The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  Now, his nose near the sweet spruce needles, his eyes open in the black, he wondered again how it should seem so normal to be stalking, and how no objections, no sense of the ridiculous came from his deepest nerves: they would have to be called, those objections, from lessons superimposed upon his alert mind. He had no time, however, for his waiting eyes now registered a faint glow from the middle of the field, and from that glow alone the field oriented itself, and he began to perceive distance. He heard from above the phut of the Very pistol and at the same time a screeching banshee bobcat yowl he knew to be Shim’s—a scream like a woman hysterical with pain, like a girl being ripped apart. Then the white, ghastly daylight of the flare on its little parachute, and the man in the green uniform running like a rookie from the protecting tree, his face big as a buttock in the white light, staring like a perfect fool at the blinding light, his mouth a black hole. More of Shim’s hysterical laughter, and the man fell in a woodchuck hole, then got up to rubberneck some more. Led thus, and thus, safety off, just to the right of the green flap of his uniform coat, he would have been a dead, dead, foolish young man. Richard’s arms did not move in such a silly pantomine of aim, but again, deep in his reflexes somewhere, an old, thick satisfaction registered.

  12

  AT BREAKFAST Murray heard about the successful stalking of young Spooner. Shim purred and laughed all the way through his meal, and Murray took this new, talkative Shim to be the result of marriage. He didn’t know for sure, but he supposed marriage could do funny things to a man. Who would have thought Shim would marry Miss Midget? But there it was. In school that year they’d spent in Leah—he always remembered it as the year he didn’t learn anything—he used to sit in Miss Midget’s English class and think what an odd, unhealthy (because she was so old) but thrilling thing it would be to undress her. Gluh! Now she treated him the same, in a sort of proud, motherly way, not seeming to realize that he was grown, now, and pretty experienced. He wondered if she and Shim did it, and then realized what a childish thought that was; of course they did. The image that came to his mind, however, was not erotic at all, but rather sexless, and strange, as if the two of them simply wrestled.

  “You should of seen the damn fool,” Shim was saying. “He run, his gaumen big face hanging out, and fell flat. Oh, Jesus! You should of been there, Murray! Stepped in a woodchuck hole. He won’t be telling that story around!” Shim laughed low and long, his reddish face creased all over. “Oooo, hoooo!” he said.

  “It’s funny they didn’t teach him in the service not to look up at a flare,” Richard said.

  “Air Force,” Shim explained.

  Murray looked at his father and found him trying to be amused for Shim’s sake. It wasn’t necessary; Shim never seemed to care. Half the time he laughed alone, out of his own bitter frame of reference.

  “Well, I wish I’d been there,” Murray said.

  “Oh, you should of been there!”

  Zach, too, rocked and rumbled with pleasure. “Ah, hep!” he said.

  Richard made some more pancakes, and for a while they ate. Shim felt so good he was going to go hunting too. It was the last day before deer season, and he said he never bothered with partridges when he hunted deer, so he might as well try them once more. After breakfast he wanted to shoot a few clay pigeons so that he wouldn’t disgrace himself on the birds.

  “Come on and try a few,” he said to them, “I got a whole case some sport left here last year—didn’t cost me nothing.” He went to his arms locker and brought out a big cardboard box, his automatic shotgun, and a hand trap. “You ever throw these things?” he said to Murray, and handed him the little wooden-handled trap.

  “Once,” Murray said. “I guess I can throw some for you.” Shim laughed, and seemed very pleased with him. On the evening he had come Opal said that Shim had been following his “progress in football” and that Shim admired him. He had never seen Shim quite so friendly.

  But he didn’t really care if Shim were friendly or not. Once, when he was younger, he cared very much—when Shim’s hunting, skiing and woodsmanship were so admirable to a boy. Now he was impatient, and wanted to be somewhere else, not up in the woods on a New Hampshire mountain, but into the stream of things—down on the plains, deep in the cities where adventures were happening, and he wanted to go there while there was still time. Even now, as they walked toward the little field behind the barn, he wished himself there, in the city of the high glass room, and the golden girl, and the dangerous moon.

