In Wilderness (20 page)

And because that gook very badly wants to kill you and you very badly want to kill him first so you can go on living. Yeah, there’s got to be deep feelings on both sides, that’s what transmits the knowledge. Danny wants to be with Katherine more than he’s ever wanted anything in God’s great turning world. She wants him, too. He can sense
it coming off her even from this far away. How hard a thing, to know he must never touch her. She senses that, too.

But it doesn’t matter. She’s as much as told him.
It’s. All. Right
.

What doesn’t matter? What’s all right?

Everything.

Yeah, she’s got her back turned to him now, heading out of town. He’ll let her go a little ways, give her her lead. Can’t take a chance she’ll see him, she’d recognize him now. Can’t let her know he’s come this far. He rests his head against the back of the church pew, the wood’s comfortable curve. Danny and Katherine; get it tattooed on his biceps. Big heart with an arrow through it.
Danny loves Katherine. It’s. All. Right
.

H
E JERKS AWAKE TO
darkness. Flashes of phosphorus-blue fire, rumble of incoming artillery. Dives under the bench in front of him, curls himself into a ball. He is a ghost again. Jimbo’s bone throbs in his thigh, the only life inside him. Jimbo died when Danny wasn’t looking out for him.

Ka-ther-ine
.

He crawls into the aisle, stands. Runs out of the safety of the church into the growing storm.

S
HE LIGHTS HER LAMP
,
SITS AT THE TABLE LISTENING TO THE THUNDER
. Closer tonight; please let it rain. Four times these past two weeks she’s carried water to the garden, feared always she had not brought enough. The air feels heavy, but that’s not the same thing as a promise. All she can do is wait.

For the storm. For the deer, who hasn’t come for two nights now. For the boy at the garden, whom she will never see again. For her memory of him to fade.

The child she held this afternoon is with her still—in her arms, against her breast. On her way home, she left the trail to pick a small red flower, bright against late afternoon’s green darkness, so she could rub a single petal on her cheek to see if it was smoother than that baby’s skin. It was not.

Don’t hope. For anything. Life is a series of small moments; sometimes
they bring a little cooling rain and then it’s gone. That’s the most you can expect.

Why, then, is she so restless? She goes to the kitchen, takes mint off a shelf for tea. The sink water runs out a rusty brown; maybe that means it’s raining somewhere. Now an occasional lightning flash precedes the thunder. Its blue-white bleach makes all the trees, even the sturdy oaks, seem frail. Tomorrow she will weave it, if she has all those electric shades of yarns.

Maybe if she had a rocking chair, its constant motion, she wouldn’t feel so out of sorts. She has thought many times how she might get one to the cabin: Take it apart, bring it back on the trail in pieces; then nail them, glue them back together. It would need to be a small one, its seat and back no wider than the diagonal inside her cart. She could bring it in two trips, first the seat and rockers, then the back and legs. Wedge other items—bags of rice, salt, beans, balls of lightning-colored yarns—around it. Maybe that will work. If she can find one small enough.

It’s full dark now, still thundering and still no rain. She strips off her day clothes, reaches her muslin nightgown from its hook, pulls it on over her head and stretches out on top of her sleeping bag.

But nothing sleeps in this heat-swollen night. Not the owl, not the monotonous whippoorwill, not the desperate mockingbird flinging his lonely arias into the heavy air. Katherine lies there with her gown hiked up.

Unbraid your hair
.

She barely notices the rising wind, the thunder, not even the rain. Until she hears his voice shout out her name—so like a dream lodged in the storm, yet real. She rises, dazed, moves toward the sound. Pulls back the bolt, opens the door.

He stands there on her porch, wild-eyed and shaking. Rivulets of rain slide off his tangled hair. A blue-white flash of lightning, crack of thunder, something struck nearby. A brief pain in her ears. The boy’s hand shoots out, grabs her wrist tight as a vise. His eyes bore into her too proud to plead.

“Take me in.”

D
ANNY JERKS WITH EVERY PHOSPHORUS
-
FLARE LIGHTNING FLASH
. So many things rain down on you out of a sky lit up like that. Bird shit, metal shards, bone fragments, human flesh. All of it on fire.
Jimbo, man, I told you. Stay off the fucking trail!

Ka-ther-ine.

