In the morning, I ascended to John William’s cave, feeling, strangely, like a supplicant. It seemed to me I had a plea to make without knowing what it was. John William greeted me with a rock that missed my head by inches. Standing by the fire pit, holding another rock beside his ear, barefoot and grinning, wide-eyed with feigned malice, he looked more disheveled and bedraggled than before, but his teeth were still conspicuously white, and he still had that upright, English fell runner look, that ebullient physicality and stalwart expression I’d loathed on that May afternoon, five years earlier, when he’d gripped my hand earnestly after beating me in the half-mile. Now his wool pants and limp sweater both had burn holes, brown-edged and smaller than dimes, that must have been made by flying cinders, and the ash in his hair, beard, and eyebrows made him look ghostly, or ceremonial in the tribal sense, as if this ash was ritually cosmetic, but he also resembled a downed RAF flyboy surviving on wits, derring-do, and a stiff upper lip, maybe in the Schwarzwald. My friend had no mirror and didn’t know, probably, that with his stains of leaden ash, his smudges and grime, he further brought to mind a Day of the Dead celebrant, an Ash Wednesday penitent, or—especially with that rock in his hand—a character from Lord of the Flies. “You missed,” I said.
“Same old Countryman.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re here.”
I got out of my pack and threw the Eliot at him. He caught it, looked at the cover, and said, “I overdosed on T.S. in Althea’s class,” meaning the Mrs. Mastroianni who’d given him an F for forty-seven opulent if misguided pages on “Cosmology of the Gnostics: Penetrating God’s Illusion,” the Mrs. Mastroianni who’d petted her Abyssinian while discussing Chomsky with him in her apartment, the Mrs. Mastroianni who believed all her Lakeside students should read, reverently, as John William put it, “that most overrated poem of all time, ‘The Outhouse.’”
“I don’t know ‘The Outhouse.’”
“It’s also called The Waste Land.”
I’d brought T-bones, catsup, mayonnaise, and iceberg lettuce. Within ten minutes of my arrival, John William was frying the meat in mayonnaise while packing his mouth with all the lettuce it could handle. He ate that head the way other people eat an apple, by cleaving it in two, except that he poured catsup and mayonnaise into the exposed leaf folds and doused them with salt, pepper, and cayenne. He doused the burning steaks as well, and flipped them repeatedly with darting fingers, and after slopping more mayonnaise—also with his fingers—into his smoking and spitting skillet, cut a chunk of half-cooked beef, charred and fat-rimed, and ate it from the spear point on his pocketknife. I noticed, again, that dozens of flattened cans lined his fire pit, slipped under one another like roofing tiles—clever heat-reflectors that, with time, were degrading into rust-hued powder—and that some of his fire-ring rocks were heat-cracked. His camp, nevertheless, retained its vaguely military fastidiousness. His canteens were neatly hung. Socks were drying on a line. The heads of his hand tools sat on stone, not dirt. The limestone chips that were the refuse of his cave building had been swept under trees, and the hot tub, enlarged, now included a flat, stone bench.
“Hey,” John William said, “how was San Diego?”
“San Diego? I thought you said Vegas. I thought you wanted me to sell your car in Vegas. Didn’t you say Vegas?”
John William, who’d finished off the lettuce already, said, “These steaks are done enough,” stabbed one on his knife, and tore into it. “What’s T.S. say about meat?” he asked, close to unintelligibly, because he wouldn’t take time away from chewing.
I said, “Eat both.”
While he did so—noisily and with shiny chin whiskers—I discovered cedar bark floating in the hot tub, rolls of inner bark knotted with their tapers, and dangled my feet among them. These packets suggested my friend’s woodland prowess and occasioned in me a glandular resentment. They were so neatly done, so adroitly crafted, that I felt bad about myself just looking at them. Here he’d been going competently native, under these trees and in these woods, while I’d been analyzing “Gerontion” in a college library carrel.
