God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  It's no coincidence that hunts begin in the hour of the wolf. In the taint— taint night, taint day, taint neither one, so it's just taint. Town left behind, hunters shamble along in semilight, semidark, grumpy, surly, not speaking if grunt or gesture will do. Play at being animals. Beg for the animal's complicity. Hope the animals love them as much as they love the animals. Hunters wish they lived in the mountains. Wish they could devour human trespassers. Beasts and men. Hunters and hunted. As if they have a choice. As if they can remain both. As if it's not death but miraculous exchange waiting in the mountains. As if, like kids playing war, they can squeeze the trigger, then holler and crumple in slow motion, have fun groaning and twisting on the ground after their bullets strike.

  Of course it doesn't work that way. We're always the hunted. At the moment of truth, when the coincidence of hunter and hunted occurs, we don't possess the writer's prerogative to sort out who's who and decide where the story's going.

  In a small, isolated town like Laramie—maybe anywhere you reside long enough to establish the routine of your habits—you become unbearably transparent. People look through you. Your presence confirms the town's presence, the town's bottomless capacity to level and consume. A town's gaze—its curiosity about my color, my pretensions to write a novel, for instance—never innocent. It's sizing up the lump it intends to swallow. Hey, how you doing and go away, leave me alone. Love and hate in one quick, hungry, breakaway glance.

  You can go a little insane trying to find something new about yourself. Try on a different life to convince yourself one might exist just beyond the horizon of familiar routines. You take up a hobby, steal a chocolate bar from Albertson's, screw your best buddy's wife, or you drive up into the Snowies, lock yourself into your pickup, and blow out your brains with a shotgun, or run away and fatten up in another Wyoming feedlot town, snuff out your life one day like Molly snuffed hers I can't even say how.

  But you can't inch closer to what's unreachable. The unknown remains precisely that—unknown. All those tabloid descriptions of near-death experiences bullshit because no pilgrim has returned and reported how it feels to die. You can't grasp the unknown even when it's pissing in your face. That's the dirty joke hunters go to the mountains to laugh at. Werewolf with other werewolves, furry clothes, furry faces, stomachs bloated with jelly doughnuts and beer.

  Though certain scenes are attached indelibly to one group or another—high-butt Chris's long-legged country-boy strides in no hurry as they tirelessly consume miles of rugged terrain, Harry's head bobbing and weaving, his ghetto shoulder swagger efficiently stylized so he keeps pace side by side with Chris in open country or pushes out when his turn to cut trail through deep snow, Sarah shivering, a blue Michelin lady, the chubby arms of her parka hugging the jacket's roly-poly bulk, her eyes pleading, demanding an answer, and when I have none she stares at Alex, silhouetted on the next ridge, his fine brain at half mast since the day it bounced helmetless along a dirt road for twenty yards beyond his overturned Suzuki, blue-eyed Alex emptying his rifle, pow-pow-pow-pow, slowly, methodically, into a pocket meadow where a dozen or so pronghorns had been browsing, spooked and long gone before he got off his first shot—these scenes, distinct as the crack of a Coors opened at dawn in the mountains, also blend into one seamless hunt, a work-in-progress, everybody out there still wandering the Snowies, me bowing my head as near as I can get to the roots of a solitary clump of dwarf pines, last trees before we climb too high for trees, kneeling so I can hear what sounds like a fast river a mile underground or the fierce, baffled moaning and whistling of a windstorm miniaturized within tangles of brush and skinny tree trunks the way the sea echoes in a shell clamped to your ear, kneeling, listening, amazed by the black roots' howl but I can't say who told me to kneel, can't say why I feel ambushed by coincidence.

  Imagine seeing a familiar face forming in a bank of clouds or an incredible mix of color, light, and motion blazing on the horizon. Imagine needing someone who will recognize the face or amen the sunset, but you're sure that if you turn away to find someone, when you turn back, with or without your witness, the sky will have changed.

  Last week a flock of honking Canada geese suddenly passed over my head, so low I felt their wind, the chill of their fluttering shadow spreading over me, a net that just might snatch me wherever they were flying, remembering only after the geese had disappeared that I'd heard them startled up by I don't know what from a pond near the road I was jogging on, the clatter, splash, and panicked cries of their lifting, their wake strong enough to whiplash the pond, decapitate me if I didn't duck fast.

