The fading light of dusk and the headlights of Audra’s car mingle into a vague mash ahead of us. Everything is just barely illuminated, like something could appear at any moment, unbidden, unexpected. The road unrolls like an asphalt tongue. The dark, silent trees zipper closed behind, giving the impression that we can never go back.
I wanted to stay at the house, relax, ice my ankle—which feels like murder right about now. Every bump over these rough back roads sends a jolt of pain through me. But she insisted. She wouldn’t hear of it. She wants me to see the wilds at night. To give me my chance to see some animals at this juncture in between times while the sun is falling away but true night has not yet arrived. I feel half-powered in this light, half-real. Like I could do anything inside this veiled suffusion and get away with it. Like she could.
Audra slows and takes a right onto a dirt road. “More apt to see something interesting down here. There are lots of potholes, but I’ll take it slow. I promise—look!” And there, just for a moment, springing forth along the shoulder of the road ahead of us is a red fox, small, fuzzy, and then it disappears into the forest. “We’re on our way, Max!” she says excitedly. “Already seeing cool stuff.”
Despite my discomfort, Audra’s unguarded delight is refreshing, like a window opened on a spring day. I cherish it.
“Out here is one of the best places to see deer, moose. Sometimes even bears.”
“Kinda hope we don’t run into any bears, I have to say.” I chuckle gently.
“Did you bring your knife?”
“No.” I look over at her. She clucks her tongue in disappointment.
“Too bad. Never know when you might need something like that in a place like this. If not now, when? You know?” She looks out the wind-shield, leans forward a little over the wheel. She’s serious. I suddenly feel naked without it, like right now that knife in my hand would feel like a sword, a shield. But against what? Audra’s beautiful home filled with her beautiful paintings? The plush towels? The decadent brie? The joyous smiles Audra flashes me? It is all so comfortable and comforting. And yet. I find myself prickling with anxiety. Teeth set on edge. As if the whole thing could crumble in an instant. Like I might be looking at everything from the wrong angle. The only thing I can possibly attribute this to is the unresolved tension between Audra and me. The unspoken tease of it all. It electrifies the air around us.
“When I was maybe nine or ten”—Audra’s voice cuts through the repetitive rhythms of the car, the crunch of the dirt and gravel beneath the tires and the low whisper of the heater—“I went out on a hike through the property. By myself. It was summertime. Pops was at work, Gram was up at the house working on the garden.” Audra eases down and through a major rut. I brace my hand against the door, teeth gritted. “Sorry,” she says quickly. “So, on this hike, I brought my backpack, I brought some water, I brought a compass, I brought my knife, I wore good shoes. I took it all very seriously.” She laughs. “I figured I’d be gone an hour, two, tops. Well, I got all turned around at a certain point, dropped the compass without knowing it somewhere along the way. One hour turned into two turned into four turned into six. Because I panicked. I kept moving in the direction I assumed was correct, but I was in so deep that everything looked the same. The trees, the clearings I passed through, the patches of sky I saw above me. I kept moving and moving, getting more and more lost.”
As she speaks, I look out into the dense forest surrounding us. To be lost somewhere in there. To be small, to be Audra, with her mane of auburn hair and her backpack. What a thing.
“I couldn’t hear or find any water to follow anywhere,” she continues. The road feels like a continuous rumble strip, my ankle sparkling with sharp jabs. Audra seems not to notice. “Nothing to give me any direction. I tried using the sun, to sort out which way our house was, but I just didn’t know. I couldn’t figure it out. So, as late afternoon set in, I did the only thing I could think of. I got out my knife and started cutting down brush, looking for the driest stuff to start with, piled it on a bald patch in a clearing. Luckily I had a lighter. I started a fire.” The road smooths out a bit, and I take three deep breaths, light sweat on my brow. “As it got going, I found wetter stuff so it would smoke. I kept the fire going and going, terrified I wouldn’t be able to contain it and I’d burn down the whole forest around me. But I didn’t, I managed to keep it pretty safe and good and smoky. On my, like, fourth round of cutting brush, I was rushing. I got careless, my hands were tired, and the sun was sinking, and I cut the palm of my left hand open.” She holds out her hand and shows me the white scar line that cuts across her palm.
