Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail Page 10

  “A mineral spring for the soul,” I muse.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind, just thinking aloud,” I say.

  Simone takes a picture, shifts toward me and our legs touch. The sensation of skin on skin sends a jolt through me that I have not felt in a while. I don’t want to move, but my stomach is about to cave in on itself, so I light my stove and cook cheese-filled bowtie pasta, spoon in peanut butter and hot sauce, taste, add salt and pepper. This meal is my trail specialty, and I hold out a spoonful. Simone tastes and grimaces, spits over the railing.

  “I hope you don’t cook for a living,” she says.

  “It’s a cultivated taste.”

  I taste the sauce, dump in more salt. Retaste.

  “Try again?” I say.

  She shakes her head and laughs. I fail to see the humor, eat my supper in silence, get out oatmeal cookies Roxie mailed to my last town stop. Simone reluctantly bites into one, gives me a surprised look, and we eat until the Baggie is empty.

  “Good cookies,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  I don’t tell Simone where the cookies came from, see no sense elaborating on how Roxie got my letter and started mailing me food. She quit coke, she says, cold turkey. Writes incessantly about how I have inspired her to lead a better life. She wants to drive up and visit, to see how we are together with our heads on straight, to test the waters, so to speak. I have a hard time believing she has changed and have not given her the go ahead.

  Simone has that look women get when they want to be kissed, and my lips seek hers. The sun is all but down and we kiss until dark, and then I slide my hand between her legs. I can feel her heat and know she can feel mine. She scoots away until there is a two-foot gap between us.

  “Not in town,” she says. “In town we’re just friends.”

  “We’re not in a town.” Technically, I think I’m right. The park butts up to a town.

  “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  * * *

  Back when Roxie and I were together, she got this idea we could give up coke if we went on a three-day drunk. She believed we would wake up on day four with a bad hangover but we would be drug free. We bought six quarts of vodka at the liquor store, five gallons of orange juice from Save-A-Lot, rented a motel room, and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The first day we drank and watched Seinfeld reruns, fucked on top of this bedspread green as her eyes, beat on the wall when the neighbor hollered we were playing the television too loud. On the second day she walked to her favorite street corner and made two hundred dollars in two hours. We spent the next two days shooting coke and drinking.

  A couple months later she wanted to try something else and I said sure, I’d tie her up until the craving left her body. We had plans. First she’d get clean, and then she’d tie me up and I’d get clean. I brought along a Popsicle stick for her to bite on if she got the urge to scream. She had an eight-ball, and we shot it up until it was gone. I went out and bought an ounce, cut it with baby laxative, broke it down, and sold the shit at a crack house down on Harvey Avenue. We spent half of what I made on coke, shot it up, and I kept right on dealing.

  Roxie is a stone-cold junkie, and I’d have to see it to believe she quit. Anything is possible. I study Simone’s silhouette in the twilight, the curve of her breasts under her shirt. It’s cooled off between us.

  Least for now.

  * * *

  Later that night, the park now devoid of the public, Richard lurches out of the dark and falls against a garbage can. Thruhikers are allowed to camp if they are discreet, which Richard is not, even when he’s sober. He smells like whiskey and vomit, and his lips don’t work well enough for him to form understandable words. I lead him to his tent, unzip the fly, and he crawls inside. Simone comes up, and we stand around in the dark. I try to kiss her again and she balls up her fist and digs her knuckles into my chest, not so much that they hurt but enough so I know they are there. I have not fucked anyone since Stacy back in Franklin, North Carolina.

  “He’s thinking about quitting,” I say. . . . “He’s been getting worse but says he’s going to stop any day now.”

  Simone launches into a rant about how once a drunk always a drunk. She tells me about a book she studied in college and how the author theorized we are all born with a flawed gene that leads to our demise. I remember my mother’s words when she was talking about my father—and how she thought his weakness etched my future.

  “Hand-me-down blood,” I say.

  She speaks in a firm voice.

