“Daddy longlegs are the best,” Earl says. “They live the longest. ’Cause their legs are so long and thin. I’ve picked all eight legs off the same daddy longlegs and it still went on living. It couldn’t move, but it was living.”
Earl is leading me up the steep slope of woods behind the diner. I’m out of breath while Earl barely seems to notice the steady incline of the land. It occurs to me that we are at altitude and my body isn’t used to it. The Black Hills get to just over seven thousand feet at their peak and I’m a sea-level kind of girl. We are following a narrow, well-worn path on the forest floor, only as wide as one of his red-rain-booted feet. I glance up from my climb to watch how he uses his hands when the hill gets too steep, maneuvering on all fours when it suits him. His hands are almost as red as his boots, chapped and raw, nails bitten to the quick. His butterfly mask sticks out shiny on either side of his head and is tied with a simple silver ribbon that disappears into the back of his matted dirty-blond hair.
“You’re into bugs then?” I ask.
Ray once showed me how to get a bumblebee to land on my finger so I could pet it with my pinkie, reach up right behind the wings and stroke down. The bee would stay still for me. Antennae and legs thread-skinny, body purring.
“It’s not just bugs. I love all creatures,” he says, and reaches around the back of his head to tighten the bow of his mask. “Big ones and small ones. I like seeing what makes a thing work,” he says. “Did you know that monarch cat-a-pillars shed their skin four times before they become a butterfly? Also, night butterflies have their ears on their wings so they can hear the crows and the bats coming for ’em at dusk.” Earl stops short, turns to face me, and holds out his arms from his sides to show me his wingspan.
“The crows out here are huge,” I say.
“They mate for life, bet you didn’t know that, and they’re songbirds. All crows are,” he says, proud of himself.
“I did not know that.”
“I’m very scientific,” he says. “I like experiments. Every time I meet a new person, I try to decide how long they’ll live if I pick them apart.” Earl stops on the hill and turns to face me. His voice is low and serious. If he weren’t so slight, barely reaching my chest and far too skinny, I would be scared. “It’s fun to figure out which parts to take off first,” Earl continues. “A leg. An arm. With some people, I make sure to take their head off right away so they won’t scream. I’d take your head off last.”
Earl turns. Starts up the hill again. The terrain is getting steeper. I shorten my stride and find my balance with my hands on a tree trunk.
These hills are full up with green pines and the air carries their syrupy scent—if not for the early cold this year thinning everything out, that smell would stick to the skin it’s so thick. The ground is littered with the browned needles of the trees and large rocks jut up bald and lonely and thick as houses. I did not expect the rich desert red that stripes some of these otherwise gray rocks.
Under our feet there are caverns. I know this from Ray. Some are natural but most are abandoned mines. Settlers blasted deep into this rock to root out what they collectively decided was the most precious thing, ignoring the fact that, once dug out, it becomes an excavated organ, robbed of life. The steady rock and the reaching trees do not reveal the fragility of this wormholed place.
“Why wouldn’t you take my head off first?”
“You’d have something to say when it came to the very end.” Earl stops again to answer me, and I have to rock back to avoid running into him. My hand reaches out, and I see the blood on my skin as Earl sees it. Some of it mine, my palm raw, but the rest of it, up under my nails and smeared across the back of my hand, someone else’s.
“I could kill you. No one would know,” he whispers. Earl and I are face-to-face.
“Keep walking and try to remember I’m the one with the gun.” I make a shooing gesture.
He turns without hesitation and reinitiates the hike.
“My mom says this is the loneliest place in the whole world.”
“She obviously hasn’t lived in Southern Ohio.”
“Close though, actually,” he says excitedly. “She grew up on the Ohio River. In Switzerland County. Isn’t that a funny name for a place in Indiana?”
“It is.”
“Her daddy was an artist like me. It skipped her and flew straight to me.”
“Did he live here with you too?”
“Opa? No. He died. That’s how George bought this place.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “The dying part anyway.”
Earl shrugs.
We walk in silence. Minutes pass.
Something shines in one of the nearby branches. A small tinfoil bird hung on nearly invisible string. Earl looks at it and then at me, checking to make sure I’ve noticed, but then there are more, unmissable hundreds. Different kinds of birds and flowers but also elephants and jungle cats and buffalo. Some hang in groups, mobiles made of twine and sticks and husks of flowers. I reach out and let a tiny horse rest in the clean skin of my unhurt hand. It slides from my palm as my body moves forward. It glides back and forth in the cold South Dakota air.
Earl is watching me.
There are carvings peeking out of the pine needles and tired growth on either side of the trail: salamanders; a long driftwood-colored snake whose curvy body shows off the knots of a time when it was simply a tree branch; three baby mice, one overturned; a spider’s web that he’s used to connect two tall trees, the spider shining out from the middle of the web. My eyes feel hot and I reach up to rub them to find the start of tears.
Ahead Earl pauses to adjust an object. He steps off the path, looking over his shoulder at me. His boots all but disappear into the browning undergrowth. As he leans over, I see each of his vertebrae through his layers of flannel and sweater.
