In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  The bright mackerel sky she remembers vaguely from the highway has given way to a pewter overcast that turns the woods ominous. She should not have come. Brambles catch her long wool coat as if to hold her there. How far is two miles? How many steps? How rough is the trail? How steep? Can she get to where she’s going before nightfall? She doesn’t know. Not any of it. She jerks hard at her sleeping bag and labors up the narrow path. She got herself this far. There’s nothing for it now but to go forward. To whatever’s there.

  The clouds part for a moment, but it isn’t reassuring. The bare trees cast deep shadows. She has lost some time somewhere. Hours. And she’s got no memory of them, none at all. Not by any means the first time such a thing has happened, but disturbing nonetheless. She left Atlanta in the predawn darkness, she remembers that. By her calculations it should be noon now, perhaps a little earlier. The light looks like maybe four p.m. Worrisome. To lose four hours. Five. To get only this far so late. A bear, a boar, a wildcat, they’re all there, if you look for them, as shapes among the late-day shadows. She is truly alone.

  Which is what she bought and paid for, what the agent promised, but how could she know that this was what was meant? Always before, alone meant being in her house or at the agency with no one else around, but still able to hear noises in the street, muffled voices from an adjacent office, music from a neighbor’s radio. She had—has—no concept of this new alone, where there’s no one but herself for miles.

  And the forest is not silent as she had expected. The wind in the tall pines sounds so much like traffic on a distant freeway that she imagines once again the agent lied, that she will come upon a busy highway around the next bend. Wishes for it, even. Winter tree branches creak against themselves like haunted doors, blue jays shriek above her, and a squirrel thrashes in the dead leaves not three feet away, as noisy as a man. Off and on, she’s certain something’s following her. A shadow large enough to be a deer or bear, slides between the trees up on the ridge. Once, a tan dog glares at her from a hillside then trots off. Other dogs bay in a distant valley. She shudders, and for a while walks hunched into herself, turtle-like and looking down.

  But the raw dirt on the new-cut trail shows no one’s footprints but her own, and gradually she lets the forest’s beauty stun her, even slow her progress. The wilderness beyond the trail appears to separate itself into an endless string of rooms that beckon like a fever dream, rooms for gnomes and forest nymphs who live in them with their own mysteries. On the ground: crisscrosses of pine straw, fallen twigs, overlays of rotting leaves; she views them without depth perception, as one might modernist paintings in a gallery. For a while she carries in one hand a rotting branch ruffled with lichen soft as pale green broadcloth. Long after she drops it, the woodsy perfume of its bark stays on her palms; she inhales it greedily, repeatedly. Once, when she sits to rest, she rakes dry leaves aside with her gloved hand and peers at dirt the color of dulled copper, knows that for the first time she has truly seen the ground.

  She stops often. It’s almost twilight when she at last gets to the cabin. At the end she runs—it’s downhill—both from relief and from fear of what might stalk her in the coming dark. After a hurried visit to the privy, and too exhausted even to light a candle, she dumps the contents of her sleeping bag onto the floor and crawls inside it still wearing her coat.

  But sleep won’t come despite all her exertions. She lies there wide awake as winter night slides in around her. None of her nature books talked about nighttime as a preview of the grave, an oversight that’s inexcusable. They should have warned their readers how stone cabins left a long time vacant give off fireplace drafts that call to mind interiors of tombs. Clouds hide the moon, or maybe there isn’t one. The darkness in this place is nothing like a city darkness, always filled with city lights. It’s black and thick, something to dodge, or else reach out and grab on to, like a weighty velvet stage curtain. It turns her hearing keen: A small wind whirls dry leaves and an owl hoots somewhere back in the forest; closer, something steps lightly on the ground. Fright lifts the fine hairs on her arms.

  At the agency she once conceived a campaign for an airline bringing day flights to a town formerly served only by a red-eye. Cartoon businessman trying to sleep, feet sprawled in the aisle, versus that self-same businessman accepting a lunch tray from a smiling stewardess. “The difference between night and day.” She’d thought then she knew what that meant. She’d been an arrogant little fool.

