“I was twelve. Playing video games on a Saturday morning.” The words floated on the still air before I realized they were coming out of my mouth.
This story. I didn’t want to tell this story. Beyond the fire, the darkness fell in a black curtain, separating the outside world from our own.
“Dad said if I made the all-star regionals u-13 team, he’d buy me a PlayStation. Mom was the one who let me put it in my room; I remember them arguing about it too, in the car on the way home from K-Mart. Fencing, almost, you know how parents do when there’s a kid in the car? They don’t want to out-and-out fight, but they go round after round of bickering, scratching at the same thing. Dad wanted to keep the PlayStation in the living room and lock up the controller until one of them gave me permission to play. I guess he thought I’d turn anti-social and ignore them in favor of the TV. But Mom stood up for me, and when Mom put her mind to something, my Dad liked to say she was stubborn as a pit bull with a stick it doesn’t want you to have.” I laughed, but there wasn’t an ounce of humor in it. “Crazy, isn’t it? The things that set off huge events in your life? A PlayStation. It was just a PlayStation.”
I shifted in my seat. There were ants in my pants, and they were crawling up my legs. I felt their tiny legs, scratching and tickling my skin.
“Anyway. I was playing video games in my room, and I heard a pop and a whoom—a blast, you know, like the ones you can feel in your chest? It shook the whole house. My signed Joe Montana poster fell off the wall. Then the fire alarms started going off. I wasn’t scared—I was irritated, because I just wanted to play my video game. I got off my bed and went downstairs, calling for Mom. I knew something was wrong, right then. Mom kept a clean house. Like, commercial clean. The carpets were always vacuumed, the hardwood swept. Outside the kitchen window, she kept this huge gardenia bush, trimmed and neat. And I mean, huge—as tall as my dad—and when she opened the window, the kitchen smelled like flowers. Especially in the summertime. In the summertime, the entire house smelled like them.”
It came back to me, every bit as strong as a hot evening in mid-August, sixteen years ago. Sweet, and full of a kind of perfume that went straight to your head.
“I didn’t smell the gardenias; the smoke had grown too strong. The house was shaking, trembling.”
I looked at the memory through the haze. I still remembered the details. I thought it lay abandoned; I’d boxed it and left it alone for over a decade. The broad strokes were still there, still imprinted on the bedrock of my soul, but I thought I’d left the painful details in the past.
I was wrong.
“The firefighters had to come get me from the bedroom, I think. I don’t remember running out.” Shards of glass coated my lips. The tingling in my fingers turned to buzzing, angry hornets trapped in my skin. Details, I’d forgotten the details. Like a dream, I couldn’t remember how I got out of the house. A blank spot on the record, a skipping point. As though my brain had buried those details, trying to protect me. “The next thing I remember, I was out on the street, looking at the house. The fire was bright—so bright I needed to squint. So much smoke. Mom never made it out.”
“Oh, brother.” Appletree covered his mouth. I said the words out loud now, and they lived.
Something, lingering in his face. Horror, dismay . . . but no surprise. Which made sense; he had to know it was coming. The words, pressing against my lips ever since I found Green-Eyes.
I nodded, swallowing past the lump pressing against my throat. “Yeah. I tried to run in, but I didn’t get ten feet down the hall before the heat became too much. Someone was in the kitchen, out of sight. I could hear them, knocking bowls and plates over. They were struggling. Struggling to get out. Buster barked like crazy.”
The muscles in my neck twitched. The hungry faces pressed against the edges of the fire, eager and hungry. I scooted closer to the campfire and tried not to remember the sound of china shattering.
“The roof collapsed, toward the back. I heard one of the firefighters whisper that it was probably the kitchen. That’s when I ran away. Ran down the block, to my neighbor Mr. Neery’s house. I was crying, maybe. Can’t remember. I remember falling into his front hallway, like I couldn’t walk right. Buster was there—he followed me? No one could drive through the street, what with all the fire trucks blocking the way. Four of them, a whole fuss. Everyone came out to watch. Watch our house burn down around her.”
I watched them from Mr. Neery’s living room. Watched them watching. Mrs. Jones, standing in her pink and white overalls, battered Dustbuster still in hand. Mr. and Mrs. McElroy, frozen at the entrance to their driveway. Dustin, their son, stood behind them, still wearing his baseball uniform. He and I played football in the park sometimes.
