Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (20 page)

The day is cloudless, and the rays coming through the branches have a yellow tint. I breathe the air, imagine golden molecules traveling through my blood stream and filling my entire body. A moth floats over the ground and lights on my shoes. The wings, thin as chartreuse tissue, slowly open and close. The movement is mesmerizing, and I watch until the moth glides into the forest. Simone and I hold hands. In my past, I never held hands. I'm still changing, I guess.

“I was thinking about after,” I say. “What do you think about renting a house and moving in together?”

A squirrel jumps from branch to branch and dislodged leaves float confetti-like below the tree. My question drifts with them, suspended and unanswered.

*   *   *

When I was in prison and reading about hiking through the 100-Mile Wilderness, I expected one hundred miles of Maine forest, solitude, beaver ponds in the lowlands, stunning views on the mountains, a trail so beautiful it made my heart hurt. I did not expect gravel roads, chainsaws in the forest, logging trucks stirring up dust as they drive to pulp mills. Still, if it hadn't been for the gravel roads, Simone and I would never have met Charlie Evers, a southbounder who hiked in the mid-1990s.

He pulls up in a pickup and asks if we want to attend his annual trail festival, says it's a three-day party, and today is the second day, so we got lucky walking out of the woods when we did. Charlie's trail name is Ink Blot, and he has so many tattoos he's more ink than skin. He paints landscape scenes on old milk jugs and sells them in tourist shops along the coast, says he feels like he's selling out, would rather do something more avant-garde but no one buys his art. He has a mournful voice, like he lost something he'll never get back.

“My work is too dark,” he says. “These days people are afraid to look inside, too afraid of what they might find.”

Simone and I walk off to the side and hold a low conversation. Agree that putting off the end of our thru-hike a day or two won't matter one way or the other, so we climb into the pickup bed and travel through miles and miles of forest, to a white-sided
house set in a maple grove. Charlie parks on a driveway covered in leaves, walks us to a shaded rear yard, to where several thru-hikers mill around tables piled high with fruit and donuts. A drum set glitters atop a wooden stage. The hikers chatter about what they plan for the summit. One guy—his trail name is Loose Cannon—plans to write “The End” on his ass cheeks with a magic marker and have someone take a picture. Sweet Dreamer, a fine-boned woman who has a French accent, plans to kneel and give thanks to the goddesses who helped her along her journey.

Simone and I pitch under the branches of a yellow maple. The stakes sink easily into the soft earth. We veer toward the food, come across a hiker on the grass, a bottle next to his head. His long black braid, red beads intact, wraps around his throat like a boa constrictor.

Richard.

Drunk again.

*   *   *

Darkness descends, and the band takes the stage. There's a fiddler, a banjo player, a lead singer—a white guy who has a gravelly voice like Louis Armstrong—and a drummer with sleepy eyes and a tendency to wander from the beat. Richard weaves to the music. He holds a bottle, is too drunk to lift it to his lips.

Simone and I go inside the house, to Charlie's studio, which is a candle-lit room on the first floor. Our host paints faces—of himself. Simone and I start at the doorway and walk clockwise around the room, stop at paintings hung three feet apart.

“No wonder he can't sell his work,” I say, breathing in the smell of drying paint. “Who would buy this shit?”

Each painting has an exaggerated feature, an ear that looks
like it went through a meat grinder, an upper lip so thin and shriveled it reminds me of a dried-out green bean, a forehead so stretched out the effect is one of looking into a fun-house mirror. The portraits grow darker as we walk, the maimed body parts more exaggerated, until we come to a body-sized painting of a tattooed man that includes all that came before. Gouged eyes stare back at us, unseeing, unblinking, gore-like tears dripping down the distorted face.

Next to the door, a milk jug glows in the candlelight. A mountain landscape wraps the bottom half of the perimeter. Peaks and valleys, sun in a blue sky. Clouds suspend over the land.