When John William was meat-sated, we climbed his pueblo ladder. He’d driven two spikes over his cave entrance to support a stripped sapling on the horizontal, and wrapped around this, like a roll-blind, was a cedar mat he could unfurl like a curtain. He left it where it was, though, to let forest light in. We sat on cedar mats and under cedar mats: three were hung, from spikes and cord, like banners. They weren’t so much festive as civilizing, though the work was crude and absent of design—not the sort of thing you’d see in a gallery alongside ceremonial masks, but not bad, either, tightly woven and, in the main, square. Sprawled under them, I rested while John William tried unraveling his rat’s nest with a 59-cent comb I’d brought.
He was eagerly talkative. No doubt he hadn’t spoken for a while, except to birds who didn’t answer, or to squirrels who squeaked at him from trees. He tried to show me how to make three-ply rope out of cedar bark by twisting to the right, but I told him I didn’t need to know about this, since I could buy rope. A few minutes later, he put in my hands a cedar basket he’d woven, delineating his technique as if he was guest basket-maker on a Sunday-afternoon public-television show, and stressing how useful this item would be for gathering whatever he was gathering. Not changing my tune, I reminded John William that five-gallon plastic buckets were free for the taking behind paint stores.
His cave felt improved. The subterranean gloom of those limestone facets was now concealed by the warp and weft of his mats, which insulated, too, dispelling drafts. You could loll meditatively without feeling claustrophobic, because the banners, in squaring off what was shaped like a mine shaft, hid tomblike indentations and made the air less dank. This was not so much a dungeon now as a room in one of those Japanese teahouses I’d seen in National Geographic. This was the secure, well-stocked, and shipshape nest of a survivalist whose bona fides were apparent in his mats, baskets, canned-goods larder, how-to manuals, and ditty bags of sundries hung like pelts. It was easy to be impressed by my friend’s industriousness and preparatory efforts—he’d been making like a squirrel getting ready for winter—but I couldn’t help thinking, at the same time, that things would change when his food ran out.
I said, “So what happens when the cans are gone?”
“I’ll have more room.”
“You’ll walk out of here.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You’ll go up to Forks for bacon and eggs.”
“No.”
“You’ll start thinking about hamburgers and have to come out.”
“That’s you,” said John William. “You’re thinking of yourself. You’re a loyal citizen of hamburger world.”
I DID WHAT I had to do—which is to say, I visited my friend a lot, hauling offerings on my back—powdered milk, toothpaste, Fritos, shampoo—none of it, I stress, at his behest. At the same time, he didn’t reject these artifacts from the real world the way he’d once rejected Christmas presents, because in the end he couldn’t reject them and go on with his hermitry. Was that hypocrisy? I brought him gloves, socks, lantern mantles, and white gas. I brought him Playboy and Penthouse. I brought him chocolate malted-milk balls, weed, scissors, a deck of cards, and M&M’s. He knew, of course, what all this meant—that, like everyone else, he was dependent on hamburger world—but what could he do about the fact that he was human? Nothing except try to get supremely woods-wise, which is what he spent his time doing. My visits, though, were vacations from this regime: we played Blackjack with M&M’s in the pot, drank Jack Daniel’s, and turned the pages of Penthouse and Playboy. Occasionally, John William would blurt something like “Miss June’s most recently read book is All Things Wise and Wonderful,” or “Miss July likes to listen to KC and the Sunshine Band while washing her Corvette.” If I laughed, he’d say, “She also likes to listen to the love theme from A Star Is Born while pleasuring her dog,” or “In her
spare time, she repairs sluggish vibrators.” In other words, he could be as puerile as any twenty-one-year-old boy in the exercising of his wit. And so could I.
