“We came up from Tacoma,” Dirtrat shouts to them. Then he leans over to me and Jeff: “We gotta tell them who we are so they know we’re not here to snitch them out.” Jeff nods. Then Dirtrat shouts again: “I heard about y’all from Acacia and Critter in Olympia.”
The woman’s face lights up. “Acacia! Love her!” She picks up her pace, half jogs toward us. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty good, I guess,” Dirtrat says, fists jammed in his pockets, eyes ringed by the black of his face tattoo. “Last time I saw her was at Olympia Food Not Bombs a couple weeks ago. She was cooking.”
“Right, right,” she says. “Cool. Acacia’s an awesome woman. So powerful, right?” Dirtrat looks vaguely uncomfortable. “I’m Sage.”
Up close I can see her tattoo, the outline of a tree, black branches snaking around the curve of her strong forearm. She offers her hand to shake. The guys hesitate, awkward, so I reach mine out. Her grip is strong. “Nice to see a girl up here,” she says, smiling right into my eyes. It catches me off guard.
Then the guy catches up, his gait loose and calm. He stands a foot or two behind Sage, but not like he’s holding back, just giving her the lead. His T-shirt says “Northwest Biocentric Conference 1994” around this intricate circular design; a tiny ponytail curls out from underneath his stocking cap. Up close I can see they’re older than me, but not by much. He’s twenty-one, probably; she might be Jeff’s age, maybe a little more. “Hey,” the guy says. “I’m Aaron.”
“He doesn’t have a forest name,” Sage says, smiling at him. “I keep telling him that won’t be safe forever, but he wants to hold out as long as he can.”
“She’s probably right,” Aaron says to us. “But hiding generates its own energy, y’know? I’d rather not do it unless I have to.”
Jeff crosses his arms, skeptical. “You don’t think you have to?”
Aaron holds his gaze. “Yeah. I think we’re okay.” Aaron gives Sage a tiny smile, almost imperceptible, like a secret language.
There’s a weird awkward moment. I don’t even know what they’re talking about, hiding and fake names and whatever. Like with the guy at the Quik-Mart, I don’t see what the big deal is, why everyone is acting like there’s some kind of war.
I decide to act like a normal person. I hold out my hand. “Hi. I’m Alison.”
Aaron turns away from Jeff and shakes my hand. His grip is softer than Sage’s but still strong. “Hey. Another A.” His relaxed warmth seems familiar somehow.
They take us on a “tour”: first the kitchen, sacks of lentils and rice, plastic vats of oil, a cardboard box of salvaged veggies. Battered restaurant-size steel pots sit on the forest floor, twigs collecting on their lids. It looks kind of like the Food Not Bombs setup in the park, except for the huge jugs of drinking water lined up beneath the tarp and the fact that we’re in the middle of a forest. It’s not particularly appetizing, let’s put it that way. I’m glad we have the Funyuns.
Aaron brings us over to a central area between the kitchen and the tents, a big clearing with a fire pit and a guitar case and a couple of kids sitting around. One of them is reed-thin and gangly, hunched over a notebook, scribbling. He has stringy brown hair tucked beneath an army cap—the kind you see in old pictures of John Lennon, or Chairman Mao in history books—and a quiet face, like a deer. The other one is short and stocky, ruddy-cheeked with a thick red beard; he’s sturdy, like a carpenter, a punk version of the union guys who work the docks back home. His forearms are crowded with india-ink tattoos, kind of like Dirtrat but less punk in his plain grimy T-shirt. They both look Jeff’s age, like nineteen. “Guys, this is Alison and Dirtrat and Jeff,” Aaron tells them. “They came up from Tacoma.”
“Cool, cool,” red-beard guy says. “I’m Nutmeg. This is Exile.” He nods toward the army-cap guy.
Nobody names their kid Nutmeg. Everyone here except Aaron has weird names they clearly picked out themselves. I thought Dirtrat was just his own special kind of weirdo, but it seems like it’s kind of a thing.
“Does everybody, like, choose a name here? What is that?” I ask.
