The River at Night(10)

Fairly early on, I went from the one he loved to the one he’d married. I felt it at holiday parties, at art openings for his students, when his faculty meetings stretched into dinner, then later and later arrivals back home. From the beginning I never felt attractive or hip enough for him, always slightly amazed he’d picked me. After a while I figured it out: not only did I put my creative goals second to his—I’ll never know why—but I was a great audience for him. Problem was, ever-lovelier fans in the form of female graduate students cycled in yearly, until he finally chose one. All I had to do was open my eyes. But it’s my Scottish stock. We’re stubborn, and when we say yes, by God, we mean it. We hold on forever, choking the life out of the thing we must have. My terror of being alone had one result: I was alone.

After Millinocket, we left the speed and efficiency of the interstate and took Route 11, the road that would take us all the way to Dickey and the lodge. English radio stations turned French. We spun the dial, fascinated. French rock and roll, French talk shows, the news in French, French easy listening. Signs welcomed us to Aroostook County, while evidence of civilization—including houses—became rare. The ones we saw looked abandoned; creepers veined across walls and nosed into windows. Bushes muscled over rooftops, joining others in a living canopy, all with the intent of digesting the structure beneath.

We drove mostly in silence, as one does when entering another world, through Grindstone, Stacyville, Knowles Corner. Here, signs of initial excitement about a new business venture appeared to be followed by the marks of a much-longer-lasting and enduring despair. A colorful placard announcing DADDY’O’S LOBSTER ROLLS! sported a grinning cartoon lobster, but the arrow pointed to a darkened trailer that tilted helter-skelter in a swampy field. Five dollars bought you a rain-soaked mattress propped up by chairs in a front yard.

By the time we reached Patten, it seemed people had even given up on naming things. A sign outside a rotted motel said MOTEL. The word GUNS painted in twenty-foot letters covered one side of a barn. On a hand-painted shingle, a restaurant announced that FOOD was available within.

But soon, even those sad enterprises faded away. The woods on either side grew dense, impenetrable, alive with their own logic and intelligence. Mile upon mile unspooled before us with nothing man-made in view, no shotgun shacks, no stores, nothing. The world of the forest dwarfed our strip of holed-out road. I sensed green-sprung life anxious to swallow it; imagined trees and plants breaking up the road as they burst through, erasing it as if it had never existed. It was beautiful and frightening to see how nature didn’t give two shits about houses, buildings, and bridges, that it would shrug us off the first chance it got. I opened the window a few inches. Afternoon blew in on a fresh, clean breeze—full of chlorophyll and wood and cold mountain water—it shocked me fully awake and almost made me high.

“I hate to say this,” I said, “but I have to pee.”

Pia tapped the brakes, heeding signs that signaled sharp turns ahead. “We all do, I think. Want to practice going in the woods?” She glanced over at me with a smile.

I shivered. “There has to be something around here.”

More green flew past, broken only by vast unnamed lakes bordered by tall pines standing sentry. Ignoring the double no-pass lines in the road, a truck loaded with Porta-Johns roared by. Pia’s hands whitened on the wheel.

We drove another half hour, then forty-five minutes, everyone’s bladder bursting by then, as we bumped along on pitted tar dead level with the earth. I had the sense that anything could come brawling out of the woods, snarl across our path, then disappear into the forest on the other side.

Down a short dirt drive, a log cabin butted up into a hillside, a satellite dish stuck to its flank like a wart. A wooden sign that read SUNDRIES/GUNS/TACKLE/BAIT hung askew over the door. A smaller sign underneath—an afterthought—read CARHARTT QUALITY BOOTS. A yellow light burned behind glaucous windows. Heavy pine branches clawed at the car as Pia crawled along the shoulder. I was struck by the sameness of the view in all directions, the sheer density of growth, and how easy it would be to lose our way just steps from where we sat. I felt watched, though I couldn’t remember feeling farther from civilization.

Pia turned to us. “Ladies? Your thoughts?”

“Perfect setting for the next Saw movie,” Sandra said.

Pia rolled her eyes. “That’s the spirit, Katy-Loo.”

“I’d like to say I don’t have to go that bad, but . . .” I shifted in my seat as I watched Rachel’s jaw work at her gum.

She cursed under her breath as she reached for the door handle.

“When in Maine . . .”

The rest of us got out of the car in thick silence, shaking out our stiff limbs and brushing ourselves off. Daylight lingered, a peach-colored glow through blackened trees. Pia did some kind of runner’s stretch, groaning a bit. We waited until she was done, then followed her down the dirt path to the entrance of the store.

A muscular metal spring slammed the torn screen door behind us as we stood awkwardly in front of a vast candy display. Necco wafers, Rolos, giant Hershey’s bars, Bonanza taffy, Now & Laters, licorice pipes, all coated with a gray film of dust. Behind the counter in the receding darkness a lightbulb ticked and swayed over a display case of sausages coiled like snakes in a white metal pan. Flies buzzed behind the glass or turned quietly on yellow strips that curled from the ceiling.