Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  NINETY-EIGHT

  Jayme reread, for the third time, DeMarco’s text. Should take two days at most. The words swam before her eyes. Two days? He was leaving her behind, just like that? As if a few words of apology solved everything? Was that all the more she meant to him?

  What she should do is pack up her grandmother’s car, lock the house, and leave without a word. No texts, no notes, not a single word to indicate where she had gone.

  Good plan.

  But where would she go?

  Anywhere! Anywhere she pleased.

  And, for a moment, that thought was exciting, to be so free and unfettered, sailing down the highway like in that YouTube video she loved, Van Morrison’s “Philosopher’s Stone” playing across the green hills, a slow river of music coursing along the valley.

  But then the emptiness hit again, and she missed him. Missed him so badly her stomach felt like a huge stone of emptiness, cold and hollow and as heavy as lead. And just above that leaden nausea her chest burned, heart swollen with misery.

  DeMarco was the only man she had ever loved in a full-blown, insatiable, romantic, and normal way. She still loved the first man but had learned to contain that love in a deep unlit corner of her heart just as he had asked her to do. He had put a thousand miles between them specifically to make that containment easier for both, and because he was exhausted from struggling against the moral consequences of their relationship. He had learned from many years of experience that mere willpower would never keep them apart, especially since Jayme had never struggled against any rationale, moral or otherwise. She did concede however that anything you had to keep hidden from universal condemnation was probably doomed. She could quote biblical exceptions to that disapproval and had for a while, but stopped because no argument softened the deleterious effects he suffered. It had never been a public love anyway. According to him, her love was an immature addiction. He promised that she would have lots of boyfriends when she outgrew her gawky stage. But being held by those boyfriends never felt as fulfilling to her, never stilled the other hunger for long. She’d kept hoping it would shrink in significance and fade into a fond, though secret memory.

  It showed no signs of doing so until she met DeMarco. She’d been surprised to find herself thinking so frequently of him. It had something to do with proximity, of course, with DeMarco visible five days a week and the other man not even permissible through Skype, which they discovered would inevitably lead to cybersex that left neither feeling soulful or serene.

  And maybe that was the difference DeMarco brought to the table. Their lovemaking always left her feeling serene and safe and clean and fulfilled. Even now she had to admire him. It wasn’t as if he was out chasing another woman, or had cheated on her or abused her in any way. He was working for those seven unfortunate girls. Chasing down a lead. He was a lot like a wolverine in that regard. A badger. A snapping turtle. Once he got his teeth into something, you had to beat him with a stick to make him let go.

  He’d been jealous, that’s all. Was a little jealousy necessarily bad? A little insecurity in a relationship? Every man has a bit of the beast in him. But there’s a time and place to let the beast run free. He needs to learn the proper etiquette, that’s all. She couldn’t have him going nuclear every time a man smiles her way.

  So now it came down to a battle of wills. A little suffering will be good for him.

  But what if he isn’t suffering?

  What? DeMarco not suffer? DeMarco is a first-class sufferer. Among the men she knew, he holds the heavyweight belt in self-induced suffering.

  So she needed to keep herself busy a while. Not lie around moping. There were things she could do too. McGintey’s girls should be interviewed. If they had any information, she could squeeze it out of them. Maybe even put them on the right track for a change. Teach those poor girls about a thing called self-respect.

  NINETY-NINE

  At the campground, DeMarco hoisted up the backpack, loaded down now with all the equipment and supplies from the RV. He was sweaty, exhausted, and hungry already, but felt no inclination to remain in a noisy campground, his RV a mere ten feet from the one next to it. Some time alone in the woods would be invigorating. Atop the first summit he would make a cup of coffee, eat some jerky, spread out the tarp and sleeping bag, and wait for the stars to appear. The weather forecast, posted on the campground’s bulletin board, called for clear skies and a low of sixty-five degrees.

