The Cactus Eaters (14 page)

I had my own reasons for sticking to the trail. I can’t boil it down to any one thing, either. The trail still seemed better to me than an occupation. In fact, it was becoming my life now, Velveeta, horseflies, sunsets, and all. The trail made me feel like an iconoclast, zigging when the rest of the nation merely zagged. The national recession was only a seedling when we dreamed up our plan to walk the PCT. Now the bad times were in full bloom. There’s nothing like an economic slump to remind you of the chances you might have taken, if only you had found the cojones. I had some friends at that time who were becalmed in the Horse Latitudes of diminished ex
pectations, even before the economy begun to plummet. They were stuck in the same small towns for years. Only their hair moved away, marching off their scalps and taking up residence on their backs and asses. All around me, men stood meekly as life’s changes ran roughshod over them. Prospects diminished while guts enlarged. Every year gave shape to new unspoken horrors: maxed-out credit cards, mortgages, children, male pattern baldness, and they didn’t even get to choose the pattern. I knew I had break out
now
or it would never happen. I needed find out what I had before the time was lost.

It was July 6. Twenty-four days had passed since we first set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail. After resting up for the night, we rose up the next day and made a vow to march on as far as we could toward Kennedy Meadows, while drinking cup after cup of sun-brewed Twining’s Ceylon India blend, so strong it gave us cottonmouth. As we headed into the Domeland Wilderness, caffeine sang in our veins. We hiked, jogged, and sprinted through green-grass meadows, past tall trees that blocked the sun that lit the tops of rock giants above us. We ran until the landscape grew lush. The Lois and Clark Expedition hiked past a tilted shack, complete with a crone in a plastic chair out front and a pit bull at her side, but we paid them scant attention. On we walked until we reached a place where wildflowers grew to our waists, and the sound of something static filled our ears. It was water, more than we could ever need, flowing by the side of us. The Lois and Clark Expedition had crossed its last stretch of dry terrain. The first time we saw the Kern River, it seemed a dreadful waste, all of that moisture slipping past us. We also felt small beside it. In the desert we were the tallest things. Here, even the rocks on the meadow’s edges were bigger than single-family starter homes. Mountains moved in closer, until I realized they were not independent of one another, but were towers on a connected wall. The closer we got, the more the wall seemed to wrap around us.

In a field, we found a Pacific Crest Trail journal in a weatherproof metal container mounted on a pole. Todd the Sasquatch had signed the trail journal in bold letters. “Am I the last through-hiker?” he had written. “NO YOU’RE NOT!” a message beneath it said. The spidery script was the Gingerbread Man’s. We whooped. Maybe the Gingerbread Man would catch up to Todd the Sasquatch and leave him in his dust. But that wasn’t all. Beneath his addendum to Todd’s message, GB had written a missive for us:

“Hey, Lois and Clark Expedition,” he said. “You made it. Welcome to the family.”

Allison and I did a spontaneous jig in the tall grass. Now every bit of our hike added up to this moment. We could not stop jabbering about how our feet alone had brought us here as we high-stepped through the meadow and stomped onto a two-lane blacktop to Kennedy Meadows. Get me to a hamburger stand. Get me to the nearest phone booth. I could hardly wait to call the people who thought we would die. And then I remembered that Kennedy Meadows had no phones. It was one of the last “off-the-grid” towns in America, with ranch homes, scattered stores, and two restaurants—Irelan’s Home Cooked Meals and Grumpy Bear Retreat, restaurant, information center, and home of Mountain Beef Jerky—all running on generators. The only way to call loved ones was to stand outside and yell. That, or you could borrow the emergency radio phone at the fire station for five dollars a call, but it was a long walk down the road. Oh well, we couldn’t brag to our loved ones after all, but at least the locals would hear our stories. We’d be kings for the day.

The Kennedy Meadows general store was closed when we got there. Allison stuck her thumb in the air and waved it in front of the road. Minutes later a brick-colored pickup stopped. An old man and an old woman sat in the cab. A German shep
herd crawled all over the bed. Its name, according to the owners, was Jake.

“Where to?” the driver said.

“Food,” I said.

“Bath,” Allison said.

“Painkillers,” I said.

“I know the place,” the driver said. “Get in. Don’t mind Jake. He won’t bite you.”

