“You coming with me?” Mano held her breath but tried hard not to be obvious about it. Not that it mattered. Rick wasn't paying attention anyway.
Rick shook his head. “I'll just see you at home.” It was a code and Mano knew it, and maybe what she had going on with Keith meant she had no right to hold other women against him, but she did. God, she did. And suddenly, more than anything, she wanted her sister. The night before her wedding, not quite a year ago, Ruth had pulled her into the backyard rock garden, an island of mossy flagstone and small boulders that bloomed from June through frost. She'd opened a bottle of whiskey, offered Mano the first shot.
“Your room here will stay yours. I know Rick's place doesn't have space for all your art mess.” Ruth pointed to the small window of Mano's art room, a small space off the bedroom they'd all shared as girls, that Mano had shared, for a while, with Ruth's daughters. A large closet, really, but since the house usually held more family than it had rooms, nobody ever thought to use that space for clothes.
Mano's art room was the only place in the world that was hers alone. She'd built sculptures and mobiles from elk antlers, weathered driftwood, polished rocks, peach-tone seashells, sand dollars that rattled when she shook them and still carried the sweet-salted scent of the death of the creatures they'd once held. She'd filled presses with flowers she collected on mountain hikes, glued the flattened blooms around the edge of the window overlooking the side-yard garden. She had charcoal rubbings of bark patterns and gravestones. She hung bird feathers from string for close observation above an ink-stained table lit with shadeless lamps and candles so that she could vary the quality of the light. She'd posted silhouettes she'd done of her sisters and her best attempts at various calligraphy styles. Wall shelving sagged under the weight of watercolor tubes and oil paints and pastels and colored pencils and charcoals and brushes and solvents and glass baby food jars and old coffee cans full of gum erasers and pencil stubs. Her rock tumbler sat nearest the window, flanked on both sides by glass Mason jars full of tumbled glass in gold, greens, deep blues. In the past weeks, she'd filled every available space with trout. Pages she'd torn from art books and field guides. Her own sketches and Polaroids.
The room at Ruth's was a refuge she could run to, now or anytime, a gift she hadn't known she'd needed but Ruth, like a miracle, had. Ruth's ex, Del, showed up unannounced once or twice a year, made attempts to charm Ruth out of some money. It was easy to forget, in the face of all Ruth's determined self-sufficiency, how much she knew about the ways a heart could break. Ruth was busy, hovering, spider-like. Having spun herself an ample, sturdy web, Ruth spun relentlessly for all the people she loved.
“You're missing out, baby. Apparently, the comet has some sort of magic. Or poison. Some idiot thinks it's killing the fish.” She felt the room spin, saw the red, white, and blue of the Budweiser lamp soften and swirl into the flashing lights of an emergency. Which it was, in a way, her last valiant effort to rescue her marriage. “Really, come with me.”
Rick rolled his eyes. “Nope. I don't mind all your weird obsessions, Mano, but I don't want to get involved, either.”
Mano found a stool, her heart straining against the tension in her chest. It had come out, after the flood, that the Army Corps of Engineers knew the dam was weak, had been announcing it, publicly, year after year. The park rangers had begged for repairs, for the funding it would take to shore it up. It had been easy for people who could not picture the scope of the coming catastrophe to ignore the early warnings from people who could. Rick was right about himself. He'd only ever done what anyone else would have, the day of the flood and every other day.
Rick cleared his half of the table easily. He turned away from the table before the 8 ball even dropped. She could see now that her marriage was over, that she should have understood this sooner. She could see also that nobody cared about the fish kills, about the water in her Pepsi bottle, about the facts of the world. Or they did, they knew, they saw, but they just weren't sure what to do.
Mano shoved her cue into his chest. “I think I will go see the comet,” she said, even though that was no longer her plan. She swallowed her drink, glared at Rick, and tried hard not to wobble on her way out of the bar.