“Jesus, Audra,” I hiss. She pauses in the story here and looks at me. She sees my wince. But she also sees my interest. I swallow, realizing that she knows I am imagining the colors in all this. She waits, her eyes turning back to the vacant road. “The gray-black smoke. The proud, brown tree trunks. The evergreens. The trailing, failing light.” She nods at my words. “And then, in all of this, the bright-red blood, like a cardinal through the trees.” My voice is almost a whisper, like the last remnants of light outside: barely there, hardly anything at all.
It’s so vivid in my mind, coming at me all at once, that I know it will be my next piece, that I must work on it once home. Maybe even sketch it out somewhere tonight, before we go to bed, so I don’t lose it. I can see the heavy daubs of paint creating topographies of foliage in seaweeds, basils, pines; a pale, young hand with a slash of ruby currant that splits the peace and the piece wide open.
“That’s right.” Her voice is gentle. A deep ripple of heat runs through my body. “So I grabbed the spare pair of hiking socks I’d packed in my bag and tied one as tightly around my hand as I could, to help staunch the bleeding. But it kept on bleeding, and it burned under the wool.” Audra raises her arm suddenly and points through the windshield—I catch the blaze of tiny, brown-and-white back legs as a rabbit vanishes into the depths of the woods on the left. “About thirty or forty-five minutes after I cut myself, I heard someone or something coming. Then I heard my name being called. It’s Pops. He found me because of the smoke. I was three miles deep into our neighbor’s land. Only about three-quarters of a mile from a proper road, the one our driveway is on.” She shakes her head at her younger self. “If I’d gotten to the road, I could have sorted myself out easily. Pops took me to the hospital, I got stitches, I learned my lesson: don’t lose your bearings and always bring a knife. The knife saved me.”
“It also harmed you.”
“Two evils, one is always the lesser.” Her voice is quiet and sure. “Most of the time, anyway. And I chalk that up to user error.”
I think of her left palm, that hand that has painted so many incredible things. That hand that rests so close to me in this car. I would like to grab it, seize it, kiss my way down the length of the scar. I would like to press on it, imagine the rawness of it that day, the cardinal blood, a vivid flutter added to young Audra’s panic.
The car slams down into a pothole.
“Fuck!” I bark, gritting my teeth.
“That’s a bad one,” and there’s almost the hint of a laugh in her voice as the car rises back up with a thunk. “Snuck up on me.” She eases around the next rut, saves me from another jolt.
The forest on the left is opening into a low, wet marsh area. It’s like seeing the opening of a familiar movie from long ago. The marshy vista expands and widens, like curtains opening on a stage. The sky is painted in smeared marmalades. That feeling I had in the parking lot of the trading post leaps upon me—that I might be a man reliving the same moment twice: a double exposure. I stare out across the scenery and the dirt road, momentarily paralyzed, beleaguered with a kind of deranged sentimentality, wondering if it’s a feeling that could possibly belong to me.
“You alright, Max?” Audra is giving me a funny look. I nod.
“Fine,” I say, making myself smile.
“I’ll pull over here. Famous local spot for seeing moose. Out-of-towners always want to see moose.” She pulls over onto the side with the marsh, hugging as close to the edge as she dares. We look out at the purpling, bruised sky, the marsh grass pressed down and springing up in various lumps, pools of water lit as if from underneath. Broken husks and trunks of trees lean this way and that—tired, wounded soldiers. “Yeah, this is good.” We sit in silence for a few long moments, taking in the expanse, both beautiful and eerie in its desolation. Worry has crept into my bones, hazy and unnameable.
“Common sightseeing spot, huh?” I ask her, my throat constricting like a finger trap.
“Very. It’s not a guarantee to see something, but pretty close.” Okay. I swallow and take a breath. It’s a common place to go. Everyone goes here. Especially with out-of-towners. I was then. I am now. I devour the uncanny scenery, a memory arriving: in the daylight, the road had seemed almost white under the glaring sun. We drank warm, skunky beer. We talked about art. We talked about each other. We smiled, and we laughed and had not a care in the world.
Now, laughing is the furthest thing from my mind.
