Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  Desires. Yearns? No, too long.

  The nurse sighed. “Bring her back for a minute.”

  Enid disappeared with Alsea.

  “Was Aunt Enid really going to shoot him?” Chub asked, swinging his legs.

  “Shoot who?”

  “The tow-truck man.”

  It was a good question.

  “No.” Colleen licked her thumb and wiped a spot off his cheek.

  Chub tipped his head away, eyes settling on the gum-ball machine, though he knew better than to ask. Watching him peeled back the layers on what Rich must have been like as a boy: gentle, quiet, a terrible sweet tooth.

  The door that led to the exam rooms swung open and Helen Yancy shuffled out. Colleen hadn’t seen her in months, hadn’t even known she was expecting. Helen’s pregnant belly jutted through her coat, her hands large and pink from cannery work, her hair pulled back in a thick black braid. Luke trailed behind her, still small for his age. He’d been born small, barely five pounds. Helen’s great-grandmother had pressed a dark paste inside Helen’s cheek and rubbed salve on her belly. Her great-grandmother had raised her and wouldn’t set foot in a white man’s hospital—she said they sewed Yurok women up inside so they couldn’t have any more babies—and Helen had refused to go without her. Her great-grandmother had sung prayers—a rhythmic singing the old woman carried on for hours without seeming to draw breath, her tattooed chin wrinkling in concentration. Not prayers, Helen had corrected Colleen, later. Medicine. To make the baby come easy, which Luke had, landing slick and furious in Colleen’s hands as she knelt on a shower curtain spread out on the floor of Helen and Carl’s bedroom, herself six months pregnant with Chub, stunned and grateful, holding the first baby she’d ever delivered.

  “Go sit over there,” Helen told Luke now.

  Luke climbed up beside Chub and swung his legs.

  “You’re starting kindergarten pretty soon, aren’t you, hon?” Colleen asked him. Marsha called everyone “hon” and the habit had rubbed off on Colleen when she’d worked in the mill’s front office. Enid said hanging around old people made her act like one.

  Luke nodded.

  “You and Chub will be in the same class.”

  The nurse handed Helen some papers.

  “Can you do immunization records for the DeWitt kids?” the receptionist asked the nurse.

  “Again?”

  The receptionist shrugged. “She lost them.”

  The nurse sighed and accepted Enid’s thick file—six kids’ worth of earaches and broken bones, chicken pox and strep throat. Colleen pictured her own file: a thin catalog of disappointments. No, she shouldn’t say that. Here was Chub, swinging his legs beside Luke.

  “Luke, let’s go,” Helen said. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She gave Colleen a quick nod.

  “Congratulations,” Colleen offered. They’d been close, drifting apart after the boys were born. She thought Helen might offer her condolences, or some explanation—I heard what happened, I wasn’t sure you’d be up for it. Colleen had delivered Luke just fine, hadn’t she? Why wouldn’t Helen want her there for her second? But Helen only touched her belly, as though worried Colleen’s bad luck might rub off on her, and pushed out the double doors into the drizzle.

  “Next time we’re going to charge you,” the nurse warned Enid, handing her the new cards.

  “All right.” Enid tucked them into her purse. “Is it true that baby came out with no brain?” she asked the nurse.

  Enid. Colleen wanted to shush her.

  “What’s her name? Married one of the Cooney boys.” Enid looked to Colleen for help, snapped her fingers to spark the name. “Beth.”

  The nurse gave Enid a stern look. “They still making noise up by you?” the nurse asked.

  Hippies had been hitchhiking up from Arcata to protest the logging. Humboldt State was infected with them. A few weeks ago, they’d blocked No Name Road again, and Rich hadn’t gotten home until dark.

  “Can’t mow your lawn without somebody showing up to protest,” Enid said. “What do they wipe their butts with? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Somebody ought to tell them trees grow back,” the nurse agreed.

  * * *

  “Okay.” Enid climbed into the front seat. “That’s done.” She adjusted the baby’s swaddle. “Remind me to make Eugene sleep in another room from now on. Six is enough.”

