The odor of the stew and the Spam cooking filled the campsite along with the darkness that settled in around them. The sulking sky was a sign that the rain was going to get heavier..
Bennett and Fred set up their tents. Bennett would share his with Lucius, Fred and Henry would share the other. Rob was going to share a tent with Mike, and Tom had brought one for himself and Cory.
“Where are they?” Rob asked.
It got darker and the drizzle became a steady rain and the five men huddled around the fire sipping at a bottle of Pendleton they passed around and swapping stories.
They talked about ‘first fuck.’ For Bennett it was a neighbor’s daughter in a hayloft in northern California.
For Fred it was a high school date, doggy style, in a canoe on Lake Casitas, down in Ventura County.
Rob, who had a space blanket over him while he waited for Mike to bring up his camping gear, talked about an older stepsister who had spent months diddling him into rapture before she finally took him all the way. He was thirteen.
For Henry, it was his wife.
“Your wife was your first?” Bennett asked then laughed.
Henry didn’t answer.
“Were you her first?” Rob asked and he laughed.
“Were you the last?” Lucius asked.
The men caught a disapproving look from Fred. But if Henry minded, it didn’t show.
Lucius said. “I’ve had ‘em all; brown sugar, white sugar. But the first one, I was fifteen, almost as big as I am now, and she was a married woman in the apartment complex we lived in when I started high school down near San Diego. Her husband was away on a ship. So was my dad. Different ships, though,” and he realized that was how Henry had been cuckolded. But Henry didn’t seem fazed at all, so he continued his story, and when he finished, they all fell quiet.
“Where do you think they are now?” Rob suddenly asked.
“Who?” Fred asked.
“Mike and the other guys, asshole. Who do you think?”
“They should be here any time now,” Fred said remembering them for the first time in a while.
“Poor suckers, they have to hike through this rain in the dark,” Lucius said.
“Fuck ‘em,” Rob said.
“They’ve got the tent you’re supposed to sleep in,” Fred reminded him.
“Let ‘em bring the tent, then fuck ‘em.”
They all found that funny. The booze and the fire made them all feel better.
“I don’t care if they or the tent ever show up,” Bennett said.
“Fuck you, too,” Rob said.
“Looks like you’re going to get wet tonight,” Lucius said.
“Like I say,” Bennett said, “I don’t care if they ever show up.”
They all laughed and Fred said, “Let’s get another load of wood. We can have a good raging bonfire when they get here. Anyone bring a flashlight besides me?”
He got up and went to his pack and retrieved his flashlight. Bennett and Rob got flashlights from their packs, Henry hadn’t brought one and Lucius had a big five cell that he ordinarily kept in his car.
Fred shined his light down into the creek and played it on the running water. Bennett, Lucius and Rob used their flashlights to join in. They did this for several minutes.
“Any fish down there?” Rob asked.
“Dunno,” Fred said. “I don’t fish.
“You won’t find fish in a creek like this,” Henry said.
“How would you know?” Rob challenged.
Henry didn’t answer.
“Can you three guys get the wood?” he asked Lucius, Bennett and Rob.
“Sure,” Bennett said answering for the three of them, and they set out down the creek to fetch more wood.
“Get enough for a breakfast fire,” Fred called after them.
He sat down on a rock facing Henry over the fire. They could hear the three calling to each other as they went down the path until the sibilant flow of the creek drowned out their voices, and they watched the play of lights until they were almost out of sight.
“Where do you think the others are?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know,” Fred answered. “They should have been here an hour ago. Maybe they had to camp downstream.”
Henry said nothing.
“Maybe they got pissed at us and they went home,” Fred suggested.
“I don’t think Mike would have left Rob high and dry…or wet, as the case may be. He knows that Rob is supposed to share a tent with him.”
“He might have skipped out anyway.”
“He’s your brother-in-law. You know him better than anyone else here.”
“Yeah. He wouldn’t skip. We’ll wait a little longer before we worry about them.” He threw more wood on the fire.
“What do you think happened to that hiker?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s funny, that car with the smashed windshield, the tools abandoned at Cougars Camp, the fire places wrecked. And Lucius is right, those shoes, they were a left and right one from the same set.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. It’s like something’s happening all around us but we can’t see it yet.”
“I think you’re letting your imagination run away in the dark.”
Henry said nothing.
“Want a little water?” Fred asked.
“Sure.”
The canteen was almost empty.
“Do the guys know about what’s going on with me and my wife?” Henry suddenly asked.
Fred shrugged in the glow of the fire and realized it might not be seen. “Dunno,” he lied.
“It kind of showed a couple of times when they made jokes. But it’s okay. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I’d like to get out of it. Get out of both of them; my marriage and my job — before the company cans me.”
So, he knew about what was happening with his job, Fred thought. “I’m sure you’ll work things out,” he said.
“I almost don’t care if we get back.”
“What do you mean?”
Henry didn’t answer.
“We’ve all got to be back in time for work Monday morning.”
