Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (19 page)

“The water came up and he was floundering like a turtle,” Richard says. “He started drifting downriver and screaming and stuff. . . . I just did what anyone would do.”

“Have you had lifeguard training? Anything to prepare you for the situation?”

“I'm a Blackfoot, we're the best swimmers in the world.” He orders more bread sticks, chews up another bite of spaghetti. The noodles have a spicy sauce, tiny pieces of chopped up mushrooms, and the meatballs have a crunchy brown crust. This plate is his fourth and his stomach is full, yet he keeps on eating and talking. His lie gets larger, just like his stomach, and he wonders if both will get so large they explode.

Betty nibbles one of his bread sticks, and her foot brushes his. She has gray eyes, mascara on her lashes, plump cheeks that remind him of ripe peaches, but then he is always thinking about food and can't be blamed for the comparison. Her blouse is unbuttoned three times below the collar, and the tan of her bra shows against her skin. She has cleavage and Richard fantasizes licking his way to nipples large as purple grapes. He senses intense loneliness in her, the same suffocating feeling he has lived with most of his life, yet cannot bring himself to feel empathy for her plight. If she went on a diet, she could solve her problem. He, however, will be a displaced Indian until the day he dies. Their feet remain together, toe to toe, and a flush forms on her throat, red blotches that creep toward her cheeks. She is fat and smells bad, but his blood is hot and he wants to see where this will lead.

“I have a broken nose,” he says.

“I see that.”

“I caught an elbow when I grabbed his arm.”

“You really should put ice on that,” she says. “It's pretty swollen.”

He likes how she worries about him and wonders if she has ever had a boyfriend.

*   *   *

Betty has a long-finned goldfish that swims in an aquarium in the living room, no kids. She lives in the woods, in a small house she bought off an old woman who moved to the city after her husband died. Evidence of a degree hangs in a picture frame on the wall. His host graduated from the University of Maine in 1990, a journalism major, she says. The house has striped wallpaper in the bathroom, a look Betty would like to change but claims not to have the time. He prefers not to ask questions about her personal life, thinks leaving her will be easier the less he knows, so he remains silent during the tour. In the kitchen she hands him a bag of frozen peas, suggests he hold it to his nose. The bag is cold and his nose hurts, and he does as she says until the pain goes away. He hands her the bag and she puts it back in the freezer.

“I was born on the reservation,” he says. “My mother's name is Wind in Her Hair and my father's is Light Foot because he can run without making a sound.”

Through the window, a channel in the flowered curtains, elongated shadows crawl across the lawn. The grass is cut close to the fence; a white woman's yard. He talks about his past, the one he made up for himself when he was a kid and realized he was different from his family, tells her about riding ponies bareback
alongside cottonwood creeks and killing a cougar with a spear to enter manhood. She scribbles furiously, the pencil a blur.

He studies the fat on her sides, the way her arms bulge below the triceps, wonders how it will feel to have his red-skinned body next to hers. Soft, he thinks, like falling into a bottomless feather bed.

“So you came to the AT why?” she says.

“I walk the trail because my spirit guide suggested a journey.” He does not want to tell her that he hikes because he's trying to solve an alcohol problem. She keeps asking questions, eventually winds around back to the river and his heroism.

“I cannot take the credit,” Richard says.

“A true hero.”

Her gaze does not leave his, a suggestion that now is the time. Richard touches her arm, a lingering that trails toward her wrist, and from her lips comes a little sigh. Her hands shake, and he thinks she does not have much experience at love. She is not the only one who smells bad—the swim in the Kennebec only washed off the worst of him—and he hints around about taking a shower together.

“I want you like you are,” she says.

Richard, who thinks that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to him, lowers his head to her chest. His earlobe, where it touches her breast, feels like a hot nickel.

