In Wilderness (32 page)

The noon sun’s a steel disc in a pale gray sky that quiets everything. Danny moves as usual, doesn’t make a sound. Hasn’t been home
in some days. Worth coming in the front way, through the orchard. This time last year, just wanting to be near her, he ground one of its soft, ripe peaches against his open mouth, his teeth, till juice dripped off his chin and ran between his fingers.

Ka-ther-ine. How can she stay apart from him, untangle herself so thoroughly from him, after living how they did? Might as well just rip him clean in two. Memory seizes him so completely he almost misses the invasive scent, a flower sweetness mixed with sweat that calls up cinderblock juke joints set far back on highways out of town. He stops still. Only his eyes move.

There’s sound comes with the smell. Boots crunching on dry leaves. Someone whistling some old song off some long-gone radio. Fucker even trills it. Aftershave, sweat, some corny song.

And blinding orange surveyor’s tape knotted around a nearby hickory. That’s when he sees the man. Skinny little gook in khakis skulking around outside Danny’s hooch. Moves sideways like a crab, like maybe his knees aren’t so good. Danny straightens, tucks in his shirt, pats the knife in his pocket. Approaches him without a sound. He’s five feet away when the gook hears him, or maybe only senses him, and turns. Frowns.

Danny folds his arms across his chest, stares him down. “Excuse me, sir,” looking him straight in the eye, “what might you be doing on my property?”

Gook’s shorter than he seemed. They’re all short, gooks.

“I think there must be some mistake, sir.” Glares at Danny, gives back what he gets. “This house and all the land around it is the property of Carlisle-Colorado Mining and Development, the company that hired me to survey it.”

Danny’s turn to glare. Important not to miss a beat. “You’d think they’d let the neighbors know. I’ve rented right beside them, kept care of this place up here going on two years now. Cared for it like it was my own.”

Gook’s face brightens. “You live in the cabin, then.” He nods in the direction Danny came. “You must know how to get in touch with the lady that owns the place. That Mrs. Reid. Mr. Carlisle wants to talk with her.”

“What for?”

“Wants to buy her out. Good price, too.” He stops, considers, then goes on. “Mr. Carlisle means to turn this whole area, right up to the government wilderness, into some kind of big year-round showplace. Golf course, tennis courts, horse stables, even a man-made lake with a real sand beach.” Gook says these last words with wonder, like they’d won some kind of prize. “Lake’s what he wants the cabin for.”

“Wants the cabin for a lake?” That’s crazy.

“Wants the land.” Gook’s getting wound up now. “Lowest point around, creeks running through it. Dam them up, you got a proper lake. And houses, people living everywhere around it when it’s done. People living in big houses all around here, that’s what Mr. Carlisle wants.”

The gook’s words buzz in Danny’s head, hard to translate.

“She won’t sell. Tell you that right now.” The knife weighs heavy in his pocket. “No, she loves that place. She’d never leave it.”

“Oh, he’ll make her a good deal. She won’t be one bit sorry.”

“She won’t sell. Wouldn’t sell to me, won’t sell to you neither.”

Gook’s got an axe stuck in a stump maybe thirty feet away. Second nature, scoping out the likely weapons.

“What’s your name, son?”

Son. How long since anybody called him that? “Danny MacLean. What’s yours?”

“Lonnie Washburn.”

“Well. Where you hail from, Lonnie, Mr. Washburn?”

“I come from Wynne, other side of Elkmont.”

“Wynne, huh? You’ve come a ways. You the only man out on this job?”

“Am today. We’re mostly done. I’m just up here confirming where the house sits on the property.”

“What’s Mr. Carlisle plan to do with it, the house I mean?” Danny waves his good arm at it. Gook hasn’t noticed the gimp one. Must not see too good.

“They say this here’s going to be the clubhouse. Say he’s going to build it back just like it was. Velvet curtains, crystal chandeliers. Rent it out so folks can have their parties.”

“Reckon he’ll keep the orchard?”

“Orchard? Couldn’t say.”

“He’d be smart to keep it. It’s beautiful in springtime. Summertime and early fall, it gives good fruit.”

Gook nods.

“Last year I did some work on it, some of the trees. My wife Katie and me, we picked the fruit. She canned a lot of it. Wish you could meet my Katie. Got that long, black hair down to the middle of her back. We got a baby coming in the fall.” Danny grins big and wide.

