Our "Girl Autobiographies"

[Robyn Katie]

Hi,

Wish I were ready to post more, but I do want to say thank you Absaroka for your postings. I'm enjoying reading, even if I'm not writing!

And I am thinking about possible new approaches, though what will come of them I don't yet know.

Love, Robyn Katie

[Absaroka]

Thanks Robyn Katie. Eventually you'll get to it.

I figured anything that talked about my inner life needed to talk about revenge. So here is the revenge fantasy. I apologize in advance to anyone it upsets or brings unpleasant memories to.

It's genesis was in thinking about vilence towards women after my eldest daughter was born. What man hasn't had feelings like the ones in this next chapter? Also it was rooted in resentment- the names of the other people here are all those of people I bore a grudge against for a very long time.

It's titled "What would you do if I did that to you" which is to me the foundation of morality. I'll leave it to the reader to make their own judgements about the morality of the characters, but this is also a place to show just how feral Mountain Girl really is. It's also about some of the chances I took when my disease was active.


What Would You Do If I Did That To You ?



It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Mountain Girl had enjoyed her explorations of civilization so much that they had decided that this summer she really needed to see more of the world, and so after earning enough money to carry them through the coming year of college they had quit their jobs, loaded a tent and some food and a bunch of other paraphernalia into Andy’s car, and had set off for a place they had only read about, the ocean. So far it had gone well and they were all pleased with their little journey of exploration. On the way they had stopped at a couple of national parks and gone exploring, hiking up to other peaks even grander than where Mountain Girl lived, and other times just spending the night at the local bar and then sleeping by the side of the road or occasionally even spending money on a hotel and staying in a city, which always delighted Vickie with the possibility of sampling the local music scene. And they’d enjoyed the whole feeling of meeting new people, getting to know them, having a feeling for a place by befriending those who lived there. They had a book filled with addresses of those they’d met who they had promised to write or to visit again someday.

It was a little known lake in a hollow far up in the local mountains. There were no other cars at the trailhead and they hadn’t gotten any permits or anything; it wasn’t that kind of place. From the looks of what passed for a trailhead no one had been here in months. Andy had heard about it in a bar the night before with Mountain Girl. Then just as they were locking up the car, hoping that they were in the right place, Bill James and Ken Gregory had driven up. They knew the route, why not go together? They parked their cars near each other and started off up the trail.

Vickie had been against it from the start. There was something about them that just rubbed her the wrong way, and she thought that if she'd been with Andy and Mountain Girl the night before she would never have agreed to any of this. She’d had a lifetime of gauging people and discovering the worst about them and her instincts were usually right but Andy seemed to think they would be okay even though Mountain Girl had some doubts also, and so against her better judgment Vickie had convinced herself that they at most would be obnoxious companions. She could handle obnoxious. Besides they had offered to pack up a whole bottle of Jack Daniels and some weed and to share it later. Vickie didn’t trust that offer either but still it sounded good.

They didn’t seem so bad on the hike up. It was a faint trail that looked like it was hardly ever used but Bill and Ken remembered the route well enough from before and led the way. Finally they got to the lake and Ken and Bill put their tent up while the others put their things a discrete distance away at Vickie’s insistence. They made dinner as it got dark and then it was time to party. Vickie didn’t feel like drinking much and neither did her friends that night but eventually almost half the Jack Daniels was gone along with some of a bottle of Blackberry brandy they had brought and that was when the trouble started.

It began with not too subtle teasing of Andy leading up to the question they all knew had been on Ken and Bill’s mind ever since they had met at the trailhead. What was Andy doing with two gorgeous women anyway? Didn’t he think he should share? Andy was acting too buzzed to really respond although Vickie knew this wasn’t really the case. It was more a case of Andy trying to be thoughtful and letting his two friends make their own decision. It was something they had agreed on at the beginning of their trip but Vickie wished he would be less thoughtful and polite tonight, or at least less seemingly oblivious to just how uncomfortable Vickie was feeling about everything.

The two men began to describe the time they had come here last year. They’d been accompanied by a woman who had turned out to need forceful persuading and they described the details of what Vickie thought was a clear cut major felony. Then Ken began playing with a hunting knife that he produced from his pack, talking about just how deadly it could be. Vickie was suddenly far beyond uncomfortable, now worried and disgusted with the whole situation and seething over the story they had just told. She hoped it was at least partly fabricated. She thought it probably it was; these two seemed to have too much to lose to engage in any serious violence. But you never knew, people were often full of unpleasant surprises. She responded to Ken's demonstration by cleaning her nails for a few moments with an equally ominous looking knife and then said she was going to go to sleep, rather pointedly commenting that she had better be left undisturbed. She wished Dennis was here. Between the two of them they could have a lot of fun teaching these two punks a lesson. But she hadn’t seen him in months and he certainly wasn’t here now. She started off through the woods towards their sleeping bags wondering why her friends hadn’t picked up on her cue. She was having a really bad feeling by now and wasn’t tired at all; worrying that she might have been wrong in her estimation of how far Ken and Bill might be willing to go with what they seemed to think was a game. She had begun to think that maybe it would be prudent to stay awake and perhaps even quietly pack up their stuff and bug out if the chance came. But her friends were still by the fire and not showing any signs of following her.

She wondered what was going through their minds. Andy just looked confused but she was having trouble figuring out what was going on with Mountain Girl tonight. Vickie could tell that something about the two men was rubbing Mountain Girl the wrong way also. But indecision about something was in plain sight on her face as she sat by the fire. Vickie couldn’t quite figure it out even as a feeling resonated deep inside her, as if she too was trying to revisit some unacknowledged thought.

She decided they would be better off with an unseen friend and so she settled down to watch what happened, hoping that Mountain Girl wanted nothing to do with these creeps. About five minutes later she saw Bill say something to his friend and then he reached over and grabbed Mountain Girl. She angrily told him to get his hands off her and suddenly Ken wasn’t being pleasant at all. He asked her what they thought she and her useless boyfriend were going to do about it and Vickie was suddenly sober and coiled to strike like an angry snake. Mountain Girl pushed Bill off her and he swore at her and grabbed her again. While Vickie was deciding just how violent to be Andy got up and screamed at Bill to let her go as he grabbed him. His voice was pleading with them and frighteningly angry all at the same time. Ken hit Andy across the side of the head with a big piece of firewood and as he fell Ken swung at Mountain Girl without even breaking his stride. She flung up an arm and kept the stick from hitting her head and as Vickie ran between the trees back to the campsite she knew that she suddenly didn’t have many choices and that they were all bad.

Mountain Girl was fighting with Bill and Vickie had the thought that she couldn’t really tell which one of them was trying to get away from the other, while Ken stood over Andy threatening him with the hunting knife and forcing him to watch the fight. She decided Ken was the more immediately dangerous of the two and charged silently out of the shadows with only a half formed plan as to what she was going to do. As she ran her knife found it's way into her hand. Somewhere far away in her mind she knew better. She didn't need a knife. A rock or a stick were longer range weaponry and less lethal too, but she was too drunk and too angry to care. She was looking forward to the next few seconds in a way that was so intrinsic to her that she neither noticed or questioned it.

She stuck her knife into Ken’s backside and he screamed and collapsed backwards. Then she tripped over something as she stepped out of the way of his fall and he landed on top of her. She grabbed his forearm and cut the hand holding the knife as hard as she could with her knife. He dropped the hunting knife with another more frightened scream and she pushed it away from him with her foot just as Bill somehow freed himself from Mountain Girl and turned to help his friend. The next seconds seemed to last for hours and would forever have an awful clarity for Vickie. She saw that Bill’s face was covered with blood from deep scratches around his eyes and that his neck and one hand were bleeding from what had to be several vicious bite marks. She saw that Andy was on his feet again and trying to get to the knife Ken had dropped but he was still clumsy from the blow to his head and Bill was closer to it. She had a moment of total despair as she thought that Andy was no good with knives anyway and it wouldn’t matter if he got to it before Bill did. For an instant she looked at Andy’s face and could see the same understanding in his eyes. She tried with all her strength to get out from under Ken and reach the knife but he was just too heavy and slippery with blood in addition to being wild with rage. Bill was only two steps from the knife when she saw Mountain Girl grab Bill’s hair to yank his head back. Vickie had time to see an eerie calm on her friend’s face masking another look, a look of inhuman desperation hiding deep in her eyes, and then in an action of horrifying simplicity Mountain Girl pulled her own knife across Bill’s throat and Vickie knew that all of their lives had just changed forever. He began to cough as she pulled his head further backwards, forcing the cut open and pulling him to the ground and then he fell with a look of astonished terror and pain on his face just as Ken’s elbow hit her under her chin and then there was nothing, just blackness.

The next thing she would remember would be looking around in confusion. In her few seconds of near unconsciousness Andy had pulled Ken off of her, and he was frantically beating his unconscious form over the head with another piece of firewood as if he expected Ken to get up and continue his assault at any moment. As she remembered what had just happened she saw Mountain Girl stand and step quickly but carefully towards Ken with her knife. She stood watching as Andy hit Ken again and again and then moved into a startled crouch as Vickie scrambled towards Andy. Vickie had a moment of fear. “It’s me! Vickie!” she screamed at Mountain Girl and then she grabbed Andy, screaming for him to stop. He flung her off of him and smashed the piece of wood over Ken’s motionless body and then collapsed next to him.

Vickie gazed in adrenaline filled relief mixed with bewildered despair at the scene. Andy was half sitting and half lying with a terribly grief stricken expression on his face while Mountain Girl began throwing up onto Ken’s inert form. Didn’t her friends know what they had just done? All she had done was stick Ken in the backside, nothing fatal. He'd have eventually managed to limp back to the trailhead although it might take him an extra day or two. Somewhere she knew she'd been enjoying that vision as she rushed into her attack. But now they instead looked to have either a dead man and a witness or two corpses. She couldn’t allow herself to figure out which thought was worse.

Mountain Girl finished retching and they sat for a few minutes. Ken was bleeding incredibly from where Vickie had stuck him. She wondered if she had missed the safe spot and had hit some important blood vessel by mistake. It wouldn’t have mattered with the beating Andy had given him. Bill wasn’t moving at all and after a few minutes Mountain Girl felt around on their bodies for a bit and said that she they were both safely dead. Then she vomited again.

They stared at each other for an infinitely short eternity and then Andy said that it was clearly self defense and they would have to go to the police. Vickie wondered if things could possibly get any more insane as she explained to Andy that he hadn’t gotten a real good look at these two men or even listened to them today. They were wealthy college boys with families who were bound to be outraged and although Andy might somehow be found innocent she and Mountain Girl were an entirely different story. Vickie’s presence alone was probably enough to convict the three of them. It was Mountain Girl who decided the issue. As Andy and Vickie argued over what to do she wiped the vomit and blood from her face, pulled the bodies to the nearby lake and gutted them. She threw the gut pile into the lake as far as she could and then began filling the body cavities with rocks. Vickie calmed down a bit and had the presence of mind to take the car keys from Bill’s pockets and then the three of them took an air mattress from Bill and Ken’s tent and somehow dragged and floated the bodies out to where the lake was real Deep and let them sink into the depths. Mountain Girl said that the lake looked like it had plenty of fish and the bodies should get eaten up pretty quickly. They burned all the men’s camping equipment they could before sinking it also into the lake and then waited till dawn to be sure that they had cleaned up as much as possible, hoping desperately that some other hiker wouldn’t appear. It didn’t seem like the sort of place many people ever came to, especially early in the morning, but this had to be the unluckiest night of all their lives. Finally they started down the trail talking in whispers about what to do. It was late afternoon by time they got back to the trailhead.