Charlie walks in, head down, like he is uncomfortable watching people look at his work. Simone hugs his neck and whispers in his ear and he nods. They stay that way for at least a minute, like they are sharing a secret. Soon I'm the only motherfucker in the room who isn't crying. Charlie walks to the milk jug, crosses his tattooed arms, and stares downward. Simone stands beside him.

“It's very nice,” I finally say. “Superb craftsmanship.”

They look at me like that's the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard, then our host says he has to get back to his guests and abruptly walks out the door.

“What the hell was that all about?” I say.

Simone wipes her sleeve against her cheeks, and the tears dry up. “If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

“It's the first time I've ever seen anyone paint what's inside of me, Taz. It got to me, that's all.”

I stare at the paintings, the grotesqueness that leers at me from all directions, turn toward the window before I say something
stupid. I don't get art, never have, and those paintings mean nothing to me. Outside, the band plays a fast tune, fiddle sweeping the melody along. Richard has sobered up enough to start drinking, and he sits on the stage and sips from his bottle.

“You might be right about Richard,” I say.

“People stay the same. That's the irony of life.”

“I'm different,” I say. “I'm not the same guy that started down in Springer.”

Simone, in front of the full-sized portrait, studies me with such intensity I cannot turn away. Her gaze has a penetrating glare, like she can see who I was, who I am now, and who I will become.

“You only
think
you're different,” she says.

Her presumption pisses me off, and I can't keep the annoyance out of my voice. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

She walks out of the room, and through the window I watch hikers dance around Richard like he's a goddamn icon. The fiddler whips his bow across the strings, and the drummer's sticks slice the air. The lead singer growls his lyrics. Simone is right about Richard. He will die a drunk, but I am not Richard. I am Taz Chavis, and I choose dominion over my life. I am Taz Chavis, and I plan on living a good life after the trail.

Footsteps, Simone returning to apologize, but there is only an offered plate. At first I think she has brought me a peace offering, maybe a plate of ribs or a barbecue sandwich off the grill. I look closer and a claw grips my heart. In the center of the plate, a line of thin white powder beckons. I look at her face, study the smile that contorts her lips. I hate her for this and tell her so.

“No,” she says. “You only hate yourself.”

I take the plate, look closer, and twist my wrist. Powder drifts to the floor and settles around our feet.

“I don't know what that was,” I say. “But—”

“It was baking soda.”

“That's what I thought.”

“It doesn't matter,” she says. “I saw your face.”

The fiddler jumps around the stage, music exploding from his strings. The hikers writhe around someone, and I think it's Richard until legs separate and I get a good look at the tattooed face. Charlie kneels, hands outstretched, beckoning the dancers until they swallow him in their midst. Simone takes my hand, leads me outside, into our tent. She is right; I don't hate her. But she is also wrong; I don't hate myself. I move on top of her, enter her with more urgency than usual, and our rhythms merge and separate. She takes my face in her hands and brings her lips close to mine.

“I want a suicide pact,” she says. “You, me, and Richard.”

I tremble and know she can feel it.

“Whatever it is. . . .” I say.

She pushes me off her, curls her legs to her chest, and rocks in slow motion. I lie beside her, on my sleeping bag, listen to the party outside. Richard whoops and hollers, hikers clap in rhythm. I wonder if Simone is right, if our genes set us out on an unwavering trail, that we are who we are and no amount of walking will change a thing.

*   *   *

Seven days after beginning the 100-Mile Wilderness, Richard, Simone, and I stealth camp in a flat spot off the trail a quarter mile up Katahdin. An evergreen thicket shields us from patrolling park rangers in the campground down below. When it becomes too dark for rising smoke to reveal our location, Richard builds
a fire, using a technique, according to him, that his people perfected long before Columbus got lost and discovered America. In the crater, surrounded by mounded rocks covered with dirt, twigs crackle and burn. A dim red glow casts upward; Simone and Richard are barely visible.

They huddle across from me, and she has her arm around his neck. Their tone is urgent, words too low for me to make out.

“Hey,” I say. “Does anyone want some tea?”

I boil water, make a cup, sip, and watch the smoke twist through the branches overhead.

“I think we should get some sleep,” I say.

