by Swan Adamson
“Tree-huggers?” Whitman laughed a little too loudly. “Are those like hip-huggers?”
“Like Earth Freedom,” the man said. He stepped closer, blatantly peering into the back seat.
Tremaynne averted his face. His sudden passivity seemed odd because he was usually challenging people. But I was afraid to look into the old man’s eyes, too. They were really hostile. I crossed my arms over my chest, depriving him of ogling rights.
“I’ll bet you’ve heard of Earth Freedom,” the man said. His voice was vaguely threatening. “They’re huggin’ trees all over the place up here. Huggin’ ’em so fuckin’ hard that nobody can even cut down a tree no more.”
“Well,” Whitman said politely, “if we see any, we’ll certainly let them know how you feel. Bye now!” He rolled up his window and whispered to Daddy, “Get the hell out of here.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “get the hell out of Hell’s Canyon.”
Daddy started up the road on the other side of the canyon.
Whitman whistled and blew out a big loud breath. “Did you see that gun? That was a real gun.” He turned to Tremaynne. “He seemed to recognize you.”
I laughed. “Whitman, he was looking at my tits.”
Whitman continued to stare at Tremaynne. “What was the name of that group you were with?”
It was a simple question, but whenever Whitman asked a simple question, it meant he was digging for something more. I knew how his sudden interrogations worked. His nonchalant tone put me on high alert.
Tremaynne kept looking out the window. “What group?”
“Those environmental activists,” Whitman said. “The ones down in the Siskiyous.”
Tremaynne licked his lips. “Arbor Vitae.”
“Oh yeah.” Whitman turned back around. “They’re nonviolent, right?”
“Right,” Tremaynne said.
“Look.” Daddy pointed at a sign. “We’re in Idaho.”
When he was working on Pine Mountain Lodge, Daddy always flew to Boise, rented a car, and drove from there. He’d never been in Snakebite, and Whitman couldn’t find any mention of it in his cache of reference guides. He said the town must have gotten its name from its proximity to the Snake River.
“More likely because it’s full of snakes.” I hate snakes. I was on my guard.
“Don’t step on any rattlers,” Daddy warned. He told us how one of the carpenters working on Pine Mountain Lodge had come out to hike in Hell’s Canyon and was bitten by a rattlesnake. “If it hadn’t been for his cell phone,” Daddy said, “he’d be dead. They had to airlift him out in a helicopter. He couldn’t walk because his leg swelled up as big as an elephant’s.”
“Don’t scare her,” Whitman said. He reached back and patted my knee. “Don’t worry, honey, I brought our snake kit. If you get bitten, I know where to cut and how to suction out the venom.”
My faux pa always teased me like that. He knew perfectly well that snakes made me faint, spiders made me scream, roaches made me weep, and mice took my breath away.
“Maybe there’s a McDonald’s,” I said hopefully, “with a drive-through so we don’t have to get out of the car.”
“I’m not eating in a McDonald’s,” Tremaynne huffed.
“McDonald’s is inappropriate for a honeymoon meal,” Whitman agreed. “But I have to say, a quarter-pounder with cheese would taste pretty good right now.”
“Double quarter-pounder,” I sighed. “No onions.”
“I’d get the pâté de foie gras burger,” Daddy said. “With fries.”
We were just joking around, but Tremaynne became all indignant. “Do you know how much nondisposable waste those places generate?” He glared at me. “Do you know what they do to make those seven trillion hamburgers a year?”
I saw Whitman take a deep breath, like he was trying to control himself.
“They’re burning up the rain forest because of fast-food restaurants. So they can raise these huge herds of cows that don’t eat any natural food and get shot full of growth hormones.”
We pulled into Snakebite.
“I don’t think we have to worry about a McDonald’s,” Daddy said.
“Take a picture.” Whitman handed me his small digital camera and led Daddy over to a sign that said Snakebite. Pop. 34.
“Get the sign in. Use the zoom. Just our faces and the sign.” He pulled Daddy into an embrace and was kissing him on the cheek when the old guy’s black pickup slowly jolted up the rutted gravel road. The truck stopped just as I snapped the photo.
