I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

2. Top of the World

THE TOP OF the World is a clearing cut into a hill outside Chester, California, and from that height Wintric watches a column of white smoke pushing out hard from the mill. Inside, men strip and cut trees into boards. Some of the workers tell their children they’re making clouds — Wintric’s father had told him this years ago — but from the Top of the World Wintric can see the plume dissolve into the air well below the slow-shifting cumulus.

The bet is up to thirty dollars, and the.38 special feels just right in Wintric’s callused hands as he squeezes the gun’s handle. He’s gathered his long brown hair behind him in a band, and his left big toe claws at a fresh hole in his shoe from a nail he caught working construction out by the sewers. He kicks some of the construction paycheck to his mom and dad to keep the electricity on, but the betting windfalls he keeps for himself.

Young men he passes every day in high school shout obscenities as Wintric takes aim at a target the instigators squint to see. Today there’s a run on motherfucker and bitch. The rules: they can shout and move about, anything except touch him. Tall trucks with gnarly tires line up at their backs. Ponderosa pines surround them, many with white chalk lines around their trunks where they’ll be cut.

Kristen sits in Wintric’s Bronco, swings her long legs out the side, and sings to Metallica. Her green eyes look out through mirrored sunglasses on a scene she’s witnessed plenty of times, and she wonders if this is one of those outings when he’ll purposely miss so the second round of bets nets over fifty bucks. She stays in the truck in case they have to leave in a hurry, but she feels relaxed as she hears her voice mesh with James Hetfield’s. She watches Wintric take the verbal abuse in his green Levi’s T-shirt, his young face, the squint he never seems to lose. To her, he seems most alive on these betting runs and other afternoons when he drives her deep into the woods on back roads and chances getting the Bronco stuck. She knows Wintric’s routine and senses that he’s about to perform the wipe-the-forehead move. It’s hotter than usual for late May, and she guesses that if everything goes well she may score an ice cream soda out of this if he leaves in a good mood.

A new smile rounds at the corners of Wintric’s mouth. He knows this game’s conclusion, but he lets the boys in their flannel shirts go at him a little longer. He has to play the whole thing up, even lose sometimes, or people will stop wagering. He drops the gun to his side and shakes his head. He wipes his sweatless brow. His toe digs at his shoe. After a theatrical exhalation he lifts the handgun and pictures the new boots he will buy: black steel-toe boots on sale down in Chico. The advertisement he saw on television says you can drop a thousand pounds on them without so much as a dent. He keeps both eyes open and visualizes the bullet’s trajectory all the way to the target, a skill he’s been able to conjure for as long as he can remember. One of the boys calls Wintric’s mother a cunt, which he would normally fight over, but the money’s too easy to take the insult as an insult. Just a game, he thinks. Still, the word hits Wintric enough for him to say, “Through the capital P.”

The boy replies, “Make it fifty, motherfucker, and when I win, I’ll give half to your mom for services rendered.”

Wintric has cocked the gun, so the trigger pull is light. A Pepsi can falls in the distance and he’s wearing new boots.

Marcus ruins another black-and-white sundae. A little chocolate sauce on the bottom of the glass, a fat scoop of vanilla, marshmallow cream, a scoop of vanilla, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry. The dessert construction isn’t hard, but Marcus flusters easily, and the gray-haired woman in front of him shakes her head, trying to talk above the crowd and the spinning milkshake machines.

“No. Marshmallow in the middle, son. Not the bottom. The middle.”

Already Marcus’s fourth mistake and he hasn’t hit the lunch rush, but this summer has brought temperatures in the high nineties, and the line for the Lassen Drug Old-Fashioned Soda Fountain snakes out the door. These rushes exist only in the summer, when the lake brings the crowds up from the valley to their second homes and the main-street town awakens.

Marcus stands short and muscular behind the counter in a white shirt with a banana-split patch sewn onto the front. His work shirt is the only one he owns that isn’t black, and it showcases the drying splatter of an exploded strawberry shake. His hair is parted down the middle, and he doesn’t yet realize that a sliver of banana is lodged in his eyebrow. Two female coworkers shoot around him, filling orders for milkshakes, ice cream sodas, and cones. He dumps the ruined sundae into the sink and grabs another glass from beneath a NO OUTSIDE FOOD sign.

