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Lucharte was confident that he was in purgatory, for it seemed ages ago that the mayor had stood at his door and had spoken of Oradour-sur-Glane. Ages ago that young Agnes had been lying in the Lapierre’s guest bed, covered in blood and forest. Events, it seemed, had passed in a flurry, but time had advanced, at the same time, quite slowly. He felt older for it. He wanted out of the quagmire, but there was nothing to do but approach the doctors gathered around, to speak, to inquire, to learn and move on.

The church looked pitiful from the front. Stone rising out of the ground, blackened, cracked, broken into pieces that lay scattered around the base. The smoke smelled of sulfur, and it tasted metallic in his mouth, a coin run along his tongue and the inside of his cheeks. It infiltrated his nostrils and his oral cavities. He wanted desperately for water to rid his mouth and nose of the taste.

The church’s innards were blackened ash. Remnants of beams and struts, butresses and icons burnt. And amidst the ashes, bone. The doctors were given pails of water, filled from the still-running fountain in the middle of the square. They doused the ash, plumes of smoke rising, pieces of flesh and wood casting into the air and settling on their brows and clothing. Hissing of cooling materials.

In the afternoon, with the burnt remains cool to the touch, and the town still smoldering, they removed bone after bone. Skulls were passed from doctor to doctor, and were placed into mass graves at the back of the church with the other bones. Scattered at the bottom of the piles of bone and ash found in the foundations of the church were personal artifacts. Rings and necklaces, eyeglasses and pipes. Hardly an identifying object amongst the group – only objects with no heirloom qualities, no family marks. The dead were not identified except by number. The skulls they pulled from the church were nearly four hundred. In other parts of the village, smaller groups of doctors and soldiers recovered remains from barns and farmhouses.

In the evening hours, it was reiterated that they must not share any details upon their return home, and the doctors were allowed to leave in their automobiles.

Lucharte, steeled against emotion, drove home and promptly fell into bed. He did not stir through the night, but slept quietly, deeply. In the early morning he awoke and walked to the café, where he had coffee and fell into a stupor from which he did not rise for more than three hours. A crowd had gathered within the indoor confines of the café to look upon Lucharte in the street, as he sat, hand on the coffee, staring into the empty cup.

When he felt quite finished with his thoughts, Lucharte left coins on the table, stood, and walked home. He tended to several patients during the day but was silent and removed. In the evening, he drank from a bottle of Bordeaux, and fell to a fitful sleep.

Haunted, he felt the stir of curtains in the wind. And a swinging open of his door. His closet, dark and gaping, became a portal through which one face after another emerged. The faces, white, floated in through the closet door and through the open window. The stairs creaked and bodies materialized below the faces. Their eyes were black. Their cheeks were hollow. He sat up in bed and did not move. He stared. And they stared back. Not a word was spoken. They were silent spectres, watching him, feeding off him. Looking through his body and into his heart. They pumped the blood from within him until his fingers and toes turned cold and his legs turned numb. His breath was visible.

The silence was palpable. The wind outside raised to a pitch and clattered against the windows. Rain fell and thunder pealed. The house shook in the thunderstorm and the rain drilled against the ceiling like hail on a winter’s day. He closed his eyes and counted to one hundred. Opened to find their eyes still staring at him. Their clothes flowing. Their voices silent, but their mouths open, howling.

In a violent rush of wind, the window slammed and the door pulled shut. And they vanished with a howl, this time, distinct and real, like a mourning dog in the hills. Behind them, only a whisper that lingered for minutes on end. He stood up and closed his closet door with a fright. And with a clatter and a bang, the thunder left, too, and ignited the sky. And at the window, hands pressed against the panes, Agnes. Howl on her face, cheekbones hollow, but eyes startlingly blue. Darkness again, a distant rumble, and light. And then, but a the ghostly imprint of a hand upon a cold window left upon the pane.

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The Veteran

He sat down with trembling hands and tore open a paper sealed together many years before – he held a hand to his mouth – silence, drifting through the room like smoke trailing upwards and across the sky, a million different fixtures of light – and he through and through – thought to himself – and he paused and closed his eyes and relaxed a bit, and his hands fell to the green stucco chair arms, stumbling, taken victim by an unkind world and the terror that was gravity as it were – and overhead, in the dark sky a plane flew its course – and a man held a scotch on the rocks to his lips – and tasted sweet sin – and with it resigned his heart – and a thousand miles high a satellite, foreign metals and bright shining crystals, beamed images into a home – where a lady was sitting with her son in her lap, and his mouth smacked open and shut – open and shut – as he chewed on gum obscenely – and in the big black box with the flat screen the face of a man who seemed only half real related tragedy and horror and depravity and starving and the alcoholics and the homeless and the bums and the greedy corporations and the wars and the bombs and everything forever plaguing anything at all to the families in their rooms – and the woman threw half a steak, and bread, and a salad – untouched – into the garbage – and she picked her whites with a toothpick that came from the forests in some country where the jungle grew thick as ants on a warm summer’s sidewalk in a town on a shore of a lake that stretches into the mountains with snow-covered hills – and all around was land – a land with beautiful mountains and aching hills, and flat plains that stretched on for miles – and somewhere, highway 95, a young man drove to Boston in a jalopy and parked in front of the recruiting station, where they moved men through in a hurry where out they left with pride-filled faces – and onto a boat where they sailed across an ocean to a land with accents and old churches and old houses and old cobblestone streets and fog and mist and celtic legends – where they met young women and drank in pubs and sailed across the channel – where they sat in a u-boat and shot their lives to hell – where shells went off all around and water splashed high and rocked the boats – and as the doors opened and bullets whizzed past his friend fell to the bottom of the sea – and they plowed through the countryside, with dead houses, and dead trees, and dead soldiers floating in flooded fields, parachutes still strapped to their backs – to a land where the sun never shone – and it was covered in soot from the flames and the bombings – where tommy’s put holes in the enemies shirts and a red flag waved on a building – and to home they went and saw their girls and everyone smiled real happy – and his wife was in the kitchen fixing a meal – and listening to a voice on the radio saying this and that about Iraq and the way that everyone opposed it – and a voice full of southern, laid back drawl and indifference spoke aloud about how he was a man of the people and that he never paid attention to polls and he told men to be good sports and carry on their daddies traditions – and so the men lined up at the recruiting stations, rain pouring on their heads – and they frowned at each other and lit cigarettes and dreaded to be pushed through – and when they came out it was into blinding sun and sand in their eyes – and a boy wakes up and realizes he’s a man – and a bullet strikes his heart and he drops dead – and the man looked up from his green stucco chair and muttered holy hell – and a tear dripped from his tired eye as he read the letter written in ’45 by a man he had known as Sarge – and his hands wept and his eyes they cried and he covered his hands with his face – and he sat sad and lonely and depressed and his wife hummed and hawed in the kitchen and he gave up – and he detests the southern president talking on the big black box and the way that he stands for nothing and far away in another land an American flag is burning.

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It is the first day of the ski season.  We have been doing dry-land training for weeks, and I could scream with joy when the snow covered mountain rises into my view.  It is fake snow, but Casey and I still bounce in the seats of our bus eagerly.  I clutch onto my ski poles, run my hands over the finger guard, and pull my backpack around my shoulders.  I swing my boots over the top of my bag, and pick up my skis.  As we sit on the lift I am giddy.  The snow on the ground is fake, and probably hard, but any skiing is better than no skiing.  I look at Casey and smile, he is pulling on his poles and lifting the bar.  “Let’s do it, man,” he says, looking over at me.

We tear down the mountain, following our coach.  The ski hill is covered in large rolls of icy snow.  The rolls are a result of snow making.  They haven’t groomed the trail yet, so they are spread out across the mountain where the snow has been dumped out of those big hoses lining the mountainside.  I crest one hill after another until I hit the ground, hard.  I can feel myself losing balance, my ski pulling out from under me.  It’s the ice.  I know it.  My legs splay and one foot rises up in the air.  I am on my back, looking up at the sky seconds before I crash face first, flipping in mid air.  My ski pops up and hits me in the mouth, my boots are still buckled in.  I slide for a bit and then come to rest at the base of another roll.  The team crowds around me and I taste blood on my lips.  Swell.

The attention is focused on me for a minute, and I can feel that little something inside of me dancing with pained glee.  Arla helps me stand up and brushes snow off my back.  Casey gives me a playful slap on the side of my helmet and all is well.  I choose not to exaggerate my injury.  I clear off my goggles and pull them over my eyes again.  “Let’s go,” I say, deciding that it would have been much better not to hurt myself at all.

The dining hall is unusually quiet.  A large piece of paper clings to a billboard when I walk in with Hazen.

“Due to yesterday’s events we will not be having class today.”

I am delighted.  A day off from class!  No responsibilities!  I think that, maybe Hazen, Casey and I can go skiing.  Maybe we can take Casey’s video camera and try to do some tricks in the woods behind the school.  Then I see Mrs. Weymouth.

Mrs. Weymouth, my old English teacher and the dean of students stands in the doorway, picking her nails.  Her eyes scan over the student body inside, who are whispering in hushed tones to each other.  Someone sobs.  A guy has his arm around a girl, comforting her.

“Mrs. Weymouth,” I ask, “what happened yesterday?”  I am speaking in hushed tones, conscious of the atmosphere inside the cavernous hall.

“Geoff,” Mrs. Weymouth sighs, “Hazen.”  Mrs. Weymouth says our names slowly, and she puts her arms on our backs and turns us away from the dining hall and the silent students inside.  “Last night, two of our students were killed in an accident.”

All I can say is oh my God.

“Oh my god.”  Hazen echoes my sentiments.

“Who was it,” I ask, not sure I want to know.

“Weston.  And Mike.  Mike D’Amico.”  Weston registers immediately but I am not sure who Mike is.  I do not want to seem rude and ask, my eyes drift to my feet.  Mrs. Weymouth is now sobbing.  “I’m so sorry to have to tell you guys.  It happened late last night, most kids didn’t find out until today.  It was just before curfew.  They were walking back from Irving when they were hit by a drunk driver.  The guy drove away but there were witnesses and they found the guy early this morning.”

I now remember seeing flashing lights on the road below campus the night before.  I remember walking back from the gym with Casey and wondering what had happened.  I can’t recall anything else though.  I don’t remember hearing kids cry or scream.  The lights, those cop lights, they had seemed so…inconsequential…and they still sort of did.  I’m not sure how to feel.  What are you supposed to do, how are you supposed to act when someone you didn’t really like dies?  I stand there dumb.  “Father Weymouth will be in chapel all day today if you need counseling,” Mrs. Weymouth says.  I feel a kick in my gut.  I don’t feel like skiing anymore.  Maybe I’m in shock.

