Jesus Out to Sea

It could have come from Waldo’s, across the creek, he thought. He looked through the leafless cottonwoods at the stacked hay bales that Waldo and his children used as an archery target. Yes yes yes, Waldo, he thought. Always Waldo. Last summer Waldo had been bothered by a skunk under his woodshed, and he had hired an out-of-work sawyer to tender-trap it inside a vinyl garbage bag. The sawyer had fitted the crimped end of the bag over his exhaust pipe and, while Waldo watched from his window, asphyxiated the animal to make a pair of gloves for Waldo’s oldest son.

But Roger well knew the reason for his deliberate remembrance of a past grievance. The arrow didn’t come from Waldo’s property. Waldo was not a bow hunter, and also the trajectory of the arrow was almost straight down, which meant that it had not bounced off the top of a hay bale and flown across the creek but instead had been fire

d high into the air so that it would drop cleanly into Roger’s yard.

It could have fallen out of their jeep when their doors were opened, he told himself. It could have happened that way. Yes. But he felt his heart clicking against his ribs.

The next day was bright and clear and windless, and the valley was white and dazzling under a bluebird sky. By afternoon, the sun was so warm that the snow had begun to pock in the fields and melt around the base of the ponderosa trunks. All day he waited for them to return. But when the sun finally dropped behind the pines on the valley’s western rim and the snowfields turned as purple as a bruise, only one vehicle had come up the county road, Waldo’s, carrying Waldo and a graduate teaching assistant, a statuesque blond girl named Gretchen whom Waldo had requested as his grader.

Two days later, right at daybreak, he heard a four-wheel-drive transmission grinding up the road, and when he looked through his window, his breath clouding against the glass, he saw the red Toyota jeep stop at the foot of his property. The two hunters got out with shotguns and empty canvas backpacks, cut through the bare cottonwoods, stepped gingerly across the boulders in the creek, and threaded their way through fences, brush, trees, and an abandoned horse corral at the back of Waldo’s property until they reached the trail that led into the national forest.

In minutes he heard their shotguns booming. He put on his glasses and found Waldo’s telephone number in the directory. The phone rang a dozen times before Waldo picked up the receiver, his voice full of sleep.

“Waldo, two guys just went through the back of your property,” Roger said.

“What guys? What are you talking about?”

“Two hunters. I wouldn’t let them into the canyon, so they crossed the creek and climbed through your fences.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“You want guys with shotguns walking by your back door without permission?”

“So when you see them, tell them to ask. In the meantime I don’t appreciate your waking me up because of your personal problem with hunting. Get some help, Roger, because you’re an ongoing pain in the ass.”

The line went dead, and Roger looked out at the blueness of the morning, the black, leafless shapes of the cottonwoods along the creek bank, heard the deep, booming echo of another shotgun blast up the canyon, and felt the cold pierce his naked feet like nails.

Two hours later the hunters walked out of the canyon in full sunlight, crunching through the sheath of ice and frozen snow along the creek’s edge, their canvas packs fat with dead grouse. The driver, who still wore a skinning knife and galoshes that flopped on his feet, flipped a cigarette across the stream onto Roger’s property, but neither he nor the other man, who had an untrimmed beard and a bitten look in his face, ever glanced in Roger’s direction. Their tracks were jagged in the crusted snow. He heard one of the hunters laugh just before the driver started the jeep engine and ground the transmission into gear as sharply as Coke-bottle glass breaking.

That afternoon he drove into town and bought a forty-foot length of chain, a huge iron bolt and nut, and a Yale lock with two keys. A mile below his property, far down on the county road where he had no legal right to block access to the national forest, he looped one end of the chain around a ponderosa trunk, bolted the links together against the bark, strung the rest of the chain across the road, and locked it to a steel eyelet on an old U.S. Forest Service signpost. Now the only other way to reach the national forest was down Waldo’s private road, and Waldo had a locked, electronic gate across his cattle guard.

The only neighbors who would be affected by the chain across the county road were a hippie carpenter and his girlfriend who lived just below Roger’s place. Roger stopped by their log house, drank a cup of coffee with them, and gave them one of the keys to the padlock. While he explained the reason for the chain, the carpenter and his girlfriend smiled and nodded and rolled joints out of a bowl of reefer on top of a redwood table, and he realized that they were not really listening because they considered his behavior as conventional and expected as their own.

That night, under a full moon that lighted the valley floor like a white flame, he walked down the road in the silence, the soles of his boots squeaking on the snow, and looked at the chain strung between the ponderosa trunk and the signpost. He lifted it up in his palm and bounced it against its tension. The links were heavy and cold and shiny with ice. They felt solid and good in his hand, the way the handle of a weapon probably did to some men. He let the chain slip off his fingers and rock clinking back and forth in the shadows. Far down the valley he could see the glow of headlights from the interstate highway against the clouds.

The season was almost over, he thought. Maybe they would not be back again this year. Maybe the birds had been enough for their pride.

But he knew it wasn’t finished yet. They had found each other, right here, at the end of this valley, and they knew it and so did he.

Late the next afternoon he looked out his window and saw Gretchen, Waldo’s grader, stepping carefully on the icy stones in the creek, her arms stretched out for balance, crossing onto his property. The wind was blowing, and her face was red with cold and there were ice crystals in her blond hair. When he opened the door for her, her breath puffed up in a cloud of steam.

“The power went out, and I can’t get the generator started,” she said.

Her eyes were blue and wide and the wind had made tears in them. He closed the door behind her. Her lug boots and the bottom of her blue jeans were caked with snow.

“Where’s Waldo?” he said.

“He went up to the Cabin for a drink.”

“What are you doing at his house, Gretchen?”

“He just gave his midterms. He likes me to grade them close by so I can ask him questions if I have to.”

Roger had known her since she had entered the English program five years ago. Her father had been a gypo logger who had been killed felling trees over in Idaho, and she lived with her mother in a clapboard house out by the pulp mill, where on a windless day the sweet-sour stench of processed pulp hung in the air like ripe sewage. She worked hard and did well in conventional classes in which the professor rewarded a student’s ability to memorize, but she never took creative writing courses, and one way or another she avoided studying with professors whose ideas were eccentric or unpredictable, except for Roger, and he believed she enrolled in his courses only because he never gave anyone a grade lower than C.

“Where’s Waldo’s wife?” he said.

“She’s out of town.”