HE SPENT the large part of a month on the road, tenanting in forgotten smokehouses and boatsheds, even the occasional chicken house surrounded by time-torn wire. The property was often consigned to the lower elevations, so it was dank and beyond the scope of the sun. But these retreats were disregarded and safe, separate from the landowners’ immediate concerns. That was how he found the time to heal, to let his body and mind assume their former integrity as well as they could, though there were certain damages that produced a difference in how he walked and even how he spoke.
He let his hair grow, and by the bad half of December it was long enough to comb, though he lacked any tools for grooming, so it stuck up in stiff dirty tufts that crowned his head like fur. He was aware of the indecency of his appearance, so he kept to the woods during hours of daylight. At night he foraged, stole up to the edge of the country houses and picked over what was left in outdoor garbage bins. A stew of discarded vegetables and meats that he collected and combined in shallow aluminum plates and ate under cold skies.
Though he was not conscious of it at the time, there was a pattern to his progress, moving eastward and through the mountain pass, down toward the promise of Tennessee.
He came into Cocke County where the French Broad River flowed, and stayed for a day behind a green farmhouse that kept roaming chickens. He watched them hungrily through much of an afternoon, beckoned them toward him in his mind, though they refused his psychic invitation. At twilight an old fat woman in a flowered housecoat and a collie dog at heel came out and shooed the fowl into a small pen just at the rear of the house. He waited for half an hour and early dark to come on before he slipped from his concealment and came up around the back end of the enclosure. He squatted there for a minute and listened for any signs of alarm, heard only the eerie muttering of the hens at roost. He crept forward to lift the latch.
As soon as he seized the nearest hen every other bird clamored and beat its wings to war. In the evening light he was quickly turned around and could not find the way he had come in. He tucked his captive tightly under one arm while he guided his free hand over the chicken wire to discover the gate. House lights flooded at his back.
“Come on, goddammit.”
Finally he found the opening, jammed it forward against a ledge of packed leaves and stepped, but his shoe skated over the smoothed cake of chicken shit, and he leveled in the air before he struck the ground with the flat of his back. He rolled out clear of the pen and stumbled to his feet, tried to gather his direction before he sprinted for the wood line because now the back door had swung wide and the old woman’s figure was caught up in the coffin-shaped back-lighting, holding what appeared to be a shotgun broken open at the breech.
“You better run, you sonofabitch,” the woman called out against the barking of her dog. As punctuation to this advice, a blast tore overhead, the shot losing itself into the indistinct woods he was running toward.
“Merry Christmas, motherfucker!” she shouted, slammed the house door shut.
HE WALKED deep into the woods with the dead chicken under his arm before he began to collect wood for a fire. Once he had enough to serve his purpose his hunger was so great he doubted he’d be able to wait until the meat was cooked, but he knew the night would grow hypothermic if he didn’t have a way to stay warm in the open air, so he disciplined himself as he turned the breast above the flames. When finally he ate there was no savor to it, only the abeyance of belly pain.
A light snow began to fall in the middle of the night and by first light had stacked enough to silence the woods. He gathered wood once more and revived the fire in case the weather worsened, but by midday the sun appeared and tree limbs ticked and dribbled with melt. He stamped the fire and covered it and walked the ridgeline that overlooked the French Broad, followed it as it flowed into the valley country.
By evening he’d begun to come into the outskirts of Newport, though he was still out of sight from the road save for the closest inspection. He could see the bulk of warehouses by the waterfront, heard the tight passage of street traffic. Along the main street the telephone poles were decorated with red and white lights. At their peaks they wore green tinsel meant to signify Christmas trees and wreaths.
A wind began to blow hard; he knew that he needed to find cover somewhere at the edge of town, so he stepped down from the woods. He saw a bar, a place without windows along the front that settled next to the river. It had a painted beer sign affixed next to the door and didn’t look like it would cost much money. He gleaned a five-dollar bill, half a dozen singles, and a few quarters from his pocket and went in.
Inside the lights were lowered but still bright enough to pick out the ugliness of the place, all plyboard and bad carpet. A slate with drink prices in chalk, and at the head, the name WILEY’S LOUNGE. A retired couple two-stepped to some new country tune he couldn’t name on what purported to be a dance floor. The music came from small speakers attached to a CD player on a side table. Every few seconds it would skip and stutter before catching the correct train of lyrics. He sat at the dimmest end of the bar and ordered a glass of PBR. The bartender, a man who had eyes that seemed to look at more than one place at a time, brought the beer to him and went back down to the other customers without saying anything, not even to ask for money. He thought it strange, but didn’t make a comment. Drank the flat beer, listened to the music and waited. In half an hour he raised his empty glass to draw the bartender’s attention. The man slowly walked over, bent his head forward in an imitation of deference. Even in the bad light he could see a strangely shaped birthmark above the bartender’s jaw.
“Nother one?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah, I believe I will.”
“You paying with money or bullshit?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard what I wanted to know. I’m a Christian, so I’m happy to serve any man on the eve of our Lord’s birth. But this ain’t a soup kitchen, shitbird.”
“I got money,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it, because I’ve got beer. But let’s see it this time. Two-fifty a pop, so that’s five bucks.”
He shoved the bill across the bar.
“Bring me another beer, asshole.”
The bartender took the money, stuck it in his pocket, and smiled before turning around to pull the tap. He set the full pint glass on top of a cocktail napkin in front of him.
“No tip?” the bartender asked.
He reached into his pocket, found a penny and pushed it toward him. The bartender smiled again, put that in his pocket before he left him alone with his drink.
