I felt embarrassed about losing the trail. Martin Cranmer was right about my woodsmanship; I was a Chicago boy through and through, awkward and top-heavy in the woods. What’s more, it was no mean feat for me to even enter a forest after the Argonne. I had worked on that in Michigan, taking long walks alone in the woods near Ann Arbor, even if I had to get boozed up to do it; it wouldn’t have done for a grown man to spend the rest of his life getting the tremors every time he was surrounded by trees, afraid the next snapped twig would be followed by the bark of a machinegun nest opening up. By and by it had gotten better.
I thought about Cranmer crouching in the trees near the burntdown house. Or was that a conceit on my part, imagining Martin had to crouch to avoid my notice? But then, Lester hadn’t seen him, either. Dora had not seemed to like Cranmer very much. Had she gotten an extra earful of gossip about him when she was in town?
While I was musing on the war, Martin and Dora, I worked at removing a sticker that had gone deep into the heel of my hand. All I did was drive it deeper; I would have to dig for it later with whiskey and a pocketknife.
When I looked up, I saw that I had lost the trail again.
This time was worse because I had no idea how long it had been since I went astray. I turned around 180 degrees and marched with my eyes fixed on the forest floor, hoping I would recognize the trail again when I crossed it. A distressing amount of time passed before I noticed a recession and turned right, praying it would start to look path-like. It did.
I stopped and crouched down on my heels for a moment to rest. I took a long, cool swig from my canteen, delighting in the taste of the iron. I thought back to my days in Glastonbury, England. Somerset County, where clotted cream on a scone was the culinary equivalent of a naked girl in a field of wildflowers.
I had worked several weeks for the gardener at the Chalice Well. Less for the money than for an excuse to linger around that odd little town. The spigot in the well had been made in the shape of a lion’s head, and the water had been clean and cold and rusty, just like the water out of Magi Rock. There was a cat that used to nose my hand as I weeded or pruned, the cat the girl I was sleeping with called Bully because it bore the marks of so much fighting. My own wounds had still been fresh then, particularly those inside, but the waters of the well had helped to make me whole. I believe that. And I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something to the stories about that place. I met other veterans there, too; the Chalice Well called the walking wounded to it. I had been twenty then, and I had liked to imagine the waters of the spring below running over the bones of Arthur and Guinevere, bringing their strength to those who needed it. Twenty years old and through with God—whose ears I believed had numbed with too much prayer, or deafened from the noise of shelling—I had asked that place to heal me, and it had.
Mostly.
This forest was a place, too, the way Glastonbury had been a place.
There was something powerful here, something beyond the reach of lightbulbs and combustion engines.
It was soon after I got going again that I began to feel watched.
I stopped.
It was around five o’clock. The day’s heat had reached its zenith and was easing off at last. The shadows had just begun to stretch. The feeling that I was being supervised was so intense it made the back of my neck feel warm.
I stopped and opened my mouth, which I often did to help my blighted hearing. I adjusted my glasses. I even tried to engage my nose. Nothing moved. I heard only the cruder noises; birdsong and the screeching of a squirrel warning its neighbors, whether about me or something else, I did not know. I smelled the stone-littered, black soil of the forest, how fecund it was. Trees in all their variety pushed sap, and summer flowers peddled their fragrances to the summer air; the drought that was parching half the state had not come to Whitbrow, as if the tops of these trees gouged the rain clouds and bled them out before they could save the farms over the county line.
I started walking again, minding the diminished undergrowth that comprised the trail, but keeping part of my awareness on the forest around me.
“Goddamnit, someone’s out there,” I mouthed. No one of my senses reported the presence; I simply knew I was not alone.
Could it be one of the pigs?
No. Pigs were not subtle. Pigs did not stalk.
I would have to turn around soon if I wanted to be home by dark, but I was not ready to turn around yet. Some part of me craved confrontation with whatever was out there.
Not far off to my right, crows called and took to their wings.
There it is; we have something.
“Salutations!” I called out.
Was it Cranmer? I didn’t know the man well enough, after all, to know what sort of monkeyshines he was capable of.
“Martin?”
A tardy crow took off from the brush to join its fellows.
Crows don’t spook easily.
“It is I, Nanook of the North, and I come in peace,” I said.
That was when I saw him.
The boy stepped into view. A thin, pale mulatto just entering puberty. I knew this because the boy wasn’t wearing pants. Just a dirty shirt that stopped at his navel.
“Hey there!” I said. “Are you alright?”
The boy said nothing. Just stood there with one hand on a tree, looking intently at me.
“Where are your pants, my friend?”
Silence.
“Fine, that’s fine,” I said, turning my gaze from the boy and continuing down the path. The boy kept his distance but kept pace with me. It was clear that he had not come forward because he had been discovered; it was simply time for me to see him.
The two of us walked for a moment silently, the other keeping about twenty yards off the trail.
I spoke.
“We can play this way if you like. You be the naked lad of the woods, and I will be the dressed man of the trail. Is it that you own no pants, or do you reject the idea of pants altogether? I can’t say I blame you. It is a hot day. Perhaps, if I had any sense, I would remove my pants and cool off a little. The thing is, I know I would feel embarrassed. But look at you; you don’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. I envy you that. Waving your pecker about in the breeze like a primal man, that’s first-class.”
No effect.
I stopped walking now, and so did the boy. I took a big, burlesque step to see if the one in the trees would mimic me, but the other stood still. Another clownish step, and a third, daring the apparition, but it did not move, not until I got fed up and started walking down the path again.
The boy caught up to me easily and regained his measure.
What in hell does he want?
I remembered a French poilu who called one light-skinned mulatto gravedigger café au lait during those bleak days of the Meuse offensive, how I had laughed with the other soldier just to have someone to laugh with. Besides, café au lait would be shoveling dirt over our blanched faces soon enough. Café au lait. It occurred to me to shout that at the boy who was stalking me now, and I felt disgusted with myself. How easily the paint of civilization peels off with a little bad weather.