Audra suddenly turns her head and looks behind us out the rear windshield. I turn my head to follow her gaze but see only the empty dirt road slithering off into the darkened tree line. She keeps looking, her eyes squinting.
“What is it?” The silence all around us feels material, like my eardrums have burst. She looks this way and that behind us for another moment or two.
“You ever get the feeling you’re being watched?” She turns her brown eyes on me. I look out the rear windshield, seeing nothing but trees, grass, a potholed dirt road. But there is so much darkness out there, so much density. I feel surrounded by the unseen. By that which wishes to remain concealed. By that which I wish to remain concealed. “Probably just some animal. I can sense them sometimes,” she says, turning back around. “Hunter’s instincts.”
“Do you really think something’s there?”
“Hard to say.” She shrugs. “Unless you want to go look.” That hinky Colfax smile breaks on her lips; a dare.
“Not particularly,” I reply, her beauty and magnetism distracting me from my low-level paranoia, my tender ankle. We are so alone out here. No one, it seems, for miles. Just the sunset. The blank forest. “I’d rather stay right here. With you. In your car.”
“Suit yourself.” Audra laughs. Her eyes fall upon the open marsh. They rest on the landscape lightly, as if the whole scene might be in soft focus for her. Quiet gathers between us. We’re both eased back in our seats, looking out onto the cragged, spooky land. She, perhaps, really is looking for moose, deer, bear, rabbits, foxes. All I am doing is looking out into the rough landscape, the scene registering as an indiscriminate wash of colors and shapes, a melted watercolor, aware that I had been a player on just such a stage before. But not inside of a Volvo. On the hood of a truck. But a woman, yes. A sunset, yes.
I feel Audra’s body heat, hear her quiet breaths, smell her faint perfume. The rosemary from her kitchen. I want nothing more than to take her, to feel grounded in her. She is a vitalizing violet shock in the near dark. I have been holding my prayer for so long, for too long.
“Audra—”
“Do you hear that?” Audra’s eyes are suddenly keen on me. My eyes search her face, wanting to see a flicker of desire for me, but instead I find she is simply alert, ear tilted up.
“Maybe we could—” I slip my hand on top her hers.
“Shh,” she says, but she does not pull her hand away. We are both quiet. I listen with her, the sun all but gone now. Then I hear it. “There!” she whispers, her fingers intertwining with mine, squeezing. It comes again, a low, bass sound, fading from blaring to weak. It comes again, lasting for four solid seconds.
“It—it sounds like a moan,” I whisper. She bites her lip in mild anxiety and looks at me, nods her head a little. She turns the key in the ignition, flicks the headlights on. The road illuminates before us. Low brush borders the narrow dirt road ribboned out, bog on the left, dense tree line on the right. The insistent moaning sound—a lowing almost—is more urgent now.
“It’s ahead of us, I think, whatever it is,” she whispers, leaning toward the glass of the windshield, straining to pin down the source of the noise.
“Perhaps we should head back.”
“I’ll pull forward, slowly, a few yards at a time,” she says, ignoring me.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She laughs gently. “Are you scared?” The knowing smile, the closing darkness, the mystery of the desperate sound, the centerless sense of kinship with this road, this view—I feel myself growing aroused.
“Never. I’m with my local.”
She smiles bigger and eases us ahead cautiously, dipping through a few potholes, weaving slowly around some errant rocks. We scan the road and the ditches alongside as we inch forward, the sound lower, more tired. Our tension and my growing desire for Audra are almost unbearable to me now, as if the two are linked, intertwined; they are muddled up, the moaning out there somehow my own moaning: desperate, pathetic, visceral, iris mulberry. These desolate woods are manifesting my need for her, drawing us on, haunting us. A sudden, short gasp-shriek from Audra, a sudden, unsteady shape in the road. She hits the brakes, the red taillights flaring behind us.
An impossibly gangly, young moose calf has stumbled into the road. Its improbably long legs shake. It stands there dumbly, before us, not knowing what to do.
