Stone Junction (15 page)

Daniel had tried not to anticipate the question, but he had assumed it would be perceptual, not personal, and was caught slightly off guard when Wild Bill poked the fire and said, ‘Why haven’t you asked where we’re going?’

‘Because it makes no difference,’ Daniel replied.

Wild Bill rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, bullshit. When has that ever stopped you? I think it’s adolescent perversity myself. It’s wasted on the mountains. Just be real, that’s all it takes. And since you haven’t asked where we’re going, I’ll tell you.’

Their destination was a geomorphological anomaly called Blacktail Basin. In the center of the basin was a twenty-acre lake. Wild Bill claimed he’d never seen the lake on any map, thus giving credence to the local Indian legend that a Nomlaki shaman had cast a spell of invisibility on it after his first encounter with a white man. Since the lake was spring-fed – ‘filled from within,’ as the Nomlaki described it – they considered it a place of great power, and thus a place to be protected. Although Wild Bill had discovered it independently some fifteen years earlier, he contacted the Nomlaki elders whenever he planned to go there. They always let him. In their view, he had ‘seen through’ the spell, which could only mean the place had chosen to reveal itself to him. Who were they to grant a permission that was already so clearly given?

Since the lake was under the spell of invisibility and therefore didn’t exist, it couldn’t have a name – a referential problem the Nomlaki had neatly solved by calling it Nameless Lake.

Wild Bill spoke highly of Nomlaki culture. ‘The Nomlaki were known out to the coast and up to the Klamath for their shamanistic powers, healing and sorcery in particular, which are two of the tougher arts. And you’ve got to like a culture where the most precious thing you can own or trade is a black bear hide to be buried in.’

They crested the lower rim of Blacktail Basin late the next afternoon and headed down toward what Wild Bill assured Daniel was the lake, though it wasn’t visible. Daniel had expected the basin would be dramatic, but in fact it was quite shallow, with less than a four-hundred-foot elevation drop from the low southern rim to the center. The basin was heavily forested along its upper slopes. As they made their way downhill, the trees grew farther apart, and the fern and gooseberry understory gradually thinned away. Despite the change in density, the flora seemed arranged in such a way that while you had a feeling of open forest, you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of yourself. Daniel almost walked into the lake before he saw it.

Daniel followed Wild Bill around the lake to a terracelike meadow. Sheltered by the steeper northern rim, nicely oriented to the sun, with an unobstructed view of the lake, the meadow was a perfect campsite.

Wild Bill slung off his pack. ‘Goddamn! It’s a pleasure to get out from under this load.’

‘How high is this lake?’

‘High as you wanna get.’

‘I meant elevation.’

‘Close to three thousand feet,’ said Wild Bill.

‘We’ll probably get some snow then, right?’

‘Just enough to occasionally change the view.’

Stretching, Daniel looked around. ‘I can see why the Indians think it’s under some spell – the trees are a natural screen.’

‘What you don’t see,’ Wild Bill told him, ‘is that the shaman moved the trees.’

With a playfulness that both allowed and protected his mild disrespect, Daniel said, ‘Whatever you say, Teach.’

‘You’re learning. And I say we set up camp and then jump on the chores.’

When camp was squared away, Wild Bill announced, ‘All right, we’re home. Now to the chores. There’s only two: fishing for dinner and gathering firewood. Take your choice.’

Daniel said, ‘I’ll fish.’

‘That’s my choice, too,’ Wild Bill told him.

‘So I lose, right?’

‘Well … given my experience and all, I
should
fish – I’m a fish-catching fool – but don’t ever say Wild Bill ran you over by abusing his natural authority on almost anything that matters. Tell you what: I’ll fish for about an hour while you collect wood, and then you fish for an hour while I sit there and laugh. Whoever catches the most fish, he’s the Official Camp Fisherman for a month – the loser can practice when the rod ain’t required by the champ for survival protein production.’

‘You’re on,’ Daniel said.

Wild Bill winked. ‘That’s just what I tell them fish when I set the hook.’

Wild Bill caught two.

Daniel didn’t catch any. He couldn’t understand it – he was fishing off the same overhanging boulder where Wild Bill had caught his, and he could see the surface swirls of feeding fish. He was concentrating so deeply that he was startled to hear Wild Bill at his shoulder. ‘Count your catch, the hour’s up.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel sighed, ‘what’s the secret?’

