Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “That sounds real nice,” her uncle says in a flat tone that suggests he’s not one for the outdoors.

  “So where to?” Willow asks after the van coughs to life, realizing that she and Harris didn’t discuss where to deliver Everett once she’d retrieved him.

  He shifts on the beaded seat cover. “There’s something I need to do in Saskatchewan,” he says, almost bashfully. “And I plan to hop one of those airplane flights to get there.”

  Willow shakes her head. “Saskatchewan’s close. You’d be better off just taking the train east from here.”

  At this, she swears he shudders. “I’ve had my fill of trains,” he says with a masklike expression. She remembers her father mentioning one Christmas after he’d drunk too much sake that Everett had been a hobo during the Great Depression, a train-hopper, and a veteran of the First World War before that, details that seemed utterly prehistoric. “And besides,” Everett adds. “I need to check in with my parole officer in Vancouver before I go anywhere.”

  “Be warned: flying has got expensive since the oil crisis with the Middle East.”

  “That’s fine,” he replies. “I did some carpentry work while I was in there. I probably built ten thousand birdhouses, and some shelves for the prison library. So I was able to sock some money away.”

  “Vancouver it is,” she announces, with no small amount of dread at the idea of returning to the big city and once again exposing herself to the scrutiny of law enforcement. She lights a menthol and coaxes the Westfalia from the penitentiary’s parking lot, the ominous black sedan that was following her still creeping through the back alleys of her mind.

  ALL THE YEARS IN BETWEEN

  USUALLY, THE ENVIRONMENTALIST in Willow detests the fact that she finds the act of driving so profound, that such joy can be decanted from something that lays so much smog on the biosphere. Today, however, the drive is a drag. She’s unaccustomed to having a co-pilot, and it doesn’t help that Everett’s prison stint seems to have atrophied the knack for conversation he displayed in his letters. He’s too stiff. Too cordial. Too unwilling to meet her eyes. In the flesh, it seems that her mysterious outlaw uncle is about as much fun as her father. So after a few hours of silence—Everett staring with wonderment at the scrolling landscape like an acid-tripping freshman—Willow’s eyelids grow heavy. It’s then she remembers the white crosses in the glove box, leftover pills from that decadent final week with Sage. To perk herself up—and to compensate for Everett’s miserly way with words—she discreetly pops two.

  “Thanks for doing this,” he says finally, after they’ve watched the highway’s lines arc and stutter for another hour, while Willow sucks down menthol after menthol, her smoke-scorched eyes darting to the rear-view mirror every few seconds to check for the black sedan. “I never learned to drive myself.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” Willow says, trying not to grind her teeth.

  “So how is old Harris holding up?”

  “He and I don’t practise what you’d call regular contact,” she says, and for a second she’s forced to ponder once more the unprecedented sentimentality of their most recent interaction. “He’s fine, though, I suppose. He’s slowing down now that he’s retired. At least he’s not a full-time forest murderer anymore. He listens to birds now.”

  “And that friend of his? What’s his name—Feeney?”

  The question seems loaded in ways she can’t decipher, though the name is unknown to her. “Must be before my time,” she says. “Harris never had any friends. He prefers assistants. They’re much easier to order around.”

  But her response only saddens her uncle, whose face clouds over, and he remains quiet for some time. “At least he has you,” he says.

  She laughs bitterly. “I think I’ve been more of a headache to him than anything, especially since I dropped out of his alma mater.” With her tongue racing from the speed, she describes her brief stint at Yale—a final gambit for Harris’s impossible-to-attain approval—and how initially she loved the field trips to the woods of upstate New York and Maine, and the classes in “forest management,” which, she later realized, was just a euphemism for determining which trees to destroy first. It wasn’t until the end of her second semester, under an enormous chestnut tree outside the campus chapel, that she read a book called Our Plundered Planet and her entire world caved in. The exploitation, the waste, the destruction of the land and its indigenous peoples were all laid bare, and, worse, it was people like her who’d perpetrated these crimes. “I dropped out that week and went tree planting,” she says. “I’m not boring you with this, am I?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “I could listen to you all day.”

  After they’ve left the grasslands behind and climbed up into a wooded valley of tall lodgepole pine, Willow notices a dark sedan in the rear-view mirror. How long has it been there? she wonders in a panic. “I need to pee,” she says, and pulls onto an old logging road, feeling great relief when the car carries on down the highway. She parks in a patch of gravel near a cobalt-blue mountain stream and goes off into the woods. Returning, she watches her uncle limp out to a lone cypress that bends over the stream’s bank, leaning against its trunk and tearing off some new-growth needles from its lowest branches. He proceeds to crush them in his hands, then cups the needles to his face and inhales deeply—an act of such strange intimacy, Willow feels guilty being witness to it. Every culture has its tree-related myths: from the ubiquitous trees of life that quite literally hold up the sky, to the monstrous trees that eat toddlers or drink human blood, to the trees that play pranks or heal the sick, remember stories or curse enemies. And watching her uncle, who has time-travelled here from a different age, she’s reminded that trees are also capable of resurrection.

