The Unforeseen Read online

  After a difficult silence, the girl seemed to come awake and remember him standing there. She finally put out her hand for the letter. He hated waiting while she read it. He looked across the trailer park to a scraggly line of Scotch broom on the other side of the fence. In a minute she held out the paper to him, again without looking in his face. “You have to ask my dad.” Her voice was small, low.

  He didn’t take the letter back yet. He raised his eyebrows in a questioning way. Often it was easier from this point. She would be watching him for those kinds of nonverbal language. He was “keeping a personal silence,” he had written in the form letter.

  “Over in the shower house,” she said. She had fine brown hair that hung straight down to her shoulders, and straight bangs she hid behind. Jay glanced toward the gunite building with deliberate, self-conscious hesitation, then made a helpless gesture. The girl may have looked at him from behind her scrim of bangs. “I can ask him,” she said, murmuring.

  Her little rump was flat, in corduroy pants too big for her. She had kept his letter, and she swung it fluttering in her hand as he followed her to the shower house. A man knelt on the concrete floor, hunched up at the foot of the hot-water tank. His pants rode low, baring some of the shallow crack of his buttocks. He looked tall, heavy-boned, though there wasn’t much weight on him now, if there ever had been.

  “Dad,” the girl said.

  He had pulled apart the thick fiberglass blanket around the heater to get at the thermostat. His head was shoved inside big loose wings of the blanketing. “What,” he said, without bringing his head out.

  “He wants to put up a tent,” she said. “Here, read this.” She shook Jay’s letter.

  He rocked back on his hips and his heels and rubbed his scalp with a big hand. There were bits of fiberglass, like mica chips, in his hair. “Shit,” he said loudly, addressing the hot-water heater. Then he stood slowly, hitching up his pants above the crack. He was very tall, six and a half feet or better, bony-faced. He looked at the girl. “What,” he said.

  She pushed the letter at him silently. Jay smiled, made a slight, apologetic grimace when the man’s eyes finally came around to him. It was always a hard thing trying to tell by people’s faces whether they’d help him out or not. This one looked him over briefly, silently, then took the letter and looked at it without much attention. He kept picking fiberglass out of his hair and his skin, and afterward looking under his fingernails for traces of it. “I read about this in Time,” he said at one point, but it was just recognition, not approval, and he didn’t look at Jay when he said it. He kept reading the letter and scrubbing at the bits of fiberglass. It wasn’t clear if he had spoken to Jay or to the girl.

  Finally he looked at Jay. “You’re walking around the world, huh.” It evidently wasn’t a question, so Jay stood there and waited. “I don’t see what good will come of it—except after you’re killed you might get on the night news.” He had a look at his mouth, smugness, or bitterness. Jay smiled again, shrugging.

  The man looked at him. Finally he said, “You know anything about water heaters? If you can fix it, I’d let you have a couple of dollars for the shower meter. Yes? No?”

  Jay looked at the heater. It was propane-fired. He shook his head, tried to look apologetic. It wasn’t quite a lie. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day fiddling with it for one hot shower.

  “Shit,” the man said mildly. He hitched at his pants with the knuckles of both hands. Jay’s letter was still in one fist and he looked down at it inattentively when the paper made a faint crackly noise against his hip. “Here,” he said, holding the sheet out. Jay had fifty or sixty clean copies of it in a plastic ziplock in his backpack. He went through a lot of them when he was on the move. He took the rumpled piece of paper, folded it, pushed it down in a front pocket.

  “I had some bums come in after dark and use my water,” the man said. He waited as if that was something Jay might want to respond to. Jay waited too.

  “Well, keep off to the edge by the fence,” the man warned him. “You can put up a tent for free, I guess, it’s not like we’re crowded, but leave the trailer spaces clear anyway. I got locks on the utilities now, so you pay me if you want water, or need to take a crap, and don’t take one in the bushes or I’ll have to kick you out of here.”

