by David Bergen
She didn’t, I said.
She wouldn’t. She’s not a show-off.
I know that.
I hear you believe in God.
I do.
All them gods, he said.
He spoke quietly and with little inflection. He seemed to be talking to himself. I felt small and helpless.
We slept beneath a scraggly jack pine, on the soft bed of dry brown needles. We had no blankets. The mosquitoes were the worst at dusk. Frank built a smudge using the fire we had made earlier to roast the rabbit he had shot. I was hungry and ate the meager meat and then sucked the bones dry. Best meal I ever had. As we ate Frank talked. He said that when he was young, ’bout fourteen, he went to school in Alberta. Near Brooks. The kids didn’t like me for some reason, he said. Beat me up every day. And so it was my stepfather who one day packed my satchel full of rocks and sent me off. This time when Roger Steingaart pulled my ears, I swung my satchel and spun and caught him across the temple. Knocked him out. That was that. No more beatings.
He stopped talking.
Did you get in trouble? I asked.
He chuckled. Funny, he said. That became my name. Trouble. Here comes Trouble. Look out for Trouble. But as you know, no one wants to tangle with Trouble.
That night, I tried to stay awake, believing that Frank would kill me in my sleep. Or that he would leave me to die in the bush. He’d seen me playing with my compass earlier. He asked to see it and then slipped it into his own pocket. Shit, he said, follow the moss on the trees. It always grows on the north side. I slept finally and woke at one point and he was still sitting by the fire smoking. I watched him for a long time and then I fell asleep again.
In the morning, he was gone.
3.
I married my girlfriend, the one that went to Udine, a year after she returned from Europe. We are still together and she continues to read early drafts of my stories, offering advice, confirming at some point that I have moved beyond sentimentality into clarity. The first time I told her about April and Frank she said that the story was twisted, all upside down, and that’s why she liked Frank. She said that the climax of the story was when I woke up and found myself alone in the bush. Right there, she said, that’s a good moment.
I could have died out there, I said.
Not at all, she said. Frank knew what he was doing.
When I first realized that Frank was missing, I imagined he had gone into the bush to pee, or that he was out hunting and would return with a small animal slung over his shoulder. I sat by the dead fire for a time. Then I stood and walked out into the bush and called out Frank’s name. My voice got lost in the trees and the land and branches and scrubby bushes. Not even an echo. Two hours later I realized that I was alone. I had a vague sense of the direction we had gone the day before, northeast, and so I began to walk so that the sun, when it appeared through the clouds, was hitting the left side of my face. For the first while I was dogged and focused and I kept track of the sun and, as Frank suggested, I kept checking the moss on the trees. And then, about noon, it began to rain and the sun disappeared completely and the trees all bled together and the rocks looked the same. And I ran. For a long time I crashed through the trees and the bushes, scraping my face and arms, falling and picking myself up, charging onward, until I fell. I stayed where I fell and I wept into the ground.
Eventually the rain stopped and the sun came out. Water dripped from the leaves and the branches of the trees. It was a calming sound. I stood and began to walk once more. I slept that night on a high rock beneath a small conifer. I pulled loose branches over my torso and legs and pulled my shirt over my head to ward off the mosquitoes. I was hungry. I was wet. I was cold. I had no way to make a fire. And so I prayed. I asked God to save me, to help me find my way out. I told Him that if He would do so I would serve Him the rest of my life. I fell into a busy sleep only to wake and imagine wild animals hunting me down. I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest and fell asleep in that manner. At dawn, when the shadows were dissipating, I resumed walking. At midday I came upon the waterfall where, two days earlier, I had washed my arms and dunked my head. I dropped to my knees and drank from the stream, raising my head finally to survey my surroundings, aware that I might find my way home. According to my calculations, this stream was three hours from the road.
Six hours later, exhausted and prepared to lie down and accept my fate, I came upon a logging road that eventually led to the highway where a man in a mining truck picked me up. He rolled down the passenger window and waved me over. He looked at me and said, God look at you.
