He continued ahead a few paces and saw a red knit cap emerge from behind a tree, then a curtain of black hair that caught a glimmer of sunlight. She was looking away from him and he realized she’d stepped off the trail. Then he heard a distinct sound of trickling water. He coughed loudly.
“Ooops. Never fails. If you get lonely in the woods, just step behind a tree and pull your pants down. Someone will show up right away.” She laughed.
Charlie responded with a loud chuckle. “Guess I’m right on cue, then.” But he didn’t move.
“Come on ahead. I’m done,” she called to him.
“You’re coming down awfully early. Camp nearby?” He asked as he walked a few steps up the hill and came up next to the young woman who sported the red cap. She was looking down, away from him; her hair reminded him of crows’ wings, blue-black, draped across the back of her neck.
With little effort she lifted a large pack onto her shoulders. An aluminum water bottle swung from a tie near the top. As she reached up to pull her cap down over her hair, the water bottle clanged against what looked like the handle of a large knife sticking out of the top of the pack. She turned toward him, squinting her eyes against the few rays of sun that had managed to work their way through the veil of fir and hemlock, and gave him such a startlingly beautiful smile it felt like a gift.
“Umm. Enjoy your walk.”
She nodded, stepped back onto the trail, and began walking down the mountain.
“Hey, wait,” Charlie called to her. “You couldn’t tell me where, um, where there’s… I mean I’m looking for…” She stopped and turned to look back at him. She put her hands on the shoulder straps of her pack and tilted her head.
“What?”
“I, um, I heard there’s a camp of tree huggers around here. You know where they’re at?” Charlie knew he’d be lousy at this subterfuge shit.
She shrugged her shoulders, and the water bottle clanged against the knife in her pack.
“Nope.” She began to turn away again but stopped. “It’s easy to get lost around here if you don’t know these woods. I’d stay on the lower trails if I were you. They’ll get you back to town sooner or later.”
“Thanks.” He said, but he didn’t want to let her go just yet. “I thought everyone would know where those protesters were.”
She shrugged again. “Looks like you thought wrong. Sorry.” And she took a few steps down the trail.
“Wait. Wait.” What was he doing?
She stopped her forward motion and planted her feet. Without turning around, she said, “Yeah?”
“Look, I’m not… I mean, I don’t know what you think, but I’m just taking a hike here. I have no intention of getting involved in anything.” This was weird, what was he saying? Why didn’t he just shut up?
“OK.” She looked over her shoulder and studied his face for a moment longer. “Bye then.”
“You live in Prosperity?” He called after her.
She laughed and picked up her pace.
Charlie started to follow her but realized that would only make matters worse. “Name’s Charlie,” he called after her. Then mumbled to himself, “in case we run into each other again.”
As he stood on the trail watching her descend, she nodded and raised her hand in acknowledgment, “I’m Grace,” he heard her say, though she didn’t pause or turn around. Charlie wondered for a moment if he’d really heard her, or if his imagination was taking over and creating a disaster he hoped to avoid. He stood watching the red cap peek in and out of the trees till it finally disappeared where the trail bent back toward town. Had she said Grace? Maybe he’d misheard Stacy or Tracy. Could this be the girl Walt had warned him to stay away from? Charlie turned and headed on up through the smoking dew that rose toward the ridgetop. It had been too long since he’d had a woman in his life. Not a decision as much as a consequence of other choices. Being alone suited him, mostly. And yet.
And what had happened to Parrot? Nathan’s adamant instructions and Walt’s drunken anger began to churn in Charlie’s imagination. Nathan had selfish interest in mind when he demanded his son to keep away from Parrot, but who was Walt protecting, him or Grace? Would she turn them all in? Expose the tree theft? Being back in Prosperity was spooking him. This job was no good. And now a girl—two of them, actually—who might be dangerous.
Charlie kept trudging up the trail. He breathed in the green air and coughed. The craving for a smoke threatened to overtake him, but he pushed on. He wasn’t doing this for Pat; he didn’t care if some hiker stumbled upon their setup. If the operation were shut down he’d have to scramble, but there would be a lot of relief. One way or another this thing was going to end. As long as he got out before the whole rotten job exploded around him.
