A boy in the trees【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my committee members Patricia Foster, David
Hamilton, and Jim McKean for helping me to shape this writing. My professors at the
University of Idaho also did a great deal of work in helping me along on my early writing
path, in particular Brandon Schrand, Joy Passanante, and Joe Wilkins. I would also like
to acknowledge the support of Thor Nystrom, Elliot Krause and Michael Lewis for giving
me crucial edits for the early chapters. In particular, I owe a great debt to Thor, who has
gone over every word I have written in the three years I’ve been at the University of
Iowa. Without my family’s love, guidance, and patience, this longer work never would
have happened, and I would like to thank Paul Lindquist, Glen Lindquist, Matthew
Lindquist, and Elsa Lindquist for keeping me alive and sane throughout the process.
Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Katy Lindquist, who encouraged me, always, to
keep on keepin’ on with whatever beat the drummer of my heart dictated. In the late
hours of our phone conversations before she passed away, when I had doubts about what
I was doing and where I was going in life, she encouraged me to keep writing. I like to
think this work would make her proud.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. SUMMER DRIFTING ....................................................................................................1
II. SCATTERING POINTS ..............................................................................................25
III. MOVING ON .............................................................................................................42
IV. EXCAVATIONS ........................................................................................................76
V. PLACES IN-BETWEEN ...........................................................................................105
VI. ECHOES OF LEAVING ..........................................................................................134
VII. MOVING FORWARD............................................................................................166
VIII. DANCING IN THE DARK ...................................................................................199
1
I. SUMMER DRIFTING
The summer my mother died, I was living in a window-less converted storage
room down the hall from my father. It was a little larger than his walk-in closet. A
florescent light buzzed from the ceiling. My father once told me that he planned on
taking out a wall and installing a big bay window. He liked the idea of breaking down
walls and adding onto the house, but it was one of my father’s plans that never came to
fruition. At various times, he talked about digging pits for swimming pools, expanding
the kitchen, vague ideas that came to him. How serious he was, we couldn’t quite tell. A
big bay window would have been nice. Telling time was difficult without seeing the sun.
Instead, just those white walls and the flicker of the light above. That summer, I was
twenty-years old and stayed up until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., slept until 12:30 or 1:00 in the
afternoon. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had vague plans to write about my
upbringing in small town Idaho and my mother’s history of mental illness and
hospitalization, but I tended to put it off. Writing was always the next day. I stayed in
that room, coming out for lunch or when my father called us in for dinner.
Sometimes, I saw high school friends like Matt Henretty floating around on the
Internet and I thought about asking if he wanted to see a movie, but I felt distant from
him, too. People were gone to me in the Boise Valley. At most, I played basketball and
drove through the hills, half-expecting that eventually, I would be at a stoplight and see a
lonely girl who would wave to me, tell me she liked that I listened to The Beatles at high
volume. With a small smile, I would open the passenger door and offer her a ride home.
We would date, marry, have children. The eternal power of music and love. Those were
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things I believed in. I somehow thought it might work like that, while I was driving
through the center of town on Eagle Road. Eventually, it would fall into place. It had to.
This was in June, in the early summer before anything changed. Driving the dirt
roads of the Boise foothills, basketball at the Brookwood subdivision, that little cave off
to the side of the hall between the laundry and my father’s bedroom. My clothes lay
piled on the floor. After one or two loads of laundry upon my return from Moscow, I
stopped caring. I wore the same pair of shorts every day. In the corner sat a pile of my
workout clothes, damp with sweat. I didn’t bother to wash them, either. For days, they
just sat there, until my father stuck his head into the room to tell me we were going for
pizza—Thursday was our Family Pizza Night and even when the Yankees were playing, I
still kept up with Family Pizza Night—and then noticed, “This room stinks. You need to
do laundry.” I mumbled something about meaning to do it. I was embarrassed and
defensive when my father said things like that, because it made me aware that he was
thinking about how I was living.
He wanted me to work, but in my twenty years, I had never held a job. It would
get me out of the house, it would be good for me. When he asked me how my job search
was coming, I told him I was looking, that there wasn’t a lot available, that I had applied
to some places and hadn’t heard back. It was my stock answer, akin to my mother’s “I
had a bowl of Grapenuts” when I asked her what she had eaten that day. Albertson’s
Grocery, Hollywood Video, Hastings Entertainment. Those were the places I applied to.
I filled out the applications online so that I wouldn’t have to talk to actual people. The
applications asked the same things Do you consider yourself a hard worker? Do you
have experience dealing with customers or helping others? What experience do you have
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that would suit you for this job? I answered the questions as basically as I could. Yes, I
considered myself a hard-worker—I had helped my father lift tons of hay when I was a
teenager. No, I did not have experience dealing with customers or helping others—and I
didn’t really talk. N/A—I knew that Bob Dylan’s favorite ice cream flavor was vanilla,
but that would probably not help put groceries on the shelves at Albertsons. In the first
week after submitting an application, I thought I might be qualified for stacking
groceries. I can do something in this world. When they didn’t call back, I forgot. I
didn’t follow-up on the applications. Those were jobs to be applied for in March or
April, before the summer kids took them. I was a summer kid, too, but I didn’t want a
boss. I wanted money, but I didn’t want to work for it.