I saw April one more time. I had to face her and I had to face Frank, and so I knocked on the door one evening and Frank answered. He didn’t seem at all surprised. He said, Whoaa, where’s the eagle? Or have you come for this? And he grabbed his crotch. Then he laughed his big laugh and slapped me on the shoulder and he held my chin with a rough hand and he went, Ahhh.
He went back inside and I could see April at the kitchen table, spreading peanut butter on a piece of white bread.
She looked up and grinned. I didn’t know if she was smiling at her uncle’s tasteless joke, or happy to see me. I couldn’t tell. I never could tell with her.
Did you know he was going to leave me out there? I asked. I was still standing in the doorway.
She shrugged.
You could have warned me.
You wouldn’t have listened, she said. She turned back to her sandwich.
The thing is, I could have gone in and she would have been fine with that. But she seemed to be fine with me not joining her as well. At that time in my life, at that moment, I could make no sense of how to choose. And so I stepped away from the door and I walked back to my motel room. Two weeks later I left Snow Lake.
During my second night in the bush—when I was still unsure if I would survive, when the mosquitoes attacked with ferocity and then just as quickly went away, when the noises of the forest fell down around me—I had a vision. I was a small animal. A vole or a chipmunk or some such little beast. I was alone. I was being hunted. I was running through the underbrush, zigzagging here and there when I came to a hole into which I tumbled. Inside the hole was a vast open space, and against the walls of this space, on chairs, sat a group of animals—beaver, muskrat, fox, bear, deer. They were drinking tea. It reminded me of prayer meetings I had attended as a young boy. Except here, no one spoke. I took a chair. The silence was disconcerting.
Where am I? I asked.
Silence.
Can you help me? I said.
What’s the problem? the bear said.
I’m lost, I said.
Good to know, said the bear.
How Can n Men Share a Bottle of Vodka?
When the question was pierced, then plucked from the dartboard and folded open and read, Maxine Duras, with her feverish eyes, rusty hair, small forehead and freckled arms, wanted to know why it was just men and didn’t women drink vodka as well? Her red hair moved up and down with her shoulders. Her boyfriend, Rodney Alder, who had thrown the dart to perforate that day’s question, was still standing. I asked him what he thought. He said it was a problem and he lifted his chin, offering his thin neck, a rope holding the globe of his head, and I imagined him in bed with Maxine, the sheer weightlessness of him above the substantial organized fury of Ms. Duras. Sometimes I was astounded and awed that these children were sexual beings. I could not imagine it: adolescents were too happy, too exquisite, to be fumbling around with something imperfect. I shook off the image and said, “Sit, sit, Rodney,” and so he sat, casting his eyes towards the freckled forehead of his lover, who loped her long hands through the air and, pre-empting Jimmy Skrivens, said that the question was more a matter of argument than any clever calculation and if n equalled twenty then there should also be twenty glasses and a fair pouring out of the vodka into those glasses until all the n were happy and could thro
w back the vodka. “Am I right?” she asked, and I had to admit that yes she was right, if ever there was a right because, don’t be fooled children, I said, the idea of right and wrong was dreamed up by moralists and witch hunters and prudes and tee-totallers.