Hazen is playing Sim City on Casey’s computer.  He just got it in the mail but his computer can’t play it.  I guess his computer doesn’t have the requirements.  Casey and I are sitting on the couch underneath Casey’s bed in his freezing cold single.  His fan is in the window, blowing cold air into the room on a January day.

“Casey, it’s freezing.”  I say.  Casey nods and closes the window.

I play with my hands and watch Hazen click on the mouse, directing roads and cities to be built, lives to spring up all over a city map on the screen.

We are waiting patiently for the memorial service, which is in fifteen minutes.  Some of my dorm mates don’t want to go.  “Why should I,” this kid, Bill, asks.  “It’s not like I knew the guy.”

I guess I’m going to go on principle.  I wasn’t friends with him, but I interacted with him, I saw him all the time.  I knew his girlfriend pretty well.  I would feel like an ass if I didn’t go.  So I get onto a bus into town, along with nearly everyone else from the school.

There are cameras everywhere.  We file into the church in the center of town and there are cameras everywhere.  Concord Monitor.  Manchester Citizen.  The Boston Globe.  I guess Weston and Mike’s deaths have made big news.  At this point I just want the assholes to go away.  They don’t care who died, I think to myself, they just care about getting the details everyone wants to hear.  How many kids were there, how they were crying and howling, how good Mike and Weston were, how their deaths were such a great tragedy.  I hang my head as I walk inside, I feel something tugging at the corner of my eyes.

James, a friend of mine from home, is in the church.  He is sitting in a pew as I walk in.  We catch eyes and I saunter over to him.  He went to Holderness for a year before leaving.  It wasn’t his thing.  But he knew Weston, they were pretty good friends.  His eyes are bloodshot.  “Fuck man.  This sucks,” is all he can say.

Everyone is so eloquent in their speeches.  I am near the back but I can see the podium, where one by one students, faculty, and parents stand up to talk.  Some of their speakers deliver short monologues.  Like our Athletic Director, Mr. Low.  He grips the podium and chokes back tears; “They were good boys,” he says.  I nod my head in agreement.  Some deliver long, rambling speeches.  Like Mr. Ford, the dean of faculty.  He stands at the podium, his tie loose around his plaid shirt and he rambles on and on about Weston and Mike, telling story after story.

There are sobs all around.  Everyone is crying.  Ali is standing at the podium, shaking.  She is trying to form words, she is trying to explain the fire in her gut.  She chokes on the words that are trying and come out, swallows and wails.

I choke back something.  Hazen has his head down.  Casey stares at the flowers arranged around the podium.  I think about how Weston was there one minute and gone the next.  I remember the last time I saw Weston, earlier on the day he was killed, in assembly, when the student body gets together.  I sat one row behind him, my feet propped up on the back of Ali’s seat.  He had been breathing.  His skin had been warm.

I think about Jason, a kid I went to elementary school with.  He had red hair.  He had a temper and he liked to call me a “flatlander” because my family was from Montreal.  I remember we weren’t always best of friends, but he did come to my birthday parties, I went to his.  I remember getting a call from my mom, telling me that Jason had taken a gun and killed himself in his old trailer home, a year after his dad had done the same.  I think about how I used to hang out with Jason, how he had blown his brains out.  How quickly life can leave you.  How sure we are that we will live another day.  There is nothing certain about life.

I cry.  My chest heaves, loud, dry sobs escape my throat and I bury my head in my hands.

Weston’s hockey and soccer jerseys are up on the wall of Bartsch, the athletic center.  They are retiring his number.  I am standing in the hallway outside the trainer’s office, surrounded by team photos and the pungent smell of hockey gear.  A year has passed since he died.  A year.

I remember the images on the news.  Two shoes on the road, and a blue Holderness baseball hat.  The one with a white H on it.  He’d been hit so hard that he had been knocked out of his shoes and into the snow bank which covered the sidewalk he should have been walking on, if only it had been plowed by the town.  Like they were supposed to.

I place blame on them.  I place blame on the drunk driver, now serving 38 years in prison on two counts of vehicular manslaughter.  I place blame on myself for not being friends with Weston.  He was a good guy, I tell myself.  I think about Outback.  I think I could have really gotten along with him if we’d been hiking in the woods together, devoid of cliques.

His jersey is all that’s left of him for me to see.  His number on both jerseys is white.  It’s a number four, like the tattoo Sam carved into himself on the fifth day after he died.

Sometimes I wish life was like a good movie or a book.  I wish everything could make sense.  I wish everything could be coherent and spelled out clearly for me.  I wish I could grasp a sense of order and put it in my pockets to carry around like a trusty paperback.  I sigh and give in to the fact that sometimes life doesn’t make sense.  That some things just don’t add up.  That life is confusing and disorienting.

The night is cold and the air is quiet.  I can see my breath, can’t feel my hands.  I trudge through the snow, forging a path towards the road.  The snow bank is still there, rising up out of the road like a tiny mountain of white ash.  I take a deep breath and look at the stars.  The moon hangs lazily above the clock-tower watching over the college in town.  I am overwhelmed and I lie down on the snow, my hands behind my head.  It is freezing, I can feel the snow against my bare back.  I stick the bouquet of flowers into the snow.  They sit alone in the cold air, trembling.

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THE MAPLE TREE

In the small town where he lives there is his house.  The house stands on a hill on the side of a road that is paved but old, with cracks running down the middle of it and the lines faded, no longer yellow but pale, nearly white.  And behind this house there is a tree, its branches gnarled and its trunk full of holes from woodpeckers and the insects that live deep within its wide confines.  And on this day the tree is dying in the early throes of autumn, its leaves turning yellow and orange and red well before the others that crown the hills surrounding the town.  And in the yard the grass sways in the wind which comes, blustery, from the north.  And in the sky the clouds are gray, threatening rain.

He wears a black peacoat and a Red Sox cap which is angled to the right and rests carefully on the top of his head, his brown eyes not hidden, but bright in the light of the fading day.  On his feet he wears sneakers and they are intertwined with her sneakers, which are red, low-top Converses.  She is a brunette and her hair hangs about her shoulders.  Her nose is strong and her eyes are blue, her eyebrows thin and her cheeks red from the wind which kisses her tiny ears and makes them cold.   Her head lies on his chest, a book rests by his side, its pages crumpled from extensive use.

From the base of the tree they can see the town which is just settling in for the evening.  Smoke rises from the brick fireplaces that cap the colonial houses which surrounded the small green where they used to graze cattle but which is now only occupied by benches with peeling green paint.  They lie and say not a word as the leaves from the dying tree play hide-and-go seek in the folds of their pants and dance across the lawn which is neatly trimmed, the grass soft, like a carpet underneath them.

They had said what they must, but neither had any desire to leave.

She considers where she had come from and where she was going to go.  She remembers her first day of school and the terror that accompanied it.  And the brown haired boy who became her best friend.  She recalls swinging together at recess, every day.  She remembers swinging in the rain.  And in the snow.  And she remembers sadness because one day the snow was so high that they could not swing.  She thinks of their first kiss, in sixth grade.  They are sitting on the tennis court and the recess bell has rung.  The kids are heading back inside and they are facing each other, hand to hand, knee to knee, lip to lip.

She reminds herself of their first fight, in ninth grade, when Mandy Edwards said she had seen him kissing another girl.  She remembers his denials, his attempts to kiss her.  She remembers running home and ignoring his calls.  She was angry.  When they finally spoke he had told her, sternly, that she needed to trust him.  Who do you know better, he had said, me or Mandy?  Who’s always there for you, he asked.  And she had agreed that it was he.  And she remembers prom.  And the carnation she wore on her wrist and the tuxedo he wore, with white trim and a black bowtie.

He thought of the day he had snuck out of the house, just to watch television with her.  Thought of his mother’s anger that he had climbed out the window in the evening.  He recalls their first kiss.  They were sitting on the tennis court.  It was a sunny spring day, it was baseball season and he was wearing his baseball cap with the floppy, cheap brim folded so that it resembled the roof of a house.  He remembers that he moved his head to the right and ran into her nose.  He thinks that they laughed and then they looked into each other’s eyes and they kissed and he remembers her lips tasted like cherry Chapstick.  He remembers the time she got drunk at a party and another guy tried to kiss her and he pulled her away from the guy and held her close, her head against his chest and he recalls that he screamed and cursed, and that the guy, with his long, brown hair and his wild, drunk eyes, walked away.

And he remembers that they went to a party down the street from his house and they got tired of the company and it was raining outside and they didn’t care.  They ran through the streets in their bare-feet, carrying their shoes in their hands.  He remembers that they ended up in his backyard, on the lawn, beneath the tree with the gnarled branches and the rotten trunk and they had kissed.  And they had felt for each other in the dark and they had made love for the first time.  And with a knife that he stole into the kitchen for, they carved their initials into the trunk, in the pouring rain.  And he recalls the day he received his letter of college admission from Duke.  And he remembers staring at it several weeks later and staring at the letter of admission from the University of Vermont.  And he remembers thinking, how do I choose?

And she recalls that she cried as they sat on the bank of the river on a sunny, April day.  And that she told him she wanted what was best for him.  She said, I am just a silly girl, I am not your life.  And he had tried not to cry, his lips trembling, his jaw hard, his eyes dark.  And he had said, damnit, and walked away.  And stood with his feet in the river, his feet in his shoes and the water lapping at his calves which were covered by jeans which were soaked.  And she remembers that he stared at the opposite bank for a long time and she feels like she held her breath.

And he knows that he said to her, after a long time, I think I have to go.  And he remembers that she said that she knew.  And she had stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist and she had kissed his neck and whispered in his ear, I’ll always love you.  They had stood, for a long time, with both their feet in the water, watching the opposite bank.  Watching the wind rustle the trees, watching the sun as it slowly moved through the blue ocean of sky that was painted above their heads.  He knows that he said that he loved her and he knows, though he hates to admit it, that he then cried.

The tree sighs.  Its branches creak in the wind and as the wind calms down the tree settles into the ground where its roots are firmly set.  She recalls that a tree can stand a hundred feet tall and its roots can stretch for hundreds more, a wide circle that keeps the tree where it belongs.  And after a storm, when she is wandering through the woods behind her house and she comes across a tree that has fallen she looks at the roots and she is sad because she wonders what the tree could have been.  And she wonders whether the trees around it are aware of its death, of its uprooting and disappearance.  She wonders, do trees mourn the loss of a kindred?  And she likes to think that the trees go on living and don’t stop to mourn too long.

