Out of the Woods

by E. Christopher Clark

  “And get your fingers out your nose,” says the youngest.

  The bare-chested boy, he removes his hands from their hiding places and wipes them across the seat of his pants. “I just don’t understand why we have to light it on fire.”

  “We light it on fire,” says the oldest, “because that’s what our people do.”

  “Our people?”

  The youngest slaps him upside the head. “Vikings, you idiot.”

  The bare-chested boy shakes his now-sore noggin. “Don’t they do that with an arrow, or something? Once it’s out to sea like?”

  “Like we’re gonna trust you with a bow and arrow,” says the oldest.

  When they reach the hill, once they sense the vehicle beginning to move of its own accord — with a little help from Granny Gravity, o’course — they put blocks in front of the near-flat tires and grab a rusted red canister of gasoline from the front seat. The oldest does the honors, anointing my trusty steed with the holy water of the rambling man. The youngest thumbs through a grease-stained Bible he pulls from his back pocket while my middle boy stands idly by, rubbing at his red shoulders and wincing, rubbing and wincing.

  “Can I light it?” he asks his brothers.

  They look at him, then each other. Him, then each other. I reckon they’re wondering if he’ll miss while tossing the match, if he’ll set the field ablaze instead of the car.

  “I thought you didn’t understand,” says the oldest.

  “You learned me up,” says the bare-chested boy.

  The oldest rolls his eyes, then nods at the youngest.

  The youngest pulls a book of matches from his other back pocket, untangling it from the lint and loose thread that’s wrapped itself all around the book. Then he tosses the matches to his brother.

  While the bare-chested boy works out how to strike a match proper in the wind rolling in off the snow-capped mountains and down across our tiny valley, my youngest boy begins his recitation, orating a psalm. My oldest ducks his head, tries not to think about the thermometer his wife showed him before he left their bedroom, her encouragement to hurry back because “It’s all in the timing.” He knows they’ve been out here too long, but he’s also sure I deserve everything they’re giving me.

  How I wish I were solid for one more second, so I could punch him in the arm and tell him to get back to doing what needs to be done, to forget about what’s gone — and who, o’course — and let his brothers tend to the rest of the ritual. But I ain’t, and I can’t.

  The youngest nods at the bare-chested boy, who finally has a match aflame, his hand cupped around it to shield it from the wind. The bare-chested boy tosses it and finds his mark. And then, as flames begin to lick across the hood, my oldest removes the blocks and together they give the car one last shove.

  It rolls toward the cliff and they chase after it, chasing after it like boys running down butterflies when their papa’s trying to learn them what matters. Then the car jumps over the edge and begins its descent. They watch it, hoping for the explosion, hoping they’ve done it right and they’ll send their daddy soaring up to heaven before his body finds its way to hell. And they’re still watching when the fire takes me wherever I’m bound to go. I try to judge by their faces where that is, but only one of them is smiling, and it ain’t the sharpest tool in my shed.

  Books & Letters

  When he sees her pulled from the register to reshelf things, he finds himself a dark corner in the stacks in which to hide. It doesn’t matter which corner — yesterday it was between Weight Loss and Human Sexuality, today it is amidst the tomes of Religion and Philosophy — but he must hide. He cannot see her.

  Three days ago, he mailed the letter to her house. He didn’t know where her locker was at school, after all, so how else was he supposed to do it? And for three days now, he has waited, waited for her to find him and give him an answer. As he stands there, thumbing through The Celestine Prophecy, he imagines he could make it easier for her, but he’s scared he would drop a book on her foot again. For, like, the fifth time. She always tells him that it doesn’t hurt, but she’s stopped wearing shoes with open toes now, so he knows what’s what.

  “Hem, hem,” comes a voice from behind him.

  He slaps the book shut and jams it rudely into the first empty spot he sees.

  A squat woman dressed all in pink steps toward him.

  “I’m on my break,” he tells her.

  “For how much longer?” she asks, nodding discreetly toward the cafe that fills out the back of the bookstore. There is a line forming there, he sees.

  Just as he is about to respond, the girl rounds the corner with her cart and they lock eyes.

  The woman in pink looks from boy to girl, from girl to boy, and gives her head the smallest shake. She walks away.

  “I’m on my break,” he tells the girl.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “It’s almost over.”

  “Right,” she says, ducking her head and nodding. And then, when a lock of hair falls down from her neat bun, she tucks it behind her ear, looks up at him one last time, and nods.

  He stands there until she’s shelved the book in her hand, until she’s taken the cart and pushed past him onto whatever comes next. It is only when he hears the “Hem, hem” one more time that he remembers his role and dashes off to play it.

  * * *

  At school the next morning, when he opens his locker, the letter is there, wedged into the slats at the top; he’s surprised he didn’t notice the edge of it jutting out before he opened the door.

  He holds it for a second, the letter, as his classmates crowd around him, nudging their way toward their own lockers in the cramped hallway. But he pays them no mind, doesn’t respond to their elbows or their glares. He needs to take it in.

