Possession (18 page)

"One. And no 'I told you so's.' I am not in very good shape. My legs hurt. My back hurts. My goddamn butt hurts." He held up his hand to silence her. "Two. I am afraid of snakes. I am fucking terrified of snakes. Not just your rattlers that you're exposing me to. Garter snakes. King snakes. Corn snakes. Blue racers. Rubber boas. Any- 128

thing that slides through the grass or out from under rocks and sneaks up on me. Are you going to laugh?"

"No." She reached for his hand. 'Wo. I wouldn't laugh. I'm glad that you felt you could admit it to me. I'm afraid of so many things, and I thought nothing frightened you. I'm glad you're afraid of snakes. Most people are." "Are you?" "What?"

"Afraid of snakes?"

She pondered it. "No, I don't think so. I used to have pet garter snakes when I was little; I carried them around in my sweater pockets and fed them chicken livers."

She moved closer to him, reluctant to let the moment go. "Do you want to know what I am afraid of? Really afraid of?"

"Sure. Lay a few of them on me. I earned it." "O.K. Let me think." She looked away from him, concentrating on the lake far below. "Well, I'm afraid of being dumb—" "You're not—"

"Let me finish. I didn't interrupt you, and if you stop me, I might lose my nerve. So, by being dumb, I mean that I was never expected to be anything but pretty and nobody has ever shared anything with me that called for a serious opinion. People talk over me and around me. It takes me longer to verbalize what I mean—and then the chance is gone. What I say is of little value."

He started to speak and then said only, "O.K. What else?"

"I'm afraid of being alone. I'm afraid of losing you. And . . . I'm afraid of ghosts." "Ghosts? Ghosts in white sheets?" "Are you teasing me now?" "No."

"Ghosts that watch me. Ghosts that wait for me in old buildings and lonely places as if I owed them something—

as if there was something I should have done and now it's too late."

He was quiet for a long time and their breathing was 129

louder than the forest noises. "I felt something when we were on the boat—something like that. I wanted to turn around and go home."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"It was nothing real; it was just a feeling."

"Feelings are real. Do you want to go back now''"

"No." He rubbed her back with the palm of his hand. "It's gone now, whatever it was—probably just felt guilty leaving Sam back there working alone."

"He was the one that talked you into coming away with me, wasn't he?

How did he do it?"

He could not tell her the feelings he'd had in his partner's dirty, empty trailer. It would be a betrayal.

"He said I was lucky to have you, and if I didn't watch out you'd be running away with the Fuller Brush man."

She laughed at the old joke. "He's misinformed. It's the milkman I want."

"Well, something along that line. 'You don't realize what you have until it's gone.' Sam's not one of your great philosophers. He just said to get my ass out of there and spend some time with my wife."

"I owe him."

"Yeah."

"But I love you," she said quietly. "And I'm greedy for all the time I can get."

He held out a hand and pulled her to her feet, holding her against him. And then they were climbing again, the high noon sun focused on their exposed skin, making them sweat with the heat of it as well as their exertion.

The trails were well marked and they made the two miles to the juncture with the Boulder Creek Trail within the hour. They detoured a half-mile to a point above the falls, hearing the roar of the endless cascade long before they saw the falls themselves tumbling for hundreds offset down the mountainside in hypnotic continuum. Joanne moved toward the spray of suspended droplets in the air, and Danny held her back.

"No."

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"But it feels so cool. I want to take off my clothes and let it touch me."

He held her still. "And I'd like to see that. But the ground could give way and you'd be part of it."

She pulled her eyes away from the plunging water and followed him back to a safer vista. "It's dangerous up here, isn't it? Everything looks so beautiful, but someplace underneath it, you know it could kill you." He led her back to the hot trail and they hiked steadily without speaking, the big lake diminishing behind them. There were no other hikers; they might well have been the only humans on the mountainside. The trail was capricious, punishing them with a maze of switchbacks that tried the muscles of their aching legs, and then turning suddenly into meadow paths choked with valerian and daisy-mimicking fleabane, Jacob's ladder, everlasting, and creeping phlox, a vista like the fairy gardens in children's storybooks. They stopped in a meadow and ate the last of the bologna sandwiches, drank warmed water, and kissed like high school lovers.

