I’m exiting the trading post bathroom, leather wallet in hand, when I catch sight of him. He’s moving away from a set of cash registers with a green plastic shopping bag. He’s a tall tree trunk of a man, strong and sturdy and almost heavyset, with a day’s scruff, a handsome, boyish face, and good, unkempt hair. Lance Peters. I look around me, thrown off-balance at seeing him and feeling relieved I was able to convince Max to stay in the car while I made this pit stop. I pause not far from the bathroom, unsure of what to do.
He looks surprised when he notices me. I bet I do, too. Lance and I go way back. We met in seventh grade, Trapper Keepers and all. As teenagers, we shot guns on my family’s property, went skinny-dipping with our friends in Moosehead Lake, got drunk and a little handsy with each other up in the long-abandoned cabins at Lupine Valley. And recently, we’ve reconnected between my trips to Boston.
“I can say with complete honesty that I did not expect to see you in the camouflage walkie-talkie section of Dirigo Hill today,” he says as he comes to greet me. His eyes are warm, but there’s also something else in them. Like he wants to ask me if I’m okay but can’t bring himself to do it out loud. It’s been a little while since we’ve seen each other. Longer than either of us would like, I think.
“Me neither,” I acknowledge. “Just in the last leg of driving up from Bangor. Had to take a break.”
“But back on the road now?” He turns his head in the direction of the exit, the parking lot. Like he’s trying to catch a glimpse of someone.
“Back on the road now.” I nod and touch his arm gently, bringing his attention back to me, away from my car, from Max.
“I take it your professor or advisor guy or whatever-he-is is somewhere here?”
A fine, silken web of nerves flares white-hot in my body. He may try to play it cool, but Lance knows his name. Lance knows he’s with me. I nod.
He takes a breath and places a hand softly against my ear and hair.
“Been able to sleep?”
“As much as I can,” I sigh, looking around us. “A bit.” I know I should go. I know I should speed this along and send Lance on his way so I can get on mine. But being with him is bracing. I need it.
“Shotgun ammo?” I ask, trying to squint and see some box markings through the bag.
“Yep. And plenty of it,” he says, hands working the plastic bag to show me. I count at least five or six boxes. “Anyway. I should head on. My buddies and Uncle Marc are waiting for me in the truck.”
Marc?
“You’re hanging with Marc?” I ask, rattled. I swallow and steady myself.
“I know, I know—he’s a tool,” he says with a sigh.
“He’s a violent, drunken maniac,” I correct, my blood boiling. I cannot believe he’s hanging out with Marc. Lance and the rest of his family have been estranged from him for years. And with damn good reason.
“I know—but he’s my dad’s brother, and Dad asked me to check in on the guy. My dad’s been on me about it for a month. I guess he’s been a wreck since Minnie left him.” We’re both quite sure Marc used to hit Minnie, his long-term, live-in girlfriend, but I don’t say it now. “I guess the guy is doing the Twelve Steps.”
“Really? He’s doing AA?” My voice is filled with skepticism.
“That’s what he says. Well, that’s what my dad says. Heading toward making amends, I guess.” Blood flows hot into my neck and cheeks. “I know, I know—he has a lot to make amends for. But he’s trying.”
“I’m sure we don’t know the half of it,” I reply, surprised at just how rattled I am, at how easily it’s edging into anger.
“Well, if he keeps at it, we just might.” Lance sounds apologetic, somber. I look at him and know that he is sincerely torn. “If he does or says anything out of line, today will be the end of me extending myself, that’s for sure. I promise.”
I really don’t want them hanging out. Reconnecting. That would not be for the best. “Don’t tell him you saw me. I want nothing to do with that guy.” I cross my arms in front of my chest.
“I won’t, I won’t. I promise,” he assures me, seeing that I’m upset. I take a breath. Settle down. Recalibrate. You’re fine.
“Hunting today?” I say, changing the subject.
“No,” he replies simply. “Not today.” I nod, and we just look at each other for a moment. “Anyway, I should go. I’ll see you soon.” Then he hugs me tight. And I hug him tighter, shutting my eyes for a moment. He smells like wood chips and faint cologne and the faraway whisper of woodsmoke. I wish he didn’t have to go.
