The Constant Heart (29 page)

A sound or a muffled shriek came from below where the men were, and its quality, at once piercing and exasperated, made me stand up and walk toward it, but it disappeared, and I was left with nothing more than the sound of the stream and the wall of trees, the gray and silky sky. I sat down again. The woods had a tactile silence in the dark heat, and I could feel its diminutive burn. The sound came again.

Of course, she was telling them to get lost. What else could she do? Or she could say she would pay ten thousand a month. Would that be it? Would they scream about that? I stood in that hot silence and the tops of the trees, just torn silhouettes, as though while night might hide objects that existed during the day, it did so by devastating them first. Now they were torn into unrecognizable shapes that one associates with the stagnate smoke of the underworld. The sound came again, vague, distant. Intermittent. Almost like the call of a bird or some other delicate sound, but after it was gone, I realized that the birds were quiet. Sara liked to take care of her own business and didn't accept help easily. It took me a moment to recognize the haunting quality of her voice, but it came, like the scent of a flower long forgotten. It was her voice, years ago, when she was being arrested in front of the jail and called out to me. All I could hear was the cadence.

My father was halfway there by the time I caught up to
him. The trees stood like enormous pillars, shaggy on top, the memory of that honey all gone now or changed into something else. The darkness flowed in, like some kind of ink, or fluid, and it washed through the trees, absorbing them, but it didn't absorb the sound, which came from the other side of the smoking fire where the men had Sara on the ground, and while she still had her clothes on, they now ripped at her shirt and an innocent breast quaked, the nipple pink in the light. They pulled at her bootlaces and then her blue jeans and at her pink underwear. They had it down to her knees, and she put one hand between her legs, a gesture of exquisite modesty. Bo took off his shirt. That's when my father and I stood behind him. Scott grabbed the hand Sara had tried to cover herself with and MD held her other arm and her head. Bo began to undo his belt buckle, on which he had a sheath for a knife with a blade that could be locked.

My father opened the sheath, just snapped it open. He took out the knife, which had an upturned blade for skinning, and then my father locked it open. He said, “I'd leave her alone.”

“Fuck you,” said Bo.

My father put the tip of the knife against Bo's back, just above his belt, and when Bo looked over his shoulder to scowl at us, he let go of Sara's panties and then, still not turned, still in that awkward half crouch that is the beginning of such violence, he stumbled in his own jeans, pulled down to his knees, although he was still in his underwear, gray and unwashed. The scent of sweat and smoke came off his skin, and he oozed a lingering and stale reek of bourbon. It was like the stink of liquor that had been spilled in a bar with a cheap carpet. And maybe he was confused, too, since he didn't seem to feel the
tip of the knife. He seemed concerned about only one thing. A drunk man on a high wire who realized he didn't know the first thing about how to get across.

He made a sort of rowing motion with both arms, which he had held out for balance. It seemed more funny than serious, at least for an instant, when I thought of Laurel and Hardy, before one of them fell into a swimming pool. Then the knife showed against Bo's skin. Scott and MD let Sara go. She sat up and pulled up her pants, still modest now, but with an air of fatalism, as though she knew that in this last attempt to put things right, we were about to fall into the abyss. How hard she had tried to avoid that. The presence of the depths colored everything: the air, the trees, the darkness of Bo's blue jeans as he went on with the rowing motion. He worked harder now, since he had fallen enough to know the point of the knife was against his white skin.

He fell.

He did so like a man who falls backward off a cliff, his hands out and still making that sort of swimming motion. Did my father have the time or even the thought to move the knife? But maybe other matters came into play, my mother out there in the ashram, in Berkeley, with the boyfriend called North Star, who would be able to spend the money my father had been saving all his life. Or maybe it was that stupid commissioner's job, the first time my father had applied for it. Or the sheep that had disappeared from the field where my father's house had been built. The buzzing of those wires held up by the gigantic Erector Set men. Or me seeing him when my mother told him about the motel.

