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GUEST ARTICLE
My regular article posts at its regular time.
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Barefoot Girls


by D. Ritchey



Fox’s car broke down on the road to Lignum Pass. Fortunately the weather was clear and calm. Night was coming on. He got out, knowing the car was finally dead, and glad to be walking away from it. He was not handy, as the term goes, with things mechanical. His eyes swept the sky, looking for rain clouds. He saw none. As he walked away the darkness was less threatening because he had been forced out on his own. Action is the antidote to a static situation. Move. Walk away from the car. The car is finished. Throw one thing away that is not working for you; leave an opening for a new. Call it the intervention by Fate.

At this elevation the woods were piney. He thought about which was the best way out. Maybe back down, to Herkimer? Or on up over the pass to Nitro on the other side? Either way was a long walk. Maybe he should wait in the car, wait for a passing truck? He took the forward option. His boots began sounding on the dirt road. He began going forward. The air smelled cool and clean with the pines.

He trudged on. The pines gradually thinned out, replaced by hardwoods. He was puffing for breath. Along the way he heard animals scurry in the bush, heard calls. He thought he heard an owl, or maybe a coyote give out a short howl. The forest seemed a black confusion. It worked on his mind despite his physical exertion. His mind seemed like a sieve, and a giant receptor both. Like anything might get in, like he would be forced to process any stimuli he never had experienced. That is the effect of the night on the human mind.

And the night was damn dark. He didn’t like it. He paused and sat on a fallen tree that had been sawn and jerked to the shoulder. He dared not go very far into the bush. He was frightened. He admitted it to himself. He wished he had a rifle, or even a long walking stick. He looked around. He saw a long branch and managed to snap it off. It was a good diameter for a walking stick. He winced at the noise it made as he snapped it clean of small branches. Why didn’t he have a knife? Good god, how could a man live in the open country such as this, and not carry emergency items? He was too civilized, he decided. Too urban.

“You’re a lost guy,” he told himself. “All book learning and no sense.” He got up with his stick and looked around, but not feeling any better about he situation. He swung it a couple of times, to get the balance of it. Not a bad piece and he did like the heft of it. The action made him feel confident. The heavy stick felt like it could make a difference. Take away a city boy’s credit card and his automobile, what’s left?

Then out of nowhere the voice came, Mister Enow’s voice. It sounded inside his head but as usual it seemed to come from the outside. Like the asshole was right there beside him. It was a cheap ambush, the kind Fox expected of him. It started with a laugh, a bitter, whiskey-and-frustration laugh like he used to hear on TV dramas. But it was also the laugh of a man who suspected that he would ultimately be defeated. Fox saw it.

“You deserve this, kid. You never listen to anybody,” Mister Enow said.

Fox tried not to retort, but after a moment he cut loose. “I know where I am. Get lost.”

He thought this area was called The Rush. Why it had been named that, he could not imagine. Especially on a night like this: smooth and calm, breezing, pregnant with sighs from the tossing trees that made you think you would dream good dreams tonight. Despite being stranded and carless.

“Mister Enow, my ass,” he thought.

He continued up the high, wild road. He looked up often; it was difficult not to, with the sky filling the upper part of his eyesight, just forcing itself in with stars as big as his fist. But over there he saw clouds rolling in, from the east. He didn’t like it. He got a feeling like he might be strangled or something. Destroyed. He looked back down the pass. His car was long out of sight. He walked on some more, puffing hard but keeping a good pace. He was a bit proud of his physical condition. He was doing all right. Most people, who had experienced his mishap, he was thinking, wouldn’t think of walking. They would wait in the car until someone came by.

Fox looked around at the forest hemming the road. The wind was rustling through it. Half the sky was stars, the other clouds, with the clouds creeping in faster than a man might figure. But he didn’t smell rain. Maybe they would just pass over. Some moonlight would help. He didn’t know about the moon. If it was coming up tonight. Or when.

Hiking is mostly monotonous. The mind wanders. Fox’s mind ran here and there, but it always returned to him and each time he was feeling a bit different than when it left. It was the sort of experience which always drew Mister Enow back in. Fox tried to let the thought of Mister Enow pass, but he failed to allow it to happen, again; and so Fox prepared himself for the voice. It came soon enough, when he was feeling thirsty. Dehydrated. It was just what he needed to hear.

“You’re going under tonight, kid. You didn’t listen to me or your dad and now you’re gonna pay the price.”

He was up about 8,000 feet here, he guessed. The pass was about 1,000 feet higher, he guessed further. Still, the air was pleasant; not warm or cool. It felt a perfect medium, like a womb; it could lull a man into sleep. He thought that odd, in a dim sort of way in the back of his mind, that he was up at this elevation and wasn’t cold. Even in July it could snap cold, with the weather fickle in these mountains. Memories unpleasant and good came to him, and musings on the big questions.

