by Rachel Kane
“Is it the right cabin?” asked Eli. He had his fingers in his hair again, pulling at the locks. It looked painful. “Are you sure?”
“This is your uncle’s place,” I said. “But nothing is here.”
“That’s a little strange, isn’t it?” Eli had his back to me, looking up at the hole in the roof as though the book might have flown away. “Nothing at all? Where is his bedding? Where are his supplies?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t really ready for a mental challenge, not after my earlier fall. “I don’t know.”
Honestly, I was glad to have this distraction. We had somehow managed to go this entire time without talking about what happened earlier. Not the fall, not him saving me, that part was fine.
But the kiss.
It wasn’t a kiss. Just because your lips touched him, doesn’t make it a—
Enough. It didn’t bear thinking about. He hadn’t noticed it, thank god, and hadn’t brought it up this whole time, and now he was so busy casting around the cabin, that there were no other thoughts in his head.
“Did someone clean the place out?” he asked. “You and your dad?”
“Nah,” I said. “I never come to the cabins.”
“Shit,” said Eli. “Was it back at the shed, and I missed it? Let’s go look there.”
“I… Eli, are you sure there’s supposed to be a book here?”
He touched his jacket. “There is. I know it. My uncle wrote my dad a letter, he said he’d written it, he said… Damn it, the book has to be here, Jake!”
“Okay, okay! I believe you, I do. But let’s get out of here. You can’t breathe this air, it’s bad for you. Let’s get back to the strip, then we can think.”
He really didn’t want to go. I think he would’ve taken the cabin apart, piece by piece, trying to find the book.
I hated to tell him what I thought, that someone had probably come in and cleared out the cabin, thrown all the stuff away, the bedding, the supplies, the book. There was a spot further down the trail where people threw their trash, far from the cabins, to keep bears and raccoons from visiting. That’s probably where all his uncle’s belongings were, now, turned to landfill.
Better not to mention that. And better not to mention that it was probably Pop who did it. I know Pop and Ron had known each other for years. I don’t know that they ever had a real conversation or anything, but Pop would’ve seen it as his duty to clean up the cabin, to not leave it a mess. He would’ve maybe wrapped all the stuff in one of Ron’s blankets and dragged it to the trash pit. For him, it would have been a gesture of kindness to Ron. Keeping things tidy.
I was sure Eli wouldn’t see it as a kindness.
He walked outside and put his hand against a tree trunk, leaning against it. His breath was coming fast. “Fuck,” he said, “am I wrong? Did I come all this way, did I risk my fucking life, for nothing?”
I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off and stalked back towards the strip.
What the hell is in this book? I wanted to ask, but I knew it wasn’t the right time.
The way this day was going, maybe there never would be a right time. Maybe I’d never find out why this intense, strange man had appeared in my life.
When we heard thunder in the distance, we looked at each other. Our shoulders slumped. The storm was coming.
It felt like defeat.
By the time we made it back to the strip, a light rain was falling, but the breath of warmth in the air suggested much more was coming. The scent of rich, moist earth reached me, the way the forest came alive during rain. Normally breathing that in would make me feel so hopeful, but not with Eli looking grim as death beside me.
In a way, it felt like our roles had reversed. I’d gone from being silent and grumpy over my afternoon plans being canceled, to feeling clean, like the events of the day had washed away everything unimportant, everything mundane. We were alive, and that was enough for anybody.
Meanwhile Eli had been cheerful and talkative before (too talkative, to my mind), but something had turned sour in him, something had closed off.
I offered for us to sit in the supply shed while the rain came down, but he refused.
“I’ll just sit here and wait,” he said.
“We don’t know how long that’ll be. You don’t want to get wet and cold.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Don’t care.”
“Come on, don’t be like that. Come inside.”
But he wouldn’t budge. I looked back at the shed. It might as well have been a mansion full of warm fireplaces and thick rugs, for all the comfort it offered compared to being outside now that the rain was picking up, coming down harder. I sighed and sat next to Eli.
“I really am sorry,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You’re sure he didn’t mail it off or—”
A brisk, curt shake of the head. “I’m not sure of anything, Jacob. This morning I was sure. This morning I was positive. Now I’m just seeing a lot of wasted time. Time I could’ve spent…well, doing anything other than this pointless quest for a book that doesn’t even exist.”
Should I tell him about the trash pit? Did that even make sense? The last thing he needed was to hike up there, get himself completely filthy, with almost no chance of finding the book there.
On the other hand, it felt like lying not to mention it.
“I have an idea,” I said tentatively. “It’s a pretty bad one.”
He looked over at me. Rain dripped from his dark eyelashes, like tears. It fell onto his cheeks, sliding down in a trail an inch from his mouth.
Kiss away his tears.
“What’s your idea?” he asked.
“My Pop. He’s probably the one who cleaned up the cabin.”
“Would he know—”
“That’s what I’m asking myself. Would he have thrown a book away? He isn’t a sentimental guy, Pop.”
