Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail

by T. J. Forrester

  “He’s got a million in the garden, in a safe buried under the broccoli. You leave us alone and it’s yours.”

  “A million?” The boy’s eyes clear, only for a moment, and the glaze returns.

  “Cash, some jewelry—”

  “I always wanted one of them gold necklaces like a music video pimp.” He takes another swallow. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “He has gold necklaces and rings and a diamond bracelet so shiny it’ll make your eyes hurt.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Giuseppe picks up a shovel and walks out of the shade into the sun. He blinks blindness from his eyes, steps over the carrot row, and walks around the fast-growing zucchini. A ladybug lands on his hand and he flicks the bug away and walks deeper into the garden, pauses when he comes to the hole. It seems so long ago he lay at the bottom staring up at the sky. Dobbs stands ten feet away, wine bottle at his feet. He looks lost, a tourist at an intersection and no map in sight.

  “I think I drank too fast.” A stain starts at the bottom of the boy’s zipper, spreads outward. “I think I should have slowed down.”

  “Hey,” Giuseppe says, “ever see a praying mantis?”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a bug that eats other bugs, rips their guts out and everything.”

  The boy looks interested. “It rips out their guts?”

  “They sort of remind me of you,” Giuseppe says. “They sneak up on you, then move in for the kill.”

  The boy thrashes through the corn and stops short of the hole. “I can’t see him.”

  “He’s about a foot from the ground. See, he’s on the stem, stalking that caterpillar.”

  The boy sags to his knees, clutches dirt in both hands. The praying mantis, a twig with matchstick legs and bulbous eyes, closes in on its prey. Giuseppe always feels sorry when he sees a bug about to die, but he never interferes with nature. In the garden, the strong survive.

  “Look,” the boy says. “That’s me and you.”

  “So it is.”

  “You’re the caterpillar,” the boy says. “You sucked yourself right in with Pike and now you’re fat and happy and about to die.”

  “You got me to a tee, Dobbs, you nailed me to the wall.” Giuseppe studies the house, looks for open curtains, a patron on the porch, glances at the campsites and sees only trees and tents. He grips the shovel handle, nails digging into the wood, and raises the blade. Giuseppe stares at the boy’s neck, at the spine at the base of the skull, imagines the swift arc, the downward thrust, the spray of blood and the crunch of metal against bone. It would be so easy, one thwack, then fill in the hole and forget about him. A coolness comes over Giuseppe, a chilliness that spreads through his extremities. He shivers and raises the blade high. Lowers it when he spots movement out of the corner of his eye. It’s Tazmanian Devil, who crawls out of his tent and drapes a sleeping bag over a picnic table. Giuseppe lowers the shovel and kicks Dobbs into the hole.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Giuseppe says.

  “Oh,” the boy says, and falls on his back.

  Giuseppe clambers down and presses the shovel point against the quivering throat. The boy squirms and mouths words that don’t come.

  “What?” Giuseppe says. “What did you say?”

  “I was fucking with you.” The boy turns his head and vomits into the dirt. “I’m a month over eighteen. Are you crazy or what?”

  Giuseppe grabs the boy’s head, drives it into the earth. The chilliness is still there and Giuseppe is so cold he is shaking.

  “Eighteen or fourteen,” he says. “I don’t give a shit. You hurt Pike and bad things will happen. Do you understand me? Something very bad will happen.”

  * * *

  Candles flicker on the dining room table, turn the champagne glasses into shimmering mirages. Pike’s cologne drifts through the air. The aroma is rich and sweet and reminds Giuseppe of summer walks in meadows thick with flowers. Pike wears his robe, but Giuseppe chose something more formal for the occasion: shirt and tie, black pants, and a pair of brown loafers one size too small. He wears the toe squeezers for a reason. They are his pinch on the arm, the self-invoked pain that reminds him this is really happening. Pike removes papers from a briefcase, and he and Giuseppe lean forward.

  “This one,” Pike says, and hands Giuseppe a gold pen, “is a mutual-fund account I opened around the time I was offered senior partner. Remember the party we had afterward? You and me drinking all those martinis? I had such a hangover the next day.”

