by Cheryl Klein
“No offense, sir, but that is like her. Lately, at least. She’s gone off a few times on trips with—friends.”
“Sure, sure,” Mr. Twentyman nods. His dark eyes dart about the bar. He’s around 50, Jody guesses; his tan skin is smooth over probing cheekbones, but his hair is almost white. “Too bad. I coulda used Meg this week—she’s so organized, and I’ve got a lot of work to do. Lot of work,” he adds, and Jody can tell he wants to talk about what he’s working on. She remembers Meg’s stories. Mr. Twentyman always wanted to expose some corrupt local official or investigate some ancient mystery. Usually nothing came of it. He would move on to the next scandal, or people would get tired of talking to him.
“What sort of work’re you doing?” Jody asks. She nods for the bartender to refill her glass.
“Interesting you should ask. I can tell from your hands and your manner of dress that you work at the mill, no?”
“Worked.”
“Right. Worked,” Mr. Twentyman says, narrowing his eyes. “I’ve got a scoop that would be of interest to you… to a lot of folks here. But that’s exactly why I can’t discuss it.”
“Okay then.” Jody wonders if the colony has quieted down for the night. She wants to crawl in bed beside Imogen. Their room—there are real rooms now, built by Jody—is one of the ones that overheats. She’ll strip down to boxer shorts and slide her hands up Imogen’s dark brown thighs, warm and waiting beneath the cotton sheet. Imogen has one of those bodies that thickens with age but doesn’t lose its shape; she is a delicious second helping of herself.
“Well, I suppose I could let you in on it, but we can’t talk here.” Mr. Twentyman takes Jody’s arm like a gentleman and she follows him to the alley behind the bar. Jody feels the glassy eyes of the guys watching the old Indian in the suit and the woman with the blonde crew cut walking as if they’re on their way to the dance floor. She clenches her free fist. The alley is gray with sludgy snow. The sky is clear and full of stars, as if pleading innocent to ever having inflicted foul weather on the town.
“It’s freezing out here, sir. Tell me quick.”
“Inga clarkei,” Mr. Twentyman says. At first Jody thinks he’s talking about one of the Clarksons, a female maybe. After a dramatic pause, he continues, “Western sugar moth. Little bugger likes to hang around our trees. Feeds off the flowers that grow at the base of sugar pines, those little white wildflowers you see all over the mountain every spring. Sucks up that nectar like it’s a dry martini. When they’re drunk they curl up on some bit o’ bark and snooze a while.”
“Right,” says Jody, still confused, “except I guess we’re cutting down the trees, and now they’re endangered, ’cause that’s the only place they can ‘snooze.’ “
“No!” Mr. Twentyman shouts triumphantly. He quickly lowers his voice. “No. That’s the northern bark moth. Inga lunaris. It actually eats pine needles. But more importantly, it’s only found in Oregon, Washington, and the southwestern part of Canada. I caught a couple of our little green moths myself, snuffed them out good. I figured they weren’t too endangered yet. But then when I compared them with field guide photos of the northern bark moth, I discovered our boys, inga clarkei, weren’t endangered at all.”
Snooty environmentalists still traipse through Jody’s head. They all look like Petra in a lab coat. She pulls her jacket tight around her, and clarifies, “So they closed the mill to save a moth that doesn’t even live here? That just has a twin here?”
“Bingo.”
Jody can hear faint music coming from Lilac’s around the corner on Calla Boulevard. It’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” “That’s great news!” she says. “You just have to show the Clarksons, or the scientists or whoever, and they won’t have to close the mill!”
“Not that easy, I’m afraid. Let me ask you something: Did you sign any papers when they canned you?”
“Yeah, some stuff to make sure we got our—what did they call it?—our severance pay.”
Mr. Twentyman shakes his head. “I won’t bore you with the details, ma’am, but you’re not getting your job back. None of you are. Truth is, the wood and the work are better and cheaper up in Oregon. The mill owners want to move there, but they knew if word got out, they’d have the whole town to answer to.”