The work that raised me was what my father put me through. When I was in high
school, I dug ditches in the field at our Rush Road home, for the sprinkler system my
father was installing. He spent years on that sprinkler system. When I was in my
basement room watching baseball, I heard his call almost every weekend, “Hey Mark, I
need a little help outside.” Help digging the ditches, setting the big metal pipes which
grew hot under the Idaho sun, clearing debris away from some random spot on the five
acres. We tended to the mustangs, too, though we didn’t ride them. Banjo was nosey for
hay, Coco tended to aggressively charge and try to bite when you were in the field, Presto
shied easily. A few times a year, my father woke Matthew and me in the early morning
to help him load hay for the horses. We drove to small farms on the outer edge of the
Eagle foothills in my father’s wobbly-steering, broke-heater pickup. Our gloves had
holes worn into the fingers, and even wearing gloves, the twine of the hay bit into our
hands. We seemed to be one pair short almost every trip, which left our father to pick the
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bales up with his bare hands. I loved my father for lifting the hay that way. It was such a
simple act. Heavy lifting, no gloves, his fingers swollen and bleeding by the end. It was
a gentle thing that my father did, a sacrifice he made.
The hay scratched and bit at our arms and legs as we lifted, and on the last bales, I
did not have the strength to push them to the bed of the truck. Matthew helped me, which
I appreciated, but also loathed. I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to be strong like my
father. After several hours, when the twenty or so tons were loaded, my father looped
black and orange rope around it to keep it “secure” in the bed of the truck. The stack
dwarfed the truck and weighed it down. Bales stuck out from the side. We drove at
twenty miles an hour with our caution lights blinking, my father glancing out the window
to make sure the lanes on Ballantine were clear. In our fifteen years with the horses, we
never lost a bale. The rope held well.
I considered myself a hard worker, somebody who did what they were asked to do
when they were asked to do it. I just didn’t have a job. And really, since I had enrolled
at Idaho, I didn’t have to do much of the outdoor work. Especially after we moved to
Cobblestone Lane and no longer had the five acres. Then, it was just the occasional hay
lifting expedition. By then, I was older and it didn’t make me feel like a man, the way it
had when I was fourteen. At the age of twenty, that sort of thing was tedious. On
Saturday afternoons, I just wanted to watch the baseball. The game didn’t matter to
me—our local FOX station aired western teams like the Mariners, the Diamondbacks and
the Angels, teams I didn’t care for. But it was baseball. In cynical, tired moments, I
wondered why we still owned the horses. They just milled around our neighbor’s field
and ate when we fed them. My father paid our neighbor each month. Banjo became fat
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and lazy, often just lying down for the day until it came time to eat, his ankles diseased
and hurting. The horses were just there, like scenery. Not much different than me, I
suppose. We didn’t serve a practical purpose. Them, out in the field, me in my storage
room listening to John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, not leaving until dinnertime or until
the day cooled enough for basketball over on the Brookwood lot. It didn’t matter if it
was a Saturday or a Wednesday. We were just there.
My father placed little clippings on the computer keyboard regarding this job or
that job. “I put them on the keyboard because I know you’ll see them there,” he told me.
I couldn’t tell if there was a slight edge to the statement. I knew that I spent too much
time at the computer. He didn’t tell need to tell me. Several times he placed ads about
poetry or writing camp. I appreciated this, because though my father was an engineer
and didn’t write or read much, he understood that I was at least trying something. I
didn’t have the money to sign up, though, and I was too proud or too afraid to ask him.
Or both. He also tried to secure a job for me as a technician at Micron, where he worked.
The job description was basic and stressed no experience necessary. I simply put off on
applying until after the deadline. Things like this didn’t make me feel like a good person,
but I was comfortable in that storage room.
While I was happy to sit around jobless, other people were losing theirs. The
Idaho Statesman churned out articles about economic downturn each week. The
electronic sector was the largest source of employment in the Boise Valley. Companies
like Micron and Hewlet Packard, creating computer parts and equipment. I saw the
headlines, but didn’t think much of them. My father had been laid off before, back in the
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earlier part of the decade, but I assumed his job was secure—even though every year,
more and more people seemed to be getting put out of work from Micron. He mentioned
it during dinner once or twice, not indicating how he felt. He could be like me, quieter
about the big things. Once, I asked him if he liked what he did. “It’s work, you do what
you do” he said, then maybe thinking about my own situation, followed it up with, “It’s
nice to get paid.” That’s the most he said about that. His voice was deep and gruff, and
he smiled at the end. I smiled back before letting another application slip by. Two days
after my mother died, my father was laid off from Micron.
Both of my parents were 52 years old that summer. My father had been working
since the 1970’s, whether it was an early lifeguard job in Houston, or his work in various
labs for IBM or Santa Clara Plastics or Micron. He owned a home and several cars. Four
kids, one of whom had graduated from college, another (me) who was set to graduate
within two years, the youngest two who would both be going on to college. When we
were off to wherever we would spend the rest of our lives, my father would stay in that
little house down Cobblestone, sleeping on the small mattress in his bedroom. Better for
my back, he told me. The queen-sized mattress would become piled with books and car
parts and clothing. Gradually, the rest of the house would fill with these odds and ends,
too, as my father grew old sitting on the back patio with a beer and a cigar, watching the
mountains turn black. And my mother would live in her little apartment miles across the
Boise River, friendless beyond the two cats she owned, drinking boxed wine, reading
mysteries, and taking pills each day to keep her mind from tipping. My mother and
father would become old in these ways, I believed. By then, there was no illusion in my
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mind that they would ever be together again. That had been shattered years before,
during the hospital stays, the medications that only worked marginally, the slow grinding
of her life down to the very basics. Unlike my father, my mother didn’t make an effort to
date after the divorce. Each week melted into daily phone calls to me, trips to the grocery
store, doctor appointments. And in the month following Matthew’s graduation, she
seemed less than even that. There seemed to be a slip in her awareness of the world. It
came across, so strongly, in our phone conversations. I hated talking to her on the phone
during that June. She was unaware of how stagnant her life was, or I was more aware
than I had been before, or something in-between. Maybe I could feel it more because I
was like her. I wasn’t moving or improving, either.

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