Leave No Trace, page 3
“Maybe I would’ve,” he says. “Probably.”
The thing is, Stef’s pretty sure they never met Mandy Kowalski. All the faces they meet on the road run together in her head, so it’s not impossible, but in the end there’s no way that lady is carrying T.J.’s kid. Just not possible. Still, the lawyers keep saying it’s gonna be awful hard to prove something didn’t happen until they can compel a DNA test, and in the meantime the headlines are killing ticket buys. So on the advice of the firm of Adler, Mohegan, and Said LLC, T.J. is laying low. Being a ghost. Number of comments made to the press: zero.
“So this is what the Hotel California is like,” Stef says. “I guess we can check out whenever, but … etcetera, etcetera.”
They are silent a good couple of beats.
T.J.’s fingers are scratching on the balcony railing anxiously. He needs to do something. The tour is off for now. They tried to keep it going after news broke, but when the press turned on him, the crowds started getting rowdy and someone threw a bottle at the stage midway through a show—so, time to hit the pause button. Tony put it out there that T.J. lost his voice. Exhaustion an issue. They postponed dates. Life is now on hold.
“Burt Fuckin’ Reynolds,” he mutters.
Then he whips around. Stef jumps back, heart thudding. “What?”
“Deliverance,” he says.
“Soo-wee,” she whispers in relief. “You still stuck on that movie?”
“We could go,” he says. “To the woods.”
Stef screws up her face. “You want to go camping?”
“Whole other world there,” he says, staring into the city with soft eyes. A few horn honks drift their way. “No news. No headlines. You can disappear, maybe never come back.”
“We talking about the same thing here? Is this a camping trip or early retirement?”
He waves his hand at her and his smoldering joint leaves tiny dragon trails. “Picture it,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. That flop of hair jostles with every beat. “Us five. Me, you, Tones, Daryl, Ian. In the woods. Hunting. Bag us a deer.”
The idea makes her uncomfortable on a few levels. “Get eaten by a mountain lion more likely,” she says. “Or a bear.”
“Yeah!” he pumps a fist into the sky. “A bear! We’ll go bear hunting! Come on, Peps.”
He’s serious. She can tell because he’s being cute, using that nickname. T.J.’s been Salty and she’s been Pepper ever since they first met up in school. Got called a lot worse over the years, so once they hit high school they decided to own it. Corny as hell, but who cared: They were a team. It was the name of their publishing company, too—Salty Pepper.
“We can live it like that movie, without the bad parts,” says T.J. “Nobody’ll find us. They got dead zones in the woods can’t track nothing. I’ll even use a bow and arrow. No guns.”
Stef folds her arms. She was in Girl Scouts; she did the summer vacation in the woods—including that weekend they got dropped off and had to find their way back through ten miles of forest without checking their GPS even once. Not T.J., though. “Didn’t you quit Cub Scouts when they told you about a five-mile hike?”
He waves his hands. “Not like that. We can do it our way. Gonna be Burt Fuckin’ Reynolds, kill ourselves a bear.”
“You are still high.”
“No shit.” T.J. can’t help but laugh. “But this is the best good idea I’ve had in weeks.”
A Girl Named Jim
Crunch crunch go the leaves under Daddy’s feet. Under mine it’s only swish swish. He hasn’t made me put on my boots yet so it’s almost like I’m not even here. But I sometimes feel his eyes on me. Watching. ’Valuating. I pretend I don’t see.
Over our heads the tree branches are scraping and waving and poking at the sky and the whole forest is easier to see through. The leaves are mostly gone by now and all that’s left are the forever-ever-greens and pines that keep watch and don’t change and are always ready for you to go climbing up and hide.
Here’s some things to hide from:
Pete pumas
Artie
Blizzards
Mad Daddy
But there are other reasons to scale the trees:
Eggs in nests
Seeing far away to know where you’re going (I don’t need that anymore but I pretend for Daddy sometimes ’cause he can’t know about my abracadabras).
