Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  It was on a lightless evening at the end of August, only moments after Corky Bondurant began to snuffle and snore, that Parker Monroe ducked beneath his blankets and shone his flashlight on the slip of paper he had discovered moments earlier beneath his pillow.

  Meet me, it said, in her careful script.

  Parker switched off his light. He lay listening to his cabinmates until he was certain they were all asleep, then he slipped from his bunk and dressed in jeans and sweatshirt and tennis shoes, and eased out the open door. In a light-footed sprint he zigzagged across the dark, familiar campground, ducked behind the infirmary, took a narrow footpath within yards of his parents’ log home, then opened up to a full-speed dash down the gravel road toward the main highway.

  Five miles he trotted down that hill, then another half-mile along the serpentine asphalt road that passed through the small town of Cherokee.

  With his heart thrashing as it had from his first moment with her, he climbed up the running board and slipped into the aromatic darkness beside Lucy, his Cherokee lover.

  Parker had first glimpsed her two months before, in the outdoor pageant that ran all summer at the nearby amphitheater: Unto These Hills. The drama portrayed the history of the Cherokee Nation from the Indians’ first encounter with white men till their forced removal from their native mountains and the violence and heroism that followed. It was required viewing for all Tsalimen, for it told the story of the camp’s namesake, a simple Cherokee named Tsali who had sacrificed his life so hundreds of his people would be allowed to stay in their native hills. Tsali’s sacrifice was the moral gold standard of Charles Andrew Monroe’s summer camp—that every man must be ready when the crucial moment came to lay down his life for a greater good.

  Though Lucy’s role in the play was minor, when she first moved across the outdoor stage Parker was mesmerized. The footlights sparkled on her long black hair. She stepped lightly and spoke no lines, but she held herself with such artless dignity that she lodged deep in Parker’s mind, and back in camp that night he could barely sleep.

  The next evening he went AWOL for the first time. Stealing back to the amphitheater, he talked his way backstage and fumbled through an introduction so clumsy Lucy and her friends barked with laughter. But he persisted, and the two of them wound up strolling in awkward silence down a nearby footpath that meandered beside the Oconaluftee River. On that clear night the rippling water was coated with gold, and trout rose in multitudes as if to feast on the dense moonlight. Fireflies hovered in the grass, and the air was lush with honeysuckle.

  Overpowered by the moment, he tried to kiss Lucy, but she shoved him roughly away. He blurted that she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and she laughed at him again. Foolishly he reached out to touch her cheek, but she caught his wrist in a grip as powerful as any boy’s and wouldn’t let go until he apologized for his forwardness.

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. “You think because I’m Cherokee you can do or say whatever you want.”

  “It’s just that you…” He stared at her face gleaming in that gold light.

  “I’m so exotic. So mysterious. My long black hair, my cinnamon skin. You’re swept away and can’t restrain yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not usually this way.”

  “Yeah, Thomas says you’re real polite.”

  “Thomas?”

  “My brother Thomas. I believe he sleeps below you.”

  “You’re Thomas Panther’s sister?”

  “That’s right,” she said, and smiled. “But more important to you, I’m the oldest daughter of Standingdog.”

  Parker stared at her speechlessly.

  Standingdog Matthews headed a faction of Cherokees who had been campaigning fiercely to annex several parcels of land adjacent to the reservation—land they considered sacred. One of those parcels was the meadowy knoll on which Camp Tsali stood.

  In the last year Standingdog and his people had organized the local merchants to boycott the landowners. Campers at Tsali were no longer welcome in certain shops, and several grocery stores had refused to supply Tsali’s kitchen with fresh produce. That summer there was a sudden rash of vandalism around the campground. Fires broke out, and machinery failed and had to be replaced. The new camp bus blew an engine. An avalanche of boulders destroyed the archery range. It had reached the point where any mishap around camp was blamed on Standingdog Matthews and his gang.

