God's Gym (22 page)

When we promised to be kind, responsible uncle or aunt to the other's children, was there an unspoken statute of limitations. Weren't we released or at least absolved from our obligations once the others' kids were grownups, out in the world on their own. By the point Molly's life began to fall apart, both couples had split and Molly more parent than child, orchestrating an intervention and commitment to rescue her mom from drinking herself to death, then nursing Christina through the last terrible stages of cancer. A few letters, phone calls—Oh, I'm okay. Just a teensy bit nuts sometimes is all. You know. All the lies get to me and crazy is a better place to be. You know. Mom's lies, the God lies, my so-called friends lying, our so-called leaders lying and murdering people, and you know I'm kinda glad in a way I don't see you much anymore, man, cause I bet you'd lie too. Crazy's better. Till I get sick of me crazy and want the lies again.

Except for a meeting when both of us happened to be in Boston, no contacts or news for years at a time—spared the awful metamorphosis, Christina shrinking down to nothing, Molly ballooning. The distance so huge I could only nod my head and ask myself how the fuck did it happen when John told me on the phone he'd heard Molly weighed over two hundred pounds.

Why do we let each other go, why do we watch, take what we can get as long as we can get it, till it's gone or can't be taken any longer, watching all this happening, then let go and try to
forgive ourselves or at least comfort ourselves with the thought that most people are not much better at this than we are, they watch, take, let go, and in time it will be our turn to be let go, the others watching, forgetting, regretting. What's done is done, how could it have been any other way, we say. Then some unforgiving moment, some coincidence with no mercy sneaks up and announces the different way things could be. And it's as if two threads of time are trying to squeeze through the same needle's eye at once, but it's not separate threads, is it, always the same thread that only seems to divide into past and present, then and now because we need to believe we didn't take, didn't watch, didn't let go, need to believe what's done is done, no matter how true our witness of exactly the opposite.

A night ago a train erupted just inches from the one I was riding from Massachusetts to New York City and the train hurtling past in the opposite direction licked away the glowing earful of passengers I'd been studying in the darkness outside my train's window, all those faces, including my own, smashed and speeding away in the bright cage of the other train.

Will I glance up one day and see the huge Wyoming sky, find myself surrounded by the raw gorgeousness of daunting moonscape desolation, not for one forgivable instant, no déjà vu or daydream or miscalculation, but find myself there again, not a ghost like the ghosts of Wyoming sometimes haunting me here but there in Wyoming, stuck again as I'm stuck here, shopping for groceries at Albertson's, walking Harney or Grand, beer, bluegrass, and pool with John and Roger in the Cowboy Bar and Roger blows his quarter, scratching on an easy eight ball in the side pocket and that familiar wince of incredible disappointment pinches his features and I want to tell him it's okay, you're a good man, Roger, a very smart, very talented person I respect, everybody respects, though you'd be the last to hear it from them, don't always be so goddamned disappointed with the world, man, disappointed with yourself for failing to change
it, my friend, or at least try being less visibly disappointed and maybe people won't assume you're blaming them for a world so evilly out of control, but I say instead what everybody around him says, Nice shot.

I anticipate a horrible stench. Steel myself not to gag, not to give the others an excuse to laugh in my face, snicker behind my back. The others my companions for a hunting party, John, Roger, Max, Herb, Walt, all of us up before dawn, rendezvousing outside the Alibi, dark empty roads like tunnels, then trudging miles through fresh snow they happily agree makes tracking easier and the going tougher, my companions who know I'm over thirty and have never stalked, shot, or gutted game, and they can't wait for me, the tag-along city kid, to lose my cool, fuck up, the black boy from Pittsburgh and Philly and New York where snow falls as white as Wyoming snow but does not stay white long, cities with gray skies from which these others, once upon a time, had tumbled, boys like me except they fled West to stay white as snow, all of them armed with a thirty-aught-six high-powered rifle, a handgun, a large knife, a Swiss Army pocket wad of blades for every purpose. Two guys smoking cigarettes, one chewing tobacco, one sipping a Coors from an endless six-pack cached in the bulk of his camouflage hunting vest. Roger steps away to pee. Smoke unwinds over his shoulder. Still zipping, he cuts a loud belch as he turns.