When my mother died, he’d spent two days in a deep, unreachable funk, and then right after that, he’d neatly laid out all her clothes, keeping one or two of her favorite dresses, and sending the rest to the church charity box. Her jewelry went to her sisters, her makeup and ceramic figurines and other knick-knacks went into the trash.
When I’d realized he was throwing her books away, I had to stop him. I was deep in grief myself, feeling almost unable to move out of bed. The two days after she died was like being in a coma, like being paralyzed, watching sympathetic family come in and say words that meant nothing to you, feed you things that had no flavor, then disappear, leaving you alone in the darkness again.
I couldn’t say any of that to Eli. “I caught him shoving my mother’s books into a big black trash-bag. I stopped him, I told them I wanted them. He looked at me like I was crazy. Why would you want all these books, you’re not going to be one of them college boys? But he didn’t understand, these were my last connection to my mother.”
Eli glanced back at the cabin. “You think he threw Uncle Ron’s novel in the trash?”
“The thing is—”
“How do you even handle trash up here? There’s no dumpster, there’s no trash truck, there’s no—”
His voice was urgent, as though this had all happened in the past few days, rather than two years ago.
“There’s a pit,” I said. “But trust me, if the book was in there—”
“Take me,” he said.
“No, you don’t understand. If it’s in the pit, the book is nothing now, just…nothing. Atoms. Dust.”
But he was already up and headed for the paths again.
Take the right-hand path, and keep walking past the last cabin, this one with an old deer stand leaning against it, remains of some hunting trip from last season. Sometimes people plan on coming back to the mountain, and then never do.
You go up for a ways, until the path levels out again, and then you find yourself in a dip. You have to watch your step carefully, because the pit isn’t marked, you just have to know where
it is.
“There,” I said, and Eli looked where I was pointing.
Rain is different under a canopy of trees. The drops are gathered together on the pine needles overhead, become fat and heavy, and only at their heaviest do they speed down, their irregular patting surprising you each time a drop hits your face.
It was getting dark now, even though it was still afternoon. The clouds had brought in an early evening gloom.
“That’s…it?” he asked, his voice weak.
If you didn’t know it was a trash pit, you never would realize it by looking. Since the last hunters left a few months ago, a steady fall of leaves and pine needles had covered the pit, making it look as anonymous as any other patch of ground in the woods. In fact the only thing that marked it at all was the lack of trees in it.
I watched Eli approach it cautiously, like he was wandering towards quicksand. That was smart. I didn’t even have to tell him. You did not want to land in the pit. They didn’t care what they threw in there. I could picture reaching in and grabbing a rusted old can lid. Instant tetanus.
He took a branch and prodded at the leaves, flipping over a layer of them.
“It’s like an archaeological dig,” he said.
“People have been coming up here for a hundred years,” I told him. “That’s a lot of trash.”
He pushed more leaves aside. “There’s something.”
I watched him clear off a brown mass that revealed itself as a cardboard box. Bloated, torn, destroyed over time. Ready to disintegrate if you looked at it too hard. He poked inside the box with his stick. Nothing.
I realized something just then. Even though I’d had this picture of Eli being one of those soft city tourists, there was something hard inside him. Something that did not want to give up, ever.
That look he had given me when I was clinging to the rock, an inhuman look, where I was no longer a person in danger, but a problem to be solved. That was how he was looking at the pit. I could almost hear his thoughts: Fly a back-hoe up here, dig it up, layer by layer. Find the layer that represents two years ago, and search carefully…
Surely he saw that was useless. Surely he understood that this was the end of his search. You couldn’t get a backhoe up here. Oh, sure, eventually these trees might come down. On the other side of the mountain, lumber operations were turning forests into vacant lots, a shocking bareness where the soil was quickly washed away, with no sturdy canopy of trees to protect it. But here? It might be another hundred years before you could really investigate that pit. We’d all be long gone by then. And those future archaeologists, what would they find, really? A novel? No. They’d find the same rusted cans that we’d find right now. A broken knife-blade, a shovel with a snapped handle. The detritus of men who came to hide from the world, but not their written thoughts.
I could see that mechanical light fade from Eli’s eyes. The way his expression softened.
Defeat replaced certainty. Disappointed again, he seemed to shrink into himself.
He thought he would find the book in the cabin. Then he’d been certain he could find the book in the pit.
Now there was nothing left. There weren’t any more places for the book to hide.
I don’t know why I reached for him. Maybe it was just that it had been a rough day—the roughest either of us had ever been through—and we were both exhausted and needed comfort. Maybe it was the way the rain had collected on his eyelashes, and I was deluding myself with the innocence of the gesture. Whatever it was, I reached out, and he moved between my arms, accepting an embrace from me.
Perfectly platonic. The way you would hug a friend who had gone through a loss.
I held him close, and did not put my lips against his throat, nor did I bury my face in his hair. I just held him, and felt him breathe a ragged breath against me.
Nature wanted to remind us that she was more important than our feelings. That she was to be ignored at our peril. The lightning that struck nearby was practically blinding, followed instantly by a crash of thunder that shook the forest.