  “From the time our father’s sperm meets our mother’s egg, we are who we are. Fighting it is a waste of energy.”

  “People can change.”

  Her voice, when it comes, has lost its firmness. She sounds hopeless, like she’s in a dark room and can’t find her way out.

  “No,” she says. “They can’t.”

  “You sound like you’re talking from personal experience.”

  She doesn’t say anything, and I wish I could see her eyes, but it’s too dark for that and I can only read her posture. She is tense, withdrawn, and I sense I have overstepped a boundary. The silence becomes uncomfortable and to fill it I start talking about my father and his pill habit. I tell her almost everything, leave out the part about him committing suicide. How he died is no one’s business but mine.

  “He started wetting the bed at night,” I say. “I used to get up every morning and throw his sheets in the washer before I went to school. Then I’d come home and put them in the drier.”

  Simone is quiet, head cocked my way, as though she listens intently, and I continue my story, right up to me leaving that day in Hawkinsville.

  “Do you feel guilty?” she says.

  “I took him to NA meetings. I fed him. I got him up in the morning. I took care of him for years.”

  “Yes, but you still left him.”

  A car engine sounds up on the mountain, and I turn away and look up the road, wanting any excuse to end the conversation. Rpms rev and the car, headlights on, comes out of the forest, down the road, at a high speed. I will the car to slow, only it is going too fast, and the squealing brakes have no effect. The car fishtails and leaves the road. Impacts a telephone pole nose first. Metal shrieks and folds inward, glass shatters, and Fay and Randy fly headfirst through the windshield. Watching them tumble, the car’s rear end settling back down to the road, a hubcap rolling across the white line and into the ditch, seems so out of place for someone who has been hiking in the woods that nothing seems real. But when it is over, Fay prone in the grass and Randy across the hood, I know it is real, and along with that comes the feeling there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

  Simone and I run to the car and look at Randy, at the sliver that splintered off the pole and drove itself deep into his eye. I don’t check for a pulse.

  The street light overhead vibrates from the impact, and the shivery light that falls over the car seems dim and impermanent. Simone has a strange smile that goes away soon as she realizes I’m looking at her. Lights blink on in a house up the street, and a man opens the front door and hollers that he called an ambulance. Simone brings her face close to Randy’s. Presses her lips against his. A tender kiss, her hand on his cheek like they are lovers with a future. I have never seen anyone kiss the dead and look away like this is a private moment between family members. Then I check on Fay, whose neck twists at an odd angle to her shoulders. Simone and I stare at the body. She bends down and kisses her too.

  “They loved each other,” I say.

  Two dead kids, a sadness, a futile feeling that I suspect Simone and I both share, a helplessness that drives us across the street, into the park, where we sit on a picnic table and watch the emergency crews arrive. An ambulance strobe brightens the night. We sit hip to hip. Stay that way until the wrecker winches the car onto the flatbed and drives down the road and out of sight. The light high on the pole is still on, and on the street glass winks under t
he reflection.

  I have a definite sense of us and them, of the separation between the real world and the life of a thru-hiker, yet that distinction is anything but comforting. Simone and I walk to Richard’s tent and stand in the spots we were in when the wreck happened. Like we’re trying to rewind time. She asks if my father is still alive, and I tell her he’s dead. She offers her condolences, then says goodnight, and crawls into her tent. Richard snores drunkenly, a wretched sound, the death rattle of the living, and I pull up my own tent and pitch it far away so I don’t have to listen.

  That night I think about the dead and how they are gone forever. Fay and Randy will never again walk this earth and neither will my father. Do I feel guilty about leaving him? A small part of me feels that way, I guess, but the rest of me is just sad. He was my father, and you only get one of those in life.