  Giuseppe starts the ballpoint rolling with a downward curve, signs first and last name, ends with a triumphant swoop. The fund is worth 1.2 million. Pike hands over another paper and Giuseppe signs again, half interest in an office building in Philadelphia, an investment Pike says is paid off and worth 3.5 million last time he had it appraised, which was back in the late nineties so it’s worth a lot more now.

  “I knew you had money,” Giuseppe says, “but I really had no idea.”

  “We had money.”

  “I knew we had money but this is crazy.”

  “You were going to get it all, sooner or later,” Pike says. “You are the sole beneficiary in my will.”

  “I don’t even have a will.” Giuseppe loosens his tie and works his toes, eases the pain shooting through his feet.

  “We’ll need to draw one up for you. Or maybe you’ll want to go to another attorney and have it done. That’s a very private occasion.”

  “You can do it, Pike. It’s not like I have anything to hide.”

  Giuseppe signs his name on nineteen more pieces of paper—various stocks, insurance funds, and savings accounts—drops the pen to the table and leans back in his chair.

  “Listen,” Pike says, “feel free to paint the bathroom back the way it was. I guess you really don’t like chartreuse.”

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  “Dobbs did a nice job.”

  “Yes, he did,” Giuseppe says.

  “Do you know what he said to me after I fired him?”

  “That boy was liable to say anything.”

  Pike sips champagne and stacks papers into a neat pile. “He tried to extort money, said he was only fourteen years old. Said by the time he was done with us he’d own the B&B.”

  “Well, he’s gone now.” Giuseppe rolls the pen across the table, one way, then the other.

  “You took care of the problem?”

  “Let’s just say he decided to hike north.”

  Pike pours champagne, a swirl of silver bubbles. “He reminded me of you, you know? When you were young.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take away the acne, dye his hair black, and you could have been twins.”

  One of the candles goes out, and Giuseppe holds a match to the wick. It won’t relight and he gives up. “I was a hustler.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I hustled you into giving me a place to stay.”

  “Yes, you did,” Pike says.

  Giuseppe closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “Have any regrets? Anything you wish you could take back?”

  “About us?”

  “Anything, anything at all.”

  Pike waits awhile before answering. “None I’m aware of. You?”

  Giuseppe takes off his loafers and studies Pike’s face, wonders how he would have reacted if roles had been reversed in the garden. Would Pike kill for his lover? A melancholy comes over Giuseppe, a roaring sound across a barren land. He braces against the relentless wind, faces the loneliness of his world.

  9

  SIMONE AND I have hiked into Vermont, our twelfth state, and today a smattering of rain blankets the trees. The clouds open and close, send random shafts of sunlight through the leaves, a mottled landscape of greens and browns that lighten and darken the forest floor. A clearing in front of us opens to a large pond and we stop and sit on a log, drink from our water bottles, and eat a snack. A rainbow trout
flashes against the surface, a fusion of red and silver, and the swirl it leaves behind ripples across the waves. Frogs peep in the weeds near the shoreline, a chorus that seems to grow louder the wetter it gets. Across the pond, deer ghost in and out of the trees, their brown backs turning gray in the shadows.

  “Roxie and I go way back,” I say. “There’s nothing between me and her like you’re thinking.”

  True to the words Simone spoke back at Pen Mar Park, she only fucks me when we are on the trail. In town she gets a motel room and so do I. In town she acts like I’m a stranger. She plays a control game, and I willingly follow along. Part-time pussy is better than none at all.

  I touch her elbow, and she jerks her arm away. My hand drops to the log, to the soggy moss and rotted bark. In my other life, I would have washed off my gritty palm. In the mountains, life is different. There are no sinks, no paper towels, and now, judging the ferocity in Simone’s gaze, no girlfriend.

  “Taz,” she says. “You don’t need my permission to go back to your cokehead lover.”

  “She’s only coming for a visit, twenty-four hours and she’ll be gone.”

  “You are such a loser.”

