by Daniel Kraus
For several seasons, I adopted the nomadic ways of wildlife, trading territories with moose and mule deer, bobcat and badger, pronghorn and pika, emulating the way each kept an ear perked for danger. There was none, not for me. For the first time in my death, not to mention life, I was neither predator nor prey. Though loneliness clung to me like dried mud, I attempted a philosopher’s ethos and searched for meaning in the dendrochronology of tree rings, the fractal spirals of raindrops in spiderwebs, the constellations of wildflowers efflorescing from a previous season’s decay. Life beget death beget life beget death—only I, as always, resisted natural cycles.
I believe it was the spring of 1950 when my cliffside contemplation of a herd of buffalo was interrupted by an unexpected guest in the valley below. It moved too casually for a wolf; the buffalo, when they saw it, did not flee. It was, realized I, a human being who passed between the eight-foot, one-ton mammoths as easily as a jay. Though I’d seen, and even heard, evidence of hikers on occasion, I hadn’t laid eyes on a biped in three years. Disused parts of my brain, and heart, twitched.
Days I spent girdling the valley, but it was weeks before I spotted him again, this time at a closer perspective. He was lean and wore a cowboy hat, tinted snow goggles, a brown coat insulated with animal fur, and a cowhide rucksack, upon which was strapped an ice ax. I found him watching two grizzlies from an unsafe distance, though the bears did not appear to mind. He stood there for hours; even I, who’d mastered the art of inaction, grew impatient.
When he at last walked, he did so on boots affixed with metal cleats.
I should have let him be. But I was not full beast, not quite.
He slept in a canvas tent, and after a week he hiked for thirty-six hours to a log cabin. Nothing like the extravagant Swiss chalets I’d seen on the subalpine piedmont, this was a one-room, chimneyed affair that smelled of good, clean blood. The fellow was intimidatingly capable. He emerged periodically to parcel game and clean trout. The resultant bag of offal, he dangled from a tree out of the reach of bears until he had time to burn or bury it.
Over the full year I spent stalking the man, not once did he break from the mountain, welcome a visitor, or evidence any particular scheme against land or animal. His exile, like mine, seemed self-inflicted. Still, it came as a shock that clear, blue day he called out to me, for I’d grown certain that I’d become as faint as the Millennialist.
“You, boy.” He sat upon a stump chair that, months earlier, he’d fashioned by reducing its tree to firewood. “Closer.”
My instinct was to caper off like a white-tailed deer. But a mammal’s eyes are what imparts its malice, and this man had hidden his by looking lapward, where he quartered an apple. The Excelsior in my breast pocket thump-thumped as I advanced with a lynx’s caution. The man spat a bad hunk and gestured me in with the knife. I exited the forest canopy, felt exposed in the grass.
“These apples fixing to rot,” said he. “Might as well share.”
At close range he looked rather like an apple himself, one left in the sun to wrinkle and brown. Two watery eyes strained past wads of sunburnt wrinkle and through the shadow cast by his hat brim. He was at least sixty, but retained a square-jawed cattle-wrangler essence. He cut another slice, thumbed it between strong white teeth.
“Been watching you a spell. Wasn’t sure you knew words.”
Zebulon Finch, the boy once ashamed of his fussy diction, presumed to be a feral mute? There was a dark justice to the presumption. I cleared my throat, and to my horror it sounded clotted with years of soil, leaves, and rock, and I worried that my long-neglected voice might indeed be a savage, unmodulated thing. Echoes of old language lessons crashed about my skull (indefatigable!) but I was afraid to attempt them. Silence had, after all, served me well as talisman against the pain of companionship.
He scooped an apple from the pile at his feet and lobbed it. I caught it against my chest.
“You want more?” asked he.
I regarded the apple’s wine gleam and shook my head.
“You cold? I got a blanket. Half burnt, but half not.”
The kindness weakened me, but again I shook my head.
He pointed his knife at my feet.
“Soles worn through. I got a bad old pair of boots.”
He raised his billowy white eyebrows. I looked down, wiggled my toes through the holes in the leather. He chewed, apple juice dribbling down his whiskery chin, until I nodded so delicately that I was uncertain that I’d done it.
