by Rodney Jones
She’d never before done this—camped alone. If anything went wrong, she could blame Roland. He had just the other night expressed his enthusiasm for solo camping, telling her about his going off for two or three nights at a time, hiking into little known state forests around Buffalo—the only person in the entire woods, as far as he knew. “It’s always a bit scary the first night out,” he’d said. “All those monsters lurking within”—the monsters held at bay through our daily routines and countless forms of escape. She wasn’t so much concerned with monsters, however; she had only recently become acquainted with hers. They still haunted her—tried to—but they no longer controlled her.
Another noise. She swung the light to her right and stared. Perhaps the decision to do this was overly impulsive, with it being already dark, but the thought of spending another night in that lonely house more than compensated for this concern. The house, it seemed, had contracted a contagious malady. At the very moment Roland said goodbye, the air within it changed, as though that part of the house, the essence that made it a home, rather than just a building, had been sucked out. Camping out in the wilderness, alone, as scary as it was, had to be better than the lifeless box she’d just walked away from.
After making it up and around to the backside of the butte, Joyce stopped to catch her breath. The weight of her backpack, pulling down on her shoulders, was almost too much. She tugged on the straps, readjusting them, then looked up the path—just a hundred feet more. She gave the pack an upward heave. A glow in the south caught her eye—a break in the clouds. The moon sent a shaft of light to a spot of ground about a mile away, like a spotlight on an expansive, darkened stage—just the light, unaccompanied. It was a rare night; the air was warm, still, quiet; the desert was suffused in a color at odds with its warmth—the cool glow from the moon hidden behind a thin blanket of clouds. Joyce marched on, and soon came to the ladder that was fixed to the rocks at the upper edge of the plateau and climbed it to the top.
There were still a few pieces of firewood left unburned from two nights before, the night she and Roland spent there, and in her backpack was some kindling. She slid the straps of the pack from her shoulders, leaned it against a boulder, and savored the sudden feeling of lightness its absence generated. She lifted her chin toward the sky, stumbling backward as though the earth had shifted beneath her. The cloud cover, which had been solid the whole day, was breaking up into an even patchwork of goose-gray forms, each defined by a soft glow around their edges. The clouds crept almost imperceptibly across a deep, navy-blue sky dotted with stars, while the moon collaborated in a slow movement of light and shadow, like a dance—a dance that had been going on for a billion years, a dance of sublime patience that would likely continue for a billion more. It was a dance, which few people consciously engaged in, and then, only fleetingly. Joyce had but a vague sense of it, though even that carried the possibility of revelation.
She removed the wood from her backpack and set about building a fire. After nursing the kindling to flames, with a lot of huffing and blowing, she carefully added the larger chunks of firewood.
Seated before the fire, her eyes shifted from the flames to the sky, back and forth as the moon appeared and disappeared and reappeared. The clouds slowly lost their dominance to the moon and the stars. She stood and surveyed the moonlight-mottled desert to the south. Not a sound. Not the slightest movement of air. The encroaching chill of night was held at bay by the intimate envelope of warmth produced by the fire. A thin wisp of smoke, carrying an occasional orange spark, rose with a shimmy, straight up. She followed the sparks upward, fifteen… twenty feet…
The eerie howl of a coyote, like a creature in mourning, broke the silence. Though distant, it nonetheless provoked an awareness of her vulnerability. She studied the lights along the northern horizon, trying to locate her house, searching for her nightlight.
A response to the lone howl came from a pack of six or so animals, their unearthly yips, yodels, barks, and howls, were faint, though nonetheless unnerving. She repeatedly assured herself that all this activity was far off, and these dogs were incapable of climbing that ten-foot ladder. She gazed into the burning embers, trying to ignore the subtle but potentially escalating unease that the calls and counter calls aroused. Roland had warned her of this. He’d said, “You can’t really know it until you do it.”
She placed another piece of wood on the fire, and watched as narrow tongues of flame licked up around it. Her mind drifted to a distant past, to the first time she’d ever camped in wilderness.
