East of the Mountains Read online

  This strategy had possibilities, he realized, so he programmed his VCR to record a show called Great Railway Journeys playing on public television, and turned back a copy of Scientific American—a Christmas gift from Renee, his daughter—which he placed on his bedside table. He wished he had reserved some bills unpaid to leave behind on top of his dresser: he might have arranged them artfully to appear artlessly strewn.

  He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretense that everything was ordinary, but in fact to service his end-game ruse. He was going over the mountains, he'd said, to hunt for quail in willow canyons, he had no particular canyons in mind, he intended to return on Thursday evening, though possibly, if the hunting was good, he would return on Friday or Saturday. The lie was open-ended so that his family wouldn't start worrying until he'd been dead for as long as a week—so none would miss or seek him where he rotted silently in the sage. Ben imagined how it might be otherwise, his cancer a pestilent force in their lives, or a pall descending over them like ice, just as they'd begun to emerge from the pall of Rachel's death. The last thing they needed was for Ben to tell them of his terminal colon cancer.

  He sat at Renees table with a fork in his hand, admiring her durable, quiet beauty—at fifty she was slender, thoroughly gray, aging in a poignant, tender way—and taking note of Chris's forearms, which were vein-cabled, thickly corded. He asked after his granddaughter, Emma, who had married a man from Wellington, New Zealand, and was rarely seen in Seattle anymore; he asked after Renee's husband, John, who was on a business trip. Ben urged Renee to talk about her work—she wrote screenplays for children's movies and had penned two highly respected scripts—but she was, as usual, reticent about it out of a native modesty and preferred to deflect the conversation toward Chris, who had embarked on his third year of medical school. He'd begun his clinics, he told Ben. He was seeing patients for the first time, but only for the purpose of asking questions and to practice diagnosis: he found it more interesting than labs. "What about a climb?" he asked out of nowhere. "We haven't gone since August."

  "Well, I don't know," answered Ben.

  "What about Silver Peak?" insisted his grandson. "Up in the pass. A shakedown cruise. A tune-up run. A day hike."

  "I don't know if I can do it anymore. My legs are beginning to wobble."

  Chris held a piece of bread in his hand. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "You're still the toughest old goat in the mountains. Don't start talking like that."

  "I'm not the toughest goat in the mountains. That's you, Chris."

  "Silver Peak," said his grandson.

  They'd climbed together for fifteen years. Chris had been with him on fifty summits. They'd taken lunch on mountaintops, sprawled back easily on their elbows, peaks spread out before them. The boy was strong and confronted his climbs with an admirable good cheer. Ben enjoyed his company. Early he'd taken the boy to the mountains, but of late the boy took him.

  "All right, Silver Peak," Ben said, and it was this lie he found most disturbing now, as he stood in his bedroom arranging more lies. "We'll go up there when I get home."

  Ben decided he hadn't packed to produce the illusion he wanted. If this was at least a six-day hunting trip, beginning on a Saturday and ending on a Thursday, his outfit would certainly include more clothing, and so he gathered more together—socks, shirts, long underwear, and a worn pair of canvas-faced brush pants. In the bathroom he made up a full toilet kit, including a tube of hemorrhoid cream, a bottle of aspirin, his second pair of glasses, and his bottle of calcium gluconate pills for easing leg cramps at night.

  The truth was that at the end of this day of hunting, he intended to set his dogs free on the sagelands, hang himself up between strands of barbed wire—as if he'd been making a low fence crossing—and shoot himself in the carotid artery: shoot himself in the neck. Only his doctor, Bill Ward, would suspect the truth, but even Bill wouldn't feel certain about it, given all the evidence to the contrary, and anyway he wouldn't want to hurt anyone by suggesting that Ben had committed suicide. For Bill, Ben knew, there was a protocol about such matters, a principle governing them. Unless obliged by a coroner's inquest or an insurance agent's inquiry, Bill Ward would keep Ben's cancer to himself.