OUTSIDE, MANO LOOKED UP at the sky, overcast, fuzzy, no stars or comets to be seen. She walked the half mile from downtown to the riverbank in the silence and the dark. People loved the river, walked along it, fished from it, waded in it. She was amazed at what people were curious about, and what they weren't. She thought of Rick racing a flood down a mountain trail, praying the emergency phone would connect. She thought of the dead fish, the dim light of the maybe-comet. There was more than one way to sound an alarm.
Mano worked her way up the river, the water gurgling as it pushed against the rocks along its floor. Some of the fish were still floating, hung up on the twisted curl of protruding roots. The new-growth peachleaf willows were bright-yellow bare against the gray maze of cottonwood bark, nearly glowing in the hazed moonlight. Mano collected fallen branches, some as thick as her fist, others more delicate. She found a dead kingfisher next to a half-eaten trout, a few black feathers from crows or vultures. She swore to learn the difference. She collected a variety of river pebbles the size of large grapes. She dug in her purse for her pocketknife and the fishing line she'd swiped from Rick's truck.
The construction site was located about a mile west of town, not far from a heavily used section of trail that followed the river and the road between two city parks. At night, in the dark, it was deserted, though Mano thought the way the moonlight glowed blue behind the clouds, the way it backlit the dark thatches of woody branches, made it more beautiful now. She was the lone human moving in the world, but she was not alone—the woods full of wary animals who knew how to stay both invisible and watchful. Mano used the fishing wire to hang the thicker branches by both ends, like trapeze bars, just above eye level. She had to climb the trees a bit, shimmy awkwardly, belly down, out onto the limbs, but she managed to get the placement she was looking for. She rolled a larger rock around for a stool and started hanging the corpses.
From one branch, she hung five dead trout, some by their tails, some by their gills. The moonlight reflected off the fish scales, lit the wet of the fish skin into a brilliant shine. She rushed together a series of fishing line macramé that she draped around tree trunks and limbs, filled with river-polished rocks. From another branch, Mano hung a single trout with crow feathers attached so that they radiated in all directions like night-black rays, and next to that, the dead kingfisher, strung up by each of its wings so that it looked bat-like in the shadows, nearly vampiric.
The dead animals and rocks hung at eye level, lifted so that the men could no longer look down on them. Impossible now for people to miss the horror of what they'd done. Mano lay down on the damp earth of the riverbank, tracked the moon's trajectory across the night sky, observed the shifting light against the terrible beauty of her sculpture. She squinted into the darkness, hoping she'd see the comet clearly, tail and all, but saw nothing. She felt achingly, utterly, alone.
SOMETIME JUST BEFORE DAWN, Mano made it to Ruth's, crawled onto the hidden trundle mattress she kept underneath her art desk, and fell asleep. She slept through to afternoon, woke with a pounding headache. Downstairs, Ruth was at the kitchen table with a ham and Swiss sandwich, a coffee mug, a Mason jar full of homemade sweet pickles. The evening newspaper and a hand of solitaire were spread in front of her.
Mano felt a bit ashamed of herself. “Four o'clock already? I'm surprised you didn't get me up earlier.” She got a coffee cup from the shelf, grateful for Ruth's odd hours, the house perpetually full of fresh coffee, a bottomless pot.
“Rick called,” Ruth said. She raised an eyebrow, then looked down at her cards. “And Keith.”
Mano sat across from her. Ruth added a generous pour of Irish cream to her coffee, then Mano's, her face lined with concern. “L
isten, Mano, the only good I got from my marriage was the kids, but divorce hasn't exactly been a picnic, either. Just be sure you know what you're hoping for, okay?”
Ruth's unexpected kindness brought tears, and Mano let them run down her cheeks in rivers, let the snot drip from her nose like rain off a roof, let her shoulders shake in deep sobs. She felt sorry for herself, mostly, but also for the Stevies, for the dead kingfisher. She wondered again whether Ruth knew that Rick was cheating too, that he'd been cheating first.
Ruth sniffed and pushed the newspaper toward Mano. “When you pull yourself together, maybe you want to explain this?”