  Simone walks down the trail and doesn’t look back. I shouldn’t have told her about Roxie and our drug problems, but getting it out in the open is my way of moving on. When I lived in Atlanta, I did things no human should do. But I’m no longer that guy. I think that’s what pisses Simone off the most. I’m proof her DNA theory is flawed.

  I wait for an hour, then walk north. She has the tent in her backpack. I’ll need to find Richard or a shelter if I want to sleep dry tonight.

  * * *

  That evening, I walk up on my friend in front of a campfire. He gave up his loincloth when the mosquitoes got bad and now wears long pants and a long-sleeve shirt. Next to him, strips of meat lay on a flat rock. He sharpens a stick, skewers a strip, swings the stick toward the flame.

  “Blacksnake,” he says. “Cook your own.”

  Richard showed me pictures of his mother and father on the ranch in Montana, and yes, they are blond haired, blue eyed, and look like they flew in from Denmark, but I don’t buy his theory an Indian gene hides for generations in his family, then emerges and produces a Blackfoot carbon copy. His mother slept with someone on the reservation and that’s how Richard got his high forehead and ink-black hair. In his real life Richard is a tire salesman. He can name every brand, every size, wholesale and retail costs.

  “I thought the snake was your spirit guide,” I say. “Or was it the bear? I can never remember that shit.”

  “It might be the eagle.”

  I take off my pack and sit on the ground. My ass has been in the rain all day long, so it’s not like it can get any wetter. Least, for the moment, the sky has cleared.

  “You can’t change your spirit guide,” I say. “That’s like one day saying you’re Catholic and the next you’re Baptist.”

  “I was hungry.”

  “You’re out of food?” I ask.

  “I was hungry for something that isn’t in my pack.”

  Richard swings the stick away from the flame and blows on the meat. He is the only hiker I know who can start a fire in a soaked forest. He’s a natural. I boil water and cook a dish I’ve worked on for the last couple of weeks, a seasoned rice that I mix with chocolate oatmeal. I sprinkle in two drops of Louisiana hot sauce.

  “I’m using less spices these days. Brings out the chocolate flavor,” I say.

  He eats his snake and I eat my rice and oatmeal. The evening turns to darkness, and I throw a log on the fire, watch flames curl around the bark, listen to my white Indian friend make guzzling noises when he swallows. I tell him about arguing with Simone and proclaim her a bitch through and through.

  “I’ve never even seen her take a break on a cliff,” I say. “What kind of hiker is scared of heights?”

  “Maybe she thinks you’ll push her off.”

  It’s a bad joke, brings up the memory of the dead guy Richard and I burned at the base of the cliff down in Georgia. I shove the memory back into its hiding place. There are some things I’d rather not think about. Richard gets out his bottle and offers me a drink. I sip and hand it back. He laughs, a crazy fucking sound, and drinks a quarter of the bottle in one long swallow.

  “I wish I had your self-control,” he says. “I wish I could sip instead of guzzle.”

  He leaps to his feet and hovers over the flames, extends his arms, and the smell of singed hair mixes with wood smoke.

  “The white man,” he says, “stole this land. They raped and murdered and took what wasn’t theirs. They killed with guns and cannon and knives and chicken pox.”

  “Knives and chicken pox,” I say. “Guns and cannon.”

  He sheds his clothes, and firelight turns his skin into a red-hued shadow. “My people were like the trees and the air. We were everywhere. Then the white man came and took it from us. I have a white mother, true. And I have a white father, that also is true. But my blood is red and in my chest beats the heart of a warrior.”

  “Will you shut up,” I say. “You’re giving me a headache with all this Indian shit.”

