Why not? After all — why not?
He drank until the bar shut, then tried to chat to the two young bartenders as they guided him towards the door. One radiated boredom, the other mild distaste. Tom realized he was probably not much younger than their fathers, most likely square-jawed mountain types who took a nip of bourbon or sour mash or whatever the fuck about once a month. The door was shut firmly behind him. As he staggered back towards his motel it occurred to him that he didn't have to care what they thought about him any more. His new course put him on a higher plane. He got so cross that he turned around and reeled back to the bar, intending to explain to Chip and Dale that while these were great times for boys in their twenties, men in middle age weren't having it quite so smooth; that one day their own abs might sag and they'd forget how to love and have no clue who they were. He felt this would be a valuable insight for them. It was the only one he had, in any event, and he was willing to share it around. By the time he got back to the bar it was locked and dark. He hammered on the door for a while, telling himself they might still be inside but mainly just because he wanted to hammer on something. It wasn't more than five minutes before he was suddenly quite well lit. He turned to see a car from the sheriff's department parked on the street behind him. A youngish guy in a uniform was leaning back on the bonnet, his arms folded.
'Believe it's shut, sir,' he said.
Tom opened his mouth but realized there was too much to say and none of it made any sense. He raised his arms, not in surrender, but in a kind of mute entreaty. Strangely, the deputy seemed to understand. He nodded, got back in his car and drove away. Tom walked home, padding slowly down the middle of the main street through the steady, meditative blink of traffic lights with no cars to direct.
Next morning he thought it through. His options were limited. There was no gun store in town, and he didn't want to drive until he found one. Even assuming they let him have one, guns were scary. Jumping off a cliff, supposing he could find one, was also out. The idea was self-evidently counter-evolutionary. Even if his mind was determined his body could simply over-rule — in which case he'd have a long walk back to the car feeling the world's biggest fool. Yes, I was going to throw myself off, that's right. No, it didn't happen. Sorry. Nice view, though. Mind your step. Besides which, he didn't want to end up as something distended or smashed or half dead, something to be found, photographed, and shipped home. He didn't want to be broken, he wanted to be erased.
On Sunday he was picking at a huge Reuben in Henry's, the town's more friendly diner, when he heard something that put the final piece in place. A local old-timer was taking delight in worrying a pair of Winnebago retirees about the scope and impenetrability of the woods. Tom's attention was drawn by the repetition of a number. Seventy-three. The local said it several times in a row. Seventy-three — how about that?
His audience were looking at each other and nodding as if impressed. Then the male of the pair turned to the local, with the air of a man who had spotted a flaw in another's argument.
'Big ones, or little ones?' he asked. 'The planes? What kind of size were they?'
His wife nodded. No flies on her husband. She'd always said so.
'All sizes,' the old geezer said, somewhat tetchily. 'Big ones, little ones, civilian, military. Planes go down all the time — matter of fact, many more than that have ditched around here. My point is that of all the planes gone down in the Pacific North West since the war, seventy-three have never even been found.'
Is that right? Tom thought.
He pushed his sandwich away, paid his tab, and went to buy as much alcohol as he could carry.
— «» — «» — «»—
He wasn't prepared for how quickly it got dark. He was stumbling more than walking, the muscles in his thighs and calves turned to lead. He'd still only gone maybe eight miles, ten at most, but he was exhausted. It occurred to him that if he'd spent more time in the gym he'd be in better shape to die. This made him laugh until his mouth filled with warm saliva and he had to stop walking and breathe deeply to avoid vomiting.
He was now about as drunk as he'd ever been. As he rested, bent over with hands on knees, watching the floating spots before his eyes, he considered what to do next. He was already very lost. Getting lost could be ticked off the schedule of tasks. The ground had been getting more mountainous all afternoon, steep and slip-slidy and treacherous. When it got properly night, it was going to be very dark indeed, the kind of darkness that would swallow up and deafen a city boy. He took the rucksack off and felt for the flashlight. When he flicked it on he realized it wasn't just the quality of the light that was changing. A mist was gathering. It was also unbelievably cold. For the moment it was just sweat turning to frigid water on his skin, but when it got into his bones it would be hard to bear. Which meant he had to keep moving.
He rotated his ankle to warm it up a little, made a slight turn and kept ploughing onwards. The forest was very quiet now, noisy birds having cawed their fill and gone off home to roost. He wasn't sure about other animals. He'd already spent time not thinking about bears. He didn't think there were any around — or the old timer in the diner would surely have brought them up, he'd most definitely been the type — but you never knew. Tom didn't think he looked like a threat to any large mammal he might chance upon, and he had no food to attract them, but maybe that was all crap. Maybe they lay in wait and attacked people for the fun of it. Anyway, he didn't want to think about that, so he didn't. He kept not thinking about it at regular intervals. The flashlight had two settings, bright and not so bright, and he soon stuck to the latter. As the mist thickened it bounced more of the light back in his face, making his head whirl. Also, the light made the shadows worse. Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent's big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you're nervous in the dark. Night forests say, 'Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you.'
So he kept himself mist-blind and smacked his brain with vodka and kept moving. All of the crunches and rustlings he could hear were of his own making, he was sure. There were no shapes in the mist, only the movement of the moisture itself — that was also certain. You could take all of it to the bank, leave it there, and keep on walking in utter safety and only moderate discomfort: walking until it was totally dark and time itself seemed to flatten out, until each thought became hard to distinguish from the next, until fear twisted back on itself and swelled and he started moving faster and faster to escape from something he carried within himself.
— «» — «» — «»—
He had no warning of the fall. He'd been shoving aggressively through a long trench of mid-level bushes, yielding to a third bout of head-snapping hiccups, when all at once his leading foot had nothing to come down upon. His body was tilted forward, the better to shove branches aside, there was no way back.
He was suddenly skidding down a sharp incline, legs apart, arms thrashing. Acceleration was halted by a full-body collision with a smallish tree, at which point he lost the flashlight and his bottle and was twisted and spun onto his side to slide the rest of the way via every rock in the ground. It was over quickly, and ended with him landing hard on his face with a crunch that knocked every last breath out of him.
He groaned, a low and desperate sound. At last, he shrugged off the rucksack and rolled over onto his back. The pain in his chest was so intense he let out an involuntary whistle. His right side felt as if someone had poked a spear in it and was encouraging a child to swing off the end. His balls ached too, pain rising to a hot little hollow in his lower abdomen.