LITMIR.BIZ

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up and folds away when I’m not here. I almost want to come check my special place.

      • • •

      She awakens hours later, upstairs in the cabin, on the air mattress. Their mummy bags are zipped together, Dave’s legs pressing hot against hers. Moonlight shines in through a tall, triangular window, the rafters slanting darkly overhead. Dave’s hands, on the pillow, smell of cooking gas. Rolling over, she looks closely at his face, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, his thick eyebrows, scattered whiskers. She certainly loves him, despite himself; it’s easy to love him when he’s asleep.

      Then she hears something. Outside. Footsteps, on the loose gravel of the drive. They stop, as if to trick her, then begin again, heavy and slow. She tries to see through the window, but the plastic is scratched and cloudy, and the sounds are coming from around the side of the cabin. Now she hears a low moaning, perhaps slurred words.

      She pulls herself from the bag without waking Dave and crawls along the wooden floor, to the square hole where the ladder stretches down. She wears a long flannel shirt. The rungs of the ladder are sharp against her bare feet. Downstairs, she ducks at the last moment, just missing the darkly hanging lantern. She opens the door.

      It’s lighter outside. Standing still, she hears no sound. She steps down from the porch, and then there’s a motion, over where the truck is parked. She doesn’t move; in her hand, she holds a thick branch, someone’s walking stick. She considers waking Dave, but she knows she’s the one to handle a situation like this—he would only complicate it.

      Whoever is out there is hiding on the other side of the truck, a dark figure visible through the windows. Melissa holds her breath. The light rises from all surfaces; it seems to cast no shadows. The air is cool, the smell of the pines sharper, yet fainter, without the sun to warm the needles. At first, only the head sticks out, then the two sharp bumps of shoulders. Melissa steps closer, to get a clearer view. The cow turns its neck, rubs its jaw back and forth on the hood of the truck. It wheezes, stomps its hoof.

      Melissa holds out her hand as if she has something to offer, as if she is no threat, and the cow seems to be frozen there, waiting for her. They are only ten feet apart when it jerks its head away and shuffles into the trees, hardly lifting its feet, kicking gravel as it goes.

      The light is thick and soft around Melissa, and there’s the faint sound of something like dark wings in the night, the nervous twitching of nocturnal creatures. In the morning she’ll try to explain this to Dave. She promises herself she won’t write about it in the notebook.

      • • •

      She has slept at least another hour when the knocking begins, someone rapping at the door, pausing, then beginning again. She shakes Dave until his eyes come open.

      “It’s your turn,” she says.

      “What?”

      “Something’s outside.”

      The knocking resumes, now more impatient. “That’s not a cow,” she says.

      “What are you talking about?” Dave sits up, hits his head on a rafter. “Damn.” He rubs above his ear, kicks his legs free from the sleeping bag.

      From downstairs comes the sound of the door swinging open, its bottom rasping along the floor, then uneven footsteps, something kicked against a wall.

      “Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice, straight through the floor beneath them, less than three feet away.

      “Hello,” Dave says.

      “We got a little problem up the road.”

      Melissa wants to sleep. The sound of the voice—shrill, demanding, wide awake—irritates her.

      “We could use a little help. My husband’s hurt, and it’s not so easy for me to move him around.”

      “Did you call someone?” Dave says.

      “I’m calling you. How would I call anyone? I don’t know where you’re from, but out here when a person asks for help it’s because they need it.”

      In the silence, Melissa watches Dave think; he’s trying to decide what to do, and she can tell he feels her watching him. He wants to make the right decision.

      “Am I going to have to come up there?” the woman says.

      • • •

      The woman drives, the truck jostling and creaking through the ruts. Dave sits next to her, watching the single headlight’s illumination. They’ve passed the painted sign twice, and he suspects they’re circling, backtracking, that the woman is in some kind of shock. She wears a red bandanna around her head. The skin on her face looks weathered in the dim light, her eyes small and round. She told him her name is Nancy; she’s been silent since, driving, her long, thin fingers tight around the steering wheel. He feels her looking at him, but every time he turns toward her she’s squinting through the windshield. He wonders what kind of problem it was—he’d assumed it was a car accident, but here she is with the vehicle.

      “Was your husband conscious when you left him?”

      “He was.”

      Dave holds the small, plastic emergency first-aid kit on his lap; when he bought it, three weeks ago, Melissa said it was a waste of money. She had stayed behind at the cabin, though Nancy seemed certain that they’d both be needed. Dave assured her it would be all right. He could feel Melissa turning stubborn.

      “Getting close,” Nancy says, leaning forward against the wheel.

      In the dashboard, the glass is broken, and the speedometer doesn’t even have a needle. There’s a dark, rectangular cave of wires where the radio had been. The truck rises over a gentle curve and then two headlights shine, off to the left, hidden back in the trees. Nancy slows and eases the truck over a small ditch, onto a hidden road; they keep on moving, slowly, under the trees, as if the single headlight nudges the trunks aside to make room.

      “Fool,” she says, squinting. She parks and leaves the truck running, twenty feet from the pair of headlights.

      A man steps out of the trees, into the lights. He is tall, with a thick, dark beard, a tangle of hair around his head. He wears a flannel shirt, suspenders. He’s already talking, his hands up to slow her, when Nancy opens the door.

      “I kept the lights on, like you said to, and he just walked into them and stood there, five minutes, staring at me, just asking me to put him down.”

      “Quiet,” Nancy says.

      “Is there an accident here?” Dave says. He sees the blood on the man’s hands.

      “You stay in the truck,” Nancy says, slamming the door.

      He watches through the windshield as the two of them walk a short distance away. What he took for headlights, he realizes, are actually two round halogen lamps, propped up on stones, a few feet apart; there’s no other vehicle. It’s clear that Nancy and the man are arguing, but he can’t hear them. The man is pointing at the truck, back at the road, and Nancy’s pointing into the woods. Turning, Dave looks in that direction, behind him, where the lamps are shining. Something large and red is hanging there, from the branch of a tree. It’s a body, a bloody body. He narrows his eyes, trying to focus. It’s some kind of animal, he decides. A deer, antlers almost resting on the ground, front hooves stretching down; the skin has been peeled off the flanks and hangs, doubled over the shoulders.

      He’s still looking back when the truck’s door opens.

      “Get out,” Nancy says.

      • • •

      Dave stands holding the first-aid kit, watching the truck drive away. Behind him, the man watches, too, holding a rifle in one hand and a long knife in the other. He must be over six and a half feet tall, pushing three hundred pounds, at least forty years old.

      “I guess she went after Melissa,” Dave says. “And they’ll come back.”

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