The rhythm of the mountain is the occasional crack of long rifles in the arms of fall hunters, the sparse, tap tempo of ruddy woodpeckers, short bursts of growling chainsaws occasionally taking down a limb on some small homestead with a plot of thriving land, and the rumble of trucks in low gear crawling up the long slope of the highway – unaware that, spaced every quarter mile or so – they count out the beats of all hours like clockwork. All else is buried by the river, which runs consonant with the wind off the cliffs, lazily soloing with a gentle hiss that soaks up the ambient noise of wild, living things except when pierced with the shrill melody of descending shouts as boys run joyously down the foothills.
Most of the muscadines are too high. I don’t climb. Frank’s too delicate. But it’s still me that Charles picks on. “Hold it, dammit.” I’m cupping my hand and boosting him, even though his boots are scraping my skin, and he manages to snag one little vine, but he’s still too short to get at the cafeteria creeping around the high trunk or even get his arm over one of the thicker limbs.
“You’re the one who should get up there,” he says. “You’re the tallest.”
“Frank’s taller,” I say.
“Stand back to back,” says Charles. We do. I’m taller, but only by an inch. “You’re both pussies,” says Charles. ‘I saw the grove first, so you two should pull down the vines.” I never heard of muscadines before Wauseka. They are bigger than grapes. Muscadine berries, the older boys call them. They taste like grapes, only not the ones our parents bought at the Safeway. They are grassy—and something else—kind of like grape juice mixed with rubbing alcohol. The older boys say, “acidic,” but they don’t burn your insides out when you eat them.
“How many do we need, anyway?” Frank is smiling, relieved he doesn’t have to try it. There’s no point. Tight leather jacket. Tighter jeans. Big afro. A walking style statement, but not a climber. Frank is skinnier than me, which gives me some relief from embarrassment. I am the youngest of the Inverness boys, but not the thinnest and not as young as the Paisley boys. I don’t know why they named our house for a place in Scotland and theirs for someone called Paisley. Who has a name like that?
“You two are lightweights,” says Charles. “I can eat a lot.” We all can. What they give us at breakfast isn’t enough. Powdered eggs, a biscuit, jelly that sometimes has weevils or some kind of bug in it. At dinner we get greens or green beans, some cornbread, a little piece of meat—turkey or Salisbury steak—and mashed potatoes. It is always the same dinner, with parts on rotation. Iced tea, but iced tea still leaves you hungry, even if you dump sugar in it that makes you even more hungry. Sometimes for a lunch—not a sit down lunch, just something in wax paper—we get a boloney sandwich, because it is Fall break, but only if we do extra chores, and that doesn’t make up for the work. Better to stay a little hungry.
We have three whole weeks. Some of the boys are angry because we are switching schools. No one has ever said why. I don’t care anything about school. All I know is the old school started their break a week earlier, the new one a week later, so altogether two weeks becomes three. We’ll have to drive our bus farther. It’s a different town altogether, but I don’t care about that either. I like our school bus, because the older boys drive it. No adults. All the Grove girls go with us, so Charles and I get to look at those for the whole ride and talk in our secret space language the older boys give us Hell about. But we can’t very well say, “look at her tits” in plain English.
We sit down and divide up the muscadines we can reach. A dozen or so apiece. “At least we won’t get sick,” I say.
“What do you mean?” asks Frank. Frank is wrapping his berries in a bandanna and putting them in his pocket. I am watching too, trying to guess what he is thinking. Maybe he has food stashed in his room we don’t know about. Some of the boys do. I heard someone say they found wrappers in Frank’s room. Like he had money from somewhere. Maybe not a lot, but enough for Oreos and Fritos and that sort of thing. I get care packages sometimes from my grandmother, with some homemade oatmeal cookies or whatnot. They are always gone in a day or two, because all the boys get wind of them and come and guilt me into sharing.
What can you do? You can’t sit and eat cookies in front of everyone. One time I said, “no”, because Charles said I should. I think he just wanted them to last longer for him and me, because we’re in the same dorm room. But someone broke into my cubby. Took the screws out of the hasp where I had my padlock. I came back from chores and all the cookies were gone. I think it was Ross. He’s the one with the tools, and he was the only one in the dorm at the time. I asked and he denied it, and you can’t really argue with Ross. He’s built like a bull with arms. Jess said once, “Don’t get him mad. He’s slow, but if he gets his hands on you, you’re most likely dead”. Since then, I share equally with everyone, because why not? It’ll be gone anyway, and you might as well spread some good will. Not like Frank does—always kissing up to everyone.
“What are you doing with those?” asks Charles.
Frank says, “I’m keeping them from falling out of my pocket.”
“What for?”
“Until we get back to wash them.”
