Once a month my uncle mails me a salami. The same all-beef Hebrew National Hard Salami that his father mailed him when he was in basic training in Indiana, a Jewish kid from the Bronx lost in the corn out there, the locals fondling his forehead searching for horns. A kid about to be shipped off to get lost in the even more alien jungles of Vietnam. But he always said he appreciated the salamis. A taste of home. I don’t care for them much myself and I’m not in the Midwest or about to go to war, but my uncle sends them all the same.
My roommate Dozer is just as mystified by the meat as those draftees in the sixties must have been. He’s from upstate New York. Around Plattsburgh. I’m on his turf now. We’re two sides of the strange coin that is Paul Smith’s College nestled on Upper St. Regis Lake: one half hospitality and culinary school, full of city and suburb kids from the northeast, from Philadelphia, Hartford and Long Island, looking to learn how to manage maids or julienne carrots; and the other half local bumpkins from the surrounding Adirondacks or the neighboring mountains of Vermont or New Hampshire, studying forestry and tree management. Growing up outside of Philly, it’s a trade I’d never heard of. I’ve almost finished my first semester and I still don’t know what it is, other than chunky dudes in camo caps throwing axes in the woods or climbing towering pines with massive cleats, their metal teeth leaving a trail of scored bark. And cases and cases of Genesee beer. Somehow this constitutes “forestry.”
“Got another Jew log in the mail?” Dozer asked me a few days ago when I walked in with my latest salami. He was lying in his bed, drinking Genny and watching his favorite movie, Predator, on the small tube tv on his dresser at the end of the bed.
“Want a slice?” I don’t like the salami myself so I’m always happy to share. And sometimes the smell of it overpowers the stink Dozer’s built up around him, the stink of himself, the stink of a self.
“Why don’t he ever send you fish, your uncle?” He said, spitting his Skoal into a water bottle in his lap. I can tell how long he’s been in bed by how full it is. Three hours that day, by the look of it.
“I don’t know. It won’t keep, I guess.”
“But I thought Jews were always eating smoked fish? Salmon with cream cheese and shit.”
I don’t like smoked fish myself. The oiliness, the way it coats your fingers, your face, skeeves me out. But I did go fishing with my uncle as a kid. Not that we ever caught much. What I remember most is the motels we stayed at. Little motor courts on the Jersey shore or up in Quincy, on the part of Massachusetts that hooks into the sea. My uncle had a thing for Xena the Warrior Princess. We’d sit on the motel beds with their stiff sheets and scratchy blankets, the a/c coughing along, and watch Xena do backflips over her enemies, clucking her tongue like a murderous turkey.
I put the salami on my dresser. The oak veneer is a good cutting board. It’s soft and doesn’t dull the blade. I sliced it thin for Dozer, trying to save enough to keep him sated until the next salami installment in January. Scheherazade had her stories. I’ve got cured meat.
“I’m just saying if your uncle’s taking orders, I wouldn’t mind some Jewish salmon to go with the Jewish salami. A full feast,” he said, taking a slice of salami off the paper plate. They’re holiday plates he bought at the dollar store in Saranac Lake. Cheap, waxy paper covered in blue snowflakes. He took a bite. “I fucking love this stuff. Maybe I’ll convert.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” I said.
“All right, Rabbi. How’s it work, then?”
I didn’t answer because I don’t know. I’ve never met a Rabbi. I closed my eyes and listened to Dozer chew and say the lines along with the soldiers as the Predator stalks them. There aren’t a lot of lines in the movie so in the long silences it was just Dozer, his breathing, his spitting, his slurping beer, and the sounds of bullets tearing through a tropical jungle.
“Over here,” the Predator said, playing a recording of the man he’s just killed to lure or taunt his next victim.
“Over here,” Dozer repeated to himself in a reverent whisper.
Here I am, I thought, sinking into a mushy mattress in a single bed in a dorm in the ice-coated Adirondacks. Where am I?
I don’t know exactly what made me want to be a chef but it may have been Jacques Pepin, all those hours I spent watching him masterfully chop and dice and slice, while he waxed poetic about potatoes or mussels, and sipped wines with pretty names like Beaujolais or Bordeaux. His whole world seemed ordered, cozy and warm. I’d sit for hours on my uncle’s couch and pretend my hands were his. My hands were dumping the gnocchi in the boiling water. My hands were sliding the shallots into the butter in the skillet. Me and Jacques.
