DEADWOOD
an excerpt

November – Thanksgiving week. Tuesday.

The bugs were the first to notice. They scattered in dismay, their bright wings whirring in protest through the decaying leaf litter as they hurriedly abandoned what had, moments before, been a sumptuous feast of rotting flesh. The maggots were next, spilling out of navel, ears and nasal cavity, their wriggly bodies unhappily tumbling over each other in their hurry to escape. Beetle larvae, too newly hatched to get their bearings, shriveled where they were, ejected from the regenerating meat with surprising force and dropping onto the ground as lifeless husks. Blood pumped, slowly at first, finding it's way through a filigree of veins and tissue, pushing the oxygen into the starving cells, flushing away the irreparable damage as new, stronger tissue took its place. With the blood came heat and the blue tinge of the pasty loose flesh was gradually replaced with a rosy hue, the skin tightening with vigor as the nerves tingled reflexively. Beneath the still closed lids the gray film over the pupils dissolved to leave them clear, the brown and green shades of the hazel iris’ once again rich in their colored depths. An unseen spark of dream fragments and ancient memory flooded the many dormant paths of the jellied brain till the grey labyrinth surged with firing neurons, the mental lightning clearing away the decay. In the depths of sleep the eardrums pulsed to the waves of blood the now-whole heart sent out to into the limbs till warmth reached even the nail beds of the curled fingers and toes, the spasmed claws still painted with chipped pearl polish relaxing till they were limp, gently cradled by the earth beneath them. Cracked bones knit together as nutrients filled the dried out marrow and strengthened once again. Where the fragments of skull lay exposed to the air new flesh overlaid the old and the pieces merged together tightly. Here, if one looked closely, the repair was obvious, the web of fracture lines still faintly visible, as unexplainable as the new, denser bone now overlaying them was. The skull and adjacent flesh whole again, new follicles sprouted long fine hair as old ones tightened, sending rejuvenating proteins along the dull strands till they shone with health. It was in the hair that the first evidence of the changed life truly showed. Where before a rich chestnut mane had crowned the small neat head and fine long dark brows and lashes framed the eyes, the hair was now ash-blonde, the red cast gone. Instead the new color seemed almost silver appearing to almost be tinted a faint green in the patchy forest light. Finally the lungs filled, the punctured left sack now healed over and filling with breath for the first time in three days. The lips, no longer cracked, popped open with a sigh. The first exhale expelling the last of the foul fetid air inside; the first intake refreshingly sweet, tingling the buds on the tongue with hints of mint and orange blossom. With breath came waking and the body stirred under the meager covering of leaves and tattered clothing.
At first the comforting smell of rich loam lulled the body to indulge in a lazy stretch but feeling the gritty dirt grind on the newly sensitive skin between its fingers and toes a sudden jumble of disturbing images flooded the suddenly alert mind and the eyelids flew open in a panic. Dead leaves flew into the air as the body jerked upright then floated back down gently to be lost in the drifts gathered around it on the ground. In the second it took the pupils to adjust, the images faded, though a vague sense of panic remained and the girl, for that’s what she was - she knew that much, turned her head in quick birdlike movements to look here and there, trying to quickly get her bearings.
I’m on the ground – I’ve been lying on the ground – in a wood, but I’m safe. Was I in danger? I’m dirty – filthy. The roots of this tree here feel like they’ve grown into my ribs but I can feel everything else is fine. My fingers, my toes – they’re all ok, not bruised at all. My head is fine too – why does that surprise me? I’ve ruined my clothes – are these my clothes? I feel a little cold. It’s late autumn by the looks of the trees. I should be freezing here in the shade with the sun so low. The ground’s warm, though. Perhaps it was a warm day and I fell asleep here. Why would I fall asleep in the wood? That’s not like me – I think. Maybe it is. Except for these roots I’m quite comfortable. Is there something strange about that? I think perhaps there should be…
Distant barking made her turn her head again to search for the source and, realizing the bark was a specific alert, self-consciously pull her legs in under her as she sat up all the way. The barking approached and she heard rapid footfalls of more than one person following close behind. Suddenly aware of how barely covered she was the girl scrambled backward so her spine was pressed against the larger roots of the huge old tree and wrapped her arms around her chest and legs as best she could. The dog bounded into view, short golden coat catching the last of the sunlight, tail high and pink tongue lolling happily as it stopped in front of her.
“Hi boy.”
