The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (4 page)

Pop, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, only nodded blankly and returned the canteen. But I could see that he remembered.

“It’s kid’s stuff to live for that sort of thing,” I told him.

I had to pull him up because he didn’t want to rise on his own. I stayed behind him now. I watched his back, the burlap sack, the way he picked his knee up gingerly and kept the weight from his left leg. We sat every so often. “Damn sage,” Pop said. “It just sort of fills you up.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. If anyone should have had words for him then it would have been me, but I couldn’t think of any.

Near the end we were hardly moving. “We’re at the coot ponds,” I pointed out. “It’s not more than two hundred yards to the fence.” But we sat for a long time in the sand, saying nothing. I could see that my son had the headlights on. “Just a few more steps,” I said to Pop. “Come on.”

“You go on ahead,” he answered. “I’ll get there sooner or later.”

“You sure?”

“I want to just sit here for a while.”

I went ahead and waited with Sean. On the truck’s hood, one by one, we laid the ducks out and looked them over. The teal had buffy undertail coverts; one of the mallards had the tightest curl of tail feathers either of us had ever seen. “Not a bad opening day,” Sean said. “Eleven birds. Count them.”

He kept running his flashlight over them. “Meat for the table,” he said. I wanted to tell him how wrong he was, how meat for the table was a boy’s illusion, but I didn’t because I knew that quite soon enough he would find it out for himself.

At last Pop was at the barbed wire. “All right,” he said firmly. “Let’s get out of here.”

He slept as we drove back across the mountains, slept like a baby with his chin against his chest after dinner at a
roadstop in Vantage. Sean slept too and I crossed Snoqualmie Pass on my own, alone with my thoughts. There was snow at twenty-five hundred feet but the semis had it cleared from one lane nicely and I followed their track over the summit with the wipers barreling and the defroster roaring in my ears. At North Bend Pop perked up and, pipe lit again, sat with his head against the side window.

“What is it?” I said.

“Nothing.”

We crossed the floating bridge into Seattle. Sean woke up, wiped his eyes with his knuckles and looked around at the rainy streets. “We’re back,” he said. “Damn, Dad.”

“You can’t hunt every day,” I told him.

Then when I pulled up in front of Pop’s apartment building I began to understand his silence. I opened up the back of the camper and hauled out his burlap sack with its waders, thermos and field jacket inside. It smelled powerfully of sage, and when I looked in I found the sprigs of it he’d collected for his living room.

Everyone shook hands all around and a lot of things were left unsaid. My father didn’t want to take any of the birds; didn’t want to draw and pluck them, he said. I walked him down the corridor and got him inside; Pop limped away and started up the bathwater.

Settling in beside my son again, turning the key in the ignition, it came to me what Pop had left behind. The engine hadn’t caught before Sean noticed it, too, and he turned to me for a resolution. “Pop’s gun,” he said. “He forgot it.”

I put my hand on his forearm. “Go on and take it into him,” I almost said, but I didn’t, I stopped myself, and the two of us drove away from there. My son didn’t say another word.

Day of the Moonwalk

I
n the summer of 1969, while playing a game of basketball, my brother Harold blew out his knee. For some time afterward he walked with crutches, then with our newly dead grandfather’s cane, and finally with a pronounced limp that faded until, to everyone in our family but me, he appeared to have made a complete recovery.

In July of that year—the summer of the moonwalk; the summer when I fantasized about playing for the Lakers and being Jerry West or Elgin Baylor—our family sojourned from Seaside, Oregon, where my parents were managers of a small, sand-wracked motel, to a north Seattle neighborhood of new-built homes, many of them in varying stages of incompleteness, some mere foundations or yawning craters in the earth, some framed up but still skeletal, without roofs, others half-plumbed but not wired, or vice versa—the line of houses on our side of the block was a stark and vivid frieze about the growth of cities, and wandering through
them at the age of thirteen I felt the disquieting security of having so many unpossessed places to hide, as if the furtive corners of these half-built, lifeless homes could be counted on in times of darkest trouble, if they came somehow; for times of trouble—poisoned water in the tap, unformulated enemies, hydrogen bombs dropping from the Seattle skies—seemed always just ahead to me for some reason.

