The Beginning Place Read online

  “Same to you,” Irene’s voice said, and her legs stood up under her.

  At once he turned and was coming at her. She stood her ground because her legs refused to go anywhere. “Get out,” she said. “Clear out. This is private property.”

  The staring eyes steadied and fixed on her. He stopped. He was massive. The staring face was white and blank, mindless. The mouth said words she did not understand.

  He came towards her again. She heard her own voice but had no idea what it said. She was still holding the rock she had picked up. She would try to kill him if he touched her.

  “You don’t have to,” he said in a strained, husky voice, a boy’s voice. He had stopped. He turned away from her now and went back, clumsily crossing the water, up the bank, across the clearing, to the threshold.

  She stood without moving and watched him.

  He passed between the pine and laurels and went on. It was strange; had she never looked through the gateway from this side? The path that went up so steep and dark into the daylight looked level and open, from here across the water; it looked no different from the paths of the twilight land. She could see along it for a long way in the dusk under the trees, and could see the man walking down it, still walking away under the trees in the grey unchanging light.

  3

  He broke the signboard, stamped the pieces into the mud, and stood there in his shirt and jeans soaked from his stumble in the creek, his shoes full of water. “You bastards,” he said, the first words he had ever spoken aloud in the twilight place. “You sneaking bastards!”

  The high bushes crashed and writhed. Somebody came out of hiding there, a boy, black-haired, staring. “Get out,” the boy said. “Clear out. This is private property.”

  “All right. Where’s my stuff?” Hugh took a step forward. “It cost a week’s pay. What did you do with it?”

  “It’s up there in the woods. Don’t bring it back. Don’t come back. Just get out!”

  The boy stepped forward, self-righteous, jeering, hateful. Hugh could not keep himself from shaking. “All right,” he said, “you didn’t have to—” It was no use. He turned, plunged back down the bank and across the stream, slipping and catching himself on boulders as he crossed. He made for the gateway. He had to get out. He would get out and go, never come back, it was ruined. His stuff was up in the woods, he would go through the gate and get his stuff and never come back.

  But he had already gone through the gate.

  When he looked back he saw the twilight behind him and the rush of the water and the rocks breaking it, and ahead of him he saw the twilight and the path going on among the trees.

  He had lost his way. There was no way.

  He went on a few steps, then stopped; he stood there; then came back, passing between the high bushes and the red-barked pine, to the beginning place.

  The other, the stranger, was still standing on the far bank. Not a boy but a woman, jeans and white shirt, blur of black hair, white face staring.

  “I can’t get out,” Hugh said. “There isn’t any way.”

  The loud sweet voices of the water ran between them.

  He was very deeply frightened. He said, “If you know this place, if you live here, tell me how to get out!”

  The woman came forward abruptly, crossed the creek, going light and lithe from stone to stone. She stopped by the shelving rock and pointed to the gateway. “There.”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s the gate.”

  “I know.”

  “Go on!”

  “It’s changed,” he said. He turned and crossed the glade, went between the bushes and the pine, and went on. There was no darkening of the way, no steep scramble under shrubs and blackberry, no sunlight ahead. The trees stood close and dim in the windless dusk and there was no sound but the music of the creek behind him. He turned at last and saw the figure by the water watching him.

  He came back. She came across the grass to meet him.

  “It goes on,” she said in a whisper. “I never saw that. It’s never been closed on this side.—Come on!” She passed him, quick, rageful, going towards the gate. He came with her. The rough reddish trunk of the pine brushed his shoulder. On the dark path a bramble caught at his hair. He could scarcely see her scrambling ahead. A bird chip-chipped dryly overhead. The air smelled of smoke, rubber, gasoline, sunwarmed pine needles. The path underfoot was dry. “There’s your stuff,” the woman said. His pack and bedroll lay in the scruffy grass by the thickets.

