Shaken, I hurried forward and soon came to a section of the stream paved with water-smoothed pebbles, on which I left no marks that I could see. Here and there were points along the bank where I might exit onto stone, leaving no footprints or disturbed vegetation. I took the third of those and hurried into the trees and once more uphill.
I proceeded now into new territory, not sure what I might find, and I was very afraid. As I climbed the slope, I told myself that I wasn’t just eight years old, that I was going on nine, that I might be a boy, yes, but not an ordinary boy, that I was strong and quick beyond my years, that already I could read at the level of a sixteen- year-old, which wouldn’t save me in this situation, but which nevertheless suggested that my chances of outwitting the hunter were much better than those of other boys my age.
And maybe my appearance could be turned to my advantage. The hunter had expressed his loathing—
As I ascended the wooded slope, the autumn trees lost some of their radiant color, and the scattering of sunshine faded from the forest floor. I peered up through the lacework of branches and saw that gray clouds had come in from the east and swallowed the morning sun. Cloud cover, too, might be to my advantage, for surely the hunter would find it more difficult to read my tracks in a forest that had fallen into shadow.
The woods ended just past the crest of the slope, and beyond lay a broad meadow, at the far end of which stood a couple of ramshackle buildings: an old single-story house long shorn of paint and with no window glass intact, and what might have been a stable, where now the roof sagged like the tortured spine of a swaybacked horse. A few canted sections of split-rail pasture fencing still stood, but most had years earlier collapsed into the knee-high wheat-gold grass, which swayed ever so slightly, as if it were seaweed moved by deep ocean currents. My passage through the grass would be as obvious as if I had marked my way with a can of Day-Glo spray paint.
Staying within the forest, I circled the meadow, weaving among trees as fast as I could, acutely aware that the hunter might arrive at any moment. My initial intention was to navigate a semicircle to the woods beyond the house. When I arrived behind the structure, however, I discovered that the tall grass gave way to a short, dead, matted sedge of some kind that suggested this side of the meadow had once been much wetter but had dried out. The dense surface resembled a Japanese tatami and seemed unlikely to show tracks of any kind. Nearing the end of my resources and not certain how much longer I could continue fleeing through the forest, on impulse I crossed to the house.
The cupped boards of the porch steps protested, and half a dozen barn swallows exploded from their mud- cup nests under the eaves and arced up to roost for the moment on the rusted tin roof. There was no back door anymore. I entered the dark interior in hope of finding a good hiding place.
Even when new and painted and home to someone, the structure had been humble. Long abandoned, it groaned and creaked with my passage, and though it wouldn’t collapse on me, it would announce my presence to the hunter if I so much as shifted my weight slightly from one foot to the other.
In the front room, the gray light of the clouding day came ash-pale through the glassless windows and through another opening where the front door should have been, and I narrowly avoided stepping into a hole where a floor plank had gone missing. The house had been built off the ground, on a series of piers, perhaps because the meadow had once flooded in heavy rains, and underfoot lay an enclosed crawlspace about two feet deep.
The house offered fewer places of concealment than I had hoped, and I was about to retreat when, through a window, I saw the hunter moving just within the shadowed woods, following the very route by which I had circled the meadow. I had no choice now but to hide, no option but the crawlspace.
Because they were loose, some of the twelve-inch-wide planks rattled underfoot more than others. The nails that once secured them had rusted away. At the east end of the room, near the wall, I lifted aside one plank and then another and squeezed down between the floor joists into a realm of spiders and centipedes and their kin. I pulled the first plank into place with little effort. I had some difficulty manipulating the remaining one through the twelve-inch gap, but then it settled where it belonged, and I lay on my back in darkness with the sudden thought that I had just constructed my coffin.
5
A wilderness can be a vast tract of forest or jungle largely devoid of the works of humankind. Or a desert so arid that not even cactus will grow. Or a continent of ice and snow. A crawlspace under a small house was not of sufficient size to be a wilderness, but I found it as forbidding and cheerless as Antarctica.
Only dim, gray light found its way through the space where a plank was missing on the farther side of the front room, and when I turned my head to look between the piers in that direction, the pale glow shaped itself to resemble a human-size cocoon. I knew it could be no such thing, but when I squinted to clarify my vision, I thought I could see the spinner’s pattern, the winding silken filaments woven as tight as any cloth made on a loom, and within that faintly radiant and translucent form a shadow of something completing metamorphosis and waiting to be born. The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.
I turned away from that far light and stared at the rough plank inches from my face, though I couldn’t see it in the gloom. I waited and hoped the hunter would think that the abandoned buildings were too obvious and too small for me to seek refuge in either.
From the back of the house, a board creaked as he set foot on the porch. He proceeded cautiously, trying to be quiet but betrayed repeatedly by warped and weathered wood. When he came into the front room, the planks groaned as well as creaked, further evidence that he was a large man, and the loose boards rattled against the joists.
Near the center of the room, he stopped and stood and remained very still. Because he didn’t even shift his weight, the silence was complete. Certain that he must be listening for me, I took shallow breaths and only through my mouth, and the dank air tasted sour with mold and wood rot, and I wanted to gag, but I didn’t.
After a minute, he surprised me both by speaking and by what he said. “When I was fifteen, I was already humping meth and PCP and slicker stuff on the street, running the shit for a nasty bastard named Delehanty. There was this turf war, there’s always a turf war in that business. These two guys brace me in an alley, mean to beat the crap out of me, take my merchandise, send Delehanty a message. I kill them both. I kill them, cut off their ears, take the ears to Delehanty. He promoted me. The killing meant nothing, nothing except because of it I moved up in the organization and lived a lot better.”
He wasn’t talking to himself. His words were meant for me, he knew that I hid nearby, and because no other place existed in which to hide, he believed that I had gone under the floor.
As far as I knew, only a loose plank offered an exit from the prison to which I had committed myself. If a hinged panel or sliding door existed somewhere along the perimeter of the building, I would never find it in the dark, not with all the supporting piers to make my way between. And the crawlspace wasn’t deep enough to allow even a boy like me to crawl. I would have to turn facedown and squirm like a serpent. Anyway, escape was impossible, because the moment the hunter heard me moving, he could stand over me, fire through the floor, and kill me.
“I long ago stopped counting the people I put away,” he said. “Some I was told to waste, some it was suggested I might want to chop on general principles, others I did all on my own hook. One way or another, it’s always for money. To take from somebody else or to be sure they don’t take from me. I don’t try to justify it. No need to justify it. I didn’t make the world how it is. It’s brutal, and you do what you need to do to get along.”
As he spoke, he never moved. He remained rooted to the floor, which I took to mean that even as he talked, he listened. And when he paused between portions of his monologue, he remained especially alert for the faintest telltale sound. I wondered why he didn’t just walk the room, shooting at random, until my scream confirmed a hit.
“I chopped this couple in their seventies. This is in Florida, I’m on vacation, but I’m never on vacation if I see
