Henry Miller Police Log

The Dry Trailer (a micro-play in three acts)

Characters: Wallace Stegner, fiction writer and revered historian of the American West. What he looks like, here, is any white-haired old man of renown. He has on a vest with a few safari style pockets.

Ajax: a short man, with unkempt hair. A poet.

Scene: The inside of a well-aged house trailer. Large enough to have a separate bedroom near the back. The interior implies a rural location—woodstove, bb gun, binoculars and such around the room. A table cluttered with catalogs, radio scanners, a bag of weed, dirty glasses, piles of books.

Act 1

Wallace Stegner stands in the middle of the trailer, looking weary, displaced. Ajax enters.

Ajax: Thank you for coming Wally. I just, I just figured out something about you today. And I really need to get it off my chest. Can I call you Wally? Probably not. I’ve finally figured it out. I was in the library and I picked up Mormon Country and there it was. I could see that there was that little boy in you, the one of Big Rock Candy Mountain vintage, writing the story. The story where the order and gentility of the Latter Day Saints is as appealing to that young boy as a glass of lemonade. All that harnessed energy, all that reserve and modesty. So inviting. Only, the thing is, I think the way you came to love the Mormons was the way you came to love playing tennis; an entree into company so unlike the dissolute and gaudy people of your youth. But then....

Wallace Stegner: Excuse me young man. You have me at a disadvantage here. I awake in a strange house, a trailer really, and here you are. You, of course, have created me and so it is up to you to tell yourself how I would respond. I can’t possibly be expected to tell you anything about me.

Ajax: I know Wally. But we’ve been over this. If you could just come to accept...

Wallace Stegner: You are kind of a strident person. Perhaps you might take to writing what you want to say and not blaming your failure on me.

Ajax: But I can’t Wally. Nobody listens to me. Wait, is that me saying that or you?

Wallace Stegner, sighs: Resorting to literary trickery already. I can see that you probably think about the shortcomings of old men more than you write your own....what was it again... poems?

Ajax: They’re micro-fictions really. I don’t know about the term poetry.

Wallace Stegner: You don’t know about much, it would seem.

Act 2

Wallace Stegner and Ajax seated around a table in the trailer.

Ajax: Really Wally, it’s not you. It’s your acolytes. These supper club wilderness poets, these timid professors conditioned against the imaginative aspects of the west. It doesn’t look to me like the geography of hope. Just boring old conventional liberals with wilderness vacation plans.

Wallace Stegner: And you don’t want to be bored, I take it? You want some big ideas? Some cooler people perhaps? 

Ajax: No, I want better stories, something other than this guild of scissor bills, this endless echoing of the same bell. 

Wallace Stegner: That’s pretty harsh.

Ajax: One of your people, this poet guy....

Wallace Stegner: Could I have a glass of water? You know, I’ve been back in that bedroom for so long. It seems that every time you feel the need to harangue me, you forget that I have been back there for years. I’m thirsty, give me some water at least.

Ajax, dragging a glass carboy from near the door: You’re in luck. I just filled up from the bootleg spring. Good limestone spring water.

Wallace Stegner: You don’t have any water here of your own? Where are we anyway? 

Ajax: Wally, you don’t get a house in the Los Altos hills with a redwood deck just for singing the land electric around here. You get a dry trailer on someone else’s property. But the view! 

Wallace Stegner: It is pretty good water. I’ll give you that. But still, a house without water is not a home. And you have no idea of what my deck was constructed.

Ajax: Anyway Wally, I think we all know they gave you the pulitzer for Angle of Repose as a sop, because they’d ignored your better work. I mean, c’mon, Lyman Ward is a prick and the stuff that comes out of the kids’ mouths? They’re just foils for you to bitch about the turmoil of the sixties. The whole thing, just an exercise in putting dry words in their mouths so you can dismiss them. One wonders what campus slight you endured to write such crap.

Wallace Stegner: Words in their mouths? Just like what you are doing here, you mean. Putting words in my mouth? 

Ajax: Fair is fair. 

Wallace Stegner: Patience young man. In a hundred years, people will still read Cuckoo’s Nest and probably not Angle of Repose. Cowboy stories, they’re nothing new. You’ll get your revenge, I suspect. You’re on the side of the easy answer, the sexed-up movie plot as history. 

Ajax: You might be right. The cowboys have better parties and the polar fleece professors, they just aren’t my tribe. But I’ll tell you what, Wally, Crossing to Safety is an immense book. A courageous ode to simple, decent friendships and plain-spoken words. How can I ignore you for that? How can I just let you go?

Wallace Stegner: I’d like to go very much. Perhaps you could try just making friends with me. I can see why no one listens to you. You talk too loud. 

Act 3. 

Wallace Stegner sits at the table, Ajax stands looking out the window. He fingers an unlit joint.

Ajax: Finish your water, Wally. I’m having dinner with John Muir.

Wallace Stegner: Let me guess, you’ve got some complaints with him as well?

Ajax: A preacher is a preacher. 

Wallace Stegner: What does that make you? Does anyone really read these micro-fictions of yours? It strikes me that you are mostly a kidnapper, interrogating your heroes. Aren’t you going to ask for some sort of ransom? Wouldn’t that be customary here? What did you say about this water, again? A bootlegger spring?

Ajax: That’s right. A whiskey spring. In the Depression, the ranchers made it up here in the hills and sold it to the Salinas gentlemen. 

Wallace Stegner: You’ve seen this? There is evidence, a record? 

Ajax: Sure. It’s our history here.

Wallace Stegner: Yours? It’s a good story. Better than beating up old men who can’t talk for themselves. 

Ajax: My people came and grew dope from the same springs. You see the elegance of the thing? We’re all looking for the right water, for any water.

Wallace Stegner: Aridity is destiny? I said that, right?

Ajax: Damn straight. The history of the west. Drink your water Wally.

Ajax and Wallace Stegner drink glasses of water. Fade out. 

it's just something we do now and then

1.

