Ben looked down at the plastic bottle of amber liquid in his paws. The wind whipped through the trees around him carrying the scent of snow and pine. It was cold, but the whisky burned in away that made it not so bad. His hind legs hurt from the gray granite boulders, the snaking roots, and the hard packed clay of the trail.
He looked out at the broken teeth of the mountains on the horizon and closed his eyes. It wasn’t even that long ago.
She had looked at him, tilted her head and sighed as she opened the door, a vintage red vinyl bowling ball bag stuff to the brim with organic toiletries and threadbare t-shirts.
He had looked up at her. That was the part where he was supposed to say something. “Don’t go, I’m sorry.” Or “I don’t know what is wrong with me.”
He stared into his lap and looked at the wear on his claws.
When he looked back up, she was gone.
The apartment was quiet.
Now he sat under a blue sky amidst the evergreens, just shy of timberline… the trees spreading out, until they were dwarfed and bent in the wind. If it was whisky, it barely tasted like it. It was more like grain liquor with a slight whisky after taste. Like lemon wedges in a glass of ice water. You wouldn’t call that lemonade.
Whisky or not, it was two dollars and it was now lunch.
He raised a shaky paw to his lips again.
The hike was supposed to inspire him… inspire him to paint again or do something. To action. To life.
That was four hours and a few thousand vertical feet ago.
“Hey, hey… you, hey, hang on.” The voice startled Ben and when he turned around, he saw a relatively young chimpanzee in forest ranger garb, his hand like feet poking out bare from the olive khaki trousers.
He made his way over to Ben, while Ben secreted his plastic bottle of rural liquor store hooch under his rain shell.
“Some view, hey fella?” Ben shrugged.
“It’s okay.”
“Okay, it’s the wonder of mother nature!” The chimpanzee had an impossibly midwestern accent. His vowels sounded odd, accented in a way that reminded Ben of conversion vans and little league.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to disturb you, but there’s a fella who’s been missing since last Wednesday in these parts and we’ve been looking for him. If you wouldn’t mind, I could leave you with a flier and maybe if you see something… You know.”
“Sure. Why not?” Ben shrugged. At least if he took the damn flier the ranger would amble off and he could drink.
The chimp reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded up stack of papers that he’d clearly sweat on. Maybe chimps didn’t sweat. Ben didn’t even know. He handed one of them to Ben.
It was a picture of a rabbit. Mottled gray fur. Wide open, bloodshot eyes. He looked thin. Malnourished. It was almost a mugshot, but it wasn’t. The rabbit was holding a fishing rod.
“His name’s Jacob Reynolds, but he just goes by ‘Thump’.”
Ben tried to surpress a chuckle.
“Yeah, I know that’s a silly name for a rabbit, but there you go.”
“What do you think happened to him?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know for sure. He’s older… he could have, forgive me, fallen and broken a hip. Hard to say. His girlfriend is worried sick about him. He’d been drinking a good bit. I guess they were fighting. Horrible business, you know?”
“Yeah.” He could imagine the plastic whisky bottle and hoped the ranger was about to leave.
“I guess he went up here to find himself or something. Oh well, takes all kinds. But if you see him, you let us know. The ranger station is on the way back to the main road.”
“Okay.”
The chimp nodded and turned around, Ben reached under his jacket and stopped when the chimp turned around.
“You know, I’m not as dumb as I sound. I don’t think Thump is the only one who is lost.”
Ben sat there, with his hand in his coat. His mouth felt dry. He wasn’t sure if it was with thirst or something else…
“Well, take care. Keep your eyes peeled.”
Ben turned back to looking off at the mountainscape. The rocks on the peaks were a blue slate spotted with snow.
He didn’t pull the bottle out.
He just breathed slowly, hand still in the pocket gripping the bottle. The wind whispered, whistled, almost speaking to him.
“Ben, look at me!”
She had been staring at him all night. He just looked at the ceiling.
“What is wrong with you? I’m basically asking for it and you just lay there with that million mile stare.”
She was right. They hadn’t had sex in three months and even then it was this mechanical, brutal process. He had been silent the whole time. It felt like a chore and what pleasure was there felt forced. Cheap. As if it wasn’t real.
What had her ploy been, that last night? Have sex with me or I’m going to leave?
If that was her gambit, Ben let her play it out. Go ahead and leave. I don’t care.
He felt broken.
Even then, he didn’t like drinking. It was just something to do. Nights in warm fog and sleeping in. He never really felt the power of his habit until he’d stand up to piss and he’d feel the room sway.
It had been a room, it had been their room, with the television set and the bookcase full of old paper backs, the artwork from their friends. Then it had become an alien place with white walls and an old brown lamp made from a log that was missing it’s lampshade. A mustard yellow recliner and a literal pile of half-read Louis L’Amor western novels. A corner with empty
plastic whisky bottles. Cigarette burns in the dirty, navy blue carpet.
He felt the shadow of the hawk before he saw it. It dove straight for his head.
He barely ducked as the hawk flew back up, arcing up to the midday sun.
“Christ!”
The bird circled back and Ben got up to run, throwing his backpack over one shoulder.
Bears, despite popular belief and thier girt, could actually run. A bear could easily outrun a human. But Ben was drunker than he expected and his bulk didn’t help him.
He slipped and began to tumble down the side of the mountain.
He knew he should have been worried about his life or what would happen to him when he inevitably stopped, but he was more concerned with all the dust that he was surly coated in and… and if it really mattered at all any more.
