We have so much weed, you have no idea. We smoke it and we sell it, and we sell it by slipping the buds into the hollowed-out Gideon Bibles that Preacher hauls downtown in his VW van, setting up shop on a street corner, proselytizing. He grows his beard long and speaks of eternal damnation with enough brimstone to keep your everyday citizens at a distance. When a paying customer picks up a Bible and drops a hundred-dollar bill in the offering pot, Preacher winks and says, “God bless you.”
Anyway, whatever money we make selling weed, which is plenty, goes into a communal bank account we use for fertilizer, ammunition, electricity, food, beer, tools, toys, parties. We are a community—a colony, Seb calls it—and if we didn’t have to work jobs, buy groceries, punch numbers into the ATM, we wouldn’t.
I live in a big two-story cabin with a red steel roof. Just me. Which is a little lonesome, but otherwise great. Seb designed it. He designed all our cabins. He is an architect and contractor who sketches blueprints for those houses you see in subdivisions, the ones that look like they came from a box. How we met is I’m the guy who builds those houses that look like they came from a box.
Back then, when we first met, I didn’t amount to much. I spent my days striking things with hammers, my nights drinking toward a dreamless sleep, fighting. There was this bar I used to visit, called the Someplace Else Tavern, where the floor was ankle-deep with sawdust and there was a tooth, a human tooth, embedded in the bar. Everybody had a different story about how the tooth got there. But I knew.
I am the one who slammed the guy—the guy with the bandito mustache and the attitude—into the counter with such force that when he pulled his face away, the tooth remained, its roots gleaming red.
Back in the day, I would carry electrical tape in my back pocket and around midnight, if a fight hadn’t found me, I would wrap my knuckles and find a fight. At the time, even though I couldn’t imagine what else I might do with myself, I fell into a convict’s funk, looking forward and seeing only a life sentence, all double bourbons and palettes of lumber.
Seb changed all that. Seb changed me.
One night after a hard day banging together some subdivision, he and I shared a hitter out behind the tavern. The noise of the jukebox was muffled, replaced by the rats scraping through garbage. “This might seem like a strange question,” Seb said, “but are you happy? And when I say happy, I mean happy.”
The rest is history.
Seb is a planner and a talker and maybe a genius, and I am none of these things. He can talk for hours about some planet or philosopher you never heard of. He looks like a lumberjack, with a porcupine of a beard, but he is short. And I mean short. I have to admit, the straight-backed posture, his vertical-striped shirts, his blustery voice, his untamed beard, make me wonder if he isn’t compensating for something. Sometimes I wonder if this colony is one big compensation.
Take our cabins for instance. They’re huge! In my living room I could stick a thirty-foot Christmas tree, lit up with powdery lights, if I wanted. When I said, “Do I really need a place this big,” Seb said, “Yes, you do. That’s exactly what you need.”
Sometimes I race through the cabin, naked, except for my wool socks, sliding along the wideboard floors, with the lights blazing, with the stereo blaring, for the sense of freedom. Once I took my pistol—a Hardballer .45 Seb got me for my thirtieth—and shot holes in the walls—just because.
Together we built the cabin. Tractors growled around, uprooting trees, pushing dirt into piles, clearing a space for the cement truck to lay the foundation upon which we stacked logs straight as a plumb line, troweling cement between them to choke away the wind. When it was finally finished, I breathed deeply, taking in the piney smell of the cabin, the forest, the colony, and my part in it, and when I exhaled, I blew away the bong-water vinegar of my life before Seb.
We throw parties. And when we throw them, we throw them. Imagine a hundred drunks milling around five pigs roasting on spits. Imagine kegs of Black Butte Porter. Imagine buckets of steaming chili, platters of pickled trout fingerlings, caramel cake and peach pie and a hookah pipe packed with the finest greenery you’ll ever encounter. Imagine a hundred yards of extension cables snaking from my cabin to the woods so we might watch big-screen baseball under the stars. Imagine an amphitheater dug from the side of a hill with the Portland Shakespeare Company performing Shakespeare, the Portland Pops Symphony Orchestra performing German composers I can’t pronounce.
