Journeyman

Stan pulls out a doobie.

“I didn’t know you were holding. Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“I just had the one.” He lights it. By the time the joint’s half-smoked, the sun has dipped behind the trees, the horizon purple and gray. Tossing a pebble into the water, I hear a satisfying plunk. Bullfrogs croak. Crickets chirrup. Cicadas click.

“Ah,” Stan says, flipping our dinner over carefully with a stick, “the simple life. Think how much time people waste working jobs they hate to acquire things they don’t need. Ever seen a picture of Thoreau’s house? It was tiny—just ten by fifteen.”

“This is our own private Walden Pond.”

“Damn straight.”

“But what about the Summer of Love?” I ask.

“Hell, we’re already four years behind schedule.”

“Yeah, but Mark Twain might say that for Kentuckians, we’re ahead of schedule. According to him, everything happens there twenty years after it’s already happened everywhere else.”

“I read where he didn’t really say that.”

I shrug.

When the fish sizzle, our meal is ready. We eat it with our fingers. It smells and tastes wonderful. When we finish, I put another branch on the fire, stirring up sparks and bits of white ash that rise and float away.

“We should be in Denver by tomorrow night,” I say. “My friends there might put us up. We could take a hot shower and sleep on a mattress instead of the ground. I could call.”

“Okay.” Stan passes the joint, tilts his head back, and says, “Look at all the stars.”

I shift my gaze. “I’ve never seen so many.” We sit quietly, smoking what’s left of the marijuana.

“Do you believe in God, Stan?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t really know. What about you?”

Poking a stick at the fire, I tell him about being dragged to a holy-roller church every Sunday, where the sermon was invariably hell fire and brimstone. “They were always collecting to send missionaries to Christianize Africans. But when the neighborhood turned black, they moved the church to the suburbs.”

I toss the stick into the flames and listen to the fire crackle.

After a while, Stan bends and twists until his legs look like a pretzel. He tells me it’s a half lotus. A chick named Carla showed him how to do it.

“It opens the central conduit so you can drink the nectar of your essence,” he says.

“Opens the what?”

“It’s supposed to be relaxing.”

“So you can drink what?”

“Shut up,” he says.

I obey, inhaling and holding onto the smoke before exhaling. “What happened to Carla?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Have you ever had a real girlfriend for more than a week?”

“Once, back in high school.”

I’m expecting more baloney.

“Cheerleader named Teresa. She had perfect skin and big green eyes. We dated my whole senior year and broke up on graduation night.” Stan explains that he had a basketball scholarship. The plan was for Teresa to go with him. “But I guess down deep she was a practical girl because after we walked across the stage and picked up our diplomas, she told me she’d decided to go to some out of state college on her own. When I asked her about us, she said, ‘Oh, Stan, these high school romances don’t last.’”

Untangling his legs, he picks up a twig and starts whittling. After a long silence, he says, “Thoreau believed we can’t begin to understand ourselves until we’re lost.”

“Thoreau? Again?”

“Thoreau’s the man.” Stan keeps whittling until that twig is nothing but scattered shavings.