Chapter One
Into the Wild
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone in the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
Brendan closes his eyes, hugs his worn copy of Into the Wild, the book he loves better than any other. He opens it again, stares at the haunting self-portrait of Christopher McCandless, the handsome and enigmatic young man who had renamed himself Alexander Supertramp before he abandoned society and wandered alone into the Alaskan wilderness. How Brendan fell in love with him during the first breathless read, convinced that if only he had known Alex Supertramp, he could have saved him, and together they'd live in their north woods cabin, surrounded by books.
There are works like Into the Wild that Brendan revisits regularly, and while, like sex, the first time is usually the most memorable, the second and third and fourth times bring pleasures all their own. When he reads a story, it's like osmosis; he absorbs it at the cellular level. It lets him spend time in places he's never been, and with characters whose company he prefers to the crazy man who takes the seat next to him on the bus, loudly muttering obscenities.
Books open up new worlds. That's why when he visits his brother Ian he always brings him at least one book as a gift. It's the only little piece of freedom Brendan can offer him; Ian's been in jail for several years now. In fact, for most of the time Brendan has known him, Ian's been an inmate at Rush City, a men's correctional facility north of the Twin Cities.
Brendan thinks that his own life is a lot like the books he reads; he has two or three different stories in progress at any given time. Ian's wife wonders how Brendan manages to switch from one book to the next and then to the next one after that, only to return to the first. She has a hard enough time keeping the characters straight in the romance novels that she reads like recipe cards.
Brendan's particularly excited by the book he'll present Ian today. Unlike the weathered copy of Into the Wild, which sits on his lap, the book he will give Ian is brand-new and safely stowed in the backpack. The backpack itself sits snugly next to Brendan as the bus to Rush City begins its journey.
The bus is a service of a nonprofit organization in the Twin Cities that provides families of inmates with free transportation to Rush City each week. Wives and girlfriends and sons and daughters catch the bus downtown, and it takes them all the way out to the prison for visiting hours and then brings them back to Minneapolis. It's much nicer than the regular city buses: there's a bathroom on board and the seats are upholstered. It's mostly full of women and children, and there's even a storybook for kids to read during the trip called Visiting the Big House. In honor of the season, the bus driver has given each child a candy cane. Some slurp theirs noisily while others hoard, stealing and bartering more.
There's a woman on the bus with three children. She's Asian, perhaps Hmong or Laotian, and what catches Brendan's attention is the fact that she's embarrassed by her children's behavior. Compared to the other boys and girls on the bus, hers are relatively compliant, but that's not good enough for her. Brendan feels sorry for her, surrounded by white and black and Mexican and Indian and other Asian women and children who've taken this trip a hundred times or more. He can tell this is her maiden voyage. As he studies her--her stiff posture on constant alert, like a sentry at his post--he understands that she wishes she were somewhere else, anywhere but here, on this bus.
One of her boys runs over to Brendan's seat. This he's used to. Brendan's often the only adult male on the bus, and the boys, no matter what color they are, all wind up next to him, wanting to roughhouse or talk or pretend that he's their father. The stray smiles at him and says, "Who you gonna see?"
The boy's mother whispers violently at him in her native language, but the boy doesn't seem to be bothered. Brendan tells him, "I'm going to visit my brother."
The boy climbs up on the seat next to Brendan, a minor feat for one so small, and says, "My daddy killed a communist."
Brendan looks at him, skeptically. "Really?"
The boy, whose little legs don't even reach the edge of the bench, pulls his socks up over his rubber boots. "Yes. He knew him from seminar camp. He tried to make my daddy pasason."
"What does pasason mean?"
The boy laughs, like Brendan had asked what color the sky is. The boy says, "People."
Before he can say anything else, the boy's mother arrives, and with one eye still trained on her other two, who sit obediently in their seats, she sweeps him up in her arms. As she carries him back to their little post near the front of the bus, the boy knows that she's furious with him, but he smiles at Brendan anyway, thrilled to have talked to a grown-up man.
Soon the bus stops next to the visitors' entrance, which is outfitted with a large evergreen wreath. Passengers gather up their layers: sweaters, coats, overcoats, scarves, hats, and gloves. It's ten degrees outside and Brendan's reminded of a book he read as a boy, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His seventh-grade class saw the movie version after they read the novel, which chronicled twenty-four hours in the life of a Russian prisoner interned at a Siberian work camp. They were having a particularly brutal winter themselves that year, so a few of Brendan's classmates failed to understand what all the fuss was about.
After the metal detection and the pat-down he's granted admission to the visiting room where Ian sits, waiting for him. Ian is Brendan's older brother by five years, which places him squarely at forty, an age that doesn't suit him particularly well. Still, he's attractive for his age.
Brendan puts his backpack--his x-rayed and thoroughly searched backpack--on the table and unzips a flap. "I've got a couple of presents for you. A pack of Camels to begin with, and a book."
Ian reaches for the cigarettes and sighs. "You always bring me a book. You know I can't read anymore, it gives me a headache. Are you trying to kill me?"
"You should give this one a try." Brendan has gotten him what's called a graphic novel, in other words, a really long comic book.
Ian squints at the cover. "What's that?"
Brendan passes it to him. "It's a collected set of comic-book stories bound in a single volume."
Ian laughs. "Batman?"
Brendan nods.
Another sigh. "Let's have a look, then."
Ian flips through the pages, his eyebrows arching at the violence or at Catwoman's breasts, each one as large as her head.
Brendan smiles. "You like it?"
Ian's eyes never leave the book. "You finally picked a winner . . ." He calls Brendan by the name given him by their parents. Brendan gently corrects him, reminds him yet again of the name that he has chosen for himself: Brendan Wolf. The renaming was inspired by Christopher McCandless, the hero of Into the Wild, who changed his own. Brendan Wolf is not Brendan's legal name, but his name in every other way. He thinks his name's intriguing. The Wolf adds a bit of The Call of the Wild (Jack London having been one of Alexander Supertramp's favorite writers). And Brendan is an old name making a comeback. To him it means charting one's own course into the new, the unexplored, just as the Irishman called Saint Brendan the Navigator did when he took his small crew across the unknown horizon to North America. Choosing that first name was also his much-delayed act of childhood rebellion; his father had emigrated from England and couldn't abide the Irish.
Brendan says, "I'm glad you like the book."
Ian stares at a page and asks, "Do you think Catwoman would be a tight fuck or what?"
Most people would be offended by Ian's question, and in some ways Brendan is most people, but of course in other, more fundamental ways, he's not. "I'd prefer Batman."
"You can still imagine sex with a woman, though, can't you?"
Brendan gives him the look their mother used to, the amused warning.
Ian laughs softly, says, "How's work?"
"Fine," Brendan says.
"Still at Wal-Mart?"
Brendan looks at the floor. "I got a new job at--"
"Jesus Christ, Brendan! Another new job?"
"It's a better one, I think . . ."
Ian shakes his head sadly as he asks, "Still living in da hood, then?"
"It's not so bad."
"It's dangerous. Half the guys in here grew up there." Ian slips him a torn piece of paper with a name and a phone number on it. Ian says, "There's this new kid, Frankie Thompson, just in. Remember that name: Frankie Thompson. Before he ended up here, he had a very tidy arrangement with some rich old man. I'm doing him and he tells me that his old man's lonely. So it occurred to me that if you introduced yourself to the old man as a friend of Frankie's, perhaps you could come to some sort of agreement. You know, move in with the gu...