Ray stopped eating at the end of his life. He wanted to feel the life go out of him, and I didn’t tell him I thought that was bullshit. I let him do it. I watched. He buried his body in clothes so no one would notice, and I ate his food for him. Put on ten pounds, fifteen, twenty. I stopped touching him then too. The intimacy that we’d so long shared was gone. I couldn’t stand the sharpness of him or how his veins bulged out, pinchable. His skin so thin that if you even bumped against him a great blue blossom would bloom in that spot.
“Who takes care of you, Earl?” I ask even though I know the answer is no one, and in asking, my hand twitches at my side, as if my body wants to reach out to Earl. I shove my hands in my jean pockets.
“I’m not a baby.”
“This George dude. He’s your father?”
“He says he is.”
“He must be proud of all your art.”
“‘If you can’t sell it, it ain’t worth nothin’,’” Earl says in a gruff voice.
“How long have you lived here?” I ask, changing tack.
“We’ve been here two Christmases. Next week will be our second Halloween. George moved us out here, then he ate up my mother.”
“He did not eat up your mother.”
“Course he did. He bought her a ghost town, made us move here, and then he ate her.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone buying an entire town.”
“I speak only truth.”
“Only liars say they never lie.”
“My mom says we’re all liars. Liars and ghosts.”
“You mean said.”
“Sure, said. She says we carry with us all the things we’ve acclimated.”
“Accumulated?”
“Like you’ve got that scar on your belly…”
“When did you see my scar?” I instinctively pull my shirt down, as if there is some hope of covering a sighting that already occurred.
“When I took your gun. Your shirt was all bunched up,” Earl says, but he does not break stride. “Something happened to you and so you got scarred. Ghosts are like that too. Like scars. They travel with you.”
“So where’s George? That’s what I’d like to talk about. We’ve been walking a long time.”
“Black Hills are made up of 1.25 million acres.”
“Are we walking all of ’em?”
“George bought 6.1 for $249,000 back in 1990. Read about it in a magazine and moved us out here straightaway. When he’s dead, it’ll be mine. One hundred percent of it.
“The town is supercool. It’s got an old church, a post office, a grocery. Big old house for living in. It just wasn’t near as livable as George thought and you can’t never get to it from a main road, especially not in the winter, so Mom opened that diner down there far from the town but nearer the road. That way we could tell diner customers about the mysterious town through the woods. George was gonna build a gravel road from one to the other. Turned out even the diner is too hard to get to most of the year. They don’t plow out here. Spring is just as bad. Mom said we should make a commune out of it but George hates people so I figure we just have to get rid of George, then Mama will be back and we can love this place proper like.”
“When did you last see her, your mother?”
“Those days add up to too many.”
“That I understand,” I say, anxious for the days back to Ray to be too many to track.
“Here we are,” Earl says.
And then there it is just ahead of us, a wide plateau of land dotted with brown boulders that look like they’ve been dropped from the sky. Spruce trees sit on the edges of the plateau. On the far side, facing us, is a row of buildings that lean softly to the right as if they are putting all their exhausted weight into their one good hip.
Like the diner the buildings are aptly labeled: SALOON, POST OFFICE, GROCERY, CHURCH. They are painted garish yellows and ketchupy reds, although any paint job was clearly done some time ago. The beaten-down wood shows through, raw and indignant. The remnants of a truck, hood open, guts gone, sit sadly in the tall grass. A smattering of tree stumps in varying states of decay sit in the barren field between where we stand and the storefronts. A rusted chain saw tilts sadly against a skinny but still-standing pine. At the end of the row of buildings and separated from them by a distance of about thirty feet is a farmhouse. Simple in frame but tall and once proud. The roof is caved in, a great toothless hole gaping up at the sky.
“Nothing sadder than a roof given in, is there?” Earl asks.
“Tell me that’s not where you live.”
“No, ma’am. George fusses in there but I have a spot in the barn behind these buildings and down the hills that way.” He points toward the saloon. “You’ll love the barn. I’m fixing it up real good so a whole family could definitely live there.”
Closest to us there is a firepit full of ash and blackened objects that aren’t meant to burn (beer bottles, curling food wrappers, and cans). There are beer bottles strewn around the small open space. There is no sound. No birds, no crickets, no rustle of leaves. There isn’t even any undergrowth. Just dusty ground that looks to have been tamped down by anxious feet. A small dead space.
“So where is he?” I’ve got that uh-oh feeling in my stomach. That child-molester, kidnapper, razor-blade-in-the-candy feeling: Tell Mommy and Daddy about the bad man.
“Where’s who?” Earl asks. He is looking at me but that stupid mask makes it impossible to tell if he’s joking. My eyes are tired and I’m out of breath.
“George, for fuck’s sake! Where is George?” I ask, and shiver. I zip up my jacket to my neck before crossing my arms over my chest to hug my breasts tight against my body.
“You scared?”
“No,” I say, and resist the urge to ask for my pills. I’ve been doing some kind of something since I was sixteen, when Ray and I decided to clean up the remnants of our parents’ Halloween party. Drinking, smoking, snorting. My father made me swear I would never be like him, but he only made me swear when he was sober and miserable. When he was drunk, he was happy, unafraid of the world and its consequences.
