He sighed again and then stood silent as though considering something.
‘Pete, Harold, get some branches, scuffle up the leaves. Nobody was anywhere around here, right? Danny? Here. Do like we said, son.’
In Ludlow’s peripheral vision he saw something long and dark pass from hand to hand between them.
‘Dad . . .’
Harold’s voice. Pleading with him.
And it wasn’t just the pleading, there was something in McCormack’s voice just then that warned him, a tiredness and a grim resignation and he opened his eyes and started to roll. He saw Danny standing over him and saw the heavy broken limb of the tree come down across his head exactly where the ear had been, understanding in just that too-late instant what they were thinking, that they were covering the bullet-wound with something infinitely worse. He felt a sudden jolt throughout every nerve in his body and he thought, oh my god, so this is what it’s like, this is what Red must have felt suddenly and forever and then he was falling into blackness again so deep it seemed to burn his eyes.
Twenty-eight
When he woke the second time it was dusk. Nearly night.
He woke utterly lost to himself.
He did not know who or even exactly what he was. He might have been some spirit of the woods, newborn of earth and pine needles on the first day of creation. Not flesh at all. He might have been anything.
He tried to sit up but he couldn’t. The trees were moving overhead as though he lay in the center of a huge vernal carousel set absurdly in the forest by some fool maker’s hand.
He moved like an infant unsure of his limbs. First one foot and then the other, one hand and then the other. Then his arms and legs. He blinked to slow the whirling. He blinked again.
When he judged it might be possible, he tried to sit up a second time and this time he could. Pain raced through him, immense and angry, and then just as suddenly disappeared, a phantom pain hiding somewhere inside a phantom numbness. He put his hand to the back of his head and felt a strange damp softness there. The back of his head transformed to spongy moss. The hand came away a sticky brown, red and black to which dead pine needles clung.
He wondered how he’d got here.
He saw the truck in the shadows a few feet away, lying upside down and wrapped around the trunk of a tree like a finger curled tightly around a pencil.
The truck was familiar to him.
He tried to stand. He could get to his knees but no further so he crawled to the tree that was nearest him and, with his arms around the trunk, he hauled himself slowly up. Until the shaking in his legs grew tolerable he was content to embrace the tree like a lover, with his cheek pressed softly to its rough fragrant flesh, breathing deeply of the scent of it and then after a while he let go and tried to walk.
His goal was the truck. The truck was very familiar.
It might even have belonged to him.
He kept close to the trees and stumbled once and caught himself on a limb and held himself up. Pain darted through him and then vanished. The forest swam.
When he reached the truck he bent down and peered through the driver’s side window. He looked at the debris scattered on the ceiling. A crushed paper cut. A torn map half open. An empty soda can. A window-scraper. Gum-wrappers. The contents of an ashtray dusting all the rest with a fine grey powder that mingled with bright shards and pebbles of broken glass. He did not know what he was looking for here or what these things should mean to him, so he turned away.
It was getting dark. He knew he should not be out here in the dark.
In the dark he would lose his way.
He thought that he should try to climb the hill. He wasn’t sure why. It was enough to feel he ought to.
He followed the path of broken undergrowth, stopping often to cling to what few saplings the truck had left standing, seeming to remember the truck’s dark passage, catching his breath and regaining his balance and then moving on. Halfway up the hill he felt a queer sensation, a tingling up his backbone which his mother used to say was somebody walking over his grave, or perhaps it was his father.
His father was alive in a nursing home. His father’s name was Avery Allan Ludlow, Sr.
He looked down at his feet and saw the gun lying in the leaves in front of him.
It was as though the gun had called to him.
Like him, the gun did not belong there. He thought it would be wrong to leave it lying there.
He stooped carefully and picked it up, dusted off leaves and dirt and with difficulty put it in his pocket. Standing up the pain lanced through him again like a bolt of lightning and then was gone.
It was dark when he crested the hill. Moonlight bleached the trees beside him. Behind him, the way he’d come, the forest was black and dense. He stared at the road and wondered which way to go.
He thought that there was something he was supposed to do.
He sat down to think with his back to a birch tree. The gun stretched the leg of his trousers. Inexplicably he had begun to cry.
After a while he looked up from his lap and saw a pair of eyes glinting low at the edge of the scrub directly across the road. The eyes moved back and forth, up and down the road and then settled on him and stared.
A moment later he saw them move tentatively forward.
Then more aggressively, moving through the startled brush.
The dog who stepped out onto the shoulder had gone a long time without proper feeding. He could see its ribs through the thin white fur, could see its skinny haunches. A farm dog probably, a mutt with a lot of beagle in him, neither young nor old yet nearly feral now, the kind of dog who was left outside to scrounge for itself in every kind of weather. Closer now he saw it was a male. The eyes were large and did not seem hostile but only curious about him sitting there alone.
‘C’mere,’ he whispered.
