by Charlie Haas
I walked all day. By afternoon, as I walked on flat ground under high stone bluffs, my clothes had dried salty and my throat was half closed by thirst. I heard water and followed the sound, but it wasn’t flowing, just stirred by a breeze. I was on the spongy bank of a swamp, black water under a thick rind of yellow algae. Tangles of vines and broken trees choked the landscape, as if the earth could corrupt itself just fine with no help from people. It seemed weird that there were no dinosaurs there to eat it all.
I started back toward the bluffs, stepping on a branch that felt wrong under my foot and that turned out to be a snake two feet long. I jumped back, tripping and falling, as its head reared up in the air, jaws open wide, its white fangs hideous against the white skin inside its mouth. I braced for its strike but it shot past me, down the bank and into the yellow-skinned water.
I stood up slowly and started walking again, one eye checking the branches underfoot and the other watching for Freebird. Half an hour later I sat down on a bank of dead leaves, took my glasses off, and put them down while I rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, my glasses were gone.
They were rimless, hidden somewhere in the blur of leaves around me. I started searching on my hands and knees, staring at the leaves from an inch away, but lowering my head made me so dizzy I almost passed out. It was the thirst. I fell back on the leaves with my hands on my face. When I took them off, my left eye was too swollen to open. Then I realized the other half of my face was swollen too, along with most of my neck and both arms. It could have been poison oak, poison ivy, or, given the Shawnee’s location in the middle of the country and how bad the itching was, both.
I scratched at the emerging blisters with the heel of my hand, then with my nails, and then as if I were trying to take my skin off. I’d be dead soon anyway. I was running from a motivated psycho with an excellent track record and I was going to die without ever getting the joke, finding a home, or dislodging the obstruction Gerald said was in my ass. I hadn’t been sharp enough to recognize the guy from the T-shirt at Barney’s lab, and here we were.
Barney’s ambition was to repair all of life from the inside out. Had I even had an ambition? Stay fed and stay out of trouble, and how was I doing on those? I saw a fixed trajectory from Rancho Cahuenga, where everything made sense until childhood ended and life turned baffling for good, to San Jose, where dental made cowards of us all, to a national swamp where I’d die of hunger if the motivated psycho didn’t shoot me first.
I started looking for my glasses again, sifting through leaves and making a mound of those I’d searched, until my blistered fingers touched a lens. I put them on and looked around. This is it, I thought, the rough ground we crossed to settle the country, a new land whose fabled streets were paved with good intentions.
I looked at the hundred shapes of leaves—teardrops, dog paws, spades, diamonds, hearts, clover, gum-wrapper mint, cereal-box grain tassels, and a tangle of weeds like a nine-dollar California salad. Thad Anderson at Country Ways had tried to teach me edible plants but I’d barely paid attention. I deserved to starve now.
Then I saw a plant with umbrella-shaped leaves and thought I remembered Thad’s scarred hands lifting them to show me some little fruits underneath. I bent over and pulled the leaves back, and there they were, berries shaped like apples. There were a few more growing nearby. The berries were nothing to eat, and they started the stomach juices, so I was hungrier than before, but there was water in them.
I sat still. I’d remembered a plant. It was possible that not all my useless knowledge was useless, that maybe I hadn’t really wasted every minute, or at least it was too soon to say so until the end, though that could be any second now. I wanted Jillian’s woodlore, but what I needed was Patti’s attitude. In Kansas she’d been ready to bite the guy who was chasing me now. We should have let her, I thought. She’d be worried about me. I stood up and started walking again.
Thad had said to pick a direction so you didn’t walk in circles, and he’d shown me how to take bearings with a watch face. My watch was digital but I could draw a clock face that showed the time. I had no paper but I scratched the clock on a leaf with a twig, put it down, and stuck the twig in the dirt to make a shadow. My guess was that I wanted northwest, and I set out that way. Once I had a destination the cadence of walking was a mild tranquilizer, like half a beer or a cup of Richard and Agnes’s green tea, and the itching began to cool.
