Camouflage
In the late afternoon, inside the silence of the forest—the only movement the looping flash of a cardinal’s now-here-now-there—a man in jungle camouflage steps out of the wall of woods. He’s cradling a rifle, his face painted to match his coveralls. I look toward Jane’s tidy backpack twenty yards ahead. Jane hikes point, the one who leads the way. I hike shepherd. The shepherd brings up the rear, catches strays, makes sure everyone’s safe. Gracie hikes between us. Her pack is large, lopsided, wagging from side to side. The three of us have been at it all day. The trail that had plunged down in the early morning mist, rocky and steep and ankle-deep in fog-damp leaves, is now sun-dappled and wide, almost a road. Wilderness surrounds us—thousands of acres of pine and hickory and oak—but the trail has been trafficked by a bulldozer, rutted. The man has materialized at the edge of this trail, facing me.
I don’t move. I pitch my voice loud but I don’t yell. “Jane?”
A silent space, then Jane sings out—“Hello!”—and within half a minute she’s sailed in between me and the man. I move to stand beside her. Gracie stays where she is.
The man is as tall as I am with a long, dark-painted face; his eyes, behind the stiff paint, the living blue of a gas flame. I avoid the eyes and concentrate on the camo. My mind moves down and in like a microscope, closer and closer, until the spots on his coveralls transform into single-celled protozoa.
“Hello,” Jane repeats, holding her hand out. “My name’s Jane Templeton, and this is Alice Straw.” She might have been greeting some newcomer at the Opera’s Sunday matinee.
I retract the microscope and focus on Jane. I don’t let my face show what I feel; I maintain opaqueness. Jane’s fifty-one years old, but her fine profile, lifted up with a luminous smile, shows few wrinkles; her silver hair is neat in a girlish headband. Next to the hunter’s painted face, she’s gracious and civilized, radiating order.
The man lowers his rifle and shakes Jane’s hand with his dark-painted one, “Claude Alberts.”
“We’re with a large church group,” Jane says, her voice innocent as birdsong. “We got so busy talking that we got separated from the rest a couple miles back. You haven’t seen them, have you?”
I feel my mouth quiver with laughter. But I keep it in a straight line and only slant a quick glance toward Jane. I don’t allow my gaze to linger, but I take in her puffed-sleeved shirt with its front darts and how it’s tucked into her slim, belted jeans.
Claude Alberts shakes his head.
“They must be farther ahead than I thought,” Jane says. “What’re you hunting?”
The man puts his rifle butt on the ground, leans the barrel against his thigh, and unhooks a wooden box from his belt. “Turkey,” he says, and hands the contraption to Jane. “First weekend of turkey season.”
Jane turns the box over with her graceful hands, “Will you look at this!” After showing me a groove that’s been cunningly whittled to hold the rubber band, she turns and calls Gracie to join us.
Gracie walks up, noisy with gear: a Nikon on a wide woven strap, steel binoculars around her neck, an aluminum canteen at her waist.
“Can you believe this is the first weekend of turkey season and I didn’t know it?” Jane says. “But then I don’t know how we got separated from the rest of our Bible Study. Somehow the men got ahead of us.”
“What?” Gracie says, shifting the metal load on her chest.
“They just walked off and left us,” I say.
Jane holds out the wooden box that is Claude’s turkey caller, “Alice, look how it’s made to hang from his belt!” Her joy in its craftsmanship is genuine. She insists that Claude show her how to work it, and her curiosity—its lightness and warmth—brings the rigid box to life. Together, she and the box make fine-sounding gobbles. Her delight invokes ours. Soon we’re all grinning.
When we part, old friends, Claude promises to keep a look-out for the rest of our party. But where should he tell our men we’ll be?
Oh, he wouldn’t know it, Jane says. It’s an obscure campsite, off the trail, where Caney Creek drops and there’s a small waterfall.
But what a coincidence. Claude knows exactly where she’s talking about. Three months ago a road was cut through from the other side. Blacktopped, too. He and his buddies can drive right up to the river.
Claude melts back into the endless wall of trees, and I turn to Gracie. “Don’t worry. He doesn’t know. We’ve camped there a lot and never seen a soul.”
“It’s hidden,” Jane says. “We can bathe nude in the waterfall.”
“I’m not worried,” Gracie says.