I threw my arms in the air and said “Enough, enough,” and read off their assignment and left them stewing, the air suddenly solemn and filled with sharp little pencil scratches and the rub rub rub of erasers. I stepped across the hall to gaze through the tiny window at Jennifer Donne’s English class, all in a circle, Jennifer’s arms a thing of beauty, her head thrown back suddenly, wide mouth open in a roar of delight that came to me as from a silent movie, the door being closed. It was Jennifer who had suggested the dartboard with a series of problems pinned to it which was, she admitted, a bit of a trick, but then teaching was all smoke and mirrors, wasn’t it, she asked, and ducked her chin. We were eating lunch that day in her room where the window looked out onto the football field and the figures of the soccer team at practice appeared as if through the wrong end of a telescope. I was eating crackers and drinking vodka from my sleek-looking Thermos of shiny aluminum when I told her that my wife had left me six months earlier for a Korean man with a small dick and her response was not one of solace or pity but curiosity, for she asked, “How do you know his dick was small?” I replied that I could not verify this but the statement was based on stereotype and in my shame and anger I was willing to abuse this notion. Saying this I fell into a tale of recent history, remembering the day I returned home from work to find my father, who was a near-invalid and lived with my wife, daughter and myself, standing, bags packed by the doorway waiting for a taxi. Seeing me, he began to shout that some man was upstairs having his way with Holly, my wife, and this was something he would never have allowed, never, and as the spume fell from his mouth I guided him back to his bedroom where he went to sleep. I ascended finally to the top floor of our big brick house where I found Holly lounging, fully clothed, in one of the rooms facing the street, the light falling through the window. It was a grey spring light, almost gone. Holly was alone. She had just showered and her hair was wet, her feet bare and she wore jeans and a black sweater and was working at her left foot with a nail file. I loved her feet, the ridges and lines and tendons, the definition, the length of her toes, the curve of her arch when pressed within a high-heeled shoe. I could see the outline of her hamstring through her jeans and the sight of this, the frailty it evoked, the sudden knowledge that we are made of blood and shit and neurons and cells that lead, through chaos, to the wonder of her hamstring, almost made me weep with grief and joy. She looked at me and her mouth flickered and the dull light through the dirty window made her eyes darker though I could still see the truth there and I bowed my head like a repentant child and said that I was stupid. She said that I wanted to be stupid, this was not the first, and then she began to cry and then more tears arrived and she said, “See, see,” and I kneeled and held her till the light was sucked from the room.
Why I related this all to Jennifer Donne was not a surprise. I needed a gentle breast to fall upon and Jennifer was both gentle and ample, for she was a large woman, fat some might say, though I would not describe her so, perhaps because I found her attractive, and later, after we became lovers, I discovered that desire will always surprise us. That day, after my confession, Jennifer took my hand and she said my talents were prodigious, I had created a sense of place, had an eye for detail, and the telling of it was lyrical and poetic and she had, she said, fallen for the voice of the teller. I went home and told my daughter Natalie, who was thirteen at the time and had in recent months taken up witchcraft, that a colleague of mine had invited us for supper and she was divorced and had black frizzy hair and five children and there was something wild and woolly about her. Natalie said that five kids was scary and I didn’t want to be leaping into anything on the rebound and she wanted no part in a blended family, no thanks, and I better watch out that this woman didn’t style her way right into my bank account. She waved her hand at me through the haze of incense, dismissing me, so I went downstairs to find my father asleep and drooling in front of the TV. I woke him and walked him to the bathroom and pulled down his pants and he sat and looked at me and said he couldn’t poop. “You can poop in the morning,” I said, and I crouched beside his sour-smelling legs and raised his trousers. I took him to his bed where he put on his pajamas, sighed, and said that he should die already. “No, Dad, no,” I said, and I left his light on, the door open. Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a gin and tonic, a lime for pleasure, an ice cube, and I sat down in the darkening room and looked out at the street. A car passed, a boy on a bicycle, and I thought of Holly, my actor wife, and wondered where she was tonight. For several months now there had been no contact and Natalie was suffering that. I imagined a myriad of men lined up, wanting to share my wife: a breast, a leg, belly button, her heart-shaped ass, her mouth, her cunt, which I had loved to stroke, telling her she was beautiful, my shoulders pressed to her inner thighs, her insteps on my hips and her soft voice whimpering far above me. I still missed her, even though in the last year I knew I was sharing her, that I had become simply a number in a series repeating to infinity, a procession which included a blue-haired clown with large biceps; a Falstaff who had been flown over from England because no credible actor could be found locally; a bearded queen who was the son of a provincial politician and who acted fey parts and probably tried Holly’s beautiful heart shape, though she made no mention of it and certainly would have if she had liked it; and sundry others, jack rabbits all, having Holly beneath my roof; and then finally, the tiny dictator, who had her the same day I found her barefoot on the couch and ached for her but could only hold her as she wept and asked me to see.