“Wash them?” Charles and I are looking at him, and he means it. He’s not going to eat them. Damn kid probably does have a mattress full of snacks. Maybe he keeps them under the carpet. That’s gross, but you do what you have to do. “You’re not gonna wash them,” says Charles. He’s mad now. He doesn’t stop talking unless he’s mad, and that’s all he says.
“If you’re not hungry enough to eat them now,” I say, “at least give them to us.”
“Yeah,” says Charles.
“Besides, they’re clean. The rain washes them.” Charles kicks me in the leg. He’s right. I shouldn’t have said that. “Or maybe not,” I add.
“Tell him about getting sick,” says Charles.
I can see Frank is suspicious now. He won’t trust anything I say, but I have to make up for putting my foot in my mouth.
“Last time,” I say. “The first time. When we all went down to the truck stop—”
“I wasn’t there,” says Frank.
“I know, man. That’s why I’m telling you.” Charles is looking less angry now. He’s stuffing his mouth full of berries, which I want to do, but I have to tell the story, because I started it. “So we’re coming back from the truck stop, all us boys but you.” Of course, Frank didn’t go. He wouldn’t go.
He’s always afraid he’ll get in trouble. Man, if the older boys are gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. They usually know what we can get away with. “Anyway, some of us don’t have anything. No donuts, no soda. Nothing. Can’t even buy tobacco.”
“No money,” says Charles. He’s almost done with his berries.
I have to hurry or he’ll want mine. “Right,” I say. “So Ross is watching us and says, ‘I know what you young-uns can eat,’ and Lonnie, Jess and Newsome walk back, but we go with Ross prowling in the woods between here and there.”
Charles finishes eating and starts looking at my pile.
I cross my legs a little with the berries in between them. I don’t tell Frank about how there’s one time I got caught with tobacco and an administrator asked me where I got it, and you have to answer an adult if they ask you a question, even more because you hardly ever see one unless you’ve done something wrong. So I tell him the truck stop, but I tell him I went alone, and he lets me keep the tobacco but goes and tells Lonnie and Jess they better watch us younger boys better. Lonnie and Jess were pissed at me, almost like I had told. “If you had told, you’d be getting your ass kicked,” Lonnie said. Jess wanted to, but Lonnie pointed out, “He didn’t tell, and that makes Gumberson all right.”
I had to make up for it. I liked making up for it. That’s why everyone started calling me Gumberson. I became the new boy appointed to go down the mountain every night—I guess there was one every year, and it used to be a kid named Gumberson from the previous year, and now it made sense for the new Gumberson to be doing it.
The boys wait until an hour after curfew, half an hour after lights out, and hand me their money and their orders. Skoal, Red Man, Snickers, pop. There’s always a little more money than I need, to make sure I don’t come up short. I go down the mountain. I’m not scared of the snakes, or Georgia panthers, or drop offs. I’m careful. I keep getting better at seeing in the dark. So dark you can’t see your hand for the first half hour. When I come back, I get to keep the leftover change, and that’s how I make a little money. Only no one told Frank. Not because he’s ever told on us. Jonas would, so we hide it from Jonas and Frank both. But Frank is always afraid of breaking the rules and he might crack up under the pressure if an adult started asking if there were boys out after curfew.
“Anyway,” I say, “he found muscadines. I never heard of them, but there were more than we have here by a lot, and they were where we could reach them. We pulled them down and ate them until our bellies were full. It was the first time my belly’s been full since I’ve been here.”
“Tell him about the sick,” says Charles.
“Yeah, the sick,” I start. “There’s some kind of acid in these.” Now I’ve got it. The acid will scare Frank. He’ll believe it, and he’ll want to give up his berries. “It makes you sick to your stomach if you eat too many.”
“What kind of acid?” asks Frank. His eyes are bigger. I know I’ve got him.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Acid. I guess it’s weak acid.”
“I don’t believe you,” says Frank.
“I was there,” says Charles. “I got sick too. Worst belly ache I’ve had in a long time.”
Frank looks at him and doesn’t say anything. He takes his bandanna back out of his jacket and opens it up and looks at the grapes. Charles comes up off of one elbow and leans closer. “If you’re worried, don’t eat ’em.” He’s gonna spook Frank, but Frank gets an idea. “If they make you sick, why do you want them?”
“Because I don’t care,” says Charles. “I gotta eat.”
Frank looks at me, and I chime in. “Me too.”
Charles wraps them back up and puts them in his pocket. “I’m gonna take them back and wash them.” He gets up. “Maybe that’ll take the acid off.”
“The acid is inside, dumbass.” Charles probably shouldn’t call him dumbass, but Frank is used to it. It won’t make a difference whether he gives up the muscadines.
