Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [84]
They were reaching the edge of the tangle. Deanna peered through, swatting a mosquito and rubbing her scratched-up knee. The day was warm, but she regretted her shorts at the moment. She could see now where they were: not very far from the Egg Creek trail. She retied her braid into a double knot to keep it out of the branches and pushed on to the end of this tedious maze.
As they emerged from the pine needles, they startled up a grouse, whose coppery tail flashed as its plump body soared horizontally with a noise like an outboard motor. Deanna stood still with her hand flat on her heart, which raised an equivalent ruckus. Grouse always made such an explosion. She wished she could have seen their chickenish cousins the heath hens, who used to strut around in clearings with their feathers standing straight up, inflating the yellow balloons on their necks to make booming sounds you could hear for miles. Not anymore, of course. In the same plaintive tone her single friends in grad school used to complain that all the best men were married, Deanna felt like whining, “All the best animals are extinct.”
“Is there a season on those?” Eddie asked, marveling at the grouse, his earlier irritation now gone without a trace. She gave him a look, didn’t answer. Grouse were fairly rare here. More often she discovered flocks of hen turkeys gabbling quietly in the woods, battering the undergrowth with their wings as they struggled into low branches. They’d seen some yesterday, in fact. And there was one big old tom they often saw in the early morning strutting alongside the Forest Service road, alone, steering clear of female companionship. She unknotted her braid and let it fall down her back while she considered the best route out of here. Eddie Bondo had begun to whistle.
“Shhh!” she hissed suddenly. Someone or something was there in the pines above them. She waited a second to see if it moved like a deer or a man.
Man.
“Hey, buddy,” she called. “How you doing today?”
From the dark-green boughs he came forward: tall and a little potbellied, with gray hair down to his shoulders and a small-bore rifle, dressed out for jungle combat. It always killed her how these guys dressed. Like a deer would be impressed by the uniform.
He was squinting at her. “Deanna Wolfe?”
“Yeah?” She squinted back. She’d be darned if she could name him. She could memorize Latin names and birdcalls, but the guys she’d gone to high school with all kind of blended together.
“Sammy Hill,” he offered finally.
“Sammy, sure,” she said, as if that had been on the tip of her tongue. Sammy Hill, could she possibly forget a name like that? “Dee-anna Wolfe,” he repeated, directing his pleasure mainly at her legs. “I heard you’s up here. I heard you near ’bout got eat by a bear.” He spoke too loudly, maybe nervous, or possibly a little deaf. A lot of guys lost their hearing on tractors and mowing machines.
“Yeah? That story’s still going around?”
“That’s how Miss Oda Black tells it. But hell, I didn’t believe it. Gal like you getting cold all by herself up here on the mountain? Hell, you haven’t changed a bit.”
All by herself. She glanced to the side, listened behind her. If Eddie Bondo could be relied on for one thing, it was to disappear. Well, fine, he didn’t need to be part of this. “Not a bit, since high school?” she asked sweetly. “You’re saying I still couldn’t get a date unless everything else female in the county had rabies?”
“No, now, you’ve got that wrong. We was all in love with you, Deanna.”
“Well, heck, Sammy. How come I didn’t notice?”
He laughed. “We’s just asceared of you.”
“Now, is that why you brought your gun up here today?”
He looked at his rifle, dismayed. “What, this?”
“I hate to tell you, Sammy,” she said, sounding convincingly sorrowful, “but deer season’s in the fall. And now here it is June.”
He looked at her, blinking with the effort of his innocence.
“You know what?” she said. “Down at George Tick’s