In the Land of the Living (25 page)

“I get…twenty-two.”

“Did you get those short ones there on the sides?”

“No, twenty-five. No, you’re right, twenty-nine.”

The elk turned away and then turned back so Leo could count again, and again he got twenty-nine. Then the elk turned and slowly walked off into the trees.

They pitched Gavin and Bailey’s tent by the water music of the Elwha on a high ridge overlooking the river. The Indians said there used to be so many giant salmon you could walk across the river on their backs, but they didn’t see any. As Mack preferred, Leo said where to pitch the tent and how to do it and where to make the fire and which wood was dead and which alive and no good for burning. The opposite hill was dark and distant and green with denuded tree trunks white like crazy needle teeth in the dusk.

Leo broke up a fallen tree limb by wedging it between two tree trunks and was pleased that it worked, as this would provide for a good long fire. They smoked cigars and watched stars appear and disappear as invisible clouds drifted by. Before bed, they hung their food up in a tree. If a bear came, Leo knew, it would be up to him to scare it away. He’d heard black bears outside his tent before and hyena even, when he was in Botswana, but he’d never had to run one off. Hyena could crack a man’s skull with their jaws, he was told, and they’d proved it by biting through an inch and a half of Plexiglas. He could run off a hyena or a bear. He dared the mountain to challenge him when he was in charge of his brother.

“You remember when I left for college and I gave you that
Playboy
?” Leo said.

“Of course.”

“1987. Luann Lee. Ah, Luann Lee. I had a lot of good times with Luann Lee. So did you like it? Were you glad or what?”

“Yeah! What do you think? I don’t like to look at a
Playboy
?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell if you were even interested in it. You didn’t say anything at the time, so I thought,
Maybe he just thinks this is gross or something
.”

“No, man, I kept it for years.”

“Did you have a girlfriend in LA?” Leo said, embarrassed that he didn’t know, and trying not to be annoyed that Mack hadn’t told him and that Mack wouldn’t ask about his life in Baltimore or New York and didn’t care.

“Yeah.”

“Did I meet her?”

“No.”

“Well, who was she? I assume you’re not still with her, since—”

“Her name was Cindy.”

“Yeah?”

“She was really funny but she had a temper. She once got mad at me because I beat her at tic-tac-toe. We played a bunch of times and I kept winning and every time I won I laughed, and she got mad. I was like, ‘You’re playing tic-tac-toe, I think you can figure out how not to lose. You’re getting pretty angry.’”

“Was she in Teach for America?”

“Yeah, a kindergarten teacher. In Compton.”

“Sorry if this is a weird thing to ask,” Leo said, “but…did you have sex with her?”

Mack laughed with some embarrassment. “Yeah.”

“I just wondered. So, was it good?”

“I guess so. We played hooky from school one day and just had sex all day. I remember we listened to the Dire Straits song ‘So Far Away’ over and over. That was nice. I don’t know if you remember, but a long time ago I asked you about what to do with a girl.”

“You did? No, I don’t remember.”

“We were on a Zajac vacation. You don’t remember this?”

“No.”

“I was in college. We were in a hotel room somewhere, each of us in our own bed, and we were talking about our frustrations with girls one night in the dark. I was thinking,
Who the fuck can I ask about this?
And I knew you’d had a girlfriend for a long time, and I figured you must know
something
.”

“Ha!”

“Yeah, I figured you might like it if I asked you for your advice. You told me where the clit was and I asked you how do you do it and you said, ‘You want to just touch very gently.’ And I tried out your trick and it worked!”

“That’s funny, I don’t remember telling you that. But in my experience, it’s true. And you know how I learned it? It’s hilarious. I couldn’t figure it out on my own, and every guy I asked was a complete idiot, and I asked Michelle and she didn’t even know. I finally figured it out from reading the play
Cloud 9
by Caryl Churchill. She’s a very edifying playwright!”

“Yeah, Cindy said I had magic fingers.”

“But it didn’t work out, huh.”

“No, she was mad at me all the time. One time the Beastie Boys came on the radio. It was the song ‘Girls.’ Her brother really liked that song, and she was disgusted with it because it objectified women. Coming from Brown, I wasn’t going to put up with that shit. So I said, ‘You have a stick up your ass about this. Men like women. It’s not a big deal. Plus, it’s a song.’ She got furious. I said, ‘You’re mad at your brother and me that we would like this song. Come on. And I don’t even really like this song.’ I told her if we were going to keep dating she had to tone down the anger, because I couldn’t deal with it. And her response to that was to get even madder.”

