When I reached the thicket at the edge of the yard I started right in, hacking away, chopping at the dense knots of vines and thorn-bushes. The machete was dull and it took a few whacks of the blade to cut through even the thinnest brush. Before long I"d sweated through my shirt, but I kept slashing. It was exhilarating, the glint and scream of the blade, the shudder it sent up my arm when it hit. Some of the vines sprayed a sweet, stinking liquid from their severed stumps.
Eventually, I found myself on the other side of the main thicket. The brush began to thin out, and soon enough I could hack through the vegetation without much trouble. I"d never been this deep behind the yard before. The old lemon fields were dried out, but tall, reedy gra.s.ses and bulbous weeds covered the area. I could hear rodents moving beneath me, and every few moments the gra.s.s rustled with the movements of larger animals I couldn"t see.
I walked for a long time, hacking away at everything in front of me. This is my life, I thought, and brought down the blade. I slashed my way forward. This is my f.u.c.king face. I was so busy swinging the blade I almost walked right into the women"s prison. I didn"t even notice the perimeter until it was in front me, a wide, glowing green line in the gra.s.s.
I looked across the line at the prison grounds on the other side. They appeared even more stunning than through the telescope; the manicured lawns glistened. The trees were clipped perfectly. The chalk-white walking paths wound across the gra.s.s.
I braced myself for an alarm to sound, and then waved the machete over the line. But nothing happened.
I put one foot on the other side of the line, then the other. Still no alarm. Maybe it was silent, I thought, but somehow I knew that there was no warning system.
I crossed the gra.s.s to the main walking path. Up ahead, the barracks rose from behind a line of trees. I headed toward them, the machete at my side.
The grounds were entirely silent. No crickets, no owls. Just the faint crunch of my feet on the path. I pa.s.sed the jogging track, the small pond filled with koi, the vegetable garden with its little rows of trellised stalks. I pa.s.sed the picnic tables where the women sat for lunch every day.
When I reached the barracks, I saw that the only thing blocking me from entering was a screen door. Slowly, I pulled the door open and stepped inside.
The barracks were darker than I expected. Small emergency plug-ins lined the base of the walls, casting dim puddles of light along the linoleum floor. All around me, I could hear the women breathing in their sleep. I walked past the first few bunks. I saw the eye surgeon in one of the bottom beds. She looked different in person. She slept on her back, her lips parted just slightly. I leaned over her, examining her face in the faint light. With her gla.s.ses off and her features relaxed she looked much prettier than she had through the telescope. Younger, more innocent.
I walked on. I pa.s.sed the jazz drummer; I pa.s.sed Shirley Sayles, the golfer, sleeping with a tanned arm thrown over her eyes. As I continued on, I noticed that many of the beds had photographs taped to the headboards. One woman had a picture of a puppy sleeping on a windowsill. Another had a photograph of a little boy with a balloon tied to his wrist by a ribbon. Some of the women had belongings or charms beside their beds, on shelves built into the walls: a stuffed giraffe, a library book, a snow globe with a miniature tropical resort inside.
Then I saw her. Rose Deach was sleeping on a bottom bunk near the window. I could tell it was her by her hair, white against the dark pillow.
I was careful to be quiet as I made my way over. There were no pictures taped to her headboard. No toys or trinkets or books on her shelf. There was just Rose, lying alone in the narrow bed.
I bent down over her, examining her face, which was raked across with deep wrinkles. Her expression was stern. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her brow was creased, like she was thinking hard about something. She had black scabs growing on her scalp, visible through her thinning hair. Her breath came in slow rasps.
"Rose," I whispered, excited now. "Rose." But her eyes stayed closed.
I reached down and opened her hand. Then I placed the machete in her palm and closed her fingers around the handle.
Her eyes fluttered opened. I felt my throat seize. Even through the darkness I could see how yellow her eyes were.
"Rose," I said.
I thought she might start, or even scream, but she just stared at me, blinking away sleep.
She turned her head and glanced at the machete, her thin fingers wrapped around its handle, and then she looked back at me. Slowly, she pushed herself up to a sitting position.
I pointed to my chest. "What do you see?" I whispered. "Here."
She was looking straight at me, but she said nothing.
"Please," I said. I opened my shirt so she could see the s.p.a.ce over my heart.
"What do you see?"
Rose just stared.
"I"m begging you, Rose. Tell me." I felt tears forming in my eyes. My voice was cracking. I needed to know.
