In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  Except she took the time to make it, this list of tasks she needs to take care of. Because when its words are all crossed off she’ll have completed all her business here and can go anywhere she wants. Because for now it comforts her to feel it in her pocket, clutch it in her hand.

  At Nora’s Dress Shoppe, which smells like artificial flowers might if artificial flowers had a scent, the white-haired saleslady addresses her as “dear” in a soft, musical voice that makes her want to stay, maybe ask if she can organize the clothes on the sale racks, which really don’t need organizing. Maybe the saleslady will ask her to stay for lunch, join her at that round table with the two chairs in the back room behind the not-so-carefully-pulled curtain she can see from where she’s standing. Katherine can talk with her and eat the food she brought. She is suddenly so tired of eating lunch alone.

  But the white-haired saleslady does not ask her. And Katherine has other errands, needs to finish them.

  The bookshop down the block is narrow, dark, and quiet, with a side room given over to a weaver’s studio. Katherine peers at it through the open door.

  “It’s okay, go on in. Have a look around.”

  The proprietor, seated at a small desk near the rear of the store, presses his rimless glasses back up on his nose.

  “It’s my wife’s. She’s just gone out a minute.”

  Katherine nods, steps through the door, then stops. Going farther seems an intrusion akin to reading someone’s exuberant, chaotic mind. The bright, sunny room is pleasantly in disarray and smells of nothing except wood and wool. In it, her dizziness subsides. Bins of yarns the colors of grasses, flowers, the dirt along the trail, are stacked halfway up the opposite wall. Taking almost all the floor space are three large looms on which a rug, a blanket, and something still too narrow to identify are coming into being. On the only wall lacking a door or window hangs a dramatic and unfinished woven rectangle suspended inside a giant square of hefty nails resembling a child’s potholder loom made large. She walks over to it, studies it.

  Her cabin has a large expanse of empty wall. But it’s too late, she won’t be living there.

  City apartments have all kinds of empty walls. Have to—they back up against other apartments.

  “Do you think she would sell me some yarn, your wife?”

  She leaves with a dozen skeins stuffed in a paper bag with two jute handles, along with the gardening book she came for. Out on the street, dizzy again and queasy, she rummages a hand inside the shopping bag, tunnels her fingers through the wool and keeps them there.

  At the hardware store she buys a sturdy hammer and two pounds of their largest, longest nails. Tenpenny nails, that’s what they’re called, she’s told. Likes knowing it. The man with the Adam’s apple isn’t there, will never know how right he was a month ago when he implied she wouldn’t stay. Screws, nails, a trowel, a lantern, candles, another door lock, seeds for tomatoes, lettuces, green beans, she brings them to the register. The seeds she’ll plant in pots on a balcony, or in window boxes. The nails, the lock, the other things, they’re good to have on hand. And now her list is finished, she’s done all she set out to do. Now she can drive back to the city.

  As she dumps her purchases onto the car’s back seat, the trowel’s sharp point jabs her palm. She blots the blood off with a corner of the red bandanna tied around her lunch, looks up to see a thin young man sprawled on the nearer of the courthouse benches staring at her. Stringy blond hair grown past his shoulders, camouflage jacket, jeans ripped across both knees. His visible boot sole has a hole in it. He smiles, flashes a peace sign she at first takes for a rabbit in a shadow play, and his eyes meet hers with such a fierce and inexplicable intensity her face grows hot. She does not walk over and sit down on the other bench to eat her lunch, as she had planned. Instead, she locks the car, hurries away.

  The sun’s high and the courthouse clock is chiming noon. The street has grown shimmery; she fights to keep her knees from buckling. A young man and woman, both in jeans and soft, well-worn twill shirts Katherine yearns to touch, come toward her from the opposite direction. Laughing, looking only in each other’s faces, they nearly run into her then skip aside like fawns to let her pass. Katherine turns and sees them stop to look into the window of a little gallery, how they lean into each other, bodies perfectly aligned, with the fluid grace of something they’ve done many times. In Katherine’s chest comes a quick pain, as if a thorn has tweaked some memory she can’t recall. Suddenly, she does not want the lunch she’s brought. She wants something else entirely, something she can’t imagine.

