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We
sat with our backs against a stone wall which
had no business being here, in the middle of an
Alaskan nowhere. But here it was, so we rested
against it.
"Do you have the matches?" Roger asked
me.
His lips were fat and bluish, and trembled beneath
the bristle of his mustache as he spoke. His face
was pale, his eyelashes stiff and white.
"No," I said.
Roger nodded and stared into the distance. "I'll
bet the cabin is warm right now. I'll bet Johann
has the stove going."
I bit my lip to flush some warmth back into it.
"I would like to sit in front of that stove
again," Roger said. He lay his head back
against the stack of stones and mortar and rolled
his eyes toward me. "It would be nice to
be anywhere again, I think."
"Very nearly," I said.
Snow fell lightly, buffeted about by increasingly
strong gusts of cold white wind. The snow tumbled
and somersaulted on the currents, finally swept
back up into the sky. For a time it seemed no
snow touched the earth.
The blizzard was moving in slowly, circling us
like a tiger, quiet and patient. It was accompanied
by a great rise of fog, so tall and wide that
we could not see where it ended. The fog was crested
with white and roiled like a magnificent, unfocused
breaker.
"I can't feel my legs anymore, William,"
Roger whispered.
The heavy snow pants he wore were dark with water
which was beginning to freeze. Roger leaned forward
and swatted at a buckle in the fabric and a shelf
of ice crackled off of the material and disappeared
on the snow beneath him. He groaned and fell back
against the wall, muttering about the cold.
His
head was all but hidden beneath the blinding orange
woolen cap he wore and the black scarf that circled
his neck. The cap had shifted, revealing the deep
black smear of crusted blood on his forehead.
Another smudge traversed one lens of his glasses.
When I pointed it out to him after the crash,
he said, "If I could see without them, I
would probably break them and rub the stems together
for a spark."
Johann
gripped the end of a split log and delicately
tried to place it in the mouth of the woodstove.
He flinched as sparks fluttered up and dotted
the scratchy sleeve of his sweater. "Dykes!"
he shouted, and yanked his arm back. The piece
of wood clattered to the floor of the cabin.
Rog sputtered and took the beer bottle from his
lips. Foam dotted his mustache, and his face was
bright red. "Did you just say 'dykes'?"
he choked.
Johann stopped and stared at the wood on the floor,
then looked at the two of us. "Right. Dykes.
All American say that when they have problem."
Rog laughed so hard he couldn't speak, so I explained
to Johann the correct use of the term, and its
correct form. "It's 'yikes,' Johann,"
I said. "Dykes..."
"I thought that it was 'dykes,'" Johann
said flatly. He leaned over and picked up the
piece of wood and shoved it violently into the
stove, then slammed the metal door and twisted
the lynchpin shut.
Rog pressed his palm against his chest as though
pressure would suffocate his laughter. "'Dykes'
is another word for lesbian, Joe," he said,
his words warm around the edges with his delight.
"And what is 'les-bee-uhn'?" Johann
asked sternly, his hands on his hips.
"Well," I began, my mind working quickly
to find an easy and tactful way to explain this
oddity to him.
"Dykes!" Rog spouted. "Lesbos!
Girls who eat girls!"
Johann looked confused. "Like can-uh-bulls?"
Now Rog was puzzled.
"Cannibals," I said. "No, Joe,
not like cannibals. He means women who love women."
"Oh," Johann said smartly. "You
mean yikes."
It was too much for Rog, who knocked over his
bottle of beer as he tumbled off of his cot. Johann
studied Rog as he lay flat on his back, roaring
with laughter, then looked at me and said, "I
do not like him very much now."
I nodded and grinned. "Ditto," I said,
and when Johann offered up another perplexed look,
I said, "Forget it."
By the time Johann finished heating three cans
of beanie weenies, Rog was pretty much sloshed.
His face was high and red with the alcohol, and
he was losing control of his expressions, which
blurred from one to another in a matter of seconds.
When Johann told a joke, Rog's face would fall,
and Johann would apologize profusely, suddenly
afraid he had injured Rog's feelings. Then Rog
would explode in laughter again, leaving Johann
and I to shrug at each other.
