Everyone knew where the group of tree huggers had set up camp; it was a couple of miles from town on the edge of some old growth, just inside the park border. When the guys had set up their last-ditch operation, they’d been careful to keep well away from that spot.
Grace always enjoyed a chance to hike in the forest. Even with the sense of betrayal she was carrying with her that morning, she was still cheered by the calls of flickers and the shafts of sunlight that shot through the green. The first half mile or so was a gradual slope, but after the trails converged and she took the fork leading up toward the camp, the trail began switchbacking steeply. If she got this gig, she was going to get plenty of exercise. As she got close to the camp, she heard laughter and the strains of a guitar. She rounded the last switchback in the trail and found them. Dotting the forest floor were a few orange tents, covered with dark rainflies. They’d hung a large blue tarp among three trees; beneath it a few sleeping bags were laid out over another tarp on the ground; three or four people were dozing or reading in this shelter. The guitar player was sitting on a boulder near the tarp, he faced into the forest, his back to Grace.
Warren had taught his daughter how to hike quietly and it was her habit. She made no noise as she approached the camp. No one noticed her until she was standing in their midst.
“Hi.”
Nervous as she was, Grace hoped she appeared friendly.
The music stopped, books dropped. Then nothing. No one moved or even smiled.
“I’m Grace.”
“Hi, Grace.” A woman’s voice. Grace turned to see dark dreadlocks framing a bright round face peering out of one of the tents. The young woman stepped forward; she appeared to be about Grace’s age. Like Grace, she wore mud-splattered jeans and a dirty down jacket. Her smile beamed welcome. “Hi. I’m Chelsea.”
“Hey. I was just wondering if you guys would like some food. I mean, to buy some food.” Grace started shifting her backpack off of her shoulders.
“Yeah? You delivering?”
“What is this, you sent by the enemy to poison us?”
All this from the direction of the large tarp. Grace turned toward the voices. She hadn’t registered this group in detail before: a gray-haired man in khaki trousers and a fisherman’s knit sweater leaning back in a camping chair. He nodded somberly at her.
“We’re fine. Don’t need a thing.” The other two were younger, maybe high school age, in jeans and sweatshirts. The thought flashed across Grace’s mind that this was a father and his sons, all fighting for their cause together. Against her town. Suddenly she felt surrounded and vulnerable. She looked back at Chelsea, whose smile had faded.
“You want to sell us food?”
“Yep. I run the café down in Prosperity and I thought… You know, since you’re here and you don’t appear to be leaving any time soon.” She rested her pack on the ground and opened the top flap. She pulled out a few sandwiches wrapped in plastic and held them out toward Chelsea. “I thought you might be getting hungry.”
“You’re from that logging town?” Chelsea eyed the thick slices of what looked like homemade bread. “Why would you do this?” “
“Well, honestly? I’m desperate.” Grace knew she was no good at lying. All she could do was lay out her situation and pray. “My business has dried up. No one can afford to come to the café for meals anymore. So, I figured…”
“Who knows you’re doing this?” Grace was startled by a voice behind her. She swung around to see the guitar player—the only guy whose face wasn’t hidden by whiskers. He was tall and wiry. Grace felt a momentary urge to give him a sandwich whether he paid for it or not.
“Well, it’s just an idea me and Lyle—the guy who works with me at the café—we just talked about trying it. So, I came up here to see. Nobody else knows anything about it. That’s the deal. I could bring you food, but nobody in town can know.”
“Right.” Chelsea nodded. She put her hands on her hips, shook her head and started to turn away. Then she stopped and looked over at Grace’s pack. “Got anything in there for a vegan?”
SECTION 2: CHARLIE
Chapter 8
“Now the goddamned government says it a crime to cut trees.”
“Yeah, we’re criminals. Fuckin’ criminals with chain saws.”
Charlie Roberge was headed north from the California border pushing through Oregon when he heard the talk over the CB. More jobs shutting down. More lumbermen racing against time. The cloud-masked sky was falling.