With beer or weed or speed in my system, I felt joy. It made the hate inside me shrink down. And I could forget my promise. Dad wanted me to be happy, bold, and brave. It didn’t matter how I got there.
The hospital kindly turned me over to prescription drugs and life happens at arm’s length now—close enough to destroy the joy and distanced enough to fog the pain. My body off of everything will be an unfamiliar landscape.
“Sometimes it’s safer to be scared. That’s what Mama says.”
Maybe, I think but do not say. Maybe feeling all of it every moment will be safer.
Something in me shifts. Something that I thought they removed months ago opens up and I reach for him. To hug him? To shield him? My arms think better of it and drop back to my sides before I notice that he has taken a step toward me as if he knew my offer of comfort was coming before I did.
“Show me,” I say.
Earl nods and leads me around the dead campfire toward the farmhouse. For a minute, I assume we are entering the building, but he lets his shoulder brush against it silently as we walk. He disappears around the corner. I pause, stand up straighter, and then step forward. There’s a big man slumped in a beat-up lawn chair. His back is to me and his head is rolled slightly to one side.
Earl stops. I take a few more steps forward. I look over my shoulder at Earl, who gives me a nod.
“Hello?” The man, George, doesn’t answer. I catch the smell of him as a breeze moves through. Something is wrong. Urine. Sweat. Alcohol. A darker smell too. Decay. “What’s wrong with him?” I ask Earl.
“Nothing wrong with him, but I wouldn’t wake him if I were you.”
“Why not?” I whisper back. All the hairs on my neck are standing up.
“I’ll be right back,” Earl says in a quick whisper. I spin on my heels in time to see him disappear around the building.
“Goddamn it, Earl,” I say, and think about following, but my legs are shaking.
George is wearing a black leather jacket and a black knit hat. I can’t see much about his size or anything of his hair. He is just a big, sloppy body in a chair. From the back George could be anyone. Could be my dad. Could be Lowell. Could be Ray. Could be me.
“Do you need help?” I ask, and take a step toward the body. “Listen, your kid said you’d be able to give me gas. My van ran out. That’s all I need, then I’m gone.”
As I come up beside him, I have to cover my mouth and nose. The smell is strong. The hat is a ski mask. His face is invisible. Just eyes through the holes and they are open wide, a too-clear blue as if bleached out by the sky. He has on ripped jeans, which are wet from the crotch to his knees. His blue sweatshirt is slightly wet down the front. Vomit. There are beer bottles all around him. Too many to drink in one sitting. His wide eyes stare up at the tops of the trees or the sky, I can’t tell which. I turn to see what he sees and two crows circle. Then a third joins and a fourth. They glide, making no noise. Their beaks sharp and ready.
“You drunk?” I study his face. He’s not present, and from the looks of things, he might never even know I’ve been on his property. “You dead, mister?” I hadn’t planned to say that word, “dead,” but there it is floating around now and suddenly I know it is the obvious choice. I move toward him slowly, unsure of what I’m planning to do, but feeling sure I have to prove to myself that he isn’t dead so I can leave both drunk man and small boy behind. I get close enough to reach out and tap his shoulder with two fingers. I keep my other hand clamped over my mouth and nose. No response.
I give his muddy cowboy boot a kick. Nothing.
“I wouldn’t wake him up if I were you,” Earl says. He’s back and standing right behind me.
“God, you’re a creeper. Stop sneaking up on me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this man was dead. As a matter a fact, I don’t know better. He’s dead. This is fucked-up.”
“He’s not dead. He’s nappin’.”
“Does he always nap with his eyes open?”
“Usually does. Yep.”
“That’s fucking creepy.”
“He’s just sleepin’ it off.”
“Earl, honey, he is not sleeping. Something is wrong.”
“It’s the white powder I gave him.”
“You poisoned him?”
“It kills the rats.”
I wish I could see Earl’s face behind the mask. As it is, I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning and the mask has regained its glare, its crow-attracting shine. I’m close enough to him to see the hills and valleys of the tinfoil crinkles and it looks like the surface of the moon.
“Earl, I hope he’s a son of a bitch.”
“He’s just nappin’,” Earl whispers.
“How long has he been napping?”
“Since yesterday noon. I gave him some of your medicine this morning.”
“How much?”
“Many of them.”
“That’s not a number.”
“All?”
“Is he still breathing?”
“Yes, watch.”
We stand quietly waiting until George’s chest rises ever so slightly.
“I guess that was a breath. If he’s alive, you have to get him to a doctor, and really, it strikes me as a very bad habit to be poisoning people so early in life. Just look at him. We need to call someone. I mean, you need to call someone.”
“There isn’t a phone here.”
“You need to get him help before this turns into something even bigger than you want. Believe me. I know. Some choices can’t be undone.”
Earl is quiet for a moment, thoughtful, but then he speaks with a sadness that seems deliberate: “I was hoping you’d help me bury him.”