  8

  IN A SNIT over Pike’s choice of color for the downstairs bathroom, Giuseppe says good riddance and moves out of the B&B into the garden. Instead of digging in the weeds in the shadow of the tall poplar, a patch he and Pike save for fall cabbage planting, Giuseppe plunges a shovel into a tilled row and scoops out dirt, worms, and broccoli plants. He digs toward the tomatoes, yanks an Early Girl upward, tosses it into the corn. The uprooted plant falls through the leaves and topples slowly onto its side. He slaps his palms together, a satisfactory pop filling out an otherwise still morning, sniffs the coffee smell wafting out of an open kitchen window. The property’s epicenter is a two-story Victorian, white with tin roof, shutters blue as the mid-morning sky. On the far end of a sprawling lawn, Appalachian Trail thruhikers pitch their tents on ten-dollar-a-night campsites. Giuseppe wishes the hikers stayed elsewhere—more trouble for him is the way he sees it—but they spice up the ambiance, and regular guests, gay professionals from surrounding cities, enjoy the company.

  Giuseppe bends to his work, and after two hours of steady digging, widens the hole into a smooth-sided hollow. He sculpts a crumbly pillow on one end, a gritty table on the other, flings the shovel into the air and watches it stick point down in the grass halfway between house and garden. He doubts Pike, the original literal man, will understand the symbolism.

  The rear door opens . . . closes on a set of raspy hinges Giuseppe should have oiled months ago. He crouches on his haunches and watches his lover walk through the garden carrying a plate of blueberry muffins. All arms and legs, head bobbing to an arrhythmical gait, Pike exudes an innocent awkwardness, and the impression of those meeting him for the first time is docile ineptitude. A false assumption. Pike is a retired attorney, a raider who dismantled companies with all the abandon of a child playing in the sandbox.

  “I brought you breakfast.” Pike places the plate on the ground. He wears a robe the color of his eyes—butterscotch brown—an iris tint that causes Giuseppe to speak in sentences that end in the middle of nowhere. He forces his gaze on Pike’s legs, at the scar below his left knee, a wound he received in a minor car accident a few years back. Giuseppe knows every inch of that body—moles, blemishes, arthritic knuckles, how the aging spine, once so straight, bows between the shoulders—he knows it all.

  Pike steps close to the hole and soil falls over the edge and puddles at the bottom. “I can’t believe you are so riled up. Over such a little thing.”

  “I’ve told you before, chartreuse nauseates me. I cannot abide the idea of sitting on the toilet surrounded by puke-green walls.”

  Two women come outside and adjust their floppy hats and look toward the garden. It’s Monday morning in Kent, Connecticut, and it’s time for Wendy and Josselyn to leave the mountains and head to Boston. Pike’s good-bye hugs are a B&B tradition, and he turns and walks toward the women. Giuseppe recedes into the hole. His world has shrunk to a dirt floor, four walls, a blue rectangle overhead. He paws the edge until his fingers grasp the muffin plate. One thing about Pike, the man can cook.

  * * *

  Giuseppe eats the last muffin and works his mouth for saliva, wonders if Pike forgot to bring something to drink on purpose. Probably so. Anything to get Giuseppe out of the hole. The sun climbs a high arc and slips behind a thin cloud layer. He stretches out his tightening back, coils and uncoils his fingers, and wishes he were thirty years younger, still sporting a ridged abdomen and the accompanying youthful impudence. Pike prefers lovers on the younger side, that’s no secret, and Giuseppe shows wear, wrinkles that look like ditches when light hits his forehead just right. He’s dyed his hair, camouflaged gray threads above his temples, but has been unable to avoid the feeling he’s deteriorating one cell at a time.

  That afternoon Pike places a pitcher on the porch rail. The setting sun illuminates the water and ice cubes swirl in amber light. Pike the temptress, Giuseppe thinks, the corporate pirate who offers drink while secretly plotting to cut your throat.

  “I’d rather dry up and blow away than drink your water,” Giuseppe yells, and instantly regrets his outburst. He has spent many evenings listening to Pike explain the ins and outs of negotiating. The secret is to never let them see you scratch . . . even if your ass itches so bad you can’t stand it.