“Did you know it takes firefighters hours to stop a fire? I didn’t. In movies and TV, it happens in a flash—they roll up, spray it a bit and it goes down. Unless it’s a bad one. If it’s a bad one it means the hero is going to show up and run inside, ignoring the firefighters telling them not to. They grab the person in danger and make it out in a dramatic crescendo. But no one went running inside my house. No dramatic crescendo. They just . . . stood next to their hoses. Watched my childhood burn to the ground.”
I brought my knees up to my chest, circled them with my arms. A shiver ran up my spine, spreading goose bumps across my shoulders. The fire felt very far away.
“My dad got there about an hour later. He knocked over Mr. Neery’s mailbox, he drove so fast. He jumped out of his car and just . . . stood there, staring at our house. By then the whole thing was on fire—bright enough to light up the whole block. There were news crews, policemen closing off the street. All that commotion, all that noise, and my dad stood next to his beat-up oh-three Taurus and . . . watched. After a while he came and got me. We sat together on Mr. Neery’s back porch—him, me, and Buster. Sat there, watching the clouds turn orange. He told me it was Mom, in the kitchen.”
Did he? I struggled to remember, to bring certain details into focus. I remember the angry orange tint to the night sky, a looming menace. I remember Buster barking like crazy beneath my arm. I remember my dad talking, muttering under his breath like he talked to himself, like I wasn’t there. He stared at the grass, rocked me back and forward and whispered, “Everything is going to be okay.” But did he tell me it was Mom? Did he bring himself to say the words out loud?
“The firefighters said it was a gas leak. A pipe fitting slipped behind the oven and filled the kitchen with gas. Mom went to make herself some tea. That was . . . that was when it happened.”
The spaces between the trees were pitch-black now. What horrible things loomed in the soft shadow? What things full of teeth and claws were lying in wait for one of us to get too close? To let our guard down enough for it to snatch us and rip us apart, all teeth and anger and fire, so much fire—
“Switch.” The fire popped on a piece of sap and I jumped, snapping back to see Appletree leaning across the campfire, concern etched in his deep-lined crow’s-feet.
“Switch, you all right?”
A memory. Just a memory. It couldn’t hurt me anymore. It was in the past. I recited the mantra Dr. K and I had come up with all those years ago, and swallowed, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’m fine.”
I held my hands out, grateful for the heat of the fire, crackling on a fresh piece of wood Appletree threw in. It seeped into my bones like a hot bath. The world warmed, and my ghosts faded back into the spaces between the trees where they belonged.
“Sorry. Sorry, I—” I shook my head. The words came of their own accord, like they did every time. In their absence, I felt bad. “I don’t know why I told you that. I haven’t . . . you know, I haven’t told many people.”
The bricks settled, back on her grave. Just like they did every time. Just talk about it, and the pain goes away. Just remember, and you can sleep. A price too high to pay for a kid who hears his dead mother screaming every night.
“It’s all good, brother. I told you mine, right? That’s awful, though. To go through so much heavy stuff at twelve . . . I can’t imagine. How were you and your dad, after?”
“He, uh . . . well, you know, he kind of shut down after the fire. We went to live with my aunt for a while, and he spent a lot of time in bed. He would be asleep when I left for school and he’d still be in bed when I got back. He went back to work after a few months, which seemed to help a lot.”
“Right, but how were you and he?” Appletree asked, running a hand through his bristles. “I mean to go through that much trauma together?”
Dad hid it well. He hugged me before I left for school, he drove me to football practice. Ran plays with me in Aunt Sophie’s backyard. But every now and then I would catch him looking at me in the rearview mirror as we drove. Looking at me like I did something wrong. He always looked away if I made eye contact, switched the subject to something lighter, something happier. But I still caught him looking.
“We were great. Hey, out of curiosity, how far are you going tomorrow? I’ve been averaging about twelve miles on a good day, but if it’s hot I’ll take a break in the afternoon.”