“Shit, we gotta get cover,” I said, releasing Eli and pushing him ahead of me.
12
Eli
Compared to Uncle Ron’s cabin, the one we ducked into was practically homely. The roof was intact, and everything had been sealed up, so it was dry inside. The rain had found its strength, battering the tin so that we had to raise our voices to be heard.
“I think we’ll be safe here,” said Jake.
I have to admit I looked skeptical when he said that. The lightning had been close. After everything we’d been through today, being struck by a lightning bolt didn’t seem far-fetched.
But the cabin was dry, and there was a chair, and an undamaged cot with a blanket, and a little wood stove.
Like if Ron’s hadn’t been destroyed.
The loss hit me like a punch in the gut. I took a seat on the chair. I wasn’t sure what Jake was doing. I was too forlorn to think about that. I was just glad to be somewhere dry, where I could think about how awful this was.
No book. How could there be no book?
I’d interrogated my parents after I found the letter from Ron. They were already pretty angry about my accidentally outing myself, but I think they were telling the truth when they said they had no idea what had become of Ron’s last book. My dad hadn’t cared. Ron had been persona non grata when he died.
How does that work? How do you grow to hate your own brother so much that when he dies, it doesn’t matter to you at all?
Amanda said I needed to talk to them, needed to fight with them, to battle them for my place in the family. But that was hard to do. It was hard to want to be in a family that turned you out.
At a certain point, you harden your heart against them, so you won’t get hurt anymore.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Jake. He had found a box of matches and was lighting the stove. Miracle of miracles, the wood took light, and suddenly there was warmth in the cabin. I hadn’t even realized I was shivering from being wet.
I shook my head. “I doubt anyone would understand,” I said. “Just family stuff.”
He sat close to the stove. I noticed he’d buttoned his shirt back up at some point.
“Okay,” he said. “Everybody’s family is fucked up in its own way.”
I couldn’t disagree. Nor could I really expect Jake to understand what it was like to be the only gay man in the family, the focus point for the entire family’s homophobia.
But what the hell. I had nobody else to talk to right now, and no idea when we were going to see civilization next. It could be tonight. It could be next week. Maybe they’d just find our skeletons in this cabin, bones picked clean.
“What are we going to do for food?” I asked.
He glanced over. “You’re hungry?”
I touched my stomach. “I don’t know. I think I was high on adrenaline for hours there, and now that’s all fading out and I just feel…yeah. Like all I want to do is eat and worry. Worry and eat.”
He inclined his head toward the empty shelves. “Unfortunately there’s nothing here. In the morning we could probably do some fishing, but until then—”
“I suppose before long we’ll be resorting to cannibalism.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but I guess I wasn’t in a joking mood, because it came out as a flat statement, the way you’d announce a dentist appointment. Tuesday, 8 am, cannibalism.
Now he was staring at me in a way that left me feeling unsteady.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dumb joke.”
“You know, it’s okay to feel like shit. This has been a shit day, you don’t have to try to make jokes to lighten the mood. You can just feel bad. Nobody’s going to judge you for that.”
“It’s like how you judge a book by its ending,” I said. “This could have been an exciting, great day if it ended with us being rescued. Instead, it’s just one fucking disaster after another…including not finding the book. Includ
ing not being rescued. Including being in the middle of a huge thunderstorm, lost without food or real shelter.”
He glanced up as I said this, as though confirming the roof was still working.
“Yeah, this isn’t how I pictured today working out either,” he said.
“But it’s okay. It’s just the way my life goes these days. One fucking disaster after another.”
You know what’s strange? I could hear anger and frustration in my voice.
When I was talking to Amanda about all the stuff with my book, I hadn’t really let myself be angry. Nobody likes a mope. Nobody likes self-pity.
But maybe there was a difference between righteous anger and self-pity. Maybe sometimes you had to admit you were frustrated, that life had stuck you in a bad place, because otherwise how were you going to work it out?
I discovered that I really, really wanted Jake to ask me about this. I wanted to spill it. He was a stranger, wasn’t he? Practically so. Strangers are the best people to tell your problems to, because they don’t hang around looking at you afterward.
Jake wasn’t going to ask me. He had found something.
Under the cot, his foot had brushed a box, and when he drew it out, we realized it had some supplies in it. Cans and packages of food.
Suddenly a pang of hunger gripped my belly. Which was ridiculous, I’d eaten breakfast this morning, it wasn’t like I was starving. But seeing that food made my mouth water.
“Lookie here,” Jake said. He pulled out two cans of soup…and then frowned.
The cans were dented and a little bloated.
“Mmm, cream of botulism,” I said.
Then he found a sealed bag of jerky, and my eyes lit up.
“This looks all right,” he said.
I took the pack from him and checked the date. “Still good until December. Is it intact? No mouse bites?” Amazingly, the package was untouched by vermin, which is really the number one thing I look for in food.
“At least we won’t starve,” Jake said.
