As he drove uptown, proud that he’d remembered in the Seventies how to cut west with Broadway through Columbus to the Henry Hudson, he realized he had no idea how you drive to New Hampshire from New York. He was one of those Manhattanites who understood the subways and made it a matter of honor to use them, despite the hour. He knew the underground map, but he had no sense of direction, and all he understood was that he was driving uptown, the Hudson River on his left, with bunched, dense, unreadable Harlem on his right and the George Washington Bridge beyond it.
As he followed the signs to the bridge, then guessed and took the leftmost ramp that led to it, he accepted that he was driving to New Hampshire. He had believed, on leaving the house, that he was going to take a walk. Now, even while he aimed himself away, he was surprised. He wanted to look at the surface of the river, but he was made anxious by the lights and speed of the traffic. He saw a tugboat, he thought. He thought it was pushing a barge on which a mound—was it garbage?—rode low in the water. Maybe he’d expected to see it. He knew of so many error-laden first-person accounts that historians had banked on, to their grief. People rarely saw what they claimed to.
But he had seen his father on the wind, he thought. It was something he knew. He knew, too, that he would pull over when he could and telephone Leslie. He would tell her, “Don’t worry.” She would swear in the rhythms he knew, and he would grin. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “I was in some kind of fear fantasy, heading for New England. But it’s all right. I’m all right. It was nothing more than dread. I’ll be home soon, and I’ll tell you the whole stupid story.”
He grinned in the darkness as he headed out on, apparently, the Palisades Parkway through New Jersey. When he passed a service station at Ramapo, he thought: The next place I see, I’ll turn around.
He saw a sign for Route 17. He was half an hour up the Palisades Parkway, driving slowly and being steadily passed. He thought he remembered something about 17, that a lot of people he knew had driven it. He wasn’t sure it went to New England, he probably should turn around if he could. He didn’t. He followed a sign, after a while, that took him onto a long, subtle curve, and he had taken a ticket at a booth, and he was driving upstate on the Thruway. You can always, he thought, get off the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway and go back in the opposite direction. They can tell you how to do that. But he didn’t ask. He knew he was headed upstate. You could, he figured, get to New Hampshire from there, or you could always turn around.
His mother had left them. He didn’t know it at the time, of course, because he was eight. You don’t tell an eight-year-old with chubby legs and prominent teeth and an affection for books and games about war that his mother every once in a while takes off. Later, he understood that she had left before that summer and would leave again. She didn’t leave permanently until he’d been in college for almost a semester. She kept in touch, thinking he’d need it. And he hadn’t the courage, then, to tell her she was distracting him from the two great recently discovered programs of his life—falling in love with the historical narrative of anyplace in any age as told by almost anyone at all and succumbing to lust with what he later thought of as sagacity.
So Hank’s father, in the summer of his boy’s ninth year, left alone with the child by his wife, reread pertinent sections of the Boy Scout handbook, sought the advice of an outdoorsy friend, and took Hank by train to New Hampshire. In the motel room that smelled of wax and heat, this man—who had not camped out since basic training—showed Hank every piece of borrowed equipment in each of the borrowed rucksacks.
“We have to be careful up there,” his father said. “I don’t mean there’s anything to be scared of. I mean we have to take precautions. It’s what I do in business. It’s what you should do in your life. Things are the same, di dum di dum di dum, nothing to worry about”—here, he lit a cigarette—“then all of a sudden they’re different. Really changed. Understand? Weather on the mountain changes very suddenly. You feel how hot it is?”
“It’s very hot,” Hank had answered, eager to be right. This was an important trip, he knew. He didn’t know why. “Very hot.”
“But it still could snow on us once we get up there.” His father pointed. “Above timberline. Do you know what that is?”
His father smoked Camels, one after another. His fingers were stained yellow, and Hank loved the harsh, dark smell of the stubby little cigarettes. He heard his father pull the smoke in. Seeing that Hank watched him, he blew a thick, steady smoke ring onto the air. He winked. Hank winked back. His father’s gray-brown widow’s peak was encircled, after a while, by smoke. It looked the way Mount Washington looked from the front of the motel, hidden at its top by clouds.
