Halfway Read online

  * * *

  I HEARD VISALIA shouting in the woods, and then he emerged from a stand of birch holding a large femur above his head. He claimed it came from Sasquatch and dandied about the group, showing it off. One boy took it and shook his head. This here, he informed us, is a cow’s bone.

  Visalia grabbed it back. You don’t know dick, he said. Holding the bone between his biceps and lat, he removed a drawstring from his hoodie and tied the bone at both ends, draping it around his neck.

  It was Christmas Day, 1994.

  There are many photographs of us, all slender-faced and hollow-eyed boys with scruffy necks and chins, our eyes obscured by dangling hair. In most I’m wearing snow boots, jeans, and a field jacket. I can’t see my thermals, though I know I’m wearing them. The photos are relics taken with disposable point-and-click cameras, all of them overexposed. We are always smoking, our arms draped around each other’s shoulders, hanging from one another as if, were we to let go, we would fall.

  Written inside my Big Book are many notes and letters, like a high school yearbook. There are addresses, phone numbers, signatures, promises—Yo, it’s been fun. We’ll be killing some caps this summer. I’m going to miss you. I’ll write. Write me. I’ll write you back—but we were all just travelers, and like most travelers, we’d slide past one another eventually. I don’t know what happened to most of the boys. The kid? Shit. No idea. Visalia jumped off a roof and is dead.

  * * *

  A FEW YEARS LATER, I was living in Los Angeles with this girl. I was bone-dry then, very close to not existing. We lived in a mid-rise on top of a hill, and each night I’d climb the ten flights of stairs and stand on our roof’s edge, imagining a free fall into nothing. I’d gone crazy, I guess, and wanted to die.

  I decided to track down the child actor, see if he could give me some of his old enthusiasm. It was a very hush-hush operation, I recall, very cloak-and-dagger, as if he were Leo DiCaprio now—I’d call one Westside number and leave a message, and he’d call back from another number two days later, leave word of some kind, Call me at this other place, this guy’s house, let it ring a few times, hang up, call back immediately. And would I meet him somewhere, like Lincoln and Rose?

  He wasn’t doing well. Truly, he’d found a new worseness. He was homeless or thereabouts, sleeping in one man’s bed or another, banging dope. The same old same.

  A year later, someone told me he’d passed.

  Almost all of us—but not all—are dead now.

  I find myself googling the dead ones again and again. Will anything change? Will any new information come to light? For years, on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, the child actor’s name offered an avatar with only a question mark, a few dreary day-player credits, nothing remarkable. But then one day I looked once more, and his avatar had changed. In place of the question mark was a photo of a middle-aged man who’d grown his locks out into a manbun. Gone now his fancy mountain beard; he wore some real Hollywood stubble. His bio listed a wife, some kids. He was alive.

  Lessons

  AT six weeks sober, I had no memory of my mom’s house. Couldn’t tell you a thing about her living room, kitchen, or dining area, didn’t know where her TV was, if she even owned one, or what pictures hung on her walls. I learned other things. Terrible things. Boys, when they left here, did not go home. Instead they went to far-flung Omaha or Crapsville, Louisiana. No one wanted to go there. Louisiana was scary. We heard stories about it, true shit: counselors beat you there; they literally whaled on you. But, guys said, you can get a GED. You have some freedom. Still, I was skeptical.

  Wind kept whipping down from the mountains, blowing the crystalline snow. After Christmas came the New Year. Goodbye, 1994. I’d been speaking to my dad for a few weeks now, always ending with the same report—a few months to go. Knowing him became my number one thing, and I called when they let me, asked all the things a young man will ask the father he never knew, said like Tell me how great you are, and then he’d tell me, or I’d ask how smart he was and he’d say, Very, very smart, son, and I’d call him Dad and prompt him in ways that excused his behavior and explained why he wasn’t around. Do you think, I’d say, you were always afraid of getting close because you loved me so fucking much? Oh, yes, he’d say. That’s it. It’s exactly what it was.