This was the tradition of our hunting trips, which
Johann would learn over time. For sixteen years,
Rog and I had journeyed to this cabin in the Alaskan
bush, content to get drunk and pick off rabbits
from the porch. On occasion we would load up the
snowmobiles with traps and slink into the trees
to place them. There were the odd and uneventful
encounters with insomniac bears and rail-thin
moose, which we would immediately practice inflating
for the folks back home, who always listened with
amazement.
Johann was twenty-four, a dozen years younger
than Rog and I, and new to America. He had grown
up in France and Switzerland with his mother,
whom he described as a "crowd-pleaser"
for the off-track circuses of Europe. He explained
to us that the circuses were generally comprised
of those who could not find their way into the
major circuits: women whose beards were too real
to be considered entertaining; clubfoots who looked
too pathetic to incite laughter. Because of this,
the audiences were usually a smorgasbord of cruel
and crude men who would rather throw dirt, and
sometimes even feces, at the performers.
"Which is where my mum got in," Johann
said over eggs and salmon at the Snowbird in Anchorage.
"She would dance around in a pretty costume,
and if the crowd settled down for her, she would
have to take the costume off. It was -- ahh --
de-gray-deeng."
Rog and I got a kick out of Johann's stories from
the beginning. He would spin these truly interesting
stories about the time he lost his virginity to
a nest of over-the-hill prostitutes during a rip
through Amsterdam; he laughed as he told of how,
when finished, he pulled his pants on, then shouted
"You bunch of cows!" at the women and
ran into the street, where he was promptly knocked
flat by a pimp on a moped.
It was Rog who invited the boy along, and Johann,
who boasted of cooking for a military regime in
Germany once, readily agreed. He would cook for
us, he declared, and while we hunted, he would
"defend the cabin from instruders."
"Just like a woman," Rog crowed. Johann
kicked him squarely in the shin and cried, a little
too eagerly, "I am not a woman!"
We discovered quite soon that Johann's cooking
skills were much exaggerated. He screwed his nose
up at the first rabbit we skinned and brought
into the cabin, and proceeded to puncture a can
of beans for dinner instead.
Johann watched Rog's journey from sober -- well,
Rog was never completely sober -- to drunken with
interest. "I have never seen Americans so
inclocksicated," he said seriously, which
prompted Rog to thump his forehead against the
wall repeatedly.
"We do tend to get pretty smashed,"
I said, popping open another beer. "Want
one?"
Johann nodded, but as Rog and I downed bottle
after bottle, I noticed that he only sipped daintily
at it. He didn't like the taste. "American
beer," he said, "is piss."
Rog has always held his liquor badly. I have always
been the opposite. It is always I who, after eight
beers, will drag Rog into the backseat of his
car and drive him home. Two is enough for him
to embarrass himself.
The evening wore on, with Johann finally loosening
up a little and regaling us with tales of his
episodes in Saudi Arabia and Iceland, and recounting
conquests in Italy. Most of his stories were extremely
detailed until he reached the climax: "Then
I would do her," he would say, "and
that was the end of that!" 'That was the
end of that' was his favorite phrase. I stopped
counting after the fourth repetition.
"My best girl ever," Johann said, "was
a pretty Spanish girl. She was as tall as I am"--Johann
was short, almost stumpy--"and had skeen
like...like dark skeen, but not so dark. And whoa-ho-ho,"
he bellowed, cupping large, invisible breasts
in his hands. "She was--"
"You think that'sh hot?" Rog erupted.
His face was lonely, but his tone exploitative:
another contradiction of such hilarity that I
could not help but smile.
"I once did this gal," he continued,
"who was absholutely perfect. Perfection!"
He stood up unsteadily and traced a wobbly hourglass
in the air in front of him. "Perfection!
She had the best legsh I've ever licked. Wow!
Wow! She, ohh, she wash sho good. Man, she wash
good. Freckles! Like hundreds of millions of them!
Kabazillions!"
I laughed. Rog had always poked fun at my wife
for her bright red hair and profusion of freckles.
It was what drew me to her, actually, and Rog
found it uproarious.
"Ohhh," he moaned. "The besht part
wash that she wash married, you know, she wash
married to this other guy, and he never knew about
it. He wash even home one time, I think rebuilding
a carburetor or somethin, and me and she went
at it in the bathroom."