“I’m gonna try,” says Frank.
“They stay in the forest,” says Charles. “You either eat them or give them to me,” is what I think he is going to say to us but I see what he wants now. He wants them all. I start eating mine. I’m tired of waiting, anyway. My great grandfather used to say, “Bird in the hand.” I have grapes in the hand and right now, I don’t care about Frank’s as much as mine.
“I’ll take them back and wash them,” says Frank. I’m eating and watching, because I’ve never seen Frank challenge Charles. Or anyone. It’s new.
Charles is balling up his fists, and Frank is looking like he’ll run. That’s what he’ll do. He’ll run and tell, and then we’ll all end up doing extra chores like Ross, only they won’t pay us extra like they have to pay Ross when he goes over the number of hours the government lets boys work. The whole other reason we went off in the woods besides looking for berries is so some adult wouldn’t spot us walking around. A boy caught aimless on campus was assigned extra chores—even if you had done yours. “Loitering,” they called it, so the work could be a punishment, not chores.
Ross was the one that warned us. “You young uns better go to the woods and pick muscadines or they’ll give you chores.”
“Even on Fall Break?” I asked him.
“Especially then.” Ross liked to work. That was about all he liked. He didn’t even sing with us boys when we gathered around Ron Barley’s banjo on the porch on warm evenings. He just watched. But he liked using tools, so he volunteered for chores even when they didn’t pay him extra. Same tools he probably used to get my cubby open. Long as they gave him a hammer to use, he was a pig in shit.
Now I have an idea looking at Frank. “You’ll drop them in the forest,” I say. “Because you don’t want us to know you’re afraid to eat them.” I glance at Charles, then back at Frank. “Then they’ll be wasted.”
That’s the sin. Sin of me making up such an accusation, but also the sin that something one of us might eat sits and spoils in the woods. I half think it’s true. Charles is now sure of it. He doesn’t say anything else. He is mad again. Really mad. Frank can see it. I’ve ganged up on him and he has lost. Now comes the punishment. I see it too late. He reaches in his pocket and hands the bandanna to Charles. Charles tears it open and shoves a fistful of berries into his mouth—more than half of them.
“Hey!” I go to one knee.
“You’ve still got some,” he says. He’s right. “You must not be as hungry.” Frank is grinning. Bastard probably has candy in his pockets right now he’ll eat on the way back to the dorm. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll give him chores. Maybe he’ll tell them there are two boys out in the woods with nothing to do but pick berries. Maybe we’ll kick his ass, if he does.
Charles has me. It’s cowboy rules. Isn’t fair, but fair changes when you can make an argument for being first. It’s like calling dibs or shotgun. It’s dumb, and you know it’s dumb, but if a guy says it, that’s all it takes. You have to honor it, and especially if you have the berries in your hand. Possession is nine tenths. No one will back you up if you go against it, unless there’s no damned argument to make.
Frank has run out of arguments. The berries belong in the woods. But now they belong in Charles. He finishes them right in front of me and looks at the rest of mine, what few there are. I shove those in my mouth and Charles smiles, because that just goes to prove the rule. If you need something, and someone else needs it just as much, you keep what you can grab.
“Going back,” says Frank.
“I knew you would,” I say after I swallow. I look at Charles for support. “You better not tell.”
Charles loses his smile. Frank loses his. I hate it. Nothing is any fun like this. Sweating in your jeans in September when it’s 80 in the woods—84 in the sun—anyone’s out to get you and even the trees won’t share. I wish I was with the older boys. They get to keep shotguns, albeit locked up in the old horse shed. What happened to the horse, no one will say. They went off deer hunting several days ago and are camping in the wild. I bet they’re eating all kinds of meat out there and drinking moonshine to boot. Smoking rich tobacco. No chores. They get a real break. But they promised to bring back something to eat, one way or another.
I hope it’s not the other. Newsome told me once what they do. If they can’t get a deer, they get a squirrel. If they can’t get a squirrel, they do anyway, because they shoot up into the nest. “It kills the babies and the momma together,” he said. “They go flying and fall out of the tree dead.” I tried to make him stop telling me. “Sometimes they’re not all the way dead,” he said. I covered my ears, but he got mad and pulled my hands away. He didn’t want to beat me up. I don’t know why he was mad, or what kind of mad that was. Mad at Lonnie and Jess? “You need to know what people do,” he said.
I looked at Newsome differently after that. Some bad thing had happened between him and Ross, and Newsome had started sleeping on the floor in a corner of Lonnie and Jess’s room instead of in the second bed in the smaller room with his brother. The other boys are careful with Newsome. Like he’s dangerous. He’s really the older one, even though he’s the same age as Ross, besides being younger than Lonnie and Jess. He reminds me of my great grandfather.
