American Spirit: A Novel (20 page)

But the motorcycle turns a hard right, comes right up the
secondary trail and into Matthew’s white-gravel drive. And the head has caught on to the game, silently issuing a stern
Jesus, Bowie. Call first.

Heading off a knock at the door, Matthew walks out onto the small concrete porch from where he was once the one being watched and judged, and stands there sizing up the man taking off a helmet. The man who spills over the medium-sized motorcycle’s seat and frame is far from Bowie. North of fifty certainly, but a hard north, a tough piece of road to get there. A body fueled by nachos, by Fridays, by reduced-calorie beer consumed in such volume as to render the calorie reduction moot. A crew cut, they love these, men of a certain blocky frame and fashion and head. A sweatshirt and shorts, both making certain you understand that Steve attended a prestigious-for-the-left-coast university. The font that boasted this choice he made to continue his education thirty-plus years ago is just as blocky and stout and collegiate. It’s a font that’s supposed to bring to mind hallowed corridors of passionate endeavoring in the name of culture and knowledge; a font meant to call to mind Ivy League schools on the eastern seaboard. In fairness, it’s a font that demands a little respect when it’s spelling out the name of a university, but the baggy and prefaded indigo-colored XL sweatshirt undermines this solicitation of respect. And whatever respect the shirt has managed to hang on to has been thrown under the bus by the shorts also pasted with the name of the learning institution.

But you never know. Some of the smartest people decided
not to drop out; not as rare as you think, the schooled winding up interesting raconteurs of life’s rich pageant; this college stuff works on some. So, let Steve open his mouth, open your mind a little, be open to meeting new people, that’s the sporting attitude required of even temporary neighbors. This is the moment; Matthew knows it, this is the moment when he learns just how wrong he was in his shallow and base assumptions that reek of class insecurity. This is the moment, Matthew is certain now, where this dirt bike interloper in lazy logo-covered clothing soars into the conversation, elevates small talk with ease and admirable aplomb!

“Holy shit, this thing’s fast! Did you see me out there, haulin’ ass up that trail?”

After the opening salvo, the man walks right up across the porch. And Matthew thinks about how Buddha said:
A man walks across the room and he comes back different.
The still-unnamed neighbor advances, meaty hand outstretched and claiming the name Steve, as if it were up for grabs just seconds before that. Matthew grabs the hand in reach and says hello, forgetting to say his own name, probably forgetting his own name altogether in the haze of disappointment.

“Been meaning to come over and say hi all week, but I’ve been fucking around with firewood and getting this thing running again for when my son comes up.”

“Oh, okay, well. That’s all right, stranger,” this comes from Matthew’s mouth in surprise even to Matthew.

Stranger?
But that’s how people talk in the mountains, right?

“I don’t know who you’ve met, but you’ve got great neighbors here on both sides.”

“Who is it? Who’s the neighbor?” Matthew asks with the urgency of a man still half hoping he’s landed next door to a holed-up rural Bowie.

“Well, you’ve got Hank just down the trail on the left; that next big cabin you can probably see the roof of when you’re on your back deck.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“And if you drop in around five or six, we’ve usually got a good fire going out back there and the cocktails are flowing,” he says this with a flourish of the hand that’s a cross between a drink being raised to his lips and a mimed dove or pigeon fluttering its way into his mouth for some reason, or a trumpet that has a thumb for a mouthpiece and four human fingers waving about frantically. So far, judging from this small-talk exchange, Steve’s two main passions seem to be dirt bike motorcycles, a size or two smaller than his frame requires, and booze. Which, oddly, make him a much more inviting social prospect than the college souvenirs he dresses himself in would lead you to believe.

“Oh, okay, maybe I’ll come over and say hi. It’s nice… you know, having a drink with friends, getting out of my head… I usually drink alone; in my car or whatever.”

Woopsie, bad form, indeed. But Steve plows through, not leaving any time for the conversational D Minor 7th note to hang in the air and create suspicion or sadness. Viva Steve, then!