It wasn’t a deep thought. It wasn’t soul searching. It was more observational. “That child is wearing red sneakers.” Or “Huh, this restaurant has generic ketchup.”
It was almost disinterested and uncaring, as if he was just responding to a request for the time.
“Looks like I’m about to die.”
It hurt, he rolled over broken branches and gained speed, bouncing off of boulders and if he wasn’t going to die, could he at least black out?
He rolled and rolled, like a rag doll. He closed his eyes and just let it happen.
Whatever.
And then splash. Icy cold water. The ripples of light cutting through the surface. A sort of lake.
The water was so cold. Even Ben, with his thick fur and fat felt the chill of it. It was surely from melting snow on the surrounding peaks.
Ben scrambled for the shore, panting.
He lay there for what felt like hours. Whisps of clouds visible just under the edge of the trees. He was cold.
“Maybe I’m going to die of hypothermia.” He said aloud.
The wind replied with a stinging breeze.
He decided it was probably time for that drink.
He reached in for the bottle, half expecting it to have been broken in his fall.
It wasn’t broken.
Maybe.
It wasn’t there.
Ben felt panic rise. Not much, but enough to wake him up. He sat up. He hadn’t felt any emotion except regret at his lack of emotion in a long time. Did this mean he was a drunk?
He looked up at where he came from, an impossibly steep downward slope covered in trees. How had he missed all of those trees?
Why wasn’t he more hurt?
Was he dead?
He almost laughed at that thought. He didn’t believe in any sort of god or afterlife. If this was it, it was boring. Maybe that was it: he was damned to spending his afterlife in the same rut he spent life.
Where did that fucking bottle go?
He began to climb back up the slope. The trees grew thicker as he followed a trail of broken branches and bent grass. His trail, he supposed.
It was hard going. It was steep. Far too steep for all these trees to be growing as normal. On one hand, Ben felt the trees looked valiant. “Take that, gravity! We will grow anywhere and you can go fuck yourself.” Or perhaps they were just arrogant. “Fucking trees, think they’re better than me.”
Ben almost lost it when he said that. That was incredibly stupid. Who talks like that? Furthermore, who talks like that aloud?
“Crazy drunks.”
As he climbed, he noticed another line of broken branches intersecting his.
That was… odd.
He turned around and follwed the new line of mild destruction. It was hard to fight it, the mountain was pulling him down. He had to lean against trees and grab branches as he felt his true mass fighting with gravity at nine point eight meters per second squared.
They had once been happy together. He had been happy too. He had laughed, he had made others laugh. He had been excited to be alive.
What had happened?
“Hello, Ben.” It was his father, calling him as they prepared to meet friends for happy hour.
“Hi.” It had been a few months since he had talked to his father, at the time, and he always felt so odd about it. They never addressed it directly, but he felt like a sort of failure, in the eyes of his father. It was cliche, but he couldn’t help it.
The weight of his father’s expectations travelled with the electrons through miles of copper wire and fiber optics, to collect in his phone. It felt so heavy that Ben didn’t want to answer.
“Ben, I heard it through the grapevine that you’ve been painting.” Of course, he’d been painting. That was what he did.
Of course, Ben’s paintings were macabre scenes of violence and sex, abstract collages of fantastical characters swinging crystal bladed swords. Demons who’s semen looked like fuscia paint that sprayed across a crowd of doughy looking parishioners.
Ben knew where this was headed.
“You’re almost forty, Ben. The paintings are disturbing… I… I’m disappointed in you.”
He hung up.
Ben hadn’t talked to him since.
He saw a flash of red ahead, trailed by the mild destruciton of a fall. But not Ben’s fall.
And there he was. Gray, grayer than the picture, his eyes staring eternally, glassy and big.
Thump had done the same thing Ben had. Maybe he had even been chased by a rogue hawk. Only Thump had not been as lucky.
Without thinking, Ben reached into Thump’s red parka and fished out two empty plastic bottles of gin.
“You too, eh?”
Thump groaned.
“Holy shit, how are you still alive?”
“Gurgle.” Thump didn’t talk but looked up at him, blinking.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Ben opened his wet backpack and pulled out a bottle of water and a silver and bronze reflective “space blanket” he kept for emergencies. He didn’t want to touch Thump, he was afraid if Thump had a broken back or something, he could paralyze him.
He fished out his phone.
No signal.
“Okay, okay, okay. Let me think… you can’t move. Stay here while I go get the ranger.”
He made Thump drink and put some trail mix into his mouth.
“Eat, eat. I don’t want you to die while I’m gone.”
Thump nodded, slowly and chewed.
Ben knew he had to get to the ranger station as fast as he could. This was the time he needed his old college speed back. A young Ben would have already covered a mile in the time old Ben spent contemplating what to do.
Ben began to run.
And run.
His feet kept slamming into the trail, each footfall jarring his body… but it began to blur. He just had to save Thump. He had to save him.
Ben started to cry as he ran.
What was wrong with him? Was he bored? Was he just a jerk?
The sun was low in the sky when Ben arrived, out of breath.
“I found Thump, I found… I…” he gasped for air. “I can show you where he is.”
The chimpanzee ranger walked over to Ben, “My god, that’s wonderful! I’ll get the rescue chopper people on the phone right away. Are you up to finding him again?”
“Yeah.” Ben thought of all the times he hadn’t felt anything, good or bad, and smiled. Not because he was proud of what he had done: but because he felt happy and guilty all at once.
“Yeah, I can help you.”
Maybe it was time to call Beth.
January 5th, 2012 | Category: WTF | Comments Off