“Two cords,” he said.
“Ah, fuck.”
“After that, hike to Shafer Peak and find me a three-inch sapling, twelve feet long, for the rock star’s bed. Drag it back without doing any damage and then we’ll see if you’ll have a job in the morning.”
“You’re gonna kill me, man,” Eli said, but he took the ax. Sasha followed him, snapping at his heels as he walked to the woodpile at the side of the cabin.
“He’s not worth saving,” Cal told Jake.
“So he tells me.”
“I found his dad behind Teton’s last night. Wes had so much vodka in his blood, he was pissing it.”
“Eli’s no drunk,” Jake said. “He’s never even tasted my beer.”
“Would you, if Wes was your father?”
They walked into the cabin Jake had built by hand ten years ago. When he had surfaced in Prescott fifteen years ago, he’d taken a job he had never considered in his other life, as a carpenter’s assistant. He had tried to hate the work, but the truth was he took to wood the way he figured a mother took to a child. He wrapped his fingers around a smooth trunk and thought, Now this has possibilities. This is something I might be able to make right.
He started making pine furniture on the side, and was so good at it he soon had enough orders for lodgepole beds to go into business himself. He found this property on the back side of Kemper Mountain and, after studying a few log cabins in the area, decided to build one himself.
He was meticulous about the logs he chose, because he liked them marred—knotted, lightning-struck, shredded by bear claws. He handcrafted every support beam, joist, and table in the house from damaged wood. The floors, loft, ceiling, and walls were all scarred pine, and over the years the floors had gotten even worse, gouged out by the dogs’ toenails. Only five small windows and a sliding door broke up the expanse of bad wood. On cloudy afternoons, he could hardly make his way down the steep stairs from the loft without a flashlight. If he took a deep breath, he got a little woozy breathing in so much natural fiber at once.
From the highway to Jake’s cabin was a forty-five minute drive. He was separated from his nearest neighbor by one air mile, or three hazardous driving miles, where the slightest miscalculation could send a car plummeting down a ravine that appeared to have no end.
Cal and Eli were the only people with the guts to come up here now, and even they must have wondered, more than occasionally, what the hell for. Even they must have smelled the tobacco and spite in the air. Since they’d never seen a ghost, they probably thought it was all coming from Jake.
“You still working on that bench for Doug Dawson?” Cal asked. “How’s he feeling?”
“The man’s dying. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
He walked out onto the back deck, where the air was yellow and thick with pine pollen.
Cal came out behind him. His weight, along with Jake’s, made the large deck sway. “You got anything to say?” Cal asked.
Jake sucked in hard, until his chest burned. Cal asked the same question every time he saw him. He must have smelled the bitter stench that rose out of Jake’s chest, where he’d stuffed down what he’d done and what had been done to him, and let it rot.
What Jake could say was that fifteen years ago, his life went into cardiac arrest. He walked out the door one morning as one person, and could never come home again because sometime before nightfall, he became someone else. He could say it was entirely possible to walk around without a soul, because he’d done it. He was made up of little more than guilt and regret, both of which he wouldn’t wish on anyone, not even his ghost. He could say he’d killed a man out of sheer rage, and lost everything he’d ever wanted.
But all he said was, “Nope.”
Jake picked up one of the many rawhide bones he kept on hand for his dogs and flung it as far as he could. The three of them bounded off the deck, snapping at one another for the lead. Jake sat down in one of his uncomfortable Adirondack chairs, the same kind he sold for four hundred dollars apiece to Montana actors.
“You all right?” Cal asked. There was no sound except a few early-bird crickets and Eli’s curses as he split wood. Jake was not all right; he figured that much was obvious.
“You see that woman?” he asked. “Doug’s daughter?”
“I saw the granddaughter at the high school,” Cal said. “I’d suggest you keep Eli here when you go down to work. He’s no Romeo, but then, when you’re that bad, you don’t have to be.”
