"Blumlein-PaulAndMe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blumlein Michael)

MICHAEL BLUMLEIN

PAUL AND ME


In the course of the epic fantasy Beowulf (as you
scholars may recall), we're treated to a lot of boasting and
"kenning" (describing ordinary objects in grand terms). I
like to think that the impulse toward aggrandizement is one
of the prime driving forces in fantasy, that desire to tell a
whopper so big and yet so true that we've got to accept it on
some level. The American tall tale seems like a good example
of this sort of exaggeration, as do the urban legends that
have been popular more recently. But what happens to these
big boasts over time? That's just one question addressed in
this fantastic new fantasy from the author of The Movement of
Mountains.

I first met Paul in '71, the year I got out of college. I was bumming around the
country, crashing in city parks and church basements, cadging food and
companionship, avoiding the future. In keeping with the spirit of the times, I
considered my carefree and unfettered existence both highly evolved and
intrinsically righteous, when in truth I had no fucking idea. It didn't matter.
My girlfriend was in New York City, living in a commune and doing guerrilla
theater. My ex-girlfriend was in Vancouver, B.C. with her boyfriend, who'd fled
the U.S. because of the draft. Those two women were ballast for me. In my
imagination anyway, they were fixed points and gave me the security to do what I
wanted in between.

I'd been in Bozeman a few days when I was busted for stealing a sandwich. After
a night in jail, the judge threw me out of town. The first ride I got was headed
to Seattle, but I wasn't ready for another city quite yet. I got out in
Wenatchee, caught a ride to Carlton and two days later, a pack on my back and
enough brown rice to last a week, was in the high country north of Lake Chelan.

There is nothing like the mountains to feel simultaneously large and small.
Incomparably large, I should say, and insignificantly small. Distances are vast,
and yet life, because conditions are so exacting, is condensed. At the higher
elevations the trees and wildflowers, the voles that skitter in and out of
rocks, even the mosquitoes seem lilliputian. Which made Paul, at first glance,
all the more striking.

He was kneeling by the edge of a stream, taking a drink of water. He had on
those trademark jeans of his, the navy blue suspenders, the plaid shirt. From a
distance he looked as big as a house, up close even bigger. Because of his size
I expected him to be oafish, but he was nothing of the kind. He moved with
remarkable grace, dipping his cupped hand delicately into the water then sipping
from it with the poise of a lady sipping tea.

I was alone. It was July, and I had camped by a lake in a high meadow two
valleys over. That morning I had gone exploring, following the drainage creek
down as it fell through a boulder-strewn slope of fir and pine. An hour of
walking brought me to the confluence of another, similar-sized creek, at which
point the water picked up force. The trail leveled off for about a hundred
yards, then dropped precipitously. This was the site of a magnificent waterfall,
sixty, seventy feet high. Paul was at the far end of a deep pool carved by the
water. His hair was dark and short, his beard trim, his lips as red as berries.
Waves of reflected sunlight lit his face. He had the eyes of a dreamer.

The trail zigzagged down a granite cliff, coming out near the base of the
waterfall. The noise was deafening and masked my approach. By the time he
noticed me, I wasn't more than a stone's throw away. He stopped drinking, and a
frown crossed his face. Quickly, this gave way to a stiff kind of courtesy, a
seemliness and a handsome, though remote, civility. His public persona. I
apologized for intruding and was about to continue on my way when he motioned me
over.

Standing, he was thirty feet tall; kneeling, nearly half that height. His thighs
when I first met him were as wide as tree trunks; his biceps, like mountains. As
I drew near, he stood up and stretched, momentarily blotting out the sky. Then,
as though conscious of having dwarfed me and wanting to put me at ease, he sat
down and leaned back against a pine, which, though venerable, bent beneath him
like rubber.

It was he who spoke first. His voice was deep and surprisingly gentle.

"Hello."

"Hello," I answered.

"Nice day."

"Incredible."

He looked at the sky, which was cloudless. Sunlight streamed down. "Doesn't get
any better."

"Can't," I replied insipidly.

An awkward silence followed, then he asked if I came here often. I said it was
my first time.

"You?" I asked.

"Every few months. It's a little hot for me this time of year. In the summer I
tend to stay farther north."

I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was in long pants and a flannel shirt
with the sleeves rolled up partway. I suggested that he might be more
comfortable in other clothes.

"I like to stay covered," he replied, which nowadays would mean he wanted to
keep out of the sun but then was more ambiguous. I searched for something else
to keep the conversation alive.

"So what made you come?" I asked. "South, I mean."

He shrugged. "I don't know. I had an urge."

I nodded. Urges I knew about. My whole last year of college had been one urge
after another. Sex, drugs, sit-ins. As a life, it was dizzying. And now, having
hiked into the high country with the lofty purpose of getting away from it all,
of finding a little perspective, here I was talking to a man as tall as a tower.
I was no less dizzy than before, and beyond that, I was humbled by the
realization that the very impulsiveness I was running from was what had gotten
me into the mountains to begin with. I had to steady myself against a rock, and
even then my head spun. Thinking the light-headedness might in part be a product
of hunger, I took out a bag of peanuts. I offered him some, but he shook his
head.

"I'm allergic to nuts. I blow up like a blimp."

This was news to me. Of everything I'd read or heard about him, nothing ever
mentioned his being sick. I didn't know he could be.

"You don't want to be around," he said. "When you're used to pulling up trees
like toothpicks and knocking off mountain tops like cream puffs, it's no fun
being weak as a kitten. I'm a lousy invalid. Worse if I'm really sick. I had a
fever once that started a fire and chills that fanned the flames so hot that
half the camp burned down before the boys finally got it out. Then they had to
truck in three days of snow to cool me off."

I could picture it. "One time I had a fever like that. It made me hallucinate. I
was reading a book and the characters started appearing in my room. It was
freaky."

"This was no hallucination," he said indignantly.

In those days, theories of the mind were undergoing a radical transformation.
The word psychotic was being used in some circles interchangeably with the word
visionary, and people who hallucinated without drugs were held, at least
theoretically, in high esteem. Obviously, Paul didn't see it that way, and I
apologized if I'd offended him. At the same time it surprised me that he'd care.

"I have a reputation to uphold," he said.

It turned out he'd been getting bits and pieces of news from the lower
forty-eight and knew, for example, about the Vietnam War, the protests, the race
riots, women's liberation and the like. Institutions were toppling everywhere.
Traditions were in a state of upheaval. The whole thing had him worried, and I
tried to reassure him.

"As far as I know, your reputation's intact."

"For now."

"Don't worry about it."

"No? How about what's happening to your President Nixon? He was loved once. Now
look at him."

Love seemed a strong word, and even then, it was hard to believe Paul considered
himself in the same category as a man on his ignominious way out of the White
House.

"People are fickle," he said. "Times change, you don't, and what happens? All of
a sudden you're a villain."

"Fame's a bitch," I said without much sympathy.

He gave me a look, and for an instant I thought I had gone too far. What did I
know of impetuosity? He could squash me like an ant. But then he laughed, and
the Earth, god bless her, trembled too.

"I'm not famous, little man. I'm a legend."

* * *

We ended up spending a week together. He took me north to his logging camp,
which lay in a valley between two wooded ridges. He kept Babe in a pen at the
foot of the valley beside the river that drained it, and every afternoon for an
hour or two the ox would dutifully lie on his side and dam up the churning
water, creating a lake for the loggers' recreation. They bathed and fished, and
the few who knew how, swam. In winter, when the waters froze, they played hockey
and curling.

