4

AS SOON AS THE WOMAN and boy had fallen asleep in the backseat, the man carefully opened the car door and slipped out, leaving the door open so as not to wake them. He walked the sidewalks and the alleys. He walked through yards and looked into cars parked in driveways. He slipped in and out of the shadows, searching for some answer. And then he quit. I’ll leave them there, he thought. And he began to walk out of town. No idea of which direction he was going and only coins in his pocket and the town shrunk behind him. He was missing a front row of teeth and was perpetually smacking at his upper lip with his bottom lip, a sucking rhythm that kept the woman sitting right on the edge of anger, the sound a constant reminder to her of this life that they lived but as he walked he listened to the smacking as if it were some notice that he was alive. A lone effigy moving through the moonlight. He walked and wondered and then imagined falling into a big black hole that had no bottom, falling with his arms and legs spread wide and no fear of what was below. He turned and looked back at the few faint lights of town and then he kept walking until he came to the valley.

The moonshine gave a pale light across a land covered in kudzu. The rich green depths and rises and falls of trees and hillsides long since conquered by the timeless vines. The man gazed across the great expanse of green, captivated by the reach of the kudzu. By the multitude of heartshaped leaves that seemed to wave to him as the nightwind swept down through the valley. He stood on the road and the kudzu came right up to its edge. One step from the bumpy asphalt. He knelt and took the end of a vine in his fingers and it was thick like a pencil and rough and scratchy. He then touched a leaf. Slick and smooth. He snapped it from the vine and held it flat in his palm and stroked it with his rough fingertips as if trying to soothe it to sleep.

He carried the leaf as he kept walking, the road turning in a long curve that wrapped around the valley. The vines hanging down from clumps of forest that served like some curtain into the backstage world below the kudzu and into it the man entered. Standing there among the trees. Moving deeper inside. The kudzu canopy above blocking out the moonglow and in the dark he heard things and imagined more things and he hurried back out to the road. His breaths quicker. His heart quicker. The sides of his mouth bent up in a smile. He no longer wanted to leave. He no longer wanted to walk off into the night. He picked more leaves from the vines and he squeezed them in his hands as he hurried back toward town, the eastern sky beginning to change from black to blue. He kept looking over his shoulder as he walked as if to make sure the valley had not been part of a dream and just before first light he returned to the car. He reached into the open window of the backseat and shook the woman by her shoulder and did the same to the boy. They were slumped against each other and he pushed at her until her eyes opened and he said get up. Both of you. Get up and start pushing. I found us somewhere.