His brother Jimmy was coming home for the summer, and so Lloyd turned his thoughts to the ripening of rose hips. He figured Jimmy would last until right about the time they turned red. That was how long he expected have to put up with things. It wasn’t a prediction, it was a plan.

Jimmy’d be fresh from dropping out of something or other, looking to find the next thing to not finish. Lloyd loved the summer, the hours of chasing cows in the high country and fixing fence, going sun up to sun down. He liked to do this, the same thing every year. His brother made him agitated. Before long he would probably stop coming back around. Lloyd felt settled in at twenty-five, and that suited him okay.

He’d had his own wild years. They consisted mostly of going to football keggers and, on occasion, up to the treeplanter parties at the old Bruce place. It was fine for awhile, puffing on a joint at the edge of the campfire or sucking on a Silo cup of warm beer. Especially when the hippy girls or the cheerleaders came out, but not the young ones. It wasn’t like that.

The afternoon Lloyd graduated from Baker High School, the wind whipped around a purple banner with a motto stitched in gold that he preferred to forget. He sat through the ceremony, got his piece of paper, flipped the tassel thingy around, and felt no different. All of that supposed work to get this thing that everyone knew was worthless? He felt scammed and went back to the ranch more or less for good. 

His brother graduated two years later, chased the empty promise as far up the food chain as he could. Dropping in and out of one college or another, confident that if he could find the right way into the water, he could slip into stream that guided his friends along. Eventually, he forgot where he was trying to go but kept looking for new ways to get there. Guiding kayak trips for a broke outfitter, canvasing for critters, building rickety furniture out of shipping pallets. Lloyd paid no attention anymore when his mother called to tell him about it. Jimmy talked of these things in terms of what they might become if he worked the right angle, turned the right corner. But he gave up quickly.

Lloyd watched for the rose hips to start swelling. So he could grudge them the days it took to widen and darken in color. He knew this was sarcastic, but it gave him a chuckle. 

And then, there was a white plastic tent in the lower meadow. It had a plexiglass eye at the apex of the roof and it looked like a giant white pimple grown next to a perfectly serviceable old board and batten cabin.

2.

It was mostly just Lloyd and the ranch manager, a few hired Mexican hands, around the main house in the summer since his parents had moved closer to town. The morning after the plastic yurt appeared, Lloyd decided to go to Baker for groceries. He would offer to pick up some things for his brother. He drove down through the lower gate, over the creek and pulled in beside his brother’s Toyota. No one answered his greeting, but a few seconds later, two dazed faces poked through the door flap. 

His brother, still loose-limbed and ranch strong, and a skinny blonde woman with the ashram look. Jimmy broke into a smile, gave his brother a hug, and without saying a word, bent to his knee and flung his arms out at his companion like a carnival barker. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen from his baggy pockets and wrote: Heather. They all nodded and smiled like tourists with no common tongue.

His brother went back to the pen and paper and wrote: We’re being silent today. It’s just something we do now and then. It looked frustrating, writing that all out. It looked like Jimmy had a new tattoo. When he held the pad up, both he and Heather shrugged. 

Lloyd poked his head through the flap, a doorway for which they had no door, and cast his eyes around. A jumble of sleeping mattresses and rolls of bubblex insulation. The smell of the PVC off-gassing from the yurt walls stung his eyes. It would be like living in a fort made of new bath mats, twenty four seven.

He forgot to ask about groceries, and his brother mouthed the words tomorrow or the next day and pointed up to the ranch house. Lloyd waved as he backed out. The image stayed in his mind, the two of them there on the porch, his brother waving back with his note pad and Heather bowing to the waist, the cottonwoods and birches budding out behind them. 

3.

Heather got a seasonal job with the Forest Service, and Jimmy did things. At first these things might include changing the tire on the four wheeler or clearing the dead row poplar for firewood. But soon he did these things out of sight or off the ranch. Eventually he came up with a job maintaining HVAC systems that kept him on the road, in a company car, all over the northwest. 

By the time the rose hips were good and well formed, it was often mostly he and Heather at the ranch. Not that he saw her much, it was what he heard of her. Anne Whitcomb from the Forest Service said that Heather had, upon arrival in the office, informed most of the men, all of the men really, that she “did not believe in monogamy”. It should be said that she was easy on the eyes, strong and willowy and new to the dusty, windy world of the Baker valley. The men, said his informant, had lined up.

There were other things, but that was the gist of it and he figured the other stories just embroidered on the main thing. He figured Anne Whitcomb might have her own boyfriend in the mix and could possibly have added yeast to the starter. He felt a little proud, really, to be living out at the source of the river of gossip running through town. But didn’t really believe the story, because he told himself surely she would have visited her policy upon Lloyd himself.

Heather did have this policy, though, about honesty. He could see that and didn’t care for it. This included saying strange, blank things at any time whatsoever. Little honesties that ought really not be spoken of. One time, drinking some greenish tea and sitting on the floor of the yurt, she told Lloyd, “You know, Jimmy doesn’t like you either.” Or she would say, “I have to fart.”, before doing the deed, usually with gusto. It made Lloyd go a little red in the face and find an excuse to be moving on. It just made no sense to waste people’s attention with such things. 

They fell into a rhythm of the comings and going of vehicles, half-hearted porch waves, a cup of pond scum tea every few days, when Jimmy was on the road. Lloyd kind of forgot about the smiling woman giving him a mock salute as she sped up the driveway in Jimmy’s truck, on the way to work. But he kept an ear out for the more mysterious, can-you-believe-she-did-that woman who lived in town behind a desk. That woman was possibly the same as the one who lived in the plastic tent, he couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to be. 

4.

A warm August evening, the wind starting to die down, Jimmy and Heather stopped at the mailbox in separate vehicles. She asks him, as he is looking over the new catalogs, whether he might cook her a steak. “Is that,” he asks, “a trick question?”

“I eat meat. When it’s local. I could really go for a big barely cooked steak right now.” Lloyd ponders this, whether there is some hidden meaning to it. But Heather just looks at him, suppressing a friendly giggle. “I know, shocking, right? But I need a fix.”

