The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  Did I want to be standing here after sundown, when navigating the overgrown path became a fool’s mission? How long did I have before staying the night ceased to be a matter of choice? I let my stomach’s first plaintive squeals of hunger persuade me that whatever had been around must have lost interest and slunk away. I quit playing statue. Lowered my arm and straightened my spine, with groans of relief. Clambered to the ground, holding my breath all the while, and jogged over to the weed-encumbered path. Waded in, wincing at the noise of brown leaves underfoot after ages of bated stillness.

  Was my progress loud enough to echo off the reservoir? The crackle of trampled vegetation was converging on my ears in disconcerting stereo. I halted midstep, but the crunching went on and in isolation was resonant with the momentum of a rolling boulder, and it was certainly headed for me, even if I couldn’t pinpoint from where. Something too powerful for the underbrush to hinder. My heart rate, already elevated, instantly skyrocketed, making me wonder if a coronary would kill me right this minute as I broke into a desperate scramble, racing, for all I knew, into the jaws of whatever was on my scent. If so, control over my legs had gone AWOL. Panic wiped my mind blank, not that I had any choice of direction but forward or back. An animal fragment of awareness had rallied in my ears, as I listened helplessly for pursuit gaining on me. Whether this were hungry bear or human psychopath, whether alien intelligence had any role here or not, had become moot.

  Fear had stupefied but not blinded me. I was cognizant of the border between brown and green thicket, of dashing across the bloody, defoliated ground where Wil had floundered in agony, where potent wintergreen odor had not abated. And it did sink in that his hat was still there, red fingerprints smearing the crown, though his saw was not. In the heat of the moment, I gave that no thought. With the same blunted response, I processed that my lungs were feeling scorched, and then the steep uphill grade was butchering my knees, and my eyes had to strain in the graying daylight. Camcorder was still locked in my charley horse grip. Handkerchief I had discarded, God knew when.

  From over the top rang urgent hallooing. Had I been in a lousy horror film, this would have been too good to be true. I paused for the seconds it took to fill my chest and shout, “Over here!” For that brief interim I listened as well. At the voice of impending rescue, the lurking unknown had likewise paused. Though camouflage of leaves and dusky shadow still hid its physique, its heaving, whistling breaths, perhaps through nose or perhaps through snout, sounded appallingly nearby. After the newcomer called to me again, the whistling respiration slowed and quieted, as if trying to blend in with the innocent breeze. My legs, on their own initiative, resumed strenuous ascent.

  I kept the booming dialogue alive, for want of other means to make the presence think twice about last-ditch assault. “Who’s there?”

  “Metcalfe! With the Parks Service!”

  “I’m two-thirds up this really sheer slope on the yellow trail! Where are you?”

  “Almost in sight! Are you okay?”

  Didn’t want to jinx myself by saying yes. Vindictive stalker might yet pounce and do grievous harm in a flash. “Please hurry!”

  “If you’re okay, keep moving! Be right with you!” Was I picking up a pleading undertone? My cramping legs valiantly boosted me the final inches onto level path, and I witnessed my one-man cavalry at full gallop. I prayed to nobody in particular, Please let our shrill voices bluff the thing out of lunging at us! Hatless Ranger Metcalfe was stout and balding and sweating red-faced, and about half a foot shorter than me. A cheerful, intrepid public servant, yes, deserving of unconditional respect, I firmly believed that, but not a formidable specimen. On beholding me hale and intact, he stopped and crumpled slightly, panting, hands upon bent knees.

  “Christ, am I glad to see you!” I exclaimed. “But are you okay?” My ears meanwhile were on alert for rustling herbage and ragged breaths. Nothing competed with Metcalfe’s wheezing as he waved aside my concern and pulled himself together.

  Discipline triumphant, his huffing and puffing subsided as he explained, “It gets dark fast out here. Well before the sun goes down. Saw your car in the lot and didn’t want you stuck in the middle of nowhere. The Center’s closed for the day. Just you and me between here and civilization.”

