Two Lovers
David Michael Wolach
We spent a lot of time in those woods, back of the house. The pines were ours on late afternoons. We trudged through garbage, various items softened after years of rainfall, lying half-buried in the underbrush. Planting buckets, rain gutters, beer cans—fossils of no intrinsic value,
except that they were evidence of a past that occurred before any of us existed. We played here often, as trucks came and went on the interstate, their wheels wheezing. Like the boats going to harbor two miles southwest, they were invisible to us, in those woods, back of the house.
Some run out of oxygen first, others light. Both go eventually. It’s a matter of sequence—and for us it was light. Seven o’clock and the sun is dipping, exhausted, like it had run a race out. Dusk creeps up on us; suddenly the smells come. There’s an odor to it. They say it’s the change in the atmosphere up north, the cooling off of surfaces,
smells carried on steam that rises up from the soil. We’d go deep and have nothing to guide, because that smell, like darkness that comes from her, was everywhere. It would last, that sensation of not knowing where we’d gone, until the porch light would splinter through spruce, alien beacon, and then we would run back to the house, laughing,
pretending that our laughter was something other than relief. We kept close to each other. When we went too far. Into the thick of it.
Late spring. A steady rain went most of the month. The brook was swelling. Capillaries branched in jagged, unpredictable spurts. We gathered after school in the back yard and headed off, armed with our handmade bows and arrows, sticks with twine fastened taught to either end. We spent an hour slashing through mud, shooting at birds, at shadows cast by the pines, every shadow a faceless enemy, every bird a plane or helicopter. We shot and ran, we set up guard posts, we alerted each other as the enemy approached—soup cans in jacket pockets were our walkie-talkies—and for an hour that day after school the forest was a vast cityscape, its nooks and hide-outs signature dangers of guerilla warfare. It was that day in late spring, playing army men, that we saw him.
We saw him come out of the trees on the other side of a clearing. It startled us because you don’t see other people out there very often, because it’s usually so quiet in the forest. He was tall and featureless at first, like most people are from a distance. He seemed to gallop across the grass, using the cattails as reigns, his movements jerky. We watched him come across this way, stumbling up over a mild incline, the sun shining much too high above him, his bare legs wading through that waist-high thicket. And he didn’t see us, because as he got closer we fell back and hid behind the first flank of trees. Later on he came even closer, and such proximity made his nakedness more real, less forgivable. His body was lean, his skin scratched and bruised—and it appeared as though, judging by how soiled he was, that he’d risen straight from a bog. A sound was coming from deep inside his lungs. The sound wasn’t words. It wasn’t nonsense, either. As he stood in that clearing we heard him make this sound, and it didn’t take us long to figure out that whatever he was saying was in a language that only men like him—men who know desperation and pain—fully understand.
Perhaps we watched him for a long time. It was probably a minute or two, but to us it was longer. The sun was piercing through the canopy of trees. There was an odd kind of quiet. A rustling of the leaves. Wind sifting through the prairie grass in clearings. Other than this, we could only hear our breathing, and the intermittent moans his mouth made. We studied him then, his body lean but muscular, caked with soil, the mud intermingling with bruising and a rusty smearing. Blood perhaps, or clay. He stood and frantically looked around, surveying possible routes of escape, as though something in that forest—an odd tree, the way his wails echoed, even us—might act as a kind of compass for him. And then something did send him on his way. It was the yelling, the voices of other men. The sound of adults deeper in the woods.
Shortly after he ran away they came. There were ten, maybe twelve of them. Young men, boys really, but to us who weren’t even old enough to stay home when our parents were out, they appeared older, their clean faces and scrawny, bird-bent postures not relevant, denial. They came out from the direction the man had come, ten or twelve of them, laughing a weird kind of laughter, some of them holding baseball-sized rocks, others sticks. One dragged some muddy climbing cord. This one straggled behind, his mouth jack-jawed, panting, his eyes darting towards and away from the others. Two of them took up the front. They were the first to come. They held another man, this one partially undressed, bare-chested, his boxer shorts dirty and tattered. They held him by the arms. They were dragging him, and when they stopped in the clearing and let go, he collapsed in the grass. They left him there and ran past us into the forest.
We approached him, this body, with the caution of tree dwelling people native to a land trampled by armies. Forming a circle we approached, and we approached, and we asked: “Where do you come from?” One of us poked him with a stick. The man gurgled, blood erupting from his cracked mouth volcanic.
“Help me,” he said. “Help us.” Crawling now, crawling through our huddled form, he groped for the edge of the woods where the highway took you far from here, fistfuls of grass, crawling. “Why do...” His voice went out like a candle. We let him crawl, that body struck and carved and bleeding. We let him pass, slowly, past.
God knows if they reached the highway. God knows, nor cares. We left him. Our woods, our forest, cursed by our stillness. We left both men. The other boys: had they found what they sought? Did they seek forgiveness later? We knew nothing then, less now, from those woods, back of the house. That house:
its tiny porch light, her reliable beacon, summoned us to several suppers, singular, each. We dispersed, ran far from this incomprehensible flesh. Far from the thick of it.
David Michael Wolach, 29 and originally from Detroit, is a professor of writing, poetics, and philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Prior to coming to Evergreen, Wolach lived in New York City for 10 years, spending six as a union organizer. Author of the novels We Are Richard Pryor and Structures of Air, as well as the chapbooks, Fractions of M and The Cutting Room, Wolach's work has appeared this year or is forthcoming from Night Train, The Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, The Duplications, Thieves Jargon, Saint Elizabeth Street, Ditch, AB OVO, Fuselit, and others. His essays on German modernist music and poetics Acts of Art/Works of Violence, is forthcoming from the SSLA (University of Syndney). One of the editors of Wheelhouse Magazine, Wolach is also co-hosting Evergreen's international literary conference PRESS.