  The floor’s cold under her sleeping bag. How strange to think that in Atlanta it’s another Friday night and everybody from the agency is drinking at Wallbangers with everyone from every other agency. No one will say her name and someone else sits in her chair.

  The owl is gone. As long as there was an owl, there likely were no larger animals around to frighten it. She scrunches farther down inside her sleeping bag, maneuvers it so deep into a corner that her head nearly touches the cold stone wall. Perhaps sheltered in this manner she can sleep. And she must sleep; if she can’t sleep she will almost certainly die even sooner than she fears. She tries to relax. Tries to think about each part of her body, tense it and then release the tension, like one of her doctors showed her. Toes, feet, ankles; she lies very still. Knees, hips, belly. In this stillness she hears a new sound. Hears it unmistakably, almost feels it. A faint, rhythmic rustling, as of something breathing very near.

  An echo of her own breath bounced back to her off the wall. That’s all it is, that’s what it has to be. She can prove it, hold her breath and make the phantom breathing stop.

  Only, it doesn’t stop. Something that isn’t her keeps breathing right beside her, separated only by a wall.

  She lies frozen, listens to the sighing of her pulsing blood, afraid to move even her eyes. Tries to align her breathing perfectly to this faint second breath, this breath that is not her breath. Breath that is the least whistle of air passing through a chink between two stones.

  She tries to make her own breath disappear inside it, so that her suddenly too-solid body disappears as well.

  In. Out. In. Out. Soothing. Terrifying. She places her palm against the wall’s rough stones. Feels on her skin a spot of moist, illusive warmth, a vibration so slight it must be her imagination.

  Jerks her hand away, cries out.

  “Please, God, please. Oh, please don’t let me die.”

  The breath that is not her breath stops.

  And then begins again. Longer. Slower. Deeper.

  Relentless.

  Inside this new breath, her breath—exhausted, hopeless—finds a resting place.

  And, finally, she sleeps.

  2

  The Watcher

  THE WHOLE THING STARTS WITH A MISTAKE, A REDBIRD IN THE WINTER woods and he’s stoned on it already. Acknowledging, of course, he’s so wasted to begin with he’s screwed up the day marks on his wall and set out thinking it’s his birthday, Sunday, and it’s cool to raid the dumpster at the grocery store out by the highway, bring back something to celebrate. Stale Slim Jims, package of smashed cupcakes. Smashed cupcakes with icing. Only, turns out he can’t because it’s Friday, Monday, Saturday, who the hell knows, and there’s people there.

  Dog knew. Hightailed it down the back side of the mountain to sniff her own kind, get a little doggie hump. Won’t do her any good. Dog, somebody somewhere loved you so much they spayed you. Live with it.

  So here he is. Alone up on this ridge, whacked out of his gourd under a heavy sky and the air tasting like snow’s coming before nightfall. And here’s this red dot bobbing so close he can reach out and grab it. Except dope fucks with your depth perception and it’s not a redbird after all. It’s some city bitch trudging along the trail way down below. In what Memaw used to call a “Sunday coat” and prissy little fur-topped boots, and dragging what looks like a giant turd behind her. What’s she doing here, so far back in his woods she’s like a fairy tale, poetic-vision acid-trip, phantasmagoria-of-the-month?

  Phantasmagoria. Yeah,
old Professor Beckman would be proud.

  Danny pinches out the joint he’s held cupped against the wind, drops it in the pocket of his torn fatigue jacket, moves soundlessly to keep her in his sight. Looking back, he will recognize this moment as his first act of commitment.

  For now, the reality of her blows his mind. Her substance, her sheer suddenness. Like the first time you get sent out, how it hits you that you’re really there and you’re so scared you see, hear, taste, smell everything at once. All of it, not just what your eyes are trained on. The wind and where it’s coming from, the bugs, the snakes, the shitstink gook-jungle muck under your feet. From then on you’re always keeping track. Watching, listening, sniffing the air. Shaking it all up together like some bar drink in your head to figure what of it might kill you.

