In Wilderness (5 page)

But he can watch. Yeah, watch till his heart and all the rest of him’s content. The hard part isn’t learning how to move so they don’t see you, it’s learning how to keep your heart from pounding so hard, your breath from coming so fast, that they hear. There’s a trick. Imagine yourself someplace quiet, safe. Danny is always with his Memaw
on a particular late-summer day in the shade of the huge water oak beside their cabin. Her bulk weighing down the rusty metal yard chair, her lap filled with dark red cherries. His mouth is stained with them, his body ringed with pits there on the dusty ground close by her swollen feet in their stretched-out cotton hose. Nothing can startle him, wound him, kill him, so long as they two sit together in that clean-swept yard.

This close, the woman’s older than he thought. Maybe older even than his mother would have been. He’s never stuck his tongue inside a woman’s ear. They’re supposed to like it, he’s been told. Not old Janelle. She only liked straight kissing. On the mouth. And no hands below the waist, no finger fucking. Ever. Not even way back when he thought they’d got engaged. He wonders what this woman likes. From the look of her, not much of anything. Danny aims his “rifle” one more time.
Pow
.

The woman trudges up the new-cut trail some longer. Then she sits on a rock to rest and he can see she’s nothing but sharp points—shoulders, elbows, knees. And shaking with a tremor that looks like it never lets her be. He smells the sickness on her before he gets his first good look. The acrid stink of medicine mixed in with puke and a third odor, a cloying sweetness he’s smelled twice before, both times on men dying.

Her face bears this out. Blue-veined skin stretched tight across her skull, drawn up mouth, cavernous eyeholes. The eyes themselves stare dully. She pants, sweats in the February air, but doesn’t make a move to unbutton her coat. Instead, she raises a gloved hand to wipe her damp forehead, lets it drift down to her pocket. Pulls something out—a Mars bar. A goddamn Mars bar. She shoves half the candy in her mouth, chews like she hasn’t eaten in a week. Nibbles the remaining half, the last bite with both hands covering her mouth. Swallows, lowers her hands, clasps them primly in her lap and sits perfectly still, her jaw clamped shut. Then suddenly—oh, shit—she doubles over, spews the whole mess out onto the ground.

“Damn it all to hell.” Says it quietly, like a single word. Like she’s not much given to cussing. Spits once, then again.

Then she takes off her right glove, wipes her mouth with the back
of her hand, wipes her hand in a clot of leaves, all of it so matter-of-fact, resigned, familiar, Danny knows whatever’s killing her has shown its face. She rubs a dangling run of snot off her nose, chafes her arms. Then glances up to where a pair of buzzards circle high as angels in the pure, white sky.

What happens next drives the last reefer haze out of his brain. The woman straightens her spine. Her breath now coming quiet as his own, she turns her face up to the birds as if she’s basking in the sun.

“Hi, babies,” she says. “I’ll leave a window open. You can pick my bones.”

Y
OU DON
’
T FEEL FOR
them. You’re there to figure out what’s going on and take appropriate measures, that’s all. At first he thinks she’s crazy, one of those dumb bitches that quit eating for meanness or no reason till they waste away to bones. But then he sees whatever’s wrong pisses her off too much to be a thing she chose. She moves so slowly, looks so annoyed by it, he pities her and knows it for a weakness he must overcome. When she stops to rest again, so shrunken, scared, and hopeless in the fading light—just a few feet from where you see the Old Man’s cabin, his meadow and his pond—Danny has to fight the urge to run out, grab her shoulders, shake her till her teeth fall out, the urge to holler, “Get up, lady, look down there.”

Even though he’s got no personal stake whatever in her getting there. Even though, truth be told, that outcome runs counter to all his interests—especially his interest in continuing to fish the Old Man’s pond.

At last she stands up, takes the few steps. Then it’s like some fit comes over her. She goes rigid as a plank and starts in trembling. Gives the sleeping bag a mighty tug, starts running down the hill with it bouncing behind her, nipping at her heels. And all the while she’s letting out these eerie little wild-bird cries as if she can’t believe she really made it.

You must not let yourself feel anything.

