by Rich Foster
Despite the revulsion he felt for the leg, he was also drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. It was so damn outré he thought. He touched it gingerly with one finger as though it might move. Then he picked it up. He had never seen a real human bone up close, much less one that came from someone he knew. The work of piercing the bones to wire them together showed careful craftsmanship. He studied the leg.
“Sorta fascinating ain’t it!”
Alan had not heard Karl returning and the voice made him jump. As he set the bones down Alan asked, “Does it hurt?”
“Only when you squeeze it!” said Karl with a straight face before he exploded with a rolling laughter. Alan put the leg down. “I get phantom pains. Hurt’s like hell sometimes. Vicadone can’t touch imaginary pain.”
Karl poured the water into a pot made from bent aluminum “If I ever crash again I’m gonna’ bring a steel bucket with me. It took me damn near a day to figure out how to pry the skin off the wing and then fold a piece without metal tools.” Seeing his unfinished plate Karl said, “Eat up! Or have you had enough?”
Alan picked up his plate and continued where he had left off. He couldn’t help but look at the bones and then at Karl’s empty pants leg.
“This is good. It kinda tastes like chicken.”
“People say everything tastes like chicken. Rabbit, snake, frog’s legs, no matter what, it’s always like some damn chicken.”
Alan sensed that maybe he had somehow offended Karl so he dropped the subject of food.
“But why did you put the bones together?”
“Ah, they were laying around and it seemed like something to do to help pass the time. Even as my leg healed it was quite awhile before I could really get around. Sitting here day after day I just started in on it. Getting’ those small bones put together was a real challenge.”
He doesn’t sound crazy, thought Alan. It’s just the things he does which are nuts! “But you had to cut the meat off the bones!”
“Sure!” said Karl. I had to do that before I ate it.”
“Before you what?” gasped Alan.
“Before I cooked the leg!”
Alan hopped up, tried to step backwards and fell head over heels on the plane seat behind him. He scrambled backwards madly like a crab on it’s back.
“You… you…”, he struggled for words. “You’re a cannibal!”
With a wry grin on his face, Karl looked at Alan backing away from him. “Yes, but I’m an alive cannibal!” he said. It was then that Karl realized Alan was staring at the remaining meat on his plate. A moment later Alan was very sick.
“Hell boy, what do you think you’re eatin’? That ain’t my leg. That’s meat’s from the other rabbit I snared.” Karl looked at Alan with disgust. “You think I’d let some stranger eat my leg? I didn’t even want to eat it.”
Karl turned his back on Alan and limped away. Alan was still on all fours but he was looking at Karl. “How could you do that?”
Karl shrugged. “I couldn’t move around much. I could barely scrape together some firewood. Soon, even that was going to be out of reach if I didn’t get some food. So I pried the leg out and cooked it! I won’t say it was easy. The first bite damn near made me choke. But it was that or starve! And, like I told you I ain’t leaving life without a fight.” Karl turned again and hobbled off down the path toward the stream.
Alan was left to himself. He felt as if he were suddenly caught up in a madhouse. It seemed this was a dream that became more and more bizarre. Surely he must soon wake up. He shuddered with a mixture of fear and disgust.
In Alan’s mind he heard Ralphie say, “I never heard of nothing like that before, I thought cannibals all lived in the South Pacific”.
“Evidently not,” answered Alan. “There’s Alfie Packer and now him!”
Ralphie sat on top of the plane looking down. Cannibals did not bother him.
“This is sure cool, huh? What are the chances of two guys lost in the woods finding each other?”
Alan shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know Ralphie, in one way it’s a heck of a coincidence. But looked at another way I guess they’re fifty-fifty, either you do or you don’t!” After a minute he continued. “If I hadn’t found him, I’d be dead by now.”
Alan opened his rucksack and took out the last pack of cigarettes he had. It was almost full but slightly crumpled. He could not recall when he had made a carton of smokes last so long. His hands trembled as he lit the cigarette at the fire.
“It’s been a hell of a morning Ralphie, that’s for sure.”
Alan worked his way through four cigarettes before he began to calm down. Instinct told him that Karl was not a normal human being. Normal people did not do what he had done and this made Alan fear him. Yet Karl had done what he had to so he could go on living. Alan suddenly began laughing. He sure wasn’t normal either. The thought of going on had always frightened him and here he was afraid of someone who wanted to do just that!”
“I think he’s all right Alan,” said Ralphie. Then he slid down from the plane. “You’re going to be okay. I just feel it.” Then Ralphie faded away.
Alan was left with his thoughts for sometime and then he stood up. Using a stick for a cane he hobbled off in the direction that Karl had gone. He followed a trail that meandered down hill. Soon he came to a bank above a brook. Karl sat on a rock dangling a fishing rod in the water. He heard Alan coming and looked up.
“You gonna’ be okay?” he asked.
“Guess so. It sorta spooked me is all.”
Alan chose a rock and sat down. They listened to the silence of the afternoon.
