Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (3 page)

Einstein and I leave the motel room. The sky is gray, slow to wake after a night's sleep, but in the east flame crawls across the horizon. I've forgotten about desert sunrises, how they begin so far away and seem so alive.

I ask Einstein if he's hungry and consider his wag an enthusiastic yes. I have a hungry dog and a $9,000 check in my wallet. I have a headache and a cottony tongue—

In my peripheral vision, a fist appears. A punch that catches me by surprise. It's a wide loop that misses my chin and spins my ambusher in a circle. I smell sour breath, cheap wine, unwashed clothes. I see a head matted with dirty hair and recognize the man at the terminal. Maria, wearing a twisted smile, stands behind him.

“Told you,” she says. “I told you he was stealing your dog.”

“That's my dog,” the man says.

Maria's eyes are twitchy, and she chews her lip. She's high, tweaking on my fifty.

“It's my dog,” I say.

“Liar.” The man raises his fist.

I remove change from my pocket and hold the coins palm up. It's enough for a bottle of MD 20/20.

“Have one on me,” I say.

“He'll pay more,” Maria says. “He'll pay a thousand dollars for this dog. He loves this dog.”

The man throws another punch, a lazy arc. I duck and then I have him by the throat. Coins fall to the ground and Maria kneels and paws at the dirt. My words are flat and hard. “Do you know how many dogs I've killed?”

The man's eyes are unfocused, but Maria glares up at me.

“Seventy-seven,” I say. “Do you understand? We gassed them. You ever seen a gassed dog?”

I release my grip and point toward the ground at my feet. I tell them that's all the money they're getting.

“Don't fuck with me,” I say.

Einstein and I walk across the parking lot to a street that curves around a gas station and heads east. At an intersection that leads down a street to the house I grew up in, I jam my hands in my pockets and lean against a weathered light pole. The lawyer said the house is up for sale and I'll reap the proceeds if a buyer comes forth, but not to look forward to it anytime soon. One part of me wants to revisit my youth and one part of me says that's where my father blew off his head and I have no desire to see blood-spattered walls.

I turn away and take a road that crosses the city limits, where I step over a sand-clogged gutter and arrive at the cemetery. I shield my eyes, trying to see the bone-white headstones. The sun is over the horizon, and the desert is on fire. It's burning up. The dog trots back into town, and I follow him for a block—watch him turn into an alley without a backward glance. I don't blame him, know I'm not worth taking a chance on.

Instead of going after him, I think about the last time I was in this town. Back then, my dreams were all about leaving. It didn't matter where I ended up or what happened when I got there, so long as it was anywhere but here. Now, I'm leaving with a dream that has substance and direction, a dream that began while I was behind bars. I promised myself then, and I'm promising myself now: I will walk the Appalachian Trail end to end. Or die trying.

It feels good to have a long-range goal, my first ever, and my feet feel lighter as they contact pavement. For the first time since I can remember I have a reason to get up in the morning.

2

ONE MINUTE SIMONE
Decker, enjoying Day Two of her thru-hike, watches a hawk windsurf the updraft and the next she wants to push Devon off the cliff. He sits beside her, eats a cracker and brushes crumbs into the abyss. The urge intensifies, and she smothers it with thoughts of how much she enjoys spending time with him, and how tonight they will pitch the tent and snuggle into their sleeping bags and talk about whatever. She enjoys his voice in the darkness, likes how it surrounds and caresses her with its easy tone.

Marveling at the absurdity, she allows her thoughts to dissipate and the urge to reappear. Devon, in that quiet way of his, talks about buying a house with a spare room. He wants a studio that faces east so he can catch morning light while he works on his drawings. She nods agreeably, aware that sitting next to someone on a cliff is an act of implied trust. Has he ever thought about pushing
her
off? Simone lays her hand on his back, applies the tiniest pressure. She studies his eyes, looking for a flicker of recognition, and in the end decides he is oblivious.

