down when they reach into sewer grates to fetch their runaway baseballs. “You know how Pepto-Bismol turns your poop black? Well, this guy is so evil, he poops black even when his poop doesn’t have Pepto-Bismol in it.” He goes on another minute, and then his grandfather interrupts him, saying, “I’ve got a story.”
A moth flickers by and vanishes.
“Go on then,” Justin says.
“A long time ago,” he says, as slow as breathing, “something terrible happened here.” He studies Graham and Justin, making sure he has their attention. “It was the summer of Red Morning’s fifteenth year, and like every Indian boy, he went on a vision quest.” At this point he has had six beers and from the sound of his voice they are beginning to affect him. “In this very canyon.” He aims his knife at the ground for emphasis before lazily returning to his whittling.
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