The park was low in the foothills and swept down toward the river where moss was tangled on low limbs of the pines. During the day the lake sparkled with sunlight and at night it lay in darkness like oil and a bitter wind came off of it and whispered in the pines and stung their faces.

After supper Tim put the copper plates in a pail of water on the fire and then rinsed them from the cool canteen. Paula put a mound of dark coffee in the top of a percolator and hung it above the fire when Tim moved away. The pot burped and gurgled for a while and when the coffee was done Tim poured two cups full and gave Paula one and they sat in the wind by the lake. Paula held her cup with two hands just under her nose and Tim held his through the finger ring and rested it on his thigh. After two days at the campsite they still hadn't talked about it, so Tim unscrewed a small flask of rum and poured some into his coffee. It was sweet and sharp and clung to his tongue even after he swallowed.

"I wish it hadn't gone the way it went," he said after the rum warmed him down to his fingers. "I wish it had been different."

Paula stared over the cup at nothing and sat very still for a moment. She took a noisy sip of coffee and then said, "Me too."

“I’m sorry about the things I said. It wasn’t just us, it was the money too and a lot of other stuff. None of it was your fault and I never should have said it.”

Paula touched her coffee with her finger and tested it on her tongue and then took another sip. “It’s not important,” she said. “You said what you said.”

Tim poured more rum than coffee and took two big burning sips and wiped the rim of his cup with his thumb. “I just wanted to talk about it,” he said.

“We always talk,” Paula said. “I’m tired of talking.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I want to drink coffee and watch the lake.”

Tim drank three more cups of coffee and finally something let go and ran down the inside of his mind like dark syrup. He reached for Paula’s hand. One side of it was warm from the cup but she never gripped back and soon she pulled it away and held the cup again with two hands. For a while neither of them spoke. Trees swayed and sighed in the wind and water lapped at the weedy bank in the darkness. Tim let silence come down around them again and with liquor warm in his belly, silence was okay. He licked sugary enamel from his teeth and poured another coffee that was mostly rum. Between sips he held the warm cup on his lap with two hands and breathed slowly. His breath burned the rims of his nostrils and wind was cool on his face. Wisps of Paula’s hair twitched in the wind.

“You cold?”

Paula sipped her coffee and then said, “No, I’m fine.”

“Wind’s picking up.”

“It’s not bad. I’m fine.”

Tim looked around at the sloping bank of the campsite and the thin tall pines and the gray shape of the tent in the darkness. “It’s been a fine camp,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s been nice.”

“Like that first spring when we came.”

“I hadn’t thought of that but, yes, it is like that.”

Tim hesitated for a moment but then went ahead. “Remember the waterfall, and the picnic table, and the big rock in the sun out on the trail?”

“Of course I do.”

“This reminds me of then.”

Paula slurped her coffee and blew a long sigh through her nose. “It’s like that in some ways, I guess,” she said.

Tim was not sure he should have brought that up but with the liquor warm in his gut it was okay. Paula sat very still and seemed to be thinking of it. Now with something pleasant between them Paul felt better and talked for a while about nothing. He waved his hands to shape his thoughts and sipped the rum and in between sips and talking he held the warm cup tightly on his lap. He thought carefully for a while about the warm feeling in his fingers and then stopped thinking and let the feeling just be. He could hear Paula breathing into her cup when she sipped.

They emptied the pot and sat in the wind by the lake. Tim could hear the tent flutter in the wind.

“I’m going to make a fire,” he said finally, pushing out of the chair and catching himself after a small lurch.

Paula kept staring at the lake. “It’s a little late for that,” she said. “But if that’s what you want, okay.”

Tim hefted a few chunks of wood from the pile and leaned them together into a hollow pyramid in the fire ring. Then he lit the kindling strips underneath and broke dry twigs into the fire and blew into it until it grew and swirled up and blackened the rough-hewn wood. He listened to the crackle and watched tiny sparks fly up from the fire in bright curls and then disappear. Then he sat by Paula again and held the empty coffee cup on his lap. The cup was cool now and sticky from the coffee and liquor. He kept bringing it to his lips and then remembering it was empty.

“I wish you wouldn’t drink so much,” Paula said.

“It’s all under control,” Tim said.

“It’s not that. It’s just that it’s always in the way.”

“In the way of what?”

“In the way of everything. You’re drunk even now.”

