David Guterson - The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind: Stories

The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind is superb, tough, intense, wise, with characters meticulously rendered. I really cannot imagine a more affecting first collection.

Mary Robison

David Guterson is my great hope for the future of American fiction. Here at last is an antidote for the pretense and fashionable angst in Brat Pack fiction of the 1980s.

Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage

A seamless flow of language and story rewards the readers efforts. Well crafted and polished these tales tender truth.

Seattle Weekly

Set mostly in the clean outdoors of the Northwest, in a world in which hunting and fishing and sports are among lifes givens, the stories contrast this outward robust confidence with the inner doubts and disillusionments that are, in Gutersons reckoning, what little boys, and big ones, too, are made of. The pieces are well-crafted, the characters taking shape with a few simple brush strokes.

Boston Globe

A first collection of ten storiesstark, moody portraits of men or boys faced with lossthat are tautly written, austere, occasionally lyrical, and mark Guterson as a writer to watch.

Kirkus Reviews

These are wonderful, compassionate memory pieces told with a fine sense of detail, and without a whiff of sentimentality, whose revelations unfold quietly and inevitably.

Booklist

also by David Guterso

Snow Falling on Cedars

East of the Mountains

Our Lady of the Forest

David Guterson is the author of the novels Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains, and of the story collection The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind. His forthcoming novel, Our Lady of the Forest, will be published in October of 2003. A Guggenheim fellow and PEN/Faulkner Award winner, he lives in Washington State.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1996

Copyright 1989 by David Guterson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1989.

The following stories have been previously published: Opening Day in Sports Illustrated under the title When the Hunt is Done; Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada in Washington Magazine; Three Hunters in The Iowa Review; American Elm in The Seattle Review; and The Flower Garden in Prairie Schooner.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guterson, David.
The country ahead of us, the country behind : stories / by
David Guterson. 1st Vintage contemporaries ed.
p. cm. (Vintage contemporaries)
eISBN: 978-0-307-78909-9
1. Northwest, PacificSocial life and customsFiction.
I. Title.
[PS3557.U846C48 1995]
813.54dc20 95-34665

v3.1

for Robin, Taylor, Travis and Henry

W e were at my sisters house for Christmas Eve, fire in the fireplace, lights on the tree, Christmas carols playing on the stereo. Outside the window a light snow blew down. Icicles hung from the gutters and in the yard the grass looked sprinkled with powder. By morning everything would be white.

My sister had sent her children to bed and her husband, Larry, was pouring out four glasses of champagne.

Long life and happiness, he said, Merry Christmas, everyone.

All this was less than a year ago.

Cora, myself, Larry, my sister: we sat around talking about normal things at first. Jobs, cars, houses, childrenI dont remember exactly: pleasant conversation. But then Larry said, because my sister asked, Christmas on Okinawa? Do you want to know what we did? We got drunk and went to sleep. We passed out. That was Christmas Eve. Christmas Day we ate ham. We took aspirins. We called home. Somebody at the other end yelled Merry Christmas! at you. When the echo faded you yelled Merry Christmas! back. You hung up and then you were on Okinawa again, it was Thursday and everyone you knew had a hangover.

Sounds great, my sister said, and kissed his chin. What about the Japanese hookers?

Larry sipped at his champagne and smiled. He was a big man in his early thirties, hands thick but not ungraceful, a good growth of hair on his head. My sister had a way of knocking him, of making him out to be stupid, but Larry took it all as a joke, as harmless, as her way of loving him after all.

Larry said, Hey. Why not? A whore was like giving yourself a Christmas present.

We laughed at that, and in the silence that followed my wife asked me if I had ever slept with a prostitute.

I told them how we had gone to Las Vegas, I told them the whole story that Christmas Eve. My sister remembereda family vacation, Memorial Day weekend. My fatherd had an insurance convention.

Sweet sixteen and three days in Sin City, Larry suggested, smiling. But thats not how it was, I said. Thats not it at all. Well, how was it then? Cora wanted to know. So I told the three of them the whole thing, a mistake.

We went down there, I said. We got two motel rooms at the end of the Strip, at the edge of town, after the swimming pool there was only the desert, scrub brush and barbed wire fences. It was a quiet place, hot and dusty, air conditioned, cigarette and pop machines in all the landings. A maid came at ten oclock and cleaned your room.

My parents went to floor shows, meetings, casinos, maybe department stores, anyway they were never around. They left us hamburger money, telephone numbers. What did they expect? What were they thinking? My sister smeared herself with suntan oil and slept by the swimming pool all day. I swam laps. I was going to be in good shape forever. The other guests lolled around while I swam furiously the backstroke and breaststroke. In the room I did sit-ups in front of the air conditioner. I looked at my muscles in the mirror. I had this Playboy magazine at the bottom of my suitcase. In it were photographs of Raquel Welch. Raquel in sequins. Raquel in the shower. Raquel on the beach in Mexico.

Raquel Welch, I said to them last Christmas Eve. Was that some kind of mistake maybe? Was there something wrong in that? It must have been Playboy, I said to them. I dont remember clearly.

He still reads that stuff, said Cora. Not really, I insisted. Maybe once in a while. Oh, come on, John, said Cora. Wherere we going? I said.

You guys arent going anywhere, said my sister. Not at this rate you arent.

Not on Christmas, anyway, I said. Tonight is Christmas Eve.

Thats the spirit, said Larry. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men and champagne.

He filled my glass, grinning, amused. O Little Town of Bethlehem played on the stereo.

Goodwill toward some men, anyway, said Cora. Goodwill is a two-way street.

Christ, I said. Shut up.

Dont tell her to shut up, said my sister. That just makes everything worse.