Leo slumped back against the log. But he was too tired to apologize again. He was too tired to point out the parallel between the girl’s temper and his own, and he had no doubt that Mack would not see it anyway, even if he said it to him straight out. He was most of all too tired to tell Mack that Mack was mad as fucking hell too and had been bludgeoning him with rage for years but had turned that rage down to a temperature of zero degrees. He was sorry, he was sorry! He just wanted Mack to thank him for the
Playboy
and for teaching him how to deal with a clit, or to remember the times Leo had taken care of him. But sometimes Mack couldn’t remember love, and sometimes neither could he. He looked out into the darkness beyond the fire and saw exactly nothing.

“You remember Red Barn, Mack?” Leo said.

“Yeah.”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember it was pure hell.”

“Remember the overnight? Your earache?”

“Yeah. Mostly I remember the cicadas. And the Melonheads.”

The cicadas hadn’t bothered Leo. He could show dominance to a cicada, a dog, a hyena, a bear, or a man. But not to those forces that made him weep in summer or fistfight among the painfully bright roses.

LEO AND MACK
took a picture of themselves in the dark sitting on the end of a log and smoking the cheap convenience-store cigars they’d bought in Sequim.

“It doesn’t make you have to burp,” Leo said, holding out a monogrammed flask, which had been a groomsman gift. “Hey, buddy, don’t make me drink alone.”

Mack relented and took the flask, drank, wiped his lips. “That’s too strong for me. This cigar is already burning my throat. Isn’t it burning yours?”

“Bah!” Leo dropped the heel of his boot into the coals and watched the red cinders fly up and barrage the darkness on long whirling braids of light.

“Careful!” Mack said.

Leo dropped his boot again and released some more fireflies, which puffed, paused, and then flew like Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff, pausing on the air, then falling. Leo had drunk enough to forget the fight in the Rose Garden.

“Why did Mom send us to that place?” Leo said. “What kind of mother sends their kids to a barn? A mother pig, that’s who.” He had to be drunk to bring up their mother.

“She did it for you, didn’t she?” Mack said, with what Leo believed to be false innocence. “Because you hated sports camp.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would’ve rather been playing baseball.”

“I thought you told me once you were afraid of the ball back then.”

“No. Not really.”

Leo said, “She sent us to Red Barn because the Helpern kids went there.” James Helpern’s boys would all be surgeons, like their dad.

“Yeah, but Mom was worried about you. I remember.”

His mom did worry about him, that much was true. How much he loved his mother! He could admit that to himself fully, proudly, when he was drunk, regardless of how his brother judged him for it. The most beautiful woman on earth, she’d been, before she paralyzed half of her face. At her wedding to Philip, she’d worn a silver silk blouse, the kind of thing Susan Clark wore in
The North Avenue Irregulars
in 1979, and she was soft and strong just like all those chaste, fair females of the North Avenue Presbyterian Church in the movie: Rookie, June Bride, Kiddie Car, and Phantom Fox (even Cloris Leachman had a pleasing shape in 1979, though he’d adored Susan Clark more in her shirtwaist dresses and Karen Valentine at the organ and Barbara Harris joking about her Saint Bernard; he’d adored them in a rather distant way back then, as one adores something very valuable that must not be handled, a mint-condition baseball card or the title to some estate cached in safe deposit). His mother was beautiful like those beautiful ladies in the movies and at heart as tough as those Midwestern matrons you read about who lift a truck off their children in the moment of need, and that was what his mom had done, in a way. He wished it were 1979, before his mom’s face was paralyzed, before AIDS, and he could have sex with Miss April of that year, Missy Cleveland, who was nineteen and had real breasts with soft pink nipples and a huge blond civet-buttered bush.

“What, you think she wasn’t worried about you?” Leo said.

“Not as much as you,” Mack said, looking in the firelight noble and faintly aggrieved like an Indian.

Leo did not even let out the great big sigh rising up in his chest.

Not long after the sun came up in Olympic National Park, Leo went out of the tent and sat on a rock thinking. He remembered the smell of coffee and wind particular to canoe trips with Philip; Philip had been Dad for as long as he could clearly remember. And he thought for a long time about the elk and where it was right then and where it had slept and whether it had slept at all, and what it thought when it woke up (like,
I guess I won’t brush my teeth again since I have no hands
). He listened to the running of the Elwha and wondered if he was enjoying the sound, which nearly moved him to tears (he couldn’t let it, though, and so the tears remained a fullness in the rear passages of his nose and throat). Or was the sound of the Elwha the sound of the last good things on earth bleeding out to their tragic end as the human race fragged itself on its own unstable age of change? Or was it only the sound of his own minutes on earth trickling from the vein?