It is nearly dark.  The sun has set behind the mountains and the sky is the color of the leaves in the dying tree.  The lights are on in town.  The shops are closed for the evening and his mother’s car is in the driveway.  She stands up and he watches her movements.  His hand drops off her leg and onto the lawn and he is aware that she is not going anywhere.  She is quiet.  He stands behind her and with one hand he touches her waist and with the other he touches her fingers, which he realizes are tracing the faded letters they once carved in the tree.  And he is sad because he is going.  And he is sad because she is not.  And he is sad because the tree will soon be gone.

An orange tag flutters in the wind, tied around the trunk so that the tree-cutters know to take it down with their orange chainsaws.  And when it is gone he imagines that it will be turned into wood chips but he hopes that it is planed into boards that will go into a house, and that one day, the owners of that house will look at the board in their floor and notice the initials and content themselves with the belief that the couple who had carved those initials ended up happy.  And he holds hope even as the rain starts and the color disappears from the sky and she turns and faces him and he kisses her and feels her warm tears on his shoulder and she whispers, I love you, into his ear.

And she thinks as they stand under the tree, that maybe roots grow as life moves on like a bright light across the night sky.  And that those roots grow not hundreds of feet but hundreds of miles and that they always have a trunk, a base to return to.  And she thinks that that is a warm thought.  And through her tears, with the rain slicking her hair and the air cold and her breath showing in the fading light she smiles.

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The town resided on the banks of a large river that wound it’s way leisurely through the valleys that lay between the green mountains that burst into life every April and died every November.  The river ran continuously.  Not even the oldest resident of the town could recall a summer when drought had rendered the river empty of water.  The town did not lie on one bank of the river, but both.  On the left bank lay the downtown district that consisted of several blocks of brick buildings and storefronts.  Beyond the downtown district there nestled residential neighborhoods where the streets curled around large elms and maples and in the summer the children rode their bikes and played football in their yards.  The left bank sloped gently up from the riverbed and crowned at a small hill which rolled to the north.  On the top of the hill there was an obelisk two hundred feet tall that paid tribute to a battle of the revolution.  On the top of the hill there lounged the stately manors; old, white colonial homes with picket fences, ancient maples and every Christmas, candles in all the windows.  They congregated comfortably along one long street, and in the middle of the street, at the very apex of the hill, there sat an old, white church with a steeple that nearly rivaled the height of the monument.  The graveyard of the church was nearly three hundred years old.  The stones were worn away by the years and many of the names and dates were no longer discernible.  In the fall, photographer’s flocked to the church because in the graveyard there were many majestic maple trees which burst into flame come October, their leaves as orange as the sun, as red as blood, as yellow as a canary.

The right bank of the river was narrow.  The valley floor sustained only a few blocks of residences before sloping steeply onto Mount Tabor, a monadnock which rose to thirty-five hundred feet.  The top of Mount Tabor was nearly bare and extremely rocky.  The only plants that grew on its cold, windy peak were tundra plants, arctic wildlife.  Small, purple flowers that bloomed in July and gave way to the first frosts in September.  Wheat-like grasses that climbed to a height of ten centimeters.  Moss that clung onto the rocks.  Signs at the top warned hikers that the government protected the peak as it was an endangered wildlife environment.  It was prohibited to step anywhere but on rock, failure to do so could land a heavy fine.

The residences that bordered the base of Mount Tabor followed its contours until it’s base swung away from the river, a mile upstream from downtown.  Here the narrow valley gave way to a four-lane highway with a speed limit of sixty-five and, approaching the highway lay a strip of box stores, Wal Mart and Home Depot, Sears and Best Buy, McDonald’s and Burger King.  Behind the box stores lay the poorer district of the town, trailer homes and old Victorian mansions turned into multiple family apartment buildings, the windows black with dirt and the wood siding tearing off and in need of paint.  The trees in this part of town seemed less beautiful than those on the hill where the battle monument stood proud and the church bells rang every Sunday.  In April their leaves seemed to bloom late and in the fall they died brown and shriveled, not orange and red and yellow.

Downriver from the town, across rolling hills and farmland, was Massachusetts, and the towns of Watertown and Mayfield and Lewisburg.  Upriver lay Hampton and Saint Martin and Waterbury, small hamlets and towns that hugged the river’s banks.  And further, to the north, beyond the headwaters of the river, lay Burlington and Montreal.

His parents had migrated from Montreal before he was born.  His mother worked at a local factory that made plastic molds for car parts.  She worked nights and when she came home in the morning she collapsed into bed and slept until noon, when she would rise and head out the door to work up on the hill at the large old colonials, doing garden-work and house cleaning.

She was lovely, her cheeks were flush with color from the cold in the winter and tan in the summer from her work in the yards.  Her eyes were shaped like almonds and were green like the grass that grew in his backyard.  Her eyebrows were thin and she plucked them every once in a while to maintain their perfect balance between being too thin and too large.  Her hair was red, but not fire red.  It was like the color red on a faded, old crayon drawing, or the letters on the back of an old fishing boat, it was a muted red and it was curly and full of bounce.  It was long and hung down her back, resting between her shoulder blades.  Her nose was straight and her lips were bright red, like the color of rose petals that glistened in the rain.  When she smiled her mouth did not curl open but burst open like a spring bud, a large, happy smile that revealed her terribly white teeth.  Her neck was slender and it rested on shoulders that were strong and wide.  She stood at an average height but she had long legs with muscular calves.

She had grown up in Montreal proper, not far from the centre-ville where skyscrapers were stacked like giant dominoes that seemed to sway in the wind as she watched from the balcony of her apartment that she shared with her two parents and her three brothers and one sister.  Her father had owned a traditional French restaurant in Westmount that did not do very well.  It never succumbed to bankruptcy but it never made any money either, rather it floated like a dead weight, nothing under and nothing over.  It was a tidy little restaurant with ten or twelve tables and a short bar that was placed at the back, by the kitchen doors.  The restaurant walls were white and lanterns hung six on each side and the bar was painted black, as were the tables which hid under white tablecloths.  He had named it La Montagne, for Westmount rested against the base of Mount Royal and rose up onto its sides where the wealth of Montreal lived in large mansions with courtyards and tennis courts and swimming pools, houses that scaled the steep walls of the mountain, the real estate becoming greater in expense as the altitude of the properties increased.  The restaurant served crepes sallees and foie gras, poutine and smoked meat, poulet roti and gratinee, steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes, steak hache and steak marinated in red wine and ratatouille and sole and smoked salmon and large baguettes that came to the table in a basket, cut into pieces.  The wine list was not substantial but her father had prided himself on the quality of the selections he had made and did not concern himself with the small selection.  It was a good restaurant located in an area with many good restaurants and it was tough to distinguish it from the one next door or the one down the street.

Her mother had lived at home and was busy with the duties that five children provide.  In the morning she woke up first and put on coffee and bacon and eggs and toast.  She would wake her children and hurry them into the shower.  She would hustle them to school and shop for groceries.  She would prepare dinner in the afternoon and clean the apartment and take care of the bills.  She had friends but she did not often have the opportunity to see them, for they lived all over the city and she hardly had the time to take the metro to the forum let alone to Lavalle or Dolare des Ormeaus.  She was alone at night, as her husband worked at the restaurant, and she regretted that she had to discipline the children by herself when they grew rowdy and broke a lamp or came home from school with bad grades.  She feared that she was a mean, haggard old lady in their eyes and that her husband was fun-loving and exciting.  She imagined that she saw in their eyes a smile when their father had a night off and that she detected the hint of a frown when they learned that their father would not be home.  She worried herself ragged and worked herself to the point that she would collapse in bed at the end of the night, her head aching, her eyes drooping and her feet sore from walking and standing on them throughout the day.

His father was a tall man with wide shoulders and a barrel of a chest.  He had dark hair that once sat long, combed to the sides but now was receded to the point where he was nearly bald.  It rose along the sides and up through the middle until the crown of the head where it begin to wear thin and die.  His eyebrows were heavy and thick and his eyes were sunk deep into his head, they were dark, so dark because of the hollow, that at night, at the dinner table, it was difficult to see them at all, just the outline of two round holes sunk between his long, thin nose.  His neck was thick and his arms were muscular, rippling through his tee shirts.  He was a workhorse of a man who enjoyed nothing more than a beer in his hand and football on the television at the end of a long day of work at the building site.              His father grew up in La Prairie, just across the river from downtown.  When he was growing up it was not a suburb full of houses with the same floor plans and two cars in every driveway but a small town that rested on the edge of the Saint Lawrence and at the doorstep of great cornfields that blanketed the land south towards Vermont and New York.

His father grew up on skates.  He and his friends would leave school in the afternoons when the sun was already beginning to set and the shadows were already growing long over the fields that hibernated desolately in the winter, with snow blowing over the wasted stalks, and they would skate on the stream that meandered through farmer Petain’s property.  The ice was not smooth but granular, it was filled with cracks and bumps and holes and rocks that stuck out in the shallow recesses of the stream.  But there was a large round oval area where in the summer the water pooled deep and in the winter they would play hockey, their boots set up side by side as goals.  They played two on two and three on three.  They played until they could not see the puck and then they retired home, walking across the fields, laughing and shoving each other into the snow drifts.

The house his father grew up in resided on the outskirts of La Prairie.  His father’s old man was a butcher who operated his boucherie on the main square, across from the old church that was built in 1824 and was capped with an iron steeple that clanged when the bells rang twenty-four times per day.  The boucherie was a small shop.  The storefront consisted of a display case packed with sausage and sandwich meats and legs of lamb.  The back room consisted of a long table that was used as a cutting board, it was bloody and on the floor sat chunks of meat and fat that had been cut off and deemed unusable by his old man.  There was a freezer in the very back in which, on hooks, there hung all manners of meat.

His father’s old man would come home at the end of the day and wipe his boots on the stiff rug that lay on the doorstep.  He would hang his coat and hat on a hook in the mudroom and he would sit in front of the fire at night, listening to the hockey game on the radio and in the summer, listening to the comedies that ran on CBC until the early hours of the morning.  The shows usually involved a husband and wife or two best friends.  The two best friends would work at a factory together and at the end of the day they would drive around town and stop at bars and then get yelled at by their wives until the wife was chasing her husband around the room, waving a spatula.  The husband would be a jolly but clumsy fellow who worked hard, played hard and at the end of the day, found himself at the mercy of his wife, who was witty and made smart remarks about her husband to her friends and at the end of the day, to her husband who would smart from the wounds she inflicted but they would always, always make up.  His father’s old man enjoyed the shows because they entertained him and they moved quickly and he didn’t have to bury his nose in a book, which he thought took too long and tired his eyes.