I eye her, standing in the middle of the trail, hands on hips, loaded down. She’s a head shorter than I am, but muscled and a decade younger. I’m a hushed blonde; Gracie’s dark, and her spikey hair glistens with gel. Her olive-green Bermudas, paired with lace-up Vietnam jungle boots, couldn’t differ more from my starched safari cloth.
“I coach softball, remember?” Gracie says. “Get me a bat-sized branch and that guy’ll be the one with the worry.”
“We can’t have that kind of talk,” Jane says in her elementary school teacher voice. Her blue eyes seek mine. She’d never met Gracie before this trip; I’m the one who invited her. She has an amazing voice, Janie. We’ll put on a show that’ll knock your socks off.
“Is this another rule?” Gracie says. “Like the one about watches?”
Jane and I had been posing in the morning mist by the “Ouachita Wilderness” sign at the trailhead when Jane had seen Gracie’s chrome watch. “Oh. A watch,” she’d said. “We never wear watches. Do we, Alice?”
Gracie had lowered her Nikon, “I always wear a watch.” She’d held out her arm, the arm that she’d called “hirsute” like her Sicilian father’s. “I never don’t wear it.” The insistent digital face flashed the passing hour, minute, second.
“But the wilderness has its own time,” Jane said.
I’d used my harassed get-this-lab-cleaned-up-now tone. “Just take it off.”
Gracie had turned, a fast movement, forcing me to step back in order not to get swiped by her backpack. A dislodged rock clattered down the incline. “Messing up your private party am I, Al?” Gracie’d said, emphasizing the shortness of the name, the final consonant.
“There’s nothing private about this weekend,” Jane said. “I was happy when Alice said a friend of hers wanted to come.”
Jane had turned then to start down the trail and after a moment, Gracie’d scraped off her expandable wristband and shoved the fistful of chrome into a side pocket, increasing the general bulge. I’d motioned her toward the trail and had watched her climb down, noisy and awkward, her borrowed backpack lurching sideways with every step. But I, trusted companion assigned to the shepherd position, had also been unsteady as I descended, my vision blurry, my boots slipping on wet leaves, sending rocks skittering down the trail toward the shapes who moved below me in the fog.
Jane’s husband, Ray, plays tournament-level tennis but doesn’t like to hike, so the two of us usually camp alone or with Sierra Club groups—which was where we’d first met three years ago, on a bus headed for Big Bend. Why had I arranged for Gracie to join us on this trip? Among the hundred women in the Dallas Women’s Chorus, she’d never stood out. I sang alto, she soprano, so we’d never practiced together. We’d only met five months before when we’d been paired at a tryout for a Mozart duet from Così fan tutte. Gracie, I discovered, had an extraordinary gift, and the harmony of our voices had been a thing of wonder. At the September concert, our duet had brought the house down. Was it all vanity, then? My desire to entertain Jane obscuring my usual caution?
Throughout the morning, Jane had stopped often to turn back toward the novice with words of encouragement or warnings of loose rock, and now in the late afternoon, in the middle of the almost-road, she speaks to Gracie in the slow, calm voice she might use with her third graders.
“There’ll be no need for a bat—or any kind of weapon. We come to the wilderness for renewal. We’ll convert her, won’t we, Alice?”
Gracie stands with hands on hips and what shows clearly in the daylight that was never visible in the artificial light of the rehearsal hall is the manly afternoon shadow on the sides of her jaws and chin. I look to see if Jane has noticed that Gracie needs a shave, but Jane is already walking point.
“Why’re you acting like this?” I say.
She shrugs, “I’m Sicilian.” She shifts her stance, adjusts her grip on an imaginary bat and makes a small flick with her wrists. “She has no idea, does she?”
“I won’t tolerate you being rude to Jane,” I say.
Gracie’s black eyes go flat. She drops her batting stance.
I don’t explain that my job is to protect Jane, to keep her safe, that’s she’s too innocent to be polluted. Jane has twenty years on me, but not only do I look older—I had a hysterectomy six years ago and lack the hormones for youth—I have knowledge of worlds she doesn’t know exist.
“I invited you to sing,” I say. “We’ll have supper, we’ll sing our duet. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be back in Dallas.”
