Bad Moon On The Rise (27 page)

It was, hands down, the longest ten
minutes of my life. While I waited for him to call me back, I
passed the time on that icy boulder dangling my feet in the warm
springs to keep from freezing and trying to count up all the men I
had slept with. Hey, I needed something to keep from going crazy.
It’s amazing how much you can forget about your own life—and how
okay it is that you are able to forget once you make the mistake of
remembering. I was up to the year after I got out of prison, when I
was trying to make up for lost time, which meant the per annum man
count had peaked a little, when Ramsey called me back.

“
You’re in luck,” he said.
“I think you are probably about a mile northwest of the prison,
which isn’t bad considering what you were up against. And that
means you are within hiking distance of Happy Times Family
Campground.”

“
So happy times are here
again?” I interrupted.

“
If you shut up and
listen, they might be.” Truthfully, one of the things I had always
liked about him was that he never put up with my shit. “They’re
hosting an old timey music festival this weekend,” he explained.
“They always do this time of year, right before peak season for the
leaves.”

“
So I’m not crazy? I did
hear banjo music.”

“
No, you are crazy, Casey,
but not because you heard banjo music. In fact, I want you to
follow the music.”

“
Over the river and
through the woods?”

What can I say? I’m sarcastic by
nature.

“
Not over the river,”
Ramsey explained. “Whatever you do, stay on the east side of the
springs. Otherwise, you’ll be screwed and it will take us longer to
find you than it took the feds to find Eric Rudolph. And you know
how that went down.”

“
The east side of the
stream?” I asked tentatively.

He didn’t like the sound of that.
“Aren’t you a country girl?” he demanded.

“
Look, buster, I was a
country girl in Florida, where it’s flat. Got it? None of this crap
about mountains and clouds hiding the sky and all that
shit.”

“
Then I want you to do
this. Stand up by the side of the stream, stare at the top of the
mountain and raise your right hand.

I felt like a fool, but I wasn’t one,
so I did exactly what he said.

“
Now, just to be clear
about this: what direction is the water going in?” Ramsey
asked.

I glanced to my left.
“Downhill.”

“
Okay, good, then you are
definitely facing uphill.”

“
I see you have a lot of
confidence in me.”

“
You should see that I’m
serious about getting you home.”

“
You’re right and I thank
you. What next?”

“
Look to your right. That
is the direction you want to go in. You want to try and stay as
parallel as you can to your current longitude.”

“
Are you sure it’s not
current latitude?” I asked. “I tend to get the two
confused.”

“
You’re definitely scaring
me now,” he said.

“
I was just kidding. I’ve
got it. I am to go no higher up the mountain.”

“
Correct. If you stay
where you are and keep going east, you should hit the campground in
about an hour, even if the woods are deep and filled with
snow.”

“
You sound like Robert
Frost,” I said.

“
Thank you. I have been
called worse. Now, you are not going to like what I tell you
next—take off your pants.”

“
I didn’t know you still
cared.”

“
It’s to keep your ass
from freezing,” he explained. “And I mean that
literally.”

“
My jeans are only wet up
to the knees.”

“
Doesn’t matter. Unless
you have a knife to cut the wet parts off with, you had better take
them off completely.”

I thought of the contraption Bobby had
tossed me as the dogs closed in. “I do have a knife,” I said.
”Bobby gave me his.”

“
Good. Cut the jeans off a
couple inches above the wet part. Have you got anything else you’re
wearing you could sacrifice?”

I thought. I had two tee shirts on
underneath my work shirts. “I have an extra tee shirt I could cut
up.”

“
Take the tee shirt, cut
it in strips and wrap the dry cloth around your feet. Wear that
instead of socks.”

“
You want me to go
barefoot?” I asked incredulously.

“
No, I want to spare you
from crippling blisters and sores. After you wrap your feet in
clean cloth, find some dry leaves in the underbough of the thickest
bush you can find. Look for rhododendron. Make sure the leaves are
green and still alive. They should be waxy and shiny on one side.
Pick enough to wrap around your feet. The goal is to encase them
like you’re wrapping fish in banana leaves to bake in the
sand.”

