Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (10 page)

“Probably slipped,” Richard says. “See that cliff? Bet it's right off the trail.”

High on the mountain, a granite ledge merges with blue sky. Richard climbs into the tree, shoves a stiffened leg, and the body tilts forward. Another shove, and it falls to the ground. He climbs down, goes through the guy's backpack, pulls out a wallet. Thumbs through it and holds up a driver's license. “Christopher Orringer. . . . Born in 1935.”

“Old guy,” I say.

“He didn't have anyone.”

“What?”

“Been dead for two, maybe three weeks and there's no one out looking for him. This guy's a goner and nobody cares.”

“Got any money?” I say.

He holds up four twenties and hands me one.

“You shorted me,” I say.

“I got him out of the tree.”

He's right. Fair is fair.

“We should build a funeral pyre,” he says. “Consider the money as exchange for labor.”

“I'm not starting a forest fire.”

“The woods are too wet to catch.” He grabs a branch and drops it next to the dead man. “You helping or what?”

“You want my help, you give me my half.”

Richard hands me another twenty, and we stack branches into a pile four feet high. He searches for a hollow log, scrapes out dry, crumbly wood from the interior, snaps twigs off a branch hanging above the ground, then builds a tepee at the bottom of the pile. He lights the wood in the center, blows on it until flame creeps upward and small branches catch fire. When the larger branches catch, we swing the man into the flames. I don't want to smell burning flesh, so I start moving through the forest. Richard catches up and leads the way, which is a good thing because I was angled in the wrong direction. We regain the trail and walk up the mountain. When we get to where the man fell, we stop for a few minutes. What looked like a cliff is actually a boulder off the trail. He must have climbed up to get a view of the surrounding mountains. We climb up and look down at smoke boiling through the trees.

“Hell of a way to die,” Richard says.

I wonder what the man was thinking on the way down. Might be a bunch of bullshit but I've heard people who fall to their death relive a lifetime in a few seconds.

“You really should give Stacy a spin,” Richard says. “I've seen the way she looks at you.”

“I'm meeting my girlfriend in Franklin.”

“Does she walk around naked?”

“You're a weird cocksucker,” I say.

“I've been called worse.”

*   *   *

Twelve days into my hike, 106 trail miles north of Springer, I arrive at Winding Stair Gap and hitch east to Franklin, where I check into the Franklin Motel and settle into my room. The air has a pine scent odor, like the maid sprayed freshener on her way out the door. The carpet is new, and the walls are freshly painted. I take a shower and wash clothes in the sink, scrub my socks three times before the water turns clear. Then I walk to the grocery store, where I buy enough food to reach Nantahala Gorge, which is less than thirty miles to the north.

On my way back, plump plastic bags dangling from both hands, I hear cars traveling highways, a barking dog, the hum of a transformer bolted to a street pole, a woman screaming at two kids in a van parked in front of the check-in office. I've lived in towns for most of my life, but this is the first time I've
listened
to one. The noise is constant, a nervous old man who can't stop jabbering.

Richard, on the sidewalk, holds up a bottle of Scotch and invites me in for a drink. I stash my groceries in my room and head his way. Inside, Stacy sits on his bed and so does Valerie, who has been in town for three days waiting for a tent manufacturer to send new poles. Valerie tells a story about a branch that fell on her tent during a windstorm, and Richard tells one about how his spirit guide, the bear, stopped him from stepping on a rattlesnake. I make one up about throwing rocks at a skunk that wouldn't get off the trail. Richard and I look at each other and a
silent agreement passes between us. What happened—burning the dead guy, taking eighty dollars off him—is between us and no one else.

Valerie, a forty-six-year-old professor, takes a sabbatical every seven years and goes on an adventure. She has black eyes, a marine haircut, looks at Richard like she could swallow him whole. Stacy stares at me from where she sits on the bed. I drink what's left of my Scotch and hand my glass to Richard, who gives me a refill and hands it back. Roxie's failure to show, not even leaving a message at the front desk explaining why, only means one thing.

There is no us.

