Freedom [236]
Seventeen years in cramped quarters with his family had given him a thirst for solitude whose unquenchability he was discovering only now. To hear nothing but wind, birdsong, insects, fish jumping, branches squeaking, birch leaves scraping as they tumbled against each other: he kept stopping to savor this unsilent silence as he scraped paint from the house’s outer walls. The round trip to the food co-op in Fen City took ninety minutes on his bicycle. He made big pots of lentil stew and bean soup, using recipes of his mother’s, and in the evening he played with the ancient but still workable springdriven pinball machine that had been in the house forever. He read in bed until midnight and even then didn’t fall asleep immediately but lay soaking up the silence.
One late afternoon, a Friday, his tenth day at the lake, when he was returning in the canoe with some fresh unsatisfactory bittern footage, he heard car engines, loud music, and then motorcycles coming down the long driveway. By the time he got the canoe out of the water, Mitch and sexy Brenda and three other couples—three goon buddies of Mitch’s and three girls in sprayed-on bell-bottoms and halter tops—were unloading beer and camping gear and coolers onto the lawn behind the house. A diesel pickup was idling with a smoker’s cough, powering a sound system loaded with Aerosmith. One of the goon friends had a stud-collared Rottweiler on a towing-chain leash.
“Hey, nature boy,” Mitch said. “I hope you don’t mind some company.”
“Yeah, I do mind,” Walter said, blushing, in spite of himself, at how uncool he must have looked to the company. “I mind a lot. I’m here alone. You can’t be here.”
“Yes I can,” Mitch said. “In fact, it’s you that shouldn’t be here. You can stay tonight if you want, but I’m here now. You are on my property.”
“This is not your property.”
“I’m renting it now. You wanted me to pay rent, and this is what I’m renting.”
“What about your job?”
“I quit. I’m out of there.”
Walter, near tears, went into the house and hid the camera in a laundry basket. Then he rode his bicycle through a twilight suddenly drained of charm and filled with mosquitoes and hostility, and called home from the pay phone outside the Fen City Co-op. Yes, his mother confirmed, she and Mitch and his father had had angry words and decided that the best solution was to keep the house in the family and let Mitch do the repairs on it and learn to take more responsibility.
“Mom, it’s going to be party central. He’s going to burn the house down.”
“Well, I just feel more comfortable having you here and Mitch on his own,” she said. “You were right about that, sweetie. And now you can come home. We miss you, and you’re not really old enough to be by yourself all summer.”
“But I’m having a great time out here. I’m getting so much done.”
“I’m sorry about that, Walter. But this is what we’ve decided.”
Biking back to the house in near-darkness, he could hear the noise from half a mile away. Cock-rock guitar soloing, blunt drunken shouting, the dog baying, firecrackers, a motorcycle engine sputtering and screaming. Mitch and his friends had pitched tents and built a big fire and were attempting to flame-broil hamburgers in a cloud of pot smoke. They didn’t even look at Walter as he went inside. He locked himself in the bedroom and lay in bed and let himself be tortured by the noise. Why couldn’t they be quiet? Why this need to sonically assault a world in which some people appreciated silence? The din went on and on and on. It produced a fever to which everyone else was apparently immune. A fever of self-pitying alienation. Which, as it raged in Walter that night, scarred him permanently with hatred of the bellowing vox populi, and also, curiously, with an aversion to the outdoor world. He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which was like his mother’s weakness, had let him down. Had allowed itself so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only abstractly, and