Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail

by T. J. Forrester

  “My mouth tastes like pennies.”

  Then she says something else.

  “I wish I was dead.”

  I didn’t think our breakup was that big of a deal.

  * * *

  In the motel parking lot in Norwich, a town a few miles from the New Hampshire border, a used Toyota pulls up and the driver steps into the twilight. I have been on the trail for over four months and in that time Roxie’s cheeks have thickened. Her skinny, haunted look is gone. Instead of T-shirt and jeans, she has on a beige dress and high heels that click the asphalt. I’ve known her for years and never heard her click when she walked. I wasn’t sure what to expect, know it wasn’t a Toyota and high heels.

  We walk inside, out of the shadows, into the light of my room. If Roxie notices the trail smells, she doesn’t say anything. Least I’m clean. Took four showers and washed clothes, applied deodorant under my armpits.

  “So,” Roxie says. “Here I am.”

  “You look good.”

  “So do you.”

  We sit across from each other, a round table between us, make several attempts at small talk like ex-lovers do when they try to find their way back to each other. Memories from our past are impossible to sort out, and our conversation is a series of dead ends. We didn’t get much sleep when we were together, that I remember. She has a distracted look, like she can’t remember why she’s here.

  “If we get back together, you got to promise me some things,” she says. “You got to make some fucking changes.”

  Roxie ticks off a list, which starts with no drugs and alcohol and ends with no staying out all night. She’s moved into an apartment and works for a travel agency in northern Atlanta. Right now she only takes phone calls, but she has a chance to make something of herself and doesn’t want to screw it up.

  “I don’t even think about it anymore,” I say.

  We talk about it, never once saying coke out loud. She’s off it for good. Thinks it came close to killing her but now she sees the light. I tell her I haven’t even thought of it since I started walking the mountains, add that it is in the past for me.

  “My thru-hike is going well,” I say. “I’m a purist, which means I’m walking every foot of the trail and not taking shortcuts.”

  She looks around the room, like she sees my gear for the first time, and a narrowness invades the flesh between her eyes. My tent hangs from the bathroom door, and food bags are strewn across the carpet. My sleeping bag blankets the air conditioner in the window. I’m like every other hiker who walks out of a wet forest, I dry my gear when I get to town. This is not a bad thing. I open my data book and point out the mileage, tell her about the springs and the shelters, and how it took me a long time to walk into hiking shape.

  “New Hampshire and Maine,” I say. “Two states left to go.”

  Roxie drags a brush through her hair. A ripping sound. Like there are tangles she will never get out. She makes a flicking motion, as though she clears the air before starting a new conversation. “I want you to pack up and come back to Atlanta. If it goes well, you can move in with me. But not right away. . . . We have to see first.”

  I touch her cheek, want to ignite something inside me. My hand lingers for a long time. She stares at her purse like she wants to pick it up and leave. I should have known she would ask me to choose between my life and hers. The phone rings and I pick up the receiver.

  “Hello?” I say.

  The hiss of a bad connection, someone breathing.

  “I cut my wrist with a razor but you needn’t worry,” Simone says. “It didn’t go deep enough.”

  Drama queen comes to mind, then an image of a man tied between horses straining in opposite directions. I have a choice, get off the trail and try to make a life with Roxie, or continue hiking into an unknown that may or may not contain Simone. I study Roxie, take in the dress and the searching green eyes, come to a decision I hope I don’t regret.

  “Meet me in the parking lot,” I say into the phone.

  I tell Roxie I’ll be back, slip outside. The town is spread out and has a white glow that washes out the stars. Cars and trucks drive down the highway, and the smells of oil, gasoline, and a catalytic converter tinge the breeze, scents that didn’t bother me pre-trail but now nauseate me. Simone steps out of a room five doors down and heads toward the street.

  “Hey,” I say.

  She does not turn around. I jog up to her, and, in the glare of oncoming headlights, spot the nick on her wrist. The cut is an inch long, over the vein, and barely deep enough to break skin. I follow her into town, where we parallel show windows so glassy and dark they remind me of black ice.