After a while I started praying: “Please get Barney out of this, and then me, and if you could check on Deirdre, Michael, Pearl, and Patti, but right now the thing is Barney. Also, thanks for my ten seconds of being able to do something violent, and I’m ready to stop seeing the replay of that anytime now, but that’s not key.” I didn’t bother with the “Okay, I know you might not exist” preamble that I’d used a handful of times before. I just did it, for the usual reason, which was what could it hurt that hadn’t already been beaten senseless?
At 4:00 P.M. I was at the base of a tall hill. I’d avoided trails so far, but the switchback up the hill was screened by trees and I needed the view from the top. I climbed as fast as I could, and at the summit I saw what I’d hoped to, the Mississippi in the distance and the towns and farms on the near shore.
I found where I wanted to go, drew a watch face on another leaf, and lined up the direction. As I started down the hill my exhausted mind decided that switchback trails were one of mankind’s greatest inventions. If you tried to go straight up a hill this steep you’d fall back down, but if you sneaked up on your destination sideways, never facing it, you got closer all the time.
An hour later I was at the edge of a clearing. An old VW van was parked fifty yards away from me and ten yards from the weedy jeep trail it had come in on. On the door side of the van, a tarp was fastened to the roofline and staked to the ground, making half a tent. Clothes were drying on a rope between two trees, and a woman was heating something over a fire. I started to go back into the woods, but she saw me and yelled, “Hi.” I waved. She put a hand over her eyes to look at me and shouted, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I yelled. Two girls, six and eleven, came out of the van, followed by a man who waved me over.
The adults were in their thirties, the woman thin in blue jeans, a red denim jacket, and a plaid shirt. The saucepan she was heating was on a round grill from a backyard Weber, suspended over the fire on two piles of rocks. The man was balding and stocky, in cords and an old Henley shirt. The girls wore jeans, the younger one a VEGGIE TALES sweatshirt, the older one a HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL T-shirt and a plastic hoop over her hair. She held a Discman in both hands, her name on it in thick marker letters.
“Are you all right?” the dad said. “Looks like you’ve got some poison oak there.” I said I was okay. “I’m Howard,” he said. “This is Dianne.”
“I’ve got some lotion inside,” Dianne said, and introduced the kids, the older one Angela and the younger Corinne. “Would you like some dinner?”
“Thank you. Yeah.” I looked back at the woods. “Maybe I should get some of that lotion from you.”
“Sure,” Dianne said, and picked up the saucepan.
The van’s backseats were on the ground under the tarp. Inside, their place had been taken by a card table and milk crate chairs. Sleeping bags were piled in the front seat. The lotion Dianne gave me was hand cream, but it helped.
The table was set with bowls, two plastic and two paper. Angela set a place for me and Dianne served miso soup and flatbread crackers. I ate my few ounces of soup as slowly as I could, felt it bloom into gas in my empty stomach, and damped it with crackers. A gunshot went off in the woods and I jumped.
“There’s a lot of hunters out now,” Howard said. “Turkey season. I’m hoping to get one myself.”
“We lived at the campground before,” Angela said, holding the Discman in one hand as she ate. “We’re not really official here.”
“He can see that, honey,” Howard said.
“We had a downturn,”
Angela said. “We’re sitting it out for a while.”
“Angela, that isn’t something we go ahead and say to people,” Dianne said.
“I know.”
“Well, but you just did, though.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“That was good soup,” Howard said as the kids cleared the table. “Thank you, honey. Who wants to sing?”
“Me!” Corinne shouted, the first word she’d said since I’d gotten there. Howard started singing a folk song with a tick-tock melody, about an immigrant who’d come to his new land without any money,
But the land was sweet and good,
I did what I could.
Angela looked embarrassed but still sang, and Dianne sang with her eyes far away. The guy in the song got a shack, a cow, a horse, and a series of other animals, all failures. Howard sang, “I called my shack,” and the others sang, “Break my back.” He sang, “I called my duck,” and they sang, “Out of luck.” It seemed like an insane choice, the “Old McDonald’s Farm” of ruin, but Corinne loved it. Howard gestured at me to join in, but when we got to “I did what I could,” my voice broke like it was changing, and I had to stop.