  “If he’s your father, why does he have a different name?”

  “My mother threw Standingdog out years ago and took back Panther.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It complicates things, doesn’t it, Romeo?”

  Lucy Panther smiled at him and stepped back from Parker and turned to watch the river’s golden passage.

  “It doesn’t have to.” He reached for her again, but she skipped away.

  “What I suggest, Parker, is that you go back to your camp and get more practice being a Cherokee, and if you ever get any better at it, maybe we can talk again.”

  That week he wandered in an airless trance. Nothing he knew about girls had prepared him for her. Parker had a glib and easy manner, and he’d always found girls his age to be plentiful and compliant.

  But Lucy was something else. She’d spoken to him with the scorn of an adult chiding a misbehaving child, and stared disdainfully at his white skin as if it were a fatal affliction.

  Finally he cranked up his nerve and snuck down the mountain a second time and waited in the parking lot until the pageant was over. She was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and her hair hung to her waist. She met his eyes but didn’t alter her path to her pickup truck. She got inside, started the engine.

  Parker stood nearby and waited. The truck idled for several minutes until the parking lot was clear. When finally the passenger’s door squeaked open a few inches, he let go of a breath he’d been holding for the last week and moved quickly and slid into the seat beside her.

  For the next hour he said little, but listened attentively as she told him of her younger brother who collected butterflies, a little sister who suffered from epilepsy.

  As she talked, Parker stayed on his side of the truck, reining in his pulse as best he could. He spoke only when she posed a specific question. Late in the evening, after she parked on a bluff that looked west toward the dark mountains, Lucy went silent for a long moment, then suddenly leaned her face to his and rewarded his restraint with a kiss.

  Another week of nights passed before their kissing deepened and Parker touched for the first time the dusky silk of her hidden flesh. Then in the unforgettable summer nights that followed they made love dozens of times in the tall, flickering grass beside the Oconaluftee. Her hair smelled like the river’s lush perfume and her body surged like its dark currents and together they were swept along at the river’s raging pace.

  Lying together afterward in the high, fragrant grass, they watched the constellations shift and listened to the Oconaluftee move across the boulders with a deep, steady rumble, and Parker felt that new feeling steal through his body like that mysterious river noise, a deep resonance that swelled inside his chest and brightened the stars and gave the breeze an unbearable sweetness.

  For two months their romance flourished, then on that moonless night in August, an evening when they were not scheduled to meet, her note brought him racing down the hill, breathless and sweating and full of the amazing certainty that Lucy Panther had come to need him as much as he did her.

  He climbed into the truck, gave her a quick kiss, and as she drove him silently to their spot beside the Oconaluftee, he felt again the airless heat of his passion, the mad roar fill his ears.

  “How did you get the note to me?”

  “Thomas,” she said simply.

  When she parked the truck and swiveled on the seat, he saw from her expression that there would be no kissing tonight. No words of love. He drew a careful breath.

  “What is
it?”

  She brushed the hair from her face, set her mouth, and looked away.

  “Standingdog knows about us,” she said. “He knows everything.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a small town, Parker. A small tribe. People talk.”

  She stared out the windshield at the black, gleaming water, moving so quickly but moving not at all.

  “I’m sorry, Parker. But this is finished.”

  “He’s not even your father anymore. He doesn’t live with you. Why should it matter what he thinks?”

  “He’s my father. He’ll always be my father.”

  “Hell, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him how I respect you. How much I respect your customs, everything about you and your people. I’ll just tell him.”

  “He already knows who you are. He knows what you respect.”

  She turned her head and showed him the other side of her face. Her eyes and lips were puffy, and a lump disfigured her forehead.

  “He beat you.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Shit, I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

  She raised her hand.

  “No.”

  “This isn’t about you and me. It’s about my father. The land.”

  “It’s all the same. You can’t help who you are. None of us can.”

  “I’m his son, but he and I aren’t the same person. Don’t do this.”

