The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  It began with a pulse of heat, down on the back of her leg, the fleshy part of her calf. Then, the itch: an itch that sank in roots, unfurled tendrils, a growing thing that was in motion, as if blown by a breeze, or underwater, and something in the itch reached well beyond her leg and into the core of her, so that she felt it in her chest, her belly button, her sex, and her first clear and furious desire was to take the back of her leg and rake it across the rough pavement until it bled. Her breath hitched, then caught. She looked up. Wes was coming toward her with a bottled water. All she could do, it seemed, was widen her eyes at him, and she had time to think, I’m going to just stand here and let this happen, but then Wes seemed to understand, to inexplicably know, and he dropped the water and ran toward her, fumbling with his holster-pocket.

  “Where?” he shouted.

  Tears had started streaming down her face, but still, she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. She managed with a hand to motion, and Wes said, “Leg?” and she rasped, “Yes,” and then her weight somehow was on her left knee and her palms, her right leg stretched out behind her as if she were at her Pilates class, doing lunges, and someone was holding her shoulders, rubbing the back of her neck. She felt her trouser leg being tugged up, a sudden slap of cold air on her exposed skin.

  “Do you want me to—” A male voice.

  “No,” Wes said. “I’ve got it.”

  Then the pain. At first it was satisfying in a strange, vaguely shameful way: incinerating the itch, severing the tendrils that had reached into those other parts of her body, isolating the agony to this one point of flesh. But then it was as if her heart pumped a surge of blood across her body, a wave that passed hot salt through the burn, and then the agony was more intense, immeasurably worse than the initiation Stamp had been. Her entire leg throbbed hotly, the pain unlocking her voice, and she wailed, couldn’t stop herself, then screamed, the scream breaking up after a long couple of moments into croupy sobs. She collapsed onto her side and pulled her injured leg toward her chest, rocking a little. Someone, a woman, was still patting her head, making a shushing sound. Tia, she thought it was.

  “Oh, Marta,” Wes was saying. “Marta, I’m so sorry.”

  She blindly put out a hand toward his voice, and when it grasped hers, squeezed it hard. “No,” she said. “You did well. Thank you.”

  She could sense that a crowd had gathered around them. She understood why—if another had been the first, she would undoubtedly have been standing and staring stupidly, just like the others—but that did not make it less invasive and mortifying. “Please make them go away,” she whispered to Wes, and he said, “Back off! Give her a minute!”

  “Where the fuck did it get on her?” a man yelled. He sounded panicked.

  “Where do you think?” said Andy.

  “But you said this place is monitored for ticks,” the pop singer said. Marta wasn’t yet looking up, but she knew his voice—the entitled bravado and its underlying warble of fear.

  “I also said to be on guard and be near your buddy,” Andy said. “Wes, that was some fast and decisive action. Good job.”

  Wes bobbed his head in acknowledgment, face pink. Marta managed to smile at him.

  Andy squatted down beside her, forearms resting on his knees. “Marta. How’re we doing?”

  “Better,” she said.

  “Tia will get some ointment and a bandage on it, and we can give you ibuprofen for the pain. So tell me, where did this happen?” An odd look flickered across his face. “This really shouldn’t have happened,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.

  Marta pointed. “I went in the grass over there to throw up. I sat down for a minute.”

  Tia began dabbing the Stamp site with an alcohol-soaked swab, and Marta winced. “How about your suit?” Andy said. “This is an unusual first contact point. Did you have your pant leg tucked in? Socks and boots, the way we discussed?”

  “I thought I did,” Marta said. “But it could have pulled loose. It must have. I just don’t know.”

  Andy patted her knee. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. This was probably just bad luck, but if a burrowing can be avoided, we want to avoid it. So remember, tuck in. Check and double-check. You’ve gotten a hard first lesson.”

  Tia finished applying the bandage and tugged Marta’s trouser leg down. “Like this,” she said, pulling the microsock up over the leg opening, then re-lacing the boot so tightly that Marta felt like she was going to lose circulation to her foot. She grunted thanks.

