The Other by David Guterson
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.
LAST 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?
We went home. Jamie was reading by an open window. No, she didn’t want a ride on the Vespa—even though our son asked repeatedly, teasingly—but she did tell him how much she’d enjoyed speeding on a Vespa when she was twenty-one in Rome. Our son went online to check on something. He fed the dog after making her roll over, then poured a glass of beer, took it to the living room, and turned on the television. There were four fingers of Hefeweizen left, which I drank from the bottle. I sat listening to the dog lick her bowl, to her long tongue aggressively slapping the metal, and gradually became aware of other sounds—the refrigerator compressor, the furnace fan circulating air through the house, the automatic ice-maker dropping ice, the wall clock ticking. Then I remembered that the pint glasses were on the patio, and it seemed to me important to go get them, let the dog out, shut the tool-shed door, and collapse the garden umbrella. I did these things and also put our dinner scraps in the worm bin, stopping for a few seconds to watch the fruit flies, with their ten-day life spans, feed on wilted lettuce leaves.
In the living room, our son sat in the armchair, watching a few seconds in succession of every channel. I lay on the couch, and because I was there, he lingered on Steve Buscemi, in Fargo, attempting to bury a briefcase full of cash along a snowy roadside fence while his face is bleeding—the wound plugged with what looks like toilet paper—and I became conscious that my son and I, for better or worse, share about the same sense of humor. “So what are you going to do?” he asked, during an advertisement.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to change anything? Now that you’re rich and famous?”
“I’m going hiking on Thursday.”
“That’s a Zen answer,” said my son.
I walked him to his Vespa when the movie was over and, before he got on the bike, put a hand on his shoulder and thanked him for bringing the bread and the Hefeweizen. The last thing he said was that he couldn’t go hiking with me on Thursday because of work.
Later, Jamie and I went to bed with the window open. I could hear our neighbors’ lawn sprinklers, and the fan in their greenhouse starting intermittently, and because I couldn’t sleep while listening to these things, I watched Jamie, in the light from the open curtain
“A light he was to no one but himself”—that’s a line from a Frost poem, “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” which a lot of students don’t respond to very strongly. “A light he was to no one but himself”—I wouldn’t choose that, and if I have to suffer it one day, because of circumstances, I’m fairly certain it will lead to my demise, because that cast, that illumination, is foreign to me—I’m finally saddled with my take on things as ineluctably as I’m slowed, and pained, by the neuroma in my foot. So be it. I have the beauty that I have, and none other, in the meantime. One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I’ve thrown in my lot with love, and don’t know any other way to go on breathing. I embrace this world—the world my friend hated—and suffer it consciously for its compensations, and fully expect to awake one day to the consequences of this bargain I’ve struck, since life, eventually, closes in.
APRIL SECOND ARRIVED, a Saturday of dubious weather, and I sat in the Datsun with a bag of potato chips on my lap while Jamie drove and fiddled with her radio until there were no stations left without static. I mentioned that my sister used a potato for an antenna, and Jamie stopped and impaled an apple on hers, and after that we got an AM station featuring a preacher whose subject, that morning, was chapter 37 of Ezekiel, which contemplates the resurrection of the dead. In the curves around Lake Crescent, Jamie reminded me how the Italians drive in the middle of the road when it makes sense, and honk their horns and flash their lights a lot—in short, “make use of all their tools and concrete,” as she put it while driving in the middle of the road herself, in this region of RVs and logging trucks. A little danger put things in perspective. I’d gotten a C on my James paper and a B–in my James seminar. I was glad the quarter was over, so I could read what I wanted—Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I had that book along on April second, with my “Death Mask of Shakespeare” bookplate pasted on its inside cover, and as Jamie drove I read Carver while feeling jealous of him. Jamie stopped to pee behind a tree, and when she came back she said that she didn’t want to drive anymore, that she needed a nap, so I drove toward the Hoh while she slept. She woke up, when I slowed down in Forks, to suggest we buy eggs, milk, bread, butter, and syrup and make French toast for dinner. It was raining, so we ran into the store. I remember Jamie in a green corduroy jacket from the Salvation Army and with a wet face as we went down an aisle. The jacket had a wool collar and, also wet, it smelled like sheep.