  The envelope has been opened neatly, cut at the top by a letter opener he imagines she stole from her father’s office. And his letter is there too, but there’s a smaller piece of paper, a purple one, wrapped around it. And she’s scrawled a note upon it.

  There’s someone else now, reads the first line. I’m so sorry.

  But it’s the second that gets him, the words that appear just above her looping signature: The books hurt less than this does.

  He tosses his own letter back into his locker, then folds hers into a neat square. He stuffs it into his wallet, hides it in a corner so dark that even he will forget where it is.

  Except that he will always know it is there. Always.

  Dogs

  What Marla remembers the most is the way the middle of the suitcase lurched upward as the kid slammed it atop the hood of her truck, the way the middle bulged so big at that moment that she thought the fabric of the thing would tear and send the horror within soaring. There was the thud of course, and the sound of the kid’s Chuck Taylors slapping against the pavement during the escape, but nothing was as vivid in Marla’s mind as the lurch, as the dog’s body, bound within the suitcase, bouncing into the air one last time.

  This is the story she thinks of at the Legion while nursing a Gansett and listening to an ex-cop’s yarn about discovering a dead dog in the bed of a missing Pittsburgh kid some years back. The kid — a wealthy writing student at the local college — it turned out that he done the deed before skipping town.

  “Two in the chest,” says the cop, “while pulling a B&E. His accomplice? Get this: it was his professor.”

  “Get outta here,” says Marla with mock-enthusiasm.

  “I am not shitting you,” says the cop. “It was all hushed up by the college, o’course. Probably why you never heard of it.”

  “That,” says Marla, “or the fact that I ain’t never been to Pittsburgh.”

  “Nah,” says the cop. “If that’d made the news, it’d be all over. National story, I’m telling you.” And then, after a healthy pull from his Coors, the cop adds, “Fucking academics.”

  “Fucking A,” says Marla.

  * * *

  More than anyth
ing, Marla wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forget shit that doesn’t matter, like the name of the guitar-playing punk who sang about the United States of Whatever — Liam Lynch, she remembers, with a wrinkle of her forehead, a twinge in her temples — and she wishes she could forget about the shit that does. That did.

  Back in the day, before she left the wilds of Maine for college in the big city, she owned this Australian shepherd, and there’s this picture of him she has to shake every time she gets called out to deal with some supposedly rabid stray that’s harassing the country clubbers up the hill. The picture is of she and her mutt by the fence of the family farm, the sows he was charged with wrangling blurry in the background, her arms around his neck. There is mud matted in his fur and caked on her windbreaker. A day later, he will run into traffic to chase down a runaway piglet and he will be crushed beneath the wheels of a Jeep Wrangler plowing down their country road. But now, in the picture, in her memory, he is alive and well. His tongue is loose, his one blue eye focused on the camera as he poses, his chest puffed out and proud. In her head, he never dies.

  And she wishes he would.

  * * *

  Still, she keeps one dog around at all times. Two, if she’s fostering some mongrel she can’t bear to see put down. And now, as she stands on the lawn behind the Legion, staring across the pond at an empty beach in the twilight, trying to shake the cop’s story out of her head before it finds a dusty corner to call its own — even now there is a dog beside her. She doesn’t know its name — there’s no tag — and doesn’t know where it came from, but Marla, sucker for punishment, doesn’t shoo him off and tell him to go home. She lets him stay there beside her, lets his drooping belly imprint itself on her brain, lets her brain imagine where the scar on his left ear came from, whether he was overfed before the incident or only in the days since.

  But she does better this time, better with the part that always makes her want to forget. She doesn’t let her mind wander to the natural conclusion, to nature’s conclusion for this poor pooch. Instead, she sends herself backward and sees a puppy chasing butterflies in a field…

  …or pigs…

  …or a little girl who won’t ever want to forget.

  Ventricle

  I’ve forgotten how to hold myself together, so that the cyclone twisting around my heart is tearing one ventricle from the other and casting off the weaker half of me into the gunmetal sky, like the house Aunt Em and Uncle Henry used to own (before the market crashed).

  Crashed, crash, crashing — I am crashing now into a land of make believe named after the second drawer of a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet!

  As I search the prairie for the bloody half-organ that’s been taken from me, I lament my compulsion to understand how things work. I long to be able to read a sentence again for the pure joy of it, never wondering how the writer got to the snow over Ireland or why it was general and not merely widespread.

  I am not the first to find my heart. A straw man has torn himself down from his cross, a woodsman in rusted tin armor has dragged his way out of the forest, and a lion cowers in the shadows of an old oak, lying in wait amongst the poppies growing in its shade, hoping the others will go away.

  They stand aside when they see me, though. Me and the hole in my chest. Yes, they stand back and let me pluck the ruined thing from its place in the corn. They do not protest in word or in deed. For, while they may be wretches, they are not thieves.

  I fit the thing back into my chest and sew the loose flap of flesh to my collarbone with a ribbon I pull from my hair. Then, I wave goodbye to the menagerie and I make my way back toward the house.

  “Don’t you w-worry,” the lion asks me, “about another twister? About it happening again.”

