Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  An eighteen-wheeler swung around the curve, bunks stacked with logs. It whooshed past, rocking them, the prow of Deer Rib Ridge, where the road forked, appearing through the passage torn through the fog. Colleen eased down onto the muddy two-track, Deer Rib Road carving along the base of the ridge, narrowed by brush, as though it led not only back through the clear-cuts but back through time. Her mother would have raised Cain with Sanderson, the county, anyone with a tank truck and a spray hose.

  Verne had a pair of lungs on her, people said. Pair of lungs and a pair of balls.

  The dashboard clunked, ruts knee-deep. The herby scent of last night’s rain seeped in the vents. Saws buzzed down from the other side of the ridge, out of sight. Rich was somewhere over that ridge, on the Lost Road side, past Enid’s.

  “Tim-ber,” Chub echoed, then grinned, his hair falling into his eyes—she needed to trim it.

  Himalayans ripened along the hills, berries hanging in black clusters. Pockets of mist smoked across the road, undergrowth scrubbing the windows. At last, the farm appeared. They trundled up the long driveway between fields lined with knobby apple trees, past the pond where her father’s pale hands had stretched toward her through the brown water—Kick, sweet pea. Keep kicking.

  Chub leapt out as soon as she set the parking brake.

  “Five minutes,” she warned him.

  Joanna emerged with Camber on her hip.

  “Baptism?” she asked when she heard four dozen, and sent Judith into the coop.

  Colleen wondered if it hurt Joanna’s feelings that she wasn’t invited. Joanna eyed the truck. Faster to walk, Colleen could see her thinking. She remembered Scout’s low, throaty growl and considered asking Joanna if she’d seen anybody walk up the gulch, but that was silly. Who would be wandering around way out here?

  Judith came out balancing the heavy tray. Joanna loaded the eggs into the cartons Colleen had brought, tucked the five-dollar bill into her waistband, and fished out a single. A helicopter’s rotors thwacked over the ridge, spray plume drifting from its booms. A faint whiff of chlorine.

  “Get inside,” Joanna told the girls. Joanna snatched a dirt clod and hurled it toward the creek, where a raccoon hunched, drinking. The raccoon stood up on its hind legs, hands at its chest as though snapping an invisible pair of suspenders. “Get!” Joanna stomped toward it. The animal scurried off. “They’re after the chickens,” she said, straightening a hose Colleen hadn’t noticed, running across the fields from Little Lost Creek. “Deer Creek stopped running,” Joanna explained.

  “When?” Growing up, they’d taken their water from Deer Creek, cleaner than the Little Lost, sweeter. Drinking rain.

  “Friday?” Joanna narrowed her eyes as though to bring the date into focus. “It’ll find a way out. Water always does.”

  CHUB

  The eggs were cold. No chicks moved inside. Still, Chub kept a hand on them, looking out the truck window at the sunlight dancing on No Name Creek. His dad was teaching him: the Lost, the Mad, the Mistake, Fatal, Starveout, Runaway, Last Chance, like learning the threads of a spiderweb. Roads dead-ended, but if you knew your creeks, you could always find your way home.

  His mom turned onto Lost Road, the road to Fort Eugene. A tow truck came toward them pulling Aunt Enid’s red Wagoneer, its windows smashed.

  “E-nid,” his mom scolded under her breath.

  Across the swampy meadow a wind sock of smoke unspooled from the stovepipe of Fort Eugene. Goats stood in the branches of the goat tree, the trailer house balanced on cinder blocks, Little Lost Creek running right underneath it, dividing the yard into two separate territories: Aunt Enid’s chicken-wire cat pen on one side, Uncle Eugene’s junkyard on the other. Chub pressed his nose to the window. Add-ons mushroomed from the sides of the trailer house. Fort Eugene was damp-soft Oreos, hallways sloping like chutes for racing Matchbox cars, pocket doors that slid into the walls, his heartbeat cousin: Ag-nes, Ag-nes.

  “Don’t pet the cats, please,” his mom said, pulling up in front.

  Chub dropped down onto Uncle Eugene’s side—a graveyard of rusty car skeletons and flat-tire bicycles—catapulted across the creek, and ran up the steps.

