Going on 99

I volunteered. It wasn't a church-related activity like Bishop Sanders had hoped. I knew he'd be disappointed in me, but surely he couldn't argue the altruism here. And we got to cut class if we attended the ESAR presentation. "Eee-Saur," the vice principle announced through the intercom: "Explorer Search And Rescue." It was a slide show, a talk from the operations leader, Mike, who had a long, gnarled, black beard and dressed like he walked straight out of a logging camp.

Earlier in the year Bishop Sanders had paid me a visit that was both a surprise and expected. In Tacoma there was no such thing as a typical Mormon family, but our family had drifted far enough from the watermark that members of our ward began to take interest in the personal lives of my sister, Jenny, and me. My parents, trying to ease into a divorce, encouraged these visits as a sort of third party parenting system -- they could continue dividing up our past and the church could shoulder responsibility for our souls and our bodies.

As a family, we were never really into our ward (nor anything else as far as I could remember). But dad would always bring a sizable tithing check with him when we did attend, he'd "genuflect" in the face of God and the disapproving looks of the ward. And he made sure we all put in "face time" with the bishop.

Bishop Sanders was a fat man whose missionary garments showed under the stretch and strain of his shirts. Just walking from his car to our front door made him break a sweat. He began his first visit with a chat about how difficult it was for boys my age to find their lives in relation to Jesus.

"There are temptations," he said, his voice quiet, like a whisper. "And the devil would like nothing better than to use this difficult time." He paused and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a thread-bare hankerchief he kept in his shirt pocket. "To use this time to wrestle control," he cocked an eyebrow at me before finishing out his thought, "of your soul." His eyebrows were long and each hair seemed to shoot off in a different direction like insect antenna.

"But," he said,"there are also ways to fight the devil and his temptations." Bishop Sanders sat forward and tugged at the back of his shirt. He tried to make his shirt and garments stretch far enough to tuck back into his pants. "For masturbation I recommend you keep a calendar. Mark a big black star on the days you can't resist."

The following week he brought me a calendar and a big black felt tip which smelled a little like the act itself. Bishop Sanders, assuming I think that I needed at least one black star to get started showed me how to draw these stars. He drew a big, black pentagram on September 17th, covering over the whole square of the day, and then he carefully filled in the star. "Now you do one," he said. He turned the felt tip over in his hand and pushed it toward me. "Just find the last day you..." he nodded and pushed the pen into my hand, "and you fill it in."

I let the pen hover over the 18th and looked at Bishop Sanders. He narrowed his eyes, and I moved the pen to the 20th. It was only five o'clock, and I thought about coloring in only half of the star. But I had already committed myself.

His plan was simple enough, but I didn't think it could possibly stop me. Only embarrass me a little more the next time the bishop visited. Once I had the calendar it was a matter of cheating, and compounding my guilt, or facing Bishop Sanders' slow, measured exhales when he saw the darkened days of my month.

Bishop Sanders seemed very concerned about my masturbation and liked to begin most of our talks with this topic. How was my calendar coming along? Did I feel as though I was getting better? Should we try stronger measures?

He said, "I know that you're turning into a man now and that these changes can sometimes lead you to do things you think a man should be able to do. But a real man doesn't do these things." He pulled the handkerchief from his shirt pocket and fiddled with it in his hand. "And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, what could someone like Bishop Sanders know about being a real man. But don't just take it from me," he said. "Do you think baseball great Steve Garvey is a masturbator? Or do you think Jim MacMahon masturbates before he goes out onto the football field?" He had a good point there. "This is a lonely, lonely thing you're doing to yourself,"Bishop Sanders told me. "Don't you feel lonely after you've been unkind to yourself?" I told him that I did, but I couldn't seem to remember the loneliness the next day.

Bishop Sanders told me what really worried him was that masturbation might lead to other, more substantial sins. "And this in turn," he said, "might preclude you from getting your mission call when you graduate from high school."

A mission was something I hadn't considered to that point, but I hated to think I might be "precluded" anything because of an embarrassing weakness. And I believed that if Bishop Sanders knew about my weakness, surely the Church of Latter Day Saints knew as well. No mission call might be a sign to the rest of the world.