  He expected to hear from Jayme sooner or later, and then he would do his best to patch things up, and would then be able to pass the night in blessed stillness, with nothing but the scents and sounds of nature for company. Tomorrow he would find Emery Elliott Summerville. Or he would not. The rest he would play by ear. Listen to the heart brain. Listen to the murmurings of seven unfortunate girls—seven unloved babies whose presence, ever since he’d started loading up the pack, seemed to be hovering near.

  He couldn’t get out of the campground fast enough. The pack was heavier than he’d expected it would be. Or you’re weaker, he told himself. With the Glock 27 concealed beneath his T-shirt, he was carrying an extra thirty pounds or more, much of it clanking with every step.

  On his way to the trailhead he passed a cement pad with a basketball hoop mounted at each end, all of it enclosed by a chain-link fence. Playing a game of one-on-one were two young men in jeans, no shirts, white socks, their arms and faces deeply tanned, chests and backs pimply and pale. Their hair was shaggy but not fashionably so. Factory boys, DeMarco assumed; late teens or early twenties. Their boots were lined up against the chain-link fence, each beside a tallboy can of beer. They played basketball clumsily, crouching low to dribble, lunging forward to hit the backboard from twenty feet out, the ball’s trajectory flat, with no chance of sailing through the rim.

  He watched them and felt sorry for them, a couple of life’s underdogs, no special talents, no grand ambitions. He knew their type well, felt their sadness in his bones. He thought about joining them for a while, a couple games of Horse or 21.

  But that wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He wanted to have a talk with them. Tell them to never give up on hope. Never give up on love. Keep firing at the rim. Just put a little more loft on the ball. Employ a lighter touch. Life doesn’t have to be a constant slugfest, he would tell them.

  But would they appreciate such a conversation? Would he have at their age?

  Hard to say, he thought. With a different kind of father maybe.

  A man like Tom Huston would have a made a world of difference in his life; he knew that much for sure.

  And then he saw the trailhead and the opening in the trees, a gaping black mouth four feet wide and twelve feet high, a tongue of packed dirt, a hole full of shade.

  IV

  Unless you have chaos inside, you cannot give birth to a dancing star.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  ONE HUNDRED

  The dimness of the forest surprised him. He had been counting on a good four hours of daylight, but the light in the forest came in stray slender beams, broken and alive with drifting motes of dust. What sunlight wasn’t blocked by the high canopy some forty feet above was caught or deflected by the second canopy of saplings and slender trees maybe a dozen feet high. For the first twenty minutes, until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he held to the trail, but after encountering his tenth or eleventh day hiker descending with nothing more than an empty water bottle or a dog on a leash, every dog too eager to sniff DeMarco’s trousers, he thought Enough of this and veered straight uphill and slightly to the right of the switchbacking trail.

  Here his pace slowed by more than half. But after he had put sufficient distance between himself and the trail walkers that their shouts and laughter faded into whispers, and then no longer registered on his ears, he did not mind the pace, and felt his body attuning itself to the climb, his senses attuning themselves to the more nuanced sighs
and scents and sounds of the forest.

  And his days as a boy in the woods came back to him then, that old calmness and acquiescence to a deadfall or protruding boulder. What he had taught himself as a child was that if you fight the woods they will weaken and defeat you, but if you attune yourself without resentment to their demands, you can find pleasure and reward wherever you look. His gaze was never more than six feet up the slope now as he walked, and was frequently trained on the understory or ground cover, from the squat shrubs and ferns to the fungus clinging like cantilevered stairs to a tree trunk, the moss and lichens and ground-hugging vines that would snake around his ankles and excoriate his skin with their barbs if he wasn’t respectful of their space.

  Frequently he had to pause to catch his breath and allow his pulse to even out. He wasn’t a boy anymore with unlimited stamina, able to walk and climb all day without rest. But the advantage of age is the ability to endure greater pain, to accept it as concomitant to life, so that the straps pulling on his shoulders and the ache in his calves could be recognized and accepted without bitterness.