“I will see you soon,” I say firmly. We release each other, and he looks down at me from his six-two vantage.
“I’m around. Let me know if you need me, okay?” His hazel eyes are bright and alert.
“Will do.” I nod. “See you later.”
“See you,” he says, and then he turns and goes. I watch him walk out of the store.
He’s hanging with Uncle Marc. Now. He hasn’t seen or talked to the guy in six, maybe eight months.
I take a breath, rub my eyes, get my bearings. Deep breaths. Keep your head.
The other him.
Max.
When did he come in? How did I miss him?
I wonder if he saw me talking to Lance. I weave behind a rack of rabbit-fur snow hats. Max is gazing around almost watchfully, then he wanders to the far side of the room, to the modest self-serve coffee bar named JOE—I can see he’s tempted—but he ultimately turns away, his face showing his disapproval at the offerings. Only the best will do for him. Unlike Lance, who will drink any coffee put in front of him as long as it’s hot enough to hurt. But Max? He’s a fine-tuned machine, particular and demanding. There is no denying this. He is not to be denied.
In Boston, Max is an urbane little Newbury Street prince: self-important, handsome, fashionable. In the Dirigo Hill Trading Post in Greenville, Maine, he’s just another overdressed flatlander. And it’s clear he doesn’t understand his difference; it doesn’t even register with him. He’s not the most self-aware guy. The man is wearing a fitted black tee that I know cost him seventy-five dollars. He has on slick but exaggerated black frames. His dark-wash jeans, easily a couple hundred dollars, are bespoke. He’s crisp. Deep-brown leather Chelsea boots on his feet. Designer. Everything about him is designer. Designed. His clothing, his home, his reputation, his life. He has crafted it all with an almost religious egotism with himself at its center, his own god, his own theology. He is that pretentious a figure in a sea of large, thick men wearing slouched, faded jeans and layered workman’s flannels stained with the proof of real labor. Motor oil, tree sap, soil.
But even I have to admit that for a man circling fifty, Max is exquisitely lean and youthful-looking. Smooth and strong; nothing wasted. You can see it in the way he carries himself like a lynx through the wood-paneled showroom. I had been immediately reminded of his…vitality in the most visceral of ways when we reunited at the airport this morning. I was embarrassed by it. I hated myself desperately for it.
I glance around, not recognizing anyone else in the store, for which I am grateful. Max walks with his hands clasped behind his back, wondering at the cramped but tidy goods stocked all around him.
I do my best to push Lance from my mind. Marc, too.
Max moves toward a display of hand-carved walking sticks. I make a casual beeline to him, forcing myself to clasp his arm gently, warmly, like a lover or a girlfriend or a naive hanger-on is supposed to do. He brushes his hand across the box tops of some of the game cameras on display.
“Hey, sorry—there was a wait for the women’s bathroom,” I lie.
“I got bored. Thought I’d check the place out.” He shoves his hands into his jeans pockets, shoulders high and tense. His eyes zip around us like a man being watched. I wonder if he didn’t want to be alone in the car without me. Maybe he has made a talisman of me in these unknown territories.
“Ready to go?”
“Just about—but there is one thing I wanted to…” He wanders off ahead of me, deeper into the store. He says over his shoulder, “I was looking at them while you were in the bathroom.”
Maybe he didn’t see me talking to anyone; if he did, he doesn’t let on.
Max walks hastily to a case of gleaming knives hugging the eastern side of the room as I follow behind him through a cookstove display. In the case, I know, are knives for gutting. Knives for skinning. Knives for deboning. Knives for butchering, caping, hunting, camping. There will be knives with clip points and drop points and trailing points. Knives with gut hooks. I know the arsenal intimately. If you weren’t doing something in the woods or on the lake, especially as a kid and a teenager, there never was much to do in these parts besides drive around Greenville or go up to the trading post and look around. I’d look at rifles, duck calls, GPS devices, game cameras, survival guides, and—of course—knives. I have hovered over this knife case many times in my life, from the time I was a girl.
