King of the Mild Frontier (10 page)

I found if I slept on the lawn in my sleeping bag, I was less afraid. If someone were really going to do me in, it would have been a lot easier to creep up on my sleeping bag in the middle of the lawn in the dead of night and ball peen me than to find a way into my second-story bedroom and dig through the 600 pounds of covers I was hidden beneath. But I'd go to bed and my room would start to feel like a closed refrigerator box, and I'd grab my sleeping bag and head for the great outdoors.

Then death began leaking all over everything. A picture of a twelve-year-old girl named Charlene Zahn showed up down at the post office. Charlene had disappeared from her Boise home, and the entire state was on the lookout for her. She and the Philadelphia boy began hanging out together in my dreams. Soon I was scouring the obituaries in the
Idaho Daily Statesman
with the zeal of a mail-order grief hustler. I knew the names of the people who died in Idaho on any given day better than I knew the TV schedule in the newspaper.

It may simply have been that time in my life when I realized that nothing was forever, that a person could be there one minute and not the next. I wasn't particularly worried about grieving survivors, though the thought of them made me sad; I wanted to know what it was like to be dead. And I started trying to be
very
good. I made daily attempts to
stop swearing. I cut stealing money out of my mother's purse almost in half, cut ripping off the candy and pop machines at my dad's service station by almost forty percent. My daily prayer sessions could have landed me a guest spot on the Trinity Network, had it been invented yet. Lazarus became my new personal hero.

There is only one remedy for all that, though I didn't know it then. That remedy is time. At some point, a few months down the road, I simply said, If you're going to get me, Mr. Reaper, just do it. I'm tired of hiding under the covers until my sheets are soaked, tired of trying to discover whether every nocturnal sound is coming from the waking dead in my storage closet or the parade of zombies moving up Main Street in the dead of night to discover the phantom ladder leaning against the house outside my bedroom. Have at it. Hack me up. Suck my blood. Peel off my hide in two-inch strips. Kiss my ass. I'm going to sleep.

 

When I was a junior in high school, Alan Thompson's cousin mistook him for a deer and killed him. Alan was a relatively new kid; his family had moved down from McCall so his dad could take a job in the mill. He was pleasant, with a good sense of humor, not outstanding in any obvious way. He sat behind me in study hall, so we got to know each
other in our mutual attempts to keep from doing homework.

I only knew Alan a few months before he was killed. I heard the news over the weekend, and it didn't faze me much; I've always had a delayed reaction to traumatic events. On the following Wednesday the majority of the high-school population migrated to the funeral over at the Mormon church, which was filled way over capacity because two busloads of students also came down from McCall. It was an open casket funeral, but I didn't look. I'd seen one dead kid too many. Later, as we stood outside the church watching the pallbearers, including Alan's cousin—the one who killed him—bring the casket to the hearse, his cousin's knees buckled and a moan escaped his throat that pierced my heart. I knew instinctively that, given the choice, I'd rather be Alan than his cousin. Death didn't haunt me like it did in the days of the Philadelphia boy, but the ache of loss set free by that boy's moan scooped out my insides. I went home that night praying the people I cared most about would stay alive until I could be a better human being, and asking a version of the same question I'd heard the pastor ask: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” which was, “Why does Alan Thompson get it when the Thornton brothers, who spend half their time threatening to kick my ass and the other half kicking it, roam the planet with
impunity?” No good answer came, and I went through another period of trying to be good. Got the stealing down to about a third, though the swearing remained about the same. Shit.

I made it nearly through college holding death at arm's length—only old people died, people whose time had come—but when I was a senior, a close friend's girlfriend was killed in a senseless car accident.

Linc was one of the toughest guys I'd ever known; he still is. He was my age, but a year behind me in school. He'd had to take two shots at his senior year in high school because he punched out a student teacher for harassing his girlfriend. He was expelled for the rest of the year, and his father, every bit as tough as Linc, contacted a friend who was sailing around the world and bought Linc passage on the boat. To make a long story short, the boat shipwrecked and Linc had to pull several of the crew to shore. When he got back home, instead of receiving a hero's welcome from his father, his father enlisted him in the marine reserves, since he couldn't get back into school until the following year and the father didn't want Linc wasting his time. By the time I met Linc, he already owned his first bayonet.

You crossed Linc at your own peril. He had a “magic tooth,” which I would years later insert, along with Linc
himself, into my book
Stotan!
It was low-level magic. He'd had an abscessed front tooth before entering the marine reserves, and his dentist drilled a hole in the back to let the abscess drain. For some reason the hole was never filled in, and the swill that drained out of that tooth could easily bring a mink running with a smile on her face. If you disappointed Linc, or refused to do his bidding, he would clutch you by your shirtfront, bring you
very
close, suck the tooth, and blow in your face. If you survived, you honored his wishes. He was barrel chested and strong and redheaded and known for his creative capacity to get even. No one got a leg up on Linc. No one but the universe.

On New Year's Eve of my senior year in college, a bunch of the swimmers were together at a friend's house, watching bowl games, when our coach knocked. It was surreal seeing him there in the doorway; few of us had ever seen him away from the college or the pool. He called Linc into the kitchen. We glanced at one another, turned back to the game. When Linc came back, he said his girlfriend was dead.

For a while all the toughness ran out of my friend. He swam through workouts, hung out with us at our very edges, and complained to no one. Once in awhile he would come down the hall to my room in the wee hours of the
morning and reminisce about the things he and his girlfriend had done together and the things he missed. Then he would walk back to his room, broken. Now I
really
wanted to know why bad things happen to good people. I demanded it.