“You all right? You mad?”

“No, I’m not mad,” Leo said.

They packed up and loaded up and left. Leo didn’t care about bears anymore. He didn’t care if he was eaten or not. He hoped he would be eaten and that Mack would run away and live.

They went to see the springs, yellow algae-bubbling pools that breathed a sulfurous steam among rocks. It didn’t look like a good place to swim. They hiked back down and stopped for lunch beside a gray chill sky. They saw fallen trees, alpine forget-me-not, and sage buttercup.

Leo carried in hand his
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Western Region
, heavy as a brick with its glossy photo paper, and he didn’t say anything the whole way down. He waited for Mack to say something but Mack didn’t say anything either.

When they reached the bottom the green Saturn awaited them one and a half inches from the mud.

They drove on.

They drove to Bainbridge Island and took a ferry to Seattle. There in that northwestern capital, on a Wednesday, they ate their lunch with the businessmen on the grassy embankment at Pike Place Market, watching tankers and ferries slowly cross Puget Sound. An old man with no shirt on and rings through his nipples and tattoos up and down his back ate a nectarine with his left hand and only his left hand, prodded his thumb through its rind and squeezed its juice into his mouth. Leo admired this act of gusto and thought the old man very wise. He said, “Mack, I need help.”

“What is it.”

“Something’s going on with me.”

“Why.”

“You know, this happens to me sometimes. I’m sorry it’s happening now, but it really is.” Leo spat on the ground. Swallowing anything, even saliva, was like swallowing a nail.

“It’s okay.”

“Help.”

“What should I do?” Mack said.

“I don’t know. If I knew I wouldn’t need help.”

At the University of Washington a group of touring high school kids passed them twice. Both times Leo smiled at two pretty young girls and they smiled at him. They went to see a movie,
Summer of Sam,
and ate dinner in Belltown, where it was raining and completely dead and empty. The prawns scraped Leo’s throat and the Merlot burned the scrapes.

He stayed awake in the Red Roof Inn thinking about time, thinking about how each passing second is different and smaller than the one before, because every new second adjoined to the seconds of memory has a smaller and smaller share of the total time lived, and week by week, year by year, the pace of time accelerates so that living is in fact diving headfirst into a screaming black hole. And he thought of last good-byes, how for every person he knew there would be one, a last one forever and ever, though neither he nor they might recognize the moment for what it was till after it had come and gone. And he thought of how the earth is filled with liquid—metal, but liquid metal (he wanted to write a story about a man who dug to the center of the earth and became the richest person in history with all his wealth in nickels that he piled on the moon)—he thought of how all people, splitting their seconds one by one like atoms, were living on a fragile floating rind, like ants on an easily punctured nectarine. Then all the products of human life and human beings themselves could be wiped out at one blow without a worry for all the hard and careful work people had done or for the billions of years it had taken for Earth and its people to get to that point, without a care for how people would feel.

In the morning they drove west on Highway 2 across Washington State, across the dirt quarry of the Columbia River Basin, dry and brown with vast Martian mesas of denuded earth and a few unnatural lakes here and there in the dark unnatural earth. As they passed through the irrigation district, Leo’s heart sank deeper and deeper, city by city: Ephrata, Electric City, Coulee City, Davenport. They stopped at the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest concrete structure in the world, stuff of the Roman Empire, the New Deal project that bridled the Columbia River to make tanks and bombs and irrigate the desert east of the Cascades. FDR’s wooden wheelchair rested there like a shed carapace, like the dam itself, a remainder of the Great Depression and the New Deal and the war. A Blackfoot Indian sat before a stack of pamphlets at the Grand Coulee museum, not saying anything. Leo went to the bathroom and took off his Cleveland Indians jersey with Chief Wahoo on it so he was wearing only his shrunken pit-stained white undershirt.

And finally, in Spokane they ate at Frank’s Diner, which was in a real railroad car, and Leo thought of lying on the tracks, except that there were no tracks; it was just a railroad car turned into a little restaurant on a patch of weeds. The free newspaper in the vestibule rack said the Nazis were marching tomorrow morning in Coeur d’Alene.

“Let’s go see what these fuckers think they’re all about,” Leo said, and in fact, at least for a moment, he felt he would slay the doom, death, and desperation in his mind once and for all and never again have the urge to lie down on railroad tracks.

