—Seen them when?
—Anytime from afternoon to right now.
—Not at all, he says. No children seen whatsoever.
—How long have you been parked here?
Instead of gesturing his response with a middle finger, he flicks three fingertips under his salt-and-pepper chin whiskers with great aplomb. When he rolls the window up, the sweeps leave parallel tracks in condensation on the inner side of the glass.
After that, Luce and Stubblefield wander for what seems like hours in the night, flashing their feeble light on black trunks and humped stones, startling small animals, which skitter through the downed leaves. Luce singing out Dolores’s name in three rising syllables every minute, and in between, Stubblefield barking Frank. And at some point in the night, they hear off in the coves and along the ridges other searchers calling too, echoing out the same two words like simple-minded spirit voices of the green world. In the silences, floating thin in the air from a great distance, coon dogs bay as they work the high mountains on an entirely different mission.
TOWN DARK AND EMPTY, the three streetlights flashing yellow, Bud creeps alleyways. Trying to work some imaginary juju shit to guess which townsfolk might be hunters and fishers and summertime campers. When he needs to see, he clicks the flashlight with his fingers over the lens, so that about all the shine he gets is bloody glow through skin.
Luck strikes at only the third garage. He finds an army-surplus pup tent and a down mummy bag rolled tight and smelling like poultry and must. A brown greasy World War II knapsack collapsed onto itself like the carcass of a goat or small deer left to the elements for a couple of seasons. Also a damn unexpected prize, a jungle machete, rusty from tang to tip. All of which goes to show what great rewards come from pausing to plan.
That afternoon, when Bud started figuring he needed gear for the journey up the mountain, he headed first to the grocery, and then the Western Auto. Buy a fat warm sleeping bag and an assload of matches and one of those wonderful little nesting cooking kits no bigger than a baby moon hubcap that, when unpacked, reveals a half dozen shiny vessels for boiling and frying and poaching. And, at the center, a precious metal cup with folding wire handles to drink your coffee from. All fine, until the thought emerged from the general milling inside his head that there might be bad backwash from such a shopping trip. This time, unlike the fishing rod deal, he very much shouldn’t want to call attention to himself as a novice mountaineer. So, how to satisfy his needs anonymously? It took but a second to come up with the correct answer, and yet he wondered how slack-minded bootlegging had made him. Why hadn’t pilfering been his first idea?
Back home, Bud stuffs the stolen knapsack with his food and gear. Best if his truck stays in town, so he dodges alleyways and empty lots to the shoreline. Keeping to the trees, he walks until he finds an unchained canoe. Paddles on and on across the spooky black lake to a narrow cove. Starts walking up the mountain.
Survival. That’s what it comes down to. Like, in Argosy and True. Every month, along with swimsuit girls, some story tells about how you’re lost in the Arctic or the Amazon, and a polar bear or a jaguar rears up out of nowhere and opens its monster jaws to crunch your skull like a mouthful of popcorn. But real quick, you push the muzzle of your .45 deep into its pink mouth and pull the trigger, and red stuff blows out the back of its head onto the snow or the litter of the jungle floor. Or it could be coral reef and great white shark and some kind of underwater sling gun. All the same difference.
It’s cold and dry here. Dead leaves everywhere. Dark too, at the moment. But these bears are well known to nap all winter. As do snakes. After the first frost, the woods are safe as church. Which Bud rethinks immediately. Surely safer than church. Lifeless as these woods are now, all the blood must flow in summertime, whereas Jesus’s blood covers the world every day of the year.
The trail pitches hard upward, and it being the middle of the night, Bud soon stops and tries to camp. The woods become so expansive in total darkness, yet Bud goes fireless by choice. At least in the sense that he chooses to quit burning up his too small supply of matches trying to light sticks that don’t want to burn. Best save at least enough to equal the number of cigarettes he’s brought along. And forget about trying to set up the tent. Without wasting his batteries, he can’t hardly see the palm of his hand waved in front of his face. He sits in the dark and eats half a pack of cold red Valleydale wieners and puts the rest in his knapsack for breakfast.
When he lies down to sleep, every distant sound amplifies and warps. Wind in the trees and creek water over rocks. Voices mumble conspiracy against him. Bud huddles in his bag on the cold ground and feels it trying to pull at him. The heat of his body soaking into the earth like water.
How did fucking life reach this fucking pitch? Not even stars to offer light, and his legs crunched together by the mummy shape of the bag till he feels constricted like a deceased elder in his coffin.
TWO IN THE MORNING, a stand of tall red oaks in a peninsula of forest interrupting a big hay field. Unexpected light rises under the trees. A Coleman lantern hanging by its bail from a tree limb projects a harsh white dome across the ground and up the tree trunks and into the brown dead leaves overhead. A group of men stand together in the blaring light like actors on a stage, their eyes dark under hat brims. The shadows of the people and of the trees stretch long across the ground.
Luce stands apart, gathered into herself and fatal.
Stubblefield is with the group of men. They’re looking at a green canvas tarp covering a small body.
The sheriff says, There’s no need for her to look. We have his wallet. It was still in his pocket.
—How was he killed?
—Hard to say at this point. When the searchers found him, it was already dark. A lot of animals around here. Plenty of wear and tear. We’ll get him out in the morning and see what the coroner says.
Stubblefield holds his cut hand to catch the light, looks at the bandage. He says, I’m betting knife wound.
—We’ll see. Like I told her, there’s a lot more than one suspect. Need to keep an open mind.
—Have you talked to him since Lit’s been missing?
—Of course. He seemed pretty broken up. Said they were tight. Never had such a good friend in his whole life. Said he didn’t believe for a minute that Lit had taken off on his own without a word. Something bad must have happened. I believed him.
—You believed him? The end?
—I’m not as big an idiot as Luce thinks. He has an alibi for the night Lit went missing. A couple of men saw him at the Roadhouse until late.
—Two drunks hanging at a beer joint can’t remember one night from the next.
The Sheriff says, Everything doesn’t have to be connected. Most of the time, something happens and then some other things happen. Usually the simple answer is the right one. I’m keeping an eye on this guy. But it’ll turn out to be somebody with a grudge against Lit. There’s plenty of those around. It won’t be a friend. And, by the way, I don’t think of it as a beer joint. I think of it as your beer joint.
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
BUD’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 h
asn’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.