Palouse - 32. Chapter 32

Chapter 32

After the Bottom – March 1995

A Month Later

Don’t only practice your art,

but force your way into its secrets,

for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.

– Ludvig van Beethoven

“I need to show you something. But it’s going to take the rest of the day. Can you do it?” Micah asked as they woke to a bright, cold morning.

“Of course.”

“Are you sure? You don’t have homework or anything?”

“No. I’m clear, Micah.”

“Get your keys, then; we’ve got a drive. I’ll even buy you some doughnuts and coffee.”

They stopped at a bakery, where Micah bought a half-dozen doughnuts and then got lattes at an espresso stand.

“Which way?” David asked as he pulled his Civic toward the highway.

“Endicott.”

David eyebrows rose. “I’d better fill up the tank, then.” He turned into a Shell station, pulled up to a pump, slipped his credit card into the slot and filled up.

They headed up U.S. 12 to Waitsburg and Dayton, then through Starbuck and crossed the Snake River at Lyons Ferry. From there it was a long, winding stretch across the hills till they eventually got to Endicott.

“Go on through town towards St. John,” Micah instructed. About a mile later, they dropped down into the Palouse River valley and then turned toward the plateau 300 feet above it. Micah told David to turn right off the main highway onto a gravel road that crossed the wheat fields, winding across the Palouse. They drove past a large farm, with the name on the mailbox: Kingman. Two dogs were barking madly at the passing car. There probably were some eyes in the house looking out at the road, but Micah knew they wouldn’t recognize David’s car.

David’s raised his eyebrows as he turned to face Micah. “You don’t want to stop here?” he asked.

“Nope. I want to show you something, and it’s not at my house.” They drove on another half mile, where Micah told David to turn right onto a farm road. Thirty feet down it was a fence and a gate. Micah hopped out and unlatched the gate, swung it open for David’s car to pass through, then closed and latched it. Micah hopped in the car, and they drove another quarter mile across frozen wheat stubble. “Stop here,” Micah commanded. They got out, and Micah grabbed his violin and bow cases before David could lock the doors. Micah was amused at David trying to lock the car doors in the middle of a wheat field miles from any other persons. The chance that anyone would come by in the middle of a Palouse farm was almost nil, and the chance that that person would be a thief was even less.

Micah crossed the field and started down the farm track on its edge, leaving David to catch up. His feet made a hoarse whisper across the frozen stubs of the harvested wheat. After a quarter of a mile, Micah turned right and followed a faint path that led from the dirt farm track to a grove of leafless cottonwoods that grew in a hollow below the wheat fields. The path wound through the trees and ended at a natural amphitheater that sat in a creek bed banked by walls of lava topped with the deep topsoil of the Palouse. Wheat fields rimmed the enclosed space, looking like a natural thatched roof. In the center of the natural amphitheater was a flat rock as big as a living-room sofa. Micah strode up to the rock, climbed it and stood with his head proud-high, surveying the surroundings. He beckoned David to join him, and they stood side by side.

Nothing was said for a long time. The only sounds were the sough of the cold wind through the leafless trees and the screech of the raptors circling above, waiting for unlucky rodents to show their faces.

Micah undid the latches on his violin case, lifted the violin gently out as if it were a newborn baby and took out his bow, temporarily leaning it against his leg. He plucked the strings with his fingers then adjusted the pegs to bring it into tune, testing the final settings with his bow. The dissonance of the sound was, in itself, a sort of symphony to David.

Micah began to play his Mendelssohn. The sound traveled to the edges of Micah’s sanctuary and came immediately back, as if the acoustics of Carnegie Hall had been lifted into the wilds of Eastern Washington and Micah’s sanctuary had turned into the hall itself. David sat stunned at the extraordinary acoustics of the place as he listened to Micah playing.

Micah played for an hour, moving from Mendelssohn to Bach to Franck, seemingly oblivious to the presence of David – mindful only of the glorious music he was playing and his attempt to bring out its meaning. When he stopped, he looked around as if dazed until he oriented himself. David began to clap softly, his dark auburn hair glistening in the late-morning sunshine.

“That was beautiful, Micah. I’m amazed at this place: it’s beautiful and the natural acoustics are amazing.”

“Yes. This is my special place, David. No one else has been here with me, except you.”

“I’m honored.”

“I found this spot when I was ten. I was traveling down that road we drove along and got curious what was down in this creek bed. I was looking for a place I could practice my school trumpet as well as my violin.” David’s eyebrows rose. “You didn’t know I played the trumpet, did you?”

David shook his head. He didn’t want to break Micah’s train of reminiscences by speaking.

“I did for a while until I got my violin, but I played the trumpet in the high-school band. I would come out here with my violin whenever the weather let me and play for hours, and I would stop and think about what I was playing and how I wanted it to sound. This is where I was really born, where I became what I thought I was going to be for the rest of my life – that is, until I screwed everything up.”

Micah looked at David with anguish in his eyes. David patted the rock next to him, beckoning Micah to sit down, which he did. David put his arm around Micah and drew him in. They sat quietly in the sun and dry winter air, not saying anything.

“I wanted to show you this place, David, because I think I want to start over. This is the first time I’ve been here in, I think, four years. When I started to fall apart, I couldn’t come here. It would have been a desecration. But now, I want to be reborn.” David looked sharply at Micah, and Micah just grinned. “Relax – not as a Christian, but as a musician. I don’t know if I can do it. Sometimes I think it’s too late, and I get depressed, and sometimes other things happen – at school, with my family, my finances – and it almost becomes too much. It almost became too much with everything that happened with Casey.”

David nodded, in understanding.

