In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  “But . . .”

  Mary turned and glared at her. “Joan, I’ve got to go down there. We’ve got to find out what happened to Alex’s trail.”

  Joan opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. She had learned, during the past three days, that arguing with Mary Crow was pointless. “Just please be careful,” she said meekly as Mary slipped like a shadow through the trees.

  When Mary had gone, Joan sat down beside a fallen pine and stretched out her legs. Once delicate and high-arched, her feet were now swollen and blistered. They protruded from Mary’s jeans, looking as if they belonged to someone else. She wondered what Natalie, her favorite shoe clerk at Saks, would say if she could see them. I’m so sorry, Ms. Marchetti. No more Ferragamos for you. You’ll have to try the orthopedic store on Thirty-ninth. Joan’s lips trembled as she bit back a sob. Alex had always laughed at her passion for shoes. What a kick she would get out of this. Brooklyn’s answer to Imelda Marcos, she would hoot, condemned to beige oxfords!

  Joan turned her gaze away from her feet and stared through the leaves. Alex, she thought, trying to sharpen the now hazy memory of her teasing friend. Where are you? Has Barefoot done the same thing to you as he did to me, or has he done worse? All at once his stink filled her nostrils as she recalled his rough fingers on her flesh. Raped.

  Violare. Her parents would call down the worst of curses on a man who would do such a thing. Her Uncle Nick would gleefully hack off that man’s balls. And so would I. The realization sizzled through her like a jolt of electricity. I, too, could kill him.

  The shrill chirp of a wren jarred her back to reality. She frowned. Where was Mary? Wasn’t she supposed to come back soon?

  She stood up and nervously scanned the clearing. “Shit!” she cried, wringing her hands. Mary had been gone far too long. Had she gotten lost? Had she fallen and hurt herself? Had Barefoot sprung some sick trap? What was she supposed to do now? And what would happen to her if Mary never came back?

  “Think,” she told herself. “Think like Mary would think.” She forced herself to stand still and try to come up with a plan. If Mary had walked into a trap, then Barefoot would either wait for her to fall into the same trap, or he might get impatient and come looking for her. Mary had taken the palette knife and the paint box; all she had was the nearly empty tube of yellow paint. Though the idea of creeping through the forest alone made her queasy, sitting here waiting to be violated again made her want to throw up.

  “Move,” she finally decided. “Mary would move.”

  Stashing the paint tube in the pocket of Mary’s jeans, she crept down to the clearing. The trail led to a wider patch of trampled grass, then there was nothing. It looked like Alex and Barefoot had come to this spot and simply vanished.

  Okay, Joan thought. Where would Mary have gone from here?

  She turned in a slow circle, her heart thumping. No one direction seemed any more promising than any other, so she moved forward, hesitantly keeping close to the trees.

  The afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground while the forest lay eerily still. She’d felt the same anticipatory hush when she’d sung on stage, as the curtain rose and the audience waited, silent, for the notes to start soaring from her throat.

  Mary, she thought, longing to sing out her name, longing even more to hear her friend’s voice answering in return. But the only sound she heard was the hiss of golden maple leaves, shuddering on a breath of wind.

  On the left the roadbed veered slightly uphill. On the right sprawled a massive thicket of twisting bushes. Laurel, Mary had called it. Appalachian kudzu. Suddenly, Joan stopped. Had she heard something in the dense foliage?

  “Mary?” she called softly, peering into the tangled green darkness.

  Nobody answered. Still, Joan knew Mary was in there, somewhere, searching for Alex. Trust your instincts, she thought as she ducked and stepped into the tangle of high bushes. That’s what Mary would do.

  She picked her way easily through the first spindly plants, then the leaves grew thicker, the branches more confining. Beneath them, the air smelled pungent, choked with rotting vegetation. She started having to shoulder her way between the reluctant bushes, then she had to turn sideways to penetrate them at all. The plants granted no admittance; the further in she pushed, the denser they grew. Suddenly she realized that this was crazy—Mary would never have traipsed through a tangle like this.

  “I’d better get back,” she said aloud. “Mary’s probably waiting back at that log, pissed.”

