American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  The owner may be happy to get some cash, if it’s coming, but he’s currently just staring from the porch at the wrappers and torn pages of glossy porn shifting a bit in the breeze like leaves; at the dead cigarette packages—it’s like a hurricane picked up a hard-luck convenience store and slammed it down right here in his driveway. Matthew is grunting and yanking and finally: The roll of cash comes free—just a little more than he needs to pay for a two-night stay in a two-story cabin here in the beautiful Catskill Mountains of New York. Call it rehearsal for travel—Big Indian, New York, is a far cry from Italy and taking lovers for spiritually fit boning like that woman in the book did, but it’s good practice. One can’t just go from one’s car and out into the world so large without a dry run or two. Better to be working out bugs like all this shit jamming the cash flow here than in the parking lot of LaGuardia or JFK. A half-spent prescription bottle of Vicodin hits the gravel and Matthew immediately reaches back and down without looking and snatches it right back up with urgency. Yes, cabin owner, this is your distinguished guest, the man on his knees under the American flag waving over your American white-gravel driveway, surrounded by the filthy litter of broken-down days; the one you’re about to let pace and weep and masturbate all over the beautiful cabin where your beautiful American family spent its summers and holidays.

  Inside, the place is amazing, a time capsule, stained pine plaques with pictures of Indian chiefs varnished onto them and prayers to the great spirit wood-burned into them, a big fat radio on the desk—from an age when radios had FM, AM, and weather-frequency bands; a thick, silver telescoping antenna stretching to the corner up by the window, stretching and aching for a signal. There’s a shotgun in a rack on the wall, the heads of deer who haven’t had to worry about life’s undignified folly for maybe forty or fifty years. There’s a huge fireplace, big, split tree trunks and logs making a staircase up to bedrooms, there are bear pot holders, bear kitchen towels. On shelves, there are small framed snapshots of bears being cute and almost human—standing on hindquarters to outfox the lid on a garbage can, probably only after figuring there was no chance of snatching a kid or an elder from the porch and dragging them to the tree line to crack a rib cage open for the sweet marrow.

  Cash is handed over, agreements are signed and initialed—something about not smoking, something about trash and bears—and at last the owner departs and Matthew is free to feel that the heart is almost instantly heavy here. Where is Tatiana? How can one go about missing so deeply someone they don’t even know, really? To that point, who is Tatiana? What year was it that we became a nation of lonely people able to do such intimate and gorgeous and obscene things and then disappear completely? Never mind, out to the BMW, the Bavarian Moan Wagon, get the groceries in, because in a couple of hours the sun will be down and it will be time to sneak up on the barbecue when it isn’t looking and figure out how to light the Goddamn thing.

  A steak is cut from its shrink-wrapped Styrofoam grave, and rushed out onto the grill, with the urgency of a waffle house slammed and trying to get out of the weeds. That is the mountain feeling summed up, really; hurrying among a quiet hush that feels like death, and the knowledge that things both big and small can kill you here; gigantic teeth and claws; little fangs and hemotoxins; tiny stings you didn’t know you were allergic to. A place where one always wonders a bit: lying down to sleep? Or simply waiting to be quietly dispatched by the black widow or brown recluse? After cooking fast under the primal urge of not wanting to share a kill, one eats like a convict, standing in front of a fireplace with no fire in it, and that’s when the paranoia kicks in.

  What exactly can bears do? Can bears shoulder open a door and pluck Matthew from the cabin to make ground chuck of him? Or do they sit out there on the mountain silent until they decide they’d like to come in and have a nice tall meal? Do they sit in the dark, in pairs maybe, just out of reach of the porch light, waiting for Matthew to step out for a smoke so they can then advance, ready to violently mount and mate him up against a damp, rotted stump full of slugs and grubs? There are the rumors of bears smelling women who are menstruating; blood! In the urine! Remember? From this kidney stone tearing its way around up there! Matthew puts his plate down, walks very quickly and efficiently to the desk with the radio on it, starts rifling through the binder of guest resources next to it, tearing through it fast, right past brochures of thin-soup tourist attractions and historical pamphlets, right past the menus of restaurants in the town thirty minutes from here, a fast, desperate leafing, slapping, pawing, until the big drawing of a black bear stares him down on top of an informational card from the State Department of Fish and Game called “You Should Know About Black Bears.” And the head thinks this: Fuck yes, I should know, thank you very much!

