To Darkness and to Death

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Randy stood for a moment, the cold November sunshine bright on his face. Ed didn’t sound like he was retiring. He sounded like he was getting ready to slit his throat.

  From the front of the house, he heard a door slam. Ed had some nerve, telling Randy to move away for work, when it was him who was throwing in the towel. There were always good-paying jobs, if you were willing to hustle. Guys got old, they forgot that. He looked at where Ed’s hand had curled over his shoulder. A bloody smear blotched the denim.

  From the front of the house he heard a car starting up, the squeal of tires laying down rubber, and then the unmistakable sound of something big and heavy crunching into his bike.

  11:15 A.M.

  Becky tumbled out of her Prius and stared in horror at the motorcycle lying in the street. She wasn’t sure what had happened; she had felt the bone-shuddering impact and then heard a sound like a dumpster full of recycled cans dropping onto the asphalt.

  “Holy shit! What did you do to my bike?” The guy who had come to see her dad ran past her. He skidded to a stop in front of the motorcycle. “Oh, man, you’ve torn up my fuel line!”

  “I’m so sorry.” Becky glanced over her shoulder to see if her dad had heard anything. That would really be the icing on the cake—to have him charge out of the house and find her here like a sixteen-year-old screwing up on her learner’s permit. “Look, let me pay for the damage, please.”

  His back was still toward her. He held his hands out over the machine as if he were commanding it to rise from the dead. His voice held the disbelief of a child faced with an inexplicable loss. “How the hell am I going to get it to the garage?”

  He seemed to be talking to himself, but Becky answered him. “I’ve got Triple A. I can call them. They’ll pick it up for you.”

  He turned toward her. He was a few years younger than she was, attractive in a farm-boy-meets-skinhead kind of way, dressed in JC Penney hip-hop, the look of someone whose only inner-city experience has been downtown Schenectady. “It’ll need to go to Jimino’s, out to Fort Henry.”

  “Wherever you like.” She smiled apologetically but couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder again.

  “What is it?”

  She snapped around. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to, you know, tell your dad on you.” He bent and lifted the bike by its handles. The arms and back of his jacket bulged with the strength of a man who makes his living by his muscles instead of his brain.

  “You can park it in the neighbor’s driveway until the tow truck comes.” She pointed toward the Bells’ next door. “They’ve already left for Florida for the winter.” He shot her a suspicious look. “It’s closer than our—my parents’ driveway,” she added helpfully.

  He grunted but rolled the bike up the driveway next door. Becky retreated to her car, grabbed her wallet, and unplugged her cell phone from its charger. She dashed over to the Bells’ driveway. “Look, I can call Triple A right now.” She juggled the wallet and the phone until she wiggled her membership card out of the billfold.

  He held up his hands. “Calm down, will ya? You’re acting like you think I’m gonna call the cops.” He squinted at her. “You carrying or something?”

  She didn’t have to worry about the police finding drugs in her possession, but he looked as if he might. “No,” she said. She glanced back toward her house. “I just had a big fight with my dad—well, you heard the end of it—and I’ll never live it down if he finds out I wrecked somebody’s bike backing out of the damn driveway.”

  “Ahhh.” He nodded, satisfied. “Now I get it.” He looked at his bike, at her car, at her. “I got my truck over to a friend’s house. He’s out by Glens Falls. Could you give me a lift? I’m gonna be late picking my wife up from her job.”

  Glens Falls. Exactly the opposite direction from where she needed to go. “Where’s she work?” Becky asked, mentally crossing her fingers. If it was right here in town . . .

  “Haudenosaunee. It’s a camp up past—”

  “I know where it is! I’m headed there now to pick up some papers. Why don’t you come with me, we’ll pick up your wife, and then I’ll take both of you to your truck.”

  “Uh.” He swayed back and forth indecisively.

  “Please? It’s the least I can do.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. I’m Randy Schoof, by the way.”

