“No sir that would not work.” Pierre says to
the tramp in the battered plaid suit. “Some years ago I lit an entire shack
full of dynamite. While the
experience left me insensible for a brief period I remained, as you can see,
fully intact.”
Everybody guffaws as the plaid tramp passes the
bottle to the little lame hobo. Pierre remembers this from before the darkness descended, stories
around a campfire to pass the time, a place where a stranger can speak the
truth knowing nobody’s going to believe him anyway.
“You hear that, Chuck?” the weasel-faced boy by
the tarpaper lean-to asks the burly one-eared man squatting beside him. “Think he could take a mortar round
like you did at Guadacanal?”
The burly man looks up, the stubble on his jaw
nearly as long as his buzzcut. “It was at Chosun, not that a little pansy like
you would know about war.”
The weasel-faced boy sneers. “Not that you’d
know who your Daddy is.”
“What did you just say?” Chuck asks slowly as
he stands. Pierre holds up his
hands, palms facing outward as if he could shove away the jagged anger rising
at the fire’s edge.
“Easy, cats. No need for aggression, let’s have
a chilled out session, you need some relief and I got some sweet leaf.” He
snaps his fingers as Chuck’s rage cools back down to annoyance and reaches into
the backpack for the joint lying atop the shotgun shells. “The smoke is my
deliverance and salvation, keeps me out of bad situations, provides my
questions an explanation. And if
you two gentlemen will partake I’m sure you’ll be able to put your differences
behind you.”
“How about that, Chuck?” The boy turns his
attention to Pierre. “He ain’t
just good at exploding, he can rhyme too.”
Chuck stares at Pierre’s cigarette. “Don’t you read the papers? That stuff
will make you crazy.”
“My experience, sir, is quite the opposite.”
Pierre strikes a kitchen match against the sole of his boot. “When I first met
Mary Jane, the weight of my sorrows pressed me so that I could but cry out in
my despair. And then, as I wept and raged in a forest, a little Mexican man
came to me with a fat smoldering reefer.
One draw of that fine Mexicali tea and I began to feel like myself
again. I tried to pass it back but
he said, ‘No, all yours’ and disappeared.”
Pierre inhales, then blows out smoke and hands
the joint to the plaid tramp.
“I still believe him to be an angel sent to
offer me balm for my affliction. And since that moment I have always taken
pains to keep Miss Mary Jane near at hand.”
“Pass that over here,” the boy says. “Ain’t
every day you get to smoke reefer from an angel.”
Chuck grunts his disapproval. “Johnny, you
gonna be even funnier than you already are.”
“Weren’t you listening?” The boy examines the
joint. “This comes from God.”
The little lame hobo looks up. “You oughtn’t be
mocking a man who’s telling the truth.”
Johnny starts to respond but something in the
old man’s unblinking grey gaze stops him. The fire crackles as he turns to
Pierre.
“I met another of your kind a long time ago. I
wasn’t no older than Johnny nor no smarter. This one looked my age when I met
him but he was older. I bet he still looks the same even though I don’t.”
“Yes sir,” Pierre hesitates for a second. “He
probably does.”
“I was working in Michigan then, at the
Callimac Mine on the Gogebic Range.
You know where that is?”
“Yes sir,” Pierre says as he stares at the
flames reflecting in the old man’s eyes like Diogenes-lanterns. “On the Upper
Peninsula. I used to know that
area real well.”
“Business was still just holding on then.
Everyone knew things was near tapped out.
There wasn’t but a skeleton crew working by the winter of ’16. Everyone
else had been let go and I was planning to head to Detroit to see if they had
anything for me in the new automobile plants. That was when we started dying.”
The scent of piñon pines wafts on the evening
breeze. Pierre remembers the smell
of balsam firs and white spruce and frost over swampland: he draws on the joint
as if its cherry might drive away the long-ago cold.
“It was a hard winter and we lost one with
every snowfall. At first we figured they was just moving on like we was going
to move on. Then right before the New
Year we found what was left of Aleksi.
