Jesus Out to Sea

“I’ve heard about you.”

“Oh?” Roger said.

“Yeah. I just didn’t know it was this canyon.”

“I see.”

“We’ve still got time to go up the Blackfoot. Forget this guy,” the passenger said.

The driver put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and looked around the yard as though he were deciding something. Then he laughed, lit his cigarette, and looked off down the valley.

“Too much,” he said. Then they both got in the jeep, backed it around in the snow, cracking an old tomato stake in the vegetable garden, and crunched down the road over their own long lines of stenciled tire tracks.

The coffee cup was cold in the professor’s hand. He looked down at the creek that flowed out of the dark stands of pine and fir in the national forest. In the center the riffle was a deep blue-green between sheets of ice that looked like teeth. Through the willow frame of the sweat lodge he could see two smooth, round boulders that always reminded him of a woman’s breasts, and behind them a bark-less and polished cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream to form an eddying pool whose pebbled bott

om was always marbled with the shapes of cutthroat and brookie trout. In the spring and summer he and the students would fish the pool, have community dinners among the ferns on the bank, and pack far into the canyon, where the cinnamon bears and white-tailed deer were never hunted and bighorn sheep grazed through the saddles high up on the peaks.

The frozen trunks of the ponderosas creaked in the wind, powdering snow in the twilight.

In the spring, he thought.

He didn’t remember at which particular stage of his dissatisfaction with university life he had decided to take early retirement. Others had tried to dissuade him—he was a wonderful teacher, he would be hurt financially, he would be missed by his students. And there was truth in what they said, but he had reached the age, he told himself, when he no longer had to apologize or defend.

Maybe it had been the interminable department and committee meetings, the jealousies and hatreds that his colleagues kept alive like green wounds for decades, the self-anointed liberals whose pension plans were invested in nuclear energy, South Africa, and the Boeing Company. He tried, at least in his own mind, not to be hard on them, but in reality they filled him with a visceral disgust. There was often a sneer in their laughter, an atmosphere of bitterness and personal failure in their meeting rooms that was almost palpable, like the smell of fear. They denigrated anyone who accomplished anything and tried to sabotage any educational innovation that threatened their own meager positions. If any of them had acquired any wisdom in their years as educators, he had yet to see the instance.

No, he did remember when he made his decision to hang it up. A search committee had to meet during the Christmas holidays to choose from a huge file of applicants for a vacant position. The chair of the committee, Waldo Gates, and one of his allies, consistently gave low ratings to the most qualified candidates and high ratings to people with no publications and little experience. Waldo Gates, who lived across the creek from Roger, was also a hunter. He had even worn his mail-order camouflage fatigues and brown corduroy shooting vest to the meeting. His friend was dressed for the hunt, too, and both of them kept looking at their watches. After they had just sandbagged a Ph.D. from Stanford who had published two collections of critical essays, it was obvious to Roger that the department was about to hire an underqualified and frightened young woman who would be easily controlled by Waldo and his coterie, and Waldo and his committee ally would soon be duck-hunting at the reservoir south of town.

Waldo was sitting at the desk in the front of the room. He wore a red chin beard and horn-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His eyes were lime green, the size of dimes, and they never blinked when they looked over the top of his glasses at someone, which gave him the appearance of candor and directness and which always intimidated students and younger faculty members.

He held a file folder gingerly between his fingers and clicked it up and down on the desk. “I think we’ve found the lady we need here,” he said. “And it seems to me we have more or less a majority agreement on that, sooooooo”—his eyes roved over the five other faces in the room, and two junior faculty members glanced away—“unless anyone else has anything to say, we can be on our way.”

“Going out to make things fall down, are you?” Roger said.

“I beg your pardon,” Waldo said.

“Have you guys ever thought about an open season on people? You could establish these big reserve areas enclosed by electric fences where y’all could go inside and hunt each other for, say, three or four days at a time. Blow blood, brains, and hair all over the bushes and have a fine time. Except it’d be a genuine sport because the prey would have guns, too. What do you think, Waldo?”

“I think your cause is silly and your personal life needs some attention.” Waldo’s eyes were round and lidless in his soft face.

“Would you care to explain that?” Roger said.

“There’s life after divorce. That’s why people have divorces. You end a relationship and you go on with your life. You don’t lay off your problems on your colleagues.”

“Maybe we could talk about that later, Waldo.” Roger cleared his throat slightly. “Outside somewhere. I’ll keep one hand in my pocket. In fact, I’ll turn my back so the position will be more familiar for you.”

“I’m glad you’ve gotten that off your chest, Roger. I’ll report your remarks to the dean. Then you can take it up with him. I believe our committee work is done, ladies and gentlemen. Sooooooo, unless Dr. Guidry has any more entertaining observations to make, we’ll say God bless and good evening.”

They left him alone in the room, feeling foolish and wrong. Did he always have to speak his mind, as a child would, he thought, then spend the rest of the day rationalizing his impetuosity? He looked wistfully out the window at the brown, grassy slope of the mountain behind the campus and the thick stands of ponderosa that grew along the crest and through the saddles. The trunks were orange in the sunlight, wet with melted snow, the pine needles as dark and shiny as clusters of splintered blue glass. High up on the wind stream a hawk floated against the thin wafer of pink, winter sun.

Then Roger heard the janitor knock his broom against one of the wood desks. He picked up his briefcase at his foot, smiled politely, and walked across the empty quadrangle to his pickup truck. His vehicle was the only one in the parking lot, and for some illogical reason that fact struck him as significant.

His son was away at Stanford, and his two daughters had started their own lives in Oregon and Minnesota. They came to see him in the summer, usually with friends, and their conversations were alive with subjects that seemed to exist just beyond the borders of his knowledge or his interest. After the divorce he had thought of his wife only with anger, and when the anger passed he could think of nothing except the ringing winter loneliness in his house.

Young women were available, certainly, both out of affection as well as kindness. He woke hard in the morning, throbbing with desire, and he had to sit quietly on the side of his bed in his underwear and force his mind empty of their shapes, their bare thighs and breasts, their lips, their hands that wanted to stroke his sex. But he managed to live celibate, castigating himself in the silence for his prurient thoughts, on one occasion walking far up the canyon in knee-deep snow, beating his arms in the cold, saying, “Bullshit, bullshit.” A whitetail doe crisscrossed the trail in front of him, staring back at him with brown, curious eyes.

The morning after the visit of the hunters in the Toyota jeep, he walked outside into the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the snow, the air as sharp and cold inside the lungs as ice water, and began stacking firewood in his wheelbarrow to take back to the house. His malamute, Boomer, who was as big and thick through the middle as a small cinnamon bear, frisked in the snow, snorting down in a badger hole by the garden, pulling a stick out of the snow and throwing it in the air.

Then Roger saw that it was not a stick, that it was made of aluminum and the flanged steel tip was the point of a hunter’s arrow. He caught Boomer by the thick nape of skin on the back of his neck and forced him to release the shaft from his jaws. The point of the arrow felt as sharp as a razor against the ball of his thumb.