The Other (20 page)

“I have one goal,” John William told him, “and that’s to be reincarnated as an elk, Rand.”

We sat in his trailer laughing about that. Then John William got up and came back with his chessboard. I’d been practicing and wanted badly to beat him. There was a chess club on campus, and I’d been playing against fiends and aficionados in the Husky Union Building and taking my lumps. At a used-book store near campus I’d picked up, for 35 cents, Rudolf Spielmann’s
The Art of Sacrifice in Chess,
with its examples of sham sacrifices and real sacrifices from legendary European matches, and I thought I could defeat John William by pretending to lose while gaining good board position. He stoked up the fire and put the board on the cable drum. The hot light from the stove spilled over the squares and illuminated the black and white bodies of the chess pieces so that they looked like they would melt. John William tugged his beard. He took off his cap. Out came his king’s pawn. It took only this to make me waver and to recollect an observation of Spielmann’s: “The timid player will take to real sacrifices only with difficulty, principally because the risk involved makes him uneasy.” The gambit of sacrifice suddenly seemed in error. As a result, I got caught between two strategies and, on the defensive, exerted myself over the course of a long battle to produce a draw. There was no pleasure in that. Four or five times, I was so deliberate about my next move that John William picked up
Reading Animal Tracks
to pass the time. This was arrogant, or seemed arrogant. He said, “Hard to get counterplay in your restricted position,” and “Good move—keeps tension in the middle of the board.” Of course, these comments irked and incited me. But what could I do? In silence I pressed. We played a second game to a draw, and then a third. John William went out for more firewood, and when he came back told me he was interested, lately, in flint knapping—the art of making stone tools. He was emphatic that learning to knap was hard and showed me where he’d driven a pressure flake into his thumb while attempting to shape obsidian. He also showed me some flake scars he’d made on a chunk of flint, but there really wasn’t much to see.

In the morning, we took the Impala to the coast. We walked north, toward Hoh Head, in a heavy rain, and sat under trees on a bluff above the ocean. There were gulls in the sand, and a seal partly eaten by turkey vultures. I was a little surprised when John William, wielding a lockback knife, cut a strip of meat from this dark carcass in the sand and chewed it tentatively; he said it tasted like beef jerky and wanted me to try it, but I passed. We built a shelter out of driftwood and sat in it in order to avoid the wind, which by noon had the force of a gale. I laid my head against a square of washed-up Styrofoam. John William, in his watchman’s cap, fingerless woolen gloves, and a tattered yellow poncho, stood barefoot in the surf with his arms raised, yelling. I felt impatient. I wondered why we were suffering these particular elements. Later, we took shelter again in the relative protection of the shore trees, where John William, leaning against bark, stripped off his gloves so as to inspect his calluses once more. “I’m majoring in English,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I like it.”

John William said, “What’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything?”

John William: “What’s the point of reading a lot of dead Brits?”

We drank water and ate pilot crackers. We compared the scars on our palms, mine crescent-shaped, his longer. I suggested leaving, and after a while we walked down the beach to the mouth of the Hoh. “I remember this place from when I was a kid,” John William said. “My mother got interested in native art. She had these Hoh elders from here recorded on tape, but then she flipped.”

This April, at about the time that I was prominently in the newspapers, a Hoh elder spoke at our school. He wore thick glasses and a flannel shirt and stood on the auditorium stage with the American flag on his left and the Washington State flag on his right. He showed slides. He told the students that the Hoh used to eat what was on the beach—barnacles, anemones, sea cucumbers, seagull eggs, smelt, and so on—and what they caught in pitfalls and snares. He said that in the beginning the Hoh walked on their hands, but then were turned right side up by Changer, the better to dip smelt. He said it was interesting that no owls lived on the South Fork of the Calawah, and that some Russians stranded on the coast in 1808 were made into slaves by other tribes, but not by the Hoh. Eventually, almost the whole tribe died of smallpox, brought by the drifting people.

In my classroom that afternoon, after hearing from the elder, my students and I, with the lights off and the shades drawn, watched
The Great Gatsby
on a television wheeled in on a cart. I sat in the back of the room, looking over the tops of their heads, taking in this oft-repeated scene in my life—Room 104, with its blackboard and posters of Tolstoy and Eudora Welty, its flag in the corner, and its model of the Globe Theatre on a table against a wall—but, frankly, I had seen that movie too many times, it had staled for me, and I wanted to shut it off and ask my students what they thought about that term, “the drifting people.”