The next day, Lloyd thaws two steaks. He can’t be sure they have come from his family’s cows save for the purple ink stamp on the white freezer paper. Milton’s Mobile Butchery. Milton the meat guy, his bloody apron and comb-over hair blowing in the wind, that’s what he thinks of when he thinks of steak. He wonders if that makes it local. 

“My job’s going to be cut early.” says Heather. “Gotta celebrate that.” She opens a beer from the six pack she has brought. Lloyd doesn’t really believe in hops, but he sips his and celebrates too. No more Jimmy and Heather. But really, his brother is gone already. It is going to happen before the rose hips are ready to pick.

The air sizzles and pops with the steaks frying on the old stove, the smell of it through the house. “So what now,” Lloyd asks, “you and Jimmy?” His brother hasn’t even stuck around long enough to become a ghost when he leaves this time.

Heather waves her hand at Jimmy’s name. “He’s going to Alaska. He wants to go climbing. Me, I don’t know yet.” She rubs her eyes. “But I think I want to stay around here.”

Lloyd is surprised and not. He puts the steaks out and Heather makes a salad of greens and little round tomatoes. She attacks her steak, holding her fork down like a kid and sawing at it with her knife. Lloyd likes watching her work. Then she gets up, in obvious distress, and walks around the kitchen. “It’s nothing,” she says, “I just have a bladder infection and I can’t sit still for long. From all the sex I’ve been having.” 

A lump forms in Lloyd’s throat. He isn’t sure what he is hearing. It doesn’t sound like a proposition, but maybe it is, beneath a ruse. He fumbles for words, but she is doing some sort of stretch, knees bent and one arm thrust forward like a fencer, back toward him. Not a proposition. 

She sits back down and recommences to sawing on her steak. “This is so good. This is just what I needed,” she says. 

4.

Jimmy went to Alaska and almost climbed Mt. Chamberlin, up in the Brooks Range. But he couldn’t raise enough money for the bush flight. And then he got a job in Fairbanks.

Heather and her cousin bought a property higher up toward Eagle Creek, in the woods with the summer people. They moved the plastic pimple and the gossip up there with them. They were good neighbors, really, and they mashed the rose hips he picked into jam. He liked them fine, but not like that. 

The Fair Banks

The man sits in his truck with the engine running while his son gets his coat on. The boy gives him a passing kiss and says, “Dad, you’ve got a cactus on your face,” runs off into the building. He watches the boy until he is only a yellow coat in a crowd of other coats. Over the building entrance, a blue airplane of mosaic tile flies through a kaleidescopic sky beneath the word EXPLORE. The loudspeaker on the building reminds parents tomorrow is Friday in Fairbanks and he makes a mental note to pack an orange with his son’s lunch. The boy doesn’t eat enough fruit.

It is snowing again, hard and cold for this late in the spring. The man drives the corners slow to avoid spinning out and eases the Ford into the parking lot of a bar to have an early beer. He pushes through the door into brown-paneled gloom where the Eisen twins are sitting at a table by the window. Two old men with matching hearing aids and beaked noses, eating a plate of nachos and drinking iced tea. He knows and he knows the bartender knows that when she is not looking they spike the iced tea with a flask of Jim Beam.

On the television behind the bar, college kids run up and down the court, glistening with sweat, the resolution of the screen showing it all too clear, too bright. The bartender empties various bottles into a glass beaker, when it is nearly full she splashes in a few drops of blue curacao. “Easter drink,” she says, “I’m thinking of calling it The Rising.” He tries to say something encouraging, but the blue liquid looks like after shave.

 “It looks....sweet,” he decides.

“You tell me. It might be too much.” 

She pours him a shot glass and wanders off to check her text messages. The drink is minty and viscous, like mouthwash. But he tells the bartender it is just right because he wants another freebee. Instead she throws out the whole thing and starts over, pours him a beer which he cannot really taste now, as if he has already brushed his teeth. He watches a short white boy on the television take and miss one three-pointer after another. 

When he gets home, he decides against fiddling with the carburetor on the snow machine, takes a pair of snow shoes and a length of yellow tie down webbing down from the garage wall. He starts out onto the ice of the Tanana, hoping the logs he has sawn are still to be found on the berm in the middle of the river. The red Toyota was there the day before, his competition for the last birch logs washed up in the summer, now sticking out of the ice like pick up sticks. He doesn’t need the firewood, but he sawed it up before the Polaris went balky and he thinks of it as his.

Out on the river, the snow has stopped falling. He shuffles along, the ground barking, and wonders if the boy’s mom will remember to buy oranges. As he walks he smokes, first with his right hand and then with his left when it goes numb. 

He gets to the pile of birch poles and choses a small one, one that he can pull on foot. He sets a choker with the strapping and begins pulling it back to the shore. The going is easy where snow machines have left a track. He sweats into his long underwear and imagines his clothes becoming stained with blue, sticky sweat. 

The wind hits him in the face as he crests a rise. Just a little wind, but a wind in the face now and not at the back. It blows in past his hood and down over his shoulders. He stops and finishes his cigarette. The fog of his breath clouds his glasses, the snot in his red mustache slowly turning to icicles. Something blows into him with the force of the wind, a feeling more than a thought: a person could die out here, on a day like this.

A person could die out here, a mile or so from the northern-most Denny’s in the world, thinking about oranges and listening for the midday jet to descend into town. He could turn into a corpse hauling a pecker pole of firewood with a cell phone in his pocket and a warm room full of blue cocktails just up the road.

The feeling pleases him; he will not freeze to death. He needs to get home and stoke the fire before the boy and his mom get home. He puts out his cigarette, re-cinches his burden and shuffles along toward the shore. 

The Pocket Ref

(Published in Cheatgrass 1999-ish)

The letter landed on Bob Schramm's desk as he and his assistants were busy checking the final draft of the 3rd addition of the Handy Pocket Reference. Tim, the smirking young man who worked as a fact checker--just until his novel was sold--dropped it onto the stained calendar pad along with his report on the previous day's progress. The postmark was stamped Baker City, Oregon and there was no return address.


