Big Green Country

by Frances Rivetti

  Not more than a minute later, she stepped behind me into the steam of the muggy stall and set about lathering my back with a dense and woodsy smelling, scratchy bar of soap she’d removed from its paper wrapping deposited on a narrow shower caddy that hung from the faucet. Soap bubbles filled the vaporous cubicle with the heady scent of rosemary and pine.

  I felt the weight of her full breasts rest against my back. She reached up to lather my hair, moving her hands across the contours of my head, deftly caressing the scalp beneath my thick, wet, sudsy hair with the strong tips of her fingers.

  I turned, slowly and deliberately so as not to slip, holding her firmly around her waist with one arm while steadying myself with the other. Reciprocating her kindness, I lathered her breasts with the small bar of aromatic soap, cupping them beneath their swell to rinse them from the suds. Afterwards, I lowered my head to her chest, tracing each wet, rosemary-scented nipple in turn with the tip of my warm tongue.

  In a single smooth move, she dropped to her knees to gently soap and lather the scar tissue of my stump, rendering me breathless as she gradually worked her way up.

  We wrapped our freshly showered, towel dried selves in the already rumpled sheets, bodies entwined once again on the bed, arms and legs, full and partial, her hips, soft and round pressed against my own. “It’s like piecing together the complicated puzzle of a pair,” Maggie said as she wrapped a leg across my stump and tucked her foot beneath the calf of my good leg. My body relaxed into the easy, calm repose of her.

  Three or four hours after I had given in to a by then desperate need for sleep, I was rudely awoken by one of my bad dreams, brought on this time by the mad jumble of disturbing memories that had resurfaced in the evacuation center — the smell of antiseptic a major prompt, for starters. That night in the cabin, I experienced one of my frequent flashbacks to the makeshift military hospital in Iraq, the place where I’d awoken after the blast. In this dream, though, I was back on the operating table. Bizarrely, Bobby was the medic. He looked down at me as I was lying there and he frowned, the fucker, as if he never even knew me. I kept on trying to tell him: “Bobby boy, it’s me, your old pal, Marcus,” but I’d been muted by the anesthetic. He looked a little closer, scrutinized my face and smiled in some form of basic recognition as he reached out a hand to comfort me. I woke up, sweating like a pig.

  These sweats, this bad taste in my mouth, they come back to haunt me on an almost nightly basis, an unwanted reminder of the sickly berry flavors of the sugarcoated, fast release opioid lollipops the military medics doled out to us blast victims to take away the pain.

  I’ve heard it said how idiotic rich folk in Hollywood serve these same deadly, narcotic-laced lollipops to their party guests on silver platters no less. Make no mistake, the sole intended design of a fentanyl infused lollipop is for combatting breakthrough pain. If you ask me, whoever it was who came up with this whole sick, twisted idea of making a drug as addictive as crack into a lollipop, should be made accountable for the string of lethal deaths they’ve caused.

  Let me make it clear. Opioids are heroin times 50 in pill form. Keep on taking them and they’ll kill you sooner than later my friend.

  Fuck, some 50,000 people no better than me have kicked the bucket from opioid addiction in this goddamn country in one single year. I lay there thinking my usual thoughts on how the government never stops making a whole load of noise about it, pointing fingers at the addicts and the whole codependent system and yet fuck all is ever done to put a stop to this madness.

  Maybe that’s what they want, to get rid of the deadwood. The big drug companies, they’re laughing their way to the bank while opioid addicts are dropping like flies. I’d sweated so profusely, the sheet was soaked beneath me.

  I propped myself up on my elbow seeing as I was awake anyway, taking the opportunity to study Maggie’s facial features in the still darkened room. One day I hope to wake up to this woman without the fucked-up PTSD triggers grinding me down. Much as I was enjoying my private study of her fine bone structure, the arc of her eyebrows, the slightest part in her lips, I was mindful of freaking her out if she woke up and caught me staring at her.

  She opened one eye before the other, an endearing move and there it was again, that irresistible half smile. I shifted my position as she rolled over and lowered her body onto mine. She looked me in the eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked, a frown crinkling her forehead. “Is this all too much, considering?”

