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By Root 373 0

Sometimes, walking, you were amazed to see them stumping away beneath you. It was as if they belonged to another being who had fallen mysteriously under your command. You wore layer after layer of clothing, wrapping everything you owned around yourself—jackets on top of sweaters, jeans on top of flannels—and as the sun rose, your sweat wicked gradually into the fabric. Because you had nowhere to do your laundry, colonies of fungus formed around you. You did not notice the smell usually, but now and again, caught in the warm burst of air from a subway grate, an awful fetor would billow up around you. There was the outdoor life, and there was the indoor life, and you had far too much of the one and far too little of the other. The outdoors offered speed, commotion, and freedom of movement. The indoors offered comfort, security, and its own kind of freedom, freedom from the jabs, nicks, and toothmarks of the cold and the rain. Occasionally, when the smaller one had been unexpectedly generous with you, you would check into a cheap hotel for the night, taking advantage of the warmth, but such nights were rare, and from time to time, in your desperation, you were willing to settle for something less—if not the indoors, then at least the illusion of it.

So it was that Morse made up his mind one day to pay a visit to the camps. He went to the bus station and stowed his shopping cart in one of the large roll-in storage lockers across the lobby from the ticket counter, then caught the northbound train from the platform across the street. He got off at the third stop after the river, hiking past strip malls and used-car dealerships until he reached the warehouse with the painting of the American flag on its side, where he slipped through the rent mesh of a chain-link fence and cut through the tree line to the freeway. The culvert was dry, so he followed it under the road, then scaled the bluff that looked down over the traffic. Sometimes, during rush hour, he would sit on the bare mass of marble at the top and watch the cars and trucks streaming by. Every so often a squirrel or a possum would dart out of the woods and vanish into the chaos of wheels, reappearing as a flash of golden light that popped open and scattered across the concrete.

The camps were a quarter-mile into the trees. Morse walked through tussocks of yellow grass and over the slanting roofs of half-buried stones, then past a rickety wire coop where a line of chickens sat meditating eggs. Suddenly a clearing opened up, and there it all stood: the lawn chairs and the clotheslines, the circles of charred dirt, the clumps of nylon tents that seemed to bloat out of the ground like sheeny orange mushrooms. A stop sign had been nailed to the trunk of a white oak and along the bottom someone had spray-painted the word TIBET. Toward the back of the clearing was a pile of trash, filled with all the waste pieces and bits of metal the camp’s countless fires had not succeeded in consuming—beer cans with their labels whitened away, clothes hangers straightened into antennas, the spoonlike keel bones of chickens. And to the west, beneath the arms of an ancient chestnut, was a canvas tarp with a soft glow leaking from inside.

Something drew Morse toward the light. He found a dozen men sitting hunched on crates and logs around a gas lantern. Their bodies seemed to whisk around inside themselves. Tucker was the one with the eczema scales on his face and the respiratory ache in his chest, the cramps in his stomach and the chilblains on his feet, and God only knew what terrible baroque infection casting its glow from the beds of his fingernails. His body had become a horror novel: The Fall of the House of Tucker. He couldn’t remember the last time he truly felt like himself, the last time he sensed that old strength of spirit pulsing inside him. When he was thirteen or fourteen, probably, around the time he met Jeff Moody and that crowd and his parents tossed him out for huffing paint and breaking into storage units. Those were the days. All that ravaged holiness. Things had never