Imagine a trebuchet the size of a sailboat. I’m talking a fifteen-foot arm. I’m talking a sixty-pound counterweight. I’m talking about hurling large stones, dead marmots, pumpkins, watermelons, and even milk jugs full of flaming gasoline two hundred feet or more. I’m talking about serious fun.
Everyone goes dead quiet when over their heads soars the milk jug, glowing with spectral light, and when it lands, it detonates into a flaming mushroom the size of a small house.
Seb’s porch, like my porch, like all the other porches here at the colony, is the nice wraparound kind with homemade rockers, made from larch and stained with teak oil, set on either side of the front door.
Twilight, I go here to rock and talk and drink and smoke, to watch the horizon go crazy with color. Seems like every moth in the county flaps around our heads, their clothy wings stirring the air. The porch light draws them, and sometimes they land on the lip of our beer bottles and taste.
There is a hookah set between us and Seb takes a deep hit from it. Words smoke from his mouth and I follow the smoke until it gets lost in the purpling haze when he says, “I want to ask you a question. Because you’re a man, you know about things, right?”
I say shoot.
He says, “All my life, I’ve felt dissatisfied with where I am.” For such a little guy, he’s got a deep voice, somewhere between bison and professor. It surprises people. It enchants them. “You know, like there was some mix-up in the space-time continuum or whatever. Like this moment wasn’t my moment. You ever feel that way?”
“All the time,” I say.
He winks or else has something in his eye. “Where would you be? If you could choose anywhere, anytime, to be, where would you be?”
The answer lies in the hookah. I draw smoke deep into my lungs and feel my brain constrict. I smack my mouth with the skunky sweet flavor. Inspiration swirls behind my eyeballs. “Sometimes I have this dream where I wake up and I’m the only person left. There are empty cars in the middle of the highway. There are casseroles rotting on supper tables. There are tigers and wolves roaming through the streets. It’s like the rapture happened or something. Anyway, I walk around and explore all the abandoned streets and houses and grocery stores and I do whatever the hell I please. Go naked. Burn money. Hunt animals in department stores. Anything.”
“Yes.” He puts out his hand and I grasp it and shake it in the arm-wrestling way, and when we release our grip, I have to admit a part of me is disappointed, a part of me wants to keep holding him.
This June afternoon we’re at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, picking up supplies, when an old woman points a trembling finger at the ceiling and says, “There’s a vulture.” And she’s right, there is. Maybe it was attracted to the smell of food or maybe it chased a mouse through the electric sliding doors or maybe it caught a bad air current, who knows, but there it is, flapping among the white metal rafters, squawking and casting feathers that float through the air-conditioned air like black snowflakes.
We hurry our way through the human traffic, following the vulture to electronics, where it circles and skitters to a stop in the middle of the aisle. A zitty teenager wearing one of those blue how-can-I-help-you vests chucks a DVD at the vulture, and it hisses and opens its wings so wide they brush the shelves on either side of the aisle. It cocks its bald red head, observing us with a yellow eye, and then, with one heavy flap of its wings, lifts itself into the air, sailing over to groceries.
We follow it there. It tries to roost on some top-shelf cereal boxes, unsuccessfully, knocking them to
the floor. The vulture flies next to the butcher, where, perhaps frenzied by the smell of blood, it flops onto the meat case, its claws clicking on the stainless-steel counter. One of the butchers, in a bloody apron, screeches her surprise and so does the bird and so does Seb when he withdraws his Glock from inside his coat.
Holy shit, I’m thinking.
The pistol jumps, the explosion so loud it blows every other sound from the store, leaving behind a scary silence Muzak and the shrieks of women will soon take over. The buzzard dances sideways and falls flat, missing most of its left side and spraying blood.
“Let’s get out of here,” Seb says and I say, “Yeah. Let’s.”
