Natural Instincts (2 page)

According to the map, the office was only about a quarter of a mile away, so I decided to walk. I’d probably already disturbed my neighbors enough last night, driving in so late, without starting up my car again. Besides, after the drive up from Boston yesterday on top of a long day at work, I needed exercise. I headed up the road.

I let myself concentrate on details—the patterns the fallen pine needles made on the packed gravel surface, arranged by the rain last night; the red berries on a low-lying plant; the chittering of a red squirrel as it made a dash along the trunk of a long-ago-fallen pine. I liked the nice, orderly logic of details.

In a few more minutes, I came to the campground office. It was a low, rambling building that was part office, part store, and part house. Did the owner of the campground live here? A couple of cars were parked beside it, and the door next to an ice cooler was open. As I walked quietly up onto the porch, I pulled out my phone and swiftly typed a few lines into its notepad. I used to carry a real notebook around with me, but this was easier.

A man behind the counter looked up as I entered through the screen door. He was dark, rugged, and dressed in khakis, blending in with the controlled clutter around him. He looked as capable of cutting down a tree as selling soda out of the cooler next to him. I quickly glanced at the shelves of camping supplies, displays of maps, and photos of spectacular sunsets across the lake, and then focused on the proprietor, who smiled pleasantly enough.

“Hi, welcome,” he said. “I’m Hal. Bet you’re the guy in 7B who came in late last night? Saw your car when I did my quick drive around this morning. Didn’t want to pitch your tent in the rain, huh?”

I nodded and held my phone across the counter so he could see the text.

Hal looked a little confused as he focused on it, the way people usually did. Then he gave a nod of understanding. “Oh, okay,” he said. I noticed that he began to speak more carefully and loudly, assuming I was deaf. Everyone did that too. “You want to take 7B for five nights?”

I nodded. He slid a registration form and a pen at me a little tentatively, as though unsure if I could fill it out. Most people, I’d found, assumed that if one thing was wrong with you, everything else was too. And he was too afraid to ask if I needed help, in case I flipped out at being thought incompetent. That was the problem with our society. People wanted to be kind and do the right thing around someone with a disability, but they just didn’t know how to.

I filled in my name, address, license plate number, car make and model, and how long I wanted to stay. Hal stayed totally silent, which actually made sense if he assumed I was a lip-reader. As soon as I’d finished, I passed the form back, along with my credit card.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s going to be one hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

He glanced quickly at my face to be sure I understood. He might also have been concerned that that was too much money, since many people also assumed folks with disabilities could only handle minimum-wage jobs. I controlled a smile, thinking about how my boss had actually gone down on his knees to me one day a few years ago when I had told him to sell everything and sell
now
, hours before the bottom went out of the housing market.

I just nodded.

Hal swiped my card in his machine. Silence hung in the room when he’d normally, I figured, be talking about the weather and where I was from and how I’d heard about this campground and all the small talk people filled their days with. As soon as my credit was approved and my slip printed, he put it down before me and tapped where I was to sign. I signed my indecipherable scrawl. While he was filling out a tag for my car, I typed on my phone for a second. I might want to rent a canoe later, and I didn’t know if I had to come way back up here to pay for it.

“Oh, there’s no charge,” he said quickly after reading.

I frowned a little. I appreciated the gesture, but really!

He searched my eyes, then flushed bright red. “No, I mean, there’s no charge for anybody. The boats are covered in the registration fee.”

Now I felt embarrassed.

“Just help yourself whenever you want. The paddles and life jackets are in a little shed down there.”

I nodded understanding and typed for a second.
May I at least buy some ice?

He laughed awkwardly, trying to make the best of a bad situation. “Yeah, of course. Dollar twenty a bag. You can grab it out of the freezer on your way by—
it’s unlocked.”

I gave him exact change. As he was putting it in his cash register, I stuck my car tag and receipt in my pocket. I hesitated, then typed a little bit more. He waited, relaxing a little as he got used to my way of communicating. The next time I came, he’d be totally cool, I knew. It was only the first time that was so awkward.