Duane had traversed it all before on stronger legs, but his first night on the mountain had been miserable. The storm had drenched him in his sleeping bag, and insects rose from Rainbow Lake to sting and bite his exposed face and hands moments after the rain ceased. And in the black black just before dawn he became anxious. What if they had taken another trail? What if the storm had kept them away from the mountain?

He waited until noon, hearing the call of the loons and high wind in the pines. He headed south over his own tracks, searching for them. Up. Then sharply down past the trilling of the small falls to a place where he could see the spread of meadow. He crouched there, watching, for most of the afternoon. The sounds came before sight, laughter bouncing off trees and multiplying its vibrations back to him, before he could make out their images in his binoculars. What if they weren't alone? If a party of four or more

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crossed the meadows, the challenge for him would be increased ten-fold for each doubling. He held his breath as he saw them emerge from the wall of pines—the woman first, and then the man. Only two. And he knew them even before their features were clearly denned, recognized her movement from all the hours he'd watched her, graceful as only slender, fragile women are. The man moved stolidly and betrayed fatigue.

They did not see him in his watching place, secure in their belief that they were alone, their eyes cast down upon the trail as they walked toward him.

He watched for as long as he dared, reluctant to lose her in his glasses, and then he turned and ran silently back to the green lake and the hidden camp he had chosen for himself a hundred yards beyond the favored campsites. Sunset was still hours beyond. He would watch to see their exact location of encampment, and then sleep easily in his hidden blind and regain the hours he had lost to the night's anxiety, sleep with the sun orange on his shuttered eyelids, while his gear dried out and his body warmed for the things he would demand of it.

They crouched next to the fire Danny had built and battled the onslaught of mosquitos, clouds of stinging gnats. Joanne dotted 6-12 on her face and hands and then anointed her husband with the greasy liquid. The sun was gone, leaving a fluorescent glow in the western sky where the treetops were black tracings, the air as chilled as pebbles in a creek bottom. Their shirts were pulled over their hands and their pants tucked into their socks as much for warmth as to form a barrier against the mosquitos, and she moved closer to Danny to let the heat of their bodies combine, realizing that they were truly in the wilderness. They had come to the place hidden behind the storm clouds she'd watched yesterday; their legs had carried them five thousand feet above the big lake and eleven miles from the shelter of the warm rooms behind them. She was not afraid, but subdued by the way the mountain changed when the sun left it. Even the sounds were different.

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On every side of them—rustling, scrabbling, a swishing as if something glided through the grasses, and somewhere, far into the trees, a crashing of brush. The birds no longer sang, but she could hear the beating of wings occasionally above them. She looked at Danny, and he seemed not to hear the hidden life around them; he gazed into the fire and puffed on a cigar, fascinated by the flames.

She was tired, exhausted really, and her legs trembled still from the day's exertion, but she was not ready yet to trust enough to crawl into her sleeping bag and sleep. Something could come for her while she slept, and she would not know her enemy until it was too late. At that moment, a woman's scream sang through the woods, leaving a silence that seemed endless. She threw both her arms around Danny's neck and buried her face into his chest, and then was startled to feel his laughter rumble against her face.

He held her against him and whispered, "Hey, babe— that's nothing that will hurt you. It's a cougar—a lady cougar—with the hots. She's not looking for us; she's after a mate. I hope it turns him on, because it's not doing a thing for me."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. If we freak over every sound up here, they'll have to come get us and take us to the Home for the Bewildered. I thought you said you wanted to go out in the wilderness and rough it—so this is it. Too rough for you?"

She drew away and shook her head. "No, but you'll have to admit it's different. I guess we should have camped out in the backyard at home for a while to get used to it, kind of ease into it. I know what—let's sing."

"You're kidding."

"No. That's what we always did at camp around the campfire." Her voice quavered and then grew stronger. "I love to go swimming with bow-legged women and dive between their legs."

