Gemini: A Novel

by Cassella, Carol

  The next morning he took her hand and led her into the woods, scanning the branches of the evergreens without even glancing at the ground. “Here,” he said, stopping in front of a bough laced with pale blue-green necklaces of moss. “Tease that off the branch. Go around here.” He swept his hand in a general circle. “Get three or four handfuls of the stuff.” At the base of her virginal pyre he mounded up a nest of moss and handed Raney one more match. The moss caught and blazed at the first touch of the flame, burning long enough to scare all trace of damp and cold from the smaller sticks so they, too, burned and caught and in turn caught those above.

  They cooked oatmeal and sausages and hot chocolate and roasted half a bag of marshmallows. Grandpa acted like last night had never happened—talking about camping trips he’d taken with Raney’s grandmother before she got sick, a boyhood elk hunt with his own grandfather, “back when we used muskets and flint,” and laughed gently under his breath when Raney nodded without so much as a smile. After they ate they carried the dishes to a stream and scrubbed them out with sand and sat still and quiet until all the life that depends on a stream forgot they were intruders and let them witness the ceaseless hunt for food.

  After a very long while he said, “Raney, you’ll make a lot of choices in your life—some like mine and some different. But you can’t know who you are unless you know who you are not. Met your limits and overcome what you can. On your own.” He paused, giving her time to digest this. “Do you get my meaning?” At the time, all she could wonder was why he’d put her through a cold, hungry night instead of building the fire himself. But as if assuming her silence begged more explanation, he added, “I suppose a nicer grandfather would make it easy on you—tell you how to get through life instead of make you learn it through living. Sometimes you can’t find a new path until you admit you’ve hit your limit. Doesn’t mean you’re giving up—means you’re smart. Tough.”

  The second big blowout between them happened the day Raney was supposed to go back to school in Seattle after his heart attack, him still so weak that climbing to his bedroom required two stops on the staircase. She told him she was withdrawing and moving back home, and in a burst of cursing he threatened to kick her out of the house, going as gray and breathless as the day he’d collapsed, humbled finally by a nitroglycerin tablet she stuck under his tongue. That battle too, she understood, was over an unwillingness to accept limitations—it was apparently a flaw they both shared.

  —

  For a month or more taking care of Grandpa was a full-time job, half her energy poured into making him believe he was still taking full care of himself. Other than the time he had surprised her with an envelope of $7,000 in cash, Raney had never thought about where Grandpa’s money came from or went. Until it was her job to do all of the buying and cooking she had never stopped to consider how much was from their own poultry or garden or Grandpa’s barter and trade. But one bitter day in February she poured soap into the tub and left the water running while she put the laundry away, then stripped and stepped into a bath of bubbly, icy-cold water. That afternoon she cashed part of her leftover school money to fill the propane tank and later that night she used a screwdriver to open Grandpa’s locked desk drawer, taking care not to leave a mark on the wood, which turned out to be wasted effort as he caught her red-handed going through his papers. “You take a wrong turn at your own bedroom door, Renee?” The boom in his voice so shocked her the bank statements and bills scattered. He stared at her a minute and added, “Don’t you look guilty as all hell!”

  “I’m just amazed to hear you shout so loud. You must be getting better. I can’t find any bank statements from the last two years. How have you been paying your bills?”

  “I closed the account down. Didn’t pay enough interest to cover the cost of the stamps. Why should I give them my money?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “You’re looking for stamps?”

  “Money. Do you have any money?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  Raney held her retort and stuffed the outdated papers into the trash can. “Grandpa, how are you getting by? You still get your VA check? Pension?”

  He crossed his arms and looked at her over the top of his crooked reading glasses. “For someone who’s so worried about money you’re mighty wasteful. Whole tub full of bathwater gone cold in there.” With that he drew his head up, folded his glasses into his pajama pocket, and shuffled to his bed.

