In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

It’s not like the Dead Lady, Katherine, turns him on or anything—she’s the same age as his mother. It’s just, he’s gotten used to watching her. It’s just, the day before she drove to Elkmont she squatted on the ground, clawed through the dead leaves and pulled up everything green. Violets and creasy, curled-up ferns, all the little spring things. Stuffed them in her mouth with both hands like a goddamn vole. How hungry do you have to be to gobble that shit down like that? It sent a shiver through him that he’d seen her do it. He liked it, seeing her like that, is all.

  Sometimes over there, when he’d been stoned and watching some gook days on end, when he’d been waiting to do whatever he’d been sent to do, he’d get to feeling the gook knew the score. Like it was all some dance, them moving to the same rhythm like lovers in some black-light jungle disco-hole. When he threw a stone into a patch of creasy that day and she turned toward the sound like he intended—went for the creasy without wondering, much less knowing, why—in that moment that’s the way it felt with her. Just like with the gook.

  Get out, Danny. Get out while you still can.

  Outside, he rubs his tracks out with a pine bough, starts up the mountain. Keeps turning around, looking back, until her cabin disappears inside the falling snow.

  BY THE TIME HE gets to Gatsby’s house, snow’s mounded on his fruit trees, on what’s left of his driveway, on his slate-floor porch with its marble columns. Snow has sifted into his grand entrance hall and through the broken window in the library where he sleeps.

  Dog meets him at the front door, paces, maybe wants something to eat. Danny digs in his pockets, pulls out a Slim Jim.

  “Here, you sad-eyed bitch. This was supposed to be my supper.”

  She eats it noisily, barks once when she’s through.

  “Nah, you’re not getting any more. That’s it. It for me, too.”

  He peels off his wet jacket, canvas pants, flops back onto the mildewed mattress. Dog curls up on the floor. Danny’s right wrist still tingles where the Dead Lady’s, Katherine’s, hair fell over it. He rubs it with his palm.

  “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

  “Try to set the night on fiiiii-errr.”

  The hippie girl’s blond hair splayed out over the California rocks, daisies crushed beside her ear. He hadn’t even come. Wound his hands all through her hair, so long and silky like Janelle’s, thinking that would make it happen. Because it was supposed to happen. Because it was his first time. Because he had waited, his whole time over there. Then there comes the part he can’t remember. Only afterwards, crouched, determining which way to run, did he see the other couples there among the rocks and trees, sliding over each other’s bodies in what passed for love. He ran then, so fast no one looked up.

  On the Greyhound, he stashed his rucksack in the seat beside him, squeezed his hands around his elbows so his trembling wouldn’t show. At some jerkwater town in Arizona, a Mexican woman tried to get on without paying. He pressed his ticket into her damp palm and walked away. Took him three months in a rusted-out trailer, howling into the hot desert sky, before he got back on a bus again and headed east and did the only thing he could do. Gatsby’s house, just like the cabin, stood right where Jimbo’d told him.

  He pulls a ratty blanket over him up to his neck and his hands remember the soft feel of the Dead Lady’s clothing.

  In three years going with Janelle they’d never done it. “The Golden Couple,” every high school has one. People he went to school with actually called them that. Danny and Janelle. Janelle and Danny. They weren’t supposed to do it, were expected not to. Good kings and queens live up to expectations, so they didn’t. Time for that when they got married. It’s what kept him sane out in the fucking jungle, thinking how he would come back a hero, spread out his medals for her on a velvet cloth. That, and the reefer that hollowed out a room inside his head where he could shut the door.

  And his all-day fantasies that kept him safe from dying.

  Because he’d never heard of any man in all recorded history to fetch up dead on any battlefield, his cold hand squeezed around his dick.

  Danny’s hands slide down his belly, along its centerline of soft, pale hair. Over there, the point of his every daylong dream was just to take it slow and keep it going, that’s how it saved you. It had just one rule: You have to start from where you are. And whether it’s some dung-heap jungle village or it’s Gatsby’s burnt-out mansion, that same rule still applies.

