He screamed and jerked awake. Still in his spot near the bait station.
The forest was quiet again, warming in lambent sunlight, the air still. Had he really screamed? His head began to throb, not unpleasantly, like a tiny hand, a bird claw, had reached into the healing cut where the old man had hit him with the firewood and was gently squeezing his frontal lobe in a one-two-three rhythm.
He’d crossed over some frontier and come back, but traces of the other place clung like mud. He breathed and settled into the ground, feeling Earth’s motion in his bones, the slow spin of the planet, ponderous on its axis, traveling in its accustomed arc around the sun. Continental plates ground and shattered. Far away the sun lifted water from the oceans and rained it back onto the land. Life squirmed and sprouted, inhaling, exhaling, it spoke and wept, hatched and died.
He waited another hour. When he stood, his ghillie camouflage rustled softly. He felt steady and strong.
Twenty-Nine
After he started wearing the ghillie poncho, the other animals’ reactions had ranged from curiosity to acceptance, but mostly they ignored him. Rice, for his part, had turned predatory. He’d been hungry for days, but now, like the wolf in a cartoon, he began sorting the animals he encountered according to their delectability. A turkey walking through the forest appeared in his mind’s eye plucked and dressed, fresh from the oven, skin browned and still crackling. Cottontail rabbits turned on a spit over charcoal, glistening with bacon fat. Deer he mentally butchered into their various cuts: hams, ribs, tenderloin. Without thinking much about the implications, he made a spear, nothing more elaborate than a long sharpened stick, and began to hunt.
When he finally managed to pin a big fox squirrel to a maple trunk, it didn’t expire quietly as he’d hoped but chittered and flung itself about, trying to get away. He drew his knife in a panic to kill it, to end its suffering, and it bit his finger just before he severed its spine at the base of its skull.
He awoke from his predator’s trance, his chest clotting with regret. He lifted the warm, furred body, held it close to his face, peering into the eyes. No one home. There had been life, a conscious presence, then in an instant it was gone forever. Where did it go? How could the universe possibly work this way?
Thinking it might help, he apologized to the squirrel the way he’d read Native Americans would when they killed an animal for food. It didn’t help, though he understood the key was to love and respect the squirrel species and accept the gift of meat and sustenance that came in the form of individual squirrels. Which was hard, in that it still entailed a predatory suspension of empathy, an objectification of individual others, centers of perception, their own universes surely very different from his own but nonetheless significant and demanding consideration. He’d spent enough hours watching wild animals to be incapable of forgetting that.
He wondered, had he hardened his heart? To harden one’s heart would help to avoid pain but, he was sure, it also impaired one’s consciousness. At some other time he might have sat longer puzzling this out, but he was hungry. He built a tiny fire of dry hickory twigs in a crevice in a boulder, skinned and gutted the squirrel, and cooked it on a green-stick skewer over the coals.
His kills grew cleaner as his hunting prowess developed, but a quick death was death nonetheless. An alert, self-willed creature going about its business, transformed with a stab of Rice’s spear into an inert corpse he could eat. He found it strange, and more than a little heartbreaking; certainly it rubbed his nose in his own mortality, all of this adding up to the price of meat, of causing the deaths that sustained him. Despite his misgivings, he soon broadened his prey base beyond fox squirrels to include gray squirrels, cottontail rabbits, and grouse. They were all small animals, and he was only able to spear one every couple of days, not enough to quell the hunger. He started thinking about turkey and deer. He might need a better weapon.
This thing that was happening would help him catch the poachers, he was sure. But there was more to it than that. He knew he was no longer altogether in control. Memories he’d long shut off, now seeped through. Buffers were being stripped away—scientific detachment, language, story, self-consciousness itself. He tried not to worry.
Thirty
Rice stood in the cabin, looking up at Sara’s black cat perched in the loft over the bathroom like an owl. He had no idea how she’d got in here.
