The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  He decided to take some aspirin; he would have to get up in a couple of hours, and maybe the aspirin would help him get back to sleep. God knew how, but he would try it anyway. He took two aspirin out of his bottle and turned out the lamp before he went next door to the lavender bathroom. He didn’t turn on the light, but felt for the plastic tumbler above the bowl, rinsed it once, and washed the aspirin down. When he came out he glanced down the hall, and his fear suddenly returned; someone stood at the hall window. At least it looked as if someone stood there against the dim light. He knew that he couldn’t go back into his room without finding out for certain. Why had he turned out his light? Had he been afraid to be caught silhouetted against it? He walked down the hall toward the window. It was somebody, because it moved—turned toward him: now, with fear still left in him, he saw that it was Opal. She was kneeling on the bench below the window, and she had turned, silently, halfway around. In the darkness he could see nothing about her face, only the outline of her cheek and the bow of her glasses.

  She whispered to him, “Can’t you sleep?” and because she whispered, because it was so startlingly conspiratorial, he shivered violently and almost had to sneeze.

  “What’s the matter?” he whispered back, and she moved closer to him in order to whisper again.

  “It’s Shim, I think.” She tapped her fingernail lightly against the windowpane. “I think he’s up on the mountain. I think I heard a shot.”

  “I dreamed I heard a shot.”

  “No dream. I wasn’t asleep. Look.” She pointed out into the night, and in the dim light from the clouds he could see the line of her bare arm. “I think I saw a light up near the top of the ski tow. It’s so stupid! He knows Spooner is after him.” She shivered herself.

  “You’re cold,” he said, and couldn’t keep from putting his hand on her shoulder. Her nightgown was filmy beneath his hand, and her warmth came through it. He smelled her dark hair. “He’s taking a chance,” he whispered, glad that they had to whisper—his voice at that moment might have been unsteady. She didn’t draw away.

  “Spooner is the one who’s taking a chance,” she said, and he knew that she pretended to ignore his hand. She trembled. “I don’t think Shim would let himself get caught. I don’t think there’s anything Shim wouldn’t do,” she said, and shivered again.

  She smelled warm, lovely; she smelled of bed, and he wanted to pick her up in his arms and put his face against her. “You think he would do something drastic?” He didn’t believe it; he was aware of his dishonesty in saying such a thing.

  “I don’t know,” he said. His hand moved down her arm, onto bare skin. It was excruciating. He thought wildly, should I do this? I should damned well not do this. Will she let me do this? Yes, she will.

  The hand slid from her arm to her waist. So narrow! So uncertain! And with relief that the decision had now certainly been passed, he turned her around and pulled her to him, hard against his rumpled, suddenly unsubstantial pajamas, and kissed her. When she first felt him against her she jumped nervously, then let him press her against the whole length of him, and with a little, fluttering spasm of the lips, opened her mouth. Her arms, in a compulsive motion—she may have been imitating the usual, dramatic gesture—came up and around his neck, and as he lifted her up, his hands upon her dark, warm flesh, hips and buttocks round and warm, her soft lips nervous against his lips, he felt what he knew immediately to be lust. There was pepper in his nose, his ears rang, and he had in his mind, not quite complete or seen, the image of a bar of white iron imbedded somehow in flesh, and slowly the bar began to bend; slowly and surely, the white bar bent.

  She had been struggling to get loose, and he realized that he must let her go; his strength was so much greater than hers, and yet he wondered why he hadn’t immediately noticed her desire to get away from him. She shuddered—no doubt about that, it was revulsion—and he was shocked by it. His feeling had been all desire (lust, he’d thought a moment before), with no reservations whatsoever. He had to have her, and because he was a careful man he let her go, knowing that the time hadn’t come yet. But he saw himself begin to plan; he would let the sensuous present lie in wait, and appear to be an understanding man.

