Into the Wilderness

By Chris Helvey

An unhappy middle-aged man returns to his hometown to find himself. Instead, he finds more trouble than he can handle, and a chance to make a difference.

 

Dave Wertz has lost his job, is estranged from his son, and his marriage is falling apart. In an effort to find himself, and some semblance of happiness, Dave returns to his hometown and old friends. However, the town and his friends have changed and even in familiar surroundings life is full of dangerous surprises.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613094655

Book preview

Prologue

THE FIRST TIME I SAW her she was just a face on a milk carton. The second time she was performing fellatio for twenty dollars a pop in the late evening below the Singing Bridge.

It was the same girl. There was no mistaking those wide-spaced eyes. They were the green of an angry sea. Set too far apart, they drew your attention, then made you wonder if she was looking at you or seeing beyond you, to another face, or another life.

She might have been fifteen or nineteen when those eyes first stared out at me from the refrigerator. I’m not good at guessing ages. Why I noticed her particularly I can’t say. I’d seen hundreds of lost faces before I saw hers, and I saw hundreds more afterwards. Every one had once been somebody’s precious baby. Every one was given a name, even if no one called them by it any longer.

However, certain faces you can’t forget, even if you try—think of the Mona Lisa, Nixon, Einstein. This girl was one of the unforgettables. Somewhere along the way she, like all whose pictures decorated milk cartons, had gotten lost, stepped off the path and become entangled in the underbrush, that thorny barrier that warns of the wilderness.

If we think about the lost, we assume it’s either an accident, like misplacing your car keys, or the work of a nefarious soul. But maybe we ought to ask if these children deliberately strayed from the path. Why children, or for that matter people of any age, wander off the path I can’t answer. You see, I’m not entirely sure what compulsion forced me off the pavement and onto Frost’s road less traveled. Perhaps these children, whom society cannot comprehend and labels lost are, like me, searching for the light to lead them back to the path. Whether any of us ever find it is one of life’s great uncertainties—a curse as well as a blessing. All we can do is keep searching.

Whether any of us ever finds the light is not for me to answer. All I know is that I am a better man for the journey, and the people I met on that journey—especially a girl with angry sea eyes.

One

RAIN POUNDED AGAINST the glass, anxious for admission, as if there were something inside the room it wanted, needed. It had been raining all day and the sky was as smoothly, obstinately gray as ever. The light was going now, the house next door rising out of the rain like a ship, lights yellow at the portholes.

We hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. The Stranger lay open across my lap. All afternoon I’d been trying to read it. Gail sat by the window, fingers moving like a pianist’s across the keyboard of the laptop. The screen was angled so that when she shifted position I could catch a glimpse of mirrored silver. One leg was tucked under her while the other stretched like pale alabaster in the waning light. Her foot twitched, rhythmically, as if she were listening to a song she didn’t want to share.

Since midday, the room had grown steadily cooler and I thought about offering to bring her the afghan that lay across the back of the couch, but something in the erectness of her profile made me look again at the rain and the line of pines, dark, dripping.

Silence was a familiar visitor and there were times when I welcomed it. Gail hadn’t spoken since lunch, and now I couldn’t even remember what she had talked about. Her fingernails clicked on the keys, beating a telegraphic rhythm to someone in Los Angeles or Toronto or Miami. I couldn’t interpret the message. I didn’t have the code.

Camus’ book was heavy on my lap. His voice called to me, but it wasn’t the only voice calling across the empty afternoon. I should have telephoned my father. Our Sunday chats were a ritual. One I had migrated to from in-person visits—telephone calls were safer. My father and I were a volatile mixture. Without trying, I’d always been able to ignite a spark that fired his anger. Silence had settled in my brain and I didn’t feel capable of dealing with my father’s verbal pyrotechnics. Always next Sunday, I told myself.

