Men from Boys

Life Before the War John Straley

Afterward, when I was riding the train back to Anchorage, I noticed that the sky over the interior of Alaska was so vast it felt as if the top of my head was rising into the air. The few clouds around the top of Mount McKinley’s twenty-thousand-foot summit seemed like wisps of inconsequential smoke. This is the mountain the Athabaskan people call Denali or ‘The Great One’, and I would not have argued with them.

Earlier in the day I hadn’t noticed the mountain. I had been in a sour mood and it may have been because I was only serving a subpoena. The lawyer who had hired me to dump these papers had no understanding of Alaskan geography. He had called from Eugene, Oregon, and told me that cost was no object. His client wanted the papers served right away. He represented the wife in a divorce case and she knew her ex-husband was climbing McKinley. She wanted the papers dropped on him in the post-coital high he would be experiencing after he had summited North America’s tallest peak.

The lawyer had no idea where I lived in relation to Mount McKinley. Through a friend of his, he knew I was in Alaska. That I lived in the southeastern panhandle of the state meant nothing to him. To ask me to serve papers on someone near Denali would be like hiring an investigator from Baltimore to drop papers on someone in Montreal. Denali was a hell of a long way away: almost a day of flying, one leg west to Juneau, then an hour and a half by jet to Anchorage, and then a train ride of some two hundred miles to the town of Talkeetna, which served as headquarters for the area climbers.

I told him all this. I told him I lived on an island on the Gulf of Alaska and that there were easier ways to get his papers served but he didn’t listen. He had tried some Anchorage servers and apparently wasn’t happy with their attitude so he settled on me and whatever expenses I wanted to rack up. His client was paying for it and she was not particular. She was going to nail her ex for all the legal expenses anyway so, in a sense, I would just be spending his money.

The money, what there would be of it, didn’t matter much as I stood in front of Eagle’s Nest bar in Talkeetna. I had the papers sitting in my pocket and they felt less like a paycheck than an overdue library book I needed to dump. The husband’s name was Garth Holebrook; he was an anaesthesiologist from Portland. I had found him through talking to the kid who worked the desk at a flight service in Talkeetna. A plane had brought Dr Holebrook back from the base camp on the mountain and the kid knew that the climbers would be celebrating in the Eagle’s Nest.

Where I live, it rains hard. Even in these early days of July the clouds can move in from the sea and curl against the mountains for weeks at a time. Living in southeastern Alaska is sometimes like living with a head cold. So for me the summer air in the northern interior has a biting narcotic thrill. The air is so dry and pure it can feel like a hit of cocaine. I looked through the one window into the bar to get a vague layout of where people were sitting, then I took a long breath in through my nose and walked into the clattering bar.

Serving court papers is a straightforward job. The server has no real authority other than his physical presence. The subpoena gains its authority from the judge. Once in the physical possession of the named recipient all arguments are channeled through the court. The server only has to identify the recipient and hand the papers over. The recipient doesn’t have to be happy about it. They don’t even have to hold them in their hands; they just have to acknowledge their receipt. Ripping them up in your face is acknowledgement enough. I keep a copy and take it back to the court, then I collect my hundred bucks and expenses.

My father had been a Superior Court judge. He had encouraged me to follow my sister’s path into law school, but I never did. He could never understand that I liked this end of the law. I liked talking to people and I liked the physical authority which comes from wandering around in the real world. I liked living out from under the tangle of legal jargon. Serving subpoenas had always been enough for me. I was happy to leave the arguments to my sister and my good father.

Inside the bar six men and three women were sitting at one long table near the back. The climbers sat behind pitchers of beer looking drowsy and a little bit sad. All of these well-heeled adventurers had reverse racoon tans: weathered faces but pale around the eyes. The men had their fleece shirtsleeves rolled up to their elbows and their two-hundred-dollar sunglasses perched on their foreheads. I sat in a booth across the bar and looked over the top of the lunch menu toward the table where I was fairly certain my guy was sitting.

I had a description of him from the lawyer. Dr Holebrook was forty-eight years old, had brown hair and brown eyes, was six foot three and weighed one hundred ninety pounds. He was sitting at the head of the table next to a blonde woman wearing a red beret and a white sleeveless undershirt. They were leaning toward one another, their heads almost touching, speaking softly.

I never drop papers on someone when it causes embarrassment, not if I can help it. I once had to serve papers on a Tongan prizefighter in Ketchikan. He was working for a logging outfit back in the days when logging camps were good places to hide out. He had a reputation for having a bad temper. I watched him for several days, in the bar or in the café early in the morning waiting for the rest of his crew to show up. He seemed like a friendly guy and was always in a conversation with the waitresses or someone at the counter. Finally I got him as he was coming out of the bathroom and he simply thanked me in a soft, almost feminine voice as he stuffed the papers in his sleeping-bag-sized cargo pockets.

