In Wilderness (8 page)

The hardware store.

Where she bought work gloves, the candles she’d forgotten—beeswax, they burn longer and their smell’s so lovely—took her purchases to the cash register and laid them on the counter. The clerk looked her up and down and she stared at his swooping Adam’s apple, knowing what he saw: an emaciated woman with dark, stringy hair and incongruous new jeans already falling off her hipbones.

“Yew come up from Atlanta?”

The way he curled his lip said at best “summer people.” More likely “dirty hippie,” though she’s at least twenty years too old. They’re children, hippies. The Beats were much more interesting.

A senseless fury gorged up in her then, mixing with the store’s oil-on-metal stench. She wanted more than anything to spit at him that she was not some city dweller come up for a weekend taste of winter
cold, that she was here for the duration. Instead, she swiped her hand across the nearest display rack and slammed a random dozen seed packets—bright watercolor vegetables—onto the counter.

“And that shovel up against the wall, I’ll take that, too.”

Later, she left the shovel in the car because it was too hard to carry, slid the seed packets into her sleeping bag. Now she collects the shiny envelopes and props them on the mantel. They’re pretty there. Cheerful.

Lunch is late, more cabbage and then once again a period of sitting quietly on a bench beside the table. This time, though, a nap’s out of the question. She’s got to get a fire burning in the stove, dinner cooking, and a second fire laid in the hearth to light at sundown. She’s thought a lot about this. If she always keeps the stove fire burning she’ll have live coals and not use up her matches. If she burns a hearth fire every evening she’ll save candles. From this morning, little twigs and bigger twigs, small branches and larger, all separated by size and laid out on the porch, none of it as dry as she had hoped. And she’s got no old newspapers this time, no loose paper at all, just the “How to Use This Book” parts of her guidebooks. But a fire’s essential, otherwise she’ll almost certainly die sooner than she is prepared for. (She could, of course, just go ahead and shoot herself this afternoon, but she’s already covered that one.)

So. Crouch at the firebox with your matches. If the floor bruises your knees, take off your shirt and wad it under them. Pretend nothing hurts. Pretend you have infinite patience. Your plans, your life, depend on what you are about to do right now. Lay twigs and your few nonessential book pages, twisted tight, inside the firebox. Strike a match. If its flame dies out too soon, then strike another. And another after that. Lean forward, breathe your mouth-breaths long and slow into the firebox. Like the wind that sings among the meadow grasses.

The tiniest flame curls the edges of one of the book pages; the flame ignites a twig. The twig’s bark smolders, flames, and then the small light dims, winks out.
Oh, don’t, don’t go, don’t leave me
. But another has lit in its place and fire licks all around it. A small branch catches, then a larger one. Slowly the stove’s black surface starts to warm. She’s done it.

Now she runs water in the larger of the cooking pots, dumps in brown rice and lentils on blind faith. She’s never tasted either, bought them on some book’s suggestion: “Nourishing foods to take into the wilderness.” Her legs and arms are trembling. She should stop, sit on her sleeping bag, lean back against the wall. But the trees fling out late-afternoon shadows that let her know she is afraid, and that there’s one thing more she needs to do.

The gun’s dull silver makes her think of snakes. Not interesting and harmless ones like hoop snakes. Poisonous ones, like rattlesnakes. Normal good sense says keep the gun within arm’s reach of where she sleeps, to guard against intruders. But what would intrude here? She runs through her memorized litany of animals she might encounter in the wild: Bears won’t show themselves unless there’s food left out, wildcats won’t come near you, and cougars have been extinct up here for years; wild dogs attack in packs but bark out warnings, deer are shy and run away, and turkeys, as best she can tell, are just plain stupid. Raccoons, opossums, squirrels, and rabbits are all small enough to fear her.

And there are no people. Yesterday along the trail she saw no cigarette butts, bullet casings, campfire ashes, empty Vienna sausage tins, no sign of any human being but herself. Saw no sign of anything as large as she except a shadow high up on a ridge.

