Forrest Gander: As a Friend

I caught him in the Lyric theater, sitting in back, making out with someone I didn’t recognize. In the dark, I wouldn’t have distinguished Les except that he hurried in with her just before the lights fully dimmed and I knew his shape and the way he moved, rolling on the balls of his feet, all swing and curve like a big cat. Before the previews were finished, they were in the same seat.

That was something I wouldn’t have thought to do. To fuck in the back of a movie theater.

I sat there, hardly watching the movie, thinking that while his mouth was wet with her wetness, whoever she was, and hers with his, I was alone as usual, slumped in the dark, my fingers and lips smeared with the grease they poured on my popcorn and called butter.

* * *

I never heard him read anything he’d written, but he would sometimes quote a poem, his own or someone else’s, in conversation. It sounds unlikely, self-conscious or pretentious or bogus, but across the booth from us at The High Hat, he could join the lines of a poem to the flow of talk seamlessly. His face was so weighted down by its brooding handsomeness that he seemed older and more convincing than the rest of us. His gravitas sucked us in. He could lock his eyes on you and draw you toward an alien realm where you were given to suspend your habits of thought. It was as if he’d come from a place where excitement wasn’t taken to be a reverse indicator of intelligence and where it was normal to mention Cocteau and blue channel catfish in the same sentence. None of us had his range, none of us had read so much. The opal blackness of his eyes was magnetic.

Everyone knows how much I love you. All your gestures have become my gestures . I remember him quoting those lines one night at The High Hat. What I mostly remember of those days are particular things he said. His words didn’t memorialize events so much as events enabled him to practice a way of talking that mesmerized us, even when we knew it was bullshit.

I have no doubt that at least half of what he said was exactly that. The things he’d mention as if in passing: how he’d earned money teaching police officers karate, how he met Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer on his one trip to New York, how that same weekend, he spent the night with Alvin Ailey’s principle dancer who, he said, kicked him out of bed in the morning, staring at him as if he were crazy when he asked if he could see her again. These were the kind of inventions a quality liar who rarely crossed the state line might tell gullible friends with equally limited experience. I’m sure he practiced in the mirror the set of his jaw and his hieratic gaze.

Nevertheless, I’d find myself trying to mimic his down-turned lips and his slow, smoky voice, retelling his stories, where I thought I could get away with it, as if they were my own.

Everyone knew how much I loved him.

* * *

It was a typical June day. I downshifted into second at the square by The Basin Hotel where the old men had set up their lawn chairs in a little circle and joined yesterday’s conversation to this morning’s whittling, fragrant cedar shavings already flecking their loafers. Someone with a straw hat stood with his back to his chair, plucked his trousers above the knees, and sat down. I parked next to three mud-caked pickups in the gravel lot behind the pottery studio and backtracked the half block to Walker Land Surveyor. A ten-speed leaned against the wall outside the door and two orange dragonflies idled on the wet concrete windowsill beneath the air conditioner. Quinton Walker was in the side room talking to a rancher about a boundary job. I could hear him saying, Yeah, we’ll definitely get down there next week , as I came in past the draft table and the ratty chairs into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. Sure we’re definitely going to get down there next week , I parroted, announcing myself. He stuck his pony-tailed head into the doorway and gave me a look.

I tore open two sugars, courtesy of Frank’s Truck Stop, and poured them in. After stirring with my little finger, I watched a dirty swirl eddy across the black surface. I carried the Styrofoam cup into the back room where there was another long draft table covered with plats and, protected from dust by a Union Jack, an old plotter machine. On the radio, a reporter was describing survivors on a boat that had set out from a refugee camp only to be attacked by pirates.

From the shelf along the back wall, I grabbed one of the yellow two-ways and put it in my side pocket next to my calculator. I took an extra battery for the EDM and carried it, with my coffee and Quinton’s keys, which were on the counter in the kitchen, back outside, and I walked toward Quinton’s Chevy C-10, my warped reflection in his hubcap. I got in on the passenger side, leaving the door ajar. A fat yellow cat jumped onto the hood and then up onto the roof.

The rancher went by, mimed tipping his hat, and got into his truck. The cat reversed its earlier trajectory, drumming the hood as it descended, and then dawdled up the wooden stairs toward the pottery studio. A few minutes later, Quinton lowered the tailgate and shoved the bright orange theodolite and meter cases onto the truck bed. Then he opened the driver’s door. Wait a minute, he said, I should bring a print.

We headed to a small job in Green Forest where there were about a dozen tiny WPA-era natural stone cabins just off the highway. The reflection of trees cascaded up the windshield relentlessly. Fifty feet before the cabins, we passed two signs advertising an antique shop. The smaller sign was an oversized cut-out of an Ozark rocking chair. But the post under the chair sign had tilted — maybe a car backed into it, I thought — so that the image of the chair blocked out the last word on the bigger sign. Instead of reading Stop Here for Good Bargains , it now read Stop Here for Good .

Quinton sniggered. With pebbles dinging the under-chassis, he pulled into the horseshoe driveway that serviced the cluster of cabins soon to be dozed.

Yeah, I saw it, I said, unimpressed. You and Les messed with their signs?

Quinton glanced out the side window to keep from snorting directly at me.

Why didn’t you set the breaklines then?

Theodolite got hot, I was hungover as hell. The whole day was basically fucked by ten, Quinton answered. Ended up we drove by the golf course, Les made me park while he took a shit in the six hole.

Quinton stomped the emergency brake and as we let ourselves out of the truck, I caught the rank whiff of my underarms.

The morning was gorgeous. Between the cabin and the road, an apple tree was in bloom. I looked around the parking lot and spotted the flagged control point that Quinton or Les had hammered into the busted macadam.

Jesus Christ, Quinton.

Quinton came over and stood beside me staring at the black ants swarming around a hole about three inches from the control point. He said, Clay, you know I wouldn’t have put that point there if the ants had been there. You bring bug spray?

No.

Maybe you could stand on something, he said. Must be going to rain, they’re getting their business done early.

* * *

I would guess that Les was a liar not just because it was expedient, but because he took lying to be creative. He lied not only about his wife Cora, his girlfriend Sarah, his lovers, but about everything. I heard him lie to the man we were supposed to meet at ten a.m. about a surveying job, when at ten a.m. he was screwing around with the bartender and didn’t pick me up until after eleven. He lied so fluently, with such an instinct for the unexpected detail, he could make me think he’d seen a movie I knew for a fact he didn’t see. He lied to the editor who had paid him to conduct an interview he’d never done with some famous writer. He’d lie about a jar of peanut butter in Quinton’s office kitchen. He had a perfect ear. He could imitate any bird, and he was the first bird watcher I ever knew. He could walk out of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries —after convincing us to drive to Fayetteville to watch it, talking up the movie into an event we would sooner gnaw our arms off than miss — and later that night, after innumerable shots of bourbon, freeze us at The High Hat with a panoramic gaze across the table and a mumbled monologue in what I would have sworn was Swedish.