Words come into his mouth hard as stones. “Take me in.”

She steps back and he follows her across the threshold. Her wrist bones turn in his clenched fist.

“I don’t mean to bother you.” It spurts out all run together like he’s on a battle high. “It’s just, I got to get inside.”

She nods. In the darkness he feels the movement more than sees it. “It’s all right.”

Her words wash into him, rain sluices down outside. It’s all one thing. Her words, the rain, her wrist-pulse banging against his fingers.

She reaches around with her free hand, closes the door and bolts it. Now everything inside is silent. Even the wind and rain seem far away. He is in the Old Man’s house, in the Old Man’s presence, with this woman he has known such a long time. In this quiet, familiar place, he is suddenly so tired.

She moves toward the picnic table he built out of the smokehouse boards. Table and two benches, a foretelling.

“I’ll light a lamp.” Her voice soft in the darkness.

“Don’t.”

He walks her to the corner where he’s watched over her so many nights. Pulls her down onto her sleeping bag. Her body trembles in the heat, she is afraid of him. Afraid of Danny. He curls himself behind her. Draws up his legs, his knees against her back. Still gripping her wrist he wraps his other arm around her.

“We got to lay like this. Like spoons but with our legs drawn up. Pull your knees up like mine.”

She folds her legs. Danny smooths her gown down over them, his other hand still clamped around her wrist. Her body shivers like she’s cold, and she makes tiny, frightened noises not quite words.

He rocks her slightly. “Hush, now. I just got to lay here for a time. I promise I won’t hurt you. That’s why I laid us with our knees drawn up. So I can’t hurt you even if I try.”

She nods, still full of fear.
Please, Lord, please let her know I don’t mean to harm her
.

“It’s just, I can’t stand a thunderstorm, especially in the night. I got to have some live thing to hold on to.”

His words spill out onto her back, into the dark well between her shoulder blades.

Comes a lightning flash he tightens his arm around her knees, counts off time till the thunder. Thunder moving off, his shakes settling down, muscle aches he gets after the shaking starting to come on. Got to stay strong, she needs that.

“I had a dog that used to let me hold her, but she ran away. I wasn’t home too much by then. Couldn’t find enough to feed her. She never did take much to dumpster food.”

Dumbass. Talking such stupid shit. His words are moist air caught inside the muslin of her gown. Her back is smooth against his forehead and her nightgown smells of sunshine. He rests his free hand against her hair. Won’t comb his fingers through it, no matter how he craves to. But he can’t do anything about his words, how they keep tumbling out against the warm life of her lying there. And him not even sure she hears.

Words about how his daddy was a laughing man who grabbed Danny by his baby ankles, swung him high into the air, and how that’s all of him that he remembers; how his mama’s lipstick, when he sucked her titty, made him think of plums; and how he should have cried for her in that hot schoolroom full of other wailing kids so maybe she’d have heard somehow and not have shot herself. He tells how Pawpaw smelled of two-day-old tobacco spit and Memaw smelled of flour and sometimes of carbolic acid she used on the babies and sometimes of mamas’ babies dying when she couldn’t help them, how he knew from her smell coming through the door which thing had happened on that day and how she felt about it.

He tells how, the day after his mama died, his Pawpaw taught him how to shoot a rifle so he’d have a thing to take her place, and how by the time he turned eight he could already hit a squirrel square in its eye; Pawpaw, who used to ride him on his back when they went hunting so he could keep up, Danny grabbing at his shirt to hang on, the muscles in his Pawpaw’s hairy shoulders like riding on a bear, the dogs moiling below him on the ground; Pawpaw, who died when a logger’s tree fell on him the year Danny turned twelve. Tells how at high school football games they all cheered “Dan-ny, Dan-ny,” because he was the quarterback; and how at college sweet bells chimed the hours so you didn’t need a clock and all the radiators hissed and every room he entered seemed a place where he was meant to be.

Tells how once he’d thought to be a lawyer and came home from Memaw’s funeral and sat inside the room where Pawpaw’s mantel clock still ticked, till Jimbo showed up banging on the door and saying how they should get up and go, just like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and if they joined the Army they’d get paid for going back to college, maybe even law school. And how, too much later, he realized
Jimbo’d done it all for him, that even growing up with all those books Jimbo never gave a flying fuck for college.