The old man stared at us through narrowed eyes. Whitman gave him a friendly wave, but the man didn’t acknowledge it.
“Canyon of the damned,” Whitman stage-whispered. “Okay,” he said with a show of bravado, “now I’ll take one of you two.”
I took Tremaynne by the arm, but he pulled away. “I don’t want to,” he said. Which was weird, because he was the sort of photogenic person who always gravitated toward cameras.
“Okay, then I’ll take one of Venus and her alpha dad.” Whitman motioned for Daddy and me to stand together.
But we were all immobilized by the man. He just sat there in his truck staring at us like we were bears in his viewfinder. Finally Whitman aimed his camera at the old man. “Say Brie, darling!” He snapped the photo.
Springs creaking, the truck slowly lurched off down the road.
Snakebite was one of those places where it’s impossible to imagine anyone really living. It was set in a gully with a creek rushing through as if it wanted to get away as fast as possible. One gravel-covered street with about five ramshackley wooden houses and a couple of trailers made up the entire town. The rusty skeletons of dead cars, weeds poking through their vanished windows, were scattered along the side of the road. Tires and discarded appliances had been pitched down into the creek. Everything looked dusty and forlorn.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Whitman said cheerfully. “You never know where you’ll stumble across a three-star Michelin restaurant.”
We trudged over to a brown wooden building with Snakebite Café painted above the door. Spoted Owl Served Here was written on a piece of cardboard taped in the front window.
“Obviously a logging town,” Whitman said.
“Former logging town,” Daddy said.
“Whatever you do,” Whitman whispered, “don’t order spoted owl.”
I’d never felt such a hostile atmosphere in my life. It really gave me the creeps. I wanted to leave, but it was like we were being sucked into this bad dream and couldn’t get out of it.
First of all, there was a low funny smell. I don’t know what it was. Something stale and icky-chemical-sweet at the same time. Like old grease and roach powder.
Deer and elk heads stared blindly from the walls. A giant black bear, stuffed to look like it was about to attack, reared up on its hind legs next to the cash register, fangs gleaming, claws ready to rip and shred. There were other stuffed animals, too. Small hairy things, arranged to look as though they were scampering along the shelves.
A woman with dark bags under her eyes, several chins, and thin yellow hair stood behind the counter drinking coffee and puffing on a cigarette.
“Can we sit anywhere?” Whitman asked.
Her ice-blue eyes moved slowly from me to Tremaynne to Daddy to Whitman. “Where you from?” she asked.
“Portland,” Daddy said.
“Where you headin’?”
“Pine Mountain Lodge.”
She sniffed. “Won’t find that kind of food here.”
“Well,” Whitman said, scanning a menu, “we’ve been driving since seven this morning, and we’re all pretty hungry so we thought we might get a salad or something.”
“No salads,” she said.
“Okay.” Whitman slid into a chair and the rest of us followed his lead. “How about—”
“Ain’t got it,” the woman said, smoke streaming out her nostrils.
Whitman cleared his throat. “How do you know, when we hav
en’t ordered anything yet?”
“I just know,” was her cryptic reply.
Daddy groaned in disgust and made a motion to leave, but Whitman put a restraining hand on his wrist. One thing about Whitman, he never backs down from a potential fight.
“Is there anything on the menu that you recommend?” he asked pleasantly.
“No.” The woman crossed her arms. It was a showdown. “We don’t serve nothin’ you want.”
I hadn’t had a smoke all day and the first drag made me lightheaded. I was so nervous I kept my eyes on my cigarette and away from Mrs. Multichin.
“I’ll have the spoted owl,” Tremaynne said.
I kicked him under the table.
The woman glared. “The what?”
“That sign in your window.” He pointed to it. “It says you served spoted owl.”
“Spotted,” she spat.
“Oh,” Tremaynne said. “It’s spelled s-p-o-t-e-d. Well, that’s what I’ll have.”
The woman half-closed her eyes, took a deep drag of her cigarette, and let out a wet hacking cough. “Smart ass,” she muttered.
Whitman whirled around. “Do you refuse to serve everyone who comes in here?”