Jake nodded. When he’d picked up the paper that morning, he’d seen the ad for the amazing fortuneteller. He never used to believe any of that stuff, but he’d had time to change his mind about everything. It was no longer a stretch of the imagination to think a gypsy might have the key to his future, so he had called her.
“Come any night after six,” she’d told him. “I’m in the MesaLand retirement community. On Sage Street. The house with the garden.”
And then he’d known who she was and something else too. He’d known if she read his fortune, she would find herself in it. He remembered the look on her face when he’d driven off, and how he’d felt he was making the worst mistake of his life by not taking her with him. But he made terrible mistakes every day of his life; he was a master at messing up every possible good fortune. So when he found himself in the middle of his lonely woods, wanting something for the first time in fifteen years, he just hung up on her.
“You interested in her?” Cal asked.
Jake looked up. Cal had a wife and two grown kids, one a pediatrician, the other just finishing her masters in physics. He was from another planet, one Jake did not have access to. Jake still had no idea what he was doing here.
“I’m not interested,” he said.
Cal fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “You should be.”
FIVE
KNIGHT OF WANDS RISK
Jupiter’s Beard was so aggressive, Doug could watch it overtake his chestnut rose in a single afternoon. Two years ago, he had planted a two-inch seedling along the back wall and now it was twelve feet around. Like everything else in his garden, it was lush, colorful, and totally lacking in form. His neighbors might admire his jungle display, but master gardeners would cringe at his use of invasive crown vetch to fill a hillside. They’d berate him for not cutting back his leggy clematis to its roots each winter, and for failing to master the art of vase-shaped pruning.
The worst he had ever done was take out a row of raggedy crape myrtles. He’d never had the stomach for hard gardening, and luckily there had never been a need for it. When he’d tried to thin out his purple coneflowers, they’d merely sprouted across the street, in the cracks beside Wendy Ginger’s lap pool. When he’d made up his mind to cut back the faded torch lilies, his wife beat him to the task, sneaking off to the lily bed in the dead of night.
Standing at his bedroom window, he scratched his forehead, then stopped when he picked off another piece of scab. He looked down at his bloody fingers, more stupefied than anything else. Despite lying in a hospital bed every Wednesday for a month with cold chemotherapy dripping into his vein, and now getting radiation treatments five days a week, he sometimes did not believe it. Sometimes he felt so good, he wanted to take Maggie to dinner and stay until they finished a whole bottle of wine. Sometimes, no kidding, he just stared in the mirror and did not know the chalky man who stared back at him, a creature frail and spindly as silver sage. Sometimes the sight of himself was worse than the cancer itself.
He was a gardener, never in much of a hurry, and now it looked as though he’d run out of time. He hadn’t done half the things he’d set out to do. He hadn’t made it to Europe or taken Maggie to New York yet. He hadn’t tackled the Pacific dogwood, a tree that hated garden watering, fertilizer, pruning, and sunburn, a tree that was spectacular if you didn’t kill it. If you did everything exactly right.
The door opened behind him and Savannah came in carrying a tray of cream of mushroom soup. She had brough
t him a tray that morning too, loaded down with eggs, bacon, and thick wedges of cantaloupe. He had sucked on the bacon to humor her, but she must have noticed him gasping when the salt burnt the tender roof of his mouth.
Maggie came in behind her. “Sit down, Doug,” she said. “For God’s sake.”
Doug sat on the bed, though he hated the smell of his sheets, his own appalling odor sunk deep into the cotton and coming back at him. In his most fragile moments, a pillow under his head made him want to give up then and there.
He was grateful that the garden was self-sufficient. He’d installed a drip irrigation system before planting a thing. He had not wanted to do it; he had loved those evenings in Phoenix when he’d come home from work, eaten a few bites of steak, then had gone outside to hold a hose to his azaleas. He had watered till midnight some nights, until he’d tuned his humming to the same frequency as the shrill cicadas, until each root was mistaking desert soil for farmland.
