THE TWO SAT for a long time after devouring dozens of berries and many drafts of sweet-tasting water. When the sun began to go down they decided to rest until morning.
The twilight in the uncharted high forest was beautiful but when the sun set and the moon rose over a far mountain, the air turned cold. Lorraine began to shiver. Ronnie put his arm around her and pulled her close.
“Get off me,” Lorraine complained. “I don’t need you.”
“I know you don’t, girl,” the killer said. “Maybe you ain’t cold, but I’m freezin’. I just wanted to get a little warm, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Come on, baby, you need me to tell you again how my dick ain’t workin’ right?”
“Do you have to use that language?”
“It’s the only language I got.”
Lorraine turned her back to Ronnie and pressed into his embrace. When they came together, they were enveloped in warmth that was both physical and somehow emotional. Ronnie giggled, maybe for the first time since before adolescence, and Lorraine smiled, forgetting about the philosophies of if and why; about the crimes against her or ideas she believed but did not accept.
Swathed in warmth neither one had known since infancy they fell into a sleep so profound that the world around them seemed to fall away.
As they slept they didn’t notice the chromium skinned antlike insects that swarmed around Lorraine’s eyes, biting her over and over with preordained precision and accuracy.
* * *
IN THE MORNING Ronnie rose first. He went across the stream and into the forest to relieve himself. He was just zipping up the brown pants he’d bought in the thrift shop when Lorraine screamed.
Running back to their bed of grasses and soil, he saw the young woman standing upright, moving from side to side, and holding her face with both hands.
“What’s wrong?” Ronnie shouted, running to her side.
“I’m blind! I’m blind!”
“Let me see,” Ronnie said. “What’s wrong?”
He grabbed her wrists, pulling at them to get a look at her face—but when he tugged, her head moved with her hands.
“I got to look at it if I’m gonna do anything,” he reasoned.
Lorraine fell to her knees and Ronnie descended with her. She continued resisting him and he had to consciously keep himself from forcing her to expose her face.
Finally he let her go and said, “Please, Lorraine, I just wanna help.”
Slowly, hesitantly Lorraine lowered her hands. Her eyelids and the flesh from the middle of her forehead down to the bridge of her nose were red and very swollen, effectively shutting her eyes.
“What is it?” she cried. “I can’t see.”
“It looks like bug bites.”
“Bugs? Why would the Silver Box go out of his way to make a place so completely and then leave bugs to hurt somebody like this?”
Ronnie wondered too but he didn’t echo his companion. Instead he took her hands in his. “It’s just bug bites,” he said. “They’re swollen but they’ll go down. We should get some cold water on’em and I bet the swellin’ll go down soon.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“How long could that take?”
“When I get a mosquito bite, it usually lasts a day, two at most.”
“Two days,” she wailed.
“It’s okay, Lorraine. I’m right here wit’ you, girl. I promise you that.”
He took her down to the stream and, using cupped hands, poured water over her eyes.
“That feels really good,” she said.
“Don’t it sting?”
“No, the water makes it feel relaxed. I think you’re right about it helping.”
“You think maybe we should wait here until you could see again?” Ronnie asked as he went about plucking the deep red ground berries.
“No,” she said. “Silver Box didn’t give us a deadline but he made it sound like we had to act fast. We have to keep moving.”
“But he said that time stopped until we get back.”
“Maybe he meant it stopped until when we got here,” she argued. “We can’t take the chance.”
“Okay. You just put your arm in mine and I’ll tell ya if there’s a rock or tree branch in the way.”
Lorraine smiled and reached out for her killer’s crooked arm. They got to their feet and continued on the unlikely path of their lives.
* * *
AS THE DAY progressed they made good time, feeling energized by the sun and air, the ground berries and also somehow by their closeness.
Ronnie noticed that a new kind of tree was appearing here and there. This new vegetation had dark bark on thick trunks with huge outcropping branches that bore light green leaves the size and shape of one-man kayaks. The wary side of Ronnie’s streetwise mind wondered what this new kind of tree might mean for them.
