by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER FORTY
Woods and Won’ts
Joe pedals south along the laser curtain toward the Atlantic Ocean. Given that Noramica is not renowned for being a country where things work, unlike Korea or India, the longer the boy pedals alongside the unending pile of bones without seeing a single break, the more frightened he becomes of the danger he’ll face on the other side of the fence. If the government has taken such care maintaining the fence, then it must be for a very good reason. He envisions riding through a land filled with thousand upon thousands of animals infested with hundreds of ticks, which themselves are infested billions of Lyme’s spirochetes.
Kilometers pass and the skeleton mound continues unbroken. Joe has a vision of a woodsy paradise so over-populated with wildlife that millions of animals are forced to flee or starve. Yet, the unending scrubland and woods, broken only by the twists of water, suggest that there are not so many animals that they have destroyed the habitat.
To resolve the conflict of how so much animal life has died, yet the habitat appears sustained, the teener comes to the idea that some force might be driving the wild life out of its sanctuary and into the killing fields of the laser curtain. As he rides along, the boy notices that there seem to be areas where the jumble of bones rises higher. He guesses that could be used as evidence that something is chasing the animals from the woods. Or, it could be that something in the habitat beyond the curtain, something hidden by the deep foliage from his eyes, such as too much or too little water, or the wrong kind of plant-life, could be responsible.
As Joe bicycles further south toward the ocean, his pace must slows as the laser curtain passes over more brooks and streams. At those spots, the air is humid and misty from the steam created where the water passes under the laser. Since Joe himself must investigate every body of water to see whether he can ride through or if he has to remove his shoes, roll his pant legs and lift his bike on a shoulder, he takes the time to look for aquatic life. Some is floating on the surface like a piscine Ganges, but in the deeper streams, the fish seem to be able to survive running the laser’s gauntlet.
As Joe approaches the waters of the Atlantic, the trees become fewer and exhibit ever more fantastic shapes from their daily battles with the winds. Scrub, vines and rosehips grow denser. Finally, the boy arrives at a beach where westerly winds are pushing meter high gray green waves onto the wrack and rock shore. The last pole of the laser fence rises from the waters twenty meters out from shore.
Joe takes off all of his clothes and packs them into a bundle. He attaches the bundle to the bike and lifts the bike over his head. Keeping far away from the laser line, Joe goads himself into entering the piercing cold water and begins to make his way out past the last pole. Before he is half-way there, the surf is past his waist. The swells push against him like a parade of bullies. By the time he gets past the end of the laser curtain, the water is slopping across his face. He has to hop to get his breaths. Despite the fact that his whole body is quaking from the Atlantic’s cold, Joe’s biceps are burning from holding the bike overhead. The shivering teener makes himself keep going forward until he is sure that he is past the point of danger. Finally, Joe turns and angles his way back toward shore. His teeth are chattering and his limbs are jerking like the first day in a marionette class. He is so consumed by his body’s attempt to combat the frigid water that he misses a shallow trough in the sea floor and stumbles forward. Instantly, Joe is hit by all of the feelings that swept through him when the Hudson tried to swallow him up. But, as soon as the thought of opening his mouth wells up, Joe explodes from the water and frantically scrambles toward shore.
When he finally makes it, the first thing he does is put the Schwinner on its kick stand. Next, he wrings out his soaking clothes and hangs them out to dry on the frame of the bike. It is not until those tasks are done, that he squeegees his head, forearms and chest, and, finally, his legs. His intention is to stand naked until the sea-breeze dries him, but his shaking becomes so bad that he decides he has to get dressed. His pants are on and he has an arm inside his shirt sleeve when he stops himself. He knows wearing wet clothes is a dangerous idea, maybe even life-threatening if his core temperature drops too low; however he doesn’t think that he can endure being naked much longer.
Joe screams STOP at the wind, then, a second, later, applies the same command to himself. He stands stock-still as he takes a series of deep breaths. The shaking becomes a little less violent. He closes his eyes to see what Bob Tom would do.
When Joe was rescued from the Hudson, there was a blanket and fire. Here, he has neither. When Bob Tom towed him from the barge to Manhattan, he dried off in a marina restroom and half-dried his clothes with the hand dryer. That won’t bappen here.
He needs shelter. Joe scans the shore and sees where the wind has carved a shallow dip in a small mound of sand above the wrack line. He trots over, collects handfuls of dried seaweed, layers his nest, and curls up in the indentation. He pulls more ribbons of grass on top of himself. His hidey-hole isn’t comfortable and it isn’t warm, but it is warmer and more comfortable than standing wet and naked in a strong March wind. After awhile, the shivering stops.
