"It's not."
"You'd be good to me, wouldn't you?"
"I can't," he said.
"You'd suck it back out...?"
"".
"Go on. I'm about to choke."
She pushed her face onto his and forced open his lips. This second kiss was even shorter than the first as he leaned back, just a dot of time that left a trail of spit, on his chin, and then she pretended to pass out, fell away to the ground, opened her legs, lifted one of her knees and threw her arms behind her head. And then she was still.
He shook his head, told himself he wouldn't fall for it, couldn't fall for it. This wasn't real. She didn't need his help. Not that way. He watched her breathe. Her chest came up like dawn. He understood what was going on. She had her eyes closed. She was letting him see, the sun kissing her skin in pinpricks, kissing his, the way he should kiss her. He got down on his knees next to her so his head cast a shadow over her torso, thinking how it would look like he had killed her, had struck her down with a rock, if anyone happened to see. He checked around in case: nothing but lines of tree trunks out to where the world dropped away. And when he looked back she had her eyes open, a wide smile on her face, laughing at him, sun ripening her eyes. He put up his hand out to try and block the rays from getting to her through the gaps in the leaves.
"You weren't going to kiss me again?" she said.
"No," he replied and looked away.
"But people do... Grown ups... You started it." She reached up and took hold of his wrist, pulling it down to her chest where his hand touched and pulled free.
He lost his balance, falling in slow motion, hands punched flat at the dirt to stop himself, pressing against her by the weight of all the universe on his back, until he felt once more the cushion of her breasts, all to stop their bones from colliding, hearts from merging, like air bags, like lungs full of sweet breath. He had to tense his arms to get a hand free, and he could have pushed away then but remained stuck, no longer wanting to move.
They touched lips for what felt like a year, then she pressed him away from her, lifting him free. Strong. His feet scrambled to take hold of the ground as he stood up, as if the world had tilted imperceptibly while he had been down. It was hard to move. He licked his lips and could taste some sort of fruit. He turned and stared up to the trees, the only sort of place he could find solace, remembering that close up view of her white skin, as if it might be petrified bark that would crumble if he looked at it without care, or make him crumble.
Was it meant to be like this?
She was close to a woman. He knew what sort of interaction that could bring, in his head, in his dreams, behind his eyes. He was sure the books didn't lie. He stepped away from her, looking around for something that might help.
One of the trees nearby was larger than the other and he walked up to it while she straightened her clothes. The bark was rough to the touch. He remembered taking a large sheet of paper into the forest with his father when he was much younger, when they had not been out into the wilderness together for that much long, and he had pushed the paper onto the bark of the tree and rubbed it with a scrap of blue crayon he had found in a house.
The wax caught the grooves and the lumps on the bark as he rubbed. It took a ride on the contours and left tracks of where it had run. It was an amazing thing to see, leaving his fingers the colour of the sheet, the result taking the appearance of a dried up sea. As if some of the beach caressed by the waves had been frozen and then projected. This was the first such rubbing and there were many.
He used to take them home and stick them on his wall. He preferred that to the wallpaper. One of the pictures had what appeared to be a face on it, drawn long, it hung down from the rest on his walls and seemed to gaze at him. It took him several weeks to notice. But once he did he could not escape the eyes that followed him around the room, that followed him now.
CHAPTER NINE
"Did you know you can use sap from trees to find out if there's anything buried underneath?" the girl said.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's an old treasure hunters' secret."
"But how?"
She walked up to one of the trees close to the trodden down trail in the grass they had been following, which could have been made by people, or more likely a family of deer with their heads down.
"Like this," she said. She grabbed a branch without breaking stride and used it like a rope to swing herself around until she faced him, smiling at the sudden free-fall she had twisted through, with all the brightness of a drip of water illuminated by the sun as it fell off a cliff in a spray. "I can show you. Kind of. You take one of the branches and pull it open, or cut down to the sap."
"Then what?" he said.
It was becoming harder to talk, as if the air was thinner again here, or somehow had less oxygen. Had they gone so much higher than where he had begun, up that mountain that crossed into the lands of adulthood, or was it in his head? Had her kiss bonded to his blood like car exhaust was supposed to, slowly squeezing him of air, so he'd die all sickle-cell smiles on the inside. Or had they merely walked a fast clip for half an hour now, pushing on before the sun went down behind the landslips of rock and spearhead trees.
"You need to analyse it, in a machine, looking for what chemicals are in it, stuff that's been pulled up with the water in the soil from below. Traces of whatever you're trying to find. You know, like gold. People could do that once. When they cared to find treasure."
Her tongue slipped out of her lips as she focussed on the branch, turning it all the way around so that the end pointed at him, like the head of snake squeezed through the eye of a needle.
"You got a knife in that pack?" she said.