  One day I see Roger in the department office, next day Molly's voice over the phone. A day or so after, on my next commute to UMass, I overhear a blond woman on the train yammering excitedly to her cell phone about foxes in the woods behind her house, red foxes—one standing guard, the other, one cub at a time in her mouth, moving to a new den. No idea foxes back there, she exclaims, and then one, two, a whole cute little fox family ... and I see Molly's orphaned baby fox, crazier each day she tries to keep it for a pet, dart red under her mom's new sofa, nip blood from Molly's finger with its tiny needle teeth when she tries to scoop it out.

  I don't believe past explains present, nor present explains past, and certainly coincidence doesn't explain anything, but peculiar, disruptive spaces I'm calling coincidences, for want of a better word, open almost daily. Past and present chat, maybe, or maybe refuse to speak to each other, who knows, but their convergence seems to uncover crucial information just beyond my grasp. At these moments my life feels crowded and empty. I'm stalled at a crossroads with lots of traffic in many directions whirring around me and I can't regain my bearings, don't know how to step back into the flow.

  Molly Ritello, who's never called in the ten years we've been colleagues at UMass, phoned me at home. John ... hello, John. It's me, Molly ... the voice not belonging here, an unmistakable sore-throat huskiness, a nasal twang at the ends of words and phrases, singsong almost, the pixels of it visibly wobbly, as if forming words a precarious business, not to be taken for granted, a girl's voice trying on adult sound effects, pumping itself up with grown-up bluster, sentences chipping away at the edges of what she's meaning to articulate, just give her a little time and patience, the young-forever voice of Molly, my first Molly high up in a tree I'm standing at the foot of while she climbs, agile as a monkey, me the adult on duty in the back yard to watch her, to caution and slow her, catch her if need be, sent to do the job by her anxious mom, martini in hand at the kitchen's French doors, Christina in a goofy tuxedo apron watching me watch her Molly climb, my eyes with no choice except to fix themselves on Molly's round little bottom, the white cotton drawers, twist of glen-plaid skirt, her bare legs as they scissor and stretch up the gnarled tree's rungs to a shelf near the top she and Sarah call the Fairy Queen throne, Molly's tight, neat buns years later when I get up to pee at 3:00 A.M. and catch her walking naked back down the hallway connecting bathroom to guest room to her and Sarah's room and she doesn't miss a step, proud I'm sure of her taut athlete's body, unselfconscious about my eyes as she'd been at ten scampering up a tree, and though neither of us utters a word, she knows I'm behind her, probably guesses I'm hung over from all the margaritas and wine knocked back with her mom and John and I guess she might be half asleep, probably still half stoned because it's a weekend and she'd split the grownup slooshing early for her own partying, she knows I'm there in the hall and knows her young woman's body glows in the darkness, knows I can't help seeing, appraising, admiring her and it's okay, fine, she likes the accident, the coincidence, understands how it might please me she says in the look she flashes over a bare shoulder, isn't that what she's telling me with her slow strides, the casual slap, slap of naked feet on the tile, saying, Yes, I'm a woman now, I've caught up with your being a man, and it's kinda nice, huh, hello, goodbye, let's get some sleep, Molly gone before I'm positive whom I've seen, gone though her pale shape hovers after her door clicks shut, Molly
gone but not before I understand, stopped there in the darkness, that the moment stirred me and shouldn't have, and why does that moment come back, Molly's young, naked body like Roger's pained face returning here, now, as if nothing else about either of them mattered, my failures, guilt, my dead greeting me, testing me, reminding me there won't be another time, not with Molly, not with Roger, no second chance to do better, to do more than watch, never more than one time, one chance, and maybe once way more than enough, wouldn't I choose every time to be whoever I thought I wanted to be instead of friend or guardian, an unforgiving once, as if a father borrowed once and only once for three seconds the eyes of his daughter's brand-new groom beholding the perfect naked female creature the father had loved into the world, Hi, John, Molly here ... speaking from the grave and I didn't dare answer. It's me, Molly, she says again and I'm on the other end of the line listening, unable to speak, green socks all I can think of, green socks and wanting to ask Molly what she'd done with them, green socks to match green blazer and green glen-plaid skirt, knee socks rolled down to her ankles when she climbed the tree or did you race off the school minivan directly into the room you shared with Sarah, chuck the monogrammed blazer across your bed, snatch the green tie from around your neck, plop down and whip off socks and shoes, or were you wearing shoes, am I making up curly white monkey toes gripping rough bark like fingers, Sure, I'll phone Jim—soon as we hang up—Thursday at 10:00, right, in your office—Thanks for setting everything up, and thanks for calling—See you Thursday. I don't remember how the conversation with Molly Ritello ended, what I've written above close enough, but I do remember saying to dead Molly's mother, Done deal. You keep an eye out for mine, I'll keep an eye out for yours, meaning whichever one survived the other would be an unofficial guardian of the dead friend's kids. I'd said those exact words, Done deal, and have wondered about them since. Christina's girls around nine and eleven, my boys four and six when we exchanged our little vow. A lighthearted, hugging, feel-good reassurance at the time, the kids young and we felt young too, maybe younger with the pledge between us that seemed to guarantee a certain immortality as much as it acknowledged the possibility of fatal accidents, because Christina and I, as well as the partners we spoke for, expected lots more life ahead, natural and full life, more or less owed to us, and now even in the unlikely event one of us might be struck down, the others would be left standing, a permanent safety net for the worst circumstances.