Jeff flushes red: everybody’s supposed to already know the secret punk-rock codes. He turns to them, explaining for me: “She knows what it is.”
“No, I don’t,” I say, and look at him like What are you doing? He’s acting weird, like I’m embarrassing him or something. Until yesterday, it was always just the two of us. We’ve never really hung out around a bunch of people before, especially people he doesn’t know, especially a bunch of punks he wants to impress. He won’t meet my eye.
“Most people choose different names, yeah,” Sage answers me, looking past Jeff, straight at me. “When the BLM sold this land to Cascade, it became Cascade’s private property, so technically we’re trespassing. They can arrest us just for being here, so we have forest names in case a bust happens and they try to ask us about each other.”
That’s kind of crazy: that it’s illegal just to stand on the dirt I’m standing on. I suddenly feel nervous. I mean, technically, it’s not like I haven’t broken the law; I’ve smoked tons of pot, and I told a sophomore where to buy it once. But this is different. They’re not breaking the law by accident; they’re doing it on purpose, planning, thinking ahead to handcuffs and a night in jail. I don’t know who these people are. Tacoma might be hell, but I feel just a tiny bit relieved that Jeff is driving me back tonight.
* * *
• • •
Later, people hang around the camp: Dirtrat’s wandered off somewhere; Jeff is sitting by a tree alone, smoking. Exile’s working, stacking buckets, organizing stuff; Aaron’s over in the kitchen, rinsing rice. Near the fire pit, Nutmeg picks up a guitar with his stubby fingers and starts playing some folk song about the spirit of the trees. It’s cheesy, filled with lines like sing the heart of Mother Earth.
Sage picks up a backpack full of tools and says she’s going to “fortify the front lines.” She puts her hand on my arm: “Wanna come with?”
I think about all that cops and jail stuff and I don’t, not really, but no girl has invited me anywhere in pretty much as long as I can remember. Let alone touched me, unless you count slamming me against a locker. The girls at school all have each other, clumped up into clusters of safety and trust; they bring each other places, stay together, have each other’s backs. I forgot what that felt like.
I see Jeff watching Sage and me: he looks nervous or something, like he doesn’t want me to leave. He locks eyes with me. I lock eyes back. “Thanks,” I tell Sage, “but I’m kind of tired. Next time?”
“Sure,” she says, watching me watch him.
I head over to sit with Jeff, relieved to finally be alone with him. His back is pressed against the tree trunk; he’s jiggling his foot. He hasn’t said much to me since we got here. It’s like he doesn’t know how to act with me when it’s not just us. “You okay?” I ask as I sit down, put my hand on the leg of his jeans.
He doesn’t answer, just looks up at the canopy above us. I turn my face up too. Tree trunks stretch up like spires, spindly and angular, green turning to black against the bright of the sky. It’s quiet here. Really quiet, the kind that lets you hear everything you’re thinking.
We haven’t talked about what happens after he drives me back tonight. I’m just here playing hooky; I have someplace to go home to. Jeff doesn’t. And it’s a long drive from here to there. My heart thrums at the bottom of my throat as I think about it. I want to ask how long he thinks he’s staying, but I also don’t want to hear the answer.
I don’t even want to think about being in Tacoma without Jeff. It’s not that I’m in love with him; we don’t say that to each other, and I think if I felt it, I would know. In movies everybody always knows. But he’s my only thing. The only thing I have that reminds me I’m a human being—the only person I can laugh with, the one reminder that there’s a world outside the bla
ck hole of my house and the gauntlet of school hallways, the empty abstraction of homework and the endless dark lonely of my life.
If I don’t go home tonight, though, my mom will lose her shit. And if I’m not at lab on Monday morning, I won’t graduate. And it’s stupid, but I think somehow Andy would know.
“So . . .” I say, finally breaking the silence.
“So,” Jeff says back.
“What are you gonna do, do you think?”
He looks at me. “What do you mean, what am I gonna do?”
Suddenly my cheeks flush, like maybe I shouldn’t have asked. I pick at the dirt.
“I mean, like, tomorrow?”
