Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  And she had held out her hand—her shrunken, IV-trailing hand—and of course June had taken it, and—

  —and something had happened. Even now, walking through the woods of Pacific Spirit Park back home in British Columbia with Coltrane whispering in her ears, June was not sure just what. But information exchange had taken place. Data of some kind had come surging up her arm from her mother’s feeble grip, and data of some other and different kind had flowed in the other direction.

  It had not been the “getting it all said” that her mother had spoken of earlier. The questions June had walked into that hospital room with were still unanswered; the words she had gone there to say were yet unspoken. But some kind of profound communication had taken place, something just as for beyond talking as talking was beyond eye contact. (And something, therefore, just as unsatisfying as eye contact had been—if for different reasons.) June did not have a mystical bone in her body…but she was quite certain that her mother had taken something from her in that brief physical contact, and imparted something important to her in return. Something almost tangible, in the form of an energy almost palpable. Some kind of change had occurred in June. She just wished she knew what, so she could explain it to Paul when she finally saw him again.

  She was still trying to analyze it, as she wandered heedless through the woods, jazz saxophone playing softly in her FM headphones. How, she thought, am I different?

  I am different in some way that I cannot define. Changed. I sense that the change is, or probably will be, temporary. Nonetheless it is important. And it reminds me of something…

  The memory surfaced. It had taken awhile because it was a memory not of a real event but of an imagined one.

  This is what I used to imagine it was like to have a magic spell put on you!

  When she was a little girl, a voracious consumer of Tolkien and his disciples, she had often acted out fantasy scenarios of her own devising in her solitary play hours. This was what it had felt like just after the wizard had placed his enchantment upon her, and just before it was fully activated by the inevitable appearance of the handsome warrior. It had something to do with the inevitability of that appearance, and the certainty that they would recognize each other at once. It was, now that she thought of it, probably one of her earliest gropings, in imagination, toward the concept of empowerment.

  Well, she already had a handsome warrior in inventory, thank you very much. She had recognized her Tall Paul on sight…and had basically won him in combat and directed that he be scrubbed and brought to her tent. Even better, he had a tent of his own now. She was as empowered in that area as she felt any need to be.

  But she did, now that she thought of it, feel more than usually empowered today, in a strange sort of way. Usually when she was in raw nature like this, she felt like a stranger, who must be careful not to offend through thoughtlessness; like a visitor to the zoo, whose gawking curiosity is a kind of impertinence; like a tourist. Today she felt, for once, at home here in the woods. And the woods seemed to agree.

  She saw more wildlife than usual, for instance. Several squirrels. A raccoon. Something she took to be a weasel, that browsed her with his eyes, like a penny-pinching shopper, and decided she was too expensive. Birds—June never saw birds in the woods, even when she was right underneath the chirping things and the branches were bare, but so far she had seen at least half a dozen, without even thinking about it. All of these wild things noticed her in return, and were wary of her—but none of them seemed to feel any need to flee. Perhaps they were all under the influence of the magic spell.

  Between her light head and her heavy heart, she felt no alarm at all when she became aware of the man ahead of her on the trail, even though he was clearly a sleazebag.

  She reached up to switch off her radio headphones, succeeded only in turning the volume all the way off, and settled for that.

  She did not even momentarily wish she had her handsome warrior with her for backup. She was armed and competent—and more than that: somehow she knew that on this day of days, she could face down a mugger with impunity, calm a psycho with her gaze, unman any rapist. Death—not the concept but the grim reality, up close and personal, ravaging one of her loved ones—had in some odd way given her power, and she could sense it. She mistook an electric tingling in her earlobes for a symptom of it. She studied the sleazebag carefully, but her pulse remained steady.

  Caucasian male, about her age. He looked like when he was five Santa had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he’d chirped, “A perpetrator.” In the distant neighborhood where her lover had grown up, in a country adjoining America called The Bronx, he would have been termed a mook. He could not possibly have passed within a thousand meters of a cop in thick fog without instant radar lock taking place. At the moment, even in the middle of nowhere and believing himself unobserved, he was managing to skulk, mope, loiter, creep and look furtive, all at the same time—a virtuoso performance. He reminded her of a man she knew called Hopeless Harry.

