“What luck?” said Earley, and slipped him a twenty. His last.
“That about pays for last time,” said Scoter. “You got any more of that weed?”
“I’ll give you a raincheck,” said Earley. The TV ad changed to a blonde in a bathing suit, filling her palm full of shaving cream. “Take it all off,” she intoned in a thick Swedish accent.
“I wish,” Scoter said. He threw Earley a room key. “Two hours. You go falling asleep on me, I’m coming in after your girlfriend. Whoever she is.”
Margie’s nipples were big as fried eggs. Earley could not get enough of them. They’d made love the second they got through the door, barely stopping to tear off their clothes, and now he was leaning against the headboard with Margie curled into him, resting her back on his chest while he played with her tits.
“That feels nice,” Margie murmured.
“I’ll say,” he said, slipping his palms underneath them and lifting them up, like Miss June in the pinup he kept by his bed.
“You should’ve seen me before I had kids. I had beautiful boobs.”
“You still do,” Earley told her.
“If you only meant half the stuff that you say,” Margie said.
“I do mean it.” He did, too. He loved to watch Margie unhook her stiff bras, the way she spilled out like a jackpot. He loved licking her nipples until they got hard, the way that she moaned underneath him, the touch of her fingernails over his back.
She rolled over and looked at him. “What are you doing with me, Earley?”
“What do you mean?” he said. He wasn’t ready for this, not tonight.
“Look at yourself, for Christ’s sake.” Margie ran her hand over his chest muscles, tracing the taper of hair that bisected his belly and led down towards his groin. “You’re a big healthy animal. How come you don’t have a girl of your own?”
Earley wished she would leave it alone. This was not going anywhere good. He tried keeping it light. “I’ve got half of two nickels. A secondhand bus and a ’58 pickup. I’m no one’s Prince Charming.”
“I don’t want Prince Charming. I want someone who tells me he still likes my body, and fucks like he means it.” She was looking him right in the eye.
“Well, you got me,” said Earley, shifting his weight on the pillow.
“Don’t give me this crap. If I wasn’t married to Harlan, you’d head for the hills.”
Earley could have come up with some line, he supposed, but he figured he owed Margie better. “I already live in the hills,” he said, stroking her cheek.
“I know,” Margie said, “God, do I know,” and she closed her eyes.
Earley looked down at his sweatpants and shirt, tangled on the blue carpet with Margie’s bra. He wished he could slip on his clothes and go back to the bar.
“I’m sorry,” said Margie. “I’m dumping on you. Got a lot on my mind. It’s my little girl’s birthday tomorrow.”
“Amber Ann?”
Margie shook her head. “The one that I lost. She’d be eighteen years old. The same age I was when I had her. Half my life ago. I can’t hardly believe it.”
Earley touched her hair. “What was her name?”
“Angelica Dawn,” Margie said. “Three weeks old.” Earley didn’t know what to say. There was nothing that didn’t feel hollow, inadequate. He wrapped his big arms around Margie and she closed her eyes again, letting him rock her.
“I don’t think Harlan even remembers the date,” she said. “He never talks about her at all. Not even when Pete got hit.”
“Harlan’s an asshole,” said Earley.
“I know,” she said. “But he wasn’t back then. He slid into assholedom bit by bit.”
“Just like we all do,” said Earley, feeling sheepish that he’d called her husband an asshole.
Margie looked at him. “What if he leaves me for good this time? Would that make a difference?”
Earley hadn’t expected that. He could feel Margie’s eyes on him. “He’ll be back,” he said.
“I don’t know that I want him back,” Margie said, resting her lips on his collarbone. “I could get used to this.”
“I’m not your kids’ father,” said Earley.
“No. You’re not.” Margie threaded her fingers through his. “Did you ever want kids, Earley?” He was taken aback, not so much by her asking the question as the fact that she’d put it in past tense, as if he had already missed his chance. Well, she had her first kid at eighteen, Earley thought, and Amber the year after that. By the time she was my age, her littlest was riding his bike to Little League.
“I never did think so, but maybe. Yeah. I think I might.”
