Nightwoods

Jones says, No shit, Sherlock. Where were you headed? Making a run to Atlanta?

  Everybody laughs again, and then Jones says, Some of you might not have got introduced. This is the new bootlegger.

  Silence.

  Bud studies the crowd and tips his forefinger to his brow.

  Jones, talking to his cohorts, says, I’m wondering something. This mountain’s not a good place to sell bonded liquor. We’re making our own. So, same question. What the hell is he doing up here?

  Bud had been too preoccupied with not freezing to death to have premeditated a good story. He starts riffing grammar however it links up in the moment.

  —Seen a couple of kids? he says. Boy and a girl? Blond-headed? I’m part of the search party. The kids have been gone a day or two now. So, probably in this weather, we’re looking for bodies.

  —Party? the old bootlegger says.

  —Got separated from the others some while back. By the lake.

  —And you kept on climbing by yourself? For what, six or eight hours?

  —I really want to find those kids.

  —Yeah, Jones says. That’s exactly how you struck me back in the summer sitting on my porch. The kind of fellow would give Jesus a run for his money when it comes to lost lambs.

  But the tone Jones tries to set in regard to Bud won’t hold. This isn’t anything anyone is interested in. They drift back to the night they want.

  And Bud is so happy to be suddenly not dying, that he doesn’t have room to be worried too much about anything. You fall from the brink of icy death into the warm lap of plenty, you lie back and enjoy.

  Doesn’t take any time to learn that these old boys have all the shit in the world they need. Everything carried up by several packhorses, now standing at the edge of the circle, each one relaxing with a hind foot tipped. There’s food to last a couple of weeks, eating big. Sixteen-inch iron skillets, a refrigerator rack for a cooking grate, a Dutch oven for when biscuits and cornbread become necessary. A chain saw and a maul and splitting wedge to keep the fire fed. Much pork, especially in the form of bacon, but also wonderful sausages and smoked country hams. Syrup in gallon tins. Dozens of eggs sunk down in sacks of flour. Everybody wants pancakes at three in the morning, they’re set to go. Plenty of dried white beans to cook with ham hocks if anybody gets to craving vegetables.

  Also, theoretically, all the coon and possum the dogs can raise. Except, sadly, little to show in that category of meat. Way deep in the outer reaches of firelight, pinch-waisted hounds shift about humpbacked with self-conscious looks on their faces. Talk of their failure swirls around the fire. Some dude lifting his head and saying something and then somebody else. Faces tipping up to the fire and catching the light and then nodding dark.

  Somebody says, I never did confidence your blue tick much.

  Jones says, Can we keep the local-color shit to a bare minimum?

  And then he says to Bud, Whose kids would those be that you’re looking for?

  —That Luce girl, Bud says. Trying to adjust his language to the audience.

  —Lit’s girl, somebody says.

  —Not hers. Her sister’s kids, somebody else says.

  On the far side of the fire circle, a faint voice behind the roar and crackle says, Bad for one family to have so much trouble strike so close together. Lily and Lit and now this.

  —Maybe we’ll find the kids tomorrow and maybe Lit’s gonna show up any day, Bud says, trying to get out ahead. Maybe Lit’s been to the beach with one of his women.

  —Anyway, somebody says, the kids are retarded or something, so I guess they wandered off.

  —Though you got to wonder, Bud says. Maybe she got tired of being substitute mama for messed-up kids. Probably they’ll never be found.

  Some few of the drunk hunters who have known Luce since she was a child stick up for her, and some who hold Lit in low regard figure it’s possible. And then somebody brings up the school burning down when Luce walked out on her job, and they nearly all nod solemnly.

  The talk swirls back around to shared memories and other useless bullshit. Baseball games back shortly after World War I, how somebody dropped a fly ball or hit a home run in the ninth inning. Ridicule and glory. Men who weren’t in those particular games doze off sitting up, then come back to consciousness. Deep in the night, the snow thins down to just a wet flake or two falling into the circle of light and melting away.

  ONE IN THE MORNING and the weather bleak, Stubblefield drives the lakeshore until he hits pavement, then turns in the direction of town. Cold rain falls through the headlights, drizzling forty-weight viscous down the windshield, on the cusp of deciding to freeze.

  Luce had been exhausted from lack of sleep and gainless searching, hardly able to speak from calling the children’s names into black woods. Both of them frazzled from many cups of Maddie’s bitter gritty coffee. At midnight, Stubblefield had led Luce to the settle and calmed her to sleep with her head in his lap. Saying meaningless phrases about how everything was going to be all right. Kneading her shoulders, smoothing his palm down her face from hairline to jaw, fingers through her hair from brow to crown, fingernails on her back under her shirt.

  He eased her head onto a throw pillow and covered her with an afghan, put on his jacket with the .32–20 in the pocket, and walked into the kitchen. Maddie sat at the table with a cup of coffee, and she looked a question at him, and he had said, Sleeping.

  It suddenly occurred to him that Maddie hadn’t been home since the kids disappeared. He said, Where did you stay last night?

  Maddie said, Luce’s not got but about forty bedrooms and doesn’t use a one of them. I made do.

  Stubblefield said, Thank you, and headed out the back door, grabbing the flashlight on the way.

  Now he drives across the dam and along the shore to town like through a tunnel, a dark wall of woods rising to the left and the lake barely visible to the right, an emptiness behind the rain. Stubblefield is terrified of the next couple of hours, not at all expecting to find the kids and be the hero. But the night at the Roadhouse keeps coming back around. Bud dismissing him as no kind of threat, then slicing him open. Luce scared but glaring Bud straight in the face. The cut hand is still wrapped in windings of muslin bandage, dingy and unchanged for the past two frantic days. Underneath, a wide pink scar and a thin line of brown scab.

