Nightwoods (28 page)

Luce looks up and comes fuming over. Says, Lit’s dead. He’s been dead. The children might not be yet. Why are we all standing around?

Luce and Stubblefield ride in the backseat of the patrol car like criminals. A smell of Pine-Sol and vomit. Back at the Lodge, dawn is still a ways off. Maddie waits for them in the kitchen, and to kill the time, she has coffee going, cat-head biscuits browning in the wood-oven, and a pot of grits, yellow with butter and speckled throughout with coarse black pepper. As soon as Luce and Stubblefield and the sheriff come through the door, Maddie scrambles a dozen eggs in a huge iron skillet left over from the days of Lodge hospitality.

Maddie repeats what she said on the phone last afternoon. If the children and the mare are still together, they might be heading for the highlands, the peaks and balds, which Sally might remember from summer grazing in the long grass many years ago.

—Ifs and mights, the sheriff says. My thinking is, if you lose your car keys, the best place to start looking is on the kitchen counter and in your coat pockets before you head up a foot trail to the top of a mountain. Might be coincidence that your mare wandered off the same day as the children.

—I doubt she’d have carried her bridle with her, Maddie says.

—Well, I’ll keep that in mind, and we might find ourselves up there eventually, if we don’t get results down here. Normally, we find lost kids in the first six or eight hours. This time of year, by the second night out in the cold, we’re just trying to find something for the parents to bury.

—Good Lord, Maddie says.

—Luce likes straight talk, the sheriff says.

BY THE TIME
the partial moon slides down the sky and disappears, they are far up, pretty high. Creeks becoming thin enough for Sally to step over without getting her feet wet. The woods have slowly quit being jungle and have started to become alpine. Firs and balsams, and heathery stands of flame azalea and huckleberry.

Later, they stop and get off and stand bleary and disoriented in a bald place at the top of a mountain. All around, ghostly frosted clump grass.

Sally collapses her knees and then her hind end, an awkward fore-and-aft jerk, to lie down. She blows three deep breaths and falls asleep. Dolores and Frank use her side as a backrest and lie canted toward the sky, eating raisins and watching the stars fade out toward dawn.

They sleep a brief while and wake high above the world to silver bands of light illuminating valley fog so deep and broad that only the tallest peaks rise dark and solid from it, like islands in a pale sea. As if the island they occupy is theirs alone, a place where they hold the only power to be reckoned with.

But as the sun climbs above the east ridges, the sea draws into the ground until only a distant small shape of elongated fog remains between ridges, underneath which lies the lake. The landscape reconnects all its parts, and the children on their pinnacle are not any kind of power anywhere.

Below them, a hawk floats on a cushion of air, and the children look down on it, studying the novelty of sunlight glinting off the tops of its spread wings, the brown feathers like bronze. With two strokes, it rises and sweeps over them, close enough that they hear the sound of its wings cutting the air, a faint rattle of feathers.

Sally stands and walks stiff-legged a few yards across the bald and begins cropping long grass, dead brown and lapped over by frost in smooth striated waveforms. The children each take fists of grain from the bag. Much tingling and laughter at the velvet sensation as she lips it out of their palms.

Neither reasoning nor planning for the day ahead, and hardly consulting each other except, perhaps, by glances and gestures and thought waves said to be shared exclusively by twins, one thing becomes clear. No going back. Ahead, mountains and woods and creeks, endless by the look of them. Follow old wagon roads, cart tracks, footpaths, animal trails. Go the way the sun goes, as far away as you can. Don’t worry about what happens next until it happens.

CHAPTER
  2

B
UD’S LIFE HAS BEEN
such that he hasn’t witnessed the beauty of dawn in some time. And yet, now, peering out at it from the hole in the mummy bag, how disappointing. Everything grainy and unformed. A new damp chill in the air, and the low sky the color of cold bacon grease.

A fat granddaddy bear, not yet settled into his winter den, waddles from the trees and begins rooting around in the knapsack. He’s scarred around the head from various fights in the past and sort of dusty-looking under the long glossy black hairs of his outer coat. Very casual. A pro. A few motions of the wide forepaws, with their long curved claws, and the knapsack and tent become ribbons and Bud’s stuff is scattered all over the ground.

