#7: Deeper into the Shadows
"I watched—wanting, fearing, doubting, hoping."
(Last time, the guys met an old man in the woods, who began to tell them a story.)
“It’s an old story. It goes all the way back to the first days, back when the Dutch were just coming, and the Shawnee walked the land. The Shawnee had tales of these spirit creatures that lived in the woods. It was said that these spirits guarded something. What? Nobody knew. Maybe it was a treasure or the fountain of youth or maybe a sacred something or other. But everyone knew this: Say. Out. Of. The. Forest.
“Now the Dutch came, and heard about these things. But do you think they listened to the Shawnee? They thought it was just a superstition—like the world being flat. But they saw real fear in the eyes of the Shawnee. When some doubters went out to explore this forest, well, they ran back to the settlement with their tails tucked between their legs. Dark shapes running all around—weird howls filling the night.
“So the settlers left the forest alone, at first. But more men came. More houses were built. And so one day, one man—we call him Farmer Jon, the third son of a third son—wanted more land for himself. And he decided he was going to take it from these woods.
“Farmer Jon was gonna show them all. Day and night he chopped wood. His two farmhands feared. His wife and children feared. But he kept working. He built his farm deeper in the forest—in the turf of the boskrijgers, as they came called. Folks said they saw odd shadows in the night. Farmer Jon—he laughed at their fears. He would not give in. His farm grew bigger and bigger. And folks said that shadows deepened around his house.
“Farmer Jon’s crops failed. His livestock got sick. And one night, disaster struck. His youngest daughter had disappeared. The boskrijgers has stolen her, he believed, and he went out into the forest to save his beloved child. He took both the farmhands with him that night. Now, no one knows what happened. But only one farmhand returned—pale and scared. And he never spoke about what he saw. The forest—the boskrijgers—had taken revenge. And that was that. His widow and surviving children left the forest. No one wanted to settle in that homestead, and, eventually, the house and the fields disappeared as the forest took the land back. So the boskrijgers watch. Round these parts, sometimes, a farmer would go too deep hunting in the woods and never come back, or a little girl would go picking flowers and not return. Back when I was a child, I always heard, never go deep in the woods after sundown. And if you should hear the eee-eee-eee, the sound of their war cry, you better run, run, and never look back.”
“What happens if you look back?” Ralph asked, taking the stem of his pipe away from his mouth.
Chester shrugged. “No one ever told me for sure. But I heard some things. That their eyes will catch you. That they would take you back to their forbidden home.”
“That’s a good story,” Danny said.
Chester shook his head. “There are a chunk of stories out here, and some of them are more true than you might think at first. I’ve heard things—I’ve seen things—I can’t explain, and things I won’t pretend to understand. But they’ve happened. And there, in the dark forest, you face a lot that makes you wonder.” He then stood up and stretched. “Well, I got a puzzle to get to. You boys have a good night. I got a shovel by the camper if you gotta use the bathroom. Be careful out there.”
As the gray fell to black, the mound of flame grew before us. I watched it, sometimes pushing sticks into the heart of the flames. I soon lost them in the red torrents. We ate chicken noodle soup heated by the fire. Time passed within the wavering shadows cast by the crackling flames. Ralph had rested his head on his bookbag, and his eyes had drifted closed. Stretched out on a blanket, Danny had cracked open another space opera, which he read by a small flashlight clamped to the back cover. Pat flipped through the remainder of the newspaper that Danny had used to start the fire.
I watched the licking dance of flames. I thought of the road, of the miles that reached behind and ahead—somewhere—in the shadows. I stood up and walked away from the fire. Chester was right. You could see the stars so much clearer out there. I wonder what she would say to her friends about me. If she talked about me—if they remembered me—at all.
A cry tore through the night. A gust of wind roiled the campsite, and the leaves whirled with that song. And then silence.
“What was that?” Ralph asked, poking up his wide-eyed head and brushing a leaf away from his face.
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “It could be a wolf or a coyote.”
“Or a boskrijger,” Pat said.
Danny shook his head. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a boskrijger, seeing as boskrijgers don’t exist.”
“That’s what Farmer Jon thought, and...”
“He probably didn’t exist, either.”
Ralph slumped a little higher. “Go and investigate it, then, if you’re so sure it’s not a boskrijger.”
“I’m not going out there.”
“If they’re just so fictionally impossible, why are you so afraid?”
Danny replied, “Wolves and coyotes and bears are dangerous enough. They can hurt you more than a made-up story.”
