Wilderness (3 page)

And maybe my appearance could be turned to my advantage. The hunter had expressed his loathing—
“Abomination!”
—but I had also seen terror in the blue eye when first he’d met my stare through the limestone flute. At some point his fear might get the better of him, and he might turn back.

As I ascended the wooded slope, the autumn trees lost some of their radiant color, and the scattering of sunshine faded from the forest floor. I peered up through the lacework of branches and saw that gray clouds had come in from the east and swallowed the morning sun. Cloud cover, too, might be to my advantage, for surely the hunter would find it more difficult to read my tracks in a forest that had fallen into shadow.

The woods ended just past the crest of the slope, and beyond lay a broad meadow, at the far end of which stood a couple of ramshackle buildings: an old single-story house long shorn of paint and with no window glass intact, and what might have been a stable, where now the roof sagged like the tortured spine of a swaybacked horse. A few canted sections of split-rail pasture fencing still stood, but most had years earlier collapsed into the knee-high wheat-gold grass, which swayed ever so slightly, as if it were seaweed moved by deep ocean currents. My passage through the grass would be as obvious as if I had marked my way with a can of Day-Glo spray paint.

Staying within the forest, I circled the meadow, weaving among trees as fast as I could, acutely aware that the hunter might arrive at any moment. My initial intention was to navigate a semicircle to the woods beyond the house. When I arrived behind the structure, however, I discovered that the tall grass gave way to a short, dead, matted sedge of some kind that suggested this side of the meadow had once been much wetter but had dried out. The dense surface resembled a Japanese tatami and seemed unlikely to show tracks of any kind. Nearing the end of my resources and not certain how much longer I could continue fleeing through the forest, on impulse I crossed to the house.

The cupped boards of the porch steps protested, and half a dozen barn swallows exploded from their mud-cup nests under the eaves and arced up to roost for the moment on the rusted tin roof. There was no back door anymore. I entered the dark interior in hope of finding a good hiding place.

Even when new and painted and home to someone, the structure had been humble. Long abandoned, it groaned and creaked with my passage, and though it wouldn’t collapse on me, it would announce my presence to the hunter if I so much as shifted my weight slightly from one foot to the other.

In the front room, the gray light of the clouding day came ash-pale through the glassless windows and through another opening where the front door should have been, and I narrowly avoided stepping into a hole where a floor plank had gone missing. The house had been built off the ground, on a series of piers, perhaps because the meadow had once flooded in heavy rains, and underfoot lay an enclosed crawlspace about two feet deep.

The house offered fewer places of concealment than I had hoped, and I was about to retreat when, through a window, I saw the hunter moving just within the shadowed woods, following the very route by which I had circled the meadow. I had no choice now but to hide, no option but the crawlspace.

Because they were loose, some of the twelve-inch-wide planks rattled underfoot more than others. The nails that once secured them had rusted away. At the east end of the room, near the wall, I
lifted aside one plank and then another and squeezed down between the floor joists into a realm of spiders and centipedes and their kin. I pulled the first plank into place with little effort. I had some difficulty manipulating the remaining one through the twelve-inch gap, but then it settled where it belonged, and I lay on my back in darkness with the sudden thought that I had just constructed my coffin.

A wilderness can be a vast tract of forest or jungle largely devoid of the works of humankind. Or a desert so arid that not even cactus will grow. Or a continent of ice and snow. A crawlspace under a small house was not of sufficient size to be a wilderness, but I found it as forbidding and cheerless as Antarctica.

Only dim, gray light found its way through the space where a plank was missing on the farther side of the front room, and when I turned my head to look between the piers in that direction, the pale glow shaped itself to resemble a human-size cocoon. I knew it could be no such thing, but when I squinted to clarify my vision, I thought I could see the spinner’s pattern, the winding silken filaments woven as tight as any cloth made on a loom, and within that faintly radiant and translucent form a shadow of something completing metamorphosis and waiting to be born. The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.

I turned away from that far light and stared at the rough plank inches from my face, though I couldn’t see it in the gloom. I waited and hoped the hunter would think that the abandoned buildings were too obvious and too small for me to seek refuge in either.

From the back of the house, a board creaked as he set foot on the porch. He proceeded cautiously, trying to be quiet but betrayed repeatedly by warped and weathered wood. When he came into the front room, the planks groaned as well as creaked, further evidence that he was a large man, and the loose boards rattled against the joists.

Near the center of the room, he stopped and stood and remained very still. Because he didn’t even shift his weight, the silence was complete. Certain that he must be listening for me, I took shallow breaths and only through my mouth, and the dank air tasted sour with mold and wood rot, and I wanted to gag, but I didn’t.

After a minute, he surprised me both by speaking and by what he said. “When I was fifteen, I was already humping meth and PCP and slicker stuff on the street, running the shit for a nasty bastard named Delehanty. There was this turf war, there’s always a turf war in that business. These two guys brace me in an alley, mean to beat the crap out of me, take my merchandise, send Delehanty a message. I
kill them both. I kill them, cut off their ears, take the ears to Delehanty. He promoted me. The killing meant nothing, nothing except because of it I moved up in the organization and lived a lot better.”

He wasn’t talking to himself. His words were meant for me, he knew that I hid nearby, and because no other place existed in which to hide, he believed that I had gone under the floor.

As far as I knew, only a loose plank offered an exit from the prison to which I had committed myself. If a hinged panel or sliding door existed somewhere along the perimeter of the building, I would never find it in the dark, not with all the supporting piers to make my way between. And the crawlspace wasn’t deep enough to allow even a boy like me to crawl. I would have to turn facedown and squirm like a serpent. Anyway, escape was impossible, because the moment the hunter heard me moving, he could stand over me, fire through the floor, and kill me.

