She switched on the radio—a garbled voice. She twisted the dial but could find nothing clear, the distant signals a cacophony of chopped and liquid sound. She turned it off, and the car crept along. Nailed to a tree, a weathered plank indicated the fork to Munro’s Furnace.
The road narrowed until it became a sandy rut walled by brush, and now pine boughs crushed against both sides of the car. Around a turn, the brush thinned, and another winding branch diverted from the main trunk of the road. Dark shells of ruined houses passed.
Soon, her own home loomed, dark and ugly in the windshield. It was her late husband’s house really, the house he’d been born in, last surviving structure of an old mill town. The present-day town of Munro’s Furnace, such as remained, lay another three-quarters of a mile down the road.
As the car crunched to a halt on gravel, she stared unblinking. No matter how long she lived here, it always proved something of a shock, this reality. Funny, but in her mind she always pictured the place the way it had been when they’d first begun fixing it up—scaffolding and ladders, cans of paint and bags of cement everywhere. A royal mess, but she hadn’t cared because they’d been happy, working together until…
Glaring headlights held the cobbled-together structure in cruel scrutiny: clapboard walls beneath phantom paint; boarded first-floor windows she couldn’t afford to repair; collapsing front porch propped up with old bed slats and cinder blocks. She switched off the engine, got out, and night fell on her.
Her grandmother’s home in Queens—no matter how miserable she’d been there as a child—had at least held life. This house lay black and silent. Looking up, she strained to make out the blind diamond panes of her son’s bedroom window. He’s been asleep for hours. She allowed her gaze to drift across the hanging eaves, along the tilting gabled roof…missing shingles…crumbling chimneys.
While she limped around to the back, shoulders straight, she forced herself to walk closer to the bristling shadows, farther from the house than necessary. She mounted the wobbling steps to the porch and stood, fumbling her key into the kitchen door. Why couldn’t Pamela ever remember to switch on the porch light before she left? Something wet and warm pressed against the back of her hand, and she jumped. “Stupid dog!”
From the darkness of the porch came a yawning whine and the scratching of claws on wood. “Get away, Dooley.” When she got the door open, the moldy smell of the house met her like an invisible wall. “Go back to sleep. You can’t come in.” She heard the dog yawn again and flop back down on the porch with a deflating sigh.
Pulling the door closed behind her, she could see nothing, and she stumbled across the rough wooden floor, feeling along the wall for the switch. She flinched when yellowish light flooded the kitchen.
A three-inch millipede tapped along the stove, waving its antennae in blinded confusion. Darkness bulged at the door. Pamela’s note lay on the crumb-littered tablecloth.
Granny Lee once had a dog put to sleep. Her thoughts grew fuzzy and, yawning, she crumpled the note. The cellar door stood slightly ajar. She closed it, turned the old key, remembering how they’d used to tease her about being afraid of the basement at her grandmother’s house, and how Aunt Jeanie had always been inventing errands to take her down there. Such a night for reminiscences.
The house returned to absolute darkness as she switched off the kitchen light, and a cricket began to throb beneath a floorboard. Groping her way into the living room, she walked into a chair and cursed, then felt her way toward the stairs. The other rooms on the first floor had been closed off. From outside, the voices of the night—the insects and the whispering trees—sounded low and indistinct.
As she started up the stairs, her hand rode along the smooth banister, smearing the dust. She turned left at the landing. Boards creaked under her footsteps along the hall—a loud thump followed by the weaker, softer sound. She went straight to her room.
Without turning on a light, she put the scanner on the dresser, then pulled bobby pins and elastic bands out of her hair. A hair band knotted, and she yanked it out, tossed it on the dresser. Feeling sweaty and dirty, but too tired to do anything about it, she fell across the too-soft, untidy bed. Mounds of laundry lay heaped around her, and her leg ached.
From the scanner, police calls muttered distantly. She listened to them drone and thought about getting undressed, knowing her reflexes would alert her if the tone that preceded ambulance calls sounded. The scanner’s small red light was somehow comforting, and her mind drifted to the night-light Granny Lee had given her so long ago. Even as a child, she’d thought it cowardly and every night had dragged herself out of bed to unplug it, loathing herself all the while.
