THAT NIGHT THEY slept on the flat top of a boulder far away from any water, reasoning that whatever had bitten Lorraine was an insect living in or near the stream. Ronnie stayed awake for a long time after she was asleep to make sure no biting bugs crawled up or flew down.
He finally fell asleep and did not see the approach of the huge form of a woolly beast that was at least forty feet in height and twice that in length. The nearly silent four-legged creature moved through the woods like shadow. From its shaggy, egg-shaped head, a long and needle-thin bone slowly stretched out until it reached the sleeping young man, pricking him on every joint and at the back of his neck.
The slight discomfort from the venom of the mammal’s sting caused Ronnie to twist and turn until he came to rest on his back with legs straight and arms down at his sides.
Its work done, the needle withdrew and the shadow beast backed away, merging with the moonlit shadows of the nighttime forest.
“Ronnie, I’m cold,” Lorraine complained in her sleep.
He imagined turning on his side and holding the young coed. In his dream he did this but not within the reality of the Silver Box.
* * *
LORRAINE WOKE UP with the sun in her eyes. The itching was gone, and not only could she see again but the world looked clearer than it ever had. She jumped to her feet with unaccustomed ease and looked down on her companion.
Lowering herself again to her knees, and seeing that his eyes were open, she said, “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
“I’m awake,” he said, “just not up.”
“Then come on. I can see and all the bites are gone.”
“That’s great,” Ronnie said. “You know I’d get up wit’ ya but my arms and legs are stiff as sticks. I cain’t even turn my head.”
“Why not?”
“Just another trick SB be pullin’, I suppose.”
“You can’t move at all?”
“Been gettin’ stiffer and stiffer every minute. It’s hard for me even to open my mouf. It hurts where that cop broke the bone and I don’t even think I’ll be able to talk after while.”
“Don’t be scared,” Lorraine said. “I’m here.”
“I know you are” were the last words he spoke for some time.
* * *
LORRAINE SAT BESIDE the paralyzed young man for the next few hours—talking.
“I’m sorry for getting so mad,” she said at one point. “I mean, not sorry but I’m just saying that I understand what it is that drove you. And even though you didn’t want to save me, you did anyway. Only you could have done it. But I don’t know why … I mean, you know, I’m really mad. You did a terrible thing to me and I hate you for it partly but … I never got anything but A’s in school, you know. I was always the best student in every class and I thought that meant that … that…”
Ronnie listened and appreciated that she sat there next to him, keeping him safe from whatever might attack a paralyzed man in the deep woods. Any kind of animal or bird could start eating him out there and he wouldn’t have been able even to try and shoo it away.
Ronnie had no sensation except for a thrumming that started in his chest and traveled through his arms and legs, down along his fingers and toes. The vibrations passed through his bones and reminded him, as so many things did, of his mother’s wordless songs when he was little.
“… I could see in the way the police treated you, and in the things my father had to say, why black people have it so hard,” Lorraine was saying. He noticed that she was talking faster and faster. “I mean, you were still wrong to do that to me and if it wasn’t for how it happened, I’d—I might really have hit you in the head with a rock.”
Her voice carried sharp anger. She could have hit him now. Worse … she could just leave him to be eaten by birds and foxes. There were foxes in the eastern forests; he’d learned that in third grade.
Third grade was a good year, Ronnie thought. Miss Peters was a very kindly woman who would make him stay behind in her classroom at recess and over the lunch break to keep him occupied and off the playground, where he was likely to get into fights. She talked to him about foxes and forests and why the smartest people in the world knew that they didn’t know anything for sure.
“Ronnie?” Lorraine said.
He tried to turn his eyes to show that he’d heard, but he couldn’t even do that.
“My legs are all jittery,” the girl said. “I’m going to take a run up the path a little ways. It’ll only be a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
IN THE PERIPHERY of sight, he saw Lorraine jump off the fifteen-foot-high boulder. He worried that she might have broken her neck on landing until he heard her call, “I’ll be back soon.”
He wondered if she had abandoned him; if she had decided to go on because the world was about to be destroyed and her parents might die. He would have left her. At least the old him would have.
A moment of darkness filled the world, and Ronnie realized he was still blinking. Whatever had paralyzed his movements left his heart beating and allowed his lids to work on his eyes.
The thrumming in his bones somehow kept him from being frightened. It was his mother, and the feeling of life so pure and so strong that the thing Ronnie wanted most to do was laugh. And even that, the feeling of a laugh that wouldn’t come out, made the young brawler glad.
He’d never killed anybody before Lorraine, and somehow God—even if God was a machine and not an old white man in a white beard—had turned the clock back a little bit and given him a chance to undo what had been done. The forest was beautiful and the white girl had taken off all her clothes in front of him and nobody got hurt.
It was at that moment Ronnie accepted his death. Maybe, he thought, he had died in the police interrogation room or in that Rikers cell when his back was turned and somebody came up on him with a toothbrush turned into a knife. Maybe he had died and come to this imaginary place to have his last thoughts like prayers asking for forgiveness for what he’d done wrong. He had tried in this dream to save the white girl. He had said he was sorry even though people always told him sorry was not enough.
But sorry was all Ronnie had. He tried in his mind to make things right. He dreamed the girl back to life and imagined the great Silver Box that had God inside. He said he would do what’s right and if that wasn’t enough, if that didn’t make things okay, he’d have to go along with it because there was nothing else to do.
When Ronnie blinked, he imagined the world coming to an end, but instead a large, emerald green bird flew up and landed on his chest. The long-taloned bird had bloodred eyes. It turned its head from side to side, examining Ronnie.
Maybe this, the ex-con thought, was his personal executioner studying him for the deathblow.