He nodded and instantly swung the bag from his back and knelt down to open it. He pulled out the knife, shaking it free of a wrap of paper that used to contain something sweet. He handed it to her and she turned it around in her hand and then expertly opened the blade using the small slot in the edge of the metal until it clicked into place. The metal was tarnished and flecked with dark stripes, with a faint birthmark of rust on one side of it that ran around and back.
Some of that was dried blood. He had found the knife outside the back of an abandoned house a few years back and had kept it in secret, like the more recent lighter. His father had had him wait out in the yard while he scoured the inside for whatever it was, and the boy had wandered around kicking stems of grass, until he found the swing, part-hidden behind a large tree, letting his feet brush over the top of an area where the soil was still bare, as if ghosts had kept busy going back and forth with the rusted chains. Here in turn he spotted a channel that led down a slight slope. Inside the channel were walls made from poorly cut floorboards stacked in a line, a trench sized for children, as if some macabre game had gone on there before, during, after. Perhaps a way to keep the little ones at ease somehow, to make them feel secure. And it was down at the bottom of this channel where the soil had been dug around and similarly lined that he found the knife, picked it up, and opened it, intrigued by the shape, having never held such a thing before, without thinking, pressing it into his palm.
The girl took one more look at the blade, twisting it so that the edge was aimed at her eye, then ran it over the branch, sawing back and forth as her brow became a grill with the effort, her fingers turning white as she pushed, leaning into it on tiptoes, lifting her shoulders, turning her wrists in on themselves and easing all of her weight down onto the edge of that blade, bending the branch under the push until she yelled in surprise and the knife slipped, came out of the groove, and the branch flew back to where it had been before.
"What is it?" he said, taking a step towards her to see if she'd cut herself, to suck it out, because that had done for him when he had first found the blade, had been forced to press his lips into his skin, lapping the colour up, until only a razor slit remained, one time, then again, until it stopped leaking until he could close his hand, just about,
enough not to let his father see.
"Don't," she said, stepping back so that he couldn't touch her.
"What is it?"
She pointed over to the tree with her other hand as she wiped her palm across the backs of her legs, checking it carefully.
He picked out the branch, now limp, and moved it towards him. He inspected it to find where the knife had cut, and saw at once what she had seen. The sap was not clear, but black like oil, thick. He reached a finger to touch it but she stopped him.
"It might not be safe."
"It's just a tree... isn't it?"
"I haven't seen anything like that before."
"Could it be a sign of treasure?" he said.
"No," she replied. "Not any treasure I want to find... It's like... sick, it's disgusting."
"Yeah."
He let go of the branch but it just hung, as if it would forever float alongside him.
"We should keep moving."
She picked up the knife and handed it to him, still open. He looked down at the blade, no trace of anything on it, even the cutting edge. He pushed it closed, put it into his pocket and followed her away.
"I feel bad for doing that," she said after a few minutes.
"For snapping a branch?" he replied.
"Aha."
"Why?"
She stopped and turned back to face him. She wasn't kidding.
"I don't know... It just looked like... like it was hurting inside, you know?
"I guess."
"There must be something wrong with the soil..."
"Something that made the inside black?"
"Yeah."
"Do you think they're all like that? The other trees?"
"Maybe."
The boy glanced around them. Suddenly all of the bark seemed so much more grey, so much more like it was turning into stone, the deep ridges cracking as if dried out, all water turned to sludge, the colour of the middle of their eyes, as if vision was really pulled in by this devil dark coal that absorbed all the light. It made sense they had no leaves.
"Don't even think about checking," she said.
"I wasn't."
"Good."
"You think there's something in the ground here?"
"Must be."
"But, what?"
"Well it's not gold that's for sure..." she turned and smiled at him for a moment, since the first time that branch had swung away from her and shaken her up. "Even if there used to be."
"Used to be what?"
"Used to be gold. You know? In rivers, in the earth."
"Like pirate treasure?"
"No, just there. Before people started gathering it, hiding it."
"What happened to it all?"
"I guess it just ran out."
"But how would the sap have looked if there was gold in it?"
Her eyes sunk down towards the dimples in her cheeks as if attracted by magnets and then circled back up to where he could see them. "I think it looks the same... Clear."
"Oh."
"I don't think it sparkles."
"Right."
"You have to sample it. With a machine, like I said. But it is nice to imagine that maybe it would..."
"Yeah..."
"".
"Should we tell someone about the black?"
"Who?"
"My dad, yours...?"
"About the trees? Not sure why anyone would care."
He turned away and gazed down the side of the small hill they were up on top of now, down towards another slab of brown that looked like a wooden table, made out of long runs of soil and mud that rippled together like poured sand before being punctured by more plants and brush, before the trees reached across again, threatening to turn everything black, from the inside out.
"Which way?" he asked. "Down here?"
She nodded and he decided to take the lead, walking ahead of her for the first time, batting any branches that crept across the trail aside so she didn't have to touch them, some misguided idea or another about trying to shield her from having to think about such things any more.
"You never did tell me what brings you out here," she said from behind.
"You never told me," he replied.
"Well, feel free to ask..."
