Nightwoods (32 page)

Bud walks on until the sun drops and disappears in the trees. Suddenly, all the warmth of the day drains into the ground. It gets to a point of darkness where you don’t know what to call it. Dusk or night. Twilight fits in there somewhere. People used to have a word,
gloaming
, but that’s only a snatch of memory from a song. Wait a few minutes, though, and like so many things, it quits being an issue. Night falls, too dark to see your feet at the bottom of your legs.

Bud sits down in a level place by the trail. He’s failed to learn the lesson of the coon hunters. Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.

Impossible, though, with no chain saw, no bright-faced kindling fresh-split from a cylinder of pine with an axe. No childhood buddies sharing the heat and light.

Bud draws together wet rotting twigs and squats with his last matches. He achieves smoke for a few seconds. Says, Fuck it, and wraps himself in his blanket on his piece of Visqueen. He lies mostly awake through the night, listening to all the swirling languages the nightwoods speak.

When he drifts to sleep, it’s not really enough to interrupt his train of thought. And when he drifts back in, the voices are always murmuring against him, and he’s always thinking about two quick sweeping movements.

No denying the ugliness. But swear you’re done and move forward. Bud touches the necklace, then his arm.

Blood. It covers the earth. Animals and humans in their billions, their skin like the membrane of a balloon or a rubber. A thin scurf trying to keep the liquid from spilling out, but doing a poor job of it. Touch a needle to your finger and see how bad it wants to get into the air. If God wanted things different, he’d have coated us in armor. Or made us pray to a face pulled apart by pain, screaming.

But he wanted us to bleed. The flow of blood, a red bleeding heart. That is beautiful.

CHAPTER
  4

A
T THE FIRST SUSPICION OF DAWN
, Luce takes off alone. The earth and the lake and the sky still grade only slight shades of color apart. Bare November trees pitching in the wind against a charcoal sky, and the lake charcoal too, with little waves breaking against the shore rocks. Maddie and Stubblefield dozing at the kitchen table.

Alongside the trail, the lush growth of summer droops over, dead brown. The tops of giant hemlocks disappear in fog, and their roots probe deep in the moisture below the creek banks. Galax leaves, transformed by frost, shine glossy maroon.

She has slept once in the past three days, and Stubblefield even less. He’s taken an hour now and then, leaned against her on the front seat of the car somewhere way up a fire road. The afternoon and evening of horrible weather—rain falling hard, ashy sideways streaks of rain in the headlight beams—they drove into the mountains until the roads got so rough they dragged the muffler off the Hawk and figured the oil pan would be next. By the time they returned to the Lodge, she was too tired to argue when he put her to sleep. When she woke, early that morning, the rain had become big wet flakes of snow, melting as they hit the ground, but by the time the sun was up over the eastern ridges, the clouds were breaking apart. More empty searching that whole day, but with the sky blue and the high peaks white all morning with snow. Searching in the car and on foot, knocking on farmhouse doors and asking the same question over and over. Driving to check the phone at the store every few hours. All the time, trying to hold a positive picture in her mind and entertain imaginary hope. By late afternoon, sundogs and bare trees.

Now, walking in the cold fog, Luce doesn’t even try to track the children. Short of a dropped sweater, all trace of them will have been erased by rain and snow. So she walks with nothing at all in her mind and tries to feel which way they might have gone. But she isn’t the least bit telepathic; no vibrations reach her other than the general shimmer of sleeplessness.

Many turnings present themselves, plenty of opportunities for choosing one faint passage over another. These mountains are no wilderness. They have been lived in for thousands of years. Many old nobodies, long gone to earth, left their marks on the land, subtle or not. Gameways stretching back beyond buffalo days to a distant ice age became Indian trails, little foot-wide hunting paths and broad valley trails linking towns, each with its pyramid. Roads broad enough for helmeted Spaniards and their horses and scores of pigs and captives to make twenty miles a day in their traverse through here. Two hundred years farther on, many paths for horny colonial merchants and botanists and preachers coming to the highlands to make money and mixed-blood babies. And then American soldiers burning the villages so that the townhouses at the tops of the pyramids became nothing more than a layer of charcoal. Some of those same roads became exile trails for the Cherokee, endless trails for the many who never reached the end. On the same mule tracks and wagon roads, the deluded greyboys traveled to war. Then, sunken logging roads and skid paths from the end of the previous century, and narrow-gauge rail beds from the early clear-cut years of this century. Everywhere Luce looks, the ground lies webbed with lines of passage, a maze for the children to get lost inside and never come out.

