Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail

by T. J. Forrester

  “So you came to the AT why?” she says.

  “I walk the trail because my spirit guide suggested a journey.” He does not want to tell her that he hikes because he’s trying to solve an alcohol problem. She keeps asking questions, eventually winds around back to the river and his heroism.

  “I cannot take the credit,” Richard says.

  “A true hero.”

  Her gaze does not leave his, a suggestion that now is the time. Richard touches her arm, a lingering that trails toward her wrist, and from her lips comes a little sigh. Her hands shake, and he thinks she does not have much experience at love. She is not the only one who smells bad—the swim in the Kennebec only washed off the worst of him—and he hints around about taking a shower together.

  “I want you like you are,” she says.

  Richard, who thinks that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to him, lowers his head to her chest. His earlobe, where it touches her breast, feels like a hot nickel.

  * * *

  That night he wakes to the remnants of a dream he has had many times. His father, clad in a purple robe, on a bejeweled throne high up in the sky, had yanked a lever that turned loose a rainstorm of tires. They had landed and bounced upward, only to fall again. There were so many of them they blocked the sun, and all the animals that inhabited the forests began to die. Richard screamed his protest, but then a Monster Truck radial hit him on the head and he fell face first and lost consciousness. Now, entwined in the sheets, naked as the day he entered the world, he gasps and slowly regains consciousness. The nightlight in the socket on the wall casts a glow over the bed, Betty’s ponderous body on display, lips purring with each exhale. He is hungry, so he goes into the living room and opens his pack. Eats a candy bar he finds in his food bag. The snoring stops.

  “Come back to bed,” Betty says from the bedroom.

  “In a minute.”

  In the kitchen he opens the fridge and pokes around for a soda, finds a beer on the bottom shelf. Holds the can in both hands. He had his first drink when he was nine, a swallow of Jim Beam from his father’s liquor cabinet. The liquor tasted awful but he was curious and came back once a week to sample different bottles. The Wild Turkey made him want to puke, but the vodka tasted good when he mixed it with orange juice.

  He developed a taste for beer when he turned twelve and found a six pack a fisherman left on the dock. Richard vomited on his tennis shoes that day, told his mother he had the flu but she smelled the beer and told his father, who said it was no big deal, that all boys experiment. His mother, who left the discipline to her husband, shook her head and retired to the rear bedroom.

  Richard remembers his recent vow and desperation wells up inside him. It’s a jittery feeling, a lostness that scares him enough to weaken his knees. He wants to believe Taz’s theory that a person can become someone else, but experience suggests his best friend is wrong and Simone’s fatalism is reality. Before he met her, he thought he drank because he hated tires. Now, after hearing her talk so convincingly about how all humans are born with a flaw that leads to their demise, he knows better. He drinks because he has an alcoholic gene. The starkness in that thought, the despair in those eight simple words, stun him and he opens the can and pours it down the sink. The act brings little solace. He has quit drinking a thousand times and is under no illusion that today is any different from yesterday.

  He wants to call his father and finds the phone on an end table in the living room. His finger, red and slender, punches the wrong number and he wakes up a sleepy woman in Idaho, apologizes, and dials again.

  “Who are you calling?” Betty stands at the bedroom door, sheet wrapped around her body. Her hair is tangled, evidence of last night’s lovemaking.

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The phone rings and the familiar deep voice answers on the other end. His father, an ex-marine who has risen at 4:00 AM every day of his life since he was eighteen, is already at the office. He is the proud owner of the most popular tire store in Bozeman, loves tires so much he would rather talk about them than anything else in the world.

  “Dad?” Richard says.

  His father’s voice comes quickly. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  Richard coughs instead of talking, and his father’s voice becomes more concerned.

  “Are you in jail again?” his father says. “Do you need bail money?”

  “Not in jail, on the trail.”

  “Are you drinking?”

  Richard ignores the presumption. “I’m thinking about not coming home after I summit. I’m done selling tires.”