  In this manner he continued for another two hours, picking his way through a boulder field and detouring around a jagged outcropping of sandstone plates, climbing over deadfalls with spiky broken branches, descending shallow ravines slippery with old leaves, inching under low-hanging limbs. He paused to admire an exposed rock strata polished by the elements so that it resembled an ocean wave carved in stone, and was stopped for several minutes by the sunlight splotches thrown across the forest floor like lemon paint on a Pollock canvas.

  Like Jackson Pollock on a pogo stick, he told himself. He stood there smiling, imagining a half-drunken Pollock, cigarette dangling from his lips, bounding through the forest on a pogo stick, its tube filled with yellow paint, every leap squirting out a quart or so onto the forest floor. Of course he would have been knocked silly by the first branch he struck, DeMarco thought, but that wouldn’t have damaged the art any, would maybe even improve it.

  He was walking a pathless path now, no blazes on the trees, no indication on the ground that anyone had ever walked there before him. He allowed the path to choose itself, moving according to feeling, this way, then this way. A scent could stop him in his tracks—was that cigarette smoke? The scent of meat frying? The perfume of honeysuckle? He paused frequently, not just to catch his breath and rest his legs but to listen for a sound, a feeling coming from somewhere inside, or maybe coming to him from the woods, he did not know which. But who said he had to keep walking until he exhausted himself? He could walk a while then stop, enjoy the light through the branches or the anomalous surprise of a tiny purple flower growing between two rocks, then walk a while longer and stop again, have a drink of water, take a bite from a PowerBar. The mountain was not infinite, he would reach the top sooner or later. One foot in front of the other, that’s all it would take. But nobody said he had to do it without rest. Even the bones could respect that. Keesha, Jazmin, LaShonda, Tara, Debra, Ceres, Crystal. He knew they were in a hurry; he sometimes felt those seven pairs of hands against his back. But sometimes their pressure on him relented too, stopped driving him forward, a lighter touch, as if they were all out walking together, enjoying the day.

  Sometimes a sound like a young woman’s laugh whispered from the dimness behind him. Sometimes a few footsteps following. Then silence. Not so much as a bird chirping, a squirrel scurrying through the leaves.

  He thought it strange that, though he was walking uphill most of the time, except when cutting laterally around an obstacle in his path, a lack of urgency had settled into him. Not even the attention of the insects bothered him for those first hours in the woods, the shrill mosquitoes and silent gnats buzzing around his head, the stealthy spiders and beetles and bugs that somehow made their way onto his trousers, the little green worms that fell out of the trees and onto his shoulders or head.

  The constant, barely audible rumble that used to plague him was silent now. Had it stopped because he had climbed above it? Or because this was a different kind of walking than he had engaged in daily as a trooper, when from morning to night he always felt as if he were walking against a wind, a thickness of air trying to hold him back. It had been like swimming against a slow current, nothing so forceful you could not make progress but just strong enough to require greater effort. That was how he had walked through his days for the past thirteen years—as if trudging through a swamp. But in these woods near the end of the day there was a strange lightness to his step despite the heaviness of the pack. He knew he would stop soon, find a place to lie down and sleep for a while. But it was not difficult to keep walking if he decided to do so. No force of opposition blew against him. If he felt anything at all it was a force from behind lightly urging him upward. Maybe he had simply gotten used to the walking, had found the right rhythm, entered into the flow. Whatever was happening, it was a nice feeling. A good feeling. He hadn’t felt this good about himself for a very long time.

  ONE HUNDRED ONE

  He decided on no fire. Had nothing to cook anyway, and felt no need for coffee. Anyway, too tired. He had spent the last twenty minutes bypassing a half acre of brambles by descending and then ascending a steep, deep ravine slippery with dry brown leaves on top, damp decomposing leaves underneath. By the time he reached the top, every muscle was burning.