Gook smiles. “Well, that’s great, son.”

Danny wishes the gook hadn’t said that, about it being great about the baby. Wishes he hadn’t called him son again. It’s given him a sadness, a kind of wistfulness he badly wants to get shed of.

“You seen the orchard yet?” he says.

“Walked around it. Never really gave a look.”

“Let me take you. Show you what we’ve done.”

“I don’t want to put you out, son.”

“No trouble. Only take a minute.”

“Okay, I’ll have a look. Got a couple apple trees myself back in Wynne.”

“This way, Mr. Washburn. Down that path right there, I’m right behind you. There’s thick blackberries growing alongside it. We picked gallons of them last year, me and my Katie. Best berries I ever ate.”

The knife still fits his hand like it was made for it. Trees rustle with the same papery sound as palm fronds in the wind. Danny doesn’t need to think about it, grabs the gook’s chin and jerks his head up, cuts a deep, clean slice across his throat. Holds him like a lover while he spasms. Gray hair, blue eyes, pink skin.

Shit. What has he done?

Oh, sweet Christ Jesus.

His own blood runs cold all through him. He lays the old man gently down and pulls him by his ankles to the orchard. Pain in Danny’s shoulder turning everything he sees to silver as he drags him to a gully by the peach trees. Kicks dirt over him, over his face, his head. Maybe enough to keep the buzzards off him, maybe not. Must have hiked up here, no way to bring a truck. Maybe no one’ll find him.

But now everything’s all changed. Just like San Francisco, no matter how you look at it. A mistake. A jolt of memory. Could happen anywhere.

With anyone.

With her.

Inside the house, Danny’s reefer’s still stuffed in his mattress where he left it, with some papers not too damp. He rolls a joint slowly, tries to think of nothing else. Flicks open his lighter, stares into its fire. The joint flames, its seeds crackle and spark. He takes a long drag, holds the smoke and feels a singing in his blood.

Together forever.

She shot twice at the rabbit. That leaves two bullets in the gun.

K
ATHERINE DIGS DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BURLAP RICE SACK
, works her fingers into its ragged seam, comes up with eleven dirty and chewed-looking grains. All the beans are gone. She slides her hand along the grim edges of all the pie-safe shelves. Nothing. The weather is hot and dry, even for early June; what few vegetables she managed to plant this year are withering for lack of rain. There’s nothing else to do but walk to town. Otherwise she’ll have no food. Nor will her baby.

It’s begun to move, the merest flutter, as if she’d swallowed live a small tropical fish. Just like that other baby. But this baby will move inside her every day and every night, until it moves in the wide world all on its own. Because she wills it so. Because she will go to town for it, get food for it, for her. Because she will pay attention. Because she will not be afraid.

She goes into the front room, sits in the rocker, strokes her belly lightly through her jeans.

“Dear little fish, my little fish, I promise you’ll grow up with singing grass and forest animals. And always have enough to eat.”

She does not deserve this child, its innocence. Her fears for it arise from circumstances she created through her weaknesses, circumstances that already have endangered it. Yet these same weaknesses led to her child’s creation. What was the right of it? What was the wrong? She can’t unravel the one from the other. Would it make any difference if she could?

Today she would love nothing better than to lie all morning on her warm rock at the pond’s edge, her shirt hiked up to show her belly. Would her baby feel its warmth, see its rays as the same deep, pulsing red she sees when she looks through closed eyes at the noon sun? But Danny is out there somewhere watching, so her lying with her baby at the pond’s edge will not come to pass.

She gets up from the rocker, puts on a shirt too thick to hint at any shape inside it, too thick to let in any sun, jams the gun in her jeans pocket, loops a second shirt around her waist to cover it. Prays her baby cannot sense her fear.

“We’ll go now and hurry, little fish, stop only for groceries, something at the hardware store.” She smiles in spite of everything. “And larger pants so you will have more room to breathe.”

