Chatters on the Tide

by Robert Mitchell, Jr

  Chapter 19

  The road was a tunnel the wind ran down unobstructed, and it came on strong and headed toward the sun. It felt good on his face. There were no sounds aside from his own footfalls and the fluttering of the soybeans across the ditches on either side. Harold kept moving forward without caring where he was going to end up, just wanting some time to think in silence.

  I may not know what’s the truth, but I do know that I want a drink and a cigarette. No, not a drink, a beer. Just one beer and a cigarette would be great.

  Billy was probably following him. If he stayed on the roads between the soybean fields Billy’d be able to pick him up in no time; they were too low to hide his profile. If he was going to have five minutes peace he'd have to make a turn-off. He branched into a cornfield, walking past a sign that carried the genetic marker for the breed of corn growing there.

  Everything's gotta have a mark, even the corn. At least these ears aren't smart enough to know they're marked. I wish I wasn't either. I just want to go to work, come home, watch a little TV, get laid once in a while, maybe party a little on the weekends. Is that so much to ask?

  The sound of corn in the hot breath of the Eastern Shore's heat was white noise. Harold couldn't see over them either. He was in isolation. If he cried out, his words would be eaten by a million ears. It was darker in the corn rows. The sky was getting pink.

  Emerging from the rows onto a rutted clay dirt farm road, he looked left and right. To the left, nothing; to the right, choppy clouds with curling tongues of peach and orange over the not yet lidded eye of the sun. He guessed he had an hour or two more of light left.

  Aw hell, I'm not getting anything done out here, been gone long enough, he thought, and decided to go back to the old home place for the moment at least. Maybe that lying Lucas will leave me alone there and I can get my head together.

  He turned left on the clay dirt road, but in a mile or so it curved into a loop like the eye of a needle, a turnaround point, and ended. In the center of the cul de sac was a pile of fencing wire and some split rails shot through with weeds. He was sure he was heading the right way. He had cooled off and now he just wanted to be back at the house. He couldn’t go back the way he came because it would impossible to get back before dark. A path led up into the woods in the direction the road would've gone had it not turned upon itself. Certain the path would again become a road on the other side, he went up the pine-taggy path into the trees.

  In there it seemed the sun had already set. Ferns brushed his ankles as he walked. On the right, the trees seemed dead and mossy, on the left clean and strong. He turned and looked back. The spot where he had entered was an orange archway of light. Deeper in there was no light on the other side. The pathway was heading downward.

  “Great. I’m lost.”

  He smacked at a horse fly that had landed on the back of his neck, missed, let out a curse. Mosquitoes were coming out, and he smacked at them too with an equal amount of success.

  “At least out there the breeze kept the bugs off.”

  There were several branches in the path, and each time he took the one straight ahead.

  “Watch me step on a cottonmouth and die.”

  The path ended at a creek. He stood there on a swatch of chartreuse moss and looked around. The banks of the creek were high and the water was too wide to hop. He decided to head back the way he came thinking that when he emerged from the woods he’d be able to see lights in the distance somewhere.

  Thinking about the footsteps he had heard on the attic stairs at Lucas’place, Harold doubled back and headed out of the woods fast. The darkness had gotten so thick that he would not see which way to go when he came to the forks he had encountered on his way in.

  “Aw naw, this can’t be happening,” he said out loud. “This is a nightmare.”

  Off the path he saw a lightening in the hooded cloak of the trees and headed for that. It was tough going with briars to get through and decaying logs to get over, but in a few minutes he was standing in a little clearing and looking up at an oval of dark blue. Some early stars were out. It looked like it was going to be a clear night, maybe unseasonably cool.

  “No, no, no, this can’t be happening. This sucks, it sucks!”

  “You’re problem isn’t being lost, your problem is wanting to know where you are,” someone said.

  Harold spasmed and looked around but he couldn’t see anyone.

  “Billy? Keep the heck away from me you sicko.”

  “It’s Gator, you remember me, right, from Lucas’s place?” He walked into the oval clearing of lighter blackness and stopped a few feet in front of Harold.

  “Gator? What are you doing here? Can you get me out of here?”

  “Why? You got somewhere to go?”

  “They said you were a mute,” Harold said backing away, “that you don’t talk.”

  “I don’t,” he said flatly.

  “Don’t kill me. I just want to go home.”

  “Give me a break. I won’t kill you,” Gator said. “But this time of year the ticks will. We’re both probably covered with them. We need to get somewhere and get ‘em off. Come on.”

  “Geez,” Harold said, and scratched automatically.

  Gator lead the way to pile of rocks in an even larger clearing a few minutes farther on. When they got closer, Harold could tell that it was actually bricks, the remains of a fireplace, the cabin around it long gone. Gator piled up some wood and debris in the sooty square hole and put a lighter to it, and soon there was fire. He squatted in front of it and blew to get it going strong.

  “Just lead me out of here,” Harold said. “C’mon, you know the way, right?”

  “Relax,” Gator said. “That’s your problem. You want to be in control all the time, always in a hurry to do something, but you don’t have any idea exactly what you want to do. You tell me where you want to go and I’ll think about leading you out of here.”

  “I don’t want...look, how come you’re talking to me but you don’t talk to Lucas or Opal? They’re your friends, not me.”

  “I’ll tell you while we get this done. Come here.”

  “What for?” Harold asked.

  “I’m going to get those ticks off of you, and then you’re going to get them off of me. C’mon. Sit. You want Lyme disease?” He pointed to the vee between his legs on the ground before the fire.

  Harold came over, felling uncomfortable, moving like a scarecrow. He sat there in the dirt, and Gator began to run his hands over Harold’s neck and head.

