In Wilderness (14 page)

Or does it?

Her feet sink into drifts that force her to step high to keep from falling. Inside her coat, her body is thin, hot metal. A sharp pain in her chest reverberates with every heartbeat. She is so small, to a bird high in the sky no more than a red berry. She is not healed; why should it matter if she gets where she is going? The bird always flies on.

But now, ahead of her, a faint patch of pale gray inside the swirling white. Please let it be the woodshed. It does matter if she gets there. It matters a great deal. One step, another, straight ahead.

Inside the lean-to’s shelter, her stillness hurts her much more than the walking. How pleasant it would be to sit here on the ground and rest, but there’s no time. Time only to pile the driest stovewood into her backpack, all it will hold. When she shoulders the pack, its weight slams her to her knees. To rise again takes all her strength—for such a little bit of wood, hardly a day’s worth for the stove and nothing for the hearth. To stay warm she’ll need to sleep in the kitchen, far from the deer’s reassuring breath.

And if she sleeps somewhere distant from its breathing, she herself might cease to breathe. Who’s to say that can’t be true?

If she turns her coat into a sling, she can bring logs large enough for the fireplace. Her not wearing it won’t make much difference—going back will take less time than getting here, she’s left a trail. And anyway, the effort of carrying the wood will keep her warm; people
don’t freeze to death in five minutes. She strips off her coat, throws three heavy fireplace logs into it, draws its edges up around them. After the first few shocking seconds she no longer feels the cold.

Except in her feet, which hurt more than she could ever have imagined.

But the snow is falling harder, already filling in her footprints. She shoulders her backpack, drags her improvised tote with both hands and starts for the cabin, pushing hard against the wind. The wind pushes back. Peering ahead into the swirling snow is like staring into an endless maze of rooms, the forest rooms that beckoned her that first day. But unlike those woodsy rooms that let her walk on past, these snowy rooms are irresistible. She enters one and gauzy curtains close behind her, thicken into walls. The spaces these snowy walls enclose are small—alcoves, anterooms—but open into larger rooms beyond.

She’s less conscious of her pain now; her whole body’s growing numb. Everything’s gone calm and dreamlike as she leans into the wind. When she topples into a drift, she sees no reason for alarm, lets go of her coat, watches its wood scatter, black against the snow, the unconscious artistry of it something to remember.

Smart to quit walking when she did. No point to it. She can rest in this small room until the weather clears. That’s what it’s for: a waiting room. Granules of snow collecting now inside the folds of her nightgown, as is their nature. She closes her eyes, at peace in her four walls, waits in this white room, this waiting room.

For what? Not for the snow to stop, she likes it here, her feet have even ceased to hurt. No, she waits for something that’s supposed to happen, the reason why she’s here. She waits for Michael to come bringing her child, carrying it in his arms. Hers and Tim’s child, which should have been hers and Michael’s. Let the dead carry the dead, isn’t that the way it goes? She has vomited up everything inside her that is sickness. Now she is pure enough to go to Michael, pure enough to hold her son. In this white waiting room, snow swirling all around them.

“Get up.”

Her numb heart lurches. “Michael?” Spoken so soft he’ll never hear.

“Get up, lady. Get up.”

Snow sifts into her hair.

“Ka-ther-ine, get up. Go home.”

He’s said her name. Michael is in the adjoining room, she sees his shadow. Yet he makes no move to come to her. And he has not brought their son.

Clumsily, slowly, she gathers the spilled wood back into her coat, ties up its corners, pushes her hands deep in the drifted snow and tries to rise. Stands at last with a cry of pain that shatters all the snow-white rooms. Cries out again with every step, until she drops the coat and all its hearth wood, closes her hand around the porch rail of the cabin.

Later, this will be the last thing she remembers.

T
OUCHING HER
,
EVEN A LITTLE
,
IS THE MOST DANGEROUS THING HE
can do. If he does it, even just to pick her up out here and carry her inside so she won’t freeze, he breaks his number one commandment. If he breaks his own commandment, he will go to his own hell. A whole goddamn hell just for him.

