Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  In his dream he had been small, and that was how he’d always felt around his father. Then, the summer after his father’s death, a growth spurt. On the football team he was feared for the ferocity of his play, feared by teammates and opponents alike. In gym class DeMarco found himself to be faster and stronger than his classmates, able to hurl a soft, fat dodgeball at lightning speed to pin a cocky opponent against the folded-up bleachers. He often stepped in front of the weakest member of his team to intercept balls, catching and returning them to nail the rival in the chest or head.

  But sports could only slacken the boiling pressure, never extinguish it. Even when he sat motionless at his desk, classmates felt DeMarco’s heat. Teachers avoided calling on him, treated him delicately, afraid of unleashing whatever force simmered within. DeMarco was amused by it all. They thought him full of indiscriminate fury, half-orphaned son of a murdered man. How could a boy from such upbringings feel anything but rage?

  Only he knew that what he felt was liberation. Infinite possibilities. A caged pigeon freed to become a falcon. They all feared him, and he liked it.

  Now, in the woods, still chilled from the dream of his father, he felt nothing but shame for those years, and for the years that followed. Until Laraine and then Baby Ryan he had cultivated and polished an intimidating persona, used it whenever called for, and just as often when not. Laraine and his son then stripped that all away. She was two months along when they learned she was pregnant. Ryan Jr. was still a baby when he died. Call it thirteen months altogether then. Thirteen months as a better human being—gentle, nurturing, all gratitude, all joy. Then the car accident. DeMarco reverted full force. Silent. Brooding. Unreachable. And truly filled with rage.

  He lay on his side now, stared at the dark bark of the nearest tree. He had become, he realized, a version of his own father. A bully. A punisher. Bearer of a soul so hard and small and mean.

  He despised that man. Wanted rid of him forever. Wanted to cut him away clean, shed him like a skin.

  Jayme was the key. He could not do it without her. His last chance to open up, be the man the boy in him had always wanted to be. The man the boy who loved the woods had often felt himself to be, only to return home to the trailer, to poverty and fear and helplessness.

  You’re not helpless now, he told himself. There’s nobody now to blame. You have to change yourself.

  The bark of the nearest tree was darker than the darkness, almost shiny. The bark lay in thick black scales, ridged, fissured, overlapping layers. Beautiful in its way, brilliant in its construction. To think of it as an accident, a product of mindless evolution… Can’t be, he thought. Just cannot be.

  The fall of leaves, the seasons’ change. The humus, the earth, the fragrant fecundity. Why had he forgotten all this? Why had he ever allowed this feeling, this certainty of life, conscious and observant, meticulously made—why had he ever let it slip so far away?

  The dream. His father’s shadow hovering over him. It needed to go. But how?

  Rewrite the dream, he thought, and, remembering this, he smiled. Took a long, slow inhalation, and released it just as slowly.

  He had asked Thomas Huston one time, after Tom had confessed to the plague of nightmares that tormented him, “How do you deal with such dreams?” And Tom had said, “I rewrite them. I sit there half-awake, but awake enough to know I’ve been dreaming, and I rewrite the dream. I come through the door before my mother is shot, and I tackle the guy and knock him down. Or I pull out a revolver and put a bullet in his head. Or I shoot him through the window.

  “It doesn’t change reality,” Tom told him, “but it keeps the dream from haunting me all day long. It keeps the dream from making me crazy.”

  DeMarco bunched up the top of the sleeping bag into a pillow, wiped what felt like a cobweb off his face, and lay on his back again, looking up. The leaves were black and the sky was black. Everything around him was black. He closed his eyes and imagined himself as a boy in his bed on a night as black as this one. He let the footsteps approach, but this time the boy was not afraid. The door to the bedroom opened, and it was he, DeMarco, and not his father who entered. DeMarco walked quietly to the bed, saw his son sleeping peacefully. He bent low to kiss the child’s head, and the boy smiled in his sleep.

