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.
Dolores and Frank watch from start to finish, like it’s their favorite movie. Talking to each other the whole time, if that doesn’t have to mean constructing sentences out of generally agreed-upon vocabulary using approximate rules of grammar. Outside the world of people, a category they feel little allegiance to, they talk plenty.
THE TRAIL CLIMBS STEEP, following a creek bank, giving every impression of being a main thoroughfare. Thigh-clenching, ass-cramping climbing through lots of unexpected greenery, even in this dying season. Laurels and hemlocks and those kinds of plants that probably either never die or live a great long while. Like maybe the biggest of the hemlocks were sprouts when Jesus walked the earth. They go on and on the same every day, ignoring the pithy symbolic yearly circle of life and death. Being happy all the time. Happy, happy. Then, probably, one day they fall over dead. What a grand life plan that is compared to oaks and maples and all the other loser trees that die a thousand colorful deaths for our autumn enjoyment. Pleasers never get paid back a fraction commensurate with their effort. Which goes along with one of the main rules of life. Which, unfortunately, has two parts. The a is, You got to get paid. A fine idea if it stopped right there. But the cruel b part is, You got to pay.
Without his bear-shredded knapsack, Bud carries his remaining gear in the pockets of his pants and leather jacket and inside his sleeping bag, which he sometimes drapes over his shoulders like a fireman with a limp body and sometimes balls in his arms like a mama with her baby. After a long while of slogging upward, Bud’s feet hurt. Blisters bubble on the insides of both big toes, and skin peels off both heels in moist white petals. Underneath, weeping new flesh. A lot of good daylight gets spent sitting in the leaves with his boots and socks off, picking at his feet.
Hours into the climb, scenery loses its attraction. It’s nothing but ten feet of dirt and leaves in front of his aching feet. Bud is bored and thinking about violence, but trying not to, because violence is best accomplished spur-of-the-moment. Let it happen out of nowhere. Anything else, and you go from being a hothead manslaughterer to nothing but a cold first-degree murderer. Act with great purity—like there’s no past and no future, nothing but the red right now—and there’s a degree of innocence to it, no matter how heinous and bloody the outcome. And that’s not just Bud talking out his ass for his own convenience. The State itself draws the same distinction. Premeditate and they’ll fuck you over bad.
It’s a legal concept confusingly related to something the counselor in teenager prison liked to drag on about. Deferring gratification. Which you’d think would be a bad thing, or at least awfully dreary. The catch is, in the everyday crap of life, premeditation is a valuable skill. If you learn to do it, you step onto the path to success. Never ever do anything you really want to do at exactly the moment you really want to do it. Always stop to think about the consequences of your actions. Defer all the way to the grave, and you draw a ticket to heaven or something. Yet there’s this one amazing exclusion when it comes to rarefied moments of sudden violence. All bets are suddenly off, and there’s a happy and unexpected reward for jumping in with both feet and letting anger run bloody buck wild without any thought of future consequences. Who would have guessed?
On up the creek, two or three little branches of trail peel off ignorably. Then after a dazed while of not thinking at all, but just letting the drab repetition of the world overwhelm him, Bud finds himself standing on something that he can’t even say for sure is a trail. Everything brown or grey, bare trees as far as he can see, and rain starting to fall in earnest. Dead leaves cover the ground hock-deep like a bad snow. Untracked. Stand still, and all you can hear is rain in the leaves and your own breath.
Bud looks for an empty shape among trunks, a suggestion of a lane. Which all depends on which degree of the three-sixty he whirls to look. In leafless woods, the thousands of trunks stretching into the distance shape themselves to suggest a lane everywhere you look, when you’re looking for a lane.
—Fuck if I’m not fucked now, Bud says aloud.
The trouble is, the mountain encompasses so much more territory than Bud would have guessed, never having climbed one before. From town, looking at it way in the distance, flat against the sky, the mountain seemed simple and compact. Not really that big a deal to wander around and cross paths with the kids. On it, though, the mountain encompasses more space and is way more three-dimensional than Bud imagined. The confusing landscape goes every which way. Near-vertical pitches climbing to side ridges and falling into countless coves. Bud lifts his necklace into his mouth, sucks on the tooth, then licks the serrations until he tastes iron. Even an idiot knows that if you need to climb a mountain, the way is up.
Time passes, and Bud persists. At altitude, every kind of bad late-fall weather crosses the sky. Rain, and then freezing rain. Later in the afternoon, sleet hisses against the frozen rain in the trees and the dead icy leaves on the ground. Finally, heavy snow before dark. Big wet flakes falling straight down, an inch an hour.
