Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

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  For my parents, Susan and Dean Davidson

  … they are not like any trees we know…

  —John Steinbeck

  It’s easier to die than to move…

  —Wallace Stegner

  SUMMER 1977

  July 30 RICH

  Rich nabbed the week’s mail from Lark’s box and swung off the Eel Road, bumping down the muddy two-track past a pair of show toilets. Thorns screaked against the Ford’s side panels. Ferns tall as a man scrubbed the windows. The driveway was so overgrown Rich could barely read the signs.

  DRIVE-THRU TREE! REAL GENUINE SASQUATCH! CLEAN PUBLIC RESTROOM!

  The two-track dead-ended in Lark’s clearing, overlooking the river. Rich pulled up alongside the ancient International abandoned in front of the cabin, grass grown up through the truck’s rust-eaten hood. The old hog nosing around in the weeds behind the outhouse didn’t raise its head, but Lark’s two lazy mutts stretched and moseyed over as soon as Rich popped his door.

  “Banjo! Killer!” Lark called from the porch, carved Sasquatches posted along the railing.

  Fifty degrees and here was Lark in a stained undershirt, gray hair and beard wild to his shoulders, rolls of toilet paper stacked in a pyramid on the parked wheelchair. He used the thing like a glorified wheelbarrow. Rich snagged the foil pan and six-pack of Tab riding shotgun and climbed out.

  Lark sat back in his carving chair. “Saturday, already?”

  “How’s the shit business?” Rich asked, coming up the steps.

  “Regular.”

  Lark scraped a chip off a hunk of driftwood where a shaggy Sasquatch head emerged, like the wood had washed up with the Sasquatches already inside, and all he had to do was shave off the extra with the ease of a man taking the rind off an orange in a single long peel.

  “Had a gal out here yesterday, ass so round I wanted to take a damn bite.” Lark lifted his chin toward the outhouse—the only pit stop for miles in this stretch of the redwood belt—as though the tourist might still be inside.

  Twenty-sheet wads of toilet paper were piled on the chair beside him, enough to refill the basket below the tin can where tourists deposited their outhouse dimes. People were always pitching the rolls into the pit or stealing them, but no one took much interest in the individual wads.

  Lark’s flying squirrel sat on his shoulder. He’d found her as a pup, blown out of the nest. With her twisted hip, she and Lark were a matched set. Lark toed the half-circle of shavings at his feet, rotated the statue, and rubbed a thumb up the grain to feel the muscles underneath. Lark’s own jaw was sunken. Rich eyed the upside-down crate piled with tools and empty Tab cans—no sign of his teeth—and spun the warm tin on his palm.

  “That my last meal?” Lark asked.

  “Still hot.”

  “Put it in the icebox.” Lark tossed his head toward the door, always propped open, no matter the weather.

  Rich ducked inside. Lark had built the cabin himself, back when men were smaller. The kitchen was just a sink and a two-burner camp stove, some cupboard shelves Lark had never bothered putting doors on. What the hell for? Have to open them to find anything.

  “What time is it?” Lark called from the porch.

  “Six?” Rich looked out the window at the gray sky. “Six thirty.”

  Empty pork-n-beans cans littered the counter. Rich pulled open the icebox: Marsha’s tuna-casserole pan, one shriveled square remaining, a bottle of barbecue sauce.

  “You coming in?” Rich asked, eye level with the door frame.

  “Let’s go see what else Kel is frying up.” Lark took up his canes, one cut in the shape of a saw—the standard Sanderson retirement gift—the other a wooden rifle he’d carved himself.

  “You want to go down to the Only?” Rich asked.

  “There another place to get a hot meal in this town?” Lark asked.

  “You going to put a shirt on first?”

  Lark hobbled in, pulled open the top drawer of the hutch, dipped his shoulder so that the squirrel fell in, and slammed the drawer shut. The dogs would corner her if they ever got her alone.

  “Those are yours.” Lark grunted, pulling on an old work shirt and nodding at a pile of toothpicks on the kitchen table, sharp and even as store-bought.