The Sunday Herald-Leader was still on the kitchen countertop, unopened. Job listings were buried there. Six weeks ago, after thirty productive years, I’d suddenly found myself standing on the sidewalk—looking in through the frosted glass. At first, I could still see myself sitting in the leather chair, printouts spread across my desk, red pen in hand. Now that image had begun to fade, as if I were vaguely remembering another man’s story. At night, unable to sleep, I grew angry at my lethargy—if that’s what it was—but not enough to do anything about it. Malaise was my midlife crisis, or so I told myself.

Gail sighed then, so softly I couldn’t name what emotion filtered through the sound. Nothing unusual. Not that she withheld emotion, more that I never quite got a clear picture of the reality of her emotions, as if I were seeing reality reflected from one end of a long hall of mirrors, the emotions traveling toward me like a beam of light, reflecting off one mirror, undergoing alterations as it traveled to the next. Reaching me, the emotion was real, yet having undergone metamorphosis, it created a chilling uncertainty within.

I glanced down at the book, then back up, letting my vision drift. Beyond Gail, the light was changing, charcoaling shadows on her face, etching familiar lines. Yet, in that quiet moment, I didn’t recognize her. We seemed strangers, our studied indifference quietly allowing one more day to pass into the next, unlived at a level beyond existence.

We were in the room, but not of it. Two people sitting silently in a room going dark, each listening to the rhythms of the other’s breathing and the rain against the smooth glass and, now and then, the whoosh of a civilization driving by on the wet, black asphalt.

I sensed myself going out of that room and into the room inside my mind, drifting without conscious effort. Resistance to that journey had ceased long ago. It struck me that we might be two travelers occupying the same capsule, drifting through deep space. Closing my eyes, I listened to raindrops dying against the windows, shivering a little and pulling my sweater more tightly around me. Her fingernails clicked in counterpoint to the falling rain and the sound was that of a train at a distance, moving steadily away.

Two

ASPHALT THE COLOR OF burnt truck tires snaked through a scraggly grove of aged cedars. A heavy mist was cold against my naked face and damp in my unruly hair. As we followed the casket, the mist grew thicker. Cedars pressed in tighter now, branches overhanging the road, their pungent scent pervading the air.

Twenty or so people trooped along, lost in personal ruminations, half a step out of stride with the person beside them. My wife walked on my right and my son on my left. Yet I’d never felt more alone. Gail resented being there; the funeral forced her to postpone a business trip to Cleveland she deemed important. She was there because it was good form, and, therefore, in some way I could fathom but not express, good for business. Chase was upset, full of anger. But he had been that way for months. At odd moments, on certain days, I sensed that at a subterranean conscious level he had always been angry. Being an angry man myself, it was in those moments that I felt closest to him. Those moments and the ones in which I watched him sleeping, remembering when we were both younger, full of clandestine dreams.

This was not one of those moments. Gail was cloaked in the formality of her resentment and Chase was savoring a private anger he deemed righteous. I was, quite simply, alone.

Anyway, a man is always truly alone during a funeral. Other people are no more than a disembodied collection of somber hats and coats.

Spring was supposed to be in the offing, but the mist and the accompanying wind made the day seem more like late October, when the earth was dying before the approaching winter. As we walked toward the grave, it struck me that the weather was appropriate. Burying my father on a balmy, sunlit morning would not have cast the appropriate aura, not when he had blown his brains out the week before, pulling the trigger on my birthday.

That was my father, always one to have the last word. Pain welled up in me, or was it anger? What difference did such a distinction make? He was still dead, forever beyond my reach. Thinking about him being gone forever made my head ache. In the same instant, it made me quietly furious. I felt eighteen again.

I shouldn’t have taken offense. After all, I’m a grown man with a son older than I was when, despairing of ever reaching common ground with my father, I’d left home. Telling myself it was to preserve my sanity, I’d left my Frankfort, Kentucky home the way Ernest Hemingway had left his Oak Park, Illinois home, full of anger and frustrations and longings. I hadn’t returned much more often than he had.

Trudging down the damp asphalt, I remembered that Hemingway had shot himself thirty years after his father had blown his own brains out with a pistol passed down from the Civil War. Now my father had chosen the same path. A premonition, or merely a flight of fancy? Another question I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer, at least for now. The universe seemed full of them lately.