  She moved back, and so successfully was he able to postpone his desire for her he was amused: she was actually panting. Panting like a dog. He was amused, he supposed, by her ambivalence toward him as a man—now that he had none at all toward her as a woman. He could feel her breath, in little gusts, and smell it—the stale breath of cigarettes, the exciting breath of her own mixed-up desire.

  “I never felt like that before,” she whispered. She wouldn’t run away. Evidently she had to talk about it.

  “I know how I felt,” he whispered back. Now he felt that he was in control of himself. Once a problem had a desired end, he was usually able to solve it. He reached out and placed his hand, gently, on her neck below her ear. She didn’t draw away.

  “Can I come up close and talk in your ear,” she whispered, “and not have you pull me against you?”

  “Yes.”

  As she came up to him, he bent down, and she cupped her small hands around his ear. “I thought Shim was like you,” she said. “At first I thought Shim would be like you.”

  He had to tremble, and wished he hadn’t. The little mouth in his ear was too warm, too near to his senses.

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “He’s not gentle. Why does he feel that he can’t be gentle?”

  “Shim is a very odd boy.”

  “Yes. I’m a very odd girl, too,” she said, and he thought: Oh, are you? We’ll see. We’ll see about that.

  “Well, I am,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I am. It isn’t all Shim.”

  Her little mouth touched his ear. He moved his hand up her arm, up along the forearm, past the elbow. Each little increase in its design, each little convexity of tendon or muscle termination increasing his pleasure in it. It was a beautiful arm: he thought again how surprising a woman could be who did not at first glance conform to the general idea of beauty—how she might, taken as she was, in a perspective relevant only to her, be the most beautiful creature in the world. Rachel was, even at first glance, beautiful, full of sex. Opal had to be touched, and then, as if her beauty had to have a conductor, as if it were not so much visual as electric, she became whole and perfect. His hand grasped her arm just below her shoulder; the firm sheath of flesh in back gave way to the silk of her armpit. Remembering his promise, and his strategy, he slid his hand back to her wrist, then back to her hand, which turned and now lay in his.

  “I know what you want to do,” she said, and for a second his heartbeat rang in his ears.

  “You don’t know how much,” he said.

  “We can’t,” she said, and he thought: We! Yes.

  “No, I guess not,” he lied carefully.

  “Shim might come back,” she said, and he heard his heart again. “No, I don’t mean that—I don’t mean it that way,” she added quickly. “I’m no cheating bitch. I’m not.”

  “Of course not,” he said, and turned and kissed her on the forehead. He put his hand on her breast, and the nipple was distended and hard. “Of course not.” He took his hand quickly away.

  With a sudden, almost desperate motion she put her hand beneath his pajama top, lightly against his side, then withdrew it so quickly it seemed as if the reaction had been more involuntary than cerebral—as if the motion had been controlled by the nerves of the spine. Then she turned and ran away from him; her door closed softly.

  He was conscious of his own breathing, and he scraped his hands harshly down his torso. Even as he did this—this desperate motion much like that of a drunk who tries to rub his face sober—he was proud that she had pressed against the body of a hard, lean man. Before he went back to bed he looked carefully and for a long time up toward the ski tow, but saw no light and heard no shot. For some reason he went quickly to sleep.

  15

>   IT SEEMED to Murray that he woke up just before he heard the shot. It was so far away—such a soft sound, really—he didn’t think that it, by itself, could have awakened him. And he wasn’t wakeful because it was the first day of deer season. That had kept him awake all night, once, when he was sixteen and his father had taken him out of school for a few days just to come up here and hunt. That was the first season he’d had his Mauser. Strange how excitement could fade away—just not be there any more—and all he could remember it by was a little fact like a sleepless night, or a counting of the hours he once spent working on a rifle stock. He couldn’t remember at all the quality of that excitement; all that was left were the little facts, like old invoices.

  But who could have been shooting on the mountain in the middle of the night? Most likely Shim, but it might have been anyone from Cascom or Leah out with jacklight and shotgun. It would be awfully dangerous for Shim, with Spooner after him the way he was, even though Shim was the kind of man who looked for danger—was always ready for sarcasm, argument, always stared straight into trouble or embarrassment with an interested, almost avid expression on his face. All that energy for it, all the time!