  “Who’s that?” Aunt Enid called down the hall, nursing the baby on the couch. “Hey, Chub. You drive yourself?”

  Mavis and Gertrude looked up from their coloring books.

  Where’s Agnes? he wanted to ask, but he didn’t want Aunt Enid to call him lover boy again. Aunt Enid teased mean and she never said sorry. She was loud, her blond hair chopped short like a man’s, the opposite of his mom’s quiet voice and silky mouse-brown ponytail. He slipped past Aunt Enid, past heights drawn on the wall in permanent marker. Agnes’s room was empty. A cricket hopped down the hall and sailed out an open door that knocked against the outside of the trailer house. No stairs, a long drop, like one of those doors that opened up in dreams.

  “Got one!” Wyatt yelled, popping up from the tall grass, shaking his cupped hands like he was trying to roll double sixes.

  Agnes shot up nearby, red wisps working free from her braid, holding a jar. Wyatt stuck his hand in, jerked it out in time for her to clap the lid on.

  Wyatt flicked the glass. “Kill it, stupid.”

  “Chub, look!” Agnes held up the jar.

  Chub jumped down. A frog squatted behind the glass, grumpy, ignoring the crickets hugging the walls.

  “He’s retarded,” Wyatt said. Wyatt liked watching the cats torture grasshoppers to death.

  “Frogs eat flies,” Chub said.

  “Frogs eat flies,” Wyatt mimicked, bending one hand into a dinosaur claw and banging it against his chest. “Why do you always wear these?” Wyatt batted at Chub’s binoculars. “Necklace boy?”

  They rounded the corner into Aunt Enid. Agnes showed her the frog.

  “Did you touch him? You’ll get warts.”

  “Will not.” Agnes squirmed. “Warts are gross.”

  Chub covered the hard button on his thumb, wishing he were brave enough to bite it off.

  “Chub, don’t run off,” his mom warned him.

  A tank truck lumbered slowly down the dirt road, a man walking behind, spraying with a hose.

  “You’re sure this is everything?” his mom asked Aunt Enid, reading the list.

  “Hey, Carl!” Aunt Enid shouted. The man aimed the spray at the bushes, showering the nanny goat with the black ear eating weeds around the culvert. “How’s Helen?”

  “Any day,” the man yelled back.

  Chub coughed, a bad taste on his tongue.

  “I wish he’d spray those Himalayans,” Aunt Enid said, lifting her chin at the berry bushes. “Only damn thing that kills them. Chub, have you been picking your nose?”

  His mom swooped down and pressed a tissue to his nostrils. He felt a pang of fear.

  “Tilt your head back,” his mom said when they got in the truck.

  “Drive fast and take lots of chances,” Aunt Enid called after them. “Ag-nes!”

  Agnes scampered out of the brush.

  “Where’s your brother? Don’t you feed that frog to the cats, you hear me?”

  Agnes waved at Chub, showing her secret dimples. She opened her fist: two flies flitted out.

  COLLEEN

  Gravel clattered against the truck’s belly. A gnawing feeling, leaving the baptism gown behind. She’d gotten used to taking it out of her sewing basket, smoothing it across the burl table, as though it were meant for a different baby. Enid had tossed it onto the back of a chair when Colleen gave it to her, in a bad mood from arguing with Tice Whelan, crumbs of the Wagoneer’s busted windows shining like crushed ice in the yard.

  Chub rubbed his eyes.

  “Ready for a nap?” Colleen asked.

  He shook his head in heavy-lidded denial. Something quick for lunch: tuna. Brush blinded the curves, curling yellow on the side Carl had already sprayed. By tomorrow, the blackberries and ferns—everything the spray had touched that wasn’t timber—would shrivel, lea
ve the road wider. She swung around the bend, slammed the brakes: Daniel, a body’s length from her front bumper.

  “Ow,” Chub grouched.

  Daniel started toward her with such an air of purpose she felt the urge to press down the peg lock. She rolled her window down.

  “Colleen,” he greeted her sternly; she’d nearly run him over. “Hey, buddy,” he said to Chub. He shifted the knapsack bandoliered across his chest. Glass clinked inside it. “The Knife still running back that way?” Daniel lifted his chin at the road behind her.