"Jacob," came a woman"s voice. Laura"s voice. I spun around, but the hall was dark and silent.
"Jacob. Where are you?"
She sounded close and far away at the same time, like someone shouting through the wind.
"Jacob?"
I realized her voice was coming from the walkie-talkie still clipped to my belt. The red light on the top had come on.
"Jake, I can"t find you."
Rose Deach was looking at me, dead-on. I took her hand and placed it over my bare chest. Her palm was cool and rough and sent a chill through my ribs, but I held it against my skin. I stared into her eyes, crying now.
"Jacob, where are you?" said Laura.
I held Rose Deach"s hand against my chest. "Here," I said, pressing her palm hard over my heart. "Here."
IN THE SUMMER, I SIT UP IN MY HUNTING STAND AND WATCH THE children get thin. There"s a camp for obese youth just down the road from my house-a fat farm-and from the stand, perched high up in a ba.s.swood tree, I have a clear view of the whole facility. I can see the different buildings scattered around the grounds: the cafeteria, the gymnasium, the rows of cabins. I can see the playing fields. I can even see the campers themselves, lumbering about, half-nude and shameful.
The place is called a camp, but to watch the campers is to know that it"s a farm. There are all kinds of camp activities: the children go swimming, barging around in a small pond; they play soccer and tennis, even basketball. But they do everything dressed in uniforms, shorts and T-shirts made of a black, rubbery material. The uniforms are designed to absorb the sunlight, to suck it right up and make the kids run with sweat. They have strips of mesh around the belly and down the thighs to let things funnel, and with my rifleman"s binoculars, complete with adjustable crosshairs, I can see the sweat draining down the children"s stomachs and thick legs, leaving shiny, slug-like trails across the playing courts.
All summer I watch the children run and jump and heave under that fat, watch them struggle to shake it off. Occasionally, they manage it, too. They peel off their uniforms and emerge pale and slender, looking slightly bewildered, blinking into the bright August sunshine. But more often than not they simply achieve weird, uneven forms of fat. One girl last summer lost only the rings of lard around her neck, and another, just the turkey flaps beneath her arms. I once saw a boy who was bony from the waist up, but mammoth around the a.s.s and legs, like his guts had been stuffed down to make room for something that had never arrived. Always, though, before I"m ready for it, winter charges in from the east, hammering everything flat with cold, and the children scatter, having emptied all they could of themselves into the ground.
Now and then one gets loose. Sometimes a boy, but usually a girl. I"ll be outside with my metal detector, sweeping it through the woods by the road, and she"ll barrel through in a flurry of snapping twigs. Once, a black boy, about eleven years old, got into my house. When I came home from work I found him standing in my kitchen, cooking popcorn in a pan. He was tremendous, probably twice my weight even though I stood at least a foot taller. He could have carried the stove out on one shoulder.
He didn"t see me at first. My cat was crouched beside the refrigerator, trembling. The boy had flung off the top of his uniform and his t.i.tanic, black b.r.e.a.s.t.s were slick with sweat. A veil of cobwebs clung to his hair. I was amazed and terrified by him, by his need; I could have watched him for hours. He mumbled frantically at the kernels to pop. He talked right into that furious, sizzling pan.
"Come on and pop, motherf.u.c.kers!" he said to the kernels, rattling them over the flame. Sparks of b.u.t.ter shot from the pan. "Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!"
But they wouldn"t; he"d doused them with too much salt. At the camp, the children weren"t allowed to have salty foods because salt made them retain water. So this boy had poured salt all along the floor of the pan, smothering the kernels in it, cooking salt into them until they looked like tiny white baby-teeth burning on the stove.
"Pop!" he yelled again. "Pop up!"
Then he saw me.
I suddenly realized I was caked in salt-dried sweat from being out all day in the July heat.
He stared at me, his mouth hanging open.
"Easy there," I said.
He put down the pan and raised his hands toward me.
"Let"s just calm it down, okay? Calm. Calm!"
He trudged around from beside the stove. My cat hissed hysterically. I backed into the wall, knocking off a pilot"s medal I"d dug up the day before.
He kept coming, those horrible b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his swinging from side to side.
"Wait a second!" I said, huddled in the corner. "Stop!" But then he moved past me, out the door, and was gone.