That quicksilver wisdom that trumps good sense says store the gun where it can best protect you from whatever you most fear. What she fears most is not intruders, animal or otherwise. It’s the sudden impulse, dream, memory, or fresh, sharp pain that might lead her to reach for it before she needs to, suck its barrel into her mouth and fire. Very like what happened with the Valium, but final. No, the gun goes on the high shelf near the ceiling, where she will have to take some trouble to get at it, take some time to think things through before she brings it down.

Strange in her present circumstances that should matter. Yet it does.

T
HE SUN IS GONE
and the air has once again grown cold. On today’s notebook page she’s added,
Unpacked. Found seeds I’d forgotten, along
with my lost hours—had to buy two tires. Built both fires, a challenge. Cooked beans, rice; tasted not too bad; threw them up returning from the privy. Stored gun and bullets out of reach. If the deer comes back tonight, I hope not to be afraid
.

She crawls inside her sleeping bag and, before blowing out her candle, looks around. All things being relative, she’s settled in. Does this mean she harbors some faint hope she’ll be here for a while?

Impossible to say. Hope is like what happened with the seed rack in the hardware store: Something uncontrollable that’s done by your left hand.

I
T
’
S HIS OWN LITTLE DITTY
,
MADE UP JUST LATELY TO THE TUNE OF
some old-timey song he can’t recall. He’s sung it patching holes in Gatsby’s roof, spreading leaf mulch on Gatsby’s fruit trees, scraping rust off Gatsby’s gate. Now he’s all morning humming it inside his brain where nothing else can hear him, climbing down the mountain
once again to pay another covert visit to the Dead Lady. Who don’t look near as like to keel over as she did three weeks ago.

“Don’t look near as like.” College-boy grammar’s shot to shit. Hung on to it all through Nam and now it’s gone. Maybe the books’ll help him get it back. If he wants to. Moldy books all around him on shelves floor to ceiling. He’s sleeping in a fucking library.

He’s got a plan to read them, learn something. All of them; already started on the east wall. East, the sunrise side, where shit begins. Might as well do it that way, they’re not in any order. Just stuck up there on someone’s whim. He thought to rearrange them so it made some sense, by writers’ names or years when they were published, but there didn’t seem much point to it. Easier just to start somewhere and take them as they come. More like life that way. Random. Destined.

Same as with the Dead Lady. Showed up fresh out of nowhere right when he was passing by—and fucked up his whole schedule. Cut into his reading time and all his plans for building squirrel traps and the like. It’s got to where near about every day he’s hiking down to the Old Man’s cabin like going to see a friend. A human friend, no dogs allowed. He’s trained Dog to stay back when he climbs down this side of the mountain. Not a pleasant thing, but necessary. Dog would have given him away.

Just like with the she-bear, just like with the panther
. “Painters” is what Memaw and the old folks called them.
Just like with the painter, it’s just ’cause she’s there
.

He tracked a painter, panther, once. Back when you used to hear them screaming in the night like haints. But this panther was no haint. Its prints, splayed out bigger than Danny’s nine-year-old hand, bigger even than a grown-up hand, ended in claw holes gouged deep into soft red clay beside a trickling stream. He tracked it down one ridge and up the next then down and up again, far out of sight of any place he knew, only to lose it in some craggy rocks. Used the cat’s same tracks to find his way back home, just like Tarzan of the fucking apes. Thought the whole time how maybe the cat had also doubled back and was that very minute slinking along some parallel path, watching with its wild yellow eyes. Tracking him.

Yeah, he could track a panther now, for sure.

It’s just ’cause she’s there
.

If the Dead Lady dies he can dig a hole and bury her and move back in the cabin. No one’ll ever know. That being said, the fact she’s not yet dead causes his heart to rise.

Though it’s wrong to feel so, affects the outcome. Who knows but what his wishing she won’t die might be the very thing that’s keeping her alive, giving her new strength?

And where’s that new strength coming from but sapping his?

Die, you dumb bitch, whore of Babylon. You don’t mean shit to me. You dead’s like a dead possum in the trail for me to step over, that’s all.

