In books written and published in the past century, books with cloth covers in octavo size, separate dustjackets, and prices written up in the corner of the flap such as one dollar or one-dollar, fifty cents, there used to be contents pages that read like rolling credits in our movies and were separated one from another by headings that were a clue to what was to follow in their very short chapters. If this was one of those, it might read, "In which our hero finds a friend." But these are different times and there are no such hints, either in life or in books.

Tough.

"Tough Nabinzos," we used to say, and if queried what a Nabinzo was, might hesitatingly reply, "A kind of cream-filled cookie?" And the other would say, "That's a Nabisco, asshole," and he'd be right, but only partly so, because it was an Oreo, too, and the whole matter of what a Nabinzo meant was forgot. I do not know (or much care) to this day what it is, only that we said it and often, and it made a marvelous putdown.

I made a friend, two friends, three, a whole bunch, but then what is a friend, how do you measure friendship, must it be intense and long-lasting? If so, none of them were friends, only peers, associates, yet they were good enough for now and sufficient to keep a lonely boy from being so miserable. O, did I say I was miserable, all this while? I did? Well, let me say it again, for even multiple repetitions will not convey how deep it ran and how much it hurt. It may make for writers and other creative types, but it also makes for street people, those who live in cardboard boxes next to heat exhausts and who eat out of dumpsters and are determined not to let the next bottle of white port in its paperbag disguise pass their way unsampled. Yes, we are much alike. For example, my cardboard box is made of cedar shakes.

It is hard to establish the correct chronology for those years of misery that do not readily sort themselves out and arrange their iron filings under the magnetic pull of weak imaginations. I was forced into all manner of group behavior by my parents and performed the specifics dutifully, not yet knowing I could resist or have any say in the matter. Sure I protested, pouting, and stamped my small foot, and wept and shouted, but I also did what I was told, much more so than, say, my little brother after me and, many years later that third final and surviving Arnold, my son, Garth.

What I did was this: I continued lessons on the B-flat cornet, going downtown on the bus to Sherman and Clay, and being instructed by one Charlie Decker, who sometimes played trumpet (a longer, more slender, more stylish instrument that carried the melody in bands and, rarely and then mostly in Haydn, in orchestras) locally and we went to see him performing for bond rallies and troop-ship welcoming-home events.

Many boys progressed from cornet, suitable for marching bands, to trumpet, and I longed to, but none of the powers heard me, prudently, and we saved the cost of a shiny new instrument. Yet I continued to play in the grade school band, as I had in Highland Park, adding my wobbly notes to those of others to produce some semblance of uniform brassy sound and, at the best, not standing out discordantly.

I swam at the YMCA naked, took showers fore and aft, walked through medicated footbaths that tingled and were supposed to, dried myself on tiny towels that were sponges and never did half the job, climbed back into damp clothing, and burped chlorine-tainted water for the next couple of hours, lived with wet hair. I swam like a stone, in spite of years of instruction, and thought I was the worst swimmer in the world until I married and discovered one even worse, and loved her specially, accordingly. There is a butterfly stroke you do on your back that is identical to what girls do when they make snow angels. It is useless for going anywhere and is downright dangerous because you can crash your head into the tile at the end of the pool and brain yourself, literally, your white mush brains spilling out into the water and necessitating the draining of the pool and its refilling, much as when somebody takes a crap there or throws up, but many times worse.

And there is the frog stroke, which I urge every tadpole to avoid, as I did, for it is not only ungraceful and silly-looking, but threatens to brain you from in front, though you can see where you are headed, I must agree, and you would have to be pretty dumb to do so. It is not cool or fluid or easy-looking, not like Johnny Weissmuller, of Tarzan fame, who used to be a world's champion, and who swam swiftly with the Australian crawl, breathing out of only one side of his face as it came to the surface.

My favorite was the side stroke, even though my mother used it haltingly to propel herself from one side of the pool to the other, which was about a third the regular distance and did not count for boys, men. Yet it was sort of nifty and kept your nose and mouth above water for most of the time you were afloat, or trying to be, and shot you along your course with an impressive burst of speed. It is what I always used, later, to get me out to the float and staved off drowning for certain, and I tried to give the impression I might easily switch over and go into the crawl, the Australian stroke like Johnny used to do, but didn't, even if you expected it of me, arriving at the end of the pool or, later, at the ladder to the float and climbing on board with a nonchalance that belied the fact that I could only see as if underwater all that took place above water without my glasses.

Said glasses were locked up securely in the big olive metal locker closed by a padlock whose combination I invariably forgot and had to ask the locker-room attendant to open for me, having to establish first who I was and that it was my locker, which is hard to do when you are naked, eleven years old, nearly blind, and all your identification is locked up inside the locker that you might be attempting to pilfer, though you don't look the type.

Now I know that locker-room attendants at this particular institution are certain fairies of the predatory type, but I didn't then and was thus protected from predation, though part of the reason might be that I was not very appealing to them, skinny, naked, my weeny shrunken, shivering, stammering, wanting only my towel and basket and the clothing necessary to escape.

Let's see, what else?

I was not yet old enough by a year for the Boy Scouts, although I hear now that you can join them at the age of eleven, and so had to make do with the Cubs. The Cubs are to the Scouts as Venus is to the Sun, I suppose. They had cutesy little blue uniforms with only short pants and caps with practically no bill to them to shield you from the sun's cruel rays which you were continually exposed to when out-of-doors in anything other than mid-winter. Your Boy Scout-imitation neckerchief was blue and yellow, not bad colors, with a slide that looked like a lodge ring, all gnarly and round, and you moved up through the easy grades of Wolf and Bear and I forget what came next, or maybe Lion, and then you were old enough to be a Boy, that is, Boy Scout.

Cubs were run by mothers, for Christ sake; we had had enough of them by now and couldn't wait to be rid terminally, though they had their nice side, when you had a cold or were out of cookies. Otherwise they were to be humored and shunned. They never understand this, poor darlings.

Cubs learn dumb things they soon have to forget because they are wrong and won't apply in the world, or else they embarrass you in front of amassed others and cause you to be thought a dork, all through life, and dork life is long at this point.

Eventually I entered the Boy Scouts and stayed around for a while, not knowing what else to put in their place. (Note, there is nothing available.) More in due course.

I read. On Saturdays I would mount the bus, and it would take me directly downtown, without a transfer and more standing in the eternal rain, and drop me off right in front of Seattle Public Library; there was a men's room right in front, which you and everybody else in the world entered from the street without even having to go inside the library, but it was to be avoided (not because there might be queers inside, which we did not yet know about, but simply because somebody might beat you up, which was bad enough, probably worse than getting your pants invaded), and right across the street was the hated YMCA, with its penchant for nude swimming and a pool that reeked of chemicals that would gag you. These two institutions, I now realize, formed the narrow boundaries of my downtown world, at least they did on everybody's public Saturday.

Inside the library was more of something very much like a school but promising greater freedom, since there were no students and the librarians did not correspond to teachers, though they looked a little like them, but were not so militant. You could pick books off the shelf at will (but not return them there, for you knew not how and unalphabetical shelving by inexperienced little hands was as good as throwing the book out the window, not a bad idea in itself, with many of them) and you could sit yourself down in one of those curved oak chairs with the high shine and which was big enough to contain two of you, and you could read yourself through the late morning and full afternoon.

The library was divided into sections and there might be some correspondence with the alphabetical listings in the voluminous card catalog, but probably not, of both book and author, so it was what you mainly avoided, for probably the greatly sought after book was "out" or inexplicably missing, and what you were after was what was real, that is, sitting on the shelf, and pluckable.

I would pull down a whole shitpile of them, six or eight or ten, and stack them authoritatively in front of me, like an adult scholar, real or fake, and begin going through them, but if one was as good as I hoped for would soon be halted in my mad chase and settle down and begin to read this one slowly, with longing, and the day would pass and I would have dented only one or two, and the rest would be left for reshelving, untouched and lost to me.

For lunch you walked six long blocks North to Bartell Drug, which occupied a little wedge-shaped island, all unto itself. surrounded by streets, three of them, and cars whisking in multiple directions, all trying to run over you. You sat at a counter and ordered from a waitress in tan dress with pencil over her ear and pale green pad whatever you wanted within reason.

I was always being allowed to do things "within reason." It was the guiding principle of our family, never to be exceeded, but never defined, and in time each of us knew precisely what it consisted of and what the dangerous components of a given situation were.

What did I order? Say a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich almost identical to what I might be served at home, with a big glass of milk on the side. No tip, because, hey, I was just a kid, and a kid doesn't truly know about tipping. Besides, you never tip when you are sitting up at the counter. The waitresses all know this. A tip is tantamount to throwing money away and, in my case, there was never enough of it to buy what I wanted. This was artfully arranged by my father to motivate me to go out and earn money, which I in turn was not eager to do. But I did. As I said, it was not explained to me that there was any such thing in my world as an option. The rules were such that I might frown and protest but I must do what I was told, whatever it was. Sure it was to be unpleasant.

Then back to the library along wet streets whipped by wintry wind, which often abounds in the two surrounding seasons, and a retreat back inside to dry varnish smells and the soft stink emitted by the insides of books which I suppose is knowledge reduced to sub-atomic particles of infinite number; in short, dust. And all the people like myself with nothing better to do on such a day, people who invariably needed a bath, especially their feet, clad in an ubiquity of white cotton socks and black ankle-high boots with hooks at their tops, not eyelets of brass.

Books, I say, were organized according to sections, and I remember there was one on Psychology and it stood only a few yards away from one called Drama. I selected democratically out of both sections, and read O'Neill, an American, Sophocles, a Greek, Shaw, an Englishman, and I don't remember who else. In Psychology there was an area that was almost as good as fiction and it was called Case Histories. Among them I found Freud. (I don't think Kraft-Ebbing was there, or I'd have discovered him, and my whole life might be different. I'd be writing porn, not this.)

It is not impossible to picture an eleven-year-old boy reading The Interpretation of Dreams; what is difficult is believing he understands what he reads. Trust me. I understood on the same level as one believes without much suspension of the critical, doubting faculty as he reads most fiction. If Agent Nine solved his first case and all that followed, given enough time to analyze the crime scene correctly, and Lassie could outwit the kidnapper bent on ransoming off the young son of the millionaire industrialist from the next farm, I could read about hysterical wives who dreamed of candles that bent and broke when forced into holders, and listen to Freud tell me that they weren't really candles but penises, and vaginas that wouldn't or couldn't admit them.

Me, I was barely able to understand what it was that went on between men and women, including why they would want or consent do it in the first place. But I knew I got all excited over pictures of girls in magazines and movies, girls who had breasts—those pointy objects that pushed out their clothes and caused them to bulge roundly when they moved. This was the time of the uplift or so-called bullet brassiere, and a boy would have to be blind or not a full boy not to have noticed them, since they would practically have put your eyes out.

Freud drew parallels from Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights (right next door on the library's shelves), and while I had not read them, would not come across the plays for many years, you did not have to know them first-hand to recognize the issues at stake. This was the adult world and here were more than hints of what took place under the covers at night between men and women, not always husbands and wives. There was a perfect correspondence to me between what Freud was talking about and how I felt in my sweaty private life when I saw my favorite, Jeanne Craine, move sideways in some movie about college life, and her breasts would come into silhouette and my loins would turn to mush.

Or—worse—rise to attention and make of my pants a huge tent.

Again there is great literary precedent, but I did not have Roth and Portnoy to draw from, and this was all new and original phenomena arising, to speak literally, for the first time in my short life. To put it another way, I was alone in the night of my boyish soul with my hardon, and not yet ready or able to know what to do about it, that is, cease and desist, like the air pumped into a balloon. (To follow, about two hundred specific page references to Roth's book to save me from repetition and replication of what girls never fully understand and what boys need no more reminder of, and which exists in his book and weary life in exhausting detail, and we want no more of it.) But it was happening in life's first instance, as it always does, to each and every one of us, and this is new, news, and-ever fascinating until at last banished by time or marriage or old age.

Or castration. Freud brings it right out in the open and talks about it. At first I thought they cut your pecker off, in which case what did you do about peeing, pee like a girl, who was not known to have one and thus could not pee as we did, but then how did she, nobody knew. Then, somehow, over time, I learned that they cut your balls off; also known as testicles. They opened up your little sack and slipped them out like two marbles and you were then a girl, or very much like a girl, and could sing high for the rest of your life and were greatly in demand for church choirs, so went the joke, which was Catholic in origination, for in our church, Presbyterian, everybody sang in the same middle register and there was no importance given to singing up high.

We had more sopranos than anything else and they were all girls and women.

Freud wrote about everything nobody else did, a whole new world forbidden to those who did not or could not read; if you read in these terrible books right out there on the shelf, where anybody could pull them down and cart them off and break them open like a biscuit, all of life's forbidden knowledge would fountain out and spill over you like seed, you would know Original Sin, but it was well worth knowing, for it was wonderful and exciting and important. You could not stand living a life that lacked such basic information about what lay behind the daily actions of men and women, boys and girls. Why, some of the case-history subjects were even younger than I.

The dream world, for instance, and what Freud called Dream Work, as though it took effort to dream and if you did not apply yourself hard enough you would not dream and accordingly not know. What there was to know was terrifying, filled with the same kind of terror that you daily faced at school and for which there was no respite, no escape.

Freud's world, and the realm of dreams, was peopled by boys and girls, men and women, who all wanted to sleep with each other, including boys and their moms, girls and their dads, but dreams confused the content and it came out in disguised form, half of it being penises, half of it what were called vaginas, commonly cunts. Pricks and cocks, for that matter. But Freud, a German who lived from the last century well into this one, a Jew and a prude (O yeah?) had the old fashioned words for what boys incessantly snickered and whispered about. And while he didn't call a spade a spade, as the old saying put it, he called them much more tellingly and exactly what they were, what they stood for, what they did or wanted to do, in the company of the opposite sex, and which is how the world populated itself and was thus the most important thing in the world. Even more than having people like you or growing up less than ugly, a cretin, a worm.

What a gulf existed between the world in books and the world at school. Words, mostly. For instance, you call a boy— a bully—a cretin, and he would look at you perplexed; he might even thank you, for he wouldn't know any better. But you call him an idiot, or a stupid shit, and he'd be quick to fight you. You tell him he is suffering from an Oedipus complex and he'd think you some kind of showoff, but you tell him he wants to sleep with his mama and he'd fight to the death because you said the worst thing in the world to him. His mama?

Why would a boy want to sleep with his mother? Would she let him, like going to the circus or a movie? Was it the kind of thing that could easily be done, if you thought to ask about it? You would put your thing in the self-same place you came out of, eleven years ago, where Daddy had been, in that manner, and then you would feel all funny and move up and down and there might not be a baby nine months hence, but there could be, and it would be your brother but you would be its father, and it could call you Daddy or Brother, it didn't make any difference, and neither name would be any more untrue.

Why would you do it? Why, to make the tingly go away. We were very much on the edge of masturbation, Portnoy's Disease, or Complaint, or rather his Habit, his Obsession or Compulsion, according to Freud.

I did not ask my mother if I could practice what Freud mostly called coitus with her. Consequently I continued to live in the same house with Mimi and Edmund. Not to mention my brother Dicky. But I continued my reading in depth of Freud and the Greek dramatists at Seattle Public Library. I mean, what else did I have to do, when the terrors of school left me momentarily free of my own pursuits and I hadn't yet discovered other activities in which to lose myself?

For instance, Freud wrote about his childhood dreams, and though I could remember hardly any of my own, I know I did have them and it was Repression or the Censor that kept me from recalling them in any detail. Freud spoke of his own "long-forgotten experiences" and recent events that "appear together as dream-sources" (page 106). Yeah.

He continues: "After I have been traveling, and have gone to bed hungry and tired, the prime necessities of life begin to assert their claims in sleep, and I dream as follows: I go into a kitchen in order to ask for some pudding. There three women are standing, one of whom is the hostess; she is rolling something in her hands, as though she were making dumplings. She replies that I must wait until she has finished (not distinctly as a speech). I become impatient, and go away affronted. I want to put on an overcoat; but the first I put on is too long. I take it off and am somewhat astonished to find that it is trimmed with fur. A second coat has a long strip of cloth with a Turkish design sewn into it. A stranger with a long face and short, pointed beard comes up and prevents me from putting it on, declaring that it belongs to him. I now show him that it is covered all over with Turkish embroideries. He asks: "How do the Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth. . .) concern you?" But we soon become quite friendly.

"In the analysis of the dream I remember, quite unexpectedly, the first novel which I ever read, or rather, which I began to read from the end of the first volume, when I was perhaps thirteen years of age."

This is wonderful. Sure, the language is a bit stilted, the phrasing from the century before, but that was okay, it gave what he was saying a certain literary flair with which I was becoming familiar; not only did I like it, I expected it from my authors. And Freud being a kid of thirteen—I was nearly twelve now—I could identify closely. "Turkish design" was not in my vocabulary previously, but it was now, and I looked for this quality in many places, on many occasions, and found it a little. It was amazing what you discovered in this world, once you knew what to look for and where to look for it.

At the same time what Freud described in his dream was foreign and strange. I knew what dumplings were, for my mother made them to go with roasted chicken, all creamy from the oven; young Freud and I ate the same kind of food, well, sort of. But "hostesses" and long coats trimmed with fur, and strangers with long faces and short, pointed beards were from another world, and everybody I ever saw was different, the men all clean-shaven.

Freud's world was rich with literary parable and characters drawn from classic mythology. It was exotic, unfamiliar. It was also sexy: a paragraph later, Freud talks about a young man "who became a great admirer of womanly beauty (Jeanne Craine?)" recalled that he once had "a wet-nurse who had suckled him as a child," and "he was sorry that he had not taken better advantage of his opportunities." I knew what this meant, well enough, without having to run to the dictionary to learn what the role of a wet-nurse was and I could only guess at the wet possibilities involved in taking "better advantage" of the situation, though I now, today, can see how it would be the nurse who would take the advantage and that would not happen until he was old enough not to require a wet-nurse, unless some degree of retardation was present. Still the idea excited me, though not as much as, say, when I shinnied up and down a pole or rubbed up against something both firm and soft.

I was not yet masturbatory, but that time was not far off (and for particulars I again refer you to Philip Roth, who said it once and forever and best).

Freud brought together the three Parcae, "who spin the fates of men," and the three women in the kitchen, including "our hostess." They made dumplings and babies and controlled the fates of men, rubbing their hands together over the dough and producing dried skin or epidermis in order prove with a snicker that we were all created from "dust," and this is what it was.

What a rich life the young Freud had, and how wise he had grown in his maturity, the Father of Psychiatry, that's for sure, but greater than all that, a man of literary sensibilities who wrote not dry textbook case histories but Literature, stories themselves full of anecdote and mystery, sex, adventure, excitement. I read on, coming across words in Greek, German, arias from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, men who were Counts, students at Academy, etc.

Some of the passages were long, obscure, and dull, but they were promptly followed by ones that claimed me and my attention. For instance, the second dream: "I had driven to the Western Station (wherever the hell that was) in order to start on a holiday trip to the Ausee, but I went on the platform in time for the Ischi train, which leaves earlier. There I saw Count Thun, who was again going to see the Emperor at Ischia. . . ."

You didn't have to read any farther, even on to the next sexy part, to be intrigued and transported. But read on I did, learning that the young Freud was sharing a first-class (what other?) compartment on the train with a Government representative, then being displaced by him to a half-compartment, and when he complained to a full one, but one lacking in toilet facilities. "My complaint to the guard was fruitless; I revenged myself by suggesting that at least a hole be made in the floor of this compartment, to serve the possible needs of passengers. At a quarter to three in the morning I wake, with an urgent desire to urinate, from the following dream:—"

I too had waked at three in the morning or night, having to pee. And I probably was dreaming, all the while, as well, though I was able to remember my dreams only for about twenty seconds vividly, but they faded on the air like a fart and were lost to me forever. Freud's dream-within-the-dream began, "A crowd, a student's meeting. . . . A certain Count." and it went on to a vestibule (I knew what these were; we even had one in our house, though we didn't call it this) in which "all the exits are thronged, and one must escape. I make my way through a suite of handsomely appointed rooms, evidently ministerial apartments, with furniture of a colour between brown and violet, and I come to a corridor in which a housekeeper, a fat, elderly woman, is seated. . . ." He must get by her, which he does with difficulty, "evading detection. Now I am downstairs, and find a narrow, steeply rising path, which I follow."

I mean, is this literature or is this literature? It is the stuff of novels and plays, myth, poetry, and legend. It is terrific.

The mature Freud analyzes the content of this dream and says he is skipping over the stuff of explicit sexual content. I do not ask why, not knowing him yet this well, and finding elsewhere in my later reading no such reticence. What I do retain is Freud's problems with having to go to the bathroom, as we call it (and he does not). Viz. "Then, when I was seven or eight years of age another domestic incident occurred which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed, I had disregarded the dictates of discretion, and had satisfied my needs in my parent's bedroom, and in their presence." (Page 117.) What? Yes, he had peed or shat on the floor, right in front of them. How weird. This, you understand, I would never have done, but the young Sigmund had and, worse, lived to tell about it.

"Reprimanding me for this delinquency, my father remarked, "'That boy will never amount to anything.'" This must have been a terrible affront to my ambition, for allusions to this scene recur again and again in my dreams, and are constantly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: "'You see, I have amounted to something after all.'"

In my mature years I think I have come across the triggering event central to the life and work of Sigmund Freud, and I who have read extensively in him (but not lately) have not heard of anyone else pointing it out, or noting its significance, so I may have uncovered something (not unlike the seat of a neurosis in a patient) unique, important, and if I do say so myself, earth-shattering in its implications.

Freud—a bright boy to start with—became the World's Foremost Psychologist because he relieved himself in front of his parents, without recourse to a toilet bowl.

Wow, what a guy. Me, I would die first.

Later Freud goes on to write about the dream in which he becomes his own father, his father goes blind ("You see, if you keep playing with yourself, it will produce blindness"—attributed to Freud by little old ladies who have never read him), and his father "is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. By means of the glaucoma I remind my father of cocaine, which stood him in good stead during his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promise. Besides, I make sport of him; since he is blind, I must hold the glass in front of him, and I delight in allusions to my knowledge of the theory of hysteria, of which I am proud."

My God, this is as good as it gets—as good now as it was then—and I am inclined to go on and on, quoting from "The Material Source of Dreams," but I stop. I recall only indirectly and probably inaccurately the case of Anna O., a compulsive/obsessive, a girl who laid out the dining room table as though it were her marriage bed, and in her psyche it was. If I remember right, she was a victim of hysteria, too, the word coming from the dictionary and the Greek, meaning womb, which is what they have, girls do, and where babies come out of, once you've put your dork in them, for whatever purpose you might have in doing so, which I don't quite understand. To make the tingly go way? (Good enough.)

I would return home on wet Saturday afternoons via the No. 19 bus of the Seattle Transit System, all hot and bothered, to enter a house, a privileged house that was Viennese in no single way, did not have a shard or shred of overstuffed furniture in it that was that greatly desirable shade of violet/brown that was known to cloak our collective neurosis and its attendant sexual charge and mystery to eat the most ordinary of dinners with Edmund and his wife, Cecile, now called Mimi, and to partake of store cake or rice pudding and go to my room, banished, to amuse myself with Radio, where in its stead my friend Freud had wet-nurses and plump hostesses with doughy upper arms and damp bottoms to plunder and amuse him with actions fairly dripping with sexual content or overt action.

I had the Lux Radio Theater, Your Hit Parade, One Man's Family (the Barbers and, no, they didn't all cut hair as a living), Fred Allen, and the king of them all, Jack Benny, with squeaky Dennis Day and that man of a thousand voices, all of them weirdly the same and instantly recognizable as distinct, Mel Blanc.

* * *

The house was privileged, but I now realize only in the sense of the phrase, privileged testimony. It is privileged to me to talk about, too. Only a house, ordinary though nice, it was ours, nobody else's, just as now, in 1995, the bargain priced year, it was somebody else's, their pride and their prize. Their privilege to talk about then. But this did not make it any less my own in 1942, the year the war swung into full mobilization.

People we knew went away to war—Dad's assistant buyer; John McGraw, who used to play football with me, using me as his football; countless others whispered about and rumored, friends of my parents, older brothers of my chums, people who lived down the street. All left. My family was priveleged in not offering up anybody to the cause, but I didn't think of it that way. Edmund had been too young for the first war and contributed to the homefront effort by playing his tuba in war-bond rallies, etc., and was now too old, too burdened with family, for him to be called up again. Let me see, he must have been in his late thirties, and the draftable age was steadily raised as the war drew on but never exceeded 35. It was Germany and Italy that were drafting boys nearly as young as myself and doddering old men. These were called "cannon fodder."

As for the Japs, they were so unlike us as to be unrecognizable as human beings, and one of them could be a kid or an aged man without being recognizable as different from any adult. They all looked the same, now didn't they? If they were scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel, who was to know or care. It meant they were hard up. Good!

God how I hated Japs. Slant-eyed, yellow-bellied bastards, they'd shoot you in the back and laugh fiendishly about it as you writhed on the point of their bayonet, like a baby or a nun, many of each known to be executed that way. They deserved worse than their own atrocities, but who could think of how? They'd jabber like monkeys in a tree, throw you over their head with jujitsu (which we kids were all learning to do from a manual; we'd practice on each other and knew holds that if correctly performed would execute within seconds), gun you down in your parachute, stab you in the back (like Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway), rape your sister, in short, perform all of the horrors of the world in one fell swoop.

I knew all their airplanes by silhouette, of course, and would qualify for a Spotter, if the world was not owned by adults and conceded to according to age, not knowledge or talent, and therefore was turned down as part-time Aircraft Spotter Deluxe and not permitted to stand in one of those sandbagged shelters strategically placed on high bluffs, wearing steel helmet and binoculars, and gaze ever-Westward at the horizon, from which the enemy would appear (coming in out of the sun in order to blind you) as dots in the sky, very much like seagulls at glide. But I knew them all already, each of the models of attack aircraft, friend and foe alike, frontally, from the side, and in overhead outline, every aircraft ever planned for or constructed anywhere in the world, ever since man could fly, and was supreme in my knowledge, and would consent to be tested against any adult who would come forward to contest me. And would win, hands down, bet a year's allowance on it.

But I was too young, and watched with envy the Civil Defense Patrol, or whatever, with WW I helmet and arm band and something resembling spats, in the event of mud. Old men mostly. They would walk down our streets at dusk, checking for light cracks in blackout curtains that would enable enemy bomber to home in on our privileged houses and factories and, above all, The Boeing Airplane Company, who was our major hope to win this war with bombs and bring all our boys home safely.

We had a morning paper and an evening one, plus another, The Star, which I think was evening, too, and they all proffered military maps with fat little curved arrows pointing to advance lines and corresponding fat little dark enemy arrows indicating where the Bad Guys (the Axis Powers) were aligned and thwarting us. You could have on the wall a map of Europe or the Pacific, with fiberboard behind it in which you pushed colored pins, standout red for Us, sinister black or green or blue for Them, and daily pluck pins out and move them about and plunge them in against what might be termed Faint Enemy Resistance, and then you could follow the battles daily and almost partake in them, and when the Allies won, you won, and when they lost, you were greatly saddened but confirmed in your belief that some day we would triumph and the world be free again.

Meanwhile there was Freud to be studied downtown on Saturdays, often after my music lesson, lunch to be ordered from waitresses at Bartell Drug (doomed at counters to go ever untipped), soccer to be played at recess, and the daily awful bus ride to Magnolia Grade, which prescribed a chevron turned on its side, so that you rode one bus on the first leg, dismounted, always in rain, waited for Bus Number Two at the apex of the sideways V, rode it back a shorter distance to gasp to a stop in front of the red-brick school, Tudor with cream trim, the same the nation over, and dismounted and entered the dismal halls of youthful learning and were subjected to a steamy grind of math and language (English, but even so difficult) and science and history. Dull, dull.

I liked not a one. Nor anybody. There was no correspondence between these subjects and what I read on my own. In fact, I never found much connection, direct or indirect, all the way through college and afterwards.

* * *

We are going on our first overnight not Saturday morning but late Friday afternoon. There's been a slight change in plans. It is March, the weather windy and often full of rainy blasts. Cars will take us to Camp Long in West Seattle, which is a large park, with multiple facilities. A galaxy of mothers will drive us there. Since we have so many young scouts in Troop 81, it is deemed best to start off with the basics and go not far from home. Our handful of experienced scouts scoff at this idea and threaten to boycott the event, the affair is so beneath them. They have many hikes under their belt, including two summers' up in the North Cascades. But when we assemble, I see they are all suited up and wearing full fieldpacks.

We have tents. Well, some of them do. They are the veterans. The rest of us share the Troop's wan facilities, which include tarps of canvas and some of the new wartime material, nylon. There are poles that fasten together by means of metal joints, and some of these have interlocking notches that form A-frames over which the tarps will be spread and fastened down by means of grommets, which I learn are simply holes reinforced with metal rings so they won't tear out. There is, as a matter of fact, a whole new vocabulary of both scouting and camping, and I am picking it up just as fast as I am able.

My Trapper Nelson is pitifully new and bright, not smudged with soot and ground-in dirt, like most the others. I vow to soil mine in some natural manner just as soon as I get a chance. Grease left over from cooking is a good way to do it, as is a thin application of soap to which practically everything to be found in the woods will stick long enough to dirty it up. My sleeping bag is official, made of wool, and I do not know it yet but it contains little warmth and I will spend the night just short of a full shiver, doubled up upon myself in a vain effort to conserve body heat. And I have to place beneath me for warmth. . . absolutely nothing, for what do I know yet? Very little.

Camping is an adventure, the scout manual tells us, with classic understatement; this I know but only five decades later, when I track a manual down. This takes some doing. Finally I find one in the cluttered basement of my house and learn that it has, written on the flyleaf not my name but that of my wife's brother; I examine it with all the consciousness of a fully grown man. Then I find it naive beyond belief, containing a robust optimism and cheerfulness that has no correspondence elsewhere on this planet. It is as if an alien had landed and brought with him values from another world, one in which everything is exactly what one says it is and there is no duplicity, distrust, cheating, lying, etc., in other words, the element by which we come to know and measure each other, here on Earth.

For instance, a fire is built in a firering, which is stones gathered and arranged in a circle for this express purpose. No shit. We are given no instructions about finding dry firewood, let alone wood that is not green; no caution against cutting down live trees and expecting them to ignite; nothing about the uses of tinder (of which shaved cedar is best, but try to find it, shaved or other than growing tall and green), but there are a few words in the manual about something called fuzz sticks, which are made from kindling such as you can buy at the supermarket for two dollars a bundle. But the woods have no bundles to offer you, but here at Camp Long we are provided with nicely split wood and smaller sticks that are not quite kindling, admittedly, but work well when broken in half or split lengthwise with the Trusty Boy Scout Knife, one of which we all carry now.

Mom didn't bat an eye when I insisted on one, that day at the Bon Marche; as usual, I had my way, and now I had the means and method to split a stick (careful with those fingers, Young Scout) so that it gave maximum edge to capture the flames. But today we modestly used crumpled newspapers from the back of some provident leader's car, probably that of Assistant Scoutmaster, Clay Blackstock, who was known to be expert with fires.

Clay was young and tall and slender, with black hair combed slickly back and a heavy stubble that was quick to appear on an overnight such as this one. He was heir to a lumber company and already taking his place at the bottom of the ladder, up with which he would mount with inherent speed. And it was probably he who brought along in the trunk the neatly split alder that would fill the firering with flames and permit the fire to die to embers, then coals, over which we would cook (me in my unbesmirched, unsullied Official Cooking Kit, ever again to be the same, thank goodness, for it is the obvious badge of the inexperienced) my first meal—dinner tonight.

The caravan of cars driven by moms now departed, we settled in. Camp Long is technically in the city, sure, but it is woodsy enough to satisfy a scout on his first "hike." Of course we hiked exactly nowhere. It was the first of several misnomers that I was to learn lay at the heart of scouting and did not matter one whit, for the truth of the situation would soon out and that was that this was all serious stuff, worthy of the best of us, and we would learn from it little lessons that would accompany us through life and make us all the better.

I do not speak entirely facetiously.

We unclipped our cooking kits and brought out our grub. Blondie Stamer insisted we all purchase kippered salmon, for it was cured and cooked well, and could we eaten raw without mishap, which it was in due course, though mine got warmed a little over a quick fire. There were bones to be encountered in this unusual meal, and I and we picked them out from between our teeth during and after the meal, using as toothpick any one bone we selected from among many. With our entrée we had (s)mashed potatoes, again a unique substance, for these came in the form of nearly weightless flakes that were added to some tepid water and stirred vigorously with a fork until halfway smooth; they had butter and salt and pepper thrown on top of them and beat in, and there was a huge, neighborly can of peas heated deftly by Clay in a cauldron and ladled out to us with giant spoon. We admitted them to a corner of our little tin plate.

It was delicious and what is more highly digestible, not like some of the meals we were to prepare later on in scouting, off in the deep woods, under a lowered and dripping lid, with thunder rattling in the distance and lightning streaking the sky with hallucinogens.

I do not remember what came next, try as I might, and must reconstruct from other camping trips what was always nearly the same, and there is no reason why this evening should be an exception. The dishes washed with water provided from a garden faucet by the good folks of Camp Long and heated on the dying embers of our dinner fire, and the lingering dirt and grease wiped off on pristine towels that, washed as much as they could be into the future, were never the pale ghost of what they had been, the camping kit reassembled and blackened delightfully by the action of the fire to a degree I could be proud of, the cover (our eating dish) snapped into place and locked there by the handle of the frying pan, the whole kit again tucked away for the night at the top of our Trapper Nelson, our tarp up and stretched taut, our virgin sleeping bag unrolled and awaiting us on the packed and unbelievably hard ground, we watched as our elders built up the fire until it roared and we assembled in loose patrol formation, actually forming a precise circle because of the distance the flames held us away from them, we began singing that famous protocol of songs consisting of story-telling and tales about legendary events that lie at the throbbing heart of young scouting.

My mouth lipped the unknown syllables first, a little behind the others, my mind working quickly to commit the words to memory in the right order. "Bill Grogan's Goat" was an early song, and what a goat was he! What he ate what the other goats disdained, but how easily he got it all down and kept it there. I was a little envious for my own dinner lay heavily in my gut—oh, nothing serious, but thanks for asking. And there was Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, a song whose exact meaning I did not understand then and I must admit now, for really how do bottles of beer arrange themselves on or against a wall, and what is it that enables them to stay there, let alone begin to fall off? Somebody, please, explain it to me, so I can get on with my life.

So we counted backwards from just under a hundred, as the bottles fell and I presume smashed, until much time had passed and there were none, none left, none left standing. A cheer accompanied each new negative number left of the whole. The enthusiasm of the assembled scouts did not seem to diminish as the bottles did, and this troubled me only slightly, for I could not comprehend the excitement. Now, if they were full of smelly beer, and smashed hard, in sight, on cement, let us say, and there was a clatter and shatter, sure, it might be substance for a mild thrill, but these were after all mythical bottles and, besides, who among us ever had so much as even a sip of beer, a beverage forbidden to us and all scouts, perhaps lasting into early adulthood, which was admittedly far away?

We sang and the fire roared and then there was a pause in Songfest, for thus was this called, and tales were told, which I soon discovered were mostly horror stories, the yesterday equivalent of "Tales from the Crypt," with which everybody is familiar today. Ghouls, goblins, ghosts; mummies, witches, bodies of the dead, the dead who aren't really dead but consigned to some nether world, doomed to nightly excursions over the earth until relieved and deprived of some ancient guilt, the living among them who are nearly dead, coughing, wheezing, dripping thin blood, limping along, hunchbacked, clubfooted, blinded—all the usual shit which is not frightening but only morbidly intriguing, even when you are but twelve pressing thirteen.

More entertaining in a way that combines fright with possibility were tales involving large animals. Wolves were a favorite but they were scarce here, along with grizzly bears, but there were assuredly black bears (not so little, either) and coyotes and, worst and best of all, cougars, which were a form of mountain lion, everybody knew, plus the occasional wolverine, which was identified most often only by its tracks, which were distinctive, in the High Cascades, and wolverines could rip an arm off an adult male as easily as you could tear the cover off of, let us say, Life Magazine. The fact that we were still in the technical city made no difference, or not much; coyotes often trekked into Seattle's outskirts when their known food supply became scarce and, if desperate enough, might eat a baby or even a young scout, generally those under five feet tall.

A grizzly, everybody knew (but me), preferred a human diet, where brown and black bears were content with leaves and berries. It was the berry season when they became specially dangerous. This now over for the year, and winter all but passed, a hungry bear might come out of hibernation and not remember his diet and go on a rampage for . . . human flesh. It seemed likely, probable, as full dark drew down and the fire shrunk to radiant orange and lost its leaping flames.

When you are twelve you are only inexperienced (I speak with Jimmi Hendricks' use of the word in mind), not stupid. Not dumb, as we say wrongly. So you are inclined to believe a lot that you have not seen directly in your but dozen years, but this does not mean you aren't gullible. You doubt all, everything. And you have inherent good sense and a keen built-in bullshit detector. It is possible to believe and disbelieve, both at once. You go along with the gag, disbelieving it. So there is a bear and no bear. (Zen expresses this as no-bear, but you have no Zen yet. Or no-Zen.) You are frightened, but only a little, and it is mostly mock-fear. A bear, right here at Camp Long, in the heart of the city? Not likely. Running alongside the camp and separated from it by a cyclone fence is, for Chrissake, a golf course. And a thirty-five-mile-an-hour arterial runs along the other extremity, carrying people even this late home from office and factory. True, at the bottom of the ravine where the fence bends away is a swampy industrial section not yet built on, but wouldn't it be possible for certain wild animals to tunnel that fence and spread out their number and, in the drear and dread of night, encircle a troop of innocent boy scouts and, tiptoeing through the silent grass, devour them in their sleeping bags, the very same sleeping bag containing and confining them like an enchilada? Starting with their toes? You betcha, Little Beaver.

Not likely but, admit it, possible. Barely. Yes it was. Your disbelief contains the seeds of delicious fright. Am I talking about lost innocence? What else is there? At last the fire died low and it was that dratted time, time for bed, the new sleeping bag, and we disperse from the fire, the leaders last, lingering, probably for the same reason we would, if so allowed, and we shed some of our clothing but retained our shorts and T-shirts and socks as bedwear, folded our uniforms up so they would be clean and dry, ready to don in the morning, and slid into icy bags that rather than warm throughout the night grew oddly colder.

The next time out I had me an army-surplus down bag, two of them, actually, one a mummy, the other a voluminous rectangular sack into which the former would slide on those nights when all the available water turned into a skating pond at sunset time. And still I would spend the night trembling and self-wrapped up, arms twined around narrow ribcage, as though not yet emerged from the womb that bore me, only to awaken in the still black all asweat and feverish. Then you unzipper the bag and admit the cooling night air and your body drinks it in until you are that odd mixture of cold and hot, your body undergoing a transfer of energy from one extremity to another, hoping for a successful mix that will admit and permit sleep, delicious slumber, sleep that seems ever to stand at arm's length until wan liquid dawn brings a brief, deep coma.

You sleep, I'm told, even it you don't think or believe you do. They don't call your sleeping bad a "fart sack" for nothing; you emit smells in the night and strive to keep them trapped inside your bag for as long as you decently can, but permit yourself a brief sniff now and then. The stink is still there, you discover. You let it escape in gasps so that you will not offend those in the tent with you, but this is not necessary, for they have all eaten the same food and are making the same smells, so who is to say it is you rather than them who smells so? You have poisoned your new sleeping bag forever, you think sadly. But you haven't, only initiated it and slightly compromised it pristine quality into a short future.

You sleep slightly and haltingly, but sleep indeed, truly, in gasps and starts and finally deeply, exhaustively, and have trouble about seven arousing yourself (as you always have and always will have) and entering the pale day; you clamber out, stiff and cold and grumpy, and draw on your scout uniform in parts and the socks of yesterday, even though you have spare clean ones at the bottom of your Trapper Nelson. You do this simply because it is too much trouble to search them out in the fresh cold. You rise and bend to tie your laces and slide you neckerchief over your head, catching it on your ears, and slick back your hair with the palms of both hands (maybe using spit, maybe not) and don your scout overseas cap that is nicknamed after a piece of female anatomy that you have not seen yet and will not glimpse for five or six years more—unbelievable, incredible, that there should be any a thing extant in this wold and it be attached to a lovely girl, that is, a young accommodating woman.

Somebody is badly blowing reveille, off in the distance. What with your B-flat cornet training you bet you could beat him out for the job, holding down only the one and three valve, but not trying to do it full open. In time you will have this job by default and then it will be others who will wince when your roll or muff a note or, worse, miss it entirely and proffer another, one never heard before in this context, this order. Troop Bugler it is called, and you get a special little badge to wear on your sleeve denoting it.

The idea is, in addition to survive camping and overnights such as this tepid one, to accumulate badges of honor and to wear them in something less than fully modest display all over the tan uniform that you are only now beginning to realize looks undressed. The Tenderfoot badge is a trefoil, and across it is spread the American Eagle; it is clasping something, but you can never get your nose close enough to see for sure what it is. Perhaps the American flag? Or some bunting? When you become a Second Class Scout you will discard this emblem and substitute for it The Scroll, which bears clearly enough to be read at a short distance the Scout Motto, which everybody who is not dead knows by heart, for it is but two words. There is a knot below which appears to be a bowline on a bight. Ah yes, we are learning knots now, and going solely by the manual all knots look hopelessly involved and complex. They proffer a maze of interwoven ropes that, hopefully, when pulled up tight, form a beautiful and expert knot. But try to tie one.

Beware of the granny, for she will slip.

When you combine The Trefoil and The Scroll what you have is the Official Boy Scout Emblem, which is also the badge of the First Class Scout. Big surprise. This is greatly sought after, but marks only the start of real scouting. You get to put the two badges together, forming a synthesis, a unity, a whole. So you duly memorize the precepts and are examined for Tenderfoot rank by Art Golofon, your patrol leader, and are dutifully passed, with a thinly disguised sneer, for Art is a Star Scout, so far removed from you that you are scarcely a twinkle in his universe. And for Second Class it is Clay Blackstock who seriously tests you, corrects you on a few misguided points, and passes you, when the minimum time has lapsed. And for First Class it is The Man, Blondie Stamer himself, Scoutmaster still, a few years not having yet transpired and there being appointed a new one, nor has it been uncovered that aside from being in the real estate business and a perennial bachelor Blondie Stamer is rumored for having a secret liking for boys, and nobody ever had an inkling.

I would like to continue to believe that this whole notion is untrue and there was no incident, no sign of such a thing, no proof.

But back to my first overnight. We ate some kind of mush for breakfast, sprinkled with sugar and milk made from a powder, and we toasted Wonder Bread on sticks over a low fire, and if your slice fell into the coals—Tough Nabinsos. You snatched it out and brushed it off with your hand, then wiped your hand on your little tan scout trousers that by now were streaked with black from other sources, and you slathered the crude toast with butter and somebody's jam, and it was delicious. You washed it down with cocoa that was cool to start with, no more than chocolate milk, really, for no scout would drink coffee, ugh, for among other things it would stunt your growth, and it was only thought to be ingested after you'd had your full size, like Clay and Blondie had, who drank such stuff.

You looked at the lightening sky and thought, "I have come through the night. I am a scout. I have survived. I am still alive." As if there were any doubt.

Camp Long had a mountain to climb, not really a mountain, but it had certainly a Rock, Climbing Rock, it was called, and that rock had an easy side and it had a tough side, and in between them it had The Rock Chimney, which was widely known and feared. To climb the easy side, you could carefully walk up, all bent over, in your tennis shoes. The hard side required something called "roping up" and you could rappel down afterwards, with a rope slung over your shoulder like a gaucho and brought up smartly against your hip and around it, and you lowered your weight against the rope with one hand and took up the slack with the other, and gradually descended, if all went well. If it didn't, you plunged to the bottom as though there were no rope attached, and you and the rope fell in a heap and you felt yourself all over to make sure nothing was broke, and you never, never, cried. Or else you were dead. There were rumors of dead scouts at the bottom of Climbing Rock, but I never much believed them. A broken leg, sure.

We roped up and we belayed and we rappelled without incident. A few of us, including me, tried The Great Rock Chimney, which was something you would not often encounter on a real mountain and which required ascending in crab fashion, your back against one side of the chimney, your feet against the other side, you levering and inching yourself gruesomely upward, painfully, foot by foot, until you came to the top, full of sky, where you laboriously turned yourself over and clasped the upper edge of the rock face and hauled yourself up on top, becoming King of the Mountain. (Crown me!) But if you erred anywhere along the route you plummeted, banging your frail body against the rocky outcropping and gashing and gouging yourself into a bloody mess. No thanks.

Nobody fell, nobody gouged himself into a bloody mess. But a few of us gave up the ghost halfway up the chimney and descended slowly, carefully, to whence we had started, and thereby deprived ourselves of the victor's whoop and the proud descent down the Easy Side. Or the victor's rappel, perhaps yodelling all the way down, choosing the Tough Side as only appropriate.

What else? A few games were played, Red Rover, Come Over, and no doubt though I don't remember it more of that perrenial favorite, "O'Grady Says," at which I was getting good. I mean, it is easy enough, if you only learn to pay attention. Every time I was in the final three. Once I won it as a Tenderfoot, but the other two times my mind wavered, I guess it was, and I got squoze out when I should not have, and received mild consolation and a friendly thump from other members of the Beaver Patrol in commiseration. (Do you believe there is something in us that secretly wants to lose?)

How I loved those hearty thumps that hurt so much but really not at all.

* * *

Our second hike was out along the Cedar River. No mother took us there in her sedan, our packs piled in the trunk or lashed to the roof and secured there with half hitches or bowlines on a bight. We rode the Seattle Transit System as a patrol and later transferred over to a Trailways bus. The troop assembled in Renton and then we began the three-mile jaunt out along Maple Valley to where we first crossed the river on the highway bridge and soon left the road on a fisherman's trail that cut across an open field and entered an alder woods.

It did not matter that when we boarded the bus in the city some soldier sitting next to his buddy from nearby Fort Lawton muttered in a voice meant to be overheard, "What's this—Errol Flynn's Junior Commandos?" Errol Flynn, also known as Robin Hood and by a host of other adventurous names, had just undergone a paternity suit and had lost; even we scouts knew he was now a synonym for licentiousness. It was and is pretty funny, since we were all virgins and understood the happenings of the adult world imperfectly. It didn't matter because we were intent on our first official hike, and the overnighter would this time be in the woods, by a river, and there would be nobody but ourselves to come to our aid in the event of mishap.

We had a patrol flag, a black beaver on a scarlet field, and it was triangular. It flew from a staff at scalp level and declared to the world who we were; we took turns proudly carrying it, and like the American Flag it was never to touch the ground as a point of honor. All of us would rather die than allow The Beaver to suffer disgrace.

We hiked along the shoulder of the highway and sang songs, as cars roared upon us and streamed by. Some honked recognition, others derision. You could tell the two apart from the duration the horn button was depressed. Some horns had a friendly sound, toot-toot, while others mocked you and expressed themselves with anger and hostility. They went blare as they passed you, and according to the Doppler Effect screamed shrilly as they approached and loudly as they went on by and took on a fading moan as they continued on down the highway.

When we came to the golf course, those who were not intent on the putting green, cast us a quick look over the shoulder and most of them waved. All who felt like it, most of us, waved back. We were proud scouts and took the wave for what it was, the anodyne of the car honk, a friendly greeting, for who in the adult world hadn't been one kind of scout or another and didn't retain a lingering pride? Surely all of these brightly costumed, overweight men with fancy hats and clubs did.

On the far side of the bridge we halted, adjusted packs (for packs were heavy and always required readjustment), and turned down the gravely slope of the bridge abutment and rounded the cedar post at the end of the three-strand rusty barbed wire fence, clinging to the post for support, for below the river not exactly raged but swirled and flowed gently, deeply, against its cutbank. One by one we swung out, then skirted some brambles, and began our transverse of the field that had not been mowed yet this spring. Then we filed across the tall green length of field at a swift diagonal, aiming at the copse ahead. There was no barbed wire strung there, as we entered the woods; the woods themselves and the river beyond served to deter cattle. No path was needed, for the woods were sparse and easily threaded, and here and there stood cowpies, some of them old and stiff, but others rich and redolent, softly black. I remember one that was still steaming and the cow that looked over her shoulder suspiciously, and how at last she moved her brown bulk aside as we passed by her, a little afraid collectively of our first wild animal seen in the open. Close, too.

Of course a cow is no way a wild animal, yet she is large, and when you are alongside her the possibility is that she might choose to attack, for whatever her cow reasons. And there are those snub horns in front, not to mention her cloven hoofs whose prints we had been studying for many yards now, muttering softly, reverently, to ourselves, "Cow."

The woods, at last. What do you say about them? They are what they were, mostly trees, with spaces between them through which you may pass. We wound through what was in effect the winter floodplain of this small river, the ground washed free of much debris and full of loosely deposited sand. (This was, remember, back in the days before the Landsburg Dam, when the river was free to fill its banks and flood the lowlands; now it is largely contained and kept at hand's length within its channel.) Trees rose out of the packed sand and we skirted them, always in patrol formation, Art at the lead, Ranny at the rear, the rest of us strung out between, the beaver emblem whipping in the breeze.

We did, as scouts do, pause from time to time for "breathers." Then, our packs flung on the ground and ourselves atop them, lying down and propped up, we were addressed by our leaders. Blondie Stamer spoke. "You guys keep in mind we are on private property. I've known Farmer Anderson for years and it is with his permission we are here. Respect him. If you don't, we won't be invited back." We heard this dumbly. I mean, what was there to say? We were warned against doing something we didn't know what, forewarned, vaguely threatened. What can you do in a shallow woods, anyway? It takes an imagination larger than mine. He continued, "Do not cut any live trees. The deadfalls, they are okay, it's in his and our best interests to burn them up, but not his woods. All right?" A light rain was falling. It seemed unlikely to me that, try as we might, we could not set these woods afire. As a matter of fact, all the fires we ever tried to light promptly went out.

We dirtied our knees bending over to blow on the sooty embers that merely smoked. When a tongue of orange flame licked out, we cheered in unison. This was a rare event. Usually a troop leader had to come over and produced from nowhere some dry kindling or sticks deftly split along the grain with his ax. Then our fires leapt to life and remained blazing so long as he tended them. The idea was, a big enough blaze will dry wet wood; the paradox remained, where do you find sufficient dry wood to dry wet wood?

This was the perennial problem but did not much matter until late afternoon, when we ended our march and set up camp. This moment was both dreaded and looked forward to greatly, for the march was tiring and after a while pointless, for here we were, at the river, and woods along rivers remain pretty much the same, so why did we continue to press on? It made no sense. But when we received the order to stop for the day ("Pass it on down"), we were met with another difficulty, namely, all the work that was involved in making camp. First you were to choose a tent site, a piece of relatively flat ground on which to pitch your tent. First you pitch it, then you ditch it, the saying goes, and it is one of many general truths governing scout life.

The Beaver Patrol ("Let's hear it!") had two tents and a tarp, for there were seven of us. Wally Ort couldn't make the hike and would remain all the worse off for it, ever lost when it was referred to or alluded to, a non-participant, a Cedar River outsider, you might conclude. For soon this hike would be transformed like all the others, the bad parts put aside, the good ones (few) elevated and transmogrified onto a new level, one transcendent and splendid. A lie, of course, but one we all believed and reinforced so that over time we came not only to believe it but to believe in it. A great time, yeah!

We doffed our packs at the place where Art said to and began to unroll out tents and tarp. Tree roots poked out of the soil everywhere and broke up the only flat spots that were available, so it soon became apparent that a tent had to be pitched over roots and our sleeping bags positioned so to keep the intrusion at a minimum. It was easier to say than to do. Also, the deadfalls we found that were suitable for stakes and poles were so dry and brittle that they immediately snapped and splintered when subject to the slightest stress. We were under an admonition to cut no living trees, that is, green wood, so what were we to do for stakes? It was easier for those with tents, for some of those contained poles that could be assembled and locked together at joints, as we had done at Camp Long. As stick after stick broke and our tarp kept slipping back to the ground, and as dark approached with attendant terror, we became desperate. Finally George Trick cut down two young alders with his belt axe and they penetrated the hard earth and we had the makings of a structure on which to string our tarp.

"Blondie is going to be pissed," I said.

George Trick said what Blondie could do to himself, adding, "He doesn't have to sleep inside this dumb tarp. He's got a tent to himself, the lucky guy. And—you'll notice—it comes with poles and pegs."

Somebody said that nobody wanted to sleep with Blondie in his tent, but nobody opined why. Homosexuality was an unknown subject to us. Blondie was the seat of power, authority, and nobody wanted reside to be too close to it. Instead we wanted to remain free inside our own tents and tarps, where we could burn a candle late into the night, whispering, telling jokes and the usual sad horror stories, with nobody to tell us to shut up and douse the light.

This is how we finally accomplished it: We cut off the twigs and lashed the trunks of the whippy young alders together with twine and erected them, then ran an old deadfall pole down the center and strung our stiff and filthy tarp across the structure and pegged it down, only the pegs kept flattening and splitting under the blows of our axes until George Trick solved the problem. And then the damn thing was up, sort of, and required ditching, which we did with our sole shovel of the collapsible kind (called that because it was constantly collapsing while in use, I guess), running a shallow grave around the tarp and dragging the tip of the shovel (we had not yet learned to call it an entrenching tool, that being the military name for such an implement, not until next year, when some of us would bring that term home from Camp Parson and we would all adopt it) around the bottom of the ditch and promptly encountering myriad thick roots —probably from the same alders we had just down for pegs.

Blondie made quick inspection in the gathering dark. If he noted the green trees often used for support of our housing, he said not a word. Perhaps it was because of the dim light and, we knew, he could not see very well, light or no light, and wore little wire-framed glasses, except at moments when his vanity dictated that he not wear them, at which time he slipped them into the shirt pocket of his uniform and secured them there by buttoning the flap over their earpieces. We now had small fires going thanks to Clay Blackstone. He carried flaming embers from one firering to another until each patrol had an established blaze going and the evening meal was underway.

The rain had halted, though all was wet. It is this way in the woods. Our packs were stacked in pairs in a special fashion that Trapper Nelson permits, with their frames interlocked, front to front, that is, the part we put next to our shoulders placed together, so that the backs faced away and were easily accessed, once the sleeping bags were removed. This we were not eager to do because of the prospect of our shelters leaking water and the bags getting sodden. The tarp did leak, but it was only around the edges, and as soon as it was apparent a patrol member was sent out with a shovel to fix it, but when the rains started again, however lightly (and we were blessed with lightness, that night), water showed itself again and crept into the uphill edge of our shelter.

I did not know how this could be because the ditch, into which the smaller ditches ran and gathered, seemed always to be full of water running in its usual direction, which is of course downhill. Only downhill proved to be not exactly where each and all of us had thought it was, and hence the leak.

Scouts who know what they are doing always bring fresh meat for the first night out. It is because, unless you are very careless and foolish, meat will not spoil in so short a time. So we had hamburger, that universal malleable substance that is pleasingly compressible (though the more it is forced the more it tends to leak juices into what lies beneath it in the Trapper Nelson) and boiled potatoes with their skins on and a gravely substance called mixed vegetables which came dehydrated and to which you added river water and cooked for very long and then you ate it, it was still chewy and you couldn't tell one vegetable from another in your mouth, except the corn portion was hardest and resembled what was left at the bottom of the bag of popcorn you bought at the movie theater and you had to spit it out. This we were accustomed to doing, so there was no big problem.

Nothing got cooked very much on overnighters, for fires are first too hot, then not hot enough. This means you burn things but you do not cook them. Potatoes turn out very much like apples, only even harder and not so tasty, and hamburger is red and juicy and cold at the center, and leaves you feeling a little queasy as you mouth it round and eventually swallow it. For dessert there is apple sauce made from flakes and shreds stirred with more river water and if you are wise, that is, provident, cookies from home. These I had in abundance, and I noticed nobody else who did have shared them. Washing dishes was mostly a swipe in the sand and a rinse in coolish water, with a towel applied vigorously to get rid of about half the incumbent grease.

Clay built up the central fire as he had built up our individual ones, finding dry wood by means of his special talent, going off in the dark and coming back with armloads of the stuff. I think he whacked it off the undersides of downed trees, but I can't say for sure. (Later, on subsequent hikes, he was to show me some of his tricks and I, in turn was able to impress others with my skill, which was more a practical necessity than anything to show off with. But this was years away—well, at least a couple.) Fires dispel gloom because of their brightness and radiant heat. They are cheerful, too. If a fire is going, at least half the world is under control, and the other half nearer to subjugation.

Fireside means different things to different troops and in various parts of the country, but it always means something special and it is expressed in a number of ways, all of them having common ceremonies. Troop 81 always began its with a ring of standing scouts, all of whom encircled each other with arms around the shoulders and, heads bowed, sang reverently one of the dedicated scout songs, the words of which I can no longer even partly recall. They had to do with love of scouting and country and the out-of-doors and God. Often we participated with tongue in cheek, sometimes lip-farting the tune, while all the while we sincerely believed the words. Sure, there was a hoot of derision and an unkind word was heard, but God was not to mocked, nor country sneered at, not when the Japs and Nazis were still winning and we hated them so.

The soldier on the bus who had labeled us Errol Flynn's Junior Commandos had struck the right note and we all recognized it. The humor was just right for the times. Sarcasm ruled the day, to be sure, but some things are held sacred, and soldiers were venerated as a class. Boys do not respect anything soft and comforting, such as mothers. So we resorted to crude remarks uttered under our breath in order to banish sentiment and fear. "The voiced sneer," it might be called. Or the mocking tribute. We could sing "The Star Spangled Banner," and add our special words to the verses, without doing ourselves or our country any real harm, we believed. And each of the scout songs had a profane version, which was highly obscene. This was part of the male world we aspired mightily to. It was vital to our esprit. We would like it no other way.

We sang around campfire, which was too warm on one side, cold on the other, and it was always Bill Grogan's Goat or the one about Clementine, a favorite opening for meetings that began, "In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine. . ." and going on to describe the adventures and misadventures of the old "miner, Forty-Niner" and his true love, his daughter, "darling Clementine." And always, endlessly, without loss of fascination or remorse, that one about all those bottles of beer on the wall that mysteriously kept falling off and miraculously being renewed in time for the next occasion.

