Clearcut

by Nina Shengold

  He hunkered down on a flat rock, scooping out some tobacco and rolling a smoke. He didn’t know how to proceed. Zan and Reed had been talking at breakfast about whether Reed might find work with the treeplanting crew. Should Earley hang around, waiting with him to find out? Did he owe Reed a ride back to town if the answer was no? It was too far to walk, not to mention good odds on him losing his way. But why should that be Earley’s problem?

  He took out his lighter and struck it, remembering the joint they’d shared in his pickup cab, laughing like fools. Getting naked together, the dime falling into the drain. The touch of Zan’s fingers last night in the dark, like a promise.

  Maybe Reed would get hired and wind up with that pale chick who couldn’t cook beans. Maybe Zan would get sick of his oversized dong and gold watch and decide what she needed to make life complete was a penniless shake-rat with rotting front teeth. Maybe Earley should get in his truck and move on. He was wasting his time.

  He spotted a shadow above the gray water. An osprey. The bird swooped low, winging upstream as it searched for fish. Without warning it plummeted, sinking its talons deep into the sides of a trout. The silver fish writhed in its grasp as the osprey flew off, disappearing into the mist. That was how quickly a life could be over.

  Earley tossed his cigarette butt in the creek and watched it tumble downstream. He’d stay a bit longer. At least till he’d worked out some way to see Zan again.

  He got back to the kitchen yurt just as the treeplanters’ crummy rolled into the campsite. It was an old flatbed truck with a plywood cabin built onto the back. There were metal racks on either side of the back door for mud-spattered hoedads and treebags, and when the door opened, he could see benches along both side walls where the treeplanters sat like spent paratroopers preparing to jump.

  Cassie came out with a steaming washbasin and a quart of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, which she laid on a rock just outside of the yurt as the planters humped out of their truck. They were muddy and sullen, a sad-looking outfit, thought Earley. Not one of them seemed to take note of a six-foot-five stranger standing next to their kitchen tent. Then the crew chief stepped out of the driver’s seat. He looked right at Earley, pegging him as the same guy he’d seen in the Cedar—the one Zan had stayed with last night—and his jaw clicked into a frown. Just like that, they were enemies.

  Earley and Reed stayed for lunch, at Zan’s invitation. The black-bearded crew chief kept eyeing them, trying to figure out which one he ought to resent. The other planters all called him Just Nick, apparently to distinguish him from Young Nick, the wickiup owner, who wore hawk feathers tied to his Dutch Boy-blond braids, without pissing him off with Old Nick.

  The Nicks weren’t the only treeplanters who’d renamed themselves. Earley caught wind of a Robbo, a Graywolf, a Japanese girl named Susu and a ham-faced girl with a crewcut who called herself Mum. He found himself edging towards people with names like Dave, Bob and Eric. True, he had sort of a weird name himself, but he’d come by it honestly: his mother had christened him for Jubal Early, a Confederate general whose gravesite was in her hometown, though she’d misremembered the spelling and added an extra “e.” But nobody’s mom named him Graywolf.

  Reed looked in his element, perched on a ten-gallon drum of tahini and scarfing down seconds of Cassie’s inedible beans. He was doing his damnedest to get himself hired, asking all sorts of questions about the treeplanters’ coop, how they bid for jobs from the government and logging companies, what kind of tools they used, how many trees they were planting per acre. In Earley’s opinion, Reed’s eagerness exposed him as a virgin to woods work. There was a clear hierarchy, with tree-toppers and sawyers on top of the heap, cat skinners, buckers and choker dogs a notch below. Shake-rats were sneered at as scavengers, living off loggers’ dropped bones, but at least they used chainsaws.

  Treeplanters weren’t even part of the food chain, although, as they liked to point out, no one else in the woods would have jobs if they ran out of trees. Which could happen: the oldgrowth near Forks had been logged out from every place skidders could reach, and no one had thought to replace them till recently, when the Forest Service and private owners like Royalton Timber had started to contract out reforestation. The tree plugs the co-ops were planting would take thirty years to mature. Treeplanting was grunt work, undertaken exclusively, it seemed, by people who had a perverse sort of downward mobility, suburbanites seeking out hardship in hopes it would make them feel real. Scratch a treeplanter and you’d find a master’s in Eastern philosophy, a family fortune in stocks or tobacco. Reed and his watch ought to fit right in.