He looks down too. “Oh. Yeah.” Long pause. “I don’t know.”
I’ve never had to deal with the fact that Jeff’s older than me, not really. Not in any way that was a problem. I mean, he can do what he wants with his days. He can stay out late, he can drive to Seattle for band practice, but none of that has anything to do with us. I mean, he lives at home, like me. Or—he did.
“Are you gonna stay here?”
He looks at me. “I mean, I think I have to, at least for a while.”
I’m scared to ask it, but more scared not to know the answer: “What’s a while?”
“I mean, until I can figure something out?”
That doesn’t help.
“Zach doesn’t have room at his place in Seattle,” he says, “and Chris is traveling. I don’t have any cash, so.”
And there it is: the difference between us. He’s an adult now, I guess, which means it all comes down to money. I hate my mom, but I’m allowed to sleep in her house. Jeff’s dad just kicked him out with nothing. That means he’s really on his own.
This space between us opens up, a distance that scares me. I want to look at him and know that he feels the same things I do, that we understand each other, that we make each other less alone. I want to make us match again.
For the first time since that day at Point Defiance Park, I feel like I need something from him that he might not need from me. I need him to come back with me—but he doesn’t need me to do anything. It’s like Andy in the van, when I wanted him to stay but there was no way I could tell him that, no reason he would stay there just because I asked him to. And I could have gone along, I was invited, but I was too afraid to take the leap. I feel out on a limb, suddenly. Like I might get left. It’s scary.
I’m trying to figure out how to stop the silence when suddenly Sage runs back into camp. She’s out of breath, sweaty, and her eyes are blazing. “You guys,” she says. Nutmeg puts down his guitar; Aaron comes from the kitchen. “I heard an engine.”
“Shit,” Exile says, his big dark eyes alert. “How far?”
“I mean, I can’t hear it here yet, so we have a minute,” she says, “but it sounded like it was just a little ways down the mountain.”
“Did you check the dragon?” Nutmeg asks her.
“I stuck a screwdriver in; it’s dry. But just that one; the other three aren’t set yet.”
“Shit.”
“Did you hear that?” Aaron says. Sage’s ears prick up like a rabbit’s; everyone stays still for a second, animals in the forest. We hear an engine in the distance, gears grinding angry and loud against the still of the woods. Still far off, but getting closer.
“Shit,” Aaron says. “Let’s go.”
* * *
• • •
The sky’s almost dark when we get to the front lines. Aaron spots Dirtrat sitting in Grandpa and knocks on the window. Dirtrat opens the car door: “’Sup, man?” A cloud of pot smoke tumbles out.
“Get up,” Aaron says. “Go stash your weed over there somewhere,” he tells Dirtrat, pointing toward the trees. “Away from the car and off your person.”
Dirtrat’s about to argue, but we hear the rumble of the engine again, closer now, and Aaron says, “Go,” and he does.
Sage gathers everyone around. “Okay,” she says. “Here’s the deal.” She turns to Exile and Nutmeg. “Sorry to be repetitive, guys, we’ve got newbies.” Then she turns to us, explaining, “We don’t know who’s out there. Could be nothing. It could also be the Forest Service, loggers, or the cops.” The engine roars again; she tilts her head to listen. “They’re definitely headed toward us, though—not toward town—and it’s getting dark, so chances are they’re not just hikers.”
There’s a thickness in the air between us; everyone huddles close. It’s like when Jeff gets intense about the FBI, except instead of being kind of funny, this actually seems real. My heart pounds in my chest and adrenaline floods my fingertips, even though I have no idea what’s going on.
“It’s early,” Exile says. “They’re not even supposed to know we’re out here yet.”
“Yeah, well, someone in town must’ve tipped them off,” Sage says.
“This isn’t cool, man,” Nutmeg says. “The space isn’t secure. We’ve got three more dragons I’ve barely even started on.”
“We’ll have to work with what we have,” Aaron says, firm.
“Look,” Sage says. “We’ve got one. It’s dry. I checked. And the road’s narrow. Even without the other three, they can’t get around us unless they’ve got bulldozers to dig out a ditch. So we just need to figure out who’s willing to lock down.”
