by Farris, John
The Cherokee Trading Post already had a pottery glut; Faren was able to place a small order at the Totem Pole Craft Shop, which improved her mood.
"Doing better than last year," she told Terry. "I think you're lucky for me. There's still some places up around Gatlinburg I can hit early next week. Are you hungry? You didn't have much breakfast, and my stomach's rumbling. How about a picnic? I know a beautiful spot overlooking the Oconaluftee, south of the ranger station."
"Sure." He would go anywhere with Faren, anytime she asked.
At a grocery they loaded up with chips, fried pork rind, Velveeta cheese, white bread, bread-and-butter pickles, cold cuts, mayonnaise, and a carton of Dr Pepper.
"How about a moon pie?" Faren asked him.
"What's that?"
"You've never had a moon pie? I don't believe it." She was having a good time at his expense, but in a nice way. Faren bought a box of moon pies. "It's just kind of marshmallow and a little cake and chocolate on it, but tasty. Next you're going to tell me you've never eaten fried squirrel or hash meat."
"I like corned beef hash."
"Hash meat. Can't buy anything like it in a store. You cook the head, feet, and liver of a hog until they're tender. Then you take out the bones, grind the meat up kind of coarse. Grind some red peppers, sage, and salt. Serve it up with artichoke relish and baked pawpaws for dessert. That's eating."
Clouds were beginning to fatten like sheep in a spring pasture as they drove north on a winding road. The river was close on their right, sometimes glimpsed through the thick trees and high walls of rhododendron as a white tongue licking downhill. Faren hummed to herself, occasionally frowning as she nursed and humored the cranky old Ford up the grade.
The place she had chosen for their picnic was not far from but out of sight of the road, where the river rushed thinly over slabs of green bedrock. The banks were loaded with rhododendron, each bush weighted with tapered yellow buds as long as a man's index finger. Some of the buds had popped into pale pink bloom. Dogwoods were spread to infinity in the noontime shade. A split log footbridge crossed the Oconaluftee to a rocky hillside overlooking the river.
Faren said, "I knew a girl, she couldn't cross running water, even on a bridge like this one, unless she was chewing on something, broomstraw or leaf. She'd just lose her balance and go ker-plash." Faren herself was lightfooted and swift, even though she carried one of the bags of groceries and the logs were soaked with spray from the torrent six feet below. They were both well-wetted by the time they got across; tiny beads of water sparkled on Faren's russet forehead in a thin shaft of sunlight. She smiled, putting down the groceries. "Isn't this a good place? The bugs won't get bad for another month or so. Can you climb down there to the water without falling in?"
"Ha," Terry said derisively; she handed him the Dr Pepper carton.
"Put two or three of these bottles where the water'll wash over them; they'll be good and cold in no time." When Terry clambered back up the slippery rocks, she had already made a table on a flat ledge with a square of oilcloth and was putting sandwiches together: liverwurst, cheese, and baked ham. She used a wicked-looking pocket knife she had taken from her purse. It had a staghorn handle and one of the blades was five inches long. They feasted. Terry liked the crisp peppery pork rinds; even the gummy bread, totally lacking in texture, unlike the French loaves he was accustomed to, tasted okay with enough mayonnaise and pickles pasted between slices. After eating he went down to the river to retrieve a couple of bottles of Dr Pepper, looked up, and saw a black bear on the bank opposite him. The bear was shaking its head in a low arc and making grunting sounds. Terry scampered back up the rocks, bottles clinking together. Faren had seen the bear, too, and was unconcerned.
"He won't bother us," she said.
The bear had waded out into the river, and was looking up at them.
"Is he coming over here?" Terry asked, fascinated and a little scared.
"I'll just talk bear talk to him if he does." Faren used the bottle opener at the base of the smaller jackknife blade and handed him a Dr Pepper.
"Be serious."
"I am serious. All Cherokees are brothers to bears; because our legends tell us there was a time when they were human. And if you're adawehi—that means you have special powers of discernment and maybe the gift of tongues—you can talk to bears, other animals too. Wolves, Painters."
"Painters?"
