He again began to cross the parking lot.  The Oldsmobile was the only vehicle there.  He pulled the key chain from his pocket while he walked and ran his fingers over the various keys until he located the right one.  At the car door, he missed the keyhole and, fumbling, lost the key.  With the flashlight, he found the right key and stabbed it into the keyhole.  There was a click and he yanked on the door.  It was locked. The car had been unlocked and now he had locked the front door.   He abandoned the driver’s door and flung open the back door instead.  The flashlight momentarily illuminated the interior—a disarray of clothes, brown bags of food, books, loose leaves of paper, and several potted plants—but the beam suddenly died. He cursed and began to furiously wind the handle but soon stopped: the stars and crescent moon emitted just enough light to outline the headlamp under the rear window.  He jerked its back rubber compartment open and dug out the two AA batteries.  His breath came out in thick milky plumes and the sound of his breathing filled the car. Then he dropped the headlamp and back-scrabbled out. He slammed the door shut and began to head back towards the woods, only to hurry back to get the keys, which he had left dangling from the front door lock. He sped-walk across the first half of the parking lot, and then ran the rest of the way.  At the bend he slowed to gain control over his breathing, and then he rounded the bend casually.  The man was still there, warming himself by the fire.  The only change was that he had flipped his hands around.

The young man approached him slowly.  He brought the two batteries out of his back pocket and offered them.  “I don’t know how much punch they’ve still got—” he said, pausing to draw a quiet gasp of breath, “but they should hold you through awhile.” 

The man peered at the batteries as if they were unearthed arrowheads, then plucked them from the young man’s hand.  He held the batteries up to his face and carefully rolled them around in his sausage fingers.  Some of the knots in his face relaxed.  “Yeah, these’ll do fine.”  He stared at the batteries and when he spoke again it was in a low muffled voice.  “Yeah, that’s a real help.”     

The young man stretched his arms back.  “Well, I’m beat. Thanks for the smoke.”  

The man clenched the batteries and crossed his arms over his belly.  He stared into the fire and nodded. “Yep, I’ll pack it in soon too.  After I burn down some more wood.  And maybe another jibber.”  

The young man went to his campsite and unzipped the tent without climbing in.  On his knees, he extended an arm, groping along the tent floor. His hand touched a warm slumbering body. The young man sighed.  He stood, finished off the remains of a water jug, urinated and then climbed into the tent. His eyes gradually adjusted to the dark.  She was facing away from him, one arm under her head and the other extended above her, the wrist slightly bent and the palm up.  Her body was clearly outlined under the limpid sleeping bag, which rose and fell with her breathing. The young man leaned over her, propped up on one arm, and ran the backs of his fingers along her hair.  The head of the young woman jerked up and spun towards the hand, her eyes open and tense. Then her eyes focused on him and closed again as she murmured, turning towards him.  He lay on his back and her head came down, settling upon his shoulder. The side of her face was marked with rosy blotches and creased with the lines of the wrinkled sheet she had been sleeping on. Her fingers lightly stroked his chest, and then the fingers slowed and stopped, and her breathing again became heavy and regular.

The young man lay with his eyes wide open, staring at the low peak of the tent.  The crackling of the fire was audible as was the occasional rending of a branch being snapped in two.  The young man put his hand down to his right pants pocket to confirm his pocket knife.  Then he kicked off his hiking boots and carefully moved away from the young woman.  She slid off him and, still sleeping, made herself comfortable on her side.  Then he slipped, fully clothed, into the sleeping bag alongside her.  He lay for a long time, his eyes rigidly staring up, and soon there were no more sounds of fire or breaking branches.  He finally slept, his hand in his right pocket.  

The sun was up in the foliage when the young man emerged from the tent, holding his hiking boots. He squinted and turned his head away. As he stepped into the boots, he looked over at the neighboring campsite.  The tent was still up and the bicycle was leaning against the tree, but the man was nowhere in sight.  

The young woman was sitting, reading a book, her knees up and her back against a towering eucalyptus.  Just above her head the enormous trunk branched off into five slimmer trunks that ascended beyond sight into the foliage. She looked up from the book as he approached and straightened her left leg, digging into her pocket.  She fished out a pair of keys, which she dangled in the air before him.  

“Good news.”

“Bessie’s running?”

The young woman nodded. “Bessie came through for us. She’s a tough girl.”  

The young man sat beside her and leaned his head back against the peeling trunk.  “It was all that driving.”  He picked a eucalyptus leaf from the ground and mashed it in his fist.  “She’s not used to California.  She just wanted some rest.”

“I think she deserves a treat for that.  Maybe a checkup.”  

“We could give her a good waxing.”

The young woman gave him a sharp side glance and then curtly returned to her book.  “Bessie’s a country bumpkin.  She’s not into wax jobs.”

“You never know till you try.  Everyone’s got upper crust cravings in them.”

The young woman did not raise her eyes from the book.  “You can wax her.  I’ll get her a checkup.”  

The young man blew away the fragments of crushed eucalyptus leaf. He stood up and then headed towards the parking lot, smelling his hand as he went. 

