The Beginning Place Read Online Free PDF

down on soft unseen surfaces, fought the shouting white water between boulders where the current raced. He came out of the water like a buffalo charging, shaking and stamping with cold and energy, and rubbed himself dry with his shirt. After that he always swam when he went there.
    Since he came to the creek place only early in the morning, he kept thinking that he could not spend the night there, as he had imagined doing. And indeed he could not spend the night there, because it was never night there. It was never any different. It did not change. It was late evening. Sometimes he thought it was a little darker, or a little lighter, than last time; but he was never sure. He had never seen the star near the top of the high tree straight on, but was certain it was there in the same place each time. But his watch did not run, there. Time did not go. It was like an island, time running to either side of it like the water of a river, like the tides past a rock in the sand. You could go there and stay and you
would come out to the moment you left. Or almost. When he felt he had been there an hour or longer, his watch seemed to show a few minutes had passed, when he returned to the sunlight. Maybe it did not stop, maybe it ran very slowly there, time was different there, entering the glade you entered a different time, a slower time. That was nonsense, not worth thinking about.
    The fourth or fifth time he spent a long while at the creek place, swimming, making and sitting by a fire; by early afternoon, working at Sam’s, he was groggy, half asleep. If he did stay and sleep at the creek place, he wouldn’t have to stay awake twenty hours on end. He would live two lives. In fact he would live two lives in the space of one, twice as long in the same amount of time. He was arranging celery in the showcase when this occurred to him. He laughed, and found his hands shaking. A customer looking over the vegetables, a bony old man, glared at the mushrooms at $2.24 and said, “Crazy people taking psychologic drugs, ought to be taught a lesson.” Hugh did not know whether the old man was talking about him or the mushrooms or something else altogether.
    He took his lunch hour to go to the cut-rate sporting-goods store in the shopping center across the freeway. Most of his week’s wages went for a bedroll, a stock of camping victuals, a good two-bladed jack-knife, and an irresistibly compact steel cooking kit. He turned back on the way to the cash register and added a cheap Army-surplus backpack. As he stuffed the food packets into the backpack he realized that
he could not take it home. His mother was not going out tonight. She would be there when he came in. What’s all that, Hugh, what have you got a backpack for, a sleeping bag, but if you get one worth getting at all they cost a lot of money, just when do you think you’re going to use all this expensive stuff. He had been a fool to buy it all, to buy any of it. What did he think he was doing? He lugged it all through the heat back to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart, left it locked in the freezer in the back storeroom, and went to the manager to ask permission to leave work an hour early.
    “What for?” the sour man said, crouching in his office that was littered with empty cardboard cans of loganberry yogurt, and smelled of old yogurt and cigars.
    “My mother’s sick,” Hugh said.
    As he said the words he turned white and sweat started out on his face.
    The manager stared at him, perhaps intimidated, perhaps indifferent. After a long staring pause he said, “O.K.,” and turned his back.
    Hugh left the manager’s office feeling the floor and walls skip and sway. The world went white and small like the white of an egg, the white of an eye. He was sick. She was sick, yes, she was sick, and needed help.
    I do help her. My God, what can I do that I’m not doing? I don’t go anywhere, I don’t know anybody, I’m not going to school, I work close to home where she knows where I am,