She put some rice on the stove and started chopping spinach and peas. Every once in a while she’d glance up at the old-fashioned clock that hung on our wall and made a loud ticking sound I knew so well that sometimes I couldn’t hear it when I tried. On top of the clock sat little wooden turtles and rabbits and birds my dad had carved for both of us years ago.
She looked again at the clock. It read seven thirty, which meant my dad should have been back a few hours ago, which meant he and Davie, the guy he built houses with, had either broken down or were smoking a joint at the river.
She licked her dry lips and looked at the door. It had warped over the years and now a half-inch gap of outside light shone between the door and the frame. Once she had asked him to fix it, so he took some duct tape and pasted a strip over the gap. “There,” he said, grinning, laying the duct tape on the table. The strip of tape still hung there, half peeled down, the sticky part dull with cobwebs.
My mom turned the tap water on, and the light over the kitchen sink flickered. She had asked him for real electricity too, not the long cord strung from tree to tree through the woods up from his parents’ house that made the lights flicker every time she used the blender or ran water. My dad just laughed and left the room when she asked for that.
I heard his truck coming up the driveway and went outside. When I was young we drove that red Ford to Florida and camped in a tent surrounded by pines. We cooked on a Coleman stove, and my mom’s skin turned a beautiful brown; there are pictures. There’s also a picture I took of the two of them dancing barefoot on the beach at dusk, my mom’s neck tipped back, her mouth wide with laughter.
My dad hopped out of the truck and came toward me. “There’s my beauty!” he called out, scooping me up and swinging me around in a circle. His eyes were bloodshot and he was grinning. He set me down and looked at the house. “How’s Lyn?”
We walked inside together. She didn’t look up, just kept chopping her vegetables, the knife making little scratching sounds on the board. “And beauty number two,” he said, quiet, breathing.
He went around the counter to where she stood and put his arms around her waist, placed his thumbs on her hip bones. “I said hello, beautiful,” he said into her ear. Then he looked at me, his eyes glistening. He was stoned, I could tell. I loved him when he was stoned; he talked to both of us this way. My mom stopped chopping her vegetables and closed her eyes. The cotton of her shirt went up and down with her breath. Then she pushed him away with her elbow. “Go take a shower.”
We ate dinner at the table out in the yard: rice and veggies and a can of pintos my mom opened up. She didn’t even heat them on the stove, just dumped a pile onto each of our plates. My dad got a six-pack from his truck and opened a bottle and told us about his week. He told my mom this was the biggest house they’d ever built, that he was going to make a profit. “I’ll buy you any goddamn thing you want,” he said, grinning, leaning over and pinching my thigh.
My mom poured some white wine into a Ball canning jar. She took small sips and squinted out toward the view. She was doing that thing she did, I knew: trying, with her eyes, to make the hills flat, pretty. Turn them into poetry. They used to belong to my dad’s parents. Now they were just black silhouettes spotted in ugly houses, the sky behind them the blue of my dad’s eyes, and mine.
He set his beer down and looked at my mom. “Okay few days, Lyn?”
She took another sip of her wine. “It was all right.”
Their faces were shadows. My dad leaned down and unlaced his boots, slid his feet out of his boots and socks, rested them up on the bench between us. They were pretty like a woman’s: pale from being inside his boots all the time.
My mom got up and cleared the plates and took them into the kitchen. I heard water running and the kitchen light flickered. Mosquitoes swarmed around my head and bit my legs. I let one turn red with blood, and then I swatted it so it left a smear on my thigh.
“Ugly,” my dad said, and laughed, but it was an out-of-proportion laugh, like he was laughing at something much funnier or not funny at all. I sat there waiting for another mosquito to land on me and fill up with blood. I thought about the girl in my book and how she didn’t think about her parents’ spent dreams, or weed their gardens; all she thought about was the people in the stories she wrote and about herself.
“How about you, Katie Belle,” my dad whispered. That’s what he called me. “Doing okay?”