  Perhaps simply to get out of the heat. Down the block, a neon sign proclaims “Rexall Drugs and Luncheonette. It’s cool inside.” Inside it is indeed cool. A cloying, custardy smell from years of people wiping up spilled coffee and ice cream mingles with odors of perfumes and medicines—all drugstores smell the same. She takes a seat at one of the small fountain tables and immediately realizes she should not have sat facing the plate glass window—sun deflecting off the parked cars blinds her. A waitress in what looks too much like a nurse’s uniform comes toward her brandishing a menu.

  It ought to feel so normal, stopping in a place like this, something she’s done since childhood. It’s what she wanted from this place, to feel normal and to cool off from the sun, that’s why she came inside. Only, it doesn’t feel normal: Walls appear to slant toward her (all those soda glasses lined up on the shelves), the floor seems to lurch beneath her feet, and what’s real is no longer anything to be depended on. She shakes her head to clear it, but that does no good.

  “Excuse me. Dizzy. Need some air.”

  She runs out and retches on the sidewalk like a drunk outside a bar. Ashamed, she swipes a hand across her mouth and walks quickly, guiltily, away. Someone will bring a bucket of water and a push broom, scrub it off; the sidewalks of Elkmont are very clean. But that’s scant comfort.

  The stringy-haired young man is gone. A part of her wishes him back, in case she needs some sort of help. She can’t stop shaking, can barely unlock her car.

  At a filling station just off the square, the gasoline fumes gag her.

  “Wash yer windows? Check yer oil?”

  “No time. Just fill it up. Got to get home.”

  Strange word, “home.” Same long, mournful “o” as “lonely.” Lonely. Home. She circles the courthouse, drives past the Atlanta road, does not notice this until she’s heading back the way she came. Got to get home now.

  Mustn’t, mustn’t miss the turnoff. Peeling clapboard grocery. Wicks? Wick’s? Wickle’s? “The Wickles Store” with no apostrophe. “Colonial is Good Bread,” “Drink Coca-Cola.”

  She’s back to dying, isn’t she?

  At the road’s end she grabs one of the grocery sacks. She’ll come back for the rest of it. Tomorrow. Sometime. Maybe. Forgot to buy more bullets for the gun.

  On the trail she retches once again and feels better enough to fear the afternoon’s long shadows, whatever makes the blue jays shriek, the peeper frogs go silent. Trees creak in the wind. She draws up her shoulders to hide the exposed back of her neck, its thin, vulnerable hairs.

  Just after the sun has set, she climbs the single step onto the cabin porch. Inside, she sets down her grocery bag and, with an unsteady hand, lights last evening’s half-burnt candle. This is not where she thought she would be this night, but it is where she came.

  Lonely. Home.

  She slides down to the floor and weeps into her hands, as the stubby candle gutters in the window.

  10

  Danny’s Errand

  DANNY IS GONE FROM THE FOREST PRETTY MUCH THE WHOLE NEXT day and night, doing what he has to do. Far beyond the hour when the wind blows cold through his thin jacket. First night—in how long he can’t remember—that he hasn’t stopped there by the cabin, hoping to eavesdrop on her dreams.

  11

  The Cart

  TWO DAYS LATER, SHE HIKES BACK TO HER CAR TO GET THE REST OF what she bought. It’s muggy an
d overcast, a March day that belongs in April, as quiet, moist, and warm as the day before it had been raucous and cold. Shreds of drifting mist envelop her and wetness drips from the trees, small, muffled plops in the hushed, comforting stillness.

  The walk is easy. And a good thing, too; it’ll take two trips to bring back everything.

  Getting sick in Elkmont was a one-time occurrence, had to be. She caught a stomach virus. Or ate something the night before, some poisonous weed nestled among the salad greens, a lesson to take more care.

  Or just to get the hell out, drive back to Atlanta like she’d planned. Buy food in supermarkets, eat in nice restaurants, live like normal people who aren’t dying.