Mano wiped her eyes on her sleeve and then her nose, too. The front page of the newspaper had a grainy black-and-white photo of the construction site on the river, her fish drooping from their branches, the kingfisher, half eaten by some scavenger, attached by only one wing. She felt a quick shiver of excitement—that other people would see what she saw, that she would no longer be alone in seeing it.
The article, though, was full of speculation and outrage, her sculpture interpreted as bizarre satanic ritual, possibly related to fears of Halley's Comet. The reporter quoted a number of residents who hadn't thought it possible that depravity of that level could exist in their town. “Why would anyone kill a kingfisher?” one outraged resident asked. “Them cutthroat are endangered,” another said. “And they already been struggling this season.” Higher than usual numbers of dead fish had been observed in and near the river this spring, the article read, causing many to speculate that Halley's Comet had somehow upset the balance of the river ecosystem, though the reporter was careful to add that the cause of the fish kills was unknown and unproven. “Whoever did this should be tarred and feathered,” said a final interviewee, who added that she no longer felt safe to walk her corgis along the river trail. “Or at least they should know better. People are scared enough.”
Mano thought back to her favorite art professor, a woman who wore colorful patterned caftans and Birkenstocks, kind and creative and cool. “You can't follow your art into the world to defend it,” she'd said. “Your art has to speak for itself.” Mano was horrified. This was not at all what she'd thought her art would say.
Ruth studied the photo in the paper, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. “The crow feathers? On the fish? I like that. That's got style.”
Mano tried to sort her thoughts into some sort of order—her marriage, the comet, the way the world was, the way the world should be, but it was like untangling knotted hair, complicated, painful, time-consuming. “I didn't kill the kingfisher. I didn't kill anything.” Her whole body felt shaky, loose, impossible to contain. She stood up and paced the length of the kitchen.
She grabbed the Pepsi bottle out of her purse, handed it to Ruth. “It's from the river. It's a sample. If I get it tested, I can prove that the construction poisoned the fish.”
“The fish are dead in the river for everyone to see,” Ruth said, shaking her head. “And nobody else is asking why.”
Mano felt the truth of that settle all around her. Knowing why carried a weight—a responsibility to act or the shame of not having acted. So many things were easier not to know. “So what do I do now?”
She wanted Ruth to weigh in, give her the answer, say exactly the right thing. Ruth might have been late to mothering Mano, but she'd come on strong over the past ten years, lumping Mano into the same category as her children. It was easy to believe that Ruth saw the best next step, always. Mano felt hope dissipate the pressure that was building inside her body. Maybe she wasn't as alone as she felt.
“I can't tell you what to do about this.” Ruth looked sorry. She made eye contact, set her cards down.
“You tell me what to do all the time. And what not to do.” Mano's laugh caught the throat phlegm from all her crying, and she half choked.
“Too bad you didn't ask me about this dead animal sculpture,” Ruth said, smiling. “I would have given a real clear no on that one.”
“I think I'm going to call Keith.” Mano savored Ruth's shocked expression. It tasted sweet, this openness, like some sort of freedom.
“Think twice before you do anything stupid,” Ruth said. She tilted her head to the side, tapped her index finger on the newspaper photo. Her face was loving. Understanding. “Anything else, I mean.”
Mano didn't know which of her choices, past or future, she'd end up regretting the most. But Ruth's coffee, her pickles, her Lorna Doone cookies, her judgment, her presence, had become part of the shelter of the house. Mano felt it solidify something underneath and inside her.
KEITH'S BACKYARD WAS A revelation. He planned to start a business growing native plants for yards and gardens. He'd turned his half-acre lot into an experimental low-water landscape, had built himself a small greenhouse for breeding native seed. “They know there isn't near enough water for all the people about to move in around here, and the lawns are an absolute disaster, water-wise. Anyway, they call it ‘xeriscaping,' landscaping to save water. Pretty sure there's a future in it.”
