“Must we have a big fire?” Jenny sighed again, her vision already blurry with perspiration and humidity. “I’m smothering as it is. How come it gets hotter at night? We should have stayed by the stream. Amelia, don’t go too far.”
Chasing lightning bugs, the little girl paused to watch a bat, wings pinkish and translucent against the evening sky as it darted after moths. “Eww!”
“What is it?”
“Something flew up my nose!”
Having scooped out sand in the middle of the circle of logs, Casey meticulously finished stacking branches, using small twigs and dried pine needles for kindling. “Where are the matches? Oh.” Once lit, the fire only served to make the woods darker. Only the nearer trees remained visible, and they seemed to waver as the firelight now caught them, now let them go.
Casey dug out the supplies—plastic forks, fruitcake remnants, half a loaf of bread, smoked hot dogs, canned corn. “Who the hell packed this?” he muttered under his breath. Canned goods, no less—no wonder it weighed a ton. He wished his friends could grasp the difference between backpacking and picnicking. “We’ll need more wood,” he called, sharpening sticks with a pocketknife with a mother-of-pearl handle.
“Nice knife.”
Casey looked up to find Ernie standing right beside him.
“You’ll stay and eat with us, won’t you?” Alan asked, smoothing his mustache with a comb.
Insects descended in a vampiric swarm. The mosquitoes, wet and bloated but still feeding, surrounded them. Conversations in the clearing became peppered with slaps and curses.
Flames licked up around the pine chunks. Because the smoke kept away some of the bugs, they all sat close to the fire, in spite of the heat. When Alan passed around insect repellant, Ernie declined wordlessly. Jenny rubbed some into Amelia’s small back, already covered with bites, and the oily scent mingled with the odor of smoke. Smelling the food, they sat in relative silence, while corn slowly heated in a pot perched among the coals, and hot dogs sizzled and blackened on sticks.
Ernie drooled. Jenny stared—she’d never seen anything like it before. Shocked, she turned away. Finished with Amelia, she rubbed repellant on her own legs and arms. It stung a spot on the back of her ankle, the spot where Casey had burned off the leech.
Scorching their fingers and mouths, all ate ravenously, jaws and throats working rapidly.
Amelia turned to her mother. “I don’t like him. He smells bad.”
“Amelia!”
Ernie froze. A hunk of bread halfway to his mouth, he peered through slitted eyes as though afraid someone might try to take the food. Jenny stared at the grease around his mouth.
“Uh…good food,” said Alan. “I’m hungry as a wolf.”
Ernie resumed eating.
Sandy licked her fingers and moved away from the fire. “You think it’s going to rain?” Leaning back on one elbow, she gazed upward.
“It wouldn’t help,” Alan said around a mouthful. “The mosquitoes probably use Aqua-Lungs.”
“I mean, it’s just so hot.” She fanned herself with a paper plate. “Next time, can we bring an air conditioner?”
“What do you mean? What next time?”
Casey distributed the evening rations of cigarettes, and somebody rolled a joint. They all felt pretty good—full bellies, a campfire to stare into. Alan stretched out on the ground.
“What happens if it does rain?” wondered Sandy, sitting back. Last night there’d been more stars than she’d ever known existed, but to night the sky was blank.
“We get wet.” Alan rolled onto his stomach and rested his chin on his arms. “That is what’s known as going camping. Hey, what’s that over there? See it above the trees?” Suddenly, he was on his feet. “Is it the moon coming up?” Ernie laughed and Casey joined him. Alan turned to them in bewilderment.
“That’s a city,” said Casey. “It’ll reflect off a haze like this sometimes.”
Far to the north, the cold whitish glow hung low in the sky.
“What city?”
“It looks almost radioactive,” said Alan. “Tell me, you suppose a war started, and we’re the only ones who don’t know about it?” He giggled. “Maybe the only ones left alive?”
They all stood, staring over the conifers at the distant wash of brightness. “So faraway.”
The sands whispered, faint as thought.
“These crickets sound like they’re big as a house.”
“Back in high school, I used to borrow my brother’s ID and catch the labor bus at dawn, come out her to pick blueberries for the day.” Casey’s voice droned intensely. “You wouldn’t believe the ways they used to get people onto that b us—practically dragged them off the street. These old guys would come staggering out of a bar in North Philly. Next thing they know, they’re out here in the fields, throwing up, passing out, sun blazing down.”
“Tell me, is that how they caught you?” Alan asked, as he sat down by the fire. “Staggering out of a bar?”
“Why’d they do that, Case? Bring people in from the city, I mean? Aren’t there little towns and stuff out here?”
“Well,” he began, “there probably just aren’t enough pineys to—”
“Pineys! Oh, I know about them!” announced Sandy gleefully. “They’re the crazy people who live out here! Man, I’d forgotten all about them. We used to hear all kinds of stories.”
“What crazy people?” Jenny edged closer to Amelia, closer to the fire. “What are you talking about?”
Casey looked disgruntled.
“Yeah,” Sandy continued. “This friend of mine was telling me. He was driving and he runs out of gas, right? Shit. Something stung me. Shit. Anyway, he said he saw these men in the woods, right, and he gets out of the car, only now the men are gone.” She looked around the campfire. “But he feels like he’s being watched. Anyway, he starts walking. Finally, he makes it back to the main road. So he finds this broken-down old gas station, and this weird guy sells him some. So he starts lugging gas, right? But when he makes it back to the car, the windows are all smashed. And there’s all these weird marks on the side of the car.”
The others continued to lean forward expectantly.
“I remember seeing a newspaper article once.” All heads turned toward Alan, now perched on a rolled-up sleeping bag. “A couple years back—they found this old house out in the woods, you know, log cabin sort of thing. Inside, they found this ten-year-old girl in a crib. First they thought she was retarded, but then they found out her brain was normal, but mentally she was still, let’s say, an infant.” He buried a cigarette butt in the sand. “Turned out her mother lived about a mile away with her new family. Once a day, she’d walk over, feed and change the girl and then leave. The girl would just lay in the crib all day, every day. All alone. Never learning to speak.”
“But that story’s not really true, is it?” In obvious dismay, Sandy tried to make out Alan’s expression.
“Honest to God.”
“But that’s so sad!”
“How come she stayed in the crib?” Amelia demanded impatiently. “How come she didn’t just—”
“’S true.”
No one knew where the voice had come from. They all looked around, finally locating the stranger’s dark form. Back beyond the shifting perimeter of light, Ernie spoke nothing further.
“Tales like that come out of the barrens all the time,” Casey told them finally. “The pines seem to breed that kind of—”
“I was just thinking. You suppose our cars are all right?”
“Huh? Oh yeah. Sure.”
Firelight flickered over them.
“Mom, are there really…?”
Alan leaned forward. “What are you grinning about, Casey?”
The mood was set. Conscious of everyone watching, Casey took out his pipe and tobacco pouch and, with slow deliberation, filled the bowl, then took a light from a blazing twig. Which would it be? The walking tree monster? The man-eating grizzly? He fed wood to the fire, and waves of sudden heat pressed them all back a bit, smarting their eyes. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said at last.