Something rattled overhead. It could have been another tile that had worked loose, clattering across the roof…or it might have come from the attic. She listened to the house, to the beams that groaned like an old wooden ship.
She seldom truly slept anymore. Habitually, she’d push herself to exhaustion, then lie twitching on the edge of wakefulness, only to be active at dawn. The hours stretched long before her. Lying in the dark, eyes open, she always ran out of the distractions and evasions. In the woods. Whenever she was motionless, questions seemed to whirl around her. She’d expected so much from herself, but what had she done with her life? She was thirty-two years old now and trapped in the pines—ten years almost. It seemed so much longer than that…and so much shorter. All the things she’d wanted…
Too late.
But her work on the ambulance was important. She tried to hold to that thought as the redness of the scanner grew hazy. Her scalp still smarted from the hair band, and her thoughts drifted to how Aunt Jeanie, jealous of her light skin, had always teased her about her kinky hair, and how Granny Lee had always tried to straighten it with chemicals that stank and burned. No…I don’t want… Her hair would come out in fistfuls, and always there would be scabs on her scalp for weeks afterward. No.
She closed her eyes, and the darkness was complete.
The bedroom window was open but with the shade drawn against the night. Ten yards from the house, beyond the waving grasses, pines swayed, making a noise like the sea, like a still-boiling primeval element.
And the dream began.
Always, it was the same: torturous fragments raced through her mind, baffling glimpses of frenzy, the savage joy of forest revels, the crazed pursuit of those that fled, blood gushing hot, the rending of fawn’s flesh and the splattering of trees in infantile desecration, mad decoration, alone and not alone. She writhed on the bed.
A different noise filtered into her nightmare—a rhythmic groaning, full of the creak of bedsprings.
Half awake, she got up and made her way along the hall. At its end, steep narrow stairs were set in a closet like alcove, and she went up them practically on all fours, feeling her way in the dark.
The attic room had a sour, baby smell. She felt in the air for the string, and the naked, insect-encrusted bulb blazed, dancing. The attic was a mad jumble of chairs, boxes, broken and unwanted objects from all over the house. Oh Christ…I have to clear out this mess. Maybe tomorrow she would get to it.
The cot shook, creaking with the boy’s efforts. Naked and sweaty, his ten-year-old body twisted into serpentine knots on the bedding, and his teeth locked in the rumpled pillow he ripped with convulsive jerks of his head. The boy was asleep.
She stared. His hair was curly like hers, coppery like his father’s, and in the leprous bulb light, his damp skin had an unwholesome yellow sheen. He was the source of the sour smell. She wanted to turn away, obliquely wondering what wordless images comprised his dreams. He needs a bath. His sleep-swollen face remained buried in the pillow.
He growled.
“Matthew.”
She simply spoke his name, and though his body remained tensed, all movement ceased.
Her son. For perhaps the thousandth time, she wondered about herself, about why she felt no tenderness when she gazed on this child. She would not
pretend to herself. Her mind slid to her late husband: she’d let Wallace down in so many ways. The house. The boy. And the awful thing is I don’t really feel sorry, can’t even feel guilt anymore. Can’t feel anything. Like hot water scalding dead flesh, her thoughts brought only an echo of pain. I’m paralyzed.
There were long scratches on the boy’s legs.
He’d been in the woods again, she thought uneasily. In spite of everything I’ve said to Pamela, he’s been out in the woods.
She stared another moment. The sheet was a graying tangle, tucked between his legs, and she thought he might have wet the bed again. If I try to change the bedding now, I’ll only wake him. She switched off the light. Pamela can do it in the morning.
As on so many other nights, she groped her way back down into the narrow darkness.
Tuesday, July 14
The sky between dissolving stars grew colorless.