  Jay nodded. He stuck out his hand, and after a very brief moment, the man shook it. The man’s hand was prickly, damp.

  “You show him, Mare,” he said to the girl. He tapped her shoulder with his fingertips lightly, but his eyes were on Jay.

  Jay followed the young girl, Mare, across the trailer park, across the wet grass and broken-shell driveways to a low fence of two-by-fours and wire that marked the property line. The grass was mowed beside the fence but left to sprout in clumps along the wire and around the wooden uprights. There was not much space between the fence and the last row of driveways. If anybody ever parked a motor home in the driveway behind him, he’d have the exhaust pipe in his vestibule. The girl put her hands in her corduroy pockets and stubbed the grass with the toe of her shoe. “Here?” she asked him. He nodded and swung his pack down onto the grass.

  Mare watched him make his camp. She didn’t try to help him. She was comfortably silent. When he had everything ordered, he looked at her and smiled briefly and sat down on his little sitz pad on the grass. He took out his notebook, but he didn’t work on the journal. He pulled around a clean page and began a list of materials he would need for beginning the boat. He wrote down substitutes when he could think of them, in case he had trouble getting his first choice. He planned to cross the strait to Vancouver Island and then sail east and north through the Gulf Islands and up through the inland passage to Alaska. He hadn’t figured out yet how he would get across the Bering Strait to Siberia—whether he would try to sail across in this boat he would build, or if he’d barter it up there, to get some other craft, or a ride. It might take him all winter to build a skipjack, all summer to sail it and go up the west coast of Canada and Alaska, and then he would need to wait for summer again before crossing the Bering Strait. He’d have time to find out what he wanted to do before he got to it.

  The girl after a while approached him silently and squatted down on her heels so she could see what he was writing. She didn’t ask him about the list. She read it over and then looked off toward her family’s trailer. She kept crouching there beside him, balancing lightly.

  “Do you think it’s helping yet?” she asked in a minute. She whispered it, looking at him sideward though her long bangs.

  He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “They’re still fighting,” she murmured. “Aren’t they?”

  • • •

  His mother had written to the Oklahoma draft board pleading Jay’s only-child-of-a-widow status, but by then the so-called Third World’s War was taking a few thousand American lives a day and they weren’t exempting anyone. Within a few weeks of his eighteenth birthday, they sent him to the Israeli front.

  The tour of duty was four years at first, then extended to eight. He thought they would extend it again, but after eight years they sent him home on a C31 full of cremation canisters. He sat on the toilet in the tail of the plane and swallowed all the pills he had, three at a time, until they were gone. The illegal-drug infrastructure had come overseas with the war, and eventually he had learned he could sleep and not dream if he took Nembutal, which was easy to get. Gradually after that he had begun to take Dexamyl to wake up from the Nembutal, Librium to smooth out the jitters from the Dexamyl, Percodan to get high, Demerol when he needed to come down quickly from the high, Dexamyl again if the Demerol took him down too far. He thought he would be dead by the time the plane landed, but his body remained inexplicably, persistently resistant to death. He wound up in a Delayed Stress Syndrome Inpatient Rehab Center that was housed in a former prison. He was thirty years old when the funding for the DSS Centers was struck from the war budget. Jay was freed to walk and hitchhike from the
prison in Idaho to his mother’s house in Tulsa. She had been dead for years, but he stood in the street in front of the house and waited for something to happen, a memory or a sentiment, to connect him to his childhood and adolescence. Nothing came. He had been someone else for a long time.

  He was still standing on the curb there after dark when a man came out of the house behind him. The man had a flashlight, but he didn’t click it on. He came over to where Jay stood.

  “You should come inside,” he said to Jay. “They’ll be coming around pretty soon, checking.” He spoke quietly. He might have meant a curfew. Tulsa had been fired on a few times by planes flying up to or back from the Kansas missile silos, out of bases in Haiti—crazy terrorists of the crazy Jorge Ruiz government. Probably there was a permanent brownout and a curfew here.