He turns back around to face the crowd and sees Kristen. She stands inside the glass front doors, touching one of the painted ceramic bowls for sale. Wintric is there.

Marcus is seventeen years old, and at the moment completely aware of his attire. Kristen has seen him working many times before, and even though their families have been close for years, her presence still unnerves him, and now, as she plants a cheek kiss on her boyfriend, the volume in the store lowers and he can hear his insides working. His vision blurs for a moment, and when he comes to he sees that the marshmallow ladle is at the bottom of the new sundae glass. He wants to throw the whole thing, wants to take off his shirt and burn it. The gray-haired woman turns to her companion and says, “Moron.” More people squeeze into the store. Some of them wear shirts printed with his town’s name on it. Marcus has the ladle in his hand and marshmallow at the bottom of the glass.

He reaches back for another glass, stealing a glimpse at Kristen in the large mirror, her gaze intently fixed on something, as are the other reflected faces, and several customers now point. Over his left shoulder a woman has her hands locked around her throat and her female friend bangs at her lower back with a closed fist. Like the others, Marcus freezes. The choking woman shades to maroon in seconds. Her forehead veins bulge, and one of his coworkers joins the woman’s friend beating at her back. Marcus knows what to do, as do many of the people in the shop, but something stays them. The back beating isn’t working, and he holds a sundae glass in his hand. A few people huddle closer, and Kristen takes a step in as well. Marcus stares at her and her frightened face, but suddenly she bounds forward, pushes the swinging women away, and reaches around the choking woman. Kristen vises down and Marcus notices the long muscles in her tanned forearms before they disappear into the woman’s midsection. A violent moan, and a thick pretzel segment explodes out.

The tense atmosphere flushes out after a minute and the crowd invites Kristen to the front of the line. Playing into Marcus’s simultaneous fear and desire, she and Wintric take seats at his section of the counter.

“Hey,” Wintric says, and Marcus nods.

“Maaarrrcus,” Kristen says. She buries herself in the menu, and despite her confident tone, Marcus can tell she’s still coming down off the adrenaline. Kristen only ever orders one of two things — a cherry or lime ice cream soda — and he’s never seen her peruse a menu before.

“That’s why they have the policy about outside food,” Marcus says, pointing to the sign above the glasses. “We only sell ice cream. Can’t choke, you know, on ice cream.” Kristen peeks up at him with a polite smirk before returning to the listings. Marcus would tear his tongue out if he could. Wintric orders a chocolate malt and she gets a banana split. The malt is easy, but at the store they have a policy on the order of the strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream in the split — each has a specific position and topping — and although Marcus can recite the last twelve U.S. presidents in order, he can’t remember the flavors’ banana-split positions at this nervous moment, so before he scoops the ice cream he tilts his shirt up and examines the patch.

Marcus places their orders in front of them, but before he turns away Kristen reaches over and touches him on the arm and draws him closer. Confused, Marcus glances at Wintric, but he’s already into the malt. Marcus hesitates, but leans in after she says, “Come here, Marcus,” his name from her lips like magic. Her vanilla perfume intoxicates him as he advances ear first, but she repositions his head straight on. She stares just above his eyes and swipes at his lower forehead twice.

“There,” she says, leaning back. “A little banana.”

Wintric and Kristen swim naked in Lake Almanor while the Bronco’s stereo plays Incubus out the open windows. The water appears mercury silver and dense just after midnight. They tread out past where they can touch, and slithery plants rub at their feet and calves. The low water level reveals random stumps poking up from the beach. The moon blooms full. To the west, a cloud of lit smoke from the mill.

They laugh about a teacher who always has coffee breath, about the future occupation survey they were forced to take in class, and Wintric tells Kristen he signed papers to enlist in the army. He leaves two weeks after graduation. He’ll pocket a bonus for signing up. She’s guessed at a departure of some kind for a while — he said he’d never work the lumber — but Wintric’s casual announcement while she treads water surprises her. She lets herself sink to the lakebed, only a few feet below. Her feet settle in cool mud and she stays there for a moment, inside herself, wondering what she’ll do next.