He began counting the mile markers on I-5 when he crossed the Washington State line.
He’d just glimpsed the gilded dome of the capital building poking through the top of the fog as he passed Olympia, when he saw the nose of a southbound Kenworth ramming through the low-lying cloud. Behind that one came a mile-long line of logging trucks with their empty beds collapsed. Charlie reached into the pocket of his work shirt and pulled out a cigarette. He held it between his lips, unlit.
The southbound log trucks breathed like dragons roused from their caves, smoke streaming from their vertical exhaust pipes, their binder chains rattling in frustration. Designed to haul the weight of big timber, all they carried now was weightless hope. The caravan curved around the interchange, winding off the freeway and turning west. It was no secret where they were headed. The loggers’ plan was to block Highway 101, stopping traffic across the Hoquiam River and grabbing the attention of the world.
Charlie bit off the filter of his cigarette, spit it out the open window, and reached for the Bic on his dash. He’d made it a hundred and forty miles without a smoke; that was good enough for today.
The cab of his Peterbilt was as close to a home as any Charlie had had since he was eighteen. He conscientiously swept wood debris and mud from the floorboards every day; he wiped dirt from the seats and dash and emptied the ashtray with the care of a compulsive housewife.
Holding his foot on the gas, he forged north. He wished those southbound truckers well, but their fury was infectious and he couldn’t afford to catch it.
***
The phone call had come in the early morning over a month ago. Charlie had been asleep in room seventeen of the Siskiyou Motor Lodge. He always slept in seventeen when he worked southern Oregon. It was tucked behind the main strip of rooms that faced the highway. It was almost quiet and he could park his Peterbilt in the shadows.
The sound had pierced its irritating way down through the thick dark of his dream. Charlie rolled onto his side to avoid it, but as he reached out to grab a scaly tree branch and pull himself deeper into the woods, he found instead a tangle of sheets, the softness of a mattress beneath him. Still the insistent noise.
Finally the phone dragged him up through the forest of his nightmare. Coughing, he grabbed the receiver.
“Yeah?” Sleep cottoned his voice unmistakably.
“Charlie? That you? Get up, boy!”
“Who is th—Dad?”
“Charlie, times’ wastin’. You got to get movin’!”
Charlie held the receiver out in front of his face, put his feet on the thin carpet, and shook his head. This had to be a dream. He hung up the phone and walked into the bathroom. In the few moments before the phone rang again, Charlie had pissed, splashed a few handfuls of cold water on his face, and considered the possibility that his father had actually called him.
He grabbed the receiver after the first ring.
“Dad? Jesus, I thought I was still dreaming. How did you find me?”
“Dispatcher. What the hell? You think you can’t be found, boy? You done with that piddlin’ job in the Siskiyous yet?”
“Yeah, Dad, I’m done.”
“You got another job lined up?”
Charlie hesitated. He didn’t want to give his father the advantage of knowing how desperate he was for work, but, hell, he was a log truck driver. Desperation was part of the job these days. The initial adrenalin the ringing phone had shot through him was wearing off and the old disappointment
was surfacing.
“What is this, another great job offer from the reputable Nathan Roberge?”
“Listen, Charlie, I may not always play by government rules, but I ain’t no criminal and I take care of my family. So, you shut your mouth and listen to me!”
“OK, Dad.”
“You got truck payments, don’t ya?”
“Yeah, Dad, I have truck payments. You know I do. That’s not why you woke me up. Get on with it.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly why I woke you up, Charlie. ’Cause I got a way for you to make those damn payments.”
Charlie reached out for the pack of Marlboros on the bedside table. His father had been trying to entice him into one of his schemes for years, but Charlie had been determined to make it on his own without resorting to the quasi-legal behavior Nathan was so skilled at.
He sighed and lit up, inhaling long and slow before answering.
