Wild

“You want to talk about suicide, darling, I’ll tell you about suicide,” Guy said, coming to stand before me and lean against the stone mantel. Rick drank from the tumbler and handed it to Josh on the other side of him, then Josh took a sip and handed it to Richie on the far end. “We got some dealings with suicide around here, unfortunately. Now that’s where this job gets interesting,” Guy said, his eyes growing animated, his face hidden behind the dish towel from his mustache down. The tumbler made its way slowly back to me; I took a sip and handed it back to Rick, and so on, like we were smoking a gigantic liquid joint. As we drank, Guy told us in great detail about the scene he’d come across one afternoon when a man had blown his brains out in a Port-a-Potty in the woods nearby.

“I mean just absolutely brains fucking everywhere,” he said through the towel. “More than you’d imagine. Think of the most disgusting thing that you can even picture, Cheryl, and then picture that.” He stood staring only at me, as if the Three Young Bucks weren’t even in the room. “Not just brains. But blood too and pieces of his skull and flesh. Just all over. Splattered all over the walls inside this thing.”

“I can’t even picture it,” I said as I shook the ice in my tumbler. The Bucks had left me with sole custody of it now that it was empty.

“You want another one, hot stuff?” Guy asked. I handed it to him, and he took it into the kitchen. I turned to the men and we all looked at one another with meaningful expressions and then burst out laughing as quietly as we could while basking in the glow of the fire.

“Now there’s this other time I got to tell you about,” said Guy, returning with my drink. “Only this time it was murder. Homicide. And it wasn’t brains, but blood. Gallons of blood, I mean BUCKETS of blood, Cheryl.”

And so it went, all through the evening.

Afterwards, we walked back to our camp and stood around in a circle near our tents talking half drunk in the dark until it started to rain again and we had no choice but to disperse and say goodnight. When I got into my tent, I saw a puddle had formed at the far end. By morning it was a small lake; my sleeping bag was soaked. I shook it out and looked around the campsite for a place to drape it, but it was useless. It would only get wetter as the rain continued to pour down. I carried it with me when the Three Young Bucks and I walked to the store, holding it near the woodstove as we drank our coffee.

“So we came up with a trail name for you,” said Josh.

“What is it?” I asked reluctantly from behind the scrim of my drenched blue sleeping bag, as if it could protect me from whatever they might say.

“The Queen of the PCT,” said Richie.

“Because people always want to give you things and do things for you,” added Rick. “They never give us anything. They don’t do a damn thing for us, in fact.”

I lowered my sleeping bag and looked at them, and we all laughed. All the time that I’d been fielding questions about whether I was afraid to be a woman alone—the assumption that a woman alone would be preyed upon—I’d been the recipient of one kindness after another. Aside from the creepy experience with the sandy-haired guy who’d jammed my water purifier and the couple who’d booted me from the campground in California, I had nothing but generosity to report. The world and its people had opened their arms to me at every turn.

As if on cue, the old man leaned over the cash register. “Young lady, I wanted to tell you that if you want to stay another night and dry out, we’d let you have one of these cabins for next to nothing.”

I turned to the Three Young Bucks with a question in my eyes.

Within fifteen minutes, we’d moved into our cabin, hanging our sopped sleeping bags over the dusty rafters. The cabin was one wood-paneled room taken up almost entirely by two double beds that sat on antediluvian metal frames that squeaked if you so much as leaned on the bed.

Once we’d settled in, I walked back to the store in the rain to buy snacks. When I stepped inside, Lisa was standing there by the woodstove. Lisa, who lived in Portland. Lisa, who’d been mailing my boxes all summer long. Lisa, whom I’d be moving in with in a week.

“Hello!” she half screamed while we grabbed each other. “I knew you’d be here right about now,” she said once we’d recovered from the shock. “We decided to drive up and see.” She turned to her boyfriend, Jason, and I shook his hand—I’d met him briefly in the days before I’d left Portland for the PCT, when they’d first begun dating. It felt surreal to see people I knew from my old familiar world and a bit sad too. I was both happy and disappointed to see them: their presence seemed to hasten the end of my trip, underlining the fact that though it would take me a week to get there, Portland was only ninety miles away by car.