The Backwoods

(I)

The feeling made Patricia think of the few times in college she’d smoked pot. A warm buzz, a mental lightness, as though an aspect of her persona were floating. She’d been at the cookout for only an hour before it plainly occurred to her that she was not herself, and this—to a high-strung D.C. attorney—was not necessarily a bad thing.

It must’ve been that stuff I was drinking, she decided rather giddily. Aid or whatever they call it, kicked up with Judy’s booze.

But . . .

So what?

It was a party, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t have a good time. She picked at more food off and on, and drank more ald. Judy was already drunk, but that was to be expected. Everybody seemed to be fading off into the darkness tinged by firelight. Patricia found herself chatting happily with townsfolk and Squatters she didn’t even know, and several times, when she noticed Ernie talking to some Squatter girls, she felt some pangs of trifling jealously, after which she just laughed at herself.

Eventually she lost track of Judy entirely, and when she couldn’t make out Gordon Felps anywhere in the crowd, she had to wonder, but that just caused her to laugh too. I’m getting hammered! she realized next, but with Judy not around to top off her ald with vodka, where was the inebriation coming from? Had somebody else spiked the Squatter concoction and not told anyone? That had to be the answer.

“How come we never dated in high school?” Ernie appeared out of the dark to ask right up front. He looked a little crocked, too. But what would compel such an overt question?

Maybe the fact that I practically pulled his pants down in the woods the other day? she chided herself. Suddenly, though, she seemed remorseful. “I don’t know, Ernie. I guess it was all me. I didn’t care about anything except getting an education and getting out, after . . . well, you know. What happened at Bowen’s Field.”

Ernie nodded, probably not expecting his question to cause such a dark note. He just nodded, then thrust a plate at her. “Try a mushroom stuffed with crab roe. They’re great.”

Patricia laughed. She ate one, then said very quickly, “I wish we had, though, Ernie,” and wandered off.

“Wish we had what?” he practically shouted after her.

She giggled and wended through more people, sensing him behind her. “Where’s Chief Sutter?” she asked to change the subject. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I think I saw him leave earlier.”

Patricia stopped, peering between some shoulders toward the woods. She grabbed Ernie’s arm. “Is that Everd Stanherd out there?”

“Can’t be,” he said, squinting himself. “He’s wanted by the police.”

Even now she could see the figure standing between some trees, firelight from one of the cooking pits shifting across the thin, old face. For a moment it appeared as though his intensely bright eyes looked right at Patricia. “Don’t you see him? He’s right . . .” But before she could point, a pretty Squatter girl stepped right in front of them. Her ripe young body filled the skimpy shorts and makeshift top. A trinketlike cross dangled about her swollen cleavage, and the smile on her face seemed wanton, mischievous. Squiggles of some kind of dark face paint adorned her cheeks—like a child at a carnival. More bizarre lines curved down her bare belly and around her navel, while still more traveled down voluptuous legs.

Patricia was taken aback when the girl kissed both her and Ernie on the cheek, then placed pendants around their necks, after which she scurried away into the crowd.

“What is this?” Patricia touched the object about her neck, a furry preserved animal foot of some kind. “A rabbit’s foot?”

“Not quite. It’s a badger’s foot.”

Patricia winced. “Gross! Why would she . . . Like the Hawaiians and their leis, some kind of welcoming gift?”

Ernie snorted a laugh. “It’s sort of a fertility thing with them, a romance thing.”

“Huh?”

“Lemme put it this way. The Squatters must think you ‘n’ me would make a great couple. Guess they didn’t see your wedding ring.”

Patricia’s fingers were unconsciously diddling with the dried foot. “How strange.”

Ernie was obviously frustrated and maybe even embarrassed. He peered back through the crowd. “What were you sayin’? You saw Everd? If ya did, we should probably call Chief Sutter.”

“I don’t think for a minute that Everd Stanherd had anything to do with Junior Caudill’s death, and neither do you.”

“No, I guess I don’t,” Ernie verified, “but why’d he ‘n’ his wife head for the hills the minute folks started sayin’ he did?”

Patricia couldn’t answer. She stood on her tiptoes to look over the crowd. The fire pit raged, but there was no one standing between the trees where she thought she’d seen the Squatter elder. “Maybe it wasn’t even him,” she dismissed. “Just someone who looked like him. What was it they called him? Remember the guy who gave us the oysters the other day?”

“Oh, Regert, yeah. That name the clan has for Everd is sawon. It means ‘seer,’ or somethin’ like that.”

Patricia kept looking out. “Damn, I’m sure it was him, though.” Without even thinking, she grabbed Ernie’s hand and pulled. “Come on; let’s go check.”

