Wild Blues

by Beth Kephart

  And then he laughed.

  You have said that was it. You have said, in the court, according to my mom, who went and listened, that’s how you knew, how the lightning struck. This man out there on the tracks, in the morning mist, this man that you might have once called Dad, was the very same man that he had been when you were young and he killed a trooper man who was doing nothing more than filling his Crown Victoria with gas. Your father had pulled into the station, seen something he didn’t like, and that was it. Murder in cold blood. No gold. No reason he ever confessed to. Your dad was that man, and he had no redemption in him, nothing but hate for everyone but him, and now that man, your dad, the one that you had come to save, was walking through the valley mist toward the ridge with the first of the sun crashing against his head, and a pup was hurt, and he wasn’t a man you wanted as Dad.

  He wasn’t the man you’d hoped for.

  You left the car where it was. You left the key in the ignition. The escapees were closer now, on the abandoned railroad line, headed for the ridge. You slid across the seat to the passenger side. You found the knife you’d slid into the glove compartment, just in case, an alternate plan. You did what you did, you heard the air sizz, you hunched and ran up into the trees as the men started their climb. You hid behind the thickest one.

  You were out of breath, you said.

  You were wild with the fear of what would happen next.

  You watched. You saw how it was, how they climbed up the ridge, hurried to the car, got in, never even looked for you, never waited, not one second for you, sweet Caroline.

  How they drove.

  How they laughed.

  How they thought they were as good as gone, too much ugly in them, too much boast for them to realize, at least just then, that they were driving on two flats. That you had sliced those tires straight to sizz.

  You let them believe in their new freedom.

  You let them believe they had won.

  You couldn’t imagine what would happen after that. How six million acres of the world’s prettiest earth would shut down. How a Salvadoran boy with two canes and bad hips would be swept into the chase. How my uncle with his limp would go out there in his TV shoes and his bow tie. How I would come to the top of a new mountain and hear the song of the Moravian bird and keep climbing.

  You couldn’t imagine.

  And you had left your fingerprints.

  96

  ONE NOTE. TWO BREATHS. I heard it again. The sun had fallen into stripes between the trees. The earth had risen at its angle. The saw-whet blinked. I hoisted the pack higher on my back.

  I’m here.

  Horace Kephart would set off into the woods with his tent, his poles, his pegs, his canvas bucket and his spirit stove, his waterproof matches and his knife, and gladly not look back. He would go up against bears and snakes and lonesomeness, poison ivy, white cave rats, rhododendron jungles, and stand there, on the elastic earth, alive. He would go so deep in, get so twirled up, grow so dark inside the dark, but he’d look ahead. Footloose and free, he said. Independent. The man alone in the woods was a privileged man, seeing country no one else ever had, capable of more. Keep going. Trust the woods. Give the woods your heart.

  I was a girl, thirteen years old. I am that girl still. I was strict out of provisions. My jeans were boards, the bugs were mean, I couldn’t see light for all the darkness that there was, and the only privilege I could feel was imagining what would happen next. I would cut the escapees down. I would find Uncle Davy and Matias—alive and mine and unharmed. I would tell Sergeant Williams, then CNN, all that I’d done, and because of all I’d done, because I was born with my own blood, because I am 100 percent of the person I am, Mom would get well and the estrangement would end and Dad would know that I wasn’t him and I would have fixed every problem we’d ever had. Anything was possible in how I imagined next.

  Standing on the angle of the earth, I felt Keppy at my back, in the bottom of my pack. I felt the weight of Tiburcio’s courage in my hand. I heard my own voice inside my head: Don’t stop. I walked through the stripes of the sun under the lurch of the trees, and when the breeze blew, the leaves shook and it rained, but just for seconds, again. Sometimes the light shone through the wheels of spiderwebs and I’d go blind, and once, when I looked up, I saw the white head of a bald eagle slicing through the sky. I was hot and cold and out of breath and I climbed, and right there, you can believe it or not, I saw that fox again, the same black-purple raven in its jaws.