“You should have said that to Chester,” Pat said with a nod at the camper. Soft golden light and oldies music poured out of one of the windows.
“I was trying to be polite. It’s possible that there’s something there in the woods, but we need evidence for it. Real evidence. Like a picture or something.”
That’s the problem with scientists!” Pat proclaimed. “Just because they can’t get a fairy on film, they think they don’t exist!”
“Well, yes.”
Ralph sighed. “Ah, no. You can’t cage all the facts with a—with a periodic table or statistics or anything else. What’s wrong with a little fantasy, to show us what’s beyond ourselves?”
There was so much out there, in the shadows beyond. Incidents of surprise and wonder. Festivals and oceans and weddings. It would be like some fantasy to swagger into Kentucky for a rendezvous with some girl I had met on the highway—to dance with a smiling mask.
“There’s nothing wrong with fantasy,” Danny said and picked up his novel for emphasis, “as long as you recognize it as fantasy.”
I had learned that fantasies all too often flee before the cool clarity of experience’s gimlet beam. Fairy baubles would turn out to be the metallic wrappers of chewing gum littered in the underbrush, and will-o-the-wisps would be revealed to be just marsh gas. The smile would be practiced politeness and not a sudden effusion of joy or affection or empathy. And maybe nothing would have been meant at all.
Danny continued, “Fantasies can hurt you, if you believe in them too much.”
The waning fire stretched the shadows. The darkness and light fell into a sinuous curve, which leaped and sputtered and crashed. The languorous, thick-pulsed dance pulled at the limits of my eye. The flame glowed with a black light, and the night seemed to distill into an irradiating glow.
I watched—wanting, fearing, doubting, hoping.
Happy Days
The flashing technicolor twilight rolled over my face. Some nights, I couldn’t bear to put the lights back on—anything more than the TV’s glow was too bright.
“Charlie,” my mother said from behind me.
I pivoted to see her concerned face. “Oh, hi, Mom.”
“It’s—it’s four in the morning. Aren’t you tired?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” I was almost too weary to sleep. “I should go to bed soon.”
She sat down on the couch next to me. “Oh my boy—oh my dreamy, dreamy Carly.” My grandfather—her father—had called me that. She only used “Carly” when she was feeling very sentimental.
“Mom…”
“What are you watching?”
It was a “Happy Days” rerun. “I’m sorry, Mom. This must be a disappointment—to have son like this.”
I awoke with an urgent throbbing between my legs—the revenge of cheap beer. I fumbled my sneakers onto my bare feet and quietly unzipped the front of the tent. A few hours in a sleeping bag on the hard ground usually stiffened my back, but not that night, when the warm air ran like palm fronds over my sweaty face and bare legs. I left the path to go deeper into the woods.
As I emptied my bladder, I heard a splash in the distance, just at the edge of my awareness. Its ripples reached in tenuous, glittering rings through the air. Another splash. A woman’s laughter wove through the air like a sliver of gossamer silk. Its notes set my pulse drumming in the back of my head. Who—
The laughter again. Or was it a call? I hadn’t remembered seeing a river or a pond in the daylight. But now the wind carried watery tumults to my ear. I turned around and scanned the forest around me.
I heard it again. I knew I could follow it. So, in my boxer shorts and sneakers, I went forward in pursuit. I would have to make my own path. I walked like hunters of old did: quiet, deliberate, with supreme concentration. The vast forest—underbrush, dead leaves, giant oaks, and all—seemed almost too alive in the stillness. I slipped as I tried to step over a fallen tree branch coiled with briars. The leaves gave way, my ankle turned, and only a dancing step forward kept me from falling.
The night had its dangers. The canopy of leaves allowed only lunar hints, glints, and portents through. I stalked through a curling landscape of silver-etched shadows. Plants brushed against my legs like reaching hands. Vines and tree roots writhed around me. Sounds—crunching, fluttering, loping, running, thrashing, knocking—gave flashes of evidence of life around me. A jagged cry ripped through the night. What else walked around me? Perhaps witches were gathering for some festival, with their infernal servants wrangling victims for the latest sacrifice. Perhaps the shades of warriors from ancient tribes glided through the woods. Maybe a farmer’s daughter, searching for a home long ago ransacked by time. Maybe another sleepwalker staggering through the woods.
As I went deeper into the woods, the whispers of glamour grew louder. The laughter and splashes struck with more force.