  “I’m counting on you . . . so is your mother. It’s your duty to take over the business. Selling tires is what our family does, son.”

  They talk for a while longer, his father doing most of it, then good-byes are exchanged and Richard hangs up and plops on the couch. Betty plops beside him and the sheet opens, exposes her thighs. She has black-and-blue marks above her knees, where he had gripped hard to hold on.

  “You’re a tire salesman,” she says.

  “Was. I’m something else now.”

  “Do you . . . umm . . . do you think you might like. . . .” She takes a breath, slowly exhales. “Do you think you might want to stay with me for a while?”

  Richard thinks about her question for a long time. His thru-hike should have ended yesterday, he should have drowned in that water and if it wasn’t for Taz Chavis risking his neck that’s what would have happened. He misses his friends and tells the white woman he wants to leave in the morning, which by the look of the grayness outside the window isn’t far off. Betty picks up her notepad and flips through it, gnaws on the eraser end of the pencil.

  “Is any of this true?” she says. “Any of it at all?”

  Richard crosses his legs and straightens his back. The reflection on the television shows a thin young man, upright, unmovable. Jet-black hair falls down his shoulders and gathers like horsetails on his chest. His nose is large as a walnut.

  “I’m a Blackfoot,” he finally says, “but you can probably cross most of the rest out.”

  * * *

  On the way to Caratunk, Betty’s hand creeps over and rests on his thigh. He tells her that he will visit after he summits but they both know that isn’t true. She flips on the blinker, turns into the store parking lot, and he steps out. The sun is up, a red globe above the trees, and he feels the warmth on his forehead. He kisses her good-bye, puts on his pack, and hikes down the road. He walks quickly, faster than normal, knows he needs to hurry if he wants to catch up to his friends. He can feel Betty watching him, the intense energy focused on his back, but he does not turn around.

  13

  EXCITEMENT BOILS BENEATH the surface, something every northbounder feels in Monson, Maine. Katahdin, the summit I’ve walked toward for so long, seems so close I can touch it. Richard, Simone, and I stay overnight in a hostel, eat pancakes for breakfast, amble outside to a picnic table, and sort through our food for the 100-Mile Wilderness. Simone, who receives mail drops from her parents, boxes she filled before she started the trail, is so sick of eating gorp she tosses a Baggie in my direction and I add it to my pile. Richard’s nose has shrunk to normal, and now cants to the right, an oddness in his otherwise symmetrical features. He has shaved his head so only a black strip remains from his brow to his neckline. The strands that fall to his back are braided into a rope thin as a buggy whip. He has not drunk a drop since he emptied the bottle on the side of the Kennebec.

  “Here,” Simone says, and hands Richard a Baggie filled with licorice gumdrops.

  He grunts and adds them to his pile. We don’t talk about the river crossing, have left it behind us like unwanted pack weight. Richard fucked up and he knows it. Simone was vindicated for suggesting we all take the canoe and she knows it. I was caught between the two and had to save his ass. There is no use bringing it up.

  “My father is expecting me home the day after the summit,” Richard says.


  His face is a mask, eyes unblinking, jaw so tight it seems made of wood. He wraps a string of red beads around his braid, ties off the string with a square knot. He has never said what he’d rather do than sell tires, and I haven’t asked. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. In his mind, anything would be better than smelling new rubber all day long.

  “He says I have to stop the ‘Indian nonsense,’” Richard intones. “Says he’s white and my mother is white and my brothers and sisters are white, and it’s bad business for a son of his to have long hair and wear feathered headbands.”

  “I think you have nice hair,” Simone says.

  “Your old man is an asshole,” I say.

  Richard loads up his pack, every movement slow and determined.

  “No,” he says. “He’s basically a nice guy who thinks it’s time for me to assume my responsibilities.”

  The mask dissolves, and the face underneath appears in all its pliability. There is sadness in his features, hopelessness. But then the mask returns. He hoists his pack to his back.

  “It’s lighter without the alcohol,” he says.