  “Screw down that there wingnut,” Shim said. “Gives the right tension. Not too tight or you’ll break the bird, not too loose or it’ll just fall off the trap.”

  Murray slipped one of the fragile little discs into the trap. Shim loaded his gun, got set, and said, “Pull!” Murray swung the trap out on a stiff wrist and the little disc, black with a yellow center, spun out into the air and rose toward the trees. Shim fired, and the disc was a black fuzz of powder in the air.

  “Dead on, by God!” Shim said.

  “Good shot,” Richard said.

  “Couple more like that and I’ll know I ain’t too rusty.”

  Murray loaded the trap again, and when Shim was ready threw the clay bird lower and faster this time, so that it began to rise farther out, the way a jumpy partridge might flush ahead of a man. Shim fired three times, but the bird sailed on and on, unperturbed, almost insolent, entered the woods, and disappeared. They heard it smash against a tree.

  “God damn it! Toss me another!” Shim stuffed more shells into his magazine.

  “Where do you want it?” Murray said, sensing that he had made a mistake to ask.

  “What!”

  “High, low, where?”

  “Any goddam place!”

  Shim shot twice before the undamaged bird sailed into the trees.

  “Must of run right through the pattern. I was dead on, both times.” No one could say anything to that. Shim broke the next bird, and felt a little better. “You try it,” he said to Murray.

  Murray loaded one barrel of the over-and-under, and when Shim threw the bird he easily found it over his barrel, and fired. The bird turned to black dust. He got the next three, and on the fourth Shim threw so hard the bird came off the trap in two flopping halves. Before they hit the ground Murray chose the largest half and powdered it.

  “That’s shooting,” his father said quietly. Murray looked up, as if his father had meant it as a hint, and watched Shim carefully. He was aware at once of the tension in Shim’s face: a redder, darker line crossed his eyes like a slash of paint, and the little yellow irises were bright in its dark shadow.

  “I think I’d rather shoot these than live birds,” Murray said.

  “You would?” Shim was truly incredulous. Perhaps he understood that it had been a pacifying remark; actually Murray would rather have been doing something else entirely. “What I can’t understand,” Shim said, “is why, since you do everything so well, you ain’t a hunter.”

  “I guess I don’t have the blood lust.”

  Shim laughed. “Your old man’s got it. What happened to you?” He looked slyly at Richard, then said seriously: “You know why I can’t hit them damn clay pigeons? They don’t give me no blood lust.” He laughed harder.

  “It looked as though you lusted after that first one you missed,” Murray said, carefully smiling.

  Shim may have hesitated for a second, but then he chose to grin, and said: “They do sort of take on a personality, don’t they? The little black bastards. Here, throw me one more! Urrrr,” he growled as he got ready. He hit the bird before it had gone ten feet from the trap. “See? I got to get my blood hot first.”

  “Wait till tomorrow morning,” Richard said.

  “Oh, the deer,” Shim said, rubbing his hand delicately over his orange brush of hair. “Murray, how do you feel about the deer?”

  “I’d like to get one, I guess.”

  “You’d like to get one you guess! Murray, you’re a strange one, you are.
You’re a rang-dang weirdball sometimes.”

  Murray’s father looked at him too, but he couldn’t tell what kind of speculation or judgment lay there.

  Shim threw some more clay pigeons, and his father broke three out of four. “Wait’ll we see some hot-blooded birds,” Shim said. “Course, if we do see a deer we can’t shoot—even if it’s close enough for birdshot.” Shim laughed meaningfully, then added seriously: “If young Spooner warn’t so hot after me, I’d try for a little camp meat. Always carry a slug and a double-ought buckshot in my belt anyway.”