As he waits for his clothes to dry, Joe considers how accurate Blesonus and Bob Tom have been when each, individually, told him he was naïve. As he huddles against the elements, two ideas come to him. A boy with a bike on a beach beyond the Pale with no blanket, no matches, little food, no extra clothing and no water is beyond naïve. Prissi. A collage of Prissi whispering about romantic love in the Waterville library, looping the loop in a clear blue sky, prankish eyes, shadowed eyes, snorts and snarls, and…kisses. Kisses that were there and then they weren’t. Joe realizes that he has come a long way from home looking for someone he doesn’t understand.
Joe is curled up tight in his hole thinking about Prissi and what keeps him bound to her when a noise different from the unceasing skirls of sea and wind intrudes. Rushing, skittering, pounding, howling, squawking, and crying, grow and subside as the winds gusts. Then, the skein of noise grows so loud that the wind can’t suppress it. Finally, there is a blur rushing from the woods, across the broken ground and under the laser. Pops, hisses, other sounds that bring tears to Joe’s eyes. Moments later the smell carries to him. He hides under the grass until he is sure whatever has caused the death flight is gone. When he finally emerges, the streaks of his tears are deeply outlined by the black of ash.
After his clothes are dry, Joe gets dressed and rides the bike along a path parallel to the laser’s beams. His plans to go north until his mypod shows he is on the proper latitude to turn back east. But, after two hours of slow progress, Joe sees an opening in the woods with a beaten trail heading east and, on an impatient whim, takes it.
The narrow path starts out winding through a denseness of brush that grows to twice the boy’s height. He enters the path walking alongside his bike, but with the trail being so narrow, he keeps snagging the handle bars in the vines. After a few minutes, he finds it is easier to ride than walk alongside the bike. However, riding means that he needs to be constantly alert for low hanging branches. In the first hour it seems he has to portage across creeks and brooks every five minutes. That is the bad part; the good part is that most of them are less than a half meter deep and none is more than two meters wide. As frequent as the streams are, so, too, are the numbers of junctions with other paths. Those other paths seem to be much the same as the one which he travels. Their frequency and similarity get Joe wondering what has made and maintained these passages. He is crossing what might be the seventh or eighth ribbon of water when he first notices the hoof print, half again as big as his palm, in the mud of an embankment. Once he sees the first ones, and he shifts some of his attention from the branches overhead to what is beneath his tires, he sees hundreds more. Although Joe knows little about horses, he wonders how conducive the habitat he is crossing through can be for horses. Ten minutes later, he stops the Schwinner so that he can shut his eyes to help his memory.
He had spent more than two hours riding along the unbroken cairn of bones, but now he can’t remember seeing a skeleton as big as that of a horse. He wonders what force can keep a horse from making the same mistake as thousands of other animals.
After awhile, the land rises, the brush thins out and individual and small stands of trees, ten to twenty meters high, appear. Despite the openness, the trail itself remains obvious. Joe crosses through a meadow of knee-high grasses a hundred meters wide. Fifteen minutes later, the land drops back down. The rivulets of water increase, as does the density of brush.
It is late in the afternoon and time is sliding into shadow. Joe is hungry, but not yet so hungry that he is willing to eat the last of his food. Although the traveler is bone-tired, he is hyper-alert. The further he has moved along the path, the thicker the hoof prints have become. Now, he is moving along a path that is little more than churned mud. The trail, though wider than before, has become so messy that he has stopped riding and begun walking again. Part of Joe’s reason for dismounting is because of how difficult it has become to ride, but another motive is that if something happens, like a remuda galloping down the trail, he wants to be able to leap aside quickly. He is pushing his bike through a low spot filled with mud the consistency of cookie dough, when he hears sounds. Birds, thousands of birds, have been singing love songs and, like Eastern Europeans, arguing over territory. This is different. More speech-like. But, low and guttural. Rather than reassure the boy that he is not alone in the woods, that safety and sustenance are nearby, the sounds cause the skin on the back of Joe’s neck to prickle. He moves forward as silently as he can while dividing his attention between looking ahead and looking sideways for a gap in the brush big enough to get himself and the STA off the path.
Before he has moved fifteen meters down the trail, Joe spies a low break in the undergrowth. When he stoops, the boy can see that it, too, is a well-kept path but one made by and for an animal much smaller than a horse. Joe squats down and makes his way five meters into the tunnel. It isn’t comfortable to stoop down, as he must if he is to make his way, but seeing no hoof prints acts as a great motivator. The boy turns around and retraces his steps. While listening carefully, he lowers the seat and handlebars of the bike; however when he tries to pull the bike down the path, the handlebars catch. Joe backs out, loosens and twists the bars so that they align with the bike’s frame and tries again. This time the profile of the bike is slim enough that he and it both can move along the trail.
