In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  At last she stands up, takes the few steps. Then it’s like some fit comes over her. She goes rigid as a plank and starts in trembling. Gives the sleeping bag a mighty tug, starts running down the hill with it bouncing behind her, nipping at her heels. And all the while she’s letting out these eerie little wild-bird cries as if she can’t believe she really made it.

  You must not let yourself feel anything.

  She jerks the sleeping bag onto the porch, takes a key out of her Mars bar pocket, turns it in the new brass lock. The front door sticks. Always does after a rain. She shoves her brittle shoulder into it. Once. Twice. It gives, and Danny is surprised to feel relief where he is not supposed to.

  That’s why he doesn’t come close as he might when she goes in, doesn’t want to know what she is doing in those rooms he ought still to be living in. Yet he’s not so far away he doesn’t hear the kitchen faucet cry out like a red-tail hawk. Or hear the stupid bitch let drop one of the cast-iron stove eyes with a clang so sudden and so loud he has to clap his hands over his mouth to keep from screaming.

  Later, in twilight, he moves behind her down the privy path. When she doesn’t shut the door, he turns his back—there are some things he doesn’t need to see. Yet he can’t help but hear the clear, pure chiming of her urine in the slop jar the Old Man for some weird reason set inside the privy hole. The same dark-night sound as Memaw on her piss pot when he was a little boy.

  His familiar tears come then. Silent, constant, they slide down gullies chapped raw by their predecessors running to his beard. She’s come here to die; he’s known it since he stared into her face back on the trail. For a little while he fooled himself into a kind of future. Someone to watch, someplace to be. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, next week even. Now it’s gone.

  He should leave before the snow starts. Should not scuttle toward the cabin, pick a corner she can’t see from any window. Should not crouch there, sit and straddle it, should not slide in close enough to touch the walls, then closer, nor stretch out his arms, embrace the two sides of the house, nor lay his cheek against its smooth, cold stones.

  Should not imagine her a foot away, sleeping where he used to sleep.

  There’s a chink in the mortar, level with his face, where he can hear her breathe. He wishes he could suck it in, her breath so close like that, presses his ear hard against the crumbling mortar. Hey, whore, Dead Lady, you want a lullaby? I’ll sing you one inside my mind. Here goes. Hushabye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby. Bees and butterflies are picking out your eyes; oh, you poor, poor little baby.

  Those are all the words he can recall of what his Memaw used to sing. He loops them round and round inside his head, while his fingers and his thighs grow numb gripping the stones and a barred owl hoots from somewhere way back in the pines. Hushabye, hushabye. He hears the wind and his own breathing and the Dead Lady’s, stays there a long time.

  Then something happens.

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

  Danny presses the side of his face hard against the wall, hangs on till her sobs die back, even their echoes. Clings with his aching body long after she is through, as if that in itself might keep the thing from happening.

  Not till the first frail snowflakes drift into his hair does he unbend himself from his stony embrace and move soundlessly back up the mountain in the dark.

  3

  Gatsby’s House

  SLIMY, SNOWY MUCK. TWO FREEZING FINGERS POKING FROM YOUR gloves. You could fall, you know, roll down the fucking mountain, knock yourself out on the Old Man’s porch, wake up and find that skinny bitch dead in the cabin. Who would find you innocent? No one, that’s who. You are not an innocent-type life form, and that’s the truth.

  But Danny won’t fall. A moon’s just slid out of the clouds. Sky, snow, it’s all turned pure, pearly white. Plenty of bright light to guide old Danny home. “There’s a moon out to-ni-ight. Let’s go strolling through the paaaaarrrk.”

  He knows better than to sing a song like that. Even in his mind. Anything to do with parks can set him thinking about that park.

  Or maybe it’s the woman did it. So scrawny she put him in mind of hippie girls. And hippie girls put him in mind of that hippie girl in that park. Put him also in mind of old Janelle, who was different from hippie girls in every way there is, except that she’s a girl. And who he has not thought about all day not even once. Till now. Which is some kind of record probably.

