Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (21 page)

The air has a wet feel that thins as I walk. My pack shifts, and I reach around and pat it like an old friend. I will miss not having it back there. Trees grow small—stubby outgrowths not much higher than my waist—and soon the trail veers above tree line. Up ahead, the glow from two headlamps sweeps through the night. The half moon is low, behind a film of horizontal clouds. A car travels a road in the flatlands, headlights barely visible in low-hanging fog.

I hike upward, pausing to seek out the white blazes when I lose the trail in the rocks. A gray strip on the eastern horizon signals dawn is on its way. I wrap my hands around metal rods driven into the rock, swing myself to the left, out into open space. Although I cannot see what is beneath me, I sense a long fall. The risk, the sudden exposure jacks up my heartbeat. I hang in the air, revel in the feeling. The crawl of adrenaline through my veins feels the same as when I shot coke, and I hang for a long time before continuing up the trail.

My direction is north, to the top, but what then? I have several options, trails that take different routes off the mountain, but they all lead to civilization and a different kind of life. The stars and the moon fade, lights on the road are no longer visible. The headlamps above me switch off, and two shadowy figures toil on.
I eat a candy bar, a minty chocolate, savor the almonds in the center. My legs power upward—flesh, tendon, and bone—two pistons that will never again be as strong. A pebble works its way between my sock and my right heel, and still I hike. I enjoy the bite into my flesh. I revel in the feeling of feeling.

I whoop and hike onward. I hear nothing from above, watch Richard and Simone crest the peak and walk out of sight. I think of Roxie and hope Simone's prediction is wrong, that Roxie will stay away from coke and lead a good life. I don't know where I'm headed, but it's anywhere but Atlanta.

I reach the crest, only it's a false peak and not the summit, and I walk upward. A jet, a silver sliver on a westbound journey, rumbles across the sky. Maybe I'll fly to get where I'm going. I have enough money left from my inheritance to go first class, and I'll sit in the cabin with my worn-out shoes and backpack, a man whose smile holds more depth and knowledge than it did months ago. People will look at me and think this man next to the window knows things they don't. They will remember me long after the seat belts are fastened and dinner is served.

There is a spring beside the trail and I kneel and fill my water bottle. I drink and the wetness drips off my lips and down my cheeks. The coldness, the purity, the cleanness of taste. Sensations. That's what a thru-hike is. A string of sensations that meld into one flowing river. I laugh, think I sound like Richard.

The sun becomes a redness above the horizon, and Katahdin casts a blocky shadow to the west. The mountain towers above a fall foliage that looks brown in the early light. The only smells are my own, the accumulation of sweat on my pack, the stink of dirty socks and a dirtier body. I have grown accustomed to the unwashed during my long walk.

And then I am on top, next to the summit sign, and the rush that goes through me pounds against my temples. I look to my right, to where Richard and Simone sit on a boulder. The drop beneath their feet—a cliff that slopes 2,500 feet to Chimney Pond—is the most dramatic elevation change on the Appalachian Trail.

We are alone, the only hikers to start for the summit before daylight. Simone talks to Richard. Watches me. I jerk back to reality, a suddenness that leaves me with a churning stomach. Richard shakes his head, like he has changed his mind. He rises, this friend of mine for the last 2,160 miles.

“Don't,” I say. “Don't you fucking jump, Richard.”

He nods and I know it will be all right, that we'll walk off this mountain and find him a rehab, or maybe we'll walk off this mountain and keep walking. It doesn't matter. We'll walk out of here instead of choosing a solution of no return.

Simone's hand goes out and I see what is about to happen and my mouth opens and no words come out. A shove. Hard. On his left leg for he is turned away from the cliff and headed for safety. And then he is not.

Richard stumbles and steps off the edge. He looks at me, and his face transforms into a tough, unyielding veneer. I watch him tumble in a slow somersault, see his body bounce off the granite. His pack rips off his back and follows him downward. He is no doubt dead long before he splashes into Chimney Pond.

“He changed his mind!” I scream, or think I scream it because my mind has gone numb and I might not have said any such thing.

