The Coming of Bright (27 page)

She needed to rest and calm her nerves. She peeled off her bright orange vest, her hunting safety vest. Threw it aside, onto the cooler. She had set the cooler down even before Victor had vanished into the brush. She leaned back against a large honey mesquite tree, slid to the ground, her back scraping against its gray-brown scaly bark. Victor had given her cold comfort, now the tree would give her no comfort. She closed her eyes.

The snap of a branch nearby snapped open her eyelids.
That was no little woodland animal.
She stood, erect against the tree. Her body quaked.

“Victor! Victor! Victor, is that you?”

The sound of that single solitary snap was replaced with stillness. An abyss of silence. The unnatural calm began to truly unnerve her, and she began to sway and shake against the trunk of the tree, shivering uncontrollably in the mid-day heat, ready to run helter-skelter away from the next sound.

Without warning, a new sound. A new horror.

Coming toward her was the faintest whoosh she had ever heard. She barely had time to register the sound in the center of her brain. On the back of the sound, an instant behind, the arrow invisibly flew. It came at her with unbelievable speed, unnatural speed, faster than her fastest reflex.

It burrowed an inch into the tree just a fraction of an inch above her head. Her body automatically, violently recoiled from the shock. She crouched in a spasm, and then leapt away from the tree.

Zora fell into an animal panic, the panic of a hunted deer. She screamed and ran, ran and screamed, heedless of her steps. She tripped and stumbled over rock after rock. She slapped her face against bramble and branch, covering her cheeks with scratches, drawing blood. Her mind had no thought but flight. The arrow had not killed her, but her haphazard dash through the woods might. She could fall to her death in the ragged karst, bash her head against a boulder, cascade down a hillside like a rag doll, bones breaking along the way, organs rupturing.

“Zora! Stop!”

Running, she turned her head toward the voice. It was Victor, over to her right, by a large outcropping of grotesquely weathered rocks at the base of the sheared-off hill. The rocks resembled the rotting teeth of an enormous statue. She was passing about 100 yards away from him, heading in the opposite direction.

Her reflexes had taken over, and in her blind panic, the voice of her lover was not enough to break the spell of fear. In fact she veered away from his voice, instinctively thinking the tone of his cry a threat. She continued to hurl herself forward, oblivious of obstacles in her path, running obliquely away from Victor. The turmoil in her mind, in her heart, was so bestial that she trusted no one and nothing around her. That arrow had not materialized on its own. She could not consciously conceive that Victor had fired that arrow, but she also had no proof, no physical evidence, that he hadn’t. Who else could have?

Victor took off after her. He ran like a hunter after his quarry, after a terrified fleeing whitetail doe. He was incredibly fit, but even more important, he knew the contours of this land like the contours of his own skin. Zora was exhausted and confused, spurred onward only by adrenaline and fear. She was a hopelessly inefficient runner over the unfamiliar ground, continually getting caught up by the rocky terrain and the thick rough vegetation.

Within minutes he had caught up to her. When she still ignored his repeated cries to stop, he leapt upon her and held her tightly to himself. She squirmed and fought the grip of his arms, like a deer might fight the jaws of a mountain lion around its throat. Like a deer in the grip of a lion, she expended her last ounce of energy fighting a futile battle. She stopped struggling.

“What the hell are you doing Zora? Why didn’t you stop? Did you actually see a mountain lion?”

“Why, Victor, why?”

Her eyes brimmed with tears like a sinkhole during a downpour.

“Why did you shoot that arrow at me?”

Now it was Victor’s turn to be shocked.

“Someone shot an arrow at you? How do you know?”

His incredulity was a sign to her of his innocence. Her fear dissipated. But her anger returned—anger over him leaving her there for so long, leaving her to flirt with death alone in the wilderness. He released her from the cage of his strength, and she faced him with the strength of her rage.

“How the fuck do I know? Because the arrow hit the tree right above my head. You shouldn’t have left me there for so long.”