By the time the three of us hike off the regular trail and into our idyllic, undiscovered site, we see three pickup trucks and a bullet-shaped silver trailer parked seventy-five yards away, across a flowing cataract of Caney Creek. The vehicles stand on leaf-covered ground, spaced amid tall trees, and behind them, barely visible through the forest, gleams blacktop. The only sound in this remote hollow of the Ouachita Wilderness is the rushing of water, but to me, our place feels defiled. It’s too late to keep hiking—even if this spot weren’t a dead-end.
“We’ve no choice,” Jane says.
My job is to gather wood while Jane lets Gracie help her set up camp. I’m an expert wood-gatherer and usually wander far to find deadfall, dragging in huge limbs, like a hunter with his kill, to Jane’s shouts of celebration. This afternoon, clumsy with unease, I get tangled in a thick muscadine vine on my first foray, and the forest seems to rise up, impenetrable. I stay close to the campsite. I gather what’s available on the near ground.
Jane, always the teacher, can’t get the tents up without showing Gracie the secret life around us: the tiny cricket frog invisible behind a fiddler fern, the poisonous mushroom hidden beneath a greenbriar’s tangle; and when she comes across strange scat, she shows the presence they betray. They’re owl pellets, powdery pieces of regurgitated fur, which she breaks open to reveal the fragile skeleton of a mouse.
“Remember when we saw the barred owl on the Upper Kiamichi?” I say.
“Oh, yes. Wasn’t it so thrilling?”
It had been more than thrilling, seeing the owl’s round, feathered face, its huge wings working in a steady pumping rhythm as it flew toward us, low, silent and mysterious, out of the foggy twilight. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel its searching intelligence. Beneath the surface of the world I thought I knew: something more. Everything I know about birds Jane taught me.
“Maybe this scat is a barred owl’s,” she says to Gracie.“Who cooks for you/who cooks for you—that’s their call. Maybe we’ll get to hear it tonight! We’ll listen closely, won’t we?”
Jane’s curiosity and child-like delight in the natural order work to clear away my sense of dread. There’s no ambiguity about Jane, no murkiness. When I’m with her, the world is transformed. The light changes; objects—rocks, trees, leaves—shimmer. I’m able to move into this light, wrapped in the musty autumn smell of oak leaf humus, the resinous tang of pine. I stack arm loads of dead branches, start the fire with pine straw and broken twigs and patiently feed it until it’s strong—all this before Jane and Gracie get the first tent poles in the ground.
Normally Jane and I would set up our tent on the flat leaf-covered area near the fire-ring, but this afternoon we hide it on a slanting hillside in a little thicket of oak and sweet gum. We don’t talk about this; we just do it. We are as one in our instinct for caution, but there’s no need for Gracie to worry, so we say nothing. Like the cricket frogs, the hunters are invisible, but their presence is felt. The plan is for Jane and me to share our usual tent, with Gracie in another, borrowed one.
“But we might all sleep in the same tent,” Jane says.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Gracie says. “Too crowded.”
“Only if it gets too cold,” I say to preserve the illusion of normalcy.
“No matter what,” Jane says, “we better stay dressed.”
As we lash aluminum poles together, Jane chatters about the luxuriousness of sleeping naked in a down bag and how she wants Gracie to experience it—but not tonight. I know that she’s only trying to convert a novice to one of the pleasures of backpacking, but my face flames. When I try to make a joke of it, Gracie looks at me with a mixture of disgust and amusement and shakes her head. I put myself behind glass, a tiny insect husk pinned with others of my kind.
When we pitch Gracie’s tent, Jane and I work silently, in tandem. Because we’re on a slope, we site the entrance to facilitate her being able to sleep with her head higher than her legs, which means that she’ll have to crawl up, into the domed space. Our tent site is basically flat. This isn’t intentional, but I wait for Gracie to complain: Is this another rule? Make the newcomer suffer? Instead, as the three of us hook up her fly-cover, she begins humming, an exquisite thread of silver sound.
My body relaxes. I tell Jane how she amazes me: she’s so brave—walking up to that painted apparition. “Next to him, you were certain proof of Homo sapiens’ continued evolution,” I say. I watch her laugh. She always tilts her head back, tosses her silvery hair, and her cheeks lift, curving up to downslant her eyes.