  He was well over two meters tall, and seemed to mass well under fifty kilos. He wore clothes meant for other people, who unless they were color-blind were not missing them, and a jailhouse haircut. On his back was a large designer backpack. Its designers had intended it to say behold me: I am rich, stylish and fit but on him it had the look of a false mustache, making him look, impossibly, even more suspicious.

  June had been moving quietly, one with the forest, even before she saw him; now she became a Shao-Lin monk walking the rice paper, leaving no trace. Her first instinct had been to change course and avoid him…but that backpack intrigued her. An instinct only slightly younger on the evolutionary scale told her it contained treasure. June Bellamy liked treasure. And she was in the mood for a distraction from her thoughts.

  She left the path and shadowed him for a little less than a hundred meters, paralleling the meandering trail. He was the kind of mook who could have been tailed through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras; for someone with a magic spell on her in a forest this damp he was candy. Twice, he spun craftily on his heel in the hope of surprising someone following him; both times his gaze passed right over her without stopping. Call me Chingachcook, she thought smugly.

  He kept staring from side to side as he walked, looking for something. Occasionally he would leave the path, pick a spot at apparent random, paw at the earth briefly with his sneakered foot (it was probably the name that had first attracted him to sneakers), and then move on.

  Finally his eye was caught by a large, freshly toppled tree about twenty meters from the trail. The bank on which it stood had been undercut by centuries of Vancouver rain, and the days of sustained downpour just ended had finished the job. The huge elm had fallen to a 45-degree angle before being caught like a drunk by its neighbors; roots clawed at the sky like tentacles frozen in spasm, bearded with brown glistening tendrils that made her think of shit tinsel. He looked around one last time, failed again to see her fifty meters away, and unslung his stylish backpack.

  She began to understand when he removed a collapsible entrenching tool and assembled it. The earth the tree had lately protected was freshly turned, easy to dig. There was indeed treasure in that bag, and Captain Kidd there proposed to bury it. June smiled.

  And almost instantly felt a stab of sadness. A week ago, such a gift from God would have been a blessing and a pure joy. Now it was a consolation prize. A prize booby.

  Still, she was forced to admit to some interest in just how much consolation; she took a position of vantage and dropped into a squat as the mook began digging.

  The longer he dug, the better she felt. The deeper he wanted his plunder buried, the more likely it was to console her. But when he began approaching a depth and dimensions which would have served for the grave of a child, nearly waist-deep in the hole he was making, she entertained a brief Pythonesque fantasy in which, having buried his treasure, he would protect its secret by shooting the guy who’d dug the hole. That way she
wouldn’t have to wait for him to pass out of earshot to uncover the swag, and there’d be that nice handy entrenching tool.

  Come to think of it, digging up a grave wasn’t something she was really in the mood for, just now—even one with treasure in it. She’d settle for marking the spot, and coming back with Paul sometime. Let him do the grunt work; that was what handsome warriors were for. Well, one of the things.

  The mook’s shovel, which had been saying chuff—shrrrp…chuff—shrrrp…chuff—shrrrp with decreasing rhythm like an asthmatic slowly recovering from an attack, suddenly said chuff—shrrrp…clack!

  Not clank! as if it had hit a rock. Not chup! as if it had hit a root. Clack! As if it had struck…she didn’t know, plastic or plexiglass or formica or something. Something manmade.

  He made a muttered sound of irritation that, if it had become a word, would have been “Naturally,” set that shovelful of dirt aside carefully, without any shrrp, then offset his point of attack slightly and tried again.

  Clack!

  “Aw, fuck!” he groaned.

  No, no, she wanted to say. “Fuck!” is the sound of an axe sinking into a tree. That was “Clack!”