  He looked at them, as if to check that everything was there. He did not dare look back. He was afraid that if he looked back the twilight would rise and come with him. The woman, the girl, his age, stood on the path, black hair, black eyes, white face.

  “What place is that?” he asked her. “Do you know?”

  She did not answer at once, and he thought she was not going to. “If you belonged there, you’d know,” she said in her harsh, thin voice.

  “I need—” He could not get the words out. Why did he stand here letting her shame him? His face was hot and stiff, had he been crying? He rubbed his jaw with his hand, hiding his mouth, to hide his shame.

  “It isn’t a boy scout camp,” she said. “It’s not for bringing all your crap into and camping and—It isn’t any state park. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know the rules. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know their—It isn’t your place. You don’t belong. It isn’t safe.”

  No anger would rise to relieve him of shame. He had to stand there and take what she said, and then repeat the only thing he had to say, “I need to come back.” His voice was a mumble. “I won’t leave stuff there.”

  She shook with rage like a bit of newspaper shaken by the wind, a bit of blazing paper in a fire.

  “I warn you!”

  What she had said before was getting through to him.

  “There are—people that live there?”

  After a long pause she said, “Yes. There are.”

  Her eyes flashed queerly in the restless light.

  “They’re waiting for you,” she said in her stifled, jeering voice, and then came forward suddenly and passed him, not going back, as he had expected, down the path into the evening land, but passing him, abrupt, swift, solid, and going forward into the morning. Within a few feet the bulk of the thickets hid her, another moment and the slight sound of her steps was gone.

  Hugh stood bewildered and bereft in the warm, slightly dusty air of the woods, which was continually shaken by the vibration of distant engines on the ground and in the air. A spot of sunlight filtering in through leaves danced on the dun cover of his bedroll, in constant motion.

  Where do I go now? There isn’t anywhere to go.

  He was tired, worn out by emotions—anger, fear, grief. He sat down there beside the path, one hand on his backpack, protectively, or for reassurance. The dreary ache of loss would not leave him or grow less.

  Maybe she feels like this too, he thought. Like I took it away from her.

  But I can’t help it. I have to go back. I don’t have anywhere else. She has no right…That was not the appropriate word, but he did not know how else to put it.

  I will go back. I won’t leave my stuff there. Not at the gateway clearing, anyhow. I could go farther—up the creek a ways. She can’t go everywhere. There’s no reason we’d ever have to see each other.

  Unless I can’t get out again.

  That thought went through his mind quite lightly. The panic terror he had submitted to when the gateway led only farther into the twilight had already sunk down deep in him, too deep to stir up easily. If it’s like that again I can wait, he told himself, and go through with her when she comes.

  She’s like me, she comes from here. But there are people who live there, she said.

  But his mind slipped away from this idea too. I don’t have to meet them. There’s never been anybody at the creek place. And she’s gone now. I’m going back…

  He
shoved his gear under the dusty, spiny outskirts of the thicket, stood up, and went back down the path to the threshold and into the twilight, to the clear water where, at last, he knelt and drank. The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”

  He got to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten and by ten-five was opening up Line Seven. Donna looked over from the register in Six. “You O.K., Buck?”

  For Hugh two days and three nights had passed since he left work an hour early yesterday afternoon; he did not remember why Donna might think he wasn’t O.K. “Sure!” he said.

  She looked him up and down with a curious expression, cynical yet admiring. “You wasn’t sick at all,” she said. “You had something better to do.” She rang up a sixpack of cola and a packet of cocktail cheese snacks for a shaky, unshaven old man, remarking to him and to Hugh, “Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”

  He did not explore far downstream. The gorge of the creek deepened; it always seemed darker in that direction. Upstream from the gateway clearing there was less underbrush, and in many places the creek had clear, broad, sandy verges. He came to a place where the creek, under a stand of big willows, was narrowed by an outcropping of red rock that slanted across the streambed in steps and shelves. Above the white water lay a deep, long pool. The shores were overhung by trees, but the pool itself lay open to the sky. The place had about it a sense of remoteness, self-containment; no one else would come here.

