Two years after Cricket left me, I let go the good graces of this world as one might set down a bowl of soup gone cold.

I lived just off campus and walked my neutered beagle, Romeo, twice a day. In times past I strolled the quad and chatted with students and faculty while Romeo relieved himself. Post-cuckolding, I preferred to go in the other direction, into the countryside, where the lots are vast and wooded, houses barely visible from the street, mountains on all sides. I liked the solitude and Romeo preferred the route as well, given its abundance of squirrels and the occasional deer or flock of turkeys.

It was early November, late afternoon. We had the road to ourselves but spied in the woods a black bear ransacking dead leaves for acorns, a late bid to fatten up for winter. I read once that black bears in the fall may spend up to twenty hours a day looking for acorns and I saw now a parallel to my own hollow striving. I heard an approaching vehicle — the Amazon delivery van, which buzzed our neighborhood at all times of the day and evening like some irksome horsefly. It rumbled past us, then stopped at the top of a long gravel driveway. The driver jumped out, parcel in hand, and jogged down the steep path toward the distant house. I suppose he did not want to negotiate the driveway in reverse on the way out. Whatever his reason, he left the van sitting there, engine running.

I motioned for Romeo to jump into the cab, which he did happily as if embarking on some unfathomable adventure. I put the van in gear and drove to my house, a little more than a mile away. I was sipping fresh coffee when the Amazon driver showed up with a Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy. She handcuffed me and impounded Romeo.

I didn’t steal any packages or damage the van. What might be considered a prank from a teenager or adult of no standing was an unforgiveable scandal for the president of a small liberal arts college grounded in the Christian tradition. The local newspaper spilled its scornful ink. Students mocked me on social media.

When the trustees fired me, they asked, for the record: Why?

“I was cold,” I said. They had it in for me regardless, ever since the divorce.

Cricket called me from Chapel Hill with the same question. Why did I do it? I told her I guessed I didn’t see much point to anything anymore and she asked why I couldn’t simply take up cigarettes or opioids like a normal person. I told her I might yet do that but what did she care? We already split the blanket.

They evicted me from the president’s residence before Christmas. The old place with its Greek Revival conceits was too drafty anyway. I moved to the next county north, where things were cheap. Little town, hemmed by mountains on one side and the French Broad River on the other. I leased an efficiency above the Department of Motor Vehicle’s driver’s license office on Main Street, where most the buildings dated to the early 1900s. A single window offered a view of the alley, railroad tracks and an iron bridge spanning the water. My late-model Prius stood out like a snobby nose among the old pickup trucks and rusted Subarus. Romeo enjoyed the new arrangement — there was nowhere I could go in my unit where he could not see me.

By summer the mental habits, emotional ticks and even the muscle memory of my past life melted away, replaced by nothing. I intended to read — I taught English literature before slumming in administration — but in practice I mostly laid around. The words of the great authors struck me now as showy and nugatory. Likewise the words of the prophets and evangelists. The Baptist Church across the street had a white steeple and attracted a couple dozen worshippers on Sabbath days, but I was not among them. Each week, the pastor greeted his flock at the door dressed in the temple robes of Protestant Appalachia: khakis and an Easter-colored shirt with short sleeves and a button-down collar — he had a rotation of them in various hues, made in Vietnam or Bangladesh, probably, delivered by Amazon, I bet. He waved at me once, the casual hello variety, not the come-hither-and-be-cleansed kind, and we never spoke. I wondered whether people like me reeked of Cain or otherwise radiated futility to the spiritually discerning.

I patronized a saloon down the block that served craft beer and decent hamburgers. The French Broad, they called it. The jovial owner, Dave, was in his late forties, a decade younger than me. He liked classic country music and dogs and would salute me when I shuffled in with Romeo on a tether. I knew some Hank Williams songs, so I passed his test in that respect also. His wife Shelby tended bar.

Come fall, a brawl of reds and yellows smothered the town’s essential ugliness and decline in natural grace. It affected me to some vague degree, not rejuvenating, exactly, but mildly assurgent. Evidently, I would not die in my sleep so perhaps I needed to do something with the rest of my life? That sort of feeling. I left my room more frequently and would say hello to people on the sidewalk. One night, Shelby set a beer down in front of me and said, “You’re that crazy college guy who carjacked Amazon, aren’t you?”