Coming up from Seaside in the back of our Bel Air, I listened to Harold recite the names of all the presidents in order, ending with Richard Milhous Nixon. His ability to perform this feat was vaguely irritating to me; when we’d cleaned motel rooms on summer afternoons he’d often muttered the names of presidents under his breath while exhorting me to work with greater energy so that the two of us could be done with it sooner. Today Harold is a pediatrician, a soft-spoken man of thirty-five with the emaciated limbs and astonishingly thin face of an Auschwitz survivor—one of those stick figures that stares at you from black-and-white photographs of the Holocaust as if to say:
I am alive, but just barely
. I sometimes ponder how it must be for children to have Harold tapping at their bony chests, if he is an adult who engenders in them fear or trust, if his hands inspire confidence or not. He never married. At fifteen, that summer his knee went, he was aggressively and obnoxiously competitive, an adrenalated whirlwind when it came to games of any sort; he was, in his own stringy, blue-eyed, determined way, unbeatable at just about everything.

While Harold named presidents beside me in the backseat I watched intently the passing landscape, nervous that our father might be too inept as a driver to get us all safely to Seattle. I’d seen him, only hours before, fumble with backing up the U-Haul trailer that now flew along behind us
like a ponderous shadow, carrying everything our family possessed in its gloomy, malodorous insides. My mother, her bare feet propped just over the glove compartment, read
Woman’s Day
magazine from behind her sunglasses, a straw hat pulled down over her head, her thick hair braided down her spine. My father listened to a Pacific Coast League ball game—Portland vs. Spokane? Portland vs. Tacoma?—on the Bel Air’s fading radio, one index finger wrapped around the bottom of the steering wheel, the back of his shaved neck—from where I sat—sunburned and latticed with pale crevices. He wore his hair cropped short and gelled rigorously with Brylcreem, a Hawaiian print shirt, zoris, and his bathing suit, below which his slack thighs lay pale against the car upholstery. He was much given to rooting in his nose as he drove and, at crucial moments in the baseball game, turning up the radio volume to deafening levels. At these times Harold fell silent.

“Twenty questions,” our father said, just before Astoria, because he felt we were bored and that he owed us something. “Let’s see which one of you can get it, all right?”

“Male?” said Harold.

“Yes.”

“Before nineteen hundred?”

“Yep.”

“American?”

“Right.”

“A president?”

“Right.”

“Abraham Lincoln?”

“No.”

“George Washington?”

“You got it.”

Harold clapped his hands emphatically. “I did it in six,” he pointed out. “Did you hear that, mom? I did it in six.”

“Very good,” said our mother.

In such a manner we flew north together, in our box on wheels, dragging our possessions behind us. We all knew how momentous this journey was: when my grandfather died in heart surgery that spring my mother came into a modest inheritance, and with this my parents made the down payment on the Seattle house, for they desired, the two of them, a new life in the city, the life they had talked about for many years. In Seaside they’d grown weary of vacuuming sand from ravaged motel rooms while the wind from the Pacific blew seams into their faces and made them both old before their time. They’d wanted to be free of this wind and sand and of empty wine bottles on bedside tables and of living like visitors in the motel’s office-apartment while strangers came and went ceaselessly, leaving behind an eternal mess to be cleaned up so that others could come along and, finding it clean, wreak havoc on everything because they deigned to. They were tired and wanted to be where cleaner jobs were and where my mother’s family was; they took it for granted that moving to this new place meant all things unwanted could be left behind, and they persisted, for years to come, in believing that they could always move again should their lives begin to turn sour on them. We have all thought this, people have always thought it; but this fact did not prevent the idea from taking root in my parents’ hearts and nurturing them through all the harsh times.

We crossed, in our Bel Air, the gray-green breadth of the Columbia. We passed through Megler, Naselle, Raymond, Artic, Melbourne, Montesano, Elma. And as the journey thickened and the towns became more foreign to us we all
became less talkative—each with our private universe of sentiment to contemplate en route to a new home to live in. We watched the world rush past outside our windows and felt that it was increasingly alien, increasingly strange but beckoning.