His father and mother worked hard, but they did not earn a great deal of money.  They often found themselves short at the end of each month and the mortgage on their house continued to be a burden fifteen years after they had taken it out.  The front yard was impeccably trimmed for he mowed the lawn once a week so that he could earn ten dollars a week in allowance.  The allowance disappeared nearly immediately as he always desired something, whether it be a new album or a book or simply a meal out with his friends at the diner that sat on the corner of the steel bridge that crossed into the center of town which lay on the left bank.  The garden was well maintained by his mother, who worked throughout the weekend at other folk’s homes only to step out of her car in the late afternoon, drink water from the tap in the kitchen and then labor for two hours among the tulips and hydrangeas and lilac trees that never stopped growing up and out.  The paint on the house was peeling and his father knew that it needed to be taken care of but said they didn’t have the money.  And in the back of the house, next to his window, was a large maple tree with leaves that bloomed green in the spring and died yellow and orange and red in the fall.  It seemed to him to be the only maple tree in their neighborhood that didn’t succumb to the expectation that it turn dull brown in the fall rather than the brilliant firework-like explosion which ushered in it’s last days.

___________________________________________________________________________________

ONE

He enjoyed his first kiss.  It came when he was fourteen and sitting on a bench at the middle school, overlooking the river which was pregnant with snowmelt.  He remembers that she was wearing a sweatshirt with her hood up.  Her auburn hair was tucked behind her head, but a stray strand lounged upon her cheek.  Her lips glistened with gloss that she had applied five minutes earlier in the bathroom while he had been waiting to meet her outside the front entrance, by the school buses.  He remembers that the kiss was wet, and he remembers that he had been mortified that he would move in the wrong direction and that they would bang foreheads or rub noses.  He was horrified of a sudden, awkward pause and he remembers that when he first kissed her, he opened his eyes.  He watched her as he kissed her and he noticed that even though her eyes were closed, he could see that they were moving back and forth rapidly.  He remembers that she then hugged him and they held hands and they walked around the soccer pitch.  He remembers warning her of puddles and helping her step around snow that still hung on desperately in the angry, warm throes of the afternoon sun.

He enjoyed his last kiss also.  He remembers that they had walked back to the hotel from dinner.  It was snowing and the streets were empty.  He recalls that it reminded him of the final scene in It’s A Wonderful Life, when George is running through the streets of town, cheering because he has just been saved by an angel, and the snow is thick on the roads, so thick that it looks like deep ruts have been carved into a white cake.  In the windows of white houses, he recalls that candles sat and flickered.  And the trees along main street had been decorated with Christmas lights, strung up the trunks and along the branches.  They had put a fire on in their room and he had made love with her under the covers, the fire casting tall shadows on the walls.  As they lay in bed afterwards, she with her head on his chest, her chestnut hair running the length of her back, he had kissed her on the forehead and on the eyelids and on the tip of her gently sloping nose.  And then he had kissed her lips and she had kissed him back with the zeal of a teenager.  Then they fell asleep with the fire still in the fireplace, and the lights still on the trees outside, the snow gathering layer upon layer on the windowsill.

She had died that night without warning.  The doctor said it was a brain aneurysm.  He said that they sometimes happen and that she probably never knew anything was wrong.  One second you’re there, he said, and the next you’re gone.  You aren’t aware of any pain.  You aren’t aware of anything at all.  She didn’t even wake up, I’m sure of it, he said.

And now in town he was a source of enthusiasm for teenagers bedecked in gothic attire, their pants black and ballooning over their shoes, their eyebrows pierced, their noses pierced, their nipples pierced, their everything pierced and their hair black and their fingernails black and their Marilyn Manson posters resting on the wall, a corner torn, but not unintentionally, as if in a fit of rage over their teenage angst, they had unconsciously swung at it and in doing so, created a dog eared corner.  And when they got together and sat in their rooms, with their loud music blasting they talked about him and they said, man, that guy is one dark motherfucker.

He was a dark person in folklore only.  But this was because he was known as a recluse.  He was an urban myth, if the term can be applied to a small town in Vermont of hardly ten thousand people.  The teenagers would say, whispering, that they had once seen him in town, at the seven-eleven late at night, or at the Hannaford’s, buying groceries when they were working the graveyard shift.

He was well known to be an author, one who had achieved some success in his career and when he had married his wife, they had moved to his childhood town, and renovated an old mansion on a hill.  The mansion, in reality, was not a mansion but an old colonial, white clapboard, stone walls in the woods surrounding it, green lawn and a sprawling garden that his wife had tended to every day.  The truth was, many people still worked for him.  They kept up his garden, they mowed his fields, they helped him with his taxes.  He was not as reclusive as some believed, but the absolute truth was that he did not want to leave his house, for he did not want to abandon the comfort of his warm bed and his living room, filled with books and a large fireplace that reminded him of that last kiss, ten years in the past on a cool, snowy, Christmas eve.

It was nearly March.  Which meant that Spring seemed like it was close but was in fact miles away.  He thought, as he looked out the window, about how without fail, March was the snowiest of all the months.  The nor’easters would blow up the coast and rain cold, cold freezing rain on the Massachusetts coastal communities and heavy, thick, wet snow on Manchester and Concord and Hartford and fluffy, dry, cold-weather snow that piled up on the roads and the lawns and the roofs of the houses in Vermont and northern New Hampshire and Maine.  It was a grey day outside, much like any winter day, and in town, two miles away, he could see curls of smoke rising from the many fireplaces and wood stoves that Vermonter’s still used today.  He was standing at his living room window, looking out over the valley while behind him, on his television, CNN visited the news with the sound on mute.  A storm was coming in.  Ten to fourteen inches.  He padded across the floor in his slippers.  He walked past the stairs which led to a loft that hung over a third of the living room.  The loft was his reading nook.  Each of the three walls was covered in bookshelves and in the middle, right against the railing that looked out over the tall ceiling of the living room and the large bay windows that looked upon the valley and town, was his desk, upon which sat his computer, unused for many months.  He didn’t know what to write.

He walked past the stairs and through a door to the right of them, into the kitchen, where he set a pot to boil for tea and where his dog, Harvey, was resting against the stove, his nose buried in his white fur.  Harvey was a St. Bernard, a huge, hulking dog covered with inches-thick hair but he had the temperament of a big, cuddly teddy bear.  Harvey looked up from his sleep, heaved a sigh and slowly got up.  He stretched his legs and nudged himself into his owner’s legs.

His owner was standing by the stove, his hands on the knobs, twisting, his eyes staring at the pot which sat on top of flames that licked at its burnt black sides.  He was staring because he was worried.  He was worried because he had no ideas and no motivation.  His days now consisted of waking up late, letting the dog out to relieve itself, making breakfast, sitting in front of the TV, making lunch, taking a shower, jerking off, making dinner and watching TV.  Sometimes he would go up to the loft and sit at his desk.  He would write a page and then throw it away.  He wouldn’t throw it away, he would save it on his computer, never to look at it again, which was essentially as good as throwing it away.  None of it was worth saving.  What he wrote had no purpose, no motivation, there was no sense of direction.  He felt like his ideas were simply large circles, doing nothing but passing the same landmark time and again.  He always believed that he had already written what he was always commencing to begin.  So six out of seven days a week he would resign himself to nothing, and he would do nothing.

His publisher was constantly harassing him, whispering through his teeth on the phone that he had better get a move on it.  Or else, the publisher would say, the public will forget about you.  His kitchen table was covered with notes on god knows what.  Some of the paper was faded and yellowed, from years of resting untouched.  His phone had speed dial, but there was only one person on it.  The other numbers were emergency numbers, the fire department, the hospital, and the police.  They did not have 911 service in the town.

As his tea was heating up and as he was letting Harvey out to the yard the phone rang.  He hesitated in the doorway, caught between the cold and the wind that was picking up from the south, and the warm mud room.  He turned and strode to the kitchen and picked up the phone.  It was  her parents.

“How are you doing today, James?”  Her mother asked.

“Not too bad,” he said.

“Good.  Good.”  There was a heavy pause and an uncomfortable silence.  “We’re up in the area today.  In fact, we’re in town.  We were wondering if you would like to have lunch with us.”

It was already ten.  He had hardly woken as he had been growing accustomed to the warm sun filtering through his curtains before he got out of bed.  He hadn’t been to town for three years.  When he did leave his house, he drove through the mountains, usually to nowhere in particular.  He would wind up route 100, through the National Forest.  He would stop at the waterfalls that dotted the side of the road and he would stand at the base, leaning against the wooden railings that kept people from crawling all over them and falling and he would stare at the source, fifty feet up, a hundred feet up.  He would often stand at a waterfall for an hour or so and he would often close his eyes and he would often find that he had nearly drifted to sleep.  The rushing water soothed him and not only that, but it reminded him that life was bound to recycle itself, for water never went anywhere but to the ocean where it evaporated, entered the atmosphere and eventually, given time, worked its way back to that waterfall where he stood.

He would drive through the mountains.  His favorite time to do so was in the winter, in the early morning.  He would wake early, before the sunrise.  He would drive along the churning White River.  He would turn onto 100 at Stockbridge and he would drive along the mad river and he would wait until that magic moment when the sun was just peaking in the east and the top of Mt. Ellen, bald and snow covered, would suddenly turn pink in the morning sun and as soon as he saw the sunrise he would stop and pull his car to the side of the road.  He would sit in the drivers seat on warm mornings but if it was cold out he would step onto the dirt curb in his shoes and his jeans and his sweatshirt with a Red Sox cap on and he would watch as foot-by-foot the mountain would become pink and then red and then yellow with soft morning light.

He would do this maybe once a week.  He would drive an hour and a half north and then turn around in Waterbury and drive an hour and a half south.  Once each winter he would take the pass between Bethel and Richmond and he would watch the sun rise on the Adirondacks that sloped into the long, thin expanse of Lake Champlain, stretched out like a blue ribbon across the white winter landscape where it lay cushioned between Vermont and New York.

About twice a year he would venture to Montreal.  He would do what normal people do in the city.  He would get a hotel room, always the same, on the twenty-seventh floor of the Sheraton downtown.  He would go shopping.  He would eat at restaurants, his favorite being near the waterfront in the old city, on place Jacques Cartier.  He would go to a Canadiens hockey game like he used to do with his father growing up.  He would struggle to recall his college French.  His semester in France.  On his last day he would stop at Atwater Market, because Ben’s no longer existed, and he would buy a pound of smoked meat.