‘Give me the pole and I’ll show you how it’s done.’

Daniel reluctantly surrendered the rod.

‘Now pay close attention,’ Wild Bill said.

When Daniel turned slightly to watch, Wild Bill put a hand on his chest and pushed him backward off the boulder into the lake. The shock of cold water brought him gasping to the surface.

Wild Bill was pointing down into the water. ‘See them rocks there in the shallows? Now see them black dots? Those are the stick-and-stone houses of caddis fly larvae, which is what the fish are feeding on today.’

Teeth chattering, Daniel waded to shore. He was furious, but he had to know. ‘Okay, what kind of fly were you using to imitate them?’

‘Well shit,’ Wild Bill said, putting his arm around Daniel’s wet shoulders, ‘I took my pocketknife and sliced that goony looking batch of feathers off the hook and put on some of those real caddis fly larvae. That’s what the fish are eating – not a bunch of feathers and tinsel and such.’

Daniel shivered. ‘That’s cheating.’

‘You got to fish ’em
real slow
,’ Wild Bill explained. ‘Sort of let ’em swirl up easy from the bottom. I tell ya, takes tons of patience and a pretty good sense of humor to get it right.’

The regimen was much like that at the ranch: meditation, daily work, nightly question. The only significant change was the addition of what Wild Bill called teaching, which amounted to Daniel listening to him tell stories around the campfire.

‘My dad saw something over on the Middle Fork that I doubt either of us ever will. He saw two full-grown male bears fighting over a she-bear.
That
ain’t so unusual, of course, but the thing of it was, one of the bears was a black bear and the other was a grizzly bear. Quite a tussle.’

‘Who won?’

‘Well, like daddy always said’ – Wild Bill paused to spit emphatically in the fire – ‘“Son, if you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.”’

‘What kind of bear was the female?’ Daniel said.

‘You know what, Daniel? You could fuck up a steel ball.’

Daniel bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it ain’t easy to fuck up a steel ball.’

Although the regimen was basically the same, the quality of the days was different. They existed quite easily. Along with the food they’d packed in – heavy on rice and beans – there were fish, edible plants and fungi in season, and birds, small game, and an occasional deer that fell to the .222/.410 they’d brought. To preserve ammo, they only took one shell in each chamber while hunting, a practice, Daniel soon discovered, that greatly increased his accuracy. On average, they spent less than an hour a day on food.

Daniel used his free time to explore the basin, day-dream, or work on various projects, most of which failed. He could hardly hit the hillside with the bow and arrows he made. His hand-carved duck call hastened mallards on their way. His fish traps didn’t.

Wild Bill was no help and less solace. ‘You can usually trace failure back to one of two things: design or execution. Looks to me like both of ’em got you.’

At the end of each month they hiked back to the Balm of Gilead crossing and picked up their month’s supplies from the two hidden footlockers. Tilly or Owen always left a note with any important news. There had been one message from Volta to say there was nothing to report. It took them ten hours to walk down with empty packs, and a tough sixteen going back. Twice during the winter they had to use ropes to cross the rain-swollen Eel. At first Daniel despised the overnight treks, but by winter he was actually beginning to enjoy the grueling all-day push back to the lake; the sheer physical exertion seemed to cleanse him of a rancid congestion that he could feel but not locate.

January was a terrible month for Daniel. It rained or snowed nearly every day. He stayed in his tent as much as he could. He discovered, as many others had before him, that the mountains impose you on yourself. He came to some realizations he didn’t like. The first was that he hadn’t recovered from his mother’s death. The raging, wrenching grief, once so palpably present, had faded into a haunting emptiness.

Daniel’s second unpleasant realization was that he hadn’t dreamed since the bomb explosion. Worried that this might indicate brain damage, he became so aware of his dreamlessness he could hardly sleep. He woke exhausted and eye-sore, as if he were a pilot who’d spent the night fruitlessly searching the ocean for a raft or signs of wreckage. He didn’t mention his dreamlessness to Wild Bill. If it meant something was wrong, he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and if it didn’t mean anything other than that he wasn’t dreaming or couldn’t remember them, then it didn’t matter.

His third realization was that obsessive carnal desire and almost daily masturbation was preferable to gloomy contemplations of his heartache and dreamlessness. He remembered Brigit Bardo’s face a hundred times a day, and her mouth a thousand, each accompanied by a pure genital urge for release. An early spring poured fuel on his fires. He couldn’t meditate for five minutes without an image of breasts or tautly curved buttocks or silken thighs affecting his concentration much like a boulder hitting a mud puddle.