  After clearing the sticks and roots from a small, nearly level shelf of ground several feet from the edge of the ravine, he laid out the tarp and then the sleeping bag, then removed his hiking boots and socks and lay looking up through the leaves. The leaves were dark with the sun below the hills, but here and there a dim star shone through. He could not remember what phase the moon was in, but saw no sign of it climbing the wall of the sky. He chewed a few pieces of beef jerky and sipped the last of the first bottle of water.

  He thought back over the past many years, ever since the car accident that had taken his son away. The only times he had not felt alone, had not felt torn in half, were when he was alone with Jayme. Where didn’t matter. In a vehicle, his bedroom, walking across a parking lot. How could one person change things so dramatically? Well, Ryan Jr. had too. And before him, Laraine. No one before them. No one. And who was left? Only Jayme. And maybe that was ruined now too.

  If only she hadn’t flirted with that lowlife. Now everything that had been good and pure between them was tainted, poisoned because of Richie.

  And then he told himself that was all nonsense. Purity is a product of love and trust and not past experience. There was certainly nothing pure about his own past. For a long time after his mother’s death he had not allowed himself to feel anything but anger and fear and grief. In Panama and then in the States after Iraq, he had been with women but only to blunt the physical need. The other need was always there and as sharp as a spear, but he would let nobody touch it. He had grown accustomed to the darkness inside and believed he deserved it, so would not allow it to be dispelled, and even doubted it could ever be dispelled.

  The fistfights of his youth were nothing compared to what he had done in uniform, and he had come out of those places sick to death of violence. Sick of grief and suffering and loneliness and despair. And one bright day with his heart black with misery he had sought out a dark room so as to contemplate what to do with his shameful life, and bought a ticket into a movie house and sat in a rear corner to work up the courage to do what he wanted to do, and was surprised to get caught up in a movie that gave direction and the promise of purpose to that life. And afterward he was blessed with moments of purity, thanks wholly to three people in his life—moments with Laraine and then little Ryan, and now finally with Jayme.

  The truth, he told himself now, is that nobody ever gets to be pure except through love. And if you’re not yet old enough or smart enough to realize that, DeMarco, you never will be.

  All right then, he thought. You know what you’ve done, and what you’ve failed to do. It can never be
undone, but maybe you can use it and learn from it, become a better man, a better partner for Jayme. You can open up more. Give her more of what she needs. Maybe you can take what you’re feeling up here in these woods and carry it back down the mountain with you.

  God, how he missed her. Wished he could share all this with her, the stillness and the forest and the breeze through the leaves. The scent of night. Her scent. That fresh, soapy, warm, filling scent she gave off.

  The night was beautiful, fragrant and still and almost sacred in its peacefulness. But even that felt empty without her.

  He rolled over and reached for his pack. Rummaged through it, took out the phone. Screen dark. Battery dead. Why hadn’t he remembered to charge it before leaving the RV? Why had he ever been jealous? Why did something as beautiful and wonderful and rare as love feel like broken glass in his chest?

  ONE HUNDRED TWO

  Sleeping, he heard the footsteps approaching. He knew those shuffling footsteps, heavy and slow. He knew that presence, knew the stench of its breath, and was assailed by a paralyzing fear, an inability to breathe, a thundering of his heart. A pit of darkness enveloped him.

  But then a realization: You’re not a boy anymore. And the fear bloomed into anger, such a roar of heat flooding his body that he sat upright, fists clenched, and would have leapt to his feet were he not waking now, not yet fully awake but eyes open and straining in the darkness, the blackness all around him but smelling of forest now, the air thick and moist on his face.

  It took him a while to unclench his fists, to separate the dream images from the real. The night was pitch-black, just like some nights back in the trailer, but his father, he now recognized, was not a part of it. Yet the image of his father standing close, hand reaching down, was difficult to dislodge.