She crests the surface splashing but silent, and retreats to the shore. The moment deserves a scene. She wants to cry, wants the tears. She needs him to witness them running down her cheeks, but they aren’t coming. For a reason she can’t capture, the news itself troubles her only lightly. She knows the town sends lots of people into the military, and her father has told her that the service has saved many of the local kids, but Wintric? Her mind spins, but comfortably, and she searches for a response that makes sense. He should have told her weeks, months ago — only a month’s warning after two years together?

Some of her classmates already celebrate their near-future plans to leave Chester for faraway towns and universities, a course she hasn’t pursued, and she knows couples who have promised to stay together when one half leaves, but long distance rarely ends well — it just ends. In the forty seconds she’s had to process the news, she’s decided that if Wintric asks, she’ll stay together, will, if he asks, maybe even go with him, but everything is too new, there’s no expectation, only a calmness, this unanticipated reaction to his announcement.

She walks to the shore and the lake recedes down her body and the mud at her feet hardens to pebbles. Her skin throbs with a recovering sunburn and the soft air evaporates the moisture away. She poses in front of Wintric’s lifted Ford, low beams at her back, disappointed that she can’t recall all the words to the song playing. After a minute the rocks dig at her bare feet so she steps onto a nearby stump.

She calls out over the stereo, “How much is the bonus?”

Wintric has stayed in the water, letting her go about her business. He’s witnessed her productions before, and is a little surprised there aren’t any tears. He swims in to where he can touch and revels in the sight of Kristen’s moonlit body, her constant, unabashed confidence.

“Thirty thousand.”

“You’re going to the war.”

“Is there anything else?”

Something swims between his legs and he grabs his genitals. He isn’t sure of all the details of his enlistment, about what he’ll be asked to sacrifice, but he knows the posts are nowhere near this place, that the travel will take him away from these pine-filled valleys that cut him off from what he calls “civilization.” There are other lakes in the world like the one he stands in. He would struggle to name any, but he’s sure there are cities with lakes right in the middle of them, and when you’re done swimming you walk a block to your apartment or to other city things that await your call, and the sun shines warmer. He wants more than a taste, he wants to stay, and not in Chico or Redding or Red Bluff. Farther. He longs for strangers surrounding him, people who don’t know about his family’s crumbling house or his father’s bad back or his repeating sixth grade. He needs the separation, even if it means aiming a weapon for real.

Wintric watches Kristen balance on the stump. He’s sure she will never leave this place. Once when he asked her about her fantasy vacation, she said she’d always wanted to drive through the massive redwood over near the coast. She wasn’t sure of the tree’s exact location, only that she’d seen photos of cars halfway through the trunk. It was so close by, her dream getaway, he had to laugh. She argued that people come from all over the world to drive through that tree. “If you’re from Japan or France, driving through the tree is a big deal. Why can’t it be a big deal for me?” He knew she was right, and he thought about how the only thing interesting about travel was that it’s away from where you are.

Kristen turns around, faces the low beams, and Wintric studies her silhouette, her lean shoulders, the lines of her slightly spread thighs up to their intersection. Her hips have filled out, and Wintric pictures his hands there.

Wintric hobbles out of the lake and strides to her. Her skin smells like fish, and he smells his own arm and it’s the same. His face comes to her stomach and he kisses her belly button. She sways her hips and he places his hands on them and listens to her singing.

They decided early never to say “I love you” to each other. Even so, Kristen is all he has known of romance and trust. He kisses her right hip, then runs his tongue along where it meets her thigh.

“Wintric,” she says.

Though he can’t fathom what death or war means, he’d want her to get the folded flag if everything came to that, and he wonders if that’s what love is, and he thinks that it is. He reaches up from her hips and runs his palms down her sides, up to her breasts, down her ribs, her stomach.

“Not here,” she says.

“Please,” he says.

Wintric squats down and kisses the inside of her left knee, and she runs her hands through his wet hair.

“You’ll have to cut your hair,” she says. “You’ll look bad with short hair.”