I make another cup, eat a candy bar I purchased in the store near Abol Bridge. The candy bar tastes fresh. The chocolate tastes strong. Richard gets out a bottle and firelight glints off the corners and reflects into the darkness. Nostalgia sweeps over me and I want to embrace my friends and I want them to embrace me. At that moment Georgia seems like so long ago I feel like I have walked out of one world and into another.

Another hour passes, no words aimed my way, so I pack up my stove and crawl into the tent. Simone's sleeping pad and sleeping bag are unrolled beside mine, but I do not expect her anytime soon. I am surprised when she unzips the fly a few minutes later. I ask her to talk to me, but hear nothing but silence.

In the middle of the night, I wake and go outside to piss. The air is nippy. I can see my breath, and I walk to the edge of the clearing to relieve myself. A voice comes out of the darkness. Richard, in the moonlight, sits on the trail.

“About tomorrow. . . .” Richard says.

I sit next to him.

“There's AA,” I say. “Programs, rehab facilities, stuff like that.”

He hands me his bottle, and I hand it back without taking a drink.

“Did you ever tell her about the dead guy we found down in Georgia?” he says.

“Are you nuts?”

“She knows about him,” Richard says.

“Bullshit.”

“She told me his name, when and where he died, and she knows about the others too. Remember that newspaper article about that old woman who supposedly committed suicide because her husband was dying of cancer? Simone was there, Taz. She says she pushed the woman over the edge.”

“That's . . . what? You'd better be joking—”

“She knew his
fucking name
,” Richard says.

I leave him on the trail and crawl into the tent. Flick a lighter, grab Simone's arm, yank it across the sleeping bag. She jerks awake, a startled look.

“What?” she says. “What do you want?”

We stare at each other, and she cannot look me in the eyes for long. When she turns her head, I flick off the lighter, and we lie in the dark. I want to ask if Richard is telling the truth, don't know exactly how to go about—

“Did you kill Christopher Orringer?” I say.

A long silence follows, and I repeat the question. Simone sobs, wracking sounds that come from her gut, and I turn away and jam my legs into my sleeping bag. Death means little to me. I've seen people shot on the streets, I've seen them stabbed in prison, I've seen a man get into an argument and run over his girlfriend, but that was the real world where bad things happen. This is the fucking Appalachian Trail, a walk through forests and rolling
green pastures, across mountaintops so close to the sky at times I felt like I was a god and not a mortal strolling with a pack on my back. People die accidental deaths in the mountains, that's a risk they assume when they leave civilization, but murder is something altogether different. A hiker murdering hikers is a defilement, the worst of mankind, and what was clean and pure, my journey from Georgia, every experience along the way, is suddenly dirty, something I wish I could sweep under the rug and ignore, but there is no rug and there is no ignoring the fact that my girlfriend confessed to two murders and probably committed two more.

I grab her shoulders, shake her hard.

“What the fuck?” I say. “How could you do that to those people?”

Her sobbing continues and I clamp my hands over my ears, tell myself that I will not go back to what I was before. I repeat these words. I sharpen them until they are a tempered blade I drive into my skull. I will not go back to what I was before.

I will not.

*   *   *

In the early-morning hours, well before dawn, Simone crawls outside and packs up her gear. Richard does the same. Headlamp glare shines through the tent, Richard and Simone looking in my direction. Richard says good-bye, a voice barely audible, and their footsteps recede up the trail. I'd like to smash in their skulls. If Simone wants to commit suicide, that's one thing. Influencing Richard is another. There are worse things than living the life of a drunk.
Much worse
things.

I consider jogging downhill and telling a ranger what I know,
but I am not a snitch. I think about packing up, chasing them down, and hauling Richard back to civilization, but I am not Gandhi. I ponder lying here for eternity, but I walked all the way from Georgia and I'll be damned if I'll allow Richard and Simone to deny my summit. I force the night's revelation from my mind, wait an hour, pack up, walk the trail. I hear their voices above me, in the darkness, occasionally glimpse a headlamp through the trees.