  After two more days poking into every place she was not welcome, Raney discovered a row of tin cans in the bunker, each with the bottom cut away so the beans or corn or spaghetti could be replaced with rolls of cash bills. There were potentially, she knew, dozens of such secret caches around the farm, and for weeks she passed time unscrewing the oil and gas caps off the engines of abandoned cars ditched behind the barn, prying back loose wall planks, sitting in the dank, cloistered air of the living room praying for X-ray vision to show her Grandpa’s hiding places. Finally she got a job waitressing at Loggers Restaurant and Bar. With the money from the cans and Grandpa’s veterans benefits it was enough to keep them warm and fed and for Raney to occasionally buy some new canvases and paints.

  In June her college roommate, Brittany, called to say she was on her way to Port Angeles and wanted to stop in to say hello. She had all of Raney’s bedding and paintings in the trunk of her car, that and whatever clothing Brittany hadn’t appropriated for herself. A bottle of Herbal Essence shampoo had spilled and warped the cardboard box holding Bo’s book of Monet colorplates; the pages were gummed together and smelled of all the flowers trapped inside. Raney took it as a sign and accepted that she was back in Quentin to stay.

  —

  Grandpa got stronger over time—and more belligerent, either as a result of his heart attack or a source of his improvement. Some days Raney bit her tongue so many times it felt raw. She started taking the truck out to the Dungeness Spit or Lake Crescent to paint—once, on a rare day of spring sun, she drove all the way to Cape Flattery. But that evening great peaks of clouds shoved in, turning the sunset an eerie blood orange. By the time she had hiked back to the truck, the storm had gathered and redoubled above, breaking rain so hard across the highway outside Neah Bay that the worn treads on Grandpa’s tires seemed to float more than roll down the road.

  She waited out the worst of it drinking coffee in a diner just outside the Makah tribal boundary, the storm shivering the plate-glass window like a laundered sheet whipping in the wind. Three men at the end of the bar kept trying to buy her a beer—loosened up on plenty of their own, it was apparent—so she left even though the rain was still blinding. Thus she got only as far as Clallam Bay by the time it was fully dark, when she began to regret that she had not replaced the truck’s burned-out right headlight. She didn’t realize she’d missed the junction at 113 until she was all the way to Beaver Lake. No wonder she’d passed so few cars. The single headlight barely nudged the black beyond her windshield. It looked like a county-wide power outage, the modern world ended and any houses either unoccupied or absent even lanterns and candlelight. Disoriented and cursing, Raney did a three-point turn on the narrow road, the rear wheel dropping once off the pavement so that for a brief angled instant she gunned across broken branch and mud to gain traction. One mile back up the road she felt the warbling lurch of a flat tire.

  “Damn. Goddamn.” She shoved the gearshift into park and searched for a flashlight in the glove compartment or beneath the seat, amazed that for all he had stocked his bunker with every conceivable tool for survival, Grandpa apparently assumed his pickup would be blasted straight into a nuclear winter or fried by the radiation of an alien spaceship. The most useful thing she found in the truck was a bag of chicken feed. The reach of the single headlight through the mist died out a body-length away; Raney could practically spit farther than she could see.

  She climbed out and slammed the door. After
the last groan of hinge and latch had died, the air hung sodden and silent. She stood with her hands on her hips, straining to see any bit of star or moon or reflection of man-made light on the low clouds. The rhythmic grate of frogs started up from the direction of the lake; she imagined the horde of them, slime-green, squatting with their wide, judgmental frowns, shushed a moment to consider the slammed truck door and her curses but now hunkered back down to the solemn business of mating. They made her angry, this army of frogs, and not one who cared an iota for her predicament. She picked up a rock and threw it toward the chorus, answered only by the briefest swell of their collective croaking.