“Oh shit, oh shit, that’s awful. I’m sorry. Let’s go back and see if we can find the arrow. I know a lot of the hunters up here, maybe we can figure out who it was.”

But when they returned to the tree, the arrow was gone. Her vest was still lying on the cooler where she’d left it. Victor inspected the damage to the trunk from the impact of the sharpened steel. He glanced at her vest, unworn.

“You took off your vest. Whoever shot at you must have mistaken you for a deer. The brush is pretty thick around here.”

“Victor, do I look like a goddamned deer to you? What kind of imbecile would mistake me for a deer?”

“Believe me, guys around here will shoot at anything. Especially when they’re drunk. He probably just saw some different coloration against the tree, couldn’t tell what it was through his blurry vision. Let an arrow fly at it anyway, in case it was a deer.”

In the back of her mind, Zora could see Victor’s point: maybe it hadn’t been the smartest idea to wear a shirt that day whose color could accurately be described as “whitetail tawny.”

But she still had serious doubts about his theory of the shitfaced hunter. If someone was so fucking drunk they mistook a woman for a deer, would they really be able to almost impale her head to a tree? Zora suddenly had an idea.

“Call up Vane. Call him up on the radio. I want to hear what he’s doing right now.”

“Well, what if he’s into some deer? We can’t just—”

“CALL UP VANE. RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.”

Victor had learned, sashimi-style, how risky it was to provoke Zora. He obliged without another word of protest.

“Vane, come in, where are you guys? Any deer?”

The radio crackled to life. It was Vane.

“Can’t talk right now. We’re tracking this huge buck. Over by Lacey Hollow. A 6-by-5. Beautiful spread on him. I’ll radio you if we bag him.”

The airwaves fell silent. Vane was gone.

“Where’s Lacey Hollow? Close to us?”

“No, not by a long shot. Three miles on the other side of the canyon. Probably at least six miles from us.”

The hollow got its name from its old growth of
Quercus laceyi
, the Lacey Oak. A regal tree, unusual for that region of the karst, topped with an expansive crown of foliage. A sultry tree, dressed in a silky coat of blue-green leaves.

Zora closed her eyes as if meditating. She sent aloft a slow exhale, a sweet breeze through the skein of trees around her. She opened her eyes, looked at her lover. Accepting of his words, his judgment.

“You may be right. Some dumb Texas hillbilly probably did shoot at me. Drunk on his own moonshine.”

She hadn’t been joking, she was still incensed just beneath the surface of her meditative face, but Victor had to laugh.

“Hillbillies and moonshine? Think closer to home—think Kentucky or Tennessee. But it really doesn’t matter. Hunters everywhere like to get drunk. It’s almost an unwritten rule. A 6-pack for a 6-point. No beer, no deer.”

A smile finally leafed itself across Zora’s face.

“No beer, no deer. I’ll have to remember that when we get married. I’ll make a new rule for you, one for the bedroom:
You’re drunk, you’re out of luck
. Doesn’t quite rhyme I know. Too bad.”

Victor quaked in his boots—almost as much as Zora had when the arrow nearly split open her skull. The blood drained from his face. He began to sputter.

“W-w-hat do you mean, when we get married? Did that arrow somehow jilt your brain?”

Of course he meant
jolt
instead of
jilt
—but in his panic-stricken state, he was falling prey to slips of the tongue. And this particular Freudian slip just happened to highlight his womanizing nature.

“My brain is fine, you jerk. No thanks to you. And you had better not jilt me. You’ll get an arrow in you if you do. Don’t play games with me. What do you expect when two people love each other?”

Zora’s mention of the dreaded m-word had put him on the defensive, only compounded by his adulterous Freudian slip. He’d better go on the offense, and fast. Defuse the situation with endearment. And humor. Or sashimi would be the least of his concerns.

His took Zora’s hands in his, as a groom would take a bride’s. He gazed as lovingly as he could into her eyes. His eyes shimmered.

