Nightwoods

  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.

  Bud walks on until the sun drops and disappears in the trees. Suddenly, all the warmth of the day drains int
o the ground. It gets to a point of darkness where you don’t know what to call it. Dusk or night. Twilight fits in there somewhere. People used to have a word, gloaming, but that’s only a snatch of memory from a song. Wait a few minutes, though, and like so many things, it quits being an issue. Night falls, too dark to see your feet at the bottom of your legs.

  Bud sits down in a level place by the trail. He’s failed to learn the lesson of the coon hunters. Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.

  Impossible, though, with no chain saw, no bright-faced kindling fresh-split from a cylinder of pine with an axe. No childhood buddies sharing the heat and light.

  Bud draws together wet rotting twigs and squats with his last matches. He achieves smoke for a few seconds. Says, Fuck it, and wraps himself in his blanket on his piece of Visqueen. He lies mostly awake through the night, listening to all the swirling languages the nightwoods speak.

  When he drifts to sleep, it’s not really enough to interrupt his train of thought. And when he drifts back in, the voices are always murmuring against him, and he’s always thinking about two quick sweeping movements.

  No denying the ugliness. But swear you’re done and move forward. Bud touches the necklace, then his arm.

  Blood. It covers the earth. Animals and humans in their billions, their skin like the membrane of a balloon or a rubber. A thin scurf trying to keep the liquid from spilling out, but doing a poor job of it. Touch a needle to your finger and see how bad it wants to get into the air. If God wanted things different, he’d have coated us in armor. Or made us pray to a face pulled apart by pain, screaming.

  But he wanted us to bleed. The flow of blood, a red bleeding heart. That is beautiful.

  CHAPTER 4

  AT THE FIRST SUSPICION OF DAWN, Luce takes off alone. The earth and the lake and the sky still grade only slight shades of color apart. Bare November trees pitching in the wind against a charcoal sky, and the lake charcoal too, with little waves breaking against the shore rocks. Maddie and Stubblefield dozing at the kitchen table.

  Alongside the trail, the lush growth of summer droops over, dead brown. The tops of giant hemlocks disappear in fog, and their roots probe deep in the moisture below the creek banks. Galax leaves, transformed by frost, shine glossy maroon.

  She has slept once in the past three days, and Stubblefield even less. He’s taken an hour now and then, leaned against her on the front seat of the car somewhere way up a fire road. The afternoon and evening of horrible weather—rain falling hard, ashy sideways streaks of rain in the headlight beams—they drove into the mountains until the roads got so rough they dragged the muffler off the Hawk and figured the oil pan would be next. By the time they returned to the Lodge, she was too tired to argue when he put her to sleep. When she woke, early that morning, the rain had become big wet flakes of snow, melting as they hit the ground, but by the time the sun was up over the eastern ridges, the clouds were breaking apart. More empty searching that whole day, but with the sky blue and the high peaks white all morning with snow. Searching in the car and on foot, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking the same question over and over. Driving to check the phone at the store every few hours. All the time, trying to hold a positive picture in her mind and entertain imaginary hope. By late afternoon, sundogs and bare trees.

  Now, walking in the cold fog, Luce doesn’t even try to track the children. Short of a dropped sweater, all trace of them will have been erased by rain and snow. So she walks with nothing at all in her mind and tries to feel which way they might have gone. But she isn’t the least bit telepathic; no vibrations reach her other than the general shimmer of sleeplessness.

  Many turnings present themselves, plenty of opportunities for choosing one faint passage over another. These mountains are no wilderness. They have been lived in for thousands of years. Many old nobodies, long gone to earth, left their marks on the land, subtle or not. Gameways stretching back beyond buffalo days to a distant ice age became Indian trails, little foot-wide hunting paths and broad valley trails linking towns, each with its pyramid. Roads broad enough for helmeted Spaniards and their horses and scores of pigs and captives to make twenty miles a day in their traverse through here. Two hundred years farther on, many paths for horny colonial merchants and botanists and preachers coming to the highlands to make money and mixed-blood babies. And then American soldiers burning the villages so that the townhouses at the tops of the pyramids became nothing more than a layer of charcoal. Some of those same roads became exile trails for the Cherokee, endless trails for the many who never reached the end. On the same mule tracks and wagon roads, the deluded greyboys traveled to war. Then, sunken logging roads and skid paths from the end of the previous century, and narrow-gauge rail beds from the early clear-cut years of this century. Everywhere Luce looks, the ground lies webbed with lines of passage, a maze for the children to get lost inside and never come out.