Jefferson, the security guard, said it was a bear. Only he couldn’t
explain how this bear tore a grown man to pieces and didn’t leave no
footprints.”
Pierre passes to the little lame man, who
shakes his head. He stretches the
joint out toward Johnny but the boy stands motionless as his sneer melts into
terror.
“Two nights later it snowed again and we heard
shots in the dark. Next morning Jefferson was gone.” The old man takes a gulp
from his pint. “Later someone told me they found his badge and his gun in the
woods that spring. Never heard of them finding anything else.”
Chuck eyes Pierre warily: the plaid tramp
hesitates before taking the joint from him. Pierre stares straight ahead into
the fire, hoping the last dancing flames will distract him from memories of
loud noises and acrid smells and a brief stinging spark exploding into
shrieking red velvet shreds. The old man stares into the flames with Pierre,
his knuckles white as he clutches the bottle.
“That was when we all decided to go. But the
railroad wasn't running and all the roads were blocked. There was no getting
out save with a dogsled or a snowmobile and we didn’t have neither. Big Bjorn remembered Jefferson had a
pair of snowshoes. But then Kowalski pointed out even so you couldn’t walk to
Ironwood without spending the night in the woods. And wasn’t a man in that camp
willing to do that."
“Winters are hard in that part of the country,”
Pierre says, trying to keep the words coming. He can feel the smooth brass of
the Pinkerton man’s watch and wonders what time it is now, a beast of the field
knows light and dark but a man can read a clock, it was three seconds past 8:38
when he came in and when he looks down again it is exactly 9:32.
“Since we had nothing else to do, we all
decided to wait for death or the train, whichever got through first. Turned out
to be neither.”
The dancing flames are flickering lower now,
nothing left but embers and fear and the little lame man sitting on his orange
carton. Pierre extends his hands, easy
cats, and the plaid tramp becomes a blank gap-toothed smile but Johnny and
Chuck are out of range, he can feel their terror but can’t snuff out its
locust-song. The lame man eyes him quizzically.
“The other fellow was different. You make folks
calm. He couldn’t help but make you feel like there were spiders inside you.”
Chuck moves away, Pierre thinks he might run
into the hills but instead he grabs a handful of sticks and kindling and throws
it on the smoldering fire.
“I was the one keeping watch when he walked
into camp. He didn’t leave no tracks in the snow. The way that thing in the
woods didn’t leave no footprints.” The old man drains the rest of his pint.
“The way your boots weren’t muddy even though you had to cross a creek to get
here.”
“Quit it, Pops,” Johnny says, his voice a high
whimper. “This ain’t funny no more.”
“Wasn’t funny at all,” Pops says, smiling
faintly despite himself. “I wanted to run but I couldn’t turn away even though
looking into those eyes was like sticking your head into the maw of hell.”
Not like
hell, Pierre thinks, like a great
empty void and at the bottom snow and stars and hands so pale the moonlight
reveals knuckle-bones beneath the skin and a sad-eyed boy singing Domini
Deus Noster, Miserere Nobis.
The old man continues. “He told me there was no
monster in the woods, just a soul in torment and that it wouldn't trouble us
again. I asked him what he meant and he said he couldn't take away its
suffering but he eased it for a little while. Then he laughed and I swear to
God I soiled myself when I heard that laugh.”
Singing
till you can’t help but sing with him, Miserere Nobis, and then you remember language and fall sobbing to your knees in the
snow and there is no singing, just a pale hand on your head and a soft voice
saying “A beast of the field howls but a man has words to sing with.”
“The next morning they finally cleared the
tracks and we all left on the next train. Except Kowalski. We found him in his
bunk with his throat slit.”
“Stop it, Pops,” Johnny is nearly crying
now. “Stop it.”
“What’s the matter, Johnny? Thought you didn’t
believe in any of this bullshit.” The old man laughs as he turns again to Pierre.
“Don’t worry, kid. If you meant us
harm we’d all be dead right now, ain’t that right?”
Pierre hesitates then decides he doesn’t want
to go to Dr. Oppenheimer with lies on his conscience.
“Yes sir,” he nods. “That’s right.”