The road bent a little and he paused and looked back. Far down, far away, behind him, he saw the lights of Herkimer lying sprinkled in a dark bowl. Civilization. It looked so far away, and all he thought of it now was the comforts it offered: security, companionship. Food and bed and women. And hopscotch on back, eastward, toward the coast, on the other cities, each growing bigger and bigger until you landed on the monstrosities covering the old coast of the Atlantic like a leprosy. Companionship? Maybe. It was getting harder to find, he had discovered, no matter where you went. But it was very hard in the cities. The people were growing lonelier, sicker. It could not be denied, even by the strong-minded, who played on their good manners and optimism. Even out here in the mountains where people were fewer. There were diversions keeping people indoors. The offerings from television, the remote internet, rental films, personal phones, and the rest. All were mixed bestowments of human imagination; all had positive and negative effects. Unfortunately he had never seen the positive outweigh the negatives of them. Maybe that was just his personal luck of the bad draw.

He went on but found himself looking back often at Herkimer until the lights were gone. The road had bent out of sight of the town, and the night seemed to close in on him. Now Fox was regretting he did not go back down the way he had driven up. That way was sure, at least. He looked ahead; the road climbed and narrowed and he didn’t like the look of it. But―hell with it! He was tired of what he knew. He went on.

The road climbed some more. He skirted some ruts made by heavy trucks, timber trucks maybe. The road was leveling off now and near the top of the pass he saw a marker placed by the survey department. It was a concrete post with a disc embedded in its top. He didn’t bother looking at it; it would be stamped with survey data and that was all. He went on a little ways, feeling some urgency. He was turning hungry now, and wanted to get out of there. His need for water was demanding his serious attention now.

A little farther on he saw a road, narrow and nearly overgrown, shooting off to his left. It bored straight in to the forest and disappeared. The entrance was so dim with bush, so narrow, he wondered why he had noticed it. He looked up and saw the starry sky had been nearly buried now by clouds. Still, no hint of rain. He stood there, leaning on his stick, looking down that barely noticeable road.

He glanced around, making out the topography. The features were shadows upon shadows, blending with each other, in too many hues of grey and black. He saw that he was standing on a gentle ridge top that was close enough to level to relieve a tired man. But such roads were nothing around here. He was about to move on when he thought he heard a whisper, certainly different from the wind whispers. No, these whispers were different.

“But kid, you don’t know anything. You better scat,” Mister Enow said.

Fox stepped off, thinking that he never heard his father’s voice. Why? But no matter now. Fox was walking fast now, three, four, six steps gone―but he stopped. He was listening again. He thought he had caught, just when his foot had come down, a woman’s whisper. Or not quite a whisper, a sort of cry. He couldn’t define it. A woman’s voice near crescendo. Not in distress. Something else. And after that he had heard a blow, or a concussion, sharp and deep. It could not have been a falling tree. Maybe a firearm. Maybe that. He turned and went down the path.

It was a long path, but a kind path; it stayed flat and clear enough. The mosquitoes and bloodflies didn’t bother him much. Going down it, he felt like this was a choice as good as any other. Why? This wasn’t a good idea, leaving the main road. No, it wasn’t. What the hell was he doing?

He picked up his pace a little. There was not light enough to see the ground. He did not know if this was often used. But he was feeling no ruts or prints under him. And the ground was dried well. It was feeling good to be here. Why? He looked over and saw the moon now, rising in the southwest sky, barely visible but advertising itself to all those concerned with life. It seemed to be rising to meet the advancing clouds.

The road shot straight on. Gradually they returned, the noises, steady now, rising and in the material world. He heard chanting, he heard drums, and women’s voices. They came out of the bubble of yellow light that he was just beginning to see. Coming stronger. The light swelling out of the featured blackness ahead on his left. Just there. He came to a clearing and stopped hard. The scene jumped in front of him.

It was a fire, and women dancing around it. To the right, facing them, were the drummers. Fox didn’t know whether to run away, or stand there and wait, or just stand there, because none of them looked at him. But Christ, he was thirsty as hell. They might give him some water.

“Move on out of there, kid,” said Mister Enow. Sometimes Fox could let Mister Enow’s cancerous comments pass. Sometimes not. This one went on by, but not smoothly. Fox felt the thing pass out the other side of his head and he turned his attention back to the incredible scene in front of him. There were five women. He watched them going around. It had the effect on him of a bal sylphe. The dance seemed perfect to him, on the edge of wild. Yet a formality in their movements presented their sense of dignity to him. He felt it, and knew it was good. He waited for Mister Enow to say something. But Fox turned his mind back to the girls. He glanced at the drummers, and to the girls again. Nothing in this foreshadowed that he should leave. He wasn’t feeling any warning at all. It was as if a force, or a profound need in him, ordered him to stay, observe.