The sound came out like a croak and she realized she was thirsty, really thirsty - a grumble rolled through her belly - and hungry. Really hungry. She balled her fist into her stomach in an effort to halt the rumbles but it wasn’t that, that stopped the sound. A sudden crash of sticks and leaves set her fingers and stomach clenching and she turned wide eyes on a wildly swaying hedge of late season blackberries. Panting hard, a man stumbled through a clump of brambles and, cursing, almost tripped over the now patiently sitting dog. He was tall with a red and black check flannel shirt that barely covered the top of his heavy gray pants. His heavily soled black boots seemed to match the dense beard covering his mouth, making it hard to see his eyes…
Hunter - steel trap and a broken knife. Thick yellow mud walked over the newly washed wood floors of the ranger station…
The girl blinked at the sudden images, unable to make any sense of them or even be sure they were associated with this man. She’d never seen him before – had she?
“This better be something this time Meatloaf,” he said, trying to swipe an unseen spider web from his neck.
She saw him notice her then, though she hadn’t moved from the moment he appeared, as awkwardly positioned as she was, feeling almost tangled amongst the roots of a giant tree. Her fine light hair lifted in wisps as an errant breeze swirled through the river of dead leaves collected in the gully, adding an otherworldiness to the moment until she blinked, feeling a sudden itch in her nose. She scrunched up her face in a futile effort to stall a sneeze but it came out anyway. The unexpected loudness of the sound broke the eeriness of the moment and the dog stood on all fours again, wagging its tail happily as it looked over its shoulder at the man. Tension drained out of the man’s stance, replacing his startled surprise with a grimace of annoyance.
“This isn’t the ‘something’ we talked about, Boy,” he whispered.
The girl’s eyes hardened slightly as her ears picked up both the words and the disappointment behind them. The dog whined, high and almost inaudibly as the tail stopped wagging. What had he been expecting to find? The man’s head tilted up as other footsteps began crashing through the brush and he cleared his throat before speaking to her a little too loudly, arms and hands held wide and unthreateningly as he approached her like a wild animal.
“Are you OK Miss? Are you lost? ‘Cause this is private property you know…”
He broke off mid-sentence as a large, slightly heavy man in a sheriff’s uniform pushed past him and with professional concern, crouched in front of her uncomfortably to address her.
“You’re OK now Miss..” his eyes quickly scanned her hands and face and must have seen something there as he hastily amended his choice of word to ‘Ma’am’. “Do you know where you are?”
The girl creased her forehead and opened her mouth but couldn’t think what to reply. She was in the woods, wasn’t she? Wasn’t that obvious? Then belatedly the question went deeper. Which woods? The other man had said she was on private property but she would never trespass, would she? Perhaps she would. She closed her mouth again, confused and moved her hand from her stomach to curl her fingers around her arm. Then she noticed it too. Her ring was gone. She stared at her finger, distracted by the even paler line of flesh exposed there. She’d had a ring and she hadn’t taken it off – not for years. Was she married? She didn’t feel married but then thinking about it she couldn’t say what being married should feel like. She held her hand up to the light but the memory wouldn’t come and she tightened her lips as she frowned.
“Do you know your name Ma’am?”
The voice, though kind and gentle, seemed to come from a long way off and she jumped, eyes wide again as she looked at the man squatting in front of her. She opened her mouth to reply automatically to the question but her lips wouldn’t form a sound that felt right so again, she just closed her mouth. The policeman sighed, his shoulders bowing just enough so she registered it, then he shifted with a grimace, tugging awkwardly at his pants leg as he turned ungracefully around to motion to the two other uniforms who were in the clearing now as well. She didn’t remember them arriving but then it was beginning to appear she didn’t remember much at all. One hurriedly brought forward a coarse blanket then waited a few beats while the other walked around them in a semi-circle, rapidly clicking off a round of pictures using the compact camera slung around his neck, before giving a brief nod and concentrating the lens on small surrounding details. The blanket felt rough against her skin and though it looked like wool it felt strangely unnatural, like the fibers had been man-made. Why she would notice such a thing she didn’t know. The more thoughts she had the more she wondered if any of them were typical for her or if this odd situation was causing her to think odd things. She concentrated on what she did know.
“I’m thirsty,” she all but whispered and found the small top of a plastic thermos lid thrust into her hands.
