“You-hee!” she howled when she sighted the familiar leaves. She didn’t get up — just crawled over on hands and knees, like a baby hurrying across the lawn for his new toy. Saliva fed into her mouth and her still-sore stomach glowered and muttered impatient.
She grabbed at one of the blueberry plants, turned it over. Nothing there, so she grabbed at another one. And another after that. And one more—
And then she howled again.
Because it looked as though someone had been here before her too. Only they hadn’t picked the blueberries.
They’d stomped them. Taken a pair of boots, and stomped over every square inch of this little blueberry patch. Janie’s fingers were blue where she touched the leaves — but when she licked them, there wasn’t even enough berry there for a sweet.
Jeez, but Ernie’d taken time to do a lot of things for his dead wife, before he ran away in his boat. Janie felt the hot coming on.
“Baaa-sterd!” she yowled, head turned up to the sky. “Baaa-sterd!”
She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care if she caused an embarrassment, or broke something valuable, or swore, or just did something stupid. She didn’t care if Ernie was down at the dock now, listening to her — she didn’t care if he came back up here right now to teach her another lesson. If there was a wasp’s nest here, she’d probably find a shovel and hit it.
“Baaa-sterd!” she screamed, and as she did, she felt a gust of wind come down on her, pouncing like a tree-cat on a mouse. This high up from the waves, it was a drier wind, but it was cold all the same. She opened her mouth wide, and faced it this time, and when she yelled again the wind took it from her and she didn’t mind.
“I’m hung-ry!” she hollered. And as the darkness came complete to the island, the wind hollered it too.
Janie would get spells some days. That’s what Ernie’d call them, because that’s how they must have seemed to him, like magic witchy spells that made folks strange. She called them her hots, because that’s how they’d feel inside. She got hot, from her toe-tips up to her eyebrows, so hot she itched for things she couldn’t say and did things she barely knew. One time, she went out and smashed all the windows in Ernie’s pickup truck with his new axe-handle, then broke the axe-handle too somehow. Another time, she ran bare-naked out to the township road, and Ernie had to come after her with a rope and a stick to goad her back inside. Sometimes during her hots, she remembered seeing things. Folks dressed in black dancing jigs all across her roof so hard the ceiling started to wobble; or a lot of birds flying in a circle around her head and pecking at her sun hat so as to knock it off; or big old bugs crawling out of the cracks between the sidewalk stones outside the grocery carrying their grubs under their wings. Her momma used to think she saw into the spirit world, but Ernie called them dream-things and said for to pay them no attention. Like the wasps — let ’em have their sniff, and they’ll leave soon enough.
When she woke up in the middle of the night, crooked up against a rock covered in dry white lichen, she thought she might have seen a dream-thing.
He came up over the same way she had — up over the rock from where the lodge sat — but he wasn’t dressed for the cold wind. He wasn’t dressed at all in fact. He was a funny man: bare-naked, not even shoes and socks on, and even his privates dangled out for all to see.
“Ain’t you cold?” Janie asked, but the funny man didn’t even look at her.
Maybe the cold didn’t bother him. He had a lot of hair on him, looked like blue in the dark. It went all up his back and down his chest, and the hair on his head and chin was real long, and his beard came up near to his eyes. And it seemed like there was a fire in those eyes — Janie didn’t get to look at them directly, but she could see that everywhere the funny man looked got covered in a flickery orange light, like it was sitting near the firelight of the funny man’s eyeballs.
So fired on the inside, furred on the outside, maybe clothes’d just heat the funny man up too much for his own good. Sometimes Janie felt that way too, particularly when her hots came on.
The funny man was moving on feet and fingertips the whole time, and his face kept close to the rock, like he was snuffling it. He was saying something over and over — Janie thought it sounded like Yum-tum, yum-tum, yum-tum, which were no words that she knew. He crawled over the top of the rock, and face-first down the inside slope of it. It was a pretty good trick — Janie’d fallen on her behind when she tried to get over and then she’d had to stand on level ground and get her bearings. But the funny man didn’t even need to do that. He just turned around and started moving along the sides of those rocks, like he was a spider or an inchworm or some sticky-footed fly. When he’d come to a tree, he’d squeeze behind it if he could fit, and if he couldn’t just lift his arms over it and sort of jump-like with his long hairy legs, and keep on yum-tum-ing along the rocks like nothing had happened. Janie’d put her fist to her mouth and gasped at that — he was sure a good climber, the funny man was.
And he kept at it, until he’d gone half-the-way around the rock circle and come up beside Janie where she leaned against it. For a minute, she thought he was going to crawl over her like she was another tree, rub his dangly privates all along her middle and then go on along the rock like he hadn’t rubbed nothing. But the funny man didn’t. The rock glowed next to her shoulder where he looked at it, and then his fire-filled eyes moved up to her yellow-clad shoulder and made it glow, and underneath the sweat oozed out of her skin like pus from a dirty cut. And then he said yum-tum again, and she knew it wasn’t words at all. It was the sound his tongue made when it licked against the rock, tongue-out-yum, tongue-in-tum, right next to her arm.
Janie pulled away from him a little — she sure didn’t want that long, knobbly old tongue licking her next, any more than she wanted those privates on her middle — and quick as she did, the funny man yum-tum-licked the rock where she’d been leaning. A big strip of lichen came away when he did.
Janie put her hand to her mouth again, and let out a little squeal. Of course! That’s what the funny man was doing — she followed the path he’d taken around the rocks, and the whole way she found a dotted strip as wide as a tongue, like the passing line on the highway.
“Hey!” she said, turning back to him. “That lichen any good to eat?”
But the funny man was already gone. Or so Janie recalled as she sat up in the middle of the night, and looked at the rock beside her.
The funny man must have been a dream-thing, because the lichen on the rock face hadn’t been touched. He’d just given it a sniff, and made on his way.
Janie ran her fingers across it — it was rough and dry and flaked under her thumb, and it was blue like the funny man’s hair. It didn’t seem much better than mustard and butter, but then Janie didn’t see any harm in giving it a try either. She leaned close to the rock — so close she could feel the match-flame heat of her breath bounce back at her.
“Yum-tum,” she said, and swallowed.
Outside the rock circle, the wind had been roaring and splashing and rattling things all night. But by the time Janie was done eating, it stopped making all that racket and went quiet. The lichen meal didn’t quiet Janie’s stomach any, however. It was twisting and yelping up at her like a colicky baby. Her aches elsewhere weren’t so bad, but her belly…
Her belly would need quieting.
Janie peeled off some more lichen — just a little, a strip not much bigger than a postage stamp — and put it on her tongue. It was dry and tasted like dirt, and seemed like even the wet in her mouth wouldn’t go near it. She shut her mouth, and made herself swallow, but the dry lichen gritted up in her throat like she was swallowing sand. She didn’t let herself cough, though. Just kept swallowing and swallowing until the last of it was down.