It wasn’t that complicated although they all practically died of fright for the next week. Vickie drove Bill’s car with Andy following. They had all taken a good swim in the lake and hoped the blood was gone but just in case they changed out of their clothes and put the ones they had been wearing in a bag in a dumpster at a rest stop. They took everything they could out of Bill’s car and put it in another dumpster, looking to make sure it was full and ready to be removed. Then they drove into the city which was a couple of hours drive away and found a neighborhood Vickie considered suitable for their purposes. They quietly left the car with the keys in it and the windows down, looking as if they would be back in just a minute and hoping some cop didn’t bust them on the suspicion that they were here to buy drugs. When they got to the next state they took a little more time before they got rid of all the camping gear that they had brought on the trip and Andy and Vickie took turns driving for a couple of days till they were home. They spent the night at Andy’s house and his family knew something terrible had happened but all he would say was that he wasn’t going to talk about it.

Vickie had been slightly wrong but only slightly. Bill and Ken had wealth and power to spare and an attitude that they should have what or who they wanted whenever they wanted. A trial would have found them innocent of anything even without them there to protest their blamelessness. But they had never been known as thoughtful and there wasn’t anyone who would miss them until much later when they were due to return to college. Their friends dismissed the lack of any word from them as something to be expected and their families were actually relieved that they were not getting any calls from the police this summer about what they had done now. By the time anyone began to seriously wonder when they would return their car was in Brazil and memories of the two had faded from those they had met on their trip except for those of three people over a thousand miles away. It would be many years later when a fisherman would find the remains of a leg bone a mile downstream of the lake and by then there would be nothing left to indicate how some bones had come to be in this lake lost up in the mountains, certainly not enough for anyone to ever make a connection to two men who’s families had thought it best not to even encourage too much of an official search, wondering instead what it was that perhaps had given their sons a reason not to want to be found for so long. Their families' far more extensive searches through other channels would likewise prove useless and their epitaph would forever be a secret held by three people who would never ever forget them and someday by a very few more who would be almost too horrified to believe what they had been told.

[Absaroka]

First of all thanks SL for reopening the thread.

Most of the criticism I got of my story had to do with what was in the last post. The most literary critique of it came from a writer friend who said to either make it the focal point of the whole story, or delete it entirely, because it just can't be just another chapter. Other comments ranged from my sister saying she enjoyed seeing the two creeps get what they had coming, to the real life Dennis / Denise asking how does Andy manage to live with himself afterwards.

The best solution probably would have been deletion. But since this was an exploration of fantasies I dwelt on as a child, I decided to keep it. As noted earlier, this was also an exploration of my feelings about violence towards women which took on a far greater meaning for me after my eldest daughter was born.

But it's about something else as well. It's about chances I took at times, and why I took them, although that will not be clear till the next couple of chapters. And about how unclean and dirty inside anger can leave us.

My solution to how to wrap up their feelings comes across a bit of a deux et machina, something just arbitrarily imposed on the story, because I didn't want to write a huge amount about the grief and self loathing they feel. I took a long time trying to figure out how to write them out of their emotional corner, and then one day the hungry elderly bear just appeared. Sort of like the line in the movie Grand Canyon where it's observed that sometimes you just happen to be swimming in the ocean, and a hungry great white shark just happens to swim by, and it really has nothing at all to do with you at all except that you get eaten.

A lot of stuff got into this. My obsession with objects. My feeling that I've been different people over the years. I remember working at the mental hospital and a woman tried to cut her heart out. I found her, and saved her life by doing so. I never realized blood smelled like that, and it made me horribly nauseaus. The poor cleaning lady who had to mop it up did vomit all over the place.

Hope you enjoy it.

What would you do if I did that to you? part 2


The next fall Andy practically dropped out of school with a wealth of schoolwork poorly completed at the last minute. Self defense or not, the depth of both the fear and the rage he had felt left him feeling dirty inside for a very long time. And the guilt was almost as bad. It has been his idea to go to the lake, his insistence that it would be okay to accompany Ken and Bill over Vickie’s objections, and his acquiescence to Vickie’s demands not to do anything later. He should have known better; anyone should have known better. And then when the time came he had forgotten everything he'd been taught about how to end a fight before the other guy even knew it had started. How could he have been so stupid? He knew a dozen dirty tricks, had practiced them innumerable times when he was younger, and they were all non lethal. But instead he had grabbed Bill like a dumb kid with no thought at all about what was about to happen. His friends could have been raped, all three of them could have been terribly hurt or killed, and he couldn’t have prevented it. How could he have acted like such a helpless fool? How could he have endangered his friends that way? And most of all, how could he have actually done what he'd done?

Not only that, he knew Vickie had been right about keeping this a secret. And so he regarded every policeman with fear. He turned off the news when it came onto the radio in his car. He searched his car perpetually in terror that some trace of what had happened remained unfound. He obsessed over the idea that he might talk during one of the nightmares he had. His family knew there was a connection between whatever it was that had happened on their trip and a major personality change in him and asked him about it again and again, but never would he speak a word about it to them. His silence grew to encompass all his time with them; grew till it forced him to seek to avoid their company.

He had always known that half his life had been a secret to his parents but this was different. He would never have imagined keeping something like this from his family and doing so was almost as shattering as the knowledge of what they had done. He needed them desperately and couldn't say a word about it, had to try to pretend that a momentous disaster had not taken place. Had to try, and had to fail. He wondered exactly what he had done, who he had become, and he couldn't stand the thoughts that came to him.

Danny went to college with him. They rode the train into the city sometimes together and had become friends again; the falling out years ago part of the past. But now something was different. He looked at Danny and saw the person he had been before he became friends with Vickie. He saw the person he had been when he had tried to defend Danny and Steven. He saw the person who had never lied about anything he considered truly important. He saw what he now realized could have happened the day he'd thrown dirt in Peanut's face. He saw the person he had been until a few minutes one evening the previous summer.

Just thinking about all those people made him want to cry. Danny wanted to know what was going on in Andy's mind, why had Andy had somehow become so silent and seemingly defeated.. His family could accept his absent silence and his secrecy but with Danny it was different. They'd been estranged for too long, and after all he was only Danny anyway. Only the man who lifetimes ago had been one of his two best friends. The person who'd been Danny's best friend was gone. Sometimes Andy hoped he was gone forever, other times he longed for him desperately. Whatever the case, being with Danny, even sitting on the train with him in silence, brought back memories that were too much to bear. Too sad. Too hateful. It was one more thing to worry about; avoiding Danny, not taking the train when Danny might be on it. One more way to miss classes. One more reason to avoid life altogether.

Mountain Girl thought that she hadn’t been this confused since the time that her father had failed to return from his trip the summer that she met Andy. She hadn’t done anything wrong; she had been protecting her friends, and that was all there was to it. But she couldn't forgive herself for her stupidity in even being in the company of Ken and Bill in the first place. She spent endless hours wondering just how many more Ken and Bills existed in the world. When would she encounter them again? What should she do? Worst of all, she found herself constantly reliving a scene where Bill got to the knife before she could stop him and the look of horrified surprise was on Andy’s face instead of Bill’s, and she couldn’t get seem to get the smell of blood out of her nose no matter what she tried. Protecting her friends would have been worth any price, but still the blood had smelled so different than that of the game she killed for food. So human. She had the terrible thought that Andy and Vickie's blood would smell the same.

And then there was the matter of her knife. It had been her fathers and she had treasured it since his death. It was the food knife, used only in matters relating to food, and she used it constantly, in cooking, cleaning game, in all the tasks related to food. How could she eat food prepared with that knife now, now that it had been soaked in Bill's blood? It didn’t really matter. She had thrown it into the lake with their bodies feeling like it had been defiled by the blood it had drawn. But it had been her fathers, and they had taken it from her. She had the thought that she needed to forgive them for that and it felt so stupid that she thought it must be true. But she couldn't do it, couldn't forgive them for what they had taken from her. For any of what they had taken from her.

If she had listened to Vickie none of this would have happened. But she hadn’t. She had a bad feeling about why they had even gone to the lake with Bill and Ken, but she wasn’t going to let herself think about that, not at all. She wasn’t even going to discuss it with her friends, and that in itself was disturbing. But she wouldn’t think about that either. There was so much not to think about all of a sudden. For the first time in her life she felt like she had a evil secret., one that she told herself over and over had nothing to do with how she had protected her friends. But that always led to another question. And then it was time for her to draw a blank across her mind, not to think. It wasn't that difficult. She was getting better all the time at not thinking about things.

She was sure of one thing. One thing that she did think about, over and over. If somehow they were caught she would take the blame for everything. Vickie had told her stories about some of her friends going to prison and how it seemed that no one was never truly released from prison, even after the sentence was long over and they had left the walls far behind them, but she didn’t care. Even being accustomed to all the freedom of her mountains, she didn’t think a life sentence in some tiny jail cell or even being sent to death row could possibly be more of a prison than going through life without her two friends.

Vickie, in contrast to Andy, seemed more impassioned than ever in her studies and surprised everyone with some of her accomplishments. At the same time her teachers and classmates noticed how much quieter she had become. It seemed as if she was always deep in thought. And that she was.

She hadn’t wanted anyone to die and was pretty sure that their attackers would have preferred not to kill them either. They would have wanted their victims to live with their memories of humiliation and fear. And Vickie had to admit that she had wanted the same thing, for their attackers to live unable to ever escape the knowledge that they had made a terrible mistake this time in their choice of victims. She shocked herself with the thought that this was what had happened anyway but that she just hadn’t intended that the rest of their lives be such a short time. The depth of her desire for their attackers to live for the sole purpose of satisfying her desire for revenge and her bitterness over their escape into death from that revenge had left her with some of the most serious doubts about herself and her values that she had ever felt, and again and again she thought of Zechariah’s words to her and wondered who the enemy had really been. It was starting to seem like the enemy was becoming the despair Andy and Mountain Girl had fallen prey to. And combined with all these feelings was also a genuine regret over how the lives of their attackers had ended so badly. The fate so many she knew had struggled so desperately and uselessly to avoid. The part she'd played in two more foolish deaths. She hoped that was the real reason she felt so bad. She hoped with all her might that was why she felt so ashamed. So terrified.

She thought of her childhood friend David as well. He was in prison for a very long time for killing someone. It had been self defense in his case too, but the legal system was having none of that. David had been a gang member and so had his attacker and as far as the lawyers and judges were concerned they were all guilty of whatever they could possibly be charged with. The person he had killed hadn’t even been someone the outside world considered to be important. What could Vickie expect given the identity of their attackers?

But the most overwhelming truth of all was that like Andy, she too had failed to protect her friends. If only she could have thought of a way to keep them out of what she knew was a bad situation. She could have insisted on turning around right at the trail head and they would have listened. But she hadn’t and she didn’t want to think about that. True they were physically unhurt but Zechariah’s words once more returned to her. The scar on her heart and on the hearts of her friends had just gotten an awful lot bigger. She didn‘t want to think at all about how much more it could grow.

Autumn came and went, and then winter. First Mountain Girl and then Vickie found some sort of peace, accepting that it had after all been self defense and somehow convincing themselves this was the only question to be considered. But not Andy. He'd killed someone. It was that simple. How could he ever be forgiven?