Always some scout would slip away from the troop, usually somebody older, and slink off a short distance in the scrub and begin to howl. He would howl excellently, chillingly, and while we knew it was all a joke to frighten Tenderfeet with we believed briefly in its authenticity and felt the ghost of a chill pass down our spine as a body, and knew in our young, collective, fluttering hearts it was finally time to unroll our sleeping bags and try to achieve sleep.

But sleep will not come in the woods. It is held off by night sounds. These differ from those of the day by their magnitude. A stick breaking at night is three, four, times as loud as one during the day. What could be wandering around in the scrub at night to cause so many disparate noises? And such loud ones? There could be only one answer: bears. Only bears are known to crash around so. Not one but several of them. A deer is not known to be nocturnal and, besides, would have a lighter step. It would prescribe a more subtle, erratic course. Also cougars lived in this part of the country. They were night creatures, too. Did it matter much what you were eaten by? Listen hard. There would be long silences and then, about the time you were slipping into sleep, a noise again, just about the point you were beginning to believe in and trust the silence.

You would spring awake—not that you had exactly been napping. You were only relaxing into that nether stage that is a long ways off from true sleep. You were courting ease. You were easing into trust of the night. And night had betrayed you. A stick breaking sounds exactly like a twenty-two rifle being fired. It resounds. The resound rebounds. And so on. You lie on your back, listening hard, trying to put all thoughts of what it might be—untoward, horrible, mystifying—out of your mind, and just as you believe you are succeeding there is another one just as loud, and you are fiercely alert again. So goes the night.

You waken to a thin dawn stretching between the bare limbs of trees just putting out a fresh greenery that is like Irish lace. You'd swear you never slept a drop, only there is a huge spill of time between what you last remembered, in the pitch of night, and where you are now, in the early morning stillness. But where are all those sounds now? Gone with the darkness, the night.

The only sounds that come to your ears are ordinary. You can hear the cars streaming along the Maple Valley Highway, a near mile off. One is clearly a logging truck, gunning up for some grade ahead. The rest comprise an ordinary rumble. And there are scouts already up and moving about, soon to be chopping wood for fresh fires with their little axes. Loath as you are to join them and get into the swing of the day you do, the rigor, you do so with a sigh, to find all your joints are stiff and sore. Your new down sleeping bag has been wet in the corner ever since you started out the night and you have slept curled away from it.

You put on your clothes from yesterday, right down to the socks, and pull on your sweater and windbreaker. You put on your field cap and lace your moccasin-toed shoes up tight, ready to face the morning, and shuffle in among the others round the fire. There are no coals available yet and everybody is waiting wisely for them to form before cooking their separate batch of gruel. You add your little water-filled pot to the line. Secretly you are thrilled that you have made it through the night. Not that there was any doubt, of course. The idea of a bear now seems ludicrous, perhaps a joke played on the troop by some other scouts or even the night itself.

Breakfast is oatmeal, bread, strawberry jam, and cold cocoa. Afterwards you join the others for assembly, the bugler calling you all out to it by some weird call that is unrecognizable and everybody likens to that of a moose in distress. You all laugh at the likeness, though nobody has ever seen more than a picture of a moose or its famous hatrack. Then you run through the prescribed morning gambit. You disperse, at last. Some of you go fishing. There is but one pole among you, George Trick's, and he has tied on the end of his line that classic fly, the Royal Coachman, never known to fail, and you join him, though he won't let you take his pole but it is okay for you to hunt periwinkles for him along the bottom of the river. These are tiny creatures that live in houses of cemented pebbles held together by what they excrete. Rainbow trout love the insects. You put one on the hook containing a Royal Coachman and George throws it out into the current and the pair of you wait. A person doing this is rewarded in seconds with a trout.

Well, in minutes, then. Say, an hour? George does catch and kill (for lunch) a spotted fish he says is a rainbow. It is about five inches long. Well, nobody said it was going to be a salmon, did he? Then there is another piercing bugle call, full of flats, and we are being summonsed for another formation. Rumor has it that there will be an exercise in map reading this afternoon and the patrols will compete for a prize. Great—we all love prizes. The Beavers will go up against The Cougars and The White-Tailed Deer. We have but three patrols; there used to be another, The Moose, as it happens to be, speaking of moose, but the patrol is defunct. The Cougars are known to be cards. Could it have been one of them rooting around in the dark last night, trying to live up to their name and scare the hell out of everybody? Whatever, it is widely known that the Beaver Patrol is the best in Troop 81, and the one to beat. But try it!

It is to be a treasure hunt conducted by reading some crude coordinates that are in effect clues; these are found on scraps of paper cleverly hidden or disguised (say, placed half way up an indicated tree), as we move through the woods in single file, carrying our patrol flag, and sure enough we eventually come across the prize, which proves to be a brand new aluminum canteen in a khaki cloth cover and shoulder strap. A shout of triumph goes up. We give the troop the Beaver Salute, which is a noise we make deep in our throats, followed by a collective hand clap that simulates the sound a beaver's tail makes when it strikes the water. I am appointed to rush to the river and fill the canteen and return at a gallop, which I do, happily. We all drink sweet water from it. And then it is time for lunch.

Lunch is hardtack and brick cheese, a slice of salami, an apple, and for those who got 'em, eat 'em—more cookies from home. I've got a few left and going against the grain share the last one, breaking it in half for two Beavers. One is George Trick, who ate his whole trout himself, bones and all, in one gulp, like it was a limp sardine, which it just about was in size. And I guess the other one to enjoy Mom's last cookie was Don Johnson, my wrestling mate, though I didn't really look and merely handed it to one blind side, whence it disappeared.

We then broke camp. It is much easier to do than to set one up. Down comes naturally, for gravity is an ally, not a force to be reckoned with. How wet everything has grown. Why, if it hadn't been for Assistant Scout Master Clay Blackstock and his knack for finding dry wood we might have all perished. But then that is why we have leaders and are not abandoned alone in the woods, we twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who must survive in order to become leaders, each in his turn, and sustain the troop. And I communicate to you this small truth—it really works.

How sodden my sleeping bag is when I roll it up. I hate it. If I were rich, I'd throw it away and buy me a new one after each camping trip. It is rumored that this is exactly what Joe Burgess does, for his father is a brain surgeon. He merely laughs nervously when the Tenderfeet ask him if this is what he does and will not acknowledge that he has heard the question. So perhaps he is shamed of being rich. But he is fifteen, and fifteen doesn't speak to twelve when it doesn't feel like it.

We roll up the wet tent, wet bag, wet tarp, and strap them to the wet Trapper Nelson and lift them to shoulders still damp, though no rain has fallen since morning. Since no fire was built for lunch, for scouts are usually hiking and eat on the run, trail food it is called, there are no dishes to be washed, which is good, for the dishes and frypan from breakfast are not tolerably clean. You might get sick. Mom will wash them for us at home, with a look of mild disgust, but how do you explain to her that the conditions are different and she has hot water in abundance, Brillo pads, liquid soap, and we had only the river, sand, and a bar of Ivory, which is not expressly designed for this purpose and proves inadequate for anything other than bathing baby? Well, you don't.

Off we march, some of us singing, most of us too tired to want to or be able to, in the exact reverse order of how we got to the river retracing our steps, thinking kindly of Farmer Anderson, whose hospitality we violated by ax and pocket knife. We have broken apart our fire ring and spread out the ashes over a wide area, thereby disguising them. And we have made sure our latrine (which nobody hardly used because of mass constipation) is dismantled and the paper and shit covered over in mounds of river dirt because it can't be deeply buried as a result of all the tree roots. Why, nobody can tell we were here, we all promise each other, as we take one last look around and glance at the swift green river a few yards off, a river that soon nobody will dare drink out of for fear of poisoning. The earth is still good, in 1943, the river fresh and sweet. Nobody suffers any consequences.

Soon we are transversing the farmer's field and heading in a swift diagonal course to the furthermost fence post and the familiar bridge abutment. We swing carefully around the post and expertly avoid the rusty barbed wire (known to be the common cause of lockjaw), and form patrols again on the far shoulder of the highway, as cars screech by and honk and shout at us words that cannot be clearly heard because of the ambient noise but can be accurately be guessed at—their full malicious content. And we hike along, proud scouts, headed West and North, facing into the traffic, which is what you are supposed to do, for as Wag Ranny Hennes says, it is better to see the car that hits you than to forever guess its make and model.

We are on the bus again, we junior commandos of Robin Hood's modern-day representative, our packs stashed in the aisle alongside our seats, where in patrol formation (ever; forever) we sit in pairs and watch the civilization build and dominate the landscape outside our window. How many stoplights between Renton and downtown Seattle? It is the kind of thing scouts are curious about and involves counting, and this we do eagerly and well, but come up with widely different numbers and dispute them and quarrel mildly. At the bus station at Seventh and Virginia we are met by the mothers in sedans and stationwagons, all pre-war, for there are none being manufactured because of the war. We disperse and do no see each other for three whole days, that being the duration until the weekly troop meeting at the fieldhouse on Wednesday eve.

Then we will debrief (this is not a word yet, but it is what takes place, I assure you) and discuss the hike, pass tests unto the next level of scouting, play O'Grady Says, do close-order drill of progressive complexity and magnitude, review and repair equipment, break up into patrols for covert purposes not to be divulged to non-Beavers, reform the troop, and do what is most important in all of scouting:

Plan our next hike.

Chapter Four

Trail-Notes (from Somewhere Deep in Russia)

To be able to see life in multiple perspectives is useful in reading Dostoyevsky, for it is what he provides, most of the time, and Notes From Underground is no exception. The technique is apparently chaotic, random, purposeless, pointless, at least it was for me on my first and second readings, readings which spanned the large whole of my life. And I was troubled by inattentiveness, perhaps brought on by the narrative itself. Dostoyevsky's hero sees his life from many angles, and they are often contradictory. This strikes a responsive cord in me, for nearly fifty of my own years have gone under the bridge, and I am better able to understand the importance of this fine short novel.

Dostoyevsky gives his protagonist, who is one of the very first anti-heros, no name. I will call him F., that being for Fyodor, though we cannot presume any degree of autobiography in his story. It is fiction, pure and simple. No, it is fiction, muddy and complex as life gets, or we may wish it to be, in our bad moments. But it is good. The best.

F. is a former government clerk of no special importance. When he inherits a small fortune (six thousand rouples), he gladly quits his job and goes "underground," which consists of living in shabby rented rooms and eating little. Nonetheless he is able to afford a servant, one Appolon, who holds a variety of poor jobs to make ends meet, including being a part-time tailor, and he will work for F. for but seven rouples a week, so anxious to be paid it that he gets nasty when the money is not forthcoming—and it rarely is. In fact, F. baits him by holding back his salary, and watching Appolon belligerently stare at him without speaking.

The novel begins with this abject statement: "I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man." We accept this. A moment later it is denied. "I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying out of spite." And a paragraph later, "Not only could I not become spiteful, I could not even become anything: neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect." In the same paragraph he amends this to read, "an intelligent man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature." And: "to live longer than forty years is bad manners; it is vulgar, immoral." Thus we have a man living in suspension.

What are we to make of all this? Beats me. But this is Dostoyevsky's method. Life is both what it is and what it is not. If this sounds muddled, acknowledge that life does not move ahead straightforwardly and without ambiguity. One lives in the midst of the old chaos and does the best he can.

F. is a man of low self-esteem, according to the popular psychology of today. He loathes himself, at the same time he has inordinate pride; the two often come in one package. He imagines slights and receives real ones. St. Petersburg society as it comes to us from Dostoyevsky is rife with conflict and snobbery. A man passes another on the street and causes the second man to give way, without giving him a single look. This is cause for moral outrage. It is the stuff that duels are fought over, only duels must be fought between equals and, clearly, no equal would ever offend another so. So it is a slight to the one who is socially inferior; the other does not even know it has taken place, which makes it doubly, triply, offensive. And always at the heart of the snub lies money and what money will buy—the symbols and tokens that signify money and its social manifestation, class.

Thus a man may have a servant, but the servant believes himself superior to the man who is his "master," and acts accordingly. Appolon is "an elderly, dignified man" but for some reason he despises F. "beyond all measure, and looked down on him insufferably." He is a man who never doubted himself, F. says. "Though he did scarcely anything for me, and did not, indeed, consider himself obliged to do anything, there was no doubt that he looked upon me as the greatest fool on earth, and that the reason he did not 'get rid of me' was simply that he could get wages from me every month."

In Petersburg of 1860 there were many such uneasy alliances between unequals. F. disliked his servant back; in fact, he says, "my hatred reached such a point that sometimes his very walk almost threw me into convulsions. What I loathed particularly was his lisp. His tongue must have been a little too long. . . . "

Note that Appolon's walk "almost" threw him into convulsions, not that it did. There is a pent-up rage here that does not get exorcised. In fact, most of the rage in Dostoyevsky is internal; it does not find its objective correlative, or whatever, in expression. The social (or moral) slight is recorded, brooded over, but does not result in some overt act. The respondent burns inwardly, plots revenge, simmers, but never takes action, or if he ever does, it is only with a contemptuous word or a gesture. F. notes that Appolon was "an integral part of that apartment, and for seven whole years I could not get rid of him."

Why not fire him?

Well, their lot is too integral, too intertwined. They in effect define each other. The relationship involves bondage, and the word is used frequently in the early part of the novel; it is symbiotic, but who is the parasite, whom the host? The bonding is inextricable, chemical in nature. The trouble is, their roles keep changing. They switch back and forth. F. shows Appolon that he has the money to pay him his wage, then withholds it because "I am master and it is for me to decide." He is punishing his servant because "he has been disrespectful (he 'dissed' him, as we would say today), because he is a ruffian." Why, he might choose not to pay him for weeks.

"But no matter how angry I was, he always got the better of me," F. admits in the next paragraph. Appolon reads the Psalms aloud behind his partition, which infuriates F., and the reason it infuriates him is he knows Appolon has a third job reading at services for the dead. Appolon also kills rats and makes shoe polish. Combining all of these low-paying jobs is how he manages to stay alive. And on and on it goes, the game they play, and games they inflict on others.

It is a minor moral conflict, though, when compared to some of the others, and serves as an enduring backdrop against which the major battles are conducted. They are continuous in a life that is supposed to lie underground, covert, invisible, but turns out to be surprisingly out in the open. It is important to get F.'s station clear: he is an intellectual. A woman he meets tells him that he speaks like a book. He admits to reading a lot. He is educated. His going underground is a conscious decision. In fact, "consciousness" is his big problem. He knows too much. He is too sensitive. He is aware of everything going on about him. This consciousness is a disease. It is the disease of the European intellectual and especially of the Russian. It leads to inevitable conflict between man and his environment, the individual and society. He knows he is superior, but encounters slights and insults whenever he goes out in public; half of these we must recognize lie entirely in his mind.

One night he is out wandering the town and sees a man get bounced—he is literally thrown out of a tavern through a window, following an altercation with pool cues. In the perversity of his mind, F. is envious. He wishes it were he hurled through the window. What? Yes, this is how he thinks, and we must get used to it. So he goes inside the tavern, hoping for a similar incident, but nothing takes place. He is disappointed, left all wrought up. A moment later, an officer approaches in a narrow corridor and does not see him, at least not as a person, a fellow human being.

It is a crowded street. Without a word, the officer grabs F. by the shoulders and lifts him out of the way so he may pass on by. F. is enraged, but then he is always angry, so it is hard to tell how important this is at the moment. We are soon to learn definitely. He concludes in fury, "I absolutely could not forgive his having moved me and so completely failing to notice me." He had been "treated like a fly," or as he puts it differently earlier in the narrative, like a soap bubble, an organ stop, a piano key. But what he really wants is something far different from revenge in the form of a duel which, remember, can only take place between equals. He'd like to be thrown through the window, if you please.

It's what he says, anyway. He wants to be noticed badly, but in a spectacular manner, and if danger and injury are involved, so much the better. True, the officer is "over six feet, while I am short and thin." Yet because of the nature of the insult, "the quarrel was in my hands." Instead of challenging him on the spot, F. "changed his mind" and "beat a resentful retreat." In other words, the problem he has is ninety percent of his own making.

So what does he do instead? He goes "straight" home, "confused and troubled, and the next night . . . continued with my petty vices, still more furtively, abjectly and miserable than before." The petty vices he refers to we can only guess at, but they might include drinking, smoking, and masturbation. And lest we think he is a coward, he assures us "I have never been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action." We should not be in too great a hurry to laugh at this paradox.

F. is a literary man, a Hamlet-type, who prefers to brood rather than take action "against a sea of troubles and thereby end them." The satisfaction lies in the anger and it runs deep. F. often spots the officer in the street now and observes him "very carefully." He is not sure that he is recognized in turn; probably not, for he wasn't the first time around and was simply moved aside, out of the way, like a straight-backed chair. So why be noticed now?

F. decides to write him a letter. Of course. It is the passive way, always. It is why angry people write letters to editors of newspapers: no risk is involved, and the very act of writing is purgative. But as many do, or rather do not, he never sends the letter. Instead he has "a brilliant thought." He walks out along the sunny side of the Nevsky (is this the Neva?) in mid-afternoon, where the officer is known to walk, as do many important people such as "generals, officers of the Guards and the Hussars, or where ladies" congregate and "wriggle like an eel" among them in "the most unbelievable fashion" and continuing to move aside for the men. From this event he experiences "innumerable torments, humiliations, humiliations and resentments."

This is your typical abject Dostoyevskian anti-hero, the prototype, and it is hard to love him, let alone like him. But he is familiar and his kind is not limited to Nineteenth-Century Russia; we have his equivalent today, and I think that this is what I recognize and respond to in all the short novels. They are just the thing for an American boy about to enter an American high school. He will feel right at home with the despair of the characters.

Walking along the quay, F. becomes increasingly aware of the shabbiness of his clothing and "of the vulgarity of my little wriggling figure." And when he encounters the officer, it is always F. who steps aside in deference; this annoys him so much that he often wakes up at three A.M. wondering why he and not the officer must give way. He decides he will not step aside but continue on, perhaps even bumping him. Yes. But if he wants the officer to yield the path, something more is needed. The officer must recognize F. and see him as an equal. Which is impossible.

Impossible under existing circumstances, anyway. It is his shabby clothes that give away his station in life, F. concludes. So he gets an advance on his salary from his boss and buys a pair of black gloves and a "decent" hat of the same color. Only briefly does he consider gloves of lemon-yellow, but they would be too gaudy, as though he were trying to be conspicuous, which of course he is, but in an inconspicuous way. If this sounds contradictory, it is merely par for a typical Dostoyevskian character.

He has a good new shirt and a good overcoat, but the coat has a raccoon collar, "which was the height of vulgarity," he knows. He decides to splurge on German beaver, a fur that wears out quickly and begins to look shabby soon; all the same, it is expensive and fashionable, so long as it holds its looks. To buy it, he must borrow more money from Anton Antonich, his boss, and having to ask for it degrades him, makes him feverish for several days before asking—your daily basic situation in the life of underground man.

He is determined to face the officer and hold his ground, sadly remembering one such attempt when he had stumbled at the last instance, when he was only six inches away and "my courage failed me." He fell at the man's feet and the officer calmly stepped over him, "while I flew to one side like a ball" to get out of the way. "That night I was ill again feverish and delirious." Of course he was.

So—well dressed and thinking boldly—he came across the officer again and closed his eyes, girding himself for an encounter of equals. "We ran full tilt, shoulder to shoulder into each other! I did not budge an inch and passed on a perfectly equal footing!" The man moved on by him, not noticing, or so F. thinks. And F. gets the worse of the jostling because, he tells himself, he is the smaller man. But that is not the point, he says. "The point was that I had attained my goal. I had kept up my dignity. I had not yielded a step, and had put myself publicly on an equal social footing with him. I returned home feeling that I was perfectly avenged for everything."

It is not so awfully different from what goes on hourly in school when classes change over and it is required that one boy walk down the hallway and enter an unfamiliar room in a new school. Bodies bang and lower-course students are expected to yield. Big boys intimidate smaller ones, much as the officer did F., solely with his size. And more importantly students do not see (or recognize when seen) those beneath them. They walk right past them or "through" them, brushing them aside or forcing them to give up the space at the very last moment.

It is right out of Dostoyevsky, and I realized that we inhabited the same world substantially, the only variables being those of time and distance. The essentials were all the same. Seattle, Petersburg; the Boy Scouts, the underground world.

What's the difference?

* * *

F.'s satisfaction and peace of mind last but three days. He is delighted and sings Italian arias to himself. Yes, I have done this too, as a teenager and as an adult. You ought to hear my, "La donee mobile" and the chorus from Faust. But the old terrors return and are attendant. The officer is transferred to another sector. Fourteen years pass. And in the meanwhile F. has quit his job and gone underground.

It is this period of time that Dostoyevsky describes in the first section of Notes and in which he states "the antithesis of the normal man," which is "the hyperconscious man" who thinks of himself as a mouse. Various other times he is the organ stop, the piano key, a cipher, a spiteful man, a coward. Above all, a mouse, who lives underground in filth and squalor, scarcely leaving his mouse hole for brief excursions into the civilization that exists above ground. This he does for forty years. It is a considerable period of time, the bulk of one's life.

Eventually F. come to the surface and suffers more daily indignities that provide the rage and feverish illnesses he so badly needs. They are soon forthcoming. After all, what does it matter, when life is meaningless, purposeless, and unsatisfying? Nothing can be lost when there is nothing to lose.

Exactly like the seventh grade.

Inertia, brooding over there being nobody to feel vindictive against, no object worthy of the spite he feels, F. likens his situation to a man with a toothache. In fact, he had one that lasted a whole month and he knows the situation well. He speaks from experience. A man with an infected tooth moans repeatedly. They are malicious moans, the maliciousness being "the whole point." What is more, the toothache is enjoyed, miserable as it is. Misery is enjoyable. You are "in complete slavery to your teeth," he notes. The man with the aching tooth is playing to an audience with his moans, which are continuous. Or nearly so. It is another form of sensuality of the kind the Russians seem to excel at. Oh, how they can suffer.

Americans can, too. I testify. And the analogue of the toothache is the man suffering from superconsciousness. He is a raw nerve, a plucked string. For it is better to suffer than not to feel life at all, to go through one's span unexperienced, plagued by inertia and boredom. To liven things up, F. crawls out of his mouse hole and enters society again. As he says, he is unable to tolerate dreaming underground for more than three months at a time. He needs people and interaction with them. He feels the need to be degraded and insulted again. Better this than . . . the vast void.

So he seeks out his old boss. Poor Anton Antonich Syetochkin. What a load he bears, and much of it from his former employee. Syetochkin has an at-home day when visitors are welcome. It is the common aristocratic practice. He meets the man's aunt and two daughters, one thirteen, the other a year older. F. is embarrassed because the girls are constantly whispering and giggling together. Well, it is what teenaged girls do. The talk in the salon is routine, superficial, in short boring. It is your ordinary prattle and gossip. It is precisely this that offends F. He knows his thoughts and dreams are vastly superior to what he experiences directly, and he is right. He is overcome with "paralysis," the disease of modern man. His psyche. If F. did not invent it, he first articulated it, although there are other models in Gogol, Goncharov, and Chekov. The fact that there are does not make F.'s plight any less or more insignificant.

Although he has been suffering from "a desire to embrace the world," F. puts it off a while longer and decides on a more limited form of action. He will devour the world a bite at a time. He has a "sort of acquaintance," a Simonov, whom he had gone to school with. In fact, he had a number of school chums living near him in Petersburg, but he has given up associating with them and no longer consents to nod at them in passing on the street. His childhood was hateful to him and he has cut himself off from it and "all those terrible years of penal servitude."

This too I could closely identify with. And with the need for respite. You could call it a respite from spite, ha, ha. So on a tepid Thursday, when Anton Antonich's door is closed to visitors and the need is great, F. decides to visit Simonov; he had done so a year previously, and the experience was none too pleasant. He had made the man uncomfortable and it had proved a mistake to visit him. Precisely that kind of pain is now needed. F. climbs the four flights of stairs to the man's apartment and finds a party going on.

Two more school chums are present and they are arguing heatedly over an important matter. It is a farewell dinner for Zverkov, an army officer. He had been a classmate and, not unexpectedly, F. had begun to hate him as an upperclassman. Formerly, everybody had found him petty and playful, and had uniformly liked him. Then he had become arrogant, vulgar. He had inherited in his last year of school an estate with 200 serfs. A typical Russian estate of its time, the serfs were poor and the place was close to going under financially. Still it was something of substance.

Zverkov "was a specialist in regard to tact and good manners." Naturally this infuriated F.; one feels that the rising of the sun each morning is a personal affront to him. Zverkov got the better of F. on several occasions and the man had a sharp, self-confident tone of voice, which F. hated, especially when he laughed loud at his own witticisms. With his new estate to entertain him, Zverkov boasted of how he was going to whip his serfs and tax them out of existence. Laughing, he told his friends how no woman on his estate was safe from his attentions and he would probably rape them at will.

F. attacks his former friend on these justifiable grounds. Zverkov tries to make up with F., but F. remains "maliciously and contemptuously silent." Years pass. Now he drops in on Simonov on the eve of a goodbye dinner. Ferfichkin, a Russianized German, is there, as it Trudolyubov, a success-worshipping military man and a relative of Zverkov. The dinner is tomorrow night at the Paris Restaurant. Clearly F. is not invited; it is an event for close friends, he is told. Immediately he invites himself, of course, and promises to pay his share of the tariff with money he has not got.

He might use Appolon's wages, he thinks, which he has been withholding in order to torment his servant.

No, he is not invited, he is retold. Think about it, he urges them; with him paying seven roubles, the pot will be larger and everyone's share smaller. No, no. He is furious. This we recognize as his natural state, the condition he is in when he is most at rest. He will become feverish, sickish, peevish, spiteful. In short, it's back to normal.

He vows to attend the dinner, and there follows the most incredible series of events. It is the reward and the penalty, we infer from leaving the underground life for one more unnecessary encounter with society and all its manifest hazards. Once again he holds money back from the silent, glowering Appolon, even though he knows the company he will spend the evening with is puerile, stupid, and boring. Would he want them any other way? I'd guess not.

Back in school the men were banal, ordinary, dull. They spoke in cliches and thought in stereotypes. Already, beneath their youth and freshness, he could detect the extent of their depravity. He was reading serious literature of the kind they could not understand, books like my Freud and Dostoyevsky, books not offered in the school curriculum. Yes, yes. F. says, "I did not want them to like me; on the contrary, I continually longed for them to humiliate me." Though I wouldn't go so far, I agreed in principle and with the following: "Once, indeed, I did have a friend. But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unlimited power over him. I tried to instil into him a contempt for his surroundings. I required of him a disdainful and complete break with those surroundings. I frightened him with my passionate affection; I reduced him to tears, to convulsions. He was a simple and devoted soul, but when he submitted to me so completely I began to hate him immediately and rejected him. . . ."

Oh, how I wished I had a friend like that. To humiliate and summarily reject! Instead I had the Beaver Patrol, and none of them exactly corresponded to F.s easy friend. Still I felt myself to be an outsider and would have gone underground but I was way too young to be self-supporting yet, what with my paper route and in summers the mowing of people's lawns. There was no prospect of an inheritance, either. Dad was in good health. And where was there to go, anyway?

I had no idea of where to find the mouse hole.

* * *

F. arrives at the Café Paris too early. There has been a change of plans and of course he was not notified. Instead of everybody being there at five, the hour has been moved back to six, and what would have been fashionably late at 5:25, he finds he is grossly early. He has some time to kill and does it in his usual angry fashion. Clearly his friends have tried to shame him. He can feel the derision of the waiters, too. In the next room are two solitary diners, eating their meal in silence, and even they are "gloomy, angry-looking" persons. Of course they are; they are minor Dostoyevskian characters and one would not expect any less of them.

Everybody is angry, everybody is raging. Each is insulted, plotting revenge. It is your ordinary Petersburg restaurant on evening at mid-week, with a few odd particulars.

When the gang shows up, F. is "for the first moment overjoyed" at seeing them; then he remembers that it is "incumbent upon me to look insulted." He does so.

Boy, life is complex.  How does a guy know how to act, when he has multiple feelings and they are all in competition with each other and in conflict? Well, he doesn't, that is for sure.

Zverkov enters in the lead, shaking hands with his old, despised school friend with "circumspect courtesy almost like a general's." Of course F. is offended. He has never experienced such condescension. All the good lines and jokes he has been rehearsing in his head depart and he is left speechless with rage. (I've felt very much the same way myself.) Zverkov has an annoying way of lisping and drawling, which was something new. Zverkov tells F. that he should come around more—they are his friends." He counters with, if so, why didn't they notify him of the time change for the dinner?

Simonov "forgot." They laugh. Zverkov calls him a poor fellow for it, but laughs on the heels. Ferfichkin adds "his nasty little snicker." The party is off to a bad start.

They drink, they begin to eat. One of them makes polite conversation with him, asking him in front of the others why he left his former job, the one of a low-level government functionary. He tersely tells them it was because he wanted to. Zverkov asks about his remuneration there. Blushing terribly, F. tells them what it was. They cannot believe anybody could be paid so little. It sets a new record. They mock him and his job, referring not to his "department" but his "dumbpartment," evidently a Russian pun.

F. calmly suggests they talk about something more intelligent.

He is asked if he wants occasion to show off his own intelligence. He takes another drink, then another. He gets drunk fast. He realizes the stimulating conversation he has imagined and hoped for is not going to take place tonight and he is going to hear more snobbery and name-dropping of high-ranking officials. A joke that starts out to have a point degenerates into a listing of names of people of high station and everybody laughs enviously. Nobody pays any attention to F., which may be good, in such a case, but turns out to be disastrous. F. becomes aware that his clothes are old, tattered, and there is a yellow stain on one knee of his trousers. Everybody has noticed it. Drunk now, and getting drunker, he reflects, "I longed all at once to insult them all in a most flagrant manner and then go away."

It is the situation that many of us recognize from a horrible party, when you want to flee but remain and needs to tell them all off. It is universal, timeless.

Then Zverkov examines him without a word "as though I were a little beetle." The glasses are filled—with champagne, this time. A toast is made. F. doesn't raise his glass. Does he disagree with the substance of the toast to their host or is he too drunk to lift up his glass? No, he wants to make a toast of his own. He does? They all lean back and await it.

"I drew myself up in my chair and feverishly seized my glass, prepared for something extraordinary, though I did not know myself precisely what I was going to say."

Recognize the feeling? I have felt this way at scouts and many times afterwards, when I must address a group and have not prepared what to say. But usually I have handled it well. At least I think I did a good job of handling it. On the other hand, they may have been laughing at me, all the while. The boys I spoke to in scouts and on all the occasions throughout my life. Maybe they were mocking me. How can you ever be sure of what is in their minds?

He wants to tell them off, for he is smarter than they, better read, more worldly knowledgeable. He is insulted, but then he always is. Strangers on the street, any uniform, waiters, everybody who is better dressed—all pose affront. They are legion.

His so-called friends muse over his condition with the kind of attention he so badly needs. He is to be disregarded because he is drunk. Who asked him, anyway? He invited himself. Unheard of. F. wants to throw a bottle at them. At the same time, he wants to be reconciled to them and participate in their good time and camaraderie.

He tells them he won't leave—he has paid his own way. It is after all a public restaurant, the Café Paris. He sees them all as "pawns, inanimate pawns." He will sit there and drink. If he feels like it, he may sing. Yes, that is a good idea. He listens to the banality of their conversation. They get mawkish, maudlin, embrace and kiss each other. He is ignored. He tries to pretend they aren't there, drinking quietly by himself in his chair. Time passes. The hour is eight, then nine. He distances himself from them and finds a couch to retire to. Ten, eleven. Then he is "stabbed to the heart by a thought." "Ten years, twenty years, forty years would pass, and that even in forty years I would remember with loathing and humiliation those filthiest, most ludicrous, and most terrible moments of my life. It's a horrorshow!

But the evening will not end. It goes on and on, like a bad dream. F. says, "I was so exhausted, so broken, that I would have cut my throat to put an end to it. I was in a fever, my hair, soaked with perspiration, stuck to my forehead and temples." He apologizes to them. He has insulted them, he knows, he says. He wants to be their friend.

Everybody had been drinking heavily. In short, they are drunk. This is the Russian mid-evening norm. He tells Zverkov that he has insulted him and he is sorry.

Zverkov replies that this is impossible. Under no set of circumstances could F. have insulted him, he lisps. The implication is that only equals can insult each other and F. is far beneath them.

"I stood as though spat upon," F. tells us. In a night of insults and slights this is the greatest. It is terminal. Whirling on his former friend Simonov, who has his wallet out, tipping waiters, he asks that an old money debt be repaid, for all between them is over. They are no longer friends or even friendly.

Scornfully Simonov tells him, "I have no money," and laughs. F. grabs his overcoat, saying, "I saw you had money, why do you refuse me?" He adds, most mysteriously, "If you knew why I am asking! Everything depends on it! My whole future, my whole plans!"

Simonov pulls out the money and almost flings it at him. "Take it, if you have no sense of shame."

And in a paragraph absolutely ringing with the squalid horror of the aftermath of the broken dinner, F. tells us:

"I was left alone for a moment. Disorder, the remains of dinner, a broken wineglass on the floor, spilt wine, cigarette butts, intoxication and delirium in my brain, an agonizing misery in my heart and finally the waiter, who had seen and heard all and was looking inquisitively into my face."

Is this the face of God looking into his, or just another visage? If so, it is a God who does not enter into the personal arena, take a side, or alter the outcome. It isn't the Christian God. It is an impassive god, one who doesn't care, a god with the face of a sad-eyed clown, a god who is as perplexed and doubtful about what goes on on the planet as the rest of us, a god who can only similar puzzlement and a vague sympathy.

* * *

The party leaves for another restaurant, not telling F. for fear that he may go with them. But he discerns their objective and is determined to follow. His goal is their apology for the massive insult, or to else to deliver to Zverkov "a slap in the face," thereby challenging him to a duel, perhaps forgetting that Zverkov has just told him he can't be insulted by the likes of F. Wow!

This is where the novel goes crazy and takes off in an important new direction.

F. hires a sledge pulled by a single piebald pony, a shaggy creature. A soft wet snow is thickly falling. It is a warm night, warm for Russia, anyhow. The pony is powdered with snow and is coughing. The sketch of the scene is acutely visual and moving. The money paid him by Simonov seems to double him up in agony and he "tumbles into the sledge like a sack."

F. begins to speak aloud in a telling interior monologue, really thinking to himself but delivered to the night, the pony, and the driver. He tells them what he is going to do, how he will broach no further indignity, and now all he wants is an apology and their friendship. But he knows this is impossible—"a cheap mirage, revolting, romantic and fantastical." So he is going to slap Zverkov's face, instead, and fight a duel. That's more the truth of the situation, he argues. Of course he is fantasizing wildly. He believes that after he has enacted his revenge he will be arrested, sent to Siberia, perhaps deported.

Or else they will fight the duel, after all, and he will nobly discharge his pistol into the air. He will forgive Zverkov, if Zverkov won't forgive him. He thinks of Pushkin, he thinks of Lermontov, as literary antecedents, for he is ever a literary man, and his old enemies are not. He is feverish in the sledge and overheats badly. He feels that what is about to happen is fatalistic and cannot be prevented. At the same time, he is captain of his destiny. He lashes out at the driver and pummels him. Finally they arrive at where he thinks the group was headed, but they have fooled him before, haven't they, with the matter of time?

He hops out of the sledge and dashes to the door. Where are they, his friends or enemies? Oh, they are long gone, departed, gone in separate directions, he is informed. As a matter of fact, Simonov warned the people that another might be arriving and to beware of him. It was a place "in which one had to give notice and to observe certain of precautions." Oh?

Hey, what kind of place is this?

It is "one of the 'millinery establishments' which were abolished by the police a long time ago. By day it was really a shop; but at night, if one had an introduction, one might visit it for other purposes." In short, it is an after-hours club and cat house.

* * *

He had been there before. (One of those petty vices, F.?) He enters a familiar drawing room, where only one candle is burning. There are no customers. The madam regards him with "a stupid smile." A moment later a door opens and another person enters. He pays her no attention and continues to look round the room. Then "mechanically" he catches a glimpse of the girl who has come in. She has "a fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows and with a grave, as it were, amazed glance, eyes that attracted me at once. I would have hated her if she had been smiling." Fortunately for both of them she isn't. She is no beauty, F. tells us, but "she had something simple and good-natured in her face, but something strangely serious." He is not sure this stood in her way.

This is Liza.

"She was tall, strong-looking, well built. She was very simply dressed. Something loathsome stirred in me. I went straight up to her—."

Suddenly he becomes aware of just how harassed he looks, "extremely revolting, pale, spiteful, nasty, with disheveled hair." It is just the look he normally cultivates. It keep people away and makes his life obscure and his station in life unintelligible. He thinks, "I am glad that I shall seem revolting to her; I like that." It is precisely the Dostoyevskian chemistry that makes everything possible.

But he passes out. He awakens to hear "a shrill, nasty and, as it were, unexpectedly rapid chime." It is the shop clock striking two. He says he wasn't really asleep but dozing. He sees "two wide-open eyes scrutinizing me curiously and persistently. The look in those eyes was coldly detached, sullen, utterly detached." He has met his match, his female counterpart.

He asks her name and attempts to make small talk. She remains silent. The absurdity of the situation strikes him. She reveals her name. He asks if she is a local girl, lying back on his couch with his arm under his head. Already the idea of sex is on his mind—lust without love, he calls it. Well, after all this is a cat house, he has been here before, he knows what the place is used for, after hours. And we presume that among his "petty vice" is consorting with whores.

There is a huge class distance between them, though he knows he is nobody. He is a nobody, that is, who is still a somebody by virtue of education and having been (however lowly) a government worker. She is a girl sold into prostitution by parents who need the money. A gulf separates them. Yet there is no gulf other than what they agree to. Still, interrogating her bores him. Well, everything bores F., so what else is new? He pursues his quest.

The questions he asks as are though he is going to employ her for something other than why she works there. A job in a shop, for instance. He goes on, tired and still half drunk, "weary and dreary," he tells us. Then a scene from the previous day strikes him and, determined to make small talk with this person of no consequence, he tells her about his experiences, inventing and embroidering where he needs to. He saw a coffin being brought up out of a cellar in the Haymarket. The place was a whore house "filthy all round—eggshells, litter—a stench. It was loathsome."

She does not answer. After all, he is talking, not she, and her opinion isn't being sought. Or is it?

"'A nasty day to be buried,' I began, simply to avoid being silent.

"'Nasty in what way?'" she asks, not unpleasantly. After all, she is expert in making conversation with customers and can hold her own in the weary politeness department.

"'The snow, the wet' (I yawned.)"

She says it doesn't matter.

He agrees, saying, "'No, it's abominable,'" and yawns again.

What is going one here? It is a desultory conversation worthy of Beckett and about as meaningless in an existential way. It is words uttered by dejected beings to fill the air with human sound and to displace the void that is pressing. It is also not unlike the graveside conversation in Hamlet and perhaps its more recent echo. It serves to fill the same empty space.

And of course he is lying to her. None of this is true; he is making it all up, bullying her. He is bullshitting her, too. Why? It is because he is spiteful, malignant, he admits. And he tells her about how she is subject to disease in her occupation. Does she know, for instance, what consumption will do to a "working" girl? It starts out as a chill, becomes a cold, and turns into a deadly cough. From then on the end is not far off. That girl in the coffin is you, Liza, a few years hence. It is a parable I am detailing you. Pay attention.

And when she doesn't answer, he asks, "What do you think?"

She says she doesn't think anything. Yet his words are not lost on her, he knows. She is not stupid.

He begins to moralize. It is not too late, too late in the game to stop being a whore. She is young, good-looking. She might love, marry, be happy. Quickly she injects that not all married women are happy. Of course not, he agrees, but won't she admit that it is a better life than turning tricks in a shop at night that sells hats in the daytime?

Then—controlling the conversation and its direction with his superior intellect—he admits to being a bad example himself. It is different for a man, besides. He drinks too much; a man drinks out of grief, you know, just as he goes to brothels. For instance, he has just come to this place and been intimate with her, but surely that is not love, or loving. It's hideous, that's what it is. And she quickly agrees.

It is the sport in this that attracted him most, he tell us. Sure, it is words again, not actions, and it exists solely on an intellectual plane. It is just the way he loves life to be—entirely cerebral. But at the same time life won't sit still and keeps on happening, messy and complicated. This too is what he seeks, after two or three weeks of being underground.

He now begins to talk again and she dutifully listens, as a female must. It is how she pleases him. He launches into the wonders of married life, children, being parents, the secrets that pass between husband and wife, the wonderfulness of it all. This is more bullshit, of course. She knows it, too, but goes along with it as her female obligation. Then she stops him with an incomplete sentence.

"What?" he asks "with tender curiosity," for he is enthralled by his own words and her listening aptly to them.

"Why you—speak exactly like a book," she says. She is not fooled one bit. And he hears something sarcastic in her voice.

It is exactly what he deserves, he knows.

He notes that "I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings by sarcasm and that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to surrender till the last moment and shrink from expressing their feelings to you."

F. has found the perfect companion, a young, inexperienced whore who has been in the business for only two weeks. She is his antithesis, his soul mate. He can delight in tormenting her—the sole sport of the classless intellectual who has contempt for everybody and sees himself as worthless, too, no better than an insect. And she, Liza, gets satisfaction from his attentions, the poor girl who men use but do not speak to, do not acknowledge as being other than as a receptacle, a warm soft body into which to plunge their despair. At least he will talk to her. Oh, how he will. Still half-drunk but refreshed by sex and sleep, he goes on and on.

F. tells her about the fate of women like herself. (Is he trying to save her, this man of no faith and no resources?) The parable is the whore from the Haymarket, evidently the absolute bottom for women of the night. She was turned out "by her own," that is, the other whores, on New Year's Day, as a joke, because of "her howling." At nine in the morning she is already "completely drunk, disheveled, half-naked, covered with bruises, her face was powdered, but she had a black eye, blood was trickling from her nose and her teeth. . . . She was sitting on the stone steps, a salt fish of some sort was in her hand, he was howling, wailing something about her 'fate' and beating with the fish on the steps. . . ." Cabmen and drunken soldiers were taunting her.

It doesn't get any worse than this. And the image of her helplessly beating on the steps with the dead fish is a telling one, one of the great haunting images in literature. It stays with you, even as a boy of twelve, and comes back to remind you of the extent of frustration and despair that can be met with in real life. I accepted it then as I do now as a testament of futility and impotence. It does not go away.

The image frightens Liza, too, which is what F. is trying to do with his only weapon, words, a flood of words, words in endless succession. If consumption is not her fate, what about this: Drunk in the morning, beating a dead fish on the steps? Liza is young and strong and almost pretty. There is hope for her if she stops this dreadful business at once. Does F. really care about her fate or is he merely engaging in an expenditure of words? It's hard to tell, and looking back it would seem that he does not mean what he says but through so much discourse convinces himself that he cares about her. And—if so, and I'm not sure I am right—he tricks himself into caring for her. It is the tragedy of the isolated intellectual; he is able to talk himself into a making positive commitment to someone, which is a real accomplishment.

The commitment must be seen in the context of his earlier ineffectual actions with the officer in the tavern and with his school chums at the going away party for Zverkov, which immediately precedes this episode. There he fumed in silence and was largely ignored, or laughed at.

F. feels as if he was "turning her soul upside down and breaking her heart." Yet this is precisely what he set out to do. He calls it "sport," but admits sport wasn't entirely his motivation. What it was he doesn't explain and we must guess. He admits the truth of what Liza says: his talk is bookish, entirely. He knows this and accepts it, because what he is most after is to be understood. This partly explains the great flow of words. To be understood! This is a key point, and after so much bombast it is apt to go unnoticed.

Seeing her responding to his words, he is suddenly panic-stricken. Never before has he "witnessed such despair! She was lying face down, pressing her face deep into the pillow and clutching it in both hands. Her heart was being torn. Her youthful body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions. Suppressed sobs rent her bosom and suddenly burst out in weeping and waiting. . . ."

Each now makes a concession and it is a major one. F., tells her where he lives and asks her to come to see him. No longer is she the whore a man goes to visit only when he is drunk. They have reached a new plane, that of a personal relationship, one very much like that of equals. She, in turn, tells him to wait a minute, going off to fetch a letter from a medical student who had met her at a dance in the home of some respectable people who know nothing about her new life. The student had known her at Riga when she was a child.

See, see, she is saying: I am still respectable in the eyes of some people. And he is touched and recognizes the genuine nature of her act. It is her treasure, perhaps her redemption. She wants to share it with him, this bookish person with his fine words—this man who flattered her with his attentions and use of language, just like the young medical student did. Each has shared a confidence, trustingly. The relationship has moved on to a new level. Where it will lead nobody is quite sure, especially F.

The next day he is mildly regretful and considers the past night "sentimental." He has mixed feelings about what comes next. One side of his mind does not want her to come, this young whore, this woman of a night that is past. But the other side devoutly wishes that she will come to see him; he even determines a precise time of day—seven in the evening. The time becomes an obsession with him.

He goes through his day with remarkable good humor, trying to right the wrongs of the night now past. He writes to Simonov, begging his pardon and sending him six roubles to help pay for the cost of the evening. He drank too much, he admits, and was not used to it. He is still a little sick, he admits in the letter, and has a bad headache. The tone of the letter is light-hearted, apologetic, and mild. Mild is unusual for him, he realizes. Well, it is only appropriate for a gentleman, a "cultured and educated man of our day." Even the fact that he blatantly lied to them and admits it does not trouble him much. He wants to be rid of the occasion, the bad taste in his mouth.

For he is changed and knows it. He is a better man, in spite of himself. Rather than sink lower, last night's event have lifted him up. He finds he is looking forward to her visit, while at the same time he despairs that she will deign to come, and he remembers that he was experiencing "real feeling." Does this make all the imagined slights and revenge fantasies unreal? Yes, it does, and he acknowledges them as such.

But she does not come, not the first night nor the second. And he remembers her in the same debased situation. "One moment out of all that had happened last night presented itself before me vividly: the moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face, with its tortured look. And what a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a distorted smile she had at the moment!" It was how he would remember her, even fifteen years later.

A second and a third day pass and still no Liza. Maybe he was wrong in thinking he had such power over her with his words. Bookish and artificial as he had been to her, it had not taken many words " to turn a whole human life at once according to my will." He was sure he had conquered her, even though she had not consented to come. Where was she, then? He needed her affirmation of what he had done to her and muses, "That's innocence for you! That's virgin soil for you!"

And to make it real for himself, this rootless intellectual, he thinks of her in terms of George Sand, the female novelist and woman of letters, and "European, inexplicable lofty subtleties." In short, she is multifaceted—a woman, an idea, and a foreign culture. But then of course he is badly hungover and confused.

And now there occurs the strange exchange with his servant, Appolon, over whether or not to pay him his wages. Is an insolent servant deserving of his pay, especially when he "tortures" his master? Appolon won't be humbled, damn him, and threatens F. with the police. F. shows him the money with which to pay his wages but says he is going to hold it back because Appolon is "proud," stares at him punishingly, and stupidly tries to torture him. Then he calls his servant's bluff. Go call the police, he says.

He admits to himself that without Liza, nothing of the sort would have been possible. Twice more he tells Appolon to go to the police. Knowing he has been beaten at the game of torture and bluff, Appolon backs down. He tells F. that he must not be in his right mind. "Whoever heard of a man sending the police against himself?"

"Go!" orders F., grabbing at Appolon's shoulder to turn him and push him out the door. He returns to his room, clutching his head in both hands and leaning against the wall, motionless.

Two minutes later (not one, not three) he heard his servant's "deliberate" footsteps.

"'There is some woman asking for you.'"

Go away, he exclaims, just as his old clock begins "whirring and wheezing" and strikes seven. (A wonderful, precise touch.)

Always when he encounters Liza he is disheveled, panting, angry, his hair flying in points. Now he does his "utmost to wrap myself in the skirts of my ragged wadded robe." This parallels his meeting of her in the brothel, unexpectedly, at a moment when they are both ravaged and distraught. In fact it is almost diabolical that he always sees her when he is at his worst. This is necessary for her to love him as he is, that is, at his most despicable. Only then will it be the pure love that his soul requires and that he demands from her in return. He will give a pure love back. After all, he has more to lose than she does, even if in both instances it is comparatively little. This does not mean that it is without value. (Perhaps it is more valuable, seeing that there is so little of it to share.)

Sit down, he tells her gently, adding that she has found him "in a strange position," and stammering as he does so. He asks if she would like tea? No, she says, but he insists upon it, and calls Appolon to send him out, suddenly giving him his wages of seven roubles to pay for it. Thus the money-as-power, money-as-reward for obedience, theme is reinforced. But Appolon cannot turn off his insolence just because he has been paid on a whim. He knows F. is no better off than himself and cannot afford any extravagance. This makes them near equals. And F. knows it, too, and asks his servant "to come to my rescue" with tea and a dozen rusks from the restaurant. If he doesn't, F. will be "miserable." And partly in apology and partly because he doesn't think his servant can understand the situation from a surface reading of it, he says, "You don't know what this woman is. This is—everything!"

Not "she" is everything, but "this" is everything. Liza may be a young prostitute but she, or "this" (what she represents to him, namely his salvation) is "everything." Surely Appolon can understand? She represents F.'s hope, his very future.

Appolon is busy preparing to sew, which is his second occupation, remember. He has not yet threaded the needle. He deliberates with the thread, busying himself with his glasses. Several minutes pass. F. bursts into a sweat; well, he is always feverish and breaking out in droplets, so maybe this means nothing, nothing more than the usual, but it signifies the depth of his despair and Appolon "must have been moved to pity," for he puts down his sewing, rises from his chair, counts out the money, and finally scathingly asks, "Shall I get a whole pot?"

F. is so angry he considers running out of the room in his tattered bathrobe and disappearing into the cold Russian eve and letting come what may. But he doesn't. This is the old, never-ending battle between master and slave, employer and employed, aristocrat (no matter how small the scale) and peasant, and it will be endlessly replayed into a bleak, vague future.

"'I will kill him,' F. vows and Liza, new to the game, asks again, as she always does, "'What are you saying?'" for what lies behind the exchange of words and actions she does not comprehend, in her full innocence. It is a sophisticated give-and-take, and it calls for some experience to be able to fathom it.

He is superior to her, always, but not to Appolon, and this becomes immediately apparent when he orders Liza to bring him water "in a faint voice," though he doesn't need it badly and is only feigning thirst, or "putting it on," he tells us. As soon as the knowledgeable servant is gone, F. begins to play his next card with the innocent Liza. Appolon returns, changing everything, and serves them the tea. Liza looks at Appolon "with alarm," but he exits without glancing at either of them.

Anybody who wants to see a homosexual element in this is free to do so. I won't dispute it.

F. asks her if she despises him, trembling with impatience to hear her answer. Why the impatience? Well, she is a mirror to him, a reflecting glass from another world, and his anxiety is a further measure of his spitefulness and vanity. He reinforces this by another reference to his anti-heroic, underground self, the superconscious man who is "fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful stupidity." And a moment later his heart "positively ached with pity for her tactless and unnecessary straightforwardness."

Five minutes pass without a word as both sip tea that must be cold by now.

"Perhaps I am in your way?" she asks, starting to get up to leave.

Knowing that she can't stand to be ignored and would rather be insulted, for that is better than neglect, he charges, "'Why did you come to me, tell me that, please?'" And then he answers for her, giving her no opportunity to do so. "'You came because I talked "fine sentiment" and says she was longing to hear fine sentiments again. Also, the other night when they first met, he was laughing at her because he had just been insulted at dinner by his companions, he tells her. He "vented his spleen" at her.

He can say all this not because he doesn't care but because he does. It gives him power. All along he has had power over her, power he doesn't have over Appolon, and both of them know it. After all, what is lower than a whore? Everybody abused her. He had used her, knowing she thought, she hoped, he had come on horseback, as it were, to save her. Save her from the life of a prostitute that he had described so cunningly, so acutely, the night before: from a fate of drunkenly beating on the steps with a salt fish. But in reality he is a "blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard." So what else is new? She is worse.

He tells her he had said he wasn't ashamed of his poverty, but he was. One can be sure F. is possessed by something when he assures you he isn't, we know, and suspect Liza does, too. He is thoroughly mortified at being poor. His vanity ensures it. Vanity makes him as though he were skinned "and the very air blowing on me hurt." And he is envious. He is jealous even of her. His doom is to be insulted by every louse that comes along. But what about her? Her doom is to sleep with every man who has the money for it. Who is worse? Why she is, clearly. Then why does he rage on, while she remains silent, listening to the tide of words? It cannot be true.

A man speaks out like this "once in a lifetime and it is in hysterics," the author tells us.

F. tells us that, at this point, a strange thing happened. This is not unusual in Dostoyevsky. The roles are suddenly reversed. Though Liza was "wounded, crushed by me," she understood much more than he had surmised. She saw right through him. She loved him and her love gave her insight into him and his condition. He was most unhappy. It was why he raged so. And truly understanding his predicament, she cannot be hurt. She is invulnerable. He is the vulnerable one and had been, all along.

She rushes up to him and embraces him, bursting into tears. He experiences "an upheaval in my heart too." F. cries out, "'They won't let me—I can't—be good.'" He goes to the sofa and falls on it, face down, and sobs into it for a quarter of an hour. As always the length of time in Dostoyevsky is precise and exists as a clue to the strength of the passion being felt. Meanwhile Liza drops to her knees in the position of supplication (which is really the key to her strength) and embraces him, or rather that part of him that is available for embracing, when a man is buried in a sofa, face down.

Their roles are entirely reversed, F. realizes. He asks myself, "'My God, surely I was not envious of her, then?'" And he recognizes that "I cannot get on without domineering and tyrannizing over someone." It is beyond reason and reason is useless, anyway.

He experiences "a feeling of mastery and possession." He grips her hand tightly, she who needs so badly to be mastered, possessed. It is the perfect match. In life (surely in literature, at any rate) such people find each other. F. muses, "How I hated her and how I was drawn to her at that minute!" It was almost like "an act of vengeance. At first there was a look of amazement, even of terror, on her face, but only for an instant. She warmly and rapturously embraced me."

And who was she? No more than a call girl, that is, a prostitute who makes house calls.

* * *

No, Liza is much more than that. She is Woman, the compassionate being, the one who stoops to conquer. For he who loves exercises "moral superiority," F. tells us, and so does Dostoyevsky, and defines love for us, for all time: "love really consists in the right—freely given of the beloved object—to be tyrannized over." And he had previously believed it had to do with bondage—his bondage to some anonymous someone, perhaps the officer in the tavern, or Appolon, or Zverkov or Simonov. A man. But he had been so "out of touch with real life" that he did not realize it would arrive only in the form of a woman and he had been wrong again to suppose she came to hear the "fine sentiments" his wit could endlessly and mockingly compose.

She came only "to love me, because to a woman true resurrection, true salvation from any sort of ruin, and true moral regeneration is contained in love and can only show itself in that form." This he knows, and it is a considerable revelation, the stuff of great literature and religion, surpassing ordinary understanding and existing on the level of myth and transcendental experience.

All the same F. knows himself to be his limited human self, beyond redemption. He is the intellectual who exists in his lonely room, outside of time and place, killing time, waiting to die and enter the void. He says, "I wanted to be left alone in my underground world. 'Real life' oppressed me with its novelty, so much so that I could hardly breathe." Thus the anti-hero wants to be rid of the Woman, the only person capable of understanding and loving him. It is to this self he must be faithful, at all costs. Costs involve the giving away of money, money of which he has not much, admittedly, which is why he lives at the poverty level.

And here we have the great inadvertent moral insult that lies at the heart of much literature. (I'm not sure it is "inadvertent," either; only consciously, on a surface level, is it apparently so.) Liza gathers up her pitiful personal items—her shawl, her hat, her coat, preparing to leave, but taking her time about it. F. gives her "a spiteful grin," the only kind he has, we suspect, in order keep up appearances. Dostoyevsky underlines this, not me. F. opened up her hand and put some money in it. He "did this cruel thing purposely," and though it was not an impulse from the heart, it came from that other dominant organ, "my evil brain," that gives him no peace. Also, it was right out of "books" (underscored again). He was back to where he wanted to be, alone and despised, subject to everybody's insult, real or imagined. Above all, alone.

He is instantly regretful over what his head did to his heart. It overruled it. Liza, he cries out, rushing out the door. On the hall table he sees the blue 5-rouble note he had given her. She had flung it on the table as she went out the door.

What a marvelous gesture. She joins the legion of figures, named and unnamed, who have insulted him and thereby put him in eternal bondage to them. For F. would rather be reviled and in bondage than be purely loved for those sparse human qualities he possesses and the world is not allowed to glimpse. And Liza will benefit, too, he knows. True innocence exists in the form of eternal outrage. "That is purification," Dostoyevsky tells us, thinly disguised in the voice of F., "it is the most stinging and painful consciousness. Tomorrow he would have defiled her and exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of humiliation will never die in her." And that will make her life—such as it is—better.

And we remember the fate of the young prostitute who will never grow very old but will soon die of galloping consumption or end up beating a dead fish against the cement. Or of the married woman whose husband goes to visit the prostitute or degrades or neglects her in several other meaningful ways. Already Liza knows that marriage is not the answer, not the life that F. mockingly describes to her in the language of cheap romances. He has given her the only thing that will last her through her short, horrible life: a sustaining deep moral outrage.

And having created this marvelous tragic situation and then blown it all apart with a calculated gesture, Dostoyevsky brings his short novel to a close in the person of the anonymous narrator I call F., after Fyodor, by continuing to define the plight of underground man, the anti-hero, who lives without the crutch of God and whose life is not so much literature as "corrective punishment." It is a fictive type he has created, but one with many correspondents in real life, many men he has glimpsed, and women, too, who "are divorced from life" and are cripples.

Life "is better in books," he tells us, and thinking of F. and Liza we are inclined to agree. We do not know what we want for ourselves and find ourselves loving what we hate and ruining that which we think we love and that brings us pleasure. And then he reminds us of what he told us at the start of this strange parable of life, that it is a tale told by an aging man, either forty or over sixty, and we have had penetrating glimpses into his life, and it is nothing. It was nothing as a minor bureaucratic functionary on a pitiful salary and it is nothing as a middle-aged underground man who is in love with a whore who (whether she knows it or not) is as doomed as he is, and again his life comes down to nothing as an aging man, a paltry thing, a rag, a stick, a bone, a hank of hair, a man who lives alone on a pittance with his books and subsists on thin gruel. He is Everyman, he is us.

