I think — Ike’s breath is humid in Bit’s ear — I’m gonna get lucky tonight, and he laughs and staggers back inside.
Bit only wants to be alone. He pushes off into the dark of the forest to find a warm spot of dirt under a tree to curl up in. He wants the hold of the woods on him, the animals to crawl over him, he wants to sink into the roots of the trees and become the earth.
In this little hole at the base of the hill, the old stories fill him up again, the forest thick with magic, witches sitting in the cruxes of trees. This happens whenever he’s not protecting himself; the dark bad fairies are dancing endlessly below him in halls filled with rush light, in fur coats made of squirrel tails, in little shoes whittled from bear claws. They are planning their tricks, the beasties. If they saw him, they would blow poison nettles at him and make him fall asleep there, to awaken a century later, Bit van Winkle, his life gone by in sleep. He is so terrified he starts to cry, then forgets his fear in the beauty of his fingernails shining in the moonlight.
He walks. He touches the bark as he passes each hulking dark tree, and each bulges and sucks itself in. When the sound of the Quonset dims and blends into the more distant sound of the concert and there rises the rushing of the stream somewhere ahead, he realizes he must piss.
It has to be the right place: he touches tree after tree, and none gives him permission.
A new sound arises out of the forest, a low groan that, at first, he thinks is the music of the spheres, the great cold stars singing, not at all as lovely as he’d imagined. But it is too close, and Bit freezes, waits to see where the sound is coming from.
There, he sees a pool of darkness, an oil slick that grows upward, becomes a black lump on the ground, lit in some places by unshadowed moon. Even in his off-kilter brain, he knows it is a couple of people having fun. Something isn’t quite right, though, with the way the bodies are. Bit squints through the pulsing fog in his eyes. There is a person on top of another, yet the head of the second is in the wrong place, yards away, as if the body is both enormous and bent. A quickening, a rattle in the chest, a raw bear growl, and then a belt buckle tingles, the fucker stands over the fuckee’s legs.
Thanks, baby, comes a man’s voice quietly. You were amazing.
A voice rises, a girl’s. Sure, she says, it was fun.
Now the man says, Hey, you think you have a little sugar for my buddy here? What do you think? Share a little? If not, it’s totally cool, but he really digs you. Be a favor for me.
You’re just a gorgeous thing, says another voice, higher-pitched, male. Prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.
There is a long pause, then the girl says, hesitant, I don’t. .
Come on, says the first man. It’s no big deal. He kneels and begins to whisper, and at last, the girl’s voice emerges from the darkness. Okay, she says, with bravado.
The second man rises, belt jingles, crouches down, merges with the girl’s body on the ground.
Bit can’t move. He can’t breathe. The man finishes, and both men stand up, looking at the lump on the ground, struggling to sit. Let’s take her back, one says, and they pick the girl up between them and dust her off. One of them, it seems, picks something tenderly out of her hair.
Bit shrinks behind the tree beside him as they crash past over the sticks and leaves. They come straight at him, so close he can smell the musk of sex, clove cigarettes, blood, alcohol. Even closer, and he wills himself into the tree. They pass, and Bit sees a sprinkle of black under one man’s eye, the shimmer off a leather jacket, and Helle’s face gleaming like its own moon, a comet tail of white in the air where she’d been.
When he can no longer hear them, Bit returns to his body. The stars are still out, the sky endlessly black. The stream gurgles. On the wind, there is the distant sound of cheering from the Sheep’s Meadow, the end of a song. He doesn’t think he saw what he saw. There is no way. It was, like everything else tonight, an alchemical reaction: desire poured from a great height into a beaker of fear.
And yet, he begins to run. He doesn’t believe; but he still has to find Hannah or Abe or Titus, someone who can do something, Handy, Astrid, a midwife, an adult, someone. Branches rake his cheeks. He trips and feels rips in his palms, warm blood spilling out of the bag of his skin. At last, out to the Pond, Arcadia House still very far. He has a stitch in his side, has to stop to breathe out his lungs.
When he stands, he is so tired that his limbs are made of stone. It is all he can do to keep trudging, step after step. He tries to focus, but he can’t remember now what he was afraid of. There were woods and people fucking, or the woods fucking itself. Stars and fucking and woods. He can’t quite figure it out. There was Helle, possibly. Or Pooh. Helle and the trees, Pooh and men? There was a yes? He wants to weep for the overwhelm that sucks him in, a quicksand. The word rape surfaces in his brain, hot and glowing, and he pushes it down again. It wasn’t. Stilclass="underline" not right. There is something wrong, and if he could ask Hannah, she would make it clear for him, make him understand what he doesn’t understand; he doesn’t believe his own nose, here, his hands, the hunger a purple spike in his belly. It vagues in and out, and he knows only that he has to find Hannah somewhere, Helle somewhere, Hannah, Helle, Hannah.
Bit passes an ember burning in the dark, which develops as he nears into Kaptain Amerika. The old Trippie singsongs as Bit passes,
Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart’s desire.
The ember vanishes. Kaptain Amerika is moored in the shadows eddying behind Bit.
Almost to Arcadia House. Bit’s blood is weary. The air seems so heavy upon him. He is almost to his own bed. What if he dealt with everything tomorrow? His legs buckle, and he crawls through the apple terraces. The moon silvering the branches soothes him, and he lies and sleeps. He wakes to a hard green apple banging his temple, a misty dawn, and sits up, wracked with pain. The dew has crept into his joints. Somewhere he hears a strange sound, a clip-clop, and thinks of the choppers and stands to warn the rest of Arcadia, then falls again, dizzied. But there is nothing on the horizon save the sinking moon, and when he looks down he finds the source of the sound: an Amish buggy clipping around the gravel drive. He ekes his tender way down and stands where the horse comes to a halt. The beast’s sensitive nostrils dilate and prod at the air, smelling something strange in it: the bonfire, the wasted bodies, the chemicals coursing through thousands of bloodstreams, Bit’s own confusion.
Amos the Amish slides off the bench, face blank. Bit looks for irritation, but the man gives nothing away. He opens the buggy’s door, and out spill three Trippies: a man who wears a wedding dress; a plump woman whose brain has snailed into itself; Henry, who tried once to yank Midge’s tongue from her mouth because he believed it had turned into a rattlesnake. Of the fried ones, the man in the wedding dress is clearest.
What happened? Bit asks him, and the man shrugs. We tried to go, he says and shuffles off, his hem gliding gray in the dirt.
Where were you trying to go? he asks the woman, and she grunts and twists her face this way and that and says Kalamazooooooooooo, ending up with a hoot like an owl.