  Wes helped her up, and she brushed grit off her bottom self-consciously. The wound, bearing now the pressure of her standing weight, throbbed, but she tried to draw back her shoulders, reclaim a posture of dignity. If she still had hair, she would be brushing it carefully into place now.

  If only David could see her, could know what his selfishness had already begun to cost her. David will always take care of you, he’d said. What a joke.

  Wes’s face was drawn with concern. “Do you want to go inside and sit? Go to the bathroom?” He had picked the bottle of water back up, and he handed it to her. “You should at least drink this.”

  “All right,” Marta said. She uncapped the bottle with a trembling hand and took a long sip, then held it against her forehead. “My God, Wes. That was worse than I expected. That was much worse than the initiation Stamp.”

  “It was?”

  She nodded. Felt her face crumple. “Oh, goodness. I thought I could do this. I don’t know if I can do this again. I thought it would be better when I got through it the once, but it isn’t. It’s so much worse.”

  Wes didn’t offer her a platitude in response.

  Marta hugged him. Unlike Sal and Enzo, he was about her own height—she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe to reach his shoulders—but there was something comforting and familiar about the awkwardness of his young man’s embrace, the yeasty smell of perspiration on his neck, and she squeezed him fiercely. If she needed proof that God was looking out for her on this trip, it was this boy. Only now did she fully grasp the importance of a buddy—how much of your well-being you were handing over to that person.

  Her heart finally slowing its insane rhythm, Marta pulled back. Wes would feel even more dragged down by her now, she thought. Oppressed by her need. But he grabbed both of her hands, smiling a little, and gave them a cheerful little shake. “You and me,” he said, as if he’d read the tenor of her thoughts. “We’re a team. It’s going to be great. OK?”

  Marta nodded weakly.

  “No, seriously. It is. OK?”

  “OK,” Marta agreed.

  “Then let’s go check out this weird restaurant.”

  They started inside, cutting a path through the prying looks of their fellow travelers, but Marta felt better already. Stronger. She vowed to herself then that her allegiance would be to Wes, not to David, and she wouldn’t do anything to betray him. She’d protect Wes with as much ferocity as she’d protect her own sons.

  Six

  Two a.m., according to the glow-in-the-dark dial on his watch, and Wes didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. Even Marta, who had spent the first two hours after lights-out rolling over to her side, then her stomach, then her other side, with the steady regularity of a rotisserie chicken, was now breathing deeply beside him, inflatable pillow tucked between her right ear and her bent right arm, left arm curled up close and tight to her chest, as if she were cold. Wes pulled her blanket up over her shoulder. The tent, to him, was cozy, even a little stuffy, and his mattress, which Andy had cautioned against overinflating, was so thin that he could feel every bump in the ground unless he lay flat on his back and perfectly still. It was like trying to sleep floating in a swimming pool.

  Across the campsite there were sighs, coughs. Sniffling—maybe allergies, maybe soft crying. He dozed a while, then jolted awake to a low-pitched gasp and a sudden blaze of light a dozen pac
es outside his tent. He waited, tense, Stamp clutched in his right hand.

  “Oh,” said a man’s voice. There were a few hitching breaths. “Oh. Sorry.”

  It was that Jesse Haggard—he knew it. Of all the blowhard, cowardly assholes he could have drawn as company for a trip like this.

  Marta groaned and rolled 180 degrees this time, so that she was facing Wes. “A bite?” she asked hoarsely.

  “False alarm,” said Wes.

  She propped herself up on one palm and smooshed her face with the other. “This is the longest night of my life,” she said. “I thought I was too old for long nights.”

  “Seems like you caught a few Zs,” Wes said.

  “A few.” She leaned over stiffly, snagged the loop on her water bottle, and unhooked the cap. “I was having a nightmare about my husband.”

  She hadn’t said much about her husband, and Wes hadn’t asked, had just assumed he was someone dull, a lawyer or a corporate executive, and that Marta had taken the trip as an extreme response to empty nester’s syndrome. “What was it about?” he asked.