  She opened the truck door again, flicked on the interior light, and began to poke through the general automotive refuse Grandpa had stashed in every chink and crevice. Under a tarp in the pickup bed she discovered a spare that looked older than the truck itself. There was a tire iron and jack behind the seat. She hunted for a stone large enough to wedge under the opposite tire, placed the jack underneath the U-bolt, fit the crank into position, and tried to turn it. Nothing gave. She threw more weight into it, straining so with the effort her pulse hummed inside her skull and her eyes teared. Finally the rust etched into the metal threads gave and the lift began to rise, resisting when it hit the full weight of the truck, but with a few more cranks the level plane of the flat tire relaxed into a curve. Two more revolutions with the last of her strength and the tire hung free of the ground. She felt like Hercules, Athena—elated—until she remembered that she had forgotten to loosen the lug nuts.

  Raney had only changed one tire before, when she was already late to meet friends and came running downstairs to find Grandpa had let the air out of the rear wheel. It was a hot summer evening and he was settled on one of the nylon strap chairs beside the pond, his beer on an overturned five-gallon bucket next to a pile of round rocks he was slinging at targets both fixed and on the wing. She’d had her license for three months and had suffered all of his lessons on jumping dead batteries, changing oil, cooling an overheated engine. He talked her through setting up the jack and wrestling off the flat tire, but after ten frustrating minutes, when sweat rings stained her best shirt and she was sure her friends had given her up for the night, she threw a lug nut at his head.

  “You’re going to need that.”

  “Why is it you insist on teaching me every goddamn thing in as hard a way as you can make it?”

  “Don’t cuss. Your grandmother wouldn’t have liked it.”

  The memory of that evening inspired a fresh string of curses shouted out to the dark, swallowed up by the forest, the frogs startled into unified silence for a single lonely moment until one brave bull coaxed them back into song.

  Then, beyond the rolling chorus of croaks, she heard something else, something not of the forest or the lake. Another car engine. And then a flicker of light raked between the trees. Headlights taking a curve in the road so they bore steadily at her, blinding as twin searchlights before they disappeared at the next bend. Her first emotion was relief. She wouldn’t spend the night huddled under a plastic tarp in the passenger seat eating chicken pellets! But then she considered her circumstances: a mud-splattered young woman stranded beside a decrepit, hitched-up truck with one hubcap set out like a begging bowl. She tried to recall how long she’d driven off the main road before catching her mistaken turn. She tried to gauge the boundaries of the reservation, how far inside or outside those boundaries she might be.

  The truck’s interior bulb was dim, but in this wet black nowhere it would surely have been spotted. The car took another bend; lights winked in, then out of sight. Raney pulled the tire iron out of the socket, turned off the interior light, and groped her way around the pickup’s bed until she was on the far side. She lost her footing on the embankment but stayed low when she heard the car coming closer, saw the road under the truck glint gray as the headlights shone dead on. She held her breath and listened to the engine, said a prayer when the tone dropped a note as it slowed. “All right, God, I suppose you have a plan and this is part of it but I am asking for a break here, if I have any say at all. Which I probably don’t, so why the hell am I bothering to ask?” And so the prayer took its usual course of circular deterioration, if on a more desperate note.

  Maybe the car would slow just enough to pull around and go on by. Maybe they would stop and offer help. Most people were nice enough, weren’t they? Her grandmother would have said yes, that mean people were mean because too many people had been mean to them, and if you were nice to them for once you might turn the cycle of meanness around to kindness. Her grandfather would have said the world had plenty of mean people in it and it only took one or two, particularly when they were elected into office, to ruin your life and everybody else’s, so why expose yourself to any more people than absolutely necessary?

  The engine sounded close now, slowing down, not a steady slowness like people gauging how much clearance to leave, but a curious slowness—people assessing this unexpected gift at the side of the road, maybe a road they traveled every day, because this was their land and they had a right to make their own rules and maybe here all that mattered was who caught whom. In the dropping pitch of the engine she could hear them debating. And then the car stopped, hummed a minute more before it went silent—only the tick-tick of contracting metal. Raney heard men’s voices, muffled through the window. Her bladder clenched. The car door opened and someone stepped out.