I listen to him sometimes since then, but if he catches me paying attention he gets quiet and when I asked him what to do about the care packages he got angry and said he minds his own business and that if I want advice, I should maybe ask Ross. Of course, you don’t ask Ross for advice, except if you want to fix something or find muscadines. “Go in the deep part of the woods,” Ross had said, “where the trees are old.”
Frank just stands there like he’s stupid. Then I see it—he’s waiting for Charles to defend him. Only Charles doesn’t do that. They stand there a long time—maybe a whole minute. Then Frank says, “I won’t tell.” Then he leaves.
“You hurt his feelings,” Charles says when we can’t see Frank through the trees anymore.
“You saw him,” I say, “how long he waited to answer.”
“So?”
“So, he was going to tell.”
“At least he gave us the berries.”
“Gave you, you mean.” Charles looks at me, quiet, so I say, “He’s got snacks or something, probably.”
“If he does,” says Charles, “I’m going to go after him and beat his ass.”
“I don’t know if he does.”
“You don’t know, or you don’t want me to beat his ass?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m still hungry.”
“So am I.”
I look down, and that’s how I notice the color. Green, but not green like leaves. It’s a crabapple. We sometimes see crabapples in the forest. They’re more common than the muscadines, but you can only eat a couple of them or you get sick—sicker even than a whole pile of muscadines. They aren’t for people to eat. I knew that even before I got to Wauseka. The other boys know it too, if they’ve had any time in the country.
Frank doesn’t know anything. He’s from New Jersey. Charles doesn’t know either, but that’s because he’s Canadian. All he talks about is finding fiddleheads and there are no fiddleheads anywhere on the mountain or in the forests that cross from one mountain to the next or even along the creek down under the bridge or the river down under the bigger bridge after that, which is too far to walk.
We went tubing down it one time. Drove down there in the school bus on a Sunday afternoon and jumped off the bridge, each of us boys with an inner tube. The girls wanted to come, but they couldn’t, because only the boys could make that jump. No girl was going to show herself a tomboy by doing it. Maybe Cherry would have, but no one listens to Cherry. She’s new and there’s a rumor that she hitchhiked with truckers all over America, and she was loose with some of them. So they just tell her what to do and don’t listen to her.
I didn’t even mind there were water moccasins in that river. All kinds, not just one. The big gray ones, and little back ones, and others that were too quick to tell what color they were. You jumped either in your tube or on it—whichever you were more afraid of—the rocks or the snakes and, once you landed, you just tried to find a stick to keep them off you while you floated down the river. Then they’d get Mister Talbot, the grounds manager, to drive the bus down and leave it at the other end for us to drive back. We only went the one time, but I like to think of it as a thing we did, because I keep doing it in my head. The water was so cool.
I got a sunburn that peeled all the skin off my back, but I would do it again in a second. After that, the girls fed us in the cafeteria, and even though it was the same food we aways eat and they eat half an hour earlier so they can serve, it was the best meal I’ve ever had at Wauseka. Not the best one I was hoping for, if Lonnie and Jess came back with a deer. But it was pretty good.
I pick up the crabapple and, just as Charles sees me do it, I take a bite. It isn’t like finding my own stash of muscadines and eating those right in front of him, but it makes the apple sweeter. Sweet but kind of woody and sour too, like pickled bark with a little sugar on it. I eat the whole thing. Charles waits. I’ve earned it. He knows I have. He doesn’t say anything. Then I start going through the brush around that spot looking for more and Charles looks too. It’s quiet, but not quiet. We aren’t talking about anything, and I like that. It’s like when a song ends on the radio and they don’t fade it out and there’s a moment, while the DJ cues up the station identification where he misses the beat and, even if there’s a little static, your mind kind of lets out a breath you don’t know you’re holding.
We each find more crabapples. As soon as either of us see one, we pick it up, and bite into it. We find maybe six between us before we find the tree. Charles shoves his apples in his pockets and reaches up for the fresh ones. I throw mine down and do the same.
“Wasting is a sin,” says Charles.
“So is eating old fruit when there’s new in reach.”
No argument. We eat and I stop when I feel the first stomach cramp and sit down, disappointed. I’m not so hungry, but I’m not full. Charles cramps up a few minutes later and sits too. We sit there a long time, not talking, for my part because talking makes my belly hurt worse. Charles doesn’t last long before he starts up. Always the same kind of thing—girls, but not girls like who you like or wondering about whether she likes you. It’s like the time I visited my uncle’s house and they had an outhouse out back and another older outhouse which my aunt told me to leave alone because it was dirty.
