by Paul Monette
Why am I doing this?
Who could say? It was over before he knew. Perhaps he would have been almost sorry and mourned the brother he almost had, but for the fact that he felt such vast release. He was rid of the claims of people once and for all. His mind reverted to blank. The carcass slumped at his feet wasn’t dead in any way that really mattered. Dead was not a concept he had gotten to yet.
He possessed instead this sense of perfect emptiness. Though he’d had the occasional glimpse of it before, till now it was nothing more than a shine he saw on the face of things. Today it burst inside him like a bomb.
Once more Michael wandered into the alley. He climbed again into the old black car. The staring woman beside him seemed content to let him do the driving. She must have friends up north, he thought. When the time came, she would have to tell him where she wanted to be left off. She probably lived with her widowed mother, he thought as he drove down Market, smiling, lost in a cloud of misperceptions. Perhaps she had a garden on the sea.
“You know, I never really learned the names of all the flowers,” Michael said, waving a hand at a small park that perched on a knoll above the piers. He seemed to mean he had failed to catch the feeling of the place.
He crossed the Golden Gate at ten minutes after six. The hills were so gold they were white like fire. The road was in sweeps, through vales of fog. Though suburbs lay on either hand and the sound of hammers rang in every valley, it seemed to Michael the way was built exactly here just for him to follow. This late November morning was the reason it went north.
Of course there were other cars. Caravans of them, already coming in the other way, to reach the city and get to work. Michael’s side of the road was almost empty. The blood on his hands from the cut of the wire had greased and slicked the steering wheel. He played the Caddy from lane to lane, not bothering with lines. He paid no heed to signs or posted limits. Trucks that passed too close rustled his hair and made him grin.
When the bedroom towns were done, he rode through endless pastures, thirty or forty miles without a break. The wide view to the ocean opened on the left. He had never longed for country life. He had no talent for landscape. Only a certain dread of the ocean that he couldn’t put his finger on. He felt no urge to run down onto these beaches, though they linked like beaten gold beneath the cliffs as far as he could see.
“I wouldn’t live on an island, you know,” he said with conviction. He offered her a cigarette. She declined. “Frankly,” he said, “I’d be afraid of it sinking.”
He could not seem to leave the coast. Hour after hour he trailed the high bluff road. A light rain fell. He had never been quite so close to the sea and yet so high above it. Here, the lay of the land itself appeared to be set down by design, to accustom him to the vantages of power. He saw how one could command these coves and headlands without ever getting near the water. He breezed along as lofty as a general. It seemed a fortuitous thing, to have the object of one’s dread so near at hand. The dreadful part wore off.
Above Albion—it must have been about noon by now—he had not seen another car in fifteen minutes, so he noticed when a small sedan loomed up just behind him. He could tell they meant to overtake, as soon as the road uncurled to a quarter mile of straightaway. Michael studied his rearview mirror with barely a glimpse at the zigzag turns he took across the bouldered downs. Two kids in a hurry rode in the car behind, and they seemed to think Michael was moving too slowly. They honked and weaved and sat back laughing. Michael took his foot up slightly off the gas. In response, they careered ahead and bumped the Cadillac, blowing out one of its taillights.
Michael laughed out loud. As they came around a crag, the road looped back on itself in a steep and slippery grade, going down to a tiny harbor. A low-gear truck with a load of cement was chuffing up the hill. Michael put his hand out the window and waved the boys’ car by. He slowed another fraction. The little sedan, blind to what was ahead, shrieked out into the oncoming lane and lurched past Michael into the path of the truck. The Caddy pulled up neck and neck, so they couldn’t veer away. The moment gleamed like diamonds. With a useless squeal of tires and a lot of screaming, they hit the truck head-on and crumpled like an eggshell.
Michael glided off unscathed. In the mirror, he watched the sedan go tumbling end over end, through the rust and olive meadows. Then it went up in a shoot of flames. The truck had simply ground to a halt, as if it couldn’t make the grade.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Michael said, with a gesture that took in miles of rugged dunes and cypresses. “We have it all to ourselves today. I’m a hermit at heart, aren’t you?”