  Thinking about Janelle—how in high school, with her cheerleader captain and him quarterback, they’d been king and queen of everything—leads him to thinking about other shit that makes you want to drink and drug till you pass out and die. Or maybe only blow your brains out, since it’s quicker. Shit like that day he ran the ball, a day he every minute goes out of his way to never think about. Won’t think about now either. Can’t think about. Because the weather’s different. Night. Cold. Snowing.

  On that other day the sky was a clear, high blue. October weather.

  For the Homecoming game.

  Her bus from Athens—she’d gone to the University and he’d gone to little Larramore, halfway across the goddamn state from her, because he’d got a football scholarship—came in at 12:09 p.m. He still remembers. Him standing at that scummy grocery near the campus, in the driveway circle where the buses stopped to let off passengers. Him staring down the road and actually praying, “Please, God, don’t let her be late.” The game started at two and he had to be there by one-thirty, suited out and everything. Remembers how her bus was seventeen whole minutes late when it pulled in, should have been there at 11:52. Him waiting with the rigid florist’s box, a white orchid with a golden throat to match her hair. Not purple like what other guys had bought. Different, special just for her.

  She looked so pretty getting off the bus, pausing for a second on its single step in her sky-colored suit and high-heel shoes. Carrying her little train case, shading her eyes to search for him. His fingers shook when he pinned the corsage on her left shoulder. The too-short pins that came with the flower in the box were tipped with tiny pearls.

  “It’s for all day,” he told her. “For the game and then for dinner and tonight,” his voice gruff because he had just pinned a flower on his girl, the same thing all the guys were doing, but so far from anything he’d ever dreamed could be a thing that he might also do. That boy who’d spent so many days out in the woods with Pawpaw, hunting squirrels so there’d be meat for dinner.

  He left Janelle with Jimbo’s girlfriend at the stadium and so knew where she was sitting. Tried to keep his eyes from even looking toward her that whole afternoon, while him and all the other freshmen players warmed the bench. Watched the score, their score, spiral up so high that late in the fourth quarter he and one other freshman got sent in “just to get the feel of it.”

  Then there was the ball high in the air above him, some boy in an opposing jersey jumping, reaching for it, Danny jumping higher, reaching too. Cradling it hard and running. Thirty yards. So many yards people applauded, even though it didn’t matter, the score so lopsided they had already won.

  That night she wore her corsage on a dress that looked like dresses goddesses in statues wore. They danced awkwardly on the crowded floor of the gymnasium to music from some singing group he’d heard once on the radio. At intermission he led her outside into the cool air, to the practice field. There they sat in the bleachers, the only couple who had thought to walk that far. He put his arm around her, lowered her head down to his shoulder.

  “If I was in a fraternity and had a pin I’d give it to you,” he said as he stroked her hair.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t need one.”

  He can’t remember if he wanted her right then, thinks maybe he did not. Not that way anyway. No, he wanted her right then for all his life. Wanted to hold up in front of her a certificate that said he knew the things you need to know to be a lawyer and provide for her. Wanted to stand up in Memaw’s little church
and promise he would spend his whole life with her in that silly house she’d cut out from a magazine, with its wide porch and all that stupid woodwork. Wanted to make babies with her, babies that would be like both of them.

  After a few minutes sitting out there in the autumn night with the dry leaves rustling and drifting down, he did want her that other way. Wanted her so bad he stood up abruptly, said, “We need to go back now.” For her own good, to protect her from himself, from what he so desperately wanted before it was time. Because that was what you did. Because she was the kind of girl you’d do that for.

  They walked back slowly, both of them reluctant. He removed his coat, draped it around her shoulders, took her hand. Far away, they heard the singers starting up after the intermission. Their music floated through the building’s open doors. “The evening breeze caressed the trees tenderly.” They stopped, stood listening. In that moment Danny felt his life as he had always thought it was supposed to be, the way he had imagined it from books and his own yearnings. That this realization came to him in this way, as a fullness inside himself that would render him able to accept such a life, seemed so remarkable he allowed himself to believe in it, standing with this perfect girl across the practice field from that small-college gymnasium where a quartet of somewhat famous, not-so-young men sang their second set. Allowed himself to believe his world had at last become exactly as it should be, every part of it, and that this was the way it would remain for him through all his future. Like the Bible said: “Now and forevermore.”