He turned and stopped.
"Are you hunters?"
She had her hands up by her face, inspecting the backs of them as she walked. She shook her head. "Why did you ask that?"
"Just wondering..."
"So you said it's you and your dad?"
"Yes."
"You know, we ran into a straggler yesterday not far from here. Are you part of that group?"
"Kind of."
"Kind of?"
"Yeah, it's not really a group."
"What do you mean?"
"There's no group."
"No group?"
"It's just him and me."
"The man we met?"
"Yeah. I mean, I think so. He told me..."
"Told you what?"
"Told me he met some hunters... That's why..."
"I see." She narrowed her eyes. "So what's he look like? A bigger version of you?"
"Guess."
"Beard? Going grey?"
"Yeah."
"Well, are you hunters?"
The boy shook his head. He laughed. "That's what he said you might say."
"You never been hunting?"
"No," he said. "Have you?"
"Sometimes."
"Have you fired a gun?"
"Aha."
"Have you ever... shot something?"
"No. But I've seen things get shot, like animals and stuff."
"Oh."
"Yeah my uncle's a good shot. But then, after the first few times, I stopped watching, didn't like it, the way they react, the animals, I mean."
Ahead were a couple of trees that were staggered as the side of land plateaued at about thirty feet above where they were and then fell away. There were tufts of grass spilling over the top like those around the stream, like near where they had met, just floating in space, almost as if they didn't realise the land had gone, dropped away, turned into a sheer side of auburn mud that dried to a fine powder down at the base.
"We'd often go up on a ridge like that," she said, pointing, "and we'd have to wait for a long time. Sometimes for a good few hours. I let the grown ups get on with it now, you know. I prefer to go off on my own. To explore. I'm old enough."
"Yeah... Your men, they're hunting now?" the boy said, fixated on the top of the peak.
"Maybe. I don't know what they are doing: searching for supplies, patching kit. I try not to think about it."
"Ok."
"Worst part about hunting is when when you do it right."
"Why's that?"
"The target never even sees the bullet coming. It would usually be a deer or something, just strolling along the valley. I guess it would hear a crack of thunder and next thing just feel a sudden pain and that's it."
"Dead in one shot," the boy said.
"Sometimes. Or at least in the time it took to get over there, the time it took to take the knife... The weird thing is I sometimes get a pain like that too, like I said, all sudden, out of the blue. Maybe it's karma."
"The epilepsy?"
"Right, I mean haven't you ever had a sudden hurt? Really? Don't lie to me. I mean like sometimes at night when I turn just the wrong way, I get this jolting burn through the back of my head, it's like, I don't know, it's hard to describe, like my skull has been run over, like I'm dying. But it never bursts it just resonates and throbs. And then it goes away. Fast."
"Like a charley horse?"
"Something like that... But what I mean is, how's it any different from what the animal feels getting shot. It doesn't understand what's happening it's just a pain too."
"So that makes it ok?"
"No. I mean, what if we have a similar lack of understanding to them? What if there's someone shooting at us, and the pain is when
they hit?"
"But that doesn't make any sense," the boy said. "When we get a pain like that nothing happens, we just forget it and carry on. The animal ends up cooked..."
"Not all humans hunt to eat..."
"I guess..." he wasn't really sure what she was saying anymore and shrugged.
"I guess the point is that's why I had to stop tagging along. It was too much. The way they fell and the way I swear they'd know that we were looking at them? Ugh. You ever felt that?"
"That animals know I'm looking at them?"
"No, that someone is watching?"
"Oh..." he thought back to the yard. "Sometimes."
"Right? Me too. I mean I've seen it too often for it to be chance. So many times, the moment my uncle raised the gun... He always tried to teach me it was best not to look at your target until you were ready to pull the trigger, or they'd get away. He knew what he was talking about."
"That's crazy."
"But there's some truth in it, you know?"
"Isn't it just superstition?"
"Want to try?"
"How?"
"Go and stand over by that tree. Yeah. That big one. Go on..."
He did as he was told.
"Now what?"
"Now turn around. So you can't see me... I'm going to stand over here and I'll stare at the ground and count to ten, so that you can get a feel for what it's like if nobody's looking at you..."
"OK."
"Then after 10, I'll either look, or turn completely the other way. And, and, if I do look at you, I'll think about you too, you know, I'll think your name or something, or imagine I'm about to shoot you."
"Don't think of that."
"Alright, I won't imagine shooting you... I'll picture you. And if I don't look at you then I'll try and think about something else. I'll make patterns in the sky or something."
"Alright."
"You ready? You going to focus?"
"I am."
"Here goes."
The boy stared at the tree in front of him, watching the long lines created where the bark had become ragged and started to come off. The sort of thing the animals would rub up against and use to scratch, or mark with scent. He started to smile to himself as it felt weird. What was he supposed to be doing exactly? Trying to experience not being looked at. Well that was easy wasn't it. It felt like most every other moment of his day.
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