The back door slammed and I went around the side of the house. My mom was going down the hill to the garden in the near dark. She kneeled by the zucchini this time, pulling more weeds, trying to make things right. It was a losing battle, I knew. I followed and stood quiet in the shadows a few yards away. After a few minutes she stopped weeding and bent over and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders started to shake. I looked at the view and then at my toes and then back at her. The shadows of her shoulder blades started moving around under her skin. The skin of her back stretched out until it was gleaming, nearly translucent. Large pointy things, the length of my legs, began moving around, poking through her ribs and skin.
“Mom,” I called out, my voice too loud in that dark.
She looked up at me. Her eyes hazy, viscous, blank. Those things on her back were iridescent, dark feathered wings.
Then a look of recognition passed through her. “Oh. Hi.” Those wings disappeared. Stopped pulsing there. She had been crying but she looked beautiful. “Want to help, Kate?”
My heart was electric, but I went and knelt next to her. It was the only thing I knew how to do. We pulled until it was so dark we could no longer tell the difference between one thing and another: unearthing spinach and peas and beans. A firefly flew into her blouse and started blinking in there. She laughed and tugged the cotton away from her chest, and the bug flew out. Then she put her arms around me and held me to her. She smelled like dish soap and earth, but something strange and sour that I’d never smelled before, too. All around us crickets were finding their partners. I thought about my dad up there alone at that table and how I’d always be like him: wingless, from here.
“You cold?” she asked. She started shaking and I could feel those wings again, behind me, trembling below the surface of her skin.
“No,” I lied. The night air was warm but I was freezing. Only where she touched me was I warm. Her breath was sour, uneven, scented with wine. On the horizon the moon started to come up through the trees—just a sliver, then disappeared behind the tops of the hemlocks and the pines.
4
MAGGIE IN THE TREES
I can smell Maggie everywhere in here: black coffee, tree bark, skin. I can smell her in the couch cushions in the half-size kitchen, and in the dirty sheets of the bed where she lay down three times one day in August when outside it was near ninety and humid as drink. We were like that then. I would get up and boil water for coffee, thinking the best way to cool down was to start sweating, like caffeine makes me do. Thinking how she and I needed something to get our bodies out of bed, out of the trailer, out into the shadows of the pines where I had set up two lawn chairs and a cooler for beer. From the kitchen I could hear her slipping into jeans, pouring a glass of water; I could feel the tired ache from my balls hanging limp between my legs making me feel exposed and ugly and foolish, too, if there had been anyone else there to see, which there was not. There wasn’t anyone except Maggie and me within one-point-two miles, and it was all trees and granite and a steep logging road between here and there.
If anyone had come, it would have been Rich, Maggie’s husband and my best friend of thirty years. Rich, who hooked the trailer onto the back of his Ford F-250 and dragged it up the trail behind his house that week in April after Deb left me, recognizing a wounded animal when he saw one. Said, Pete, leaning over the hood of his truck. I been thinking. How ’bout you move onto my place? Give yourself some time to get your feet back under you. Rich, who said, We go way back, man. It’s the least I can do.
So I did.
Now I throw a pair of jeans on and pour water from my five-gallon jug into a pan on the stove. My body throbs from beer and an empty stomach and the burning sensation on my skin that has not left me for weeks. I glance out the window—am always glancing out windows. The dawn light is a sheet of orange spreading amidst the trees here on top of the hill, and I think for a moment maybe it’s fire—want it to be fire—but it isn’t, it’s just sun. I pour the hot water through a filter, take my coffee outside, and sit in a lawn chair wet with dew. Maggie: chestnut hair, one blue eye, one brown. Once I wanted to be a teacher, she told me. Laughed. You think I would have made a good teacher?
Yes.
Ha! She took a sip of her coffee and pinched some leaves between her fingers: little fingers, chewed pink nails. Streaks of gray in her dark hair. Never even graduated from the tenth grade.
A crow takes flight above me, and I turn my head to watch it disappear into this hillside—the home of the headwaters of Silver Creek—Maggie’s Mountain, as I call it, Whiskey Mountain, to others. You know why it’s called that?
No.
