House of Dead Trees

by Rod Redux

  After her mother died, her father took in his younger brother. Uncle Rick had just gotten a divorce, and his “bitch of an old lady”, as he seemed to relish calling her, had taken everything: their savings, their house, even his coon dogs. He drank a lot, just like his older brother, her daddy, did, but he was always really nice to her. He called her “princess” and “ladybug”, and took over most of the chores her mother used to do, helping her with the cooking and cleaning.

  “Just tryin’ to earn my keep,” he would say as he stood beside her at the sink, washing dishes next to her.

  It was nice to have some help around the house, even though he drank. She could smell the beer on his breath when he joined her on the couch to watch cartoons—She-ra: Princess of Power and Care Bears, usually, but sometimes Inspector Gadget, too. She smelled it on his breath when they talked, when he played dolls with her. Pretty much all the time. And even when he wasn’t drinking, she could smell it. In his sweat. In his clothes. But it was nice to have some company.

  Her father took her mother’s death hard. Jane was an only child, and as was natural, perhaps, she had tried to fill her mother’s shoes. Her childhood, it seemed, had consisted of two constants: helping her father tend to the nursery, and trying to draw him back from the dark place he had retreated to in his soul. But Janey was only eight years old. Her feet were way too small to fill her mother’s shoes. And her father just didn’t seem to have any interest in her anymore. Sometimes he acted like his old self, cheerful and teasing, but mostly he just cried, or sat around staring into the distance.

  She thought about her mother a lot at night, and she was glad whenever Uncle Rick snuck into her room after her daddy fell asleep, even though he kind of stank.

  At first, he only cuddled with her. He’d warn her she must never ever tell her father what they were doing, ‘cause it was not something grown men were supposed to do with little girls, but he was lonely, and she was lonely, too, right? What with her mother just passing.

  Yes, she was lonely. She was very, very lonely!

  Eventually, their cuddling became an intimacy that was both pleasurable and disconcerting. He would stroke her hair, hold her tight against his body. Sometimes he would ask her to rub his chest or tummy, saying it felt good to be petted on. Summer came, and it got hot. All she had was a window fan to cool her room at night. It seemed perfectly reasonable when Uncle Rick suggested they should strip down to their underpants. Then, about a week after she started back to school, she fell asleep beside him and woke to find her uncle shifting her body atop his.

  He was breathing hard, and at first she thought he was crying, but then she felt the hard length of his penis between her legs, and she realized that he was doing something sexual to her. She wasn’t sure what he was doing exactly. She only knew about sex from cable TV and what the girls at school had said about it.

  She pretended to be asleep, her cheek pressed to his hairy chest, and she listened to his heart gallop as he gripped her buttocks and pressed her groin rhythmically against the rigid length of his organ.

  Why is he doing that? she wondered, listening to his heart whoosh-whoosh-whoosh beneath his sternum, smelling his sour beer sweat.

  Finally, he groaned and a shudder worked its way down his body like he was cold, only he couldn’t be cold because it was summer and the air was hot and thick as oil.

  He returned her to the mattress after a few minutes and rose carefully from her bed. She continued to feign sleep and watched through the lattice of her eyelashes as he took off his underpants and wiped off his big floppy penis with it. The sight of his enormous organ made her feel funny inside. She was frightened, but also strangely fascinated. She watched as he peeked into the hallway, and then he dashed across the corridor to the bathroom. Moments later, she heard the hiss of the shower, the thumps and bumps of his movements in the shower stall.

  She touched the moist patch on her panties, then smelled her fingertips, curious. The odor of her uncle’s leavings reminded her of mushrooms and the black soil her father used to pot the plants in the greenhouses outside.

  Rick Rivers was never cruel to her. He was jovial, often even silly. He played dolls with her, and they watched cartoons together. She loved him, which was probably the hardest thing to deal with later. There was no hate in her voice even when she confessed her secrets to Billy years later. Just shame. Shame and remorse. And for Billy, who knew her uncle, even worked part-time with him in the spring and summer months, there was only shock and embarrassment.