  There’s not a lot of good news in the pamphlet, that’s the first thing one takes note of. They can outfox mechanisms and get into things, it turns out, but the snapshot on the bookshelf already proved that. They’re smart, it says, but apparently not smart enough to know they shouldn’t rip a human being from ass to eyes then open him up and scoop out the warm tripe in dumb, bloody frolic. But there is even worse news about them: They can smell like a motherfucker. Admittedly, not exactly the way the brochure words it, but the bear’s reliance on olfactory glands is supposed to be amazing, paramount in their foraging. There are tips, how to play dead and let the virile beasts toss you about like a rag doll in a filthy orgy of appetite and good old-fashioned curiosity; very specific procedures for how to throw away and secure your trash properly. Matthew bolts over to what is left of his steak, tears a few last panicked bites of it, then wraps what’s left in plastic wrap, in foil, in a paper bag, then a plastic bag, and into the freezer it goes. Utensils cleaned with dish soap, grill burned clean and wiped down, the wrapper from the steak—this bloody plastic cling, it has to get sealed and wrapped and frozen, too.

  Matthew rushes to finish this kitchen trash, rushes to brush his teeth, because they can smell meat on your breath! So one might step outside exhaling a warm waft of bloody mouth and one of these bears could decide it’s a little bent out of shape that you ate and he didn’t; could reach inside your face to grab the smell, tear your identity off like it was zippered on to your skull, one must suppose! The mouth and breath situation are all locked down, everything’s brush, rinse, spit, brush, rinse, spit again, spit until Tatiana’s voice is in the head, on a loop, a whisper with a lilt; the one phrase burnished on the brain from that chance smashing into each other; maybe the most exciting thing a woman has ever said to Matthew in bed in his earthly years so far spent: “Spit.” The thought of it in his head a thousand times, the idea of it blooms and dies and does it over again, but backward from death to bloom, the brain’s perverse and innocent little stop-motion animation called longing.

  So now what? Now go into the living room and relax under huge, pitched log ceilings and paintings of Indian chiefs, have some sort of epiphany, which is evidently why the mountains exist. A twenty-minute, absolutely epiphany-free pause spent staring at a fireplace made of stones, wondering exactly when and how death by bears would come, is interrupted by a sudden little beep and chime of confirmation that there is suddenly cell phone service where there was none earlier. Maybe the night skies do something to usher in waves or bars or signals to anyone out here and hopeless. Maybe it was always nighttime when the family that owns this place gathered in here and stretched that radio’s antenna heavenward into the corner, reaching out to grab stations that would fade by sunrise. The phone rings—Tim. Mobile—and the ring of it makes Matthew jump up into some kind of half-assed fighting position. He answers on the first ring, as the desperate often will. “Hello.”

  “Reporting in, Chief.”

  “Tell me how you handle bears.”

  “I had one around the rig last week. I handled it. I did what you’re supposed to do, I think.”

  “The play-dead thing?”

  “Fuck that. I played dead for three months and when I go
t up my head was shaved, I was bankrupt, evicted, and the SEC was witch-hunting me; not a huge fan of playing dead, Chief.”

  “What did you do, then?”

  “It was one of the last times I had to use the drugs. It was a life-and-death situation as far as I could tell, so I don’t need a high-road speech on using the drugs for a minute again.”

  “Just tell me. I could be in a situation with them at any moment. I’ve rented out a cabin. I’m alone up here.”

  “It’s not like that, they aren’t looking to get you like everyone thinks.”

  “Well, one came looking for you apparently. What happened?”