  You get good at it so you won’t die. That’s when it starts to feel good, that danger standing all your nerves on end. Feel good in ways you never say. Like Pawpaw with the squirrels and deer, you move in close enough to hear them breathe, then closer. So close you see the small muscles in their faces twitch, smell what they ate for dinner or if they got lucky in the middle of the night. Given time, people lay out their whole lives in front of you without a clue you’re even there. You watch, always, with a degree of awe.

  And if you’re Danny you don’t quit watching. Not even when they send you home. You stalk everything that’s human, till you think you’re better off with the wild animals so you set up house with them. Then one day here comes this red thing, and there’s this cosmic coincidence of you thinking you’ve turned twenty, only you’re a few days off. And there she is, and here’s you watching her—and it’s like you got a birthday present straight from God and Jesus.

  Who fucked the date up same as you.

  He kneels behind a fallen tree, raises his left arm, stiffens it into an imaginary rifle, braces it with his right hand. Takes aim at the woman struggling up the trail. Pow. His imaginary rifle kicks from his imaginary shot. Feels good, that old familiar push against his trigger finger.

  Even if it’s nothing but thin air.

  Pow.

  He frowns hard at the implications of what he’s just done, jams his rifle hand deep in his pocket, creeps closer to the trail below.

  Well, goddamn. Army-issue sleeping bag, that’s what she’s dragging. Stuffed it to the gills and sewed a harness on it. Resourceful bitch. Plods right along.

  And he knows where she’s headed. He’s been expecting her, or someone like her, ever since some asshole with a chainsaw came cutting a path back to the Old Man’s cabin. Danny had an hour, tops. Packed up his hatchet and his little handsaw, the hospital scissors he’d swiped to trim his beard, his tin cup, cook pot, bent spoon, broken piece of mirror, extra shirt. Hauled away the ashes from the fireplace and the stove, balled up a fistful of weeds and wiped the floor clean of his footprints, covered his yard prints with dead leaves. Made it like he never once existed in that place. Like he was nothing but a ghost. Then he took his duffle and himself on up the mountain, in the fearful lightning and the coming rain, to the burnt-out house he sleeps in now. Ever since, he’s been trying to wrap his mind around the idea of someone that’s not him living at the Old Man’s place.

  Can’t do it.

  Its location, the deserted cabin Jimbo used to hole up in when he went hunting, was the one piece of information Danny brought back from the war that turned out okay. Shit, better than okay. Before Pawpaw died he taught Danny some carpentry, enough to find work at it after he got grown, more than enough to know what he was looking at. Enough to know whoever built that cabin didn’t use a single nail below the rafters, put so much of himself in it his spirit must have seeped into its walls. The more Danny studied on that house, thought about some old man—it was always an old man, white hair, kind eyes—pouring his whole soul into planing a board or some such, the more he loved that old man like he was his father. No fucking whore dragging a sleeping bag behind her can know shit like that. And she is a whore—and other names he will not think or say.

  She won’t know either that’s why Danny built the table, to honor the Old Man. Used the few good boards from the caved-in smokehouse like the Old Man would have done. Told each board out loud before he took it, “Board, I’m making you a better piece of wood than you can ever dream of.” When he was done making the table he made a bench for it, and then another. Two benches, as if he thought he might have company. Took awhile to see how fucking weird that was, him making that other bench.

  In the Old Man’s cabin Danny slept a sleep too deep for dreams. He aims his “rifle” at the woman’s red coat. Pow.

  Moves in closer. So close his mind flips out all the way to San Francisco. The park, the girl’s blond hair—so like Janelle’s, so like his mother’s—coiled tight in his clenched hands so he could keep her by him. Later, her lying there so still he didn’t stick around. But this isn’t San Francisco. And he’s only watching. Be here now—isn’t that what all the hippies say?

  Yeah, be here now. Crouched close to another human being because it feels so good. Maybe that’s the reason no one ever speaks of it, this watching aspect of the art of war. Because it’s not supposed to feel this good. Supposed to feel like shuffling papers at a desk in Saigon—thin, pale, dry. This woman here is all those things, yet if he wanted he could take five steps, maybe four long ones, and jam his tongue deep in that ear that peeks out from her dull-dark, pulled-back hair. Lick till her moans curl deep into whatever ghost he has become.

