Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [105]
But for a while after lunch, Bud lets his thoughts wander. Find the kids and take them with him back to town. Get there late night. Leave them standing safe and sound and no more bewildered than usual on empty Main Street with the three lights flashing yellow. Drive west for days to some unimaginable place with no connection to his past whatsoever. Galveston or Gallup. Start fresh. Get a damn job.
Like that would work. He’d be looking over his shoulder from now on.
Bud keeps on through a long afternoon of gloomy walking with no faith in the future. Then there they suddenly are right in front of him. Three inches deep in the muddy ground. Hoofprints. Water half-filling the cup. Easy enough to guess which is the toe and which the heel and start following.
DOLORES BEGINS SINGING “Back in the Saddle Again.” She can do all the verses exact, but half the words don’t register much beyond their sounds. They are like other notes of music, with no more or less meaning than a finger twitching on a banjo string. Put a banjo in her hands, and Dolores could probably play the song as accurate as singing the words. It’s all nothing but a pattern of notes. Hear it once and it sets in the mind. When Maddie sang the song, Frank was fairly preoccupied with the job of grooming Sally, but he attends close now to Dolores, and when she gets back to the chorus, he echoes the words.
Sally keeps bending, contouring along ridgelines, hunting paths. She steps out strong down the trail, and all the children feel is that they are going forward. Through the twists and turns, they lose three thousand feet of elevation during the afternoon. The lake becomes visible again below them, a ragged trail of liquid silver trapped between slate-colored ridges, like mercury cupped in the palm of a hand.
WOODLORE DOESN’T FACTOR big when it comes to tracking a horse over wet ground, where with every few steps it sinks to the ankle. You follow the holes. Bud’s railroad boots cling wet to his feet, muddy to the fifth eyelet. Everything inside squishing. He hopes it isn’t because his feet are bleeding again. But to look on the sunny side, he’s survived beyond all expectation. A puzzler, though. How did those two morons live through that brutal white night on the mountain?
Maybe they didn’t. And Bud’s following nothing but a lost horse.
He holds that happy thought in his mind for a few miles, until he comes upon the browning core of an apple with little-people teeth marks.
So, probably not dead.
No use getting down about it. Bud wonders where they might be going. Takes out the old boys’ cornmeal map and runs his finger over it, trying to place himself among its lines and words. But it makes no sense to him. Pretty different from something you’d buy folded precise as the bellows to an accordion at the Esso station. Meaningless squiggles and place names drawn with a dull carpenter’s pencil. Hog Pen Gap, Bear Wallow Branch, Picken’s Nose.
Those fucking backwoods morons. If they wanted their real estate to ever be worth anything, instead of its only value being to hold the rest of the world together, they’d use names like Butterfly Ridge, Wildflower Glade. Imaginary places where fairies sip dewdrops from honeysuckle blossoms. Ahead of my time, Bud thinks. But what else is new?
Unseasonably warm in the late afternoon, particularly in contrast to the blizzard. For the novelty of it, Bud sheds his upper wear down to the skin. Let sunshine beat on his pale chest for a few minutes.
He comes to a place where the trail bends to the south, onto great sunny expanses of dark rock scattered with little eroded pockets filled with water. Everything angled to catch the light, becoming warm as summertime. Above the bare flats, patches of intricate moss and stunted pines struggle out of fissures. Below the flats, a sharp edge of rock, and way down at the bottom of an ass-clinching drop, a river runs like a white thread.
As Bud rounds the bend, what does he see on the