She moved her forearm and began to close the door. I have work to do, she said. And God knows I wouldn’t want to keep you from your drinking.
MOVE AWAY FROM THE DOOR, Karas told the old man. I want to get out. The little man retreated and sat down on a block of stone and took,tobacco from a pocket and began to construct a cigarette. Karas saw that the stone was part of a set of ancient limestone steps laid into the earthen wall of an embankment. He opened the door and climbed carefully out.
The little man had his cigarette going. How’d you get back in here? he asked through a fog of smoke.
I drove, Karas said.
There ain’t no road, the man said. Did you wreck?
Karas glanced at the Buick, bright and anomalous midst the brush, like something that had been teleported there, and wondered at the force necessary to wreck a car so far into the woods — some sort of nuclear fission wreck, a chain reaction wreck that kept forcing the car deeper and deeper into the timber.
There is now, Karas said. Of a sort. I made it. I drove around the big trees and it looks like I just drove over the little ones. I was drunk.
How’d you plan to get out? Back where the road is? You did come off a road, didn’t you? Or did you just come all the way from wherever you come from through the woods?
Karas had walked around behind the car and he stood urinating with his back turned to the little old man. It was not my intention to get out, Karas said. I came in here to drink and do away with myself. I figured I’d be toted out. I just didn’t bring any weapon adequate to the job.
Lord God, the man said. Do away with yourself. What method was you usin, if you don’t mind my asking?
Karas came around the Buick zipping his pants. All I could find was a penknife and a jack handle, he said. Do you think a man might beat himself in the head with a jack handle until he died?
I expect it’s been tried, the man said. Might near everything has, at one time or another.
Likely you’d just knock yourself out and wake up back at the same old stand with a hell of a headache. It was one of those tire spuds though, I guess a man might fall on it like a disgraced samurai falling on his sword.
I guess, the man said doubtfully. Was you not wearing a belt?
Son of a bitch, Karas said, falling into the spirit of things. Karas was fond of words and suicide seemed to call for a lot of them and he had brought neither pencil nor paper. He had heard of living wills and immediately decided to make of the old man a sort of living suicide note. I don’t know why a belt never occurred to me, he said.
Give me a little drink of whatever-it-is. My name’s Borum, by the way. He rose from the stone nimbly and took the bottle when Karas proffered it to him. Borum was wearing strapped across his shoulders a bag that looked like a child’s book satchel. On closer examination Karas could see that was just what it was, for there were faded green Ninja Turtles imaged upon it. Borum squatted in what appeared to be a spectral roadway and tilted the bottle and drank, his throat working.
What are you doing in here yourself?
Borum lowered the bottle. He stood up and reached it to Karas. He gestured at the pack he carried. Roots and herbs, he said. I been diggin ginseng, goldenseal. I sell em for medicine. There’s a spring right up that holler, he said. Let’s go get us a drink. You drink some good cold water, wash your face in it, you’ll see things in a different light. First let’s see that knife, though. Was that what you was going to do, open a vein?
Karas unpocketed the knife and handed it over, somewhat ashamed of it — the blade was scarcely two inches long and the tip was broken off and it was covered with a scaly orange accretion of rust. It seemed a ludicrous tool for so solemn and daunting a task, and Karas wished he had put more forethought into killing himself.
Borum was looking at the knife and he was shaking his head. I doubt you’d have the stomach for it, he said. It’d be like swallowing a bedspring, or bein eat a mouthful at a time by them little bitin fish. Eatin yourself with a spoon. A gun’s quicker and easier.
I don’t own a gun, Karas said. I never believed in guns.
Borum had produced a knife of his own from somewhere beneath his clothing, a thin lethal-looking blade with a deep blood groove. He turned back the cuff of his khaki shirt and raked his forearm with the blade — it made a faint, unpleasant sound that Karas felt more than heard. Tufts of crinkly gray hair clotted on the blade and Borum raised the knife to his lips and blew them away. He turned his arm so that the paler underside of the wrist was uppermost and laid the blade across the veins. When he looked up at Karas in the failing light his eyes looked like a cat’s watching you through broken jungle greenery. This one’d be like a whisper, he said. Like a woman’s fingernail raked real light across it. You want to use this one?
Karas thought his madness must be communicable and the old man had caught it. Then he thought Borum must be something out of one of the Storm Princess’s nightmares, demon or child killer made real and malevolently set upon the sleepfast countryside with dire intent.
Then Borum grinned and took from a pocket a flat rectangle of chewing tobacco and sliced a corner off it and tucked it into his jaw. The knife disappeared back into the folds of his clothing. Let’s get that drink of water, he said.
Swinging the bottle along, he followed Borum up the stone steps to a smooth slope of land, they crossed through old foundation stones, shards of broken dishes, scattered bricks, past a chimney standing like a sentry with nothing left to guard. An old house place, metal twisted and blackened in some long-lost conflagration. Everything was laden with an enormous silence, and for a bemused moment Karas felt that he used to live here, in a white frame house. The Storm Princess had planted a rose garden, he had tilled the fields. Then some cataclysm of the heart had destroyed it, he had come in from the fields one day and found only rubble. They crossed what had once been a lawn, rhododendron grown rank and feral, and went down the slope on the back side to a small meandering stream. He began to hear the rush of water. They followed the stream up a hollow to its source, where it came boiling out of the fissured limestone rock. The air was cool and astringent and heady with the smell of peppermint.
Long ago someone had hammered a section of iron pipe into the striated rock and the water that ran from its moss-encrusted end was cold to his fingers. He set the bottle aside and cupped his hands and drank from them and washed his face in the icy water. He dried with the tail of his shirt and when he turned around Borum was studying him.
I expect it’s a woman, he said. I’ve seen it a lot of times. Had it happen to me myself. A woman’ll warp your mind worse than whiskey ever thought of doing.
Karas’s wife, when she was eighteen, used to wake in the mornings with her black curls so tousled and windswept that he imagined the landscape of her dreams to be beset with perpetual storms. Now years had come and gone and in her dreams ice held dominion. He took up the bottle and drank from it and let it ease him further into despair.
Course you’re talking foolishness, Borum said. Doin away with yourself. Let me tell you a story. You notice them stone steps we dumb up? Laid in that bank? I toted that limestone out of this hollow myself. Mixed the mortar in the hood of a forty-seven Studebaker. Laid that rock more years ago than I want to think about. This used to be my place, me and the wife lived here when we was first married. I raised corn and a little cotton, she planted all them flowers. Then later on we had some trouble over one thing and another and she quit me. Went back to her family. Them was hard times. Bitter times. I thought of killin myself, setting the house on fire and just laying down in our bed and letting the ceilin cave in on me. Instead of that I got up my nerve and went and talked to her one last time. Pled my case, so to speak. No politician running for office ever spieled out words the way I did. No lawyer try in to snatch his client out of the electric chair. Like I had a tongue of gold. Words were sweet as honey in my mouth. So she come back to me.