“
Because I’ve done that so
very often.”

“
Just do it,” he ordered.
“Then put your shoes back on. The leaves provide a temporary
moisture barrier. But it won’t last long. If you can’t find the
campground within two hours, stop where you are, find another bush
to crawl under, cover yourself with dry leaves, take off your
shoes, and pray they dry a little overnight.”

“
I’m going to find the
campground,” I said. “For one thing, the music is getting louder.
For another, I am not spending a snowy night in the mountains under
a damn bush.” 

“
Actually, you are,”
Ramsey said.

“
Why?”

“
They’re not likely to
interrupt the music festival and announce a prisoner is on the
loose,” Ramsey explained. “They need tourism on Silver Mountain and
that’s going to look bad and you’re minimum security anyway.” He
paused. “You were minimum security, right?”

“
Yes,” I assured him.
“Well, medium security, actually. I don’t think they consider
anyone minimum, given it’s in the middle of absolutely fucking
nowhere and anyone else stupid enough to try to escape would find
themselves in my predicament.”

“
Look on the bright side,”
Ramsey suggested, “You’re unlikely to run into any other escaped
convicts who might overpower you and take your clothes.”

“
Good point,” I conceded.
“What’s next?”

“
When you find the music
festival, stay out of sight. Even if the sheriff doesn’t send
someone to alert the organizers, people will start to hear in on
their radios, or CB’s, or some asshole friend will hear it down on
the mountain and decide to call and tell them. Blame it on a cell
phone world.”

“
I’m kind of digging the
cell phone world right now,” I confessed.

“
Grab dry clothes, steal
food, not a lot from any one person, try to liberate a couple of
blankets and find a warm, dry place to spend the night. Need help
with that?”

“
No,” I assured him. “I
have it covered. Warm. Dry.”

“
Good. It’s going to take
me at least six hours to get there, so we’re talking first light.
There’s no point in trying to find each other if it’s still dark.
I’ve got to borrow a couple of guitars from a friend, so it looks
like I have a reason to be on the mountain, but after that I’m
heading your way.”

“
You’re coming to rescue
me,” I said. I gave a long, fake sigh. “My hero.”

“
I’m going to remind you
that you said that,” he threatened me. “You need to wait until
first light and then follow the access road out of the campground
to the highway. Every map I pulled up, including the US Forestry
Service map, shows only one road into those areas, so I’m trusting
we won’t go wrong there.”

“
Two lanes, black top,
dotted line. I’ve got it.”

“
Once you find the
highway, I want you to walk up it, without being seen, to the first
straightaway beyond the campground entrance. Pick a spot in the
middle of the straightaway, fade back into the bushes, keep dry and
wait for me. I’m going to honk three times as I pass the campground
entrance, just to let you know it’s me coming.”

“
Are you driving the blue
truck?” I asked, fond memories of its spacious bed flooding through
me.

“
I am indeed.”

“
I’ll recognize it,” I
said happily. “And Ramsey, I’ll never forget this.”

“
Just don’t let anyone see
you,” he warned me. “You cannot tell by looking who is going to
decide to be a good citizen and turn you in. Trust no
one.”

“
The truth is out there,”
I countered.

“
Trust no one. And keep
those feet dry.”

He hung up and I missed his reassuring
voice within seconds. He was enjoying it, I knew. He was enjoying
the challenge, the battle against the elements, but, most of all,
he was enjoying helping me. Ramsey Lee was a chivalrous man by
nature, a sort of old-fashioned man in many ways, and perhaps an
odd man out by the standards of the modern world. He’d spent time
in jail for so-called eco-terrorism crimes, and perhaps he had
taken his hatred of the developers carving up his beloved state a
little too far. He was rumored to have a fondness for explosives.
But if he had ever hurt anyone, I didn’t know about it, and if he
had destroyed property, I didn’t know about that, either, because
he rarely said much about anything. Unless he was trying to get you
safely off a mountain, of course. Then he was a regular
chatterbox.