  Not quite just you and me, but I didn’t want to correct him outright and maybe pique his curiosity into investigating. Nonetheless, some Imp of the Perverse made me ask,“Did you hear anything crashing around while you were en route? Have you had complaints about bears or cougars, or about hikers being harassed?”

  Metcalfe gestured up the trail toward civilization and started trudging, and I followed, needless to say. “No, nothing’s come to our attention lately. Could always be bears in the woods, you know. Or coyotes.” Yes, fair enough, but bears that pilfered serrated implements? It didn’t sit right that something “crashing around” didn’t spark Metcalfe’s interest, and his remarks struck me as a little glib, considering the potential disaster so recently at my heels. Or did he have his own official reasons to be imperfectly frank? In any case, these quibbles on my part felt ungracious. My nightmare was over, and he had effectively ended it. And perhaps he changed the subject as a further diversionary tactic. “You’re Wil’s friend, right?”

  I nodded. Mortified at forgetting about Wil’s genuine suffering while mine had remained in the speculative realm. “I hope he’s gonna be all right.”

  “Those two guys you met got him to the emergency room. He didn’t want to go. Argued till they were inside the hospital.” We were halfway along the curving slope leading up to the main trail, and Metcalfe scooped up his colleagues’ abandoned hats.

  “What? Where else could he go?”

  Metcalfe threw up his hands and shook his head. “He didn’t seem to think the ER could do him any good. All we could do was stop the bleeding and bind up the wound. He needed a lot more than that.”

  “He’s had some bad experiences with hospitals lately. Did he say anything about his wife and kid?”

  “He said they were taken care of, and not to worry about them. I think his wife’s laid up, isn’t she?”

  Is that what she was? If that was a direct quote from Wil, he still had it in him to invent extraordinary euphemisms. “Last I heard, yeah. I was hoping to find out more from him than he cared to discuss.” And that was true, without putting too fine a point on my motives and his state of mind. “What did you do with his car?”

  “Glad you asked, actually.” We hooked a left onto the main trail of red and blue and yellow dots. “One of us returned it to his garage, but I ended up with the keys. You’re his friend. Would you mind holding on to these for him?”

  Wil might mind, but I didn’t. One more opportunity for “crawling skin” footage. At my cooperative nod, Metcalfe fished key ring out of beige jacket pocket and thrust it at me, as if to beat any second thoughts to the punch. The ring was hefty with house and car keys and others. Better and better! “How long they’ll keep him there is anyone’s guess,” Metcalfe said. “Overnight, if he’s hurt himself really badly. Let the hospital know you have his keys, and they ought to tell you when they expect to release him.” They could well hold him longer than overnight, I mused, depending on the upshot of bloodwork or physical exam. In any event, it was a safe bet that Wil wouldn’t be driving to work or anywhere else for a week or two.

  The head of the trail deposited us on dirt road again. “By the way, what do you make of that gigantic band of dead vegetation down the trail from where we met?”

  “Nobody mentioned it to me.” Metcalfe was looking me straight in the eye, but that was no guarantee of candor. “If someone had, we’d probably wish it was more gigantic, after all the trouble we’ve had clearing weeds this summer. It’s been crazy. A banner year for ’em. But maybe where you were, there was a blight or a shift in the water table. These things happen.” How simple to debunk any element of the fantastic, without half trying, anywhere I perceived it. At this remove, even the
covert, snuffling menace was fading to figment status.

  But then, as pavement resumed beneath our feet, Metcalfe casually shifted the goal posts of reality on me. “You and Wil work on that cable show about unexplained phenomena, don’t you?”

  I copped to it, without enthusiasm. I’d been through the wringer this afternoon, I wanted to go away, and I didn’t want overlays of unrelated info to distract me from phoning the hospital when I got home. But that earnest, almost childlike glow on his face shone like a traffic light. He was dying to confide something pertaining to the occult, and I alone would listen without scoffing. What the hell, I brought it on myself, hosting OGAM Chronicles without wearing a disguise. “I can tell you about something you might find interesting.” And there it was. The archetypal come-on! I politely begged off. We negotiated the cow gate at the edge of the parking lot, and I cited a need to deal with poor Wil post haste, but could we reconnoiter later?