“They break your heart,” Margie said. “Break it in pieces, and grow you a bigger one.” Earley thought of his mother, wedged into a trailer with four screaming kids and a husband who got drunk and beat on her. Somehow she’d loved them all anyway. Maybe the trick was just having the family, sowing your seed in whatever sad patch of ground you had to work with. He looked down at Margie’s left hand, where her flesh had trapped her in a zircon engagement and wedding set two or three sizes too small. I don’t know how to do this, he thought. Never have, never will.
“I’m making you sad,” Margie said.
“No you’re not.” He had to kiss her now. It was what Margie expected. Earley leaned forward and opened his mouth around hers, feeling the grateful thrust of her tongue and the quick surge of heat that reminded him why men and women had bodies. He slid his palms over her breasts, but a part of his brain was already weighing his options and wondering how to head back to his bus without hurting her feelings. Why couldn’t anything ever be easy? Margie’s arms roamed over his back, and she rolled over, taking him with her.
NINE
Earley woke up squinting. Something was off, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was: the sun was out. Sunlight poured in through the bus’s twin rows of windows. It steamed off the soaked branches outside, turned the snow-covered crest of Olympus a bright golden pink. It might have been gorgeous, but all Earley knew was that his eyes ached, his head hurt, and he needed to piss. He stumbled up from his bed and went out the emergency exit, releasing a stream in the dirt.
The sun wasn’t fair. The view of Olympus was stunning, one of those hand-of-God vistas that was supposed to lift up your spirits and fill you with awe, instead of reminding you what a hungover, stale piece of shit you were. Earley sighed and went inside to brew some strong coffee. The stove was dead cold; he’d come home too wasted last night to refresh it. The kindling hopper was empty—Reed’s job, he thought, kicking it so hard it rattled.
He picked up his olive-drab thermos and opened it. Nothing. He lifted the lid of the coffee pot in the wash basin. There were some dregs, a bit grainy with grounds, but at least it would give him a jumpstart. He drained the pot into a nearly clean mug and poured in some sugar. The milk in the cooler was sour. There was more in the truck—he’d forgotten to unload the groceries last night, Earley realized—but it had probably gone sour too in this goddamn sun. He dumped in a few lumps of powdered milk, stirred it and choked it down, gritting his teeth. This is no way to live, he thought, and the second his mind formed the words, he knew they would stick in his head all day long like a tack, like a mantra.
He got through the chores. Split the kindling. Relit the stove. Made a new pot of coffee, some oatmeal and toast. He unloaded the groceries from the truck, sniffing and tossing the milk, a pound of ground chuck that was starting to rot and a whole fryer chicken he thought might be dicey. He got out his poacher’s spade and dug a grave for the meat so coyotes and bears wouldn’t come around. He put away laundry and hung his damp jeans from a tree. Then he went to the truck for his Husqy. He sat down on a stump round, took off the saw chain and cleaned it methodically, picking out black clots of fuel and sawdust and sharpening each tooth with a file. The sunshine was warm on his back. He heard the high liquid song of some bird that he realized he hadn’t heard once all win
ter, and spotted a Steller’s jay watching him work from the crest of a tree.
Earley tugged the chain back onto the bar of his Husqy and realized that he was sweating, with twin streaks of crankcase oil over both forearms. He went back inside and put on a new shirt. Then he looked at the watch Reed had left by his bed. It was nine a.m.
The weekend unrolled ahead of him, empty. Earley guessed he could go to the clearcut and split out some rounds; he could pick up some volume and speed on his own, get the numbers back up. But his heart wasn’t in it. All he could think of was Zan and Reed, wrapped in each other’s arms. And Margie, who’d probably cried herself to sleep last night after he’d dropped her off down the street from her trailer. He remembered the look of contempt on Vern Gillies’ face when he’d asked for the dimes and figured he probably deserved it.
Earley poured more coffee and looked out the window. He could see peaks and ridges he hadn’t seen clearly for months. It wasn’t a day to be working in mud.