So—I stress this—we had fun up there. Yes, it was perplexing to see my friend this way—as a lonely woods-dweller, as a filthy forest troll—but we still liked to smoke dope, play cards, and, in short, treat the whole matter as a Huck Finn–like vacation. For a while, we indulged in heavy gambling and passed long nights with a deck of cards and straight faces. John William was a credible and practiced bluffer who could relax through a ruse and not betray himself. I found this to be true in our Blackjack tournaments, epic bouts in the dirt by the fire, or on cedar mats, by candlelight, in his cave. He played as if he was ahead and betting my M&M’s even when he wasn’t, and this gave him an ease I didn’t feel. He had gambler’s cool, and his confidence was natural. At first I thought I knew what was up—for example, if his eyes went to his chips on the flop, it meant he had a winning hand—but I was wrong. Fortunately, most of the time we were just playing for candy, although on one trip, determined to defeat him, I suggested we play for more meaningful stakes. We took a hundred toffee-covered peanuts each and, after settling on an ante of five, agreed that he whose stock was first depleted would suffer thusly: if I lost, I would have to dig enough cedar roots out of the ground with a yew stick to fill one of his baskets; if he lost, he would have until my next visit, two weeks hence, to memorize The Waste Land and recite it flawlessly. The two tasks seemed about equally abhorrent. Naturally, I got in trouble right away by bluffing. The set of my chin and the aggressive way I dropped a lot of toffee-covered peanuts into an already scary pile was about as subtle as showing him my down card. I got my expression under better control but couldn’t help shifting around a lot when investing in a paltry hand, and again John William lit me up for more peanuts. Down to nearly nothing, I started talking off the cuff, thinking this might make him waver, but instead it made things worse, because my silences now meant something. In short, John William knew what I was holding more than 50 percent of the time, and it didn’t take any more than that to clean me out. As it unfolded, digging cedar roots with a yew stick was arduous. My back couldn’t take all the stabbing at rocky soil. The roots snaked around stones, and since our deal was for straight roots—because those were the ones good for baskets—I pulled a lot of roots I couldn’t deliver. To keep my word within a reasonable duration, I had to work by the river, where the digging was easier and the roots were straighter, and so the cruel reality of my defeat was that I not only dug roots, I carried them uphill.
During three days in August, we played a lot of chess, and this tournament was notable for the gravitas that flavored it when it became apparent to John William that I’d been practicing. I beat him in our first game by making sacrifices aimed at penetrating his castled position, and then, after a loss and a draw, I beat him again by sacrificing in the early going so as to get a rook file open. We sat on cedar mats, fending off gnats, drinking cherry Kool-Aid, and, at first, deriding each other’s gambits, but by game five we’d fallen silent and were both eyeing the board as if the stakes were mortal. I won that one, too, again via sacrifice, and then we settled on twenty-one matches as appropriate to our circumstances. In this marathoner’s mood, we played a trio of draws. John William twisted his hair while he brooded. Neither of us would capitulate during lengthy endgames. The next day, I blew the morning’s first match by attacking eagerly and, as it turned out, transparently, but came back by employing my signature—sacrifice—in this case a rook for two pawns. It worked, and for the rest of that day I hit him with variations on my theme, gulling or beguiling him with irresistible giveaways. John William could be duped, I found, if I let myself look stupid—but not if I let myself look too stupid.
Day three of Barry versus Countryman. We both knew that he was the more sophisticated player but that an upset was potentially in the making. After lunch, I dared an end-game exchange sacrifice, a rook for a knight, and thereby, and roundaboutly, promoted a pawn, which I parlayed to a go-ahead victory. That closed it out, because all the remaining matches were attritional bouts, which took patience on my part, since John William knew what was happening and did everything in his power to obstruct my conservatism and force the board—but still I got the draws I desired.
When the last match was done, John William shook my hand and said, “You’ve got it dialed in, Neil.”
“What’s that?”
“Sacrifice.”
BEFORE HIS FIRST WINTER, I tried coaxing John William out of cave dwelling. I went to see him on the day after Thanksgiving, bringing with me leftovers packed by my aunts—including two slices each from four different pies, and a Tupperware container of mashed potatoes—plus twenty packets of dried leek soup and a hundred bouillon cubes. There was snow on the ground, but not a lot, and almost none right under the trees. The needles on the spruces looked waxen and brittle, and the canteens, when shaken, sounded sandy. In the cave, steam billowed from our mouths, and I, for one, wore a hat and kept my hands in my pockets. While John William bolted sliced turkey from a plastic bag, I emphasized that when the road got snowed in I wouldn’t be able to bring supplies. He shrugged off this news. He licked his fingers and started on the pie. I counted his remaining cans and reported the result—seventy-seven—but this made no difference to him. Nothing made a difference. All talk of winter and its meaning was useless. I decided to leave him my sleeping bag, gaiters, gloves, stove, and parka in lieu of pleading.