  As she skirts a jutting rock she sees in her mind’s eye for no apparent reason the iron pot on the cabin stove, recalls how old and alien she’d thought it that first day. For weeks after she came, her mind’s projector showed her only city pictures: odd, ordinary scenes, most of which she could not remember having noticed when she lived there. The white stucco house with the crank-out windows she drove past going to the agency; the downtown alley where a small neon sign identified a shop that cleaned and blocked men’s hats; the flat, wooden arms on her easy chair, wide enough to hold a coffee cup and saucer. A longing for the previously unremembered thing would squeeze her heart each time.

  During those days, the skyline in her mind showed itself crisp and white as origami under a della Robbia blue sky; the agency became a sparkling carousel of a thing that spun in its own cloud of noise and cigarette smoke and excitement; and her home looked as it did when she had lived there, including all its furniture. Lately, though, deep sunset shadows hide most of the downtown buildings, when she thinks of them at all; she walks through a silent agency as unacknowledged as a wraith; and her home has been refurnished, its exterior indeed repainted Restoration blue.

  Or else she sees the woodpile by the privy, the cast-iron pot. A change of scene.

  The hike feels shorter even than two days before, a measurable indication of improving stamina, despite her setback in the town. She stops everywhere to look at everything—a startling patch of bright waving daffodils, a wild azalea with blooms orange as fire, the bleached and peaceful skeleton of a small rodent. Already she’s reached the rock outcrop where far below she’ll see the smudge of yellow that’s her dear little car, its rear end backed into the laurel. But not today, today it’s hidden in mist. She grabs on to a series of small saplings, scrambles down the bank. Her car is just the other side of that thick clump of rhododendron, she can see it now. Only, something’s wrong. She stops, stares. The perspective’s off. Her car looks too low to the ground.

  “Oh, dear God.”

  Her shirt’s gone damp with a cold, prickly sweat. She hugs her elbows, bends over out of fear she’ll faint. Someone has shattered all her car’s windows, headlights, taillights, beaten in the roof and all the doors until they look like crumpled sheets of paper. Both bumpers and all four tires are gone. Rims, hubcaps, everything. And the hood is up.

  She runs to her poor yellow Mustang—its doors won’t even open—thrusts her head in through the glassless window on the driver’s side.

  Inside, all the seats are slashed, the floor mats cut out. The door’s ripped off the empty glove compartment and the radio is gone. There’s nothing in the trunk; they took the jack. Under the hood are gaping holes; what’s left is smashed, slashed, twisted, bashed in, broken.

  A mourning dove coos far back in the quiet woods. The sound’s incongruous peace unhinges her. She lowers herself onto the ground, leans her forehead against her wrecked car’s left front door, pounds hard on the crumpled metal with both fists and screams.

  Afterwards, she fishes her red bandanna from her shirt pocket, wipes her eyes and blows her nose, gets up. She will need to go back to Elkmont in another week, and the week after that, and the week after that. Because a week’s worth of food is all she can stuff into her backpack, carry in her arms. She can’t live here anymore. But where else can she go?

  Standing quite still, hugging herself so tight she moves only her eyes, she studies the brown weeds around her ruined car. They’re tamped down but they hold no footprints. There are no footprints anywhere but hers. She turns her upper body, twists her head, looks in a circle. Against the wide trunk of a chestnut oak something gleams silvery and incongruous. She forces herself to look at it and a fresh current of fear runs through her. It’s a cart. Packed full, and large enough someone could crouch behind it. It’s taller, leaner than a grocery cart. Narrow, with wire sides. There’s no one hiding back of it, of course. They’re gone.

  But they left everything she bought behind.

  For that’s what fills the cart. Vegetables, yarns, bags of rice and beans, the lantern, trowel, hammer and long nails, even her sunglasses from the glove compartment.

  Why would anyone do that?