My uncle said it wasn’t dirty. It hadn’t been an outhouse in forty years. “She just doesn’t like it, because it’s where I go to drink.” Later, I said I had to go to the outhouse, and I went down to the older one and found old whiskey bottles but also a lot of magazines with naked ladies in them, with hair all over their private parts. I took one of those magazines out in the woods and looked at it for a while but then I put it back, because somehow it felt like Charles’s stories about girls before he came to Wauseka.
“There are these two sisters,” he says. “And my mom takes me over to their house to talk to their mother, and they’re all downstairs talking for a long time, and I’m upstairs with the girls, and they’re both younger, and one is younger than the other.”
I’m just waiting for the cramps to go away. Besides, I don’t know what to do after this—I don’t want to walk back and there’s nowhere to go.
“So I want to be with the older one but I have no chance with her and so I talk the younger one into going into her bedroom and feeling her tits and taking her shorts off. And she lets me do more than that. She lets me put it in her, and I’m doing that while my mother and her mother are downstairs talking, and even the door of her room is open to the hallway.”
Maybe he’s lying. There’s always something that feels like a lie about Charles’s stories, besides feeling like something you shouldn’t do or shouldn’t make someone see in his head—like the squirrels in the nest. But you talk about sex—that’s what you do. Because you want to—even when it’s like the crabapples—because you’re hungry, even if the only thing there is for it are wilted stories falling out of Charles’s mouth.
He’s talking faster now, building up. “So I’m going at her. Like this,” he says, and he turns over and starts humping the ground under the crabapple tree. Then he turns back. “Like I say, her sister is down the hall and everyone’s right downstairs, and her sister comes down the hall and sees us and yells, ‘Stuff her, you stud!’ and then runs back down the hall to her room.” Charles leans back on one elbow and then says, “I thought for sure someone had heard it and would come upstairs, but I wasn’t going to stop. No one came, so I did her like that, and later I tried to do her sister too . . “
“Jesus! In the same day?”
“No, that was weeks later. But she wouldn’t, and neither would her sister again.”
“Were you a virgin?”
“No. Are you?”
“I’m not saying.”
“You are.”
“If I am, it’s because I’m fifteen and haven’t had a chance.”
“Yeah, I guess,” says Charles. “But if you get a chance and you don’t, then you’re gay.”
“I haven’t had a chance.”
“I’m just saying IF.”
“Did her parents ever find out?”
“I don’t know,” says Charles. “Later on, I got sent here.”
“So this just happened?” I ask.
“Well it’s not like I’m a hundred years old,” says Charles. “Everything just happened.”
“Why’d you get sent here?” I ask.
Charles is quiet for a minute. I think he’s going to think about it and answer me. Maybe he’s going to lie. My father sent me to Wauseka, because he didn’t want me, and neither did my mother, and she put me on a Greyhound bus which took three days to get to my Dad and called him a day later to tell him I was coming, so he found a place to put me. I asked him if it was a good school. He said it’s boarding only—I’ll go to a normal High School but it’ll be yokels. My dad hated yokels. He used to talk bad about Indiana, because he said we have inbred relatives there. Then he told me it’s because it was the cheapest place. They put kids from broken homes there. Poor kids. But they needed the money and would take anyone, even if he wasn’t from a broken home. “I told them,” he said, “no one wants you, so that’s as good as a broken home.” I guess Charles came from something like that.
Instead of answering, he says, “Show me how you go down the mountain at night.”
“Do you have money for the truck stop?” I know he doesn’t, but maybe he does and I don’t really know it. Like Frank with the snacks and dropping the muscadines and telling on us.
“No, but if you go that way, other people might go that way, and maybe one of them dropped something.”
“No one else goes that way.”
“Show me,” he says. “I once found a whole bag of chips and a soda just sitting by the side of the road. Not even opened. Someone just dropped it.”
“It’s a long way even to the highway, let alone the truck stop,” I say. “Besides, if anybody did drop food, it’d be rotten by now or eaten by animals.”
“Are you gonna show me?”
“I don’t have to.”
“No, but I could beat your ass.”
“Then you wouldn’t be much of a friend, and why should I show you?”
“Just show me.”
I sit there not saying anything. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. Let him wait, after threatening me. He watches me. Like he watched Frank. “There’s nothing to do anyway,” I say. Then I remember. “What if Lonnie and Jess come back with deer?”
“They aren’t coming back.”
“Ever?”
“No, stupid. They aren’t coming back right away even if they do get deer.”
“Where will they go?”
“Nowhere. They’re camping free out there with no chores, no 6am inspection, no curfew, with something to drink, because Lonnie can get it, and with sandwiches they bought with their chore money and their allowance—which is way more than you or I get.”