She twisted in the huddle of blanket to thank whomever had brought it but all the men – no, there was a woman too – ‘people’ - all the people were busy doing other things. One kept placing little bright yellow plastic numbers on the ground while the kind, heavier one was turned away, talking earnestly into some sort of phone held close to his mouth. She concentrated and heard him say “doesn’t appear to be hurt but she should be examined anyway..” then looked away before she heard anything more disturbing. She noticed they all had plastic gloves on and thought vaguely she should tell them there were no diseases here they could catch, no poisonous mould spores hidden in the leaf litter and no virus carrying wood fleas. Here, wherever ‘here’ was, was healthy – more so than any of them. She wasn’t sure why she knew that either and suspected she didn’t really want to – it was a different sort of sense – not her. No, that wasn’t right. It WAS her but it was new. Her thoughts shied away from the subject and she turned to the cup in her hand.
The water it held was cold, fresh, filled from a spring, not from a tap – she knew somehow she would have tasted the pipes it traveled through and the joints between them old and new. She still hadn’t answered the policeman. She didn’t really want to try again. What she wanted was food, something fresh, and sleep – she was suddenly so tired, even though she’d just had a very long nap here in the… ‘here’. She found herself frowning again when ‘here’ couldn’t be identified and looked up to see a scowl on the face of the man with the checked shirt. It was almost as if he were ‘put out’ by them finding her. The thought made her smile slightly before it tumbled together with the suggestion that perhaps she had been – and in that case was - trespassing. Suddenly it was very important to her to know ‘something’ – something true, something now before she lost all sense of who she was. Her throat no longer dry, thanks to the water, she tried to catch the attention of the woman officer working at bagging samples of dirt and leaves near her feet.
“Where am I?”
Her sudden question startled the woman but she recovered quickly and smoothly bagged and sealed the leaf she’d been inspecting before putting it down to give her full attention to the girl.
“You’re in Creek Run Valley Miss, on Lemmuel’s land – or so he claims anyway,” she jerked her chin at the man with the dog, her doubt evident in her furrowed eyebrows before she smoothed it away to a neutral look again. “Do you remember how you got here?”
The girl waited for an image, a memory, a sense, anything but when nothing came she shook her head and bit her lip. Why couldn’t she remember? The woman patted her blanket-covered knee awkwardly with a gloved hand then withdrew it hastily as she realized what she’d done.
“Never mind. Just you concentrate on feeling better. We’ll figure everything out when we get back to the station.”
The girl looked away – she did feel better. She felt the best she ever had, at least that’s what it felt like at the moment. She felt the blood pumping steadily through her arteries and veins and the oxygen flooding each cell. She felt a strength in her bones that seemed new – had she been weak before… before now? She didn’t know. She thought perhaps she had but she couldn’t be sure. She let her head fall forward and her hair swung down from her shoulder and across her face.
Where did the color go? I was dark wasn’t I? Or was I red? No. I don’t know. It feels like mine but when I close my eyes and open them this isn’t the color I expect to see. So is this new or did I change the color before… before now? I should be able to remember something as basic as the color of my own hair, shouldn’t I?
She shook her head slightly in irritation. She should remember her name too. It didn’t get more basic than that.
The older policeman approached her and crouched in front of her again. She could feel his knees creak in protest and sense the uncomfortable tightening of his uniform against his middle, shortening his breath and flustering him more than her liked though he didn’t show it.
“Can you stand Mi-Ma’am? We really should get you somewhere warm and dry.”
He didn’t say ‘safe’ but she heard it anyway and wondered why he’d think she wasn’t safe right here, next to this large, old – very old - tree.
“There’s a car waiting for us on the road just over the hill. We’ll go back to the station and you can call someone from there,” he paused, as if he’d just heard what he’d said and wished he’d chosen different words. “Don’t worry Miss – Ma’am . We have very good people there and they’ll know just how best to help you…”
‘Unlike me,’ –again the unspoken words fairly hung in the air between them and he hauled himself back to his feet and looked at his watch. The girl clutched at the blanket and tried not to think about who all the people she couldn’t remember and wouldn’t be able to call – a mother, a friend, a husband? Was there anyone who was missing her right now? Suddenly the tree at her back felt like the only friend she knew… and she was about to leave it, possibly to never see it again – especially if Lemmuel had anything to say about it.
