by Leah Hampton
“He said all the downward trails lead to the parking lot,” she said, a new firmness in her voice. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Frank said, “so I guess this other way is the right path.” He nodded upwards, to the right and the dark figures gathered there.
“Well,” said Carolyn. “I’m leaving.”
Frank opened his mouth, but the back of his throat held tight. He tried to make words but could only form his lips into a breathy “wh” sound.
“I’m done.” Carolyn started down the sloping fork. “You stay if you want.”
“But—” Frank managed, then stopped. He followed her, rustling up the muck of old leaves with his massive sneakers.
“It’s fine, Frankie, if you want to stay.”
“I thought you were having a good time.”
“I’m not. I’m not at all. I don’t like this, Frank. I don’t like any of it anymore.”
“Well, but…” He looked up to the high path again. “This was all your idea. What happened?”
“Him,” said Carolyn. She wiped her eyes and jutted her chin behind Frank, toward the outline of the naturalist. Frank looked back. While the group continued walking, the naturalist had paused. He was crouching with his flashlight to peer at a lady slipper bud. His fingers were almost, almost touching it.
“I don’t like where he’s taking us, how he talks,” she said. “And my knee hurts. I’m going back to the car.”
Frank tilted his head, and in his best big-brother-by-four-minutes voice, he asked, “What did that man say to you?”
“He told me I was wearing the wrong shoes, and I should be careful. And he said something about the fragility of the ecosystem, or whatever.”
“The wrong shoes,” Frank repeated, smirking, and took a step back from her.
“Yeah. But it’s the way he said it, and his whole…” Carolyn swooped her hand wide. “Just his whole thing with us. It’s not right.” She drew a breath to speak again, dismissed her thought. “He’s not even from here.”
“None of these people are. You and me are the only locals, I bet.”
“Anyway. I’m going back to the car.”
“But you said you wanted to learn about this stuff,” he said. “You’re always talking about how we don’t get outside enough, how we don’t appreciate home.”
Carolyn squinted and turned her body away from him. Frank reached out to touch her and grazed her arm with his hand. Her bicep felt clammy. Carolyn stared at her sandals. Her white toes wriggled like maggots in the gloom.
“Yeah,” she said, “but I didn’t think we were going to just, like, wander in it. I didn’t know he was going to make us feel bad.”
Frank cleared his throat. “Well, sissy,” he replied, leaning into her, “this is nature. He’s just showing us that. He’s just telling us the truth about how we’re not nice to it.”
Carolyn’s head snapped up. She peered at Frank, his round face, his beard. She glared at his hat, the sunglasses perched on its brim.
“I’m nicer to it than he is,” she said.
A long silence followed.
“What does that mean?” asked Frank.
“I don’t act like it belongs to me.” She spun around and began to plod down the steep fork. “I’m going back. You stay if you want.”
Frank stood in the wide patch of trail and watched her go. It would take her a while to find the car. There was time to visit another creek bed, maybe see a tree frog. He started upwards on the path. The group, now diminished to an even smaller band, was continuing deeper into the woods. Surely they would be circling back to the station and its buildings soon.
The naturalist stayed fully behind, at the back of the group for the first time, adopting a shepherd’s position. The salamander boy and the girl with the braids were no longer visible. He kept his back to Frank, but there was a beckoning in the way his shoulders moved.
“On we go now,” he called softly to the figures in front of him. His arms outstretched into the gloom, fingers splayed. “On we go.”
Frank watched as the tiny band disappeared under a shadow of canopy. Late spring clouds were forming around the moon. It would be cold soon. Black. He wondered about the missing people and which trails they had taken in the night.
The naturalist stood surveying his remaining charges as they proceeded into the woods. He lowered his hands. Slowly, he turned around and caught sight of Frank. He paused as Frank moved toward him, up the path, away from Carolyn descending. The dark was getting deeper, and Frank could barely make out the naturalist’s face. It seemed, for a moment at least, before he turned again and disappeared with the group, that he smiled.