  “Appreciate it.” Rich funneled the toothpicks into his front pocket. He’d quit chewing snus cold turkey the day he met Colleen. Stuck a toothpick in his mouth nine years ago, and that was it.

  Lark took one porch step at a time.

  “Since when do you want to go down to the Only?” Rich asked once they were in the truck, Lark panting from the effort. Besides a ride up and down the coast highway to pull his road signs—DRIVE THRU REAL LIVE REDWOOD! HOUSE INSIDE A TREE!—for repainting or to replant them, Rich couldn’t remember the last time Lark had wanted to go anywhere.

  “Since when do you ask so many questions?” Lark shot back. He squinted out at the river. Two Yurok men slid by in a boat. “Looking for fish.”

  “Early for salmon, yet,” Rich said, backing up far enough to turn around.

  Lark shrugged. “They’ve been fishing that river for a thousand years. They’ve got fish in the blood, those guys.”

  The truck juddered, swung around the Eel Road’s washboard curves, as winding as the animal it was named for. Dark walls of second-growth rose up the steep sides of the gulch, alder and vine maple crowding in around old stumps large enough to park a pickup on. When they pulled into the gravel lot, there was only one other truck besides Kel’s: a burnt-orange Chevy Rich didn’t recognize. Rain dripped off the bumper, washing mud from peeling stickers.

  KISS MY AX.

  DON’T WORRY, I HUGGED IT FIRST.

  MY BOSS AIN’T A WHORE, HE’S A HOOKER.

  The sign out front—THE ONE AND ONLY TAVERN—was faded by rain, but the white high-water mark over the entrance was freshly painted, showing the river how far it would have to rise to impress anybody.

  Rich held the door and Lark hobbled in, surveyed the place as though it were crowded, and made for the bar, maneuvering himself onto a stool next to an old guy watching baseball, his dirty plate pushed aside.

  “Corny.” The man acknowledged him. Only old-timers, guys who had worked with Lark when he was young, called him that.

  “Jim.” Lark knew every crusty old logger for a hundred miles and which side to butter him on. “Rich Gundersen, Jim Mueller.”

  “You’re Hank’s boy?” Jim Mueller asked. His white hair was buzzed, an old scar visible on his scalp.

  Rich nodded, taking the stool beside Lark. Jim Mueller narrowed his eyes, searching Rich’s face for some resemblance.

  “Hank was a hell of a tree-topper. Part monkey. Damn shame what happened to him.” Jim Mueller cleared his throat and glanced at Lark. Lark had been Rich’s father’s best friend; after forty-five years, he still carried his death on his back.

  “Rich lives out at Bald Hill, Hank and Gretchen’s old place,” Lark said.

  “Above Diving Board Rock there?” Jim Mueller asked.

  Kel pushed through the swinging kitchen doors. “Who let you out?” he ribbed, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “I like to look around once a decade,” Lark said. “What happened to your hair?”

  Kel ran a palm over his shiny head,
as though he’d forgotten his own baldness.

  “I’ll take mine rare,” Lark said. “And easy on the damn onions this time.”

  Kel looked to Rich, who shrugged.

  “One burger,” Kel announced, pouring them coffee before heading back to the grill.

  Lark turned to Jim Mueller. “I hear you’re looking to unload a couple of forties.”

  For a man who rarely set foot beyond the end of his own driveway, Lark had an uncanny knack for knowing who had land for sale, whose truck had been repo’ed, who was doing six months plus a fine for poaching burls off the national park.

  “Might be.” Jim Mueller cast a suspicious look at Rich.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Lark said. “I’ve known rocks that talked more.”

  “Hazel’s bleeding me dry,” Jim Mueller confided, glancing back at the TV.

  “How many’s a couple?” Lark asked.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen?” Lark choked, setting his coffee down.

  “Seven hundred twenty acres.” Jim Mueller scratched his cheek, eyes still on the game. “The 24-7 inholding—that whole ridge behind Hank’s.”

  Rich’s heart skipped. He’d walked 24-7 Ridge every morning of his adult life. His great-granddad had dreamed of buying it, and that dream had been handed down through the generations until it landed, heavy, on Rich.

  “Some good timber in there.” Lark took another swig. “If you could get to it.”

