by Ash Davidson
“A lot can happen in a month,” Lark said. “Get those signs loaded up, will you?”
Rich went out to the shed, looked up the gulch at the stripped pole of the Doug fir Lark had taught him to climb on after his mom died. He remembered Lark’s voice rising from the ground.
Cut from above. You cut from underneath, that branch’ll strip down the side, suck your rope in, squeeze you so tight your gizzard’ll come out your nose.
For weeks, Rich had scraped and grunted his way up that pole, slipped, slid, started over, hands rope-burned, arms sore, until he could race to the top and touch ground in forty seconds, circle of flayed bark at the base.
Now Lark watched through a veil of smoke as Rich heaved signs into the truck bed, plywood nailed to sharpened two-by-fours.
HOUSE INSIDE A TREE! “House” was a lot to say for an old hollowed-out stump with a wobbly table and a couple of milk crates inside. In the old days, it might have made a good goose pen, but Lark had put a door in front and two pieces of tin over the top and started charging a quarter to go in. If there was one thing he enjoyed more than smoking, it was screwing a tourist out of a city dollar. Too rich to sweat for a living, too dumb to dig their own hole to shit in.
Lark stubbed out his cigarette. “Rich Gundersen. Won’t risk a buck on a dice roll, up to his goddamn neck now. Welcome to the party, Rich. Congratu-fuckin-lations.”
A grin tugged at the corner of Rich’s mouth.
“How long ’til you’re back harvesting the grove, you think?”
“Don’t know,” Rich admitted. “But I know that skull wasn’t up there three weeks ago.”
“You tell Merle that?”
“That I’ve been snooping around on my off days?” Rich asked. “No thanks.”
“It’d give you a chance to ask him about using his roads to get your timber out. You want to nail him down on a milling contract, don’t you?” Lark reached for his canes, knocking the saw over and using the barrel of the rifle to drag it into range.
By the time he got into the truck, the dogs had knocked the tin of onions to the ground, pushing it around with their snouts.
“Here’s your mail.”
“Cornelius Larkin,” Lark read, as though the name belonged to someone else. He tucked an envelope into his pocket, ripped another in half and tossed it out the window.
Lark called the spots and Rich pulled over, Lark talking out the window while Rich sank the signs, occasional car whooshing past.
“Old long-thumbs Danforth still cruising for Sanderson?” They were stopped on the south end of Gold Bear Bridge.
“Yep,” Rich said, driving a sign into the ground with the sledgehammer, impact ringing up his arm.
“Lucky somebody never cut his damn thumbs off,” Lark said.
Rich slid back in behind the wheel. “I asked him how far down the roads’ll go for the lower grove. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Merle’s been pushing through those harvest plans Danforth writes up for years,” Lark said, “but that don’t mean he can read them for shit. Most timber that cocksucker’s ever handled is a pencil. Just ask him to give you a look.”
Rich glanced over his shoulder. Three signs left. “Are there more of these than last time?”
They passed run-down houses along the coast, taken for the park. For now, they were rented, but once their twenty-five years were up, they’d be bulldozed to the ground, like Rich’s own. You’d never know babies had been born here, dishes broken, that a man lay awake the whole night listening to a tree creak in a windstorm, worrying it might fall on the house.
“What’s the use of putting a new roof on?” Lark lifted his chin at the last house, set apart from the others, bright white. The roofer reached into his hip sack and Rich saw it was Tom Feeley’s kid.
“Would have made a good climber,” Lark said. “Look at him.”
“Would have,” Rich agreed.
* * *
Rich hammered in the last sign, blood leaching from the hot lines where brambles had ripped flaps in the back of his hand.
“Merle’ll find out sooner or later,” Lark said, like he’d come to some decision. “Better it be from you. And tell Colleen. Nothing’ll get you in hot water like lying to your old lady.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“No. You didn’t say a damn thing, did you?” Lark ran his stump finger along his gums, clearing out onion slime. He sighed. “Let’s go take a look.”
“Now?” Rich asked. It was near twilight.