He did not get out often and he never went into town.  Her parents were aware of this.  They had, for years, been trying to coax him out of the house where he had fortified himself.  They nearly always, reluctantly, ended up leaving their hotel in town and driving up the hill.  They nearly always ate dinner with him, at his kitchen table, which he would clear of the papers.  He would light a large fire in the grand fireplace and they would drink two to three bottles of wine over the course of several hours.  They would speak of many things, what they were doing with themselves, how her father’s business was coming, whether James’ writing was progressing.  He usually sent them home with a draft so they could look it over and suggest changes to him.  They never spoke of her.  They would move to the living room and they would watch football on the television or he would put James Taylor on the turntable and they would talk but with comfortable silences.  When the warmth of the fire and Harvey’s hot breath on their feet eventually tired them out they would thank James and excuse themselves and leave.  But the next day, on their way out, they would always stop in for tea.

What surprised him was that the invitation to come to town was the first in years.  It was as though they had given up on their resignation, tired of his pity and sadness.  When his wife passed away, he had wallowed in sadness and he soon found that he grew tired of town.  He was tired of the inquisitive looks, the local storeowner who would lean over the counter as she rang him up and she would look him in the eyes and she would put her hand on his and say, how are you doing, with her head turned sideways and her eyes full of sincerity.  He grew tired of seeing people.  He used to walk through town with his head up and his wife invariably would be on his arm, her warm fingers full of life.  He found that after her death, he no longer wanted to keep his head up, instead, he watched his feet as he walked, his head down.  He would only look up to pay a bill, to say hello to an old friend who recognized his gait from a distance or to watch the river which ran through town as he stood on a bridge.  It was about a year after his wife’s death when he snapped.

He was walking through town.  It was snowing a light snow, it was late November and the cold weather had finally settled in.  The snow was brown with mud from car tires and on the sidewalks it was brown from people’s feet.  It was slippery and as he walked, head down, with a bag full of groceries, to his car, he fell.  He fell and hit the ground.  The food rolled out of his bag, oranges and bananas, ice cream and cereal, bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, which rolled into the road.  And he stared at the food on the ground.  Watched as a car hit the bottle of wine and shattered it.  It bled red on the gathering snow and his ears were cold.  He remained on the ground and then he cried.  And he closed his eyes.  He was embarassed.  He didn’t want anyone to see him crying.  He was afraid of his emotions, but he couldn’t stop crying.  He sat on the curb as cars drove by, he sat on the curb and ignored requests to help.  His eyes were soaked.  His cheeks were cold with tears that rolled down and froze in the biting wind from the north.  And after a long time he stood up.  And he bent down and picked his groceries up from the street and put them back in the plastic bag.  And then he walked back to his car.  And he got in and he turned off the radio.  And he drove to his house.  And he went directly to bed.  And he woke up in the morning, the sun coming through the windows, the snow melting on the roof, dripping onto the ground and he decided he did not want to go to town.

Her parents had called him.  And he had told them that he did not want to leave.  And they had said what he expected them to say.  You’re too young to resign yourself to a house.  You’re only twenty-six.  We’re worried about you.  And for four years they had tried to get him out of the house whenever they came around, but he refused.  And for four more they hadn’t even tried.  But again they were pushing and he didn’t know what to say as he stood with the phone cradled against his ear and the teapot whistling suddenly on the stove and he was aware that he had maintained a silence on the phone for a good while and he drew in a breath when her mother said, softly, as though she were speaking to a sleeping child, “James?  Are you alright?  What are you thinking?”  And he takes the teapot off the stove and he gropes blindly with his right hand for the cupboard where he keeps his tea.  And he can’t grab the cupboard and get to the tea and he finally says, “Damnit.”

And she breathes heavily on the line and waits.  “Should we come to the house and see you,” she asks.

“That would be fine,” he says, his fingers are still groping for the tea.  “When would you like to come up?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Okay.”  And he hangs up.  And he is frustrated and he grabs the box of tea he was looking for and he tosses it into the sink and curses and sighs and finds that he has walked upstairs and that he is in his bed and that he is the in the shower and he finds that he forgot to remove his boxers and they’re soaked because he’s sitting under the hot water and he curses again.  And he changes clothes after the shower and sits on the couch facing the front door and he waits for them to arrive, waits to hear the crunching of tires on snow.  He notices as he looks out the window, that the first snowflakes of the storm are beginning to fall.  The clock says ten-thirty-seven.  It is then that he hears Harvey barking and soon afterwards he hears the crunching of tires on cold snow and he stands up and he puts on his peacoat and he walks out the front door as they step out of their white SUV.

Two Shoes

Two shoes.  Two shoes lie abandoned on the blacktop at the bottom of the hill.  Two shoes on a cold winter night.  The stars are shivering in the sky, and he lies there, in the snow.  Quiet, not moving.  I wonder if he feels anything at all.  I wonder if he hurts.  I want to lie down next to him and listen to the cars whistle past on the road.  I want to know if he’s okay.

Sometimes I hope that I get shot.  Not shot as in, bang you’re dead, but shot as in, damn, that really hurt.  Something Monty Python-esque.  Just a shot in my back shoulder as I’m walking to 7-11.  Or I imagine getting hit by a car, just clipped at a high speed, my body sent flying onto the sidewalk, a crowd of pedestrians screaming for someone to call 911 for God’s sakes, and a kind brunette holding my hand.  It’s not that I want to die.  Sometimes I just want obscene amounts of attention.  I want to be ogled over.  I want to have Get Well Soon cards spread out across my hospital room, acres of them, from all of my distraught friends and the sad, stone-faced throngs of admirers in the parking lot beneath my hospital room.

I want to get hurt because I want to be helpless.  I want to have a condition that requires someone paying attention to me completely.  I want someone to laud my heroics.  I want them to forgive me for my mistakes and cry over the times they hurt me and didn’t treat me as well as I deserved.  It’s sick.  I know.  But I crave attention.  I want to be the center of it all.  I want to be the talk of campus for weeks.

I guess I’m being selfish.  Thinking like this.  After all, everyone wants attention, why do I deserve to revel in it more than others?  God help me, but there’s a little something (someone?) deep inside of me that celebrates when I get in trouble and dances with joy as I take a soccer ball to the nuts or slip and fall on the stairs at the bottom of my dorm in front of a large crowd.

And I like to think that little someone exists in everyone.  That all of us have a little someone or something in them, living only to suck up attention like a large black hole.  Me!  Me!  Me!  This creature screams enthusiastically.

The girls’ quad is covered in Frisbees.  And there are kids too, chasing the Frisbees, diving through the air, laughing.  There are baseballs too.  And gloves.  And soccer balls.  Everyone is having a good time.  My roommate Hazen, Casey, and I sit by the dining hall, which affords us a commanding view of the quad.  I spy Jenn Reilly and Justin Simon, squatting behind the faculty garden in the middle of the quad, their lips locking.  I can see Marta Heinen running (gloriously).  Mr. Ford is marching around, a smile on his face, plotting.  Plotting to catch someone doing something wrong, plotting to put an end to the fun.  Not that he wants to.  But it’s his job.

I finish my ice cream sandwich and grab my baseball glove.

“Hazen,” I say, nodding towards the quad, “we should go throw a ball.”

He nods and agrees, picking up his leathery glove, and shoving his fingers up inside it.  “Let’s do it,” he says, jogging.

We nudge our way into an opening and promptly begin to expand our territory, throwing the ball a bit farther after each catch.  Girls scatter out of the way, guys snarl at us and storm off.  We command attention, our tosses arcing gracefully through the purple sky.  The sun is a tiny orange globe swimming behind the tall maples which grace the edge of the quad.  The hum of cars on the highway below assails us.  A loud rumbling eighteen wheeler chugs by, heading north towards Franconia Notch, the White Mountains, the Northeast Kingdom and Canada.

Casey eventually rejoins us, adjusting his popped collar against his thick neck.  He brushes his dirty blonde hair out of his eyes and sits down on the grass (grooving). We don’t know when he smoked or where, but his eyes are bloodshot, and he’s eating a third (third!) ice cream sandwich.  Casey is stoned.

We like Casey.  He’s a good kid, and one of our best friends.  Okay, he is our best friend.  Hazen and I like to think of him as a brother.  We don’t really do anything apart.  We are on the ski team together, we live across the hall from each other, we take the same classes together, we skip classes together, and we eat together.

The grass is soft.  I enjoy lying in it, watching people as my baseball glove and ball lie at my side.  Music courses out of the speakers set in the middle of the quad, reggae, Bob Marley I guess.  Casey, Hazen and I watch as Ali Neal walks by, her hips swaying back and forth, her tan legs hardly covered in her very short shorts.  Weston stands next to her, his hand on the small of her back, laughing.

I’m jealous.  Mostly because Ali talks to me, which means that she likes me, right?  She’s popular, part of a separate social clique, most of whom don’t really talk to me.  They sort of just ignore me – us.  The exceptions to the rule are Gillian, a Canadian from New Brunswick who I have been friends with (and been in love with) since the first day of school, and Ali.  Ali is bubbly and excitable.  Her blue eyes glow with happiness and she always has a big wave and greeting for me whenever I see her.

In the competitive nature of boarding school a wave from Ali is more than a wave, a smile is more than a smile and a greeting is more than a ….well, you should be able to see what I’m getting at.  Holderness is a massive congregation of cliques and any cross-clique fraternizing is regarded as unusual to say the least.  It is somehow…special.

Yes, Ali is a jock, and a preppy.  And I am a shy kid.  Correction, we (Hazen, Casey and I) are shy kids.  And so it is slightly shocking and amazing each and every time she waves to me, which leads me to falsely believe that we somehow could (gulp) be together someday.  I am delusional.  I know.  But I can forgive myself because I am a teenager.

Weston (the guy with his hands on Ali’s back) is a jock, and he carries himself like one.  His shoulders are thrown back.  His head is held high.  His curly locks seem to shine in the fading light of day, as if God were naming him “favorite son.”  I do not like Weston all that much.

I’m sitting in the diner on Main Street.  A plate of hot eggs rest in front of me, on a fake marble table top.  Pack, who’s from Chevy Chase, Maryland, sits across the table from me.  He’s using the ketchup to make a smiley face on his poached eggs.  Gillian sits next to me, her hair long, straight again.  Not braided like it had been earlier in the year, when we had been out in the woods.  Mr. Henriques, a middle-aged English teacher, sits at the front of the table and addresses us.  “It’s good to see you guys again,” he says, smiling.  “I thought we could get together this morning, before class and remember the good old days.”

