PenWomanShip

They say he lost himself there in the woods on that cold grey day. They say he forgot himself, that he wasn't thinking. They say a lot of things, but it makes no difference. I know different. I know the truth.

I had seen him the week before. He called me and asked for help. Those were his words: help me.

I met him in a coffee shop in the middle of town. It was one of those cold days that gets on your nerves. Your skin is still baby fine to the sting of it and it can only remind you of the long months ahead and worse yet to come. I didn't want to be there and wished I could tell him so.

The cafe was crowded but quiet for all that. Faces looking out at me glowed with hushed chatter and the warmth of thick lamps hanging overhead. I sat down across from him and felt the cold still radiating from his body.

He looked bad. I hadn't seen him for a few weeks and I was surprised by the change. He looked like a man who'd spent the past few weeks in bed and had dressed with a grimace to put his face to the world because he knew he had no choice in the matter.

He started to cry before I said anything. Tears dropped thick and fast down his cheeks and into his mouth. I didn't know what to do.

The waitress came and poured us each a cup of coffee.

"Talk to me," I said.

I had been a social worker down in the city so I guess he thought I was the man for the job, but I was never any good at it and that was the reason I left. I wanted to remind him of that right now.

"I can't stop," he finally said.

"What?"

"I can't stop thinking. My thoughts. They won't let me be. They're all around me. Surrounding me."

I nodded. I had heard this before. Nothing I said could make any difference.

"It's like this giant pinball game there inside my head, the ball thudding from one thing to the next. Quick. Double time. I can almost hear the ping of it. It hurts. It hurts all the time."

He lifted his coffee to his lips and his hands shook. He smiled embarrassed and put the cup down again.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"Bad things."

"Be exact."

He looked around the room as if searching for an answer then turned to me and looked me full in the face. He was a man who had made a decision. I could see that now.

"I'm going away."

"Where to?"

"I don't know. Just...somewhere."

"Why?"

"There's nothing here. Nothing."

"It will follow you you know."

"Maybe," he said but he didn't seem to care.

"What about Jeannie?"

Jeannie was the woman he'd slept with a few times but it was no more than that and I couldn't see it lasting.

"She's better off without me."

I studied his face, the blackened stubble at his chin, the red-assaulted eyes, the thin hair hanging limp and dirty, obscuring his view. I had seen the signs before with others. I knew what he was thinking. I began to worry.

We had been friends for years. There was something clearly wrong with him. He'd had these episodes before, long ones that made no sense. He was fine it seemed and then he wasn't. There was a desperation to him, a deep and abiding grief that would not leave him, would not let him be. And then he was fine again and we could forget about it all for a little while. He tried to explain it away as just his disposition. He wasn't a carefree kind of guy he said. But it was more than that, much more, and we both knew it. Some people would wonder why I stuck by him and I wondered it too myself sometimes but above all else I wanted to be a good person and this friendship was part of that equation.

"Look," I told him, "I know you've had a hard year..." He had lost his father in the spring and his job soon after. His wife left. Things were going rough with him. It was hard to keep going I knew it.

"What about our hunting trip?" I finally asked though it didn't seem to matter.

"Oh! I forgot!"

"Are we still going?"

"Okay," he said. "Why not? One last hurrah."

He gave what was meant to be a smile then but it came out all crooked and made him look strange. I could think of nothing else right then but putting him out of his misery.

"We'll talk then," I said, "about all this," and I swept my arm wide before me to show him there was a world still to be said.

We walked out of the cafe and stood there awkwardly in the doorway for a few moments. I told him to call me, that I'd be there. I didn't know what else to say.

I picked him up a few days later on a grey day not much warmer than all the days before. He was waiting outside his apartment, waiting patiently it seemed, his old green duffle bag at his feet, his rifle straddled across his chest. He was still unshaven but his clothes looked clean. That was something. Maybe everything would be all right.