“No,” she said, “just rich smartasses that like to cause trouble.”
Now it was Daddy who restrained Whitman. It was just a touch on his arm. “Whit, let’s go.”
Daddy Two let out a loud Buddha breath. “Have we done something to offend you?” he asked the woman.
“Rooms at that Pine Mountain Lodge cost four hundred bucks a night,” she hissed.
Whitman stood and slowly walked toward her. He held his hands up, as if she had a gun pointed at him. He smiled. “So is that the problem? You don’t like Pine Mountain Lodge?”
The woman moved closer to the stuffed bear. “It’s your kind spoils it for the rest of us.” She angrily stubbed out her cigarette and shook out another. Whitman grabbed her Zippo from the counter and offered to light her cigarette, but the woman backed away.
He put the lighter down again. “Sorry. Old habit. I was raised to be polite.”
She took the lighter and silently stared at him.
“Okay,” Whitman said. “It’s obvious you don’t want our business, so we’ll leave.”
Daddy, Tremaynne, and I leaped up and got out of there as fast as we could. Whitman stayed a moment longer, examining the bear, then he too started out.
“We gotta live here all the time,” the woman called to his back. “We can’t afford no Pine Mountain Lodge.”
“Especially if you keep turning customers away,” Whitman called over his shoulder. He stepped outside and looked at us. “Well. Pâté anyone?”
“Let’s find a spot outside of town,” Daddy suggested. “Tremaynne, you’ll just have to eat bread and cheese.”
“I’m not your little boy, okay?” my husband said grumpily. “I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want to.”
Whitman’s voice was sharp. “Then don’t. But let us enjoy our goddamned diseased goose liver, okay?”
I’d been tracking the advance of another pickup rattling into town. You couldn’t miss it; it was the only moving object in the landscape and it was barking.
The truck pulled up next to the café. Two men wearing camouflage jackets and feed caps peered at us through the dusty windshield. With the glare and the dust, I couldn’t see much. One of them had a black beard; the other one had pale, shoulder-length hair.
The back of the truck had been fitted with a large cage. There were three furiously barking dogs in it. Big dogs, mixed breed, vicious looking. Their barks were slightly muffled by a brown hairy blanket draped over the top of the cage.
Only it wasn’t a blanket.
“Jesus Christ!” Tremaynne cried.
I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach. Once I saw it, I couldn’t not see it. I didn’t want to look but I had to.
The bear’s belly had been slit open. It was gutted. Strings of slimy blue and red entrails hung down into the cage, dripping onto the enraged dogs. A smell like blood and shit reached my nostrils. Next to the cage I saw two plastic pails full of raw oozing guts. Then, with a jolt, I saw the bear’s face, its small, startled eyes, its dangling pink tongue.
I raced around the side of the Snakebite Café and threw up my latte and the barbecue-flavored potato chips I’d eaten hours earlier. It was horrible. There were flies everywhere. I had to wave them away while I puked. They buzzed down to dine on my vomit.
I heard a loud voice. Tremaynne’s. Accusing. “You killed a bear! Why did you have to kill it?”
Another voice. Unfamiliar. Angry. “That ain’t none of your goddamn business.”
“There’s hardly any bear population left!” Tremaynne shouted.
“There’s tons of bear around here. They’re like rats.”
Tremaynne’s voice sounded like a sob. He must have really lost it. “Do we have to kill everything?”
There was a moment of silence. Then I heard laughter. It sounded like the hunters hadn’t heard anything so funny in their entire lives.
“The air.” Whitman sucked in a deep breath. “Delicious.”
I sniffed, cautiously. It did have a pleasant tang, sort of like Western Wind room deodorizer.
I scrunched my butt down good and hard on the earth, so the vertigo wouldn’t get me. We were sitting at the top of Hell’s Canyon, looking out over miles of nothing.
“It’s mostly sandstone,” Daddy said, tearing off a hunk of French bread and carefully positioning a slab of foie gras on top. He closed his eyes and took a rapturous bite.