Spring came. The bear hadn't eaten nearly enough before hibernation and emerged from it's den weak with hunger. Arthritis and internal parasites had combined with age to leave it desperate, and the young elk near the trail to Mountain Girl's cabin looked like a godsend to it. And then the mother elk charged. Taken unawares, the bear was caught in a vulnerable spot by her hooves. A few seconds later both mother and calf were in full flight and the bear was staggering away, mortally wounded and soon to provide a welcome feast for the coyotes. Andy and Vickie watched for while in sadness; they'd both acquired Mountain's Girl's fondness for predators. They somberly resumed their walk up the mountain and then Andy stopped in mid trail as if what he had to say was far too important to continue walking. "We didn't do anything wrong" he said. Slowly, wondrously, and filled with amazement the words emerged. "No we didn't" answered Vickie, softly, abandoning the sarcasm with which she usually acknowledged Andy when she thought he was right about something significant. They got to the cabin and then Andy had to talk about the bear and the elk incessantly until it was time to leave again. Mountain Girl wished with all her might that he would shut up. She went as far as to avoid him for as much as she could, finding reasons to leave, either alone or with Vickie. But as they were about to head back down the trail two days later she clutched Andy to her with an almost frightening violence. And Andy, the old Andy that they thought they might have lost, understood, holding her and then lowering himself to the ground, pulling her with him and cradling her. "I'm sorry" she said. "Talk all you want. Someday we'll be old and weak, and we'll make our last mistake, just like that bear. Just like daddy." Borrowing the mindset of Vickie she rendered her verdict: "It's cool" How stupid, thought Vickie. Reducing life and death to such terms. But Mountain Girl had said it, and it was true.

[Absaroka]

I really don't want to be the only one posting here. No need for anyone to write a book, a little vignette will do just fine.

However I love posting my stuff so here's the first part of the next chapter. About half of this got written all at once while listening to a song by a band called Dreams, which had both the Brecker Brothers in it as well as Billy Cobham, and was a sort of alternative to BS&T back in the late 60's. And yes the lyrics were all about not knowing where you were. It was called Asset Stop.

Most of this came easily, and was really a pleasant reminiscing about a very difficult period of my life that ended quite happily. However later I went and rewrote the beginning to make it's connection to the previous chapter a bit less implied because a lot of folks didn't see what I considered to be a very obvious connection. The seams still show a bit awkwardly in the writing I think. I was also trying to show how a long formative period in our lives can just turn into a blur.




The Life And Death Struggle



Over the years the terrible night by the lake would seem to fade into a bad distant memory. Andy's realization had pushed the guilt, and outright hate they had felt as far into the past as they could be. The following summer had found them almost unable to bear being apart from each other for fear of the stranger, and that had been followed by a bravado that they need fear nothing, afflicting each of them in turn. But slowly the outward normality of their lives rested and reassured them until peace returned. A peace that blinded them not only to the fact that their insidious, incestuous secret was slowly removing them from the rest of the world in a thousand small ways, but also to the fact that there was still another secret as well. Something that left them feeling dirty inside in a way that had nothing to do with what had happened to Ken and Bill. A secret that none of them dared speak, dared think, not to themselves, not to each other, and certainly never to anyone else. Never, ever, to anyone could anything be said. Not to anyone. Not about what had happened to Ken and Bill at the place they now referred to as Dead Bear Lake. And about something else as well.

Nevertheless, in time life returned to them, and sometimes it almost seemed that youth had returned as well. And life was good again. At least with a little help life was good. Most of the time. But by time he had graduated the five years of architecture school had left Andy just too tired of it all, no matter how good life seemed to have become. Vickie had finished a year before him and both life and her music were still one big adventure for her, but Andy wondered if he had really wanted to study architecture to begin with or anything else either for that matter. He found that the few job interviews he could bring himself to arrange were perfunctory at best and then seemed to just stop looking. He went to see Mountain Girl and wound up staying a week, then two. He went home for a few days and was back. He wanted to stay there for a while and although Mountain Girl was happy having him there with her she after a while he was always in the way. Making the best of a situation that she couldn't bring herself to think of as bad, she decided that this might be her big chance to see a bit of the world without abandoning her home and suddenly he was living in the little cabin alone, caring for the life she had temporarily left behind while she in turn was living with Vickie in the city and the two of them came to visit him every couple of weeks.

He lived there for more than an entire cycle of seasons before he decided that he spent too much time drinking up here alone and that he really needed a bit more connection with the world and in particular a lot more connection with his family. He wondered for endless evenings at how Mountain Girl managed to thrive on all her solitude and finally understood something about her that he'd previously accepted without comprehending. And then Mountain Girl had had enough of civilization and returned to her home. She no longer found him to be in the way and they'd enjoyed each others company, but still it was time for a change and when he returned to the world he found that architecture had regained it’s appeal for him and that finding a job was not that difficult after all. Vickie had decided that if giving her music all she had meant being on the road for awhile well that was what musicians did, didn’t they, and by now they were all three of them grown up, at least sort of, and the letters and phone calls between them were enough with Andy and Mountain Girl both being incredibly proud of her.

But after a few years had gone by the road was old and had just too many drugs on it, too many drugs and too many other problems as well, and when she came back things sort of settled down to the way they had been with she and Andy spending lots of time in the mountains for a while and then taking a vacation from all that peace and giving themselves to the frantic pace of the city and it’s jazz while Mountain Girl came to visit them. For awhile Andy and Vickie lived together only to find that they saw an awful lot less of each other that way and then Vickie was sick of all of it and did the same thing Andy had done and took a long retreat up in the mountains till she was strong enough again to cope with being a jazz musician and being driven by her art and her love while Andy by now thought that he was truly fortunate to be an architect which after all is supposed to be an art form too. His art was of the wedding band variety which meant he wasn’t calling out any great emotions from anyone or revealing “the truth” but at least it was fun and he was getting paid.

By now they seemed to be all adult and responsible and that sort of thing. But there was something that just didn’t seem to be working. It seemed like the music was working and the architecture was working and the mountains seemed eternal and life should be an awful lot of fun but still there was something wasn’t right, and whatever that something was seemed to be getting more wrong all the time. Being grown up was supposed to mean that you were in charge of your own life but they kept thinking that as much as they tried, something else seemed to be running their lives for them. Andy would think back to when he was a kid and realized that there were two parallel experiences going on in his school and think that the same thing was happening again but this time he just couldn’t seem to see what the other way was.

There were lots of culprits for the un-named thing that was wrong; lovers who just didn’t measure up to what the three of them had come to expect from each other, the demands of work and public taste, and even the idea that they really just needed to stop treating life like one big party and drink a whole lot less. The one thing they were sure of was the fact that the rest of the world seemed to have some sort of a problem. They would spend long hours by the fire with philosophical bottles of wine talking about this but still never getting to the point, culminating only in long mornings trying to sleep off the effects of the discussion the night before. And when they were apart all three of them spent their nights and often days alone, wondering what exactly was happening to them as they tried not to think about what they were afraid the answer might be. An answer that grew more ominous by the day. An answer that seemed to have distorted everything about their lives, until they had all begun to wonder if anything at all had turned out the way they would have wished.

Mountain Girl was the first to figure it out. After she had woken yet again to find her wilderness home in disarray and set about doing today what she should have done months ago, enough was enough. She thought about the last year or two. She couldn’t understand how her father had managed his life so seemingly effortlessly for so long. For the first few years she had managed to keep things at least as nice as he had, even better really, but then it just started to seem too hard and her home was slowly, imperceptibly beginning to fall apart. Hunting had become an effort and she was finding that not only had her aim deteriorated, it was also harder for her to sneak up on anything. It was harder to be silent, but she suspected it really had more to do with a disturbing odor that seemed to follow her around. She had lost a great deal of the last harvest from her fruit and nut trees simply by failing to care properly for it.

Worst of all she had twice cleaned game improperly and then failed to recognize this, making herself horribly sick with food poisoning and then having to discard the entire catch. The second time she’d had to get rid of an entire deer. The only other time that had happened had been as a young adolescent when her father had let her eat only a few bites of the animal she had been careless with and the results had left her with a great and lasting respect for doing this the right way.

It occurred to her that she should perhaps be concerned about the winter. It was still quite a ways away but she just didn’t seem to have something she had always had to face it’s challenges. This was new to her; even in what she now thought of as her winter of seclusion she hadn’t felt like the winter itself was to be feared.

Most telling of all she thought was the strange fact that she had become so secretive. She spent so much of her life alone that she had trouble figuring out who she was keeping any secrets from. It was something entirely different from the lack of communication with most of the world that both she and her father had embraced. She had long ago withdrawn from Lee, who still lived on the other side of the divide, and she sensed the same furtiveness in Andy and Vickie. It wasn’t like there was anything that they didn’t know about each other. It was more like a collective shame that none of them could acknowledge. And yet daily she battled with her suspicions about the root of that shame and the path it seemed to be inexorably leading her on.

In the huge pile of books she had amassed over the years were any number of books about substance abuse, collected first in an effort to understand Vickie’s family for her and then later for another reason that she didn’t quite allow herself to comprehend. She got out a big blue book, one that had been written in an archaic and dramatic style, read it for two days, and then picked out an address and began a letter for which she could not find the words. For a week of fireside evenings she wrote and then tore it up until she had the thought that although she wasn’t going to drink that a little marijuana would help her find the right words. It was then that all the years of living by nature’s rules had given her one of the biggest rewards of her life because she could recognize bullshit when it was staring her in the face at least, and now the words did come, they came freely and without the help of anything to alter her mind. The next morning she ran down the trail to mail her letter and waited breathlessly for the next two weeks for a return letter. It came a day before her friends were due for another visit and when it did she had become her very own loner group of Alcoholics Anonymous.

She hoped against hope that when Andy and Vickie came they wouldn’t bring anything but that wasn’t the way it happened. Somehow at least it was a restrained weekend because they were going to support her in this foolishness of hers; after all they didn’t like the idea of her up on the mountain all alone drunk yet again but they were different. Three visits later they agreed that she might be right about an awful lot of things and that they would give sobriety a try also but felt no need to write anyone themselves and all the while Mountain Girl was coming to know that she was going to be okay on this new path. She had been taking the advice in the letters and had gone out to the rock where she had seen her father praying so many years ago and asked for guidance and help from whoever was there, in her letter writing sponsors words “Who’s large and in charge.” Her sponsor talked like Vickie did when she was on the bandstand she thought, and perhaps this was a sign of something. And the two of them would come visit, sometimes sober, sometimes not, until one night it was all clear.

They weren’t even very drunk but somehow the words were coming freely. They were scared. Vickie told them of the song lodged in her brain all the way up to the cabin, something they had tried to work out in the band years ago but it hadn’t really come out the way they wanted it to. It had a vocal right to the point: “If you knew where you were, you’d know you were lost, with nothing left to hide.” They had both half tried so many times to stop drinking that they were beginning to suspect that they hadn’t been half ways trying at all; in truth it was an all out effort in disguise and it wasn’t working. They were proud of her, they thought maybe they should avoid her but they also thought that maybe she knew something they didn’t know. They were jealous of her peace. Late the next morning Mountain Girl made her move. They were going to a new place she said.

Somehow they got lost which wasn’t that big a deal, but when it started getting late she led them down into a little town way over on the other side of Dead Goat Saddle and they realized that she had walked them almost 20 miles. It was all out of character but she had walked so fast that they could barely keep up and there wasn’t much time for questions. As if to further baffle them she dug some money out of her pocket and bought them some food at the store which was a first and then she actually conversed with the store owner a bit and when she led them into the basement of a church another mile away they were beyond wondering. There were a bunch of people there and she sat her publicly antisocial self down with a smile. Vickie had the song going through her brain at top volume by now; still the same one with the singer jamming over and over again on “you’re lost, you’re lost, you must be loooooooooost……”

Mountain Girl looked at her, feeling the song in her friend’s mind and just as Vickie looked like she was about to leave; she knew where they were now, Mountain Girl said in her best facing down a hungry bear voice that they were both going to sit their asses down right now and while Andy and Vickie were sitting in confusion someone asked something and they heard her say “I’m an alcoholic and these are my friends and they’re alcoholics too. It’s their first time here.”

