The Upright Man Read Free Page A

take the cabin apart but one glance told me there was nothing for us to find. If you killed someone in this cabin you could take your time. Plus, I just didn’t want to be there. At all. The longer you stood in that place, the more it felt like the cabin was breathing, slowly, a palpable exhalation of rancid air. I wanted to be outside.
    I backed out over the threshold, staring back at it. I was less surprised now that some of the wood remained brown. It was as if many, many bad things had been absorbed into the walls, keeping it moist, keeping it alive. Whatever had happened here had taken place over a long period of time. It had to be the work of more than one person, perhaps even more than one generation. Was it just a place to dump bodies, or was their silent presence, their positioning, supposed to achieve something more nebulous? I thought about the country as a whole, with all its wide, dead spaces, and wondered if this was the only one.
    Zandt came out too, but then he stopped suddenly, staring at something over my shoulder.
    I turned and saw what he was looking at. It was twenty feet away, on the other side of the canyon, positioned where you would see it when you came out of the cabin.
    I took a few steps toward it. This body was far more recent. It had not been arranged like the couple up on the plain, however, but merely thrown on the ground, arms outstretched and one leg bent. Something brown had been nailed to its chest, in the center, where you couldn’t fail to notice. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen, but the unnatural emptiness of the man’s gaping mouth told me what it was.
    “Is that the guy? Is that Joseph?”
    Zandt didn’t have to answer.
     
    IT WAS A LONG WALK BACK TO THE CAR . W E DROVE in silence, following the Columbia down toward Portland.
    At the airport we got flights in different directions. We didn’t meet again for another month, by which time everything had changed.

PART I
COLD HARBORS
    I do believe Though I have found them not, That there may be Words which are things.

—L ORD B YRON ,
C HILDE H AROLD ’ S P ILGRIMAGE

C HAPTER ONE
    THERE’S NEVER A PULL - OFF WHEN YOU NEED ONE . You’re belting along, forest on both sides, making light work of shallow rises and swooping dips, ranks of paper birch framing a series of flicker-lit views so snowy beautiful you can’t even see them, and you keep thinking that just around the next bend there must be a place to stop and park but for some reason there just isn’t. It’s a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in mid-January, a fact that has already seemed odd to you, a strange time to be doing what you’re doing, and you’ve got the road to yourself for probably five miles in both directions. You could just dump the car on the side of the road, but that doesn’t seem right. Though it’s only a rental and you have no attachment to it other than it being the last car you’re ever going to drive, you don’t want to just abandon it. You’re not being sentimental, you don’t think. It’s not even that you don’t want someone to see it, wonder if something untoward is taking place, and come investigating—though you don’t. It’s just a neatness thing. You want the car to be parked. To be at rest. Right at this moment this seems very important to you, but there’s never anywhere to stop. That’s the whole problem, you realize, suddenly hot-eyed: that’s life in a goddamned nutshell. There’s never anywhere to rest, not when you really needit. Sometimes you don’t need a vista point. You just want to be able to . . .
    Shit—there’s one.
    Tom slammed his foot down three seconds late and far too hard. The car skidded thirty feet, back end swinging out gracefully until he came to rest straddling both lanes as if placed by a giant hand. He sat for a moment, neck tingling. Through the window came cold air and the sound of a bird cawing with maniacal persistence. Silence otherwise, thank God. Anyone else on the road and it