He kisses the inside of her right knee, her inner thigh.

“I could look great. You never know.”

“A bowling ball,” she says. “A tennis ball. Round.”

His hands on her hips.

“The lights are on,” she says. “At least get the lights.”

“Low beams.”

Her hands through his hair, her fingers on his scalp underneath. Can he feel better than this?

“They charge for haircuts in the army?” she says. “Stupid if they do.”

“Are you kidding?” he says. “It’s thirty grand a cut.”

Marcus prays his erection will go down before the bell rings. He has about ten minutes left in class, but Kristen sits two rows ahead to the right, wearing a white cotton shirt, and every time she leans over to talk to her friend he catches a flash of the top of her breasts. He untucks his black shirt. A female voice trickles down through the air, something about lawyers.

The results of the career questionnaire rest on Marcus’s desk. He darts his eyes back to the top of it: (1) Doctor, (2) Teacher, (3) Accountant, (4) Lawyer, (5) Services. A week ago he filled in the far-right bubble on each line and let a computer tell him what career options there are for high schoolers who answer “Very Interested” to every question.

Even after glancing at the results multiple times, seeing his name above “Doctor” sends a warm surge through him, but when he closes his eyes he can’t picture himself in the white coat, can’t feel anything but the word and the sound of it from Kristen’s mouth, the same mouth that he dreams of at night. He imagines her naked in his bedroom doorway, walking toward him, taking back the covers, saying his name, and going down on him.

The lecture ends and the counselor weaves up and down the rows, helping anyone with his or her hand raised. Marcus’s hands are in his lap, but Miss Sheroll stops beside him. She appears tired.

“They don’t have an ice cream question so you blow it off? Keep the paper, Marcus. Keep it and think of what you won’t be. When you wake up, we can talk.”

The bell rings, and she leans in with bad coffee breath. “Not everyone has to go to the mill.” Then, with a smirk: “I wouldn’t assume they’ll be hiring.”

Marcus stays put, waiting, and Kristen walks up his row, books at her chest. He flexes his right arm, leans in enough to get a whiff of her vanilla perfume.

Wintric and Kristen eat lunch in Reno before his flight to basic training. The slot machines near the casino buffet bang out their solicitations. The carpet underneath them is a dated turquoise-pink-and-black stew. He wears a gray shirt with Army across the front, and his hair reaches the middle of his back. He has put away four platefuls of shrimp.

Wintric has never been on a plane before, and his buddy told him to watch for the turbulence, but he isn’t afraid. When he imagines the inside of the plane, the images are from the movies and the seats are large and flight attendants in tight uniforms carry trays of drinks.

“Are you going back for more?” Kristen asks.

“No, I’m good.”

“Is it time?”

“You want me out of here?” Wintric says, and stares at her to make sure she feels the joke, but he knows she’s his equal.

“As soon as possible,” she says. “Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything. Afghanistan has world-class shrimp.”

“Got to get through Fort Benning first.”

Kristen wears his favorite outfit, but she hasn’t caught him glancing at the plunging neckline.

From the casino floor, Wheeeel ooooff Fortune!

“Will you send me your hair?”

“What?”

“Your hair. It’s something. Stick it in the mail.”

“You want me to overnight it?”

“Stick it in the mail.”

“Fine.”

“They’re gonna wonder where the heck you came from with your hair.”

“The army has to have people like me. That’s the point. Rich big-city people don’t enlist. Why would they?”

“It saves the kids of our town.”

“What does?”

“The army saves. That’s what my dad says.”

“We’ll see. Not sure what I need to be saved from.”

“No. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay.”

She spoons soft-serve vanilla ice cream into her mouth.

“They take girls, K. I’m only half joking.”

“Yeah. Well. I haven’t thought about it.”

“I don’t know if I want you to think about it.”

“Be fair. If it’s good enough for you…”

“Okay. Let’s not talk about it right now.”

“So you’re going to send me your hair?”

“If you want. I’m serious. I will.”

