In Wilderness (6 page)

First time he touched that chain, back in the early fall, it burned the shit out of his hands. Everything was mist and smoke from a piss-poor lightning fire still smoldering after rain. A last fiery limb crashed down right in front of him, and a few dead trees now and then collapsed inside themselves and flung their sparks into the sky. Like over there, where something always burned, even inside the sopping monsoon jungle. Muck there, muck here; fire there, fire here. Hard to keep straight which part of the known world he was inhabiting at any given time. A pack of wild dogs bayed down in the valley, a moiling, frantic sound of lives gone suddenly so strange they couldn’t figure out which way to run.

The house inside the gate loomed through a dense orange haze. He couldn’t see what-all was there. Looked like parts of it had maybe
burned once long before and fallen in. He threw some dirt on the back side, where some of it still smoked again, then walked all around it like he’d seized the Castle of the Black Knight or some such.

“Hunters never go there, climb’s too steep. It’s like everyone’s forgot the fucking thing exists.” Jimbo’s eyes dreamy in the flares’ unearthly light. “Mold all over everything, like digging up a corpse. Dumped all my weed seeds in the side yard. Years of them. Should be shit enough to stone sixteen battalions. I’ll take you there when we get back.”

Danny found one room he could live in, dropped his duffle. Home.

That signaled Dog to come from somewhere in the mansion’s bowels. He heard her before he saw her, her claws tick-ticking on the marble floors. Took her stand in the foyer, a midsized, deer-colored bitch like Pawpaw’s hunting dogs. Growling, snarling. Something alive in Hell besides just him.

He’d grinned at her, crooked his right arm chest level.

“Dog! Yeah, you. C’mere.”

Slapped his arm to goad her.

“Yeah, I’m a fucking loony but I like you lots. C’mere.”

He feinted toward the dog. Once, twice. When she lunged, he grabbed her muzzle with one hand, wrapped his free arm around her body, dragged her to the floor just like he used to wrestle Pawpaw’s hounds. Flipped a leg over her and started in petting whatever of her he could reach with his free hand.

“You like that, my hand all in your neck fur? You like the way I rub your belly? Yeah, you like it so much you don’t want me to ever stop.”

His voice was even, soft, his mouth close to her ear.

“You put on a big show like you’re some kind of hellhound, but you’re just a hungry little bitch at heart. And you need me to love you, only you don’t know it yet.”

Danny cocked his head toward the valley and the pack of wild dogs, grabbed her harder.

“Assholes down there, they throw you out? Looks like they didn’t let you get too much to eat.”

He lay with her still pinned beneath his leg on the stone floor, worked his fingers through her fur, spoke softly in her ear for a good
while. At last he took his hand off her muzzle, pulled a Slim Jim from his pocket. He bit the paper open, stripped it with his free hand, fed it to her.

“You better like it. That shit was my dinner. Dumpster’s finest.”

She gobbled it down and he rocked her in his arms.

“Yeah, you’re my dog now. All mine. You belong to nobody but me.”

Whispered it in her ear over and over, till finally he let go his hands and she stayed down beside him and the two of them just fell asleep right on that marble floor and let the fire burn out around them.

“Dog?” His one word now muffled by the snow.

Danny holds the gate open, purses his lips, calls her with little sucking sounds. She doesn’t come.

“Dog? Okay, see if I bring you any Slim Jims next time.”

He’s got nothing for her this time, maybe that’s what’s wrong—greedy bitch only shows up when she smells food.

“Dog, you’re acting no better than a human, which has knocked you down a fair number of pegs in my opinion.”

He wraps the chain loosely around the gate, leaving enough space for her to squeeze in if she wants to. Snow’s starting to clump on Jimbo’s reefer plants, on Danny’s fruit trees. Apples, peaches, pears, he runs his fingers along one of the small branches of a pear tree, brushes off the mounding snow.
“Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie, something-something don’t know why.”
He needs to recollect the other words, sing it when he works on them in spring. Memaw always said green things do like being sung to.

“Yeah, you need me, all you trees. Need me to keep care of you.”