"What can I do?" I said.

"A hobby," Bishop Sanders said. "You could get back into the Boy Scouts," he said. Our ward had a Boy Scout troop I'd belonged to until my parents began their separation. "There's basketball, camping, wrestling . . ." his list of activities, I knew, were all tied to our ward somehow. But if I was going to give the rest of my life to the church and begin to focus myself for a mission in the next few years, I wanted to do something on my own. Something that would put my mind off my loneliness.

As I was signing up for ESAR, I met Todd. He had a big, round head and hung out with the Mods, the dozen-or-so kids who comprised the Curtis High ska scene. Like most of the Mods, Todd drove a scooter to and from school and wore an old army surplus jacket with a small German flag sewn on the sleeve. His Mod look included a skinny tie and penny loafer shoes. A look was the kind of thing I coveted.

The first thing he said to me was: "All I know is I finally get to see some dead people." It was a line, but the Green River Killer was on everybodys' minds at the time, and the specter of Ted Bundy and other murdering creeps still haunted the woods at night.

"Why are you doing this?" Todd said. He wasn't being mean spirited, I didn't think. He talked a lot, I could tell, as if silences made him nervous.

"I like the woods," I said. It wasn't an untruth, but it wasn't very close to the whole truth either.

Another ESAR kid at our school had found a femur bone the police had never matched to a victim. His story had been passed all the way down into the junior high hall. He told and retold the story of spotting a sliver of something cream-colored under a thicket of ferns. It was nearly imperceptable, he said, but there it was. When he picked it up out of the wet leaves the bottom was coated in dark green moss and a black fungus like engine grease. That's what happens to your flesh, he said, after a Washington winter. And since no other bone was found in the area it was probably drug there by animals. The body had probably been eaten. Todd asked the ESAR kid a slew of questions about the the bone: did it have any bitemarks? was there any blood on it? did he feel it might be a woman's bone? etc.

I wasn't sure what I thought about Todd, and I acted put-off at his morbidity, but there was no escaping the sick thrill at the thought of being the Brush Monkey who found a dead body.

Todd knew I was a sophomore and couldn't drive, and he offered to give me a lift to the meeting site: the bank parking lot in Spanaway. When I volunteered I hadn't considered how I'd get there and though the idea of riding on the back of a scooter in mid fall seemed embarrassing it was the least embarrassing of my options. We exchanged phone numbers. We were members of the Pierce County Unit.

The call came on October 3rd, when Jenny and I were home alone on a school night. It was Mike, the operations leader. He was very curt and professional. I was to meet my group in nearby Spanaway at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday morning.

"Don't think I'm taking you anywhere at 5:00 a.m.!" Jenny said. Her perfume was stronger than I remembered it ever being before.

It was just Jenny at the house then. Dad was gone for months at a time and mom was off with a new friend. She was only home on the weekends, and now I would be gone too. Being gone from the house felt good to me then.

I told Jenny I had a ride and I saw her eyes get big. Since Bishop Sanders began his visits Jenny and I were starting to keep secrets from each other. It seemed Mom and Dad's split was driving us apart as well. Jenny stared at me, waiting for me to tell her who might be picking me up at that hour, but when I shrugged she pretended not to care. "I'll have the house to myself," she said.

"Yes you will."

After the call I went to my room and stood in front of my bedroom mirror. I had two red, round zits at the corner of my mouth. My side-burns though were coming in and I stripped off my shirt and lifted my arms and imagined my face covered with the same dark hair. I put my chin near my arm pit and imagined a goatee.

There were a couple of hairs sprouting around my nipples and a few hairs laying over a couple of more zits in the middle of my chest. I had pale skin like Jenny, but she was blonde and I wasn't. I always thought my pale skin looked odd on me, like it was borrowed or some rip-rap I'd thrown on in a hurry. I unbuckled my belt and let my jeans slip to the floor and wriggled free from my boxers which fell around my ankles. I was too skinny, I knew that, and the ribs of my chest stood out like the fingers of hands clenched in prayer.

Jenny burst into the room and stood and stared at me as I tried to cover myself with my hands. "Get out of here!" I yelled.