  “I’m already starting to forget it.” She took a gulp and lay back down. “I’d gotten bit again. I remember that much. And he was trying to use the Stamp on me, but he kept missing the spot and burning me other places.”

  “That’s horrible,” Wes said.

  “In the dream it was painless. It was just the idea of it. Knowing I was running out of time, and what would happen when it did.” She shivered and clutched the blanket to her neck. “What about you? You sleep?”

  “Not really,” he said. He ducked his chin down, surreptitiously, he hoped, and sniffed his armpit. He was starting to smell himself already, and it made him anxious. Back home, he showered twice a day, once when he rose, once just before bed. He had, in preparation for the excursion, tried during Boot Camp to skip his evening shower, but he found himself cheating, rationalizing to himself the harmlessness of a fast five-minute scrub the way an alcoholic might argue that beer isn’t the same thing as liquor. So now he was here, with no practice living unwashed, and the novelty of the situation hadn’t jolted him out of his neuroses, as he had assumed it would. Worse, he was starting to feel the press of his bladder. He moved the muscles down his groin, assessing, and yes, there it was—that first faint cramp of fullness. He shifted his hips. Contracted the muscles in his groin again. The prickle. He would never be able to sleep, needing to urinate. Or knowing that he might soon need to urinate.

  If he were sharing the tent with another man, he’d just relieve himself into an empty bottle. But next to Marta? Good lord, no way.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, understanding the absurdity of his word choices but not willing to say “take a piss” or “take a leak” in front of this woman who could be his mother (if his mother were nicer and warmer and generally more motherlike). “Is that OK? I won’t be long.”

  “Of course,” she said, switching on the lantern. Its bulb glowed cool and blue against the tent’s white walls, and they both squinted.

  “You’ll want to run the vac as soon as I’m outside.”

  “I know,” she said. Her voice had thinned slightly with impatience, but she put her hand on the remote to let him know she was ready.

  “Okay,” he said, and she hit the Open button. He wriggled out as quickly as he could, and when his second foot hit the ground behind him, the flap drew shut with a snap and the vacuum motor whirred softly. The air outside was chilly and clean; he exhaled a white cloud. Seven tents formed a circle on smooth, even ground, ground that had been worn to mostly dirt by the traffic of multiple excursion groups. The last embers of their evening fire, which Andy and Tia had built in a rock-lined depression that was sooty from previous use, were long dead, still faintly redolent of the greasy soy dogs the campers had roasted on sticks (these also from a well-used, fire-hardened stash stored in a utility shed just downhill and out of immediate sight). There had been throughout the evening an air of forced cheer, everyone in the group trying too hard to demonstrate their enjoyment, to prove to one another, and themselves, that the risk and the expense were worth it. Look at that sky! people kept saying. You don’t see stars like that in the zone! And, Smell that mountain air! Berto and Anastasia, a married couple, both lawyers of some stripe, in their late thirties—fitness nuts (Wes realized that calling someone a health nut, even in his own head, was a bit hypocritical), lean bodies knobbed with long muscles—had started singing an old children’s camp song as the group worked on pitching their tents, and it caught sluggishly on with a few of the others, Jesse Haggard pausing (while his girlfriend worked on, Wes noticed) to play his ukulele and over-sing the lyrics.

  I’m a mean old man in a little old shack

  With a mean little dog and a duck—Quack! Quack!

  And a pig and a horse and a cow—Moo! Moo!

  And a mean old wife who died—Boo hoo!

  And all the while Mickey Worthington, one of the pair of pudding-faced lawyers Wes had a hard time distinguishing from each other, was still moaning from the pain of a particularly nasty bite-Stamp combo, this one on the tender flesh of his neck, just left of his Adam’s apple. His buddy, Lee, who had panicked when the moment came to administer the Stamp, silently erected their tent on his own, occasionally throwing looks of guilt and annoyance at the weeping man he’d so humiliatingly let down. It had been a bad episode, halfway on the trail between the drop-off point and the campsite, and it was Andy, finally, who pushed the shocked Lee out of the way, gripped Mickey’s head roughly in his left arm, as if he were shouldering a watermelon, and depressed the trigger. “You need to get a fucking grip,” Andy said when he released Mickey, eyes lit with fury. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to Mickey, Lee, or both of them.