The bear is first drawn to the wieners, which scent the air for hundreds of yards into the woods. In three bites, he eats a full loaf of bread, including the cellophane wrapper. The bear sits up on his round ass and sucks down all Bud’s uncanned food like a cartoon glutton. Then he gets interested in anything else falling even vaguely into the category of edible. Such as Bud’s suede gloves with the sheepskin linings.

Bud, with just his face from eyebrow to lower lip out the hole of his bag, watches and figures maybe he’s next. He tries to sit up and find the zipper at the same time, but his fingers jitter. The inside pull eludes him, and he can’t squeeze his hand out the face hole to get to it from the other side. He jerks himself vertical and tries to hop away from the bear, but he falls onto his side. Breath won’t draw right, and his diaphragm burns. The bear walks near, sniffs and blinks tiny brown eyes, huffs from deep in his chest, the breath steaming in the cold air. He shies away and disappears into a laurel thicket.

After a while of calming himself and fiddling with the zipper, Bud squirms out of the bag like an extrusion, then eats some of the canned stuff leftover from the bear’s breakfast. Anchovies and Vienna sausages and Red Devil potted meat. His campsite looks like a plane crash.

Before he starts walking, he has to decide which way to go. He wants to turn around and go home, and has to give himself a pep talk about going forward and doing the necessary. Get it over. Put the past where it belongs and start the new.

He squats beside the creek and scrubs the rust from the machete with glittery grit from the water’s edge. He tries to sharpen it on a smooth creek rock, spitting on the rock and then stroking the long edge back and forth in the lubrication. Spitting again and swapping sides. All he knows about knife sharpening is that you hold the blade at such angle as to mimic taking a thin slice out of the stone. He rubs and rubs, and his breath clouds around his head. Thinking, when I’m done up here, I’ll bury this son-of-a-bitch deep deep in the ground and it will rust away year by year. When I’m an old man, it probably won’t be anything but a reddish stain in the soil.

A BUNCH OF MIDDLE-AGED MEN
in the cold light of morning, all bleary-eyed and uneager to get moving and continue the search. Happy to keep stoking the fire and spiking their mugs of coffee with Wild Turkey and Black Jack that they mostly either bought direct from Bud or at one remove. One of the men looks at the sky and sniffs. Says the air smells like snow.

The sheriff looks especially busted up by his few hours of sleep on the ground. But voters have a way of holding it against you if you go home instead of sacrificing a night in bed to find two lost kids. Now his hair hurts when he tries to smooth it down. He keeps taking his hat off and rubbing his head and looking into the hat like the band is what’s causing his trouble.

They’ve not made it into the woods more than shouting distance from where their vehicles are parked along the lake’s back road. Partly out of laziness, and also because they cannot imagine two children, even if they are riding a worn-out mare, going far before they give out. Like when they, themselves, go hunting in November. And also, the mountain gets weird and dangerous and scary when you climb way up on it, especially if you’re the manager of the grocery or the guy that works the recap machine at the tire store.

The sheriff finally says maybe everybody ought to get off their asses and start finding the poor kids. And then he and his number one suckass, Carl, bid the others adios and head back to their black-and-white. Can’t everybody be out in the woods at the same time.

The sheriff and Carl ride around in the patrol car. Stopping at houses at the edge of the deep woods. Carl sits in the car listening to the radio while the sheriff knocks on doors, takes his hat off, walks in, and asks, Seen two retarded kids wandering loose? Might have a horse with them?

Late morning, the sheriff swings back by the Lodge to check if the kids have come home, see if there is any cooking going on. See how Luce acts.

Not like he hasn’t given it a passing thought that she and the boyfriend might be behind the children’s disappearance. He doesn’t believe it, but that’s where you look first, close to home. A wife disappears, you look to the husband. And maybe Luce inherited some of her father’s crazy streak. There isn’t a lawman rule book to learn this stuff from, and the sheriff hasn’t been to police school. Being an elected official means you don’t need any training or qualifications. Nor even common sense. All he really knows how to do is build roads on padded State contracts. Also how to make voters feel comfortable or uncomfortable, peaceful or excited, whichever is more useful at the moment.

