The Trip to Echo Spring (33 page)

This poem also ends with a memory lapse: ‘But you don't remember. / You honestly don't remember.' This time, though, there seems to be a suggestion, contained in the gentle irony of that
honestly,
that the narrator realises his excuses and ellipses might not be enough any more, never mind the seeming helplessness with which they're being proffered.

I turned over on the big bed. The curtains weren't quite closed. I could see two darknesses outside, one still, the other shifting on itself. There's a saying in AA that addiction isn't your fault, but recovery is your responsibility. It sounds simple enough, but making that step away from blame is, as Berryman discovered, about as easy as standing up and dancing on a sheet of black ice.

I clicked the light back on and got
All of Us
from my bedside table. I'd marked ‘Wenas Ridge' a long time back. It opens with the narrator remembering a boyhood afternoon spent grouse hunting with two friends. He'd just got a girl pregnant, as Carver had in the spring of 1957. The boys – bozos, he calls them – shoot six grouse and then,
on the ridge above the river, they stumble upon a rattlesnake: fat and dark, thick as a boy's wrist. It rears up, singing its sinister song. They back away and scramble down, climbing over fallen trees and crawling through deer paths, seeing snakes in every shadow.

During his descent the boy prays to Jesus, but in some other quarter of his mind a rival prayer starts up, a prayer to the singing snake itself. ‘Keep believing in me,' it says, and in response the boy makes ‘an obscure, criminal pact'. The final stanza returns him to adulthood. ‘I got out, didn't I?' he asks, shruggingly, and then answers himself: not quite. He remembers the troubles that followed on that day: that he poisoned his beloved wife's life; that lies ‘began to coil in my heart and call it home'. He weighs up the two powers, the fearful rattlesnake against the uncertain, doubted presence of Jesus. The poem ends with another ambivalent statement, a pivot of a line:

But someone, something's responsible for this.

Now, as then.

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself.

The next day was my thirty-fourth birthday. I hadn't made any plans. We went to the Cornerhouse for eggs Benedict and coffee. My mother could barely sit still, and eventually she told me, bursting with pride, that
she'd found somewhere where I could shoot a gun. She'd driven out of town the day before to find a range, and seen two longhaired men shambling up the highway. She pulled over on a hunch and they shifted from foot to foot and sucked their teeth, and eventually remembered Matt Dryke's place on the road to Sequim. Then one of them asked for five bucks, and she gave it to him, entirely satisfied by the exchange.

The shooting thing had started in New Hampshire, plinking wine bottles with a Crossman air pistol. I liked it; liked the steadiness, the concentration. Later, I'd graduated to my friend John's CZ rifle. We'd drive up to a deserted sandpit in his truck and set up a coyote target on the pitted wooden stand. All afternoon we'd trudge back and forth to check our shots, a turkey vulture wheeling overhead. I loved loading the cartridges and hunkering down over the hood, pressing the stock into my cheekbone, bending my left knee and peering in through the enlarging circle of the sights. Not much I've ever done has been as satisfying as sighting in that rifle and clipping the target in the clean pink circle of its heart.

It was a different business at Sunnydell. ‘Turn left at the yellow rocking chair,' the woman in the office had told my mother on the phone. ‘If you get to Kitchen Dick's you've gone too far.' There was a duck pond, a shooting range and an old tennis court planted with a sagging ping-pong table. We rang the bell and after a long while Matt came loping up the yard. ‘You ladies the ones that want to shoot pistols?' he asked. ‘You got everything you need? You got ear defenders? You got pistols?' My mum looked a little startled. ‘No,' she said. ‘The woman in the office said you had pistols.' ‘No, we don't got any pistols,' he said laconically. ‘I got shotguns. I can get you set up with shotguns.' He got two guns out of a locked cabinet, a .410 and a big, ugly thing, its butt lagged with padding and masking tape. We went up to the
platform together. ‘I've never shot skeet,' I said, and he grinned and handed over the first gun. ‘Tuck it close into your shoulder,' he said. ‘Lean your cheek into it and don't be afraid of it, then it won't kick up. Watch the target, not the sights.' I kept missing and then, after a long time, my eye slotted in. ‘Pull,' I said and the green disc flicked up into the sky, and I tracked and squeezed and it shattered and splashed down into the water. It seemed almost magical, the knack of swinging upwards. My heart was running hard and the air smelled harshly of spent shells. ‘Follow him up,' Matt said. ‘Follow him up. You're a bit over. Now you're getting him. Don't let him suffer.'

When we'd shot through the box we went back to the office to settle up. There were medals on the wall and I took a look. ‘Jesus, Matt,' I said. ‘You were an Olympic Gold.' He grinned, that same swift grin. ‘Yep. I grew up out here. Been shooting all my life.'

As we drove away, I could still feel my hands shaking from the reverberations of the big shotgun. Funny, I used to hate guns. Somehow the old air rifle at Tall Trees had become a symbol of everything I loathed about those years. My mother used to shoot squirrels with it, out of her bedroom window. My job was to take the bins out, and often I'd find their little frozen corpses curled amid the rubbish. When the gun itself was taken by the police, it somehow lodged in my head as a way of encoding all the disorder and potential danger of alcoholism itself. It was the only thing about that night that had stayed clear to me: the policeman walking out of the front door, carrying our rifle.