She stood still in the doorframe and stared at me. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

I pushed her out of the room and slammed the door. She was in league with the bishop, I thought. It wasn't so awful that Jenny had seen me naked, but that she thought she knew something. Maybe she already did. I looked over to the drawer where I hid my calendar and my small, dark galaxy. My urges had never been this bad before Bishop Sanders told me to keep track. Now even the thought of the calendar tempted me. I tried to make a list of something in my head. A list of anything.

In preparation for Saturday morning, October the 6th, I bought a knife with twenty-eight different uses, an all-weather shatter proof compass, a new pair of Sorels, and a Coleman flashlight. Todd picked me up at 5:00 a.m. on the painfully frosty morning. And by the time we got my sleeping bag slung opposite his and all my other gear stowed in my pack, which I had to shoulder opposite his pack, we must have looked like old Don Quixote and what's-his name slouched over a struggling mule. We staggered off into the fog following the tiny white spot of his Vespa headlamp. I tried shining my flashlight over his shoulder, thinking on-coming cars might see us better, but it was too hard to keep my butt hanging onto the back of the vinyl seat. I gripped the sides of Todd's parka as lightly as I could. I didn't want to hold onto him.

"Is your sister Jenny?" Todd said. He turned around his big head around so that I could hear him better over the load whine of the engine. "She's a hottie. Superdeluxe."

"She's got a boyfriend," I said. It wasn't true. Maybe it was. "Watch the road, please."

Todd yelled the whole way to Spanaway, often turning around so that I could hear him. He talked mostly about girls. He knew, somehow, that the operations leader from the school, Mike, had a sister named Dina who sometimes came on the training courses. He said he hoped she'd be there. According to Todd Dina had the best legs he'd ever seen and she liked to wear little mini-skirts and she didn't shave her upper legs. She was a hottie too. She had jet black hair like Mike, and Todd said that dark upper leg hair meant a really hairy one.

Dina didn't sound so hot to me, but when we pulled into the bank parking lot she was easy to spot. Her hair was jet black and shiny and tumbled out of her parka collar. Her face was made up and her lips were bright red. She looked like a sexy vampire, like something from a dirty-comic book. It was too cold for mini skirts, but I could see two thin legs, waffled in long-johns, poking out from under her parka. She had wool-knit mittens on and rubbed them together and joked with some of the older-looking volunteers. Dina looked a lot like Jenny, but with striking black hair, and soft, dark eyes. She wasn't hot, like Todd had said, she was beautiful. Todd said, "Heh? What'd I say? What'd I say?" as we coasted to a stop.

Dina wasn't the only girl in the lot by 6:00 a.m. But she was the only one I was interested in. In the Boy Scouts I'd gone on camping trips with friends, but it seemed strange and sexy to have Dina and the other girls there. Even if the other girls weren't that interesting they were still girls.

Mike was there and was wearing a brown and orange coat with an ESAR patch on the arm. I wondered if we would get coats too. "You're going to do compass work back in the hills," Mike said, "and we'll be camped out for two days." I pictured myself crawling into Dina's tent after everyone was asleep, but my imagination wouldn't take me any further than that. My future with God and Jesus was floating up through the trees and away.

A Deuce-and-a-half rumbled into the lot a little after six, the big diesel engine crashing the still, pitch morning sky. We climbed into the back, told to huddle up for the ride into the hills. I hung back, thinking of clever things to say: So, how long have you been with ESAR? I can't say I ever imagined I'd sign up for something like this, I'll bet its really exciting to find a dead body in the woods. I waited for Dina to climb in, but she didn't. She hugged Mike, said good-bye to some of the older volunteers, and climbed into a compact car. Todd had hung back too. "She doesn't go on these things," he said. "But I'm going to get her to go see Bad Manners down at Community World next weekend. You should come."

I looked at the tired faces jounced up and down in the back of the Deuce-and-a-half. They all seemed the same in the dark. No one spoke, but I could see the vapors of their slow breathing rising out of their mouths and noses.

We followed the stitches of logging roads deep into the back country, deep into the pale blue sun-rise. There was a light snow and rain that afternoon. It would be a wet weekend.