“There’s a little light getting in between my eyelids,” Lorraine said before he could mention the trees to her.
“That’s good,” he said. “That means you’re gettin’ better.”
They walked arm in arm, as close as lovers or siblings or small children using the buddy system on a school outing.
“Even though I was mad at you, I still wanted to jump your bones again last night,” she said after a while.
“I never had a woman do that to me before.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was wild. You know like if you was a man.”
“I thought you said you did that in prison.”
“Yeah, but I was always the one on top. You know I never let a woman do too much with sex. I guess I never even wondered about what she felt.”
“What do you think now?”
“That I never knew nuthin’ before we met.”
“Maybe you’ll regret it by the time this is over.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because of my great-uncle Phil Goldstone, my mother’s mother’s brother.”
“What about him?”
“He was in the war that Ma Lin fought in.”
“Vietnam?”
“There’s a rock in front’a your left foot.”
They stopped and Lorraine nudged her left foot out until her shod toe tapped the four-inch-high obstruction. Stepping over the rock, they went on.
“Uncle Phil hated everything about the war,” Ronnie continued. “He said that he hated the enemy and he hated the white government for sendin’ him there. But he made his best friends and had the greatest times of his life there. He hated it, but he loved it more’n anything too.”
“And that’s how you feel about me?” She hugged his arm closer.
“That’s how I feel about everything. My whole life’s been a war, and you the last fight in that war. I won the fight but then I lost it too. And now … now I’m free and I don’t regret a thing. I cain’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it brought me here.”
Three steps of silence and suddenly Lorraine pulled away and started scratching furiously at her sides and all around the waist. She made panting sounds and was in such distress that she fell to the ground scratching, scratching. Ronnie got down with her, putting his hands up her dress to help.
“Don’t do that!”
“I have to, Lorraine. I got to see what’s wrong.”
Lorraine stopped struggling and lay stiff on the ground. Ronnie lifted the blue fabric.… Bug bites covered her abdomen and sides going down under the line of her panties, coming out at her thighs, and traveling down another five or six inches.
“The bugs must be in your clothes,” he said. “I’ll carry you back to that pond we saw and we could wash’em there.”
Lorraine yowled loudly and Ronnie hoped that insects were the largest creatures in that wood.
* * *
HE WALKED HER out into the middle of the deep pond. It was about thirty-five feet across, fed by the stream that they had lain next to the night before and three or four other rivulets.
When the girl was shoulder high in the natural pool, he had her take off her clothes. These he took to the shore and rinsed over and over, finally beating them with rocks.
“Ronnie, are you there?” Lorraine called from her semidarkness.
“Right here beatin’ on these clothes. You know if there was any bugs left, they all dead and crushed. How you doin’?”
“The water soothes the itch. It’s cold but I like it.”
“It’s really pretty here. When your swelling goes down, you’re gonna love it.”
“You know what’s so crazy, Ronnie?”
“What’s that, Lore?”
“That we just accept all this as real. I mean, it’s impossible, right?”
“It always felt like that for me,” the once brooding and ravenous brute said.
“Like what?”
“Like nuthin’s real but I couldn’t stop it anyway. Locked doors, hunger, me hatin’ myself for the things I never did and the things I never did right.”
Lorraine turned her blind gaze toward her companion. There was a question in her mind that went unspoken.
“You surprised that a niggah like me think about things too?”
“I guess I am,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think that name about you but what you just said, that question and that feeling has been in my heart for as far back as I could remember.”
“It’s like when somebody you know die, right?” Ronnie added. “You feel like they should be alive, like they must be somewhere. All you got to do is figure out the right way to turn or somethin’ special you could say.”
“But if you did, it would turn out like Claude Festerling,” Lorraine added. “And me too if you hadn’t come back.”
Lorraine pushed herself toward the sound of Ronnie Bottoms’s voice and came out of the water only a few feet away. He wrung her clothes with all his strength and then reached out.
“You’ll be cool in these.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bottoms.”