They swing their legs over the void, stare at the view that begins
a quarter mile below their feet and spreads toward the horizon. It is early March, and the Georgia forest is stark and barren. She is in her late twenties, they both are, and she has the build of an athlete, strong bones and strong muscles left over from her gymnastic days when she was a teenager in Oklahoma. Her eyes are hazel, and Devon often comments on the gold flecks in her pupils. She thinks her jaw is crooked and her nose is too big, and her hair is too flat, but her lover never mentions any of those things. He's an aspiring artist and sixth-grade teacher on spring break, and she's a laid-off scientist who worked for Luctow Labs in Tuscaloosa for five years. They have been together four of those years, met at a cocktail party after she attended a downtown art exhibit one Saturday evening.

Today she wears a Nike shirt and has on long pants because they conceal her thighs, which are more solid than fat, but she lives with worry Devon will lose sight of the difference. Her lover is skinny and can eat all he wants and not put on weight. She wears his ring. The diamond is bright and hard and promises two people wish to live together forever.

“Do you think I'm a bad person?” she says, rising and backing away. She picks up her pack, an internal Osprey she selected because she likes how it fits against her back.

“You are a fire-breathing monster.”

“Devon.”

“Ask a ridiculous question, get a ridiculous answer.” Devon has brown eyes behind thick glasses and the magnification gives him a serious look. They are the same height, something she thinks he finds annoying because she often wears two-inch heels when they go out.

“I almost pushed you off the edge,” she says.

“Now you're talking crazy.”

“It's happened before.”

“With me?” He sounds surprised.

“With others.”

She closes her eyes and sees a murder gene twisted inside her DNA. The gene looks thin and flexible, deadly, like a garrote wielded in experienced hands. She was seven when the gene first showed itself, on the edge of the quarry where she stood behind Bobby Heavenside. Bobby had a crooked leg and walked with a limp, did not like it when other kids poked fun at him. She was big for her age, often rode a red bicycle her father bought for her seventh birthday. The boy stiffened against her thrust, was so off balance he could not stop moving forward. She jerked her hand away, like it was on fire, and peered down at his tumbling body, listened to the shrillness in the air. She felt no remorse, only a hot hand and a numbing stillness inside.

There had been one more, a girlfriend shoved off the top deck of a parking lot, an act Simone tried to delude herself into believing was an accident, but she gave up after a while because she knew the truth about herself. Deep inside she carried the intense desire to push people over the edge.

Strangely, the desire came and went on its own, submerging and resurfacing like a demented creature that only needed to breathe once in a great while. In high school, the desire surfaced when she was in a gaggle of kids atop the bleachers during a football game. The urge was strong, but she was so worried about getting caught she was able to shove her hands in her pockets and walk away. That was the first time her rational mind took control, and it gave her hope for the future.

At Ohio State, she studied genetic biology and familiarized
herself with the intricacies of DNA, polymers and nucleotides, chromosomes and replication. She read the works of Dr. Bristow, a scientist who theorized that one secret of the human race is that every person is born with a genetic flaw that leads to his fall. His theory comforted her. It meant the deaths were not really her fault, but at the same time she felt depressed. If her desire was gene based, that meant it would linger until the day she died.

During that four years, the desire surfaced from time to time, never strong enough to act upon, and she was, more often than not, amused with herself afterward. Eventually, she felt so confident she had gained control that she began driving to the Appalachian Trail during her summers, often testing herself when she came up on hikers taking pictures on overlooks. With each successful interaction she became even more confident and often sat with the hikers and held conversations that lasted for minutes at a time.

Then, during a day hike in the Whites, the urge reappeared with such ferocity it left her shaken. The boy had turned toward her as she neared, had stepped away from the edge in a hurry. He had looked frightened, as though he had seen something in her eyes.

That was the moment she decided to seek out ways to force change. She experimented with Buddhism and Catholicism, then finally resorted to self-help books. Her favorite was
How to Become a Completely New Person in Twenty-One Days
, and she read it three times in a two-week period. Afterward, she affirmed, she wrote negative notes to herself and set them on fire, she adopted positive attitudes that turned every half-empty glass half full. Nothing worked.