Each morning we had hotcakes for breakfast. It was a ritual the men adored. Half
a dozen of them would strap bacon fat to their feet and skate around the
skillet, careful to avoid the batter, which was coming out of full size concrete
mixers with stainless steel flumes ten feet above their heads. I heard stories
of skaters who'd fallen and been cooked up with the batter, dark-skinned men
who'd been mistaken for raisins, light-skinned ones, for blanched almonds.
Nothing like that happened while I was there. Paul was sensitive to the reports
of cannibalism and kept careful track of the skaters. If one fell, he'd quickly
pluck him up, and if there'd been a skillet burn, he'd rub it with that same
bacon fat they had on their feet. And that man would be offered the day off,
though none of them ever took it for fear of being accused a sissy.

After we had our fill of hotcakes, Babe would be led in and allowed to eat what
was left. One morning I saw him sweep up ten stacks with a single swipe of his
tongue, each stack the size of a silo. It took him less than a minute to stuff
it all in his mouth, swallow it down and bellow for more. It was a
bone-shattering sound. When it came to hotcakes, the Babe was not to be denied.

"They'll be the death of him," said Paul. "But I don't have the heart tO say
no."

"I'm not sure he'd listen."

"He's quite reasonable about everything else. Works straight through from dawn
to dusk. As many days as I ask. Never complains. Which makes it hard to deny him
his one weakness. I feel caught. Too lenient if I let him eat, too strict if I
don't."

"It's nice you care," I said. "But look. It's his choice. You're not responsible
for what he does."

Paul looked at me as if I were crazy, and maybe I was. On the other hand, maybe
I was just ahead of my time.

"Don't let him victimize you," I said.

His incredulity increased, then all at once he leaned over and cupped his hand
over his mouth.

"He can't," he whispered, as though letting me in on a big secret. "He's an ox."

The men in the camp worked in shifts around the clock, but as a rule Paul didn't
get started until after breakfast. But once he did, he was unstoppable. I saw
him log the entire side of a mountain in a single morning, strip the trees,
dress them and have them staged to be hauled out by lunch. He carried a
double-bladed ax that allowed him to chop two trees at once, and when he got
going, he could fell a whole stand in the time it took for the first tree to hit
the ground. He was a furious worker, with a wild spirit and a love for people.
In response, people loved Paul, and they came from all over to work for him.

But he had a quiet side too, and a need for solitude. One evening the two of us
took a walk over the ridge above camp and down into the next valley. The meadows
were lush with lupine and Indian paintbrush. There was aspen and spruce and a
lazy stream that flowed without a sound. We built a fire and gazed at the sky,
which that far north dimmed but never completely darkened, so that only the
brightest stars were visible. We shared our dreams. Being twenty-one, mine was
to taste life. Paul's was more specific.

"I want to fall in love," he said.

I laughed, but he was serious. And wistful. And uncertain that he ever could.

To my mind he already had. "You have a vision," I told him. "To tame nature, but
with a spirit that refuses to be tamed. You do love. You love freedom. You love
life."

"I want to love a man."

Timidly, his eyes sought mine. I could see how desperately his heart wanted to
open. I was twenty-one and eager for experience. To put it another way, I was a
rebel even against myself.

It was the first time I ever had sex with a man. Obviously, some things were
beyond my capability. Afterwards, we joked about it. He called me little tiger
and revealed how much he had always liked little people. His parents were small,
as was his older sister. At first they thought Paul had a glandular condition
and took him to prominent doctors and specialists who prescribed various
nostrums, all to no avail. They tried a Penobscot medicine man, who diagnosed
possession by a powerful spirit and performed a day-long ceremony designed
either to rid or to honor this spirit, they were never quite sure which. After
that they gave up and just let the boy grow, which he did with a vengeance. By
six months he required a cradle the size of a ship; by twelve he was plucking up
full-grown trees and tossing them in the air like match sticks. His parents did
their best to keep him out of trouble, but he had a spirit that couldn't be
harnessed. They had to move frequently, and by the time Paul reached
adolescence, they'd had enough. Unwilling and unable to control him any longer,
his parents abandoned him in the forests of the Upper Peninsula, a deprivation
to which he attributed his craving to love and be loved. There were four Great
Lakes at that time. Paul's tears made the fifth.

Our meeting one another was one of those rare instances of two people's paths
happening to cross at just the right time. We came together with equal passion,
equal need, and an equal degree of commitment. It was intense, satisfying and
brief. Paul told me his deepest secrets and I told him mine. Three days later we
parted company, promising to see each other again as soon as possible. Twenty
years passed before we did.

Again it was summer. I had recently separated from my wife. This was not my
college sweetheart, the one who'd gone to New York to fight the beast and topple
the patriarchy, although we had been married briefly. This was the woman I had
met after law school. She was coming out of a bad relationship at the time, a
bum and destroy affair with another woman, and was ready to try something new. I
was new, and we did famously for eight years, therapy for five, and now we were
trying separation. It was her idea, and I was having a lot of trouble adjusting.
A friend suggested I get away, and the first place I thought of, or the first
person, was Paul.

I took a plane to Wenatchee, picked up supplies and a car, then drove to
Carlton. The town had grown. With the opening of the North Cascades Highway
there were all sorts of new development. I saw no sign and heard no mention of
Paul, and it crossed my mind that, despite his fondness for little people, this
influx of commerce would not be to his liking. But I had a premonition that he'd
be at that waterfall where we first met, a vague an d vain idea that our lives
were somehow running in parallel, that I would be on his mind as much as he was
now on mine. It was a sixties kind of notion. Unfortunately, this was the
nineties. He was not there, and he didn't come. I waited three days, then left.

I drove back to Wenatchee, turned in the car and took a plane to Seattle. From
there I headed north, on successively smaller planes, ultimately commandeering a
four-seater Piper Cherokee that dropped me in the town of Ross River, a few
hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. This was the vicinity of
Paul's old camp, up in the Selwyn Range to the east, and here I heard mention of
him, a whisper really, not much more. But a whisper was all I needed. The next
day I was on my way.

It was August, and this was north. The days stretched on forever. I wandered in
twilight, caught glimpses of moose and bear, fox on the run, geese in migration.
I saw mountains decked in snow and a sky that shimmered with magnetism and
light. But no Paul. His camp was empty and by the looks of it had been for
years. The skillet that had cost old man Carnegie a year's output of steel was
warped and covered with debris. The pen where Babe had slept was down, the field
now overgrown with trees. I pitched my camp beside the creek he used to dam for
the men and cooked myself meals of desiccated sausage and freeze-dried eggs, all
the while dreaming of hotcakes swimming in maple syrup. I took day hikes,
resigning myself to the fact that this past, like my marriage, was over.

Then one day in a snowfield I saw footprints. Boot shaped, waist-deep, as long
and wide as a wagon. That evening I found him.

He was sitting by a lake in a talus-sloped basin above tree line, absently
tossing stones the size of tires into the water. The evening chill that had me
in parka and mittens didn't seem to be affecting him. He was wearing what he
always wore, though not in the way he always wore it. He was unkempt, his
shirttails out, his boots untied. One of the legs of his pants was torn, and his
beard, which I remembered as being neatly trimmed, was scraggly and matted.