Jody has never felt a kinship with the guys at the mill. She stays out of their way, and they respect her thick-for-a-girl biceps. But suddenly she wishes they were large enough to be a union shop. She wants to spill the news, to rally with them in the cold dark night. They’ll storm the Clarksons’ big house on the western edge of town, chop it down like a giant tree.
“And so what if it gets out now?” Jody asks.
“If it gets out now, it’s just a story,” Mr. Twentyman says. “But what a story. I’m working on it.” He pats her on the shoulder.
Something about the gesture makes Jody ask, “Mr. Twentyman? You do a lot of research about things that happened in Lilac Mines, right?”
“Surely do.”
“Can I ask you a question? Have you ever heard of someone named Calla Holmes? Who might have been Lilac’s friend?”
Mr. Twentyman looks at the black sky. His face twitches as he pages through mental files. “Calla Holmes? Oh, well, there’s a Calla Hogan, of course. The Hogan newspaper family’s girl. I’ve got a picture of all of them back at my office. Good-looking family, although the first wife—Calla’s mother—died of scarlet fever, but quite a family. Newsmakers, literally. Wise not to seek their fortune in mining. Mining is so unreliable. But the news, that’ll always be there, good or bad. And if there’s no news, you just make something up!” He laughs. “They were the Clarksons of their day. Almost.”
“But you don’t know whether Lilac and Calla knew each other?”
“I don’t know that they didn’t,” Mr. Twentyman says. “Hard to prove a negative.”
“Well, thanks.”
“You give me a call if you hear from Meg,” he says. “I’m listed.” He leaves, walking down the alley, looking over his shoulder in fear of spies behind trashcans, or in hopes of them.
Jody has just promised not to tell Mr. Twentyman’s secret, but it seems that it is her secret, too. She is the one with a troublesome shoulder and torn-up hands. And no job. Maybe she could discuss the matter with one person, someone reliable. Maybe it’s not too late. She slips back inside the bar and scans the room. A man she recognizes but doesn’t know well is kissing the old Bettie Page poster that hangs over the row of tall tables at the back of the bar. His friends are egging him on. He tongues the glass and sloshes beer. She keeps looking. Zeke Espey is hunched over an empty shot glass at the bar. She hopes he hasn’t seen her. A couple of guys are here with their wives. They’re the most likely to behave themselves, but Jody isn’t sure what to do with them. Is she supposed to greet the wives as one of their husbands’ co-workers or as a fellow female? Finally she spots Tom Barratucci sitting at one of the shorter tables near the front of the bar. Tom is part Indian, part Italian, part something else. A mix of dark things. He’s sort of the de facto black man at the mill—the guys alternate between baffled reverence and overly barbed ribbing. And Jody, in turn, watches him from afar. They could never be friends—that would be asking for trouble—so she alternates between empathy and calculated distance. But tonight she says, “Hey Tom.”
He nods. He doesn’t offer her the other chair at his table. There are two empty glasses in front of him, and she wonders if he’s here with someone. “With” is ambiguous in Lilac Mines. You can go to a bar alone and find yourself with everyone you know. Tom’s eyes are red beneath long lashes that Jody never got close enough to notice before. Curls of dark hair are matted against his forehead, like little Christy’s hair when she wakes up from her nap. “What do you want, Clatterbuck?” he asks gruffly.
The baby-fine hairs on the back of Jody’s neck act as antennae that sense hostility, people who are insulted by the mere presence of a dyke. The hairs have gotten coarser over
the years, but they still know things before her brain does. She takes a step back from the table, but continues. “I heard something about the layoffs is all. About how the ’endangered species’…”
Tom’s lips peel back, and she sees that his teeth are long and yellow. “You know who should be an endangered species, Clatterbuck?” He says her name like an epithet. “Fucking dykes. You think the Clarksons wanna stay in a town that’s turning into a hippie commune? I know you live with them. You think folks like it that you’re taking over the mill, bringing more and more of your hairy girlfriends there each year?”
Jody thinks about how she urged Linda and Essie to apply for work there, even as receptionists or bookkeepers. But they sided with Petra. Their environmental consciences would let them spend the money Jody bought home, but not actually see a tree slaughtered.
