We laid stiff and unmannered atop one another through the darkness. I woke periodically: greedily eating a slice of cold pizza above Ken’s sleeping head, flipping the channels between infomercials and syndications, going to the bathroom. Somewhere around dawn I was up for good.
Ken snuffled into the blankets. The room was at last lighted, just. The corn-yellow mutt was up on my jaw, breath like old stew. I took my two hands and held his muzzle, whispered, “Listen!” His rheumy eyes orbited. He laid his big dog body beside my friend. “Goodbye!” I mouthed, and latched myself out of the scene.
FROM KEN’S I drove focused or blind. The goings-on of the morning stuck to the corners of my eyes. There was a child at a bus stop. There were newspapers thrown from a station wagon, a yield sign fallen over, a seasonal flag featuring daffodils wrapped over on itself and flush against a pole. There was a chow dog chained up in a driveway, an old man limping across a median, a silent church. The green and white signs hung dusty above the road. The highway greeted me, a gangway, a signal.
I made it out of the town limits, and then the county limits, and then the state’s. There were reasons to turn back: the sights of a collapsing barn, an abandoned fruit stand, a closed RV dealership in the middle of nowhere stuffed to its gills with stock. I did not. It was my last week of paid-up rent, I reminded myself. I passed a backyard-sized cemetery and empty gas stations. The landscape was haunted with its own disuse.
I drove on in this long and languorous wheat-colored vacuum on its way toward gray, harvest nearly done. Leaving in late September wasn’t the soul of smarts. Up on the mountain a frost would set in before I had a chance to enjoy the wildflowers. I drove and whether I drove all night or many nights I couldn’t say.
Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time.
ANNE CARSON, from “Time Passes Time,” Red Doc>
Going in one direction for so long, the final turn felt dramatic. It wasn’t. I had a sweaty, crackling soda between my thighs. My temples hurt from squint. Only then did I realize I’d forgotten my sunglasses on Ken’s coffee table.
Hocked off the highway and onto a long farm road, I drove past an operational gas station and a closed family restaurant and finally to the outfitter. It was a freestanding cinderblock building, flanked by drainage ditches. I parked. The lot was flyaway dirt and flyaway dust. When I got my feet on the ground my muscles felt like rotted rubber bands. I shook out the last drips in the soda bottle as I walked across the lot. The liquid made a scatter pattern in the dirt. Everything smelled like a bowl of dry grain, cut through with petroleum.
Once I got through the double doors I saw it was just like anywhere else: a place with stuff in it. By the entrance there was a bulletin board. Shooting ranges twelve miles away (indoor and outdoor, machine gun demos once every season), survivalist meeting groups (regional, all welcome), a litter of kittens in need of loving homes (calico). There was a handwritten sign for lawn services and handyman repairs, its fringed bottom curling with a repeated number.
Beyond the bulletin board there were a few racks of olive clothes and orange clothes and black clothes. A shelf or two of boxes, crates full of varieties of one thing or another: compasses, carabiners, rope. The halftones of lures, and spools of line in half-lit fluorescents. A whole display of items useful in emergencies: water purification tablets, reflective blankets, an impressively small box of nutrient powders, flares, a waterproof map, a small bottle, a tent patching kit, crush-to-heat pouches. As if the right patent was all that was standing between a body and a painless, endless life.
There were boxes of waterproof boots lining the back of the store: more soldier, more savvy, than any part of my wardrobe had ever been. I touched a rough sleeve of a nearby jacket and felt a specific delight. I dined on the sights of these items. They pushed my brain full with the new anonymous, no room left for—
“Help you, miss?” In the dim light there was a skinny lady stood up behind the glass case of a firearms counter. She was pricing something, orange stickers clinging like burrs to her shirtsleeves. I told her I was supposed to be meeting someone, told her the man’s name. “Do you know him?”
“Course,” she said, then dialed and handed over the phone. Holding it reminded me of the one I’d left lodged between Ken’s couch cushions.