  In the afternoons, our dyadic encounters and paperwork done, me and the rez kids scraped ice off a slab of concrete and got burn on the slippery half-court. I was still dunking and doing so with ferocity. But I wasn’t the only one. The court had a bent rim, its net a tangled mass of frozen chains, and we played one-on-one, two-on-two or two-on-three, twenty-one, Utahs, and fifty, always all-out, hateful, our shoulders dipped, crown bowed, swinging wildly. One day the court disappeared under snow too high to shovel, and we handlessly smoked while playing bloody knuckles. This was painful, but the pain was easy to understand. My knuckles swelled up and burst. Barely able to close my fist, I kept swinging. A social worker came hauling ass through the snow.

  What are y’all doing? he asked, pulling us apart. What’s going on here? This is not the place. It’s not how we do things here.

  Why are you so surprised? I asked, but he didn’t answer. He just glared at me, eyes cold and full of shame, until I looked away.

  Later, on the porch, I eyed the prairie and mountains. The setting sun cast a lingering glow, shading the snow a dim pink. I tugged at my beard, swept the bangs off my face. My hair was so long I could chew it in my mouth.

  * * *

  THEY MOVED ME OUT of the big cabin and into a small one where I lived with just one other boy, Donald. He never spoke. Not in group or mess, not in the rumpus or on the prairie while we dug rocks. He didn’t talk about his past, didn’t bitch about the tests or work, didn’t war-story, didn’t joke. He never said a word.

  He was from a notoriously rough reservation in a forgotten part of the state, a place beyond hardscrabble, beyond marginalized, where pipes freeze and pickup trucks never run and all the homes are missing floorboards and doors, where children are stolen and sold by Russians and every male over a certain age is in fact the bogeyman. Donald was just about that age and knew it. He had close inset eyes, a scumstash. A scar covered one of his cheeks—he’d taken a bottle there once. He wore a Raiders parka, jeans, and high-top sneakers, but never gloves or a hat, never earmuffs or a scarf. He was like, Oh, is it cold? So. Fucking. What. I don’t care. He had a rattail, mean streaks razored into each eyebrow and above his ears. He’d stand on the porch huffing into his bare fists, the shittiness of his seventeen years replaying in the snowy limbs of evergreens as he rocked back and forth on his heels, or he’d sit on the weight bench or in group, his arms crossed, always that same stoic far-off look on his face. Tough, but not boastful, his grit exposed itself only in silence: life is this, so what.

  He would not be my friend.

  * * *

  MY FAMILY CAME. Not my dad, of course, or Aidan, but Abba, my mom, Lee. I think I was talking about going home. And where is that? my mom asked.

  But I couldn’t answer her—not directly, only hint. Huh? I asked.

  Sixteen is old enough, she said, and you are seventeen.

  She sat perched at the edge of a chair, tissue balled in her fist, unblinking and unsmiling. I had to consider this. All around me, winter had been growing more defined in its principles—colder, darker, less sun, more ice—and here was this coldness beyond all that, a coldness that wouldn’t stop.

  Then Lee told everyone how I tried to kill him that time with the baseball bat.

  I guess it’s true. It’s hard to judge intent. I remember the moment, though. I’ll take his word for it.

  Of course, in some places this kind of information would have made me unsavory, but not here. Here it impressed people. Suddenly, I was much cooler than before. That motherfucker tried to kill someone, people said. And that is always cool. Killing someone isn’t cool, obviously, but trying to shows something.

  I tossed and turned that night, tryin
g to conceive a new plan. I could ask my dad to take me in, or traffic dirt weed, maybe find work in a warehouse. Long detailed blow-by-blows kept me awake, all of them heroic, as if I were Robinson Crusoe.

  Donald started laughing.

  I knew he was laughing at me. Nothing else could be so funny. What? I said.

  I thought you were some pussy, he said. Not a damn killer.

  Well, I said. He’s still alive, isn’t he?

  Huh, he said. No shit.

  That’s right, I told him.

  He asked for a cigarette and I handed him one, and though smoking wasn’t allowed inside, neither of us cared. Who knows how we conveyed the unspoken? Is it like when vampires spot each other? Is it born of instinct, the commonality of bloodlust, or just the wisdom of living eight hundred years? Or, like snakes who den together, how it doesn’t matter their breed, whether they’re viper or constrictor, garter or king, they will all climb the same hill and all crawl to the same damn hollow—thousands of them, sometimes more—where they’ll tangle together in one giant denning ball of scale and fang and spit.

  You know what, Donald said. Fuck it. I’ma tell you something.