The next day I put the following on the blackboard, (x + y)2 = x2 + 2xy + y2, and I said that Leonhard Euler once wrote this equation to prove the existence of God and that as a boy Bertrand Russell was forced to chant the square of a sum is equal to the sum of the squares increased by twice their product and though Mr. Russell did not know what this meant he feared the tutor would throw things if he got it wrong. Maxine Duras said she understood, hmm, hmm, and Rodney Alder said he liked the allusion to God but wondered how the formula proved anything. I admitted that I didn’t know, though I did know that once upon a time people believed in magic and then they believed in God and that today we believed in science and I was all for that because where would we be without science and logic and reason. I told Rodney Alder that because I was better at logic I could win any argument and I said, “Ask me a question, pose a problem. Anyone?” The class retreated, heads bowed, except for a few brave souls who smiled weakly. Then James Gerbrandt cleared his throat, lifted his sharp chin and asked, “How can n math teachers share a Thermos of vodka?” He looked around triumphantly, perhaps expecting a raucous backing. I hesitated and looked out across the empty air suspended above those thirty-one empty heads. A few titters rose and fell. I pondered my options and then I opened my Thermos, filled my coffee mug and said, “Water, with a hint of lime.” I took a sip and asked if Mr. Gerbrandt should choose a dart and the class, like a sleeping elephant, roused itself and trumpeted, “Dart, dart.” I waved my hand, brought forth silence, and said we would forgo the dart for a lecture. I said that the question was insolent, a betrayal of trust, and the point was that I had a personal life and was not a mere jack-in-the-box animated at 9 a.m. for their benefit and that yes children I did go home after school to a place where I ate, shat, wept and laughed and okay, I drank, but that wasn’t so bad was it, and who of their parents didn’t snooker a glass of something now and then and I said that the world was a cruel place and if there was anything at all to take the edge off the cruelty, find it and use it. The class was quiet and embarrassed and then Chrissy Tremblay raised her hand and said that I was not a bad person and that she liked me and that this was the best math class she’d ever taken. Other voices called out, “Hear, hear,”
and, “Me too,” and, “Hey,” and, “Yes.”
Still, I suspected that James Gerbrandt was on to something, simply because I had acquired a taste and with that taste came lethargy and cynicism. I had stopped taking attendance in my classes only to discover that the students still came. I halted all giving of tests and found that no one suffered and I, certainly, had less marking. I introduced the dartboard and more and more of our classes descended into discussions on argument, logic and philosophy. One day we debated the merits of hallucinogens and three-way sex, which related in some way, one could argue, to an isosceles triangle, two sides being equal. Another time Brook Rice, a shy, articulate girl, used Liebniz to explain why things are so and not otherwise. That same day Jimmy Skrivens approached me after class and wiggled his long fingers as he talked about a poem he was writing which was, Mr. B., he said, related to Pythagoras’s idea of number as the source of all things. I told him to read me the poem and he did. It was dream-like and made no sense to me and so I said, “Lovely words, lovely words.” I immediately regretted the comment and shooed the poor boy off with a pat on the back. I found that I was resorting to irony and sarcasm. Cynicism had descended: not for the students but for myself, for what I was doing. I could not find my way through and imagined everything as rotten and wrong and I began to see the children I taught as rats conditioned to respond to buzzers, inane lines in thick textbooks, stupid questions, lots of stupid questions. And so, one morning I intoned, “Why, why, why?” and of course Maxine raised her hand and asked, “Why?” I bellowed at all sixty-two ears that if they believed that x equalled seven or thirty-six or nineteen, then they were wrong because x was crap just as n was crap, that was all, and I had spent my life searching for n, imagine that, and now I was leaving it to them, and I walked out the door and took the end stairs to the staffroom where I sat and drank coffee laced with rum.