But the day they bought this Prescott house, he’d gotten a funny feeling in his gut. An uneasy impulse to order three-year-old Juneberry trees instead of two, and put in pampas sod rather than sowing from seed. A sudden, desperate need to stop wasting time.
“Eat your soup,” Maggie said.
Doug looked at the food and felt his stomach flip. When Savannah put the tray on his lap, though, he managed to take one spoonful.
“I’ve got two appointments for tomorrow after work,” Savannah announced. “High-school girls.”
Maggie snorted, but Doug reached for his daughter’s hand. “Will you read my fortune now? I’m thinking it’s got to be good.”
Savannah looked at Maggie, but for once Doug’s wife was silent. Savannah clapped her hands and went for her cards. When the door closed behind her, Maggie took a good, long breath.
“I don’t want to hear it when the Death card comes up,” she said.
“It won’t come. You’ll see.”
He looked out the window. Whenever he’d gotten excited over a new strain of pear tree or daylily, Maggie had looked at him coldly and said, “That’s great, Doug. Another goddamn plant.” But it was never just another plant. He only bought plants that reminded him of her. Deceivingly delicate-looking bamboo that could stand up to hurricanes, narcissus that smelled so good, he took one whiff and couldn’t think straight for hours. Tay blackberry, with its long, thorny vines that hid huge clusters of fruit. When he was knee-deep in soil, when he had his back to his house, he was really thinking of Maggie. She was in his roses, in the first shoots of ivy, in everything.
He fell in love with her the first time he saw her. He and his best friend Michael had planned a road trip to Santa Fe, and at the last minute, Michael’s younger sister joined them. Maggie had sat silently in the backseat of Michael’s stuffy Oldsmobile while he and Michael talked about the lack of a professional football or baseball team in town, the dearth of datable girls, and the merits of Budweiser over Coors. They smoked constantly and, after six hours, Maggie stuck her head out the window and screamed.
She pulled her head back in and glared at them both. “You are so simple.”
Michael swerved to the side of the freeway and cut the engine. “You’re a goddamn baby. You’re the simple one. You and your stupid fashion designs, your pathetic dreams of going to New York. I’ll bet you one million dollars right now you’ll never make it west of the Mississippi.”
Maggie didn’t look at him, not until the end, and then she sneered, “It’s east of the Mississippi, you fool.”
“Whatever.”
She reached into her purse, took out a small mirror and lipstick tube, and put on a fresh coat of passion pink. She did not say another word, and she didn’t have to. Doug was already lost. When she glared at him, he saw something he’d never seen in a woman, something fierce and unknowable. He would never crack her code, and he didn’t want to. In thirty-six years of marriage, he had never even thought of cheating. Why would he, when he woke up every morning beside a woman he could not predict?
Not everyone, of course, saw Maggie in the same light. The widows on the block avoided her. His best friends had sometimes squeezed his shoulder in pity, and Doug had laughed out loud. Maggie shouted for both of them, but only when she had an audience. In private, she said his name while she slept and sneaked into the garden when she thought he wasn’t looking. In private, she watched the designer fashion shows on cable, then dared him to say a word about the tears in her eyes. Doug was no fool; he’d learned his lesson years ago. He didn’t say a word or try to cheer her up with flowers. He just held her hand and prayed he’d been enough to make her happy.
Savannah had fought Maggie on everything from cereal choices to the meaning of love. She had fought until she must have been bloody inside. Right before she went off to marry Harry, she’d said, “God, Dad, why do you love her?”
Doug had not slapped his child; instead, he’d walked to the garden and ripped out the first of six crape myrtle trees. Savannah had followed him, and he had whirled on her.
“Remember your prom dress, the one your mother said came from Nordstrom’s? Did you really think we could afford that? No girl looked as beautiful as you did that night, and that’s because your mother swallowed her regret and bought two bolts of white silk. She sewed that design from memory. She wouldn’t look me in the eye for days.”