At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life. That evening I went for a walk on the beach on my own, and got to thinking about
the Carver story I most love. It was called ‘Nobody Said Anything' and he wrote it in 1970, slam in the middle of the Bad Raymond period. He might have been in his study, or he might have scribbled it in his car, as he sometimes did back then, hunched up with a legal pad, trying to sidestep for an hour or two the unseating demands of his domestic life.

It's written in the first person, from the perspective of a boy called R, who wakes to hear his parents in the kitchen, knee-deep in a row. He nudges his younger brother awake, but George misunderstands the shove and thinks he's picking a fight. ‘Stop gouging me, you bastard,' he says. ‘I'm going to tell!' R decides he doesn't want to go to school, and persuades his mother he's unwell. He watches her get ready for work, rattling off instructions and prohibitions. Don't turn the burners on. There's tuna fish in the icebox. Take your medicine. Before she leaves he switches the TV on, sound down, but she doesn't say anything about that.

After she's gone, he takes possession of the house. He prowls around his parents' bedroom, looking for some evidence of their sex lives. He can't find any rubbers, but he gets a quick thrill from inspecting a jar of Vaseline. Something dirty about that, for sure. He opens a few drawers, checks around for money and then decides to walk to Birch Creek and see if he can catch a trout. It's fall, and the season is open for a week or two more.

As he's walking down Sixteenth Avenue, a red car passes and pulls over. A skinny woman with spots around her mouth offers him a ride. He listens to her talk and fantasises about going home with her, though it's evident from the halting scenario he builds that he isn't entirely sure what two people do in bed. Down by the river, he jerks off and ejaculates into the creek. He casts a few times, meandering through different spots. The water's low, and in some places there are drifting yellow leaves.

Up by the airport he tries again, putting salmon eggs on the line and casting into a deeper pool. Just as he starts thinking about French-kissing the pimply woman, the tip of his fly rod jiggles. He's hooked a trout, a green trout that lies on its side and doesn't fight the line. There's something not quite right about it. ‘He was the colour of moss, that colour green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss for a long time, and the colour had come off all over him.'

He carries the trout back to the bridge. A smaller boy is down there now. He's skinny and unkempt, about George's size, with big buck teeth. He's very excited about a fish he's seen, and when R looks his heart jumps too. The fish is a giant, as long as his arm. They decide to try and corral him. The first attempt goes wrong, and the little boy ends up sopping, drenched to his collar. They scream at one another and then they find the fish again. This time R makes the boy drive it down towards him. He grabs it in his hands and hurls it to the bank. It's huge, the biggest fish he's ever caught, but there's something wrong with it too. ‘His sides were scarred, whitish welts as big as quarters and kind of puffy. There were nicks out of his head around his eyes and on his snout where I guess he had banged into the rocks and been in fights. But he was so skinny, too skinny for how long he was, and you could hardly see the pink stripe down his sides, and his belly was grey and slack instead of white and solid like it should have been. But I thought he was something.'

R kills it by yanking its head back until its spine crunches. Then they put a stick through it and carry it back to the road together. There's some tension over whose fish it is, and eventually they decide to cut it in half with R's pocket knife. An aeroplane takes off above their heads. The day is getting colder, and the small boy looks freezing.
Both want the head end, but R manages to convince him to take the tail by making a bribe of the green trout.

When he gets home his parents are arguing again and the kitchen is full of smoke. It's another one of those corrosive domestic scenes, a more violent version of the tensions simmering in Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. R's mother throws the burning contents of the pan against the wall. R opens the door then, just as his father is wiping up the mess. ‘You won't believe what I caught at Birch Creek,' he says. He shows his mother the creel and she looks inside and starts to scream. ‘Oh, oh my God! What is it? A snake! What is it? Please, please take it out before I throw up.' Instead he shows it to his dad, his gigantic summer steelhead. His dad screams too. ‘Take that goddamn thing out of here! What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage!'

R goes back outside. He has the creel in his hands. He looks into it. Under the porch light its contents have turned silver. They fill the creel. ‘I lifted him out,' he says. ‘I held him. I held that half of him.'

I was still thinking about that story the next morning. It was our last day in Port Angeles and I got up just before dawn. In the afternoon we were taking the car back to Seattle, and the next day I'd catch a plane from Sea-Tac airport. It was hard to get my head around. I'd been away from England too long. I needed to get home, to sleep in my own bed. All the same, there was one last thing I wanted to do before I left America.

I got dressed and slipped outside. It was very cold. The mountains looked as if they'd been dusted in icing sugar overnight. Mist was pouring off them and drifting through the valleys. I started the car, scraping ice off the windshield with a credit card. I got lost twice, once by the Nippon paper factory and again by the airfield, but eventually I found my way to Ocean View Cemetery and parked the car under a dripping tree.

There were pines at the edge of the field, and beyond them the land dropped away, falling 400 feet or so to the water beneath. I could hear the waves moving very softly, a lush, lulling, impossibly rich sound. In September 1987, Carver was out there on his boat with a friend when they looked up and saw a group of people on the bluff. ‘I think they're planting somebody up there,' he said, and turned his attention back to the sea. He'd been coughing all month, but wouldn't know for another few weeks that there were malignant tumours in his lungs.