Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  I didn’t know what he meant by that. We putted into Bend, a clean sunny mountain town, and he pulled over outside a big white Colonial. A ten-foot-tall sea foam green model of the Statue of Liberty was propped up on the lawn. Pink and yellow flowers were planted in circles instead of strips. It looked like an eccentric’s fortress, an inflated version of my parents’ house. The old man put the car in park outside the house and insisted that I go inside.

  I didn’t know what I should do. I didn’t want to stay there. If this white house were a bed and breakfast, it would be expensive, and I didn’t want to waste so much money. And if it wasn’t a B and B, it was somebody’s house.

  I felt nervous. I considered my choices. I missed the Thirty-Eights; I wondered where they were, how the hell we’d gotten separated. Maybe they were riding into town now, getting motel rooms. I wished I’d waited for them. But then maybe they were ahead of me, had passed me when I was squatting to go to the bathroom off the trail; there wasn’t a way to know. I didn’t have any of their phone numbers, how absolutely dumb of me, Bend was a big town. I felt like a shard of cracked plate; I didn’t know any of their real-life names.

  Faced with the possibility of losing these friends, it suddenly bothered me deeply that none of them knew that I’d been raped. I felt that they had never had the chance to truly see me as I am, and I wondered if I could have trusted them to be kind. My secret began to feel more unbearable to keep than to risk telling. Now, I regretted losing them without them ever knowing me and my secrets. I felt lonelier than I had before.

  I had come to Bend for the Thirty-Eights, but I was here alone.

  I didn’t know where I should stay.

  I grabbed my pack, nauseated and hot, sun-blistered, and hopped out of the car and started walking, the sun-heated pavement silent, the volcanic rock’s dead crunch still echoing in my memory.

  BEND, OREGON, MILE 1,989.5

  Bend was cut by a calm and winding river, pine-scented, lovely. I checked into the old inn the deaf man had dropped me off at—it was a bed and breakfast, $89 a night, a lot to waste but I ached to lie on a bed—and there I was. I didn’t have the energy to wander. The inn turned out to be owned by an ex-New Yorker, which explained the ten-foot-tall sea-green model of the Statue of Liberty propped up on the lawn; the bed was plush and clean with soft, smooth sheets. I showered and then collapsed onto it. In the morning I felt good, rested and happy. Breakfast was fresh strawberries on French toast. I devoured it, studying the map of town.

  The dining room was white and sunny, well-fed tourists talking quietly. The innkeeper, Gwyn, squeezed my arm as she walked past me, she was carrying a frosted pink glass pitcher of orange juice, I smiled up at her. She slipped back in from the kitchen, over to the small round table I sat at alone. “God girl,” she said to me, “you’ll be a star.” Her accent was thick true-blue New York.

  I laughed. I said thank you. I drank my last MRSA-killing pill, it shimmered in my water in bright day’s light, the window a shining block of silver, and then stepped outside and met Dash.

  I first saw him in Bend’s public library. I was sitting behind a big clunky public computer, writing about my hike. He was packing up, squinted at me and said hi. I said hi back. We were both in town to get hot food and a bed, rest our legs and shower, as hikers did about once a week or so. You can always spot a thru-hiker by their filthy clothes. Even after they’ve been washed and no longer smell pungent, gray dirt darkens the armpits. His were nearly black. He told me his trail name, “Dash,” but I forgot it right away. I’m pretty bad with names. I did remember that he was handsome, remembered his slick muscles, his suntan, his big lips, ice blue eyes bright under thick, dark lashes. He had big hands and muscular arms strung with veins. He was tall. I was blinded by him, as if I’d looked at fire and then away, into the dark. Then he left. I tried to get back to work, to concentrate, but couldn’t. A few of the Thirty-Eights drifted through; we made plans for dinner later. I stared at the bright screen’s blinking curser. Later I noticed a torn shred of paper tucked under my black journal: his number.

  When I showed up to the Deschutes Brewery that night to meet the boys, he was having dinner with them. It turned out they were friends. Apparently Mystic had known him since the desert. I sat next to him, close, and his knee brushed mine. He smiled. I smiled, too—tried not to but couldn’t help it.