She can’t pinpoint exactly when she started talking to the child out loud, or keeping one hand always on the little tummy bulge it lives beneath, stroking it gently. Nor can she name the day she started singing softly to it in the house. The only lullaby she knows all the way through is Memaw’s and she won’t sing that. Sings instead the old songs about looking over four-leaf clovers, taking slow boats to China, waking to mockingbirds’ trills. And sometimes medleys of advertising jingles so closely akin to nursery rhymes: “Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is.” “You’ll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent,” “Use new White Rain shampoo tonight, and tomorrow your hair will be sunshine bright.” Sometimes she makes up songs about what’s handy. Birds and squirrels, the garden and the trees. She does not sing love songs.

And she does not sing this morning when she ventures out onto the trail, where the cart’s clatter can’t quite mask the wind rustling the
trees, the rhythmic chirps of shade-loving crickets, the trills of distant birds.

Or other sounds that might be Danny’s.

She hears him even in the smallest whisper of dead leaves, sees him in every shadow and on every ridge. Her heart rises in her throat and she holds on to her breath. Fear feels like so many things she does not want to remember. She tries desperately to divert her thoughts from it, welcomes the highway, with its drivers who see everything that happens on its roadsides. Every house she passes is a blessing, someplace she can run to, people who might take her in.

When they come into the town—lately she thinks of herself always as a “they”—Katherine wraps the gun in her twill shirt jacket and lays it in the cart. On the street she looks into the faces of everyone they pass. The blue-eyed, birdlike little man with razor stubble, the plump, gray-haired woman with the cabbage roses on her yellow dress, the sullen teenage girl who stares down at the ground. She searches there for memories of him that have twisted their mouths, afterimages that linger in their eyes. Finds nothing. She walks quickly, shies away from vacant buildings, alcoves, trash alleys, all the places he might hide. A car backfiring, a burning cigarette tossed on the sidewalk, a sudden bark of laughter, all cause her heart to hammer in her chest.

The cashier at the little grocery smiles at her. “Haven’t seen you around lately.”

No mention of Danny, but that is to be expected. In stores he tends to disappear. Indeed, for the people in the town, Danny has already disappeared as if he never once existed. No one asks about him, not even the postal clerk. Yet Katherine senses he is near. No matter how quickly she turns, it’s as if he’s just moved out of sight and is still watching.

In the hardware store she buys a hunting knife like his. The man with the Adam’s apple runs his thumb down the blade edge. “It’s plenty sharp.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

She eyes the indentation along its length.

The clerk slides his finger through it. “Blood gutter.”

She should be thinking of a hunter with his deer. Or of her baby’s
cord this knife will cut. Instead she thinks of Danny, buys a box of bullets for the gun. Wedges them down near the bottom of the cart, good ballast for the hike back to the cabin. She doesn’t load the gun, is not sure it’s allowed out in the open. Anyway, it’s got two bullets still, in case she needs them.

Heading back, she feels safe on the open road. Knows now he will come to her, if he is going to, in some private place, not here. Here, she is free to walk a normal pace. Free to look around at what delighted her in other circumstances.

“Fish, swaddled in your amniotic bubble, if I take a deep breath and hold it can you smell the honeysuckle? The bank on this side of the road is covered with it. And bees. And look—but of course you can’t look, no, not yet—there’s the red barn. We’re almost to the turnoff.”

Only in the past few days has she allowed herself to think of the child alive, out in the world and growing. Every day she lets herself imagine just a little more without a penalty. Hard not to cry.

“And here’s the Wickles Store. We’re almost home.”

But she has lied to her baby, they are not almost home. In fact, if measured by the likelihood of danger, their journey has hardly begun. When she leaves the highway she takes the gun out of the cart and shoves it in her pocket. The little asphalt road seems safe enough but she knows otherwise. She pushes the cart down its middle, as far away as possible from the concealing brush on either side. Honeysuckle, young red blackberries—lovely things made fearsome now. When the road narrows, goes to gravel, then to dirt, she starts at every sound, half expects him to jump out from behind her mangled car before she jerks the cart onto the trail. Sometimes her hand lets go the cart handle, moves to her pocket just to touch the gun.

It’s hot, midafternoon. The woods are hushed; even the leaves don’t move. She does not talk to her baby now, nor stop to wipe the sweat out of her eyes. Just plods on, fast as she can, in silence.

As if silence made a difference. Danny is the Prince of Silence. He could be six inches from her elbow and she wouldn’t know it. Rocks, trees, are you hiding him?