Mike began forming us into teams of five. The girls all went to other teams. Every last one of them. Todd was on my team and Mike, who looked more scraggly and intimidating than I first thought, was our team leader.

Mike had a map and doled out five whistles, five compasses, and he plotted out our search grid. There wasn't a lot of explaining, just direction: "You'll spread out in a single-file line twenty yards apart and walk east for about five hundred yards and then check in." He seemed impatient with us. We would cover our grid and report back. "Make yourselves familiar with your compasses. They are your life-lines."

"And keep your eyes peeled," Mike said. "Sometimes we recover murder weapons, pistols, rifles, knives, metal pipes, or other important clues to unsolved cases. You never know what's important. Sometimes we find bodies, even on the training course." It seemed like a false optimism. Todd caught my eye and mouthed the word "bodies." I worried about not checking on Jenny before I left.

But this was what I had been waiting for. This was what I had prepared for. And yet while I was walking all I could think about was Dina and a little about Jenny too. I could have been scrambling over heaps of bones, and ducking under artilery cannons.

I tried to figure out my compass. It always pointed in one direction, that was about the only thing I understood. Asking Mike seemed too embarrassing.

Mike, I discovered, had a tremendous knack for finding his way around the woods. As the day progressed he would give scores of more complex directions which always sounded wrong, and just when I was sure he had gotten me lost, he'd come crashing through the ferns and sumac right in front of me. We searched far apart and close together. And when we were close Todd talked. He talked about girls and he talked about ska and he talked about girls some more.

Todd talked all evening and when we made camp on the cold, wet ground as the light faded into shadows of the pines he was still talking. Mike made a big fire and we ate our dinners and watched the burning orange embers glide into the trees and fade out. The smoke was sharp against the cold night air. The wet mist turned to a fair dusting of snow on the ground and I sat hunched in my mummy bag thinking about Dina, what she could be doing, who could she be doing it with. I wanted to hold off putting another star on my calendar because I knew the sad loneliness that would creep in between us. And then I'd never have a chance. She didn't shave her upper legs.

Mike lay nearest the fire and as the light faded his face seemed to turn from rugged to downright frightening. "Did you ever find a body out here," Todd asked Mike.

"Go to sleep," Mike said. He shut his eyes, but I could tell he wasn't sleeping.

Todd talked about the Specials, about the English Beat, about Desmond Dekker, and about Madness. I didn't know anything about any of these bands, and even Todd's enthusiasm couldn't make them interesting to me. He talked about Jenny. Todd's batteries never wound down and even an hour after most of the camp was asleep Todd would jump up to skank. He'd throw his elbows in the air and cut his feet into his rumpled sleeping bag. Todd's talk of Jenny kept her safe for me. I drifted off, swaddled in my black mummy bag like a winter cocoon. The night sky between the tops of the trees was black and the clouds parted so clearly I could make out the depth of the stars. Some were closer than others. One was falling and I was wishing.

"Wakey, wakey pup-tent." I heard Todd's voice drifting back again. The next morning was pale and my face was numb from the cold. "We need your morning wood for the fire." He was poking me in the groin with a withered branch. I wanted to be home, asleep in my bed, my parents getting breakfast together in the kitchen.

We had to review our compass work and learn the rules of engagement, as Mike called them. "If you find someone alive the radio code is always 98. Blow your whistle, give the code and give the location. Do whatever else you can. You're not doctors, you're seekers, finders. If you find a corpse don't touch a fucking thing and call in a 99." This was to spare the feelings of family members waiting back at the operations center. Corpse was a horrible word. I could see Todd mouthing "ninety-nine".

Before we headed back to Spanaway Mike had us work one more course. A shorter course. It was more of the same, but I kept my focus better. I didn't think about Dina. I thought about cold hands, cold feet, and the pain in my back. I turned over suspicious looking stones with the toe of my Sorels. I looked behind trees and ferns. I looked under bushes. There was a glint under a fallen tree, but it turned out to be an old Dr. Pepper can. The day was warming, melting the snow off the trees in loud, wet plops. Onto my head, down my neck. I crushed the empty can and stowed it in my pocket. Even the air smelled wet and dead.