So, the story morphed into a tall tale. Carjacked?

She said, “Lots of folks here liked what you did. Dave got a big laugh out of it. I don’t think he knows who you are, or your money would be no good.”

Shelby was ten- or twenty-pounds overweight, like me, but carried it well. Her cheeks had a magnetic, warm color.

“Maybe I should tell him,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a free beer.”

She said, “Don’t tell him, I kind of like knowing more than he does.”

She gave me a wink.

From then on, she gave me the same wink every time she saw me, but never did offer a free beer. Her mild flirting made me feel good. One night she knocked on my door at about eleven o’clock. She brought me a cheeseburger in a paper sack. “What do you do up here all day?” she asked. “You are so mysterious.”

Then she said, “I would like to kiss you.”

I hadn’t been with a woman since Cricket and no one besides Cricket since my early twenties. I didn’t know what to do. I asked her, “What about Dave?” She said he went deer hunting and wouldn’t be back for two days.

“All right,” I said. “I’d like to kiss you also.” Like stepping into the Amazon van all over again. She tasted like rum and Coca-Cola.

She turned off the overhead light, undressed me. “Lie down on the bed for me,” she whispered. She took off her clothes and climbed aboard. The moon over the river shined through my window enough to let us see the general way of things, while dimming our flaws. “Oh honey,” she said. She kept saying it, words repeated in time with the rocking of her hips, until I couldn’t take it anymore. Romeo, the good boy, stayed curled up in his dog bed by the bathroom. Later I split the cold cheeseburger with him.

Shelby came back the next day at noon with a grilled Reuben and again before midnight with a bottle of tequila. Between the lunch visit and the late-night visit, she had trimmed her pubic hair. I worked myself into the kind of giddy delirium that is inadvisable for someone my age and wondered whether my enthusiasm indicated a fresh desire to live or merely the hope for a big-league ending. Later, as we rested, I traced her appendectomy scar with the tip of my finger and she asked me where we would go, if it was just her and me. I told her I didn’t think she would like that very much. She laid there for about ten minutes, then put on her underwear. “This wasn’t always my life, you know,” she said. “I have a degree.”

Dave and his buddies rolled into town around lunchtime the next day with a harvested buck already dressed and its severed head tied to the hood of his F150. When I passed him on the sidewalk a few weeks later, he said, “Hey, how come we never see you anymore?” I told him Romeo was becoming incontinent in his old age.

 

#

 

One night in late winter, dressed in my flannel pajamas and sheepskin slippers, I took out my trash to the alley after dark. It was snowing. I think I remember hearing the approach but perhaps that is a false memory. I woke up inside a frigid cabin, facing a corner. My head throbbed. A flashlight somewhere behind me illuminated rough-hewn walls covered in green algae like a bad paint job. My slippers laid tossed in the corner, beyond the reach of my naked toes. My hands were tied around a column behind me.

“Hello?” I asked in a small voice. The beam of the flashlight jumped. Someone behind me gonged the side of my head with a club or perhaps a piece of firewood and my vision detonated white. I screamed. There was a second blow, I think.

When I shivered awake, I seemed to be alone. I had wet myself. My muscles cramped. Milky daylight bled through a dingy plate-glass window, dappled with moving shadows. Still snowing. The whole left side of my head hurt and I had a broken tooth. I moaned for help but there was only so much cold, pain and fear my mind could take and it checked out at some point. I woke to late-afternoon murkiness and the sound of footsteps behind me, some busyness I couldn’t decipher, like maybe a tool chest being set down.

“Dave?” My throat hurt.

No answer.

“Dave,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Still no answer, and then: the pump of a shotgun or the racking of a pistol or the bolt action of a rifle.

Before the cabin, I welcomed the idea of death, the concept of it, and there was a certain logic to my situation. In this moment, however, I suspected no one welcomes it and my circumstances felt especially low and punitive. My brain pan became a flashfire of regret. I wanted to live to be a hundred. I wanted to taste cream soda, behold a spouting whale, comb my hair. Every cell of my body recoiled from the mechanical sound of the executioner’s tool. Why had I killed myself?

I bawled and offered money. Nothing happened. Absolute silence behind me, the loudest of noises. Time immeasurable. Suddenly, shuffling boots, the gathering of objects. A door opened. I felt a gust of cold wind. The door closed.

