New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (43 page)

Bob was a large man outfitted in olive drab camouflage, his pants stuffed into gray rubber boots. He had laughed, an incredulous, seal-like sound muffled by his mustache, when Audrey expressed her reservations regarding the contents of the canister that he intended to spray inside and outside the house.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “This here is deadly poison. That’s a fact. Might be you want something organic.” His eyes, bright blue and winking out from under bushy eyebrows, showed deep amusement. “Just sprinkle some garlic on the bastards. Or say a prayer. You know what the word
organic
means to a bug? It means
dinner
.”

Bob made more seal sounds. Audrey turned and left the room without saying anything, and I accompanied Bob on his rounds, watched him go through the house, crawling under the kitchen sink, squirting death behind the refrigerator, in the cupboards, along the baseboards. When he headed off to the basement, I left him to his work and went outside. I sat on the porch reading some more of the Dillard book until Bob came outside and I tagged along again, watching him as he drilled deep holes into the cinder block and squirted poison into the holes. All the while, he supplied me with a wealth of anecdotal material about his trade. “Ants are mad about electricity,” he said. “I’ve known them to eat the insulation off wires. I’ve found dead clumps of them in air-conditioning units and around electrical terminals. All the lights go off in your house, it could be ants feeding their addiction. And the thing about ants, the thing about a lot of bugs, is they don’t give a goddam whether they live or die. That’s an edge they got in the war. And you might think war’s an exaggeration for it, but I’ve been in the business a long time, and war’s the word. And there ain’t a clear winner yet.”

When Bob had finished with the house, he said, “I’ll just mosey around the property, see if there’s any problems brewing, maybe a big hive. There’s a hell of a lot to be said for a preemptive strike.” I watched him set out toward the woods, the canister balanced on his shoulder, an American warrior, and I went back in for dinner.

Audrey was sitting in the kitchen, her elbows planted on the table, a book open before her. I looked over her shoulder and experienced a shock. She was reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. I just stood and stared until she sensed my presence, turned around and looked up.

“What?”

“I thought you hated Hemingway?”

Audrey looked a little sheepish, then defiant. “He has hardly any commas.”

I raised my eyebrows in query.

“I can’t handle commas right now,” she said. “I can’t breathe on a comma. And Henry James . . . all those commas. I nearly fainted trying to catch my breath.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded my head and moved on to the refrigerator. In retrospect, I guess it was a warning I should have heeded. But retrospect and two dollars and fifty cents will get you a latte at Starbucks.

That night I was reading in bed when I heard an engine cough into life. I knew it wasn’t someone making off with our Camry; that would have been a different sound entirely. This was the distinctive rattle of a diesel engine in need of a tune-up. I slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake Audrey, and went to the window in time to see red taillights curve down the driveway and disappear past the trees. I realized that I had just seen Bob leaving in his truck. I had forgotten entirely about Bob. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past midnight. I marveled at such dedication. Say what you will about country folk, their work ethic is admirable, an example for the rest of us.

I returned to the bed and decided that I’d better get some sleep myself. Tomorrow I planned to confront nature, armed with a notepad, a pencil, and a will to revel in her wonders, no matter how stony the soil, how overgrown the path.

As I moved toward the bed, Audrey stirred in her sleep, stretched and turned on her side, rolling the bedsheet with her and pulling it up past her feet. I bent to pull it back down and noticed something on her ankle, a pale green patch of light. I leaned closer. Between her ankle and her heel, an area of skin the size of a quarter glowed with the yellow-green luminosity of a night clock’s hands. As I studied this glowing spot, it dimmed and disappeared.
Odd
, I thought. I pulled the covers over her feet, resolving to mention it in the morning. I remembered that the spider or mite or whatever had launched its assault on her ankle. No doubt this was a related effect, nothing to worry about. Still, it might signify the onslaught of infection. Audrey might not be aware of the phenomenon if it only manifested itself while she slept. Another consultation with Dr. Bath might be in order.