  She nodded. “It’s too far to walk.” She wondered if he’d ask to hitch a ride back to town.

  “You’d be surprised.” A smile played on his lips.

  “The Knife meets the Fork just shy of Starveout,” Chub recited.

  “Rich’s teaching him,” Colleen explained.

  “You.” Daniel pointed at Chub. “Have got your mom’s good memory.”

  Colleen blushed. It had started out as a school assignment, eleventh-grade history: Daniel Bywater. Colleen Hinkle. Partners pulled from a hat. She’d wanted the lighthouse in Crescent City from the topic jar, the class giggling when the radar station came out instead.

  I can drive us to the library, he’d said. So, that Saturday, they’d gone down to Arcata, to the university, her first time alone in a car with a boy. She’d buried herself in the books on the table instead of looking up at the high ceilings in a building she’d been afraid to walk into. It was on the way back that he suggested they go see it. For research. He’d parked the car at the make-out point and they’d walked down the coast in silence. There was only one reason you went to the radar station with a boy. Maybe because he was nervous too, Daniel had talked. He’d told her how his father had been stationed here, during the war, a white man with a wife and kids back home. How his mother had met him dancing at the Cutthroat, how nine months later Daniel was here, and his father was gone. He told her about eeling on the spit where the river met the ocean, how once, when he was thirteen, a sneaker wave had grabbed him by his ankles, how his uncle had hooked him in the back before the current could drag him out and drown him. About a canoe his uncle was carving from a redwood log he’d found floating near the mouth of the river, tied to the boat, and towed home. How his uncle would carve a heart, and lungs, and kidneys at the bottom, because redwood was alive, the canoe was alive. The way the river was. They’d sat, shoulder to shoulder, against the radar station’s cold cinder-block wall. She’d wondered if he was thinking about his father, the way she sometimes thought about her own. Finally, Daniel had taken her hand, as if he had come all the way here to do only that.

  Good memory, he’d whispered later, after she’d rattled off the dates she’d learned for their presentation and they were both back in their seats, her heart banging at her ribs. She’d wanted to reach over and take his hand again, but of course she hadn’t. The next month he graduated a year early, and he was gone.

  “There’s nothing to see back here but clear-cuts,” Colleen told him now.

  “You trying to turn me around, Colleen Hinkle?”

  “Gundersen.” She pressed a hand over her turtleneck, as though to keep the red blotches of heat she felt on her clavicles from showing through.

  They were stopped in the middle of the grove, creek water crashing downhill into the culvert under the road.

  “What’s in there?” Chub asked. He’d unbuckled his seat belt and stood in the footwell behind her.

  “In here?” Daniel pulled a jam jar from his knapsack. Water sloshed inside. “Just some samples. I was hoping you might help me out.” He met Colleen’s eyes, hitched the sack up with a clank, and whistled. Scout burst through the brush, dripping.

  “Scout!” Chub yelled.

  She opened her door and Chub tumbled out after her, Scout bounding over, knocking Chub onto his butt to lick his face.

  “He’s all wet!” Chub shrieked.

  Scout shook and threw himself to the ground, legs bicycling.

  “He wants you to scratch his belly,” Chub explained.

  “I figured he belonged to somebody,” Daniel said.

  Colleen made Chub climb back into the cab.

  “Good-looking dog,” Daniel offered.

  She shook her head. Scout looked like he was pieced together from parts of other dogs—gray-and-black brindle body, a bird dog’s speckled legs, a shepherd’s long coat, the white-dipped tail of a herd dog.

  “He run off a lot?” he asked.

  “He goes looking for Rich.”

  “Does he ever find him?”

  “Usually finds a porcupine first.”

  “Dogs are the best judge of people. Must be a good guy. Tree-topper? Famous one, from what I hear.”

  The rain started again. She let the tailgate down and Scout leapt up into the bed. Her eyes stung.

  “Really smell that spray now.” Daniel pulled up the neck of his shirt and wiped his face. “Your water comes down off lower Damnation Creek, right?”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Do you filter it?”

  “Rich takes care of it,” she said. “He adds some chlorine, but the water’s pretty clean.”