  “Sanderson’s putting roads in next door, on the east side, to harvest Damnation Grove,” Jim Mueller said. “Practically rolling out the red carpet to the 24-7.”

  Lark looked to Rich.

  “Harvest plans finally went through,” Rich confirmed.

  “All this new environmental bullshit, it’s just paperwork,” Jim Mueller said. “You know they’ll have to run a road clear down to the creek to get the cut out. The big pumpkins in that lower half are all down along the bottom of that gulch. Hell, it’s spitting distance from there to the foot of 24-7 Ridge.”

  “A lot of board feet up the 24-7,” Lark mused. Rich felt his eyes on him.

  “A million bucks’ worth, at least.” A look of disgust crossed Jim Mueller’s face. “I’ve been waiting fifty years for Sanderson to harvest Damnation, so I could get to mine. I told Hazel: ‘Wait. Couple more months, Sanderson’ll cut roads down.’ But that bitch says she’s done waiting on my ass. She wants her alimony now.”

  “Those big pumpkins aren’t worth a nickel if you can’t haul them out,” Lark reminded him.

  “She’s steep, and she’s rough,” Jim Mueller admitted, “but as soon as those roads go in and Lower Damnation gets cleared out of the way, somebody’s going to make a goddamn fortune.”

  “Merle doesn’t want to buy it?” Lark asked.

  “Merle’s a goddamn sellout.” Jim Mueller belched. “The big dogs let him keep the Cadillac so he can rub elbows with the buddies he’s got left on the forestry board, but all the real decisions go through corporate now. You think those San Francisco sonsabitches give a damn? They bought Sanderson to bleed her. They’ll harvest her big timber, then auction off every piece of machinery that isn’t nailed down, lock the doors, and throw away the key. Look how they sold off the trucks. Like a goddamn yard sale.”

  Rich sipped his coffee and tried to slow his racing heart. He pictured the 24-7 tree herself: a monster, grown even wider now than the twenty-four feet, seven inches that originally earned her the name, three hundred seventy feet high, the tallest of the scruff of old-growth redwoods left along the top of 24-7 Ridge. He’d circled that tree every morning for the last thirty-five years, figuring the best way to fall her, but it had always been just a story he’d told himself, like his father before him, and his granddad before that. Someday, Rich remembered his father saying. As a boy, it had seemed possible, though generations of Gundersens had died with the word on their breath.

  “You sure the park don’t want it?” Lark asked. “Aren’t they looking to expand?”

  Jim Mueller pushed air out his nose. “Up here? You seen the clear-cuts? Looks like a bomb went off.” Jim Mueller shook his head. “Tourists don’t want to see that. They expand, it’ll be down where they’re at, Redwood Creek area. Humboldt County’ll die of that park. At least up here in Del Nort, we still got a fighting chance.” Jim Mueller inhaled. “I’d take four hundred.”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars?” Lark asked.

  Rich’s heart sank.

  “Rich here has been saving his whole goddamn life,” Lark said. “Give him another five, six generations.” He leaned back to make room for Kel to set his hamburger on the bar.

  “Timber’s worth ten times that.” Jim Mueller sulked.

  Lark picked the bun off the burger and scraped away the onions. “You got equipment rental, plus a crew, plus contracting some gyppo trucker to haul your cut to the mill,” Lark calculated, cramming in lettuce and tomato and a few rounds of pickle.

  Jim Mueller shrugged. “Got to spend money to make money.”

  Rich nursed his coffee, trying to focus on the game, to ignore the itch of possibility. It wasn’t possible, not at that price. He’d never qualify for a loan that size. The batter hit a line drive to left field. Lark finished his meal, took hold of his canes, and pushed himself up, in a hurry.

  “Damn lettuce runs right through me,” he muttered, hobbling toward the john.

  The game went to commercial.

  “You get in a fight?” Jim Mueller asked, eyeing Rich’s split knuckles.

  “Nah.” Rich flexed his fingers, still tender. “Just from working.”

  “You a high-climber too?”

  Rich nodded.

  “Well, you got the height for it. How old are you?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “Christ. Aren’t loggers supposed to be dead by fifty?”

