There! Hamm shouts, pointing, He’s almost at the woods…and Heber shifts a turn, throws the limo madly, aiming its speed at the gross quavering tush. Hit Him if you have to, says Hamm, and hard — wasn’t our fault, dumb luck…just get your fender smack on His hynie! Heber floors, topspeeding at this looming rear…Benjamin only a blur of pants and trunk, then embraced by the branches, comforted in the midst of the boughs. Desperately, the limo goes hurled over the curb of the lot, falls into a sluice, slamming into an embankment of woody decay, icemelt, smoke wheezy from the hood: Heber’s thrown over the eructed airbladder and into the windshield, Hamm tumbles through the door, lands tush over head, flails, his hands grasping at logs dead and wrapped loose in diapers; the limo’s wheels turn up dirt, mud, the severance of weeds, the vehicle entire revving one last, worthless assault, raising itself up on its rearwheels as if posed alongside the Unknown State Trooper for a proud example of municipal statuary, prior to flopping its flab metal down again, finally, what a mess. Hamm surfaces with a used diaper perched as a nest on his head, tries to stand, slips on a log submerged, falls again into the sluice as insects unparticular to climate begin their swarming around him, assemble tightly into nimbi, artfully shifting their shapes — isn’t that an elephant, its trunk hovering about his mouth and nostrils, or a lion, a bestial storm, manelike clouds. He finally rights himself, staggers to the other side of the limo from which he drags Heber unconscious out of the dent shaped like Heber in the shatterproof shield; leaves him on the asphalt, propped against the limo pouring fire, tires singeing his tux. Mada mugs over with one hand denting down his hat, the other holding a pilfered plastic sipper, in which he’s iced Hamm’s two lost teeth, found slushed on the reststop floor, having been spit to slide slip under a chair against the easternmost wall. Limoside, he stoops to enshrine the sipper in Heber’s hands limp, taking a moment to arrange them in a disposition of prayer before he and Hamm make their attempt on the Kieferöde.
It’s the wind that rustles them in, a gust of rope, a whipping noose — branches snap underfoot and those under them, sog; at lot’s edge, last scattered lungs of leaves still hang from the boughs, breathe uneasy, giving way to the horripilation of needles, sharply incising of flesh, prickling floor. Staying near, they scurry the two of them as one, a mutant rodent now sundered at its gut by the jut of a tree it has to pass as they, on two legs each they hurry, they run; dense stone foliage snaps up against them, whips into their faces as hard as knots, as barbed chains…Mada shouting His name and it echoes in the voice of Hamm, who shouts to echo Mada with them too occupied in the preservation of their status of employment to notice the difference, if any; them running deeper into the needles’ slice, the blistering cones, then having to slow, the forest treeing denser…rimming these immense windquaked piles of leaves, and huddling, too, around widening trunks dark, deepfurrowed, furry with moss; these piles themselves piling into one solemn pile flaming with ice, identified as Joysey in atlases too soon to be made obsolete: they slip into this pile of piles, and into splenic cranbogs, scumponds of sunken, groping root; slicking on slabs of blighted bark, which is the fallen scab of the wound that is the tree, a scar on the horizon known only as white in this weather. Their feet mire in sap, freeze, they fall then right themselves only to lose each other, themselves, nature fills their mouths when they try to scream, what, why, Shalom, Benjamin’s name — echoes echoing wet leaves around tongues, as tongues, down their throats into stomachs, needles, also, that’d slit throats down to navels, spilling their pursuit all over the floor of the forest, amid the dreck and the imprinting paw.