He woodchucked his apple to the core before lumbering into the cabin. My brain, long divorced from domestication, shouted at me to run, but I reminded myself that I was no hare. I was a human being—wasn’t I? Before I could be sure, the man returned, tossed through the air a pair of boots, and reclaimed his stump. The boots landed at my feet. The shafts were mangled, but they would be a great improvement over civilian wear. I picked them up.
“Need anything else?” asked he.
Did I? It had been so long since I’d been asked.
He shrugged.
“All right. Get on, then.”
I did what he said, the animal part of me relieved to scamper, but I did not stray far. The boot heels lifted me two inches that might as well have been two miles. I felt tall, vertical, humanlike. After a week, I laxed my lurking so that the man would spot me again. He had a deer strung up by its hindquarters and was skinning it. He was busy, but favored me with a nod, and before I left, tossed me an old coat that had been slashed by horn and thistle. I transferred my Excelsior, envelopes of government cash, and other valuables into the new coat and put it on. It set squarely upon my shoulders and brought to mind forgotten things: drinks, parlors, civilized discourse.
My dead body ached.
It did not escape my notice over the eighteen months of our odd acquaintance that my role was that of stray dog, his of scrap-offering master. By then I knew a mutt’s mind. There was nothing wrong with accepting charity if it meant propagation in a harsh world. Gradually we came to spend a portion of every day together, with me, by custom, staying silent; and him, by character, speaking only when he had something to say—roughly two or three times per week.
His name? It never came up.
We were, learned I, deep inside Glacier National Park. Yes, Reader, in my race to reach untrammeled worlds, I’d stumbled into a property that President Taft had institutionalized forty years before. The man in the cowboy hat shared my disappointment. The land, growled he, belonged to the Blackfoot nation, who’d given this continental divide the more satisfying moniker of “the Backbone of the World.” Despite feuds lasting well into the 1890s (during which time I’d been knocking heads in Chicago), the Great Northern Railway had effectively ended Blackfoot dominance.
Musing was all I had left to do, so I mused upon the generations of vision quests taken by Blackfoot adolescents. I liked to think, naïve though it was, that these spiritual journeys had influenced my own wanderings, and that I, like them, had drawn from solitude insight into how fragile, temporal bodies could find infinity within nature’s renewals. By becoming less than human—by becoming animal—might one indeed become more than human?
After all, the man in the cowboy hat’s objective, if not obsession, was to walk among animals without trace of fear, to feel the moist heat of buffalo exhalations, to smell the private stinks of mountain goat fur, to hear the indulgent clucks of a black bear as it watched its cubs nuzzle his legs.
Under his quiet tutelage, I too did these impossible things. The feats frightened me at first, the flickering eyes of beasts, the yellow teeth, the flexing claws. What pushed to the forefront of my mind was a battle charge near Champagne, France, where my beloved Seventh Marine Regiment gyrenes had wrestled the Blanc Mont Ridge from the Germans. Both armies had leveled armaments for close combat, when a deer, still spotted with fawnhood, bolted between the forces. The soldiers, Yank and Hun alike, pulled up weapons so that this creature of grace could live without a taste of our fabled
“humanity.”
Glacier became the attic study where my hatted tutor drilled this lesson: animal violence bore no resemblance to that of humans. A weasel pounced upon a snake, only to become prey to a diving hawk. Animals protected their flesh and blood, not the constructs of ideology. Thirteen years after reading Bridey’s unproduced opus, that filmic fable called In Our Image, I understood this to be its central theme.
Humans had been wretched to me; in turn, I’d been wretched to humans. Yet from my first days in the Pageant of Health, who alone had offered me respect? Insects, Dearest Reader. Vermin, Dearest Reader. Every animal, Dearest Reader, aside from the Barker’s wicked Silly Sally. Rather than gobble at my corpse, as critters were born to do, they’d recognized my inhumanity and offered me the Animalia accord.
I admired the Blackfoot people, but cursed them.
You knew about all this, thought I, and kept it secret.
I expect that you crave anecdotes elucidating the crusty good nature of the man in the cowboy hat, our shared moments of collegiality, the reciprocating tenderness underlying our masculine exchanges. You are, I am afraid, out of luck. It took until the first thaw of our second year together before I even learned why he was in Glacier. He’d been a successful land developer, receiver of certificate and plaque for his knack for predicting new areas of growth. Years back he’d told employers that he was headed to Montana to reconnoiter for mountainside lodges, when in truth he’d grown sick about his role in the rape of land.
