1961

  May 2, 1961

  Mary,

  Yesterday Frank arrived on his motorcycle and parked out back and went over to the owner’s unit and unlocked the door and went inside without saying a word to anyone.

  It was all furnished and ready for him—done by proxy, like everything else. He’d even hired somebody to come by the day before and stock the spaceship/refrigerator for him, the lazy bastard. Can’t believe how rich he’s gotten off fish sticks. He spent the evening here. Now he’s gone down to his apartment to hit the sack. Tomorrow he and Jug and I are heading out to the farm.

  Mary, I miss you. God, I miss you. I sit here on my little balcony and look at Mt. Whittlesey and think about when I’d come here and ask if you wanted me to woo you back to the farm. I have to remind myself that you said no.

  If only I could woo you back now.

  It doesn’t feel like you’re gone, sometimes.

  Sometimes all I can feel is that you’re gone.

  June 10, 1961

  Mary,

  Jug and I were supposed to drive to Park Falls today and pick up the lawn mower from the shop—on Saturday it wouldn’t start no matter how many times I yanked the starter rope. But instead, we walked up the train tracks and out along the highway. It was midday. There wasn’t much traffic, and we mostly had the road to ourselves. I kept Jug on lead, to his consternation, steering us onto the shoulder and into the ditch where it was level and grassy—freshly mown, as it turned out. Jake Bellows passed in his pickup, honking. Ahead of us, his brake lights blinked and flared. He waited until we caught up and asked if we needed a lift, but I said no, we were just on an expedition.

  Half an hour later Jug and I were standing in the parking lot of the old ski jump, overgrown now with thistles, milkweed, and every other kind of knee-high stalky vegetation. There are even umbrellas of sumac at the edge of the forest canopy, and late-season daisies looking white and delicate among the autumn reds and yellows. I unclipped Jug. He disappeared up the slope for five or six minutes, came trotting back to check on me, then bounded away again.

  Not so long ago it took every ounce of strength I had just to get out of bed. By the time I’d eaten breakfast, I needed to lie down again to rest. But there I was, grinding my way upward. Maybe I couldn’t keep up with Jug, but I made a pretty good show.

  Forgive my body, Mary. That’s the only part of me that has recovered. Though perhaps not entirely—I haven’t told you the whole story yet.

  Do you remember the earthen and timber steps that led up to the jump? Built, as I recall, by the CCC. Those steps have endured admirably. Jug and I wound our way upward along the west slope of Mt. Whittlesey. The woods have grown so much thicker than when Claude first led us through them to show us what he wanted to do. By the time we reached the top I was huffing like a locomotive, and even Jug was winded. He curled up and went straight into a doze on a soft patch of weeds.

  Those steps lead up the west side of Mt. Whittlesey, but the jump faced north. It was never visible until you crossed the plateau at the top—something I’d forgotten until we started our climb. I expected to find the jump in disrepair, but it was gone, demolished during our years in Oceanside, I suppose. I can guess the reasoning: sooner or later some kid, trying to impress his girlfriend or otherwise stupefied by youth, would find a way to break his neck, most likely by attempting exactly what I’d come up there to do: walk, crawl, or slide down the thing, for reasons I can’t explain either. But all evidence of the jump—every board, every timber, every flag, every rope—had been erased, undone. A stranger standing beside me might not have believed any structure had ever existed there, if not for the pairs of concrete pylons marching down the hillside like pint-sized Easter Island heads. I, of course, saw the ghostly wooden run clearly, and could even hear the hiss and rattle of waxed skis racing down, and I experienced the same vertigo you and I both felt that first time we stood beside Claude and looked down the boards.

  I stood there for a long time wondering, Am I such a poor human being as this? But in the end I threw off my funk and said to Jug, “Come on, you lazybones.” And down we went. If I couldn’t walk down the jump itself—a terrible idea, I admit—I was still determined to walk beside where it had been.

  With the superstructure gone, it was obvious that the steepness of the once-upon-a-time ski jump was only possible because it had been built over a narrow, sheer granite outcrop. But our descent wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine. The outcrop is hugged on either side by broad wooded slopes. Here and there, as we climbed down, I came upon remnants of the jump: bolts and lengths of metal strapping rusting like coral. The occasional rotten timber lay decorated with moss.

