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By Root 942 0

it and threw it back, we were in a hot room except that the ends of our noses were nippy from sticking them out of that area to get firewood and water. Japhy put the bulgur in the pot with water and started it boiling and stirred it around and meanwhile busied himself with the mixings for the chocolate pudding and started boiling that in a separate smaller pot out of my knapsack. He also brewed a fresh pot of tea. Then he whipped out his double set of chopsticks and pretty soon we had our supper ready and laughed over it. It was the most delicious supper of all time. Up out of the orange glow of our fire you could see immense systems of uncountable stars, either as individual blazers, or in low Venus droppers, or vast Milky Ways incommensurate with human understanding, all cold, blue, silver, but our food and our fire was pink and goodies. And true to what Japhy had predicted, I had absolutely not a jot of appetite for alcohol, I’d forgotten all about it, the altitude was too high, the exercise too heavy, the air too brisk, the air itself was enough to get your drunk ass drunk. It was a tremendous supper, food is always better eaten in doleful little pinchfuls off the ends of chopsticks, no gobbling, the reason why Darwin’s law of survival applies best to China: if you don’t know how to handle a chopstick and stick it in that family pot with the best of ’em, you’ll starve. I ended up flupping it all up with my forefinger anyhow.

Supper done, Japhy assiduously got to scraping the pots with a wire scraper and got me to bring water, which I did dipping a leftover can from other campers into the fire pool of stars, and came back with a snowball to boot, and Japhy washed the dishes in preboiled water. “Usually I don’t wash my dishes, I just wrap ’em up in my blue bandana, cause it really doesn’t matter…though they don’t appreciate this little bit of wisdom in the horse-soap building thar on Madison Avenue, what you call it, that English firm, Urber and Urber, whatall, damn hell and upsidedown boy I’ll be as tight as Dick’s hatband if I don’t feel like takin out my star map and seein what the lay of the pack is tonight. That houndsapack up there more uncountable than all your favorite Surangamy sutries, boy.” So he whips out his star map and turns it around a little, and adjusts, and looks, and says, “It’s exactly eight-forty-eight p.m.”

“How do you know.”

“Sirius wouldn’t be where Sirius is, if it wasn’t eight-forty-eight p.m…. You know what I like about you, Ray, you’ve woke me up to the true language of this country which is the language of the working men, railroad men, loggers. D’yever hear them guys talk?”

“I shore did. I had a guy, an oil rig driver, truck, picked me up in Houston Texas one night round about midnight after some little faggot who owned some motel courts called of all things and rather appropriately my dear, Dandy Courts, had left me off and said if you can’t get a ride come on in sleep on my floor, so I wait about an hour in the empty road and here comes this rig and it’s driven by a Cherokee he said he was but his name was Johnson or Ally Reynolds or some damn thing and as he talked starting in with a speech like ‘Well boy I left my mammy’s cabin before you knew the smell of the river and came west to drive myself mad in the East Texas oilfield’ and all kinds of rhythmic talk and with every bang of rhythm he’d ram at his clutch and his various gears and pop up the truck and had her roaring down the road about seventy miles an hour with momentum only when his story got rolling with him, magnificent, that’s what I call poetry.”

“That’s what I mean. You oughta hear old Burnie Byers talk up that talk up in the Skagit country, Ray you just gotta go up there.”

“Okay I will.”

Japhy, kneeling there studying his star map, leaning forward slightly to peek up through the overhanging gnarled old rock country trees, with his goatee and all, looked, with that mighty grawfaced rock behind him, like, exactly like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness. He was leaning forward on his