  “Why do you think I don’t talk to Lucas or Opal?”

  “I don’t know. Because...you don’t like them?”

  “You know that’s a lie. Think,” Gator said.

  “Because...I don’t know.”

  “Okay, why do you think I talk to you then?”

  “I don’t know. Look, you had to be following me. Why were you following me?” Harold asked.

  “Why do you think I was following you?”

  “I don’t know, because you wanted to feel me up for ticks.”

  “At least you have a sense of humor,” Gator said laughing. “It’s because there’s so many people trying to influence and control you. I don’t want you to be what they want you to be. I want you to be what you want to be.”

  “That’s great, but I don’t know what I want to be.”

  “That’s a good start. Do you want to be the prophet of the Congregation?” Gator said.

  “No.”

  “Then why were you staying there?”

  “I don’t know,” Harold replied.

  “Take off your shirt. How did they make you feel?”

  “Important. Respected,” Harold said, pulling his shirt off over his head.

  “And that’s how people who care treat people they care about.”

  “Sure,” Harold said.

  “How do you treat people you want to sell somethin
g?” Gator asked.

  “You tell them how great something is, you act friendly, and...okay, I see what you mean. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What do you say to people you really care about?” Gator asked.

  “That depends. Sometimes you tell them what you’re afraid of, what you’re afraid is going to happen to them. You ask what’s on their minds, how their day was. Sometimes you just don’t need to say anything at all, you’re just together.”

  “Which is one of the reasons I don’t talk to my friends in the motorcycle club. It’s the highest complement,” Gator said. “What kinds of things did The Congregation talk to you about? What did they ask you?”

  “They didn’t ask me much. They talked to me about what they wanted, but they never really asked me how I felt I guess. Which, now that you ask, makes them seem pretty uncaring.”

  “You have to do your own crotch. Pull down you pants and I’ll do your legs.”

  “I can do my own legs,” Harold said, standing up. “Don’t look, it’s creepy. And don’t ask me why I think it’s creepy.”

  “I was going to ask you that, I really was,” Gator said laughing.

  “I know you were,” Harold said. “I have an idea, while I’m doing this, you do your legs and crotch so I know you’re busy doing something instead of staring at me, and plus, I won’t have to look away later when you’re doing it.”

  “Okay,” Gator said standing up.

  When they were done, Gator said, “We’re going to need a few things. Help me find them.”

  “What?”

  “I said we’re going to need a few things if we’re going to spend a pleasant night out here,” Gator said. “I’m going to need some wire, like a coat hanger or something, and a couple of sturdy sticks or poles. And we’re going to need something to boil water in, and something to drink out of. Nothing with rust. Glass bottles, or those tin cans with the white lining will do.”

  “Yes Sir,” Harold said.

  They hunted around the remains of the cabin for what they needed. Gator warned Harold to look out for snakes, to move slowly and allow them time to run away. In a few minutes they had an old rake handle, a stick, and a yard of green two-by-four inch wire fencing. Harold found a gallon pickle jar and a can with the white lining. Gator started a fire in the remains of the hearth, and while it died down to coals, they went to the creek to rinse and fill the pickle jar and the can. Once that was done, Gator placed three bricks in the coals and rested the jar of water there.

  “That will take a while to boil clean, and still more time to settle out the trash. While we’re waiting, get yourself a flat rock and sand the rust off of that wire mesh as much as you can.”

  “Alrighty Rambo,” Harold said.

  “Good, that’s it,” Gator said. “I guess we can talk a little while we work.” He put another stick of dead wood on the fire. “Do you know the story of Samson?”

  “Yeah, the guy who lost his strength because he cut his hair.”

  “Well, I’m kind of like Samson,” Gator said. “I feel like if I talk too much, my words will lose their power. That’s another reason I don’t talk. This is harder for me than I’m making it seem.”

  “See, that’s what I don’t get,” Harold said. “You’re talking right now.”

  “I know, I know. But talking to you is different. Talking to you is like talking to myself.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You don’t feel it?” Gator asked.

  “Feel what? I mean, you are pretty easy to talk to, and I have to admit you seem, I don’t know, kind of familiar.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Gator said.

  “Hey – you aren’t gay are you?”

  “No. You aren’t homophobic are you?”

  “No. Okay this is weird. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Alright,” Gator agreed.

  He took the wire from Harold and sat close to fire for light. He got out his multi-tool and used the nippers on the plier jaws to cut out a square section of the wire mesh that looked like a tic-tac-toe board. He wrapped it around the end of the rake handle and using the pliers, tied up the ends like twist –ties to hold it in place. Three spurs of the fencing stuck past the end of the handle like a big fork. He handed it to Harold.

  “That’s a frog gig. Tonight you eat Parisian cuisine.” He began to make another one out of the other stick and the rest of the fencing wire. “Did you see any more tin cans in that burn pile over there?”

  “There were a couple,” Harold said.

  “Okay, get us a couple, as big as you can find, but they have to be the same size around. Rust doesn’t matter for this.”

  “What are they for?”

  “Breakfast,” Gator said.

  With the second gig done and a selection of cans by the fire, they worked their way down to the creek-side in the moonlight. To Harold’s surprise Gator produced a small flashlight. They walked slowly along the edge of the water. Harold soon learned that there were no frogs where the creek was deep and narrow, that his prey was found where the water was still and there was grass within hopping distance.

  “Listen for the croaking, track in on the sounds,” Gator said.

  “This is pissing me off.”

  “You being pissed off will not make any frogs hop into your pocket. Patience might though.”