  The jump might have evaporated into thin air, but kids have been up there just the same. Some have dug pocks into the concrete pylons with their car keys, like monkeys with tiny miner’s tools. Most, though, had come up to record messages on the pylons. I quickly recognized a trend: toward the top were devotionals: Bobby + Helen Forever, 1954. Vivian, Will You Marry Me? I Love Benny J. Further down were challenges and insults: Freddy P is Going Get His Ass Kicked Tomorrow, and HE KNOWS WHY. This Town is a Snake pit in the Middle of a Pig pen Dump. Fuck Mr. Dorkhead Johnson and His Dumbass History Class. Still lower it was cartoon sex acts with names attached to the participants with arrows.

  No collective effort is so simple, though. At every level I found a mix of high ideals and low motives—romance and retribution, I suppose you could say, or maybe ribaldry and realism. The juxtapositions were sometimes comic, sometimes bemusing. Some just strange. The strangest of all was on one of the topmost pylons, where, amidst the blizzard of vows and proposals, I found this message stenciled in yellow traffic paint:

  On this site, on the night of July 1st, in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred Fifty-Eight, James Benjamin Petersen of Mellen, Wisconsin, facing eastward, made sparkling pee-pee under the light of a full moon.

  We’d only begun our descent when I came across this message, and because the slope was so steep, we passed by in a rush. A few minutes later, though, it registered. I climbed back up and sat resting against the pylon opposite while I copied it into my notebook. Jug stood panting and nosing my elbow, but I made him wait. I was imagining James Benjamin Petersen trudging up the dark slope of Mt. Whittlesey, paint tin, brush, stencils in his pack, flashlight in hand, passing pylons along the way to read what others had recorded before him. And when he reached that last, highest pylon, I imagined him sitting like I was, thinking: Who cares whether Bobby and Helen stayed Together Forever? Or whether Vivian accepted her marriage proposal? Freddy P’s fate must have felt small and irrelevant. Young Petersen considered what he’d intended to write. Suddenly the documentary impulse illuminated his thoughts: more worthwhile to truly record one moment, however insignificant, than to make a promise, espouse a principle, pass judgment, predict the future. Above all, one must record what has actually happened. So he did, vividly. And I wanted to thank him.

  We were maybe five hundred yards from the weedy parking lot when I thought there’d been a lightning strike somewhere nearby. I was knocked off my feet. But it was a clear sky, and whatever had happened had happened inside me. I sat panting and Jug came over and sat beside me with a worried look. I put my hand on his withers to reassure him.

  I decided I should lie back and rest a while.

  I had a dream from a long time ago. I’ll tell you about it in a while.

  When I woke, on the hillside in the shade, Jug was sitting beside me, big as a stone lion, and practically as still. Peering straight ahead, but somehow casting a protective shadow in every direction. He looked calm as could be, but I think a dinosaur would have been scared of him if it had come by.

  I was forced to stop and rest four more times on the way down, but eventually we made it to the highway, then the train tracks. I’m writing this from the apartment. Jug’s asleep on the floor here. He must be tired, because normally he’d be next door checking on Rufus Furnauer, or downstairs, snuffling loudly under Miss Annabelle’s door.

  I suppose I ought to see a doctor, but I don’t even know a doctor around here anymore. Willowbrand retired a few years back. Where his office used to be there’s an accountant now.

  Anyway, today isn’t the first time that has happened, only the most dramatic. Six months ago at the feedstore I found myself sitting on a stack of chicken feed bags for no reason. And two months ago while I was carrying one of Miss Annabelle’s potted plants onto her patio I just sort of plopped down and had to pant for a minute. If today was a thunderclap, those were firecrackers, but it’s the same thing. It can wait until next week.

  Okay, okay—Monday. But I’ve got big plans for the weekend: Frank’s coming up Saturday morning. I called him last week and told him it was time I learned to ride a motorcycle. The more I look at them lately, the more beautiful they seem to me. I like the idea of them.