  When they brought the trap and the clay pigeons back to the house, Opal was standing at the sink on her little set of steps, doing their dishes. “I hope you get your limits,” she said. Murray noticed that she did not look straight at his father, and in her not quite looking there was excitement of some kind. It gave him a little shiver, and he tried to decide just what kind of shiver it was, but he could not choose between fear—not fear for his father’s possible entanglement with her (what a strange thing that would be!) so much as a fear that life might find him up here in the mountains where it could not be as romantic as he wanted it to be—and another choice, even stranger, but stronger; he saw Opal as a girl. For just a second she was no longer ten years older than he, and had never been his teacher. He was aware of her silky legs, and of possibility—slight, tiny, ridiculous possibility. Ridiculous, all right. Then they went hunting, and he almost forgot about it.

  When, at noon, separated from the others by at least a half-mile of trees, he shot a partridge, he half remembered it again. The vividness of death, even in the bird, again suggested possibilities. Here was death, and it was like taking off his clothes, like opening the wrong door and being ready, even though embarrassed, to see the naked woman standing inside; shock, response; not quite shock, too much response. He sat against a maple tree and looked at the gawky-necked dead bird. He began to think of Opal again, and thought, Ridiculous! Then, because the bird was still warm in his hand and yet very still, except for the skinny neck which rolled meaninglessly over his fingers, he went straight from the possibilities of dreamy sex, straight, as he usually did—as he usually tried not to do—to reality and fright, as if he had within him a horrid ability to perceive morning-after—a previewer. And this unwelcome memory had to do with life and its little visitor, wee death, too. But he was younger then….

  It was in the spring of his freshman year, when he had just become eighteen. His Aunt Mae called him from New York.

  “Murray,” she said, and her voice, usually a rather mellow, effected alto, this time was touched by a hysteria that came clearly all that way, through all those circuits. He thought first of tragedy, and it was the thought of his father that came down upon his head and all at once crushed him, made his neck bones ache. He pulled the telephone booth door closed against the ringing of the dormitory hall, and asked, with dread in his voice, what was the matter?

  “Oh, Murray, I’m sorry I scared you! Nobody’s dead. But we need you.”

  “Me?” He’d just come from a poker game—penny ante, and he was triumphantly twenty-one cents ahead. “Me?” He had never before been needed for anything, and the penny-ante game, he thought suddenly, might even be considered the measure of his serious life.

  “Murray, I can’t tell you over the phone. But it has to do with Sophie, and we’ve thought it all out, and we do need you to help us. Can you come, and tell nobody? Do you need money? Not even your father or Rachel? Will you?”

  No adult relative had ever pleaded with him, had ever needed him. He could not refuse, but he might simply turn inadequate: the child’s choice still powerfully occurred to him, with some shame. Aunt Mae’s tone of voice had made him pretty sure he knew what was wrong with his cousin Sophie, who was just a kid—fourteen or fifteen—but how could he help that? For a horrible, trapped moment, he wondered if the family were planning to trap him into child marriage. With his first cousin?

  “What’s the matter? What can I do?”

  “I can’t tell you now, Murray.” He had never heard more love, more respect directed toward him. “You come and we’ll pay for your trip, and then you can make up your mind—we won’t try to make it up for you, Murray. Please, Murray.”

  He liked his Aunt Mae. Her husband he disliked with such nervous intensity that he could hardly eat anything in Aunt Mae’s house. He hadn’t seen any of them for two years, and then Sophie was a plain, plump little girl in the eighth grade. But he liked Aunt Mae, and she began to cry into the phone—unlike her to be so unstable—and suddenly he felt very strong and wise.

  “Aunt Mae. Mae!” he said sharply, and impressed by this new voice of his, also aware of its staginess, he said, “Now don’t you worry. I’ll be there tomorrow morning. I’ll get the night train to Boston, and I’ll fly from there. I’ve got enough money. Just don’t you worry, Aunt Mae. Just take it easy and I’ll be there.” He could not see her even in his most recent memory, and the reason was that she had always been firmly, justly adult: he recognized in her voice another person, a stranger who was his flesh and blood, full of the need for comfort.

  “Oh, Murray! I told them. I told them you were a peach, Murray, even if I haven’t seen you for a year and ten months! You were always my boy, Murray. God bless you!”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “All right, Murray. God bless. God bless.”