*   *   *

That night he wakes to the remnants of a dream he has had many times. His father, clad in a purple robe, on a bejeweled throne high up in the sky, had yanked a lever that turned loose a rainstorm of tires. They had landed and bounced upward, only to
fall again. There were so many of them they blocked the sun, and all the animals that inhabited the forests began to die. Richard screamed his protest, but then a Monster Truck radial hit him on the head and he fell face first and lost consciousness. Now, entwined in the sheets, naked as the day he entered the world, he gasps and slowly regains consciousness. The nightlight in the socket on the wall casts a glow over the bed, Betty's ponderous body on display, lips purring with each exhale. He is hungry, so he goes into the living room and opens his pack. Eats a candy bar he finds in his food bag. The snoring stops.

“Come back to bed,” Betty says from the bedroom.

“In a minute.”

In the kitchen he opens the fridge and pokes around for a soda, finds a beer on the bottom shelf. Holds the can in both hands. He had his first drink when he was nine, a swallow of Jim Beam from his father's liquor cabinet. The liquor tasted awful but he was curious and came back once a week to sample different bottles. The Wild Turkey made him want to puke, but the vodka tasted good when he mixed it with orange juice.

He developed a taste for beer when he turned twelve and found a six pack a fisherman left on the dock. Richard vomited on his tennis shoes that day, told his mother he had the flu but she smelled the beer and told his father, who said it was no big deal, that all boys experiment. His mother, who left the discipline to her husband, shook her head and retired to the rear bedroom.

Richard remembers his recent vow and desperation wells up inside him. It's a jittery feeling, a lostness that scares him enough to weaken his knees. He wants to believe Taz's theory that a person can become someone else, but experience suggests his best friend is wrong and Simone's fatalism is reality. Before he met
her, he thought he drank because he hated tires. Now, after hearing her talk so convincingly about how all humans are born with a flaw that leads to their demise, he knows better. He drinks because he has an alcoholic gene. The starkness in that thought, the despair in those eight simple words, stun him and he opens the can and pours it down the sink. The act brings little solace. He has quit drinking a thousand times and is under no illusion that today is any different from yesterday.

He wants to call his father and finds the phone on an end table in the living room. His finger, red and slender, punches the wrong number and he wakes up a sleepy woman in Idaho, apologizes, and dials again.

“Who are you calling?” Betty stands at the bedroom door, sheet wrapped around her body. Her hair is tangled, evidence of last night's lovemaking.

“I'll just be a minute.”

The phone rings and the familiar deep voice answers on the other end. His father, an ex-marine who has risen at 4:00
AM
every day of his life since he was eighteen, is already at the office. He is the proud owner of the most popular tire store in Bozeman, loves tires so much he would rather talk about them than anything else in the world.

“Dad?” Richard says.

His father's voice comes quickly. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

Richard coughs instead of talking, and his father's voice becomes more concerned.

“Are you in jail again?” his father says. “Do you need bail money?”

“Not in jail, on the trail.”

“Are you drinking?”

Richard ignores the presumption. “I'm thinking about not coming home after I summit. I'm done selling tires.”

“I'm counting on you . . . so is your mother. It's your duty to take over the business. Selling tires is what our family does, son.”

They talk for a while longer, his father doing most of it, then good-byes are exchanged and Richard hangs up and plops on the couch. Betty plops beside him and the sheet opens, exposes her thighs. She has black-and-blue marks above her knees, where he had gripped hard to hold on.

“You're a tire salesman,” she says.

“Was. I'm something else now.”

“Do you . . . umm . . . do you think you might like. . . .” She takes a breath, slowly exhales. “Do you think you might want to stay with me for a while?”

Richard thinks about her question for a long time. His thru-hike should have ended yesterday, he should have drowned in that water and if it wasn't for Taz Chavis risking his neck that's what would have happened. He misses his friends and tells the white woman he wants to leave in the morning, which by the look of the grayness outside the window isn't far off. Betty picks up her notepad and flips through it, gnaws on the eraser end of the pencil.

“Is any of this true?” she says. “Any of it at all?”

Richard crosses his legs and straightens his back. The reflection on the television shows a thin young man, upright, unmovable. Jet-black hair falls down his shoulders and gathers like horsetails on his chest. His nose is large as a walnut.

