And as he said it, I thought: Well, why not? Why not lie down in the middle of the road? Driving away, I suddenly couldn’t think of a single reason, hard as I tried. Traffic would stop, the cops would come; they’d haul you off somewhere for observation, maybe a little “treatment”-reuptake inhibitors by the fistful, bad food on metal trays, serious conversations with some joker in a white coat with a blackjack stashed in his sock-while, meanwhile, the world would turn without a stutter. In a crazy way, it actually made sense to lie down, to drop your guard and let the truth come out. I thought: who cares?
Which, of course, was absolutely no way to live. There’s more to the story, but before I knew it I had second-guessed myself into the worst kind of box. I went back to my mother’s house in Bangor, loafed the summer away under the charade of “getting some thinking done” and “looking for a new direction,” and in September answered a want ad in the Maine Sunday Telegram that turned out to be Joe’s. I drove up to Sagonick and looked the place over; it seemed, then as now, as far away from everything as I could get without actually hauling myself to some dope-smoking Oregon commune or an ashram in India (both of which I actually considered for at least ten minutes), and when Joe put the ring of keys in my hand, I felt in their solid, singing weight the answer to my problems, and knew that I was cured.
End of story; or the beginning, if you like.
All of which is just to say that these were the things on my mind that morning, as much a part of the feel of the day as Kate’s kiss, Joe’s drunk lawyers, and Harry Wainwright. For two hours I went out with a party from cabin two-a couple of guys who just wanted somebody to show them a good spot and then beat it-then into town for some screws and other things I needed to repair a set of steps by the dock. Lucy had made it clear that I was supposed to stay close to camp, to keep myself available for whenever Harry wanted to go, but I thought a short errand wouldn’t hurt, since Harry, even if he experienced some kind of miraculous recovery, would need a while to get ready. I would have asked Kate to come along for the ride, but she was off somewhere, shuttling the moose-canoers, and probably wouldn’t be back till nearly noon.
What happened next I can’t explain. I was driving into town, mulling over what size screws I wanted and that maybe I should pick up a case of engine oil while I was at it, when I caught myself thinking about my father, and the day I learned he’d died. This in itself was odd, as right till then, driving the Jeep up the long hill into town, the wind and sun roiling around my face, I would have sworn I had no conscious recollections of that day at all. Standing by the canoes, I’d told Kate all that I remembered of him, or thought I had; so maybe finally talking about these things had cleared a space in my mind for other memories to flow in behind them. In any case, the things I suddenly remembered hit me so hard I actually tapped the brake, then found myself pulling the Jeep to a stop by the side of the road.
We were living on base then, the three of us in a small, prefabricated house built of nothing much better than cardboard. It was summer, the air of the tidewater thick as clam chowder. I don’t think we had an air conditioner, because the house was always full of whirling fans-table fans, ceiling fans, fans on tall stands that rocked to and fro like the heads of robots-and that was where my memory began: with the feel of fan-pushed air on my face. I was in the kitchen, which was really just a kind of galley with a small extra space for a table and chairs. The fan, an old-fashioned model with metal blades and a cloth-covered cord, was positioned on a chair so that it pointed toward the stove, where my mother had been cooking dinner for the two of us. She had left me alone there when the doorbell rang-I was playing on the floor, pushing a toy dump truck around-and in her absence the fan had worked a kind of magnetic pull on me: I left my playing and went to stand before it, to watch its blur of blades and soak the skin of my face in the cooling relief of its man-made wind. My father flew jets, aircraft held aloft by forces as invisible to me as magic, but there were plenty of propeller-driven planes around, and one could not be a small boy growing up on the grounds of the Oceana Naval Air Station without grasping at least the basics of aeronautical propulsion. In my mind I connected the action of the whirling fan blades to my father’s mysterious and important job-a job that, I knew, scared my mother half out of her wits even as she told me constantly what a great, brave man he was-and the longer I waited alone in the kitchen for her return, the more I experienced both a deepening anxiety at her absence-there was a boiling pot on the stove, which I also dimly understood to be a danger-and a strong, almost mystical pull toward the blur of metal that floated before my face. It seemed to contain a strange and ancient power-the power of my father, of men and their machines-and I longed to touch it, a desire sharp as hunger. I had been warned against this a thousand times, as I had been warned against the stove, the electric outlets, strangers who might want to talk to me, and traffic on the street. The urge to obey such commands was strong, but in my mother’s lengthy absence I detected a quality of permission. For a long moment, two seconds or ten, I held my hand up in front of the fan to feel its wind more intimately, weighing my options. And then, from the hallway, the sound traveling unmuffled through the cardboard walls of our house, I heard my mother scream.
Which was exactly when my defenses collapsed and I extended a single, outstretched finger toward the fan, through the metal cage that wrapped it, and into the whirling blades. I did it quickly, furtively-so quickly I didn’t realize for a moment what I’d done, though the pain was, I imagine, instantaneous. The sharp metal sliced off the end of my finger so neatly that it seemed to simply vanish, and then a jet of blood shot out from this open tube of flesh into the blades, splattering everything-my hand and face, my arm and shirt, even the wall and floor, with its vibrant, Martian-red confetti-and it was this fact, as much as the pain itself, that made me scream too.
Jesus Christ almighty, I thought, and probably said so too, remembering all this in the parked Jeep on the side of the road. A logging truck roared past me, a hundred tons of naked trees stacked on its bed like corpses in a mass grave, detonating the air around me and making the Jeep rock like a toy in a tub. In the silent wash of its departure I held up and examined my right index finger, its end stublike and flattened, the nail stunted to the shape and size of a shirt button-a familiar sight, nothing I had ever given a second’s thought to, or not for years and years. I’d always thought I’d sliced it somehow on, or with, a bicycle; I’d even constructed a mental story as to how this had happened, riding my first two-wheeler and then, for no reason at all, reaching down and sticking my finger into the grinding gears of the chain ring. But this made no sense. Maybe it was something my mother had told me, though I quickly tossed this thought aside. It was, I understood, a tale my mind had told itself.
I drove on into town. At the hardware store, still feeling a little dazed, I fished through the little file drawers of screws, filling a sack with the ones I needed-up here we pay by the pound, like fruit-slung a case of motor oil onto my shoulder, and took it all to the register in back, where the owner, Porter Dante, was sucking on an unlit cigar and paging through a hunting magazine.
“How do, Porter.”
He gave me a curt nod from the chin, the North Woods equivalent of a full body hug. “ Jordan.”
He weighed the screws, then wrote up the price on the bag with a carpenter’s pencil. On the wall above him, clipped to pegboard, was a new display of power tools: not the retail junk you see in Wal-Mart, but contractor’s grade, high-voltage Makitas, all cordless, with rechargeable battery packs thick as a grown man’s fist stuck on the handles.