Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  I picked up one of my aluminum walking staffs, then clambered carefully down the bank to retrieve the other, avoiding the mother spider and the thorns of a honey locust sapling.

  The trail wound uphill past a row of scrub pine, around a bank of cherries. Beyond their long, drooping leaves stood a wooden sign which read CRABBES SUPPLIES in carved block letters. Directly across from the sign stood one of those wooden boxes mounted on a pole you see all along the Appalachian Trail, containing a notebook hikers can use to leave each other comments.

  The arrow on the sign pointed to a narrow side path that climbed straight uphill, forging through dense clusters of laurel.

  At that moment I realized I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than the company of another human being. I made a mental list of things I could stand to restock and started up the hill.

  * * *

  CRABBES SUPPLIES turned out to be a 1850s-era log home about the size of a storage shed, perched atop the mountain ridge. Tan chinking filled the gaps between wooden slats aged mildew black. The roof’s blocky, gray shingles had been hand-cut with a hatchet.

  An ancient jeep as dirty as the slats sat behind the shop, parked on an old logging road that wound its muddy way down the other side of the mountain. The jeep’s fenders were caked with enough layers of mud to justify an archeological dig. Somewhere nearby, a generator hummed.

  Through the window’s dusty glass I could see a heavyset woman, her back to me, her silver hair pulled up in an elaborate bun. The painful pink and green print of her flowered skirt made her disproportionately wide hips seem even wider.

  I leaned my staffs against the wall and set foot on the single front step. It creaked under my weight.

  Then I drew up short. Viscous strands of cobweb crisscrossed the open door. I’d almost stepped through them.

  I checked for spiders—there were none—then brushed the webs aside. Except I didn’t. My hand passed through the webbing without breaking a strand. An electric tingle numbed my forearm, the same cold jolt I felt when the boy ran through me, though not as strong.

  The old woman spun around as if yanked on a string. At the same moment, a rail-thin and stunningly ugly old man stood up from behind the cash register.

  My hand shook as I passed it again through the cobwebs. Again, the cold, the shock.

  That happened.

  The boy’s terrified face, etched in shadow, flickered before my mind’s eye. As I stood paralyzed, the old couple watched me, both their heads cocked at precisely the same angle. I grew conscious of their gaze, and embarrassment compounded my fear.

  Leave it alone, little panther.

  The old man finally broke the detente by displaying a smile full of long, crooked teeth. “Well, son,” he drawled pleasantly, “are you coming in or not?”

  His tone made up my mind for me. I hopped through the door with an apologetic “Hi!”—but the syllable was strangled by full-body shock as I passed through the cobwebs.

  “Whoa, there, tiger, you all right?” He came around the counter, a spindly arm extended to brace me. His wife put a fretful hand to her mouth.

  Something in me squirmed as the old man took my arm, but I didn’t resist as he helped me out of my backpack and steered me to a wooden chair. I was all too grateful for the chance to sit down.

  He must have been acclimated to decades of hikers stomping through, because I was a fright myself. Cheeks hollowed from day after day of dining on raisins, peanuts, jerky, granola and the occasional nasty but edible meal plucked and boiled directly from what the trail offered. Those sunken cheeks almost completely hidden in a scraggly shrub of black, curly, untrimmed beard, with my densely curly hair grown out three times that length. Even without my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt sticking to my body, I stunk from four weeks away from air conditioning and plumbing. Not to mention I was freakishly piebald, my sun-exposed forearms and face dark as hickory, the rest of me pale as cream. And people with my complexion don’t normally have green eyes. That alone has earned me many double-takes through the years, but none of it phased him.

  “Check him for a fever,” his wife said.

  I tried to wave him away. “I’m fine, really. Just need a little break.”

  “Don’t usually see a man this young in such a state,” my host said. He had to press his hand to my forehead before he was satisfied. His touch felt so strangely cool that I wondered if I did have a fever. But finally he nodded and backed away. “No problem with letting you sit for a spell. I think you need it.”

  Next, as I recuperated, came the small talk. Their names, they told me, were Herman and Gertrude Crabbe, the kind of names no sane parent would ever give their kid nowadays.

  As Gertrude approached and I shook her flaccid hand, I wondered how a woman so wide through the hips could have such a pinched, hungry face. Yet her voice had an earthy, soothing cadence.

  “Welcome to our little oasis,” she said. “You want something while you’re here? Bottled water? Crackers? Maybe a pillow?”

  My panic faded, though a nagging sense of unease never left. Something still bothered me about the Crabbes, though they acted as pleasant as you please. During the give and take, they told me they’d lived for the past fifty years in a cabin nestled in a hollow on the east side of the mountain, so secluded they never saw hikers there. Both had been born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains and didn’t much care to live anywhere else. Gertrude told me she and Herman had both been born to large families, back in the days when everyone’s family was large, and each had been the family “eccentric,” the lone introverts marooned among their gregarious kin.

