The River at Night(44)

Simone emerged from behind the shelter carrying a plastic jug and metal cups and set them on a tree stump. A joined section of green and orange leather seats that looked scavenged from a VW bus—springs and stuffing busted through—huddled close to the fire. I moved toward it, holding my hands up to the flames as if to warm them, when what I was really doing was trying to stop quaking with fear.

“Would you ladies care for a drink?”

We all looked at each other. Rachel stood by me, still gripping my belt, her face unreadable. I didn’t think she’d seen the animal heads. Sandra’s face was utterly drained of color. I gripped her hand, her flesh clammy and cold, her breath coming in shallow bites.

Pia took one of the metal cups offered to her and said defiantly, “What is it?”

Simone barked out a laugh. “Just water, I’m afraid.”

“I would love some,” Rachel said, stepping forward. With no inquiry as to its origin, she accepted the metal cup of water, spilling it over herself in her haste to drink.

“What’s with the heads in the trees?” Pia asked, arms folded. I shrank at the tone of her question.

Simone gazed up at them. “They’re rather beautiful, don’t you agree? My now-silent friends . . .” She shrugged. “I suppose it’s my way of telling the forest who’s boss.”

Above us, the moon glowed like a piece of plate. Dean busied himself by the fire. He took down the carcasses, now charcoal black, and laid them on a flat piece of river slate. I flashed on the presents Ziggy had left at my doorstep when he was an outdoor cat: mice, a baby raccoon, bunnies, even a garden snake; all headless.

Dean wiped his hands on his pants and approached his mother.

Then he signed, his movements fast and precise, “Women, eat? Women, hungry?”

I looked at Pia. She’d seen it—the words flying from the boy’s hands—we all had. He signed again, more slowly this time, “Women, eat?”

“It seems that Dean is wondering if you ladies are interested in dinner,” Simone said with a strange annoyance.

“What . . . is it?” Sandra asked.

“Porcupine, mostly. A couple of grouse, maybe a squirrel. Quite delicious.”





28


Simone ate her food with a delicate clicking sound; finally it occurred to me that her teeth might be fake. Grubby pinkies extended fastidiously, she nibbled at a leg of something before tiring of it and tossing it into the flames. It shocked me that I was eating what I was told was a vole. The meat came off the bone in long, gristly shreds that I forced myself to swallow. Pia and Rachel sat on the blown-out car seats, turned toward each other as they peeled porcupine meat from a small rib cage. They ate quickly and with an odd shame. Sandra huddled on a stump stool by the fire, warming her hands. She said she wasn’t hungry, but no one believed her.

Dean spread out a freshly skinned deer hide in the dirt near us. Its head—four hooves laid neatly next to it—sat staring at us on a nearby stump, nose still glistening wet.

“Such a tragic story about your guide,” Simone said as she peeled some kind of root with a short-handled knife. “I imagine you marked his grave?”

“We made a cairn in the river,” I said.

“I see. So people will be coming to retrieve him.”

We were quiet, imagining this.

“Why do you live out here?” Pia asked.

Simone worked something out of her hair and threw it into the shadows. “We grew tired of people, Dean and me. We’re better off without them. We make our own paradise here, as you can see. No phones, no taxes, no noise, no pollution. None of the insanity civilization has to offer, thank you very much. Besides”—she skewered the root and rested it on glowing coals—“they were threatening to take my dear boy, and I couldn’t have that.”

“Is Dean . . . all right?” Rachel asked.

“Dean is not like everybody else. You can see that. He marches to the tune of a different drummer, I believe the saying goes.” She pulled a short twig from a pocket in her voluminous skirt, used it to remove something from between her front teeth. “This world can’t handle anybody different. It’s like some sort of sin. They want to put you in an institution and shoot you up with drugs and try to make you like everybody else. So we disappeared ourselves. Simple.”

An owl hooted, haunting a nearby tree. Sandra shivered and said, “What do you do in winter?”

“Cut a lot of wood. Don’t think we’ll ever run out of that.” Simone smirked, glaring out at the trees that hung over us with what I could have sworn was a touch of disgust.

“Does anyone know you live out here?” Pia asked.

Simone considered Pia, her size and strength. “You four do. I believe that’s it.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, struggling to keep my expression neutral.

“You see, the secret,” Simone said, puffing up with pride, “is in how you burn your wood. That is the key to everything. On flyover days in summer, when rangers patrol by air—bunch of overpaid fatheads if you want to know the truth—you don’t hunt, because you cannot smoke your game. They’ll see you. Make a note of you. Pay a visit. Tell you to leave. If you need a fire, burn clean, dry wood. It doesn’t smoke up. It burns clear, and you are safe. That’s my tip of the day. You’re welcome.” She snorted out a braying sort of laugh at her joke—clearly she was out of practice with mirth—and tossed her homemade toothpick into the flames.