Imperfect Birds (41 page)

Hiking out that first night, Rosie had thought they would at least sleep cuddled together like freaked-out puppies, but instead they slept apart and she was scared to death all night. That night they got all their food for a week, which they were living on now—bulk hippie shit in plastic bags with twists, not even zip-locks except for the Kotex: oat flakes, powdered milk, raisins, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, bouillon, rice and lentils, and that was it. There was also this carcinogenic powdered-cheese product the instructors called “cheesy,” and a tin cup with a handle, sort of a tin bowl you could put over a flame.

The second night the instructors made a big fire for all of them, but threatened that this might be the last time they did. They would need to start making their own, or live on dried fruit and cheesy. “So let us begin,” said the instructor named Tom. He looked like a basketball player who had gained fifty pounds and joined a militia. He told them to dig holes in the ground with sticks, and then gave them each an Altoids box with a hole in it, and a small square of red cotton. They put the cotton in the tin, and their tins on top of the fire.

After a while, you could see a little flame poking out of the holes, and Rosie got two sticks, like the two instructors were doing, lifted her tin out like someone eating Chinese who didn’t know how to use chopsticks, dropped the tin into the hole she had dug, and then buried it. When she dug it out, the red cloth inside was black, and fragile, burnt but not ashen. It was called char cloth, Tom said, and he gave them waterproof plastic containers, smaller than film canisters, to carry them in. The instructors also passed out quartz rocks that the kids had found themselves at that day’s site, as well as steel handles, and showed them how to make a fire. Rosie did not pay attention to how you used the char cloth and tinder, the steel and quartz, because to do so would have indicated a willingness to participate in this charade. She was desolate, enraged, hating her parents, psycho- homesick, all these things at once. It was the worst she had ever felt, except for one time on acid when she had believed she was buried underground.

She daydreamed endlessly of Fenn and her friends on the steps of the Parkade at night, definitely some of them looking druggy and vacant, like they had washed up on the concrete shore, but the others so happy and plugged in to one another and to the sense of ongoing transactions, and not just drugs, but stuff that filled and defined them: their music, most important; woven bracelets they tied to each others’ wrists; maybe a pipe; sometimes little things they had stolen, like turquoise jewelry, harmonicas. Under the sun and stars, just like here, but free and safe as carrier pigeons at their home lofts.

Tyler got his fire going the fourth night, and the instructors showed them how to make rice and lentils in their tin camp cups, letting them use Tyler’s fire, and it tasted so great, though she hated to say so, especially with a bunch of cheesy on it, and sunflower seeds; she was starving. She loved it. She must be losing her mind. You stirred your food with a twig, and one of the instructors told them not to let the food stick to the cup, to wash the cup right away after eating, because they had to use it again in the morning for oatmeal, and anything you didn’t wash off was going to haunt you then.

She lay sleepless in her sleeping bag, under the tarp she had tied to a tree, and she thought about dying in the cold, but mostly she thought about Fenn, his body so warm and tawny, his lips so soft and insistent, the feeling of sleeping in his arms. She wondered what it would be like to make love with Tyler, or get high with him, even on something legal, like salvia. She and Fenn had done salvia a few times because it didn’t show up on the urine tests. You could buy it right in town, over the counter at any head shop in the county. It was a legal herb, in various concentrations, on the shelves in the store right across the street from the bus kiosk on the north side of the Parkade.

She got so depressed thinking of her old life, way back in history, like last week. Her heart was like a little dead animal. What had she done that was so terrible that her parents had to ship her to this place? Later she calmed herself, because she had to stay strong; she had to put on her game face tomorrow, try to start a fire, try to get released as soon as possible. She replayed great Ecstasy nights in her mind to hypnotize herself, replayed entire tennis matches, tennis lessons with Robert, sitting together talking in the grass by the side of the courts, acid trips, French finals, making love with Fenn, movies, meals. Salvia was sort of ridiculous if you thought about it. She and Fenn and Alice had taken it together. Jo had never done it—it hadn’t really been around when she was using. Plus now she was so into collecting her NA plastic key rings. You smoked salvia in a bong. You used a butane jet lighter so you could suck in the maximum smoke possible. It was totally legal. If you took five times extract, 5X, you went cartooning, but it left you on earth, which was totally a blast. With 10X you were still on the planet, but the planet had changed a little, for the better, a yellow brick road and a gingerbread house, really fun. And with 40X, you were ripped out of the world for a minute. It was so great. God, what if someone could get hold of something here? She and Tyler could get high together, under the white stars that broke through the black sky like the flames in their Altoid boxes.

For some reason the first twenty-four hours of her being here were never far from her mind. In the morning, the instructors had cooked oatmeal with raisins over a fire Tom had made, and powdered milk, which was basically foggy water, and then they broke camp. Rosie had memorized every detail of the hike from the SAR base to the first campsite, committed every detail to memory, because she was going to run away. A girl Rosie knew had snuck out of wilderness in Montana and hitchhiked home. Her parents hadn’t made her go back.

Rosie and the others had to write in their journals for an hour every day. She marked off days on the back page like a prisoner. Up at dawn, breakfast, filtering water in the Nalgene bottles, breaking up the old camp, learning wilderness skills and lore from the instructors, trying not to die of the cold, hiking to the next site, setting up the new camp, listening to the wilderness instructors, waiting for Bob to arrive.