“We’re not taking over, we’re just working, same as you,” Jody says, but she’s seen this look before. It’s a no-turning-back look. Tom’s hands are shaking. He’s had to work up the courage to be mean, and now that it’s turned him into something else, he will run through the forest, biting.
Jody can bite back. She knows how to let words like Tom’s blow past her like a wildfire, just hot enough to singe her skin and get her mad, not close enough to burn her. She gave Zeke Espey a fat lip that made him lisp like a sissy. But tonight she doesn’t have the energy to fight for the same thing she always fights for, which is nothing at all. Not with quiet, distraught Tom Barratucci. Tonight she is 36 years old and her shoulder hurts. “Never mind,” she says. “See ya around.” His snarl follows her out the door.
Jody makes her way through brown snow-sludge to her Edsel. She has never been as riveted by Lilac as others are. She went to Petra’s ridiculous séance in the woods a few years ago because she knew Jean wouldn’t be able to stand being the only butch there. But the past has never seemed particularly useful to Jody. It’s either painful or pointless, stuff for college professors to debate as they polish their thick glasses.
Now, though, she wonders why Lilac got a whole town and Calla—if she was really Lilac’s friend—just got one street. And what she died of. Jody wonders why the northern bark moth is worth saving, but the western sugar moth is just a pawn. She thinks of environmentalism as another hobby for people with too much free time, but on a logical level she wonders: if the western sugar moth is not endangered, but they keep chopping down the trees it naps in, will it become endangered? Will the western sugar moth be punished for surviving and reproducing and not complaining? Except it won’t be, because it’s masquerading as the northern bark moth. It’s pretending to be something more precious, and whoever decides these things has decided to save it.
THE PATRON SAINT OF TRAVELERS
Anna Lisa: Fresno, 1974
Anna Lisa comes home late from her hospital nursing internship at Saint Julian’s. She chose the hospital after her classmate Letty Quintero told her, “Saint Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of travelers and hotelkeepers and murderers and clowns.” It has proven to be a good choice, leaving her too tired to think at the end of the day.
Terry is late too; he’s grading tests again. Two years ago, he sold The Quill Pen and started teaching elementary school. He just had to take a couple of exams, having minored in primary education in college, a fact Anna Lisa didn’t know until he announced his career shift. He took on 25 fifth graders and stopped bothering Anna Lisa about having a baby. She was relieved, of course, but also saddened. She missed him having hope in her. She takes a TV dinner out of the freezer and puts it in the oven and waits. The house is quiet. She wishes she had a dog. Outside a layer of thick Valley mist muffles her May flowers. There are ten minutes left on her meatloaf in the oven when the phone rings.
“May I speak with Anna Lisa Hill?” The woman’s voice is deep, and awkwardly formal.
“Speaking… Well, it’s Kristalovich now, but, yes, that’s me.”
“Al?”
“Meg?” The voice on the other end of the line is not Meg’s, but this is what Anna Lisa says, as if she’s playing the word-association game that terrified her in Psychology 100.
“Did you hear, then?” says the woman.
“Hear what?”
“About Meg. Al, it’s Jody Clatterbuck.” As if there might be other deep-voiced Jodys in her life these days.
“Jody! Wow, are you still in Lilac Mines?”
“Yeah, but not for long. The mill closed in March, and no one here has any money. Imogen and I are gonna look for a place in San Francisco. It’ll be weird to live in a real city, but I dunno, maybe it’ll be okay. Everyone’s getting outta here. Even Petra… the girl is stubborn, but she ain’t strong.”
“Who’s Petra?”
“That’s right, she came after your time. Anyway, Al, I called because Meg… so you didn’t hear?”
“No, hear what? Who would I have heard from? Meg and I haven’t talked in years.”
“Right. Well…. Um…. God…. ”
Anna Lisa watches the clock above the oven. In six minutes her meatloaf will be done. The green beans, the nubbly corn, and the chocolate pudding that will burn her tongue because she’ll try to eat it first. Except in six minutes she might never feel like eating again.
“Al,” Jody says quietly. “She killed herself.”