I held out my phone.
I got lost last night and came in by the old entrance.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry about that!” He looked genuinely upset. “I’ve been meaning to block it off to cars, but I never get around to it. Once in a while, a GPS takes somebody around the long way, and they come to that entrance first. I hope your car is all right.”

I wrote
It’s fine.
Then, really not sure why, I typed
I saw a man standing on a table in the rain. Naked.

I don’t know exactly how I expected Hal to react. Probably some combination of shocked surprise and confusion. But instead he swallowed hard and shook his head. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll speak to him. My brother is a bit disturbed.”

Now it was my turn to react. I wasn’t going to forget the look of rage on the guy’s face for a long time. It wasn’t comforting to know that he was “disturbed” and allowed to roam at night. And he did it often enough that his brother knew about it, probably from other reports. On the other hand, it was good to know I hadn’t made the whole thing up. That would have been a little crazy even for me.

I wrote
He looked extremely angry to be interrupted. Would you tell him I apologize?

For a very long moment, Hal stared at me, his face utterly frozen in shock. What the hell? I’d meant to be nice, that was all. And, in part, to keep the brother from slitting open my tent with a knife in the middle of the night, and maybe my throat too. So why was Hal looking like I’d just written the most shocking thing he’d ever heard? Did he want me to call the police and have the guy arrested for indecent exposure or something? That’s what I just didn’t get about people. Hal wasn’t fazed by what his brother had done. But he was shocked that I was decent about it?

Hal took a death grip on the counter in front of him. “He saw you?”

I’d been kind of hard to miss in a car with headlights blazing, roaring up a steep bank after plowing through a mudhole. So why was Hal looking more surprised that his brother had seen me than that I had seen him?

I didn’t need to type anything; Hal could tell by my expression that yeah, his brother had seen me.

“What happened?” he asked, holding on to the counter like he was about to faint.

I shook my head and raised my hands slightly, signifying that nothing had happened. Why, had I really been in danger? I wrote quickly to reassure Hal that I’d come to no harm.
It was right before that bolt of lightning. When I could see again, he was gone.

Hal read. His face went from red to very pale in a second. “Right before? You were really close?”

I nodded and gestured to the back wall of the office. About that close.

For another long second, Hal just stared at me. Then he cleared his throat and swallowed, letting go of the counter. “Well, as I said, I’m really sorry about that. I’ll speak to him. Enjoy your stay here, and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you, Kyle.”

I liked that he used my name, that he remembered it from the form. Lots of people didn’t bother naming me, since I never named myself. But it didn’t take the weirdness away from the situation. Still, Hal had clearly dismissed me, and I frankly wasn’t sure I needed or wanted to know any more about his disturbed brother. So I put my phone back in my pocket, my way of showing that I, too, considered the conversation over, and left with a nod. As I shut the screen door, Hal was already heading through a door that probably led into the living area.

Was his brother back there? I hadn’t felt like there was anybody else in the building, hadn’t heard anyone moving around, but I hadn’t really thought about it. I shouldn’t have brought the whole thing up. Worried, I set off toward the lake and my waiting site. After all, I still had a tent to pitch and a shower to take and a breakfast to make before I settled down in the sun. All I had to do was make small and quiet and stay in my site and mind my own business, which was why I was here in the first place. And I was damn good at being quiet. I didn’t have to go near the store again until I needed more ice tomorrow, and—

Shit. I’d forgotten my ice. And I almost never forgot anything.