Steelheads, he thought. I’ll go fishing. The thought made him happy. He got out his tackle box and picked out a small stash of bobbers and aeroflies. He took down his favorite rod, threw a one-handed cast into the living room and hooked one of Reed’s socks on the first try. He packed up a couple of sandwiches, tossed an orange and some nuts in a day pack, grabbed his waders and left.
The sunshine changed the whole landscape. The blue sky and firs were so bright that the colors seemed fake, like a Kodachrome postcard. The air smelled like spring. Earley rolled down the window and let the wind roar through the truck as he sped down the coast road. The mouth of the Hoh would be rushing with meltwater, perfect for steelhead. The turnoff was just up ahead, past the sign for the Rainforest Trail. Earley had never been up there. Last fall he had given a ride to a couple of backpackers from New Zealand who’d raved about it.
“You lived here how long, mate?” said one. “And you’ve never done the trail?”
“Change your whole life, it will,” said his friend. “It’ll blow out your socks.”
The Rainforest Trail sign loomed up, and Earley impulsively turned the truck towards it. Why not? he thought. I could do with my whole life changing around about now, or at least with my socks getting blown.
The approach road was long, and the trees started changing as soon as he turned off the highway. Instead of the towering trunks of Douglas fir, cedar and spruce, there were moss-covered hardwoods, their low branches trailing green veils and streamers of clubmoss. The damp ground was matted with horsetails, ferns and vanilla leaf, no bare space anywhere. It looked fertile and lush, a north country bayou.
Earley pulled into the parking lot next to the trailhead, which was empty except for a couple of Park Service trucks and a VW Bug. He stood in front of a big wooden map, gazing at distances and elevations. Avalanche warnings above Glacier Meadows, he read. Hard to believe, with the air warm and springy, but high elevations were treacherous. Earley went back to the truck for his gear. He figured he’d hike the first five or ten miles along the Hoh River and go fishing somewhere high up in the back-country. He could take the wool army blanket he kept in the truck and bed down in one of the shelters if he had the urge. No one on the planet would know where he was, or care if his hike took him one day or two. No strings, he thought. Fuck it.
He strapped the blanket and fishing pole onto his day pack and started the trail at an easy lope. The groomed path was wide, with considerate wood slabs laid into the muddiest sections. Like a sidewalk, he thought. Piece of cake.
The trail started climbing alongside the Hoh River gorge. The water had turned a weird silty gray; it was moving so fast it looked like it was boiling. If there was a river that led to the Underworld, Earley thought, like in those old myths, that’d be just the right color. He fingered the Buck knife he wore on his belt and wondered if bears had come out of their caves yet. The winter was losing its grip, ice yielding to mud. The earth oozed beneath his stride, crusting his boots.
A few miles farther up, Earley ran into two older hikers on their way back down, Sierra Club types with collapsible cups on their rucksacks and loud cheery voices that called each other Mother and Pop.
“Great day!” said Pop, grinning, and Earley said, “Beautiful,” hoping it sounded like something he meant. Mother smiled at him indulgently. Mated for life, Earley thought as they passed him by. Some people found that. He wouldn’t be one of them; too much of his life had already gone by. This is no way to live.
This is really cheering me up, he thought, great plan. But hard on the heels of that thought came another that pleased him: that Zan and Reed weren’t mated for life either. Earley didn’t know how he knew this, he just did, had known it the moment he saw them together.
What was missing? He couldn’t imagine how Reed, or any man for that matter, could help falling in love with Zan, unless he was worried that she’d be too much for him. And why wouldn’t Zan fall for Reed? He had a big dick, he was smart, he played musical instruments. His family had money, even if he didn’t. Reed didn’t talk about his parents’ wealth—had, in fact, changed the subject abruptly when Earley asked him what his father did—but it seeped out in his stories of sailing, of summers on Cape Cod and in the White Mountains. He was even good-looking, Earley supposed, in a way women went for: straight nose, even teeth and those startling, Paul Newman blue eyes. He was as fair as Zan was dark; they looked great together.