The first things they saw were weird flags—Confederate flags, upside-down American flags, Nazi flags—and when Mack saw them he said, “Let’s get out of here. This place is not good for us.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Leo said. “Especially not me.”

“Especially not either of us.”

The avenue was lined with innocent mom-and-pop country-cute stores like you see in Chagrin Falls east of Cleveland, and there were decorations still up from the Fourth of July, lots of those half circles of county-fair red-white-and-blue bunting that call to mind grandmother aprons and butter churns. Leo looked at them and saw families hoping for customers and the Fourth of July colors on the embarrassed storefronts were like the color of their shame.

The people in the parade were shouting, “White power!” and a lot more people were shouting back, “White trash!” The king of the parade seemed to be an old man lying on a lawn chair on the back of a pickup truck. They were right up close; the old man had brown spots on his head and a tie with a swastika tie clip and a bullhorn. A big white dog lay next to him with its head between its paws on the flatbed and its eyes closed.

The old man said into the bullhorn, “I don’t think there are too many niggers out there because my dog Himmler here’s sound asleep. My dog doesn’t hardly ever get to smell nigger, it drives him crazy. I’m glad I’m not a nigger. Himmler would chew my leg off. If you want to live under the thumb of the Jew dictatorship, that’s fine with me, if you want your children’s blood mixed with nigger blood, then go right ahead. But go do it down in the islands where nigger people belong, or in holes in the Ural Mountains where the Jew belongs, not in the USA. This is a land of whites and Christians. Now, some people think we’re violent. That’s what the Jew wants you to believe and what he tells you in the Jew-controlled mainstream media. In fact, we’re not violent at all. We’re just the same as anyone. We’re not violent unless you threaten our children. That’s when violence becomes the only moral choice. When the laws of God come into conflict with the laws of man, then it’s your duty as a Christian not to follow the laws of man, laws written by a government of mongrels. But don’t listen to what Jew newspapers and bellyaching niggers say. We’re not violent. We just want to be left in peace. People ask me if I condone the actions of that fellow in Chicago who shot the niggers and Chinamen on the Fourth of July. I say, no I do not, as he then turned the gun on himself, and suicide is a sin against the Lord Jesus Christ.”

There was a helicopter in the sky. There were a hundred policemen in riot gear, there to protect the straggly, pathetic little Nazi parade from the citizens of Coeur d’Alene, who were doing most of the yelling and were jabbing their signs at the sky. The green hills themselves seemed embarrassed by the basic irrelevance of it all and the green traffic lights, too, spearing the boring cloudless blue sky, unable to do anything about any affair of human beings but stand there and suffer in the harsh midmorning sun over the eastern end of Sherman Avenue.

The Nazis seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in refusing to be deterred, like a child saying “You can’t make me,” and they threw a black baby doll onto the street and began to take turns gleefully stomping on it. A lady with a real baby in her arms, a white baby, of course, kicked the black baby doll as if it were an effigy and when a man in the crowd called something to her, she went right up to him and struck him directly in the face.

Leo was pushed forward up close to the lady with the Nazi baby and he said, “Let me ask you something! Let me ask you something! If you’re so superior to the Jews—”

“I am! I’m white! I’m Christian!”

“If you’re so superior to the Jews, then why are they running the world and you’re out here in Idaho with your leader in the back of an old pickup truck?”

“You just admitted it! You admit you’re trying to run the world, you kike parasite!” she said, and she reached out and swatted Leo in the face and her fingernails flashed hot across his temple. “This is a Christian country! Love it or leave it!”

“You Nazi bitch.”

He couldn’t see Mack anywhere.

He heard Mack calling his name but he still couldn’t see him, and for a moment he wished Mack hadn’t used his name because he thought the Nazis would come get him. Then he felt a big arm around him. Mack was much bigger than he used to be, a big lug now, six foot three, an inch taller than Leo.

The old man was raising his voice louder through the wobbly bullhorn and he had his arm up in a
Sieg Heil
salute.

“How could somebody that frail consider himself superior?” Mack said. “To anyone. The guy looks like Larry King.”

“Isn’t the car that way?” Leo said.

“It’s up here,” Mack said. “Let’s get the fuck out of Idaho.”

“I’ll get bacteremia from the bugs that live under that Melonhead bitch’s fingernails,” Leo said in the bathroom of Dunkin’ Donuts. He’d worried so much they had to stop and buy hydrogen peroxide, which fizzed along his scratches in the bathroom mirror.