“No. But I don’t want you calling your mother names. Not to her face, and not behind her back.” “Bitch.”
“Do you hear me?”
Toby mutters something else.
“I mean it, son.”
Toby stands. “Bitch!” he shouts.
“If you call her that one more time — ”
“How do you know I’m talking to her?”
“All right, is it me you’re upset with?”
Toby sits.
“Is that it?”
He props his elbows on the table. “I’m not upset,” he says. “And I’ll do whatever I want.”
“You’ll do your homework.”
“If I feel like it.”
“You’ll feel like it,” Adams warns him, “after dinner.”
“We’re doing geography,” Toby says. “It sucks. All those stupid maps.”
“Your feelings toward me have been noted. But you’re still going to have to do your homework.”
Toby pushes himself away from the table. “I’ll do whatever I want.”
“Go to your room,” Pamela tells him. “And stay there.”
Toby leaves the kitchen.
Pamela smooths the tablecloth in front of her. “I don’t know what to do with him. I’ve talked to a couple of doctors.”
“He doesn’t need to see a doctor. For God’s sake, Pam, we just split up. It’s bound to be confusing — ”
“Poor man, he’s become so boring boring boring.”
“It needs to be discussed. You’re like Fort Knox these days. I never see you, never hear from you.”
“If it’s the money — ”
“To hell with the money.”
“I can’t deal with him, Sam. Last week he sat here throwing lighted matches at me.”
“Lighted matches?”
“Let me try a doctor.”
“All right,” Adams concedes. “But on a trial basis. I want to know how he’s coming, and if there are no good signs within a month, we do something else.”
“Okay.”
“Your family’s always been quick to push the panic button.”
“If you mean my father — ”
“That’s right. He’d have Toby in juvenile court. It’s a wonder he hasn’t locked Otto up.”
“He should be. He’s a drunk.”
“He’s not as bad as Jurgen thinks.”
Pamela folds her arms. “He has too good a time.”
Adams knocks on Toby’s door. “Come in.”
Toby jounces on the side of the bed. Once. Twice. His shoulders drop, he slumps and places his elbows on his knees.
“What is it,” Adams asks. He sits on Toby’s American Bicentennial desk with the bald eagle decoupaged on top. The desk was a gift from Otto one Christmas — he had taken a sudden shine to the children.
Above the desk, a poster of a woman in a leopard-skin bikini, gazing provocatively from the crotch of a tree. She is famous, though Adams can’t recall her name, acts in a television series and does commercials for a popular soft drink.
Toby’s room is clean, almost empty.
“What’s bothering you, Toby?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
Toby jounces on the bed.
“Things have been pretty rough.”
“I’ll say.”
“Let’s talk about it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Would you rather talk to your mother?”
“No.”
“Why are you giving her such a hard time?”
“I’m not.”
“She said you threw matches at her.”
Toby doesn’t answer.
“It hasn’t been easy on her, either, you know.”
“I know.”
“Well then, why don’t you give her a break?”
“She’s always busy.”
“She’s very talented.”
“Does she hate you?”
Adams stands, smooths his pants. “No.”
Toby jounces higher. “When you’re married and you like each other, you fuck a lot, right?”
“Are you trying to shock me with your language, is that what you’re trying to do?” He feels the leopard woman’s eyes on him as he moves around the room. “Because if that’s what you’re trying to do, it won’t work.”
“Don’t be an igno, Dad.” Toby stops jouncing. “Everybody says it. But Mrs. Sorge, the principal, heard me and now I’ve got detention for a week.”
“For saying — ”
“Fuck.”
“That’s all?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“We were on the playground.”
“And?”
“I peed on a girl’s shoes.”
Adams resists an impulse to laugh. “You must like her a lot.”
“Yeah.” For a second Toby smiles, then his face hardens. “Mom wants to ground me.”
“I think you deserve it, Toby.”
“She can’t stop me from doing what I want.”
“She can take your money away from you and make you sit in your room.”
“No she can’t.”
Adams believes him.
“She doesn’t care what happens to me.”
“You know that’s not true, Toby.”
“And she hates you. I can tell.”
Maybe I should wrap a steel tube around his neck, pin him to a tree with wooden pegs.
When Toby was six he joined the Indian Y-Guides, a father-son organization sponsored by the YMCA. Adams went to meetings, wore a silly headband and feather, helped Toby make bulletin boards, letter holders, hot pads. (The leader of the “tribe,” a retired fireman, nixed Adams’ suggestion that they all make tom-toms — “too damn noisy.”) In early Decern-ber the Y-Guides took a bus to an abandoned state park, now overrun with weeds. The nights were cold, Toby cried, peed in his sleeping bag, lost both his shoes. He was never, after that weekend on the plains, a “joiner.” Refused the Cub Scouts, church groups (shook Jurgen mightily), Little League. They would never explore together, father and son.
He mixes a Scotch, presses the suit he will wear tomorrow morning, removes the Ixodes from his pocket and places it on the nightstand next to his wallet. He sits in the dark, eating the ice, recalling happier days.
Alaska. He had joined a geological survey, exploring uninhabited regions in northern Birkin County. They had flown in by Piper Cub and landed, late at night, on a dirt road between water and ice. On the plane a graduate student from the University of Oklahoma, who’d done fieldwork the previous summer, suggested that each member of the survey take sulfur pills. “If you sweat sulfur, the insects’ll leave you alone,” he said, and passed around a Dopp Kit full of tablets. In the mountains the mosquitoes were big as birds, and more colorful.
Grizzly bears also posed a problem, especially in wooded areas where the snow was beginning to melt. To warn the bears of their approach the geologists draped cowbells around their equipment. One young man played Bob Dylan (badly) on the harmonica.
Hunters from Seattle and San Francisco shot caribou from helicopters at night. Adams couldn’t see the sport in this but tried it one night, unsuccessfully, to see what it was like.
He was young. Just married. Endless vistas.
In 1978, when the focus had narrowed for him and he was very much a married man, seismologists began to question existing plans of the Izu Trench and the Okhotsk Abyssal Plain. The Plain, they felt, was perhaps twice as deep as previous calculations had indicated. In Tokyo, on his last assignment abroad, Adams met the Japanese cartographers who would accompany him to the coast. At a sushi dinner the day before they left, a man named Onu spoke of a recent survey he’d done at the foot of Mount Fuji. The survey had been interrupted by a manhunt in the foothills. A twenty-one-year-old Tokyo woman, who had recently broken her engagement to a young banker, was missing. A week later, police turned up not only her body but the badly decomposed bodies of six others, four male, two female. “Fuji has come to be known as Suicide Mountain,” Onu said. The 6,250-acre Aokigahara woodland at Fuji was, Adams learned, the most popular spot for self-destruction in all of Japan. Annually, thirty to sixty people — businessmen, usually, or pregnant women disowned by their families — made a suicide pilgrimage to Fuji. “The forest is one of the most picturesque in Asia,” Onu continued. “It has a sacred, gloomy aspect, and most of these people simply wander into the woods, lose themselves in the foliage, and starve. Their skeletons are often found under leaves.” As he spoke he fingered prawns and gracefully scooped slivers of tuna into his mouth.