Waving. Jim always waved at anybody he saw off in the distance. Somebody might wave back, he said to me when I why-ed him.
Walking from our cabin to the meeting spot is almost three days, Daddy says. I don’t even count steps when we go that far. We always go to far off spots to meet people ’cause Daddy says they shouldn’t find out where we live.
Never let predators follow you home, he told me a whole long while ago. Take ’em where you can hide or bring ’em into the water and let ’em drown. Once they know where you sleep you’re never safe again.
What about people? I asked him.
People are the ultimate predators, he said and his eyebrows got low and he looked at me, serious.
Daddy doesn’t say much these days. Used to be, we came here and he had all the words. When Jim was with us, Daddy was fulla a lot more than he is now, both shit and shine-o-la. Took me some time, but ’ventually I got to figuring out when he was fulla shit and when he was being true. For the shit times, when he went on and on about how bad people were and the world was in a handbasket and nobody had the guts to do what needed doing I nodded and shut my head. Let it go over me all cool and clear like when I jump into the stream for a bath. Water in my ears, glug, glug. Water in my nose. Water in my eyes. La la la.
When he was being true, though, I opened up to hear it all. Telling us about the forest it’d be like Daddy swallowed a flashlight. Was like brightness poured out of every inch of him. His bushy black hair went this way and his long smoky beard went that way and he waved his arms and his eyes went wide and he told me all the shiny things I could never guess on my own. His eyes got wide and even darker than Gil’s and you felt like you could fall into them. If he said something I remembered it.
I’d be dead out here without him. On Day One. Maybe Day Two. All of us would’ve been deader if we hadn’t come to the forest. Daddy said so.
Some of the things he told me over the years:
How to start a fire with special stones.
How to pick stuff off trees and bushes and put it right in your mouth for good eating.
What stuff never to put near your mouth.
How to make your own bow and arrows. And shoot ’em.
How come the Outside was unsafe now.
How to string a snare, hide it so animals don’t see it until it’s too late.
Not to talk to strangers ever in the woods unless Daddy said it was okay. (I didn’t listen to him when I met Gil, though.)
Fishing with your hands.
How to pop a shoulder back in the joint after you fall out of a tree. (It hurt and I cried but then it was better.)
Daddy has all kinds of magic even if he doesn’t use abracadabra words. I don’t think he’s finished showing me everything yet. He does all kinds of other stuff that isn’t magic, too. He can throw a rock farther than anybody, least he could until Jim got big. Can take a deer down from up on our ridge, skin it and make the meat last for a week, maybe two. Can hide himself so smart in the trees he’s like a big old branch.
But since Jim left, he doesn’t have so many words anymore. And when we walk or when we sit or when we eat or when we run the noises we make mostly aren’t words, just grunts and chews and cracks and breathing. I eat my quiet with my dinner and think about being mad at Jim. ’Cause Jim left without taking me along.
I take Jim with me, though. Soon as I came down that ridge yesterday I was Jim. I wear Jim’s clothes and his hat and I have his haircut and when we hunt, Daddy calls me Jim. It was his idea at first but ’ventually I signed on. When Daddy went back to tracking for campers, maybe two weeks after Jim vanished, he said he would need a new assistant. But he couldn’t take a girl.
I why-ed him.
’Cause people are dangerous, he said. They come in here with big ideas and think they know everything ’cause they read about it in a book. People from the world have a sickness I try to keep you from every day. Sickness called civilization. Nothing good ever came from being too civilized.
This didn’t mean anything to me.
People who don’t know you are gonna think you’re weak. They’re going to see a small person and a girl to boot and they’re not going to think you can track, he xplained. They’re going to look at you and maybe want to touch you and hurt you. They might seem nice at first but before you know it they will jump you.
He told me this after we were here five winters. I was prolly thirteen.
I can jump too, I said.
Naw, chicken. Jump you like you see the animals do to each other.