We are all the better off for knowing this.

* * *

Our next hike was to Carkeek Park, a large patch of woods at the city's northern terminus, where the Great Northern Railroad tracks came down to the edge of Puget Sound and turned North, skirting the water but always keeping it in view. It was a simple overnighter, one designed to experience young scouts like myself to life outdoors in inclement weather and teaching us how to survive it, if not triumph over it, which may be expecting too much.

And so we accepted the overnighter grudgingly, knowing that as soon as next summer (which was rushing on) we would go off into the real woods for a week and to one degree or another survive. An overnighter is the next best thing and an unescapable first step in achieving the ineffable. It is to real love—sex in bed—what making out in a car is to teenagers. So this camping out was to be tolerated, learned from, practiced upon, looked on as necessary and productive, though rugged and demanding. I was a Second Class Scout now, but everybody seemed to be advancing lockstep, so the others ahead of me in scouting were already First Class, or rapidly becoming that, but now there were two or three new boys behind us and they weren't even Tenderfeet, so we had somebody to deride and subtly bully and whenever we could get away with it torture, at least mentally.

Pure Dostoyevsky.

There is something about the smell of wet alder being made to burn, however reluctantly, by stacked cedar shavings and crumpled up newspaper that brings me back to my boyhood days and makes my eyes mist over, my mind drift back. Fifty years have somehow passed, but I know that I am still the same boy, full of ineptitude, half-truths believed in, nervous tics, long resentments, sudden expressions of anger, witticisms that are often misplaced and badly delivered, and fear held at arms length. What joins the men and the boys in the wet woods is simple fear. Something will go wrong, everything will go wrong. He who writes worst-case scenarios is educated by a night or two among the trees, when pegs are driven into the mud, tents collapse, fires won't light or even show a glimmer, and food is eaten nothing more than raw.

Your socks are wet inside your boots and you slosh when you walk, so you sit still, cold, hoping the others won't hear your sound. The guy next to you, whom you will bunk with in your sodden tent tonight, is your worst enemy. The scout master is a sadist and, you suspect, a pervert. (Pre-vert, we call them, with ironic mispronunciation.) You haven't had a crap in two days and it is beginning to tell on you through your eternal stooped position. And in the morning you will don wet clothing, eat more cold uncooked food, and hike five miles through weather no better than this, which is weather at its worst.

God you love scouting.

Soon everybody will have the same cold. It is called Upper Respiratory Infection and it is nothing to laugh at. It is more than a simple cold. It is bacterial, but since penicillin has not come home from the war the matter is academic and each must do his best to survive without it. Aspirin and bed rest, with plenty of liquids is the prescription. URI is epidemic. You catch it off somebody's cough or wheeze in your face. It starts off with a scratchy throat. Fever follows, often a spectacular one. Then the old sinuses start to pour—first down your throat, then out through alternating nostrils. Great thick green streamy stuff. You think it will never end. You sneeze and you sneeze, and the stuff is goaded into massive accumulation and comes issuing forth copiously in quivering clots. A handkerchief soon becomes a sodden rag incapable of absorbing any more. You develop the old man's habit of emptying out one nostril on the ground, while a finger on the opposite side holds the other nostril closed in order to concentrate the force of expanded air. How the snot goes flying. If you weren't so sick, you'd appreciate it better.

Green hawks, yes, and an absolutely splendid rattling sound in your throat, enough to turn another fellow around in wonder and envy. And there are those who strive for emulation. These are the copycat snifflers and hawkers. They only pretend to be sick. They fake it. A true sufferer stands in silence, the prospect of lying down being far off. He emits not a sound for long periods. His eyes are glazed. It hurts so to talk that he doesn't speak. But then most incredibly comes gushing forth this sound so loud and crude and absolutely rotten that its authenticity cannot be denied:

Crraaaa-kkk-shuuuuup-uuuuulk-auk-hup-hum-hum-braaaak—wulllth-pittttt. Plop.

It lies there, an oyster not even on the halfshell but on the bare ground, looking up at you, as it were, quivering into stillness and offense leading to outrage. Who dropped an egg? And yet some are proud of producing such a specimen. The hawker—silent and still until now—can be glimpsed actually smiling secretly. From deep within his being, his very soul perhaps, he had produced this wondrous object, this jellyfish, this island of mucus, this quivering world, this microcosm of the cosmos.

And if you are a member, an apprentice at URI or a journeyman or even a graduate, you smile appreciatively and nod recognition—a salute to the originator, the hawker supreme. He smiles modestly, or does it seems so because he has exhausted himself and his little energy reserve is spent? He is no more able to produce another, recycle one, regenerate it, than he is able to speak a series of words, however slight, however faint. It is like having a sexual ejaculation and one must wait before attempting another. Meanwhile, the sinuses fill up their reservoirs with evil green slimy substance in preparation.

The fever that accompanies URI but does not show up for a couple of days, or rather nights, is incredible. It really has to be experienced to be understood. If you've already had it, words from me are not necessary, but if you haven't, words from me will not be up to the task. Yet try I must. What would Dostoyevsky have been if he hadn't tried to express the world in his terms? Yes, yes, I know: one more salt farmer.

You feel a faint stirring in your shoulders and a warm wave passes across your forehead. A zephyr, you believe, and pay it no heed. You believe it has gone away, but you are wrong. URI is merely lying in wait, charging up its batteries. Now it returns as a cool wave of about identical intensity, but it crosses your brow and moves down your shoulders to your spine. Ah, the spine, source of all sensation; it is the seat of the central nervous system and accordingly is what makes a man or boy nervous—did you know? How cold it is, how contradictory to the climate and the ambient temperature of the day. How contrary. And an involuntary shudder starts. You decide to mimic the shudder as a joke on yourself and as a superstitious act to disperse it, for everybody knows the best way to get rid of a shudder or shiver is to introduce as soon as possible another one, which will act as a sine-wave. You kill a wave with another wave, don't you?

The induced shiver or shudder is false and your body knows it. There is no nerve response, no rising of the pores in the approximation of gooseflesh, no nothing. Your body recognizes it as the sham it is, and it is that body exactly which is lying in waiting to remind you again, Something is wrong. The true shudder is not far behind.

It starts out warm but becomes immediately cool. And there is something wrong with your nose. What is it? Has it grown large, as if from telling a whopper? No, but something has grown amiss inside. It is burning. The air has grown colder. It bites at the inside of each nostril, stinging the soft concavity of it with each breath until you are ready to wince. Your head has grown light-hearted. I mean, lightheaded. I don't know what I mean. You have a giddy feeling, all over. You am bouncing along, like an India-rubber ball, each step taking you higher and higher, while at the same time you are weighed down, your arms and legs are lead, it is most peculiar, you don't like it, but you are powerless to dispel it and make it vanish.

Now your throat is aflame with what is being secreted by your nostrils. Phlegm it is called. Try as you may, you can't stop the stuff from trickling back and downward. You crumph it up and it is scratchy. You attempt to spit it out but it isn't there. You are left with your lips extended in a pucker that lacks a form of expression. You must look a little like a goldfish trying to form its characteristic bubble.

If you didn't feel so awful you might enjoy this. Certainly there are pleasant aspects to being so light-headed, or is it light-hearted? Bubble-headed? Floating. You wish there was someplace to go to lie down. Would the others mind if you simply unrolled your bag, there in the quasi-dry tent, and flaked out for a few minutes? Unheard of, true, but vital to your survival, surely, and it would be acknowledged by all in the Beaver Patrol who are coming down with it in a staggered series, it might be called, at a rate of about one an hour.

Is this how the plague started out, Ranny Hennes asks? Nobody feels well enough to laugh. The goldfish stare at each other and strive to make a collective bubble. After all, isn't it inherent in scouting that the patrol is at its heart and the patrol is where life begins and ends? The patrol is part and parcel of scouting, and mustn't all do everything together? That is explicit, or is it implicit? So a patrol that gets sick together is practicing scouting at its finest. It only stands to reason. You advance this idea dreamily to Art Golofon and he listens to you seriously (as a leader must do) and nods his head in tentative agreement.

"Must be an award somewhere for this," he muses, for Art is awards-conscious and will someday be All-City Guard, and this will be commensurate with his greatness. Already he is well on his way to becoming a Life Scout, and we are of course all a shade envious.

We have a new patrol, the Buffalo, and they comprise about five, with one of them already dropping out. This takes us up to four patrols again, your basic complement, for the Moose are defunct. The Buffalo are anxious about their status, as well they should be, for they have none. And they are ragged unmercifully, which is the nature of boys. What you do is single out somebody, or something (a patrol, for instance), and then attempt to drive it into the ground with derision. In turn the apprentice Buffalo Patrol becomes super-defensive, almost paranoic. It doesn't take much to get a rise out of them. They are all Tenderfeet, except for their patrol leader, stolen from us for this special mission—it's Wally Ort.

Yes, we've lost him, but he hasn't gone very far. Everybody wants to be a Beaver (naturally we are all called Eager Beavers, proud of it) so there are many vying to join our ranks. And while everybody who wants to be a scout and will pay the membership fee, which is small, not everybody can be a Beaver. I mean, what do you think this is, a democracy? And Blondie and Clay go along with us. It is important to cultivate esprit, wherever it may be found. So we are tacitly urged on in our petty elitism, while from a scouting standpoint, you understand, this characteristic is greatly to be discouraged.

A typical exchange between us and the new patrol goes like this:

"We are the Buffalo Patrol."

"The Buffalo are extinct."

"You stink, too."

Or, "Hail, Buffalo. Where goest thou?"

"Fuck you."

Not exactly the height of civil repartee, I agree, but about the best you can expect in the field among boys averaging fourteen years, with many of them younger and foolishly striving to be accepted.

Our chant goes, "Beaver, Beaver—Slap!" We clap our hands nearly as one to simulate the sound a beaver makes when its tail hits the water as he dives with a splash. A beaver is always "he." Nobody wonders where baby beavers come from. In fact, none of us gives the matter of beavers much thought, collectively not having ever seen one.  (This was before the coming of The Discovery Channel, you understand, when everybody with eyes is intimate with even the rarest of creatures of nature.)

Meanwhile, it grows dark at Carkeek Park, and everybody is wheezing like a locomotive and snorting like a pig and the Beavers are making their beaver noises in their throats and hawking up goobers, for that is what these slithery things are called. And night stretches ahead like . . . a wet blanket. Our night is exactly like that. It is a literal statement.

We keep each other awake with our pathetic sounds. It is a regular cacophony, displacing the ordinary noises of rural dark—the low of a cow, for instance, or a barn owl's hoot, or the rusty hinge creak made by some other owl, smaller, more discrete. Instead there is this barking of scouts. It obscures the real barking of somebody's penned-up dog or the yip-yip of distant coyotes, to which we have gotten not quite used and still causes a minor thrill to escape down our spine.

The worst sound of all is somebody trying to get up a goober and failing. He will try and try, and in our sodden bags we will all be pulling for him, bending our bodies to help him succeed, crabbing up sympathetically, and we will listen intently, especially for the third and fourth cough, deep resonant ones, and then there will be racking silence, a lull, and if he is lucky there will be something to spit out of the front of the tent.

Finally, one by one, the snifflers and the coughers, the hawkers and the spitters, grow still. A train roars and rattles by, not very far off, gathering up speed after having cleared Seattle and not yet gotten very near Edmonds, its next stop on the way to Everett and points East. The train is long and fully extended on a roadbed which at this point has no curves, is pure straightaway, and if it has passenger cars (not likely at this time of night) they will be relatively still, muffled, window lights mostly off, for people are sleeping, but if it is a long freight there will be a constant thumping from the couplings hitting the joints in the tracks where two rails come together but do not quite match up because of the space left for expansion or contraction, according to the ambient temperature and weather. We all know this small truth. Everybody but the Buffalo, who are pitiful.

Morning is not so bad, a gradual cessation of rain and skies beginning to part their clouds so that you can glimpse sky through them and, far off over the Olympic Mountains, some flashes of silvery light signifying a fresh storm. All is as gray as the inside of a goose. We decide to go on a hike, for this is what scouts do; if they do nothing else, they hike, and there is no weather too poor to prevent them.

There is a saying that once you are wet to the skin, you cannot get any wetter. Oh, yeah? Yeah; it is true, true as anything is, these days. And your very skin (I call it very to differentiate it from whatever other skin may be around and does not count) is waterproof. Not many people—scouts included—know this. It is what I term a rare fact.

Soon we are all about as wet as you can get. I mean, there are two ways (at least) to get sodden. The first is from rain penetrating your clothing and reaching your very skin. The other is from sweat and condensation within your garment, it being trapped there and not permitted to evaporate by an imaginary process known as venting.

The second kind is worse. A scout soon learns it is better to ventilate and be sort of wet than to be hot and wet, which makes you sick. And if you are already suffering (and that is the word for it) from URI, as 80 percent of us are, your garments (scouts call any piece of clothing a garment, I don't know why, perhaps it is from the scout handbook, or else it is a military carryover from the war nearly over now) have trapped all the moisture they can hold inside your waterproof.  A waterproof can be a nylon poncho or some oilskin material.

You are told to wear wool, for wool retains its warmth when wet, but wet wool stinks, as the Buffalo Patrol would put it, and it gets heavy. Heavy to begin with, it becomes beyond tolerance when sodden. But cotton is even worse. Cotton is summery stuff with no heat in it, and not for boy scouts. It is cold to begin with and when wetted becomes colder, clinging to your arms and elbows and knees and ankles like wet newspapers. With cotton you will die in the woods, while with wool it will only seem like it and while you may pray for the release of death you will survive to hike another day.

We talk to ourselves and each other in a language like this; it soon becomes universal, as natural as scratching your balls or going off to take a pee.

With the Beaver Patrol in the lead, its pennant or flag flying, carried by the second boy in the file, which is the traditional and I believe Army way, we set off along the edge of the railroad tracks, headed North, and we check our position relative to the earth every once in a while with our compasses, nodding wisely to have confirmed by a dumb arrow what we have known in our hearts and our bones all along—that North is straight ahead, the direction the tracks are headed, and minor deviations for bays and promontories of Puget Sound mean nothing. They are mere variants from the truth. North is North, although there is magnetic North to be coped with and what is called True North, which is not true at all, nor even only slightly deceptive, but varies at this longitude by 23 and one-half degrees from what the compass points at, with its little iron needle, which is a lie, for force fields divert it.

A mist comes down and there are seagulls (terns, Bonapartes, herring) that drift across our field of vision, hardly beating their wings for flight. They are on garbage patrol. Great open sewers pass under the railroad tracks and disgorge their contents onto the mudflats that pass for beaches, and each time we pass over one there is a terrible stench, as if the entire world flushed its toilet at once (which it has). And then there is the garbage dumped on the beach in suburban areas without the community's own waste-treatment facility, as it is called, and people are helpless to get rid of orange rinds, coffee grounds, old mattresses, broken chairs, etc., in any other way, so they cart the stuff in sedans to where the crossings of the tracks and lug or drag the stuff to the riprap below which lies the rocky beach and toss the stuff over, and hope the tide will carry it out to sea.

But the tide doesn't; the tide merely effects a random redistribution of the flotsam, and the stuff floats briefly, is washed back and forth, spun around, drifted South, caught on rocks, lifted free, moved along, and comes to rest but a hundred yards from where it began its journey. This each scout can discern from the limitless amount of time he puts one wet foot in front of another and moves along the coarse cinders at the edge of the track.

"What's that—up ahead?" calls out a boy, sniffling and hawking.

We all look to see.

"Looks like a boot," answers George Trick, for Art Golofon has for some reason has taken up a position at the rear of our column, instead of at the head, where he usually leads us, which is his job. Perhaps he is off taking a trailside crap. Or else he is off after a straggler. Funny, that, because the Beaver Patrol has no stragglers, or none that we will acknowledge in public. We all look after each other and maintain a profile of invincibility. We are even known to help each other out in emergencies, which is what boy scouts are supposed to do but—if the truth be told—seldom happens, everybody being so envious and competitive.

"Yes, its a boot," another somebody replies. Then: "Uh—oh."

Uh-oh, what?

"There seems to be a foot in the boot."

"Oh, no." A collective gasp passes moves along the patrol column. This is the stuff of fireside ghost stories and does not belong to the daylight hours. I mean, none of us is up to the ordinary horror of what this portends. Even Dostoyevsky doesn't prepare you for it.

"You young kids, you look aside. Troop detour."

It is Blondie Stamer who orders us. We make a wide swing around the boot with the foot in it and I detect there is part of a leg, as well. It strikes me sudden that we will have to pass by the boot and the foot on our return journey, unless Blondie and Clay know of another route, and I doubt there is one, but if there is it must be obscure, a complex route through people's backyards and pathless woods replete with blackberry thickets. And now up ahead looms what appears to be an old coat, we hope it is. The bulk grows horribly larger, as we approach it, though there is a general slowing of progress at the head of our column because of our fear.

"You young kids, stop. In fact, everybody stop. Halt, that is." Blondie Stamer raises his hand, its back towards us. It is exactly as though he is starting to give the Scout Sign or Pledge, but has forgotten the finger combinations indigenous to them and must come to a stop first and try to remember them. He holds his hand in the air much longer than he has in the past and the gesture seems indecisive.

"Clay. You and Art go ahead and inspect the object. We'll remain behind and await your report."

And they dash ahead as though at the start of an ambush raid. We can see them—at least I can—from where we stand halted in the rain, steaming as a body like an old plough horse. They remain staring at the object no longer than they have to for identification purposes. It is what it seems, a body. When they return they are the subject of our astonished attention. Is this why they look so solemn and thoughtful? So pale and chagrined? So sick at heart and stomach?

It is the missing other body components of the found foot. It is a bum, an Indian. And while what had happened happens fairly often, monthly here, on this stretch, it had never happened to us before, to Troop 81, and we are all staggered by the event. An Indian from Skid Road, or more likely the Tulalip Reservation, was walking along the tracks and made a big mistake. Either he didn't get out of the way or else he attempted to board it, while it was going a shy sixty miles an hour.

He was presumed to be drunk. He had made a judgmental error, as it is often called. He had believed himself to be invincible. The fact that it was his leg that got severed, while his body was bumped and battered badly but otherwise intact, led us to the conclusion that he was attempting to board near here, for the freight was known to slow down near here for a critical bend in the tracks. But that lay ahead a few hundred yards. If it had been a suicide, wouldn't it have been his head that got separated from his body? It is well-known that this is a favorite way for an indigent to depart the planet; he lays his head down to sleep on the tracks, and this clearly was not the case.

Rather than skirt the corpse as we had his foot and lower leg, we about-faced and headed back, skirting his foot and limb, we made our way back to camp immediately and Blondie Stamer headed for the nearest telephone. It is what good scouts do, under these precise circumstances. Blondie Stamer phoned it in. Our message was received by the railroad with aplomb. They were used to such news, evidently. You don't exactly expect a commendation, but you wish for a little more commiseration—or for any.

I think there ought to be a corpse-finding merit badge. It should be awarded to all of us on that hike. You would wear it on the right side of your uniform shirt, over the pleated pocket, not over your heart, which is more to the left. Place it nearer to the stomach, which is still aquiver.

That's it!

That a scout is "a friend to all and a brother to every other scout" is of course patent nonsense. Daily the events confirm it. But we all believed this truism to some extent. We believed it, but we did not practice it. To me this is perfectly normal. We were not mass hypocrites, that is. We were just little boys, striving to grow up. And of course we did.

Our troop was buttressed by a constant flood of recruits, while ones who had been with us for a time dropped out. (Some discovered Girls, and that was a great diversion, not to be overcome or competed with.) Three new scouts became my friends and we were hiking companions. They were Harry Walrath, Steritt Metheny, and Jack Hepburn.

I mentioned Jack Hepburn earlier, whose old house I passed on my recent deja vu walking tour before my December surgery. He lived on Viewmont Way, but before that he and his parents had a large apartment on Queen Anne Hill, and with his father being a wholesale jeweler, it was often just Jack and his mother at home when I was invited to stay overnight. Besides Jeanne Crain in the movies, Mrs. Hepburn was the first woman I was keenly aware of having breasts. (I could not demean them or her by calling them what they were—tits.)

She was late in rising and did not dress until nearly noon, so most of the late morning she lounged around in a silken (it was probably rayon, but what the hell the effect was nearly the same) nightgown loosely belted and plunging in front. She wore a lot of makeup and perfume, and I used to feel a stirring in my loins, as bad books put it, when I was overnighting with them, especially the following morning, when Jack and I went after our stamp exchange or worked on putting together our airplane models, and she was constantly pottering around.

Mrs. Hepburn would slink around the house, dishabille, as it is called in fancy bad books, reeking of perfume, a cigaret trailing smoke in her wake. For many years—decades—I believed she was unaware of the consternation she caused me; now, as an older man, I believe she knew all the while and enjoyed it. I mean, I was not sexually ready for anything and was most unattractive, with my crossed eyes only partly corrected with their gold-rimmed glasses and my scrawny body. She had no real designs on virginal. But she was ware of me as a male—a person with a penis. (It was called a cock; only mothers and doctors ever called it a penis, but it was the same thing. It got stiff on you at the most inconvenient moments and would cause you great embarrassment with its tenting effect and how it would throb.) And it was satisfying for her to observe that all of her equipment was in good working order.

When Mrs. Hepburn was around, her breasts moving independently like nothing I'd ever seen before inside her peach-colored night gown, her high-heeled mules flashing and clacking when she walked, the matching bathrobe whirling and swirling around her smooth hips, I got aroused. And I guess it was meant that I get aroused, I now believe. She enjoyed my consternation. Along with the perfume, makeup, cigarets, cold coffee by the cup, the radio playing constant swing, deep rugs, dark drapes that remained pulled all day long, she liked to know she had a womanly effect on a young boy who was not related to her. And if I had but known this, and had suspected the humanly, womanly worst of her, I might have not been so embarrassed. I might have seen it as a distant tribute to my young, dubious manhood, or the maleness I represented. But then this would have ruined it for her. And for me.

I can still picture, as I must have then, with my limited imagination, a sexual encounter between us, but not in all of its multifarious glory or in its rich detail and intrigue. Had I known about the delights, say, of oral sex, I might have been better able to comprehend what a tryst between us might have consisted of. This would have greatly abetted my fantasies. Jack would have been set off to the store with a $5 bill for some groceries and I would have been left alone in the house with just her. We would brush in the narrow hallway, her gown would dip lower and swing even more open than it already was (which was about as far as possible without her losing one boob to the cool morning air), a thigh would grind against me, we would move apart slightly, only to join inevitably again.

I think the top of my head would come up about to the bottom of those marvelous breasts, whose nipples I could frequently detect through their single layer of thin, bias-cut fabric. Always they would appear at unexpected places, so free were they to move with only slight hampering. On one side a nipple would be right where you'd expect, dead-center, but on the other side, where the tension of the material slackened, it would be an inch or two off, pointed in a different direction. Simply amazing.

And if the top of my head came to there, then my chin would touch her navel—to me a mysterious place and highly sexual, because I knew it was once attached to the mother and her vast interior plumbing, her womb, and if my chin was there, then by a gradual lowering of my head, my lips would slowly arrive at what I did not know then was called her bush, or mound, that furry area that diminishes in the manner of an inverted pyramid to a bony ridge and beneath that to an opening that is slightly extended to the rear, and warm and wet.

Wow. To be so near the source, and not know what to do when I got there. To be a virgin again, but sexually ready, with my hardon handy —the idea is still exciting. And would I bend and nuzzle Mrs. Hepburn, my friend's mother, and part her lower lips with my little tongue and drink of those juices that hinted of the sea, and hear her moan and relax backwards and clutch my head with both hands and their scarlet tipped fingers. . . .

Or would she lower those thick red lips to my still-hairless crotch, cup my newly extended balls expertly in one hand, strip back my foreskin deftly, and engulf me? Then would she give lick and promise to sexual fulfillment and madness? Smiling into my eyes, would she offer one kind of relief or another, as a woman is pledged to do before beginning? Bliss.

At the time I only knew there was some kind of consummation achieved between men and women and it involved a coupling of my well known area with her mysterious one, and it is the source for all those dirty jokes whose specific twists and turnings I could but guess at, laughing along with the unsure others at what I hoped were the correct places and hoping, desperately wishing that from context alone I could determine just what it was expressly that men and women did together.

I mean, you could be "six inches in snow," or "Snow," for that was also a girl's odd name, and snicker, and know what it referred to, while at the same time you didn't have the faintest idea what was involved, and the subject remained ever obscure and remote. Sex in jokes usually involved a farmer's daughter and a traveling salesman—never did know what he sold, perhaps jewelry on the wholesale level; it would be only fitting—and she would be wanton and ready, randy, as available as Mrs. Hepburn, except for the vigilance of an overly protective father of a farmer who, as it turned out, knew what it was he was guarding her against, but was always a few minutes late in arriving and failed ever to thwart the grand event, to observe time after time the salesman leaving the scene of the crime, pulling his pants up, his sample case clutched in his other hand, scurrying off to where his coupe was parked, while the daughter (she looked just like Daisy Mae in "Little Abner") lolled on the haystack, a little twig of straw stuck in her teeth, a well-satisfied expression on her beautiful, still nearly innocent face. Oh boy.

So whatever it was, women liked it. It made them smile afterwards. They got something out of it. It felt good to them. They got your semen, sure, but they got something else. Excitement, satisfaction. Well, when you got a hardon and grabbed yourself, it made you feel good, too, at the same time you were left guilty, nervous, and unhappy. Could both be the same thing? If so, how did sex operate or function?

It beat me. I wanted to keep on watching Mrs. Hepburn and to be near her, hoping some of the thrill would rub off on me. And she had a way, I swear, of looking me full in the eye and smiling broadly. And she did not cover up. In fact, she seemingly exposed a little more of herself in the process.

I learned that breasts were important to a woman and her relationship with men, it was what kept guys interested, but it was not the primary site (as it might be called) of sexual expression. Breasts were ornaments, attractors. They riveted the attention (my long love, Jeanne Crain, was master at this), while at the same time they turned you away from that more important area where relief resided and babies came from. The crotch. Yeah!

The crotch contained the cunt, a mechanism. Wonderful, mysterious word and place, a boy or a man had a crotch, too, but it was different. The crotch was a generally defined area where the legs joined the body, but a woman had a cunt there, and it was special. It was a word not to be spoken aloud and only to be murmured or whispered. It was sacred, holy; at the same time it was unbelievably dirty. It was where babies came out of, and next to where they shitted. For a baby, you had to put something there first. It was your penis and your ejaculate, commonly called jism.

And she let you!

Now why on earth would a woman (Mrs. Hepburn, for instance) let you? It was simply too incredible to contemplate. Because it made her feel good? Now, how could it, it was so despicable and filthy an act. I mean, it is what you peed out of. And where your jism appeared surprisingly, usually at night, and made a mess out of the bed. Why? How could it make women feel good? Impossible to contemplate.

And so, for the time being, this is where I left the matter of sex and Mrs. Hepburn. There was in the movies, many years later, a Mrs. Robinson, told to do what she did by Director Mike Nichols, in a bedroom scene designed by Richard Sylbert, before a young college student, Dustin Hoffman, and Anne Bancroft offered him what Mrs. Hepburn didn't offer me, but surely teased me with, but if I had been Dustin Hoffman would she have? Pressed it up against me? Begged for it, for Christ's sake?

A boy now a young man can ask himself questions of this sort from sundown to sunup and never receive an answer from his skies. And there is no point in grieving for lost opportunity when it wasn't a chance at all but only a situation, perhaps playful for her, who must have been bored screamingly to resort to such sport, or so I now believe. But there is her side—to tempt a boy of twelve or thirteen, and feel a thrill in her bones from his visible stirring in his pants, standing before her, half-ashamed, and know it was in her female power to bring it about, if not sate it.

Harry Walrath had a sister. Let us call her Georgianna, though I am pretty sure that was not her name. Her charms were considerable but not yet readily recognized. She wore the tight sweaters and skirts of the day, and I remember how the plaid rounded her bottom like a salami. She was about sixteen—a few months in either direction. This made her equally unaccessible to me at thirteen. She was a Big Girl. But she was often always around. In spite of her great tits (for hers were tits, not breasts, and not all girls had them so fine, but more than not, in my opinion) she was not sought after by boys yet, nor by the boys she wanted, as must have been the case, and therefore was usually brooding and silent and yawning and bored about the house. But she was nice, and pretty, and she would occasionally consent to speak to me, a real girl would, and for this modicum of attention I was eternally grateful to her.

You could look at a girl like Georgianna Walrath and when she was head on to you in her sweater it seemed as though she had tits, all right, but they were incorporated in the rest of her anatomy but no great thing, just there, a couple of large objects located just below her neck and stopping short of her shoulders, lifted up with a bra or riding along naturally high because of her youth. They were new to her, after all, only a couple of years old and still surprisingly delightful to be come across in the mirror, where only yesterday there was nothing much there, only a flat field, with a couple of boy-like nipples at each of their approximate centers. Now she would incidentally turn sideways in the glass and see that they would nearly put your eye out. So she turned sideways a lot, or maybe she was simply active, restless, and the action was not consciously intended, or do I tend to discount female machinations? This was, you understand, in the days of those famous push-up, pointed brassieres. They are unforgettable and sorely missed.

You could take a nice, soft, substantial girl and put her into one of these armories and she would become as formidable as a battleship. If you came across her in a school hallway and she bumped into you, you experienced the simple solid thrust of her bulk; she did not flinch or bounce away. You did, or were inclined to do so, and at school there was much of this bumping and shoving between classes. And on the bus ride to and from school. It was part of the daily exchange and as natural as rain and breathing. If girls didn't like it, they hid it well and put up with it, cold-eyed, tight-lipped, unyielding. Probably it was exciting to them, too.

Georgianna Walrath simply existed, she and her famous boobs. They were a corporeal part of her life, essential, not to be obscured or done away with. They were best when viewed from the side, but mostly you encountered her head on, but then something caused her to turn and she overwhelmed you with her size and pointedness. She saw the effect in a young boy's eyes—how you suddenly gulped and looked away—and she felt power. She smiled in recognition, a sweet smile, and it was okay, okay to look, I mean. This went on daily and she and we never tired of it. Oh, I was but one of many. She dressed herself accordingly, for maximum daily effect, and you knew it, and she knew that you knew it, and it was fine, so you looked, and she smiled at the attention. She gave you herself in profile and happily revealed her upper row of teeth. They were perfect, for her father was a dentist. Day after day, it was great. Harry's sister.

These women and girls were incidental to our lives as scouts. I mean, they were always around. Girls didn't have so much to do. They were always hanging about houses, while houses to us were where we waited when we were on our way from one place or event to another, and these usually involved the out-of-doors. Girls were different; they hurried from one indoor situation to another and seemed to dislike being outside, where it was always blowing or you got rained on. But then they weren't scouts.

There was a hike about every second week, and as we got more expert at spending time in the vast outdoors we went farther from home for our adventures. It was usually mothers who took us places. Since we invariably left early on Saturday morning, it could have just as easily been fathers who took us, but it wasn't. They avoided us, busy with their own weekend activities. Mothers fired up the sedans and stationwagons and collected us from in front of our houses, where we stood waiting, our packboards at our sides, as one by one we stowed our gear in the trunk or on one of those roofrack carriers, and piled inside with other scouts tightly arranged, shoulders and hips aligned, and were driven out to the country. We rode across one of the two dominant mountain passes, Stevens or Snoqualmie, and were taken up winding dirt roads along which there were dwindling houses until at last they disappeared entirely and we were moving slowly over deteriorating roads that soon became not much more than a path and petered out, at which point the assigned mother stopped the car and we dismounted, joining other scouts that had arrived minutes earlier, and watched our own vehicle depart with a sinking feeling that meant we were on our own until late Sunday afternoon at which time the amassed mothers would return singly and transport us back—grimy and yawning—to whence we came. We would warmly sleep most of the way.

One long weekend trip was to Salmon La Sac, or rather to a small lake about fifteen miles up past the sparse settlement. There was an extra day tacked on to the weekend because it was Memorial Day. Cars picked us up at our homes early Saturday morning, while there was still mist in the air. I believe it was in June. It was Steritt Metheny's mom who took us; she was the wife of a physician, a surgeon, and they lived in a fine house just off Magnolia Boulevard. I used to go down there to play with their two youngest sons, for the eldest was two years ahead of me in practically everything and would barely acknowledge my existence, which is pretty odd when you are in the same house with him all the time.

We rode along in the Metheny stationwagon, an Olds, all spread out and lying back on our packsacks, looking out the windows at the streaming new scenery. On the way to Snoqualmie Pass there were all these brown postage stamps where the timber companies had been cutting their trees in blocks, and while at first we were appalled we soon grew used to the sight and knew that it was inevitable. Then we cleared the pass and the countryside took on a whole new configuration—it spread out and opened up, the trees now being those sparse pines that stand alone and resemble fishbone skeletons. Clay had told us how the needles, which continuously fell, poisoned the earth, so that was why nothing grew underneath them, much unlike our dense forests to the West, which were clotted with bushes and shrubs and young alder trees freshly sprouted and especially with blackberry thickets, through which you could not pass without shredding yourself and dying a slow death.

The ground was dry and brown, crusted with layers of needles no longer the dusty green of the parent trees that had a shaggy pyramid shape. The lower limbs were without needles, which meant they were no longer alive and if not already fallen could be snapped off or given a whack with the butt end of an ax and would drop to the ground. They made excellent firewood and, since there was little or no rain here (a wonder!), they could be tindered easily with needles and twiglets, and a fire soon would be roaring. How welcome this was to us who had had miserable times starting fires with wet or green alder, and only had blazes because of Clay Blackstock's genius. Now we were all budding arsonists. Often we started fires when there was no real need for them, just to prove to our miserable, previously failed selves that we could, and nearly effortlessly. The woods even in June were so dry it is surprising we didn't set the forest on fire and have to flee before it. But our leaders were keen on keeping an eye on us and averting any potential disaster.

You turn off the I-90 highway onto a pleasant two-land blacktopped affair that wound between hills that by degrees increased their slant, their slope, and soon you realized you were climbing, if the laboring engine had not already indicated this. Deftly Mrs. Metheny steered an unblinking course. She had tight iron-colored curls pressed flat to her head, and a scarf over the back of her skull, plus a great wool coat she would not remove unless it became unbearably hot and then reluctantly, first sliding it back on her shoulder, later down her back, and finally off her arms, where it piled about her in the cramped car seat and surrounded her in its hot folds.

How different from, say, Mrs. Hepburn, who would probably have on under her coat maybe only a bra and panties, and would smile as though herself surprised at what she discovered there when the sun through the windows caused her to shed a second skin. She would smile to the air in delight. You might find out that all she wore was her primary skin.

But she was long ago and far away, and her son Jack—an unsure boy with flaxen hair and a face that never wore a smile—rode along with us, experiencing what we did but not adding to it or (to be fair) subtracting from it either but simply partaking of it evenly and existentially, as I would now describe it, not with the wisdom of years but only their amassed weight.

I think the mounting hills, hills that would increase in size and scope and volume until they became the start of mountains, then true mountains, and off in the distance mountains for sure, wearing a coat of old snow on their upper slopes. We passed the place with the famous name, Salmon La Sac, and found that it was one large building, a lodge, plus a number of quite small ones that were cottages for guests, but all were closed up presently, the season not beginning until the Fourth of July weekend, which was a full month away. We streamed past this ghost town and soon came to a creek running full with snow melt. The creek simply crossed the road and had no bridge. What you did was drive through it, and we did.

Mrs. Metheny was wise and stopped and made us all get out and one of us, probably Art Golofon, went ahead and tested the depth with a pole. It was the patrol flag on its staff. He took off his shoes and left them behind, inching out into the torrent and proving it shallow, illusionary, as he pushed and probed ahead and finally stood in water only a couple of inches deep on the far side. Thus encouraged, Mrs. Metheny waved us all back into the stationwagon and drove through and across the creek with a wonderful slushing sound, the water flying up and spraying out while we cheered and Art Golofon on the far bank waved encouragement. We all knew she would have to cross the creek alone on her way back to civilization, but it would pose no real obstacle now that it had been once plumbed.

The water level was up on both creek and Cle Elum river because of recent warm weather that had melted the lingering snow. We moved along the packed dirt road that was little more than a trail, but a trail in open country like this, with its hard ground, was as good as a road and would serve well as one, and the only thing that would keep you from moving on would be deep water or rocks that could not be circumnavigated. And it was the latter that eventually stopped us.

But first we passed Fish Lake, to our collective left. It was long and narrow, and had a couple of pre-war cars parked at its near shore and men fishing from boats. Fishing had great appeal to us boys, we scouts, for it was part of the menu of living off the land, an important illusion to maintain in scouting. We all believed it was possible to live like a bear, that is, by nibbling berries in season and catching trout year-round. A boy could thus stay alive, we thought, and the Boy Scout Handbook cleverly skirted the issue and let us infer that we could survive on such a diet. It would be hard to give up such staples as Wonder Bread, peanut butter, ground beef, and freshly squoze orange juice, our healthy staple, but a determined boy could. He would not go blind from Vitamin A deficiency or develop beri-beri, commonly called scurvy, from lack of fresh fruit, for the blackberries and huckleberries would take care of that problem. And he could set snares and traps made out of peeled green limbs to catch small animals that he could gut and skin and eat. The fact that the overnight traps we made and set in the past had never resulted in the capture of anything at all only meant we didn't believe strongly enough in this credo, or make our traps with enough skill.

If we ever got right down to it—the matter of survival—we had enough accumulated lore and patience to make it happen. This we all subscribed to.

Our rendezvous point was a half dozen miles beyond, and the road began to give us an idea of what we were in for by showing one large rock we had to drive around, or rather Mrs. Metheny did, evidencing a new steepness to the grade. The towering pines pressed closer and mostly obscured the skyline, which had all the while been far but evident. Once we came across another car headed in the opposite direction and had to pull to the side for it to pass. It was one of the moms on her way out, her eyes angrily (or so we thought) fixed on the road and failing to glance at us, though we waved, as she trudged by. It was simply road attention. Come to think of it, Mrs. Metheny barely waved, either. It was no doubt because of concern over what lay ahead in those last few miles. It was understandable. We forged ahead and when we got to the circle of scouts that greeted us with cheers she insisted that we dash down to the creek (for this is what the Cle Elum River had become in its headwaters) and bring back water to splash on the Olds's radiator, which she said was overheating, judging by the temperature gauge. And sure enough it was up at the top, where the red line indicates you are headed for the boiling point.

This we did, filling canteens and cooking pots, going back and forth, until the extreme needle began to dip and she momentarily left the car in her great coat and thanked us with a wan smile and quickly piled back in and started up the hot engine with a little difficulty, turned around in the road, and headed away. And I presume if she passed the last mom headed in our direction, she continued the new tradition of not looking at her directly or smiling or moving her head away from dead center or in any other way acknowledging her presence short of staying to her own side of the single-lane road and not scraping the side of her vehicle against the closest tree. Perhaps an eyeless half-salute at the instant of passing.

We were alone in the deep woods now, among the foreign mountains, and it was about noon, and we had many miles to go before we could pitch our camp at Hyas Lake, also known as Long Lake. Farther ahead and about two miles off as a crow would fly it lay a remote mountain lake that contained grayling, a rare fish that was not a trout but of the trout family, which had an enormous dorsal fin that glinted purple in the steeply angled rays from the sun. I had seen one only in pictures. But they would have to wait, for right at camp we had the prospect of brookies and cutthroats. And some of us had brought fishing tackle to angle for them, namely worms from the garden and salmon eggs from the store in tiny jars. Plus the rod and reel necessary to offer them to the fish.

It was all part of the mystique of living off the land.

Meanwhile there was our perennial favorite, Kraft Dinner, which was nothing more that macaroni and cheese, but it came in a neat little kit, a cardboard box in which the hard jointed macaroni rattled like castanets and there was a thick packet of orange cheese in powdered form. What you did was boil some water (easy enough to say) and cook your macaroni until it was tender, an activity which necessitated darting off for fresh sticks of dry tinder to keep the fire going red and yellow, blackening the bottom of the pot. It seemed to take forever and you always settled for a condition you might now facetiously call al dente supremo, which is chewy. You drained your water, you see, being careful not to pour out any of the swollen elbow joints of macaroni on the ground, for each contained an element of your survival, you knew, and spooned them on your plate, and you sprinkled the cheese power over their little pale grub-like bodies and gave it all a stir, and—lo—an incredible paste was formed that as it cooled became like concrete and bound the grubs into a homogeneous mass that resembled aggregate and was also a little like caramel corn and had to be gnawed at in a ball.

Delicious, you pronounced it, one and all, when your individual batch came off the fire and you added to it the ladelful of canned vegetable your patrol had voted on and packed in and cooked as a unit. And it really was good. As I write this I can taste the stuff on the back of my tongue, smudged with unescapable charcoal from the fire and smoke from the shifting flames and sand from the inevitable ground near a river or a lake. The sand grits on your back teeth and always there is the aftertaste of burnt wood and the lingering scent on the back of your nostrils of what the wood had to say about the fire you managed to start on the second try, the first having fizzled to a smudge.

You had a concoction of dried apples, brought back to life by the application of water, and cookies; thank God for cookies. And moms to bake them.

You would not die on a single overnight or even after two nights in the far woods, and we knew it. We had enough trips under our belt to build confidence of a cocky sort. We went off down the trail, a good one, tripping over rocky outcroppings and lunging ahead (pushed by our packs) and catching ourselves just short of mountainous disaster and, grinning, pressed on. We sang the Beaver Song, gave the Beaver Chant, raised our middle finger to the Buffaloes, the Cougars, the White-Tailed Deer. We sang Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer On The Wall and about Bill Grogan's goat and the Stanford Fight Song, which somehow got mixed in with all the others and made us each determined to go to Stanford simply because of their song, which was better than any other, unless it was the one about fighting for Notre Dame. But there you had to be Catholic, or else you were sorely handicapped, and the priests in black would not let you play unless you were already a star.

At least at Stanford all you had to be was smart and rich.

Marched on, stumblingly, crossing creeks that would soon dry up on the tops of rocks that were steeply round or pointed so that you were always toppling off and everybody's boot was wet, but it didn't much matter, for the air was sharp and scented with pine as from a bar of soap and cold, cold from the mist rising above the tiny creek running full now that would in another month be discernible only by its track in the gravel or sand, but then we would be long gone away and all of this would exist only in the realm of memory. Which it does not.

We reached the lake, the long one, Hyas, and found that there was a trail that followed its circumference and paralleled it closely, winding in among Ponderosa pines and stocky hemlocks and an occasional cedar, none of them exceedingly tall because we were over three thousand feet up and you could see where the timber stopped on the sides of ridge lines across the lake. The lake was absolutely beautiful, I mean, not a stick had been cut, and those trees had been there, we commonly understood, Forever, at least as long as there were people on this part of the planet. Trees rose out of gravel shoals stark as telephone poles, just as straight, sparse, and the land leaped abruptly from the edge of the lake, and we came to understand that the steepness of the rise indicated the nature of the bottom of the lake, and if the rise was great the lake was deep there, but if the rise was gradual then the bottom slowly dropped off. You could judge a lake by its surrounding mountains and come to know it quickly, with only the eyes.

I'm not sure where I learned this—perhaps from Blondie Stamer—but it has always been with me and is one of the few things I know to be true and unvarying.

Harry Walrath and Steritt Metheny and Hepburn of the Great Mom and I all shared a shelter, disdaining one of the few post-war troop tents and pitching a single large canvas tarp and after it was up and guyed tightly ditching it, which meant not throwing it away or abandoning it but going to work with our garden trowels and shovels and making a little trough for the rain water to run along in. Then—wise to the trickiness of night and the woods—we fetched canvas pails of water to test it. This necessitated some rework so that the water did not pile up on itself but continue along a course away from the tarp. When we saw that it did, we relaxed and went to work on constructing our fire circle. And then it was time to try our hand at fishing.

We caught nothing that afternoon and early eve. We offered the trout worms and eggs, floating them just under the surface and well out from the edge of the lake. The fish ignored our offering and the most we experienced was one tiny pluck on our bobber, followed by nothing. A half-hour later inspection proved the bait was gone.

Night was the usual, with fresh meat because it was the first day out of port and would not have rotted yet, though it was warm and smelly. We had entered the era of dried food, though none of it was freeze-dried, which was yet to come and a tremendous improvement; we had powdered eggs (B+), powdered mashed potato (C+), dried vegetables (C- or D+), and apricots or peaches (B), again mere mummies of their living selves and hard to tell one from the other until you plopped a segment in your mouth and chewed a while, then not easy either.

Cookies, hardtack, saltine crackers (which always turned to crumbs in your packsack and were useless for anything except to thicken soup), raisins (which by the way are dried grapes, corpses from the arbor, for the inexperienced); all food was dried, requiring water, either to rest in and gather up softness or else to be cooked in and therefore acquire some degree of palpability, though there was a tendency for it to turn to mush.

You would not die from hunger, admittedly, but there were other hazards. For instance, Jack Hepburn's father had returned home from his jewelry junket long enough to exert his role and insisted that Jack take Army C-rations, which were now just hitting the market as a surplus commodity. Wisely, the husband of Jack Hepburn's neat mom (and that was something to think about—what they did, with Jack gone) had a plan to ensure his son's survival. Sure, the rest of us might starve, but his son wouldn't.

No, he didn't die of hunger, but he became badly constipated. After our usual fireside sing and a tardy trundle into sleeping bags and unwilling sleep and whispers throughout the early night, we rose and faced the first dawn, which I remember as being spectacular when seen from across a lake, the sun flirting with the knife-edged ridge opposite, sending up shooting rays, brightening the blue of the sky, and then bursting over the ridge and exploding into flame and eggyoke. Quickly the rays of the clear, slanting sunlight moved towards us, across the water, and broke over the shoreline and inched up the beach to where the trees stood, partly blocked behind individual pines and requiring us to shift our heads from side to side to dodge the brilliant light and then moving again and letting it flood over us. It was a game you played with the sun until it was so high in the sky there was no game left to the light and the earth was tame, the light far off and unspectacular. It became and remained the light of day.

We ate breakfast, Jack slowly, contemplatively, a forkful at a time, then we drank our cocoa and assessed the day. One by one we went off to have a bowel movement—which a good scout does always at the same time of the day, if he can, which is right on the heels of finishing his breakfast cocoa, which we all know is a pale substitute for coffee, but coffee stunts a boy's growth and we all shunned it because each of us wanted to be as tall as he could be. Thus cocoa. And one by one we had our craps, all but Jack, who tried manfully. He returned from his trip to the scrub, roll of toilet tissue in hand, still looking thoughtful and a little annoyed at his fate.

After lunch he tried again, and we noted his departure and his return our of the corner of our collective eye, the Beaver Patrol and the others, but he was unsuccessful. His meal had been little sausages from out of a can, plus hardtack and jam, with a powdered soft drink we all envied him for having, because it was Army, who were Big Scouts. I think it was lemonade, which ought to have been bowel loosening but wasn't, at least not in his case. And at dinner time Jack gave it the college try but remained squinting and depressed. Unexpressive as he normally was, beneath his blond thatch and set frown, it was pretty clear what was happening. He was blocked. We cursed his father, and the damned C-rations, but when I thought of his father I thought of his mother, too, and the thoughts she evoked were not welcome here.

The troop had broken up into units not strictly organized according to patrols and that was a good thing, for it gave us a chance to get to know one another, those of us who weren't already too well acquainted and regretful about it. The troop was constantly expanding and shrinking back on itself, like something organic, reorganizing, trying this method, abandoning that one, forging off in new directions, then retreating in dismay or discouragement, which lasted but a short time, for we were hardy, optimistic, cheerful, all the things scouts are continually reminded to be but frequently aren't.

I was now assistant patrol leader, Ranny Hennes going off to lead the Buffaloes, a job he didn't want, he told us, for his heart was always with the Beaver Patrol, but leadership being what it was, he could hardly say no. He loved us, and we could see him relatively near, farther away in spirit than in real distance, showing the Buffaloes how to start fires, learn and recite the Pledge and Oath, do the Salute and Handshake correctly, mysterious to anybody not a scout. He'd wave at us and roll his eyes. We'd laugh contagiously across our space and make our eyes go white and pupils nearly vanish the way he did.

I tried to wear the honor of assistant with appropriate modesty, but I think I failed, for I liked to boss people around, as I did my little brother, Dicky, who was not even old enough to be a cub, and make his life miserable. Why was it nobody paid me any attention? Where was there anything in the manual that said scouts wouldn't do what you'd say? Was this leadership? Well, I determined, there were those who were born to lead, and those slated to follow. Maybe I wasn't one of either group, but some forlorn creature that fell in the middle gap, unable to get others to do what was necessary, unwilling to do what my true leaders told me to do, and able only to function on my own, so to speak—solitary, perverse, ornery, and resentful.

Nowhere in the scout book did it say anything about a third element. In fact, there was only leadership mentioned, and we were free to presume followers became leaders with time and experience. A leader was a boy whose time had not come yet, that is, come up. It would, assuredly. In the meanwhile he dutifully followed orders and awaited his moment. But I didn't really care. I liked things just the way they were, with myself mostly in the middle. I would prefer not being assistant patrol leader of the Beavers, since the other scouts wandered off whenever I tried to get them to do something. Or if they didn't walk away, they neglected to do what I had requested of them and I had to do it myself.

Maybe that is what leadership is. You do the chore and take full credit for it. Who else? What nobody admits is that you tried to get others to do it and failed miserably. It is the world's great secret and extends clear up to the President of the United States. The truth is, he does everything himself, or nearly everything, and the ones who are supposed to do it are pledged to keep a straight face and the President is too embarrassed but too experienced by all his efforts to smile, either, and life goes on. This is the great truth of experience.

We met some men come back from fishing a lake beyond the farthest ridge. They had had spectacular fishing and one of them undid the straps of his pack and out tumbled two dozen of the biggest trout I had ever seen. It was enough to feed a troop for days and probably constituted much more than the legal weekly limit for the two of them, which was generous then. The fish must have weighed more than a pound apiece. I was impressed, we were all impressed, they served to drive home to us the tremendous skill of these guys, who of course were grown men and pigs.

They had a little yellow raft, Army surplus, and wanted to know if we'd like to buy it from them. Harry Walrath and I looked at each other and we caught the eye of Steritt Metheny. How much? Twenty-five dollars, one of the men said, looking aside. It was a lot of money, but the raft was probably worth it, if you could catch such fish. Why were they selling it? Well, it was heavy, and they were tired of packing it around with them, along with the big trout. They could buy another when they got back to civilization, they implied.

"Civilization." The word rang wonderfully in the still mountain air. We were members of a rare fraternity, mountain men, men and boys who lived off the land, who caught trout (we had hooked none so far) and ate them, along with nuts and berries and small animals that would soon blunder into our snare or trap.

Three of us scouts emptied out our pockets and came up with $22.78. "Close enough," said the tallest of the men, reaching out for it, and quickly transferring it to his own pocket. We now had us a raft. Buoyantly the men moved off along the trail. Quickly we inflated our new raft. I was the first to take it out. I discovered a small leak. Fortunately I had a tin can with which to bail it out. Bailing, I learned, is constant, warm work. But I caught me a mess of nice-sized trout by trailing a small spoon in the water. When they hit, the tip of my borrowed rod went into the water, and I grabbed the butt and reeled like crazy. Soon a trout was splashing off my bow. The fish was big enough to pose a difficulty in landing it and I had to press my feet down, compressing the bottom of the raft there, and hoist the trout over the edge and drop it between my feet, where I embraced and killed it by breaking its neck with my finger jammed down its tiny throat. It rewarded me by squirting blood in a thin stream which I soon learned to point over the side of the raft so that it fell into the water and incarnadined it instead of the bottom of the raft.

When I had six or eight nice trout, I rowed to shore, where Harry and Steritt met me, hauled me in by the bow, helped me clamber out, and argued who got the next turn. I helped push Steritt until he floated free and was able to work the oars without hitting bottom.

"Don't forget to bail," I told him. "If you don't bail, you will sink."

"Thanks for letting me know," he said sarcastically, which was the way we said everything.

And then, surrounded by many eyes, I cleaned my catch with my pocket knife. It is best not to think about what you are doing. A gory mess, you want to hold off looking closely or naming parts. Your hands are bloody clear up to the wrists. There is no avoiding it or the queasy feeling that is attendant.

It was a good raft and the leak a small one, easily patched when we got back to the city, for there was a kit that came along with it containing the same material you use for car and bicycle tires, with a number of little pink bunion pads with peel-off white backs that after you have cleaned the area with solvent and buffed it with a shredder cap, just like cabbage, you peel off and stick quickly on, not touching it along the way, for that will ruin its adhesive quality and you'll have the leak again.

We soon had more trout than we needed, but that didn't stop us. They were beautiful creatures, though a bit skinny from the altitude and lack of year-round food, and their colors and spots stood out brilliantly when they came thrashing in but tended to fade fast, making them wrinkled corpses bereft of color, or comprised solely of the ghost of colors past, colors fading before your eyes. We cooked them up and ate them on the spot, learning that they were mostly bones, or had such a high bone content that you spent most of the meal picking your teeth and spitting bones onto the ground or into cooking the fire. They were flavored mild, you might say, but greatly abetted by butter and salt and pepper, and you smacked your lips and licked your fingers accordingly and pronounced them "great." The others regarded you with envy. You shared no more than a morsel among many.

You could not wait for morning to burst and bring you your next turn in the raft and glory.

Meanwhile Jack Hepburn continued to make his forays out into the forest density, clutching his roll of paper, to return downhearted and uncrapped. We turned our faces aside in a gesture close to commiseration and empathy. We began to feel that Jack might be a jinx and feared a like condition. Constipation might be like a cold or the flu, even though this was unreasonable. So we scarcely spoke to Jack. And so the third day in the woods dawned, after a night that passed with some degree of comfort for most of us and a sleep that for me was without a bottom. I can't speak for Jack.

We ate our morning gruel, as we called it, Cream of Wheat or else oatmeal, and chewed up more hardtack and jam, the Wonder Bread being long gone. More tepid cocoa flowed, which we drank over a dying fire, as the day emerged from over its ridge and pushed its rays out on the iron lake that was now breaking out in corraguations. I was anxious to get afloat before the whitecaps grew any taller and—if the truth be told—had not ventured out so very far the day before but hugged the shoreline. Today I would go out less far and find the fishing not very good, perhaps because of all the wave activity effecting the behavior of my spoon. Or perhaps the trout had simply taken a pounding yesterday and were off their feed.

But for now, still on shore, one by one we snuck off to the nearest copse and deposited our load in the brush, and covered it over like a cat, keeping a weather eye out for Jack and his situation. He sat looking straight ahead, dreamy, with a minimum of facial expression, as usual. Then he rose suddenly, picked up a roll, and dashed off. A tense silence occupied us. Then Jack appeared. He waved the roll. On his face was a grin. A beatific smile I'd call it.

We cheered.

* * *

There is nothing much to cheer about in Petersburg, not now or in 1846, when Dostoyevsky sat down to write in The Double about Mr. Golyadkin, "our hero," as he is often called mockingly—one Yakov Petrovitch, a "titular councilor" in some obscure government office, where he is assistant to the chief clerk, who is an assistant somebody else, reporting to a Certain Somebody addressed as Your Excellency. What they do is copy out reports originated usually on a higher level, doing the work haltingly, nervously, for it doesn't much matter, in the long run, but everyone is keenly observant of each other. It is a tense place. Whatever is produced, gets uniformly ignored and languishes in its file folder in a drawer. Sound familiar? Have we Amnericans advanced very far beyond this state of busywork and bureaucracy?

Like so many Dostoyevskian heroes he is an anti-person, the smoldering antithesis of nobility and high social station, a pompous little non-entity who is easily insulted and feels every twinge of snobbery with justifiable resentment. Most are his superior. He keeps a servant who despises him and treats him with arrogance, as most of Dostoyevsky's servants do their masters. It is more of the same that we have seen before, as with the tutor who becomes addicted to gambling, or the unnamed man I called F., who decides to throw up his menial job, one not very different from Yakov's, and go underground. Or is it more of the same? When we meet Yakov (Dostoyevsky never calls him this but I like it, the name, and shall do so, not needing any longer the irony of calling him Mr. or "our hero"), he is maneuvering around in the familiar toady world, kissing this ass but refusing to buss another, addressing his superiors unctuously by their patronyms repeatedly but putting down with a word or less the younger clerks who are of no value to him. But then the known world of Yakov Petrovitch begins to fall apart; it does so right before his eyes and ours. For a moment we become as disorientated as he is.

The government agency which he likes to think of as a benevolent parent treats him malignantly, viciously, and we begin to think it is a paradigm of society at large and perhaps the entire universe. This feeling gets reinforced as the story unrolls. If the paradigm is so, the short novel works on many different levels, the realistic one perhaps the least effective of all, for the story is largely a fantasy and is dependent upon a large suspension of disbelief for its acceptance. But with Dostoyevsky telling the story this is easy to make, for he is a master story-teller and well able to incite and hold our interest.

Always there is the Russian weather. Is it ever summer in Petersburg? Is night ever clear and cool but not cold? There is a storm brewing, with big white flakes drifting down and being imperceptibly adding to the mounds of snow already accumulated. Or else—as now—there is a general thaw underway, with snow falling never the less but a wet snow, almost like rain, and Yakov is racing around the streets at night in a cab, or open sleigh, while the skies leak water and the slush piles up under the horse's hoofs, and the heavy wet fur presses down on the protagonist, who is ill with fever and chills, burdening him further. To add to this, the driver is furious, but then everybody in Dostoyevsky is always furious, so what does it matter?

Yakov has a cold, a cold with complications, a cold which we today would call the flu. It hangs on. He gets sicker. He gets out of bed, feeling peculiar. He rushes to the mirror to see if a pimple is starting on his face. Reassured it is not, he looks out the window to see if everything is in its place. It is. He glances into his servant, Petrushka's, quarters and is happy to see he isn't there. He opens up his wallet and "for the hundredth time since the previous day" counts his money, "carefully smoothing out every note between his forefinger and thumb." In other words, ironing it with his fingers. The sum comes to 750 roubles, "a noteworthy sum," an "agreeable sum." And surely it is. What is a middling clerk doing carrying around as spare change around $750, a rouble being the rough equivalent of today's dollar? Well, it is what he likes to do. A hobby, if you will.