  When we promised to be kind, responsible uncle or aunt to the other's children, was there an unspoken statute of limitations. Weren't we released or at least absolved from our obligations once the others' kids were grownups, out in the world on their own. By the point Molly's life began to fall apart, both couples had split and Molly more parent than child, orchestrating an intervention and commitment to rescue her mom from drinking herself to death, then nursing Christina through the last terrible stages of cancer. A few letters, phone calls—Oh, I'm okay. Just a teensy bit nuts sometimes is all. You know. All the lies get to me and crazy is a better place to be. You know. Mom's lies, the God lies, my so-called friends lying, our so-called leaders lying and murdering people, and you know I'm kinda glad in a way I don't see you much anymore, man, cause I bet you'd lie too. Crazy's better. Till I get sick of me crazy and want the lies again.

  Except for a meeting when both of us happened to be in Boston, no contacts or news for years at a time—spared the awful metamorphosis, Christina shrinking down to nothing, Molly ballooning. The distance so huge I could only nod my head and ask myself how the fuck did it happen when John told me on the phone he'd heard Molly weighed over two hundred pounds.

  Why do we let each other go, why do we watch, take what we can get as long as we can get it, till it's gone or can't be taken any longer, watching all this happening, then let go and try to forgive ourselves or at least comfort ourselves with the thought that most people are not much better at this than we are, they watch, take, let go, and in time it will be our turn to be let go, the others watching, forgetting, regretting. What's done is done, how could it have been any other way, we say. Then some unforgiving moment, some coincidence with no mercy sneaks up and announces the different way things could be. And it's as if two threads of time are trying to squeeze through the same needle's eye at once, but it's not separate threads, is it, always the same thread that only seems to divide into past and present, then and now because we need to believe we didn't take, didn't watch, didn't let go, need to believe what's done is done, no matter how true our witness of exactly the opposite.

  A night ago a train erupted just inches from the one I was riding from Massachusetts to New York City and the train hurtling past in the opposite direction licked away the glowing earful of passengers I'd been studying in the darkness outside my train's window, all those faces, including my own, smashed and speeding away in the bright cage of the other train.

  Will I glance up one day and see the huge Wyoming sky, find myself surrounded by the raw gorgeousness of daunting moonscape desolation, not for one forgivable instant, no déjà vu or daydream or miscalculation, but find myself there again, not a ghost like the ghosts of Wyoming sometimes haunting me here but there in Wyoming, stuck again as I'm stuck here, shopping for groceries at Albertson's, walking Harney or Grand, beer, bluegrass, and pool with John and Roger in the Cowboy Bar and Roger blows his quarter, scratching on an easy eight ball in the side pocket and that familiar wince of incredible disappointment pinches his features and I want to tell him it's okay, you're a good man, Roger, a very smart, very talented person I respect, everybody respects, though you'd be the last to hear it from them, don't always be so goddamned disappointed with the world, man, disappointed with yourself for failing to change it, my friend, or at least try being less visibly disappointed and maybe people won't assume you're blaming them for a world so evilly out of control, but I say instead what everybody around him says, Nice shot.