  Jay said, “Okay,” but he didn’t move. He didn’t know where he would go anyway. He was cold and needing sleep. There was an appeal in the possibility of arrest.

  The man looked at him in the darkness. “You can come inside my house,” he said, after he had looked at Jay.

  There was a daybed in a small room at the front of his house, and Jay lay on it without taking off his clothes. The next morning he sat on the bed and looked out the window to his mother’s house across the street.

  The man who had taken him in was a Quaker named Bob Settleman. He had a son who was on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, and a daughter who was in a federal prison serving a ten-year sentence for failure to report. Jay went with him to a First Day Meeting. There was nothing much to it. People sat silently. After a while an old woman stood and said something about the droughts and warm weather perhaps reflecting God’s unhappiness with the state of the world. But that was the only time anyone mentioned God. Three other people rose to speak. One said he was tired of being the only person who remembered to shut the blackout screens in the Meeting room before they locked up. Then, after a long silence, a woman stood and expressed her fear that an entire generation had been desensitized to violence, by decades of daily video coverage of the war. She spoke gently, in a trembling voice, just a few plain sentences. It didn’t seem to matter a great deal, the words she spoke. While she was speaking, Jay felt something come into the room. The woman’s voice, some quality in it, seemed to charge the air with its manifest, exquisitely painful truth. After she had finished, there was another long silence. Then Bob Settleman stood slowly and told about watching Jay standing on the curb after dark. He seemed to be relating it intangibly to what had been said about the war. “I could see he was in some need,” Bob said, gesturing urgently. Jay looked at his hands. He thought he should be embarrassed, but nothing like that arose in him. He could still feel the palpable trembling of the woman’s voice—in the air, in his bones.

  Afterward, walking away from the Meeting house, Bob looked at his feet and said, as if it was an apology, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a Meeting that was Gathered into the Light like that. I guess I got swept up in it.”

  Jay didn’t look at him. After a while, he said, “It’s okay.” He didn’t ask anything. He felt he knew, without asking, what Gathered into the Light meant.

  He stayed in Tulsa, warehousing for a laundry products distributor. He kept going to the First Day Meetings with Bob. He found it was true, Meetings were rarely Gathered. But he liked the long silences anyway, and the unpredictability of the messages people felt compelled to share. For a long time, he didn’t speak himself. He listened without hearing any voice whispering inside him. But finally he did hear one. When he stood, he felt the long silence Gathering, until the trembling words he spoke came out on the air as Truth.

  “I wonder, if somebody could walk far enough, or long enough, if they’d have to come to the end of the war, eventually.”

  • • •

  He had, by now, an established web of support: a New York Catholic priest who banked his receipts from the journal subscriptions, kept his accounts, filed his taxes, wired him expense money when he asked for it; a Canadian rare-seeds collective willing to receive his mail, sort it, bundle it up, and send it to him whenever he supplied them with an address; a Massachusetts Monthly Meeting of Friends whose members had the work of typing from the handwritten pages he sent them, printing, collating, stapling, mailing the ten thousand copies of his sometimes-monthly writings. He had, as of last count, a paid subscription list of 1,651, a nonpaid “mailing list” of 8,274. Some of those were churches, environmental groups, cooperatives; many were couples, so the real count of persons who supported him was greater by a factor of three or four, maybe. Many of them were people he had met, walking. He hadn’t walked, yet, in the Eastern Hemisphere. If he lived long enough to finish what he had started, he thought he could hope for a total list as high as fifty or sixty thousand names. A Chilean who had been a delegate at the failed peace conferences in Suriname had kept a yearlong public silence as a protest of Jay’s arrest and bad treatment in Colombia. And he knew of one other world-peace-walker he had inspired, a Cuban Nobel chemist who had been the one primarily featured in Time. He wasn’t fooled into believing it was an important circle of influence. He had to view it in the context of the world. Casualties were notoriously underreported, but at least as many people were killed in a given day, directly or indirectly, by the war, as made up his optimistic future list of subscribers. It may have been he kept at it because he had been doing it too long now to stop. It was what he did, who he was. It had been a long time since he had felt the certainty and clarity of a Meeting that was Gathered into the Light.