  Shoving the scratchy branches away from her face, she turned. All at once her legs went limp. The coiling foliage had swallowed the path she’d just made: the laurel itself seemed to have closed behind her like a wall. Every plant loomed above her, blocking out all light and air.

  “Mary?” she called, bewildered, a sudden cold sweat bathing her body.

  There was no answer.

  “Mary?” she called louder. Her voice edged toward panic. What an idiot she’d been. What had ever made her think she could navigate these woods like Mary Crow?

  She turned quickly, then felt something slash against the top of her hair. She remembered the hawk, plummeting down from the sky, its talons like knives, and she started to whimper. Instinctively, she ran, tearing headlong through the unyielding bushes. Leaves clawed at her eyes, branches snatched at her legs as she fought her way through the malignant green maze.

  “No!” she cried, thrashing through the twisted bushes that held her prisoner. She wanted to go back the way she’d come, but the leaves crowded around her, cutting her off from any place that looked familiar. Was she going forward? Or running in endless circles? Panic gripped her. She ran faster, growing dizzy, all the plants now tilting, thrusting maliciously toward the sky. Suddenly she stepped on something sharp. She cried out as a white-hot pain sizzled up her foot and into her thigh. She toppled forward. Lurching to her feet, she kept moving, charging recklessly through the thick plants. As she shoved between two towering bushes, her foot snagged on a root. This time, she fell sprawling, biting her tongue as her left cheek hit the earth. With the warm, metallic taste of blood filling her mouth, she crawled beneath a bush, seeking shelter like some stricken animal. Gasping, she sat up and examined her foot. A huge thorn lay imbedded just below her big toe. Already the fleshy part of her sole was hot and throbbing in time to the frantic rhythm of her heart.

  “Shit!” she cried. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Without thinking, she grabbed the thorn and yanked hard. The sharp point broke off, but most of the thorn remained buried deep in her flesh.

  All at once she felt sweaty and nauseous, just as she had when she was five and her brother Frank had locked her in their hall closet. Then, hot woolen coats had pressed against her, robbing her of the air she needed to breathe. Now coiling bushes kept her captive, their branches trapping her in an emerald darkness where the air smelled like the moldy insides of an old refrigerator. How she would love to breathe fresh air again! How she would love to see the sky!

  Suddenly she could bear it no longer. She grabbed the laurel leaves above her with both fists and tore them from their branches.

  “Shit!” she cried, cackling like a madwoman. “Shit! Shit! Shit! I’m going to be strangled by a bunch of fucking bushes!”

  All at once, the shredded leaves that flew around her turned into women. Every Mary she’d ever known floated to the ground smiling, radiant as pictures in a missal. Mary Crow. Sister Mary Ignatius. Sister Mary Magdalen. The Virgin Mary. “Help me,” Joan pleaded, now sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m trying so hard. Please don’t let me die here. Please tell me what to do. . . .”

  “Joan?”

  The sound startled her so that she was sitting up before she was even awake.

  “Joan? Is that you?”

  Joan struggled to focus in the dark, bracing herself to run. Hours must have passed since she’d collapsed beneath this bush. A figure crouched in front of her, someone dirty, hunkering down like an animal. The smell of fear hun
g rank in the air. Joan bit down a scream. Was this a dream, or had Barefoot found her? Would she die here without anyone ever knowing what had happened to her?

  “Good God, Joan! Where in the hell have you been?” Mary grabbed her so hard Joan felt the breath leave her lungs. “I didn’t know what had happened to you!”

  Joan felt Mary’s arms around her, felt her sweatshirt soaked with perspiration. She was trembling so hard she could barely speak. She was not dreaming! Mary had returned!

  “Why on earth did you come in here?” Mary cried. “Why didn’t you stay where I told you to?”

  “I was looking for you,” whimpered Joan. “Please don’t yell at me . . .”

  Mary let Joan go and stared into her eyes. In the dark her dirt-streaked face gave her the look of some aboriginal mud-woman. “You don’t know what this is, do you?”

  The warm comfort Joan had felt just seconds before evaporated. Trembling, she shook her head.