  A siren sounds, my old instincts kick in, and I duck into an alley that smells like fish. Simone merges with the shadows. The squad car drives past, blue lights licking at the buildings, then the night returns. Soon as my eyes adjust, I skirt a box-filled Dumpster and she follows me through the litter. We walk past cats squalling on a stoop, past mattresses propped up against buildings. We kick cans across the asphalt. Simone communicates in monosyllables. Yes, she thinks I’m an asshole. No, she’s not afraid to walk in alleys. Yes, she likes to walk at night. We leave the business district, cross a street, and drift past fenced-in backyards. Dogs bark and inside the houses the glow of late-night television flickers across the curtains.

  Houses thin out and soon we walk past the city-limit sign and arrive in the country. Here, there is no light to fade out the stars, and they flicker against the blackness like fiery sequins, millions of them, as though every star mankind has ever seen has decided to show itself at this very moment. Simone has a fresh-washed smell, a fruity scent that makes me hungry in more ways than one.

  “I love you,” I say.

  Simone mimics my words. I don’t love her and she knows it and that’s the problem. She doesn’t need to hear that lie.

  We come to a house, a single story set off the road, in a field partially lit by a rectangle of light spilling out of a window. A woman, framed by open drapes, reads on a sofa in a living room. I cut through the grass, to the shadows next to a rusted swing set, motion to Simone. She arrives in that familiar crouch, and we face the window.

  The woman, wearing a housecoat, sits in a recliner. Her legs curl under her hips, and toes peek out from beneath yellow folds. She holds a book that has a picture of a bare-chested man on the cover, and her face has a glow, an intensity, like she’s inside what she’s reading. I come up with an idea, something crazy that I hope closes the distance between Simone and me.

  “Let’s break in and steal something.”

  “I want no part of this.” Simone backs away.

  The moon is over the trees, and there’s enough light to see her outline on the road, not enough to make out her features. I creep to the window and straighten enough to see inside. Pictures of Venice, the Eiffel Tower, and island beaches—in silver picture frames—hang on the walls. The woman has big bones, a girl who grew up on the farm and carried milk pails every morning. Her hair is blond and her skin is pale, her fingernails are long and buffed at the end. She is the salt of the earth. The woman needs a name, and I decide on Sybil. My Sybil is a romantic. She likes faraway places, vacations best shared with a lover. I was wrong about the book. There’s also a woman on the cover. She’s kneeling and looking up at the man, has a rapturous expression. Rapturous. I like that word.

  Simone hisses, a drawn out, angry pssst. I ignore her and she hisses again. A thump, a dribble across the grass.

  Simone is throwing rocks.

  “Come over here,” she says.

  Another rock, then another and another. They fall short, a product of piddly tosses from someone who apparently has never played baseball, and I conclude she doesn’t have much of an arm. I cup my hands and whisper in her direction.

  “You throw like a girl.”

  The next rock lands closer and I realize she does have an arm and not only that, she also has aim. She bends over the ditch at the side of the
road, digs around, straightens, and hurls another rock my way. This one lands at my feet. I pick it up and throw it back, aim it over her head, into the trees on the other side of the road. Another rock lands at my feet.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,” she says.

  I raise my fists above the sill, enough so I’m sure she can see them, extend my middle fingers. Mimicking her posture the day she was almost struck by lightning is funny, and I hold back a laugh. The next rock comes out of the darkness into the light. Flat trajectory, like the rock has energy behind it. I notice this because I know what’s going to happen and in that knowledge comes a slowing down that enables me to see minute detail. The rock, round and dull gray, tumbles like an asteroid on a collision course. There is no taking this rock back. It’s thrown, hurled really, approximately seven feet off the ground, and soon will reach its destination. I can only watch the rock sail over my head, can only listen to the rock impact glass, a million cracks spreading in all directions. I duck and run from the shrillness within. I run down the road, and Simone runs with me.