He recognized the dance. It was the old Irish dance, but changed. He thought about it, puzzled, and the answer came to him. Yes, it was the same dance, but as it was in the heathen days. The church always made the women keep their arms pinned to their sides. The churchmen thought the waving arms of the natural heathen dance lascivious. So, here it was, the correct dance. The right way, the way of power. The dance as it was in the old times. Fox stepped closer until he was just beginning to feel the heat of the fire. Then he backed away a step, still watching.

The girls would bounce in place, half a dozen times on one ball of foot, then the other, with arms high above their heads. They would stamp their bare feet and shift, in a glide, to their next position. The grass was short under them. At the next place they repeated the low, bumping whirl. They thrust their hips, and turned, their long dresses flying, with their fingers twinkling at the ends of their long arms, twinkling and winkling in the firelight and the rising moon. An ankle, a leg would flash cleanly in the light, flash and disappear back under their skirts.

He turned toward the men on the drums. There were three, hairy and robust men, one banging a short, hollowed birch log, the others on skinhead drums. They were wearing rough clothes, and vests of animal skin. The beat was heavy and rolled through his body. Heavy and fierce like the drums of Africa, but in another way. The tone of them, the tempo and the method, and thus the origins, were different.

“It all tracks on the sun and the moon,” Fox thought as he watched the girls. And he wondered the next moment where that thought came from.

“This is dangerous!” said Mister Enow. Fox thought there was a hint of whining in his voice.

“Get lost, Mister E,” he said, using his term of contempt for the memory and the man. Fox had never figured the source of negative cachet in the term “Mister E.” But it sounded low grade and dismissive. Anyway, it worked, if Fox didn’t use it too often.

One of the girls looked at him as she came around. He thought she was looking at him. But in the firelight and under the stirring sky there came over him a mood of unreality. As if he could not separate this from an interior event, a personal dream manufactured by the billions of cells that churned and struggled in his brain. The drums were pounding, each impact sending a little shock through him. The women came by in a whirl of feral motion that never crossed from honesty. Or so he thought of it. The girl came around again. He heard her speak, although he did not notice her lips move. That voice. It must have been hers.

“Fabrea,” he heard her say. “Fabrea.” She floated up and down, her auburn hair coiling out of their tight curls as she lifted her head and put it down again, looking at him from upside down, from her arched position. She pulled back in and whirled away, her blouse white, her skirts swimming like a living thing itself. He watched her twine her arms slowly up, vining and twining them to their limits and then her hands flicked out toward the stars, and her fingers began to dance, each slim and lithe and almost fawn colored in the moonglow. Her eyes were green, a true match for the summer.

He looked over at the drummers again. None seemed to notice him. He noted that their pace was consistently energetic, as one would think pagan drummers would be. Yet Fox felt an additional force behind them, as he did in the dancers, more than the need to make music. It was not quite primal. No, he couldn’t call it that because he did not think primal people were a fact around here. Nor would the dance of primal people be reserved and feral both, as this was. He was from three counties south but he knew this area well enough and he would have heard of such people. Word would get out. The boys were always running their trucks and dogs through here. Fox doubted a tribe, a real tribe of the forested mountains, could go long undetected.

Yet there was in this ceremony the presentiment of confirmed action, ancient acts repeated. These people were doing this dance, this ceremony―if that is what it was―with perfect ease and skill. They had been bred to it. Or it was in their blood. Or both. The drummers watched the girls in their dancing ring about the fire. Occasionally one would look at the stars, lift his head slowly as if taking in every star along the trajectory of his eyes… His eyes would first pull away from the dancers and the fire and drift up, slowly like a hot air balloon, and lose themselves. After a few moments he would return. And so it went on.

Fox watched each of the girls closely. Each had a wild, windburned beauty. Some were stout bodied, but they moved almost as well as the slim girls. Blood was in their cheeks, and their bodies were tight and strong. Their dresses were something like that of the peasants of l9th Century Europe and America, with false hems. They reached nearly to their ankles. Each wore a blouse, unbuttoned to the navel. Some wore a waistcoat also.

Some of the girls were redheads, the others brunet or black. Each seemed to him to be in an elevated state, and blissful. Their eyes shone powerfully with a light which caused him to imagine a complexity hard to maintain. A mental complexity. Their energy was like a wall to him. To get close to them was unthinkable. He looked over. The drummers were streaming sweat that glittered like liquid fire as it reflected the light, and they too were elevated, their eyes lost in the dome of the stars or in the fire, deep in the mystery of the dance.