That night, on the metal beds with their thin mattress pads, they turned and coughed and slept to waken—Hank because of his father, his father because of one among all the secrets, Hank suspected later, that rose up around him like the smoke of his cigarettes. Early light made his father appear pale and, from the side, vulnerable as he looked through the window. A path that led to the road that would take them to the first of their trails was outside that window. His father, without his wire-rimmed glasses and with his hair pulled up by friction against his pillow, stood at the window and smoked. Seeing his father without glasses felt like seeing him naked. Hank had shut his eyes and, hearing his father taking in smoke and letting it out, he had fallen back to sleep.
They ate what to Hank was an exciting meal because it was composed of food their mother never cooked: sausages and eggs so greasy the oils soaked through the rye bread his father showed him how to fold for sunnyside-up sandwiches.
“You want coffee this morning, Hank?” His father turned a cup of coffee beige with milk and sugar. Hank half expected to be offered a Camel with it and was disappointed when, winking, his thin, sad-faced father frowned around a cigarette and lit it up, but didn’t shake the pack to release the tips of one or two and offer it as Hank had seen him do for others at restaurants and parties.
When their waitress brought the check, his father, counting change and squinting against smoke from the cigarette that wobbled between his lips, said, “This man opposite me here is climbing up to Mizpah Springs Hut.”
Hank remembered looking into his coffee and blushing, both because of the attention and because he disliked the taste of the coffee which his father had offered with so much sudden good cheer.
“Which one’s that again?” she’d asked, taking the money.
“Well, it’s just up there. It’s our first stage. Kind of base camp, on the way to Lakes of the Clouds.”
“I know where that is,” she said, walking away.
“Hurray for you,” his father said.
“Hurray for you,” Hank said, passing a rest stop and reading the sign that told him he would have to wait for thirty-seven miles before the next. “A man will turn around when he’s ready to,” he said. “He will.”
Hank remembered timberline. He remembered their slow, laborious, thirsty climb up a track of dirt and rocks through dense bushes and trees. He remembered the clouds of gnats and blackflies, the stink of citronella and its greasy weight on the skin of his arms and neck and face. His father’s lungs made squeaking sounds as he panted, Hank remembered. And he remembered that his father forced a fast, unhappy pace, as if they were driven through discomfort and poor conditioning and the oppressive heat by an obligation that was urgent, undeniable.
When they rested, his father showed him how to sit in the harness of his rucksack with his legs pointing downhill. “Let gravity do the work,” his father said. “When you get back up, it’ll be easier. The pack’ll fall onto your back as you stand. It’s an old Boy Scout trick.” He smiled as he lit his cigarette and blew the smoke up, at the gnats that hovered about them. “Isn’t it great? You show ’em you can take it. You show you. I always wanted to do this, Hank. And you. Aren’t you something? You’re climbing to Mizpah Springs, you’re climbing Mount Washington, and you’re only eight years old. It might be a
record. You might be posting a national record.”
Hank remembered drinking too much water, and his father’s gentle, breathless rebuke when they stood, facing downhill, about an hour later. “The White Mountains make emergencies. That’s what I’ve heard. So you need to make sure there’s plenty of water until we get to the Springs.”
As they continued to climb, breaking free of the confines of the trail to see the widening white glare of sky unencumbered by brush, his father, struggling for breath, instructed him to note how the trees were lower, the winds steadier. Hank saw, at last, when they made the ridge that would take them to the hut, how entire evergreens, mostly bare of needles (but not dead, his father said), were no higher than his knee.
“It’s the cold does it,” his father said, “and the winds. They look like miniature trees, but it’s all in them—they’re just stunted. It’s like when you, I don’t know, when you just run out of it. This is what it’s like.” He shielded his face with cupped hands to light a cigarette. “I believe that life is a bivouac, Hank,” he said as the wind took his smoke and some of the sound of his words away. “You know what a bivouac is?”