The good old days he is referring to ended about two months ago.  It had been freezing and I had holstered the seventy pound backpack onto my shoulders.  I could feel the pain in my muscles.  Felt them crying out for me to sit down and rest.  It had been twenty two degrees below zero and the mountains, normally shrouded in clouds, were disturbingly unobstructed.  Snow covered the mountains, in places eight feet deep.  Our snowshoes had left deep tracks in the woods.  We had been on Outback.

Outback is something juniors at Holderness have the option of participating in.  (Optional only in the sense that with great shame and your head hung, you could opt out.)  In March, when it is still freezing out and winter is (supposedly) just winding down, we have to go camping in the White Mountains for two weeks.  As luck would have it, our Outback had taken place in the middle of one of the worst cold spells in years.

“To the coldest Outback ever,” Henriques exclaims, raising his glass of orange juice.  “I didn’t think you guys would all make it, (cough, cough) Pack, but as far as I can count, we’re all here and I think we had a lot of fun while we were out there.”

The truth is – it was great out there.  In fact, it was the greatest experience of my life.  It wasn’t exactly fun (frostbitten fingers and overcooked meals come to mind), but it was unique and I suppose I learned something from it.  I take pride in the fact that I did it, I stuck through, and I took part in something completely unique to Holderness School.

I remember cold nights, all of us hunkering around the fire, a hint of rubber in the air.  “Oh man, my feet are toasty,” I proclaimed moments before Bubba pointed out that the toe of my boot was melting.  A potentially dangerous situation given my feet would be exposed to thirty five below zero temperatures that night.  Luckily he caught it in time and I patched it up.

I remember Ben and Gillian and me, sitting in a hut by a lakeside high in the mountains, the wind blowing viciously cold air against the blue tarp we had put up across the front.  The smell of couscous wafted in from the outside, where it was cooking on the fire and I plugged my nose.  “I hate that stuff,” I said.  They both concurred.  We lay in our sleeping bags and talked about Dumb and Dumber, a warm shower, the radio.

“In just a few days I’ll be in Florida, sitting on a beach, listening to music on the radio” I said, smiling in the dark, my breath lifting off my tongue.

“I’ll be in Canada,” Gillian said, chuckling, “It’ll probably be warmer than this.”

Ben was silent a moment before saying, quietly, “In just a few days I’m going to take a shower.  And that sounds pretty nice right now.”

I remember Pack, Bubba, Gillian, Ben, Mr. Henriques, Eliza, Sam and me sitting around a fire, telling jokes.  I remember each and every face being warm and friendly.  I remember feeling accepted.

I recall climbing on the bus at the end, old faces shining at us from within the warm, heated interior.  Other groups that had been picked up before us, their hands pink and warm.  I remember the way that cliques, dissolved in the woods, instantly reformed.  “Hey,” I said to Pack, moving over to the window so he could squeeze into the seat right next to me.  He kept walking, waving to his friends in the back.

I try and remind myself everyday that these kids I can’t get along with at school are actually good guys.  I tell myself that when we erase the cliques, anything is possible.  That we could be best friends if we could just wander outside the protective cocoon that was Holderness.  We had all been best friends in the woods.  It is astoundingly clear that we are no longer best friends now.  We sit around the fake marble table top rather awkwardly.

Pack is cordial.  Sam is non-committal, only speaking to Bubba.  Eliza sits and stares at the wall, smiling at Mr. Henriques’ joke.  Gillian is quiet, but friendly, talking in small bursts with me and Ben.  We have lost our sense of accomplishment; we have since given up our grip on friendship and fun between us.  We are divided, even at the table.  Popular, shy, nerdy, foreign; we all sat in different corners.

When the food is finished and Mr. Henriques, our faithful Outback leader is paying the bill, Gillian turns to me and says, “Remember how I told you, when we started solo – that if I got scared I would come to your tent?”  I smile at the memory and laugh nervously.  After a week together as a group we had been split up and told to walk into the woods, pitch camp and stay there alone for three days.  They gave us food to eat and that was about it.  We were all relatively close together, but far enough apart that we never saw each other.  Each tent was situated several hundred yards from the next.  We were expected to remain alone, by ourselves.

It gets pretty boring, being by yourself.  I heard the rushing of the trees, squirrels running up and down my tent, coyotes, and my own voice.  Inner monologue for three days straight.  We were given journals, but I hardly wrote in mine.  Instead, I walked through the woods for hours at a time, nervous that I would get lost in a sudden slew of snow.  My tracks would become buried and I would yell aimlessly at the mountains, their peaks laughing at me from above.

“Yeah, yeah I do.”

“You know,” she says, leaning forward and smiling, whispering, “I tried to.  I was afraid one night, all alone, I could hear the coyotes in the mountains and I put on my snowshoes and walked down the path, but in the night I couldn’t tell which site was yours.  Where you’d, you know, pitched your tent?  So I headed back and slept alone.  But I had Geoff, I had gone looking for you.  I wanted to stay up all night, talking, laughing, forgetting about all the noises in the woods.  It would have been fun.”

I smile, my cheeks contracting, my eyes squinting like they do when I’m happy.  “I wish we had.”

I wake up cold, my alarm is gently prodding me awake.  It sits at the base of my bed and I punch the snooze button.  I pull the covers around my shoulders and sink into the warmth of my blankets.  Minutes feel like seconds and the alarm roars to life again.  Hazen struggles in the bunk above me.  “Geoff, wake up, you’ve got class man.”  He mumbles, and I guess that his head is still stuffed into his pillows.  He has first period off.  He can sleep in.

The day is a brilliant orange, red and yellow.  It is fall, and the mountain hovering over the town is covered in a light snowfall.  I have art class to go to.

I walk into class late, and straddle my stool quietly.  Ali sits on the stool next to me, her hands clumsily dragging charcoal across a brown piece of paper.  She is frustrated, I can tell by her body language, the way her shoulders are slumped and her mouth pouts.

“What are we -” I begin to ask out of the corner of my mouth when Ms. Finster notices that I have arrived.

“Well, well, well Mr. Calver.  Nice of you to show up on time.”

“I’m sorry Ms. Finster, my alarm didn’t go off.”  I smile sheepishly at Ali and she smiles back.  Mrs. Finster walks away and Ali leans in and tells me that we’re working on a still life in charcoal relief.  I shake my head and sigh, pull off a new sheet of paper and begin to sketch, my hands slow, methodical.  I am terrible at art, but it’s okay.  Ali smiled at me and I feel accepted, popular, just for a moment.  As if for once, I was in on the joke.

Weston moves across the ice smoothly, his skates fly.  His stick serves to balance him, his shoulders heave back and forth.  The air is cold and the wind bites our cheeks as it sweeps in through the open sides of our hockey rink.  We are all crowded around the boards, our breath fogging up the glass.  We cheer as the game begins.  Arla, a freshman on the ski team with me, leans over and says, “Did you hear Boston College is looking at Weston?”

I nod.  I have heard the rumor going around, and it isn’t hard to believe.  He is talented with the puck.  He is a winger and he scores regularly.

We are playing Deerfield.  The Big green.  Their team is made up of post-grads, guys who are doing a second senior year to get into a better college or improve their grades.  They are all twenty year olds with beards and wide shoulders.  They are essentially a young college team.

There is hot chocolate over in the corner and there is a long line waiting to wrap hands around mugs, hats pulled down over ears.

We score and I see that Weston has his hands in the air.  The school cheers loudly and we bang our hands against the glass.  I join in.  I have nothing against him when he’s on the rink.  I have no problem with talent.  I merely hold his popularity against him.

We lose 3-2.  But we assure ourselves that it was a good game, because Deerfield is the top ranked team in New England, or is it Cushing?  Either way, they’re up there and we held our own.  At least for a day.

It is cold out and we are huddled under sweatpants and sweatshirts in the room.  We are still reeling from it all.  Sam, a kid in my dorm and a friend of Weston, has a visibly swollen tattoo on his arm.  It’s a simple design, the number four.  He displays it proudly, his face beaming.  It obviously means a lot to him.  So much so that he was willing to carve it into his arm with a sterilized (and hot) end of a coat hanger.  We smile sadly and acknowledge him.  “It’s great Sam.  Really.”  I ache just a bit inside.

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In the master bedroom, the German commandant shaved. “We take hostages,” he said to the sergeant, who stood in the back of the room, adjusting his lapels. “We will have the General returned to us, no matter how many of them we may have to take.”

“Or,” said the sergeant with a sneer, “how many we have to kill.”

“Yes. If it comes to it, I won’t worry about a few filthy French.”

The young man stopped at the edge of the road and looked ahead.  The town was white in the heat.  The streets seemed to float rather than sit.  It was scorching outside.  The humidity was brutal.  It encompassed his all.  It flooded his senses and crowded his brain.  He felt depressed and he sat down upon the sidewalk.

The town was empty.  It stood against a backdrop of green, rolling mountains.  The sky above was blue but for a tall thundercloud flirting with the top of a mountain some distance away.

The town church stood tall and vain.  It seemed to defy the decay that surrounded it.  The lilac trees about its base were twenty feet high and had a canopy large enough to gather shade underneath.  The streets were cracked and filled with weeds and saplings that fought against death in the waves of heat.

It was unusually hot and humid.  Even for July.  Once, long ago, he had driven through this town.  Stopped at the General Store to buy foods for a hike with his girlfriend.  Once he had enjoyed hiking.  Now it was all he did.  Out of necessity.  Not pleasure.

He didn’t trust permanency.  Didn’t trust staying in one place.  Didn’t trust the seeming quiet of Vermont.  In front of the old inn, underneath a large maple tree, three nooses hung empty, a pile of bones in the shade of the trunk.

The white clapboard buildings of the town were falling to pieces.  The windows were shattered and cars lay rusting in the streets and in driveways.  The movement of a stained, mold-soaked curtain flapping in a hollow window frightened him to death.

The general store was empty.  Broken wine bottles lay on the ground and dollar bills floated here and there – useless, devoid of any consequence.  On the second floor there were several old sweaters hanging on a display.  They were eaten by moths and covered in caterpillars.  Spiders clung to the ceilings.  Outside, a crow called from the trees along the river.

His destination was a gap between the mountains, a high, steep road that wound up and up and forever up.  He had a bag on his back.  It was a large, old hiking pack.  There was a sleeping bag rolled up at the base of the pack, and a tent was cramped into a sack that rested behind his neck.  The pack was stuffed with shorts, shirts, and canned food.  A bottle of water, dipped out of the river.

