The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “What about the girl, Christine—the one who had polio? They said she was going to come up last June.”

  In Charlie’s baggy, burnished face there was a great deal of pain. How do you get to put things together all of a sudden? Murray wondered as he watched Charlie trying to put just a sentence together; there was some terrible thing Charlie tried to say, and he should have seen it long ago.

  So when Charlie finally managed to say that Christine had leukemia—the polio she’d had long ago, as a kid—and in July went into a coma—they’d thought she might have six months left at least; but in July she went into a coma and she died—a sweet kid, Murray, but that’s the way the ball bounces—when Charlie finally said it and then hurried off, Murray knew what he should have known, or guessed, were he not so goddam lousy egotistical about the stupid lousy egotistical charm he planned to use on her. Christine was dead in the summer. Dead. And whatever sensual dreams he’d had, whatever exuberance he’d had about his worthiness, now turned rotten, sinful. Blood no longer moved through the chambers of her heart; her game leg now pitifully lay like a stick, out straight, the foot turned slightly inward.

  He went back to his room in the dorm. School hadn’t started yet, and Shelton wasn’t back, so he sat in the unoccupied-looking room and stared out the window at the wet old leaves left from the summer that was over. He had been chosen, hadn’t he? Charlie Gilman had picked him out for them on order, Christine’s “dream boy” she said she never waited for, the one whose qualities would most likely appeal to her. “A real intellectual type,” he could hear Charlie saying to them as they busybodied themselves for their beloved granddaughter. Charlie had hit some mark or other. Use me! he thought, for Christ’s sake use me! But will you use me sometime to help? Must I go merrily on past the bodies of babies and children, all the sick children, and always come out a stupid failure?

  Ah, but the poor old people; how they had watched his strength and done almost superstitious homage to his gross and obvious fine health. Leukemia, cancer, and they could not understand it. Half the time we study to kill and half the time we make signs and incantations out of terrible, god-awful love. Perhaps they wanted more from him than his talents could ever warrant: a transfusion for their beloved of his life and energy. How the old lady had squeezed his muscle! And if they wanted him to, he would have been so glad to try.

  When he moved his head quickly to the side, trying to shake it loose from such memories, a sharp stick poked him in the cheek hard enough to draw some blood. He put his finger to the spot and then examined the little red smear. “Keep right on reminding me,” he said to the stick, to the tree, to, he guessed, nature in general. “Keep on telling me I’m alive but only sitting on my dead ass.”

  He had to be going and doing. He pretended to speak to his father: “I say, O.M., Old Indian, Old Stone-Age Man with all your bloody honor…” His voice turned suddenly bitter, near to crying. “Explain to me just what I am doing here.” In his lap he held a machine out of one end of which could come, at great velocity, a most ingeniously and subtly perfected complex of metals; first a cap of bronze, which also functioned as a plunger. Behind this cap was a wee air pocket, and behind this air pocket was a certain amount of lead alloy, surrounded by a graduated jacket of copper. A most wonderful invention, worthy of man’s ceaseless aspirations, his unflagging inventiveness, his inspired and never-ending search for perfect happiness. This bullet was meant to strike just one material—in fact it wouldn’t work very well at all unless it struck one certain material, and that was living animal tissue; when it struck living animal tissue, at perhaps twenty-five hundred feet per second, it did its work beautifully and spectacularly, for living animal tissue, being approximately 70 per cent water, was nearly incompressible, and the hydraulic effect alone was truly fantastic.

  That was the way to think! Never mind the rest—the strange dignity of life, the fear, the tears: flesh was 70 per cent H2O, right? That was something you could get your teeth into, now, wasn’t it, Old Scientist, Old Know-How?

  “Not you, really, O.M.,” he said apologetically, “because I’m a man too, I hope, and I’m part hunter too. But why don’t you yell at me, sometimes, out of frustration and anger that is really love? I’ve seen Mother when she wanted to blubber and scream and cry, but, Pukka Sahib, that wasn’t done in our house.”