“Lock down?” Jeff asks. “What do you mean?”
“In the dragon,” Sage says. Nutmeg pulls us over to the plank of particleboard laid on the ground beneath the tarp.
“Here,” Nutmeg says. I stand on the board and he crouches down, showing us the hole in the ground behind it. I peer over his shoulder. Hinged to the wood, beside the hole, is an open steel door with a cutout circle in the center. Inside the hole is a deep plastic vat cemented in the ground with concrete. At the base of it, an arm’s length underground, is a metal crossbar, sunk into the cement. Attached to the crossbar is a set of handcuffs.
“This is a sleeping dragon,” Nutmeg says. “Dragon for short. Basically, you lie on the plank, reach underground, and cuff yourself to the crossbar. Then you lock the fire door around your arm. The cuffs have a latch; you can open it with your hand if you want, but no one can cut you out of it against your will. It would take them days to dig you out. You can stay there for hours if you need to; the only thing that sucks is when your hand starts to swell.”
Jeff eyes it, looking kind of scared of it and intrigued at the same time. I don’t get why anyone would want to handcuff themselves for hours to a steel crossbar in a bucket sunk in concrete in the ground. “What’s the point?” I ask.
“To block the road,” Nutmeg answers.
I suddenly realize what they meant when they said the Free State’s here to “stop the loggers.” They meant literally. These people are here to lie down on the ground in front of moving trucks so they can’t get in to cut the trees. I remember the face of the guy at the Quik-Mart, how he looked at us like someone who hurt his family. And I wonder: if that guy was the one behind the wheel, if he would stop.
I can hear the engine rumbling toward us, louder. Now it’s close enough that I can tell it’s a truck. “So who’s locking down?” Sage says. “We gotta decide.”
“I’d do it,” Nutmeg says, “but I still have to finish the other dragons. No one knows how to do the foundations but me, and we can’t really afford to lose a week if I go to jail.”
“Right,” Aaron says. “And there’s a warrant out on Exile still from the Elk Creek action. And Sage and I need to handle logistics. Shit.” Aaron’s calm cracks and I can see his mind whir. “No one’s here yet. It’s too early.” Sticks crack beneath the wheels of the truck as it gets closer. Dirtrat’s faded to the edges of the group, almost blending into the forest.
I look at Jeff. Usually the chance to face down a corrupt authority figure would make his day. He’d probably quote some Crass lyrics, go
in there ready for a fight, sure he’d win. But last night when he tried that with his dad, he lost. I remember the hurt in his eyes when his dad stared down at him, how skinny he looked in the face of his dad’s shadow. How he realized he was losing. It did something to him. He looks down at the dirt. I can tell that he’s embarrassed not to be the one he usually is, the one who’s stepping up. And then I realize: maybe that’s the thing that he could need from me. Maybe I can be the one to do it, and because I’m his girlfriend, it’ll be like he did it, sort of, and he won’t be embarrassed anymore.
“I’ll do it,” I say. And then I hear myself and panic. What the hell did I just volunteer for? But everybody looks at me, grateful. And now I have no choice.
CHAPTER 5
I can smell the dirt, moist and cool beneath me. My cheek is flat against the hard metal of the fire door, arm reaching underground into the dragon, the rest of me curled on my side on the soil. I can’t remember ever lying on the bare ground before, without a sleeping bag or a tent or a towel. The cuffs circle my wrist in the dragon, hand clasped around the crossbar. I can see how your arm would fall asleep after a while, but for now it’s all right.
Sage crouches down beside me, whispering fast as the engine gets closer. “Okay. So we don’t know who’s in that truck. Like I said: could be nobody, in which case they’ll drive up, probably look at you weird, and leave. If it’s Forest Service, you could be here longer.” She hands me a bottle of water. “Don’t drink too much so you don’t get stuck having to pee.” Crap. That hadn’t occurred to me. “If it’s really long—like overnight—someone’ll eventually come in and relieve you.”
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