Because there is something growing inside of Anna Lisa. It was planted a long time ago and Jody’s words are a bullet, puncturing the bulb and releasing the thing that wanted to grow. It fills her stomach and climbs her throat. She makes a choking sound into the mouthpiece of the phone.
“She hung herself. We should’ve seen it coming. I mean, sometimes she was fine and all, but…” Jody’s voice is full of anger and regret. But it’s the “we” that Anna Lisa hears. There’s a group of them, out there in Lilac Mines, to hold each other up as their limbs turn to liquid, to keep each other from washing down the mountainside.
“When did it happen?” Anna Lisa says finally. This seems important. She cannot grasp certain things right now, not yet, so she will focus on the details.
“Last week. Thursday night, we think. We would have called you sooner…” Her voice trails off. Meaning, but no one thought of it. Anna Lisa had been gone almost eight years. What was five more nights? Anna Lisa works backward. Last night she studied for her cell biology exam. Sunday night she and Terry ate seven-seas casserole in front of the TV. Friday and Saturday nights she spent assembling wedding decorations with Suzy, who is in town for her wedding to an engineer named Martin Ketay. And Thursday night Anna Lisa stayed late at the hospital, hanging bright prints she’d found at the Salvation Army on the walls because she thought the place could use a little cheer. During each of those activities, Meg was already dead.
“What time?” Anna Lisa asks. She wants it to have been when she was doing something meaningful. She wants to have felt a chill in the hushed hospital corridors, or to have been hanging a picture Meg would have loved.
“No one knows,” Jody says. “We saw her at Lilac’s on Wednesday. She was her regular self, kind of drunk and quiet.”
Except this is not Meg’s regular self, as far as Anna Lisa is concerned. Meg is talkative. Meg dances.
“Essie went over there, ’cause, well, actually Meg and Essie had sort of been getting together. They weren’t a couple or anything—Meg would only go for butches—but Essie got this haircut a couple of weeks back and, who knows, maybe Meg started to look at her different. Anyway, Essie went over there Friday morning. She had some zucchini bread that Linda made. She could hear some music inside, but Meg didn’t come to the door. So she opened it. Meg never locked it—we always told her that was stupid, living alone in the mountains. So Essie found her—” Anna Lisa doesn’t know who Essie is, or Linda.
Jody’s voice trips over itself. It has been trotting along on the details, but now it slows, as if climbing a steep trail. “Hanging from… you remember that wardrobe she had? I guess she tied a rope… somehow… and she was�
�� stiff. Essie said her face was blue and her neck had… Anyway, we think it happened Thursday night.”
The timer on the stove buzzes. An alarm going off in another world, where time still exists. Anna Lisa lets the vibration bore through her as she stands still, feet rooted to the linoleum, hand gripping the yellow receiver. All these years, she’s pictured Meg as she was in 1965. A fitted dress made of some slightly rough material that might make Anna Lisa’s skin break out if she touched it. Wavy brown hair begging to be mussed by sex. Bessie Smith spinning. Pulp novel splayed on her soft patchwork quilt. Meg frozen, not at absolute zero where molecules stop moving, but a commonplace sort of frozen, where they buzz about but don’t really change. It occurs to Anna Lisa that, in this way, she has already killed Meg. Made her hover there, a memory.
“Was there a note?” she asks. She wants to hear that there were pages and pages addressed to My Darling Anna Lisa. She’d accept the guilt in exchange for proof of her own existence.
“No,” says Jody. “No note.”
And what happens now? Anna Lisa is moving through something thick, like water or a dream or smoke. What do people do when someone removes herself from time?
Anna Lisa chokes, “Funeral?”
“A funeral? No. I mean, we had a little service for her here at the colony. Sunday night. But Petra got a hold of Meg’s father—they grew up in the same town, you know—and her… body was shipped back there.”
Anna Lisa thinks of Meg flying over the thawing mountains, Midwestern farmland, places Anna Lisa has only seen in pictures.
“I guess they’ll have some kind of funeral for her there. She hadn’t talked to her father in years. Petra said he yelled at her, as if she was the one who made Meg come out to California. Even though Petra was in fucking junior high school when Meg left.”
“And what did you do at, uh, the colony?” Anna Lisa asks.