  I saw it, but then it was gone.

  Finally, again, the song was sung. The Moravian bird was closer now—top of that mountain, around a bend, where the trees were coming to a stop and the sun was falling more completely in and the bugs looked like a tornado funnel, the way the light was hitting them.

  I didn’t see next until I looked up again.

  97

  ONCE DURING A RAINSTORM AT the schoolhouse cabin, my uncle told a story. This was a thousand years ago, when I was twelve, before I knew what I know now about hearts and how they will beat even after they have burst.

  It had been storming, too much rain to leave the cabin. We’d marathoned a game of Chinese checkers. Polished the gears on a clock. Made our own breakfast hash, with crispy bacon and tender ham. We sat at the kitchen table eating, my uncle fingering the acorns and telling me the latest news about the Cream of Wheat advertisements, the old-fashioned ones, which was the subject of his latest column. Afternoon got to be evening. Evening got to be dark enough that he could puppeteer his stories.

  He climbed to the loft. I sat on the trundle, lay back, pulled the blanket to my chin. He powered on the flashlight and bobbed its yellow lamp above the crescent moon. He froze the tumbling dust.

  “Once,” Uncle Davy began, “there was a rainstorm in the woods. Three days of rain that turned the creeks to streams, the pools to ponds, the lakes into the start of rivers. All roads were flooded. All birds were grounded. The bats were stir-crazy in their caves. The frogs were stuffed into the hollows of the logs.”

  Uncle Davy flickered his fingers into the spotlight.

  “Rain like that,” he said.

  He was all alone, he said. The mountains were sliding, the mud was thick, the schoolhouse cabin was getting clobbered by wind, and it seemed to him that it’d be but a short couple of ticks before the earth would become one unending waterslide. He imagined the corn whipping away, the tomatoes rolling, the cabin breaking loose, all of everything floating back through time. He thought it was the end.

  “Then.”

  (In the light on the wall the shadows of his fingers stopped raining and six knuckles rose, three from each of his hands.)

  “I heard it roar. Loudest commotion you ever heard. Like an old man snoring through a megaphone that had been slapped against my ear. A sound like that.

  “You know what it was, Lizzie?”

  I shook my head. “An earthquake?”

  “No.”

  “An avalanche?”

  “No.”

  “A bear as black as the burned bottom of a pan?”

  “Bigger than that,” he said.

  Only one thing bigger than a bear in the six million acres. I knew it, from biology.

  “Yes,” he said. “A big bull moose with a six-foot crown of antlers upon its head and a bellow like the earth itself was speaking.”

  Uncle Davy could see it staring in at him through the crescent moon, he said. Just one eye, turned to the side, a profile glance into the schoolhouse cabin of Victorian finds, into my uncle’s heart. The rain was washing everything away, but the moose stood, it didn’t budge. Its face in the window started to nod, up and down, so that my uncle, sitting at the kitchen table, by himself, could see the forty pounds of mega rack, the flop of muzzle, the ridiculous bell, the big dark-brown face nodding up and down.

  “I could see the moose but only in fractions,” Uncle Davy said. “The moose, with its one brown curious eye, could see all of me.”

  Outside
the rain fell down. Out on the porch, by the crescent moon, the moose stood nodding. One small itch of irritation and the moose could crash on through, bull its way through the Victorian finds, take the schoolhouse as its hostage.

  But that’s not how my uncle’s story ends.

  My uncle’s story ends like this: The moose didn’t leave until the big storm stopped. My uncle had been saved.

  98

  THE MORAVIAN BIRD SANG—ONE NOTE, two breaths.

  It was out there.

  They were.

  They had to be.

  There were long lines on my skin where the thorns had dug in. There was that poison-ivy rash, a hot spot beneath the Band-Aids, big blooms of bruises on my knees, and I didn’t stop. I pulled myself up by the arms of the trees. I caught myself on the pebbly path and on the skids of moss, and when the slippery stuff or the slope pushed me back, I slammed forward, up and up, until the trees began to thin to barely any trees and the slope went up at a harder angle and I had to stop to catch my breath and then I started again.