“I feel like quitting.”
“Quitting?”
“Everything. The job…my family…I may just stay up here for a few days longer. Let you guys go back by yourselves.”
“You can’t do that. You’ve got to support yourself and your family.”
Henry shook his head.
“Is that why you asked if anyone ever tried living out here? Living off the land?”
“I started thinking about it as we were coming up here. And I know you know how shaky my job status is. I’m probably going to lose it anyway.”
Fred didn’t know what to say.
“It’s not that I can’t do the job…it’s that I’m lost.”
Fred was beginning to feel uneasy. But he liked Henry.
“This hike has been harder on me than it has on you guys,” Henry said. “I’m in such lousy shape. I feel like I’ve had to fight all the way up here. But I made it. I feel like I won something. Nothing tangible. But I haven’t felt this good about myself in years. I don’t want that good feeling to go away.”
“That sounds pretty good,” Fred said.
“It’s damned good.”
“But quitting your job is liable to end your marriage for sure.”
“That’s done, anyway. And it wasn’t the lack of a job that did it. It was me. I’d become a nothing.
“Correction: I’d let myself become a nothing. What kind of a woman wants a guy who’s a nothing, who’s just coasting along on the tides of life letting it take him aimlessly wherever it pleases? I was in the Navy. I know how important a rudder is. I didn’t have a rudder.”
Fred was trying to think of a way to change the subject.
“I lost my way. Somewhere I lost it. I stayed in the Navy for twenty years to play it safe. I wanted
the retirement so I could play it safe. I just lost my bearing playing it safe. And I lost her. And it was long before she first fucked somebody else. Whatever it is that makes me “me,” I lost it. I don’t blame her for what she’s done.
“She was seventeen when I met and married her. She was a kid and she wanted a hero. I gave her a guy who joined the Navy and stayed in for twenty years because I didn’t know what else to do with my life. There’s nothing wrong with making a career out of the Navy. But that’s not why I stayed in.”
He fell silent, and Fred was glad.
Then he started up again. “She stuck it out for a long time hoping I’d become something. But I didn’t.
“I feel like I lost myself somewhere back there in Michigan or maybe when I joined the Navy. And I lost whatever it was I had had with her. I don’t blame her for sleeping around. I cared at first. Now I blame myself.”
Oh, how he wished Henry would shut up. “You shouldn’t say those things about yourself.”
“It’s all right. They’re true. But this hike has done something. I’ve done something for myself for the first time in years, and for the first time in years I feel good.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” Fred said.
“No, not yet… Connie would know what I mean.” He was talking about his wife again. “Maybe when I get back we can work something out. I know how to find myself again. Maybe she’ll find me. No, that’s not right. Maybe she can find the guy she thought she married.”
Henry stopped talking and they sat in silence and watched the fire, one embarrassed for the other. But the other was reveling in the novelty of being content with himself for the first time in decades.
The boys were working their way back up the creek and as they reached the luminescent halo thrown by the fire, Fred could see that each labored under a burden of wood which they dropped in the proximity of the fire pit.
Breaking the wood into lengths suitable for the fire became a game. Taking thick branches, they would wield them like bats against the rocks, letting half yard long pieces fly off. Lucius was best, taking the biggest limbs and usually breaking them with a single swing.
“You thinking about whacking honkies when you break those logs?” Bennett asked.
“Just the ones in management at Hawker & Shoal,” Lucius answered and they all laughed.
Even Henry, and he said, “Then let me swing a few of those,” and getting up he pushed Lucius aside.
Though they didn’t break as readily when Henry swung them, they broke nonetheless. But he tired quickly and Bennett took over.
When he sat down, Henry took the bottle of whiskey and looked at it. There was about a cup left. He took a nip and passed it on.
“Wood bustin’ fluid,” Lucius called it when the bottle was passed to him and taking a swig he moved Bennett aside and started breaking the wood again, pieces barely coming to rest on the ground before he had another one flying in the air.
“I’m done,” he said after he had broken the last piece. “Now, you honkies stack it.”
“Yessir, Massa Lucius, yessir,” Bennett said. “Don’t you go whippin’ us po’ little ole crackers.”
Lucius gave him a hug then said, “Now, you get to work, or I will.”
And Bennett and Rob stacked the wood within reach. And when that was done, they all hunkered around the fire.
“Where the hell is Mike?” Rob asked looking down along the darkened creek in the direction from which they were expected to come.
“If they don’t get here we can make some sleeping arrangements for you tonight,” Fred said.
“Why wouldn’t they get here?” Lucius asked.
“Henry and I figure it might have gotten too dark for them and they had to pitch camp further back.”
“Or they might have decided to go home,” Bennett said.
“Yeah, we thought about that, too.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do to Mike if he left me here,” Rob said.
“They probably just camped down there because of the dark,” Lucius said.
“Well,” Fred said, “you wouldn’t want them hiking in the dark. You know that place where Rob saw the deer. You wouldn’t want them trying to walk there in the dark.”