  She didn’t hate him, she said, but she would always consider herself damaged goods. In her mind, she was a naughty girl for going along with all the nasty things her uncle wanted to do with her. And for liking it.

  Most of all, for liking it.

  Still, she longed for true love in her secret heart of hearts. She had not given up on her idea of real love, despite her uncle’s desperate gropings in the dark of her childhood bedroom. Of finding someone who loved her for who she was, not just the urges she could satisfy with her body, an equal, a man her own age, who wanted the same things she wanted, believed in the same things she believed.

  She longed for love, and looking at her reflection in the mirror of the truck center ladies room, water dripping off her nose and chin, Jane thought, Well, who the fuck doesn’t?

  4

  The restaurant adjacent to the truck stop was called the Cup of Stars Café. The phrase sounded familiar to her, though Jane could not quite place it. Cup of Stars… It summoned images from her childhood: unicorns flying over rainbows beneath dark blue starry skies. She drew a lot before her mother died-- in her bedroom, at the kitchen table. Unicorns and butterflies, stars and rainbows. Always drawing, a battered plastic pencil box full of markers and colored pencils sitting beside her hand. Jane remembered how her mother would take a moment while cooking dinner to look over her shoulder. “Pretty,” she’d say as Jane drew, before returning to the range. “I like all the stars.”

  Her father often hung her pictures in the small office he kept next to the dining room, pinning them up over his desk with its messy piles of invoices and nursery catalogs. “My little artist,” he’d proudly declare as he fixed them to the wall with push pins, then he’d step back to admire them. Sometimes he’d ruffle her hair.

  After her mother died and Uncle Rick moved in, she mostly just drew flowers.

  Little Dan had just exited the men’s room when Raj and Big Dan strolled through the sliding electric door together. They’d filled the tanks and moved the vehicles to the parking spaces in front of the truck center. Jane was perusing the postcards in the souvenir section as the three men gathered by the doors.

  Jane collected postcards from her travels, kept them in a large photo album on her coffee table. She tried to memorialize all the places she visited, though sometimes she thought she did it more to preserve the memory of herself than the places she had been. She sometimes looked through the album and thought, I was there. Existential Jane.

  “Everything come out all right?” Big Dan asked.

  Little Dan grinned sheepishly. “Thought I was going to make a mess there for a minute or two,” the short redhead answered.

  “Maybe we should grab a bag of adult diapers for ya while we’re here,” Big Dan snorted. “Then we won’t have to stop so much. You could just let ‘er rip whenever the urge hit!”

  “Don’t make fun of me! You know I’m gluten intolerant. I can’t help it. Besides, I’ll do it! I’ll wear one, just so I can shit in the car and make you smell it for the next five hundred miles.”

  Jane smiled as she eavesdropped on the two Dans. Their never-ending game of braggadocio had long lost its novelty, but it was always interesting to see just how far each man was willing to go in his quest to one up the other.

  “Can we dispense with the scatological humor for a moment, gentlemen?” Raj asked. “I was thinking about having some dinner at that café and you’re making me queasy.”

  “Sorry, boss,�
�� Big Dan replied. “Don’t mean to put you off your oats.”

  “Thank you.”

  Raj wandered away to peruse the soft drink coolers, and Jane heard the Dans resume their banter, going back and forth in low voices:

  “I’d make you wear it for a hat.”

  “I’d tape it to your face while you were sleeping.”

  They headed toward the candy aisle, chortling like junior high buddies.

  Jane returned her attention to the postcards. She had picked out two, but was indecisive which to buy. One featured the state capitol building, the other a cardinal with the legend “The Buckeye State”.

  Raj slipped up behind her and suggested, “Buy them both.”

  Jane jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach.

  “Buy them both,” he said again, and smiled when she craned her head to look up at him.

