Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail Read online

  They—Cloyse, Poppy, and Dalton—sit in the living room, an expansive area with a high ceiling and white walls, the floor a polished hardwood. Logs crackle in the fireplace, and firelight bathes the elegant sofa and the plush recliners in an orange glow. A smoky scent hangs in the air, a leftover from when Dalton lit the kindling with the louver closed.

  “More wine?” Dalton says. He’s in the cardigan his wife suggested.

  An eyebrow lift from Poppy, a lip curl from Cloyse, and Dalton recognizes the exchange as unspoken conversation between spouses.

  Cloyse thrusts her glass forward. “I’d love s’more.”

  “Now, Cloyse,” Poppy says.

  “A teeny-weeny little more won’t hurt a thing,” Cloyse says.

  Dalton fills her glass and excuses himself. In the kitchen, he watches Deirdre open the oven and poke a fork into a sizzling chicken wing. She wears a maroon dress, pumps to match, has on a string of pearls he purchased on one of their rare vacations. They had gone to Tahiti, where they ate seafood and lounged in cabanas during the heat of the day. Remembering how good she looked in a bikini stirs him and he comes up behind her and encircles her stomach with his arms. He rests his chin on her shoulder.

  “Your friend is getting looped,” he says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “She’s an alcoholic,” he says.

  “She probably likes to have a good time. A little wine never hurt anyone.”

  “She’s a bottomless pit.” He nibbles her earlobe, traces the curve of her neck, tries to think of the last time they made love. It was back in California, before the move, a hurried coupling that was over as quickly as it began.

  “No one’s perfect,” she says.

  “Her husband’s only here because she dragged him along. He’s not engaged in the conversation at all.”

  “Her name is Cloyse and his is Poppy.”

  “I know their names, hon. I’m only wondering about the wisdom of making friends with a couple who have these kinds of marital problems.”

  Before she can reply, he grabs another wine bottle and heads to the living room. In California his wife only made friends with people who could help her career. Her supervisor Bob Thornfelt, a widower who bathed in English Leather before he attended dinner parties, was the most common invitee. He and Deirdre talked letters, stamps, and bubble wrap late into the night. The lead reporter for the local newspaper was also a frequent guest, and Dalton was not surprised to see Deirdre’s rise through the postal service profiled in Out and About Town. He looks at Poppy and his knobby ankles, at Cloyse and her peachy hair—wonders how these two fit the master plan.

  “I hear you’re a furniture designer,” Cloyse says. “That’s the scoop around town anyway. You know how that is. People can be so nosy.”

  “I majored in ergonomics at USC.”

  “Mum’s the word.”

  He swallows a yawn. “It’s not really a secret.”

  “I need a smoke,” Poppy says, and walks outside.

  “Don’t mind him,” Cloyse says. “He’s always been a party pooper.”

  Dalton settles into the couch and tugs his sweater over his belt. “I hear there’s a search going on for a lost girl.”

  A haruuumphh comes out of Cloyse. “The last time she ran away they found her in a crack house up in Waynesboro. Like to have embarrassed her momma to death. Let’s see . . . this time is the sixth time in the last two years. Folks around here don’t even search for her anymore, leave it to outsiders and the law.”

  “I heard she got lost somewhere around—”

  “She doesn’t know how good she’s got it. Her family’s got money, loads of it. Highest producing tobacco farm in these parts.” The last of her wine swirls in the bottom of the glass. He hands her the new bottle, and she pours her own.

  “So,” she says, “Deirdre tells me you’re thinking of adopting.”

  “What?”

  She hands him a business card. “My fee is listed on the—”

  “I’ll be right back,” he says.

  In the kitchen, Deirdre arranges chicken wings on a silver plate. The wings form a perfect circle—an inch of separation—meaty ends flared toward the edge. In the center she places a bowl filled with cheese dip. She has a deft touch, a concentrated air; attributes honed by dropping mail into thousands of slots throughout the years. Dalton wishes she would apply the same attentiveness to their marriage. Doubts she will. Theirs is an unequal love, and he is certain his is greater than hers. He measures the difference in frustration. His, of course.

  “I know why you invited them,” he says, when he can no longer hold it in. “Or more precisely, her. I know why she’s here.”