  Their serendipitous first meeting took place at a saloon in the tiny town of Warm Springs, where both had been reluctantly dragged by cousins with wild streaks. “I couldn’t believe how perfect we were for each other,” Mrs. Crabbe said. “I just looked at him, and I knew, and I could tell he knew. We hardly had to say anything.”

  I had no trouble believing in that instant attraction. These were two of the homeliest people I had ever met. Her with her hunched shoulders, beady eyes and crooked jaw, her head configured as if God had gripped her cheeks with thumb and forefinger and squeezed; him with those eyes set too far apart in his narrow face, the spiny hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils, that lipless mouth. They belonged together.

  Under normal circumstances I would never have revealed so much about myself in return, but every tidbit they offered seemed bent to draw something out of me, and even as I recognized the game I couldn’t stop myself from playing it.

  I’d not been the happiest boy, growing up in the coal-shaft riddled mountains outside Kingsport. A bookish waif is nothing to be among the sons of miners, who see you as something to piss on for sport. The only bookstore was at the Kingsport Mall, half a day away by a switchbacking road that made me throw up in the back seat more than once.

  My father taught at a high school in Sullivan County while my mother quietly seethed at home, a college educated woman bound to cooking, cleaning, and chasing after an awkward, oversensitive and insolent brat. My dad would build up ferocious squalls of temper in the gray-bricked classrooms and release them at home in full glory once they were seeded by my mom’s resentful needling. Was it any wonder I spent so much of my childhood alone in the wood,s exploring the endless web of well-worn footpaths, a mite scaling the surface of our country’s oldest mountains?

  Nothing had delighted me more than landing that art scholarship at UNC in Asheville. That, folks, was my great escape. And a setup for complete failure. I loved dabbling in art, but not living it under a professor’s dictatorship. Even the grace of the brush between the fingers, the high-inducing turpentine stench, changed into something sickening. After my terrible grades wrecked my scholarship, I managed to stick around a semester and a half, reinvented as an English major supported by a student loan. If anything, I performed even worse, and quit before midterms with most of my spring loan still in the bank—and that became the funding for my tr
ek out of civilization.

  “You’re starting out pretty late for a thru-hiker,” Mr. Crabbe said. “By the time you hit Massachusetts, you’ll be knee-deep in snow, boy.”

  I told him that a good friend from my recently left-behind school and his lovely wife awaited me in Pennsylvania—though this was half-truth. I’d winter with them, I said, then finish the journey once the world thawed. In fact, I planned to look up my friends, but had no idea if they’d take me in, or what I’d do after that. I was lost.

  The Crabbes listened to my tale of loserdom with the rapt attention due a death-defying war story. Whenever I stole glances at the doorway I still saw the ethereal webbing.

  “But you seem like such a smart boy,” Gertrude said, pursing her lips. “Why’re you even struggling in school?”

  I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth next.

  “I kept having nightmares after I left home. Just about every night. I couldn’t remember what happened in them, but I know they were bad because of the way I kept waking up. My heart would be pounding. Sometimes I’d scream. I burned through four roommates my freshman year. I started to…well, I dabbled in substances, to try to get it under control. But that wiped out the focus I had left.”

  “That’s a shame,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked. “A good woman would’ve taken care of that.”

  “Nightmares,” Mr. Crabbe said dreamily. Unbidden, I saw the ghost-boy’s face scream.

  There had been a woman, named Yolanda, whom I’d lived with up to and after my academic implosion. She was a candle-burning new-agey type who loved weed, and she started calling me Panther, like my grandmother had, though I couldn’t remember telling her about that, and finally I asked her to stop. Our cohabitation was the last thing to go sour before I took to the trail, the thing that made me decide I had to leave for the forest. I wanted to return to my roots, but not, absolutely not, to go home.

  I was trying to explain this, without indulging in too much uncomfortable detail, when Herman Crabbe floored me.

  “You got some Melungeon in you, I think,” he said.

  It took long seconds for my startled brain to even form a response. “Wow, that’s…I don’t think anyone’s ever…I’ve had people ask me if I’m Turkish. Or Arab. Or Greek. Or Indian. Even mulatto. No one gets it on sight.”

  Mr. Crabbe snickered. “You ain’t no Arab.”

  “My grandmother,” I said. “She was full Melungeon, if you can really properly apply such a term.” Both of them nodded as if I was confirming facts they already well knew.

  “Sure is a shame about that boy,” Mrs. Crabbe said, with no transition, as if it were the topic we’d been addressing all along. “I hope they at least find his body before the animals get it.”

  I nearly fell right out of rickety chair.

  Herman sighed and shook his head as he straightened the assortments of candy, crackers and trail mix next to the cash register. “Probably too late.”

  When I recovered my balance, I asked, “What boy?”

  Herman stood and licked his crooked teeth. The couple exchanged glances. Gertrude asked her husband, “You bring the paper?”

  “Yep, sure did.” The old man ducked behind the counter and started rummaging. “Here somewhere.”