  If he finds Bud home alone, it probably means the kids are dead. Then what? Stubblefield’s first fallout with Bud went poorly, and the terror of that moment still grabs at his breath. But a saying of his grandfather’s loops in Stubblefield’s head. Ride to the sound of guns. A stirring sentiment, except his grandfather never spent a day in anybody’s army, which could serve as an excuse to make a three-point turn and head back toward the Lodge. Yet Stubblefield keeps on aiming the Hawk forward.

  For a short while around the black lake, he succeeds in holding a bright image in his mind, a pinpoint of diamond light. Convinced that hope rules us, not fear. But at the city limits sign, the light blinks out. In its place, the blood and darkness he saw down inside his cut hand. Still, he drives on into town and parks. Walks two blocks in the rain. Wet dead leaves on the pavement and windows dark in the bungalows. Bright rings misting around the scallop-shaded streetlamps.

  At Bud’s place, no light shines. But the green pickup in the driveway casts fresh waves of fear. Stubblefield draws the .32–20 from his coat pocket and goes through the side yard to the back door. Gives the knob a slow twist, to no effect. The lock is nothing much, though, and he’s brought a stout wood-handled screwdriver from the Lodge. One yank outward, and the door pops open with a screech of old wood shredding. Stubblefield presses his back to the clapboards of the outside wall and waits. He listens on and on. But nothing. No sound of children, no Bud coming with his knife to check out the noise.

  Stubblefield steps inside and switches on the flashlight in quick bursts to orient himself. In the kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter. In the living room, a dirty white T-shirt o
n the floor, a pair of white socks with two red bands around the top. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet contains one bottle of aspirin.

  He enters the bedroom carefully, in case Bud is in there asleep. But only an unmade bed and more dirty clothes. No books, no records. Nothing anywhere to indicate personality or taste, nobody to point his pistol at. The closet is empty except for a pair of new palomino loafers. He begins opening drawers. Not enough clothes to fill a suitcase. But, in a bureau drawer, he finds a rubber-banded roll of bills. And then, in the nightstand drawers and under the mattress, identical rolls. Also a little brown leather pocket notebook.

  He takes them into the living room and sits on the sofa and places the rolls upright on the coffee table. Muffles the flashlight with an amber glass ashtray and studies the notebook. Page after page, phone numbers and matching liquor orders. He unbands a roll and counts. Five hundred exactly. He doesn’t bother to reband the money or to count the other rolls. Together, the meaning of the book and the cash is simple. Whatever Bud has done the past couple of days, he hasn’t run far.

  Stubblefield sits in the dark and waits, pistol in hand, trying to bring the diamond light back. If Bud shows up, point the pistol at him and ask some questions. See what happens next.

  After two hours, Stubblefield unwinds the dirty bandage and drapes it over the money and the little book displayed on the coffee table. A message. He walks through the front door, and outside, big flakes of wet snow fall and immediately melt everywhere but in the grass. By the time he reaches the dam, snow falls much harder, brilliant and dizzying in the headlights.

  At the Lodge, when he steps out of the car, snow falls on his hair, his shoulders, catches in his eyebrows. The lawn is white, and dawn is not even a faint luminosity in the clouds above the eastern ridges. In the kitchen, Maddie still sits at the table, drinking coffee. A pan of biscuits nearby, ready for the oven. She doesn’t wait for his question. Says, She’s still asleep. She needed it, but probably she’ll be mad if you don’t wake her up now.

  Hoping to replace the pillow under Luce’s head with his leg before he wakes her, Stubblefield eases in. But his weight on the settle cushion does the job, and she reaches a hand to touch his knee and then sits up and finger-combs her hair. Gives him a glancing cheekbone kiss.

  —Where have you been?

  —What?

  —You smell like outside.

  —Out looking. But nothing.

  She touches his hair, the drops of water.

  —Rain?

  —Snow.

  She turns her palms up and looks at them a long time.

  Stubblefield says, Yeah, bad night. Let’s eat and get back out.

  CHAPTER 3

  AT DAWN, COLD MIST, pale metal colors. Grey and yellow and blue. Then various degrees of early light as the sun burns through the fog. Each twig and fir needle in its own case of ice. The sun reflecting off the crystals, every which way except the usual. The ground deep in wet snow, and evergreen boughs drooping under the weight. Light bouncing crazy, eye-burning brilliant. Weird and exciting.

  Frank lifts his hands above his shoulders and flutters his fingers. Dolores nudges him hard, smiling.

  Breakfast is a jar of pickled okra, a bracing start to the morning. They vie to eat the biggest pods, and blink tears from their eyes while they crunch the white seeds between their back teeth. Dolores tips the jar to her mouth and drinks a gulp of the salty green vinegar and reaches it to Frank and he does the same. Both of them laughing at their own puckering and weeping. When they mount up and ride on, Sally’s mane dangles festive beads of ice.

  Pathfinding would be more difficult if they had ideas of their own about where they are and where they want to go. Being lost means nothing. Especially when being found seems like a thing to avoid. Where they are is fine, so long as they move through it, onward to someplace else. So they keep looking ahead, and Sally keeps going.

  Frank loses his hat. His ears become red, and then they get blue. Dolores takes off her ear-flapped toboggan and whacks him on either side of the head with it and puts it down over his hair until it covers his eyes. From then on, they decide by ear color when to swap the hat. That is so delightful that at the next rest stop they strip naked and swap all their clothes. An hour later, they change back.

  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 whil
e 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?