The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  Sara saw the light first. It was just a flicker, like a firefly, but it became more constant and started to look like a beam that swung back and forth in the big timber. Some of the trees were dead and leaned one way and another, as though an explosion had taken place. Some of them were just stumps. The beam showed the movement of insects, their wings just filaments as they darted one way and another. MD’s boots came along and made a hard thumping where the earth was packed down. He turned out his light and stood in the glow from the fire.

  “So, here you are, sneaking up this way,” he said.

  “We didn’t sneak,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Let’s not quibble,” he said. “So tough and brushy and filled with berry vines up here you can’t even use an ATV. Had to hoof it. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Yes,” said Sara.

  “A regular spitfire. I like a woman with spirit. Brings out the best in me.”

  He sat down.

  “You catching any fish up here?” said MD.

  “Couple,” I said.

  “Just a couple. Can you beat that?” He turned to Sara. “How about you? You catching anything?”

  “A couple,” she said.

  “On what?” said MD.

  “He showed me,” said Sara, pointing to me.

  “You’ll have to show me,” he said.

  “A wulff. We caught them on a wulff,” I said.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” he said. “A wolf. They always work, don’t they?”

  We sat in the dusty glow from the fire. Sara pulled her sweater up to her neck and held it with one hand. She waited there, almost as though expecting a blow.

  “I know what you think of me,” said MD to Sara. He kept his head down. “I guess you think I’ve done all kinds of bad things. Isn’t that right? But there’s more here than meets the eye. There is the lower layer. I know a thing or two.” He winked at Sara. “Isn’t that right, spitfire? Sure. Who else knows how lonely the universe can be, the way I do? No one. I’m not afraid of being alone, don’t you see? You can take that to the bank.”

  “Is that right?” said my father.

  “Why, of course. But I have my charms,” he said. He looked at Sara. “Don’t you think so, spitfire? Don’t you think I know what’s in your heart, when you’re in the mood? Why, you and I are like two peas in a pod.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  MD laughed now, his head down, his face in the shadows.

  “Well, maybe not when we’ve got company. Privately, it might be another matter.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” I said.

  “You are the funniest of all. You think she can be redeemed, don’t you?” He went on laughing. “I don’t know when I had such a good laugh. It is funny. Say, tell me, don’t you think you are going to find something you can depend on? Tell me, aren’t you on the verge of finding some kind of order? Your kind are easy to spot. I know you like the back of my hand. Well, I’m here to tell you there isn’t any order. No, sir. There’s nothing but trouble.”

  “How do you know anything about it?” I said.

  “Oh, I spent a little time courtesy of the state. They had a subscription to all these science magazines. Nothing else to read. The pages of the Playboys were all stuck together. Radios and TVs always blasting.”

  He looked at Sara.

  “They sure miss you down at the dealership and across the border,” he said.

  “So, Judah sent you,” she said.

  “Judah? That guy who runs the Palm? He’s a friend of mine. I guess that’s right. But you come running up here and, you know, that makes everyone uncomfortable. See? Since we’re thinking about going into business together.”

  “No one has to worry,” she said.

  “That’s good. So long as we agree on how you pay off what you owe. This is a real chance. Why, those cars were just child’s play, you know. For people who can’t really face up to what’s worth something. It’s up to you, spitfire.” He looked at Sara. “I can tell you are a defiant one. Me too. I bet you know that, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” said Sara.

  “Now, I’m not going to ask you to come with me. Not now. I’m going to let you think about it. I know that any woman with some spunk in her will have the desire to go with a man who is unafraid. See?”

  From the river there came the voices of the other two. They came up to the fire, too.

  “Well, here they are,” said MD. He turned to Scott and Bo. “I’ve been wondering where you two have been.”

  “We got lost,” Bo said.

  “Damn lonely country up here,” said MD. He turned to Sara. “Isn’t it?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.

  His dark eyes were the same color as the black compost mushrooms grow in.

  “Nothing,” he said. He shrugged. “Tell me, Sara, how did you get the shiner?”

  “Ask these characters,” said Sara.

  “See? Listen to that,” he said to the other two. “I guess that puts me in my place, doesn’t it? Why, you let her slip through your fingers.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” said Bo.

  “Hit them harder, for Christ’s sake,” said MD.

  “This is a warning,” I said. “Leave us alone. Go back the way you came.”

  The sound of the dark was that non-sound, that hiss and click, that rumble of the stream, and behind it the infinite silence of the stars, which began to appear, so much like the highlights in Sara’s hair.

  “Maybe we ought to give her a hand with these two guys,” said Bo. “This one looks pretty sick anyway. Maybe she doesn’t want to be with them. Sick guy like that.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  “That’s what they all say,” said MD. “Just words. Give us the woman. We’ll let you catch your fish.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” said MD. He pointed at my father. “Walks funny.”

  “If that’s all you’ve got to say, why don’t you go back down the way you came?” said my father.

  “Just a minute, bub,” said MD.

  “Bub?” I said.

  “It’s just a matter of speaking. I don’t mean anything by it.” He waited. “You can see that, can’t you?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

  We stood there. Some flecks of ember, like red insects, rose from the fire. My father stood up, the sweat on his face red now, as though he were firing a coal-burning engine on a ship and he had just opened the door. You could almost smell the burning coal.

  “Don’t take it to heart,” said MD. “Save your strength.”

  “Why don’t you leave now?” said Sara.

  “A regular spitfire,” said MD. He turned to the other two. “What did I tell you?” He looked back at her. “You’ll think about me. I can tell. You’re angry now, but you’ll think about it.” He laughed. “That’s something you can take to the bank.” He turned to the other two. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t want to get lost,” said Bo.

  “I know the way,” said MD. “Come on.”

  They walked off into the dark rubble of the trees and turned along the stream, which was black but marked with white, almost zebra-like, where the water broke up around the rocks and streaked away from them. Even the sound of Bo’s and Scott’s singing and laughter receded into the darkness.

  Sara said, “Well, what are we going to do now?”

  “We’ll go further up,” I said. I gestured upstream, into the Branch Brook Wilderness Area. “Up there.”

  “We just keep going further and further away from a road and the further away we get the worse it seems . . . ,” said Sara.

  She sat down, licking her lips and occasionally put a strand of hair behind her ear.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s think it over.”

  My father nodded, Yes, yes. He kept his head down. But even from the side his expression w
as the same as when he had mentioned that the scientific studies of the bone marrow transplants for his particular cancer showed an 18 percent increase in longevity, separate from any mortality caused by complications, which longevity was measure in weeks. Not months. And then I considered MD and the bleached blonds. Would they be able to follow? Men who didn’t know the woods? Or did meanness of spirit, or just outright malignity, have a method of navigating that had its own efficiency? And then I faced what I had suspected. If I had bought a gun, I would have had to use it on all of them, at once, otherwise they would have been waiting, hidden, on our way back. I rattled the pills in the bottles. Still plenty, but not as much as I would have liked. At least the touch of Sara’s hand was unexpected, caressing.

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

  WE 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 sittin
g 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.”