Yes, that was it. The naturalist smiled, but not in a way Frank could be sure of.
DEVIL
“Being of these hills I cannot pass beyond.”
—JAMES STILL
Tech Sergeant Boggs was beaten. He cracked his knuckles and stared out the windshield at the back streets of Cumberland. Sun seared through the glass onto his chest, and he rested an elbow on the open driver’s window. He rubbed his right palm across the high sides of his fresh haircut—fast, back and forth, hot friction. The old man had stumbled upon him, and now Boggs had missed his chance to play things out his own way.
“Well.” The low density of his father’s baritone cut the air. “You planning to roast in there?”
When he arrived, Boggs had diverted the rental car into the parking lot of his old elementary school. He lingered and sweated for fifteen minutes. Before the old man showed up, Boggs had planned to hike up the last few blocks toward home. Slip onto their porch, ring the bell. Nod hello like it was nothing, keep the talk smooth and easy, a short visit to call things even in his mind. One night with the family, let them know what was happening, then up, out of these snaking hollers, and press on, mute and numb, until he landed in Bagram.
He stared up, above town, to the close stack of Kentucky mountains. The old man waited, a sliver of flesh at the lip of Boggs’s side mirror. The hills loomed, deep emerald, over the six steep streets behind the elementary school. They skewed toward him, a rush of vegetation tilting from the peaks like a dark wave. The squat brick school to his right obstructed his view of town, with its boarded shop windows and broken bottles tossed along the edges of faded pavement. When he’d passed through Harlan twenty miles back, the rest of the world disappeared, and now, in his childhood hamlet, anything from outside, anything other, receded into implausibility. Boggs couldn’t navigate past his view of the landscape leaning toward him, all of it one degree from toppling.
He pushed the butt of his palm against his brow, then reached into the backseat to heave over his dark-blue duffel bag. He popped the door latch and put a foot out onto fractured blacktop. He sighed and leaned out of the car, craning his head back toward his daddy.
Six four, sharp white button-down even on a Saturday, and mean as fuck. In his left hand, the old man gripped a plastic half-gallon jug purchased from the convenience store on the main road. He gripped it full, like a brick, not by the handle. The other hand swung loose, its meaty fingers tensing and releasing. The corded muscles in his wrist writhed. His glasses were cloudier than before, his pants too short. There was less of him than there had been the last time they’d seen each other. Still mean as fuck, though.
“Come on,” his daddy said, flicking the jug. “Get on up to the house.”
Boggs had told Cedarman he didn’t want to come, didn’t want to visit or even send a letter. But some hot piece of metal inside him, some charred grit, wouldn’t rest until he’d done it. Cedarman, also a tech sergeant like him, told him everybody’s got some shit they have to eat and wished him luck. Boggs’s back still felt cool where Cedarman had touched him on the shoulder. He hoped he would be there when he shipped out.
Boggs swung the car door wide and hauled himself out. He stood, just shy of six two, and held his duffel low at his side. He looked for as long as he dared at the school, studied the WPA cornerstone p
laque and the heavy wood door. Then he squinted one eye back at his daddy. The late afternoon sun slapped his scalp.
“How long you been standing there eyeing me?”
“Long enough for my buttermilk to get warm.” His daddy chucked his chin and turned, started the walk up home. He expected to be followed.
Boggs’s mother was on the porch fanning herself and listening to the radio. He could see her from the end of the road, her face glowing haintlike at the far corner of the block. He slowed his pace and took in the street of his boyhood. Crackerbox shacks and tidy, square bungalows alternated down a narrow lane that seemed to drop off into an infinity of mountains, always green mountains. Everybody’s house had a fence, some rattier than others. Almost everybody had a dog. From a few porches, flags hung limp in the heat.
As he advanced, his mother rose from a plastic deck chair and put down her funeral fan. She pinched the seams of her brown polyester dress and billowed it out, pulling the sticking fabric off herself. She watched the two men approach and bent her knees in recognition. Her body reminded Boggs of the hills around here in winter. Her arms flapped, and she grabbed her short, half-gray curls with one hand.