But somehow—and this wasn’t just envy talking, he told himself—the two of them didn’t catch fire. Earley couldn’t say why; it was something he sensed, like the whiff in the air that lets dogs know on meeting which one is the boss. For all of Reed’s moony-eyed pining, for all the way Zan threw her body against his and kissed him all over, something between them was not what it should be. Zan knew it too; there was a desperate cling in the way she touched Reed, as though if she ever let go of his body, he might float away.
Earley was doing a god-awful job of getting them out of his mind. Work would have been better. The whine of the chainsaw, the ache of the hard, steady rhythms would numb him, where walking through all of this beauty stirred everything up. Margie’s voice echoed in his head, asking him, “How come you don’t have a girl of your own?” A big healthy animal, she’d called him, and he figured that was about right. A Clydesdale horse. Reed was a thoroughbred, high-strung and flighty. Zan was one of those things from Fantasia, half horse and half pinup girl.
Earley noticed a strange smell in the air, not the primordial scent of wet earth and decay that hung in the rainforest air, but something harsh, acrid. He rounded a bend and thought, oh. Yes, of course. The forest ahead was charred and black, even the standing trunks torched by a forest fire. Nature’s clearcut. It must have been recent; the underbrush hadn’t come back yet. A few months from now there’d be fireweed budding, and western hemlock cones would release their seeds into the troughs of dead logs left behind by the fire. It would all cycle back, but now it was lifeless and eerily silent.
Earley craned his neck up as he walked through the burn zone, wondering which trunk the lightning had split, although it was equally likely that some irresponsible hiker had tossed down a Marlboro. People fucked up the earth every day. He stepped off the trail and his boot crunched on something. He looked down and saw vertebrae in the ash. Each bone was tiny and fragile. What had it been? Earley wondered, squatting to peer at the blackened remains. Then he spotted a deer skull, so tiny it looked like a toy. The fawn must have been born and died here, he reckoned, too new on its legs to outrun the flames. He thought about taking the skull with him, hanging it up on the wall of his bus, but decided to leave it where it belonged. He stepped away quietly, feeling a rawness like smoke in the back of his throat.
A few miles past the burn zone, the trail widened into a meadow. Right in its center, arching over the green grass in every direction, was a massive bigleaf maple. Every inch of its gnarled trunk was covered in moss, with trailing streamers that hung from its branches like yak fur. Off to
one side, Earley spotted the Happy Four Shelter, an open-front lean-to of weathered wood planks. He wondered if Mother and Pop had slept up here last night, spooning together in matching blue sleeping bags.
The shadows were lengthening. Earley wished he had paid more attention back down at the trail chart to where the next shelter was, and how low the avalanche danger began. Glacier Meadows had an ominous ring to it. He figured he had about two hours till dusk. He could either pack on up the trail and see where luck brought him, or bushwhack down to the river and try to catch something for dinner.
He decided on dinner. The gorge was steep-sided and he missed his caulks. Reed had done well, he thought, scrambling around in those hiking boots all week long. Could it really be only one week since Earley had picked him up outside Bogachiel, in that ridiculous poncho? He wondered what he’d have been doing right now if he hadn’t stopped to give Reed a ride. Probably cutting up stumps, ignoring the weekend because it was just like the rest of the week. He certainly wouldn’t be clambering down to the Hoh River, clutching a fishing pole. Or zoning out picturing Zan with her shirt off. Both of those things were good things, he decided, baiting his hook.
Earley walked into the river. The chill of the water forced air from his lungs, made his blood rush and tingle. He fished until sunset, and just when he’d started to feel like an idiot, he hooked a beauty. It jerked his line, fighting for life, but he stayed on top of it, letting it thrash and swim till it had played itself out. He watched it gasp, supple and silvery, drowning in air, then gutted it out with his Buck knife and started back up the gorge.
It was dark by the time he got back to the clearing, and the air was much colder. He built a fire in a circle of stones in front of the grandfather maple and let it burn high and hot. Then he set his steelhead onto a flat rock and left it to bake on the coals. He hadn’t thought of packing a plate or fork, so as soon as it cooled enough not to burn him, he picked it up whole in his fingers and chewed the charred flesh off the bones. It was possible he had once eaten something that tasted as good, but he couldn’t think when.
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