  And then he thought: I am not being fair at all, and it isn’t just because I love the man that I think so. He is what he is, suppose, and what he is, is a man. For better or worse a real, redblooded goddam man, a credit to the tribe. But…”

  He had been hearing a sound like a long breath; a familiar sound, one that anywhere but in the deep woods might not have been noticed, and now he looked straight up into the clear blue sky. Three tiny vapor trails grew in silence far ahead of the sound of breath, and the sun glinted just once, needle-like, from the silver crosses with their slanted bars as the planes bore toward the southeast in formation, the vapor trails curving around after, like the thinnest strands of cobweb.

  He raised his rifle and pointed it at the tiny silver airplanes. “Bang, you’re dead,” he said, and laughed bitterly.

  18

  WHEN RICHARD had completed his circle around the open field he passed by Shim, who had moved thirty yards away from Murray’s original stand. Shim didn’t signal to him, preferring no doubt to play the deerstalker, so Richard pretended that he didn’t see him. Fat chance of that, he gloated; today in the woods he was as sharp with his eyes as Shim, that woods animal, ever was. And he could outstalk Shim rather easily in another situation, too; in that game he was much more adept, all right. He smiled, and shivered with pleasure. Maybe tonight something would happen.

  It was getting late, now, and the sun would soon go behind Cascom Mountain. It was getting colder, too, and the leaves underfoot were brittle, and had little frost lights on them here and there. All the way back to the house, even though he couldn’t help making a lot of noise, he never relaxed, but kept looking and expecting. There would be at least three-quarters of an hour more of light, and it would be a good time to pick a spot, especially on the first day of the season when the deer had not yet become almost completely nocturnal, and sit out the light altogether. He had been hunting with all of his attention ever since daybreak, and no deer had appeared; but there was another kind of game (he smiled, and shivered again), and at least he knew where he could catch a glimpse of it.

  Before he went into the kitchen he flicked the glittering cartridges out of his rifle, then picked them up and carefully wiped them off before he put them in the cartridge case on his belt. Zach sat in his chair and watched his portable television which, as usual, he had set up on the kitchen table, his straight old head incongruous before the wide brass rabbit’s ears. He and Richard nodded to each other, and Richard put his empty rifle, bolt open, in the corner and went upstairs. His legs were tired, but still felt very strong. His whole body felt nicely tough, and woodsy, as if, even though tired, it could go hunting again and do quite as well in the woods as it had all day.

  He took a shower, deciding that he would plead an old man’s tiredness if, by odd chance, Shim or Murray returned before dark. What a lie that would be! His wife could leave him, his son could go hipster or whatever the hell Murray meant by quitting school, but by God he was still a man in his prime, and one thing he knew was that Rachel hadn’t left him because of a lack of a certain kind of attention. In the mirror his long face seemed quite young—well, not too young, but still somehow full, still in contention, not decreased at all in the firmness of its cheeks or the positive and possible look of its eyes. Light blue, they were, and could not look soft; that was a cool, contentious blue in the pale iris; the eyebrows and mustache were pure and original black, too, and the teeth sharp and white. He shaved carefully, then brushed his teeth before he stepped out into the hall with a towel wrapped around his waist and his hunting clothes over his arm.

  And got a delicious shock—a tingling in his nose a
nd in his loins—because Opal stood there waiting for him. He stopped and looked down at her. She wore neat dungarees, and her shirt, styled like a man’s, was light blue, crisp and jaunty, graceful in a squarish, boyish sort of way. He had to keep himself from sneezing, and he could have taken her right there, before she spoke, but like a hunter he wanted to be sure.

  “It was Shim last night,” she said, trying not to be embarrassed by his nakedness, not able to find a place to look. Then finally, blushing, she looked him in the eyes, and hers were brown, shy and nervous.

  “Did he jack a deer?”

  She nodded. “I know where he keeps them. Do you want to see?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I want to see.” And she blushed harder, her dark skin turning the color of a rose; a dark rose, he thought. He put his hand on her arm, ostensibly to let her know he would go on by and get dressed, but of course it was a caress, and she moved slowly, as though she were dreaming, just out of his way.