“Law, it’s you.”
She stepped out the screened porch door and into the tiny front yard. As Boggs closed the distance, she eyed him with a prim smile and reached out over the fence, clapping his biceps in a tight squeeze.
“You come up to see your momma.” She stressed the last word with a girlish pitch.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Boggs. He kept his eyes pointed at the ground and kicked the cracked concrete steps leading off the street into the yard.
His mother opened the wire fence gate for the two men and stepped back to let them pass. She hitched her hands onto her hips and watched her son.
“Well now,” she said.
Boggs clomped onto the porch and followed his daddy into the house.
“Curtis,” he heard his mother say, “why didn’t you tell me you were going to get him?”
“Didn’t know I was,” said his father.
Boggs walked through the front door and a gust of A/C sucked the heat off him. The house smelled the same as always—a thick blend of pepper, mildew, and warm corn. The orderly living room was paneled in dark wood; the furniture hadn’t changed. His mother watched him closely as he moved through, passed the front bedroom—his parents’ room—on the right, and walked down the short hallway. He stopped just shy of the kitchen and turned left into his old bedroom.
It would have been a stretch to measure the room ten by eight. A small white desk sat under the window, cluttered now with his father’s Bibles and cuttings from old magazines. On the single bed to his right lay a faded tartan blanket. Boggs dropped his duffel onto it and stretched his neck. He closed his eyes and listened to his mother begin to work in the kitchen. Now and then she said his name; she poked her head in twice.
On a high shelf above the bed sat a short stack of books, three framed pictures, and a rusty old cookie tin. Boggs swooped his arm in a layup and grabbed the tin as he lifted his feet off the floor. His body flopped on the bed with a dull whump, tin in hand.
He rifled through the unruly batch of cards and souvenirs inside. He had seen none of it since his last visit in ’97, five years ago. He felt no flood of sentiment, or even much memory, upon touching each piece. He shoved everything back in the tin, stood, replaced it on the shelf, and stared out the window.
The stack of sun-bleached Bibles on the desk—King James, NIV, some in strange, glyphic languages—faded into a scatter of the old man’s papers and clippings. The clippings got smaller as they reached toward the window. On the sill there were only fragments and remnants, some only a single word lying in the dust. A beige plastic window blind sliced the green outside into strips, and Boggs reached across the desk to pry open two slats. He still couldn’t see anything except the same old wall of hills.
“Supper’s on,” his father announced from the doorway. Boggs turned, flexed his shoulders. The old man nodded at the duffel on the bed. “You staying?”
“Just tonight,” he replied. “Have to leave tomorrow to get down to Cherry Point.”
His father lowered his brow. “That’s a marine outfit, ain’t it?”
“Yessir.”
“No sense for them to send you there.”
Boggs nodded. “The other branches use it sometimes as, uh … as an exit point?” His voice lilted, quivered slightly.
The old man smoothed his hands down the legs of his trousers. “Is that for you to be moving on to somewhere?”
“Sir,” the tech sergeant said.
He reached out and gripped his son’s shoulder. At first the fierceness of the grip stunned Boggs into old fears, but his daddy hadn’t moved to strike. They stood in silence.
It was a long time before he said with unfamiliar gentleness, “Son, let’s go on in the kitchen. Tell your mother about it.” He blinked, tightened his fingers in his son’s shoulder.
They turned into the kitchen and took their usual seats at the table in the middle of the room. His parents had painted since his last visit; the cabinets were cream instead of wood, and a new border of yellow gingham paper ringed the top foot of wall below the dingy ceiling.
“There’s cheese and crackers,” his mother said into a pot on the stove. “Beans are almost ready.”
“You been working on the place,” he replied.
His mother looked around and waved a general assent at the gingham border. The family passed ten minutes in old rhythms. Bowls and utensils were set out, a fuss made over extra napkins. The old man poured each of them a glass of buttermilk, which Boggs never drank.