  “Fucking weekender in a little Four Winds Majestic had the space next to me and started cooking up bacon on a grill welded to the bumper of the thing, then he poured the grease on the ground, and later that night, I was sitting in here and, sure enough, a bear came around. So I had to slam up a couple of lines of that shit, the stuff she left me hooked with, you know… just waited for it to hit, and when the big rush came, I grew a pair, unclamped the tabletop here, and flew out the door screaming and swinging it around.”

  “The tabletop comes off?”

  “Yeah, it can slide down to become a bed. But you can take it off though, if you need, like, legroom in the lounge area. For watching movies or whatever. This thing’s nice, it’s a good setup, and it has a little area for…”

  “I thought you were out of drugs, or done with drugs; all of that talk about reporting in with someone, staying off everything, sobriety in God’s country and all that.”

  “Well, I saved a little, obviously. Just basically in case something like this happened.”

  “Did the table thing work on it?”

  “Fuck yes, it worked; he didn’t want any of what I was selling, trust me. Prison rules, Chief—you have to come at them unhinged, and when they see you’re fucking crazier than they are, they walk away. Back into the woods. They’re like: ‘I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with that creature, but I want nothing to do with it.’”

  “You got really lucky, Tim. You did all the wrong things,” Matthew says, while retracing the What to Do If… bullet points of the brochure from the binder.

  “Well, it wasn’t all good. There was some bad luck, too. The guy from the space next to me comes out of his rig when he hears me on the warpath; comes running up behind me and I spin around, real basic primal instinct, and fucking clock him with my dinner table, basically. Just, THWACK—four-foot slab of pine and Formica to the back of his head, courtesy of yours truly in space two-twenty-seven.”

  “What’s with this word rig? Everything’s a rig now?”

  “Not everything, just the RV, that’s what we call them in the campgrounds. But I can’t stay in most of the campgrounds now in Yellowstone, that’s what I’m saying. I’m banned from Canyon Falls, obviously, where it happened. I’m banned from a bunch of them. Well, I’m banned from all of them, technically, but I know a few that are too big for them to ever notice me in if I just stay a couple days and move.”

  “You’re banned because of hitting that guy, or, you know, your… other stuff?”

  “Fuck you, other stuff. Dude: I am down on the ground, in case you haven’t noticed. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m up against the ropes, you know? Have a little decency.”

  “No, I didn’t mean other things, like drug things… I literally, just, I don’t know; I thought, like, maybe they ask people to take a break from the campgrounds if they had a close call with a bear or something. Like maybe the bear recognizes the truck or the scent or something.”

  “Yes, banned because of hitting the guy. Which only happened because he literally fucking came up on my blind spot when I was already in a defensive state with large game, Matthew; with fucking wildlife that would have me if I didn’t come out swinging something.”

  “Well, in a state from fighting off big game, and also from really clean cocaine, though.”

  “Okay, here comes the high-road scared-straight shit. Go ahead and judge me, and keep pushing me away when I’m trying to help you. And when you get eaten like wet trash, I’ll explain that I tried my best to teach you how to live around wildlife and be safe, but you pushed me away with judgmental bullshit.”

  “Tim, I’m just trying to do whatever it is you want me to do. You said you needed someone to check in with, and be accountable to while you’re trying to get shit straight; your words.”

  “Fair enough, fine, okay, well I’ve checked in with you, and I thank you for that.” A huff and a dead connection.

  Sleep, which comes first by lying on top of a bed built for a boy, the bed upstairs, because bears can’t climb stairs, is hard-won but amniotic in its calm. The boy-sized bed means Matthew’s arms and legs and head hang over, but wadded up in a prenatal curled hunch and policed by gravity, a man will fit on here. And the first half hour or so it’s just about lying there and wondering what you heard. Everything out there sounds like a bear or coyote tearing someone limbless and being super quiet about it, but is probably just gentle breezes ruffling leaves, which is something one is supposed to be enjoying and cooing over. And what of the tiny things waiting to descend on you from the corners and gutters and screens? Or the reptiles delighted to flick tongues at new, warm blood in prostrate repose, delighted to be able to warm and regulate their own blood then find purchase on a vein so that their warm carbon-based boarder can be converted into a meal? After the paranoia passes, sleep comes like something that should require a prescription; there is something about the air or the stars or the body being convinced it will be devoured or poisoned while prone, something about it brings a sleep like honeyed Novocain.