He breathed deeply and looked at the moon. It was fatter now, expanding from the crescent to a broader shape, glowing ever closer to white light. But now it was still a weak orange. Soon it would swell to its full brightness, a cold fury, as Fox had imagined it many times, a brilliant mirror of the Sun.

Behind him sounded a rustling, a shift of feet. It was remarkable he heard it through the drumming. But he didn’t turn to see who it might be. He waited. He watched the drummers, he watched the dancers. None seemed to have noticed anything.

Finally the dance slowed. He couldn’t give credence to his first impressions any longer. He thought them at first an apparition; then mad people, runaways from civilization. But here they were now, panting, sweating. He saw their eyes going mellow as their exhaustion crept in to displace the ecstasy. The girls were staying upright now, turning easily like toy tops running out of energy. The sight was a bit mournful to Fox. He disliked the depressive effect of the end of the dance. But it was a time to rest, a time to sleep.

“You goddamn kid. You stupid son of a bitch kid,” said Mister E. with his old authority. “I can see you’re a juvenile delinquent. Already, age ten. How old are you, kid?”

Fox was watching the girls. The first detail that caught his eye was their necklaces, how they were floating to rest as the whirling slowed, as if their green and blue stones and white shells had wills of their own. Settling in little waves, perfect and smooth as the energy rippled down them. Their eyes were wonderful, bright like clearwater streams. For a moment Fox let Mister E.’s attack arrest the outflow of poisonous energy from his body. The flow stopped dead as if a gate had dropped, and Fox stood there a moment. No, he couldn’t stand it. He looked at the drummers, at the fire ebbing, at the girls, now all hugging all, and some kissing, all of them making to sit and rest. Fox felt his own self deflating. Like someone was slashing the wires of a puppet. He fought his fear of it. He urged himself to let go. But the harder he urged, the harder he held on. Even in that time compressed to but a few moments. Standing there, lost and alone, hungry and stranded.

“And when are you going to tell your father about the knife you took from my porch? Huh, boy?” Mister E. demanded. And Mister E.’s hard grey eyes were boring into him. The boy couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. He could neither yield to, nor challenge, the man. His mind began to crumble. “Good gawd, what are you god-damn crying about, boy? You’re a cry-baby. That’s all. If you were a man you’d go in there and tell your father what you did. Now I’m going to tell him…”

Then Fox was watching the girls, all of them sitting now on sections of felled trees. Sitting contently, as if they had done their duty well. As if they had spent themselves, but properly. The elevation of mind, the venting of poisons psychical and physical. They were sitting together. The drummers looking steadily at him now. Their drumsticks were leaning neatly against the drums. He looked down and saw that he had backed up several paces. Fox saw Fabrea whispering to the drummer on the birch log.

Mister E. burst out, “I told you. Son of a bitch kid.”

“You’re nothing,” Fox thought, and Mister E.’s face fell away and Fox looked again at the moon. Then he saw them, they were looking at him. All of them. They had stopped talking and were watching him. Fabrea was looking at him. This time he felt her eyes. Not like last time, when she was dancing. Then her eyes weren’t on him, they were looking through him. She had been looking through him, like he was in the way of what she wanted to see. He looked back at her now, direct and questioning, but she didn’t react in any way. Suddenly all of them turned to one of the men, the drummer on the log.

It was a complexity he saw in the man’s eyes: a sort of considered remorselessness, the look of a man pursued by things but who pursued back. But balance, too. The man got up. He was lean and quick. His hair was sandy brown, cut short. His beard was close. He came out of the circle, drawing a knife from his belt and passed by Fox and Fox heard his feet receding in the bush behind him.

“Now you’re finished,” Mister E. said, from far away, in a faint, dopplerized voice. Fox didn’t react. He was looking at the people. They were extraordinary. At ease they still looked bright as candles. Of a super vitality. They seemed to burn. They were burning people. They were bright.

Fox heard their leader emerging behind him, with a rustle. He had his knife out and a small limb in his hand. The bark on the limb was beautiful, a sort of streaked white, like birch, but not birch. The leaves were small and waxy and vital. Fox had never seen such a tree before. The leader re-entered the circle and the others gathered closer as he set to chopping and carving the limb. Now they were looking at Fox as if seeing him, looking from Fox to their leader and back to Fox. He thought the girl named Fabrea was saying something to him with her eyes. Maybe a bit of warmth in them. But Fox could not be sure. Fox let it go, because he could not know. Not yet.

The moon was high now, a good moon burning with cold sunlight. The leader finished and rose slowly, the others watching him. He came out and presented Fox with the finished stick, a drumstick, and two girls followed, Fabrea and the girl called Faiga, the one with the black hair; and each took Fox’s hands and led him into the circle. There were smiles. Fox did not understand anything except this: he was home.



The end.