As he prepared to join his family at the table, the old man hitched his belt to adjust his pants. Boggs flinched, and his arms tightened against his chest. He stared at the plain gold buckle. His skin had known the lash of belt leather since toddlerhood, and the buckle stung a memory of teenage dander brutally quelled. His daddy cleared his throat and sat down.
They began their meal with a long prayer. The old man spoke of sin and unworthiness, noting his son’s presence only indirectly. Per his usual, he invoked brimstone upon enemies, implored the heavenly father to protect this land, and blessed briefly any sacrificed souls. It had never been their custom to hold hands during grace, but Boggs’s mother grabbed his fingers this time, then patted them after the amen. He twitched throughout. Her skin was cold and smooth, like always.
“Pastor Rick’s saying there’ll be another war,” his mother said. She pushed the cornbread toward him. “Been talking about it every Sunday. About them Muslims.”
Boggs did not reply.
“Will you have to go over there?” Her voice was loose, like she was pretending she didn’t know or hadn’t heard them in the other room before.
He chewed a spoonful of beans. The old man cleared his throat.
“Afghanistan,” said Boggs finally.
His daddy’s face didn’t change, but his mother let out a low whistle and deflated inside her dress. Boggs mused on what Pastor Rick must have told them—accounts of black magic and swarthy demons riding the dusty hillsides of some foreign hellscape. His mother would chink extra quarters into the collection plate to hear these tales.
“You know where that is?” he asked her. She narrowed her eyes, nodded.
“We read about it,” said his father. “We’re always reading, son.” He arced his spoon with curt authority toward a Lexington newspaper on the counter. A headline about President Bush denouncing Saddam appeared below the fold. “When do you go?”
“Two weeks.”
“And you’ll be doing what, exactly?”
Boggs shrugged. “Logistics, mostly. Maintenance. Ops checks,” he said.
“Well, you’re no soldier, I know that.” The old man adjusted the paper napkin on his leg.
Boggs knew he’d meant it as comfort to his mother, but the comment stung him. “No shit, Dad. I’m Air Force.”
> His father’s jaw twitched at the cuss spoken at his table, and Boggs felt a dull gladness fill his throat. He swallowed the power of the word.
“Fighting’s grunt work,” Boggs continued. “Marines. Army. Kids who can’t think worth shit. They do the shooting, not me. I’m not putting my ass on the line for anybody.”
His mother stared at him.
“I fix airplanes,” he said to her. He rested an elbow on the table and tore at a piece of cornbread.
“So you’ll be on a base,” the old man said. “You won’t be out there with the—” He glanced at the newspaper and seemed to pull a term from it. “Advance teams. You won’t have a weapon.” He gripped his glass, swung it to his lips, and held it there.
Boggs met his daddy’s eyes. He savored the idea of telling them he’d be toughing it out in some movie-style operation, even though he would indeed be on a base, pushing papers and counting gaskets. His father had never served, never left Kentucky that Boggs knew of.
They held each other’s gaze until his mother erupted beside them. Boggs watched as she wiped her eyes, but he could not see tears.
“Jesus, lord,” she said, squinting hard. She rocked in her chair, pulled her hands down to clutch her neck, and was still.
They proceeded to eat in near silence, though there was some half-hearted talk of cousins and uncles. As they scraped the bottoms of their dishes, Boggs declined invitations to attend church or visit with anyone else before he left.
“I need to get on in the morning. Supposed to check in with medical, store some things.”
His mother’s lips disappeared at his refusal. When he tried to get up from the table, she shooed him back.
“There’s that divinity,” she said.
She walked to the fridge and fumbled around inside, eventually producing an electric pink and yellow divinity salad in a Tupperware bowl. As she muttered to herself, he noticed how thick her accent was; she came from deeper country than this place. He had forgotten how many sounds she packed into her words. She could lay four tight commands on him with a syllable. He thought of the round, calm enunciations of the men he worked with—scrubbed NCOs, officers with parchment degrees behind frames. All of them came from somewhere rich and plain. They spoke every letter, but still Boggs often missed their hints and jokes.