  “The gown’s almost finished,” Colleen offered, to change the subject.

  A pastor was coming down from Crescent City for Alsea’s baptism in two weeks. There hadn’t been a regular pastor in Klamath in years. People saved their gossip, their bolo ties and pearl-button dresses, for the Sanderson fish fries, free for employees, fifty cents for their families, all you could eat, every other Sunday. Alsea—still an effort to think of the baby by name. With Enid’s kids, the baby had always stayed the baby until the next one came along, though Enid swore this was the last. Alsea, for the town in Oregon where Eugene had grown up—he’d finally run out of great-aunts to name her after.

  “Why bother?” Enid yawned. “I’ve still got Mavis’s lying around somewhere.”

  “Every baby is a miracle,” Colleen said.

  “Yeah. Right. Tell that to my tits. Down to my knees. You should sew me a bra. Or get Rich to carve me one, that’s about what it would take.”

  “I’ll bring it by,” Colleen said. “I just have the roses around the neckline to do.”

  “All right.”

  The truck climbed into the bends, fog drifting up from the ocean and across the road like smoke. The radio dissolved into static. Chub slept, then Enid, breath ruffling in her nose. Colleen gripped the wheel. Finally, the sign emerged from the fog—WELCOME TO TIMBER COUNTRY—then the two gold bears, guarding the bridge.

  August 12 RICH

  Rich hunched at the service-station pay phone, still in his work clothes. He dug the worn paper coaster Jim Mueller had given him from his pocket, thumbed a dime into the slot, hung up the receiver. He took a step back, palms sweating, and toed the ground. Finally, he thumbed the coin into the slot again and dialed.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Jim Mueller said.

  “Now?” Rich asked, chill seeping into the sweat-damp folds of his shirt.

  “Half hour,” Jim Mueller said, and hung up before Rich could change his mind.

  * * *

  Rich’s hands buzzed with nerves by the time he pulled open the door to the savings and loan. The air was stale and musty. In the indoor quiet, he was suddenly aware of his odor, the mix of sweat and gasoline, the sweet nip of sawdust. He hadn’t set foot in this place in years. Colleen deposited his paychecks; all he did was run through the account statements at the end of the month.

  “Mr. Gundersen?” a man asked. He was short and stocky. He held out a hand hesitantly, as though wary of Rich’s size. “We spoke on the phone the other day,” the man said, to jog Rich’s memory. Rich had pictured the loan officer older, in a suit and tie. This guy was in shirtsleeves. “We’ve got all the paperwork ready for you.”

  Jim Mueller sat with his back to the door. He nodded in greeting when the loan officer led Rich into his office and plopped down behind the desk.

  “Mr. Mueller has already signed,” he said. “All we need now is your John Hancock.”

  Jim Mueller slid the stack of papers toward Rich. Rich felt his front pocket for his cheaters but found only a stray toothpick. Here and there, a word jumped out: his full name, 24-7 Ridge Inholding, $250,000, interest rate 8.96 percent.

  Rich swallowed, rubbed his sweaty palms over his knees, denims rough, oil-stained.

  “How much would I need to put down again?” Rich asked.

  “Mr. Mueller, would you give us a minute?” the loan officer asked.

  Jim Mueller grunted and got up.

  The loan officer laid out Rich’s accounts, as he’d done on the phone.

  “That would leave you twenty-five hundred dollars in savings, after closing costs and the down
payment,” he explained.

  That wasn’t much of a buffer, with a $2,102.10 loan payment to make every month.

  “What about the house?” Rich asked. “Could I use that as collateral and put less down?”

  The loan officer shook his head, coughed, turned to the side to clear his throat. “No. Not with the park—” He paused, choosing his next word carefully. “Situation.”

  “I still own the place, don’t I?”

