Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  They found the next tree with a blaze on it, this one nice and new looking, red instead of pink. Their moods brightened along with the flash of color. They had to be getting closer to the trail’s outlet; the well-maintained blazes seemed proof. Natalie and Doug linked hands and set out walking.

  “Look,” Doug said, after maybe an hour had gone by, as indicated by the rising sun. With his arm in the sling, and the warmth generated by walking, Doug’s voice sounded more normal. “We really need to look for something to eat.”

  “Sure,” Natalie said over her shoulder. She had taken the lead because she seemed better able to spot the blazes. “I’ll let you know when I see a food cart. Maybe we can”—she tried to chuckle, but wound up coughing—“review it.”

  “I’m serious,” Doug replied. “Even unripe blackberries or raspberries would do. We have to get some nutrition into us—and fluids.”

  The idea caused Natalie’s belly to start rumbling like an engine. She and Doug had seen some hard, white-green berries earlier on in their trip, before they had gotten lost. Bypassing them when they had a backpack full of supplies had been a no-brainer, but now the pimpled fruit stood out in Natalie’s mind like nuggets of the purest ambrosia. Her mouth began watering, a hot rush of saliva that she swallowed down thirstily.

  She started turning her face, peering into the dense brush on either side of the trail. Berries grew in wide, bushy thickets; they should be easy to find.

  “Anything besides berries you can think of?” Natalie asked. There was some kind of bark you could chew on, but she didn’t think it was nutritive. Doug knew more about this topic, though.

  The sun seemed to be creeping upward by mere millimeters in the sky. Having something else to focus on would help pass the time and also take her mind off her feet, which had started to ache. Norlanders weren’t meant for miles of trekking. Natalie’s cheek hurt too, the injury radiating outward from its original spot until her whole face had become a fiery field.

  “Not the right season for fiddleheads,” Doug called back. “And I don’t think the ferns themselves are edible. We might be able to find some wild onions, though.”

  “We might!” Natalie responded, almost joyfully. “I remember reading something about that in one of our guides.” The thought of the guides made her start trembling again, even though she felt warmer now. Once, the idea of foraging without text and photos to keep them safe would’ve been unthinkable. Now the risk seemed glancing against its alternative. How long could they keep pushing their bodies like this—roaming through hectares of untraveled land—with no sustenance, and not even any water?

  Water.

  If she let that notion take hold in her mind, she would start caterwauling like an infant.

  The trail swerved abruptly, leading them into a dry creek bed, like some cosmic joke, a finger taunting them as they lowered themselves over rocks devoid of moss, their Norlanders scuffing through dirt as waterless and silty as powder. Natalie winced to see Doug favoring his arm, although the injury must have been improving. At some point, her husband had removed the sling, cramming the wedge of cloth into one of his pockets. His bare chest and back were sunburned, ruddy with an illusion of health.

  A blaze appeared, slashed across a rock. Natalie and Doug aimed for it, then continued steadily descending.

  “Hey, look over there!” Doug pointed to a brambly patch lurking amidst a second-growth forest high above the confines of this former river.

  The tree trunks Natalie and Doug had to make their way between were meager by a stouter forest’s standards, yet still sufficient to cinch their clothes and clip their limbs.

  Natalie cried out, “I see them!” and they both broke into a run.

  • • •

  “Doug,” Natalie said, her voice trembly once they’d arrived at a mass of thorned plants. “These don’t look like blackberries. Or raspberries.”

  Doug plucked a nubbin off its stem and began rolling it around between his fingers, studying the stain left behind on his skin. “They might be thimbleberries.”

  Natalie’s stomach gave a hard, painful wrench. Her hands, as she extended them, shook with longing. “Thimbleberries,” she echoed, relieved. “I’ve heard of those.”

  Doug continued to examine the fruit in his hand.

  “Can we… Should we eat one?” Natalie asked. Her voice sounded hesitant, but her mouth was already puckering in anticipation of the sour juice, a fibrous bite to gnash between her teeth.

