The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Read Online Free PDF Page A

his eyes with his knuckles and looked around at the rainy streets. “We’re back,” he said. “Damn, Dad.”
    “You can’t hunt every day,” I told him.
    Then when I pulled up in front of Pop’s apartment building I began to understand his silence. I opened up the back of the camper and hauled out his burlap sack with its waders, thermos and field jacket inside. It smelled powerfully of sage, and when I looked in I found the sprigs of it he’d collected for his living room.
    Everyone shook hands all around and a lot of things were left unsaid. My father didn’t want to take any of the birds; didn’t want to draw and pluck them, he said. I walked him down the corridor and got him inside; Pop limped away and started up the bathwater.
    Settling in beside my son again, turning the key in the ignition, it came to me what Pop had left behind. The engine hadn’t caught before Sean noticed it, too, and he turned to me for a resolution. “Pop’s gun,” he said. “He forgot it.”
    I put my hand on his forearm. “Go on and take it into him,” I almost said, but I didn’t, I stopped myself, and the two of us drove away from there. My son didn’t say another word.

Day of the Moonwalk
    I n the summer of 1969, while playing a game of basketball, my brother Harold blew out his knee. For some time afterward he walked with crutches, then with our newly dead grandfather’s cane, and finally with a pronounced limp that faded until, to everyone in our family but me, he appeared to have made a complete recovery.
    In July of that year—the summer of the moonwalk; the summer when I fantasized about playing for the Lakers and being Jerry West or Elgin Baylor—our family sojourned from Seaside, Oregon, where my parents were managers of a small, sand-wracked motel, to a north Seattle neighborhood of new-built homes, many of them in varying stages of incompleteness, some mere foundations or yawning craters in the earth, some framed up but still skeletal, without roofs, others half-plumbed but not wired, or vice versa—the line of houses on our side of the block was a stark and vivid frieze about the growth of cities, and wandering throughthem at the age of thirteen I felt the disquieting security of having so many unpossessed places to hide, as if the furtive corners of these half-built, lifeless homes could be counted on in times of darkest trouble, if they came somehow; for times of trouble—poisoned water in the tap, unformulated enemies, hydrogen bombs dropping from the Seattle skies—seemed always just ahead to me for some reason.
    Coming up from Seaside in the back of our Bel Air, I listened to Harold recite the names of all the presidents in order, ending with Richard Milhous Nixon. His ability to perform this feat was vaguely irritating to me; when we’d cleaned motel rooms on summer afternoons he’d often muttered the names of presidents under his breath while exhorting me to work with greater energy so that the two of us could be done with it sooner. Today Harold is a pediatrician, a soft-spoken man of thirty-five with the emaciated limbs and astonishingly thin face of an Auschwitz survivor—one of those stick figures that stares at you from black-and-white photographs of the Holocaust as if to say: I am alive, but just barely . I sometimes ponder how it must be for children to have Harold tapping at their bony chests, if he is an adult who engenders in them fear or trust, if his hands inspire confidence or not. He never married. At fifteen, that summer his knee went, he was aggressively and obnoxiously competitive, an adrenalated whirlwind when it came to games of any sort; he was, in his own stringy, blue-eyed, determined way, unbeatable at just about everything.
    While Harold named presidents beside me in the backseat I watched intently the passing landscape, nervous that our father might be too inept as a driver to get us all safely to Seattle. I’d seen him, only hours before, fumble with backing up the