“Go fuck yourselves, you shitheads!” I yelled, which is how Karl taught me to respond. The girls thought that was the funniest thing they had ever heard.
It was while I was picking berries that I met Edith, the girl I mentioned as my first love. I'd leave early in the morning with two three-gallon cans and a smaller container and a crossbar to help me carry the fruit home. I'd take the path down past the old dump which led into the forest where the picking was the best. Edith was often there with her dad and mom. Her dad, who was older like my own, acted strangely because he had been gassed over in France in World War I. He busied himself digging up scrap iron in this deserted dump, a valuable item for the current war effort. Once he dug up the boiler and wheels for an old logging machine and really made a payoff. Other people in town tried it, but the work was too hard. He had to tunnel down in frozen sawdust and winch out the boiler right on Christmas Day. Anyway, Edith's dad would see me coming home with all of these berries and ask me how much I made at my picking. I told him, and he asked if I'd mind putting his daughter to work so she could earn her keep.
The first few days we scarcely talked, out of shyness. We were only nine or ten and were both outcasts, I suppose. By about the third day she had a ribbon in her hair and her bare feet and legs were comparatively clean. The main reason we got more berries than anyone else is that Karl told me where to go. He was big on drawing very precise maps, and his knowledge of the woods, gained from hunting and trapping, was exhaustive. During bird and deer season, when well-heeled hunters came up from downstate, Karl would sell them game so they could spend their time drinking and playing cards and still show off when they got back home. Early one morning Karl picked us up in Ted's truck just beyond the dump. He announced he had found what he called a mother lode of blueberries. Edith and me were happy because I had an order for twenty quarts from a lawyer's wife who always paid more than we asked. This woman was known to be a bit of a drinker, but she once invited us into her house for a Coca-Cola and played the piano for us.
I remember being a little upset that Karl stopped that morning. I was having the first burning infatuation of my life, and I know Edith felt the same way. Sometimes we held hands, and I imagined us as living in the books I read at the time by Horatio Alger, Jed the Bootblack Boy or Sink or Swim, that kind of book. Edith said she was going to be a nurse when she grew up and help those wounded in war, no doubt thinking of her father. Myself, I was torn between becoming a preacher in an enormous, big city church who would be given a new car every year and an occupation Dad preached against. He railed against the gods of Mammon and Moloch who built the Hoover Dam where a boy-friend of his, and dozens of others, had died in its construction. I read about this dam in Richard Halliburton and, since I had always been so protected, I felt the appeal of doing some truly dangerous work. What boy hasn't felt the call to commit an act of daring that will lift him out of the commonplace in the eyes of others?
Well, we were way down a gravel road and, turning off on a two-track, Karl turned to us with an air of foreboding.
“I suppose you ninnies, you two lovebirds, think I'm taking a day off to help you out? Think again, suckers. You might say I'm an archaeologist and you're my workers. You two are so goddamn dumb and scared you don't even know how to kiss and screw. Now Corve (my nickname), if you don't give Edith a little loving, she'll start looking for a real man like me.” Karl was a fourteen-year-old at his worst, all hormones and braggadocio.
“If you touch Edith, I'll get your gun at night and shoot you in the head!” I literally screamed this and grasped Edith's hand. She had begun sniffling, and I put my arm around her.
“Calm down, you little chickenshits. We're doing archaeology today, not screwing. You're absolutely dead-on right, Corve, to shoot anyone who screws with your girl. I was testing you to see if you had the courage to face up to what I'm going to show you. Last winter when I was trapping way back here along the edge of the swamp and was led out of the blizzard by a giant, fire-eyed dog known as Wendigo to the Ojibways, I saw something that almost burst my heart with fright.”
Now Karl stopped the truck as the two-track winnowed down into no more than a game trail. Edith and me got out with our scalps tingling from Karl's apparent caution. He led us down the trail carrying three shovels and berry pails as if we were stalking the most crazed Bengal tiger. We reached the edge of an immense marsh that was blue with acres of berries. Karl pointed to a hillock and rock outcropping on the far side of the marsh.
