The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Read online

  acclaim for David Guterson’s

  The Country Ahead of Us,

  the Country Behind

  “The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind is superb, tough, intense, wise, with characters meticulously rendered. I really cannot imagine a more affecting first collection.”

  —Mary Robison

  “David Guterson is my great hope for the future of American fiction. Here at last is an antidote for the pretense and fashionable angst in Brat Pack fiction of the 1980s.”

  —Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage

  “A seamless flow of language and story rewards the reader’s efforts. Well crafted and polished … these tales tender truth.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Set mostly in the clean outdoors of the Northwest, in a world in which hunting and fishing and sports are among life’s givens, the stories contrast this outward robust confidence with the inner doubts and disillusionments that are, in Guterson’s reckoning, what little boys, and big ones, too, are made of. The pieces are well-crafted, the characters taking shape with a few simple brush strokes.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A first collection of ten stories—stark, moody portraits of men or boys faced with loss—that are tautly written, austere, occasionally lyrical, and mark Guterson as a writer to watch.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “These are wonderful, compassionate memory pieces told with a fine sense of detail, and without a whiff of sentimentality, whose revelations unfold quietly and inevitably.”

  —Booklist

  also by David Guterso

  Snow Falling on Cedars

  East of the Mountains

  Our Lady of the Forest

  David Guterson

  The Country Ahead of Us,

  the Country Behind

  David Guterson is the author of the novels Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains, and of the story collection The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind. His forthcoming novel, Our Lady of the Forest, will be published in October of 2003. A Guggenheim fellow and PEN/Faulkner Award winner, he lives in Washington State.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1996

  Copyright © 1989 by David Guterson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1989.

  The following stories have been previously published: “Opening Day” in Sports Illustrated under the title “When the Hunt is Done”; “Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada” in Washington Magazine; “Three Hunters” in The Iowa Review; “American Elm” in The Seattle Review; and “The Flower Garden” in Prairie Schooner.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guterson, David.

  The country ahead of us, the country behind : stories / by

  David Guterson. — 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. — (Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78909-9

  1. Northwest, Pacific—Social life and customs—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  [PS3557.U846C48 1995]

  813′.54—dc20 95-34665

  v3.1

  for Robin, Taylor, Travis and Henry

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Angels in the Snow

  Opening Day

  Day of the Moonwalk

  Aliens

  Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada

  Piranhas

  Three Hunters

  American Elm

  Arcturus

  The Flower Garden

  Also by This Author

  Angels in the Snow

  We were at my sister’s house for Christmas Eve, fire in the fireplace, lights on the tree, Christmas carols playing on the stereo. Outside the window a light snow blew down. Icicles hung from the gutters and in the yard the grass looked sprinkled with powder. By morning everything would be white.

  My sister had sent her children to bed and her husband, Larry, was pouring out four glasses of champagne.

  “Long life and happiness,” he said, “Merry Christmas, everyone.”

  All this was less than a year ago.

  Cora, myself, Larry, my sister: we sat around talking about normal things at first. Jobs, cars, houses, children—I don’t remember exactly: pleasant conversation. But then Larry said, because my sister asked, “Christmas on Okinawa? Do you want to know what we did? We got drunk and went to sleep. We passed out. That was Christmas Eve. Christmas Day we ate ham. We took aspirins. We called home. Somebody at the other end yelled ‘Merry Christmas!’ at you. When the echo faded you yelled ‘Merry Christmas!’ back. You hung up and then you were on Okinawa again, it was Thursday and everyone you knew had a hangover.”

  “Sounds great,” my sister said, and kissed his chin. “What about the Japanese hookers?”

  Larry sipped at his champagne and smiled. He was a big man in his early thirties, hands thick but not ungraceful, a good growth of hair on his head. My sister had a way of knocking him, of making him out to be stupid, but Larry took it all as a joke, as harmless, as her way of loving him after all.

  Larry said, “Hey. Why not? A whore was like giving yourself a Christmas present.”

  We laughed at that, and in the silence that followed my wife asked me if I had ever slept with a prostitute.

  I told them how we had gone to Las Vegas, I told them the whole story that Christmas Eve. My sister remembered—a family vacation, Memorial Day weekend. My father’d had an insurance convention.

  “Sweet sixteen and three days in Sin City,” Larry suggested, smiling. “But that’s not how it was,” I said. “That’s not it at all.” “Well, how was it then?” Cora wanted to know. So I told the three of them the whole thing, a mistake.

  We went down there, I said. We got two motel rooms at the end of the Strip, at the edge of town, after the swimming pool there was only the desert, scrub brush and barbed wire fences. It was a quiet place, hot and dusty, air conditioned, cigarette and pop machines in all the landings. A maid came at ten o’clock and cleaned your room.