Thick and brown with tannic acid, the sluggish waters of the creek flowed noiselessly over their sandy bed. The fish—the stunted sunfish and carp of the barrens—began to drift up from their murky holes to feed on insects caught on the surface. Occasionally, a young perch would clear the water, landing with a splash, explosive in the prevailing hush. Then broadly circling ripples would spread across the width of the stream, lap softly against the crumbling banks, and vanish.
At the water’s edge, a large shape grew gradually more distinct—a man on the bank. Unmoving, he’d stood thus for some time, staring at something lodged upon the rocks.
The dawn light began to glint off tangled yellow hair that stuck out beneath his soiled hunting cap. Al Spencer was a big man, six and a half feet tall. Grizzled face too large, watery eyes too far apart. His whiskey belly bulged under a plaid jacket. Shoulders hunched, he studied the thing in the water; then he peered back into the still-dark pines. Good. Wes was nowhere in sight.
The stream threw off a grayish light that sloshed across the bank. He took off his jacket, folded it and laid it carefully on the sand; then he kicked off his shoes and slipped off his suspenders. The rest of his clothes made a neat pile.
Naked except for his cap, he waded into the stream, slipping on rocks slimy with green moss. The corpse was rigid, shifting almost imperceptibly in the vague current. Al grabbed it by one arm and yanked it around.
The boy’s face had become a bloated abomination. Dark hair floated, soft as seaweed, spreading around the head, and gelid eyes had swelled from their sockets, yet clung, opaque as jelly-fish. A huge tongue engulfed blue lips. Even the neck had expanded, become a puffy, waterlogged trunk slashed with purple wounds that leaked thin fluid. The green T-shirt, too tight now, rode up and exposed the round white stomach.
There was a watch on the left wrist.
Al crouched low in the shallows, the water warmish on his genitals, and with furtive gentleness, pried the watchband off the swollen wrist, over the stiffened fingers. Barely glancing at it, he slipped it onto his own wrist. Then he stuck his hands in the dead boy’s pockets but found nothing. He giggled—other things had swollen too. With a quick heave, he flipped the body over onto his stomach and fished out the wallet.
It contained twelve dollars, some pulped identification, and a graduation photo of a girl. He squeezed the money in his palm and tossed the wallet into the creek. It floated for a second before it opened and spun downward.
Splashing back to the bank, he climbed out, dripping, stuffed the loot in his jacket and picked up his pants. Then he stopped, thoughtful. It was wrong to just leave the body there. He took the pocketknife out of his pants and with long strides sloshed back into the creek.
He flipped the corpse onto its back and launched it into the center of the stream. Flies kept trying to settle. Snicking open the jackknife, he waded after it.
The blade was thick with rust.
Slowly, the woods took on color, pinkish light blazing first at the tips of the pines, then shimmering along the trunks.
He plunged the blade deep into the distended stomach, and the corpse splashed under. It bobbed, and a stiffened arm struck his thigh. Foul gases escaped as he stuck the knife in again, neatly slitting the belly. The gash burbled, and he gagged on the stench. Immediately, the body began to sink, trailing fat bubbles, fluid spreading like smoke through the brown water.
He waded back to the shallows and clawed up a slime-haired rock, breaking a thumbnail in the process. “Shit.” Grunting with the weight, he returned to where the body hung just below the surface. It drifted slightly, eyes trailing. He positioned the rock and dropped it on the chest.
The birds were beginning to make a racket as he clambered back onto the bank and shook himself like a dog. Dressing, he smiled the mild smile of a man who has completed some trivial yet satisfying task. Finally, he put the jacket back on and patted the pocket, feeling the damply wadded money.
Already, the sky was so bright it hurt his eyes. Hiking back toward camp, he sucked on his broken nail, tasting blood and foulness.
With the morning sun slanting across the corrugated roof, the heat in the ambulance hall soon reached oven proportions, even with the garage door up. A few feet beyond the blindly staring ambulance, Doris sat at a card table with Larry Jenkins, a trainee.
“This one’s from a call we had a couple weeks back.” Doris raised her voice to be heard above an old window fan that stood on the cement floor. “We picked up this guy down at that new construction site. You know the one? That development out by Batsto?” Steam swirled from a Styrofoam cup and mingled with the smoke from her cigarette.
