Forrest Gander: As a Friend

* * *

Les, in the truck bed, handed me the prism pole and I stood it straight up next to the pickup and checked the bull’s-eye bubble to see that I had it vertical and plumb. Les strapped the meter box to his back and jumped to the ground. Then he put the tripod over his right shoulder and picked up the theodolite. The hair around the back of his neck was already wet and he set down the tripod and wiped it all to one side.

I’ll take the theodolite, I offered.

Alright.

Someone started up a lawnmower. I snapped the hammer into its holster on my belt and patted my shirt pocket to feel my pencil. With my left hand, I balanced the prism pole which, with swaths of pink surveying tape tied to it, looked something like an Indian lance. The equipment was fairly heavy. Following Les across the parking lot, I was taking inventory. I could feel the measuring tape in my front pocket and the knife in its leather casing tapping against my thigh. All set.

Got your two-way? Les asked, not looking back.

Yep. Field book?

He tapped his breast pocket.

I loved these times when the two of us were sent out together. I loved watching him, feeling my own neck and shoulders make little sympathetic adjustments to the way he moved. It didn’t matter whether he was walking into a room full of people or leaning into the transit in the middle of a field, he was more hypnotic than anyone I’d ever seen. It was a strange electric quality like when leaves take on the first shimmer of color in the fall. And maybe it was his death in him, pressing early to the surface of his skin, that gave him some kind of radiance. There was something purely erotic about it. And when we surveyed, whether he was speaking to me through the two-way or calling out matter of fact questions and numbers, I felt an almost masochistic charge, an undercurrent of throbbing obedience to him that weakened the sockets behind my knees and sometimes gave me inconvenient hard-ons.

Two nuthatches were chasing each other around the scaley bark of a bull pine. Les pulled out the legs of the tripod and clamped the distance meter to it. He looped the battery cord over the adjustment screw. I checked my pockets for flagging as I walked over to the control point between two laurel bushes and turned the prism pole reflector toward Les.

What’s your height, Les called.

This is seven-four.

OK. Let’s backsight and get going.

For the rest of the morning, I shouted to Les a description of each shot— Flow line of curb, Toe of slope, Building corner —which he’d write into the field book next to the shot readings. I drew the lines of each shot across my field sketch. Then, when I could see Les push the EDM’s battery-off button and start to record his readings, I’d move on to the next shot.

The temperature rose quickly and we were both as wet as if we’d been swimming in our clothes, but the work was all easy and in-tune.

That evening, it was stifling. As much for the air conditioning as anything, I went to Lana’s Café and ate shepherd’s pie and kale and then walked across the street to The High Hat for a beer. It was a little before sunset when Les came in and walked right up to me where I was sitting with a couple of fiddle players. He nodded at everyone and he bent down to tell me that he wanted to show me something. Alright, I said.

You’re going to need to pay up. It’s a ways from here.

Alright, I said.

We can take my truck.

His windows were up and I opened the passenger door, scooting into a coffin of baked air. My first breath seared the inside of my nostrils and heat from the seat radiated into my thighs and shoulder blades. The inside of the windshield was a mess of smeared mosquitoes.

We rolled down the windows in synch.

He drove down the hill and off the pavement onto a dirt road where the pharmacist lived. Tied to the barbwire fence, a half-dozen large catfish heads dangled like church bells. A whippoorwill was calling. In the fall and winter, I used to run along this road, and although there were only a few houses, there were a lot of dogs. I had my arm out the window. Fireflies lit up the hill by the pharmacist’s house. The cab filled with dust. The road crossed a cow guard and wound upward. Les turned his headlights on and, a hundred yards later, pulled into the weeds where the road crossed a creek. Here it is, he said. Careful, it’s slope-shouldered.

Woods on both sides.

I followed him into the woods, up the branch through knee-high ferns. He kept telling me we had to hurry, we might be too late. We came to a little rise and a cairn of mossgrown rock. There’s a little cave here, he said. We missed the bats already, but take a look at this.

The hole in the rock went straight down. It was only the diameter of a garbage can lid. I could make out something quivering along the lip of it, and when I stepped closer, I instinctively jumped back again and slipped on some lichens and fell to one knee. It’s ok, it’s ok, Les said softly. He wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to the swarm of chestnut-size creatures exiting the mouth of the cave.

What the fuck are they? I heard myself whisper. I didn’t want them to notice me if they hadn’t already. My jeans were tom and my knee throbbed where I’d cut it on the rock.

Some kind of giant cricket, I guess, he whispered back. No kind I’ve ever seen before.

* * *

In the window booth of The High Hat one night, Quinton and I were drinking drafts when Les came in and wound his way over to our table. He was talking in a strange, quiet patois. I kept asking, What, what, what, and he kept on, his voice animated and his eyes half-closed, almost reptilian, but I had no idea what he was saying, not even what language it was, not even whether it was a language. After he downed a beer, he got quiet and then left.

What was that? I asked Quinton.

Yeah, oh well, when he’s drunk he’ll talk like that now and again. Picked it up one weekend in New Orleans.

Quinton and I stayed until just before closing when Quinton started to look queasy. He stood up like he’d been bit and glanced toward the men’s room and then he looked toward the door to the street. The street was closer. The High Hat was packed and a lot of people were dancing. Quinton started away without saying anything to me, his cheeks starting to puff and blow, as though he were struggling with some conundrum. I saw him pause by a table where no one was sitting, kneel on one knee like a knight, pick up a woman’s purse from the floor, open it, and puke into it in one gushing heave. Then he propped the purse up against the table leg and stood, wiping his face, adjusting his ponytail. And he went on out through the door.

* * *

By lunch break, we were near Jasper so we went for a swim in the Buffalo River near the bridge. There were some picnicking families there too. Les dove off the bluff a couple times and swam over to the shore where I was soaking in the sun. Just downstream from me, on the sand, there were half a dozen bluegill heads swarming with bluebottle flies. Les approached the woman in shorts and an orange tank top who had been calling her son out of the water, but he spoke to the boy. Lars, Les said, you’re probably the only Lars in Arkansas. The boy didn’t answer anything, but his mother, wrapping a towel around him, said, We named him Lars because my family’s Dutch.

I had already put on my boots, and I came over to tell Les that everyone else was waiting by the trucks. Les said, But isn’t Lars a Swedish name?

Yeah, yeah, the woman said sharply, but Americans don’t know the difference. With her hand on his shoulder, she began to direct the boy toward the campsite.

A quick movement in Les’s face as he glanced back at me — I wasn’t even sure he had seen me coming up behind him — kept me from wise-cracking, and then, even before I realized what stopped me, Les released my eyes with an expression as subtle as a watermark.