She was tugging him gently through the crowd. More firelit faces grinned at them as they passed, many of them adorned as the girl had been, with the carnival-like face paint. Again, and even more strongly, Patricia didn’t feel like herself, but whoever that other self was . . . she enjoyed the sensation. Another part, though—some remnant of her rational self—probably knew what her subconscious was up to. Lewd thoughts shouted at her in the baldest truth: I’m drunk, I’m horny, and, gee, look what I’m doing now. I’m hauling this man into the woods on a stupid pretext—the same man I almost had sex with the other day. I keep telling myself that I’d never cheat on Byron, but . . . what am I really doing?

She couldn’t even fool herself.

Their footfalls crunched into the woods. I should let go of his hand now, she thought. But she didn’t. She led him in deeper, until the moonlight showed them a footpath. “Let’s go this way,” she said. “He probably came this way.”

Ernie said nothing, but he was frowning.

Moonlight painted one tree whose bark had been scraped away, and into the bare wood beneath more odd Squatter etchings had been cut around a makeshift cross. Would this be her good luck? And what of the bizarre badger foot the painted girl had christened them both with?

The night shimmered. As the cicadas thrummed, Patricia felt herself merging into that other self. Her heartbeat had already picked up; she could feel her nipples aching against the fabric of the sheer blouse. The evening heat was caressing her, sensitizing her skin through pores seeping sweat.

“Everd ain’t out here, Patricia,” Ernie finally spoke his mind. He likely had already deciphered her motives, even before she had herself. “This is dumb. Let’s go back”

“No,” she whispered. She was secretly desperate. “I’m serious. I really did see him.” Now her fingers seemed manic, diddling with the dried foot as though it were some talisman that would embolden her.

“I’m goin’ back,” he insisted, agitation in his voice. “We both know what’s goin’ on here.”

“What?” she questioned ineptly. “What do you—”

“If we stay out here, we’re both gonna get in trouble, and it ain’t gonna lead to nothin’ no ways. I ain’t comin’ out here just to be jerked around.”

Patricia let go of his hand and stopped. “Ernie, that’s ridiculous,” she insisted, but her head was reeling—not so much from inebriation as from lust. Lust felt stuffed in her head. Her knees were almost shaking. “I really do want to talk to Everd Stanherd—”

“Fine. Then go talk to him. I ain’t gettin’ myself set up again to wind up lookin’ like a fool. I’m goin’ back.”

When he turned, her heart twisted in her chest. All reason was lost now, along with her values and self-respect. “Ernie, wait. . . .”

He gruffed a sigh, stopped midstep, and jerked back around.

Patricia had already unbuttoned her blouse. Her breasts felt hot and very heavy on her chest now, as though all that drunken desire had pushed more blood into them. She skimmed off the blouse and let it fall to the twigs. She was leaning against the skinned tree, her head just under the crudely adorned Squatter cross. Her eyes riveted into him.

“Christ, I feel sorry for your husband, Patricia, ’cos you are one right pain in the ass when you drink.”

She barely heard him. She arched her back against the tree, elucidating her breasts, and next she actually caressed them in her hands. When she pliered the nipples between her fingers, she moaned out loud.

“You’re drunk,” he declared.

“I know, but so what?”

She slipped her shorts down to midthigh, then openly played a hand through her scarlet pubic hair.

Ernie gnawed his lip, then decided. “You’re all bark and no bite, Patricia. You got some midlife fucked-up city-chick thing goin’ on, like teasin’ it up with some redneck sucker who had a crush on you since junior high’s gonna show ya somethin’ about yourself you didn’t know. It’s just bullshit, and I ain’t buyin’ it, and even if you were game, all that’d do is make ya feel guilty in the morning ‘cos you’re fuckin’ married and you and I both know you ain’t gonna cheat on your husband. You might act like you’d cheat on him, but you ain’t gonna do it, so’s I’m wastin’ my damn time standin’ here like a fuckin’ idiot.”

Ernie turned around and walked back to the cookout.

The reality collided with her. She was almost in tears when she pulled her shorts up and got back into her blouse. She stumbled to the fringes of the gathering, finally letting some common sense reach through her drunkenness. I am really one screwed-up woman. It doesn’t have anything to do with my childhood, or the rape or my parents. It’s got nothing to do with Dr. Sallee or Byron or Ernie or anyone. It’s me, and I’ve got to get my act together, and I’ve got to start right now. . . .

The party was still in full swing as some of the older Squatters lit the great bonfire in the middle of the field. Patricia edged around the crowd, cloaking herself in shadows. She didn’t look to see where Ernie was and she felt too embarrassed to allow herself to be seen. After several deep breaths, she felt a little less drunk, and she walked back up the hill.

The only person who even noticed her leaving was Everd Stanherd himself, who was looking out from the trees he’d been hiding in. He watched her walk home.

“Maybe she can help us, like you said,” Marthe Stanherd remarked. She held her husband’s hand in the dark.

“Maybe, my love,” he replied in his strange, buoyant accent. “Or maybe I’m wrong about everything, and the great Lord God has deemed me unfit to be a seer even for myself. . . .”