The employee behind the display is farther down the case consulting a tattered Maine Gazetteer, giving directional advice to some out-of-towner wearing a stiff, expensive-looking parka that may as well still have the tags on it. I don’t recognize the trading post employee; he must have started here within the past year or two, since I’ve been mostly away in Boston working on my MFA. I pull my hands up into the sleeves of my wool sweater, continuing to follow Max, mindlessly investigating a shotgun displayed on the wall as I go. I look to the far end of the knife case and see that the salesman has finished with his out-of-towner and is moving toward mine. Max, to my surprise, lingers. He’s taking in the array as the salesman comes to lean his palms on top of the case opposite him. Also to my surprise, Max points to a few of the knives on display and begins to engage the man in conversation about them. I can’t quite hear what they’re saying over the chatter of other shoppers and the Bob Seger being piped in from overhead. I go over and join him.
“Doing a little browsing?” I ask, looking between Max and the thirty-something man behind the counter. He’s wearing a battered New England Patriots ball cap with a fishhook attached to the severely curled bill.
“Getting into the spirit.” For the ten-thousandth time, I am made to look at Max’s too-white teeth—his dazzlers. The same immaculate teeth that I know want to pinch at my nipples as soon as we get through the goddamned door of my house. He wants me. That’s why he’s here, after all. I’m not oblivious. “What do you think? I like these two.” I look at him and see he is speaking in earnest. A knife. The pacifist Bostonian artist. The liberal academic. I realize now he’s not just admiring the lines, the craftsmanship. He means to buy one of these things. I’m irritated; maybe a little alarmed. I want to leave. I want to get him out of here. I have a timetable to keep to.
“You’re going to buy a knife?” My brow creases as my gentle laugh tails off.
“Souvenir,” he says. I look at him, into him, and see he’s serious. A slow creep of something like anxiety or excitement ripples through my body—I can’t tell which. It travels from my toes to my scalp. I search his face, calculating what he may be sensing—in this trip, in this place, in me. Why do you want a knife, Professor Durant? “You’ll have to mail it to me when I leave since I can’t take it on the plane.”
“Gonna use it for anything in particular?” the salesman asks, dragging his large hand down the side of his scruffy face, looking at Max without enthusiasm, ignoring me. The question seems to take Max by surprise.
“Maybe just for the basics. If I ever got in a pinch and needed to cut rope or brush or something.” I want to laugh at this. I can’t imagine any situation in which Max Durant would use any sort of knife like this, in a pinch or otherwise. He’s never done anything remotely handy or outdoorsy as long as I’ve known him. “But mostly, it’s just to have. Mark the occasion.”
“Ayuh, okay,” the man says, seemingly satisfied. He looks at me with tired, hangdog eyes, and then he looks at Max. “Up from Portland?”
“Boston,” Max replies.
The man nods almost smugly, as if he’s heard everything he needs to hear. He turns his gaze back to Max after letting his eyes linger on me with some curiosity. He is trying to place me, trying to tell if I might be a local. I do not answer the tacit question. “Well, so you like these two heah?” The man brings his face closer to the display glass and considers the contents of the brightly illuminated box. “Then, of those two—I’d go with this one right theya.” He points to a beautiful switchblade knife with a drop point. The handwritten tag has Fallkniven scrawled on it. The blade is flawless, silver stainless steel, and the handle is sturdy and immaculate, banded with what appears to be oxhide. It’s a handsome knife, almost like a sports car: the lines sensual; the purpose utilitarian; the potential deadly.
You sly, woodsy little bastard, is all I can think. I start to laugh. Both men look at me.
“Forget that,” I say, unable to watch the fleecing of America. “That’s a three-hundred-dollar knife. You don’t need any goddamned three-hundred-dollar knife.” Max looks over at me, his face quizzical, as if surprised he’s being interrupted. I look at the man behind the counter then down at the knives. “Your other choice was the better bet. The Buck Knives 279. It’s versatile; it’s sharp. It folds like the other one. It’s fifty bucks. It’ll cut whatever rope you want.” The knife is mean and sturdy and strong-looking. It has a black handle with an all-metal edging. Max looks at me with wonder and subterranean annoyance. I look to the salesman. “Am I right on those price points?”
