Night Soul and Other Stories (20 page)

Our people will say if questioned that they found the trail and left it unmarked all the way to the wilderness clearing where the two rivals were apparently, unbeknownst to each other, to meet, less strange to each other than to this forty-by-fifty-mile parcel of land so recently annexed from our neighbor to the north. Was it a rest stop, a soul-restoring brief detour for the woman and the man our two warriors? Was it a sanctuary, wild or human, was it a thoughtful retreat? we asked, not quite knowing if what must surely have been an unplanned get-together betrayed in fact that they read each other to a
t
?

No question as to the later hours, we have those on record. The earlier we have had to infer, for these two acted almost independently of us. And ahead of our plans for them in these closing weeks of the struggle, the fight with tooth and claw to the finish, if we believed in the finish, of this hunt for victory, for the other’s inner flaw or failing, for some weakness in the jugular. Yet that they had arrived we do know at this targeted clearing of this new territory of ours along different routes, as if there might be two trails, two trials, as an Aussie correspondent said it, and must have made camp at the end of the day, these blood rivals, if in fact it was not, as scripture puts it, prepared for them.

What are they rivals for? we want still to see more surely. As if it were us. Two leaders at it and each other night and day to lead the nation and lead each other even? Until now, at the several centers of command, it had seemed in all honesty that they could use some time alone, in which to think, and in a beautiful, as yet unknown, untouched, in fact just annexed parcel of our nation ever young and growing. Quality time we dare say, the very term and concept cited as we will see elsewhere by the man.

A moment apart—from the public contest and its rigorous conventions: the great leap upward at start and finish of speech; a rolling and bulging of eyes to show the most white; extending the tongue wordlessly—what the people live for in their leaders. A need to know their feelings not their thoughts, their childhoods and formative years, hobbies, promises, significant relationships and favorite food groups, so the people wherever they are can decide which one they want not even so much to govern the nation as Be There for them. A burden for the man and the woman warriors this hunt for the people’s voice and to
be
that voice; yet more, to be believed.

The woman was coming from the southeast we know from one witness to her vehicle thirty miles down country; whereas the man, from the west and north and east it seemed, if that is possible, more forthright yet elusive. Each in some unspoken silence needing to be alone and, as it turned out, each armed. Deserving to be alone, we would hazard, though what they or we deserve became moot long before the rights on which our nation was founded proved a fiction to be remade moment upon moment as each of our rivals in words but more in deeds has revealed along the road, the endless pilgrimage, the trail, the way. For what right does any of us have to anything at the end of the day apart from what we claim to the death, if we believed in death. To know your target and set it free, we like to say. Yet lured they were, these rivals, and by curiosity, animal and mineral life, by well-advertised fossil wealth, history, silence, empty land ours before we were the land’s, and then by the very weather, forecast to be bad, threatening a hybrid storm never before seen if there be people in this freshly acquired real estate of ours to suffer it.

It was late when they arrived. Late by the clock, by the sky, by the voices of the trees, many-timed too by the delicate, reassuring stink of one deciduous burr oak leaf the woman crumbles to release a scent reminiscent of the potato trees she walked among with her great-grandfather, a preacher/farmer/hunter/small businessman, just those values she has often brought up in her speeches, a man who she once but only once had stunned her handlers and biographers by saying he had brought
her
up. Strangely like her rival’s childhood, the thin man of many ideal origins, dreams, races (if there be such a thing as race, he has added late one night in a university dorm—himself a veteran of reverse outsourcings that brought him and his facets to our shores).

“
You
,” she said, hearing a sound, a soft shoosh bird-sound and/or a syllable—“old”?—finding across the clearing before she knew it the figure in jeans and windbreaker and modest backpack.
You
was what she said, her voice unnaturally soft, in fact making no sound at all we think though he grasped her sense, the flaxen-haired woman as well-known to the man and the world as he now to the nation and to her stare across the clearing. “A piece of him,” he joked, and as often before, she strove to place his familiar and she hoped borderline inappropriate words. Though her dead reckoning of danger and opportunity at once in his unexpected presence fifty yards away was less clear than her suspicion why and how he’d come (for
her
, she thought). “I see you’re ready,” he said.

Good speakers, each, yet now even her own long-leveled aim was the issue she had come here almost by chance to worry with a dearly missed emotion all but unnameable, for she now thought this duel with herself was why she had slipped away from her handlers incredibly, her wardrobe friend, constant updates, and from her public obligatory feats of agility—the great leap five or seven feet vertically up into the air, arms outstretched, at the beginning and at the end of the address; the enlarged eyes required of her but not her male opponent, whose notorious concentration was expected in midspeech to change the color of his eyes from brown to blue to green and back, as too he must inimitably
lean
—toward the whole world which had him in its hand (why not hers?—though sometimes hers); and required of him
and
her, embraces gauged instantly to each person old, young, gendered, health insured, needy, sometime foreign; conferring a Christian thought through the sinew and ingenuity and virtually exposed bone of certain bodily exercises the tradition of our country and these damned transcontinental contests demanded of its would-be leaders and the endless speaking engagements and her factual preparedness and tongue for prophecy: today a scant hundred thirty-five miles to the south and east to set off here almost unrecognized in an old experimentally environmental vehicle she had found in a driveway and piloted here.

And so, while she heard herself say to this slender, tall, perhaps overeducated rival, “Do your people know?” (that is, that he was here—the overnight liability more his than hers)—he a person of color suddenly alone with her, equally famous now and able if not to read her mind, to guess her thoughts—to which his quick shake of the head, his wide, full lips pursed, worried her thoughts again of whether he, this brown man, her rival
genetically
she realized, had come from west or east, or even north, she thought—no law against it, no laws or rights anywhere except what you claimed, she privately knew. (And she had never had a ready read on compass bearings.)