He is feeling most peculiarly. He goes to see his doctor about his cold, but the man barely recognizes him. He seems inattentive. It is almost as if somebody got there ahead of Yakov and warned the doctor. It is a strange world Yakov lives in and by the hour it is getting weirder. The doctor does not want to see Yakov, Dostoyevsky tells us, but not the reason. This will be revealed in time and we must be patient. And we are given insight into Yakov's personality, which is halting, bumbling, faltering, often with behavior inappropriate to the occasion, and embarrassing both to himself and to others. And often he is at a loss for words.

Yakov blushes. He reveals his bumblingness by taking a chair, then suddenly rising, realizing he has not been offered a seat, glancing round, reflecting that already he has made two social blunders, and plunging back into the chair and committing a third. The situation being hopeless, he settles lower and glares defiantly at the doctor. No wonder the man doesn't like him and isn't glad to see him.

The doctor tells him to change his habits. Go out, especially at night, see your friends, keep cheerful company, and do not stay away from the bottle. "You must have a radical change in your life," he adds, leading to "in a certain sense, a break in your character."

In other words, change entirely; become a different person.

Haltingly Yakov tells him he tries to maintain an even balance, keeping to himself and not being dependent on anybody, often going for walks for the sake of his health. Is this not good?

The doctor tells him that walks are not particularly beneficial in Petersburg, where the climate is terrible. All that cold and slush and snow, you know.

Weird and getting weirder.

He tells the doctor he is not a toady, but a private person who lives neatly and privately, with pride. He dislikes intrigue very much and does not participate in it, though it is rampant in the bureaucracy. But he is there seeing his doctor, to speak frankly, because he is not feeling well—is feeling very odd and peculiar.

The doctor begins to write out a prescription to get rid of him. The sight of this makes Yakov angry. "This isn't what I wanted," he snaps. Then "a queer change came over him. His grey eyes gleamed strangely, his lips began to quiver, all the muscles, all the features of his face began moving and working. He was trembling all over." Then he becomes motionless, as if losing all confidence in himself and awaiting inspiration. Soon he is sobbing and clinging to the coat of the doctor, trembling and striking himself on the chest with his free hand.

The breakdown—if this is what it is—continues without respite. It is horrible, but what better place to have it than at your doctor's? But this is a doctor who may be an enemy. Yakov speaks his thoughts aloud to his physician, telling him, "I have malignant enemies who have sworn to ruin me."

This confession strikes the doctor's interest. Finally he offers a seat in his office to this unsure assistant clerk who is super keen to protocol, while at the same time he keeps violating its tenets. A seat, at last? Wonderful, wonderful, but at what price? This terrible confession.

Yakov begins to ramble. His interior monologue, which he has shared with us, is now publicly spoken. In regard to his enemies theory, which the doctor wants him to elaborate on (perhaps a Freud in the making?), Yakov says, no, no; that will have to wait for another time, "a convenient moment, when everything will be discovered and the mask falls off certain faces." This is classic paranoia, of course, but particularized to a high degree. The doctor is clearly intrigued. And, having finally caught his interest, Yakov is quick to want to break contact and depart.

Obsequiously he tells his doctor he doesn't want to trouble him. If so, then what is he doing here? We must conclude that it is typical of his many daily contacts with people in which no real understanding is possible. These contacts consist of words and allusions shouted into a void, with the return communication often but a weak echo. Yakov is inclined to speak in familiar sayings, Russian proverbs, which are without number and there is at least one for every occasion. (If there isn't, you are free to make one up on the spot.) So he speaks vaguely, proverbially, of his problems, relating them to social conventions of the city, and often seems to be raving in a Shakespearian sense.

He describes his daily world as one of great insincerity, where bureaucrats flatter their superiors and nobody speaks the truth. Yet unrefelctively he takes his toady place in it, suffering his insults and snubs and, in turn, delivering his own.

The doctor knows how to draw him out. He now has time for this most interesting patient. He asks leading questions. In what way do people know how to congratulate other more important people at the right moment? Encouraged, Yakov responds with particulars, not forgetting to call his doctor frequently by his patronym, Krestyan Ivanovitch. It is an example of Yakov at his worst and his most obsequious. We learn to recognize it as a nervous reaction, almost a tic, and a sign of his progressive derangement.

There is a man in his office, for instance, who was congratulated on being promoted to the rank of assessor. As he speaks of this, Yakov gives his doctor "a sly nod" and, "screwing up his eyes," looks at him. The doctor urges him to go on and he does. This new assessor is a young man, still wet behind the ears, or the Russian proverbial equivalent of this, the milk not yet dry on his lips, who is going to get married to the boss's daughter. But this man is already engaged. Oh, the hypocrisy of it all. This "Prince Charming" has earlier promised to marry "a disreputable German woman" who used to give him free dinners. She is "a low German, a nasty shameless German," and he names her. His contempt is bottomless, but it is hard to tell who it is primarily aimed at, the young assessor or the German woman.

Now Yakov restates his position and his views on society. All are all hypocrites, he alone sincere. He dislikes intrigue, but resorts to it of necessity. Intrigue is shameful, womanly, and anybody strongly masculine won't resort to it. Immediately he does so, implying worlds of plotting on the part of everybody but himself. As for himself, at a previous party with these important people who are a rank or two above him, he baited them to show them he was honest, above board. After the intended, Clara, had sung "a song of feeling," he tells her that truly her song moved him, but some people in the room heard it with something less than "a pure heart." And this means that most of the people in the room "were not running after her now but looking higher. . . ." His words were evidently heard by the young assessor, of whom Yakov is clearly envious.

So he has "killed two birds with one stone," he tells his doctor proudly. They are the assessor and his intended. This is an example of how he does "things openly and above board, he boasts. But he really must go now; he has kept his doctor too long on a non-medical matter. Calling him once more by his patronym, as though the man might forget who he is if not constantly reminded of it, he scrapes his boot toe on the carpet, walking out and leaving the doctor "in the utmost amazement."

No wonder Yakov is not invited to the next party. He has insulted everybody in the room, all of them his superiors. He has done this, we must presume, out of obstinacy and pride. This is the classic hubris formulation and made of the same stuff that carries tragic heroes to their doom in Shakespeare and Sophocles. There are many classic echoes in speech and deed in this early short novel of Dostoyevsky, written about the same time as the longer work, Poor People.

The scene with the doctor is not important in advancing the plot, which becomes more complex on the surface level and more fantastical on another level (that might be called cosmological), but it serves to show us Yakov operating under ordinary conditions. These are plenty weird. They are about to get more surreal and frightening, however.

The carriage with the insolent servant Petrushka in it takes Yakov off at mid-morning to do some shopping. Once again we see our troubled protagonist in action. He is the same man who counts his money over and over, ironing its corners with his fingertips, pressing it flat, making sure all the faces are on top and looking in the same direction. He even color codes the bills. Now he moves through a department store, asking about this, ordering some of that, but never completing the transactions, only acting grandly and bullying the sales clerks. All he ends up buying is a pair of cheap gloves and a bottle of scent; they total one and a half roubles, about a buck and a half. Next he goes to a restaurant and has a light lunch. (For light read cheap.) He encounters two under clerks from the office and condescends to them, but he can' keep his big mouth shut and refers mockingly, overly familiarly, to the boss as "the bear."

The bear, it turns out, has been asking about him. Why isn't he at the office? Why indeed. Yakov tells them they hardly know him but he will treat them to a moment of explanation. He is, after all, the only sincere man left in the world. Everybody is polishing one another's boots, these lickspittles, and behaving as though wearing a mask at a masquerade. They plot, they intrigue grandly. They kiss every ass within reach. They care about dressing up and presenting a polished image. Not him. He is the last honest man in Russia.

They hear him out, amazed. Everybody who runs into Yakov, who is AWOL from work, gets a lecture on the insincerity and inconsistency of society, particularly in its political manifestation, government. Big government. And then the two clerks turn to him and break out in a great uncivil burst of laughter. Once again he knows he had made a fool out of himself and mortgaged his future.

Because (again we must presume, for Dostoyevsky with all his words can be most elliptical) he has insulted everybody at yesterday's party for the assessor and his bride-to-be he is persona non grata. It is not clear whether he knows this ahead of the party, which he crashes, or learns it only later. Since his entire future is in doubt and he is embarked on a course of madness, hidden under the cloak of absolute integrity, it may be an intentional ambiguity, and the story does not suffer because of the lack of clarity. Anyway, Yakov orders his cab to the fine home where the party—clearly a family-only party, a party among equals and relatives—is to be held, not knowing the precise time and deciding to go a little early, since it is informal, that is, intended for family. And so his driver pulls him up in front of the estate at about four.

As the only sincere man left in all Russia, he certainly exhibits a fawning exterior, and this may be half-ironic but it is also fitting to his comprehension of correct social behavior. When he sees a woman looking out from behind a curtain in an upstairs room, he kisses his hand to her. Dostoyevsky tells us he did not have "the slightest idea of what he was doing, for he felt more dead than alive at the moment." "Pale and distracted," he gets out of the carriage, mounts the steps, takes off his hat, "mechanically straightening himself, and though he felt a slight trembling in his knees, he went upstairs." This is a little like how he went to the doctor earlier, feeling shaky but determined and needing to brace himself.

And the faux pas continue. The butler greets him coldly at the door and asks his business, though surely he recognizes him from the other night. His master is at home, but he is not "at home," he says nervously, perhaps a bit ambiguously but clear in intent. Gaily, Yakov says this is nonsense; he has come for dinner, and addresses the butler lightly as "brother," which must be unprecedented. If ironical in temperament, one is not ironical with servants, but saves it for their masters, the ones who count. But Yakov is beyond normal intercourse and convention. He is quite mad and everybody who encounters him realizes it.

He insists on seeing the man who is not at home to him but to everybody else, this precise afternoon. And finally the man who he previously thought of as his benefactor, his father figure in government work, come down the stairs to see what the ruckus is. Repeatedly he asks Yakov "what is the matter with you?" Nothing, he murmurs, starting to explain himself, as he did with the doctor, not much earlier today. But again he is vague and rambling. Finally he burst out about the German woman who is pledged to the new assessor and calls her "an impudent slut of a girl, and nothing more."

His boss, or rather his boss's boss, is stupefied with amazement. He gives a little laugh of derision. Yakov, incensed, steps forward heatedly. The boss jumps backward, starting a retreat up the stairs, and ducks behind the front door. Yakov "inwardly uttered a desire to sink into the earth, or to hide in a mouse-hole together with his carriage."

F. in Notes From Underground had precisely the same feeling, even to wanting to find a mouse-hole into which to enter to lead his underground life. And the sensation of utter despair is an everyday event to a Dostoyevskian anti-hero, this miserable little bumbling clerk. Of course he is Everyone, each of us, on the level on whcih we lead our daily lives. We recognize ourselves in him the same way we do when we watch the poor schmuck in a Charlie Chaplin movie. Only, here, it is even more moving, elevated as it is by art and great writing.

We laugh, but there are tears is our eyes.

* * *

Thus ends chapter three. With chapter four Dostoyevsky enters his novel as narrator—no, as author. Craftily he tells us he must tell the story from a different standpoint, one outside the consciousness of Yakov, who is not very aware of the nuances of what is happening around him. (Or is he, on another level of irony?) He begins to describe the birthday party held by Yakov's boss for his newly engaged daughter, the one who Yakov wants to warn against the insidiousness of the new assessor who has a coarse woman living down the road.

The party is scrumptious, and Dostoyevsky describes it lavishly, telling us mockingly that as a writer he is not up to describing something so ostentatious and impressive, not up to the job of "reporting" it as a society writer might. Then he proceeds to do so tellingly, and we see the people at the party from one remove, as Yakov could not relate it, in all his wildness and approaching madness. The personages (all minor to the tale, but important as backdrop) are defined and described, their relationships to each other and their places in society and government delineated. They dance, they circle, they indulge in the cliches of repartee and wit. And I think there may be some satire of Turgenev here, and his preoccupation with French manners. Yes, I'm sure of it; he is beating the popular writer at his own game of words.

But since our Yakov's participation in the drama is essential to what happens next, the novelist brings him forward and tucks him away as observer for the moment in a backstairs passage, a cache, where he is left cowering and hiding. This is a restatement of a very early theme in which Yakov cringes in "almost panic-stricken haste into the darkest corner of his carriage" at the onslaught of his disorientation on the page four of the novel. Now, "as afraid as a hen," he hides on the back stairs and watches the proceedings through a little window. (Shades of Hawthorne and his peers!) He is the observer of life, but is not content with this role. His madness demands more of him. Participation. He must plunge into life and clasp it with both hands. After all, when everything is already lost, what more is there to give up?

Practically nothing. The most one can do is hasten his doom. Sometimes this lies at the heart of the mad action of a hero or modern-day anti-hero. And so Yakov bursts forth into the party. The music has stopped. Though he is scared as a hen, he recognizes crazily that "being scared is our special line. . . . To be abject on every occasion is our line; no need to ask us about that. Just stand there like a post and that's all." Why, if he were at home, just now, he'd be having a nice cup of tea. But it is too late. He is standing in the middle of the room. He sees only Clara, her father, her fiance, and a host of important-looking officers and junior clerks. He heads straight towards them, but he is of a bumbling nature and screws up everything he attempts: "he jostled against a councillor and trod on his foot, and incidentally stepped on a very venerable old lady's dress and tore it." He also bumps a servant with a tray and several other people along the way to where Clara stands, watching him. One side of his mind would like (again) to sink right to the bowels of the earth, but the other side, the one that has urged him on, reflects that what is done cannot be undone. It is a tragic echo out of the literary past that lifts the drama and makes us think of Macbeth, or rather of his wife. This is probably intentional.

He announces (either to himself or to Clara, unclear to us because quotes are used in both instances) what might well be his motto: "If I fail I don't lose heart; if I succeed I persevere." In other words, he keeps boring ahead, heedlessly.

Her father, his boss's boss, is nearby. "For shame, sir," he tells Yakov, not for the first time today. Yakov repeats that this is out of his "personal life" and therefore is not a business or governmental matter; it also is concerned with his "domestic circumstances." This must be as unclear to Clara and her father as it is to us; what they behold is a wild-eyed intruder, a party-crasher, an underling, a boor. Yakov is only aware of the social impropriety of what he has done and how he has lost his social position. Well, all along he hasn't understood the situations he finds himself in and underestimates them. Or does he?

Trying to salvage the social aspects of the situation, and failing as always miserably, he tells a young, handsome officer that he is holding two chairs for Clara and her friend, a princess. The officer says nothing, but turns away with "a murderous smile." If looks could kill, as we say. Yakov decides to "try his luck in a different direction." He comes up to a councillor with a huge cross of great distinction around his neck—but is immediately backed down by the man's contemptuous stare. Instantly this stills him. His vision remains acute, however. Stillness aids it, and he notes that a man across the room is wearing a wig. Doesn't everybody know it? Everybody is doing his best to ignore this raging intruder with the heightened sensibility. The attention is no longer directed at him and he misses it.

He sees the butler across the room, one Gerasimitch, the same man who told him his master was not at home, at least not to the likes of Yakov. Yakov feels most at home having a contretemps with a butler, such as his own Petrushka, as did the underground man, F., in Notes. Only with a servant can he speak and behave as an equal. But he isn't even a servant's equal, this poor worm, this insect, as he feels himself to be, alongside the handsome young officer. And it was Gersimitch, remember, he addressed earlier as "brother." Now he engages him again and, as though in one of those Shakespearean comic asides that has in it the flavor of madness, he tells the butler that the candle there in the chandelier is bending. Soon it will fall down. Shouldn't that be of concern to him?

Gersimitch replies contemptuously that the candle is all right. It is not bending, not in danger of falling. But—incidentally—somebody is asking for him. Asking for me, Yakov asks, flattered. So people have noticed him and want to speak to him. Who is it? Gersimitch says he can't say. Yakov replies that he will be happy remaining where he is and not going off to meet this unmentionable someone; after all, he "belongs" here. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course, and both know it. He belongs outside this residence, far from the private birthday dinner party, and that is precisely where everybody is trying to maneuver him, not for the first time today or any day.

Yakov now sees them all as enemies. Well, paranoids do make real enemies and retain them, if not by conscious effort. The servant, whom he now addressed (again and forever incorrectly) as "my friend," is mistaken that somebody wants to speak to him in another room. Stiffly he informs the servant that he is "cruelly and unpardonably mistaken" that his master, Yakov's boss's boss, who he had always looked on as his protector, his benefactor, his father, is shutting his door to him on a permanent basis. For if he was, then government would not be benevolent but malevolent, and the whole universe cruel and despotic.

A tear appears in his tragic eyes, as he realizes how he has misunderstood everything to date. Suddenly the room begins to swim, as a polka is providently struck up. "Everything in the room began to undulate like the sea." Giddy and for the moment struck dumb, he reels. Music fills his ears. Then the music stops inexplicably, though the polka is not over: their hostess, the Birthday Girl, the beautiful newly engaged Clara is exhausted. She has flushed cheeks and a prettily heaving bosom. She drops into a chair. Everybody turns his sympathetic attention on her. And the mad Yakov once again completely misreads the social and political context. Wildly he advances on her—lurching again, stumbling, bumping people, scraping his foot on the dance floor—and takes her by the hand. He wants to dance with her, too. She rises unsurely and then, recognizing who he is, she shrieks. The orchestra remains silent.

Lackeys rush forward, slip him into his greatcoat, jam his hat on his head, over his eyes, and give him the bum's rush to the door. He is unceremoniously bounced, shown the gate again. Suddenly he is plunged into the night. It is the great, vicious Russian night of dead winter.

* * *

And now the novel takes a decided new slant, a wonderful one. How much that has preceded is paranoia, how much truth, how much ordinary social illusion based on a subtle code of snobbery and rank? Rather than explain in the role of narrator/novelist, as he did at the start of this magnificent chapter, Dostoyevsky chooses to add yet one more complex layer of meaningful burden on the back of poor Yakov. But first a taste of the Russian night.

The ordinary weirdness of the wintry night makes possible the bizarre, the fantastic. Here is how Dostoyevsky succinctly presents it, with only one small deletion on my part: "It was striking midnight from all the clock towers in Petersburg. . . It was an awful November night—wet, foggy, rainy, snowy, teeming with colds in the head, fevers, swollen faces, quinsies, inflammations of all kinds and descriptions—teeming in fact with all the gifts of a Petersburg November. The wind howled in the deserted streets, lifting up the black water of the canal above the rings on the bank," etc. There may be some Dickens in this, to be sure, but it is decidedly a night unique to Russia and to Petersburg, and Dostoyevsky tells us that every inhabitant of the city is familiar with these elements.

It is also a perfect time for the fantastic to happen.

He is exhausted, weakened, tortured, feverish, all those things a Russian anti-hero is subject to in eternal winter. His terror mounts, just as he feels even more strange. The snow is melting fast and the Neva is rising in it banks. There is probably going to be a flood. This is the reality of the situation. Now for the unreality. He sees a figure approaching. The man looks familiar. He is dressed like Yakov and even walks in the same staggering, bouncy manner. He shows a similar feeling of abject terror in how he moves. Then the stranger disappears without a sound. Yakov asks himself what the meaning is of this and feels an icy shiver descend his spine.

Is this the shiver of recognition?

A few moments later he sees him again, on this wet, dismal evening when nobody else is stirring and the slushy streets are deserted. Yakov "cries out with amazement and horror," his legs weakening and buckling beneath him. The same man, but appearing from a different direction. Impossible. How did it happen? What is the explanation, please? He runs in the opposite direction, stumbling as is his wont, losing first one galosh and then the other in the thick slush. He turns down one street in the Nevsky Prospect and ducks into another. "His position at that instant was like that of a man standing on the edge of a fearful precipice, while the earth is bursting open under him, is already shaking, moving, rocking for the last time, falling, drawing him into the abyss, and yet the luckless wretch has not the strength, nor the resolution, to leap back, to avert is eyes from the yawning gulf below; the abyss draws him and at last he leaps into it of himself, hastening the moment of his destruction."

This is heavy stuff, great writing. It is what makes literature. The only trouble is, it occurs so frequently in Dostoyevsky that it approaches bombast. Life is one emotional crisis after another and the anti-hero hangs eternally on the brink of extinction. So it is tempting to dismiss such writing as excessive. And it is. But it is also emotionally accurate. The despair of one of Dostoyevsky's anti-heroes cannot be doubted; neither can it be approximated in another time, a time such as ours. It is unique.

The ambivalence continues unabated. Though he feels each of the two previous times he sees this mysterious figure that looks much like himself a wave of terror, he is looking forward to the third encounter, for he knows there will be one; there simply has to be, for it is his fate. The third meeting, however, will be unpleasant again, but he is ready for it, inured, and is anxious for it to occur and for him to handle it. But before it can take place, there hs to be a marvelous mini-scene that gives the whole unreal situation a stroke of reality: a little wet dog, lost and shivering, attaches itself to him and runs briefly alongside. It is pitiful and so is the situation. It evokes "a memory of something that happened long ago—came back into his mind now, kept knocking at his brain as with a hammer, vexing him and refusing to be shaken off."

But he does shake it off, with a curse, "not understanding himself." And he goes on, and so do we. Life is like this and so is the perfidious grip of memory.

He reaches his apartment building and is not at all surprised to see a dark figure waiting for him at the entrance. It is his "interesting companion," Dostoyevsky calls him, with a little less than accuracy but great irony. Horror can be interesting, I guess, and a companion be somebody you cannot rid yourself of. So extreme accuracy may be involved, along with irony. Always irony, for this is Dostoyevsky.

It is the stranger who darts first up the steps and wends his way through the mounds of "heaped-up masses of refuse from the flats." Why, a man could break a leg, running and dodging there. He hastens to catch up with the stranger and almost does, coming so close that the man's coat once or twice "flicked him on the nose." Wonderful, exact image. Tactile, too. The man reaches the door to the apartment, knocks, and is admitted without hesitation by the servant, Petrushka. Yakov follows them down the hall by the servant's lit candle. It is a nightmare scene.

They reach the bed chamber and the man piles himself on Yakov's bed, still heavily clothed. Yakov knows that all of his worst "presentiments had come true. All that he had dreaded and surmised was coming to pass, in reality." The man is of course himself, Mr. Golyadkin, Yakov Petrovitch. He is exactly the same, right down to the clothing, the halting manner, the old looks, the thick, tight bundling. He is what is called "his double." But we already know that from the novel's title. The question is, what does he mean and what does he stand for?

* * *

In the morning the true Yakov awakens, alone. His bad cold is bothering him still. He thinks of "his enemies" and wonders what they have in store for him today. He recalls the previous day and wants to admit to himself that it "was all an incredible delusion, a passing aberration of the fancy, a darkening of the mind." But he knows it was not.

He dreads going again to the office. He tells himself he is ill and doesn't have to go, using the illness as an excuse. He smokes his pipe, delaying the start of the day, accepting from his surly servant a quick breakfast. Then he shaves, dresses, grabs up his papers, and hurries to the office complex and his government job. He buries himself in paperwork and tries to blend in with his surroundings. All the while the memory of the previous day haunts him and reminds him that it cannot be an isolated series of incidents but events presaging the new life, one in which there is another one of him to contend with.

He looks up from his papers when the door to the work area opens and a familiar shape dominates his field of vision. It is the visitor from last night—his other self. He knew it would be, in his heart of hearts. It could be no other. Funny thing is, everybody accepts his second self as the most natural of occurrences. There are no surprises, except in his own sad life:

"This was another Mr. Golyadkin, quite different, yet at the same time exactly like the first—the same height, the same figure, the same clothes, the same baldness." Nothing is lacking, and if you were to put them side by side nobody could tell who was real, who was counterfeit. There are, Dostoyevsky tells us, such things as identical twins, as alike as drops of water.

Yet they are as different as night and day. The "Mr. Golyadkin junior," as he is often called, is a villain, pure and simple. Or not so simple. Alike on the outside, on the inside he is the opposite. He is toady, where the original prides himself on being candid, truthful. Yet this causes us to wonder. Isn't the original toady himself, in spite of bragging how honest he is? He is honest, that is, when it suites his purposes, but often—as is the case with his doctor, with all of his superiors at the office—he kisses up to them disgracefully. So he is alternatingly obsequious and rude. He is especially rude with servants, including his own. This is the perfect Dostoyevskian predicament and his anti-heroes are wonderfully consistent in their behavior. It is almost as thought they are one.

Much more so than their doubles, who behave in an opposite manner. It would be satisfying and pleasing to report that all of Yakov's recent troubles are the result of his double acting in his stead, but this obviously isn't true. He causes most of his own problems with his rude and errant behavior. He can insult at the same moment his ingratiates, and it is most annoying. We see him commit social blunders, one after another, when his double is no where near the scene. So the double can't be blamed for many things. He can only be blamed, that is, for taking away from the original what the original has already yielded up through error.

So when Yakov beholds his double integrating the office environment and taking a similar job as titular clerk, it is with his boss's blessing; it was the boss, in fact, who recommended him for it, being able to laugh with him easily, as he can with all the other toads in the office. And this complicates the situation terribly. If only toads can succeed, how do we explain Yakov's earlier successes in the bureaucracy, for his failures must only be recent and the result of his aberration.

The double succeeds, but only where the original has yielded the ground. The double proves that if the original were different—some degree of consistency would be a good start—he would have succeeded, too, though obsequious behavior seems necessary, and the original shows it often enough, usually when it counts for naught. And his arrogant behavior is reserved usually for servants, who are rightly haughty back. With his superiors, he constantly misunderstands what is socially involved and blunders badly, as when he went to see his doctor and couldn't make up his mind whether or not to sit down uninvited, and handles the simple scene about as badly as anybody could do it.

Yakov is inconsistent in everything, which produces a weird sort of consistency. When he tries to be on his toady best behavior, he is at his worst. He quickly follows this up with being mute as a fence post and trying to pass himself off as invisible. And when people begin to ignore him, treating him as though he is indeed invisible, he is motivated to some new terrible affront, as if to prove to both of them that he does exist and carries weight.

So if he is inconsistent with everybody, calling a servant "brother" or little buddy or friend, one moment, and insulting him grossly, as one should never insult somebody so far beneath his station, the next, he can't make up his mind how to act around the double, who is clearly malevolent. One moment Yakov sees him as his nemesis, the source of his disaster, and the next he attempts to treat him as a colleague. And as for his immediate bosses, he would like to continue to think of them having a benevolent attitude towards him and being concerned with his future. But he doesn't trust him or them. They may be enemies. Just when you drop your guard is when they choose to strike you. In short, he is thoroughly confused.

And he sees them all with remarkable vision as being what they truly are, unctuous functionaries engaged in "a burlesque farce." This may be the truth of things. All the same, his moods swing back and forth alarmingly. They are all enemies, they are all his friends. And sometimes it is hard to trace down whom Yakov is thinking of, as when he says, "I like the good-natured fellow, I've always liked him, and I'm always ready to respect him." Is it his immediate superior he is talking about, who has just left him to run some obsequious errand for his boss, or is it the double? It is unclear, though probably the former. And a moment later he feels great confidence in the future, "as though he had risen from the dead." As for his double, "let him work in the office, and good luck to him so long as he doesn't meddle or interfere with any one; let him work in the office—I consent and approve!"

Of course it doesn't matter whether or not he consents and approves; it is no more important than whether you give the sun permission to rise and shine. It will anyway. The manic moods persists. He goes out into the street, thinking he is in Paradise, having made his peace with the unthinkable situation—that his double will be working in the same office and has the confidence of all the big bosses, all of whom are shunning him and whose collective opinion is that he is insane and has no future with them.

He believes himself to be secure in his full innocence. He is "genuine, straightforward, neat and nice, meek and mild." In short, he thoroughly misinterprets the situation. He can work this way, off to the side, saying nothing, silently hating his enemies but keeping his opinions to himself. If they will just let him alone he can weather it out. It is the calm on the horizon, the first storm already passed, the second worst one just beyond the break in the clouds. It is illusion.

His double comes meekly up to him, slithering along, toady style, whispering softly in his ear, ingratiatingly, begging to be excused, pardoned for this morning at the office. He didn't mean to be intrusive, he says, but he felt that the original showed some interest in him and the double says he "felt drawn to you from the first moment." He wants to talk to him further. Is there some place they can go. . . ?

And the original bites. He invites the double home. He suggests that they travel by back streets, where they won't be observed. Meekly the double agrees; gratefully he accepts. Dostoyevsky tells us that Yakov is "utterly unable to grasp what was happening to him."

* * *

Yakov recognizes his double as a villain but is powerless to do anything about him, perhaps acknowledging the horrors that are to come as his proper fate. If so, maybe he can escape them. As for his double, he is totally obsequious—pleasant and mild. He wants Yakov's "acquaintance and protection." Now, how could anybody refuse so reasonable a request? Not even the foolish Yakov, who pretty well knows what is coming.

The double tells Yakov that he knows about his "innate goodness and excellence of heart." If this is true, both that the double knows this and that it is true, why is Yakov having such bad luck and unending trouble with his superiors? It is not deserved. And more importantly how can his sudden aberrant behavior be explained? We can only guess what he was like before this "change" came over him.

The other Mr. Golyadkin begins to tell Yakov (they are both Yakov, of course, and address each other formally back and forth as Yakov Petrovitch, the patronym they share, along with everything else) a long story about his recent past and his hard luck. It is touching and the original responds as he is meant to. The story last three or four hours. It is full of trivia and "wretched incidents." The original believes every word of it. He sees his double as an "artless, pitiful, insignificant person, with no craft or malice about him," whose behavior is absolutely impeachable." As a result, he is growing kind-hearted and "in a very good humor," lively and skittish. He is being seduced by degrees, of course.

We know it, and perhaps the true Yakov does, as well. But this master of self-deception continues to delude himself. He sees himself as his double's patron, taking on the role his superiors once felt toward him and which is now denied him. This is ironic again, irony raised to yet another level. He also sees himself as doing a good deed.

Shades of the boy scouts. Did they have them in Russia, in the St. Petersburg of the 1860s? No, no. This is long before Baden-Powell so to speak invented them in England. And while I am speaking facetiously, I say this with genuine empathy. Yakov's plight is ours, to some degree.

His heart warms towards his opponent, his antagonist, his nemesis. In return for such personal revelations, he relates some of his own problems, including those with his boss and the lovely Clara. He warns his new friend about their perfidious behavior and how he was stung and rejected for his innocent actions trying to protect her honor and that of her father. He does this because "we shall be like brothers; we'll be cunning, my dear fellow, we'll work together; we'll get up an intrigue, too, to pay them out." In short, they'll get even for the insults he suffered at the private dinner party and this morning at work. They will conspire together and the two of them, so alike in every way, will defeat their enemies. His double is a "guileless soul" and needs protection from their mutual foes. He will serve as patron to his new friend and teach the enemies a lesson. Then they will laugh out of the other side of their mouth. The phrase is both a Russian proverb and a thoroughly American expression. Well, the two worlds are not all that far apart in distance and time, and the apartments littered with garbage in the hallways are not solely the property of Nineteenth Century Russia. We have them in today's America, as well.

The hour has grown late and it is time for bed. The original Yakov kindly makes a bed for his friend and offers him clean linen. They have drunk a lot and there is a strange ringing in his ears. He wonders if he has gone too far, noting that, "I always overdo things."

One clue that he has lies in the behavior of Petrushka, who systematically ignores him and does not acknowledge his commands, including the very simple one of waking him, them, at eight the next morning. And when he awakens all by himself and addresses his servant, the man doesn't recognize him. He glowers angrily and tells him that his master is not at home. Yakov replies, heatedly, that he is his master. Petrushka gives him a withering look that makes his ears turn red and says that "the other one" is and he went away an hour and a half ago. To the office—to work.

He goes there too. He greets his friend from last night, his soul new mate. The man does not seem to notice him in this other environment, though they are "nose to nose" at their respective desks, doing much the same work. His double was doubly busy, always leaping up and darting off to accomplish some strange mission, and explaining to the original that he is too busy to stop to talk to him and perhaps it would be better if he were to go through channels.

"Are you joking?" he asks his twin. My, how things have changed from last night.

For a moment his double responds with condescending warmth. Did he have a good night? Yes, he did. He smiles, shuffling his feet. The double is off to a special meeting, vanishing "like an apparition." This gives the original a pins-and-needles feeling. We all recognize it as the cold chill.

There follows a terrible scene in which the double reveals his complete duplicity by defacing a report Yakov has prepared, complaining that there is an ink blot on it. Can't he see it? His friend will "fix it up" for him. Lend it here a minute. And instead of scraping at the imaginary blot with his knife he grabs the report under his arm and dashes into the Big Boss's office with it, passing off the work as his own. Unthinkable, isn't it? But this is what the double does, time after time, and when afterwards the original complains about it, the double torments him physically with a hard poke in his conspicuous stomach. It hurts, but then it was meant to, and is it any worse that the mental torture he has been subjected to, the past few days?

He has been treated "like a rag," like an insect. It is a common Dostoyevskian predicament, conducted to reduce a person to status less than a dog. It makes the quasi-hero an anti-hero, all in the wave of the hand. And it takes place daily in Petersburg's commerce. There follows a series of slights and insults that in themselves may seem meaningless but in the society of bureaucrats are of mounting significance and indicate that all is lost—dignity, honor, pride, hope for the future. Everybody recognizes the downgrade and responds accordingly.

Yakov accosts his double and accuses him of perfidy. Doesn't he remember his host's generosity the previous day? He does indeed. Did Yakov Number One sleep well, last night, the double asks him again? It is the most callosal of insults, it being such a trivial matter to drag into such a conversation. Enraged, he replies that he slept well enough and reminds the double that he, sir, is playing a very dangerous game.

The man replies, mockingly, knowing the original's mind now better than he himself does, "Who says that? My enemies?" He has even appropriated the original's enemies. My God, what else is left him? Nothing, Yakov knows, and he sinks in impotent despair against a lamp post on the familiar street near the bridge across the Neva, feeling helpless and lost. He believes all is over in his life. But it is not.

There is worse to come. In Dostoyevsky there always is.

* * *

Again an euphoric mood arrives to leaven despair, and one is reminded of the toothache scene in Notes, and how pain arrives at an abject time to irritate wounds and bring "great satisfaction" and an "almost voluptuous enjoyment." Yakov concludes that he would gladly cut off his finger to be rid of his double—as if it were so easy. A finger gone would be worth it, the true measure of what he was willing to give up to be free, or to at least to have the old, miserable life back. It is a stupid offer, when one's nemesis controls the terms and wants much more than one-tenth of one's extreme appendages.

Mr. Golyadkin junior continues to pop in and out of Yakov's life, appearing at the most inopportune moment, mocking and taunting him, causing him no degree of trouble and consternation. He shows up at a restaurant, when the original finds himself hungry, only to learn that his junior got there first and ran up quite a tab, which he is expected to pay, since they look to one and all to be the same person. The double has eaten eleven small (meat?) pies to his one. The double waves familiarly at him and winks. Senior pays the rouble and wanders off, disgruntled.

Brooding on this, the import of the insult grows in his mind. To us, it doesn't seem such a great matter. A dollar tab? At home again, he writes his foe an angry letter, going over it time and again until he gets it right. He gives it to Petrushka to deliver and again the servant is recalcitrant. He tells him what to say to the double and the servant barely acknowledges the order; Yakov insists he repeat it, to make sure he's got it right. Reluctantly Petrushka does and unwillingly goes out into the night to deliver it. It is the usual blustery night, one fitting only for Petersburg.

Yakov waits for his reply. He waits and waits. Finally, growing angry, he decides to go out into the streets and hunt down his double. He walks down by the river and the bridge. He passes his boss's flat and sees lights on in three rooms, behind red drapes. He moves on to the office building. What is he doing here? Looking for some clue as to where his other self is and, as a matter of fact, where his tardy servant has gone. He returns home, the porter lets him in, and he finds that Petrushka is still not back. He flakes out on the sofa. He awakens at two or three in the morning, and goes to his servant's room. He finds him there, sleeping noisily, drunk. He is furious—which is his normal state. He bawls out his servant and calls him worthless. Petrushka denies there is another Mr. Golyadkin and says there was no letter to deliver. How could there be? Who would send a letter to himself? In fact, the whole situation is incredible. "Good folks" don't have doubles, he is told. Only those who live lives of falsity may be afflicted with other selves. Of course Petrushka is still drunk and not responsible for what he says or does.

There is a letter lying on the table; not the letter to the double but another letter, this one addressed to him (but I don't know how he can tell) and it is from a young clerk at the office. In it he asks for two roubles in repayment for an old debt. He no longer wants Yakov's friendship, he says, realizing that he has become dangerous and has lost his dignity and reputation; this he has learned from his new friend, who has explained it all to him. But he tells Yakov where his twin is living. It is at Caroline's place, where he used to sometimes himself stay, before he became so notorious and universally shunned. And, he adds, that Yakov has insulted, among them all, his new friend, whose name he will not mention, but it is clear enough that it is himself, that is, his other self. Junior.

He tells him that his trusted servant, the insolent Petrushka, has sold this Lady Caroline a lump of sugar at so low a price that he must have stolen it (from Yakov) because it could not be bought in a store so cheaply. Therefore, he should fire the servant—which seems at the moment not a bad idea.

Nonetheless he replies in a stiff, indignant letter that he has been mortally insulted by people of a station well beneath him, including his former friend. He has never, never, spoken ill of him or of anyone mentioned, and it is his enemies, especially the one that bears the same name and looks like him, who is the villain. They have lied about him, including the woman, Carolyn. Everyone had his fixed position in life, he reminds him, and to be spoken to by the likes of him must be some kind of terrible joke. If so, it is in extreme bad taste.

To say more would be immoral, he adds.

He sends it off. At bedtime, he lies awake, worrying, his head aching. He realizes "his absolute defenselessness" in coping with his adversary, his other self. Mr. Golyadkin junior is clever, ruthless, subtle, for all his outrageousness. He has won all the others over to his side, leaving the true Yakov disreputable in everybody's eyes. In fact, there is nobody in the world whose opinion his nemesis could not change round. His method is complex and various; he can work the crowd, as it is called, manipulating several worthies at once: "He scarcely had time, for instance, to make up to one person and win his good graces—and before one could wink an eye he was at another. He stealthily fawns on another, drops a smile of benevolence, twirls on his short, round, though rather wooden-looking leg, and already he's at a third, and is cringing upon a third, he's making up to him in a friendly way; before one has time to open one's mouth . . . he's at a fourth." The method is "horrible sorcery and nothing else!" Worse, everybody likes him and exalts him.

In a society (not unlike the French-influenced society of Turgenev's world) where people are known for their wit and sarcasm, the double is superior to the true Yakov, who is not unskilled in the arena himself. And as he lies abed, thinking dismally about all the recent events, he has one of those half-waking visions in which his double is seen racing away from his captors who are on the edge of figuring him out, but with each thud of his footstep on the pavement up springs another double, "and they stretched in a long chain like a file of geese, hobbling after the real Mr. Golyadkin." There is no place to escape to and avoid "these duplicates."

In other words, the false Yakov has cloned himself.

In the morning he looks for his faithful servant and finds he is gone, deserting him. He concludes that Petrushka "has been bribed at last." Well, a servant in Dostoyevsky is the last person in the world to be trusted and you can read the man's unfaithfulness in his eyes, in his daily insolent manner. But if any living person personifies the devil in this story it is "the filthy German woman" in whose "den the whole power of evil lies hidden now." It is a powerful ethnic indictment and perhaps a weakness, for it lies outside the story proper and serves solely as a distant, malevolent focus. There are enough active "devils" in the personages of the government officials who are his superiors but decline the benevolence and patronage that should come with their office.

The worst of these is of course his double. He is the original plastic man, able to form and reform himself according to the needs of the situation. And he is a reflection on those in society or government that are unctuous and conniving, who flatter endlessly and unmercifully, and—like the true Yakov—use a person's patronym ceaselessly as a means of gaining one's good graces (and often unintentionally alienating him).

Not long ago, Yakov tried to make his peace with his double, telling himself they could get along and co-exist. But this led to more betrayal and perfidy. Now he sends himself (his second self, that is) a note saying that the double's mere existence is a dishonor to him, the real Mr. Golyadkin, and if he won't step aside as a decent man would do, he is hereby challenged to a duel with pistols.

There—that will clear the air and permit life to go on. He is filled with a rush of clarity and enthusiasm. Peace is near, he believes. He picks up his hat and dashes to the office, only to be met with one of those obsequious minor clerks who always seems to be hanging around, looking for tips. What a strange, toady society this is, mid-Nineteenth Century Petersburg. The bureaucracy is hopelessly corrupt and everyone is on the take. Each kisses up to the next higher level of command and will perform any task for a few roubles more or the prospect of a promotion.

Yakov starts feeding the lackey tiny bribes, drawing him out. We realize that the bribe system of government will not work without those in need of information supplying the cash necessary to keep the system going. One thinks of lobbyists and PACs in our democracy and is quick to look away without examining the system too closely, for old Petersburg is easier to accept and laugh at than such actions would be committed closer to home. But the echo of events, now and then, is persistent.

Yakov learns, after paying a series of tiny bribes, that a new man is sitting at his desk. Oh, really? Has he already been displaced? Is it his double? No, but the double is clearly established and in the good graces of his superiors, as once the original Yakov was. His fate is sealed; it has been for a long time, actually, and there is a definite clarity of vision and euphoria that comes with giving in to one's fate and no longer wrestling with the porcupine—if that isn't already a Russian proverb, it ought to be, and probably comes down to not "kicking against the pricks."

At the office everybody shuns him. Business goes on at a brisk pace, with the double darting about on important-seeming matters and impressing everybody with his busyness. He does this in his usual disgusting manner which nobody else is able to discern, but for some reason doesn't: "he was approaching with his usual mean, tripping little step, prancing and shuffling with his feet as though he were going to kick some one."

This is overkill, to some degree, yet it is delightful and reminiscent of Shakespeare's Malvolio, among other characters; there are a lot of Shakespearian echoes in Dostoyevsky, including Yakov's drawing out of the lackey that immediately precedes this scene and sets it up, along with one more plunge of "our hero" down the ladder.

Under the arm of the double Yakov sees an impressive green portfolio that signifies that the rascal is on some special mission from the Big Boss, who is ever addressed as His Excellency. And the double lords it over the rest of the staff, as Yakov himself would do, if he had had such an honor bestowed on him. He is, in fact, very much like the double, when he is at his worst, the difference being only one of degree and the extent of his duplicity. For instance, for all the true Yakov's talk about being "above board" and not fawning, we have in fact seen him plot intrigues, connive, and debase himself disgracefully. So what is the difference, at least to outsiders? Could not the double be another side of the original's personality, one which he denies or suppresses and won't publicly or even privately acknowledge?

Or is this my boy scout's Freudianism coming to the fore?

On one level certainly Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin has a split personality, as we say perhaps too readily and easily today. And I do so, too. But there are elements of this schizophrenic disease present and they must be acknowledged; this is all I am trying to say, and to read this short, rich novel without this element is not to do it justice. On the other hand, to belabor it is unnecessary and probably imprudent, for as Dostoyevsky tells his story, the double has a separate and completely parallel existence. That is to say, on a realistic level the double cannot be the original Yakov, for on the literal level they exist in different places and at different times, pulling at and pushing at each other without mercy. Yet it is the double who affects Yakov most, not the other way round. In fact, aside from providing him with some creature comforts and information, which are the ordinary decencies, Yakov gives him nothing useful for his purposes. The double creates all the dissension on his own, exercising his own initiative. So on both levels, the original Yakov does nothing to bring on his doom. The causes are external.

Yet he alienates all by acts that violate the social code of society and government bureaucracy, with which it is meshed. He knows better. He insults people—his doctor (who is his social superior), his supervisor, his supervisor's boss, and his boss's boss; in short everybody he comes in contact with who has any influence over his career and his personal life. Yet none of this is enough to destroy him. It takes much more to do the job—perhaps an act of providence.

His personal life and his career, of course, are intertwined. All of the aristocracy of Petersburg live on this level of mixed interactions. We can recognize ourselves even in this bygone society, I think, for many people today mix business with their personal lives and suffer the consequences. Again, Dostoyevsky and the Petersburg of 1851 don't seems so awfully long ago. Surely not 150 years have passed? I would have expected more change.

* * *

If the novel holds a mirror up to contemporary Russian society as reflected in a principle city, Petersburg (to become Leningrad, Stalingrad, and ultimately Petersburg again, without the "Saint" preceding it), it also reflects the cosmos. Government is seen as the great, kindly father, who can bestow favors and promotions according to merit, only it never works out this way. Toadies and favorites rise, while those who tend to their work and do not massage their bosses fail to get recognized.

Surely there are no such elements present in contemporary America—or am I falling victim to Dostoyevskian irony, from having viewed so much of it?

Repeatedly, in both his thoughts and in his outward actions, Yakov repeats the theme of government as father; bureaucracy as benevolent family headed by a male paternal figure. He says to Andrey Flippovitch that he blindly trust his fate to him. In short, the man is father-like to him and he trusts him. His superior receives the news with astonishment. It is not how he sees the relationship at all. How can an underling be so misled? How can he so badly misjudge the world in which they both must live and work? And when His Excellency calls, the toad that he is responds unthinkingly to do what the man tells him to do, with scarcely a backward look over his shoulder at his flunkey, our "hero."

In fact it is only Yakov whose mind we are allowed to enter and often we do not like what he shows us. Yet he behaves according to a moral sense that may be flawed but is ever present and enables us to see the others through his eyes. He expects fairness and justice, in a world (unlike our own, of course) where there is none, where it is purely a literary consideration or serves as an issue to be debated among scholars. And while he imitates his superiors in society and government, snubbing some, kissing up to others, he believes he is acting always on principle. He is fair and honest, when others are not. And this makes him believable as a character and, if you will, real.

How easy it would have been to create a black-and-white character, a man who is acted upon by government and society and is purely their victim. But this is not complex enough for Dostoyevsky nor will it interest critical readers. This is the stuff of literature, and while we read him in these short novels we are sometimes annoyed at the repetitious raving of his major characters, we are constantly aware of the literary value of what is going on. There are no easy offers, no simple characters, no singularity of motivations. Life is rich and contradictory, painful most always, tedious and exacting.

As his boss-once-removed bolts out of the room to do His Excellency's (read "the Senator" or "the Colonel," if you wish) bidding, he promises his underling that there is a change in his, Yakov's, status, for there must be, since there is now somebody sitting at his desk) and it will "be explained in due time." In fact, he "will be officially informed of everything today."

Does it have to do with what happened yesterday, Yakov asks, because if it does. . . .

No, not that. There is something else amiss, he is told, vaguely. It is hard to defend oneself from so indistinct a charge, he knows. What is it? He is told, "Why, you were meaning to be sly with some one."

It is more innuendo and insinuation, of course. The world of intrigue and gossip. Had he forgotten it or its importance? It is what rules. He suspects it is more of his double's dirty work. Pressing, he provokes his boss to explain further:

It is "your unseemly conduct, in injuring the reputation of a virtuous young lady belonging to that benevolent, highly distinguished and well-known family who had befriended you."

Clara and her dad? But he was only trying to help, to protect her innocence from the corrupt world of her father, his boss's boss, in the personage of the newly advanced accessor, a rogue who is keeping a loose woman on the side. Surely she ought to be told. . . ? If only to protect her family name and the errant direction of her future

But he doesn't get a chance to say this. He has already, in absentia, been tried and convicted. It is a closed manner. His last recourse (if there is any at all) is an appeal to the Big Boss, His Excellency. You see, benevolence having failed to do its duty, Yakov never stops believing in it and thinking in the manner of the petty bureaucrat that he is: another higher level of father-figures will see the injustice and right it. Sure he will.

All is linked, we realize—if not before, surely now. Petrushka said it first: if Yakov had led a good life, he would not have been given a double to confound it. And now he tells his superior that he agrees with the ordering of the universe, with its lower-order microcosm, government, and that he believes, as it were, that God is in his heaven and, if not, only on His coffee break; the coffee break might explain all the terrible things that have been happening lately.

Yakov has clearly cracked up, but he still believes. He believes in God, Government, and Society. They are one and inseparable. He explains patiently to his impatient boss that "divine Providence has created two men exactly a like, and that a benevolent government, seeing the hand of Providence, provided a berth for two twins. That is a good thing." He is not a free-thinker but a believer in an ordered universe, only something has gone terribly wrong with it. Instead of order there is chaos. Instead of a kindly father, there is a punitive one. Please, please, Lord—set things right.

The Boss tells him he has committed other sins. He has slandered a woman, one of foreign extraction; he has treated even his faithful servant abominably. On every level he has been despicable. How can the boss know all this—the most intimate details of his personal life, unless he has been informed and misinformed by somebody who is privy to them, namely, his double? (Perhaps his faithful servant ratted on him.) Spotting the false Yakov slithering along a corridor, leaving the office, he takes off in hot pursuit, still believing he can rectify the situation.

Poor fool.

He chases down his double and takes him into a coffeehouse run by some German women. Again Yakov junior mocks him, gobbling down pies he doesn't intend to pay for. They argue and when Yakov tries to make peace, shaking hands, the double repeats the joking insult from this morning—he takes out his handkerchief and wipes off his hand. Suddenly they are back to the total affront and enmity of earlier; no degree of honesty and fairness has been achieved. If anything, matters are worse.

The double runs out of the tavern and enters a cab that is waiting. The true Yakov trails after him, as usual a moment late. The German woman, who understands no Russian, rushes after them, unpaid, ringing her bell. The double is already in the cab, laughing. The German woman is, like all Germans in Dostoyevsky, insistent and rude. She wants to be paid. Yakov flings some coins in her direction and grabs at the coach, but cannot get inside before the horse, frightened by the bell, rushes off. He rides along on the outside, precariously, and soon falls to the ground. With his luck, he lands in the mud. It is your usual Petersburg day, full of mud and snow and slush. The sight of the original lying on the ground, filthy, gives the double more occasion for laughter.

They happen to be in the courtyard of Clara's father, the Big Boss. Yakov sees his double running up the front steps. He thinks of continuing his furious pursuit, but realizes it wouldn't be prudent. He then remembers that he has a letter in his pocket that he has been carrying around unread for most of the day. (Yes, this is Victorian fiction.) He flees down a slushy street until he comes to a tavern, ducking inside. The letter turns out—marvelous to say—to be from Clara. It is warm, familiar. She understands the truth of his situation. Finally there appears somebody who understands his plight, somebody who is not deceived by falsity and appearances. (Praise God!) She knows that the true Yakov is her savior, the false one perfidious except in his uncanny resemblance to the original. She says she is being married against her will. Will he please come to her house tonight? There is going to be another ball in her honor and "a handsome lieutenant" is coming, but she will sneak away and meet him and together they will flee. There are other government jobs available where a man of his calibre can serve his country. She places herself entirely in the protection of his arms. She signs herself, "yours till death."

Could he ask for anything more? Could he, after all the daily betrayals, believe her words? Only if he really wants to, and he does.

This is pure madness, of course, and—let's face it—a plot weakness, a matter of plot convenience. But this is also the great Dostoyevsky, so we read on. Yakov returns to his flat and is handed a message from a runner. It is from his immediate boss, the one who promised him word on his fate today. The message contains the details of his dismissal. This is not news, only a confirmation of what was evident earlier. He pays the messenger absent-mindedly and enters his flat, where he finds his faithful butler ready to abandon him, too. It is, after all, a day of betrayals.

An odd scene follows, late in the novel, and it is a lengthy one, one that proves critical to the book, for it is highly realistic, this exchange between servant and former master, and serves to tie down the tale, when the madness and unreality of what is to follow may seem incredulous. But on a solely realistic level alone it is masterful. Again there are Shakespearian echoes. When all has been lost, a kind of peace settles over the nerve-endings and nothing worse can happen. Or can it? The delusion, anyway, that there is nothing left to lose remains, and it tempers the tone and makes what is to come appear reasonable.

Yakov senior (the true one) shows a benevolence toward his departing servant (the unfaithful one) that was not evidenced earlier, surely not moments ago when an impersonal messenger delivered news of his dismissal, and he had to tip the man to receive it. So there is a gentleness and thoughtfulness in Yakov's manner, a rare sincerity, when he talks to Petrushka about his plans, addressing him as "my friend" and "dear fellow" and "my boy," which are not merely figures of speech but genuine sentiments. And when Petrushka refers to the fact that a "good" man wouldn't have a double, for Providence wouldn't inflict him one on him, there is an irony in how a real, good man—Yakov now, if not before—behaves, and it is not recognizable to the servant. The ironies compound and are delicious.

Petrushka prattles on about all the "quality" he has served—generals, princes, colonels. This reflects the world of aristocracy that Yakov lives on the edge of, such people being his superiors, too, but him serving them on a much higher level, though not the level of near-equals, surely. He trades on them and their titles as surely as do the under-clerks at the agency. So the name-dropping of Petrushka is conducted on every level, every stratum, of government and society. All this is way beyond Yakov's concern now, for he is doomed, totally ruined. So he is able to act kindly now, thoughtfully, truly benevolently, as he had never before, when he was a functioning member of government and society. Before he was destroyed.

How odd it is, how peculiar.

The true Yakov speaks with the candor of philosophy (read: resignation) when he advises his departing servant on life and offers him his good wishes. He tells him that "a different path lies before each man, no one can tell what road he may have to take." To be sure, this is the wisdom of the ages—more Eastern than Western—but it is well meant and not without its powers of consolation, for Petrushka is uprooted, too. And in return his servant is as truthful as he can be. Candor deserves candor. And if he can't speak himself philosophically, he can at least tell the truth, the truth as he knows it, which he has not done with his faithful master in the past.

Petrushka confides, "The earth is full of rumors, sir." And while this is darkly Shakespearean again, it is also as near as the servant gets to seeing his life and others on a higher plane. The fact that it is a plane of truism and cliche does not much matter, since it is as honest as he can get, and as truthful. He adds, confidentially, "You have an enemy—you've a rival, sir, a powerful rival, so there. . . ." And notice that he calls Yakov "sir," which he does not lately do, remaining silent and when forced to address him doing so in curt terms devoid of any form of civility or respect.

Irony piles on irony. Now that all is lost and nothing matters for either of them (Yakov on a cosmic level, Petrushka on one simply of job security), all manner of daily mutual respect can now express itself. Here are two men adrift on a choppy sea, reverting to class differences and as much honesty and mutual respect as each is capable of in his personal context. Common decency finally prevails.

But it is too late for decency to save the day. All is over, finished. And Yakov dimly recognizes that in ways yet unknown to him, and probably not to be learned, Petrushka has betrayed him. Perhaps this is why he is so kind now; he knows the terrible burden the man must bear. Betrayal is the heaviest cross.

It is night again, the dreadful Russian night, Petersburg night, the weather its usual rotten self, wet and cold. "The weather was awful," Dostoyevsky tells us, with that unflagging delight with which he describes yet once more the miseries of Petersburg in winter. "It was a thaw; snow and rain were falling—just as at that memorable time when at the dread hour of midnight all Mr. Golyadkin's troubles had begun." And we are remind that as in classical tragedy the unities are being obeyed.

Yakov hires a cab for the evening—a considerable expense, seeing that he is now without income. He decides to give it one more college try, as we say. He will approach His Excellency and fall on his knees, shamelessly, and beg another chance. He will toady himself once again, for a final time. He will explain how—to act on slanderous information, without a hearing or even a quick trial—is "an unlawful act." Worse, it is immoral. He will beg, "Do not destroy me, I look upon you as my father, do not abandon me—save my dignity, my honor, my name, my reputation. . . and save me from a miscreant, a vicious man," namely his malicious double.

He might as well be praying to the empty skies and, in fact, is.

He takes the cab to his superior's flat. Again it is down by the river, near the famous bridge. He runs up the stairs, pounds on the door. A new servant greets him. With neither over-familiarity or condescension, Yakov addresses him as one should a servant, telling him politely and tersely what he wants. And—mess that he is, muddy clothes and all—he is admitted. The boss, though, doesn't recognize him. He has so many employees, you see. Losing his cool, Yakov blurts out some words about being pursued by enemies.

What did you say your name was, asks the boss?

And Yakov once more achieves that clarity of vision necessary for a true comprehension of the situation, at least for the moment, at least of the situation up to date. He notices an odd shine on the toe of His Excellency's boots and wonders for a moment whether there is a hole in them. A hole in the boss's boots? This would make him ordinary, a mortal, something far less than an "excellency." Then he sees it for what it really is, a bright spot—a blick or rib of light, as it is called in yet another world, an artist's studio.

Suddenly we are whirled through time and place to another realm, the world of art, of reality and reflection, life and illusion. It is a wonderful stroke, fully appropriate and natural here. It is the mark of genius and deserves to be recognized as such.

Of course this figurative and literal "bright spot" is followed by another descent into darkness, this time in the figure of his nemesis, the evil Yakov junior, who has been hiding in a closet nearby. He comes bouncing out, strangely curt and self-confident in the presence of the boss, indicating that he has achieved some kind of status that doesn't require ordinary toadiness.

With the original, junior is his usual rude, mocking self. The real Yakov is led out of the room. He notes that it was just as it was before at the party of Clara on her birthday and the one before, when his doom began to descend like a drawn shade and everything he did was wrong, or wrongly read.

And his double taunts him, calling him "Excellency," and telling him goodbye. Yakov calls him scoundrel and depraved man. The double doubles up with laughter, repeating these word, tasting them, not denying them. They are oddly just right, he seems to say, and complimentary. He ushers the real Yakov out the door and back into the cold Russian night.

He is exhausted. It has been a long, traumatic day, and it is not over yet. As in the past, he attempts to console himself with platitudes, telling himself that things may all "turn out for the best" (in this best of all possible worlds), but knowing in his battered heart that most often they do not. And he is feeling feverish, a condition not abetted by the rugged weather. He shivers and slumps in his cab. The weather, Dostoyevsky reminds us, is typical. He tells the driver to move on. About two hours later, he finds himself in front of Clara's father's place, out in the snow, standing where he has been this great length of time, behind a woodpile.

Why is he doing this? Why is he here? He forgets. It is because he is free, and being free he can do anything he wishes. He is no longer an employee of her father. He can stand, wait, lurk, anywhere he likes. And of course dimly in the back of his mind he knows he is here because Clara asked him to come. He is her savior. She depends on him. Her is going to take her away. She . . loves him. Impossible, we know.

