The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Virginia came up, smiling. “Ahh,” she said to Allison and me. “So you’ve met Hiram?” Her eyes darted between me and the stranger, as she set down another sundae.

  Hiram scooted up close to me. One of his eyes was all squinched up. His yawns smelled like liquor. He waited until I’d scooped deep into my sundae. Another spoonful of cold ice cream was starting to press against my tongue when Hiram gave me a jab on the shoulder and said, “The best way to eat a goat is when it’s right out of the womb. It melts right in your mouth. Best fuckin’ thing you ever tasted.”

  I just about spat out my sundae.

  Hiram cackled, slapped his knees, and fell all over the place. He kept getting up and sitting down again. He laughed some more and pointed at my shocked expression, as if gesturing to an imaginary crowd. He let out a long blast of language about everything and nothing. He did a twitchy sort of jig as he moved all about that porch, circling us, regaling us with stories and anecdotes that I could only half hear. He moved with a peculiar grace, holding his arms to the sky. If he were capable of quiet, Hiram would have made a fine mime. He told us that he was a retired beryllium miner. As a recovering high school nerd, I knew a bit about beryllium. Among other things, they use beryllium in guidance systems for weapons of mass destruction, which is odd, considering that Hiram had no guidance system to call his own. He caromed from place to place on that porch.

  “Want to know what really pisses me off?” he said. “On all the land around here, you can’t build new roads because it’s federal wilderness designation. They’re shutting down the jeep roads around here, and for what? The Sierra Club asks you, ‘Don’t you want to save the wilderness?’ What they don’t tell you is they’re closing it off from everybody, including you, too. What about the cripples who can’t go in with backpacks like you? What about everybody else?”

  “We’re just walking,” I said. “We don’t represent anything.”

  “You packing heat?” Hiram asked. “I tell you, there’s so much meat running around out there, you’re wasting your time with all that dehydrated shit. You wouldn’t believe all the animals. You could shoot your way across the trail. You know, speakin’ of animals, I was hanging out with a group of guys once, not far from here, and we ran over a bobcat—didn’t kill it, though, only stunned it—and what we did is we put it in a briefcase. We left it outside, on the side of the road, and what do you know, a Cadillac comes cruising down the road, and it’s full of niggers, you know, black people. So the Cadillac stops and pulls over, and of course they stole the briefcase—what else are they gonna do?—and opened it and drove away with it. They only made it a short while, and sure enough they slammed on the breaks and every single one of them ran off in a different direction.”

  Allison and I looked at each other, stunned. Hiram wheezed, and then he started in again. He asked us if we were carrying a rifle to help us get food on the trail. He asked us if we were even carrying a fishing rod. When we shook our heads both times, he laughed again. “Such a waste,” he said. “To be out here and not carry a fishing rod. You got some of the best fishing in the country right here!”

  Virginia cleared out the dishes and presented us with the bill. As she came around to take the water glasses, we asked her where we might find a bed. She pointed to a dirt road leading, across the rocks, to a hill, on which sat a gleaming aluminum trailer. The rent was thirty-five dollars a night, in advance. Allison and I paid in cash, and Virginia handed us the keys. We were just about to leave when we noticed the handyman chatting with Hiram, and looking at us with suspicion and amusement. Hiram explained to the portly fellow that we were out hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but we weren’t hunting or fishing because we were environmentalists. As he said this, he tilted his eyebrows in a dismissive way, and the handyman chortled.

  We hiked onto the pebbles, leaving Hiram and the handyman sitting there gesticulating to no one. Out on the rocks, we found our trailer. Before we went inside, I shot a picture of Allison, holding a jawbone she’d found. All the teeth were intact. “Maybe it’s a deer,” she said. “I can’t tell.” The bone was a stained crook, curved in the middle. I have the picture still. Allison looks weary but lovely, her blond hair flying everywhere. She’s flexing her right bicep, and in her left hand she’s carrying the bone, white from the sun. Allison appears to be flying, her arms in a cloud bank.