Therefore it smelled fishy when he began making jaunts to nearby ranger stations, returning with bags of victuals, with which I had no quibble, and bound blocks of newspaper, from which I recoiled. He began using his graveled voice regularly to recount the major world events I had missed.
It was feculent news, all of it. In 1949, despite the paired apocalypses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets had made a show of testing their own A-bomb. As if engaged in a hand of cribbage, the U.S. took its turn, hatching a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb thousands of times worse. The USSR answered, of course, with their own H-bomb. Pegs were breaking off in the cribbage board, making it impossible for anyone to win.
Hear that hissing across leaves?
The prankster Millennialist resurfaces.
As an animal, I could but sit there and take the updates like kicks. In 1950, America had joined a conflict in a place called Korea, where warring factions acted as proxies for big brothers America and Russia. (The Millennialist thumped his fingerless palms against the cabin walls.) The Korean War came to armistice in 1953, but on the homefront a senator named McCarthy revived Detective Roseborough’s Red Scare and began witch-hunting purported Commies from every arena of life. (The Millennialist, made of ash, began to seep through gaps in the cabin walls.) In 1954, racial segregation began its path toward illegality, to raucous uproar, a mere three decades too late to save John Quincy’s brood. (The Millennialist spread through the cabin air; upon him all of America would choke.)
“Stop,” said I. “Stop. Stop.”
They were the first and last words the man in the cowboy hat needed to hear from me. I cared about these human problems, after all this time I still goddamn cared, and it was impossible for me to hide it. He folded the most current newspaper, threw it into the fire, and squatted to jab it to brighter life.
“This here’s a place for wild things,” said he. “Even I’ll go home one day.”
I pressed a cold face into colder hands. For months he’d been acclimating me to lower altitudes, yet it was hard to envision how I would survive without him, all the way back down on Earth. He’d saved me from a desolation as broad and long as the Rockies.
“Sorry, son. But you got to go back. If we wait much longer, I won’t be able to help you like I’m able to help you now. They won’t remember me forever.”
My shoulders shuddered with dry sobs.
That night he produced correspondence he’d been trading, via ranger stations, with colleagues in residential development. There was a brand-new kind of neighborhood, he told me, that aimed to combine the best of rural life with the best of urban—ideal, or so promised his real-estate associates, for easing a recluse back into society. They called these places “the suburbs,” and to encourage growth, the Veterans Administration, under the GI Bill, was offering initiatives and incentives.
Should I want a home, the VA would find me one.
The man in the cowboy hat shrugged. He didn’t know shit about the suburbs, but he’d gone against his own ecological principles to ensure I could try them for myself.
“There’s two kinds of courage,” said he. “Shoot, out here you’ve seen plenty of both. There’s the courage to die. And there’s the courage to live.”
I thought of the hawk eating the weasel eating the snake, and wondered which segment of the chain was the hardest to bear.
My trip down the slushy springtime mountain was a bright, frightening one. I had taken the man’s old boots and coat, but it was his cowboy hat I wanted, to shield myself from the unnatural brilliance of tin roofs and stop signs. Everything was arranged and waiting for me, including a rented car—a 1945 Pontiac Streamliner gnawed away by road salt and trembling with age—several road maps, and the name and address of a man in a faraway town who would help get me settled. The man in the cowboy hat’s good-bye was as offhand as his hello: a nod, a spit, and then a turn on his heel before heading up, up, up.
I did not watch him go. I got into the Streamliner and busied myself with a dashboard full of strange buttons and levers. My prized Tin Lizzie had taught me the basics, however, and I’d spent many an hour watching Kuppisch operate a Mercedes. I got the engine running and hit a country road, which soon melted into a paved thoroughfare. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and its 41,000 miles of new roadways was two years off, but groundwork was being laid. Cars zoomed by at impossible speeds, and gray-pink roadkill blemished the pavement—my friends the animals, having been swatted by a Gød unhappy about my earthward return.