On our way back to the colony Seb whistles as if nothing happened, as if I’m not checking the rearview every five seconds for flashing cherries. He digs around beneath his seat, removing a silver cigarette case he thumbs open to reveal six big blunts, meticulously rolled. He lights one and the flame releases a smell like rained-on hay. He drags hard and with the smoke boiling in his lungs swings a last-minute right into a new subdivision to check out this fountain-in-the-middle-of-the-driveway schema he wants to incorporate into his next proposal. He steadily releases the smoke, where it spreads down his chest like a second beard. “You know,” he says, rocketing over a speed bump, swiveling his head side to side to inspect the carefully trimmed hedges, the billiard-table lawns, the gray plastic siding and bone-white shutters and river-rock chimneys. “This place would almost be pretty, if it wasn’t so damn ugly.”
A week ago, things changed between us.
Seb shows up with this girl, Gillian. Got homeless written all over her. Says she’s twenty-five but I’m thinking teenager. Says she needs a place to stay, to get her bearings, a couple hot meals and a couple hot showers.
There is a homeless situation in Portland. Downtown, along the Willamette River, in Pioneer Courthouse Square, you’ll see them. They’re the ones squatting on the street vents to get warm, reading crumpled paperbacks, playing strange whistles, asking for change to call their mother. They wear a special type of clothes that reminds me of the really, really old ham sandwich you’ll find in the back corner of your fridge, sort of wrinkly and kind of slimy and pretty much something you don’t want to touch except pinched between your forefinger and thumb on its way to the garbage.
When Seb goes downtown, he goes nuts. Some guy with duct tape on his shoes asks for a buck, Seb gives him twenty. He does this frequently enough they know him by face. We can’t go anywhere without getting swarmed. You should see the way he hands out money, our weed money, big greasy clumps of bills, as if it’s weighing him down.
I don’t get Seb sometimes. Sometimes he seems so brilliant, like he has this special plan for us. A vision. Then he goes and throws away our weed money, money he says is meant to build a community.
Now this. Now he brings to us the very problems we’re here to escape. Now he comes home with a stray dog answers by the name of Gillian, always looking at him like she’s looking for a belly rub.
Here is what happens when Seb introduces us: she puts out her hand for a shake, and I let it hang there.
“You’re kidding me,” I say, conscious of a sort of watery anger filling me up, so I can barely breathe, so I can smell sawdust, so I can see a tooth embedded in a bar counter.
“I am not kidding you,” he says. “She’ll be bunking with me.”
I sense my expression tightening. Gillian gives up on the handshake, taking a step back, sinking her hands into their pockets.
There is something hooded in my voice when I say, “Enjoy each other,” and then I walk away from them.
Of course I later apologize. This is at Seb’s cabin, where fishing rods and crisscrossed snowshoes and rusted metal placards advertising Red Rock Cola decorate the walls. Seb sits on his leather couch with one hand resting in his crotch. He looks at me like he looked at the vulture, his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed. “I’m only going to tell you this once,” he says, amping up the baritone for the professorly effect. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again. I won’t tolerate it.”
We, who have shared so much, have arrived at this, growling over a girl. “My bad,” I say, my voice cracking into a whine.
He stares at me and I look away, because the worst thing you can do is look a biting dog in the eye. He snaps his fingers to get my attention—says, “Hey”—and gives me the Plains Indian hand signal for don’t-sweat-it-bro. “We’re all here to let real life go,” he says, “to escape.” He combs his beard with his fingers, neatening it. “Here we got someone, just a girl, who’s been dealt a bad hand, the chips stacked against her. I would think you of all people could dig helping her find an antidote.”
There is, he thinks, hope for improving her. Like me.
He says, “Just for a little bit, yeah?”
“Okay,” I say. “Cool.” I mean, whatever. But my wide teeth-showing smile is enough to convince Seb everything is settled, and so he rises from the couch and slow-motion slugs my shoulder and a minute later we are outside shooting arrows into human silhouettes, the firing-range kind, taped to trees.
Gillian smells like red wine and campfires. She has an almost square, sort of masculine face. She has a way of chomping her gum, of drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, of sitting slouched down with her legs wide open. It’s enough to make me imagine pressing against her in a tavern somewhere, looking for an excuse to stroke her arm, lean in for a kiss, invite her home to hammer the headboard, buck her body against mine. I want her, but I don’t like her.
