West of Here (54 page)

“What is Mount Rushmore,” he deadpanned.

“What is Mount Rushmore,” echoed a toothsome, gravelly voiced contestant, as Rita lowered herself into a seat beside Meriwether.

“Drinker,” the old man said, with perfect conviction. “Look at the nose.”

“He’s improving isn’t he?”

“Yes. But the red-haired woman has the momentum. She’s at twenty-five hundred right now.”

“My
son. Curtis.
He’s getting better, isn’t he? You said he was improving,” Rita said. “Dr. Kardashian said you were making progress. He said you were having breakthroughs. You said yourself he was remembering things. He’s going to be all right, isn’t he? He’s going to come back?”

“How can I know these things?” Meriwether said, his eyes fixed on the television. “Who is Helen of Troy?”

“Who is Helen of Troy?” echoed the red-haired contestant.

“Last time, when I was watching you through the window, I actually
felt like you were getting through to him — like you actually could communicate with him. Two weeks ago, I thought you were crazy talking to him like that. But the other day, I saw it — I did. And toward the end of the session, it looked like he was drawing,
really
drawing —
pictures,
like he used to.”

“What is Antarctica?” said Meriwether. “They cut your boy’s hair — over the ears. It looks good.”

“The drawings — they’re a good sign, aren’t they?”

“Could be,” said Meriwether. “Oh, goodie, Double Jeopardy. This should be good.” Eyes glued to the screen, Meriwether fished two coffee nips out of his white coat pocket. “Nip?” he said.

AUGUST
2006

Twenty minutes after Rupert had unearthed the Pinnacle Pasta wrapper, Franklin began ascending the steep face of a narrow wooded ridge, keeping his eyes peeled on the periphery of the trail, looking for movement or any sign of Tillman’s passing. Low clouds had moved in during the morning hours. The wooded hillside was shrouded in mist, and visibility was less than a hundred yards. In the early afternoon it began to rain so lightly that it collected like dew on Franklin’s sleeves and didn’t penetrate the fabric of his sweater. It clung to his face like perspiration.

Midway up the face of the ridge, Franklin paused to reposition the lone remaining can of Chunky soup within his blue bag, which was digging into the small of his back. Bracing himself unsteadily against a mossy outcrop the size of a VW Beetle, he switched from his tennis shoes to his easy breathing loafers, which accommodated his swollen feet more comfortably. Once inside of them, he wiggled his toes and hiked up his socks, then trudged onward somewhat refreshed.

Was he crazy to continue under these circumstances? Was it crazy to think that in this vast and seemingly endless wilderness he could actually find Tillman? Was it crazy to believe that it was actually his
destiny
to find Tillman? Was it naive to think that Tillman
wanted
to be found in the first place? Franklin granted himself one more day. If his search yielded nothing by morning, he’d have no choice but to turn back.

As Franklin approached the ridge, the clouds broke, and he found himself walking above the clouds. The sensation was indescribable.
Ethereal
— was that the word he was looking for? It was sort of heavenly up there above the clouds. The air was lighter, sweeter, with
just the slightest hint of underarm deodorant. Even his footsteps felt effortless above the clouds. The sun shone down, gloriously unobstructed, and Franklin paused to close his eyes and turn his face upward and soak in some of its goodness. He opened them again to a sky impossibly blue, so blue it was hard to look at. Gazing back across the valley, the eastern ridge was visible in the distance like a dimpled pie crust running in a crescent around a creamy cloud filling.

“Holy Toledo. Would you look at that, Rupe?”

But Rupert was already descending the ridge on the far side, nose to the ground. The bald shale face of the ridge was the trickiest terrain Franklin had negotiated yet. The ground skittered out from beneath his feet with nearly every step. He descended the steepest portions crab-wise, descending back into the clouds to the tree line until the grade of the trail leveled out somewhat, whereupon Franklin and Rupert assumed a steady pace, the former with his gaze ever scanning the forest all around them and the latter with his butthole puckered and his nose to the ground intently. Within the hour, they reached the bottom of the narrow valley where the trail jogged south, and somewhere in the distance the river roared dully, shielded by the trees. Though Franklin tried to avoid his thoughts, the creeping fear of finding his way back out of this wilderness, trail or no trail, was inescapable. They must’ve covered six miles since the Pinnacle Pasta wrapper. Tillman could have proceeded anywhere from there. Hell, he could be on a bus for Jackson Hole. He could be eating lobster right now at Dupree’s. Or rib-eye. Or jumbo prawns. Or garlic mashed potatoes slathered au jus. The thought of it was almost enough to make him hate Tillman.

