The Constant Heart (27 page)

“So,” said Sara, after a little while. “What have you Einsteins come up with?”

W
E WENT FARTHER into the wilderness. This is a place or a condition that makes most people uneasy, even though everyone says otherwise. Wilderness is the salvation of humanity, they say. Of course, few people have any unguided, genuine experience with it. Take an ordinary human being, an insurance salesman, say, and drop him into northern Canada where the nearest road is a hundred miles away. What is his first sensation? A fear that has a particular reach into the most hidden, most private, most uneasy places of the mind, where, of course, panic takes its rest.

My father and I never felt that way, since we had spent years in the woods, although we had never come up this far on Furnace Creek. The landscape now showed a keen combination of death and a wild struggle to survive, and you could see this everywhere, in the progression of plants in any clearing where a fire had been started by lightning. Wild raspberries, soon to be overtopped by birch, to be overtopped by pine, which would, in turn, be overtopped by oak. In the
shadows stood the skeletons of pine, the rotting stumps and trunks of birch. And, of course, the coyotes were moving back into their old ranges and perhaps the wolves, too, down from Canada. The prospect before us, aside from the cut where the river flowed, was a clutter of new and old growth, of rot and the wild insistence of the next progression. The most telling sense, though, was the sound. The animals became quiet as we walked, as though giving warning.

Still, the quality here that was hard to explain and which my father, Sara, and I wanted to wear like a cloak was the sense of distance, of isolation, of the fact that if you got into trouble, you were on your own. The beauty here was, in a way, its indifference to anything human. My father, particularly now, found this profoundly reassuring, as I did, too. After all, it wasn't so different from what the pictures of distant galaxies suggested. It was a variety of loneliness that we flowed into, as though we could disappear into it, if we were just indifferent enough to any danger. We wanted to be part of what would scare MD and the others to death. The wild growth, the darkness of the shadows under the full canopies, the sluggish movement of the copperheads that sunned themselves in the dappled sunshine, the hawks that watched for a moment of vulnerability, all combined to validate the distance we were from any help.

My father, years before, was part of a rescue of a lost deer hunter, and when they found the hunter, he was trying to build a fire. All he had for kindling was a stack of hundred dollar bills, which he had ripped into small shreds, but they were damp and wouldn't burn.

If we got far enough into the wilderness, they'd get lost or turn back. We wouldn't have to fight them. Certainly we were quiet when we left, just at gray light. The terrain rose and gently flattened out before going up again. The flat part was marshy and the beavers had been at work there. The ponds were terraced, one behind the other like rice paddies in Asia. The dams were just layers of aspen, piled up by the beavers, a sort of spongy dike. From time to time an insect hatched and made a dimple on the tea-colored water in the ponds. In a new pond the trout get fat from not having to fight the current, although after a while the bottom of the pond fills up with leaves and the insects don't reproduce anymore and the trout die, or get short and stunted and ugly looking.

The stream went though some marshy sections, but a lot of it was meadow and we walked through the grass easily. Everything about the land, the intensity of the insects on the water, the way in which the birds were difficult to scare, the silence of the place, implied the harshness and the emptiness of it. Nothing definite, just an edge, an air of something that made you careful. For instance, you wouldn't want to get hurt up here and have to walk out. I tried to imagine what the land would sound like if you were hurt, really hurt, and didn't have a chance.

Then my father put his hand on mine.

Sara stopped to look back the way we had come, and when I walked up next to her, I came into the perfume of her hair. She turned to look at me and shook out the dark red strands. Then we both looked upstream, into the Branch Brook Wilderness Area, which existed in a smoky haze. We
started walking again, covering the ground with a pace that wasn't quite a run, but we weren't wasting much time, either. A hawk perched on a dead tree that stood up out of a flooded meadow. After a while, we seemed to breathe a little better or easier, and finally we found a dry place, not far from the stream and decided that was enough distance.

Some blue butterflies hovered around us, a couple hundred of them, each of them the color of a milk of magnesia bottle. They landed here and there and took off into the air in a blue quiver. The shimmer of them, as they rose around Sara, appeared as though the stream, which was in the background, had somehow been given an airy presence, a fluttering of wings, and the shine on the water seemed to imbue the wings of the butterflies with promise, with the buzz of making love, with the sheen in the eyes of someone who looks directly at you and tells you she loves you.

In the heat of the day, Sara and I stood on a beaver dam and fished a pond. The branches of the dam were spongy, and when we walked on it the dam gave a little. The sky was blue and the water was so still that it looked as though the trout, when they rose, were dimpling the clouds that were reflected in the pond. It was easy to catch the brook trout there, and we killed enough to eat for dinner and let the rest go. As we were catching them, Sara laughed from time to time, although it was a kind of giggle, as though she was about to do some mildly forbidden but exciting thing. The trout were spotted on the sides and they had such silky tails.

She went around to the far side of the pond and took off her clothes and bathed, half her figure above the water, and half in the mirror of the surface, her pale skin, the shape of her
breasts, the pink of a nipple, the hair between her legs showing on the green surface. As she raised an arm it shimmered in the film of the blue sky and clouds. The blue butterflies flickered behind her. She splashed and said, “It's so cold,” and went under, leaving nothing but a spreading ring. When she got out she bent at the waist, her hips there against the clutter of brush and trees, and wrung out her hair. She didn't have a towel so she found a place to lie down in the sun to dry. I glanced up once or twice and saw the air shimmer off the rock where she had stretched out in the sunlight. Little flecks of gold in the air. Insects. Dust.