  “It looks it,” Daniel said. “And cold. No wonder the coho like it. It’s a hike to get out here to sample, though. I was hoping—if I gave you some jars, could you collect some from your tap once a week? It’s pretty straightforward.” He pulled a smaller bag from his sack, the same gold-topped jars she used for canning. “Just label them with the date. I can stop by and get them.”

  “I can’t,” she said. Her eyes slid toward Chub, watching out the truck window.

  “Come on, Colleen,” Daniel pressed her.

  The old refrain tugged at her. Come on, Colleen. As if he knew her, her secret wants and fears, the bridges she had to cross to reach them or to leave them behind.

  “Daniel, I just—” She had a house and a child and a husband. “I can’t.”

  “Well, if you change your mind…” His hand grazed hers as he swung the bag of jars up into her truck bed. He gave a casual salute.

  She climbed back in behind the wheel. Chub slid the rear window open and Scout stuck his snout through.

  “He’s stinky.” Chub clothespinned his nose.

  She turned the key, grinding the starter. She’d left it running this whole time.

  “Where’d he go?” Chub asked.

  Daniel had vanished.

  “I don’t know, Grahamcracker.”

  * * *

  Back at the house, she tightened Scout’s collar a notch. Chub yawned, slouching at the table, picking horseshoes of celery out of his tuna. She smoothed his bangs out of his eyes.

  “Where’d you get those beautiful brown eyelashes?”

  “I got them at the eyelash store,” he answered, tuckered out.

  She turned the water on full blast to fill the tub. It sputtered.

  “Your dad’ll have to fix that.”

  Afterward, helping him towel off his hair, she had to give her head a shake to cast out Daniel, the involuntary thrill when their hands had brushed.

  Chub crawled into bed without any nap-time fuss.

  “Where’s Scout?” he asked, drifting.

  “Outside, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” He yawned.

  “Sweet dreams, cookie-boy.” He snuggled, rubbing his nose back and forth against the blanket’s satin edging. She pressed her thumbs into his dimples. He turtled his head.

  “Your hands are cold!”

  “I got one miracle. And you’re it.” She kissed his forehead.

  * * *

  The dozen jam jars Daniel had given her clanked in their bag. She wasn’t sure what to do with them, so she opened the cabinet under the junk drawer, where she kept her canning supplies, and stacked them there, in two neat rows.

  She fixed dinner, watched the numerals click around on the stove clock: six, then seven. Rich must have stopped off at Lark’s again, avoiding her. Outside, Scout
barked. She went and got the fire poker. It was almost dark when Rich finally came in, meat loaf drying out in the oven. He turned on the rabbit lamp, shed his slicker in the pool of its light.

  He sniffed. “Smells good.”

  “I think somebody was up on the hill earlier,” she said. “Scout barked his head off.”

  “Bears are out,” Rich said, watching her set the fire poker back against the wall. “Where’s Chub?”

  “Napping.”

  “Still?” Rich asked, glancing at the dark window. “Want me to wake him?”

  Want.

  “Let him sleep,” she said.

  September 3 RICH

  Morning mist blanketed Bald Hill. Scout shot up the trail ahead of them, Rich eyeing the path for broken ferns, trampled salal, a snagged thread. At the top, he cut sideways along the tree line.

  “What are you looking for?” Chub asked.

  “Nothing.”

  By the time they got up to the 24-7, Rich was panting. Chub pressed his palm to the big pumpkin’s bark. It was only up here that the worry—a pain like indigestion—faded from Rich’s chest. This was his timber. He’d find a way to get it out. He’d talk to Merle.

  “How do you get to Lark’s from here?” Rich asked, testing him.

  Chub studied his palm. Rich held his own out beside it, like two books they were comparing.

  “You walk up, up, up to the spring, then you zag along Eel Creek, you follow the sound…” Chub hesitated. “On one side is town, on the other Knockdown. When you start to Shiver—” He bit his lip, struggling to remember the rest of the rhyme.

  Shiver was a spit creek that ran off Knockdown Ridge, through the parcel where Rich’s dad had been clubbed to death. The stump was still there, a makeshift shrine, rock pile ten feet high, new shoot a tree in its own right.

  “You’re close to the river!” Chub exclaimed.

  “Good. Now, which way home?”