“Now Jimbo’s dead and I keep in my thigh a bone from him, from the explosion.”

She winces and a silent exultation rises in him that she’s heard.

“My flesh and skin grew over it so now it’s nothing but a long red welt that aches before a storm. Motherfucker threw me his brains, too, on his way out. Frothy with tiny bubbles like half-melted ice cream. I had to wipe them off my face. Reckon he thought I might have need of them.

“Yeah. Jimbo. He knew how to get things done. Medic tried to dig his bone out of my thigh and I raised up and held my knife blade on him, said, “Leave it alone, man, or I’ll slit your throat.”

She shudders and he smooths her gown over her knees to soothe her.

“It’s different over there. You try and leave it all behind, but you can’t help taking some away with you. Like what drew me to you was you were dying. I was used to people dying, I smelled it on you hiking in, you in your long red coat and dumbass city boots. I wanted to be near you when it happened. If a person’s dying smell turns sweet, most times they’re gone before the week’s out. I waited but yours never did; your dying smell just went away. You beat out Mr. D., and when he came for you again out in the snow I wouldn’t let him at you. Took you inside and laid you by the stove and made a fire.”

She turns her head and tries to look at him. Storm’s moving on. All that artillery flying off to somewheres else. His muscles ache from shaking, still he can’t stop talking. Into the forgiving back of this once-dying woman lying in the curve of his right arm.

“Death draws you, but you got to keep a distance from it all you can. Each time you see some poor fucker buy it, each time you look at them, at anyone after they’re dead, touch them, smell them, any of that shit, you take a little of their death inside you. Take in enough and you become a haint, a ghost. Like me.

“Over there you’re in the death business. There’s death everywhere and you can’t get away. Some poor shits got to bring the bodies in for counting, load them on the trucks, fly them in the copters. Sometimes
there’s not body bags enough. You steel yourself to not look and then you look anyway. The dead reach out to you and make you stare. It’s their last act with the living.

“I saw myself once in a dead gook’s eye. I’d killed him, he was my dead gook, so it was me had to go out and bring him in. I bent down to get him and the sun was shining through the trees behind him and I saw my face inside his open eye, its iris clouding like a mist, trapping me inside that eye forever. I grabbed my knife to gouge it out—it’s nothing, taking parts of dead gooks; Jimbo wore three ears around his neck strung on a bootlace—but I couldn’t get my hand to do it. I feared cutting myself out of him might kill me. That dead gook took my life inside him through that eye. I looked at it and took his death in me. I reckon that’s a fair exchange. Considering.

“That’s why I live in the woods. I got so much death in me there’s times it takes over my mind. It’s mostly people set it off. Their sudden noises, all that talk. The fact they stayed behind. It’s just better in the woods, with the wild animals.”

The Dead Lady, his Katherine, is shaking violently against his folded knees. Danny tightens his arm around her, pulls her nightgown down some more in case she’s cold, then knows she’s crying.

And then he’s crying, too. The way he’s learned, without moving or making any sound. It’s got to be the first time he’s been cried for. He tries to think on what that means, him being cried for, what the Dead Lady’s, Katherine’s, tears signify. In this way, so tired, he drifts into sleep.

Later in the night he wakes enough to know the rain’s stopped, hears the quiet, moisture dripping from the trees. Maybe halfway up the mountainside a whippoorwill chants in the dark. He’s let go his grip on Katherine’s wrist and she’s no longer curled there with her back against his knees.

He lurches in a kind of panic to get up and find her, but there’s something holds him back. In their sleep they have changed places. It’s now her arm around him, her knees pressing in the backs of his, him lying there in her embrace. It is a terrifying thing to feel so safe.

Please, God, I laid down in cold-flowing creek water. Do this one thing for me. Please let me, us, stay here like this forever
.

She breathes small, regular sighs against his neck, their rhythms as familiar as his own. Now it’s him matches his breaths to hers. Which is better, to hold the one you love or be held by them? Danny ponders that, wants very much to find the answer. Nick Carraway went back east to learn “the bond business.” Maybe the bond business he took in wasn’t that Wall Street shit at all. Maybe it was what he learned from Gatsby, who loved Daisy more than he loved life itself.