Bob reached for the letter dagger in his drawer, slit the envelope open and extracted one page of spiral notebook paper, which shed confetti from the untrimmed edge upon his desk. He smoothed the paper out, sliced away the fringe with the sharp point of the dagger and hunched over the desk, hands folded, to read the letter:

Mr. Editor,


In regards to your second addition of the Pocket Ref., page 213 states that lodgepole pine, under the comments section, is given M-medium, for smoke and M-medium, for spark. Have been burning lodgepole pine firewood all my life and everyone knows that lodgepole is a low spark wood having been favored by the Indians for use in the teepee fire because of it not throwing sparks over the blankets and whatnot.


Sincerely, 


Dee Matthews



Bob folded the letter up and stuck it back in the envelope. "Tim," he said, "We have a little project here, an NVO." Non-Verifiable Opinions were Bob's vexation. He dreamt nightmares in which he was a prisoner of war and invisible tormentors jabbed at him with sharpened bamboo, chanting the awful acronym. "Bring me what you can about lodgepole pine, especially anything," he paused, "anecdotal." 


Tim smiled. Anecdotal was the kind of word he liked. "Sure, Bob. Right away."

Bob cleared the confetti from his desk and sat worrying his nails with the letter opener after Tim was gone. Bob's job was to verify all content of the Handy Pocket Reference, or the Ref. as it was known, and he was bound by the clear mandate of the title. He knew from past editions that pocket-sized meant no more than 542 newsprint pages, 5 1/4 by 3 inches. "Handy" implied that it must contain the kind of information a person would develop a sudden itch to know, such as the area code of Zimbabwe (263), the amperage capacity of 14 gauge copper wire (25 amps), whether or not Shellac was really made from the secretions of the Lac bug (it was). Handy also demanded that the reader not be left groping for definitions or fat encyclopedias. An ideal Handy Pocket Reference entry was like a haiku— simple, direct, and mysteriously satisfying.


The confusing, the redundant, and especially the outdated were to be eliminated. The last edition, for instance, had seen the ouster of a page about the various brands of typewriter ribbons and the inauguration of a chart comparing the relative sizes of kilo, mega-, giga-, tera- and petabytes of computer memory. Morse code was debated and argued over and finally retained, although Bob could not defend its elegance for much longer.


The weight of responsibility was heavy upon Bob, and he was a nervous man for it. Mornings were becoming a fest of nail picking and heavily sugared coffee. His hair was thinning, his waist expanding and his shirts were often stained with sweat and mustard.


The future of the Pocket Ref. was in doubt. Already the younger assistants talked of the day when people would carry around computerized reference cards and when they needed to know, say, the R-value of loose fill vermiculite (2.2R per inch), or the length of the Mesozoic era (65 to 230 million years before the present), they would enter their question and have it answered instantly by satellite link up. "No more Handy Pocket Ref.," they teased. Bob quickly squashed such speculation: "It was also said the telephone would end letter writing and that the television would replace radio. Besides, I don't suppose any of you own a video phone?" That kept them chewing for awhile.


Privately though, he worried. He worried not only for his job and for the Ref., but also for his readers. Bob had been untying Gordian knots of trivia long before the techno-jingoists had coined the term Information Superhighway, and it was not easy. Oh sure, anyone could look on the Internet now and find out how many gallons per minute a 1/2 inch water nozzle discharged (23.6 gallons at 10 lb. per sq. inch), or what the radio code 10-21 meant (use a telephone). Anyone could gather the random threads of the whole, the fingernail clippings and dust bunnies of trivia. Secretly though, people needed someone else to decide what was and what was not useful information. 


That someone else was the Handy Pocket Ref. Bob's mission was to screen the waters of trivia for a few useful, though random, jewels of knowledge. He worked as a miner pans for gold or, at more sublime moments, like a Maestro coaxing music from the white noise. The world, Bob knew, needed his services.


But these pesky NVO's...Bob was always entertaining speculation and opinion on such sections of the Ref. as the page comparing the merits of paint types or the recommended thickness of concrete slabs, and he accepted that on some matters he could not please everyone. He knew that as soon as the 3rd addition hit the shelves, he would get a phone call from some place like the Valpraiso, Florida Chamber of Commerce informing him that he had listed their population, in the Airports of The U.S. section, as 6316 when it was actually 6340. These quibbles the Ref. could withstand; people would understand that the population of Valpraiso was subject to change, or that paint selection depended upon variables.


When Bob imagined this Mr. Dee Matthews, this toothless old woodcutter from the boondocks, turning to page 213 and frowning over the simple M for medium spark, Bob frowned with him. Lodgepole pine either produced sparks or it did not. If the Pocket Ref. were wrong on that point, it left the matter to speculation and made null the reason for having the book in the first place. Perhaps Mr. Matthews would curse the editors as dumb city slickers and next time he had a question about the density of diamonds (10 grams per cubic centimeter) or the phone number to report his lost Sears card (800-877-8691, in the U.S.) he might not turn to the Ref. for answers. The future of the Ref. depended upon its authority, and a tricky NVO left no room for a final word.


Bob summoned up what little he knew about lodgepole pine. When he was a boy, he had been dragged along on a pack trip into the Yellowstone backcountry. He remembered his father identifying the various pines for him-which had two needles, which had three. Ted Schramm had been puffed up, childishly proud of this simple woods knowledge, he who had not been anywhere more rustic than a Chicago tavern in years. Bob remembered being introduced to each species as if they were important dinner guests, but he did not recall the name lodgepole.


Tim burst through the office door waving a fat paperback book at him. "Try this," he said, " It has great illustrations in it. Woodcuts. You'll love it."


"Thank you Tim," Bob snapped. The book was A Natural History of Western Trees by Donald Culross Peattie. Beneath the title was a drawing of some tree or another with a Medusa-like spread of branches and the twisted, malevolent posture of a goblin. Bob flipped the book over and read the reviews. "Both poetically evocative and deep with scholarly information," crowed one Thomas J. Lyon.
He opened it and found the section on lodgepole pine (Pinus Contorta var. latifolia Engelmann). Other names: Black, Spruce, Prickly, Jack, or Tamrac Pine, Tamarack. The second paragraph described the range as being from the Nutzotin mountains of eastern Alaska south through the Rockies. "Jack pine!" he said aloud. His father had called it jack pine.