  “Becky Castle.” She led the way back to her car. “Go ahead, it’s open,” she said, as he stood by the passenger door. “You can see how I managed to run into your bike,” she explained, sliding behind the wheel. “I hung my dress on the hook in the back, and it completely obscured my view.” She stretched her arm over the seat, unhooked the dry cleaner’s bag, and tossed it on the backseat. “I should have just settled for a few wrinkles.” She looked pointedly at the seat-belt strap. “You all set?” He buckled up.

  Randy Schoof sat silently as she pulled away from her parents’ house, stayed silent as she put in her call to Triple A to ask for a motorcycle tow to Jimino’s, and remained silent while she returned her phone to the charger. It was weird. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking, or sulking, or shy. It put her on edge, and she found herself rattling on to compensate, telling him about her friend Millie going missing, railing against Eugene van der Hoeven’s parochial frontier macho mentality, complaining about how utterly unreasonable her father was. He just sat there, looking out the window, making the occasional noise of acknowledgment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as they turned onto Route 53 and headed up the mountain toward Haudenosaunee. “I don’t usually hijack people with nonstop talking. It’s just that I woke up this morning expecting everything to be great, and so far it’s been an incredibly crappy day.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” he said. “It’s been a pretty shitty day for me, too.”

  She opened her mouth to ask him why he had been to see her father, but the sight of the access road wiped the question from her mind. “Fire Road 52!” She slowed her car down. “Would you mind terribly if we made a stop here before we hit Haudenosaunee?”

  Randy Schoof glanced at her assessingly. “I’m not late to pick Lisa up yet.” He looked out the window. “Why here?” he asked, his head turned away.

  “This is where my dad has his logging equipment. I need to inventory it for insurance purposes.” She turned into the road.

  “Come again?”

  “The trucks and feller-bunchers and all are insured against damage or loss. Like your motorcycle and your truck.” It occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t like his motorcycle and truck. It wasn’t hard picturing him as the sort who maintained his insurance just long enough to register his vehicles, then let it lapse.

  “Oh,” he said. Then, “Okay.”

  She swung her car onto the dirt road. It was wide and hard-packed, a road meant for log-heavy trailers and dump trucks full of pulpwood, navigating through the icy depths of winter. It was made wider by the dead zones on either side, gullies wiped bare of life by the heavy concentration of salt washed off the road. Another damning aspect of logging her father would not allow.

  She bumped maybe a half mile uphill and then shut down her car.

  “What’s up?” Randy said. “We’re not nearly there yet.”

  A childhood of traveling into the woods with her father had taught her that you never drive up an unmarked Adirondack road unless you have four-wheel drive and a winch chain. “I didn’t want to get stuck in a boggy spot or burn out my bushings trying to climb the mountain,” she said, grabbing her purse before getting out of the car. “You can wait here for me. I won’t be long.”

  She started the long uphill slog. She had friends in Albany who would be aghast at her leaving her car and keys in possession of a man she had just met, but this was Millers Kill. In twenty minutes, without his even saying much, she knew his name, his wife’s name and where she worked, and where he had his motorcycle fixed. They probably had a dozen acquaintances in common.
Not to mention her father.

  At the thought of her father, her stomach clenched. She had sworn to herself she was going to act like, and be treated as, an adult this visit. Instead, she had been reduced to a level of discourse with her father no better than “You can’t make me!” “Oh, yeah? So there!” Punctuated by storming out of the yard without saying good-bye.

  The echo of a slam cut off her self-recrimination. Must be Randy, bored with the view through the windshield. She didn’t wait for him, pressing upward against the bright cold sunlight, looking past the tenacious brown weeds, clinging to the poisoned soil, to the forest vaulting up on either side: heavy, dark hemlocks, the ghostly remains of birch trees, mummified blackberries caged inside their briar tombs.