Visions of doom blossomed in Charlie’s mind. Images of cops and handcuffs, of a witness box where he had to decide: cover for Nathan or expose him? He let the scene spin itself out. The cell door sliding shut on him and Nathan walking away, leaving Charlie to rot. But the anticipated relief didn’t come. There were too many ways this could go wrong. Too many bad endings. Charlie feared he couldn’t imagine them all.
Best-case scenario? Maybe he’d make the next few payments on his truck.
The trail turned sharply to the left and Charlie stopped. He caught his breath and looked around him. These were old trees. Doug firs, hemlock, spruce, and even giant cedar. At his eye level the trunks, gray and pleated, were branchless, some dangling delicate drapes of Spanish moss, others scarred black by ancient lightning strikes. Many harbored birds and rodents in cavities made by woodpeckers, or hollows formed where their roots arched out of the duff. He tipped his head back. The green started high—twenty-five, thirty feet up—and then formed a mass, hiding the tops of these behemoths far out of sight.
And he? He was a speck, an insect—no, insects belonged in this world, provided a necessary benefit. He was more like a virus, a microscopic enemy with the power to kill. Charlie began to calculate. Valuable timber, but you’d have to be picky. Many of these trees were probably eaten away inside, their cores feeding a turbulence of wild, unseen life. Each night he was hauling out the best of their kind. Specimens that had held their places for a hundred-fifty, two hundred, three hundred years. They were here long before Jake Oliver sought to preserve them. Charlie was looking at time.
He had never doubted the rightness of logging. The need for it, the directness of it. He’d hauled ton after ton of lumber from clear-cuts. Logging was a harvest and when it was done crews went in and replanted. In time, the forest would reform.
The scarcity of this old wood made Nathan’s mouth water, Charlie knew. “Rarer means more expensive. You keep your nose to the ground, son. Let them put limits on the big boys. A little independent outfit can maneuver, get around where the big operations can’t go.”
The familiar tug: the old man’s no dummy, he can pull it off. Step up, be a son. Don’t be a fool, Charlie—the same part of his brain that whispered, those cigs’ll kill you.
But if not this, what? Go back to long distance hauling? Shit. That would kill him faster than anything.
Maybe he’d head up to Canada. Henry said something about an operation needing log trucks up there. That might be far enough away from Nathan.
Charlie pushed on. The white sky wedged itself between the trees, forcing the green aside as he reached the ridge. A large boulder marked the trail’s edge and offered a seat from which to take in the forested valley. Charlie sat, his hands leaning hard on his knees. There was no mistaking the scars from the clear-cuts that blotched the hillsides, massive squares of orange—the color of tree blood, the debris from a messy harvest—a few patches speckled with green where saplings were beginning to stake their claim. His farther gaze took in layers of mountains massed with green, the ever-replenishing resource, treasure for the taking.
And he had been its servant. Without him, the trees died where they stood, unmoving, unavailable. In spite of what those hippies sai
d, the old trees died, killed in a way by their own gifts—fuel for the hunger of wildfire, eaten from the inside by bugs, infection, fungus.
And yet. It wasn’t an honest living anymore. Not this way. Guys like Nathan could still make money, but nobody who just kept his head down and did what he knew how to do. So what’s that make me?
Charlie stayed there until his craving for a smoke made him jumpy. He took a long look across the valley, then turned his back and headed down the trail toward Prosperity.
When he reached the junction of four trails, just above the spot where he had met the girl, Charlie stopped and looked across the trail to his right in among the giant trees. The familiarity of this spot startled him; the shadows, the contour of the duff-covered space between the trees, and a sharp scent of pine carried to him by the morning breeze—he hadn’t thought of that childish adventure in years but it was all there before him now.
