“He’s a great kid.”
She shuddered and drew up in a series of short serious sobs. When that wave passed, I said, “What’s the matter?” We were both speaking quietly.
She shook her head again, this time as if shaking something off. She said, “You’re bright and young and you get married and you kind of always have money and then, bang-o, a thousand people later you’re sunburned and eating fish in the big woods with an old friend and only the smallest part of it seems like the center of your life anymore. What’s that about?”
I was beyond speaking now, lost in a widening orbit miles from our little fire. I knew she was going to go on. “There is a message, you know. From Lily. We saw her at the wedding.” It had taken her all day but she had finally said Lily’s name. “It’s terrible, of course. We were eating cake and she came over to our table and said to tell Jack hello. So, hello.”
Now I had to hold her. Someone offers you that kind of last hello and whether you’re camped by the river or not, you’ll probably hug her, feeling her pulsing sunburn, and sit there thinking it all over for a little while. I had forever turned some corner in my life this month (twenty-two days), but I hadn’t known it until Glenna said hello. Like it or not I was through being a boy.
So be it.
We sat there quietly and soon—over the steady low flash of the river—I could hear Toby, down in his tent, humming. It was something familiar, a sad ballad involving the devil’s cattle and a long ride.
OXYGEN
IN 1967, THE year before the year that finally cracked the twentieth century once and for all, I had as my summer job delivering medical oxygen in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a sophomore at the University of Montana in Missoula, but my parents lived in Phoenix, and my father, as a welding engineer, used his contacts to get me a job at Ayr Oxygen Company. I started there doing what I called dumbbell maintenance, the kind of make-work assigned to college kids. I cleared debris from the back lot, mainly crushed packing crates that had been discarded. That took a week, and on the last day, as I was raking, I put a nail through the bottom of my foot and had to go for a tetanus shot. Next, I whitewashed the front of the supply store and did such a good job that I began a month of painting my way around the ten-acre plant.
These were good days for me. I was nineteen years old and this was the hardest work I had ever done. The days were stunning, starting hot and growing insistently hotter. My first week two of the days had been 116. The heat was a pure physical thing, magnified by the steel and pavement of the plant, and in that first week, I learned what not to touch, where not to stand, and I found the powerhouse heat simply bracing. I lost some of the winter dormitory fat and could feel myself browning and getting into shape. It felt good to pull on my Levi’s and work-shoes every morning (I’d tossed my tennies after the nail incident), and not to have any papers due for any class.
Of course, during this time I was living at home, that is arriving home from work sometime after six and then leaving for work sometime before seven the next morning. My parents and I had little use for each other. They were in their mid-forties then, an age I’ve since found out that can be oddly taxing, and besides they were in the middle of a huge career decision which would make their fortune and allow them to live the way they live now. I was nineteen, as I said, which in this country is not a real age at all, and effectively disqualifies a person for one year from meaningful relationship with any other human being.
I was having a hard ride through the one relationship I had begun during the school year. Her name was Linda Enright, a classmate, and we had made the mistake of sleeping together that spring, just once, but it wrecked absolutely everything. We were dreamy beforehand, the kind of couple who walked real close, bumping foreheads. We read each other’s papers. I’m not making this up: we read poetry on the library lawn under a tree. I had met her in a huge section of Western Civilization taught by a young firebrand named Whisner, whose credo was “Western civilization is what you personally are doing.” He’d defined it that way the first day of class and some wit had called out, “Then Western Civ is watching television.” But Linda and I had taken it seriously, the way we took all things I guess, and we joined the Democratic Student Alliance and worked on a grape boycott, though it didn’t seem that there were that many grapes to begin with in Montana that chilly spring.
And then one night in her dorm room we went ahead with it, squirming out of our clothes on her hard bed, and we did something for about a minute that changed everything. After that we weren’t even the same people. She wasn’t she and I wasn’t I; we were two young citizens in the wrong country. I see now that a great deal of it was double-and triple-think, that is I thought she thought it was my fault and I thought that she might be right with that thought and I should be sorry and that I was sure she didn’t know how sorry I was already, regret like a big burning house on the hill of my conscience, or something like that, and besides all I could think through all my sorrow and compunction was that I wanted it to happen again, soon. It was confusing. All I could remember from the incident itself was Linda stopping once and undoing my belt and saying, “Here, I’ll get it.”