He sits on the shore, where as a boy he had sat with his father and watched a loon swim underwater the length of the pond. On its sky-blue surface, lily pads are pandemic. Frogs here are huge and have baritone croaks. His father said this is because they are old, retired frogs. Fish sporadically jump. John gives them scores, one to ten, for height and splash. Hours pass. His right arm so pains him he threatens several times to kill it. He condemns to hell his missing finger. He blocks from his mind all thoughts but those relating to his corporeal self. His hurt. His mutilation. The odd way that his four remaining fingers will suddenly jump of their own accord. Other thoughts hurt too much to think about.
Darkness falls. He listens to a hoot owl and watches a fox and two deer come to the pond and drink. The new moon is a wisp of itself. He grows light-headed and tired. He fears his hand is infected and will become gangrenous. He tries and fails to recall for pain an old Indian recipe—something made of mud and a certain kind of crushed leaf. Like a wounded animal, he retreats several feet into the woods, crawls beneath an upturned stump, and sleeps.
He dreams of fire, acres of orange flames high as the trees they devour. A conflagration, pushed by a strong wind. An entire mountainside going up like a Roman candle. A burning that wipes out plants, animals, people; fouls the air with its breath; raises the earth; turns flesh to smoke and bones to ash; that spares no life, large or small. In the blaze’s aftermath, on God’s charred field, lies only dead silence. A dog doesn’t bay. A bird doesn’t chirp. A breath isn’t breathed. On this hardpan, a piss stream would emanate like rifle shots, but there is nothing. Only mute souls in this graveyard, until from the black skeletal remains of a pine break comes a barely audible rustling. Then footsteps, like the harsh popping of virgin snow. Now a buck’s snort, loud as a trumpet blast, and life’s horror begins anew….
SATURDAY
HE WAKES feverish in the deep woods, half buried beneath the roots of a giant upturned oak. Did he hear voices talking? He’s not sure. He quietly lies there, inhaling the smell of rich humus and rot that makes him think of an exhumed grave. Only a narrow shaft of sunlight penetrates this cool, dark cocoon in which tortured horseflies twist in a brown spider’s web and where slugs and beetles are riveted to the decaying walls. The throb in his hand is a reminder of pain’s continuum.
He slowly rolls toward the entrance, unintentionally applying pressure to his injury. The pain is searing. He envisions a pair of tongs gripping his skin below the stub and tearing upward to his shoulder. He bites his lip so as not to scream. Now, beyond the enclosure, sounds splashing water.
John tentatively pokes his head through the opening. Several wood ticks and a mole scurry away. He blinks in the sudden midday glare that reflects harshest off the pond fifty feet to his left. A woman’s head floats atop the water. Then John understands her body is swimming beneath it. Her hair is wavy and long and trails her skull like a tangle of black snakes. A pair of wood ducks float a few feet behind her as if she is one of them.
Suddenly a loud whistle comes from the shore closest to John. The swimmer glances that way. She exhales a sharp bark that sounds like cold ice breaking. From a high stand of pussy willows wades a naked man. He is muscular and tall, with hair the same color as the woman’s, in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He walks toward her until he is in up to his knees, then stops. Treading water twenty feet away, the woman warily watches him. The man reaches down with both hands and splashes water at her. The woman takes in a mouthful of the pond and spits it his way. The ducks nervously flap their wings and back up several feet.
John is immediately transfixed by the couple. He wonders who they are, how they got here, and in what manner they are intertwined with his fate. He thinks maybe they are predisposed to interact in a way that will determine the course of his own life.
The man splashes more vigorously at the woman, almost as if he is angry. Now John sees that the man’s penis is erect; long and thick, it curls steeply upward and back, touching his stomach above the belly button. The woman rasps stridently. She paddles several feet closer to the man, rising up out of the water enough so that her unclothed breasts float atop it like two more heads. Like the rest of her, except for her blood-red areolae and nipples, they are the color of fresh cream. They strike John as being filled with that substance. She hisses at the man.
John thinks maybe they aren’t acquainted. But how could that be? Out here, in the middle of nowhere, strangers colliding? Still, their manner of circling one another suggests two wandering curs sniffing each other. They are to John beautiful and ugly at the same time, like the corpse of Ingrid Banes.
With her chin the woman beckons at the man, challenging him to come farther into the pond. The man slaps more water at her, but doesn’t move. The woman swims to within five feet of him, then stands up and darts her tongue at him. The pond is halfway up her thighs. Drops of it trickle from her pubic bush, which is dense as briars and comes to a sharp point an inch below her navel. She reaches down and runs several fingers through it. As if in response, the man wraps a hand around his penis.
The woman haughtily tosses her head. Then she pointedly slips a finger into her vagina and begins steadily thrusting it in and out. Her hips increasingly pulsate. The man snorts. He starts yanking at his erection. The water’s surface gently ripples from their movements, which are like an intensifying dance. Neither has uttered a word since John has been watching them. Their openmouthed, wide-eyed glaring at one another suggests two cats vying for the same spot on a couch.
Precipitately they rush toward each other. Releasing himself, the man grasps at the woman, who throws her arms out to the sides like someone doing a swan dive. The man loudly slaps his hands on her buttocks. The woman lets out a loud yelp. The man jerks her out of the water, his prominent deltoids rippling, and hoists her breasts up to his face. He starts biting and suckling at her nipples. The woman gyrates side to side so that he can’t keep one in his mouth for more than a second. She wraps her legs around his waist and starts baying like a hyena. He sounds as if he’s growling.
John tells himself that these are Conservancy hikers fucking, but in his feverish state he doesn’t believe it. He feels as if he’s being made to watch two devils mating or murdering each other. Or both. Now they are turned sideways to him and the woman is gripping the man’s penis, which looks big as a bludgeon. She points it straight up toward her crotch and the man, in a way that makes John wince, pushes her down onto it. The woman yelps again. Then she’s throwing her whole body at him as if she’s trying to knock him into the lake. Their splashing heightens. In a rush of wings, the ducks take flight and John, witnessing this hell’s dance, suddenly wants to do the same.
With his good hand he hefts himself up out of his dark den just as the couple spin another half circle. Suddenly the woman faces directly toward the shore. At first John’s not sure that she sees him, standing fifty feet back from the water, then, skewered on that great hook, she thrusts her head straight at him and John imagines her piercing, devilish eyes purloining his worst thoughts. Then she throws back her head and, not altering in the least the harsh pumping of her hips, bays twice as loud as she had before.
John starts to run. Behind him he hears, echoing off the water, that awful hyena’s bark. Once he looks back and sees her, still astride the man, intently eyeing John as he crashes through the trees and bushes on his way downstream toward the truck.
As he drives back down the lumber road to where it intersects with the cleared swath leading over the mountain to the Nobie side of the preserve, his behavior is no longer determined, if ever it was, by deliberate thought. He is the artist striving to complete a mosaic for which no blueprint exists. Not that he is acting aimlessly. On the contrary. Each of his actions, like a domino, follows by rote the act preceding it.
Barely wider than the pickup, the steep path through a stand of white pine said to be among the oldest in the state is not intended for vehicles. Several times he has to stop and get out to drag fallen trees from the road. Even with four-wheel drive and all-terrain tires, the truck gets hung up in a creek bed. Next to the water lies a mound of bear scat so fresh it steams. John listens for the bear, but can’t hear it. With his one good arm, it takes him half an hour to wedge enough flat rocks under the pickup’s tires to free it.
Beneath the weald’s dense canopy, headed for the mountaintop, he is like an exhausted homeward-bound
