Free Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

me, if anything in the world could make a woman like that fall for something like me not once, but twice? There wasn’t but one way to answer any of it, and so I made up my mind right then and there that just as soon as dawn broke over the jack pines I would settle it, put an end to the wondering.
    —
    THE TRAIL TURNED steep just a hundred yards from a kidney-shaped gravel parking lot. The Little Green lookout wasn’t far, but from there, the trail cut switchbacks down angled grade and didn’t flatten for a second until the valley. When I was younger and Daddy still took me to the woods to get away, he used to bring me down that trail to chase speckled trout with red wrigglers where the headwaters of the Tuckasegee was nothing more than a creek. He’d poach those specks by the dozen, sliding the six-to-eight-inch trout into the top of a milk jug until it was full and those fish were flapping against one another. He’d never cared much for game wardens, and considered all those newfangled laws an attack on a family that settled here before the first land grants were cut loose. We’d head home and Daddy would fry the trout whole, eat those specks, bones and all. I ate them too, but the memory that stuck out most was the way those fish smelled on my hands, that mossy kind of smell that was clean and dripping wet with something older than any of us, and the smile on my father’s face. Those were the times when Daddy was most like a father, the times when he shared fragments of what truly made him happy. That was what stuck out in my mind as I sat down on the rock that morning and stared out at Little Green.
    Maggie had started running during the middle school years after her family left The Creek. The Creek was a beautiful place, but it was lawless and always had been. The land was of little use for farming, so the folks who settled way back when were mostly drunkards and thieves. I was generations away from those earliest outlaws, but things like that have a way of staying in the blood. Maggie’s father didn’t carry those ties, but he fit right in. When Maggie and I were kids and her father tied on weeklong drunks, he’d wander the road, stumbling tranquilized, speaking gibberish, wake up covered in dew when the booze wore off. Even the crankers took him for a joke and searched his pockets for any dollar left while he lay sprawled like a cadaver. It was when he
found Jesus
that he moved the family onto Breedlove Road. I guess he figured he could leave it behind.
    With their house on Breedlove just up the gravel from Panthertown, Maggie took a liking to the trails that wove through that wilderness. For years now, she’d been coming here every morning when the sun rose, and would run from the parking lot to Schoolhouse Falls and back, no matter if it was drowning frogs or snowing over tire chains. I’d never cared much for running. I wasn’t about to run unless something gave chase, more specifically something with teeth, something with a gun, or something with blue lights and a badge looking for someone to take down to Sylva mid-shift. Maggie ran from things all her own. She ran from circumstance. She ran from things that would never catch her. And somewhere down in that valley, Maggie was running right toward me without even knowing.
    I’d stolen a soft pack of Winston straights from a carton Daddy kept in the freezer, and by the time I heard someone coming out of the valley, I’d already smoked that pack half flat. I heard her long before I saw her, tennis shoes crunching gravel, then her breathing as she blurred behind a laurel thicket. She saw me standing as she passed and threw on the brakes, her soles sliding to stop on loose gravel.
    “Jacob,” she said, huffing for breath and searching for words. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and a tight lilac-purple top stretched at her breasts while she panted. Black sweats followed the curves of her legs to just past the knees. “You scared the hell out of