Wild Bill noticed. One mid-February morning, clear and warm, right in the middle of their meditation, Wild Bill jumped to his feet and glared down at Daniel, demanding, ‘Just
what
in the holy-fucking-hell is
bothering
you?’

Daniel wanted to run for his tent. ‘I don’t know if I know,’ he stammered, ‘except I haven’t been dreaming, not since I was hurt.’

‘Goddammit, worry about your dreams when you’re asleep. Worry about getting wet when it’s raining. When you’re sitting, just sit. Don’t wiggle. Don’t wobble.’ Wild Bill started to resume sitting when he thought better of it. ‘Actually, I’m tired of fighting your hormones for attention, and I’m tired of looking at you. Go.’

‘What?’ Daniel said, both crushed and strangely relieved.

Wild Bill pointed north. ‘
Go
. That old fir snag there – go dead uphill from that and about a hundred yards over the crest you’ll find a little spring, and if you follow it down beneath the rock outcrop, there’s a cave. You can stay in the cave or wander around – I don’t care. But if you get lost and I have to find you, you’ll wish you’d
stayed
lost.’

‘Is this personal, or some sort of teaching?’

‘Both.’

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘First,’ Wild Bill said with exaggerated patience, ‘you go. Then you have dreams and visions. If you can’t dream, just have visions. Explore the visions for value. Examine yourself for value. Try to figure out what’s valuable and what ain’t. In seventeen days you can come back.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel said with a touch of petulance, ‘but I’m taking half of everything. Since you’re staying by the lake, it makes the most sense that I take the gun and leave you the pole.’

‘Nope,’ Wild Bill said with finality. ‘I’m over sixty and you’re pushing sixteen. You take a knife and your sleeping bag; I keep everything else.’

Daniel yelped, ‘Forget it! That’s not fair.’

‘Bye.’ Wild Bill fluttered his fingers in farewell.

‘Fuck you,’ Daniel muttered.

‘Way your hormones are flooding, that’s kinda what I’m afraid of.’

‘It’d probably be better than getting beat up.’ Daniel immediately regretted saying it.

But Wild Bill laughed, and waved again. ‘Adios.’

Daniel stalked to his tent, stuffed his sleeping bag in its sack, and left without another word.

He spent the first week at the cave, eating from the thin smorgasbord of early spring plants. When he wasn’t foraging, sleeping, or meditating – he continued to sit, but half-heartedly – Daniel was absorbed in erotic fantasies of such sensual detail and endless possibility that he lay on his sleeping bag and masturbated till his forearm cramped.

To break the siege of desire, he decided to walk north to the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek. The weather was clear but cold. He ate whatever was available, mainly wild onions and some early miner’s lettuce, supplemented occasionally with frog legs. The nourishment kept him going, but wasn’t enough to fuel his usual pace. He tired easily and had difficulty concentrating for more than a few minutes. However, he experienced a lightness that wasn’t confined to his head, a sort of metabolic austerity, and with it came a profound sense of objectivity – uncluttered by judgments or combustible desires. He quit meditating and masturbating. He didn’t have any dreams or visions. After eight days of wandering in a slow loop, he reached the cave just hours before a storm.

The storm proved the last gasp of winter, but winter died hard that year: blinding lightning strikes; thunder so loud it raised dust on the cave floor; winds that sent widow-makers spinning out of the lashing firs, snapped off snags that splintered as they crashed; and then torrential rain. As he sat snug in the cave, a good fire with plenty of dry limbs stacked against the walls, watching the wind suck smoke out the cave mouth in a ropy braid, Daniel decided he would fast and meditate for his last three days. He wanted dreams and visions.

As Wild Bill would later rule, Daniel had two near-visions and one for sure, but Wild Bill was a hanging judge.

One near-vision began with the color pink. At first Daniel felt it was some sort of overture to an erotic fantasy, but as he watched, the color constricted slowly into the terror-brightened pink of a lab rat’s eye. And then he was inside the rat, running a maze, turning left, right, right again, running until he caught the scent of his own fear still hanging on the air and realized he’d tried that passage before. Daniel rose out of the rat’s body like mist lifting from a field. He could see the maze below him, a perfect square, infinitely intricate, no entrance or exit. The maze exploded when he screamed.