  “Grab those napkins, will you? No, not the plain ones. Bring the ones with the little flowers. There, bring those.” She wipes her hands on a dishtowel.

  “She runs an adoption agency.”

  Deirdre speaks in a low, but firm voice. “I know what she does for a living.”

  “You know?”

  “I asked her to come over and talk to us. Show us some four-year-olds.”

  “You did what?”

  “It’s a compromise, Dalton. I’ve been very clear about not wanting a baby.”

  “Don’t you think you should have asked first?”

  “You would have said no.”

  Deirdre picks up the platter, and he follows her into the living room. She sets the platter in front of Cloyse, who nibbles a wing and comments on the tenderness. He and his wife sit side by side on the sofa, and she takes his hand in hers. She has a warm, soft palm, and her thumb brushes his, an unspoken plea for him to at least consider possibilities.

  “Please forgive the lack of political correctness,” Cloyse says, “but young white children are very hard to come by these days. It’s much easier to adopt a child from overseas. Asian, especially.”

  Dalton removes his hand from his wife’s grasp, flicks his fingernail against his wineglass, and a ping swells through the room. Adopt? What an idiotic idea. He goes to the fireplace and throws a log on the flames. Poppy, framed in the living room window, lights a cigarette.

  “Your husband smokes like a chimney,” Dalton says. “He hasn’t stopped puffing since he stepped outside.”

  “Hubby gets nervous around strangers,” Cloyse says.

  A sob from the rear of the house, a hiccup, a whimper, and another sob.

  “You didn’t tell me you were already a momma!” Cloyse says, and pats Deirdre’s knee. “I got two myself. Is that a boy—”

  Dalton says, “Don’t get up, hon. Lord knows you’ve done enough today,” and to Cloyse, “All he does is cry. I’d put him in the garbage disposal if Deirdre would let me. Chew his little butt right up.”

  “Dalton’s a big kidder,” Deirdre says. “He’s a softy at heart.”

  Halfway out of the room, Dalton says over his shoulder, “The booger eater took his first steps last week. Can you believe it? Where does the time fly?”

  In the study he turns the doll over, jiggles the control switch, and the sobbing morphs into a scream. He thumps PP’s button nose.

  “Hey, quiet down will you.”

  He unbuttons the sailor suit and flops the doll on its stomach. The directions begin at the shoulders and in crisp sentences work their way to the buttocks. The study door opens and Deirdre strides across the room. He shouts in her ear that he must have accidentally set the timer this morning, that the directions indicate the crying will stop when the doll is good and ready. She grabs the doll and slams it against the chair.

  “Fa-rigg,” she says. “Make it shut up.”

  “Wait, I read something that might work. Hold it against your shoulder and bounce up and down.”

  “I’m not sure I’m doing it right,” she says.

  “Slower, I think. It has to be the right rhythm.”

  He studies his wife, the doll in her arms, plastic chin in the hollow of her throat.

  “It’s working,” she says.


  “Hon,” he says. “Look at you. . . .”

  There is moisture on her pupils, a shine he rarely sees. Deirdre closes her eyes, opens them, hands him the doll. “There’s an opening coming up in the district—”

  “What?”

  “I want more, Dalton. I want the top of my profession.”

  “We’re talking about a two-month pregnancy leave! You’re saying you can’t leave your job for sixty days?” He smooths the doll’s hair, straightens the crooked collar, tries not to look at that cute stubby nose.

  “I told you from day one I was never having a baby,” his wife says. “From day one.”

  PP starts up again, a startling shriek, and Deirdre walks out of the room. She looks over her shoulder to see if he is coming.

  * * *

  Outside, the air smells of wood smoke, and on the next ridge over, a lazy curl that hooks into the mountain, a hound begins a plaintive howl. Dalton raises a shovel and brings it down hard. The spade glances off a leg, strikes stone, and sparks shoot into the air. He swings again—the sobbing at his feet now a scream—and the spade bounces off an arm. He swings the shovel in wide arcs, and with each blow mentally rescans manufacturer catchphrases etched into the doll’s back:

  BUILT TO LAST.

  HIGH-IMPACT PLASTIC.

  LIFETIME WARRANTY.

  “Hey!” Poppy runs across the yard with fists raised. “Hey! Hey! What are you doing?”