  I was so close.

  I was so sure.

  I was coming.

  All the way up the hill with its moss. All the way up, the mountain growing steeper. All the way up, and then the mountain stopped short and flattened out into wide, smooth rock, and then the rock broke and there was nothing but a trickle of a stream way, way, way below—nothing but rock, then air, then water. I slid straight to the edge of the rock. Caught myself in the nick of time. Saved myself from tumbling over the edge, into the plunge.

  I tried to catch my breath.

  I tried to calm my heart.

  A bald eagle sliced the higher sky.

  A crow flapped.

  It was so far below and so far across to the gorge’s other side. I tried not to look, not to think about how many feet down—twenty? Thirty?—it might be. I thought my heart might stop, just imagining this. Suddenly I was lost in a crowd of butterflies—light and dark, blue and white. Butterflies, all over. When I could see past them again, through them, I saw, like a miracle, a stone bridge, like a delicate arch, like something someone might have carved. A stone bridge across the gorge, across the stream below.

  One note. Two breaths.

  I heard the song and looked up, across. I saw what I hadn’t seen yet—an Adirondack lean-to, a landmark hut, just three sides and a roof. Left out there with a fire ring and a water bucket and a toilet pit, a camper’s place to stop. The song was coming from that place where people stopped.

  The stony mountain had been split and there was bridge between the two rock ledges, and if I didn’t move fast, I’d be out of time.

  Choose.

  You get to choose.

  It was up to me.

  Over that thin stone bridge and a stretch of rumpled gorge, where there were logs and twigs and leaves, a mess. Over a smattering of spruce and pine and moss, a narrow clearing where the bright stream ran, and I was thinking about what Keppy had said, about the boughs of a spruce being a perfect, gentle bed. Just get us all home safe, I thought. To bed.

  99

  ONCE, ON THE BIG WHALE of that rock, in the earliness of day, Matias told a story. It was the last day of my first summer with Matias, and the sky that we could see was cloudless, and words I didn’t know included “estrangement” and “vanish.”

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  I did.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now you’re there.”

  “There” was El Salvador, the coffee farm, the weighing plateau, the breeze blowing through because it wasn’t coffee-picking season. It was Tiburcio in one hammock and Matias in another and a canopy of mango trees above their heads, the orange-chinned parakeets chattering in the glossy green above, and the coffee trees on the slopes beyond blooming their white flowers, like jasmine, Matias said. The crystal pool where Matias sometimes swam was down one way. The ocelets were higher on the jungle hill. There were butterflies like birds, the scuttle of an armadillo, a toucan’s call. In the beauty and in the danger, my best friend and his best friend lay, Tiburcio’s machete in its sleeve slung loose across his chest.

  They were shorter than no one, and defended.

  The breeze was rocking the hammocks. Matias was half asleep as Tiburcio talked, telling the Pipil story of the great Quetzalcoatl, the god of civilization, the force of goodness, the source of light, the serpent wearing feathers. Tiburcio talked and Matias remembered and still my eyes were closed as I imagined Queztalcoatl, who went down to the land of the dead after the fourth world ended and fought his way back up against the dark and turned bones and blood into man and woman, boy and girl, who is the reason for the beginning of us.

  That’s how Tiburcio talked and Matias remembered, and I sat there on that whale of a rock in the six million acres believing in bones and blood, the feathers and the sizz of us, the same strange place where we all come from. Quetzalcoatl, who became, Matias said, the morning star after his work was done.

  “Open your eyes,” Matias said.

  I did.

  “That’s him.”

  He pointed to a break between the trees above, where there was one lone star floating above.

  “The great god rises,” Matias said, and then I looked up, then I looked straight across at the light that was Matias’s eyes, his soft black hair, his smile—nothing small about him, everything bright. I looked at him, and that’s how I see him now.

  Perfect as the morning star.

  And rising.

