Wilderness

an opportunity. They’re driving this boat of a Cadillac, and she has all this jewelry. I see them in a restaurant, and I know these two are a major score. You have to go with your instincts sometimes. So I leave before them and then follow them, and they’ve got this really bitchin’ house on the back bay, but it’s still daylight and I need dark.”

In my dank and odorous refuge, a spider or something very like it settled on my forehead and for a moment trembled but didn’t move, as if it anticipated danger. But then it began to explore, crawling across my brow toward my left temple.

“So I come back in the evening, and I’m figuring to go right to their front door and talk my way in with one spiel or another. You’d be surprised what stupid crap your average marks will believe, want to believe, even from a total stranger at their door. But there’s a gate at one side of the place, it isn’t locked, so I follow a walkway to the back, just scouting the place. And there they are, sitting on the patio in the dark, with just a couple of candles, looking at the lights on the bay and drinking martinis. My piece has a muffler, so I shoot him dead in the lounge chair, no one can hear. Before the old bird gets out a word, I slam the pistol upside her head and drag her through the sliding door into the house.”

As the spider quested along my left temple and down my cheek, I decided that the hunter must not have much ammunition left. If he possessed only a few rounds, he couldn’t find me the easiest way, by shooting up the entire floor. He needed to unsettle me with his tales of murder, work on my nerves until unintentionally I revealed myself. Toward that end, the spider seemed determined to assist him, and it crept toward the corner of my open mouth, through which I had been breathing quietly. I pressed my lips shut, and the spider crawled upon my chin.

“Me and the old bird went through the house room by room, so she could show me where they stashed their best stuff. She kept pleading poor, and I busted her up pretty good to make her talk. It turned out funny, a real joke on me. Her jewelry was all fake, and the antiques were lousy reproductions, and about all they had after the latest stock-market bust was a stupid pension and the bitchin’ house, where they could still live because of a reverse mortgage. So I waste the two of them and an evening of my vacation, and all I get out of it is six hundred twelve dollars in cash and this crystal paperweight from the old man’s desk, which I kind of liked but now I don’t know what the hell ever happened to it.”

As the spider ascended my right cheek, doggedly circumnavigating my face, I listened to the silence of the hunter patiently listening for me. The eight-legged explorer detoured to my nose, and I thought it might be curious about my nostril, which would be too much for me to endure. But as the silence held, the spider moved toward my right eye, where perhaps it would mistake my lashes for another of its kind.

When I heard a footfall and the protest of ancient wood, I thought that I must have made a sound, that the hunter was on the move at last. But then another man said, “Oh, hey,” and my stalker seemed to turn in place, surprised by the voice. He opened fire, three quick rounds. The scream lasted only a moment, though it was terrible even in its brevity. A weight crashed to the floor and rattled the planks.

“Who the hell are you?” the hunter asked, and I supposed that he must be speaking to whomever he had shot. Curses unspooled from him, an obscene rant that sounded to me like the panicked profanity of a terrified man.

As the spider crept toward my ear, I dared to raise a hand to my face, offering it another option. My leggy visitor didn’t frighten away but quivered delicately from fingertip to fingertip and then down onto my palm.

“Whatever you are,” the hunter said, speaking now to me, “I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna kill you, I’ll come back and chop you good.”

The merest glimpses that he’d had of me had filled him with rage and hatred, had inspired violence, but evidently had robbed him of the courage to confront me without plenty of ammunition. He fled the ruined house, his footfalls thundering off the planks, the wood cracking under his plunging weight. Maybe he stumbled, and I’m sure he fell against a wall, judging by the way the place shook, and he cried out like a terrified child. Cursing once more, he righted himself and found the door and left.

In the stillness, I lowered my hand to the earthen floor of the crawlspace, and after some fascination with my thumb, the spider grew bored with me and went elsewhere in the darkness.

6

Because I am not one to take chances, I remained on my back in the crawlspace, listening, waiting, thinking.

That long-ago day, when I was only eight, I didn’t arrive at this realization, but in time I came to see that of the many kinds of wilderness, the human heart can be the bleakest and the most hostile. Many hearts contain great beauty and the smallest measure of darkness. In many other hearts, beauty brightens only remote corners where otherwise darkness rules. There are those in whom no darkness lies, though they are few. And others have purged from their inner selves all light and have welcomed into themselves the void; their kind are to be found everywhere, though they are often difficult to recognize, for they are cunning.

In the years following my escape from the hunter, I encountered the best and worst of humanity, in days of much peril but also days of triumph, through years salted with much grief but also sweetened with joy. My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty. I will not say that my life would prove to be the strangest in a world replete with strangeness; but I would never have reason to complain that my life was ordinary.

At last, convinced that the hunter had gone away, I slid aside the two loose planks and rose from the crawlspace. I brushed off my clothes and wiped my face as if to gather the spider silk with which my imagination had festooned my features.

I saw the body lying just inside the front door, the pooled blood more black than red in the dim light. Although I wanted to exit by the back door and avoid the dead man, I knew that it was incumbent upon me to look into his face and bear witness.

Apparently he had been a hiker, one who loved nature and the mountains. He dressed the part, and he carried a large backpack. He might have been in his late twenties, a curly-haired man with a well-trimmed beard. His eyes were open wide, but as grotesque as I might be, even I couldn’t frighten the dead.

I had seen just two living people in all my eight years, and this was the first that I had seen dead. He hadn’t willingly offered his life for mine, but fate had spared me by taking him. Perhaps he’d heard the hunter’s voice but not his words, or if he had heard nothing, then he might have come into the old house for no reason but curiosity. Each life is a spool of thread that unravels through the years, and it is by a thread that we are so perilously suspended.

I thanked him and closed his eyes and could do nothing more for him than leave him there to the attention of Nature, that she might take him unto herself and be one with him again, which is the way of all flesh.

If the hunter had lingered, he would have by then attacked me. Nevertheless, I didn’t walk boldly through open grass, but returned to the woods and circled the meadow with caution. Clouds masked the entire sky, and in the dismal light, the trees no longer blazed with color but seemed to have faded a bit more to brown than they had been when I’d set out that morning. The sycamores, quicker than some other species to drop their foliage, were nearly stripped, black-limbed and stark against the sky.

By a somewhat different route, I hiked toward home, wondering if the hunter would indeed return and take the forest from me, so that I would belong neither in my mother’s house nor in the wild. I decided not to seek sadness by dwelling on that prospect, and soon I felt as welcome in the woods as ever.

When I found the wolf waiting on the rimrock as I crested the ridge, I felt certain that he was the same one who had warned me of the hunter.

We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I said, “If you would like some chicken, come home with me, and I’ll give you a nice dinner.”

He cocked his head to the left, then to the right, as if I were a puzzle to him.

“Shall we be friends?” I asked, crouching and holding out one hand to him.

Perhaps because he was of the true wilderness and I was of two worlds, he didn’t approach me. But when I