  Metcalfe appeared to be a good sport about being put off. Accompanied me to the car, where he cautioned me to check for ticks, take off my jacket for inspection and lift up my shirt, roll up my trouser cuffs. “It’s been a bad year for bugs as well as weeds. Scary bad. The jumbo mosquitoes died down early, but not the ticks.”

  Who was I not to humor him? The Jersey mosquito that had strafed me on the water some weeks ago definitely qualified as jumbo. Off with the varsity jacket then, and after giving my T-shirt the once-over, bunched it up to my collarbone. Was in the middle of asking Metcalfe if he was watching my back. The sentence stalled with an unintended click partway into “watching.” In the jungle of fine, short hair above my navel was the distinctive brown and black raindrop shape of a deer tick. It wasn’t engorged, but it was the size of my thumbnail, and upon exposure to daylight it was crawling in aimless zigzags, as if drunk or diseased. Mute with disgust, I brushed it off, located its anarchic gyrations on the blacktop, and stomped it. “What was I telling you?” Metcalfe chimed in. I raised my foot. Ticks were often sturdy enough to withstand a crushing heel, but this one, perhaps in consequence of its disordered biology, lay impacted in fragments like dry crockery. “Looks like you got him,” Metcalf congratulated me, while acknowledging no more uncanniness here than in everything else I’d been through today.

  “Thanks for seeing to it I didn’t take that home with me.” I flapped my jacket downwind before shrugging it back on, bared pants legs past my knees in case of more stowaways, and promised Metcalfe I’d be in touch soon. My mental note to that effect was more committed than the one to send thank-you cards to Gerry Heroux and his fellow correspondents. Only out on the highway did it dawn on me that the reservoir, where Metcalfe spent forty hours a week, may have been the subject of his supernatural anecdote. Dammit! I might well have blown off my most valuable informant. On the other hand, stay on track! I had to phone the hospital the instant I walked in the door. Hours had ticked away and, for all I knew, Wil and his bandaged leg were stewing in the lobby at Occam General, minus a ride home and the keys to his own building.

  How many Wils were out there in the “metro area”? Isolated, in the dark about what was happening to them and why? By turns deathly passive and hair-trigger belligerent? Going to pieces, figuratively if not literally, in their own bedrooms and living rooms, with no one the wiser, and if anyone were, clueless over what to do about it? Melancholy ruminations, but at least they kept my thoughts on track.

  The last few miles called for headlights. In the driveway, I opened car door onto dim moonlight and nearby cacophony. This wasn’t the first evening it sounded as if an animal shelter had set up shop in the neighborhood. A dog pack was roving the formerly restful woods out back, and reasonable to assume it included some of the pets I’d seen fleeing town at the height of the Perseids. I slammed the car door, and the barking desisted a wary moment. Sometime when I had the energy, I planned to holler for Elsie.

  11

  I was back at the kitchen table, where the day’s travails had begun. Bottle and shot glass and portable phone were lined up and waiting where I’d left them. Poured a double and crossed my fingers that the phone’s battery hadn’t conked out. Nope, good strong dial tone. Occam General was on the list of emergency numbers taped since 1990 to the grubby top of the phone. Savored a few gulps of McClelland till the extension for Admissions came up. The nurse on duty gave the impression she was at the moody end and not the outset of her night shift. There was no inpatient named Wilbur Rice. She transferred me to the ER, whose records indicated he’d been discharged an hour ago. Wherever he was, he had left the hospital.

  Resorted to Wil’s cell number. Had he cadged a lift from a coworker or another OGAM member? Was he stranded on the front steps of Dyer Hall, leaning with his crutches against wrought-iron railing? I wavered between preferring to reach erratic Wil or his safer voicemail.

  “Hello?” Wil slurred, as if on powerful meds. I winced at painful interaction in the offing.

  “Wil, where are you? I have your keys. I’ll bring them to you as soon as I’m off the line.” I decided not to say my name, lest it incite knee-jerk hostility.

  “I’m home,” he mumbled, followed by dead air. Which stemmed as much from my bewilderment as his sedation.

