by Craig Nova
“It’s pretty big,” I said.
“Let’s keep moving. They won’t bother us.”
“Is that right?” said Sara.
“Sure,” said my father. “And up here we have some copperhead dens. The snakes den up in the winter. Forty, fifty of them. They all find a nice cozy place for the winter.”
The bear was a long ways off now.
“Are these bears the kind you were talking about?” said Sara to my father. “I mean the ones who have killed for fun.”
“Well, yes. I guess that’s right. You cleaned those fish down there, didn’t you?” my father said to me. He pointed a hundred yards away, where I had gotten ready to help cook dinner, scrapping the gray and reddish guts onto the stones. Red the color of cordovan shoe polish.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“Why is that?” said Sara.
“So it will stay away from us this time. But it will be back. They like to keep a routine.”
We sat and looked into the shadows, and from time to time I thought the darkness undulated like a green sheet on a line. The fireflies came out, each fleck of light seeming to suggest the possibilities in the darkness that surrounded it. The lights were pale green, just like a chemical highway flare. And, as the fireflies flew, each path describing the edge of a scimitar, MD and the other two called out as they splashed in the stream. They were down below, around the bend.
They emerged from the brush, none of them too steady, one passing a bottle to another. Just like they were cut out of black paper. One in front, one in the middle, and one coming up from behind, all walking in a gait that rose and fell, rose and fell, like horses on a carousel. They kept right on coming, their murmur and laughter unemphatic, constant, business-like. They came to a flat place not far below, the three dark shapes circling like a dog before lying down, once and a second time. The packs they carried hit the ground with a smack, and they went to work, setting up that tent, pulling the guy-lines tight, still making that constant murmuring, a kind of jar, jar, jar. The boom box hadn’t run out of batteries, at least not yet, and when they were done with the tent they turned it on. The fireflies didn’t seem to care, though, and they went on flickering on and off, no matter what music was being played.
“So,” said Sara. “I thought you two were supposed to come up with something.”
“We’re going to keep going,” said my father.
“It hasn’t stopped them yet,” said Sara.
“Maybe we haven’t gone far enough yet,” said my father. “I think that’s the trick. We grind them down.”
Sara put a hand to her face, looked down at the ground, her entire posture suggesting an attitude from the past when she was defiant, when she took a joint out of the tight black shirt that made a sheen on the shape of her nipples in the library. I could almost hear her thinking that they, MD and his associates, weren’t being ground down, but that my father was. Was she able to let him do that, even if he wanted to, and what happened if he died somewhere even further up? A dead body, MD and those two others, that landscape of green chaos, the hunting birds in the air. A kind of setting for the worst. And by her posture she seemed to suggest, in her getting ready to spring like a fox at the end of log, that the days of my father wearing someone down had come to an end.
“Maybe I can talk to them,” said Sara. She shrugged toward MD. “Maybe I can save us all a lot of trouble.” When she said this word, she glanced at my father, then at me. “Maybe I can say to them, you know, if you give me a little time, if you let me think it over, why maybe I’ll throw in with you. Something like that. Some half-assed agreement that would make those guys think they had scared me enough.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea” said my father.
“Well, if they don’t get lost, I’m going to have to do something like that.”
“I don’t know,” said my father.
“Let’s keep going,” I said. “There’s a lot of land up there. Maybe just the scale of it will help.”
Sara’s eyes had that horrible depth they always had when she considered the worst. She turned to the stream.
“And I thought you were a smart guy,” said Sara.
In the hiss and splash of the water, I understood: If MD and the others decided the best thing was to kill her (since no one wanted word to get around about what they were planning), they’d have to kill us all, and the further we got away from the nearest road, the better for that.
“I can keep going,” said my father. “Don’t worry.”
“Are you sure?” said Sara.
“Have I ever lied to you?” said my father.
“No,” she said.
For an instant, even I believed that he could go on forever. Even like this. That’s how love works: It colors everything, even the most profound aspects of things, like the fact of someone dying.
“So, we’ll try it the way you want,” she said. “But if it doesn’t work . . . ”
She crossed her arms, looked him right in the eyes: defiance itself.
“I can take a hint,” said my father.
“All right,” said Sara. “Let’s rest a little. At least you’ll do that, right?”
“Yes,” said my father. “That’s a good idea. I’ve always bounced back fast.”
He started laughing, slowly, contemplatively, looking up from time to time at the fire the men down below were trying to light and which smoked, the shape of it drifting into the shadows. Even then I waited, hoping to see something move in the darkness, but I guessed Bo would just try to kill a bear with a .38. The fireflies blinked and rose and mixed with the stars, and the smoke drifted away, filmy, insubstantial, and simply vanishing into the dim outlines of the trees.
IN THE MORNING mist, Sara put a finger to my lips and pulled me into the moist air and said, since my father slept deeply, statue-like in his stillness, because of the drugs, “Let him rest.”