“Well, I’d have to check,” he says, feigning uncertainty as he pulls the knives out and turns over the tags. Scrawled on the Fallkniven tag is $349. Scrawled on the Buck Knives tag is $59.
“He’s been in Boston too long, bub, not me.” I beam as I clap Max on the back, looking at the salesman. Max seems displeased.
“I’ll take that one.” He points through the glass at the expensive one. The one that costs three hundred forty-nine dollars. The one, it must be admitted, that is more beautiful. The sports car. He looks over at me, and in his eyes is something like spite. Is something telling me I had better never do anything like that to him again. I’ve embarrassed him. “I want that one. And I’ll have it.”
“You got it, man,” the salesman says. “Want a carrying case or anything like that?”
“No,” Max tells him, looking back at the clerk. “I intend to keep it close.” I look at Max’s profile. He won’t meet my gaze, but his neck has flushed red.
“I’ll ring you up right over heah.” The man gestures at the cash register down at the end of the case, and Max walks away without looking at me. I push the sleeves of my sweater up to my elbows. I’m too warm. Max is buying a knife. A beautiful, sharp knife. I’m sweating. The way he looked at me. That barely contained contempt.
As he leaves the register with his knife inside a paper bag, he gives me a big, smug smirk. It says, Look at me, being a man. I’ll have whatever I want. Despite you.
I fuel up my car at the gas station outside, and we get back on the road. I’m incredibly relieved to be putting distance between us and one of the region’s biggest gathering places. For the rest of our secluded weekend away, the odds of us running into anyone at all, let alone anyone who would know me, is mighty slim. I watch Max’s eyes look intently at Dirigo Hill in his side mirror as I pull away. Maybe it’s good we stopped there, despite the knife. He seems a little lost in himself again.
Good.
I study him and wonder more than anything what he’s thinking.
He studied me with great interest while in his natural habitat in Boston this past year; me, who still feels like a sketch of a person down there, not quite filled out, run ragged against the city’s kinetics. I like the dark and the quiet. Boston was neither of these things. But now I’m back in Maine, in the woods, heading toward Rockveil, and everything in and of my body feels more substantial somehow, more three-dimensional and real. And I have extracted Max and transmuted both of us so that he is the one fading into the background while I am the living being of flesh and bone, fully rendered. He will drift and be drained without the city’s swarm of safe, glittering lights. He will be tied to me with no quick exits on underground or road-splitting trains, on planes or in Lyfts. It makes me feel witchy. Dastardly.
As we cruise through downtown Greenville, I point out signs for the Katahdin Cruises steamboat tours of Moosehead Lake. Max asks if we could do one this weekend, and I tell him sure, we could try. The foliage is always pretty in mid-October. Max pulls the paper bag from his pocket then pulls the knife free. He turns it over, admiring it approvingly.
“What a thing,” he says then whistles. “I used to do a little whittling back in the day, you know. Folksy little pieces.” He’s in a good mood again.
“Did you?” I laugh gently, genuinely tickled by the thought. It’s just so…down-market for him. He flips it open and nods, smiling at me.
“Just little things. For myself. My friends,” he says. I look over at him and then down at the razor-sharp blade in his hands.
We arc out around Moosehead Lake, leaving Greenville center for the rural outskirts. “Do you see many animals around here?” Max peers into the quaking pines sentried along the road. He flicks the knife open and closed, open and closed, snick-snick, not even looking at it. Just something to do with his hands. The more he does it, the more anxious I become. Honestly, I wish he’d just put it away. And it’s not the knife in and of itself that makes me nervous. I’ve been adept with knives from a young age. But a man like Max with a knife like that—that makes me nervous. The scale between predator and prey tipping out of my favor. I can’t have that, not this weekend. Not now.