Gracie starts in about the stupid hunter with his painted face and his stupid camouflage and how immoral it is to kill anything, even stupid turkeys, and she’s moving on to the stupidity of men in general, when I shoot her a look. She shuts up.
“Wild turkeys are extremely smart and hard to hunt,” Jane says. She explains that she told Claude our names because according to a lecture she’d heard, you’re supposed to do everything you can to personalize a dangerous situation, to make someone who threatens you, know you’re human too.
Occasionally, interspersed in the activity of hiding our tents, Jane has cupped her mouth and hollered at her husband of twenty-eight years: “Ray Templeton. Come help with these tent poles!” Then Gracie, without a husband to call for, had joined in, yelling toward the river, “Joey Castellano, bring more wood!” My vocal chords refuse to call out for a non-existent husband. I am unable to give life to any bible study kin. Finally, with the tents up, Jane and Gracie are laughing so hard over our church-group masquerade that they collapse on the logs around the fire-ring. I watch them, but I’m not laughing. My membership in church groups cannot be shrugged on, a disguise, easily worn then discarded. Born Baptist in Waco, doesn’t that say it all?
I pick up my water bottle and leave the campsite to walk down to the river. I wander on the no-path through the timeless evening, and the old flicker-and-cramp in the gut I knew as a child accompanies me. Our church, The True Vine Missionary Baptist Church, was a one-room, clapboard building with red double doors on the I-35 access road. In my mind I hear those doors clang shut, I see the lights abruptly extinguished. I am six years old, sandwiched safely between my parents. It is winter: sounds of heavy breathing; acrid smell of close bodies in wool clothing. The blackness in the room spreads, becomes the blackness of my mind. From the back of the room behind me, a drum begins to beat. Terrified, I fumble for my father’s big, rough hand with its web of skin-fissures, its broken nails. A deep voice cries out, I am the true vine, you are the branches. Over and over the drum beats and the voice calls out from the dark, I am the true vine, you are the branches. On the altar, candles flicker to life. I scramble out of the pew and run, the first to be saved, toward the light.
It was a scandal. I was too young. But I had run toward the light and after that, what? Growing up, church three times a week until I graduated from Baylor. Sixteen years hearing about the sins of the flesh. Even natural flesh—Adam and Eve, the way God intends—sinful. And what about unnatural flesh?
The natural order of things has always comforted me, and now, on the way to the river, leaving behind the tall trees, the dense undergrowth, I linger—turning to touch a bright leaf, a pincushion of moss, stopping to look up at patches of orange sky. I feel the wilderness all around me, its secret breathing life, and slowly my insides unclench. The sound of the river is big, and I jump from rock to rock until I am surrounded by the music of its rush. The water is effervescent, bubbling against the rocks. I am squatting, filling up my plastic bottle, enfolded by the joyous, when I look up. Across from me, hunkering at eye level, a turkey hunter—not Claude, but another. I have not heard him, have not seen him approach. He has simply appeared, painted, grinning, snag-toothed.
I bring my fear back to camp with me, but I don’t speak it—not even to Jane. The shepherd doesn’t scare the flock. As night comes on, the fear comes alive. From the men’s camp across the river, music and laughter thread through the trees—gradually dwarfing the water’s murmur. The three of us have hiked nine miles into the wilderness bringing only small flashlights, but across the river the curtained windows in the bullet-shaped trailer glow, and a spotlight has been turned on above the barbeque grill. The men seem to be taking turns coming out of the trailer to cook on the grill, and I know that inside the trailer, behind the glowing curtains, a lot of whisky is being drunk. I know about men and hidden whiskey.
Last spring Jane and I had shared leisurely cocktails by the fire after a waterfall frolic. But tonight we don’t bathe, we start right in on dinner. I pull out the dented and blackened coffee pot that sits in the fire to boil water; Jane produces the torn plastic envelope that contains the collapsible grill. I brought the steak we’ll share; Jane, the two potatoes wrapped in foil. I brought the butter; Jane, the sour cream. I brought a half bottle of wine decanted into a plastic flask; Jane, a tiny cosmetic container of scotch.
I see Gracie watching us.
We sit on logs around the fire listening to the sounds of men living it up beneath an eye of light that becomes more insistent as the woods darken. My body has grown heavy with dread, but when Gracie pulls out her monster-steak and two-liter bottle of red wine, I laugh. For Jane’s sake, I attempt lightness. I tell Gracie she’d better get more wood for the fire. I say she’ll have to hike the bottle out and if she thought it was bad walking down with a heavy pack….