"Mountain lions. But they're scarcer today than they used, to be. You could spend a week in the woods and not see one. There's plenty bears, though, they get to be a nuisance some places. Just like tourists."
Their particular bear was in the middle of the river, which flowed around him almost to his chin.
"Better talk some bear talk," Terry said urgently.
Faren sat up and faced the river, hands folded in her lap as if she were about to pray. After a few moments' contemplation she began grunting and chuckling gruffly, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the river pouring by. The bear lifted his head alertly, nose quivering. He answered back. Faren opened another Dr Pepper and put it in Terry's hand.
"Take this down and leave it where ole bear can get at it."
"He wants a Dr Pepper?"
"He's probably never had one before; but he'll like it. All bears have sweet tooths."
Terry went cautiously down the rocks to the river's edge, never taking his eyes off the wet bear; but the bear just looked at him, perhaps without ill will. At least he wasn't showing a lot of tooth, or looking as if he might suddenly come bounding at Terry in an explosion of spray. He left the Dr Pepper wedged upright between two rocks smothered in lichen, and returned to Faren.
She talked to the bear again. He came to their side of the bank, sat down in the shallows, gazed at the soda bottle, then took it in both paws, sniffing the contents. He began to drink, pink tongue the size of a baseball mitt catching every drop. When he was finished he put the bottle back and ambled off downstream.
Faren unbuttoned and removed her fringed leather jacket, folded it inside out to make a pillow for herself. "I've got some business to attend to in a little while," she said, "and I didn't get much sleep last night. Believe I'll catch a little nap." She covered a yawn with the back of one hand, licked her lips, and smiled at Terry. She settled back, almost lying down, cushioned in a ferny cleft, and closed her eyes. "Don't go too far if you decide to take a walk," she cautioned.
"I'll just stay here," Terry said, thinking about the bear.
After he put the remains of their picnic back into the brown paper bags so the scraps and greasy butcher paper wouldn't draw flies, there was nothing much to do but watch the currents of the river, butterflies in the undergrowth of rhododendron, cream-yellow clouds filling up the spaces of blue sky visible above the treetops. And Faren's composed, sleeping face. A little humidity in the hollows of her eyes. She used only eyeliner and a touch of lipstick. Her mouth was relaxed. There was a little scar like a misplaced vaccination mark half under her chin on the left side (slugging it out with a nitwit kid who called me red nigger). A small steady pulse in her throat.
When a mosquito alighted on her forehead he brushed it off and her eyes opened halfway. She looked at him as if in a dream, then put an arm around him and pulled him gently to her. His head came to rest on her shoulder, warmed by a ray of sun. She was mildly fragrant, a talcum of some kind. She didn't wear perfume. Hair coarse and black over one ear, just the lobe showing. Terry listened to her breath stirring faintly in her nostrils, soft exhalations, and studied the shape of her breasts, rising, falling. He was stunned with desire but of course she meant nothing by this, although he was practically lying on top of her, aware of hip bones and belly, but he didn't dare move the one cramped hand which already was down there where he wanted to touch her, the hem of her denim skirt at mid-thigh. Warm brown flesh there. Her legs spread, relaxed. Last summer in Cannes, french-kissing Paul Juilliard's sister Anne-Marie, who already was fifteen, they had simultaneously put their
hands into each other's swim briefs. Oh, she had said, that's a nice one, but when he asked her if she wanted to, she shrugged and said, no, she liked him okay but she was in love with someone else. His first and only pussy, the fleetest of feels, a sleek little handful she let him hold and stroke for a few seconds longer as if it were a nervous lab animal out of its cage. Then, he couldn't remember, somebody had come in a door or up the stairs or something, they let go of each other just about the time he thought she was going to change her mind. Faren probably felt different between the legs because she was older, but he could only imagine what the difference would be. Darker, bushier, with a more provocative tang than the girlish, fishy essence of Anne-Marie that had lingered on his fingertips. God this was wonderful, but it was awful too. He tried to think about other things, but what else was there? The sun had disappeared like a thin coin in a cauldron of seething lead, the day finally darkening for good. Faren's faintly sighing breath, the river flowing strong as heartsblood through a green artery of the mountain, made him drowsy: and just in time; he hadn't shot off daydreaming about screwing her but he'd already leaked a little. He assimilated her close, airy, human rhythm, which quieted the pent-up beast of the groin and then his nerves; closing his eyes, he fell peacefully asleep.