  Richard swings his arms in time with his feet and throws back his head. He stomps clockwise around the fire, pauses, and drinks more whiskey. He staggers and I jump up and grab his shoulder, sit him with his back against a tree. I rummage through his pack and get out his tent, pitch it in the firelight, then unroll his sleeping bag. I haul him upright and guide him inside. He sprawls diagonally. I don’t have the heart to push him aside, which means there is no room for me, so I sit next to the fire. Above, stars speckle the sky, winks of light on a black background, and I sit for a long time without moving. Clouds move back in, bring a quick shower, and I face the rain without blinking an eye. The clouds leave and the stars return, the fire now a smoldering memory. I think of my father and how he enjoyed the outdoors from time to time. He took me places, like to see horses in the desert, but back then I was an outsider in the wild. Now things are different. I’ve been on the trail for so long I feel it coursing through my veins. The AT has become my lifeblood, my sustenance, and sitting in the rain in the middle of the forest feels like the most natural thing in the world.

  A breeze whispers out of the darkness, a coolness over my skin, and I kneel and blow across the coals until they flame upward. From a nearby tree, I break off a dead branch, snap it into pieces, drop them into the pit. The breeze switches direction, and flames bend toward my legs. I step away from the heat and the smoke, pat my pockets for a snack.

  A twig snaps and I swivel to peer into blackness, see Simone’s face reflecting the firelight. I lunge into the forest, hear crashing in the brush. I call out her name and no one answers.

  * * *

  Richard thinks the weather god is a she. Mine swings both ways. On good days, she’s a she. On bad days, he’s a he. Today, as we ascend Killington Peak, a mountain that tops out at 4,235 feet, the weather god is a soggy bastard. Water runs down the trail in miniature creeks, veers into eroded ditches that V into ferned-over slopes, only to start anew like an eternal spring put on this earth to annoy hikers. My feet have been wet for three days. My shirt and pants cling to my skin in sodden clumps. The storm comes in waves, bands of a hurricane that angled away from land but is determined to leave a mark. Clouds whip past in long shreds that shadow the forest for minutes at a time.

  Simone’s right foot turns outward more than her left. Sometimes her footprints are close together and sometimes they are stretched out, like she hears me coming and jogs to put distance between us. I’ve done Downward Facing Dog ten times a day since she showed it to me, and my foot pain has disappeared. If I want to catch her, I can. I speed up, strides that squish into the mud.

  An hour later I see her on a switchback. She has an odd walking style, a semi-crouch like she creeps up on something, arms that cock at her elbows and swing out of rhythm with her legs.

  The trees, the steel-c
olored boulders, the muddy footpath, congeal into a watery mosaic that absorbs edges and stretches shapes into long curves. I blink away the moisture, watch the world refit itself. She has a determined stride, but I walk up behind her soon enough.

  “Hey,” I say.

  She looks over her shoulder.

  “You might have told me it wasn’t over between you and Roxie.”

  Simone starts walking faster but she can’t out-walk me and eventually realizes the futility and slows down. Which is a good thing because we will soon be above treeline, close to the top of this mountain, and no sane hiker will chance electrocution to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. I walk toward her, and she walks up the trail. I stop and she stops. We repeat this several times, then I grin like the game has been fun, tell her we should wait out the storm, watch her walk up the trail. Expecting her to come back, I wait a few minutes. When she doesn’t, I follow her to where the trail exits the trees and winds around the side of a rocky summit. I move quickly, trying to limit exposure, see her leave the AT and scramble up a blue blaze trail that leads to the peak.

  She reaches the top, looks down at me, and seems to be saying something. Wind and rain gouge at her words, and all I hear is the storm across the Appalachians. Above her the clouds are nasty colors of gray and black, bruises that slide over the peak and rush onward. She raises her arms and extends her middle fingers. Light bridges heaven and earth, an explosion to her left, and a sizzling spiderweb scuttles toward her. The air turns green, like I’m looking through night-vision goggles. Another bolt, and she disappears in the flash like she disintegrated, only that isn’t possible and before I know it I’m running up the slope. The granite is slick and I lose my footing. I slide down, regain my balance, scramble upward until I arrive at where she lies on the rocks. Her eyes roll back in their sockets, and I shake her until she focuses. I help her to her feet, down the blue blaze trail, back to the AT, where I press my palm against her back and guide her into the relative safety of the trees. I tell her if she had been standing twenty feet to the right, that bolt would have fried her top to bottom. She regains her bearings a little at a time, and a quarter-mile down the ridge says something I will never forget.