  She’d lived in Yakima, where Donald had family. They’d met at fourteen, fallen in love, he’d been young—this was a long time ago, he explained, a long, long time—and in and out of school, already gangster, banging with heavy hitters, future hard-timers, real fucked-up dudes, so this here, with her, was different, strange—Can I say, he asked, can I tell you this? He visited her as often as possible, took buses, hitchhiked, caught rides with uncles and aunts, truckers, whoever. As he spoke, I imagined the loneliness of those rides, how quiet they must have been, always needle at ninety, hell-bent under that big sky, his heart beating with love, hurtling toward elusive mountains on a horizon he’d never reach. Nothing in his life had ever made the kind of sense life is supposed to make. He’d known brutality instead, rage, ugliness, pain; he knew the price of Mad Dog and could tell by the weight of his jeans if he had the coins to meet that price or could only afford a shorty; what mattered to him were cigarettes, a shipment of brick weed, how many .22s he had left, how to pack a slug or turkey-bag dope, and how to, yeah, take a motherfucker out if need be, but he’d never known anything as sweet as holding this girl. At the end of the day—she’d be there. He dropped his guard, then lost it, got vulnerable, let things go, so instead of imagining trouble around the next bend, he imagined her and this thing they had, this beauty, lifting him higher and higher. In train or bus station, next to stranger or family, in cab or truck bed, standing along a highway’s edge, he thought of her. One day, crossing Idaho, he decided that when he got back to the rez, he’d sell a sheet of acid, buy a truck, and move to Yakima for good, and so he procured and sold the shit and found an old Silverado owned in part by an uncle who sold it to him for a few hundred bucks, and what he thought, filling its tank with gasoline, and stuffing the cab with his parka, clothes, loose change, cigarettes, shotgun shells and sawed-off, was that life would be good. The drive took no more than thirty minutes. He flew, sailed, even skyrocketed west, imagining beginnings and endings, dawns, good nights, and a place to come home to, but when he got to his girl’s mom’s place, she wasn’t home. He asked a neighbor, but the neighbor didn’t know shit, and so he asked another neighbor who pointed to a house where maybe the girl’s uncle lived, but the uncle wasn’t home, he was shooting pool, a woman at the door said, laughing, but her cousin, who was definitely shooting pool, might know something. At the pool hall this cousin said no, but he knew this bad motherfucker named Rudolph who lived in a trailer park near the hop fields, but when Donald went there, he couldn’t find Rudolph or anyone willing to admit they knew or had heard of any Rudolph, and so he returned to the billiards place, where he saw a blood cousin of his own who said, Hell yes, saw that bitch earlier, kicking it with a guy Harlan off North First, but on North First he saw only the usual bellyachers rolling on the curb or slumped against walls, bandanas hanging from pockets, a sad western light edging the steely gray sky. And does anyone know Harlan or my girl, he asked up and down North First, until a guy pulled his head from his chest, wiped his eyes of sleep, and said, That fuck’s at the movies with his girl, he likes movies, they both like movies, everybody likes movies, and so Donald went back to his truck, loaded up his shotgun, and set out for the movie theater.

  Sometimes there isn’t anything to do but stop listening, even when a story continues; all you can hear is wind rattling the windows, the flick of your Zippo, a crackling cigarette. Whatever he said now wasn’t for my ears—only the telling mattered, and only to him.

  We grew inseparable.

  Bullies

  WE prepped for weeks, learned how to build snow caves, igloos, lean-tos. We skied. A lot. Like every day. After group, before diagnostics. Up and down the hills surrounding the ranch, across fields, for miles on end. We dried fruits and meats, made granola bars, gorp, high-protein bombs we’d eat for lunch. We took classes, how-to and survival. We participated in rope courses. We got fit.

  In the preparation, certain things grew clear. I’d be on Trip when baseball season began. Possibly while I was out there, my dad would die. What happened now would determine my next residence. A lot of boys got sent to adult facilities, places where they had to grow up. This meant no school, no baseball. Other things—it was winter and cold. Nicotine and caffeine restrict circulation; they’d be off-limits. We’d be skiing in big-game country. We discussed bears often. In the winter, when it’s unseasonably warm, bears emerge from dens looking to eat and screw. This was important. A bear, it’s known, will fuck a human if it wants to. They are animals, and animals don’t care.

