Because I wasn’t. Fifteen or so football fields up the trail I understood I wasn’t feeling. Not just drug-numb to moods or heartaches, I mean heat, cold. Tasting. That deadness of tongue and skin and eyes that doesn’t technically blind you, but you’re not seeing. Like the man said, the day I ran out of the pharmacy with my first ticket to oxy-nowhere: Blind blind blind. It grows on you till you’re darked out and don’t care. Something in me was wanting to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in here.
Eyes on the trail, deer tracks, moss, nothing. I chewed on my age-old grudges. The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment. That parch like a bandanna pulled tight around your throat. It got so bad that the sight of water, a little creek, made me get down on my belly and drink like a dog. The water had taste, sweet. A little piney. People say you’ll get a dread disease from doing that, due to all the animals that have pissed in it. I wondered: Do I give a fuck here about dread diseases? I polled the mostly dead players—skin, tongue, eyes—on the subject of checking out on all future days: What if anything would you miss? Came to no real conclusion.
I sat there on the fence about it. On a rock actually. One of those buzzy tiny hummer birds bombed in close. Not to be ignored, this guy. The air from his wings blew the weeds all around under him, like the choppers in the war movies, tiny version. He didn’t land, just dipped around sticking his pointy nose into the flowers. The ones he liked were orange and dangly like ornaments, but shaped like little vaginas, lips and all. Go, tiny guy, I said. Eat your fill.
Touch-me-nots. That name popped into my head from another age. They grew all over the banks where we used to go fishing. Mr. Peg showed us how to touch the green pods and make them explode, throwing tiny shrapnel. Damn. Mr. Peg was there, sitting up the bank and a little behind me, out of my line of sight. Sorry for everything, I told him. And he said, Is that so hard to do? His voice, his words. My ears. I’m not suggesting any of this makes sense.
I got up and moved on. Yes sir, it is. Hard to live, and hard to watch the opposite coming down the road at you. I left out the f-bombs, not being sure if he was still with me or not. I looked at the trail and the dirt and the moss. The woods were their own show, with mushrooms for jokes. Mushrooms like orange ears that looked like they’d glow in the dark. I was delirious, given the no fuel in my tank, other than painkillers. But I felt some things. The deer family that left their tracks in the muddy trail. As much venison as I’d eaten in my life, I felt I was some percentage of deer. I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been. This is the fucking wonderful world of color.
After another hour I sat on a big old mossy log to catch my breath, and remembered the joint in my pocket, a going-away present from Maggot. I hadn’t smoked much weed since Dori died, just not feeling it. Hard to explain the various levels of doping hell, but there’s a dark territory past the pleasures that weed is made for. I fished it out and admired it before lighting it up. Maggot’s perfectly rolled white twig, pointed as a pencil on both ends. I actually had a hankering to draw its portrait. Another itch I hadn’t felt in an age.
I set no land speed records. The sun got low, running me up against the wire on to-be-decided. I wasn’t getting to the top of the cliffs. Not this day. That original asshole, the body, took over then, harping on getting me through a night. Not even asking, did I want to do that. Just the gripes, no water or food or roof over my head. In dire need of a piss. The last was easily taken care of. The rest was yet to kill me. I’d known sketchy shelter, and had logged enough hours hungry to be licensed as a professional. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I thought, trudging up an ass-kick of switchbacks that knocked the wind out of me. The trail wound above the trees to a gravel slope, and then the Sand Cave. Dark and cool under a wide arch, seriously big. You could set a single-wide in there. Evidence of previous escapades here and yonder littered the sandy floor.
If I were a Boy Scout, I’d have known how to make a campfire. I’d have thought to bring a can of beans for dinner. And a can opener. Water. Being an ignorant juvenile delinquent with little or no will to live, I had none of the above. The person I felt watching me now was Angus. Not like Mr. Peg, earlier, I knew she wasn’t really there. But I told her to shut up, and she laughed some more. That was it, the one place I’d like to be: talking to Angus. Dopey, tougher than hide, generally if not always one to improve a situation. Always saying I had to start trusting the ride at some point, because life was not a total and complete dumpster fire, which she was wrong about. She said my messed-up childhood made me a better person, also wrong. She’d believed I would go far, regardless my drawbacks galore and unsavory habits.
I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the moun-tainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.
I shifted and felt the lighter in my hip pocket, and laughed at myself for forgetting it. Stand back Boy Scouts, I told Angus. Oh my Lord. I’d have paid money for a little bump of her. Angus that was solid while all the shiny objects I craved came and went. She was going away at the end of summer, to real college. She’d gotten an offer she couldn’t refuse. I was pissed as hornets. Vander-something the hell, Nashville T-N. Who knew they could make country hits and brainiacs in the one convenient location.
Okay, my friend. I rifled around the mess inside me and found what I needed to wish her happiness. Fly away and don’t fall back into the slime I’m trying to crawl out of here, and also drinking on the sly, calling it my life’s blood. Too scared to leave the last place where people looked at me and saw their son or blood brother or their shot at a winning season. I knew what she’d say about that. Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.
I spent the night curled up on the sandy floor with my back pressed against cold rock, thirsty and hungry and in the end not sufficiently doped. Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was a bear. If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.
61
A year was not a long enough time to stay away. Even three years might not be, I would find out. One of the many things June got right.
Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?