by Kendric Neal
$14,200 at a $100 table, you'd think he'd just soaked them for a half million. All the time he'd spent here before, he'd never felt it was such a backwater. You could hardly call them gamblers, idlers was more like it. This wasn't real playing and Neely knew it. Sure, you could lose your paycheck here as well as anywhere, but it wasn't a place you could really test your luck. It was just a bunch of cigar shop injuns soaking the white man for a few cents a day. Though, as he'd noticed many times before, most of the suckers at the slots were Injuns. Like most human societies, first they preyed on their own.
He walked out after cashing in. Him the big winner, the stuff of legend, guy took 'em for $39 and change in one day, that's what low-rent dreams were made of. “That's enough to buy a new truck,” some working stiff said when Neely left, and it left a sour taste in his mouth, like the money was dirty now and he was too. He used to love coming to this place, maybe the accident really had ruined it. Or maybe it was winning, maybe winning ruined it. As he left the parking lot he nodded goodbye to the cheesy faux Indian architecture—he knew he'd never be back and the thought depressed him.
CHAPTER 8
He was five minutes down the road before he realized where he was headed. Rubbing some salt in the wound? Biting down on that sore tooth? Sure. All the above. He wanted to see it, he wanted to stand there.
He parked by the shoulder and walked to the spot, shooting gaps in the traffic. There was still a sizable dent in the pavement, he supposed that wasn't such an easy thing to fix and must be on a list somewhere. Dent, hell, there were still pieces of the Jeep embedded in the surface. That was a serious pancake act, flattening a car so bad you smooshed it into the tar of the roadway. Wonder if there's bits of Indian boy in it too? Neely suddenly felt nauseous but he looked off for a moment, just in time to have a car honk at him and bring him out of his daydream.
Something caught his eye and he waited for a truck to pass before crossing over again. There were flowers by the roadside—it was a shrine with candles, photos, cards, flowers and bundles of sage. Neely didn't recognize the boy in the photos, but he wouldn't, would he? Somehow, looking at them, he knew it was him, though. Something in the carefree body language fit the boy he saw die, the arm flying up in farewell. Beseeching the universe, seeking admittance, waving to the animal spirits, beckoning to the gods of the earth. His name was Jack Wakyza, and those were his brothers. Five brothers, all with the same happy grin. They were on motorbikes in someone's backyard. A trail worn by their wheels, a dog chewing a flea, two more lying on a patch of dirt. It was a picture of summer, a life rich in company and poor in belongings. Cinder blocks and dirty resin chairs, a collapsed backyard pool, a rusted swingset, an old shed propped up with graying 2x4s. Another photo…a party, or no, something on the reservation, what did they call them? Pow-wows. A family gathering, some in traditional garb but most in t-shirts. A small, wizened woman in a faded dress, looking shrunken next to the boys. Lomasi, her name was. Lomasi Buchanan-Angel, and she looked like Yoda. The boy's grandmother, the one who'd grasped Neely's hands at the funeral and whispered that word to him…
A car suddenly blasted by him, its horn so loud it almost made him leap into its path rather than out of it. He must have surprised the driver, it was just a small rise on the horizon and he was crouched down to see the photos. Still, it seemed unnecessary… Neely would have flashed his commentary, but the guy was already gone. Instead, Neely looked down at the shrine and had an impulse to kick it all over, to stomp on it and destroy the memories already fading. Instead he walked back to his car and got in. The sun was shining, it was a steady 78, the birds were out and the sky was cloudless. Damn.
He walked in late, but it didn't seem to afford suspicion and everyone sat down to dinner together. He had nothing to bring to the table since he couldn't very well fill them in on the events of his day, so he listened and asked questions as Jess and Cullen talked of school and tests and grades, then moved on to the gossip, insults and jealousies that really took up most of their day. He always enjoyed this, it was one of the pleasures of parenthood to hear what seemed of mind-blowing importance at age 14 or 17. Just wait, he'd think. Just wait. It had a sadistic edge, parenting… The Hunger Games wasn't entirely a work of fiction, after all. Shut up and get moving kid, they're coming for you.