  He didn’t go back to the poker game to cash in his twenty-one cents’ worth of chips, but went straight back to his room. Shelton, wise in this emergency, with a grave face that showed to Murray his understanding and delight, said he would tell the professors that it was so sudden and such an emergency that Murray could have had no time to ask for leave from his classes. Also two exams. He did not ask Murray for details; that would have been beneath the fine gravity of the moment.

  Murray packed a small bag, and in the alternate moods of fear and a benevolent, proud feeling of real experience, took a taxi to White River Junction, a train to Boston (it seemed to take very little time), and another taxi to the airport. With some superstition he calculated his chances—somehow they were worse because of the nature of his journey—for crashing. He couldn’t stop, of course, and then worsened his chances again by buying $10,000 worth of life insurance from a coin machine and making Sophie Gelb beneficiary. That would help, if he could not.

  How serious, how wise he felt as the plane labored up from Boston and circled like a giant silver cross! This, he felt, was life; mixed, risky, breath-stealing life. He was honored by it—a rescuer. But then came the small thought that held him quickly, again, in its smallness like a nest holding an unfledged bird: what did they want him to do? Could he make himself do it? He had diarrhea, and had to go to the rear of the plane, to the hissing little cubicle, and spray his childish, babified nervous mess out into the cold, the iron cold, real night.

  He got out of the taxi in front of Orson Gelb’s house in Floral Park, Long Island. The modern little house was solidly made of brick, just like the house next door, and just like the house next door to that, and in the suburban, secondhand dawn that was all gray, in which even the dew was dirty on wood, cement, brick, asphalt, the number of the house, silver on a little black plaque—1488—was the only indication he could trust that this was Orson Gelb’s house. And because of such deliberate duplication of everything—even the picture window swathed in its gauze glaucoma around the oversized table lamp was the same up and down both sides of the street—it seemed to him that trouble and possible tragedy were waiting for him just beyond the front door of any house he chose, or that whatever was wrong with Sophie was number 1488 in the canon of trouble.

  Sleepy gray dawn, tired grass in the little front yard, the short driveway to the carport just two cement strips so that some more of the precious, soiled green could exist in the middle; but everything now, in April, was just a shade or two removed from the dirt of winter. His eyes were tired from his trip, during which they had only closed to blink, and t
hey felt as if they, too, were covered by dreck; his eyeballs itched. The dew was drying on the trunk of his uncle’s new Chrysler—on the taillights and on the huge, dirty fins that nearly touched the side columns of the carport.

  The knocker was an aluminum anchor, not really meant to be used. He pushed the square plastic button of the doorbell and heard, deep inside the house that seemed somehow thick, thickwalled, thick with sleep, paint, panelings and joinings, the heavy, soft chimes. Inside there were wall-to-wall carpets to absorb that sound, and solid doors to stop that sound and all the necessary sounds of arguments and toilets and bed squeaks. He pushed the button again, and the chimes, deep inside in the still, heavy air, rang slowly.

  Waiting, he looked at the sky. Light grew, but though there were no obvious clouds, he could not tell east. The sky lightened as if a bank of fluorescent lamps straight overhead came slowly on—as if the whole suburb had been set up on the floor of a huge, dirty loft. One of the plane trees that had been planted up and down the narrow street had died, in spite of the wire cage that protected its frail trunk. It was spring for all the rest, even if they did remind him of animals in a zoo—the kinds of animals who must be protected by cages from the people, instead of the other way around. But they were the only real indication of spring. The trunks of the trees were soiled like the calves of children who have played in dust—in rings and little islands—but the little leaves were quite young, and still bright.

  The door opened, and a big girl in bright green pajamas stood smiling at him. Upon the tall green creature’s neck was Sophie’s head, no different than it had been upon the little eighth grader he remembered; the face was seriously open, incredibly open, as if it could never hold a secret. The face was plain, with a wide mouth, a narrow forehead below black hair thick as wrapped velvet. Sophie just smiled. “It is Murray,” she finally said. Her eyes were hazel, and the whites of them were too large, so that the irises seemed unsteady, and moved as she spoke, smiled, and examined his face. They moved too much, with what seemed to be too much freedom, too much affection.