All he had to do, of course, was nothing, and Bo's weight
would do the rest. The man came down, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, onto the tip of the knife. It went right in, like a magic trick. The blade caught that last light, silver as aluminum foil, and vanished into that white skin. And when the blade had disappeared, my father's hand, which held the handle of the knife, made a fist against Bo's back. It was almost as though my father held a wrench that stuck out of the man's skin.

I wish I could say that my father jumped back in horror, but I suppose he had already faced that by looking at those Xeroxed medical papers that said 16 percent of the patients showed a 24 percent extension of two months of life, although the complications, when included in the mortality computations, reduced life expectancy by six weeks. Maybe it was all those years he had tried to do what he thought was the right thing. It all took effort. Or maybe it was something else altogether: a sense, I sometimes think, of harmony. Harmony? As though what was happening to my father had found a useful outlet, that the viciousness of his own hopelessness flowed into a variety of rectitude. When Bo's weight was on the blade, my father turned it about halfway around. As he did this, as though twisting a doorknob to get into his house, he turned his eyes so I could see them.

There, he seemed to say, that's honesty for you. If this is what has to be done and if that's the case, and it is, then I'm the one who should take all of the difficulties, no matter how intricate, in doing what is necessary. It is, his eyes seemed to say, the hardest of all things people face. I'll let you see it.

Bo sat down and put his hand on his back, but in the half dark that inky fluid leaked through his fingers. He pushed
against the throbbing rush of it as he faced the darkness of the trees. It looked like the fluid from an octopus, a dark ink, dark on darkness, and then it made a dark pool behind him. He sat back. “You prick,” he said to MD. “You promised me I could have some fun. Didn't you?”

“Get a rag,” said MD.

Scott pushed a dirty sock against Bo's back, but the fluid seeped through it and then Bo lay back, his eyes on the stars, his head moving from side to side, his legs twitching a little as he wet himself, although even in the dim light you could see that when he wet himself something dark was in it. He strained to sit up and said, “I'm pissing blood. Fuck. What does that mean?”

“Probably got cut in the kidney,” said MD.

The fatigue of Scott and MD was obvious, each more exhausted than drunk, and when they got up, they seemed to move like men on a planet where the gravity is twice that of Earth. Each seemed to be dragging some heavy but invisible object.

Sara stood up now. Her shirt was pulled out and some small twigs and dirt were in her hair. Then she went over to the stream and took off her jeans and everything else and splashed water on herself and put her clothes back on, just to get rid of that sense of someone touching her. She shivered in her wet clothes as my father came over.

She sat there, head down, intent. I squatted, not more than a foot away, afraid to touch her. She looked up at me and went back to rocking by the water.

“Get me some dry clothes,” she said. “Will you? I'd appreciate that.”

She stripped off her clothes, shivering by that deep green water. I gave her a shirt that she used as a towel. She pulled on the clothes I'd brought, her teeth chattering, keeping her face down. She turned her back on the things she had worn, leaving them there in a heap. We walked back to my father, who had stepped away to give her some privacy. The air was sweet, but it didn't smell like a sugarhouse anymore.

I thought an alarm must have gone off in the tent, although it wasn't really the buzzing of an alarm so much as a whistling. The planes appeared, their shapes dark against that pale sky, their wings without any markings, sleek and flat black. Three of them came along the stream in an arrowhead formation. They couldn't have been more than three of four hundred feet above the ground, practicing, I guess, to come in low under the air defenses of Pakistan or any place where they wanted to show up fast and get out fast, too, without being seen. The planes went by in that whistle and rumble that made everything shake. They sailed away over the treetops and were gone, leaving behind only that diminishing whistle that finally trailed away into the hiss it left in the ear. The tailpipes made streaks that were the color of coals. Sara watched them trailing away like smears of the brightest lipstick imaginable on a black sheet.

A
BAM
moved through the woods. Not like a firecracker, but more like someone hitting a metal barn with a sledgehammer. The planes were in the distance, but even so I thought that one of the pilots had taken a practice shot.