“Last December, when the snow was falling hard, I was on that island in the marsh. It was late in the afternoon, and I didn't want to spend a night under a pine tree with my hands buried in the warm guts of a beaver to prevent freezing.” Karl was a fan of Jack London. “I stood there in the fading light trying to figure out what to do and then suddenly I heard a deep, hoarse breathing, as if it were wind from some hellish cave. I turned slowly and leveled my rifle at whatever it would be.” He stopped and shook his head dramatically, while we clutched at each other. “I'll tell you what it was, and I swear this on Mother's head—it was an open-mouthed white skull bigger than a car!”
I fairly tripped over poor Edith trying to run for it, then paused out of love and grabbed her arm, but Karl was too quick and held us back with his muscular arms.
“Nothing doing, cowards. It's too late to turn back, besides we've been spotted. I actually brought you along to protect me. You two little Bible-thumpers are safe from dark spirits while I'm a nonbeliever and they can get me. It's like Dracula can't suck blood from anyone who wears a cross. Please help me.”
The Dracula comment made matters worse as we shuffled along behind Karl. The merchants in our town sponsored free shows in the summer, putting a sheet up against a building next to a vacant lot. Our church was dead set against both movies and dancing, so Karl was the only one who got to go. Dad somehow didn't mind Karl reenacting the movies for us, and Dracula was his most powerful performance. The whole family was frightened by this blood-sucking menace from Europe. Dad offered a usual theory.
“This is surely dire portents of the Last Days. The Lord will not bear his children sucking blood out of each other's necks. Jesus said no man knows the hour of his return, but I'd say it was right around the corner.”
“It's just a movie, Dad. It didn't really happen,” Theodore said.
“If it's in a movie, it had to happen to get on a screen. I saw movies in Chicago before I was saved. I can tell you, Al Jolson never bit anyone in the neck.”
Well, we reached the island after stumbling in the spongy sphagnum of the marsh. I had a lump in my throat, and Edith's cheeks were streaked with drying tears. Karl held up his hand as we stared into dense viburnum and tamarack to a small knoll with a clearing. Without question there are places in nature that own a certain unique spirit, that are so peculiar and individual that they draw us to them, not that they care, but that they stand out in the surrounding solitude and vastness of the forest and act as magnets to anyone who passes their way. This was such a place, and to this day, more than thirty-five years later, I remember it as well as any house I have ever lived in.
Now Karl began singing a no doubt phony Indian chant. I suspect he had managed to frighten himself a bit. Then he plunged boldly toward the clearing, and we hurried after him, not wanting to be left alone.
“Corve and Edith, this is where I saw the skull, big as life. It was about eighteen by ten feet, which would make the whole skeleton as tall as that fire tower over by Rexton. I would have to guess that the skull, for its own reasons, has sunk down into the ground.” Karl scuffed at the dirt in the center of the clearing with his boot. “This might well be the tip of the nose. We better get digging right here.”
So we dug our hearts out. By noon and lunchless, Karl excused Edith to go pick blueberries so we wouldn't get in trouble with her dad or the lawyer's wife. We continued probing for the nose tip and then the forehead, which would offer a larger target. Edith came back, announcing with d
elight that it was the best berry picking in the world; her feminine pragmatism had replaced fright with fulfilling an obligation. She watched us dig with condescension as if she had caught us whacking off. What saved the day was that under a damp bed of tamarack needles I found a large, yellowish-white bear skull. This was a rare find because up here porcupines clean the forest of all bones and antlers. If it weren't for porcupines, the forest would be a boneyard. Karl seized on the bear skull as a vindication of the day.
“I knew it, goddamit! This bear skull has the power to grow and shrink. I mistook it for a human in the blizzard. Corve, try to imagine a bear the size of the Mackinac Ferry. That's how big this sucker would be. It could eat the whole town and might very well do so.” He looked around as if wondering what to do with it, then made us kiss it as he whispered more mumbo jumbo. Then he took his belt and hung it from a limb so the porcupines wouldn't get it. “This ought to scare the shit out of anyone who tries to trespass on my trapline.”
