Snapper (24 page)

“Can’t do it anymore,” said Dad. “The stripper pit woods are full of crystal meth labs. You see ammonia bottles, lithium batteries, whatever else they use lying around everywhere. Two or three years ago I went out there and a Warrick County sheriff questioned me. Told me it was not the best place for an elderly math professor to be.”

“He called you elderly?” said Annie. She looked ready to pick up the phone and lodge a formal complaint. Her accent alone would be devastating.

“Not directly,” said Dad. “It’s a look people start giving you at a certain age. You get used to it. I’m sure Nathan knows some places that haven’t been despoiled.”

Vermont has bears. I like bears. All four states bordering Indiana have bears, too. The state forms a sort of sock-shaped bear-shunned hole. Vermont also has moose and mountains and other natural glories, all of which I enjoy. But they don’t—can’t—call my name the way Indiana woodland used to; the Ohio and Wabash Rivers have a way with words that our local New England brook can’t match (I suppose you would say it babbles). Vermont has famous fall foliage, too, but compared to Box County in October, Vermont is a painting Gauguin left out in the rain.

Annie noticed my disappointment at how those little towns had changed. She said she had been looking forward to driving from Needmore to Prosperity via Stony Lonesome. I told her not to worry, because that wasn’t what we came for. I said we’d go to my square mile of Box County State Forest, where my birding career began.

I wouldn’t take a pregnant woman there in high summer—I had always worked in intolerable heat, and however carefully I dressed, the poison ivy, poison sumac, smilax thorns, deer ticks, and mosquitoes lacerated or pierced every inch of my skin. But it was October when the forest becomes an endless cool cathedral in red and yellow and gold and green, with a perpetual shower of susurant leaves. Out there I had encountered wild dogs, hostile armed men, and a vicious tornado, but in October none of these things was even conceivable. I imagined that Annie and I would have a pleasant, unhurried stroll along a dry creek bed whose every turn, rise, and depression was known to me intimately despite the intervening years.

We left our phones in the car.

“I think you’ve painted an unnecessarily grim picture of Indiana for me,” said Annie as I helped her over a fallen log. “I didn’t mean this,” I said.

“Everything else, then,” she said. “You told me, ‘Indiana bills itself desperately as the
Crossroads of America
because there isn’t anything else to say about it.’ ”

“Did I say that?”

“You did.”

“I meant that other places have mountains and coastlines and major cities. They call Indianapolis ‘Naptown’ for good reason.”

“But you have this,” she said. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy and the leaves drifted past like the ashes and embers of a celestial conflagration.

“Yeah, but the people,” I said.

“You love them. It’s why you didn’t take me to Gnaw Bone or Bean Blossom. You’re afraid of what they’ve become.”

“I had a good time,” I said. “I will admit that. But you can’t live in a place full of signs about killing babies. I can’t, anyway. Like you said about bumper stickers. You’re surrounded by people who choose to introduce themselves with ‘You kin pry it from my cold dead fangers’ or ‘God is my co-pilot.’ Just as bad either way.”

“You went to jail and everyone was really nice,” she said.

“That’s different.”

“If it weren’t for your ear,” she said, “would you have stayed?”

It was only when I returned that I viewed Indiana through such a jaundiced eye. While there I tried desperately to gather the whole state around me and make it cohere. I don’t mean to say that I enjoyed living there, either; rather, the state itself was my own lifelong imbroglio. I was driven to fury every
day by the idiotic factions people formed; by the smugness of university towns stocked with out-of-state migrants and the bewildering willful irrationality of the native retrograde reprobates. I had hoped or assumed, though, that one day, maybe tomorrow, everyone would be just a particle or two more like
me
: and the ineluctable outcome would be that the Eastern bluebird flourished again, cats assisted the blind, and every campaigning politician from elsewhere was greeted in Indiana with polite skepticism.

Perhaps that is a kind of hope one must maintain to live anywhere but in solitude. From remote and sparsely populated Vermont, Indiana seemed hopeless; a collection of turtle-shooting subliterates—people opposed to evolution, pluralism, and poetry.

And yet. Those leaves.

“Would you live here again?” said Annie.

“Would you live here?” I said.

“I love it,” she said.

My parents had talked about moving to Vermont. I didn’t want them to do anything that drastic and disruptive at their age.

“I’d have to buy a canoe,” I said. I could picture it, provided I could spend my time outdoors. Imagine the parasites and predators and uncouth species I could take out with a well-trained Cooper’s hawk. Every last cowbird in the Sweet Note Saloon would hightail it for Illinois.

If you were to stand in that creek bed during April or May you would get wet to the knee and above. By mid-June you would be walking on fragments of dry limestone and skirting the occasional stagnant puddle. By October you would not find even a
trace of mud. The banks, however, are loose in places—looser, in fact, when dry—and although I knew exactly where the earth was most likely to give, I didn’t think of it because the whole was gently clothed in leaves. Every sharp thing was smoothed, and everything straight was softened, save the sturdy eternal trunks of the trees and the ephemeral sunlight in lengthening shafts like the spokes of Apollo’s wheel.

Annie placed a foot on the side to clamber out, and with her weight it gave way. She landed on her ankle with her foot folded at a right angle inside. She cried out and shifted her weight to the other foot but lost her balance. She pitched face-first into the creek bed, keeping her hands low to protect Peach, and when she rolled, wailing, into a fetal position, the rocks beneath the leaves had cut her forehead and both her hands.

I could have prevented it.