  I lifted my hand, moved it slow through the space between us like a teenage boy trying to float unnoticed to second base. I pressed my trembling palm against his sweating beer, squeezed the glass. Lifted and carried it through the air to my mouth. Took a sip. I was nineteen, underage, and he knew it. He looked amused, and contorted his face like he disapproved. I wasn’t supposed to be there, didn’t have a fake ID.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  He stared right at my eyes, squinted, his eyes were so bright, pool blue. He told me, “You asked me that fifteen minutes ago.”

  I didn’t look away. I could hardly breathe. I felt like my face was on fire, I was burning up. He was so damn hot. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

  “Stash,” he said.

  “Stash,” I repeated. “Stash, hello.” And so I called him Stash, not knowing, the Thirty-Eights all grinning when I spoke, me wondering why. Me drinking Stash’s beer, his brilliant smile.

  Then, the Thirty-Eights still all around, a happy, shouting pack, we were sitting in the outfield of a baseball field at dusk. Then night. Then it was just us—Mystic, Buddha, and Deep had left for a bar—and the sky was cooled-coal gray and Stash and I were talking, alone, together. I talked to him for hours while it got dark. He was almost thirty, he told me. I was nineteen with that narrow sense of what I wanted.

  I didn’t know quite how to talk to him. He was an adult. I had no allure. I had no style. My secret fear was that he’d be able to sense that I had never been loved romantically by a boy ever, and find that there was a detectible reason for it. He told me he’d had a six-year relationship, had worked in aerospace and then in finance in Manhattan. I wanted to know everything about him. “What did you major in?” I asked.

  “What?” That same big grin, he looked so happy. His lips mesmerized me.

  “In college?” I asked. “What did you major in?”

  “I haven’t thought about it in years.”

  “But tell me.”

  “It was math.”

  It was math. I was disappointed. I was sure that I could only ever love an artist, best of all a writer. “Why math?”

  “Because it was easy.”

  “Oh,” I said. I told him that made sense. “I’m just getting over MRSA.”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  I regretted saying it; he’d know I was dirty and think I was disgusting. He would get up from the ground and leave me on the outfield’s grass, alone. Yet I answered him, fully and graphically. I told him it was a flesh-eating bacterial infection commonly spread in prisons and in urban gyms. “I had to go home for four days. My mom almost wouldn’t let me back.”

  He looked at me. I felt embarrassed. Young. But I didn’t feel he was judging me, his warm gaze didn’t falter. Suddenly I knew the one possible way I could have contracted it: from the bed of one of the small-town motels I’d slept in, those non-brand, cinder-block palaces.

  We told stories from our childhoods. Stash told me about his old pet rat called Lizzy, named for the Queen of England. She would sit on his shoulder and sometimes try to climb up on his head. But in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire he took her with his family to the car—their house would, like the thousands around it, burn to nothing. When they faced a flaming evergreen dropping lit-amber needles like sparks onto the windshield, blocking the road out, they climbed out of the car and into the burning air and abandoned Lizzy. Lizzy burned to death.

  I told him I’d had a parakeet named Alex, the namesake of Alex from my preschool, my best friend. “But no fire, though.”

  We went for a walk and Stash bought a six-pack
of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a gas station, and I took his hand. I didn’t really like beer but didn’t say anything. In the river park where we stopped and sat I just pretended to sip. Stash had a few while I touched one to my tongue. Lying on wood chips above the water’s bank, he kissed me.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” I said.

  He pulled back, tilted his chin down. “You didn’t?”

  I shook my head no, but I was euphoric. “I don’t know.”

  He was grinning. “What do you think we’re doing here?” he asked. He lay on his back and I kissed him. “You know Stash isn’t my name,” he said.

  We lay there by the river, kissing, pressing palms.

  When we rejoined our trail-gang at another bar where I wasn’t legal, Dash’s back was covered with clinging wood. Everyone pointed and started calling him “Woodchips.”

  I was a little embarrassed. “You guys,” I said. “We just only kissed, relax.”

  But Dash kept smiling and saying, “Stop calling me Woodchips,” bringing it up long after everyone else had forgotten. That’s how I knew he liked me. He wanted everyone to know about us.