  100

  SOON YOU’LL BE GONE. SOON you will stand up and go down the stairs, but I can’t do that. I have four bones smashed in nineteen ways, thanks to your mistake, which was finding beauty in the paintings your father sent, finding the future in the schemer he was, finding a father on visitation days when you waited in line and checked yourself in and sat where he sat and he said, “Sweet Caroline.”

  Your crime was the hope you gave: “The car will be there, Dad.” Your salvation was the promise you broke: a knife into the tire flesh.

  Criminal facilitation with regret. That’s what you have: your regret.

  I have everything I can remember, and now I’m remembering the sound of the motorized bird that was chopping in just then, low in the sky above the six million acres. All those troopers and the National Guard and the helicopters swooping, and it had taken a day and a night and a half and hundreds of eyewitness mistakes and there had been a storm in the way, and Sergeant Williams was out in front. She had promised my mom, promised the Bondanzas, promised every other trooper, promised herself.

  Some promises count. The manhunt was looking like a fan from up above—the troopers and the Guard curving through the woods, over the moss, into the caves by the lakes of the loons and up the falling water and into the shadows black as the burned bottom of a pan and out again over the bumps and hills. Armed and dangerous. The hunters and the hunted. The clock ticking, and three missing, and I was one of them, and Sergeant Williams was out in front, in the cockpit of a bird that rumbled.

  I was on the bridge. On the skinny beam of stone that catwalked out from one rock ledge across to the other rock ledge, where the song of the Moravian bird was dimming. Even as I walked—my arms out for balance, my pack with its Keppy on my back, those two caps on—the song was going softer, one note, soft breaths. If I looked down, I would die; if I for one second stopped, I’d tip and fall, caps over sneaks, to the little slice of stream below, the frogs and the turtles and the logs, the leaves, the mess, so I kept on ahead. One step. Another step. Half breaths. My sneaks cutting into every inch I went and full of the squeak of the water still in them.

  We are who we become.

  Inch by inch. Across one stone bridge. From one ledge to the other. Like walking a tightrope or a balance beam or the thin last lines of a dream, and right then it happened, right then the fox opened its mouth and the black-purple raven escaped—flapped its punctured wings and flew, not enough height in those wings, not enough power. I heard the wings beat
ing away from the jaws of the fox and the edge of the woods. The wings coming at me.

  Across the ledge.

  Toward the gorge.

  Over the bridge.

  I turned.

  I fell.

  Six million acres of earth. In a terrible scream of a rush.

  My pack like a pillow at my back, a clump of leaves, soft twigs.

  The stream a thin, chill thing.

  The last thing I heard was the sound of the machete.

  A distant, far-off clink.

  101

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  I’m here.

  Where are you?

  Here. Here.

  I opened my eyes in the stream of down below. I opened my eyes, and all I saw at first was sky. The whole big dome of it, the rounding blue curves of it, the little pokes of trees rising from the shined rocks of the cliffs, a fox stopped in its tracks, the freed bird flying. The earth is small. The sky is big. The sky goes on forever. The sky so dizzy.

  I opened my eyes and I saw sky. I tried to breathe and the air coming into my lungs through the pipe in my throat felt supercharged and heated. The sound of the copter was coming nearer. The stream was flowing through me, floating off with my caps, stretching the curls in my hair, getting salty with the tears I’d started crying. My heart felt flat and wide against my broken ribs. My legs were smashed in wrong directions. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t come to anybody’s rescue.

  I closed my eyes.

  I opened them.

  The sky bobbed like a big balloon, but I could see now, up there, through the rough blur, the three sides and the roof of the lean-to. I could see it, but it was like seeing through smoke, like the shelter was swaying, like it was shifting back and forth on a pair of feet. I closed my eyes, tried to breathe again, tried to get my brain, my eyes, back into some working order, to stop the dizziness, to get the rock ledge and the lean-to to stay put, in one place, so that I could see what was happening, because the copter was coming in closer now, closer, and everything was rumbling, and there were little ripples in the stream, in my hair, through my jeans, through the pack, through the pages of the Keppy that had saved me.