  Doug moved deeper into the tangle of green. “Remember the taste test,” he cautioned. “We have to do this right.”

  Natalie’s heart sank, and she quelled a spike of rage, not quite sure who it was directed toward. Doug was right, of course; he’d told her all about this. The taste test, with its ladder of steps, each posing slightly greater risk while ensuring the opportunity to see how the body reacted to a particular substance, was the only way to ensure edibility. But the test necessarily took time, a whole day’s worth of excruciating, unbearable hours.

  “We can’t stick around here long enough for a taste test,” she complained.

  If they stayed much longer, they would die in this berry patch, ten feet from the trail. She felt suddenly, coldly convinced of it.

  “We’ll take some with us,” Doug answered reasonably. Natalie realized that the anger she felt was at him. She pushed past her husband into the tangle of green, plucking one berry after another off its stem. She had just lifted a handful to her mouth—brushing the questionable ingredient against your lips was the first step of the taste test—when Doug batted her hand away and all the berries went flying.

  She turned on him, eyes blazing, her dry mouth singed.

  “I’ll do it,” Doug said softly, raising a single berry to his lips. “Really. Let me be the first in case they’re no good.”

  Hunger had catapulted Natalie into a completely irrational place. Doug wasn’t trying to deprive her; he was taking the risk upon himself.

  They picked as many berries as they could, stuffing their pockets till the fruit bled through. Then they wound their way carefully back to the trail, making sure to identify a blaze before setting out again, not trusting their memories to settle on the right direction. Their vision had grown dull, cloudy from focusing so intently on the fruit, and for the first few minutes of walking, it was difficult to see much of anything.

  Midway through the afternoon, a leaf from a tree overgrowing the trail brushed against Natalie’s cheek, and she screamed.

  Doug spun around. “I’m okay, Nat!” he called, as if she had asked after him. “Touched two of those suckers to my tongue and still standing. We’ll be having fruit salad for supper.”

  Natalie placed one palm on the trunk of the tree that had assaulted her, and stood there, panting. The pain was so excruciating that she couldn’t imagine ever moving again, adding to the agony in her face by lifting her throbbing feet. Her feet had done all that they could for her now. Taken her as far as they’d go.

  “Nat,” Doug said. Clarity returned to his voice as he walked toward her. “What happened? What’s wrong?” He looked at her face and cringed.

  “Is it bad?” Natalie asked.

  Silence.

  “Please tell me,” Natalie said. “We don’t have a mirror. I can’t see my own face. It can’t be worse than what I’m imagining.”

  “The cut looks infected,” Doug said crisply. “You’ll need antibiotics when we get back. And there might be a scar.”

  Doug had taken field medicine courses as part of wilderness preparedness, and the rational quality of his assessment did almost as much for Natalie’s state of health as medicine could have. “All right,” she said quietly. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Joining hands—Natalie shocked by how dry Doug’s skin felt, scaly, like lizard flesh—they walked on side by side.

  At least the
blazes were now reliably easy to spot. There were no more of those deteriorated ones, sparse freckles or mere slits of pink paint, nearly invisible between the rutted lines of tree bark. The marks Natalie and Doug followed were crimson and glossy, propelling them onward with confidence.

  Twilight besieged them—coming on fast after the endlessness of the day—and they had to stop for the night, unable to see even bright-red flashes on the trees.

  The falling temperature posed a new problem. It had been cool and gray all day, although movement kept them warm enough. Now as they positioned themselves on the ground for sleep, taking painstaking care to avoid Doug’s arm and Natalie’s cheek, another night spent exposed to the elements seemed impossibly long, a bridge to morning that couldn’t be traversed.

  “We can use dirt,” Doug said, his words slurred, hard to make out.

  For a moment, Natalie thought that he meant for them to eat the substance, and she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  “To cover ourselves,” Doug went on. He was shivering, his body racked with spasms. “It will keep us warm. Leaves too.”