She jerks the sleeping bag onto the porch, takes a key out of her Mars bar pocket, turns it in the new brass lock. The front door sticks.
Always does after a rain. She shoves her brittle shoulder into it. Once. Twice. It gives, and Danny is surprised to feel relief where he is not supposed to.

That’s why he doesn’t come close as he might when she goes in, doesn’t want to know what she is doing in those rooms he ought still to be living in. Yet he’s not so far away he doesn’t hear the kitchen faucet cry out like a red-tail hawk. Or hear the stupid bitch let drop one of the cast-iron stove eyes with a clang so sudden and so loud he has to clap his hands over his mouth to keep from screaming.

Later, in twilight, he moves behind her down the privy path. When she doesn’t shut the door, he turns his back—there are some things he doesn’t need to see. Yet he can’t help but hear the clear, pure chiming of her urine in the slop jar the Old Man for some weird reason set inside the privy hole. The same dark-night sound as Memaw on her piss pot when he was a little boy.

His familiar tears come then. Silent, constant, they slide down gullies chapped raw by their predecessors running to his beard. She’s come here to die; he’s known it since he stared into her face back on the trail. For a little while he fooled himself into a kind of future. Someone to watch, someplace to be. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, next week even. Now it’s gone.

He should leave before the snow starts. Should not scuttle toward the cabin, pick a corner she can’t see from any window. Should not crouch there, sit and straddle it, should not slide in close enough to touch the walls, then closer, nor stretch out his arms, embrace the two sides of the house, nor lay his cheek against its smooth, cold stones.

Should not imagine her a foot away, sleeping where he used to sleep.

There’s a chink in the mortar, level with his face, where he can hear her breathe. He wishes he could suck it in, her breath so close like that, presses his ear hard against the crumbling mortar. Hey, whore, Dead Lady, you want a lullaby? I’ll sing you one inside my mind. Here goes.
Hushabye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby. Bees and butterflies are picking out your eyes; oh, you poor, poor little baby
.

Those are all the words he can recall of what his Memaw used to sing. He loops them round and round inside his head, while his fingers
and his thighs grow numb gripping the stones and a barred owl hoots from somewhere way back in the pines.
Hushabye, hushabye
. He hears the wind and his own breathing and the Dead Lady’s, stays there a long time.

Then something happens.

“Please, God, please. Oh, please don’t let me die.”

Danny presses the side of his face hard against the wall, hangs on till her sobs die back, even their echoes. Clings with his aching body long after she is through, as if that in itself might keep the thing from happening.

Not till the first frail snowflakes drift into his hair does he unbend himself from his stony embrace and move soundlessly back up the mountain in the dark.

S
LIMY
,
SNOWY MUCK
. T
WO FREEZING FINGERS POKING FROM YOUR
gloves. You could fall, you know, roll down the fucking mountain, knock yourself out on the Old Man’s porch, wake up and find that skinny bitch dead in the cabin. Who would find you innocent? No one, that’s who. You are not an innocent-type life form, and that’s the truth.

But Danny won’t fall. A moon’s just slid out of the clouds. Sky, snow, it’s all turned pure, pearly white. Plenty of bright light to guide old Danny home.
“There’s a moon out to-ni-ight. Let’s go strolling through the paaaaarrrk.”

He knows better than to sing a song like that. Even in his mind. Anything to do with parks can set him thinking about
that
park.

Or maybe it’s the woman did it. So scrawny she put him in mind of hippie girls. And hippie girls put him in mind of
that
hippie girl in
that
park. Put him also in mind of old Janelle, who was different from
hippie girls in every way there is, except that she’s a girl. And who he has not thought about all day not even once. Till now. Which is some kind of record probably.

Thinking about Janelle—how in high school, with her cheerleader captain and him quarterback, they’d been king and queen of everything—leads him to thinking about other shit that makes you want to drink and drug till you pass out and die. Or maybe only blow your brains out, since it’s quicker. Shit like that day he ran the ball, a day he every minute goes out of his way to never think about. Won’t think about now either. Can’t think about. Because the weather’s different. Night. Cold. Snowing.

On that other day the sky was a clear, high blue. October weather.

For the Homecoming game.