My allowance is five dollars per month, which isn’t enough for more than a little pipe tobacco and a soda on whichever day I guess will be the hottest. I already spent that weeks ago in August, and my Dad isn’t sending any this month because he says I don’t deserve it.
Charles says, “They’re not stupid enough to go out and come right back. They’re gonna stay out there as long as they can and maybe not even try that hard to get a deer for a while.”
So we get up and dust the woods dust off and I wipe the sweat off my forehead with my pocket bandanna and put it back. Charles ties his, red like mine, around his head like an Indian on TV and I start walking. He follows. When Frank was with us, we’d only gone maybe a twenty minute journey into the woods from Inverness House, which bounded the denser trees. Now we have much farther to go. The heat is thick like when you open an oven, except instead of cool air behind you, it’s the same in any direction. “When are we gonna get there?” asks Charles.
“Get where?”
“Wherever you go.”
“I go all the way down the mountain and to the highway, then all the way down the highway to the truck stop.”
“How long to the highway?”
“A long time.”
“You’re leading me on.”
“No, but I go a lot faster alone. I can go fast, but you gotta be careful, because you can go over a drop-off out here, and break your leg or your neck.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “I’ll lead.” He walks past me.
“You don’t know the way.”
“You found it,” he says. As though if I can do it anyone can.
I let him lead, but he keeps stopping, waiting for me to catch up. It doesn’t make sense, because he doesn’t know which way to go next. He waits until I start to walk ahead, then goes past me again. The slope is too steep to be sure of your footing, and it’s dangerously fast for his first time.
“Stop!” I call out.
“I’m not waiting for you!”
I stand at the start of the trail and wait. You have to go right at that point, not straight, but he passes it.
I wait a while, and he comes back. “Son of a bitch!” he says.
I don’t know where he would’ve ended up going that way, but this is the right way. “See it?” I point down. “Old Indian trail I think.” I look around. The forest is thick now, the slant treacherous. “Ross told me there used to be Indians in here.”
“Ross is a moron.”
“That’s not all. He said—”
“I don’t care.” He goes on down the trail and I follow, more slowly.
“Wait up!”
“Catch up!”
We make it half way down the mountain, Charles sometimes stopping and waiting. Once, he says, “See?” He means he can find his way without me leading. With a trail, of course he can. But a couple of times he goes off of it and, when he realizes I haven’t, detours to get ahead of me again. He’s up ahead quite a bit when I hear something. Sounds like a little tree branch falling. I don’t hear Charles. I don’t hurry, because I don’t want to fall into a sudden ravine. The forest is more dense and, coming down the mountain, you can’t see far ahead. I can see where he has gone off the trail. A ravine is there, and Charles is down in it.
“Charles?” He doesn’t answer. “Charles!”
“Shut up!”
“Where are you?”
“Down here, idiot!” He’s lying on his back.
“You fell.”
“No shit. Help me get back up there.”
I start to climb down the ravine, but it feels as if I’ll slip. The years of trees wasting their leaves and other things into the ravine have made it hard to climb up or down.
“Not like that, stupid!” he says. “Throw me a rope.”
“I don’t have a rope.”
He gets up on his legs again, but slips and tries to hold on so he doesn’t slide farther down the mountain. “You’re Grizzly Adams,” he says. “Make one.”
I stop to think. Not about that, but about what I might do. I look around for a limb to hold out in case he can reach it. There isn’t one. But Charles begins to make progress, grabbing at the bases of small trees growing out of the damper soil like weeds. He slips again, curses, but keeps pulling himself forward. I climb down a little ways, maybe a dozen feet, to meet him. I hold out my hand and he grabs it and hauls himself forward. He pulls back a little with the other, like he wants to punch me, but he doesn’t. In a few minutes, we’re up on the trail edge looking at where he’d gone over.
“Let’s go back,” he says.
“I thought you wanted to see if there’s food,” I say. “Just follow me.”
“No,” he says. “You’re right. I give it to you. This is your thing. Not mine.”
“All right.” I start walking.
After a minute, he says, “Go slow like before.”
“It’s easier going back,” I say. “You won’t fall again, if you follow me.”
“My leg hurts. I’m limping.”
We walk for a bit and I might have taken a wrong turn. It ought to be easier in daylight, but it isn’t if you’re used to only going in the dark. What stands out is different, and I am thinking about hunters, deer meat and getting distracted. I stop, not because the forest looks unfamiliar. It doesn’t. It looks like every other part of the forest in the light. Instead, I see something—see and hear it both. So does Charles. A flash of something white, like a robe. Something moving through the trees as if it’s eluding us, but has just been there with us without me realizing it. I look at Charles. He looks at me. We look at the woods. There is nothing. I start walking again.