Tim thought about it for a moment and then said, “Only a little.”

Paula tucked her chin against her chest, as if the cold had finally gotten through. “It’s always the same with you,” she said.

Tim stared at the lake and a hard blind feeling fell down around him. He steadied his voice with a deep noisy breath and finally said, “That’s the crux of it, isn’t it.”

That seemed to end it. Paula stifled a sigh and folded her arms and they both stared into the darkness around the lake. The fire stretched and jerked the shadows and the whole forest and lake seemed to want to fade from existence. The wind that had been so pleasant before was now just a roaring invisible thing that tormented the trees. Finally, Paula set her cup aside and walked away into the tent. The zipper whined like an insect for a moment and then she was gone and the tent was still and quiet except for a few ruffles on the side when the wind picked up.

For a while Tim thought about going into the tent. But the whole rotten business was like tangled lake grass where it was too deep to touch the bottom and to thrash was only to sink. So he settled the whole mess in his mind and with no coffee left he poured small dabs of rum into the cup and moved the cup in circles and then drank the rum. The liquor was cool and sharp without the coffee and between sips he touched the roof of his mouth with his tongue to get the aftertaste. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and held them in loose fists while he watched the black lake. The campfire pulsed in the corner of his vision. When he thought enough time had passed, he pushed himself out of the chair and kicked some dirt on the fire and went inside where everything was flat and gray and Paula was just a dead shape in the blankets facing away from his side of the tent.

*

Rain swept through during in the night and when daylight came, low gray clouds lay across the whole sky. The thin pines on the campsite were dark from rain and the lake was a smooth mirror of the sky.

Tim found some dry sticks and made another fire and when it was hot enough he fried bacon in a skillet and cracked eggs in the leftover grease. He watched the edges of the frying eggs and moved them around with his knife while Paula cleaned the coffeepot and poured a gray slush into the wet grass near the tent.

“Coffee will be late,” she said, but now she was smiling and wiping her hands on the tail of her oversized shirt. While she filled the percolator with grounds he finished the eggs and dumped them next to the bacon on their copper plates. When the food cooled they ate without talking and Tim watched the clouds hang above everything almost close enough to touch. Half thoughts kept creeping to his lips but when they did he concentrated on the food, pushing chips of the bacon into the runny part of the egg with his fork and then sucking the gluey mixture from the tines and crunching the chips with his mouth closed. Now he missed the coffee but didn’t say anything. Instead he watched Paula push small piles of her own breakfast against the raised edge of the copper plate and then scoop them sideways to eat them. She kept blotting grease from her lips and then laying the stained napkin on her thigh.

She was still much like she had been. She had dark eyes and thick hair that always fell into her face. One eye squinted with humor or fury and the other was wide with a kind of shock or remorse that made Tim want to save her from whatever was hurting her. She wore a half smile while eating and one eyebrow kept leaping as if she were expecting a joke or waiting to tell one. Tim noticed when she swallowed that the notch at the center of her throat above her collarbone was deeper than before. A pink abrasion still burned on her neck. Other than that, she was almost the same as she had been.

When the plates were empty Tim mopped them with a napkin and rinsed them with water from the canteen. Paula put the coffee on the fire and stoked the logs with a gnarled stick and before long the pot was rattling with heat again. Tim liked their system and the way it could run without talk. But some days the silence was like swallowing things you hadn’t chewed. So instead he talked about the weather and how perfect their breakfast had been even without coffee. Paula nodded and smiled and moved around the campsite putting things in their places. This is how the old ones do it, he thought. This is how they string together forty years of baby talk in showrooms full of knick-knacks and throw pillows. Only difference is, our showroom is the camp and our throw pillows are musty bedrolls. But the past had taught him to let the good days go as long as they could.

They kept waiting for the sun to burn through but the gray blanket of clouds hung low all day. The wind stayed down and after a lunch of apples and white wine they pulled a couple of fine catfish from the lake. Paula made a batter with cornmeal and spread it in a wide plate and Tim butchered the fish on a small wooden table, raking piles of shiny guts and slivers of skin into a bucket and piling the silvery pink meat of the fish on another plate. He stoked the fire and added two knotty chunks of hickory and melted a palm of shortening in the pan. At the first sniff of burning oil he gingerly dropped the fish into the batter and then into the pan where they sputtered and slowly curled away from the heat on the ends so that he had to flatten them with the knife while hot grease stung his fingers and wrist. It was too soon after the apples for supper but when the air filled with the smell of the batter Tim felt a pleasant clawing in his gut.