Yawning, Larry reached for the report. “Bad?”
She checked the card. “Just a metal sliver in his hand. Lots of blood though. You should have heard him yelling. We took it out for him, bandaged him up, took him over to the clinic at Mount Misery for stitches.”
Considering what to show him next, she flipped through reports, found the one about the man who’d fallen on the chainsaw—over a week old now.
“Is this everybody?” Sounding disappointed, Larry glanced down the list of volunteers.
“And, oh yeah, whenever you pick anybody up from the construction site, you got to make sure somebody there follows you to bring the guy back.”
“I thought you had more women working this thing.”
Walking through the hatch, Jack Buzby sauntered over to the table. It had been his idea to get his buddy Larry involved. They did everything together, almost. Both were volunteer forest-fire wardens, and both worked for a roofing company owned by Larry’s uncle. “How’s little Larry doin’, teach?”
“Man, would you quit it with that ‘little’ crap?” All five foot six, one hundred and fifteen pounds of him bridled. When angry, his nineteen-year-old face vividly displayed the thick cloud of freckles that covered it.
“He’s doing all right, I guess. Let’s see now. You know calls are in clear speech, right?” She shuffled through blank forms and looked up at Jack. “Christ, it’s hot. Who am I running with today anyhow?”
“Athena and Siggy.”
“Sig?” She groaned. “Oh shit, the fate worse than sex. It’s not bad enough they bleed all over me, I have to be in a close space with that smell? What’s the matter, don’t I live right?” As Jack walked away chuckling, she called after him. “Forget I said any of that.”
“Said what?” He got a Coke out of the refrigerator and strolled back outside to the hot blue morning.
Larry picked up an accident card, and Doris glanced at it. “Athena filled that one out.” She took it from him, holding it gingerly between fingers brown with nicotine.
Watching her read it over, he felt she expected him to say something. “Uh, I hear she’s real good.”
“Clear head that woman’s got. Not like some.”
“She really black?”
She raked him with a look.
“I only ask because she sure don’t, uh, look like no…I mean, do they, uh, have a lot of accidents out at that site?”
Her gaze rel
axed. “Almost every day, seems like, and they always call us. One of the foremen is a buddy of mine.” She crushed out her cigarette. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know why they haven’t had a fatality out there yet. They’re all a bunch of alcoholics anyway.” Leaning closer, she added, “They’re claiming there’s been a lot of sabotage by locals. Ropes cut halfway through, that sort of thing. Pineys jealous over the jobs, I guess.”
Larry nodded, thinking she had a real nice build for an old broad. He breathed in her perfume. Strong and pungent. And oddly familiar. Old Spice? He fanned himself with an accident report.
Outside, Jack shaded his eyes and swigged Coke from the can as a car pulled up. The Plymouth looked cancerous with rust, midnight blue paint flaking off the sides.
“Athena, when you gonna clean out this car?”
Surprised, she peered up through the smeary windshield. “What?” She’d been rifling the glove compartment for a candy bar, her breakfast, only to find a runny lump. “Damn.” The vinyl seat next to her was heaped with what looked like a year’s worth of junk mail and outdated ambulance paperwork. “Why?” Crumpled paper cups and hamburger wrappings covered the backseat. “You want to do it for me?”
“I’ll betchya I could do it for ya, ’Thena.” He gave her his best sexy smile. “Given half a chance.” Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes were pale blurs. Staring, he tried to figure out what it was about this woman that excited him. He supposed she was attractive enough in her own way, though not especially pretty, not with her hair pulled back that way and the shirt buttoned all the way up. Then there was the leg, too. Maybe it was just this feeling that she’d be so grateful if a guy could only get her to loosen up a little. Flashing his teeth at her again, he leaned against the car and wondered whether she wore the same blue work shirt every day or if she had a ware house full of them at home.
She smiled thinly and shoved the door open, almost knocking him over. “You didn’t pull duty today, did you?”
The Pines Page 3