I slept poorly and dreamed that I was back at Clayton teaching a class on biology, and Francis Bacon had come to demonstrate to my students just how to stuff a chicken with snow, this being the famous experiment that had led to his death by pneumonia. I found myself disliking Bacon, who was pompous and rude and wearing an ugly blue dress, and I asked him to leave and he took a swing at me with the chicken, but then the dream’s logic broke down, and the chicken, while still looking like a chicken, was much larger, was, in fact, my old high school drama teacher, Mrs. Unger, and I woke up. It took me half an hour to get back to sleep, and the sleep I gleaned was shallow, the dregs of rest.

I wasn’t feeling entirely fit in the morning, but I probably would have remembered to mention the ankle business after my first cup of coffee. Audrey, no more of a morning person than I, lumbered down from the bathroom where her morning ablutions had taken an inordinately long time. I looked at her and was . . . well, puzzled.

We men know that sometimes the women in our lives will look different. I can’t speak for all men, but I know that I have an uncanny sensitivity to this new-look thing. I become instantly alert, like a deer in the forest on hearing the snap of a twig. New hair style? New lipstick, new eye shadow? Is this alteration for my benefit? Is a compliment in order? It can be a panicky moment. Not all new looks are planned or, if planned, executed with success. If some new hair style is, in Audrey’s opinion, a great disaster, or if—an early learning experience—she has simply slept funny on her hair, producing a fuzzy, disheveled effect, a compliment can precipitate tears.

I was more baffled than usual. Audrey looked like Audrey and then again, quite different. She seemed to have a higher forehead, a just-scrubbed look, a nakedness of feature and a new bluntness to her gaze.

Audrey is very intuitive, and we have been married for ten years—we were married just after we got our undergraduate degrees—so she sensed my confusion.

“Eyebrows,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I shaved off my eyebrows. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and, I don’t know, they looked superfluous.”

I had one of those revelations which, despite several bad experiences, I always share. “Like commas!” I said.

“What?”

“Well, eyebrows are sort of like commas, and you’ve been having this thing about commas, not liking them.”

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Audrey said.

“Is it?” I jumped up, ran into the living room, and returned with
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. I plopped the book down in front of her and flipped the pages.

“Okay, I’m crazy. What’s this?” Every comma had been sliced with a short red line, that little mincing flourish that is the copy editor’s delete symbol. There were a lot of red deletes, more than I would have expected in Hemingway.

Audrey stood up suddenly and snatched the book from the table, clutching it to her chest. “A marriage is not an invitation to abuse another person’s privacy.”

“It’s just a book; it’s not your diary.”

Audrey sniffed. “And I suppose that
The Great Gatsby
is just a book?”

She had me there. My copy of
The Great Gatsby
is a very personal, passionately annotated book, and I had thrown—I winced to remember—a fit when I found Audrey reading it.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m a lout. I don’t know how you put up with me.”

Audrey is not one to hold a grudge, and we hugged each other and kissed.

I drank the rest of my coffee standing up. I set the mug down, grabbed my backpack, and moved to the door. “Today’s the big day, off into the wilderness to bag some inspiration.”

“Yes, I can see. Good luck.” Audrey wiggled her fingers at me.

Then I was out the door and walking across the tall grass toward a pale meadow and the vibrant green of the trees beyond. I was a little nervous, so much seemed to ride on this venture. Did I really have the stuff it took to be an essayist?

I had made preparations for the journey (journey may be too extravagant a word for an outing that doesn’t leave home). I wore heavy khaki pants, hiking boots, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a backpack containing a first-aid kit, a packed lunch (baloney sandwich, apple, cheese), a flashlight, a spade, two jars for specimens, several balls of twine, my notepad and pencils, a pocket knife, a compass, and a bottle of spring water.

I entered the meadow. The straw-colored grass reached to my waist. I ignored the disquiet that came with a sudden sense of vulnerability. The pale blue sky loomed over me, tattered scraps of cloud moving slowly, animated by the same wind that stirred the grass.
Waves of amber
, I thought, pleased with the metaphor, then chagrined, realizing that the image wasn’t original.