“I’m sure you do, Dad.” Holding the receiver, Charlie walked over to the window and looked out at his truck. Why couldn’t he just to do honest, necessary work and not have to sit in some stale office pushing paper around? All he’d wanted was to work in the woods and be proud of his job. When he was a kid, loggers had the best job in the world. Hell, being a logger was all Charlie dreamed about until Uncle Walt let him crawl behind the wheel of one of the gigantic Macks he was working on; from then on Charlie was hooked on log trucks. He’d set his sights on owning his own rig. Being his own boss, he believed he’d always have work. But that was before all this crap with the fucking owl. Now nobody could count on having any kind of job in the woods unless they were some sort of goddamned owl inspector.
“You got to promise me you’re not going to back me into a corner here, Dad. This isn’t like the last time, when you tried to give me a kickback on your scaling bullshit, is it? ’Cause I ain’t that desperate.” Not yet, anyway.
Three years before when Charlie had gotten the bank to loan him the money for the truck, he’d called Nathan to tell him the great news. Nathan had been even more delighted than Charlie had expected. This, it seemed, was going to work right into his plans. Back then Nathan was working as a scaler at a small mill in Fog Valley, Oregon. He was in a position, he told his son, to help a driver make a nice bit of extra change. All Charlie had to do was look the other way and Nathan would do the work.
As a scaler, Nathan measured and graded the logs brought into the mill; he was the guy who determined how good the wood was and how much of it a log was going to yield. It took an expert eye to see the flaws in a log, to know, before it was milled, how much of it was going to be wasted by splits and knots. Nathan was good at his job and he knew how to make it pay just a bit more than any other scaler around. He’d offered to split the take with his son, and Charlie didn’t have to do a thing—that was the important part. Instead of double-checking the scaler, as was Charlie’s habit, he would have had to accept his father’s judgment without question. Charlie knew himself—back then such guilt-freighted passivity was out of the question. He’d work for a fair dollar and take his chances. Back then there were better options.
But what Charlie saw out that window now was a hulking burden of debt, a far cry from his ticket to the good life.
“You listen here, Charlie Roberge, I’d never tried to get you into somethin’ that would send you to jail. Hell, you’re my goddamned son! I wouldn’t do that. I just want you to be aware of opportunities. There are opportunities that come my way you wouldn’t know about ’cept if I told you. So that’s what I’m doing. Telling you.”
“Yeah, Dad. So tell me about this opportunity.” Charlie took another long drag and turned away from the window.
“Well, Charlie,” Nathan’s voice took on a gleeful giddiness that set Charlie’s stomach churning. “What’s so sweet about this particular opportunity is that you’ll get to go home again.”
“Home?”
“Yes, son, back to Prosperity.”
***
Now, as the miles rolled under his wheels, bringing Charlie closer to the town where he was born, anxiety flooded through him. His last view of Prosperity had been out the rear window of his mother’s Chevy station wagon as she drove the two of them away from his wooded childhood and down to the city where he would endure his adolescence. That car had been weighed down with mountains of his mother’s bitterness. He was twelve years old the last time he saw Prosperity, and the name still tasted of confusion and grief.
Who would remember him? Surely his Uncle Walt, even in a drunken haze, would know his nephew. But there could not be many others. The guys he’d learned his way through the woods with, they must have all scattered by now.
Nathan had given him one parting warning: “Stay away from Parrot, Charlie. She’s probably still there. Don’t go riling things up with that girl. It won’t do nobody any good.”
Parrot. He hadn’t thought of that name in years. Now, seeing the exit sign ahead, Mt. Oren National Forest/Prosperity, he was suddenly twelve years old again, his back pressed against the red vinyl of a booth in the Hoot Owl Café.
“What are you doin’? Are you writing?” Her sticky hands poked at his math sheets, getting crumbs all over them.
“Go away. I have to do my homework.” He sat up and leaned over the table, using his arm to shield his paper.
“Why is it homework, if you’re doing it here? This is my mommy’s café. She bakes pies. You want some pie? I like the cherry. And the rhubub. What do you like?”