A few songs later it was dusk. Howard turned on a battery lantern, reached under the table, and brought out a board that held a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of Paris.
“I should get going,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Good luck on the rest of your trip,” Howard said.
“You’ll get that looked at,” Dianne said, touching her face where mine was messed up, and I said I would.
Outside I stopped by the clothesline and checked to see that no one was watching from the van. I had eighty dollars in my wallet. I put sixty in the pocket of what looked like Dianne’s jeans and took off. Going back into the woods, I had the feeling that goes with helping, half virtue and half ricocheting embarrassment. Then I realized that my most recent brush with helping anyone had been when Patti and I ran into Misty on the pedestrian bridge, and then I remembered what happened after that, and for the next hour all I could think about was sex.
I walked in the dark, using what I hoped was the North Star to take bearings the way Thad had shown me. The night was loud with baying and bird screeches, animals or Freebird crashing around, and the constant buzz of insects. My brain was the loudest of all: He’s right behind you, too slow, vine, next tree, you’ll start hearing the shot but then nothing, where’s Barney? When I walked into trees a few times, I decided I had to take a chance and sleep a while. I slipped under a bank of dead leaves. You did do what you could, I thought. You’re not Barney but you’re not worthless Herbert, either. Lie down and think you’re on your boyhood bicycle, ride past the gates of a big old place, be nine, ride all day.
I woke before dawn and started walking again, weak and slow. At first light, a sick monochrome on rocks and branches, I sped up. The bumps on my skin oozed a clear fluid now and still itched. I was making a clock face on another leaf when there was a gunshot to my right, somewhere close.
A hundred yards to my left the earth ended in midair on top of limestone bluffs. I ran there and looked over the edge. Fifty yards below me was another swamp, covered with algae and maybe full of snakes like the one I’d seen slither into the water before. I started climbing down, but the stone edge crumbled under my feet.
Falling took longer than I would have thought, but I still forgot to hold my breath and had only half a lungful when I plunged through the scum into a foul syrup of cold water and decomposed plants. I pictured the splash I’d made, a flare going up to guide Freebird.
My shoes and velocity dragged me under. I flailed with my arms, finally stopped sinking and struggled upward, my head bursting from no air. When I surfaced, gasping, the greasy water ran into my mouth. I went back under and swam blindly away from the bluffs, finally coming to shore at the side of a dirt road.
I put a hand on the bank, looked back at the bluffs, saw no one, dragged myself up on to the road and ran, stumbling in my wet clothes and bracing for the gunshot. Up ahead, on the other side of the road, was a clear river inlet with islands of water lilies.
I took my shoes off, waded in fast, and swam underwater with a shoe in each hand. I saw the water lilies’ long stems waving in the current, swam around a cluster of them, stood on the soft bottom, and came up for air, hiding my head behind a shantytown of jammed-in leaves. The water looked fresh enough to drink and I gulped some, went back under and swam, stopping for air at each cluster of lilies till I reached the inlet’s far shore.
When I came up on the bank I was in the woods again, but I could hear a train whistle now, and the thin roar of cars on a highway. I put my shoes on and stumbled toward the sounds. In twenty minutes I was on the shoulder of a two-lane road, not far from where I’d been aiming. I ran across the road and got down in the drainage ditch, keeping an eye on the woods.
The ditch went past big houses set back from the road. I came to one where three days’ newspapers lay in the driveway, the owners still away for the weekend. The St. Louis Sunday paper’s plastic bag had a bubble on it, labeled FREE SAMPLE! NEW WISEGRAINS PLUS!
I tore it open and took out a foil packet with a picture of breakfast divots tumbling into a bowl with sliced peaches and splashing milk. I stayed low in the ditch and poured all three ounces into my mouth, closed my eyes, and chewed silage mixed with corn syrup and vitamins, crunchy workforce Ritalin, the taste of all our hometowns. I dropped the bag and moved on, imagining the annoyance of the people I’d robbed. I was a homeowner myself. Crouching ditch weasel was just a sideline.