When the man answered he said he needed an hour to get up there. “Be seeing you.”
I held the phone over the gun counter. She retrieved it with her spindle arm.
“You the one staying up at EJ’s cabin?”
“I am.”
“How are you fixed for supplies?” she asked. Her salesperson smile was shallow and picketed.
I told her I was just fine, felt miffed she presumed otherwise.
“You have a gun?”
“I’m an artist,” I told her, sticking to my story. “Why would I need a gun?”
She said that you didn’t know what you’d find up there, that a gal alone should supply herself with a bit of security.
I told her I had two knives, holding aloft my pretty hummingbird knife. She took it and extended the blade, looked down its axis and shuddered her head, tapped the glass counter quick. The reflected light licked her pitted cheeks.
Next I showed her my new carbon steel blade. On the back you could spark a fire with flint. “See?” I showed her how I wore the hummingbird knife on one side, on a climbing-grade carabiner, and the carbon knife in a leather-nylon holster on the other, like a fresh little professional.
She snorted. “It’s up to you, of course.” I didn’t need the gun. But I wanted it.
The glass display whined as she unlocked it, slid it open, and handed over a gun. “This one’s good for beginners,” she said. “Ruger SR9. No safety, so you’ve got to shoot through the magazine before you put it down. Don’t have to worry about how many bullets you’ve got left.” She arrayed four boxes of ammunition. “Just in case you have to hunt, or practice a lot. Though this one’s not for hunting.” It was meant for concealed carry; one magazine held ten bullets, the other seventeen. “Keep the bigger one with you, and the smaller one in the piece.”
I took the gun up in my hand. It was part plastic, like a toy. She showed me how to load the magazine, how to force my thumb down on the rounds, harder and harder as it filled. I did so with trouble. She clicked her lips and told me to keep pushing.
This woman, or the gun, gave me a risky feeling. I hadn’t felt this way since high school, maybe, turning down the wrong hallway at lunch, coming upon the feral kids whose parents had never been around. But because of her association with the cabin owner, and her evident expertise, I presumed her to be well-meaning. My presumptions were crisp and quick.
“You want to see how it handles?”
We went out the back through the storeroom, stood in the midday sun at the bottom of a grass-seed hill. There were pines and poplars cut back into a crescent, a quick chill wind slicing through the heat, snapped stalks in a far field. The target was a drawing of a hefty man in blue, gun drawn, an old-style mob bagman, clipped to a cardboard A-frame, weighted. The clouds above us looked matted.
“Never point a loaded gun at anything you wouldn’t shoot,” the skinny lady recited. Like she was doing an impression of herself or maybe someone she’d seen on TV.
I missed and missed and the sound of that was like a gigantic book falling. A wall falling. Excuse me: a gravestone falling on hard marble. “The kickback is almost nothing,” I said, and she said, half-lidded: “Yep.”
Once I stopped staring at her and got my eye on the target I hit once, missed once, hit twice: jawbone, armpit, crotch. Slowly the gun began to feel as small as it was. I shot a few more times, deciding. I began to feel in myself a new warlike way. This was a fiction but I still shot and shot. At last the skinny lady interrupted the rhythm.
“Fine,” she said. “Guess that’s enough,” as if she’d remembered who I was to her, which was no one. In
side she sold me the gun for three of my last four hundred-dollar bills. It felt dangerous to have so little cash. But there was nothing to buy on the mountain. I asked her if I needed permit paperwork. She laughed, said not to worry, turned, didn’t turn back.
Armed, I went out to the truck and unfolded my inventory list from the glove box. I worked the car, elbowing boxes and prying plastic tubs, till I was sure everything was there. It was a motley mix, based on manuals, prepper forums, and other online hearsays. I guess I could’ve spent more time figuring out what would be of use and what wouldn’t. But that didn’t interest me at the time.