  She could hear the clearing site before she could see it. There was something about a large open space amidst all the trees—a nonsound, a negative space in the thick mass of the forest, a pause in the breath of the woods. The road curved, leveled, and opened up into the expanse of a battlefield. She winced at the enormous gash in the forest’s face, the battlement of stumps that had been chained out of the ground and discarded, the crackle-dry heaps of brush and junk wood piled like funeral pyres to the sky. The place, even abandoned, pulsed with a kind of energy, lingering ghosts of men ready to muscle miles of board feet and tons of pulp out of the raw wilderness. Machines waiting only for the overnight frosts to become a good hard freeze before tearing into the barricade of trees all around them.

  They were all here, just as she remembered them from her childhood: the crawler tractor, the skidders, the bulldozer, the loader, the trucks. Back when she was a kid, her dad had tied and staked tarps over the equipment, protecting the heavy machinery from rain and leaf fall. Now he used pop-up portable shelters, which gave the machines the appearance of a herd of dinosaurs on a camping trip.

  Becky sighed and dug into her purse for her portable camera and notepad. She flipped the notepad open and wrote No. 1: bulldozer. She walked around the dozer, snapping pictures from the front and back and sides, trying not to envision riding on her dad’s lap on the thing as he leveled out a new access road.

  Will you name the road for me, Daddy?

  I sure will, sweet pea.

  Sure enough, he had bought one of those sign kits at the hardware store, and the access road for that winter’s cut was Becky Avenue—“avenue” because she thought her dad’s suggestion, Becky Lane, sounded like an actress’s name. That had been when she thought making her mark on the forest was the way to show how much she loved it.

  She hissed, impatient with her own sentimentality, and moved on to the next vehicle. No. 2: skidder.

  Randy Schoof appeared over the rise where the road met the clearing. He waved, and she waved back before raising the camera and capturing a side view of the skidder for posterity. Randy strolled past her as she jotted down a description of the skidder’s condition, glancing at the feller-buncher and the dump trucks, resembling nothing so much as a Sunday shopper on a car lot.

  We’re not nearly there yet. He had said that, when she parked the Prius. She went around to the other side of the skidder. “Have you been here before?” she called out.

  He stopped. “Uh. Yeah.” He took a few steps toward her. “Actually, I work for your dad. I mean, I did. Before he decided to pull the plug.”

  Great. She was up here with a disgruntled former employee. What if he decided to goof up one of the engines to get back at her dad? “It’s not really his decision,” she said in a loud voice. “Once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation takes control, logging’s going to be forbidden on this land.”

  He looked at the slumbering giants all around them. “There’s still work if you’re willing to go for it. Travel farther up north for the cutting. Or harvest small private wood-lots. You know, fifteen acres here, fifteen acres there.”

  She crossed to the feller-buncher and started taking pictures. The sooner she finished up, the sooner she—they—could get out of here. “Fifteen acres here and there won’t pay my dad’s costs.”

  “Yeah, but what about just a few guys, throwing in together?”

  She looked at him sharply. “What were you seeing my father about earlier?”

  “I wanted to work something out to, you know, keep the business going. Like, pay him over time for the equipment.”

  “It’s pretty valuable.” Becky tried to keep the skepticism from her voice. “I don’t know if he can afford to take back a note on it.” The young man’s blank face indicated he had no idea what taking back a note was. “Sell the equipment to you on credit and let you pay the loan back on time,” she explained.

  “So he’s going to sell all this.” He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and rocked back and forth on his boot heels.

  “Yeah.” She moved to the front of the crawler tractor and took another picture.

  “Man, all I need is one break. I know I could make a go of it.”

  She forced herself to keep her eyes on her notebook as she wrote down the condition and VIN of the crawler tractor.

  “I mean, what if a couple machines went missing? Your dad wouldn’t be hurting. He’d get the insurance money.”

  Was he suggesting what she thought he was? She lifted her head. Randy was staring past her, past the crawler tractor, into some limitless future that existed only in his mind.

  She brought the camera back up and snapped off a shot of him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She took another. Then another. Stepped to one side so she could center him in front of the feller-buncher.

  “Quit it. What are you doing?” He took a step toward her.