By the time the older man emerged, hacking and spitting, from his tent, the couple had already dismantled their tent and folded up the tarp.  They were sitting next to each other on the campsite’s wooden picnic table. A green speckled coffeepot was heating over a gas camp stove.

The man went over to the oak tree, stretched with a loud grunt, and then spat on the closest limb. The mucus hung from the branch, lengthened viscously, and came to a stop, swinging lightly in the morning breeze.  He went over to the firepit and started piling twigs.  As he worked, he glanced furtively at the picnic table where the couple sat.

The coffeepot was soon boiling and the young man shut off the gas valve on the fuel canister.  He looked at the pot and then over at the man standing by the firepit. The man had his arms crossed and was facing down the fire in a kind of reckoning as if it were a fierce beast he had captured. The young man rubbed his forehead. “Want some coffee?” he called out to the man. 

The older man looked up at the young man and then, after a pause that gave the appearance of deliberation, he emptied out his mug and went over to the picnic table.  He was in green sweatpants and a tight thermal shirt that outlined his protruding nipples.  He still wore his baseball cap, and his hair winged out over one ear, but on the other side the hair was compressed against his head where he had slept. He swung himself into the picnic table and sat across from the couple.  

“Yep, wouldn’t mind some coffee at all.  Good for clearing the ol’ la ca-bay-za in the morning.”          

The young man filled the three mugs.  The couple sat with both hands around their mugs and their faces low in the steam of the coffee. The older man held his head high and brought the mug from the table to his lips and back again.  

“How’d you sleep?” the young woman asked.

“Oh, I always sleep good.  Grass is good for it.”  He picked at the inner corner of his left eye and laughed. “It was nippy last night. I bet that one Canadian’s trying to thaw his bunnies out right now.” The man looked at his fingertip, then rubbed it against the edge of the picnic table.    

“So how long have you been in Idaho?”

“Oh, I lived there all my life.  It’s a good place.  Gets cold but it’s a good place.  More free there than most places in America.”

“How so?”

“Government don’t control us as much.  Though they try.  They try take our guns away.  Oh, they come knocking all the time.  See, I’m part of the Idaho militia.  Government comes, they wanna take our guns.  I’ll tell you, there’ll be a revolution when government says we can’t have our guns.  Freedom to have guns is the last freedom in this country.”  He paused to slurp from his mug.  The tip of his tongue ran along his mustache.  “Yeah, they come but they’re scared.  I remember one time a cop came to my door, the first thing I did was hand him a box of bullets.  I gave it to him all quiet and smiling.  Scared the shit out of him.  Government wants to take our guns away so we can’t fight back.  And take our money too.  And what do they give us?  Jack shit.”

“So who do you think benefits from the taxes?” the young man said.

“Oh, the government.  Sitting back, living well and doing nothing.”

“What about corporations?”

There was a pause.

“Who?”

“Corporations.”

The man shrugged and slurped at his coffee.  

“You think corporations benefit from the taxes?” the young man insisted. 

The man came up from his coffee and shrugged again.  “It’s the government that takes our money.  That’s why I’m a tax resister.”

“What do you do with the money?” the young man said. 

“Keep it.  I aint gonna give it to them.  Why?  So they can give it to them Africans?”

The young man looked down into his mug.  When he spoke it was in a low voice.  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t say that we—”

“I say we stop giving AIDS money and let So-malia and the rest of them rot.  We should close our borders too.  Goddam immigrants taking all our jobs.” The young man stared into his mug and swished the coffee around.  When the man began speaking again, the young man looked up at him without raising his head. “I been with the militia a long time.  Used to be part of the American Nazi party too.”

There was a silence.  “What’s that about?” the young woman said.

As if waiting for the question, he raised a fist and his face took on a glowing solemnity.  “White power.”  The pride left his face but his hand remained a fist after he brought it back down to the table.  He finished off his coffee.  “But I got away from those ideals—”

“I’m glad to hear it,” the young woman said. 

“Yeah, mostly cause the cops were watching us.”  The young woman looked away.  She took the coffeepot and made a round refilling.   “Cops are always on your back,” he continued.  “I hate law enforcement.”

“You don’t think there’s good cops?” she said, pouring the last of the coffee.

There was silence for a moment and the sound of the coffee being poured was clean and musical.  The man looked into his mug.  “Yeah, I guess there’s good cops…”  Then his face came up and hardened.  “But I got no use for them.  Kinda like blacks.”  He glanced over at the young woman and took a slow deliberate drink.  “Course, blacks out in the country are okay.  But in the inner city, I say give ’em a bullet.  Same with Arabs.  I don’t have much use for Arabs.”

The young man had not moved, his shoulders hunched in, head low over his mug, eyes fixed on the older man across the table.  The young woman was also staring, but upright and rigid, at the man.   

“Yep,” he continued.  “A good Arab is a dead Arab.  Arabs got no respect for our culture and I got none for theirs.  There was an Arab guy at a convenience store down the road from me, a dark dirty fella.  I told him that my militia buddies were gonna come after him.  I put five thousand bucks on his head.  He closed down that seven-eleven and disappeared like that—”  The man snapped his fingers and wheezed with pleasure.  “With five thousand bucks you get most anyone knocked off.  There’s plenty of hate groups on the Internet.  Most of them do it how you want it done.  If you’re gonna go after somebody, you’re trying to hurt them.  You want them to suffer as long as possible before they expire.”         

