Joe left, taking the pad with him, his sandals slapping the floor on his way to the bathroom in the hall outside his office. Parsifal knew that bathroom well. It was squalid, with a hand dryer that only put out cold air. It had a dirty sink and a stall with a door that wouldn’t close, the inside of which had been covered with various violent and incomprehensibly threatening messages left, he assumed, by Joe’s other clients — not a good lot, all in all. Parsifal got up and hefted the stone in his hand. It didn’t feel special. It didn’t feel like anything but a stone.
After a surprisingly long time, Joe returned. “What was it you were asking?” he said.
“I wanted to know why you asked me about fire?”
“Oh,” Joe said. “For no particular reason.” He picked up the stone and put it down again. “Maybe I was feeling chilly.”
What is this fear that falls into my heart?
The body Parsifal had discovered in the pit he had dug to catch a deer was of a man, and clearly the stranger had died instantly, face down, impaled on the spikes Parsifal had wedged into the ground a few days before. The severity of the impact had been no doubt increased by the weight of a large sack of brown rice the man had been carrying when he had fallen, and the spikes had run straight through the stranger’s chest. The stranger was wearing a dark suit and a baseball hat, which, oddly, had remained on his head, even as the rice scattered all around his body. Because many of the grains were covered with the man’s blood, they gave the appearance of the red sprinkles on the tops of the cupcakes that Conrad used to bring him, as a special treat, once in a while. Someone, either the man or some other person, had tied several bags around the dead man’s waist, and these were also stained by blood, and worse.
What would Pearl say? Parsifal wondered. He was only fourteen, not quite grown, and Conrad was gone, as usual, so wasn’t around to give any advice on the matter. As a result, Parsifal acted out of instinct as much as anything. First, he knew enough that for him to touch the body would only leave behind a trail of evidence that might confuse anyone who ventured this far into the forest to search for the man. The last thing he needed, then or ever, was a prison term. Second, the man was clearly dead, and his grave had already been dug, so to speak. That would have been the hard part, anyway, so all Parsifal needed to do was to fill it in with the dirt he had pushed to one side earlier when he had dug the hole, and then afterward to cover that with a layer of leaves and tamp it down so that only an eye trained in woodcraft would be able to detect any irregularity. In a month not even an expert would know what lay beneath. It didn’t even seem like a choice: Parsifal left the stranger right where he was, not even bothering to jump into the hole to retrieve the man’s wallet, which might have been useful to Pearl and him, and filled the hole to the brim with dirt. Then he sprinkled leaves on top and stood back to look at his handiwork. It looked fine.
When Parsifal returned home that night, rather later than usual, Pearl asked him where he had been.
“Out checking my traps,” he told her, not untruthfully. He would wait, he reasoned, until his father returned to reveal more of what had happened. Clearly, that dead man wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“Any luck?” his mother wondered.
“Yes and no.”
But then, soon afterward, the fire came. Parsifal left the forest, and he never did manage to locate his father’s house in the city.
Blindfolded, Parsifal wandered with his improvised cane outstretched before him, bumping his head into tree limbs and banging his shins on stumps, sticking his hands into thickets of briars, like a slow-motion game of Pong, and although the scratches, bumps, and bruises did have a familiar feel to them, he couldn’t come up with anything specific location-wise. Wet leaves, yes. Moss, yes. The cold wetness of his shoes in a stream, yes again, but it was the wetness of no particular stream that he could identify. He decided that later, when he took the blindfold off, he would change his socks.
His ankle began to throb.
Above him, Parsifal heard a sound from the sky, a flapping of wings, or a hum, as if something was continuing to follow his erratic progress through the forest, and in the midst of everything else, the sound seemed a comfort. In a way it felt comforting even though — or perhaps because—he couldn’t actually see a thing through the blindfold. Was it growing dark? He couldn’t tell, but at the rate he was moving, propelled by those energy bars, he didn’t see why he needed to stop at all, let alone for darkness. Whether the result of genius or terror, Parsifal could feel himself going up hills, crawling on his hands and knees like a powerful baby, and descending them upright, his back leaning into the pull of gravity, the heels of his soggy boots digging into the earth, his cane striking grass, leaves, and wood.
Then, through the humming/flapping above him, he detected yet another sound, one so faint that he was sure he would not have noticed it if he had been distracted by the world of sight. The sound grew louder and, without hesitating for a moment, Parsifal whipped off the blindfold, blinking at the sky just in time to see an Airstream trailer heading straight at him. Quickly he leaped to one side, and as he did the trailer came crashing down right where he had been standing. He looked around. It wasn’t nearly as late in the day as he had guessed, only about two in the afternoon, by his watch.
Parsifal stood, his limbs aflutter, and sat down again. Then, still shaking, he rose to his wet feet again and gathered a few dry branches to start a fire to make tea. Upon reflection, the blindness experiment had been a failure, even though it had allowed him to hear the Airstream more easily and may have saved his life. Still, in the long run he could not tell much difference between searching with or without sight, except for the extra bruises. Neither had brought him measurably closer to his goal.
Parsifal sipped his tea, and for the first time forced himself to stare at what was left of the fallen trailer, now only a shiny foil packet of aluminum, about twelve feet by six feet by six inches. The impact had crushed the doors, as well as a bumper that proclaimed, We’re Spending Our Kids’ College Fund.
Parsifal had often heard of the awesome power of tornados regarding trailers and trailer parks, but had never actually witnessed it in person. Had anyone been living inside when the Airstream was carried into the sky? It was possible, but if so, there could have been no survivors. “Rest in peace,” he whispered, and then, overcome by the desire to rest himself, spread out his sleeping bag, changed his wet socks, and, even though it was still early in the day, fell immediately to sleep.
In his dream he was blind. Nothing fancy, just the conventional sort of blindness — straight black, without a speck of light anywhere, not even gray. And no matter what he did (it wasn’t much), the blindness would not disappear or fade, even for a moment. But at least he wasn’t dead.
Rest in peace, stranger in the pit.
Rest in peace, old couple possibly still inside the Airstream.
Parsifal thought about the suit the dead man in the pit had been wearing. Except for his father, it was unusual for anyone to wear such formal attire in the forest. It was entirely possible, he surmised, that the dead man may have been a fellow stockbroker of Conrad’s who had offered to take Pearl and Parsifal a sack of rice, Conrad being tied up at that moment with a big deal.
Sometimes, as a child, lying awake at night in the forest, Parsifal heard the screams of wild cats, the short, choked cries of dying things, the silent scuffle of somebody’s pet dog running down a desperate deer. Then everything grew quiet except for Pearl’s heavy breathing and the rustle of wind through leaves.