  When he returns to the Westfalia, his hair is slicked back with stream water, and the citrusy aroma of pine floods Willow’s nose. “Thanks. I needed that,” he says in a markedly enlivened tone while meeting her eyes for the first time. Willow remembers the oppressive concrete and steel of the prison, how its designers had avoided using wood in a way that felt vindictive.

  “They move you around when you’re in prison for that long,” he says, as she tentatively steers them back onto the highway, but not before checking both directions for black cars. “First I was in Stony Mountain. Then the Kingston Pen. Some years I couldn’t see any greenery at all from my cell window. Other times, it was just a few scrubby black maples out on the yard’s perimeter. For a while it was a nice stand of south-facing birch, and I could watch their bark peel back like parchment. Those were the best five years.”

  “You know, your letters were very important to me growing up,” she says. “Sorry I just kind of trailed off and never thanked you.”

  “I always knew it would end. And I should be the one thanking you. I’m not sure I would have made it through those early years without your letters to look forward to.”

  “What was it like?” she asks, instantly regretting the question. A child’s question.

  “Oh,” he says. “It was like riding a train car that doesn’t go anywhere. Riding it with some of the worst and some of the best people you ever met. And doing that for decades.”

  “The longest they ever kept me in jail for trespassing on a forest lot was overnight, and that was more than enough,” she says, silently wondering what kind of time the destruction of three logging machines worth a million dollars each will fetch her if she’s caught.

  Everett flashes a quick smile, his first. “You get used to it. You find ways to handle the time. I went in during what they’re calling the Great Depression—and even after I learned to read I stuck to novels and never followed the news. I figured it’d all just be different by the time I got out. I miss anything important?”

  “The stock market’s just crashed again and lost half its value,” Willow says. “Not as bad as it did in your day, I guess. And as I said there are gas shortages, because oil prices have gone crazy. They’ve lowered the speed limit i
n Oregon to conserve fuel.” She lights another menthol and continues her lecture on the festering rot of human greed and consumerism, while also stressing how Mother Nature is pushing back with acid rain and resource depletion and desertification, and how a global environmental apocalypse will be the only way people finally learn their lesson. While listening to herself talk, she wonders if it’s cruel to describe the world’s imminent end to a man who’s just regained it after so long a time away.

  “There were some good years in there, though, right?” Everett asks after she’s talked herself out. “Other than that Second Great War?”

  “Sure, things were fairly comfortable for a while after that.”

  He nods. “Sorry to have missed it. Not the war, I mean. But all the years in between.”

  I WON’T MENTION IT AGAIN

  AT DUSK, THEY pull off at another logging road for dinner. To settle her persistently gymnastic stomach, Willow brews nettle tea on the van’s propane burner. Everett accepts his clay cup, clutching it intently, like it’s brimming with liquid gold. She picked the nettle herself with cowhide gloves from one of her secret spots, and the tea is rich with tannin and chlorophyll, almost creamy.

  “I prefer simple foods,” she says later, stirring tahini into the chickpeas that she’s boiled before ladling a scoopful over his brown rice. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I can’t imagine a meal I’d rather sit down to,” he says, taking his bowl.

  “When we depend less on industrially produced food and live in the world’s quiet spaces,” she says, quoting something she read in the Whole Earth Catalog, her mouth still turbo-charged by the pills, “our bodies become vigorous. We discover the serenity of living in sync with the rhythms of the Earth. We cease oppressing one another.”

  “Makes sense,” he says, slipping his fork into his mouth. She still can’t tell if he’s capable of sarcasm.

  For dessert she offers some of the soymilk she makes, heated with honey stirred into it. Everett sips approvingly as she details the process: boiling the beans, blending them, and straining the mash through a muslin bag.

  “Even when you were just a little thing, you never could stand cow’s milk,” he chuckles after he takes an approving sip, his voice suddenly alight with the past. “I used to give you goat’s milk, whenever I could find it. But this bean milk is a fine alternative.”

  “Funny, Harris never mentioned you being around when I was a baby. When was that, exactly?”

  “Oh,” Everett says, a hesitant gaze cast into his cup. “I’m getting things twisted up. Sorry. Your father was right. I wasn’t around. All that about the goat’s milk was something Harris once told me.” Still, the warmth of his recollection moves Willow, even if he invented it. Harris never reminisced fondly over the past, and especially not over memories of her childhood.

  After they finish, Everett insists on washing the dishes in the van’s small basin while the sun’s salmon light falls fast behind the mountains.

  “So why do you choose to live this way?” Everett asks as he scrubs. “I imagine you could afford to live otherwise, if you wanted.”

  “I don’t live in my van full time,” she says. “I used to stay in a communal house in Vancouver during the winters, except now I need to figure something else out. But out here in the forests, I’m constantly reminded that I’m no more important than any other organism, and that nature is the greatest force of all.”

  Everett nods affirmatively. “As a younger man I never had much use for proper houses, either. Or people.”

  “Do you know that there were once six trillion trees on this planet?” she replies. “And now there are three trillion? How long do you think they’ll last at the rate we’re going? So I guess I’d rather be with them before they’re gone. And maybe even save a few in the process.”