Todd filled the Deuce-and-a-half with more of his talk. His questions about Jenny were met mostly with I-don't-knows and not too-sures, but he kept them up, encouraged whenever some little fact slipped out. His big head bobbing up and down, back and forth. "Bad Manners is coming to town. We should go," he said. It was late afternoon and the silent faces of the others being carted out of the forest were sober and smudged and as disinterested in Todd and Jenny and Bad Manners as they were in each other.

The girls I had seen the first morning were sitting across from me. Our knees touched when the Deuce-and-a-half bounced. Their faces had taken on a sexy, earthy glow. They had sprigs in their hair and I could almost smell the smoke and the dampness of their parkas. Their faces shone from two days in the sunshine and cold. I imagined my hands on their waists, wandering up the soft clean skin underneath their sweaters and t-shirts. I imagined they didn't wear bras, these girls. That their small breasts hung loose under parkas, and wool sweaters and t-shirts. I imagined the softness, my fingers rolling under their arms to the moist stubble there. I felt a small, dark star burning in my stomach and felt so lonely. Bishop Sanders lead me to imagine these things, I thought. Since he began visiting me, my imagination was so much more active than I remembered it being before.

Dina was in the Spanaway parking lot when we came rumbling in. She was wearing Levis and a barn jacket, her jet black hair tickling the collar. I tried to smooth my hair with my glove.

Todd hopped out, pulled his gear from the pile and made a bee-line to her. The Deuce-and-a-half girls slouched off into their cars and drove quietly away. I inched my way toward Todd. His scooter was near where he and Dina were standing and I dreaded the idea of the ride home. Dina was laughing.

I wanted Todd to introduce me to Dina, but he acted like we were all old friends. Todd talked and talked, but he did get Dina to agree to the Bad Manners concert the following weekend and when she agreed she looked straight at at me and said, "Maybe I'll see you guys there." I nodded, but nothing would come out of my mouth. Her brother Mike had grabbed his gear and said his goodbyes to the Deuce-and-a-half, to us. He stared long and hard at Todd and I until Dina said she had to go. "So long Brush Monkeys," she said. "See you around."

"Friday," Todd said and skanked out a little dance. My feet felt as if they were stuck in mud. The ride home I found myself clutching Todd's back. I was tired. I was disheartened. I was on another world. Another planet under a million black stars. As Todd's scooter whined and shimmied its way back into my familiar space I knew I didn't want to even out from the highs of my lows. Dina was already fading from my imagination in ways that left me wanting much more. The promise of the woods was still fresh in my mind, over the promises of Bishop Sanders. I felt like I needed time to settle these things and I knew it wasn't going to happen back at my house.

My house looked the same as it had when I left. It seemed quiet and still and unchanging. I dismounted from Todd's scooter. "Friday," Todd said. "Bad Manners," Todd said. "Lip up Fatty, now Lip up Fatty, now reggae..." he sang.

"Should I try to meet you there?" I said.

"We'll pick you up," Todd teetered his scooter backward down the drive. I imagined Dina and I heaped on the back. It was a vivid and stupid image. The engine screamed and he was gone.

I didn't feel like a woodsman, and I didn't feel like a Mormon, and I didn't feel like I had enough sexual spark to light a match. Jenny looked at me sideways when I came in the house. She kept giving me knowing looks all week, like she might blackmail me to our parents or Bishop Sanders. Like she might tell them I did weird things when I was alone in my room.

In the sanctity of the bathroom I undressed and looked at my body in the mirror. There were more zits. I had to stand on my toes in front of the sink to see most everything. It was my flesh. It was bumpy, tight, skinny, and dirty. But there was no denying its call for Dina. I stroked my skin and boney thighs and thought that she doesn't shave her upper legs. I imagined her thick forest of hair and I scrubbed myself red in the hot shower. I was determined to keep at least one star off my calendar.
 