I think my uncle was worried I was gay. It was bad enough for him, having his nephew foisted off on him after his brother and sister-in-law died. Worse still if I was gay. Not that my uncle is bigoted or anything. It just would have been a bridge too far for him. His resources were already overextended, if that makes sense. The supply lines plenty stretched.
But once I started cooking for him, breaking out all those hours of cooking with Jacques I’d absorbed, my uncle didn’t seem to mind. He even encouraged me. So, when I graduated high school he offered to help me cover my college fees. I looked at a few culinary schools, one in Florida, one in Rhode Island, but I settled on Paul Smith’s because we used to come up here, my parents and me, when I was little. Camp on Rollins Pond. Hike around the High Peaks. Drive around Lake Placid and poke through the antique shops there. I’m definitely not the most outdoorsy person, but it felt right, coming up here. Felt like my parents would have approved.
And then, Dozer. I moved in at the end of August and my roommate was Dozer. Roommate maybe isn’t the right word. It’s his room, I live in it. It’s like I’m subletting the bed from some better, cooler, manlier roommate that just moved out, temporarily, and Dozer’s letting me keep it warm for him until he gets back. I’ve spent the last three months taking the required courses, the basic general education baloney like Effective College Writing, plus Cooking Fundamentals and Baking: An Introduction. The baking was my favorite. There’s nothing more hopeful, more heart-warming than watching the yeast work as the dough rises. But of course, you’ve got to punch it down sometimes.
Now, it’s December and I don’t know if I still want to study anything, let alone culinary arts, let alone at Paul Smith’s. Though I certainly don’t want to go back to sleeping on my uncle’s couch in Germantown. That much I know. But another semester of Dozer, of the Predator, of freezing my ass off in negative forty-degree weather as I hurry from class to dorm to class again? I don’t know.
Dozer’s not all bad. He takes me out sometimes. Snowshoeing or cross-country skiing with his forestry buds, thick young men in thick coats sporting thin goatees. You can follow their trail through the woods not so much from the tracks the skis leave behind as from the empty beer cans and specks of Skoal spit that dot the trail like wet scat. One time he invited me to throw axes with his friends on the ax throwing team. There aren’t a lot of extracurriculars up here, so the students get creative. There’s a basketball team with city kids from Philly who lose to teams in Burlington every year and, in the spring, a very active mycology group that I’m considering joining. I don’t like mushrooms much. They’re too close to mold. But I think it’ll be nice to have someone besides Dozer to walk the woods with.
Anyway, the way the axes flew from the camo-clad men looked martial to me. A montage of Vikings in training or an outtake from Red Dawn. In a clearing behind the upper parking lot they threw double bit axes at stumps and hatchets at wooden boards painted as targets. This was in October and the leaves were changing, winter rearing up, but it was still warm enough for me to bring a cheese and salami platter out along with a thermos full of hot cider. Dozer had to make jokes, of course, about the Jew log and his roommate/housewife, but that didn’t stop anyone from eating the platter clean.
Dozer won second place in the informal competition. I congratulated him. He did look beautiful out there, the way the ax flew from his hands.
“Matt’s more accurate,” he said. “I won’t argue that. But when push comes to shove, I’d win in a real contest.”
“This wasn’t real?”
“I mean on the battlefield. Because I’ve got more endurance. I could hurl an ax all day. Could single-handedly decapitate a whole platoon.”
“You going to battle?” I asked. I wasn’t being snide. I wanted to know if I should keep my head down in the coming war.
“Ok, wiseass, make yourself useful and go back to the room and come back with more log and more beers.”
“That’s pretty much the last the salami, Dozer.”
“Then you better call your uncle and place another order,” he said, spitting his blackberry Skoal onto the leaves at my feet. It looked like Worcestershire sauce.
Last week, Dozer let me tag along with him to Bobcat Hall up the hill. He’s got friends there and they were having a bonfire. We went together, me a few paces behind Dozer—he’s quick considering his weight—and in the parking lot, melting the snow around it, was a burning heap of old dorm furniture. A particle board dresser sprawled out across a plywood desk, both blackening.
A group of students were on the roof jumping into the snowbank pushed into the side of the building by plows. It looked hard, the snow. More crust than fluff.
“What do you say, chef? Want to take a dive?” Dozer asked.