Wait. She must’ve snuck in when he’d brought the flooring. He’d forgotten about the delivery—he’d ordered it weeks ago—and they’d unloaded down at the locked gate, so he’d hauled the floorboards up here in his pickup, nearly a thousand board feet of tongue-and-groove salvaged from a nineteenth-century warehouse somewhere in Pennsylvania. STP had found a company that catered to people like her, people who wanted to know the provenance of their building materials the way others cared about what farm their tomatoes came from, the name of the pig that gave them their pork chops. It was beautiful wood, heavy and whiskey-dark, hard as iron.
He’d intended to rent a table saw and an electric floor sander from the place in Blakely, but he didn’t see them in the cabin. Not out back either. Had he forgotten that too?
Power tools might not be what he needed right now anyway. The world seemed to lie at a remove as he walked through it, as if he were piloting someone else’s body, the controls mushy and imprecise. He functioned well enough in the forest, but now that he’d come out he’d begun to falter. At the edge of the meadow he’d hesitated, reluctant to return to this world. The forest seemed to hold him, to discourage him from returning to the lodge, as if only through enough time away from the human-built world would the accreted layers of self-deception dissipate like condensation evaporating from a fogged window. Or mirror. He had no idea which. He’d removed the ghillie camouflage and buried it in leaf litter and dirt because he didn’t want it to pick up any civilized odors.
He watched the cat and she watched him back, her black face featureless in the indistinct light, as if she wore a veil hiding everything but her bright green eyes.
“Hello, Mel.”
She showed no signs of distress, though he was afraid she might’ve been shut in here for a while. He wasn’t sure what day of the week it was. It could be any of the seven. He couldn’t rule out a single one of them.
It might even be October now. He should check in with STP.
“You know I’m supposed to shoot you.”
Mel blinked at him. This is weird, he thought. He should get her down from there, encourage her to depart the cabin. She might’ve taken a shit somewhere. He couldn’t smell it, though, just the turpentine tang of the heart pine floorboards. Should he get the ladder? He found he couldn’t move. Maybe he was dreaming. He’d been dreaming intensely, furiously, desperately, he didn’t even have to shut his eyes. He’d given up trying to untangle dream from experience.
Something tall and heavy began to tip in his subconscious, he saw it now, an antique hardwood hutch stuffed with precious china heeling over. He’d always stopped it before, pushed it back into place, but now that didn’t seem so important. He backed away—best not to stand underneath something like that, best just to let it fall, to let it come crashing into your day.
The kid, he was skinny, taller than he’d expected. Younger, too, maybe nineteen, twenty-one at most. He dressed the part of the narco, if not the sicario, dressed it self-consciously. That had bothered Rice for a moment, the pathos of the retro outfit, the silk jacket, big silver belt buckle, snakeskin boots. Tattoos winding around his wrists, his neck. Snakes, it looked like. Buzz-cut dark hair, wide mouth, fleshy lips, heavy eyebrows. Eyes far apart, dark, frowning at the noise Rice made, a rustling as he drew the pistol and stepped out from behind a defunct Telmex booth. The kid started to react, fast but sloppy from drinking, he reached under his jacket, cross-draw, like he had a shoulder holster, but Rice was shooting, landing double taps and walking toward him, remembering what he’d learned from Raoul Fernandez, you are dead if you hesitate, and no head s
hots, no fucking Mozambique, the cabrito is too cocky for armor, you shoot him in the chest, shoot him as many times as you can, so he shot the kid in the upper torso eight times with the 9mm, not missing, and the kid was down, bleeding out in the packed dirt alley, gurgling and moving his right leg in slow spasmodic kicks.
Rice only had a few seconds before someone showed up.
He toed open the jacket. In the shoulder holster was a big European 9mm, an HK. Spendy, a status weapon. On his upper arm, the obligatory Santa Muerte tattoo, not what he was looking for. He rolled him over, and there was a sick-spinning horror, like maybe he’d been played, that this was somebody else, this was not the guy, he’d been tipped to murder some kid who had nothing to do with anything, but then there it was, the Mayan mask screaming on the other side of his neck, hidden beneath his collar.
The liquefaction of his internal organs reversed, firmed, every cell of his body resolute. This was not a boy dying in the street but a psychotic, sadistic murderer. Apryl’s murderer. Rice’s proper prey.
