The Terrashot Hunter

The terrashot, a long, dry mammal shaped a little like a coffin, served as the controlling metaphor of Tom’s work. Born in hidden valleys, every ten years the terrashot would embark on a pilgrimage into the desert, where the heat struck them, made them burst, leaving demolitions in the ground that had the distinct impression of gravestones. Hunting the terrashot, then, was an existential exercise. Confronting a beast that leaves its life of comfort, only to die. I liked the excerpts he had sent me, though I had not finished it, as the many denizens of our city soon would, discovering the book in the early hours of morning. Tom had told me this in the car and I was thinking of it as I took the lengths of rope in my hands and wove them delicately around his ankles and then the lumps of concrete. For four days he had been doing his leg exercises devoutly, he had told me. The plot of the suicide had arrived in a dream. Will Oakby’s corpse was on the beach, now, twitching his mustache with his nose, as I imagined he did while reading.

Here’s how it happened. Four nights after Oakby died I took Tom, his prodigy, out to the lake so he could drown himself. I wanted to be a good friend. We had talked in the car, but once we arrived it was hard to find anything but a vast and stupefying sadness between us. A pair of fat squirrels squabbled up and down a tree by the picnic table. It buckled under our weight, how rickety it was, and it left bits of peeling brown paint on my jeans. The three of us looked out across the lake. The squirrels disrupted my one, looping thought: of when Will’s wife relayed a message to our Goodreads group (officially “Cherrycoke’s Seminary,” colloquially “Novel Chat,” half-jokingly “Oakby’s Angels”) that William Oakby’s body, almost as vast as his magnum opus, the 1150-page The Last Rancher, had stumbled cross the crosswalk in the early hours of the morning and been ground up like beef below the wheels of a black Silverado. The squirrels were crawling up to Oakby and mussing the curly hair of his beard and trying to set his glasses right and picking up the little stained shards that had shattered from them, all red and pink and brown soon and I was starting to cry, stopping, starting again.

Oakby was a large man and a frustrated, angry man; he requested we buy his book, that we bring them to stores and hide them on the shelves so that others could discover them, carefully nestled, like fetal birds. Oakby called these books his “baby porcupines (the porcupine being, for Oakby, a major theme in his work, representing a sort of settler resilience and simultaneous vulnerability, their faces so capable of tears)” and asked us to settle a porcupine or two into a new nest every few months, and of course, to maintain our own personal copies for annotation and consumption.

He had liked Tom because once Tom had sent a picture of himself to the chat, his hair longer then, his stubble absent, and Oakby had said that he once looked like Tom. Tom wrote about the frontier, like Oakby had, although Oakby excelled in historical fiction, Pynchonesque in a way that he attempted to hide due to his anxiety of influence, and Tom’s work took a rather different tone. It was quiet, contemplative, magic realist, it alluded to Borges and to other winners of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards which he continually won throughout high school on both the local and national levels. It was the writing of someone who hadn’t figured out what they were going to say yet, but knew they were going to say something. He was clearing space, preparing  the right vibrations in the air. A roaring booming sound across the wide expanses of our town, across the world. Oakby liked his writing because it was about the frontier and coyly alluded to Pynchon to Tom, said he might ought read him, even if Oakby would only ever say he learned to write from reading Tom Clancy, like some alchemist making gold from cowshit.

I was on one end of the table and Tom on the other, out of tears. I had been carrying two cinder blocks with me and now they were sitting in the light embrace of the grass alongside a loop of rope. It was Tom’s plan to tie the cinder blocks to his legs and walk into the lake until he sank standing. The Funeral Mountains; or an Account of the Hunting of the Terrashot, his masterpiece, sat torn to pages on the table. I would distribute pages all over the city, and when they came to find the maestro behind the work he would be upright underwater staring back at them. Tom wanted me to ensure his eyes were open. Without Oakby, he was certain no sequel could be written, and as Oakby taught, only one book was necessary. Tom had been at Kenyon but he had left to focus on art and on the friendships he had made with fellow literary people. We lived about ten minutes from each other and when I picked him up from his parents’ house to take him to the lake it was the first time we had seen each other in maybe six, seven months.

I remembered the car ride on the way there. Tom was in the front seat, eating an ice cream sandwich he’d grabbed out of the freezer on his way out the door. Little, nibbling, mousey bites. Sometimes he would take a bite and realize the absurdity of it and look out the window or at me but I was desperately trying to avoid eye contact because I did not want to be crying again. “I’m going to be a writer,” he said to me, “that people know. People are going to know me.”

“People are going to know you, Tom.”

Tom did something with his hands while I was driving. Running them over his arms like he was feeling himself up, checking for ticks, some crawling, clammy activity. He dug his fingernails into his arm and pulled up a bit of flesh ensconced in skin and released it and got to talking again, satisfied. “Are you going to do it too?”
“What, kill myself?”
“That’s no way to talk about this. That’s no way to talk about what I’m doing, we’re doing here at all.”

“This is all too much. I can feel the novels in the back, you know.”

“What do they feel like?”
“Like they’re buzzing, like they’re untenable. I’m scared, Tom.” I wanted some water. We were driving by a steep embankment and I considered Tom’s first question and then set my eyes on the road and my mind on the novels in the back and on Tom.

“Will readers feel that buzzing? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if I want that.”

“No.“

“It’s not a buzzing sort of novel.”

“No.”

“It’s a thinking sort of novel. And you laugh, sometimes. Not too much. Please stop crying,” Tom paused, he exhaled through his teeth, black bits of sandwich cookie on his hands. He wiped them on his shirt. “Anyways, it laughs with you, it broods with you. Oakby said-”

“I love you Tom.”