After it was all done she explained to them that she came here once every two weeks, walking a good part of the day to get here, and that there was a nice barn a little ways away where they could spend the night. The walk home tomorrow would be a lot more fun, she usually did some fishing and the berries were in season and there was a shorter way with a drop dead waterfall to swim under but she had timed it to get them here at just the right time tonight with them too tired to argue.

Exhausted, they were too tired to argue now either but Vickie recognized the same Mountain Girl she had written Cat Ear Moon for so many years ago. For Andy even with how well he had known her for all these years it was all still a bit too strange. The barn sounded like a great idea.

[Leeza]

I am glad SL opened this thread. I didn't realize it, but I had missed out on some of the last segments so had to catch up. I really enjoy the posts, but have never thought about my life as a girl.

Leeza

[Robyn Katie]

Hooray Absaroka. Great to see Mountain Girl, Andy, Vickie and all back.

Love, Robyn Katie

[Absaroka]

Thanks Robyn Katie. Yes they are back, and soon Dennis will be back too. Any hope for your folks?

The last entry was originally the whole chapter, but over time I added a lot to it. It became a trio rather than just one voice, if you will. Here's Vickie's chorus and it's a long one. Holding forth like Gordon in a previous chapter.

There's a lot of foreshadowing of this part throughout the entire story. I was never clear if I was too heavy handed in that or not. To some it probably shouted at top volume, to others it was probably not even a background hum.

I didn't have a lot of blackouts and didn't, thank God, have most of these experiences. Yet. However Vickies inabitlity to figure out who she might be in a different circumstance is very much me. And I'll never forget the moment of clarity, walking up the stairs just like in the story.

I absolutely loved writing this part. It may sound painful, but it's a pain that dries up and blows away in the light.

Also enjoyed throwing around the catchphrases. A favorite is change people, places and things. It wasn't till I wrote this that I realized I had misunderstood this at many times to think it meant I should change them into something else.



Mountain Girl hoped that she had finally gotten through to her friends, but she'd heard enough to know that this might not be the case. The next time she went to her meeting she was told by several others that it had been terribly arrogant of her to introduce her friends, much less label them as alcoholics in front of the whole meeting. They explained to her that this was something that her friends must do themselves and that she was just going to have to accept this and she supposed that they were right, but that didn’t mean that it felt right to her. Then they would tell her that her friends were lucky to have someone like her to care for them even as they went on with all that stupid talk about changing people, places, and things. Change them to what? She was trying to help them change, why were people telling her to let go? The people at the meetings confused her. They kept talking about listening to your feelings and when she did they told her she was thinking like an alcoholic. And when she told them that none of this made any sense all they ever said was to be patient. More will be revealed they would say as if they were preparing her for some secret truth. And then they had the nerve to call her arrogant.

It didn’t make any sense and at the same time it made perfect sense. But in the meantime she didn‘t have any better ideas and as irritating as the people there were there was still something about them that she liked. She was clear about two things. She didn’t want to drink or smoke marijuana anymore and she was going to hold on to her friends no matter what. The rest could sort itself out. How was that for the detachment and patience they were always talking about!

Her hopes were only partly met for the moment. Andy and Vickie, the their own surprise, began attending meetings at home and went with Mountain Girl when they visited her, but for the most part they timed their visits to miss that time of the month. Vickie in particular made a real effort to take what she called the sobriety thing seriously. She had suspected that this time might come for her for a very long time. But somehow the most both Vickie and Andy could do was make a bigger pretense of controlling themselves and somehow keep their drinking to occasional episodes of drunkenness.

Truly unpleasant clarity came for Vickie at the end of a gig one night. She and Andy had gotten drunk and she had been late to the gig, something that never happened. The right way was to drink during the gig and get drunk after. She didn’t drink before. And then to further compound her unhappiness the gig had been mediocre at best. The other musicians had somehow been lacking in spirit, the ensembles had been sloppy, the solos tedious, and she herself had felt unable to find the right notes anywhere she looked for them. It was the sort of thing that happened to everyone now and then and normally she accepted it as the price to be paid for sounding good on other nights. But not tonight. Tonight she felt as if something she had always known she could count on had failed her for the first of a long dreary parade of soon to come disappointments. As they packed up at the end of the evening one of the newer members of the band, a shy quiet sax player who idolized her and the whole band, had tried to be helpful. Vickie had flown into a rage, heaped abuse on him and ended by smashing his sax into the drum set. Things had deteriorated from that point. The other band members had been appalled and they had all been thrown out of the bar.

Vickie was long past her abandoned childhood, but she still didn’t have that many rules for herself. Even so, she'd managed to break almost all of them in one evening. Even worse, she felt as if she was becoming the person she remembered fearfully watching her brother become. Andy had heard about the whole thing and had called and then come over but she hid from the phone, locked the door, ignored his knocks. He had a key of course and could of come in but he didn’t. The following day she went to a different meeting where she knew she wouldn't see Andy. It was a different fellowship entirely, and she wondered for a moment should she really be here. She'd come a couple of times before and she'd liked it, felt more comfortable than the other meetings she'd gone to.

She sat listening to the opening reading and leader said something about how alcohol was a drug and that they could not afford to be confused about this. The entire room answered back at the end of his sentence. "Period." Emphasizing the completeness and finality of the thought. Call and response. During the readings people would chime in at certain parts, like they were in church or something. It was almost musical. She thought about that for a moment, her thoughts interrupted by what she recognized as the final refrain of the introduction. "Jails, institutions, and death" the room called out. Silently she added an "oh my" like Dorothy in the movie and smiled for the first time that day.
She guessed it was okay to stay.

In fact, she thought,. they had to let her stay, enjoying her willingness to do battle should the need arise. She sat silently till almost the very end of the meeting when the leader asked if anyone had a burning desire. She knew what that meant, a desire to pick up, to hurt either herself or someone else. She raised her hand to tell the truth as she understood it. There was suddenly almost nothing to be said, but she told the truth. She left scared out of her wits hoping that this would finally work.

The first weeks after her outburst went about as well as could be expected. She spent the first few days wondering what in the world was going to happen to her now and hoping desperately that she wasn't going to use that day. After about two days she called up Andy and asked could he come over to see her and she told him everything that had happened. He was relieved to see that she was taking the whole thing seriously and offered to stay with her for as long as she wanted him to. He spent the night and then the next night and then she wanted a little time to herself.

The people in the meetings told her to try to go to meetings every day and to start developing friendships with some of the women there. She managed to attend the meetings most days and found a couple of women that she felt sort of comfortable with. She also found a couple of men that she felt okay with, perhaps even a bit more comfortable. She didn't think the whole idea of limiting herself to talking to the other women was a very good idea at all. After all most of her fairly close friends had been men. Not that she had anything against women of course.

She liked the meetings when they weren't annoying her and liked the people there even if she thought they tried a little too hard to impress each other with how terrible their lives had been. There was something that they seemed to understand without being told that not too many other people understood at all. Something about wanting everything and nothing all at the same time. But within a couple of weeks even with her new acquaintances she started to feel more alone than ever.

It wasn't for a lack of people in her life. To her great relief her band had survived her tantrum. She'd apologized profusely to everyone involved and they seemed to have accepted her apology. Their gig at the bar they had been thrown out of had been reinstated. Andy was being terribly supportive and she had all her new friends. But with each passing day she felt more alone until eventually she felt as alone as she had before she and Andy had become friends.

At the meetings they told her to talk about her feelings and she did, as best she could. Her feelings were so hard to describe, let alone try to explain. They told her that what she was feeling was normal. They told her she hadn't really allowed herself to feel her feelings in a very long time. They told her that she was mourning the loss of her best friend; her addiction. It all seemed sort of true but there was more to it. Much more, she thought. And she didn't believe them when they told her that she had never allowed herself to feel her feelings. She felt them all the time.

She spent more time than ever with Andy. And then one night as she lay next to him, sleepless as he snored, she knew.

She was going to lose Andy. He still drank, still smoked his pot, and although he tried his very hardest to be supportive of her in every way he could, she knew that he was having trouble with her sobriety. He was jogging for miles and miles every day to tire himself out so that he could get to sleep unaided when he was with her. And even so there were far too many nights where they lay in bed together awake, alone, apart, at a loss for words. They'd make fantastical, incredible and exhausting love and still after they were done there would be something more that they'd both want. She knew what she wanted. Just one bottle of wine. For herself. A tiny little half gallon bottle. Another for Andy. Or a joint or two. For each of them. Or even just a handful of pills, enough to spend the night in oblivion even if all it meant was passing out before she could have any fun.

Well she knew that she couldn't do this. In the meetings they told her that these feelings would eventually fade. When this would happen they didn't say, but she'd endured far worse. What she hadn't had to endure was the distance she felt from Andy at these times. She'd let him know that it would not upset her if he went outside for a few minutes, smoked a joint and come back so they could both get to sleep. Sometimes he did and she would feel herself relaxing as he left. He'd come back half an hour later, telling her he'd gone for a walk. As if he had to lie to her. As if there was a chance she'd believe him. They both knew better. But it worked. When he came back she would feel herself melting into him and everything was good again. They could sleep together if he was high. It wasn't bad at all, being sober with him while he was high. It was certainly better than lying sleepless next to him feeling him try to pretend none of this bothered him. Yes, it worked. For now.

She went to see Mountain Girl alone. She'd done this many times; they both did. But this was one of the very few times that she had specifically not wanted Andy to come with her. She tried to explain all this to Mountain Girl. Half way through her confused verbal wandering Mountain Girl interrupted her. "Don't you think I know exactly what you're feeling?" she asked. "Remember who you're talking to." And of course Mountain Girl knew what she felt. How could she not? And with her friend for the next two days the fear receded. It would be okay. Things had always worked out for the three of them. This would be no different.
Halfway down the mountain the loneliness returned, stronger than ever as if trying to make up for the time she had not been tormented by it. It stayed with her all the way home and clung to her at the gig that night.

She went home with the saddest songs she had ever played crowding every thought she had out of her head. Andy went home with her. He loved her. It didn't change anything. She did her best to let him comfort her and failed completely. She told him of her fears of losing him in some way and he promised it would never happen. They went for a long walk, miles and miles of moonlit romantic watching of the night and she started to feel a little better. A little.

She went to her meeting the next day. She went out for lunch with some of the people there she liked. They really were nice people and since they had managed to stay clean there must be something that she could learn from them. After all, as they kept reminding her, they'd felt all the same fear and pain. The same anger. But although at any given moment she might feel a little better there was always that something looming over her. Andy came to see her play again the next night. But it was a Sunday night and he needed to go to work on Monday morning. She told him that she'd be fine; that she was exhausted and would go right to sleep after the gig. She didn't sleep at all. At four a.m. she gave up and spent the next two hours looking through all her photo albums at the life the three of them had had together. At six a.m. she got in her car, bought several large cups of coffee, and left to see Mountain Girl again.

There was no one in the cabin. This wasn't all that unusual. As she usually did, Mountain Girl had left a little note in case they dropped in unexpectedly. Vickie sat on the bed and fell sound asleep. When she awoke it was late afternoon. She took the rifle down from where Mountain Girl kept it, went outside, and wandered quietly around until she shot something. She went back to the cabin, made a fire in the stove, gutted and cleaned her catch and cooked herself some dinner. Then she wandered around till sunset. She didn't expect Mountain Girl to return for another day.

As it grew dark she returned to the cabin. She lit a few candles and a lantern, and then she sat on the porch reading for a while. Finally she put the book down and thought fondly of other times she'd spent here at the cabin alone. Half an hour later her fond memories had turned to despair. What was going to become of the three of them? She'd reached a turning point and there was no going back. She was a drug addict, an alcoholic. She knew what that meant. She could choose sobriety, choose recovery, choose life, and take a chance on losing Andy. At least she might have Mountain Girl. Maybe. There was that feeling again; that she couldn't be friends with one without the other. Or she could choose something else, knowing full well what it meant.