Alerted by thunder a quarter of an hour later, they woke up together. There was a change in the air, ionic; a steady, high, drafty rustling of leaves. Faren pressed her cheek leisurely against his, smiled obscurely, still coming out of sleep: she ran a hand through his hair the way his mother sometimes did, plowing a furrow, exciting it in the wrong direction; at the same time she shifted her body slightly athwart his own so that they came together neatly but shockingly below the waist. He lit up all over except for his right hand, which had gone numb in the press of their bodies.
"It's going to storm," she said, and he wasn't at all sure she meant the clouding of the sky. There was weather in the blood to be reckoned with. They sat up, a common impulse drowsily managed, hands on each other for balance, her skirt wrinkled up past her knees, his right leg crooked inside hers, knee resting against a firm inner thigh, their faces inches apart and now giving off the last of their sleep like heat, clearing like mirrors that have been breathed on: they looked in each other's eyes, the light and the dark, no secrets unshared. What she saw was gratifying, but made her sad too.
"I know, I know," she murmured. "You're such a good-looking boy; and I do have a sweet tooth for you. We could get each other stirred up here and now. But Terry, what that does, believe me, just leaves good hearts full of trash. I want my heart to go on feeling kindly, with friendship for you that'll last forever. Understand?"
He nodded. More relieved than disappointed.
Faren pressed her lips against his for a moment, neutrally, drew back smiling again.
"You need a Cherokee name, for sure," she said, and thought about it, sizing him up. "What's your favorite sport?"
"Skiing."
"Hmm. I don't think there's an expression for that in Cherokee. What else do you like?"
"Swimming."
"Okay. You'll be Ayunini—the Swimmer."
"Is Faren a Cherokee name?"
"No. I'm Kálanu. Raven. You like that?"
"Yes," he said, and wished she would kiss him again. Instead she shook out her jacket and put it on.
"Time to be leaving. I've got a chore to do. That little sleep cleared my head. Can you go fetch that empty bottle ole bear drunk out of? We don't want to leave anything behind that spoils the wilderness, get utkena riled at us."
"Who's utkena?"
"Lives in deep misty places like this. He's a monster. Kind of a serpent, but with horns. But if you've got a healthy spirit and nothing to fear, chances are you'll never meet up with utkena. And that's a good thing. Just to look him in the face means certain death, unless you're powerful too: adawehi."
"Like you."
"Like me. Reckon I'm a pretty handy sort to have around, don't you think?"
With sprinkles of pain in his right hand Terry went down the rocks once more and brought up the remaining bottles. He walked behind her across the footbridge, still hearing thunder but no closer. There was no rain yet. Just the spray from the river wetting them again. In the car they shared a handkerchief from her purse, odorous of lipstick and so many other things, exotic to him, that collected in women's purses. Faren looked at the sky, huge thunderheads dark as bruises. The trees were nearly motionless, the air still sharp and not hazy the way it would get just before rain fell in sheets.
"Hope all that stays up to the north," she said.
"Some of these old red-dog roads get to be like glass in a downpour. But—I promised Trudy."
"Where are we going?"
"Ways from here. Trudy's grandfather's house. She told me how to find it. He's lying in a coma, it's six days now. What they want to know, will he come around or is this the end." She started the car, backed down the road a little until she could get the clutch to engage, the balky gears to mesh. Then they went up the hill, in fits and starts. "Hate this ole Ford, wish we could be rid of it. But we can't roll up the price of another one right now, and there's times we need two, even though it's reached the point Arn takes off three weeks out of every four."
