Forrest Gander: As a Friend

Take care, Lars, he called after the boy.

* * *

I came into The High Hat and they invited me over — Sarah and Les and some young filmmaker from out of state who had read Les’s books and was shooting a film based on interviews with him and images from the poems. The air smelled like stale beer and dirty laundry. They were salting the foam on their draft beers. The filmmaker’s name — Bill or John, I don’t recall now. And as soon as I was seated and before I could order a beer, they leaned forward again as though their faces pressed some invisible concern between them, and they began again to talk, Les in his slow smoked-ham of a voice and the filmmaker, Bill or John, interjecting little riffs of counterpoint, and Sarah animated, nodding her head. The waitress didn’t come over to ask what I wanted to drink. No one at the table made an effort to bring me into the conversation, and I couldn’t follow it.

Now Les was saying that to be defiled — was that what he said? — was to become recognizable to yourself. Which sounded to me like priceless garbage. I couldn’t piece together his argument, if that’s what it was. My mind hung on phrases— dumb abundance, crushed stones, the colors in Giotto’s paintings. Letting one space tell against another. It was all over the place.

It would have been humiliating to stand up and go to the bar while Les talked because the talk was so clearly a process for him, or an intricate pretense, of thinking something through. Also, I wanted to be among them, part of the conversation. But I couldn’t add anything and because I couldn’t either excuse myself or sip a beer I didn’t have, I kept watching the three of them, though mostly Les, with ratcheting unease. I focused on his facial movements as though they might be more decipherable than his words. I noted the way he tented and untented his hands in front of his mouth and I stifled my panic with reminders that I wasn’t stupid, I’d come late to a discussion already in progress, I was suffering the fatigue of four straight days surveying in the sun, and they probably had read things or seen movies that provided a context I didn’t share.

But I was stranded there for twenty or thirty long minutes. Caught by that root indetermination from which, I could suddenly see it was true, all the events of my life have stretched out.

I had come to the table happy to see Les, buoyant, with a slight self-conscious swagger that I liked to think characterized me, and with every intention of paying for the next round. Without any doubt I would have something to say. But I was forever unqualitied by Les. Emptied out. He had some kind of juju that turned me into a manikin. At best, I was wounded by every encounter with him. And I began to think, leaning my elbows on the table, looking from his face to Sarah’s, that I would only heal if he were harmed.

* * *

We had gotten high and hungry and we stopped on our way back from a party in Fayetteville for which all the guests, to gain entry, needed to be dressed as a character from a Dylan song. Les, invited by a professor he knew, hadn’t planned to go. But after he told us about it at work, we harassed him until he promised to take us.

We met up in the parking lot by the office.

Quinton, reeking of Brut and high on crank, was dressed as always in jeans, t-shirt, and Stetson, but he had a thick, filthy rope he’d taken from a construction site. This he had spray-painted a patchy blue and wrapped around his torso and shoulder like a boa constrictor. He was squatting and offering an unlit cigarette to a bedraggled beagle that had wandered over and he was talking obsessively to Les about college pussy.

Les had on a safari suit he’d bought at an auction in the winter and he wore the white pants and vest with a mismatched jacket so torn up it looked like it might have been used to train police dogs. And he had a child’s plastic tiara wrapped with some loose rushes wedged on his head.

I was dressed in overalls and a straw hat, my pockets stuffed with nickels I was planning to pass out to people who couldn’t guess who I was.

But as soon as we arrived, I gave it away by asking the guy at the door, who was dressed evidently as a string bean, if he was having a good time. He said, Maggie’s brother, right? He looked over Les and Quinton. Napoleon in rags and Tangled Up in Blue, but Tangled Up in Blue’s not a character.

Yeah look who’s talking, fucking green bean, Quinton blurted as he pushed inside, Les and I falling in behind him.

We started back to Eureka Springs after midnight and passed a Mr. Burger that was still open. We looked at each other and Les started laughing that infectious, ridiculous laugh of his and we were all laughing. Les had a hard time parking his truck. We stepped inside like a travesty of the three kings, Quinton so drunk and high his eyes were almost shut and his mouth hung open. I felt every face swerve toward us and I smiled at the girl taking my order. Heard myself laugh a little fake laugh that indicated to her that I knew I looked like an idiot, but I was just pretending to be an idiot, I wasn’t really an idiot, and she grinned back to let me know she suspected as much. But Les stepped up after me in that bizarre costume and ordered his quarter pounder with cheese. He straight-faced it right through. And no one smirked.

I could see it was a kind of exercise for him. He couldn’t let anything fall away from his control, any aspect of himself. It wasn’t any concern for dignity, which he could have salvaged just as I did, smiling and nodding. It was a matter of who would control the material. Les took control. And of course his doing so was an accusation and a verdict on how I had handled myself. I had blinked, so to speak. I’d let them make me look obsequious. For the sake of appearance. We’d arrived at a fork and I’d gone one way and he didn’t respect me enough to follow. Instead, he’d presumed to add up all the reasons I might have had for choosing my direction. Then, he crossed them out one by one. He’d disregarded my reasoning, my moral character, our camaraderie, even my dumb luck to be first in line.

And it all reversed. Envy turned me inside out. I hated him. While he stood with his fingertips drumming the counter by the register, I felt like I could smell his death rise up in him, flush with the veins and scars on his forearms, plumb with the rise of his cheekbones and the dense bright gaze of his eyes. I felt I suddenly had power because he didn’t suspect me. I could get inside him without him knowing it, like a parasite.

* * *

Heading back, we trudged through thickets of liana and berry brambles close to the river’s edge in sweaty jeans and long sleeves despite the heat, all of us reeking of Off. Quinton was pissed and he was swinging the machete even when he didn’t need to. I saw him cleave a yellow butterfly in flight.

When we left the water, we climbed through shortleaf pines until we came out onto a bluff, everybody silent, me and the two part-timers closing in around Quinton. Below us, the river gleamed, its surface stippled with breezes. In the clear green water, I could make out big chert blocks that had loosened from the bluff and plunged into the shallows. The sun glinted from our two-ways and from the prism pole in my hand. When we moved again, a covey of quail exploded from the bushes next to us. My heart jumped as they veered across the river, the pant of their wings quickly diminishing.

We came back to the river one more time near a stand of old cottonwoods whose gnarly bark had been rubbed smooth, chest high, by elk. Quinton lowered his machete.

It’s all spider web from here, he said. You earned it, Clay. You lead.

He handed me the machete.

I hated spider webs. I hated all of it. The sac spiders and deer ticks and poison caterpillars and clouds of mosquitoes and chiggers running around my fingers and rattlesnakes and eye gnats. But I had fucked up the job, the numbers didn’t work out and the lines didn’t close. It wasn’t even supposed to be my job. I was filling in for Les who had called in supposedly sick. I’d volunteered and now I had to ride the fucking beef.