The rain got worse before it stopped. He did not think to roll his window up, and soon his whole left side was soaked. His teeth began to click with the cold. Every fifteen minutes or so, they passed through the outskirts of a weatherbeaten town. Mostly these were minor ports, abandoned now for years, with rotting wharves and two or three dozen tarpaper houses. Relics of the lumber boom, lately fallen into a sort of ghostly flimsiness. Any one would do, he thought. But he also seemed to understand his chances would improve the further north he went. Thus he refrained from turning off at a couple of jewel-like villages tucked in half-moon bays. He held himself back and kept on going. The dazzle grew till the sea was bright as quicksilver.
He rocked from side to side, all drowsy and uninvolved. He crooned a half-wit song about shipwrecked sailors to the sad, unapproachable woman on his right. It was not till after the road turned in that he had his second chance. The coastal cliffs had become too steep. The highway took to the woods, where it hugged the south fork of the Eel River. Redwoods stood in colossal ranks. He seemed to be in a tunnel, riding through the earth.
When the yellow car appeared behind him, tooting to get the right-of-way, he felt a sudden shock of recognition. He’d never yet done a thing twice, it seemed. He loved the idea of a nice new car exploding into these trees. Too bad he could see no trucks ahead. He would just have to engineer it some other way. Instinctively, he slowed so she could pass—he’d seen it was a woman. Now, as she drew up parallel, Michael did a slight acceleration. He turned the wheel a hairbreadth to the left. The two cars slammed and scraped their sides.
It was so easy. For some reason people trusted each other. They threw themselves in the way of danger with curious abandon. No wonder they died like flies. He pulled the Cadillac over to score a second point. He happened to glance across, to gauge the competition. The woman stared back wide-eyed, bringing her hand to her mouth to cover a scream he could not hear. This wasn’t the least remarkable: anyone would have been full of horror. Yet he could have sworn he saw it double when she looked him in the eye. Then the two cars bashed, and the moment broke. Somebody’s bumper tore away. He was suddenly all caught up in the beauty of the duel.
The road did not have shoulders. Trees had crowded right to the edge of the pavement. However she tried to speed or slow, he stayed right with her, nose to nose. He battered her fender, then her door. He sent her right front hubcap sailing into the woods. Over and over, he thrilled to see how artfully she recovered equilibrium. As the tension built he grew quite giddy, and wished they could ride a thousand miles before this fight was won. He looked over at her with a delirious grin.
She did not return the gallantry. Her face was frozen solid. She looked possessed by a terror worse than what could happen here. The two cars crashed like cymbals, and it dawned on Michael: she knew him. Wait—
She pumped her brake and slowed to a limp before he could think what he ought to do. At first he was too stunned to stop. Then he jammed the pedal so hard, the woman beside him teetered forward and slid to the floor. “Oh, good,” he said gently, “you stay down.” The Cadillac stood in the road. In the mirror, just behind his haunted eyes, he watched the yellow car lurch through a three-point turn and flee. He decided not to follow. How could anyone know him if he didn’t know himself?
Besides, he thought with icy calm, once he’d got to wher
e he was going, they wouldn’t be able to touch him.
Even so, he could not forget her face. By the time the road had wound its way to the sea again, he’d convinced himself he must have been mistaken. It wasn’t him—he’d reminded her of someone. This, he thought, must happen all the time, since people took such care to be so much alike. They sought out mirror images to cut the world in half. He was just as glad that he hadn’t hurt her, frankly. She reminded him of someone, too, though he couldn’t pin it down to name and circumstance.
He reached Eureka at four o’clock, and the north began in earnest. The stretch of coast between here and Point St. George was as thinly peopled as the moon. The cliffs rode higher still above agate beaches thick with wrack and muzzy timbers. Here and there the sheer walls fell to a rocky lowland pocked with bottle-green lagoons. The raw Pacific currents threshed without end on the stark pine shores. You could hardly guess the high tide from the low. The redwoods stepped right to the water’s edge.