The mist grew thicker as we approached the gravesite. Trees turned gray and spectral and time seemed to have lost the count. The Frankfort Cemetery sits on a high bluff overlooking the Kentucky River. Daniel Boone is supposedly buried there, along with hundreds of others, including my mother.

Wiping moisture from my face, it struck me that I’d known my mother only a little better than others whose shadows had briefly fallen across mine as they passed along the edges of my life. She had been gone so long and I had been so unobservant as a child that sometimes she seemed more dream than memory.

All children, to one degree or another, take their parents for granted, but to be honest—and the day seemed to evoke a brutal honesty—I’d been a selfish brat concerned almost solely with myself, my safety, my security, my gratifications. Early years had passed in a self-induced fog, as I paid attention to only who and what was important to me.

Standing at the gravesite, I was having trouble bringing a picture of my mother’s face into focus. Her coloring had faded, the way old photographs fade over time when exposed to strong light. Her remembered voice was a scratchy whisper, distorted by time and distance. The best I could manage was a nebulous feeling, a spectral sensation that she had been a kind person who wanted rather desperately to love me and my father, yet never quite figured out how. What I was convinced of was that she had died too young. In certain ways, she seemed no more than a girl to me. Perhaps that was because I was older now than she had been when she had died. At certain moments, falling between memory and dreams, she seemed more an older sister than a mother to me.

My father’s image was clearer, yet aggravatingly incomplete, more of a silhouette chiseled into a wall in my mind, the gouges sharp-edged and deep. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d ever truly loved either of my parents, but I had worshipped him once. Even now there were days when I was uncertain if I was capable of love. Gail probably wondered, too, and Chase. I was afraid to ask. Some individuals are born with crippled limbs; maybe there was a similar deficiency in my mind, a flawed chromosome. Wondering about that when I was alone frightened me in some basic way.

Staring blindly into the mist, I remembered the past. My father and I had both held extreme opinions, and vocalized them. As we aged, the horizons of our extremes grew steadily further apart until we could scarcely share the same room. We had each been committed to some personal journey, now forgotten. Maintaining a modicum of civility had become a daily challenge. Harsh words had been exchanged with a depressing frequency. We’d both been too proud to take them back.

One incident often played in my mind with a cinematic clarity. The family is sitting at the dinner table. I don’t remember what we were eating or the conversation. I remember the faces, though. Oh, I remember the faces. I can see the lines on my mother’s face—she looked ill—and the way my father’s eyes first went unnaturally bright and then turned dark. I can even see my hands trembling, but not with fear.

Midway through my sophomore year at Kentucky State, a blast of anger had rushed through me. I was still living at home, anxious to leave, yet afraid to be on my own. Sometime that afternoon, so achingly long and dull it must have been a Sunday, my father and I had gotten into an argument. Probably over some trivial matter that seemed at the time as though the fate of the world hung in the balance over its resolution.

Whatever the genesis, I’d been full of anger that afternoon and so had my father. We had glared at each other, hatred blinding us, leading us down a path that led where neither truly wanted to go.

We pressed on, though, at least I had. I can still remember how hot my face felt when he told me to wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, and how my right arm had flung itself into the air as I rose to my feet. My chair had smashed to the floor with the sound of a bone breaking and my legs had trembled beneath me.

"Sieg Heil."

Shut up, Dave.

I don’t take orders from a Nazi like you.

Dave Wertz, you don’t talk to me like that.

Fuck you.

Get out; get the hell out, now.

"Sieg Heil, Dad, Sieg Heil."

HEADING WEST, I’D RETURNED home only at brief, necessary intervals, like my hero Hemingway. Only I’d never gone to Paris, or Spain, or Cuba. The first journey home had been for my mother’s funeral. I’d stayed two days, during which my father and I spoke perhaps a hundred words. There had been words I’d wanted to say. Yet even goodbye had been painful. Pride, I’ve often thought since, is wasted on the young.