She glanced over at the man who’d found her first and saw he was no longer watching the policeman interestedly. He looked bored and more put out than ever, one hand absently ruffling the dog’s fur as if out of habit. The dog itself was still watching though. Head on his paws as he lay at the feet of his master his large brown eyes shifted back and forth between the girl and the activity, the forehead wrinkling like an expressive golden mono-brow. He appeared more brown than golden now, the sunlight having given way to the dusky gloom. Flashlight beams began bobbing within the activity, their light pitifully pale and weak compared to the even the last rays of sun that had now sunk beyond the horizon and the girl realized she hadn’t noticed the lack of light. It wasn’t because she was confused or disoriented by the circumstances. It was because she could still things see almost as well as when she first woke. She could still see the mud dried on the dog’s collar and how his claws were a little jagged on one paw. She could still see the repaired patch of stitching, done in a light blue thread, on the left elbow of the man’s checkered shirt. She saw, too, that an empty evidence bag had been dropped close by and wondered if anyone would see the clear square of plastic to pick it up before they left. She also wondered if she was seeing these things with her eyes or if her vision was being helped by that odd sense she couldn’t seem to shake since waking. Though she couldn’t be sure she was fairly certain that being able to feel the natural or man-made properties of something was not ‘normal’ – not for her and possibly not for anyone. The realization that she could see and sense more than the other people in the gully felt good, a secret with the pleasure of warm flannel sheets on a chilly night, at least initially. In only a few seconds the sensation melted and gave way to a creeping dread. What she knew was strange and it made her different. She didn’t know if it was bad- different or good- different and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. What was even worse was not knowing if she’d always been this way or if it was ‘new’. Her jaw tensed even further at the thought – her teeth pressed so hard together she had to make an effort not to grind them.
‘New’ means something happened. Something happened - to me - and now I’m different. If that something was big enough – I don’t want to think traumatic enough – to change me then surely that’s something I wouldn’t forget. Maybe this is more normal than it feels. If I don’t want to think about it I’m sure others would feel the same when they realized all the things they could suddenly know about… Who am I kidding? It’s just me. Why do I feel so certain about that? Am I still ‘me’? And who is Me? Why can’t I remember?
The girl put a hand gently on the root she was leaning against and stroked it sadly. The answers felt close by, buried almost – both in the ground and in the depths of her mind. A mind full of locked doors that even the owner didn’t have the key to and one she was feeling a little dizzy trying to find her way through. She closed her eyes as mentally she sat down and hugged herself. Perhaps if she would stay still someone could come and find her, like Mama had always said…
Mama!
A gentle smile in a wrinkled face swam up out the deep darkness occupying each turn in her mind then dissipated frustratingly quickly as she tried to focus on the details. All that was left was the sense of wood grain of an old knotted door. If she squinted she could imagine faces there but none of them belonged to that brief smile she had seen. She opened her eyes again and realized she’d turned her body to the tree trunk, pressing herself to it as if there were arms there she could find comfort in. The saddest thing was that it had worked – she had felt better there. And someone had found her. It just wasn’t the Someone she’d hoped for – whoever that might be. Instead here were these strangers, working around her like she was another lost person – another piece of paperwork – except for the awkwardness. For all their professional manner they still seemed confused at finding her, even more confused that she was not hurt in anyway. She was glad she hadn’t said anything about the water, or about the other things she’d noticed. They didn’t need to know just how abnormal her being there might really be, though she couldn’t figure it out herself. Self-consciously she hiked the blanket around herself again and tilted herself forward, wondering exactly how odd she must appear. No doubt they would consider it all part of her ‘trauma’. That was a strange thing. All the officers acted as if something awful had happened. It was odd that they happened to be equipped with cameras and evidence bags – not quite a standard search party – at least she didn’t think so. What the large man seemed most concerned with was that she was ok – except for her memory of course - as if that were - what was the feeling she kept sensing? – unexpected. Even Lemmuel had been surprised, though not in a concerned way. They had been searching for something. Of that there was no doubt. Instead of ‘it’ they found her. She wondered if they would be as bothered if she were ‘not fine’… Again her thoughts shied away from the implication and she took refuge in the blankness of her memory, letting herself be led gently away from the warmth of the old tree when the time came.
As she crunched her way through the ankle deep leaf drifts in her bare feet she registered snatches of sentences that made no sense:
‘..consistent with other locations..’
‘…no victim though the etymological evidence indicating the presence of a possible…’
‘...coincidence? I don’t know…almost fits the profile but there seem to be key differences…’
‘..not going to help as a witness… potential to screw up our case…’
The girl stopped concentrating on the nonsensical words. Nothing made any sense and it only made for more confusing questions among the many she already had. She breathed in, trying to inhale the comforting sense of the forest around her before it was replaced by the almost discordant smells of metal, plastic and leather that had stayed with the sheriff’s men even as they sifted through the rich fresh ground and surrounding foliage. She held the one image she knew was true in her mind and let herself be comforted like a small child in the glow of the fading smile. All the other images and words she let wash around her like an errant tide until even the smell of old mold under the seats in the sheriff’s car couldn’t stop her from drifting into a dreamless sleep. The last thought she had was that she’d forgotten to say goodbye.