The following Friday, October 12th, Jenny announced to the hollows of the house that a big blue car was sitting in the driveway. I could see the white glare of the lights coming through the living room window. I could hear talking outside and I knew it had to be Todd. "I've got to go," I said. "I'll be back before midnight." The curfew Jenny had assigned me when I wasn't with ESAR. She stared at me as I left and I loved that she didn't meet Todd and didn't know where I was going. Jenny, who now acted as if she knew things about me, apparently, even I didn't know.

Todd was standing against the car finishing a cigarette and talking to the driver, a sulky looking kid in a parka. He was wearing a skinny black tie. So was Todd. It was the ska look. I only had my side-burns. I felt underdressed and then embarrassed about it when I saw Dina sitting in the shotgun seat. She waved at me.

"Jenny want to come?" Todd said. "Always room for one more."

"She can't come," I said.

Todd skanked out his cigarette on the drive and climbed in the back. He passed my name to the driver as he slid in and I slid in next to him. "And this is Rudy, a bad-bad-monster-man. And you know his girl ... Dina." I couldn't muster a "hello" or even an "aw shit."

Todd talked the whole way to Community World giving us the low-down on every song on the tape playing in Rudy's stereo. This band was from San Diego, these guys were from Jamaica and their drummer played in the original Maytals line-up, these guys were all dead because of a plane crash. Bad Manners, Todd said, was fronted by Buster Bloodvessel, a super-tanker from London, and he launched into another round of "Lip up Fatty" even when the song had died from the stereo.

Dina looked so endlessly amused with Todd I didn't dare interrupt. Instead I stared at the back of Rudy's head. He didn't seem so cool. His white collar was rumpled and stained with sweat. His hair was short and black and greased down. He pounded the steering wheel with the flats of his hands in time to the music and sucked down cigarette after cigarette. He blew his smoke out the window, but it mostly came back into my face. I thought Bishop Sanders needs to visit this guy, not me. Rudy needed Jesus like I needed Dina.

When we got to Community World Todd commented on the small crowd of parka-toting ska-kids. He thought there should be a bigger turn out for a band like Bad Manners. The kids standing around outside the bar reminded me of the rag-tag group in the Spanaway parking lot.

"Idiots," Todd said. "Look at all those fucking plastics." Plastics were his term for Japanese scooters. Only the Italian Vespa, apparently, was cool enough. I came around to Dina's side of the car and finally got a look at her legs. Todd was right. She didn't shave her upper legs and it was sexy. I wanted to run my hands along her thighs, to trip that fine, downy hair like a hundred prickly triggers. She caught me looking and I tried to look away. I looked at Todd's big head bouncing towards the door of the bar. Rudy running his hand through his hair. I didn't want to look away. I imagined another black star.

I followed them, walking behind Dina, and tried to distract my fears with the strong, vanilla scent of Dina's perfume. Rudy seemed to ignore her. I felt myself getting angry at Rudy when I saw how Dina floated close to him anyway. Like his gravity kept her close. Like she was powerless to get away from him.

Todd talked to the two giants at the door as if he knew them. They stamped Rudy's hand, because he produced an ID and suddenly we were inside. When we were out of earshot of the door Todd said, "What a couple of gorillas." The crowd in the bar was mostly standing near the stage. There were tables near the dance floor and a bar all along one wall. I had never been to a club or a bar before, but really, it wasn't much different than a stake center dance. Beer and cigarettes instead of cookies and Jesus.

Dina threw her coat over a chair at a table near the edge of the floor. She had a short, small-checked skirt on and a tight, black, sleeveless blouse. I couldn't bear to look at her, and I couldn't bear not to. I was angry at Todd. I felt because he knew about me and Dina he had used that to lure me to the show. He had dropped his coat over Dina's and was warming up his skanking moves in front of the table. Elbows cocked and flying furiously, head down, penny-loafers cutting back and forth. People were watching. I felt the difference between me and them that Bishop Sanders had warned me about creeping in, but I fought it back.

At the table next to us I heard two big guys in sweatshirts critique Todd's performance. They were being loud, almost shouting over the background music and bar noise. "Look'it that faggot," one of the guys said. They weren't ska types and they had three empty beer pitchers on their table.