  “You were part of the legislative takings?” the man asked, as if Rich had had some choice in the matter. What he’d had was the bad luck of owning twenty acres in one of the slender necks of land Congress decided to use to string together a few state parks along the coast. People down in Humboldt got the worst of the takings, the body of the upside-down seahorse of land that became the national park. The Del Nort County piece was just a skinny tail of state parks, hugging the coast, Rich’s house smack-dab in the middle of it. “What you have is more like a lease,” the man explained. “They bought you out in ’68? So, twenty-five years,” the man calculated, “what’s that, 1993?”

  “Or until we die,” Rich said. “We can stay in the house until we die. My wife’s younger.”

  The loan officer nodded, like he was accustomed to people coming face-to-face with their own mortality on the other side of his desk.

  “You have to own an asset to use it as collateral,” he explained. “Excuse me a moment.”

  Jim Mueller came back in and sat heavily. In his mind, Rich saw Colleen watching him back down the driveway this morning. Be careful. His whole life, he had been.

  “Got to take a risk sometime,” Jim Mueller said, as though Rich had spoken the thought aloud.

  The pen weighed ten pounds in his hand. Rich swallowed. Saliva refilled his mouth. The loan officer returned just as he was initialing the last page. Hard to believe a quarter-million bucks fit in a contract lighter than a pack of cigarettes.

  “No reason to clear-cut,” Jim Mueller said, chatty now that the contract was signed. “Once Sanderson clears the lower half of Damnation out of your way, go easy. Cut forty percent, let the rest grow. Your kid’ll sit on the porch someday, watching your great-grandkids harvest.”

  “Used to be talking like that could get you killed,” Rich said. Look what had happened to Lark, for preaching sustained yield—not cutting faster than the forest could grow back. It was just a hop, skip, and a jump from there to a union, pensions, vacation pay. Sanderson could smell a unionizer a mile off, snuffed that fire before it sparked.

  Jim Mueller smoothed a palm across the desk, as though to wipe away Lark’s whole sorry history.

  “You’re going to make a goddamn fortune,” he said with a note of regret. “Well, you Gundersens have been lusting after that ridge for eighty years. Hank’d be proud as hell that one of you monkeys finally owns it.” He stuck out a hand and Rich shook it. The loan officer walked Jim Mueller out. Left alone, Rich stared at the lacquered burl clock behind the desk. The whole transaction had taken less than forty minutes.

  The loan officer came back with some dates—first payment due in October. Rich scribbled out the post office box number and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” the man asked.

  “Mailing address.”

  Colleen took care of the bills, wrote the checks, licked the stamps. He didn’t want her finding out like that. He would tell her his own way, as soon as he got the details hammered out.

  It was a relief to push out of the lobby into the early-evening air, rain freckling his face. Rich folded the documents into thirds, leaned across the truck’s bench seat, and popped the plastic bottom out of the glove box. He picked up the key to the post office box he’d rented last week from Geraldine, silent and unfriendly, and, for those reasons, trustworthy. He weighed it in his hand, then tucked the papers into the secret space underneath, dropped the key in on top, and pressed the plastic back into place.

  COLLEEN

  She walked Chub to the drugstore’s toy aisle and took her list from her pocketbook.

  “You stay right here, okay?”

  Chub nodded, not taking his eyes off the rack of sixty-nine-cent Matchbox cars, his nose nearly touching the tiny hot rods. He was allowed to choose one.

  “Look with your eyes, not with your hands,” Colleen reminded him.

  She picked up a quart of peroxide, Chub’s wart ointment, Rich’s foot cream, a box of sourdough pretzels, vitamin E. Rich had had the itch twice this season, a scaly mother patch on his rib cage that spread like beastly hickeys across his chest and arms and lasted six weeks: sweated-through clothes, rubbing for hours, that’s what caused it. There was no cure, but vitamin E helped. She picked up cotton balls and rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, a shower-curtain liner, all the things she would need for Melody Larson’s birth. She pushed the thought of her own due date from her mind.

  “Colleen?”

  She looked up. A man stood in front of her: pencil tucked above his ear, long dark hair, confident and upright, a half inch shorter than she.

  “Daniel?”