“It’s rhubarb, not rhubub. Now go away.”
Strange how the details came back to him—the jukebox was playing Johnny Cash: “She’ll go sailing off on any old wind that blows.” Across the café Nathan was talking in a low murmur and Charlie could hear Annie’s nervous giggle.
Parrot climbed up onto the bench on the opposite side of the table from where he tried to focus on math problems. She scooted over to the window and pressed her head against the glass.
“My daddy is sad.”
In her voice, innocent and raw, these words sounded prophetic. Charlie looked up. He wondered if she were going to start crying. Instead, she slid down on the red bench and stretched her little body out along its worn surface, disappearing from his view.
Everyone in town knew Parrot’s dad, Warren. He was the best logger Jackson had; even Charlie revered him. It was hard to imagine Warren sad, but Charlie suspected his daughter was right.
Charlie glanced over his shoulder; his father’s back was to him, but Charlie could see Annie’s face clearly. She was smiling and there were tears in her eyes. She leaned across the counter and reached a hand out to brush Nathan’s hair off his forehead.
Charlie dropped his pencil; it rolled under the table and he crawled down, into the dark space. He sat on the floor and looked over at the little girl sleeping with her legs pulled up under her and her thumb in her mouth. He felt bad he’d brushed her off. Poor kid, he’d thought.
He scooted out from under the table. “Dad,” he called to Nathan. “Can we go home now?”
***
What would she be now, twenty or so? Still in Prosperity. Of course my father wants me to keep away from her; seeing me is only going to remind her of him and that won’t be good. Not for him and not for me, Charlie thought. And he geared the truck down as he began to climb into the mountains.
It was after midnight by the time Charlie pulled into Prosperity. He hadn’t been sure he’d remember the way, but as he drove down the main street, it all came back to him. These streets were used to the weight of trucks like his: the ruts were smooth, and Charlie could feel the give of his tires easing into them. It was like driving an old horse to the barn. In the glow of his headlights, the mill looked smaller than the picture he carried in his mind—the one created by a boy who knew no other lumber mills. Charlie was momentarily confused by a gravel parking area behind the mill office and what looked like a couple of new houses down the street. He remembered a ragged space, blackberry bus
hes humped among a few scrawny maples separating the mill from the town. How often had his mother sent him down across that tangled space, that no-man’s land where Jake’s old cabin stood, to hurry his father home for dinner? He had hated the trek, feared the stories of ghosts and monsters that haunted the abandoned cabin.
They’d surely torn that place down by now.
Charlie drove around the back of the mill and found a spot behind a pile of raw logs. He’d leave his truck there for the night till he checked in with Walt and got the lay of the land.
He turned off the engine and looked around the inside of the cab, sticking his Bic in his pocket and brushing the dust from the seat. He opened the door and stepped down, stretching his long legs. He stood to his full six foot three and leaned his shoulder against the door of his rig to shut it. Charlie rubbed a hand over his face, his chin darkened by a three-day growth. Taking a deep breath, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and held it between his fingers as he surveyed the territory. From this vantage point things made more sense. The new houses and the parking lot had disoriented him; he’d been looking in the wrong spot. There was the old cabin. And it looked like someone was living there—there were lights shining out of the windows. Hell, there were windows.
Things had changed.
***
Charlie and his mother, Marcia, had only been living in Seattle for a few months when she went back to Prosperity to find her brother and gather him up after the accident. She offered him the same cure she’d provided for herself.
“You are not responsible, Walt. Stop beating yourself up. You need to get away from that stinking, inbred town. You can find a decent-paying job in the city and put that all behind you.” As she drove him out of the mountains, she harped on him with a sisterly impatience.
“If anyone’s to blame, it’s Nathan. You told him you had more work than you could handle. He didn’t care about anything but his own damn cheating self.” She played that note so often that both her son and her brother soon became deaf to it.
What We Take For Truth Page 11