In summer it must have been beautiful. Picnic tables perched in the wayside turf. Parks were staked, and vast preserves, in which nothing irreversible could be done by men to trees. Presumably the ominous retreated when the tourists were at large. Or the whirlwinds took the summer off, to seed the next year’s growth. In any case, it was not summer now. The moiling clouds were low against the gorse. The bitter roots hissed. The seabirds bellowed warning. All along the road, the sand blew in and lay in ripples on the asphalt. Everything was drift.
Michael Roman was all but asleep. The car kept roaring off across the gravel, spinning its wheels on the uphill edge of the road. The heather-blue bushes swiped at the side of the Cadillac with a sound like someone clawing on slate. His lids went up, and he jerked awake. His gaping mouth snapped shut. With a dreamlike lunge, he swung the car back on the road—then swerved with a violent wrench and shrieked to a stop. His head went crack on the windshield.
There in the mist, like a sentry barring the way, was an ice-gray wolf who would not flinch. He stood broadside across the road and raked the dying afternoon with his yellow eyes. Michael shrank in his seat. Before he could slip the car in reverse, the animal trotted up to the passenger’s side, so close he could breathe on the window. He stood and locked eyes with Michael, waiting for his place. It was clear he would not brook a moment’s indecision. Quickly, Michael reached across and flung the door wide so he could enter. The wolf went into a crouch and made as if to leap—when he saw the hunched-up body on the floor. Now he drew back. Shied, almost. His nose was faintly trembling. He seemed to be offended.
In a single vague maneuver, Michael picked up Ruby in his arms and dragged her with him out of the car. He lugged her off the road to the downhill slope, through a patch of burrs, and dumped her in a rain ditch, staring at the sky. By the time he scrambled up to the roadway, the wolf was in the car, one paw up on the dashboard. Michael climbed in carefully.
The smell of wildness was so rank he felt his stomach tilt. It wasn’t rot, nor raw infection—more like the carnal stench of death by inches, agonizingly slow. Michael had to lean past him to pull the car door shut. The animal’s fur was old and matted. His skin was aquiver with mange. A low growl boiled in his throat when Michael brushed an arm against him.
Yet the prophet felt no fear. He eased the car back on course and steered through the gathering dusk. He’s mine, he thought with a drunk rapacious smile, though to anyone peering in it would have looked quite the opposite. They rode four miles in silence. Michael had no wish to stroke him, to win his trust or make him loyal. He would not, like a man with dogs, talk nonsense. What he longed to do mostly was command him.
The hedges grew thick on either side, and the night now gained a foothold. It did not seem that a town could be this far away. The loneliness was too extreme. The blasted land had long grown void of all gesture to human scale. Thus, Michael would never have seen the turnoff if the wolf hadn’t started to whine. With a night hunter’s luminous concentration he lowered his massive head and looked past Michael, out at the blue-gray darkness. He shook with a rage to run free. Spellbound, Michael followed the glow of his eyes. And suddenly, weird as the clefts in a dream, saw the tunnellike break in the trees.
He turned and crept down a wooded road, where the lower limbs were all torn and hanging, as if some terrible engine had barreled through to clear the way. A mile downhill he came out at the lip of a gorge. An iron bridge shot over it. Michael drove slowly across. On the island side he entered a rolling plain where the straw grass rippled in the cold sea air. The road ran switchback up the rise to an empty crest that Michael knew would outlook miles and miles of open water. He drove forward with a mounting sense of calm, as if something deeper than memory were pulling him out of the path of time.
He gained the high ground and braked on the edge at the top of the rise. His face lit up with a strange delight. The rocky meadow below swept down to a close-built village strewn across the cliffs. Perhaps half a hundred houses ringed the lower hill—dazzling white, each with a square of garden front and back. Then a single row of shops with covered porches, one or two sullen public buildings, and a church with a stunted spire. This main street, such as it was, led out to a grassy open space on the outermost point of land. There was a squat brick lighthouse set like a jewel at the tip.
