“Close your eyes.”
Yes.
“Hold out your hands.”
I did. I heard her pull her belt from her pants, the whush of leather on denim. She cinched it around one of my wrists. “Keep your eyes closed,” she hissed, then softer, “trust me, trust me,” a whisper close to my ear, her cool breath on my neck. She tightened the belt around both wrists then forced my hands down so she could loop the tail through my belt. I was cinched up to myself, a manacled prisoner. “Count to ten,” she said, and I felt her brush past me, heard her on the ladder.
This was her surprise. She ran now. Dry twigs cracked. Once, she looked over her shoulder and saw me in the doorway, my face crumpled in despair, a stupid man. She laughed her woman’s laugh. I knew what it meant. I had heard that laugh before, Aunt Arlen’s laugh in the middle of a fight with Uncle Les when both of them were drunk. “I shouldn’t have married such a short man,” Arlen said. “Mama warned me.” The words had some secret meaning that made her snort and spout and finally erupt, throw back her head and laugh from her gut. That sound beat my uncle down. He shrank, hands in pockets, chin on chest; he slouched, neckless, just as I did now.
I struggled but that only tightened the belt. The leather cut into the underside of my wrists. I clawed and wriggled, scratching myself. The belt stayed taut. My fingers tingled, then throbbed; my hands swelled, fat and bloodless. I thought of trying the ladder but saw myself falling through the rungs, breaking both my legs, shattering my knees, lying in the dark as the gully grew cold and silent. Or I would manage it somehow, make it to the ground without splintering my bones, and I would go home, hands still tied. How could I explain? What stranger could I invent who might do this to me?
I sank to my knees. Finally I worked the tail free from my belt, so I could bring my hands to my mouth. I loosened the belt with my teeth, ripped it free so fast the leather burned my arms.
I scrambled down the ladder, my feet slipping, my hands nearly numb, unable to grasp. They felt twice their usual size, dangling huge and useless as I stalked the girl. I was the angry trapper again, the betrayed man.
Avoiding the path, I headed toward the pond, knowing the girl would move toward water to wash her arms and mouth, the places I’d touched. I stopped half a dozen times, hearing echoes of my own steps. A crow squawked above me, its heavy body teetering on the highest bough of a maple. I passed the egg rock. The ravine was strewn with boulders left by the glacier when it finally melted, but this one was bigger than most, its top smooth as shell, one side split open by a jagged crack. In the legend I’d heard, beasts pecked their way out of this egg when the Indian girl loved the white man. The trapper. Me. Each creature grew more horrible than the last. Cats sprouted wings; dogs had razor jaws and rattlesnake venom.
I had to track the girl and lead her to the Sacred Lake, where our sins could be drowned in the moonlight. I found her in the wet reeds near the pond. I meant to save us, to stand in the icy water until it seemed to fill our veins; I wanted to stop the beasts from crawling out of the stone. But she would not go near the water with me.
“Look what you did,” I said, showing her my bruised wrists, the raw, burned flesh.
She didn’t apologize. Still I could have forgiven her until the moment she said, “That’s what you get.” She smirked, disgusted with me, just as she was the night I gave her that first wet kiss.
I shoved her backward, pinned her to a scraggly pine. The bark scraped my knuckles but I didn’t care. She arched against me, so we stood pressed to the tree, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. I kissed her, hard, smashing our noses together. Poppy petals, butterfly wings, what did I care if I hurt her? My teeth cut the inside of my cheek, and I opened my mouth, trying to force my tongue between her tight lips. She grabbed my face just below the eye, pinched as if she meant to tear the flesh from the bone with her short, jagged fingernails. Still I pushed at her lips, licked her mouth and chin, let my tongue dart up her nostril. She raised her arms and brought both fists down on my kidneys. I reeled, stunned, giving her time to strike the tender place again. My spine buckled; my legs bowed. Gwen tripped me, knocking me to the ground. I lay on the damp grass staring at the sky, all its color drained. I touched the sticky blood where Gwen had scratched my cheek.
The caws of bantering crows stabbed the still dusk, wings flapped as if trapped in a box. The rhythm of their squawking was almost human.
Gwen knelt beside me. “I hate you,” she whispered. I didn’t know if she spoke as the Indian girl or as Gwen Holler, but I knew who I was: myself. The trapper was dead, just as Gwen had said that night in the trailer. He was tied to his stove, frozen blue; the wolves sniffed at his corpse and would have eaten him but his blood had turned to ice and his flesh was hard as stone. In the spring he’d thaw and rot. By summer he’d be foul, filling the cabin with his putrid black smell. But by the time they found him, he’d be clean, reborn, a bleached white man of bone. They would stand him up straight and say: He was a tall man.
“Liz?” Gwen said. “Are you okay?” Then again, “Liz?” Yes, my own name. She lay down beside me with her arm across my ribs, kissed my cheek, licked at the drying blood, nuzzled my ear with her nose. Still I couldn’t answer. “Forgive me?” she said, the same words the Indian girl had spoken in the tree house before the trapper was dead.
I moved my mouth in the shape of words. The crows railed in a frenzy, their calls so loud and close I thought they would swoop down on us. Suddenly the woods snapped with the sound of stampeding animals: breaking branches, pounding hooves; they burst into the clearing. Zachary Holler and Coe Carson charged us, waving their arms, grunting like pigs.
“Forgive me,” Zack squeaked.
Gwen tried to crawl between their legs, but Zack thumped her chest and shoved her toward me.
“Forgive me, forgive me,” he whined. “You two like to kiss? Kiss for us. Come on, show us what you like. Hey, le’s be friends, okay?” He gave Gwen another swat and she fell on me. Winding a thick clump of her hair around his fist, Zachary forced her face down to mine. “You like girls, little sister? Give Lizzie a big smooch. Come on, I like to watch. Don’t you, Coe? Don’t you like it?” Gwen’s nose rubbed mine, and Zack kept pushing, pressing our dry lips together. He yanked her hair, jerking her head back. “You like that? Wanna do it again?”
Coe said, “Come on, Zack. You’ve had your fun.”
“I’ll say when I’ve had my fun. If you don’t like it, get the fuck out of here. I don’t need help from any wussies.” He cuffed the side of Gwen’s head. “Shit,” he said, “I’m tired of this anyway. You little queers make me sick. If I ever catch you at it again I swear I’ll kill you.”
Coe Carson took a step closer, reaching out his hand as if he meant to help us. “What the hell are you doing?” Zack yelled. “Don’t touch them. It’s like a disease. You want to end up queer?” Coe hopped back and the two of them fled. The woods swallowed their bodies, but their words hung over us, unmovable spirits hovering in the gray light.
I lay on my back with Gwen half on top of me, staring at the sky, afraid to move. Gwen stood, flicking at the mud on her pants. I studied the spots, a dozen places where dirt was ground into blue cloth. “Look what you did,” she said, pointing to the splatters of mud. “You and your stupid game. Don’t try to follow me. Don’t you dare try.” I didn’t answer. “Do you hear me?” she said. I closed my eyes and nodded. I listened to her splashing water on herself at the pond. She didn’t run. Gwen Holler walked away from me.
I don’t know how long I lay in the reeds — a minute, a half an hour, a night and another day. My back was wet and cold. The headless trees shook their dark arms at me. It was dinnertime or long past. Mother might be standing on the porch, looking down the empty street, a fear like hunger in her, not again, not again. My father might make her sit down and eat without me, pretending the thought didn’t rise in him. Imagining my parents’ pinched faces, all their fear turned to rage when they saw my filthy clothes, made me want to lie in the cool mud till the snows came. For the first time I believed I understood why my sister never came home.