“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Cheryl said.
“You have to let me confront things on my own terms,” she said.
The naked woman was running deeper into the woods, and the man was staring up at Cheryl.
“Hey!” the naked man said to Cheryl, clothes clutched to his crotch. “Aren’t you in my yoga class? Charlotte, right? Or Charlene?”
Cheryl left them all there shouting and tried to find a path without people. She followed the curve of the valley and then ascended on the far hills. Bright lichens covered everything.
Before Paul there had been Theodore, and before Theodore there had been Christopher, Jeremy, Karl, Andy, and Abraham. And there was another horrible line of them waiting in the future, with even worse names like Kevin and Camden. She could feel all of them groping her with endless clammy palms.
That was not to let women off the hook, especially not mothers like Paul’s, who would back her against the kitchen sink, stab a finger into one of Cheryl’s ovaries, and ask, “When are you going to stop letting these go to waste?”
The sun broke through a fist of clouds. Cheryl was looking up at the treetops when she felt a stick smack against her shin. “Shit!” she yelled.
A small girl and her even smaller brother were standing in front of her. The boy was whirling a stick around and making zapping noises with his mouth. The girl was staring up at Cheryl with a broken stick in her hand and a pout on her face.
“You broke my wizard stick,” the girl said.
“And you said the s word,” the boy added. He whacked his sister’s jacket and said, “Shazam!”
The girl didn’t acknowledge her brother. She kept looking at Cheryl and made her eyes start to water.
“Okay, okay,” Cheryl said. She walked into the woods and tried to rip a thin branch off a sycamore. It clung surprisingly to life. Eventually she just picked an appropriate-sized stick off the forest floor, which the girl grabbed without even a thank-you.
“You want to see a Death Fire Spell? I’ll show you a Death Fire Spell!”
The two ran off down the path. Cheryl was feeling tired and leaned against a large tree with dark red leaves. Maybe Paul could be the end, she thought. She did love Paul during certain hours of certain days. How many hours did you have to love someone to be in love?
She felt something crawling on her neck. Ants poured out of the bark.
Cheryl ran up a pathless hill, swinging her arms around to ward off branches and small plants. She thought if she got to the top she would be able to spot Paul.
There was a plastic bag full of Chunky soup cans tied up at the overlook. The large rocks were piled up with deep cracks, and Cheryl wondered what kinds of beasts or snakes might leap out at her. She climbed to the top of the rocks and looked out across the valleys and toward the shrunken town. Autumn was spreading with crackling orange and red leaves, like the path of a teenage pyromaniac. There was even a little house ablaze on the side of the hill, smoke worming toward the clouds. Through breaks in the trees, she could see fire trucks the size of toys racing up the slope.
“My cans!”
“What now?” Cheryl said, turning. A man covered in dirt and bits of dead leaves was crawling out of a crevice. He crouched on the rocks and thrust his hand toward her. Where did they keep coming from?
The man was holding out a rusty blade. His face was one giant beard with eyes attached.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“My cans,” he said, a little sadder now.
She looked over at the sack of canned goods hanging from the tree. The man was inching toward her across the massive rocks.
“I don’t want your stupid cans or anything else,” she said.
The man made small swipes with the knife.
She pulled the bag off the branch and swung it at the bearded man. It hit him in the knee, and he let out a loud growl before tumbling off the rock.
Cheryl looked down at where the man had fallen and saw bits of blood on the rocks. The sun was beginning to go down, and his body was mostly in shadows. It was very quiet. The man’s hands twitched their last twitches. A bird watched with a cocked head from the neighboring rock.
“Cheryl!” a voice said down the hill. Of all people, it had to be Paul.
Cheryl gazed down into the crevice where the man had come from. She could lower herself down there with ease, live a new life in these woods.
Paul was working his way up the hill. Cheryl stood there at the peak. It was another in an unending succession of situations in which she had no interest in learning what it was she was required to do.
THE DEER IN VIRGINIA
Or take the day my father handed me his glass of lemonade and reached for the rifle. My mother had gone inside to fetch a tray of crackers. My father’s hands no longer worked well, and he asked me to pump the gun. I did so as silently as I could.
“Watch this,” he said into the chamber as he held it against his shoulder with both hands.
It was his birthday, and the backyard was drunk on the green nonsense of spring. Below us, a group of deer nibbled on my mother’s daffodils. Suddenly they became as stiff as cardboard cutouts. The rifle was only an air rifle, my present to him that day. It came with a sandwich bag of silver pellets. Deer were everywhere in Virginia. They had been my whole life. When I was a child, I would watch my father hurl baseballs at the deer in our yard as I ate my cereal. Now his pitching arm ached, and the only thing he wanted for his birthday was a BB gun.
I had returned to town because it was all I had left. Everything else I’d lost or had sneaked away in the night: my friends, my job, my apartment in the city, and you, my almost wife.
My father only wanted to drive the deer back into the woods, but when he fired, the pellet rode a gust of wind into the largest deer’s eye. This sent it frantically sprinting into the trunk of an old oak tree. The body dropped into the mulch beside the tree trunk where, growing up, I had hidden cigarettes and cheap beer. The others leapt away in different directions. The sunlight was peeking over the distant hills and into our eyes.
Or else another time, when you and I were fighting on a four-hour drive through West Virginia in the rain. We were back together for what I thought would be the time that lasted, but along the way things had collapsed again. You had a blue scarf tied around your throat and the window down three inches to let out your cigarette smoke. We were fighting over something one of us had said. I was driving, and you were turning up a country station, the only one that came in, as loud as you could when a small buck darted out from the trees. I swerved to dodge it and barely held on to the road. The car made its way in and out of the gutter and continued straight as if nothing had happened. You turned the radio off, and we were silent for a while before we both began to laugh. The storm was starting to peter out. We emerged from the shade of highway trees into fields of wheat and a bright sun that, for a brief second, made everything look as if it was wrapped in cellophane.
Then ten miles later, we stopped at a gas station because the car didn’t seem to be accelerating correctly. We thought maybe a tire had popped, but when we stepped out of the car, we saw the trail of red and fur and, underneath, the buck with its head twisted in the front axle, its wet body hiding behind the wheels like a playful child.
So many days seem to end this way: bewildered, standing in a town I do not know with a person who might as well be a stranger, and the windshield wipers flicking specks of rain against my cheek.