“You know, it depends, man, the weather has more of a say in it than I do, but . . .” Appletree leaned back against his log and changed tack like a goddamn champion. The stars inched over our heads as we spent the next hour talking about the trail. Appletree wanted to get an early start the next morning, trying for a day trip up Glacier Peak. Around eleven I made my excuses and staggered to my sleeping bag, changing into shorts. I fell into a restless half sleep of vivid not-quite nightmares, shifting and rolling with every tiny sound outside.
After what felt like a lifetime, the blissful black door of sleep opened and I slipped inside, letting it close behind me.
* * *
The night sprawled pitch-black outside my tent when I woke up again. I had to pee, but after hours of tossing and turning I’d finally gotten warm and comfortable, which is no mean feat when you’re sleeping on a two-inch-thick foam pad. I abided by the tried-and-true tradition of every camper who’s ever woken and faced a full bladder: I rolled over and pretended I didn’t have to pee. But bladders don’t like to be ignored, so it wasn’t long before I woke again with an even more desperate urge. I unzipped my bag with no small amount of grumbling and staggered outside.
I knew right away something wasn’t right. The forest wasn’t dark—it was black. No glimmer of moonlight or stars behind the thick clouds choking the sky. It pressed close, like the shadows lurking at the edges of our campfire, but this time I didn’t have a light to protect me. I had nothing to protect me.
Five days from the nearest road. I had no weapons, and apart from an old man sound asleep ten feet away, I was alone. To the average-sized predator in the mountains, I came gift-wrapped on a silver platter.
The little hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
I stumbled a few feet in a random direction and unzipped. Each way I turned my head, nothing but inked shadow and the barest suggestion of silhouettes. No birds sang, no underbrush rustled. I listened hard, but there wasn’t a single sound. Like my head was muffled in a blanket. Something was off, something wasn’t right, my gut whispered.
A twig snapped.
To my scraped-wire nerves, it sounded louder than a gunshot. I jumped and spun, scouring the black like I would see something. Tree trunks, silent and menacing, separated by their lengths of empty—
A silhouette, the faintest suggestion of a shape, standing between two trees. Staring at me.
A man, alone in the darkness.
“H-hello?” My whisper came out hoarse, high-pitched.
I couldn’t make out where his shape ended and the curling shadow surrounding him started. Shoulders and legs.
He was small, half my height and size, almost lost to the pressing night. He held something in his hand, something long and thin.
Something was wrong, in his face. A cloud shifted and a dull, pale glow illuminated a shaft of pine boughs. His face mutated, a nightmare mask of twisted skin and malformed flesh—
I took a trembling step backward, hands buckled into white-knuckled fists at my side. Run, I needed to run; any moment now he might explode into motion and come for me, come to kill me. I took another step.
His head split into two pieces. My breath turned to ice in my throat and I almost screamed. A hole grew in his head, now; I could see through it.
I could see through it.
I waited, not daring to believe. I moved my head a fraction to the side . . . and his form deteriorated. A tree limb here, a rock sitting on a fallen trunk there. Moonlight on the indistinct lakeshore.
I’d imagined it. The sigh of relief made my knees buckle. Looking at it now, I could see the holes I’d given corporeal form, the rocks in the lake where I’d seen malformed flesh. Not a thing out there—just me and the wilderness, and a dead-to-the-world Appletree.
I wiped the cold sweat from my cheeks. The clouds shifted again, and the scant light vanished. Shadows—empty and devoid of mutated serial killers, I now knew—crept back over the forest.
I turned and walked back to my tent, shaking my head at my own foolishness: a serial killer, out alone in the woods, staring at me?
Then, for a second, I caught the faintest reflection. Close-set, in the darkness. Almost like a pair of eyes. For a second, then they were gone. Rocks, or something else ridiculous. Just like Dr. K said: I needed to look at it the right way.
I chuckled to myself, peed against a nearby trunk, then crawled back inside, rolled back into my sleeping bag. The night turned soft again, and somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. I rolled over, and after a few minutes fell back asleep.
When I woke up for the second time, the sky through the mesh of my tent was the heavy gray of early morning. Appletree tapped against my tent.
“Whassit?” I muttered, blinking like a baby owl. I could see the outline of his face and beard through the mesh above me. The morning air was too cold against my face, and I pulled the sleeping bag up around my neck. I didn’t need to go anywhere anytime soon, I could keep sleeping.