“We had the big bear over there last night; you seen that big male around your back deck yet?”

“No, what?”

“Yeah, he’s been coming around. Big male.”

“I’ve been really good about trash and stuff.”

“Hank throws sweet corn all over the back for the deer, so we’ll sit out there making margaritas and throwing corn all over the hill, and last night that big fucker comes down and, of course, I’m a little buzzed, so I start goofing around with him, trying to get him to come down to the deck and stuff, we were laughing our asses off.”

Holy Christ! Matthew is disposing of dinner trash like it’s medical waste and biohazard and all the while there’s a neighbor whose idea of happy hour is chumming up savage mammals! And now they’ve got a taste for corn! So now, thanks to Hank, no matter how careful one is with dinner trash, all it would take is making some popcorn or stepping outside for a cigarette after some tortilla chips and
wham!

“Oh, okay, well…”

“I got him to come right down from the back hill there. I tried to get him to stand up on his hind legs, but he just stood there staring at us!” And with this, Steve’s laughter explodes like a hearty cough and takes an eternity of minutes to fade off.

“Yeah, okay, he was probably… yeah…,” Matthew tries to say.

Jesus, can you imagine? This bear staring down at Steve standing there with his arms stretched heavenward, refusing
to put down his margarita for the sake of the charade, probably pumping a boyish growl through the plump frame, hearing the basso as tenor in his heart. The bear must’ve been thinking:
The prey is volunteering himself, he is presumably slow in stride, being so thick in the middle and all wrapped in ill-fitting, aged college-bookstore souvenir sweatpants. What’s the fucking catch? Where’s the trap? Fuck it, I’m walking back up into the tree line, I didn’t get this big by falling for shit like this.

“You here all week?”

“I rented it for a couple nights, so, but maybe, you know, the owner said it’s not booked till the fifteenth, so I can just leave money if I want to stay the weekend, too.”

“Burning some sick days, huh?”

“Uh, well, more or less. They’re kind of all sick days now, Steve.”

“I hear that, brother. I’ve been on disability, so I moved up here in, what, ninety-nine. I still do consulting, but I’m up here full-time. I don’t know, you know, you spend the first half of your life trying to live up to something, trying to prove everything to everybody and yourself, and then you realize every single person you were living your life for is gonna be gone someday, just like you’re gonna be gone someday, and that’s when things get interesting.”

The head cheers: If only everything Steve just said could be typed up fast by Matthew and sent off to himself on the small email thing; if only everything Steve just said could fit on a mug! The heart reels: If Steve had breasts—well, he
does—but the point is, if he were an attractive woman, Matthew would be face-to-face with the woman he’s been waiting to hear something like this from for a lifetime.

“I agree! Okay, yeah! Yes! This… finally… somebody, yeah, when we die there’s…”

Matthew’s stammering fanfare and poor paraphrasing leaves Steve staring and confused, and he’s looking at Matthew probably exactly the same way the bear was looking at him last night.

Station to Station

N
IGHT FALLS AS IT DOES
up here, at the pace of the bankruptcy in that book by Hemingway, first gradually and then very suddenly. The sky is black and smacked with more stars than one thinks there are, and you can almost feel the signals coming through like ghosts spotting a crack in the door. Over on the desk of another era, the old radio’s thick telescoping antenna seems to silently bristle and stretch an extra inch into the corner of the cabin in hopes of picking up something; the dusty little nineteen eighties Sony television aches to let a night of phantom stations from Tokyo and Taipei come rushing through. At night in these mountains, it’s hard not to feel like a receiver—hard not to long for whispering or typing the heart’s every secret to satellites and servers. The sky has opened, the signals have
strengthened, and Matthew’s phone chimes to indicate that a message has come in; chimes to indicate that the giant night sky has allowed it to awaken from another daylong silence.