  He made a cache for his gear, the fork of a low tree, so thickly overgrown with a small-leafed vine that it was hidden even from him till he put his hands on it. He gathered a little supply of firewood, mostly branches from a dead tree nearby, and scooped a fireplace in the sand of the sheltered bank just above the barrier of red rocks. He laid a fire ready. Then he took off his shirt and jeans and silently, holding his body straight, walked out into the still pool. Just above the rock barrier it was deeper than he was tall. There he swam in silent and intense delight until he could bear the cold no longer, and made for the shore cramped and shuddering, and lighted his fire.

  The flames were beautiful in the clear twilight. He crouched naked to get the heat on his skin, in his bones. At last he dressed, and made himself a cup of the sweet coffee-chocolate mix he had bought on sale, and sat drinking it in peace of heart. When the fire had burned down he covered all trace of it with sand, put on his shoes, and set off to explore farther upstream.

  He came daily now. Half his life was spent in the twilight land. When he was there even the rhythm of his breathing was different; was deeper. When he woke from the sleep he slept there, a sleep deeper than dream, dark and resistless as the currents of the stream, he would lie a while, lazy, listening to the water run and the leaves stir, thinking, I’ll stay here…I’ll stay another while…He never did. When he was at work in the supermarket, or at home, he did not think much about the evening land. It was there, that was all he had to know while he was checking out a sixty-dollar load of groceries or getting his mother quieted down after a rough day at the loan company where she worked. It was there, and he could come back to it, the silence that gave words meaning, the center that gave the world a shape.

  He had never found the gate closed again, and had given the possibility very little thought. It had had something to do with the girl. It had happened because of her, because of her being there, and that was why she had been able to unhappen it, going with him through to the other side. From time to time he thought about her, apprehensive yet regretful. If she had not been so full of hate and spite maybe they could have talked. He had let her push him around, it was his fault. She might have told him something about this land. Apparently she had known it longer and knew it better than he did. If she didn’t live here, she knew those who did.

  If there were any others. He thought about that a good deal, during his silent whiles at the willow place. All she had said was something like, “You don’t know the language,” and then when he had asked if there were people living here she had said yes, but after hesitating, and with something faked or forced in what she said. She had been trying to scare him. And the idea was threatening. It was being alone here that was the joy of it. Being alone, not having to try to handle other people, their needs, demands, commands.

  But people who lived here, what could they be like? What language would they speak? Nothing here spoke. No bird ever sang. There must be animals in the woods but they were elusive, silent. There was no need for anybody here to bother anybody else.

  He thought about these things when he sat in the silence by the bright small fire beside the water under the willows. A thought here could occupy his mind for a long time, having room to expand and think itself through. He had never felt himself to be particularly stupid, and had done well enough in school in the subjects he liked, but he knew people found him stupid because he had no quickness. His mind would not work in a hurry, would not rush. Here he could come and think things out, and that made a great part of the freedom he felt here. The alternation of two utterly different lives, the repeated crossing of the threshold between Kensington Heights and the evening land, might have confused and exhausted him, if it had not been for the strength he got from his whiles by the creek. He was quiet, occupied simply and fully with hiking, swimming, sleeping, thinking, using his senses; and that full quietness replaced all the sense of being pushed and hurried through life without time to ask what he was doing or where he ought to go, without time to see that there were choices, and to choose. Even there, if he held fast to the quietness he found here, even there he managed to get some thinking done.

  Since he had said his mother was sick, had heard his voice say the word, he had been self-compelled to face the idea instead of running and hiding from it; to try to consider steadily how sick she was, and what her sickness was.

  That was hard. It meant comparing: as if she was not his mother, but any woman, anyone. Anyone sick.