“I never said it was a deer,” Rob said.
“What’s this about seeing something?” Lucius asked.
“Rob just thought he saw something down on the canyon floor back there.”
“I’m not really sure I actually saw anything,” Rob said.
“What did it look like?” Lucius asked.
“It didn’t look like anything. It was in the brush.”
“What made you notice it?”
“It was moving along the canyon floor.”
“That canyon floor was quite a ways down,” Lucius said. “I wouldn’t have noticed anything unless it was big.”
“It was nothing,” Fred said.
Rob looked at Fred as if he’d just accused him of making it all up.
“I never liked guns,” Lucius said. “But for the first time in my life I’d feel more comfortable if we had just one up here tonight.”
“Smelled that fishy smell again when we were getting wood,” Bennett said.
They all fell silent.
Then Fred asked, “Was it there when you got wood earlier?”
“The smell? No.”
They hunched around the fire, each with his own thoughts, and it started to rain harder.
“This much wood will last until we go to bed,” Fred said, “and there’ll still be some left for the morning.”
“What time do you figure we’ll go to bed?” Rob asked him.
“About nine or ten o’clock. There’s really nothing to do once you get up here except eat, drink, and sleep.”
“Wish I’d brought a pussy with me,” Bennett said. “Then I’d have something to do.”
“Try a handful of sardines,” Lucius said.
“I figured on staying up late,” Rob said.
“Go ahead,” Fred told him. “But if they’re not here, crawl in the tent with me and Henry.”
“I’ll stay up a while…Fucking Mike…I’m gonna need more wood to stay warm.”
“Then get it,” Fred said.
“Fuck Mike,” Rob repeated and stood up. He took his flashlight and started back down the creek. Henry watched him descend to the level of the creek, swinging his light as he went, when he stopped. He shined the light ahead of himself, through the yawning darkness and rain.
Henry watched him stand there for all of twenty seconds and then he turned around and ran back. When he reached the fire he had trouble talking.
“What’s wrong?” Henry asked.
“There’s something out there.”
“What?” Fred asked.
“An animal.”
“Probably a raccoon,” Fred said.
“No…eyes…” He didn’t know how to say it. “It’s bigger than a raccoon.”
“Where?” Bennett asked.
“Down where we got the wood.”
“How big is it?” Lucius asked.
“All I can see for sure is the reflection of the eyes. But it’s big.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Fred said.
They all got up and walked to the creek and shined their lights down the creek to where they had earlier gotten the wood.
Rob hung back. “I saw it from here,” he said and stopped.
“What was it doing?” Bennett asked.
“Staring.”
“Could it have been a cat?” Fred asked.
“No. This was no cat. It looked bigger than a cat.”
“How could you tell how big it was?” Henry asked.
“The size of the eyes and how far they were apart.”
“Probably those guys trying to scare us,” Fred said.
“Who?” Lucius asked.
“Mike, Tom, and Cory,” Fred said.
“How would they get their eyes to shine lik
e that in the dark?” Rob asked.
“I don’t know,” Fred said. “Are you sure you saw something?”
“What the fuck? You’re an asshole. Of course I’m sure.”
“Calm down. I’m just asking.”
“If they’re screwing with us, I’ll screw with them when they get here,” Lucius said.
They stood there in the rain for a minute, panning the darkness with their flashlights.
Then Henry said, “I’m going back to the fire.”
Fred, then Bennett followed him leaving Rob and Lucius to peer into the darkness.
“There it is again,” Rob yelled.
“Where?” Fred asked as they came back.
“Over there on the other side of the creek,” Rob said.
“I don’t see anything,” Fred said.
“Me either,” Bennett said.
“You sure you’re seeing something?” Fred asked.
“I saw it, too,” Lucius said quietly, and they turned to him.
“What did you see?” Fred asked.
“Eyes,” Lucius said.
“What do you mean?” Fred asked.
“Eyes.”
“What were they doing?”
“Watching us.”
“Where?” Fred asked shining his light across the creek.
“They’re gone now.”
“It’s them — the other guys.”
“No way,” Lucius said.
“How do you know?”
“If you’d seen it, you’d know it’s not them.”
“If it’s them,” Rob said, “I’ll kick Mike’s ass myself.”
“Let’s get back to the fire,” Bennett said. And they retreated to the fire, crouching around it like their ancestors hunkered around fires forty thousand years before.
“Give me another nip of that booze,” Lucius said.
“Have to get another bottle out of Bennett’s pack,” Henry said. “This one’s dead.”
“I’ll get it,” Fred said and he got up, stepped into the shadows. He returned with the bottle and sat down at the fire again. “Think it could have been some kind of wild cat?” he asked Lucius.
“No, those weren’t cat’s eyes. But I don’t hanker for any wild cats, either.”
“How about wild pussy?” Bennett asked.
No one laughed.
“You guys sure you didn’t set this up with the other guys while you were down getting wood and Henry and I were sitting here?” Fred asked.
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