  Numb and hopeless, Luce walks in the direction of the black hole. At the trail tree, she sees hoofprints and starts running. When she gets to the dry ridge of hickory and locust, she smells smoke in the woods and runs downhill into the wet cove and into the shadows under the hemlocks. Running across the beds of needles so quiet the loudest thing is her breathing.

  At the hole, near the lip, a fire smokes, burned down mostly to coals. Stubs of Franklins, half-burned at the edges of white ash. Like they had no more value than yesterday’s sports section crumpled to light a fire. Bud stands between the fire and the hole, looking off into the woods, a long bright-edged blade drooping from his hand. Burnt edges of bills sticking out his jacket pocket.

  Luce can’t see the children until she follows Bud’s line of sight. Dolores and Frank stand together on the far side of the hole, right at the edge. Sally shifts about, off in the trees behind them.

  Bud turns around and looks at Luce. He says, Jesus Christ.

  Luce tries to breathe. She says, What have you done?

  —Not a damn thing yet. They keep running around this quarry.

  He starts moving toward Luce, and she angles away. For a few moments they mirror each other, like a slow dance separated by twenty feet. Bud moving in and Luce moving away, skewing out of reach. Until they stop with the circle of fire between them, Bud standing near the hole, Luce with her back to the hemlock woods. Bud kicks at the burnt ends of bills, shoving them toward the live coals.

  —Look at it, he says. I could have lived high forever. But now, nothing.

  Luce glances quickly at the bits of paper igniting in the coals, confused. Then back to Bud. Waiting for him to move again.

  —Y’all haven’t left me a lot of choice here. I’m going to do what I have to, and then get gone.

  —You don’t have to do anything, Luce says. Just go now. Never see you again, that’s all I want.

  —How dumb do you think I am?

  —What?

  —You can say any kind of lie right now. But I’m not leaving a string of witnesses.

  —I haven’t witnessed anything, Luce says.

  Bud looks across the hole to the kids. He says, Stuff piles up. Probably, they’ll try to blame Lit on me too.

  —I know you did it. But I can live with that. Leave us alone and go.

  —No. From right here, there’s one way it’s got to be.

  Out of frustration—the endless circling of the hole trying to catch the kids, figuring they would eventually act like prey animals and get nervous and flare off into the woods in fear and then he would run them down, but them never panicking, keeping always one-eighty degrees away, circle after circle—Bud makes some bullshit calculation in regard to the smaller circle of fire. He tries to leap it to get to Luce.

  Midway in the crescent of his jump, as he realizes one foot is going to land in the fire, the machete slips his grip. It spins behind him to the edge of the hole, jangles on rock, and falls over the lip. End over end, down into the black water, which receives it without comme
nt, neither splash nor ripple.

  Bud steadies his footing, one boot muddy and the other ashy. Says, I’ll kill you with my hands.

  He comes at Luce, but not rushing. Moving wary and uncertain without his blade.

  Luce pulls her birthday razor from the pocket of her coat and flips the hook at the end of the handle. Holds the razor angled, like a barber ready to shave a face. The steel of the rectangular blade ripples in the light. Along the edge, it’s almost transparent.

  The Adam’s apple makes a good round target, a knot of gristle under the skin to mark exactly where the windpipe runs. Luce moves at him and swings hard, wanting to go deep.

  Instinct. Bud steps back and throws up his hands. The blade passes across both palms with hardly more resistance than through air itself. For a second Luce thinks she hasn’t gotten him at all. But Lit said the blade seeks bone. The faint ripples she felt through the handle means it cut to every one. She stares at Bud’s hands, the marks thin as paper cuts.

  Luce squares up in case she needs to make another go, but then the blood comes. Two dark sheets running from the heels of Bud’s hands and down the wrists where all the suicide veins tangle. The fingers extend spectacularly white above the blood. Blood falls to the leaves and dirt.

  BUD YELLS IN SHORT BURSTS, just vowels, declining in volume. He keeps his hands up, and blood runs warm and sticky past the cuffs of his leather jacket and down the insides of the sleeves and pools at the elbows. He can’t think of anything to say. His breathing becomes a problem. And there stands Luce with the razor, ready to come at him again. He turns and looks at the kids. They stand pale-faced across the hole, in the shadows under vaulted boughs of hemlock. Watching him with no expression at all.

  Bud runs. Takes off without benefit of track or trail in no preconceived direction whatsoever. All the wet dead shit of autumn grabbing limp and clammy at his feet. He runs until he can’t do it anymore, and then he walks. He holds his hands pressed in his armpits and keeps going, sort of grunting and sort of sobbing. When Luce and the kids are far behind, he sits with his back against a fat hemlock trunk, the bark streaked black with rain, and reaches his hands into the air to slow the bleeding.