The road widened to four lanes as it came into town. I passed a Montessori school and a nude furniture outlet, both after my time, and ran the last two blocks with people staring at me.
The lobby directory still said DOBEY PUBLICATIONS 2ND FL. He’d said never to show my face again, and look at it now. I climbed the stairs, barged through the OWNER door, and said, “I’m sorry about this. I need some help. I’ve been in the woods.”
“I can see that,” the owner said. She came out from behind her desk and steered me to the sofa. “Henry ‘Hank,’ you need to sit down.”
Dobey had sold Jillian the business three years earlier and retired to Alabama. I had a personal demon who couldn’t find Florida.
She looked only a little different, no bangs and some faint lines by her eyes. When I picked up her phone and started dialing she went out the door, mouthing, “I’ll be right back.” I caught myself wondering if I’d made any points with her by having been in the woods. Dobey, live from Mobile, shook his head and said I was incapable of personal development.
Patti answered her cell phone in half a ring and said, “Where are you?” When I told her I was okay she said, “Oh, God” and started to cry. Jillian came in with bananas, graham crackers, and Gatorade thinned with water, and went out again.
“Are you home?” I said.
“No, I’m in Illinois,” Patti said. “I’m at the hospital where Barney is. In Edmundstown. He’s okay. He’s not conscious but they think he’s okay. They don’t know.”
I started to put my face in my hand but it hurt. “He was shot?” I said.
“No, he fell. He hit his head. Where are you?”
“I’m in Illinois too. I’m where I used to work. A guy was chasing me. Freebird. I thought he was going to shoot Barney. He was the guy who hassled us in the car with Barney and the kids that time.”
“I know,” she said. “They caught him. The forest rangers. The ones that were looking for you.”
Jillian called Jeff, arranged for me to shower and change at his house, and told the receptionist to cancel her day. In her car she said Freebird’s arrest had been leading the news. When I told her about Barney she said, “God, I’m sorry. Do you want to go straight there?”
“No, I should get cleaned up,” I said.
She filled me in on the years since I’d seen her. Nine-Hole Golfer and Tropical Fish Owner had
folded soon after Kite Buggy. Dobey had tried magazines about home brewing, home security, satellite-dish TV, flag football, prop airplane building, mopeds, and tai chi, none successfully.
Jillian had bought the business for a dollar and the assumption of debts, sold the cereal-box press for scrap, found a printer in St. Louis, and started titles about bluegrass music and family camping. They were doing okay, but the mainstay all these years had been Crochet Life. Cerise Lander had found a woman in Vermont who did terrific angels and Hobbits, and signed her to an eight-year exclusive. Jillian had married Jack, the adult-ed bookbinding teacher, who was also a state hydrologist and played dobro on jam nights at Riddenhauer’s. They had a three-year-old daughter.
Jeff’s small house was on a riverside street, with a green fiberglass carport sheltering his Galaxie and two kayaks. When he saw me he said, “Henry, wow. Give your child the Outward Bound experience and he will come home to you like this.”
“Henry’s brother’s in the hospital in Edmundstown,” Jillian said.
“Whoa, sorry. Is he okay?”
“They think so,” I said. “They don’t know.”
“We should get over there,” Jeff said. He gave me a towel and some clean clothes. When I undressed, the smell of sweat and swamp water filled the tin shower stall. I washed the mud off with poison oak scrub and watched chips of gravel go down the drain.
Jeff’s house was full of drying kayak clothes, murky green light, and books disintegrating in the river air. He was at the other end of the dial from the enthusiasts I’d been keeping apprised of the latest models all these years. Everything he touched turned discontinued, and the Pendleton he lent me had the bald patches of a museum tapestry. It seemed like a brilliant way to live.
The hospital was five stories of brick with a long plain portico extending from the entrance into the parking lot. A sixty-year-old guy sat under it on a bench, wearing a patient’s gown, smoking a cigarette, and clutching the upright of his wheeled IV stanchion. We smiled at him, but his smiling obligation had expired.