Now, as she contemplates her earlier interaction with Devon,
she's annoyed with herself. This is the man she plans to marry. Soon as the urge appeared, she should have gotten up and walked away.

*   *   *

That afternoon, Simone and Devon crest another mountain and arrive at an overlook, and he glances at her with curious eyes. He asks if she wants to stop and enjoy the view.

“I don't want to sit next to you,” she says.

“You're serious about this?”

Simone tells him yes and they walk down the mountain, he in the lead, she lagging behind. She crouches to take pressure off an old knee injury, wishes he would slow down so she could keep up. He looks back from time to time, but in the end seems to drop whatever is on his mind.

Devon plans to hike to her first resupply point—Hiawassee, Georgia—a town sixty-four trail miles north of Springer. When she first heard he was joining her for the start of her thru-hike, a conversation that took place back in the winter when she was dehydrating food for her mail drops, she was happy. Now she's not so sure. She's not worried about pushing him off—long as she stays clear of him on ledges bad things won't happen—but she thinks he might try to take over her hike and make it his. He is a male, after all, and genetically they are more comfortable when they are in control. She stretches out her stride until she runs instead of walks. Catches him at the next switchback. They hike to the base of the mountain and drop their packs in a clearing.

“A fire would be nice,” Devon says. “Be dark before you know it.”

Her lover prefers camp chores to gathering wood because he
worries about getting lost. Getting lost never happens to Simone. She has a keen sense of direction, much keener than Devon's.

Knowing he will not stop hinting until she brings him wood, she walks out of camp, along a ridge interspersed with pines, poplar, and white oaks. Fiddleheads, green and slender, curl out of the ground, but higher up, where branches are without leaves, colors are muted slashes of gray and brown. An owl's hoot drifts through the trees. Against the sky, in the upper reaches of a scarred poplar, wings unfold and a feathered shadow glides through the forest, gone before she can raise a hand and offer a hello.

She picks up a branch and drags it behind her. Picks up another branch and adds it to the first. Head down, she walks a wide loop that takes her into an oak grove south of the campsite. She hoists herself onto a low-hanging limb, climbs high enough to see down into the clearing. In a fork gently buoyant under her weight, she watches Devon glance in the direction she has disappeared. He restakes the guy line at the rear of the tent, then restakes the guy line at the front. He's fiddling, something he does when he is nervous. She wonders how long before he cracks, and an hour later gets her answer when he walks to the edge of the clearing and shouts her name.

“Simone!”

Simone wants him to go after her, rooting for his love to trump his fear of the forest, knows she wastes her time. Devon sees the trail as a conduit through the unknown. Venture from the footpath and he is doomed.

“Simone!”

She turns away, toward where the sun falls below the mountains. An orange band stripes the horizon and above the band the sky is the color of washed-out purple. Toward the north, where
the sky is darker, the first star appears. She imagines the star hovers over the northern terminus, wonders how many steps it takes to get there from here. Devon believes she chose this journey because she wants to put off their marriage. He calls her thru-hike a 2,160-mile procrastination. But he's wrong.

“Simone!”

She's here because she's convinced herself that no one can thru-hike the Appalachian Trail and be the same person as when they started. She hopes change will arrive like an erupting volcano, melting her genes so completely that when they cool she'll become someone else entirely.

“Simone!”

Devon turns on his headlamp and the beam cuts a swath through the darkness, illuminates trees in its white glow. Guilt seeps through her, a nausea that washes into her stomach. She feels her way through the limbs, to the ground and the hardpacked trail.

“Hey,” she says.

“Over here!” Devon says, headlamp bobbing. “I'm over here!”

“I'm here.” She walks into the clearing and gives him a hug.

He backs away. “I've been calling for hours.”

“I got turned around but I'm back now.”

“I can't believe you did that!”