  The trailer was small and tight. Allison fell asleep on a simple bed in a dark room with wallpaper that looked like knotted wood, next to a tub with a hot-water faucet whose thin drool felt like a sacrament. The tub was narrow and short, and I had to contort myself, sticking my legs up, to fit, but I let the water coat me and watched the dirt rise along with the soap scum. It felt wonderful. The sun went down behind the mountains through the window. The trailer didn’t have a generator, so I leaned from the tub to light the lamp on the floor; it hissed and gave off a greasy smell that filled the room. Light from the lamp revealed a row of other lamps on the floor, each made of glass of a different color: yellow, orange, pink, and blue. I lit them all. Our strange room glowed. Allison slept while I looked in a mirror. The wind picked up and shook the walls while I studied my bristle beard. My hair has always been brown, and yet my beard was red. My face had narrowed. Circles had grown under my eyes. I kidded myself that I looked like van Gogh. In truth, I looked a lot more like the cavemen in a diorama I’d seen, long ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in the Hall of Evolution. I looked so hard in that trailer mirror, and at the man staring back, that it gave me vertigo; the more I stared, the more I saw someone with a dim glint in his eyes and a beetling brow. He looked so brave and mean and dumb, but mostly dumb. My mouth was closed, but the image in the mirror bared its teeth. I had to brace myself, my hands on the wall, and it felt like I was falling into the mirror.

  Next morning, I couldn’t get Hiram’s harangue out of my head. I felt he’d misjudged us. It irked me, to have come all this way and have people get the wrong idea about us. And it occurred to me that this experience might not necessarily fill other people with awe after all. I could no longer assume that walking the trail would change the way people regarded me or, if it did change the way they looked at me, that the change was necessarily a good thing. If this was so, it was silly to chalk this up as an achievement to inspire other people. Was that the point? As my dad liked to say, “This trail is yours alone, young Daniel. You can’t put it on your résumé.”

  If that was the case, we might as well enjoy it more, especially now that the desert was over and the mountains had begun. And so, when Allison expressed interest in buying a fishing rod, I backed her up enthusiastically. Hiram was right. Why rush this, and eat lousy food, for the sake of wowing everyone when they might not be wowed? Let’s take it easy and live off the land. Besides, we’d packed too many baggies of homemade granola. It was delicious straight out of the oven. Now, one month later, I dreaded the kitty-litter clumps of oats, the terse raisins, the bitter elbows of old cashews.

  And Allison loved fishing, though she barely knew how. She associated it, for some reason, with her father. They squabbled sometimes, but it was something they enjoyed doing together. She wanted him to teach her to whip her line in an S-curve over her head and make the fly alight on the lake like a real bug. We were going on about all this when Virginia overheard us. “I’m going down to Bakersfield today anyhow for supplies,” she said. “You want to come along? We’ll stop at this fishing place I know.”

  Allison looked like a child then. She smiled in a way that still fills me with an ache when I think about it. Before we knew it, we were bouncing along in Virginia’s sod-colored Blazer, down a road above a vast drop, no guardrail in sight, speeding down mountain roads above the copperhead curl of the Kern River. We stopped at the fishing place by the riverside. Allison searched the aisles. The owners indulged her, thinking she was Virginia’s daughter, and Virginia said nothing to correct this. Allison found a black shiny thing, four segments folding into themselves like an op
era spyglass, so compact you could barely tell it was a fishing rod. “Look at this,” she said to me, holding it close to my face. It was her first telescoping Shakespeare pole. After we drove back to camp, without another thought, I took the granola from our backpack and threw it straight into the nearest Dumpster. We wouldn’t need that crap anyhow.

  Everything was going to be slower, and Allison would catch fish every night. That is how it was going to be, I thought, as we lit out from Kennedy Meadows the next day, toward a snowbound horizon, passing fishermen up to their waists in the Kern River, then up into a scorched wood, a forest of poles and skeletons with no arms. So the handyman hadn’t been lying. The smell lingered in our nostrils. So one of our kind had done this to the forest? Allison and I vowed not to strew toilet paper all over the place, not to burn the woods down. We decided to be ambassadors for the PCT.