The trail passed through scree, and the sound of shifting rock announced my
arrival while I was still high above the lake. He looked up and frowned, as
though unhappy at being disturbed. When he recognized who it was, the frown
turned to a kind of puzzlement. He could have helped me down, but instead, he
waited while I descended on my own.

It was a thrill to see him again. He said the same about me. But after the first
flush of excitement our conversation lapsed. He seemed listless and preoccupied.
I mentioned I'd been by the old camp.

"I saw you," he said.

"You saw me? When?"

"A couple of days ago."

My blood rose. "I've been looking for you nearly two weeks."

If this bothered him, he gave no indication of it. "I haven't been in the mood
for people."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm depressed."

"You? C'mon. You're a mover. A shaker. You're a dreamer. You're the opposite of
depressed."

"The world is leaving me. Everything I've ever loved is gone."

Gradually it came out. The logging industry had been in a prolonged slump.
Demand for timber was a fraction of what it had been. And most of the
first-growth forests were gone, and the livable land cleared. Paul couldn't
support a camp, and one by one the boys had left. Ole the Blacksmith, Slim
Mullins, Blue-Nose Parker, Batiste Joe -- all the old gang were gone. And then
one day Babe had died. It was the hotcakes, just as Paul had always feared.

"He had an eating disorder. That's what the vet said. And I said all right, an
eating disorder, so tell me what to do. But he didn't know, he'd never seen an
ox like that.

"It got to be harder and harder to control him. The smell of me mixing the
batter was enough to drive him crazy. One day he broke out of his pen and rushed
the kitchen. The hotcakes were still in the oven, and he swallowed the whole
thing at once, oven, burners, smokestack. Everything. Stupid ox. He burned to
death, from the inside out."

"That's awful."

"Saddest day of my life," said Paul.

"When did this happen?"

"A year ago. Maybe two."

"Did you have someone to talk to? Someone to help you through?"

He looked at me with woebegotten eyes. "Did. Then he died too."

Randy was his name. They were lovers, and Paul nursed him to his dying day.
Buried him deep and built a mountain on top for a grave stone. It was less than
a year since he'd passed away.

"Seems like yesterday," said Paul.

"I'm so sorry."

He sighed. "I keep wondering who's going to bury me."

"You planning on dying?"

"I dream of it sometimes. Is dreaming planning? You tell me."

A couple of years before, I'd had a bout of depression that responded nicely to
a short course of Prozac. Fleetingly, I wondered how many truckloads of pills it
would take to help Paul. I could hear the outcry from all those deprived by him
of their precious drug which made me weigh in my mind the good of the one
against the good of the many, a quandary made all the more difficult by the one
in this case having dedicated his whole life to the many. My brain was too weak
to solve that riddle, and fortunately, Paul interrupted my attempt.

"I don't grow old the same as you," he said. "It may be a thousand years before
I die. It may be never."

"Everyone dies."

"I'm as good as dead now. That's how I feel. The rivers are cut. The forests are
logged. My friends are gone. Who needs me now?"

"I do," I said. "I need you."

He gave me a skeptical look. "You're being nice."

"I'm being honest. My wife left me. I know what it's like to feel unwanted and
unloved."

Granted, my loss paled beside his own, but misery is misery and I needed to
talk. It was all he could do to listen. His attention kept wandering drawn
inward by a self-absorption that, frankly, offended me. Talking to Paul was like
talking to a pit, and finally, I gave up.

The silence of the high country took over, normally a vast and soul-inspiring
event. But neither of us was getting much inspiration. Paul was hopelessly
withdrawn, and I felt angry at being cheated of my fair share of attention. I
suggested, in lieu of conversation, a walk. Reluctantly, he agreed.

I had in mind a short stroll, something to stretch the legs and stir the blood,
a constitutional. We ended up on a three-day trek to the Arctic Circle and back.
Most of the time I rode on his shoulders, which he said made him feel useful.
The scenery was magnificent, the land utterly uninhabited. We had snow and wind
and skies the color of gemstones. I thought frequently of my wife and the early
years of our relationship. I missed her. The vast and untrammeled beauty in that
deserted land made my heart ache to have her back.

Paul seemed happy enough to be on the move, but when we returned, his spirits
again plummeted. I stayed with him a day or two more, listening to his troubles,
stifling my own, growing resentful while trying to appear otherwise. Eventually,
I couldn't stand it anymore.

"I have to get back," I told him.

He nodded morosely, then gave me a penetrating look. "Why did you come?"

It was the first genuine interest he had shown in me since I arrived.

"To see you," I answered.

"Why?"

I thought about it. "I had an urge," I said at length, flashing a smile.
"Remember urges?"

"I do. Yes. Vividly."

He gave me a look, beseeching maybe, and then fell silent. As the silence grew,
I began to feel defensive.

"I didn't come to replay the past, if that's what you're asking." I hesitated.
"I'm not gay, Paul."

"Is that why you came? To tell me that?"

This irritated me. "I came because I needed a friend."

He seemed to find this amusing. "And have I been?"

"It's been a rough time for you. I understand. Yes. Of course you've been a
friend."

"Of course." He made a parody of the words. "Just so you know, you haven't. Not
at all. You're patronizing and self-serving. You breeze in at your whim, then
you breeze out. You don't care." He made a motion with his hand of sweeping me
away. "Go away, little man. Enjoy your little life and your little troubles.
Your little country. Go away and do me the pleasure of not coming back."

That was '91. It was the culmination of a bad stretch of time. Two years before,
I had turned forty and Sheila, my wife, forty-one. We had put off having a
family because that's what our generation did, put off certain commitments in
order to indulge others. We traveled. We became enlightened. We fought
injustice. We didn't have children because we were children, children of the new
age. And then when we were ready, we couldn't. The equipment just wasn't up to
snuff. Sperm without heads, ovaries without eggs. It was pathetic. We'd grown
old before we'd even grown up.

We went to doctors. Took tests, hormones, injections. Tried the turkey baster,
the baking soda douche, the upside-down post-coital maneuver. We charted
temperature and checked mucus, fucked on schedule and the rest of the time not
at all. Were we having fun? Sure we were. And just to emphasize the point, we
upped our therapy to three times a week.

And those, believe it or not, were the good times. The bad started after we
visited the baby broker. Met her in an unfurnished tract home on an empty street
in a white bread suburb of Sacramento. Our hopes were high, but one look told us
it was all wrong. She was a right-to-lifer, smug and self-possessed. She marched
outside abortion clinics and hurled insults while on the side she gave Christian
guidance to unwed mothers. She had a photo album of all the children she had
placed and showed it to us like a lady selling Tupperware. Beautiful babies with
angelic faces, flawless parents with milky complexions and award-winning smiles.
She advised us to print up a thousand leaflets and pass them out in parking
lots. Stand on street comers with placards announcing our need. Beg for babies.

She told us, in essence, that we were to blame for our childlessness and if the
Lord willed us to be parents, then and only then would we be.

It just wasn't our thing.

We paid her her two hundred dollars, then went home and puked. Two months later,
Sheila moved out.

The shock of it sent me reeling as though gravity had suddenly ceased. I cried
on and off for weeks, couldn't get a purchase on things, felt disoriented and
wracked by a sense of guilt, failure, and self-doubt. In retrospect, that had
been my purpose in visiting Paul, to restore some degree of proportion and
balance to my life. He was, if nothing else, a man with his head on his
shoulders and his feet on the ground. Mr. Dependable, the quintessential
pragmatist. Or so I thought. When he turned out to be such a downer, when he
gave me nothing, when in the end he accused me of being a fraud, I felt
betrayed.

