Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (6 page)

“Eat up,” I say.

“We got some box wine and a twelve pack of Old Milwaukee,” Roxie says, and trickles me a glass of wine. I drink it and another. Odell falls asleep on the couch, and I cover him with a blanket, ask Roxie if I should carry him to the bedroom. She says the boy can sleep through anything and won't wake until morning, so I spread backpacking gear on the floor—tell her about the sleeping bag and how it has baffles to keep the down evenly distributed.

“It's a Mountain Hardwear 15 degree,” I say. “Top of the line. . . . Too long for you but they sell a small that would fit you pretty good.”

Roxie hands me a beer, but I put it on the table and tug her
pants to her ankles. She pushes me away, shoots up again. Then she takes off her hip-huggers and walks around in blouse and panties. She throws the backpack over her shoulder and I'm pleased. She's into the idea, the first time I've seen her seriously consider my plan.

“
Moowhaaah
,” she says, and bends at the waist. Head down, she stomps around the room. “
Mooooooowhaaaaaah.
” She extends her index fingers and puts one on each side of her head. Her foot scrapes the carpet. “I'm a stoned-assed bull and you're the matador. Show me some ass, Mr. Matador.”

I take off my shirt, my pants, my underwear, and she rams her head into my butt cheeks. Her fingers dimple my skin like pink worms. I laugh so hard my sides ache, lean over the table and roll the needle in a circle. One bump wouldn't hurt, might temper the zipper of a headache I'm sure to have tomorrow. I walk down the hall to the bathroom, relieve myself, then eyeball the mirror. I stick my fingers in the corners of my lips and pull the skin tight. Then I grab a brush on the counter and comb my curls across my forehead. Then I tease them straight up in the air. I should have been a frontiersman. I would have walked through the mountains and eaten meat on a stick every chance I got. I love meat on a stick. Chicken, beef, pork, name it, and I've eaten it on a stick. My stomach's stuck on spin cycle, and I puke bile into the rusty toilet bowl. If I want to get high, I better do it now. That coke's going fast.

Roxie cusses in the living room and I hurry in there and shoot her up. “These veins,” she says. “These veins are like spaghetti. I got spaghetti veins. I'm a fucking bull with spaghetti veins.”

I pick up the box wine and hold the spigot to my lips. Drain the box, toss it on the floor. Drain the last beer and toss it next to the
box. The sun's coming up, and through the window the trailers look dirty in the brown light. A car drifts down the road. Some sucker headed to work, no doubt. In the yard across the way, a woman with curlers in her hair clips weeds around her mail box. Weeds! Who thinks about weeds first thing in the morning?

“Taz,” Roxie says. “Taz, come here.”

She tells me she spilled the coke, drops to her knees, rakes her fingers through the carpet. I think of the boy and can't remember if we fed him or what. He's asleep on the couch, and I don't know how he got there.

“Give it up,” I say. “That dope's history—”

“You're such an asshole.”

“I'll take you to get some more. Just relax and we'll go in a minute. Take a shower, why don't you? You smell like hell.” My hands shake, and I stare at that needle.

“Get off my ass, don't nobody care how I smell. TT Charlie don't care and he's the only one that matters. He's got the dope, you ain't got shit. You got less than shit.”

Instead of arguing, I let her believe what she wants. If Roxie knew about Pop committing suicide and leaving me an inheritance, she'd bleed me dry inside of a week. She opens the door, throws the backpack outside, and it rolls across the lawn and rests against a rimless tire.

“Cook, my ass,” she says. “You ain't leaving me and I ain't walking no Appalachian Trail. You put your clothes on and take me to the corner. I'll get us some money and we'll get us some coke and come back here and do it up. You and me, we'll do it up like old times.”

At the window I study my backpack. The dirt is wet with dew and the sun is coming up. It will be a hot one today, and I look around
for a fan. There's the needle, the empty Baggie, a dozen empty beer cans, the noise from the shower, and Odell on the couch. Breakfast coming up, I say in a voice too loud. I heat a skillet on the stove and get four eggs out of the fridge. I break the eggs over the skillet and watch the whites bubble and brown on the edges.