The geological survey map showed an abandoned farmstead nearby, and in the morning, in that mist, like Adam and Eve in the first fog, Sarah and I walked in that direction. It took about twenty minutes to find what was left of the farm, since we were only looking for a couple of holes in the ground. The cellar hole of a farmhouse, which had fallen into it a hundred years ago, was in the middle of a small orchard. The place had a well, too, but we found that the hard way. The trees were laid out in rows, and most of them had been worked on by a woodpecker. The pattern on the bark was like the face of a South Sea Islander who has been tattooed in dotted lines. It was a little musty where the pines had overtopped the apple trees. Some farm equipment sat next to the cellar hole, a plow, which wasn’t much more than just the blades, and next to it there was what was left of a harrow, the teeth of it curving up from the ground like it wanted to catch something. The harrow had a seat, too, a piece of metal shaped like the imprint of a human rear end that had some holes for ventilation. It was so rusted that it looked like it was covered with red lichen.
“Do you suppose, Jake,” said Sara, “that we could have made it, a hundred years ago, in a place like this? Just the two of us.” She looked away and blushed. “And some kids. You’d deliver them yourself. You’d give them to me, all bloody and pink.”
“We’d watch the stars at night,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s nice to think.”
The well was at the side of the cellar hole, about twenty-five feet away. It had been long overtopped with trees, and the opening had been crisscrossed with dead branches and covered with leaf clutter and then needles so you couldn’t see it was there, and when Sara stepped on it, she vanished, at least up to the armpits. The dry branches snapped like an old man popping his knuckles, and even before she said a word, I had taken her hand. But the dry branches and the clutter fell into the well, where they hit the bottom with a splash.
As I pulled her up a copperhead that lived in the stones of the opening of the well slithered out and moved towar
d us, head up, more like a mixture of light cinnamon than copper, its tongue taking the air. It moved around toward us, and as I held Sara’s hand and kept her from falling the rest of the way in, down to the bottom, I took the snake by the tail, its tensile, coiling muscles working under the skin, and dropped it into the well. It made a splash, too, although both Sara and I kept an eye out for another.
“So much for the romance of back to the land,” said Sara. “Jesus. Did you see that thing?”
We sat there in the cool, old apple tree scent. The well became quiet again.
The water at the bottom of it was like a polished surface, like black glass. The quietness of the surface of the water, now that the snake had made it into the stones down there, was remote from the heat and light of day, and yet the silence here suggested the lack of sound that defeat always brings and was a reminder of the people who had tried to make a living on this farm and that even though they had given all they had, it hadn’t been enough. There, at the bottom of the well, the worst had been nicely distilled, and who can bear to look away from one’s reflection in such a mirror?
We kneeled, side by side, looking down, the two of us in the perfume of her hair, which was mixed with the scent of the dry pine needles. Our heads appeared there in the reflection, but at what seemed to be a great distance. She put her hand on mine and leaned a little closer, still trembling, her fear of having almost fallen in, of the snake, perfectly added to the vibrant touch of her lips against my cheek as she said, “What do you think?” She leaned against me, just taking solace in the touch of someone else. She was much lighter than I had thought. We went on looking down, in the dusty air of the groove, until she said, “Can you feel that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s what I felt years ago. You knew that, didn’t you? You felt it then and could admit it. I thought I was too tough for anything like that.”
“Maybe it’s just because we’re scared now,” I said. “MD, the snake, almost falling into . . . ”
“Being scared helps,” she said. “But that’s not it. And you know it.”
The air of the grove was still. Bits of dust, just golden pinpoints, hung in it, hardly moving at all. From beneath us came the scent of water.
“I guess we better go back,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”
The perfume of her hair made me want to inhale, and when my chest was full, to try to take in more.
She looked up, away from that polished lens.
“I should never have given you a chance to think,” she said. “Come on. You’ve ruined it for now.”
We came out of the grove, glad to be in air that didn’t reek of the bottom of the well. But being at the farmstead, with its cloying air of defeat, had made us tired, and Sara slumped down at the side of the stream. Sometimes when you are fishing, if you watch for a while you can see a fish rise, or you can see just a little dimple here and there, and this gives you a notion about what to do or where to begin. I stared, feeling the lingering touch of her hand on mine, and thought, Well, what now?
The surface of the stream glared. The air was hot. Everything was still and even the birds were quiet. And yet, in the green on green shadows of the woods, something moved, a black shape with a fluid aspect, and yet that black was streaked with sunlight, as though even hope were dangerous. A bear, I guessed, too hot to sleep and too thirsty, too. But it vanished into those green depths, the opaqueness of dark green on dark green. The only sound was the distant buzzing of the insects, which in the heat seemed languid and hypnotic.
We started walking, going in and out of the shadows until we saw my father. He was sitting against a tree. The dappled shade, the golden shapes moved from time to time in the occasional gust of wind, just a tender movement of air. Around us the insects made a hum and buzz and from the stream there was a repetitive splash of the water as it fell, in a streaked arc, from one pool to another.
