The Backwoods

by Edward Lee

  Another few steps and he was at the head of the cot, looking right down at the stupid rube. The mallet froze high over his head, and in that moment Ricky could see his own shadow thrown against one wall: a shadow of death, a haunter of the dark.

  At that single image he smiled, his heart beating faster, because he looked bigger now than he ever had.

  “Who the—”

  The Squatter’s eyes glimmered in the moonlight, wide open. A hand shot upward, but—

  Thud!

  —too late.

  One whack with the mallet was all it took. Ricky patted the top of the guy’s head, felt no fractures. Good job. Didn’t matter if he was dead or not, because he’d surely die in the fire that Ricky would start in a few minutes. David Something-or-other’s lights were out for good.

  A macabre realization occurred to him then. The last thing this weirdo hillbilly saw in his life . . . was me.

  Ricky liked that.

  He went back out and grabbed the bag. It didn’t take long to put the matchbooks up in a cupboard, along with the acetone and the first bottle of denatured alcohol. Next he pulled a small boiling pot off the wall, set it on the stove, and dropped in a handful of allergy pills.

  Now all I gotta do is drag the cracker out of his bed, empty the other bottle of alcohol around the joint . . . and light ’er up.

  Ricky liked fires. He’d liked to look at them since he was a kid-when he’d burned his mother and stepfather’s house down with them in it. Bitch had it comin ‘fer lettin’ her old man make me ‘n’ Junior . . . He didn’t finish the thought, but it would suffice to say that fires made him feel like a success. They made him feel transcendental . . . not that he had any clue what that meant.

  With some huffing, he dragged the Squatter out of the cot and left him to lie across the floor. Ricky didn’t notice his chest moving up and down, so he guessed he was dead. Burning the fucker up alive had more kick to it, but that was the way the cards fell sometimes.

  He noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. Shit, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before she’d started boozing hard and passing out every night, leaving their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and—

  Well, that was another story.

  He opened the jar, was about to grab an egg, but—

  Holy shit!

  The stink from the jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his head.

  Smells worse than a fuckin’ pile a’ dead dogs.

  He put the jar back, revolted; then—

  “Daddy?”

  —his eyes bolted open, and he spun.

  Shit!

  There was someone else in the shack.

  A slant of moonlight fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl—mid-teens, he guessed, but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.

  It must’ve been something in the water.

  But whether it was or not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all fucked-up in the head to begin with, and now—razzed and bristly over busting the cracker’s coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a late-night bonfire—he was even more fucked-up.

  His blood felt hot, excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt tight.

  “You’re not my daddy!” she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a worried glance down at the empty cot.

  The guy was lying in darkness behind Ricky. She can’t see him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the comer of the room out of the moonlight. “Aw, now don’t’choo worry ‘bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He’s outside runnin’ a errand, but he’ll be right back. Me ’n’ him are good buddies.”

  The girl’s lower lip trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was looking at the rest, though, his lust holding his eyes open.

  “But I ain’t never seen you before,” she questioned.

  “Oh, well, that’s ’cos me’n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab boats.”

  Yeah. Ricky was all fucked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?

  Well, never mind what he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out into the night.

  (III)

  Patricia dreamed of smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable, safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it only stoked the heat of her own desires.

  “That’s what the heat is,” a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a chair by a stand of trees. “The symbology of the dream mechanism. Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex for the concrete world around us: dreams.”

  The voice drifted like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor’s words and discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She felt flushed; she felt . . .

  Oh, God . . .

  “Just a dream,” she muttered to herself. At least she knew that. “It’s just a dream, so I don’t have to worry about it.”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its fabric frayed.

  . As though he’d just climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long time.

  “The death of Freudian dynamics, I suppose,” he said, disheartened. “Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I’m afraid. I’m dead.”

  For whatever reason, then, Patricia laughed.

  “But you’re right,” he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? “This is a dream, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

  Patricia peered at him through smoke.

  “And you don’t have to worry about what you do.”

  The smoke engulfed him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath them. Her sexual urgency—her feminine heat—rose with the flames. At one point she broke through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she was wandering along the edge of a lake—no. . .

  A pond.

  The realization seized her then.

  This is the pond at Bowen’s Field. . . .

  Moonlight blared in her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her reflection on the pond’s glass-flat surface.

  The vision gave her a mild shock.

  She stood pantiless in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration. She seemed a caricature of female sexuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of the dream. Her breasts were ample in life; in the dream, though, they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could’ve been pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives. The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when (with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt, she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing pubic hair as well.

  Her desires squirmed with her nerves. The night’s heat drew more sweat from her skin, leaving her in a veneer of indeterminable lust.