  Over there, his every long dream started with him crawling through the jungle back to camp. Then the usual Army bullshit, discharge papers, and at last the Huey rising out of its own dust like some huge, glorious bird that had swallowed Danny whole, and the killing and the dying turned to silent smoke puffs on the ground. In the beginning, lots of times he shot off there. He couldn’t help it.

  Later, in Saigon, he’d meet a woman, strike up a conversation, buy her steamed fish in a French restaurant. Buy her coconut ice cream that she’d let melt on her tongue, slide out the corners of her mouth till he was forced to look away to where her heart pulsed in her wrist—you got to get the details down, that’s how you stretch a long dream out and make it last. He left her on a bench beside a busy street to catch his plane. And him still safe, still saving himself for Janelle.

  In his long dreams over there, it was always night when the plane they put him on crossed the Pacific, and he slept deep, drowning, stateside sleep there in his seat, lulled by the engine’s hum. The high school girl sleeping beside him sighed when his arm brushed against her coat. When the plane landed in San Francisco, he got off and kissed the tarmac. Sometimes that’s when he came.

  He used to spend sweet long-dream time in San Francisco, a mistake. Should just have let himself catch the Greyhound right away, then maybe the thing in the park would not have happened. Should just have let himself drink in all America outside his window—desert, grasslands, delta floodplain. He always slowed the bus down when it got to where the ground grew trees and where blue mountains, his mountains, rose up like mist on the horizon. Sometimes a song from Memaw’s church came to him then. “With arms wide open, He’ll pardon you. It is no secret what God can do.” He believed it, every word. When finally he let the bus pull into his hometown, sometimes real tears rolled down his face there in the jungle. Other times, he shot his wad from no more than the cosmic thrill of seeing everything that he remembered.

  When you start a long dream from Danny’s burnt-out mansion, there’s not nearly so far to go. But if you walk it takes the same amount of time. You notice everything. A farmhouse woman in her side yard hanging clothes out on a rope line tied between two sweet gum trees. A tractor rusting in the damp shade of a willow grove. A fast-running creek where water sings inside a hollow stone. Nights, you curl up on the warm ground. Once or twice you stop to eat the bread and cheese you carry in your pockets or an apple off somebody’s tree. One day you fall in step with a redheaded girl Janelle’s same age, but all you give her when you part ways at a crossroads is a closed-mouth kiss.

  It all takes you to the same place, no matter where you start. Walking from Gatsby’s house, you cross a railroad bridge and you’re on the outskirts of the town. When you used to start from Nam and took the bus in San Francisco, it let you off just one block farther on.

  It’s always early morning when you get there, the sun’s first rays warming the downtown’s squat brick buildings. Everything smells fresh. You’re the only person on the street, no cars. And it’s so unearthly still you can’t hear your own footsteps. The granite office building across from the courthouse has its upstairs windows labeled “Bobby Brownlee, DDS” and “Matthew Hingle, Accounting.” Downstairs, on the tall window with the green shutters, the one that looks out on the square, gold script letters edged in black read “Daniel J. MacLean, Attorney at Law.” Inside, there’s a Chinese rug, brass lamps. Good furniture, like at Jimbo’s dad’s office that time he sewed up your cut foot. All of which is very
weird, because you joined the Army after freshman year and never once got near a law school. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in a long dream except holding on.

  So you walk on by, because you’re getting close now. Almost to where the houses start. Mimms, Beasleys, Rowans, brick houses set on good granite foundations, shaded by magnificent old oaks. You pass through a strip of woods you don’t remember. Thick woods, on both sides of the road. Then you round a curve and there it is. A big house, two stories, white and frilly as a wedding cake, with a wide porch and a cupola like Janelle always dreamed of. It sits back from the street behind a picket fence. And all the grass inside the fence is green and purple flowers edge the walk and nothing there can ever harm you.

  You turn in at the little gate and you can hardly breathe for wanting all of it right then. But you got to slow it down, hold on—this is the best, the most important part. Up the walk, up the steps, across the porch boards painted shiny gray. You’re trembling so hard your rucksack bangs against your legs and you can barely ring the bell.