Her bus from Athens—she’d gone to the University and he’d gone to little Larramore, halfway across the goddamn state from her, because he’d got a football scholarship—came in at 12:09 p.m. He still remembers. Him standing at that scummy grocery near the campus, in the driveway circle where the buses stopped to let off passengers. Him staring down the road and actually praying, “Please, God, don’t let her be late.” The game started at two and he had to be there by one-thirty, suited out and everything. Remembers how her bus was seventeen whole minutes late when it pulled in, should have been there at 11:52. Him waiting with the rigid florist’s box, a white orchid with a golden throat to match her hair. Not purple like what other guys had bought. Different, special just for her.

She looked so pretty getting off the bus, pausing for a second on its single step in her sky-colored suit and high-heel shoes. Carrying her little train case, shading her eyes to search for him. His fingers shook when he pinned the corsage on her left shoulder. The too-short pins that came with the flower in the box were tipped with tiny pearls.

“It’s for all day,” he told her. “For the game and then for dinner and tonight,” his voice gruff because he had just pinned a flower on his girl, the same thing all the guys were doing, but so far from anything he’d ever dreamed could be a thing that he might also do. That boy who’d spent so many days out in the woods with Pawpaw, hunting squirrels so there’d be meat for dinner.

He left Janelle with Jimbo’s girlfriend at the stadium and so knew where she was sitting. Tried to keep his eyes from even looking toward her that whole afternoon, while him and all the other freshmen players warmed the bench. Watched the score, their score, spiral up so high that late in the fourth quarter he and one other freshman got sent in “just to get the feel of it.”

Then there was the ball high in the air above him, some boy in an opposing jersey jumping, reaching for it, Danny jumping higher, reaching too. Cradling it hard and running. Thirty yards. So many yards people applauded, even though it didn’t matter, the score so lopsided they had already won.

That night she wore her corsage on a dress that looked like dresses goddesses in statues wore. They danced awkwardly on the crowded floor of the gymnasium to music from some singing group he’d heard once on the radio. At intermission he led her outside into the cool air, to the practice field. There they sat in the bleachers, the only couple who had thought to walk that far. He put his arm around her, lowered her head down to his shoulder.

“If I was in a fraternity and had a pin I’d give it to you,” he said as he stroked her hair.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t need one.”

He can’t remember if he wanted her right then, thinks maybe he did not. Not that way anyway. No, he wanted her right then for all his life. Wanted to hold up in front of her a certificate that said he knew the things you need to know to be a lawyer and provide for her. Wanted to stand up in Memaw’s little church and promise he would spend his whole life with her in that silly house she’d cut out from a magazine, with its wide porch and all that stupid woodwork. Wanted to make babies with her, babies that would be like both of them.

After a few minutes sitting out there in the autumn night with the dry leaves rustling and drifting down, he did want her that other way. Wanted her so bad he stood up abruptly, said, “We need to go back now.” For her own good, to protect her from himself, from what he so desperately wanted before it was time. Because that was what you did. Because she was the kind of girl you’d do that for.

They walked back slowly, both of them reluctant. He removed his
coat, draped it around her shoulders, took her hand. Far away, they heard the singers starting up after the intermission. Their music floated through the building’s open doors.
“The evening breeze caressed the trees tenderly.”
They stopped, stood listening. In that moment Danny felt his life as he had always thought it was supposed to be, the way he had imagined it from books and his own yearnings. That this realization came to him in this way, as a fullness inside himself that would render him able to accept such a life, seemed so remarkable he allowed himself to believe in it, standing with this perfect girl across the practice field from that small-college gymnasium where a quartet of somewhat famous, not-so-young men sang their second set. Allowed himself to believe his world had at last become exactly as it should be, every part of it, and that this was the way it would remain for him through all his future. Like the Bible said: “Now and forevermore.”

Yeah, well. Wish in one boot, piss in the other, see which one fills up first.

It’s near morning. He’s got no watch, but he can tell the hour. Time’s in his blood and bones and he can sense its passing. So he knows it takes just shy of ninety minutes to make the hard climb from the Old Man’s cabin up to Danny’s mountaintop home. Up to the iron gate, where he unwinds the heavy chain he wraps around its bars to keep bears out.