  “I think the itching stopped before you got to it,” Mickey wailed, wiping his sopping face with a sleeve.

  Andy stood with his hands on his hips, breath short. “You’ll know soon enough,” he said. The humor, the gruff-but-reassuring paternal pose—both were gone. He seemed simply annoyed and disgusted, and the look he flashed at the rest of them in turn was no warmer. “I’d suggest y’all wear your microsuits properly. The calf, the neck—there’s no reason why these bites should have happened.”

  But then the anger slipped from Andy’s face. “Look. I’m sorry. You’ve just got to understand that I’ve been through this more times than I can count. You can’t treat every bite as cause for a nervous breakdown.”

  “I don’t care,” Mickey said. “My partner didn’t do his job. It’s not right.” In his distress, a twang had slipped into his voice. It was like seeing him naked, and Wes flushed to the roots of his hair.

  “It’s probably fine,” Andy said gently. “The odds are on your side. Remember that.”

  “It’s not right,” Mickey said. His face shined with tears. “You pay as much I did, you expect some things.”

  That had been his refrain, on and off, for the rest of the evening. He skipped dinner. As soon as Lee had pitched their tent, Mickey retreated into it. When Andy called to him irritably, “You know, Lee still needs a buddy out here,” Mickey yelled, “Fuck Lee!”

  Wes crept past Mickey and Lee’s tent. It was silent and dark, and Wes hoped Mickey had exhausted himself into a deep sleep. He’d tested everyone’s nerves tonight with his whining, Wes’s, too, but you would have to be soulless not to pity him a little. To have your buddy fail you like that right out of the gate. You’d have to be soulless, and you’d have to be pretty confident in the brave stoicism of your own hypothetical future self. Wes wasn’t feeling that confident.

  There was a glowing gibbous moon in the sky, bright enough that he could watch his footing as he put some distance between himself and the tents. He had a pocket-sized flashlight, but he refrained from switching it on yet. Everyone was sealed up in a tent—he’d hear their door vacs if they stepped out—but he felt sh
eepish and exposed out here. His digestive cycle was off; he hadn’t emptied his bowels in nearly two days. Andy had recommended that they answer that particular call of nature only in the daytime, unless it was an emergency, so that they could scan the area around them in full light. Good advice, of course. Wes imagined a nightmare scenario in which he’d have to try Stamping his own bitten ass or—worse—scream until someone (Marta? Good lord) could come and do it for him. But he needed privacy, and now that he was out here, this might be one of the few opportunities he’d have to get it.

  He shuffled downhill another twenty paces, until the camp lights were an abstract glow without an identifiable source, and shined his flashlight on the ground in front of him. There was a rich, musty smell in the air that he’d never before experienced, a damp smell, decaying but totally alive, that rose from the layers of fallen leaves that created a soft carpet underfoot. He liked it. Not enough, yet, to make him glad that he was about to take his first open-air dump, but enough to ward off some of the despair that threatened to level him—a despair that was bigger than Wes, a despair that felt as real and risky as it did because he could sense that the other travelers were on the verge of it, too.

  He stopped beside the wide trunk of a tree and looked around. Here was as good a place as any. He put the penlight between his teeth, letting the beam fall on the ground, and started clearing a circular patch of leaves. When he’d done that—no sign of ticks, not that they’d be easy to spot with these shadows—he used the edge of a small, flat rock to dig a shallow depression in the earth. Then, heart racing, he quickly swung around, unzipped the back of his suit, and dropped down on his haunches, letting his back rest against the tree trunk for balance. This was a thousand times worse than using a public toilet. A million times worse. He waited, sweat slicking his temples, his thighs and ankles beginning to quiver under the strain. He was, he realized, terrified.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. What am I doing? What have I done?