The next mile offered relatively flat terrain through the woodlands. The cloud cover lifted and the mist let up, though the forest all about continued dripping. Puddles riddled the trail, and Franklin’s shoes were soon soaked through. Sunset was still two hours off, and that Chunky soup was more enticing by the minute. The trail was about to jog around a corner to the south when Rupert caught a scent and began to pick up speed. Before Franklin could stop him, the dog went bounding toward the bend and out of sight. Franklin took after
him at a jog, then turned on the afterburner as Rupert rounded the corner.

“Rupert!”

By the time Franklin cleared the bend he was winded, and Rupert was nowhere to be seen. Stopping in his tracks, he did his best to quiet his breathing, and he listened intently, scanning the forest with a slow panoramic sweep of his narrowed eyes.

“Ru-peeeeeeert!”

Suddenly, something flitted out from beneath the brush to his right, and Franklin spun his head around just in time to see a bird shooting off into the canopy. Deliberately, he resumed his inventory, tracing no further movement beyond a gentle swaying of treetops. Somewhere to the east — if the sun could be trusted — the river was just barely audible, a low steady hiss, and from here and there in the canopy came birdsong. Beyond that, a deafening silence. Franklin held his breath and felt the panic rising in him. Suddenly there came three staccato barks in the distance up ahead. Franklin took after the barks for forty or fifty yards and then stopped once more to listen, his heart beating out of his chest.

“Ru-peert!”

Rupert loosed another series of clipped barks, farther off this time, in the direction of the river. In spite of the panic, Franklin kept his wits about him. He scurried to a nearby tree, where a broken limb jutted out seven or eight feet above the ground. Just as Rupert barked once more, Franklin rose on his tiptoes, slung his bag strap-wise from the limb as a marker, and began tromping through the underbrush. Creeping vines entangled his shins, low limbs whipped his face and arms and he plowed forward, a hundred yards, two hundred yards, until he stopped to listen and gather his breath. Looking back he could not discern his own path. He strained to locate his marker, but the harder he looked, the harder it was make out anything distinct in the shadowy forest. As a precaution, he wrestled his striped sweater off, and dangled it over a limb, reasoning that the cobalt blue and orange stripes would be more visible than the dark bag.

“Ru-peeeeert!”

A few birds twittered.

Franklin could no longer hear the river. But he knew it was dead ahead — just as surely as the trail was directly behind him. He was at a sudden loss as to which way to proceed. Perhaps the wise choice was to backtrack and find the trail and await Rupert’s return. But what if Rupert was hot on Tillman’s trail?

“Ru-peeeeeeert!”

Not even a bird twittered on this occasion, though Franklin heard the faint trail of his own echo calling back from across the valley. He stood perfectly still in the calm of the forest for a minute or more, waiting for Rupert to betray his whereabouts. But Rupert was silent. Finally, he gave up, yanked his sweater down off the limb with a sigh, and decided to proceed back to the trail to await Rupert’s return. Turning back, he retraced his steps for fifty or sixty yards, until they ceased to look familiar. Or maybe they were familiar. It all started to look familiar. He forged ahead for thirty or forty more yards, until he could hear the river faintly, once more. But something was wrong. The river seemed to be coming from in front of him now, which made no sense at all. That would mean the trail was the other way, when clearly he’d come from this way, right? Wait a minute. But then — hold on a sec. Shit. He scanned the forest desperately for his marker, for any sign of the trail, but the more he tried to gather his bearings, the more disorienting were his surroundings. Somewhere out there, Rupert maintained his deathly silence, as an icicle of fear ran down Franklin’s neck.