  Pausing in his bathroom, staring in the mirror, Ben recollected his pact with Rachel on the train from Mantua to Bressanone: that the ashes that were the remains of them both would someday make a bed for roses—his for a red rose, hers for a white: the two to grow and intertwine with the passing of many years. It had been the foolish desire of romantics, the sentimental vow of young lovers. It had been the sort of thing young people wish for in their recklessness and passion. He and Rachel, on growing older, had been amused by the idea of these roses, but had not let go of them, either. And he prayed now, thinking of her, that their pact might yet be consummated. He'd preserved her ashes in such a hope.

  But perhaps the price of his suicide was that such a thing couldn't happen, and he imagined his bones bleached to dust in the sagelands, scattered about by coyotes. He imagined, too, that his dogs might wander into hunger, hardship, death. He hoped they would somehow fend for themselves and find their way to another hunter, yet he still felt he owed them more than to abandon them in that expanse of empty canyons. His last meal, too, he understood—the breast of a quail, spit-cooked on a fire—would go to nurture nothing but the worms and maggots feeding on a dead man.

  When he returned, Rex had jumped across the car seat and had his forepaws over the rucksack. Ben had to prod against his haunches in an effort to force him rearward, Rex resisting stubbornly until Ben caught him at the throat. He spoke frankly to the dog about his behavior, then turned the Scout's engine over. As always it expired momentarily and required a half dozen strokes of the accelerator before the choke sustained itself.

  Briefly, he sat idling in front of his house—a half-timbered Tudor, modest in scale—where the telephone answering machine was on, the heat set at fifty-five degrees, and the timers on the lamps in the living room and bedroom set at five and ten P.M., respectively. The rain beat hard so that the house seemed shrouded, beleaguered, and somehow reduced. A neighbor had been solicited to collect the daily newspapers and mail and to move the garbage out to the curb by eight A.M. Tuesday morning. Ben noted, to his satisfaction, that all had been left in proper order. He'd made his arrangements carefully, seeing that every detail was covered. To the last he'd attended to particulars.

  Working himself into a seizure of purpose, Ben drove away without looking back at his home of forty-three years. The rain rattled off the car roof, fell in long streaks through the arcs of streetlamps, and ran torrentially in the gutters. He could not see more than a few yards in front of him, even with the wipers barreling at full speed. Through the glass the streets he passed along seemed only half real, half formed. He leaned forward, squinting a little, switched on the defroster and made an adjustment to the heat lever. It was shy of six o'clock on a Saturday morning; no one else was on the road just yet. No other travelers, just Ben.

  On the interstate he poured a cup of lemon tea, steadying it before him on the dashboard so that it shed a crescent of steam against the windshield, and settled back in his seat. There was the high smell of dogs in the car, the sharp odor of their animal digestive tracts, the rain evaporating from their rank fur. There were whitecaps southward on Lake Washington as he crossed the wind-wracked floating bridge. To the north the water was a black expanse, and on the east side, beyond Mercer Island, loomed half-built exit ramps dressed in skins of intricate concrete pouring forms. The wind tore tired leaves from the alders and blew them onto the freeway. The long shore of Lake Sammamish, once a place of marsh and cattails, now lay throttled by condominiums, their yard lamps bathing the valley. At Issaquah, there were more lights: a Triple X Root Beer, a Texaco gas station, a Dairy Queen, Boehm's Candies. Then the last of the suburbs dropped away, and he was climbing the grade above Issaquah Creek
beneath the rain-embattled trees.

  A tractor-trailer roared past on the right, and a sudden slap of road water, lashed from its tires, washed across his windshield. He could not make out the borders of the lanes or much beyond the rain in his headlights, as white as sleet and flashing rapidly like small electric sparks. Another truck passed, and then there was no one, and Ben took a sip from his lemon tea and fell into fretful meditation.