  He dressed quickly. His hands were shaking, and he thought, This is hunting, when the game lusts after the hunter! He had a vague but powerful memory of a child’s tale about a hunter: yes, and in it all the game—the deer, the foxes, the rabbits—all came to the hunter because of a spell, or a granted wish in the dark forest of childhood memory. But how had that story ended? He could not remember, but he remembered when, as a child, he had read it. Strange: it was in hunting season, on his uncle’s farm in Iowa, shortly after his father died, and he remembered all the bright pheasants piled in the front hall, their iridescent green and golden feathers, their berry-bright red eye patches gleaming in the light that came from the big Iowa sky through old-fashioned patterned-glass door panels.

  Opal waited in the hall, and he followed her down the steep back stairs. She was so short he could have touched her head easily with his foot on the way down, and as he followed her he wanted to pick her up, to pet her, to take off her clothes. The Portable Woman, he thought exultantly, The Sex-homunculus, travel-size; the distilled, reduced, essential female appetite! She made him think of his new, expensive, accurate wrist watch—small, thin, beautiful—but Opal was thin only in those nice places where a woman should be thin.

  Zach didn’t bother to turn toward them as they went by. “We’re going to get some cider,” she said to Zach, and Richard knew that this was the first and most important of many lies. How smooth and easy it was for lovers! He and Rachel had so easily evaded her family, too, no matter whose house they were in, when he had first gone to work for Saul.

  He followed her down the cellar stairs into the cool, earth-smelling damp air. Potato peels, he thought, and was chilled, pleasantly, after the kitchen, which was kept hot for Zach’s old blood. Above them the voices of television were faintly raucous.

  “Look here,” Opal said. She pulled a string, and in the dim light from a small bulb she led him to the one cellar window. On the frame at the bottom there were little bits of brown blood, and brown and white hairs here and there. “He’s careless,” she said. “Spooner might get a warrant, and he’d find those hairs.”

  “But where’s the deer?” he asked, and put his hands on her shoulders. She let him pull her against him. He took off her glasses and put them in his pocket, then picked her up to kiss her on her trembling mouth.

  “Let me show you,” she said, without quite enough breath to vocalize the last word.

  “Yes, show me,” he whispered, and kissed her on the neck, feeling out the smooth, hollow places he had been thinking about. She signaled to get down, and as he put her down he thought how there was that purely tactile language, too, she would not have to learn, but as a woman instinctively know, and the words were Kiss me, wait a second, caress me there, put me down, I don’t mean it, and the words would become longer and more complicated, too.

  “He’s got a refrigerator in here,” she said. “I’ll bet you can’t find it.”

  He looked around, impatient of the refrigerator; he wanted warm game. Well, there was the furnace, its octopi arms reaching up into the floor above; there were the cider barrels (they had better remember to fill a jug); there were the odd shelves, here and there, of unpainted, darkened pine, full of Mason jars; there was about half a cord of stove wood….

  “Where is it?” he asked, keeping impatience out of his voice.

  She went to one of the cool-air intake vents of the furnace, where the vent came down the wall and turned at the floor before it came across to the bottom of the furnace. The vent pipe was at least three feet wide, but very shallow, made of galvanized sheet iron. At the wall, she reached down and turned something that was in the shadow, then pulled on the whole upright section of the vent pipe. It swung open—heavily, ponderously, and there was a bright room on the other side of it, gaudy-bright under white fluorescent light that flickered as it came on, and he was afraid that someone was there. A red carcass hung in the small room, a carcass so red, so bright it almost hurt his eyes, so bright a blood red it looked artificial.

  “The light goes on when you open the door,” Opal said, “but you can turn it on from the inside, too.” They stepped inside, and the small room was somehow full of murder, not like a butcher shop, perhaps because it was so deliberately hidden; it was full of death. The bodies of three small deer hung from hooks in the fiberboard ceiling, each hook cruelly through the tendons of one front leg near the hoof. Two were skinned, bright and headless, but the other was still in its skin and had its head on; it was a doe, the eyes glazed open and gummy in the cold. One eye had been punctured by a buckshot, and was wrinkled and black; it looked like a piece of skin from an ancient Negro.