“I was a star and a celebrity once, but I don’t want to be a star again,” Micah said. “No, that’s not true. I do want to be a star, but I don’t want to be a star like I was. I want to be a star because I offer my playing to the audience – just as a philanthropist gives his money to help people – as something I hope they will appreciate. I don’t want to be a star that accumulates adulation at the expense of why he’s there, needing adulation as a sponge needs water. If I’m to be a star again, I want to do it on my own terms. But I don’t know if I can do it, and I’m damned sure I can’t do it alone.” Micah looked at David, wanting an answer to the proposal that he was implicitly making – but maybe wanting even more from David than just help in resurrecting his career.

For David, the easy part was a willingness to support an incredible talent. He knew Micah possessed the talent. As they drove back to Walla Walla across the wheatlands and valleys of the Palouse, David thought that the hard part, was assuring himself that the hand he held out to Micah would be enough and Micah would not retreat into the small world that he had created for himself over the past few years or retreat into the bottles of pills that Micah had arrayed in front of him the night before.

David saw Micah’s crossroads. He knew he could help. His inclination was to offer to help, but he didn’t know if he could stand seeing Micah fall again, and he didn’t know if the slightest stumble would stop Micah in his renewed quest for greatness. And he didn’t know if he wanted to fall in love with Micah – again.

“Being a child prodigy is so lonely,” Micah said. “I was one. I was really different from other kids. No one else can understand what it is like to be so different. I wanted to connect with people in the music world and outside. I wanted to have people see the deepest part of me, the part that people don’t usually see. But it never happened. I was always the Guarneri Brave, the half-Navajo wonder – never a person.

“I was searching for meaning and connection, and I found it finally at home – in Endicott – with Amelia, but it cost me my music, and her brother and his friends almost cost me my freedom. I wasn’t mature enough then to balance everything out.”

They rode in silence for a long time, Micah turning to David with his eyes seeking David’s response to his unspoken request for help. They arrived in Walla Walla as dusk was settling into night. David drove to his apartment, assuming that Micah would want to have some dinner with him.

He drove up to the garage door, turned off his keys, but didn’t pull them out. “I’ve got some nice steaks that I can thaw in the microwave and a bottle of wine or two. Will you have dinner with me?” When Micah nodded, David pulled the keys from the ignition, opened his door and waited for Micah to get out as well. Micah had his instrument under his arm.

They opened the door and climbed the stairs to the second floor. David flipped on the lights and wanted immediately to flip them off because the mess he had left had not cleaned itself. The clutter and stacks of CDs, books, and papers showed how David lived. The apartment was just how he had left it.

The kitchen, though, was tidy, and David pulled a loaf of French bread and two steaks from the freezer, setting the microwave to the defrost cycle for the steaks. He turned on the oven and put the bread in it. He opened the refrigerator and set the last of the salad ingredients onto the small counter that divided the kitchen from the living and bedroom areas. Without being asked, Micah took the lettuce to the sink and began to wash it then dry it with paper towels, shaking off the moisture in the sink. David handed him a paring knife, and Micah cut up the tomatoes and cucumbers, tossing them in a bowl that David had pulled from a cupboard.

They were not saying a word to each other. There was only the tacit choreography of making a meal – each one accepting a responsibility for part of the dinner. It was as if the entire mood of the day would be broken if they said a word. Micah opened cupboards till he found the dinnerware and the drawers till he found silverware. David put two placemats out on the table.

David put some cooking oil in the skillet, salted and peppered the steaks and, after the oil had heated, laid them side by side. Micah found the salad dressing in the refrigerator and mixed it with the salad fixings. He found the butter dish and set it on the table, then took the bread out of the oven and cut several slices. He found the corkscrew and opened the bottle of wine and poured two glasses.

The clatter of dinnerware and silver, the opening and closing of cupboards, oven and refrigerator doors, the sizzle of steaks cooking became the background prelude to a dinner, sounding much like a percussion concerto.

David put the steaks on the plates, dimmed the kitchen light, lit a candle and set the plates on the table. They both sat and finished dishing up their plates and paused – enough to be a moment of silence – looking each other in the eye in the dim light.

David raised his wine glass. “To you – now and tomorrow,” he said holding it in front of him. Micah clinked his glass against David’s and echoed David’s words, the first that had been said between them in hours.

The words spoken in the toasts were enough to open the floodgates of thought and repartee. The two young men dived into their steaks, salads and bread and talked of everything except what had happened that day. David was unsure of what he had seen and experienced, and Micah did not want to destroy the small, tenuous step he had made toward rebuilding his life. So they talked of school and sports and books and television.

They finished their dinners and cleared the table, and David dished up some ice cream from the freezer. After the ice cream, David poured the last of the wine, and they sat at the table in the warm buzz of a good meal and nice wine. A contented silence between them rose again as they sat and looked at each other across the table.

“Are you still gay?” Micah asked, breaking the silence, his voice low and hesitant, out of the blue.

“Yes,” David responded, “it was a nice day.”

“That’s not…” Micah stopped when he looked at David.

David was trying to keep a straight face after this forward question and its answer that Micah surely knew, but failed in the end. He didn’t know what the question meant, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know. David was just not sure of the permanence of the changes in Micah that maybe had begun that day. But the source of the question – Micah himself – was so innocent of so many aspects of the world that David really wanted to deflect what Micah was asking. The subject fortunately was dropped – in a way.

“You can stay the night, if you want,” David offered. When Micah looked nervous as he waited for the answer to the question, David added: “I have an air mattress and extra sheets.”

“No, I think I’ll go back to my room.” David looked worried. “I’m okay now. Trust me.”

David grabbed his keys and took Micah back across town to Walla Walla College.