Well, shit, what’s he supposed to do? Leave her here to die not ten feet from her door? If she dies that’s the end of watching her. And all he’s done to keep her here won’t go for shit.

There’s just one answer: He will operate under
new rules
. Special rules just for today. Because today is an
extenuating circumstance
. By these rules he still can’t touch her. Not really, not her bare skin. And that includes her face and hands. Even her hair that falls by accident over his wrist when he carries her inside and lays her down. He shrinks from it, shakes his hand free.

He probably
should
touch her. Take off her wet clothes so she
won’t catch pneumonia. Zip her in her sleeping bag so she’ll stay warm. As it is, all he can do is go out for more wood and build a huge and everlasting kitchen-stove fire, drag her sleeping bag beside it, pick her up off the front-room floor and dump her in there on her side so her wet clothes’ll dry.

The cotton of her gown feels soft and velvety, like the outside parts of his own ear.

She’s shivering from the cold, passed out and frowning. He spreads the damp coat over her, the only cover he can find. Empties out the pot she puked in.

Get out, Danny, before the dumb bitch comes awake.

And yet he stands a long time in the kitchen doorway, looking at her and at everything around her. Thinking how nights she’ll cook herself a meal in that big cast-iron stove pot, eat it off that pewter plate there on the shelf. Eat sitting at his picnic table. He backs out into the front room, sits on the only bench he comes to. Stares across the room at the other bench, turned upside down under a window, full of dirt with green shoots coming out of it. Wonders what it means and why she did it—the Dead Lady’s full of mysteries. On the table there’s a burned-down stub of candle in a little metal holder, that book about weeds. His mind’s eye sees her sitting on that other bench, across from him, her head bent over the weed book, reading by the candle’s light. Her dark hair parts at the back of her neck, falls forward past her shoulders.

It’s not like the Dead Lady, Katherine, turns him on or anything—she’s the same age as his mother. It’s just, he’s gotten used to watching her. It’s just, the day before she drove to Elkmont she squatted on the ground, clawed through the dead leaves and pulled up everything green. Violets and creasy, curled-up ferns, all the little spring things. Stuffed them in her mouth with both hands like a goddamn vole. How hungry do you have to be to gobble that shit down like that? It sent a shiver through him that he’d seen her do it. He liked it, seeing her like that, is all.

Sometimes over there, when he’d been stoned and watching some gook days on end, when he’d been waiting to do whatever he’d been sent to do, he’d get to feeling the gook knew the score. Like it was all
some dance, them moving to the same rhythm like lovers in some black-light jungle disco-hole. When he threw a stone into a patch of creasy that day and she turned toward the sound like he intended—went for the creasy without wondering, much less knowing, why—in that moment that’s the way it felt with her. Just like with the gook.

Get out, Danny. Get out while you still can.

Outside, he rubs his tracks out with a pine bough, starts up the mountain. Keeps turning around, looking back, until her cabin disappears inside the falling snow.

B
Y THE TIME HE
gets to Gatsby’s house, snow’s mounded on his fruit trees, on what’s left of his driveway, on his slate-floor porch with its marble columns. Snow has sifted into his grand entrance hall and through the broken window in the library where he sleeps.

Dog meets him at the front door, paces, maybe wants something to eat. Danny digs in his pockets, pulls out a Slim Jim.

“Here, you sad-eyed bitch. This was supposed to be my supper.”

She eats it noisily, barks once when she’s through.

“Nah, you’re not getting any more. That’s it. It for me, too.”

He peels off his wet jacket, canvas pants, flops back onto the mildewed mattress. Dog curls up on the floor. Danny’s right wrist still tingles where the Dead Lady’s, Katherine’s, hair fell over it. He rubs it with his palm.

“If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

“Try to set the night on fiiiii-errr.”

The hippie girl’s blond hair splayed out over the California rocks, daisies crushed beside her ear. He hadn’t even come. Wound his hands all through her hair, so long and silky like Janelle’s, thinking that would make it happen. Because it was supposed to happen. Because it was his first time. Because he had waited, his whole time over there. Then there comes the part he can’t remember. Only afterwards, crouched, determining which way to run, did he see the other couples there among the rocks and trees, sliding over each other’s bodies in what passed for love. He ran then, so fast no one looked up.