A few more people came in as the night developed, crowded into their familiar clusters. Mostly rednecks getting off from shift work, a few of them leaning in against bored wives and girlfriends, drinking rail whiskey and saying God’s blessings while arguing they wouldn’t say “happy holidays” when everyone knew good and goddamn well it was meant to be “merry Christmas.” After a while they toasted one another’s health. In the confusion of bodies, he slipped away to the men’s room.
It was as small as he’d expected, with only a toilet and a single urinal, but as in the main room there was a drop ceiling of the same plyboard that comprised the wall and, he suspected, the carpeted floor. He lowered the toilet seat and balanced there so that he could lift up on the panel directly overhead. It gave under pressure, slid from its place with a soft sense of being unburdened. He hung briefly by the board to test its strength before he clambered up and slid the panel back so that he was concealed in the attic space.
He waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness before he eased out along the ceiling support beams where the horizontal slashes of ventilation showed the blue night. The sounds of music and voices from below thumped up through the soles of his feet, jarred him, but he was grateful for the indoor heat, so he relaxed into this new shelter as best he could. Pulled off his shoes and rolled his Army cargo coat into a pillow, lay there looking up through the dust at the narrow view of the sky until his mind grew heavy and stupid with tedium.
The shifted light of the moon woke him some time later. Hours it seemed. The chemical weight of deep sleep was on his body, though he could remember no dreams. He was hungry but had nothing with him. He thought of going down to check what might have been behind the bar, but he could still hear water running through the pipes. Cleaning up before shutting everything down, he supposed. He settled in to wait as long as he needed to.
He thought of when, as a boy, he had found shelter in a treehouse much like this. Windowless and closed up by plyboard. It had been his secret, though a secret he shared with his grandfather, a man who loved the woods as much as he did. The old man had moved in with his family after his stroke and roomed in the converted garage for less than a week before he dragged out a heavy general-purpose military tent that had been boxed and forgotten for more than a decade. It had belonged to the old man at one time, had been what he erected when he had taken his children, both his sons, fishing and turkey hunting for weeklong trips in the Bankhead National Forest. But he had preferred even that, ancient and begrimed from disuse as it had become, to sleeping another day under his son’s suburban roof.
Still, the tent had not given the old man the autonomy he needed. The family knew the old man and his son had been cut from different pieces altogether. The son had made his money sitting inside climate control, moving paper across a desk. The old man had built his world through the action of his own hands. Money had not come easily, but still it had come in sufficient measure to feed and house his sons and wife. The son had never been able to forgive the father for this providence.
Yet, the grandson loved his grandfather, inherited his affinity for the natural world. He had hammered in the stakes with a sledgehammer until the tent stretched and held, sat with him by the Coleman lantern and played endless hands of gin, even on school nights when he had to sneak from his bedroom window or risk his father’s punishments. So he had required no convincing to agree to a plan of building a place farther back in the woods with pieces of scrap and salvage. The treehouse was a conspiracy, a way for him and the old man to devise a world apart from the family house with its predictably arranged symmetries. The roughness of his and the old man’s design had given them something worthy to hold.
After the old man died, he had spent most of his afternoons and evenings in the treehouse. While other boys his age began to date girls and drive cars, he read books about the Cherokee and mountain people, how to devise fish traps in streams, how to build lodges from deadfall and mud. Though he did poorly in school, he taught himself Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire books and all they had to say about folk knowledge. Most importantly, he learned how he needed to grow toward the truth of his manhood alone.
So it had been natural for him to run away one morning when his parents had already driven off to their separate workplaces in opposite ends of the city. He simply packed his oversized gym bag with a change of clothes, some emergency cash he knew his father kept hidden in his chest of drawers, and walked straight into the woods behind his house until he came to the highway, where he hitchhiked with the first person willing to take him as far as the Appalachian Trail. He left no note.
He now heard the front door close and the lock slide home. From the ventilation opening he could see the bartender, uneasy on his legs, lurch and tumble into an old Lincoln and stab a key into the ignition. A moment later the engine caught and the car fishtailed across the gravel lot and was gone into the otherwise quiet night. He waited a few minutes more, listening for any sound at all before he climbed down.
The lights in the barroom had all been doused except for a neon Miller sign near a pool table that glowed under the steady pulse of green into red. The scattered billiard balls appeared to advance and recede by the changing cast of light, so that they moved by shaded degrees, small and lurid worlds. He palmed the cue ball and rolled it toward the far rail, where it rebounded with a deadened thump and came back at a bad angle. The balls clacked loosely but none found a pocket.
He ate stale pretzels and peanuts from the bottom of a big plastic container behind the bar. Broke into a perforated box of Hershey’s plain chocolate bars and ate two while he sipped from a glass of PBR draft. Somehow, the emptiness of it all filled him and he then began to search for signs of a key to the cash register. He saw no evidence of a safe.
Within fifteen minutes, he found a ring of keys hanging from a nail in the back office. He tried all of them, but the drawer remained sealed. No doubt it would yield under sufficient force, but he considered other values the bar might hold. Returning to the office with its desk overburdened with ledgers and pornography, he tried the keys in each of the drawers. Mostly small cash, but also a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed .38, nickel plated, loaded, and clean. He considered taking it, but thought perhaps he already had something more important at hand. At the back door the first key entered the lock and turned the deadbolt. He stood there on the small iron stairway with the key pinched between his fingers and listened to the river for a long time. He worked the single key free then and returned the key ring to its place, left everything as undisturbed as he could before he locked the door and walked down to the river as it began to silver with daybreak.