This was bad. This was real bad. Franklin told himself to stay calm. Think this thing out. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and reassess your surroundings. He couldn’t be
that
lost, because he hadn’t trekked more than a couple hundred yards off trail. The thing to do, Franklin decided, was to climb a tree — get a better look. Maybe he could see the river from up there, or maybe the trail. Couldn’t hurt. With that, Franklin selected a nearby tree whose fluted trunk seemed to offer good footing and began climbing the first tree he’d climbed in thirty-nine years.

AUGUST
2006

Wet, bedraggled, half starved, but above all else resolved to procure a cheeseburger and a pair of dry socks at almost any cost, Timmon Tillman set out from his lost paradise having enjoyed a breakfast comprising hot water and the peanut husks he’d managed to scrape from an inseam of his backpack. God, how they’d melted on his tongue. To think of the countless times he’d scattered husks carelessly at his feet at old Comiskey. To think of that curlicue of mustard on a hot pretzel, with that little dapple at the end, like an exclamation point. And the fucking hot dogs. Oh, the hot dogs. Maybe he should give sauerkraut another try. His old man had sure loved the stuff. The bastard.

Timmon’s long strides carried him fast on a downhill course through clustered ferns and thickets of salal, until he could hear the Elwha raging in the distance. He traveled light, having cut bait on the useless fishing tackle, abandoned his nest of skillets, and closed his books for the last time. A mile into his journey, he nearly went back for the crossbow, which might’ve fetched a decent dollar in hock — maybe even a hundred bucks. But coasting on forward momentum, he didn’t have the strength to turn back for anything.

Timmon was willing to forgive himself for his most recent failure, on the grounds of false pretense. His unmolested solitude had, after all, been molested — molested by old ladies peeing themselves, by neofascist yuppies in Gore-Tex socks, by dead industrialists, and finally, by a gnawing hunger and the irrepressible thought of a cheese-burger. Timmon was forced to concede that his fate was inextricably linked in the most arbitrary ways to things and people and events he’d never given a thought to.

The mist had burned off in the highlands, though a ghostly ribbon of clouds still clung to the valley floor below. As he switchbacked his
way down the wooded ridge, a weak sunlight was beginning to filter through the canopy, and his thoughts warmed along with his muscles. Though he had nothing to buoy his optimism, Timmon felt it creeping into his step and decided he liked it there. What if it were true, that a decision — as much as any person or event or thing — could change a life, really change it?

Timmon’s path met the Elwha running fast at the head of a wide channel. After the next gap he knew he would descend into Press Valley — a half day of easy traveling. Moving still at a brisk pace, he trained his eyes always upon the rutty trail and its perimeter. It wasn’t until he quit whistling that he heard the first shout and stopped in his tracks. There came another. They seemed to be coming from the northeast, but the echo made it difficult to tell. One thing for certain, the shouts were earnest, though something in their tone could not belie to Timmon’s ears a certain hopelessness.

Proceeding slowly, ears alert, Timmon came upon a blue gym bag hanging from a tree limb on the side of the trail.
What sort of dumbfuck packs a gym bag for the backwoods?
Timmon yanked the bag down, snapping the limb, and instinctively began the business of unzipping it and rifling through its contents: an ugly sweater, a map, three books of matches, two pairs of filthy socks, and a lot of little Styrofoam crumbles. And lo and behold, in a corner of the bag behind some wet corduroys, bingo — a can of Chunky soup! Timmon could scarcely believe his good fortune.

Even as the ragged pleas continued in the distance, Timmon swung his fancy pack off his back and fumbled around in the pockets for his Swiss Army knife and, squatting on his haunches, opened the can furiously with trembling hands. No sooner had he pried the top loose than he brought the can to his lips like a pint of beer, where he discovered that Chunky soup was too thick to consume in such a manner. He dug into the brown gravy with three fingers, furiously shoveling the mess into his mouth. When the can was scraped clean but for a pair of marooned peas refusing to be dislodged, Timmon nearly tossed it aside but checked himself and stuffed the can in a plastic grocery bag, which he replaced inside the gym bag.
That’s when Timmon noticed that the shouting had stopped. A wave of nausea washed over him like a chill. What if his selfishness had cost a life? What if destiny had offered him a choice, a shot at redemption, and he’d chosen Chunky soup?

He listened intently, hopefully, for another shout. When it didn’t come, he called out into the valley:

“Hello?”