Mano, knowing how much Ruth loved her peonies and her tulips, how much time and effort she put into her Kentucky bluegrass, doubted the solvency of his plan. “If I wanted to live in a desert,” Ruth would say, “I'd have stayed in Nevada,” and so Mano was only half listening as Keith droned on about plants—columbine and manzanita, grama grass and waxflower—all grown from seed he'd collected in the wild. She considered the best way to interrupt him. He'd be more open to her ideas if she was naked, but she decided to keep her clothes on.
“We have to tell people about the fish kills,” she said, cutting off a passionate monologue about breeding for drought tolerance. “Call the state regulators. The newspaper.”
Keith shook his head. “Lloyd would know it was us.”
“Lloyd is already going to hell. We might as well go right with him if we let this go on.” Keith wouldn't meet her eyes. He knew he was taking the wrong side. She'd already lost.
“I can't risk my job over some fish, Mano. You shouldn't either. Lloyd says it's not harmful to people or anything. Like there's not enough of whatever the chemical is to poison a whole human.”
Mano set her face to the wind so that the tears in her eyes could be for anything or nothing at all. She took deep, slow breaths. She tried to match the pace of her own breathing to the movement of the linden branches in the gusts. As a young girl, she used to pretend to call Ruth and Teresa on a toy phone that had a working rotary dial. Come back, she'd tell them, come home. After a while, she'd realized that painting was a less lonely way to talk to herself. Looking at Keith just then, seeing all the ways he would never listen to her, she realized it still was.
“I haven't had any luck seeing this comet,” Keith said. “All this goddamn cloud cover.”
“Well, it's up there,” Mano said. If there was no more Rick, and no more Keith, if her life was now her own again, and of course it was, who else had it ever belonged to, then she could be certain about what to do next.
Mano went back to Ruth's and called the paper, told them everything she knew and some things she suspected, that Lloyd was covering up for the construction company, that the regulators had not been called. Her next call was to Lloyd himself. “You'll want to fire me soon enough anyway,” she said, “so to save both of us the trouble, I'll just quit.” Ruth made bottomless pots of coffee, gloated in insufferable ways when she beat Mano in double solitaire, gave her the number of a good divorce attorney. Drop Rick. Mano did not return Keith's calls. Drop Keith.
Weeks later, the paper finally ran an article about the fish kills, except they only wrote about one, as though it had only happened one time. The article was sympathetic to the construction company—an investigation had shown that all the required mitigations were in place, made the chemical spills that dropped the river pH so much it killed the fish seem like something mild and inevitable, a regrettabl
e but ultimately harmless mistake. Lloyd was highlighted with a reassuring quote, “The fish we put in the tank the next day lived, are still alive. Whatever was in the river, it was a very temporary state. It flowed away as quickly as it flowed in.” Various state and local authorities had collaborated to find nothing—no systemic problem with construction near the river, no lingering negative environmental effects. Lloyd and Keith were commended for their quick-thinking actions to preserve the integrity of the city's drinking water.
Mano took down all the trout she'd painted before and started again, painting trout over and over on postcard stock—trout swimming above the rocky peaks across the Estes Valley, trout spawning in a native waxflower grove in full spring bloom, trout wiggling through the geometric beauty of a spiderweb, trout shooting like comets through a maze of peachleaf willow growth, their spots shining like stars on a dark summer night. She sent these postcards to her congresspeople, to the mayor, to the governor, all with pleas for species protection, for water quality, for oversight and reparations. Most of the officials declined to reply, but Mano kept writing, kept painting, kept offering chances.
The Best Response to Fear
EVERY DAY BEFORE SHE left for work, Amy boiled coffee on the wood-burning stove Bobby Jackson had rigged from a fifty-gallon oil drum and read the newspaper that still appeared, like some kind of magic, in the driveway. It had been months since they'd had the money to pay for the subscription. He couldn't explain it.
“We're in luck, baby,” she'd say, folding the pages neatly, saving the paper to shred and crumple under the stove kindling later. “The recession is over!” Amy said this every day, a joke between them. Bobby would laugh briefly, rattle his fingertips against the plastic taped over the broken windows, lean the military surplus cots they slept on now against the wall like Murphy beds.
Site Fidelity Page 6