Unseaming (12 page)

Help me!
yelled the boy.

No noise disturbed the steep wooded incline where I froze, my heart dancing a crazy flatfoot. A distant catbird screeched above the flying saucer whine of the cicadas; that was all.

Yet the boy’s voice shrilled again in my head, loud as a rifle shot.
Please help me!

I dropped my aluminum hiking staffs. One of them tumbled down the bank, right through the place where the boy crouched, right through
him.

Nothing more than an outline sketched in the furrows of bark, the cross-hatching of pine needles, yet clearly
there
, cowering amid the trees about ten yards below the trail. A slender boy, maybe ten or eleven, muddy face streaked with tears, his sweatshirt ripped, one jean pocket torn open.

Through him, the late summer sun dappled knotted branches, twisted ropes of creeper, glistening pine.

His lips parted, and in my head I heard his voice:
Don’t let it get me.

I felt as if someone dropped a boulder in my backpack. I staggered—
swooned
, my grandmother would have put it—and grabbed at a birch sapling to keep myself from tumbling down the slope.

A commotion erupted below the pines, in the brambles at the bottom of the gully. It sounded like a deer, like a herd of deer, trying to fight a path through the tangled thorns.

The boy ran at me.

I raised my arms to block him, but he ran through them, through
me
. I howled as a cold electric jolt galvanized me from inside.

When I screamed, it wasn’t just from the sensation, but from a burst of impossible recognition. I’d felt this before, this ice lightning. Suddenly I was terrified as a five-year-old shut in a cabin full of ghosts. My sinuses seared with the reek of copper. Static blasted in my ears. My skin curdled in goose pimples.

Then the hallucination vanished, quick as it had struck.

Whatever made the commotion in the brambles then crashed away through the brush, out of earshot in seconds. A stench of rotten eggs drifted past me like seeds on the wind.

Then all was calm. No sign of a boy. No sound of running footsteps. A distant cicada changed its pitch from whine to buzz.

To my right, the slope descended to the impassable brambles where I’d heard the deer moving. To my left, the ground rose even steeper in a mad, rocky quest to reach the mountaintop. I stood on a wide hump in the trail, gasping as if I’d sprinted the last quarter-mile. My mouth felt desert dry. I thought of sipping from my canteen, then decided otherwise, realizing that the sulfurous taint still lingered in the air. My stomach twinged.

I denied that shock of recognition with every fiber of my being. I told myself that my imagination had run haywire, that I’d never encountered anything like that in my twenty years of life. I took a step, then bent over and dry heaved.

As I squatted there, eyes shut, a phrase repeated in my head.
Leave it alone, little panther.
At first the voice was unfamiliar: old, dry and crackly as fallen leaves just before the first snow. But then, like twin muted beacons, I pictured my grandmother’s eyes, her sky-blue stare clouded by cataracts. The voice was hers. When had I heard her say that?

She had died thirteen years before, when I was only seven. It was a miracle I remembered the sound of her voice at all, and so strange that I remembered it
then
.

The rustling continued—at first I thought her voice had somehow escaped my skull, but as I recovered from this odd spell I noticed motion at the edge of the path. A large, grey spider, a wolf spider, its leg span as wide as my palm. Tiny brown young clustered on her back. She was so large that as she crawled across years of shed leaves they whispered beneath her weight.

Leave it alone, little panther.

I told myself that nothing had happened, that maybe I just needed fresh water. It was easy to buy into my own sales pitch.
All in your head. Thirst and exhaustion. Just need to find a good resting spot.

I picked up one of my aluminum walking staffs, then clambered carefully down the bank to retrieve the other, avoiding the mother spider and the thorns of a honey locust sapling.

The trail wound uphill past a row of scrub pine, around a bank of cherries. Beyond their long, drooping leaves stood a wooden sign which read CRABBES SUPPLIES in carved block letters. Directly across from the sign stood one of those wooden boxes mounted on a pole you see all along the Appalachian Trail, containing a notebook hikers can use to leave each other comments.

The arrow on the sign pointed to a narrow side path that climbed straight uphill, forging through dense clusters of laurel.

At that moment I realized I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than the company of another human being. I made a mental list of things I could stand to restock and started up the hill.

* * *

CRABBES SUPPLIES turned out to be a 1850s-era log home about the size of a storage shed, perched atop the mountain ridge. Tan chinking filled the gaps between wooden slats aged mildew black. The roof’s blocky, gray shingles had been hand-cut with a hatchet.

An ancient jeep as dirty as the slats sat behind the shop, parked on an old logging road that wound its muddy way down the other side of the mountain. The jeep’s fenders were caked with enough layers of mud to justify an archeological dig. Somewhere nearby, a generator hummed.