  • • •

  On the Naniamuk peninsula, he scouted out a few broken-down sheds, and garages with overgrown driveways, and passed entreating notes to the owners he could locate. He needed a roof over the boat project. He expected rain in this part of the world about every day. One woman had a son dead in India and another son who had been listed AWOL or MIA in the interior of Brazil for two years. She asked Jay if he had walked across Brazil yet. Yes, he wrote quickly, eight months there. She didn’t ask him anything else—nothing about the land or the weather or the fighting. She showed him old photos of both her sons without asking if he had seen the lost one among the refugees in the cities and villages he had walked through. She lent him the use of her dilapidated garage, and the few cheap tools he found in disarray inside it.

  He left the garage door raised to let some light in on his work. The girl Mare came unexpectedly after a couple of days and watched him lofting the deck and hull-bottom panels onto plywood. It had been raining a little. She stood under her umbrella a while, without coming in close enough to shelter under the garage roof. But gradually, studying what he was doing, a look rose in her face—distractedness as before on the porch of her trailer, and then fear, or something like grief. He didn’t know what to make of these looks of hers.

  “You’re building a boat,” she said, low voiced.

  He stopped working a minute and looked at the two pieces of plywood he had laid end to end. He was marking and lining them with a straightedge and a piece of curving batten. He had gone across the Florida Strait in a homemade plywood skipjack, had sailed it around the coast of Cuba to Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and then across the channel to Yucatán. And later he had built a punt to cross the mouths of the Amazon. A Cuban refugee, a fisherman, had helped him build the Caribbean boat, and the punt had been a simple thing, hardly more than a raft. This was the first time he had tried to build a skipjack without help, but he had learned he could do about anything if he had time enough to make mistakes, undo them, set them right. He nodded, yes, he was building a boat.

  “There are mines in the strait,” Mare said, dropping her low voice lower.

  He smiled slightly, giving her a face that belittled the problem. He had seen mines in the Yucatán Channel too, and in the strait off Florida. His boat had slid by them, ridden over them. They were triggered for the heavy warships and the armored oil tankers.

  He went on working. Mare watched hi
m seriously, without saying anything else. He thought she would leave when she saw how slowly the boat making went, but she stayed on, and when he began lofting the deck piece she came into the garage and put down her umbrella and helped him brace the batten against the nails when he lofted the deck piece. At dusk she walked with him up the streets to the Four Pines. There was a fine rain falling still, and she held her umbrella high up so he could get under it if he hunched a little.

  In the morning she was waiting for him, sitting on the porch of her trailer when he tramped across the wet grass toward the street. Since Colombia, he had had difficulty with waking early. He had to depend on his bladder, usually, to force him out of the sleeping bag, then he was slow to feel really awake, his mouth and eyes thick, heavy, until he had washed his face, eaten something, walked a while. He saw it was something like that with the girl. She sat hunkered up on the top step, resting her chin on her knees, clasping her arms about her thin legs. Under her eyes, the tender skin was puffy, dark. Her hair stuck out uncombed. She didn’t speak to him. She came stiffly down from the porch and fell in beside him, with her eyes fixed on the rubber toe caps of her shoes. She had a brown lunch sack clutched in one hand and the other hand sunk in the pocket of her corduroys.

  They walked down the paved road and then the graveled streets to where the boat garage was. Their walking made a quiet scratching sound. There was no one else out. Jay thought he could hear the surf beating on the ocean side of the peninsula, but maybe not. He heard a dim continuous susurration. They were half a mile from the beach. Maybe what he heard was wind moving in the trees and the grass, or the whisperings of the snowy plover, nestings in the brush above the tidal flats on the strait side of the peninsula.