Our Lady of the Forest Read Free Page B

sounds more like a visit from God. The bright light—it’s a dead giveaway. Bright light, visit from God. Guy with horns, Satan.
    They say that Satan wears disguises, though.
    A ball of light with a person inside it. Satan gets creative.
    Ann laughed. So I’m seeing things, she said. Maybe I’m mental or something.
    Okay. I’ll be candid with you. There’s people around who think that’s true. Because one you’re kind of a loner and two you keep that hood down all the time. You do act a little bizarre.
    It keeps my head warm.
    It’s not me who thinks you’re mental.
    Who is it then?
    Other people in the campground.
    I’m not very good at being social.
    There’s more to it than that I’ll bet you.
    Anyway, said Ann, it wasn’t the sun. And I’m not going out in the woods tomorrow.
    I’ll go along, answered Carolyn. I want to rip off your mushroom spots anyway.
    When Ann insisted she wouldn’t go, Carolyn pulled from around her neck a small canister of pepper spray she wore on a loop of braided leather. No worries, she said. Because this stuff here is totally killer. We see the devil I’ll spray him with this. It’ll give him cardiac arrest.
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    In the morning they set out in a mist that blurred the treetops, the woods wet from the night’s hard rain, the light gray and the branches dripping, the maple bottom and the copse of alders sodden with new lost leaves. Carolyn had a quadrangle map and she watched it as much as she watched the world, following the contours with her fingertips and taking readings from the altimeter and compass she had strung around her neck. She wrote notes in a timber cruiser’s field book made of small waxed pages. When they traversed the rotten log straddling the creek she stopped halfway, above its wet boulders, and looked upstream, then at the map, then upstream again. UFO Creek this is called.
    What?
    Fryingpan Creek I mean a tributary of it, depending on how you read this. We’re crossing it here I’m going to guess. At this little V in the contours.
    Don’t fall in.
    Okay. I’ll try.
    That log is slick.
    Okay already.
    They found the elk trail Ann had taken and wound through the labyrinth of blowdowns. Carolyn, two steps behind, meditated on an enduring theme: that her legs were too fat and that no matter what she did, diet, exercise, both together, they would always be bloated and disgusting. Her parents’ genes, she felt, were a curse. It was her fate to grow fatter despite every effort. On the other hand Ann was
too
much of a waif. Flat-chested, mousy, no hips, a boy’s gait. A sickly, child-size runway model. We’re headed east, Carolyn said. Isn’t that like the Muslims? Don’t the Muslims always face east?
    They face… Mecca.
    I’ve heard that too.
    Christians don’t do any of that.
    That’s because they own the whole world. They face anywhere, it’s theirs already. They don’t have to choose a direction.
    You’re not explaining it the right way you know.
    This is more like south-southeast. Stop. Let me look at the compass.
    There were mushrooms Ann had missed the day before and they picked them for half an hour. Carolyn pondered a plan for the evening. It didn’t matter to her that Ann was slightly off, obsessive, eccentric, cryptic, a loner. Ann was inoffensive in most regards, and her religious fervor was interesting. Carolyn decided to offer to drive her to the laundromat in North Fork. They could eat next door at the Chinese restaurant while their clothes were in the dryers. Then they could split a cheap motel room, take showers, watch television, sleep between sheets. It would be good for Ann’s cold anyway, her incessant hacking and wheezing. It was time, felt Carolyn, for some creature comforts, ones that didn’t cost very much.
    They ate a breakfast of dried apricots Carolyn had brought