Nightwoods (31 page)

Snow tastes pretty good a tablespoon at a time, but not more. Birch twigs broken off and frayed at the ends occupy five minutes of taste buds if scrubbed between teeth and gums and against the tongue. A single sprig of balsam is interesting, but study it too long and the symmetry and repetition of the needles makes a pattern that gets as creepy as snake scales if you don’t put the brakes on in your head and make it stop vibrating.

At some point, Sally quits paying strict attention to the direction they’re looking. Among all the possible turnings, she starts curving back to Maddie’s house, making a big circle.

Midmorning, the sun is out strong, and the snow and ice melt fast. Grey-brown everyday floods back. Which is good for travelers. Though a little sad after the brief transformation of the world into something white and brilliant and new. Now mud seems muddier, and Sally’s hoofs make sucking sounds, step by step. Whereas before, it had been a clean four-beat rhythm of crunches. Lunchtime, they don’t even build a fire. They take turns eating peanut butter two-fingered from the jar.

NOVEMBER MOUNTAIN WEATHER
. Without warning, it’s snowing and you’re about to freeze to death, and then twenty-four hours later, sunshine and your coat thrown over your shoulder. Slogging now, the trail muddy with snowmelt. True, part of any trip is slogging, but you don’t have to like it, you just have to get through it. One foot in front of the other.

The old boys had sent Bud on his way with his clothes and blanket dry from the fire, and a hobo bundle of considerable food and a big square of dirty Visqueen and four lengths of nylon rope to make shelter. Also a map drawn on the inside of a flattened cornmeal bag. Assurances of mild weather for at least three days, and many good wishes for finding the kids.

They made a halfhearted offer to send some men with him, but Bud would not hear of it. They’d saved his life, and that was more than enough. Now he needed to move fast, cover ground. The boys mumbled about backs that hurt and hips and knees that had catches in them. Get old, no guarantees you won’t break down and do more harm than good. Though what feats of endurance they once accomplished. They said that one of the fellows, back when he was eighteen, carried a fifty-pound sack of flour on each shoulder over Laurel Gap to his mama, cut off by spring flooding that had washed out all the roads to her cabin. Twenty-five miles and thousands of feet of elevation gain and loss. Took him less than eight hours.

Bud said, Well, hell. I guess that was a walk. And the old man who’d done it said, I was about crying that last five miles.

Bud keeps going, seeing what he can see. But every step, the mountain expands, like huffing into a balloon, except the balloon’s more like a big sheet of newsprint crumpled into a ball. Nooks and crannies in every direction. When he’s covered a few miles, Bud stops and eats cold leftover pancakes rolled around cold sausage and dark smears of apple butter. Sun blazing and the sky blank and blue, but a little snow still in the cups of leaves and ankle-deep patches in north shade. Bud isn’t sure how to finish his mission anymore. The old boys know him now. Every one of them could point fingers at him in court.

But so what? Do things right, no bodies and no weapon, and everything will still fall clear. Don’t think about that sad Lit business. It got emotional, and naturally there were flaws. Get feeling betrayed and all trembling scared, blood to your elbow, you’re prone to misjudgment. Case in point, the depth of the woods around here. Apparently, they go on and on, and these hillbilly fools wander way into them to a remarkable extent. So bury deep and don’t ever deny being up here. Just trying to help, looking for the kids of your sadly deceased wife. Survived a great snowstorm. Didn’t find them, came back brokenhearted. Left town for greener pastures. End of story.

But for a while after lunch, Bud lets his thoughts wander. Find the kids and take them with him back to town. Get there late night. Leave them standing safe and sound and no more bewildered than usual on empty Main Street with the three lights flashing yellow. Drive west for days to some unimaginable place with no connection to his past whatsoever. Galveston or Gallup. Start fresh. Get a damn job.

Like that would work. He’d be looking over his shoulder from now on.

Bud keeps on through a long afternoon of gloomy walking with no faith in the future. Then there they suddenly are right in front of him. Three inches deep in the muddy ground. Hoofprints. Water half-filling the cup. Easy enough to guess which is the toe and which the heel and start following.