I knew what it meant when the animals were on top of each other. Either they were mating and making more animals or they were fighting and probably making less animals. But people aren’t xactly the same as that, Daddy told me round the time we had this talk. He said I should watch the animals that weren’t fighting closer. This book Daddy gave me way back was called Our Bodies Our Selves for the New Millennium and had a lot of drawings of people doing things and body parts and lists and I read it a couple times but a lot of it didn’t make any sense. In the book they didn’t call it mating. They called it sex.
That’s one word for it, he said. But you’re too young. I’ll tell you more when you’re not too young.
I figured that was all right. And I’d wanted to get back to the point. But if you can’t take a girl hunting—
You’ll be a boy, he said. You’ll be—my son.
I didn’t know why being a small person but a boy was better for people we might take tracking but I didn’t care much. It meant I could pretend while we were working. I could pretend to be—
Jim. You’ll be Jim.
That got me quiet for a while. I want another name, I said.
He rubbed his chin a while and stared up at the sky. Nope, he said finally. Jim it is.
I didn’t know how to fight him. Once Daddy got an idea in his mind it was hard to take it back out. Early on he called me Jim and I wouldn’t answer. Then he came over and sometimes bring the strop. And he never used it on me but I thought he might. So I started being Jim. I even didn’t mind it after a while. If Gil could be Gillie, I could be Jim. Sometimes it was like having him back. I was smarter when I pretended to be him.
So now when we track, I am Jim. And he is Daddy Samuel. And that is that.
Daddy’s been watching me all day and not in a friendly way. Pretty sure he wants to ask me something but he’s holding it back until we stop for the day outside this cave we visit every summer. We get the fire in the pit going and cook our food and it’s all soft and silent for a few minutes while he eats.
Lexi, I hear. Lexi.
’Course I’m not really hearing my name. Just sounds that way. The cave we’re sitting in front of is a special place for 100s of reasons, and one is that it sings. Way back in the cave is a deep crack and when the wind sighs through it—this warm, funny little breeze that sometimes smells like bread—it feels like it’s singing to me. Singing my name.
Leeeexxxxi, I hear again.
Daddy mutters something under his breath I can’t make out but I kinda know what he’s thinking. Every summer we wall up over that crack and every year our patches fall back down again. Daddy calls it our Sissy Fuss task. He was a man cursed to roll a rock uphill only to watch it fall down again, said Daddy once.
At least we’re not rolling rocks uphill.
Anyway, we were last here when it was hot out and when we left that crack was all blocked up. Now it’s singing. So it’s open again.
Daddy mutters some more. I keep eating. Then the singing stops and the night starts crawling in and Daddy gets to what’s on his mind.
“Who were you talking to today?” he says, just out of nowhere.
But he can’t get me Offguard. I can smell when he’s feeling ornery. Comes in handy. “When?” I ask. Him keeping both eyes on me all day was no fun at all, so I decide to ornery him right back.
“You know when,” he says. “You ain’t said more’n two words to me all day. Don’t sass.”
I wait a minute, poke the fire. Feel my gut turning over. When Jim was with us Daddy hardly had much to say to me ever. Just told me to do things. He wasn’t mean; I never got the strop with Daddy, but it was like I was an extra bit he couldn’t trim off. Was pretty clear once I got old enough to see it how Jim was the one he spent most of his time on, gave most of his training to. But since Jim’s gone, I’m the only one he has to keep in line and it’s like having a rope ’round my neck.
“Nobody,” I say finally. “Just readin’ to myself.”
“And what you want to do that for?”
The lie twists in me. I don’t like lying. But I also know I can’t ever say anything bout Gil to Daddy. “Forest’s too quiet sometimes. Got to fill it up a little.”
He studies me and it’s like I feel his stare burning into my head. “You know the rules.”
Rules. There’s lots of rules. But I know the one he means right now. We’re not supposed to be here, not supposed to xist. Leave no trace, he always says. “But we’re going to see people now,” I say. “We see people all the time. Who cares?”