“Hey man, uh, I think maybe a ’coon got into your bag, it’s kinda all over the place.”
“What?” That woke me up faster than any alarm clock. I bounced to an awkward sitting position, peering outside. “Aw, shit.”
My pack lay open on the ground beside my tent, the contents scattered all over the clearing. My pants were draped across a tree limb ten feet up and a pair of underwear soaked in a suspicious-looking puddle. Two of my shirts were burnt, covered in ash from the dead fire. Most conspicuous of all, though, was what remained of my food supply.
A trail of neon-colored plastic fragments waved at me from a sunken spot beneath a rock. I could see bits of dried ramen noodles and dried chili mac thrown helter-skelter. Clif bar wrappers danced in the breeze.
For a brief second, I thought about the night before. Someone ransacked my bag. A chill slipped along my spine. What if . . .?
No, no, of course not. He wasn’t even a he; it had been all me. My imagination and a loose collection of tree limbs didn’t open my bag and throw shit everywhere. There wasn’t anything out here last night. Appletree was right, must have been a raccoon or something.
“God damn it.” I wriggled out of my sleeping bag, throwing my boots on. I ran to my pack first, ransacking it to see what I had left.
I came up with two granola bars and a packet of M&M’s, buried way down at the bottom. Whatever critter got into my pack ate five days’ worth of food. I hoped it choked on a piece of plastic and died slowly. “God damn it!”
“Sorry ’bout it, brother,” Appletree said, laying a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off with a little more bite than was necessary. I even had a bear bag in my pack—there it was, thrown on the ground beside Appletree’s tarp. All I needed to do was throw my food in it and hoist it over a tree limb. It’s the most basic-bitch thing to do when you’re backpacking, and I’d forgotten. Now, I had no food.
I stalked around the clearing gathering my discarded clothing, swearing like a sailor.
“Hey, don’t sweat it, man. You can go to Bedal.” Appletree handed me my pants, and I snatched them, throwing them into my open pack.
“What?” I snapped.
“Bedal,” he repeated, calm as you like. He pulled a bag out of his pocket and started chasing scraps of trash. He stepped behind a tree, still talking. “It’s a one-horse place, a few miles off the trail. There’s a diner and a general store. You can get back up to par today, be back on the trail by tonight. It’s all gravy, man.”
I took a second and ran my hand through my hair, forcing a deep breath. The air pressed cool against my cheeks and tasted of the mist curling around the edges of the lake. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, man. I read about it, and a few hikers down Oregon way recommended it as a late-trail stop. There’s a dude who runs a general store, friendly to hikers on the trail.”
The second deep breath came easier. “Okay. Do you know how to get there? Is there a side trail?”
Appletree shrugged. “Sorta. One of those ranger ATV access roads crosses it, down the end of the valley where it turns back north. Follow it, and it’ll lead to a road. Busy one too, if the old brain box is knocking back the right info. Hiker I talked to said catching a lift north’ard to town took nothin’.”
It wasn’t the way I saw my day going, but life turns on a dime, right? At least I had a solution that didn’t involve me scrounging for berries and edible plants, Into the Wild style. As I recall, it didn’t work out so great for Emile Hirsch.
* * *
I spent most of an hour pitching around in the early-morning gloom cleaning up my crap, double- and triple-checking for any trash left behind. They taught us to “leave no trace” in the Boy Scouts, and I’d be damned if I was ever the person who left garbage lying around a campsite.
Appletree had already broken down his “tent,” humming tunelessly to himself. I changed into the single set of clean clothes I had left, threw the rest in my bag, and rolled up my sleeping bag.
“Hike down to the service road together?” I asked. I didn’t turn around to look at him—didn’t want to be making eye contact if he said no, too awkward. I needn’t have worried.
“I’d consider it a pleasure, Switch,” my trail mate chirped, rolling his tarp into an untidy log. His presence felt like a patch of shade on a scorching day on the trail. The thought of spending another four hours with him for company (depending on where this magical access road was, if it existed at all) was more exciting than I cared to admit.
I clipped my tent bag to the bottom of my pack. Mist and early-morning shadow still steeped the edge of the lake. Fog rolled off in lazy curls, and the leaves underfoot were wet with dew. A bird sang from a tree up on the ridge somewhere, a high, sweet sound. I inhaled; the chilled late-summer air cooled me, calmed me from the inside out.