  Don’t move. Whatever you do now, don’t move.

  Used to, in your daylong dreams, footsteps echoed down the hall. Then the door opened, and you caught a flash of Janelle’s gold-blond hair inside the hall’s cool darkness. You reached out to take her hand, so you could lead her down the hall and up the stairs. To the bedroom, your bedroom. Your own brass bed you slept in with your mama when you were a little boy and your daddy was gone off to fight the war.

  You never made it. Convulsed there on the porch before you even touched her. Every goddamn time. Bit your lower lip to keep from crying out. And then the sun was going down and you’d got nothing left to give her, but you’d kept yourself alive another day. Because there never once was any death inside a daylong dream.

  Till he got Janelle’s fucking Dear John about how she’d got engaged to someone else. After that, nothing worked right anymore. No one opened the door and Danny just stood there on the porch, his dick in his hand and nothing happening, real tears running down his stupid face.

  He kept on trying for a couple months, then gave it up. Because there wasn’t any point to it, it was like something inside him had quit paying attention. He got scared then, decided maybe he was nothing but a ghost and didn’t know it. That maybe that’s the way you tell, your dick gets hard and nothing happens. That’s when he knew for sure his number had come up and he was going to die. The men knew, too, wouldn’t go near him, left him to move day and night inside his own cleared space. All except Jimbo.

  Then one bright blue-sky October morning Jimbo got blown up not ten feet from him. A smear of pink brain froth on Danny’s forehead pointed him out sure as any finger: That hit was meant for you.

  He screamed for seven days, then tried to shoot his trigger finger off. The Army sent him to a hospital. After that they sent him home.

  But the long dream didn’t work there either. Not in the desert, not in the Old Man’s cabin, not here on his moldy bed in Gatsby’s house.

  It doesn’t work again tonight, but the end is different—the door opens. He doesn’t see Janelle’s blond hair, but the hallway isn’t empty. There’s something in there, he can hear it breathing close enough to touch.

  Maybe just another ghost like him.

  Or maybe not—his right wrist tingles underneath the covers. From where whatever-it-was brushed against him in the dark.

  16

  The Ones Who Went West

  SHE IS ALIVE IN A WARM ROOM, AMID SOUNDS OF DRIPPING WATER. The kitchen sparkles with the bright, wet light of sun on melting snow.

  She does not remember how she got here, only the heaviness of the wood she carried through the blizzard’s white-walled rooms. And Michael commanding her to get up, go home. And so she must have, and with strength enough to build a fire inside the stove and sense enough to lie beside it. There, though, her resourcefulness seems to have deserted her. She is still in her wet nightgown and her boots, and huddled under her damp coat. But it was enough, what she did. She can save her own life, take care of herself. Alone.

  Her starving eyes devour everything in sight. The twined basrelief tulips on the stove’s firebox door, the dull sheen of pewter plates against whitewashed walls, the floor’s earth-colored slate. She is alive in the midst of beauty. How could anything be wrong?

  Yet something is. She pokes with stiff, exploratory fingers at her throat, chest, stomach. Nothing. It’s as if she has gone numb. A pure, clean terror seizes her. Has she had a stroke? Have parts of her—organs, appendages—frozen from exposure? Did she die out in the snow? She moves her right arm, right leg, turns her face to the right, repeats it all on her left side. Everything still moves. And she can feel the damp sleeping-bag canvas balled up under her, its zipper tongue gouging her thigh—not a characteristic one associates with afterlives. Yet something is absent. Something that used to fill every empty space inside her—spaces between joints, in and around organs, seemingly even inside cells—as recently as yesterday.

  Pain.

  For this one minute all her pain has ceased.

  Don’t move, don’t breathe. And whatever else you do, don’t weep. It’s just one moment out of your life’s sum total of moments, one vagary in the countless vagaries of your condition. You are not healed, don’t think it; name one thing you wished for from this illness that came true.

