The Blue Blazed Path

Tabatha looked in the bathroom mirror and hardly recognized herself. She swished to the right, twirled to the left, puckered up and air-kissed the mirror, but without her trademark make-up she looked just like the girl next door. 

Arista was standing behind her, arms folded. “Very good, very convincing, but can you also do something about the clothing? We’re in Maine, not LA, and we’re going hiking, not pole dancing.”. Arista handed her an LL Bean T-shirt, at least two sizes too big. Tabatha took it from her and held it by her fingertips, at arm’s length, as if it was contaminated. She looked at Arista, pleaded for some kind of commonsense understanding, but her sister was unyielding.

“Fascist!” said Tabatha, draping the drab green T-shirt over her head, over her skinny tank top. “It’s coming off when we get out of town”. She deftly spun her blonde hair into a ponytail, revealing the tattoo at the back of her neck. “Let’s go, Sis”.  Tabatha took a selfie and texted it to Paps and the ‘Step Lady’, definitely not something that she wanted her fans to see. “Bonding”, she typed.

 “You might as well turn off the phone”, said Arista, "there's no phone coverage on the trail, and you’ll want to conserve the battery, just in case”. Tabatha mock-horrored and eyeball-rolled. Arista emptied the contents of her pockets and zippered them in a backpack pouch, stuffed in with the map, a compass, matches, and a dayglo orange can of bear spray. 

An ugly blue taxi was idling outside the motel room, an old police-cruiser, emblazoned with “Joe’s Taxi”, but the Sherrif’s decal was still visible beneath. The eponymous Joe was leaning out of the window, fiddling with the rusty articulated arm of the old spotlight. When he spotted the women, he popped the trunk, and they dropped their bags onto a jumble of ropes and rags, next to a bulging camouflaged backpack. 

 When Arista opened the back door of the cab, a young fella, about their age, was pretzeled inside, dressed in khakis and bluish short-sleeve shirt with epaulettes. A paramilitary wannabee, she figured, a pharmacist or an accountant doing the weekend warrior thing. He introduced himself as Derrick in a high-pitched hyper nasal voice. Needs to practice machismo if he wants to pull off the look, she thought.

Tabatha got into the cab first, scooted across the back seat, plenty of room for her knees. Arista squeezed in beside her, there seemed to be a lot of knees. She didn’t like that her sister was sitting next to a stranger. She couldn’t see much of him, but she didn’t like his silly paramilitary outfit, nor his backpack, and he was wearing clunky spectacles, very Jeffrey Dahma.  She prayed that he would not recognize Tabatha; it always got weird when that happened.  

It was stuffy in the cab, smelled of sweat. Tabatha squirmed for space and removed the T-shirt, handed it to Arista. The skinny tank top left little to the imagination.  Joe, the driver, took his eye off the road and they swerved on the road. Tabatha pressed against Derrick.

“Where you headed?”, asked Derrick, stealing a furtive look at her tattooed forearms. 

“We’re headed north. We’re hiking the trail through some mountains”, said Tabatha. Arista gave her sister a dig in the ribs.

“The blue mountains? You headed straight up, or are you going through the lakes?”, he asked.

“Straight up!” said Tabatha, and Arista gave her another dig in the ribs, this time harder.

“Straight up,” said Derrick. 

“Are you a straight up kind of guy?” asked Tabatha, playfully.

He looked embarrassed, “You could say that I suppose”. Catching Arista’s judgmental eye, he turned away and looked out of the window through thick lenses.

Joe stopped the cab on a rough patch of exposed soil near a Parks Service noticeboard, a pair of blue-blazed gate posts, the trailhead. The path disappeared into the dark woods, a tunnel into the pines.  

Derrick got out of the car first, held open the door for Tabatha, who sprung out after him. Tabatha was wearing daisy dukes, really tight. Derrick and Joe were ogling her as she bent and stretched, danced a little jig, one of her stage routines.

She’s asking for it, thought Arista, who then censored the trope, glad she’d left this thought unsaid, “I’ve lost my wallet!”, Arista cried. She was patting her pockets, and looked over-the-top distressed, “Tabatha, we’d better go back!”

“Tabatha? You Tabby Williams?” asked Derrick, incredulously.

‘Same”, she gave him a coquettish twirl.

Derrick stood slack-jawed for a moment. “Can I get your autograph?” he looked like he was about to start drooling.