In a few minutes, it’s the same. A moment of something—maybe it’s beige, maybe leather. It’s too quick. Whatever it was has come back, and then it’s gone again through the trees. I stop and Charles catches up to me. He is staring where I am looking, so I know I’m not crazy, and then he is glancing around, like I am.
“It’s Frank. He’s messing with us.”
“Frank wouldn’t come out this far.”
“It’s Frank.”
“If you say so.” We wait, listening. There’s nothing. We walk on. I lead.
It happens again. Just as before. Like you’re walking up an escalator and the person in front of you is walking backwards and then, just before you reach them, starts going forward again. Except, it’s much faster. Each time, it’s something that seems upright, wearing bright clothing. Charles stops.
“Panther,” he suggests. Charles is sweaty but his face is pale.
“No. They only come out at night.”
“Then it’s Frank.” Charles shouts. “Frank, I’m gonna—”
“Not Frank,” I say. “Frank’s back at Inverness probably getting extra chores and who knows what else?”
“Frank!” Charles calls out. “I need help. I’m hurt.”
“Don’t do that!” I say. Charles looks at me. “If it is Frank, he’ll go get adults to come out here and then—”
“It was Ross who told you to come out here, right?”
“Told all of us.”
“Told you, and you told us.”
“So?”
“So, it’s him. He’d come out this far, if Frank wouldn’t.”
“Why would he?”
“A prank. He’s joking with us.”
“I don’t think it’s Ross.”
“Then who?”
“Well Ross said—”
“Said what?”
“He said there are Indians that still live out here, in the deeper woods somewhere. He said they keep to themselves and live off the land, so no one will take them away like they did the others.”
“You can’t live out here,” says Charles.
“Lonnie and Jess can,” I say. “They’re living off the land in the wild.”
“They’ve got sandwiches.”
“Well, it might be Indians. One Indian, anyway.”
“Let’s go back,” says Charles.
I start walking again. Charles stays a little closer. It happens again. We both see it. He tries to pretend for a few seconds he doesn’t. I think he wants it to be his imagination. It isn’t. He starts to run, only he can’t with his leg hurting. Besides, the way back is up the mountain and it’s hot. The night at least would have been cool, the air more breathable.
“It’s Ross,” says Charles. “I’ll knock his lights out when I get back. I don’t care.”
“Don’t do that. It’s not Ross. You know it’s not.”
“We should run.”
“We should follow her.”
“Her?”
“I think it’s a her.”
“So we follow her and if she’s got brothers they kick our asses or kill us.”
“Why would they do that?”
“If she’s hiding out here, she wants to stay hidden. That’s why.”
“I say we follow her.” I think about it for a moment. If we follow her, we might find a better place. Any place. A place shining with silver towers and golden fruit, hidden in the forest. The land of the elves in Mirkwood. The Land of the Lost. Any land. “They might feed us,” I say.
Charles thinks about that. “Let’s follow her.”
It doesn’t happen again for a long time. We wait. When nothing comes, we follow the trail to the place where it ends in more forest, but we don’t see anything further.
“It was Ross,” says Charles. “Or Frank.”
Then I see her. Her hair. The edge of her shawl. It’s bright leather but soft like wool. She flees through the woods before I can see her face.
I take off after her. Charles hesitates for a moment. “What is it?”
“You saw!”
“If I saw, I wouldn’t ask.”
“It’s her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Come on!” The mountain is not steep anymore, but she hasn’t gone upward toward the school. She has turned to the right. I hurry and Charles follows in a kind of gallop, ignoring his leg.
We chase her through the woods. Running, I can’t be sure if I glimpse her again. There is light breaking through the tall trees and the sounds of all woods—snaps, leaf falls, and cracks which might or might not be a more ancient people hiding quietly in our midst, keeping their wilder, yet more civilized lives a secret.
I want that wildness. I want what I read about in the first book I ever truly loved, which I brought with me and hid in the suitcase under my bed. Halflings that disappear swiftly and silently when big folk they don’t want to meet plunder by. It seems like magic, but it’s not and you don’t want it to be. If it were magic, it would disappear at bedtime, like monsters under the bed, packed away in the dark when you want even monsters to be real, because it means there’s more—more of whatever more is. It’s another way of being hungry and never full.
Even if they kill us, I have to find them. They live among the muscadines, out of reach. I keep running, Charles gallops, and the woods give way to something I haven’t seen. Grass taller than Charles—taller than me. Thick grass, a foot and more above my head. There’s a wall of it. Like the big corn fields in Minnesota, where you need a ladder to reach the ears on the tallest stalks. They grow rough and untamed outside the fences, spreading along the drainage ditches, across the roads, and into the uncleared woods beyond the farms. We stop. I have not come this way by night or day. I push a little at the big fronds. They give, but behind them are only more.