Todd worked his way through the room smiling and hugging the other people like they were all old friends When Rudy left for the bar I leaned over to Dina and asked her if she liked ska music. She had to pull her attention away from the empty stage. "Rudy likes it," Dina said. "Don't you?"

"I think so," I said. She turned away from me, towards the dance floor. I tried to think of something we could share about ESAR. "I'll bet its really exciting to find a dead body in the woods," I said.

She lit a cigarette and smiled at me, but not the kind of smile I'd hoped for. "Oh, excuse me. There's someone I need to talk to." She said, and she got up from the table in a puff of smoke and walked across the floor. I watched her talking to some of the other ska-kids, her hands flitting around her face and her hips cocking first this way, and then that.

All of the kids at the club seemed to have a look. The ska kids in their jackets and skinny ties, short skirts and hair bands. The big, loud guys at the table next to me with their short hair and team sweatshirts, the sloppy reggae kids, the two punks at the bar with the torn shirts and wild hair all had something I didn't have. I pulled at the husk of the popped zit at my mouth and nodded to Rudy when he came back from the bar with a pitcher of beer and three cups.

"So," I said. "How long have you and Dina been dating?" Rudy seemed to ignore me while he carefully poured the beer into the cups. Then he said something under his breath just as the band came onto the stage. Buster strode to the edge of the stage. He was fat, like Bishop Sanders, had a shiny bald head, and was wearing nothing but a set of long-johns and combat boots. He swallowed the mic when he spoke and droned on and on in a thick brogue about how fat he was. "Some people don't like me 'cause I'm fat." he said, and then the band cut into a refrain of "You fat bastard, you fat bastard..." The ska-kids went wild. Rudy chugged a drink and pounced on the dance floor, swinging Dina wildly. Her little skirt flew up and I could see she wore black, silky panties. As black as my stars. There was the devil, just like the bishop had promised.

Buster tugged up his waffled shirt and slung his big gut over the end of the stage and continued to bark into his mic. The ska kids poked at his belly with their fingers as they went skanking by. Even Dina poked at his belly-button. His stomach turned red.

The two loud guys were standing near the floor with their arms folded when Todd bumped one of them with his elbow. They grabbed his arms and yanked him off the dance floor and shook him around telling what they were going to do to him before they did it. It looked like they might punch Todd's lights out so I decided to step in. I had nothing to lose anymore.

"C'mon guys," I said, my voice a tiny treble to Buster's terrific bass. "He didn't mean it." Todd didn't back off.

"Fuck off you assholes," he said.

One of the loud guys let go of Todd's arm and shoved him to the floor, but Todd scrambled back to his feet and began working his mouth. I was being hopelessly ignored. A small crowd of dancers gathered around. I tried to step up again. "C'mon. Why don't we all cool down." I could hear myself speaking in Bishop Sanders' voice.

One of the bouncers from the front door wedged himself through the crowd and pointed at the two loud guys, "You're out," he said. One of them said, "It wasn't us. It wasn't us." They chugged the last of their beer and stomped away. The crowd was cheering wildly between songs.

I looked through the crowd and could see Dina and Rudy were still dancing, Buster still leaning his gut into the crowd. "Thanks," Todd said. "What assholes." He looked me over as if I were the one who had been knocked down. "Why don't you dance?"

I said, "I don't think its really my scene." But I imagine Todd already knew that. "I think I'll call my sister and see if she can pick me up."

"You sure?" Todd said. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I thought he might try to hug me, but he just slapped his hand down a couple of times and went back to the dance floor.

I nodded to the bouncers on my way out and I heard the one who had pulled the guy off Todd say, "That's the asshole." It was snowing big, fat, wet flakes and the street lamps looked dull, insulated by the heavy air and warm. The snow was accumulating, but I knew it wouldn't be there in the morning. I saw a pay phone at the end of gray and slushy block and headed towards it.

As I shuffled down the sidewalk I heard footsteps coming up quickly behind me. I thought for a moment it might Todd, or even, possibly, Dina. "That's him!" A loud voice said, and as I turned to see who it was something crashed into my chin. I crumpled to the wet sidewalk like a heavy glass slipping through wet fingers and my head connected with the gritty slush. I heard the two bouncers come out of the club, yelling. The flakes looked different from the ground, I remember, like I was falling through a tunnel into darkness lit by a million tiny, dim lights.
 