  “It happens every day,” I tell him. “One day it will kill me, but not today. Not today.”

  Forks

  After the funeral and the burial and the celebration of life where distant relations and overreaching parishioners drank his liquor cabinet dry, Andre found himself across the kitchen table from a girl whose index finger was buried deep in the cavern of her right nostril. She’d scrunched up her eyes and her nose, as if squeezing together the features of her face might make it easier to unearth the treasures inside her hollow head. Andre’s stomach churned at the sight, but he said nothing, even though he supposed it was now his place to do so.

  The girl belonged to the wife that Andre had just put in the ground, a leftover from a marriage gone by, and she was now Andre’s by law. At least until she bled and curved out and he could pass her off to someone else. Maybe even get a dowry out of it, if he could get her to stop picking her goddamned nose.

  “Not very ladylike,” he said, picking at his teeth with his thumb.

  “It’s right there,” she said through gritted teeth, still digging.

  Andre reached into the suit coat he’d hung over the back of his chair and produced a hankie. He held it across the table for her to take.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked.

  “Blow your nose,” he said.

  “Never learned how,” she said, finally calling her finger back from the hunt.

  “Never learned?” he said.

  “Never,” she said, wiping her finger along the bodice of her dress, mucus smearing across the new black fabric.

  “You put your nose into it and blow,” he explained, miming the action.

  “That’s awful,” she said.

  “And what you’re doing isn’t?”

  The girl’s eyebrows ticked up upward ever so slightly as her painted lips trembled.

  “What?” said Andre. “What did I say?”

  “My mother,” said the girl, a pair of tears chasing each other down her cheek. “My mother taught me to do it this way.”

  “I never saw her,” Andre began, but before he could finish, the girl stood up sharply from the table, her chair toppling backwards onto the floor, and she said:

  “No, you didn’t.”

  * * *

  Andre met the woman and her daughter on the third of July, down the center of town, where he took townsfolk up in his hot air balloon for a quarter a pop. They were the first in line, wanting to get a ride in before claiming their spot along the sidewalk for the parade the next day, and they were all smiles as they climbed aboard.

  When Andre asked “What’re your names, my pretty ladies?” he was told by the young girl that they were Carla and Carlene respectively.

  “Respectively?” he said, with a smile of his own.

  Carlene, the daughter, she pointed at the gap along the right side of his grin, and she asked her mother what happened to the nice man’s teeth.

  “Lost them,” he said, closing the basket’s door and latching it. “Lost them in the war.”

  Carla, the mother, set a gloved hand upon his bare forearm and gave him a little squeeze. “Oh, you brave soul,” she said.

  He smiled again as he adjusted the flame and took them into the air. “No bravery required to lose a couple of teeth,” he said. “Just a German boot in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  She tilted her head a touch and raised the corners of her lips in a weak attempt at a grin, then said something about his modesty as they lurched upward—a rockier beginning to their ride than Andre had hoped for. But when she stumbled into him, her chest pressed against his, her gloved hand still on his arm, he did not feel sorry.

  Though he did say, “My apologies” as he steadied her, as he held out a hand to steady her daughter as well.

  “My apologies” — it was what he said to her in the dark of her bedroom that night, as well, when he finished before she could.

  She laughed loudly, then quickly covered her mouth as she looked to the door to see if her daughter had been woken.

  The starched sheets clung to his back as he rolled off the top of her, came with him in a twisted mess and left her naked in the moonlight.

  “You,” she whispered, “are the first m
an to ever say that to me.”

  “A French girl taught me manners,” he said, as Carla rolled onto her side and ran a hand along the contours of his chest.

  “What else did she teach you?” said Carla. “Something to make it up to her?”

  Andre blushed.

  Carla slapped his chest so hard it stung, so hard that the sound echoed through the room. She looked to the door again, held still as she waited for a light to come on in the hall.

  “What was that for?” asked Andre.

  “You can’t just blush,” said Carla. “You have to tell me.”

  Instead, he showed her.

  * * *

  “Did you love my mother?” Carlene asked him.

  It was the morning after the funeral and he was spooning sugar atop his apparently tasteless corn flakes in the hopes of appeasing her sweet tooth. The marriage had been young when catastrophe struck, the relationship not much more mature. There had been barely two months in which to learn what these women ate, how they spent their day. Barely two months to learn — or not, as the case might be — of their nasty habits, the affectations he would have to adjust to in this house where he had lived according to routines established by his own mother a lifetime ago.

  He stepped away from her, toward the refrigerator, to gather up the milk and to compose an answer for his lips and for his face. He had appreciated Carla, had been fond of her, of waking to the sight of her pretty face half buried in a pillow on his bed, but had he loved her? He’d been working on it, but that wasn’t what the child wanted to hear.

  Lost in thought, he opened the ice box instead of the fridge, and it was only the blast of cold air that broke him of his reverie.

  Inside, there was nothing but a wrapped-up piece of wedding cake, something he’d been convinced to save for their first anniversary. As he stared through the cellophane at the thick icing piled atop the white cake, his stomach grumbled in hunger.