Evening Performance by George Garrett

Author:George Garrett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780804151054
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-08T21:00:00+00:00

UNMAPPED COUNTRY

THE CAPTAIN PULLED his car off the road and got out and opened up a map. He spread it out on the hood, smoothing down the creases, and studied it. He was only a few hours away from a city and only a few minutes away from the highway, but the map showed nothing at all. The narrow dirt road he had been driving on dwindled away ahead. He had to make the choice of continuing to follow it or taking what was not much more than a rutted kind of trail that forked off to the left into the woods. He decided that he favored the dirt trail because it had to go somewhere. The road from here on looked like it might come to an end soon.

He folded the map and got back in the car, smiling. It was hard not to be smiling on a day like this, an April day in the Tennessee mountains. The air was fresh and sweet and warm, the sky was bright and clear. The leaves were newly green and he had seen dogwood blooming, wild puffs of white among the trees. With everything suddenly new, renewed, it was hard not to smile, not to feel good. It was hard to think of death. The Captain’s impulse was to loosen his necktie and loll back his head and sing to the whole wide world. But he resisted that temptation. He drove along carefully, both hands gripping the wheel, silent and alone.

The Captain braked suddenly and the car skidded to a stop in the ruts. Deep mud ahead. And just beyond the patch of mud a choked mountain stream, water swirling in white mustaches around rocks. More mud on the other side. If he went ahead he would probably be up to the axle in the mud or else drowned out in the stream. He twisted around and backed up slowly until he found a piece of hard ground for the car. Then he got out, locking the car, and walked, glad that he was in uniform with his trousers bloused in his jump boots. Of course the high shine of the boots would get messed up with mud and dirt, but it was better than getting his whole uniform dirty. He skirted the edge of the mud the best he could and then crossed the stream, stepping from rock to rock, finding his way with care. The ruts began again beyond the fresh mud on the other side.

The path wandered close to the stream for a while in a dense cool shade. He could see in clumps, close to the earth, the leaves of wild strawberry plants, promising later on the small, pink fruit, the kind that set the teeth on edge just to taste them, they are so sweet. Then the path left the shade and went uphill, twisted away up a hill and dropped off again into a pie-shaped section of low ground. He was sweating by the time he reached the top and waited a minute to catch his breath.

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