  He went to his window and felt the night air. It was still moist and drippy outside; in the woods it would be quiet going. Maybe he would get a deer with his ugly, beautiful Nazi rifle. Slick, slack, the bolt would go, smooth as the joints in your arm, and then…all that blood, all that meat. How different were the adventures he wanted! But what were they? He went back to bed and lay on his back. As he stretched, his legs felt strong and supple.

  “Somewhere there is my love,” he whispered, aware of the corniness of the idea, yet ready to defend it. Why couldn’t the world, even for a time, be lovely and full of fairy tales? Were the old movies all lies? He had to find out, and the answer was not here on the side of Cascom Mountain. Yesterday he had seen a B-47 fly over—so slow it seemed, so high he could hardly hear it—just see the glint of it and the vapor trail that curved back around the world. And then suddenly he realized that in that speck of metal was a hydrogen bomb, and the men who flew the plane could, if they took the notion, put it together and blow up the world. Just ordinary men, the kind who blew their brains out every day. How long could the world last? While there was tender, lovely flesh left in the world, and somewhere a girl with kindness and passion—just the one to be killed first, to be riven and destroyed by the first stupid, murderous explosion—while there was the possibility that she existed, while he had time to find her, he must go and look.

  “I’m in love,” he whispered, and had to smile. But it was sad, just the same. Give me time, he thought, give me some time. Leave my world alone for a while, please.

  He was in love with the idea of love—that is (let’s figure it out, Mr. Grimald), is love an idea? Or an emotion? Can love exist without its object? Oh, his love was plenty subjective, and thus it had an object: a lovely girl. She should have smooth and loving arms, be soft yet strong. She should be brave, yet hurt for any pain or sorrow.

  “Oh, my God! I love you!” he whispered. And yet she had no face, no voice, no color.

  The girl in the dream had been blonde, but that blondness was like a blank canvas. It was what she was, what they wordlessly knew about each other, that mattered. She could be an Oriental, a Negro—just so she was vivid and lovely.

  And then, of course, he could get on with his life, and use his talents for himself and for the world. Would there be time? His father thought him wasteful, that his leave of absence from college was a waste of time. How could he tell his father that time was short, and that he knew how short it was? He had to go looking. He wanted to pack his things right now, and go.

  It would be morning, perhaps—a hotel morning in a gray city that every morning seemed collectively to have a hangover, and he would walk, looking, looking, along a street of quiet lofts, and find a small, triangular park where the winter trees would move, brittle and disconsolate, and an old newspaper, pages and pages of gray print, would fly apart in the aimless wind and then scrape the cement before it melted against the iron fence. All cold and bare, the sun far away and yellow, shining dimly on a row of ash cans, the benches too dirty to sit on—why look there? Why? Out of ugliness, to him, came this eternal paradox: among the ugliness man made of himself, made of the places he lived in, there would always be found the sweet youth, the perceptive, selective innocence, the candid, level gaze of beauty that was always, strangely, another product of mankind. Honesty, generosity, compassion, beauty to the marrow, to the last dark center.

  He reached above his head and took hold of the cold brass bars of the bedstead, then pulled them together so that they bowed slightly—not so hard that they would not return—just testing them, his strength, his control. Someone walked down the hall, past his door. It was three-thirty in the morning, and he must go to sleep.

  When Shim woke him up it was five o’clock. He looked up at Shim’s face in the bright lamplight, and Shim grinned down at him.

  “You going to shoot a deer or not? It’s deer season, boy! You awake?”

  He nodded, and Shim left the room. “Yahoo!” Shim yelled in the hall. “Come on, you hunters, grab your socks!” Shim was gleeful; he’d actually been trembling.