"Bob," he had said, "We'll cut some camp logs out of that jack pine thicket over yonder. It grows real thick and there's bound to be plenty of dead wood in there." Bob had been stopped by his father's relaxed diction. Ted Schramm was a lawyer, a man of precise and urbane speech, a man who didn't use words like yonder. The warm command, the way he had tipped his head in conspiracy when he said "jack pine thicket", had promised something, some confidence Bob had never known. He had stood there looking at his father dumbstruck. Ted had smiled back at him and barked, "Well go on boy. Don't just stand there like a dude. Get us some wood." 


Bob sauntered toward the thicket of tightly-packed trees with a Hudson Bay ax whose painted blade was still fire-engine red, while his father removed the pack boxes from the horses. The sky was clear and high overhead and the boggy meadow grass sank under his boots as he walked. The whole world looked soft and summer-ripened, even the flies were too drowsy to bother buzzing in his ears and for the first time he thought he understood what his father was after by coming here.


Entering the thicket was like stepping into a cloud. He looked up but the sky was hidden behind the trees growing together like dog fur. Nothing at all grew on the ground, no other kind of tree broke the monotony. He turned around but could not see camp, though the horses nickered and stomped and he could hear his father talking to them as if they were close by. For just a second, he felt dread settling over him like a cold dew, but he laughed at himself and said aloud "What are you scared of, a few trees?"


He was strong and young then, about to leave for college and he told himself that someone who had placed 5th in his weight class at the Illinois state wrestling championships had nothing to fear from a bunch of skinny trees. Nonetheless, he cut up only a few limbs, hacking them with the ax and looking back over his shoulder as he worked.


When he returned to camp his father was watching him with his hands on his hips. Bob dragged the limbs to the fire pit and whacked the head of the ax into a round of wood that had been used as a stool. It didn't stick and he whacked it again and it caught and pulled the round over. When he looked up, there was a calm hatred in his father's eyes, a look like a brick wall. He was staring not at Bob, but at the pile of green limbs.
 Without a word, his father pried the ax from the round and strode out toward the pine thicket with the handle over his shoulder. He returned, after Bob had taken to his tent, with a pile of short logs, the ends neatly hacked into points where he had cut them from the deadfall.

The Culross-Peattie entry on lodgepole was a hodge-podge of fact and story. In one paragraph, the author talked of the dimensions of lodgepole lumber, in the next how Indians would make a travois by stretching hide between two poles and drag their possessions behind dogs or horses. Bob scanned the pages looking for reference to his problem, but his mind was filled with the sight of the red ax blade and the smell of the live bows, and the corny songs his father had made him sing that night around the campfire: Old Susanna and She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain. Neither of them had enjoyed it. 


The entry concluded with a long digression about the differences between the crowded thickets from which the lumberman cut his poles and the high mountain, open grown specimen. The bark of the alpine tree was softer, thicker, with a warm living yellow-brown hue, or even a charming pink tint as if it had kept some of the afterglow of alpine sunsets, and how it mingled with larch, hemlock and fir. The final paragraph read:

Truly these trees have life stories quite as different from those of the pole-stemmed specimens, as they are unlike them in appearance, and they deserve a distinctive English name even if they cannot logically be granted a separate botanical one. But there seems to be none as yet and, when it is given, let us hope it is not made known by revealed authority of some deus-ex-nomenclature, but is born out of the imagination and experience of the western people, just as was the name lodgepole itself.

Mr. Culross Peattie wouldn't have made a very good Handy Pocket Ref. editor. Despite all of the poetic digression, Bob could find nothing on whether or not lodgepole produced any sparks. He was picking at his fingernails and remembering the way the pack horses had watched him with their big liquid eyes, never quite trusting his approach, when Tim returned with his notebook. "Well," Tim asked, "What's it to be?"


Bob searched Tim's face for sympathy and found none. He was going to miss this job. He answered, "Page 213, lodgepole pine. Spark N, for none."

I fought three am and won, or Kurt Weil versus outdoor lighting

(Anthologized in The Best of the First Line)

I remember the radio was playing the best song.

“Snap, Crackle, Oompah, Fuck!” is how I remember it, but that wasn’t its name. It was a kind of audio montage whose backbone was Kurt Weil singing pieces from the Threepenny Opera in German, accompanied by a wheezy pump organ. It was a very old recording; the scratch and pop of the aging vinyl sounded like a pinewood fire starting up. Rearranged samples of the Butthole Surfers would cut into the mix, guitars and voices barking like the shouts of a Tourette’s sufferer. “The old motorcycle will not get us to China!,” “Fantastic Noodles!” “I’m a certified radiator now!”It’s the kind of thing that is brilliant beamed in at three am from the community radio station 80 miles to the west. In the daylight hours you just smile weakly at it and say, “That’s weird.”

Out of the window of my cabin the stars were strung up bright as electric pearls over the gleaming snows of Mt. Adams. The dog eyed me from the corner by the wood stove; he was getting used to these late night antics of mine. The look on his face said, “I hope you don’t plan on taking me outside at this hour.” “No,” I replied to him, “It’s too cold outside and besides I am naked.”

It had started two weeks ago when a new neighbor had hauled a dorky looking doublewide trailer onto the hill above my property. No sooner was the trailer operational then there appeared a brand new American flag on a pole and a great big mercury vapor light was strung to the crotch of an oak tree. Seriously bad neighbors.

I had thought about shooting out the light the first time I awoke to see it shining in my bedroom window. However, there are limitations to these kind of antics when you grow pot for a living. The thought of the Klickitat County Sheriff coming up the driveway to question me about the light was a more ornery proposition than lost sleep. Of course I considered asking them to take the thing down, but the more I thought about it the more a dilemma arose in me. What if they said no? What if we got into an argument and they decided to keep a closer eye on me? Anonymity is my oxygen. But it was getting toward the time when I would have to haul my seedlings across the hillside to the gully where they grow in the summer. I would have to make trip after trip in front of the spotlight carrying water, bat guano, peat buckets, and shovels. I couldn’t tolerate having the light there either. It was them or me.

