Here’s how I remember the woods of my childhood. Every tree, even the pines planted in strict rows by the forest service years ago, seemed different: one with sap seeping out in blisters in the heat, another with a branch knocked down, leaving a gnomelike face in the wood. The woods were a kind of nursery for not thinking, for just seeing and walking along. I liked running my eyes over details, over twigs and pine needles, over roadkill with intestines like spilled baggage on the asphalt. There were certain things I knew about the woods, but always, too, there were things I was sure I’d never seen before in my life. A crow fighting with a snapping turtle over a fast-food bag on the shoulder, for instance. Or a carpenter ant, appearing from out of nowhere on my wrist, dragging a small green caterpillar up my arm like a prize.
Or this. Halfway back to the Gardner house, a car passed me by. Then a hundred feet ahead, it stopped and began to back up. By that time, the sun was much lower in the sky. A woman in a white sun visor was driving, craning her neck around, but it was the man in the passenger seat who rolled his window down and spoke to me. In the back of the car sat two little kids, a boy and a girl, staring out.
“Hey,” the man said. “Everything okay?”
Their license plate said Illinois. Land of Lincoln.
I kept going.
The car, a station wagon with a canoe lashed to the roof, slowly followed along as I walked. Like one of those dogs you can’t get rid of.
The man had furry eyebrows. “We’re not trying to be creepy,” he said. “And you’re right to be wary, of course. But I think—”
The car drove over a fallen branch, which cracked very slowly and loudly.
The man went on. “I can’t help but think you look like you could use a ride somewhere? Do you need a ride somewhere? The map says it’s woods for fifty miles in this direction. Just lakes and woods.” He held the map out the window to show me. As if I didn’t know this already, as if this was news to me.
But he was watching my face very closely.
“Okay,” I said finally. Late afternoon was settling in around us. The bottle of aspirin was still in my hand. I felt calm, delivered. “It’s not far,” I promised.
In the backseat, the little kids in their shorts and T-shirts helped me buckle my seat belt.
I had to direct the car. I had to say “slow down” at the turnoff to Still Lake and then point the way in the shadows toward the narrow road that led to the Gardner cabin. The visored woman was a good driver, and she took it easy on the gravel roads. The woods passed by languidly, the branches a blue-green slurry through the windows. I wondered how long I could keep the woman driving—she was very trusting, I could tell. I had the feeling I could point down any backwoods road, any rutted path, no matter how remote, and she’d go where I said. When I found myself enjoying this thought, it felt like a betrayal of something, though I wasn’t sure what, so I urged the careful woman driver forward. I tried to warn her of bumps in the road, of future dangers. “Sometimes it’s hard to see deer. You gotta watch out if you’re driving at dusk. Keep that in mind for later. There’s no streetlights or anything.”
The woman gave me a little smile in the rearview mirror. Like: I know.
The man was into small talk, but not like Leo, who liked facts, or my dad who only did baseball, weather, and fish. He asked me where I was going. I said “home”—which I guess sounded about right to him, because he left it at that and started telling me about their campsite up near Turquoise Lake.
“Ever been there?”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “A million times.”
“Any tips?”
I thought about it. “There’s a bald eagle’s nest on the north shore.”
One of the little kids, the girl, said with all earnestness, “Cool.” She had out a notebook, and she wrote it down. Eagels Nest. At the top of that page it said Plans, and next to that was a second list for Memories. Here’s what she’d written down under that: Dead deer on the road. Girl who looks like a boy. Doesn’t know how to use a seet belt.
“S-E-A-T,” I told her.
She made the correction, rubbing at her paper with the eraser.
The father up front said, “We’d love to see a bald eagle.”
The mother said, “We’ve seen some hawks, but not any eagles. That would be great.”
I almost told them then: There’s something wrong with Paul.