Joe moves slowly. He stops frequently to listen. An image of Huck Finn comes to him. Pirates. The boy has been on the path for less than a quarter hour when it comes to him that he is moving away from the voices. He squats down on the damp ground to think. He is confused. The day before, as he rode his bicycle along the cracked pavement, a feeling of adventure, of derring-do, had been inside him, as well the feeling of loss that Bob Tom had left him. The night in the woods had been scary, but when the sun rose he had felt a return of courage. Following along the fence to the ocean had given him a sense of accomplishment, but that confidence began to shatter when he stumbled and the water surged over his head. Hearing and smelling the death of the animals being run out of the forest did more damage. Once he entered the woods, each time the trail intersected with another trail, another piece of his courage got left behind. The deeper he penetrated into the woods, the less sure he became that he could ever make his way back.
Now, Joe is feeling like a character in a fairy tale, except that instead of marking his trail with kernels of corn, he has been leaving behind dribs and drabs of courage. In a fairy tale, when a path is longer than the bag of corn is deep, problems, serious problems result. Joe thinks that that he might have very few kernels of courage left. The sensation of being alone and filled with fear, the same feeling he had had when hiking along the ridge with Seka and Adrona and, far worse, when he was lost in the bowels of the cave has a fierce grip on him. Joe shudders when he gets the notion that, if he doesn’t get moving soon, he will become too afraid to move.
To energize himself, Joe makes himself think of what he and Bob Tom have been doing as an adventure. Other than Prissi herself, there can’t be anyone else at Dutton having a…Joe pauses his thinking to be sure that he chooses the most appropriate word…more eventful spring vacation. He cottons onto that thought—that he is having an interlude—and, too soon, will be back in school.
Joe pushes the Schwinner off the low path and into the woods. He hides it at the base of a half-dozen river birch trees and covers it with a blanket of dried leaves. He marks the tree next to the ones where he has hidden the bike by scraping away a piece of bark near the base of the trunk. The teener looks around to memorize his embarkation point as best he can before carefully starting off in the direction of the voices.
As Joe crawls and crab-walks through the brush, the point from where the voices come shifts around. The boy hears what he supposes is the clopping of horse hooves. He considers whether the horses might be domesticated and he is listening to their owners. He wonders what kind of men would choose to live in the Pale. He tries to imagine what the male equivalent of the Greenlander women might be. The only idea that comes is a woodsy equivalent of the subway zies.
Joe becomes so involved with the voices that he forgets to blaze his progress. When he does remember, he is overwhelmed by a tangle of feelings whose strands include fear, shame, and being out of his depth. It seems impossible, so soon after getting lost in the Greenlander’s mountain maze, that for a second time he has forgotten to mark his path. The chagrined boy whirls around and studies the woods until he spies his last mark. He quickly retraces his steps and adds two more blazes. When he is satisfied the trail is well-marked, the teener moves back to where he left off.
As he progresses, the land rises and, as it had before when he came across the meadow, the brush thins and the trees seem to grow taller. As Joe approaches the summit of the rise, the voices grow louder but no more intelligible. Just shy of the crest, the cautious adventurer slides down on his belly and stretches forward with his chin bobbing just above the ground. He slinks forward a meter and, then, another.
Poking his head over the ridge, Joe spies a ring of woods, mostly free of underbrush, surrounding an open area that he guesses to be a half-kilometer wide and twice that long. Joe’s first thought is that it is another meadow, but a second look tells him that, although there are patches of tall weeds, there also are irregular plats of land which appear to be planted with spring crops. With the growing shadows, it takes Joe a moment to pick out the long low building tucked under the trees off to his left. A second later it is obvious that the voices he has been hearing are coming from there. The nervous boy decides that his best plan is to withdraw further into the woods and make his way around to the backside of the building. Joe has gone no more than a quarter of the way when he hears a metallic rattle and then a scrape. Carefully raising his head, Joe watches a garage door roll up. Even when the door is fully open, the lowering sun makes it hard to see into the gaping darkness. Several voices are talking at once. The voices grow louder and a few seconds later, louder again. Suddenly, two men on horseback gallop from the building.
Joe’s breath disappears in shock when he understands that he is seeing something very different from men on horseback. The two centaurs’ rear and their front hooves claw at the air. The larger centaur, whose head is totally bald, reaches down, picks up a large rock and hurls it at the building. With a resounding boom the rock smashes a metal door and ricochets to the ground. When the thrower reaches down for a second stone, the other centaur, a smaller, gray-haired man with a huge belly atop a dappled gray pony-sized body, grabs his arm. Joe thinks the words they are shouting at each other might be, “Not now,” and, “Then, never.”