What she hated most of all was the feeling that she was being forced to choose between her two friends. Andy or Mountain Girl. As if for some reason she couldn't have both. They were a trio, or they were three strangers, and if she had to choose one she'd lose both of them. She went into the cabin and got one of the knives Mountain Girl used for chores around the house. Not one of the food knives; that wouldn't be right. She went back outside and threw it at the cabin wall. Then she pulled it out of the wood siding, walked about twenty feet away and threw it again. She did this over and over, till her arm hurt. Then she left the knife sticking in the side of the cabin and went inside.

Maybe Mountain Girl would come home in the night, although she didn't expect her to. If she did maybe she'd see the knife and know how Vickie felt. Yes, she thought, Mountain Girl had to know how she felt. She tried to imagine what it was like for Mountain Girl to wonder what would happen to both Vickie and Andy. Imagining that amount of pain in her friend was overwhelming. But she left the knife in the cabin wall anyway.

She felt stupid the next day. She made herself some breakfast and went outside to see if there was anything that needed to be done. Then she wrote Mountain Girl a long letter and left it on the table, explaining that she had needed to see her but she was okay, just feeling sad. Lastly she pulled the knife out of the cabin wall and put it back where it belonged. It was as if she had impaled her pain on the knife, slaughtering it. She felt okay right up till the moment she reached the bottom of the trail and got into her car and began to drive home.

Her band didn't have a gig that night so she went to her meeting. When it was her turn to talk she shared that she was hurting in a way that she hadn't hurt since she had been a young child. Hurting in a way to which the only reasonable response seemed to be to hit someone or break something. She didn't want to do that. She didn't know what she did want to do. After the meeting people came up to her to talk to her. They asked her if she wanted to go out for coffee with them. She was exhausted. She told them she was just going to go home and go to sleep.

For the rest of her life she'd wonder what happened next. She awoke in her bed to a sun high in the morning sky, a throbbing pain in her left hand, and a terrible feeling about something. She got out of bed after a few minutes and by time she was halfway to the bathroom she knew why she felt the way she did. She was hung over, or at least she was going to be hung over in a few hours. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe she'd figured out a solution to her problem. She got back into bed. There was a wet spot. There'd been a feeling between her legs too. She must have gotten laid last night. She wondered if it was Andy. Maybe not, she'd been upset with him. She wondered who it was. Maybe they hadn't been able to sleep and were in another room. She hoped she'd had fun. She hoped that whoever the lucky man had been had enjoyed it too. She'd get up in a minute and see if he was still here.

Maybe this wasn't going to be such a good thing. Her hand really hurt and now she recognized the pain. She'd hit something or more likely someone too hard too many times with it. She looked around her room more attentively. The blanket was on the floor at the foot of the bed and it seemed to have blood on it. The thought that she had had every single morning of her life since the night at Dead Bear Lake came to her, unnoticed in it's familiarity. But the bedroom looked okay. Not a corpse in sight, she thought, with the fake laugh that topped a long list of things she' come to hate about herself in the last few years.

She went out into the living room. It was a wreck. Furniture was strewn almost randomly about and the door to the hall and stair was wide open. The door and doorjamb had blood on them. Near the door one of the kitchen chairs had been smashed.

She looked around more carefully, trying to sort things out. There was a mans sweatshirt on the couch. It was unfamiliar and the wrong size for Andy. In the kitchen there were dirty dishes and pots and pans strewn about that had been clean and put away when she had left the apartment the night before. There was no dirty silverware, she noted. One her nightgowns, her favorite, was lying on the kitchen floor. It was torn and bloody.

She looked at herself. She'd fallen asleep in a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. They were muddy but without any blood on them. She remembered waking up. She'd been surprised to find that she was wearing her shoes to bed. A nice pair of running shoes, the kind she wore for long walks. She'd taken them off before she even got out of bed. She went to look at them. They were covered in mud. She looked again. She'd left a series of muddy footprints all over her apartment. At least there was no blood in the stair. And her hand really hurt, as if she'd been using only her fists. She told herself that she was sure that who ever she'd been fighting with had escaped in mostly one piece.

She put some of the dishes in the sink and then picked up her nightgown, wondering if she could sew it back together. She threw it on the couch and it landed on one of her cats. Both the cats got up and looked at her as if they were remembering what she'd done last night. If only the cats could talk, she thought. Better that they couldn't. She thought they looked like they knew something they'd rather not know.
She went outside and down the stairs to look around. Her car was parked in front of the house and it seemed to be okay. She looked around a bit more but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She started back up the stair to her apartment and it was on about the fifth step of the stair that it all hit her.

She tried to piece together what had probably happened and felt a shudder as she considered the possibilities. No one was dead but there were other less frightening possibilities. Could she have been raped? She'd have a lot more cuts and bruises if that had been the case. She thought about it for a bit more, convincing herself and felt relief flow through the dirtiness of her hangover. Not just for the trauma and violation that she had just decided hadn't happened. Relief from the need to try to find out somehow what had happened and exact revenge.

There was a pinprick of something else as she felt the fear leave her. Disappointment. An utterly absurd feeling. Disappointment over not having been raped? No, disappointment over not having a reason to make someone pay. She remembered a saying from the meetings. Some are sicker than others.

You're one seriously sick chick, she thought, and decided to try to think more about what had probably happened. She must have met some guy and brought him home. She hoped it was no one she knew. After they'd had sex she'd gotten mad at him and chased him out of the apartment. She'd probably gotten pretty physical and wondered if he'd said or done something to provoke her, admitting to herself that quite possibly he hadn't. After that she must have gotten dressed and gone for a walk. And she'd eaten a lot. There was no silver ware out so she'd eaten with her hands which meant it was probably after she had chased her unfortunate companion away.

She wondered how much the people downstairs had heard. She could ask them but she wasn't sure she wanted to. And they probably wouldn't say much; they spoke only a little English. Enough to be pleasant to her on some days and to look at her as if she was the source of all their problems on others.

She made herself some coffee, took a shower, got dressed and morosely began to clean up the mess. The more she cleaned the bigger the mess seemed. After a little while she gave up and called Andy. He answered with a cheerful hello and before she even said hello she breathed a sigh of relief over the answer to a question she hadn't dared consider. It hadn't been him. But what if next time it was? Andy was talking on the phone, wanting to know who it was on the other end. She forced out a sickly hi and asked him if he was okay. "I'm fine" he answered. "You sound like you're not. You want me to come over?" "I'm okay" she lied. "I just want to be alone for a bit." She stopped herself in the middle of putting the phone down. If she hung up like this Andy would come over anyway.

She didn't want to see him. She didn't want to see anyone. She didn't want to talk to anyone. So she put the phone back to her mouth and tried to babble aimlessly until she hoped she'd convinced him that she was okay, or least that he could stay away in good conscience.

She ended the phone call and sat with her coffee trying to relax, trying to compose herself. The people in the meetings were always talking about honesty. How in the world could she be honest about anything, she thought, when she no longer had any idea what the truth was? Perhaps things weren't as bleak as they seemed. Maybe she just needed to try harder. No, she thought, she'd been trying with all her might and in reality things were even worse than they seemed. Horribly worse.

She thought of the fights she had been in. Ever since the night at Dead Bear Lake she'd put every effort into avoiding losing her temper in a physical manner. For several years she'd been successful. But then the trend had begun to change. She'd told herself she'd come in off the road because of the drugs and loneliness. But it wasn't the drugs, it was what she did when she used the drugs. What she did to men who didn't want to take no for an answer had gotten her fired at least once and perhaps more; she wasn't sure. Maybe that was understandable, they should have known better. She was proud of how she'd protected herself and she admitted it freely.

But there had been other things, things that she didn't like to think about. Things that should have been embarrassingly petty but in the heat of intoxication had seemed to call for revenge. How many mornings or afternoons had she woken up dreading the recollection of the night before? Dreading the consequences? So she'd come home, and it had seemed that the world had stopped provoking her. Until recently.
She thought of her childhood friends. Dennis had disappeared years ago. She had no idea what had become of him. He was probably dead, victim of an overdose or a crime that hadn't turned out the way he had planned. David was still in jail for a very long time. She had no idea what had happened to Alan. Maybe he was okay. She didn't believe that for a second.

Unasked, her sister made her way into her mind. She thought of her family. Even though she barely allowed herself to use that word to describe them, that's what they were. And each and every one of them, her mother, her father, her sister, and her two brothers, had lived lives that seemed to be unmitigated disasters. Only she had been spared. She had a variety of people to thank for that but there had always been something, some little spark of defiance in her that refused to accept the fate that seemed inevitable for her. And now it all seemed to be for nothing. She was well on her way to becoming exactly like every other member of her family.

Andy had given her so much. And now his every effort would have been wasted. Every ounce of love he and Mountain Girl had given her, been given by her, would someday be obliterated by the person she was becoming. They'd rather lose her, never see her again, than to have that happen to her. If getting clean, or sober, or whatever the word was, meant saying goodbye to Andy in his drinking and to Mountain Girl in her sobriety, well they would have gladly paid the price. Shouldn't she? It didn't matter. She would do anything to avoid the fate of the rest of her family. If it was possible. Maybe it wasn't. She didn't know. But loyalty was loyalty. Loyalty not to Andy and Mountain Girl but to what they had offered her for what seemed like her entire life. Loyalty too the love she had for them, loyalty to the love they had for her. Loyalty to herself. She knew what she had to do.

Two hours later she drove up to the mountains again, practically ran the whole way up the trail singing You’ve Got To Be Ready to herself between gasping for breath and collapsed into the cabin. Mountain Girl had looked at her and knew that this was finally the time and she had stayed there, talking incessantly about what had happened for the first day and then silent for the next and then they had hiked all day over the mountains, across Dead Goat Saddle, and then to that far away town with Mountain Girl actually hurrying to keep up.

Vickie was ready, no matter what the cost.

[Absaroka]

Here's the 3rd voice in the trio. Surprisingly or not, this was more difficult for Andy than anyone else, with the result that he inflicted more pain on his now unanesthetized friends than they did on him also.

Maybe there's a bit too much jargon in this part. But I did like how Mountain Girls speech patterns have been altered by her experiences.

I liked the idea of the wilderness as rehab, and it is where my decision was made. Andy's realization at the very end of what will happen mirrors my own. I was also very pleased with the description of both the quietness of his despair, the despearate measures he takes to keep his disease at bay, and the power of Mountain Girls anguish. I imagine lots of us have felt similar anguish over other things. Only the actual events are fiction in this part.




Over the next months she and Andy developed a pattern that worked for them, or at least seemed to work. Andy had never been one to do anything to call attention to himself, he was a quiet drunk who never bothered anyone, never did anything wrong, never seemed to have a problem.

He was terribly relieved that Vickie was now finally in recovery, he had worried about her in one way or another for as long as he had known her and suddenly he was able to see that this had been a very specific worry of his about her for years now.

And Mountain Girl with her calendar of the sun and moon and life of mountain lakes and snowy peaks was someone who seemed born for a life of meditation and austerity. She really seemed more like someone who should be meditating on a mountain top or at least on the prayer rocks where she liked to go for answers than she did someone who should be staggering around intoxicated with anything besides life itself. Even if she was going to eat whatever she caught on the mountaintop. Hmmmm, there were certainly several ways of thinking about that! Sobriety seemed so in character for her. But Andy-he was different.

He knew his friends would reject this idea out of hand. They were soul mates they all agreed, as different as night and day but as alike as any three drops of water in one of the streams near Mountain Girls home. But he had lost his drinking companions and without them he was incomplete no matter how much time the three of them spent together, or even how much they loved each other.