“From time to time,” I tell him. “A lot of deer. Rabbits. Turkey. That sort of thing. But there’s so much land that sightings aren’t as common as you’d think. No reason to come near a road if they can help it.” The openness of Greenville has left us. The trees now creep close to the roadway and block most of the sunlight, like we’re in some natural timber tunnel. Snick, snick. He flips the knife open and closed again. Then again. I look over at him and at the knife. Part of me still can’t believe he bought it.
“Maybe by the end of the weekend?” he asks hopefully.
“Maybe,” I reply. “We’ll take a ride tonight at dusk along some of the logging roads and see what happens. I know a great spot.” The drive is quiet for the next several minutes, the only sounds the hum of the car over the asphalt and the snick, snick of his blade. He’s like a boy who’s just discovered his own dick.
“Way out here, huh?” he asks. “You grew up way out here.” He says this last part as if he can’t quite believe it. He is putting me in one of his paintings. Inside a frame. He is making me a cameo, not quite real. Snick, snick. I look over at him, but he’s looking out his window with intensity and focus. “I see you,” Max sighs. “I see it all in you. This wildness. This beauty.” The more he talks, the more he tells me what I am, the more my muscles tense like poured concrete hardening up. I look over at his fidgeting hands, at the blade being unveiled and hidden, over and over, the sleek, sliding sound it makes, again and again and again, worming into my ears. Snick, snick. “My woman from the woods. Halo of myrtle green, foliage, wilderness. No wood nymph, no.” He laughs gently, deep inside his own mind. “An archer enrobed in her forest. Sap green, viridian, lime, teal, turquoise highlights. Parchment, to define and brighten. Tendrils. A small, glowing heart—outside of the chest, like Kahlo, as if pinned—in shades of violet; a prism, deep blue.” My fingers are tense around the steering wheel. He has made me what he wishes. But I know it’s not what I am. It’s only in his mind. Only ever in his mind.
A Subaru with two kayaks strapped on top passes us going in the opposite direction. Snick, snick. Snick, snick.
“Such a surprise to get an invitation up here. To your world.” My world. Max runs a hand through his hair then scratches his jaw, vaguely pensive again. Some buried unrest seems underscored by the incessant flicking of that knife open and closed, open and closed—a weapon that could gut me like an animal. “What a weekend this will be.”
“Yes.”
“What a place.” Snick, snick. I look over at him. He gazes introspectively out the window. Fuck you, Professor Max Durant. Fuck. You. There are several long moments of quiet, and then:
Snick, snick.
“Would you keep that damned thing closed?” I snap. “It’s flashing the sun in my eyes, Max.” We’re both surprised at my tone. I didn’t expect to be testy with him this early on. Maybe the stress of this weekend is getting to me. Of what I must do. But it’s also that he has that knife. I had not anticipated it. I look over at him. He folds it closed. Puts it in his pocket. His eyes appraise me. He’s trying to sort out who he’s in this car with. I’ve so rarely snapped at him.
Quiet settles upon us, and I can feel him growing agitated. His face is set, and I know he wants the uncomplicated fantasy back. His verdant archer. His wilderness goddess. I do not oblige immediately; I do not return his dream to him just yet, because I don’t want to. But after a few minutes, I’ll relent. I don’t want him to be miserable or, worse yet, to spiral into one of his moods. Not yet. The weekend is so young, and there is so much promise for what it could hold.
“Sorry about that, Audie,” he says, his voice strained with the effort of playing nice with me. I don’t like that nickname—Audie. In fact, I hate it. He’s the only one who calls me that. I let another solid minute or two pass in silence.
“Sorry I snapped at you, Professor. I am—that was…out of line.” I look over at him, my face seeming to plead for absolution. His face brightens, bit by bit, as my hardness recedes, as he pulls the apology and angst from me. He thinks he’s regaining the upper hand. He looks satisfied. “I’m probably just a little tired. And…well, I dunno—wound up.” My voice is gentle and cryptic and maybe mildly flirtatious. I let him have it. This gift. A bit of that wolfishness from before creeps back into the lines of his face, the glint of his teeth. I relax. There he is. The predator I’m fully prepared to face.
“How far to your place?” he asks, shifting in his seat.
“Not long, now.”