With neither tent nor campcraft to get him through the night, Bud walks on in the dark, shawled in his wet sleeping bag. It hangs sodden and heavy across his shoulders, and the wet feathers stink. Might as well be carrying a dead body through the aftermath of a flooded henhouse. He casts it aside.
His gear has dwindled mainly to his leather jacket and one wet wool blanket, the machete, and the flashlight. He shivers uncontrollably, and admits to himself he’s flat lost. Snow lies ankle-deep and keeps coming.
With his batteries almost spent, Bud decides to walk in the dark five hundred steps, feeling the ground with his feet, wishing and hoping and praying that when he thumbs the flashlight switch he will have stumbled onto a path. He does it over and over, and each time, he stands stunned and confused to see in the beam only blank forest, except for his own receding footsteps rapidly filling with snow. Nothing but random oak and poplar trunks, no sign of track or trail or other mark to indicate way of passage.
Bud’s arms fall to his sides,
and he stares bewildered at the circle of light puddling around his feet. The symmetry fascinates him, until he notices that the light, which had been white, has turned yellow, giving the snow a quaint look, like old-time photographs. He watches it dim and go dark. Rattling the flashlight does nothing.
One fuckup over the line. You could collapse dead, face in the snow, and nobody know it. Eventually, all that would be left would be some mossy scrag of spine and skull laid out nose down like a shot hog. Thinking this, Bud just hangs his head in the dark, wondering if he has strength left to keep going and find shelter, maybe a rock overhang. Sit huddled all night eating anchovies. Probably that’s nothing but hope, and he’ll be dead by dawn.
But when Bud looks up, he witnesses a miracle. Way up ahead, at the saddle of a ridge, a tiny spot of light glows through the woods. Thank you, Jesus.
MAKING FIRE FROM sparks is a lovely and fragile art. Of necessity, the early movements are delicate, the materials fine as hair and fingernail clippings, shreds of dry leaves. Whether by bow or flint and steel or even a scant few matches, the second you achieve a spark in tinder, you lean close to it and breathe on it from your throat like a sigh. If you purse your lips and blow, everything goes black.
Done carefully and with luck, maybe a flame no bigger than the tip of a finger lives for a few seconds. Then, when the tinder begins to catch, an old man with his long hair on fire, crumple a few more whole leaves and place twigs above the flame. Nervous as pick-up sticks in reverse. Judge wrong, the sticks collapse and snuff the flame. Do it right, and the flame grows, but still fragile. More twigs and then small broken branches. And when that layer starts to catch, that’s when you purse and blow. Do it on and on until, when you look up to the sky, everything is dark and grainy as soot with little silver sparkles dancing in your vision. From there, it’s easy. Nothing but the architecture of broken wood. Pick a shape and lay pieces in squares, triangles, cones. Place them close enough to burn one another but not so close as to shut out the air between.
In the cave of a hollow tree, the children crowd together. Right at their feet, the fire they lit at dark needs constant attention. They judge their sticks and limbs to be skimpy for lasting the entire night, and they begin rationing early on. Still snowing hard enough to discourage them from leaving their tree to hunt more wood in the dark. They feed the fire only the least amount to keep it alive.
Close by the fire, Sally locks her knees and sleeps standing. The outer hair of her winter coat lies on her back like a thatched roof. Underneath, a thick layer like boiled wool, so snowmelt runs down her sides and drips off her belly without soaking through. In her time, she’s lived through many such nights. Miserable and shivering, icicles hanging in her mane and tail. But she’s always been standing come sunrise.
Same for the children. They are not tender babes. They have experienced considerable pain. Cold is more like discomfort, one more thing to take. Shut down, let your breath become shallow, and wait for it to be over. Then go on. No tears, no wishes.
They feed their little fire with twigs hardly bigger than pencils and lean against each other, not thinking forward or backward. Let the night play out, and go on in the morning. Keep running. But it isn’t the Lodge and Luce they’re running from. The Lodge was a fine weird place to live. And Luce was a little bit like Lily, what they still remember. But they don’t expect mama love. What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, and nobody making you bleed. Accept one and you have to accept the other, that’s the deal. You can’t control everything that happens. All you control is your mind. Make it like the lake on a still day. Don’t react any more than you can help, not to outsiders. Trust only the two of you all the way. Hoard up your love for each other and state your rage by way of things that want to burn.
And that had been working pretty well for them, until Bud erupted out of nowhere. Then they broke all the rules. Reacted big, let themselves get scared again. But not just scared. That was no big deal. Fear was every moment. Constant as breath, no matter how hard you tried to tamp it down. What they did was panic. And that was way outside the boundaries of the deal.
