And so, while she heard herself say to this slender, tall, perhaps overeducated rival, “Do your people know?” (that is, that he was here — the overnight liability more his than hers) — he a person of color suddenly alone with her, equally famous now and able if not to read her mind, to guess her thoughts — to which his quick shake of the head, his wide, full lips pursed, worried her thoughts again of whether he, this brown man, her rival genetically she realized, had come from west or east, or even north, she thought — no law against it, no laws or rights anywhere except what you claimed, she privately knew. (And she had never had a ready read on compass bearings.)
While she smelled what? The trees, some rot, some real matter, him even though not from this distance surely—how black exactly were we talking about, while he, thinking of her instincts and recalling the émigré Pole’s tale of water and canoes and initiation in which if you really read the words you saw that the sun had to be coming up in the west, saw to her left as did she at the same moment through a distant aisleing thinning of the trees a sudden distance of aerial space a jump-off from what must be a cliff edge beyond which through gathering twilight stood a horizon not of events this time but of a conflagration as beautiful as the end of the world, a sunset she would not have to share, whatever direction she was looking, the sun dying in the east or north or upside, where lay the lands of our neighbors from whom we had a few short weeks ago annexed this small but valuable pocket of wooded, fossil-rich land fifty by forty miles but more than its sum of two thousand square miles of land with its great water table not horizontal but vertical down and down like a flumey flue an add-on destiny for the nation when we put it to work, the northern rim of this new territory now our rim and border, already manned by a border patrol the equal of any this side of China.
One trail to the clearing, it was said and therefore thought: so the man and the woman had arrived by their curious routes nonetheless of one same trail passing into and/or leaving the clearing, with in store for them a savage, never-documented animal in the woods, a stormy night, and a contrary denizen, a reputed man, an independent who came with the territory — but what did they first find? Embers of a campfire waiting in the light of the late late day, on the horizon below the cliff beyond which one heard the sound of still waters lifted by a wind itself the natural frontier our nation is about, final sunburst flooded by evening, while high above in the last light and airspace of our new territory an eagle circled for rodents, its white wing patches identified by the man — exclaiming softly before he’d seen the woman — as those of an “immature golden” (as American as we could have wished) — and then they, these two weary warriors, were surprised to see each other across the clearing appearing from out of nowhere, entering from the woods as we had planned — yet half a day ahead of us, as if they had known our plan and, if you will, stolen a march, in order to seize a solitary time, however brief, never imagining that the rival would arrive at the same moment, to say nothing of the same place.
He from the west, though mysteriously not only west; she from the southeast as we had foreseen after a series of engagements, the toll of casualties growing by the day — the fading but brave little (yet not little) campfire like an end of the ongoing trail — though we had lost track of them for a day unthinkably and by the time we were able to observe them many hours later in dark of night they had evidently survived together and kept alive this earlier discovered and soon to be legendary fire they had found flameless but for two pinkly twined tongues of blue jetting like signals or souls, the campfire waiting for someone to slide the long tree limb along, burned black only at one end, yet now with brush and caches of already hewn hardwood logs both campers had gathered even alert to what had previously, in the last of the light of the sun that seemed to have died in the north, appeared to be an abandoned den deeper into the first and second growth evergreen dark and a small curving sound or song from those woods that they had after all not been asked into, as the man observed to the woman, who pursed her lips skeptically at his useless thought.
No killer instinct, she had long since concluded.
And too thin. To be a leader of substance. To win (she thought). Too thin to win, this man with whom she might spend the night now virtually upon them — a man should have a certain…a capacity to…A man? she caught her temper in mid-flush, a male man? — well, he should cast a certain shadow, whether white or not, whatever certain breakdowns of the electorate who, bless them, don’t believe in evolution in their heart of hearts really and truly or feel comfortable with, you know, we know, about him or bottom line like…Though “white,” she answered the critics of her honesty, meant not “white wash” but beige or in fact pink like her own husband somewhere across the country keeping the home fires burning tonight. In fact any everyday white blue-collar worker from any of our red-zone American towns with blue and yellow soccer uniforms and green soda pop can see through your words — in fact you’re too thin to lead, she read him almost to the t yet quite liked his thinness like some vanishing point where she could have seen her life if she believed it could be relived.
But this man, knowing her strangely like some native who’d been here before her, this late-model backpack of his — she sensed him, smelled him — in another country she could almost like him, get accustomed to his face, use him. A distance between them, as they talked for the first time as…as what? Vacationers, prize-winning campers, hopeless humorists, make-believe comrades, ill-equipped spouses by some arranged marriage improvising some mutual decision-making technique near physical — a closeness contracting through the time itself of this clearing they had accidentally gained as representatives of their nation. He spoke of the fossil beds here, he was asking if the white race talk meant really the fossil subject — was that what was coming up in her mind? The fossil record? With its proof not so much of Darwin’s bleak rightness as of Charles being himself a child of, even incarnation of, the intelligent designer.
Smiling, perhaps somewhere in pain, she all but loved his vulnerable thought, this man. Yet now this opponent of hers, this man of color, he…he spread his arms to the trees, the sky, the nation, a mute speech all but sweeping away whatever truly had brought him here today. And her. With a new in-and-out, back-and-forth field of time whose very quality was to grasp a future.