  The Thirty-Eights found a pizza box left on a nearby table with a plastic baggie full of shrooms inside. Mystic, Einstein, Deep, Buddha, everyone took them except for Dash. “I’m good,” he said, grinning like a kid, passing the baggie to me. “I’m good too,” I said, also passing it.

  As the Thirty-Eights got high, Dash and I slipped away from them, out of the Brewery garden, lit with gold and blue Christmas-tree lights and copper lanterns, out to an overgrown field behind the sprawling shopping mall. The sky was black. We wandered the reeds and tall grasses of the abandoned field, it was huge, felt never-ending, skirted the pines, we could feel their shadowed figures but could hardly see. I had never been so attracted to someone. I hoped he felt it too. I wished on every star I saw that he did.

  “I wish,” I said, not knowing how I was going to finish the sentence, wishing I hadn’t started, wanting to say something smart and wonderful. “I wish that there were more girls on the trail. Sometimes I go weeks before I see another.”

  He laughed. “That makes two of us,” he said. Dash bent and kissed my neck, my cheek, my lips lightly. He whispered, “Where you sleeping tonight, Wild Child?”

  I looked at my phone. I didn’t know. It was one A.M. and the town of Bend was closed. Mystic had met a rich guy earlier in the night, apparently, and charmed his way into the man’s vacant weekend cabin on the town’s outskirts. Dash could have stayed with them, but there were only four bunks. There wasn’t room for me.

  We were walking across the field, wandering. The ground was ink dark; I lifted my feet high and lowered them slowly so I wouldn’t trip. I took his hand. “I don’t want you to sleep alone,” he said. “Do you want to get a motel room?”

  I smiled and hoped that, in the darkness, my joy was invisible. “We just met today,” I said, swinging his hand, speeding my steps, “Maybe that’s a little fast?”

  He didn’t comment on my pace or pull me back. He said, “Don’t worry, I don’t want to have sex with you. I just want to see you naked.”

  I laughed; I was blushing. He was too blunt. “Still no,” I said. I was still holding his hand, my palm was hot, I could feel my pulse against him, I was burning up. “But thanks.”

  He said only, flatly, “Okay.” Then his face broke open into a sweet boyish grin. His palm was warm with mine. He said that even if I didn’t get a motel room with him, he didn’t want to leave me alone here on this dark field in a town we didn’t know. He suggested we stealth-it, pitch our tents at the edge of the overgrown field, in the trees.

  So we did. I pitched my tent at the field’s edge, he put his nearby in the dark trees, and we slept separately, divided by nylon walls and night.

  I woke to my tent shaking, someone was pounding on it, mumbling, “We’re not allowed to camp here.” It was a man’s voice, raspy. It wasn’t Dash. I peeked outside. A homeless man wearing a blanket like a cape bent over my tent, I stuck my head out, he was squinting, as if I were blinding.

  He was saying, “The police don’t like it when we camp here.”

  I was scared, only half-dressed, shocked at myself for camping so exposed. The night before, in darkness, Dash had tried to convince me to come with him into the trees, we’d be hidden there, but I’d been scared, and I’d stayed out in the open on the field, pitched my tent by starlight, drunk on black night air, the Milky Way my roof.

  I crawled out of the tent, barefoot, in only my shorts and new light cotton shirt. The dry grass snapped under my foot soles, sharp. “Sorry,” I said, squatting to pull my sleeping pad and sleeping bag and knapsack—everything I had—out into the light. I lifted my empty tent, shook out last night’s dust, took it down. I glanced into the dark still woods. I felt melancholy, realizing that Dash and his tent were gone.

  I was crestfallen. I’d never met anyone like him. I felt a twinge of loss, in a blink robbed of a gem I’d found in all this dirt, its brilliance blinding. Our meeting felt fated. I wished I’d asked him everything. I badly wished I’d asked him his real name. I desperately wanted to know it.

  I packed my knapsack, alone again, zipped it up, sad, walked back across the overgrown abandoned field, sun gleaming in thin patches of stray wheat.

  I walked, dejected, for a slow minute, down a sandy dirt road until it became paved, heard my name, a man’s voice, looked up, around. Tripped and steadied myself in the road. Up on a small nearby hill a man waved. Dash! There Dash was. He’d been sitting, watching; he’d seen the caped homeless man, the whole scary interaction, ready to intervene. I looked down, relieved, embarrassed that he’d been right—the trees were safer—and I’d been caught. Climbing the hill to him, I found a marble in the dirt, a blue and yellow cat’s eye. I stooped down as I climbed and plucked it up.