The song was reaching a wobbly crescendo of honking saxophones, groaning organs, and the word “Barbecue” repeated rapidly with an emphasis on a different syllable each time: BAR-Bee-Que, Bar-BEE-Que, Bar-Bee-QUE! “What,” I asked the dog, “Would a Dadaist do about this?”

The dog sighed and said, “Cut off your hair.” Of Course.The answer to the dilemma was to face its absurdity head on. I pulled out a pair of blue handled shears from the desk and went outside under the stars. Leaning forward, I gathered my long blonde hair into a firm knot on top of my head and hacked through it with the shears yelling, “That’ll show them!” The dog went back to sleep.

Some Hands

It was a Spring long on rain, short on flowers, mud everywhere, and one morning I started to shave and a bright red mole had sprouted overnight on my left cheek. No warning, no sensation, just there like a puffball arisen from the driveway. It was the size of a piece of confetti, and I touched it dumbly two or three times to confirm the obvious: it existed, it hurt when pushed hard into my jaw, it was in the way of a razor blade. Other than that it might be cancerous, it did not bother me much, but I called to my wife for a second opinion.

“Well,” she said, “at least something has decided to spring forth. That was definitely not there yesterday.”

She too confirmed its existence by poking at it with the nail of her forefinger, then stuck her face up close to mine, too close so her face was a blur, and I could smell the peppermint shampoo in her hair. “Big sucker,” she said.

I went to the doctor and he sent me to a dermatologist who said it was not cancerous but that its sudden appearance was unusual to say the least. She asked me what I wanted to do.
“Nothing."

I returned from the dermatologist and Clara was unhappy with me. “What do you mean nothing? You cannot just let it stay there and do nothing.”

It had not occurred to me that it would offend her and yet something about the sudden ugliness upon my face made my wife irritable, nervous, and for the next several days she could hardly take her eye from it. In turn, I decided the strange eruption did not bother me and I took a perverse delight in her dislike of it. It was the kind of small battle an old couple sometimes fights when their senses of individual vanity become too inextricable, when it must be recaptured in petty skirmishes. In the same way, my wife had recently asked whether I cared for a particular pair of turquoise earrings. I did not, and thereafter she wore them constantly. We had entered that portion of a long marriage where to retain our own identity we fought small, suffocated attempts at rebellion from the other. My face was not otherwise particularly ugly nor was it very attractive. At least that was how I thought of it, but who can say?

The next day I found myself having to shave around the mole with an inordinate amount of dexterity and decided to acquiesce. The thing was taking up too much energy and if I had derived some childish satisfaction in flaunting a disinterest in my own appearance in front of my wife, it was time grow up a little.

The procedure took all of half an hour, and when it was over I left the office with a thick wadding of gauze on my cheek. The doctor, a woman with the plain spokenness and humor of a plank of oak, explained it had bled a little more than expected but not to worry. My wife was relieved and despite having been a persistent irritant over the blemish, insisted on changing the bandage herself. She took a cotton ball full of alcohol and rubbed around the crater. I asked her why this had been so important to her. “You don't take care of yourself,” she said. “You've got to take care of yourself better.”

A week later she was driving across the train tracks towards St. Johns when an oncoming truck lost control and hit her little red car so hard that it spun around twice and landed in the ditch along the tracks. The first person who stopped said she extracted herself from the rear door, appeared to be okay, and then simply dropped dead. The car was full of bags of compost, spilled everywhere, and I cannot imagine the scene without black dirt arising like a cloud and crushing the wind from her lungs.

What followed was an long swim through waves of shock and grief. Our friends and family gathered around me for a month or so then slowly receded away. In the second month I contemplated suing the delivery company who the other driver worked for, as my in-laws suggested, then forgot about it. And then time was a flat, dull weight passing very slowly until I felt like going back to work.

It is my occupation to restore old trucks, mostly Dodge Power Wagons, and work means opening the door to my garage and picking up a wrench or a grinder. When Clara died I had been in the process of replicating a well-drilling apparatus that once came from the factory and fitted onto a winch driven by the engine. It is a remarkable contraption, a giant auger affixed to the front of a vehicle and capable of drilling shallow water wells, setting power poles, and so on. A remnant from a rural past.

One day I opened the garage and felt like bangin and welding on it again and so I did.

As I came back to the use of my hands, I found myself shaving in the mirror one morning and realized that the hole in my cheek was not healing. I removed the bandage and where there should have been a slight scar, according to the dermatologist, two parallel welts came together but did not close. Pressing them apart with my fingers, I could actually see the moisture from the inner skin of my mouth. In my grief I had not noticed this occurrence, had simply kept replacing the bandage day after day out of habit. But where a minor thing should have been was now a major thing, a hole in my face.

I was reminded of a man I had met years before in the mountains of Nicaragua. He was standing at a tienda holding a chicken in a string bag and wearing a Yankees hat. When he saw me he started talking in a thick east coast accent and telling me how he had lived for many years in Pennsylvania. There was a rather enormous hole in his throat, big enough to see a shocking red cave of flesh and sinew beneath the skin. As he babbled excitedly, declaiming upon the depth of snow in Pittsburgh, he lit a cigarette. Small whiffs of smoke puffed from the hole in his neck as he talked. This did not embarrass him and when he was done I left with a carton of beer and the perverse awe one feels after visiting a circus side show.

I called my dermatologist and explained the situation. She was as baffled as I was and told me to go to the doctor straight away. If it turned out to not be a sign of anything medically serious, she could provide a referral to a good plastic surgeon. But it did not hurt and I was happy to be amongst my tools again with no one to notice the scar. Eventually I stopped wearing a bandage.

As the work on the old Dodge progressed, I became happier. Several floor panels had rusted out of the cab over time and once I had cut them out and replaced them, the project was past its apogee. From there on out it was a matter of refining the outline of the whole rather than of solving its puzzle. I found myself spending more time sipping coffee in the morning and making forays into rehabilitating my wife's overgrown garden. The idea of picking up some compost no longer had the morbid overtones it had had six months before.