They ate the fish without forks while sitting in the warmth by the fire. Their fingers shined with grease. Tim pulled the white meat from the skeleton by digging it away against the plate and then pinching the meat like tobacco and sucking it from his fingers. Paula held the fish like an ear of corn and skillfully tore the meat from the tines of the spine by raking with her teeth. She kept rolling her lips between her teeth to lick away the grease. Drowsed by the warmth in his gut, Tim spoke in a tired quiet voice while the smoke from the fire drifted into his face in dry wisps.

“Want to leave early in the morning?”

“That’s fine.”

“Might be nice to get an early start.”

“Yeah, that sounds okay.”

“Or we could stay if you want. There’s no hurry.”

“That’s true.”

Tim moved the skeleton of the fish around on his plate with his finger and spat a shred of skin into the fire. “We agreed we’d talk about it before we left,” he said and at the end his voice trailed off and suddenly the fish was heavy and hot in his gut.

Paula put her plate aside with shiny shreds of cotton-white meat still glistening on the bones. She rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers and then blew out a long breath. “I know we did,” she said. “But I just don’t know what there is to say.”

“Just the truth, I guess.”

“You already know the truth.”

“The whole truth, I mean.”

“Why swim around in it like that? Why drown in it?”

“That’s not drowning. This is drowning.”

“What do you mean?”

Tim held his hands up with the palms turned toward the low clouds. “This,” he said. “Small talk at the campsite. This is drowning.”

Paula was sitting up now with her hands clutched together in her lap and her face turned away from him and toward the ground. A muscle in her jaw pulsed again and again. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said.

“I mean that we just can’t leave it lying around,” he said.

“Why not? Why can’t it lie?”

“Because it will ruin us. It already is.”

Paula brushed her thighs with her palms and then folded her arms in front of her chest. Even with the grease gone from her lips she kept rolling them in around her teeth and licking them. In the gray afternoon with the wind whipping at her hair she looked small and tired. The edges of her eyelids were ragged and pink and she slumped in the chair. Her mouth worked for a moment but no words came and now it was as if the low still clouds had choked out all of the sound except the wind. They sat by the lake like crumbling statues and for a while the only movement Tim could see was the slither in Paula’s throat when she swallowed.

Tim watched the dying fire. Hunks of black wood in silvery coats of ash hissed in the pit. The wood was touched with glowing edges that flared and faded in the wind. A single tendril of smoke curled from a corner of the wood and formed a tiny spiral before the wind tore it away. The flat ceiling of clouds edged across the sky and brought more flat clouds behind it. The new clouds seemed to push a weak and erratic wind through the trees on the edge of camp and into the loose ashes in the fire pit. They sat there for a long while in silence and ashes blew out of the pit and salted their shoes. The trees seemed to be craning in different directions for a better view.

After a while Tim felt the muscles in his neck loosen, so he pushed out of the chair and began piling wood into the pit. He fed long chips of kindling to a smoldering pile and before long flames caressed and then consumed the leaning wood in the pit. Now they at least had the uneasy crackling of the fire.

They went on like that while the afternoon faded toward evening. At first the only noticeable sign of night was a thread of darkness on the bottoms of the clouds. Before long, though, the sky was so dark that the clouds were lighter underneath and then the darkness leaked into the clouds and there was nothing above them but a giant black emptiness with no stars. They cleaned the campsite again without speaking and moved to the fire between tasks. Tim was always warm on one side and the bright heat of the fire made a small flickering place where the silence was okay. When they had done most of the work for leaving and returned to the chairs by the fire, Tim made two small sandwiches with pineapple and mayonnaise and they ate them by the fire. Paula ate quickly with one pinky raised and Tim could hear her teeth squelching and crushing the wet pineapple even above his own chewing. When they finished the sandwiches, Tim felt crowded by the silence.

“I had a nice time,” he said.

“Me too.”

“We really couldn’t have had nicer weather.”

Paula looked at him for what seemed like a long while. Then she said, “Yeah, except for the rain it was nice.”

Tim looked around the campsite. “But even that was light and it left things cool, at least.”

Paula seemed to think about what he said for a moment but didn’t say anything. Instead she folded her arms and slumped toward the fire. Tim could see the flames glinting on her eyeballs.

