Devil’s Lake

My dog Princess killed herself. I was visiting her grave when these voices trickled down the trail. It was three of Mantah Hashi’s girls. I followed them to the creek where they threw off their dresses and stepped into the water and splashed about. They laughed and, I mean, these girls were friends. I’d had some friends. Never nothing like this, I mean, joyful is the word about what they were, and they were naked, happy, all filled up with joyful life, and high on the sunshine is what it looked like to me. One girl crawled onto a rock right out there in the bare sun. My teeth got to aching so awful, throbbing with pressure so bad, leaking pus into my mouth. I felt weird and jealous and wished for death.

Next day I walked up from my cabin beyond the junkyard to fry some eggs in the main house. While yet on the trail I heard Mantah Hashi say, “The illusion of self is a great pleasure.”

I turned. Sure enough, there he was, I mean, just clad in a long white robe with a white turban all around his head and all. He sat in a school desk. Before him on the ground were his protégés, each with a little black book and pen. I walked up closer to see what they were doing, thinking they might invite me to sit down, too, but they paid me no mind. I looked over their shoulders into their books. Just a bunch of squiggles, dumb lines, and doodles. That’s what they did as the man in white laid down the laws of nature.

“The illusion of self is a gift,” Mantah Hashi went on. “Through the illusion of self we understand the exceeding excellence of the world around us, how perfect is the world, the feeeeeel of the world. But keep in mind! ” Mantah Hashi said, and his long-ass finger was pointing straight up at the sky, “that this gift is also a curse, for it leads to insatiable cravings. The result is always a deep and painful unsatisfactoriness in your life. The ignorant live in a world without ratios, where what is apparent is taken at face value. For those unfortunate men and women there is the self and nothing but the self. ”

A dirty little guy with a round head raised his hand.

“Yes, Angel? ” Mantah Hashi said.

“What is a ratio? ”

“Would somebody tell Angel what a ratio is. ”

Now Pinecone, who I met the day before, she was sitting cross-legged on the ground at Mantah Hashi’s side, and she went ahead and said, just as if she knew every damn thing in the world, all snooty, if you ask me: “It’s how big a thing is in relation to something bigger.”

Angel nodded like he understood, and I thought, good night. I shook my head and walked along, and passed the barn where a bunch of razor blades were left on the concrete slab. The protégés had been using the razor blades to cut the plastic tarps Matteo and I scored from the lumberyard. The trick is to cut out inch-wide strips so that we can use them as shades to cut out half the light above our goldenseal crop. Manta Hashi’s protégés were fast workers. I pictured them walking around on the tops of the blades in their bare feet. That was funny. I went on to the house to fry my eggs.

After frying my eggs up and eating them, I went upstairs to snoop. I didn’t like the Mantah Hashi. I still heard his voice in my head, him saying that thing about a deep and painful unsatisfactoriness in your life. That sounded like me he might’ve been referring to. What a jerk. I pegged him for a quack, a modern day Jim Jones sorta dude, and you know how those people ended up. I didn’t like his nose. The ungainly downward hook on the end of it really ruined his looks, I thought.

But I went up to his room, and his shimmery clothes, what he’d worn the day before when he arrived at the farm, were folded nice on the bed. I ran my hand over the material to see if it was silky as it looked. It was. I looked out the window and saw him out there in the field doing his teaching gig. Looked like he’d be out there for hours.

I took his clothes downstairs into the compost toilet room with me, and put them on. They were a tight fit, but I felt forty pounds lighter. Pockets of air gathered under my feet, trying to lift me off the ground. Even my teeth felt better. I looked in the mirror and said, “Wow! ” My stomach bulge sported a sunburst, all these bright yellow rays spraying outward towards the four ends of the earth.

I’d thought I’d just try them out then put them back, but I needed to walk around in them. I left the compost toilet room, and Matteo was in the kitchen. When he saw me in the Mantah Hashi’s clothes, he put his hands on his head and said, “Stupid! What are you doing?”

I looked down at his panicky eyes and said, “How do I look? ”

“I want to know what you are doing? ” Matteo said.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “The Mantah Hashi is out there teaching them mathematics. ”

“What are you doing in his clothes? ”

“I told you not to worry. I got it in control. ”

“Are you crazy? If they see you they will go away. Why do you try to ruin things for me? ”

“I’m not ruining anything,” I said, getting a little mad. “I told you they’re not gonna see me. If they leave because of this, I’ll fix that field up myself. ”

“You could never fix that field up. You are the laziest person I ever saw. Get out of his clothes, now! ”

“Don’t tell me to get out of his clothes. ”

“Goddamnit! ” Matteo shouted.

Pinecone walked in. Matteo stopped screaming. When I saw her I blushed. If this wasn’t getting caught red-handed, shit. But Pinecone acted like nothing was strange. She said, “The Mantah Hashi needs liquid. Do you have any lemons or limes that I can put in his water? ”

Matteo had the blush on too. Matteo likes them twenty to twenty-five, he’s told me so himself. He has a whole series of picture books called Marriageable Country Gals, and Pinecone, I could tell it from the moment I saw her, was the war baby’s dream woman. She hadn’t bathed in a long time, you could tell that all too well, and there was hair on her legs and in her armpits. Her smell was of a lot of dried up sweat mixed with a little patchouli.