Matthew walks over and grabs the phone from its lifeline, from its charger cable anchored into yesteryear’s wall socket. A text. From Tatiana! And the heart thinks:
Under these skies, something beautiful and strange is able to happen!
And the head rolls the kind of weary eyes that come from having too much experience, screaming:
There is nothing good that can come from this. I can list twenty reasons in a flash why you should not get near someone.
And Tatiana’s message falls somewhere dead center between the two sentiments offered up by the guts and ticking gears of Matthew’s biological container:

hope it’s ok that I got yr # from Hernan. still in LA. known you a nite, missed you for weeks on end. Sound a tad desperate, desn’t it? :)

With the abbreviations, arrhythmia, and misspellings of the way people are communicating, it’s a wonder some days that anyone on earth is still falling in love; hard to believe anyone is still taken aback by somebody. How, in this century, does one maintain the memory of a dashing and dangerous night of magic unexplained? Suddenly in the head, the graceful and gorgeous woman from an evening hurled down from heaven without explanation is reduced by tiny keyboards to a bumpkin; standing in Los Angeles, wearing a barrel and suspenders, chewing a sprig of dried grass, and
bleating through tobacco-browned lips:
Sound a tad desperate, desn’t it?
Matthew says a prayer to God or The Great Spirit.

In front to the plaque of the Indian or Native American, Matthew asks the sky that life stay fast like this, and that his heart learn to come up to speed with it. In the next breath he’s asking anyone or anything up there bored enough to be listening that it all goes back to the way it was for him. There are moments in days like these, they come rushing in when one least expects it and they remind a person, in what one thought was one’s strongest hour, that it wasn’t always like this. The thoughts cry out like a kid in silent tantrum, a sudden reminder that there were years and years of order; of living right, of living like they say one should at this age. Sure the marriage thing had become a ghost, but it was a ghost here on earth somewhere at every moment, one could take comfort that it wasn’t someone gone to heaven. Sure the job was probably sitting there just waiting to feel the crush of these times; waiting to make yesterday’s news of deadwood like Matthew; of jobs and offices and salaries that made sense only years ago when things were fat—so who cares that Matthew beat these times to the punch by urinating all over his office?

The point is, for a decade and a year there was work until six, there was a commute until north of seven. And for years there were dinners to cook up and make the house smell like chicken and spices and smell like a home that had people in it instead of a house making boarders out of the hearts
of lost kids. There was an annual ski trip, there was watching romantic comedies on the couch with pillows clutched to chests for comfort in making heads or tails of the feelings from it, there were photo albums of the new house and vacations, and even the nights spent on the living room floor making them. There was staying home together on New Year’s Eve because it felt better than being out there in the fray of mania of love being thrown around like party favors or cheap sentiment. There was the silly, dumb old-fashioned thrill of a fun thing for dessert that one of the two had brought home. There were simple little things like deciding together to splurge on a pay-per-view movie and of sitting on the couch for it, having showered early and gotten into clothes that were comfortable and dumb, clothes that neither of you would ever be seen in; sitting there showered and pj’d with a special dessert treat and feeling like one was circling back and getting some of the fun of being a kid again; of being a kid for the first time, really. There were simple little things like two feet touching in bed after a long day in the city working; the top of one pressing into the arch of the other, and it always felt like there must be no better feeling on earth. There was simple, sweet excitement about deciding Friday night to sleep late together on Saturday morning and then do something good for breakfast.

It wasn’t always parking lot longing and better living through chemicals; it wasn’t always guns and unscheduled sex that came on like a summer storm that nobody predicted. Then again, there’s something just fine with days like
that, too. But they leave one reeling, don’t they, these days, they’re nothing that can be sustained, or are they? To wonder what the answer is, and live one’s life as if only half alive, is torture. How many years can one spend sitting still waiting for the world outside to come wandering in? At a certain point it becomes important to seek it out, to go wherever one might find the truth—it seems like the woman in the book about eating and praying and loving knew this. But is this smart thinking? Haven’t people made a pretty compelling argument for succeeding through routine living, sensible actions, and levelheaded thinking?