  In his last couple of high schools he had known fellows who went the hard-drug route, all the way. And in tenth grade, it was not a memory he wanted to dig up, the girl who used to copy his English assignments sometimes, he could not think of her name—she always made him feel guilty because she was so humble—Cheryl was her name, and one day the week before school was out she had locked herself in a stall in the girls’ room and tried to stuff herself down a toilet. He had heard the screaming and seen a girl in the hall laughing in a horrible whooping way, and then Cheryl carried out doubled up, with pinkish water dripping out of her hair, screaming in a high thin voice, and he and all the other kids standing watching, people running up the stairs to see. Nobody had known how to talk about it afterwards, nobody who had heard the screaming. That was the worst he had been close to so far, but working in groceries you saw a lot of people scolding the mushrooms, and crazies like the shoplifter who tried to bribe his way out or the guy who pulled a knife on Donna when she refused to cash his check without ID; and people doing things that might have a reason but looked pretty weird, such as buying forty-eight bottles of germkiller spray and a can of water chestnuts. What all these people had in common, as well as he could figure it out, was a kind of getting out of gear, out of synch. The engine made a noise but no power got to the wheels. They were stuck. They got nowhere. In the last seven years his mother had changed houses thirteen times and lived in five different states; and the oftener she moves, he thought, the more she doesn’t get anywhere.

  All the same, even if she was like the mushroom people and the germ-spray people, she wasn’t as bad as the junkies or Cheryl. She was stuck but not sunk. The loan company, a huge outfit with offices all over the country, had let her transfer twice now, and still gave her raises. She complained a lot about the work, but never missed a day at it. And in this office she had made a friend finally, Durbina, and found a whole new interest, this pr
evious-lives business, which she was getting very deep into. Was that crazy? Hugh had no inclination to judge it one way or the other. What she told him sounded pretty silly. They always seemed to remember being princesses or high priestesses in their previous lives; he wondered who had worked at the loan companies and the supermarkets in Ancient Egypt. But then, no doubt you tended to remember the high points. It was screwy, but no screwier than most things people got interested in: baseball scores, aluminum futures, antique medicine bottles, nuclear proliferation, Jesus, politics, health foods, playing the violin. People did very strange things. People were extremely strange. All of them. You couldn’t judge sickness by strangeness, or everybody would come out sick. Sick was when you drove the car in neutral. The place she couldn’t get away from was home, the more she left it the worse she was stuck; could not bear to be alone in the house, could not come home at night to an empty house, lived in terror of waking up at night with no one else there. And that had got worse. She was worse now than she had ever been—But I know that, he thought. What’s the good of knowing it? There’s nothing I can do. She hasn’t got anybody but me. You have to have somebody, even if neither of you can do anything. There isn’t anybody else.

  He was waiting for Hugh at the corner across from school. “Let’s go watch the track events down at the college practice field,” he said, and Hugh, thirteen, wearing the green shirt he had got yesterday for his birthday, noticed the other kids noticing his dad, a big, fair man, tall and broad-chested, looking good in a jeans jacket gone white at the seams. He had the Ford truck there and they drove down to the college track and watched runners, broad jumpers, pole vaulters in the golden haze of the April afternoon. They talked about the last Olympics, about the techniques of pole vaulting. His dad punched his shoulder gently and said, “You know, Hughie, I have a lot of confidence in you. You know that? I can count on you. You’re steadier than a lot of grown men I know. You keep that way. Your mom’s got to have somebody to depend on. She can depend on you. It means a lot to me, knowing that.” Hugh could not kiss the large, gold-haired hand; the only way men were allowed to touch each other was by hitting. He could not even touch the frayed cuff of the jeans jacket. He sat silent in the sudden blissful sunlight of praise. Next day when he got home from school their neighbor Joanna was there, thin-lipped, in the kitchen; Hugh’s mother was lying down, under sedation; his father had gone off in the Ford truck leaving a note saying he had a job in Canada and thought this was a good time to make the break.