  Right now, though, I’m tired. As a matter of fact, since that last sentence, I’ve gotten into bed, and I’m sitting here half-reclined so I can keep writing. I just called Jug. Usually when the nights get warm like this he prefers to sleep on the floor, but tonight he jumped right up on the bed. He’s sitting here looking at me, big as a horse. I guess there’s still some puppy in him. He used to curl up next to me every night, all night, when he was little. He felt protected that way, I suppose.

  And he was. He was indeed.

  Now I’m the one who feels protected.

  Jug has this attitude of vigilance about him tonight. Twice already I’ve tried to tell him there’s nothing to protect us against, but he’s not having any of it. At least now I’ve convinced him to lie down. He’s stretched out with his back pressed against me, all the way from my knee to my belly. Such a great, steadying weight. I can feel him breathing. I know he can feel me breathing, too. He’s thrown his head back onto my hip and he’s looking at me, almost coyly, panting hard, thumping his tail. To him, I look upside down, and he wants me to know that this is the best joke he’s ever told. Just to look at me this way.

  What a knucklehead.

  Here’s a funny thought: I miss you with every molecule of my body, Mary Svoboda. Loving you, longing for you—feeling your absence in the world—underlies my every thought, my every sensation. Yet right now, in this moment, I don’t feel lonely.

  Going to sleep now.

  I hope, as always, to dream of you.

  EPILOGUE

  BEYOND SOMETHING

  Southern california, in frank eckling’s opinion, was gratingly pleasant, the climatic equivalent of a person without definite opinions about anything. This day at least had the virtue of sweltering heat. Without a cloud in the sky or a bit of haze, the sun was a great yellow pan, frying the ever-loving sweat out of anyone dumb enough to be afoot on Acton Street. That being a population of one. This section of Acton was one of those commercial-industrial quasi slums that big cities apparently required in order to balance out the beautiful parts—for every palm tree on Beverly Boulevard, a broken streetlight on Acton; for every fountain on Sunset, a salvage yard like the one whose chain-link fence he now limped past.

  He passed a transmission shop, then a machine shop of some kind. Then he was standing in front of a nondescript white warehouse with a huge loading dock door that made the human-scale door next to it look like a mouse hole. Elbow hadn’t bothered to put up a sign. Frank had the number written down. He checked to make sure it was right.

  Inside the door was a little office. He took one of the respirators off a peg and pulled it over his face, then, reluctantly obeying the sign on the door, fitted a set of earplugs into his ears and covered them with hearing protection earmuffs and walked through the inside door.

  The air inside the shop was some ideal temperature, he knew, and some ideal humidity. Ventilation conduits, like huge silver bronchi, led up and away from various workstations to a massive filtration system in a distant corner of the shop. Against the back wall, six immense logs lay in cradles. The ones near the ceiling were still encased in pitch-black tar, but further down they were white to the point of translucency. Each log was on the order of twenty-five feet long and eight feet in diameter. One had been sliced in half lengthwise, with each half occupying a separate cradle. Another log had been forklifted onto an immense carriageworks sporting an array of levels and dials and three-spoked turnwheels that allowed the log to be positioned in front of—and in fact, mechanically connected to—an equally immense band saw, currently at work shaving a sheet of crazywood or moneywood or whatever the hell Elbow called the stuff off the log’s face. Voicewood—that was it. A plasma-like blue line glowed at the frontier of contact between the saw blade and the wood. The sawdust spraying onto the concrete floor looked as fine as sugar and as bright as sparks. In fact, Frank couldn’t be sure they weren’t sparks; the suction apparatus whisked them away before he could get a good look.

  The muskmelon-over-earplug business that had seemed ludicrous in the little office now felt barely adequate. The log looked as big as a bus. It was thrumming so powerfully it percussed his chest like a second heartbeat. The band saw’s blade, razor-thin but a foot deep, whirled at a speed so high that wherever it wasn’t cutting wood it cut a line of vacuum into the air with a long supersonic scream.