A short distance up the highway Faren turned left, began following a couple of ruts of clay and shattered rock, the car bouncing up and down. Woods pressed close on either side, branches of flowering trees and shrubs scraped the car body until the windshield was yellow with grains of pollen, pink and white petals fluttered in their dusty wake. There were no signs anywhere. The poor road branched and rebranched, they went south, then they went north again, past log cabins chinked with dried mud and where naked potbellied Indian children and piglets mingled in the putrid door-yard, past a trailer up on blocks, its metal sides peppered with rust in shotgun patterns, through a scary scrambling pack of dogs that came out from beneath a cabin as if they would chew the tires off the car, into deep, mysterious ravines, across flowing creeks and out immense dead tree or a skeletal auto sitting tireless near the road of a submarginal cornfield with last year's stalks hanging tough on a hillside, "That looks familiar," or, "Yeah, I know where I am now."
Suddenly she applied the brakes with an expression of disgust.
"Merde! Should have gone the other way at the Cohosh Fork. Get good and lost back here if we stay traveling in this direction. Well, let's stop awhile. I can't hold my water any longer and you must be perishing to go too."
They got out. The road space, like an alley between speckled white trees that made a living picket fence up to the turbid tin-colored sky, was only about ten feet wide. Gloomy sultry woods all around them. Birds shrill and musical, busy as bullets flying from tree to tree.
"I'll stay on this side of the car, and that's the boys' side," Faren said cheerfully, pointing. "Don't step off into the woods even if you need to squat."
"Why not?"
"Rattlers. Copperheads. That's two good reasons."
"Oh." Every word spoken, each breath they took in this walled place of closely packed cottony air, resounded magnified. His fly zipper opening. Faren working her skirt above her hips as if she were peeling herself, peeling long-stemmed cherry-swart fruit, slipping her silk-sounding underpants down to her ankles, then settling wide and spaciously bare-assed on her heels (Terry able to distinguish her movements out of the corner of his eye, not really seeing anything), holding the edge of the front bumper to steady herself. Pee coming almost at once, to her great relief and satisfaction. The unmistakable pressurized hissing of a woman in urination, intriguingly vulgar out-of-doors, so close to him in the road, strong acid-gold chemical change in the air he breathed, hot confusion of images in his head, he had his penis out but it swelled treacherously in his hand until he couldn't do anything himself, just stood there hurting and frustrated. So self-conscious, knowing she would hear him too. Jesus. It really hurt now, and not a drop.
Faren stood up, pulling her underpants snugly
to her waist. She smoothed her skirt over her thighs, pushed hair off her damp forehead and glanced at his rigid back. She waited.
"Terry?"
"Huh?"
"Ready?"
"Uh . . . uh."
Faren grinned cheekily, leaned against the dusty hood of the Ford, chin in hands. After a few more seconds she said, "Want me to come over there and talk bear talk to it?"
He started to laugh. Doubled over, holding himself, laughing, still locked up tight and hurting like hell, three-quarters of a foot of stone hose in his hand.
"I'll just take a walk down the road for a couple of minutes," Faren said. "Holler when you want me."
When she was far enough away he relaxed and got going, at last, but kept laughing and seizing up and jerking all over the place, getting big wet spots on his wrinkled chinos. When he was through he climbed into the car and honked the horn. Faren came strolling out of an ethereal nimbus at a distant bend of the road. Terry felt very red in the face but Faren pretended not to notice when she joined him. She seemed solemn about something, backing the car up carefully until they reached the fork she felt she should have taken earlier.
"I wasn't poking fun," she told him then, patiently working the long gearshift and trampling the clutch until the obstinate transmission was out of reverse. "Trying to make you feel ridiculous. It's just good to have somebody to laugh with, a little joke that's nobody's but ours."
"I thought it was funny," he assured her. "I cracked up. 'Bear talk.'"
"If I can't laugh, then I get all sunk into myself. Maybe not so different from your mother, when she's upset her work's not going well. I don't know—maybe this wasn't such a good time for you and your dad to show up here. But I'm real glad you did. I wasn't feeling too great, just trying to get through each day, but sinking. Like the utkena was wrapped around me, and pulling me down into the deep pool where he lives. The last time it happened, I sunk so low they had to shock me out of it."
"How do you mean?"
"Electric shock, Terry. I had to have electroshock therapy to cure my depression. I was away for about six weeks. Arn came to visit me, one time. Then he just went back to his woods." Unexpectedly she began to cry. "It was pure . . . hell."