  My parents went to floor shows, meetings, casinos, maybe department stores, anyway they were never around. They left us hamburger money, telephone numbers. What did they expect? What were they thinking? My sister smeared herself with suntan oil and slept by the swimming pool all day. I swam laps. I was going to be in good shape forever. The other guests lolled around while I swam furiously the backstroke and breaststroke. In the room I did sit-ups in front of the air conditioner. I looked at my muscles in the mirror. I had this Playboy magazine at the bottom of my suitcase. In it were photographs of Raquel Welch. Raquel in sequins. Raquel in the shower. Raquel on the beach in Mexico.

  “Raquel Welch,” I said to them last Christmas Eve. Was that some kind of mistake maybe? Was there something wrong in that? “It must have been Playboy,” I said to them. “I don’t remember clearly.”

  “He still reads that stuff,” said Cora. “Not really,” I insisted. “Maybe once in a while.” “Oh, come on, John,” said Cora. “Where’re we going?” I said.

  “You guys aren’t going anywhere,” said my sister. “Not at this rate you aren’t.”

  “Not on Christmas, anyway,” I said. “Tonight is Christmas Eve.” />
  “That’s the spirit,” said Larry. “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men and champagne.”

  He filled my glass, grinning, amused. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” played on the stereo.

  “Goodwill toward some men, anyway,” said Cora. “Goodwill is a two-way street.”

  “Christ,” I said. “Shut up.”

  “Don’t tell her to shut up,” said my sister. “That just makes everything worse.”

  “You have to be sensitive,” Larry threw in, winking. “That’s the whole thing nowadays.”

  “Back to Vegas,” I said. “Let me finish.”

  I was swimming laps in the swimming pool, I said. A bright day, ninety-five degrees. Up and down, back and forth, flip turns, chlorinated water sloshing in my goggles. My sister, hair in a bun pinned to the back of her head, lay sprawled out on her back like a greasy Barbie doll. Four or five others sat around in lounge chairs, drinking cans of pop and smoking cigarettes. Air conditioners dripped, a radio played, the maid rolled her cart from room to room.

  I sat in the shallows. The maid wasn’t half bad. She had a uniform on, like a nurse maybe. Two women lay on their breasts in chaise lounges. One had unclasped the hook to her bathing suit top. The other had a leg turned behind her; her toes made circles in the desert air. A man read a book on the far side of the pool, seated on a towel, his bald head sunburned, his pectorals drooping. By the diving board a fat man in mirrored sunglasses sat in a lounge chair looking wider than he was tall, coiling the silver hairs on his chest between his fingertips, the palm of his hand measuring the weights of his soft formless breasts.

  I started swimming again—the kind of teenager who confronts boredom and the dangers of aging with a passionate, religious routine.

  Back and forth, up and down, doing the butterfly, flutter kick and slashing hands, when a room key floated down into the yellow world made possible by the lenses in my swim goggles.

  “A sixteen-year-old gigolo,” Larry interrupted then. “I could see it coming there, John.”

  My sister had roasted some Safeway chestnuts, poured melted butter over them, sprinkled them with salt. We ate those now. We drank the champagne and cracked the shells. Larry blew out some of the candles on the Christmas tree—the ones that had burned low into their holders.

  Outside, snow covered the last of the lawn. The world looked hushed, delicate and beautiful.

  “A room key,” said Cora. “Is that right?”

  The key in the pool was the fat man’s key, I told the others that evening. He waved me over when I came up with it.

  I swam to where he was. I looked up and saw my face, nose like a bulb, in his sunglasses. He had his hair cut in a peculiar way—the bangs trimmed short, greasy and distinct, like a Roman soldier in a television movie.

  A fat guy in a nylon bikini suit, wristwatch, black leather sandals.

  “Listen,” he said, leaning down toward the water. “Take that room key and go have a good time. A girl’s there, she’s waiting for you, big tits, a knockout.”

  “If this isn’t fantasy, what is?” my sister asked.

  But Cora said nothing. She was waiting to hear how things came out, waiting for the rest of it with her lips pressed shut.

  * * *

  I told the fat man no, thank you, and left the key on the deck by his sandals.

  “Room 201,” the fat man said. “If you change your mind, that’s where she’ll be.”

  What was the meaning of this? I got out, hooked my thongs on, took my towel and went up to our room. Why? I asked. How much would she cost? Is this how the world of prostitutes worked? Was the fat man a pimp maybe? I felt I had connected somehow with the world of sleaze. My sister came in, took a shower, put her clothes on, her makeup. Younger than me: fifteen.

  That evening we ate at a spot called “Sir Steak’s,” five hundred yards down the road toward town. My mother and father went to see Mitzi Gaynor. My sister read beauty magazines. I sat for a while, then went for a walk. First I went into the desert, drank a Pepsi and looked at the purple shadows of the mountains. Then, vaguely excited, I caught a bus into town.

  It was all the things you’ve heard about. Old ladies waving keno slips. Busloads of gamblers. Drunks stumbling over the sidewalks. Neon wedding palaces. Change spilling out of slot machines.

  Sixteen, alone and in Vegas for the first time in my life.