  But Danny shall not want to, shall not want. The Lord is his shepherd, for whatever shit that’s worth. All Danny has to do is keep his own number one commandment: Do not touch another woman. Not ever again.

  But he can watch. Yeah, watch till his heart and all the rest of him’s content. The hard part isn’t learning how to move so they don’t see you, it’s learning how to keep your heart from pounding so hard, your breath from coming so fast, that they hear. There’s a trick. Imagine yourself someplace quiet, safe. Danny is always with his Memaw on a particular late-summer day in the shade of the huge water oak beside their cabin. Her bulk weighing down the rusty metal yard chair, her lap filled with dark red cherries. His mouth is stained with them, his body ringed with pits there on the dusty ground close by her swollen feet in their stretched-out cotton hose. Nothing can startle him, wound him, kill him, so long as they two sit together in that clean-swept yard.

  This close, the woman’s older than he thought. Maybe older even than his mother would have been. He’s never stuck his tongue inside a woman’s ear. They’re supposed to like it, he’s been told. Not old Janelle. She only liked straight kissing. On the mouth. And no hands below the waist, no finger fucking. Ever. Not even way back when he thought they’d got engaged. He wonders what this woman likes. From the look of her, not much of anything. Danny aims his “rifle” one more time. Pow.

  The woman trudges up the new-cut trail some longer. Then she sits on a rock to rest and he can see she’s nothing but sharp points—shoulders, elbows, knees. And shaking with a tremor that looks like it never lets her be. He smells the sickness on her before he gets his first good look. The acrid stink of medicine mixed in with puke and a third odor, a cloying sweetness he’s smelled twice before, both times on men dying.

  Her face bears this out. Blue-veined skin stretched tight across her skull, drawn up mouth, cavernous eyeholes. The eyes themselves stare dully. She pants, sweats in the February air, but doesn’t make a move to unbutton her coat. Instead, she raises a gloved hand to wipe her damp forehead, lets it drift down to her pocket. Pulls something out—a Mars bar. A goddamn Mars bar. She shoves half the candy in her mouth, chews like she hasn’t eaten in a week. Nibbles the remaining half, the last bite with both hands covering her mouth. Swallows, lowers her hands, clasps them primly in her lap and sits perfectly still, her jaw clamped shut. Then suddenly—oh, shit—she doubles over, spews the whole mess out onto the ground.

  “Damn it all to hell.” Says it quietly, lik
e a single word. Like she’s not much given to cussing. Spits once, then again.

  Then she takes off her right glove, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, wipes her hand in a clot of leaves, all of it so matter-of-fact, resigned, familiar, Danny knows whatever’s killing her has shown its face. She rubs a dangling run of snot off her nose, chafes her arms. Then glances up to where a pair of buzzards circle high as angels in the pure, white sky.

  What happens next drives the last reefer haze out of his brain. The woman straightens her spine. Her breath now coming quiet as his own, she turns her face up to the birds as if she’s basking in the sun.

  “Hi, babies,” she says. “I’ll leave a window open. You can pick my bones.”

  YOU DON’T FEEL FOR them. You’re there to figure out what’s going on and take appropriate measures, that’s all. At first he thinks she’s crazy, one of those dumb bitches that quit eating for meanness or no reason till they waste away to bones. But then he sees whatever’s wrong pisses her off too much to be a thing she chose. She moves so slowly, looks so annoyed by it, he pities her and knows it for a weakness he must overcome. When she stops to rest again, so shrunken, scared, and hopeless in the fading light—just a few feet from where you see the Old Man’s cabin, his meadow and his pond—Danny has to fight the urge to run out, grab her shoulders, shake her till her teeth fall out, the urge to holler, “Get up, lady, look down there.”

  Even though he’s got no personal stake whatever in her getting there. Even though, truth be told, that outcome runs counter to all his interests—especially his interest in continuing to fish the Old Man’s pond.