Because some poor fella died making moonshine. Went blind one day; the next he came back for more and died. She laughed, that cigarette-worn caw. Can you imagine? A place named after that kind of wanting?
Yes. I think now. Yes I can. Wanting and waiting—always waiting. For Maggie. For Rich. Every morning—for days, weeks—waiting for the sound of his truck up the steep track, his fist on my door, the click of a shotgun behind my head. Waiting for him to come up that path and tell me to leave, or kill me, or grab me by the nuts and pull.
But as always there is just this light, these birds, this dew. It soaks through my jeans, and I think for a moment I am cold, that I will go inside, and then I think of that river water, translucent and deep, and picture Maggie in it, a flash of white skin, moving, and I think, Fuck cold, and close my eyes and conjure Maggie: beautiful, sad, drunk Maggie.
I had heard something rustling in the leaves. A deer, I thought, after the spikes of June’s new grass. The late-afternoon yard cool and bright, leaves crackling with the first dry heat. I poked my head out the trailer door.
Hi there, Pete. She stood in the clearing in her hiking boots and cut-off shorts, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. Small but strong, tan, those unsettling eyes.
I stepped outside. Mumbled hello.
She asked if she could sit down for a while, and I nodded, so she sat down on a birch log. I went out and reached into the cooler of beer that I kept on the north side of the trailer and pulled out two bottles. I had known Maggie for years, but we’d rarely had a conversation just the two of us. She was Rich’s woman: quiet and wild and inscrutable. She took the bottle and tipped her head back for a long drink, closed her eyes.
It’s been a while since I’ve been up here, she said, opening her eyes, looking around.
I nodded.
She turned the bottle around in her small hands, her shoulders bent forward a little. How you been getting on? She glanced toward me, then away.
Okay, I guess.
Lost?
I laughed into my bottle. Yeah.
What you do all day?
I shrugged. Read a damn lot. Drink too much beer. I haven’t gone back to work.
No job. That’s never good. Her face softened, her eyes flickered with light.
No, I said, watching those eyes, suddenly unsure. Never good.
She raised her beer toward me. Here’s to you, Pete, she said, smiling.
I raised my beer, felt something light and warm rise in my chest. When the bottles were empty she stood, set hers on the step, and brushed off her shorts. I’m going up to the top of the mountain, she said, glancing toward the trail.
I sat there looking up at her legs and arms and at the bright sky behind her.
She looked straight at me. You want to come?
My eyes hung on her for a second that felt too long. Yeah, I said. My voice too quiet. Yeah, I do.
Now the perforated sheet of leaves above me is thinning daily, revealing more and more sky. Geese pass overhead. October: the season of schedules and regularity, but I haven’t gone back to Ron Bates and asked for work. I haven’t bought a newspaper and scanned the Help Wanted pages with a ballpoint pen either, looking for dishwashing jobs or maintenance crews. I’ve always worked crap jobs, which means that every year when April rolls around I start to itch like a jackrabbit in a cage; I want to go to the woods, or take a canoe trip or head out on a long drive with Deb and Julie—the kind of time one week a year of paid or unpaid vacation doesn’t allow—so come May I tell them what I think: that their factories and sawmills and construction companies are the stink holes of the earth and that they treat their labor like shit, and then I walk out the door and cross the parking lot to my truck and go pick up my wife and daughter and drive us somewhere beautiful–a lake or a field–and feel, for at least a few weeks, free.
Come September, I would always go back to another job.
But not this time.
This time I am living on beer and beef and cans of beans. I am losing money and weight and smelling Maggie in the leaves and in the sheets and in the trees and in the air. At night I lie in bed in the trailer and listen to the coyotes up on the ridge and the deer nibbling the grass outside the door and feel no need to light the kerosene lamp or turn on the twelve-volt radio. I have nothing of hers—no shirt, no ring, no book—but that doesn’t seem to make a difference; I don’t get bored.
