Call Me Joe Read Online Free PDF Page A

any other self-respecting hedonist would.
     
    As I sat on a bench at the terrace next to the Seattle Aquarium, enjoying the pastel shards of yet another splashy sunset, it came to me that I had made all these changes to begin with, not because I was seriously dissatisfied with my life - although the need for change was undeniable - but because I wanted to be able - maybe, someday, possibly - to accommodate the presence of someone else in it. The changes had all been positive but it was incomplete. The original point, lost in the mists of time, was not to spend the rest of my life alone.
     
    I got up and started walking purposefully, back down the waterfront toward Occidental Square and my office.
     
    I looked out at the sunset. God, I can't stand it when everything is fraught with symbolism.
     
    "Okay," I sighed wearily, "Okay."
     
    Three
     
    As the air cooled and the eagles stopped surfing the updrafts, Joe swept the binoculars along the near horizon, watching the evening lights' long play through the trees and along the low ridges.
     
    It was what he liked best about his home: the isolation. Ten miles into Colville, over nearly impassable roads, 360 degree wilderness, unbroken but for a thin ribbon of county road maybe six miles to the northwest. His cabin perched on a broad shelf about a hundred yards below the summit of this hill, the tallest in this entire stretch of the Kettle River Mountains.
     
    The cabin had been built by a rich recluse from Seattle, on land that originally belonged to the man's family. He had died 15 years ago and the cabin had been vastly renovated by a rich, eccentric Seattle attorney, one of Joe's precious few army buddies. The lawyer had paid a Colville couple to clean and maintain it four times a year.
     
    He sold it to Joe for pocket change; less than half its market value. Joe thanked the caretakers, wrote them generous checks, and let them go. The attorney cashed out his father's estate and moved back to Thailand, to the woman who bore his son after Saigon fell. Joe hadn't heard from him in four years and didn't expect to, again.
     
    To Joe, it was perfect. His appealingly casual persona was carefully cultivated, endlessly rehearsed, until no cracks showed. Inside, Joe had always been a curious emotional blank. He never felt any of the things - anger, lust, confusion, moodiness - that all teenagers battle; never had a girlfriend, never knew school spirit or civic pride or family loyalties. He sailed through adolescence, made good but not excellent grades, and never gave his parents a moment's trouble, although it could be said, also, that he never gave them much of anything. He was a polite, if not especially warm child and, eventually, his parents ceased to be surprised that he never showed affection, never needed consolation or guidance, and only rarely showed much interest in anything that wasn't right in front of him. They were, after all, born and raised in Finland and so had certainly known people of great reserve and emotional coolness. Their own personality meters would have read far onto the introvert side of the scale, so Joe's ultimate blandness and malleability seemed, to them, simple genetics. They were only really surprised on the day after Joe's graduation from high school, when he rose at 5:30, loaded his already-packed bags and trunk into his old Dodge, and left without a word.
     
    He drove non-stop into Portland, got a room at a local boarding house, and showed up at the army recruiting office at 8 a.m. sharp the next day. He knew the induction schedules and, within two weeks, was on his way to California, a buzzcut, new clothes, and a new life. If he'd ever thought of his parents once in the following 38 years, it was as a sort of mental post-it note, something to be dealt with later. There were no regrets.
     
    There were letters from them - at first, after they finally reported a missing 18-year-old and waiting for the police to check it out - that reached him