He still went to hear Vickie’s band. He liked to show up for the last set and hear them when they were shouting for all the world to hear, and he often succeeded in not drinking very much when he was there. Hanging out after had always been fun and the nights with Vickie after the gig would be the perfect end to the perfect day even when they merely fell asleep in each others arms. But it was different now.

He found himself needing to leave just as they finished. Now that she was sober he just couldn’t quite be with her, her energy, her coming out of what was like a trance for her when she played. But there was much more to it than that. He found that he had structured his time with her in such a way that it helped him control his drinking and he figured this was a good thing. They would have dinner together or spend the afternoon together on the weekends when they were both around and he wouldn’t drink then. He would manage to limit himself to a couple of beers when he went to hear her band. But what he could not seem to do was to fall asleep without a lot more to drink than that.

Sometimes as he left the gig he would see a look in her eye as she waved goodbye to him. A mixture of sadness that he was leaving but relief also. He did his best not to notice it and he knew she did her best to hide it but it was there all the same and they both knew exactly what the other was thinking. Then he would go home, smoke a joint and drink his little half pint of something, gin or blackberry brandy or whatever had caught his fancy that evening in the liquor store. He never bought more than a half pint and he bought it just before the stores closed so that he wouldn’t have it available to him for longer than absolutely necessary. But he did it every day, alternating between several different stores.

The whole bedtime ritual took less than half an hour and then he would fall asleep in peace, barely awake even long enough to enjoy the high.
It took every ounce of strength he had not to think about the fact that the last twenty minutes or so of his day was what gave his entire existence it’s structure and meaning.

He went to the mountain cabin less also. The trek up the mountain and the activity while he was there was enough to leave him exhausted enough to get to sleep unaided, and if he only drank a little his friends seemed not to mind that much even as they worried about him. The fact that they considered this a price they had to pay to be with him was something else he worked hard at not thinking about. He also didn’t like to think about how the two women for the first time had a bond that he was not a part of. He knew they talked about him, worried over him, and prayed over him on the rocks by Zechariah’s peach tree, and he didn’t know how to feel about this. There was so much not to think about. It was exhausting, and it was only the last few minutes at the end of a long day that gave him the strength to keep not thinking about it all.

His bottom came fitfully, half a year later. The last few times with the three of them he had avoided any substances completely and it had felt almost like the old times. Even addiction and recovery was not as strong as the three of them together he thought. He’d stayed sober at Vickie’s gig but once more left just as it was over. Feeling alone on the way home he decided that he would surprise Mountain Girl. She and Vickie spent days alone with him on their minds; he might as well spend some time alone with Mountain Girl, something that he had not done in a while.

Halfway there for some completely unfathomable reason he bought a big bottle of wine, Guinea Red, just like the old days. Vickie had written a song about it, that’s how good the wine tasted, and he had enough to get really wasted, not the pitiful little half ways high he allowed himself every night. The summer night air as he drove along the river just made it seem so right with the smell of the river and skunk cabbage and all the night sounds. It was half gone when he parked the car and all gone when he got to the top of the pass where the trail led to the cabin. He left it standing on some rocks thinking that now they too had a name, Wine Bottle Rocks.

He staggered to the cabin and began a quiet talk with Mountain Girl about the look he had seen in Vickie’s eyes as he had left that night. She wasn’t upset at being woken in the middle of the night-usually when these things happened they all went back to sleep pretty quickly. She was upset however about his condition.

Something was in her eyes also, something he had never seen before. He didn’t know what it was, couldn’t put it into words in his drunken state, but there was a distance there, something that hadn’t been there even the very first time he saw her sitting beside the trail so very long ago. It frightened him-how had she changed so much?

Fear in Andy usually made him even more quiet and discrete but this time it was all too much and with a quiet hatred in his voice he started to explain everything that she had ever done to annoy him. After half an hour she was finished with him. He could sleep it off in the lean-to she said, and pushed him out the door. Furious but cowed he made his way to the lean-to which had fallen into disrepair years ago. When he was almost there he slipped and felt his ankle turn in a way it was most absolutely not supposed to. He couldn’t tell if he was just too drunk to stand or if he had really hurt himself but he crawled the rest of the way and then passed out. He was definitely too drunk to know that he had been followed the whole way or to know that his friend had spent the rest of the night nearby lost in a confused miasma of thoughts.

She’d tried so hard to help her friends but Vickie had gotten sober when she was ready and not before. Not only that, but in Vickie's case Mountain Girl had been spared the sight of what Vickie called the change. The personality change that all alcoholics eventually begin to undergo when they drink. Mountain Girl could recognize how this was something that happened to her when she drank alone even though there was no one to witness it and no one for her other personality to interact with. It was still there. It hadn’t seemed to happen to her friends when they would drink with her while she got sober and she hadn’t been present when it finally abandoned it's preliminary assault and began to erupt full force from Vickie, quickly terrifying her into surrender with it’s awesome power. But now she was watching it happen to Andy and she felt as if he had been somehow abducted by someone bent on doing a terrible job of assuming his identity.

She found herself wondering if Andy would ever be ready and thought that it was time to seriously consider the idea that he might not. Several times now Vickie had said that someday they might only have each other and it was something her sponsor had been warning her about too, for almost as long as they had been corresponding, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe it. She’d always thought that the three of them would do anything for each other but now she was confronted with the idea that maybe there were things that they might not be capable of.

A thought entered her mind unbidden. If Andy couldn’t be with her in her sobriety maybe she would just be with him in his drunkenness. She’d survived years of drinking. Could it be that bad really if it meant that the gulf that was growing between them would go away again? Maybe Andy had brought more to drink with him. One night drunk couldn’t possibly be worse than the next few hours as they looked to unfold at the moment, spending it in sleepless panic at the thought of losing yet another person that she loved. Vickie would be the only one left, and who knew what might happen to Vickie next? Just a few hours of unconsciousness, that’s all Mountain Girl wanted of anyone or anything.

She allowed the idea to linger for a moment. It really wasn’t that bad an idea after all she thought and then remembered what they called this. Listening to your disease. The folks in the meeting she attended every other week liked to talk about their addiction like it was some sort of living, breathing entity. “My disease is in the parking lot outside doing pushups right now” they would say or perhaps “my disease is sitting right here in the chair with me trying to talk to me.” Well right now hers was shouting at her as it sharpened it’s fangs.
She found herself wishing it really was a living entity, something she could defend her friend from. How comforting to imagine eviscerating it and burying the corpse in a lake. And that started a whole new chain of scary thoughts but at least they distracted her from the idea of a drink.

Her friends had never quite seemed to understand what she instinctively knew, that a wounded adversary was the most dangerous. Well Andy was wounded now by his disease. Maybe that would give him some sort of strength to fight back. No, that wasn’t it either. They kept telling her that the key was surrender, that she had finally surrendered. Had she? She didn’t really know. It certainly seemed like Vickie had in some way given up, had changed the rules and announced that she was going to fight a different fight altogether now, and it was working for her. And it seemed to have worked for Mountain Girl also, her current state of mind notwithstanding. But surrender Andy to his disease? It was unthinkable.

She fell into a confused and tormented sleep as dawn approached only to wake a few hours later with what felt like a gaping wound in her insides and far more to say to Andy when he woke than she knew was wise. She bit her tongue a thousand times as she spoke explaining to him that although he couldn’t walk very well, it was just a bad sprain and would be better in a week or two.

He could stay in the cabin when he was able to get himself there and didn’t reek of booze. He could stay with her until he was able to walk down the trail to the road. And he could stay here alone in the lean-to if he had brought anything more to drink. She left him some food and disappeared for a number of hours. Andy would find out a few days later that she had gone down the mountain to use the pay phone in the store for the second really important phone call in her life, calling Vickie collect to talk about what had happened and what she planned to do and then for quite a bit longer to assure Vickie that she herself was going to be okay.

By the end of the day Mountain Girl was feeling a shred of hope and Andy had dragged himself back to the cabin but spent the night outside. It was no big deal, they slept outside a lot anyway this time of year. She brought some blankets out and slept near him, saying she just couldn’t stand that smell in her home anymore.

She said little more that night but the next evening she told him a secret that she and Vickie had both come to realize about themselves. The secret. The huge secret they'd spent so much effort not thinking about. She’d known better that night years ago.

She had known from the beginning that Ken and Bill were bad news and that the only reasonable thing to do was to avoid them. But they'd had the liquor and the marijuana and so she had argued with Vickie, saying it would be okay.

The desire to spend just one more night intoxicated had been enough to put them in the situation they had found themselves in. She told him how Vickie had come to the same realization; after all it hadn’t been very difficult for Mountain Girl and Andy to bring her around to their opinion that their new companions would be worth putting up with for an inexpensive evening of getting wasted around the fire.

She asked him if he recognized the thinking and he had no choice but to tell her that deep in his heart, in a place he had never allowed himself to go, that he knew that he had done exactly the same thing. He even thought that sober they might have found a peaceful resolution to the whole conflict and Mountain Girl said maybe because she didn’t want to get sidetracked in a disagreement with him about this.

Vickie had said the same thing. Sober perhaps she wouldn’t have tripped and let Ken fall on her and the whole terrible night might have ended differently.

She told him of the feelings she had had about life becoming an unlivable prison without her friends. It wasn’t a new idea, they’d all discussed this many times years ago. But maybe it was time to rethink that idea, she said, because some times there are choices that we don’t get to make. And that was a new idea.

They were silent for a long time, staring into the distance at anything but each other. Then Andy looked at her but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything of what he was feeling or thinking. He had an absurd thought: Vickie was always saying that her music allowed her to say things that couldn’t be expressed with words. If she could read his mind right now she would have the material for an entire symphony of conflicting ideas. He didn’t hear himself laugh. Mountain Girl did. He stared at her without even seeing her expression change.

She had spent most of her life watching and listening. The sky, the wind in the trees, the look of the moon, the movements of animals, her friends. There was something about the way he sat as the tears rolled silently down both their faces that let her understand what she had just heard. She allowed herself to acknowledge a bit of the hope she was beginning to feel.

She gave him some books to read while she made dinner. They talked a little more while they ate and then sat on the porch in silence while dusk turned to night. Finally they went inside and fell asleep in each others arms with her offering her Higher Power all the gratitude she could possibly imagine if only this was going to be okay this time.

Within a couple of days they developed a routine. Mornings she would help him out to Prayer Rocks and leave him there, returning after a few hours to bring him back and to talk over any realizations he might have had. Each day he felt stronger and more confident as he realized more and more about himself, his drinking, and his friends. By the end of the week he had decided that it was divine intervention that had led him to his injury and given him the time for a spiritual retreat here.

A week had gone by. Vickie had come up to the cabin and they spent two more days there. It was as if they were thirteen again with the barriers of their addiction gone. Finally he felt well enough to make it down the mountain side and when he promised Mountain Girl that he would be okay she and Vickie both allowed themselves the hope to believe him.

A few weeks later he had a bunch of A.A. meetings that were for real under his belt, had gotten himself a sponsor, and was saying his prayers twice daily, reading his program books and talking to Vickie almost constantly when he wasn’t working or writing long letters about all this to Mountain Girl. She was going to get a real treat on her next trip to the post office. He was finally doing things the way they told him to in the meetings and it was working. What a surprise he thought, that these things went best when you followed the directions, just like his friends had told him they did. He was sitting in a diner one afternoon between jobsite visits with a hamburger when a beer found its way into his hand and it felt so right, so natural, and so good that he knew he would be okay now and that he could finally control his drinking.

It would not be a sacrifice to refrain around his two friends that meant everything to him and there would be no more days of horrified regret like the ones a few weeks before. He would even be able to share in their time at Prayer Rock with them, giving thanks for his cure.