He sounded strange, his voice a hoarse gurgle he barely recognized. He tasted blood in his mouth and licked his dry cracked lips.
He held out his hand.
The dog’s nose twitched, scenting him. The dog’s head held low.
‘I won’t hurt you.’
The dog raised his head and looked at him and barked. The voice was high and clear and echoed in the still night. He barked once more and then fell silent. For a moment the dog continued staring, resigned and empty of hope for this encounter as perhaps for most encounters with the human animal and then turned and walked slowly back into the scrub. He saw the brush move as the dog passed through and then could only hear it move and then finally the dog was gone.
He sat listening to the silence, listening to scraps of memory inside him like pages fluttering in a wind.
When he stood up again he had found his direction.
He stepped out on the road and headed up the mountain.
Twenty-Nine
The sky was filled with stars. A half moon bright above. A Janus moon, he thought. A half moon was a Janus moon.
Janus, the god of doors and gates.
Had a month named after him.
January.
January, February, June or July.
Shine on, shine on harvest moon.
Up inna da sky.
Strange what he was remembering.
In the war one summer night under just such a sky, he’d shot a North Korean sniper out of a tree. Or else Phil DeAngelo had, they never knew which. They were sharing guard duty that night and both had fired on him at once.
In the morning they went out to look for him.
They were puzzled at first at what they found. Apparently the bullet had hit the rifle, not the man. The rifle had fallen from his hands and then the man had fallen after. He fell upon his weapon, which was pointing upwards. The barrel broke away from the stock and pierced his right calf muscle and his left thigh, impaling the man like a bug on a collector’s setting-board. The fall had broken his neck and immobilized him. Yet this would not have been fatal to the man except for the fact that the barrel had pierced t
he femoral artery of his thigh. His blood had drained out of him through the broken barrel like rainwater through a drainpipe and by morning he was long dead.
Their first year in the house they had to put pots and pans out all along the floor to catch the rain. Then he’d fixed the roof.
The blood beneath the North Korean sniper was a black sticky pool crusted over by the heat and swarming with bloated flies.
Sticky. Like his mossy head.
He touched it.
Allie’s head and Billy’s. Both of theirs had popped out fine. But Tim’s was looking like a breech-birth and Doc Jaffe had to get his hand in there, into Mary’s insides and turn him around inside her.
They’d almost lost him.
He’d been present at all three births and at Tim’s he almost fainted.
The summer heat in Korea. You could almost faint You couldn’t breathe.
And then they had lost him.
His own breathing was a thin rasping sound, the only sound out here except for the scrape of wind through the trees and brush and the sound of crickets everywhere and frogs somewhere down below over the embankment, in a stream probably, and his scuffling feet moving in short awkward steps along the tarmac.
He saw the headlights from a car coming up behind him, saw them dim in the distance and then watched them grow steadily brighter, yet he didn’t turn but merely moved on and when the lights swept over him and disappeared over the hill like the wings of a great white bird passing, all its passing meant to him was not a lost opportunity for rescue or aid but that, in the glare of headlights, he had seen ahead to the edge of the forest where the road began cutting through farmland.
He was closer.
He was aware that the angle of his walk was wrong.
He kept veering off to the left and had to correct to the right every six steps or so. He thought of the four steps up to the porch of his father’s nursing home which were so hard for his father to climb. He needed a hand getting up and down these days. He wondered if his father was happy or if he should feel guilty for putting him there even though it was what his father had asked for. I won’t be a burden to you or Mary, he said. Bad enough I’m a goddamn burden to myself.
Mary’d cried the day they left him there. Red was standing in the bed of the truck. But then she’d wanted him in the cab with her so they drove home that way with her arm resting on the dog’s back and the dog’s head sticking out the window, squinting at the wind in his face, the wind ruffling his hair.
He was walking beside a wooden fence now, white birch trees on the side of the road opposite and low rolling pastureland on his side just beyond the fence, all of it grey and lovely in the moonlight like a pastoral black-and-white photograph taken in another age and a simpler one.
He walked. The pain came and went. He didn’t mind. The pain reminded him that, remarkably, he was still alive.
He saw shapes in the field ahead.
Horses grazing. Six of them.
He wondered why they had not been put up for the night and thought that perhaps the horses were wondering too. He stopped and leaned heavily on the fence and decided to catch his breath there. He watched them step forward now and then and lower their heads to crop the grass beneath them. He could hear the sounds their teeth made plucking the grass reluctant to be parted from the earth and then their chewing. He could not make out their color in the moonlight, whether black or brown, though one horse was a spotted paint. He heard them snort in satisfaction as they ate.
When he was a boy of six or seven his Uncle John Fry owned a dairy farm with a couple of horses in the barn and Ludlow had never ridden. Fry decided it was high time that he did. He saddled the big brown mare and hoisted him up onto the saddle. Ludlow complained that his feet didn’t reach the stirrups but Fry said, Doesn’t matter, you’re only going for a little ride is all.