  Once we made our way out of the forest of ashes, the trail changed. In bare feet to spare our socks, we stepped through cold creeks and walked across meadows full of shooting stars and toad song. As a precaution we’d packed ice axes, two and a half feet of blue aluminum with metal claws. You can use the duckbill part of the handle to dig stairs in a snow wall. You use the sharp end to bite into the ice if your legs slip out from under you. The new gear and clothes made me feel like a beetle, wobbling on stumpy legs. Big Motherfucker sagged with the weight of himself. Swaying on his hinges, he groaned.

  But the land is beautiful enough to make you disregard gravity. One day out in the mountains, you are halfway across a meadow, and something comes creeping. You glance at the muscles in your lover’s right calf and notice, for the first time, the length of her sunburned neck and the way she lopes when she walks across a meadow, the way she presses her nose into every mountain aster and columbine. You pull her toward you. Before you know it, the two of you are falling, just off the trail near the edge of a forest. Dried sweat makes your clothes stiff; you take them off. Your feet are swollen from the elevation; it takes too long to remove your boots so you give up; you leave them on. Soon you’re on your back; your head is resting on a sequoia root. Her eyes are closed now, and her hair is blowing all over the place. A pine cone presses your back, then rolls up your neck and works itself into your hair. You are together just off the trail that has confused you, forced you to fight, and led you to a poison spring with uranium in it. All the worries about mile-bagging, all the obsessive thoughts about reaching Canada: your lust crushes these things. You lie in uncomfortable pebbles afterward. For a long while you stay where you are, on the ground. Lying there, dazed, you snap away at the telescoping branches of the trees above you with your Pentax K1000 camera because you want to preserve the way you looked up through the trees and into the blue, from this exact angle. You don’t want to forget again, the way you forgot in the desert.

  We lost Allison’s fishing rod somewhere in the high country. I can’t remember where the hell we lost that thing. Most likely it was out in a backcountry camp near a row of boulders and a ribbon of clear water. It would be easier to remember where we lost it if she’d ever had the chance to use it. That way I could look back on the maps and remember such-and-such lake, where she caught a trout, and come up with a rough approximation. I have little to go on, but I remember the moment when she discovered it was missing.

  We were a few miles north of camp one day. On a whim, she’d searched her pack and found it gone. We backtracked to our camp or the place she thought was our camp, for there were dozens of tent-flattened spots like the one we’d used for the night. When we got there, we found nothing but thigh-high grass, boulders, and a stream full of thimble fish, the sun shining clear to their bones. She searched one row of sites while I searched another. “It’s black, remember,” she said. “The rod is black. I might have lost it in the dark.” I watched her down-turned eyes as she scanned the landscape. “Are you sure we lost it here?” I said.

  She said nothing. Neither one of us knew for sure that she’d misplaced the rod here, and we both knew why. I’d promised to slow the pace, let her take afternoons off and fish, but it never happened. I said we’d “slackpack,” but old fears and ambitions came up. I was concerned that steep snow, slippery glaciers, and rough climbing would impede our progress, so I’d tried to compensate by rushing us through the flatter terrain. Since she’d rarely even handled the fishing rod, we could not say for sure that it went missing in this place, instead of a hundred other places. We searched for a half hour. A ranger went past, then another hiker. Allison told them that it was a “telescoping Shakespeare, brand-new,” and to “look out” for it. She turned to me. “You told me we were going to take it easy,” she said. “You told me I was going to catch fish for supper.” Judging from the just-so tone of her voice, this was a declarative statement, not an accusation. “I wanted it,” she said. “I thought we were gonna go fishing out here.” I had no idea what to say, so I shrugged. She took one last look at the place she thought might have been our camp, and then she cinched up her pack and headed north on the Pacific Crest Trail.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She said nothing.

  I followed close behind her.

  Chapter 18

  The Way of the Wolf

  One week in the backcountry, close to the most popular base camp for Mount Whitney, Allison and I were sweating our way up a long set of switchbacks, our eyes on a diamond patch of sky above the treetops, a sign the climb would be over soon. We walked all day up steep ridges, then marveled at the views from the top. Directly in front of us, to the south, the tallest peaks caught the drifting sunlight. Scattered lakes in the foreground lay in shadow; they looked like holes punched from the scenery, through which the sky above the distant peaks shone. In the forest that day, I tended to lose myself in thought. I had been to these woods before. After one more week of walking, we were set to arrive at Mammoth Lakes, the resort where my family vacationed for one week each year. I came to think of this area as my refuge, sealed away from the rest of my adolescence.