  * * *

  The afternoon recedes into dusk, dusk into darkness. Lights switch on inside the Victorian and shadows move across curtained windows. Doors open and close, laughter and muffled conversation escape the guests on the porch. The moon is out, an orange splash above a tendriled cloud, and stars track the sky. Tents light up like glowing orbs.

  Giuseppe yells an obscenity, grins through dry lips. He yells again, a “goddamn” that ends louder than it started. Pike’s voice flows through the darkness, a quiet apology to the guests and a request that everyone spend their night inside. In the next hour, windows darken one by one, and when the last light blinks out, Giuseppe screams “asshole” nine times in a row, catches his breath, screams another ten.

  The rear door opens, followed by the squeak of a turning valve and the rush of water through a hose. The sprinkler sweeps over the garden, rattles the broadleafed squash and what’s left of the tomato plants. Spray hits Giuseppe’s face and he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, licks moisture from his lips.

  “Are you there?” Giuseppe says, seeing only shadows at the rear of the house.

  “I’m here.”

  The sprinkler comes around again, and Giuseppe takes the spray on his back. “I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the water, I truly do—”

  “I hired a houseboy,” Pike says.

  “How young?” Giuseppe, eight years younger than Pike’s sixty, feels eighty at the moment.

  “Younger than you.”

  They are quiet for a long time, and Giuseppe feels such an emptiness it’s like his blood has drained from his body. “You still there?”

  After what seems forever, Pike’s voice comes through the night. “I’m still here.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t’ve done that. We really don’t need a houseboy.”

  “It’s only until you come to your senses.”

  The sprinkler stops, the rear door opens and closes, and Giuseppe removes his clothes and wipes water off his face. The breeze chills his slicked skin, and he wraps his shivering arms around his torso. He and Pike have been together for thirty-two years, met outside a Hartford convenience store where Giuseppe panhandled for his supper. Back then he lived in an abandoned car on a dead-end street, rummaged through Dumpsters when panhandling didn’t pay off. After a brief courtship, mostly sex in the backseat of a leased Cadillac, Pike said he had room for two in his bed and Giuseppe took his offer. In the ensuing years, they lived in a series of rentals that grew pricier and higher off the ground as Pike advanced in a downtown firm. Because they were queers before queers were fashionable, they never ate in a restaurant together, never sat side by side in a theater, never went to the firm’s Christmas parties. Whenever they packed up and moved from apartment to apartment, Giuseppe felt like they were starting anew and suggested they adopt a pet. He didn’t care if it was a bird or a slab-si
ded iguana, as long as it required shared written commitment. Each time Pike said no.

  Giuseppe blamed the corporate life for his lover’s reticence, believed desire to get somewhere enticed ladder climbers to seek unfettered relationships. At times, he felt like a trinket so cheap Pike wouldn’t hesitate to toss it in the garbage. The affairs started when Pike turned forty, voices calling in the middle of the night, hanging up when Giuseppe answered the phone, but he dug his heels in and refused to turn his lover loose. To his amazement—he couldn’t believe they had been together that long—Pike retired and started shopping for a B&B. Giuseppe dreamed about the contract, imagined how they would sit around a mahogany desk and sip champagne, contract spread like a tantalizing siren across the glossy surface. He dreamed of the pen in his hand, of broad strokes on the bottom line—Pike Orwell and Giuseppe Stephanopoulos—tying the knot forever. Never happened. Pike purchased the house alone, and Giuseppe moved in without arguing the point.

  Now, he faces the moon, a yellow eye that peers down at him with a reproachful stare. Giuseppe thinks he might be too hard on Pike. It isn’t easy managing the B&B. Pike writes and places advertisements in niche magazines, does the accounting and taxes, designs and cooks gourmet meals. He handles the customers, makes them feel comfortable coming and going. Giuseppe washes linen and makes up the beds. He also mows, but he enjoys riding the John Deere and doesn’t count that as work. They share the gardening.