  I walked down through Glitter Gulch, the middle of Vegas. I stood outside the Golden Nugget looking in. There was a Rexall Drugs, closed, a neon cowboy on a building top, a golden horseshoe suspended in midair. I sat in the lobby of the MGM Grand, hoping I would see Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra. A million cars, a million people, everyone in a hurry, everyone going to places I couldn’t understand.

  I wandered. I bought a Pepsi from a machine. I watched some people playing softball in a park. Moths swarmed in the floodlights. I ate a bag of barbecued potato chips, took a leak by a bush. I chewed some bubble gum and walked past the casinos. There were so many pretty girls I nearly died on the streets of Las Vegas.

  That’s what I told them, anyway. The truth as inspired by champagne.

  “His head’s still turning,” Cora said. “It doesn’t have to be Las Vegas.”

  “Well, whose doesn’t?” Larry said. “Name me one guy who’s immune.”

  “Not John,” said Cora. She cracked a chestnut with her fingernail. “John’s got a regular rubberneck.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said. “Come on.”

  “It’s true,” said Cora.

  “Okay, it’s true,” I said.

  My sister hit me just below the shoulder. “Will you two stop it?” she said.

  “Baby in the manger and all of that,” said Larry. “Cut it out, you two.”

  “It is true,” I said. “My neck’s made out of rubber.” I dragged down the collar of my shirt to show them. “Cora’s right about me.”

  “To hell with that,” said Larry.

  “To hell with what?” I said.

  “You’re a good enough guy,” said Larry.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “He’s got eyes in the back of his head,” said Cora. “He’s got eyes popping out all over.”

  “They’re just eyes,” said my sister. She leaned forward, making a point out of it. “Everybody looks, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s where it stops,” Larry added. “Everybody looks. But not everybody does.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Cora.”

  “Finish your story,” she said.

  I left Vegas behind. I walked back toward the motel, sweating, then caught a bus. It was all flat, it smelled of desert; the only thing standing out was the soft purple of the mountain ranges. A hot night, sultry, windless.

  Big tits. A knockout. I began to imagine this.

  I decided: pull out my copy of Playboy magazine, walk into the desert, look at the pictures of Raquel Welch and masturbate underneath the stars.

  Instead I went up the stairs to the motel’s second floor. I was just going to peek in the window, if I could—to get an idea of what she looked like.

  “Pretty juicy, John,” Larry said, filling my champagne glass again.

  The curtains were pulled tight. I stood listening. I was too nervous, I guess, because the door opened then. They must have heard me panting by the window.

  It was the fat man. “Glad you came,” he said. He wore safari pants, a Hawaiian print shirt unbuttoned to his navel, his hairy beer gut plunging out. His small teeth looked white and perfectly shaped. “Come in and have a drink,” he offered.

  “Excuse me,” I explained. “This is a mistake.”

  The fat man pointed with his thumb at the numbers on his door.

  “Room 201,” he said. “It’s what you wanted, what you came for.”

  At school there were girls like this one. Nobody looked at them. Nobody noticed. I thought maybe something was wrong with me, with the way I saw them. She was like that: slender, tight, hair long and strai
ght. She sat in a chair with a mixed drink in her hand, giving off that aura of control, of economy. An efficient, lean girl no older than twenty in a halter top, red corduroy pants, her brown navel the center of it all.

  “This is Suzette,” the fat man said. “I’m Don. You’re one hell of a swimmer. Incredible.”

  Whatever words I might have had to say were camouflaged from me, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there. It seemed as if I’d stepped outside the borders of the life I recognized. Don and Suzette, I said to myself. Names in a porno movie.

  “To think I missed out on all this,” my sister said.

  “Let him finish,” said Cora.

  I watched Larry peel open a chestnut. The fire in the fireplace had smoldered down to orange coals. Outside the window the falling snowflakes looked larger, the street was covered with a thin layer of white. At one edge of the lawn a low drift was forming—tomorrow the children would make angels in the snow.

  “You couldn’t ask for better,” my sister said happily. “A good snow on Christmas Eve.”

  I told them what happened then. I told them what the deal was. Suzette stood up with her drink in her hand. “Why don’t you relax?” she said to me. “I don’t know if I can,” I answered. “You can,” she said. “It’s easy.” And she came to me. She kissed me. I felt her tongue jump into my throat, her breasts, her hair falling across my cheek. “Don?” she said when she was finished. I looked up: the fat man had taken off his shirt, was working on his pants, he was stepping out of his safaris at the edge of the bed, he was naked, soft, silver and hairy, the only thing left on him was his wristwatch.

  “I just want to watch,” he said to me softly. “Please—don’t be frightened.”

  “It’s what he likes,” explained Suzette.

  “I’ll pay you,” Don said. “It’ll work out.”

  Suzette took my head between her hands and kissed my cheek—flicked her tongue across it like a dragonfly. I stood there, locked up inside myself. Suzette put her fingers on the button of my shirt. She kept looking into my eyes.