Forget it, Roger. No matter how crudely you act or talk up here, no matter how many notches on your gun or spots on your slovenly khakis or how much grime under your fingernails, you'll never fit in—too much Eastern prep school, too much Eng. Lit. professor whose existence insults the others even as you dispense a desired patina of knowledge and culture, red-pencil their B/B- essays, too much stern, thin-lipped, narrow-hipped spinster, New England rectitude and ruling class and old money, money proved by your poor church-mouse lifestyle, your disdain for stuff other folks work their tails
off to own. Then I show up in Laramie—a suspicion, a gut feeling in the others that somehow you're responsible—a brown professor in Bartlett Hall who reminds them of their crimes, flight, waywardness, failure to measure up.

They say animals trapped with you in your truck. Smell sucked them in—they couldn't get out. Looked like the goddamn OK Corral in there.

What's so bad about poaching, Wilson. You ought to run for sheriff, my man.

You know goddamned well sheriff's not elected.

Right. But Wilson ought to run anyway. If he's the only candidate, might just win.

Hell, yeah. You got all the Alibi votes. Herb here would sponsor you, wouldn't you, Herb. Good for business. Move the sheriff's office to the Alibi.

Where you going, dear. Oh, I'd love to sit home and watch soaps with you, honey, but I got pressing business over at the sheriff's office.

Shouldn't be a hunting season. Should run it like we do at the county hospital now. Morphine hooked up to an IV so patients can medicate themselves. As needed. Makes more sense in every way to me. Hunting as needed. Problem's not poaching, anyway. Folks round here don't kill for killing's sake. For some of these hods, a big buck in August the difference between meat and no meat on the table come fall.

Bet Mr. Tenderfoot here agrees with old Tenderfoot Wilson, don't you. Save the animals. Shit's sake, no shortage of animals. Would have seen for yourself, my man, if you'd been around the year of the big blizzard. Snow piled up thirty foot deep in the mountains. Game couldn't forage so they started sneaking into town. Shock at first. A wild critter where you don't expect to see one. Then before you know it, a goddamned invasion. Antelope deer elk moose jackalope. Like some damned Noah's ark. Like goddamn welfare. Bunches of 'em
trooping down from the mountains around dusk looking for a handout. Hung round the golf course at first, then started parading in the streets like they owned them. Breaking and entering people's barns. Stealing what folks had stored up for livestock. Turning over garbage cans, drinking out the town fountain. Shit's sake. Clomp right in your front door if it wasn't locked. Plague of cussed animals. Turned the dogs on 'em. Dogs got fat and lazy feeding on the carcasses. Didn't slow the critters up one bit. Had to see it to believe it. Critters and carcasses everywhere. Blizzard wiped out half the herd, still plenty left to do mischief. Hell, had to elbow your way through critters to get up to the bar.

Walt's got a point. No shortage of animals. Plenty critters even without tenderhearted Sheriff Wilson here protecting their rights.

Damned straight I got a point. Why do you think nature crops them. If not, they'd eat us out of house and home. Then eat each other. So why not pop one when you feel a need to pop one. A kindness, really.

The others a veteran crew, regulars from the Alibi abiding the presence of an eternal rookie, extra baggage along for the ride, for a joke. No gun, no intention to kill anything would set me apart, if nothing else, from my companions semicircled around John in his grease-monkey coveralls. He's dropped down to one knee beside a gut-shot antelope whose bad dying he's just terminated with a pointblank bullet to the brain from his pistol.

I remember the ground under John's knee. Ground antelope color, or the antelope the color of ground it had staggered across, barely able to hold up its pronghorned head, slow, faltering steps, neck bowing lower and lower, the antelope weary, maybe ashamed of surrender, of helplessness, aiming for the rifle held by a baggy-looking creature who through the antelope's glazed eyes might have seemed antelope color. Snow everywhere around us but John's knee presses into rocky earth speckled here and there by subtle pinwheel explosions of lichen that cling to mountain turf you'd think would be lifeless buried years under snow and ice.