After graduation I traveled with my college roommate and boyhood friend, Ron Nakatani, doing odd jobs, playing Route 66, and discovering my bachelor of arts degree plus a quarter was enough to get me a bad cup of coffee, so I scampered back to Eastern to get a teaching certificate, thinking that as much trouble as I had caused for teachers over the years, I could help teachers in general retaliate by causing the same amount of trouble for students. My student-teaching placement during the last quarter of that year took me to a high school in a small town outside Seattle where I would apprentice in English, psychology, sociology, and history.

About four weeks into my student-teaching term, a popular renegade point guard on the basketball team drowned while lake fishing in a boat when a quick, violent storm blew in. Charlie was a strong swimmer, but he had been fishing the lakeshore earlier in hip boots and had not bothered to take them off. A note posted on the teachers' bulletin board the next morning requested all teachers to report to the teacher's lounge before going to first period. There, the principal and counselors asked us to help the
kids with their grief, help them understand. No one thought to help us understand. Most of the teachers walked out of the lounge like zombies, and the pall that fell over the school for the rest of the day was so thick you could almost taste it.

My master teacher was substituting for another teacher who had called in sick, and I was left alone with the class. I had no idea what to say. I didn't know Charlie well, but his edginess and quick smile were infectious, and I had only to think back to my college friend to imagine their loss. I told the kids to work on whatever they liked, or sit, or come up and talk. I placed a chair beside my desk and began grading papers and reading. Throughout the day several students sat in the chair and simply started talking. It scared me, so I didn't say much back, only nodded or shook my head in the appropriate places. Later many of them would say I had been a lot of help. It turned out to be my first clue to the nature of good therapy when I started working with people nearly ten years later: Shut the hell up; the person across from you is the expert on his or her feelings.

But this time death handed me a twist. At the end of the day another student, a heavy, uncoordinated freshman with thick glasses and bad teeth named Martin Korf (that's almost as appropriate as the name I gave Sarah Byrnes),
walked across the school lawn headed for home, by himself as usual, bugging anyone within earshot with stupid songs and bad jokes. That was business as usual for Martin, but on this day it got him a number of mean, sometimes malicious, retorts. Martin looked confused and a little bit pleased; usually his weak attempts for attention didn't put a blip on anyone's radar, so today, of course, he got louder and stupider until someone knocked him down. He was still sitting on the ground yelling epithets at his assailant when the teacher I was with trotted over to help him up.

“That guy's a son of a bitchin' bastard,” Martin said, brushing himself off.

“People are a little edgy today, Martin,” the teacher said.

“Yeah? How come?”

“Well, because Charlie Post died.”

“So?”

“A lot of people liked Charlie,” the teacher said. “They'll miss him.”

“I bet if I got drowned, everybody wouldn't get to sit around all day and not do work,” Martin said. He picked up his books and walked off in his ungainly gait, and I realized that this day was not much different from any other day in the life of Martin Korf, other than that he could irritate people more easily. He was right. We wouldn't have
suspended our regular schedules to let people grieve for him, because few people, teachers included, would have felt the need. It occurred to me that a lot of people in that school, allowed a secret ballot, would have voted Martin off the island long before Charlie.

The reverend in charge of Charlie's funeral asked God that same rhetorical question: Why do bad things happen to good people? and in keeping with the “Strange and Mysterious Ways” stance that was becoming all too familiar, he didn't give us an answer. I wondered if he'd have stated the question the same way had it been Martin Korf's funeral.

A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life. As they say, without death there is no story. Probably a better way to say that is, without loss there is no story, and death is simply the trump card of loss.

At fifty-five, death is no longer a stranger to me. I have seen it heartless and I have seen it merciful. Because of my work in child abuse and neglect, I have seen, from up close and at a distance, babies and infants killed, survivors of drive-by shootings, attempted and realized suicides. Death lurks everywhere, every bit as much a part of life as birth.

In the spring of 1985, I was back in Cascade, Idaho,
visiting my parents. I'd brought the manuscript of
Stotan!
for them to read. At five o'clock on Easter morning, I felt a presence in the blackness of my room, flipped on the light to see my father standing in the doorway. For the first time
ever
in my life he said, “Buddy, I think I need your help.” He was having a heart attack. I got him into the car and drove the few blocks to the hospital, where they stabilized him temporarily. We had a long talk that evening about what it felt like for him to believe it was probably over. He said it “scared me a little.” He went to sleep, and I went back to my parents' house, talked with my mother until she fell asleep, and wondered what it might be like to be at that spot where you were forced to consider the value of your existence. It scared me a little.

The following morning I got up early to go see him, and as I approached the entrance, heard loud voices and scrambling in his room. I walked in to see two doctors pounding on his chest while a nurse ran for the electronics. I was situated just inside the doorway where I could see the action and also see the heart monitor placed outside the room. In the midst of the chaos, the man who was my father's chief political and personal rival in town coincidentally walked in to pick up a prescription. He looked over at the room, where everyone in town knew my father was, turned around
with no expression, and walked out. Within minutes I watched the monitor flat line.

There and gone.

Later that day, after I had delivered the heartbreaking news to my mother and contacted relatives, I walked into my parents' bedroom and saw the manuscript of
Stotan!
lying on the headboard just above my father's side of the bed, open to the last page he had read. I gazed at the manuscript and thought how fortunate I was to have evidence of just exactly, to the page, how far my father knew me. I leafed through it, grateful for every word he'd read, anguished for every word he'd missed. I wondered if he'd liked it.

There and gone.

Because my brother, who is still fifty pounds heavier and infinitely stronger than I, would shoot me in the head with a BB gun right after he broke my collection of ESUS SAVES memorabilia, I won't tell you what I did with my father's ashes, but you can use your imagination. My dad was a bomber pilot, trained to identify his enemy, and to never give the enemy the last laugh. Like father, like son.