The young man was still hunched over the mug but his eyes moved away from the man, over to his campsite, passing over the smoking fire, the one-man tent, the bicycle perched against the oak tree from which the mucus still hung, and then his eyes went out beyond the campsite, looking at nothing. The young man brought his hands down flat on the table and stood up.  He looked down at the man and focused in on his beady eyes, which, just on him, slipped away.  The young woman also stood up. 

“We’ve got to get going,” the young man said.  “A lot to do today.” 

The man shifted and his balled hand flexed for a moment.  “Yep, me too.  I’ve got to make it down past Frisco.”  He remained seated.  

The couple stepped out from the picnic table and gathered up their camping gear.  The young man returned to the table with a pack on his back and a sleeping bag under one arm.  

“Interesting talking to you,” the young man said.  He took the coffeepot and the stove with his free hand.  “Good luck with the rest of your trip.”

The older man looked at them and said nothing.   

“Take care,” the young woman said, and she and the young man began to walk towards the parking lot.

“Do… do you guys want to brew up another pot of coffee?”

They turned and looked back. His elbows were on the table and his body was leaning down heavily on them, his head sagging into his shoulders. They stood silently, looking at him. The sunlight penetrating the foliage made a brilliant patchwork on his body that shifted with the breeze.  

“I’m afraid we’ve got to go get Bessie checked out,” the young woman said.  “I mean our car… that’s Bessie—” she qualified.  She let out an abrupt clipped laugh and then turned sharply and began to walk towards the parking lot.  The young man paused and looked at the man sitting at the table.  They stared at each other without speaking, the leaves rustling overhead, the light playing between them.  Then the young man turned and followed the young woman.   

The older man watched them as they walked away and rounded the bend.  He sat quietly for some time, pushing the mug back and forth on the table.  Then he murmured something to himself and inflated his chest, stepping out from the picnic table.  He went over to the firepit and broke some sticks and jammed them into the fire.  The fire picked up.  He threw all the sticks and twigs around him into the flames and, when there was nothing left to burn, he stood before the firepit with his arms crossed.  In the distance a car engine roared to life.  The sound of the motor climbed in pitch and then faded away into silence.

The man stood immobile before the fire. His face was like marble except for the bottom rims of his eyes, which glistened and shimmered, mirroring the flames. Then he dug his heels into the ground and, putting his palms up, spat between his hands into the fire.

Constantine Markides

_____________________________

The One Man Tent

The young man sat without shutting the door behind him. He inserted the key into the ignition and squeezed the wheel with his left hand.

“Come on, Bessie,” he said, leaning in towards the dashboard as he turned the key.

Red indicators on the dashboard lit up and an electric hum surged through the Oldsmobile, but where the familiar revving of the motor should have been was only a weak clicking.  He turned the key back to off.  The clicking stopped, the surge died away, and the red lights went out, though the color lingered momentarily against the dashboard in blurry imprint. The inside of the old car was silent and still, and when the young man stuck his jaw out and scratched under his chin, the slow sawing of his fingernail grating along the stubble stood out against the silence.  He sat for some time longer and then popped the trunk and stepped out.  

The compact campground, shaded by a canopy of eucalyptus and oak, was much darker in the twilight than the unsheltered expanse of the parking lot. The young man walked towards the narrow horseshoe of campsites.  At the first campsite was a one-man tent, the only pitched tent in the campground.  Two sites up, a young woman was kneeling on a blue tarp, snapping together a tent pole.  She wore a brown wool sweater and blue jeans patched at the knees and mottled with earth.  The young man walked over to her and unloaded a backpack, two sleeping bags, and a half-full jumbo wine bottle.     

“No luck?” the young woman said, glancing up at him as she fed the first pole into a sleeve that ran along the top of the tent.

He went to the other side of the splayed tent to receive the pole.  “We’ll try again in the morning.”

“Poor Bessie.”  She pinched the nylon with one hand and pushed the pole through with the other.  

The young man buttoned up his flannel shirt and unfolded the collar, pulling it taut against his neck.  “At least we’re at the campsite.”

“Not a bad place to have it happen.”

“On a mountain?  I can think of better places.” 

“For tonight at least it’s not a bad place,” the young woman said, smiling at him while clipping the pole end into place.  “I see you brought the wine.”

The young man was looking at the first campsite where a small unattended fire in the standing firepit was casting a reddish glow.  “We’re pretty close to that tent.  I mean, of all the sites, we’re right next to it.”  

The young woman stopped feeding the next pole into the sleeve and looked at him. “We can move.  I just took the first spot that looked—”

“It’s all the same for you, one spot from another, isn’t it?”  He looked down and shook his head.  

The young woman released the tent pole and went over to the pile of sleeping bags and backpacks.  She began loading them into her arms one at a time as if they were logs.  