  We hear the squad car before we see it, duck behind trees, veer back on the road as the car passes. Simone laughs so hard she doubles over.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” she says.

  She presses against me like she wants to fuck right there in the weeds, and I tell her we need to put distance between us and the house. We run into town, stretched-out strides, arms pumping in time with the asphalt thuds. We slow to a trot and make our way through the alley, past the cats and rotting mattresses, to the motel parking lot.

  Roxie’s car is gone, and I’m relieved she didn’t need a breakup conversation. Richard has a room at the far end of the motel, and his light is on. The door is open. I knock, he doesn’t answer, so we walk in, step over his gear, peek into the bathroom expecting to find him passed out in the tub. Empty. A half-full bottle on the table, alongside his data book. A groan from under the bed, Simone looks, says he’s passed out.

  She gets her pack from her room, and we go inside mine. I read a note from Roxie, wad up the paper into a tiny ball, toss it in the wastebasket. Her coming up was a bad idea all around. It’s over between us, her exact words, and I tell Simone I have closure. Closure. That’s like walking through a door that doesn’t open from the other side, which is okay with me as far as Roxie is concerned. We only had it between us. Take it away and there is no us.

  I cradle Simone’s wrist, bring the cut to my lips. I explore the edges with my tongue, suck at the wound, taste the salty skin.

  10

  LEONA, IN THE waiting room, holds her purse on her lap while she waits for word about Emanuel. Across from her, a young man and a young woman sit one chair apart and between them, in the middle chair, kneels a child who scratches her patchy scalp. The young man has calloused hands and brown skin. The couple hovers over their offspring like their physical closeness will protect her from evil.

  Leona is in need of shelter and wishes her parents were alive to offer encouraging words, but she is old and her parents are dead. If Parker was here, her youngest, he would tell a joke and regale her with a comical scene from his travels. Heather, her oldest, is in the hospital, in another wing, where she delivers Boston babies at the rate of several a day. She has promised to look in before Leona and Emanuel head back to New Hampshire.

  “Nice weather we’re having today,” Leona says.

  The man and woman glance up, turn their attention back to their child. Leona looks down at her own hands and watches her fingers entwine and separate, a synchronized movement of wrinkled skin and sweaty palms. One part of her wants to escape the hospital unscathed and another part wants a diagnosis that explains Emanuel’s erratic behavior.

  She accommodated his desire that they experiment with multiple sex partners, had separated body and soul to endure his perversions, but yesterday’s experience in the grocery store had convinced her that she needed to seek help. They were in the dairy aisle—trying to recall whether they preferred two percent or low fat—when he pointed at an overweight woman who pushed a cart filled with potato chip bags and donut boxes. The smell of salami drifted from the nearby deli.

  “Look at that cow,” Emanuel said. “If those titties get any bigger, they’ll have to hook her up to a milking machine.”

  The woman waddled away, Emanuel’s voice loud behind her. Leona was appalled and when she and her husband returned home, she called Heather, who promptly scheduled an emergency appointment with a neurologist.

  Footsteps now come down the hallway, and Leona peers around the corner. She wears a print dress, and her flowery hat is pinned to her hair so tightly the fabric feels like part of her cranium. She watches a nurse walk past, full of purpose, white hose a whisper with each step.

  Leona’s right leg is asleep from sitting, so she gets up and stands in front of her chair. Anyone looking at her will think she suffers from indecision, unable to make up her mind to sit or stand, but there is no one in the room except the young man and the young woman and the little girl, and they haven’t even asked her name.

  Leona looks down at the child. The girl, who has a turned-down mouth, is made uglier by whatever illness afflicts her body. Leona chastises herself for the thought, gets a gumdrop out of her purse, holds out her hand. When her offering goes unnoticed, she pops the candy in her mouth and sucks the lemony flavor. She thinks lemon is her favorite, although she can’t remember for sure. It might be cherry. The child squalls, and Leona sits down. The young woman holds the girl and stares straight ahead, while the brown-skinned man glances at Leona and apologizes.