Karl spoke up, “I heard a story about a guy they found in the woods. Only had one arm with two fingers left. The other arm, both legs and a couple rump filets were gone. The guy was quoted as saying, “Thank God you’re here! I was about out of groceries!” He then roared with laughter having amused himself. Alan found the laughing contagious and joined in.
“Seriously though, some researchers say the closer a protein is to you on the food chain, the more usable it is to you.”
“Did you do it because you’re afraid to die?”
Karl shook his head back and forth slowly. “Naw, dying doesn’t bother me. The time will come for that when the good Lord is ready. But I kinda feel the Lord helps those who help themselves.”
“So you figure there’s a heaven and all?”
Once again Karl thought before he spoke. His answers didn’t seem to come lightly. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”
“It always seemed creepy to me. Going on and on endlessly.”
“Well now son, there I think you’ve got it kinda twisted. Outside of time I don’t see how you could talk about going on and on, there would only be… being. By that I mean you, wouldn’t be looking forward or back, there would just be now. Think about sometime you were doing something that was real intense. Like that night you told about when you climbed that rock wall in the rain. When you looked up at it, it was terrifying, and when you look back at it, the thing still scares you; I could see it in your eyes. But at the moment you were climbing, during those seconds you were locked into the here and now and that was all there was. Now make that moment the best one you ever had. For me that’s what heaven is and if that’s true I don’t see how it could ever be bad.”
“But what if there is nothing?”
“Well then you won’t ever know will you? So why let it ruin what you are doing here and now? You know it ain’t living that screws so many things up son; its fear.”
“But we’re trapped! We don’t have a choice!”
“Sure you do Alan. You can choose how you are going to face it. You gotta' stop being afraid of what you already are. You are alive! So stop trying to deny you exist. Nothing you can do about that. You’re letting fear ruin your life. Ninety-five percent of life’s problems rise from fear of what might happen. And ninety-eight percent of them never do.”
The conversation lagged. Inse
cts buzzed in the air. A fish swam past Karl’s line, indifferent to his hook. Overhead a buzzard floated across the sky looking for carrion. The leaves rustled in the wind and the water splashed over rocks in the stream.
It was five minutes before Karl spoke. “You were damn near dead when you turned up here. Were you afraid of dying?” he asked.
‘No, not really”, replied Alan. “Before I saw the plane wheel I had accepted it. Death seemed to be inevitable. Almost natural.”
“It is boy. Dying is one of the most natural things there is when the time comes. You were lucky! You’ve had the chance to learn somethin’ a lot of people never get a turn to. That’s because they don’t get the chance to practice dying. It’s a waste of time to fear death, cause when it finally is time, it will be the most natural thing to do. And it’s a waste of time to fear livin’ cause you already are!”
“Then why did you fight so hard to stay alive?”
“Cuz I knew I still had a chance. Knowing that, it seemed unnatural to die.”
For the moment the conversation had run its course and they both became restive of pursuing philosophy. Karl toyed with the reel on his fishing rod.
Alan tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with the butt he was smoking. He offered the pack to Karl.
“No, thanks. I gave those up twenty years ago. I decided it was a shame to destroy something that worked so well. A man knowingly wouldn’t put dirty gas in a new automobile so why would I want to crud up my body’s carburetor?”
“These cigarettes saved me! I don’t think I would have gotten a fire going without them.”
“Well son, it’s been twenty years but they still smell good to me.”
Silence filled the woods. Alan watched Karl tease a fish with the hook.
“Using a pole and hook doesn’t really make sense when you’re alone in the woods. But I had the gear in my plane and it helps pass the time. That basket trap floating over there is my main trap. Up stream, I have a “vee” trap like the one you built. Maybe we can both limp up there later.”
Alan nodded. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Along the way I can show you the different plants which are edible. If you know what you are looking for, at least at this time of year, the forest is one vast grocery store. I could sure teach you a thing or two about survival.”
And thus they began their friendship. One was young the other getting old, both were hampered by a bad leg. Individually they had faced difficulties that few people are ever called to face. Their conversation over the next days roamed widely. They discussed philosophy. Alan had a college educated, psychotherapy shaped perspective. Karl’s worldview had been shaped by life experience, the world of hard knocks and years, often alone, while working the open plains of his ranch.
Alan had never talked so openly with another person. Lilly had seen him when he was vulnerable but she had never really been privy to his thoughts. In Karl, Alan found the father who had abandoned him as a youth. Karl accepted him for who he was. He had no expectation. Alan could learn what he had to teach or he would not. It was that acceptance that encouraged Alan to confide.
Karl, got to experience sharing those things he had always imagined sharing with his own son. His boy had died of leukemia when he was only six. Even now Karl did not speak his name. He always referred to him as “our son” or “my boy.” Day by day as the boy had slipped away Karl had found his love for his son growing so immense that he could never imagining having another. The sense of loss when the boy was gone was a black void so great that Karl hadn’t known if he would ever escape it. He was pushed by death into another dimension of black grief, which had no doors or windows. Somehow their marriage survived.
Karl shared with Alan how one day he noticed the sun highlighting the veins of a new leaf. The next day he found he actually tasted the oatmeal his wife served for breakfast. He discovered raisins and brown sugar and in that, a glimmer of living again. Slowly color had seeped back into his life. His wife and he found themselves in each other and in the memory of the son they had known.