  Dalton gets in one last swing and drops the shovel. His chest heaves. Poppy toes the doll, nudges a leg cocked at an awkward angle. “Shoot, I thought this thing was real. . . . What a set of lungs.”

  “It won’t shut up,” Dalton says, catching his breath.

  “Why don’t you just bury it?” Poppy picks up the shovel and says something about Californians being a real piece of work. “Any place in particular?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s your yard, where do you want the hole?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dalton says. “So long as it’s deep.”

  * * *

  “They found her up on the Appalachian Trail?” Cloyse says, and sips her wine.

  Poppy, cell phone to his ear, covers the mouthpiece. “At the bottom of a cliff. Been dead for several days.”

  “I’ll be,” Cloyse says.

  Deirdre acknowledges the news with a nod, flips open a glossy adoption catalog, and points out a boy on a rocking horse. “Isn’t he the cutest thing?”

  Dalton is not surprised the news fails to faze Deirdre. His wife rarely loses focus. He, on the other hand, will not allow himself to feel one way or the other about the girl. Deirdre’s stubbornness makes him angry, and it’s a feeling he wants to hold on to.

  “That is the ugliest kid I’ve ever seen,” he says.

  His wife has a loopy smile, gooey gaze to match, and she flips pages without looking up. She points out a curly-haired girl, fingertip on the girl’s foot, and Dalton calls attention to the flapjack ears and bulbous nose.

  “I don’t want a kid that looks like she belongs in a freak show. There, see that? The one on the bottom of the page? Check out that chin. Looks like it’s been run over by a truck.”

  Cloyse speaks in a soft voice. “Adoption isn’t for everyone; perhaps you two would like to reconsider?”

  “Yes,” Dalton says. “Perhaps we would.”

  * * *

  The flashlight beam swings through the darkness, illuminating the trees, the boulders, the grass. Poppy and Cloyse are gone, fire long dead, wood smoke a memory. The chilled air is without breeze, and somewhere on the mountain the hound still howls.

  Dalton tilts the beam so it shines on the freshly turned mound. The grave is long as a breadbox, and he thinks of the doll, dirt pressing on all sides, wonders if Poppy buried it right-side up. Deirdre bows her head and asks him to turn off the light. He does. He can no longer see her, but she is so close he can hear her breathing. Dalton moves toward her, a subtle sidestep that brings their shoulders together. She’s trembling, and so is he.

  “I feel bad about that girl,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  “Her parents must be horrified.”

  “People make it through,” she says.

  “Yes, I guess they do.” He looks through the trees for the mountain, listens for the hound. Behind the branches, the peak shimmers in the moonlight.

  “I don’t want you to leave me,” Deirdre says.

  They stand in silence until she says she’s going inside. He tells her he’ll just be a minute, almost suggests she get out the catalog. He listens to her steps fade into the night, wanting, for a reason he can’t identify, to hear the rear door open and close before he follows her down the grassy slope.

  7

  THE TRAIL IS nothing like I imagined. I’m a thousand miles from Springer, and the exhaustion I felt hiking over those Georgia mountains is long gone. I’m in shape, can hold a conversation going uphill and never lose my breath, but the pain never ends. First to arrive were the blisters, opened up by walking in wet shoes through North Carolina and Tennessee. The blisters healed, then my waist belt began digging into my hips. I purchased buffer pads at a hardware store to solve that problem, then pulled an Achilles tendon on The Priest in Virginia. My ibuprofen intake increased to 3,000 milligrams a day until the pain went away, and my limp swung into a normal gait.

  Now I have plantar fasciitis in my right foot, and every step feels like a nail penetrates my heel. I eat ibuprofen from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. My stomach feels raw. Like a rat claws and chews at the lining, always hungry, a perpetual feeling of devouring myself from the inside out.

  * * *

  Day Seventy-five of my hike, I limp out of the forest and walk across a gravel parking lot. On an overlook, a man strapped under a hang glider runs to the edge and launches into open space. Fluorescent-yellow fabric snaps against the breeze. He circles on the thermal, sails into the valley and out of sight. I’m in Maryland, almost in Pennsylvania, and can see into both states, a vista of small towns with roads that run like gray arteries between fields. I’ve walked through leafy green forest for what seems like forever, and the sudden expanse has a magnetic feeling. I don’t want to leave, but if I stop too long my foot will seize up. I tighten my load-lifter straps and my pack shifts toward my back.