  Earley had asked him at breakfast how he and Zan had first met. “Reed played in the coffeehouse where I was waitressing,” Zan answered, taking Reed’s hand.

  “I’d been buying my lunch there for months and she never looked at me twice,” added Reed. Zan smiled and shrugged.

  “A skinny white guy with a pile of poli-sci textbooks in Berkeley. One of a thousand. But I took you home the first night I heard you play. That counts.”

  “Oh, it counted, all right,” said Reed, kissing her fingers one by one. Earley sliced his fork through both his fried egg yolks and smeared his pancakes through the glop. Zan and Reed seemed reluctant to volunteer any more about their shared past, so they traded birthplaces instead of more recent events.

  “Waycross, Georgia,” said Earley.

  “Marblehead, Mass,” said Reed, adding, “Near Boston,” when Earley looked blank.

  “Guam,” said Zan.

  Earley hadn’t expected that. “Your dad’s in the service?” he asked her.

  “They’re both in the service.” Zan stuck her butter knife into the jelly as if she were trying to kill something with it. She licked the knife clean. Reed looked disconcerted.

  So Zan was an army brat. Earley figured that made her a novelty item: a hippie treeplanter with working-class roots. He wondered how long she’d been up in the woods. Not very long, he bet. She was too restless to settle for this kind of life. Even the way she sat was impatient, like an engine that idles too high when it’s parked. Earley couldn’t imagine her staying in any one place, or with any one man. He wondered why she had ditched Reed back in Berkeley and then pulled him back like a magnet. And he wondered if he would be next.

  Zan crossed the yurt to refill her tin cup with green tea. Earley could feel the molecules shift in the tent as she lifted the speckleware pot from the woodstove and circled the hay bales, refilling men’s cups. Cassie nursed her juice, sullen. The other two women, the slim Japanese girl and crop-haired Mum, sat close together, thighs touching like lovers. The Nicks were arguing over the wisdom of hiring Reed. “We’re barely making our nut as is,” said Just Nick. “If we took on another hourly wage—”

  “But if we had another guy working, we’d cover more ground.” Young Nick reached into his bowl and scooped out some tempeh to feed to his dog.

  “Ever planted before?” Just Nick turned to Reed, his gaze challenging.

  “Marigolds, corn, sensemilla. A few windowboxes.” Reed seemed to know he was being obnoxious; he just didn’t like the guy’s tone.

  Just Nick frowned. “We don’t need more rookies. Too late in the season to break you in. We’re finishing up our last contract.”

  “I work like hell,” said Reed. “I’m an obsessed man. Ask Zan.”

  Just Nick shook his head. “Can’t afford you.”

  “Okay,” said Reed, stung. “It’s your party.”

  Earley looked at Zan. She’d been silent throughout, and showed no disappointment. Was he imagining things, or did she seem a little relieved that Reed wouldn’t be sharing her tent? Earley could not put his finger on what they had going. Zan wasn’t in love with Reed, that much was clear, but she wasn’t just playing him either. There was something that glowed in her eyes when she mentioned his music, a lingering cling in her touch when she reached for his face. They were tied to each other in some indefinable way, an invisible rope Reed m
ight yet use to hang himself.

  Zan walked them back out to the truck after lunch. The rest of the planters were pulling their raingear back on and clambering into the crummy. Earley busied himself rearranging the tarp in the back of his pickup as Zan moved towards Reed. “You could stay for a couple of days, at least.”

  Reed shook his head. “I don’t get the feeling I’m wanted.”

  “Oh, fuck Just Nick—he’s been trying to get in my pants for a month. You can stay here with me.”

  “And do what all day long while you’re planting?”

  Zan opened her mouth to say something, then nodded. She didn’t look happy. “So what’ll you do?”

  “Head on up to Alaska, I guess. Find a job there.”

