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manner, that suggested what I came to conclude from the scene: that Wyman was gay, a homosexual. It was rather their intimacy that suggested it, the way in which their pool game shut them off from the world and made them a society unto themselves, so that what the rest of the bar might think of them was a matter of complete insignificance. Wyman had grown a mustache. He seemed to be more of an adult than I was—he looked older, more knowledgeable about the rough-edged, seedy part of life than I would ever be. His face had gotten softer, his hair had receded, his body had thickened almost imperceptibly. But I noticed the details of his aging, of course, just as I’ve found I can’t help but notice a lot of things about people. I had come there alone at midnight from my studio apartment in order to be in proximity to others for a while. I sat at the bar with my beer and watched Wyman. Once, as he moved past one of the men on his way toward the cue ball, he very gently placed his palm on his friend’s buttock. The man smiled as he pondered the pool table. The third man leaned on his pool stick.
    I didn’t speak to him. I only watched. After a half-hour I wandered back to my apartment, where a novel I would never finish writing lay strewn across my desk. I looked for Wyman’s picture in my high-school annual—searched for it with a curiosity I didn’t know I possessed. Daniel Richard Wyman it said beneath his picture, a handsome boy in a white tuxedo suit, white teeth, combed hair. Woodworking, Hunting, Automobiles .

Wood Grouse
on a High Promontory
Overlooking Canada
    I went up there with my brother, Gary—up on the side of Goat Peak: a high promontory overlooking Canada.
    That day we caught no fish at Wall Lake. They were there, watching what we did, but the weather was all wrong, too sultry, and the fish stayed down in the deep water.
    That day Gary wouldn’t talk about the war he’d only just come back from. “You don’t want to know,” he said to me. “Take my word for it, Bud.” So after a while I didn’t ask anymore. But I could see Gary had seen things I hadn’t.
    I don’t know. I was fifteen. I spent a lot of time throwing rocks, I know that. Building stacks of rocks, backing off thirty yards, then throwing for as long as it took to knock the stacks of rocks apart.
    We saw a flock of sheep, a sheepdog and a shepherd, up on the Wind Pass trail. “Aren’t they beautiful?” said Gary. The shepherd was a silent Mexican on a horse, his dog a ragged mutt; the sheep flowed away from us in a slow whitewave as we waded through them in the cloudless sunlight.
    There were no trout for lunch but some cheese I’d kept in the streambed and a can of sardines and some dried pears. Then—later—we smeared ourselves with jungle juice, put our sunglasses on and took the compass and the Geological Survey map up on the side of Goat Peak.
    Up there Gary spread the map out on a slab of rock, and laid the compass down and watched while it settled. “There’s Canada,” he said. “That’s Eldorado Peak way over there and that’s the Chilliwack Valley.”
    I looked up into a world of blue spruce that rolled on endlessly to a land I dreamed about. I didn’t say a thing about this dream to my brother, though—about the mountains or about living off the land. It seemed the wrong dream to tell him about, now that he was back in America.
    “This is the border,” Gary said. “We’re in Canada, Bud.”
    Driven into the scree up there we found the mounted iron border marker—number fifty-five, it read. We sat by it: a place to rest and watch the sun go down.
    “Draft-dodger heaven,” said Gary.
    We kept crossing from country to country, back and forth, reveling in the freedom of not answering to anyone about it.
    Eventually to the northwest there was no light other than a crescent of orange wavering on the horizon. The sky over our heads lit up, while the earth we sat on went cold in the last sweet twilight.
    It