Jane says, “Leave her alone. She’ll know better next time.”
Gracie and I look at each other across the campfire. She makes a wintery grimace that might pass for a smile in some cold-blooded species. We both know there won’t be a next time. In the five months I’ve known her, practicing twice a week for our duet, we became friends. This has been undone in a single day. How is it possible? We’ve so much in common: both high school teachers, music for both of us a passion. We’d been companionable, going out after rehearsals for Mexican food. She’d even invited me to her birthday party so we could sing for her parents.
In the waning light, Gracie’s spiked hair and black eyes are sharp-edged against the net of branches behind her. There’d been a brown net the night of her party too, a macramé weaving that draped the entrance to her tiny dining room from ceiling to floor, and behind this net, her little white-haired Sicilian parents and her four closest friends. We’d drunk tequila shots and posed for photos. We’d sung Happy Birthday, eaten cake. Did Gracie and I sing our famous, comic Così duet? We did. It might have been our best rendition, our voices melting together: duped sisters toasting their disguised lovers with Cuervo shots.
After Gracie’s parents had left, we’d switched to Fifties music. We’d danced and sung, until birthed into rhythm, inspired, Gracie’d shrugged out of her shirt. Then everyone—all women younger that I, none of whom I knew—had either shimmied or shrugged her shirt off. Gracie’d shouted “For freedom!” and ripped off her bra, and we’d all shouted “For freedom!” and done the same. We’d drunk more tequila shots to cement our bond with women around the world, then an elfin child-woman with pixie-cut pink hair touched my breast. And that had been the start.
At rehearsal the next week I’d barely looked at Gracie, but she only asked blandly if I’d had a good time. When I retreated into microscopic remoteness, she never mentioned the party again. Gradually I grew easy around her. Looking at her now, I see that this ease has been an illusion. In the trembling light of the fire the naked branches behind Gracie morph into a knotted macramé net. Cold slithers through my gut.
We cook and eat our steaks, but as the noise from the men’s camp grows louder, we grow more and more quiet. We clean up silently. Their rowdiness gradually subsides, and the single eye of light disappears. When the trailer’s generator finally cuts off, no one would know the men’s camp is there. All is dark and still. There’s only the crackling sound of our fire and beyond that, in the invisible vastness, the cricket frogs’ thin scrape. I had imagined this evening filled with music and laughter—the Cosi fan tutte duo performing beneath the stars and Jane enraptured—instead we huddle silently around a tiny fire. I’d anticipated the Milky Way’s bright flow through my veins, but there are no stars, no moon. Blackness rises up around us, only the flames of our campfire lick the face of the night.
“It’s been a long day,” I say. “I vote for bed.”
“Let’s not let these guys ruin our trip,” Jane says. “You know something unexpected always happens. Snow storms in August, and— Remember that flash flood in Big Bend?”
“I agree with Jane,” Gracie says. “We can’t let men determine what we do. We came to sing, let’s sing.”
“No,” Jane says. “The men’ll have to get up early. We can’t disturb them. It’s against wilderness etiquette.”
“I agree with Jane,” I say, putting my arm through hers.
“Of course, you agree with Jane,” Gracie says.
A silent stutter of time, then, “Do you really think we should let others stop us from singing our song? I mean, come on, Al.”
I say nothing, but I realize I’m feeling the wine and curse myself. I take my arm out of Jane’s and straighten my spine.
“I do think if you sing softly, it would be all right,” Jane says. “We’re far enough—”
“Let’s sing our song, Al. What do you say?”
“Why do you keep calling her ‘Al’?” Jane says.
Gracie stares across the fire at us but says nothing. The flickering light glints off the spikes of her hair. “Good question,” she says. She jumps up and slaps at her butt with both hands, shedding dirt and pine needles. “Hold that thought, Jane. I’ll be right back.”
She walks away, out of the circle of light, disappearing in the darkness. The crunching sound of dry leaves moves in the direction of the tents. Neither Jane nor I stir, then she takes my arm and moves close, the warmth of our bodies a guard against chill.