  As if insisting on his point of view, he said “Fuck!” again, louder. But this time, the way he said it was so different, and so incongruous, so full of an almost religious awe, that it caused her to focus her attention on him. Because of that—remarkably—she actually recognized what happened to him next. It was a thing she had never expected to see in quite that context, but if you were looking right at it and paying close attention, it was unmistakable.

  Standing up, hip-deep in an unfinished grave, fully dressed, shovel still held in both hands, the mook threw back his head, keened like a forlorn kitten, and had an orgasm.

  It might even have been the orgasm of his life. As she stared, marveling but never doubting, June was impressed. Thanks to her mother, she had been confident in her own sexuality since the age of fourteen, but she had to admit that in a varied life she had never received applause quite as enthusiastic and sincere as the mook was now awarding to…no one at all. It was more than vocal: his body language was so emphatic and so explicit that she decided he might well have found work as a male erotic dancer, even with that body.

  I’ve heard the expression “Fuck the world” countless times, of course, she thought, but I’d never actually seen it done before.

  He was not even rubbing his groin against the wall of the pit in which he stood, though he could have. Instead he simply thrust, violently, at the air itself, and seemed to find it a more than adequate lover.

  For all its intensity, the event seemed to take somewhat less time than usual, at least in her experience, and when it was over, he simply let go of the shovel and sat down in the hole, his head disappearing almost completely from view. As the top of it bobbed up and down with his slowing respiration, its coconut-husk hair made it resemble a hedgehog trying to frighten off an intruder with a display of puffing bristles.

  Something in that hole, June thought, causes men to have instant orgasms, of higher than usual quality. I might just find a use for such a thing. God help me: I am starting to feel consoled…

  She waited, and watched, her vision so narrowed and focused that she seemed to see him in the crosshairs of a periscope, her hearing so acute she became aware of a mosquito hovering near her left wrist (the silenced headphones passed ambient sound so well, she had forgotten she was wearing them), her attention so concentrated she ignored the mosquito.

  “Angel Gerhardt,” he said aloud, his voice hoarse but happy.

  Of course. After you have sex with the universe, it is polite to offer your name. He must be a nonsmoker.

  “Heinz,” he said, “but everybody calls me Angel.”

  I see, she thought. And your address?

  “Nine four seven four Williams Street. Two two two, fourteen hundred. Frosty at eWorld dot com.” Despite their prosaic nature, he spoke each of these factoids blissfully, as though they were special joys to be shared in afterglow. “No, there’s my old lady and another couple and a dog and three cats. Linda Wu. Tony Solideri and Mary Carry-the-Kettle.”

  There were short pauses between each sentence. By now she understood that something silent in that hole was interrogating him, somehow, and she memorized every syllable. Whatever it was, was a potential enemy, and she did not want it better informed than her.

  “I was looking to bury a couple o’s of flake till it cooled off a little,” he said, still lazily ecstatic. “Yeah. No. Yeah, they do. No, they don’t. Yeah, I’m sure. I don’t trust them. Well, Linda, a little.” Even those last two sentences sounded happy.

  The next pause was long enough to give her time to work that out. Yes, his lover and housemates knew he was out burying cocaine. No, they didn’t know, or even suspect, just where. This suited June. She was much less interested in even two ounces of coke than in whatever the hell was in that hole…but either way it would be nice never to have to meet anyone who would have Angel Gerhardt for a friend.

  Then she caught herself, remembering the e-mail handle he had revealed: Frosty. Admittedly, it was more energy-efficient than walking around wearing a sandwich sign that read, “I deal cocaine in felony weight”—but not much smarter. Angel could not be considered a reliable judge of what his lover and housemates did or didn’t know. Worse, all the neighborhoods that bordered on Pacific Spirit Park were upscale: he had probably attracted attention on his way into the woods. She did not believe anyone could have tailed her the way she had tailed him; nonetheless it came to her that it might be well to complete her business here and be gone quickly.