  His cancer had metastasized, traveling from the mucosa of his colon to the lymph nodes close to his tumor, and from there to sites in his liver. Each day he fortified himself once again to accept this intractable state of affairs; each day he started over. He was, he knew, incurable; he had seen too much in his years as a doctor to delude himself that things were otherwise. He knew exactly what to expect and could not turn away from meeting. After the bedsores and bone fractures, the bacterial infection from the catheter, the fluid accumulating between his viscera that would have to be expunged through a drainage tube; after the copious vomiting, the dehydration and lassitude, the cracked lips, dry mouth, tube feedings, and short breath, the dysphagia, pneumonia, and feverishness, the baldness and endgame sensation of strangling; after he had shrunk to eighty-five pounds and was gasping his last in a nursing-home bed—only at that point would Bill Ward put him down under a drip of death-inducing morphine. That was how his life would end if he did not end it first.

  He was well aware of countervailing arguments, but these, he saw now, had been forwarded by people not yet confronted by death. He, too, had articulated at times the consolations of a gradual dying: how the trivial paled in the face of death, yet the veins in the tree leaves and the evening slant of light were brought to the forefront of existence. How all was intensified, heightened, compressed, vivified, transformed, appreciated. How love deepened and ordinary tribulations sank into insignificance. How one had time for a summing up, days on which to meditate in search of a divine composure. Yet what had he really known of these matters even as soothing words about them flowed easily from his mouth? What had he fathomed of dying? Ben knew there were regions of pain so bleak they could not be traveled without surgery to sever nerves in the spinal cord. There were regions of pain so terrible, they obliterated all argument. The cancer-ridden, often, preferred to die as the only antidote to their suffering. Such was predominantly the case at the end; such might be the case for him, too.

  It did not seem to him cowardly to want to avoid pain. He had seen enough of it in his seventy-three years to understand its indifference to character, temperament, or virtue. There was no real bravery in enduring it, but only fear of pains alternative, the cessation of everything.

  The biology of the body, which he'd confronted every day, had not in the least taught Dr. Givens to disbelieve in God. On the contrary, he had seen that the body was divine, and he had witnessed the ceasing of its processes often enough to know that something holy left the body at the very moment of death.

  It was sometimes possible—the perception came and went—to view the imminence of his own end with a calm, fearless detachment. In his grave he would experience nothing, the condition of death would not be painful, it was nothing, a kind of sleep. The problem, then, wasn't death but dying, and if the trial of dying could be got through—like any horrifying or painful ordeal—death, the other side, would be endurable. And so the best one could do, it seemed, was to remove the pain and horror from the process by choosing an intelligent suicide. A course well thought out, rational, the least of many possible evils. The worst of it was his present melancholy, and the illusion that after his end came, he would experience an eternal regret. In this nether-life he now endured, he experienced regret already. He felt no longer a part of the world. Everything reeked of the grave.

  The rain fell even harder over Tiger Mountain, and by the time he had crossed the Raging River, he had slowed to fifty miles an hour. He passed Echo Lake and Rattlesnake Peak, and in the darkness of morning the hills all around—or what he could see of them through the veil of rain—were a bare shade darker than the sky. The faint first light from out of the east made the crests of the hills just distinguishable from the heavens, and as he traveled down the long grade to North Bend, the profile of Mount Si became visible. Ben had scaled it three dozen times, mostly to test his strength and endurance before more difficult ascents. Its abrupt black fault-scarp seemed to rise up directly from the lights of North Bends main street, and the promontory of its summit—the Haystack, it was called—appeared forbidding against the sky.

  The highway began to climb in earnest, following the south fork of the Snoqualmie River, past Harmon Heights, Cedar Butte, Grouse Ridge, and the low summit of Mount Washington. Here the trucks worked around one another and the wind whistled through the window moldings. Ben passed the cutoff to McClellan Butte—another promontory he had climbed often—and the Tinkham Road cutoff where in the growing light he could see the river steaming. The rain was pummeling the flats along its bank and melding into its currents. Power lines traveled over the hills. As the light of morning grew more expansive, the mist tucked low in the valleys was revealed, and the first snow dusting the high couloirs. It occurred to Ben to follow his present heart and on the spur of the moment change everything, hike in the rain to the summit of Silver Peak, and there simply lie on the crest of the Cascades and wait for the end to come. The plan had a soothing elegance, and the prospect of succumbing to a hypothermic torpor was not really so dreadful. It was less like taking one's life than allowing it to be taken. One just stopped living, that was all.