  “It’s Bobby,” I said, my hands shaking. “But not because of what we’re doing here. I was dreaming and Bobby, he was back.”

  “Well, you’re wide awake now,” she said as she took my still trembling hand in hers. “And I’m the only one here with you. And you know what they say, third time’s the charm.” She whispered a number of enticements into my ear. Her morning hair smelled of wood smoke and rosemary. Warm from sleep, naked the whole night long beneath the sheets, her contours were smooth and tender to my touch. She rolled onto her back so that I was the one on top this time. I hooked one knee and one half leg beneath hers as she made good on her promise to take my mind clear off the misery and sorrow of mourning my dead friend for at least as long as it lasted. My brain temporarily stopped playing tricks on my central nervous system. The phantom limb pain I’ve grown accustomed to waking up with failed to materialize. Anyone who has experienced the loss of a limb will tell you how bullshit strange and disconcerting it is to go on feeling the full effects of discomfort in a body part that is no longer there.

  A little after daylight we pried ourselves apart, showered again, though separately this time and we dressed. I fixed my prosthetic for the day ahead, one eye on Maggie as she towel dried and brushed through the tangles of her long, wet hair. We gathered our scant belongings and walked back downhill to sit ourselves at a wooden bench table on the covered porch of the empty reception area.

  “It is a damn ghost town,” I remarked, looking around the deserted resort. Tanya showed up a few minutes later, breaking the silence, a glint in her eye. Clearly she’d perceived a sense of the fervor of the night before even if she hadn’t seen it for herself, though I am sure she had. She tamed her crazy hair, it was secured it in a tighter coil that morning, a wild crown of copper held in place with a large, multicolored plastic clip shaped like a butterfly. She floated around like a giant forest fairy bearing gifts, setting down a heavy, wooden tray. My stomach rumbled at the welcome sight of two big mugs of strong coffee and bowls of steaming oatmeal, plus a set of small, stainless steel containers filled with chopped bananas, walnuts, raisins, syrup and brown sugar.

  A dog, heavy with pups, sauntered over, extending her ample girth beneath the table at our feet.

  “Don’t mind this one,” Tanya said, shifting her own substantial weight from one foot to the other. Her fleshy cheeks were flushed and rosy in the chill morning air. “This one’s been hanging around here since before the river broke,” she said. “Dogs, they sense it coming, danger. She’ll find her way home when she’s ready, I don’t doubt.”

  Maggie reached under the table and took a hold of the scruff of the dog’s neck. “No tag,” she said. “She looks pretty young for her condition, though I’ll wager this is not her first litter.”

  The dog was in need of a heavy-duty grooming, her short coat caked with mud. The mutt appeared calm and friendly, relieved to find some company.

  “Most likely she belongs to one of the travelers, puppy draggers they call them, though it’s not a real nice thing to say in my mind.” Tanya thought the dog was maybe part pit.

  “I’ve fed the poor baby scraps,” she added, “what with her puppies coming.”

  I petted the dog behind the ears and took a closer look. She was medium sized, stocky, tan and white colored with one blue eye, one brown.

  Maggie liked the mix. “Look at her, a real sweetie. She’ll make a good momma.”

  Tanya stepped back indoors in answer to the shrill, invasive call of her landline. We
were alone, again, except for the dog.

  “You never wanted any?” It just came out. I’d put her on the spot in an uncomfortable way. It was too late to take it back.

  “Puppies?” she asked.

  I reddened. “No. I meant kids.”

  It was unlike me to burst out with something so way out of line. It was none of my business.

  Maggie took a second. She looked at me straight on, unwavering, as is her way.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said. “We tried for years. Never happened and the sad thing is, neither of us ever really knew if it was me or him that was the problem.”

  Her soon-to-be ex was not the type of dude to take any sort of failure lightly — “It would have hurt his manly pride if I’d placed the blame on him,” she said. And so they had swept the fertility issue under the carpet.