Jake curled his lips and showed some teeth as we climbed in beside him.

“Jake,” the driver said, looking back, out the window. “
Don’t
bite them.”

The truck sped up, with us and our things in the back. Polymorphic rocks in the distance held their shape. The landscape slipped back, cows in the foreground, dust on the cows, and the highway behind us. Ranch houses flashed red and white. The truck came to a stop in front of a bloated tan dog snoring in the road. He looked like a hair-covered sausage. We climbed out of the truck, shouldering our packs, and stepped over the dog, which didn’t flinch. The café doors were open. We looked through the crammed aisles: beer, tackle, Advil, muffins, salsa, banana chips, fishing lures, powdered Gatorade. Near the door was a barrel of sour fruit gumballs that squirted goop in your mouth. A middle-age woman regarded us with no facial expression. Her hair was curly, her body small and stocky. Standing next to her was a handyman, in his mid-thirties, plump, with splotchy stains on his overalls, a tool belt around his waist. “Hi,” I said, hopefully. “We’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers looking for a bite to eat.”

“We get a lot of those,” she said, and did not smile. “Some of you are okay. Some of you haven’t been so nice. You steal the salt shakers.”

“We what?”

“And the pepper, too. The salt I understand, but I’m not so sure what you do with the pepper.”

The handyman smiled at this. His eyes were bright marbles floating in an oil slick.

“Did you say Pacific Crest Trail hikers?” the handyman said. “You hikers shit all over the woods around here. The coyotes get the turds, and then the toilet paper dries up and blows around. And one time, this hiker tried to burn his toilet paper after he took a crap in the forest. He burned the toilet paper all right, and he burned the trees down, too. Five thousand acres.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. So much for my king-for-a-day fantasy. Now, after walking 245 miles from Agua Dulce, I was just another potential condiment-swiping deadbeat, and an arsonist to boot. The woman’s husband, Frank, came out, sweaty from the burger grill set behind the store. He held his arms to his sides and yelled through the door at the dog, which had risen from its slumber to bark at cows. We were starving. The woman, whose name was Virginia, took our orders. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, sundae, sundae.

Allison and I walked out front and sat down. Virginia came up with our orders, one at a time. I fell all over that burger, biting wet chunks out of it, wanting more. The homemade ice cream was so cold it made my neck cramp up. We killed our sundaes with long glinting spoons shaped like swords. I was starting on my second when I noticed a dented exclamation mark of a man, skinny and stooped, walking toward us. He could have been fifty. He might have been eighty. The man had a ragged beard, jeans, a ripped shirt, and an expression of stupefaction. Frantic motions, absent teeth, and yet I was happy to see him at first. I needed a bit of attention from the outside world. Besides, he seemed like a friendly fellow. He kept on smiling. I smiled back.

“Damned Pacific Crest Trail hikers,” he said. “You’re not one of them, are you?” He let loose with a harrumph and
shook his shoulders. The shake traveled south, down the length of him, like snake twitches. I no longer wanted to talk to him so much, and yet a talk was about to happen, perhaps a long one. He pulled up a chair and scooted up close to us. “You hear my question?” he said.

“Yes, I heard,” I said. “And yes, we’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers.”

Virginia came up, smiling. “Ahh,” she said to Allison and me. “So you’ve met Hiram?” Her eyes darted between me and the stranger, as she set down another sundae.

Hiram scooted up close to me. One of his eyes was all squinched up. His yawns smelled like liquor. He waited until I’d scooped deep into my sundae. Another spoonful of cold ice cream was starting to press against my tongue when Hiram gave me a jab on the shoulder and said, “The best way to eat a goat is when it’s right out of the womb. It melts right in your mouth. Best fuckin’ thing you ever tasted.”

I just about spat out my sundae.

Hiram cackled, slapped his knees, and fell all over the place. He kept getting up and sitting down again. He laughed some more and pointed at my shocked expression, as if gesturing to an imaginary crowd. He let out a long blast of language about everything and nothing. He did a twitchy sort of jig as he moved all about that porch, circling us, regaling us with stories and anecdotes that I could only half hear. He moved with a peculiar grace, holding his arms to the sky. If he were capable of quiet, Hiram would have made a fine mime. He told us that he was a retired beryllium miner. As a recovering high school nerd, I knew a bit about beryllium. Among other things, they use beryllium in guidance systems for weapons of mass destruction, which is odd, considering that Hiram had no guidance system to call his own. He caromed from place to place on that porch.