He can feel, more than see, the smooth progression of the early light, even behind the clouds and snow. Something else he’s picked up over time. He is one smart fucker, for whatever good that gets him—smart even among those city-shit frat assholes that one year at the college. Walking up through the orchard takes more time but, truth be told, he likes coming home this way. Makes him feel like he owns the place. Because he does, no matter what shitass’s name’s gathering dust on some forgotten piece of paper in some other state.

Yeah, he likes it. Likes how the broken driveway sweeps wide from
the orchard and that’s when you see it. Gatsby’s house, just like old F. Scott wrote it.

Three stories. Limestone white as bones—what crazy fuck would haul limestone up here? Wide-ass lawn in front, mountains spread out behind like torn scraps of faded blue tissue paper. Standing here in the early dawn, you can’t tell it’s a ruin. Can’t see the broken windows, raccoons nesting in the sofas, whole top floor caved in. Sometimes you can’t tell when you wade across the lawn that’s grown up almost to your chest. Sometimes not even when you set foot on that first, and still unbroken, slate porch step. And if you’re careful where you look, sometimes you can’t tell till you’re standing at the door.

Because until then you are something very like a ghost and you can almost see them. All those skinny girls in their thin, flowery dresses and that slicked-down flapper hair; the men in white suits and wide ties striped like store-bought candies. You can almost see them dancing with their knees and elbows angled out, almost hear them.

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

Danny can still quote whole passages, who the fuck knows why? Maybe because Jimbo could and it got to be a contest with the two of them. Maybe because he just craved to be there, someplace so different from anything he’d ever known. At first he thought he was Carraway, because they both knew how to keep a watcher’s distance. Then one day it hit him like a block of that damn limestone: He’s Gatsby. Got to be—it’s his house, isn’t it?

The massive oak door sticks in damp weather, same as the door on the Old Man’s cabin, Dead Lady’s cabin now. Before Danny gives it his usual running shove, he rests his forehead on the wood, breathes in its piss-smell of old mildew.

“Dog?”

He lets out one last whistle and this time she comes, dashing up the drive and lunging into him as if he himself were the stuck door. It gives, and they all but fall into the house, her on the marble entry floor, him on top of her, his nose in her fur. He rolls around with her, ruffles her up.

“Where you been, lady? You get a little?” Her fur smells of pine needles, wet leaves, other dogs. “You think you’re well on your way to a wolf’s life, don’t you?”

Hugging her warmth against his own chill bones, he carries her into the ruined library, won’t let go. She sniffs his pockets.

“Nothing there. You got nothing here but me. I got nothing here but you. We’re two against the world.”

He drops with her onto his rain-stained mattress and sleep falls on him, sudden and heavy, wraps him in the dog’s soft fur and imagined fireplace warmth from yesterday’s cold embers. His last thought is of the Dead Lady, dragging all she owns behind her up the trail.

S
HE DREAMS RARELY ANYMORE
,
MAYBE ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR
. T
HIS
dream is a good one that she doesn’t want to end. She feels well in it, which hasn’t happened in a long time, and stands in an open space under a gnarled old tree. A wind so high up she can’t feel it flings itself against the tree’s top branches. They boil into the sky like clouds from a gathering storm. She will continue to be well as long as she stays where she is and doesn’t wake, she knows this. But it’s cold and it’s morning; she should open her eyes.

And let familiar terrors seize her. Where is she? She doesn’t know this place. Is it a hospital? Did she collapse somewhere and get brought here?

She can’t remember.

Is she hemorrhaging? She feels around inside her mouth, inside her clothes, looks at her hands. Nothing. Oh, dear God. What if she’s in some warehouse for the insane? She guards against it and it’s never
happened, but there’s always a first time. She remembers she does not remember things too well. Remembers her strategies on these occasions. Stay calm; assess the situation, one piece of verifiable information at a time; try to breathe normally.

First things first. She can’t have died, she hurts too badly. In all the usual places, also the soles of her feet and the muscles in her upper arms. Unnerving, this hurting in odd places. That’s how new symptoms happen, they just show up and stay.