And the coffee is good: strong, bitter on my tongue. My chipped mug says HOME COOKING AWAY FROM HOME and, below it, THE MISS BELLOWS FALLS DINER, the place where Deb worked before she left me this April for the man who is able to keep a steady job, the man with the large house down in Vernon where they don’t pay taxes because the nuclear power plant does. Where living is cheap because if the plant goes, they will all die quick as fish out of water. Julie too. Julie: my seventeen-year-old daughter who has stopped meeting me in town for coffee. Julie: long legs and feverish eyes and a habit of looking anywhere but at her old man.
Your coffee tastes like stove ash and water, Maggie would say, reaching her cup out toward me for more. In the afternoons she’d add a splash of Jim Beam. For the throat, she’d whisper. That sly, Scorpio grin.
The first time I saw her was at Rich’s cabin, a year or so after he and I had moved up here from Mass. When we were twenty Rich bought thirty acres with a run-down hunting cabin on the south side of Whiskey Mountain. Our older brothers had both returned fucked up from Vietnam, and we wanted out of that life, out of our suburban hometowns. Back to the land, Rich’d said, grinning, cruising up the side of the mountain in the green Jeep he drove back then. All he wanted, he said, was a place to hunt, fish, and fuck around. I, as usual, followed him. That was how it had been since we were kids: shoot his guns, ride in the passenger seats of his trucks, drink his beers, admire his girlfriends.
That night: dusk, mist rising off the river, the cabin perched on a slope amidst the trees. By then I was living with Deb in Nelson and Julie was a few months old. We left her sleeping in the car and walked up the path to the house. Rich had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out on the table and four half-pint canning jars. Fill ’em up, he said. Want you to meet someone.
Maggie stepped out onto the porch. She was young, tan, barely over five feet, a good-size gap between her two front teeth. It took me a minute to notice her eyes: one blue, one brown. Spooky, Deb said later, on the car ride home. We poured ourselves glasses of whiskey, and Rich handed us plates of venison. He went through women like he did boots, but I knew Maggie was something he’d hold on to when he told us the two of them had shot the buck together. Her hand on the trigger, mine on the barrel. Out of season, he said, grinning in his infectious way.
Maggie smiled and rubbed her big toe against the pine floor. Deb asked her where she was from, and she told us she was from here, that her family had been loggers, that she had lived on this mountain for a while when sh
e was a kid with her horse-logging grandma Sugar Pial, that she waited tables at the ski area now. We nodded. Looked toward the trees. Ate.
Later, stoned out in the grass under the stars, Rich told stories about the two of us, hunting and fishing when we were kids. He told about the time he’d accidentally shot a fawn, a two-month-old speckled thing, and how the mother had hung around our campsite that whole night, love-sick and crazy, rubbing her head up against trees and pawing the ground. He laughed. We were fucking scared shitless, right, bud? he said, looking at me, and I nodded. Rich was quiet then. We were all quiet. Deb fell asleep on the grass, and I watched Maggie in the moonlight and wondered why Rich had told that story; I remembered what that dead fawn had looked like the next morning—flies clustered around its eyes—and remembered the sound of the doe’s constant pawing. Maggie leaned back on her elbows and looked up at the stars and said, That’s fucking awful, and I thought then how she looked like she was of this place, like she was some kind of creature or tree that had grown here, and wondered how it was Rich had landed something as spectacular as that.
Another snap in the woods behind me, and I turn, too quick, my heart electric, but it’s just two squirrels, bandy-legged, chasing each other up a pine. They are lucky—creatures who fuck and scramble through trees and die—happy. I toss the rest of the coffee onto the ground, get up off my chair, and start walking up the hill through pine needles and dead leaves: Maggie’s trail. That day in June we followed the logging road as far as it went, and when it dead-ended I followed Maggie, who seemed to know her way. We followed deer paths through the grass and ferns, noted where moose had scratched their antlers against the bark, where bears had lain themselves down to bed.
Maggie paused in a grove of beeches to catch her breath. She told me about when she lived with her grandma Sugar Pial, a half-Abenaki horse logger, up here in a tar paper–covered shack. Nothing left of it now, she said. Wore burlap bags to school over my shoes in winter. She laughed. They called us the Robinson Crusoe kids.
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