  We discussed hypothermia, knew full well the problem of hypothermia—it doesn’t take much; all you got to do is get wet. You can die from it at fifty degrees. We talked frostbite, told stories of boys who got frostbite, lost their fingers and toes, had them shits chopped right off. We talked spruce traps, tree wells, deep voids, hollows, black holes in snow that will snag and bury you. We talked about what to do in case of emergency, if we got lost or separated, how to proceed and act.

  The first week in the wilderness, we awoke each day at four a.m., skied up and down heavily wooded hills all day, and were asleep by six p.m. These were long days. We wore long underwear, sock liners, wool socks, rubber pants, water- and windproof nylons over everything. We wore Sorels, gaiters, base layers and wicking layers, big parkas, headgear like astronauts. We carried sixty-pound packs and dragged ninety-pound sleds loaded down with tents, sleeping bags, pots, pans, sternos, and nine dinners and nine breakfasts for nine people. On the tenth day, we planned to resupply. We also carried bags of lunch stuff—the dried meats and protein what-have-you—for which there was no resupply. What you made at the ranch and brought to the woods was it. Meting out our lunch stuff was important. We needed to ski ten or more miles each day. Calories were essential.

  Nine of us went out there—seven boys, a wilderness guide, and a social worker—and though nine of us returned, what does it really mean to come back? You are here and you are there. Parts of us emerge only in certain places, like when shrouded, how only in total darkness can we find light, or only from badness goodness is born, and sometimes lines blur, there’re no heroes, no guilt, just what happened. I’m thinking of the peppy-stepped guide, who had a Ph.D. in outdoor adventure and for whom this was a dream job, who every day bubbled with optimism and joy, a smile gleaming in his frosty beard, who, after this, quit working at the home; and the social worker. Ours was the first time the home sent a woman on Trip. It was also the last.

  * * *

  LANKY AND FIT, magical on a pair of skis, the guide swished about in perfect form. I know fuck-all about winter sports but have long legs and an earnest desire for pain. Plus, I’m a real bonehead when it comes to giving up. My motto is Fuck You. I can ski all day. We had two Jeffs on Trip. Good Jeff skied pretty, swanlike and graceful. Bad Jeff was passable, athletic; he could move. Bi
g Bill, who was older and had recently been kicked out of the navy, had long strides, and watch out should his big ass get behind you on a downhill—that fucker could fly. Donald, Kev, and Shawn were all okay. No one was mistaking them for Greg Louganis or whoever, but they did well in effort categories. All of us were okay except the social worker. Her brain sent the wrong messages to her body. She lacked athleticism, possessed no endurance, and skied slower and slower each passing day. Even fastening her backpack troubled her. It hung loose about her body, all awkward and wanting. Often she stopped. Often she removed her backpack. Often she rested, looking at her pack. She always refastened it exactly the same way.

  Planned ten-mile treks became eight, and we fell behind resupply. We found ourselves many afternoons in the middle of some wooded trail, nowhere near water, and miles from our intended camp, knowing, in the waning light, we had to stop. We consumed fewer calories; tempers flared.

  I felt bad. Truly. The social worker was pitiful, out of place. I wanted to help, but helping meant correcting, and she was not the type of person you correct.

  No-no, she’d say, personal responsibility, accountability, and so forth. Or she’d get hysterical about “macho posturing,” “blah-blah,” “out here,” “in the wild.” She was an illustrator or writer on the side, and she’d look at us with her sad writer eyes and predict all our tomorrows by how we behaved today. She’d thaw her finger over the fire just to shake it in our faces. You’ll use again, she’d say, and you and you, and you I’m not so sure of, but you and you and you, too.

  We’d ask, Just what do you expect of us? and she’d say, For you to work a program, and we’d say, We’re trying, and she’d start up with that TC talk—trying’s dying—get all Yoda. Try to pick up that rock, she’d say. Go on. No. I didn’t say pick it up. I said try. You either do or don’t. You either are or aren’t.

  Maybe this kind of talk makes sense in a warm prefab, but out here, making camp before dark meant life or death. She began pulling nonsense. Now, when she stopped to unfasten her bag, she’d unpack it, repack it the same way, stop thirty minutes later to repeat, always the same—lightest gear on bottom, heaviest on top—creating a cycle of irritation, forcing our tempo, slowing it, always blah-blah, you dick-slingers, you cowboys, you misogynists; I don’t need your fucking help.