And with this new, terrible clarity of vision he is able to see himself as the cabby does, this man hired for the evening, hanging around, not going much of anywhere. What harm is he doing, there behind the woodstack? He's not disgracing his honor, as another might. (Not disgracing his honor because he has none left.) And there follows a Shakespearian soliloquy, most remarkable, addressing some female not mentioned anywhere else in the text but sounding very much like the personage of Clara, telling himself in her voice, the voice of a cultivated person familiar with French and the world of foreign manners, that nobody today lives "in a hut, or anything like that." It is, after all, modern times—the industrial age, and the dream of them going away together and him getting another government job, say, as a register clerk, and them living in a shack by the seashore is, in effect, immoral. Besides, it is not realistic. There are no such jobs, not by the seashore, and nobody would hire him for one because (even if there were) he is not qualified. (We presume he is over-qualified both by work experience and education.)

The situation of which Clara wrote to him in the letter now reported missing is romantic, untrue. And yet he waits for her by the woodpile in the wet snow. Wonderful. He remarks tellingly that such a plan is that of "stupid novels," and it would melt into insignificance in the form of "tears on a neighboring hillock, gazing at the cold walls of your prison house, and finally die, following the example of some wretched German poets and novelists." (Most European, and not solely French, either.)

The scene and the reflection seem lengthy and out of place. It is tempting to skip over them and dismiss them as more bombast and excessive writing. But the image is important and must be kept in mind as we come to the end of the novel, where it is not only justified but restated as the closing theme. More of that in a minute. For now the author restates his anti-Romantic message clearly: "the day of Jean Jacques Rousseau is over." And he mocks the endearments that are no longer in favor from that time, all the bill and cooing, and says the most one can expect from marriage is the ordinary dinner and vodka, plus the kiss that occurs about once a week, if you're lucky. The kiss being an euphemism, of course, for continual conjugal bliss.

So Clara, in her astonishing letter to him (if there really is one, and it is not a figment of his fever), promises a world to share that cannot truly exist. It is the stuff of romantic literature, not the realism written by Gogol and Dostoyevsky himself. The most one can wish for, or hope for, is a life among "straightforward people," who have "open character and common sense." He adds, "I am not one to intrigue" and wears no mask. And while this is not exactly true, either, and borders on the fanciful, it is what he believes and is determined to live by. It is all he can offer Clara.

The fact that she will choose him, one who is so far beneath her, is another irony, for it is most improbable, that is, unlikely, and provides yet another ironical layer to the story. Yakov's revery is broken by the reality of "the red and absolutely sopping beard" of the cabman. It brings him back to the precise situation: he is a wet unemployed clerk who has lost his servant, and very likely his lodging, who is at present hiding in the snow behind a woodpile.

The cabby reminds him he has been waiting a very long time; it is what he hired him for, but his demands are excessive. Yakov pays him his six roubles and dismisses him. He realizes it is pointless to remain any longer. The evening—everything—is over. Nonetheless he continues to hide behind the cordwood. It is a safe place to be and he needs no excuse, for he is simply an "outsider," a looker-oner of life. Whatever happens, it is not his fault.

No? What about the double, then? What has he been doing, all the while? Life is never safe when the second Mr. Golyadkin is about, and he is about forever, it would seem. Suddenly the original spots a crowd of people, all milling about. They are looking for somebody; they are looking for him. He ducks down, but "his treacherous shadow" betrays him. Window fly up and he hears his name being called by some female voices.

Madly, he wonders why "they don't whip those naughty girls as children." A wonderful jab! This would include the unreal, impetuous Clara, who ruins the lives of others, such as himself, by playing to their romantic notions and behavior. Then a familiar sight presents itself and fills him with a sinking feeling he has known before. "Suddenly there ran down the steps he (we know who), without his hat or greatcoat, breathless, rubbing his hands, wriggling, capering, perfidiously displaying intense joy at seeing Mr. Golyadkin."

They address each other by repetitive, unctuous, mocking patronyms. The real Yakov is "burning at a slow fire and freezing at the same time with shame and terror." It is his usual state. The double hauls him inside. He sees himself as the others do—"pale, dishevelled, harassed; with lustrous eyes." He is towed into the drawing room, toward Clara's father's easy chair. The daughter is there, too—"pale, languid, melancholy, but gorgeously dressed." She is wearing a little white flower in her hair, which is "superb."

He feels "reconciled with mankind and his destiny, and filled with love" for everybody—boss, daughter, even evil twin. Once again he longing to be united, bonded, with his other self. Together they would be whole. (Fool!) But again the vision clears and he is able to see remarkably. The senior councillor is wearing a wig! The boss begs him to sit down. He is told they are like a family when one of them is starting off on a long journey. Eh? All must get together, mustn't they? Oh? Yes, it is true. Yakov feels as if "something they had long been waiting for happened."

"He is coming, he is coming," comes the cry. Who, who?

The evil twin comes up to him and guilelessly embraces him. His double holds out his hand to him—the same hand that, after touching him, he twice wiped off hard on his handkerchief. Everybody seems intent on reconciling the pair. He thinks the twin is mocking him again, committing lewd gestures behind his back, administering the Judas kiss. But he can't be sure. Then a dark figure appears in the doorway. He is the one they have been waiting for, the one whose arrival has just been announced. The sight sends a chill to Yakov's heart and strikes terror within him. He has had a presentiment of just this. The man is familiar. He wears a large cross on his breast and has thick, dark whiskers. Who is it? Whomever, he holds out his hand to Yakov, and it is his double who, delightfully, explains to him the identity of the personage.

Dr. Krestyan Ivanovitch. Surgeon. His old acquaintance (if not friend, but surely confident). Doesn't Yakov recognize him? Surely he must? Or is it Krestyan Ivanovitch's double? Doesn't everybody have one, nowadays? It seems the current rage. A double for everybody and everybody his own double. Madness abounds.

And there is a crowd present—all the onlookers from the parties recently past, where he was snubbed and sometimes bounced. They gather round, waiting for what will happen next. The evil twin knows; he knows all and is the source of much of the trouble. He is fairly chortling. Yakov recognizes in his doctor, or the doctor's double, the father-figure he has long been searching for. Not the boss, or the boss's boss, or His Excellency, but the man who has been right here all along—at home, in his office. His personal physician, Dr. Rutenspitz, a man who like all the authority figures he has tried to align himself with fails to recognize him, he is such a cipher. Such an insect, a rag, a worm. He is invisible.

He turns himself over to his doctor's care, much as Blanche du Boise does, at the end of Streetcar Named Desire, which may have had its ending unconsciously plagiarized from Dostoyevsky. Yakov "depends on the kindness of strangers," when all else is lost. "Faint with horror," but accepting it as his fate, Yakov allows himself to led to a waiting carriage. "I have done nothing reprehensible, or that can call for severity . . . and general attention to my official relations," he thinks. He says that in any case he is ready, he has full confidence, "I entrust my fate to Krestyan Ivanovitch."

There is no alternative, either, so he is helpless to do otherwise. He takes a last look around. He hears "a dreadful, deafening shout of joy" from everybody and it is "repeated as a sinister echo" by the crowd. Is it a cheer or a jeer? Perhaps a little of both. It leaves him "shivering like a kitten that has been drenched with cold water." There is a flick of the whip on the back of the horses and the coach pulls off. Behind him he hears that "the shrill, furious shouts of his enemies pursued him by way of good wishes for his journey." And then his double, in his new, little green uniform, dashes away—for good. He is alone in the coach, "a dull ache in his heart." He is in effect burning up with fever. He claws at his hot winter clothing, trying to bare his breast. He wants to pour snow on it.

Apparently he faints, or else passes out. When he awakens, the coach is carrying him between rows of darkened trees, down an unfamiliar road. He "almost" swoons, that is, not quite passing out again. He sees two burning eyes, the eyes of Dr. Krestyan Ivanovitch, boring into his eyes, "glittering with malignant, hellish glee." Yet it is not the doctor; it must be his double, his fiendish self. Again Yakov supplicates himself to this superior, fatherly figure, who gives him a message, defining his doom:

"You get free quarters, wood, with light, and service, the which you deserve not."

It is a judge's sentence, one banishing him to a Siberia of the spirit, one which Dostoyevsky knows about better than anybody. It is hell, hell-in-life. Yakov clutches his head in agony. He knew it would come to this; he had had just such a presentiment.

In June, when the snow is gone from the mountains to a height of 3600 feet, we deem it time for our week-long hike to Lake Dorothy. It is what Troop 81 had been aiming for, all year long. Each of our forays into the woods, near and far, up to three days and two nights at a time, were designed to prepare us for this and to make of it something less than a forced march and grueling ordeal. What it would be remained a mystery.

The drive up to the debarking point stopped just short of the village of Skykomish, at the Forest Service campgrounds at Money Creek. The name has always intrigued meMoney Creekas though some prospectors had once mined it and had come up with, not ore, but coin itself, or better yet bills of several denominations and in plentitude. Of course I was but a boy with a hyper imagination, apt to dream and in dreaming let my mind build up layers of fantasy and weirdness. A creek that spawned not salmon but money appealed to me greatly, and I had to see it for myself. I was disappointed, but not by much.

Money Creek is a little mountain stream, and they are different from what we were used to, namely, low-land creeks that began in a bog and flowed along through meandering meadows and rarely tumbled, let alone flowed with amazing clarity and sparkle. Money Creek had none of these familiar attributes but was nonetheless a stream of considerable appeal, bouncing along between boulders left behind by the retreating glaciers (we had read about those in school, and it was called the Pleistocene Era, a long, long time ago—before even people) and spilling over these self-same rocks in rivulets and bubbly white cascades. A mist hung in the air above the tiny waterfall

and sparkled in the late spring sunlight. We did not dismount from our parents' and friends' sedans and stationwagons, but instead passed by the creek's mouth at its junction with the South Fork of the Skykomish River at a slow creep and, turning right, began our winding climb of a narrow blacktopped road, its narrow shoulder overhung with black/green boughs and sparse overshadowing alder, that led nine miles more to a second junction, this one with the Miller River.

In comparison, the name, Miller River, was pedestrian, and had no power to evoke in the minds of young scouts images of untold avarice, so we were left with a blank when it came to picturing what we might encounter, and when we rounded the final bend in the road which had become not much more than a trail, we were greatly surprised by the small stream's beauty. It was here civilization ended and the great Cascade Mountains began, scary and pulling away from the eye in a series of rolling hills that ever mounted in height and were clad in unrelieved evergreenery.

They stretched off without respite, we knew from maps, until they came to the towering mountains themselves, still dripping snow, and to the South a second mountain pass, this one Snoqualmie, which led to Cle Elum, where we had turned North on its far side and headed for Salmon La Sac. That seemed years behind us, though it was but a few months, for we were now experienced scouts, or so we had tricked ourselves into believing and now we would be put to the test.

A week—here, in these mountains? It was a thought to quiver a boy and make him quake in his hiking boots, boots but slightly broken in now and through repeated wettings molded to his feet exactly and inseparably one with them. Is it possible to be both weak from terror and firmly determined to take and conquer whatever lies ahead? Of course it is; I so testify.

There is a weakening feeling that comes when a boy watches the caravan of highly interchangeable mothers drive away singly and irrevocably, not to return we all knew for one full week, seven days, six nights, and countless hours of progressive daylight and shrinking darkness, for we were approaching the spring equinox. There is an assurance, or reassurance, that comes from so long a daylight, and it confirms that night will be short and therefore endurable, come what may then. And what might come included all the wild animals of the known woods and those beasts that might be imagined in the pressing and imploding blackness that follows after the sun has dropped below its ragged ridge and night has descended like a shroud.

Funny it never did that at home, but rather came on gradually from over a far horizon that still held its lingering colors, orange and gold. But those were the Olympic Mountains and they were different, farther off, for one thing, and because they lay to the West produced a slant of light that was nowhere near the same. They held the daylight and expanded it, while these near mountains rejected it and denied its continuing effects. The loss was ours, though a brief one. I guess going into the woods produces a heightening of the nerves, a quickening, and a person (even a mere boy) sees life more acutely. He practically throbs with excitement.

We gathered into patrol formation, I still with the Beavers, but Ranny gone off to the Buffalo and giving us a lost-soul wave, from time to time, which happened to be poignant and funny, because he was saying to us, his old buddies, that his heart was with us still, and the Buffalo were a burden nobody should wish for, they were so pitiful. And we grinned back, secure in the knowledge that we were indeed the Beavers, the very best patrol this great troop ever had, since day one.

Art remained our patrol leader and I now the assistant, by some fluke of fate—or as we called it, the fickle finger thereof. I did my best to attain and exhibit leadership and was forever a miserable failure at it. The more I tried, the worse I got, and soon I abandoned whatever qualities of leadership I believed I possessed and began to act my normal, ordinary, boring, and dreary self, and was soon accepted haltingly for what I truly was, what I had been all along, an ordinary schmuck. A dork extraordinaire.

The earth was packed from so many feet pressing it down, as groups arrived, milled around, argued, made trail-head decisions, and headed off. Now, I don't know about you, but a mountain trail to me is nothing like I imagined it to be, green as a goose. I thought it was some miniature paved highway winding off into the forest, shining in the late morning light like some sort of stationary and horizontal beacon. Think again, shit-for-brains, as we used to say, falsely encouraging one another at difficult times. A trail—get this—is nothing, followed by more of the same. It may begin with confidence (just as we wan scouts did), but just around the first turn it begins to revert to its true nature and unsure self, falling in on its edges and allowing tufts of scrub and brush to intrude upon its domain, and pretty soon it is a ghost of something never clearly established, no bright road of small dimension but a frail swath cut through the wild—provisionally, tentatively, dimly, darkly.

A trail is no more than a ghost of a rite of passage. An echo. It wends and it winds, turning back upon itself like some indefinite thought, pondering, lost. It widens when it comes to a puddle and bids you walk on through, for its perimeter are trimmed in resilient brush, and it lures you by proclaiming it to be shallowest in its middle, which is another illusion in a world of slimy appearances and raging doubts. So you splash on through and soon discover the absence of bottom, veering off to the side and up on the slanting edge before the water splashes over your boot tops and you are sodden into the quick future. This we don't want or wish for.

Past the puddle, shimmering, the trail regathers, slimming here, broadening there, twisting, hiding, emerging like a joke cracked upon an unsuspecting mind, and always disappearing again beneath some arching green to be felt with the feet when it can no longer be seen. The trail. You push through the vault and it scrubs your chin, feeling with your toes, catching a root and not going down, well, not often, only stumbling ahead and catching oneself at the last moment, for a forty-five pound pack tends to propel one forward, as though slapped on the back by Bigfoot Himself. You go lunging ahead, quick as an arrow, and manage to avoid a headlong plunge into some thorned berry by a deft clutch of your toes, inside their already damp boots. You perform an abrupt pull-up and resume standing tall and are nearly pulled back and downward by your packboard—something one side of your mind wouldn't mind at all, for it would lay you out on your back in a resting position, and you might catch a wink or two before somebody, some scout leader, found you and, humiliating to be sure, shouted you to your feet and ahead again, for a scout doesn't rest until nightfall, if even then.

You move ahead by yards by the hundred, quarter miles, half miles, and learn that it takes forever for a troop of boys to negotiate a single mile of trail that has not yet really begun to climb and in which you have not discerned with trail-critical eye a single switchback, the sure sign of ascent. You wind with your patrol and the patrol its troop through patchy copse filled with bracken and bramble, skunk cabbage to one side, where the marsh intrudes, false hellebore to the other, tiny clustered flowers with no names you have ever heard spoken mixed in with some you dimly recognize as cowslip, or is it cowbell, some cow thing, bell or slip, perhaps lip. Or maybe it has nothing to do with a cow or a word that sounds like cow when muddled by running water.

Nobody there is to build a bridge where in mid-summer the land grows parched, but now in sweet springtime with snow melting in the thin sunlight sparkling with running rivulets agathering and flowing one into another, forming the start of creeks and tiny streams that carry no name, for soon they will be dry, and who is there who loves a stream or streamlet that isn't one, that has died with the furnace blast of summer? Not I; not any of us. So we slosh on through these transparent obstacles that are ever moving, with a whispering sound, and rewet boots that are hardly dry and sometimes, when an official break is announced after less than an hour, we doff our packs and spring surprisingly light into the air on the balls of tired feet to lower our heads and sup of the incredibly cold waters that we believe are sweet, sweet as flowers, but discover sadly are merely cold and have no real taste, no more taste than, say, what is delivered out of our home refrigerators ice trays. A little of that. The flavor is tart and indistinct, something like the earth itself. And it does not, as we hoped, quench our thirst so much as it disguises it with metallic flavor and puts off the parched moment when we must bend and drink again from the next mountain trickle.

It is at its best, a trail is, when it moves in and out of sunlight patches, which alternate, becoming yellow-bright, one moment, and the next black with shadow, dense, damp, prevailing, hinting at what cloud, fog, and drizzle are like, but not producing them, holding them back, promising coolness. And you are thankful, here in the first solid and disarming mile of woodland trail, that there is a sun today, and you are privileged to move in and out of its rays and have it bless you.

As patrol assistant, you must bring up the rear, as Ranny Hennes did before you, keeping an eye out for stragglers. These are usually young scouts trampled into escalation by the shortness of time and excitement, which is contagious, the Asian flu of the inexperienced, and these guys should not be on a week-long hike but somehow shortcircuited the leadership and wheedled permission and—here they are. You have a share of the responsibility for them and are contemptuous of it and them, for you are barely up to the distance and the terror and the travail, if the truth be known, and you'd just as soon it wasn't you and things remained as they were, that is, disguised and the property of someone else, namely Ranny. In onrushing autumn you will be fourteen and expected to be experienced and superior, and you will act this way, sure, but in your quaking heart you will still contain much of your former fear and be fighting still to overcome it. So now you've got brats to look after, like some kind of mother, a mother of the woods and mountains, not a role you like or would choose for yourself, so green as you are, but one which has been foisted upon you by circumstances; call it attrition. So many sicken of scouting, or are allowed to chicken out, or drift away with weak pretexts and crude alibis. There is nobody to challenge them and cry out, "Coward, come back. Take your medicine as I did." But since there is an endless supply of virgins on the block, the egress is compensated for by a steady stream of replacements. And of course I—we—hate them all. It is worse than babysitting a little brother, let me tell you.

Blondie Stamer has been replaced, or is in the process of being superseded by John Hedges, our new scout master. Both are along on this adventure—as we cynically call it. There is a carryover from the war now being waged overseas, in Germany and the islands of the Pacific, complete and replete with irony, some of it bitter, all of it cruelly funny, and we have appropriated it as it comes to us and we are able to understand it, much as it was with the slick soldier who called us on that Cedar River preparatory hike busride, "Errol Flynn's Junior Commandos."

We did not then or much later realize we were being labeled some sort of stud, a collection of studs, future seducers, out to swing from galleys and ride horseback and shoot off arrows from our bows and fling spears, etc., etc., and in the twilight of such a day come snuggling alongside some lass in plunging bodice and ingratiate ourselves insidiously and with carnal intent. Rather we saw ourselves as mere and ordinary adventurers, with no such reward in our sexless world, for sex was solitary, shameful, and messy. It arrived in the sticky night, bewilderingly. It had nothing to do with girls in school or women on the screen, which were greatly to be coveted but were helpless for us to do anything with or about. So the soldier's clever irony went, I am afraid, unappreciated. We missed out on—as we did much else—the full, sophisticated, and piercing context.

We were innocents. I was innocent then as I am innocent now, recalling all this. It is a wonderful facility, remembering, for you are reborn into youth and sparkling wonder. You enter for the first time the deep woods that Freud and Dostoyevsky have told you about, in all its mystery and intrigue, but it is the first woods and you are the first boy and the entering is ever virginal. The trail ahead is always new. The only memory you have to go on is so fresh, so hesitant, so brilliant, that it cannot be believed and you must fall back on something else for your experience, but what? There is nothing to serve as pillow. Oh, there may be some literary antecedent—Tom Sawyer or his surrogate, Puddinghead Wilson—but it cannot be made to supply you with what you need, for it all comes down to this, mostly words, mere words, words alone, and they in their amassed wonder count for nothing when the forest closes down from rain or fog, and you are left alone in the dripping night, trembling in wet boots, all of your socks wet.

But nothing of the sort struck and half-defeated us, that first day and following night. We made about four miles, more than half the distance to the lake, but our available time had been truncated by the long drive with mothers to the trailhead. Tomorrow we would be born into the woods, creatures of the cedars and firs, spawn of the glade, and our sleeping bags and campfires and misty breakfasts over smoldering sad fires would permanently mark us, and the day ahead would be long and we would achieve great distance. As it was, we were bone-tired, as it is often called, there being no other apt phrase to describe it without distorting it, that is what it was and is. We ate, we talked quietly, we saw the night gather down around our shoulders a second time, spookily, and we were not afraid, only bone-tired. Still and again.

The Beavers had one another and the troop had the Beaver Patrol to comfort them. This is about as good as it is going to get, we told each boldly, promisingly. And it was good. It was excellent. And the rest of the week and our lives stretched optimistically ahead. What more could a boy want? Absolutely nothing, then or now.

For from the long, dim perspective of time the hike must be seen for what it is, not what it was, for memory is not precise and is sometimes downright deceitful. I promise you, I do not remember correctly, and therein lies our solution. Or salvation. I have had it so confirmed in numerous instances. I cannot be believed, as much as I want you to trust me and hang on my words. I have been betrayed by my memories and the past. That past is no longer mine, privately or even factually. It is some other thing, untrue in all its uncertainty, doubtful most often when it intends most to be truthful. That is, false. But I assure you of one thing. It is mine. Nobody else invented these events. I mean, recalled them.

It was fifty years ago. We took off down the trail as a unit, and at first the trail was good, packed earth and wide; there were even little log bridges provided by the Forest Service for us to cross daintily over wetlands. It was like being in a park; no, it was a park we were in, maintained and cultivated for us expressly. It was wonderful, idyllic—it was like Snow White and her assembled short guys, many of us yet unformed and of a similar height, our leaders corresponding at the head of the column to her, tall and elongated, looking a bit silly (at least Blondie Stamer did) in his short pants. The new guy, Bill Hopper, wore jeans like the rest of us, though we had our rugged element that insisted on the uniform shorts, that is, the knee-length pants and khaki socks that were held up with round rubber garters that bit into your calf and left a pink ring that was loath to remove itself.

Jeans and flannel shirts and, tucked away, usually at the bottom of the pack, a light-weight sweater of wool for cool nights, which were promised. All this was prescription stuff, along with the tallow candle, the matches whose heads were dipped in paraffin for waterproofing purposes, the crooked official brown flashlight, the extra batteries, the two spare pairs of socks and extra drawers, the low-cut tennis shoes, the extra T-shirts, the nested cooking kit (one side silvery still, the other burned black), the canteen with cooling cotton cloth cover for purposes of evaporation, the bags of food substances—Koolaid, Kraft Dinner, oatmeal, powdered potatoes and vegetables (these separate items, to be mixed in the pot), hardtack instead of bread, packets of jelly stolen from restaurants for those who had them (decanted contents in small jars for others), flour for pancakes and cooking breadtwists on green sticks propped against the dying coals and making small sad biscuits for us, dried fruit of whatever kind available and nearly all present and accounted for in some form, canned sardines, Vienna sausages, cookies galore. Food had to be small, it had to be light in weight. It had to be easily disposed of afterwards and leave minimal waste. Thus whatever came in tinfoil—it would not burn, of course—had to be packed out. A scout packs out his waste; if it wasn't in the manual, per se, it was implicit on every page. And toilet paper. It wouldn't do to wipe yourself with a leaf, now would it? Besides, there are no leaves to be found at 3000 feet, and you can't very well do the job with a fir bough or a handful of brown needles.

I mean, we had been around. We knew the worst and had also experienced the near-best. We had discovered, after much sweat and effort, that there were moments of isolated peace, and these were islands and they were rewarding, solid and greatly to be looked forward to landing on. We awaited them and sought them out and treasured them, for much of what we did was hard, and I don't just mean difficult. Painful.

The first quarter mile is a snap, especially so when (as is usual) the trail is level and wending through that deceptive flatland that marks the start of all trails into the wilderness and is expressly designed to trick you and put you disarmingly at ease. And the second quarter miles isn't bad, either. True, by now the trail is showing signs of obscurity, but these were nothing like they soon might be. Remember, it was June, and the country was just emerging from departing snow, opening up, and we were among perhaps the first half-dozen parties to walk the trail since autumn, and there was not yet the abundance of shoots and whips that occur later at higher altitudes and had already, two months ago, burst out in the true lowlands where we were inclined to go and hike.

I mean, these were the mountains. Well, they soon would be. We were headed their way. Gradually, in the second half mile, the trail developed a slight slope. It was up. We moved ahead on our toes now, and the gentle grade announced itself in our calf muscles. They tightened up, while our packs grew heavy, declaring their true weight and comprising a fact of life that would have to be acknowledged. It would be with us, this downward pull from the shoulders, from here on out, but weirdly at the end of our journey the packs themselves would become so light as to be absurd, since most of our food would be eaten up. And we would boast to ourselves not that the weight was less but that we were stronger, for the mountains build men. (Some truism are true.) If we were not men, we were fast becoming large boys, for hard work and suffering advance one through the network of accomplishments, and telescope experience and rectify it. Thus a boy could start out on a week's hike and be fourteen, but he would emerge from the other side of the forest eighteen years' old for sure and most likely twenty—if not in years, then in what he has learned from the trees.

This was common knowledge. Not only did the woods cleanse you, mind and body, but they promoted a type of learning not to be picked up elsewhere. (And I believe this still.) There is a kind of wilderness epiphany that comes from sheer survival that is not duplicated elsewhere; of course those who die along the trail do not attain it. (Or if they do, it perishes with their bones.) And others do not strive for it and it passes them by. Therefore, and it only stands to reason, those of us who came back have captured something unique. So we proud scouts get to name it and call it ours, without fear of contention.

You eat the usual half-cooked food and survive the burps and rumbles, the farts and groans. Like Jack Hepburn and his C-rations, you may get constipated and walk for days all bent over like some human question mark, but eventually you will be relieved, lightened, disposed of your pile of steaming shit, and you will reenter the world of vertical people and find it good. You grin, you shake your fist at the skies, you slap a buddy's shoulder, you shout out loud your joy, and you sling your one-ton pack on your skinny shoulders, and you hump off again. Hi-ho!

That first night we camped alongside Miller River. Tomorrow it would fork and rid itself of half its volume, its leftover self going off into the towering foothills and apprentice mountains and being lost to human experience, at least ours, but the remaining fork or branch so shrunken in on itself would parallel and the troop as constant companion and thirst benefactor until we reached the targeted lake, Dorothy.

Wherefor art thou, Dorothy, that someone should name a lake after you? And what did you do to deserve the honor? I wonder now, not then, and marvel at the possibilities, including the sexual ones.

It was a twinkling, tinkling little stream, and in a few places you could jump across it, if you had a running start. Then once across, there was nothing to do but like a frog jump back, for there was naught on the far side but wilderness, while on your side there was at least the trail. The trail was your passport to advancement, escape, retreat, and survival. It took you wherever there was for you to go, which in our case was ever onward and, as they say, upward. But the first night when it was time to stop and set up camp an hour before dark, the terrain was still relatively flat and our tents and tarps were pitched on ground that did not fight us for dominion.

Those of us who had 'em fished wet flies for easy trout, rainbows with parr markings. They averaged about eight inches that night and we killed them and fried up crisp in lard in a hot pan and ate them. It is not the best way to prepare trout but it is the usual way and it will do. And from our little single shaker containing both salt and pepper in clever, eternal scout mix, thereby saving both space and weight, we seasoned the trout, which was the final touch in making them palatable.

They were of course delicious. Those of us who fished with wet fly attached a periwinkle (caddis larvae in tiny stone houses shaped like cornucopia) to the hook and had fresh meat for as long as we could stomach it, which was considerable, while the others had recourse to the dreary Kraft product, which you ate like a golden popcorn ball. The trout struck savagely, fought hard for their size, and came out of the quiet of their pool splashing and I guess protesting the indignity of what we did to them; we called it fighting and cheered each jump, even if it was short of clearing the water. And I can tell you now that it wasn't difficult fishing. They were suicidal trout, hungry after a winter's abstinence, and just beginning to respond to insect proliferation, the same gnats and inevitable mosquitoes that made life near the water's edge fascinatingly miserable.

That is, we got ate alive by what the trout ate. If that is not grammatical, it is all the same true. Gnats got in your eyes, while the mosquitoes entered your ears with a descending whine, almost a snarl. You slapped at your troubled ear with the palm of the same hand and produced a stinging, ringing sensation there. A moment later it was the opposite ear, and so it went, into the evening, slap and sting.

Smoke from the fire helped fend them off, both during and after dinner. It kept them away, the solitary mosquitoes, the clouds of gnats, and the voracious manure flies. The flies liked you when you were lightly slick with sweat. It drew them well, like sugar is supposed to, and they went slip-sliding around on your skin surface, buzzingly. Each had its specialty target—the skitoes your ears, the gnats your eyes and nostrils, the newly introduced shit flies, the size of raisins, your dripping epidermis. If you got rid of one species, another promptly came forward and volunteered its services. Always there was one on active duty, and often there were two. Occasionally there were three, and woe for you then.

What you did was this: you buttoned down sleeves and collars and if you had a pull-down hat, you utilized it; most of us didn't have a hat that would cover our ears, so we were reduced to the slapping exercise. So many boys so afflicted gave the image of being engaged in a tacit exchange of hand-signals, a kind of nervous semaphore involving only the hands and wrists, and these fluttered and weaved mysteriously in the air, their message undecipherable. We as a body were in constant motion, as though trying to discourage the furies from attacking our faces, and perhaps we were, for this was an apt name for them, these denizens of the insect world.

Some green wood heaped up on the flames and smothering them helped immeasurably, but the smoke that ensued was the tradeoff. We coughed and fumed, rid of the furies for the moment, wondering aloud to one another whether this was any better, as our eyes and throats burned. And—ah—twilight in the forest, with the sun sinking down behind its near peak; it was wondrous to behold, especially from behind a sooty cloud that colored the sky orange.

And we had nearly a week more of this.

The cold waters from Miller River gave us what we needed to wash our dishes with when heated slightly and mixed with soap; the trouble was, when they were rinsed in this fashion, the coating left on the dishes, pans, and utensils was slick and filmy. We toweled it off on clean rags brought from home this very day, and saw with amazement the rags turn brown and gray. Now, and not before, they were truly clean. That chore done, and a chore it was, the meal was officially over, and so was the cleaning up, and we were free for the reminder of the evening until campfire. It was a solemn time.

Bill Hopper and Blondie Stamer were engaged in a conversation. We all strained to overhear it. This was hard to do, for they tried to keep at a distance and we made efforts to come closer and unobtrusively listen. It was important to catch the exact nature of what they said, for our fate—Troop 81's—was at stake. They held our future in their hands, literally. What was it going to be? Whatever, the balance of power was shifting from one man to another, and we were without means to affect it any or change its course.

Bill had two kids, boys, and they were among the new members of our troop; they were, as a matter of fact, the reason why he had submitted to being named our new scout master. He had a vested interest, you might say. Naturally we all hated his kids, Tommy and Joe, and vowed to shun them totally. At this we were only partly successful, alas. I mean, we had them present and unescapable, every waking moment of each day on the trail. And while he didn't mean to favor them, and tried to show that he didn't, in word and deed, it was precisely in every word and deed that we believed that he did. I mean, in ordinary assignments, we were assured that he gave them preference.

If they had to dig the latrine, for instance, we interpreted this as being favored duty denied the rest of us and were envious. Sure, they got to dig he latrine; their dad was scout master, that would explain it, boy, some guys had all the luck. But if one or two of us had the toilet duty, it was onerous. Who would want to get stuck with digging in the ground a place for everybody to go to take a crap? It was a dirty job and to be despised, as well it should be. Whoever got stuck with it was being summarily being punished, that was for sure.

They couldn't win either way, and this was the way we wanted it. Freud (with whom I was fairly familiar by now) would call this father envy. While Blondie Stamer was a surrogate father, Bill Hopper was a real one, but he was neither surrogate nor real to any of us except his own true kids while they were still around. You get it? It was crystal to all of us. We wished his kids belonged to some other troop. Then we would have him (Daddy?) all to ourselves. Meanwhile there was Blondie Stamer to contend with, our nominal leader, semi-deposed, lurking in shadows, a lame duck, a master who issued his orders in his usual bland voice and was as always ignored. He was the kind of leader we wanted and deserved, one who was incapable of leading but was universally liked, though generally despised. This new guy, nobody knew, you couldn't predict him, the future was unclear, and besides he had these two snarly dork kids. They were really the ones we wanted to get rid of. But . . . how?

Meanwhile Blondie says to Bill Hopper, "Look, we've got to do something about this situation."

And Bill says, "You got to be patient. It will work out."

What will? That was always our question. Our answer was not forthcoming and the ambiguity increased. What was going on? It might be nothing, but nobody would settle for that. We wanted something outrageous. If asked, we couldn't have said what it might be, though it would have to be something stupendous to meet our expectations. What might that be?

Well, for one thing, the troop might throw all of its scouts into a melting pot and dissolve the patrol structure as we knew it. No more Beavers, no more Buffaloes (yeah!), no more Cougars and White-tailed Deer. All patrol leaders would be demoted, all assistants (such as myself), even Clay Blackstock, who could start a fire when nobody else could, might find himself back in the pack, even though he was an adult with morning whiskers.

Imagine that, Clay as patrol leader or maybe even worse, some non-entity scout, though he was an Eagle. It could not be; the world could not be turned so topsy turvy. Clay deserved to be scoutmaster, if anybody did, and here was this new guy, Bill Hopper, nice enough, with leadership qualities that were abundant (we were always talking about leadership and its values, much more than anybody could guess we did), and those two moron sons, suddenly thrust upon us, without so much as a please or a maybe.

We wanted Clay; we thought of starting a Clay-for-Scoutmaster movement, but nobody had the temerity to head it up. You could say we were lacking in leadership in the insurrection department. We cosied up to Clay as individuals and in small supportive groups, and tried to align ourselves with him, but his future was unclear to him as it was to us, and to get too close to him might trip the lever that led to his downfall—and ours along with him. Anybody who was found too close to him might be swept along in the incoming tide. Dismissal. So while we loved him dearly, and sought him out at every opportunity, and liked to stand close to him and be seen with him, it did not pay to be near too closely identified as one of his, certainly not bonded. Do you understand? We all did. So we kept our distance, though we loved him dearly.

In times of chaos, rumor rules. I was not the only scout with a rampant imagination. When I suggested to my patrol that the two kids were spies, I was only kidding, but somehow I had captured the germ of our fear and given it incubation, and when the story came back to me from other lips, I found myself believing it thoroughly. I looked at the brats and thought I saw in their visage sly looks and mysterious signals passing back and forth between them, signs none of us could read for we were lacking the code and its detector.

Though they were ostensibly Tenderfeet and members of the despised Buffalo Patrol (boo, hiss), they had clout that none of us possessed, that being of course the ear of their father. We could always go up to good Bill Hopper and speak to him on every occasion, almost like sons, and be greeted with a smile and a willingness to accommodate our point of view, but we came to believe this was deceptive and he was not what he seemed to be. He wore disguises and cloaked his gestures with a seeming innocence in order to trick us into a false state of security. Thence he and his minion sons would seize all the implements of power from the old guard—as assistant patrol leader of the esteemed Beavers, I was part of that power structure, though admittedly on its lowest level, and would of course be overthrown along with all the others—and we would left sitting out in the cold, our fire suddenly and inexplicably gone out, the night settling down around our ears just as this one presently was doing.

So, abed, we whispered among ourselves and exchanged confidences and rumors coined on the spot, and frightened ourselves and each other in turn, and had a delightful time of it, if paranoia can be said to be fun. It can, if it is but pretend paranoia, and not the real thing, and everybody knows it. The trouble with induced paranoia, or fake paranoia, is that it can quickly turn into the real thing without anybody knowing it, and there you are, everybody afraid and imagining things and distrusting each other. Then each scout weaves his own plot and stealthily distributes it, and there is a conspiracy to believe and be believed in turn. It is self-reinforcing and deadly, and soon everybody is atremble with fearsome disbelief.

So we whispered and plotted into the night, and fell asleep with withered expressions and awoke to a grey dawn, which was normal, but soon seemed to be a part of the pall thrown over us by suspicion. I mean, my friend Dostoyevsky would be right at home with us, here at Camp Number One below the fork in the Miller River, at the start of our trek to the lake named Dorothy. And about her. . . . What did she have to do with the price of lemons?

It was quiet around the campfire, the next morning. Everybody kept his ears open, and if all do that, not much is going to get said, out of fear of missing something important that comes from listening hard. We built individual smudge fires, one for every two or three of us, and gathered round, hunched in what is called the hunkering down stance, and cooked scrambled eggs made from powder and Vienna sausage out of precious cans and ate hardtack smeared with packet jam that might be grape or strawberry or some caked orange substance called marmalade. It was adjudged best, but mainly because it was new to most of us and therefore special and precious.

If you had some in a little sealed cake, stolen from a restaurant, you did not share or trade it away. You kept it for yourself and let the others observe you scraping the bottom of the packet clean with the tip of your scout pocket knife's big blade. And you smacked your lips afterwards, signifying the meal and the packet were finished.

It was all manifold silliness, you knew, and they knew, and yet you played the game, for it was the stuff of life and you had nothing better with which to replace it, it was all, and it was enough. It was sad how everything came down to pettiness and stopped right there. You had to go on, and did, but you knew about the essential sadness of things and were possessed of a great swelling regret that never went away.

Then it was douse fires, redistribute fire stones, rake area, roll bags, lash down packs, make final inspection of grounds, mount packs, assume patrol formation, count off, utter patrol call (ours with a slap on the heels of it), and take to the trail. A mist was falling—not quite rain, but not no-rain either. It was hard to tell what the stuff was or might shortly become. It was not poncho time. Under what was termed rain gear you tended to swelter. You melted into your nylon or plastic cover and got wetter than you ever would be without it. And hotter, too. So you did without. You got ordinarily wet, rather than entrapped wet. And you could at least breathe, without the smeltering effect.

A mist in the forest is tantamount to a moderate rain anywhere else. They don't call it the rain forest for nothing. It is the woods's chief occupation. It is why everything is so fucking green—what they call evergreen. This is the Evergreen State, as a matter of fact, so the term is only fitting and it is natural that it is ubiquitous. Rain. Mist. Drizzle. All the same thing and translatable into one word: wet.

When you get soaked clear through, there is nothing more to get wet and the shoulders begin to relax in their harness (or traces) and a light-heartedness descends and the face, streaming water, shines and distributes its brightness on either side and the effect is contagious. A cheer goes up, and somebody sings a bit of song, and then another makes the beaver sound, and it is picked up in chorus and amplified, and from behind, where some other (inferior) patrol is strung out with stragglers (which we all call scragglers), comes the sound of another patrol. "That must be the dratted Buffalo," somebody says, and the sound is never the same twice because the Buffalo Patrol do not know the sound a buffalo makes and are continually trying out new sounds, ludicrous ones, ones most unbuffalolike, and everybody laughs, and the Buffalo then know that that isn't the sound, it was wrong, it is to be discarded and never made again. Then it is on to the next trial sound—and gales of derision.

Deer do not have a discernible sound, either, and emit something like a squeak, a mouse-sound, but a cougar has a mighty roar and a variety of noises that include a snarl that is really unpleasant and frightening, especially if the lips are curled back and the teeth are shown—even if those teeth happen to be wearing braces, as many of us are.

The Cougars are second best in everybody's estimation, and half of it is because they have a wild sound and it is displayed in freeform, some of them snarling, some screaming, some screeching, while others simply wail or hiss. I wouldn't mind much being a Cougar, if I couldn't be a Beaver. It wouldn't be much of a come-down, I mean, nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. A Cougar can come out in public and wear his patrol shoulder patch proudly. And while a Buffalo looks pretty neat in silhouette, and in another troop might stand for something respectable, in ours it was to be shunned. It is why that patrol always had a hangdog look which, come to think of it, exactly resembles the profile of a buffalo. Which is what they have to wear on the shoulder, poor guys.

Art Golofon—stocky, dark, not awfully talkative—says to me, as we start out, "Hear anything?"

And I ask, "Meaning?"

And he says, "Oh, I only thought you might have heard something."

I: "About what?"

"Oh, you know."

I do, but it is not to be spoken. What Art wants to know is, have I heard anything about the coup. The Bill Hopper takeover of the troop and the deposition of Blondie Stamer. When and how? Or has it already happened, and nobody is talking, nobody is leaking a word?

O, you can't tell from looking at the guys because they are part of the adult world and can't be trusted, though of course they are our leaders and to be trusted. You can trust them, I mean, in many ways, scout ways, but in the manner of adults they can't be counted on to tell you the truth, say, or let you know what is going on. So you are always on the outside. Kids are, and scouts are no exception. You go up to Blondie or Bill, and you ask them a straight question, and the answer you receive is one of those lies grown ups serve children, all of their lives. I mean, they lie. They lie outright, transparently, and don't even know they lie, they are so used to doing it, lying I mean. And so we don't ask, knowing what the answer will be ahead of time and dreading it. For we know; we have always known.

And this is one of the chief drawbacks to being a kid. You get eternally lied to, and when you in turn grow up what do you do but become a liar, a liar on account of time, it is unescapable and tragic, but it is nonetheless your fate. So you don't resent them too much for it, for it is only human, and while they may think they are fooling you with their versions and their half-truths, they are not. You know it is something designed for mass consumption, that is, food for kids, and frankly will give you indigestion.

Yet what we circulated among ourselves was far less than the truth of any situation. We were on the outside of the decision-making process and heirs to what had been decided, not participants in the process. It is what makes kids so sad and ornery. Nobody tells you a thing until long after the decision has been reached and then it is announced to you from on high. Instead, we made up our versions, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and believed what we heard or offered, knowing it was not quite true or to some degree false, but at least it was ours, and we had a proprietary involvement in it. So we believed much of what was wrong, erroneous, crazy, wild. The more preposterous it was, the more apt we were to find it acceptable. And the corollary was also true; if the truth came up and bit you, you were inclined to disbelieve it, for it lacked all the essential elements of mystery and excitement. Often the truth is dull as nails.

So we believed what we wanted to and went to where it led us, which was often nowhere. When Art asked me, for instance, what I heard, then declined to name what it was he was after or even anything vaguely specific about what it was, I understood perfectly and answered in kind. And this he accepted at face value, it being not much of anything. So we went on our way—he to the head of the column, me to its rear—nicely satisfied over the exchange but knowing no more than we had before, and perhaps less.

For a lie sucks the truth out of you and leaves you impoverished, licking your lips and finding you are fresh out of spittle. Each of us carries in our bones a hoard of everyday truth, but a lie diminishes it by one iota, let us say, and enough lies will leave you sadly lacking, and soon all you will know is falsehood. You have to know, at the heart of things, where the truth of a given matter lies and set your compass (so to speak) on its bearing, and then at all times you will know where you are in this world and that there isn't any other, not for practical purposes, and then with a back azimuth or two you can set out and have a sane idea of where you are going, but if you don't know, can't recognize the given truth, you are automatically at a loss and the loss is apt to be permanent. Then woe is you.

To know the truth of events happening is what keeps a boy (and I suppose a man, too) sane. It is not easy to remain sane, when all around you are giving up their wits to the occasion, and raving and raging unintelligently. You can talk all you want about being cool, or remaining cool (not the same thing, by the way), but if you don't know where it is at, at all times, you are lost in the deep woods and will never find your way out. And this is greatly to be avoided. It is why boys need leaders, adults, and if the truth is to be known, there are no leaders among boys your age or near it, and all that is posturing. Leadership comes, alas, from the insincere adult world and there is no substitute for it. What boys do is clown around and eternally pretend to be something they are not, and depending on the acting or the skill in clowning they are accepted and in some cases obeyed. You can obey somebody who is not a leader, not a born leader or one appointed by an adult, namely, a scout master, but only if you decide to; there is no automatic law of the universe that says he is to be obeyed, not as an adult is to be obeyed, practically every adult, unless he has in some way already betrayed the cause of adults.

The cause of adults (while I'm at it, hiking along, my mind as always at work, chewing up the scenery and spitting it out in words, mostly words) is to be deceptive but smilingly obliging and what is called condescending. An adult dispenses lies as a spider his webbing. It is as unescapable as breathing and not to be believed but somehow acted upon, solely because he is an adult. Likewise a kid, a fellow scout, is to be believed, all right, but not to be obeyed, not unless you want to obey him, for whatever various and tawdry reasons, none of which is likely to make sense. It is nonetheless the way it is. Clear? If not, stay tuned in.

We hiked along that trail, Beavers all, plus the others of inferior patrol status and scouting rank and hierarchy, keeping the next one in file formation vaguely in eye contact, but from the rear. I had my eye on Jack Hepburn's butt, but thought mainly about his mother. I could never get over the fact that Mr. Jeweler put his dork in Mrs. H.'s cunt and out sprang Jack from that mysterious place that I would like to enter, however it is done, in whatever specific manner. So I saw a little of Jack in Mrs. H., and of course Mrs. H. in Son Jack, and this was inevitable. I guess you could say that, after Jeanne Crane, she was my first love and never knew it, never realized that she had produced in me such an uneasy effect or strong impact. (Yes, she did, I caution my much younger self, since I can't let him get away with such naive behavior. She knew keenly all the while and this was her poor idea of a joke. We all know the saddest jokes of all are sexual jokes, and somebody is always being taken advantage of, nominally the female. But not always. Not in this long-ago instance. T'was me.)

You hike along in splendid grinding wonder at where you are and look about you at all the trees leaping out of the ground and fanning out their boughs or, if you've got hardwoods leaves. The higher we went, the fewer leaves we saw and the more trees with great shaggy boughs, massive cedars and firs. As we got higher, the trees rose shorter, oddly, with their crests appearing less far off the ground, and those trees developed a gnarled, shaggy look, as if it had taken them all this time and energy and effort to rise to a height of say twenty feet. I saw this as a life struggle and a worthy one, and was impressed. And far above us and still another day away was the place where the trees simply disappeared and everything became one version or another of rock and stony outcropping. This was called timberline.

You got to have something with which to occupy your mind while hiking in mountain country or else you will go mad (that is, insane) from endless contemplation of your situation, namely, that you and yours are very far away from the comforts of known civilization. You are alone with your friends in the trees, and if you didn't get along before you had better do so now, or learn how to, because all you have is each other and, of course, the conspiring adult world that exists in the form of leadership, such as it is. You had the feeling that adults were not so all-powerful and knowing but big kids like yourself and in the face of some disaster might crumble and crack and turn out to be useless, which is the big fear in scouting—that it is all patent bullshit and we are all babes in the jungle, subject to good luck or bad. Fortunately for all of us it is good, in the forests of late June, and this is as much a seasonal product as anything else.

You've got to remember, this was back before the advent of cellular telephones and all the walkie-talkies were off to war and, besides, if they were not, their range was only a few hundred yards, and by now—noon of the second day, we were about six miles out, having made good morning time, though the route was beginning to climb in an impressive manner and our legs collectively were aching in calf and quads. We occasionally now halted in our tracks and, bent over with our packs directly above our heads and the weight pressing down directly on our legs for the first time, which is a great relief, let it be known; we breathed deeply, pantingly, and stood thus as long as we could until nudged or jostled by the scout behind us, or yelled at by the one behind him, and then reluctantly straightened up again, being nearly pulled over backwards by the straps of our packs returning to their grooves in our shoulders, and marching on.

I call it marching, but it is not, nor anything much like that, which presumes a steady gait and constant speed, when what we did was more or less plough ahead with uneven steps and often sidesteps around roots or in gullied puddles, using the edges of our soles to remain upright, and forging on, ever on, the Light Brigade and us, Error Flynn's Junior Commandos (and still not getting the gist of the joke), climbing now and hearing off to the side of the clanging ravine, a rock cascading down its slope, always the fork of the Miller River.

There were the East Fork or Branch and the West of each, and I could only guess at which was which by taking compass sightings. You see, there are no signs (or few signs, and those not very informative) off in the woods to tell you much of anything, and that is one reason why you are here, and not some place else, say, in a room with a radio in it and a refrigerator full of cold pop, and you are learning self-reliance, as they say is scouting, and it is all bullshit of course but all the while true. A thing can be true and a roaring falsehood, both at once. So scouting is to be despised, while at the same time it is very valuable, and a boy growing up without it is impoverished, or so is my way of looking at it.

For instance: in the very wet rain that is falling now, you are hiking along in boots that never got dry from yesterday in day-old socks, for you want desperately to save the two pairs of dry for some special occasion, such as tonight in your sleeping bag to ward off the famous mountain chill, and your knees ache, and your thighs are tight, and there is a blister forming on the back of your left heel that you hope you are wrong about. So you whistle a little song, but you are so tired and dry that only some hissing air comes out in the form of a tune, wish-wish-wish, and you repeat it over and over, stanza by stanza, thinking the words and not quite speaking them in time to the wish-wish-wish, and when you stop the song, tell it to stop, please, it keeps coming back to haunt you and you can't be rid of it, not if you paid somebody to take it away, which of course is madness. Madness in the deep woods is never, my friend , that far away.

So you fight off the hissing tune and try to make your thoughts themselves, apart from the tune, turn to something useful (for a scout is useful), but all you can think of is Mrs. Hepburn's breasts, which you never quite saw in that mysteriously evocative way they have of hiding themselves just as they show you most, and wondering about their nipples and imagining them to be like the ends of new pencil erasers and about the same color, and it gives you a boner, which is not what you want along the trail, with sweat streaming down your face and all the mosquitoes mudwrestling in it with the horseflies. And there is something new, which are deer flies, and you wish the White-Tailed Deer Patrol would take them all, their namesakes, for they are green and golden and have a terrible whine, and when they bite you they take a chunk of meat out, believe me, and leave a wound that itches and won't close for a week.

Mrs. Hepburn is there with me, smiling and smoking and touching her red, red nails to her lips provocatively, and inviting me into bed with her to do what I am not quite sure of but have a pretty good idea by now. For sex is to a boy of burgeoning thirteen what war was to Steven Crane, before he wrote Red Badge of Courage; it is important not to mix Steven and Hart and Jeanne when you make analogies such as this, the voice of wisdom reminds me. I hadn't been there myself, not with a girl, or more likely not with a woman, neither Jeanne or Mrs. H. or Georgianna, and when I was (but three or four short years later) I could testify that it was pretty much as I had imagined it as being, but not so well organized or efficient, and there was much uncertainty on my part, but there is no uncertainty that a loving girl (for the moment loving, anyway, or for longer) can't tactfully overcome with a smile and a wriggle of accommodation. I mean, they are a practical sort and infinitely helpful in this and every other way, bless them.

Images of women and girls, known and unknown, crowd the mind of a lusty boy on the trail, most inappropriately, for if one of one's favorite images would rise at the trailhead, dishabille or more so, and beckon like a siren, and proffer the ultimate invitation to bliss, any and all of us would pass her by without a doubt and head for the next switchback without a look back at her what-might-have been. For she does not matter one leaping bit in the world of reality and urban civilization when a boy is on the trail and knows he has another three miles to go before surcease and dark. She exists—her whole sex does—as pure motivation and nothing more. You think of her and forge on. She is your inspiration and the means with which you trick yourself into putting one stiff foot in front of the other, knowing it will end sometime but not yet.

Not yet. You drop packs and with a sigh and a groan fall on top of them, for they stand between you and the hard ground, of which you have had enough already. You exchange the looks popularly known as, "Look, we have come through." Perhaps everything you know and daily express is from the movies, you realize. Every known shard and shred of behavior is thus the ape of somebody else's. The question is, how did it get started?

The noon meal was eaten speechless again. It was all I could do to work my teeth and keep my lips from hanging open. Talk about your tired. You drop your pack and you need a tie-down to keep from floating away. A tent peg or spike would do it, no, you'd need six or eight, and some Tenderfoot to pound them in for you, for you remain stiff and bone-tired. The only thing detrimental to the feeling of buoyancy is the known entity that you will soon be climbing back into your straps, your bra straps, as we call them.

What is it like being a woman or a girl like the mammificent Georgianna Walrath and always being preceded through life by your wonderful breasts? Do they bog you down, slow your style? Is it like this pack, only jutting in front? A boy is flat there, and when he looks down can see himself peeing, if that is what he is after, but a girl pees differently, but if a girl peed like a boy and wanted to look down (which a boy does only sometimes) she would see her boobs first and never the arching slant of yellow piss aimed at a bush. How sad to be a girl and miss all that; also tricks like writing your name in the snow and whether you have enough to last till the last letter. And what must it be like to have boys looking at you all the time and smacking their lips over what you out in front.

Imagine that. (I can't.)

About two-hundred feet below timberline, everything changes—the air, the rock formations, the flora. It is like passing from one country into another, but since I have yet to see Canada and only sighted Mexico from across a shimmering plain of Texas soil, I know not of what I speak. There are some places in the world where one nation merges inseparably into another, and nobody knows the difference unless there are signs (which I've said there aren't, or not when you need them) or a fence or uniformed nationals to point out the change to you. It is in effect a new world, not country.

It is exciting, too. You are inching up and you discern vast reaches of shale, which is but loose rock cleaved on two sides so that it like hard clay but slick and slippery and will go sliding out from under you and will also cut you if you fall wrong. You teeter along on the balls of your feet crossing these slopes of delicate shale, and you know the whole thing can come sliding out from under you, propelling you to your doom, but it doesn't, nor the scouts behind you or the ones you can see so well, the land being open now, ahead of you, balanced on tenderfeet, truly, forging ahead and getting to the far side of the slope turning, ebullient, and shouting encouragement to all the sad sacks still trying to negotiate the grade.

And there are switchbacks, which everybody knows about, all the same, as like as tires on a car, only each has its special slant and characteristic, almost as a face does, by which it can be known, and you encounter one after another, near endless, and shake hands with them, so to speak, rounding the first bend and acknowledging the slanting grade and transversing it and coming to the away bend and negotiating it and encountering the counter slope, that is, the one directly above the one below you which you have just accomplished, and seeing more scouts (Buffalo, hiss) huffing along them, where you'd been a minute or so before, and if you dared (you don't) look above you, you'd see Art Golofon and Bill Hopper breaking trail along the known route which needs no breaking, and where you will be—a miracle!—a few moments hence.

You pass the second night in the woods with a minimum of disturbance, and this being the approach of summer the mist dispense as you climb and you are greeted by spangled sunlight. It dapples the ground and you could almost reach right out and pick up the bright splotches. You are getting inured to the forest and the mountains, and recognize them not quite as your friends but surely less than your enemies. You have achieved a truce with them and—ridiculous as it is to say—are at one with the elements. You break camp as easily as one might break a dry stick, and it is to the road again, old horse.

This is the wonder of switchbacks, which is almost like history repeating itself with new faces and fresh generations, all behaving much alike, and only fooling themselves (these folks) because for them it is the first time, ever new, but for mankind only more of the same. This is what switchbacks are like in a trail designed and designated to carry you to an altitude of 3600 feet, where you are promised a lake. Where a known lakes lies and awaits you. Though by this time you seriously wonder if there is a lake and whether this whole painful exercise is not an adult gag promulgated for the further deception of kids everywhere.

Switchback after switchback, tedious and endless, gruelling, taxing, deceptive, frightening in number and ceaselessness. Up you go, turn, up some more, turn again, only to endure another steep ascent that when you are about able to compromise it slows your gait with another turn, and you find yourself pivoted and commencing another swinging turn to the next up-slope.

There is a fear of spending the night strung out on endless switchbacks of a never-ending trail. The trail is barely wide enough for a single boy to sack out in. Picture the troop camped there, woodless, waterless, lost, abandoned, their leadership abject failures reducing them to the quivering status of a boy, Tenderfeet all. A night on bald mountain, surely. But it is not to be. Our leadership—vying and contentious as it may be—insists we keep moving, and now it is a slave ship we are on, each pulling an oar, while Simon Legree (or whoever) cracks a whip over us and we must harvest all the cotton or corn before the bears come down out of the trees and eat our toes. Some such.

At the top of the last switchback there dawns a meadow. It is not that, of course, only meadowlike in its magnificence, as the land returns to something less than a pyramid you are constructing at the whim of some absent pharaoh who once thought it might be a good idea but now has departed and forgotten what he said in the form of an executive order to the rank and file. The trees, truncated and squat, rise out of a rocky plain and their roots search above ground for nurturing soil, finding a modicum. We wend between such trees and sparse scrub, and see ahead where the trees give up the ghost entirely.

Just above timberline lies the crest of our particular ridge, and we ascend it, steep to be sure but marking the visible end of our endeavor, and cross it and reach the start of the downslope and—lo—there is the lake. It is magnificent, sparkling blue, and larger than it has any right to be, here in the mountains. It is bordered by peaks, all seemingly contending with each other for grandeur, and though several come close there is but one that achieves the goal, and it is down at the far end of the lake, where the sun will rise the next morning, if your sense of direction is correct, and your compass tells you it is, right on.

You have seen pictures on calendars by talented photographers, but they have missed the astonishment. They try to catch the sun rising or setting, but let me tell you something. Late afternoon is the best time. There is a golden slant of light and the lake is entering once again into shadows. Moments before it was bright and sparkling and inviting; it still is, but there is something slightly ominous in the new darkness and hidden element where light has just departed. What I am saying is, it is slightly frightening, and this makes you respect it inordinately, and such a lake should be viewed just this way, with awe and encroaching unfamiliarity.

We pitched a quick camp, knowing we could do better on the morrow. I headed for the branch of Miller River that emptied out of the lake. With a bunch of cheap, store-bought flies and a steel rod that telescoped, collapsing in on itself in diminishing sections, one after the other, to become only a couple of feet long and, therefore, easily storable inside my Trapper Nelson and extending upward from one of the wooden supports for its framework, I scrambled down the scrabble that ended where the water ran cold and thin over smooth stones. The trout were there, hungry after a winter of near hibernation, scrawny, with big heads and bodies so slender they tapered back sharply to their tails. But these were different fish from what we caught readily downstream. They were a pale, silvery gray, with jewel-like spots of lemon and crimson; their lower fins had a bright forward edge.