  Yeah, well. Wish in one boot, piss in the other, see which one fills up first.

  It’s near morning. He’s got no watch, but he can tell the hour. Time’s in his blood and bones and he can sense its passing. So he knows it takes just shy of ninety minutes to make the hard climb from the Old Man’s cabin up to Danny’s mountaintop home. Up to the iron gate, where he unwinds the heavy chain he wraps around its bars to keep bears out.

  First time he touched that chain, back in the early fall, it burned the shit out of his hands. Everything was mist and smoke from a piss-poor lightning fire still smoldering after rain. A last fiery limb crashed down right in front of him, and a few dead trees now and then collapsed inside themselves and flung their sparks into the sky. Like over there, where something always burned, even inside the sopping monsoon jungle. Muck there, muck here; fire there, fire here. Hard to keep straight which part of the known world he was inhabiting at any given time. A pack of wild dogs bayed down in the valley, a moiling, frantic sound of lives gone suddenly so strange they couldn’t figure out which way to run.

  The house inside the gate loomed through a dense orange haze. He couldn’t see what-all was there. Looked like parts of it had maybe burned once long before and fallen in. He threw some dirt on the back side, where some of it still smoked again, then walked all around it like he’d seized the Castle of the Black Knight or some such.

  “Hunters never go there, climb’s too steep. It’s like everyone’s forgot the fucking thing exists.” Jimbo’s eyes dreamy in the flares’ unearthly light. “Mold all over everything, like digging up a corpse. Dumped all my weed seeds in the side yard. Years of them. Should be shit enough to stone sixteen battalions. I’ll take you there when we get back.”

  Danny found one room he could live in, dropped his duffle. Home.

  That signaled Dog to come from somewhere in the mansion’s bowels. He heard her before he saw her, her claws tick-ticking on the marble floors. Took her stand in the foyer, a midsized, deer-colored bitch like Pawpaw’s hunting dogs. Growling, snarling. Something alive in Hell besides just him.

  He’d grinned at her, crooked his right arm chest level.

  “Dog! Yeah, you. C’mere.”

  Slapped his arm to goad her.

  “Yeah, I’m a fucking loony but I like you lots. C’mere.”

  He feinted toward the dog. Once, twice. When she lunged, he grabbed her muzzle with one hand, wrapped his free arm around her body, dragged her to the floor just like he used to wrestle Pawpaw’s hounds. Flipped a leg over her and started in petting whatever of her he could reach with his free hand.

  “You like that, my hand all in your neck fur? You like the way I rub your belly? Yeah, you like it so much you don’t want me to ever stop.”

  His voice was even, soft, his mouth close to her ear.

  “You put on a big show like you’re some kind of hellhound, but you’re just a hungry little bitch at heart. And you need me to love you, only you don’t know it yet.”

  Danny cocked his head toward the valley and the pack of wild dogs, grabbed her harder.

  “Assholes down there, they throw you out? Looks like they didn’t let you get too much to eat.”

  He lay with her still pinned beneath his leg on the stone floor, worked his fingers through her fur, spoke softly in her ear for a good while. At last he took his hand off her muzzle, pulled a Slim Jim from his pocket. He bit the paper open, stripped it with his free hand, fed it to her.

  “You better like it. That shit was my dinner. Dumpster’s finest.”

  She gobbled it down and he rocked her in his arms.

  “Yeah, you’re my dog now. All mine. You belong to nobody but me.”

  Whispered it in her ear over and over, till finally he let go his hands and she stayed down beside him and the two of them just fell asleep right on that marble floor and let the fire burn out around them.

  “Dog?” His one word now muffled by the snow.

  Danny holds the gate open, purses his lips, calls her with little sucking sounds. She doesn’t come.

  “Dog? Okay, see if I bring you any Slim Jims next time.”