Hank certainly didn’t know, but he had shrugged, imitating his father, and he had nodded. When he read the word in college, sitting in the torpor of the library late at night, he had looked up, wide-eyed, feeling in his stomach some of that day: the presence of his father, and his mother’s absence.
They ate a sandwich lunch at the small, open hut with its sleeping shelf lined with evergreen branches, and then his father had moved them along, before they could grow too stiff. In the bright, hot mid-day light, hills below them were black-green under the shadows of clouds that began to mass as they walked. After a couple of hours, as his father complained about the time of day and the changing sky, Hank saw how much darker the hills were, and how clouds thickened above them. Now they were over the timberline. High cairns of rock marked the trail because there were no trees. His father kept the map, in its glassine case, in his hand.
Every January his father solemnly presented him with a wrapped gift, which he in turn gave his mother for her birthday. Every year, she added the scented oil to her bath and presented herself, in her blue silk bathrobe. Hank was aware of the heat of the water and of its perfume. He smelled it through the canvas and dust and wind. He had begun to wonder, as they labored more slowly against the pitch and the difficult, stony footing that made his calves and ankles ache, whether she might greet them, as a surprise, as a reward, when they reached the end of their climb. She came from the bathroom to find him, each year, and she presented herself, smiling, her skin a little damp. “Want a smell, sweetheart?” she would ask.
Hank remembered as he drove how his father made them stop and put on their ponchos, which were very long and which covered their packs and fastened with snaps beneath their arms. His father tugged Hank’s into place and then Hank, feeling uneasy, as if he were buttoning his father’s shirt, pulled the poncho over his father’s rucksack.
Cold winds, then colder winds, drove at them. The field of boulders and cairns and scree, and sudden declines, lay all about him. He couldn’t see Mount Washington. Ice-cold mist grew heavier, and the clouds, his father told him, were surrounding them. He thought in the car of his recollection of the night before they climbed—of his father, surrounded by smoke.
Hours into his drive, he saw a sign for Westmoreland. The name of a general whom he associated with the madness of the Vietnam War seemed significant, so he aimed himself there, yawning now and thinking not of a place to call from, or where he might turn around, but of someplace he could sleep.
There were the blue-gray boulders vanishing into the descending clouds, there was the invisible mountain they were partway up, there was timberline below them, and there was his father before him, breathing hard and urging Hank to keep up. “You keep me in sight,” his father said, turning clumsily as his poncho was flailed by wind against the hump of his rucksack. “You see me, right?”
Hank, in the car, was going to say, “Right.” He rubbed his lips and didn’t. He drove the two-lane highway onto which he’d exited from the Thruway. He knew from roadside signs that he wasn’t terribly far from where the battle of Oriskany had been fought. With a satisfaction he distrusted, he told himself that he was driving into a footnote.
The Oriskany Falls Hotel was closed, and he drove on for fifteen or twenty miles to Route 20, where he found a motel with an open bar, and with three other cars outside of rooms. The kid who took the imprint of his credit card and gave him a key told him he could get a sandwich and a drink in the bar until half past midnight.
“You close it at twelve-thirty?”
“This here’s Oneida County,” the crew-cut, harelipped boy of something like twenty intoned, “not Las Vegas, Nevada.”
“Damn,” Hank said, “I wanted it to be Las Vegas, Nevada.”
“But it ain’t,” the boy said, already looking away.
“It’s Oneida County,” Hank said. “Am I right?”
The boy didn’t answer and Hank didn’t blame him.
In the bar, at eleven-fifteen, served—of course—by the harelipped boy, Hank drank bar whiskey and ate two undercooked hot dogs, garnished with yellow mustard, which the boy had purported to roast in a microwave oven on the short counter of the small room. Hank sat at the end of the counter. The red plastic-covered stool to his right was empty, and so was the next one. On the one after that, a man wearing a dirty sling over his suit jacket drank shots with beer. On the stool beside him, a woman with a black hat that was like a turban drank coffee.