“When you get to be my age, you don’t leave things ’til tomorrow.”
Rich turned at the dark mill. Back when loggers had marched like an army over the coastal range, Sanderson ran two shifts, every day but Sunday, the debarker’s high-pressure blasts stripping logs clean, conveyers chugging bark out to be dried, sorted, bagged, Olin Rowley slicing logs lengthwise, edger sawing out defects, Yuroks on green chain, pulling boards, sorting and stacking them for the drying yards or the kiln, building rattling with the noise it struggled to contain. Now the place looked abandoned. Pecker poles got trucked south to Eureka or up to Crescent City, where mills were retrofitted with saws small enough to handle them.
Rich slowed to a stop above where the culvert ran Damnation Creek under No Name Road and looked out at the timber along 24-7 Ridge.
Lark cranked down his window, let out a long whistle. “Don’t make them like that anymore.”
A guy in a backpack appeared at the edge of the upper grove, as though the whistle had summoned him.
“You know that’s an Indian burial ground up there?” Lark called out the window, though the man was an Indian, handsome, about Colleen’s age, a pencil tucked above his ear. “You’re Dolores’s boy,” Lark said. He stuck his arm out the window and shook the man’s hand, like they were comrades.
Rich didn’t recognize him. Didn’t remember Dolores—dancing with the radar boys who’d been stationed here during the war, throwing back her head to laugh—until Lark said her name.
“Daniel,” Lark said. Lark had a memory for faces like a deck of cards tucked in his shirt pocket, one for every person he’d ever met in his life. “You a doctor by now?”
“Fish doctor,” the man said.
Lark laughed. The man’s eyes slid over Rich, as though calculating his height.
“Fish doctor, that’s pretty good.” Lark laughed again. “We’re more than a mile from the river up here, aren’t we?”
“We are,” the man confirmed, but offered nothing more.
“How’s George?” Lark asked. “Haven’t seen him out on the water lately. Boat problems?”
“You could say that.”
“Figures. I’ve seen him load her so full of chinook she wasn’t riding two inches about the water line. Full enough to sink her,” Lark recalled.
The man shook his head. “The runs aren’t what they used to be. Half the creeks are silted in.”
“There’s still a good coho run up Damnation Creek, isn’t there, Rich?” Lark asked.
Rich nodded. “Most years.”
“Must be one of the last,” the man said. “Not a lot of them are making it back, the way the offshore guys are harvesting them.”
“Well.” Lark slapped some dirt off his knee. “If there’s one fish left in that river, George’ll find it. Hell of a fisherman, your uncle. You want a ride?”
“I’m all set.” The man adjusted his backpack. “Thanks.”
“You be careful walking around out here, college boy. With that long hair, somebody might mistake you for a tree hugger, shoot you for the bounty. What’s the bounty on a tree hugger these days, Rich? Twenty-five?”
“Sounds about right,” Rich agreed.
“Used to get fifty for a mountain lion. But there were less of them around.” Lark squinted ahead. “Empty stretch of road like this can be dangerous. You might want to stay off it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” The man gave a quick salute and vanished into the brush. Lark watched the s
pot where he’d disappeared.
“What’s he doing out here, you think?” Lark asked.
“Who knows.” Rich rubbed his shoulder, ready to go home.
“Lucky somebody worse didn’t find him.”
Eugene had gone after those hippies outside the fish fry with a baseball bat. Would have bashed someone’s head in if Harvey hadn’t showed up when he did. Rich put the truck in gear.
“Hold up.” Lark angled for another look. “How much Mueller take you for?”
“Two fifty.”
Lark sucked air through his teeth. “Riding high on the whores in sunny San Diego, thanks to you.” The 24-7 glowed golden-orange, catching the last rays. “Look at her. What’s she now? 28-5?”
“Thirty and change. Been a hundred years since they named that ridge.”
“Rich Gundersen. Betting on himself. Your dad’d be prouder than hell.” Lark thumped the dash twice, the way he’d move a mule on. “About time one of you Gundersens had more than two sticks of firewood to your name.”