Appletree sat on a log, pack over his knobby shoulders.
“Ready?” I asked.
He grinned wide beneath his wiry beard. “Ready.”
* * *
The trail slipped down the valley floor in a series of lazy switchbacks. The forest twittered awake as the birds began to stir. The best hiking is the hour before sunrise, as the light creeps over the trail. You get to watch the forest transition from still to awake, cold to warm, dark to light. It’s almost like you’re walking in limbo, a world parallel to ours, just off reality. It all depends on how you look at it.
With boots on the trail again, the same unwelcome thoughts came rushing back: Deb. While not an ideal evening, it had at least been free of traitorous whispers shadowing my steps.
At least I still had the trail for another week or so, maybe ten days if I dawdled. I didn’t know if Deb was still planning to wait for me at the Canadian border like she said she would. A not-so-small part of me didn’t want her to. Because if she was, I would have to face the life I wanted to leave behind. I would have to admit that our marriage was over and face the music tuned up from it. Like the story I told last night, I would have to speak my thoughts out loud, give them life.
“So what brought you out on the PCT?” I asked the back of my companion’s head as we turned the dozenth switchback. “Just bored at work, or . . .?”
“I’ve had a sabbatical coming to me for a while.” Appletree ducked under an oak tree fallen over the trail God knew how many decades ago. “I’ve avoided using it, but in the last year or two . . .” I heard the hesitation creep up in his voice and felt bad for asking. I didn’t mean to pry. He cleared his throat and continued, “Something came up, and I figured now was as good a time as any. I packed a bag, took a bus down Mexico way, and put boots to dirt. Or I guess it’s mostly sand, down there.”
“I thought you said you started near Yellowstone.”
He hop-stepped over a spindly tree root. “Did I? Pardon the mistake—brain ain’t what it used to be.”
I get that. I regularly forget important shit all the time.
“All right, Switchback, your turn. What brings you out here into the great unknown? What long-distance bug got into you?” Appletree asked.
For one cowardly and mean moment, I considered lying. Does it make me a bad person, after breaching trail etiquette and asking him about his life? Perhaps. But the thought of Appletree’s tale last night made me want to tell him the truth. The way he lived his life, everything in the open, everything up for discussion. It made sharing seem less scary. It gave the ghosts from last night away, showed their ragged edges in the light of a shared fire.
“I’m out here running from my problems.” No fake laughter, this time. No more half jokes like with Boots.
“Is that right?” Strange, he didn’t sound surprised. Maybe he met a lot of people out here like me. Lost, confused. Maybe I wasn’t the only one.
“I found a box of contraception in the trash a few weeks ago, all torn up.”
A moment of silence, then a grunt of cautious understanding from ahead of me. “Mm-hmm. You and your girl trying to get pregnant?”
“Close, but no cigar. I had a vasectomy, sophomore year in college.”
I waited while my companion considered this. I imagined him dancing the same dance I did, following the lines of my drama to the only logical ending point.
“Oh, so you’re . . . oh.”
“Yeah.”
He stopped at a turnoff, turned to face me. “Ah shit, brother, I’m sorry about that. That’s terrible. You talk to her about it?” He dropped his pack onto a rock, pulled his ancient metal water bottle out of a mesh pouch. I reached for my Nalgene, tucked into a side pocket of my bag.
“Tried.” Talking about it right now didn’t hurt as much as I feared it would. Telling it might hurt, but maybe I needed to hurt a little to heal a lot. “She flipped at me about not trusting her. Called me all sorts of interesting names. I could have handled a lot of emotion from Deb—that’s my wife—in that moment. Grief, sadness—shit, even relief that the truth was out there and we could talk about it.” But flipping the tables on me, making me out to be the bad guy with trust issues? Something to hide. Something she didn’t want to face, so instead the fists came up. Change wasn’t in the five-day forecast, back to Jim with sports.
“How do you feel about it?” Anyone else asking the question would have buried it beneath hidden questions or judgments, hinged on their own opinion. We say, “How do you feel about,” but we mean “Doesn’t that infuriate you?” or “Let it pass, man, kicking up a fuss will only make it worse.” But my gray-haired, grizzled camp mate asked with zero pretense.