Savannah had blinked and blinked. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“God only knows, Savannah,” he said. “Your mother’s a complex woman. Half the time, I haven’t a clue what she’s thinking.”
“She’s not fair with her kindnesses.”
“Maybe not, but that’s her way. Stop fighting what she is, Savannah. She’s your mother. She never once let you cry yourself to sleep. What more do you need to know?”
“She’s mean,” she said.
“And you’re strong.”
Savannah came in now wearing a fuzzy brown bonnet and holding up her cards. They were slightly larger than playing cards, beautifully decorated with suns and medieval princes and sorcerers. Savannah handed them to him and he spotted the Death card sitting close to the top. He turned them over.
“Think of what you want to know,” Savannah said.
What Doug wanted to know was whether or not he’d be able to shuffle the cards. The strangest things had gone out on him. Not the muscles and senses closest to the tumor, not his eyes or hearing or the tendons in his neck, but the feeling in the tips of his fingers, the ability to curl his toes. The very best things had gone, like being able to dig his bare feet into two inches of cool, composted soil.
He turned away slightly and prayed his hands would work. He divided the cards, but he couldn’t curl his fingers, and the cards all fell out beneath him. He glanced up at Maggie, but she’d turned her back on him. She stood stiffly by the window, her arms crossed over her chest.
Savannah reached out and gathered the cards. “Just swirl them around,” she said softly. “They’ll know what to do.”
He took a deep breath. He put his hand over his daughter’s briefly, to stop them both from trembling, then swirled the cards around on the bed like a three-year-old.
He thought of the poem he’d written thirty-six years ago, on his wedding night. He’d hidden in the bathroom of their hotel room and scribbled it on toilet paper. Later, he’d rewritten the verse, along with all the sonnets and love poems that followed, onto parchment. When he stopped writing a few years into his marriage, he had a shoe box stuffed with sentimentality no one else had ever seen.
He was amateurish and mawkish with words, untutored in rhyme scheme, but that wasn’t what had made him give up the poetry. That happened the day he and Maggie went to a dinner party, and in front of twenty people, a man named Fred Feinstein proposed to the girl of his dreams. Fred was three hundred pounds and a hopeless stutterer, but nevertheless he got on one knee and haltingly recited all the reasons he adored this woman who had ne-ne-ne-never noticed his weight or sp-sp-speech problem. While every ot
her woman had tears in her eyes, Maggie went to the buffet table and piled her plate with cold cuts. “I give it six months,” she whispered to Doug. “One year, tops.”
If Maggie had read his poem on their wedding night, she would have broken down laughing, then flushed the drivel down the toilet. Yet he still remembered that poem, word for word.
Before you blew in,
all sirocco and sandstorm,
I could see clear to the edge of my desert.
Stone sky, blanched sand,
subsistence level desires,
I was colorblind.
You were technicolor lightning.
Electric gray eyes,
lips purple passion,
breath white hot irrational.
Thunderstruck,
I looked into the eye of your storm
and saw the color of forever—
not sky blue or heaven’s gold,
but a calloused, freckled ivory,
palm-sized,
tips painted hot pink.
“Are you concentrating, Dad?” Savannah asked, because he had stopped swirling the cards. He started up again and thought about the only question he really wanted answered: How much more time would he have with the woman who couldn’t hide the soil beneath her fingernails, who resorted to midnight trickery in order to protect him from grief? How much more time would he have with Maggie?
“All right.” Savannah took back the cards, sat down on the bed and laid them out.
They looked all right to him. No Death card, no Devil. Savannah’s hat dipped over her eyes as she studied them.
“This is the Hierophant.” She pointed to the first card she’d drawn. “It can mean a spiritual leader, or too much reserve and timidity.”
“Ha!” Maggie said from the corner, but she did not turn around.
“You see this?” Savannah pointed to the second card. “This is the Four of Cups. This is what crosses you. It is the card of weariness. A struggle.”
“What about that?” Doug indicated the card to the right of the four, a man sitting on a throne, the King of Swords.
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