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “But I want to.” Reed’s pale blue eyes went opaque. Zan stepped in closer. She lifted Reed’s hands in hers, kissing his fingers. Then she set his hands onto her hips and pressed her body against his, her lips open wide for his kiss. Reed’s eyes closed, as if he were trying to memorize every sensation. They kissed for so long that Earley looked down at the toes of his boots, feeling like an intruder. Zan pulled away first, and Reed let out an audible sigh.

  “Take care of yourself, Reed.” He nodded and Zan turned towards Earley, searching his face with a gaze so intense the heat rose in his ears. Was she wondering how she might see him again? She stepped towards him and gave him a hug, rising up onto her toes so her lips grazed his throat.

  “Catch you later,” she said. Then she turned from them both and walked into the crummy without looking back.

  Neither one of them spoke for a long stretch of road. The landmarks seemed clearer on the way down, brought to life by the echo of Zan’s vivid comments. There was the split fir with the ZZ Top beard, the boulder that looked like a crouching baboon, the moss-covered stump with the fungus ears. Earley stopped at the junction of two muddy roads. “Don’t remember this one. Left or right?”

  Reed looked around. “I don’t know. Left?”

  “Got to be one or the other,” said Earley. He turned to the left. “Why Alaska?”

  “Why not?” said Reed.

  Earley shrugged. “If you say so.” It was raining again. He switched on the wipers, cursing the warped blade that smeared the left side of the windshield.

  Reed looked over at him. His wide eyes looked as pale as a malamute’s. “I just got sick of myself and the stuff I was doing.” His voice had a choked, hollow sound; he was trying to say something true, but not finding the words. “I’ve never stepped off the track: high school, summer camp, college. I needed some air.”

  That sounded like way less than half of the story, but Earley accepted it. Maybe Reed didn’t actually know what had made him roll up all his things in a duffel and stick out his thumb. People rarely knew why they did anything. Earley had no clue, for instance, why he’d stuck with Reed since he picked him up yesterday—or why he was, even now, struggling to find the right way of framing the question he had on his mind.

  Reed was still talking. “Maybe I’ll sign up to be a fire look-out, like all those Beat poets. Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen—they all did time in the Cascades. Kerouac couldn’t hack it—he kept bopping down to the bars—but Snyder wrote book after book about life in the woods.”

  “Would you want to try working together?”

  Reed turned his head. “Cutting cedar?”

  “You mentioned it yesterday. It’s not a great gig, but—”

  “Yes. Absolutely. Yes.” Reed burst into a broad, sudden grin. Earley hoped that he hadn’t just blown it. He did need a partner, but breaking in someone this green would be hard on them both. Not to mention the issue of having a person around all the time, in his space, in his way. He’d gotten used to his own way of living. Whenever he went into town to refuel and get drunk, he felt jangled for days till he found his way back to the slow, patient rhythms of living in nature.

  “Don’t jump up and down till you see what the work’s like. Not to mention my bus. It’s no suite at the Ritz. Got a hell of a view, though.” Earley had angled his parking space so that the view from his window was two oldgrowth firs, framing the snowcap of Mount Olympus.

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “The last guy I worked with, we split sixty-forty. That okay by you?”

  Reed nodded quickly. “But I’ve never worked with a chainsaw.”

  “Don’t have to. I’ll saw and you’ll split. It goes faster like that.”

  “I’m stoked,” said Reed. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know as you ought to be thanking me,” Earley said. “You’re gonna be aching in places you didn’t know you have. And I don’t mean to sound like Just Prick, but it’s not gonna work if you can’t keep the pace.”

  “I ran track in high school. I’ve done a few marathons. I’m pretty good at just keeping on going.”

  “You’ll need it,” said Earley, imagining Reed in his bus’s tight space. He felt hemmed in already. Well, why not? he thought. Even if Reed couldn’t hack the work, Earley would have some company for a few days or weeks, not to mention a good source of weed. And he’d get to see Zan again. That wasn’t the only reason he’d asked Reed to stay, Earley told himself, but if someone had asked him at gunpoint, he’d have to admit it was high on the list.