I set full plates on the table, walk out the door, and rummage through the backpack for my hiker clothes. I put them on and stand around in the dirt. It feels odd wearing shorts and trekking shoes, a T-shirt made out of something other than cotton. I strap on the pack and walk around the car, imagine I'm on the trail, try to smell the woods after a rain. The only odor I pick up comes from an overflowing trashcan in front of the adjacent trailer. Roxie appears at the door. Odell stands beside her and brings his knuckles to his eyes.

“You make sure his grandmother knows his mother locked him in that bedroom,” I say. “You make sure he's fed.”

She nods.

“Come inside,” she says.

Roxie is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Cheekbones, the green eyes, the cocked-hip attitude, I must be crazy for thinking about leaving her.

I get in the driver's side, drop the backpack into the passenger seat, crank the sleepy piano music up as loud as it will go. The door speakers rattle and the pounding itches my eardrums. I am older, wiser than when I stepped in the acid in that extraction facility. I slam my hand on the dashboard, a smack that jolts my arm clear to the shoulder.

Fuck
that gutter.

4

LEONA BROUGHAM ENTERS
the attic and walks up to a sofa she and her husband had retired years ago, extends a finger and smudges SOS in the dust that coats the broken arm. She had been so certain their lives would unfurl in a way that would keep them together until the end. Now, with Emanuel joining Swingers In Their Golden Years to spice up their sex life, she thinks she might end up alone. Sex life? That part of their marriage ended years ago, along about the time he began snoring so loudly she was forced to sleep in another room.

She plops a box on the sofa and dust mushrooms into the air. Inside, under the knickknack clutter, wrapped in a towel for safekeeping, lies a cassette tape Emanuel recorded during his Vietnam tour. Leona has listened to the tape three times in her life: once when it arrived; once when she got the seven-year-itch and almost ran away with Trevor, chief editor where she worked at Howell Publishing all those years; and once when she was thirty-seven and her husband had an affair. She never discovered the woman's name, but the lipstick on his collar, the perfume on his
body, his propensity to shower before pecking her cheek and saying hello, added up to nothing good.

She drops the tape in her pocket and makes her way down the steps, walking carefully so she doesn't aggravate her joints. In the living room, Emanuel relaxes in a recliner in front of the television. His head turns toward the bay window, where the trim frames New Hampshire mountains that rise out of the ground like great humpback whales. A hot spring has burned off the snow, and craggy boulders etch the sky. A million thaws have eroded the peaks—splitting fissures until rocks gave way and rolled into valleys—yet the mountains are still here, still strong—a longevity that stirs her soul.

Leona studies the profile, knowing it well, harking back to when she tromped the Appalachian Trail on summer weekends, carrying hoes and pruning shears, digging water bars, and cutting back the growth to offer clear passage to hikers. Now she feels old as the trail and leaves the job to the younger crowd. The Appalachian Mountain Club honored her with a dinner and plaque when she retired. She is not given to bragging, and the plaque resides in the top dresser drawer instead of hanging on the wall.

She pauses next to the fireplace and watches her husband. He is a proud man, especially of his height, and it galls him that he now tops out at five eleven instead of six foot. The shrinkage should have taken him down a notch in more ways than one, but what he lacks in stature he makes up for in hair. Not only does he have all of it, a dense wave that curls around his ears and sweeps toward his collar, it is the same color as the day they met. Yellow as a fall maple leaf, no gray to be found. He looks her way and shifts in his seat, tells her the Wasatch couple will be here any minute.

“For an interview,” he says. “You remember, don't you darling?”

In less than an hour they plan to size up potential sex partners. Leona wonders how one should act in these situations. Should she flop out a breast and allow Mr. Wasatch a squeeze? Should she roll down her nylons and expose the pink between her legs? She glares in Emanuel's direction. Men and women their age should have better things to do.

*   *   *

Leona prefers taking her children's calls in the kitchen. This room, floor tile reflecting the fluorescent lights, was the center of her world when Heather and Parker were young, their orbits bringing them to the counter for help with homework, to the fridge for snacks, to their mother's arms for childhood bruises, real and imagined. Talking to her children on the phone brings those memories to life. If she closes her eyes, she can still smell cookie dough in the oven, still see birthday cards tucked under Mickey Mouse magnets, still hear the young voices chatter about anything from ants to the Man in the Moon.