When fall quarter ended, three weeks later, I drove out in the stakebed with the heater on high, a pack full of food, and tire chains and a shovel, but there was no getting up the Owl Creek Road when it began to climb Huelsdonk Ridge. I tried walking it on snowshoes but gave up after four miles, in the main because I’d warned John William about this and felt that let me off the hook. It didn’t. That night, in the Forks Motel, I drank a lot of bourbon, then fell asleep with my clothes on and the thermostat at seventy-five. There were steelhead fishermen in an adjacent room, and I heard them get up at four-fifteen and drive off, snow crunching under their tires.
All morning the snow fell. I didn’t feel like moving and read Chekhov stories in bed. Finally, there was nothing for it but to face hamburger world. I walked down the street in someone else’s tracks and, at the café, ate pancakes and patty sausage while reading the morning paper. I did the crossword puzzle, too, and then I just sat. The thermometer outside the window read twenty-three. I walked back with the wind and snow coming toward me, and a state truck, dropping sand, went past with a muffled rumble and tire chains rattling. It was bitter getting my own chains on, but when I was done I turned the key to my room and ran hot water over my fingers.
When I got home, Jamie said, “At least you tried.” She had a head cold and was wearing the striped pajamas she’d given me for Christmas the year before, and she had her arm across the couch back behind me, a book in her lap, and a box of graham crackers on the side table. The cemetery full of Woodsmen looked Irish in the night glow, and on 55th, a car, sideways in the steep street, rested against another car while teen-agers rode inner tubes past it. I said, “I give up. I’m calling his old man.”
“Okay,” said Jamie, “but give it twenty-four hours.”
The next afternoon, we went Christmas shopping at Northgate. I got my dad a coffee-table book on the castles of Ireland, and Carol a sheepskin car-seat cover. We went to The Last Wave—Richard Chamberlain as an Australian lawyer going mad. Afterward, we got a table at India House, and while we were sitting there sipping mango lassis, Jamie looked at her watch and said, “Twenty-four hours.”
“Yep.”
“Are you ratting him out?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“He’d never speak to me again if the Park Service came for him.”
“He’ll also never speak to you dead,” said Jamie.
We ordered three curries, knowing we’d end up taking some of each b
ack to our apartment. “He isn’t going to die,” I said. “He’s got food, two sleeping bags, water, and a hot tub.”
“When did you decide all of this?”
“During the movie. I used the whole twenty-four, Jamie.”
She said, “I always try to use the whole twenty-four, especially when the question’s a big one.”
“All right,” I said. “Will you marry me?”
“Give me forty-eight,” Jamie answered.
BEFORE JOHN WILLIAM gained fame as a hermit, there was a Bulgarian near Darrington who made the news in modest fashion because he lived in the woods for seven years. According to reports, the Bulgarian inhabited a hole in the ground covered with brush and sod spread on a tarp. He also built a shelter near a creek in fishing season, and no doubt he ate berries, but his primary survival technique was serial burglary. Whenever his situation became dire, the Bulgarian would walk out of the woods and break into a cabin. He often left mud behind, on the floor and on beds. He was legendary, like Bigfoot, as far as Darrington was concerned; there were people who left canned food for him on their porches, alongside supportive notes. A tracker finally pinpointed this invisible local hero, who, it turned out, looked like Cro-Magnon man and was still fierce at sixty-eight. He was arrested after a prolonged wrestling match with two law-enforcement officers and an attack dog. Later, his hovel was located on a hillside. There was a seep nearby, and some Mason jars filled with water. He had binoculars, rope, string, bits and pieces of flashlights, several rifle barrels, a slide mechanism from a shotgun, a burned rifle forearm, a .22 Hornet, a foreign-made automatic pistol and a hundred rounds for it, a box of twelve-gauge shells, and a coffee can full of transistor-radio parts. He had three fishing spears and a lot of pencil nubs, but no paper to write on, and no books. After his arrest, he was diagnosed as paranoid. He ended up in jail.