where October was, but I suspected she was still standing where I’d left her, oblivious to what had just happened.
My body was cold and numb, my mind empty, void of feeling, void of language except for one word: Run.
But I didn’t run. I put my head down, pulled my collar up, and walked slowly but deliberately toward the nearest exit while behind me a chorus of voices chanted “Turn the Lights Out” in three-part harmony.
I bumped into Rae as I was heading up the stairs. She was coming out of the restroom and asked me where I was going.
“The party’s that way, yeah?” she said, pointing back toward the stage.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I can’t.”
“Huh?”
I met Rae’s eyes and held her shoulders to make sure she was listening. “Tell October this: Tell her I said I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
TWENTY-THREE.
There was a guy in Sid’s writing workshop, an ex-Marine named Santiago, who was working on a novel about a soldier from the future who returns to America in 2017 to assassinate the president and save the human race. It sounds worse than it was. Santiago was a solid writer with a strong voice. He was also an expert marksman and had served two tours in Afghanistan before his twenty-fifth birthday. He said that when he came back, his head was on backwards, and he’d been trying to turn it around for the better part of a decade. Writing helped. Booze didn’t.
Santiago was built like a gorilla: wide as a doorframe, hirsute, with long arms and a rounded posture that made him look like he was knuckle-walking when he moved. He and I were workshop partners for a session. That meant we had to read each other’s assignments and offer feedback, and every Wednesday night for eight weeks we met at the IHOP out on Highway 93 because Santiago was in AA and said it wasn’t healthy for him to be around anything stronger than coffee.
During ABANDONMENT week, I wrote a poem about how I’d left October without saying goodbye. Almost all of my assignments focused on Cal or October, with the occasional bit about Sam or Bob thrown in for good measure. At any rate, Santiago knew a good portion of the backstory from conversations we’d had over pancakes, and at the end of the poem he’d scribbled two notes. The first one said: Loving a woman who can break you is the bravest thing a man can do. The second note said: Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.
It wasn’t like I’d intended to stay in Montana forever. My original plan had been to head back to California after the dust settled. The night I left, I’d only grabbed what I could load up in a hurry, which amounted to a duffle bag full of clothes, a couple of books, some camping gear, my guitar, and my laptop. I’d fed Diego the leftovers in my fridge, hopped in my truck, and headed north, assuming I would drive around for a week or so, talk to some trees, and end up back where I started, ready to face the consequences. But the longer I was gone, the more distance I created between myself and the mess I’d made. And the more distance I created, the more it seemed like a good idea to stay away.
For a while I was peripatetic, pulling off in parks whenever I got tired of driving. I stopped near Yreka the first day and car camped in the Klamath National Forest surrounded by white firs and incense cedars. From there I went to Crater Lake, Bend, and then up toward Hood River.
What I’m about to admit might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever copped to, and that’s saying a lot, but as I was hiking through an old-growth forest near Indian Mountain in Oregon, thinking about Cal and October—they were all I could think about back then—I found myself wondering why they hadn’t tried to contact me.
I guess I’d assumed they would have a lot to say, and I wanted them to say it. And I decided that as soon as one of them reached out—to curse me, call me a liar, a promise-breaker, a coward, the biggest fucking fuckhead on the planet—I would go back.
Neither of them did.
I wandered around in the woods for a couple more weeks, staying in cheap, dreary motels when I couldn’t find a decent campsite. I drank a lot of coffee, alternated between reading Trees of the