Free Just Beneath My Skin by Darren Greer

crouch down on the ground with my back against a tree. Johnny didn’t let me bring my jacket — maybe he wants to keep it as a trophy — and I am getting colder. I try to keep warm by hugging my knees and rocking back and forth on my haunches while I keep an eye out for Johnny.
    I think about what I should do.
    I don’t know where I am. I ran so hard and so fast I didn’t bother to mark the way. The woods here are big. Go west and you can walk sixty miles all the way into Digby County and not cross so much as a logging road. To the north is Middlebridge, but that is five miles or more, and to the east lies Johnny and his gun. That leaves south, across the river and back out to Highway #7. I’ll have to leave the Pinto at Johnny’s place and worry about picking it up later, if Johnny ever comes down from the acid.

I START WALKING SOUTH, RUNNING over in my mind all the names of trees I ever knew in order to stop thinking about the possibility of running smack dab into Johnny. Hoptree, dogwood, ash, basswood, Douglas fir, beech, hemlock, buckthorn, cherry, plum, crabapple, tamarack, elder, elm, witch hazel, hackberry, chestnut, hickory, laurel, birch, madrone, honey locust, maple, oak, pawpaw, poplar, larch, ironwood, redbud, sumac, sycamore, tupelo, mulberry, viburnum, alder, willow, juniper, blue-beech, pine, spruce, yew, coffee tree and hackmatack.
    It’s strange — all those years of hunting deer in here only to be hunted myself, by a man I once considered my friend now stoned out of his mind on purple microdot with double-aught buckshot loaded into the breech of his gun and nothing short of murder on his mind.
    I don’t doubt it is double-aught shot, though it’s illegal to own.
    I know Johnny has some, and he would consider killing somebody with anything less to be cheesy and unprofessional. The crazy bastard once shot a rabbit with some out behind his house, and when we went to pick it up there was nothing left but the ears and the tail. “Imagine what that would do to a deer, or a person,” he told me that day. “Fuckin’ mincemeat, McNeil.”
    Fucking mincemeat.
    If I ever get out of here, that can be my nickname.
    Mincemeat McNeil. It has a nice ring to it.

I MAKE IT ALL THE way through woods, ’til I get to the river, without seeing Johnny. Memragouche bends to the east a mile and a half below the Eight-Mile Bridge and then bends back to the west before Johnny’s. Below that is Great Falls, where Cleve Ramey built his wooden ramps every year and dipped gaspereau for the market in Japan. When we were kids we used to help him dip on Sunday for a quarter a crate. Sometimes we’d come home with two dollars or more, which we’d spend at Douglas’s on Monday. My father didn’t like Cleve, because he didn’t go to church and he didn’t wash and he exploited us boys from the village by making us work on Sunday when his regular crew wanted a day off. But we didn’t mind. Once, when the planks on the ramp were soaked with foam from the river and treacherous, I slid off into the falls but Cleve happened to be walking the ramp, a rare thing. He grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back out again.
    â€œCareful there, young fella,” he said, reeking of pipe tobacco and sweat and fried fish, which his wife made him every morning for breakfast. “You go into those falls and you ain’t gonna live to tell the tale.”
    I loved dipping fish with Cleve, even besides the money. There was something about dipping a long pole into the falls and coming up with a netful of wriggling silver-sided fish. We’d dump them into the blue plastic crates and watch them flop and fight for breath, mouths gasping and eyes turning milk-blue as the life slowly drained out of them. Some of the men Cleve hired would wait until the crates were filled with fish then lug them back to the shore and dump them in bigger wooden crates on the