I added the gun and rounds to the list and slid it unloaded into my backpack, whose seams I had double-basted—every one, in a shit way, but done—with a curved needle long as my pinky. Every button on every shirt had been triple-sewn. I lay down on the pickup bench with my knees up, hands over my heart, looking at the low clouds. I ignored for no good reason the seatbelt stay nudging my ribs sharply. I could have moved but fell asleep instead.
A minute or an hour later I heard a knock on the window. This was the beginning of untracked time. Upside down a man in a baseball cap was at my driver side window and grinning: a white broom moustache, ear hair. I got a flighty thrum-thrum in my chest but opened the door anyway.
The man asked was I Denny who he spoke with on the phone. I said yes I’m Denny who he spoke with on the phone. “You shift on over,” Earl John said. “It’ll be easier.” I opened the driver side door. He was wearing overalls, the quilted kind, sweaty looking in this early autumn heat. “I’ll be happy to keep your truck down at my place,” he said as we drove away from the outfitter. “Long as you don’t need it.” I was now passenger to this stranger, and also passenger to my own dumb desires.
I watched him drive with confidence. He looked like I don’t know what kind of man. He turned down a smaller road and up a wider road. Then, troubling gravity, we switchbacked up the steep side of a mountain.
The tree cover got taller and taller, in every green. I reminded myself that the leaves would turn soon. As soon as I did I saw a flame orange maple. I reminded myself that nothing was an omen.
We passed a pocketful of deer in the darkening branches. When I exclaimed Earl John laughed. “You see many deer where you are?” he asked.
I did not here recall the “cuts of ruined game” on the street the day I had learned of the cancer’s return. I was not yet in the position of making my story. Rather I was riding headlong into this new life. “Yes,” I answered. “But there’s no room for them anymore.”
“You know they did that controlled shooting down south of here. A deer can be really fatal, you know. For whatever reason, you’ll see, there aren’t too many deer hanging out right around the cabin. Or you won’t see. The deer at least.”
I didn’t laugh, but asked: “You ever actually licked a salt lick?” It was something I had read about in one of the books, something you could use to attract deer. I imagined it was simply a block of salt—it was not; I imagined it a mineral tongue amusement. Beside the road, ferns batted like lashes.
Earl John murmured in the negative and we drove on. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Or, I thought that anything I said could betray me, and what if he was the one, now that I was almost there, to turn me back.
I wondered briefly was Earl John another figment. No—he was a human, apart from me. I felt a draining. And then realized I must be psychically exhausted, scrambled—no longer able to digest that which was there plainly.
“What?” Earl John said. I told him I hadn’t said a thing.
In the late sun the wilderness was gilded. I let it build a little joy in my chest. I rubbed the holster of my carbon steel blade and then the beak of my hummingbird knife, and shuffled my legs back and forth in the passenger well, humming a tune I only sort of remembered, or thought of doing so.
At last we came to a large field and at the end of it was something I’d been told was Earl John’s lake plane, there on its outsize water skis, there bereft on a strip of dirt cutting through the thick yellow grass. Earl John pulled the truck up beside it. I was alone with a real stranger in a place unknown to me. Denise, I thought to myself formally—Denise, this is almost nearly what you’ve wanted.
“Here,” Earl John said. We began in tandem to unload the truck. I was holding a plastic tub at my groin, shoulder blades tensed, when he looked at me sternly but not without politesse. “Let me do this packing,” he said. “It’s all about the balance.” And so I handed off my carefully accrued wares to this stranger who was about to take us up, into pure air. Without a thing to do I fiddled my boot along the top of the grasses. A fly or other insect presented its curiosity by landing midway up my laces. “I don’t know you,” I said to it softly. In response it buzzed off.
In the cab Earl John fastened me to my seat. He checked his instruments as I rubbed my chest where the seat belt strapped it. I was given a pair of battered headphones. I put them on and soon we went up. The plane shook. We flew low. Here was now down there. Heart was now stomach.
And the down there, what a there it was. I didn’t feel free but I did note then that the world seemed to be presenting itself. The spines and poufs and slanted facets of trees and rocks and water. Then homes with extensive decks. Then chipped-roof houses. Then no houses. Then nothing but the whitening afternoon sky, and the green and green and brown and brown, and the blue black of some water nipping at shores. The plane belly flopped in air pockets. My own belly went with it. My mouth stayed closed.