DOLORES BEGINS SINGING
“Back in the Saddle Again.” She can do all the verses exact, but half the words don’t register much beyond their sounds. They are like other notes of music, with no more or less meaning than a finger twitching on a banjo string. Put a banjo in her hands, and Dolores could probably play the song as accurate as singing the words. It’s all nothing but a pattern of notes. Hear it once and it sets in the mind. When Maddie sang the song, Frank was fairly preoccupied with the job of grooming Sally, but he attends close now to Dolores, and when she gets back to the chorus, he echoes the words.

Sally keeps bending, contouring along ridgelines, hunting paths. She steps out strong down the trail, and all the children feel is that they are going forward. Through the twists and turns, they lose three thousand feet of elevation during the afternoon. The lake becomes visible again below them, a ragged trail of liquid silver trapped between slate-colored ridges, like mercury cupped in the palm of a hand.

WOODLORE DOESN’T FACTOR
big when it comes to tracking a horse over wet ground, where with every few steps it sinks to the ankle. You follow the holes. Bud’s railroad boots cling wet to his feet, muddy to the fifth eyelet. Everything inside squishing. He hopes it isn’t because his feet are bleeding again. But to look on the sunny side, he’s survived beyond all expectation. A puzzler, though. How did those two morons live through that brutal white night on the mountain?

Maybe they didn’t. And Bud’s following nothing but a lost horse.

He holds that happy thought in his mind for a few miles, until he comes upon the browning core of an apple with little-people teeth marks.

So, probably not dead.

No use getting down about it. Bud wonders where they might be going. Takes out the old boys’ cornmeal map and runs his finger over it, trying to place himself among its lines and words. But it makes no sense to him. Pretty different from something you’d buy folded precise as the bellows to an accordion at the Esso station. Meaningless squiggles and place names drawn with a dull carpenter’s pencil. Hog Pen Gap, Bear Wallow Branch, Picken’s Nose.

Those fucking backwoods morons. If they wanted their real estate to ever be worth anything, instead of its only value being to hold the rest of the world together, they’d use names like Butterfly Ridge, Wildflower Glade. Imaginary places where fairies sip dewdrops from honeysuckle blossoms. Ahead of my time, Bud thinks. But what else is new?

Unseasonably warm in the late afternoon, particularly in contrast to the blizzard. For the novelty of it, Bud sheds his upper wear down to the skin. Let sunshine beat on his pale chest for a few minutes.

He comes to a place where the trail bends to the south, onto great sunny expanses of dark rock scattered with little eroded pockets filled with water. Everything angled to catch the light, becoming warm as summertime. Above the bare flats, patches of intricate moss and stunted pines struggle out of fissures. Below the flats, a sharp edge of rock, and way down at the bottom of an ass-clinching drop, a river runs like a white thread.

As Bud rounds the bend, what does he see on the rock but dozens and dozens of rattlers. Sunbathing, taking the rays. All beside and atop one another, mottled and twined, and not moving or making a sound. Some of their heads spread as broad across the brow as his clenched fist. Fat as his calf in the middle of their bodies.

It hits Bud funny. All those thick slack cylinders of malignant meat. His insides twist up. He thinks he’s going to retch. He bends over, but when he does, his sight goes grey except for shimmering particles of light. He sort of sits, sort of falls over. The long machete blade strikes stone like ringing a bell.

At the sound, a few snakes jump like they’ve been shot. They squirt off over the rocks and down into cracks and off the lips of overhangs. And those forerunners spook the rest of them, and like cattle stampeding, they disappear. An awful fog blowing away, like they were never there at all.

Bud tries to walk on, watching his step. But that doesn’t work so good. He gets all wiggly in regard to the plane of the trail. Sits down and draws his thoughts together, trying to get to the point where he can reason again.

THE BED TO A NARROW-GAUGE
railway, new slim trees growing where steam engines hauled out monster trees that were saplings in the time before white people. The trail falls contrary to water running down the same slopes. Water tries to go with gravity, straight as possible. The trail follows contours. Not steep, but dropping steady on and on, finding the easy way down. It’s all sidehill. The feel of the woods changes over the course of the afternoon. No balsams, more laurels and galax. All those names Luce likes so much.