  The mountains beckoned in this way, the green wet flanks of mountains breaking out into windswept scree and snow. Ben shrugged them off and continued on his way. He was bent on crossing into the country beyond. He had been born in the cradle of apple orchards, and it was this world he wanted to return to.

  Past Humpback Mountain the road turned north and began to climb more steeply. A trio of haul trucks, convoy-fashion, took the grade at thirty miles an hour in the far right-hand lane. The darkness had mostly given way to the low gray light of early morning, and Ben could see red huckleberry brush and vine maples on the hillsides. Everything glistened and swam with rain, and the creeks plashing down their deep-cut ravines were white and fast with it. The Scout seemed to float for sudden interludes, as if riding weightlessly on shallow surf—there was the spatter of water beneath the wheels and the sense of being unmoored from the earth—and then it would seize the road again. And there were the headlights of a car behind him now, and the taillights of two cars in front of him, shimmering beyond his windshield. Ben slowed to forty miles an hour and leaned tautly forward. The rain, the wet pavement, the trucks to his right, the windows around him fogged with the breath of dogs—the moment was so fraught with dangers that when Rex hurled suddenly over the seat to settle his forepaws again on the rucksack, Ben felt a surge of anger. The dog had to learn his place in things, as Tristan before him had. He had to understand how it was.

  Ben spoke beseechingly at first, then with urgent command in his voice, then with the low melody of gentle threat. When nothing happened—Rex did not move—Ben took him firmly by the collar. "Get back there," he said between clenched teeth, exerting himself to pull the dog off the rucksack, but Rex only whimpered and held his ground.

  Ben anchored himself against the Scouts steering wheel and tried to dislodge his dog. Half-turned in his seat, his hand behind him and locked at the dog's throat, he did not have time to correct or control matters when the Scout began to slide toward the median. He let go of the dog and swiveled forward, the car skating silently and as if in slow motion, and clutched the steering wheel. The Scout struck the concrete road barrier and rebounded across all four eastbound lanes, sliding miraculously between two haul trucks and down the summit exit ramp, where it slammed into a small fir tree.

  TWO

  The rain beat hard on the Scouts roof. A boy pulled open the drivers door and placed a hand on Bens shoulder. "Are you okay?" he asked.

&
nbsp; "I don't know," Ben answered. He was holding his head in his palms.

  "You need some help? You need a doctor? You're bleeding pretty bad, it looks like."

  "I am a doctor," said Ben.

  The boy took his hand from Ben's shoulder and shut off the ignition. There was a squall of whimpering from the rear of the car—Tristan and Rex both sounding unnerved—and the boy urged them to settle down. Swinging his wet hair from his eyes, he squatted in the door of the Scout.

  "You're going to need some help," he said. "It looks like you need stitches."

  "My dogs," said Ben. "How are they?"

  Suddenly there was a girl behind the boy, a tall girl in a yellow slicker. "Are you okay?" she asked.

  "He's all right," the boy answered gently. "Everything's all right."

  "I'm fine," said Ben, "but what about my dogs? How do they look back there?"

  "They look good," the boy assured him. "It's you we're worried about."

  Ben held the heel of a palm to his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. With his other hand, he slid free his glasses: one lens was broken, the other had popped out, the frames were twisted and mangled. Blood trickled into his left eye and along the left side of his nose with warm constancy. "Your head must've hit the wheel," the boy said. "Here you go. Use this."

  From his hip pocket he slid a blue bandanna folded into a square. He leaned into the car and with no hesitation cleaned the blood from Ben's face; then, turning the bandanna inside out, he pressed it against Bens forehead. "Drop your head back," he advised gently, "and hold this here for a minute."

  Ben did. His neck hurt.

  "Why don't we get him in the van?" asked the girl. "It's pouring out here and everything."

  Ben couldn't see her or anything else with any power of distinction. A dense black shroud lay over his consciousness, and he felt that his brain had been jarred loose. At the same time, he felt startled awake, infused with adrenaline, raw. There was the giddy exhilaration experienced by those who survive accidents intact; there was a sense of freedom and good fortune, of his place among the blessed.