“You alright, dad?” It was Jess, always Jess.
“Sure, pumpkin. Why?”
“You seem far away.”
“Oh, just work stuff. New account and all, more pressure.” This was a ready-made excuse for anything and he was glad he had it. She looked at him, though, and he saw Hope in her eyes. She wasn't buying it, not completely. On the surface, yes, it was a good one and couldn't be faulted, but she was seeing something else in him that Hope couldn't see and it made him uncomfortable. “Now maybe you can pass the bread basket. I'm jonesing for another roll.”
She smiled as she passed them. It was a holdover from her precocious years between 12 and 15 when she enjoyed nothing better than his use of once-cool words like “jonesing” because he thought he was some sort of “with-it” dad who knew how to “get low with his tribe” and “shoot the shit with his posse.” She didn't realize until later that he only sprinkled his speech with phrases like “getting jiggy with it” as a way of getting the last laugh on her through her most sarcastic years and she didn't even know it. It gave her newfound respect for him.
Neely and Cullen crashed on the couch and played Resident Evil after dinner. Playing with his son made Neely nostalgic for his Mortal Kombat glory days, but he felt they'd gone too far with the features and gimmicks lately. Hell, he didn't even know what half the buttons on the controller did. The result was that Cullen regularly beat him at everything, a situation Cullen was quite pleased with and Neely considered a charitable confidence booster. Sometimes, however…
“Oops. That happened,” Neely said.
“Dad!”
“You were in the field of fire.”
“They're over there.”
“They're too fast, you're just standing there. Oops. Happened again.”
Cullen laughed. “Stop it.”
“Oops.”
“Dad!”
“Don't look at me, watch the trapdoor. They're coming any second. Oops.”
“I'm on your side!”
“Heat of battle. Collateral damage.”
“I'll show you heat of battle…”
“AAAAAAARRGGH!”
“AHHHHHHHHHHH!” They both screamed as they shot each other to pieces, the mutants standing idly by, seemingly neglected.
“Alright, you two. Give the aliens a reprieve,” Hope said, sitting down and grabbing the remote.
“They're not aliens, they're humanoids,” Cullen said.
Everyone had TV's in their rooms, but Hope didn't like the sequestration it created and had instituted a policy of Family Togetherness Time on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Huge protest movements ensued, petitions were signed, the verdict appealed, but the final judge, Hope of course, ratified the decision and signed it into law. Sundays were usually a board game—they all took turns choosing though the field was limited to the six Hope deemed acceptable. On TV nights, however, they engaged in lengthy debate as taking turns seemed to mollify no one. It was a lark when it all began, but after Hope instituted parliamentary procedure everyone began ramping up the seriousness of their arguments. Points were awarded for passionate entreaties and it had become family legend one night when Cullen got an empty gallon container of olive oil out of the recycling bin and began beating on it in perfect emulation of something they'd seen an orangutan do in a nature documentary the previous week. It was ironic that it was all in an effort to get them to watch something about robotic rodents swarming a spaceport on the Sci-Fi Channel, but his demonstration was considered something of a coup and he won out.
Most nights the discussions resembled sessions of Congress as the males and females fell along partisan lines. Neely hated romantic comedies aka romco
ms aka rocos aka chick flicks, while Jess couldn't stand anything with zombies, serial killers or aliens (dick flicks, she called them, when Hope was safely out of the room), which devastated Cullen as it left out virtually his entire oeuvre. He needed support and Neely gave it to him, though rendered carefully, as it was at the risk of alienating Hope. They often settled for PBS, nature docs and reality shows, only because these were the categories that produced the fewest protests and boycotts. Neely and Hope observed afterwards that the point-by-point debates were having a positive effect on both Jess and Cullen, who were showing signs of pre-preparation and well-reasoned arguments. Lately, the kids even took Neely and Hope aside before the debate started in crude attempts at lobbying. Great preparation for life, of course, as their negotiating skills were bearing fruit—they saw Cullen happily give in to a Lifetime horse drama one night in exchange for Jess's swing vote on the MMA semis the following week. These were pizza and popcorn nights as well, which helped lubricate the democratic process, though there were still many nights where one unhappy participant instituted a cold war in protest (made worse by the “no phones” rule, which was strictly enforced).