“No. I think I might break my neck.”
“Would anyone miss you?”
I didn’t answer that one. I didn’t know.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to do one leap to get the blood flowing.”
I followed him into the dorm and up onto the roof. He took one look over the side, one quizzical glance, then stepped off like he was dropping into a backyard pool. The hooligans around the bonfire applauded. Two more people followed, and I was alone on the roof, breathing in the smoke from the wood and plastic and thinking about Xena leaping off moving horses and over demigods. I thought about my parents and sledding down our street when I was a kid and how they’d bring in fresh snow and serve it to me in a bowl in the kitchen with maple syrup on top. How sweet it was, the top layer. And how the rest just tasted like snow. Tasted like a cold nothing.
How high was I? Twenty feet? Thirty? How bad could it be? Who’d miss me?
I jumped off without looking down and the snow, hard packed from the previous jumpers, knocked the wind out of me. It felt like landing in half-frozen earth. I lay there awhile, a minute, an hour, waiting for applause, for Dozer. Waiting. When I stood, the fire was coals. The people, gone. I walked back to my room holding my ribs.
But I feel better now. Nothing is broken. And today Dozer’s invited me to go climb trees, the hundred-foot tall white pines adjacent to the woman’s bathroom. I’m not interested in perving out over women brushing their teeth or going to the toilet, but Dozer swears you can see into their showers, and, well, I need a friend.
He tells me to bring the Hebrew National.
“Don’t you mean Jew log?” I ask.
“I thought I’d be nice today. Since it’s Hanukah.”
I didn’t know it was. I’d never celebrated Hanukah except in middle school when another kid’s mother brought latkes to school and we had one cardboard menorah taped to the back closet of the class. I liked the latkes but couldn’t remember anything about the day, or days.
“It’s almost done,” I say.
“What? Who you been sharing with?”
“No one. You ate half of it yesterday when you were high.”
“Well, bring the other half.”
“It’s more like a quarter. A nub.”
“Come on, chef. Being out in the woods will put some hair on your chest,” he says, flicking my breastbone. “Meet you up there.”
“Where will you be?”
“In the trees,” he says, taking his snowshoes and tree-climbing cleats with him.
I watch him from our window as he crosses the lake, a thirty case of Genny on a little sled tied to his waist trailing behind him. I think the sled’s for hauling injured lumberjacks out of the woods but I’ve only ever seen it used for beer.
I cut up half of the salami and put it in a freezer bag under my coat, next to my chest so it won’t freeze solid on my walk across the lake to the trees. Even wrapped in a fleece balaclava, the cold rakes my face and my teeth where they meet my gums. But it’s only a half mile across this section of the lake and I step in Dozer’s footprints. I don’t have my own snowshoes—I thought about asking my uncle to quit sending salamis and get me a pair of snowshoes instead—but I borrowed a pair from the gear closet on campus. They’re plastic and make a loud crunch as I walk but they work. I sink only ten inches into the powder rather than postholing to my hips. The plastic bag crinkles against my chest but I like the sound of it, the familiarity in the otherwise alien landscape. Though I’m starting to see the beauty in it. Starting to see the fisher and snowshoe hare prints. To tell the difference between Scots pines and tamaracks. I’ve even adjusted to the cold. I could barely walk ten feet when it dipped into the teens a few weeks back. Now, subzero temps are tolerable. By the new year I’ll be like a local, traipsing around coatless even when it’s negative twenty. If I stay for another semester, that is.
I hit the tree line and continue towards the dorms. Dozer’s prints disappear. They meet with another three or four sets of snowshoes, his forestry bros, dissolving into one collective track. Their snowshoes are abandoned a few feet away, stuck in the snow.
“Hello,” I say. “Where are you guys? I brought the salami. Crackers and mustard too.”
“Over here,” a voice yells from the trees. But from such heights, it reaches me as a whisper.
“Where?”
“Over here,” it says again. It must be Dozer doing lines from Predator.
“Where’s here?” I yell back, my eyes straining against the white glare of the world. I clutch the salami to my chest. How am I supposed to know where here is? How does anyone?
Kent Kosack is a writer and MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. His work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Sonora Review, Tin House (Flash Fidelity), the Cincinnati Review (miCRo series), Columbia Journal, 45th Parallel and elsewhere. See more at his website: www.kentkosack.com