Of course it didn’t work that way. A week later, quietly hung over, he had declined the trip to the mountain again. He thought he had been pretty convincing since he really was sick and it could be heard in his coughs and the rasp in his throat.

The thought came as he returned from a walk near his home. Just a pinprick of a thought but devastating all the same. “I’m not that bad. I don’t have a real problem. I’m only trying to help my friends by avoiding them. I love them; I’d do anything for them. I’m not like Vickie was. It’s not really lying to them if it’s to protect them. I’ve never lied about anything else to them, not ever.” And the word came quietly into his ear from the wind, from the sky, from the inner recesses of his soul, from nowhere.

“Yet. Not yet” and he knew it would be only a matter of time before the look he had seen in Mountain Girls eyes that night would be the only look he would ever be able to see in either of his friends eyes again, and that when that time came it would probably be too late to do anything about it. And he thought that in his quiet way he was no different from Vickie, that he had never wanted to be any different from Mountain Girl, and that none of this would be happening if his desire to drink just one beer had not been as strong as all the love he had ever felt for all the people he had ever loved in his life right back to the very first time he felt something for his parents as he lay in their arms, which was something so powerful and so long ago that he couldn’t even remember it. He would just have to stop, he knew, and then laughed. A laugh more cynical than Vickie had ever dreamed of managing during her most brilliant performances. Because if that was going to happen wouldn’t it have already happened? He was going to die and they wouldn’t even go to his funeral if he didn’t die soon.

What the hell. He wasn’t going to go to the meeting tonight and lie. Vickie’s’ friends were there. He stayed home and lay awake all night. At six a.m. he got out a meeting schedule and managed to hang on somehow till the noon meeting where he rushed in to finally tell the truth when he said his name and what he was and there was Vickie with a smile for him because she knew that there was just something in his voice, his posture, the sigh he gave afterwards that he was finally home again with his two friends.

Not too long after this Mountain Girl had her first anniversary of sobriety which they made a big deal of in her group. Andy of course had had to tell his family all about this and Stu and Emmy hiked up to the cabin with them. The next day the five of them spent all day climbing up over Dead Goat Saddle, feasting on all the berries and playing in the cascades that followed the trail down into the tiny little town. They brought a little tent along for Andy’s siblings and then after the celebration was over the next morning they took another little trip on the way back through a narrow pass to a small lake called Squash Hollow that none of them had ever seen and it was a wonderful place. That evening they sat under a huge pine tree in the warm setting sun watching a skunk dig up grubs for a long while as the three of them talked with Stu and Emmy about how it was funny how it had all turned out. They talked for a while about how much fun drinking and getting high had been at one time; acknowledging all that it had done for them before payment began to be extracted from them for it all. Finally they agreed that the last year had been the most frightening thing that had ever happened to them but that they wouldn’t have foregone it for anything. The conversation wandered off in other directions far into the night before Stu and Emmy crept into their tent and the others lay down in a circle around the fire to go to sleep.

They couldn’t sleep however. When the snores from the tent had been regular for a while they got up and walked over to a little cliff at the edge of the lake where the water spilled over a cliff and they watched the silent valley below them for a while. Then it was time for one last act of celebration.

They lay listening to the night noises afterwards and looked at each other. Perfect in it’s imperfection. A phrase Mountain Girl heard at her meeting sometimes. A perfect way to describe something, she wasn’t sure what. A perfect evening, lying naked on this beautiful cliff in the middle of a moonlit night with the two people she loved most in the world. She felt a small pebble digging into her back as she lay on the rocks and thought about how the pebble was disturbing the peace she felt. A thought came to her as she squirmed into a more comfortable position between her two friends. A perfect night and a pebble in her back was managing to be uppermost in her mind. It had to symbolize something; she’d have to figure out some sort of deep meaning to it all. “I feel like Moonchild again” she said. “She went away and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find her again sober but she’s here again.”

They talked a bit about the whole Moonchild idea and then Vickie changed the subject. "There's something I couldn't tell you" she began. Andy laughed. "Do you mean you told us about it but didn't think anyone understood what you were saying or that you haven't tried to tell us?" "I couldn't even bring myself to try to tell myself" she answered. "So you mean it's serious" Andy replied, joking and completely attentive at the same time. "I thought I'd lose you both. I thought if you stayed sober and you stayed drunk that I'd have to choose and not have one of you anymore and that would mean I couldn't have either of you. We're a trio you know? And I couldn't tell either of you, I couldn't tell myself, I couldn’t do anything."

"So you decided you'd rather live without us than kill yourself with us" Mountain Girl finished the thought. "It was the right decision and besides what would we have done without you? I did the same thing. Besides, we both knew what was kicking your backside." And the idea that been eating Vickie alive from inside it's secret lair suddenly lay exposed on the rocks, dying by the light of the moon and the truth. Andy wanted to talk about this a whole lot more but the two women told him to shut up. When he kept talking Vickie leaned over and kissed him until he didn't want to talk any more. But it was late and they were finally tired. They lay together in a pile and soon they had all fallen asleep. They were once more who they really were and no matter what happened in the rest of the world this was the life they wanted.

They woke up cold not long afterwards; it was summer but this was still the mountains. They put their clothes on and made their way back to the blankets at the edge of the fire and this time they didn’t wake till long after dawn.

It was a month or so after Mountain Girls anniversary. She'd thought long and hard about something. She'd tried talking about it with her two friends but they never seemed to be able to get to the heart of what they were talking about. Even her characteristic terse bluntness failed to say what she was trying to think about. She'd written to her sponsor about it. It all had to do with her amends. Part of her recovery was to make amends to those she had harmed.

There weren't that many people in her life to begin with, and so her amends list had been pretty short. She could have treated Lee better at times. Her father had long ago figured out how she could repay the people she had stolen from to feed herself in his absence. Whatever harm she had done to her father had been forgiven. She and Andy and Vickie had agreed that their lives could constitute their amends to each other. That left one very big situation to be addressed.

She didn't know what exactly she owed. She was entirely clear that she had been defending herself and her friends. Still the magnitude of what had happened suggested that she needed to do something. She wasn't sure what, wasn't sure how to feel or what to think. She wrote to her sponsor again, saying only that there was something that she couldn't tell her and didn't know what to do. Her sponsor suggested that she think carefully about what people were forever talking about in the meetings. If you don't know what to do, then pray until you do know. It sounded like a safe enough thing to do. And so daily early in the morning after she rose, she went to the rocks where her father had liked to sit and prayed. Then she would sit, trying to empty her mind, letting something come to her. Nothing did except the eccentric wanderings of her own thoughts. And then one day while tending to her vegetable garden it came to her.

If she could forgive them she would know what to do.

It seemed so absurd. Forgive them for what they had done? It was unforgivable. But still it wasn't as if they hadn't paid the price. She wrote her sponsor again about this. The benefit of forgiveness was not for forgiven, she wrote back. And then suddenly she knew what to do.

Since no one else was going to do this, they would hold a funeral for their Bill and Ken. Not by Zechariah's rocks, that would have been an imposition on him. She found another place, private but somewhere she distantly passed by fairly often. A place that would not be forgotten. They did and it was a time of silence and then each one of them offered up whatever they could as a prayer, out loud for the others to hear because there was no way to hide any of this from each other no matter how private their own thoughts might be. Then there was one last thing Mountain Girl wanted them all to do, a physical way of showing they had forgiven their attackers and to ask for their own forgiveness in turn.
They didn't feel any different the next day. Or the next. It was Vickie who pointed out that these things didn't work right away. That had been the whole point of the alcohol and drugs. They worked right away. But over time something changed.

They would need the optimism and joy that the beginning of their recovery would bring them; the so called pink cloud of relief that other A.A. members had warned them would not last. They would come to understand just how fortunate they had been, that their dalliance with self destruction had been so much less complete than that of others they would come to know. That idea had taken even Vickie by surprise and they all had to agree that they owed their good fortune in large part to each other.

Next would come the realization that they were no longer children; that they weren’t going to all simply live happily ever after and that no matter how harsh they had seemed at times their earlier years had been a gift that they would not again receive, even though they would come far closer to retaining the joy of youth than many do. And then finally with the protective cloak of inebriation gone would come the death of another fantasy, and with it the understanding that no matter how unbreakable their bonds to each other were that each of them needed some things that the others could not give. It was time to allow the rest of the world more entry into their lives even if none of them knew what that might mean.

The realization was painful, terrifying, and surprisingly gentle.

[Leeza]

Some posts are very light in nature, others are a little heavier, and then some are deep and turn on the thinking machine.

This one left me with deep thoughts. After reading this one I felt as though I too have bared my soul for all to look at.

My next comment is not to put anyone down, it is just a statement. I have had my addiction that I have had to deal with and it was work. It has only been since I retired that I have realized that I have used work along the same lines that others use alchol and drugs. I am not saying work is bad, what I am saying is that there were many times that I buried myself in work rather than deal with other issues. There were things that could have waited that I thought just had to be done rather than spend the time with my family.

Thank you Absaroka for the shareing.

Leeza

[Absaroka]

Thank you very much Leeza and your comment that you feel as if you have bared your soul by reading what I wrote is high praise.

As for the addiction, I sometimes feel as if my guiding principle at times has been that "if it's worth doing it's worth doing to excess" The concept of enough is a hard one for me to grasp, and although most forms of overdoing it are not as dramatically self destructive as drug addiction, they can still take a tremendous toll on our lives. Work has been one of the many things I sometimes have gone overboard with, aided by the ethos of a profession (architecture) that encourages 60 to 70 hour weeks as a sign of committment and caring.

One of my favorite descriptions of addiction is that it is an enemy of life. We sometimes talk here about crossdressing as an addiction. The question to ask of any behavior we are uncomfortable with is is it an enemy of life at any level, be it physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. Of course most drug addicts initially think of their drugs as a gift from the Creator that finally makes them feel alive, so this is a very difficult question for us to ask.

Again thanks for the compliment.

Zari

[Absaroka]

TIme for a little calm again. Musically we could say this is setting up the 2 last choruses, the shout and the out choruses. Think of this as a new player entering the fray.

Linda is a fairly good representation of my wife. She and I met as part of a blind date between her and the real life Dennis, and their RL date went almost as well as the one described here. She thought everyone involved was sort of strange.

Both the RL Dennis and Linda liked this part. Dennis commented that it might be difficult for some people (Linda) to read because I told the truth about our courtship, but Linda was not offended at all.

In the original version, Linda appears in the very first chapter, thinking about her husband and his weird friends many years later. But I didn't put that chapter in this thread.

The homemade cross on the forearm is something you don't see that many men carrying anymore but I'll notice it every now and then on older guys, and always have the urge to ask them about their youth. But some questions are better left unasked. Anyone else remember it?




Wandering Around In the Changes




Linda had met Dennis at the school she taught at. He had joined the staff that fall as the school nurse, which she thought odd. Male nurses at the V.A. hospital made sense, but she had never heard of one in the school system. Although he had a good rapport with the students, the other teachers found him a bit strange. In her charitable moments she sometimes thought of him as a traveler who was using a different map from everyone else he encountered. Days that she felt less tolerant she tried not to think about him at all. But he had sought her out at lunch one day saying that since she was a music teacher perhaps she would be interested in hearing the band of a friend of his. He was asking her for a date but only sort of, at least that was what it felt like. She thought it a bit weird but the band sounded interesting so she agreed.

Dennis brought her to a bar which looked as if both it and most of it’s patrons had seen better days, quite a few better days as a matter of fact. He paid her cover and led her past several people who seemed to be about to fall out of their seats in varying degrees of unconsciousness and some more people who seemed very intent on the politics of the pool tables, nodding and saying hello to several of them and stopping to chat for a long moment, seemingly forgetting that he had a date with him tonight.