  Angel seemed to agree. He said only one more word—“Okay”—then stood up in the hole, set down the shovel and began taking off his pants. A strange dread clutched at her, though she could not have explained why undressing was weirder than having a spontaneous orgasm dressed—but all he did was remove his threadbare boxer shorts, wipe himself off with them, drop them into the hole and put his pants back on. He was so skinny that he seemed to have no difficulty getting the pants off and on without removing his sneakers. Then he hoisted himself out of the hole and began hastily filling it back in. He did it more intelligently than she would have expected. When he was done, he collected underbrush and sprinkled it over the fresh-turned earth—again, more artistically than she’d have predicted. Then he put his backpack back on, picked up his shovel and walked away.

  His course, apparently randomly chosen, brought him rather near to June before he reached the path again, but somehow she knew he was going to walk right by without seeing her, and he did. He wore a vague, fatuous smile, and his eyes were unfocused.

  She glanced briefly toward the huge drunken tree. Whatever was down there under its uprooted base would probably stay there awhile. In any case she was not ready to confront it. She followed the backpack.

  She was tempted at first to just stroll along beside Angel, since he seemed oblivious, but she resisted, and took up stealthy station fifty meters behind him again. She was glad when, a few hundred meters later, he stopped and shook himself like a man coming out of a deep reverie. She had plenty of time to become invisible before he turned and scanned his surroundings. His expression was inhabited now, but still serene. For an instant he reminded her absurdly of her mother in her hospital bed. He checked his watch then, muttered something she couldn’t hear, and resumed walking.

  Shortly he found another exposed bank, took out his shovel and began digging again.

  As she watched, she noticed something subtle. He was not digging like a man who had already dug one hole this size this afternoon. Something seemed to have returned to him the energy he had expended earlier.

  This time his task was accomplished without incident. She was not much surprised when he buried the entire backpack: now anyone who had noticed him enter the woods and saw him leave would know he had left something behind. The trick in finding it would then be to go to the only dry trail in the fores
t, and proceed as far as the second easy place to dig. The world had lost a great rocket scientist when Angel Gerhardt decided to go into the crystal trade. Sure enough, when he was done he left the shovel about five meters away (concealed by a mound of leaves that would stay there for at least an hour, unless a breeze came up), both to mark the spot and to make it easy for anyone who found the stash to dig it up.

  Then he went away. He no longer looked serene; now he looked pooped. He dragged his feet. But he moved.

  After she was certain he was out of earshot, June took her cell phone from her hip holster and dialed Paul’s number, irritably removing her forgotten FM headphones when she hit them with the phone. Self-contained, with no wires to a Walkman or CD player on her person, they fell to the forest floor. She expected to get his machine and did; she suffered through the outgoing message with even more than her usual impatience, wishing for the thousandth time that he’d get a modern machine, which allowed your friends to cut off the message by pushing the proper key. The moment she heard the beep she began talking quickly and quietly.

  “Honey, I’m into something heavy here. I’m walking in the Endowment Lands, and I ran across a mook looking to bury something nice just off the Lowrie Trail, Dorothy twice, but that’s not the good part. He was digging away at the base of a huge old toppled elm tree, and he hit something with his shovel that made a sound like clack, something like plywood or plastic. And then—” She knew how all this was going to sound, but didn’t want to edit it. “—I know this is nuts, but then he had an orgasm, all by himself, standing up. And then he started to talk out loud, as if somebody was grilling him—only I was only fifty meters away and I swear there was no one else there. He said his name was Angel Gerhardt and he lived over in the East End on William Street and his e-mail handle, God help us all, was ‘Frosty,’ and he named his girlfriend Linda Wu and his two housemates and said none of them knew where he planned to bury the…the thing…and the weird part was, he didn’t say any of this like a mope giving information to the heat, he said it like a guy opening his soul to his new lover, happy as a clam. Then he filled the hole back in and buried the package in another spot. He’s gone now. I’m going to put the package somewhere else—but I’m not going near that goddam fallen elm without you, and maybe Rosco. I don’t know what we’ve got ahold of here, but whatever it is is very very big. Call me as soon as you get in, okay? I hope everything went okay.”