Fry was a big man given to pranks that were often cruel pranks and this one on this day was certainly in character.
Ludlow could remember his own surprising pleasure at finding himself sitting astride the horse, the sheer enormous size of the animal and the musky scent of her as he patted her and stroked the coarse short hair of her neck and then brought his hand to his nose to smell it, the feeling of hugely muscled power beneath him that seemed to him a wholly benevolent power and almost instantly his own, a newly discovered part of him. He could remember staring out from her back across the yard to the fields beyond, hoping they would head for that, that his uncle would lead the mare into the field and then just let him ride.
Instead he swatted her rump with his big calloused dairy farmer’s hand and shouted.
The mare bolted forward. Ludlow flew off her and landed in back of her in the dust while his uncle roared with laughter. Ludlow’s mother came out of the house and called his uncle a damn dumb son-of-a-bitch farmer and they hadn’t talked for months thereafter.
Ludlow had never blamed the horse, only the man.
When he grew older he’d ridden her again and again.
He plucked some grass beneath him and held out his hand.
The paint horse was watching him. She hesitated a moment and then walked over.
The long prehensile lips took the grass. The horse allowed him to touch her forelock and cheek and the cool wet fleshy nose. She bowed her head and let him cup the nose in the palm of his hand, her nostrils opening and closing, a rich bass murmur of warm breath.
Then she raised her head and shook it, her mane suddenly like dark sparks flying, her eyes gone wide. Wild, staring.
She backed away. She turned and joined the rest but continued to watch him carefully and did not continue grazing.
She smells it, he thought.
Of course she does. Something hurt or dying.
Is that me?
A man, but not entirely a man. Something fled from him now.
He thought of the dog by the side of the road and felt as though the natural world were alert to him. As though his shed blood had made him more akin to them and that both dog and horse were somehow aware of that. His vulnerability to the rough hand of man now very much like their own.
He pushed away from the fence.
He walked.
When at last he came to the dirt road and forest again the moon had disappeared behind a heavy bank of clouds. The stars as well were mostly hidden. He moved to what he felt must be the center of the road so as not to tumble off into a ditch but he could never be sure that it was in fact the center of the road or even near the center. He walked with arms outstretched ahead of him, unsure of what he might encounter in such a darkness.
Once when he was a boy of twelve he and a friend had discovered a cave along a cliff face which overlooked the sea. They had climbed to the cave and gone inside it while the breakers crashed below. The sunlight illuminated the interior and they saw that it had been used by animals and men. There were bones of birds and larger animals gnawed and strewn all along the floor. There were empty clam shells and the remains of crabs. On the ceiling they could see where smoke from countless fires had stained the rock face black.
Finally they saw that another cave led off this one to their right
They had no flashlights. They wore bathing suits and towels draped across their necks. They stood at the entrance to the second cave and tried to peer inside, into a chamber which had never seen the light of day since a shifting earth first had coughed it up. They lifted their arms to the blackness and their arms disappeared entirely. Try as they might it was impossible to see their hands. They could see neither floor nor ceiling of the cave nor the walls on either side.
Only a darkness so profound it stunned the eye.
Ludlow feared the place as he had feared no other place in his life. It seemed to him that the darkness itself was a warning not to enter, that the darkness hid the secret soul of something which perhaps partook more of gods or spirits than of men. All the same he took a step inside. A dare to himself, a gauntlet thrown down to gods and spirits alike. He
remembered feeling with his naked foot for the floor beneath him, almost surprised to find it there and not some yawning void. He felt for and then took a second step inside. And to his friend’s eyes, disappeared as instantly and completely as though he’d vanished.
He stood still a moment hoping his eyes would adjust.
They didn’t.
The cave was silent.
He took a third step and heard something shift in the darkness along what must have been the far wall perhaps twenty feet away, something he instinctively felt was big, bigger than big, and he felt fear race over him like a cloud of spiders dropped suddenly over his nearly naked body, crawling and biting him, and he yelled and turned and leaped for the outer cave and saw that his friend was already halfway out the entrance ahead of him. And then he was out there too, racing down the steep cliff face as though the claws of demons were at their ankles and reaching out for them.
Later when he thought about it and talked about it with his friend he decided that it must have been a man inside.
Just a man.
Not wolf nor bear nor even some feral dog because they probably would have smelled any such wild animal before they heard it and there was no such smell inside. He tried to reconstruct the sound he’d heard and thought that it was the sound of clothing moving over stone.
He thought that probably it was just a man. That he probably wasn’t in that much danger.
But only probably. Because then he thought how the man must have stood there, silent, watching them, able to see them clearly in front of him at the entrance to the cave all the while that they were blind to him. Stood silent for quite some time, his own eyes accustomed to the dark and watching. He thought of what kind of a man might want to do that and then of the bones on the floor and the smell of fire and he thought that he might have been wrong about the danger to them.