“Dave?”

No one returned.

Light faded. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet any longer. Sometime in the night I filled my pajamas. Light returned through the little window. Blue sky now.

After a while, I understood I had been abandoned to time and nature.

Better to be shot. I considered with bitterness the pursuit of solitude that dominated the last decade of my life, for it was not always so. As a small boy in Pennsylvania, I got separated from my parents at the Gettysburg battlefield; it was off-season, rainy and cold, and I found myself alone amid the boulders of Devil’s Den. It lasted perhaps two minutes before my mother’s reassuring embrace found me, but two minutes of terrifying aloneness made an impression and who would reassure me now in my longest hour? I wept for Romeo. I called out to no one. More than three years ago I walked in the front door and called out for Cricket and found her gone and her closet empty; how I hated her. But there were earlier times when she called upstairs to me, Let’s go eat, let’s go into Asheville, let’s drive the Parkway, and I would not. Forgive me. Too the emails from McLarney at Florida State — Buddy, you need a fresh start, you should teach again, come down here why don’t you? —  which I deflected. The speeches I gave as if sleepwalking, many times over many years, words contrived and insincere, wanting only to be left alone. Well.

Sometime in the deep night, tapping noises played above me, faint at first, then a steady din. Rain. It pounded the roof and found its way in, leaks small and profuse, all around me. I couldn’t see, only heard and felt the drops, opened my mouth, begged with bloated tongue. Then I did see: Faces leaked through the roof, spectral and luminous, mournful drops of fallen life, with noses and eyes of people long dead. Human souls bombed the roof, a great cloudburst of witnesses. We were never alone, I now understood, but rather constantly observed. This was not comforting as I might have expected. I sensed an accusatory attitude. I knew some of them. The college cafeteria worker from Honduras who tried to get to work and drowned in her overturned Tercel in a gulley two blocks from campus when I declined to cancel classes during flash-flood warnings. She was here, watching. I turned my back on my parents in their old age and they were here too. Forgive me.

At first light, the rain stopped. I said, “Yes, yes,” out loud. I was ready. After a while, they touched me, the harvesting specters. Their hands, real as my own life, gathered me up, and to my bewilderment, they were gentle.

Later I learned they were Boy Scouts.

 

#

 

Cricket said, “You look surprisingly fine.”

They had me in the big hospital down in Asheville. My predecessor at the college died here, years back. I visited him at the last and he asked to hold my hand, which was awkward to say the least. Now my ex-wife held mine. She looked older but more buoyant than I remembered.

“You stopped coloring your hair,” I said.

“No social pressure now,” she said.

“Same.”

She smirked in that clever way of hers, which she did a lot when I first knew her, usually when I was trying to tell a joke or offer some profound insight, and I realized I never saw it toward the end. She said, “Maybe shave anyway?”

It was good to see Cricket, I suppose, more so than all the other people. Aside from the nurses and doctors, there had been reporters and TV cameramen, people from the college, even the Baptist preacher from the church across the street from my apartment. And the investigators, of course — chubby sheriff deputies and two well-groomed special agents from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

“Where’s old Pete?” I asked.

“He’s home. No one is trying to provoke you.”

“Give him my best.”

Cricket dabbed the corner of my eye with a hospital tissue and dried my cheek and the part of my neck where the tears ran off. I had been crying a little, not because of her, and certainly not because my old pal Pete was keeping his distance, but only because of Romeo. Cricket told me straight off, when she came in —she had him, safe and sound, in her Airbnb.

The way Cricket told it, Romeo saved my life. At some point during my absence, he clawed his way into the lower cabinet where I kept the kibble bag, so he did not starve. But, running out of water and patience, he bayed until the DMV employees below complained. The building owner knocked, ready to give me an earful. Receiving no answer, she let herself in. She stepped in a stinky, wet mess for her trouble but saw my phone on the kitchen counter. Prius parked outside, frantic dog, ten pounds of kibble scattered everywhere, no me. Two and two. She called the police.

We sat together a while, Cricket and me, not saying anything. She patted my hand, which still felt tingly from the frostbite. She watched while I ate the hospital’s soft chicken and broccoli. Finally, she asked, “Why would someone do this to you?”