It was soon after she and her family had moved to Indianapolis. Her father was given a few weeks leave from the military. The first week and a-half were spent moving and getting settled into their new home. The new school she was enrolled in had just dismissed its students for their annual spring break. With the new house in order, and her and her sister home from school, the family piled into the car for a trip to Southern Utah. Joyce recalled she was yet feeling cheated by their recent move from Selma, as it seemed to have happened unannounced—though it actually hadn’t—and she was not interested in being even farther from the boy she’d become enamored with there. But there she was, a few days later, somewhere in the Escalante, seated on a rock before a campfire her father had built, day-dreaming about Roland, her parents and little sister tuned out.
She had concocted a fantasy: the two of them sitting cross-legged before a fire—Roland, a young, beautiful, dark-haired boy, his features lit by the flames, sitting opposite her—two young children camping alone in the desert, entertaining themselves with marshmallows and ghost stories.
Joyce smiled at the innocence and absurdity of it. The memory seemed to mean more to her now than it ever had.
A band of moonlight crept toward the western end of the plateau, chasing a shadow, eastward, and over the edge. The calls of coyotes continued from an ambiguous direction, their howls sounding eerily human—a quality which was absent before. She turned toward the south, the direction she’d climbed up from—the direction, she reasoned, the coyotes likely were. A snap came from the fire. She listened, almost breathless—a chill in the pit of her stomach—and then another sound, like a voice, a muffled shout.
There’s no one out there, she told herself, there’s no one there.
The yips and howls returned for another round—the thumping of her heart competing with the faint, crazy chorus.
Coyotes… that’s all. Dogs…
She drew in a breath then let her shoulders fall with a long slow exhale. And then again the crazy yaps and barks—sounding this time almost like her name being called. Her pulse pounded in her ears, nearly drowning it out.
God, they make the stupidest noises, she silently cursed.
“Joyce…” Her name drifted on the air, dulled by distance.
She straightened. Her mind twisted in confusion and disbelief. She leaned away from the fire, searching the air, straining to hear any little sound.
“Are you up there?” The words came from below the mass of rock the ladder was attached to. “It’s just me.”
She rose to her knees and stared toward the ladder, creaking from weight. A head appeared above the edge of the rock.
“Roland?”
He paused at the top, peering in her direction—his eyes, his face—not some dreamed up monster or phantom, but something even stranger than she would have allowed herself to imagine—more complex than a dream, but just as unlikely.
He climbed up over the top of the ladder and approached. “I saw your fire from the house. I called, but…”
She got to her feet as he came nearer. Her eyes followed his until he was standing no more than three feet away—the corners of his lips turning up into a smile. She leaned to his right, pulling his eyes around with her into the moonlight. His smile and the moon glowing in his hair and something even more subtle than that—like a reflection of the warmth tumbling within her chest—an acknowledgement of what had always existed between them, all of it. All t
hat had been missing before was again within reach.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said.
About the author:
Currently a resident of Indiana (a state in which one cannot buy cars, kites, or booze on Sunday.) Rodney Jones is an artist, a novelist, a reclusive naturalist (favorite animal: baboon), a happy immoralist, inventor of the Elastic Zukulian, and a lover of all forms of art, whisky, and chocolate. His inspirations and influences include Rod Serling, Jon Gnagy, Cormac McCarthy, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Valentina Lisitsa, Buster Keaton, Roman Polanski, Leos Carax, Antonio Tapies, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Pucer D. Holflapper. One of Rodney’s closest friends had only recently warned, “He can be trusted for about as far as you can throw him.”
Find him here:
http://rodneyjonesauthor.com/
https://www.facebook.com/rodney.jones.5680
https://twitter.com/rodneyjonesbook
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/228591
https://www.pinterest.com/rodneyjones/
More from the author:
The Sun, the Moon, and Maybe the Trains
A Young Adult Novel
ASIN: 1479328499
ISBN-13: 978-1479328499
All the Butterflies in the World
A Young Adult Novel - a sequel to previous book
ASIN: 1940215366
ISBN-13: 978-1940215365
ENCHANTED – Love Poems and Abstract Art
Anthology
ASIN: 1511732024
ISBN-13: 978-1511732024