Bob was pretty cool, actually. He was a therapist who came around lunchtime every day, occasionally with baked treats from women who worked in the office back in town, and the kids got to talk to him for an hour. He looked to be in his thirties, maybe forty, not as tall as Rosie, with gray hedgehog hair and wide, thoughtful brown eyes and wire-rimmed glasses. She ranted about Fenn with him, about what a rip-off this was, about her perfect grade-point average, and how she missed her life, how much she hated her mother and was going completely crazy, how her mother and James had taken acid when they were first together, how she’d found her mother drunk on the bathroom floor a few years ago, how she could feel the hair under her arms growing in like a wolf’s.

She told him how afraid she was of going crazy, and asked when could she call Fenn and Alice and Jo, which turned out to be never, although they could write, and she could respond the second month, when they were inside the hogan by the river. She’d see her mother and James in three weeks.

She told Bob she had been sort of in love with her teacher Robert, had taught him tennis all summer and fantasized about going to bed with him, and how Fenn had come along and saved her from that. Robert had a wife and all these little children—it would have been a complete disaster for everyone.

“But weren’t you able to see on your own what a terrible idea it was—and so, not do it?”

“We’ll never know now. I think he wanted it, too.”

“It’s common for high school girls to fall in love with young teachers. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But it also doesn’t mean Fenn saved you—except he actually helped you fail more quickly.”

“What if I kill myself with a sharp stick?”

“You wouldn’t be able to, at least not for another couple of weeks when we give you knives. We care that you want to damage yourself. We know how it is to have such feelings. We want you to learn to live with those feelings without having to hurt yourself.”

“Fuck you. I’m going to smoke dope as soon as I get out.”

“We’re not drug bounty hunters. This is a place where we try to leave you off better than we found you. That’s all we can do. And no matter what, we love you.”

E
lizabeth was in severe physical withdrawal, feeling as strung out and tweaked as when she had stopped drinking. Her hands trembled off and on during the day. Jungle drums beat out their message of needing a fix, needing time with Rosie. She could not get songs and jingles to stop playing in her mind, “Didn’t She Ramble” for a whole afternoon, and the jingle from Mr. Clean. She would get to speak to the therapist, Bob, on the eighth day, and he would read her a letter Rosie had written. But not knowing whether Rosie hated her forever, whether she was near death from starvation or cold, plagued her every thought. She felt scooped out, eviscerated, wispy, and dazed.

It was rather amazing that after everything they had been through, the different kinds of drugs, the lies, the sneaking off in the night, all she wanted was Rosie. Elizabeth was any junkie coming down; craving had entered her brain and was not going away. It was a sharp, pointed, immovable force, just like not getting the substance your body and mind were crying out for—nicotine, booze, sex, coffee. The voice of craving was extended, high-pitched, but muffled. She felt helpless as a bug.

“This is a bottom for you,” James told her. “And that means there is a chance things can rise. We could have lost her. She had become insane.” He held Elizabeth in bed until she fell asleep, which was after one, even though she had taken a pill.

O
n the fifth night, Rosie made fire. She spent that afternoon slogging through the snow searching for sticks. It was getting colder. She called out her name every single minute, like the instructors had told them to. She was seriously numb but ended up with an armful of sticks and twigs.

The sun was going down. Tyler’s fire flickered thirty feet away. She tried to find her own ingenuity and bedrock, as Bob had talked about; he told them that if they did not give up, they would find it. He had promised. Kath keened and pounded the ground in between her efforts to start a fire. The instructors had shown them how to do it a few times, and they could all make embers of their char cloth. But Rosie could not make fire.

The sunset was orange in the white sky between the pines. Her stomach cramped with the thought of warm rice and lentils going down, with cheesy. She squinched her toes to try to get some feeling back.

She made a fire nest. First she wrapped a thick hank of grass around her thumb and twisted it the way she twisted her hair into a messy bun after combing it with her fingers. She laid it on the ground, shredded tinder—dry leaves and pine needles and twigs—and tamped these down into the nest.

Her knuckles were scabbed from all the times she had tried to get fire going before. You had to take your gloves off so you could feel the quartz strike the steel handle just right, and your hands froze, but it was good to have frozen hands in case the quartz sliced into your skin. Her nails and skin were nearly black. Jo and Alice would die if they saw her hands now. Alice got her nails done every two weeks, short and French-tipped. Rosie took the steel in her right hand, and the quartz in her left. Then she put the bit of char cloth on top of the finest shredded grass in the nest.

She struck downward as hard as she could. When nothing happened, she struck downward again, and again, smashing the steel in her right hand against the quartz, over and over, listening to the click amid the pine trees, until she was out of breath and her knuckles were bleeding. Finally two sparks flew off the steel and onto the char cloth on her tinder bundle and a wisp of smoke appeared, but died. She kept going. Her body warmed, and then she was sweating like a pig, and it was dripping onto her nest, so she moved her head so she wouldn’t put out the sparks, and one landed on the char cloth and there was another wisp of smoke, like a tiny bird’s snowy breath, but it went out, too, and her own breath dissolved into the freezing-cold air, and she kept striking the quartz and rivulets of blood trickled out of her knuckles.