  “For what?” Leona says.

  * * *

  Late summer, and the New Hampshire mountains, framed by the picture window in the living room, thrust against the sky. Leona, who once sought inspiration from this view, hardly notices as she helps Emanuel into his recliner. Her husband wears a robe and a diaper, has developed a twitch in his right eye and right hand. She runs her fingers through his yellow hair. Chemo would have been pointless, the tumor so large and entwined in Emanuel’s brain the neurologist said he only had a month to live. If the prediction is correct, her husband will pass away in nine days. She sniffs the air, at the staleness that invades the house. The smell might be from the garbage under the sink. She makes a mental note to empty the container, and seconds later the reminder to remember evaporates from her brain.

  She pinches Emanuel’s arm, hard enough to break skin, and blood seeps out, forming two half moons. She pinches him again, studies the glaze over his eyes.

  “Goddamn it to hell,” she says.

  There are days when she wishes he would get it over with so she could put him in their family plot in Evergreen Cemetery.

  Parker, in the garage, sings a loud song about a one-eyed woman who loved a toe-less dwarf. Leona smiles because she knows he sings to perk up her spirits. He has moved home to care for his father until the end. Heather comes up when she can.

  Leona wipes spittle off Emanuel’s mouth, brings her face close to the window, wishes she could remember where she put the binoculars. This is the season when the northbounders, up from Georgia, traverse the mountain. She has watched them in years past. Their packs come in all colors, and sometimes they walk in twos and threes. Mostly they are alone.

  “Mom,” Parker says from the hallway, “I do wish you’d get out of the house today.”

  Parker has his father’s hair, his father’s mouth. She looks at Parker and sees Emanuel, she looks at Emanuel and sees shriveled skin and a rotted brain. Emanuel squirms and slides toward the floor, and she drags him upright. His robe falls open and she covers him up and reties the sash. Her husband would remain unshaven if it weren’t for her scraping a razor against his cheek each morning. She straps his watch on his wrist, even though he can no longer tell time. On some days, knowing he occasionally read before the illness, she places a novel in his lap. Her children think she wastes her energy. Leona does these things anyway. To stop fe
els like giving up and she does not have a give-up bone in her body.

  Her son flings his arms around her, and she feels small in his hug. She loves him when he does this, when he squeezes hard with no inclination to let go. She wants to cry but this is not a time for weakness. He steps away and presses the car keys into her hands.

  “Get the hell out of here, Mom.”

  “Are you sure?” she says.

  Her far-wandering son has returned from his travels. She wishes he was here under different circumstances.

  “Go!” he says.

  * * *

  On the cliff, Leona hands a cookie to a hiker who eats it in two gulps. The hiker has a trail name, which she forgets soon as she hears it. He has reddish skin, fine black hair, cheekbones flat as plates, and he wishes her well as he hikes up the trail. She returns to the edge, close enough so she can see down the rock wall into the thick forest. The creek that winds through the pasture at the bottom sparkles like silver minnows school on its surface. She and Emanuel fished in that creek when they were young. They caught rainbow trout and grilled them over an open fire. They made love in that pasture, water purling over the rocks, under moonlight so bright their bodies glowed.

  Leona wipes her eyes and blinks to clear her vision. She thinks she might confuse this pasture with another, brushes that thought away. They made love in a pasture when they were young, that she knows with certainty.

  Footsteps behind her, light and quick, and because she does not want to explain her tears, she does not turn and say hello. She hopes whoever it is will put her lack of acknowledgment to a deaf ear and leave her be. The breeze quickens, a cooling across her skin, and she tilts her face upwards. Clouds drift against an off-white sky. When she was young, she saw animals in the clouds and now she just sees clouds. Whoever is behind her has stopped, or maybe has moved on and she has forgotten. She wishes she had dominion over her memories. If she could choose, she would forget about old Emanuel and remember him in his twenties. So young, a promise of their shared future in his gaze.