Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [110]
BUD YELLS IN SHORT BURSTS, just vowels, declining in volume. He keeps his hands up, and blood runs warm and sticky past the cuffs of his leather jacket and down the insides of the sleeves and pools at the elbows. He can’t think of anything to say. His breathing becomes a problem. And there stands Luce with the razor, ready to come at him again. He turns and looks at the kids. They stand pale-faced across the hole, in the shadows under vaulted boughs of hemlock. Watching him with no expression at all.
Bud runs. Takes off without benefit of track or trail in no preconceived direction whatsoever. All the wet dead shit of autumn grabbing limp and clammy at his feet. He runs until he can’t do it anymore, and then he walks. He holds his hands pressed in his armpits and keeps going, sort of grunting and sort of sobbing. When Luce and the kids are far behind, he sits with his back against a fat hemlock trunk, the bark streaked black with rain, and reaches his hands into the air to slow the bleeding.
Under the hemlock, everything lies dark and quiet. Needles not rustling in the breeze like leaves, just a hissing in the air. Around the trunk, a circle of shadow denser than other shadows. Listen hard and you hear a sound like the ticking of many wristwatches, the fall of dead needles, building in tiny increments a deep thousand-year bed to kill weaker things that try to grow underneath.
Bud can’t help it, he wants to watch. He cups his palms in his lap, and counts how many times he breathes until they fill with blood. Then, reach for the sky again.
It doesn’t even hurt much, but his thumbs no longer work right. His fingers hardly move. They’re like flippers. He swipes the bloody fingertips under each eye, marking his face like a high school football player on a Friday night. Works his necklace over his head and tries to throw it off into the woods, but his hands don’t cooperate, and it goes only six feet and falls into the bed of hemlock needles. That’s good enough. Ten thousand years from now, what a mystery for somebody to find a fossil shark tooth at the foot of a mountain.
Bud sits a long time studying his bleeding. When he decides it might be slowing down some, he walks until he comes to a creek. Plunges his hands into the cold clear water and watches tendrils of blood flow downstream, trailing away across smooth mica-flecked stones. Eventually, you can’t tell blood from water, but what beautiful shapes it makes before it disappears.
Fresh from the creek, the edges of the cuts are clean and chalk white. Look deep down, though, and the details get as messy as an anatomy chart before they fill and overflow with blood again.
Moss grows dense on the creek bank. Bud peels two patches of it from the ground like scabs and puts them back to back and presses his palms hard against this green poultice.
He waits for something good to happen. And in an attempt at sympathetic magic, he tries to think back to a pure moment in his life. Cleanliness and innocence is what he’s trolling the past for. Being at the beach when he was a kid, maybe. The end of the day. Tired and sunburned and salty from the water. Or, better yet, this sweet, round-faced girl at the end of a teenage date. September. Sitting in the driveway of her house, the engine off and key switched to Alt. The radio glowing on the dash. And yet, neither of them at all in the mood for groping. Just talking and laughing. Her face open and sweet. Bud remembers washing the car that afternoon, whisk-brooming the interior. Remembers fog in the air that night, a whole sequence of songs on the radio, but he can’t remember the girl’s name. Yet he thinks maybe he should have married her. Her big smile and small teeth. Deep happiness elusive as always.
His hands come away from the compress of moss still bloody. But maybe the optimistic word in regard to the state of his cuts would be weeping rather than flowing. Possibly, death has taken a step back.
How to get the fuck out of here, Bud wonders.
He unfolds the cornmeal map with some difficulty and spreads it across the bloody lap