Path of Least Resistance

In the morning, I took the little stone with me into the living room, where Keith was on the sofa, watching television. At the time, Keith and I lived in a downtown two bedroom, under the constant press of traffic, working factory and service jobs to pay the rent and buy the beer and all that lazy nothingness. A couple of college dropouts waiting for something to happen to us.

“This guy,” I said, “had me believing this little rock could make wishes come true.”

“Give it here,” Keith said.

I threw him the stone and he caught it one handed and said to the air, “I wish for some beer. Good beer, not the shit.” Then he threw it back at me. “It’s broken.”

I had not caught the return pass and it went bouncing down the hallway toward the bathroom, which I spent some time using after picking the stone up. In the shower it took on a luster it lacked when dry and it made me think of a river stone, one of millions and trillions along all the wild rivers in the world, pounded smooth, dull gray when dry and slick when wet. If some were magic, how would anybody ever know?

The night before, at the bar waiting for a beer, the guy next to me said, “Check out this stone.”

He held it out and I took it in palm. Just a small rock. ‘What’s special?” I asked.

“It’s a wishstone,” he said. “Makes wishes come true.”

“Wish I had one,” I said, and the guy smiled at me and left the bar, me with the little rock still in my hand.

It was a pretty good joke.

When I came out of the bathroom Lucas was in the living room and he and Keith were drinking Heineken. Of course, it was Sunday, and Lucas usually came over to watch the games and he often brought beer but that didn’t stop me from holding some small incredulous belief.

“Le’me see that stone again,” Keith said. I had a reluctance now, having spent some time in the shower thinking about the consequences of wishes. “Remember the Monkey’s Paw,” I told him.

“The wha?” Keith said.

“That short story about the guy who gets a magic monkey hand and wishes for money and his kid dies and he gets the insurance money. Then he wishes for the kid to come back and there’s this knock on the door.”

“Pet Cemetery,” Keith said.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Whatever,” Keith said, waving for the stone.

Lucas was saying, “what the hell are you talking about?” as I tossed the stone to Keith and he wished for, in these words, “a girl.”

All sorts of things popped into my head. A Girl Scout, selling cookies. My sister through some disaster with her husband. Still, privately I wished for the same; who doesn’t?

Nothing dramatic happened and Keith tossed me back the stone. Lucas looked at us both, but I didn’t feel like explaining and the whole thing seemed foolish, and a while later we all went out to watch the games at a bar.

The girl. Brenda. She was a friend of Lucas’, waited tables at the same place. She didn’t look like a Brenda, which to me is a clunky name and hardly attractive. She and Keith hit it right off, but then Keith was always looking for a girlfriend. He was the kind of guy who wasn’t happy without one, and good looking enough to attract. He wrote his girlfriends poetry, spent all his money on extravagant gifts, but alcohol made him moody and easily angered. Jealous. I’d watched him cycle through a few already, never more than three or four days on either side of having a girlfriend or not having one.

We’d met at work, both of us at the time working a mail order warehouse, eight hours a day, with breaks timed to the second, putting assorted cheap plastic tools and electronics and kitchen utensils in tin bins that rolled past our stations on black conveyors. We were color coded--I was sky blue, magenta, and a sort of yellow green. Our color would roll by, stuck to the side of the tin bin, and we’d grab it off the conveyor and find the appropriate item. The merchandise was ordered to no system I ever understood. Some CD of a German symphony doing Brahms was next to a pair of garden gloves with little suction cup things on the fingertips, was next to a stack of disposable doggie diaper pads. Row after row after row, in a sort of soul-eating multitude, shrink wrapped, bar coded, like larvae. It was the order of things, the movement of the world there on that belt, a total mystery how it functioned, by what order or logic that sent the stream of objects out into the world, or for that matter, what stream brought them to me. But probably China.

My second or third day there I was walking out after the shift and Keith, who I’d just met at lunch, asked if I wanted to join some of the other guys going out for a beer. That’s how we became friends. A few weeks later my rent went up and I was looking and he had an empty room in his apartment. So there it is. No magic, no wishes, just a series of coincidences all strung together, like an old set of Christmas lights just before the holiday, all knotted up senselessly. And then you plug them in to see if they work at all. And if they do you sit down near the bare tree and start fingering through the mess, feeling the lights warm up slowly, until they’re all in order.

So we were out and Keith had his girl and I had the wishstone in my pocket, believing and not believing. The easy answers came to me: money, fame, beautiful women, power, world peace, a hot car, immortality. I couldn’t wish for any.