  I came of age in a chichi golf and beach town in California, a Jewish boy trapped in a blond eugenics experiment. Socially awkward, smelly, and bitter beyond my years, I spent large amounts of time in the basement of our house conducting unclean experiments on high school classmates, rendered in modeling clay. I would sculpt body cavities in the Play-Doh figures and stuff them with Play-Doh spleens, intestines, hearts enclosed in toothpick rib cages. Then, after a trial by a kangaroo court, I would sentence the green and purple homecoming queens, football players, surfer dudes, and stoners’ wall denizens to have their insides torn out by my plastic Yoda action figurine. Disembowel them he did. I formed an alternate world in my family home’s dank basement, where I constructed a balsa-wood dollhouse and placed a bread-dough figurine of myself in a balsa-wood BarcaLounger. While normal kids were heading to the prom, my alternate-reality Dan watched television and listened to XTC’s “English Settlement” with his harem of scantily clad bread-dough lady friends, who would scratch and cat-fight and compete for his attention in ways that struck him as inappropriate but flattering. “Dan, oh Dan, would you like some more ginger ale?”

  Aside from my Gumby killing sprees in the basement, and my imagined marathon sex binges with my stable of Play-Doh princesses, my family’s annual trips to the Eastern Sierra became my greatest joy. In those years, the woods became my counterlife. My father would pack up our striped bile-colored Ford station wagon full of external frame packs, sucrose pellets, Tang, squeeze cheese, and freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. The road trips up to Mammoth Lakes were often frightful. Coyotes, with murder in their eyes, walked across the parking lot of the Carl’s Junior in Mojave, sniffing Dumpsters, eying young children and dogs. On one trip, the car’s radiator gave out on the long crawl up Highway 395, emitting a rancid-butter smell like burned Pop Tarts. But the mountains, when we reached them, were unlike anything I’d seen, great blocks of unbroken stone on dun-colored platforms with rusted rubble on their shoulders. They se
emed to shoot vertically up above the Owens Valley. In the distance, cinder cones loomed red and sinister. Mount Ritter and the Minaret Mountains broke the sky with their black spires.

  How I loved and despised those trips. The Sierra dished out delights and torture in equal proportions, in a system so carefully calibrated that I learned to regard intense pleasures with wistfulness. Every lovely lake and tarn concealed colonies of mosquitoes, warm clouds of them descending from nowhere. They lit on my calves and shoulders and wrists to punch my flesh with their twirling stylets, to suck and poke and gouge. Those clouds chased me from camp to camp as if linked to my head like speech bubbles in a cartoon.

  No moment in the High Sierra went unpunctured. There was always a twist, an irony, a catch. During one of my reveries, on a scenic pullout on a high trail, where the air had a tangy Pine-Sol scent and views dropped away to a V-shaped valley full of wildflowers, a pack mule farted in my face. The foul whoosh went on for about fifteen seconds. I could not take it. And yet I learned to live with the balance, the yin and yang of comfort and pain, pleasure, smells, and disappointment.

  It’s not that the woods made me feel competent; quite the opposite. It’s just that the woods made everyone in my family feel like an idiot. They were a great equalizer. Even my older brother, a strawberry-blond sadist with a weakness for Ayn Rand, was reduced to a wood louse by the sequoias. Out in the woods, he screamed with fright when yellow jackets swarmed around him. Once, while he was already panicking, I informed him that these stinging creatures were attracted to the glare of his brightly colored windbreaker, though who knows if this was true. I never claimed to be an entomologist. Out in the forest, during a sudden storm over the Minarets, my brother scanned the sky with rabbity eyes, searching for the lightning bolt I dearly hoped would roast him in his boots. That’s what I loved so much about the High Sierra. It was a reliable producer of long-lasting and delicious memories.