Though I pretend to, because Seb wants me to. I don’t know. There is something about her that reminds me of me, the old me. When we are together, drinking and eating, I feel an ache spreading inside me—an ache like in my knuckles after striking someone in the jaw—at first dull and warm, intensifying into an arterial throb.
“Look at all the stars,” Gillian says. “I never knew there were so many stars.”
“Man, did you ever smell air that smelled this great?” she says, whistling a breath through her nose. “It smells like Christmas.”
She has one of those sick voices. You know, a little scratchy, throaty, like pebbles rattling at the bottom of a cardboard box. She has black hair down to her butt and always fusses with it, braiding it, combing it, sometimes even chewing it, if she’s preoccupied.
I wonder what it tastes like.
“You have it so good here,” she says. “Don’t ever leave this place.”
I tell her she can count on that.
No matter what our differences, gasoline brings us together, here at the colony, as a relatively cheap and relatively safe form of entertainment. Relatively safe.
When it is cold is when gasoline is dangerous. The fumes stay low and spread like lard melting in a pan. In the middle of December, Seb lit a couch soaked, just drenched, in gasoline. You should have seen it! He sparks a match and a blue pancake—two feet tall and twenty feet wide—appeared.
Foomp. Just like that. A wreath of heat knocking me two steps back, knocking Seb flat on his back. One second there’s snow covering the ground—the next second, gone—replaced by a big muddy oval boiling and snapping with blue fire.
Lucky for Seb, I yanked him out of all that blue. Lucky for Seb, he was wearing coveralls, Carhartt coveralls, made from the most resilient material on earth next to titanium and diamonds. Had it not been for the coveralls, forget about it. As is, his boots and gloves melted, his eyelashes charred, his hair smoldered, and for about a week his face glowed an unhealthy red.
Now, on the porch, when Seb tells Gillian the gasoline story, she nods and maintains eye contact even as she goes to town on the hookah. This is her fifth hit and this is premium bud. THC up the wazoo. She takes a muscular draw and the hookah emits a gurgling sound. Her lungs and then her cheeks fill with smoke, her eyes go glassy, and she sort of leans, sort of swoons against Seb’s rocker, giggling.
Seb doesn’t seem to notice. He, too, is blazed out of his mind a
nd on top of that caught up in his story, as if reliving it, as if hypnotized by the sound of his own voice. He moves his hands like he does when talking, like pale moths flapping around his head and into his lap where they wrestle before reaching out to stroke Gillian’s thigh.
Seeing this reminds me of the conversation we had a couple days ago, when fishing for brook trout. “She is so, so, so good in bed,” he said, slipping a leech on his hook. “I mean: wow.” Black goop dribbled down his palm and he wiped it on his thigh and plopped the leech in the water. “I mean: holy shit. I mean: do yourself a favor and go out and get yourself a girl. And I mean pronto. Your life could stand some improvement.”
It’s hard, seeing them together. It’s like seeing your father drunk or your mother dating another man. It’s like seeing your friend have an orgasm or a seizure.
Seb finishes the gasoline story like he always finishes the gasoline story. “And man, my face was burned so bad it was like this beet, man, this big red fucking beet.”
Gillian says, “Poor baby,” and touches his cheek. “Will you show me? Will you burn something? Right now? For me?”
I jump from my rocker and say in a too loud voice, “I’ll go get some fuel!”
We have this car, this old Oldsmobile, and though springs poke through its upholstery and though its brakes chirp and its engine groans, it is a good reliable car we use to ramble around the colony. We shoot it, occasionally, but not to hurt. More for aesthetic reasons.
Now it is parked before Seb’s cabin and I place on its hood a plastic bucket full of gasoline. “Give us the foomp,” Seb says. “We want to hear the foomp.”
“Yeah,” Gillian says and cuddles down into Seb’s lap. “Foomp.”
The Language of Elk Page 11