When I met Jane on the Sierra Club bus to Big Bend, I was a stone. No hormones, drained of juice. A ninth grade biology teacher for whom all magic had leaked out: a frog merely something to dissect, an object smelling of formaldehyde. I’d adopted protective coloring to ensure survival, but I hadn’t been able to protect myself against me. The cancer in my uterus was hate, I think—my own teeth tearing up my guts. Cause and effect, the natural order of things. Three years ago at Easter, the natural order of things had brought spring to Big Bend. The Earth had tilted; tiny wildflowers and flowering cactus had burst forth from Chisos Basin’s extrusion of lava and rock. When this beauty struck the tuning fork that is Jane Templeton and she’d sounded her always-clear note, I’d resounded in sympathetic vibration. I’d come back to life.
“She’s surely impulsive,” Jane says now, leaning into me. “I think you should sing your song. It seems to mean an awful lot to her.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling Jane’s vest, poufy and soft, against mine.
“Sorry I didn’t check about hunting season. It’s messed things up, hasn’t it?”
I don’t say anything. I barely hear her. I’ve melted into the fire.
Gracie crunches in from the dark to stand across the fire-ring from us. I squint up against the smoke. Her Vietnam jungle boots and thick legs in their Bermuda shorts appear in the light, but her upper body is hidden in shadow. “I brought these for you, Al. They’re doubles. In the bottom of my pack so I couldn’t get at them last night.”
She holds up something. I can’t see what—a handful of something against the black night—but in her arm’s movement, her chrome watch flashes and my gut cramps.
“Let’s go on to bed,” I say. “The night’s ruined.”
“Jane, you know,” continues Gracie, “of course you know—everyone knows—what it means to be in the Dallas Women’s Chorus?”
I go rigid, unbreathing. Gracie’s going against all etiquette, breaking every unspoken rule. I feel Jane’s mind touch her question. It moves lightly, like a long-legged fly on a stream, leaving no imprint. She slips her arm out from mine and sits up.
“Al, I only want to help you live an authentic—”
“No,” I say, and I’m on my feet now. I’ve realized what the “doubles” are.
Jane stands too. She walks around the fire-ring to stand between us, the apex of an equilateral triangle. She looks at me; she looks at Gracie. She examines each of us in turn. So different we are: Gracie, squat, darkly bristled; me, slender, smoothly blonde.
Back and forth Jane’s head moves as she takes us in. Her hair is molten silver, her eyes transparent in the firelight.
“You understand, don’t you, Jane?” Gracie says. “I call her ‘Al’ because that’s what everyone in the Chorus calls her.”
“Alice?” Jane says. She looks as if she’s been thrown a ball she has no idea how to catch.
I squat down off our log: I can’t look at her. I’m squatting, looking down at the mixture of pine needles and dirt, the blackened stones of the fire ring, while every nerve in my body shouts, Run.
“Admit it,” Gracie says. “Just say it. Go on.”
I shake my head. I don’t look up. I feed shredded bark into the fire.
“Quit it,” Jane says. “We don’t badger people.”
Always the teacherly We. But now I am “people,” not Alice.
I sink back onto my heels. I scrutinize the fire’s interior. It snaps and pops. One of the support limbs, burning through, crashes inward, scattering sparks into the night. I look up. I see Gracie’s arm winking chrome reach out. I see Jane walk to take what she offers. I want to tackle them, feed the photos of the birthday party to the flames. I try to go down and in to safety, but putting Jane under the microscope never works. She is irreducible. I go up and out instead. I circle, dangerously high, watching three Homo sapiens around a fire—a fire surrounded by a wilderness in the State of Arkansas, which is an arbitrary amount of land surrounded by other United States of America, itself an arbitrary designation for the center of a landmass on a small planet circling an insignificant star. By the time I reach the outer edges of the known universe—all the time watching Jane—she’s looked through the photos and her mind no longer seems to be a long-legged fly on a stream.
I return from my planetary excursion. High above an owl sounds its trembling call but around the campfire: silence. I stand up and leave the light to walk out into the darkness. No one says Don’t go. I listen for Jane’s voice but I don’t hear it. I hear leaves crunch but I can’t see them. The ground slopes upward.