I stalked toward a row of trees that stood like columns before a clearing. I edged near one of the trees, and peeked around its scaled trunk. A pool glittered in the cloud-strained moonlight. Silvery speckles danced over the body of the woman swimming in the pool.
I watched her, and lost myself in the gazing.
The water flowed around her body as sinuously as smoke. Her laughter seemed as unfathomable as the pool in which she so easily swam. It seemed as glossy as her shoulder-length brown hair.
Even as I recognized her, she seemed to recognize me and waved her arm, soft and smooth, in invitation.
She laughed again and turned, paddling in the water. I felt like I had been splashed in the face. What swam beneath that dark water!? My chest inflamed and my face flushed, I kicked off my sneakers. Stripping off my striped boxers, I ran as fast as I could toward the water.
I thundered into the dark wet, and the water was cool in the night. The shock stole my breath. A sudden gasp, a momentary, thrilling grasping—water slipping over my chest, my face, my thighs.
At the first touch of water, my limbs struggled with an alien force. But eagerness, the night’s insinuative promise, all the songs of wand’ring minstrels set to the clear-toned lyre—these helped me leap through my vain incompetence. Desire made a wonder of inexperience, and mystery squeezed vigor out of uncertainty. And thrashing through the water to the beckoning of a lady’s silver hands, I drew close—close—closer still.
My body swollen with new-born delight, my sharp breaths dancing, my blood all afire, mind swimming in the glamour of the night, I reached far out to dare for my desire.
And—she flew! Her flesh flashed away from my hand. My chest’s innards curled like a corkscrew. I wondered where she was, water ripples the only trace of flesh so fair. And the laughter returned. She returned, a little away from me. She blew a kiss. What fancy-frenzy captured me? What invitation in those teasing fingers, which drew me close, which I could not resist! She slipped beneath the water. I dove underneath.
Nothing could be seen in the watery darkness. A few desperate surges, and then I gaspingly returned to the moonlight. She was there, a few paces from me. Was she naked? The dark told little, and the water hid all below her shoulders, as her brown locks skimmed the water’s lim. She laughed and dropped deep once more.
I dove after her, and again she eluded my grasp. Again and again, as I seemed on the cusp of touching her hand or meeting her face, she slipped away somehow. And her laughter never seemed any closer than it had by the water’s edge. I swam under the water to touch her foot—though I hadn’t seen her feet, really—and my hands grasped at dark water. Again and again, I stretched and followed; again and again, nothing. I didn’t know how long we danced in this ballet of chase and escape, but my arms grew tired and my heart was pounding so hard that it might have created ripples in the water. At last, she stopped her circling, turned to me, and beckoned before slipping under the water.
Concentrating all my might for one final dash, I drew deeper of the air than I had before and then charged into the water. The darkness only met me there. As deep as I could dive—my limbs were so weary, my muscles nearly flaccid from the hard labor of water—it was not deep enough. My will was nearly spent, but I gambled a few moments more. And then it was over. I was done, beaten by that silent, slippery blackness. I waited for a single beat of balance, when the water held me in perfect suspension. Then that, too, ended, and I came surging up.
I had been too long. Even above the surface, I still struggled for breath. Spasms racked my body as I wretched up coughs of water. I was so tired—so worn out on the wheel of vain endeavor. Instead of laughter, the woods now echoed with the barking and spewing of a reckless swimmer.
“Hello?” I called. “Are you there? Is anyone there?”
Wherever she was, it wasn’t here anymore.
Later, the light gray felt of the early dawn wiped away any shadows as I reclined in the tent. Fingering the hem of my plaid boxers, I stared up at the trees and sky through the mesh window above me. Scattered bird-calls wheeled like yo-yos through the air, and I couldn’t tell if the birds sang in desire or warning.
I would go to Kentucky.
“To Kiss and to Catch (Is a Commonplace Thing)”
from Mickey Kent, Say Hi Again, Mickey! (1963)
To kiss and to catch
Is a commonplace thing
To mix and to match
Is to make my heart sing,
But kissin’ and catchin’
Don’t add up to matchin’
With—oh!—it’s just a little too much!
You set me all a-burning,
And you set me in a spin,
And how the hour’s yearning-burning-yearning-burning,
And you—well where can I begin?
So give me a touch, a touch of a touch,
And give me a kiss, a kiss of a touch,
And oh how I need you—I need you so much!
And—oh!—it’s just a little too much!
And—oh!—it’s just a little—
Oh!—it’s just a little—
Just a little little—
And—oh!—it’s just a little too much!