On my return from that ill-conceived trip, I threw myself into work, which at
the time was malpractice litigation. Perhaps in reaction to being hurt myself,
first by Sheila, then Paul, I went after those hospitals and doctors who had
hurt others. That most of these injuries were unintentional was beside the
point. Errors are errors, and in matters of law it makes no difference that all
of us are guilty. I sued on behalf of a woman who'd lost her baby at birth, a
man who'd lost an eye, a teenager with brain damage after being struck in the
head by the plaintiff, his father. We got a huge settlement for that one, and a
few months later we got a fat check in a sexual impropriety verdict against a
surgeon who'd been fondling his anesthetized patients. That case made the
newspapers, and my wife, who at the time was teaching a course on sexual
harassment at the local community college, called to offer her congratulations.
It was a little more than a year since we had separated, an anniversary that we
had diligently failed to observe. That date now safely past, we felt capable of
meeting for dinner. Sheila, I have to say, was ravishing. Evidently, she thought
the same of me. We couldn't keep our hands to ourselves, nor our laughter, nor
delight. One thing led to another, and we ended up spending the night together.
Three weeks later she called to say she was pregnant.

Now we have a two-year old son. He's got the build of an ox and the temperament,
alternately, of a rabbit and a mule. Lately, he's been constructing tall and
elaborate towers of blocks that he subsequently reduces to rubble with a kick.
In other games he is equally omnipotent, digging a hole in the sandbox, for
example, which he then fills with water and proclaims an ocean, before draining
it completely a minute later and naming it, triumphantly, a desert.

Paul was once like that, making lakes with his footsteps, straightening rivers
with a tug of his massive arms, causing tidal waves when he sneezed. A creator
and a destroyer. I've been thinking of him a lot lately.

The anger and hurt I felt after that last visit lessened with time, and as
sometimes happens, my feelings actually reversed themselves, so that I started
to blame myself and not him for being insensitive and unsympathetic. Now, with a
good marriage, a happy child, a successful job -- in short, with everything
going my way, I felt I could brave whatever resentment he might still harbor
toward me. I wanted to make peace.

This time I called first. Got the phone number of the Ross River post office and
asked the postmaster, who'd lived there his whole life, if he'd had wind of
Paul. He hadn't, not in a year or two. He told me to try farther north, up
around Mayo, but instead I called Carlton, where, after getting nowhere with one
lackey after another, I ended up talking to the head of the Chamber of Commerce.
He knew nothing of Paul, although he had heard reports, strictly off the record,
of some sort of creature on the loose. A Bigfoot, the locals were saying, which
he discounted as a hopelessly crass ploy by the environmentalist cabal to keep
the latest ski resort from being built. Bigfoot, he explained, had been listed
by some joker in the state senate as an endangered species. It was a pretext to
stymie development. What had happened could have been the result of almost
anything.

I asked what he was talking about.

"Oh," he said off-handedly. "A thirty-foot anchoring tower disappeared from the
top of one of our mountains the other day. Reappeared the next day in the same
spot, but upside down."

That sounded promising. I asked if he had any theories.

"It's been a heavy winter." There was a pause on the line. "You one of those
ecology nuts?"

"I'm looking for my friend," I assured him. "It's strictly personal."

There was another pause, as if he were calculating whether my actually finding
this person would be to the Chamber's benefit or not. Apparently, he decided it
would be, because he told me by all means to come up and have a look.

That was in May. In July I took a week off work, promising Sheila to be careful
and my son Jonah to bring back a present, and headed to the mountains west of
Carlton and north of Lake Chelan.

It had, indeed, been a heavy winter. There was still snow across many of the
trails, and the streams and rivers were running full. Penstemon and buttercup
bloomed in the meadows, and the young trees looked plump and green. I made camp
the first night near the base of a burnt-out pine and the next day hiked to the
waterfall. There was a level spot about fifty feet from the water's edge where I
pitched my tent, laid out my bedroll and promptly fell asleep.

When I woke, Paul was standing in the pool. He was facing upstream, so that I
saw him in profile. It was truly a shock.

His arms, once so massive, were the size of twigs; his legs, barely as big as
saplings. His beard was moth-eaten; his skin, blotchy and pale. He splashed some
water on his naked chest and neck, then cupped his hands to get a drink from the
waterfall itself. But he lacked the strength, so that the force of the water
kept pushing his arms away. He tried again and again, and then for a minute he
seemed to forget what he was doing. When he remembered, he sank to his knees and
drank directly from the pool. Then he crawled onto the shore, at which point he
caught sight of me.

His eyes narrowed, then he quickly tried to cover his naked body with his hands.
Just as quickly, I turned away to give him his privacy.

When he had dressed, he told me I could turn around. I apologized for taking him
by surprise.

He gave a little shrug. "It's all right. I expect I'm quite a sight."

I found myself nodding. "What's happened to you?"

"Clothes don't fit too well, do they?" Grinning, he hitched up his suspenders.
"Good thing I don't wear a belt. My pants would be down by my ankles. Then where
would I be?"

It was a feeble attempt at humor and took more breath than he had. Several
seconds passed before he got it back.

"What was I saying?"

"Your pants... "

He glanced at them and brushed away some dirt. Then he looked at me. "I'm
dying."

"That's ridiculous. You can't die."

He pointed to a purple lump on his arm as big as a grapefruit. And another under
his beard. "They're all over. It's how my lover died. Now I will too."

This was unacceptable to me. "Have you been to doctors? Have you seen anyone for
this?"

"What would they do? Give me medicine? I know about that. It's in short supply
as it is. And besides, I don't mind dying. I've been alive long enough. Longer
than I care to be."

"Legends don't die," I stammered.

He smiled, a look less of the sun as it used to be and more now of the moon. A
reflective smile. A sad, sweet one.

"It's too cold for me up north. That's why I'm here. Stay with me. Will you?"

I couldn't refuse. And am forever glad that I didn't. I stayed with him more
than a week, almost two, sending word to Sheila through a passing hiker that I'd
be delayed. After a few days, we moved to the high country, which was deserted.
Paul was forgetful but otherwise remarkably gay, an effect, I suppose, of the
illness, although I couldn't ignore the other truth, which was that he had lived
his life and now was ready, even eager, to die. He was also weak as a kitten,
and one morning he fell while we were traversing a snow field and ended up
sliding down the icy slope into a glacial lake at the bottom. He laughed at his
ineptitude, but the next day he developed a cough. The following morning it was
worse, and by that evening he could barely breathe.

We were in the drainage of a semicircle of tall peaks, at the foot of which was
a meadow fed by snowmelt. He dragged himself there, then collapsed, face up,
eyes closed. Between labored breaths, he asked to be cremated, his ashes
scattered. He whispered something else I didn't hear, then fell silent.

I made a pallet by his head and to pass the time told him stories, tales of Paul
Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, how they plowed the land into valleys and rivers,
moved the mountains and logged the forests. I told him the stow of the Blue
Winter, and the popcorn blizzard that froze the cattle. And the one about the
killer bees, and the carving of Puget Sound. Some time later he opened his eyes.

"I have loved," he said, with emphasis on the have, as though he were debating
some point, or answering a question. And then he died.

It took me two days to gather enough wood for the pyre. The blaze lit the sky.
And his ashes, when they cooled, made such a pile that to scatter them took two
days and a wind out of Heaven, and as far away as Spokane the sky turned dark
and people spoke of a new volcano, though no one ever found a trace.