At the airport Wintric checks his bag, and they walk together through the central lounge. A band from the local middle school plays a poor version of the William Tell Overture in the lobby and they stop to listen near a hand-painted sign and a donation bucket. The clarinets are especially awful — a squeak emanates every third bar — and the trumpets fail to keep the momentum even at half tempo. Neither Wintric nor Kristen imagined a soundtrack to their goodbye, but they hear the music and stop. The aging carpet stretches another fifty feet to the metal detectors, but this is the spot. Behind them on the wall is an advertisement poster for Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Wintric has asked Kristen not to write until he gets settled, and even then he isn’t sure how many reminders of home he wants right away. They hug, and as he pulls away he looks down her shirt.

“I have a window seat,” he says.

He walks away, the bottom of his ponytail bouncing in step. He doesn’t wave, and when he passes through the metal detector he lifts his hands up.

Marcus has twenty minutes before he enters, stage left. He realizes that everyone is worried about him, even though the cast is mostly people from the retirement home and other high school kids who don’t mind a horrible-paying summer gig. The director told Marcus that it would be okay to sit out until he is more comfortable. Julian, an ostentatious seventy-year-old with a bad hip, has memorized Marcus’s lines and could cover for him, but Marcus refuses. Marcus knows the words, but his demeanor in and out of character is the opposite of what the director needs: his character is supposed to be fiery and impassioned — a man fighting the railroad for his land — and Marcus is neither, though he may look the part with his impressive wrestler’s body. He has done poorly in rehearsals, but this is community theater in a small town, so they let him keep the part because he knows the lines and helped paint the backdrops.

His mother sits somewhere in the darkness of the half-filled elementary school auditorium. He wonders if she smells of Beam, her familiar breath-scent since his father lost a hand delimbing trees for the mill. The smell no longer bothers Marcus. His mother never drives drunk, and at least she’s there in the uncomfortable folding chair when other parents are not.

The actors sweat under the lights. Three pages before he goes on. Marcus wears thin overalls. His hat is too large for him, but he’s ready. He wonders if Kristen has come and decides that she has: he imagines she has sneaked in alone for his performance and she’s leaning forward, mouth slightly open, waiting for his entrance. She smiled when he told her about the play, and although there’s no reason to think that she’s there, Marcus doesn’t care. A hand pats him on the back and he steps out onto the stage.

The space is larger than he remembers, and as he takes the long walk to the aged railroad man, his mother shouts his name. The crowd laughs. Marcus is supposed to address the railroad man, but he stares out to the darkened back row as he speaks his lines. The conversation lasts six minutes, and Marcus maintains his focus. The railroad man ad-libs “Look at me” twice and then gives in and gazes at the back of the room as well. The other actors follow.

Marcus doesn’t realize that Kristen is actually sitting in the fourth row, where the cusp of stage light fades out. One of her girlfriends is playing a corn farmer, and Marcus had jokingly told Kristen that she should come and watch him forget his lines. Kristen hears Marcus speaking to the railroad man, a possible deal and a rejection, but they don’t look at each other, and quickly the play has changed in a way no one quite understands.

The audience listens closely, the awkwardness forcing them to shift in their seats. They want to know what they’re missing. They want to understand why no one looks at anyone else. Several glance over their shoulders to the back of the room to check if something is there. The railroad man angers, demands the five thousand acres: “Forty thousand dollars is more than fair!” But the farmer is trancelike, as if he can’t hear the offer or the threat that follows.

Marcus is in the middle of his monologue: “My land! My soul! Inseparable! The rebirth of our lives in the soil! This seasonal passion! Roots of my land! My Nebraska!”

He stands with his arms at his sides, slightly hunched over, gaze still locked onto the back row. He speaks to Kristen in the seat he can’t see. He’s placed her there and put her in a white cotton shirt. He enchants her, seduces her now. He hurls his lines forth, body slouched but his voice powerful and confident.

Kristen spots the farmer’s hat sliding down, his strong arms at his sides, everything odd but captivating. His voice has taken on a desperate but fierce rhythm, and his pleas fill the room like nothing else in Act I. She compares this actor onstage to the Marcus she’s known: playing in the back yard at family barbecues, looking at her longingly in ninth grade, exchanging daily pleasantries in the high school hallways, working at the soda fountain, wrestling, his singlet and triceps at the one match she attended. She’s heard he might get on with the mill.

