I pulled away from the nudge in distraction. "Come on, Stephen, stop dicking around."
I had moved on to the candy bars and cookies and was trying to figure out what might
last us ten days without melting into a disgusting ooze or bouncing into a bag of crumbs.
"Do you want Snickers or do you want to try something different?" I asked.
"I want Budweiser." He grinned, then, seeing this had passed me by, adopted a
sudden, solemn, jokeless tone. "Please, Bryson, can I borrow"--he looked at the price--
"four dollars and seventy-nine cents? I'm broke."
"Stephen, I don't know what's come over you. Put the beer back. Anyway, what
happened to that five dollars I gave you?"
"Spent it."
"What on?" And then it occurred to me. "You've been drinking already, haven't you?"
"No," he said robustly, as if dismissing a preposterous and possibly slanderous
allegation.
But he was drunk--or at least half drunk. "You have," I said in amazement.
He sighed and rolled his eyes slightly. "Two quarts of Michelob. Big deal."
"You've been drinking." I was appalled. "When did you start drinking again?"
"In Des Moines. Just a little. You know, a couple of beers after work. Nothing to get in
a panic about."
"Stephen, you know you can't drink."
He didn't want to hear this. He looked like a fourteen-year-old who had just been told
to clean his room. "I don't need a lecture, Bryson."
"I'm not going to buy you beer," I said evenly.
He grinned as if I were being unaccountably priggish. "Just a six-pack. Come on."
"No!"
I was furious, livid--more furious than I had been about anything in years. I couldn't
believe he was drinking again. It seemed such a deep, foolish betrayal of everything--of
himself, me, what we were doing out here.
Katz was still wearing half a grin, but it didn't belong to his emotions any longer. "So
you're not going to buy me a couple of lousy beers after all I've done for you?"
This seemed a low blow. "No."
"Then fuck you," he said and turned on his heel and walked out.
Well, that rather colored things, as you can imagine. We never said another word about it.
It just hung there. At breakfast, we exchanged good mornings, more or less as normal,
but didn't speak beyond that. Afterwards, as we waited by Keith's van for a promised lift
to the trailhead, we stood in an awkward silence, like adversaries in a property dispute
waiting to be summoned into the judge's chambers.
At the edge of the woods when we alighted there was a sign announcing that this was
the start of the Hundred Mile Wilderness, with a long, soberly phrased warning to the
effect that what lay beyond was not like other stretches of the trail, and that you
shouldn't proceed if you didn't have at least ten days' worth of food and weren't feeling
like the people in a Patagonia ad.
It gave the woods a more ominous, brooding feel. They were unquestionably different
from woods further south--darker, more shadowy, inclining more to black than green.
There were different trees, too--more conifers at low levels and many more birches-- and