These were brookies descended from the lake, I suppose for spawning purposes. They were about the same size or slightly smaller as the parr-marked rainbows that had matriculated up from the Skykomish River. Somewhere there was an barrier that separated the races of fish from each other, a barrier on one fork or both, or else down in the main river itself. So I was surprised and delighted to find fish so different from what I had expected, but I knew enough about them to know what they were. That is the value of books and pictures in books. They tell you ahead of time what is in store, and so you experience the jolt of recognition upon seeing what you never have before but already know in your heart.

Whatever fly I tied on, the trout hit it voraciously, which means they hit it hard and I had no trouble hooking them if the hook was not too big. They came burrowing in, splashing only when I hauled them up to the surface and otherwise bulldogging deep, with a little pulse of their bodies and tails. A pool would immediately produce a trout and often another one or two, then go dead. This meant to move on to the next as quickly as possible, for the light was already failing and, in the mountains, the sky will darken almost as readily as a shade being pulled down a window. You see, already I had learned a lot, and this was but the end of the second day.

We had not made as much distance as that first day, not in miles, but you always do better when fresh and, besides, today was all uphill and rigorous. The switchbacks were grueling. It seemed as if they would never end and just as our despair became widespread and thorough, we reached the final ridge and beheld the lake. Art Golofon had an economical fire going when I came back into camp and I had a string of trout, the last two still flapping. Fish of that size are easily cleaned after you've gutted them, especially if you are not too fastidious and are content with merely wiping them off on the nearest wild grasses. Which I did. Then I threw them—there were about ten, but remember they weren't large—into a big fry pan to which some bacon had been set asizzling. Meanwhile, Art boiled two pots of water and we threw some dried vegetables into one, potato flakes into the other. When the trout had loosened from their bones, I parsed them out with my trusty pocket knife, dropping chunks of white meat into the pot with the potatoes and that had now largely been drained because their contents had swollen to take up all of the water. I poured what was left out and added the last of the trout meat. All I had left were heads, tails, and wispy skeletons. These I threw into the fire and it was so hot as to quickly destroy them, though the smoke smelled awful for a minute or two. Then I added the mixed vegetables, which was our staple. The mess looked a little thin, so I put in some flour and powdered milk, stirring smoothly all the while, until the mixture had thickened and lost its watery appearance. Finally I added the salt-and-pepper mixture out of the universal shaker and pronounced it done.

I, as cook, tasted first. Then I ladled some onto Art's plate and sat back and watched him taste it, which he did haltingly, not looking at me. Then he was smacking his lips and he quickly devoured his portion. Meanwhile I was gobbling mine. Absolutely delicious. Of course most anything would have tasted great at the moment. It was mostly luck that it turned out well and I take no special credit. Trout chowder is what we called it, and trout chowder is what it was. My wife tells me that it is impossible to make chowder without corn. I smile and say nothing. We knew what we were eating and it was good.

But there was so much left over, after Art and I had eaten our fill. My pot held two quarts and had a wire bail on which to suspend it over the fire; because it was so big, I filled it with extra clothing in my packboard. Now it held the chowder that we did not eat—more than a quart. I put it down by the lake for the night, where it would be cool, and there it still was, untouched, the next morning.

Because I was known as a fisher and had caught enough little trout to provide dinner for Art and myself, and had done such a thing before, I was a little bit famous. So after our morning meal was over, the dishes washed and tucked away, Bill Hopper came up to me and asked if I'd like to go fishing with him. This was an honor, but it was also a burden, for if you are with an adult you have to be different from what you are and what you enjoy being, that is, you are not yourself but this phony human being, neither kid nor adult. And while I would rather be off fishing with another scout, the offer that Bill Hopper made me was one that I couldn't refuse.

There was a canoe, you see. It was hidden in the scrub at the edge of the lake down from our camp by a couple of hundred yards; Bill Hopper knew of it in the way he knew of many things. There is an adult grapevine denied us kids and information gets transmitted back and forth among them, including things that never get down to us kids, and apparently somebody from another troop had told him about the canoe and where to look for it. So off we went along the trail that tried to round the lake and after a certain distance, at Bill's urging, we cut down a bank, rounded a huge red cedar, pulled back some loose boughs just beginning to grey, and there it was, full of rain water. So we had to bail even before we put the boat into the water. Not a good sign.

But not a bad one, either. The canoe had the look of having been made by an Indian of no special skill, and he had given up before he had completed the job, for some reason. So it was in effect a big cedar log that had been chiseled away on the top side and a kind of basin gouged into it. There was what you might call a bow, a stern, and a small area into which you might store your gear, if you had any.

"There are some paddles here, somewhere," Bill Hopper told me, rummaging around some more in the scrub and, sure enough, he uncovered first one, then the other. He looked at me with a grin and I grinned back. This looked to be an adventure.

Next to the canoe was an old tin can that looked as if it had been used a lot; it was rusty and its purpose was to bail, so we bailed with it. Soon we had but a trickle of water left in the bottom of the canoe and pronounced it fit. Together we levered the heavy boat by inches to the water's edge and felt the lake slide under it and begin to lift it. It rode low in the water, but stable, so stable that it could not be tipped over by anything short of a derrick. It began to float so freely that Bill had to grab it to keep it from getting away from us and to haul it back to shore.

"Grab a paddle and get in," he told me.

I did, swinging my telescoping rod over the side and pointing it out of the way in the likelihood it might get broken. Even a steel flyrod can be broken if you step on it or hit it just right with a paddle. From the tip trailed a spinner-fly combination I thought might be just right for our trip. The idea was, with each of us paddling, I would let out line off to the side where my paddle wasn't swinging, and the lure would trail behind us a foot or so under the surface (depending on our speed over the water) and a hungry trout would see it and strike. Thus we could move along the edge of the lake, which was calm as a puddle, exploring the shoreline, paddling quietly, softly, and at the same time be fishing. At least I would be. Bill Hopper, he was just out for a canoe ride.

Every once in a while my rod tip would go down, either from hooking a trailing piece of weed or from the strike of a small trout that didn't get hooked. Always I'd grab for the rod about the time the rod snapped upright and the line went slack. If I pulled back on the rod, there was clearly nothing at the end of the line and my lure would come to the surface and ride along planing on it like a tiny, distant motor boat. I would have to slacken the line enough to let the lure dive and resume its sub-surface spin of the little propeller that proceeded the fly, or else I'd have no chance, not a whit, of catching a trout.

As it was, I was not doing very well. I would dip my paddle and lift it clear of the water, it trailing a little stream of its own as the water left the blade and returned to the lake. Then Bill Hopper would take his trailing stoke from the stern, forming a J in the water, and thereby steering our craft and keeping it straight on track. I would dip mine again, and he would follow with his J. We repeated this, each resting on his paddle and allowing our slow craft to glide heavily through the water until nearly still, at which point we would propel it—me first, followed by him—with our paddles. And so it went, as we eased round the lake and left scarcely a trail behind us in the gelid water.

Suddenly my rod tip went down, plunging into the water and beneath it; it did not snap up, as it had been doing. I grabbed it and felt a weight on the end. The weight was alive. It tugged back. I began to crank my reel handle eagerly, bringing in one small turn of line for every turn of the handle, so that it took many turns before I had regained very much line and I realized I had let out more than I'd thought. I did this because of my belief that the farther from the boat your lure was working, the better chance you had of fooling a trout. I'm not so sure I was right.

So I reeled and I reeled, and soon a pretty brookie came alongside the canoe and hung sparkling off the gunwale. To me it looked fat and about a foot long. I trailed my hand over the side and, on a tight line, grabbed the fish by the body. It hardly protested as I lifted it in and dropped it in the bottom of the canoe. There it beat a brief tattoo and was still. I looked at Bill Hopper and smiled.

"Nice fish," he told me. "I knew you'd get one."

Which was more than I did.

I killed the fish with a blow of the paddle to its head, thereby braining it. I had to do it again and again before the sad trout would call it quits.

"One more that size and we will have two," I said, nonsensically. It meant I really wanted another, and that is how he took the remark. We paddled on, first me, then him, and finally the long glide. Far off an eagle thudded slowly across the water, never rising very much nor lowering his flightpath any. Overhead the sun rose in the sky and flooded the lake with a slick brilliance. How very clear the air is in the mountains, I noted yet again, and how very little there is to occupy your eyes, aside from water and mountains and sky and trees. But then what does a boy want?

I wanted another trout, that's for sure. I required one an inch bigger. But it was a long time coming and I had nearly despaired that there was one left in the lake. You could look down and see bottom in water of unknown depth. What it did was get darker to denote that it was deeper, and you had to judge from its color how far down you were looking. I had this idea I could see a trout if I looked hard enough, and I did, but no trout did I see. My line trailed wanly behind the canoe and the way it lay on the limp surface seemed to signify that no other trout could be possibly interested in something so inert.

When the canoe swung to the left (starboard is right, isn't it?) the line slackened and when to the right it tightened. I noticed that I got more strikes on a tight line than on a slack one, and tried to manage the slant of the canoe accordingly but was not always successful. A lot depended on what Bill Hopper did, back there. If he trailed to the right with his J, my line speeded up. I noted all this, of course. It is what a fisher does. It is what lies at the heart of fishing.

We went on in this respect for a full hour and by that time were far down to the end of the big lake and across from where the tall ridge tended to eclipse the lesser peaks. It was that snowy cap that did it.

Bill Hopper said, "I'd like to climb that ridge and to see what the world looks like from up on top."

I said, "I would, too."

"Maybe we'll come back, the whole troop, and make it a group climb. What do you think? Would the boys enjoy that?"

Rarely had I been asked for an opinion on what other boys might like and I felt flattered. "Sure," I said, speaking mainly for myself. He knew this; he had asked because he was interested in me as an opinion of one. And that was what he got. No more.

"We could circle the shoreline, make a base camp at the bottom of the slope. Look, there." He pointed. "There's just enough level space for our tents. Then, in the morning, those of us who fashion ourselves mountain climbers could rise before any of the others and eat our selves a quick, dry breakfast. We could leave in the dark and see well enough as the sun came up to find our way to where the rocks start. We ought to be able to make the top and be back down again by noon. What do you think?"

Was I being asked to go? I was.

"I think I'd rather fish."

Just then the second trout hit, almost as response. It was like the first time, but more timely. The canoe was pulling tight on its far side and the spinner was wriggling hard, which probably took it deeper on its dive and whirl, the bright little Royal Coachman trailing behind it, nibbling on its tail. I had my attention half on it, all the while. What could I do to make it work better in the slick water, I kept asking myself? I'd try one thing, then an other, but never be sure that any one of them was working better than the preceding one. I kept making adjustments. This is what lies at the heart of fishing and makes it ever interesting.

I cranked it in as quickly as I could and it came as slowly as it could. Each turn of my handle brought in about four inches of line. So, you can see, it took a lot of turning. Pretty soon a fish flashed along the boat and trailed streaming in the water, all silvery grey with a bunch of bright dots. Sure enough, it was a fish about an inch longer than the first. I killed it with the paddle and laid it beside the first one and saw how it was slenderer, also.

"There's your dinner," I told Bill Hopper.

"What about yours?"

"I already got mine leftover in the pail," I explained. And when he looked puzzled, I added, "From last night, I mean. My chowder."

He smiled, he understood.

I said, "Two would be just about right for one. I mean, for an adult."

"Yes."

"I could give you a clue on how to cook them."

"Thank you."

He was not a bad guy. After all, how often had Blondie Stamer asked me to go out in a boat with him and fish? That's right. Not once. Of course we had never been anywhere with a boat or canoe or anything, which might explain it. The absence of deep water.

We drifted on around the lake. When we rounded the far end, the one with the small crowned mountain on it, we found ourselves pointed in the opposite direction from whence we started and there was a very slight wave formation we hadn't noticed before, perhaps because it was moving with us. Now we had to push into it, this light chop, and it required about twice as many strokes to go the same distance. Because the canoe was so heavy and rode so low in the water, it soon became hard work. Maybe three times as many strokes, I don't know.

"This is tough," admitted Bill Hopper, as though I didn't know it was. That was the problem with adults. They were always telling you what you already knew, as though you couldn't recognize it just because you were younger, smaller. Also you were believed to be dumb, or your life experience so inadequate that the basic facts of life had to be explained to you, time and again. It did no good to tell them, "Yes, I know," because they weren't paying any attention in the first place, and would generally same the same thing over again. It was always something obvious, too, you were expected to be profoundly grateful for it. Boy.

No more trout consented to hit as we ploughed along. The wavelets mounted and became genuine waves. A little light rain lashed over us. We still had about a mile to go, I thought.

"We have about a mile to go," said Scoutmaster Bill Hopper. "Think you're up to it?"

And what if I'm not, I wanted to ask, but didn't, for what is the point? So we bent our backs to the rowing task and there was not time to talk, nor breath to talk. When I lifted my head from my chore, I saw the lake had disappeared around its far edge, where we had just been, and a mist was coming at us, rubbing out details as it approached, just as a pink eraser would. It was almost like a creature, eating up the scenery. Paddle some more, look up quickly, and paddle again. We struck a cove and the wave action dissipated a little and we made better time.

Though it wasn't necessary to say it, Bill Hopper said, "This is a little better, isn't it?" I nodded minimally, dumbly, and swung my paddle. Up ahead we could see the other scouts gathered round the edge of the lake watching us. Cheering us on, somebody might say, but not me. Watching is what I call it. They were a glum sort, their little faces set, the steady rain streaming down now, nobody smiling. Have you ever noticed how nobody smiles in the rain?

And we pulled into our ready dock next to a log that jutted out into Lake Dorothy and formed a kind of casting pier, if you had any sense of balance. If you didn't, it was a diving platform. We inched in along the log, pulling ourselves with one extended hand, fist over fist, and soon the bow nudged land and we clambered out. I got a boot full of water, but what else is new?

Bill handed me the trout and I carried them careless to shore and got my pocket knife out preparatory to cleaning them for Bill's dinner, for the fisher always cleans his catch. A half-circle of scouts surrounded me.

"Look at those trout," said somebody, and I acknowledged them modestly.

"Big."

"Real big."

I admitted I had seen bigger, but not lately. I think that was the moment I became a true fisher. My prowess was noted and spoken aloud and I disclaimed it, but not much. I simply accepted their praise as my due.

"For Bill Hopper's dinner," I explained.

And I mysteriously was elevated to a level I had never expected or previously experienced. In Olympus, the minor deities were treated this way and responded much as I did—with aplomb and a kid's version of noblesse oblige.

* * *

Now the rain came down in a most serious manner. I ducked into a tent, which is the best thing to do, and lay down on somebody's sleeping bag. I found myself in the company of Bill Hopper's sons, Tommy and Joe. It wasn't the greatest place in the world to be, but it was dry, and I decided to make the best of the situation. Immediately I was returned to the world of mass paranoia.

"Dad say anything?" asked Joe, who was the larger of the two, nearly thirteen.

"Sure. He said a lot."

"You know what I mean."

"He doesn't tell you guys what's on his mind? What's pending?"

"Are you kidding?" asked Tommy. He had a shock of reddish blond hair and was barely twelve, the minimum age for scouting then and one in which nobody tells you anything.

I said, "You mean, about. . . ?"

"Precisely," said Joe, and I realized we had communicated perfectly without having said anything.

"There is a plot," I explained patiently, as if to children, which wasn't far off the mark, "to overthrow everything. Blondie Stamer, Clay, Art, Ranny—everybody. Everybody and everything."

"Of course," said Tommy, who didn't understand anything.

"Everybody who is anything. This includes me." I looked thoughtfully at my hands and wondered just what I had that was overthrowable. Assistant patrol leader of the Beavers was about as far down the ladder as you could go, while at the same time it amounted to something consequential in our small world. It was a honor, you see, to be part of the element soon to be overthrown. Overthrown, that is, if it wasn't allowed to keep on going on as before.

So while the leadership was thoroughly doomed, there was a good chance things wouldn't change—at least not so you'd notice it. It was barely possible that Blondie Stamer and Bill Hopper might share the leadership, although this didn't seem likely to any of us. Still, the more you thought about it, impossible as it might be, the more likely it became. I thought a while, looking out at the mist-clouded lake that was disappearing fast and at the sheets of rain descending at a wind-blown slant of twenty degrees (you could measure it against your compass, if you weren't too lazy to squirm it out of your pants pocket and take a bearing) and at the pocketing puddles in the near ground, and pretty soon the idea of an overthrow began to appear unlikely. Cooperation seemed the more sensible route, only these guys might be faking the extent with which they got along with each other, much as parents do when there is dissention in the house.

"I've figured it out," I told them, the man's sons.

"What's that?"

"There is no possibility of a change. Things are going to stay exactly as they are. Blondie will remain as scout master, while your dad will be his assistant. And Clay Blackstock, who is so neat to have along on hikes because of his fire-starting ability, he is going to be assistant, too, only be a notch lower than your dad."

"You sure?" Tommy asked this, but I knew he was speaking for his older brother as well.

I nodded sagely, then added, "There is a small chance I might be wrong."

What they wanted was certainty, you see, and I gave them instead a strong dose of improbability.

"And where will this leave you, Bob?" Joe asked, pursing his lips and looking up at me (a leader, such as it must have seemed to him, so far down was he) through slitted eyes and long lashes.

"Wherever they want me," I said modestly. "I'll serve where I'm needed."

Which was total bullshit, for I had my eye on the White-Tailed Deer Patrol, whose leader was rumored to be leaving because of a better offer from another troop. Junior assistant scoutmaster it was supposed to be, and a few of us might stop just short of killing to be it.

Our rivals clear across town in the Roosevelt District were Troop 42, who had as one of their leaders the infamous Bob Story. Imagine being named something fictional. How would you respond to this? What could you do for an encore, if everybody thought you were telling some version of the truth rather than the real McCoy?

Story, we'd heard, was on his way out. He was either an Eagle or First-Class—nobody could get it straight. So he was right at the top, or just starting out, a sooth sayer or a notorious liar. He was thought to be very tall, though probably of ordinary height or a little less. He had both black hair and brown. Funny as hell, or mirthless, depending on how he felt about things, which varied widely over the course of a day.

So if Jerry Sorrensen (who was soon to die of rheumatic fever, but how was anybody to know?) was going to leave the Deer for a promotion to another troop, the notorious 42-ers, there would be a gap to be filled, and quickly. I ran down in my mind and aloud the possible candidates. Nobody was more probable to be picked than myself. At the same time I had absolutely no chance for it, I knew. I asked for advice from Joe and Tommy, just to kill time. I knew their opinion would be of absolutely no value, for they knew nothing about what was going on. All the same I sought them out eagerly. Perhaps their dad had let slip some word on the direction in which his thoughts were progressing, if they were, if he had any thoughts on the subject, if he was truly in charge and not subordinate to Blondie Stamer. There was just a chance. . . .

I had succeeded in planting the seed that I might just be the best one to take over the Deer Patrol, if somebody was needed. But Jerry Sorrensen had, I was sure, no inkling of what was going on. And—was there anything going on, really? It beat me. I could not very well go up to Jerry, a classmate of mine in the seventh grade at Magnolia, and ask him, for he hadn't heard a thing and I was already light-years ahead of him on this subject. If it was a subject.

The rain had lightened up a little and it was worth a dash to my own tent. "I'll see you guys," I said, leaping up and preparing to sprint the fifty feet to where my very own canvas was flapping in the breeze because I had neglected to tie it down very well. This I would do immediately, only it was raining hard again, so I put it off for calmer weather, when it wouldn't be needed. As I popped in, I saw Art Golofon and Ranny Hennes (who didn't belong there, not by a country mile) sprawled out on unrolled up bags.

"Hey, guys," I said, by way of greeting.

"Bob," said Ranny, a visitor. I saw that he was using my bag, which was okay, I guess, for he was a friend, my former assistant patrol leader, while at the same time I wished very strongly that he would keep the hell off it.

Art didn't say anything but acknowledged my crowding presence by a stiff nod of his head. I considered it an honor because normally he didn't acknowledge anybody by anything.

Our world was full of subtle signs of recognition and rejection, and often it was hard to tell the one from the other. We were continually mistaking what was meant and this led to an ongoing confusion that, in its own way, was healthy. It meant that nothing was cast in concrete, as they say, though frequently I and my friends wished that it was. At least you'd have something to relate to, that way.

I said, "Bill Hopper's kids were questioning me about, oh, you know. The usual. I didn't tell them a thing."

"You mean," said Ranny, "you know something?"

"Not exactly," I responded, not wanting to deny it entirely but hoping to remain close to non-committal and ready to trade what I didn't know for sure for something somebody else didn't know for certain. This way, all of our doubts built on a geometric basis and soon everybody would be possessed of the same crushing doubt.

Art said, "I don't think there is anything to be concerned with, but if there is, it is pretty serious."

I nodded sagely. Art was one big rung up on me and, because his patrol was so great, a small one up on Ranny, whose was putrid. Therefore he knew more, or was expected to, even if he knew nothing.

"I think," I said thoughtfully, which is the way to say something, if you want to impress your audience, "that Bill Hopper will soon give Blondie Stamer his walking papers."

"If he does. If there are any to be given." Ranny said this, but didn't look thoughtful, only sarcastic, which was the way we knew him best and most admired him.

"True," I said.

Art said, "It is just possible that Blondie may tell Bill Hopper to bug out."

"Would he take his two kids?" I asked, which seemed to me a terrific idea. "Because if he does, just think of the possibilities."

"What are they?" asked Art.

"Can't think of a one."

Both laughed appreciatively.

Ranny asked, "If Blondie Stamer takes a walk, will he take it from here? I mean, will Bill Hopper says something like, We've had it with you, Stamer. Take off. I mean, now, not later. Will he say that while we're on this hike?"

"If he says anything," reminded Art.

And I added, "Not necessarily."

This was all very enjoyable and much clearer to all of us than, say, if I had stayed in the tent with the kids and idly responded to questions that I did not have the answers for. There is much to be said to being in the company of equals, even if some are superior to you and you find yourself in the minority. I mean, among those who are not superior. I mean, among the inferior, so to speak. But it should not be spoken of, not aloud. And as I've said before, all scouts are equal. It's just that some are more despised than others. This gives the others an edge. It makes them better.

We whiled away that afternoon waiting for the rain to stop. It never did. For lunch I had more of my trout chowder, though Art said he'd pass. Good for breakfast, it was equally good for lunch, though after I'd brought it to a rolling boil over a fire Clay Blackstock got going I found I'd lost my appetite, and after I'd eaten my fill there was still a whole lot left. I forced the lid back on and carried it down to the lake again, where there was a little nest I'd made for it to keep it cool and where the depression filled up with lake water as soon as I took it out. That water was ice.

During a lull in the bad weather about four and a long way from dark, I decided to go fishing. We had no need for more dead trout, I knew, and I thought this might be a lucky time, accordingly. I fished down where the creek left the lake, where yesterday I'd had such quick good luck but apparently I'd caught out all of the eager trout and others hadn't had time to file back in and fill up the hole. So I turned my attention to the lake itself. The fish were known to be bigger, though there were fewer of them and they were harder to catch.

I walked out on the long log where we had docked earlier, holding my arms out for balance. If I slipped, I could always flail my arms and legs and straddle the log and not risk death in the deep, cold water, though I could swim at least one-hundred yards, for I had done just that recently to earn my First-Class Scout badge. I left my wet fly on my rod to dry, hoping that this would make a dry fly out of it, that is, one that floats, however briefly. The fly was a bee imitation called McGinty, with wings made from that striking blue feather found on the wings of mallard ducks. You might not know this, from looking at ducks, but that bright blue feather has a tip of the brightest white. You slice a wedge of feather from one side of the wing and another wedge from an opposite wing feather, and you match them up, dull sides inside, and you put them over the hook and tie them down and—lo—you have a pretty little McGinty wing. The rest of the fly is brown or black and yellow, and does its best to look like a bee, none of which are found at this altitude, and most of the trout have never had the opportunity to behold a real, live bee, let alone eat one. That is why I thought the trout might like one. And it worked according to my plan. Those little brookies in the creek loved it.

The question was, would the lake brookies? They had never seen a bee, either, I reasoned, and because the lake was so deep and they had so much room around them, they might be willing to travel a greater distance to inspect the new insect imitation and, if it met with their approval, ingest it.

This is how fishers think. Men and boys, mostly. They try to develop the mind of a fish.

Blondie Stamer spotted me venturing out on the log and came after me. God, another adult, just when a boy needs to be with other boys or, better yet, all by himself. Just the same I'd always liked Blondie and was glad to have his company. And maybe he'd drop some clue or specific piece of information about what was apt to go on, or what was not, something Bill Hopper had not seen fit to let me in on this morning, or else had known nothing about. Either way, I might benefit.

"Mind if I go along with you?" Blondie Stamer asked politely.

I mean, what can you say, when some adult asks so nicely? You can't very well say, "Fuck off," like you would to another kid. It is in the contract that you don't say this to an adult, especially not to your scout master, or former scout master, as the case may be. A scout isn't supposed to say fuck or shit or call somebody a mother-fucker, even if he is one. Nobody really is a mother-fucker, not that I know of, not even me, who would like to have that kind of a relationship to Jack Hepburn's mother, even though she isn't my own mother, and certainly not my own, though I sometimes wonder what it might be like, even though I can't imagine exactly what it must be like with anybody, not even Georgianna Walrath, who has such nice boobs.

Blondie Stamer said, "I'd like to watch you catch trout, since it is what you are most famous for." He meant it nicely and I took it that way. For that, I thought contemptuously? Well, okay.

"I probably won't catch anything," I cautioned.

But that isn't how fishing works. It works like this. I cast my little McGinty fly out on to the surface of the lake and it lay there, coiled round by leader; the fly lay pitifully on its side like nothing that ever fell on to the surface of that lake before. It looked like an insect normally found at elevations lower than two-thousand feet, but it didn't look like a regular bee or even a special bee but some bunch of chenille and feathers tied on a hook, for all to see. And a big brookie came racing up from out of the darkness from a long ways off as though he knew precisely what it was supposed to be and had waited his whole watery life for this moment to happen.

What do the Arabs say? Kismet? That.

He came out of the water and arched down on the fly and crushed it and took it down into the depths. Amazed and shocked, too, I moved the rod and hooked the fish deep in the mouth, as it turned out, and it often does under circumstances like these, but I had not experienced them before (nor much since, admittedly) and so was delighted. I mean, that fish was solidly hooked, only you never know that at the time, when it can do you some good, only afterwards, when the information is valueless.

"My God," said Blondie Stamer, forgetting perhaps that scouts aren't supposed to say that, either, though it is not exactly swearing and more in the line of a simple strong exclamation or perhaps an affirmation.

"Yes," I said, "now you got to help me land it, because this if 4-X leader."

I doubt whether he knew what 4-X leader material was or what it was capable of doing or, more importantly, what it wasn't capable of doing, which was lifting this trout up on to the log where either of us might grab it and hang on. Instead the leader would snap and we would be lost a fish that went 14-15 inches, not to mention the only McGinty in my flybook.

Clearly these brookies were nuts about bees, even though this was their first and apt to be last experience with them.

The fish came in next to the log and thrashed. I held its head up. "Help," I said to Blondie Stamer, or some such thing, nothing like the quiet and manly request for aid I had in mind. Right then I would have given my next three meals not to lose this fish, which I was on the edge of doing. And do you know what he did, this Blondie Stamer—our present and perhaps former scout master? He didn't think first, which would have been fatal. He took off his hat, exposing his thin blond hair, and dipped the crown quickly in the water and, with my big trout trapped and his spare hand closing the brim overhead, he walked gingerly back to dry ground, myself trailing after him and giving line when it was necessary to prevent popping the leader, pulling him over backwards or, much worse, losing the fish in the event he should drop what he had so deftly captured.

This way we made it to shore and a closing circle of cheering scouts. Blondie dumped the trout on the bare ground, where it began to thrash mightily in the manner of a beached shark or small whale. There I quickly killed it, for I was the angler, he but the netter, or whatever is called the guy who dips it out for you, which had never happened to me before.

"Nice job," he told me.

"I don't know what I would have done without you," I said with more candor than I meant to say.

"Oh, you'd have managed."

And upon those words I realized that I wouldn't have. I could think of a dozen ways I would have lost that fish. Every one of them was valid and likely to have happened.

We had no need for such a fish, of course, which is one reason why I caught it. And pure dumb blind luck another. I returned to my perch, absolutely certain I would catch a second big brookie in another cast or two. As dark drew down three hours later I was still there, flailing the water, and had not even the flash of a fish to show for my efforts.

Boy, is fishing ever weird, I can tell you now, with the wisdom of age, which come to think of it isn't much different from the ignorance of youth.

* * *

That evening around campfire we took a vote. The majority was in favor of Bill Hopper's plan to complete our circle of the lake tomorrow and to set up a new camp just below the ridgeline on what passed for a mountain and to climb it the very next morning. I say majority, but I think most of the troop would prefer to do nothing and wished we weren't there, in the first place, and couldn't wait until it was time to hike out on the far side, past two more small lakes, and be picked up by a procession of moms pledged to meet us there on Saturday.

There is a terrible pessimism that wants to settle down over the endeavors of boys and men, and reduce all to stasis, which means doing absolutely nothing at all. Lie in your sack and gobble fingerfood and stay there until the need for a crap drives you out or abject hunger or somebody with a sharp stick. So while nobody could think of a better thing to do tomorrow, it does not necessarily follow that everybody favored this plan. It's just that nobody could muster an acceptable alternative.

It was a short hike, only about an hour and a half, and shouldn't have been that long, only the trail promptly died out in some hardscrabble scrub and we had to make our way over rocks and around bogs, always keeping the shoreline in view and knowing we could not go too far wrong that way. And—good scouts that we were—somebody was always pulling out his compass and taking a bearing, though each of us knew in his heart where North was, and East, mainly from the position of the sun. Just the same, the sight of a compass being used is always consoling. It makes you think somebody among you knows exactly where he is, when the truth is probably nobody does.

We had to take on faith, that is, that there was the start of another trail at the far end of the lake and, overgrown as it might be at the beginning of the hiking season, what with the ice newly gone out at this altitude, we could find it (our leadership could, that is, for why is it deemed leadership if it cant?) and make our way down the long slopes that led to Bear Lake and Deer Lake? Admittedly we each doubted the existence of these two lakes, which sounded more like patrol names than those of real places. But they showed up on maps, therefore they must be. I mean, nobody would lie on a map, would he? It would be a criminal offense.

For dinner that night I ate—for the fourth consecutive time, I must add—trout chowder, and it was good, though I was beginning to lose my fascination for it and after scraping out my dish I walked down to the lake and dumped the rest out. I washed my dishes and participated in campfire in a less than spirited fashion and was ready to turn in long before the others. In the middle of the night I awoke in distress and had to relieve myself with a splat in the bushes. I did it again at daybreak and again at mid-morning. Otherwise I was fine, and I attributed my brief malaise to the chowder, which had been kept without refrigeration a little too long.

The morning of the climb I was well enough, and ate my oatmeal and raisins and hardtack and cocoa, learning afterwards I did not have to go off into the bushes as I did nearly every day of my life. I was all shat out. I rolled up my sleeping bag and was told it was my turn to carry the tent (it was always my turn, and perhaps explains why I began to think of that tent as mine), so I strapped it on just below my bag, and lifted the whole bulky mess into the air and threw one strap over one shoulder and hoisted the pack directly over my back so I could slip the second strap on, then straightened up and felt the old, familiar backward tug of the weight, and we were on our way. But Bill Hopper said, "No packs, gang, remember this is just a day climb, and we'll be back by noon; just stack them here, where they'll be ready for us to break camp." And I saw the wisdom in this and obeyed.

There is a way you lean one pack against another pack and, almost like two people, one will support the other and the pair will match up and become one, or at least behave as one, which is what you are after. I matched mine up with George Trick, who fashioned himself to be a climber and high-wire specialist and proved to be those indeed. So we set off in random formation, which meant that for the purpose of this climb we were all one, patroless, and it was every man for himself, so long as there could be detected some resemblance of order. That meant nobody should get too far out in advance and nobody should skraggle too far behind. We kept tight ranks, as it was called, though some could hike and climb faster than others. And ultimately it was George Trick who fooled us all into staying behind while he sprinted out and reached the ridge far ahead of anybody else.

When we all got there he was lolling about and laughing at us. This pissed both Blondie Stamer and Bill Hopper, and the way they mouthed off at him made me realize there had been no formal decision made, and perhaps there would not be one, at least not on this trip, and the two were working as cohorts, in close conjunction, as one. But there were gaps in procedure, holes through which decisions didn't get made or, made, didn't get implemented or relayed on to the troop. And while they were both substantially annoyed at George Trick, what was there to do or say? Should they make him go back down and arrive last, now that he had been first? Should they make him do pushups—at which he was very good, for he was strong and quick at doing everything? No, no punishment was suitable and, besides, what was his crime, excelling? So after the blast from both scout masters, there was ensuing silence, and George mocked them again with another laugh in the form of a chuckle, and then we were off again.

` We climbed along the ridge, inching ever higher along the knife-edge of its spine. The view of the lake was startling. It looked to be a small lake, not the long narrow one we knew it to be, especially me, who had paddled its length, then back again. They (the map-makers, the photographers for calendars, that's who) liken mountain lakes to jewels, and they have a point here, for lakes are indeed jewel-like in their appearance, at least from a distance, nested and nestled as they are in among trees that have been there forever. (Now I understand the Forest Service has cut all those trees, or sold off the tree-cutting rights long ago to private logging companies, and what can be seen from this self-same ridge is but slowly maturing second growth of what they call a monoculture, and if I were to see it for myself again I'm sure I would cringe with shame and chagrin for the loss of all the trees I know, or feel I know, having visited them as a boy and not recognizing these others as anything other than pups—pups they are to the grown dogs that these trees were then.)

The view from the other side of the ridge was even more spectacular in that it was entirely unknown to us until now and comprised the wild territory we would be forging into this very afternoon, for this was to be a long day. Soon we would all be strung out along what we hoped would be a good trail and with a little luck would turn out to be, though not visited by many feet yet this early season. Up we inched, though we made it in larger increments, a few feet at a time, often sidestepping and doing our famous individual balancing acts, as I did on the fishing log, with there being a remote chance somebody might tumble off either side of the ridge and go cascading hundreds of feet, as it were, into the next county. Or the next world.

Then we came to snow, old snow, snow packed from rain and sun, its water content so compressed that if you were able to make it into a snowball (it was like ice, you understand) it would be so dense that you could throw it like a baseball and woe to whomever it hit, it was so baseball-like and even harder. But you couldn't: there was no way to scrape up the stuff and shape it into a ball. It remained like concrete, so you left it alone by the wayside and failed to acknowledge it for what you thought it was, ordinary snow, and went on your way, walking over it and knifing in the edges of your boots out of fear of slipping and sliding to the rocks far below.

Finally Bill Hopper, without so much as a confirming nod from Blondie Stamer, said to us all in a loud voice, "OK, that's enough, far enough, gang. We turn back here." And nobody protested, nobody disputed the decision, and there was a piercing cheer and we all turned back and retraced our steps in the icy snow that barely showed a dent from our earlier encounter with us, shuffling and sliding until we came to the shale formation that marked the end of the snowline and the commencement of ordinary mortal low-land life. We picked our way carefully down the shale slope at an oblique angle, cognizant of the fact that any one of us could easily start a landslide of sharp rocks that might carry one or all of us to our jagged deaths.

For what shale wants to do is simply sit there, left alone, undisturbed for an eternity. Yes. And if you mess with it, or tamper with its formal structure, it will reward you with death. This we knew; this we never lost sight of this truth.

We returned to camp to be greeted by those who didn't choose to make the climb (which was optional) and to have a cold on-the-trail lunch. It was familiar stuff, peanuts and raisins and cheese and hardtack bread that you could pound into crumbs but never ultimately destroy. Even soaked with rain the stuff was edible and tasted pretty good.

Bill Hopper, it turned out, had been here before. This news now outed as a big surprise. Why hadn't he mentioned it to me, during our long paddlefest the day before? Well, it was not his way, nor the right time, evidently, or else it was more of that duplicity of adults of which we had all had quite enough, thank you, and which you are never finally rid of until you become an adult yourself and find yourself doing it unconsciously, and in other ways prevaricating. And then it is too late and you are doomed in yet another way. It is why kids hate to grow up, while at the same time striving in every way to become as experienced and knowing as fast as can be. In short, young adults.

He said, "Yeah, I was here, all right, but it was so long ago, I forget—everything has changed. For practical purposes, I might as well not have been here. In fact, it might be better for all of us if I hadn't, because I might be misled by memory into making a huge mistake, and it could cost us more than time and discomfort."

I liked Bill Hopper then, if I hadn't before, and I think I did before, though I never quite trusted him, then or now, because he simply was an adult, not to mention a leader, and if you trusted leaders you were apt to go farther amiss than if you trusted nobody, no kid or adult, and went along according to your own best judgement, which is always better. Except when it lets you down. Then it is worse, far worse, than somebody else's error. For whom can you trust, if not yourself?

"Here it is," he shouted. "I'm sure this is it."

A wan, wisp, ghost of a trail could just be made out between some stuff called Oregon grape (though it neither came from Oregon nor bore grapes, only some tiny purplish fruit that, rumor had it, would kill you if you ate it) and some other tiny pink balls called huckleberry, which were tartly delicious, though so small each that it would take you half an hour to gather enough to fill your mouth twice and they would be gone with a quick swirl of your lips, a few motions from your jaw, and a gulp. They would leave you wondering afterwards if you ate anything or simply imagined it.

The trail, if it was a trail, and not some deer's joke on us, wandered off, ill-defined and uncertain, as though not sure its very self if it were trail or some accidental configuration of the nature that gave it the appearance of going somewhere meaningful, and did not. The joke would go on and on, then stop being a joke, or else turn into a practical joke, which is no joke at all, only a dirty trick. So Bill Hopper (and he knew this) was running a considerable risk in making just such a judgement. And we ran a risk, too, following him off on what might prove to be a bad joke on all of us, or some rotten trick.

After half a mile it became a popularly acknowledged as a trail, though frail and still tentative. A trail is a funny thing. You'd like it to be more than it is, but are afraid it will momentarily become less. You'd like to be confirmed in what you hope will be by some clear, overt sign of trailness, or trailhood, or whatever it might be called. A trail sign would be nice. "This is the trail, thank you. Come again." Words of this sort. Instead there is confusion, barren ground pretending to be trail, deer walks that peter out in closing canopies, dry rivulets pretending to be where footsteps went before (and didn't), and wind-blown fir needle patches that are craftily designed by Mother N. to fool the eye. These all prove you are not as experienced a scout as you thought or hoped you might be by this time.

Also your leadership is suspect. If leadership is wrong, then it is not that but mass delusion, deception on a large scale. We follow Bill Hopper on faith, doubting all the while. I mean, we don't really know this guy, he is new, also his two unsure sons, whereas Blondie Stamer has been with us forever. He is either our scout master or not. But Blondie hasn't been here before and has no special knowledge of what it was like at another time, when there was no snow 200 feet above you, and when the ground has been trod heartily by countless feet. So it is up to him, Blondie Stamer, to trust or not to trust, and us to believe in him, in the absence of anything more credible. For the truth is, we young scouts are lost and slightly afraid, and must depend on our leadership (such as it is) or rely on our own, which is nothing and tantamount to disaster.

I think this is the moment when all the pretend leadership inherent in our patrol formations dissolves into naught. We are but babes in the woods, literally. Babies. Forest children. It is the Blondie Stamers and the Clay Blackstocks and the Bill Hoppers the world over that show us who they are and that we must trust them. For everything else is chaos or as I termed it earlier, sheer potential disaster.

Below us, when we came up out of a dip and cleared the shaggy crests again, were two mountain pool set far away. Bear and Deer Lakes, we all knew they were called, with that paucity of imagination of early mappers; it was amazing how these lakes looked exactly as they did on the Forest Service maps. Now, how did they do that? Catch it so? How could mere men provide the self-same likenesses, right down to the smallest and remotest contour line? Somehow they did, and it made a boy want to grow up to be a map-maker and to bring to the world this special knowledge that would astound and delight people, as it now did us, making them ask too, "Now, how did they do this? So precisely, too? Simply incredible."

"The first lake is Deer," said Blondie Stamer, suddenly knowledgeable, through private map-reading, I guess. "The little guy you see beyond is Bear. It is slightly bigger."

"What kind of fish?" I asked.

"I have no idea," he replied, looking at me and smiling. "We're depending on you to let us know."

And I grinned back, for this was exactly what I intended to do at the first opportunity and now it was being requested of me, which gave it a kind of blessing or everyday benediction.

But we had a long ways to go first. We wound in and out of the scrawny trees over broken ground, following the hint of that trail, and I learned it is best not to examine such a trail too closely, or look at it full on, or even to think too much about what you are doing and the pitfalls ahead, but to forge along inattentively, letting your feet fall as they may, and taking visual loose bearings frequently off of trees and rock faces and distant mountains and maybe even the sun, all these things together but none of them any too specially. This is how you achieve good distance and come to reach your goals, in mountains and elsewhere.

That night we slept by the side of the trail, which was none too level, and not at any place that had been used formerly as a campgrounds before. I don't think I'd ever been so tired. The bad weather was gone, the air warm and dry, and nobody needed a Clay Blackstock to tinder his fire for him. I ate well from my cache of food, which was still mostly full because of all the trout chowder meals. Off in a nearby canyon I could hear a river roar, but I hadn't the energy to head for it and sample its fish population. Instead I relied on my trusty Kraft Dinner and found it excellent. For dessert I treated myself to a candy bar, one with nuts locked into its chocolate. The only way you could separate them out was in your mouth. That is what I did.

The roaring in the bushes was the Taylor River, I was pretty sure. It flowed into one of the forks of the Snoqualmie, but I never knew which one, since it had three. We were transported to another watershed and it had happened without any rockets going off when we poked between a pair of ridges at the end of Lake Dorothy and began our barely perceptible descent. The same descent continued in the morning but was deceptive because just as often we were climbing again. So it was always up and down, and never for long travel on the level.

We came to Bear Lake and gave it a quick glance, deciding to continue on to Deer because it was still early in the day and we were making good time. I grieved some for another lake lost to me. The trail had improved some, ever since we had joined the main route linking Lake Dorothy to the Snoqualmie Lake trail, which would take us eventually to the Taylor River Road and civilization.

This was our fifth day out, and we were getting pretty gamey. So it was no surprise when everybody dumped his pack and stripped down to his birthday suit for a quick dip in the lake. We shared several bars of soap, passing them back and forth and often tossing them to one another. If you didn't make a good catch (and the bar was slippery) you lost it, for only Ivory will float, the whole world knows. So we lost some. And when we scampered out of the frigid water and back on land, I discovered I was covered head to toe with a thin layer of grease, which was soap that wouldn't rinse off because of the cold water. It left you less than clean, you might say, though not so smelly.

As the day wore on, the soap skim left on my skin seemed perversely attracted to dirt. The dirt lodged in the soap film, as it did on the bottom of our frying pans and cooking pots, and seemed to bond there. So while we were now clean, we were still dirty, or rather dirtier than when we had started out to get clean. If this doesn't make sense, I can only say it was consistent with how everything had been going since we took to the trail and we had acquired lives of great doubts and confusion.

Our group paranoia had lessened, or so I thought, but when Jack Hepburn asked me the most innocent of questions, "How's it going?" I was suddenly plunged back into my sea of dismay and snapped, "How is what going? What do you mean, going on?" Defensively I asked, "What do you want from me?"

"Hey, it was a simple question," he responded. "It doesn't mean anything."

"To you it doesn't mean anything," I said craftily, "but if you've come to me for your answers, you've picked the wrong guy."

"Geez," he said and went away.

Perhaps I was being unduly sensitive. I'd been expecting a general announcement on how things were going to be, what the new alignment might be, what was going to happen to Blondie Stamer (if anything), and who would be assigned to the new patrols—if there were to be any and if things were not going to stay exactly the same. But there was no word, and it made me nervous. Sometimes it seems that no news only means that the powers that be haven't seen fit to pass their big secret on to you, and are teasing you by making you wait and wait for the nature of their decision. It would be just like them—whoever they are, whatever their intent is behind all those unspoken words. And then again, I may be wrong.

I was wrong to jump on Jack Hepburn so. He was one of my very best friends, and having a scrumptious mother didn't hurt his case any. In fact, even if I didn't like him, I might find reason to have him as my friend because of her. The idea of offending him and never seeing her moving gracefully around the house again, swish-swish, in her nightgown and flaming nails, smoke trailing after her from her cigaret, would be tantamount to a living death sentence, or at the least having no viable future. So I hastened after Jack and issued an apology for being short with him. I said it as sincerely as I could, though I didn't mean a word of it.

"Accepted," he announced, my friend again.

I said, "I expect to hear something by late afternoon. Maybe sooner. Don't tell anybody. On the other hand, there may be nothing to it."

"You know something?" he asked.

I smiled. "I might." This was a lie.

We set up a camp again. It seemed like we were either setting up a new camp or breaking down an old one, day after day, hour after hour, trying to find ground soft enough to accept our tent pegs and to ditch with our little shovels and trowels. And then the next day, after a broken sleep, we took it all apart, stowed the pegs and poles inside the downed tent, rolled up the canvas, tied it round with rope, nested it right beneath our sleeping bag, and mounted our packsacks for another day on the trail.

Again I carried the tent and did so proudly. Mine, as I thought of it. I did a little fishing down by the lake's edge, and caught some trout that looked different from the others to date. But I had looked at my share of pictures in the magazines and in a fine book called Trout by a man named Ray Bergman, who was so old to be practically dead but knew everything there was about catching trout—practically a trout genius. These little guys were spotted cutthroat. They had a green sheen. They got their name after pirates's, who slit the necks of their enemies and dumped them, bleeding profusely, overboard, where they incarnadined the water. These trout had similar bloody slashes under their chins, or whatever. I killed about four of them, averaging a good six inches in length. (I do not lie about the number or their six, you can tell, or else I would report more of them, and bigger, too.)

We were all getting pretty tired of eating fish and most of the ones lately had been badly stunted, mostly skin and bones, with large heads that seemed to stare at you out of flat black-pupiled eyes that asked accusingly why you had done this terrible thing to them? Murder them. And you had no good answer except that it was fun.

Since nobody else would take them, I cooked them up and ate them myself. And perhaps that was the instance I burned out on permanently on fish, and generally try to find some poor sap to palm my catch off on, so I won't have to eat it myself.

We had one last hike left of no consequential distance. We would make it tomorrow morning. We toyed with the remainder of the day and left much to do at dawn. So we swam in the cold, cold water, and fished some, and ate down the last our foodstuffs, knowing we had one dinner and one breakfast left to cook. We could easily cover the last three miles downhill to the cars in no more than two hours. It was a breeze and we were floating.

At campfire they gave us the bad news. Blondie Stamer was out—he was going to have to give more time to the real estate business, though he loved us all dearly, he said, and would miss us greatly. It was a clear case of economic necessity. He needed to make more money and it would necessitate more time spent with people looking to buy houses. Sure, sure. We understood little about that aspect of life. Men had to go out into the world of commerce and make what they called a living, which meant they brought home money, one way or another, and it was this money that paid mortgages and put food on the table for babies and children, and so on, into the boring future we would soon inhabit, also. Everybody had to become happy and purposeful. It was why we went to school, the big bother. Thus the race got perpetuated and everybody became some sort of slave, which was called growing up.

Bill Hopper would be our new scout master. Call that news? We had expected so much more, and devious, too. I really liked him and listened hard as he spoke, after Blondie was done, about what this mission entailed:

"Guys, I'm taking over your troop reluctantly. It's mainly so my kids will have something to do and not get in their mom's hair. No, that's not it, exactly. Let me try again. A dad's got duties, and these are mine. So you can count on me to be your scout master for a year or two, till Tommy and Joe get a little more grown up, after which I am going to turn it in. Understood? Blondie and me have asked Clay Blackstock if he'd be interested in the job, or in helping out again, but he can't do it. Business, too. He's got to run the family lumber yard—in case you've been wondering why not. I'm aware he is your favorite and a great fire starter. So I'm stuck with the job, for now—if you'll have me. For the sake of little Tommy and Joe. And this is how it is going to be, I guess."

This was a little less than the marked enthusiasm with which we had hope to hear the announcement, whatever it might be. Imagine how disappointed it made us feel. Nobody really wanted us. Blondie Stamer had business reasons and so did Clay Blackstock for abandoning us. And this new guy, who was likeable enough, didn't really want the job. Or us. So there it lay. Rather than be dismal about it, or dismayed, we became excited. Change will do that to a boy, or to boys. We felt confirmed in our dim expectations. Life was about what we had imagined it to be, perhaps a little better. A cheer went up, but then a cheer was always going up, so it didn't mean anything. They were more signs of youthful excess spirits and did not indicate approval or more than ordinary excitement.

The White-tailed Deer emitted their nebulous cry (which nobody but they could hear), the Beavers grunted and slapped on water their imaginary tails, the Buffalo made what they believed to be a buffalo sound, kind of a low moan, and the Cougars proudly shrieked, barred their teeth (some with braces on them), and growled low in their throats, which frightened exactly nobody.

It was perfect. Bill Hopper's ambivalence matched our own to a T. Which or who of us could say he was dedicated to scouting and wouldn't drop out gladly a few weeks or even years from now? To be both liked and shunned was a reflection of the real world as we perceived it—here, at home, in school, and out where real people held dull jobs and didn't hike around in woods either shallow or deep.

There were a few more realignments, as we had anticipated with dread. Eagerly we listened for details. Since the Beaver Patrol was so popular and everybody wanted to be a Beaver, it had grown too large. So it would be split in half and I was to head the new one. I heard this with proud dismay. Oh? I both wanted more responsibility and dreaded its arrival. I decided I would lead firmly, though I didn't really want to. Give me my druthers, I'd rather follow, though as a follower I had to admit I was nothing but critical and sarcastic. What everybody wanted to do was sit back and watch others do the work, crack wise, laugh derisively, insult somebody, and do nothing, absolutely nothing at all. I mean, we had some guys in our troop that, if not poked with a sharp stick, would stay in our little camp at tiny Bear Lake and starve to death, or else die from bad weather, rather than pack up and hike out. A grand lassitude was universal among us, truly.

To me this was much like Dostoyevsky and instantly recognizable as from the same world, while being at the same time quite different.

In my mind I was already naming the new patrol, though of course it would take a vote of all the members to come up with the animal and emblem. We would discuss it for hours, my men and I, and consider all the alternatives, all the acceptable beasts from the animal kingdom, and that of the birds and fishes, as well, debating the pros and cons of each, arguing up and down the question, weighing this element, balancing out that one, making presentations and offering evidence, gathering facts, disputing facts hotly, with me moderating moderately.

And then I would tell them what I had decided. We would be the Wolf Patrol.

* * *

The morning was howling. I mean, the weather was up. An early summer storm had moved in from the coast overnight and by dawn was battering us. There is no worse kind of weather. Summer rain is terrible because it is so unexpected. It tricks you, lies to you, surprises you, betrays you. But it is warm, steamy. It gets you thoroughly wet.

We thought collectively, "What the hell, we'll soon be back in our cars. What does it matter if finally everything gets soaked? Tonight we'll sleep in our own little beds. There'll be Radio (TV wasn't widely available yet) to soothe and thrill us with its voices and music. We'll eat real food, instead of this barf we've been living on for a week."

Or words to this effect.

We ate our gruel and hardtack, noting individually that we had a fair amount of grub left. Well, a scout is prepared, if he is nothing else that counts on the positive side of the ledger. We had anticipated the possibility of being lost for days, but we would never starve to death, not in June, even though it turns out there are no berries to be found yet, not above three thousand feet. Being prepared explains why each of our packs weighed in the neighborhood of fifty pounds, starting out. A few of the new scouts hardly weighed more than that.

I exaggerate. You sometimes have to tell small lies, when you write non-fiction. It's the fiction guys who are obliged to tell the honest-to-God truth. Didn't you know?

When you hike downhill you make good time, great speed, but there are several drawbacks, and they are weighty. One is that your knees give out. They become jelly, the muscles and tendons and ligaments go all fluid, and the chance of taking a bad tumble increases by many fold. You find yourself wobbling quickly down some rooty slope and suddenly one knee buckles, and you go plunging over some precipice (for these abound) and your packboard behind you full of all that extra food propels you like God gave you a goose from behind, and off you go flying into mountain space. You then learn that the wrenched knees is the least of your problems. You may be dead, or worse; you may have innumerable broken bones and skull, and lie there lingering till the end.

More often you simply land on your can. In my case, my "can" was my two-quarter pail with wire handle provided by the good folks at Crisco and afterwards washed clean of grease by Mom; it was this implement that cooked, you'll remember, my trout chowder and practically everything else since then not of minuscule size, which excluded only my morning and evening cocoa. In it I prepared my Ugly Kraft Dinner and massive beef/barley and vegetable soup. This came out of assorted packets, all of them dried, and provided countless meals for days, until finally disgusted with it I threw the remainder of the soup into a tiny creek and watched it disappear in a downstream cloud. Anyway, I didn't land on my "can" but my can, but was not hurt and rose to my feet with a grin and pressed on.

From then I descended more carefully, and did so haltingly, in rubbery fashion, being careful of tree roots and extending boughs at ground level that tend to trip you up, diabolically put there for just that macabre purpose. Occasionally, though, some young scout went whizzing by me, urged on by his pack, motivated by his weak knees and aching thighs. When this happened, whoever was nearest or quickest would strain to catch the guy and arrest his fall—but not if it was too much trouble. It was more fun to watch a fellow scout lunge down a slope and into a tree and crash down. It gave the day a touch of levity that was without it worse than solemn, for it was raining again (or rather still) and everything we owned was soaked to the bone, you might say and I did. Everybody was too miserable to laugh.

We reached the Taylor River Road turnaround a little early, say, by about three hours. Even the most optimistic of the more dependable moms would not be there yet. The wet woods echoed dismally with our voices questioning our dim existence. What were we doing here, and why wasn't there any shelter from the rain? If this was civilization, we could do as well without it. Here was more of the same—what we were used to, but not quite. And what was a road if it ended in nothing more than a clearing, which is but an absence of trees? Why were we here—on the planet, in Washington State, at the deadend of the Taylor River Road, at this precise moment in eternal, fluid time? Standing in the rain, steaming like horses?

Beats me. Clearly there was no God, nor anybody who could act in his place to make us less abject. Then Clay Blackstock had a great idea. Naturally it involved starting a fire. He did this with his usual precision and impressed everybody again, for the ground was very wet. Soon he had a big, crackling blaze going in the firecircle that stood at the edge of the clearing and had been used since time immemorial, or close to that, by everybody who came to the end of the road and found himself hungry and in sore need.

"We are going to cook us one final meal," he announced, "and it is going to be a doozey." People said doozey then, so it came as no surprise or oddity. We knew what he meant. A great late breakfast.

We pooled our resources, our extra food. Some poor fool had been packing around a can of bacon, all these miles, these so many days, and out it came and he opened it up and everybody brought out his frying pan and soon the fatty strips were sizzling in many skillets which were all the same since they were the frying component of the boy scout cooking kit. You know, the one with the locking handle on it.

There were various packages and bags of flour; this we all dumped in a heap together, buckwheat with white, wholewheat with sourdough, etc., and stirred it up, producing a universal dough, neither this nor that but everything together. From this we doled out in the form of batter, for it was runny and thin, not thick and like breadtwist. Into the assembled frying pans it went in the form of single pancakes. There must have been eight or ten of them going at any single time, boys extending their pans over the fringe of the giant fire, which was now bearing coals along its multiple edges which were cool enough to cook on.

Then as one the pancakes were all bubbled on their top sides and in need of turning. We lost a few then, as unskilled flippers mistimed their throws or rather their catches, and half-cooked pancakes bit the dust, so to speak, or ended up in the fire, hissing their fate, but most of them were somehow caught either half-in or all the way in the pan that had flipped them, and began to cook on their opposite sides, which we learned takes a fraction of the time the bottom side does. Meanwhile a big pot of cocoa dregs was bubbling on a makeshift grate strung over the center of the fire by Clay.

To go on the pancakes we had a variety of condiments—sugar both white and brown, various remnant jams and jellies including my strawberry, some honest-to-goodness imitation maple syrup. And then there was margarine, which is nothing more than phoney butter that won't spoil, no matter what abuse you subject it to, and at that time came looking like lard inside a plastic bag with a button of gold buried within, which you kneaded long and hard until the product you'd swear was true butter. You taste it, hopefully, only to discover it remained pure lard. It only fooled the eye.

We didn't care. Hungry from the trail and soaked to the skin on—but who cares?—the final day of the greatest week in our lives (if it wasn't also the worst), we hunkered down and ate the final ravenous meal of our young lives. The first pancakes out of the pan are always the best, having sucked up the most bacon grease, which leaves them golden brown and lightly caked. We smeared them with yellow lard and encrusted them with whatever we liked that we had left over, in my case my own jam plus a modicum of the group ration of syrup. And alongside was tinny-tasting bacon, curled tight and a little charred but delicious that way, perhaps even better than if cooked right, which is infinitely slow. (But who can wait?) We ate and we ate, and washed it all down with cocoa that had cooled, old marshmallows floating around in the froth that had begun to jell like the jetsam from a sunk freighter. And when we were done and, one by one, pronounced ourselves full, the caravan of mothers began to appear from the clutch of dark cedars far down the road.

Quickly we stowed our gear—including the unwashed cooking kits—in our grubby packs and reassembled, and pasted cheerful looks on our smudged faces, and greeted the world of mothers with the cocky grins of conquerors. What I remember most about the trip back to Seattle, the part I didn't sleep through, that is, is the sound of the car Radio playing softly in the background.

All the new, excited, and exciting voices announcing this, proclaiming that, telling you to buy one thing and then somebody hastening on and trying to get you to buy another, some music playing miraculously for a few minutes, uninterrupted, and then being interrupted by some news about life in the outer world, which had gone on without us, all the while we were off in the forest, looking after ourselves and our own. Stuff about war, I mean, and earthquakes and famines.

The world goes on without you. This I learned; we all did. When you are gone—dead, missing, or whatever—the world continues on its orbit as if you had never existed. And nobody cares. It is horrible, but it is wonderful, too, and this is exactly the way it ought to be.

Not that it makes any difference whether anybody cares or not. It's great because they don't. Do you understand me? Have I made myself perfectly clear?

In my reading of Dostoyevsky's short novels, it is good to finally encounter a Petersburg summer. Each of the other stories described with relish the misery of winter, and the weather often served as a naturalistic accompaniment to the emotional states of the main characters and echoed their interactions. This was to be expected in period fiction, even if Queen Victoria did not rule over Russia. So when characters are headed for inevitable conflict, the weather turns inhospitably bad, and we are subjected to wonderful descriptions of blizzards, freezes, thaws, slush, etc., which are really the inward states of tormented and tortured individuals.