My father said often enough, “Nothing’s free.” I must have taken the words to heart, because I was nervous, thinking of Macbeth. But in the end I still wished for a woman, someone to sleep with. It seemed an easy enough wish, yet even then I imagined disease, mass murder, robbery, all the easy disasters. Nothing happened for awhile, and we drank more, and awhile later it was turning into the usual drunk evening. We struck up conversation with friends and later Maureen came in. I’d been home with her a few times before, after nights just like this, and we’d gone out to movies or dinner or whatever in the days after but it never went anywhere. I wasn’t too interested in her but there wasn’t much else on my horizon.

In the morning the regret I felt was for the future, for that moment in the next few days when I’d cut it off again with Maureen, and all the uncomfortable days between while I held the knowledge but no way to act without causing pain. The easy path, asking only for patient hope or happy disaster. One might well say this is the way I go through the world, if one were to be charitable. If not, cowardice comes to mind.

I sort of forgot about the stone after that, thinking I never really believed in it to begin with. Then Keith got serious about Brenda, and then I did too, and even though we’d become tight friends, it got hard, so when my mother called and I could hear in her voice the fear I went back home. As I was packing I found the stone in a drawer in the nightstand and took it back up, thinking, what if, what if, but I couldn’t bring myself to wish on it there and then, again, just sort of forgot about it. The thing was, I’d wished for a bit of money, an end to the grind, some kind of small fortune. Had I held the stone as I wished? Maybe. Probably. But isn’t that what everyone wishes for?

And then, of course, I got home and heard in sentences what I’d felt in my mother’s voice.

It’s not like you ever know yourself. That would be a wish, I think, to know oneself. But it staggers the mind, the potential for harm there. Lord knows I’d had time to think about wishes the last few years, driving around spending my inheritance. Staying in hotels, drifting here and there on whims. A lot of driving. There might be guys like me all over the country, drifting here and there with our little stones. Who knows.

The thing is, I’m a coward. Too afraid to even wish for courage. So, speaking of courage: Not too long after my mother died, Keith picked up a job at a whitewater rafting outfit in West Virginia. He’d called to tell me, still had a box or two of my stuff, wondered what he should do with it. I drove out to the river, just for awhile, and camped, and Keith said, ’Hey, you should do it. The river. It’s fun.” Brenda was working there too, at the front taking tickets and handling the register.

The next day, they ran us through a quick session before we headed out into the misty morning, everything redolent of mold and sweat and moss and river. The bulky woolen safety vests, the chipped plastic helmets, all of it like suiting up in relic.

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. Actually, I was kind of petrified. Had I brought the stone, I’d have wished for safety, irrational as it was.

Rivers are strange things. You can float along and know that something is coming, some great adventure is around THAT bend, by the noise of it, the quickening speed of water. The bend is turned and the river goes white before you, churning over, misting up, and then it’s a rush forward into the maelstrom.

The guide yells directions.

Then the raft, which is tearing down a canyon of roaring water, straight ahead and on-course, pulls sideways as if on a cable, slams into a boulder, and you’re in the water.

That’s when your friend or the guide grabs the back of your life jacket and hauls you on the boat, and everyone you just met thirty minutes ago is slapping your back and cheering your little adventure.

Exhilarating, terrifying. I had no desire to do it again, ever, but the pressure was there, the looks on everyone’s face that this is FUN. Down that river in the mountains. I camped for 3 or 4 more nights, in a not-quite-too-small tent I’d crawl into after a night at their local bar/restaurant, hanging back of all the chest thumping. They had something I wanted, of course, a bonded companionship, but it was built on the terror of the river, so I signed up again.

This time I went over and was in the water, under the water. My helmeted head cracked against something hard, one exposed cheek forced by the paw of the current into a long slide against rock. I was flailing for some kind of purchase, hugging nothing but current, half upside down as the life vest and river wrestled each other for possession of my chest. The current was winning, willing as it was to beat me senseless in the fight. For a moment I was up on the surface, glasses gone, oar gone, and every moment I needed for recovery – to breathe, to cough, to catch sight of the raft, to get my head out of the water, to haul and kick my way out of the great white roar of current – every moment, time itself, was clenched by the river into too small a space and I was again helplessly battered.

Perhaps I heard people shouting. Perhaps I shouted myself; that may have been why or how I took another lungful of river.

I thought I was going to die. I knew I was going to die. What had I asked for, earlier? What had I wished for? Purpose? I was afraid to ask for money. I was afraid to ask for anything, to wish for anything because there’s always a curse. Isn’t that the story’s secret? That every wish has a curse, every action a reaction? Every front has a back. I’d tried for something nebulous, clean – good purpose – and here I was nearly drowning. Stay alive, that was my purpose, my sole purpose.

It sucked.

Wishing is an act of faith and an act of imagination. My faith was suspicious, my imagination all too capable of conjuring up scenarios of worst possible outcome. Breathe and cough, that was all I wanted then, but there was no stone, just the boulders I kept slamming into. Eventually I managed to right myself, grab hold of something - it’s all still a blur - and then get hauled back up into the raft.