She had died in the spring and over time the vegetable beds had become filled with mummified tomato plants, bean stalks, corn grass that had died at six inches of height. As I pitched their dead bodies out of the ground with a spade, I wondered if perhaps I was doing this too soon. If while her clothes still hung in the closet and credit card bills still came in the mail I should be taking on metaphorical tasks of this kind. Yet it was irresistible and when the morning was slow or a parts order had not arrived yet, I cleared a different bed and scattered clover seed to sprout in the coming rains.

That she remained most alive to me in the garden was testimony to how strange and gentle a transformation she had made in the second half of her life. Prior to moving to Portland, she had been a rocket scientist, a physicist specializing in highly theoretical examinations of gas dynamics which were applied more concretely by others to the construction of booster rockets at a NASA facility in San Jose. It was demanding and lucrative work though it meant living in an expensive and stressful place. As her work progressed, so did the ephemeral nature of her physical life, making six figures but spending much of it on an apartment, vacations, and vehicles. It was, she said, the very embodiment of the rat wheel cliché.

Before she attempted to completely jump ship, she came to a method for ameliorating her disjointed life. One weekend, a friend invited her for a long road trip to go camping in the desert. It quickly became apparent that the friend wished to seduce her and that the camping trip was to be amongst a group of people indulging in what they called The Lifestyle. The Lifestyle was a coded term—one which I have always imagined capitalized— for people who were swingers in the 70s sense of that word. A loose affiliation of mostly couples who spent time together in various silly forms of recreation which arced, over the course of a night or a weekend, toward a sexual free for all. When she would tell me of this time in her life, I pictured an endless succession of naked people manning barbecue grills, playing volleyball, planting petunias.

It was impressed upon my wife that she was free to join or not join, by means of telling others whether she was On or Not On (Yet again, I imagine the terms in capital letters, as one imagines the terms of any cult. You're probably just going to have to get used to it.). But of course, after a long day of romping around in the sun, or drinking gin besides some high Sierra lake, it was assumed everyone would be softened into the state of On-ness which was the only real point of the excursion.

The idea struck her as more silly than anything else, but then she realized silly was what she wanted. The shape of her life—paying $2500 a month for a small apartment, chasing hydrogen molecules across computer screens, running to make busses, was in need of some bending. What could be sillier than a puppy pile of lawyers, human relations directors, language scholars, rolling around the Ikea tones of some Cupertino mansion?

When she first told me of this year of her life, obviously, it was more interesting to me as a kind of appetizer to our own coitus than anything else. She was an adventurer and I was not and each remembered day of bike riding or berry picking that became a night of sweat and laughter, ended with picking pubic hair from her teeth, was recounted in the before and after of our own rutting.

Such stale titillations came back to me as I tossed the dirt to and fro trying to fix in my mind the point where she had become my wife. Not the calendar date where we had been married. But the point where such exotica was no longer proximal to the heart of our life, was packed away in a trunk belonging to that other person, the pre-wife.

When finally she had wrested herself and moved to Portland for something completely different, Clara mostly left The Lifestylers behind. But one weekend before she had made many friends here, she attended a Gathering put on by a friend who had also just moved from San Jose. Clara told the people at the dinner that she was Off for the time being and left after dessert as the others retired to the host's bedroom. Before she left, her old friend pressed a business card into her hand and said, “You have to meet The Doctor, even if only for one of his massages.”

Why was all of this old history coming back to me as I dug out vegetable carcasses and turned in never eaten peas? I was remembering what I had loved in my wife. It was that long dormant sense of what a fearless and frenetic presence she had once been and the way in which I had admired her. Some of it, yes, was a carnal counting of coup in which a rather naïve, shy young man felt himself to have struck gold by wooing a beautiful, self-contained woman with a rich past. But that had long ago husked away, and it was remembering that she had had a past, rather than the particulars of it, which I now savored.

We had met about six months after she had come to Portland and I was still repairing Subarus and Toyotas for the outdoorsy and liberal people of southeast Portland. I had saved her a bundle by correcting a bad diagnosis of a slipped timing belt and charged her only to advance her distributor. I explained that the first mechanic she had been to had only been trying to scam her for an expensive repair, during which he would have simply fixed the ignition timing and she would have been none the wiser. This struck her as somehow indicative of the honest, no-nonsense character of her new city and she invited me to dinner in return.

As I spent more time wandering her garden, my Power Wagon project hit a snag. In attempting to fit a new front axle, I realized that I had welded the frame up out of square. An inexplicably stupid and fatal mistake, it robbed the project of life for me. The garage door stayed closed on mornings and the compost flew into the vegetable beds instead, turned it in with the stainless pitch fork I had bought for her birthday last year. When I ran out of beds to clear, I started a new one, and then there was nothing more to undue, I planted autumn crops; kale and cilantro, red lettuces, broccoli.

A week after receiving his card, my wife found herself lying naked atop a massage table in the house of The Doctor, who was in fact a well known and popular local Naturopathic MD. She said the room was dedicated to nothing but his massage table, the tiny sounds of gamelan gongs floating out unseen from a corner. The doctor himself was a tall, gregarious man who had fixed a delicious dinner for Indian curry for her and then offered her the expertise of his hands. She had the distinct sensation of a medical consultation and was not aroused. The Doctor told her there was no need for anything other than to receive a massage.

But after giving just that, he had cleared his throat and asked, “Would you like to sample some of my toys?” She was in that relaxed state after a good rub down where even the voice feels becalmed of speech and she felt drugged by her own visceral pleasure. The air smelled of lavender and mineral oil. The Doctor set a plain hardwood box on the table next to her and unclasped the hinges.