  A few yards away he could hear the splash of Gator’s gig every few minutes, but he couldn’t tell if he had gotten any. Harold could not concentrate. He worried about what was crawling on him in the dark, the possibility of snakes, the miserable wetness of his boots, and the pressure to be successful. He struck a few times without luck. On his final miss his spear stuck in the mud, and when he pulled it out, the fence-wire head was left behind in the muck.

  “Let’s go,” Gator called.

  “Coming.”

  As they walked up the path toward the fire something moved across the path, and Harold jumped at it, came up with a fat frog in both hands.

  “Got one!”

  “Good work. Did you get any with your gig?”

  “Nope, this is the only one I got.”

  “I would’ve been surprised if you had. It’s a lot tougher than it looks to gig a frog. That one’s a little small. Put him in your pocket. We can use him for something else.”

  “You realize I’m never going to eat any of these frogs or drink any of that nasty water,” Harold said.

  “Sure you will.”

  Up at the fire, Gator pulled his coat sleeves down over his hands for oven mitts and set the water aside to settle out while he spitted the frogs over the fire.

  “Skin and all?” Harold asked.

  “Skin sloughs just like baked chicken when they’re cooked, and it helps the meat hold together.” He put the skewered animals almost directly on the red coals. Harold noted that his partner had landed almost a dozen small frogs to his one.

  “You’re not going to gut ‘em?”

  “Nope, why bother? You ain’t gonna eat that part anyway.”

  “I really don’t think I can...”

  “Just shut up and be patient.”

  Gator reached into a pocket and got out a baggie of tea bags and handed them to Harold.

  “Blueberry herbal tea. Throw a couple in that water. You like tea?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I love tea,” Gator said.

  When the frogs were done, Gator pulled off some legs and peeled the skins off, handed them to Harold.

  “They look like little buffalo wings,” he said. “But...”

  “Just eat one,” Gator said.

  He tried one and it was good, not as fatty as a real buffalo wing, but tastier than he thought it would be.

  “Could use some hot sauce, but not bad.”

  “Can’t help you there,” Gator said. “Okay, I promised to tell you more over dinner. Let me tell you a story.”

 
; “Go for it,” Harold said.

  “Okay, I was at this concert some years ago...”

  “I know this story,” Harold interrupted. “Lucas and Opal told me.”

  “Different story,” Gator said. “This was long before I got into Lucas’ club. I was at this rock concert with some buddies of mine that I used to work with at the garage, and we were drinking beer and having a blast. We were pretty torn up, you know, getting rowdy and stuff. There was this chick that was probably as old as my Aunt Marge, but she was looking pretty hot, and like she’d give me a go, and were dancing up by the stage. She was grinding on me and I was grinding on her, but I was thinking that this was really stupid.”

  “Stupid?” Harold asked.

  “Yeah, well we did the concert thing pretty often, and had a few beers real often. I was working at an auto shop at the time, and the guys were pretty tight, on and off the job, you know. Pretty typical guys. Life was about drinking beers, hitting the titty bars, going to concerts, eating greasy food, and scoring with the baby dolls. And I was thinking, you know, that this whole scene was getting pretty boring all in all. But what was making me see this was this older lady, because I was thinking that she was probably doing the same thing thirty years ago that she was doing right now, and I saw myself as an old guy with a bald head in blue work shirt with my name inside a white oval in red letters, holding a can of Budweiser. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh huh,” Harold said.

  “But before I could really act on my realization, some guy in a leather vest stomped on my foot with a jack boot, and when I looked down, he hit me in the face and it was all she wrote. It was a free-for-all. My buddies were in there, that biker and his buddies were in there, it was a mess. The next thing I know, I’m handcuffed to this cop car’s bumper. You know, the two guards they have on the front bumper so they can push and ram without tearing up the paint job?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “They must’ve put me there because the back seats were full. Anyway, I was drunk and beat up and I passed out. When I woke up they were stuffing me into a paddy-wagon.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That’s not the point of the story,” Gator said. “It’s what happened while I was passed out. I had a dream.”

  “A dream?” Harold said. “Must’ve been some dream for you to remember it this long.”

  “It was. Actually, it was more of a vision than a dream.”

  “So it was short?” Harold asked. “When you think of a vision, you think of The Virgin Mary’s face appearing in the clouds, stuff like that.”

  “No it wasn’t like that. I guess it was dream then. But anyway, it was really long and involved, very realistic, and I can remember it in great detail to this day,” Gator said.

  “Tell it to me.”

  “It started with the birth of this man. See, in the dream, I was him, and it was all happening to me. I was born, and things happened to me, and nothing was left out. You know how in a dream, things are all disjointed and mixed up, and most of the time they don’t make sense?” Gator asked.

  “Yeah. They’re like Alice in Wonderland.”

  “Not this one,” Gator said. “It was all in focus, this guy’s life. There were no fast forwards or cut scenes like a movie or a dream or whatever. Every second was there. Every diaper change, every lost toy, every harsh word uttered by someone, every bath, every scary moment. Did you every have your life flash before your eyes?”

  “No, uh-uh.”

  “Well, it’s a real thing, not just something that people say like ‘that truck almost ran me over and I saw my life flash before my eyes.’ When I was a kid I almost drowned in a public pool and while I was under water my life flashed before my eyes. It’s like every memory of your life hits you at one time and you experience the whole of your life in one big whoosh. Well that’s how my dream was. I was unconscious on that bumper what, five or ten minutes, and I experienced an entire lifetime of events from birth to death, with perfect clarity and infinite detail.”

  “That’s weird,” Harold said. “I mean it, I’m not just saying that to be a good listener. Who was he? Did he have a name?”