I blinked hard and squinted at Rog. His face was
flushed a deeper red that seemed to glow as he
rumbled with laughter.
"An there'sh this guy, fixin his car while
his wife's givin me a hummer in his bathroom.
Sho I look up while she'sh goin to town, and there'sh
this fancy dancy little sign on his bathroom wall
that shays 'Welcome to our home, all the pleashuresh
of your home,' and I think, don't mind if I do!"
Johann laughed, dazzled by this. I must have been
a little drunker than I had thought, because I
didn't get up and shove Roger against the wall
and drive a knee into his groin like I thought
I did. I just sat there and stared at him, every
nerve ending hypersensitive, so that when he turned
and looked at me, completely unaware of what he
was saying, and who he was saying it to, I felt
like he'd just knocked my head back with his fist.
"Besht part, Will!" he shouted. "Besht!
He never even knew, shtill doesn't know! Ain't
that a kicker!"
When
Roger crashed, I almost left him. Instead I slowed
my snowmobile to a stop in the deep snow and lumbered
after him.
His machine was upended in a shallow creek, nose
down. The frozen creek had buckled beneath the
snowmobile, and water bubbled up from the ice.
Roger was on his back on the opposite bank, wet
and blinking up at the woolen sky.
"I can't tell if I'm looking up or down,"
he said when I knelt beside him. "The sky
and the ground look exactly the same."
I pulled him to his feet and he leaned on my shoulder.
He was able to walk, and we carefully stepped
across the creek until we reached the other side
once more.
"I don't know what happened," Roger
said.
"You drove off over a ditch, pretty much,"
I said. "You're lucky you aren't dead."
"I hurt," he said.
We clambered up the snowbank and stood next to
my snowmobile. I surveyed the surrounding bleak
hills for any hint of shelter, someplace we could
burrow down and start up a small fire to warm
Roger's legs, but the land was wide and white
and shadowless in all directions. There was nowhere
to go, the cabin was much too far for a piggyback
on my sled, and I really didn't care that Roger
was probably going to ice up and die of hypothermia
before we made it anywhere anyway.
"I'm cold," Roger said.
The stone wall was difficult to see, bisecting
the landscape like a thin gray thread. We rode
the sled, Roger in front and me behind, my arms
around him so I could steer, until we reached
the wall.
"I've never seen this before," I said.
Roger looked up and drowsily said, "Me either."
"It looks like it belongs in Maine,"
I mused, and climbed off of the sled. Roger tumbled
into my arms and I dragged him to the wall. He
lolled forward when I sat him down, so I propped
him back on the stones, then pulled my glove off
and sharply thumped his nose.
He blinked brightly and shuddered. "That
didn't feel so hot," he said clearly.
"You needed it."
Roger angled his neck left, then right, and I
heard a painful crack. I lowered myself into the
snow beside him, and patted my pockets.
"Do you have the matches?" he asked.
"No," I said.
We passed the time talking only in small, emotionless
phrases. I watched as the fog and the snowstorm,
for so long so distant, drew near, swallowing
up trees and sky and land like a great gray mouth.
The wind grew stronger, and instead of sweeping
the snow back into the clouds, it drove it down
against our faces.
Roger buried his chin in the folds of his scarf
and closed his eyes. I tucked my knees up to my
face and curled my arms around my head and legs.
My breath was hot in that small dark space.
The storm was so large, I thought. I looked up
and studied the snowmobile: was there time to
ride away? Unlikely. The storm was all around
us. We were insects trapped in a glass. We would
never make it to the cabin before the storm caught
us, regardless of our position. There was no forest
to settle into, no alcoves to tuck our bodies
into. There was only this wall, and the two of
us, and the approaching blizzard.
Roger was silent for a long while, and I found
myself hoping he wasn't dead. But as the cold
fog closed in and we were separated from sight,
despite our closeness, I heard Roger whisper quietly,
"Dear Lord, take care of Georgia."
I considered telling Roger that he could tell
Georgia that himself, that things would be okay.
I considered choking Roger for the story he told
about my wife. But as the snow moved in, harsh
and needling, I let go of these things, and instead
felt for Rog's hand and squeezed it, small in
the thick gloves that he wore. There were prayers
and goodbyes to be said, but I couldn't remember
the words.
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