  Understanding dawned. Reassured not only that Doug was thinking straight enough to have come up with a plan, but also by the prospect of cushiony, blanketing soil, Natalie cried out agreement. She plunged both hands into the ground and began to scoop up fistfuls of earth.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Kurt bent over a battered tin pot full of fiercely boiling berries. It looked like a cauldron of blood. Smoke from the fire drifted into his face, causing tears to stream down his flushed and heated skin.

  These berries were poisonous, but that didn’t matter; Kurt didn’t plan on using them for food. Sufficiently reduced, this mixture, plus a little resin, would be indistinguishable from paint.

  Kurt’s senses were alert to many aspects of wilderness life that passed most people unnoticed—edibles, signs of water underground, scat that determined where to build a blind—but he was still a novice in a lot of respects. A babe in the woods, he thought, with a quirk at the corners of his mouth that didn’t feel familiar.

  He wished he’d had time to learn tracking from members of his would-be utopia, skills that would allow him to be certain that the lighter of the campfire remained in the region. But Kurt had to believe that anyone coming through here would’ve been stopped, at least waylaid, by that canyon. Which meant he couldn’t have gotten too far away yet.

  Crossing the canyon seemed possible only at its narrowest chute, and not coincidentally, that was where Kurt had stumbled upon the defunct hiking trail. Such a trail probably no longer existed on maps; the flags on the trees were reduced to mere streaks, some worn almost completely away. But the surrounding forest floor was still flattened down, which would provide welcome relief from the humps and hillocks of bushwhacking over the rest of the terrain. If Kurt brought the trail back to life, freshening the painted blazes, ensuring they led in the right direction, wouldn’t a hiker making his way through these rough and unforgiving woods be liable to follow it?

  The marks would require monitoring; the lightest rain capable of washing this concoction away, while blasts of direct sunlight would fade it. But that should prove to be enjoyable work, as Kurt found most chores out here to be.

  He fashioned a paintbrush from pine needles, bound together with vine, and lashed the bundle to a stick. Too eager to wait for the substance he’d created to cool, Kurt wrapped the cuff of his shirt around the hot pot handle and set out walking, scarlet liquid sloshing in the basin.

  Kurt kept a hawk’s eye out for eroded flags, some faded to a barely detectable pink, the washed-out color of a Band-Aid. He likely missed a few of the less visible ones, but found plenty during his trespasses, pausing at a wandering succession of trees to dip his homemade brush.

  Applying the intense focus of an artist, Kurt made the blazes young again, creating the semblance of a pathway with dab after dab of brilliant, eye-catching red.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Natalie and Doug buried themselves beneath layers of dust and soil, like children playing in sand on the beach. Before fully encasing his arms, Doug performed the third stage of the taste test, clamping one of the berries between his lips and letting it stay there for half an hour, or as close to it as they were able to estimate, lacking a clock and given the fuzziness of their heads.

  Dirt sifted from Doug’s body as he lifted himself out of the shrouding blanket to stow the berry he’d spit out beside the rest of their stash, temptingly arrayed on a place mat made out of leaves.

  “We can’t afford to lose any,” Doug explained, lowering himself again. “I’ll chew one for real in the morning, and if I’m still okay by afternoon, then we can feast.”

  Natalie stared greedily at the tinge of berry juice on Doug’s lips. She had trouble keeping herself from wriggling sideways and licking off the stain.

  Warmth from the earth enfolded them, and their bodies grew heated against each other. The dry gusts of dirt became feathery duvets in Natalie’s dreams, the crackly leaves turned into crisply ironed sheets, and she sank deeply into sleep.

  It was charcoal dark when she awakened, too hungry for further unconsciousness. How many hours had passed? Any notion of time had become as loose and ungraspable as vapor. Natalie might have been sitting here for days; she might continue to remain in place forever, until the dirt solidified with her body fossilized inside.

  Her stomach felt like a wild dog, ripping and clawing at her guts. She wanted those berries, needed them. The taste test took too long—so much time was unnecessary. Look at Doug, sleeping peacefully. He was fine. And he had gotten to eat, or at least accomplish a vague semblance of the act. She deserved no less.