MICHAEL BLUMLEIN

PAUL AND ME


In the course of the epic fantasy Beowulf (as you
scholars may recall), we're treated to a lot of boasting and
"kenning" (describing ordinary objects in grand terms). I
like to think that the impulse toward aggrandizement is one
of the prime driving forces in fantasy, that desire to tell a
whopper so big and yet so true that we've got to accept it on
some level. The American tall tale seems like a good example
of this sort of exaggeration, as do the urban legends that
have been popular more recently. But what happens to these
big boasts over time? That's just one question addressed in
this fantastic new fantasy from the author of The Movement of
Mountains.

I first met Paul in '71, the year I got out of college. I was bumming around the
country, crashing in city parks and church basements, cadging food and
companionship, avoiding the future. In keeping with the spirit of the times, I
considered my carefree and unfettered existence both highly evolved and
intrinsically righteous, when in truth I had no fucking idea. It didn't matter.
My girlfriend was in New York City, living in a commune and doing guerrilla
theater. My ex-girlfriend was in Vancouver, B.C. with her boyfriend, who'd fled
the U.S. because of the draft. Those two women were ballast for me. In my
imagination anyway, they were fixed points and gave me the security to do what I
wanted in between.

I'd been in Bozeman a few days when I was busted for stealing a sandwich. After
a night in jail, the judge threw me out of town. The first ride I got was headed
to Seattle, but I wasn't ready for another city quite yet. I got out in
Wenatchee, caught a ride to Carlton and two days later, a pack on my back and
enough brown rice to last a week, was in the high country north of Lake Chelan.

There is nothing like the mountains to feel simultaneously large and small.
Incomparably large, I should say, and insignificantly small. Distances are vast,
and yet life, because conditions are so exacting, is condensed. At the higher
elevations the trees and wildflowers, the voles that skitter in and out of
rocks, even the mosquitoes seem lilliputian. Which made Paul, at first glance,
all the more striking.

He was kneeling by the edge of a stream, taking a drink of water. He had on
those trademark jeans of his, the navy blue suspenders, the plaid shirt. From a
distance he looked as big as a house, up close even bigger. Because of his size
I expected him to be oafish, but he was nothing of the kind. He moved with
remarkable grace, dipping his cupped hand delicately into the water then sipping
from it with the poise of a lady sipping tea.

I was alone. It was July, and I had camped by a lake in a high meadow two
valleys over. That morning I had gone exploring, following the drainage creek
down as it fell through a boulder-strewn slope of fir and pine. An hour of
walking brought me to the confluence of another, similar-sized creek, at which
point the water picked up force. The trail leveled off for about a hundred
yards, then dropped precipitously. This was the site of a magnificent waterfall,
sixty, seventy feet high. Paul was at the far end of a deep pool carved by the
water. His hair was dark and short, his beard trim, his lips as red as berries.
Waves of reflected sunlight lit his face. He had the eyes of a dreamer.

The trail zigzagged down a granite cliff, coming out near the base of the
waterfall. The noise was deafening and masked my approach. By the time he
noticed me, I wasn't more than a stone's throw away. He stopped drinking, and a
frown crossed his face. Quickly, this gave way to a stiff kind of courtesy, a
seemliness and a handsome, though remote, civility. His public persona. I
apologized for intruding and was about to continue on my way when he motioned me
over.

Standing, he was thirty feet tall; kneeling, nearly half that height. His thighs
when I first met him were as wide as tree trunks; his biceps, like mountains. As
I drew near, he stood up and stretched, momentarily blotting out the sky. Then,
as though conscious of having dwarfed me and wanting to put me at ease, he sat
down and leaned back against a pine, which, though venerable, bent beneath him
like rubber.

It was he who spoke first. His voice was deep and surprisingly gentle.

"Hello."

"Hello," I answered.

"Nice day."

"Incredible."

He looked at the sky, which was cloudless. Sunlight streamed down. "Doesn't get
any better."

"Can't," I replied insipidly.

An awkward silence followed, then he asked if I came here often. I said it was
my first time.

"You?" I asked.

"Every few months. It's a little hot for me this time of year. In the summer I
tend to stay farther north."

I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was in long pants and a flannel shirt
with the sleeves rolled up partway. I suggested that he might be more
comfortable in other clothes.

"I like to stay covered," he replied, which nowadays would mean he wanted to
keep out of the sun but then was more ambiguous. I searched for something else
to keep the conversation alive.

"So what made you come?" I asked. "South, I mean."

He shrugged. "I don't know. I had an urge."

I nodded. Urges I knew about. My whole last year of college had been one urge
after another. Sex, drugs, sit-ins. As a life, it was dizzying. And now, having
hiked into the high country with the lofty purpose of getting away from it all,
of finding a little perspective, here I was talking to a man as tall as a tower.
I was no less dizzy than before, and beyond that, I was humbled by the
realization that the very impulsiveness I was running from was what had gotten
me into the mountains to begin with. I had to steady myself against a rock, and
even then my head spun. Thinking the light-headedness might in part be a product
of hunger, I took out a bag of peanuts. I offered him some, but he shook his
head.

"I'm allergic to nuts. I blow up like a blimp."

This was news to me. Of everything I'd read or heard about him, nothing ever
mentioned his being sick. I didn't know he could be.

"You don't want to be around," he said. "When you're used to pulling up trees
like toothpicks and knocking off mountain tops like cream puffs, it's no fun
being weak as a kitten. I'm a lousy invalid. Worse if I'm really sick. I had a
fever once that started a fire and chills that fanned the flames so hot that
half the camp burned down before the boys finally got it out. Then they had to
truck in three days of snow to cool me off."

I could picture it. "One time I had a fever like that. It made me hallucinate. I
was reading a book and the characters started appearing in my room. It was
freaky."

"This was no hallucination," he said indignantly.

In those days, theories of the mind were undergoing a radical transformation.
The word psychotic was being used in some circles interchangeably with the word
visionary, and people who hallucinated without drugs were held, at least
theoretically, in high esteem. Obviously, Paul didn't see it that way, and I
apologized if I'd offended him. At the same time it surprised me that he'd care.

"I have a reputation to uphold," he said.

It turned out he'd been getting bits and pieces of news from the lower
forty-eight and knew, for example, about the Vietnam War, the protests, the race
riots, women's liberation and the like. Institutions were toppling everywhere.
Traditions were in a state of upheaval. The whole thing had him worried, and I
tried to reassure him.

"As far as I know, your reputation's intact."

"For now."

"Don't worry about it."

"No? How about what's happening to your President Nixon? He was loved once. Now
look at him."

Love seemed a strong word, and even then, it was hard to believe Paul considered
himself in the same category as a man on his ignominious way out of the White
House.

"People are fickle," he said. "Times change, you don't, and what happens? All of
a sudden you're a villain."

"Fame's a bitch," I said without much sympathy.

He gave me a look, and for an instant I thought I had gone too far. What did I
know of impetuosity? He could squash me like an ant. But then he laughed, and
the Earth, god bless her, trembled too.

"I'm not famous, little man. I'm a legend."

* * *

We ended up spending a week together. He took me north to his logging camp,
which lay in a valley between two wooded ridges. He kept Babe in a pen at the
foot of the valley beside the river that drained it, and every afternoon for an
hour or two the ox would dutifully lie on his side and dam up the churning
water, creating a lake for the loggers' recreation. They bathed and fished, and
the few who knew how, swam. In winter, when the waters froze, they played hockey
and curling.

Each morning we had hotcakes for breakfast. It was a ritual the men adored. Half
a dozen of them would strap bacon fat to their feet and skate around the
skillet, careful to avoid the batter, which was coming out of full size concrete
mixers with stainless steel flumes ten feet above their heads. I heard stories
of skaters who'd fallen and been cooked up with the batter, dark-skinned men
who'd been mistaken for raisins, light-skinned ones, for blanched almonds.
Nothing like that happened while I was there. Paul was sensitive to the reports
of cannibalism and kept careful track of the skaters. If one fell, he'd quickly
pluck him up, and if there'd been a skillet burn, he'd rub it with that same
bacon fat they had on their feet. And that man would be offered the day off,
though none of them ever took it for fear of being accused a sissy.

After we had our fill of hotcakes, Babe would be led in and allowed to eat what
was left. One morning I saw him sweep up ten stacks with a single swipe of his
tongue, each stack the size of a silo. It took him less than a minute to stuff
it all in his mouth, swallow it down and bellow for more. It was a
bone-shattering sound. When it came to hotcakes, the Babe was not to be denied.

"They'll be the death of him," said Paul. "But I don't have the heart tO say
no."

"I'm not sure he'd listen."

"He's quite reasonable about everything else. Works straight through from dawn
to dusk. As many days as I ask. Never complains. Which makes it hard to deny him
his one weakness. I feel caught. Too lenient if I let him eat, too strict if I
don't."

"It's nice you care," I said. "But look. It's his choice. You're not responsible
for what he does."

Paul looked at me as if I were crazy, and maybe I was. On the other hand, maybe
I was just ahead of my time.

"Don't let him victimize you," I said.

His incredulity increased, then all at once he leaned over and cupped his hand
over his mouth.

"He can't," he whispered, as though letting me in on a big secret. "He's an ox."

The men in the camp worked in shifts around the clock, but as a rule Paul didn't
get started until after breakfast. But once he did, he was unstoppable. I saw
him log the entire side of a mountain in a single morning, strip the trees,
dress them and have them staged to be hauled out by lunch. He carried a
double-bladed ax that allowed him to chop two trees at once, and when he got
going, he could fell a whole stand in the time it took for the first tree to hit
the ground. He was a furious worker, with a wild spirit and a love for people.
In response, people loved Paul, and they came from all over to work for him.

But he had a quiet side too, and a need for solitude. One evening the two of us
took a walk over the ridge above camp and down into the next valley. The meadows
were lush with lupine and Indian paintbrush. There was aspen and spruce and a
lazy stream that flowed without a sound. We built a fire and gazed at the sky,
which that far north dimmed but never completely darkened, so that only the
brightest stars were visible. We shared our dreams. Being twenty-one, mine was
to taste life. Paul's was more specific.

"I want to fall in love," he said.

I laughed, but he was serious. And wistful. And uncertain that he ever could.

To my mind he already had. "You have a vision," I told him. "To tame nature, but
with a spirit that refuses to be tamed. You do love. You love freedom. You love
life."

"I want to love a man."

Timidly, his eyes sought mine. I could see how desperately his heart wanted to
open. I was twenty-one and eager for experience. To put it another way, I was a
rebel even against myself.

It was the first time I ever had sex with a man. Obviously, some things were
beyond my capability. Afterwards, we joked about it. He called me little tiger
and revealed how much he had always liked little people. His parents were small,
as was his older sister. At first they thought Paul had a glandular condition
and took him to prominent doctors and specialists who prescribed various
nostrums, all to no avail. They tried a Penobscot medicine man, who diagnosed
possession by a powerful spirit and performed a day-long ceremony designed
either to rid or to honor this spirit, they were never quite sure which. After
that they gave up and just let the boy grow, which he did with a vengeance. By
six months he required a cradle the size of a ship; by twelve he was plucking up
full-grown trees and tossing them in the air like match sticks. His parents did
their best to keep him out of trouble, but he had a spirit that couldn't be
harnessed. They had to move frequently, and by the time Paul reached
adolescence, they'd had enough. Unwilling and unable to control him any longer,
his parents abandoned him in the forests of the Upper Peninsula, a deprivation
to which he attributed his craving to love and be loved. There were four Great
Lakes at that time. Paul's tears made the fifth.

Our meeting one another was one of those rare instances of two people's paths
happening to cross at just the right time. We came together with equal passion,
equal need, and an equal degree of commitment. It was intense, satisfying and
brief. Paul told me his deepest secrets and I told him mine. Three days later we
parted company, promising to see each other again as soon as possible. Twenty
years passed before we did.

Again it was summer. I had recently separated from my wife. This was not my
college sweetheart, the one who'd gone to New York to fight the beast and topple
the patriarchy, although we had been married briefly. This was the woman I had
met after law school. She was coming out of a bad relationship at the time, a
bum and destroy affair with another woman, and was ready to try something new. I
was new, and we did famously for eight years, therapy for five, and now we were
trying separation. It was her idea, and I was having a lot of trouble adjusting.
A friend suggested I get away, and the first place I thought of, or the first
person, was Paul.

I took a plane to Wenatchee, picked up supplies and a car, then drove to
Carlton. The town had grown. With the opening of the North Cascades Highway
there were all sorts of new development. I saw no sign and heard no mention of
Paul, and it crossed my mind that, despite his fondness for little people, this
influx of commerce would not be to his liking. But I had a premonition that he'd
be at that waterfall where we first met, a vague an d vain idea that our lives
were somehow running in parallel, that I would be on his mind as much as he was
now on mine. It was a sixties kind of notion. Unfortunately, this was the
nineties. He was not there, and he didn't come. I waited three days, then left.

I drove back to Wenatchee, turned in the car and took a plane to Seattle. From
there I headed north, on successively smaller planes, ultimately commandeering a
four-seater Piper Cherokee that dropped me in the town of Ross River, a few
hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. This was the vicinity of
Paul's old camp, up in the Selwyn Range to the east, and here I heard mention of
him, a whisper really, not much more. But a whisper was all I needed. The next
day I was on my way.

It was August, and this was north. The days stretched on forever. I wandered in
twilight, caught glimpses of moose and bear, fox on the run, geese in migration.
I saw mountains decked in snow and a sky that shimmered with magnetism and
light. But no Paul. His camp was empty and by the looks of it had been for
years. The skillet that had cost old man Carnegie a year's output of steel was
warped and covered with debris. The pen where Babe had slept was down, the field
now overgrown with trees. I pitched my camp beside the creek he used to dam for
the men and cooked myself meals of desiccated sausage and freeze-dried eggs, all
the while dreaming of hotcakes swimming in maple syrup. I took day hikes,
resigning myself to the fact that this past, like my marriage, was over.

Then one day in a snowfield I saw footprints. Boot shaped, waist-deep, as long
and wide as a wagon. That evening I found him.

He was sitting by a lake in a talus-sloped basin above tree line, absently
tossing stones the size of tires into the water. The evening chill that had me
in parka and mittens didn't seem to be affecting him. He was wearing what he
always wore, though not in the way he always wore it. He was unkempt, his
shirttails out, his boots untied. One of the legs of his pants was torn, and his
beard, which I remembered as being neatly trimmed, was scraggly and matted.

The trail passed through scree, and the sound of shifting rock announced my
arrival while I was still high above the lake. He looked up and frowned, as
though unhappy at being disturbed. When he recognized who it was, the frown
turned to a kind of puzzlement. He could have helped me down, but instead, he
waited while I descended on my own.