  “For you,” I said, passing it to him. “A lucky marble.”

  It was still dusty, and he cleaned it off on his faded plaid shirt. That shirt hung on him, his shoulders, like shirts in Ralph Lauren ads, sleeves rolled, his forearms thick and perfect. He grinned, amused. “Gee thanks.”

  We walked back into the center of Bend together; I took his hand. He held mine firmly. I told him in more detail the story of my infection, omitting my mother, about how I was fully better now, I hoped. “Well, if you didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have caught you,” he said.

  It was true, if I’d been healthy, he’d have forever been behind me.

  I laughed hysterically, though nothing was funny. He laughed with me. I was so happy.

  Someone had given us the number of Fluff-N-Puff, a trail groupie-angel who had once been a thru-hiker—when she’d reached the High Sierra, she had quit—and we called her for a ride back to the trail. She met us and gave us kiwis and explained to us that we could eat them like peaches, swallow the skin too, people everywhere except in America do. I tried it; the skin easily broke and tasted like not much. She was right. Dash bit the skin, too. I liked how adventurous he was, how he tried it without judgment or cynicism, just like me. Green juice glistened on his chin. I rose onto my tiptoes and licked it off, like a cat.

  We rode the twenty-nine miles back up to the trail in the back of angel Fluff-N-Puff’s minivan, not speaking, clasping hands. I leaned against him. He smelled warm, like an infant, like salt, his scent addictive to me. I wanted to kiss his neck, inhale the smell of his hair and skin, but I stopped myself.

  “It’s here,” Dash said, as we reached the pull-off where Santiam Highway met the Pacific Crest Trail, PCT Mile 2,006.9, according to the Data Book. But I didn’t remember passing the two-thousand-mile mark, which seemed significant. I didn’t recognize the place. This wasn’t where I’d left the Pacific Crest Trail.

  I said, “But, wait.” Dash leaned over me and looked down at the book. “McKenzie Pass,” I said. “That’s where I got off.”

  And unfortunately it was true. In fact two separate highways that crossed the PCT led i
nto Bend. And I’d hitched into town on the other crossroad—one that intersected the Pacific Crest Trail seventeen miles south of where I now was with Dash and Fluff-N-Puff. I couldn’t believe it: Dash and I had been together in Bend, but I was seventeen miles south of Dash on the continuous footpath from Mexico to Canada.

  Dash hopped out, tossed his pack on, extended his hand to me. Pale pumice crunched like bird bones under his running shoes. “Skip up with me,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “It’s just seventeen miles.”

  “Just seventeen,” I repeated, though I didn’t step out of the minivan.

  He told me that the miles I’d miss were hell. It’d be volcanic rubble, desolate and ugly, fields of boulders, the footpath pumice stones on stones. “You keep on rolling your ankle. It’s like walking on golf balls.”

  I blinked at him.

  “Seventeen,” he repeated. “That’s like nothing.”

  I wanted to go with him. Of course I did. He was so handsome and understated, a quiet strong man who made my whole neck blush. He’d stood at the Mexican border just two days after I had, also alone, and for three months we’d been within a week’s walk of each other, trekking north in sync. And now, it seemed, fast as he’d appeared for me, he would be gone. And if I skipped up with him what difference would it make? Seventeen miles out of 2,650 really did seem like nothing.

  But it wasn’t. I had walked the 1,989.5 miles from Mexico to Bend without breaking my continuous chain of footsteps, even half-miles mattered to me, and I knew that these seventeen miles mattered a lot.

  I knew what happened, psychologically, when thru-hikers skipped miles; I’d seen skipping, like a sickness, spread to destroy hikes. A steep mile here, five dry drab miles there, and then pretty soon you’re a Yellow Blazer, hitchhiking around the trail, missing the toughest climbs, the views, hopping trail-town to trail-town, highway-coasting.

  I’d seen Warner Springs Monty’s Donner Party, avoiding discomfort, seduced by ideas of an easier way. None of them ended up making it all the way back down to the High Sierra. They wouldn’t finish the trail.