  “In the dream there was no sound. It was all feelings and pictures and events, raw emotions and stuff, so I didn’t get any names, just faces and how the guy felt. It’s funny, but the things people think of as milestones weren’t milestones to this guy. Like your first steps, your first bicycle ride without training wheels, first kiss, that kind of thing, wasn’t all that big for him. I mean, they were all there, I saw them, but they weren’t all that earth-shattering to him.”

  “What was?” Harold asked. “Hey, listen to us, we’re talking about him like he’s not a figment of your drunk brain after it got kicked around by redneck bikers.”

  “Things like the first time he lied and got caught, and his mother didn’t trust him completely anymore. That really got him. It was a loss of innocence that really made him sad, made me sad to relive it too. And...”

  “That’s not so strange,” Harold said. “I remember when something like that happened to me. It was scary. I can see why that was memorable for him.”

  “...and there was the first time he got beaten up in a fist-fight. That really hurt him. Things like that. He was very sensitive to the changes he had to go through in order to be a part of society. Having to do schoolwork, having to learn things that he wasn’t supposed to question, having to say what people expected to hear him say, having to be two-faced, having to be on guard. Having to lie. There was this one part of the dream where he was with some other kids after school and he had to jazz up a story he was telling in order to keep the other kids interested in what he had to say, and he was very let down afterward. He felt dirty, like he had done something wrong. And then it hit him that everybody did that, embellished or outright lied, and he was so let down and depressed that it was such a dirty world he lived in. It made him feel lonely to think that the only person he could trust completely was himself, and not even then, because he could see that he remembered things about himself in an unrealistic way also.”

  “That’s really sad,” Harold said. “I felt that way when I was a kid. I think everybody feels that way, but they forget it when they’re older. Was the whole thing sad?”

  “Not at all,” Gator said. “It was just like a real life, some sad, some happy, and a ton of the mundane and boring. That’s the way life is.”

  “Tell me a good part, something not sad,” Harold said, taking a sip from one of the white-lined tin cans. “By the way, this tea isn’t so bad after all.”

  “Thirst makes most liquids taste decent. Something not sad? Okay. There was this one part when I was in love with a great girl who loved me back, and we were so happy together. We used to do such stupid stuff together, it didn’t matter what we did, it was always fun. She was really smart and funny, but not as carefree as I was. I was the kooky one, the life of the party. We had so many friends to hang out with, but we spent a lot time alone together too.

  “In the dream we spent this one whole weekend reading a book to each other. We never got dressed the whole weekend. She would read while I cooked, I would read while she cleaned up...”

  “Bonnie and I did that one time,” Harold said. “It was really fun,” he said. “It’s funny you dreamed that.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it? Anyway, we were really in love. And the sex? Wow.”

  “You dreamed that too? You didn’t tell me it as an X-rated dream.”

  “It wasn’t X-rated,” Gator said. “Not any more than life is X-rated. Sex is part of life. You don’t get it. I dreamed this guy’s whole life, every millisecond of it, from birth to death.”

  “What happened to you and the girl, to the guy and the girl I mean,” Harold asked.

  “Things went along great for a long time. But then I – I keep saying I but I mean he. Oh well, I give up
. I started to put my faith in my job, and I started to get my sense of self from work. It was as if all the praise that I got from work replaced all of the praise I got from her. I craved that approval more than anything. Instead of wanting to be successful at being her husband I wanted to be successful at the job. Possessions got to be more important than people. Then I lost my job, lost her, lost everything. See, when I lost my job, I had lost the source of all praise and support. I had gotten so dependent on it that when it was gone I had nothing. The dream got really dark and sad. I tried to kill myself.”

  Harold’s face became mud, his expression washing away in Gator’s stream of words.

  “Shut up,” Harold said. “That’s enough, just shut up.”

  “Why? I wasn’t successful, like I said. I didn’t kill myself. I lived...”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore,” Harold said. He stood up and began to pace. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Does it sound familiar?” Gator said.

  “You’re freaking me out. Please shut up...”

  “I know this has got to be hard,” Gator said. “And hard to believe. But I’m not lying. Remember the blue and white milk cartons at your elementary school, and how the milk was always frozen, and how you hated that? They froze it so it wouldn’t go bad, and when you got it, the date was always a week old. Remember the girl you had a crush on in college first year, the one you couldn’t save? She only liked the bad boys. She used to hang out and smoke pot with them, and you wanted her to like you. You wanted to make her respect herself, but you couldn’t.”

  “Please shut the hell up. If you don’t shut up I’ll die.”

  “It was so funny,” Gator said, “the way you used to fuss over your clothes when you were a little kid. Your Mom would fold your pants so they lay flat, and when you put them on, you thought you looked like the sailor on the Crackerjack box. You used to re-fold them so that when you put them on they belled out the other way, front to back instead. Too funny,” Gator said. “You had that one pair of polyester pants that were navy and cream checks. They were god-awful, but you wore them until they wouldn’t button around your waist.”

  “Shut the...”

  “Okay, Okay, I’ll shut up. I’ll let you stew in that for awhile,” Gator said.

  He picked up the matching coffee cans Harold had found. Crimping the edge of one of them with the pliers of his Leatherman, he stuck it inside the other and tamped them together with a brick bat so that friction held them in place tightly making a big metal tube closed at both ends. The can opener attachment made an ‘X’ in one end. He pushed the triangles of jagged metal inward to make an opening and threw in some of the frog bones.

  “What is that thing for?” Harold asked, still shaking but hiding it as much as he could.

  “It’s a trap. Critters come after the bait and they can’t get out. I’m going to take it down to the creek, drop it in the water, and in the morning it’ll be full of crawdads. Bingo. Breakfast,” Gator said.

