suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio, I probably
would have been court-martialed and shot.
I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that something was
different It took a moment or two to figure it out: although the moon was down, I could
see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch said quarter to five. It was dawn.
I stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked two dozen feet away from the lumped-
together bodies of my friends, and pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake
the night-willies; I could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling.
I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly
chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment
the new day felt too good to share.
Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows
under the trees and bushes evaporated Like puddles after a shower. The air had that
peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a famous series of hot days. Birds
that had maybe cowered all night just as we had done now began to twitter self-
importantly. A wren landed on top of the deadfall from which we had taken our firewood,
preened itself, and then flew off.
I don’t know how long I sat there on that rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky
as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long enough for my butt to start
complaining, anyway. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer
standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.
My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my
mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot, dry excitement. I didn’t
move. I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown but a dark, dusty black – the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewellery displays. Her small ears were
scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for
curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined
cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and
the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I was seeing was some sort of
gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.
We looked at each other for a long time … I think it was a long time. Then she turned
and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping insouciantly. She
found grass and began to crop. I couldn’t believe it. She had begun a) crop. She didn’t
look back at me and didn’t need to; I was frozen solid.
Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the doe’s head came
up, cocked back towards Castle Rock. She stood there, her branch-black nose working on
the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the
woods with no sound but one rotted branch, which broke with a sound like a track ref s
starter-gun.
I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the actual sound
of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded back down the bank to where
the others were sleeping.
The freight’s slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching. There was
some funny, nervous talk about ‘the case of the screaming ghost’, as Chris called it, but
not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it seemed more foolish than interesting –
almost embarrassing. Best forgotten.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it.
That was one thing I kept to myself. I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now,
today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near
inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a
moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life
– my first day in the bush in Viet Nam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we
were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there
because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be
hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized head, thank God); the long, crazy
weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the
scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But five hundred million Red
Chinese don’t give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because
words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
21
The tracks now bent south-west and ran through tangles of second-growth fir and
heavy underbrush. We got a breakfast of late blackberries from some of these bushes, but
berries never fill you up; your stomach just gives them a thirty-minute option and then
begins growling again. We went back to the tracks – it was about eight o’clock by then –
and took five. Our mouths were a dark purple and our naked torsos were scratched from
the blackberry brambles. Vern wished glumly aloud for a couple of fried eggs with bacon
on the side.
That was the last day of the heat, and I think it was the worst of all. The early scud of
clouds melted away and by nine o’clock the sky was a pale steel colour that made you feel
hotter just looking at it The sweat rolled and ran from our chests and backs, leaving clean
streaks through the accumulated soot and grime. Mosquitoes and blackflies whirled and
dipped around our heads in aggravating clouds. Knowing that we had eight, maybe ten
miles to go didn’t make us feel any better. Yet the fascination of the thing drew us on and
kept us walking faster than we had any business doing, in that heat. We were all crazy to
see that kid’s body -I can’t put it any more simply or honestly than that Whether it was harmless or whether it turned out to have the power to murder sleep with a hundred
mangled dreams, we wanted to see it. I think that we had come to believe we deserved to
see it.
It was about nine-thirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up ahead — they shouted
to Vern and me. We ran over to where they were standing. Chris was laughing, delighted.
‘Look there! Beavers did that!’ He pointed.
It was the work of beavers, all right. A large-bore culvert ran under the railroad
embankment a little way ahead, and the beavers had sealed the right end with one of their
neat and industrious little dams – sticks and branches cemented together with leaves,
twigs, and dried mud. Beavers are busy little fuckers, all right Behind the dam was a clear
and shining pool of water, brilliantly mirroring the sunlight Beaver houses humped up
and out of the water in several places – they looked like wooden igloos. A small creek
trickled into the far end of the pool, and the trees which bordered it were gnawed a clean
bone-white to a height of almost three feet in places.
‘Railroad’ll clean this shit out pretty soon,’ Chris said.
‘Why?’ Vern asked.
“They can’t have a pool here,’ Chris said, ‘it’d undercut their previous railroad line.
That’s why they put that culvert in there to start with. They’ll shoot them some beavers
and scare off the rest and then knock out their dam. Then this’ll go back to being a bog,
like it probably was before.’
‘I think that eats the meat,’ Teddy said.
Chris shrugged. ‘Who cares about beavers? Not the Great Western and Southern
Maine, that’s for sure.’
‘You think it’s deep enough to swim in?’ Vern asked, looking hungrily at the water.
‘One way to find out,’ Teddy said.
‘Who goes first?’ I asked.
‘Me!’ Chris said. He went running down the bank, kicking off his sneakers and untying
his shirt from around his waist with a jerk. He pushed his pants and undershorts down
with a single shove of his thumbs. He balanced, first on one leg and them on the other, to
get his socks. Then he made a shallow dive. He came up shaking his head to get his wet
hair out of his eyes. ‘It’s fuckin’ great!’ he shouted.