I just remembered that someone said that the ultimate track that any creature leaves on earth is a skull. That's a wonderful statement, isn't it?
CHAPTER VII
* * *
The preceding was interrupted at midmorning of what turned out to be Memorial Day. Eulia was sunbathing on a cushion in one of those string bikinis favored in Central and South America: Suffice it to say that this suit would have fit, chipmunk-style, in one of my cheeks. Strang was bearing up well under the stress of telling his tale except for moments when he would lapse off into a reverie or the pain would overwhelm him. The pain, however, didn't stop him from his arduous afternoon crawls in the forest. The mosquitoes and blackflies endemic to this latitude had come to life, and his face and arms were covered with bites, despite the lotions used as a repellent.
“I don't see why you continue this therapy if it hurts that much?” I had asked.
“It's my only chance to see the world clearly, you know, to get better. If I just sat here and took all the drugs I've been prescribed, nothing would happen except narcosis. That's why I get up at first light when the world begins again. I always have. Then you see everything before your mind is involved in the struggles of the day's work. Same thing happens if you work a night shift and sleep in the evening. You go to work after breakfast at midnight. The excavation might be three miles across and mostly lighted by spots, with the roar of hundreds of earth-moving machines, and the roar of the diverted river behind you. You jump into a pickup to relieve your man and see how the work is going. Maybe you are lowering a three-hundred-ton generator into the new shell of a powerhouse. You saw the old crane was breaking down and you located one in the Alps, which was out of the question, and another one in Terre Haute, Indiana. The crane in Indiana is shipped down the Mississippi, then out of New Orleans on a freighter, down to the coast here. If we're really in the boondocks, you have to cut the crane up and ship it in by Sikorsky freight helicopters. After a job is done, a lot of the big equipment is abandoned if you're back in the jungle. You might find natives living in the cab of a crane when you come back to check a breakdown. Or say you work all night getting an eighty-ton transformer down a hill with hawsers and an airbag. Suddenly it is dawn, and everybody is happier because the birds start up and there's less fear on the site. Once a group of us were up on the side of a hill moving loose boulders at night and one of my men was half crushed. I held his head and shoulders in my lap while waiting for the doctor. Then daylight came, and over our circle of Brazilians, with me in the center on the ground, a huge bird flew, circling for a moment. No one had ever seen it before except the half-dead man in my lap, who was smiling. I moved him a little for his comfort, but the back of his head felt like a cloth sack with gravel in it. Then his life gave way, and all those católicos knelt down and started praying. Later I found out the bird was an eagle that eats monkeys. Maybe the dying man, who was a smart fellow, smiled because he saw the irony there. So to answer you, I do the crawling because it's the only work at hand and I'm a worker and it's my only chance to get back to my real work. Maybe the treatment is a hoax, even a fatal hoax, but it's the only one I got to go on. Twice I've been on a project that never should have happened. There's no more pathetic thing than building a dam that shouldn't be there. It usually happens for political reasons. I always demand a transfer. I can't bear meaningless work. Now Eulia is a dancer, and she works out at least four hours a day, and it's hard to understand how she repeats this same routine every day. She says it's to be physically capable, when the occasion arises, to do what the choreographer asks, or to do the movements her heart or spirit might ask her to do. So that's meaningful work. What if you suddenly couldn't write after spending your whole life doing so? You're no spring chicken—what if you had a small stroke and everything else was fine, but you even spelled your goddamn name backwards, what would you do? That's what I mean.”
“I understand,” I answered, not without a tremor in my stomach. “Perhaps I'd hang in there a while and see if it was reversible. I'd be full of dread—”
“That's wrong,” Strang interrupted. “You've got to beat the dread out of yourself, or you can't do anything for yourself properly. I've gathered together all the available information, and I'll give it a try until October. I've had other times in my life that seemed worse, but that was earlier. Now it's time for your sedative.” Strang had become an accurate observer of my behavior and knew when I was desperate for a drink.