  “Yummy,” Harold said. “Won’t it attract bears?”

  “It would, if anybody had seen a bear in these parts since 1970. But they haven’t, so I think we’re okay. Be back in a second.”

  Harold got quiet, thinking about what Gator had told him, and wondering how it was possible this stranger had dreamt his past, present, and future. As much as he wanted to see an explanation that wasn’t supernatural he could not find one, and the more he thought about it, the creepier Gator’s story seemed.

  Gator returned and began talking again.

  “After I had that vision,” he said, “it took me years to find Lucas and the gang, and to sniff you out. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to you. You have to understand, I haven’t talked to anybody but myself in years. But when Lucas said that you had taken that jump, well, I put two and two together for the good of everybody.”

  “I told you I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Okay, I won’t push you. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll never be ready,” Harold said.

  Gator let it ride, put another piece of wood on the fire and enjoyed the night. They sat there in a not uncomfortable silence for a long time, watching the fire and listening to the sounds of the Virginia woods after dark. A screech owl cried. To Gator it was all twinkling mysterious beauty, but to Harold it was a maze filled with dangerous things he could not see. No walls and no roof meant no safety, no rest.

  When Gator began to doze, Harold stared at him and although he attributed it to deja vu or some other trick of his mind he thought there was something familiar about the face. It was hard to see details through dirt and beard in the poor light. He stared more, but Gator didn’t move or twitch or open his eyes. Maybe, Harold thought, this was the person who had been watching him at Parkinson’s office the night after he crawled out of the bay. He couldn’t be sure. He considered the possibility that the familiarity of Gator’s face was because they really were somehow connected by their respective dreams – Gator’s prophetic one and his own reality-creating ones.

  He woke up with a jerk and looked around trying to get his bearings. It was not yet light but it was coming on, the sky a medium shade of blue and moon long gone from the sky. Gator was adding a few sticks to the crackling flames in the fireplace. Harold came nearer, feeling cold and damp from dew..

  “Good morning,” Gator said.

  Harold scuffled up into a sitting position with his knees bent, thankful that he had awakened.

  “Didn’t mean to go to sleep, did you?” Gator said.

  “Heck no,” Harold said. “No offense. Good morning.”

  “Once this fire’s going good,” Gator said, “I’m leaving you out here on your own...”

  “Hold on, I thought you were going to lead me out of here...”

  “I never said that. You said that, I never said that.”

  “You can’t leave me out here! The Disciples of Demeter are after me, or at least somebody is. You can’t make me stay...”

  “You couldn’t tell me where you wanted to go, which means you don’t know where to go, which in turn means that you don’t need to go anywhere,” Gator answered.

  “You’re scared to kill me, so you’re leaving me for dead,” Harold said. “Or you’re leaving me for somebody else to finish off.”

  “Maybe,” Gator said. “But that means I wasted a ton of time showing you how to get something to eat and drink and talking to you. Once you figure out where you want to go, you’ll figure out a way to get there.”

  “And if I can’t?” Harold asked.

  “Then you’ll die here, a few hours walk from civilization.” Gator handed him a plastic cigarette lighter. “Take this in case your fire goes out. Keep it dry. It’s gonna rain soon, maybe tonight.”

  “I’m not staying. I’ll follow you...”

  “Oh, you’ll stay alright,” Gator said slowly. “You’ll stay because you know you need to, for your own good. Stay long enough and maybe you’ll figure out why I had a vision of your life while I was cuffed to that trooper’s car bumper. Breakfast is in the can,” he said. Harold took it from him and looked inside. A half dozen bright red crayfish were steaming inside.

  Harold watched Gator walk away into the damp morning light. Birds were chirping for dawn and the picture should have been cheerful, but Harold could only think of the whomever or whatever was after him. He thought of the peeping tom in the shadows around Lucas’ house, and the one who left a goat at the farmhouse. Not seeing them made it worse. He did not want to be alone in these woods.

  Putting the lighter in his pocket he looked in semicircles around himself like a sentry and waited for the sun to come up fully. He passed the time worrying and thinking, reliving everything that had gone wrong. He picked and the ate the crawfish tails and put the leavings back into the trap. When the sun finally did come up the heat came with it, and he wishe
d he could have the coolness of night without the darkness. With Gator gone he was left with only the heat, his hunger, and the thoughts he had sweltering in his head.

  He had to move out of the clearing, the sun was just too hot, but neither did he want to get himself covered with ticks again. The deer path led down to the creek one way stretched out toward who-knew-what the opposite way. He decided to go in the direction he had not yet been, and took the path away from the creek.

  I occurred to him that in the bright light he might be able to find his way back to the main road, but just in case he was wrong, he elected to stick with the path until it ended, thinking that perhaps it led to something familiar.

  There was a little incline followed by a drop, and looking back he could only see the top of the ruined chimney at his camp even though he was less than a hundred yards away. Harold went on. The path forked and he took the right-hand branch, making a mental note of that. He looked for anything that could be a clue about his location but there was nothing. No signs, no trail markers, no fences, no roads. A sweet gum tree had fallen over the road, he guessed a couple of years a go, and it was suspended three feet over the trail by a crooked sapling and another fallen tree. He ducked under it and kept moving.