* * *
Colleen sat under the rabbit lamp sewing when he came in.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked.
“Lark wanted to get his signs out.” He dropped his keys in the burl bowl.
“Dinner’s in the oven.”
“Where’s Chub?” he asked, getting his boots off.
She looked at him over her glasses. “Asleep. It’s nine o’clock.”
He shuffled into the kitchen, pulled the plate out. Meat loaf with those scalloped potatoes he liked. He heard Colleen go out, porch light aglow in the white dark. After a minute, a truck door slammed. Colleen swept back inside, banging the front door shut behind her.
“The new insurance cards came,” she said. “I put one in your glove box.” She pushed an angry puff of air out her nostrils. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
He thought of the papers, the post office box key hidden in the secret compartment. How could he explain that key? The future he hoped it would unlock?
“Colleen.”
“Don’t ‘Colleen’ me.” She tramped across the living room rug without taking off her boots. “What are these?” she demanded.
He caught the packet of condoms she threw at him against his chest and cleared his throat, masking his relief. She wasn’t mad that he’d cleaned out their savings, shackled them to a mortgage he might never be able to repay, risked his future and hers. No, she was angry about a pack of rubbers he hadn’t even worked up the guts to bring inside. He tossed the condoms onto the kitchen table beside his dinner.
“Don’t put those there,” she snapped, crossing her arms.
He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. His whole body ached for her. But he wasn’t going to put her through that. Not again. Not ever.
He ran his thumb along the lip of his plate. “I can’t take another one.”
“Oh, you can’t?” She stomped down the hall and slammed the bathroom door.
He ate to the sound of bathwater glugging into the tub on the other side of the wall. When she finished, he took his shower. She was already in bed when he came in. He dropped the condoms into the bedside drawer. She lay on her side, turned away from him. He’d been hoping she would walk on his back. He eased himself into bed, traced a finger along her neck, down to her shoulder blade, felt her body tense, smelled her geranium lotion. He could tell her now—I took a chance, a big chance. He walked to the edge of it, so close.
He longed to pull her to him but stopped himself. He would never forget standing alone outside the emergency room doors after they rushed her in, hospital linoleum speckled with her blood. Left behind, helpless in the cold hallway, he’d bargained, promised, sworn. Never again.
He reached up and turned off the lamp. They lay there, separated by twelve inches of dark air.
September 2 COLLEEN
“I want another baby,” she said, setting his breakfast in front of him. She’d lain awake half the night thinking about it. “Can’t we at least talk about it?”
Rich forked through his eggs.
She crossed her arms. “If you’d just come home on time, maybe—”
“Christ, Colleen. We’ve been over this. It wouldn’t have made a goddamn bit of difference.”
“How do you know?”
“There wasn’t anything I could have done,” Rich said, dropping his fork. “Even if you’d called the ambulance—there wasn’t anything anybody could have done.”
Tears sprang into Colleen’s eyes. “But why can’t we just try?”
An expression she couldn’t read clouded Rich’s face.
“Chub needs you,” he said.
She waited for him to say more, to say I need you. When he didn’t, she stormed out, crawled back into bed. She knew she was being childish. She heard him in the kitchen, washing his dish. When he came down the hall to say goodbye, she pretended to have fallen back asleep, which, after he left, she did. She woke an hour later with a cramp—the slow leak, the sick-sweet smell of her period. Her body asking, as it did every month, Do you want another baby? She brushed her teeth, peed, stared at the bloody tissue in the toilet.
“Mama?” Chub asked.
She reached for the handle and flushed.
After breakfast, she thrust the hand shovel into the snap pea bed. I can have another baby. She levered blackberry shoots out by the roots. Scout ran to the edge of the yard, barking.
“Scout,” she called, but he didn’t budge. She stood and crossed the yard. “Scout, quiet.” She laid a hand on the dog’s head. His barking dissolved into a low growl. She looked up the hill, watching the tree line for movement. The hairs on the back of her neck tingled. Chub played with his toy cars in the grass.