“That's diseased!” Cullen yelled, capping off the two-part Serengeti doc with a medley of all the “really dank stuff” he'd found on YouTube that week. The family had found universal favor in the array of clips he presented, as he'd adopted a bit of P.T. Barnum in playing to his crowd. There were tearful reunions of people with people, people with animals, and animals with animals, right alongside idiot rednecks jumping ATV's off roofs, impossible parkour stunts, tragically-mistimed skateboard maneuvers, seemingly-impossible basketball shots, acrobatic motorcycle wipeouts, and a cornucopia of explosions of a wide and varied nature. Cullen was an enthusiastic presenter, as each of his favorite clips was accompanied by a chorus of “You gotta see THIS!”, “OWWW!! THAT hurt!” and, his favorite, “That's diseased!”, repeated at the top of his lungs.
Neely suddenly jumped, surprising everyone, as the current clip of a little Korean girl killing the drum solo from “Painkiller” didn't seem like something anyone could sleep through. “You alright?” Hope asked. Neely nodded quickly and tried to erase the look of alarm on his face. He couldn't remember what he'd been dreaming, he only knew it'd been unpleasant. He felt the tension in his brain and his skin crawl with the unseen memory of wherever he'd been. Who are you kidding? You know exactly where you've been. But this most recent foray into night terrors had ended with a revelation. As he shook the clouded visions from his head, it suddenly hit him…the trees…THE TREES…the lumber company. Why hadn't he thought of it? Everyone agreed, they were the ones to blame, they were the ones breaking the law, stealing old growth trees they weren't allowed, sneaking them in with their regular loads, not securing the added weight appropriately. They were, if anything, more culpable than him and he knew the authorities had launched an investigation. They were at fault, in the eyes of the law, not poor Neely Thomas. They were the ones.
The next day, Neely skipped lunch and tore through his in-box so he could leave at 3. He cited some appointment to his secretary, but then blew his alibi out of the water by asking Malkey to trade vehicles for the day as he said he had some property to look at. He relaxed behind the wheel of Malkey's Humvee and drove back out toward Naccahaw to visit the cut. The company had a main office but it was just stored equipment and an empty metal building, the real operation moved with the work. It was a devil to find and Neely silently thanked Malkey for buying such a monstrously impractical vehicle. It wasn't one of the civilian models, either, it was military, actually used by the Army and sold surplus to the public. It shotgunned gasoline like a beast dying in the Sahara, but it seemed unimpeded by any road conditions God could come up with. After three wrong turns, Neely took it up a steep fire road so rough he wasn't even sure he could walk it, but the Humvee had no qualms. It felt like it'd be just as happy without the semblance of a road and it made Neely think maybe military planners weren't such imbeciles after all.
It was a maze out there—there were dozens of logging roads criss-crossing the area and his GPS was worthless as most of them weren't on it. He ended up driving around looking for signs of life and finally spotted some equipment far up a steep slope to his right. He took the next branch road and saw a crane on a hill strung with thick cable overhead. His eye traveled down to a trailer and an assortment of pick-ups and idle equipment.
He pulled up and got out, eliciting menacing stares from the three men sitting on a stump taking a smoke break. He guessed they didn't get too many visits from people they'd never seen before. On closer examination, he guessed the kind of men this outfit employed were wary of strangers for a whole lot of reasons that had nothing to do with the stranger. One of them had both a white power emblem and swastika tattooed on his bicep, the other looked like a cross between The Incredible Hulk and the kid from Deliverance, and the third looked like the guy they celled you with in your worst prison nightmare. Neely headed to the trailer, trying to look like he knew what he was doing and had every reason to be there, but the door was locked and the Cellie from Hell spoke up.