The mask tattoo was the family sign. The older brother, the one who would be coming for Rice after this, had one on the back of his head.
He wiped down the burner Beretta, placed it on top of the phone booth, and walked north.
He looked up at the cat still peering down from the rafters. Her inclement gaze. He could kill her with his spear, take away her life, too. Like another squirrel, another rabbit. He was a killer, he could do this. But his eyes were wet.
The horror at what he’d done to the kid in Juarez hadn’t ever come back. He had worked hard at never doubting. What was this now? Which was worse? Feeling it or not feeling it? Apryl had called his pet maxim the Rice Moore Universal Paradox and Source of All Misery: “individual organisms don’t matter at all, and individual organisms matter a great deal, blah blah blah.” He did his best to live within that paradox, denying neither the first truth nor the second.
“I don’t care,” he told the cat.
“Yes, you do,” the cat said.
“I don’t want to.”
No reply. He shook his head and stood, brushed the seat of his pants. Took off the gloves and dropped them on the floor. Glanced at the cat one last time. She sat without moving. The hallucinations were becoming routine. He left the door open.
Thirty-One
He stepped quietly in the leaves, a long, slow stalk upcanyon along the eastern slope of the gorge. The gibbous moon sailing high in a clear sky lit the forest floor with patches of soft white light. He hadn’t slept. His diet of squirrel meat and overripe paw-paws had upset his stomach, so he’d fasted as well. He wasn’t sure how long. Three, four days. Going without food had made him woozy at first, and then came the hunger cramps, which he ignored until they went away. Now he moved through a waking dreamscape.
His thoughts had become inarticulate, the talking man-voice inside his head silenced by hunger and sleep deprivation, by too much time alone in the woods, by whatever it was that had been gradually possessing him for months. This morning, walking among the old trees of the inner gorge, he’d felt something clutch the back of his neck and lift him like a kitten. It carried him alongside the columnar trunks and up into the lower branches. Below, a bedraggled man in ghillie camouflage, dim green light falling around him, his blackened face childish and lost.
Farther up the mountain, a great horned owl hooted five times. The night air moved over his face like water. The forest was quiet for a long while, and he felt like he must be one of the few animals awake at this hour. As if to answer his thought, a fox barked twice, somewhere behind him. He wasn’t sleepy. He had become at least as comfortable in the forest at night as he had been in the daylight.
He lost some time to one of his fugues and when he came to himself a bear was walking up the slope toward him, passing through light, then shadow, then light. It was a big male, old, grizzled, limping. It seemed to be aware of his presence, able to see him despite his ghillie camouflage. Rice waited, wondering, unafraid. The bear moved into shadow, and a man came out into the moonlight. It was the mushroom picker, carrying his backpack, climbing the steep slope.
In his current state, Rice didn’t find the transmogrification terribly surprising. He thought it was more important to explain that he was hunting the poachers who had killed the she-bear, but the man shushed him. He dropped to one knee and removed his pack. He laid it down between them in a moonlit patch and untied the top flap. Rice squatted on his haunches to see. The man reached in, felt around, and removed a dead bird, a male kestrel. He set it gently on the open lid of the pack, arranged just so with its wings folded and its head turned to the side, its sharp, curved beak pale yellow shading to black, the blue of its flight feathers and the deep red on its back too bright and saturated for moonlight. Its eye was a shiny liquid black. Was it really dead? Rice stared, moved by the beauty of the bird, wondering what it meant.
The mushroom picker reached inside the pack again and pulled out a plastic bag, a colorful antique Rainbo bread bag with its open end loosely knotted. Holding the bag against his chest with his stump, he untied the knot and pulled out three pale dried mushrooms the size of his thumbnail, offered them on his open palm. Rice hesitated. They looked like magic mushrooms, psilocybin. He didn’t have time to get high.
“I have to be able to catch the poachers,” he said.
The man nodded and reached the mushrooms a little higher, as if that’s why he’d brought them. Another time dislocation occurred, the mushrooms held there motionless in front of Rice’s face while he worked through a decision, the reasoning part of his mind grown slow and unaccustomed to structured thought.