“What are you doing?” the young man demanded.

She bent at the knees and precariously reached for the wine.  She placed the bottle under her right armpit.  “Come on, let’s go to that site over there.  Or choose wherever you want.”

The young man stared up at her.  “No, it’s fine here.  We already have the tent half up.”

The young woman turned and faced him with her arms full.  Her shoulders were broad, but with her arms loaded down they hunched forward and from the front seemed even broader.  She answered without pause, staring him square in the eyes.  “We can move the tent once it’s pitched.”    

“For Chrissake, I’m happy here!  Could you please help me?”  He wrenched the extruding end of the tent pole, causing the nylon farther down the sleeve to bunch.

The young woman’s mouth tightened, accentuating her cheekbones.  She kept her eyes on him unblinkingly for some time and then set down her armload.  The young man was yanking on the pole end.  

“Hold on, it’s going to tear,” she said.  

“Goddam thing is always jamming!”  He jerked his hands off the pole.  

The young woman pinched at the bunched sleeve where the nylon had snagged on one of the metal rod pole connectors. “Okay, go ahead.”  

The young man pulled the pole.  It slid through the sleeve easily and he sullenly clipped it in place. 

They attached the rain tarp in silence and then staked the tent down.  The young man opened his mouth several times as if to say something only to shut it each time.

 “There’s not many sites here anyway,” he said finally, talking at the ground while staking down the tent. “It’s a tiny campground.”

The young woman did not look at him.  She drove the last stake into the ground with the heel of her hand and then reached for the wine.  She pulled the cork out with her teeth and looked back at him.  “Cup or out of the bottle?”

The young man crouched and removed his driving cap.  “There’s cups in my backpack.”  He hung the cap off his knee and ran his hand through his hair. 

She retrieved a coffee mug and a metal wine cup. She poured and handed him the metal cup. “To Bessie’s health,” she said, raising her mug.

The young man raised his cup.  “To Bessie’s health.” 

There was no firepit at their campsite but there was a three-foot standing grill over a burn pit. The young man collected some twigs and dry brush and soon thin licks of flames were flitting up between the grates.  

“There’s no harm in collecting a few sticks,” the young man said, feeding a twig into the fire. He put his left palm over the grill where the flames licked up and took a drink.

“I think so,” the young woman said.  She topped off his cup and then filled her own.  

“A lot of regulations in this state. But makes sense, I guess.  Need to leave wood for the forest.”  He passed the cup to his left hand and put his right palm over the fire.  “But hell, six bucks for a small bundle of firewood.  Who’s got cash for that?”  The young man stooped so his eyes were level with the flames, and he blew lightly on the burning twigs.  The flames momentarily disappeared and a red-white glow flared out as the hot mass hissed.    

“I think our fire’s great,” the young woman said, her breath pluming as she spoke. She pressed in to the grill.

The young man stopped blowing and the flames leapt up with new vigor.  “Tomorrow’ll be our lucky day.  We’ll get Bessie going and then find a place, cheap rent, near the water, no more of this hunting around.”

Night settled in.  The couple stood around the grill, holding their drinks, warming their palms over the fire, their faces glowing so from a distance it seemed they were gazing into a crystal orb. A swath of the Milky Way was visible beyond the leaf canopy.  Occasionally the traces of a man’s voice—a high-pitched talking and laughing—penetrated the quiet from higher up the mountain but soon that sound ended and there was only the whooshing and crackling of the fire consuming the twigs.  They stood silently and gazed upon the flames, occasionally raising their cups to their lips without lowering their eyes.

A scuffling sound on the slope behind them broke the silence.  It grew louder and sharper, finally cohering into the brittle sound of twigs snapping underfoot.  A form emerged from the darkness, taking the shape of a squat man who descended with a loud stomping that gave the auditory impression he was twice his size. He came grunting and wheezing, and just as he was about to pass the couple, he wheeled and stopped before them.  He didn’t wait to make eye contact before speaking.  “Whoo-whee, didn’t I scare them Canadians out of their wits.  Boy, they didn’t know what to think!”  

He leaned back with his arms crossed and resting over his belly, then squinted at the two of them through his inset beady eyes.  Though he was over a foot shorter than the young man, and almost a foot shorter than the woman, his elevated chin gave the impression he was looking down at them.  His features seemed scrunched up within his round face, while his jowls puffed out, as if there were a constant stream of air pushing against the inside of his mouth. He had a thin, ratty mustache and high on his head wore a baseball cap with sky-blue netting in the back and thick dirty-white padding in the front.  His hair winged out over his ears. 

“Howdy neighbors. That’s me right there,” he said, nodding to the one-man tent.  “Ranger came by earlier so I had to take off. He’d a gave me hell about collecting firewood.  Fucked up laws here in California.  Can’t even burn forest wood.”  

The young man nodded.  The older man peered out into the blackness beyond his campsite.  “Anyway, he ain’t coming back again tonight.  Not now.”  The man paused and then laughed through his teeth.  “Boy, them Canadians didn’t know what to think of me!  They’re up the slope some.  I went up there and pulled out a joint so big they didn’t know what to do with it.”  He hissed out another laugh and rocked on his heels, shaking his head.  “One of ’em didn’t even have a sleeping bag.  He’s gonna freeze his bunnies off up there.”  