Sally holds stronger opinions than previous about their pace and which way they go when they get to a turning. Dolores and Frank shift about on her back until they’re facing each other, and they play an intricate game of finger signals and coordinated hand slapping. A trailside observer would have trouble figuring the rules and how points are scored and what might be called a good play and what an infraction. The game goes on until the usual conclusion. Somebody hits too hard and the other one retaliates. They shift around, back to back, and ignore each other and watch the passing world for a while, Dolores looking at what’s ahead and Frank watching their past spool away behind.

In the west above the high peaks, bands of afternoon light start building in the clear sky. Platinum, bronze.

Way deep in the afternoon, camp time, they see a place they know. An older bent tree with a pointing nose. They get insistent, and Sally gives in and turns where there is no trail. The sun falls low, and the light in the dead brown leaves is momentarily etched and golden. Shadows stretch long across the ground.

An hour later, indigo twilight, and some big yellow planet falls slowly through the treetops. They have a fire near the edge of the hole, the stump to a toppled hickory as the backlog. A pile of downfall scrounged from the woods, and the blaze as tall as themselves. Dry sticks of hemlock for immediate gratification, mixed with bigger limbs of hardwoods for longevity. The light rises upward with the smoke. Down inside the hole, not a glint off the surface of the black water.

Later, the major lights of the night sky shine crisp in the dry air. Long over their quarrel, Dolores and Frank sit cross-legged under the same blanket and eat a jar of stewed tomatoes and the last sleeve of crackers. For dessert, most of a jar of apple butter, dark with brown sugar, but no bread to spread it on. They sing some more songs, learned from Maddie and the crank record player and the big radio. “Knoxville Girl.” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” “Try Me.”

They count the Seven Sisters like Luce taught them, and they say words to each other. Some are common words, and some are of their own devising. But they are like wary people in a foreign country where a language they know imperfectly holds sway. They hide what they do know, except from each other. Whatever anybody says, stay blank. They don’t talk about where they are. They’re right here all over again. Circling back, when they thought they were gone.

They let time flow right now, and they don’t worry about the black hole. It lacks interest. They can sit alone in the dark at the brink of a spooky pit in the woods and not give it more than a passing thought. The stuff they fear is unrelated to a hole in the ground and dirty water. They don’t have to make up horror-movie visions to give themselves an entertaining shiver. The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.

HOOFPRINTS KEEP ON GOING
. Gaps, sometimes, when the trail crosses rocky ground or open south-facing slopes. But you cast about, walk zigzag in the direction they’ve been heading, and before long there they are again, leading forward.

The afternoon stays clear and warmish. Get to an open shoulder of mountain and look back up to where you’ve been. High ridges grey as the bones of mountains in the sun, the highest peak still white with snow and frozen fog. You get justifiably proud of your survival. All those weak fuckers in their houses down in the valley. Watching their TVs with the heat blasting.

No telling how close the kids are now. Bud tries to get his mind right for rounding a bend and seeing a pony up ahead. No way to handle it but break it down into pieces, like any shit job. First you do this and then this. But if you start checking your watch and thinking all the way to the end of the day, you’re lost. It’s a sequence you’re following, and the bad part is just one part. For that, quick is what everybody wants.

Bud gets sad again about his ineptitude with Lit. It’s mainly doing it wrong that sticks in your mind afterward. If this wasn’t going to be the last one, he’d want to buy a big-bore rifle, like the ones used by Civil War snipers he’d read about in his magazines. Sit up in a tree, scoping some enemy officer a half-mile away. A colonel or something. Tiny dude smoking a cigar, being a big shit in front of his lessers. With your magnificent art, you hold your breath and touch the trigger with the delicacy of touching your own eyeball. Before the sound of the shot reaches the colonel, his head’s about like a big double handful of stew meat soaking into the ground, and the rest of him is barely starting to topple over like a sawed tree. And yet for the lucky colonel, the experience is no more than blowing out a candle. Happy, happy, dead. People lie in hospital beds worldwide praying for such a perfect end.

No use planning for the future, though. This is, for sure, the last one. Afterward, a new life.