Tremaynne was watching me to see if I’d eat the pâté, so I didn’t. And I was keeping a close watch on him, my prisoner of love. I was afraid that he was pushing me away. Was it because of the dads? Because he didn’t like them?
The dads didn’t particularly like Tremaynne, either. I could tell. But at least they were making an effort.
Something was troubling my husband. I didn’t know what it was, but I was afraid it might have something to do with getting married. Second thoughts. Cold feet. I knew from experience that the first time was the weirdest. Maybe he was thinking: She’s the wrong one. Buyer’s regret.
Or else . . . but I didn’t want to go where my thoughts kept leading me. Ever since Whitman’s simple question, ever since he’d asked Tremaynne about his involvement with Arbor Vitae, I’d been wondering about it myself. More than once he’d expressed a kind of exasperated displeasure with the group. Earth Freedom, as I’d learned by accidentally opening and reading an e-mail addressed to Tremaynne on my AOL account, was a splinter group of Arbor Vitae. They were far more extreme. Tremaynne must have known at least some of them.
But he’d never mentioned Earth Freedom. I reassured myself with that.
I sat there looking at the three men in my life. There was so much space around us. Vast, interminable space. I hated the way all that empty space made me feel. So tiny, so insignificant. So vulnerable. So much could go wrong when you had all that space around you. The world stopped being solid and familiar, and slipped into something vaguely menacing.
I posed a question to myself: If something went wrong right now, if there was a disaster or a calamity, who would I want to be with? My dads or Tremaynne? Who would give the most help, comfort and guidance?
“Listen,” Whitman said. “Silence. Absolute silence. Do you know how rare that is?”
Daddy sighed and bit into a tiny sweet green pickle.
Silence was not what I was after. Silence is boring and scary. Maybe dangerous. I wanted noise, bustle, chatter. I wanted to walk with my new husband through a fun glam scene with background music and beautiful clothes. I wanted him alone, away from the dads, in our honeymoon suite. If I could just get him back into my arms, he’d be mine again. I was sure of it.
“It must have been quiet when you were up in that tree,” Whitman said.
My moody, difficult husband was gnawing on a piece of bread. �
�It’s never quiet in a tree,” he mumbled.
“That experience must have changed your life.”
Tremaynne didn’t answer. He wouldn’t sit with us on the blanket Whitman had spread out. He wouldn’t touch the pâté or the cheese. When Whitman offered him a glass of champagne, he turned it down.
“Well, here’s to you, then, daughter dear,” Whitman said, clicking my glass. Of course he’d brought crystal champagne flutes. “I hope you’ll be as happy as your dad and I have been.”
“I hope so, too.” I looked up at my husband. His back was turned. He was staring off into the distance.
Whitman quickly spread some pâté de foie gras on a piece of bread and popped it into my mouth. And I ate it. It was our secret.
Chapter
9
He made a second phone call outside of Boise. We stopped for gas at a huge eight-lane station beside the highway. In Oregon someone pumps the gas for you. Everywhere else in the nation, you have to do it yourself. (Whitman always said that’s why he lived in Oregon.) While Daddy worked the pump, Whitman washed the dust and squashed bugs off the windshield. He was meticulous; “streaks” gave him a headache.
“Pee if you have to,” Daddy said, stretching his back, “because we’re not stopping for the next hundred miles.”
Tremaynne jumped out and hurried over to the busy minimart. I followed. There was only one restroom.
When he went in, I seized my chance.
I nabbed a scarred wiener from the rotating grill, stuffed it into a stale bun, slathered relish, mustard and catsup on it, and snarfed it down in three huge bites. While I was eating the hot dog, I darted over to the candy shelf and grabbed a box of red hots and a giant Reese’s peanut-butter cups. I’d paid for it all, swallowed my last bite of hot dog, and hidden the candy in my purse by the time Tremaynne came out of the restroom. I must have set some kind of record. A bulimic couldn’t have gorged any faster.
“My turn,” I said, smiling sweetly. He nodded absently and wandered over toward a rack of maps.
I wanted so bad to know what was going on in his mind. Something had happened to him. Something was out of kilter. It was bigger than a mood. He hadn’t been the same since seeing that butchered bear in Snakebite.