He was looking at the hat or at her head, and he didn’t know why. Then he did. She was bald, he realized, and she was disguising it with the turban. She looked up, past the man’s shoulder, and caught him studying her. She stared back and slowly adjusted her hat, letting it shift enough to confirm her hairlessness. He felt as though she had taken off her shirt.
“Sorry,” he had to say.
“Dickie,” she said, “I’m going to discuss my life with this man over here, all right?”
The man beside her looked Hank over and shrugged. That says it all, Hank thought: dismissed by a man in a sling who is getting drunk on boilermakers at the outskirts of a footnote.
She was very, very thin, and she was jaundiced-looking. Her mouth, which was broad with a full lower lip, had a jaunty curve despite her pursing it, maybe in pain. She looked like a supporting actress—the one who isn’t pursued by Franchot Tone in a movie that Leslie might watch after he had fallen asleep. Hank often woke to find that she’d turned the bedroom TV set low and was sitting on the floor before it, wrapped in a blanket. She reminded him of his father, smoking at the window, studying the White Mountains. Or perhaps he had fashioned the memory of his father after Leslie, he thought. Maybe none of it was true, whatever true meant.
She said, “You were looking at me like you knew me.” She adjusted her wrinkled ecru shirt in the waistband of her loose cotton slacks, as if expecting him to study her. “But we don’t know each other, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
“And you’re not the kind of man to be rude.”
“Not on purpose, usually,” he said.
“So you must have been transfixed by my hairdo.”
Her eyes were the kind of clear blue that was almost gray. They were large, and so, he realized, was her nose. She was a woman whose bold features could probably compete with even her smooth, broad head for your attention, he thought. He wished he could tell her so.
“I apologize,” he said.
She sat beside him. When she leaned closer, he could smell her coffee and a kind of sweetness that he later realized was the corruption in her body. He had come to know that smell in his father, not so many years before. “You’re a gentleman, then?” Her voice was low and tired. A couple of hundred miles from home and almost forty-five, he had met someone who made him feel young, someone older than his young wife. He smiled.
&
nbsp; “Yeah,” she said, accepting the coffee passed over by the boy, “you’re a gentleman. You have a gentleman’s smile. You’re the kind of man who thinks the world is tougher than he is. And you’re right. And you smile so maybe it’ll be easy on you. Why not?”
“It’s my birthday. Thank you. You—”
“What’d I do for you that you’re so grateful for? I’m giving you me with cancer so you can enjoy your life while you haven’t got it? The cancer, I mean. I don’t know if you’ve got your life. Have you?”
“Like a very, very bad cold,” he said.
She shrugged.
He was emboldened to say, “I know. It beats cancer.”
She said, “I’ll be the judge of that.” She looked into his face. He saw the hesitation at the corners of her mouth, and he smiled to signal that he’d laugh if she would, and they both began at once.
After a while he took a pull of his drink and raised his finger to ask for another. The boy looked at the clock, then slowly moved to the shelf of bottles.
“This isn’t Las Vegas, Nevada,” he told the woman.
“This here’s Oneida County,” she replied.
He said, “I’m Henry Borden.”
“Mine’s Lorna Wolf. One f—like the animal. The other inmate over there’s my brother. We’re going to Sayre, Pennsylvania. You know where it is?”
“I don’t even know where Oneida County is.”
“There’s a hospital there,” she said.
“Good luck in it, Lorna.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We’re going there for him. There’s a bone guy there. My brother, Dickie, he has to have his arm reset. We did me, in Utica. Now we do him in Sayre. Then we come back and do me. What we do is we drive back and forth. He’s got a wonderfully comfortable car—I read a book, and Dickie drives. He’s excellent with just the one arm.”
He nodded.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Borden? I’ve heard of you.”
He shrugged.
“I heard you on the radio. Henry Borden.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 34