“Help you?” he said, looking like helping Neely was the last thing on Earth he was planning to do.
“I'm looking for Coll Hollis.”
“What for?”
“I talked to his dad, he said I'd find him down here.”
Ken Hollis owned WNC Logging & Lumber. He mainly worked the phone these days, lining up new cuts, getting the best price for what they had. Coll was his son, he was the foreman. “What do you want?”
Neely supposed when you did this sort of thing for a living, being nice to the public wasn't a necessary or helpful trait. “I want to know what happened after the accident on 23. I wanted to know what came of it.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“I'm not an investigator or reporter. I was in the accident.”
“I can say it again if you didn't hear me.”
Neely had the attention of the other two men, neither of whom seemed concerned or interested enough to extinguish their cigarettes. Neely figured he didn't look like much of a threat to these guys. “I'm not talking about the law or anything like that. I'm talking about funny things.”
For some reason, this got the guy's attention. He stared intimidatingly at Neely, but Neely had a feeling his mind was somewhere else now, he just always stared intimidatingly. “What are you talking about?”
“I'm wondering if anything's gone wrong around here since then. Or right. If anything's gone on that's out of the ordinary.”
“Yeah, I'd say it has,” Coll said, stomping his cigarette deep into the mud. “Came out the next day and made us stop what we were doing. Mid-cut, that one over there. Halfway through it and they said shut it down. Christ, you don't shut down a cut on a tree halfway, like to kill someone.”
Neely looked where he was talking about and saw the tree he meant swaying ominously with a light breeze. It was huge, so large it dwarfed the rest of the trees on the hillside. He guessed he was looking at the edge of the protected old growth area and that these guys had been caught red-handed trying to slip one out of the cookie jar. “We had to secure it top and middle, it's not safe the way it is.”
“They strung this tape, then?” Neely said, as there were runs of Forest Service red tape in two circles around the tree and another section creating a border.
“Yeah,” Coll said, spitting on the ground. “They strung it.”
“They're saying it's not part of the cut then?”
“That's what they say. We have to have a state surveyor come out and settle it.”
“And you're not to touch it til then?”
“SNAG!” he suddenly yelled into his radio. Up on the hill his crew was loading logs onto the hoist. There was a relay system as each log was rigged to travel down by cable to a pile near where they were standing. This must be where the trucks loaded up, Neely realized, and he thought of the truck and the log he'd had his ow
n intimate encounter with.
“Goddamnit! Stop pulling, Greg, free it first! How many times I got to tell you?! Dumbass.”
The two others moved up the hill with surprising dexterity considering their size and freed the end of the log from the stump it had wedged itself against. The operator at the top of the hill resumed the cable's descent and the log dragged itself over the rough, clearcut ground toward them.
“How'd you even get those big logs out of there? It looks like your equipment wouldn't handle them,” Neely said.
Coll turned back to him. “What the fuck do you want, anyway?”
“Look. Maybe I'm nuts, I just want to know if you've seen any of the boy's kin out here. Maybe they were curious, maybe they said a blessing, maybe they were up to something.”
“Listen, asshole, either tell me what you're after or get the fuck gone.”
Neely didn't read it as an idle threat. No one knew he was here and these guys didn't look like strangers to violence. A gust of wind suddenly picked up and pushed the log traversing the cable into a mass of roots from an uplifted stump, which only tightened its grip when the cable tried to pull it free.
“STOP! DAMMIT! Stop! You'll BREAK it again, you fucking asswipe,” said Coll into his radio, heading up toward the obstruction. As the other two already had a head start, Neely found himself suddenly alone. He looked back at the towering old-growth tree still swaying from the last gust and he could see the shadowy outlines of the other sentinels of the old forest behind it. Neely stepped toward it—it was awe-inspiring up close and carried even more power stripped of its branches, cut half-through and cabled in place like that. It reminded him of the way they strapped down Hercules in the old movies or military jets on carriers, weak attempts by man to control something too big and powerful to be controlled.