It was a good marriage and when she had died from cancer his grief was large and broad, but it was tempered. She had lived long enough to know that death could become a friend, not a foe. During the long months when she had been in the hospital Karl had let the ranch work go. At first he had let the foreman continue to work it, but slowly he found he no longer cared for cattle futures and the commodity prices of grain. He laid his men off, but not before he asked around and found every man a position on another ranch. He had called in favors for many of the jobs. To him he was planting a seed where he thought each man would grow and do his best.
Pausing to watch the Milky Way flow through the night sky, or at dawn as sunlight ran free and wild down the mountains, he saw in the land something deeper and better than he had been taking from it for fifty years. He rediscovered the wild woods and mystery of his youth. He realized he wanted to see the pine lot come back before he died. He wanted the pond in the high country to run free and clear again, untrammeled by cow hoofs, the banks no longer ground to muck, nor the water fouled by dung. He let the fields go fallow and took delight in the small animals and birds that quickly took up residence.
The land that he had worked, but not fully seen, opened up before him. At the hospital, while holding his wife’s hand he would share the things he discovered. He would describe the land with an eye that truly saw it. And in the describing, they realized their part in it. They were like a speck swept along in the night sky.
One day she asked him to take her home. There was little left that the hospital could do. Karl spoke to the doctor, but the doctor refused to release her. The next day Karl parked his truck in front of the hospital entrance. On his head he wore a battered cowboy hat and on his hip an old Colt 45 peacemaker. He never pulled the gun, nor even mentioned it. But everyone’s eyes were all on it as he took a wheelchair from the hallway and rolled it into his wife’s room. The floor nurse simply said goodbye as he rolled his wife away, leaving behind the sterile room and the futility of the medical world.
At home she had laid in bed with the windows open and listened to the birds call. They talked when she was able. More often they shared the quietness of living. One morning while he was making her some tea she slipped away. He came back and her life was gone. He lay down beside her. Over the next hour he felt her hand cooling, much like the tea on the nightstand. Later he went out to the barn. He loaded the pine coffin he had made in the wagon. Beside it he placed a shovel. Then he hooked up the horse in its harness and drove the wagon up the hill behind the barn. It was a trip he had made three times before. There on the knoll were the graves of his parents and his son. The horse nibbled the long fresh grass, while he rolled up his sleeves and dug in the afternoon sun. When the grave was done, neat and square, he brushed the dirt from his hands. He walked back down to the house and bathed. Then for the last time he gathered his wife in his arms and carried her over the same threshold they had crossed on their wedding day, forty-one years before. Illness left her light in his arms. He walked up the hill without effort and at the top he laid her out. Then in the company of the sky and mountains he said his good-byes. He drove the coffin nails in with a finality he did not believe in. Alone he lowered the pine box and covered it with dirt. At sunset he turned and walked toward home wondering who there would be to take care of him when the time came.
Karl shared this story with Alan one night. It was stark in its contrast to Alan’s marriage. Alan saw a longing in Karl’s eyes for something lost which he himself had never known. He realized the shallowness of his relationship with Lilly, how little they had actually lived together, or known of one another. He sensed that for years he had been dead. A part of himself had been boarded up and closed off after Eric died. Unknown to Karl, by sharing about the loss of his son, he opened up places in Alan’s mind that had long been buried. The nails to those memories were driven home with the same finality as the na
ils in his brother’s coffin. At the time Alan had wanted to ask Karl more, but he had choked up and gone away. Karl had let him alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Charles and Lilly resumed their search the next day. The road to the top of the pass was short on the Red Lake side. Numerous cabins abutted the road. They felt certain that if Alan’s car were there it would have been spotted by now. But on the other side the road was treacherous. They started from the top and worked downhill. They continued to explore logging roads as they came to them but only for a quarter of a mile. Then they would turn around and return to the highway.
They walked dozens of curves that had no guardrail. Lilly felt someone should complain to the state for this obvious defect. At each curve they pulled off on the shoulder as soon as it was possible, then they walked in opposite directions until they had exhausted any possible crash sites, then they would retrace their steps and meet back at the truck. After they had explored several curves that rimmed steep drop-offs, Charles realized that they might easily miss the jeep.
“The shadows are still deep on some of these curves. If we don’t find something I think we should check the same places in the afternoon.” Charles mood had swung toward his usual lighthearted self. The police seemed remote and even though this treasure hunt for Alan’s car was a bit macabre, he found he enjoyed passing time with Lilly.
By the time early afternoon came they had covered half the distance to where they had left off the day before. Both their spirits were flagging and Charles began to think more of a cold drink on a Caribbean yacht than trudging along highways and chugging water. They had scrambled down dozens of embankments. They had ceased to be interested in the odd bits of debris that turn up along roadways. And weariness left them both wishing they would simply find Alan’s car wrapped around a tree, not giving much thought to the condition he might be in after three weeks.
Charles pulled off on the shoulder at yet another curve. He stared at the precipitous drop toward the river that snaked pass below.