As Linda was thinking that the evening was off to a really bad start he remembered her presence and, without even seeming to consider introducing her to anyone he'd been talking to, led her into another room which was surprisingly cavernous. The high ceilings were vaguely lit and the bandstand backed up against a large window facing back out onto the street. He led her past a half a dozen couples who were dancing to the band in the dim light to a table by the side of the bandstand. Linda recognized the location of the table, out of the focus of the amplifiers so that they could talk over the music if they wanted to and at the same time listen and watch the band intimately.

She was impressed with Dennis’s choice, not that many people knew to pick a seat like this. He relit a candle that sat on their table and then they took turns chatting and listening to the band, but he seemed more interested in the band than in making small talk. She thought that might be a sign in his favor, one of the few so far this evening. He also seemed to keep looking around the room as if expecting someone to join them but when she asked him about this he said nothing. He was really striking out with her, she thought, as she wondered if he had been telling her the truth when he told her that he had asked her out primarily because he thought as a music teacher she would enjoy the band. At least he had been right about that. The band was more than interesting and she was enjoying it greatly.

She tried to think of how she would categorize the music and drew a bit of a blank. It had the intensity of a Chicago blues band and they were playing a lot of blues. Some of the musicians seemed to be able to play an awful lot of blues with just a few notes. But they were playing other stuff too, drifting through several different styles apparently effortlessly.
The horns were clearly the backbone of the band, playing intimidating sounding licks and ensembles along with one mesmerizing improvisation after another, but managing never to overpower the singer.

The leader was a strong looking and very pretty woman who Dennis seemed to refer to alternately as either Vickie or Dee, confusing Linda. She played the trumpet, and something about her, perhaps her body language or the way she moved as she played, reminded her of Dennis in some difficult to describe way. She had flashed both Dennis and his date a brief but delighted smile as they sat and she wondered if they were perhaps related. Slightly curly long black hair framed her face and there was a scar on the golden skin of her cheekbone that would have looked unfortunate on anyone else but actually looked comfortable on her. She had on a sleeveless black tee shirt and black jeans and Linda thought that it was respectful and considerate of her not to be showing off what seemed to be a gorgeous figure. When she wasn’t actually playing she had a mischievous sexy look in her eyes but when she had the horn to her lips another look entirely came over her face as she closed her eyes and her arms had a strength in way they held the trumpet that suggested she was ready to do battle with the world.

She had a sound that, like that of the band, didn’t seem to fit with Linda’s ideas of how things were quite supposed to sound which was another plus as far as she was concerned. It was terribly personal and Linda thought to herself was that it was what Muddy Waters might have sounded like if he had played the trumpet instead of the guitar. There were times as she played that Linda felt a knot in the pit of her stomach at the stark loneliness in the music while at other moments she could feel gratitude and peace as the notes wrapped themselves around her like the arms of a loved one.

There was something else about the music too, something she wasn’t used to hearing in a band playing in a bar. A feeling of mystery and awe about life in general. The band did a song about a sunset and she kept waiting for it to turn into a love song for someone and it never did. There were half a dozen instrumental solos on it and then, she thought, the vocal will wrap it up with something about missing someone. But it didn’t and the song was really just a sunset over a lonely but peaceful valley. The sort of topic usually addressed only in esoteric jazz or classical music but this was something she could have danced to, if she had wanted to dance with Dennis, which she didn’t. She believed every note of the song and by time the band took a break she knew without a doubt that she was hearing the autobiography of it’s members as she listened. Between numbers as Vickie talked with the audience she seemed enraptured with her fellow musicians which impressed Linda even more than her virtuosity on the trumpet.

She also saw that Dennis seemed a lot more focused on Vickie, or Dee, or whatever the woman's name was, than he was on her and Linda wondered if perhaps Dennis felt the need to impress Vickie with the fact that he had a date. Maybe he just disliked sitting alone. Who knew? At the break Dennis had insisted on Linda coming with him while he said hello to Vickie and then had ignored Linda completely as she stood next to him feeling awkward. After a few pleasantries he had asked Vickie where her buddy was tonight and Vickie had said that he was with their other friend.

Dennis had seemed disappointed which seemed even stranger. Maybe Dennis was gay she thought, but no, she had a pretty good feel for these things and Dennis was definitely interested in women. Linda had been ready to quietly sit down again when Dennis finally got around to introducing Linda to her. And then suddenly Vickie had been attentive, all but ignoring Dennis as she talked to Linda. It served him right she thought, and the evening took on a different tone. She'd been toying with the idea of leaving out of annoyance with Dennis but she hadn't wanted to; she really wanted to stay and listen to the band. As if sensing this Vickie made her promise to stay for the next set and Linda complied with a sense of relief about something, she wasn't sure what.

And then even Dennis suddenly didn't seem quite so rude. They wound up staying for both the remaining sets, Linda thinking that she would pay for her late night tomorrow morning at work, and then Vickie talked to Linda some more when they were all done and she waited for Dennis to return from wherever he had disappeared to in the middle of what had clearly been the bands final goodnight. She gave Linda a little schedule of where they would be playing and warmly asked her to come some other time if she felt like it. Linda felt a little surprised at all the attention she was receiving from her. It felt almost as if Dennis had brought her there to meet Vickie rather than as his own date.

As they drove home she told Dennis that listening to his friend’s band had been a wonderful evening, leaving out any comments about her thoughts about his lack of social graces because she thought all in all the evening had been well worth putting up with him. They were so good, she asked, why were they playing in a dump like the place they had been in tonight? Dennis had certainly seemed at ease, but she had felt a bit uncomfortable there. He had replied that the band had had quite a bit of success but that Vickie always said that the people they played for were an integral part of the performance and that they played their best in places where there was a little too much angst. She hadn’t thought of it that way but felt that there was no arguing with the result however they arrived at it.

A change seemed to come over Dennis on the drive home. They wound up sitting in his car for quite a while chatting after they got to her place and she forgave him his earlier faux pas. He made no effort to kiss her good night which was just as well but said that he would like to repeat the evening sometime. She wondered why even as she realized that she felt the same way.

Vickie happened to spot Linda walking down the street the following weekend and stopped to chat, with a moments conversation turning into a long unplanned meal together that Linda thought was lunch but Vickie seemed to think was breakfast.. They somehow spent half the afternoon in the restaurant talking aimlessly as if they were old friends, and then not long after that Vickie called her asking her if she could come see the band that Friday. There was something special she wanted Linda to hear but she wouldn’t say what it was. She said that she knew Linda might feel funny going there alone, it wasn’t a terribly nice place, but told her to sit right up front by the band where Vickie could keep an eye on her and convinced Linda that this was going to be perfectly okay. She had planned on going by herself and staying for just one set but when she got there Dennis was there again, this time with another man. She pretended not to notice them, but Dennis saw her and motioned for her to join them. The two men seemed to good friends, and she wondered if she was intruding, but Dennis very much seemed to want her to join them in spite of her protestations that she was fine by herself.

She thought the other man was kind of cute. Dennis had the movements and style of a frightened but hungry big cat and his long black hair accentuated his features in a way that Linda thought looked a bit scary, an appearance that seemed to attract many of the teachers she worked with but not her. The other man wore a flannel shirt with blue jeans and had an open face with long brown hair in a pony tail and a beard that made him look a bit like a skinny teddy bear. He had a pleasant but shy air about him and as she sat she casually looked at his arms to see if he would have the same crude cross tattooed on them that she had noticed the other evening on the forearms of both Dennis and Vickie. She couldn’t find one. She wondered about that. Dennis wore long sleeves at school which concealed it and she had never seen another one before the other evening, but when she mentioned it at school a few of the other teachers seemed to think it meant something important. One of her friends had tried to explain it to her but she hadn’t really understood the idea at all, and when she had asked Dennis about it he had been even vaguer than usual.

Dennis again seemed to mostly want to talk about Vickie which seemed fine with the other guy but she got the feeling that Dennis was trying to find out something from him that he didn’t wish to share. Dennis’s friend was named Andy and he seemed to be very discrete about something, she wasn’t clear what. That Andy was good friends with Vickie was obvious by the way the two of them talked for the first few minutes of the break, and although they looked very unlike each other she was struck by the fact that their movements were those of brother and sister. Then Vickie seemed to notice Linda for the first time and she was all smiles, so glad that Linda had come and so forth and then had suddenly seemed far more interested in Dennis than she had the first time they had met.
Linda wound up staying till closing time again. Dennis and Vickie seemed to have deserted her and she talked with Andy for the most part when the band wasn’t playing. While the band was on stage though it was hard to get a word out of him. That was okay, Linda enjoyed the opportunity to just listen without any interruptions. Andy had asked her for her phone number and when she gave it to him he then asked her if there was a point in calling her. Because if there wasn’t why put themselves in an awkward situation over the phone?

She was a bit surprised at his directness but it did make sense. He had wound up asking her out for a date before she got a chance to leave, suggesting something other than hearing the band again because he would like to be able to converse with her and he just didn’t do that when the band was playing. Again she thought he was awfully direct but once more it all made sense.

They dated off and on for several months, sometimes going to hear Vickie's band after dinner somewhere else. He never did talk much at those times but at least he would dance with her, and he really seemed to enjoy that. Vickie always gave them a big hello when she saw them and Linda found herself looking forward to talking with her on nights that she stayed till the band was finished.

[Leeza]

Music has played a lot in this thread. I can't help being reminded of my dayes playing with a band. Even though I don't recongise several of the groups that have been mentioned, the experiences of playing are similar.

A band leader that I had played with had been out of the area for awhile. When he returned I called to him just chat and ended up going to meet him at a town about 70 miles away. He had a gig playing with a Mexican band at a christening dance. My wife and I got there and were enjoying ourselves when he asked me to stand in for the keyboard player who was the band leader's daughter and she wanted to dance.

Being the one to try something different and figureing that my old band leader wouldn't ask me to stick my neck out too far, I accepted. I had a blast playing as usual and got to try somethings that I hadn't done before.

During one of the breaks a little old Mexican lady came over to the tale where I was sitting with my wife and started speaking in spanish. I told her that I didn't speak spanish so she switched to english. She said, "I am enjoying your music and you are doing such a great job, but how do you play the music without speaking the language?"

I think the musications will get a laugh out of that one.

BTW the band leader of that group asked me to work with them on a permant basis, but was unable to due to the distance. They were based about 150 miles from where I lived at the time.

Leeza

[Absaroka]

Leeza that is a wonderful story. And I love the comment from the little old lady about playing the music without speaking the language.

Thelonius Monk used to say that if the other musicians had to watch him then he obviously wasn't playing clearly enough for the rest of the band to follow him.

When I was done writing part of this story one of the things I realized was that if I could write this I needed to start playing the trumpet again. Although going to hear my daughter in her HS jazz band played a larger part in that realization. I could not have gone to see her for the next 4 years and not played. I'm told this is a fairly common experience for folks who put their ax down in their mid 20's like I did.

Thanks for the comments

Zari

[Leeza]

Now I know why my youngest son is wanting to pick up the trumpet again. He played in a high school jazz band that was recognized in state compition. His instructor told his wife to watch my son as he was one of those few who got stronger the longer they played. My son now has a son that will be starting in a few years.

Even at my acient age I get the notion that I might think about playing in bands again. Short lived thought at present but you never know.

Leeza

[Absaroka]

When i was a teenager a lot of my identity and self worth was tied up in playing. Which meant that some times it was as upsetting as it was exhilarating. The 2nd time around I knew better, and it was what I did, not what I was. I was also prepared that their would be times I would play badly and be embarrassed and understood that it happens to everyone. Sometimes you can't find the right notes anywhere. If you want to do it, don't let fear hold you back.

Zari