  “It’s done.” She wouldn’t look at him.

  It was nearly two in the morning when she pulled up to the entrance road to camp. Parker had not tried to argue her from her decision. She had taught him the power of silence, and now it was all he had to use.

  When she’d brought the truck to a halt, she turned and looked at him. In the green glow from the dash, her face was slack, a withered mask.

  “Lucy, I love you. You love me. Don’t throw that away.”

  “Go on,” she said quietly. “Get out of my truck. It’s finished.”

  She reached across him and opened his door.

  “Go,” she said. “Go.”

  Parker stepped down and had to jump aside as her tires threw a storm of gravel. He watched her taillights swerve around the first bend and disappear.

  The rest of the tale was exactly as Charlotte had heard it a dozen times before. When Parker reached the campground, he found his parents’ home in flames. No one in the camp had awakened yet, for the house was more than half a mile from the cabins. He hesitated for a moment, staring at the flames, then drew a deep breath and rushed into the burning house.

  Fire ringed the living-room floor, springing up from a glistening trail of what smelled like kerosene. Flames climbed the walls, feeding on the drapes and his grandmother’s quilt, which hung from the wall below the stairs. The heavy oak logs had not yet caught, but the fire had already risen up the stairway and was fluttering at the upstairs floorboards.

  With the smoke growing more dense at every step, Parker could barely see by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs that led to the sleeping quarters. Before he started up, he looked back through the dense smoke of the great room. There was still a narrow path of escape, but the flames were closing fast.

  He screamed to wake his parents. But his voice was swallowed by the roar. As he mounted the stairs, a heavy beam from the ceiling gave way and fell in his path and the shower of sparks set his shirtsleeve ablaze. A second later, another rafter gave way and clipped him on the side of the skull.

  When he came to, Diana was kneeling at his side in the grass of the main yard. Her hair was singed, and a gash on her cheek had been hastily bandaged.

  Chief was consumed in the fire that night, along with Nathan Philpot, the boy from Parker’s cabin, and a handyman who’d been hired only a week before. A man named Jeremiah. It was assumed that Jeremiah had been awakened by the noise of the fire and tried to rescue the Monroes, only to perish himself.

  During the trial, the prosecution argued that the unlucky Nathan Philpot had changed bunks to escape the noxious fumes coming from his counselor, slipping into the cot that Parker Monroe had vacated. Before setting the fire, the culprit had gone to Parker’s cabin, mistaken Nathan for Parker, and dragged him back to die with the rest of the family.

  The prosecutor claimed it was clearly Standingdog Matthew’s goal to wipe out the entire Monroe clan because of their refusal to part with their land.

  Parker did not take the stand and refused to tell anyone, even Diana, where he’d been that night.

  Standingdog offered no defense. In a buckskin jacket, he sat erect but showed no sign that he understood the words spoken against him or in his behalf. And he sat impassively when the prosecutor pointed at Standingdog Matthews and named him as the killer and listed the evidence against him. A boy in Parker’s cabin who had seen him wake Philpot and drag him away. The kerosene-spattered shirt found hidden in his shack, his long-standing feud with the Monroe family, his lack of an alibi on the night of the fire, and the testimony of several other Cherokees who confirmed that Standingdog had made repeated threats on the Monroe family.

  The defense attorney cross-examined no one, and Standingdog continued to listen placidly as a parade of witnesses praised Chief as the most inspiring man they’d ever known.

  None of the Panthers attended the trial. One evening Parker could endure it no longer and stole Diana’s car and drove to the Panthers’ home in Horse Cove. The place had been stripped to the bare walls. The Panthers long gone. None of the neighbors would speak a word to Parker.

  When Parker was finished with the story, Charlotte rolled onto her side and put her back to him. He reached out and lay a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t respond. She lay listening to the night sounds, the hum of distant traffic, an incessant dog barking a few doors away. Her heart felt as if it had swollen to such a size inside her chest that it was cramping against her ribs.