  The trail became gradually more overgrown. Briars tugged at his pant-legs, and the soil felt damp and spongy under his feet. The air was humid, musty, and stale. The path ended in a thicket of heavy brush, but on the other side was a steep bank about ten feet high, and on top of it he could see the path continued on. Considering for a moment first, he picked his way into the scratchy stuff and began to climb the bank. It was so steep that he had to lean forward and dig in his toes. If he slipped he’d fall into the prickly brush. He made it up with care and stood on the top of the high mound. The path curved out and wound back in a circular way, and although it didn’t head straight back the way he had come, he suspected that at some point it might. The woods had become more piney and open. Over his head there was a clear patch, and a bright ray of sun fell on him like a brand. The air here was fresher than it had been before.

  “No sense stopping now,” he said, and kept moving.

  After a half hour more of hiking he saw that the path was not going to lead back to camp after all. It was laid out in huge sweeping ‘S’ shapes, curving first one way then the next. There was a mud puddle in his way, and he went around it, but as he did, he saw dirt-bike tracks leading in and out. He couldn’t tell how old they were, but he suspected that if he stayed on the path he would eventually find his way to a farm or a road.

  Intermittently along the way he spotted the tracks again until finally he came to a peculiar row of trees. He looked around, a little confused, and realized that there were many rows of them. Between the rows there was heavy underbrush, and other kinds of trees had cropped up here and there, but it was obvious that this had been an orchard. There was an apple tree in the grandparents’ yard, and these looked like that one.

  Harold was excited and ran from tree to tree looking for fruit. The orchard had been abandoned for a reason, but finally he found one tree with a half dozen small mottled apples on board and many more on the ground. He ate the ones on the tree first, then went at the ones on the ground next, eating around the rotten parts. For awhile he was unaware of the heat, outside himself with the joy of his find. He was stuffed.

  Certain he heard footsteps, he spun around but saw nobody. He froze and held his breath. Nothing moved. He tossed the last core into the woods and headed back to the path.

  The footsteps came back, this time off to the left, so again he stood still and listened, looked for any movement at all. He saw nothing.

  He felt stupid and paranoid, but he picked up a heavy stick the size of a shovel handle and used it as a walking stick, just in case. For a little while he didn’t hear it, but he kept the stick in his hand just the same.

  Ahead he could see a bright archway in the trees, and it seemed he was about to emerge into a clearing. He sped up, walking fast, and heard a bark that echoed off the trees so that he couldn’t tell where it came from. He sprinted for the clearing up ahead, carrying his stick like a spear, heading toward the light. Against the bright white he could see the silhouettes of three dogs. One barked, one bayed, and the third stayed silent, but all three busted off toward him at a dead run.

  “Damn it!”

  He turned and ran back the way he came. Glancing back he saw that his lead of about a hundred yards was down to fifty in a twinkling. The lead dog, a mixed breed hound would not stop baying. It was the ringing of bell, clear and bright in the forest, the kind of sound that gives hunters joy and prey the need to run until they are caught.

  He made it to the abandoned orchard, dropped his worthless stick, and grabbed a branch. He swung himself up, fear turning him into a monkey. The three dogs barked and howled, jumped and paced underneath him. The silent one, who looked to have more than a splash of rottweiler in his lineage, stood quietly with his forepaws on the trunk breathing like a steam engine.

  Finally the rottie and the other dog, a small white and black spaniel mutt, gave up and lay down on the leaves, but the hound stood at attention right beneath Harold and kept up the racket.

  “Treed me like a damn coon, didn’t you. You ol’ son,” Harold said. He hocked up a wad of spit and blasted it at the hound, who didn’t care one way or the other that he had spit on his hindquarters, just kept up the racket.

  It might have been around noon, Harold couldn’t be sure. In a couple of hours, maybe sooner, he should be heading back to camp if he wanted to get there before dark, have water and maybe reset the crawfish trap. Unless of course he opted to try the trail and see what was in the clearing the dogs had blocked him from. He didn’t know what to do besides wait and see if the dogs would go away, so he did that. He made himself as comfortable as he could by sitting on a fat limb with his back leaning against the trunk.

  Changing positions from time to time worked for awhile, but eventually he could not get comfortable. The hound, who had gotten intermittently quiet, would start up again each time he moved, and about the time Harold got stiff again, the hound would quiet; Harold would resituate himself and the hound would start the cycle again. The situation was driving both of them mad.

  He noticed a three hard green apples on the tree a little higher up. Harold stood on his perch and picked one, and he was just about the take a bite, when he saw another option.

  “One for each of ya, “ he said, “come here!”

  Steadying himself with his left hand holding a limb, he threw the apple as hard as he could at the hound. He missed. The second one scored but the hound only barked and backed up ten feet or so, then came right back. “One more shot,” he said. He targeted the white spaniel, but missed, striking the rottie in the side. She yelped and ran off.

  Soon the other two had wandered off to join the rottie. Harold waited until he couldn’t hear or see the dogs, then climbed down, scooped up his stick, and headed back to camp. He needed water and familiar ground. Perhaps Gator would come back and check on him.

  He had not been walking long when he realized that it was later than he thought. He increased his speed, sweating like mad, to make sure he got back to the broken down chimney by dark.

  Sliding back down the briary slope he had climbed that morning, he noticed the patch was thick with blackberries. He did not want to waste time, but he had to pick some. He filled his pockets with them, getting a few shallow, itchy scratches on his knuckles and fingers. The berries were of varying ripeness, some green and small, some large and bursting with juice. The juicy ones he ate right away so they wouldn’t make a mess in his pockets. They were tart but delicious. Though there were more, he had to go.

  Somewhere far away, he could not tell the direction, he heard the hound baying again, and began to trot. It was more exercise than he had had in a year.

  Camp was silent. No sign
of Gator or anything else. He put his hand over the soot and debris in the fireplace and felt a little warmth. First he threw on some twigs and dry leaves, and when it started to smolder, he added two pieces of larger wood. He didn’t want to trust his chances of starting a fire with the lighter Gator had left him. Better to keep it in reserve.