  As Frank approached, the leading edge of the blade moved into the clear and the face of the log shivered and tilted forward into a padded metal framework that the operator guided down to horizontal via a ratchetworks. The cut sheet, an irregular cross-sectional disk as smooth as glass, lay vibrating atop the padding.

  The operator set hooks into each corner of the frame, and using a block and tackle guided it along an overhead track toward a many-slotted metal rack. Though he was wearing a full-body hazardous materials suit, respirator, and ear protectors, the operator could only have been Elbow, unless Elbow had hired another giant to work as his assistant. When he turned and saw Frank standing near the band saw, he waved him back. Frank was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and his cosmetic hand, and he was pretty sure Elbow didn’t realize who he was. Elbow slapped a red button on a pillar and the band saw began whistling down through registers of supersonic.

  Frank had spent the entire flight to Los Angeles rehearsing how to say what he’d come to say. But as it turned out, there was no need to say anything. When he pulled the respirator mask over his head, Elbow looked surprised, then pleased, to see him.

  Then he said, “Oh, no.”

  they arrived in mellen late on the morning of the memorial service in a six-vehicle caravan, Frank’s Caddy leading, then the panel truck Elbow and Audie had rented at O’Hare, then four more vans. The vans turned west on Bennett Street and headed for the Catholic church. Frank’s Caddy and the panel truck went to the funeral home.

  “You’re late,” the director said, peevishly, when Frank walked into his office. “I spoke with the family an hour ago to see what alternative arrangements they wanted to make.”

  “We are his fucking family,” Frank told him. “And if you’ve put him in one of those overdecorated fish-buckets you people sell, you’re going to hoist him right back out again. Because that sound you hear is Ulysses Elbow pounding on your back door.”

  dogs were not allowed in the catholic church on Wilson Street, so the service was held on the back lawn using folding chairs borrowed from the high school and a lectern carried up from the catechism classroom in the church basement.

  Gar’s uncle Frank and uncle Elbow and aunt Audie sat in the front row with him and Trudy. Gar and Trudy’s toddler son, Edgar, refused to sit on a chair or on anyone’s lap. He stood in front of them on the grass, wide-eyed, silent, dark-haired, thumb of one hand jammed into his mouth, the other hand hooked back over his shoulder to twine his fingers into the ruff of their dog, Almondine. The boy was small enough yet to fit under Almondine’s muzzle, as if under the eaves of a house, and the boy and the dog stood looking out together at the strange, wide world.

  Father Jacek offered a few words of consolation to the mourners. Since John was only technically Catholic, there was no funeral Mass and no Holy Communion; allowing the service to take place on the church’s back lawn, he’d told Gar, was a favor to them. When the priest finished, he nodded at Gar, who took his place only long enough to invite anyone who so desired to share anecdotes and recollections about his father. Gar had concluded, just that morning, that he would not try to put the complex ache he felt into words. Not yet. Not in public.

  He was returning to his seat when he realized that the man standing behind the last row of folding chairs, dressed in black slacks and an open-necked black shirt, was Claude. How his brother had learned about their father’s death Gar couldn’t begin to guess; they hadn’t had any way to contact him for years—long before their mother’s death. The last any of them had known, Claude was serving in some place in some capacity in something like the merchant marine. With a nod, Gar indicated that Claude should come up and sit with them. Claude shook his head and mouthed a single word, which Gar guessed was “later.”

  Three of the owners spoke, then old Mr. French from the hardware store, assisted by his son, and then, because there was no realistic way to prevent it, Page Papineau strode to the lectern. Gar could feel the assembly collectively brace itself. Trudy dug her fingers into his knee so hard he had to force himself not to laugh. But Page allowed himself only one story—a shocking measure of restraint—about how helpful Gar’s father and mother had been when he’d first arrived in town to set up his practice, a hapless young veterinarian, and Gar found himself reconsidering his opinion of Page.

  When it looked like no one else was going to speak, his uncle Elbow exhaled a long breath and clapped his hands on his knees, stood, and went forward. He rested his huge hands on the lectern and looked at the assembled. “A long time ago, John said to me—” he began. He broke off, took a deep breath. “He said to me, suppose—suppose you could—”