The rocks licked his soles. Once, when his mind wandered, it was brought back by his foot in cold water; and the links were warm around his body. He halted to feel for more heat; but the chain was only neutral weight.
He stepped out onto moss.
His shirt lay across a bush, his sandal, sole up, beneath.
He slipped his arms into the wool sleeves: his right wrist glittered from the cuff. He buckled his sandaclass="underline" the ground moistened his knee.
He stood, looked around, and narrowed his eyes on the shadows. "Hey…?" He turned left, turned right, and scratched his collar-bone with his wide thumb. "Hey, where…?" Turning right, turning left, he wished he could interpret scuffs and broken brush. She wouldn't have wandered down the way they'd come…
He left the cave mouth and entered the shingled black. Could she have gone along here? he wondered three steps in. But went forward.
He recognized the road for moonlight the same moment his sandaled foot jabbed into mud. His bare one swung to the graveled shoulder. He staggered out on the asphalt, one foot sliding on flooded leather, took a hissing breath, and gazed around.
Left, the road sloped up between the trees. He started right. Downward would take him toward the city.
On one side was forest. On the other, he realized after a dozen slippery jogs, it was only a hedge of trees. Trees dropped away with another dozen. Behind, the grass whispered and shushed him.
She was standing at the meadow's center.
He brought his feet — one strapped and muddy, one bare and dusty — together; suddenly felt his heart beating; heard his surprised breath shush the grass back. He stepped across the ditch to ill-mowed stubble.
She's too tall, he thought, nearing.
Hair lifted from her shoulders; grass whispered again.
She had been taller than he was, but not like… "Hey, I got the…!" She was holding her arms over her head. Was she standing on some stumpy pedestal? "Hey…?"
She twisted from the waist: "What the hell are you doing here?"
At first he thought she was splattered with mud all up her thigh. "I thought you…?" But it was brown as dried blood.
She gazed down at him with batting eyes.
Mud? Blood? It was the wrong color for either.
"Go away!"
He took another, entranced step.
"What are you doing here? Go away!"
Were the blotches under her breasts scabs? "Look, I got it! Now, can't you tell me my…?"
Leaves were clutched in her raised hands. Her hands were raised so high! Leaves dropped about her shoulders. Her long, long fingers shook, and brittle darkness covered one flank. Her pale belly jerked with a breath.
"No!" She bent away when he tried to touch her; and stayed bent. One arm, branched and branching ten feet over him, pulled a web of shadow — across the grass.
"You…!" was the word he tried; breath was all that came.
He looked up among the twigs of her ears. Leaves shucked from her eyebrows. Her mouth was a thick, twisted bole, as though some footwide branch had been lopped off by lightning. Her eyes — his mouth opened as he craned to see them — disappeared, first one, up there, then the other, way over there: scabby lids sealed.
He backed through stiff grass.
A leaf crashed his temple like a charred moth.
Rough fingers bludgeoning his lips, he stumbled, turned, ran to the road, glanced once more where the twisted trunk raked five branches at the moon, loped until he had to walk, walked — gasping — until he could think. Then he ran some more.
2
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin. Loping and limping in the ruts, it would be easier not to think about what she did (was done to her, done to her, done), trying instead to reconstruct what it is at a distance. Oh, but it would not be so terrible had one calf not borne (if I'd looked close, it would have been a chain of tiny wounds with moments of flesh between; I've done that myself with a swipe in a garden past a rose) that scratch.
The asphalt spilled him onto the highway's shoulder. The paving's chipped edges filed visions off his eyes. A roar came toward him he heard only as it passed. He glanced back: the truck's red, rear eyes sank together. He walked for another hour, saw no other vehicle.
A Mac with a double van belched twenty feet behind him, sagged to a stop twenty feet ahead. He hadn't even been thumbing. He sprinted toward the opening door, hauled himself up, slammed it. The driver, tall, blond, and acned, looking blank, released the clutch.
He was going to say thanks, but coughed. Maybe the driver wanted somebody to rap at? Why else stop for someone just walking the road!
He didn't feel like rapping. But you have to say something:
"What you loading?"
"Artichokes."
Approaching lights spilled pit to pit in the driver's face.
They shook on down the highway.
He could think of nothing more, except: I was just making love to this woman, see, and you'll never guess… No, the Daphne bit would not pass—
It was he who wanted to talk! The driver was content to dispense with phatic thanks and chatter. Western independence? He had hitched this sector of country enough to decide it was all manic terror.
He leaned his head back. He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.
Fear past, the archness of it forced the architecture of a smile his lips fought.
He saw the ranked highway lights twenty minutes later and sat forward to see the turnoff. He glanced at the driver who was just glancing away. The brakes wheezed and the cab slowed by lurches.
They stopped. The driver sucked in the sides of his mined cheeks, looked over, still blank.
He nodded, sort of smiled, fumbled the door, dropped to the road; the door slammed and the truck started while he was still preparing thanks; he had to duck the van corner.
The vehicle grumbled down the turnoff.
We only spoke a line apiece.
What an odd ritual exchange to exhaust communication. (Is that terror?) What amazing and engaging rituals are we practicing now? (He stood on the road side, laughing.) What torque and tension in the mouth to laugh so in this windy, windy, windy…
Underpass and overpass knotted here. He walked… proudly? Yes, proudly by the low wall.
Across the water the city flickered.
On its dockfront, down half a mile, flames roiled smoke on the sky and reflections on the river. Here, not one car came off the bridge. Not one went on.
This toll booth, like the rank of booths, was dark. He stepped inside: front pane shattered, stool overturned, no drawer in the register — a third of the keys stuck down; a few bent. Some were missing their heads. Smashed by a mace, a mallet, a fist? He dragged his fingers across them, listened to them click, then stepped from the glass-flecked, rubber mat, over the sill to the pavement.
Metal steps led up to the pedestrian walkway. But since there was no traffic, he sauntered across two empty lanes — a metal grid sunk in the blacktop gleamed where tires had polished it — to amble the broken white line, sandaled foot one side, bare foot the other. Girders wheeled by him, left and right. Beyond, the burning city squatted on weak, inverted images of its fires.
He gazed across the wale of night water, all wind-runneled, and sniffed for burning. A gust parted the hair at the back of his neck; smoke was moving off the river.
"Hey, you!"
He looked up at the surprising flashlight. "Huh…?" At the walkway rail, another and another punctured the dark.
"You going into Bellona?"