“He didn’t say that.” I was whiteknuckle on the steering wheel.

“I love you. I’m not going to stop loving you.”

“Stop crying. I don’t want to live as you do, Janice.”

“Do you remember the flowers growing from the gravel by the embankment? When I drove up to your dorm. By the drainage canal.”

“I don’t, Janice.” My tears on the steering wheel. My hands and my body were on the cross of the steering wheel. I thought he hated me.

“They were so purple.”

“I don’t want to remember. I want to live like art.” He was an idiot, I thought. He hated me, I thought. I loved him.

Ten minutes until we got there. Past the car a roadside cross, a burst of goldenrod, a statue of a dancing bear outside a woodcarver’s stand, an exploded deer. The deer’s broad nose twitched, the wind stirred his long hair, his glasses were askew on his muzzle. Like an opened trashbag. Oakby. He ran next to the car, hoofed legs trailing to the side, his spirit running, and he opened the driver’s side door with a fractured hand, shoved over me and over the car console, and splayed down in the back. His blood was on my shirt, on Tom, though he didn’t care. Oakby, twitching his muzzle, bleeding, not reading Tom’s novel, not caring. I could smell him.

I told Tom I wouldn’t stop him but that I loved him. Reminded him of the full moon above the embankment. I wanted to remind him of the soft white skin of my thigh and his hand on it. I didn’t. “One more word and I’ll walk there,” he said. He was picking at his skin again and I stopped crying. He asked me to make sure his Goodreads author page would be set up correctly, given he wouldn’t live to see it. Six more minutes: we drove on.

It was much harder for him to walk in the weights than he had imagined it would be. I asked Tom if he wanted me to untie them, to carry them down from the grass to the beach and then begin his gesture there, but he declined. It would disrupt the footprints he was making, and besides, the assisted man, as opposed to the unassisted man or the mentored man, lacked a certain poetic aspect. I was not to leave footprints. I told Tom that I was his friend and his confidante and I did not say I loved him again and he reminded me that I was also a member of his audience. The beach was slightly downhill from the grass and Tom on his way down stumbled and I caught him and left a jumble of marks from my converse on the sand. He was about to cry again. He made it to the water when his legs got weak and the ropes started to come undone. I stumbled beside him, tried grasping each cinder block in turn and lifting it alongside him until he reached the water. It was shallow. We had so much more to walk, and he was defeated. I thought about my book of poems. I had burned it, after a quote from Pound, on his sonnets. Tom and I were two writers that were not read, that did not produce, that had worshiped a man who was read by others who wished to be him, which is to say by himself, which is to say by nobody. Now he was gone and Tom was trying to become him both alive and dead. He did a little dance in the water in an attempt to turn himself around, turned around thirty degrees, and in that moment he possessed a sort of birdness, like a bathing swan, that made me want to hate him. He hated me, I just knew it. His eyes, the sweat on his brow, the lake water on my pants all said he couldn’t do this. His mouth said “Just leave” and he craned his neck to look out at the accident of footprints on the beach again. Oakby was dead on the beach, by my footprints, and he was dead in the grass with the squirrels burying bits of his ambergris for winter and he was dead in a closed casket somewhere in Connecticut. He was dead everywhere and I kept seeing him. I had forty copies of Tom’s book in the trunk of my dad’s car and even if he died they would go unread. He wouldn’t die. We were all going to keep on living in the desert or in Eden. I was walking and he would call me in a few hours. The others in the group were doing similar sad sad unseen gestures, I could hope, and then a month could go by and we could all wipe this embarrassment off ourselves before we were steeped in it too deeply.

I remembered the opening of the second chapter of The Funeral Mountains:

She stood carefully in the doorway of the saloon and slowly looked out at the vast, willowy expanses of desert; there were the wandering terrashot, there was her husband’s grave, his bones sitting there, winnowing, oh so quietly. From her prospective all was lost: but little did she know there was so much out there left to be gained. There was gold, precious metal in the hide of the terrashot, in the hunting of it. She looked out and the whole desert was a mirror to something profound. She kept what it was to herself. 

Horseshit. The mirrored waters of the lake and of Tom’s weeping gaze behind me. My poems. I had burned them, after a quote from Pound, after an artistic life I’d learned to live, that’d led me here. I wanted them back, I wanted the flash drive with the poems back. I’d layed it so quiet and so gentle beneath the wheel of my car. And then I drove to bring him here.

In the morning, Tom would wake up in his bed. The sun would rise. There would be ducks on the lake, and footprints on the beach, and cinder blocks just at the waterline. But now he was crying. My head hurt, I was walking, walking further, towards a buzzing set of novels. I was not crying and I wouldn’t cry until I made it to the car and then I would let every bit of me flow out so I was dry when he called, so I could comfort him when he was in the car, when he was in my arms, again. I stepped in an Oakby, like he was a rotten pumpkin, and he stuck to my shoe. Tom was still in the lake and I still loved him and I turned the key in the ignition and left, left him crying and everywhere Will Oakby’s corpses on the beach and in the grass and beaten into the earth bloating and reddening with immense clouds of vapor rising from his pineal glands and in that vapor the breath of a thousand unwrit unworthy novels and a thousand mediocrities and the blood boiling behind Tom’s skull and his thoughts tearing like the terrashot as the heat expands it, its body swelling as it crosses the lake gazing out with bovine eyes and readying itself for an immense sound the sound of frozen pines of tannerite of whales on the Portland shore and the squirrels lept and they chittered and wrestled and fucked and one got its rodent fingers in the sockets of the other and pressed or gasped as we all did dreading the orange coming of yet another distant booming baying halfmast sun.