“I care,” he says. “Up to me who you see and don’t see.”
I look up and meet his eyes and they burn me some more and I hold in place. “Not forever,” I say and grit my teeth.
Just in time, ’cause then he cuffs me on the side of the head. He does that, he thinks you’re being out of line. But he’s not too mad, I can tell, since it’s not hard enough to knock me down. “You want to say something, girl?”
“I’m Jim,” I say, rubbing my head. “There’s no girl here.”
He’s waiting for me.
“No,” I say, ’cause I don’t want to have that talk right now. The talk where I maybe suggest I’m old enough to leave the woods if I want. He always said eighteen. I’m almost there. But then I do have a question for him. “Yes.”
“G’wan.”
“Is there a war happening Outside?”
He goes quiet a long while, then laughs. “There’s always a fight goin’ on somewhere.” He turns and looks at me. “How d’you mean?”
“I mean,” and I try to remember what Gil told me earlier, “is it a big fight between people like us and—sick people?”
He’s looking at me funny now. “That something your friend from the trees told ya?”
After Gil saved me from the snowstorm years ago and I came home after three days and should be dead, after Daddy finished hugging me I told him everything. About Gil and the stand and the trees. Daddy went very white and his lips went really thin and he told me that I must have hallucinated it. Made it up. There was no such thing as men in grass hats living near birch trees. I said there was. Gil was true. I knew it.
He stood really straight and I didn’t know who he was just then. He was ’valuating me, like I ’valuate the open spaces, case there’s a danger. If I thought you’d caught the sickness, he’d said then in a quiet voice, I’d have to take steps. Don’t make me take steps.
Daddy thinks anything abracadabra magic is a sickness. It’s why he brought us here. He said everybody was getting ’fected and changing ’cause of it. In that second where he said he’d take steps, I connected Gil with magic for the first time. My head had hurt a little ’cause I didn’t know and maybe I was ’fected and sick. But Daddy saying he might have to take steps made me scared. Scared like I never was about him before.
So, tell me again, he insisted.
I swallowed down all the Gil stories I knew and lied. Just kidding, I said. That was a dream I had. I made a snow fort and hid.
For three days.
I nodded. I learned a lot from you.
That seemed to be okay. He didn’t think I had the sickness anymore. And I never told about the abracadabras.
But he asks me about it sometimes still. When I’m not ready. He says things like, How is your friend from the trees doing? and I have to remember Gil is a secret and say I don’t know what he means. Or Daddy might ask me how I know the way to one place or t’other so well and I will have to say it was ’cause I learned how to read a compass and follow the trees. I can’t say I have special words that make the trees hum to me and tires out my brain.
I don’t know what Daddy means when he says he’ll take steps, but the way he looked at me when I was thirteen and fresh home from being missing for a bunch of days—I thought maybe he wanted to hurt me. I don’t want to find out. Never have tried talking about Gil in front of him since. Almost five winters I’ve been hiding Gil, and it’s not easy. But if I didn’t have Gil I might die anyway. It’s hard out here, nobody to talk to.
Now he’s looking at me the same way he did when I came back from the snowstorm, making that face with the thin lips and white skin.
“I mean,” I say, “what’s so bad about Outside anyway? People keep coming in and we take ’em hunting and they don’t seem sick.”
“They hide it,” he says. “It’s not a sick like you get rashes or a fever or you swell up. It’s something that started a little before I took you and Jim away. News reports from far away talking about strange happenings. Places in the air or the ground that started glowing. Some people who lived near ’em started acting funny. Could do things people ain’t supposed to be able to do. Some folks called it talent. Some said it was magic. Some said it was sickness, pure and simple. So did I. When you start hearing about people who can hold their breath underwater for twenty minutes and not die, or make walls fold themselves, you have to wonder. You have to wonder. Your mother—”