“No, he just wanted to shake your hand before he died. He admired you. Said if he was more like you he wouldn't be in the shape he was in.”

“He changed his mind!”

Simone stands, edges backward until only her toes remain on this earth. Behind her, off to the right and down the mountain, small figures are beginning to show against the skyline on the Knife Edge Trail, a path that follows a thin ridge to the summit. Simone says something I can't hear, and I ask her to say it again.

“I'm not a bad person,” she says. “I—”

“You murdered him!”

“None of this is my fault.”

My voice is hoarse, loud, and I force my lips to form understandable words. “You
murdered
him.”

The wind picks up, a steady blow from the north, and chilliness creeps in at the base of my neck. I'm having trouble sorting my thoughts. A series of trail memories, snapshots, flit through my mind. Mostly I see white blazes on trees, on rocks, on fence posts, on light poles where the trail meandered through towns. I see campsites and sunrises, taste the sweat on my lips, feel the pain that was with me during my journey. The memories have a calming effect and end with Simone and me, hip to hip, watching the sunset at Pen Mar Park. Now I focus on her, on that serious face looking my way, and say the first words that come to mind.

“We can get you help. We can walk down this mountain and work this out.”

She has a curious look. “You still don't understand. I planned this from the beginning of my hike, before I ever met you. From step one on Springer, if I ended the trail as I began, I planned to jump.”

“Bullshit.”

“It's true.”

“No,” I say. “You walked this trail because you
like
pushing people over the edge.”

“There is
nothing
I like about it!” Her hands turn into fists. “I
hate
this part of me.”

The hikers on Knife Edge move slowly upward, tiny figures making their way one step at a time. I walk toward Simone, pass the summit sign, the symbol of the end of my journey, and I feel nothing. A bird lands on the rocks, a head that cocks to the side, beady eyes surrounded by brown feathers. I kick a rock in the bird's direction, and the bird flaps its wings and sails off the mountain and out of sight. Simone's words mix with saliva, a verbal spray in my direction.

“Don't come any closer,” she says.

I continue walking, gaze on her face, my feet finding their way on their own.

“I could have killed you a hundred times,” she says. “I could have waited for you in the dark this morning and shoved you over the edge.”

“But you didn't.”

Simone looks back and down, raises her arms to her sides.

“I was a gymnast,” she says. “I had a fiancé named Devon, a better man than you, and I almost killed him.”

I cover the four feet between us in one quick step, and I have one of her wrists in mine. The drop off at my feet is a startling expanse, an invitation to death. Her free hand goes to my face, a gentle touch, and she kisses me like the dead in the car wreck.

“You are doomed,” Simone says.

She steps off the ledge, and the weight of her falling body slams me to my knees. I wrap an arm around a boulder, strain in the opposite direction, have no leverage, and cannot lift her even a little. She is motionless, waiting for the inevitable. I wish for a ranger to walk up, but rangers rarely stray from their vehicles
and there is no help in sight. My shoulder aches, the muscles and tendons pulling downward. My arm, where it hugs the boulder, feels like one giant cramp. I scuttle my feet to the right, find a crack, and jam my toe downward. My jaw digs into the cliff, a hard granite line pushing up against the bone, and I concentrate on my grip, will it to remain strong, to hold on until a hiker walks up and gives me some help, only I know any chance of that happening is a good hour or more away. . . .

My hand slides across her fingers, and I don't know if I lost concentration or my grip weakened so much I couldn't hold on. Her fingertips leave mine and she tumbles into open space and begins a downward fall. She hits the slope, ricochets off the granite time and again, a violence that I prefer not to watch and I turn away from the edge long before she reaches bottom. The hikers on Knife Edge, tiny silhouettes against the sky, continue on, oblivious to anything but their struggle.

I walk to the summit sign and lie on the rocks, rest my head on a boulder. I have lost my best friend and my girlfriend in the space of ten minutes' time. Immense sadness comes over me, a feeling of loneliness that I doubt I'll ever shake. Simone's last words echo through my mind. I don't know if she was right or wrong about me. I might have a destructive gene or I might like coke a little too much. The end result is the same.