“I’m—” I stopped. It was almost funny, how a single question sometimes sums up so many things. Weeks of day-in, day-out anguish and torment. How did I feel about it? Here it was—a person standing four feet away, waiting for an answer, no time to wax poetic or couch my sentiments in context.
“I’m angry. I’m angry she lied to me, snuck around on me. She made me a fool, made our lives seem foolish. But I think . . .” I listened to the wind rush soft through the pine boughs, a bird singing. Smelled the warming sap hanging high on the breeze. I stumbled through my words and lost my train of thought.
“You think what, brother?” Appletree stepped over a lichen-eaten rock. He wasn’t looking at me—why wasn’t he looking at me? “Don’t stop halfway. Get it all out there.”
“I think that anger blinded me. Or . . . or I used it as an excuse, you know?”
“It can be so easy to hate, man. It feeds a dark and buried part in us all. Powerful but dangerous.”
It would have been so easy to pull out, eject, turn the conversation to anything else—but I was in too deep. We were in this together, this voyage of pain and vulnerability. I lingered on the precipice of something.
Finish it. Say what you’ve been too afraid to think for three weeks. Come on, Josh. What do you have to lose?
“I used anger as a substitute. Because . . .” I forced myself to keep going, keep pushing. “Because down deep, I knew the relationship was over. At that moment, it was done, finito. No amount of counseling, arguing, wheedling, or crying could ever fix it. From one breath to the next, my marriage just . . . dissolved, through my fingertips.”
“She never gave you a chance to fight for it, man.” Appletree shook his head. “That’s gotta hurt worse than anything else.”
“I—” The words died on my lips. He cut straight through to the heart of it, lanced the infection with one cut. She never gave me a chance to fight for it. To fight for her. I never thought of it like that, but he nailed it. Reached right into my head, implanted a single thought.
My vision swelled and blurred, and I turned away. Being vulnerable is all well and good, but I don’t cry easy, and never in front of other people. I took a second and collected myself. When I turned back, Appletree was sipping his water like it never happened.
“Sorry about . . . sorry. Do you mind if we talk about something else for a bit? It’s still a bit . . .”
Appletree’s smile brightened the whole valley. “Raw? One hunnert percent, man. Come on, we’ve got a million and one things to chat about before we hit yon access road. Top three hikes you’ve ever been on, hit me with ’em. And don’t hit me with that ‘oh I can’t decide’ bogus, ’cuz—”
We went back to the trail and kept our conversation there.
We found where the service road crossed over our trail a little before lunchtime. The gloomy morning broke up when the sun peeped over into the valley proper, and the chill vanished from the world. After two hours my pack was pressing against my back, soaking my shirt in sweat. The lower part of the valley was steeped in the perfume of endless acres of waving pine, sharp and sweet. That part felt similar to Alabama; I found warm pine sap uncomfortably close to hot asphalt, smell-wise. The trail bebopped over a series of streams, ducking through a boulder field.
A pair of weed-eaten gravel tracks, running five feet parallel to the trail before peeling away west, down a narrow ravine.
“Is this it?” I asked, peering down the meandering road.
“That’s it.”
I sighed. Fucking raccoon. I stuck a hand out. “Appletree, it was a genuine pleasure. Hope to run into you again.”
The old man grasped the straps of his ancient backpack, ignoring my hand. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “I’m sure it will happen. It’s a funny old world that way, isn’t it, Switchback?”
A cool breeze brushed through the trees, the promise of more mediocre weather on the horizon.
“Uhh . . . I guess so?”
“I’ll see ya.”
He gave me two thumbs up, turned, and strode down the dirt path in his easy, mile-eating amble.
That seemed like a weird ending to our time together. Which dovetailed with the bizarre circumstances in which we met, so it all washed.
I stood at the crossroads. I thought of Deb, waiting for me at the Canadian border. Waiting to pick me up so we could talk at even greater length about the torn-up box of Plan B in the garbage. I was close enough to the end I could sense them . . . the ragged edges of my life, lurking, waiting. The detour meant more time in the wilds, more time pretending I was Switchback, and not Josh Mallory.
I hefted my pack and turned off the trail.