“Are you cold?”

“The wind’s getting in a little, yes,” she said.

“I’ll take care of that,” Tim said. He walked through the moist grass down to the side of the lake and fished two bottles of wine from the shallow water at the edge. The bottles clinked and dripped as he removed the twine that secured them. He walked back toward the fire holding the bottles out from his sides so the drips would miss his shoes. Then he sat again by the fire and opened both bottles and gave one to Paula with a small plastic cup.

She held the bottle in one hand and the cup in the other and stared at him for a moment. Then she said, “One each?”

“We should toast the end of the trip,” he said. “It’s been tough and there’s more to be said. But we did okay.”

They sipped the wine and sat by the lake and now the silence was like the warmth from the wine. It crept out from the inside of them and made their hands warm and heavy. Tim kept pouring the wine into his mouth and holding it near the back of his throat until it burned. The cool wine felt like smooth lozenges oozing down. He watched Paula tip her plastic cup over her lip and swallow the wine with her eyes closed, as if she were taking medicine.

Tim buffed the rim of his glass with his thumb and looked out at the lake. He started to make plans and after a while he couldn’t keep them to himself. “We should go out of the camp from the south entrance,” he said. “That road goes through the mountains and down by the reservation and there’s an apple orchard.”

Paula nodded without saying anything and held her glass up as if to toast him. Then she poured a large mouthful of wine, swished it like mouthwash and swallowed deeply. Tim could hear liquid in her throat as it went down.

“We have some extra time, too,” he said. “We could always stop again and stay in the hotel down by the river on the way.” For some reason, Tim disliked the sound of his voice. It seemed to waver in the wind like the cry of an injured animal. He cleared his throat and drank three rapid gulps of wine. He could still feel the wine’s coolness when it hit his belly so he concentrated on it until the coolness became a low pleasing burn that moved out through his body like ripples on an oily pond.

Paula was quiet and still and held her cup with two hands on her lap. She stared at the cup and let her hair flutter in the wind. The wine seemed to be doing some good. She sat quietly in the flickering light of the fire. Her eyes were wide and unblinking and she kept sucking her lips in and biting them as if to test for numbness.

Tim watched the shadows out beyond the campsite and let the alcohol do its work. As he drank he seemed to pour into himself a mild feeling of accomplishment that heated his lax muscles and burned hotter than normal on his breath. He watched Paula as she drank and he felt better. Before she had seemed to rattle and sway in the wind but now she was quiet and solid. She poured the wine with two hands, drank with a pinky raised as always and kept uttering a tiny grunt of pleasure when the wine passed her throat. He stared into the darkness at nothing in particular and a mild but pleasant blur ran down over his eyes like honey. The trees and shadows moved and merged with no certain edges. Paula was a daub of lighter color in the corner of his vision.

This was a good way to finish, he thought. That’s what you did, perhaps, dominate the need to talk until it lay warm across your lap like a sleeping pet. If your gut was full and there was wine maybe you could go on like this forever.

Paula was so quiet that for a moment he had the feeling she was gone. He looked up quickly to find her and when he did she was staring back at him and her face was stiff and pale. The corners of her mouth turned down slightly. Her eyes reflected the fire.

“I have to tell you,” she said. Her voice was low and strained and after she spoke, her throat convulsed in a swallow.

“Okay,” Tim said. His voice hit the wind like the sound of thin glass shattering. Now even though he had moved his mind off to another place he could hear the truth rumbling down the hillside to where he was.

Paula put the wine aside and sat looking at him while she gripped handfuls of her slacks in clinched fists. “The truth is, it is like they said. I didn’t refuse him at first.”

Tim felt as if he had been welded into the metal frame of the chair. Gnarled roots seemed to have sprouted from his feet and snaked into the dirt of the campsite.

Paula spoke rapidly then in a flat voice that never wavered. “But I changed my mind and he got angry and that’s when it happened. The mark is from rope he held across my throat. He choked me with it and I passed out and after that I don’t remember anything until the hospital. It is like they said, I didn’t refuse him. But it doesn’t change anything. He forced me and there’s no way I could have raised it. It would have been the end of everything.”