After a few more seconds, the shouting slows and the decibels drop as suddenly as the rock from the bald centaur’s hand. The two man-horses trot off to the far side of the meadow and disappear into the woods. Joe remains para
lyzed by what he has witnessed. He is doubly shocked. The bigger shock comes from seeing a live man-horse. Something intriguing and attractive as a mythic creature is almost unimaginable in the flesh. Even though he has heard geris talk about how flabbergasted their parents or grandparents were when people first began to fledge, Joe can’t imagine that their amazement could have been of a magnitude equal to his own at what he has just seen. Winging makes sense. Most humans revere freedom more than any god. Wings solved so many ecologic and demographic problems. Winging was mutation for a greater good. As far as Joe can comprehend, a centaur is a mutation strictly for mutation’s sake. To the dazed teener, it seems an abomination. What causes his second shock and makes the first worse is the age and individuality of the centaurs. Joe has seen many imaginings of the mythical creatures. In those renderings, clean, good looking men with curly hair, rigid spines, golden skin and muscled chests did whatever they did. The creatures Joe has seen—fat, bald, wearing raggedy shirts, displaying the normal attributes of being human—are less mythic than just insanely bizarre.
As Joe lies on the ground recovering from his shock, he realizes that he is still hearing voices. Keeping so low that he chances a sneeze from his nose being tickled by fallen leaves, Joe begins making his way toward the shadows of the dusk-wrapped building.
The sun is down, but the moon is still off-stage when Joe carefully stands up just past the rear corner of the building. He is struck by how much he can see just from starlight and the faint glow dribbling from the bottom of the three heavily curtained windows. The boy wishes Bob Tom were alongside so that he could show off his skill.
No, he corrects himself, not show off. Just show.
Joe studies the ground to plot out a safe and silent path. It occurs to him that it has been several minutes since he has heard any voices. He wonders if the centaurs could have left the stable while he was working his way around back. A worse thought comes. What if the centaurs’ silence comes from listening for him? That thought freezes him. He has no doubt that the centaurs can be very quiet when they choose. How else could they get old enough to be bald and gray? Immobilized, with his captured breath burning his lungs, Joe considers why the men-horses might become quiet. Awareness of his presence is one. To divert himself from that thought, Joe considers whether the centaurs might be sleeping. Don’t horses sleep when the sun goes down? Given how early in the evening it is and the fact that the stable remains lighted, the notion escapes his grasp. He wonders if they might be eating, or…. The boy gives up. He has no idea what a centaur might be doing just after dusk on a fine spring day.
As he stares at the minefield of leaves and limbs that the winter winds have pushed against the back of the building, Joe tells himself and repeats it like a mantra that if the centaurs discover him, his escape route is to make it back to the low tunnel from where he emerged. If he can make it to the tunnel, the space is much too small for a centaur to follow him…unless they have weapons of some kind. Joe finds it hard to convince himself that anything human, or half-human, ever would be without weapons.
The agitated teener forces himself forward. A half-second later, Joe’s foot snaps a twig and his mouth involuntarily blurts out a word that Shakespeare liked and Noramican teenerz have long loved. Joe immediately twists his neck toward where he made his last blaze. His body says bolt, but his mind makes it hold its ground. An interminable thirty seconds finally pass, but nothing happens. Finally, Joe makes himself approach the first window and the faint glow of light which has drawn him like a moth.
Through the narrow band of light at the bottom of the curtain, Joe sees three centaurs standing around a massive plank table eating what looks to be fried fish and baked potatoes, lots of baked potatoes. The man-horse who Joe best can see has four potatoes on a large square wooden plate. In the middle of the table is a beach ball-sized wooden bowl holding a mound of small green apples. All three of the centaurs are old. Their cheeks are mostly covered with gray, scraggly beards, but where the skin does show, it is red, weathered and wrinkled. After he notices them, Joe fixates on how huge the centaurs’ hands are. They look like they have spent years in hard work. Even as Joe watches in awe at the most domestic of scenes playing out with the least domestic of actors, he sees just how burdened by age the centaurs are. Their hands move slowly and in ways that appear to be painful. The centaur nearest to Joe keeps raising his back left hoof as if to relieve an ache. When the centaur most nearly opposite to Joe opens his mouth to load it with potato, Joe can see that his teeth are mostly just memories. When he sees those empty gums, it hits the boy how much of a centaur’s day must be spent with finding, preparing and eating food. With only a human’s mouth and stomach to feed a horse-sized lower body, Joe guesses the centaurs must have to eat five or six times a day. Thinking about the centaurs’ mouth and stomach lead Joe to consider what the centaurs’ whole digestive system might be like, a thought he chooses not to linger on.