Said with mock solemnity: “I do.”

He then turned his head to the left, to an imaginary justice of the peace standing directly in front of the happy couple.

“May I now kiss the bride?”

Turning his face back to Zora, he puckered his lips for a sensual conjugal kiss. All he got was a hard unmarried shove. At least she was smiling when she pushed him.

Zora thought it best to change the subject. The m-word would have to wait. One thing at a time, one question at a time. Starting with the question she had asked him that he still hadn’t answered.

“Did you ever find that path you were looking for?”

“I did. Took me a while”—
no shit Rocinante
—“but I found it. Want to go see what’s at the end of it?”

Zora answered by scampering at a brisk pace back whence the two of them had come, back in the direction of her berserk flight through the scrub. Victor ran ahead of her to show her the way. She had donned her bright orange hunting vest again—unless they ran into some drunken idiot hunting an oversized cock of the rock in the middle of Texas, 3000 miles from the orange-plumed bird’s native range, the vest should make her safe.

As they rounded the western side of the hill, the rock broke into a stubble of small cliffs, and everywhere was scattered a rabble of boulders. She understood why Victor had not wanted to bring her along earlier—wandering around rudderless in that stuff was foolhardy bordering on suicidal. Victor might have known how to play the scalawag, a part he played all too well, but he could also play the gentleman. More times than she could count, he helped her up and over a parade of rocks and crags, catching her when she tripped up on the sawtooth terrain.

Ascending the rocky scree, they came around to the north side of the hill. Zora was struck speechless. Below the concavity at the crown of the hill—from where she stood, Zora realized the top of the hill was not flat, but formed the margin of a small basin of rock—the hill on its northern face opened up into another larger bowl, another round rock-rimmed basin, about 100 feet lower. The configuration of the two basins of rock reminded her of a geological version of the
Fontaines de la Concorde
in Paris.

And not only because of their terraced pattern. The two basins were connected by a cataract, the most beautiful Zora had ever seen. The waterfall poured down from the upper bowl into a cerulean pool that filled the lower bowl. What was something like this doing in the hills of Texas? It was more like a dream of nature conjured from the pages of Mandeville.

They sat to rest on a rock near the edge of the pool. Zora finally found speech.

“It’s magnificent Victor. I see why this place was sacred to the Comanche. It’s a vision of heaven, it really is.”

“Up top is the most sacred spot. We’re not going up there—too difficult a climb. There’s a spring up there that flows from deep in the karst. The Comanche used to call it
Piki-ra-hihkiapi-paa-pahiti-ka
. The place where shadow waters are born. The water from the spring actually looks black because it’s so pure, coming up from the darkness of the earth.”

All Zora could muster was a murmur. She was stupefied by the spirituality and splendor of the place. That time of day, she noticed, the waters of the lower bowl were buried in shadows too, sunk from the sun in the lee of the hill.

“Let’s catch our breath here, eat lunch. Then I’ll take you around the pool and answer your question.”

After their lunch—food so bland had never tasted better—they ringed their way around the eastern edge of the pool, wending toward the waterfall. Because of the asymmetry in the rockiness of the two sides, the western edge was not passable. Two-thirds of the way to the falling shadow waters, Victor stopped and set down his bow. He took off his vest and set it on top of his gear. On cue, Zora set down the cooler.

“In the mood for skinny dipping?”

She didn’t nod but smiled. Victor began to undress, and she followed suit. She was eager for dessert. She hoped Victor had an entire tasting menu in store. Creme brulee followed by white-truffle custard. Ambrosia. Chocolate drizzled in a sherry reduction. Sweetness mixed with sin.

Their clothes on the rocks—no Damiana on the rocks, alas—they inserted their bodies into the dark waters of the pool. The chill pricked Zora’s skin at first but then the coolness broadened to a sumptuous warmth. For a while they frolicked and embraced, splashing apart and coming together. Partaking of the darkness of the water, the depth of its sacredness.