Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [107]
They let time flow right now, and they don’t worry about the black hole. It lacks interest. They can sit alone in the dark at the brink of a spooky pit in the woods and not give it more than a passing thought. The stuff they fear is unrelated to a hole in the ground and dirty water. They don’t have to make up horror-movie visions to give themselves an entertaining shiver. The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.
HOOFPRINTS KEEP ON GOING. Gaps, sometimes, when the trail crosses rocky ground or open south-facing slopes. But you cast about, walk zigzag in the direction they’ve been heading, and before long there they are again, leading forward.
The afternoon stays clear and warmish. Get to an open shoulder of mountain and look back up to where you’ve been. High ridges grey as the bones of mountains in the sun, the highest peak still white with snow and frozen fog. You get justifiably proud of your survival. All those weak fuckers in their houses down in the valley. Watching their TVs with the heat blasting.
No telling how close the kids are now. Bud tries to get his mind right for rounding a bend and seeing a pony up ahead. No way to handle it but break it down into pieces, like any shit job. First you do this and then this. But if you start checking your watch and thinking all the way to the end of the day, you’re lost. It’s a sequence you’re following, and the bad part is just one part. For that, quick is what everybody wants.
Bud gets sad again about his ineptitude with Lit. It’s mainly doing it wrong that sticks in your mind afterward. If this wasn’t going to be the last one, he’d want to buy a big-bore rifle, like the ones used by Civil War snipers he’d read about in his magazines. Sit up in a tree, scoping some enemy officer a half-mile away. A colonel or something. Tiny dude smoking a cigar, being a big shit in front of his lessers. With your magnificent art, you hold your breath and touch the trigger with the delicacy of touching your own eyeball. Before the sound of the shot reaches the colonel, his head’s about like a big double handful of stew meat soaking into the ground, and the rest of him is barely starting to topple over like a sawed tree. And yet for the lucky colonel, the experience is no more than blowing out a candle. Happy, happy, dead. People lie in hospital beds worldwide praying for such a perfect end.
No use planning for the future, though. This is, for sure, the last one. Afterward, a new life.
Bud walks on until the sun drops and disappears in the trees. Suddenly, all the warmth of the day drains into the ground. It gets to a point of darkness where you don’t know what to call it. Dusk or night. Twilight fits in there somewhere. People used to have a word, gloaming, but that’s only a snatch of memory from a song. Wait a few minutes, though, and like so many things, it quits being an issue. Night falls, too dark to see your feet at the bottom of your legs.
Bud sits down in a level place by the trail. He’s failed to learn the lesson of the coon hunters. Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.
Impossible, though, with no chain saw, no bright-faced kindling fresh-split from a cylinder of pine with an axe. No childhood buddies sharing the heat and light.
Bud draws together wet rotting twigs and squats with his last matches. He achieves smoke for a few seconds. Says, Fuck it, and wraps himself in his blanket on his piece of Visqueen. He lies mostly awake through the night, listening to all the swirling languages the nightwoods speak.
When he drifts to sleep, it’s not really enough to interrupt his train of thought. And when he drifts back in, the voices are always murmuring against him, and he’s always thinking about two quick sweeping movements.
No denying the ugliness. But swear you’re done and move forward. Bud touches the necklace, then his arm.
Blood. It covers the earth. Animals and humans in their billions, their skin like