Free The Pines by Robert Dunbar

rotting in the sand.
    Lost somewhere in his cramped house was an old photograph. The officer in that photo smiled broadly, his uniform creased and spotless, the young man muscular and lean. He’d only been married a short time then. So short a time. It seemed to him he’d seen this photo recently, glass cracked, gold paint flaking off the frame. It lay somewhere amid the sad clutter, the debris of a life with Anna that filled his house, preserved in a perfect state of disorder, like a museum collection waiting to be cataloged.
    Dark spots spread under his arms. He drew the dusky smell of the pines deep into his lungs, and his head cleared a little. He had to cut down on the drinking. Then he snorted in self-derision and looked around at the emptiness, feeling he’d been deposited here by an outgoing tide of booze.
    When they’d known for sure that his wife was dying, he’d resigned from the Trenton Police Department and brought her out here…because they’d always said they would retire to the country. A hideous mistake, and from the start, she’d known it, keeping silent for his sake. In a desperate flurry of activity, he’d uprooted her, dragged her away from her family and friends. Trapped her in that awful little house with only her disease for company. And the house was awful, tight as a coffin, hardly the rambling country place they’d dreamed of. She’d accepted the arrangement, as she’d accepted everything. In all their time together, she’d never complained, not even at the end when the pain must have been…
    A branch snagged his pant leg, and he bent to free it, rancor welling up in him like bile, his clenched eyes stinging with perspiration. There hadn’t been enough time. Straightening, he unzipped his fly and relieved himself against a sapling, then headed back toward the car. Though still in his early thirties, he’d lately come to think of himself as an old milk horse, the sort that made its rounds until it dropped. He thought of his wife as he plodded on, of how little she’d weighed near the end, of how he’d smothered her with petting attentions, both of them knowing the pain he tried to assuage wasn’t hers, touching her constantly, as though somehow…
    Something squelched under his shoes. Coagulated leaves almost covered the patch of bog, and blueberry bushes grew sparsely in the soggy ground. Sodden branches lay scattered, some laddered with shelf growth, the fungus flowing over them in weird, garish colors. He stared down blankly. He must have walked in the wrong direction. Stooping, he picked up a hunk of cedar wood, his vision clouding as he smelled the dampness. He held the log to his face, feeling sick with the heat as he squeezed. We t and rotten inside, it crumbled in his hand and dribbled back into the mud.
    He stared at his soiled hands—rough and callused, creased and cut with lines like tooled leather. Not moving away, he wiped them on himself, leaving smears of bark rot on his pants.
    “Is that a buzzard circling up there?”
    “We’re doomed!”
    The heavy pack caused sweat to gather in the small of Jenny’s back, and her hot T-shirt clung. A thorny, tentacular vine caught at a sneaker and tore her ankle, and every step stirred swarms of gnats from the undergrowth. The terrain never varied. “Some vacation. It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt like I was getting someplace.” She sighed. “Whose idea was this again?”
    Casey plodded ahead, his heavy hiking boots clunking along the trail. Above white socks, rolled fat at the ankles, his hairy legs were thickly muscular, and above the frayed belt loops of his cutoffs protruded the graying waistband of his jockey shorts. Sweat streamed down his back and sides. A T-shirt, bunched up and stuck in his backpack, trailed out, waving to the others like a white banner.
    “I see some more deer tracks,” announced Amelia. No one responded to the child—they’d all gotten pretty bored with deer tracks. “They look sort of