Page 19 of Be Not Far From Me

It’ll hurt. But that’s not what worries me. What worries me is that I’ll cut off part of my body and wake up tomorrow to find out I was half a mile from somebody’s house, and that I threw away college and any chance of being anything other than a washed-up athlete in a small town because I didn’t know it.

All the time I’ve been out here I’ve been thinking in longer terms, bigger goals. When I find the road . . . when I get to the hospital . . . when they fix my foot . . . this will all be like it never happened. But I don’t think I’m anywhere near a road, or a hospital. The only thing of those three here right now is my foot, and it’s going to kill me. It’s the right now I got to be thinking about, real hard.

I pull Davey Beet’s hat down over my face, to shut out the world for a while.

“I don’t know what to do,” I admit.

It gets hot under there fast, so I pull it back up, and the first thing I see is a nice hefty piece of flint sticking out of the bank opposite me.

“Well, fuck you too,” I say.

Momma told me once that I was born with teeth.

It’s one of the few things I remember real clear about her, mostly because she made it sound like I chewed my way out of her rather than being born the normal way. For the longest time I watched barn cats giving birth, wondering why they didn’t seem to mind so much. I learned later that humans are the only mammals that experience terrible pain when giving birth, something they told me at Camp Little Fish was Eve’s fault, but I thought it sounded more like poor planning on God’s part. When I said so Davey Beet laughed until his face was red as his last name, and I was blushing too because he’d noticed me.

Dad told Momma she didn’t need to be telling me that story anymore, and there was a big fight—one of the last ones. She told him he didn’t have no idea what it was like to carry a child for the better part of a year, almost die getting it out, and then have it not need her anymore. He told her to shut her mouth and stop making me feel bad for doing nothing worse than being born, and that if I was born with teeth it was because I came out ready to defend myself, and there wasn’t any shame in that.

So I was kind of proud of it, actually. When I told Meredith, she called me a liar, so I knocked her down on the playground and her mom called mine. I listened in on the conversation, Momma using an old wall phone with a cord she’d wrap around and around her arm while she talked. She started out apologizing for me—something she’d gotten good at, I guess—but then after a few drinks of Wild Turkey she was telling Meredith’s mom all about the teeth, and how I was born with fingernails long as Tammy Faye Bakker’s.

Momma said she could feel me inside her, running my nails across her ribs, exploring the inside of her body the same as I do the woods now. She said she knew I was a wild thing and was surprised when I started walking early because it would’ve been more fitting for me to stay on all fours my whole life. I busted in then and told her I walked early so I could run sooner, all to get away from her and her endless bitching.

I got a smack across the mouth for that, but I guess I kind of deserved it.

I’m using those nails now to dig out this chunk of flint from the creek bank, and damn if it isn’t perfect for what I need it to do. It’s got an edge already, one I can sharpen by knapping off a slice with another rock. Once again, the world is telling me to cut into my own flesh because instead of exploding into a bunch of tiny pieces when I hit it, the flint breaks clean, making an edge sharp enough to slice my finger pad. The whole thing fits in my hand nicely, the edge of a tooth that isn’t mine, but only hungers for what I’ve got. When I hold it I become a weapon, my arm an ax handle, the flint a good blade. I can hack off the bad part of my foot with this; I know it.

Still, I delay.

I walk clear into early evening, ignoring a rainstorm that kicks up and soaks me, pushing forward and hoping for a house, a road, someone’s wandering dog that I can follow home. But there is nothing and no one, and soon I realize I’m singing a song from my childhood, one that I always loved.

The bear went over the mountain

The bear went over the mountain . . .

And what do you think he saw?

That poor fucker saw another mountain, and while I’m not climbing peaks exactly they may as well be for all the effort it’s taking. My foot is hot and heavy in the sling, my knee screaming about being bent for so long, my arms shaky and a fresh trickle of blood running down my side from where the crutch has flat punctured my back. I got nothing to look forward to but self-dismemberment and maybe seeing another mountain, and I’m so much more into my singing than thinking about that I don’t realize I’m going over the edge of a ridge until too late.

I roll, ass over teakettle, my hand clenching tight onto my chunk of flint and the other gripping my crutch because these are the most valuable things I own. My foot slips free of the sling, my leg bending hard under me as I crash into the little trickle of water at the bottom. I am nothing but nerves, hot and severed, a warm bag of skin filled with pain. I can’t even make a noise, I hurt so bad, like the inhale of a baby right before it throws a rip-roaring fit, a moment of silence to consider what’s about to come.

There aren’t even swears for how I feel right now, or enough languages to cover it. I stare up at the sky and let pain have its way, rain starting to spatter my face. I’m considering just lying here until the water rises enough to cover my mouth, then my nose. Then the clouds part for a moment, and a ray of light breaks through, pointing like a spotlight. At camp they called those Jesus clouds, but they’re not landing on Christ right now; the heavens opened for me so that I could find a meth lab.

Meth smells like ass.

I know this because my uncle Chuck went into what he called a “business venture” a few years ago, and my dad called a “federal offense.” Dad didn’t like it too much when Chuck handed me and Duke each a wad of bills and asked us to keep an eye on a trailer he set up out in the woods. He said since we were minors we couldn’t get slapped with anything too serious and he’d been sure to put the lab out on public land so that we could claim we were just wandering if anybody official ever showed up.

Dad was not happy with my new job, but Chuck said he owed him one. Apparently back in the nineties Uncle Chuck told my dad wouldn’t it be great to start a business where you rented your DVDs to people, mailed the DVDs to them, and they mailed them back and it’d be better than running to the video store and easy money besides. He had it all worked out until Dad told him it was stupid, and nobody wanted to rent somebody else’s porn anyway, and then Netflix happened and Uncle Chuck hasn’t really forgiven him.

So that’s how I got a job guarding a meth lab, but I didn’t dare touch the stuff or I knew Dad would kill me. Given the messes I saw coming to buy, I wasn’t in a big hurry to try it. Chuck paid us pretty good, and Duke and I would just sit out there in our lawn chairs, him smoking weed while we talked. I earned enough to buy myself a real nice backpack, but then a bigger dealer than Uncle Chuck got word of his little lab and we found it torched one day, Chuck lying off in the brush with the shit kicked out of him.

The setup I’ve discovered looks to be about the same type of deal as Uncle Chuck’s, but smaller. It’s a little pop-up camper, pulled in here so long ago that the tracks are gone and any brush that got whacked down in the process has sprung back up and done a few years of growing in the meantime. It’s even up on blocks, which tells me whoever is running things has been doing so for a while and feels secure enough to stay.

Which means I’m in the ass middle of nowhere.

The door’s locked, but I kick it in with my good leg just as the storm gets a second wind, letting down a sheet of rain that makes the roof on this thing sing louder than I did after my foot got crushed. I drag myself into the camper, pushing the door shut behind me just in time. A wall of water hits the side of the camper so hard I feel it shift on the blocks and cross my fingers that I’m not about to go back over the ridge and die, crushed in a meth lab. It settles back into place and so does my stomach, so I take a minute to catch my breath.

I know enough about the cooking process to know this place hasn’t been used in a while. All the cook stuff—beakers, flasks, pans—is pushed off to the side of the counter, and scummy from the last use that never got washed away. I get to my feet and start opening cupboards, hoping somebody used this place enough to have some food squirreled away.