There’s a window in the adjacent wall and it does not have bars on it. A good sign. Outside there are trees, a great lot of trees. Maybe more trees than she’s ever seen all at one time. A bird she doesn’t know the name of trills from one of them, a lovely sound—she hardly knows the names of any birds, much less what they sound like. This one is gray, but then they all are, aren’t they? Or brown. Except bluebirds and cardinals and jays. The room she’s in has stone walls, rough wooden ceiling beams, and a hard, austere beauty, like an old church. A poor church with nothing extra, only dignity. Some things are beautiful, no matter what.

Beauty. Seven out-of-focus Polaroids. They gave them to her at the closing. Somehow she got here, to the pictures, then she slept. With all her clothes on, even her red coat. This is her first morning. All this she is now certain of. Something else: An animal breathed outside her wall last night and frightened her. Of this she is less sure.

On the floor, beside a trestle table halfway across the room, is a pile that looks like everything she dragged into the forest in her sleeping bag. In it there’s a gun, which when you get right down to it is why she’s here. She can shoot herself today, right now, and get it over with. A quick, clean end to things, not like with the pills. She slides her hand down in her coat pocket, feels the six hard, reassuring lumps of bullets tied inside their bandanna. So simple, easy. Bang. The thought causes her breath to come in strangled gulps.

Or she can wait—a day, a week, a month or two—until her pain’s too great to bear.

She slides out of her sleeping bag, stands on wobbly legs. Balancing first with one hand against the wall and then by clinging to the edge of the trestle table, she makes her way to the jumble of her belongings,
picks up the gun between two fingers, shoves its hard, cold barrel into her mouth. Being. Nothingness. No thingness and therefore no pain.

How badly does she want it?

Not yet badly enough.

She replaces the gun among her more innocent possessions. By electing not to shoot herself this morning, she can spend the whole day living here. Wriggle into her boots, hike to the privy, bring back firewood and put food on the stove, eat something so she won’t feel so weak. Maybe then heat water for a bath. These options turn the room quite bright, the edges of things crisp and clear. She puts on her warm wool sweater and her boots, goes out onto the porch.

And beauty truly is there all around her. So much more than in the photographs, or even on the trail. Beauty that slams into her hard. The cold air smells sharp and clean and makes her want to take in greedy gulps of it. Last night’s light snow glistens on the porch railings and lies delicately inside curled dry leaves on the ground. Bare winter trees sway slightly in the light wind, like blades of grass. They’re different among themselves. Their shapes are different, their barks are various colors, not the same, and their limbs bend at different angles. The small twigs at their tips appear to wrap the sky in delicate, dark nettings. She makes a frame out of her thumbs and forefingers, examines sections of the woods before her; each is equally lovely. A large, rustbrown bird perched in a tree not twenty feet away spreads its wings and flies off with a harsh cry ending in a dying fall. Katherine watches the soaring bird until it’s out of sight, a bird so large she might ride on its shoulders.

Along the privy path she clings to trees. For balance, but also to experience the textures of their barks. Once there, she finds her pain’s no more than she can bear—one can bear a lot more of a lot of things than one imagines; also, if you bite down hard on the soft part of your hand, but not so hard you make it bleed, your simultaneous pain in some unrelated body part will not seem quite so great.

Or if you distract your thoughts from it. What animal breathed against her wall last night? A deer? There should be tracks. Small, deep holes in the wet ground, like in her
Child’s Book of Forest Animals
.
She looks for examples on her way back to the cabin, finds none and turns to picking up wood—small, damp stove-wood branches to sundry on the porch, a few larger ones for the fireplace later. Wet wood smells beautiful, but it’s heavier than it looks. Collecting it’s something she didn’t plan for, something she must do each day.

Best shoot yourself as soon as possible.

That’s not funny.

Oh, but it is. Here you’re tramping around in the middle of nowhere picking up sticks so you won’t freeze to death, when all you came for in the first place was to die. Small wonder skeletons all grin.

The trail forks here. Last night she hadn’t noticed. The broader path leads back to the cabin, past a briar thicket she dodged earlier, its thorny, meandering sticks easy to spot. The narrower path she remembers from the plat as a thin, wavering line that leads out to the pond and then the meadow. Magical to see it come alive, that slender blue-ink thread. She can’t help but follow it, no matter how she feels. Drops her wood in such a way it points her to the cabin, moves tentatively onto the narrower path, again clings to trees to save her strength. There’s the walking back to also be considered, mustn’t forget that.