Yeah, best to keep a lid on things. He doesn’t need to be all the time sending his mind down to the Dead Lady’s, taking his whole self down there every night and in the daytime, too, letting his house and all his fruit trees go to shit. Because that’s what’ll happen if he can’t stop her from pulling on him, can’t stop himself allowing it.

And he does allow it. Thinks about going down there, being down there with her, all the goddamn time. It even cuts into his reading. Yeah, bitch’ll make you stupid if you don’t watch out.

But right now it’s Saturday, and Saturday’s okay. It’s not like it’s a special trip. It’s just him stopping by on his way to hit the grocery dumpster. So what if it’s got to where he’s spending near the whole damn day down there and then the whole night and then Sunday, too, and doesn’t leave her side till almost Monday dawn? He still makes it to the dumpster, doesn’t he? And it’s only once a week. Allowed, planned, part of his routine life almost. It’s all those other days he’s got to watch out for. The nights don’t count. It never counts when she’s asleep.

So this Saturday he sets out from Gatsby’s well before the sun’s climbed high, but that’s okay. He’s carrying a canteen, a Slim Jim, a squashed Little Debbie Snack Cake, some rotting book by Hemingway, and two joints. Fat Saturday joints. He takes quick breaths, sucks the smoke in deep. Watching stoned’s the only way. Like reading stoned. Stoned lets you set up camp inside somebody’s soul.

Just like with the panther, it’s just ’cause she’s there
.

He’s starting to know things about her. Like where she hurts and
how she hurts at least a little bit all over all the time. Like how she moves so as to keep parts of herself off separate, like little nests for pains. She’s not as old as he once thought. Took a while before she showed him that, kept it hid away inside her suffering.

One time, hiding behind an open door, he heard Memaw say how you could tell if a young girl’s even once been with a man, how her hips are suddenly all the time rocking like a porch swing. He took Memaw’s words for gospel, since she had no idea he was listening. In high school it proved out. He could always tell. With this woman, though, the Dead Lady, he’s not so sure. Over there, he saw women that lived day to day with their men, then saw them with their men dead in their arms, saw the moment when that sadness seized up in their hips and there was no more rocking in them. The Dead Lady’s hips are stiff from all her hurts, so he can’t tell if she’s been with a man or not. Or if she liked it. He can’t explain her. And it makes him crave to watch her all the more.

Today he hears her before he gets anywhere near the cabin. An axe—halting, staccato, lacking a man’s smooth rhythm. The thrill of finding her outdoors, someplace where he can watch her for a good long while, rises in him till he has to slow his breath. Even so, it catches in his throat when he truly sees her out behind the cabin, chopping firewood on an old tree stump. Yeah, here’s a woman no man ever taught to swing through with an axe, or that strength comes from momentum. He could step out right now, out from behind this very tree, and put both arms around her, both hands on her tensed-up wrists, teach her to trust the axe’s arc. How many steps? Seven? Six? Five?

But only if he’s someone else, not Danny. Danny must never touch again.

That’s why God gave us reefer. Long as you’ve got reefer, you’re never alone. Reefer and books, the Dynamic Duo.

He moves in close, at an oblique angle where she’ll not likely look. Between the trees, behind the rocks, and finally, his sounds covered by a sudden gust of wind, he stretches out in a laurel thicket. Then everything else falls away and there’s nothing but her. And him watching
her, the way you chew that first meat when you’ve been a long time hungry.

Yeah, look at how she stands up on her tiptoes just before she swings her axe, then bumps back down on her heels when she hits wood. And look at how she wipes that hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. Look how that hair falls right back down into her eyes and makes her brush it back again. How she does it always the same way.

In his intensity of concentration on the Dead Lady herself, Danny misses something. Her pile of limbs has dwindled. She props her axe against the stump and goes to look for more, takes short, quick strides straight toward him. He can’t move, can’t breathe. Lies flat against the ground, the dead leaves under him a mat of slick, wet sadness pressed into his cheek. It’s all over now, him watching her. Done for and gone. Without her, what’s he going to be? Already any life he had before she came is life he has forgotten.