  There was some water left in the pickle jar which he drank down to the dregs, pouring out the last inch of gritty water on the ground.

  From the creek he filled the jar again and put it on the fire to boil, emptied his pockets of the apples and berries he had gathered on his walk. Since some of them were green, he figured he’d better cook them up, so he put the berries into the largest can he had, and spitted the apples onto sticks. They would have to wait until his water had been boiled. While he waited for the water to boil, he got down to the business of making a shelter. Gator had warned him that it would rain soon, and though it seemed clear right now, he didn’t want to get stuck with no escape from a downpour.

  As he gathered some long limbs to use as supports, he couldn’t get over how he felt. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt better than he had felt in years despite the heat and the bugs.

  “You’ll feel different later on tonight when the skeeters come out,” he said to himself.

  It felt good to sweat, and walk, and run. Just one day and he could tell he was shedding pounds.

  “The Gator Diet. A new book from the publisher’s of the Adkins Diet. Eat all the frogs and berries you can scrounge up and still lose weight.”

  He knew that it was an excuse to stay inside himself and avoid Bonnie, Lucas and his gang, and the Congregation, but it was great just to busy himself with simple tasks, to just walk and see what was around the next bend. A few hours ago he was keen to find his way out. But after his trip and the thing with the dogs, he felt relaxed and happy, comfortable in his little camp. Compared to his work-a-day life at the job he used to have, this was the Mayo Clinic. He could not believe that a few weeks ago he had actually jumped off a bridge.

  A bridge, he thought, is a way to get from one place to another, a way to cross over. Jumping off of it seemed like copping out and giving up. Not just giving up on life, but giving up on the crossing over, giving up on the journey. Losing his job, breaking up with Bonnie, they were just parts of the bridge, or maybe obstructions in the path leading to the bridge.

  He was by no means Davy Crockett, but he mustered enough common sense to put together a lean-to. Two steps from the fireplace he made a tripod of tall sticks. He snapped off armloads of low-hanging pine brances and leaned them against his frame to make a primitive wigwam with an open side facing the fire. He heaped and piled brush on top of it as tightly as he could, adding leaves and anything else he could find, even a green garbage bags he found crumpled nearby.

  By the time he was done the water was at a boil. He went over and took off his shirt to use as oven mitts, setting it aside to make room over the fire for his can of berries. Putting them not too close to the coals to simmer, he thought that it might be nice to have some rain. He might even let it wash over him to cool off. A break in the heat maybe. He propped his apples up on the other side of the fire and let them cook while took the coffee can trap down to water, baited with the leftovers from his crawfish breakfast, and dropped in a different pool.

  A kind of quarter-till eight glow came into the summer air, not real dusk, but the first pinkish-orange warning that night wasn’t far off.

  He hadn’t thought about the jump much before Billy had asked, but he guessed that was because Billy had been right. If he had been deeply disturbed, clinically, the desire to die would have been pervasive, and he would have obsessed on the subject and tried again. He jumped off the bridge out of boredom more than anything else, because without Bonnie or a job he didn’t think he had anything left. Once things started happening, once he started meeting people, getting pursued, and all the rest, he hadn’t given his high dive a second thought. Right now he knew he hadn’t been destitute. This was life. Cooking a meal. Making your bed. Breathing in and out. Tending a fire.

  “Bonnie knew that, why didn’t I?” he said out loud, and it was true.

  He had finally gone to her, after weeks of waffling back and forth between not knowing how to go to her or what to say, not wanting to go to her, and not having the courage. When he got there all he could do was blubber about buying her a damn car, as if life was about buying cars. Alone in the woods and embarrassment was forcing hot blood into his face just thinking about it. He wanted her to taste these berries and eat these apples. To curl up with him in his tee-pee if it rained.

  By the time the apples were baked done and the berries were cooked down to a sweet and sticky mash, it was full on dark. He ate the apples first since they were in danger of sliding off the sticks, put his berries aside to cool. Down by the water he could hear the frogs calling for mates. He got his gig ready, thought about trying to bag some meat a little later.

  “Thanks to all this fruit, I ain’t near hungry enough to go trying to catch frogs,” he said out loud. He was sure Gator would be back tomorrow, and even if he didn’t show, Harold was certain that if he started early and followed the path the way he had before, he would be literally out of the woods. He wouldn’t starve. When the berries were cool enough he drank them down like a fruit smoothie and wiped his chin and the back of his hand.

  He rinsed out the can that held the berries as best he could, drinking the watery juice and setting the can aside. Sleep came to mind. In the space between the fire and his wigwam he reclined on the flagstones that had once been the floor of the cabin. With his head resting on the bicep of his outstretched arm he looked at the fire.

  There had to be a right and a wrong in all the things that had happened to him. He was either a prophet or he was not. He weighed the evidence, which was practically nothing except for the weird stuff Gator had told him and the little red car. Not much to base his decision on, he admitted that to himself. The whole idea was crazy anyway. But it couldn’t just be dismissed either. Unable to decide he moved on to Bonnie. There had to be a right and a wrong there as well. It was hard to argue with the fact that Bonnie had turned him away after months of trying to get him to come home. That had to be wrong. Yet he admitted to himself he had been a clumsy ass. Right and wrong, true and false, they were as elusive as the wavy heat rising from the coals.

  Something touched his hand and he jerked up to a sitting position pulling back. The mottled white spaniel from the orchard encounter pulled back a few feet and sat down staring at him.

  “You scared the crud out of me,” he said.