  It was Ernie who rose from the water: naked, his smile sweet and eyes reaching. Patricia’s eyes yearned back, but her own smile was clearly one of wantonness, the greed to slake her own needs moistening her. She simply stood there, lifting her hem again up past her navel.

  Why should she feel guilty now? It was a dream, and even Dr. Sallee—evidently a doctor whose professional philosophies were dead—had affirmed that she could do what she wanted. And when she’d ta
lked to the real Dr. Sallee on the phone, he essentially told her that she had defeated the trauma of her past.

  This dream proved that, didn’t it? Here she was at the very site of her rape, but she stood now as a normal and very untraumatized sexual being.

  Her sensibilities corroded. She felt lewd, trampish. Was this her real self coming out? Was this the real Patricia? Or was the dream just giving her the luxury of cutting loose in a way she couldn’t in real life?

  “It’s only your sexual socialization evolving,” Dr.

  Sallee’s unseen voice guaranteed. “Superego versus id. The societal verisimilitudes of modem man reinforce the self-maintenance of our regrettable sexual repression.”

  She tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t.

  “We’re all animals, Patricia. We just act like we’re not. Hence the repression and its debilitating effect. Ultimately, it’s what? Unnatural.”

  What am I doing? This is a dream. Am I waiting for my doctor’s permission to have sex? She nearly laughed at the absurdity—in a dream no less. The idea behind his comment hawked down on her. We’re animals but we pretend that we’re not.

  “Cavemen didn’t repress themselves,” the doctor’s voice assured her next. “Neither did cavewomen.”

  Well . . .

  Her eyes hooked on Ernie. He was naked in the Water, on his knees. The dream, too, had augmented him into a puppet of male sexual features all optimized. A broadened back, shoulders, and neck. Chest and biceps like pumped bands of meat. The surreally large genitals rising at the vision of her.

  “Come here,” she said, a slut now. “And bring your mouth. You’re going to need it.”

  Ernie obeyed without pause, a slave to her summons: He crawled to her on hands and knees: every woman’s perfect man. Patricia remained standing, the dream enforcing her need to be higher than him, to reduce him to subservience. She gave her plumpened breasts a shameless caress through the top and felt their gorge of nervous desire gust to her loins. She parted her legs some more, closing her eyes with a commariding smile, waiting for his mouth to give her succor. . . .

  But nothing happened.

  She looked down again and saw that he was gone without a trace.

  Unless the gentle ripple in the water could be called a trace.

  What crawled out next wasn’t Ernie. It was something thin, gray, and very dead.

  A woman. She couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. Gray skin seemed stretched over a struggling framework of bones, and Patricia could see those bones moving as the woman crawled hence. Hollow eyes looked up from the skull-like face showing through the open vee of straggly, waterlogged hair. Patricia wasn’t sure—not that details mattered in a dream—but it seemed that the corpse woman possessed crude stitches about her waist, as though she’d been cut in half and later reconnected by slipshod surgeons. A pendant with a stone of some kind swung about the starved neck as she continued to crawl.

  “Flee this evil place, child,” rumbled some semblance of a voice. Was that a Squatter accent leaking through the corrosion that death had brought to her larynx? “Run outta here now, and beg God’s grace to go with ya. Run. Run.”

  “Run from what?” Patricia asked.

  The cadaver collapsed as though all of her joints at once had lost their connective tissue.

  Patricia’s query wasn’t answered, and when she heard stomping behind her—something coming out of the woods—she didn’t need an answer to run just the same.

  Her feet kicked up splotches of mud when she dashed along the edge of the pond. Before she could turn off in another direction . . . were there things in the pond, close to the surface, looking at her or addressing her in some way?

  She didn’t want to know. She plunged back into the woods and their moonlit darkness, the fire still blazing deeper within. Smoke stung her eyes, and when she felt small, fragile things crunching under her bare soles, she realized what they were: cicadas, having been cooked to crisps while trying to fly away

  The stomping still pounded behind her.

  She thrashed farther into the woods, hoping she was heading away from the fires. Who’s following me? But was it even a who? This was a dream, and that fact, now, she had to keep reminding herself of.

  “It’s something you’re never meant to see.” Dr. Sallee’s voice somehow suffused her head. He was nowhere to be seen, of course. “Sometimes we chase ourselves. We’re our own worst predators. Could it be that the person or thing that’s chasing you is actually an aspect of yourself?”

  I don’t care! she thought at this point. Now she truly felt fear, and she expected more Freudian backlash when it became apparent that her previous sexual arousal had increased tenfold. I don’t believe that I subconsciously want to be raped again! She felt absolutely sure. Freud can kiss my ass! Her dream-enhanced breasts - swayed vigorously beneath the tight fabric of the nightshirt. Her nipples buzzed. Then—

  Shit!

