Chapter 2 Trespasser

By the time Roland stood and brushed the damp leaves and loose bark from his knees, he was thoroughly disoriented. He inhaled deeply to settle himself, and tried to inventory the scene for some clues as to what had upset the universe:

Slate-gray sky.

Thorns.

Dense curtains of saw-toothed leaves.

Ironwood, poplar, birch, and smooth ash--all yardstick straight and not much thicker. Not a decent climbing tree in the bunch.

Smells of growth and decay.

Humid heat hanging in the air.

Gurgling brook.

Now that his throbbing wrist refuted any claims of death and immortality, he grasped at the next most likely alternative.

I flipped out. Went totally whacko. Cracked under the strain of 17 credits.

Roland was a little surprised and almost pleased, in a morbid way, to find that he had the gumption to suffer a breakdown. It would have been more in character to simply bow his head under pressure and wilt like a pile of lettuce. To shrivel up, unnoticed, in a dark, cob-webbed corner and lie there until consumed by mold.

He did not feel particularly insane but then maybe that was how it was with insanity. Do crazy people know they’re crazy? That was something to ponder. Do crazy people ponder their craziness? What’s wrong with me; I can’t even do insanity right!

As the last of the flames died out altogether, Roland dropped to his knees. For the moment, he set aside the issue of how an insane person was supposed to act. Even if he was nuts, that fact had not squelched his curiosity. How could such an inferno produce no shriveling or charring in the ground litter, nor the slightest trace of soot?

He plucked a waxy leaf, clinically examined it, then crushed it. Sticky, odorless sap seeped from its veins. On impulse, he plucked a few hairs from his head, searching for singed ends, but he found nothing but a few embarrassing flecks of dandruff. He sniffed his shirt but detected no odor of smoke, only the scent of sweat masked by the spice of deodorant.

Still dazed, he was rising to his feet when snapping twigs and a rumble of gruff voices startled him. Two men approached across a shallow ravine, dressed peculiarly, like extras in a Revolutionary War story, Roland thought. One of them had red hair that wound around his face and head in tight curls. Heavy knee-length woolen pants burrowed deep into his stomach, burying his belt buckle under the flesh, and white socks covered his entire bulging calf like sausage skins. He wore a white shirt and a vest. The other man, dressed similarly, was thinner, with stringy hair and a smooth face and the stiff, pained gait of a man suffering from sciatica. Each carried a heavy, knobbed club rested against he shoulder, with a knife jutting prominently from his belt.

“These patrols ain’t but a waste of time,” groused Stringy Hair as they picked their way through the undergrowth. “We’ve went over these woods like a fine tooth comb a dozen times. Ain’t no other way to excess the island besides the ford. And nobody gets past there. What’s them folks scared of, anyway?”

“Beats me,” answered Curly Red. The tenor voice was pinched, as if a tiny throat bottled up the force of a powerful set of lungs. “But Ol’ Devil Throat. . .” He dropped to a whisper and glanced around nervously as he spoke the name. “You heard him.” He broke into a rasping, ghostly voice, “This area is to be SECURE. You will sweep the area every day to see that nothin’ bigger 'n a dung beetle breeches around our security!”

He coughed under the strain of his impression and he and his companion broke into nervous laughter. “Secure he wants, secure he gets,” the heavy man continued. “And you can just-”

He stopped dead in his tracks as he caught sight of Roland and put his hand out to alert Stringy Hair. Roland found himself staring through the mottled sunlight in a summer wood at two men who, for the moment, looked at least as bewildered and even more frightened than he felt. As much out of curiosity as fear he noted that both now gripped their clubs tightly with both hands.

Under the circumstances, Roland held up better than most. Neither his hormones nor his nervous system had never been reliable responders to threat situations. He tended to obsess over life’s small anxieties while remaining oblivious to the more serious hazards. He could worry

himself sick about whether a stranger might notice a damp patch on the underarms of his shirt. Yet while biking last fall, he had barely flinched when a truck came within a wheel’s width of splattering him on the road.

Then there was the matter of courage. Roland was blessed with a great deal of courage, only he did not know it. He did not know it because he spent so little time being Roland, having understood that Roland was not a desirable thing to be. In trying to conform to the demands of his peer group, he usually ended up doing a watery impersonation of someone else. Whatever the microscopic merits of this generic someone else, when played with so little conviction, he projected not an ounce of courage. He invariably said what he thought people wanted to hear, to the point where he could lie through his teeth without being aware of it.