  “Wil?” I finally ventured. “How’d you get inside?” That is, if he truly were inside.

  “I’m home,” he repeated. While I fumbled for a question that might draw him out, he hung up.

  If I chose not to take him at his word, what then? Comb random streets for him till all hours, with no better result than when he and I were searching for his dog? Smarter to accept that he had a spare set of keys, plausibly with a neighbor, and to quit while I was ahead. Relinquish my key ring sometime when access to his apartment might benefit him or me.

  In a positive light, my efforts had yielded new footage. Nothing to function as lynchpin for the next OGAM Chronicles due in a week, or of what I was supposed to film for Atwood, but with its own merits to boost my confidence when requesting another appointment from Atwood’s fetching secretary. The fifteen minutes she offered on Monday morning were on the daunting side of soon, which didn’t mean I was about to haggle. I had the weekend to cull and rig close-ups of and loop the pertinent clips for a laptop presentation. As if anything else cluttered my social calendar.

  No, there was something, and the upcoming Chronicles had some bearing on it, somehow. It pestered me on and off all Friday afternoon till the tumblers clicked of their own grudging accord. Aha, yes, on Saturday was the Historical Society yard sale that the brusque matron had asked me, too late, to announce on the program.

  At the crack of noon, I was in the sale’s environs and on a quest for parking. The earlier birds in their BMWs and Mercedes and 10-mile-a-gallon SUVs were hogging the curb three blocks away. Instead of wasting time and temper cruising for a closer spot, I pulled over on a side street, resigned to a few minutes’ constitutional. This was the heart of the posh hilltop East Side of the river, where the last scion of those industrialists, scholars, and alleged slave traders, the Danforths, had bequeathed the Society his ancestral Georgian mansion. The local concentration of colonial and Federal and Victorian elegance handily outrivaled Chestnut Street in Salem and Benefit Street in Providence, but architectural tourism had always inexplicably snubbed Occam’s red carpet.

  As for signs of present habitation, a pair of joggers sporting iPods may have been West Siders on a jaunt, and a Guatemalan girl chatting on a cellphone while pushing a stroller may have been some yuppies’ nanny. None of the homeowners were out delighting in the August warmth or their flowerbeds or other portions of their dearly mortgaged properties. The only proof of occupancy consisted of front-lawn sprinklers spinning water into sloppy spirals or swinging it back and forth like a lazy hand with a whip. Turning the hose on was evidently the lowest the aristocracy, old or nouveau, would stoop toward tending their own grounds. Hence I may have been lone witness to the grass rippling in multiple yards, not at the impact of periodic dousing, but afterwa
rd, as if individual blades had reflexes to shake off uncomfortably cold water. I’d have missed it myself had I not been watchful in those few seconds before the grass resumed its pretense of normalcy. I didn’t bother examining more than a half dozen frontages. What did it say about me nowadays, when writhing grass altogether failed to raise goosebumps?

  Among the earliest birds, to judge by optimal parking spots, were minivans and Japanese compacts with Wiccan slogans on their bumper stickers. What the deuce was that about? What could be less witchy than the majestic Danforth pile, a monument to the Age of Enlightenment? Its massive three stories were classic textbook Georgian, with brick walls fronted by a colonnaded portico and a pilaster-framed Palladian window, beneath a hipped roof and widow’s walk that sported pineapple finials on the corner posts, and with two towering chimneys at each end.

  In contrast to this opulence, the cobbled drive, wide as an interstate, that once conducted coaches to the porte-cochère and carriage house beyond, was crammed and chaotic like a trailer-park junkyard. Oh, some high-end detritus, to be sure. Initially I premised that members of the Society and generous friends had trawled their cupboards, cellars, and attics for worthy sales items, but most objects had a tag taped or tied to them somewhere with an accession number prefixed “OHS.” Yikes! Bluebloods as well as “just plain folk,” for the sake of posterity and safe storage, had long entrusted cherished heirlooms and treasures to this stately sanctuary in perpetuity. Yet decades of donations had been cast out, priced to go, expendable in the face of worsening recession. Some customers today, wittingly or not, may have been buying back the gifts of their ingenuous grandparents.