There was a moment of silence and the young woman fed a twig into the grill.  The older man grinned, revealing a crooked series of discolored teeth.  “Boy, that’s some bonfire you got goin’ here.”  He kept his eyes on the small fire in the grill while nodding toward his smoldering firepit.  “I’ll get that baby rip-roaring soon if you wanna come warm yourselves. I dragged a few logs over earlier.  I don’t play games.  I’ve been riding all the way from Northern Idaho and I got to keep myself toasty.” 

The young woman looked over at him as she snapped a stick in two.  “On a bicycle?”

The man pressed his lips together as he nodded, proudly and slowly, as if following the trajectory of a bungee jumper coming to a standstill.  “Goin’ to San Diego.  I do it every year.  That’s my bike right there.”  He motioned to the dark form of a road bike leaning against an oak next to his tent.  “Holds everything I need: my tent, sleeping bag, clothes, grub, whiskey, and all the grass I need to keep me smilin’.”  His feet were firmly planted on the ground but he swayed as he spoke.  

“That’s quite a ride,” the young man said.  

“It’s a good ride. Course, there’s the cops. Washington’s a police state. Oregon ain’t bad.” He spat upwards into the darkness. “Course cops are part of the fun, that’s why I ride through Washington. Only been arrested once there. Cop pulled me over for D.U.I. on a bike.  ‘I ain’t paying it,’ I told him.  Christ you should’ve seen his expression.  He didn’t know what to think of me.  But the sheriff was cool with my randy.  Shit, if I had a joint in my mouth he’d have asked me for a puff.”  His lips retracted over his teeth as he giggled, his crossed arms bouncing on his belly.  “Course I don’t mind the slammer.  Three hots and a cot, that’s how I look at it.”  He put his palm on his chin and pushed his head side to side, stretching his neck.  “Well, I gotta get that fire going.  Come on over if you wanna get toasty.”  The man stomped off towards his site.

The cold was setting in on the mountain.  The older man began dragging fallen branches towards his firepit while the couple fed the remaining twigs into the grill and finished off the bottle of wine along with a half-loaf of bread and a hunk of hard cheese.

The young woman hugged herself and lifted her shoulders with a shiver.  “It’s getting cold.  I’m heading for the sleeping bag.”

“I’ll be in soon,” the young man said, staring into the fire.  

She looked at him for a moment and then slipped away from the small circle of light.  The young man looked up at her with his eyes as she left.  It was no longer as dark beyond the grill because the other fire now illuminated their site.  He could even make out the patch on the seat of her jeans as she brushed her teeth, the pitch of the brushing rising and falling as she worked the gums from different angles.  He watched her as she leaned over, spat out the toothpaste and climbed into the tent. From his campsite, the older man also watched.   

The final few flames in the grill flickered out.  The young man spread out the embers with a stick and then tucked his hands beneath his armpits.  A loud hacking sound made him glance over at the older man.  He was brilliantly illumined, standing before the upraised firepit, prodding the burning mass with a stick.  The fire was crackling and spitting, and the entire area around the firepit was lit up.  The young man cupped his hands together and blew into them several times.  Then he rubbed them together forcefully and walked over to the fire.

The older man did not look up from the fire when the young man came. “Oh yeah, she’s burning good now,” the man said, prodding at the gnarled mass of burning branches and logs.  “That’s how I like it.”   

“I thought I’d come take advantage of your fire.”  

The man anchored a fork of a wishbone-shaped branch against the ground with his heel and yanked an arm off.  He tossed it into the fire.  The tawny inner flesh of the wood instantly began to blacken.  “Yep, I like to keep warm.  When you’re on the go, you got to stay toasty.”  The man had changed out of his pants into navy-blue long johns.  The thinness of his legs was magnified by the tight-fitting long underwear. Under the enormity of his stomach, his thighs seemed absurdly out of proportion.  “I go from here into my twenty below sleeping bag.  Sleep nude in my bag.  Stay toasty that way.  I get up with the light but I stay in my bag for a couple of hours.”  He nose crimped up as he drew mucus into his mouth, and he spat into the firepit.  The mucus hit a branch and hung from it, dangling and sizzling in the fire.  “Gotta get that shit out. I don’t keep it in.”  

The standing firepit was like the grill but larger and propped up on a concrete foundation instead of a pole. There were three brick side walls upon which the thick steel grill rested. On the grill was a tin pot. The man looked into the pot and then emptied into it a packet of noodles and powder, tossing the packaging into the flames.  The wrapper shriveled with a thick stinking smoke and vanished into feathery black shards.  

“Ramen’s easy.  Cooks fast,” he said, shaking the pot by the handle.  He crammed some more branches into the fire.  The branches protruded out far beyond the opening of the firepit and it seemed like the whole flaming mass might tumble out any moment.  

The man removed the pot from the grill and peered into it.  Satisfied, he grabbed a fork off the concrete wall and began to eat. He chewed loudly, and when he spoke, bits of noodle flew from his mouth.  