  “Sad, very sad,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked, picking up her duster again. “A city boy from east of here, I think. The paper might’ve even had his name. Fell off the top of Angel’s Leap, about fifteen miles north of here. Surely you’ve heard of Angel’s Leap?”

  When I said I hadn’t, she was all too ready to explain it to me. Its real name was McGlothlin’s Knob—that, I’d heard of—but everyone referred to it as Angel’s Leap: a craggy outcrop of rock with a popular but strenuous path winding to its peak and a 100-foot fall off one side waiting for the careless, of which there were no shortage. It was the biggest attraction on this part of the AT, in part because of its evil reputation. Bad things happened in the woods beneath its shadow, Mrs. Crabbe told me.

  Her husband reappeared, spread newspaper pages on the counter and crooked a finger to invite me closer. Gertrude stayed at my side, filling me in on the lore of Angel’s Leap as Herman guided my attention to a block of type.

  I spotted a name, Thomas “Tommy” Wayne Saunders, 9, of Hillcrest.

  Seven years ago, Mrs. Crabbe told me, a couple from Montana had been found dead inside their tents, their throats cut. Five years ago, a boy who wandered away from his family’s campsite escaped with his life, barely, from a man wearing a white mask. A year later, baffled police made a public appeal for help catching the suspect, and revealed the boy had been molested before he got loose. Two years ago, a missing college student turned up dead. An anonymous source quoted in the paper said his body was naked and impaled on a crudely carved pole.

  Gertrude counted off the horrors on her bony fingers as I tried to read. “They’ve never caught whoever did these things, whoever did any of it,” she said.

  The boy had vanished two nights before. His parents told the rescue workers they last saw him standing at the wooden railing at the top of McGlothlin’s Knob. No one saw him climb over or fall. A team of two dozen searchers still hadn’t found him.

  “Those parents should never have taken him up there,” Gertrude said. “They should know better. It’s a bad place.”

  “I keep telling you, woman, it ain’t the place that’s evil.” Herman had kept his hand on the page to hold it flat. Now he moved his fingers, uncovering the black and white school photo above the story’s headline.

  I had guessed what I was going to see. But it still chilled me to the marrow to see his face smiling up at me. His unmistakable face.

  I fought to keep calm but didn’t quite make it. “That poor kid,” I said. “I bet his parents are devastated.”

  I became acutely aware of how close their faces were to mine, how they’d boxed me in on either side. They couldn’t have missed the way my eyes widened, the goose bumps that stood the hair on my arms on end.

  There are some things I just never wanted to believe. But I’m not stupid. They knew about the boy. They knew I’d seen him, seen his ghost. I didn’t understand how they’d read my mind, but I was sure they had.

  Abrupt as a warning, I noticed empty eye sockets staring at me from the shelf behind and below the counter. An astonishing number of deer skulls, something like forty, sans their antlers, sat in regimented stacks down there. Quite a few of the eye sockets were occupied with dusty cobwebs, like leprous cotton.

  How long had I been talking with them? I had to get out. But an instinct I couldn’t explain told me that a hasty exit would be a bad move, a very dangerous move.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I do need some more water. And some dried fruit would be good. Do you have anything freeze dried?”

  The old man gathered my order while his wife went back to dusting.

  As Mr. Crabbe manned the cash register I noticed an acrid, unwashed smell that undermined the comforting scent of old wood. It originated from him. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  One last surprise lay in store, when the old man handed me the bag. Two of the fingers on his right hand were malformed. They were oddly bent, insect-like—plastic substitutions for a missing pinky and ring finger. Skin had been grafted over these prosthetics.

  He grinned when he noticed the grimace I failed to suppress, and waggled his grotesque appendages in front of my nose. “That’s what happens,” he said, “when you don’t put food on the table quick enough for the missus.”

  Gertrude Crabbe cackled hard enough to trigger a coughing fit. While she was recovering, I quickly thanked them both and left, suppressing another cringe as I passed through the ethereal webbing across the door.

  I set off at a brisk pace, just shy of a trot, my mind and stomach churning all the way down. The sun had lowered considerably, its light sparkling faintly through the trees.

  When I reached the main trail I opened the box containing the notebook for hikers’ messages. A ratt
y, spiral-bound pad lay inside, nearly filled with pen scrawls. Nothing that I skimmed help to enlighten me, though the final message read: “The Crabbes are creepy.”

  Beneath that, I wrote “Amen!” and signed my trail name, a concession to my long-gone grandma: Panther.

  * * *

  Two hours later, with the sun banished beneath the mountains, my reason overcame the urge to put as much distance as I could between myself and the Crabbes, I sought a place to camp for the night. I came upon a wooden shelter that had once been used as a smokehouse. Inside, the crusty smell of salt mingled with a fruity hint of tobacco.

  I should have been laying out my sleeping bag, donning an extra shirt and calculating how much of my crackers and jerky and dried fruit I could afford to eat that night. Instead I sat on the bench inside the shelter, my pack on the floor beside me, opening and closing my Buck knife, listening to my own heartbeat, thinking.