Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  I scraped the bark off a stick with my fingernail. I’d grown up in the suburbs.

  Not that it was bad. It taught me that the woods is the best place to be. She blew at a mosquito that was circling us. The mosquito disappeared and Maggie dug the toe of her boot into the ground and looked into the trees. Hey, Pete.

  Yeah?

  You miss Julie?

  I looked at my boots. Of course.

  Well, go find her.

  She walked toward me until she was standing a foot away, then looked up into my eyes. She wore a sleeveless cotton top unbuttoned at her neck, and I could see the soft, gently lined flesh between her breasts. She touched my chin with her finger, ran it along the line of my jaw, then turned around and continued walking up the hill, and I followed her legs and her boots and felt my stomach go sick with joy and with fear.

  Now at the top of the ridge I pause where Maggie and I stopped: a small clearing of wood ferns turned mustard from frost, scattered amid boulders. I’m out of breath; the muscles in my legs burn. I turn around and catch a view of the top of the mountain. There’s a little overhang and below it a flat spot where Maggie said the whiskey still once was. Whiskey in Vermont? I asked her. Thought you were Puritans.

  She raised an eyebrow at me. I look like one?

  No. I smiled. I was standing so close, I could see beads of sweat on the skin of her arms.

  Hey, Pete, she said, looking into the trees.

  Yeah?

  Hold me?

  Sometimes your body condones something before your mind. I reached out and held her and she put her head on my chest and I thought, Rich’s woman, Rich’s Maggie, but I didn’t let go. I stroked her hair and breathed in, put my hands on her arms, and wondered what on earth she was after, what the hell she wanted of me. When had I ever made a woman happy? What the hell did I know what to do with her sadness? She smelled like coffee and sweat and the woods we’d been walking through: the sweetness of hemlocks and pines. Then she pulled away without looking into my eyes and continued on up the trail.

  It wasn’t long after she met Rich that she moved into his cabin. She didn’t seem to have any family around anymore, or if she did, I never saw them. She planted a little garden and a few flowers in the small clearing. She seemed, back then, in love with Rich in a way that made Deb and I shy each time we drove home after being with them. It felt like there was something about life we didn’t know, or something about each other we didn’t dare explore.

  Rich threw wild parties at the cabin—coke, whiskey, bonfires—and started his concrete business. Maggie stopped waiting tables and Rich bought her a brand-new Honda. We all hung out still, but Deb said there was something about Maggie that didn’t seem right; she said she partied too hard, drank too much. She would crank the music on the stereo in that cabin, let her hair down, and shake madly in her tight stone-washed jeans and plaid shirts. In the mornings she was quiet and shy, a little stiff, like there was somewhere else she wanted to be. She would glance out the window toward the woods, then run her fingers up and down Rich’s forearm while he talked, and I used to think, Damn, Rich, damn.

  Pete, she said that day, here on this ledge where I now stand, her head against my crazy beating chest.

  Yeah?

  Sleep with me.

  Like I said, sometimes the body outthinks the mind. I slept with Maggie that day up here on these ferns, and later in my bed, and later still on a blanket out under the pines.

  After that she showed up every day. I never knew what time she would come, only that she would. I stopped going to cafés or bars, just waited out my hours in the trailer reading what books were there—some Robert Parker novels and a guide to wild mushrooms—and making quick trips into town for coffee and beans and ground beef and beer. I lived for that moment she appeared at the edge of my clearing. Hiya, she’d call out, grinning, and I’d be out that door ready to go faster than I could say why.

  She took me all around this mountain. She knew where the springs were—buried amidst ferns and saplings, water sweeter and colder than anything—and where woodsmen had hidden tin cups a half century ago. She knew where to find the old cellar holes and the stone walls and logging roads that ran between them. She knew the deer trails and the overturned tree roots where bears slept in winter and a small cave on the far side that her grandma Sugar used to say was an Indian hideout. She stared into that cave, her eyes narrowed, as if there were ghosts in there whose voices only she could hear.

  Ten years after Maggie moved in with Rich he started building a new house at the bottom of the mountain. It had a grand entryway with marble tiles and twelve panes of glass in the front door. Two years after that Rich made a contract with Ron Bates, who started building houses that popped up like bales of hay in the fields around them, and a year after that he tore down the old hunting cabin.