The Hoh was running high that day. The lane to John William’s mobile home was muddy in the low spots, and we slipped sideways once, into the nubbed grass. The tarp was partly off the firewood, and the rope gasket in the screen door had loosened and let the screen flop. The lights were off. The Impala was gone. We sat in the Datsun with the wipers and defroster making their racket until I turned off the motor. “What now?” said Jamie. We waited, me reading and Jamie sleeping, then vice versa, until it began to get dark. Finally, we knocked on John William’s door—first me, and next Jamie, with greater force. I held a black plastic garbage bag over our heads because of the rain, and Jamie said, “You look like Dracula doing that,” before trying the knob. We went in. Not only was there no John William, there was also no furniture or anything else except a broom, a vacuum cleaner, and a box of scouring powder. The place, which smelled of damp carpet, was neatly abandoned, featureless except for the woodstove, on top of which an envelope, made from a brown paper bag and tape, with BONNIE AND CLYDE written on it in felt-penned capitals, was propped against the flue and secured by a river cobble. The note inside said, BARGAIN BASEMENT LOVERS: PLEASE COME GET MY CAR. THANKS—SIMON MAGUS. Jamie said, “What’s he talking about?”
We built a fire in the woodstove. I told her what I hadn’t told her until then—because it seemed to me that the circumstances implied John William’s permission—about the blood pact I’d made with him above the South Fork of the Hoh. Jamie didn’t understand “blood pact.” On the floor that night, in her sleeping bag, she said that a blood pact sounded ridiculous. Later, I thought Jamie was asleep, but then, out of nowhere, she said, “Gnosticism is elitist.” I said I wasn’t the right person to respond. “In the end, they’re like the rest,” she insisted. “They think it’s only them who have the truth.”
In the morning, we drove toward the South Fork trailhead. The weather was better, bright and windy, with the young leaves wet in the trees. Jamie sat with her arms across her belly, humming at first, and then she said that a blood pact was a guy thing. We rounded Mount Octopus. There was still snow on Huelsdonk Ridge. Our road was winter-ravaged and full of potholes. I described pick work. I described the scaffolding. I described John William’s fire drill. She said that, to her, the Gnostics sounded crazy. If the Gnostics thought God—if there was a God—was like a big, malicious prison warden, that was “at least as crazy,” she said, “as all the other religions put together.” We drove on. The river had blown a new swath through the alders since the last time I’d seen it. We stopped, filled a canteen, and skipped a few rocks. Jamie said it was less about technique and more about persisting in finding the right rock, and she was right.
Up the road, we saw the hind end of a deer disappearing into brush. Here the going was even worse—craters like an obstacle course, and fallen saplings to slip past. Once, Jamie had to get out and bend a limb so that, driving by it, I wouldn’t scratch her car. New alders were growing in the drainage ditch. Rivulets had eroded the road-base hardpan. We came to the road end, and, sure enough, there was John William’s Impala, under the trees. It looked derelict, probably because there were no other cars to legitimize its presence, and because the wind had blown twigs, needles, and branches onto its hood. The wind was less now, but not done blowing, so more pieces of the canopy, of a gentle variety, fell while we stood there. “It’s a Nancy Drew mystery,” Jamie said.
I looked beneath the floor mat for John William’s car key before I remembered that he always left it behind a maple, pulling up the moss between root clefts and hiding it in a snuff tin. When I told Jamie as much, she said, “Vintage Nancy Drew,” but this line of humor came to a halt when, along with the key, we found, behind that maple, under moss, a plastic garbage bag containing—we counted carefully, twice—seven hundred of what some of my students call Benjamins: that is, seven hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. There was also a note, again in all capitals, reading, KEEP THE MONEY BUT TAKE THE CAR TO SAN DIEGO & LEAVE IT THERE. “Is this part of gnosticism?” asked Jamie.