  Natalie raised herself on weak, shaky arms, soil shroud sifting off her as she craned her head to locate the berries in the dark. Doug had fashioned two separate piles on the leaf mat. One big, one small. Did he mean for her to eat the larger amount? Or, Natalie thought darkly, had he allocated that one for himself?

  She stretched out her hand.

  Doug’s dirt-coated fingers landed on hers.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  The word sounded entombed, as if coming from someone no longer alive.

  Natalie twisted around. Her mouth felt arid, every droplet of moisture wrung from what had once been spongy flesh, her lips a spider’s web of painful cracks. While Doug’s own mouth looked juicy, puffy with fullness and life.

  He’d meant to take the larger portion of berries. If she hadn’t woken up early, gotten to them first, that share would’ve been gone.

  “Nat?” Doug croaked, recoiling. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Natalie squinted in the blackness. The swelling around Doug’s mouth wasn’t an indication of health. He had a rash on his lips, like a grating of freshly ground red pepper.

  “The berries aren’t edible,” he said dully. “Thank God you didn’t try one.”

  Natalie felt a sob roll up from her belly. Her empty, gaping belly. Starvation was driving her mad. In that moment Doug had become a monster to her, a thief. She would’ve fought him for the berries, maybe even killed him for them.

  She gripped her temples with her fingers. “What about you?” she asked, grating the words out. “Are you sick?”

  “I don’t think so,” Doug said. “Just a tingle on my lips.”

  “That should go away,” Natalie said, head still in her hands and hoping she was right. “You were right to be cautious. Oh, Doug, I’m sorry. You were right.”

  “Pays to be a chicken.” Then he groaned. “I had to go and mention chicken.”

  Natalie laughed, the sound of it shocking in the night.

  “Fried,” Doug went on, upon hearing her laughter. “Can you imagine how amazing fried chicken would taste right now? Remember that place we gave five stars to…the one where they coated wings in Korean hot sauce?
”

  Natalie leaned closer to her husband, dirt a paste between their bodies. “Thank you for trying the berry first,” she whispered.

  Doug’s fingers wormed through the soil, and they clutched at each other’s hands.

  Natalie swallowed a dry mouthful, devoid of saliva. “Frosting,” she said. “That’s what I keep thinking about. The bakery on Charlton Street that kept asking us to write a review. I could eat a whole tubful now of that frosting we thought was so awful.”

  Doug didn’t answer.

  “And a toothbrush,” Natalie went on. “I want one of those almost as much as I want food. And not just because of the frosting.” She tried to lick her teeth, but they were so tacky that her tongue stuck to the enamel.

  Doug finally stirred himself to reply. “Remember when they introduced that weird kind with colored flecks in it?” he mumbled, falling back toward sleep, or some other lesser state. “What was up with that?”

  “It was supposed to be like Funfetti,” Natalie replied, also sleepily. “But it wasn’t as good.”

  Neither one spoke after that.

  Time passed as the planet circled ceaselessly and senselessly onward.

  • • •

  Doug looked like he belonged to another life form when he rose from his dirt coverings, skin powdery and beige, bits of leaf matter sticking to his flesh. Natalie wasn’t sure whether the sight should’ve triggered laughter or a shriek of horror. In the end, she didn’t have strength enough for either.

  The sun hung in place overhead, a lemony lozenge in the sky, failing to provide much warmth. Shivering so hard that debris flew off their bodies, Natalie and Doug struck out to find the next blaze, aware that motion would be their only source of heat.

  Doug trudged along, pointing out a succession of plants he thought might be edible. His behavior stood in direct contrast to the caution he’d exerted while overseeing the taste test, as if he were throwing off binds, giving up the need for vigilance. Natalie, duly chastened after their near miss, deterred each suggestion. But after a while she started to ignore Doug’s mutterings, needing to concentrate to spot the shocking-red streaks amidst the foliage. The going seemed rougher today: obstacles in their path that they had to avoid, or shift out of the way with great effort, multiple obstructions requiring a change of direction altogether. Thirst thickened their throats and glued their lips together, as miles accumulated beneath their aching feet.