The Company You Keep (51 page)

While I smoked, now, I took out my survey map. There was another eight miles to the end of the logging road, where it intersected with a dogleg of the state trail: one direction came twelve miles from a trailhead along Route 25, due west, the other direction led due north to the Oscada, some fifteen miles. If they learned from Benny where I—and Mimi with me, according to Benny—had gone, they could perhaps be getting a second team out on the 25 right about now. That meant I had eight miles to do against their twelve to arrive at the trail dogleg.

I repacked the bag and looked up the trail. There was a steady grade up, now, and I thought I remembered that this would be the case for some time. As if doing an inventory of my resources, I checked my anxiety level and found it not lessened but somehow contained, painful but present in only one portion of my body.

That thought, however, I failed to connect with the joint I had just smoked, perhaps because, stoned, I had forgotten having smoked it.

Pack strapped on, I took a skip and began running again.

Again, having forgotten the dope, I did not question my immediate, enhanced sense of my body’s balance. Knowing I was going too fast, I slowed and began running off my toe, using my gastroc to absorb the impact and to launch the leg, instead of relying on the tendon of my heel. The step was made all the easier by the fact that the little logging road had grown over with grass, a magically soft surface that folded beneath my running shoe and cushioned each step. When my gastroc, in turn, began to feel the use, I switched my gait back to a flatter-footed step that relied again on the tendon and sped up to tip the vectors of my weight farther forward. Tendon, I knew, would last longer than muscle even when injured. That it would take longer to get better, if it got better at all, in this case didn’t matter.

Now the wind came to me as a huge curvaceous breath in the sky, shaped like a paisley, rustling precisely around me, the round orb of the fat end encircling my head, then gaily sending its energy into the thin twist of tail. My mind seemed to follow that tail right up over the ridge and then on west through the high sky of windy clouds, defining a precise topology of forest hill and dale, of lake and clearing, as it went. And across the distance of wind, I felt the chill waters of the Great Lakes in three directions, the water that was sending these big clouds tumbling inland on rushing wind, the water that was feeding this enormous canopy of the sky the high kinetic energy of storm.

A sudden movement attracted me, and I saw, for several bright seconds, the tail quarters of a coyote, heading away. I stopped, but just briefly, and then leaned back into the run. In the wake of the animal’s escape I felt the metallic sensation of its fear emanating like rings on a lake’s surface when a fish jumps.

As I ran for my life in the Michigan woods.

The Michigan woods. I breathed in balsam with the wind, as if it could pass purely through my body, dissipating and carrying away fear.
But now, stoned, there may have been terror in all the reality around me, but I was cleanly aware of it, without feeling afraid. What had happened? Calmly, I felt my way backward until I arrived at the joint, and as I did, I began to laugh. Ah, dope. The dope of my youth, apparently, had lost none of its potency.

Then I stopped laughing and slowed my pace. On my watch I estimated that I had run off four of my eight miles.

The lowering clouds had all but hidden the sun, now, and the evening was coming fast into the windswept forest. The deep woods during the approach of a Great Lakes summer storm. The sinking sun lighted the woods around me like a stage set. The hysterical wind poured through the trees; the plastic, nearly cartoonish colors shifting around me; the sky of fast-moving cloud, the dryness of the ripening leaves, deep green now. The road had sunk again into wetter land, and in the rutted track I ran thoughtless, an easy pace, catching footholds on the trail with my balls of my feet, shortening and lengthening my step between flat areas, jumping, sometimes, across little runnels of groundwater.

I came to the end of the logging road in two and a half hours, just as the sun had disappeared over a low ridge of hills. The remains of the old gate were there, but there was also a beaver pond that I didn’t recall. It was too dark to check the topo map. For a time I stood, hands on hips, feeling my breathing calm. Then I took off my shoes and socks and gingerly waded through the beaver pond. On the other bank, I set myself on a perch that looked back over the trail the other way.

Where would Mimi be? Eyes shut, as if the big wind could carry my perception, I imagined sweeping across the topography of the peninsula toward the western coast. She was traveling a marked trail and had a flashlight—she could reach the coast road by midmorning the next day. If she were going that way—Mimi, I assumed, was heading for the east coast, Oscada perhaps, where she had a boat, or access to a boat. What I needed to do was to keep the police following me until ten or eleven o’clock. Then she would be free.

If I could. The full night was coming in now, the wind lengthening
and hooting through the forest. I was shivering. In the bag were a set of silk long underwear. I pulled off my sweat-soaked running clothes and put those on. Then I pulled a space blanket from the pack and made myself a little nest in the leaves at the side of the beaver pond, my little pack with my clothes and shoes against my stomach. Lying there, shivering slightly, I dipped a cup of water from the pond. With the water, I ate two PowerBars and some salted peanuts. I finished with an orange.

Now I had no food left.

The thought made me feel free.

Free.

An unexpected feeling to descend on me right tonight. Lying on my back, I lit another of the joints and smoked it quietly, like a cigarette, letting the pouring wind whisk the big lungfuls of smoke away. To be alone in a woods, with a wind to destroy all sound and the darkness to hide in. To be stoned, the good, old-fashioned dope—nothing like Billy’s hybridized bud—easing my fear, massaging my anxiety.

When had I last felt like this? And at the question, it was as if a tunnel had opened into my own past all the way back to high school nights when my parents were out, alone with a joint and the television; and further: hotel rooms with my parents, before my brother was born, with a foldaway bed in the corner. I closed my eyes against the wind whipping the treetops, against the darkening sky of clouds, aware that I was seeing forty years into the past, far beyond the time when I had lost my daughter, all the way into the time before my father lost me.

I never went back to my family’s house after March 6, 1970, not once.

It had felt like freedom, then.

Now, huddling deeper into the space blanket and the little nest of leaves in the forest at night, I let my mind go where for years I had kept it away. The house on Bedford Street, my parents’ since the fifties, filled with objects from my grandparents’ Mount Morris—Jewish Harlem—apartment: their Katubah, their kosher dinner service kept in their oak sideboard. Its very rootedness was what had driven me away. The vast family—Sinais, Singers, and Levits, three cousins come together to New York in the last year of the last century, risen in a single generation, my father’s generation, to the pinnacle of what the country had to offer. The
family richness that had gathered in accidents of history like puddles after a rainstorm—the hospitality of America to Jews, the continuity of life in New York through boom and bust—its very wealth, its very warmth. Like the march of a Greek tragedy, it turned out to be that a generation later, my generation, it would all be undone, as if the very richness of the family held its loss as a necessary consequence. In the roar of the wind I saw that I had had a vision of the end of a way of life, of my family dissolving like wood in water, crumbling with age, battered by tide.

The wind hurled itself above me now, an endless pouring of energy, as if forming an impregnable roof above me, roaring through the miles and miles of empty forest, each tree shaking like a hand with a tambourine, each giving its voice to the roar of obliteration, and in that roar I huddled further into the delicious warmth that held my body within the blanket, like a magic spell.

We go through life on a tongue of flame. The very basis of our existence is as insubstantial as fire. We think that love makes loss bearable, but that’s not true. Nothing in God’s creation made losing Rebeccah bearable, nothing ever would. Love makes loss not bearable, but beautiful, and the beauty of that child, the beauty of that child’s happy life, the beauty of the few days of it spent with me, it could have sustained me until the day I died.

I saw her in Ann Arbor, Jasey. She’s so, so beautiful.

I fell into sleep as under a magic spell, curled into the warmth of my space blanket, surrounded by the roar of the wind in the trees. And perhaps my beautiful daughters, after all I had done to them, perhaps they still sent their beautiful souls to share with me this last night of freedom, because it was a sleep as sweet and sound and as healing as any I ever had.

In the morning there was a thick, still mist, the wind having gone entirely away.

Six
A.M.
Not far from me I heard the snort of a deer. Was that a dog barking in the distance? I imagined the deer pausing to listen. Then I
heard the steps of it startling and running away. The barking had come from the east.

That would be team one, the one that had left from the Linder Cabin.

I unwrapped myself from the space blanket, emerging into the chill air, and changed back into my wet running clothes. I left the blanket and the silk underwear where they fell—let the dogs find that, it would kill some time. In the backpack now were two joints left over, some caffeine pills, and some aspirins. I took the pills and aspirins, smoked half of one of the joints, and saved the other, with the remaining matches, in the little pocket of my running shorts. Then I walked around the beaver pond so as to leave a scent back to where I had slept, and then made my way back to the trail,

A dog barked. This time under a mile away, and that was sure. What was less sure was whether I had heard a man’s voice calling also.

Hunger suddenly welled up in my gut like nausea, and I leaned over to retch briefly.

I was at the dogleg of the state trail now. Leaning over still, I took several deep breaths. Then I started the northern trail at a sprint, nearly my fullest speed, for twenty-one full minutes by my clock, three six-minute miles and a couple of minutes to spare.

As soon as twenty-one minutes was up, I stopped dead, turned east off the trail, and climbed straight up a small incline, then made my way from tree to tree for fifteen minutes by my watch: a half mile at this pace. I turned at a right angle and, still sighting from tree to tree, made my way south for fifteen minutes, another half mile. Now I stopped and sat on the far side of a tree trunk, elbows on knees, head in my hands.

Slowly my breathing calmed. Slowly my body temperature came down. In the wet clothes, I even began to shiver. In the fog, I sat and shivered for a very long time, perhaps an hour, making no sound.

Now the mess of dope and exhaustion, the depletion of blood sugar, the overwork of endocrinal balances: my state of my mind was virtually impossible to take apart. And when at last I managed to put a name to the
overriding quality of my consciousness, it was, to my immense surprise, loneliness.

When had I last felt like this? Dimly I felt my way backward from place to place, year to year, all the familiar avatars of loneliness—Julia’s departure, Mimi’s flight—until, to my surprise, I arrived at the big, diffuse bruise of my existence, the time in my life when I, too, became a father who had abandoned a child.

Oh lord, that child. Oh lord, Rebeccah at two weeks old. Two weeks of that translucent skin, that milky smell, the blue of her eyes.

The morning after I’d left Rebeccah with Johnny Osborne, I went back to Ypsilanti for the last time. I cleared out the house, mechanically, without feeling, until I reached baby’s crib anyway. I told the neighbors that Mrs. Maynard had gone ahead with baby, and I packed the car and drove away, just as if I were in fact going to West Virginia. Down in Kentucky, I stored the contents of the car in a storage unit, paying for three years, and sold the car. The switch car, parked at the long-term parking at Lexington Airport three weeks before, by Mimi, was still there—Mimi had not taken it. And it was in this car that I drove to Chicago.

Now, as I held my face in my hands, crouched behind a tree in a fogged forest, I remembered those weeks as if the present, when I had lost everything, had formed a tunnel through time to its counterpart, those days of driving west to Chicago. To my enormous surprise, I had found myself amazingly, endlessly homesick. And not for my house in Ypsilanti with my wife and child—they were gone now, a hole in my breast, too horrible even to contemplate, like a gunshot wound—but for my childhood home.

It had seemed so close. As I drove west. My parents were sitting at their kitchen table, reading, or in the living room. My brother Daniel would be up in his room with Klara, my adopted sister, recently come from Israel, Daniel and Klara doing their homework or reading or smoking dope in the strange, conspiratorial friendship that had sprung up between them. In the downstairs study, the old dog, Replica, would be sleeping heavily, his white-flecked snout on two paws. And now, in the forest, in the very last moments of the run that had started then, out of all the things that could have come to me, the smell of my mother’s
kitchen came to me with a shocking reality: lamb shanks with their thick marrow, briskets cooked in wine, baking breads.

And while I was thinking that, I heard, directly behind me and at not more than fifteen yards, voices.

I had not meant to be this close, for God’s sake. They were practically behind me—I could practically hear the dogs’ paws. The wind was against them; that was good. And there was no scent trail to me: they were on the path coming from the east, and I had looped down from the north. The thought was a comfort for the second or two before the dogs began to bark.