Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [96]
—But we’re mostly going to be out hunting for them, Stubblefield says.
—I’ll be here, Maddie says.
WHEN THEY’RE ALONE, Stubblefield tries to convince Luce to come back to town with him to wait at his place, let the sheriff and his people work. All of which lasts about five seconds.
—It’s mainly a bunch of deer hunters looking for them, she says.
—Then they know the woods.
As they put on their jackets and head out across the lawn and along the lakeshore to search, Luce sets him straight, talking fast and bitter and distracted about deer hunters. Nothing but drunks with high-powered rifles and a two-dollar paper license issued by the State. Coon hunters are nocturnal, and bear hunters go deeper in the mountains. You hear their dogs baying miles away. But deer hunters, they’re the scary ones. Hiding in camouflage, mostly two by two in deer stands, little tree houses the size of a double bed, above spots they’ve been baiting with corn and salt blocks for weeks, about as sporting as shooting a hog with its head down in the trough. They huddle together, whispering to one another and sipping Jack and Coke all day, waiting for something to move. Late afternoon, half drunk and nothing to show for the day, they get twitchy. Pop a shot at falling leaves and cloud shadows moving on the ground. No court ever convicts them for a hunting accident. How could they have known that some woman walking through the woods alone was not a deer? But, Luce says, she never worries much once she’s at least a mile out from the nearest dirt road. They rarely get far from their trucks, because that’s where the beer cooler is. Which explains why jacklighting is so popular. That way, sometimes they don’t even have to get out of the truck, just roll down the window and pull the trigger. So what they know of the woods is nothing but a thin band stretching from the roadways only as far as they’d care to drag a field-dressed doe.
When she’s run her thoughts all the way to the end, Stubblefield says, I stand corrected. Luce makes a fist and swings it roundhouse, slow-motion, and glances his brow.
They spend both halves of the midday searching on foot again near the lake and along the old railroad bed. They go back to the Lodge and drive to Maddie’s to see if Sally might have come back, then down to the store to check for messages. Followed by hours of driving fire roads, stopping frequently to blow the horn and shout into the woods and listen for some response.
IT’S DEAD WINTER up on the ridges, all the bare sticks of trees like weather-beaten skeletons broken into forearms and hands, rib cages, shins and feet. Some resigned to horizontal death and some still trying to reach upward. They ride the cold ridges deeper and deeper into the mountains, but with less urgency now that they’re high above the world.
They stop often to rest and eat, and they light a fire each time. Break out their materials and use their skills. Sometimes, small cowboy campfires no bigger around than a pot lid. But also much larger blazes if the combustibles lie handy. On into the afternoon, a mist starting to hang in the air, they come upon a dead blown-down balsam, its needles dry and brown on the branches. Once a tree of majesty but now a giant brush pile.
A pyramid of dry sticks and the last cups of their kerosene, and the balsam soon lights up like a great torch throwing yellow flames thirty feet into the sky, roaring hoarse and sucking wind upward so that it pulls their hair forward into their faces. Dolores whoops in the manner of old warriors, whether Cherokee or Rebels at Gettysburg. Sally goes sideways a few steps and then settles. Frank walks forward with his arms straight ahead and his palms out until he can’t stand the heat. He backs up and presses them to his face, and then he does it all over again.
The fire dies as quickly as it kindled, leaving burnt branch tips. Hundreds of little flames like candles at an altar. Soon the flames die away entirely, and hundreds