“I’m not going in there,” Charles announces.
“We have to,” I say.
“I’m done,” he says. “Which way is back?”
“I think that way.” I point.
“You don’t know?”
“I sort of know. I don’t know where we are.”
“Son of a bitch!” Charles rubs his knee. “You’re leading me back.”
“I don’t know the way back.” I wouldn’t have led him back if I had. The pale grass whispered. Not if he begged. “She’s getting away.”
“I’m not going,” Charles says.
“I can’t be left behind.”
“Go on then. You’ll get lost and never find your way back.”
“I hope so.” I push into the wall of slithery grass which gives just enough that I can push farther.
I take more steps, the vegetable curtain closes around me, and the sound of the forest is gone. I do not hear Charles again after that. I do not hear the twigs breaking or the squirrels leaping from limb to nest. It is warmer but wetter. The ground is softer. My movement ahead is slow.
She will go to whatever place she goes, and I will never find her. To be swallowed in that place, by the immensity of it, is nothing. I cannot bear to go back to nothing, the immensity of nothing. I thrust myself further inward, and the grass thickens as I do. I go even slower still until at last I stand for a moment, catch my breath and listen, hoping for any sound or movement. Maybe she will come back for me. I bend and put my hands on my knees. When I stand again, I am uncertain which way is forward and which is back. I have lost her. I sit down in defeat.
My knees sink in wet earth, soiling my jeans. I rest on my heels, trying to stay still. Maybe if I wait and don’t move, the world around me will change something important by contrast. I stay that way a long while, not caring for the wet against my legs or the humidity filling my lungs. It is the thing I fear the most. Nothing. There is nothing. It comes for me in the form of a dimming sky. The road does not go ever on. It ends under a lid like this one, changing hue without so much as a passing cloud to mark one moment from the next. I stand, look at the stains on my jeans, and begin forcing my way back through the grass.
It isn’t back. Perhaps I have misjudged how long it should take. I should have come out by now, and I don’t, so I push a little farther and then switch directions. I don’t come out that way, either. I change directions again. Charles was right. I will be lost forever, only that won’t be so bad. It is a better ending than, “One day was like another forever and ever and still is.” I am hungry again. I push the feeling away.
My father told me, once when I said I’d run away from home, that boys who do that eventually come back, because they get hungry. They return for their green beans and their Salisbury steak, their chores and curfews, and they accept it. He said it was like pets. Even if they don’t like their lives, they still come back if they can, because someone needs to feed them. He said elves were ridiculous indulgences for a mind better spent on the future. But there is no future. Only Salisbury steak.
At last something changes. The grass thins, and some of it is drier. Ahead something is bright. I have a moment of hope. It will pay off, that I haven’t given up. In another moment, I know I have. The brightness becomes a road, and the road has a shoulder and that shoulder has been cleared. Maintained by boys doing their chores, far down the road from the school, making the drive from the river neat for the donors who sometimes come to look at us and give gifts of a dollar or fifty cents to some boy or girl, in exchange for some service like carrying their luggage to the car or showing them around the campus.
I have swung a double blade along that road, clearing the tall grass that grows where the runoff falls to either side. That grass is not the kind where she disappeared, but maybe it would be if you let it grow long enough, out of the way under the open sky. I start walking.
The sun slides down the sky’s ravine, breaking over the foothills. I don’t know how long the walk will take, and I will probably not get dinner, but I will make curfew at least. Maybe I will not run down the mountain tonight. I am too tired. I am not afraid. Just maybe on another day and not this one.
About the Author:
Asher Black is a fiction author, musician & karateka satisfied with the life he always wanted. He has been Chief Editor of MYTHOLOG: Literature of Mythic Proportions and Managing Editor of The Green Man Review. Asher is a polymath artist with degrees in History and Educational Psychology. He grew up in the central swath of the United States that forms the Great Plains and is nourished by the many tributaries of the Mississippi River. He currently resides in the tree-lined neighborhood where Walt Whitman edited the Brooklyn Daily Eaglewhile writing Leaves of Grass. Asher is a film festival, Broadway theater, and standup comedy enthusiast, art collector and ballroom dancer with a penchant for motorcycling and boating. He writes almost entirely outdoors and endeavors to create vivid, thoughtful stories emphasizing context. His literary writing has appeared in Saturday Evening Post, Hummingbird Press, Lilliput Review, The Lamp-Post, and The Pipe Smokers’ Ephemeris. His non-fiction has appeared in Forbes and other periodicals. He has two manuscripts hunting agents. By day he works as a corporate storyteller and digital ecologist. AsherBlack.com twitter.com/ashermost and twitter.com/ashermostbooks
*Feature image by Toushif Alam on Unsplash
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