  Mary looked at her fiercely. “This is a Hell, Joan. A dog-hobble. A huge sprawl of bushes that could go on for miles. Hillbillies write songs about people who wander into these things and never find their way out. I’ve been crawling through these bushes for hours. If I hadn’t heard you snoring, I’d never have found you.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be so nasty about it,” Joan retorted, close to tears. “After all, I was the one who was lost—”

  Mary gave a weary sigh. She released Joan and brushed a tangled snarl of hair from her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. “You didn’t know, I should have warned you.”

  For a while neither of them spoke; then, with another sigh, Mary curled up beneath the laurel like a bone-tired child. She lay with her back toward Joan, and in the green darkness she looked no more animate than a lump of earth.

  Joan watched her until the silence between them seemed to stretch for miles, and she felt as if the two of them suddenly inhabited separate islands in a distant archipelago. When she could bear it no longer, she whispered, “Are you mad at me?” Her voice cracked in the darkness like a child’s.

  “No,” Mary answered flatly. “Just tired.”

  The thorn in Joan’s foot was throbbing like a hot coal. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad trouble?”

  Mary turned over. Her expression was lost in the shadows. “I don’t know, Joan. We’re hurt. We’re hungry. We lost Alex’s trail, and now we’ve lost ourselves in this Hell. Does that sound like trouble to you?”

  Again, Joan started to tremble. Mary made everything sound so hopeless. “Maybe when the sun comes up . . .” she began.

  “The sun can’t penetrate this laurel, Joan. It’s never more than twilight in a Hell. There aren’t any streams to drink from, and nothing edible to forage. It could take us days to crawl out of here.”

  Joan began to cry. How she had wanted to please Mary—to prove just one time that she wasn’t the wuss Alex had called her. But she’d failed utterly. She’d gotten them both impossibly lost in this stupid tangle of bushes. She wished Barefoot had just killed her back at that spring. It would have made it easier for everybody. Then Mary might have had a chance.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, her breath coming in gulps. “I’m so very sorry . . .”

  She hunched over in a small knot as she wept, filthy, hungry, and more miserable than she’d ever dreamed possible. They were hopelessly lost and it was all her fault. And now Alex would surely die, if she wasn’t dead already. Then suddenly she felt Mary’s bracing arms around her, her breath whispering into her hair.

  “Save your tears, honey. I learned years ago they never change a thing.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  Mary squeezed her. “We’re going to rest a little while, then we’re going to move on.”

  Joan blinked. “In the dark?”

  “Dark, light, it doesn’t make much difference in here.”

  “So we’re not giving up? We’re still going to look for Alex?”

  Mary didn’t answer at first, then she spoke, sounding as if she were a thousand years old. “No, Joan. Alex is gone. We lost her when we got tangled up in this Hell. From here on the only thing we’ll be looking for is a way out of here. And we’ll be very lucky if we find that.”

  Joan looked up through the branches that coiled high above their heads. Not a star or a glimmer of moonlight shone through the leaves, which seemed to press down upon them like a shroud. What a rotten place to die , she thought, and she crept closer to Mary, knowing nothing could save them now.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  It’s going to be daydown soon,” Mitch said, using the Real Life Cherokee’s quaint term for sunset as a line of pines turned to somber silhouettes against a wild tangerine horizon. “Time for tired little trackers to make camp for the night.”

  But he walked for a few minutes more, watching as the golden light paled to mauve. Above him an owl hooted hidden in the trees; on the ground, the forest floor was spongy with moss and dead leaves. He wondered what everyone was doing at home. His mother was probably keeping company with Jack Daniels and Oprah Winfrey while his father barked orders from the library. Cal, he suspected, was sitting in his cell, royally pissed that their father hadn’t been able to buy him out of this mess. Is my testimony still funny now, Cal? Does the hour I spent for you being humiliated by Mary Crow still crack you up like it did in court that day?

  “I hope so, bro,” Mitch said aloud. “Hope you still think it’s just a scream.”

  When he tripped over the roots of a sprawling tree and nearly fell, he decided it was time to stop. No point in breaking an ankle, he thought. It’s not like Mary Crow’s going anywhere.