Instead of feeling sad, euphoria sweeps over me. For the first time in my life I am only looking forward. It's an airy feeling, like I've been transported to a surface with minimal gravity. I watch as Richard shrugs out of his dress and Valerie sits on his lap. Stacy sits on mine. We kiss and this time I do not move away. We leave and go to my room, where we take off our clothes and go at it. She moans and twitches, and I get into it after awhile. We screw for a half hour or so, and I roll off and stare at the ceiling. I'm breathing hard and so is she.

“How was it?” she says. “Was it okay for you?”

“Sure. . . . Sure, it was great.”

I step into my shorts and walk outside. The moon, pumpkin colored and half round, suspends above the mountains. The door opens and Stacy comes across the parking lot. She's dressed, and her cheeks shimmer under the neon sign on the motel wall. I tell her goodnight and she says the same, walks down the sidewalk toward her room.

In the morning I take four aspirins to get rid of my headache,
dump the food I bought yesterday into Ziploc Baggies. Richard comes in and asks if I want breakfast before we hitch to the trail. His eyes are red and I can tell I'm not the only one hungover.

“I could eat,” I say.

“I'm a pancake man.”

“I could eat a cow,” I say.

He says Valerie was a regular cougar and asks about my night.

“We mostly talked,” I say.

“I'm sorry your girlfriend didn't come.”

“Ex.”

“Like that?”

“Like that.” My voice has a finality to it, but yesterday's euphoria over my new freedom dissipated overnight, and I'm already thinking of the letter I plan to write before I leave town.

Richard and I walk a block down the street to a diner, where I order coffee and a double order of steak and eggs. Richard orders a triple stack of pancakes and shovels it in like he 's starved half to death. My seat has a rip that digs into my back, and I shift away from the aisle, settle next to the window, where I spin the saltshaker in circles. Behind a long counter a man in an apron and a white hat turns sizzling bacon with a spatula. A woman in a booth in the rear of the restaurant holds a baby to her chest and rocks back and forth. The front door opens, a squeak of metal hinges, and Stacy comes in and sits beside me.

“I'm getting off,” she says. “Valerie and I are going out to New Mexico to work on a ranch and ride horses for the summer.”

“Sounds good,” I say.

Richard walks to the counter and pays for his breakfast, says he'll meet me at the motel. I nod, sip my coffee, cut steak into chewable pieces. The steak is medium rare, how I like it, and red juice oozes onto the plate. The coffee is hot and black.

“Valerie doesn't mind if you come,” Stacy says. “The more the merrier.”

“You're asking me to get off the trail?”

“You don't have to make it sound so horrible.” There's a red mark on her neck, a hickey I don't remember leaving.

“I can't,” I say.

“You can't or you won't?”

I drain a glass of milk, ask the waitress for another. The waitress brings the milk and I drink it down. Stacy speaks in a firm voice.

“If she loved you, she'd be here instead of me.”

Although I don't look at Stacy, I feel her watching me. I finish eating, and we get up and walk to the motel, where she kisses me and gets into a rental car with Valerie and drives away.

In my room, I write Roxie and tell her I'm sorry I missed her, that I'm not ready to give up on us. I list my upcoming resupply points and estimated dates of arrival. Then I kid around and say I look forward to chocolate chip cookies in my packages. I doubt she'll send anything but it's worth a try. My hands are shaking and my body feels weak as hell. Roxie is a drug I have never been able to quit. Maybe I can walk her out of my system and maybe I can't. Time will tell.

Richard meets me at the mailbox across the street, asks if I want to carry what's left of the Scotch.

“You want it, you carry it,” I say, adding there is no way in hell I'm adding the extra weight to my pack. He studies the bottle,
like he weighs the pros and cons, and wistfully turns it upside down. Alcohol puddles at our feet.

“I need to lay off,” he says. “I don't want to be falling off any boulders.”

*   *   *

On the north side of Winding Stair Gap, a bird sings a three-note song. The notes have a tubular sound, a haunting that comes without warning, music that stops me in my tracks. High up, clouds ride the jet stream. The temperature is in the sixties, perfect weather for hiking this forested mountain. The pickup that dropped Richard and me at the trail head drives down the road, and he walks up the trail.