A
YEAR PASSED
, and, despite myself, I went on helping my friend with his cave. Then, in March of ’77, John William showed up in Seattle. He called one Friday around midnight, and I explained how to get to our apartment. Then I sat on the couch, not doing anything, just looking out at the dark reach of the cemetery, and when he knocked I threw the door open wide and said, “Hey—you shaved your beard.”

“Well observed, Countryman.”

“Are you getting a job or something?”

John William, ignoring this, said, “The lonely writer in his gloomy cellar.”

“Not quite,” Jamie called from our bed and, with the blanket wrapped around her, shook hands with John William—the long arm emerging the way an arm emerges from a toga.

We put records on, including
All Things Must Pass
—the Cindy Houghton Christmas gift John William had repulsed—and Jamie lambasted Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who’d prompted George Harrison to take up meditation, saying that the Maharishi had propositioned Mia Farrow, which, Jamie felt, undercut him spiritually. John William said that, for him, Krishna and Jehovah were the same, a point Jamie wouldn’t grant. She said that the dualism of the Hindus wasn’t really dualism; John William replied that the origin of darkness was in God himself; Jamie shook her head and said, “That’s out of left field” John William plunged next into something he called “the Valentinian Speculation”—with what I once heard a school psychologist call, in reference to a talkative student we were discussing, “socially inappropriate enthusiasm”—anyway, this is why we were awake during the wee hours.

Eventually, I gave John William a coat to sleep under. Around ten, I woke up because I heard a mousetrap leap in the kitchen. On the floor beside me was a collection of Henry James’s stories; I was supposed to be writing a paper on James, but hadn’t started. So I read for a while. I scribbled in my journal. We ate bowls of cereal at noon, puffed rice with bananas, Jamie referring to this as “Apple Scruffs,” though it included no apples. Then she turned up the heat, put new records on the turntable, and started arguing with John William again.

In the afternoon, I made a lentil soup. I baked soda bread with raisins in it, which my grandmother Cavanaugh called Spotted Dog, and we ate it with orange marmalade and butter. Our basement smelled like onions. Everybody read for a while—I read James; Jamie, Willa Cather; and John William, my copy of
Climber’s Guide to the Olympic Mountains,
which had missing pages. He and I couldn’t help ourselves and reminisced, while Jamie was deciphering
Death Comes for the Archbishop,
about crossing Mount Olympus from the Queets Basin. John William read aloud the descriptive text—“This route, across the northeast side of Mount Olympus, crosses three major glaciers and requires mountaineering skill, roped travel, and crevasse-rescue knowledge and equipment”—after which Jamie put down her book and asked us why we were laughing so hard. “We should be dead,” John William answered.

He went to the shelf and, finding Ovid there, recommended “Baucis and Philemon” to Jamie before selecting, surprisingly, a haiku collection I’d bought at a moving sale, Kobayashi Issa’s
A Few Flies and I.
He sat down with it on the couch and turned its water-stained pages. After a while he said, “Here’s a good one:

“Awakened by a horse’s fart,

I see

a firefly in the air.”

We laughed. It was getting dark, and we’d spent the day indoors. We let our soup cool and finished the Spotted Dog. John William put the haiku aside, took up his bowl, and said, “Jamie, what do you think of Countryman?”

Jamie answered, “Kind of introspective.”

“What else?”

“Kind of righteous, but Mr. Dependable. It’s a trade-off.”

John William laughed again, and since he was holding his bowl of soup in his palm, some of it spilled in his lap.

We ate. Then, after dinner, John William abruptly put on his jacket and said, “When’s your spring break?”

“April second.”

“Come out then. April second. You come, too,” he said to Jamie.

We said we would, but that wasn’t good enough; he was firm about our visit. “Promise me you’ll come on April second,” he insisted. “Swear it.” So we did.

At the door I handed him
A Few Flies and I.
He didn’t want to take it, but I made him, pointing out that if he didn’t want it I could always take it back on April second. “So you’re coming,” he said.