The door opens at the back of the auditorium — a late arrival — and the hallway sheds enough light to illuminate the empty back rows. Marcus hesitates long enough for the director to whisper his next line. His hat has slouched down again, and he grabs the brim and flings it into the crowd. He glances around at the railroad man and the other actors as they all stare at the back of the room.

Kristen watches the farmer’s hat fly up and float down into the ambient light. The room is silent, and the entire cast focuses on a far-off point as the farmer takes in their faces for the first time. The farmer appears confused and stammers: vocal heartbreak. His hair is crazy.

“Her bosom! Her long reach around us! The spring like a… like a slow kiss!”

His pace is fast and his voice cracks. His eyes dart back and forth across the auditorium, and the audience squirms, some now staring at their feet, the awkwardness too much, but a few reach out to meet him, entranced. Kristen squeezes her knees. Her feet tingle. She sees his eyes pass over her. Is any of this for her? Is it all for her?

The farmer appears lost onstage, and he delivers his final words exiting, apparently too soon, because he’s still speaking even after he’s past the ruffled curtain: “And my heart in the wheat!” There is no scene break in the play, but the actors are speechless, the audience silent. Everyone hears Marcus, offstage, stamp his feet on the floor and call out, “Shit!”

He hits himself on the side of his head before leaving the building. He has more dialogue in Act III, but he doesn’t return. When someone has to deliver the farmer’s triumphant monologue about the unrailroaded land, a confident Julian limps out to center stage in the retrieved hat, but before he reaches his mark, the crowd buzzes and Marcus’s mother screams out “Bullshit!”

Above an old pair of Nike basketball shoes and Kristen’s prom dress, on the top shelf of her closet, sits a box containing two feet of Wintric’s hair. She hasn’t moved the box in four months. Wintric’s absence no longer occupies her daily thoughts, but when she does think of him — when she spies the box or when he sends a postcard of the Garden of the Gods, letting her know he’s been stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs — his presence arrives, intense and warm. He has contacted her only twice, and each time he has written he has asked that she not contact him, said that he is still sorting out the military life and that her words would make him lose focus. When friends ask her if she and Wintric are still together, she pauses and answers “No,” but she despises the way that answer arrives more quickly to her lips with each passing day.

On the far right of the closet hang four white shirts and three pairs of brown pants, her work clothes. The supermarket — the only one in town — loans the employees a logoed apron for each shift. The block lettering reads, Holiday.

An athlete in high school, Kristen was all-district in basketball and volleyball, and she’s considered asking her old basketball coach if she might serve as an assistant, maybe one day take over the volunteer job. She thought about college until the nerves and lack of money became real, so she took the checkout job after graduation and promised herself that she’d earn an associate’s degree from Lassen College over in Susanville, but already she can’t imagine a future in which she’ll start classes. She doesn’t love or hate her job; it’s just her life now, and most days she doesn’t allow herself to dream up alternatives, save maybe the coaching gig in a couple years. If she keeps out of trouble, she can get a fifty-cent raise every six months.

After work one evening Kristen grabs her sleeping bag and drives out to a campsite at Domingo Springs. When she pulls up, her two girlfriends are setting up a tent near a stand of dead trees, and one of them holds up and shakes a bottle of rum. Experienced outdoors, Kristen knows her friends have picked the worst possible October location. There’s not much protection from the breeze, the bathrooms are upwind, and the comforting springs are a good fifty yards away, but Kristen cares little — this is how she relaxes. Local places like Domingo Springs, Willow Lake, Drakesbad — the trees, clean water, Mount Lassen nearby — form the limits of the world she knows and support her personal edict: Why go somewhere else when you’re happy where you are? The campsite is only twenty minutes from town, but far enough. She drops her sleeping bag and backpack by the nearly assembled tent and heads off to find dry wood for the fire.

Newly hired, Marcus drives his Forest Service truck up to the payment box at the campground. He opens each numbered slot and marks his camp sheet. His uniform almost matches the light green truck. He drives ten miles an hour through the one-way maze of campsites, each with a crusty barbecue grill and picnic table. Some of the campers haven’t paid, but it’s mainly locals this time of year, and he ignores their five-dollar sins and motors along with the window open, returning waves and stares. He enjoys it out here — he recognizes a few of the people, and they treat him with respect.