After, in the evening, I hung back. Every so often one of the guides would come over and slap me on the back, a hearty camaraderie I didn’t feel. I left soon after, packed up, grabbed the boxes from Keith, making excuses, went back home to finishing closing my mother’s estate.

And then, some years later I was in that part of the country again, idling along some back roads, going nowhere, coming from nowhere, what I’d been doing for some time since my mother died and left me the money. The road was one of those blacktop affairs, tracking an etch in the hills just above a mountain river, one of those old roads that seem to have been around for hundreds of years, passing through towns that seem hundreds of years old, in which live families that have been there for hundreds of years. Up on one side of the river, glanced here and there in switchbacks and through gaps in the pines, was a country store and restaurant.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot, thinking to get a late lunch, and there, dappled under an intermittently cloudy Georgia day, half shaded by pine and hill, was Keith’s yellow Charger. The same bands still bumper-stickered the trunk, the same taillight was still cracked. Instinctively, I put my hand in my pocket and thumbed the wishstone, mind silent as one can try to be in such times. I parked next to Keith’s car. What did it take then to stop and go in? Silence, I think, a certain timid silence.

Above the door there was a bell. To the left the place opened into a bright red-boothed truck-stop style café sharing space with a few aisles of convenience fare, engine oil and salted peanuts and free used car magazines. To the right was a dimly lit, cedar paneled bar, all dark, beery shadow. There was a pool table, a few signs for beers no longer produced, the same red vinyl booths.

Keith was in one, his back to me, head down.

Brenda sat before him, looking pained. She glanced up when the door dinged and spent a long, emotionless time staring at me.

I managed a smile and without much fanfare she leaned forward to Keith for a second, said something to him, then rose and came out past the pool table. Keith never glanced back.

“I told him I was getting another drink,” Brenda said.

“You look good,” I told her. There was a jukebox playing Greenday at bar levels. Nobody was tending the bar and I followed Brenda out to the other side of the restaurant.

“How’d you find us?” Brenda asked. I hadn’t spoken more than the three words.

“I wasn’t looking,” I said.

She went up to the counter with an easy familiarity. Out of the bar it was bright from long windows opening onto the parking lot. Below, down a mere thirty or forty feet of pine-treed slope, was the river, fast and white. A few of the restaurant’s booths were filled. The waitress handed Brenda two bottles of unprompted Bud, then eyebrowed me. I nodded and she came back with another.

Brenda took us over to a booth at the window. A tray with ketchup and salt and pepper and several local hot sauces sat on the table and Brenda, with typical fastidiousness, moved it.

“He asks about you,” she said.

I didn’t know how to respond. She’d taken on a strange Georgia sleekness, a slight accent. All the more lovely. That was the curse, of course, with Keith’s girl, that I would love her. When my mom had died I’d stayed at home after the funeral. There wasn’t much for me anywhere else, and her death required a certain amount of estate work. Back at Keith’s place Brenda was spending more and more time in the apartment, hanging out as friends do, and this thought was building in me, taking more space every day, this thought, ‘I like her.’ Keith did too, and they’d retire in the evenings or the afternoons, to his room and it was more than I could stand. We make wishes all the time, but in retrospect it’s hard to pin down precisely what was wished or where one’s hands might have been. I’d never asked to love her; it happened because she was smart and funny and beautiful, and who wouldn’t love her? Keith loved her too and it seemed she felt the same about him.

“So what are you up to, out here?” I finally managed.

“He’s doing whitewater rafting tours, on the river.” Brenda said. “I waitress here in the morning.”

“He asks about me?” I said. “Why?”

“You’re his friend,” she said, like I’d missed the obvious. “You’re his best friend.” She looked at her hands, then out the window. “When he’s jealous he thinks I miss you too.”

“Still jealous,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

She didn’t laugh and I could see in all its wordless clarity just how complicated and miserable the whole situation was.

I wished then. I wished with a terrible heaviness, a deep, regretful, aimless, genuine sadness. I palmed the stone in my pocket and wished for Keith to find some happiness. In the wish was a jumble of fluttery requests, all stumbles and half sentences and fear - an end to his alcoholism, a happy Brenda, a purpose, friends, direction, a clue, no anger - none of it fully realized. And in there too, Brenda to be mine.

Brenda turned her head in a manner suggesting time had slowed. I admired for a moment the fine glide of her neck, the soft indentation at her throat, a dewy cast of tan and translucently visible hair at her shoulder.

“Oh,” she said, and I too turned.

Keith was making his way down the slope, his momentum taking him from tree trunk to tree trunk, barely in control. We lost him for a moment in the shadows, then glimpsed him at the trees’ edge. Then a truck pulled past the window and when it was gone there was only a flash of his shirt in the water.

Of course, what else could I do? I went into the water after him.