Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [97]
Dolores and Frank watch from start to finish, like it’s their favorite movie. Talking to each other the whole time, if that doesn’t have to mean constructing sentences out of generally agreed-upon vocabulary using approximate rules of grammar. Outside the world of people, a category they feel little allegiance to, they talk plenty.
THE TRAIL CLIMBS STEEP, following a creek bank, giving every impression of being a main thoroughfare. Thigh-clenching, ass-cramping climbing through lots of unexpected greenery, even in this dying season. Laurels and hemlocks and those kinds of plants that probably either never die or live a great long while. Like maybe the biggest of the hemlocks were sprouts when Jesus walked the earth. They go on and on the same every day, ignoring the pithy symbolic yearly circle of life and death. Being happy all the time. Happy, happy. Then, probably, one day they fall over dead. What a grand life plan that is compared to oaks and maples and all the other loser trees that die a thousand colorful deaths for our autumn enjoyment. Pleasers never get paid back a fraction commensurate with their effort. Which goes along with one of the main rules of life. Which, unfortunately, has two parts. The a is, You got to get paid. A fine idea if it stopped right there. But the cruel b part is, You got to pay.
Without his bear-shredded knapsack, Bud carries his remaining gear in the pockets of his pants and leather jacket and inside his sleeping bag, which he sometimes drapes over his shoulders like a fireman with a limp body and sometimes balls in his arms like a mama with her baby. After a long while of slogging upward, Bud’s feet hurt. Blisters bubble on the insides of both big toes, and skin peels off both heels in moist white petals. Underneath, weeping new flesh. A lot of good daylight gets spent sitting in the leaves with his boots and socks off, picking at his feet.
Hours into the climb, scenery loses its attraction. It’s nothing but ten feet of dirt and leaves in front of his aching feet. Bud is bored and thinking about violence, but trying not to, because violence is best accomplished spur-of-the-moment. Let it happen out of nowhere. Anything else, and you go from being a hothead manslaughterer to nothing but a cold first-degree murderer. Act with great purity—like there’s no past and no future, nothing but the red right now—and there’s a degree of innocence to it, no matter how heinous and bloody the outcome. And that’s not just Bud talking out his ass for his own convenience. The State itself draws the same distinction. Premeditate and they’ll fuck you over bad.
It’s a legal concept confusingly related to something the counselor in teenager prison liked to drag on about. Deferring gratification. Which you’d think would be a bad thing, or at least awfully dreary. The catch is, in the everyday crap of life, premeditation is a valuable skill. If you learn to do it, you step onto the path to success. Never ever do anything you really want to do at exactly the moment you really want to do it. Always stop to think about the consequences of your actions. Defer all the way to the grave, and you draw a ticket to heaven or something. Yet there’s this one amazing exclusion when it comes to rarefied moments of sudden violence. All bets are suddenly off, and there’s a happy and unexpected reward for jumping in with both feet and letting anger run bloody buck wild without any thought of future consequences. Who would have guessed?
On up the creek, two or three little branches of trail peel off ignorably. Then after a dazed while of not thinking at all, but just letting the drab repetition of the world overwhelm him, Bud finds himself standing on something that he can’t even say for sure is a trail. Everything brown or grey, bare trees as far as he can see, and rain starting to fall in earnest. Dead leaves cover the ground hock-deep like a bad snow. Untracked. Stand still, and all you can hear is rain in the leaves and your own breath.
Bud looks for an empty shape