As he rounds a curve he sees Kristen’s car and the three girls huddled around a fire too large for the pit. The truck stops, and before he can convince himself otherwise he is halfway to them, kicking at pine needles along the way. One of the girls tosses the bottle at the tent, only to have it slide down the zipped-up screen entrance. He attended school with all of them and expects them to call his name in relief, but it’s too dark and all they make out is his uniform. One of Kristen’s friends has hit on Marcus a couple times, and he’s disappointed she’s among the group.

Kristen, not quite drunk, stands. She has to focus hard to recognize Marcus, but when she does she says his name, and his shoulders relax. The girls invite him to join them and Kristen fetches the bottle, which Marcus accepts.

He says nothing about their payment, nothing about the tall fire so close to the dry trees, but he does talk, sparingly at first. Yes, he works for the Forest Service now. He patrols campgrounds throughout the area. He’s self-deprecating and fit, and soon chugging the bottle. One of the girls stares at him and smiles.

Marcus avoids Kristen’s eyes, and for the first time she wants him to look at her. They all laugh and talk about high school, and Kristen tells a story about a girl fight she thinks is new to him, but halfway through she remembers that Marcus was there. She asks him why he didn’t interrupt her, why he’s so quiet, but he just nods and stares at the fire. She talks to the other two girls now, recalling the summer play, breathless and stunned, this Marcus a genius. “The fucking wheat!” she says. She describes the farmer, the silence, the frantic tension, the craziness in Act III.

Marcus glances over. He can’t feel his hands.

It’s eleven-thirty when one of the drunk girls asks Marcus if he has to report back. He’s an hour late, and they’ll think he fell asleep, or worse. Marcus tries to stand up straight, and his legs take a moment to support his weight. When he starts the truck, the fuel gauge shows empty and the orange light is illuminated. He’s excited and overwhelmed, but he keeps the truck on the road while scanning for deer. After he coasts into the Forest Service station lot on fumes, he picks up his phone. No missed calls.

Late morning in early February, and the Forest Service supervisor tells Marcus they’re letting him go. He doesn’t argue, but the supervisor lists the reasons besides overmanning: sleeping on the job, failing to prevent the tree fire last fall at Domingo Springs, having an ambivalent attitude. She tells him that she thinks the mill has started hiring again.

Marcus senses his own smile. It’s been two months since he started seeing Kristen, and although there have been no promises, they meet up regularly and have agreed to get together later that night.

The station is a mile out of town, two to his apartment, and Marcus walks back in the dirty snow. He has yet to save up for a car, but an old yellow motorcycle stands for sale in his neighbor’s yard for a hundred and fifty bucks. He stays off the shoulder of the road — the last level inches before the mounded snow berm — and passes the airport. To his right are a couple single-prop jobs tied to the tarmac and a refurbished WWII fire bomber that’s about to take off to hit an incredibly early blaze far south in the canyons. Marcus has heard about the winter fire, but there’s no smoke to prove it’s real.

He passes a worn-down storage shed and a decent Mexican restaurant — the sixth restaurant in the doomed location — and he raises his arm to slap the green city-limits sign and reads the familiar POP 2200 and ELEV 4525. A couple years ago rumors floated that they were taking a new census, but no one ever came to his family’s door. Then, without notice, the sign changed: the town lost twenty-four people. No one knew who the departed were. The county didn’t repaint the elevation, and the last 5 has almost faded away completely.

Marcus strolls past the entrance to the mill, by the red barber shop/laundromat combo, by the Pine Shack Frosty, and he smokes a cigarette as he gets to the Beacon gas station. The smoking is a recent habit. He can’t get enough of the smell on his clothes and in his apartment. He doesn’t cough at all, and he jogs to equal everything out. Kristen won’t touch cigarettes, but she keeps quiet about the smell when she heads over to his place.