  I had to admire her honesty, though it flashed through my mind in that instant that safe sex, protection, all the shit you’re supposed to think of before you hit the sack, well, that was the last thing we had stopped to consider during our throes of passion the night before — and again, that same morning. I mentally calculated the number of times we had taken that risk.

  If it wasn’t Maggie’s problem, was it too late for her, anyway? Me, I was clueless as to when a woman’s clock stops ticking and all. The few other women I was with over the past few years had taken pains with their own precautions. They’d been upfront about it, beforehand. Shows how little I’d thought things through. We’d leaped on each other without a second thought.

  Maggie read my mind.

  “I’m forty-six, Marcus,” she said, in answer to alarm bells that continued to ring in my mind. Was I that easy to read?

  “Technically, if I’m not the one with the fertility problem, I guess there might still be a small window of time for me to conceive,” she said, forthright if nothing else. Her monthlies, according to Maggie, were as regular as clockwork, more reason for concern considering that I barely knew the woman.

  I figured, oh well, fuck that shit, what the hell. Would it be so bad? I’d gotten away without impregnating anyone this far into my life. What were the chances? If our stars were indeed in some strange alignment in these first few wild times we’d been together, then we’d been fully consenting adults, the pair of us and we’d have to deal with it, though I had no clue as to what we’d do about it. Only time would tell. “Really, don’t worry yourself,” she said, making light of the subject. “I promise not to come knocking on your door with paternity papers.”

  She gazed over the fogged-in grove, most likely, I figured, mulling the subject over a minute or two more in her own mind. She turned back towards me, leaned over and took my hand in hers.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus,” she said, “We haven’t exactly thought this through, have we? I want you to know, I have zero expectations beyond the day ahead.”

  I took hold of her upturned hand in mine, tracing the veins of the skin on the inside of her wrist with my thumb: “Taking it day by day,” I said. “Best way in my book.”

  Truth is, waking up with Maggie was about the greatest start to any day I could remember. I’d thought I’d sealed off the part of me that would have allowed something this good to take a place in my life. I’d been so sure I’d lost all ability to feel anything more than the smallest pinprick of joy.

  The sky, or what we could see of it through the heavy canopy of trees, revealed itself a thin strip of clear blue ribbon threading through a blanket of mist. It looked like we were in for a respite from the rain at least for the next few hours.

  That meant we were free to make our move. I placed a call to the sheriff’s department from Tanya’s phone in reception, cell coverage being off and on, still spotty.

  ~ It took a fair bit of anxiously biding our time as we waited for a call back. We made our way down a wide staircase of muddy railroad ties that led to a grassy hillside ridge above a fast running winter creek. I laid my jacket down on a bench seat carved into a fallen redwood and we sat.

  “It was a spot like this where I hid out,” I confessed. “I settled on a hideout as far away from the world as I could find.” After I’d waged an inner war on myself with the drugs and all, the towering redwoods were the closet place to a safe haven I could find.

  Maggie linked her arm through mine and gently pressed me for more. “Why here, Marcus? Why the Russian River? Like the girls, you might have easily gone further north, inland, even more remote.”

  “After the explosion and my discharge, there was nothing for me back home,” I explained. “I was sick and tired of people, noise, disfigurement, conflict. It was like the whole wide world was rotten to the core.”

  I’d wanted nothing more to do with it all, was the truth. “I figured if I hitchhiked my way far enough west I would come to the place where the world falls off its edge, the perfect peace of a vast nothingness.”

  “I can understand that,” Maggie said, reassuringly. “You’re not a total loser,” she laughed, sharing how she’d suffered her own freak-out with regard to the rat race and all. “I guess that’s why you do the work you do, out in the park, in the forest, steering as clear of the hamster wheel as is geographically possible,” she said.

  I had begun to heal in the redwoods, though I never knew it at the time, so much of it had been drug fueled. “Getting clean and finding work is what saved my life,” I said. “If it weren’t for these redwoods, I would never have met the folks who put me into rehab, never have met Bobby.”

