The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [44]
“Mmm-mmm,” she shakes her head. Belabored inhale, belabored exhale.
I guess I’m not a kid anymore.
I start to hoist the glass jug back up on the shelf when she says, “I got some garbage out back you can take down to the pit for me.”
“Oh, sure.”
She directs me through a storeroom piled with boxes, past a walk-in fridge.
I’m thinking there’s a big bag of garbage out there, maybe two, but when I open the back door a veritable dump rots in the cool glare. Piles of crushed beer cans, giant black plastic bags lined up like bodies. Unbelievable.
“Where’s the pit?” I ask a gray-haired guy in overalls who stands chopping wood at a stump.
He chuckles to himself, like maybe I’m not the first fool who’s fallen for the “got some garbage” line.
“Up thataway about a quarter mile.” He points in the opposite direction from Dorothy’s cabin.
Great.
I think of Thérèse of Lisieux—I will be love—but I’m not feeling it. I will be sucker is more like it. I carry the stinking bags of god-knows-what two at a time up a narrow grassy trail marked by stacked stones, cursing all the way, the incessant tweeting of some damned bird following me like a starstruck stalker.
It’s got to be noon when I finally stumble back into the little store, fresh with the stench of a thousand city-campers’ refuse. “It’s all in the pit,” I announce bitterly.
“Then the wine’s all yours,” the woman says. “Take two if you like.”
I carry the jugs out to my yellow boat, place them in the center before I push it into the water and climb back in. Four strokes on the left, four strokes on the right. I’m paddling rhythmically, some kind of rowing meditation, when a sudden western wind picks up, making whitecap waves of the lake’s surface and pushing me toward the wrong shore. I paddle furiously on the left, hoping to go right, but the boat turns itself around. Oh, come on.
I row on this side, now the other. “Home,” I whisper, paddling wildly through the waves, but I’m just careening willy-nilly toward an island. A scraping sound. Bash, jolt. A creak, snap. The sharp jut of a half-submerged granite boulder pokes up through the wooden bottom of my yellow canoe. Without thinking, I jump out into the freezing water, start kicking like mad, pushing the boat toward the closest land. My legs feel like rubber. I close my eyes, push onward. Go, go. Laughter echoes in my head. I look up and around—who’s laughing at me?—but there’s no one. Just a vast rippling lake in the wind, green, granite and red-brown volcanic mountains rising up around me. Quick breath of air, I try to pull myself back aboard the half-sunk boat, but the thing rolls. The wine!
I’m just a few strokes from shallow water, splashing like a caught seal, cold drenched pathetic as I finally pull the canoe onto the shore of a sandy rock island.
Just inland between two firs, I can see a clearing, a bright yellow tent. I’m an intruder on someone’s private summer getaway with a busted boat and no wine.
I leave my boat, follow the shore to the east, skirting the campsite, surveying where I’ve landed. On the far side of the small island, I harvest a few handfuls of pine nuts from the dense branches of a tree, pull two sprigs of what smells like thyme, walk on.
I climb a rounded gray rock in full sunlight, lay my clothes to dry next to me, and stretch out, willing the sun to dissolve me into steam. A quick prayer to Saint Thérèse: “Send me some counsel, Little Flower, will you? I’m seven thousand feet up. I could climb higher, or I could head back down.”
But Thérèse is silent.
“Don’t you remember me?” I beg.
An insect buzzes in my ear, and I start thinking about all the ways in which Dorothy really is a loser: that shapeless housedress, those nun shoes, no boyfriend, probably no kids, no running water. Her outhouse smells like shit. I bet she couldn’t even make it as a journalist. Why else would she be out here in nowhereland? Probably doesn’t have a friend in the world. Expecting quite a few people for dinner? Yeah,