We didn't say much on the way to the camp. We talked about books mostly and movies, who looked good in hockey. He kept pestering the radio dial careening back and forth between stations, not making up his mind for more than a minute, until I told him to turn the damn thing off already. He was quiet then staring at the road ahead or watching the trees flit past outside the window.

I thought a lot about what I was supposed to say to him, how I could make this come out right. But his life was different than mine as each of ours is and I didn't know what his idea of hell was. That was different too. If he had made up his mind, if he had really decided, there was nothing I could do to stop him.

When we got to the camp, we unpacked the groceries then set about making dinner. I fried up some hamburgers and he tossed a salad and we ate quietly together but it was not unpleasant. After dinner he sat down to watch the game and drank a few beers though not so many and I sat across from him in a corner of the room reading my book and sipping coffee. When the game ended he said he was going for a walk and just like that he walked out into the darkness of the woods. He was gone for a long time and I couldn't help worrying. My ears kept straining for any little sound, any small sign of him. There were the usual crackles and creaking in the night, small animals running about. Every few moments I would tense up, sure that I had lost him, that he was never coming back.

After about an hour he walked back in with his head down and his eyes looking empty. I asked him if he wanted to talk but he said not now and I let him be. When we got into our beds I lay there for a long time not sleeping and wondering what the next days would bring. He was awake too and we both knew it of the other but neither of us spoke, neither of us made the effort. There was a tension in the air between us, our thoughts crackled in the night, but there was a comfort too, both of us in this together, whatever this was.

I lay there in the darkness for a long time. I couldn't sleep until I'd heard his soft snores, contenting myself that he was safe if only for a few short hours. I thought about the last time I was really worried about him, more than worried, frightened in fact. We had been teenagers then and there was recklessness to both of us as is always the case with those times, that age. We had walked down to the woods not far from town. We were drinking shotguns and shared a joint between us. I was feeling good but there was a sadness with him that I could feel in my skin. His girlfriend had just broken up with him, said it could never work out, he wasn't the one she said. He loved her or thought he did and it made him want to do something big, something dramatic with his life to change himself somehow. We had finished the joint and were walking along the railway tracks back towards town. I stopped to take a pee and he walked on ahead of me. I called to him to wait up but he kept going determined. When I was done with my business I ran up ahead meaning to catch up with him but I looked along the bridge and he was nowhere in sight. I ran faster then concerned suddenly. I didn't know if I had underestimated him, I didn't know what he would do. I came to the center of the bridge and something made me look down into the river. He was there on the ground, his body twisted and hurting. I ran down the bank and got to him quick. I yelled at him, swore at him, I couldn't help it, he had me that scared. His face was the colour of the skin of an elephant. He was grimacing with the pain. I tried to get him up but he couldn't make it so I ran to the nearest house and got some help.

When I came back I asked him to explain. Why had he jumped? What in hell was he doing? I don't know was all he said. I don't know. He healed after that, a few broken ribs, a concussion, it all mended soon. But it left me with a feeling of wariness around him, I had to look out, to play sentry with him. It was a feeling that never left me.

***

In the morning we got up early and ate breakfast then grabbed our rifles and headed into the woods. We walked for a long time it seemed and he talked along the way not animated exactly but more to stave off the silence. He was telling me about this book he'd read back in high school about the native Indians, describing in detail their hunting techniques, how they tracked and killed, how they dressed their prey. I pretended to listen though I wasn't really interested. I had never really liked hunting but it was time spent with my friend so I went along with it. A man reaches an age when the making of friends is so much more complicated than in the days of the schoolyard; each encounter becomes more precious, you want to hold it close to your chest.

He told me then that he would like to have lived in a bygone day, a simpler time when you knew what was what.

"People were more self-reliant then," he said. "They were stronger. I envy them that."

"People are weak today. I'm weak."

"Don't say that."

"It's the truth."