14

I DO NOT
tell the park rangers about the dead man in Georgia, to do that would put myself in the position of explaining the funeral pyre, but I tell them everything else and I tell them in the same way again and again. The FBI performs DNA tests on fabric from the old woman in New Hampshire, and the results confirm my story.

I move into a small apartment in downtown Millinocket, an hour's drive from Katahdin, work for a small restaurant as a fry cook. I fry oysters and shrimp and fish in one fryer, french fries in the other. Pay is twelve dollars an hour, and by the time winter passes and spring begins, I receive a raise to fourteen.

On the anniversary of the start of my thru-hike, I pack my backpack and take a bus to the West, ride in silence, endure the crush of people, the stink from the restroom, the numerous town stops along the way. In Denver, I take a bus north, arrive seven hours later in Hawkinsville, Wyoming.

The depot is empty, no drunk and his dog on the sidewalk. The feed store, the mustiness, smells the same. I walk through town, pack on my back, past the bar where I stood outside and
watched my father all those evenings. In the shadow of a clapboard building, a boy sits on the sidewalk and stares vacantly across the street. He wears a ripped T-shirt, has silver dumbbells in both earlobes. I shove him with my foot and he falls to his side, gaze slowly refocusing. A crack pipe rolls in a semicircle.

I walk down the sidewalk, past a string of buildings with glass so etched from the sand their interiors are too blurry to make out, come to a woman in a dress hiked up to her ass. She wears red stilettos and walks in small steps, asks me to buy her a drink.

“I don't drink,” I say.

I walk on, feel the stretch of my legs and the swing of my arms. It feels good to be free of the bus, away from the interminable vibration of the motor, under this sunshine. I walk to the motel where the one-legged whore and I spent the night, turn onto the street where I grew up. The houses are modest one and two bedrooms, a few have white fences around the yard. A chained pit bull growls as I walk past.

The house on the end is vacant, windows busted out, weeds high enough to cover the front steps. A bank
FOR SALE
sign sits in the yard. I am not surprised there have been no takers.

On the porch, I shoulder open the door. It swings freely and I step inside. Pop's pill bottles litter the floor, the sofa where he and I and my mother sat and watched television, the end tables, every available flat spot in the room. Dust covers everything. I walk to the rear of the house, down the hallway, to the closet next to his bed, stand in front of the slatted door and wonder why I am here. I have no morbid curiosity, no thrill in seeking out death, no desire to look inside and see the blood stains. The bed is made up,
covers tight to the pillow, like he tried to tidy up before he died. I was conceived here, in this room connected to the closet where my father put the shotgun to his head.

*   *   *

I walk the road to the edge of town, step over the sand-clogged gutter and angle toward the graveyard. Pop's marker stands alone, marked by a headstone that slopes toward Hawkinsville. I step carefully through the weeds, wary of rattlesnakes, see only a lizard on a pile of rocks.

At the headstone, I kneel and shove sand under the edge, tamp it down. Try to think of something good about Pop. He was true to his job, I'll give him that. He never let a dog go, killed every last one that wasn't claimed by its owner. I wonder what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger, if he thought of me or if he thought of anything at all.

The sun is setting, a fire to the west, clouds an orange tint. Now is the time when horses come to the spring, but I don't remember how to get there. I wipe sand off my hands, watch the trickle turn to dust in the breeze. I tell Pop that I am not him, that I will never be him, that I am a different man from the boy he knew. I tell him about Richard and Simone, and how we hiked the Appalachian Trail. I tell him life never turns out like we want it. I talk to him until dark, say good-bye, and head for town. There are trails to walk. I feel them inside me, a gravity that tugs me in their direction. I need to keep moving, can't stay in one place long, and don't know why.

I do know one thing for sure. Death is not the answer.

Death is
never
the answer.

Acknowledgments

KERRI KOLEN, MY
editor, brought out the best of this novel. I am humbled to have worked with her.

My heart goes out to my agent, Leigh Feldman, and I'd like to thank her for being the first person to read and believe in
Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail.
Without her I'd still be in that little attic in Virginia.