  Morning is black coffee and trying to remember why someone comes to the mountains. There is a less-honorable reason than convenience for coming here instead of going and praying in Italy like the woman in the book did. Everybody at New Time Media used to talk about how David Bowie had a place somewhere up here. And you get to thinking that all it takes is a drive up the highway a couple of hours, and that there must be such limited mountainous terrain in New York that any vacation rental here would mean being neighbors with David Bowie for the week. So when one is a little confused about how to be modern in areas of the heart, when one finds themselves untethered and floating away from the mother ship of functional marriage and employment, maybe one gravitates to the only place they’ve heard David Bowie might live for months at a time. Sitting here now, drinking black coffee from a cruel electric stove and metal pan defiled by the parade of a thousand summers’ strangers, it’s easy for one to feel a little foolish.

  One afternoon while pacing in front of the Indian prayer plaque, trying to ignore a neighbor whining a small engine at peak, Matthew whispers to himself: “Christ. Bowie and that fucking leaf blower he got for his birthday…”

  One morning when Matthew tries once again to meditate in front of a fireplace that has still not seen a fire by his hand, a gasoline rev down the road gets: “Bowie and his Goddamned log splitter blaring away out there again…”

  And then on another aimless afternoon, while Matthew was busy giving up on spirituality and spirit in favor of trying to read a copy of the airport novelette another vacationer had left, a motorcycle tearing its way up the small trail to the other cabins gets an offhanded: “Fucking Bowie. Treating this place like a motocross track with that Goddamn dirt bike of his.”

  But the motorcycle turns a hard right, comes right up the secondary trail and into Matthew’s white-gravel drive. And the head has caught on to the game, silently issuing a stern Jesus, Bowie. Call first.

  Heading off a knock at the door, Matthew walks out onto the small concrete porch from where he was once the one being watched and judged, and stands there sizing up the man taking off a helmet. The man who spills over the medium-sized motorcycle’s seat and frame is far from Bowie. North of fifty certainly, but a hard north, a tough piece of road to get there. A body fueled by nachos, by Fridays, by reduced-calorie beer
consumed in such volume as to render the calorie reduction moot. A crew cut, they love these, men of a certain blocky frame and fashion and head. A sweatshirt and shorts, both making certain you understand that Steve attended a prestigious-for-the-left-coast university. The font that boasted this choice he made to continue his education thirty-plus years ago is just as blocky and stout and collegiate. It’s a font that’s supposed to bring to mind hallowed corridors of passionate endeavoring in the name of culture and knowledge; a font meant to call to mind Ivy League schools on the eastern seaboard. In fairness, it’s a font that demands a little respect when it’s spelling out the name of a university, but the baggy and prefaded indigo-colored XL sweatshirt undermines this solicitation of respect. And whatever respect the shirt has managed to hang on to has been thrown under the bus by the shorts also pasted with the name of the learning institution.

  But you never know. Some of the smartest people decided not to drop out; not as rare as you think, the schooled winding up interesting raconteurs of life’s rich pageant; this college stuff works on some. So, let Steve open his mouth, open your mind a little, be open to meeting new people, that’s the sporting attitude required of even temporary neighbors. This is the moment; Matthew knows it, this is the moment when he learns just how wrong he was in his shallow and base assumptions that reek of class insecurity. This is the moment, Matthew is certain now, where this dirt bike interloper in lazy logo-covered clothing soars into the conversation, elevates small talk with ease and admirable aplomb!

  “Holy shit, this thing’s fast! Did you see me out there, haulin’ ass up that trail?”

  After the opening salvo, the man walks right up across the porch. And Matthew thinks about how Buddha said: A man walks across the room and he comes back different. The still-unnamed neighbor advances, meaty hand outstretched and claiming the name Steve, as if it were up for grabs just seconds before that. Matthew grabs the hand in reach and says hello, forgetting to say his own name, probably forgetting his own name altogether in the haze of disappointment.