I suggested that we spend the night at a motel, but Cat was determined to get a full taste of my lifestyle. We trudged back up the hill, ate some cold Chinese take-out, finished off half the remaining beers, and got sloshed enough not to care much about physical discomforts.
Chapter 8
The rain stopped that evening, and by noon on Thursday the sky cleared up, so we decided to take a walk. I figured we’d walk the borders of my land, then explore some of the country to the west.
“Let’s go on a real hike!” Cat suggested.
“Like …?”
“Like when you pack pemmican and water and spend all day. And have a compass and binoculars.”
“Pemmican?”
“That’s what we called it at Camp Watitoh. The Indians used it when they went on long hunting trips. A mush of nuts and raisins and M&Ms.”
“Indians had M&Ms?”
“They put in jerky instead.”
I had no pemmican ingredients and no compass or binocs, but we packed saltines, bananas, a chocolate bar, and two beers. We filled two water bottles. I put all remaining food in my metal-lined cabinet, and we went off uphill.
We found my uphill property boundary, the wall of tumbled boulders, then turned left and followed it as the slope descended toward Hubbard’s land. After the rain, the forest was sparkling, fulsome, glorious: brilliant green leaves sunlit through and translucent like stained glass, the shifting mottle of the forest floor, jack-in-the-pulpits, trilliums, ovoid pellets of deer scat, red squirrels skittering out of view and then, unable to contain their curiosity, peeping around a tree at us. Close to us, the birds went silent, but in the near distance, their songs rioted. Lots of blackflies, but we had doused ourselves thoroughly.
Cat got snagged and scratched more than I did, but she stayed game. Our conversation took on rhythms that varied with the terrain, the typical back-and-forth interrupted by silence when we had to navigate down tricky sections of slope or clamber uphill on all fours.
Matt had another new girlfriend, a total slut. Our friend Tom, a talented weekend sax player, had decided to make a career of it, going for a master’s degree in music from Indiana University; I should come down for his goodbye party in July. The new teacher filling my slot at Larson Middle School was okay but would never be able to fill my shoes.
We talked about Megan’s announcement that she was pregnant—twins, according to the ultrasound—and about Tomás’ alcohol problem, which had gotten to the stage of a yanked driver’s license and loss of custody of his daughter. Valerie’s car got impounded for unpaid parking tickets, which we all had warned her would happen.
Cat looked at me sideways as we descended to the edge of a rolling cornfield and began skirting it. “Don’t you miss it? Miss everybody?”
“Some of it.”
“I mean, I still don’t get why … Was it just getting away from that shit at Larson? Or, what, like, pique? At Matt?”
I ignored her question about events at school and answered the part I felt more confident with. “Matt? Fuck, no! Jesus!” A bit later, I grumbled, “‘Pique’ is hardly the right word.” This was understatement to an extreme degree. For me, our ending had been like shoving a beef joint through a meat grinder.
“I know,” she said apologetically. She understood the many levels of heartbreak and disillusionment it had meant for me.
“Actually, I’m still not sure I can stick this out. If I don’t find a job, I can’t live in the woods in winter, I’ll have to bail. I’ll still have to pay off Brassard, but I can scoot by with my savings until I sell the land.”
“You still owe him money!”
“Just ten grand. There’s some more money due from my aunt’s estate.”
She frowned.
“Everything was totally fucked, Cat! Everything! I needed to do something different. Something not in the city, not safely … ensconced among friends. Or trapped among former friends! Something out of my own ruts. I know, doing this doesn’t make sense, but it …”
“… seemed like a good idea at the time,” she finished.
Neither of us laughed.
We circumnavigated the field, putting in half a mile on the forest verge, coming out on a dirt road near a barn and house that I assumed were Hubbard’s. We headed south on the road. At noon, we stopped to eat some of our rations, resting on a tumbledown stone wall among the flurry of blackflies, nodding to the occasional passing cars.
After a few minutes of silence, Cat surprised me. “And what about men?”
“What’s a ‘man’?”
She laughed. “Personally, I’d think after Matt you’d want a torrid affair. Rinse the little shitbag out of your system.”
“I don’t have much ‘torrid’ in me at this point. Once I get a job, rent a place in town, I’ll be in contact with the human race. I’ll check out my torridity then. Vermont is very hip.”
She nodded equivocally. “So I’ve heard.”
Eventually, the sun’s heat wore us down and we turned back. We’d seen some lovely views, climbed a bit of cliffside overlooking the river, skinny-dipped in the cold clear water. When we headed back, we were tired enough to follow the roads rather than go overland. We walked past Hubbard’s farm again, then uphill to where our road intersected the ridge road.
I hadn’t explored the larger area much, because I’d been too busy setting up my domestic functions and inspecting my navel. In fact, I had never gone past the turnoff to Brassard’s valley. So I’d never actually seen “the trash that lives up the hill,” as Diz called the Goslants.
I think our encounter with them upset Cat even more than me.
Along the ridge road, the forest was heavy for a quarter mile, but just around a bend, the landscape changed shockingly. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a cut-over wasteland of stumps and brush through which blackberry canes and scrub trees had snarled themselves. You see this kind of place here and there in Vermont, looking like a