  Beneath a white spruce he staked three tent poles in the ground, clipped his orange tent to them and crawled inside, pulling his rifle and gear after him. He dug in his pack for his lantern, which lay tucked beneath the duct tape and clothesline he’d bought at the convenience store. He switched on the light and a small radio, bathing the tent in a tropical glow and filling the air with the sounds of a scratchy R&B station out of Chattanooga. He knew he would be highly visible listening to music in a tent the color of a cantaloupe, but why should he care? He and the Beretta could deal with anything that appeared at his tent flap, and if Mary Crow and company came by, so much the better. It would save him a lot of shoe leather in the morning.

  He heated some freeze-dried beef stew on his propane stove and topped off his dinner with a chocolate bar. Unrolling his sleeping bag, he remembered how the Real Life Cherokee had admired his gear, especially this bag. The Indian would have loved the Beretta, too, if he’d ever gotten a chance to see it. Oh, well, Mitch thought, as he climbed into the bag’s featherweight warmth. Shit happens.

  He turned up the radio. As Al Green’s thumping “Let’s Stay Together” filled the tent, he rolled over on his side and closed his eyes. He tried hard to revisit Rio Blanco, but his dreams took him in another direction.

  Sandra is on top of him, her tongue working in lazy circles around his nipples and down the cordon of hair that bisects his belly. He’s anticipated her ultimate destination; already his dick feels hot and swollen, rising to meet her touch. She’s at his navel now; he feels the soft weight of her breasts sliding down his thighs.

  Suddenly his cell phone chirps from his trousers by the bed. Sandra stops, looks up.

  “You expecting a call?” she asks, her honey-colored eyes surprised.

  “No,” he tells her, trying not to sound annoyed. “Ignore it.”

  “I don’t think you’d better,” she says, rising off him as the phone chirps on. “It sounds important.”

  Irritated, he rolls over and grabs for the phone. Cal’s voice, drunk, stoned, whatever else Cal is, comes on.

  “No,” he replies. “I can’t come get you. Not now.”

  But Cal pleads, begs, even weeps. Christ, his twenty-one-year-old brother bawling like a baby! The cops will get me, Cal insists. If I get busted aga
in Dad will kill me.

  He sighs, knowing his brother will not give up; has never in his life allowed “no” to thwart him. “Okay, Cal,” he sighs.“Stay right there.”

  He hangs up the phone and dresses, easing trousers tenderly over a dick that has not yet gotten the message.

  “Where are you going?” Sandra asks.

  “To get my asswipe brother,” he answers, too angry to say more. “He’s down at Five Points, stoned.”

  “Oh, bring him back here,” she says. “I want to meet him.”

  “No you don’t,” he snaps, knowing what always happens when his handsome brother meets women. “He’s a jerk.”

  “Oh, come on, Mitch. He can sober up here.Then he can go and you can stay.” She looks up at him so sweetly, what can he

  say? No, I’m afraid my little brother will steal you away?

  “Okay,” he says, brushing her large, dark nipple with his fingertip. “But only till he’s able to drive.”

  He picks Cal up. He’s done a lot of coke and some other street drugs he’s probably never heard of. Cal’s head wobbles on his neck, but his eyes are bright, his cheeks red. Cal’s knuckles are swollen; he complains that he’s been in a fight.

  Don’t do this, a voice tells him, but he ignores it. He will not allow himself to fear his fucked-up little brother.

  Later, she opens the door to both of them, smiling especially sweet when she sees Cal. “Hello,” she says, like they were meeting at some damned cocktail party. “Mitch has told me so much about you!”

  Which is a lie. He’s told her nothing. He wishes he had no brother; wishes Cal would overdose on something and die.

  They sit on her sofa; she in the middle between them. Cal pulls a bottle of whiskey from one pocket and a tin of white powder from the other. “Let’s party!” he says.

  Cal and Sandra do a few lines of coke and turn on the CD player too loud. The downstairs neighbor starts banging on the ceiling. The phone rings—another neighbor calling to complain about the racket, threatening the police. He turns down the CD, but Cal turns it back up again.