Numb and hopeless, Luce walks in the direction of the black hole. At the trail tree, she sees hoofprints and starts running. When she gets to the dry ridge of hickory and locust, she smells smoke in the woods and runs downhill into the wet cove and into the shadows under the hemlocks. Running across the beds of needles so quiet the loudest thing is her breathing.

At the hole, near the lip, a fire smokes, burned down mostly to coals. Stubs of Franklins, half-burned at the edges of white ash. Like they had no more value than yesterday’s sports section crumpled to light a fire. Bud stands between the fire and the hole, looking off into the woods, a long bright-edged blade drooping from his hand. Burnt edges of bills sticking out his jacket pocket.

Luce can’t see the children until she follows Bud’s line of sight. Dolores and Frank stand together on the far side of the hole, right at the edge. Sally shifts about, off in the trees behind them.

Bud turns around and looks at Luce. He says, Jesus Christ.

Luce tries to breathe. She says, What have you done?

—Not a damn thing yet. They keep running around this quarry.

He starts moving toward Luce, and she angles away. For a few moments they mirror each other, like a slow dance separated by twenty feet. Bud moving in and Luce moving away, skewing out of reach. Until they stop with the circle of fire between them, Bud standing near the hole, Luce with her back to the hemlock woods. Bud kicks at the burnt ends of bills, shoving them toward the live coals.

—Look at it, he says. I could have lived high forever. But now, nothing.

Luce glances quickly at the bits of paper igniting in the coals, confused. Then back to Bud. Waiting for him to move again.

—Y’all haven’t left me a lot of choice here. I’m going to do what I have to, and then get gone.

—You don’t have to do anything, Luce says. Just go now. Never see you again, that’s all I want.

—How dumb do you think I am?

—What?

—You can say any kind of lie right now. But I’m not leaving a string of witnesses.

—I haven’t witnessed anything, Luce says.

Bud looks across the hole to the kids. He says, Stuff piles up. Probably, they’ll try to blame Lit on me too.

—I know you did it. But I can live with that. Leave us alone and go.

—No. From right here, there’s one way it’s got to be.

Out of frustration—the endless circling of the hole trying to catch the kids, figuring they would eventually act like prey animals and get nervous and flare off into the woods in fear and then he would run them down, but them never panicking, keeping always one-eighty degrees away, circle after circle—Bud makes some bullshit calculation in regard to the smaller circle of fire. He tries to leap it to get to Luce.

Midway in the crescent of his jump, as he realizes one foot is going to land in the fire, the machete slips his grip. It spins behind him to the edge of the hole, jangles on rock, and falls over the lip. End over end, down into the black water, which receives it without comment, neither splash nor ripple.

Bud steadies his footing, one boot muddy and the other ashy. Says, I’ll kill you with my hands.

He comes at Luce, but not rushing. Moving wary and uncertain without his blade.

Luce pulls her birthday razor from the pocket of her coat and flips the hook at the end of the handle. Holds the razor angled, like a barber ready to shave a face. The steel of the rectangular blade ripples in the light. Along the edge, it’s almost transparent.

The Adam’s apple makes a good round target, a knot of gristle under the skin to mark exactly where the windpipe runs. Luce moves at him and swings hard, wanting to go deep.

Instinct. Bud steps back and throws up his hands. The blade passes across both palms with hardly more resistance than through air itself. For a second Luce thinks she hasn’t gotten him at all. But Lit said the blade seeks bone. The faint ripples she felt through the handle means it cut to every one. She stares at Bud’s hands, the marks thin as paper cuts.