Yes, but what is summer like but more of the same, only on the opposite end of the climatic spectrum. Listen to this, from the opening paragraph of The Eternal Husband: "The dust, the stifling heat, the white nights of Petersburg, that always fret the nerves were what he was enjoying in town." The word "enjoying" is indeed mocking. "Suffering" would be more like it. But in Dostoyevsky everybody is suffering, one way or another, so what else is new? It is the daily plight. It only becomes impossible when it reaches a heightened state and one or another of the characters crosses the line, so to speak, between the normal and the abnormal. To madness. Yes, I am speaking in a clinical sense. Remember, I am the boy who cut his adult teeth on Freud and his case histories. He was familiar with Dostoyevsky and without the novelist as precedent might well have gone into the study of rat behavior.

I jest. We meet our protagonist Velchaninov later on in that comprehensive first paragraph in which we learn that V., as I shall call him, simply for economy's sake, is a man of 38 whose life has already been full. He is presently working with

a lawyer (shades of the Chancellery of Dickens) over getting his inheritance, not a large one and a third of which he has already come into, allowing him to live a life of leisure and travel. In short, he is a "man of excellent breeding" and has the "education of an aristocrat." He manners are "free, assured, and even gracious, in spite of acquired grumpiness and slackness." Also he is "full of the most unhesitating, the most snobbishly insolent self-confidence," much more so than he himself even suspects, and is "sometimes sensible, almost cultured and unmistakably gifted."

Here we must stop for a moment and examine Dostoyevsky's method, for it is one of intentional ambiguity and the use of paradox. The style and method continue through the novel and are inseparable from its content. V. is "sometimes" sensible and "almost" cultured. He is none of these things all of the time, and neither I suppose are we, in our modern-day complexity and duplicity. So there is a great feeling of recognizable reality in his character and in his Petersburg, whose climate resembles that of many inland cities of America.

It is necessary, no, imperative, to recognize and accept at the start the world of contradictions. It is a "given." It is necessary for reading this novel and all the others, long and short, for the world of his characters and the rich style of his writing come hopelessly mixed and often appear contradictory. Yet Dostoyevsky knows exactly what he is doing at all times. He is a great artist and the society he shows us—to me, anyway—bears remarkable correspondence to the one in which I have lived, all of my life.

Yet they are nothing alike.

That statement is pure Dostoyevsky, though nowhere near so good. It signifies simply that in my life, my fiction, and my autobiography I accept his world as true and meaningful. His throws light on mine. It is illustrative, inspiring, illuminating, enthralling. And, like Shakespeare, the action is heightened, the action is, and the characters are bigger than life. Their terrible, torturous situations make mild those of most of us, certainly mine. And yet. . . . Let me digress long enough to make one more blanket statement that I won't try to support with textual evidence. If you are at home in the world of Saul Bellow, you ought to be comfortable in Dostoyevsky's. You will encounter similar outrageous strangers who enter your life unexpectedly and inexplicably, remain there and alter your course of direction, impact your emotions and drive you verily up the wall. They disappear when most you need them and have to reach some resolution.

Back to the novel. If the weather sets the mood and parallels the emotional intensity, the Petersburg summer described so tellingly in paragraph one is immediately followed by: "'Everything is a failure,'" V, says, particularly of his flat, but referring to much more in his life, such as the stasis reached in his law suit and his personal life in general. Then we have: "His nervousness increased every day; but he had for a long time past been subject to nervousness and hypochondria."

If he was not a Russian male, he might very well be a German female of the early Twentieth Century. One of the neurasthenic ladies of the aristocracy who had the leisure time and financial resources (from husband or papa) to choose Freudian psychoanalysis as a solution to her problems. In Dostoyevsky, though, our protagonist—this one is an aristocrat, or will pass for one, while most all the others are one kind of anti-hero or another—goes to see an ordinary doctor, who knows and despises him and, at least he does in The Double, contemptuously tells him to seek a complete change of scene, drink more, etc., and at the end proves to be the arch villain.

But if V. is early defined as a hypochondriac, he has very real medical problems. Thus, if he has elements of paranoia in his makeup (and all Dostoyevsky characters do; only the degree varies), he also has very real enemies, as we say, half-jokingly, today. Whether those enemies are real or are manufactured out of the incredible relationships the author describes to us is hard to say. Again it is a mix of elements and this adds to the verisimilitude of the Petersburg situation: A person from the past is out to reestablish an association when there is no good reason for him to and plenty of bad ones.

As often is the case, our protagonist has the uneasy feeling he is "being shadowed," as we might say and Dostoyevsky does not. He simply shows us through random ghostly encounters on Petersburg streets. In The Double, the short novel this one resembles more than any other, it is his "other" self, a man with the same name but with machinations designed to destroy him, robbing him of his physical person, his personal relationships, his job, his self-respect, his sanity—everything. In the case of Velchaninov, it is the so-called "eternal husband," the cuckolded spouse of a woman who he had an affair with nine years ago, in another city, identified only with an initial: T—. Similarly, the man who is pursuing him is one Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky. The repetitive Ts are not arbitrary and neither is their repeated echo throughout the story; they might as well be interchangeable, this man and the remote town he comes from.

I will call him Pavel, unRussian like, simply for ease in writing. (With a word processor, you can always change your mind and come back later and perform a "search and replace" exercise, giving him his full patroynm or using his last name, as I might with V. It is nice to have this economical option.) And he will come into the story soon, but not quite yet. Our author has yet to set the scene for Pavel's dramatic introduction, which he does deftly and in a clever way that introduces both background and a mood of inevitability. Let us see how and why.

Because he is feverish and ill, a surreal and heightened atmosphere is automatically produced, one we recognize from other Dostoyevsky works and from nearly each of the short novels. The mood is set for greater reality, intensified reality, super-reality. Sick and sweating from the summer heat and from his fever, the scene is prepared for an intrusion of the past. The past too is heightened and perhaps unreal.a Unreal doesn't mean imaginary in Dostoyevsky so much as surreal. Thus V. lies abed, sick, and his memory starts working, as we say, overtime. His past rushes back on him and he remembers many things he has forgotten, or thinks he has forgotten, which is the same thing until recovered and then it is not. There are, I believe, four episodes from the past that prepare the scene for the very real and physically intrusive present, and these can be identified and brought forward almost as an exercise in literary criticism foisted on graduate students. Nevertheless it is a useful task and one that shows Dostoyevsky's careful method.

The first episode recalled in his fever is that of a "utterly forgotten, figure of a harmless, grey-headed absurd old clerk," whom he insulted in public "with absolute impunity." He did it "simply to gratify his own conceit" as part of a public humiliation by others he was with, men and boys who had gotten the old clerk drunk with champagne and then insulted the honor of his unmarried, middle-aged daughter who had been the subject of gossip. He had joined in this youthful, shameful adventure and afterwards the incident had been "completely forgotten" to the extent he couldn't remember the clerk's surname.

Sure. And it was Freud who came later and Freud who had read Dostoyevsky, don't forget. The word repression is not used, nor do I wish to introduce it and make of it a case; yet now, in his illness, "apropos of nothing," Dostoyevsky tells us, remembrance came back in excruciating detail. (The author doesn't say it was excruciating, but I think it was, for this is the stuff of moral outrage and it alters lives; we find it in Twain and repeatedly in Faulkner.) But it is a single incident out of a past full of shameful incidents, most of them conveniently "forgotten," we are told. And we post-Freudians know that such forgetting often causes untoward symptoms of derangement, including brain-fever, paranoia, and manic-depressive syndrome.

All these were "invented" by Dostoyevsky, one might say, without fear of being proven too far wrong, and later given names by psychologists who recognized in real life the literary archetypes. I speak jokingly, but not entirely. I think it is probably necessary to recognize these antecedents and then move on. For it is the character of V. who interests us most, and his mental state can occasionally be called delusion, in layman's terms, and his other illnesses that distress him later in the novel attributed to liver disease, real and not delusionary. So the bouts of sickness that come over him and pave the way for extraordinary events are both real and hypochondriac. This is often how they are in real life.

There are three more preparatory episodes from out of the past. The second is how he had slandered "the very pretty wife of a schoolmaster." The slander reached the ears of the woman's husband, a school teacher. Since he providently left town soon after, V. never learned of the aftermath and can now—in his delirium—only speculate on it. Again it was an entirely uncalled-for act of wanton cruelty, done "simply as a joke." It rings true in the daily lives of people in modern America; at least it does in mine. Dostoyevsky has caught something important that strikes at the heart of the vagaries of the human psyche, and will not let it drop. He cannot. He repeats it over and over, perhaps so we can learn to recognize it in ourselves and be ashamed.

The third episode involves a "young girl of the working-class to whom he had not even felt attracted." In fact, he was embarrassed by her and their relationship. "Though he could not have said what had induced him," he impregnated he, later abandoning her and their child without even saying goodbye.

This is the way of the world, yesterday and today. Men (and women, too) do these shameful things and move on, seemingly without remorse. V.'s excuse is, "he had no time to spare" when he left Petersburg, presumably for T—. Then he was full of regret and spent, according to his own sorrowful account, a full year trying to track her down, but failed. It is a situation common today, at least the first part of it is, the abandonment, and perhaps the latter is, as well. The futile search. We have a generation of welfare mothers and absentee fathers delinquent in their child-support payments. So it was in Petersburg, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Possibly so shall it ever be, even with wide-spread birth control techniques available, which weren't then.

More shameful episodes follow, at least in V.'s mind, "by the hundred," though the author doesn't recall any of them for us. Enough to say V. had led an extensive, wanton, and carefree life, and was heedless of the consequences. Much of what he did he did as a joke. Men seduce and abandon young women and laugh about it. It is life, an unescapable part. In fact, men are often proud of their sexual prowess and brag about their conquests, indifferent to the consequences, the harm. Yet, admittedly belatedly, V. begins to experience shame and his "vanity" suffers. He becomes careless in his dress, that is, slovenly, and begins to dwell on this terrible memory that, paradoxically, is accompanied by "forgetfulness and nervous irritation."

The pull of memory and the onslaught of remorse are disconcerting and cause him to become cynical, sarcastic. He reflects, "Why, one would think some one up aloft were anxious for the reformation of my morals, and were sending me these cursed reminiscences and 'tears of repentance'!" The "some one up aloft" is interesting, arresting. It is about as close as Dostoyevsky comes to mentioning God directly, though priests populate his novels and people (more women than men, assuredly) are always going off to church.

Repentance has its limits, however. It is possible to be sorry about the past, but not to have learned any lesson from it, at least not by intellectual dissection. For that to happen, a character's life has to change and that can only happen through experience. The sum of dire events. Experience that brings him to the brink of madness and death. As usual, illness is the means of transition from one conscious state to another, and it is death of course that issues us out of life. But sometimes illness leads to change, and that is for the better. Not often, though.

V., hurting, still knows that if any one of these sorry episodes from out of his past were to occur again, in kind, he would act as he had before. There is no hope, no profiting from experience. There is only the tyranny of self. He would humiliate others and seduce and abandon women again. It is part of the game, the aristocratic and intellectual game of life. He would move into the uncertain future alternating moods of remorse and outrageous behavior. He is powerless to do otherwise—truly shamed, but not repentant. It is like the saint's prayer, "Lord, let me be good. But not quite yet."

And there is the fourth episode, dredged up by a sick mind. Dostoyevsky is so quick in his mention of it that we hardly have all the facts we need to evaluate it. But that is according to plan. Apparently V. challenged "a young prince" to some sort of duel about eleven years ago. He shot off the boy's leg as the result of a perceived insult. If a similar situation repeated itself, and if that boy were the only son of his widowed mother, V. would "challenge him at once and condemn him to crutches again." In short, he is powerless to escape from himself.

And then Dostoyevsky gives us a reality check. He tells us that none of these incidents repeated themselves; it would be unbearable to V. if they did, for a person cannot suffer from memories all the time. There have to be moments of respite in which the mind can "rest and enjoy" itself. Yes.

V. contemplates leaving Petersburg during this hot, miserable time of the year. He'd like to escape the upsurge of the past, the drawnout legal case, his recent feverish illness, his messy house, his brooding despondency, the stifling heat of the city. But this would be a cheating. And he reflects tellingly on "all the people left in town, all the faces that flit by from morning till night so naively and openly betray their self-love, their guileless insolence, the cowardice of their little souls, the chicken-heartedness of their little natures—why, its a paradise for a melancholy man. . . ."

Is this New York City? Chicago? Or my Seattle? Well could be any of them. But it is Russia, long ago.

Immediately a contrary mood descends on him. He sees the beneficent situation contained in the despicable one. All the truly terrible people have gone away to their homes in the country or to watering places abroad. This leaves a city that is "more deserving of respect, if only for its openness and simplicity!" How quickly things turn into their opposite. He won't flee Petersburg; he'll stay and tough it out.

How often his moods of depression pass into ones of elation. These swings occur throughout the novel. At first they are confusing and seem contradictory. We soon learn to recognize them as a familiar part of the story's texture and having a terrible truthfulness of their own. It is how things are, here and there, then and now.

So the stage is set by memory and memory alone for what comes next. This takes place with the first ghostly sighting of "the man with crepe on his hat." It is of course a conspicuous sign of mourning. For whom we do not know, nor does V., but we can bet it is something directly out of his past, and will have a great impact on his future. We should not expect any less, and will not be disappointed.

If that first day delineated by chapter one was bad—hot and dry—the second day and next chapter, the third of July, are even hotter and stuffier; they are insufferable. Yet we feel that these weather reports from Petersburg are delivered with perverse delight. V. has spent another worthless day, first driving all over town in the heat and, in early evening, planning to meet with a lawyer and civil councilor (the same person) he'd hoped would be away at his country villa. No such luck. Dreading what is to come, he ducks into a familiar restaurant for a bite. He is in a bad mood and highly disgruntled. Just as he is about to help himself to soup, he reflects on the great depression brought on by the past two weeks. What has caused it? He lifts the ladle and the realization suddenly descends. He sees it "as plain as a pikestaff"— which is about as plain as things get.

"'It's all that hat,'" he mutters, "as though inspired. It's nothing but that cursed bowler hat with that beastly mourning crepe that is the cause of it all."

What? Yes, that's it.

A couple of weeks ago, he had spotted on the street a man with crepe on his hat. He looked like everybody else and there was nothing much distinctive about him, except he stared at V. "somewhat too fixedly," which succeeded in catching his attention. A man on the street in a hat? The sight caught his attention for no good reason and he thought he had seen the man's face before, somewhere. At first, he forgot the encounter. Then the sight impression began to obsess him, and it took the form of "a peculiar undefined annoyance." I know the feeling. We all ought to. But he—like us—didn't know the cause of the feeling. The source, that is, remained obscured. This too ought to be familiar to all of us.

The next day, in nearly the same place, the same man, this time fixing him with a "rather strange" stare. He dismissed him with a curse, afterwards wondering why the curse was necessary. And again he believes he recognizes him from somewhere he knows not where. Two days after that, down by the famous bridge across the Neva that appears so often in Dostoyevsky's fiction, he spots the man with crepe on his bowler, just as the crowd disembarks from one of the Nevesky steamers. The man recognizes him and makes ready to dash towards him, but the people carry him away with their rush, just as he has "the effrontery" to hold his hand out to V. He thinks the man calls out his name. This is more effrontery from a man he deems "a low creature." Why is this man confronting him? Or is he? Perhaps he imagines it? No.

V. is overcome with a depression that dwarfs his earlier ones, and they were considerable, we know. He broods on the situation of the man with the crepe on his hat and its meaning. He feels angry and, in such a mood, starts out the next day to find the civil councilor he needs to consult about his inheritance and who is so elusive. He spots him on the street and, delighted at such good luck, hurries up to him and tries to capture his attention. He hopes "the wily old fellow" will indiscreetly let slip some facts about the case which he, V., needs to know to help him, but the man craftily evades the subject.

Just then (and for the fourth time) V. sees the man in the crepe hat watching them. He seems to be jeering.

Damn, V. thinks, cursing him a second time, and now better knowing why. The man is pursuing him, obviously. He is plotting something, jeering all the while. How dare he? V. will thrash him. (Might he even challenge him to a duel and, like the young prince, shoot off his leg? We have no reason not to think so.)

Three days pass. It is the fifth of July. (Note the precision of daily details, which along with the exact street names of the section of Petersburg gives the story great credibility.) He goes to his usual restaurant down by the strand for his regular meal; he begins to think that maybe he is exaggerating the seriousness of the situation—a chance encounter that oddly keeps repeating. Again he spots the man in the crepe-covered bowler. (The fifth time on a day that is also the fifth, it so happens.) But this time the guy acts differently.

He averts his eyes from V.'s. He darts by (continuing to move by "darting" is his way), but does not scrutinize V., nor does he make eye contact. In fact, he seems "very anxious to escape being noticed." It is V. who calls out. Who are you? The man turns round, "stood still for a minute disconcerted, smiled," seems about to speak, then dashes off.

V. wonders who is accosting whom. And—what does it matter? He returns to his flat near the Grand Theater. It consists of two large rooms separated by a "dark entry" and is two storeys up. The place is dusty and untidy—a microcosm of Petersburg perhaps. V. differs from the other protagonists we have met by having a female servant who serves as his housekeeper. This is odd, the novelist tells us, but then goes on to give a credible explanation for her presence and adds that she does absolutely nothing for her wages and V. suspects her of pilfering. Though her sex is different, she falls into line as one of the anti-hero's insolent and unreliable servants, and we recognize her type with a wry smile.

In the filthy mess that is his quarters, he falls on his bed Dostoyevsky-style and falls asleep without taking off his clothes. He sleeps fitfully and awakens typically after three hours of feverish, nightmarish slumber. His dream is of persecution and concealment. He is surrounded by a crowd that is pressing. He beholds a man whom he thought was dead but has now come back to life in order to see him. We think we recognize the man in the crepe-covered hat, but are not sure. Everything is what it is and something else, even in a dream. Especially in a dream.

The man he sees and recognizes without being able to put a place or a name to it sits at a table and will not speak. V., in his dream, is clearly guilty of something. A word from the man will clear him, he believes, but the man's inability or unwillingness to speak infuriates V. He begins to beat the man. He feels "a strange enjoyment at doing it." At the same him "his heart is thrilled with horror and misery" at what he is doing. He hits him again and again, "drunk with rage and terror, which reached the pitch of madness, but in which there was a strange enjoyment, he lost count of his blows, and went on beating him with out stopping." It is an orgy of blows and he reaches orgasm in the pitch of madness and perverse enjoyment, no doubt enhanced by the fever.

This is your ordinary, recognizable Dostoyevskian world, and without it we fail to connect to the surreal events that follow. And connection is necessary, for without it all would be without reality and the action would consist of monsters in malevolent association with each other and not ordinary people in daily conflict—or else the heart in constant conflict with itself.

The dream is interrupted and V. is returned to reality (such as it is, and not much better) by the ring of the door bell. It tolls three times and each peal is for him. Also the ringing is not unlike the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. It brings the protagonist (and the reader) back to the daily world, or in this case the nightly one, the world in which men and women go about their business and prey on each other. It does so with a jar.

Having set up this major scene, Dostoyevsky can now indulge himself in some more mood setting and deliberation. Dream becomes reality, but reality can become dream again in just an instant. V. goes to answer the door and there is nobody there. Evidently the ringing of the bell (that called him out of the dream) was part of the dream. Thus the dream itself returned him to reality by a seemingly real event that wasn't real. Or was it? He looks down the hallway, goes out on the landing, even peers down the staircase. There is "absolutely" nobody there. (When Dostoyevsky says absolutely be can be pretty sure it is ironic and . . . probably indicates its opposite.)

Awake now, he checks the clock. It is only 2:30 A.M.. But this is Petersburg night, just past the summer solstice. It remains light out. How far North they are! He has always had insomnia and a brief sleep such as this will leave him wide awake for the rest of the night, he knows. So he paces up and down the length of his large room and smokes a cigar. I don't know about you, but this would make me sick, and it does V. He can feel the old illness coming on. He recognizes that the nightmare he just had is often the start of his old sickness and feverishly thinks that the man with the crepe on his hat is part of a sick dream, and the man is not actually pursuing him but "it's I, I, who am pestering him." He has "woven a romance" about him—romance in the sense of a fiction, surely, but in light of what is to come a romance in a supra-sexual sense, too. For the relationship between pursued and pursuer, the dominator and bonded subject (or supplicant) is intensely emotional and might be said to be, regardless of the sex of the parties (and it is "no party"), of a sexual nature.

Again V.'s mind is full of raging thoughts. One "rankles" him more than the others. It is painful. The man with the crepe on his hat "once had been an acquaintance on friendly terms with him, and now sneered at him when he met him because he knew some great secret about him in the past and saw him now in such a humiliating position."

It is interesting how these revelations dawn on Dostoyevsky's characters (and on us) by stages. This makes for marvelous suspense and intrigue. It is an effective dramatic technique, when not overdone, and Dostoyevsky of course tends to overdo it, forcing it right up to the edge of acceptability and then pulling up shy of dramatic overload. But, boy, he sure comes close. Yet coming close is the stuff of great literature and, don't mistake my remarks as disparagement, this is what we have here.

Knowing so much now through a painful revelation that has taken place by slow stages, V. is stage-set for a further evolution of consciousness. He goes to the window, drawn by a presentiment or dawning sense of what lies out there. He needs a quick breath of night air—something we all have had the need of, at one time or another. Suddenly he shudders all over—a full body shudder. It is the shudder of recognition. Right outside that window, "something incredible and unheard-of was happening."

Rather than opening the window directly, he lifts the edge of the blind (we have seen this done countless times since in movies; have they taken this great scene as their source?) and looks out. There stands the man with the crepe on his hat—who else? He is not staring at V.'s window but seems to be deliberating something—what? Why, a visit. And the author explains a practical point here, err we wonder how he gains such quick admittance to a respectable building: on hot summer nights such as this, the porter leaves the gate unlocked until three, and it is not quite that yet.

V. quickly assumes a manic persona: "The man who had so lately been given up to hypochondria and nervous depression was completely transformed." Well, it happens, we all know, but perhaps not so fast. Or maybe often this fast, under certain instances. Perhaps the illness—fever, bad dream, cigar—prepared him for the emotional transition. At any rate, Dostoyevsky makes it seem acceptable, and it is only one of the many alternative mood swings that affect his characters and advance the plot. Since we have seen these swings from the beginning, we have come to accept them, even if they might otherwise and in other places be too unusual.

The man is coming; V.'s hastening fate with him. There is something satisfying in hurrying along the fate that cannot be escaped from, and tragic figures do this throughout literature and drama, if not (and I am not convinced they don't) in real life. I'm sure Richard Nixon thought much like this prior to his helicopter ride away from the White House, the night he abdicated the Presidency: "Damn the bastards, let's get it on with and over."

Chapter three opens, after a closing of chapter two that would have done Dickens proud and was no doubt a tribute to him, in a way, with the man in the bowler hat standing in the doorway. He addresses V. formally by name and says that they were "intimately acquainted." It is a good word, a choice word, a word carefully chosen, a word that sets the mood and the nature of the relationship for all that is to come. Lying behind all the word play and subterfuge that follows is a Victorian (Russian Victorianism, to be sure) euphemism for what is involved here. Pavel (for it is he) in effect over the course of the drama tells V. what he already knows and has not really forgotten. "You are the man who, nine years ago, fucked my wife. In fact, you, sir, had a long-term affair with her, right under my nose." And it is this knowledge that lies behind the acknowledged "intimacy" of their relationship and what is to come.

Of course, seen up close, at 3 A.M. on a hot Petersburg night, V. recognizes him at once. He has this way of recalling everything, but not until struck in the face by it and its special nature. He has lived long—38 rich years—and has had much happen to him that deserves to be forgotten. And now this.

* * *

Pavel's wife was Natalya Vassilyena. She died last March of consumption. She left a daughter, eight. Pavel is in search of their "dearest friends." There is irony here, a bitter one, and soon it is enforced by his joking reference to the classic "wearing of horns" of a husband who has been cuckolded. He speaks of this in regard to Bagautov, who also screwed her, Pavel's wife. The inference here is, your beloved wife being dead, who is the closest of your former circle? None but the men who were intimate with your wife. Who else?

Pavel has been tracking them down, his wife's lovers. They are numerous. He has been, after his fashion, faithful—what you might call "an eternal husband." But he is eternal or constant in other ways. He is eternal like the eternal flames that burn and pledge undying love for a departed loved one. But he is also a type, a current (and eternal) type to be found in Petersburg and throughout the world, in times past and in future times. He is a hen-pecked husband, true, and is occasionally defined as one, but beware the hen-pecked man, for he has a nether side. He can turn. Being picked (or pecked) upon develops vicious properties. It is the cowering dog, after all, that often bites, and this should come as no surprise. So if Pavel is eternal in the hen-pecked sense of the word, we have to take Dostoyevsky and Pavel's word for it because his wife is dead before the story starts.

Pavel describes himself as the eternal husband, telling V. to imagine a man so destroyed, "a man whose existence is transformed after twenty years of married life, wandering about the streets with no consistent object, as though in a wilderness, almost in a state of oblivion, and finding a certain fascination in that oblivion. . . ." That might explain (but it doesn't) how Pavel would want to avoid contact with V. upon seeing him in the street. For if it did explain it adequately, why then is he here at 3 A.M.? Because things change, we assume. People change in their behavior, but not in their basic character. This is the first law of Dostoyevsky. I'm not sure there are many more, or there need be.

Also, the description is pure "romance," absolute fiction. It is how he would like to be regarded by V. and by society, not as how he actually is. He has been busily plotting revenge. And he has been drinking heavily. More important even than these contributing factors is his daughter, eight-year-old Liza (not the Liza of Notes from the Underground, I suppose, for it is a common Russian given name, but it is interesting to speculate that she might be), who will soon appear and take the novel off in a new direction. Quickly V. counts back the years, as on his fingertips, and realizes that he could well be Liza's father. If so, all the years passed as a wastrel might have some positive result, this little girl. (Or is the crafty Pavel merely planting this message in V.'s mind, as part of some sinister revenge plot? In Dostoyevsky we are never sure, and even when he tells us, some major doubts remain.)

V. regards Pavel with suspicion, rightly, as it turns out. He remembers the man as the epitome of bourgeois respectability, regardless of the loose behavior of his wife; or do not the two go hand-in-hand? Now Pavel is a drunkard, a sneak, a prevaricator. What else V. does not know. And as for the story that Pavel is simply out to find his former dear, old friends, all of whom have cuckolded him, there is a general lack of credibility. V. recognizes that much of what he perceives about Pavel and that his intentions might be imaginary—the result of fevered dreams and delirium.

There have been many lovers of Natalya Vassilyevna. One of these is Bagautov, "a most empty-headed fellow," though belonging to the best of Petersburg society; he had remained in T— for five years, solely because of her. Finally she had dumped him. She was an ordinary woman, yet totally immoral. She had a powerful way of attracting, dominating, and enslaving men. V. knew this first-hand. She was very thin, though not "altogether beautiful." Her face was often "charmingly animated." Her eyes were not pretty, perhaps because they had "an excess of domination in them." She was not intellectual (something useful, when dealing with the educated aristocracy) and lacked in learning. But she was keenly intelligent in a worldly, practical way, and had the manners of a provincial lady, which are not the best. She was opinionated, had a great deal of tact, and knew how to dress. Everything she did she had no doubts over, including the endless string of deceptions over her husband and her flagrant infidelities. "She was of a passionate, cruel, and sensual type." In short, she was a sexy bitch. But real—amazingly life-like.

Dostoyevsky tells us that such women are born this way. They cannot help themselves, nor do they wish to. Unfaithfulness is part and parcel of their character, such as it is. They are always to be married; it too is their natural state. Their husband is their first lover, but assuredly not their last, and she sleeps with him only after he has married her. From then on it is a string of lovers. The husband is responsible for the first one, supposedly because of his inadequacies. She goes on to the second lover, never feeling she is to blame. Her infidelities are accomplished without guilt or remorse.

As often is the case with such women, they have men who are of the eternal-husband type. The one determines the other and is not complete without him. Nor is she possible without him; he is largely responsible for what she is. "Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife. . ."

These thoughts and definitions are put in the mouth of V., and it would be a mistake—a mistake that is often made in reading fiction—to think that Dostoyevsky is speaking directly, in his own personage, uttering some universal truth, rather than in the provisional truth of fiction, which is context specific and relative to what is going on. The concept of the eternal (or constant) husband is literary and intellectual. I suppose it was the subject of much cafe talk among students and writers. It was "in the air," so to speak, as was Turgenev's A Provincial Lady, which our author seems to both mock and make serious use of.

"Let me show you what a true provincial lady is like," Dostoyevsky says, and proceeds to do so acutely.

There follows a discussion of the significance of the eternal husband—interrupting the drama, by the way, which is now the story of Liza, her father, and her "father," a marvelous troika to pull the sled of the drama in a weird and exciting direction. But there is no snow for it, only fetid Petersburg heat. The eternal husband sometimes is more than the passive accomplice of his wife's infidelities. Sometimes he is not the eternal husband at all but a man of "the predatory type," V. sarcastically tells Pavel, who has never heard of either. And while V. wants him gone again from his apartment, Pavel responds the way V. really wants him to—he stays longer, continuing to plead and drink, getting sloppy, telling V. he is devastated by his wife's death and how much he loves his daughter.

Ah, but does he? It would seem not, from his behavior. And if he is of the predatory type, not merely passive, what is the design and exact nature of his predation? It soon reveals itself, but in a novel manner and perhaps one that surprised even Dostoyevsky. Sometimes one's fictional characters simply "take over" the story and act according to their own complex motivations and impulses; even the author is surprised at what they do, though he himself has planted the seeds for such actions carefully earlier in the story.

In this instance Pavel drunkenly begs for a kiss. What? A kiss from V., please. Now in the Russian of then and the Russia of today, men kiss. It is not like here in America, where there is a great fear of being thought homosexual. A kiss with men, though repugnant, is often hastily performed in many countries of the world and nothing more thought of it. In fact, in these same parts of the world, which are many, the idea of thinking a homosexual element exists in men kissing in greeting or in parting, men kissing in families or in political organizations, would be homosexual itself. Just the thought or consideration. But to kiss another man at his request on the lips—particularly when he had been drinking heavily—well, that might be odious in much the way as giving CPR to a drunken bum collapsed on the street is repugnant in contemporary America, and many unpleasant appearing people have been allowed to die by scrupulous bystanders who want nothing to do with them, let alone this.

So V. lets Pavel kiss him. Ugh. A moment later, he is not so sure that he has been kissed. What? That's right. The ambiguities continue to pyramid intentionally, and Dostoyevsky's method persists in its consistent use of inconsistencies.

Do I make myself crystally unclear?

* * *

So—though neither the characters nor Dostoyevsky himself, speaking as author—cares to define the exact nature of predatory eternal husbands, we may to guess at their characteristics. They plot to have their wives seduced by suitable candidates selected from the social world in which they move. They pick and choose from among them, and surreptitiously encourage their wives into bed. And it only follows that they vicariously enjoy the knowledge of their wives' seduction. There is some textual evidence in Dostoyevsky that they may well be thinking of their own seduction at the hands of these very self-selected men. It is not impossible.

Think of it as being a little like the Hollywood scene, if you can't imagine it otherwise.

And then Dostoyevsky begins to backpedal. There are predatory types, sure, and their are peaceable types. Pavel has read about these in a magazine, "in the literary criticism," he says. He thinks of Bagautov, who has just died and Pavel has gone to his funeral, for who is a "closer" friend than the man who has been fucking his wife for five years? How can he be closer to anybody than that? Isn't it love, passion only once removed?

Still, a true predatory eternal husband would act. Instead of having followed the lover's coffin to the cemetery, he would have struck earlier, perhaps putting poison in the man's coffee or champagne and then toasting his health. The mere fact that he, Pavel, hasn't done that—wouldn't that automatically put him in the peaceable camp? An opinion, please, dear friend?

And an uneasy V. listens and tries to avoid comment, for he knows he had been the dead Natalya's lover at the right time to be Liza's father. An opinion from him on either side of the peaceable vs. predatory equation might be damning. For instance, he might be approving his own poisoning. They are drinking, at Pavel's insistence (always at Pavel's insistence). Does V. condone such revenge conducted on the part of a cuckold, instead of the abject subservience due a true friend? Please say.

And before V. can think of a new way to avoid a direct answer, Pavel lets him off the hook; he does this by telling him a long, anecdotal story. As usual in Dostoyevsky, the story confounds more than it illuminates, thereby adding another dimension to a plot that is already overloaded with dimensions. But—ah—how rich a story and how satisfyingly complex.

The story has to do with extenuating circumstances, which is a legal term that V. ought to be familiar with, caught up in the law in regard to his inheritance. Or so Pavel informs him, but he is really talking about revenge, the revenge of the predatory type eternal husband, one so different from himself. Or is he? It goes like this: The younger brother of a man they both know from T— is insulted by a colonel in the presence of some ladies, which include the woman that the brother loves. He swallows the affront and hides it. (Freud would says represses it, but never mind.) Meanwhile the colonel courts the woman and gets her to agree to marry him. Rather than exact his revenge as many men might do, this brother—Livtsov is his name—forms "a genuine friendship" with the man. Livtsov is asked to be the colonel's best man at the wedding and agrees. All the same people are present. When the ceremony is over, Livtsov goes up to kiss the bridegroom, per custom, but instead stabs him in the belly with a knife—stabs him so hard that he "rolled over." Then Livtsov goes around the room lamenting, "What have I done?" over and over.

Stiffly V. asks Pavel what has this got to do with him?

And Pavel responds, with a snicker, why "he got his own back," that is, he enacted revenge, even though he was a peaceable type and not predatory.

What is he to make of the story? V. is disgusted with this thinly veiled threat and retaliates verbally, telling him to go to hell and reminding him of his torture of his own daughter, whom he locks up in a room when he goes out wenching and drinking, his wife only a few months dead.

Pavel, who is clearly toying with him, changes his tone at once, now that V. is on the attack. He asks, in effect, if V. is calling him a scoundrel, for if he is. . . ? But he never completes the statement, which V. assumes is about V.'s cuckolding him. The cuckold by tradition is entitled to his revenge. But there has been no direct accusation of V. having done this, though they both know he has, along with many others.

Then V. effects a sweeping reversal of self. Instantly he backs off and apologizes, as he does time and time again with Pavel. He swings from fury to abject compliance in the wink of an eye. And Pavel, who engineers these mood swings, is equally as capable of an about-face in his strategy. This makes for a strange story and one that is told on shifting ground. If we don't know where we are or whom to believe, this puts us in the same boat as the two main characters. They threaten each other, then retreat; they accuse and back down; they curse each other and they plead plaintively, affectionately.

V. is constantly telling him to leave his flat, then begging him to stay. This is easy to do, for Pavel never intended to leave until he was good and ready. When this will be is never clear. Once Pavel is put to bed, drunk, for the night, V. thinks he will have a moment's peace, but it is not to be. He has terrible dreams and fitful fevers. And when he awakens and intends to confront his nemesis and reach a solution, he finds the other is gone. When he tracks him down to his hotel room, he is missing and he discovers the eight-year-old child confined and sniveling. (His?)

Liza is a representative nineteenth-century child—a tiny sniveling adult who speaks in whole sentences, holds grievances, manipulates adults, threatens, and in every way is thoroughly despicable. Naturally everyone loves her. She uses her considerable power to get her way as much as she can. It is not clear the extent to which her father (if he is her father, it is not V. or a mysterious officer) tortures her. He does this by locking her up in their room and going off for days, drinking. When V. learns about this and experiences it at first hand, he is filled with revulsion; his repulsion is increased in magnitude by many degrees. He wants to save little Liza, for all along he believes she is his daughter—whether or not he has been craftily led to this conclusion.

He decides to intervene and take her to stay with some friends, at least until Pavel can pull himself together and stop drinking. The Pogoryeltsevs have money, a fine home, and numerous children of their own; they love children and won't mind one more. So V.—unable to make contact with Pavel and sick himself—takes her to live with them in the country. She fights against this, but eventually gives in when she learns she has no choice. (In spite of his abuse and neglect, she loves the man who she believes to be her father.) On the way in the carriage, she become silent, sullen, and resentful. These are the precise conditions in Dostoyevsky (and elsewhere) for illness to strike, and it does. We are never sure the degree to which it is psychosomatic.

At first it seems to be a cold. Then she runs a high fever. Claudia, the mother of all the children in the villa, holds off briefly calling the family doctor, knowing how severe children's illnesses are, and how quickly they may pass. Then, frightened, she calls the doctor and he comes and tells her the child is very sick and he may be too late. Liza passes into a coma and, ten days after her arrival, dies.

V. has the onerous chore of telling the man who may not be her father that his child has died. So hard to find under normal conditions, up until the time he wants to be found and make use of somebody again, usually one of his dead wife's ex-lovers, Pavel is presently missing again. V. pokes around nighttime Petersburg, tracing down the man's haunts, which he seems to know quite well from his own wastrel life of old. Finally he finds him drunk and in the company of two harlots who seem to be carrying him along. A man is hollering at Pavel and accusing him of poisoning him and taking his money. It is your usual torrid Petersburg eve. Pavel spots V. and shouts out for him to save him—Pavel, that is. The man sees V. and runs off. Angrily V. grabs Pavel by the shoulders and shakes him, trying to sober him up enough to comprehend the bad news. "Liza is dead," he says. It is imperative that Pavel come to the funeral. He is, after all, the recognized father.

And hopelessly drunk (but then he often is) Pavel lets slip a bombshell. He asks V. if he remembers a certain lieutenant that had been around T—at that time? "There's her father for you!" he says. "Find him—for the burial."

V. tells him he is lying and saying this for spite. V. has counted backwards on his fingers, remembering, and is certain he is the father, and Pavel has led him to believe this for what might be several reasons. (One would be to have power over him in order to obtain money or help. Another would be for the sheer joy of torturing somebody. Yet another would be taking the cuckold's revenge—never mind who the real father is, cuckoldings did take place.

And if it is purely the cuckold's revenge, what about Bagautov, another lover, whom Pavel professed having great affection for as he did V., and whose recent funeral he attended, shedding what we presume to be crocodile tears? Was this the heart-felt action of an eternal husband of the passive or peaceable type, or was it a predatory act? Is Pavel saying, by deeds alone, that there is no such thing as a peaceable cuckold of a husband and, under this disguise, all are predatory and revengeful? If so, then why doesn't Pavel exact his revenge and stop pussyfooting around? The answer might be that it is more fun to hold off and torture somebody, and torture is the true revenge, not retribution. Or else it might be retribution, after all, but exacted in its own sweet time—and time is what makes it sweet.

Pavel's behavior now in a time of transition for him is unpredictable, but seems to be perfectly in character and holds no surprise. This is lifelike and again the stuff of great art. He declines attending the funeral of the girl who is not his daughter (but is dear to him; indisputably so, very much as a real daughter would be, and the only remaining link to his dear dead wife), begging off on severe ill-health problems. Which is no doubt true, but then everybody in Dostoyevsky seems to be very sick, and sick V. will attend, even if he isn't sure he is the real father.

Confused? Such ambiguity is ever present; nonetheless characters act according to their personalities, which are consistent and ambiguous only in a realistic sense. After all, it is only one-dimensional characters—stick figures, if you will—that act from having attributed to them a single motive and who see things unmistakably clearly. In Dostoyevsky, nothing is black and white> Everyone is mistaken for his opposite, and most often the opposite of what something seems to be turns out to be true. I find this remarkably lifelike.

Pavel, though, on the surface anyway, becoming a respectable man, a man who is transforming himself back into the eternal-husband type who ia at a loss without a wife, that is, some woman to cuckold him, sends money to V. for the funeral. All along Pavel has managed to hold a job—we don't know how and can that the bureaucracy of provincial government is so lax as to permit long drunken absences from work, and they may even be the norm in Russia. The three-hundred rubles he sends is many times more than is necessary for the funeral and in a way an insult to the wealthy friends of V., who can well afford to pay the pittance that is rightly the father's obligation. They think of returning the money to him, but instead use about a sixth for the funeral itself and dedicate the rest to the saying of masses, which were commonly done and paid for.

Meanwhile, V. is heartsick. It may seem that this is to be his natural condition, the state of his soul at rest, and it may be, but this time it is special. Truly he has come to love little dead Liza, who has shown not one endearing trait but seems to inspire this feeling in everyone not related to her. V.'s "grief ached in his heart like a growing abscess." This is about as strong as descriptive language gets and we cannot doubt the strength of his feeling, nor of any of Dostoyevsky's characters, even if we are suspicious as to their reasons. Liza, after all, had not the time to get to know V., who might well (in spite of what Pavel says to the contrary) be her father, and to love him. As a man, a male, V. is very attractive to the opposite sex. He is desirable and has solid footing in life. So how could Liza not have loved him—as a friend and father and potential suitor, Lolita style? It is only because she didn't have the time to let her natural emotions develop, V. tells himself, with that wonderful self-centeredness that motivates nearly all of Dostoyevsky's characters.

And his redemption, Christian-style, is hinged to this child and the purity of his love, he knows. (And how impure can a love be whose recipient is dead and buried?) V. "muses" on her importance. "By my love for Liza, all my old putrid and useless life would be purified and expiated; to make up for my own idle, vicious, and wasted life I would cherish and bring up that pure and exquisite creature, and for her sake everything would be forgiven me and I could forgive myself everything."

Salvation, pure and simple, in the very Christian sense of daily Petersburg at this time, but salvation in a personal sense as well, for what good it to go through the flat routines of traditional salvation in the church if in your heart you believe you are not redeemable? If he could but dedicate the whole remainder of his life to her he would not be able to forgive himself.

And of course he cannot succeed at this. He cannot for several reasons, the chief one of which is that she is in the ground. Besides, what he must really want is not public or private redemption and rebirth but renewal at the source for continued suffering. (Ah, Dostoyevsky!)

The Eternal Husband is also a story about memory. An analogy of the vagaries of memory and its perfidious nature. It was after experiencing all four episodes from out of his past that memory served him on its platter when (unknowingly) he had most need of memory to prepare him for the meetings with Pavel. And it is memory that returns full-strength during those terrible sweating fevers of a Petersburg summer night, when nothing seems real and every horrible thing is momentarily possible. Memory consoles, but memory also betrays. Memory is our master. V., short of forty years, is already prisoner of his remembrance of things past. Memory works independent of other things and is self-sustaining in its daily terrors. Memory is invincible; memory will ultimately do us in, even if everything else lets us go on.

Memory "re-creates" Liza's "little pale face"—watch our for writers when they tell us something or someone is "little"; Chaucer handled this so well in The Nun Priest's Tale that we should be evermore prepared for artistic manipulation. He beat us over the head with the word until we begged for mercy, then recognized what he was after. Dostoyevsky is not past this bit of trickery, too, being but an ironist at heart he hopes we will notice what he is doing and respond with delight and appreciation to his artistry. Memory continues to betray us; river-like, it never sleeps, especially not when we do. V. can see with precision the dead girl in her coffin, decked with flowers, and also how she looked at the end, racked with fever, "with fixed and open eyes." And so can we. And then as so often happens in Dostoyevsky, he hits us with a stunning detail and, in spite of our perception of his use of irony we must be truly moved as he himself must have been moved to write these words—moved as Beethoven was moved and now moves us, so much later and farther away in centuries. "He suddenly remembered that when she was lying on the table he had noticed one of her fingers, which had somehow turned black during her illness. . . ."

Our collective heart lunges in our solitary breast.

"That poor little finger" (Chaucer again, but so what—good Chaucer, a tribute) makes our highly passive hero think "for the first time" of killing Pavel. But he doesn't. Instead, he goes to Liza's grave, in agony, only to have his spirits raised by choirs of angels and songbirds, that is, by what he finds there: "It was a fine evening, the sun was setting; all round the graves the lush green grass was growing; the bees were humming in a wild rose close by. . . ."

"'How serene!' he thinks." And then: "A rush of pure, calm faith flooded his soul."

Epiphany.

If no Christian salvation is possible in this instance, nor a personal one, there may be a pagan one, or one highly naturalistic in substance.

He thinks, "'Liza has sent me this.'"

If so, if we can attribute certain benevolent acts to a specific person, living or dead, can we not hang on them the malevolence that follows? In Dostoyevsky it is better to do neither, and this may be his message for us. If there is any message. If this is not pure fiction and, accordingly, wholly irrelevant to our lives.

I speak, of course, with an irony I learned from the master.

* * *

Whom should he meet leaving the cemetery and walking toward the village tavern but Pavel, ostensibly the dead girl's father. He is sitting inside the tavern, but sees V. out the window and comes running after him. V. wonders how his "health" is now, after the funeral is past? He stops and they exchange a few cold pleasantries. V. finds he feels no anger, no residual hatred. He experiences instead "a sort of impulse towards something new." But the author doesn't state what it is. Nor does it come rushing forward to be announced in the ensuing conversation. We must wait for it.

Pavel tells him he is leaving town—he has a new job, or "post," and soon will be assuming his duties. V. is doubtful. This mess of a man and drunkard to boot—a job? He looks at him closer. Pavel has cleaned up his act and is neatly, cleanly attired. He looks like a different man. Only the crepe on his hat remains the same to identify him and his past life. It is the most eternal or constant thing about him. And soon—with V.'s permission—it is shed.

He tells V. he is going to get married.

V. is astounded. The key thing about Pavel is his ability to continually confound expectation by doing the unexpected, the most outrageous thing possible. One that is unimaginable. V. does not counter him with the fact that his wife is only a few months dead. This he saves for a later occasion, but the thought is strongly in his mind. The two men part with pleasantries, both of them not feeling well, but then this is your usual Dostoyevskian condition. So what else is new, as we say?

The next morning, as in times past, V. awakens to find Pavel waiting for him. He is irate; he doesn't want more in the nature of what he couldn't tolerate before. Rudely he tells Pavel to state his business and shove off. As usual, Pavel takes this as an invitation to linger and delay. And perhaps it is; perhaps it always was.

What he is after is for V. to accompany him to the home of his bride-to-be, which is not far away. Again the man is abject and pleading. V. tells him it is absolutely out of the question. Pavel takes this as a sure sign he will go. Is everything its opposite? Nearly so. V. hits him with the fact that his beloved unfaithful wife has only been dead three months. It is so, Pavel admits, but the wedding is nine or ten months off, making his period of crepe on the hat a full year, or nearly so. So isn't that acceptable behavior?

Pavel lights a cigaret (without being invited to, a sure insult to everybody but those on the most familiar terms) and "wriggles ingratiatingly." Of course this is unbelievably scathing. Men don't wriggle, ingratiatingly or otherwise. It is the ultimate act of condemnation, or so we think, but it is soon followed by the fact emerging that his bride-to-be is only fifteen. She is the youngest of eight daughters, most of whom are still available, but it is the child, the baby, Pavel is interested in. And to top it off, his bride-to-be doesn't know that she is his, pledged; her father eagerly gave her away, she unknowing, and they will break the news to her when it is time. This they are doing—and here Pavel "screwed up his eyes insinuatingly"—for the sake of propriety. But what about her feelings in the matter? Well, they don't count.

It is a hilarious, comic scene, and outrage is piled atop of outrage until the stack is in peril of tumbling. Surely Pavel sets out to infuriate V. and that is his intention. He is amazingly successful, but then look at what he does. He behaves in a thoroughly insane manner, without any values other than what he can get away with, and he gets away with a lot. V. is his constant goat. V.'s anger always rises in moral indignation, one of the few things in life that can be counted on. And Pavel knows how to twist the knife in the wound, not unlike Livtsov and his colonel in the illustrative story. Pavel says he knows they aren't friends, comrades, but will V. please do him this one last favor, since he is going away tomorrow. For good. (But then he is always saying he is going away and doesn't; the only time he truly goes away is when he promises he won't.)

Will V. be his adviser? Just for the moment? There are not many who can refuse a request when so implored and V., who ought to know better by now, agrees. Immediately Pavel begins to ask V.'s opinion on a number of proposed actions regarding his visit of the family of the bride-to-be, but Pavel does none of what he is told by V.; perversely he does the opposite. Oh, when will V. learn his lesson? (Not on this planet.)

One of the things he asks about is whether or not to buy the little girl some jewelry. Absolutely not, says the horrified V. Not even a little bracelet? Not even that. How about one for only one-hundred rubles? V., "positively mortified," agrees to this, only to be rid of the stupid question. So Pavel buys it, with V.'s begrudging approval. Thus, if the gift proves unacceptable (and is does!), V. can be blamed, or held accountable for half the blame. It is your classic no-win situation and Dostoyevsky handles it wonderfully.

They reach the house of the Zahlebinins. They turn out to be a most normal family, the girls healthy and outgoing and with a strong sense of personal values. They like V. at once and he learns they can't stand Pavel. Especially the youngest daughter, the one who is unknowingly betrothed to him. The scene is set for great comedy, and that is exactly what we get. I won't recount all the details, but it ends with "little" Nadya rejecting the bracelet, along with the man himself. The girls—so many of them, too—dislike Pavel so much as one that V. begins to suspect a plot, "an actual plot," against the man, the eternal husband. (Are these sisters the famous real enemies the paranoid has?) The girls play games with Pavel and mock him to his face. In asides to V. they relate how they despise Pavel and are happy to learn that V. is not his friend, as Pavel has stated. V. says he has his own score to settle with the man.

Nadya, who won't sing for Pavel, begging off with the excuse that he has been misled as to the quality of her voice, but really because she detests him so, sings two songs for V., and it turns out she has a nice but not spectacular voice. It is "untrained and hardly mature, but pleasant and powerful." In return he sings for her, and he has a good voice and knows it; he has sung in social situations many times before. The song he sings is from Glinka, and there are sexual overtones, ones having to do with (my God!) kissing. Hearing, she trembles and color rushes into her face. He catches "a glimpse of something responsive in her abashed and almost dismayed little face." Ah, that word "little" again!

No doubt what Freud—that master reader—would see in this scene. Fifteen is too old for infant sexuality, but ready for pubescent hysteria. The pre-Victorians loved this kind of stuff and Dostoyevsky (along with his model, Dickens) worked the vein until it was exhausted. We today are not too sophisticated to enjoy it and should be prepared for the charge of child porn that might be attendant. After all, this is world-class literature, and as such contains no elements that might ban it from the classroom or send trembling old pederasts to jail. No? Look again.

Pavel, completely outclassed, outperformed, and reduced to the status of clown or fool, tugs V. by the sleeve angrily and say, Let's go. V.—who never wanted to be there in the first place—agrees. They leave. In V.'s pocket is the expensive (let's say it is worth $100 today) bracelet that Nadya has insisted that V. return to Pavel; he doesn't have the heart to, though, not until some time has passed to cool the painful rejection.

I have neglected to explain one critical reason why V. consented to make the journey. Pavel promised him, among other things, that on the return journey to Petersburg he would come clean. He would tell V. at last the truth of the situation why he is pestering and tormenting him so, and it is implied he will explain who is the true father of the dead little Liza. But V. ought to know by now that Pavel doesn't do what he says. Usually its opposite.

They ride along in their coach, both feeling sickish. Well in Dostoyevsky nobody ever feels great, not unless he is on the front edge of a manic streak which he knows will be followed by complete collapse. They travel in silence, V. casting his day's companion angry looks to the side. "Fool," V. hisses. Meanwhile Pavel is perspiring heavily. At his lodgings, V. tells Pavel he feels "seriously unwell." Pavel says he won't stay long if let come inside. "'It is time to settle our account,'" he adds, "with peculiar mildness."

When anybody speaks with unaccustomed mildness in Dostoyevsky, we have learned to expect extreme cruelty will follow, and are seldom disappointed.

Once again we are met with the unexpected. You never know where the path will lead. Instead of explaining about little Liza's parentage, Pavel launches into a further definition of the eternal husband syndrome. He refers to the events of the day past and all the lovely young ladies present. True, he loves the littlest one, the least nubile of them, the one most unsuitable for marriage because she is a child. Is it not perverse, he asks? It is, he agrees. Is he proud of what he is doing? Most likely.

He sees her as unformed, raw material. She is unsophisticated, but isn't that wonderful? The others are already beyond shaping. With Liza, he "shall be her slave; when she's treated with deference, when she sees something of society—she'll be transformed."

It is the salvation theme again, the one of redemption, but it comes through marriage and sophistication, according to Pavel, who is wrong about most everything. As for himself, he adds, "I must get married." If not, "what will become of me?" He points at the open bottle on the table and says that drinking is "only one-hundredth of my sins. I can't get on at all without marriage and—without new faith; I shall have faith and shall rise up again."

Thus the eternal husband must have a wife to save him, even if she cuckolds him. She gives him "new faith," where ordinary belief and daily values are lacking. We remember that Pavel was something of a bourgeois when he was married, dull and staid; he only became this wild man, drunkard and fool, after his wife died. Other abandonments by her with lovers were only temporary, remember. The ultimate abandonment of the eternal husband is the wife's death. It is the only betrayal that counts.

And this is the pitiful truth of the situation, one we can recognize and respond to. It is the slim forces of humanity at work amid chaos. It is how we are able to see ourselves in the plight of others. It is how we manage to feel for Pavel, perhaps even more so than we do for V., for V. (in all his suffering) is beyond redemption. He is so far away from it and the daily world of failure on the tragic scale that he cannot be saved. But Pavel can be—the Pavel who has already fallen so far that there is no way to go but up. He has lost a wife, albeit an unfaithful one, and also a daughter, who might not be his. Therefore he is equipped for salvation.

V., on the other hand, has lost nothing of value. Consequently he will remain sick and suffering. His life will go on without change. That is the true hell of the anti-hero.

* * *

The episodes continue, for this is not a long short story, nor a novella, but a real novel that is not terribly long. V. is sick and getting sicker. He has a great pain in his chest and it is a familiar one. He has had this illness before and it is a bad one. It is caused by his liver and brought on by excessive nervousness. (What could be more nervous-making than spending a day with Pavel?) The attack is totally disabling. Once, twice, three times; four, five, six times the pain strikes his chest.

Pavel comes to his aid. Tenderly he begins to nurse him. He brings him compresses, hot tea, plates that have been heated in the oven to warm his bed. Patiently, kindly, he continues to tend him, giving him what he needs. Finally the pain subsides a little. He tries for sleep. So does Pavel, who sacks out on the spare couch, as usual. V. sleeps briefly, but a dream awakens him. Ah, yes. (Where are you, Sigmund?) There is another terrible nightmare scene from which he is reprieved by the sound of three violent rings of the doorbell. (We think again of Macbeth and how the play must have affected Dostoyevsky.) V. leaps out of bed, believing he is under attack, but only Pavel is in the room. It must be he. Suddenly there is a sharp pain in his hand and a flow of blood; he is grappling on the floor with Pavel and believes he has wrestled away a razor or knife. Was Pavel going to kill him in the night and effect his revenge that way—in the manner of a predatory eternal husband or cuckold, who had been pretending to be passive or peaceable? The cuckold with the colonel, in Pavel's pointed story? Or was it but a dream?

He overcomes Pavel easily, for he is "perhaps three times as strong," and ties him up with drape cord. He looks out the window and sees that it is light, though only four o'clock. (These Petersburg mornings!) He goes to the cupboard and finds a clean towel to bind up his hand. Going to check on Pavel, he observes that the ropes have loosened and have allowed him to crawl to a chair and pull himself on to it. His shirt is soaked in blood—V.'s blood. Pavel asks for water and V. gives it to him. All is quiet.

The two men look at each other. Something new and final has taken place. V. believes that Pavel himself doesn't know his own mind or what he will do next, but that he tried to kill V. in the night with his own razor, after having nursed him earlier for hours. The attempt was an impulse. For if Pavel had planned the act, he would have prepared it more carefully. It is important for V. to believe that Pavel has no control over what he may do and therefore is not premeditated in his assault; this would make it a lesser crime and one not so awful to brood about.

He gives Pavel the bracelet that Nadya wants returned. He tells Pavel to leave. He has said this strongly many times before, but has never meant it so completely as tonight—I mean, this morning, for it is now six. "'Well, go,' he says, and when Pavel has left locks the door.

The chapter that follows is extraordinary. It is number ten and is entitled "Analysis." It is here that Dostoyevsky attempts to reconcile all the loose themes and contradictory elements. He does this through a rambling interior monologue sometimes involving stream-of-consciousness in which he is free to range back and forth through V.'s mind and interpret past events. And because he must resort to this technique, it is the weakest chapter in the book and to some degree undermines the storyline and our understanding of what we have been paying such close attention to—hanging on to it as though it were our lifeline. Most of what he has to add in this chapter is irrelevant, too, and consists of mastication of what is already presented in a dramatic fashion. But the storyline does advance some. We learn that, no, Pavel hasn't hung himself, as he has threatened to do at some of his worst times, but has instead gotten drunk again and taken the train away. And we meet Nadya's boyfriend, who tells us this. There is a short discussion—in the manner of Turgenev, perhaps, and mocking him for this method—about contemporary manners and European practices, and some of what we call in Henry James "secondary elaboration," as when a minor character reflects on what he has seen a more important character do or say, when the protagonist (in Dostoyevsky's case, the anti-hero) isn't available for conducting direct observation but needs the information, or the perspective, badly. As does the author.

The boyfriend, Alexandr Lobov, who seems to be a knowledgeable Russian student and a type, is versed in contemporary matters, culture, and manners. V. can play at this game, too, and regales him with some German romanticism, calling him a "Schilleresque poet." Lobov counters tersely, saying, "Don't call me names." And he recounts some things V. wouldn't otherwise know—that Pavel has been hanging out at Nadya's house, while the family sits guard over her. And then finally Pavel, drunk again, or drunk still, is whisked away by train, perhaps for good. But before he goes, he gives Lobov a letter for V.

The letter, however, is not from Pavel but an old, old one from somebody else. Natalya Vassilyevna wrote it to him after he had left T—, but had not mailed it; instead she mailed him another one. Perhaps the letter (which Pavel found in his wife's jewelry box, upon her death) will explain what Pavel did not, but always promised to do—clear the air and explain away all the ambiguities. But it doesn't. It merely adds another layer to the compounding confusion. (How lifelike!)