  Patricia fell to the ground belly-first. She’d tripped over something. A vine? A branch?

  No, because when she looked back, she saw in a network of moonlight what it had been: a severed head.

  Dwayne’s head, she knew.

  And the wild footfalls of her pursuer drew closer. But . . .

  What’s . . . that?

  Did she hear a pounding in the back of the dream? Like someone knocking on a door, she thought. But there were no doors here in the burning woods. The woods signified her desires, she knew, and the dangers that accompanied them, and her pursuer: the unknown.

  But what of the pounding?

  It scarcely mattered. She heaved herself up, was about to sprint off again, but then she saw another slant of moonlight painting the tree right before her.

  There was a design carved in the tree’s bark . . . but was the bark bleeding? No, of course not, it must be sap. And it was the design that riveted her: a crude yet elaborate cross framed by the intricate etchings and squiggles of the Stanherd clan’s symbol for good luck.

  She squirmed, flat on her back now. The dream was gone, and all she could feel were the throes of orgasm, her nerves pulsing, her hand fervid between her legs, and then—

  “Patricia! Patricia!”

  Her sister’s voice.

  Patricia snapped away. She was confused at first, for the moonlit darkness of the bedroom matched that of the woods in her dream. Of course, she’d wakened, and it was Judy who’d wakened her.

  “Patricia, I’m so sorry ta wake ya at this hour, but—”

  Oh, Jesus . . . The first thing she noticed was that her nightshirt—the same one from the dream—was pulled up over her breasts. Her nipples throbbed in delicious pain, and she knew how they’d gotten that way: from self-plucking. The sheet lay aside, her legs splayed. She knew she’d been masturbating in her sleep again, to the point of climax.

  She second thing she noticed was the smell of smoke.

  “Is the house on fire?” she blurted. Why else would Judy be waking her up so late and so abruptly?

  “No, no, dear me, no. But—”

  “And . . . I heard this loud pounding,” she said, quickly dragging the nightshirt back down.

  “That was Sergeant Trey, knocking on the front door.”

  The police? “What did he want?”

  “To tell me what happened. There’s been a burnin’ on the Point, in Squatterville. Now hurry up ’n’ put somethin’ on so’s we can go see.”

  A fire on the Point. Real smoke, evidently, had pursued her in the dream. “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  Judy turned before she left, the slyest smile in the dark. “You were havin’ yourself one racy dream, sister.”

  Thank God she couldn’t see Patricia blushing.

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a gal takin’ care a’ herself,” Judy added. “Now hurry! We’ll meet’cha out front.”

  My God, Patricia thought when she left. My own sister just caught me masturbating. . . . She pulled on a blouse, shorts, and sneakers. Before she lef
t she glanced out her open window and saw flames from afar.

  It wasn’t the kind of sight anyone would ever expect to see in a place like Agan’s Point. Ever. Blossoms of flashing red, blue, and white lights throbbed out into the night. Several fire trucks parked askew, tentacle-like hoses reaching out. A half dozen police cars bracketed the end of the perimeter—several state cars, Patricia noted—with poker-faced officers prowling the scene. Patricia, Judy, and Ernie looked on in macabre awe.

  “Oh, Lord, no.” Judy gasped.

  “It’s David Eald’s shack,” Ernie said, “so I guess that’s—”

  Ernie didn’t finish as the three of them watched firemen bring out a black body bag atop a stretcher.

  A smell in the air nauseated Patricia; it wasn’t a stench she might expect; it was an aroma—something akin to pork roast. Oh, Jesus, she thought, her stomach flipping.

  “That ain’t the worst of it, I’m afraid,” Sergeant Trey. told them. His face shifted in various luminous shades from the flashing lights.

  “David Eald has a daughter, doesn’t he?” Judy choked out the question.

  Both Trey and Ernie nodded at the same time, and a moment later a second stretcher was carried out.

  Had a daughter, Patricia thought.

  The trucks had put the fire out, a fire that had incinerated the dilapidated wooden shed that had comprised David Eald’s home. Several trees had caught fire too, leaving blackened posts in their place, smoke still wafting.

  “I know all the electrical connections ‘n’ junction boxes were good,” Ernie said. Did he seem worried that someone might think he’d made a mistake? “They’re all to spec. I installed ’em myself, every hookup in Squatterville.”

  “Just one a’ those things,” Trey offered. “Happens all the time, bad as it is. He ’n’ his daughter probably went to bed and forgot to turn off the stove. The smoke conks ’em out in their sleep; then the place bums down.”