  She lies motionless until her muscles cramp, yet her familiar hurts do not return. Not when she stands, nor when she walks across the kitchen floor so solid beneath her feet. All the air smells moist and new. She bends down to pull on her boots and when she raises up she is not dizzy; when she hikes out and uses the privy, no hot pain lashes through her; when she stoops to pick up firewood, nothing clenches in her lower back.

  Walking as if on eggshells to preserve this wondrous state, she lays a new fire in the stove, takes giddy pleasure in small, silly things. The shape of the iron kettle, the growing weight of a tin cup filling with water. The sound of her warm blood coursing through her veins when she sits still and listens.

  In the warming oven is a mix of beans and rice left from before she went to town. It’s hard and dry, and she eats every bite while she heats water for a bath. Afterwards, clean, rubbed dry with a rough towel, every inch of her tingles as if she’s a snake that has just shed its skin.

  And she is still hungry.

  THE SNOW MELTS IN one day and it is truly spring. Seeds sprout in the garden like an edging of green lace, the soil smells rich, and earthworms wriggle everywhere.

  She has gone six days without dizziness or pain, alive with an energy and attentiveness akin to some strange state of grace. She seems to have lost need of irony, of looking askance, standing aside. Spends time instead absorbed in the small things of the moment, contained by them. Her days have narrowed to activities she counts on the fingers of one hand, yet within each is infinite variety. She rises when it is still dark, stokes the stove, makes tea, then sits at her front window watching for the first hint of new day, awaits it leaning forward like an acolyte at prayers. Yesterday she held a small branch in her hand, studied it for what must have been an hour.

  In her notebook she still keeps a written record of her days, but for their mystery and beauty, not because she needs its prompting to remember:

  Wednesday: Thinned carrots,

  found two quills from a blue jay.

  At night, gentle rain.

  Entries spare as haikus. Nights, she sleeps inside the deer’s soft, even breathing, but she never writes of this and she does not know why.

  She loves the clear, fresh mornings in the garden, where there’s always a surprise. Lately, among the weeds, a patch of spindly, dry tendrils with a nostalgic fragrance has turned out to be mint. She moved some to a cracked pot she found back of the woodshed and placed it in her south-facing window, so she can drink mint tea. This afternoon she pounded all the long nails from the hardware store into the heart-pine wall that separates the front room from the kitchen. They
form the outline of a square, and now she has a loom.

  So quickly, so hungrily, she is coming to believe in her new situation, to accept it. Not as health, not yet, but as a feeling of well-being, something that someday she might take for granted, build upon. A thing even now far beyond what health once had seemed.

  And she wonders: What did happen to the ones who went west in the covered wagons, signed on to the ships that sailed around the Horn, or found some other change of scene and were not heard from?

  This?

  17

  Awakening

  FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE SHE GOT HERE, SHE FEELS SAFE, EVEN IN the afternoons, a phenomenon she can’t adequately explain. Nonetheless, she hasn’t lost the sense that something watches her, her one symptom that didn’t disappear with all the rest. That’s why, though she can’t bear to load it, she still keeps the gun with her. The gun is hideous; it intrudes on all her thoughts. She stuffs it behind a rock when she works in the garden, so the tender plants won’t sense its threat. Today, to wean herself away from it, she leaves it on her porch. If whoever stripped her car has not shown up by now, he likely isn’t going to. And if she were being watched by something out to do her harm, by now it surely would have harmed her, or have tried.

  Perhaps her fear has lessened due to what she tentatively considers her recovery. Or perhaps because her days are full. Lately, after twice seeing a brown rabbit scamper back into the woods, much of her garden time has gone into repairing the old fence. All its cedar posts are solid in the ground, but much of its barbed wire has rusted through. The pliers she bought are barely adequate to cut and twist new wire from the coil out by the woodpile. And even as she mends one break she spies two new ones someplace else. The work causes her wrists and fingers to both ache and grow strong.

  She has already thinned the earliest seedlings. The tiny plants, all of them, tasted of her joy at being alive and eating food she’s grown. She gardens with her sleeves rolled up to feel the soft breeze on her arms. Writes in her notebook: