by Julia Stoops
Sylvia says, “I wouldn’t take a kid. Crowds can be unpredictable.”
Dee puts the salad on the table. There’s a lot of grated carrot, which I like ’cause of the way it soaks up the dressing. And some kind of casserole thing with green beans and tempeh—excellent. “I wouldn’t take a child, either,” she says.
Fetzer pops the cork and sets the bottle down. “It was a march, not a riot. The cops were the ones being unpredictable.”
“They were fucking insane,” I say, and reach for the bottle.
Fetzer yanks it away. “Gotta breathe. This is a ’97. Show some respect.”
“You’re full of shit. It says ’99.”
Fetzer looks at the label and his forehead scrunches. “Shit.”
“Huh,” says Nelson. “She must’ve given us a mixed case.”
Fetzer goes to the cupboard at the end and kneels, pulls bottles out one by one. “Guess so. We’ve got one ’97 left, the rest are ’99.”
“Well,” says Dee, “let’s just drink what’s open.”
Fetzer comes back to the table. “It’s not like this one’s terrible. But the ’97? It’s a sweetheart.” He starts pouring the wine, and it’s dark in the fancy glasses.
“To the First Amendment,” says Nelson.
“What’s left of it,” says Fetzer. We’re all standing around the table and our glasses clink above the food. Mine extra gently.
Nelson’s tie is off. Is it my imagination or is he loosening up a little the last few days? He says to Sylvia, “We’ll do a story about the police response for the next show.”
“Uh-uh,” says Sylvia, like she doesn’t think it matters all that much. Then she pulls a box out of her giant purse and hands it to Deirdre. “This is for you, darling. You need a connection to the outside world.”
Deirdre turns the box over in her hands.
“A cell phone?” I say.
Sylvia looks smug as hell. Turns out the fucking thing has a built-in camera.
Fetzer grins. “Haww. That’s cool. That is very cool.”
Nelson says, “That’s really generous, Sylvia.”
“You never give me a phone,” I say. Only half-joking, ’cause I could sure as hell use a camera phone way more than Dee.
Deirdre pulls it out of the box, and it’s all silver and smooth. She touches the small square that houses the lens. “I can take photos,” she says, like it’s only just dawned on her. She looks up into Nelson’s eyes, and they're staring at each other so hard I’m getting uncomfortable.
21: NELSON
The basement stairway is a black hole tugging at Nelson, pulling him downward. His hand is on the banister, measured, silent, like defusing a bomb. Not that he’s ever defused a bomb, but it probably feels like this, with the sweating and the churning. Bare toes slide forward to find the edge. One step down, and the dark fills with the thrumming of his heart.
The violence today. Meted out so casually. And strong, young Brian, felled like a tree.
Nelson breathes in on the sore place. Inches his foot to the next edge. Steps down.
It’s way too easy for one person to hurt another. Way, way, way too easy. It doesn’t make sense. It’s never made sense.
In a slow-motion dance, he grips the handrail, feels for the edge, reaches his toes down. His heel down. Pause. The air is cooler. The handrail is sticky. The photocopier hums.
He’d hurt Lise. He hadn't meant to, but it was a side effect of his decision.
Lean forward, grip the handrail.
He would’ve hurt her more if he’d stayed and pretended.
His heartbeat rises like a flood, and when he ducks his head below the basement ceiling, he is engulfed. Deirdre’s curtain is closed, but there she is, awake, her cross-legged silhouette on the cloth.
Just as quietly as he came down, he will go up again. Yes. He will tiptoe through the moonlight in the living room, creep up the main stairs to the top floor, close his bedroom door behind him without even a click, and crawl back into his bed.
The dehumidifier gurgles. But there’s another sound. A sniff. A small hiccup. She’s crying.
No turning back now.
He steadies his hand against the wall. Toes down, then heel. His body sways around his thudding heart. Another step. Another, then the shock of cold concrete at the bottom.
The basement is like the sea after a wreck, full of debris. This debris happens to be at right angles to one another and mostly arranged in piles, but in the nearly-dark there’s a lot to navigate. Luckily the power LEDs on the electronics are like tiny lighthouses. The floor is freezing. He stops a yard away from the dim blue fabric of her curtain, and breathes in sharp against the sore place, trying to edge it out. The ferocious hard-on he had in his bedroom is gone.
Why is this so damn difficult?
Lise in his head says, Too much doubt makes John a dull boy.
“Deirdre,” he whispers, pointlessly, since there’s no one to wake up, “are you okay?”
Her silhouette jumps. “Jaysus.” Her silhouette hands pull at blankets. “Aye. Come in.”
He opens the curtain to muted brown light. They should get her a better lamp. And a floor mat. Her oversize gray T-shirt reaches baggy to her elbows and covers her bottom. She has a plastic cup of wine in her hands.
He says, “Sorry I startled you.”
She doesn’t look up. Pats the cot. He sits. Her obsidian black hair almost touches her knees. He bends down to peer up into her face, but where the T-shirt stretches across her thighs he can see her panties. He makes himself look away. On her cardboard-box nightstand is a cheap clock and a book of T. S. Eliot’s poems. A charming surprise. The box is on its side and holds small piles of underwear. She probably keeps her notebooks under the cot, with the photos. Clothes hang like ghosts from a pipe along the ceiling. Heartbreakingly, third-worldly simple. The skirt she wore today, and her jeans, and the frilly sea-green top she had on dancing that night.
He says, “What’s wrong?”
Her face rises, puffy and wet around the eyes. She hands him the cup of wine. “Nothing.”
He takes the wine, and a laugh falls out of him, nervous and absurd. “Please. You’re going to have to do better than that.” He sips. It’s strong. He’s sharing her cup. His lips are touching where hers have touched.
She looks up at the ceiling, sighs, and says, “It’s just very hard.”
“What is?”
“Being here.”
Behind Nelson’s eyelids the strings are about to snap. “Really? Why?”
“It’s just hard, okay? It’s hard to be settled. You guys are brilliant, but it’s hard.”
“Are you homesick?”
“Homesick?” She snorts. “No.”
“Can we make it easier?” he says. “Would you like to move upstairs?”
She shakes her head.
He forces himself to ask, “You want to move out? I can’t blame you, we’re not the best housemates you could find.”
“No,” she says, still shaking her head. “And that’s just it.”
“What’s it?”
Her face is shadowed on one side. “I’ve become attached.”
He’s not sure if she means attached to him, or to all of them.
“Well,” he says, and it’s like negotiating a treaty in a dialect he doesn’t fully understand. “We’re really glad you’re here.”
And “we” especially means him.
Her voice squeals, whispery. “But it’s all so bleedin’ tenuous.”
She’s so close. It’s so quiet. “You mean, staying here?” His heart slams in his chest. “You can stay as long as you want, Deirdre.”
“Everything.” Her hands lift, then drop like dead fish on the blanket. “It can all go,” she whispers, “in an instant.”
He wants to say, Yes, it can all go. In our lifetime we may see total environmental and social collapse. But that’s not really what she means. He’s sitting rigid as stone, but like a slow cog, something insi
de him begins to turn.
“Jaysus Christ,” she says. “Stop looking at me like that, I’m a right mess.”
The turning cog bends him closer to her. He sets the cup of wine on floor. Echo of his breath off her skin. Touch of her cheek to his lips, her lips to his lips. He holds there, his heart walloping, his mind spinning, every muscle in his back holding him in this awkward tipped-forward position so he doesn’t fall on her.
Her hands press against his shoulders. Slowly push him away. She sits loose and still, her eyes closed like she’s meditating.
He has done the most absolutely dumb thing of his whole life, and he can’t retract it. From now on, this moment will be the division. Everything after this will be tainted by his error, and everything before will be imbued with innocence.
“So,” she says, her voice like dry paper, “it’s really scary, falling in love with you like this.”
His limbs flood, adrenaline but smoother. The room swings, he shifts into her outstretched arms, pulls her tight. Warm body through thin cotton. Her knee digging into his side, her skull pushing his glasses into his temple. They rock back and forth and he could cry but he kisses her neck instead and tells himself to breathe. The cot bumps like a raft on choppy water, and she’s up on her knees—no, don’t push away, no—but it’s her wet mouth and hot thigh and grasping hands, and there under the pipes along the ceiling, with the photocopier humming in the sea of debris, and the city sleeping all around them, there on the creaky metal camp bed that can barely fit one person, he tumbles under the surface of his life.
In his hair. It’s her hand. He spreads awake.
“I have to pee,” she says. The cot wobbles as she gets up, and his elbow knocks the wall. She’s in the air he breathes, she’s in his mouth, she’s on his skin.
He rolls onto his back and laces his fingers behind his head. He’s floating in a spring sky. On the cardboard box sit his glasses where she’d placed them. He doesn’t put them on. The toilet flushes in the distance. He needs to go, too, but he can’t imagine ever moving from this bed. That jewel smile when she comes back. It’s where he will live out his days.
This time he wakes with a bump, and he’s knotted and gritty. She has to look at him like that again. She has to take him back up into the spring sky.
“Hey,” he murmurs.
She breathes, her eyes dozy slits.
“You awake?” he says. Her eyes open, then she props her head on her hand. “Do you always leave the light on?” he asks.
“Mmm.” Her face dips down until their foreheads touch, and it’s like she has only one eye. Her finger traces a line down his sternum.
Maybe there is nothing to say, after all.
“What’s up?” she whispers. Atoms collide and scatter with no sound. In the emptiness left behind, his heartbeat rises. She pulls back and gazes at him. “Tell me. I think you need to tell me how you came to be here.”
LEDs shine pinpoints of green in the night sea beyond her curtain. Beyond that is the broken trajectory of his life.
He breathes in against the small stone, the pressure in his chest.
“I used to be with the Forest Service,” he confesses.
“Mmm?” she says.
He smooths a corner of the sheet against the thin mattress. “Should be called the National Timber Industry Service.”
“Why’d you work there?”
“Joined right out of grad school. Considered myself a reasonable sort of conservationist, you know? Rational, pragmatic, able to make compromises.”
She strokes a finger along his wrist. “What did you do there?”
“Desk job. Dealt with state and local governments, forest industries, private landowners. God, this makes me uncomfortable.”
“Now why on earth would it be doing that?”
“Because I was ignorant. And dishonest. Told myself I was doing a good job of managing the land, you know? Till I met Fetzer and Jen. They approached me after a town meeting. Pretended to be with the LA Times.”
Deirdre’s smile almost makes him smile.
“Yeah, I was flattered. Until they were sitting in my office and it turned out they ran a newsletter for the old Northwest Forest Alliance. They’d been up at the Enola Hill protests. They spread photos and statistics across my desk and told me what they’d seen. Filled some gaps in my reality.”
Deirdre keeps smiling like the words Enola Hill are merely pleasant syllables.
It was a dry summer day when Fetzer and Jen stepped into his Salem office. They sat in his two extra chairs and spoke reasonably. Gathered up the photos and the printouts at the end. Shook his hand and thanked him for listening. Said they had a feeling he’d be open to listening.
They may as well have pushed over his bookcase, tipped his desk up, emptied the drawers on the floor.
He breathes in against the sore place.
“You see, we managed this forest called Enola Hill as part of the commercial timber base. I didn’t like the idea of cutting it, but I took it for granted that if you don’t agree with the law, vote someone in to change it, and until then put up with it, you know?”
“Ah,” she says. “Faith in oligarchy.”
“Yeah, huh. Clinton passed the salvage logging rider. A judge declared logging Enola Hill was legal, and it was my job to support it. At least in principle. I didn’t personally issue the road-use permit, but I could have. And I would have.”
Deirdre strokes her fingers in small half-moons behind his ear.
“Enola Hill was bad, Deirdre. Very bad. Old-growth hemlock and Doug fir. Lynx, cougar, spotted owl, all under the saw.”
He places a hand over her heart. His life, her life, meeting here.
“The Yakama and Umatilla were devastated. The Nez Perce had used it as a vision-quest site for centuries.” The sound out of his mouth is nearly empty. “It was like destroying a cathedral.”
The sore place burns. “I couldn’t believe what an idiot I’d been. Twenty-eight years old, and naive as a stupid kid.”
Deirdre’s hand is on the back of his neck, massaging, forgiving. “No.” Her voice is like velvet. “You opened your eyes.”
He shakes his head. “The cathedral still came down.”
Outside the crossing bells start clamoring, breaking the still night. He waits for the shrieking train to pass.
“Fetzer drove me up there,” he says. “Jen came, and this other guy, Ralph. Fetz took us up in the Toro. It was a really hot day.”
He twines his fingers with Deirdre’s and thinks of upended roots.
“Worst ride of my life. Ralph despised me on principle, said they should dump me in a gully. Luckily Fetz had just converted the Toro. Gave us all the step-by-step details. Kept Ralph from pushing me out of the car and abandoning me in the forest.”
Knotted roots.
“Six years ago, almost to the day.”
He closes his eyes.
“Fetzer stopped at a trench blockade. Some women were trying to keep it going. You could see down the hill, bald spots. They call it selective logging, but that’s a joke. Some elders from Warm Springs came by. It was like a funeral. People kept looking over at me, like ‘What’s he doing here?’”
The branch he’s holding onto won’t let him go. The sun is slanting through the evening trees and birds are gathering in the canopy. A dump truck fills the trench in seconds, and the logging convoy drives over, shaking the ground where he stands. A woman in a green T-shirt whose name he wants to know but doesn’t dare ask lifts her arms to the forest and she calls out, “Your last night.” Insects flit around her in the clearing like flecks of golden light. Huge sweat stains on her shirt from digging all day. She keeps her arms up, does a slow circle. “I’m so sorry,” she cries. She starts sobbing, circling and crying “I’m so sorry,” over and over until it’s wailing and not words anymore.
A leaf touches his face, but it’s Deirdre’s hand.
“That night”—with his eyes still closed, he takes Deirdre’s hand
and presses her palm to his lips—“I wrote my letter of resignation.”
The skin of her hand grows damp from his breath.
“Joined the Northwest Forest Alliance. Left my wife.”
Deirdre’s hand twitches. “Your what—your wife?”
He opens his eyes. “Her name was Lise. Is. She’s still in Salem. Last I heard.”
Deirdre’s lower lip is between her teeth.
“It was really hard,” he says. “Took them weeks to trust me.”
“Jen must’ve given you a rough time,” says Deirdre.
“She was okay. Mostly. But the monkeywrenching was terrifying.”
Nelson lets go of Deirdre’s hand. “I never even lied on a tax return, and there I was, prowling around at night pulling out survey stakes, hoisting supplies up to tree-sitters. There’s this thing called a dragon, used in blockades.” He gestures a mound. “A big pile of cement with a pole in it, you make it in the middle of the road, and activists chain themselves to it.” He drops his hand and mutters, “I got good at mixing cement.”
Deirdre says, “It’s a bit bloody hard to picture.”
“I can hardly believe it myself.”
She rubs his hand. “Then what?”
“It wasn’t right for me. I mean, it was fantastic and liberating. But some of the people were too angry. No, rightfully angry, but too provocative. It scared me, but I didn’t know where else to go, you know? I’d walked away from everything. Friends, career, family.”
“They thought you’d gone off your nut.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
His best friend, Craig, was teaching science at their old high school in Maryland. They’d been best men at each other’s weddings, and kept in contact for years. A message from Craig happened to arrive soon after Nelson resigned from the Forest Service. It was full of banalities and exclamation points. Remodeled kitchen, son’s soccer practice, upcoming vacation. How can you be so excited, Nelson thought, when water tables are being poisoned by gasoline additives? When five hundred children die of poverty in Africa every hour? When butterflies that once thickened the air are almost extinct? Nelson wrote back that he’d left his job, and left Lise. He wanted to do the right thing, he wrote, and he wasn’t sure this was it but it was a start. He was on a journey, he wrote, and he was scared. Craig must think he’s crazy, right? He’d visit Craig when he got his finances sorted out, but right now he was out of a job and the divorce was expensive. It would be great if Craig managed to squeeze in a visit to Portland. Nelson needed to talk all this over with a friend. Nelson sent the email twice, a week apart, in case the first one had gotten lost in cyberspace, but Craig never replied.