I got to my perch and got myself settled, pouring a cup of coffee from the thermos I'd brought along and covering my legs with a thin blanket. I said goodbye to him and heard his rustle for a few minutes more and then there was silence and then he was gone. I got out my book and tried to read but I couldn't concentrate, he was with me still. I thought a lot in those moments about what makes a friend, what I would do for him, what it would cost me.

I thought about what he'd said one time, a long time ago it seemed. He had been happy then, happier than I'd known him. He was in love, he'd just gotten married and he was beaming with that, with his new life, with all the possibilities stretched out before him.

"What if this is it?" he'd asked me. "As good as it gets."

"Then we'll live with that," I told him. "This is pretty good you have to admit."

"Maybe it's not enough."

"It'll have to be."

"If I go back to the way it was....you'll stop me won't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Let's make a pact," he said.

"No," I told him forcefully.

"I thought we were friends."

"I don't know what you want. What do you want from me?"

"Just this...I want to be happy. I want to be happier than I am even now. I can't go back. If it gets worse I want you to help me."

We stopped talking then. I refused to listen. I wanted no part of it. I thought now about what he'd asked me way back then. I knew he was serious. I wondered if he'd forgotten it all by now.

***

I sat up in my perch after a time and looked about me. There was nothing there, no telltale rustling, no crackling underfoot. I sat back and read and waited some more.

After a couple of hours my ears began to stiffen and I sat up again to take notice of my surroundings. I couldn't see anything, not yet, but I knew even so that something was coming. A wind shot up and the woods began to creak and it was hard to distinguish one sound from another. I heard a shot then way off in the distance and thought for a minute that it was him but that made no sense, he was closer than that, just across the way. Still I was frightened, I couldn't help but be.

I started to get restless then and thought I would get up soon to stretch my legs but the woods began to talk to me and things seemed closer. I picked up my rifle and steadied it in my arms and saw a patch of brown far off still but coming my way. I waited carefully for what seemed a long time and finally a brownish square stood out from a gathering of trees and I knew the time had come. I hesitated just a second then pulled the trigger quickly then got down from my perch and ran to the spot.

The blood was coursing crimson against his body. The side of his jacket was mangled with shot, the leaves beside him turning wet and sticky in the cold morning air. I thought I would faint at the sight of it. He was grimacing with the pain, biting down on his lip, breathing in forcefully, worn from the effort. After a time he looked calm if a little surprised and I wondered what it was that he was thinking. He looked young, younger than his years, far too young for something so serious to happen to him.

I ran to the cabin to use the phone and the ambulance came and took him away. I watched his body being lifted into the back and I wanted to fix him somehow, all by myself. I stayed back with the police then and there were many questions. I tried to explain myself but they were skeptical at best. They couldn't get past the bottom line: that I was an experienced hunter and I'd almost killed him.

***

I went to visit him in the hospital as soon as I could and waited a long time before they'd let me in to see him. I saw the tube running foreign from his chest and the monitor beeping on the table beside him. He was asleep so I couldn't talk to him and I was relieved at that and more than ashamed. I couldn't look at him for more than a minute. I couldn't fathom that this is what he wanted. I stood there for a long time looking away from him, wondering what would happen to him, to me, to us both.

I came to visit him every day and when they released him I was there waiting. I nursed him after that for more than a month, buying his groceries, cooking his dinner, playing cards, keeping him safe. We didn't talk a lot, just sat out on the porch some nights barely breathing. I didn't know what to tell him, how to make things right. There are some things that are bigger than me I thought. I didn't have the answers. Neither did he. We never talked of what happened in the woods that day, there was too much between us. If he had talked about it I knew I would have moved away from him. I didn't want to hear what he had to say on the matter. I didn't want to hear anything he said.

I left him then after a month, left him to his own devices, as hard as that was. I left town and tried not to look back, I couldn't afford to. He was my friend and that was something but in the end it wasn't enough for all that had happened.

They said a lot of things then, talked at my back, their whispers following me on my way out of town. They said a lot of things but it makes no difference. I know the truth.