It was a thrill to see him again. He said the same about me. But after the first
flush of excitement our conversation lapsed. He seemed listless and preoccupied.
I mentioned I'd been by the old camp.

"I saw you," he said.

"You saw me? When?"

"A couple of days ago."

My blood rose. "I've been looking for you nearly two weeks."

If this bothered him, he gave no indication of it. "I haven't been in the mood
for people."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm depressed."

"You? C'mon. You're a mover. A shaker. You're a dreamer. You're the opposite of
depressed."

"The world is leaving me. Everything I've ever loved is gone."

Gradually it came out. The logging industry had been in a prolonged slump.
Demand for timber was a fraction of what it had been. And most of the
first-growth forests were gone, and the livable land cleared. Paul couldn't
support a camp, and one by one the boys had left. Ole the Blacksmith, Slim
Mullins, Blue-Nose Parker, Batiste Joe -- all the old gang were gone. And then
one day Babe had died. It was the hotcakes, just as Paul had always feared.

"He had an eating disorder. That's what the vet said. And I said all right, an
eating disorder, so tell me what to do. But he didn't know, he'd never seen an
ox like that.

"It got to be harder and harder to control him. The smell of me mixing the
batter was enough to drive him crazy. One day he broke out of his pen and rushed
the kitchen. The hotcakes were still in the oven, and he swallowed the whole
thing at once, oven, burners, smokestack. Everything. Stupid ox. He burned to
death, from the inside out."

"That's awful."

"Saddest day of my life," said Paul.

"When did this happen?"

"A year ago. Maybe two."

"Did you have someone to talk to? Someone to help you through?"

He looked at me with woebegotten eyes. "Did. Then he died too."

Randy was his name. They were lovers, and Paul nursed him to his dying day.
Buried him deep and built a mountain on top for a grave stone. It was less than
a year since he'd passed away.

"Seems like yesterday," said Paul.

"I'm so sorry."

He sighed. "I keep wondering who's going to bury me."

"You planning on dying?"

"I dream of it sometimes. Is dreaming planning? You tell me."

A couple of years before, I'd had a bout of depression that responded nicely to
a short course of Prozac. Fleetingly, I wondered how many truckloads of pills it
would take to help Paul. I could hear the outcry from all those deprived by him
of their precious drug which made me weigh in my mind the good of the one
against the good of the many, a quandary made all the more difficult by the one
in this case having dedicated his whole life to the many. My brain was too weak
to solve that riddle, and fortunately, Paul interrupted my attempt.

"I don't grow old the same as you," he said. "It may be a thousand years before
I die. It may be never."

"Everyone dies."

"I'm as good as dead now. That's how I feel. The rivers are cut. The forests are
logged. My friends are gone. Who needs me now?"

"I do," I said. "I need you."

He gave me a skeptical look. "You're being nice."

"I'm being honest. My wife left me. I know what it's like to feel unwanted and
unloved."

Granted, my loss paled beside his own, but misery is misery and I needed to
talk. It was all he could do to listen. His attention kept wandering drawn
inward by a self-absorption that, frankly, offended me. Talking to Paul was like
talking to a pit, and finally, I gave up.

The silence of the high country took over, normally a vast and soul-inspiring
event. But neither of us was getting much inspiration. Paul was hopelessly
withdrawn, and I felt angry at being cheated of my fair share of attention. I
suggested, in lieu of conversation, a walk. Reluctantly, he agreed.

I had in mind a short stroll, something to stretch the legs and stir the blood,
a constitutional. We ended up on a three-day trek to the Arctic Circle and back.
Most of the time I rode on his shoulders, which he said made him feel useful.
The scenery was magnificent, the land utterly uninhabited. We had snow and wind
and skies the color of gemstones. I thought frequently of my wife and the early
years of our relationship. I missed her. The vast and untrammeled beauty in that
deserted land made my heart ache to have her back.

Paul seemed happy enough to be on the move, but when we returned, his spirits
again plummeted. I stayed with him a day or two more, listening to his troubles,
stifling my own, growing resentful while trying to appear otherwise. Eventually,
I couldn't stand it anymore.

"I have to get back," I told him.

He nodded morosely, then gave me a penetrating look. "Why did you come?"

It was the first genuine interest he had shown in me since I arrived.

"To see you," I answered.

"Why?"

I thought about it. "I had an urge," I said at length, flashing a smile.
"Remember urges?"

"I do. Yes. Vividly."

He gave me a look, beseeching maybe, and then fell silent. As the silence grew,
I began to feel defensive.

"I didn't come to replay the past, if that's what you're asking." I hesitated.
"I'm not gay, Paul."

"Is that why you came? To tell me that?"

This irritated me. "I came because I needed a friend."

He seemed to find this amusing. "And have I been?"

"It's been a rough time for you. I understand. Yes. Of course you've been a
friend."

"Of course." He made a parody of the words. "Just so you know, you haven't. Not
at all. You're patronizing and self-serving. You breeze in at your whim, then
you breeze out. You don't care." He made a motion with his hand of sweeping me
away. "Go away, little man. Enjoy your little life and your little troubles.
Your little country. Go away and do me the pleasure of not coming back."

That was '91. It was the culmination of a bad stretch of time. Two years before,
I had turned forty and Sheila, my wife, forty-one. We had put off having a
family because that's what our generation did, put off certain commitments in
order to indulge others. We traveled. We became enlightened. We fought
injustice. We didn't have children because we were children, children of the new
age. And then when we were ready, we couldn't. The equipment just wasn't up to
snuff. Sperm without heads, ovaries without eggs. It was pathetic. We'd grown
old before we'd even grown up.

We went to doctors. Took tests, hormones, injections. Tried the turkey baster,
the baking soda douche, the upside-down post-coital maneuver. We charted
temperature and checked mucus, fucked on schedule and the rest of the time not
at all. Were we having fun? Sure we were. And just to emphasize the point, we
upped our therapy to three times a week.

And those, believe it or not, were the good times. The bad started after we
visited the baby broker. Met her in an unfurnished tract home on an empty street
in a white bread suburb of Sacramento. Our hopes were high, but one look told us
it was all wrong. She was a right-to-lifer, smug and self-possessed. She marched
outside abortion clinics and hurled insults while on the side she gave Christian
guidance to unwed mothers. She had a photo album of all the children she had
placed and showed it to us like a lady selling Tupperware. Beautiful babies with
angelic faces, flawless parents with milky complexions and award-winning smiles.
She advised us to print up a thousand leaflets and pass them out in parking
lots. Stand on street comers with placards announcing our need. Beg for babies.

She told us, in essence, that we were to blame for our childlessness and if the
Lord willed us to be parents, then and only then would we be.

It just wasn't our thing.

We paid her her two hundred dollars, then went home and puked. Two months later,
Sheila moved out.

The shock of it sent me reeling as though gravity had suddenly ceased. I cried
on and off for weeks, couldn't get a purchase on things, felt disoriented and
wracked by a sense of guilt, failure, and self-doubt. In retrospect, that had
been my purpose in visiting Paul, to restore some degree of proportion and
balance to my life. He was, if nothing else, a man with his head on his
shoulders and his feet on the ground. Mr. Dependable, the quintessential
pragmatist. Or so I thought. When he turned out to be such a downer, when he
gave me nothing, when in the end he accused me of being a fraud, I felt
betrayed.