The images were there all along, he supposed. But now they were everywhere, wavering in the darkness and flaring up out of the flames of the fire as if they were his memories instead of hers. He saw her gasping and sobbing and choking but he also saw her at one point reach up to grip the man’s tricep and cry out with a kind of blistering hateful pleasure that was leftover from when they met. He expected rage but instead got a gaping wound of emptiness that shrieked out of nowhere like a tracer bullet and blew him irreparably open and cooked him from the inside. She had tried to keep parts of it to herself but he had begged, telling himself it was for her, and now it was inside him like a scalding shell that couldn’t be removed in time to save him. She had been willing to carry it, he thought, but now it is mine forever.

After a while she stopped mouthing the words he could no longer hear anyway and blew out a long sigh like the last breath before sleep. He watched her eyes catch glints from the fire and a torrent of silence swelled in his throat. His arms and legs were like the dead logs in the bottom of the fire. They were heavy and dead but pulsed and smoldered with a useless dying heat. A white roar swirled where his thoughts used to be.

Tim felt the silence swelling out from the campsite and into the darkness. Big pines creaked and sighed in the wind and threw down clatters of dead needles. He let his eyes burn along the tops of the trees without seeing them. Wine boiled in his stomach. He poured another cup of wine and touched the liquid to his lips without sipping. He was certain that small movements kept him from shattering.

Neither of them spoke for a long while. The wind was like an invisible giant rolling around in the woods in fitful sleep. Tim concentrated and suppressed a quiver that kept moving up from his throat to his lips. He found that if he thought only about seizing enough breath he could speak in a normal voice. He told Paula that it was okay, that at least it was out there and that they could work it out now that it was in the open. Paula nodded at the words as the wind tore them away.

Eventually the black night crowded them and they went into the tent without speaking. As Tim zipped the door, it seemed to shriek into the night and when it was over silence filled the tent. Before long Paula was just a still shape in the blankets. The gray light inside the tent poured into his eyes and held them open until nothing he could see had any definite shape or barrier anymore. He lay in the darkness staring into the peak of the tent and could feel himself expand and shrink with each breath. Breath fights for its own space even after you are dead, he thought, and he knew without thinking very hard at all that some people probably breathed for hours in twisted wreckage long after their lives had leaked into the rubble.

He tried to believe in the relentless push of time. But some time before he slept he knew that morning would never come. This is eternity, he thought. There will be no more sounds and no one will come and in the end I’ll have nothing but gray shades of wind and the ghosts of my thoughts and when I touch Paula to wake her she will crumble like a mound of ash. He knew such a thought was foolish but went on thinking it for what seemed like hours before he sank into a black heavy sleep that was more like drowning.

When morning came the sun hit his side of the tent and sent off a warm caress of heat. The wind had died and now he could hear birds chattering. He came out first and stood in the wet grass near the tent and looked down to the lake where the water was blue and deep in the sun and fringed with dry stalks of tall grass. He made coffee and two sandwiches and then started to load the truck. After a while Paula came out of the tent and they shared a rehearsed smile and ate the sandwiches by the lake. While she sipped her coffee Tim held his cup with two hands and blew across the top of it and then poured it into the grass without drinking any. Occasionally he watched Paula in the sun. Her hair was matted from sleep but her eyes were clear and wide and darted from one place to another.

When everything else was in the truck Tim kicked the black hunks of wood in the fire ring and helped Paula roll the tent into a bundle and put it in the truck. They both watched the lake for a while and then Paula said “We should go,” in a flat even voice that reminded him of the wind from the night before. He nodded and they stepped into the truck and drove up an embankment and then off to the east where the sun burned through a tangle of trees and warmed them through the windshield. Tim rolled down the window so they could have noise and drove with two hands on the wheel. He turned the car south like he said he would and passed the wooden signs of the reservation. After a while they saw rows of craggy apple trees and stopped for a bag of apples. By then the silence was too much so Tim spoke passionately about which varieties were the best and they bought the one he picked. After that there was a long drive through the mountains with the sun glittering on the highway and the wind roaring around them. They both settled heavily into their seats and soon Tim started to talk again in a deep purposeful voice that at least kept him from thinking. He knew the drive well and found some pleasure in taking the car carefully up a big hill that led to the valley and the long straightaway through town. As they drove down the hill he spoke rapidly about things that didn’t matter and waved his hands in the air. Paula leaned against the passenger door and into a shaft of brilliant sunlight that fell onto her face and torso and cut a deep shadow across the half smile that now tugged at one corner of her mouth.