“It ain’t meat but it does the job.  Me, I like to eat meat.  I like to hunt.  I like to kill things.”  He looked over at the young man, who was watching him without any change of expression, and then returned his gaze to the inside of the pot.  “My wife, she ate that goddam tofu,” he said, accenting the ‘u.’  He upended the pot over his mouth, shaking out any remaining noodles, and then tossed it behind him. A few noodles hung out from the corners of his mouth and he leaned forward, tucking his chin in, and slurped them up.  His tongue swept around his mouth and he wiped his lips with the stained bottom of his T-shirt.  There was a light coat of fuzz on his taut, exposed belly.  When he released the T-shirt, it came down just short of his bellybutton.  “Me, I don’t eat that tofu crap,” he said, then swallowed his mouthful of noodles.  “I like to shoot my food.  I go out in the woods and get me my meat.”

“I’ve only fished, never hunted,” the young man said.  “But I’d like to.  If I’m going to eat meat, I’d rather hunt the animal in the forest.  It’s a better way to kill an animal than the way they do it in—”    

“Yep, animals are to be killed and eaten.  Hunting’s the best.  I use an AK-47.  I use bullets this big.”  He held apart a stubby blackened thumb and forefinger.  “They make a big ol’ bang when you fire.”  He reached behind him and began searching the ground. He came back with a joint in his hand.  “I skin ’em too.  Most people, they don’t know how to skin an animal—”  

“Yeah, I don’t,” the young man interrupted, watching the man’s face intently.

The man glanced at him briefly and then went down to the joint in his hand.  “Oh, I do it all.  I track ’em, I hunt ’em, I skin ’em.  Course I let the woman do the cooking.  But if I wanna do it, oh, I can cook, all right.  I make a mean elk heart stew.  Heart’s the best part.  I eat it first.”  He gazed at the young man from the corner of his eyes.

“Don’t know if I’ve ever tried heart—” 

“Heart’s got all the life of the animal in it.  Makes you strong.”  The man sniffled sharply and pushed his chest forward.  He pulled a thin branch out from the fire and, after blowing out the delicate flame, lit the joint with the stick’s glowing end. The tips of his thumb and forefinger vanished inside his lips when he put the joint to his mouth. He inhaled with a loud sucking sound, his face straining theatrically. When he spoke, it was with the hoarse choked voice that results from trying to speak with full lungs: “Makes you goddam strong, strong as an ox.”  

“But then again, oxen are vegetarians,” the young man murmured into the fire.  

The man exhaled a plume of white smoke with a deflating noise.  The smoke lingered in the air between them while the man shook his head, his cheeks making a fleshy flapping sound.  He took a few more drags and then offered the joint. The young man looked at the hand, almost studying it, then nodded and took the joint.  The man crammed two gnarled branches into the fire while the young man took two drags, coughing after the first one, then passed the joint back. The flames had settled and a reverse waterfall of soft pearly smoke rushed upwards, outlining the undersides of the burning branches.    

“Yep, I like to get fuckin’ ripped,” the older man said.  He inhaled and then craned his neck and exhaled skywards.  He kicked in one of the logs that were hanging out precariously from the fire, sending off a rain of sparks that zipped and billowed above them.  The young man glanced up at the foliage draping low over them.  The man paused to brush off a red bit of burning matter that had landed on his arm and then continued: “Wouldn’t mind a case of beer right now.  I’d suck them brewskies down, every one of them.  I like my brew.  One time I went to Amsterdam with my boys and we went to the Heineken Brewery.  You get about a half-hour or so of all you can drink for free.” 

“Yeah, I’ve been there.” 

The man took a drag and nodded.  “Whoo-whee, on the third time they kicked us out.  We scared ’em.  Goddam did we scare ’em.”  He paused for another quick puff.  “There was a German couple sitting by us, they thought they were big German drinkers and all.  One point I leaned in towards them.  Told them, ‘I got two words for you: Fuck You.’  Took ’em a while to figure it out.”  He broke into a wheezing laugh and his squinting eyes seemed to momentarily recede and vanish in the contracting sockets.  He passed the joint.  “Yep, Amsterdam.  Took my own grass out there.  ‘Thunder Fuck.’  One hundred percent Idaho homegrown.”  He threw another branch into the fire, which was now hissing and occasionally popping in small explosions that sent flying kernels of live coal.  The woods around the perimeter of firelight reeled in and out of shadow.           

“So what’s your wife think of you taking off and biking to San Diego?” the young man said, passing the joint back. 

Again the strained hoarse voice as the man held the smoke in his lungs: “My wife?”  He sniggered and his face erupted in smoke.  “Oh I’ll tell you about my wife…”  He took another strenuous drag and then offered the stub.  

“Thanks, I’m good.”

The man shrugged and put the stub to his lips. His eyes closed and his body arched back as he inhaled. The young man watched him. The cherry glowed between his thumb and forefinger in the center of his puckered lips. Then his head jerked back and he yanked his fingers from his mouth, flinging the red stub into the fire. His eyes still shut, he exhaled slowly through his mouth and nose. When he opened his eyes, his eyelids barely came up and his eyes were two bloodshot cracks.  