Money plays a big part, probably the major part, in the media coverage of the hermit of the Hoh, and I noticed that money caught the attention of certain students, who approved of me suddenly as they might approve of someone in a gangster film. Once, when I was walking down the hall toward the lunchroom this spring, somebody made, for my benefit, a cheesy hip-hop move, saying simultaneously, “It’s all about the Benjamins!” and another time someone said, “Loan me some C’s, please, I got places to be, see,” before laughing so uproariously he fell against a locker. But best was a junior, notorious for being small yet still the sixth man on our basketball team, who, on seeing me walking toward the parking lot, shouted, “I’m down with Bill Gates, I call him ‘Money’ for short, I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support!” Cast in this new light, I’m a role model.
Jamie and I sat looking at the Benjamins and wondering what to do with them. “Are there other weird friends I don’t know about?” she asked.
“This is very old Seattle money.”
“It’s still green,” said Jamie.
I said, “He’s a filthy-rich trust-funder.”
“I thought you were his blood brother.”
“I am his blood brother.”
“Well,” said Jamie, “he must have sized you up correctly, because here you are, right?”
“True.”
“He sized you up, too,” I pointed out.
You have to understand how much money it was—$70,000 then had the buying power of $220,000 as I write—to get an idea of what Jamie and I felt. Or you’d have to imagine those seven hundred Benjamins spread out on the moss. They spoke for themselves. They were crass. I understood, in their presence, that my life was changed, and this understanding was not only poignant but tinged by—I suppose the word is—corruption. Yes, corruption; absolutely, corruption, because it’s one thing to have a view of yourself, and it’s another to be shown the money. I don’t care who you are—try looking at all those Benjamins. When they’re close like that, you want them. Or I did, and do, and I’m not that greedy. But obviously, inevitably, you’ll make your own decision. In the silence of your thoughts. Just between you and you. Money equals x in the moral calculus of our time, and the equation comes out differently for each of us.
Jamie said, as we knelt by the money, “This is pretty interesting.”
“What do you think?”
“I say we split it.”
“Okay, we’ll split it.”
Jamie said, “Let’s live in Italy.”
“We’ll lose our apartment.”
“Let’s give it to charity.”
“We need to slow down.”
“We need,” said Jamie, “to blow it.”
We moved the money around—picked up Benjamins and put them down in new places, made little mounds, made a pile. I counted again, and Jamie lay with her hands behind her head. Finally, I put all the bills in the bag and lay down beside her. She said, “You better hike up to wherever this place is and give it back to him.”
I tried the key in the Impala and turned the engine over experimentally. Then I shut it down and put the key back in the snuff tin and the tin back under the moss behind the maple. There were some leftover eggs, and leftover butter, syrup, and bread, and I put all of that, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and the bag of Benjamins in my pack. The last thing Jamie said, from the wheel of her Datsun, was that she looked forward to listening again to the radio preacher who knew so much about Ezekiel and death. I laughed at that, but on the trail by myself, almost immediately, I felt spooked and lonely. I’d learned to be superstitious about money from those moralizing stories in which money is a curse—I’d read The Pearl in the seventh grade; I’d seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at midnight in a nearly empty theater—and from hearing my father say, a number of times, “Money is the root of all evil.” I rested a lot, leaning on my pack but careful not to crack the eggs I was carrying, and eating slices of buttered bread slathered with syrup in the forest of hoary cedars where John William and I had failed to make fire with a flint and steel three years before. Later, I sat behind a rock, rippling a wad of Benjamins as if it was a deck of cards. What a feeling, all those serial numbers flying past, and Franklin staring at me as if it was only an hour since he’d nearly electrocuted himself so famously with a key and kite. His dour face made me remember the $5,000 I got when my mother died, and the packet of frites I bought in Amsterdam.