  He was standing just a couple inches away from her. Looming over her, practically. His nearness made her heart race. She could smell his cologne, the faint musk of his sweat. Flustered, she returned her attention to the rotating postcard display and stammered, “What about this one? The one with all the flowers?”

  Raj chuckled. “They’re all nice, I suppose.”

  Jane stuffed the two she was holding back in the display and snatched out the one with all the flowers. It suddenly seemed more appealing to her. “This is the one I want,” she decided, and shifted so that her back brushed against his chest.

  Naughty Jane!

  5

  After eating at the Cup of Stars Café, the group found a Red Roof Inn a little further down the road. They rented three rooms, two singles and a double for the Dans, who always bunked together. Jane unloaded her overnight bags and nested. Her room was clean and pleasantly decorated, lots of tans and golds, and there was cable TV and two small recliners. She cracked the window to air the room out—it was a bit stuffy from being closed up—and then she went to Raj’s room. The four of them typically spent the evening together when they were on an overnighter. They were supposed to use the time to discuss the next day’s itinerary, but usually they just ended up snacking on junk food and watching TV, and tonight was no different.

  They decided to watch ‘Salems Lot on TBS, the original, not the remake starring Rob Lowe. It was a good slumber party horror show. They laughed at the cheesy seventies fashions, made fun of the poor special effects and stilted acting. When the vampire kid floated out of the fog to scratch on his grade school buddy’s bedroom window, Little Dan pointed out the chair the young actor was sitting on, and the wires from which the whole contraption hung.

  “Why does everyone in this movie have such huge bedroom windows?” Jane asked. “Have you ever seen giant bedroom windows like that?”

  Raj shrugged. He was lying on the bed beside her, his long skinny legs crossed at the ankles. “Not me,” he answered.

  “I can’t believe this scared me when I was a kid,” Big Dan said. “I remember sneaking out of my bedroom and hiding behind the sofa to watch. It scared me so bad I went to the bathroom and stuffed toilet paper in my ears. Poor Ma had to pick it all out with tweezers later that night.”

  “You know what the scariest movie I ever saw was?” Little Dan asked.

  “What?”

  “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Little Dan answered. “No, really!” he cried, as everyone voiced their disbelief. “Those fucking Oompa-Loompa’s freaked me out, and I thought Willie Wonka was murdering all those little kids-- just for being bratty. It was horrifying!”

  “That’s because you were a brat when you were a kid,” Jane said.

  “That’s beside the point,” Little Dan replied.

  “When I was a little boy in India,” Raj said mildly. “My father took us to live in a very poor village in West Bengal. He had gone there to work at a neighboring leper colony. I was probably six years old at the time. Maybe seven. While we were there, we had to live in what was basically a big grass hut. My mother hated it, but my father wanted to do humanitarian work. His grandfather had died of leprosy, you see.”

  Jane could see the blue light of the television reflected on Raj’s dark eyes. His eyes were moist, and the light seemed to crawl.

  “One night, I woke to find that a tiger had stolen into our home,” he went on as everyone listened, riveted. “The tiger had simply pushed through the flimsy outside wall and walked into the room where I was sleeping. Its breathing was what woke me, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that great beast’s head just inches from my face. I was so frightened I could not move. I could not even cry out. Then it took my younger sister, who was sleeping in the cot beside me, and ran away into the jungle. Sometimes I still wake in the middle of the night, hearing my sister’s screams. We found out later that the villagers had known about the tiger. It had taken a small child several weeks before, and yet no one had warned us. They didn’t want to frighten us away, I suppose. They needed a doctor. These films…” He flapped a hand at the TV. “They do not scare me.”

  “Shit, man,” Little Dan murmured.

  Raj smiled grimly and shrugged. “That is what we all fear at the primal level, is it not? We fear being eaten, and all the rest—your vampires and werewolves, blobs and giant bugs—they’re just metaphors for that fear.”

  “That’s deep,” Jane said, impressed.

