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I’d have to catch the gritty Century to Chicago, then change to the Great Northern—day after day of rolling past factories and fields and deserts and mountains but seeing none of it, gazing at my own stunned reflection in the glass as every click of the wheels took me farther from school. Lying sleepless in bed that night, I saw my school as if from an impossible distance, heading across the plains in a darkened railway car, back to the melancholy and muddle of life with my father. I pictured the black-beamed dining hall loud with voices. The chapel windows blazing red on winter afternoons. The comradely sound of the glee club practicing, the scrape of skates on the outdoor rink, a certain chair in the library, the deep peace of the library, the faces of my friends. I saw the school as if I’d left it forever, and the thought made me sick at heart. I got up and collected my suicide kit of cigarettes and lighter and holder from their hiding places and went to the bathroom at the end of the hall and stuffed it all into the trash can. I never smoked at school again.
    But the temptation was persistent, and sometimes I could almost hear the old crew puffing away in the basements and attics. So my first thought when the sirens came wailing up the drive that Sunday afternoon was that one of those poor fiends had started a fire somewhere, and would pay the price that very hour. Who would it be?
    I was coming out of the library. From the top of the steps I could see a thick braid of smoke twisting up over the old field house. Thrill-starved boys poured out of the dorms and halls, with a few masters trying to form them into groups or at least slow them down, all to no effect. I followed, my notebook under my arm.
    I had been holed up most of the weekend, trying to finish my poem for the competition. What I’d been working on was a hunter’s elegiac meditation over the body of an elk he’s killed after tracking it for days through the mountains. This wasn’t typical of my poems, abstract and void of narrative as they tended to be. It fell into the pattern of a group of my stories in which a young fellow named Sam evaded the civilizing demands of his socialite mother and logger-baron father by fleeing into the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he did much hunting and fishing and laconic romancing with free-spirited women he met on the trail. I had begun this series innocently enough, in unconscious tribute to the Nick Adams stories, but over time it had evolved into something less honest. I wanted to be taken for Sam by my schoolmates, who knew nothing of my life back in Seattle.
    But this poem was giving me a headache. For one thing, how was the hunter, having trailed the elk so far into the woods, going to get it out? How big was an elk, anyway? Really big, I guessed—so after offering thanks to the spirit of the elk for giving him all that meat, the hunter was going to look ridiculous walking away with one lousy haunch over his shoulder. Maybe I should’ve made it a regular deer. But
deer
didn’t have the majesty of
elk.
There was a lot to fix, and the poem was due the next morning.
    The day had turned cold. A storm had blown off the last of the leaves a few nights earlier, and the bare black trees made it seem even colder. I fell in with a younger boy, a fourth former whose recent submission to
Troubadour
we had not yet rejected, though we probably would. I kept waiting for him to ask about it, but as we approached the fire he got excited and ran ahead without a word on the subject.
    The crowd had gathered around the old field house at the near end of the football field. The firemen stood by their truck drinking coffee and taking turns with the hose. No flames were visible, though I could hear the water seethe as it hit the roof. The shingles had burned through here and there, exposing a sheet of charred subroofing that sent up a greasy hiss of smoke as the firemen played the hose over it.
    I asked the boy next to me