Giant billboards, meanwhile, began to shout. The first one I saw featured a rough-hewn wrangler in a kerchief and cowboy hat, squinting past a halo of flavorful tobacco smoke. He was “the Marlboro Man,” and it comforted me to see him each time he appeared along my southward journey. At last I had a name for the bronzed, grizzled angel who’d escorted me back up the Road to Heaven.
II.
HILLSBOROUGH ESTATES, HILL PARK, PARK Hills, Park Village, Village Garden, Garden Greens, Green Forests, Forest Lake, Lakewood Homes, Homes at Fairview, Fairwood Ranchos, Ranch at Elmwood, Dutch Elm Valley, Sunrise Valley, Sunset Hills. Coming Soon! Buy Today! Turn Left Here! Exit Right Now!
Suburbs sucked like ticks to the belly of every city, off the nearest highway and tucked just out of view, though I could hear their screams of tranquility and feel their beating fists of welcome. My rental car returned, I was in the back of a taxi, which tootled along at a speed so slow, it would incite riots in New York City. We were, of course, a long way from that city, in Wichita, Kansas. Well, outside of Wichita, the whole point of the suburbs, after all, being the distance between.
The Marlboro Man in Glacier hadn’t been blind; he’d known my hitchhiking days were behind me. I’d had fifteen-hundred miles and the first reflective surface I’d seen in years—the rearview mirror—to reach the same conclusion. The arctic clime of the Rockies had, at least, preserved me somewhat. My skin was light brown, not florid purple, and instead of molting in sheets it had a claylike consistency—if you poked it, it held the impress. Luckiest of all, the cold had stunted what should have been a rancid stench; instead of stinking like a pile of carrion, I smelled as if a small splotch of it was pasted to the bottom of my boot.
So I was prepared for the wince of the Marlboro Man’s contact, an ex-Army lieutenant in the municipal housing department who sent me packing to Heavenly Hills, Wichita’s largest suburban development. After the toothed crags of Glacier, the wending drive through the suburb was a funhouse ride of jarring ge
ometrics: mown yards, stone-shingled sidewalks, cropped hedgerows.
Like flowers from soil popped rows of prefabricated clapboard houses, each snapped together in budget forgeries of Colonial styles. Each abode came standard with a sentinel mailbox, hugging shrubbery, detached garage, pitched roof, and picture window, through which were glimpsed scenes of such domiciliary bliss that the dormant criminal in me ticked with an urge to smash. It was only each house’s bright enamel finish that suggested individuality—sandstone orange, sage green, turquoise blue, lemon yellow.
The taxi crested the gentlest rise, and I saw, beyond uncountable mazy cul-de-sacs, a cavalry of construction vehicles mauling farmland to prepare for future development waves. The American family had become the crop, and the black blood and iron ash of Hiroshima served as fertilizer. But no matter! The cloudless April day squashed all shadow. I felt a pinch in my cheeks. Was it a smile? Indeed, indeed! And I knew whence it came, for in this sun-drenched land of wobbling lawn sprinklers, each one painting a rainbow across pollen-speckled air, there was nowhere at all for the Millennialist to skulk.
The sprinklers, I am obligated to mention, hissed like snakes.
On Mulberry Terrace, we stopped before a rectilinear domicile like any other, except painted a sinister cherry pink. I clung to the seat. Was any color more threatening? After a solid minute of paralysis the driver cleared his throat, and I handed over the cash. He was careful not to touch my hand when he took it.
He drove away, going twice as fast now, stranding me on the curb. In his wake, birds chirped. Radio soap operas blabbered. Somewhere, a baby laughed. This neighborhood was no Nazi Germany, but I felt almost as lost inside it. I steeled myself, gripped my bulky suitcase (a prop, containing almost nothing), and headed up the driveway, sidewalk, and front steps. The pinkness disoriented me, but there was a railing to grip. I prepared my knuckles for knocking, before spying beside the door a big silver button. It looked as if it ought to be pushed, so I, never one to resist temptation, pushed it, half expecting a retaliatory spray of pink paint. Instead, four chimes rang inside the house—the Westminster Quarters, familiar from my youthful churchgoings. Hold on—were the suburbs theistic enclaves? I took a step back, scanned for the taxi, and considered running.