“Want to know what really pisses me off?” he said. “On all
the land around here, you can’t build new roads because it’s federal wilderness designation. They’re shutting down the jeep roads around here, and for what? The Sierra Club asks you, ‘Don’t you want to save the wilderness?’ What they don’t tell you is they’re closing it off from everybody, including you, too. What about the cripples who can’t go in with backpacks like you? What about everybody else?”

“We’re just walking,” I said. “We don’t represent anything.”

“You packing heat?” Hiram asked. “I tell you, there’s so much meat running around out there, you’re wasting your time with all that dehydrated shit. You wouldn’t believe all the animals. You could shoot your way across the trail. You know, speakin’ of animals, I was hanging out with a group of guys once, not far from here, and we ran over a bobcat—didn’t kill it, though, only stunned it—and what we did is we put it in a briefcase. We left it outside, on the side of the road, and what do you know, a Cadillac comes cruising down the road, and it’s full of niggers, you know, black people. So the Cadillac stops and pulls over, and of course they stole the briefcase—what else are they gonna do?—and opened it and drove away with it. They only made it a short while, and sure enough they slammed on the breaks and every single one of them ran off in a different direction.”

Allison and I looked at each other, stunned. Hiram wheezed, and then he started in again. He asked us if we were carrying a rifle to help us get food on the trail. He asked us if we were even carrying a fishing rod. When we shook our heads both times, he laughed again. “Such a waste,” he said. “To be out here and not carry a fishing rod. You got some of the best fishing in the country right here!”

Virginia cleared out the dishes and presented us with the bill. As she came around to take the water glasses, we asked her where we might find a bed. She pointed to a dirt road leading, across the rocks, to a hill, on which sat a gleaming aluminum
trailer. The rent was thirty-five dollars a night, in advance. Allison and I paid in cash, and Virginia handed us the keys. We were just about to leave when we noticed the handyman chatting with Hiram, and looking at us with suspicion and amusement. Hiram explained to the portly fellow that we were out hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but we weren’t hunting or fishing because we were environmentalists. As he said this, he tilted his eyebrows in a dismissive way, and the handyman chortled.

We hiked onto the pebbles, leaving Hiram and the handyman sitting there gesticulating to no one. Out on the rocks, we found our trailer. Before we went inside, I shot a picture of Allison, holding a jawbone she’d found. All the teeth were intact. “Maybe it’s a deer,” she said. “I can’t tell.” The bone was a stained crook, curved in the middle. I have the picture still. Allison looks weary but lovely, her blond hair flying everywhere. She’s flexing her right bicep, and in her left hand she’s carrying the bone, white from the sun. Allison appears to be flying, her arms in a cloud bank.

The trailer was small and tight. Allison fell asleep on a simple bed in a dark room with wallpaper that looked like knotted wood, next to a tub with a hot-water faucet whose thin drool felt like a sacrament. The tub was narrow and short, and I had to contort myself, sticking my legs up, to fit, but I let the water coat me and watched the dirt rise along with the soap scum. It felt wonderful. The sun went down behind the mountains through the window. The trailer didn’t have a generator, so I leaned from the tub to light the lamp on the floor; it hissed and gave off a greasy smell that filled the room. Light from the lamp revealed a row of other lamps on the floor, each made of glass of a different color: yellow, orange, pink, and blue. I lit them all. Our strange room glowed. Allison slept while I looked in a mirror. The wind picked up and shook the walls while I studied my bristle beard. My hair has always been brown, and yet my beard was red. My face had narrowed. Circles had grown
under my eyes. I kidded myself that I looked like van Gogh. In truth, I looked a lot more like the cavemen in a diorama I’d seen, long ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in the Hall of Evolution. I looked so hard in that trailer mirror, and at the man staring back, that it gave me vertigo; the more I stared, the more I saw someone with a dim glint in his eyes and a beetling brow. He looked so brave and mean and dumb, but mostly dumb. My mouth was closed, but the image in the mirror bared its teeth. I had to brace myself, my hands on the wall, and it felt like I was falling into the mirror.