  ONE HUNDRED THREE

  He awoke to a chorus of birdsong, and lay awake listening in gray light. The crows were easy to identify, as were the shrill jays. There were at least two warblers calling back and forth to one another, plus more sparrows and nuthatches than he could distinguish.

  His back hurt from sleeping on the hard ground, but he knew the ache would fade after a few minutes of walking. All in all he felt good about the day ahead.

  He had a drink of water from the second bottle, and thought about making a small fire to heat water for coffee. Then decided against it. Walking would wake him and was healthier than coffee. He looked up the hill. Maybe an hour to the summit. He would climb to the top, hope for a clearing, a wisp of smoke, some sign of human habitation. If he saw nothing, he would turn downhill, return to the RV, call the local authorities, and let them find Emery Elliott Summerville.

  He saw now how foolhardy he had been to imagine he could do this on his own. Such vanity. It was laughable, really. As stubborn and stupid as always, he told himself.

  After putting on his boots and socks he shook out the sleeping bag and tarp, rolled them tight, and secured them to the pack’s frame. Worked the Glock in its holster into a hip pocket. Picked up the pack, ready to slip an arm through the strap and swing the pack onto his back. But first looked uphill again.

  In his heart he knew there was nothing to gain by continuing. Yet he didn’t want to quit. Throughout the afternoon yesterday he’d had a peculiar feeling that the girls were with him. Seven weightless spirits marching along beside him. Now he felt nothing. No presence. No hands resting lightly on his back, urging him forward.

  Just finish it, he told himself. Get to the top, have a look around. Rest, eat a PowerBar, and then head back. You’ll make the RV by noon, be back in Aberdeen by dark.

  But first he had to take a leak. He leaned the pack against a thick oak, took a long step away from it, and faced a smaller tree before pulling down his zipper. Fifteen seconds later, just as he was zippering up, bark exploded off the tree, peppering his face and sending a blast of wood dust into his eyes. An instant later the crack of the gunshot reached him. Blinking and squinting, nearly blinded by the dust, he lunged for cover behind the thicker oak, at the same time grabbing for the gun on his hip—a stumbling, lurching motion that brought his left shoulder into contact with the oak and sent him tripping forward another six feet, then tumbling and rolling and sliding all the way to the bottom of the ravine.

  ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  He remembered coming down hard and the brief explosion of pain when his head struck a rock, and then nothing till he opened his eyes and found himself on his back in the leaves. Now, in addition to the throbbing ache at the base of his skull and the pulse of what felt like liquid fire in his left leg, his spine felt strange…cooler than the rest of his body, cool all the way up to the shoulder blades.

  He lifted one shoulder, tested for paralysis. Okay, he could move, at least from the waist up. Wet, his back was wet. But blood would be hot. Water underneath the leaves. Stream bed.

  For a while then he lay there listening for the crunch of footsteps that would bring his death. All the while the pulse of pain in his leg grew and flourished, flaring rhythmically from ankle to knee, throbbing like a tortured heart. He did not know if he could move his leg or not and was afraid to try. Afraid to look at the damage. Everything hurt.

  Just do it, he told himself.

  He jerked his left heel closer, bending the knee, and pain ripped up through his leg like a serrated blade, searing hot and nauseating, into his anus and testicles and stomach and chest, so sudden and strong that it choke
d off his scream and mushroomed inside his head where it snuffed out every thought.

  ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  He opened his eyes. Felt his chest rising and falling with every breath. The pain was still there, ubiquitous. The little patches of sky overhead were not yet scalded by light, so he had not been unconscious long. There was a vague memory that might have been a dream of somebody standing above him, looking down, but the figure was all shadow, accompanied only by the sound of a distant chainsaw, lawn mower, the nebulous scent of engine exhaust.

  He put a hand to his pocket, felt the holster still there, empty but for the leaves crammed inside. Without the Glock he was defenseless. Defenseless and broken. Now there was nothing to do but to wait for the shadow’s return. Wait for one more gunshot.