  I anticipate a horrible stench. Steel myself not to gag, not to give the others an excuse to laugh in my face, snicker behind my back. The others my companions for a hunting party, John, Roger, Max, Herb, Walt, all of us up before dawn, rendezvousing outside the Alibi, dark empty roads like tunnels, then trudging miles through fresh snow they happily agree makes tracking easier and the going tougher, my companions who know I'm over thirty and have never stalked, shot, or gutted game, and they can't wait for me, the tag-along city kid, to lose my cool, fuck up, the black boy from Pittsburgh and Philly and New York where snow falls as white as Wyoming snow but does not stay white long, cities with gray skies from which these others, once upon a time, had tumbled, boys like me except they fled West to stay white as snow, all of them armed with a thirty-aught-six high-powered rifle, a handgun, a large knife, a Swiss Army pocket wad of blades for every purpose. Two guys smoking cigarettes, one chewing tobacco, one sipping a Coors from an endless six-pack cached in the bulk of his camouflage hunting vest. Roger steps away to pee. Smoke unwinds over his shoulder. Still zipping, he cuts a loud belch as he turns.

  Forget it, Roger. No matter how crudely you act or talk up here, no matter how many notches on your gun or spots on your slovenly khakis or how much grime under your fingernails, you'll never fit in—too much Eastern prep school, too much Eng. Lit. professor whose existence insults the others even as you dispense a desired patina of knowledge and culture, red-pencil their B/B- essays, too much stern, thin-lipped, narrow-hipped spinster, New England rectitude and ruling class and old money, money proved by your poor church-mouse lifestyle, your disdain for stuff other folks work their tails off to own. Then I show up in Laramie—a suspicion, a gut feeling in the others that somehow you're responsible—a brown professor in Bartlett Hall who reminds them of their crimes, flight, waywardness, failure to measure up.

  They say animals trapped with you in your truck. Smell sucked them in—they couldn't get out. Looked like the goddamn OK Corral in there.

  What's so bad about poaching, Wilson. You ought to run for sheriff, my man.<
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  You know goddamned well sheriff's not elected.

  Right. But Wilson ought to run anyway. If he's the only candidate, might just win.

  Hell, yeah. You got all the Alibi votes. Herb here would sponsor you, wouldn't you, Herb. Good for business. Move the sheriff's office to the Alibi.

  Where you going, dear. Oh, I'd love to sit home and watch soaps with you, honey, but I got pressing business over at the sheriff's office.

  Shouldn't be a hunting season. Should run it like we do at the county hospital now. Morphine hooked up to an IV so patients can medicate themselves. As needed. Makes more sense in every way to me. Hunting as needed. Problem's not poaching, anyway. Folks round here don't kill for killing's sake. For some of these hods, a big buck in August the difference between meat and no meat on the table come fall.

  Bet Mr. Tenderfoot here agrees with old Tenderfoot Wilson, don't you. Save the animals. Shit's sake, no shortage of animals. Would have seen for yourself, my man, if you'd been around the year of the big blizzard. Snow piled up thirty foot deep in the mountains. Game couldn't forage so they started sneaking into town. Shock at first. A wild critter where you don't expect to see one. Then before you know it, a goddamned invasion. Antelope deer elk moose jackalope. Like some damned Noah's ark. Like goddamn welfare. Bunches of 'em trooping down from the mountains around dusk looking for a handout. Hung round the golf course at first, then started parading in the streets like they owned them. Breaking and entering people's barns. Stealing what folks had stored up for livestock. Turning over garbage cans, drinking out the town fountain. Shit's sake. Clomp right in your front door if it wasn't locked. Plague of cussed animals. Turned the dogs on 'em. Dogs got fat and lazy feeding on the carcasses. Didn't slow the critters up one bit. Had to see it to believe it. Critters and carcasses everywhere. Blizzard wiped out half the herd, still plenty left to do mischief. Hell, had to elbow your way through critters to get up to the bar.