Once I served a cab driver in Valdez and he started screaming so loudly he woke the neighbors. I was standing in his arctic entryway surrounded by boots and mismatched snowshoes. He had been hassled by everyone, he screamed. The police, the insurance company. He was sick of it, sick of everything. I didn’t try to argue with him. He had a knife in his hand and I backed away slowly. Even with the knife, I wasn’t afraid. His pride was just injured because I had gotten him out of bed in his dirty long underwear. He was sleepy and embarrassed but he still had enough sense not to kill the guy with the subpoena, for deep down he recognised me for what I was: the delivery boy.

My climber laughed and pushed back a bit in his chair. ‘No. No. No. You don’t understand. The gnostics were considered to be heretics. You see, they thought that everything in creation was corrupt.’ The blonde woman’s eyes glittered like chunks of ice and my climber gestured wildly around the bar.

‘You see, it was a special knowledge that led a person toward God. This was before faith as we think of it. The gnostics believed divinity was a matter of knowledge.’

‘So...’ the woman said and she wobbled in her chair... ‘you mean there was no God out here?’ and she gestured toward the window, by which she meant the world, Mount McKinley, New York, Kosovo and Jerusalem.

Dr Holebrook was feeling the heady rush of late-afternoon drunken metaphysics. He would not be happy to have the subpoena from his ex-wife.

‘There was no hippy, pantheist crap. The world was corrupt and the path to God was through knowledge alone. Knowledge you had to earn.’

He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms back over his head. He had a certain self-satisfied countenance that made me almost certain that now was not a good time to interrupt him. He was in the throes of happy abstract musings, trying hard to impress this beautiful woman. It was not a good time to let him know that his ex-wife was going to bring him back into court to take possession of the Range Rover and a thousand more dollars a month in child support.

But we all have the same amount of time in a day and there wasn’t enough in this particular one for me to wait much longer. I needed to catch a train. A couple of his drinking companions got up and left, saying something about grabbing a shower. I wanted to wait until he was a bit more alone before I dropped the paper on him. Ideally it would have been best to wait until the pretty blonde woman went for her shower. The combination of arrogance and flirting was a deadly one for the humiliation of a court order, but this woman was going to have to move along soon, or I was going to risk bruising the doctor’s vanity anyway.

Holebrook leaned in close and poured himself and the blonde woman another beer from a fresh pitcher. I settled in. I would get him when he got up from the table. If they were walking out the door I’d ask him to step aside, catch him so the woman could walk easily ahead of us. I’d call his name, act like an old friend or a patient that he didn’t quite recognise, wave her on as if it would just be a minute of inconsequential business and then I’d drop it on him.

I had another tonic water and lime. I hadn’t had a drink in three years and I wasn’t missing it. But even so, I felt foggy-headed and could feel the northern sunlight trying to pierce through the nail holes in the roof.

My father had been a climber of the old leather shoe and manila rope variety. He had done first ascents on six peaks in the southeastern panhandle. ‘Nothing spectacular,’ he often said dismissively. ‘Just a walk up a steep hill nobody else had had a reason to take.’ But he wasn’t really dismissing his achievement, he was dismissing everybody else who hadn’t done it.

He had taken me with him when I was twelve. It was only one time. I remember the approach up through the rainforest, hopping over the muddy little creeks and getting tangled in the brushy alder thickets along the rock slides. I remember my lungs burning before we even got to the alpine. I remembered the thrill of walking out into the alpine, and I would have been happy just sitting there all day. In the alpine the walking was clear and I could see the islands scattered out on the ocean below us. The steep pitch of the summit wasn’t calling me. I rested there on my back in the grass and ate both my candy bars while my father scowled at his watch.

Later, up on the face, my legs gave out, and when my thigh muscles spasmed as if I were trying to peddle an antique sewing machine, my father tried to talk me through it. ‘Focus,’ he said. ‘Feel your weight close in to the rock. Keep your three points anchored while you lift the fourth to the next higher point. Don’t look down.’

He was trying to be calm, and in his own way he was trying to be gentle, but I could feel the irritation in his voice ease down on me as if it were an extra surge of gravity trying to strip me off the rock. When I looked down I felt the wooziness of vertigo and dread that seemed to be some kind of pre-falling sensation. My muscles were both clinging to the rocks and wanting to let go.

He virtually pulled me up the side of the mountain that day. I was shaking when I reached the summit, but I did not cry. The world, the forested islands and rumpled hills, circled our perch as if my father had created them all just for me. ‘You did it, boy,’ he said. ‘You can think back on this day for the rest of your life and be proud.’ But of course it didn’t turn out that way.

My father’s life was built on certainty. He knew we could make it up the mountain and we did. This is what my mother loved about him and what she always doubted about me. She said I was never going to be a climber. She said I was too fond of finding ‘smoke’s way’ out of any difficult situation. She said this with what I later recognised was disdain, but for years I had honestly thought of it as a compliment.

The doctor stretched again. He and the blonde were the only two people at the table. He reached over and touched the side of her face, and then she got up from the table and walked over to the bathroom.

I tore the recipient’s yellow copy from the subpoena, pushed the original for the court into my pocket and walked over to the edge of the table with the yellow copy in my hand.

‘Dr Holebrook?’ I asked. He looked up at me with a dreamy expectation as if he were waiting for me to compliment him on his climb.