But I was getting the hang of this, marching along, my initial trepidation eased by the comforting weight of the sun on my neck and shoulders.

The gods lie in wait for the overly confident, and just as I was loosening up, living in the moment, something exploded in front of me with a great whirring and fury, a brown blur aimed at my head, and I stumbled backward and fell, my heart banging around in my chest.

I scrambled back up and saw a bird flapping its way to the clouds. I remembered a movie I had seen in which hunters with shotguns and dogs had hunted birds—were they called wrens? That doesn’t seem quite it—in a meadow like this, the birds blasting out of the ground with the same
whup-whup-whup
sound that I had just experienced.

I was briskly heading back to the house as I thought this, my rational mind trying to retake the higher ground. I scolded my inner coward.
Are you going to let a blasted bird send you running?

I continued on course to the house, but I managed, by an act of will, to veer right and down a hill toward the small pond and the clump of sentinel willows—there’s another tree, Audrey—and by the time I reached the muddy, weed-strewn bank, I was breathing heavily but relatively calm again. Thoreau got a lot of mileage out of a pond, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t squeeze some fine writing out of my own pond. Unfortunately, up close, its charms diminished. The pond had no precise boundary, at least not where I came upon it. Green weeds marched into the water which was filmed with a yellow-green scum. When I stirred this with a stick, the end of the stick came away with fleshy, dripping blobs of goo. My research brought me too close to the edge, and I was suddenly ankle deep in black, stinking mud, flailing my arms to keep from falling forward, yanking my hiking boots free with rude popping noises while a primal sound of disgust came unbidden from my throat. Small gnats buzzed up in a peppery cloud and rushed at my mouth, nose, and eyes with suicidal abandon (
they don’t give a goddam whether they live or die
, I heard Bob saying).

That did it for the day, and I headed back to the house, depressed and angry with myself. I found Audrey on the porch in the rattan chair. Her head was down as she wrote furiously on a legal pad, and when I hailed her, she looked up, smiled abstractedly, and returned to her writing. Her industry seemed a reprimand.

I didn’t give up, didn’t let nature win the game in the first encounter. Every day I would arise, drink my coffee in the kitchen, kiss Audrey on her forehead—there was something endearing in her eyebrowless state, a subtext speaking volumes on humanity’s restless experimental spirit—and I would set off into the wilderness.

I grew comfortable with the pond and the meadow. I was no longer spooked by birds or apt to let mud demoralize and defeat me. I sprayed myself with liberal amounts of insect repellant—Audrey said I smelled like poisonous oranges, even after a shower—and the hordes of hovering midges, mosquitoes, and gnats kept their distance. I grew less fastidious. My gag reflex relented. I could pick a tick off my sleeve with nonchalance and expertly crush it between my fingernails, flicking it away. If I thought that the blood on my fingers might be my own, siphoned from me by the creature, I felt only a satisfied sense of revenge, no horror-induced queasiness.

But I was troubled. Despite this new ease, I found no subject for my essay, nothing that spoke my name. I began to have doubts that I ever would, and I was trying to escape an unsettling conclusion: Nature was boring. Turtles sat on logs soaking up the rays of the sun, as listless and devoid of interest as a pile of dirty socks. They’d sit so maddeningly still that I’d be compelled to hurl rocks at them until they showed some life by flopping into the pond and disappearing. And that, in itself, wasn’t wildly entertaining. Nature’s infinite variety was beginning to look like a rut. If you thought about it, even the seasons, rolling around every year in the same damned order (spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter), suggested a dearth of imagination. The pond was stupefied with routine. Fish endlessly rose to dimple the pond’s demeanor while small, sunflower-seed creatures with wire-thin legs skipped pointlessly across the water’s surface. Bugs whirred over the weeds; small round birds darted down from the willow trees to eat them again and again and again.

I wasn’t ready to give up, but I was having my doubts, my crisis of faith. I decided that the woods, still unexplored, might be my salvation.

I had been reluctant to enter the woods. There is a primal fear of nature when it closes ranks. Dante’s dark wood is a place where only the lost find themselves. Who would seek it out?