  I found myself telling her how my grandparents had raised my brother and me in the Central Valley after our mom took off. My dad, their son, well, he walked out of the picture soon after our mother left. The dude was as selfish, cold-hearted and irresponsible as she, for he remarried pretty much as soon as the divorce came through and moved to Boston with his second wife and three kids from her first marriage. We were five years old.

  “You have a twin?”

  Did have. “He died. When we were ten.”

  I hadn’t spoken Nick’s name in years. If I’d talked to Bobby about him in the early

  days, he knew not to bring him up unless I did first. All things considered, my brother’s death was way too painful for me to talk about. I’d kept memories of Nick firmly bottled up inside, all those years in the army and since.

  “Nicholas and our grandmother, they were killed, together, car crash — drunk driver took them both out. She was behind the wheel of the old man’s truck. Nick was up front beside her.”

  They’d been out running errands on a Saturday afternoon in readiness for Thanksgiving. Some old-timer who should never have been driving, let alone propping up the bar in town, had one two many and lost control when a stag leaped out into the road ahead.

  “It would have been me in that truck with the two of them, only I was in bed with strep throat. Nick had just come through it, he was the one who’d passed it on to me.”

  Maggie touched my cheek lightly with her palm. “A twin brother,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Marcus, I can’t even begin to imagine your loss.”

  I thought of my gramps. The old boy died of a broken heart while I was on tour in Iraq. Loneliness and loss will do that to you.

  “My grandfather was the one who taught me how to work with wood,” I continued. “He was a union carpenter by trade. Gramps lost the home they’d worked so hard for in Stockton when tough times hit the industry. It wasn’t easy for him bringing in those extra dollars at his age, taking care of me and all.”

  They’d lived on the poverty line their whole lives, my folks. They were good people and happy enough, given the cards they’d been dealt. “After Nick and my grandmother passed, it was never the same.”

  “That’s a lot of heartbreak, Marcus,” Maggie said. “And you never married? Have you ever been in love? Come on, surely so.”

  “There’s been a few girlfriends over the years, nothing serious — one back in high school and one or two I’ve gotten to know working out at
the coast,” I confessed.

  She smiled, said she was thankful for small mercies: “You’re no stranger to the female form, I’ll give you that.”

  Sex had never been a problem. It was intimacy I’d shied away from until I met her.

  “Take it from me, Maggie, you’ve switched the light back on somehow. I’m telling you, sitting here with you is an exception to my solitary rule.”

  “One of life’s great mysteries, Marcus,” she replied. “Matters of the heart. Foolish to question these unexpected feelings when they come along.”

  “Hey, too much attention on me, the emotionally disabled,” I said, only half joking. I was done with all the personal questions for now, eager to change the subject.

  Maggie was quick to ease the tension. She kissed me lightly, warming her hands between my lower thighs. She changed the subject, recounting the times she’d swam in the calmer waters of the Russian River in the summer months when she was a kid. “Even though it’s dangerous water in parts, whatever the time of year, due to the heavy undercurrent,” she said. “Summer swimming at the river was something we all did, a rite of passage, you know. It was way safer for us to swim in the stretch of the river over at Johnson’s Beach, roped off from the swifter currents.”

  Her grandparents had passed on all they’d learned about the river as kids: “The early Russian settlers, the logging,” she said. “Come to think of it, do you suppose that Tanya may be descended from Russian blood?” Maggie asked. “She kind of looks like a pinkcheeked, round Russian stacking doll, doesn’t she, perched on her stool, her hair, those high cheekbones of hers, the food?”

  “Maybe, that would be cool. Tanya’s a Russian sounding name — makes sense,” I replied.

  If Tanya had Russian ancestors in the river region that takes its name, her people arrived after they ran into a boatload of trouble in maintaining stocks of food and supplies for their Alaskan settlements, back in the early 1800s. Roaming Russian fur hunters spent years scouring the Pacific coast south of Alaska for the best place to build a Northern California settlement, one rich with sea otters for pelts. It was these determined newcomers who built a fort some forty miles north of where Maggie and I sat talking history of all things. The ocean acted as a moat for Fort Ross on one side, the rugged Pacific mountains protecting it on the other.