“Annie,” I said, crouching.

“I tried not to land on Peach,” she explained through clenched teeth.

I helped her to sit up, and I asked rather stupidly if she was all right. I wiped the blood from her face with my sleeve and she took deep breaths before replying.

“I tried to twist,” she said.

I asked again whether she was all right, and she replied that she didn’t think Peach had taken much of the shock.

To help Peach we have to help you, I said.

She looked at her lacerated palms and I told her to press them against my other, unbloodied sleeve.

“It’s just my ankle,” she said. “Just the ankle that hurts.”

I removed her shoe and her sock as gingerly as I could. There hadn’t been time for it to discolor or swell. When I pressed on it lightly she howled.

“Can you stand up?” I said. She put her arm over my shoulder and rose on her right leg, holding her left, afflicted
ankle in front. She did not want the sock or the shoe so I carried these in my free hand.

We were closer, by a quarter or a half mile, to a ranger’s station than to our car. In Annie’s condition the distance was crucial. It was a more level walk, too, and time was short as dusk approached. The route would take me out of the area I knew, and the station might be locked and empty. But I reasoned that at least I could leave Annie there while I retrieved the car. We began to hobble slowly toward the station.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure it’s just a sprain.”

“I’m not worried for me,” she said.

There was a compact black Jeep with the DNR logo on the door parked outside and a light shining through the station’s screen windows. Several plank steps led up to a flimsy wooden cabin; clearly Annie couldn’t climb these. I helped her sit on the bottom step and ran up to the door.

“My girlfriend’s pregnant and she’s twisted her ankle,” I said as I entered. A ranger at a small rickety desk stared at me. He didn’t speak, didn’t even lay down the pen in his hand.

“My girlfriend’s pregnant—” I began again.

“I heard you,” he said calmly.

He was in his early twenties, I guessed, but what struck me was how clean he seemed—as though he had shaved and moisturized his sharp dimpled chin five minutes before, gotten his fine brown hair clipped and his nails manicured that morning. His shorts, shirts, and even his socks looked freshly ironed; they had never deviated from the straight line between the driver’s seat of the Jeep and the folding metal chair he perched on, and his boots did not often forsake carpet for concrete, let alone gravel.

“Maybe you ought to marry her,” he said.

“What?” I couldn’t quite take that in.

“Since you got her pregnant.”

“Look, she twisted her ankle,” I said.

“I heard you,” he said. He rose slowly and deliberately from his chair.

“She’s outside,” I added.

He crossed the room to a metal cabinet and fetched a set of keys from his pocket.

“Her parents know?”

“She’s not sixteen, for God’s sake!” He paused to glare at me, and I supposed I had taken the Lord’s name in vain. Then he unlocked the cabinet and extracted a plastic box marked First Aid.

“You should marry her,” he said, walking past me.

He was very kind to Annie.

“Let me look at that ankle, ma’am,” he said, crouching at the bottom of the steps. “My name’s Wayne. I’ll get a Band-Aid for your forehead, too. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

Annie held up her hands.

“I’m worried about the baby,” she said. “I fell on my front.”

“I wouldn’t worry, ma’am,” he said, taking a confident and expert hold of her ankle. “By the look of your hands I don’t think there was much weight left for the baby to take. I’ve got bandages for them, too.” He began to press on her skin.

“I feel some swelling,” he said.

Annie breathed in sharply.

“I don’t think you broke anything,” he said. “You may have torn a ligament, though. Need an expert to tell you that.”

He turned to me. “How’d y’all get out here?”

“My car is at the start of the Ten O’Clock Line.”

“That’s awkward,” he said. It was only three miles away on foot, but closer to ten by road.

“The Jeep has only got two seats,” he added.

I didn’t know what to do.

“I want to get Peach checked out,” said Annie.

“I can lend you a flashlight,” said Wayne.

Peach was unharmed, and Annie’s ankle recovered over the course of many weeks, although even a year later she sometimes felt a twinge when shifting the baby from one arm to the other, or applying the car brakes unexpectedly. Wayne rang my parents from the hospital and stayed with her (I have always been jealous of him for this) until they arrived—they made it from Evansville in under two hours, which is unheard of. Dad must have been topping ninety miles an hour the whole time. I learned later that Annie was being kept waiting for further examination when they came in, and a nurse or orderly put her into a folding wheelchair that had not been fully secured in an open position. It began to collapse with her in it, constricting her middle on three sides, but Dad grabbed both handles and pried them apart.

“Another incident like this,” he said calmly, “and I will own this hospital.”

She was immediately placed in the care of a very senior, very competent doctor—over the vociferous (Mom’s euphemism for
foul-mouthed
) objections of another pregnant woman alone in the waiting room. The doctor examined Annie thoroughly and reassuringly before releasing her free of charge.

I could have made it easily without a flashlight, but I didn’t try. Highway 45 was just a mile away and I jogged along a gravel road in that direction, through billows of dust kicked up by Wayne’s Jeep. Highway 45 intersected with 37 not far
away and if I couldn’t get a lift on one I’d find it on the other. Perhaps I should have gone back for the car—I would have to eventually anyway—but I was worried and impatient.

More important, I discovered suddenly that I hated that damn square mile. Beneath and behind its beguiling ravines and glorious canopy lay such casual treachery, such indifferent malice. It was one thing to work there alone, young, in an almost simian physical condition, but now I found it laying traps for my family. I wanted human contact, preferably medical, not craven alien eyes peering at me through the dark.