While she smelled what? The trees, some rot, some real matter, him even though not from this distance surely—
how
black exactly were we talking about, while he, thinking of her instincts and recalling the émigré Pole’s tale of water and canoes and initiation in which if you really read the words you saw that the sun had to be coming up in the west, saw to her left as did she at the same moment through a distant aisleing thinning of the trees a sudden distance of aerial space a jump-off from what must be a cliff edge beyond which through gathering twilight stood a horizon not of events this time but of a conflagration as beautiful as the end of the world, a sunset she would not have to share, whatever direction she was looking, the sun dying in the east or north or upside, where lay the lands of our neighbors from whom we had a few short weeks ago annexed this small but valuable pocket of wooded, fossil-rich land fifty by forty miles but more than its sum of two thousand square miles of land with its great water table not horizontal but vertical down and down like a flumey flue an add-on destiny for the nation when we put it to work, the northern rim of this new territory now our rim and border, already manned by a border patrol the equal of any this side of China.

One trail to the clearing, it was said and therefore thought: so the man and the woman had arrived by their curious routes nonetheless of one same trail passing into and/or leaving the clearing, with in store for them a savage, never-documented animal in the woods, a stormy night, and a contrary denizen, a reputed man, an independent who came with the territory—but what did they first find? Embers of a campfire waiting in the light of the late late day, on the horizon below the cliff beyond which one heard the sound of still waters lifted by a wind itself the natural frontier our nation is about, final sunburst flooded by evening, while high above in the last light and airspace of our new territory an eagle circled for rodents, its white wing patches identified by the man—exclaiming softly before he’d seen the woman—as those of an “immature golden” (as American as we could have wished)—and then they, these two weary warriors, were surprised to see each other across the clearing appearing from out of nowhere, entering from the woods as we had planned—yet half a day ahead of us, as if they had known our plan and, if you will, stolen a march, in order to seize a solitary time, however brief, never imagining that the rival would arrive at the same moment, to say nothing of the same place.

He from the west, though mysteriously not only west; she from the southeast as we had foreseen after a series of engagements, the toll of casualties growing by the day—the fading but brave little (yet not little) campfire like an end of the ongoing trail—though we had lost track of them for a day unthinkably and by the time we were able to observe them many hours later in dark of night they had evidently survived together and kept alive this earlier discovered and soon to be legendary fire they had found flameless but for two pinkly twined tongues of blue jetting like signals or souls, the campfire waiting for someone to slide the long tree limb along, burned black only at one end, yet now with brush and caches of already hewn hardwood logs both campers had gathered even alert to what had previously, in the last of the light of the sun that seemed to have died in the north, appeared to be an abandoned den deeper into the first and second growth evergreen dark and a small curving sound or song from those woods that they had after all not been asked into, as the man observed to the woman, who pursed her lips skeptically at his useless thought.

No killer instinct, she had long since concluded.

And too thin. To be a leader of substance. To win (she thought). Too thin to win, this man with whom she might spend the night now virtually upon them—a man should have a certain…a capacity to…A
man
? she caught her temper in mid-flush, a
male man
?—well, he should cast a certain shadow, whether white or not, whatever certain breakdowns of the electorate who, bless them, don’t believe in evolution in their heart of hearts really and truly or feel comfortable with, you know, we know, about him or bottom line like…Though “white,” she answered the critics of her honesty, meant not “white
wash”
but beige or in fact pink like her own husband somewhere across the country keeping the home fires burning tonight. In fact any everyday white blue-collar worker from any of our red-zone American towns with blue and yellow soccer uniforms and green soda pop can see through your words—in fact you’re too thin to lead, she read him almost to the
t
yet quite liked his thinness like some vanishing point where she could have seen her life if she believed it could be relived.

But this man, knowing her strangely like some native who’d been here before her, this late-model backpack of his—she sensed him, smelled him—in another country she could almost like him, get accustomed to his face, use him. A distance between them, as they talked for the first time as…as what? Vacationers, prize-winning campers, hopeless humorists, make-believe comrades, ill-equipped spouses by some arranged marriage improvising some mutual decision-making technique near physical—a closeness contracting through the time itself of this clearing they had accidentally gained as representatives of their nation. He spoke of the fossil beds here, he was asking if the white race talk meant really the fossil subject—was that what was coming up in her mind? The fossil record? With its proof not so much of Darwin’s bleak rightness as of Charles being himself a child of, even incarnation of, the intelligent designer.

Smiling, perhaps somewhere in pain, she all but loved his vulnerable thought, this man. Yet now this opponent of hers, this man of color, he…he spread his arms to the trees, the sky, the nation, a mute speech all but sweeping away whatever truly had brought him here today. And her. With a new in-and-out, back-and-forth field of time whose very quality was to grasp a future.

Lured here, they half-knew, like prosperous but tired but happy tourists who at a tipping point had heard of this place unspoiled, this territory recently annexed by our nation for its own good from our northern neighbor. It was to have been an unplanned get-together, a tryst set up by us to give them some quality time, a rest from months of strife, talk, partial truth, ignorant armies. When all the time we had this trail to follow if we would, as the intimation came to meet us in our dream that this new territory just annexed might offer a special campsite to resolve or retool or half silence all this talk. No roaring camp, no big two-hearted river (though who knew?). Waiting maybe for a three-day blow…these two chatting quietly.

As God was their witness, their limbs loosened with the toilsome months along the trail, the campaign to turn the nation not just to words but with great leaps upward to health, wealth, sense.