As a nine-year-old, Charlie had spent a long dark night in a hole in the ground and now, as he stood in his thirty-year-old body, his nervous system crying out for a cigarette and his lungs rebelling against the unaccustomed exertion, he remembered the view from that hole and guessed he was near the spot.
Charlie had been a devout Cub Scout. The leader of his small troop, Mr. Boylton, used the story of the 1935 kidnapping of George Weyerhaeuser to get the boys’ attention and add some drama to their practice of woodsmen skills. Like the boys in Charlie’s troop, George had been a fourth-grader when strangers whisked him off the street as he made his way home from school. (Unlike Charlie and the rest of his Cub Scout troop, George was normally driven to and from school, but this day he chose to walk home. Charlie recalled being dumbfounded by this choice.) The young CEO-to-be was held for eight days by kidnappers who put him in a hole in the ground. Mr. Boylton read to his boys from an FBI report that was still vivid in Charlie’s mind. The hole was about four-foot square covered with a board. The boy had been chained hand and foot. When the kidnappers released him, he’d made his way alone through the woods to a stranger’s house.
This story had been like jet fuel to Charlie’s fear-propelled imagination. His mother had tried to dissuade him, but he would not be stopped from dragging his father’s pick and shovel off to the woods and digging his own hole of captivity. There was an inconsolable desperation about his need to test himself; he hoped for more spiders, more mice and lizards, more terror and threats to his health than George Weyerhaeuser ever contemplated. Charlie needed to know that he was a survivor and that nothing the evil world of kidnappers could throw at him would cause him to succumb. The hole he dug had perfectly square edges and a flat bottom.
Nathan, Charlie now recalled, had barely looked up from his paper when his son announced his intention to spend the night in a hole in the ground. “Nobody’s going to pay a ransom for you, kid,” he’d said.
Now Charlie stepped off the trail and bent down, keeping his eye focused uphill, searching for the perspective that matched his memory. He felt the ground gingerly.
Then he laughed.
Did he really expect the hole to be there twenty-one years later? How many snowfalls, windstorms, not to mention tons of rainwater, had washed through here in all that time? He stood upright again and smiled at himself. What a hard night that had been. Cold and damp and full of scary sounds. He hadn’t dared close his eyes. But he’d survived. As soon as there was enough light to make out the trail, he’d raced home. But when he reached the front porch he’d felt a need to hold out a bit longer before giving in to the safety of his own bed.
Charlie was slumped against the porch railing asleep when his father stepped out the door. Nathan never believed he’d done it. Accused his son of hiding in the backyard all night. Nothing Charlie ever said about that night would change Nathan’s belief.
***
“OK, Walt.” Charlie set a mug of black coffee in front of his uncle. “I need some answers.”
“And I need a little nip in here.” Walt’s finger shook as he pointed to the mug.
Charlie rummaged in the kitchen cupboard.
“No, no. Under the couch.” Walt tipped his head toward the living room.
A half-full pint of rum lay on its side among the tufts of dust like a sloshed knight defeated by a pack of bunnies. Charlie spiked Walt’s coffee and poured himself an unadulterated cup, pulled out a chair and sat opposite his uncle.
“What’s the deal with this Grace? Who the hell is she?”
“Shit. What’s wrong with you, boy? You can’t be losing your memory already.” Walt took a gulp of his coffee and leaned back in his chair. Shook his head. “You don’t remember Annie’s little girl? She’s all grown up now.”
“Annie’s little girl? Wasn’t her name Parrot?”
“Hah!” Walt nodded and pushed himself up from the table. He tipped the rest of his coffee into the sink and grabbed the bottle of rum. Then he turned back to his nephew. “Yeah, Parrot. She wants to be called Grace now—it’s her real name.” Walt took a swig from the bottle and then slapped his hand on the counter. “I told you to stay away from her. Dammit Charlie!”
Charlie held his hands up in surrender. “Look, I ran into her in the woods. I was hiking up and she was coming down. Early. Anyway, what’s the deal? I get why Nathan doesn’t want me to remind her of him, but why do you care?”