  When he came downstairs Murray was surprised to find Opal up, cooking breakfast. She was nervous; the plates rattled a little too much in her hands. He remembered the shot on the mountain; perhaps it had been Shim. That was reason enough for any amount of nervousness. He looked carefully at Shim, who was sharpening his Randall knife. Sharpening it? With precise fingers Shim moved it in circles on the fine side of his boxed oilstone. He’d sharpened it last night. He wore a green chino shirt and soft green wool hunting pants, both fresh.

  His father came down, and Murray was amused to see him make the same inference. Then he was interested to see his father and Opal exchange glances. And hers was, even as they both convicted Shim of jacking deer at night, somehow hot. Yes, hot, buzzy, confused. He didn’t see her look directly at his father again.

  Old Zach came in and washed his face at the sink, his little bag dangling, then tucked his napkin under it and sat up to the table, ready.

  “We got to eat well,” Shim said. “Need a lot of energy to drag all them deer out of the woods.”

  “Hough! Heard. Hough! A shot up. Huff! On the mountain,” Zach said. They all looked at the black windows. The kitchen light was bright, and seemed unnatural; soon it would begin to grow light outside.

  “Do tell,” Shim said. “Them dang poachers out again!” He did look tired around the eyes. Murray didn’t think anyone else had seen a fine rim of blood around the cuticle of one of Shim’s fingernails. “What you going to shoot, Murray? A buck, or a good eatin’ doe?”

  “Whatever kind I see, I guess.”

  “Best kind for eatin’! Just don’t take no sound-shots!”

  As Opal set Murray’s ham and eggs down in front of him, the soft inside of her arm actually slid smooth and warm along the side of his neck. He was rather shocked, but didn’t show it, he was sure. She had done it deliberately, and it was the last thing he would have expected her to do. She liked him—acted rather motherly toward him and all that—but he never expected her to touch him. That wasn’t like Miss Midget at all.

  And again, after they had buckled and slung their gear, as he followed Shim out the door, she put her hand on his waist and said, air, and then the steplight went out and they waited a moment for their eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  16

  RICHARD LOVED his own excitement. Dawn was coming; overhead scudded insubstantial clouds, and stars came out here and there, were silently brushed out, then came on again. As they waited for their eyes to get used to the darkness he felt his rifle’s action, and hefted it by its stock’s thin pistol grip. Ammunition, a sharp, clean knife, a clip to fix his deertag to a deer’s ear (if he could catch such an ear!), a length of nylon rope—he was equipped lightly. His boots were pliable and
silent, his pants and jacket soft red wool that would not scratch against the brush. It would be a day of silence, a slow day for still-hunting, for watching the wind, for close looking.

  He was elated for another reason. The look she gave him when she touched Murray’s neck! Was he old? He was a man, and could do anything. He wanted now to slip into the woods alone, to stalk. Oh, she was ready now—scared a little, trembling a little, craving the touch of him. There would be time: he would hunt, and do well—given luck, of course—but in the dark woods he would move as though he belonged there, quick, his wits sharp, his eyes clear, his weapon deadly.

  He was full of glee: and then she had, for only him to see, again touched Murray as she wished him good luck. Then she turned and stared up into his face; dark, serious, her lips open a little bit. She had made up her mind, all right. Or lost it! And that little deception—being demonstrative in such a…what? Comradely “way? Motherly way? toward Murray. Women did not have to learn love’s stratagems. She would now arrange to receive him, he knew. And wherever, whenever it was, he would be ready.

  They began to walk toward the ski tow. They had made a plan for such a silent day: at the base of the tow Murray would go south, parallel to the slope, and take a stand near the open field upon which Shim had caught young Spooner in the light of the flare. Richard and Shim would climb to the top of the first ridge—all this done slowly, for the deer could be anywhere, then take parallel routes back down toward Murray. This, they had calculated, would take until ten o’clock—four hours to travel less than two miles. Murray would have plenty of time to find a good stand. On such a quiet day, knowing that they couldn’t be tracked on the damp and springy ground, the deer might not run very far. Of course, too, they might stand ten feet away and let a hunter go blindly by.