I told her the same thing I told everyone else: “I wish I knew. I wasn’t given the courtesy of an explanation. I never saw a face.” Mystery abductor still at large, the headline said. I don’t think the investigators believed the mystery part, but they were nice about it, at least for now. Cricket neither believed nor was nice. She frowned.

“This isn’t good,” she said. “I don’t like your attitude. I know this bit, this thing you do. Don’t.”

“What bit?”

“The grudge bit. The withdrawal, the façade, the phony stoicism. That biding-your-time look from hell.”

“Some way to talk to a guy in my shape.”

“Whatever it is, you can’t handle it on your own. Tell them what you know.”

Cricket didn’t read me as well as she thought. I got my reputation back, in a way, from pariah to poor victim. The reporter for the local rag, the same one who crucified me over the Amazon van incident, wrote kinder things yesterday. The college people were condolatory. Being an object of pity wasn’t my goal, but given my past, it was the best I could hope for. I wasn’t eager to say I ended up in a derelict cabin on the Max Patch Trail because I slept with another man’s wife. I certainly wouldn’t confess to Cricket and lose my cherished moral advantage over her and old Pete. Besides, I hadn’t seen a face. I hadn’t received an explanation.

But Cricket wasn’t wrong, either. I bided my time, always — with her, with unscrupulous auto mechanics, nasty neighbors, anyone on campus who ever crossed me. I don’t know what the hell I ever thought I would do, in fact I never did anything about anything, but she was right. I did have a bit.

Cricket stuck around, popping into my hospital room every few hours. When they discharged me, she refused to go home and insisted I stay with her in the Airbnb. It was a little two-bedroom house in West Asheville, an eclectic neighborhood she always admired. She told me she arranged for my Prius to be towed to Asheville, no need for me to go back north. “Come see your dog,” she said, though he used to be our dog.

Romeo cried, clawed me, and I cried hot tears, hugged him. Truly I was a pathetic person, but he was all I had. Cricket watched and I could sense her guilt and remorse for wrecking me, a bonus. I walked him up and down the block wearing the gloves and scarf and woolen cap Cricket gave me. She bought me a week’s worth of clothing; she did not want me going back to my apartment because, she said, it wasn’t safe there with a maniac on the loose.

Each night for the next week, Cricket made dinner and we shared wine and watched television. She encouraged me to sleep a lot and I did. During the day, she left for hours at a time, to wander the Arts District, she said, and she would come back with small trinkets for herself, and a couple used books for me, as well as a special lotion, which she put on my hands and feet and cheeks. It was strange to be touched by her. “So that’s the routine,” she said, washing her hands. “Do it twice a day.” She took me to a dentist, where I got the shattered molar capped. She called the sheriff twice, asking whether an arrest had been made.

One afternoon, Pete called her when we were playing Gin Rummy. She went into her bedroom to talk. She raised her voice a couple times, though I couldn’t make out the words. The next morning, I was reading the paper at the kitchen table when she walked in with wet hair and nothing but a towel wrapped around her torso. Her bare feet left dewy marks on the wood floor. She got herself a cup of coffee and then went back to her room and closed the door, came back clothed, got herself another cup of coffee, looked at me, and said, “What?”

That same day, one of the state investigators called. “See, we’re having trouble with this one,” he told me, and went on at length about how the old cabin, or shack as he called it, sat on state land, long abandoned, not tied to anyone, how the only evidence was rope and the duct tape, both of which were common, could have come from anywhere, and how the torrential rain washed away all the usable footprints and tire tracks and how the folks who found me buggered up the floor with their muddy boots and so on. “We’d like to go over everything again. Everyone you know, everyone you talked to in recent months. No detail too small.” They came over in their neckties and blazers, looking like college administrators, asked me questions for two hours and drank most of our coffee.

Cricket sat in on the whole interview and became very quiet after. We were watching television when she turned to me and asked, “What aren’t you telling them?”

I patted her hand. “Listen,” I said, “I appreciate everything you’re doing for me, I really do, but you can go home.” She started to object but I said, “You can’t run from your problems. I know Pete is freaking out. Just go. It’s OK.”

Her cheeks reddened and she gave me an indignant look. She said, “Oh, honey, don’t flatter yourself.”