Certain nights, even now, I have nightmares about him, nightmares that instead of leaving the house, he descends on me, clamping down with his hands and mouth. Before I can stop him, he"s licking the salt off my body with his giant, monstrous tongue, licking it off my face and my chest; he"s sucking it off my arms, off my fingers; and then he"s biting at me, eating me; he"s tearing strips of flesh from my back with his teeth as I scream and struggle to escape, he"s ripping chunks out of my thighs. He eats and eats and eats, in a wild effort to get back the very thing he just spent three hot months trying to lose.
Not long ago, I met a woman who was very famous. I never found out what, exactly, she was famous for, but it seemed everyone knew who she was except for me. I worked in Glens Creek at the time. I sold hunting equipment in the back of a cavernous sporting goods store: rifles and shotguns, but also oddities such as turkey decoys and shrunken plastic flutes that would turn your voice into the call of a l.u.s.ty mule deer.
She came into the store at the very start of summer. An enormous man walked in behind her. Even in his shorts and flip-flops he reminded me of one of those heroic, iron statues you see in front of museums or military tombs. When I first saw him I thought that maybe he was the one who"d done that to her face.
She wore a baseball cap pulled down low on her head and huge sungla.s.ses over her eyes. But still, there was no hiding the damage. Her cheeks were puffy and swollen, and her eyes lay in deep black-and-yellow webs of bruising. Trails of st.i.tching crossed the skin beneath her eyelids, and her nose had bulged to a shiny mound with one stringy blue vein running down the spine like a river on a map. Beneath her chin hung a rubbery yellow bag, into which some kind of fluid was draining.
"Excuse me," she said to me. "Do you sell archery equipment?" She seemed nervous, jittery. Her eyes kept shifting around behind the lenses of her sungla.s.ses, which were blue at the top, fading to a sparkling gold at the bottom. How wonderful to look out and see the world through those lenses, I thought. Like having a gla.s.s image of dawn over each eye.
I took her to the store"s archery section, her man following us. As we made our way through the aisles, I became aware that people were looking in our direction, but I a.s.sumed this was because of her injuries.
I showed her the different kinds of bows-the longbows, the recurves, the compounds-and I recommended what I thought would be best for a beginner.
"And you find that archery is fun?" she said, looking at me a little intensely. "I mean, it"s something you can really get into?"
"If you take to it, I guess," I said.
"But you don"t find it fun?" she said, biting her thumbnail.
I shrugged. "Me? Not so much."
She gave a tired little laugh and clasped her hands behind her head, causing her nipples to press at the fabric of her shirt in a way that sent a warm tremble through my stomach. "Okay, here"s the thing," she said. "I"m a lady with a lot of time on her hands and I want to find something to do that"s private and fun. What do you do for fun around here? By yourself."
"Me? I collect things," I said. "If you"re staying nearby, you should get yourself a metal detector and see what you can find in the ground. The woods up the road from town used to be a kind of dumping area."
A man carrying a Big Wheels box stared at us as he slowly pa.s.sed the entrance to our aisle. The woman shot a nervous glance over her shoulder. "Go looking for things in the ground," she said.
"It"s what I do alone," I said.
She looked down the aisle again, but it was empty except for the two of us and her man. "All right, you"ve sold me," she said. "Where are your metal detectors?"
I suddenly realized we didn"t sell them. I told her so, but offered to lend her one of my own. "I have two," I said. "Just tell me your address and I"ll drop it off."
"My address?" she said. She looked at me for a moment. Behind her, her man took a canteen from the rack, unscrewed the cap, and peered into the empty calfskin pouch.
"Listen," she said, "you seem like a nice guy, but let me just emphasize what an evil person it would make you to put me through anything while I was in this kind of condition, okay?"
"What do you mean?"
She sighed. "What I mean is, I wouldn"t even have come to town, but I feel like I"m going stir-crazy sitting in my house all day," she said. "What I mean is, look at my face."
She lifted her sungla.s.ses to give me a better view of her injuries, but all I saw were her eyes. They were the lightest blue, almost white. Tiny blue rafts in that storm of a face.
"Your eyes are pretty," I said, before I could help it. As soon as the words were out, I felt my face go red. I"d never said anything like that to a woman I didn"t know well.
"My eyes are pretty?" she said, staring at me. For an awful moment I thought she was about to call her man over to destroy me. Instead, she laughed, causing the bag beneath her jaw to jump around in an oddly pleasant, girlish kind of way. Then she took a pen from her pocket and wrote down her address. "It"s Sat.u.r.day tomorrow. If you"re off, come by in the morning, around ten, and you can show me how to use the metal detector."