Luce squares up in case she needs to make another go, but then the blood comes. Two dark sheets running from the heels of Bud’s hands and down the wrists where all the suicide veins tangle. The fingers extend spectacularly white above the blood. Blood falls to the leaves and dirt.

BUD YELLS IN SHORT BURSTS
, just vowels, declining in volume. He keeps his hands up, and blood runs warm and sticky past the cuffs of his leather jacket and down the insides of the sleeves and pools at the elbows. He can’t think of anything to say. His breathing becomes a problem. And there stands Luce with the razor, ready to come at him again. He turns and looks at the kids. They stand pale-faced across the hole, in the shadows under vaulted boughs of hemlock. Watching him with no expression at all.

Bud runs. Takes off without benefit of track or trail in no preconceived direction whatsoever. All the wet dead shit of autumn grabbing limp and clammy at his feet. He runs until he can’t do it anymore, and then he walks. He holds his hands pressed in his armpits and keeps going, sort of grunting and sort of sobbing. When Luce and the kids are far behind, he sits with his back against a fat hemlock trunk, the bark streaked black with rain, and reaches his hands into the air to slow the bleeding.

Under the hemlock, everything lies dark and quiet. Needles not rustling in the breeze like leaves, just a hissing in the air. Around the trunk, a circle of shadow denser than other shadows. Listen hard and you hear a sound like the ticking of many wristwatches, the fall of dead needles, building in tiny increments a deep thousand-year bed to kill weaker things that try to grow underneath.

Bud can’t help it, he wants to watch. He cups his palms in his lap, and counts how many times he breathes until they fill with blood. Then, reach for the sky again.

It doesn’t even hurt much, but his thumbs no longer work right. His fingers hardly move. They’re like flippers. He swipes the bloody fingertips under each eye, marking his face like a high school football player on a Friday night. Works his necklace over his head and tries to throw it off into the woods, but his hands don’t cooperate, and it goes only six feet and falls into the bed of hemlock needles. That’s good enough. Ten thousand years from now, what a mystery for somebody to find a fossil shark tooth at the foot of a mountain.

Bud sits a long time studying his bleeding. When he decides it might be slowing down some, he walks until he comes to a creek. Plunges his hands into the cold clear water and watches tendrils of blood flow downstream, trailing away across smooth mica-flecked stones. Eventually, you can’t tell blood from water, but what beautiful shapes it makes before it disappears.

Fresh from the creek, the edges of the cuts are clean and chalk white. Look deep down, though, and the details get as messy as an anatomy chart before they fill and overflow with blood again.

Moss grows dense on the creek bank. Bud peels two patches of it from the ground like scabs and puts them back to back and presses his palms hard against this green poultice.

He waits for something good to happen. And in an attempt at sympathetic magic, he tries to think back to a pure moment in his life. Cleanliness and innocence is what he’s trolling the past for. Being at the beach when he was a kid, maybe. The end of the day. Tired and sunburned and salty from the water. Or, better yet, this sweet, round-faced girl at the end of a teenage date. September. Sitting in the driveway of her house, the engine off and key switched to Alt. The radio glowing on the dash. And yet, neither of them at all in the mood for groping. Just talking and laughing. Her face open and sweet. Bud remembers washing the car that afternoon, whisk-brooming the interior. Remembers fog in the air that night, a whole sequence of songs on the radio, but he can’t remember the girl’s name. Yet he thinks maybe he should have married her. Her big smile and small teeth. Deep happiness elusive as always.

His hands come away from the compress of moss still bloody. But maybe the optimistic word in regard to the state of his cuts would be weeping rather than flowing. Possibly, death has taken a step back.

How to get the fuck out of here, Bud wonders.

He unfolds the cornmeal map with some difficulty and spreads it across the bloody lap of his pants. It’s like a child scribbled random lines with a crayon. He could be anywhere amid this useless landscape rising all around. No matter how hard he studies the old boys’ markings, the map and the world remain irreconcilable.

DOLORES AND FRANK
sidle wary around the hole. Sally side-passes off in the woods, a dark shape far back in the hemlock shade. Exactly matching their movement, but at a farther circumference.