  I like your house, I told Maggie the first time I saw it finished. She stood barefoot at the kitchen counter in cut-off blue jeans and a sweatshirt, balanced like a flamingo with one foot pulled up against her thigh. I had come into the kitchen for a beer; Rich was in the living room watching a game. Maggie poured some Bacardi into a cup of Coke she had perched on the counter.

  I think it looks like ass, she said, unsmiling. She looked out the window at the big houses across the field. Rich had started working twelve-hour days and coming home late, and I guessed it was her unhappiness he was trying both to quell and to escape.

  It’s not so bad, I said, running my hand over the smooth marble of the counter. I’d take it.

  She chuckled. Bullshit. No you wouldn’t.

  I blushed. She was right. There were some things I thought belonged in fields, and some things I thought did not.

  Hey, Pete.

  Yeah?

  Do you remember the man I married? She glanced toward the living room.

  Rich, I said.

  Maggie raised her eyebrows at me. Yeah. Rich. Used to say I was all mountain. That that’s why he loved me. She laughed from deep in her belly. And the girl I was believed it.

  Maggie preferred to walk the long way, taking our time bushwhacking over ridges and across streams and through the dense swamp pockets of hemlock and pine, getting lost and then somehow touching on a familiar logging trail again and feeling found.

  Trees, she said one day, I love goddamn trees. Just like a goddamn hippie.

  I laughed, shrugged. My uncles and dad worked the big sawmills in Mass, so our lives had hatched at different points along the line of the fate of trees: her people cut them down and hauled them out of the woods, and mine sawed them into planks and loaded them onto big trucks headed south to Connecticut and New Jersey and New York.

  Those assholes building the houses down there, she said, gesturing toward Rich’s field, where still more houses were being built. Those assholes don’t know their dick from their ass.

  I nodded again, but I wasn’t sure I knew much of anything either, when push came to shove. I’d worked for Ron Bates plenty. All I knew was I liked sharing the woods with Maggie. I liked the way she stepped carefully, and stopped to breathe things in, and bent over a track in the mud and named her find. Coyote, she would say. Or, Fisher.

  Sometime in July she told me about the miscarriages: three in five years. She didn’t look at me when she said it, just lay in my bed with the sheets around her lower half. She was drinking, and I think if she’d been sober or looked at me, she wouldn’t have told me at all, so I was careful not to meet her eyes. I reached for my cigarettes and lit one and thought briefly about one time, maybe five years earlier, when I’d seen her sitting on a stump at the edge of the clearing outside the new house, twirling her hair in her fingers and staring out into the woods. I thought of that love-sick doe I’d seen.

  I didn’t think you wanted to have kids, I said finally. My voice was all in my head.

  Maggie laughed but the laugh meant something else. She tipped her head back, baring her long neck, her collarbone. Yeah. Me neither. Hey, Pete.

/>   Yeah?

  You tell Julie about trees? You take her into the woods with you?

  No, I said, my heart buckling in my knees, some new kind of pain settling there. But I should, huh?

  Yeah. Yeah. Fuck yeah you should.

  I go right at the end of the logging trail, scramble up the ledge, skin my palm on some loose rock. I wipe the blood on my jeans and stop to take a leak. The high-contrast, warm light of morning has changed to a cooler blaze that settles on the trees and leaves and makes the oranges and reds and yellows almost bland. It’s my least favorite time of day, when the hours feel longest, like they will go on forever without the respite of dark or drink. The birds have quieted and the mist has burned off, and I start down the west side of the hill, sliding over patches of leaves, swearing, wishing I had something to eat or drink. I half run, half skid down the steepest section in my tennis shoes, pushing branches away from my face, hoping I don’t fall on my ass, half hoping I will. Partway down I catch a glimpse of the trailer’s roof: a shock of white amidst all those trees. Something moves there in the clearing next to it, and my heart jumps—Maggie! I think first, and then Rich. But it moves again, and I see it is just a doe, standing there in the clearing, feeding on woodland grass. It startles and jerks its head, sniffing, then darts back into the woods. The trailer door swings open in the breeze. Home, Maggie once stood here and called it, reaching for my hand. Our heavenly little woodland home.

  Every day she came. Summer grew lush and too hot, and the woods filled with mosquitoes. The dying maples started to turn, and the sumac berries ripened. I never asked her where she told Rich she was going or what excuses she made up after the fact. I didn’t know what she was after, and that feeling terrified me, but I wasn’t going to risk anything by asking.

  In August she started getting careless and I started getting nervous. She’d show up on weekends when I knew Rich was home, or at least when I knew he’d be wondering where she was when he got there. She’d wait until it was almost dark before going back down the logging trail.

  You think Rich’ll be hungry for dinner? I’d ask.

  You think I give a fuck? she’d reply, smiling. She wasn’t checking her hair or her face in the mirror before she left; she wasn’t bothering to wash under her arms or between her legs. She was also growing fleshy and talkative in a way I’d never seen her. Maggie would lie back on the lawn chair outside the trailer and look up at the stars popping out of the dimming sky, play with the label of her bottle, and talk.

  This’ll be our life, Pete. You, me, a trailer and a cooler of beer and bear meat and moose skin. You wanna be a trapper? I think you’d make a good trapper. The two of us. Fisher cat, fox, mink. They sell for a good price now.

  I laughed, but I was thinking of Rich coming home to the big house down the hill with no lights on and seeing Maggie’s Honda there in the driveway, of him sitting at the table in the dark, waiting. I was thinking of what was, or wasn’t, growing inside her.

  Or one night in late August: Run away with me. Come to Saskatchewan with me. I’ve never been to Canada. I’m almost forty. Come on. A couple of old farts growing old in the trees.

  But I didn’t run away with her. I never took her seriously, never believed that a life with me was what she would choose. Now I think I might have been wrong: that maybe her daytime reveries were the closest she came to saying what she really wanted. But I have no way of knowing for sure, or how things would have turned out—whether we would have made it to Saskatchewan, or if we would still turn each other on trapping fur in the deep north woods for survival. Or if that flicker of light inside her would have survived. Or if any of that would have made her, or me, happy.

  All I know is this: in early September, heavy rain fell two nights in a row and she didn’t show up the first day, or the next. The morning after that I went down the track and found a note on the windshield of my pickup. The paper was soggy, Rich’s handwriting almost illegible. It said Maggie’s Honda had been found by the side of I-91 next to the Silver Creek bridge, the driver’s door open, that Maggie was nowhere to be found. It said, Goddamn. I stood there in the leaves next to my truck and smelled that river and the scent of whatever half-empty bottle I imagined lay on the floor of her car. I heard cars and trucks flying north and south at seventy miles per hour. I pictured Maggie’s body leaping off that bridge, tangling in reeds and mud, the trees above waving their branches in the wind. I pictured her with her thumb out by the side of the northbound lane, leaving her house and car and the two of us behind, heading where there are lots more trees to get lost in.

  I stumble down the rest of the hill, half running, out of breath. At the trailer I throw the door open, cautious as always, but there is no one. When we were boys, Rich was the better woodsman: quicker, quieter, stronger. I know the weight of his feet falling in leaves, I know the silent slinging motion of his arms as he walks, the way his fingers grip a gun. If he killed me, no one would have to know. Maybe Julie would come looking for me, but the body would be gone by then, dragged somewhere decent like a granite cave or to the edge of a quarry ledge and let go.

  I open the cupboard and stuff a few stale crackers into my mouth, crack open two beers and bring them back to my mildewed chair outside, and think of Rich. Sometimes at night I walk the mile and some through the woods to the edge of his field and look at the big house; blue flickering lights of the TV, his Ford in the driveway, but I’ve never seen him. Or knocked. Or gotten down on my knees and begged. I know I should leave, but I don’t. Julie will turn eighteen in a month and has said she doesn’t want to see me until I dry out. Which I will do. Tomorrow, I say, every night, but today there is just this: this walking, this light, this smelling Maggie in the sheets and on the couch and in the dirt out on the lawn. There is heading into the woods looking for traces—some piece of clothing or note scratched into bark, some sign of what it was she wanted. There is this mountain, full of woodland springs and trampled beds and deer and birds and woodland paths. And there is hoping, too. Hoping I’ll round some bend and there she’ll be—sitting on a log grinning, her belly round and flush, those animal eyes. That it was all some magnificent joke: Maggie and her ninety-year-old horse-logging Indian grandma camped out in that cave on the backside of the mountain, living on roots and wild mushrooms, laughing at me when I round the bend. Ha! Those lips those legs those eyes. Those hands to show I’m loved. Or think I am.

  I’m about to get up from my chair and go inside when I hear a branch break in the woods behind me. I turn to look but I am too slow. There is Rich, my old friend, with soft blue eyes and a workingman’s face, standing three feet away. He raises his arm as if it is a rifle and points it toward my face. We hold each other’s gaze, and it is, for that moment, just like I have imagined—my breath cold and uneven, rising and falling, and I think, Yes, do it, calm and clear—and then I think of Julie, and what I have yet to show her, or give her, and my heart buckles and he lowers his arm.

  Damn you, Pete, he whispers.

  I know, I say, breathing. He has lost ten pounds and his arms look withered; I think of the boy I knew and blush.

  And then he comes and sits down on the leaf-pocked ground beside me. He sits slouched over his knees and stares, like I do, aimlessly into the dark shadows of the woods, and I think: What old boys we have become. What fools. What cruel old friends. And then our eyes catch something moving in the woods on the hillside above us, and both our heads turn, at the same moment, watching that flickering light, believing in it, wanting it, hoping whatever it is will move again.

  5

  KARMANN

  The year we turned seventeen Annie and I played hooky in a purple rusted ’57 Karmann Ghia that used to belong to her brother, Jack. It sat between the back of the barn and a Northern Spy apple tree, facing a slope of cow field and a creek with banks grown up in sumac and pin cherry and wood ferns. Above that creek was a small hill covered in white pine and hardwoods, and above that was sky. Jack had blown the engine six months
earlier on Route 100, towed it home with a rope and a Dodge truck, and since then mice had given birth in the stuffing of the seats, leaves had blown in the open windows, and grass had grown up through the hole in the passenger-side floor. She smelled of mildew and mouse and rotting leaves. We didn’t care; she was ours. We called her Karmann.

  November: the sky steel blue, ashen in places. We smoothed our fingers over the cigarettes we were rolling, tapped our thumbs on the steering wheel, sang the words we could remember of Neil Young’s “Helpless.” I stuck my cigarette between my lips and breathed in. “Tastes like rat’s nest,” I said, coughing.

  Annie closed her eyes and inhaled. “I like it,” she said. “Makes my throat burn.”

  Jack had left for Vietnam in April, a few weeks after the engine blew, and the Drum came from the bottom of his sock drawer. We could have gone to the IGA in Nelson and bought fresh pouches, but we liked smoking the free stuff we scavenged from Jack’s various hiding places best: dresser drawers, backpacks, pockets of his jackets and jeans. Jack was everything this place was not: he picked apples in the fall in order to drive himself around the country every winter; he listened to music no one else did—the Flying Burrito Brothers and Mississippi John Hurt—and had a picture of Grace Slick tacked to his bedroom wall; when he danced he would tilt his head back, close his eyes, and shake his skinny hips. He was the only man I knew who danced.

  “Hoo,” Annie said, blowing fog onto the windshield. The glass clouded over, then cleared again, showing the heart Jack had scratched with a nail into the hood one night when we were stoned.

  “Fucking cold,” Annie said. I nodded, feeling the seat’s icy cracked leather through the butt of my jeans. We had taken to wearing men’s blue jeans and wool jackets we found at the Salvation Army. Annie’s jeans had a hole in each knee, and her jacket smelled like pine pitch; mine smelled like the smoke of some World War II veteran’s pipe. We were growing our hair straight and long like the women on the back covers of Jack’s records and had stopped wearing makeup. It wasn’t what boys were into, but we didn’t care. We were virgins still. Annie wanted to look like Joan Baez, and sometimes did. She was that beautiful. I wanted to look like Grace Slick. “Why her?” Annie asked me once. “You don’t look anything like her.”