Inside was a velvet swaddled collection of blown glass dildos and vibrators arranged in relative length. The most elaborate was of two pieces with the head gasketed to the shaft by a piece of dense latex. In the clear crystal she could see a battery and wires, some mechanism for vibration, in the see-through style of an iMac computer. He explained that they were made by another Lifestyler whose day job was crafting elaborate pot smoking apparatus for medical marijuana users. They were quite expensive and sought after for their aesthetic beauty alone. The box even had a wire protruding from it to warm the otherwise cold glass to body temperature.

She took pains to try and explain to me that there was something kindly and deferential about the doctor, though he was quite handsome and by no means forlorn or dispossessed of charm. He really did seem to be offering up a medicinal technique with no sense of his own participation in the event. And so she said yes.

Yes. She said yes and he proceeded to slowly and expertly stimulate her in all sorts of pleasure producing ways. I could not help, upon hearing the story, but imagine gleaming chromatic stirrups arising mechanically from the table. Such was the weird, high priest imagery of the whole story.

Afterwards they drank cold Chardonnay on his porch and he explained, his jocularity regained, that he was part of a subset of Lifestylers who thought of themselves as something like worker bees. “I realized long ago that the whole point of all this sucking and fucking was the mystery and power of the female orgasm. Everything else is just frivolous, just selfishness.” I picture my wife, you see how memory reaches back and makes her my wife even then, quivering in post-coital pleasure watching the sun set toward the Coast Range. He told her that she was welcome for “worship”, that's what he called it, any time she wished.

But by the next day she had become creeped out. Whereas everything leading to that point had been a kind of frolic, a dangerous intoxication, the doctor and his friends had perfected a methodology, had extracted and reduced pleasure to a boring mechanical operation. She had found the limitation of separating herself into more than one person and wished to leave any destination that led to unvisited.

Standing in the back yard, poking at the fresh pile of black dirt with nothing on my mind, it was time to do something about the whole in my mouth. Clara had been right—you can't go around with a pointless problem hoping it will just manifest itself as some kind of character, some slight incidence of rebellion. I was not a peasant with no health care and a rooster in a bag. Yet what was there to do? It did not hurt and I could not conceive of my appearance mattering in any way other than attracting a mate, something of no interest to me at the moment.

So I stood there worrying the back of the hole with my tongue and realized what troubled me was only the notion that there might be something more deeply wrong. A small, discrete mole on one's face does not turn into a major health problem for no reason. Perhaps I had AIDS from all those vicarious partners of hers, perhaps my fundamental immune system was trying to send me a message. Was it not from similar puzzling complaints that eventually AIDS had been discovered?

“No,” said my doctor, when I finally made it in. “It's unusual, yes, but it is not cancer and it is not AIDS. Trust me, it was just a really, really well-rooted something or other like a patch of bamboo. When it came out its roots went further than were first apparent.”

My regular doctor is an amiable Jewish guy with a flop of longish hair and a habit of clicking his pen or thumbing his stethoscope as he talks. “My advice though is that you see a plastic surgeon and figure out some way to cover it up before you start drooling out of it. Or worse yet get a carrot stuck there.” He found this greatly amusing and was still chuckling when he left the room.

And this is where my wife's old pillow talk stories and my present predicament start to relate to one another. Though the Doctor had quickly dulled as an enhancer of sexual chemistry, he lived on for many years as a running joke. He had become well known for his success in treating immunity disorders and other marginal ailments through alternative means. It was hard not to see his face every now and then in local weekly papers. And when one of us would do so, it would be enough set in motion running gags about pony-tailed orgasmic therapy healers. We suspected that perhaps he had figured out how to capture female orgasm in his wooden box and apply it later for the banishment of lethargy, fibro-myalgia, depression, and so forth.

In retrospect, I wanted this small thing, this hole in my mouth where little wisps of spit met tiny zephyrs of air, to mean something more than it did because I had not let my wife let it mean anything. That is as clear as I can put it, and I know it is not very clear.

His office was on a quiet street in southeast Portland. The yard was landscaped with bamboo, there were white kids with dreadlocks at the corner coffee shop down the street. Somewhere chickens clucked in an invisible yard. The receptionist handed me a very long questionnaire which started with age and weight, proceeded through self-assessment of my bowel movements, ran through significant life stresses, and ended with a few blank lines for stating my desired health outcome. I had not used a pen for so long my wrist was cramped by the time I was ushered into the back room.

After taking my vitals in the Chinese way, recording the multiple wrist pulses, the doctor finally peered at the whole in my mouth with a small flashlight, then sat back on his stool. He was not who I had expected, this pale-skinned, tall man with dark eyes and a white lab coat like a regular doctor. He did not have the bland, unworried smile I associate with the term “alternative practitioner”. He asked specific questions, did not have a ponytail, there was nothing condescending about him. He was profoundly likable, though I did have to stop myself from looking for his wooden box. “I don't think there is anything I can really do for you,” he said at last.

“No?”

“No. It's just a little hole there for some reason. If there is some systemic reason why it healed in such an atypical fashion, it does not seem to indicate anything worth worrying about. You could look at it like your body is trying to tell you to pay more attention to it. Not much bad could come from starting there and proceeding outward. Eat real food, sleep well, don't let anything get stuck in there.”

I left with a sensation of contentment. He had told me nothing I did not know, but I knew why I had gone there. It was to make some kind of contact with someone linked to my wife from before she was really my wife. I wanted to make some random connection to her by letting the doctor's once infamous hands pronounce upon me in some way. I don't know why that should have comforted me but it did. I felt I could go back to digging in the garden then and be assured of mourning my wife, the person, rather than my wife, the habit.

On my way to the car I stopped and got a tall cup of coffee. The counter was covered by cases of pies— apple rhubarb, peach cobbler, ginger apple. The sounds of laughing boys, music like aqueous, pulsing starfish on the stereo. In the midst of handing over my credit card, I stopped to look at the person taking it. I had not watched a woman closely in a good long while. The epicanthic folds of her eyes said Asian, and the slouchy green tee shirt with a faded duck on it said Oregon. She tossed a pen on the counter for me to sign the chit rather than handing it over. Beneath the minor details of this woman standing across from me, down through the stratifications of whatever might be settled underneath, was someone who existed without role or reason. What a vast and improbable multitude of persons.