But at this moment Roland had no clue as to what was expected of him, and so had no recourse but to give as near an imitation of himself as he could manage. He did not splutter and stutter in disbelief. He neither stormed nor fumed at the absurdity of what he was going through, nor did he babble and whimper in terror.

“Hi,” he said, with a nervous but cheerful awkwardness.

From the fear and confusion in their eyes, one would have thought it was the two watchmen who had stumbled into Roland’s world and not the other way around. They said nothing and made no move other than to hold their clubs at arm’s length as if they were some sort of talisman to ward off evil spirits.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Cursed though he was with abnormal and often-abused patience, Roland was not about to stand there all day waiting for the universe to pull itself together, and the failure of his senses to sort out his surroundings had the effect of breaking down his inhibitions.

“My name’s Roland Stewart,” he said. “And I am not having a good day.”

Curly Red gulped and gaped at his companion, then back at Roland. “What are you doing here?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Roland. “That’s pretty much all I’ve been thinking about since I got here. Not that I have a clue where ‘here’ is. I don’t even know if this is real. I think maybe I cracked up studying for finals and this is all just a mirage.”

“A what?”

“A mirage,” Roland repeated. The vacant expressions told him that neither man had a clue what he was talking about.

"I said, what are you doing here?" growled Curly Red.

“Look, I don’t have any answers. To anything. Do you know what you’re doing here? And you really don’t need to be waving those clubs; I’m not dangerous,” he added, risking a couple of steps in their direction.

The men slid quick glances at each other. Curly Red studied him a long time, licking his lips, until at last, to Roland’s relief, he tossed aside his club. “Well, now, I guess you’s right. We ain’t needin’ this.”

Now that’s more like it.

But just as Roland relaxed, the men rushed at him. Roland barely had time to flinch before he fell to the ground under the weight of two heavy and muscular men. He instinctively put up a struggle for a moment and then suddenly went limp. There’s only one way that any of this makes any sense. These must be orderlies, the guys in the white coats, except that they aren’t wearing white coats. I’m totally wigged out and they are just doing their job.

“`Don’t need weapons is right,” marveled Curly Red to his companion as he pinned the compliant Roland to the ground. “Don’t hardly need two hands. Almost like he wanted to be took captive.”

The other man carefully patted down Roland, eyeing him suspiciously, before he tied their captive’s hands behind his back. Curly Red pulled Roland to his feet and studied him again, still shaking his head in confusion. “Now, I’s going to ask you just one more time. What are you doing on the river island? And how did you get here?”

Spinning in the shifting kaleidoscope of disorientation, Roland could not begin to produce an answer. It was all too weird. It had to be insanity. Probably he had gone crazy and had been locked up months ago and just now wandered away from the asylum. That would explain the question, anyway.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t have to put the cuffs on me. I’ll go peacefully. I know I’m not well. You’re just doing what’s best for me.”

Curly Red’s mouth hung open. He thought he had been prepared for any eventuality with this intruder but Roland’s eager cooperation, done without a trace of fawning, baffled him completely. Turning to Stringy Hair, he said, “What do you make of this?”

“You got me.”

Curly Red frowned as he continued to study Roland. That lost, eager-to-please expression, the utter disregard of his desperate situation--had Roland been faking any of it, the man would have sniffed it out in a trice.

“This just don’t add up,” he muttered. “You into one o’ them weird religious cults that got a death wish?”

Roland bit his lip and thought hard. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s not me.”

Stringy Hair was beginning to squirm. “If you was to ask me, I’d say he’s a innocent standbyer. Look at him. Clueless as the day is long. Just a simple fella in blue britches what got hisself lost in the woods.”

Curly Red glanced skeptically at his partner, then furrowed his brow, deep in such thought as he was capable of. Putting on a menacing scowl, he moved his face to within inches of Roland’s. “You a spy?”

Again, he got the last response he could possibly have expected. Instead of denial or confession, he got: “I don’t think so. But then if it it turned out I am, it wouldn’t be the most surprising thing that’s happened to me today.”

Curly Red stared at Roland a long time until his confusion dissolved into a deep sadness. “That ain’t no spy, Crabford,” he said at last.

“That’s what I figure,” said the one identified as Crabford. “But that don’t matter none. You heard them orders from Devil Throat. Any intruders is to be captured alive if possible and brung to him.”