  As soon as she said it, she wanted to snatch the name back, as if she’d conjured him from the thin air of the past. He took her cold hands in his and squeezed. Her wedding band pressed into her flesh.

  “Still freezing,” he noted, reaching jokingly for the pad in his front pocket, as though to record the observation, and revealing the gap between his front teeth, wide enough to feed a coin through. She felt the strange urge to press the pad of her thumb to it, the way she once had.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked instead.

  “A little of this, a little of that.” Daniel’s eyes flashed. “Fish work, mostly.”

  “Guiding or gutting?”

  Daniel chuckled—as if he’d run tourists or clocked in at the cannery like anybody else. “Both, I guess. Mostly catch-and-release. Depends on the study,” he said. He’d been in his second year at Humboldt State when she’d seen him last, the only kid from their high school to go on to college. “It’s good to see you.” He cupped his hand to the back of his neck, as though trying to recall how many years it had been. Sixteen.

  “What are you studying?” she asked, swallowing the bitter taste in her mouth. School had always come first for him.

  “Water quality, silt load.”

  She heard it still, his refusal to dumb himself down. In a school full of Bills and Chucks, he’d never been Dan or Dan-O or Danny, always Daniel. “Even with the hatcheries, the coho run’s down to almost nothing,” he said. “And the chinook runs keep getting smaller. Every year.” Daniel dropped his eyes. “I see what it’s doing to my uncle. He’s been fishing since he was nine years old—everything he has, it comes from the river. Not just him, the whole community. It’s making people sick,” he confided, quieter now. “It’s not just food. It’s not just a livelihood. It’s our whole life, our whole identity, as far back as anyone can remember, you know?” His voice strained. “We can’t be Yuroks, without salmon. And the water…” He shook his head.

  “What’s wrong with the water?” Colleen asked. She’d leaned in closer to hear, and smelled mint.

  “Well, there’s not enough of it, for one,” Daniel said, as though this much was obvious. “All the ag upriver, and the dams—those warm-water releases are just cooking the salmon right there in the river. And then there’s the runoff issue. What logging has done around here—you wouldn’t believe what some of these drainages look like—no shade left, silt so thick the creeks are hot enough to take a bath in. And the contaminant levels—”

  He went on, casting his eyes around the aisle as he talked, as though searching the shelves for items to offer her by way of explanation. She struggled to concentrate, to follow the tight turns of his sentences. Standing so close, his presence sent a tingle of electric current across her skin.

  “We’ll see what the fall run looks like, I guess. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t be drinking out of those creeks anymore,” he said finally. “It�
�s not like when we were kids. But people don’t worry about what they can’t see, right?”

  She nodded, though she’d been tuning in and out, only half listening.

  “You’re still living up in Klamath?” he asked.

  Colleen felt the accusation underneath: What happened to getting out of there?

  “North of town,” she said. “Damnation Creek.”

  “Really?” His eyes widened a little. Or maybe she’d imagined it.

  “Arcata—” she fumbled. “This just wasn’t for me.” As if those five months—her tiny desk at the real estate office, the water dispenser gurgling digestively, the rented room with the cramped twin bed whose springs squeaked so loudly she and Daniel had moved to the floor so her landlady wouldn’t hear—were simply a shoe she’d tried on. “I was never—smart.” At school, boys had baited him—If you’re so smart, how come you don’t teach your uncle how to steal fish without getting caught?—shoved him against walls, bloodied his nose when he fought back, and still, nine times out of ten it was Daniel the principal had paddled so hard he couldn’t sit down. Colleen had once heard a teacher explain they had to beat Yurok kids like Daniel harder because their skin was tougher; they didn’t feel it the same.

  Daniel hummed in the awkward silence, the three short notes that indicated his mind was wandering off down a track she could not follow.

  “How about you?” she asked, calling him back.

  “I’ve been working up in Canada—BC. Salmon research. I got some funding to come down here for the year.” Lines puckered in his forehead, as though there was more to the story. “With my uncle and everything—it just felt like a good time to come home, you know?”