Rice was unclear exactly how the shrooms were going to help him find the bear poachers. A trip might finally push him past the threshold he’d been straddling. Maybe he could simply disappear, merge somehow with the forest, finishing the process he felt had already begun. Another ghost haunting Turk Mountain. Eventually Sara would come looking for him, and she would find his clothes collapsed here in a pile, the ragged ghillie poncho no longer needed. He would be a vengeful, badass ghost, and he would torment poachers and other interlopers. They would fear him.
He expected the mushroom picker to ask what he was grinning at, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was oddly intent, insistent. Making this offer to Rice seemed to mean a lot to him. Rice glanced down at the kestrel, alive now and perched on the canvas pack, regarding Rice with its head canted.
He took the mushrooms and placed them on his tongue. He chewed and swallowed. They left an unpleasant bitter taste. The mushroom picker smiled then, his teeth bright in the black shadow of his beard. He gathered up the kestrel—dead or sleeping again—and replaced it inside his pack, refastened the top, shouldered the pack, and walked away without ever speaking.
Soon three large bears appeared near the empty bait station, rearing up to snuffle and scratch at where the sweet oil had been smeared on the trees. It seemed to Rice that he was seeing as the trail cameras saw, in infrared: the bears were featureless black silhouettes against a shimmering white background. They moved in slow motion as they began to play, fighting and wrestling. More bears came, all of them huge, both boars and sows, greeting each other, familiars. Eventually they settled down, gathering for some common purpose, a council. A dozen bears formed a loose circle in the open area underneath the hanging cow’s head. Several of them turned to look at Rice expectantly. He understood they were offering some sort of invitation. He felt compelled, but also, now that he came right down to it, afraid. If he joined them it would mean a kind of death. If he crossed over again he wouldn’t come back. Wasn’t that what he wanted?
They waited. He felt himself starting to drift again.
Sometime later he rolled to his side and sat up, dry leaves clinging to his sleeves. The ghillie poncho was tangled around and underneath him. He stood, stretched his legs, his back. He wasn’t near the bait station. The ground sloped several hundred yards to a band of space and bright moonlight w
here the forest gave way at the top of the cliffs. He guessed he was a half mile northwest of where he’d met the mushroom picker. Could he have walked here in his sleep? He used to sleepwalk as a teenager, after his father died, but he hadn’t done it in a long while.
The moon shone through the canopy behind him and to his left. It would be setting soon, had to be close to midnight, maybe past. He’d been asleep, sleepwalking, whatever, for at least an hour. The most sleep he’d had in a while. He started to rearrange the poncho on his shoulders, but then he stopped. He held his breath, listening.
A low growling sound, faint but distinct. He remembered the bears, waiting for him. This was not a sound a bear would make. He felt like his perceptions had been tuned, that he knew instantly what was out of place. The sound came from higher up the side of the gorge, off to the east, and it wasn’t an animal but an engine, muffled, coasting downhill against compression. He jogged toward it, moving laterally across the slope. Not an ATV, and the slope was too steep for one anyway. A dirt bike would be louder, and high-pitched like a chainsaw. This sounded unlike any motor he’d heard.
A faint red glow appeared above him, appearing and vanishing among the trees. He remembered the gall buyer’s red-filtered flashlight. He stood in his poncho and waited as the light crossed back and forth, slowly descending. A man on a motorbike of some sort, with a big black bag on the back, making his way down the steep slope in long, sweeping switchbacks. He rode thirty yards to the left, then a careful turn, maybe trying not to kick up duff, like he didn’t want to leave an obvious trail, then forty yards in a shallow angle to the right, then another turn, back to the left, a patient, fully controlled zigzag down a slope Rice would’ve thought too steep for any vehicle. The bike would have to climb back up the same way.
Rice made a quick calculation and moved a hundred yards to his left to crouch under the branches of a big rhododendron. The rider passed through a patch of moonlight off to the right. It was a Honda trail bike with fat knobby tires, soft and partly deflated. Bulging from the side of the bike was an oversize muffler extension. It looked homemade and was about the size of two paper towel rolls end to end, raised up so it wouldn’t contact the ground on the steep switchbacks. Up close, the engine sound was a low, throaty cough.
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