  I shake his hand, and Simone hugs his neck. Richard wants to hike this last section alone, says he wants the solace to give him more time to think. I would prefer to summit with him, but I agreed to his wishes and Simone and I plan to stay in town for another day to give him a head start. He walks out of the yard, pauses under the shadow of a giant elm, lifts his hand and waves.

  I know what he’s feeling, what all thru-hikers feel at this point in their hike. The closer we get to the end, the more bittersweet the journey.

  * * *

  Simone and I hitch to the trail early the next day. At the first shelter, I sprawl across the planked floor, head on my pack, feet propped on the wall, and read the logbook. Richard wrote one sentence:

  FUCK TIRES.

  The shelter has a broom in the corner, along with a Gideon bible. Strings, threaded through tuna cans, hang from the eaves. If we planned on staying here tonight, that’s where we’d hang our food bags to thwart the mice. I stretch and prop my head on my pack, move a shoulder strap that digs into my ear. Graffiti is scrawled on the ceiling.

  Simone walks up, says her food weight is hurting her back, eats six brownies to lighten her load. She reads the logbook, tosses it to the rear so it won’t get wet if it rains.

  “I liked him better when he was drinking,” she says.

  The day is cloudless, and the rays coming through the branches have a yellow tint. I breathe the air, imagine golden molecules traveling through my blood stream and filling my entire body. A moth floats over the ground and lights on my shoes. The wings, thin as chartreuse tissue, slowly open and close. The movement is mesmerizing, and I watch until the moth glides into the forest. Simone and I hold hands. In my past, I never held hands. I’m still changing, I guess.

  “I was thinking about after,” I say. “What do you think about renting a house and moving in together?”

  A squirrel jumps from branch to branch and dislodged leaves float confetti-like below the tree. My question drifts with them, suspended and unanswered.

  * * *

  When I was in prison and reading about hiking through the 100-Mile Wilderness, I expected one hundred miles of Maine forest, solitude, beaver ponds in the lowlands, stunning views on the mountains, a trail so beautiful it made my heart hurt. I did not expect gravel roads, chainsaws in the forest, logging trucks stirring up dust as they drive to pulp mills. Still, if it hadn’t been for the gravel roads, Simone and I would never have met Charlie Evers, a southbounder who hiked in the mid-1990s.

  He pulls up in a pickup and asks if we want to attend his annual trail festival, says it’s a three-day party, and today is the second day, so we got lucky walking out of the woods when we did. Charlie’s trail name is Ink Blot, and he has so many tattoos he’s more ink than skin. He paints landscape scenes on old milk jugs and sells them in tourist shops along the coast, says he feels like he’s selling out, would rather do something more avant-garde but no one buys his art. He has a mournful voice, like he lost something he’ll never get back.

  “My work is too dark,” he says. “These days people are afraid to look inside, too afraid of what they might find.”

  Simone and I walk off to the side and hold a low conversation. Agree that putting off the end of our thru-hike a day or two won’t matter one way or the other, so we climb into the pickup bed and travel through miles and miles of forest, to a white-sided house set in a maple grove. Charlie parks on a driveway covered in leaves, walks us to a shaded rear yard, to where several thru-hikers mill around tables piled high with fruit and donuts. A drum set glitters atop a wooden stage. The hikers chatter about what they plan for the summit. One guy—his trail name is Loose Cannon—plans to write “The End” on his ass cheeks with a magic marker and have someone take a picture. Sweet Dreamer, a fine-boned woman who has a French accent, plans to kneel and give thanks to the goddesses who helped her along her journey.

  Simone and I pitch under the branches of a yellow maple. The stakes sink easily into the soft earth. We veer toward the food, come across a hiker on the grass, a bottle next to his head. His long black braid, red beads intact, wraps around his throat like a boa constrictor.

  Richard.

  Drunk again.

  * * *

  Darkness descends, and the band takes the stage. There’s a fiddler, a banjo player, a lead singer—a white guy who has a gravelly voice like Louis Armstrong—and a drummer with sleepy eyes and a tendency to wander from the beat. Richard weaves to the music. He holds a bottle, is too drunk to lift it to his lips.

