Too Much Poison

Part I: Cold Fish on Butcher Paper Bluff The extra weight dragged him down and made him feel shorter than he actually was. For too long he had been lugging roughly fifty pounds of backpack, tent and two weeks’ worth of provisions, suffering the burden of each pound every time he lifted a sweat-sodden boot. The trip had been yet another bad decision, and he had only himself to blame for the disappointing direction in which events had gone. He had lost count of the times he’d wished he had stayed home, warm and comfortable in a chair he’d fought ridiculously hard to keep in the divorce, rather than tramping this devilish footpath that had done its best to trick him into stepping off a cliff or walking into a den of pissed-off rattlesnakes. At the very least it seemed to put him in situations that would break every bone in his overtired body. Breakaway burs on the pack’s cushioned straps bit into his shoulders. The skin on the left side of his neck, where the strap spent most of its time, had begun to slough off. The chafing had surpassed the point of being a nuisance and was now robbing him of the ability to think. But with any luck, he knew, it would leave a story-worthy scar. His young journey has produced far more casualties than the would-be scar. Blisters at each swollen heel were about to pop. Once the blisters finally ruptured, his socks would dampen and worsen his discomfort, thereby threatening his pace. He thought it strange that his buttocks had begun to ache. But they were muscles, after all, and they hadn’t endured such torturous exercise … well, probably never before. The terrain and other forces of nature, both seen and unseen, were working against him. He wasn’t twenty-five anymore. While life’s distractions had kept his attention elsewhere, Father Time had cleverly nudged him closer to fifty. “Fifty,” he croaked, letting the word hang in the air, where it would melt into syllables and whirl in his wake like cast-off feathers. The big, hairy Five-Oh would slap him in the face in less than two years. Amazing how quickly time passed without even giving you a goddamn clue, he thought. It didn’t seem fair, just like everything else in life, but it wasn’t worth a complaint. No one would listen anyway, as the saying went. All the luxuries and comforts he had ever worked for, everything in his life that was supposed to have been fixed and permanent and unspoken, had begun to unravel. He considered this with a deflating sigh. Then he remembered his life’s unraveling had happened months, maybe even years, earlier. The pain was supposedly buried now, left to fester in a hole far behind him … most of it, anyway. Now he merely had things to fix—busywork. He lurched to the left as his foot skidded off a rock and his ankle turned over in its boot. The treads caught the rock’s outer edge, which kept him from smashing his face into a bed of lichen-bleached shale. It was the fifth or sixth time in an hour he had turned an ankle—the same one each time. Although the rest of him wanted to put more miles behind him than the nine-plus he had already hiked for the day, his legs were tired—nearly spent, to tell it right. His body was failing him, and his brain was making more stupid mistakes than it wanted to admit. All trip long the terrain had been less hospitable than he had expected, than he had been told, than the $12.95 trail guide had suggested. He was already six miles behind schedule, by his best guess, and for that he wanted someone to pay, goddamn it. In reality, he had no schedule to keep, per se. He now had time on his side, if nothing or no one else. But he didn’t need anything other than the shirt on his back and the boots on his feet and the forty-six pounds of crap weighing down his backpack, give or take a few. At least that’s the story he kept telling himself. Donald Weaver had been trying to detach and take this trip for years, decades even, but his job, his marriage, his parents’ ailing health, two mortgage payments and other petty annoyances had all conspired to get in the way. Now he could pursue his dream of hiking part of the Appalachian Trail—the AT—without the irritation of eight a.m. conference calls or Sunday lunches with in-laws he had loathed for the better part of a lifetime. His divorce had taken care of the latter, and he was relieved to have the marriage, slimy tentacles and all, finally staked through the heart. He considered it a privilege to have someone in his life named “ex” or, more respectfully, “Ex.” The job was another issue entirely. He hadn’t expected vice president of sales and marketing John Hudler to call him into an all-window office three weeks ago, early on a rainy Monday morning, and tell him the company was “bleeding cash” and had to “make some tough decisions.” Donald knew the ax was about to fall. The “whole thing with Heather,” Hudler had insisted—meaning Miss Heather Churton, the twenty-something tart from the package-design department—wasn’t the reason for Donald’s termination. Not the sole reason anyway. Hudler had used Heather’s name four more times during the nine-minute conversation, as in, “This has nothing to do with your, ah, friendship with Heather,” and “Heather’s allegations did not factor into our decision.” Shit like that. Heather. Donald cringed whenever her name wormed its way into his thoughts. He didn’t want to see her gremlin-like face ever again, not after all the backbiting she’d done, not after her accusations torpedoed his career and sank it in the harbor. There were plenty of ill-meaning words for people like her. He thought of one in particular, one beginning with a capital “C” and ending in a lower-case “unt.” She had nothing to do—well, maybe a little to do—with the dissolution of his rocky twelve-year marriage to Marley, but she certainly hadn’t helped things. His problems with Heather began and ended with how she had handled their “co-workers with benefits” relationship, as she once termed it. The ink was barely dry on the divorce papers—Marley, short for Marlene, got the dog and the big house in Ocean City, Maryland, while he got the flood-prone condominium four blocks from the beach in Margate, New Jersey—when he became suddenly jobless. But at least he didn’t have to pay alimony, he realized. And at least he didn’t have to pay child support, there being no children between them to drain the savings. She made more money than he did anyway, she being a lawyer for a D.C. firm, having raked in three hundred twenty-eight thousand the prior year, according to what she told the IRS. He had pulled down a hair over a hundred thousand in the same twelve months, and would have beaten the mark this year in salary and bonuses had he not been “relieved” of his post as director of sales, alternative retail channels, for a certain unnamed consumer-packaged-goods manufacturer that produced some of the most popular cereal brands and other breakfast foods in the supermarket aisle—a certain CPG manufacturer he hoped would suffer the discomfort of embarrassing and painfully expensive product recalls, unprecedented commodities cost increases and a spate of protracted union strikes in its Northeast-based factories very, very soon. Bitterness aside, the buyout had certainly helped. Although he would never acknowledge it, the buyout erased any notions of suicide that had begun to creep up in the days following the layoff. It’s not every day someone hands you a check for seventeen thousand dollars and says you don’t have to show up for work tomorrow or any day thereafter. The money cushioned the blow. In all honesty, it hadn’t taken long for him to realize his newfound freedom was more parts blessing than curse. Heather had done him a favor, as long as her allegations didn’t follow him elsewhere. He should send her a “thank you” note along with this year’s Christmas card, he joked.