On the Greyhound, he stashed his rucksack in the seat beside him, squeezed his hands around his elbows so his trembling wouldn’t show. At some jerkwater town in Arizona, a Mexican woman tried to get on without paying. He pressed his ticket into her damp palm and walked away. Took him three months in a rusted-out trailer, howling into the hot desert sky, before he got back on a bus again and headed east and did the only thing he could do. Gatsby’s house, just like the cabin, stood right where Jimbo’d told him.

He pulls a ratty blanket over him up to his neck and his hands remember the soft feel of the Dead Lady’s clothing.

In three years going with Janelle they’d never done it. “The Golden Couple,” every high school has one. People he went to school with actually called them that. Danny and Janelle. Janelle and Danny. They weren’t supposed to do it, were expected not to. Good kings and queens live up to expectations, so they didn’t. Time for that when they got married. It’s what kept him sane out in the fucking jungle, thinking how he would come back a hero, spread out his medals for her on a velvet cloth. That, and the reefer that hollowed out a room inside his head where he could shut the door.

And his all-day fantasies that kept him safe from dying.

Because he’d never heard of any man in all recorded history to fetch up dead on any battlefield, his cold hand squeezed around his dick.

Danny’s hands slide down his belly, along its centerline of soft, pale hair. Over there, the point of his every daylong dream was just to take it slow and keep it going, that’s how it saved you. It had just one rule: You have to start from where you are. And whether it’s some dung-heap jungle village or it’s Gatsby’s burnt-out mansion, that same rule still applies.

Over there, his every long dream started with him crawling through the jungle back to camp. Then the usual Army bullshit, discharge papers, and at last the Huey rising out of its own dust like some huge, glorious bird that had swallowed Danny whole, and the killing and the dying turned to silent smoke puffs on the ground. In the beginning, lots of times he shot off there. He couldn’t help it.

Later, in Saigon, he’d meet a woman, strike up a conversation, buy
her steamed fish in a French restaurant. Buy her coconut ice cream that she’d let melt on her tongue, slide out the corners of her mouth till he was forced to look away to where her heart pulsed in her wrist—you got to get the details down, that’s how you stretch a long dream out and make it last. He left her on a bench beside a busy street to catch his plane. And him still safe, still saving himself for Janelle.

In his long dreams over there, it was always night when the plane they put him on crossed the Pacific, and he slept deep, drowning, stateside sleep there in his seat, lulled by the engine’s hum. The high school girl sleeping beside him sighed when his arm brushed against her coat. When the plane landed in San Francisco, he got off and kissed the tarmac. Sometimes that’s when he came.

He used to spend sweet long-dream time in San Francisco, a mistake. Should just have let himself catch the Greyhound right away, then maybe the thing in the park would not have happened. Should just have let himself drink in all America outside his window—desert, grasslands, delta floodplain. He always slowed the bus down when it got to where the ground grew trees and where blue mountains, his mountains, rose up like mist on the horizon. Sometimes a song from Memaw’s church came to him then.
“With arms wide open, He’ll pardon you. It is no secret what God can do.”
He believed it, every word. When finally he let the bus pull into his hometown, sometimes real tears rolled down his face there in the jungle. Other times, he shot his wad from no more than the cosmic thrill of seeing everything that he remembered.

When you start a long dream from Danny’s burnt-out mansion, there’s not nearly so far to go. But if you walk it takes the same amount of time. You notice everything. A farmhouse woman in her side yard hanging clothes out on a rope line tied between two sweet gum trees. A tractor rusting in the damp shade of a willow grove. A fast-running creek where water sings inside a hollow stone. Nights, you curl up on the warm ground. Once or twice you stop to eat the bread and cheese you carry in your pockets or an apple off somebody’s tree. One day you fall in step with a redheaded girl Janelle’s same age, but all you give her when you part ways at a crossroads is a closed-mouth kiss.

It all takes you to the same place, no matter where you start. Walking from Gatsby’s house, you cross a railroad bridge and you’re on the outskirts of the town. When you used to start from Nam and took the bus in San Francisco, it let you off just one block farther on.