  She starts to shake as if from cold. Stripping the car is something she can understand; it’s a crime, impersonal. But why remove all her belongings and leave them for her in a cart? Why didn’t they just dump them? Or carry them off with everything else, eat the groceries, sell the hardware items? And why did they take the time to shatter her car’s windows, bash its doors, slice through its upholstery? It’s senseless. Crazy. Terrifying.

  She should leave immediately, run as fast as she can into town and catch a bus back to Atlanta. That’s the only sane, sensible thing to do. She knows this, and at the same time knows she will not go, knows she would not have gone even the other day. In this wilderness, and only here, she feels as if she isn’t dying. Dares not carry this thought further. Dares not hope. And dares not go.

  Still wary, she creeps up to the cart on tiptoe. There are no footprints here either, except now hers. She runs a hand over the vehicle’s wire frame, yanks at its rubber-covered handle, pushes it a few feet along the rutted road, pulls it a few feet back. Perhaps she can push it all the way to Elkmont, pack it with food enough to last two weeks. Might even, with those rubber tires, get it back to the cabin.

  The flat, gray sky has grown dark, threatening a storm and turning the air suddenly wintry and cool. Katherine throws her pack onto the cart, jerks it up the steep bank, and sets off pulling it along the trail at a terrified run.

  The thing looks so new, not a dent or scratch.

  And so useful. As if whoever stripped her car bought it especially for her.

  12

  Gun Love

  SHE’S DIFFERENT NOW. ALL KEYED UP AND WATCHFUL. CARRIES HER little weapon everywhere she goes. On the alert. For Danny. The thought squeezes his insides in ways he never wants to stop.

  Yeah, the gun makes it better. Makes it how he likes it, that’s what it comes down to. Like that day, him just a little boy, tracking that panther up and down those ridges, wondering was that panther tracking him.

  Just like with the panther, it’s just ’cause she’s there.

  And, man, it’s good. Him watching sometimes from his hidey-hole up in the rocks, sometimes crawling down to get in close. Her coming out into the early morning when the light’s still soft and fine, tripping down the privy path toting that gun in her left hand. Silly bitch, she’s right-handed. How’s she going to kill him quick like that? And her so pretty anymore, it puts a smile right on his face.

  He could sneak up behind her, put his arm around her, take the gun out of her left-hand fingers, gentle so she wouldn’t be afraid. Put it in her other hand and show her how to hold it right. Times like this—hell, every time he thinks about him touching her—he has to hold his breath so she won’t hear. His Dead Lady, Katherine, keeps him moving, that’s for sure. Twists him all around.

  Too bad it scared her so, him stripping her car like that. But he had to fix things so she couldn’t drive away. Never wants to go through that again, her gone and him not knowing where or why. Or whether she’s all right or ever coming back. And her new fear just keeps him sharp. One eye on her, one eye on the gun. No chance to tune out now. He’s e
ven cut back on the reefer. Doesn’t want to leave her side to toke up.

  Because that’s what it’s like now—him right there beside her all day, every day, then most of the night. He’s put himself on short sleep rations. The before-dawn hours when he knows she won’t wake, that’s all he’s allowed. He’s rolled away his flea-bag mattress, taken to the floor, among his piled-up books. The pain of this hard bed wakes him in a couple hours, three at most. It’s what he wants.

  Because she needs him all the time now. Needs him to breathe with her throughout the night to calm her down. Needs him to stay by her throughout the day to be a witness to her fear. He’s living in a frenzy now. Like over there.

  It’s him that’s changed her, too. Broke the rules and made her scared, but there’s times you need to. Got to keep your quarry in your view. In time she’ll come around, leave her little gun inside the cabin once again.

  And anyway, selling that shit off her car got him four hundred bucks. Told the junkyard dude the car’d been his ex-wife’s. (“You know how that goes.”) Son of a bitch knew he had old Danny by the short hairs. Still, you can do a lot with that much money. So much he hardly dares to think about it.

  Well, look at that. She’s put down her gun to split her kindling, balanced it on a tree root. Ought to make herself a holster for it. Wear it like Memaw wore her handbag, slung around her neck. Or just stuff it in her waistband, keep the barrel all snug and warm.