“Hot little bastard,” the man murmured, examining the tips of his thumb and forefinger.  He then put his palms up to the fire and wiggled his body, settling in on his heels.  “My wife, she used to leave me for a week at a time.  I get mean on tequila and she didn’t like that.”  

His slivered eyes swung over to the young man, who was staring into the fire.  

“I get mean on tequila all right.”  

The young man’s expression didn’t change and the eyes swung back.

“She took off a bunch of times.  So the last time she did it, I packed up her bags.  She came back and found her stuff, all nice and neat in the corner.  She got the message.  That was two years ago and I haven’t seen her since.  Best two years of my life.”  

The man flipped his hands so now the backs were facing the fire.  His face shone amber in the firelight.  The breeze shifted and the smoke blew in his direction but he didn’t flinch.    

“She used to come home every day and nag me.”  With a mocking expression he began to caricature her voice: “You’re mean, you’re evil.” He flipped his hands back around and stepped to the right, moving out of the thick rolling smoke.  “And I’d say, ‘So what?  We all got some of it in us.’”

The young man looked aslant at the man. He took his cap off and began rubbing the side of his head. 

“Yep, I had enough of her.  I’m going down to Diego where the girls are nekkid.  I told my brother, ‘You’re up in the cold where the girls are clothed.  I’m goin’ down where the girls are nekkid, gettin’ a piece.’”  

The young man stopped rubbing his head.  His hand, pressed as it was against his temple, shielded his eyes from the man’s view, and the young man glanced toward his campsite.  The tent was visible, lightly illumined by the fire.

The man’s voice suddenly took on an inquisitive tone. “What you got there?” He pointed at an object hanging out of the young man’s flannel shirt pocket.  

“It’s a flashlight.”  The young man pulled out the flashlight and began to wind the handle.  The flashlight whirred. “It doesn’t need batteries. With fifty turns you get light for a few minutes.”

The man’s hand reached out.  “Mind if I look?”  

The young man handed him the flashlight.  “It makes some noise when you charge it, but it works pretty well.  There’s two brightness levels to help conserve the charge.”  

The man turned it over in his small meaty hands.  He gave the handle a few revolutions and whistled through his teeth.  “I’ll be damned.”  He pressed the on-button and pointed the beam into the dark of the woods, then shut it off and handed it back.  “The batteries on my flashlight are always running out.”  His eyes followed the flashlight as the young man returned it to his shirt-pocket.  “Looks like it could come in handy.  I been looking for batteries for a couple a days now.  Looks like it could come in real handy.”

The young man looked down and shifted in place.  Then he looked up at him.  “What kind of batteries?”

“Two double A’s.” 

“I think I’ve got some you can have.”

“That’d be a real help.” 

“I’ll go check.” The young man set off for his campsite. Halfway there he stopped abruptly. He stood momentarily with his head down and then turned back. The man again had his palms up to the fire.  

“They’re actually in the car…”  The young man went silent.  His face was immobile.  Then he cleared his throat and brought the flashlight out of his pocket.  He looked at the man, who was examining the backs of his hands.  “I’ll be right back.”  The man went on staring at his hands without responding.

There is also the fact that every writer—or at least the anxious, competitive, insecure sort of writer, which accounts for a hefty chunk of the good ones—is continuously measuring his or her life by the lives of past writers, and any glance at the biographies of canonized writers will suggest that a ‘real’ writer should not be a virgin in either reporting or fiction. Of course this is baloney and many of the best fiction writers have never been reporters, and the same holds vice versa. But the myth nonetheless remains, and so the leapfrogging of writers between fiction and reporting goes on, only further perpetuating the illusion that there is some essential bond between the two.

From afar it appears that such an invisible umbilicus exists: both the reporter and the novelist write about human life, even if the novelist may sometimes do so in disguised form; they are both committed, at least in creed, to that academically reviled notion called truth; when not writing they often find their pleasure and distraction in drink, though rarely with the excess and tragic dissipation of the 20th century writers; they are vain, ambitious, childish creatures whose noble swellings in their writings are rarely reflected in their lives; they share with priests the feeling that they, unlike most of the world, are onto something big; they scorn authority even though in their own way they are more power-hungry than politicians; and though this is more true of novelists, they suffer poverty and low social status because they also suffer under the illusion that eventually—albeit in a post-mortem resurrection—the world will recognize them as the literary titans they think they are.

But one need only be a committed fiction writer as well as a reporter for a spell to realize that it is not the umbilicus they share, but the epidermis; the internal change required to transition from a reporter to a novelist, or vice versa, is comparable to that of a midwife taking up a new career as an executioner. They may both write, but besides that they have as much in common as do the ballet soprano and the Tuvan throat singer. The novelist turned reporter is akin to a hermit turned circuit lecturer or a holy fool turned Ombudsman.

