Read Online The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson - Free Book Online

wine and passed me the bottle without taking his eyes off the road.
    “Drink up,” he said. “Let’s get drunk.”
    “I’m already drunk,” I said.
    “Get more drunk, then,” insisted Wyman. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
    I took a drink of wine, but it was true, I was drunk already, and anything I drank now just made me feel worse than I already felt, more wine-sick, more unhinged.
    “Hey, Wyman,” I said after a while. “How come your greaser buddies hate my guts?”
    “Those guys aren’t my buddies,” Wyman said. “I don’t even talk to them.”
    “Yeah, well, how come they hate me?”
    “They don’t hate you.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “They don’t,” said Wyman. “They don’t even think about you. Nobody notices. Those grease monkeys don’t think about anything.”
    “They won’t talk to me,” I pointed out.
    Wyman looked over at me apologetically. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “Huh? Do you? All right it’s that fucking coat of yours. You look like a fucking clown in that thing, okay? You make a fool of yourself.”
    “You think so?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then why do you hang around with me?”
    “Hell if I know,” said Wyman.
    “You don’t like my coat?”
    “No. But I don’t care. Wear the fucking thing if you think you have to.”
    “Fuck you,” I said.
    “Right,” said Wyman.
    We parked and climbed the fire escape to the roof of the Savoy Hotel: me in my overcoat, Wyman with a bottle of Ripple trapped between his underwear and the waistband of his pressed cordoroys. It was still raining just a little. We sat beneath some sort of overhang. From there the city spread out toward the salt water. There was no sense of action, of a life in the streets—Seattle seemed to exist as an addendum to the water, the sky and the listless rain, all more essential elements in the landscape.
    “Nobody likes me,” I pointed out after a while.
    “Not true,” answered Wyman firmly.
    He put his arm around my neck then, something I’d never felt from anyone before—not friendship, not love, not sex, not solace even—just the sensation of something human finally, with no selfish motive attached.
    “Forget about those guys, all right?” he said. “They’re nothing but grease monkeys. They won’t let a guy be different. Forget about them. They don’t matter.”
    “It’s not just them. It’s everybody.”
    “Then forget it all,” said Wyman. “Who cares? Forget it. Have another drink of wine.”
    “I can’t forget it. It’s not that easy.”
    “Take a drink of this.”
    I did.
    It took Dan Wyman a half-hour to convince me. But in the end I threw my coat off that roof. “For you it’s easy,” Wyman said. “Toss the fucker. Go for it.” So I stood at the edge of the city and tossed it. It floated at first, and then seemed to plummet, and at last it fell out of sight.
    “Good move,” said Wyman, clutching his bottle. “For you it’s easy. It’s just that simple.” But I wasn’t thinking of what Wyman might mean, or of why he couldn’t shed his aloneness that easily: I was thinking, as usual, about myself instead, coat or not coat—of course I was.
    This is a story with an epilogue, finally; there seems to be no other way to tell it. Wyman and I stopped being friends after a while, a thing that happened gradually, in a piecemeal fashion. There was no sudden falling off, just a gradual drift, currents dragging at us from opposite directions. It seemed to me the most normal thing in the world to move on emotionally in this manner. I wasn’t hurt, and I don’t suppose Wyman was either; we just went on becoming who we were, that’s all.
    When I was twenty-four I saw Wyman again in a bar in west Seattle. He was shooting pool with two other men, the three of them circling the table with their cues and leaning low into the smoky light there to take their shots with theutmost seriousness. It was not so much something in their appearance, or even in their