  Earley rounded a curve and stepped on the brake. The dirt road they’d been driving on came to a dead end ahead, at the foot of a cliff. They looked at each other and started to laugh. “Guess that left was a right, huh?” Reed deadpanned.

  “Last time I listen to you, city boy.” Earley slung his right arm over Reed’s seat and backed up as fast as he could. “We’re in my mountains now.”

  FIVE

  Earley’s bus had been parked in the grown-over turnout of an abandoned access road for ten months, and he figured that he hadn’t actually looked at his spread, really seen it, for nine of them. There were a few dozen beer bottles lying around, for example, that he’d never noticed. Three rusted-out fuel cans, a spare tire, the dented tin cap for his pickup. A few cords of firewood that he’d never gotten around to stacking. That old-fashioned Coke machine he’d grabbed out of a landfill in case it might work as a fridge. Some spare links of stovepipe. It looked like a front yard from the lower-rent section of Waycross, except for the midnight-blue schoolbus with stars on its roof and the glaciated volcanic cone looming up over the clouds. The fir trees that framed his small clearing were heavy with rain, needles glistening. Earley turned off the pickup.

  “Well, this is it. My brokedown palace.”

  Reed didn’t say anything right away. He stepped out of the truck and looked up at the mountain, spellbound. Earley noticed the stillness around them, a silence so absolute that he could hear droplets of rain shifting down through the trees and the sound of a woodpecker drilling on some distant ridge. This was his home. He was grateful that Reed hadn’t cheapened it with an immediate comment. If he had that kind of awe around woods he’d do fine, even if he was a scrawny college kid with no back to speak of. The strength you could build, but that silent acceptance that lets two men work side by side all day long in the rain was something you had or you didn’t.

  Earley’s last partner, Dean, hadn’t had it at all. They’d been in each other’s face since the day Dean arrived with his tape deck and toaster oven, sapping the generator to play Lynyrd Skynyrd and heat up his Pop-Tarts. The bus was a constant hum of activity, appliances whirring above thumping drum-beats, the drone of the generator’s engine, Dean’s loud braying voice as he “shot the shit,” his favorite phrase. He’d been able to match Earley’s pace as a splitter, his one saving grace, but he’d kept track of every last nickel and whined about how little profit they made, and how he could pull twice as much at the sawmill, and how much the rain sucked, until it had all blown sky-high in a fight about who’d gotten crumbs in the butter.

  Dean had stormed to his bedroom and put on “Free Bird” for the four
hundredth time; Earley had stomped a caulk boot through his eight-track. They’d punched each other a couple of times, Dean’s lip had split, he’d packed up his stuff in a fury and skidded out of the clearing, hurling the word “loser” out his rear window. A couple of days later, Earley had taken the toaster oven down to the river and shot it. Let someone find it and wonder, he thought as it tumbled downstream.

  Reed was still gazing up at Mount Olympus. Earley pulled back the truck tarp and shouldered his duffel bag. “Come on inside,” he said.

  The bus was about as well-kept as the yard. The macramé dream catcher that hung from the rearview glinted with spider webs. Earley wondered when all those gray socks and dead leaves had piled up on the floor, but Reed didn’t seem to care. His eyes scanned the place in approval, noting the raingear that hung from pegs over the driver’s seat, the sideways kitchen with its cast-iron boat stove and counter hewn out of a cedar slab, tin basin and wash pitcher, jars of dried grains, the dinette seats made out of the bus’s old benches. The twin rows of windows enlarged the space, striping its walls with sunlight and shadows of firs. Earley noticed with envy that Reed could stand anywhere under the arched roof without the reflexive hunch he’d developed whenever he strayed from the center aisle.

  He ushered Reed into the bus’s midsection and set down his duffel bag, watching Reed’s face as he cased the joint. It was a living room of sorts, with a thick striped mattress tucked half out of sight behind an old couch and a beanbag chair. “That’ll be your rack,” said Earley. A brightly striped Mexican blanket stretched up to the ceiling, so the “bedroom” behind it resembled a circus tent. “I sleep in the back.”