It is not until Joe’s cold nose touches the even colder window casing that he realizes how dangerously mesmerized he has been become with the centaurs. He pulls back in terror. The foreign world he has been engrossed with instantly loses its power. With his knees quivering and mind struggling to keep his breath from blurting out of his throat, Joe scuttles backward until he feels safe enough to move to the next sliver of pale light.
With cautious step after cautious step, it takes Joe more five minutes to get close to the second window. He is crouching down reaching toward the sill when the world explodes in noise. The rattled adventurer whirls, runs, trips, falls and surrenders.
As the boy lies on the grass, the thunderous noise that has startled him, resolves itself into words—words that Joe first recognizes as English and, then, identifies as almost assuredly coming from an Adirondack riverman named Bob Tom Damall. Despite the urge to run to his friend, caution keeps Joe on the ground. It occurs to him that the yelling he has heard earlier may have been the centaurs arguing about the riverman.
As suddenly as he had begun, Bob Tom stops his lusty singing of the days and ways of Middle Earth. The shell-shocked Joe slowly gets to his feet and makes his way back toward the stable. When Joe looks through the window he sees his old friend tethered in chains leaning his elbows on the top of a slatted partition. Joe’s first thought is to alert the riverman to his presence, but, after he hesitates to consider whether there is a way to do that safely, that idea gets pushed aside. The teener has enough experience to know that Bob Tom is not good at curbing his enthusiasms. Joe goes through his options. He can tap on the window and hope that Bob Tom hears him and the centaurs don’t. If the tapping is successful, then what? The old man’s chain doesn’t look like it’s long enough to let him get close to the window. But, even if it is, will Bob Tom keep quiet as he pulls back the heavy curtains and sees Joe? With each consideration, the cautious teener thinks it’s a bigger mistake to knock on the window. Joe spends a couple of more minutes thinking of other variations of how he might alert Bob Tom before it comes to him that having Bob Tom know that he is there does nothing for the old man’s rescue if he doesn’t have a way to free him from his chains.
The boy backs away from the window and makes his way to the third and last narrow bar of light. As he approaches it, he can’t think of anything but the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It’s a leap from three beds that are too soft, too hard and just right to his situation, but there is something about sneaking peeks into the three rooms that is making a connection.
Joe feels an ache in his thighs when he squats down so that he can see under the bottom of the curtain. He considers how little hockey has prepared him for a quest.
No beds. No bears. Just two pot-bellied centaurs reading books by the green light of an ancient, battered phosphor lamp. Joe has only been in place for a minute or two before one of the centaurs, dressed in a drab green Free Lindsay Lohan sweatshirt, which bunches on his belly, yawns. Although the yawn only goes on for two seconds before the centaur raises his book
to his face to cover it, the black magic is done. Joe’s yawn is so big that his jaw pops. He realizes he’s been clenching his teeth while he’s been spying. A second yawn splits his face. As that one finally fades away like a cymbal’s ring, Joe is overwhelmed with exhaustion. He doesn’t want to rescue Bob Tom or outsmart a posse of centaurs. He wants to sleep. With a pillow that smells like his hair when his hair is clean, sheets that smell like soap, a mattress that doesn’t sag. In a warm room. Maybe not at Dutton. Maybe not a home. But, somewhere…and before he sleeps he wants to eat three double bulgur burgers with lots of tahini washed down with a huge pom-ade.
Ten minutes later, the boy lies on a pile of leaves feeling extremely drained, somewhat safe, and absolutely guilty. After twenty minutes of listening hard and hearing nothing that sounds like humans or horses, Joe crawls back out of the tunnel, uncovers the bike and raids its panniers for two of his last three Nougie-nugget bars. As the teener eats, the moon rises and the chiaroscuro beauty of the forestscape attracts enough of his attention that some of his fear fades away. He is still hungry when he finishes his meal, but knows that he has to save the last of his meager supplies for tomorrow.
Despite his exhaustion, it takes Joe hours to fall asleep. Some of that insomnia comes from the cold seeping through the blanket of leaves he has buried himself in. Some comes from worries that the darkness hides a battalion of ticks coming his way. The rest comes from shame.
When Joe finally does fall asleep, it is a deep one because the bear had snuffled him several times and begun to brush back the blanket of leaves before Joe comes awake. The boy’s dream-clouded blue eyes open to bright yellow ones, a long glistening brown snout and a sachem’s hoard of teeth.