After eating a big plate of Maddie’s pinto beans and cornbread and collards, the sheriff hasn’t come up with any clues. Luce seems genuinely broken up by the disappearance of the children, and the boyfriend isn’t any kind of killer. The sheriff tells them to be patient, let the professionals do their jobs. Everybody is doing everything they can to bring the children home safe. Stay by the phone.

Luce says the obvious: I don’t have one. So she gives Stubblefield’s number, and the one at the little store down the road.

—But we’re mostly going to be out hunting for them, Stubblefield says.

—I’ll be here, Maddie says.

WHEN THEY’RE ALONE
, Stubblefield tries to convince Luce to come back to town with him to wait at his place, let the sheriff and his people work. All of which lasts about five seconds.

—It’s mainly a bunch of deer hunters looking for them, she says.

—Then they know the woods.

As they put on their jackets and head out across the lawn and along the lakeshore to search, Luce sets him straight, talking fast and bitter and distracted about deer hunters. Nothing but drunks with high-powered rifles and a two-dollar paper license issued by the State. Coon hunters are nocturnal, and bear hunters go deeper in the mountains. You hear their dogs baying miles away. But deer hunters, they’re the scary ones. Hiding in camouflage, mostly two by two in deer stands, little tree houses the size of a double bed, above spots they’ve been baiting with corn and salt blocks for weeks, about as sporting as shooting a hog with its head down in the trough. They huddle together, whispering to one another and sipping Jack and Coke all day, waiting for something to move. Late afternoon, half drunk and nothing to show for the day, they get twitchy. Pop a shot at falling leaves and cloud shadows moving on the ground. No court ever convicts them for a hunting accident. How could they have known that some woman walking through the woods alone was not a deer? But, Luce says, she never worries much once she’s at least a mile out from the nearest dirt road. They rarely get far from their trucks, because that’s where the beer cooler is. Which explains why jacklighting is so popular. That way, sometimes they don’t even have to get out of the truck, just roll down the window and pull the trigger. So what they know of the woods is nothing but a thin band stretching from the roadways only as far as they’d care to drag a field-dressed doe.

When she’s run her thoughts all the way to the end, Stubblefield says, I stand corrected. Luce makes a fist and swings it roundhouse, slow-motion, and glances his brow.

They spend both halves of the midday searching on foot again near the lake and along the old railroad bed. They go back to the Lodge and drive to Maddie’s to see if Sally might have come back, then down to the store to check for messages. Followed by hours of driving fire roads, stopping frequently to blow the horn and shout into the woods and listen for some response.

IT’S DEAD WINTER
up on the ridges, all the bare sticks of trees like weather-beaten skeletons broken into forearms and hands, rib cages, shins and feet. Some resigned to horizontal death and some still trying to reach upward. They ride the cold ridges deeper and deeper into the mountains, but with less urgency now that they’re high above the world.

They stop often to rest and eat, and they light a fire each time. Break out their materials and use their skills. Sometimes, small cowboy campfires no bigger around than a pot lid. But also much larger blazes if the combustibles lie handy. On into the afternoon, a mist starting to hang in the air, they come upon a dead blown-down balsam, its needles dry and brown on the branches. Once a tree of majesty but now a giant brush pile.

A pyramid of dry sticks and the last cups of their kerosene, and the balsam soon lights up like a great torch throwing yellow flames thirty feet into the sky, roaring hoarse and sucking wind upward so that it pulls their hair forward into their faces. Dolores whoops in the manner of old warriors, whether Cherokee or Rebels at Gettysburg. Sally goes sideways a few steps and then settles. Frank walks forward with his arms straight ahead and his palms out until he can’t stand the heat. He backs up and presses them to his face, and then he does it all over again.

The fire dies as quickly as it kindled, leaving burnt branch tips. Hundreds of little flames like candles at an altar. Soon the flames die away entirely, and hundreds of smoke tendrils rise toward clouds of the same grey.