“I’m running out of patience,” said my father.
Across the way, they turned on the boom box.
NO ONE MOVED in the heat of the day, and even the smoke from the fire across the way where the men sat, drinking, seemed to have a sense of lethargy. It rose with a dreadful inertia, as though trapped. Bo got up and put some green wood on the fire, shoving it in and putting more on when the branches on the bottom started to smoke. They didn’t want to start from scratch again to build a fire to warm the three cans of Dinty Moore beef stew that MD put next to the meager flames. Red, white, and blue cans. The men squatted to wait, hungry, none saying a word, all of them obviously curious about when they would make their move or what would set it off.
They ate from the cans, the tops of which had been haggled open and had lips as jagged as saw blades. They glanced through the smoke at us and went back to eating, their motions mechanical, the three of them sitting next to the smoldering logs and chewing together. When they were done, they tossed the cans away, the clattering loud in the late afternoon air. They got up and looked around, as though waiting for inspiration, and finally they filed out of sight, toward the stream. Before they went one of them picked up a bottle filled with bourbon that was the color of tobacco juice.
“Thanks for letting me sleep,” said my father. “I’m stronger now. Jesus, I haven’t slept all day since I was a kid.”
The sun began to set.
“Have you still got that honey you bought?” my father said to Sara.
“Yes,” said Sara.
“Why don’t you get it?” he said. He turned to me. “Let’s have something sweet.”
We dipped a spoon in and then we passed it around, each taking a lick like a popsicle, and the sweetness, the essence of what had been gathered, as though the light at this time of the day had been concentrated into that yellow fluid, was there for each of us to taste. When my father passed her the spoon, Sara hesitated, but my father said, “You don’t catch cancer.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” said Sara.
“Sure you were,” said my father. “It’s all right.”
“So, you want something sweet?” said Sara.
“What better time than now?” said my father.
“Yeah. You don’t want to miss a chance. Like today Jake and I went for a walk and he tried to kiss me, but I wouldn’t let him.”
“No kidding?” I said.
“Well, something like that,” said Sara.
“Sometimes he can be forward,” said my father. “But he doesn’t mean anything by it.”
My father licked the spoon, the sweetness flowing from his mouth deeper into his body.
Sara licked the spoon, too, and then handed it to me. Then she touched the side of her face where it was still tender. A little green now, about the color of that part of a scallion just after the white.
The air was still sweet from the honey. It was almost like the mist in a sugarhouse. Sara got up and looked around. It was getting a little darker.
“How come they keep coming after us?” she said. “Why can’t they leave me alone?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said.
“Is that right?” she said. “And what have you come up with?”
“They’ve got a problem,” I said.
“What’s that?” she said.
“My father and me,” I said. “What are they going to do about us?”
“So what do you think they are considering?” she said.
My father looked at me.
“Something permanent,” I said. “You know that.”
I almost said we had already talked about it, since it had so obviously been in her eyes.
The plume of white smoke rose.
“I don’t know why I can’t stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?” I said.
“Every time I try to get away, to do the right thing, to resist, I just step down. Into the dark. I just wanted to be with you two, to have some time to think, to have some of the solace you seem to get, and th
en I intrude . . . ”
“Sara, Sara,” my father said. “I told you about that . . . It’s like those times, years ago when you used to come to the house.”
“Not quite,” said Sara. “Not quite. I didn’t bring the plague to your house . . . ”
She put her head in her hands.
“Fuck it,” she said. “Now’s the time. Right now.”
My father shrugged. He wanted to make it into nothing. He wanted to be a gentleman.
“We can keep going,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve done enough damage.”
“You haven’t done any damage,” said my father. “Not to me.”
“And didn’t you just say that every time you try to do the right thing, it all steps down?”
“Not this time,” said Sara.
“Where are you going?” I said to Sara.
“It’s time to talk to them,” she said.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No. Maybe they will just listen to me. Maybe I can make them understand. I’ll make up the money. We’ll leave it at that. If I have to promise more, well, I’ll lie. They can try to catch me some other time when I’m alone.”
She turned and walked into the shadows, going slowly, one arm out, her hand delicate above the ferns that grew in a feathery pattern. Her shirt was made out of a plaid material, and the white squares in it showed as she went among the trees. Then she disappeared, but we knew she had walked right up to the tent where the men waited.
I HAVE OFTEN tried to determine the precise moment when it gets dark; the light will fade, the blue getting darker and then the first star will appear, and the trees don’t look like the lace in black underwear but they turn into something else, a more uniform wall with the faded light above it, and a little bit after that, you can say it is dark, but you don’t know exactly how or when it happened. We weren’t there yet, but the night was coming.
A sound or a muffled shriek came from below where the men were, and its quality, at once piercing and exasperated, made me stand up and walk toward it, but it disappeared, and I was left with nothing more than the sound of the stream and the wall of trees, the gray and silky sky. I sat down again. The woods had a tactile silence in the dark heat, and I could feel its diminutive burn. The sound came again.