Whoever killed that kid has been dead a hundred years, Rich had said when Colleen had pressed him about the skull. Still, it bothered her. A hundred years ago it was still someone’s child. Someone’s little boy running through the ferns. She brushed soil off her knees.
Inside, she fished the truck keys from the burl bowl. Scout’s barking had spooked her. Chub launched himself torso-first into the Chevy’s footwell. The fog was so thick she could barely make out the guardrail running along the cliff edge like a fence. She hunched forward over the wheel. Every time the ground around Last Chance Creek crumbled off into the ocean, mudslide taking a section of the coast highway with it, Caltrans talked about rerouting this road inland.
No fog, no redwoods, Rich said. No timber, no paycheck. It wasn’t as easy as people thought, being married to a man who never complained.
The road curved inland at the lagoon. Chub swung his legs. Another mile to Trees of Mystery—forever in kid time—the roadside tourist trap the last marker before town.
“There’s Babe!” Chub cried at last.
The ox’s boxy blue head, big as a Volkswagen, thrust through the fog, giant Paul Bunyan swallowed from the waist up, beckoning city people into the curio shop with its burl clocks and Sasquatch key chains, and a back room where other things were rumored to change hands—grave-robbed baskets and beadwork, burls the size of kitchen tables poached from old-growth trees. Pastimes people turned to when money ran low.
She turned off up the gulch toward Melody Larson’s single-wide, set back from the dirt road, windows rattling when loaded logging trucks passed. Melody opened the door, pink in the face.
“Hey, Chub, you want to feed the fish?” Melody held the screen door open and walked him back to the tank. He sat down cross-legged to watch them. “I was doing my exercises again,” Melody told Colleen. “I feel like he’s moving around.”
Melody’s husband, Keith, worked in the cannery, not the woods. They had no insurance and no money for an ultrasound, but he wanted a boy, so she’d been calling the baby him from the start.
“Can you check?” Melody asked, sweat at her hairline.
She lay back on the couch and pulled up her shirt. Colleen rubbed her hands together to warm them and palpated Melody’s hard be
lly, skin stretched taut. Here a foot, here an elbow. She felt for the head.
“Is he right?” Melody asked anxiously.
Colleen pressed again. “He’s positioned okay, he’s just got his head… tucked a little funny.”
Melody sighed. “I hope he comes this weekend. Keith has it off.”
Colleen felt for the hard curve of the baby’s skull one more time.
“You call me when he does,” Colleen said, and stood.
* * *
She and Chub drove by the old Peine farm, the school, the Beehive with its glass case of bear claws. Cream cheese in the dough, that was Dot’s secret. They passed the post office; a boarded-up salmon-jerky shack—the fall run would be here soon, boats crowding the river’s mouth; the One and Only Tavern with its white line painted above the door: the high-water mark from ’64, the Christmas flood, when ankle creeks ran muddy to the waist and whole ridges slid out and buried roads. If her father had waited a decade, taken the skiff out Christmas Day 1964, he might have died a martyr instead of a drowned poacher. The white lines were everywhere: the base of the abandoned church’s steeple, halfway up the attics of houses. For almost a year after the flood, the only way across the river had been by boat. The world might end in fire, but here in Del Nort County, on the banks of the Klamath, it would end in water.
She turned onto Mill Road, Rich’s truck parked in its normal spot, sky reflected in the still waters of the empty millpond, once filled bumper-to-bumper with logs, enough to keep three bars in business. She’d dragged Enid from one to the next, looking for their mother’s Mercury. When she found it, she’d let Enid scramble in, pull down the visor so the keys fell onto the seat, turn the heater on, and return with what was left of their mother’s paycheck, usually in change. Think of something else.
“Four days until you start kindergarten, Chub,” Colleen said.
Chub was unfazed by the idea, though it tightened the laces in her chest. The Chevy juddered over No Name Road’s potholes, passing the grove. They’d found the skull, but where was the rest of him? The newspaper—a week old by the time she’d found it in the stack Marsha had sent home with Rich—said they’d recovered nothing else.