She tells V. goodbye forever. She now loves another. Yes, she is pregnant—no doubt about that. She "held out hopes that she might find a possibility" of handing over the child to him—but notice the conditional handling of the offering. She is leaving plenty of options open for her not to, at least not directly. And even though she doesn't want to see him again, and loves another, she "sanctions" him coming to see the baby. Boy, talk about your ambivalence.

He is probably the child's father, but maybe not. Natalya doesn't want to see him again, but please come for a visit in a year's time to see the baby. She loves another, but V. has certain obligations (not rights; rights are not even mentioned, not even so that they might be dismissed) towards the child, such as raising and supporting it. Dostoyevsky admits that there is "little logic" to her argument, but its intent is perfectly clear. Then to compound already muddy matters, she doesn't mail this letter but another. Yet she fails to destroy this one. Why? So it can surface later, when she's dead? Why again?

Just like a woman?

Just like Dostoyevsky, anyhow.

V. imagines Pavel opening the "ebony box with mother- of-pearl" and extracting the letter and reading it. "He, too, must have turned pale as a corpse," V. reckons, himself equally pale now. For the letter confirms as closely as anything will in Dostoyevsky that V. is what he suspected all along, Liza's father, and it will explain the strength of his feeling for the child, a feeling that she did not return, partly because she didn't know who she was and accepted on face value that Pavel was her father. Or did she? Nothing is ever completely clear. So we must go with the known elements, or the half-known ones, the ones that we have been given. Perhaps that is why Dostoyevsky is so equivocal with which he serves us. He doesn't want us to believe any one thing too strongly.

The last chapter is a wrap up, and things happen fast. Two years pass in a single sentence. V. settles his law suit and collects his paltry 60,000 roubles. We recall that already he has squandered two larger inheritances. His "old hypochondria" is nearly gone. The terrors of memory that have pursued him and caused him to be anxious have dissipated. In short, he is healthy and alert, happily resuming his old aristocratic ways of idleness and excess. He is "cheerful, serene, and dignified." All of the ill-humored look has disappeared, along with the wrinkles, and his skin is brighter and ruddier. The scene is set for another fall.

V. is traveling by first-class carriage in a train from one assignation to another. He reaches a junction and considers stopping off on a detour to visit a woman who has just returned from abroad. But while he deliberates, he observes a heated scene among the passengers who have debarked. One is a young woman "remarkably pretty but somewhat too gorgeously dressed for traveling." A young, handsome army officer, dead drunk, is with her. A merchant (also young, also hopelessly drunk) jostles the officer and a tussle ensues. The woman cries for them to stop fighting, addressing the soldier as "Mitenka." The merchant finds this funny and begins to mimic her voice calling the soldier's name. The officer, incensed, rushes to her aid, but is so drunk he cannot fight and collapses in a chair.

V. watches all of this. He is, remember, three times as strong as Pavel, back in their fighting days, and he was sick then. So he is certainly up to the occasion of rescuing the woman whom he is attracted to, playboy that he is. The merchant has second thoughts and lets his drinking friends lead him away. (Ah, Russia.) The drunken officer mutters, "Thanks, thanks," then passes out. This leaves V. alone with the lady. Well, he's been left alone with a lot of them before. But it is surprising he doesn't recognize the situation. She is, after all, a married woman—a little too pretty and dressed for attention.

Now—too late to be any good in a compromised situation—her husband shows up. He slithers up unobtrusive. He is the eternal husband type. He is, in fact, the prototype. It is Pavel Pavlovitch—who looks at his old adversary panic-stricken and as though he's seen a ghost.

This causes V. to break out laughing. (Funny what some people consider to be funny.)

Pavel introduces V. to his new wife. She is Lipotchka. (The name may only be an endearment.) She is also Olimpiada Semyonova. She tells V. that Pavel is "a good husband." It is in fact her first specific utterance. Ah, yes. Of course he is; he is not only good, but constant and eternal. If you are going to run around with drunken young men and they provoke fights and cause commotions, it is best to have a husband who is invariable. In this world, the two types of people seek and find each other. One is impossible without the other. They are parasite and prey. The relationship is destructive but symbiotic in nature. It is also eternal, eternal in the sense it is continuing and self-renewing.

Dostoyevsky cannot resist one more swipe at the nature of the relationship that intrigues him so much that he wrote a whole novel dedicated to describing it. Lipotchka tells her husband that he left her unaccompanied in a situation where she could be insulted: the drunken merchant had (correctly) called her a whore who drags her tail in the dirt. It is a pretty telling epithet—a lover would fight for a woman's honor upon hearing her called that, and so would a brother or a good friend. Surely a husband would, for her honor is his honor, in anybody's society and in Russia. But where was Pavel? Off getting a drink? Well, if anybody needs on, it would be he.

She goes on, for this is what the wife of eternal husbands do. She says, "When you're wanted there's no finding you, [but] when you're not wanted you're always at hand." The stupid-drunk young officer repeats her words, but cannot get her simple message straight. It is the formula for marital infidelity. Husbands are as much responsible to know and utilize it as their wives are, especially if they are of the eternal or constant type. And right in front of her husband she flirts with V. The irony is delicious, for the unfaithful wife does not know that this is not the first time Pavel is about to be cuckolded—and with his knowledge, too. For isn't this how the eternal husband gets his satisfaction? It is implicit in his knowingness and his lack of interference in what his wife is doing. That is, he will interfere only indirectly and through subterfuge. She will never know that he is setting her up—if that is what he is doing, and it appears so. His motives are complex and reach deep into a twisted psyche. It will take a Freud to tell us why, and he is years off in arriving on the historical scene; and when he does, he will turn to Dostoyevsky for his case histories—and for his understanding of the twists and turns of the human soul in torment.

But this is fiction, fiction of an outstanding kind, and the author is not yet done with us. There remains one single turn of the screw, as it were. V. contributes his share to the emerging menage a trois, of course He tells this Lipotchka that he is a free spirit, who lives an idle life. Immediately she invites him—he did after all come to her rescue, when neither of the other men in her life did—for a two-week visit. This is unheard of, even to V.'s sophisticated brain. Of course he can't come, won't. But every time he has said this before, in situations regarding Brother Pavel, he ends up doing the opposite of what he has vowed not to do. This we know through repeated observations.

Olimpiada is looking for a new lover, one who will stay half-way sober; Pavel is looking for a new man to cuckold him; V. is looking to get laid by somebody young, eager, and experienced. And why not? It is the perfect match up.

Pavel practically begs him to fuck this second wife. Besides, what is he to say to her, when V. has already told her that he is endlessly available—available for what they used to call folly? V., laughing all the while, goes along with the gag, as he must have done originally with the now-dead Natalya. No, no, he argues, laughing, being seduced yet again into folly. It is what a rogue does with his days. And nights. The equation is complete, his eventual downfall and banishment prepared for. Wonderful! Such is life.

What excuse can Pavel make for V. if he doesn't come? And before they depart inconclusively, but promisingly, Dostoyevsky hits us with a couple more darts having to do with the personality of the eternal husband. He must not be too attentive to his wife, Lipotchka explains. And the husband—in V.'s mocking words—must "tremble" in front of his dominatrix of a wife. If not, the situation requisite for the cuckolding is not right, and it will fail.

And then there is another telling fact or two about the new wife. She is the daughter of the village priest. What? Well, Russian priests were allowed to marry, but there is still some mockery involving her background and upbringing. She is a tart. The officer who has been traveling with them is the son of Pavel's distant cousin. (Incest, but far off?) He has been degraded in rank for disorderly behavior, but is now back in ranks and has been promoted. Still, he is "unfortunate." And V. reflects, "Yes, the party is complete." But it isn't. The officer has permitted her to be insulted and therefore must be dismissed from the menage. And there is an "opening"—in more than one sense, but then perhaps I am being too Freudian, and not keeping my history straight.

V., overcome with emotion at remembrance of painful things past, holds out his hand with the scar running across its palm to Pavel. Take it, he urges. But Pavel is equivocal, where a moment ago he was singular in his urge to have V. come visit and cuckold him. "And Liza?" he asks, mournfully, tears flooding his eyes. V. is dumbfounded at the reference to the dead child. Why bring her in?

The train screams, "as though some one were being murdered." "Pavel Pavlovitch! Pavel Pavlovitch!" is what they hear. Is Olimpiada screeching his name—that of her eternal husband? It is not clear, but then nothing ever is. It isn't the whistle, for the whistle afterward sounds. So it must be her. The train pulls out.

The novel ends with V. going off on his original journey (which he had interrupted), not stopping off for a night or two in bed with the old friend newly returned from abroad. He is full of regrets. But he knows what the future holds for himself and Pavel. For every eternal husband and promiscuous young wife, there has to be a string of handsome young studs. Or aging bachelors who still have some dash left. And having felt well for two solid years now, V. senses the return of the old nervous disease that made his life miserable. Oh, well. "Look to the woman," as the French say.

Perfect. The world is round.

That week-long hike certainly marked the high-point in my years of scouting, though not their end nor, as a matter of fact, anywhere near the end. Later in the same year, in August, I went away to Camp Parsons, the notorious (not really) facility on Hood Canal, near Brinnon, Washington.

What I remember most about that dim place was being trained to pass the First Aid Merit Badge. For this purpose, a grueling workshop was held that lasted nearly all of my two weeks. It was comprehensive, it was good, and I learned a lot. When they handed my badge to me in a little ceremony I was inordinately proud, though I was only one of nearly a dozen in that class.

It was a busy two weeks in other ways. We went on two hikes—an easy one, followed by a tough one. The first was a simple overnighter, for which I was well prepared and except for one incident would have been a snap. I encountered a nest of yellow jackets while prowling around after deadfall firewood and two of the little rascals stung me in tandem just above my left eye. Quickly it began to swell from the evil venom and soon it was nearly closed. Also, the twin wounds stung like hell and gave me a headache that lasted two days. Otherwise the hike was a great non-event.

I remember traipsing along the edge of a bog which soon became a swamp. Downed trees lay everywhere, some of them jutting into the peaty, the sight of which made me want to stop and fish (my new madness) but we couldn't, the trek was ever onward, and continued to wend in and out of the

alders and red cedars, apparently going on for miles. I was just getting reconciled to it when our leader announced we were there and to dump packs and set up camp.

There was where? Exactly? A little clearing on the edge of what surely must be a failed lake, and from the packed earth I deduced it was where generations of scouts went for this specific overnight. Why? Beats me. Tradition has its own values and they persist. And we were so highly organized that even if I had brought along my basic fishing gear (which I hadn't, it not being on the list of essentials) there wouldn't have been time to search for trout. They remained hidden to me (if any), another one of life's mysteries, but I presumed them to be cutthroats from the environment, dark and boggy, with downed logs floating everywhere and moss dripping from the lowered alders and every so often a croak, or chorus of croaks, from the frogs.

When we walked down to the water's edge there was a scurrying motion and rippling sound, as the frog population was disturbed and took amphibious flight. So long as we didn't pull this trick on them too often it would work. It took about an hour for them to return, regroup, and relax; go after them too soon and you met with only a frog or two's quick departure. But we had too much to do to play the game of tormenting frogs. We had to pitch tents, and of course ditch them. Pitch and ditch. A scout gets good at doing this early in his career. We had aboriginal firecircles in which to do our cooking, passed on to us from year to year, and the actual cooking was done for us by cabin counselors. So it was much like going to a restaurant.

Back at Parsons my cabin was Snoqualmie. Each cabin had an Indian name, you see, which was also the name of a river, in many instances. Moclips was not. But there was Quileute, Dungeness, Skokomish, and Quinalt. Each was made out of logs and had a roof of cedar shakes that overhung its walls and porch. The eaves were overgrown with club moss. There was no glass in the windows. This was a summer camp, but its uses extended throughout the year, and at other times you simply toughed it out. A scout is (among the many named qualities and some to persist unnamed) tough. We slept on army-surplus cots with thin piping mattresses in sleeping bags brought from home in our field packs, sleeping bags which had by now achieved their own special configuration and a distinct odor.

It was by cabin that we were organized, and did things. This hike belonged to the Snoqualmies. Our counselor, an Eagle Scout named Bennett, cooked for us in our designated firecircle a meal of his choosing. Naturally it included that perennial favorite, Kraft Dinner. There was some kind of sausage, too. And for dessert we had canned peaches. I remember that particularly because the peaches came in huge cans of a commercial nature. They must have held two quarts each and weighed about eight pounds. A boy carried a number of these according to his size, in addition to his personal gear; thus each of us packed two or three fruit cans. This made an average pack weigh about fifty pounds. Now my own weight was just about a hundred. So we young scouts were packing about half our weight in gear. Most of the camp counselors had already gotten their musculature, unlike us. They were big guys who excelled at things like swimming. Me, I swam like a stone, but barely accomplished the 100 yards necessary to becoming a First Class Scout. Afterwards I belched water for an hour.

Thus an adult who tipped the scales at, say, one-hundred and seventy-five pounds (an average weight) could pack 87 pounds, using this ratio. Well, they can't, at least most of them can't, or not for long. So asking a little kid like me to lug around so much weight was asking the impossible. But we did. I'm not asking anybody to feel sorry for me or mine. What I'm saying is that we routinely did the impossible. We did what no adult could do, muscles or not.

Our second hike came the last week of camp and lasted four or five days. It took us a grand total of 54 miles, much of it along the Dosewallips River Road, mostly paved, then straight up for the last three miles over the ghost of a trail to a jewel of an alpine lake named Constance. Behind it loomed a mountain of the same name. There was not a single patch of bare ground around for miles big enough to roll a sleeping bag out on, though we searched and searched, each of us, before abandoning the quest because of the shortness of time and how far we were getting away from the others. So we slept each on his own slope, without a tent, and it was miserably hard and uncomfortable and produced bad sleep.

The lake was at six-thousand feet and on the ridge line above us we could make out specks that were mountain goats. Before our arrival, they had drifted into our camp area and groomed themselves by rubbing up against the scrawny alpine trees. Their wool was everywhere. We gathered it up and tried to make little pillows and mattresses out of it on which to place our bony heads, but the stuff was sparse and wiry and greatly compressed, and when you got done with your collection you found you had the equivalent of a soccerball's worth. It wouldn't do any kind of job that was needed, yet we were crazy about the stuff, for it came from a wild animal and was holy, sacred stuff to scouts, the kind of relic he is constantly seeking in the wild and half his excuse for being there in the first place. (The other half is that the hike is required and there is no way of getting out of it short of faking serious illness, which no true scout would do.)

We took scouting seriously. Take, for instance, the weight problem of our packs. We didn't complain; we staggered on. All those industrial-sized tin cans were dedicated, I guess, to keep us from getting food poison from food that has gone bad on the trail. It happened to the pioneers, don't forget. What comes out of a tin can in America won't hurt you, everybody knows. It is nourishing. It is healthy. But it is heavy.

A scout believes, you understand. If he doesn't believe in the precepts of scouting, what does he believe in and what is all the work for? The sweaty trail, the long weariness, the bad night on the hard bed that is not flat and rarely horizontal and never level, in the true sense that a carpenter's level could measure it. Your eyes sting from the salt your body secretes in an overheated state, your feet are blistered, and blistered again over the old, unhealed sores, the sweaty line beneath your cap has trapped many flailing mosquitoes that are unable to get their little feet free after they have bit you and filled their reservoirs with your very red blood. And why, pray tell? Because a scout believes in it all. He is trustworthy, sure, loyal, yeah, helpful, well maybe, etc., but above all he believes in the ideal of scouting—mock it as he may. For a boy of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and maybe fifteen is an idealist. And what else is there? Besides, girls are still out of range. Sixteen is a transitional age. We lose most of our scouts by sixteen. A girl comes along, smiles at him, brushes by him, he feels the start of a soft curve, and all is lost. All having to do with scouting, that is, is lost. He is gone. But until then it is wonderful, and there is no substitute for it. (You see, I remain a believer.)

What scouting does is take a boy and throw him out into what passes today for the wilderness and says, "Survive. Make it on your own, or, rather, with the help of friends." And you do, because you are hardy, you are young, you are resilient, you have enough stored body fat to convert into protein and carbohydrates that you will not starve in the length of time you and your wilderness are one. Hypothermia is held at arm's length because a scout can endure repeated wetting and multiple instances of the callosal shivers and still keep on functioning in the wild (though often just barely). And from this process comes a weird strength and confidence difficult to describe to someone who has not gone through the ordeal—for ordeal it surely is.

From it comes a love of the woods, though a love of the woods may come in several other assorted ways or flavors, and from other sources. A few people have gained it from the window of a passing car driven slowly up a winding road alongside of which rise redwoods or mature Doug firs. A draught of wet cedar and mold spore is enough to do it for some; they never emerge from the momentary submersion in the primary forest the same person. Likewise the spiral ascent of a switchback in its slow turning, say, when you come around a snaky bend in the trail and are met with a blast of sunshine in the form of a cathedral slant of light in which prance eternal dust motes. This may do it, too. Or you may stare into the tea-colored water of a beaver pond, laced with logs which like icebergs remain nine-tenths submerged, and you see the solitary ring made by a trout supping an insect and are not fooled by an insect producing a similar ring and tricking you with its imposturing.

You gain a special knowledge the street kid with the spring-bladed knife does not have, and you cannot communicate it, nor can you whip out your scout knife with its several blades and fight the punk over what you know, its special meaning, and expect to win, but your eyes shine with what you know—with what the woods have told you in the darkest night with its sweet breath. And you walk taller, you who are still short in years and height. The soles of your wet boots blend with the configuration of the trail, and you are the trail and the trail is you, the two one, and while you know this is to some extent hype, or bullshit, you also know in your heart it is true.

For some hype is true. It is true hype. You don't want to admit to any sentimentality, for all around you people are exploiting you, trying to sell you something you don't want in the first place, or need, something that will fall apart on you at its first use, for this is America, and America is like that, but some of the sentimentality you fear and are attracted to is of your own manufacture. You must make your peace with it, and with sentiment, subscribing to it warily, gradually, never fully. It makes you cynical and sarcastic, both of which are your armor against the forces of disbelief. For you are still and evermore a believer. I mean, Believer.

For it is possible to mock only that which you know well and to some extent believe in. It has already exerted its hold on your emotions. That is what sentimentality is. For instance, Christmas. Each year you attend Christmas, not believing very much in it, but enjoying it, playing the game that is Christmas, buying gifts that are wrong and not valued, spending your hard-earned money, as all the others to, and in turn appearing to be delighted by gifts given to you, disappointed each time. For this is Christmas.

Well, Bunkie, the scouts are like that, too. What did you expect, a miracle, a transformation? No chance. But there are worse things that could happen to you. (Don't ask me to name them.)

We came whipping down off that mountain named Constance with bouncing feet, stumbling, half-falling, shooting out a hand on its wrist and arm to catch ourselves as the trail fell away. Remember, this is the same trail we scrambled up, clutching at wisps and sprouts that would not support our full weight. So, in coming down, we treated them to our unmitigated clasp and they disappointed us by succumbing, that is, yielding. We took turns catching each other and preventing a fall into deep mountain space. And thus did we descend our mountain, the reverse of our approach, and came again to the blacktopped road of the Dosewallips and pronounced it good. Civilization in the form of a country road is no less welcome than a wagon bearing gifts of roast beef and garden vegetables and fruit just off the bearing tree.

I mean, if worst came to worst, they could always send a car for us, or one of us, since kids were always having appendicitis attacks. You don't want one on a mountain top or anywhere near the end of the world. So even a rough road with no shoulder to it, one on which any advancing car meeting another will cause one or both of them to pull off into the scrubby edge to pass represents much more than what it is literally—a paved path. We cheered the sight of the road, and discovered that when we strung out along it and recognized each of its familiar landmarks in turn we were collectively and individually heartened.

We had a long day ahead, another night on the trail, and then we would come into Camp Parsons singing proudly, walking tall, cockily. But first there were all those dusty miles to go before we slept. The good news was, our packs now weighed much less. With each eight-pound can opened and ravenously dispensed with, a boy's shoulders grew lighter and he was able to reach with his hands further towards the clouds. I fairly bounded along the road, the trees casting swaying shadows on the asphalt, lacing them with filmy leaves, as a zephyr moved through them, sunlight spiking the ground like a handful of flung lightning bolts.

We literally pranced into our final camp that night. It was (fittingly) the same place where we slept after our first day on the trail. It was under a huge bigleafed maple tree about a hundred feet off the shoulder, and its canopy blocked out nearly all the light from the sky. This was not the rainy season, admittedly, late in August, but in the foothills of the Olympics there were occasional showers, and they were as wet for as long as they lasted as the hard rains of winter. So far we had not met with any rain except the ghost of a mist at the lake itself. It had not been enough to dampen our hair or ground. We welcomed it, laughing. Softly it blew on by. The skies cleared, it grew hot again.

And this night was like all the others. Dark closed down be summery degrees. Under the spreading maple it grew darkest first. Going to where our packs were arranged in pairs, each supporting the other like a couple of geriatric patients, we rolled out sleeping bags randomly, forming the spokes of a wheel, and those boys not close to the trunk took up the outer edge or periphery. We lay every which way, as we had that first night, as you may when there is no tent to confine you. As usual there were the chores to be completed at twilight, the fire built up to a roar, the songs (Parsons had a few new ones for us happy campers to bring back to the city and shyly introduce at troop meetings or to save for the next overnighter) to be sung, the phoney stories to be told of bears and wolves and the most frightening creature of all, the wolverine, half wolf, half snarling bobcat. Somebody would tell tales of spotting tracks only an hour ago, tracks made by us with sticks to scare Tenderfeet with, or tracks of a farmer's dog, its edges smudged and distorted by weather and time, tracks of some fierce ancestral monster that would descend in the visible night and devour a sleeping boy in his bag, toes first. Or head first. It didn't much matter which end the gorgon began at, if escape was impossible and death by inches your designated fate.

And nobody believed it or believed it much, and it did not stave off sleep but served to enhance sleep, and the ground was relatively flat here and in no wise vertical, and you awakened to the sharp slant of morning light and knew this was it, the final day, and by mid-afternoon you would be back at camp, victorious, bearing on a pike the gorgon's head, or at the least grinning broadly, walking tall, the straps on your Trapper Nelson grooved precisely to your shoulders and the two nestled. But nobody noticed, or consented to notice, the whole scraggly dozen of us returning from 54 amassed miles on the road and trail, or else looked aside, preoccupied with some trivia—a squirrel's antics perhaps. And we looked at each other, the twelve of us, and it made no difference what the others thought or said, for we had had the experience and it was ours, immutable, or mutable only by time, and who among us fifty years later would challenge it, or even think to want to? Not me.

We did other things at Camp Parsons, of course, except practice our first aid and go on hikes. Each day held arts and crafts. All I can remember was braiding, braid that came in thin, flat strips and you could twine three or four (the good ones, five or six or eight) strips together and form a plait. There was round braid and square, and each of them went round and round, dizzyingly, and you made lanyards (Hey, anybody need a lanyard?) or neckerchief slides. I had six neckerchief slides of various shapes and sizes, also of different mixed colors and intricacies of braiding, and on my return I managed to give one away, but nobody would take the others, let alone buy one of them) so I alternated wearing them to troop meetings for a while, but soon settled on one and the four others lay in a box in a drawer of my dresser for years and finally, thirty years into our marriage, my wife unceremoniously threw them out, with a lot of other important stuff she called junk and I howled my protest afterward, upon discovery, which was my loss of self and the inarguable past, and it did no good, for they were gone with the garbage, vanquished.

That's all; this little, I retain. I have no idea how I was returned home to the city, Seattle. Was there a bus? Did my parents come after me in the Buick? Did they bring my little brother, Dicky, who must have been envious? Beats me. It was only a few weeks ago that I discovered several old family snaps, one showing him as a Cub. My God, Dick a scout, or apprentice? I don't remember that. I do recall that neither the boy scouts or college fraternities were for him, and of the latter he tried two, before discouraging with them and the system, as it is called. (I don't blame him any.) But the scouts? Him? Even for a brief while? I doubt it. Yet here is the picture that belies my memory and proves it fallible.

* * *

Troop 81 continued to function as an entity in spite of certain internal difficulties, the chief of which was attrition. I kept reading my Dostoyevsky, noting more the differences than the similarities to my little world a century apart and about six thousand miles away. My favorite time to read was when I was mildly ill and could play hookey from school, rising late and guiltily, lying abed and listening to Radio (daytime soaps, mostly) and reading. Always a boy with a book in his hands.

When you are really ill with a raging Dostoyevskian fever, you don't read. Oh, you can look at a page, but it says nothing. It is a mass of printed lines, its intelligibility disguised in a red haze, and the lines swim. Blondie Stamer must have felt like this when he resigned from the troop, feigning a mysterious illness. Rumor was, there were myriad other reasons. Nobody guessed he was a fairy. There were no stories circulating about him buggering some Tenderfoot and being hauled to Kansas City, or wherever, to face a tribunal of scout executives in a star chamber hearing in which he would be quietly condemned for pederasty without being heard. He simply resigned and dropped out of sight, and Wild Bill Hopper (as we loved to call him behind his back, though he was in no sense of the word wild, or even untamed) took over. Or so it came down to us. The truth as in many things might be very different, but we believed (scouts believe, don't forget) there was only one answer to a given question, and it was to be simple, unequivocal.

Blondie didn't love us any more. That was it. OK—to hell with him, right back. Bill Hopper did, and we loved him back. It was simple, it was direct, it was easy, and it was wrong. The truth lay elsewhere.

* * *

Blondie Stamer lay on his cot, the wind outside howling. It was winter in the Pacific Northwest. Everything was frozen. Snow came down at a slant. Muffled people moved quickly along the streets of Seattle, down by the quay, by the strand, over the Fremont Bridge, across the erie, churning Ship Canal that led to the infamous Chittenden Locks. Cabs drifted by, some of them showing the light that meant they were for hire. The street lights (sodium) wore coronas that gave up their illumination in a haze a foot or so out from the globe. They formed a series of tangerine-colored fuzzballs strung out along a bough on the tree of night.

He thought of his plight and the general unfairness of his situation—ousted by boys who had organized and plotted his downfall. His ouster. There had been a meeting in which it all came to a pointed head. There were accusations and counter-accusations. "Did," "Did not," rang out through the hall, echoing dimly. Wild Bill Hopper had insulted him and Blondie, the wimp, had refused the challenge. Who wants a coward for a scout master, anyway? Then, alone again, brooding over it, Blondie saw the situation for what it was, a plot. Clay Blackstock, the fire starter, and Wild Bill and his two sons—Hamlet, Laertes—had put their heads together for concerted purpose. One would issue the trumped-up insult, while the other adult would back him up on it. Meanwhile the nefarious Hopper crown princes would jeer. How could dispute the charge—that he had conspired to divert the troop treasury (it contained $56, at last count) to his own purposes, which were supposedly candy and booze. (Perhaps bouquets of roses ordered by phone and delivered to his surprised self?) That was his price, they said. We would believe anything, we scouts, we believers.

Blondie spat, ravaged by fever. His purchase price was much higher than that. How dare they think he could be bought for so little? Who had made the offer? Who dared make the accusation? It was all rumor and hearsay. If they would come forward and speak the charge, he could counter it with the truth, the truth as he knew it, which is the most anybody can do in serving his own case. Did they think he was a pansy, a limp wrist, a ballet dancer, a fruit, a cupcake? Let them prove it, or cite the instances. Where, when? The specific events. But, no, it was all whispers. No, it was nothing at all, not a real, hard innuendo in the bunch. Let them state the charges and, by God, he would give them a clout alongside the head such as they'd never experienced. Or he'd give them one of his giant hugs. He might kiss them on their rubbery lips. He'd. . . something.

Instead, he threw the fur robe aside and, dashing into the night wrapped in nothing but a bathrobe and slippers he hailed a cab. Luckily the first stopped for him. The driver looked at him questioningly but consented to take him to the address he had given. Outside the snow swirled, gusted by wind. It verily pranced. It danced across the street and was trapped by the curb, forming a dry trickle in a little white line that resembled dust. Or, Blondie Stamer thought, what some men (not scouts) snorted to get high. He waved at the cabby to drive faster. His enemies were after him. It did not pay to remain too long in any single place.

They pulled up in front of Wild Bill Hopper's house. The windows were dark. How like them it was to darken themselves before him. Blondie knew it was a trick. They were all at home—father, wife, sons who were spies—and had heard the taxi approaching through the muffling snow. The new scoutmaster gave the signal to his boys to douse the lights. It was exactly the same as an air-raid alert. They had been through the drill a hundred times and were very good, very quick, at it. So when he approached the house, Blondie Stamer knew it was too directly, and he should have stopped the driver and held him there at the corner with a word, approaching on foot. That way the lights would still be blazing and they could not deny him entrance—not a fellow scout, scout master, former scout master even—in this snarling blizzard. No.

In a career of playing it wrong, what is one more mistake, albeit a giant one? He opened the door of the cab and leaped out. Suddenly he remembered he had neglected to bring his wallet.

"I . . . I forgot," he began.

"I suppose you are going to tell me, buster, you don't have any money. You neglected to bring your wallet?"

Blondie smiled, "Exactly," he said. "You understand?"

"I understand you are a deadbeat, you fag."

"No, no."

"No, what? You aren't a deadbeat or you aren't a fag?"

"You've got me wrong."

"I've got you dead to rights on both counts. Guilty as charged. Pay up or I'll beat the shit out of you. You look like the type what would enjoy it and I'm the type that will happily oblige."

"Wait here," he told him. "I'll dash up to the door and my friends'll pay you."

"There's nobody home, Mister."

And before he could think to guard his tongue, Blondie Stamer had blurted out: "Oh, they're just not pretending not to be there. Actually, they're hiding behind the blackout curtains. It's their idea of a joke."

"If they're friends, why are they hiding from you?"

"It's a game we play," he added lamely.

They glowered at each other. The man obviously didn't believe the truth. What then?

Meanwhile the sky had softened. The flakes were larger, wetter. They came down from the sky in a straight line now, the slant gone, and when they struck the pavement they dissolved in an instant. Melting, they caused the thin line of moving water to appear. The wind continued to howl but in an abated manner, while the haloes around the streetlamps spread their illumination for many yard before the glow died out in dark puddles. The oily residue from passing cars threw back a rainbow of colors.

"Wait," Blondie repeated. "I won't be a moment."

"It had better not be."

The driver was big enough to pose a physical threat and Blondie Stamer knew it. He ran up to the house and began to pound on the door. Because it hurt his knuckles, he turned his hand sideways and began to use the flat of his fist to pound. This hurt less. No sign from the darkened house but next door a window flew up and a light went on. A man's head poked out. He was angry.

"Bill Hopper?" asked Blondie plaintively.

"You got the right house, but they ain't gonna come to the door. I saw all the lights go out. You'd better go away, Mister. Come back tomorrow, when it's day."

"Tomorrow will be too late," Blondie Stamer said, the words sounding like doom, though he did not mean them this way. "Besides, I can't go—I don't have money to pay the cab."

"Things are tough all over," said the window, slamming down.

Then a light went on in the parlor of the Hopper house. Then another. Thank goodness, thought Blondie Stamer.

"That you, Blondie?"

"It's me, all right."

"It's late."

"I know it's late. We've got to talk, Bill."

"I've got an early meeting tomorrow. A client."

"It's important."

"Come to the door, I'll let you in."

"This means a lot to me. Another thing—do you have five bucks? I owe the cabby, you see, and I forgot my wallet."

"You have a lot of problems, don't you? Okay. I've got a spare five."

"I don't know how to thank you."

The snow was sticking to his bathrobe in large wet flakes. It took each about five seconds to melt, after which it behaved the same as rain. Along the curb lay a kind of grey scum. It was growing in volume. Oh, these Seattle nights. He'd be glad when it was summer again, if he was still on the planet then, and there was only the heat to contend with. Heat he loved, not this eternal wetness and cold.

"Let me take those," Bill Hopper kindly said, reaching for the wet bathrobe and drenched slippers. Blondie passed them over. He was trembling, he knew not from fever or from cold. It was all the same.

Blondie stood in the hallway, shaking, half naked. His pajamas were wet and clinging. He was a middle-aged man and forty pounds overweight. What business did he have being in the scouts, let alone their leader? Exactly. Bill Hopper must wonder, too.

"I'll get you a blanket," the man said.

"You are a good scout."

"Yes, aren't we all? Now, where's the problem?"

And Blondie knew he was wrong in coming here, to the man's home, where he lived with his gentle wife and two good-looking sons in the archetypical American situation that would ever be foreign to Blondie Stamer. As Bill Hopper left the room in search of a blanket, Blondie Stamer suddenly realized the extent of his folly. He should never have come here. The man must think him an utter fool. He must think Blondie Stamer is completely out of his mind and in need of institutionalization.

Instead of fetching the blanket, he might well be phoning the police. Or friends at some mental institution, who would come in a hearse disguised as a delivery van and whisk him away to a state-run hospital where he would be committed for the rest of his days. All the evidence based on the hearsay testimony of a handful of boys under the age of sixteen, who had suspected something. None of them knew his true nature. For that, they should ask his mother.

And so he bolted. He rushed out through the door he had entered only moments before, but without his robe and slippers. He caught the taxi driver turning around at the end of the street. Frantically he waved. He darted through the slush, his hand flapping in front of him, unable to be ignored, he believed. And the taxi miraculously stopped for him and opened up its rear door by means of the driver leaning very far back and unlatching it. Blondie Stamer popped inside.

"Thanks a lot," he said. "Once again you've spared my life."

"Don't mention it," said the cabby. "Where to this time?"

"Just drive around and let me think."

"You cruising, buddy? Because I'm not one to be a party."

"Can't you recognize a man in a crisis situation? Give me a moment to reflect, please. Don't worry about the meter for once in you life, can't you? Head, oh, South. You know Westlake?"

"You got it, buddy."

He'd had nightmares like this before, usually after he'd eaten and drunk too much, late at night. A sour stomach came with them. Running all around town in just his striped pajamas, he must looking like a convict. He smiled to himself, in the dark back of the cab. He lived in a family of dreams.

Whatever, he did not want to return home, not just yet. He lived with his mother and while she would be fast asleep she was part of a life he did not want to be reminded of. Meanwhile the weather had worsened. Sleet pelted the windows of the cab and lashed at the driver's windshield.

"Boy, what a night," said the cabby. "I wouldn't put a cat out on such a night. If I had a cat. If I liked cats. What about you, amigo?"

"Hate 'em."

"Maybe it's a night to put them out on." The cabby laughed.

Blondie Stamer said, "They're always thinking about themselves."

"Makes them nearly human. But look at it this way. If they weren't always thinking of themselves, they'd be something else. Uncatlike."

"Like a dog?" asked Blondie Stamer, wondering how he got into conversations like this one.

"You've got a point."

The cabby's entire manner had changed. Where he had been resentful, put upon, he was now accommodating. Cheerful instead of glum, as well. The man said, "Home, you'd be stoking up the cat." Laughing, he added, "Did I just say 'stoking'? I mean, stroking. A fire you stoke, don't you? Well, what's in a word?"

Blondie Stamer offered him his special brand of silence. They rode along on Westlake now. The drivers seemed as aimless as he. And Blondie Stamer he knew he was paying for this, long, pointless journey. The meter already read over thirty dollars. It was a grand extravagance. Well, let it run, let it ride.

Genially, nicely, the cabby asked, "You decided where you are headed, Mister? I mean, I got all night, sure, but I presume somewhere up ahead we'll stop and you'll find some money and I'll get paid. Am I right? Stop me if I'm wrong."

"You're right."

"Say, let me take you home. I'm inclined to end this shift early, considering the weather. Let's call it a night—what do you say? Where can I drop you."

"Not home. Surely not there? But that's an idea. Okay, home. But only to pick up a few items. Money to pay you with, for instance. Plastic, too. What would you say if I hired you for the evening and we hit the town together? I'll pay, of course."

"I'd say you are crazy, but I'm game. Look, the snow has stopped. It's going to turn into an ordinary night. Isn't that wonderful? We'll go back to your place, pop you into some dry clothes, pick up some dough-ray-me, plus the plastic. Plastic makes the world go round. The meter's running—I never stopped it. He-he. What's a cabby if not for hire?"

Soon they were in front of Blondie Stamer's apartment.

"You wait right here."

"I'm not going anywhere."

The door had locked behind him earlier, but he knew a secret way in. It was important not to wake his mother, who went to bed long before midnight and had a way of sleeping lightly. She was widowed and sixty-eight. She would snore through all but the worst storms. Without showering first, he grabbed a towel and began rubbing down hard, starting with his shoulders, then moving on to his crotch without lingering. Underwear next. He pulled on some wool slacks and a shirt that said Pendelton on the inside of the collar. He parted what was left of his thin yellow hair down the center of his wet scalp. His hair was worn long to make it look fuller (unsuccessfully), and its starred points presently touched the tops of his ears. It gave him a ludicrous look. He donned his overcoat of imitation cashmere and took up a fedora, which he carried in his hands, just in case more snow fell, but it looked more like a rain scene. Maybe he should take a leak first? No, because his inevitable tinkling tended to wake up Mother, and she would comment on it later. If there was a later.

Besides, there was plenty of time for pissing in the future. He laughed. Funny that in all these hours of going back and forth, nobody had offered him a drink yet tonight and it was nearly midnight. It is what is needed most on the planet for restoring the human soul to man. It comes down to this: Men roam the nighttime streets believing a bottle will settle their case for good. And it may be so. The hope is, one's basic metabolism has changed in the past twenty-four and the body can now assimilate booze as a food source. It is the universal secret. Booze will now nourish the soul. Redemption-by-the-drink is not far off. Perhaps tonight.

Let's all give it one more college try.

* * *

The cab rushed them through the slushy night to a club called The Black and Tan. White, he didn't exactly belong there, but had been to the place before and knew that if he had some money to flash he would be welcome. Black people here are solicitous and out to please. Formerly, before the state laws had been changed, you had to bring a bottle to the club and buy what they called set-ups, which were ice and mixer. But now they sold whiskey by the drink, the price outrageous but then so were the Blue Laws you had to contend with and which shut everything down at midnight. If you owned a club and paid the police a percentage of your gross, you could stay open until dawn and be protected from actions to close you down. It was the kind of place everybody headed just before things got ugly. This was still an hour and a half away.

It was also a good place to seek people of whatever sex attracted you. Blondie often came here to meet men. A scout leader, he knew it was only prudent to keep well away from the chicken trade, boys who resembled scouts in all but their behavior. They greatly attracted him. It was the chief reason he was in scouting. But it was a tease—what they called a prick tease. He could handle it. He could satisfy himself just by looking at all those knobby knees in short pants, keeping his lust on an aesthetic plane, so to speak. But to so produced in him an acute uneasiness, and sometimes he had to purge himself of it by visits to these after-hour clubs, where anything short of murder was permitted so long as it didn't bring the police.

The club played jazz, true jazz, not the tinny melodious stuff that came out of white men—this new guy, Dave Brubeck, for instance. Jazz was black and funky. It was get-down music. Blondie liked to get a little tight and boogie. The black women interested him without exciting him, with their red lips, big breasts, white teeth, and raucous laughter. Some of the black men excited him and he wondered if they were attracted to the black women, the handful of white women (all of them blondes, like himself) present, or other men, most of them black, too. Perhaps to all three, depending on circumstances. This he could understand, without directly feeling the same way himself.

A black man came over and asked him to dance. No thank you, he said. Bitch, the man spat out, turning on his heel. Perhaps the man was right, Blondie Stamer thought. He liked to look more than to participate. It was not unlike the boy scouts. He enjoyed most being in the presence of so much kinetic energy. A loner in so many ways, he was most at home when in the midst of a crowd of dissimilar people, people of multiple races and sexes. A poor sad-looking wisp of a girl, blonde too, sat at a table recently departed of all of its occupants except her. Blondie went over and asked her to dance. She brightened, hesitated, accepted. So mousey, on the floor she was a dervish. When the number ended, he was in a lather. It was just such a night.

When he left her at her table it was generally agreed they would not dance again. Happily he saw her table fill up with friends and companions. They were a mixed set. The band struck up the next tune and another man came over and asked him to dance. Was there something about him that drew men, he wondered? Did his preference . . . show? If not, how did they single him out? It could not be how he walked because he walked very carefully and, besides, at the moment he was sitting down.

Suddenly he remembered the cabby. The man was outside, waiting, the meter running. It wasn't polite, it wasn't frugal. He hurried out the door. There he was, his arm hung out the open window, a cigaret on his lip. The cabby looked very much like a cabby. "I'm sorry," Blondie Stamer said. "I clean forgot."

"It's okay, man. I got nothing better to do."

"You want to come inside for a drink?"

"Now there's an idea."

"Come along," Blondie Stamer said, whirling and not looking to see if the cabby was following. The man was right on his heels.

"My name is Ed," said the cabby, once they were inside and seated at a table. It was different one because, during the brief interval he was gone, a woman with two men came in and sat down and a waiter had scurried to cleared away his half-finished drink. Well, he thought, when the ice melts, it's hardly a drink any more. It's more a whiskey float. And he began to chuckle.

"What's so funny?" asked Ed.

"Whiskey float."

"You mean, like a rootbeer float?"

"Exactly."

"I guess that's funny if you want to laugh at something." The cabby looked more like a doorman than a cabby, in his little peaked leather cap.

"You take off that cap, nobody know you drive a cab," said Blondie Stamer.

"I'll subscribe to that." Ed doffed his cap. Instantly he began to resemble all the other men in the room—all the men that weren't black, that is.

Ed was drinking a boiler maker. That is a whiskey glass set inside a mug of beer, though the drinks came separately and it was up to you to arrange them this way or to drink them as two different drinks. Blondie Stamer was curious how Ed would handle his. Separately, he thought, with approval. As for himself he sipped a Manhattan. It was not especially a woman's drink, but it had overtones. A Manhattan is an ambiguous drink. He liked it because of this.

"See that blonde?" asked Ed. "My kind of meat."

Blondie Stamer said, "I think that black guy is her kind of meat. See the one I mean? Little beanie thing atop his head? It's what the Arabs wear, I do believe."

"Everybody here is a nigger," commented Ed, who had just noticed the racial climate.

"Well, yes, so to speak. But if I were you I wouldn't say the word."

"Why is that? The spooks get upset?"

"In this part of the world it behooves a man to choose his words carefully and take care not to offend a party, especially if that party is bigger on the average and constitutes a majority."

"You mean there is more of them than us?"

"That and they are rough trade."

"That means they'll fight at the drop of a hat?"

"You needn't drop the hat."

"In that case, I think I'll ask her to dance."

Blondie Stamer asked, "Grab the bull by the proverbial horns?"

But Ed was across the floor in a flash. The blonde turned him down without a sideways glance. She was beautiful, Blondie Stamer noticed. If it was important to you that a woman be beautiful, she met the minimum and maximum requirements. Ed came back and sat down forlornly. The woman was joined at her table by a black man who had briefly left to talk to a friend, also black. He handed her a small packet, which she tucked inside a huge black leather purse that glistened in the half-light. Drugs, Blondie Stamer surmised.

A man came over, a fresh man, and leaned over to where Blondie Stamer sat over his Manhattan and asked him something. Apparently it was not to dance. Blondie flushed and shook his head violently from side to side. The black man shrugged and walked away, not looking back. He joined a party of other men, one of them dressed unbecomingly as a woman. Some people, Blondie Stamer thought. Simply awful.

Ed asked, "You a queer?"

Blondie shrugged non-committally. He meant it was a subject he didn't want to discuss, at least with a cabby, at least with a cabby under hire. But it also could mean he considered the question to be beneath him, whether he was queer or not. It paid not to be too open about sexual or money matters with people who were not truly friends but friends of an occasion, friends of the night. It was best to let matters lie. A little intentional obscurity never hurt and sometimes benefitted his occasions.

Blondie went over to the lone blonde woman he had danced with before and asked her to dance again, since all of her friends and companions were busily whirling about the floor. She declined with barely a smile and kept her eyes fixed across the room where, checking himself, Blondie saw nothing but a coat tree that held a man's leather jacket. Black. Everything tonight was black.

"Struck out?" asked Ed, upon his return, grinning.

Blondie shrugged. "You want another? What did you say your name was?"

"Ed. Now I've told you three times."

"I've always been terrible at names," Blondie Stamer admitted. "Nothing personal."

"It's because you don't really care."

"It's probably because I could care more. I'm in real estate, by the way. In real estate names don't much matter. It's property that does—whether you buy it, whether you don't. So there is no incentive to fix names in your mind and make them come back when you need them. When they will do you the most good. Understand?"

"Driving cab is like that, too."

"I should suppose."

"Do you always talk like that?"

"Hmmm? Like what?"

"Do you always say things like, 'I should suppose'?"

"I should suppose I do."

"No wonder you have to hire friends by the hour."

"You think, Ed, that's what I am doing?"

"Isn't it?"

"Let's call it a night."

"Listen, I called it a night a long time ago. You're the one who talked me into turning my meter back on."

They drank up, as Blondie had urged. Then they filed out. Ed asked, "You don't want a trick, do you?"

"Trick?"

"Man or woman. A body to sleep with?"

"What on earth for?"

"Then what's is all this about? This aimless driving?"

"I wanted to get away from home, my apartment, my mom, and have a quiet drink and think. I find I think best when I'm in a crowd."

"You aren't out to get laid?"

"Goodness no. Is that what you thought?"

'I'm going to take you back to your apartment, mister, and catch myself some winks."

Blondie Stamer said nothing, the whole trip back, which was about five miles. It had begun to snow again and to stick lightly. You could see the pavement through the veneer of flakes and it was wetly dark. The wind that had howled a few hours earlier failed to make any sound now. Blondie Stamer had a headache. Often when he went out at night, searching the town, as he thought of it, his head began to pound at the temples and soon over the arch of his skull there was a dull thudding. It caused his mouth to gape slightly and, try as he might, his lips would not close unless he made a concerted effort to do so. Normally he didn't bother. This was a usual time.

They pulled up in front of the apartment. He half expected Mom's light to be on, for she tended to fret when he went out alone at night, but her window was dark. Did she have any idea of what he was looking for? Did he? If so, she might light a lamp and let him in on her secret.

* * *

Mass attrition was taking place. Is that the right phrase for it? At the time it simply seemed that boys were quitting Troop 81 in droves. For every new boy that joined, two departed. Nobody got angry; nobody issued threats or absurd insinuations. They just drifted away. Those of us who remained discussed the problem at length but to no conclusion. We shrunk to a dozen, then nine. Soon we were seven. Everybody was some kind of officer or authority figure. I was now junior assistant scout master. Yes, me. To tell the world about this, I got to wear a special patch on my left sleeve.

The outside world didn't care. A boy scout uniform is ablaze with colorful patches. You can wear a limited number of merit badges on your sleeve, but as they increase they tend to cancel each other out in a swath of hues and your arm looks like a map. So you buy a sash and your mother dutifully transfers your merit badges to it, which you wear crosswise over your shoulder and down to your hip, looking very much like the Queen of the Ball or Miss America in drag.

So while I was proud of my new rank and badges, they didn't mean a thing and everybody knew it. That everybody now numbered about six, not counting myself. I was a manager without anybody to give orders to. There was Wild Bill Hopper, one of his remaining sons (the other had split in disgust two months ago, without a word), the perennial Clay Blackstock, of course—he with the ready match—myself, Patrol Leader Jack Hepburn, and Patrol Leader Harry Walrath, he of the sister with the tremendous knockers and my friend. I was in love with Georgianna and the black cashmere sweaters she frequented. So was half the school. She would speak to me only if I obliged her to in some large way. Aside from this, she was very nice.

We had recruited Sterritt Metheny's little brother David, who was not yet a Tenderfoot and had been with the troop about three days. We hoped he wouldn't quite for a few weeks.

Gone were Art Golofon, Ranny Hennes, George Trick, Wally Ort—all my friends and sometimes opponents. We the survivors used to talk about them as though they were dead, not just gone away. Once I said to Jack, who reported directly to me, if anybody did, and not to somebody else, in point of fact, and who was a friend of mine, "What do you think old Ranny would say about all of this?"

"All of what?"

"Oh, you know. The same old shit. Everybody going off in the boonies and not coming back. The idea of there never being another hike for Troop 81 because nobody will go on one, and even Wild Bill is losing his enthusiasm."

"Ranny'd probably think of something real sarcastic to say."

"That all?"

"What's all?"

"That's all you think he would do? Say something smart? Reserve his considerable energy?"

"I'm not one to say."

If I didn't love the scouts so, I would have walked away then and never come back. What is more, I'd not miss them. What we were lacking in was mutual intellectual stimulation. Once we'd had it, for a brief shining moment, as they say about musical comedies, and the moment had evaporated (if a moment can be said to evaporated, and I've just said it), and we were left with nothing in our hands. Like that ad for Allstate Insurance, where they show you this pair of hands, fingers curled, and there is absolutely nothing clasped inside of them to be protected. They are curled up on air. The void. That was Troop 81.

It's no fun playing O'Grady Says when there are but six of you to play and they are all young and dumb, and one by one they drop out and only you are left, every time, and you know the stupid game so well that you will never make a mistake and have be told to leave the line, and Scout Master Bill Hopper looks at you and you look at Bill Hopper and he says O'Grady Says and you do it and he says to do something and you don't budge and an hour passes. You glower back and forth and finally one of you says, "Well, shit." And you quit playing in unison, without an additional word being shed. Everybody goes over to opposing benches and sits down in the field house that is so empty it is echoing , and then somebody says, some dumb scout, "I know, let's plan a hike." You groan, and another fifteen minutes passes without a word, and Harry Walrath asks, "When can we go home? Is it time?" And everybody leaves on cue.

After a couple of weeks like this scouting becomes like going to the dentist. But nobody wants to throw in the towel. (The towel's wringing wet and might hurt somebody, besides.) So you sit around and tell stories about dead kings or about hikes that are past and were dismal, and when somebody pretends there is a real possibility of a hike taking place and a destination named, everybody chimes in with this phoney enthusiasm and it lasts for about a minute. Then gloom descends again.

I say to Harry Walrath who can sometimes be wise and knowing, "How's your sister?"

"Never mind about my sister."

You see, he is always being asked about Georgianna. Whether she can be approached, whether she puts out. She is a couple of years older than any of us and is dating some guy who plays basketball in high school but never starts. He comes off the bench and scores a certain number of points. Then it is back to the bench, Charlie, and thanks. He'll get his letter, sure, but if you never start there is some ignominy attached to you and your case. His name is Bruce Patten.

"You think he's getting any?"

"Shut up."

I am simply being mean, a thing I do more and more now, out of my desperation and boredom. I mean, I might as well be a Dostoyevsky character for all the good I am to my friends and myself. We are all good Americans, but we have our limits. We bait each other (I suppose like a Russian bear) and hurl barbs and wait for a stung response. It is what the sick-at-heart do to batten themselves. Then Jack asks, "You ever see them?" And I think of his mother.

"Shut up, I say."

"Is it all them or is it padding?"

With Mrs. Hepburn, there is no padding involved, I'll swear. With Georgianna, there might be. It could be all girl or mostly padding. Harry ought to know, but Harry isn't saying. It is all anybody talks to him about, these days, in school or scouts, and it is driving him out of his mind. This and whether she is putting out for Reserve Point Guard Patten. Harry would have to be a spy to know for certain, and he isn't that kind of guy, though we wish he were, for then he would sneak a peek and report back, and we'd learn the truth, in both instances.

I wish I had a sister. You can learn a lot from a sister simply by being in the same house with her, day after day, year after year. You get to see things, I am sure. She forgets. She is in a hurry. She grows careless. She pulls on her stockings, her mind on something else. I wish Harry Walrath's family would adopt me and I would go to live with them, and sometime when they are all out on a trip together, all but Georgianna, we are alone in the house, she might come up to me and say, "I like your mind, Bob. It's time you learned what to do with your wang. Bring it here and I'll show you." Some such words. And I would run like a deer, but I don't know in which direction.

There was left only the disposal of the troop assets. We were disbanding. We were like a posse of marauders, our purpose over. Seven of us—well, six, for the Metheny kid was a doubtful entity and his brother Sterritt was pouring poison in his ear. Jack had never been an enthusiastic scout, if the truth be known, and why shouldn't it be, now that all was lost? He was only a patrol leader by default. None of us were the likes of Art and Ranny and Wally. We knew it. It is hard to make something out of nothing. That last meeting was a wake. Even Wild Bill's remaining son stayed home. I wish I had. If we'd held it outdoors in the driving rain it couldn't be any worse.

Most of the assets consisted of tents. There were two kinds. Maybe I mentioned this before? One was of wax-treated canvas. They were pre-war. They were old and worn, many times patched, but had been our mainstay. And there were the new nylon tents that weighed about two-thirds what the canvas ones did. They would never leak. They were highly desirable. One I already thought of as my own and had given it a home. When Jack Hepburn and I went out to Cottage Lake to fish for trout we took that tent along; when we went to Salmon la Sac and Hyas Lake, it was this tent that covered us over. Between hikes, it resided with me. There had been no hikes for many months now.

On this final day I was instructed to bring the tent with me. It was, after all, troop property—not that there was any such thing as a troop anymore. I kept it near, all the while he talked about division and the booty was divvied up. It was awful. It was like vivisection being performed on your dog. It was like your mother had given birth to a nest of snakes. It was as if your worst enemy had reached up your bunghole and, gripping you by the heart, had turned you inside out and left you dripping organs. In short it wasn't much fun.

I got the tent. I got a communal cooking pot. But how it hurt! It was like cutting off your toes and dealing them around the table in the manner of playing cards. We all wore our uniforms for the occasion. We looked like the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh. Where was Matthew Brady? It was a time to remember, if we couldn't manage to forget it in a hurry. It was an ugly moment that lasted for about an hour and a half. We clung to it and couldn't wait for it to be over. Happily we'd never have to go through anything like it again in our lifetime.

It would be nice to say we joined another troop, one of winners, but we didn't, none that I can recall. Nobody dies when a troop does. People go on with their lives and become survivors. Jerry Sorrensen, who lived in a magnificent house just off Magnolia Boulevard, I remember was never a scout because he died of rheumatic heart failure at the age of nine. I used to go over to his house and play cards—Hearts, it was—with him and his sister and his mother. We grieved a whole day for him in the third grade and promptly forgot him. If you don't go on, you shrivel up and die yourself. I never remembered his case until this minute, I swear.

That tent. I kept it for years and it always gave good service, which is to day I or my friends never got wet because it failed to do what it was supposed to. It weighed about seven pounds, which is light for tents. It slept two nicely. Four could sleep in it, but nobody could turn over. This is how it looked: it was low-pitched in front, just high enough so you could walk in, if you thought to enter on your knees, which nobody did. So you simply hunkered down. The tent pole rose in dead center and bisected the front; the pitch dropped to a few inches from the ground in back, just high enough not to touch the toes of your sleeping bag, and was held tightly to the ground with pegs so that no water would leak in. The sides were pinned down with pegs and it is where you ditched it with your implement. It was wise to have across the front a slight slant running away from you for the sake of rain, which you do not want to enter there or anywhere else. And there were storm flaps that covered the upper front and tied together around the tent pole with a couple of flat cords. The tent was dark green, the color of cedar boughs, and when you pitched it in the woods it quickly became invisible and you had trouble finding it again.

I grew up rapidly. My friends and I from Troop 81 continued to hike and camp out, but our attention was turning to trout and soon it would be girls. I was better at catching the former than the latter, at least for years. Then pursuit of the latter became foremost. But that is another story, perhaps a separate book.

The tent was well used. I graduated from high school and went on to college. I joined a fraternity because I feared I could not counter loneliness. A frat brother who was two years ahead of me asked to borrow my tent for opening day of the trout season. How could I say no, for I was working that day? This was a Sunday in April. In June he graduated in accounting. He accounted for my tent, which he didn't give it back to me, the scumbag. He simply went off into the sordid world of business.

How do you say good by to a couple of yards of post-war nylon? It covered me and mine for about 400 nights and never let us down with wetness or wind. What do you have to put in its place? There's nothing. Time goes by and your grief for the lost tent becomes muted. It was all I had left of Troop 81 and its Dostoyevskian aspects. But I continued to ache with accumulated loss. And I was not yet twenty.

I graduated college and went into the dreaded Army for the end of the Korean War. I returned home from overseas, resumed my studies in English, married, and five years later had a pregnant wife who bore us a son. When she was three months pregnant and not yet showing, I put down my pencil for a while and went to work for the airplane company, Boeing. I was lucky, for jobs were not all that easy to get in this time of peace.

One rainy morning on one of my long walks in to Plant Two from where I, a new hire, was obliged to park, I held out my thumb as I hurried along in the rain, my back to the traffic. A car slowed for me. The man—a supervisor—had preferred parking. This put him a quarter mile closer to our common destination, a factory office building. It was good of him to stop and I leaped inside gratefully, slamming the door behind me and spraying rain water all over the interior.

"Thanks," I said; he said nothing. Well, a ride was a ride.

We rode along silently, the tires sluicing water. I stole a glance at my benefactor. My God, it was the frat brother who had absconded with my tent. Small world.

Softly I asked, "What did you do with my tent, you son of a bitch?"

I'll swear, he jumped so high his head hit the padded car ceiling of the car. He looked at me in what is mistakenly called sheer panic but is really just ordinary astonishment. He muttered something, he stammered something else. He said he had lent it to a friend, who hadn't returned it. It was probably the truth. But the tent was mine; I had inherited it from the boy scouts.

I told him where I could be reached, in case it turned up, which was doubtful. "I'm in the book," I said. "Talk to your friend. Tell him its rightful owner wants it back."

He nodded anxiously. He said he would. Naturally nothing came of it. That was the end of the matter of the tent and Troop 81. That morning I put them to rest. And there they have stayed until today, when they came back according to my need for them. Memory.

About Blondie Stamer, he continued on in the local real estate business, doing well, I heard, many years later. His mother died ten years after he left the troop, and it was said he nursed her for her last two years, letting his business dry up. He was destitute at his loss. About another ten years passed and I was middle aged then; he was old. I read about what happened in the paper. He was found face down at the curb in an industrial section of the city, rain water flowing past his chin. His thin hair was entirely gone.

Somebody had put a knife in him. Several times. It sometimes happens. Life wouldn't be life, if it went on forever. It would be something else—a horrible, changeless, eternal thing, a thing not worth living. I tell myself this with the knowledge of another life just passed, one that has touched mine and is no more. I didn't know Blondie Stamer well. In fact, I barely knew him at all.

What I didn't know I had to imagine. It sometimes happens in writing, when you are lacking in facts. You have to make them up, or do without.