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 adu