  “Thought it was her truck. Engine’s warm.” There was a scuffle of dirt, metal on rock and the hubcap spun. “Forgot to loosen the lugs before they jacked it up. Fella wouldn’t do that. Must be our lady friend.”

  “Open the door, man. Anybody hiding on the floor?”

  Raney felt the truck shift as the driver’s door opened and a faint illumination from the overhead light gave shape to the steep slope dropping away inches from her feet. She should roll down the bank and crawl into the woods, lose herself in the pitch. She should bolt down the road, yelling loud enough somebody would hear, wake up, and call for help. She gripped the tire iron with one hand, the other stretched about a great stone, measuring the weight and cut of its angles. Her pulse hammered the base of her brain.

  “Only thing hiding in here is a purse. Girl don’t go far without her purse.” Another car door opened and shut, and Raney heard a third man’s voice, one she recognized from the diner. All three sounded too happy at this discovery, too bored with the plain sameness of every night before and after. And then, at the back of the truck, a voice too close. “Hey there! What’d I say?” A light blinded her. “Didn’t think you’d wander off.” Then a brown-skinned hand reached out and gripped her upper arm.

  Raney struck out with the tire iron, swinging in a wide arc until it hit something that gave and crumpled with a pain-searing yelp. The light flashed across the truck and through the canopy of trees, then rolled down the embankment, sinking in the mud where it glowed like a luminescent fish before it died. She crawled forward pawing for the front bumper, the clutched rock cutting into her hand. There was a scuffle of feet and the smell of kicked-up mud and swamp rot, a hoarse call, “Your way. Round the hood,” and then she was lifted off the ground, off her feet, striking with the rock blind and wild until it was wrestled from her, and she was pinned against warm, hard sheet metal by two arms, by four separate hands, her head held hard against the hard metal so that when the horn sounded it ached through her teeth, rang through her skull. And then a light, bright enough to see the loose hems of shirts and bulge of jeans.

  “Off!” The car shook and groaned. A warp of time, a hesitation. “Off! Now!” An easing, the joints of her elbow, wrist, shoulder looser. Released.

  Raney slumped to the ground, wedged as much of her body under the car as she could without losing skin, and even for that she would have felt no pain until she saw gouged flesh. In the visible slice of road she watched a play of feet and legs, a shifting and gathering, a stumble and b
acking away. Eight legs together, then two apart, sides taken, one outnumbered. Men arguing, something flung into the swamp grass—her purse, she guessed, given her luck. After a paralyzed moment six feet scuffed across the gravel shoulder, three dark figures along the edge of woods soon dissolved beyond the limit of light. And then only two feet left, and the night fallen silent—no sound of men or frogs, not even her own breath, so locked inside her chest it burned.

  She saw black boots with a low heel, shiny like they’d been polished, only a fringe of fresh mud from the road lipping the sole. The blue jeans had been hemmed by hand—the stitches even and tidy but the thread not chosen to match the inseam. Should have gone with yellow if he couldn’t find gold, she thought, and from a wild corner of her mind came the notion that she should pass that handy tip along before he raped and murdered her. And then a shock of black hair dangled into view. She ducked her head farther out of the light.

  “They’re gone. Afraid your purse is gone too, ’less it rises on the back of a turtle.” Raney stayed quiet. “Not a safe road to be alone on. At night.” Then to himself, “I guess she knows that by now.”

  “Well, now I’m not alone. Got you here. Is that better or worse?”

  “Come on out, would you? My back’s starting to hurt.”

  “Yeah? At least it’s not seared to the underside of an engine.” She flattened her elbows and winged low and slow between the muddy grit of road and the catch of metal out from underneath the car. The man put a hand down to help her up, but Raney rolled away from it and he stepped back, arms held out palms up like you might show a dog you meant no harm. After a moment of standoff she said, “I don’t know if I should be thanking you or cursing you.”

  “Cursing, probably. I offered them a lift back in Clallam. Should have smelled what they were. Your spare is flat, you know.”