Way up here where Michael was one could not see the harbor far below at the base of the cliffs. All the same, he knew it was there. For the first time since he went blank a picture bloomed in his head and stayed, so real he could hardly see around it. He had glided into that crescent harbor. He knew its every anchorage. There was a channel that ran between an enormous boulder and a loaflike headland. The boulder was thirty feet high, with tufts of weeds and three stunted pines on top. It looked like a fallen meteor. Close beside it the headland lay like a beached whale under the cliffs, a hundred yards from tip to tail. The mass of it was overspread with a violent thicket, where no one could walk. In July and August, bitter red berries flamed across it. They rotted and fell and stained the stony soil to a hue like the blood of armies.
He remembered it like a drowning man, except he didn’t drown: the landing nestled between these two gigantic, other worldly forms. Then the steep trail up to the bluff, and the new world ripe for plunder. How he knew all this he couldn’t say, but he let his foot off the brake with a wonderful release. He was home at last.
No one came out to welcome him. As the car sailed down the hill, he could see the place was empty. The night, the storm, the dead of winter had sent them all indoors. For the crux of his dark arrival, nothing moved in the naked village on the cliffs. Perhaps, like a seer mad with visions, he had to come by stealth.
He went in circles round and round till he had a feel for the borders of it. The windows lit. The evening meal. The chimneys sending up the sweet pale smoke of eucalyptus. He stopped at the gates to the cliff-top park. He got out and stood on the land like a sailor too long at sea. The wolf jumped through the open door and thundered by him. Michael was too glad to care. He watched the animal race across the flower beds that fronted a row of tightly ordered houses, then up the hill to the ancient pines. It didn’t matter. Michael did not require his familiars by his side. He preferred them roaming the outer limits, to bring him word if the world intruded.
His work would not begin until the morning. This was his final stillness, here on the windy cliff, and he savored it like an explorer come to the end of the map. He also seemed to understand his triumph wouldn’t ever be as perfect as now. He was free like the land itself tonight, because nothing could outlast him. Nothing could stand alone so long.
As if in celebration, the beacon light flashed on in the light-house on the point. It turned in a circle, bathing the startled heights with sweeps of piercing clarity. He started to walk toward it, homing like a moth, when it struck him full in the face with its naked beam. He shut his eyes and turned with a giddy smile, to see his brief and sudden shadow fall across the town. Then he looked back the way he
came, not sure he hadn’t dreamed his mystic passage here. Perhaps he had never left this place at all.
High in the meadow, at the crest of the hill, he saw twin lights like a pair of lanterns. They hovered there side by side. Michael started to laugh, for he guessed what it was right off. He laughed till the beam came around again and haloed him with night fire. Then he lifted his hand in a parody of welcome, or else it was some godless benediction. At least the sides were drawn, he thought. He could not see it, but still he knew.
The yellow car was here.
III
PITT’S LANDING was something of a company town. Of two hundred permanent residents, fully half were employed by the state, to oversee the keeping wild of Seal Rocks Park. Twenty-six square miles of coastal woodlands, a four-mile string of beaches, the last cascades of the Rotten River and its moiling spill to the sea below—all in the care of a squad of rangers who roared around in Jeeps and scouted trouble on the high ground. Fire and flood were their stock in trade. In the summer they rescued—failed to, mostly—various lunatic tourists who swam off savage rocks, fell into crevices, met up with spiders and snakes and generally lost their way. Which was why the year-round crew loved winter best of all.
They weren’t all men, and they weren’t all young. Women had equal standing in the ranger corps—more so here, in the lightly trafficked provinces, where the loner’s plainness and resoluteness counted double. Wizened veterans, taciturn horsemen, brooders over the weather. A certain type had an instinct for the lighthouse brand of isolation. Not that they kept to themselves. Some had families. Several children were bussed to school at Orick, twelve miles north. The usual quota of aged parents came to live in the odd spare bedroom. Still, the rangers had a solitary streak: they lived deep down inside, like miners.