  He slipped his fingers into a pocket, worked his hand down deep. One fingertip touched the silver metal disk. Still there. He nudged it higher, into his palm, and closed his hand around it.

  A scrape of leaves. He lay motionless, listened. Heard nothing more. “Is that you, Emery?” he said. His voice was unfamiliar to him. Fearful and hoarse.

  He thought maybe he should pray. But what would he pray for—forgiveness? That was probably out of the question. Too much to forgive.

  What he regretted most were all the years with no one to love. After his mother died, there was no one until Laraine. And then he was doubly blessed for a few short months, a wife and son. Then the accident, and again he was bereft.

  And then, out of nowhere, another gift. Jayme. A godsend, undeserved. And he had treated her poorly, allowed a weakness to beset him. He had not embraced the gift as the clemency it was.

  So here he was alone again, the leaf-matted sky almost black overhead, the decaying leaves damp and cold. His leg felt huge with pain. Sometimes a scorching heat would shoot up the ankle and scald his testicles, so that he had to grab them and squeeze to keep from screaming. Sometimes the pain would flare all the way up his spine, burning every vertebrae and disc, then up the back of his skull to set the skin and hair on fire.

  He was going to die in these woods. Bones dragged off and gnawed by scavengers. Shreds of clothing buried beneath another season’s leaves.

  None of that mattered to him. What mattered was that he had so irremediably screwed up his first chance at happiness. And his second. He had never told Jayme how he truly and deeply felt. Always wanted to, always intended to, but the words when they began to form in his consciousness always sounded somehow like a betrayal of Laraine and Ryan Jr.

  All too soon more leaves would fall in the fleetness of time. He’d imagined he could surmount these woods and their mountain. He’d thought he could find justice for the seven unfortunate girls. More vanity. Whoever had fired into the side of that tree would at any moment return to finish him off.

  He closed his eyes. So empty. So tired. “Our Father,” he began, but then stopped himself. Father had never worked for him. Father was anger and punishment. Mother was nature and often gentle, soothing, but just as frequently neglectful, lost in her own torrents of despair. So he could not pray, not even now. Not until he found somebody or something different to pray to. But what else was there?

  Images flashed across the back of his eyelids. Faces of people he knew. Strangers. He heard his heavy breathing, the soft moans, they did not seem to belong to him. He felt his body sinking into the leaves, carried along by the stream beneath the leaves as if he too were just another fallen leaf among the vastness of billions.

  ONE HUNDRED SIX

  He opened his eyes to birdsong, the air warm and heavy and full of the loamy scent of earth, dead leaves, rotting wood. The wet chill moved up and down his back but seemed gathered at his shoulders.

  The birdsong meant he had been lying there in the leaves long enough for the birds to calm. As a boy he used to test the birds and other animals. Used to sit motionless against a tree, waiting to see how long before the woods accepted him.

  And now they had. The light through the canopy was brightest at an angle of maybe sixty degrees above the plane of his body. He had come into the woods from the east. The sun was still in the eastern sky. Midmorning. He had slept—or passed out; the distinction seemed irrelevant—for at least two hours.

  Which means what? he asked himself.

  It means that whoever took that shot at you isn’t coming back.

  It means you aren’t dead yet.

  Though you’re still pretty much fucked.

  As long as he lay perfectly still, the pain in his leg lay still too, but as tight and ready as a constrictor coiled around his leg from ankle to knee. But this snake was also a viper, had already bitten him once, its venom hot in his blood. Any movement would bring another attack, like fangs sinking into the bone.

  Other options? he asked, then told himself, None.

  He would have to get to his feet somehow, find a branch to use as a crutch, and hobble back downhill until he could go no farther. Maybe luck onto one of the marked hiking trails.

  He turned his head a few degrees right, a few degrees left. Soreness, but movement. Most of the pain in that region emanated from the back of his skull. He could feel the knot like a walnut of tenderness embedded in his scalp.