“I'm a Blackfoot,” he finally says, “but you can probably cross most of the rest out.”

*   *   *

On the way to Caratunk, Betty's hand creeps over and rests on his thigh. He tells her that he will visit after he summits but they both know that isn't true. She flips on the blinker, turns into the store parking lot, and he steps out. The sun is up, a red globe above the trees, and he feels the warmth on his forehead. He kisses her good-bye, puts on his pack, and hikes down the road. He walks quickly, faster than normal, knows he needs to hurry if he wants to catch up to his friends. He can feel Betty watching him, the intense energy focused on his back, but he does not turn around.

13

EXCITEMENT BOILS BENEATH
the surface, something every northbounder feels in Monson, Maine. Katahdin, the summit I've walked toward for so long, seems so close I can touch it. Richard, Simone, and I stay overnight in a hostel, eat pancakes for breakfast, amble outside to a picnic table, and sort through our food for the 100-Mile Wilderness. Simone, who receives mail drops from her parents, boxes she filled before she started the trail, is so sick of eating gorp she tosses a Baggie in my direction and I add it to my pile. Richard's nose has shrunk to normal, and now cants to the right, an oddness in his otherwise symmetrical features. He has shaved his head so only a black strip remains from his brow to his neckline. The strands that fall to his back are braided into a rope thin as a buggy whip. He has not drunk a drop since he emptied the bottle on the side of the Kennebec.

“Here,” Simone says, and hands Richard a Baggie filled with licorice gumdrops.

He grunts and adds them to his pile. We don't talk about the river crossing, have left it behind us like unwanted pack weight. Richard fucked up and he knows it. Simone was vindicated for suggesting
we all take the canoe and she knows it. I was caught between the two and had to save his ass. There is no use bringing it up.

“My father is expecting me home the day after the summit,” Richard says.

His face is a mask, eyes unblinking, jaw so tight it seems made of wood. He wraps a string of red beads around his braid, ties off the string with a square knot. He has never said what he'd rather do than sell tires, and I haven't asked. It doesn't matter, I suppose. In his mind,
anything
would be better than smelling new rubber all day long.

“He says I have to stop the ‘Indian nonsense,'” Richard intones. “Says he's white and my mother is white and my brothers and sisters are white, and it's bad business for a son of his to have long hair and wear feathered headbands.”

“I think you have nice hair,” Simone says.

“Your old man is an asshole,” I say.

Richard loads up his pack, every movement slow and determined.

“No,” he says. “He's basically a nice guy who thinks it's time for me to assume my responsibilities.”

The mask dissolves, and the face underneath appears in all its pliability. There is sadness in his features, hopelessness. But then the mask returns. He hoists his pack to his back.

“It's lighter without the alcohol,” he says.

I shake his hand, and Simone hugs his neck. Richard wants to hike this last section alone, says he wants the solace to give him more time to think. I would prefer to summit with him, but I agreed to his wishes and Simone and I plan to stay in town for another day to give him a head start. He walks out of the yard, pauses under the shadow of a giant elm, lifts his hand and waves.

I know what he's feeling, what all thru-hikers feel at this point in their hike. The closer we get to the end, the more bittersweet the journey.

*   *   *

Simone and I hitch to the trail early the next day. At the first shelter, I sprawl across the planked floor, head on my pack, feet propped on the wall, and read the logbook. Richard wrote one sentence:

FUCK TIRES.

The shelter has a broom in the corner, along with a Gideon bible. Strings, threaded through tuna cans, hang from the eaves. If we planned on staying here tonight, that's where we'd hang our food bags to thwart the mice. I stretch and prop my head on my pack, move a shoulder strap that digs into my ear. Graffiti is scrawled on the ceiling.

Simone walks up, says her food weight is hurting her back, eats six brownies to lighten her load. She reads the logbook, tosses it to the rear so it won't get wet if it rains.

“I liked him better when he was drinking,” she says.