I didn't hear from Todd that week and I saw him only briefly, squirting his way through the crowds to class. The week after that I saw him even less, and Bishop Sanders more. The following week, on October 28th, Mike called. "We've got a missing person in the woods outside Spanaway," Mike said. My jaw still ached. "Some hunters saw him wandering through the woods and called the police about an hour ago." There had been a heavy snow the night before, a big storm. I tried to think compass, I tried to think grid. Jenny drove me.

Todd was at the Spanaway bank lot on his Vespa. And so was Dina, who looked very concerned. Not many others showed, maybe ten Brush Monkeys and a couple of field leaders. Mike distributed walkie talkies and photos. "This is our subject," he said. The man in the picture was about seventy, full head of white hair, his fleshy, sunken face smiling and not quite looking into the camera. "He's got Alzheimer's and walked away from a care facility early this morning. We don't have much time to find him. He wandered off without a coat." Mike spread a map on the back seat of the operations van and quickly divided up our routes.

"Did you get home all right?" Todd said.

"Yeah," I said. "Fine." There was something smart that needed to be said, but I wasn't the one to do it. Apparently neither was Todd.

"This guy's a stiff," Todd said.

I saw an old woman, maybe the white haired man's wife, clutching her overcoat and huddled next to the operations van. There was a film crew from channel 5 but they only stood around and smoked cigarettes. Bishop Sanders had said smoking makes you look like you don't know what else to do with yourself.

When we got to the site I thought we'd find footprints, but the snow was beginning to fall from the trees in muffled plops all around. We made one last check for whistles and walkie talkies and we marched into the woods. His name was Ernie and the woods soon began to ring with the sound of his name. It seemed like a song and a game. Dina was about two hundred yards on my left and Todd was about that far on my right. With every new hill it seemed more and more hopeless.

We walked for an hour and then reconfigured our courses. It was another half-an-hour before Todd blew his whistle. I ran in the direction of the whistle and saw Todd standing over the shaking body of the old man. Todd was grinning. The old man sat hunched on the carcass of a fallen tree. He was thin and his pale white skin hung from his face and chest like an old t-shirt draped on a line. He looked small in Todd's parka, his hair sprawled across his face. Not at all like an adult. "The way of all ska," Todd said, unashamedly. The old man looked at me as I came up and then turned away, as if I were the intruder here.

I didn't know anything about Alzheimer's except that everything gets darker and more confused. In the eyes of the old man, and his rumpled hair and crumpled pose, it seemed contagious. I wondered if he had faith. And if he had, was it with him now? Could it be forgotten like everything else?

I heard Dina in the distance, blowing her whistle and the echoes of other whistles that followed. Todd said into his walkie talkie: "I have found the subject. This is Todd and I have found the subject." Todd gave our coordinants. Mike answered back that he was on his way and Todd said: "Yeah, well you better hurry because this guy is 98 going on 99."

There was no more to be done except wait for the paramedics to arrive. I watched the old guy turn this way and then that as the other ESAR volunteers crashed through the brush. He seemed like he wanted to get away from us, but was too tired. He kept his head down and was quiet. I thought about how all of these people must be piling up in the old guy's mind, in his memories, and how we would all drift away again. I thought about the little details of our bodies that he might be refusing, at that moment, to notice. Todd's big head. Dina's beautiful, arching eyebrows, and her glistening, jet black hair. Even in this horrible place, with the Celestial Kingdom opening its doors before you, I thought, how could you refuse Dina's lure?

Dina bent down to the old man and straightened his hair, making it behave. Todd cleared the other volunteers back a few feet and called into the walkie talkie once more -- the reply was to just stay still, stay together.

I was just another observer in all of this, a seeker, like Mike said, who knew there was no going back for the poor old man and that this was as beautiful as it could possibly be. The volunteers waited there in the wet snow, nobody talking, not even Todd. Occasionally one of us would blow on our whistle, and in the distance, a whistle would softly answer, and another even more softly behind it, like vague calls back to the places we'd all come from.