I feigned some indignation of my own — “What does that even mean?” — but she was right, I was flattering myself. Our marriage was dead as Judas, yet the ghosts of routine lingered. Her in the towel that morning, it was nothing. I was more infant than man to her now, and she was no more self-conscious around me than I was showering in front of Romeo. I was no threat to old Pete. She said goodnight and closed her bedroom door behind her. It was only seven o’clock.

In the morning, I saw her suitcase by the front door. She handed me a glass of orange juice and said, “I rented this place for a month. You can have it. Don’t go back up there.” She asked what I thought I might do with myself, meaning for the rest of my life, and I told her I didn’t know but McLarney emailed me from Tallahassee about how they might have an opening in the fall for someone to teach remedial freshman composition. “He says students would think I’m cool, because I survived a psychopath.”   

“Good,” Cricket said. “You should do that. Go see McLarney.”

We ate, shuffled around each other for about an hour, polite and awkward. We were two remnant pieces of a busted plate, all connecting pieces swept away long ago. She said it was time for her to go. She kissed Romeo, whispered in his ear. She put the suitcase in the trunk of her Lexus. Just like she did a few years ago, but this time she let me watch. She gave me a hug, kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

 

 #

 

I waited two days, thinking it through, or trying, before driving north to my apartment. I was surprised to find it clean, everything in its place — there wasn’t even a lingering dog-pee smell. Had the building owner done this, or did Cricket drive up here without telling me? Romeo went straight to his dog bed and curled up, happy to resume our routine. I looked out the window at the river, felt a little boy’s wonder, for rivers — all that water passing by, and always more right behind it.   

I leashed Romeo and we walked together toward The French Broad. Some of the trees were budding out. The sun beat down on the entrance of the Baptist church across the street and part of me wished it was Sunday morning so I could wave to the pastor and thank him for visiting me, but it was not that day, and the door was shut. The saloon hummed with loud lunch-eaters and early drinkers, safety in numbers, and with deep breaths I walked right in. I saw Shelby at the bar, with her back to me. I pulled up a stool. When she turned and saw me, she turned gray as old snow.

So, she knew. Of course she knew. I told her, “I think I’ll take that free beer now.”

She did her best to recover, gave me a loud greeting, opened her arms, patted my shoulders. Her hands trembled when she set down the beer and she spilled some. She grabbed a bar towel, wiped up the spill, then walked away, wiping down the counter as she went. When she made her way back to me, she leaned in and whispered, “We need to live our lives now,” and kept moving. I wanted to ask her whether Dave hurt her, but she didn’t come back.

About then, Dave came out from the kitchen and headed straight over, whooping like I was Willie Nelson. “Holy cow, buddy,” he said, making a big production of hugging me. “Thank God you’re OK,” and so on. Some of the other regulars noticed and came over to greet me also.

I ordered the Reuben and ate it, gave Romeo a couple French fries. Shelby kept her distance — I saw her working in the kitchen, sweaty forehead, eyes down. At one point, Dave went behind the bar to change out a keg, and I waved him over.

He rubbed his hands on a towel, then draped it over his shoulder. “What’ya need, buddy? Name it.”

I asked, “What made you lose your nerve?”

He laughed like a stage actor. “What? What’ya mean, buddy? How ‘bout I freshen up your beer?”

I said OK to the refill, thinking I might sit there all afternoon, keep him squirming, but I guess I squirmed a little too and I didn’t have anything else to say, nothing I dared to say, or even wanted to say, except “I’m sorry,” and I sure wasn’t going to say that, even though I should have said it, and did say it already, on the Max Patch. I studied his expressions, tried to understand him as much as I have tried in years to understand anyone. Did he leave me up there out of mercy, some deep cowardice, or cruelty? I wanted to know whether this still-beating heart of mine was a gift or just unfinished business, but his face was pure deflection, intractable kabuki. I knew that trick.

I drank my beer and left.

I suppose I made up my mind before I arrived, to let it go. I had been swallowed then spit out. Take the reprieve. I liked Shelby and Dave well enough, however much walking out on the tab suggested otherwise. We had something in common, the three of us — a real talent for making bad things worse. Maybe it was time to stop.

I coaxed Romeo into the backseat of the Prius and drove south out of town. Eight or nine hours to Tallahassee if that’s where I was going. As we climbed the steep grade out of the river valley toward the interstate, I saw through the sourwoods and white pines an emaciated black bear shambling down the hill, woozy and magnificent, hungry to eat.