Forrest Gander - As a Friend

Point’s fifteen feet away, Quinton’s voice said. Can you get it from seventy-nine? What kind of boot was that?

I lowered the prism pole and unhooked the two-way from my back pocket again. Four feet, I said into it. No, four feet six. I can see seventy-nine perfect from here.

OK. We’ll set em both from seventy-nine. Hang there for a second.

I laid down the prism pole beside a tree and fitted the two-way back on my belt, and I bent over the bag to get my machete. I was in a semi-clearing in the forest, but it was growing in. My eye was killing me. The machete blade, which had been spray-painted neon pink at one time, was rusty on both edges. I swung it flat-bladed at the gnats. Then I cut some of the vines around the witness stake, jammed the machete into the dirt and went back to rubbing my eye. The two-way was silent. The phone call in my head, phrases standing out. Not much of a conversation really. I looked at the filth around my fingernails and then at the hairs curling from a poison ivy vine. For a while, I closed my bad eye and with the other I watched the yellow horseshoe shape on the back of a tick crawling up my sleeve.

* * *

I set it in motion with the phone call. Telling myself I was doing it for Sarah’s sake. Even for Les’s sake. A beautiful scorpion, righteousness. I had no way to know what would happen. Les was cheating on his wife by living with Sarah. He was cheating on Sarah every weekend he spent with his wife. He cheated on both of them the afternoons and mornings and evenings he cut corners at work to meet the bartender, the guitar player, the potter, and whatever others there were. Of course, he never had time for me.

I called his wife. Surprised no one else had done it. Les was in New Orleans visiting his mother. Called Cora at her farm in Missouri from Quinton’s office before work. I’m calling with bad news, like they say. Can’t tell you who this is. Then I explained to Cora about Les and his so-called lesbian roommate, Sarah. Cora was in Eureka Springs that evening, knocking on Sarah’s door. The next day, Sarah called in sick at the bookstore. I dropped by the bookstore and then the Owen Street house, but no one would answer the door.

If the three of them had made it through the next night, when Les got back from New Orleans, it could have gone differently. If they had made it through the night, some sort of resolutions might have been hammered out. There might have been a future. Forgiveness.

There might have been a future and forgiveness even for me.

Cora had showed up at Sarah’s door. They’d talked. Around midnight, they called Les in New Orleans. Sarah called. Hi Les, guess who’s here at the house?

So he hauled his excellent company back to Eureka Springs at once, but its excellence was gone flat. Sarah told me about it once in the nightmarish weeks afterwards, and I didn’t ask again. The three of them together for the first time. The vomiting and screaming in the kitchen. Cora kneeing him in the balls. And Les staying quiet through it all, as though he had already transformed. An almost ceramic glaze to his eyes. A hideous night of lies springing undone. And towards morning, he asked Cora and Sarah if he could rest for a little. And the door to the bedroom closed and then the two women heard a gunshot. Three gunshots. And Cora ran out of Sarah’s house screaming.

* * *

It’s a barren feeling to know at the age of twenty five that you’ve already lived the most intense period of your life, that a vividness has blazed up and short-circuited something in you and you will remember what it felt like to be alive but not feel it again, and you won’t even want to remember, can’t bear it, it’s too ploughed with guilt and pain. It seemed all of a sudden like a wind had slacked off and I was left leaning off-balance in a world something considerable had passed through. Once I had choices. Then it was as if my life leaped out of my body.

* * *

The first man I went down on. You tasted like well water.

When you walked through doors, otherwise graceful as a mink, you invariably banged one shoulder against the frame. No explanation.

Here it says that hair cells in the ear convert sound waves to electrical signals.

It’s lifting the end of its phrases. Not a veery. A gray-cheeked thrush I’d bet anything, but we won’t see it .

Bushes scandent with white berries.

It was a simple question. I would have answered right away. But you considered it, dragging the cuticle of your thumbnail over your chapped lips, staring at the saltshaker on the table. Finding the full potential of the words. Making of it a larger question.

So you rescued us from the commonplace. Coaxed out the best in us. Which was your great gift.

When you opened my shirt, you stepped back and said, They must envy each other .

The Jammed Log Position.

How you made me laugh. I couldn’t have fallen in love with you otherwise.

Broken chevrons of dry mud on the kitchen linoleum. And over newspaper on the table, a heap of freshly picked green beans.

Fat green-backed fly, dead, on the lath of the kitchen window.

I guess you were what the tragedians would call my bosom snake.

When we heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s recording Bright Moments , you told me that his producer was mostly deaf from childhood smallpox. A deaf producer recording a blind musician who was promoted by a famous radio station with the call letters WHAT.

I don’t think poets tell things at all , you said. Poetry listens .

The greater the cilia vibration, the louder the sound.

I stepped outside again, wishing you home. In the driveway, something was glowing on the windshield of my car. A kind of design. As I came near, my hackles up, I could make out the shape of a heart you must have smeared on the windshield with a crushed lightning bug. I heard a sound and turned and you were standing at the door where I had been a moment before, watching me in the driveway in the dark.

Your ever-present moleskin notebooks. Even when you surveyed.

The red-bellied woodpecker swerves over the primroses and claps itself to the crab apple trunk as if a magnet had drawn it. In dreams, that’s how I come to you.

October wind, carrying the sound of distance. And then a hush rippling through the trees.

You bought me nipple rouge. I mail-ordered you a leather cock ring. Your eyes erupted when you opened it.

The name. The name of my beloved.

Woke on the floor to find a line of ants trailing from the baseboard to the cut in my palm.

Not seeing the cup in the bathroom, you brought me a mouthful of water in your mouth.

Standing at the window, wrapped in a bed sheet, watching bats sip nectar from the clematis.

Sweetest was your imagination.

You said that the world must listen to living things the way Miles Davis listens to music, marking everything that might be left out.

When I came home from work, you were crumbling sage over rainbow trout. Except for eggs at breakfast, that was the first and last meal you made me. The idea of cooking you loved, but not cooking itself. You would go to Lana’s Café and eat the same thing five nights in a row.

You stayed tuned to the orioles and warblers of mid-May. First , you said, the bug-eaters, then the seed-eaters fly through .

Trying to comprehend the mechanics of hearing, scientists measured ripples across the cochlea of dead dogs.

Your ears must still be registering sounds, Les. Underground.

The way your lips relax when you sleep. And you lose your face, and a boy lies in bed next to me.

Did I wake you? Was I kicking?

A can of linseed oil in the front closet where I made you keep your Red Wing boots.