On my return from that ill-conceived trip, I threw myself into work, which at
the time was malpractice litigation. Perhaps in reaction to being hurt myself,
first by Sheila, then Paul, I went after those hospitals and doctors who had
hurt others. That most of these injuries were unintentional was beside the
point. Errors are errors, and in matters of law it makes no difference that all
of us are guilty. I sued on behalf of a woman who'd lost her baby at birth, a
man who'd lost an eye, a teenager with brain damage after being struck in the
head by the plaintiff, his father. We got a huge settlement for that one, and a
few months later we got a fat check in a sexual impropriety verdict against a
surgeon who'd been fondling his anesthetized patients. That case made the
newspapers, and my wife, who at the time was teaching a course on sexual
harassment at the local community college, called to offer her congratulations.
It was a little more than a year since we had separated, an anniversary that we
had diligently failed to observe. That date now safely past, we felt capable of
meeting for dinner. Sheila, I have to say, was ravishing. Evidently, she thought
the same of me. We couldn't keep our hands to ourselves, nor our laughter, nor
delight. One thing led to another, and we ended up spending the night together.
Three weeks later she called to say she was pregnant.

Now we have a two-year old son. He's got the build of an ox and the temperament,
alternately, of a rabbit and a mule. Lately, he's been constructing tall and
elaborate towers of blocks that he subsequently reduces to rubble with a kick.
In other games he is equally omnipotent, digging a hole in the sandbox, for
example, which he then fills with water and proclaims an ocean, before draining
it completely a minute later and naming it, triumphantly, a desert.

Paul was once like that, making lakes with his footsteps, straightening rivers
with a tug of his massive arms, causing tidal waves when he sneezed. A creator
and a destroyer. I've been thinking of him a lot lately.

The anger and hurt I felt after that last visit lessened with time, and as
sometimes happens, my feelings actually reversed themselves, so that I started
to blame myself and not him for being insensitive and unsympathetic. Now, with a
good marriage, a happy child, a successful job -- in short, with everything
going my way, I felt I could brave whatever resentment he might still harbor
toward me. I wanted to make peace.

This time I called first. Got the phone number of the Ross River post office and
asked the postmaster, who'd lived there his whole life, if he'd had wind of
Paul. He hadn't, not in a year or two. He told me to try farther north, up
around Mayo, but instead I called Carlton, where, after getting nowhere with one
lackey after another, I ended up talking to the head of the Chamber of Commerce.
He knew nothing of Paul, although he had heard reports, strictly off the record,
of some sort of creature on the loose. A Bigfoot, the locals were saying, which
he discounted as a hopelessly crass ploy by the environmentalist cabal to keep
the latest ski resort from being built. Bigfoot, he explained, had been listed
by some joker in the state senate as an endangered species. It was a pretext to
stymie development. What had happened could have been the result of almost
anything.

I asked what he was talking about.

"Oh," he said off-handedly. "A thirty-foot anchoring tower disappeared from the
top of one of our mountains the other day. Reappeared the next day in the same
spot, but upside down."

That sounded promising. I asked if he had any theories.

"It's been a heavy winter." There was a pause on the line. "You one of those
ecology nuts?"

"I'm looking for my friend," I assured him. "It's strictly personal."

There was another pause, as if he were calculating whether my actually finding
this person would be to the Chamber's benefit or not. Apparently, he decided it
would be, because he told me by all means to come up and have a look.

That was in May. In July I took a week off work, promising Sheila to be careful
and my son Jonah to bring back a present, and headed to the mountains west of
Carlton and north of Lake Chelan.

It had, indeed, been a heavy winter. There was still snow across many of the
trails, and the streams and rivers were running full. Penstemon and buttercup
bloomed in the meadows, and the young trees looked plump and green. I made camp
the first night near the base of a burnt-out pine and the next day hiked to the
waterfall. There was a level spot about fifty feet from the water's edge where I
pitched my tent, laid out my bedroll and promptly fell asleep.

When I woke, Paul was standing in the pool. He was facing upstream, so that I
saw him in profile. It was truly a shock.

His arms, once so massive, were the size of twigs; his legs, barely as big as
saplings. His beard was moth-eaten; his skin, blotchy and pale. He splashed some
water on his naked chest and neck, then cupped his hands to get a drink from the
waterfall itself. But he lacked the strength, so that the force of the water
kept pushing his arms away. He tried again and again, and then for a minute he
seemed to forget what he was doing. When he remembered, he sank to his knees and
drank directly from the pool. Then he crawled onto the shore, at which point he
caught sight of me.

His eyes narrowed, then he quickly tried to cover his naked body with his hands.
Just as quickly, I turned away to give him his privacy.

When he had dressed, he told me I could turn around. I apologized for taking him
by surprise.

He gave a little shrug. "It's all right. I expect I'm quite a sight."

I found myself nodding. "What's happened to you?"

"Clothes don't fit too well, do they?" Grinning, he hitched up his suspenders.
"Good thing I don't wear a belt. My pants would be down by my ankles. Then where
would I be?"

It was a feeble attempt at humor and took more breath than he had. Several
seconds passed before he got it back.

"What was I saying?"

"Your pants... "

He glanced at them and brushed away some dirt. Then he looked at me. "I'm
dying."

"That's ridiculous. You can't die."

He pointed to a purple lump on his arm as big as a grapefruit. And another under
his beard. "They're all over. It's how my lover died. Now I will too."

This was unacceptable to me. "Have you been to doctors? Have you seen anyone for
this?"

"What would they do? Give me medicine? I know about that. It's in short supply
as it is. And besides, I don't mind dying. I've been alive long enough. Longer
than I care to be."

"Legends don't die," I stammered.

He smiled, a look less of the sun as it used to be and more now of the moon. A
reflective smile. A sad, sweet one.

"It's too cold for me up north. That's why I'm here. Stay with me. Will you?"

I couldn't refuse. And am forever glad that I didn't. I stayed with him more
than a week, almost two, sending word to Sheila through a passing hiker that I'd
be delayed. After a few days, we moved to the high country, which was deserted.
Paul was forgetful but otherwise remarkably gay, an effect, I suppose, of the
illness, although I couldn't ignore the other truth, which was that he had lived
his life and now was ready, even eager, to die. He was also weak as a kitten,
and one morning he fell while we were traversing a snow field and ended up
sliding down the icy slope into a glacial lake at the bottom. He laughed at his
ineptitude, but the next day he developed a cough. The following morning it was
worse, and by that evening he could barely breathe.

We were in the drainage of a semicircle of tall peaks, at the foot of which was
a meadow fed by snowmelt. He dragged himself there, then collapsed, face up,
eyes closed. Between labored breaths, he asked to be cremated, his ashes
scattered. He whispered something else I didn't hear, then fell silent.

I made a pallet by his head and to pass the time told him stories, tales of Paul
Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, how they plowed the land into valleys and rivers,
moved the mountains and logged the forests. I told him the stow of the Blue
Winter, and the popcorn blizzard that froze the cattle. And the one about the
killer bees, and the carving of Puget Sound. Some time later he opened his eyes.

"I have loved," he said, with emphasis on the have, as though he were debating
some point, or answering a question. And then he died.

It took me two days to gather enough wood for the pyre. The blaze lit the sky.
And his ashes, when they cooled, made such a pile that to scatter them took two
days and a wind out of Heaven, and as far away as Spokane the sky turned dark
and people spoke of a new volcano, though no one ever found a trace.