I
F
I
hadn’t had some meat and a jar of mayonnaise in my cooler, and a bottle of wine I wanted to have chilled with my dinner tonight, I would have kept going. But I made myself turn around and slip back onto the porch. I did not want to announce to Hal that I was back in case he wanted to keep the conversation going for some reason, or thought I’d come back because I wanted to talk about his brother some more. The freezer was right next to the screen door. I’d lifted the lid silently and had my fingers on a bag to lift it out, wondering if it was going to be too cold to carry all the way back to my site, or if there was enough bunched-up plastic bag above the twisty that I could hang on to to keep my fingers from freezing, when I heard Hal’s voice. It wasn’t loud, but it was just on the other side of the screen. It was so intense that I paused.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Jon? You let him see you! Do you not get what this fucking means?”

Shit
, I thought, wanting to back away as silently as I’d come. I lifted my bag and let the lid close soundlessly.
Jon
, I thought.
The
David
’s name is Jon.

Then I heard his voice. It went right straight inside me like no voice ever had before, like a knife, but it didn’t cut me; it filled me and left me rooted to the porch. I wanted nothing more than to listen to that voice forever. If anything would ever be able to make the memories go away, that voice could. I knew it as surely as I’d known the stock market was going to crash.

It was also an utterly horrifying feeling. I’d sworn I would never give control of myself to anyone ever again. I would never even speak to anyone ever again! For five years I had not said a word, and I was damned if I was going to let anything into my heart now. Coming here had been a mistake. I should have stayed in my little apartment in a basement and kept going back and forth to my office in my car and only let myself be around people who knew to leave me alone.

But I kept listening.

“It means nothing,” the voice that touched my soul said. “It means utterly nothing. I do not remotely care. I have no interest in such things, nor will I ever. How long is he staying?”

“Five days.”

“Then I will leave for five days. He will depart none the wiser, and we will never see him again.”

“It’s not that simple! A bond formed! Just because it’s never happened before, you can’t ignore it.”

“Those traditions mean nothing to me, nor have they ever. Nothing has changed.”

“But, Jon, he seems like a nice guy. He can’t talk—I think he’s deaf—I don’t know. How the bloody hell could you be so—stupid? It took! He saw the light.”

“I told you, it doesn’t matter!” The voice deepened, sounding even more intense and somehow wilder. “He won’t be affected unless we meet again, and I’m leaving right now. He’ll be none the worse, and I keep telling you, I don’t have time for love or any of that shit. I don’t give a damn if some ancient tradition got triggered or not. It doesn’t matter to me. Some disembodied face behind a windshield is not going to make any difference to my personal life, which I don’t even want to have, ever! I’ve got far more important things to deal with. Stay here and play in your little playground. I’m leaving.”

Footsteps started toward the door.

Terror filled me. I didn’t know what was going on. I knew I was about to be discovered, but I couldn’t move.

“Jon, in the name of the past, will you listen to reason?”

Almost at the door, so close I saw a swirl of something that looked like a black cloak, Jon turned and went back to his brother. “You don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on out there!” he said in a low, rough voice. “Sometimes it takes everything I’ve got to hold things together. Believe me, I’ve got no time for anything but trying to keep alive. Don’t you get that?”

Somehow his moving away broke whatever had been holding me still. Clutching the bag of ice like it was a lifeline, I turned and swiftly, silently fled.

M
Y
HANDS
shook so badly it took me three tries to get the twisty off the bag. Or maybe they were just numb from carrying it. I hadn’t even felt the cold all the way back to my site, but now my fingers wouldn’t work. Finally I got the bag open and dumped it in the cooler. The ice I’d bought yesterday was mostly cold water with a few cubes floating around. There was an open debate about whether to drain a cooler and dump in fresh ice every time, or allow the water to stay and add new ice to it. I’d done some research about camping before setting off on this trip. Nobody seemed to agree, so I’d decided to leave the water for a while and then drain it. Certainly that made sense now, because I didn’t think I had the strength to lift the cooler over the lip of my back hatch before pulling the plug.

Seeing some floating bottles reminded me that I was thirsty. I grabbed a bottle of orange juice, closed the cooler, and sat down at my table with my back to the water, facing up the road. No one in a black cloak came running down.