  Simone and I go inside the house, to Charlie’s studio, which is a candle-lit room on the first floor. Our host paints faces—of himself. Simone and I start at the doorway and walk clockwise around the room, stop at paintings hung three feet apart.

  “No wonder he can’t sell his work,” I say, breathing in the smell of drying paint. “Who would buy this shit?”

  Each painting has an exaggerated feature, an ear that looks like it went through a meat grinder, an upper lip so thin and shriveled it reminds me of a dried-out green bean, a forehead so stretched out the effect is one of looking into a fun-house mirror. The portraits grow darker as we walk, the maimed body parts more exaggerated, until we come to a body-sized painting of a tattooed man that includes all that came before. Gouged eyes stare back at us, unseeing, unblinking, gore-like tears dripping down the distorted face.

  Next to the door, a milk jug glows in the candlelight. A mountain landscape wraps the bottom half of the perimeter. Peaks and valleys, sun in a blue sky. Clouds suspend over the land.

  Charlie walks in, head down, like he is uncomfortable watching people look at his work. Simone hugs his neck and whispers in his ear and he nods. They stay that way for at least a minute, like they are sharing a secret. Soon I’m the only motherfucker in the room who isn’t crying. Charlie walks to the milk jug, crosses his tattooed arms, and stares downward. Simone stands beside him.

  “It’s very nice,” I finally say. “Superb craftsmanship.”

  They look at me like that’s the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard, then our host says he has to get back to his guests and abruptly walks out the door.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I say.

  Simone wipes her sleeve against her cheeks, and the tears dry up. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone paint what’s inside of me, Taz. It got to me, that’s all.”

  I stare at the paintings, the grotesqueness that leers at me from all directions, turn toward the window before I say something stupid. I don’t get art, never have, and those paintings mean nothing to me. Outside, the band plays a fast tune, fiddle sweeping the melody along. Richard has sobered up enough to start drinking, and he sits on the stage and sips from his bottle.

  “You might be right about Richard,” I say
.

  “People stay the same. That’s the irony of life.”

  “I’m different,” I say. “I’m not the same guy that started down in Springer.”

  Simone, in front of the full-sized portrait, studies me with such intensity I cannot turn away. Her gaze has a penetrating glare, like she can see who I was, who I am now, and who I will become.

  “You only think you’re different,” she says.

  Her presumption pisses me off, and I can’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

  She walks out of the room, and through the window I watch hikers dance around Richard like he’s a goddamn icon. The fiddler whips his bow across the strings, and the drummer’s sticks slice the air. The lead singer growls his lyrics. Simone is right about Richard. He will die a drunk, but I am not Richard. I am Taz Chavis, and I choose dominion over my life. I am Taz Chavis, and I plan on living a good life after the trail.

  Footsteps, Simone returning to apologize, but there is only an offered plate. At first I think she has brought me a peace offering, maybe a plate of ribs or a barbecue sandwich off the grill. I look closer and a claw grips my heart. In the center of the plate, a line of thin white powder beckons. I look at her face, study the smile that contorts her lips. I hate her for this and tell her so.

  “No,” she says. “You only hate yourself.”

  I take the plate, look closer, and twist my wrist. Powder drifts to the floor and settles around our feet.

  “I don’t know what that was,” I say. “But—”

  “It was baking soda.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I saw your face.”

  The fiddler jumps around the stage, music exploding from his strings. The hikers writhe around someone, and I think it’s Richard until legs separate and I get a good look at the tattooed face. Charlie kneels, hands outstretched, beckoning the dancers until they swallow him in their midst. Simone takes my hand, leads me outside, into our tent. She is right; I don’t hate her. But she is also wrong; I don’t hate myself. I move on top of her, enter her with more urgency than usual, and our rhythms merge and separate. She takes my face in her hands and brings her lips close to mine.