Now, if a move to a new place is an opportunity for change in whom we have thus far played at being, then all of us, traveling north together, must have noticed the expectant quiet that seemed to me to settle over the land as the Bel Air rolled up Highway 12, drawing us with it toward a new life in which—because we were only human, a human family—the passions that had thus far held us together might be forever rearranged under the sky of a distant city.

It was the day before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon—presumably with the good of all mankind as his purpose—that my family arrived in Seattle. My father, his elbow slung out the Bel Air’s windowframe, gave the rest of us a running commentary. “Space Needle,” he said perfunctorily. “Site of the ’62 World’s Fair … Husky Stadium over there … Green Lake off to the left somewhere.” He fumbled his way off the interstate, our trailer pitching along behind. For a while we rambled along a wide boulevard, then over narrower, newer streets through rows of placid ranch houses, finally past a claustrophobic, overpaved city park. “See that basketball court?” said our father, proudly. “The lights come on at night out there. The net’s made out of chain links. And it’s just three blocks from your new house.”

Harold and I both looked at it; or rather, I spied on Harold
while he looked through the window at the basketball court our father had pointed out.

“Looks pretty good,” he observed.

The winter before, in Seaside, we’d stood on the concrete at the elementary school and took turns shooting thousands of free throws together, steam spewing from our mouths. My brother began his shot from the center of his belly, his mouth hung open, his elbows tucked in, utterly dependent on some physical inner rhythm that would allow him, at the right moment, to release the ball. It was a thing of beauty, I see now. With the snow shoveled aside so that a lane to the basket was cleared, and icicles plunging from the school-house eaves, he made ninety-six in a row one afternoon, his eyes glassy and still in his face, his fingers numb, saying nothing. His rhythm was exacting, impeccable, but anxious. These minutes of shooting a basketball in the cold were fraught with a deep dread of missing. On that afternoon I stopped shooting my own shots and became his personal rebounder. I felt his rhythm right from the beginning and fed it with a precision no one else could quite
get
. There was an unspoken agreement between us on this: I would sense how he needed the ball in his hands, and when it should arrive, and how gently it must assert itself; he, for his part, would put the ball in the basket.

In this manner—together—we progressed to the 1969 Oregon Free Throw Tournament. My brother’s name appeared in the Portland papers: twenty-five out of twenty-five in the semifinal round:
steely perfection at fifteen
, wrote a reporter for
The Oregonian
. In the finals, at halftime of a U. of Portland game, he missed one only because I threw it to him wrong: it was his final attempt after twenty-four in a row
had slipped through the cords impeccably. The ball caromed off the back of the rim, bounced straight up and disappeared behind the backboard—crazily, embarrassingly, extracting a groan from the gathered crowd. He won anyway, and his trophy stood on a bookcase in our family’s house for many years to come.

Watching him scrutinize the court near our new home I wondered if he would shoot free throws there in the same manner; if everything, in short, would be the same here. Perhaps Oregon had not been enough for him; perhaps he would need Washington State, too.

When we turned onto our new block finally two boys were in the street, tossing a baseball back and forth. The neighborhood, with all its half-built homes, had the chaotic aspect of a war zone. Shirtless men shingled the roof of one house while a cement truck churned, pouring concrete across the way. The dirt had a scabbed and ravaged appearance—you had the feeling that the earth was being remade on an impossibly titanic scale. Bulldozers had gouged our street out of blackberry riots to make room for exactly eighteen homes. In the end all would come to look egregiously similar; fronted by squares of immaculate lawn, guarded by yard lamps that blinked on at twilight, the split-level facades of our neighborhood were like sad, gaping and embarrassed faces set in the sill of the earth. In silhouette, on summer evenings, men mowed the grass or washed automobiles—but no one
knew
anyone. The place suggested somehow a necessity for distance, and thus on that first day—before the neighborhood existed, really—there was no one to greet us first of all, and no will to greet us even if there had been, as we did not greet those who followed us there out of the
unformulated conviction everyone shared that one’s neighbors would inevitably move on.