FORGETTING HE had slept, he wakes with his hands gripping the wheel. In his head the memory of a gunshot echoes the last remnant of his fitful dreams. The unimpeded sun is straight up in a harsh blue sky. The truck is locked, its windows sealed. In a glade of red oak, it sits behind a large boulder draped in fox scat. The unregenerated air is stodgy and moist, hard to breathe.
John reaches down and jerks open the driver-side door. Fresh air enters like a shout. He stumbles into it, voraciously hungry all of a sudden. He walks over to the boulder, around the base of which grow Saint-John’s-wort and raspberry bushes, and starts foraging for berries. A cottontail darts out of the thicket and the ground there is rife with deer and bear droppings.
John strips off his sweat-drenched shirt, twists it into a two-cornered sack, and tosses the picked berries into it. When it’s full, he sits down with his back to the truck and eats what he’s picked, once snarling at a chipmunk that wanders too close to his cache. Nothing in his recent memory has tasted better. When the shirt is empty, he fills and empties it again, remembering that he has not eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. Afterwards, partially sated, he climbs to the top of the boulder and gazes several hundred yards down through the trees to where his half-obscured trailer sits. His hunter’s eye spots nothing amiss, but his brain is no more convinced now than it was hours before when he drove up the road in the fading dark.
Standing again on the floor of dogbane and clover, he is overcome by the enormity of his life’s upheaval. He longs to be an anonymous part of the mountain’s wildlife. Another nonhumanoid who at the merest whiff of man’s odious stink retreats deep into the woods. He falls, trembling, to his knees. Inspiring his own foul-smelling exhalations, he sees his father, even while breathing death’s rattle, mumbling, “Weren’t no damn dog, tell ya. Was a wolf. A goddamn wolf!” What had he meant? No one in the family knew or had ever hazarded a guess. And Simon? While pulling the trigger on his life of excess, what enduring image had he tried to carry into the next world?
He lies flat on his back and stares up at a hole in the canopy of trees through which the sun peers, and imagines his former self sucked up into the cosmos through that corridor of light, leaving behind a flesh-and-bone shell free to be about anything.
He snarls, then reaches out with one hand and swats at the air. He unties his boots, kicks them off, stands up, and peels off his jeans and underpants. Naked, he feels freer than he had. Less encumbered by human plights. And stronger. He rakes his clawed hands through a patch of jewelweed. He bares his teeth and growls. He starts running a circle around the glade. In less than ten feet he trips on a root and pitches sideways into a briar thicket. He loudly curses. His stubbed toe hurts. So does his flesh where it is pierced by the needle-sharp balls. He feels foolish. And embarrassed. Two chattering squirrels seem to be laughing at him. He glances shiftily around to make sure no one else is. It takes him close to ten minutes painfully to extricate himself.
He quickly dresses, grabs the .45 out of the truck, and bushwhacks down through the woods to the edge of the mown field in which his trailer sits. He starts running in a semicrouch toward it. He is halfway there when, down the road, several blue jays start squawking. Then comes the sound of rapidly clopping hooves. John freezes. He is still searching for a place to hide when into the yard gallops a lathered-up Diablo, carrying Abbie Nobie.
“John Moon,” she calls out, reining the horse in. “Brought you a home-baked apple pie and three loaves of Momma’s oatmeal bread.”
John shoves the .45 into his belt and waves.
“Got something to put on it?”
“Peanut butter maybe.”
The horse shakes its head, spraying phlegm. “That all?”
“Ain’t shopped in a while.”
“Lucky for you I brought some sauerkraut and fresh-ground sausage.” She swings down from the horse. John nervously glances at the trailer. “Make ya a hoagie.”
“What?”
“For lunch.” She’s wearing blue jeans, riding boots, and a sleeveless black jersey that shows off her tanned, muscular arms. She’s too pretty for John to even think about. She unfastens a saddlebag from the girth. “Momma’s starting to worry you’re up here fading away to nothing.”
“I’m all right,” says John. He starts walking toward her, keeping one eye on the house.
“Never said you weren’t.” She tosses the saddlebag over her shoulder. “Like to have lunch with ya, is all.”
She drops the reins. Diablo puts its head down and starts to graze. John stops between Abbie and the trailer. He thinks maybe he sees something move behind the kitchen window. Then he’s not sure. Abbie looks at him and wrinkles her nose. “You need a bath, John Moon.”
John nods up the hill. “Was choppin’ wood yonder.”
“Where’s your truck?”
“Up there with it.”
“Whyn’t ya jump in the shower.”
“Huh?”
“While I make the hoagies.” She smiles and walks by him toward the trailer.
Showered and in clean clothes, he feels more grounded to the world. Combing his hair in the bathroom, he hears Abbie whistling “Where have you been, Billy Boy.” The events from the past five days give him a temporary reprieve. His recent behavior in the woods now strikes him as someone else’s. He allows himself to pretend he is a man waking from a nightmare. The dead bodies dissolve in the morning light. Ghosts wing away like butterflies. He imagines it to be Moira fixing him lunch in the kitchen while the boy quietly sleeps in his crib.
The whistling stops. A few seconds later, it begins again, though lower-pitched than before. Or in a different key. Maybe the melody isn’t the same. The sound gets weaker and weaker. The thought strikes John that it’s a different whistler altogether. Not Abbie, but a third person. He runs out to the kitchen. No one is there. The basement door is open and the stair light on.
“Abbie?” he calls down.
The whistling stops.
“That you, Abbie?”
“Who else. A ghost, John Moon?” She laughs. John hears her pulling at the stand-up freezer door. His heart suddenly feels like a large bird caught in a tar bog, desperately flapping its wings to escape. He charges downstairs. “What you doing?”
She wheels away from the freezer. She’s holding in her hand a plastic bag of sausage. “This ought to be froze,” she says, looking at him oddly. “What we don’t eat.”
His reprieve abruptly come to an end, John snatches the bag from her. “I’ll do it,” he says.
She flicks at her hair peevishly.
“You don’t open it right,” says John, “everythin’ ’ll fall out.”
“All the bodies, ya mean?”
John drops the sausage. They both squat down to pick it up at the same time. The fleshly, live smell of her makes him shudder, fills him with a combination of forbidden desire for her and remorse for the dead girl’s contrary state. Abbie giggles as her hair brushes against John’s cheek. John picks up the bag. “Your hands are shaking, John Moon.”
“Ain’t been myself.”
“Sorry about Moira taking up with that professor.”
John snaps his head back and cocks it at her.
“I’ve seen them together on campus.” She reaches out and lightly touches John’s shoulder. “He teaches in the same building where I take my empowerment course.”
John abruptly stands up.
“He’s not near as good-looking as you, John. Nor as nice, neither. He’s got a haughty attitude. Like teaching freshman English makes him special or something.”
John thinks he hears a noise upstairs. A door being quietly opened and shut maybe. He looks at the stairs, then back at Abbie, who looks like she’s heard it, too. “What was that?” he asks.
“The wind knocking the shutters round, probably.” She reaches her hand out for John to take. He does and pulls her to her feet. She holds on for a second longer, then walks by him and over to the stairs. Before starting up