John snaps his pistol into its holster, slides the holster into a backpack on the ground next to the antelope, digs out of the pack a sheathed Bowie knife. When it's bare in his fist, I study it. One edge sharp as a razor, half the other edge beveled, saw-toothed. This is how I'll manage. Concentrate on the unfolding details of field-dressing an antelope. Focus my curiosity on each step without asking why or connecting the dots. Like watching a striptease. Or like enjoying Walt's Alibi tall tales, letting him have his fun at my expense, good ole Walt busting my balls, skinning me to entertain the others. Uh-huh. I hear you, Walt, but I'm not Roger. I can laugh as hard and invisibly inside myself as you laugh behind your poker face, old buddy.

That morning or another in the mountains I remember thinking about how love could make going to sleep each night a long journey, a long separation from the loved one, and how I'd say
I'll miss you
to her before turning away to my side of the bed. Remember being offered John's pistol and declining. Remember thinking here's this whole bloodthirsty bunch of us and just one skimpy antelope each guy probably outweighs. I remember a wounded animal stumbling and lurching like a drunk, remember being riveted by the unlikelihood of what I was witnessing, a wild creature approaching closer and closer, its body begging, speaking, if the word
speak
means anything, speaking the sentence
Please finish killing me.

John's got the antelope's spindly hind legs lifted and splayed, gets rid of prick and balls, then wiggles the knife tip under the hide and slices slowly, carefully, from crotch to chest. Sounds like cutting carpet. No, fellas, I don't gasp when John opens the antelope's distended water-balloon belly and yanks out steaming viscera. I'm digging erotic pinks and vivid lavenders, delicate mauves of stretched, moist skin, the smell discharged with a palpable hiss, engulfing me, not in fetid nastiness of bile or vomit but sage perfume, so familiar, pungent, and intimate I've never forgotten it, and that nearly-falling-in-love swoon as close as I came that day to losing my composure.

I intended to return to this skinning and gutting scene, squeeze more out of it, but between one writing session and the next, while reading Haruki Murakami's
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
I encountered, by coincidence, another skinning scene—the torture of a Japanese soldier captured during the Manchurian border war between Russia and Japan in 1939, a graphic description of a man tied down and flayed inch by inch by a Mongolian with a long, thin, curved knife, who prolonged his victim's agony less to extract information than to demonstrate mastery of his instrument, which produced perfectly preserved, empty envelopes of skin while the bloody body still twitched.

Whatever little chill I hoped to evoke with my antelope butchering scene had been trumped and chumped by the horrible suffering of Murakami's prisoner, his human screams, human blood soaking the ground, the patient, methodical infliction of pain by his executioner. I felt depressed, disappointed, hopelessly outgunned. A tiny razor was lifting my skin.

Luckily, I had other work, so put Wyoming aside that day, tried to savor the irony of yet another coincidence and console myself with the possibility, whether I liked it or not, that coincidence was becoming my subject, the inevitable subject once you start searching for connections between one word and the next, one step and the next, one breath, one heartbeat, and the next, because sooner or later coincidence intervenes, a spinning universe intersects with another spinning universe, and strangely, one doesn't exactly demolish the other, each seems to go on about its business as if the other doesn't exist, the
bumping
into each other, the
touching
are fictions, imaginary accidents that produce consequences a survivor of the collision might call
change
or
loss
or
birth
or
death.

Coincidence
(1) the fact or condition of being coincidental, (2) occurrence or existence at the same time, (3) exact correspondence in substance, nature, character, etc., (4) concurrence, (5) blending.

And further down page
339
of the
Oxford Shorter English Dictionary
(Volume 1, A-M), where coincidentally my eyes stray,

Cohabit
—to dwell together
Coinquinate
—to soil all over; pollute; defile

Play in the dictionary all day, but you'll still never write like the great ones, the voice says. But so what, why should I. The point isn't replicating some other writer. The point is expressing myself, being myself. Anyway, who decides, finally, what's good or bad, and hearing myself repeat the pep talk I deliver each time a writer's shadow or my own ineptitude stops me in my tracks, I think, yeah, right, but how can I be sure my bones aren't up in the mountains already, waiting for some spring hiker to boot them deeper into a snowdrift.