  “My God, he is an outlaw,” Richard said, but he thought of Shim only as a cuckold, and the false door and the secret place seemed a child’s game, even if a deadly one.

  “He is,” Opal said, and she shivered. “I told you last night I was more worried for Spooner than I was about Shim.”

  “Do you worry about Shim?” he asked, and they both knew what he meant.

  “I worry about him.”

  “Bluebeard’s cellar,” he said, and she didn’t smile.

  “He likes to kill them,” she said.

  “So do I. What do you think I came up here for?”

  She merely shivered again, and he crowded her against the wall to kiss her. At first she closed her eyes, but then, perversely, it seemed to him, began to fight him, and her eyes were open and full of horror. He was down on one knee trying to undo her clothes, and she pushed him so hard he lost his balance, and his face pressed into the side of a bare carcass—into the naked, icy meat, which swung slowly away and then came back as if to kiss him again.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked, horrified. “My God! You want to do that here?”

  “I want to do it,” he said. He wiped the cold touch of the meat from his face.

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I love you,” he said, trying to recoup this minor loss. He would have to take care until the time was right; that might have been disastrous. Sense against sensuality. “I’m sorry, but I lost my head,” he said, smiling to indicate that he was a fool for love, and knew it. “But I want you so much, Opal. Can I have you?”

  “I love you,” she said, “but please don’t hurt me. Let me take my own time.” As she spoke her teeth clicked together, partly from the cold. He wanted her so much he wondered if he might actually be in love with her. What was the difference? Had there ever been a difference?

  They went out of the refrigerator room into the cellar and filled a gallon jug with cider, then he kissed her again, her arms tight around his neck. “We could never dance together,” she said. “It would break your back.” That wasn’t the dance he had in mind. Then she whispered, and his nose itched as the words hissed in his ear: “Shim said he was going to kill another deer tonight.”

  Then she would come to him, of course, when Shim was safely off to his night of hunting on the mountain. He gave her back her glasses—gently, diplomatically placing t
hem on her little nose, behind her little ears with deliberately careful fingers, and then he picked up the cider and followed her up the cellar stairs.

  At supper Shim was haggard; he had hardly bothered to wash, and treated his plates roughly, pushing them away as soon as he had eaten enough, clapping his silverware down into the grease and roughly wiping his unshaven bristles so hard his paper napkin shredded apart.

  “Pooped out,” he said, and looked around with a suspicious grin on his face. Then he got up and went into the living room, and they heard him flop on a sofa.

  There had been little discussion of the day’s hunt; Shim had jumped only the one skipper—nearly a fawn. They had quickly decided that tomorrow they would hunt the same area, reasoning that other hunters might push the deer across from the Leah side of Cascom Mountain, or perhaps the Cascom hunters might push them up toward the mountain from the lower valleys. It would be a night with a bright half-moon, and the deer would range around. Murray said he wouldn’t be late, but he would like to try out the Arnolt-Bristol again. He didn’t seem very much interested in the hunting, and for a moment Richard felt guilty about that, but he was so glad Murray didn’t stick around! He had other things on his mind tonight.

  Mind? he thought, and grinned at Opal, who was clearing away the dishes. She frowned and shook her head: Be careful. Zach got out his television again, and the sports car buzzed off down the road toward Cascom. He sat with Zach for a while, but didn’t watch the blue screen; he watched Opal’s beautiful little rump, and waited, and waited. He thought he couldn’t stand it, then remembered the mail he’d been given just before dinner, and took it up to his room to read it.

  But he couldn’t seem to bother with it. The envelopes wouldn’t open right. One was from Saul, on company stationery, and the others looked business—uninteresting. Forgive me, Saul, he thought, and threw the letters on the bedside table. Nervously he walked down the hall to the window and watched the slice of a moon move through wispy clouds. The great round mountain seemed to tilt, slowly, ominously, its roll-center the very center of the earth. He shrugged his shoulders impatiently. When would Shim go out again?