Walt shook his head and let out a rum-tainted sigh. “That girl has been through enough and reminding her about Nathan is only going to upset her. You need to talk to your father about it. I never wanted to be part of the whole thing in the first place. Now that Warren’s gone, there’s no reason.” He put both hands on the table next to his nephew and leaned forward on his stiff arms. He bit his lips and swallowed hard, blinking the fog from his eyes. “But you listen to me, son. Your father’s going to try and make out how he was an innocent bystander in all this. When he gives you his version of the story, then you come to me and I’ll tell you the truth. Your goddamned father is responsible for a hell of a lot he don’t take any credit for.” He pushed himself away from the table and grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. “Hell, if it weren’t for that son-of-a-bitch, Russ and Jeremy would still be alive!”
Charlie shook his head as if that might make all this fall into place. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Walt waved a dismissive hand and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house.
Fatigue was catching up with Charlie. His body needed to go back to bed, but there was no way his mind would settle into sleep now. He took his wallet from his back pocket. The last number Nathan gave him was printed neatly on an index card that Charlie had trimmed down to fit in one of the slots next to his single credit card. He stared at it for a long moment and then tucked it back in its place. It was ridiculous to waste his time getting a crooked, self-justifying story from his father.
“Walt! Goddammit!” Charlie let the front door slam behind him as he raced out after his uncle. But Walt waved a dismissive hand behind him and continued to walk toward Main Street.
Charlie matched his steps with his uncle’s. “I’m going to the café and find out what’s going on for myself, then. This is ridiculous.”
This bought Walt up short. He stopped and turned to his nephew. “OK, look, Grace doesn’t know a thing about your father or any of it. And, believe me, you don’t want to be the one to tell her. So if you’re going to the Hoot Owl, keep your mouth shut and drink your coffee. Too many folks in this town care about that girl and you aren’t going to be the one to blow this whole thing wide open after all these years.”
Charlie put a less-than-patient hand on his uncle’s shoulder. “If you just tell me what the hell’s going on …”
“Hey, Henry.” Walt’s greeting was louder than it needed to be to reach down the street to where Henry Martin had just exited the café. “Hold up.” Then Walt shrugged Charlie’s hand off and said to him, “Go ask Henry. He’s as involved as the rest of us.”
“Really?” Before C
harlie could absorb what this might mean, the three men converged in front of the Post Office.
“Mornin’ Henry. How’s it goin’?” Charlie reached out to shake his friend’s hand; Walt nodded and continued across the street.
“Why you up so early?” Henry grinned.
“So I could take a goddamned walk in the woods. Pat came pounding on my door before dawn and sent me off to go track some hikers he thought were in the wrong part of the woods.” As Charlie recounted the start of his day, fatigue hit him hard. “I need some coffee, man. Come with me to the café. I got some questions I need to ask you.”
“I bet you do. Heard you ran into Grace this morning.”
Maybe this wasn’t going to be as hard as Walt made out. “Yeah. So, what’s the deal? Some big secret I’m not supposed to tell her, Walt says.”
“Shit, man.” Henry tipped his head and stared at Charlie. “That’s right, you left just when all the crazy stuff happened. You don’t know what’s gone on here since…” Henry took a few steps up the street toward Walt’s house. “You got some Folgers or something at the house, don’t you?”
Charlie sighed. “Yeah.”
“Let’s go have a talk, man. We don’t want to do this at the Hoot Owl.”
SECTION 3: SECRETS
Chapter 11
August 3, 1991
This is how a traitor lives: Wake at five a.m., down to the café to prepare food for Chelsea and her crew, hike two miles up the mountain to deliver the day’s order, back down the trail to the café where Lyle has the coffee going and is, hopefully, fixing a few breakfast orders. Work the front of the house feeding the people I’ve known all my life whose lives depend on Chelsea and her crew failing. Do that till noon and then trade places with Lyle in the kitchen if there are any lunch customers. Close up at four--no one is going to come in for dinner—home, collapse. The hardest part of it all is keeping the secret—and hating myself half the time.
What We Take For Truth Page 14