We ate the trout right away, although we didn't have any more potatoes. We had some bread, and some more of the freeze-dried soup. As a treat, my father had been saving some freeze-dried ice cream and he passed it out now, the way he passed out his treats at the end of a trip. It tasted like something an astronaut ate. I let a little bit of it dissolve on my tongue and I imagined looking out the window of a spacecraft, at the utter darkness of space and at the flecks of light that existed there like chaos itself. What relief, I thought, the taste of chocolate would be at a moment like that. I looked up and Sara was eating hers slowly, too. She smiled the nicest smile I have ever seen. Just like that.

Those blue butterflies came back again, too, and Sara seemed to exist in that blue shimmer, as though the sky had somehow or other been broken up into little squares the size of a matchbook and that these hinged shapes were working in the air around us.

One landed on a log where Sara was sitting and she tried not to move, but sooner or later she did, and the butterfly took
off and flew back into that blue cloud, which hung around her and quivered. She kept her eyes on them, the erratic movement of the wings having a hypnotic quality, one that allowed her to relax enough to feel nothing else but the presence of the insects. More butterflies arrived, the mass of them settling around Sara, getting into her hair and somehow making the black eye look worse than before.

The colors of the afternoon began to fade a little, the greens absorbed by some deeper shade, and the water, under the trees, looked less green than mysterious, and the glare in the middle of the stream seemed more film-like, as though a thin piece of silver Mylar lay on the surface. The water got darker, though, as the shadows moved across the surface and obliterated even the glare in the middle. Mist appeared in the gloom between the trees, but after a while the darkness around the trunks seemed to move by itself.

It wasn't totally dark, but the light was fading and everything began the slow, unstoppable process by which objects, trees, stumps, brush, stones, rubble at the side of the stream all become indistinct, just vague forms that exist until dawn. But even by this standard, the impenetrable shades seemed alive. The diminishing light didn't hide what was before us, but just the contrary: It was now that one could feel the vitality of such places as this, although there were moments when such vitality is imbued with the ominous. There, in the shade, all the inscrutable aspects of things, all that maddened and confused, seemed to fill the last visible shapes. And so, when I saw some movement, I thought it was simply some phantom of my own doubt or anxiety, but whatever it was dropped down like a dog, although it was too big for a dog.

It moved to the stream, barely indistinguishable from those green shadows and the dark color of the trunks of the trees. Beyond it was a last silver smear of sunlight, and that made it harder to see, too.

“How many bears have you seen?” I said to my father.

“That close? Just like that? Not many,” he said. “Five.”

“It's pretty big,” I said.

“Let's keep moving. They won't bother us.”

“Is that right?” said Sara.

“Sure,” said my father. “And up here we have some copperhead dens. The snakes den up in the winter. Forty, fifty of them. They all find a nice cozy place for the winter.”

The bear was a long ways off now.

“Are these bears the kind you were talking about?” said Sara to my father. “I mean the ones who have killed for fun.”

“Well, yes. I guess that's right. You cleaned those fish down there, didn't you?” my father said to me. He pointed a hundred yards away, where I had gotten ready to help cook dinner, scrapping the gray and reddish guts onto the stones. Red the color of cordovan shoe polish.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “That's good.”

“Why is that?” said Sara.

“So it will stay away from us this time. But it will be back. They like to keep a routine.”

We sat and looked into the shadows, and from time to time I thought the darkness undulated like a green sheet on a line. The fireflies came out, each fleck of light seeming to suggest the possibilities in the darkness that surrounded it. The lights were pale green, just like a chemical highway flare. And, as
the fireflies flew, each path describing the edge of a scimitar, MD and the other two called out as they splashed in the stream. They were down below, around the bend.

They emerged from the brush, none of them too steady, one passing a bottle to another. Just like they were cut out of black paper. One in front, one in the middle, and one coming up from behind, all walking in a gait that rose and fell, rose and fell, like horses on a carousel. They kept right on coming, their murmur and laughter unemphatic, constant, business-like. They came to a flat place not far below, the three dark shapes circling like a dog before lying down, once and a second time. The packs they carried hit the ground with a smack, and they went to work, setting up that tent, pulling the guy-lines tight, still making that constant murmuring, a kind of
jar
,
jar
,
jar
. The boom box hadn't run out of batteries, at least not yet, and when they were done with the tent they turned it on. The fireflies didn't seem to care, though, and they went on flickering on and off, no matter what music was being played.

“So,” said Sara. “I thought you two were supposed to come up with something.”

“We're going to keep going,” said my father.

“It hasn't stopped them yet,” said Sara.

“Maybe we haven't gone far enough yet,” said my father. “I think that's the trick. We grind them down.”

Sara put a hand to her face, looked down at the ground, her entire posture suggesting an attitude from the past when she was defiant, when she took a joint out of the tight black shirt that made a sheen on the shape of her nipples in the library. I could almost hear her thinking that they, MD and his associates, weren't being ground down, but that my father
was. Was she able to let him do that, even if he wanted to, and what happened if he died somewhere even further up? A dead body, MD and those two others, that landscape of green chaos, the hunting birds in the air. A kind of setting for the worst. And by her posture she seemed to suggest, in her getting ready to spring like a fox at the end of log, that the days of my father wearing someone down had come to an end.

“Maybe I can talk to them,” said Sara. She shrugged toward MD. “Maybe I can save us all a lot of trouble.” When she said this word, she glanced at my father, then at me. “Maybe I can say to them, you know, if you give me a little time, if you let me think it over, why maybe I'll throw in with you. Something like that. Some half-assed agreement that would make those guys think they had scared me enough.”

“I don't think that's a good idea” said my father.

“Well, if they don't get lost, I'm going to have to do something like that.”

“I don't know,” said my father.

“Let's keep going,” I said. “There's a lot of land up there. Maybe just the scale of it will help.”

Sara's eyes had that horrible depth they always had when she considered the worst. She turned to the stream.