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

field of vision and focusing on something very small he never offered to share. It would stay there peering steadily down, insistently, patient, until I left in the direction of my own room—a solitary place.

Aliens
    I met Dan Wyman in Auto Shop One, a course I took mainly to intrigue and offend certain acquaintances of mine at Roosevelt High School. These were kids I’d sat among for years in honors classes—kids who seemed to know where they were headed at fifteen, kids with clear reasons worked out inside for taking Business Law or Ancient History. (How could they? I used to ask myself. How did they know with so much certainty what it was they would need?) At fifteen I wore an overcoat from the Goodwill Store and shoulder-length, unkempt hair. That coat, as voluminous and awkward as a camping tent, a gray wool number with slack lapels and limp-threaded, large cuff buttons, made me a sort of celebrity, I thought. But I was wrong. I sensed without recognizing the special sort of loathing that here and there had been reserved for my appearance, but the more general unconcern for my existence in the world I couldn’t perceive.
    Strangely, I felt a widespread aversion to my charactermost powerfully in the auto shop. The students there knew I was a Laurelhurst boy, a white-collar refugee merely trying on blue-collar life as a form of novelty or minor diversion. They were instinctively offended by my presence among them, as if I had made a game out of their lives or stepped across an invisible border into a nation where I didn’t belong. Two or three times I was openly insulted when my obvious lack of experience with automobiles manifested itself to these guys. Then almost all thirty of them turned on me. “That’s a fucking spark plug ,” somebody would say. “Counterclockwise,” somebody else would say. “Don’t fuck around with those adjustments.” “Don’t be such a fucking idiot.” “Don’t touch anything around here, all right, dipshit?”
    Naturally I did my best to conceal my ineptitude. I talked a half-decent game, but sooner or later you had to take a tool in your hand in that course, and when I did there was no hope of sustaining the pretense. With each mistake, each embarrassing confusion, I retreated further into the silence of the tourist who knows he will never communicate. Even my hands seemed to become more tentative and unworkable in the face of the loathing I felt directed at me. I began to consider skipping, another strategy of mine, a flirtation with danger I knew would garner me even more inverse social status than my street wino’s overcoat, since skipping involved putting your grades on the line and taking a chance, however insignificant, on being expelled or suspended. No real honors student would ever skip.
    But how did I meet Dan Wyman? Fifteen lawn mower engines were clamped to workbenches around the auto shop and everybody, daily, paired up. The partners I had, as a matter of course, ignored me with a studied sullenness.They picked up the tools and went to work. I stood there. Some universal agreement or unspoken policy prevented the unlucky greaser who drew me as a partner from extending the slightest measure of friendship. I became in that room an alien presence, an idea rather than a human being. But not with Wyman. He ignored me only until he needed a third hand, then asked straightforwardly for help. “Hold this down, please,” he said softly, pointing with his cleft chin. “Hold this. Right here.” So my hands began to work among his, that’s all, and he exhibited no disgust for me. He even seemed ignorant of the sphere of animosity circumscribing my being, though in retrospect I don’t think he really was. He didn’t care . He had a knack for coaxing even the most recalcitrant engine to life, particularly when others asserted such a feat was impossible. The challenge of infinitely small physical problems arranged in a long and methodical series gave him a special