Her Dark Things by Audra Colfax
Piece #1: I Remember It Stark
Oil and mixed media on canvas. 36″ x 24″.
[Close-up of a brown enamel lantern, chipped and shining. The metal curves in a never-ending arc off the edges of the canvas. The bulb in the glass center is half burnt out, eggshell, heavy cream, white, its light dusky. Found objects incorporated throughout by layering.]
Note on torn graph paper found under the drawer liner in the downstairs bathroom of the Dunn residence.
I cut myself again. Deep this time.
Mom said come NOW to the
hospital or I’ll call the cops, Cindy. I stayed shut up and bled all
over
the floor
a ruby Jackson Pollock on white tile
the cops came
an ambulance came lights came everything came. AT me.
Brady
came to visit me at the hospital
the next day. held my hand.
builds up in me, thick and oily. inside my veins and bones and lungs
and eyes and brain.
Leaves me no ROOM.
Some die-cast mold getting drowned with liquid metal.
TRY explaining that when they ask.
They gave me new pills and a therapist. Again.
—Nov87. CD.
Note on a yellow sticky note found pressed between the pages of the family cookbook in the Dunn kitchen.
will anyone EVER find
my HAUNTY little scrawlslip in with the beef wellington?
—Jan88. CD.
Note on ripped-out paper from a spiral-bound notebook with faint food stains found in the birdhouse on the Dunn property.
Got my GED today, a year late a year later
than graduation
than Brady.
Mom and dad and Brady were real proud.
Had little starty-stoppies here and there and there
cutting and trying to kill myself and cutting and cutting again disruptive
disruptions eruptions irruptions
all along the way
in middle school disrupting in high school so many
disruptions distractions marks all over my body
but I did it
I am better somehow mostly intact
—Jan88. CD.
Note in tiny handwriting on a scrap of note paper found inside an empty Kleenex box in the attic of the Dunn residence.
All I’ve ever wanted is to go to college
for art
application deadline is coming right up, I told them
they say Cindy wait hold your horses stick around a whole year
see how you feel in a year (we worry you’ll stop taking your pills)
think on it (we worry you’ll stop trying, remember November?)
save up some money (let us watch watch watch you to make sure
your
heart still beats beats beats)
Get a steady job (close by, let us help you stay alive)
I see them and I hear them and I see into them and I hear through
them and
I appreciate the thought but I’ll die here of stasis if not of my own
I have dreams, aspirations
bigger than this place
they said if you still want to study art after a year, fine, fine art
study
fine want to study fine art fine
but you’re on your own
if you want to study business and you wait we’ll pay for it
think dad wants me to work for him
dunn & daughter he’d like that not sure I would
waiting a year taking my meds going to therapy
I’m doing well now, so
we’ll see
don’t know if I can stand it
here
another whole year, though
—Jan88. CD.
Note on Lisa Frank stationery found in the landscaped rock wall outside the Dunn residence.
I baked a cake today
it came out really good
dad was wild for it mom was
crazy about it
to make them feel good
like maybe I could be okay
like maybe we could
—Jan88. CD.
Note in tiny handwriting on scratch paper with red ink doodles found folded in Cindy Dunn’s bedroom side table.
I sketched today but it wasn’t really
a sketch.
I sat in my room with my old
brown lantern
with the sticker from that class trip to
Bar Harbor.
I remember it stark.
I drew
in the orb of its light
in the dark of my bed
a circle
over
and over
again with my pen until it cut through the paper.
It was a slick oily
black smear. Shiny like a beetle’s eye.
dinner at Thelma’s Landing.
I wore my favorite summer dress despite the frigid cold
I felt like an electric spark
a sunflower.
We fucked after
at his place.
He likes my crazy ass a good bit but I don’t know why.
He’d say he’s my boyfriend
I bet.
He’d say he loves me but
but.
—Jan88. CD.
Note on yellow legal paper found crumpled in the crawl space beyond Cindy Dunn’s bedroom closet in the Dunn residence.
Dad caved, paid the application fee for college so
art.
I saw a tiny smile in him when he said don’t
tell mom.
—Jan88. CD.