He fingered through the sweaters and went back down the stairs.  He walked along the small main street.  Contemplated entering a house and decided against it for lack of time.  It was better to move on.  Best to reach the top of the gap by nightfall.

He had once believed in the goodness of mankind.  He had felt that humanity was more inclined to empathy than brutality.  He now felt differently.  There was no goodness in this world.  Not in this world.  A world without laws.  Without society.  This was a world without sense.

He began his hike up the road and when the sun was low in the western sky the thunder began to roll.  Initially it sounded as though there were drummers summoning a crowd.  A low, steady noise jogging through the valleys and over the hills accompanied by a heavy, hard wind.  As the thundercloud approached overhead it became a monster growling.  Hungry.

I hear ya.  He said to no one.

He set up his tent under the shade of trees and hoped to keep dry.

The sky opened with a light patter and a crack.  The lightning had bite.  The ground trembled.  The wind died down.  It became still.  Foreboding.  He read his book and listened to the sounds of light rain on the tent.  It became steady.  A drone.  The lightning was momentous.  It was fever inducing.  It was the type of lightning that induced even the crows to cease their chatter.  The rain was a steady sheet, collapsing upon the tent from every direction, fueled by the suddenly tyrannical wind.

For thirty minutes it rained and thundered and then the sun came out and the birds began to sing.  He put his book back in his bag and crouched to leave the tent.  The roadside was flooded with rainwater.  The hills were cloaked in mist that rose from the humid ground and soaked the sky.  He felt the cooling effect of the rain.  Felt the hot intensity of the sun burning away all moisture on the ground.  The tent would not dry.  He knew it.

He packed the tent.  Wet.  In the bag.  He continued to mount the gap.  The road turned to dirt and back to pavement.  It became frighteningly steep.  His legs burned.  He sang a song under his breath.  Pushed himself to continue.

From the top of the gap the valley stretched beneath him.

Funny.  He said.  From this high it seems as though nothing has changed.

There were parking lots on either side of the road.  Dirt enclaves where once he had eaten sandwiches out of the back trunk with his girlfriend.

Night was coming on.  The sun was settling on the large mountains to the west – whose steep sides were barely visible in the humid, charged air.  Thunderclouds consumed three-quarters of the sky.  Where the sun broke through the clouds it shone.  It shone like a veil from heaven.  A dazzling waterfall of sunshine.  A highway of beauty, lost on a world that was nearly empty.  But highly dangerous.

He slept that night in the woods.  He did not build a fire.

He awoke to find that the sun was bright again.  The air was humid and sticky.  Again.  The trees around him were short.  Stunted from the high altitude where he camped.  They were birch and pine.  The birch had branches that resembled long witches arms.  Gnarled.  Ugly.  Terrifying.

He approached another small town in the late morning.  The town was but a village.  It hugged the edge of a small river that roared out of the mountains, tumbling over rocks and falls.  The gap road curled along the river’s edge and the church and homes rested upon the far side of the road, looking over the bank and the river.  A column of smoke rose.  White.

He crossed the river.  Cold water against his legs.  The river water was fast.  It pulled at him.  He fought against it.  He lay in the leaves.  Against a dead tree.  He watched the smoking remains of the home.  Sought out signs of raiders.  None.  They had moved on, he supposed.

In the ruins of the home there was a doll.  It lay against the base of a tree.  Its eyes had been pulled out, its innards had been ripped from its body, stuffing trailed across the ground.  It was clouding up.  Sky getting dark.  He moved down the road.

In the evening he camped in a field.  Grass swayed in the wind and rain pattered against his tent.

I’m all alone, he thought.  He sat in the door of the tent and let the rain soak his tired feet.  In the darkness, in the rain, he cried.

The morning rose steaming with heat.  He felt as though the sun was getting closer to the earth, desiring to set fire to the barren lands that belonged to animals.  Man’s kingdom was lost.

As he trudged across the lower valleys, the flat plain, he amused himself with thoughts of the world and the presence it had assumed over many billions of years.  The land he stood upon, he thought, had once been a sea.  Scientists had discovered whale bones upon the shoulders of the fields and ancient reefs among the islands of the lake.

After the ice age the sea had receded into the lake that stood upon the edge of the horizon today.  The land here was flat.  It stood in vivid contrast to the towering mountains that stood like giants behind him, stiff backs of granite and marble rising out of the plain.

He considered his once saddened disposition when watching television reports on the polar bear that was losing its habitat amongst the pains of global warming.  He used to care and now he realized this was the first time that he had considered such a worry in a long time.  What had once seemed important to him now had no meaning.  The polar bear would live or die.  All he truly minded was that he didn’t lose his life to a raider or famine or illness.  One, he said to himself, only had time to care about the plight of others when life is easy and good.  There was no such thing now, though he had believed in it for a while.

When the virus appeared he and his girlfriend, who he came to know as his wife, were camping in the northern reaches of Quebec.  Fishing.  Reading.  Making love.

They returned to find an empty world.  Montreal stank of death.  The bodies crowded the streets in front of hospitals.  Piles.  Dead.  Black.  A stench.  Flies by the billions.  The cars clogged the border, dead occupants inside.  Bloated.  Swollen with death.  Grotesque faces that resembled something abstract and artistic and malicious and dark.

The woods were filled with bodies.  Trying to flee to America.  Trying to escape a plague that could not be escaped.

It swept through quickly.  They had been gone but one week.  They thought of their families and felt sick.  They investigated their homes with prayers upon their lips.

His mother and father were in bed.  Their night things on their skin.  Their lips were cracked.  Maggots crawled through the sheets.  A note on the dresser.  We’re sorry, we had nowhere to go.

In her house a letter pinned to the fridge, which was rank with dead fruit and vegetables.

Dearest, we had to flee.  We had to leave the home because we knew you would try to find us.  We did not want you to see us dead and gone.  We have taken ourselves to the hospital.  There’s no hope there but the knowledge that the dead are piled so high you wouldn’t find us in a million years.  We don’t want you to be upset.  There’s a world out there to plunder.  There’s life yet in the veins of the earth and the sun does still shine upon the plants and animals, the water and the mountains.  Go somewhere isolated.  Somewhere beautiful.  Settle into a farm.  Raise sheep and cattle, chickens and corn.  Have a few dogs that run around.  Find a nice home.  Do this, and live.  Survive.  The world is empty.  A blank slate for you.  We have moved on to a better place, a happy place.  And someday we will see you once more.  But don’t, don’t ever leave too soon.  We don’t want to see you here for quite some time.  Love, Mom and Dad.

Sobs.  Crying.  Depression setting in.  They found a farm on the eastern shore.  Near Salisbury.  They lived simple lives.  They collected cows and chicken.  Sheep.  They grew corn and wheat and barley.

He fixed a windmill so as to provide electricity for the home, and at nights they watched DVDs of old television shows and movies.  They read in the early morning hours.  Their hands were black with the soil of the land.  They never saw a car.  The home was settled at the end of a dirt road that bisected a wood.

They lived this way for several years.  They watched the sun rise to the east, over their fields of wheat and corn, and they saw it set in the west, over the roof of their barn.  They took day trips to the beach and sat upon the ocean, watching the waves crest and repeal.  Behind them were the ghosts of hotels and apartment buildings.  A barren strip of old beach shops, pizza places, grocery stores and restaurants.  A town already seedy and falling apart, now given to the tide of time and water.  The boardwalk had collapsed into the ocean, the building’s pant was chipped and broken.

They give me the creeps.  Said his wife, who stood at the edge of the shore, the water against her legs, looking back at the empty shells of buildings.

It’s like Chernobyl.  He said.

They had a child who came into the world a happy, bubbling girl.  They watched her grow up to walk and talk.  They saw her smile and clap at the promise of hot bread and butter.  Ice Cream made from churned milk and hoarded ice from the winter before.

When the second child was conceived they thought it a blessing.  He cradled his wife’s stomach and touched her beaming red cheeks.

The child was stillborn and his wife died bleeding on the bed.

The world seemed to him a bastard version of its former self.  Where once he had felt glory and a near form of exultation he now felt nothing but emptiness.  There had once been something beautiful and poetic in the open expanses of the world.  The lack of people, the breadth of a world free of law was stunning and fascinating to him.  Where before they had been recent college graduates, barely able to scrape by – a ten-inch television in their kitchen, one bookshelf, hand-me down pots and pans in the kitchen – they now had a big screen television in their living room, every book they ever wanted, shiny new pots and pans.  For free.  There was a distinct joy the first time they plundered the innards of Best Buy, Borders, and Williams Sonoma.

He remembered how they laughed.  Trailed through the stores aisles.  Filling shopping carts.  Driving U-Hauls back and forth.  Making a beautiful farmhouse theirs.  Furnishing a beach home in Ocean City.  Living luxury.

And she was dead.  Her body peaceful.  Eyes closed.  Mouth hanging open.  Hands at her sides.  He put one hand on top of the other.  Across her chest.  Kissed her forehead.  Kissed her lips.  Cradled her head in his hands.  His fingers running through her hair.  Sobbed.  Launched into tears of rage.

Walls of white.  Bed of red.  Blood.  Daughter, now six, staring.

Mommy?

Mommy’s gone to sleep.

To sleep?

Yes.  To sleep.

When will Mommy wake up?

He paused.  Wake up?  Mommy is taking a long sleep.  She said she might be asleep for a year.  Maybe two, honey.  She said that she loves you very much and that she can’t wait to see you all grown up.

But I am all grown up!

Oh no, honey.  You have a long way left to grow.

I do?

You do.  Someday you’ll be big like Mommy.  Like Daddy.  Big and tall and as beautiful as ever.  Mommy couldn’t wait to see you grow so she went to sleep.  It’s like Christmas.  You know Christmas, honey?

Uh huh.

You know how on Christmas Eve you go to sleep early because you just can’t wait for the day to come?

Yeah!  Her eyes bright.  Happy.  Memories of the Christmas Tree.  Presents.  Cocoa and snow.

That’s what Mommy’s doing.  The same thing as you do on Christmas.  She’s gone to bed early and she’s going to sleep for a long time because she wants to see you all grown up and she just can’t wait.

He buried her on the edge of the lawn, under the shade of a large oak tree.  He broke down when he threw dirt on her body.  Had visions of a drawing a blade across his wrists.  Or rocks in his pockets, a poetic death, drowning himself in the pond on their farm.

It seemed to him that his everything, his all, was buried under the dirt.  That when he said goodbye to his wife he was saying goodbye to his life and the prospect of a happy future.  His family was devastating.  His soul mate was a disaster.  The world had nothing to offer.