  “That’s what she said,” Big Dan said quickly, and all three men broke up laughing.

  Jane rolled her eyes.

  She was hoping the Dans would wear down and retire for the night, give her some privacy with Raj, but they’d had soda and chips, and they were in rare form. Jane found herself nodding off. When Little Dan poked her in the leg later, she came to with a start. On the TV, David Soul was pounding a stake into a vampire’s heart. Dispatching one of Raj’s metaphors. Jane swung her feet to the floor and stumbled toward the door. “Well, that’s it for me, guys. Time to turn in,” she mumbled.

  All three men bid her good night, and she plodded down the hallway to her room.

  Once she changed into her nightgown and slid beneath the covers, however, she found she could not return to sleep. She grabbed the remote and turned her television on and flipped through the channels for a while.

  She didn’t want to watch any more horror movies-- not alone, that was just asking for nightmares, especially with a belly full of cheese doodles—but there wasn’t anything else playing that looked even halfway interesting. She’d seen Tommy Boy about a dozen times already. She watched Chris Farley do his fat guy in a little coat dance, then flicked the TV remote, thinking, Dead.

  Billy Mays was hawking laundry detergent on the next channel.

  Flick.

  Dead.

  JohnWayne in True Grit.

  Dead.

  Ritter on Three’s Company.

  Dead.

  The Golden Girls.

  Dead-dead-dead.

  Disturbed, Jane turned the TV off. She got out of bed and dug a book from one of her overnight bags. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Hemingway was dead, too, she thought, feeling a chill worm its way up her spine. Depressed and suffering from chronic pain, he’d gotten up in the middle of the night and stuck the barrel of his favorite shotgun in his mouth, a death as declarative as his sentence structure.

  Trying to ignore a mounting sense of foreboding, Jane slipped back under the covers and read. Despite Hemingway’s concise prose, however, she found her mind wandering, unable to focus on the book in front of her.

  Which of their group would be the first to die, she wondered, after the show had run its course and their fifteen minutes of fame was over? Would it be Allen? Allen was a big guy, and he was already taking blood pressure medicine. Billy, maybe? She knew he had a penchant for risky sex when he wasn’t with his boyfriend. He confided in her sometimes, telling her about his sexual escapades. Rough trade, he called it. Anonymous sex in public bathrooms, those little booths in adult bookstores, and he rarely used protection.

  Maybe it w
ould be an accident. A slippery road or a plane crash. A random act of senseless violence. A crazy fan. The world was a tiger, and it had sharp teeth and a pitiless appetite for human flesh.

  Maybe she would be the first to check out. A little cancer of the brain, like her mum. A loathsome black rat of diseased tissue, gnawing through the stuffing in her skull. Beverly Rivers had had Janey and her husband for comfort when she’d withered and died, but who would sit at Jane’s bedside, hold her hand when her time came around? Who would make sure she took her meds, and fetch her blankets when she was cold? Her father was barely capable of caring for himself now. She had no husband, no children…

  “That’s enough, Janey!” she said suddenly, and the crow-like sound of her own voice sent a shiver of goosebumps up and down her body. She set her book on the nightstand, turned off the lamp and lay back on her pillows with a sigh.

  Staring at the bar of light on the ceiling—a street light, shining through the gap in the curtains-- the dread began to ease. She dozed without realizing it, and dreamed she was lost inside a maze-like house.

  The hallways were dark-paneled and winding in the dream, a ghost house if she’d ever seen one. She’d been inside countless haunted houses, but this dream labyrinth was the apotheosis of cursed dwellings. Cobwebs, like coagulated spirits, hung lifeless from the ceiling. Strangers in period costume stared at her through a patina of dust from their opulently framed portraits, their faces grim and reproachful. She turned left and then right as she ran down the passages, but she couldn’t find her way out.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been running through the hallways. It might have been five seconds, or five hundred years. She suspected it was a long time, but time had no meaning for those who dreamed, she knew.