  Harold knew he should have been scared, but he was not. The dog looked truly harmless, sad, and thin. He looked at the poor thing. The other dogs, the hound and the rottweiler, weren’t in sight. Harold patted his chest with his hands and the dog came over and began licking his face and hands, clearing them of the remnants of the berries he had eaten earlier. He felt more secure with the dog near him. He stroked the matted fur until it went to sleep, and before he knew it, he was asleep too. But he dreamed of shadows and hands and disembodied lips that did not speak.

  In the middle of the night he woke up feeling disoriented and edgy. This was the quietest place he had ever been. Silence was something that was relative, he saw that now. Once when he was twelve he had been to Luray Caverns. The tour guide had said that even when you think it’s dark, there’s just a little light. Eventually your eyes adjust, she had said, standing there in her lime green polyester skirt, white blouse, and matching lime scarf. Her blonde hair came down tight to her cheeks, then shot out at the bottom all the way around like the Liberty bell. She was holding the flashlight the way they held it in The Blair Witch Project. She said that your eyes adjust to even the slightest light, and sooner or later you can see just a little. A cavern, one as deep as Luray, she said, contains no light whatsoever. She said that most
people have never experienced total darkness, that she had, and she wanted the tour to experience it too. Everybody joined hands, and she hit a button. The darkness was total. He could not see his hand before his face, it was like an opaque plastic bag over his head, and he had felt as if he would suffocate. It must have been no more than sixty seconds or so, no more than a minute of complete darkness. Nobody spoke, but you could hear sniffles, and a baby started to cry. A second longer and Harold would have joined in; but the lights came up and the tour had continued. He had never forgotten total darkness.

  The silence in the woods was the same as the dark of Luray. In the city, when he had thought it was quiet, he saw now it had not been. The movement of each blade of grass was audible, and when there was a puff of breeze, he could hear the airy swish of the wind as it rushed around in the convolutions of his ear. A leaf flipping over could have been the honking of a car’s horn it was so clear. More and more of them began to flip, turning up their bottoms to accept the rain that it was clear was coming.

  Sweating by the smoky fire, eaten up with mosquito bites, he wanted the rain as much as he had ever wanted anything. He wanted the water to drink and he wanted to feel the coolness of it, but most of all he wanted something to fall out of the heavens and wash off the mud so that he could relax and breathe. He wanted something to come and get him clean on the outside so that he could start trying to feel clean on the inside.

  He remembered having seen a plastic grocery bag stuck in the branches of a tree earlier in the day. He walked slowly that general direction, giving his eyes a chance to adjust. Just as the tour guide at Luray had promised, his eyes did adjust. There was just a little light coming from the moon and starts behind the clouds, but still he could not spot the bag. He stopped, closed his eyes, and held his breath. Soon he could hear it flapping in the wind. He opened his eyes and went over, stopping every few steps so that he could hear the flapping instead of the crunch of his own steps, then he saw it.

  Back by the fire he took off his clothes, rolled them up small, and put them in the bag, which he stowed under his little lean-to. He moved his supply of wood underneath it as well. Then, squatting by the fire, he waited on the rain.

  Clouds lit from the rear tracked across the moon in billows of indigo and gray trimmed in lavender. Thunder, more a vibration than a sound, said that the storm was coming closer still, close enough to smell now. Black clouds came in behind the others and the moon was gone. A few large drops of rain came down icy cold. Harold flinched at the first one, but then smiled. Grammy had said only a fool knows no better than to come in out of the rain. He laughed at his memory, smiled again, and kept looking up at the circle of sky afforded by the clearing. The trees at the edge were a swaying chorus, and their sounds were an opera of swishing leaves and rattling stems, black against the slightly less black of the sky. The cool air was a washcloth on Harold’s scalding forehead.

  The thunder came on more strongly, but it still came from far away. The more heavily the raindrops landed on him the lighter his spirit grew. He could no longer see any detail in the heavens, and his fire began to sputter. He moved away from it, turned his back to its ashy smoke and struggling flames, and looked over his little shelter into the deepest part of the woods

  Feeling about he located a pile of bricks which had been part of the house’s foundation wall and took a seat. He let the rain wash him clean. He moved his hands through his hair the way he would have if he had been in the shower. He shook himself like a dog. Out of synch from the thunder, faraway lightning, more a phosphorescence rather than a flash, pulsed above the trees at the rim of the heavens. The clouds glowed in the distance.

  Time died with the absence of a watch. The rain faded into a drizzle and then stopped, and the dark clouds went away and allowed the moon to come out again. By its light he put some of the driest wood onto the remaining embers of the fire and pulled on his dry clothes. He wasn’t cold, had almost dried in the breeze, but it was growing cooler by the minute, and he knew he’d be chilly soon.

  Busied with his chores he had taken his eyes off the sky; when he looked up the clouds were like ocean sands after a receding tide, waves and ripples painted in stunning shades of purple, white, and lilac. He was pierced by the sight of it, unable to breathe. All of the oppressions – sweat, dirt, heat, insects – had been washed away. He felt as though he could raise his arms and fly up into the clouds. More than anything he wanted Bonnie to see what he saw, smell what he smelled, feel what he felt.

  And he saw that she could have if he had not left her. If he had stayed by her side where he belonged, he wouldn’t have to try and describe this experience. He was taking her for granted yet again, assuming that she would want to hear about this moment, assuming that she would be there for him when he got back. The urgency was intense as he began to feel that he might lose her, feeling for the first time that a life without Bonnie was possible, perhaps inevitable if he didn’t let her know, right now, how he felt. More than anything else he finally understood the triviality of his previous concerns about jobs and homes and cars.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.