Our tent is a triangular darkness. Near it is Gracie’s dark dome. We’ve hidden them well. I unzip the tent with shaking hands. I manage to tie the flaps back, but when I lean over to untie my boots, my hands won’t work. I sit down. My feet seem to have grown, my boots are enormous—huge insensate things at the bottom of my legs. I grab at their double-knotted laces, but my eyes are blind. My fingers seek to feel the knots’ undoing, but my jerky efforts only strengthen them. I scrabble to get a boot off without loosening its lace. I yank and pull until my ankle is rubbed raw, but the double-stitched, reinforced leather I paid dearly for does its job.
I crawl inside the tent, dragging my huge, heavy feet. I couldn’t undress with my boots on, even if I wanted to. I’m not letting myself think or feel. I’ve put my brain in a specimen jar high on a shelf where it’s safe. I stick the clown feet into my sleeping bag and lie down to wiggle in. I sit up, half in, half out of the bag. My body recalls its bedtime routine: put clean clothes inside the tent for morning; cover the backpack with a black leaf bag, otherwise tomorrow morning everything will be wet and—
Tomorrow morning.
I shake myself like a dog shedding water, then jerk deep into the bag. The tent’s darkness holds me close, and in the stillness, as I zip up, fury rips through me. How could I have been so stupid as to bring Gracie! The zipper’s sharp teeth chew at my down vest. I sit up and tear it off, shredding the silence in short, even snaps. I fling it so hard toward the back of the tent that the structure quivers. I don’t care. Let it fall down around me. Let the forest burn, fires rage.
What about Jane?
I struggle to hold off the thought of her, to escape the encroaching grief. Given the coffin-like shape of the bag, it isn’t easy to wrestle myself onto my side, and once there, my nose touches the taut, slanting nylon of the tent wall. I squirm back over through rising waves of panic. I’m alone, encased, mummified. After a moment, when the ocean of my pounding blood calms, I hear low voices coming from the direction of the campfire. I roll onto my stomach and peer out through the mesh opening. My eyes are tired; they see only a hint of firelight in the far darkness. Could I crawl out on my belly to eavesdrop? Creep through the night like some military maniac? But I would have to drag my enormous feet and the leaves would certainly crunch. I would be caught.
The thoughts of crawling and being caught occupy the surface of my mind but below them, all the time, a deeper mind turns. Over and over I see us, a filmstrip unspooling in my head. Jane and Alice, Alice and Jane: best friends, snuggling up against each other on Sierra Club buses, massaging tired necks and shoulders, wriggling into sleeping bags at night. Philia, not eros. When she comes to bed, we’ll talk. Without Gracie around to scare her, Jane will understand.
I lie down with this sliver of hope to wait for her.
When Gracie crawls over me into the tent, my face burns with shame. I close my eyes against her flashlight wagging its beam around on the walls. She clanks and grunts; her breath is uneven, hard. I relax my body and my breathing. I go down and in. My discovery: an organ can be removed and still remain, withered and painful, never to be dislodged, never to germinate. The immensity of my loss rises up within me. I cover my mouth to muffle my sounds.
When Gracie is a soft-breathing lump of darkness I rise up onto my elbows and look out. I wait, and the forest waits with me. I have a sense of a sentient wilderness. I hear trees groan, bramble creak, creatures scuttling through underbrush. I feel the whole of it, its thousands of square miles. In the dark, it breathes: remote, unmoved. The night deepens and grows colder. I wait. I look out, but I never see Jane come to bed.
I raise my head, instantly alert. Outside the tent, it’s earliest morning, misty, gray. Because the flaps are tied back, I see a turkey hunter walk silently into our campsite. I lower my head and lie flat and still, my eyes level with his boots. The tent’s nylon overhang drips moisture, one slow drop and after a while, another. The camouflaged legs above the boots pause—a drip extends, lengthens, falls; another drip—then the legs move away, up the hill, and the whole hunter comes into view. Now another pair of boots and camouflaged legs appear in the triangular frame. Then another and another. There are more of them than I’d imagined: rifle-carrying wraiths with dark-painted faces moving through our camp into the forest. Their breath smokes in the cold. The early morning surfaces shift; shadows change, become indistinct, undo. No shapes hold. It’s a world of apparition and danger. The hunters are almost invisible, low mists, ragged fog, nothing but momentary condensations on a rocky terrain that will retain no imprint of their passing. Their boots make no sound on the dew-wet leaves as they walk up, into the unknown day.