After Sara put on the dry clothes we went back.

The dark puddle was now about a yard across and getting bigger. Bo lay back, right in it, and looked at the stars. His
breathing made a steady, deep hush, and then another sound, a sort of sucking.

MD stumbled forward with that pistol Bo had carried on his belt in a holster. He held it with two hands just like in a cop movie. Then he just slumped down, putting his head on his arms, which were on his knees. Scott, who had hidden behind a log, sat up, his face, or what could be seen of it in the dark, at once mystified and drunk.

Sara had slumped down, too, but now she began to stand, doing so with the aspect of something emerging from the earth, of simply rising with all the unstoppable and yet logical necessity of a figure in a dream who has finally escaped from being buried alive. She stood up. She seemed frail, but the delicacy of her arms, her neck, her short hair, which blew a little in the barely noticeable breeze, now seemed wiry and having all the tensile strength of devotion or of hunger.

The last drips from Bo made a
pffft
,
pffft
in the puddle. The seeping pool by the clerk's leg in the Radio Shack had been quieter, but it had still been sad, and in the sadness of the moment, in the desperation of being able to say the right thing, to come up with the right formulation that would do something, that would make all of this stop, I thought of the photos of exploding nebulae, the blue shapes of shock waves against the blue-black depths.

 

 

SARA HELD THE flashlight and led the way, swinging the beam back and forth as we went through the orchard. MD, Scott, and I did the heavy work. My father walked along behind us as we hauled it. One shoe hung down and dragged
in the needles from the pines that had overgrown the old apple trees. The skeletal wood of them was as hard as bones, although some of them still had the shape of a tree, and I hit a branch that made a sort of
thum
, not in the wood so much as in my head.

Everything here, the old orchard, the needles, the collection of an infinite number of leftovers, dead insects, decayed leaves, added to the dusty sense of the place in the heat. Dusty seemed right, too, almost ceremonial, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Although I just wanted to get through the pine needles, to make sure we didn't lose a shoe, or anything else that might be found by a hunter or a backpacker who had the guts or craziness to come this far.

We went along through what was left of the farm equipment, which stuck up from the ground like bits and pieces of cannon that had been used a long time ago by an army whose success was problematic at best. Sara kept reaching up and sticking a strand of hair behind one ear. We dragged Bo around the harrow, but his shirt caught on one of the curved teeth. We all stopped. We jerked the shirt and it came away with the short, ominous sound of tearing cloth. Up ahead, the fireflies made their green pinpoints and gave the landscape the aspect of being up to its own business, no matter what we were doing.

“You'd think this could wait until morning,” said Scott.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Well,” Scott said. “He's in no hurry. Not now.”

Scott and MD were limping, although I don't know how they got hurt. We came up to the old well and stopped, all of us peering in after the beam of light that Sara shined in. The air seemed dusty there and the light cut through it as a bright
tube. Little flecks of something rotated slowly down below, and at the bottom, on the surface of the water, the beam showed itself as a disk.

“Maybe we could say that a bear did it,” said Scott. “See, we'd play it that way.”

“Bears don't use knives, shithead,” said MD.

“We don't want to say anything,” I said. “He isn't married is he?”

“No,” said Scott.

“No girlfriend?” I said.

“He was the loneliest guy I have ever met,” said Scott.

“Well, he couldn't have been more lonely than he is now,” said MD.

“He's not lonely now,” said my father.

“No,” said MD. “I guess not.”

“This guy didn't have any family, either?” I said. We had put Bo's shirt back on him, and the dark stain had seeped through it and down his pants, which had picked up some twigs and debris, leaves and dead ferns, too.

“No,” said Scott. “No one.”

“Didn't I already tell you?” said MD. “Bo had no one. He lived alone in a room. Ate out of a microwave. Used plastic forks and knives. I got other things on my mind right now. Don't bother me. I got things on my mind.”