Once at the local strawberry festival I had gone up in a prop plane with Pop, my first flight. The prop plane had not gone very far up nor been there for very long. Woozily, we’d disembarked and from a stall procured strawberry shortcake made with pound cake from the Giant, taken large anchoring bites. We stood by a Mary Kay–pink Cadillac while I told Ma, who had declined the ride, about my first trip up. “Eat your dessert,” she’d directed, looking somewhere else.
Years later, we’d all flown commercial to California to spend time with Ma’s surviving family: cousins who affected breeziness, and who wore natural fabrics in generous cuts and had diets based on their moods and skin. In meeting them I thought how I didn’t need more family; I hadn’t been raised to have such specific preferences. The flights themselves, out and back, had not been notable.
Earl John started the decline. The cabin filled with fuzzy noise. Or it had been there from the start. Through the windshield I saw on the horizon a kind of lookout tower. Sight soon blurred. One sense was drowning out another, a thought drowning out a feeling, a feeling drowning out a thought, the water coming up and flapping and spraying beneath us as we alighted on a lake between two mountainsides. My eyes gulped. I felt like an air-popped kernel coming finally to rest. I pulled the two halves of my ponytail tight.
EARL JOHN LASHED the plane like a boat to a small dock. It rocked there in the lake water; I was in a new life where a plane was equal to a boat. In this new life what dwelt in sky could do well enough in water. Earl John was next to me, pilot headphones around his neck. “Take whatever you want this trip. We’ll have to come back anyways.”
I strapped on my backpack, snatched an overstuffed tub, and followed him over the land, which was open and precious. “Everything’ll be safe sitting there?” I asked.
“There’s no one around here, much,” he said. “Unless they’re coming to you.” He told me there was a state park twelve or fifteen miles up the road. But another thirty to the nearest trail, so—don’t worry, he said—I wouldn’t be bothered. I wondered if I was worried about being bothered; I didn’t care much what would happen to me.
We worked through a small sash of woods. Even on the cleared path, branches snapped at my sides. The top of the tub was troublemaking, working its way from the fasteners and pinching my palms. These woods weren’t that deep, but rather just deep enough to have seemed deeper: thirty feet through, and then out. We cut across a dry blonde meadow. At my knees and
ankles I could feel bugs or errant hairs. Either way I felt buzzed. Perhaps it was the altitude.
My hip flexors see’d and sawed. I gritted my teeth. I could be whip, cart, and mule. I tried to look happy doing it. The meadow grasses and stalks waved, then gave up to a small stand of deciduous trees. The man made a belching, trying noise. A moment after, we were in a clearing, at the cabin. I pressed my feet up its four broad, bowed steps and launched my burden across the porch.
“Easy girl,” Earl John said. “You’re home now.”
“Great,” I said, straightening. My cheeks felt stretched thin. I realized then I was smiling and had been for quite some time.
The cabin was a simple house, with a wood shingled roof. It had a front porch that was a good place to imagine lounging. I wondered whether lounging was allowed in the wilderness. I wondered if I could be a person who lounged.
In the clearing yard, there was packed dirt with patches of grass. There was a fire circle made with an old metal ring. Beside the cabin was a large and orderly pile of wood. A bug flew up my nostril and I scratched my nose until it became embarrassing. Another bug climbed against my hairline. Gray-gold light fell over the whole mountain; my ears popped. A bug climbed in there too. Then I was shaking my head up and down, ear to earth. Earl John didn’t notice.
“Me and my wife used to come here for vacations when we were first married,” he said as he unlocked the bolt; with his shoulder he butted open the sticky door. People are always offering me their lives; it’s always been this way. Despite my many faults I have an open face. I am naturally good at “placid,” if not placidity, “patient,” if not patience. “The kid though didn’t seem interested.”
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