I told her ten would be fine.
"I"m Grace, by the way," she said, and put her hand out.
I shook it. "Wade," I said.
"This scavenging better be fun, Wade," she said, smiling and pointing her finger at me in a playful way. "Don"t let me down, now." Then she turned and left, her man trailing after her.
As soon as she"d gone, Haymont, my supervisor, hurried over from behind a rack of animal urines. "That was her, wasn"t it?" he said, breathing fast. "I"d heard she was staying somewhere nearby, but I never thought she"d come in here. I can"t believe she talked to you of all people!" He laughed. "You"re probably the one person on earth who hasn"t heard of her."
"Who?" I said.
"Christ, Wade," he said, already rushing to the window. "If you don"t know, I"m not going to tell you."
My cat is blind. There"s nothing wrong with his eyes-his eyes are perfect-but they"ve been disconnected from his brain. I found him through an ad in the paper. The university used him in a lab test, is why he"s blind. As soon as he was born, the people in the lab sewed his eyes shut and kept him like that for three weeks. Finally, after all that time meowing in the dark, they plucked out the st.i.tches and pried open his little eyelids. And what they found was that although there was nothing wrong with his eyes anatomically, they didn"t work anymore. The doctors tried it again and again with other kittens, and every time the same thing happened. What they proved was that if a cat doesn"t learn how to use something during that first, critical period-not just its eyes, but its ears or even its voice-it never will. The critical periods for some kittens are very short. They only last a matter of days, a matter of hours.
My cat"s name is Sonny. He"s gray with orange stripes and I try to take him everywhere with me. The morning I set out for Grace"s house, Sonny lay curled up beside me on the pa.s.senger seat of my truck, his face resting on his paws.
The address proved difficult to find. The house was set back from the main road, at the end of a long, rutted dirt path that wound deep into the woods. When I finally arrived, the size of the house surprised me. It looked like an old hunting lodge, with log walls and high chimneys of piled gray stone at either end of its mountainous roof.
Grace emerged from the lodge"s front door wearing a tank top and shorts made of a pink towel-like material. Her whole body was tanned a rich, b.u.t.tery brown and streamlined in a way I"d never encountered in real life.
"So, this is your weapon of choice, huh?" she said as I pulled the metal detector from the truck. The bag beneath her chin was empty today. It looked like a yellow rubber bib.
I showed Grace how to work the detector, how to hold the neck close to her stomach so as not to hurt her back, how to wave the pan over the ground in slow, wide arcs. I explained that fast clicks meant precious metal, and that lesser kinds like nickel or steel caused more of a low, static sound. I tossed some coins on the ground so she could hear the chatter.
"I don"t know, Wade. I lost something at the beach once when I was a kid and they looked for it with one of these things...to no avail," she said, smiling at me with exaggerated skepticism as she slowly moved the detector over the coins.
"If you don"t like it, I"ll bring over the archery equipment tomorrow," I said, and then started back to my truck.
I was about to tell her good-bye, when she said, "Hey, Wade, why don"t you come along today?"
I hadn"t considered this. I tried to imagine spending the afternoon with someone. The last time I had real company was months ago.
She glanced at her man. "No offense to Petyr, but I could use a fresh face around here. And you"re not a weirdo, right?" she said.
I told her I wasn"t a weirdo.
"Good. It"s settled. Let"s start scavenging."
And so we did. I let Sonny out so he could rest in the shade beside the truck, and then the three of us set off into the woods behind the house, Petyr walking behind Grace and me.
At first I felt nervous, being around someone new, but the day was ideal, warm and sunny, and soon enough I began to relax. The metal detector gave off gentle, bird-like clucking noises as we walked. A soft breeze blew up from town, causing the Indian gra.s.s along the forest floor to sway back and forth and tickle our bare legs.
As we made our way deeper into the woods, I explained to Grace about the surrounding land, about why it was so rich with collectibles. I told her about the air force base that used to exist ten miles west of town many years ago, back during the two World Wars. And about how the air force men of those days believed that, upon returning from combat in foreign lands, it was good luck to throw something out of the plane just before it touched down, some token of your time overseas. "If you did," I explained to Grace, "according to the superst.i.tion, you wouldn"t be haunted by anything you"d seen or done while you were away. The person you"d been couldn"t follow you home."
"What kinds of stuff have you found?" Grace asked. A jay flapped up behind us and I remembered Petyr. Despite his size, Petyr was unusually stealthy.