“You just made us promise.”

“One more thing,” said John William. “Let me see your scar.” I turned over my hand, and he looked at it closely—a prominent white ridge like the Crescent Ranch brand. “That’s good,” he said, and left.

As soon as he was gone, we opened “Baucis and Philemon.” An elderly couple living in a cottage, they’re granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, “May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other.” The wish is granted.

I said, “Simultaneous deaths? Why didn’t they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?”

“They did wish for that,” answered Jamie.

L
AST EVENING, OUR OLDER SON
came home for dinner. He rode up on his Vespa, shouldering a waterproof bike-messenger’s sack, and brought us a loaf of rosemary bread and two large bottles of Hefeweizen he’d bought at a store called Bottleworks, in Wallingford. His hair was in a brief ponytail. We sat in the backyard with English pint glasses. There were bees among the lavender plants. The night before, our son had seen Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth,
and it seemed to him now that the high temperatures in England—where, he said, some roads were melting—were a sign of bad things to come. We went in and cooked dinner, the three of us, while listening to a CD mix our son had burned and given his mother for her birthday. We ate pasta—fresh linguine—with a red sauce spiked with vodka, the rosemary bread, peas from the garden, a salad of endive, and sliced mango with French vanilla ice cream for dessert. Our son, fresh from architecture school, was recently hired by a firm specializing in green design, and this is what we talked about after dinner, on the patio, in the twilight, each with our Hefeweizen. He told us he was working with an engineer on a scheme to produce methane from kitchen scraps in a high-rise; he was also working on a high-efficiency lighting system for a snowboard manufacturer, and on recovering rainwater for irrigation at a large-scale nursery. Our son is twenty-six. During college, he worked for an outdoor outfitter, maintaining rental snowshoes and cross-country skis and wearing a blue apron; at that time, he was an avid ice-climber, but this seems behind him now. He has a girlfriend, and the two of them play park-department soccer.

I’ve noticed, lately, that our son’s doubts have eased. For a while he thought he might want to be footloose, and made plans, for example, to climb peaks in Chile, but rarely do I hear about such things now. He talks, instead, about building a house powered by a solar-cell array, Seattle neighborhoods that are still affordable—because he’s adamant, so far, about not asking us for money—and his fledgling interest in Buddhism. He seems to want a calm and orderly life, and, although he doesn’t say so, I’m sure he wants children. I’m also sure he’s watching me age the way I watched my own father age—noticing all the sad physical changes and feeling glad they’re not happening to him. As a child, I recall, he was terrified, for a while, about the prospect of a comet hitting the earth and obliterating civilization.

We sipped our Hefeweizen. Jamie went in for a sweater. Our son said he’d just read
The Seven Storey Mountain,
by Thomas Merton, merging this reading with his inquiry into Buddhism, with reports of Tibetan solitaries meditating naked in the snow, and with another book, by Alexandra David-Néel, who, he told me, had lived in a cave in Sikkim. Did I know that Merton, the celebrated monastic, had taken an interest in Tibetan Buddhism? Did I know that he’d met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama? Did I know that he’d died in Thailand, suddenly, electrocuted by a fan after taking a shower?

Our son listened to his cell-phone messages. Now the lavender glowed in the late twilight—the purple heads looked a little fluorescent. Our son put his pint glass on the arm of his Adirondack chair and asked me if I’d been to an alehouse in Ballard with an extensive list of artisanal Belgians; he extolled its pub fare and, on the heels of that, a record store called Bop Street, on Ballard Avenue. He asked me if I’d read
A Pattern Language,
a book about post-industrial architecture. He urged it on me. He said he would bring it the next time he came. He told me that the Vespa got sixty miles to the gallon and asked if I’d like to go for a spin. We went out to the street and, wearing my bike helmet, I got on behind him in my shorts and sandals. It was a small bike to double on, but we did it anyway, and there was something sad for me about his adult odor. My son drove carefully, out of deference to his father. At a stoplight, he turned his head to talk—did I want to go to Brouwer’s, a brewpub in Fremont? I told him I didn’t, not right now. They had, my son said, fifty taps. They served mussels and
frites
—the national dish of Belgium. Had I ever had mussels and
frites
?