Through the window’s dusty glass I could see a heavyset woman, her back to me, her silver hair pulled up in an elaborate bun. The painful pink and green print of her flowered skirt made her disproportionately wide hips seem even wider.

I leaned my staffs against the wall and set foot on the single front step. It creaked under my weight.

Then I drew up short. Viscous strands of cobweb crisscrossed the open door. I’d almost stepped through them.

I checked for spiders—there were none—then brushed the webs aside. Except I didn’t. My hand passed through the webbing without breaking a strand. An electric tingle numbed my forearm, the same cold jolt I felt when the boy ran through me, though not as strong.

The old woman spun around as if yanked on a string. At the same moment, a rail-thin and stunningly ugly old man stood up from behind the cash register.

My hand shook as I passed it again through the cobwebs. Again, the cold, the shock.

That happened.

The boy’s terrified face, etched in shadow, flickered before my mind’s eye. As I stood paralyzed, the old couple watched me, both their heads cocked at precisely the same angle. I grew conscious of their gaze, and embarrassment compounded my fear.

Leave it alone, little panther.

The old man finally broke the detente by displaying a smile full of long, crooked teeth. “Well, son,” he drawled pleasantly, “are you coming in or not?”

His tone made up my mind for me. I hopped through the door with an apologetic “Hi!”—but the syllable was strangled by full-body shock as I passed through the cobwebs.

“Whoa, there, tiger, you all right?” He came around the counter, a spindly arm extended to brace me. His wife put a fretful hand to her mouth.

Something in me squirmed as the old man took my arm, but I didn’t resist as he helped me out of my backpack and steered me to a wooden chair. I was all too grateful for the chance to sit down.

He must have been acclimated to decades of hikers stomping through, because I was a fright myself. Cheeks hollowed from day after day of dining on raisins, peanuts, jerky, granola and the occasional nasty but edible meal plucked and boiled directly from what the trail offered. Those sunken cheeks almost completely hidden in a scraggly shrub of black, curly, untrimmed beard, with my densely curly hair grown out three times that length. Even without my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt sticking to my body, I stunk from four weeks away from air conditioning and plumbing. Not to mention I was freakishly piebald, my sun-exposed forearms and face dark as hickory, the rest of me pale as cream. And people with my complexion don’t normally have green eyes. That alone has earned me many double-takes through the years, but none of it phased him.

“Check him for a fever,” his wife said.

I tried to wave him away. “I’m fine, really. Just need a little break.”

“Don’t usually see a man this young in such a state,” my host said. He had to press his hand to my forehead before he was satisfied. His touch felt so strangely cool that I wondered if I did have a fever. But finally he nodded and backed away. “No problem with letting you sit for a spell. I think you need it.”

Next, as I recuperated, came the small talk. Their names, they told me, were Herman and Gertrude Crabbe, the kind of names no sane parent would ever give their kid nowadays.

As Gertrude approached and I shook her flaccid hand, I wondered how a woman so wide through the hips could have such a pinched, hungry face. Yet her voice had an earthy, soothing cadence.

“Welcome to our little oasis,” she said. “You want something while you’re here? Bottled water? Crackers? Maybe a pillow?”

My panic faded, though a nagging sense of unease never left. Something still bothered me about the Crabbes, though they acted as pleasant as you please. During the give and take, they told me they’d lived for the past fifty years in a cabin nestled in a hollow on the east side of the mountain, so secluded they never saw hikers there. Both had been born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains and didn’t much care to live anywhere else. Gertrude told me she and Herman had both been born to large families, back in the days when
everyone’s
family was large, and each had been the family “eccentric,” the lone introverts marooned among their gregarious kin.

Their serendipitous first meeting took place at a saloon in the tiny town of Warm Springs, where both had been reluctantly dragged by cousins with wild streaks. “I couldn’t believe how perfect we were for each other,” Mrs. Crabbe said. “I just looked at him, and I knew, and I could tell he knew. We hardly had to say anything.”

I had no trouble believing in that instant attraction. These were two of the homeliest people I had ever met. Her with her hunched shoulders, beady eyes and crooked jaw, her head configured as if God had gripped her cheeks with thumb and forefinger and squeezed; him with those eyes set too far apart in his narrow face, the spiny hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils, that lipless mouth. They belonged together.

Under normal circumstances I would never have revealed so much about myself in return, but every tidbit they offered seemed bent to draw something out of me, and even as I recognized the game I couldn’t stop myself from playing it.

I’d not been the happiest boy, growing up in the coal-shaft riddled mountains outside Kingsport. A bookish waif is nothing to be among the sons of miners, who see you as something to piss on for sport. The only bookstore was at the Kingsport Mall, half a day away by a switchbacking road that made me throw up in the back seat more than once.