  “Still got a few lives left,” Rich said.

  Jim Mueller shook his head, the gesture of a man who’d worked in the woods, whose body remembered the way bark could bite, the wet of blood before the pain came alive.

  “Hank sure got in a lot of fights as a kid, but then, he always was a runt.” Jim Mueller chuckled at the memory. “I bet guys thought twice before starting up with you.”

  Rich rotated his mug. Plenty of nights at the Widowmaker, before Colleen, he’d tightened his jaw as some jackass heckled him. Certain type, when he got a few drinks in him, looked around for the tallest man to fight, and in any bar, any room, that man was Rich. Six six and a half in socks, six eight in caulk boots. Short guys pushed hardest—same daredevil taste that drew them to high-lead logging to begin with. As if falling the biggest timber on Earth could make up for the North Coast’s smallest pecker. Rich had defended himself, but he’d never struck a man in anger. Couldn’t remember his dad well enough to picture him fighting.

  “Hank swore he’d buy that 24-7 off me someday,” Jim Mueller said. “Died too young.” He paused a long moment, then wrote a phone number down on a coaster and slid it over to Rich. “I’d take two fifty. I wouldn’t offer that to anybody else.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Rich said. He’d been planning to use the twenty-five grand he’d socked away up at the savings and loan to build on when the baby came, but there wouldn’t be another baby, not after how hard Colleen had taken losing this last one.

  “Hazel’s lawyer has got me by the balls. I need this done quick or that sonofabitch is going to garnish my social security. Garnish.” Jim Mueller grunted. “Big piece of fucking parsley.”

  “Ready?” Lark asked, coming back. He hitched an elbow up on the bar—Rich forgot how little he was until moments like this—and thumbed a few bucks from his wallet. “That enough?” he asked Kel.

  Kel nodded. “See you in 1987.”

  “If you live that long, baldie. Take it easy on the onions.” Lark held out his hand. “Jim.” They shook. Jim Mueller nodded so long to Rich.

  “What do you think?” Lark asked once they we
re back in the truck.

  “About what?” Rich asked.

  “Nice to be your own boss for once, wouldn’t it?”

  Rich shrugged. A quarter-million bucks.

  “You cut, replant, harvest thirty-year rotations. That would be some real money.”

  “I’ll be dead in thirty years,” Rich said.

  “Yeah,” Lark acknowledged, “but Colleen won’t.”

  Rich tightened his grip on the wheel. Lark had a way of getting inside his head, limping around on that pair of canes like a cursing, wild-bearded incarnation of Rich’s conscience.

  “The real timber’s gone,” Lark said. “What’s left, ten percent, including the parks? Two thousand years to grow a forest, a hundred years to fall it. No plague like man.”

  Rich pulled out of the lot. Drizzle speckled the windshield.

  “Sanderson’s almost out of old-growth. How long you think Merle’s going to keep you around?” Lark prodded. “Another year? Two? Don’t need a high-climber if all they’re harvesting is pecker poles. You don’t bet on yourself, nobody else will, Gundersen.” Lark rolled down his window, stuck a palm out to check the rain. “I’ll tell you one thing, String Bean, your dad wouldn’t have let an opportunity like this pass him by, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t know.” Rich stalled, though he knew Lark was right.

  “You don’t know what? Listen, it might take a pair of fists, three balls, and a bucket of luck to make a life in redwood country, but you get a chance like this, you take it. Chance of a goddamn lifetime.” Lark coughed, scratched the lump on his neck. “I need a smoke. You got any smokes in this truck?”

  “Hasn’t Marsha been on you to quit?” Rich asked.

  “What, you afraid she’ll sit on you?”

  “She’s already shot one man,” Rich reasoned.

  “I ain’t scared of her.” Lark jogged his leg like he was late somewhere.

  They rode in silence up the crumbling highway along the ocean, asphalt potholed from the weight of loaded log trucks, winding along the narrow strip of coastal timber the park had annexed back in ’68. Big trees hugged the road edge like mink trim sewn to a burlap coat, hiding the clear-cuts that lay just beyond.