BUD FAILS TO ANNOUNCE his presence. Stumbles trembling straight into camp from the dark. Lucky not to get shot. Hunters have many stories of beasts and ghosts that haunt the woods at night, hungry for human blood. As it is, they are mostly too drunk to shoot. So when Bud arrives, one of them raises a toast with his jelly glass.
Nobody gets at all worried about Bud’s closeness to death, or even offers a dry blanket. Sit by the fire and take a cup of coffee or a drink of white liquor, is all the concern they muster.
Whereas Bud is convinced he is neck-deep in a life-or-death survival kind of night, here is this clutch of hoary men, on the same mountain in the same weather, yet occupying a whole different reality from his. They’re having a party. Cozy as hell in the killing weather. An enormous blaze from chain-sawed lengths of resinous fir and hickory and oak. A brown tarp stretched between tree trunks to keep them dry if the snow falls too heavy, but for now they sit out in the open, some of them in shirtsleeves, and let the heat of the big fire sizzle it away before it ever reaches them.
Around the fire, the world draws down to a small beautiful circle. Warmth and light, red coals in a deep bed on the ground, yellow flames leaping high. Sparks shooting up into the black sky, passing white snow falling into the light. An odor of pork cooking. The outer compass of their world marked by faintly lit columns of stout tree trunks gyring away to blackness.
Sleep is not a big part of the old boys’ plans. They haven’t slept for days except to nap briefly. Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead, or when you get home to the wife. Up on the mountain, they stay awake all night feeding the fire and drinking their handmade raw shine from the recent past, such as a couple of days ago. Telling hunting tales and ghost stories and imaginary stuff about the incredible pussy of yesteryear. Many timeless jokes about one another’s dicks and dogs, their equal lack of skill. How the baying of any dogs but the speaker’s own signifies nothing. Also, religious moments of silence and clarity listening to coondogs singing in the distance.
Hard to find joy in the world so much of the time, but the old boys have found some here. It makes them feel young. A renewal of their powers, if only for the dark hours. Come dawn, a camp of hungover sleepless sixty-five-year-old men will look like a mummy convention. But that is for morning to worry about. Right now it is hardly midnight, and everybody seems magically like they did forty years ago.
Bud pours himself a cup of coffee and squats on his heels so close to the fire that, after a few breaths, he has to waddle back two steps to keep from singeing his eyebrows. No good way to conceal-carry a machete unless you’re wearing a long overcoat. Bud has his stuck through his belt, and it hangs below the waistband of his leather jacket and drags the ground as he squats.
One man points to the machete and says, Somebody’s been shopping at the Army-Navy and thinks they’re beating through the jungle in Borneo.
Then he starts right back where he had left off before Bud’s arrival, complaining about his wife’s housekeeping. Says, It’s so nasty most of the time at my place, I wouldn’t even eat a walnut that rolled across the floor.
Pretty soon, Bud’s clothes begin raising steam on his front side. He shucks his boots and sets them mouth-first to the heat. Sad little animals with their tongues out. His socks stick to his feet, bloody at heel and toe, and when he gets them off, his heels still peel away layer by layer and weep pink fluid. Little red threads net below the skin, pitiful capillaries ready to burst. Bud stretches his feet to the fire. The two big toenails already blue-black.
The smart-ass with the Borneo comment says, Take my word, those are going to fall off.
Bud finishes his coffee and pours his mug full of white liquor and begins trying to catch up.
Old Jone
s, the former bootlegger, sits a quarter way around the circle from Bud, keeping within himself, like he’s waiting to see if Bud will recognize him.
Which Bud already has, but he keeps cool about it. Not like Jones has much cause to hold a huge grudge. Probably doesn’t miss the long drives and the worry about the law. All that Thunder Road shit. And way too old to live through a stretch with the Feds. In general, life has probably been pretty good for him lately. Fair to partly cloudy since Bud appropriated his job. Semiregular payments, even though the real percentage is a lot smaller than the figure they agreed on back in the summer.
Yet, maybe, you have some sneering asswipe sit on your front porch lording over you, threatening you out of business, and then later, in a sweet twist of fate, that asswipe lands himself helpless in front of you as a test of your mercy. What do you do? Even Jesus, meek and mild, might give payback a passing thought.
And sure enough, before long, Jones says, Son, what the hell you doing up here?
Bud visors a hand to his brow, acts for the moment like all he sees is one more unknown face out of many in the fire glare.
—Got lost, he says. Nearly died.
Everybody laughs but Bud.