Curly Red threw another furtive glance around the forest. “Look at the boy!” he said, now in a whisper. “Don’t know how he hauled off and got hisself mixed up in this. He ain’t no more dangerous than a soap bubble and twice as thick.”

Crabford stared at him quizzically. “I don’t get it. Soap bubbles ain’t thick. They’s actually about the thinnest things I know. Bein’ twice as thick as a--

“Would you shut up!” exploded Curly Red. “`Thick’ as in `stupid’! Like he’s got less brains than a bubble! Dang it, I was trying not to spell that out in front of him, but there you went and made me do it! Fact is, though, him being like that won’t matter none to Devil Throat. He won’t give no mercy on him.”

Roland’s detached puzzlement turned to anxiety as he was forced to contemplate first his captors’ low opinion of his intelligence and then what appeared to be a threat.

It was Crabford’s turn to glance around at unseen watchers. “I know! I don’t feel right about this, neither, him being, you know, like he is. But we can’t leave him go! If Devil Throat was to discover we done that, why you know what he’s like!”

“Never said I was leaving him go!” With that he unsheathed a knife and grabbed Roland by the hair.

The pain, as much as the mortal threat, jarred Roland out of his mental illness fantasy. “What are you doing? If you know I’m not a spy--”

Curly Red’s lip trembled and moisture welled up in the corner of his eyes. “This here’s a mercy killin’, boy, he said gently. "I can’t leave you go; but it just ain’t in me to turn you over to Devil Throat and his goons. They’d skin you alive with a potato peeler. Believe me, boy,” he said, raising his knife. He tried to look Roland in the eye but quickly turned away, biting his lip. “I’s doing you a favor. Gonna get points in heaven for doin’ it.”

“Wait!” croaked Roland, his mind racing more desperately than ever before in his life. All he could think of was that they believed he was mentally deficient, and that his only hope of survival lay in maintaining that illusion. How could he do that while outwitting them at the same time? “Wait! What would this Devil guy think if he knew you killed me when you could have brought me in alive?”

“He ain’t going to know if you just pipe down and take your killin' with a little appreciation,” chided Crabford, gently, as if speaking to a small child. “Believe me, Roland, we’s your best friends in the world.”

“But you can’t kill me all tied up, and, and, and without anyone hearing a sound of struggle--that’s going to give you away!” pleaded Roland. “You gotta untie me and chase after me. You know, shoot me or throw your knife at me or club me or tackle me again." Spotting the bow slung on Curly Red's should, he added. "Or shoot me. Make like I’m getting away and that you have to kill me to stop me.”

Curly Red paused, still poised to deliver the blow. The suggestion, as with everything about this strange intruder, caught him off guard. Time froze as he tried to sort through the implications.

"You know, he's got hisself a point," said Crabford. "If we were really fixing to kill him instead a hauling him in for questioning, then it ought to look like he run off and was gettin away and we didn’t have no choice. Man, what were we thinking?!”

Beads of sweat broke out on Curly Red’s forehead. His hand began to shake as he lowered his arm to his side. Still, the gears were grinding in his mind and he glared at Roland suspiciously.

Roland worried that he had overplayed his hand. Could someone as dumb as he was supposed to be so quickly spot a flaw in reasoning that these two had missed? “Look,” he said, before Curly Red had time to sort it out. “You’re doing me a favor out of the goodness of your hearts. I appreciate that and I’m just trying to pay you back so you don’t get in trouble. I don’t want you taking any chances on my account! Untie me quick, I’ll run and you kill me.”

Fear of this mysterious Devil Throat was working in Roland’s favor. “Leave him go!” pleaded Crabford. “I’ll raise a shout and you quick put an arrow in him. No one could find fault on us for that!”

Still fighting some misgivings, Curly Red finally put away his knife and took up his bow. “Let’s do this quick before someone sees us.” He notched an arrow on his bowstring and nodded. With yet another anxious glance around, Crabford cut the bonds. Instantly, Roland tore off through the woods at a speed that caught the two men off guard. As Curly Red let fly with his arrow, Roland dove into a screen of chokecherry bushes.

“Hey!” shouted Curly Red, reaching for another arrow. “You! Stop, you backstabbin-, double-crossing--!"

His second arrow swished through the leaves and clattered off an ironwood branch.Roland rolled to his feet and sprinted downhill into a dense stand of sumac, quickly putting distance between himself and his slow-footed, profanity-spouting pursuers.