Did I tell you that Matteo was a war baby? When he was little, growing up in Trieste, the Nazi soldiers marched through his town, and little Matteo marched behind them and learned how to sing their war songs. We’ll be driving down the road in Matteo’s telephone van to go check the dumpsters, and suddenly out of nowhere he’ll start singing Nazi songs. He got in trouble over it once in Manhattan when he started singing and a Jewish woman called him on it.

Well, I saw Matteo’s mind crushing up with yearning for Pinecone as she stood there in front of us in all her glorious cuteness. “Lemons? ” he said. “Ha ha. Limes? Well, I think I might have some limes in the pantry. Give me a minute to look around, my dear. ”

Pinecone looked me up and down, trying to look emotionless, but I saw that she registered the sunrays all over my chest, or breasts is more like it. I swear, sometimes I think I’m turning into a woman, but it’s just fat is all it is. For some reason my pecs are kind of breast-like. She looked away and followed Matteo soundlessly into the pantry.

The little bitch would tell. I knew she would tell Mantah Hashi, so I went out and threw the girl's three-speed over the gate. I climbed over and pedaled down Fish House Road.

I felt rich. I perspired jewels. Spirituality glowed around me in a colorful halo. The cars and trucks passing by honked at how great I looked. I waved back at them, feeling as if they knew my wave was a blessing.

When I arrived at the spot where my dog Princess committed suicide, I pulled over. The blood that had stained the road for half the summer was gone now, washed away. I got off the bike and kissed the spot and then continued on. I usually get sad when I think about Princess, but today I felt peaceful. When I arrived at the Great Sacandaga Lake I stood on the bank, looked across the water at the Adirondack Mountains that were so beautiful. I had never seen them like this before. I felt that I was among them, one of them. A breeze blew from behind me, and the silken fabric of Mantah Hashi’s clothes flapped against my flesh. I thought, yes, I am a mountain. I was glad. I was glad that I was AWOL. I laughed, thinking about it. The five years I’d spent hiding out at Matteo’s was nothing. I was eternal.

I heard the yellow school bus. I turned my head to see them flying down the road, their dirty heads turning all which-a-way. Some of their arms reached from the windows and pointed at me as they passed out of view. I thought maybe they were just pointing at the mountains. That’s what I hoped. But I heard the squeaking of the brakes. They were backing up. I grabbed the three-speed out of the rocks and ran it up to the road and got on it and pedaled. I looked behind me and saw the bus moving in like a slow motion lightning bolt. I pulled over, jumped off the bike and ran into the woods. I heard them shouting, and plunking down the steps of the bus. One screamed, just like a peacock. I turned my head back to see how close they were, and saw the girl from the rock. She was after me, her face all twisted up hateful and out of proportion. She looked like she intended to kill me. When I turned my head back I slammed into a tree.

It knocked me out. When I came to it was dark and I noticed my flesh was bare. My clothes were gone. All I had on was my underwear, I had this terrible pain in my head. I was freezing. I rolled through the leaves, my teeth killing me. I thought I was dying. My hair was damp.

I walked toward the road through the branchy splotches of light that came down from the moon, and saw my shoes in the leaves, but was afraid to stop and put them on. I needed to get to the road because I felt like I might black out again, that’s how hard I hit the tree, hard enough to cause serious brain damage. I only had so much time, I figured. If I made it to the road and then passed out, somebody would find me and rush me to the hospital.

The three-speed was where I’d left it. I passed it, and stepped over to the road where I curled up on the shoulder. In a little bit I heard an engine coming along. I listened to the sound of it getting closer, feeling a little excited about it, about who might help me, but the car drove past without slowing down.

Several cars and trucks passed but none stopped, so screw it, I took up the bike and pedaled through the cold moonlight, figuring I’d get pneumonia. I’m a fat coward hiding from the world. Nobody’ll miss me. That’s what Matteo thinks, that I’m a coward and a fat slob for going AWOL. I joined the Army to get away from my parents after high school, to be on my own, you know, but I didn’t fit in. I don’t fit in anywhere, come to think of it, unless it’s here on Matteo’s herb farm in the Mohawk Valley, a place haunted by the ghosts of a thousand Indians. I hear them scratching on my door at night. Like me, they are stranded in the middle of nowhere. My best guess is that they need to be heard by other people to know they exist.

When I reached the farm I tossed the bike over the gate, and climbed over the gate and went into the main house where the war baby was busy working on a cuckoo clock. He lowered his tool and said, “David. ”

“How do I look? ” I said, smiling.

“Fat,” Matteo said. “Are you okay? ”

I smeared my tears into my face.

“What happened to you, David? ”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t say you are sorry. I have told you not to say you are sorry. Why do you always say you are sorry? ”

I went to the compost toilet room and put on my old clothes, thinking of Princess. She had beautiful black lips with ridges along the sides of them that when I had my face up close looked like small hills. Yellow mucus gathered in the crescents of her eyes. I could sit for hours watching her pink tongue slipping in and out of her mouth. Her breath was like flowers blooming. The pads of her feet smelled like corn chips when you pop open the pack.

Matteo gave me some codeine and a beer and I made for my cabin beyond the junkyard and pulled the covers over me. I felt my life ebbing away, and the last thing I saw before bleeding off into the world was the girl from the rock, her lips twisted up as if out of all of the things in the world that she hated, what she hated most, was me.