  All she had ever believed about Parker Monroe now had to be reconsidered. Over the years, she had never caught him in an overt lie. But after hearing his story, she saw he’d been treating her as he’d dealt with the FBI interrogators. Omitting the crucial facts, giving her the bare outlines of truth, but not its whole weight.

  As far as Charlotte was concerned, leaving out the girl and the love affair amounted to something worse than a lie. For Lucy Panther was the very heart of the story, the meaning of it. Charlotte lay unmoving, her blood cold in her limbs, as if she’d just discovered the man she loved was a charlatan. A man who had pretended to be simple and honest and true, but was actually far more complex, more darkly haunted than she could have known.

  And worse than that, far worse when she considered its consequences for the future of their marriage, Parker Monroe was a man who very possibly had used up a crucial portion of his lifetime supply of passion before Charlotte ever walked onto the stage.

  Ten

  Ten o’clock on tuesday morning a blinding thunderstorm brought the traffic on Dixie Highway down to five miles an hour, though some maniacs were still cutting and weaving at five times that, as though it were full sunshine. Diana Monroe hugged the far right lane and crept along, leaning forward to peer through the smeared window of her Jaguar.

  A few hours earlier, bedraggled and reserved, Parker had called a cab and left the house at seven.

  With her cruiser still in the motor pool, Charlotte had little choice but to call her mother-in-law for a ride downtown. Gracey sat in the backseat muttering to herself while the two women rode silently in the front. Charlotte had called into work and been granted a temporary reprieve from her next session of facial videos. She wasn’t due back at the station until after lunch.

  Normally, Gracey took the Metrorail downtown to the New World Center, Miami’s school for the artistically gifted. But after the drama last night, Charlotte had decided she needed to speak with Mr. Steven Underwood, make sure he realized the enormous strain Gracey was under. If there were other teachers besides Underwood who held sway in her daughter’s life, Charlotte hadn�
��t heard their names mentioned.

  Charlotte also wanted another look at the young teacher, to decide which of her impressions of him was accurate. On the three other occasions they’d met, the young man seemed to fluctuate between sincere concern for Gracey’s welfare and smug amusement at Charlotte’s worry. It was possible both Underwoods existed. At twenty-five, the young man might identify a little too closely with his students. Smart enough to make nice to parents one-on-one, then later undermining the hell out of them, scoffing at their old-fashioned values to score points with his students. Charlotte was determined to find out. It was time to start plugging holes in the dike, no matter how minor they might appear to be.

  As soon as Diana slid into a parking space outside the New World Center for the Arts, Gracey popped out of the back door and without a word hurried up the stairs into her school.

  “I can’t park here,” Diana said.

  “There’s a parking garage around the block, near the courthouse.”

  Diana looked over at her and shook her head, something vaguely disapproving in her eyes, although Charlotte knew if she called Diana on it, there would be denials. “I don’t disapprove of you, darling. I’m on your side one hundred percent.” Though it never felt that way. Never in all these years had Charlotte considered herself a full-fledged member of the Monroe clan.

  As odd as it seemed, part of her alienation had to do with Diana’s appearance. Her mother-in-law carried herself with such a straight-backed dignity, something so close to haughtiness, that she managed to radiate a superiority and distance that Charlotte could never quite bridge. Her face was all patrician sharp angles. An aristocratic geometry made more severe by her arching eyebrows and neatly composed mouth and piercing brown eyes. She had rich black hair with only a few stray strands of white. Miraculously, her deep golfer’s tan had not damaged her complexion. She had the velvety skin of a woman in her twenties. Her daytime wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of bright pastel pants and polo shirts with the insignia of the Granada Country Club. She was handsome in a way that no one in Charlotte’s shabby Tennessee family was. It was a beauty that was handed down reverently through the generations along with the family silver and crystal and a few rare gemstones.