VACANCY & ARIEL

“I don’t know, Professor.” He glanced sourly at the TV. “Gets cold out there this time a’year.”

I increased my offer, but Miami was threatening to score again and Henley became even more truculent. His bony face tightened, his watery blue eyes narrowed. “Shit!” he said as a Miami wide receiver danced into the end zone holding the football aloft. He whipped off his Mountaineer cap and eyed it as if it were a thing offensive to God. His drab brown hair was home-cut, trimmed high on the neck, and he had a tonsure-like bald spot.

“Two hundred a day,” I said. “Two weeks minimum.”

He cocked an eye toward me. “Why you want to pay that much to take a nature walk?”

“The Willowy Woman,” I said.

His face emptied. After a moment he called for another beer. The bartender, a huge apple-cheeked man with a bushy beard and black hair falling to his mid-back, wearing a plaid wool shirt and jeans, heaved up from his stool and shambled forward like a hillbilly wrestler cautiously coming out of his corner to confront some masked menace.

“You’ve seen her,” I said after the bartender had mosied back to his perch.

“I seen somethin’ mighta been her,” Henley took a pull from his beer. “I seen her peepin’ at me from a purpleheart tree. Scared the shit outta me.”

“What did she look like?”

“Wicked pretty. Long hair. Couldn’t see much but her face.”

“What happened?”

He had another drink. “I like to fell over. Next I know she shinnied up higher in the tree and I heard her goin’ off through the tops of the other trees like she’s a monkey.” He sucked on his teeth till they squeaked, set the bottle down precisely in the wet circle from which he had lifted it. “Three hunnerd per day and I’ll find her for ya.”

This surprised me. Going by his expression when I mentioned her, I figured he was still afraid. I said as much and he said, “Oh, yeah. I admit it.”

“But three hundred a day will settle your nerves.”

“That ain’t it.” He tipped the bottle to his lips and drank until it was empty, then waved the empty at the bartender, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Hey, Mickey! Wake your ass up and get me ’nother beer.”

The giant lumbered up and lurched toward the cooler. “Goddamn, Whirlie. You be pissin’ for a week.” He plunked a beer down on the counter. “How ’bout you, friend?” he asked me, his bewhiskered baby face set in earnest lines.

“Well whiskey,” I told him. “A double.”

“Damn straight!” Mickey said. “I’ll join ya.”

He poured, we clinked glasses and drank. The whiskey was raw, but Mickey sighed as if in rapture and poured me another on the house before returning to his seat. I fondled the glass but did not drink. I had a presentiment of danger, a sunbreak of rationality in my romantic fog. Immense strength. Magical powers. The capacity to elude an army of searchers. Even four years down the road from the peak of her powers, I had no doubt that the Willowy Woman would be formidable.

“If you’re afraid,” I said to Henley, “and if it isn’t the money that motivates you, how come you want to make the trip?”

“It’s personal,” he said. “Once’t you seen that face, it’s kinda like you gotta see it agin.”

THE HILLS SOUTH of Durbin were thickly forested with medleys of butternut, black walnut, tupelos, oaks, tulip trees, and here and there a chestnut stump. The skies were overcast and even at noon it was dark under the trees. Whenever the sun peeked through, the twisted trunks cast devious shadows. The forest floor was carpeted with rotting leaves and ground apple, ginseng and goldenseal. Mica-flecked boulders poked out from the slopes. We backpacked for three days before Henley detected signs that the Willowy Woman might be in the area: rabbit bones that bore the marks of human teeth and human waste less than a day old. Another two days of reconnoitering and he claimed to have established the perimeters of her hunting ground.

“She’ll been comin’ through the treetops,” he said. “She prob’ly lives in ’em. I ain’t seen one footprint…though I know she’s bound to come down once’t in a while. We gonna sight ’er, we gotta get in the trees ourselves.” He spat and adjusted his Mountaineer cap. “We gon’ hafta be damn lucky any way you cut it. I figger she’s got night eyes.”

So it was that we spent the next three nights high in the crown of a water oak, keeping watch in nearly total darkness, staring down through the wends of branches and masses of leaves, alert for any glimmer of movement. On the fourth day I told Henley I thought we should change our position. I was giddy with lack of sleep, sore from bracing in the fork of a limb, and I was looking to gain an advantage over weariness and boredom—I hoped a new vantage might help to keep me awake and give us a better shot at encountering the Willowy Woman. Henley was lukewarm to the idea.

“Well, we could,” he said, scratching his neck. “But way I figger, she’s a mover. She hunts an area one night, then moves on. We might be due for a visit, we stick it out here.”