Nightwoods (27 page)

Shit piles fast and deep when you act on one bad idea right after another. No going back, though. You can’t fix the past. It’s broken beyond repair, not worth thinking about. And there’s no predicting the future, at least beyond the knowledge that you can’t expect any mercy whatsoever from it. Anything you try to do to shape it in your favor is likely to rain down a deluge on all your hopes. So what to do right here, right now? Maybe be patient, play a few games of eight ball, and see if an idea arises.

And it does. Late afternoon, one of the regulars comes in talking about the volunteer rescue squad loading gear into their trucks in the parking lot behind the sheriff’s office. Off to look for a couple of kids missing around the other side of the lake. Possibly with a pony. The fellow worked himself up in the telling, pretty excited and fraught as he went on about the wild country over there, the lost little ones. The cold death they’ll die for sure up on the high mountain.

People can get so sentimental about a couple of stray youngsters. But the little bastards lighting out offers new possibilities. What a blessing it would be if they passed. How long, though, since blessings got bestowed? Long time.

So, what are the chances that a couple of frigid morns up on the ridges will lay the kids down for good. Slim to none. Bud figures they might need helping along to the next world. And if they’re never found, nobody will think anything but that they died in a rock crevasse or deep in a laurel hell.

Sundown, Bud drives around to his best clients, letting them know he’ll be taking a few weeks’ vacation, maybe as high as a month. So they better order big for his next run. Full payment in front like always. Except prices are up. No explanations or excuses, gas going up or whatever. Life can get fucked up fast when you try to be a pleaser. Because people won’t ever be pleased, not even if you drop them ass-first into paradise. They like bitching too much.

By the time he’s done with his rounds, Bud has a couple of rolls that should let him drive until there’s no more road to ride. Wipe the board clean and start over. New places, new people. Nobody to witness against you. Let the past be what it is. Gone, gone, gone. Drive until you hit water too wide to cross. California, maybe. Or South Florida, the drain at the end of America’s bathtub. Mexico, that’s where cowboy outlaws used to go. Live another life under palm trees at land’s end like a new-minted soul.

So who’s standing in the way of clearing the tracks for good and heading out? Two, is all. Or four, if things turn real messy. And one thing Bud knows for sure, it’s blood washes things clean.

WHEN STUBBLEFIELD
gets back to the Lodge from bringing more clothes and records and books from his garage apartment and buying sacks of groceries, the sun is falling to the ridges. It’s not dim enough for headlights, though the sky to the west is forming sunset bands of violet and iron. Around the last bend in the road, he sees the door standing open. Through the windows, every electric bulb in the Lodge blazes. He drives across the lawn to the steps and runs inside, calling for Luce. No answer, and when he stops in the lobby and listens, he knows right away the place is empty. Back out on the porch, he gets still and hears Luce, way up the lakeshore, calling for Dolores and Frank. Her voice thin and frantic.

Stubblefield grabs the flashlight from its place by the back door. Runs to the car and reaches the .32–20 from under the seat, and an extra handful of cartridges from one of the boxes, destroying the precise grid. He stuffs the pistol into his pocket and runs along the shore, stopping over and over to listen for Luce’s voice. When he catches up with her, she stands dazed and numb at the edge of the water.

He holds her, and she falls into him briefly, like he’s her last shelter. And then she squirms to get out of his arms to do what needs to be done. Searching. Blaming herself.

—What? You ought to have tied them down? Stubblefield says, as they walk up the lakeshore.

A WATCHER WOULD
think Sally knew hidden paths through the dark woods. But she is just aware of her riders, and steps slow and steady to balance the load. Not fooled by the thick layer of new-fallen leaves, feeling for the hidden slick rocks underneath. And not going straight at all. Going the way the land requires, so that curves are the shortest distance between two points.

They climb a steep damp trail along the bold creek of a cove. A canopy of hemlocks and maples all the way, black as midnight underneath. Then they contour around a dry shoulder of mountain with oaks and hickories, their limbs bare enough to show stars and the slice of moon scooting along in the breaks between clouds. Look up and glimpse Orion and his dangling sword, the Seven Sisters fleeing before him.

They keep contouring, bending back into another identical cove with its own canopy of maples and hemlocks and its creek, and then around to another shoulder. Over and over, that slow sinuous movement into wet dark and out to dry bright. But all the time, climbing.

Dolores and Frank rock along for hours, warm from pressing against each other and also from Sally, who steams in the moonlight. They doze a little but stay awake a lot, because of the importance of looking where they want to go. Up and far away.

LUCE AND STUBBLEFIELD
find a blue-and-white De Soto coupe pulled off the dirt road at the edge of the lake. The water flat, and the same shade as the night sky. The car windows are fogged opaque, but it is a known vehicle to Luce. Inside will be the artistic man who teaches music at several mountain schools many miles apart on twisting roads. Like a Methodist circuit rider from two centuries previous, roaming the revolutionary hills on a weary gelding. Presumably, the musician has an actual place to live at a less remote radius of his circuit. Low pay from the State, though, sometimes requires that he overnight in his car near the lake, sharing the backseat with his wardrobe of two suits, navy and charcoal, three whitish shirts, and one red necktie. Also his professional clutter. Envelopes of sax reeds, little vials of oil to lubricate the pistons and slides of brass, white plastic flutophones for teaching younger kids the basics of fingering, crushed packets of Viceroys, and several bottles of cheap Scotch at various degrees of empty.

Luce raps a knuckle at the driver’s window and then steps back. The teacher rolls down a rear window and sticks his head into the night. All that shows clear is his dark hair and his blinking eyes.

—Yes? he says, with the precise pitch of annoyance due someone whose telephone has jangled at midnight.

—Little kids, Luce says. A girl and a boy. Yea high.

She makes a leveling motion with her hand at her hip.

—Sort of blond-headed, she says. Maybe with a pony mare. Seen them?

—With a what?

—A blackish pony mare. White socks in front.

—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.