  He’s got nothing for her this time, maybe that’s what’s wrong—greedy bitch only shows up when she smells food.

  “Dog, you’re acting no better than a human, which has knocked you down a fair number of pegs in my opinion.”

  He wraps the chain loosely around the gate, leaving enough space for her to squeeze in if she wants to. Snow’s starting to clump on Jimbo’s reefer plants, on Danny’s fruit trees. Apples, peaches, pears, he runs his fingers along one of the small branches of a pear tree, brushes off the mounding snow. “Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie, something-something don’t know why.” He needs to recollect the other words, sing it when he works on them in spring. Memaw always said green things do like being sung to.

  “Yeah, you need me, all you trees. Need me to keep care of you.”

  He can feel, more than see, the smooth progression of the early light, even behind the clouds and snow. Something else he’s picked up over time. He is one smart fucker, for whatever good that gets him—smart even among those city-shit frat assholes that one year at the college. Walking up through the orchard takes more time but, truth be told, he likes coming home this way. Makes him feel like he owns the place. Because he does, no matter what shitass’s name’s gathering dust on some forgotten piece of paper in some other state.

  Yeah, he likes it. Likes how the broken driveway sweeps wide from the orchard and that’s when you see it. Gatsby’s house, just like old F. Scott wrote it.

  Three stories. Limestone white as bones—what crazy fuck would haul limestone up here? Wide-ass lawn in front, mountains spread out behind like torn scraps of faded blue tissue paper. Standing here in the early dawn, you can’t tell it’s a ruin. Can’t see the broken windows, raccoons nesting in the sofas, whole top floor caved in. Sometimes you can’t tell when you wade across the lawn that’s grown up almost to your chest. Sometimes not even when you set foot on that first, and still unbroken, slate porch step. And if you’re careful where you look, sometimes you can’t tell till you’re standing at the door.

  Because until then you are something very like a ghost and you can almost see them. All those skinny girls in their thin, flowery dresses and that slicked-down flapper hair; the men in white suits and wide ties striped like store-bought candies. You can almost see them dancing with their knees and elbows angled out, almost hear them.
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br />   “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

  Danny can still quote whole passages, who the fuck knows why? Maybe because Jimbo could and it got to be a contest with the two of them. Maybe because he just craved to be there, someplace so different from anything he’d ever known. At first he thought he was Carraway, because they both knew how to keep a watcher’s distance. Then one day it hit him like a block of that damn limestone: He’s Gatsby. Got to be—it’s his house, isn’t it?

  The massive oak door sticks in damp weather, same as the door on the Old Man’s cabin, Dead Lady’s cabin now. Before Danny gives it his usual running shove, he rests his forehead on the wood, breathes in its piss-smell of old mildew.

  “Dog?”

  He lets out one last whistle and this time she comes, dashing up the drive and lunging into him as if he himself were the stuck door. It gives, and they all but fall into the house, her on the marble entry floor, him on top of her, his nose in her fur. He rolls around with her, ruffles her up.

  “Where you been, lady? You get a little?” Her fur smells of pine needles, wet leaves, other dogs. “You think you’re well on your way to a wolf’s life, don’t you?”

  Hugging her warmth against his own chill bones, he carries her into the ruined library, won’t let go. She sniffs his pockets.

  “Nothing there. You got nothing here but me. I got nothing here but you. We’re two against the world.”

  He drops with her onto his rain-stained mattress and sleep falls on him, sudden and heavy, wraps him in the dog’s soft fur and imagined fireplace warmth from yesterday’s cold embers. His last thought is of the Dead Lady, dragging all she owns behind her up the trail.

  4

  The Cabin

  SHE DREAMS RARELY ANYMORE, MAYBE ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR. THIS dream is a good one that she doesn’t want to end. She feels well in it, which hasn’t happened in a long time, and stands in an open space under a gnarled old tree. A wind so high up she can’t feel it flings itself against the tree’s top branches. They boil into the sky like clouds from a gathering storm. She will continue to be well as long as she stays where she is and doesn’t wake, she knows this. But it’s cold and it’s morning; she should open her eyes.