"Joanne, you didn't sing that at Girl Scout camp, did you? No wonder you grew up to be such an animal."

"We sang terrible, filthy songs every time we had the chance. We put rubbers in the counsellor's make-up kit, and

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ran Kotex up the flagpole—only nobody ever accused me because I was such a good little girl."

He sang with her while the night settled over them, obliterating first the treetops and then everything except the fire and the moon's silver quarter. "Yellow Submarine," and "Eleanor Rigby," and "Fight On for Natchitat High." He was an awful singer; she understood why he never sang in church. Their voices floated over the dark lake and drowned in it.

She sang alone for him, no longer afraid, in a high sweet soprano. "Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard. Life used to be so hard; now everything is easy 'cause of you—"

He moved so suddenly, his hand into his backpack and emerging with the gun, that she was singing when she heard him say, "Who's th—" with the song still in her throat and spilling out unheard. She turned from him and saw the figure loom behind the fire. The creature-thing was so large and it had crept up on them even as she sang for her husband, its face black as the night around them, the shape of it blurred and part of the night too. When it spoke, she was astounded to discover that it was human.

Danny did not relax, but stood in one fluid movement, the gun in his hand part of him, and a part of him that she had never seen. The man across the fire slowly raised his arms.

"Easy, friend. I'm no Sasquatch. Just a dummy who ran into a bear and hightailed it into the woods. Put your torch on me. I'll keep my hands up."

Danny grunted at her and she felt along the ground for the flashlight she'd used earlier and pushed the switch forward. The cone of light swept over her husband first, and she saw him holding his revolver in both hands, legs wide, his attention entirely on the man before him. She moved her wrist toward the stranger's voice and he appeared, a big man, inches taller than Danny, his eyes glowing red as a fox's in the beam. His hands were open and quite empty. Danny hesitated, and then slid the gun into his belt.

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"Sorry," he said. "You startled me. We thought we were alone."

"I thought I was alone," the man answered. "Scared the shit out of me . .." He glanced at Joanne and said, "Sorry." He lowered his hands deliberately and stood, seemingly embarrassed, waiting for an invitation to come into their space.

"How long have you been up here?" Danny asked, and she could hear his voice was normal now; the impulse to attack washed away from it.

"Hell—sorry—I don't know where I am. I came up on the boat yesterday and lit out for the hills, got caught in the storm last night, and started out for Early Winters this morning. Then I met a she-bear and two cubs on the trail. Spent half today up a tree, and the other half trying to figure out where the hell I was. When I heard singing—a woman singing—I thought I'd either died and gone to heaven or round the bend. Hey, I'm sorry to butt in."

Danny took the flashlight from Joanne and shone it into the man's face, and the last trace of tension left him. "You came up on the boat we were on—right? Saw you up top. Come on in, buddy. Joanne, give the man something to eat."

"No, thanks, ma'am," the stranger said softly. "I ate some dried stuff when I was up the tree, and frankly, I guess I've been too scared to have an appetite."

Danny added logs to the fire and the embers exploded into flames that cast yellow light over them, letting her see the man completely for the first time. He was younger than Danny and taller, a red-looking man. Coppery hair that the firelight turned magenta, red eyes, animal eyes, and the kind of skin with blood vessels close to the surface. He was quite handsome, but she did not like looking at him; his redness made her feel faint.

He held out his hand to Danny; he had barely glanced at her. "David Dwain," he said. "From Portland. How come you're carrying a .38? Most guys come up here with a rifle— if they can sneak a gun in." 1 35

"Would a plumber go camping without his plunger?" Danny laughed. "I'm a cop—feel naked without it. Almost took your head off too, creeping out of the woods like that. Name's Lindstrom, Danny—we're from Natchitat, and this is the wife, Joanne."

The stranger looked at her without interest, and slid his bedroll off his back. He grinned at Danny.

"I came up here to get away from it all, but it looks like you can't shake it. I'm a cop too. Multnomah County Sheriff's Office." He turned finally toward Joanne. "So you're pretty well protected, ma'am. You got yourself two lawmen to scare the varmints off."