what brand to buy and the wife of the owner waiting on her is getting mad. She still can’t decide, but then sees us, and weaves over and asks if we own the motorcycles. We nod yes. Then she wants a ride on one. I move back and let John handle this.
He puts her off graciously, but she comes back again and again, offering him a dollar for a ride. I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression. We get out and back into the brown hills and heat again.
By the time we reach Lemmon we are really aching tired. At a bar we hear about a campground to the south. John wants to camp in a park in the middle of Lemmon, a comment that sounds strange and angers Chris greatly.
I’m more tired now than I can remember having been in a long time. The others too. But we drag ourselves through a supermarket, pick up whatever groceries come to mind and with some difficulty pack them onto the cycles. The sun is so far down we’re running out of light. It’ll be dark in an hour. We can’t seem to get moving. I wonder, are we dawdling, or what?
“C’mon, Chris, let’s go”, I say.
“Don’t holler at me. I’m ready.”
We drive down a county road from Lemmon, exhausted, for what seems a long, long time, but can’t be too long because the sun is still above the horizon. The campsite is deserted. Good. But there is less than a half-hour of sun and no energy left. This is the hardest now.
I try to get unpacked as fast as possible but am so stupid with exhaustion I just set everything by the camp road without seeing what a bad spot it is. Then I see it is too windy. This is a High Plains wind. It is semidesert here, everything burned up and dry except for a lake, a large reservoir of some sort below us. The wind blows from the horizon across the lake and hits us with sharp gusts. It is already chilly. There are some scrubby pines back from the road about twenty yards and I ask Chris to move the stuff over there.
He doesn’t do it. He wanders off down to the reservoir. I carry the gear over by myself.
I see between trips that Sylvia is making a real effort at setting things up for cooking, but she’s as tired as I am.
The sun goes down.
John has gathered wood but it’s too big and the wind is so gusty it’s hard to start. It needs to be splintered into kindling. I go back over to the scrub pines, hunt around through the twilight for the machete, but it’s already so dark in the pines I can’t find it. I need the flashlight. I look for it, but it’s too dark to find that either.
I go back and start up the cycle and ride it back over to shine the headlight on the stuff so that I can find the flashlight. I look through all the stuff item by item to find the flashlight. It takes a long time to realize I don’t need the flashlight, I need the machete, which is in plain sight. By the time I get it back John has got the fire going. I use the machete to hack up some of the larger pieces of wood.
Chris reappears. He’s got the flashlight!
“When are we going to eat?” he complains.
“We’re getting it fixed as fast as possible”, I tell him. “Leave the flashlight here.”
He disappears again, taking the flashlight with him.
The wind blows the fire so hard it doesn’t reach up to cook the steaks. We try to fix up a shelter from the wind using large stones from the road, but it’s too dark to see what we’re doing. We bring both cycles over and catch the scene in a crossbeam of headlights. Peculiar light. Bits of ash blowing up from the fire suddenly glow bright white in it, then disappear in the wind.
BANG! There’s a loud explosion behind us. Then I hear Chris giggling.
Sylvia is upset.
“I found some firecrackers”, Chris says.
I catch my anger in time and say to him, coldly, “It’s time to eat now.”
“I need some matches”, he says.
“Sit down and eat.”
“Give me some matches first.”
“Sit down and eat.”
He sits down and I try to eat the steak with my Army mess knife, but it is too tough, and so I get out a hunting knife and use it instead. The light from the motorcycle headlight is full upon me so that the knife, when it goes down into the mess gear, is in full shadow and I can’t see where it’s going.
Chris says he can’t cut his either and I pass my knife to him. While reaching for it he dumps everything onto the tarp.
No one says a word.
I’m not angry that he spilled it, I’m angry that now the tarp’s going to be greasy the rest of the trip.
“Is there any more?” he asks.
“Eat that”, I say. “It just fell on the tarp.”
“It’s too dirty”, he says.
“Well, that’s all there is.”
A wave of depression hits. I just want to go to sleep now. But he’s angry and I expect we’re going to have one of his little scenes. I wait for it and pretty soon it starts.
“I don’t like the taste of this”, he says.
“Yes, that’s rough, Chris.”
“I don’t like any of this. I don’t like this camping at all.”
“It was your idea”, Sylvia says. “You’re the one who wanted to go camping.”
She shouldn’t say that, but there’s no way she can know. You take his bait and he’ll feed you another one, and then another, and another until you finally hit him, which is what he really wants.
“I don’t care”, he says.
“Well, you ought to”, she says.
“Well, I don’t.”
An explosion point is very near. Sylvia and John look at me but I remain deadpan. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do right now. Any argument will just worsen things.
“I’m not hungry”, Chris says.
No one answers.
“My stomach hurts”, he says.
The explosion is avoided when Chris turns and walks away in the darkness.
We finish eating. I help Sylvia clean up, and then we sit around for a while. We turn the cycle lights off to conserve the batteries and because the light from them is ugly anyway. The wind has died down some and there is a little light from the fire. After a while my eyes become accustomed to it. The food and anger have taken off some of the sleepiness. Chris doesn’t return.
“Do you suppose he’s just punishing?” Sylvia asks.
“I suppose”, I say, “although it doesn’t sound quite right.” I think about it and add, “That’s a child- psychology term… a context I dislike. Let’s just say he’s being a complete bastard.”
John laughs a little.
“Anyway”, I say, “it was a good supper. I’m sorry he had to act up like this.”
“Oh, that’s all right”, John says. “I’m just sorry he won’t get anything to eat.”
“It won’t hurt him.”
“You don’t suppose he’ll get lost out there.”
“No, he’ll holler if he is.”
Now that he has gone and we have nothing to do I become more aware of the space all around us. There is not a sound anywhere. Lone prairie.
Sylvia says, “Do you suppose he really has stomach pains?”
“Yes”, I say, somewhat dogmatically. I’m sorry to see the subject continued but they deserve a better explanation than they’re getting. They probably sense that there’s more to it than they’ve heard. “I’m sure he does”, I finally say. “He’s been examined a half-dozen times for it. Once it was so bad we thought it was appendicitis — I remember we were on a vacation up north. I’d just finished getting out an engineering proposal for a five-million-dollar contract that just about did me in. That’s a whole other world. No time and no patience and six