“Ah, shit,” Audra sighs. “Look. In the ditch.” Audra points down and to the left. At the very edge of the range of the headlights lies a hulking brown mass, fur thick and bristly. A full-grown moose. It groans and snorts and moves its lanky front legs, agitated, unable to stand, its back legs seemingly still, dead. Audra turns the wheel as far left as she can and inches forward as slowly as she dares so she can set the headlights more squarely on the injured animal. It is huge. Monstrous. Eyes watery and exhausted. Audra puts her window down. The pained lowing of the moose in the ditch is loud now, aggressive.
“Audra, maybe we should go.” We sit there for a moment, transfixed. I look at the calf. I can feel Audra thinking hard beside me. She leans over me, her hand reaching down between my legs. My breath catches in my throat, but my eyes stay trained. I hear her pull the glovebox open in front of me, and her door opens a moment later.
“Stay here.” She gets out of the car, holding something, and shuts the door behind her.
“Audra—Jesus—” I lean over her seat, grasping the now-driverless wheel. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” A spike of genuine fear flashes through me.
That giant, brown animal. The empty black road. Her squall of copper hair. The jagged red line on her young palm. The bog, mocking me, welcoming me back.
She approaches the calf, who chirps and squonk-squonks like a wooden door creaking open and closed. It stumbles dumbly backward into the ditch beside its mother, who emits guttural groans and honks angry, chapped, chesty noises. “Fuck. Fuck,” I whisper. Though I fear for Audra, I do not get out of the car. I do not go to pull her back to safety. It is beyond me. She is beyond me.
All of this is.
I can see Audra speaking gently to the animals, but I can’t make out what she’s saying over the squonks of the baby and the frantic groaning of the mother. The sounds assault my ears nearly nonstop now. Audra is looking down hard at the grown moose, who keeps trying to use its front legs to stand, but the effort is horrific and desperate to behold. It digs and collapses, digs and collapses. The beast is full of pain and fear. Terror.
It’s so quick, what happens. It’s unfolding already before I understand that Audra has even raised her arm.
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
My hands fly to my ears. I am cowering.
Audra’s arm still raised. A powerful black pistol in her hand. Her body steady as a stone totem. The moose in the ditch is silent. Still. Dark-red blood soaks the area around the ear and eye facing us. The calf has scrambled frantically down the side of the road. It picks its way down into the ditch. Audra fluidly lowers the gun, flicks the safety on. She approaches the edge of the road and the shape of her name starts to form in my throat, but it never arrives. I just watch. She carefully takes the slope down into the ditch, standing not three feet from the enormous animal. She looks at it with fondness. With sadness. I look at it, too. Its once heaving chest is still. I watch Audra swipe her hand under one of her eyes. She takes a deep breath and puffs out her cheeks in release.
At the edge of audibility, the calf cries out half-heartedly. Once, then twice. Audra turns to face it, sees it is just standing in the ditch down the road twenty yards or so. It doesn’t know what to do. Audra stands there and looks at it, her back to me, for a long minute. I imagine she and the orphaned baby are looking at each other, but it’s too dark to see clearly.
Audra climbs up the embankment, her face completely composed now. She makes her way to the car. With her gun. She gets in and closes the door, opens the glovebox. She places the gun in a case, closes the case, then closes the glovebox. It’s been there this whole time, I realize. From the time she picked me up in Bangor to this very moment. Audra has had a gun.
“My guess is a logging truck clipped it.” Audra sniffs, then takes a deep breath, gathering herself. “The hip, the back legs. To do that kind of damage on an animal that big—had to be a huge truck. One leg was completely snapped. The other was covered in blood. God knows how long it was there suffering.” We sit in the car, heat on, headlights grotesquely bright on the dead moose. The baby has come a few yards closer but still stands in the darkened ditch. It makes no sound.
I want to shut my eyes tight against this, as if that might obliterate what I’ve just seen. I want to remember the bog as it was, as I had known it. Not like this. Not this place, too. Christ.
“And the calf?” My voice sounds separate from myself. Audra is quiet. We look at the calf, which looks at us, too afraid of the car and the lights to come nearer to its dead mother. How long had they been there like that, together? “You did what you had to do. It was a kindness, Audra.” My eyes feast on the stark, horrible form of the moose. The brown coat, the blood, the emptiness of it now. Then the calf, down the road, so vulnerable, alone, already nearly consumed by the dark, by its fate.