Could get weird fast, thought Arista, so she hooked her arm around Tabatha’s and pulled her back toward the cab. “Seriously Tabby, I’ve left the wallet in the hotel room”. She forced eye-contact on her sister, gave her an exaggerated let’s-get-out-of-here stare.

“Silly thing!’ Tabatha laughed, “you put it in your backpack when you were in the motel room”.

Derrick got the joke and he was pissed. Arista smiled at him, hunched up her shoulders, a “sorry” of sorts, but he was having none of it. “I’d better get going” he said, grabbing his bag, “I can see that you don’t want me around”. 

Arista noticed that he had a holstered gun hanging from his belt. She didn’t want him around, definitively.

“No autograph?” said Tabatha, oblivious.

Derrick didn’t bother looking back, just waved her away, “don’t need no stupid signature…”

“Bye-bye handsome!” said Tabatha. Arista wasn’t sure whether her sister was cruel or just plain dumb. “What’s your name again?”. Arista winced, didn’t need the intimacy.

“Derrick. Derrick the straight up guy”, he cast a withering look at Arista and strode into the woods with big awkward strides.

Arista gave the driver twenty dollars, he looked disappointed. “Any chance I can get that autograph?”, he ignored Arista, looked over her shoulder at Tabatha. Arista pushed another twenty into his hand, patted his arm and thanked him. We’d better get going, she said.

When the cab left, Arista insisted that they wait around for a while, and let Derrick get a big head-start on them.

+++

For weeks, Arista had worried that Tabatha might not be strong enough for the hike, the big bonding adventure, but she underestimated her sister. Tabby seemed to be bounding along the path in front of her like a cougar, while Arista dragged along like a troglodyte behind. It must be all that dancing, thought Arista, she’s like the Eveready bunny. Arista scanned the underforest for dark menacing shapes, for khaki-clad Derrick with the coke-bottle glasses.

“You really need to cover up a bit!”, she shouted at Tabatha.

“The hills have eyes?”.

“No. Not that”, said Arista, but it was exactly that. “No, because of the mosquitoes and blackfly. When we get deep in the woods, they’ll eat you alive”.

“I’m not sure what kind of horror movie you have me in darling!”. Arista laughed at her sister’s irreverence. Tabatha stopped and looked at her big sister. “But seriously, you need to lighten up a bit. You’re not my mother.”

“But I am your guardian” Arista instantly regretted the quick comeback. 

“I’m off that shit, bitch!”. 

They walked in silence for the next mile or so. Tabatha seething and indignant, Arista vigilant and remorseful.

+++

The rhythm of the hike and the challenging search for blue flashes gradually distracted them, then eased their troubled minds. Tabatha’s anger waned, and Arista’s vigilance dulled. When they chanced upon an isolated pond, Arista was keen to make amends, so when Tabatha dared her to jump in, Arista double-dared her to go skinny-dipping. Tabatha laughed. “I guess you heard me”.  They plunged into the pool; it felt icy cold, and a million scintillas of light danced on its surface, iridescent dragonflies flitted across the surface. The sisters chased a small brook trout into the shallows, beached onto the small pebbly beach, basked in the late summer sun. 

A cloud crossed the sun, the trees shook as a cool blast of wind sheered through the foliage. There was a commotion in the undergrowth at the far side of the pond, chipmunks or squirrels quarrelling. A black-tipped chickadee swooped out of a tree, pursued by another. Arista felt like they were being watched.

“Where’s my underwear?”, said Tabatha, hunting around the grassy bank of the pond, “Pink. Pink Panties”

“Should be easy to find”, laughed Arista, but their search was futile, and after a couple of minutes, they gave up. Tabatha could be absent-minded and scatter-brained, “We’d better get moving, why don’t you take the map for a while. Just keep following the blue blazes and try not to leave me behind! And try not to lose your shorts!”. 

+++

The trail became rougher, more neglected. Arista walked with her head bowed down, solving the unfolding puzzle of where to place her feet amid the treacherous roots and rocks. Meanwhile, the landscape slipped by unnoticed or obscured by the unending canopy. When Arista did raise her head, Tabatha was gone, no longer in her line of sight. Alarmed, she picked up her pace, hurried from one blue blaze to the next, apparently unable to close the gap, but at least she could see the print of her sister’s boots in the mud. She wasn’t far ahead.