In the morning his daughter found him under the tree, shovel in hand, peaceful.  He was leaning with his back against the trunk, his chin heavily sunk into his chest.  She put her arm in his, nuzzled her nose into the crook of his elbow, and slept.

He awoke to watch her shining, blonde hair.  There was his daughter.  There was always his daughter.

He continued to walk across the plain, approaching the settlement from the east.  The settlement was a small town surrounded by a membrane of fields.  He passed old farmhouses, rocking chairs still on the front porch, birds flying in and out of the open windows.  In front of the farmhouses were old doghouses.  Tractors, paint still red.  The lawns were long fields.  The trucks rested upon deteriorated tires.  Wasted wrecks.

Drunkenly abandoned from the world, lost in his memories, he approached the settlement at a crawl and hardly noticed the poor, near-naked girl huddled against the trunk of a tree, gasping for breath.  Her head was held up towards the sky.  Her back rested against the rough bark.  Her chest was exposed.  Her breasts were nothing but small, insignificant dots.  Just budding.  She was very young.  She looked savage.  She was covered in dark red blood, dried upon her skin.  Flies visited her nose and mouth.  Her hair was stringy.  Wet.

He gazed upon her and she looked at him.  Her look was one of absolute fear.  She seemed to shrink back against his gaze.  No closer.  No closer.  She seemed to beg.  Her eyes were wild, wide.  Her pupils betrayed a trauma that he could feel through his very muscles.  They tensed.  He shivered and shouldered his pack.

He walked on.

In the early evening hours he reached the edge of the town.  Long, open roads bordered by a scattered assortment of houses become small streets.  The pavement was cracked.  Weeds grew through the crevasses splitting the black road.  Saplings populated the potholes.  Tree branches, snapped off in storms or killed by bugs and age, lay on front yards.  Street signs lay facedown, sideways, straight, and backwards.  Their yellow and red faces dark in the fading light.

As he approached the center of town signs of habitation began to emerge.  A manicured lawn, a meeting house, ladder leaning against the wall, a paint bucket on the ground.  Less weeds in the road, less cracks.

He became aware of someone following him and he stopped.  He stood.  Silent.  He listened.  He could hear her breathing and he turned upon his heels.  She cowered and stood on the sidewalk, her shoulders settling with her heavy breathing, her lips blood red as she licked them.  Her dark eyes watched him.

What do you want?  The young man asked.

She said nothing, the little girl.  She watched him and shook her head.  Nothing.

You must want something.  Why are you following me?

Mama and Pappa are dead.

Dead?

They killed them.

Who did?

I don’t know.

He turned and began to walk again.

Wait!  She called.  Shivering.  Help me.  Please?

He eyed her.  Those brown eyes.  That matted, Mediterranean hair.  He reached inside his bag.

Here.  Said the young man, approaching her.  Take this.

She took the shirt he provided her.  She pulled it on roughly, yanking at its corners.  Tugging.  It pulled and caught on her bloody wounds.  She grimaced and a tear welled in her eye.

What happened to you?  The young man asked after a few minutes, as they walked down Main Street, past shops, closed.  A man on a bike rode by.  The sheriff walked, hands on his hips, a curious cock of his head.  The glint of a weapon against his thigh.

They chased me.  She said.

They chased you?

Yes.

And the wounds?

Trees.  Rocks.  Hills.  I fell a lot.

He nodded.  Asked no more questions.

Where are we going?  Said the young girl.

Going to find a place to sleep.  Said the young man.  Stay in a hotel, get a nice bath.  Get a good meal.  You can clean your wounds, rest.  You’re safe here.  They won’t get you.

Promise?

Yeah.  I promise.  He chewed on his nails and looked around.

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1

The clouds stood upon the horizon.  The air teemed with heat and humidity.  The sun was beating down upon their heads.  Their heads were glistening with sweat.

I think, said the dark man, that our work isn’t finished here.

The house was a glorious wreck.  Vines crawled up its once-white walls that were now peeling and brown.  The front porch was collapsing.  The railings were rotted and slanted at a severe angle.  The front yard was overgrown.  The grass, once green and trimmed short, resembled a field.  It was decorated with greenish-blue milkweed.  Red and yellow Indian flowers.  Faded ghost dandelions.  The garden was heavily weeded.  The front windows were broken.  The glass was jagged.  Dangerous.

The front parlor had betrayed signs of habitation.  It had been relatively clean.  The kitchen had been stocked with canned goods.

The cans now lay on the ground, scattered.  Their contents had been gutted and spilled.  Pickled juices flooded the old, worn carpet that covered the floor.  Apples that had been in a bowl where crushed upon the floor.  The furniture was cracked, bent, folded, splintered, kicked-in and generally destroyed.  It lay in a sad pile in the living room.  Old books were torn and their pages littered the area.

Come out!  The man in red yelled.

Sing for us!  Chanted Sonny.

In the woods beyond the home the family of three huddled amongst the dead leaves.

Papa, said the young girl, are we going to run?

No, said Papa.  We’re going to walk.

But, said his wife, we need to get far away.

Yes, and if we run they will hear us.

And so the family began to move through the woods with patience and care.  They watched their steps and hoped that they would not tear up the ground or betray their presence with the loud crack of a broken twig.  The ground was like a minefield.  It was heavy with dead leaves and branches and loose rocks.

In the shadow of a stream bank they crouched and listened.  The water gurgled and churned and hiccupped.  There had been steady rains for several days, and it was pregnant with runoff.

No good.  Said Papa.  I can’t hear a thing.  We have got to keep moving.

And they did.

The stream led up the steep valley between two peaks.  The mountainsides leading away from the water were heavily wooded and treacherously soft under the feet.  Papa prayed that they were safe.  He was aware that their pursuers were tenacious.  He knew that their hideaway had been found.  Bloodthirsty animals.  They would never give up.  They would pursue him and his family for days, maybe even weeks.

The dark man said they must have gone into the woods.

So they followed the stream.  And in the dark light of dusk they came to rest just beyond the bend from the family.

I smell blood, said Charlie, who had one eye.

Come, said the dark man.  And they followed.

The family was tired.  Their fatigue was obvious from the way their backs slouched.  From their failing senses.  Their feet were slow to lift, and the father carried his young daughter upon his back.

I say, yelled the dark man.  I see we’ve finally found you!

Papa yelped.  The bullet tore through the fleshy insides of his stomach.  It came out the other side and rested in the water, glistening in the fading light.  A small brook trout investigated it, attracted as to a lure.

The young girl keeled over his shoulder and into the water, where she hit her head upon a rock.

Mama she yelled.  Crying.

I’ve hunted a number like you before, said the dark man.  His compatriots laughed.

Mama couldn’t see his face.  It was hidden beneath a ten-gallon hat that sat upon his head.  He was like a drunken cowboy.  Misplaced.  Dragged from the old, wild west.  An icon of a lawless yesterday.

The compatriots waited with bated anticipation, like a pack of wolves allowing their leader first bite.

Yes sir, said the dark man.  I’ve hunted a number like you before and none of them have yet survived.  He stepped closer to her now.  She could see his face and it was a horrifying thing to behold.  She caught her breath and swooned.  He clutched her by her hair with a sudden rushing motion.

Wouldn’t want you to go busting your head on some rocks, he said.

No way man, no way!  Yelled his compatriots.

Are you afraid to look at me, he said, noticing the horror on her face.  Is there something about me that you find despicable?

She trembled and bit her lip.  No.  No said Mama.  Nothing.

Ah.  Said the dark man.  Good.

He took off his hat and set it on the bank.  The young girl watched with rapt attention, her hand on Papa’s back.  Papa was fighting now.  Struggling to sit up in the water.

Son of a bitch.  He muttered through clenched teeth.  Don’t you dare harm her!

Come come.  Said the dark man.  Do you take me as a heathen?

I don’t take you as nothing at all, said Papa.  Defiant as death faced him.

The dark man slugged Mama on the side of her face with a rock that he had held clutched in his fist.  Her cheekbone fractured and split.  Her teeth scattered on the stream bed.

Papa said nothing.  He stared.  His eyes open.  His mouth gaping.  A scream stuck in his throat.

Mama said the young girl.

Mama.  Said the dark man.  Mocking.

In the sky above, a hawk circled, unseen above the treetops.

Mama struggled to stand.  She found her feet and tripped out of the stream and onto the bank.

The compatriots gave a whoop.  She’s a-running!  One of them yelled.  Yeah!  Said another.  Look at her go!

Mama’s jaw was slack.  Her head was light.  Blood coated her palm and her chin.  Her neck.  Her breasts.  She stumbled on the rocks and fell.  Lord, she thought, don’t let it drag out long.  Don’t let it drag out long.  She thought nothing of the young girl.

The dark man trudged slowly through the streambed.  He was deliberate in his motions.  He threw Mama to the ground.  Her head hit the water and he held her under until she was gasping for breath.

He grabbed her by the hair.  Papa looked away.  There was a sickening crunch as like an egg cracking on a pan.

Mama?  Said the young girl.

Papa, clutching his stomach, shook his head.  I want you to run, he whispered.  Run and don’t look back.  Don’t ever look back.  You understand?

When?  Whispered the young girl.

Now.  Papa said.  Now.

Papa stood with an enormous effort and hurled his full weight towards the dark man.  He collapsed on the man, throwing his body against the rocks.  The dark man’s head smacked against Mama’s legs.

There was a chorus of laughter.  A circle of wolves closed around Papa.  Blows fell around his body.  He felt his ribs crack.  His face was a wreath of horror.  Their skin, he thought, their eyes.  Their voices.  He felt sheer terror surging through the last remnants of his beaten and tattered body.

They stepped back to admire what they had done.  Papa’s head was cracked open.  His brains leaked out into the stream and curious young fish looked curiously at the remains.  His lips were bloody.  His eyes were glazed.  His jaw hung slack off his face, desperately out of place.

The dark man looked around.  The girl.  Where was she?  He cursed and hurled a small rock at Sonny.

What is wrong with you?  Asked the dark man.  Where’s the girl?

The girl?

Yes.  The girl.

Awwwww shit.  Said Sonny.

Is that all you have to say, said the dark man.  He stepped up to Sonny and wrapped his fists around Sonny’s collar.  Is that all you have to say?

Sonny nodded.  The dark man shot him in the face.  His body crumpled into the stream.  Silence.  Strange.  Silence presided over the dark evening waters of the stream.  Nothing but the trickle of water and the whistling of the hawk’s feathers in the wind high above.

The men began hurtling after the girl.