Now traditionally, the switchover takes place from reporting to novel writing, but I happened to come at it from the other end; instead of falling through the rabbit hole into fiction, I crawled up out of Wonderland into the glaring meat-and-potatoes sunshine of ‘the real world.’ Of course the weird Cheshire cat, the rabid queen, and the strung-out timekeeping hatter are merely blunt and colorful portrayals of real life characters and Wonderland is simply our no-nonsense land observed by someone who is not sleepwalking. But even if the novelist and the reporter are ultimately dealing with the same world, their work and life could not be further apart.

To begin with, the novelist, unless commissioned, has no deadlines except self-imposed ones, which are rarely followed strictly. A novelist can struggle over a paragraph for six hours and still feel like progress was made or can whittle away a whole week squirming in front of a blank screen without losing his job. A reporter, meanwhile, on average has to research and write three stories a day—often important or complicated ones, or on unfamiliar topics—which means scanning the archives and other newspapers for background, doing any necessary fieldwork, tracking down officials behind their defensive shield of secretaries, getting all the phone calls in, keeping an ear on the radio for breaking stories and an eye on the fax machine for press releases, translating all the interviews and text if working in a foreign-language press, figuring out the ‘angle’, and then “hammering out” the stories, which may not in the end be merely a journalese action-verb phrase since a veteran reporter and a skilled carpenter can probably pound out an equal number of nails and words per hour.

The next obvious distinction is that the novelist writes in solitude, alternating between ecstasy, ennui and depression, while the reporter usually works in a large noisy newsroom without the privacy or breathing space to permit either boredom or depth of feeling; the closest a newsroom gets to silence, which is not very close, is when the daily deadline approaches. Then the chatter and banter subside and the furious typing begins. It is astonishing how much raucous five or six reporters can make on computer keyboards. The typewriter may be an extinct species in the newsroom, but the boisterous bang-it-out style remains the typing standard.

The two differences that I have so far mentioned—that novelists work alone and have the leisure time to dally, while reporters work in a beehive and must produce without pause—may be superficial, but they reach into one’s core. The novelist, while in the thick of a novel, only has one foot in the flesh-and-blood world. The rest of him is swallowed up in the story. Outwardly he is alone, but inwardly he is enmeshed in and consumed by the lives of his characters, which are not his for very long since he soon becomes theirs. Because he need not dash off the novel by seven p.m., or by next year for that matter, he has time to observe the characters, to listen to them, to allow the flesh and sinew a chance to form over the bones.

With time and nurture the characters grow larger and fiercer, more vivid and vital, while the so-called real world, with all its walking ghosts and humdrum agitations, recedes to a dreamy background, a loud sunny place by the beach where the novelist surfaces for a few breaths before diving back down into the reefed caverns of the story. The result is that during this tumultuous gestation period, the novelist is semi-absent from the world, just as he would be if suffering from a severe sickness. He may even degenerate into a social imbecile. Financial woes and family obligations will naturally intrude and shorten these writing bouts, but the general picture holds: the novelist, while working on the novel, has more in common with a zombie or a misanthrope than with the ancient Greek ideal of the active and responsible citizen.

The reporter on the other hand is a social and political creature, bound up whether she likes it or not in officialdom and in daily life. Unlike the inward and socially inept novelist, the reporter is the ultimate cross-class socialite, talking at once with government ministers and striking miners, bird watchers and poachers, Nobel Laureates and butchers, Neo-Nazis and human rights activists. On one day she may report on a National Guard training exercise and a beer pouring competition, and on the next day on a packet of government energy measures and on an old man who shot a priest in the head outside the church over a boundary dispute.

But the animated and hectic life of the reporter means that she spends time with everyone except herself. Whereas the novelist suffers from an excess of solitude and grim soul-staring, the reporter suffers—like the partied-out party animal—from an excess of socializing and of day-to-day hullabaloo. The excess may be good for learning to get along in the world and to speak fluidly, but the reporter is so busy holding a mirror up to the world that she has no real opportunity to turn it upon herself. Even the reporting style, with its sober third-person narration (According to police sources, the 12-year-old boy who drove the Mercedes into the eucalyptus tree was….) and the subsuming of the individual into the newspaper (The Defense Spokesman told the Fourth Night yesterday that an investigation is currently…) is an effort to annihilate any sense that there is an individual behind the article.

Whenever the reporter is not rushing about to ‘gather material’ and ‘get quotes,’ she is striking keys at high speeds. Working at a daily newspaper is like flutter-kicking upright in a pool with your arms extended overhead: you can keep your head above water only if you keep kicking. There is no space in the world of the reporter for that decadent, self-indulgent, pansy pastime known as writer’s block. The reporter may occasionally face writer’s cubes, which she will then gruffly kick aside, but the blocks are for the leisured novelists, who only haul them out because they are looking for something to rest on with an easy conscience. Nothing can better draw out the Muses—even if they croak instead of sing—than a deadline.

There is, however, one type of reporter who may lapse into writer’s block. I am talking about the fresh novelist-turned-reporter. That reporter, still a newcomer to the art of machine-gun writing, occasionally falls back into the quicksand writing habits of his former self—and often at the very worst time.

The second and final part of this essay is the December 4 posting

Constantine Markides