The path turned to the right, avoiding a bluff of rock, then ran alongside a small stream. Tabatha’s footprints smudged here and there in the soft mud and Arista sensed that she was getting closer, when suddenly she froze in fear. A second set of footprints, a man’s, appeared alongside her sister’s, running parallel in the mud. Her heart pounding, she dumped her backpack, retrieved the bear spray cannister and pursued her sister with urgency.

“Where is he?” she screamed when she spotted Tabatha, up ahead, unharmed and unaccompanied. 

“Where is who?”

“The oddball in the cab. That Derrick man”.

Tabatha shook her head, held her hands out by her sides. “Ari, I have no idea what you are talking about?

“The footprints. The fucking footprints”, Arista turned and pointed at the trail, but there were only two sets of prints, Tabatha’s and her own.   The man must have peeled off into the woods.

“Quick, get down”, she pulled Tabatha to a crouching position, so that they were concealed by jewel weed and a clump of striped maple. Whispering now, “He’s somewhere around here, I saw his footprints on the trail, alongside yours. Did you see them?”. Tabatha shook her head. “Then maybe he followed you. At least for a while. He must be nearby”, Arista spread apart some fern fronds with her hands. “We’ve got to get away from here. Ditch your backpack”. 

Someone was approaching, a man.

“You ladies, OK?”, he growled. He stomped toward them, loomed above them, haloed by the sun.

“Shit!”, screamed Tabatha, flailing backwards into a bed of laurel as he bore down on her, reaching for the gun.

Arista leapt at him like a wild thing. “Leave her alone!”, she punched him in the side of the head, and when he turned towards her, she kicked him in the groin, sprayed his face with the pepper spray, emptied the entire cannister into his eyes, into his mouth. She jammed the nozzle into his nose. Tried to screw it through the back of his brain.

He pushed her away, “what the fuck!”, he sounded shocked, outraged. He started stumbling around, pawing at his face, throwing himself around as if he was trying to escape swarming bees, coughing, and gasping for air. “My eyes. My eyes! I can’t see anything”. Tabatha grabbed a broken tree limb and swung it at his head, but it was rotten through, broke dully on impact, like cake, doing nothing more than disorienting him. He gyrated through the pines like a madman, falling to his knees.

“Run Tabby, run”, Arista grabbed Tabatha’s hand and fled with her, back on the trail they looped south and ran back in the direction from which they’d come, abandoning their belongings. They ran and ran, stopping only momentarily when they heard a gunshot. A single gunshot, an echo, then a haunting silence. They ran some more, only faster, until their lungs were bursting, and the muscles in their legs began to ache and cramp. They stopped, exhausted, when they got to the pond. 

“I think we should be safe now”. Arista was bent over, her hands clenched on her knees, panting.

“You take this guardian stuff, pretty seriously, Ari”, Tabatha was struggling for breath too, dripping with sweat, “you really clocked that creep”.

Ari felt a dull ache in her right hand, and she realized that she was still gripping the small orange bear-spray cannister, which spurred a flashback memory of the fight, the pepper spray shooting into the assailant’s unprotected eyes, how he’d pushed her away, spun around and fallen. “Why the gunshot?”, she wondered aloud.

“Maybe it was an accident”, suggested Tabatha, “maybe he was blinded, got scared, and shot at something?", she sucked in a lungful of air, "maybe he thought it was us?”. 

They went down to the pond, stopped at the water’s edge, stooped low, and with cupped hands raised the water to their mouths. They were thirsty but the water, earlier crisp and refreshing, felt thick and tasted sour, and it made them sad. The sun cast long shadows across the pond and when they looked up at the trees, they seemed tired, the leaves crisping here and there.

“I thought this stupid hike would be a good bonding experience”, said Arista, apologizing to her sister, “but we didn’t even get to the first campground!”.

“You know how it is when I’m around”, said Tabatha, “constant drama”.

They held hands for a moment.

A high-pitched whiney voice, “Lost something ladies?”. Derrick emerged from the pines, uninjured, smiling, his shirt was dark with sweat, and he was breathing heavily. His thick spectacles were slightly steamed up.

Arista grabbed a handful of pebbles and threw them at him, but he dodged aside. In one hand he wielded a gun, in the other he held Tabatha’s pink panties.

“How about that autograph?”