At the breakfast nook, she adjusts the phone so it won't dig into her earring, says hello to her son. He starts right in on the elephants he's seen playing soccer in Thailand. Thailand? She never can keep up with her youngest. Parker, a sweet boy who inherited his father's hair, caught the wanderlust soon as he could crawl, and by the time he was three she'd had to leash him when she walked the grocery aisles. She blames his divorce on his restless spirit. Sometimes she wishes he was more like Heather, her oldest, who has lived in a small town outside Boston for the last twenty-five years. Least he'd come around more often.

“So, how are you?” he says.

She glances toward the living room where the Wasatches sit on the sofa. Mrs. Wasatch wears a slinky dress, mail-ordered from Macy's, and her high heels reveal tiny feet. Tiny feet irritate Leona, whose own are so wide she has trouble finding the right fit. Mr. Wasatch, three times the size of his wife, wears a Hawaiian shirt that does little to hide his belly. His wife worked as a bookkeeper for their hot tub company, and they both believe sitting in steamy water is good for the constitution.

“We're entertaining. The Wasatches are in the living room.” Leona craves her son's company, and the strangers in her house amplify her feelings. She doesn't want to start crying, so she goes to the sink and runs water into the coffeepot. The mechanics of doing something soothes her. Parker is silent, and she knows he is trying to place the name. That's how it is between them. They talk on the phone and trade news. Try to fit it into the larger picture.

“Your father wants to start swinging,” she says. “We're interviewing couples.”

Emanuel calls her name, and she puts down the coffee filter. For the occasion her husband wears a long-sleeved corduroy shirt, a crosshatch of brown and green she gave him for Christmas several years back. He calls again, says Mrs. Wasatch requests bottled water. Bottled water? Brougham water comes out of the tap, no fancy shenanigans in this household. Parker chortles in her ear. She wishes she was there to see his head slant back and his belly jump in and out. Her son is a whole-body laugher, able to give all of himself to the humor of the moment.

“It's not
that
funny.” Leona, who chose a pink blouse for the interview, forgot about a problem button that comes undone if she moves around too much. She buttons up and holds her stomach
in. She is forgetting something. Oh, the tape. She forgot to listen to it, cannot remember where it wound up.

“Heather told me you two had gone wild,” Parker says, “but I thought she was yanking my chain.”

“It's your father. He's having another crisis.”

Her son cackles, then settles down. “I expect next you'll order the Playboy Channel.”

“Parker, you watch that mouth.”

The phone hisses and pops, and she taps it in her palm. She knows it's unusual for a woman her age to share her sexuality with her children, but she began telling them everything about her life soon after they moved away. This desperate attempt to keep them close to her breast only works with Heather, who reciprocates by revealing things so intimate they make Leona blush. Parker holds back, has a reticence she blames on a gene passed from his father.

“I have to go,” Parker says.

“You be careful around those elephants, don't get stepped on.”

“Okay, Mom. I love you.”

She says the words back, half a mind to ring Heather. Emanuel calls again, and she heads his way.

“Sorry,” she says to the couple. “We're out of bottled water. I'm making coffee if you'd like some.”

The Wasatches say caffeine elevates their blood pressures, and they swore off years ago. Mrs. Wasatch sports a face-lift, and she brags about her surgeon, believing he is top-notch. “We're actually older than dirt. I'm seventy-four and my husband is seventy-six.”

“Thank God for Viagra,” says Mr. Wasatch. “It assists the angle of the dangle.”

Emanuel snickers, Leona can't help but titter, and after that
things loosen up. Her husband moves his hands when he talks, florid gestures befitting an orchestra conductor, and Leona suspects he is elevating his heartbeat to stay alert. She crosses her legs, her dress glides three inches up her thigh, and the fat man's mouth forms an oval. She does not want Mr. Wasatch kneeling over her body, thinks he might hurt her if his arms give out.

“What I'm suggesting,” Mr. Wasatch says, “is I don't know why we can't jump from the interview to the bedroom.”