The River at Night(47)

“What about the phone?” I whispered.

With agonizing slowness, Sandra unzipped her vest pocket. In my life I’d never heard anything make so much noise.

“What if it rings, Jesus,” Rachel breathed.

“Just let her . . .”

She held it out in the middle of our circle, a black rectangle outlined in taffy pink. No cheery, bright screen. “It’s dead, I think, I’m—I’m turning it on and off and nothing’s happening.”

“For fuck’s sake, can’t we do this later?” Rachel said.

“She’s right.” Sandra stashed the phone back in her pocket.

We sat up, the skins releasing poofs of musk and earth as they crinkled and buckled. As we stood, they slid off as if we were shedding them. I can’t remember ever feeling so naked and cold. On impulse I grabbed the sharp stick Dean had used to skewer the meat and tucked it under my belt. I caught Pia’s eye and pointed at a rusted stump of an ax that leaned up against the cabin next to the neat pile of firewood.

“No,” she whispered harshly. “Too close.”

I nodded. She was right. They would hear us.

We crept back into the woods that bordered the stream, Pia leading, Sandra next, then me, Rachel clutching my belt. We were nomads, an island of four. As bound in our lostness as we ever were as friends, we blundered through the living darkness as soundlessly as we could, but it was hard to believe that every footfall, every unintentional snap of branch or rustle of leaf didn’t wake the world and call the hounds of hell down upon us. Why weren’t we being pursued? Were we being that stealthy? It frightened me more to hear nothing, as if they had heard us but were taking their sweet time to come after us. This forest was their domain, not ours. Quite possibly they had a more efficient plan than we could ever dream of.

We followed the stream toward the river, much of the time wading in it past our knees, lunging at branches and roots that crowded the bank. The water flowed biting cold down from the mountainside, but even sloshing through it we made blessedly less noise than we did on land, or at least that’s how it felt. But the chill seeped back into all of us like an old enemy.

For over an hour we battled our way downstream, until we reached the river that had carried us to this lost world. We bushwhacked our way along the bank, often detouring into the woods to forge any progress at all, always keeping the river in earshot. There was no place open enough in the forest to rest together even if that had occurred to us. Trees stood rooted mere feet apart, their branches intertwining at waist height, so we found ourselves crawling like beasts on our hands and knees on the ground, our palms sticky with pine sap and pocked with small stones. Pain, hunger, and cold became secondary to the primal, animal compulsion that propelled us.

As I navigated by feel of root and branch, stepping blindly into rushing water, only part of my consciousness heeded the fact that the outlines of rocks and trees against the sky had grown clearer. Form and mass emerged from a palette of stygian blackness, while color returned to leaf and stone. The river, once meshed with the night, clearly separated itself from its bank. The sky had begun to lighten. The morning, like an unexpected kindness, had arrived.





Sunday


   June 24





31


Still moving like one four-hinged creature as dawn came, we fought our way through thick, dark spruce. Several yards ahead an area of the forest seemed brighter, an opening of some kind. With no discussion, we headed toward it.

We burst out of the woods, freed from a prison of green. We found ourselves in a field of rotted cornstalks, once taller than houses but now slumped over in tortured shapes, their moldering leaves grazing the soil as if anxious to return to it. I tried to imagine how the crop came to be, if it had once been part of someone’s prized farm. Now abandoned, the corn grew wildly and on its own every summer, only to sink back on itself, a ghost harvest. The field was roughly square, bordered by woods that seemed bent on taking over. Waist-height pines and alders encroached on the putrid stalks.

Stupid with fatigue, we stood gaping around, our clothes torn and black with mud. Though it was a relief to see beyond three feet in front of me, the reality of being out in the open raised the hair on the back of my neck. Sandra hugged herself and wandered off to a sunny spot, lifting her face to the light. The field droned with insects. Grasshoppers whirred by at eye height to land on the drooping stalks, grooming one hairpin leg with the other. Clouds of mosquitoes and no-see-ums swarmed and dined on us, but none of us had the energy to fight them off.

“Hey, Sandra,” Rachel said hoarsely, approaching her. “Let’s see the phone.”

Hands on hips, she peered through her one lens at Sandra as she unzipped her vest pocket and reached her hand down and right through a vicious-looking rip in its side. Her fingers wiggled. She lifted her head, face pale as death.

Rachel squinted at Sandra’s pocket with her good eye. “So where’s the phone?”

“I don’t know, it’s gone, it—”

“Where’s the fucking phone?” Rachel slapped Sandra hard across the face.

I stiffened. Pia took a step back as if she were the one hit.

“I don’t know, I don’t know. . . .” Sandra looked all around her on the ground, as if she would find it there. As if the world worked like that.