I stay where I am and watch cars speed past. I don't know what I'm waiting for or why I'm here. I think about the dead man in the forest, if the good outweighed the bad when his life flashed before his eyes. It doesn't matter, I suppose. Dead is dead.

I study a white blaze painted on the side of a tree. White blazes are the secret out here. As long as a hiker's seeing white blazes, he's on the trail. I try to think about the thousands of white blazes between Georgia and Maine, but the trail is too stretched out to imagine all at once.

6

“HON?” DALTON SAYS.

Six
AM
and his eyelids feel sandpapery, each scrape across his pupils a reminder he spent the night staring at the shadowed ceiling. Deirdre entwines her feet in his and issues a grumbled moan. Her nightgown smells of something he can't place. Vanilla, maybe.

“We're not getting any younger,” he says. He likes looking at his wife in the mornings and rises on an elbow to study her face. Her gaze, as she drifts toward consciousness, seems innocent and pliable and reminds him of how she looked during the first years of their marriage.

“Go back to sleep,” she says.

“I'll be twenty-eight next month and you're turning thirty-nine.”

“I'm turning
twenty
-nine.” She comes fully awake, wary gaze focused on his.

“Like I said, you'll be turning forty-nine and I'll be turning twenty-eight and it's time we started thinking about it.”

“I
have
thought about it.”

Dalton sits on the side of the bed and scoots his feet along
the floor in search of his slippers. Barefoot, he goes to the bureau, peers into the mirror, and rubs a sleep mark off his jaw. The brush on the doily is his. The comb is hers. She cut her curls short and despite his objections will not grow them back. He raises his arms and bends at the waist. He's not as limber as he was in college, and it takes three tries before his fingers touch his toes. His cotton pajamas sag in the rear, an aggravating circumstance he mitigates with an upward jerk of the waistline.

“It's that girl,” Deirdre says. She wraps the comforter around her shoulders. “Ever since she went missing you started back on this pregnancy kick.”

He's always been this way. Faces on milk cartons, AMBER Alerts, anything to do with a missing child starts him thinking about what he and his wife don't have. If only she would go off the pill and let things happen. Later today, maybe he'll light a candle, turn on some easy listening, and cozy up with her on the sofa. He'll remind her, tactfully of course, that only two months ago he shut down his furniture outlet company to follow her from California to western Virginia. She's the first woman postmaster in the county, an accomplishment that pleases him. It's her turn to give a little.

“Dalton,” she says. “I invited a couple for lunch.”

“Today?”

“I'm sorry. I should have told you sooner.”

“Not a problem.” He thinks it's best to stay on her good side. “We'll talk when I get back.”

*   *   *

On the edge of a road, on a mountain that drops to finger ridges flattening into a valley, Dalton calls for the girl, listens for a response, and hears only the trill of a distant thrush. He is amazed
at how dissimilar this land is from the prosaic browns and yellows of the California desert. Here, in the belly of the Appalachians, trees have leafed out and green tints the ridges. Instead of cacti and mesquite growing out of hot sand, ferns and mushrooms populate the cool forest floor, and water trickles down narrow ravines. Chipmunks dart over logs and scuttle from hiding place to hiding place, each dash accompanied by a rustling sound. Too, the air is different, and the breeze, leftover from a recent cold snap, feels cool as a moistened washcloth against his skin.

He zips his windbreaker to the throat and thinks of the question Deirdre asked a couple days ago. He could not answer her coherently, could not tell her
exactly
why he wants a baby. It'd be nice to have a baby, he finally said. They left it at that, but last night, between beating his pillow into submission and watching the moon shadows, he started wondering if his desire to procreate is instinctual. I am, therefore I breed. Can it be that simple?

Now, he watches a forest service truck drive up, front tires bouncing across the ruts. A man in a green uniform leans out the window.

“We got a tip she's on the other side of the mountain,” the man says, and sweeps his arm in a half circle.