Marcus takes a drag, and from the gas station door someone appears dressed in camouflage, and for a moment Marcus’s world explodes and he projects in flashes—Wintric, home, hero, breakup, Kristen, empty, a gun—but the man turns and he sees that he’s not Wintric, just a no-name hunter returning from a morning out. Marcus’s blood runs back to his legs and his heart settles. It’s at this moment that he imagines, then wishes for, an accident wherever Wintric is—Afghanistan? Fort Carson? At first thought it’s not Wintric’s death, just disfigurement, a lost hand, leg. But no, he thinks, it has to be his face, turned unrecognizable. He pictures a mash of swirled flesh, but he wonders if there’s too much sympathy and attention in that, no matter how repulsive. Having heard about ill-equipped Humvees from his uncle, Marcus considers an IED ripping Wintric in half from the bottom up — an instantaneous death. There’s sympathy there, he thinks, but it won’t last.

Marcus walks past the Holiday supermarket and a silent surge hits him from being this close to Kristen, only a parking lot, a brick wall, four small eat-in tables, a rack of magazines, and two cash registers away. He could go in and surprise her — she might like that — but he talks himself out of it.

He walks by the Kopper Kettle and the U.S. Bank and pauses in front of the ice cream shop where he used to work. A woman dusts the empty barstools. He passes the old theater converted into a church and the park with bent basketball rims and stops on a bridge over the North Fork of the Feather River. He works his mind toward hopeful images of the evening: Kristen sliding her pants off, her bra, standing in his doorway. He pauses to survey the cold water of the river, and he wonders how the lake can sit low in the summer with all the water running underneath him.

When he arrives, his apartment is cold, icicles hanging from the eves in front of the living room window. He turns the thermostat up to eighty, hoping it’ll hit sixty-five. Uncooked pasta sits in a pot for the dinner he had planned to throw together after work. The living room recliner calls to him, and he lights another cigarette. Marcus stares out the window, over at the post office, an old building with two flights of stairs. They’re finishing construction on a path for the handicapped. Marcus has never been in a wheelchair and wonders if anyone in the town will use the ramp. The route to the doors will be longer but easier on the legs.

At dinner Kristen gives him a plain red shirt before pouring herself a glass of cheap red wine.

“Something new,” she says.

He hates the shirt but promises her he’ll think about wearing it.

After the pasta they relax on the couch and flip through the television channels. Channel six, eight, eleven, twelve, and Kristen tells him to stop.

“Keep it here,” she says. The evening news.

Marcus holds the remote, index finger on the black channel button, ready to press. Colin Powell inside the UN, photos of Iraqi buildings taken from space, arrows, ultimatums. Marcus stays silent and listens for Kristen’s breathing, but all he hears is his apartment’s undersized heater humming and Powell’s voice: “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more.” In his peripheral vision Marcus sees Kristen put the tip of her finger in her mouth. As the segment winds down, he prays for anything except a piece about car bombings or friendly fire or any mention of Afghanistan, and his fears soon dissipate when a mug shot of Phil Spector appears in a small box near the left side of the news anchor’s head. “Producer of Let It Be arrested for murder.”

Marcus turns off the television and puts his arm around Kristen.

“We should get out of here. Go somewhere.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll go.”

“Mexico is warm.”

“Dreams. Only dreams.”

“We can drive.”

“You’re not serious. We work, remember?”

“Closer?”

“Marcus.”

“I’m serious. Any place in the world you could go, where’d it be?”

She pictures the gaping hole in the gigantic redwood, envisions her car driving through, a thousand growth rings surrounding her, but she feels Wintric in the vision, feels him in the car with her.

“San Francisco,” she says. “Go see Bonds.”

“Doable. In a couple months, it’ll be perfect.”

Eleven at night, and she asks Marcus if he wants her to do anything special, and he summons the courage to say yes. He’s nervous, but after hundreds of classroom daydreams, he can give her detailed instructions. He undresses, positions himself in bed under all the blankets, closes his eyes, and waits. The streetlight shines in enough that when he opens his eyes, he sees her in the doorway and knows it’s no longer a fantasy.

“Kristen,” he says.

She stands in the doorway. She hears her name and waits in the near darkness. She knows he’ll call for her again.