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling.

‘I’ve got some papers for you. They are from your wife’s lawyers. If you have any questions about them, there’s a number on the bottom you can call,’ and I gave him the subpoena.

He reached up and took it, then laid the paper flat on the table. He stood up slowly, letting out his breath as if he were trying to think of the words to thank me for my long trip out to find him. Then he punched me in the mouth.

I don’t know if Dr Holebrook had ever sucker-punched anyone before, but he definitely had a gift for it. The physics of a sucker punch are easy enough to understand. The more relaxed the recipient is, the more damage the blow inflicts. Getting in that first hard shot nine times out of ten ends whatever conflict there will be.

I thought of the beauty of this as I was lying on the floor. Blood was filling my mouth and as I leaned forward, first my lips and then my tongue pressed against the six teeth, three upper, three lower, which were folded back inside my mouth.

‘You motherfucking lawyers,’ he said, as he stood over me rubbing his right hand where the knuckles were bleeding.

‘Noth uh law-uh,’ I said as best I could through the blood and broken teeth. ‘Youff... been... thirved,’ I added with as much finality as I could muster, and I waved at the papers on the table.

The bartender was bending over me now. ‘You want me to call the cops?’ he asked and I waved him off. It would take too much time, I had a train to catch, and besides there was always the chance the cops would find some way to put me in jail for the whole thing.

The blonde woman was out of the bathroom and was wrapping a paper towel around the doctor’s hand. I leaned up on one elbow. The bartender gave me a towel and some ice, and I held it to my face. My ears were ringing and my vision was a little bad, but I could see that the doctor was deciding what he should do next. It was clear I wasn’t going to fight him and it didn’t appear that anyone in the bar was going to be a sympathetic ear for the story of his ugly divorce. So he kicked me once in the ribs and walked out the door.

‘Hey!’ the bartender yelled. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he said and went behind the bar reaching for the phone. ‘That’s just too fucking much.’

I pulled myself up and sat at the table. The doctor hadn’t taken the papers but it didn’t matter. He’d been served. I would mail the subpoena back to the court and they would take care of the rest. I had done my part here in Talkeetna in the shadow of the Great One.

I waited for the cops to come and start the whole new tangle of words that would eventually end in Dr Holebrook pleading to fourth-degree assault and enrolling in anger management classes. But here’s the strange part. As I waited for all that to start, I was suddenly in a perfectly good mood. I was not anxious and I wasn’t dreaming of somewhere else. I could see things in the room I hadn’t noticed when I walked in: the dust motes floating on the shafts of light, the fine smear of a bruise across the bottom of the blonde woman’s neck.

I’ve never been smacked like that before and I had always worried about what it would feel like. I realise now that I was having a light-headed shock reaction, but at the time I was surprised to be enjoying the emptiness in my head and the veil of blue lights drifting through my vision. I have been yelled at and threatened. I’ve been in loud little scuffles. I’ve even been shot with a high-powered rifle. But I had always avoided a sucker punch. Now my head was ringing like an empty wineglass and instead of being depressed about it I was exhilarated.

While the cops stood around in their creaking leather belts talking to me and taking pictures, I watched them with a mild disinterest. They brought the doctor back and talked to him outside by the cars, and now the doctor looked smaller, embarrassed, quite a bit deflated. It was beginning to dawn on him that the satisfaction he gained from punching me was going to be short-lived.

We were on opposite trajectories, of course. Later my bruises would be dark purple and I would long to eat a meal without wincing with pain. Later, too, my own anger would take hold, even to the point of filing a civil case of my own against Dr Holebrook to recover the cost of the dental reconstruction. But all of that was just another tangle of words which I wouldn’t be entering for a few more weeks. Just then, I was happy. I had served the papers and I was going to be able to ride the train back south through the delirious sunshine toward the coast. I thought about the train ride and the doctor, and about what the old gnostics would have felt climbing up Denali, where there was no God in those muddy little streams, and none in the alpine either. And earlier in the day when Dr Holebrook had been laughing and celebrating at the top of North America’s tallest peak, God would have only been that little thread of an idea the doctor had pinched between his thumb and forefinger but on which he could never quite gain purchase.

As I sat at the table in the bar I kept hearing a bell ringing and I felt as if some war was over. I couldn’t remember my childhood, and that was fine. Everything that had ever happened to me seemed from another time anyway, a time before the war, when trouble was brewing but I hadn’t been paying enough attention.

Now I seemed to be paying attention. When I walked across the little park to get on the train the cottonwood blooms drifted all around me, sparkling like planets and I held the frothy pink towel against my mouth. I thought about the doctor and I knew he was feeling bad. The thrill of his mountaineering accomplishment was gone now. He was feeling bad about being back in the world of lawyers and civil complaints. He was feeling bad about having to talk to the cops and he might even have been feeling bad about punching me in the mouth. But I didn’t care. As I grabbed on to the handrail and swung up into the train I knew that I loved the poor son of a bitch who had clambered up those cliffs. I loved him like gravity, like sunlight, like a mountain.