Back to midmoming on Memorial Day, with its sidelong glances at Eulia's bottom staring back at the sun in an equal trade of glory. My eyes were overdazzled, and my concentration inept. Strang took a break to fish in his aluminum walker contraption downstream near a log jam. His struggle against the current created a lump in my throat. Miss, the fat dog, watched him from the bank, then rushed barking along the bank and out the driveway. A big station wagon entered the yard with the dog behind it, as if it were only through her efforts that the car could move. A large woman in her early fifties got out, followed by a younger woman in a women's air force uniform and a sluggish-looking fellow, also big, in his late twenties, I would guess. They were all spiffy in their Sunday best: The man wore the sort of doubleknit suit and string tie preferred for formal occasions in the Great White North. He actually wore well-shined brown shoes and white socks. I felt snobbish and territorial at the same time, mistakenly, it turned out. Eulia got up from her brazen mat, all supple and greasy with lotion.
“May I help you?”
“I'm Emmeline. You know, Corve's first wife. And who are you, beautiful? You could start a public riot.” She laughed the kind of deep belly laugh that makes everyone within earshot feel better.
“I'm Eulia.” She offered a rare smile. I walked over, and we completed the introductions. They were openly pleased I had come that far to talk to their ex-husband and father. Robert Jr. strode down the bank and into the muck and reeds to help his father. Strang hugged them all, half pulling them over the walker, no mean feat as they were true heavyweights. They reminded me of people who had emerged whole from the time warp of the 1950s. Aurora cried after she kissed her father. Emmeline was distressed and beaming at the same time, while Robert Jr.’s face reddened as he glanced at Eulia, who was unnaturally pleased at the reunion.
“Bobby, you stupid shit, you're muddy to the knees,” Emmeline said with another laugh.
“Guess I don't care one bit.” He gave one the impression of a man who spent a lot of time alone. It turned out he was a logger.
“You sound like Uncle Karl. Emmeline, are you sure you weren't fooling with Karl when I was in Africa?” Strang's eyes sparkled with the question.
“Robert Corvus!” She covered her face and shrieked. “You know I was true to you for years. Who knows what you was doing with those jungle bunnies overseas? I'm taking my picnic and going home.”
Strang reached over and tugged her by the arm. “You were the truest woman of my life. After you, it was pretty much downhill.”
“Nobody said you h
ad to spend all your time away,” Aurora flared. I could see she held her own.
“I didn't drive a hundred miles to see you bitches try to tear Dad apart. Besides, I'm hungry. Aurie,” he called her, “get the picnic basket.”
“Get it yourself, you lamebrain bastard. You call me a bitch again, and I'll use judo.” She advanced on him with a silly smile, chasing him to the car.
It was an oddly wonderful picnic. Eulia got dressed to Robert Jr.’s loudly spoken regrets.
“To be frank, Eulia"—he pronounced it Yew-lee—"I've never laid eyes on one like you in real life.”
“Bobby here cuts down trees all day long. His wife ran off with a cosmetics salesman and left him with two kids. She was pretty awful.”
“You should have brought your kids, Bobby. Jesus, am I too young to be a grandpa? Eulia, I'm a grandpa.”
“What a wonderful thing to be!” I found out later that Eulia's happiness was due to the fact that she was from a big extended family and loved family confusion.
“I didn't want to tire you out with the kids. We know you're real sick, and we want to take you over to the hospital in Escanaba.”
“Thank you. They're no doubt good at chain-saw wounds and sewing up drunks, but I got some special problems. It was a good thought, and I'll call if I need help.”
Meanwhile, I was intent on the food before us. Emmeline had spread a fine Belgian tablecloth that I guessed Strang had sent years before. It was the kind of northern feast that accounts for the heaviest concentration of stomach cancer in the United States, a fact that deters no one. There were Cornish pasties wrapped in foil to keep them warm, smoked whitefish and lake trout, cold beef with a horseradish cream sauce, a container of home-pickled herring, and assorted pickles and relishes.