It took me awhile to hack the jeans
into Daisy Dukes. It took even longer to find a dry bush, wrap my
feet and line the shoes with dry, waxy leaves. When I was done, I
had to admit—my calves were cold, but my feet were toasty and, my
god, all I really cared about were my feet. Who know how much a
pair of feet mattered? When I was ready, I stood by the stream as
Ramsey had taught me, just to be sure, getting my bearings. As I
raised my right hand to get my bearings, the snow stopped as if by
magic. Way cool. I raised my hand again, wondering if the snow
would start back up. Nothing happened, so I staved off a daydream
about being a wizard and concentrated on what direction I was
heading in, going through Ramsey’s mental checklist in my mind. I
felt a little foolish. I knew my way east and west, after all, and
up and down a mountain, too, but I didn’t want pride or, worse,
panic to bring me down now. I had to be methodical. I headed off to
my right, staying on as even a keel as I could.

As I made my way through the forest,
it fell once again into an almost rapturous silence. Even the wind
seemed to die away in silent respect for the glory of the night
world. It was dark, but not really—though I could see not the moon
above, the snow reflected light from somewhere and my eyes had long
since adjusted to the nuances of the night. Without dogs on my ass
and with less fear driving me, I could move more easily through the
forest, sidestepping bramble bushes, rocks that could twist an
ankle or logs that might trip me and catapult me face down in the
snow. As I moved through the night, I imagined I was a panther, one
that had to get home to its cave. This line of thought led me to
wondering whether panthers lived in caves, and that led me to
wondering if there were caves around here, and that sparked an
entire fantasy involving a dry, cozy corner in a hidden cave,
complete with me leaning against the walls and stretching my bare
toes in front of a fire while my clothes dried merrily on nearby
rocks.

It was a daydream that took me over a
mile of rocky terrain. All the while the music grew louder. It was
the perfect beacon in the snowy woods. Each note, each lingering
reverberation, twisted its way past trees and over shrubs and
through the snow to my grateful ears, calling me closer. An entire
band had replaced the banjo. I could hear fiddles now, and an
upright bass, even a piano, I thought, and maybe a washtub or two.
The songs took me back to my youth, to concerts at a fire station
miles down the road, to a checkered cloth spread over prickly grass
and my mother’s good cooking laid out in a picnic so bounteous I
had no idea that we were dirt poor. My parents had been so young
then, way younger than I was now, and I had darted between the
picnic and the band, chasing fireflies, wiggling in time to the
music, stomping my feet and never once suspecting for an instant
that, like all lives, mine might take winding and twisting turns,
some too painful to recall, including detours that would one day
bring me to the point of fleeing through the woods from law
enforcement, prison bars and lost friends not all that far behind.
I knew that no one’s life ever ended up being exactly as they
imagined it would as a child—but did anyone’s ever even come
close?

As I got nearer to the campground, I
heard people’s voices wafting uphill. Either I had hiked further
above the campground without realizing it, or Ramsey, as infallible
as he was, had been slightly off with his maps. But that was good.
Uphill gave me the advantage. I moved through the dark, following
the sounds. Soon, the unbelievably enticing smell of cooking food
wafted up to me. My stomach growled. Lunch seemed like a lifetime
ago. My feet moved faster.

The oddest thing happened when I was
fifty yards from the campground itself. I’d grown weary of pushing
through brambles and ivy and the thick branches of mountain laurel
just to take a few steps. I’d decided to screw it and chance using
one of the campground’s hiking paths the rest of the way. I was
inching down it as silently as I could, on the alert for people,
when I heard a snorting and shuffling that send a shiver down my
spine. I froze—and came nose to snout with an immense black boar
trotting up the path as jauntily as if it were a fine spring day.
The wild pig froze when it saw me and stared at me through beady
black eyes that glittered in the moonlight that had taken over the
clearing night sky. Only a lazy snowflake or two still fluttered to
the ground.