When my job brought me back permanently to Kentucky, I’d settled in Lexington, drifting home for Christmas dinner with my father, indifferent food accompanied by conversation bereft of meaning. He and I had grown accomplished at platitudes as we shared fragmented memories, haltingly recalled.

Over the years, the telephone had become our connection, tenuous and infrequently used. Most Sunday nights, I’d called whether I felt like it or not. Only the Sunday before I’d told him about the arrangements for the nursing home. He hadn’t responded with the anger I’d expected. I’d thought his emotions had been worn down by the years, the way moving water wears away rock.

In the silence that greeted my news, I’d envisioned him packing and saying goodbye to his few friends who were still alive. Obviously, my father had made other plans. Now I would have to cancel the arrangements. Even death couldn’t quite separate us. We were still gnawing away at each other. Six feet underground and he was still frustrating me.

Without admitting it, even to myself, I’d loved him. Now I could see that. The plan, roaming around the wilderness of my mind, had always been to reconcile. Perhaps I’d been too upset about the job that had jilted me just before last Valentine’s Day. Perhaps I’d only wanted to be my own man. Perhaps I’d been afraid.

None of that mattered now. We had reached the gravesite, those disembodied hats and coats and one man on the dark side of fifty who wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry, or laugh, or run like a wild man and fling himself off the bluff. Far below, the river was murmuring to itself, and, through the chilling mist, I could dimly see its green surface.

Gail’s chiseled chin was pointed at the river, the flesh across her prominent cheekbones stretched tight. Her eyes were open, but I didn’t think she was seeing what I was. In the swirling mist, she looked young, fragile in a way that china appears in light cast by an old chandelier, and for that moment, my heart was full of love for her, love like we’d shared in the early days, before the world changed, or we had.

Chase was staring at the ground, swaying as if a wind were blowing that only he could feel. Droplets of water clung to the point of his straw-colored goatee and dampened his fine, long hair. His round face was void of expression; his shoulders humped as if he felt a chill. Inside his pockets, his fingers were working.

I wanted to reach out and touch them both. We were only steps apart, but there were miles between us. I chose not to start the journey.

The preacher was murmuring: ashes to ashes and he was a good man, much loved and we shall all meet again one day on that golden shore, mouthing meaningless generalities meant to comfort.

I wasn’t listening, though, not to his smooth, undulating voice, not to the whispers and subdued sobs of the people who had come to mourn, or at least to see, not to the wind singing out of tune in the cedars. No, I was hearing different voices, voices from a distant, sepia-tinted past, speaking words I couldn’t comprehend.

Three

DEEP IN THE NIGHT I awoke, shivering. Darkness covered me, so warm and thick it seemed alive—a great beast smothering me softly. Uncertainty bled into me and for a moment I did not know where I was.

Then my mind tumbled over and I let out the breath I’d been holding and came back inside myself as I sat up on the couch, rubbing my eyes and staring at the television. The sound was turned down and a thin-faced man with white teeth and tall hair kept moving his lips and smiling at the unblinking camera. His mouth moved soundlessly, the screen flickering as the images changed, reformed, changed again.

It was pleasant to sit and watch and not have to hear or think. Certainly I was glad not to have to dwell on all my failures. However, after a few minutes, I began to feel foolish and bored and I pushed myself off the couch, brushed my teeth, and headed toward the bedroom.

Just inside the door, I caught the faint scent of crushed lilacs, and memories flooded my mind. For as long as I had known her, she had worn that perfume. I could picture the small glass bottle on her dresser and her fingers closing around it. I looked around the room as though I expected to see her. Memories swirled around in my head like those fake snowstorms in glass balls as I crawled into bed.

In the quiet, I caught myself wanting to hear the sound of Gail’s breathing. I could hear its memory, the way you still hear the ocean in the night after a day at the beach. I could see her face, too, but as though I were looking at her through a veil. I flicked on the lamp. Hemingway had been right: it’s tough to be hard boiled at night.

Opening the drawer of my bedside table, I pulled out a photo of Gail, one I’d taken during our honeymoon. She