  “I’m taking your picture.” She looked at him over the top of the camera. “I’m not sure if you got this when I was talking about my work earlier, but I work for the ACC. If you’re thinking about sneaking back here and making off with some of this equipment—which is a pretty damn stupid idea all around, since you can’t even move half this stuff without a flatbed—I think you ought to know you won’t just be ripping off my dad, you’ll be ripping off my employer.”

  She snapped off another picture.

  “Cut it out!” He lunged toward her.

  She danced back out of his way. “You really are that stupid, aren’t you?” she said. “Jesus! You’re actually thinking about making off with a skidder!”

  “Gimme that! You can’t take my picture!” He swiped one long hand toward the camera. She held it back and over her head, out of reach. “Give it to me!” he repeated.

  He charged at her. At the last moment, she dropped her notebook and purse and grabbed one of the aluminum poles holding the canopy over the tractor. She swung herself around it, flying free. Her boxed and bound rage tipped over and shook loose, burning out of her skin, rendering her weightless, invincible. She touched ground, light as a feather, her eyes fierce and her chest full of a triumphant crow. To hell with Eugene van der Hoeven. To hell with Millie. To hell with her father. She could outmaneuver this idiot forever. She bared her teeth at him.

  “Bitch!” He lunged for her again. This time she leaped onto the tractor itself, one foot on the tread, the other on the seat, and then over the side.

  He surprised her then. She thought he would follow her route, a filing to the magnet, but instead he circled the tractor so fast she had to scramble back across the seat to the other side. She barely avoided his reach, and she nearly fell off the tread getting back to the ground. A cold bucket of reality upended over her. She was alone in the forest with a guy built like a jackhammer. He came around the back of the crawler, his body much faster than his brain, and this time she neither crowed nor grinned, just tucked her chin down and ran, flat out, toward the road. Toward her car. Toward escape.

  She pounded through the clearing, eyes fixed on the ground, leaping over a wind-scattered branch, dodging a rut gouged by a massive truck tire. She was deafened by her thudding feet, her sawing breath, the blood pistoning through her, so she was caught off guard whe
n the blow came out of nowhere, snapping her head sideways, reeling her around, filling her skull with a terrible pain that was a sound, impossible to separate from the sound he was making, rage and pain twisted together.

  She staggered, tripped, caught herself, and ran again, tears blurring her vision. She got three steps away before he tackled her, sending her head snapping against the ground and all the breath jarring out of her so she couldn’t make a sound when he slapped her, hard, and clawed at the camera still clutched in her hand.

  “Gimme . . . the fuckin’ . . . camera!” As he reached, he stretched, and from some well of self-preservation she saw her opportunity and took it, punching him in the throat.

  He gargled horribly, like a drowning victim, and she shoved him off her and staggered to her feet. He was clutching his neck. It sounded as if he couldn’t breathe. She stood, tiptoe, suspended between flight and responsibility. Oh, God! What if I’ve killed him? She, who had never hit or been hit before this.

  Then he sucked in a rattling, tubercular breath and lurched toward her. She ran again, for the first time knowing the wild, muscle-bunching, adrenaline-spiked velocity that means run for your life, commonplace words she had said herself, never imagining the terror behind them. The road her father had plowed through the forest flew beneath her, tree and rock and green and gray flashing by, her heart beating Daddy, Daddy, Daddy—another blow, tumbling her, rolling her in the dirt—save me, and he was on her, punching, kicking, crying, and the pain took away every memory, every thought, took away who she was, so that there was nothing left of her but arms folding over her head and legs curling up over her belly, and the pain . . .

  . . . and there was a terrific crunch to her head, and then nothing.

  11:30 A.M.

  Randy rolled away from the woman and lay in the dirt, his hands clenched, his breath sobbing in and out. He thought he was going to retch. He was trembling uncontrollably. His chest felt tight and hot, his heart trip-hammering as it never had before. He was having a heart attack. That must be it. He lay in the dirt and waited to die.