  You need to get up, he thought.

  A mosquito was busy near his ear, whining like a dentist’s drill. Another was having breakfast on his forearm. A small cloud of gnats hovered over his face, almost touching. He blew out a breath and they backed away, then returned. One crawled into the corner of his eye. He dislodged it by squeezing shut his eyes, blinking hard.

  Then slipped both hands into the muck beneath his buttocks and gradually pushed himself into a sideways sitting position, right elbow braced against the ground. His left leg, the injured one, did not appear unnaturally turned. But it hurt like hell. Another attempt to bend it at the knee sent a flare of hot pain radiating up from the ankle. So he raised the other knee instead, canted to the side. Sore but uninjured. He slipped his right foot under the left knee, ran his hand down over the muddy jeans from knee and shin. No protrusion. No splintering of bone. But the lightest touch near the middle of the tibia stiffened him with sudden pain. And now he could distinguish a different color to the mud in that area, the russet spread of blood. His breath came in loud quick gasps, his face tight and hot.

  Rolling slowly, a few inches at a time, he worked himself over onto his hands and right knee, keeping his left foot and leg resting atop the right. He swept his left hand through the leaves, hoping to find the handgun near his body. No luck. And the dizziness—his body wanted to tumble back to the ground.

  He would need a crutch of some kind. Unfortunately there were no trees growing down the center of the narrow ravine, no stout limbs within reach. His only options were to follow the ravine either up or down, hopping along on his good leg, or to crawl up the slick slope on his hands and knees.

  The latter would allow him the opportunity to search through the leaves for his weapon. The long, heavy Bowie knife should still be strapped to his pack, the pack still against the tree where he had paused to urinate. But first he had to reach it.

  He faced the slope, studied the leaves. Here and there along the sloping wall he could identify where a heel had dragged, where his body had slid and scraped the leaves along with it. There was no telling how far the weapon might have been flung from his hand. All he knew for certain was that without it he was little more than a crippled duck.

  And he laughed softly with the realization that he was going to crawl up that hill.

  You always have to do the hardest thing, he told himself.

  And answered, That’s right, I do. And slid both hands forward, then pulled his body along behind, wincing with every inch gained.

  ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

  By the time he reached the top of the ravine and lay panting with the side of his face in the leaves, his clothing was soaked with perspira
tion, his hands, lower arms, face, and neck filthy with humus. The pain in his leg had reached crescendo not far from the bottom of the ravine and abated only between pulse beats, which were coming now twice per second and felt like several pairs of huge, hot vice grips simultaneously pinching not only his leg, but also his groin and chest and neck and skull. His blood had changed to battery acid; he could taste it in his mouth.

  The pain had the added effect of making him want to vomit, but his stomach was empty, so he felt the urge mostly in his throat, a periodic gag reflex he stifled with one hard, dry swallow after another.

  The climb had taken more than an hour with frequent pauses to sweep his right hand and then left through the leaves. He had made contact with numerous roots and stones but no Austrian-crafted surfaces.

  Now he rose up onto his elbows and looked for the tree where he had left his pack. Maybe that tree…but nothing there. Maybe that tree. Nothing there. No matter where he looked, there was no sign of anything that had not sprung out of the earth. Only DeMarco himself.

  “Sonofabitch,” he moaned.

  He straightened his arms and went down onto his chest again.

  The sweat dried on his body and his body cooled. After a while his breath came more evenly, but the leg still throbbed. It felt fifty degrees hotter than his chest. Felt as big as a barrel.

  I wish I could call Jayme, he thought. Tell her about all the calories I’ve burned.

  ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

  This time he woke up shivering and feverish. The forest was darker than before, but its lines and angles crisper somehow, as if the fever had cleared his vision, and brought even his thoughts into sharper detail. He craned his eyes upward. Only gray between the leaves. Had he slept that long or was the sky overcast? It might still be morning. It might be evening.