  By the time the dishes are done it’s dark. But Willow is still too high to sleep, so she declares it best for them to keep moving. She’s eager to get to Greenwood Island as quickly as possible; it’s the only place she’ll be safe from the black sedans, including the one that followed them briefly on the highway. She’s realized there could in fact be many sedans, because their surveillance could be part of a coordinated investigation. She climbs behind the wheel, and though the engine starts fine, when she flicks the headlights nothing happens. Given that she rises and sleeps with the sun, it’s been ages since she’s driven at night. And with no moon, the winding mountain roads will be suicidal without lights.

  “It’s going to take a little longer for you to get where you’re going,” she says after explaining their situation.

  “Doesn’t bother me. Time and I have come to an understanding,” Everett says, his eyes fixed on the blackening trees. “This is a fine place to camp.”

  While she reaches to set up the rooftop tent, Willow’s nipples inadvertently rub against her polyester shirt, which suddenly feels like sandpaper. Then, while she’s changing into her pajamas in the woods, she checks her underwear with a flashlight and finds evidence of spotting. Her period is quite probably late, but she doesn’t use calendars, which are unnatural, invented by railroad operators and bean counters. Not that she needs a calendar to tell her that another presence has entered her belly, another flutter of the future. In Willow’s thirty-nine years of life, eight of these flutters have come and gone like uterine eclipses. Yet each one ended quickly, always during the first trimester. So I won’t be putting much stock in you either, she thinks.

  She returns to the van to find Everett reading a book in the van’s dim interior light.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” she asks while laying out their bedding.

  He holds up the cover of the Odyssey. “The prison librarian let me keep it after I borrowed it so much. I like books where people go places. Especially when they go home. It’s an inmate thing, I guess.”

  Then, just as she’s drawing the curtains, a gorge of chickpea bile crowds her esophagus and she thrusts her head out the sliding door to spew it onto the gravel. “Don’t worry, it’s not the food,” she says through a cough when Everett comes to her side.

  She brushes her teeth then proceeds to roll a neat little joint of indica on the van’s fold-out table. As she hoped, the smoke eases her nausea, and out of sheer habit, she holds the roach out to Everett, who to her surprise pinches it in his fingers and purses his lips.

  “I’m happy to sleep outside if you’d rather be alone in your vehicle,” he says, exhaling a great ivory plume and gesturing to the fold-out hide-a-bed she’s set up in the van’s lower section.

  “It’s freezing at night this high in the mountains,” she says. “You’ll be better off in here.” She climbs up into the rooftop tent, kills her flashlight, and listens to the wind sigh through the mesh screen just as the joint hits her in earnest. Weed has always been her shortcut to tuning into the sweetest natural frequencies, a way of assuming her rightful place in the great cosmic scheme. She lies there, feeling the contours of time warp and expand, listening to the great symphony of grass and wind and tree.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been with anyone who isn’t locked up with me against their will,” her uncle says from below, just as she’s beginning to drowse.

  “So why don’t you and my father speak?” she asks sleepily.

  Everett lets out a long breath. “He did something to me,” he says, his voice croaky and philosophical from the dope. “It wasn’t a good thing that he did. But I understand why he did it. He was protecting something he cared about. Something he lost in the end anyway.”

  “Let me guess what he was protecting,” she says. “It’s what you keep in a bank.”

  “Something like that,” he replies.

  “Harris has a talent for leaving devastation behind wherever he goes. Just ask all those acres of stumps and slash piles. I will say, though, that it seemed very important to him that I come get you. He offered to let me live on Greenwood Island in exchange.”

  “That was very kind
of him,” he says. “And it’s a fine place.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Oh, no,” he says. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Yeah, well, most of all Harris likes to get people to do things for him. It makes him feel powerful.”

  “You know, I was so nervous at first, when I heard you were coming. I didn’t know what to say or how to act,” Everett says, his voice suddenly thick with emotion. “But I can’t tell you how nice it is. Just to see you. It’s been so long. And you’ve grown even more beautiful than I imagined, Pod.”

  Willow bolts upright, smacking her head on the tent’s aluminum struts, a surreal sense of recognition overwhelming her. “What did you call me?”

  “Beautiful?” he stammers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m out of practice with talking. And this stuff has my head all twisted up.”

  “No, the name. Pod?”

  “Oh,” he says nervously. “That’s just a nickname I made up when you were a baby. You were really something then. Just a little package, so stuffed with life.”

  “I thought you said you never knew me as a baby,” Willow says coldly.

  “Yes,” he stammers again. “That’s right.”

  All at once she feels the heaviness of the day: the oppressive prison, the flutter of the future, the dead headlights, her grinding anxiety about the black sedan. And now she’s grown sufficiently weary of her stoned uncle’s weird prison fantasies about their shared history.

  “Just do me a favour and keep the nicknames to yourself,” Willow says, lying back and re-cocooning herself in her sleeping bag. “That’s not the trip I’m on, okay? I’m not a baby anymore. And I’m definitely not anybody’s pet.”

  A long silence.

  “You’re right,” he says, almost too quiet for her to hear. “You’re not. I won’t mention it again. Good night, Willow.”