“I long ago stopped counting the people I put away,” he said. “Some I was told to waste, some it was suggested I might want to chop on general principles, others I did all on my own hook. One way or another, it’s always for money. To take from somebody else or to be sure they don’t take from me. I don’t try to justify it. No need to justify it. I didn’t make the world how it is. It’s brutal, and you do what you need to do to get along.”

As he spoke, he never moved. He remained rooted to the floor, which I took to mean that even as he talked, he listened. And when he paused between portions of his monologue, he remained especially alert for the faintest telltale sound. I wondered why he didn’t just walk the room, shooting at random, until my scream confirmed a hit.

“I chopped this couple in their seventies. This is in Florida, I’m on vacation, but I’m never on vacation if I see an opportunity. They’re driving this boat of a Cadillac, and she has all this jewelry. I see them in a restaurant, and I
know
these two are a major score. You have to go with your instincts sometimes. So I leave before them and then follow them, and they’ve got this really bitchin’ house on the back bay, but it’s still daylight and I need dark.”

In my dank and odorous refuge, a spider or something very like it settled on my forehead and for a moment trembled but didn’t move, as if it anticipated danger. But then it began to explore, crawling across my brow toward my left temple.

“So I come back in the evening, and I’m figuring to go right to their front door and talk my way in with one spiel or another. You’d be surprised what stupid crap your average marks will believe,
want
to believe, even from a total stranger at their door. But there’s a gate at one side of the place, it isn’t locked, so I follow a walkway to the back, just scouting the place. And there they are, sitting on the patio in the dark, with just a couple of candles, looking at the lights on the bay and drinking martinis. My piece has a muffler, so I shoot him dead in the lounge chair, no one can hear. Before the old bird gets out a word, I slam the pistol upside her head and drag her through the sliding door into the house.”

As the spider quested along my left temple and down my cheek, I decided that the hunter must
not have much ammunition left. If he possessed only a few rounds, he couldn’t find me the easiest way, by shooting up the entire floor. He needed to unsettle me with his tales of murder, work on my nerves until unintentionally I revealed myself. Toward that end, the spider seemed determined to assist him, and it crept toward the corner of my open mouth, through which I had been breathing quietly. I pressed my lips shut, and the spider crawled upon my chin.

“Me and the old bird went through the house room by room, so she could show me where they stashed their best stuff. She kept pleading poor, and I busted her up pretty good to make her talk. It turned out funny, a real joke on me. Her jewelry was all fake, and the antiques were lousy reproductions, and about all they had after the latest stock-market bust was a stupid pension and the bitchin’ house, where they could still live because of a reverse mortgage. So I waste the two of them
and
an evening of my vacation, and all I get out of it is six hundred twelve dollars in cash and this crystal paperweight from the old man’s desk, which I kind of liked but now I don’t know what the hell ever happened to it.”

As the spider ascended my right cheek, doggedly circumnavigating my face, I listened to the silence of the hunter patiently listening for me. The eight-legged explorer detoured to my nose, and I thought it might be curious about my nostril, which would be too much for me to endure. But as the silence held, the spider moved toward my right eye, where perhaps it would mistake my lashes for another of its kind.

When I heard a footfall and the protest of ancient wood, I thought that I must have made a sound, that the hunter was on the move at last. But then another man said, “Oh, hey,” and my stalker seemed to turn in place, surprised by the voice. He opened fire, three quick rounds. The scream lasted only a moment, though it was terrible even in its brevity. A weight crashed to the floor and rattled the planks.

“Who the hell are
you
?” the hunter asked, and I supposed that he must be speaking to whomever he had shot. Curses unspooled from him, an obscene rant that sounded to me like the panicked profanity of a terrified man.

As the spider crept toward my ear, I dared to raise a hand to my face, offering it another option. My leggy visitor didn’t frighten away but quivered delicately from fingertip to fingertip and then down onto my palm.

“Whatever you are,” the hunter said, speaking now to me, “I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna kill you, I’ll come back and chop you good.”

The merest glimpses that he’d had of me had filled him with rage and hatred, had inspired violence, but evidently had robbed him of the courage to confront me without plenty of ammunition. He fled the ruined house, his footfalls thundering off the planks, the wood cracking under his plunging weight. Maybe he stumbled, and I’m sure he fell against a wall, judging by the way the place shook, and he cried out like a terrified child. Cursing once more, he righted himself and found the door and left.

In the stillness, I lowered my hand to the earthen floor of the crawlspace, and after some
fascination with my thumb, the spider grew bored with me and went elsewhere in the darkness.

Because I am not one to take chances, I remained on my back in the crawlspace, listening, waiting, thinking.

That long-ago day, when I was only eight, I didn’t arrive at this realization, but in time I came to see that of the many kinds of wilderness, the human heart can be the bleakest and the most hostile. Many hearts contain great beauty and the smallest measure of darkness. In many other hearts, beauty brightens only remote corners where otherwise darkness rules. There are those in whom no darkness lies, though they are few. And others have purged from their inner selves all light and have welcomed into themselves the void; their kind are to be found everywhere, though they are often difficult to recognize, for they are cunning.

In the years following my escape from the hunter, I encountered the best and worst of humanity, in days of much peril but also days of triumph, through years salted with much grief but also sweetened with joy. My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty. I will not say that my life would prove to be the strangest in a world replete with strangeness; but I would never have reason to complain that my life was ordinary.

At last, convinced that the hunter had gone away, I slid aside the two loose planks and rose from the crawlspace. I brushed off my clothes and wiped my face as if to gather the spider silk with which my imagination had festooned my features.

I saw the body lying just inside the front door, the pooled blood more black than red in the dim light. Although I wanted to exit by the back door and avoid the dead man, I knew that it was incumbent upon me to look into his face and bear witness.