  “Want a beer?” a voice says.

  A guy and a girl lean against a white Chevy. I limp in their direction and take the bottle, drain it, then drink another.

  “Damn,” I say.

  The guy has close-cropped hair, like he is in the military. The girl wears jeans and a violet blouse and has that casual air of standing in her element. I thank them and tell them about my hike, like how much my pack weighs and what kind of food I eat, how far I’ve hiked and how long I’ve been on the trail—typical conversation between thru-hikers and the people we meet along the way.

  Fay’s teeth show when she smiles. Randy is her man, and they have the weekend off. They work for a seat cushion factory, Fay on the line, Randy in shipping.

  “Randy is the best forklift driver in the company,” Fay says.

  Fay and Randy hold hands and drink beer. I shift most of my weight to my left foot and drink with them.

  “We come up for the sunsets,” Randy says.

  Fay says, “One of the best views around.”

  I drink another beer, this one a micro brew out of Boston, and it goes down good as the first. They seem to understand trail deprivation, how much small pleasures mean to a hiker. They offer me another beer but it will get dark soon and I want to get down the mountain and pitch my tent while it’s still daylight. I thank them and step into the forest. I feel good inside.

  * * *

  Pen Mar Park, an hour’s walk from the overlook, closes to the public at sundown. There are bathrooms and running water, soda and snack machines, picnic tables, asphalt footpaths, people sitting in fields on blankets in the sun. I feel ill-placed in my dirty hiker shirt and shorts, my once-whit
e trail runners now the color of mud, a backpack that looks like it’s been run over multiple times, but hikers are a common sight here, and no one gives me a second look. I buy a Coke and salted peanuts, nod at two boys playing Frisbee, head to a grassy spot, and pitch next to Richard’s tent. Another tent sits thirty yards away, backed up to a forest on the north edge of the park. Simone, or Never Lost, as she’s known on the trail, sits outside the tent and dumps out her food bag. She started her thru-hike well before me, twisted a knee climbing over boulders in the Shenandoah and took time off, or I never would have caught up with her. I’ve talked to her a few times, ate lunch with her next to a spring, don’t know her very well. She never takes a break on the overlooks. Trail rumor has it she’s scared of heights.

  Simone heads my way, barefoot, tells me Richard walked to the grocery store to resupply. She says she got here around noon and went into town to read up about plantar fasciitis in the library.

  “The best thing is to get off your foot until the swelling goes down,” she says. “Alternate heat and ice.”

  Stopping to rehabilitate is a bad idea. I’d grow accustomed to the easy life, and I’d get off the trail for good. I miss the showers the most.

  I swallow four ibuprofen. Wash them down with Coke.

  “Or,” she says, “you can do this exercise called Downward Facing Dog.”

  “Whoof.”

  “Seriously,” she says.

  Simone has a somber face, a professorial look that dimples when she smiles. She is only mildly attractive, but she has the glow of the exceedingly fit, a sexiness so ingrained it seems to ooze from her pores. She kneels, places her hands on the ground, then her ass lifts into the air, rocks back until her heels press against the grass. Her skin is toned and without blemishes, her legs limber and strong, and it is all I can do to keep my hands to myself. I get down beside her. We do Downward Facing Dog and at first the pain in my heel hurts so much I want to stop. I keep at it, and the pain subsides.

  Simone going into town to get information on my foot problem is my second kindness today. I think about the couple on the overlook, realize I have not heard their car travel the road that winds down the mountain and skirts the park. No doubt they are watching the sunset. I ask Simone to do the same and we sit in a pavilion, under a sky that reddens along the horizon. Clouds turn violet, an interlocking of lace that fades to pale orange. A purple hue takes over the heavens, and one last sun-shot cloud remains, a bright island in a darkening sea. This sunset is the most beautiful thing I have seen in my entire life. I am peaceful inside, something I never was in civilization, and I’m not sure why. Sometimes I feel like I came to the trail in pieces, and the AT is reconstructing me one step at a time. At first, I thought the drumbeat of footsteps that permeate my consciousness each day, and the meditation that inevitably follows, was the source for this change, but now, sitting next to Simone and watching the sky colors fade into each other, I think maybe nature’s raw, uncensored beauty has healing powers.