Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  They are beautiful.

  He barely catches what the Ana is saying, his eyes swim to find her, the store swirls, waves of color coalesce into shapes. Is she wistful? Philosophical? What? He’s furious at the man with the dog. The hypocrite! Pretending he wants to help that girl! He fights for control, trying to recapture the conversation they’d been having. He stares at the cowboy boots on his feet to keep the Ana from seeing his face. Finally he remembers who he is and what they were talking about.

  When he looks back up, the Ana seems to have faded into the racks of dresses, her face a mannequin’s, still and dreaming. He ticks off the possibilities of what she might be thinking, like he used to do in grade school before a test. With each tick he feels his control of things solidify: the ranch she left to come here and the creek—Red Medicine—that borders it; her barrel racing; fishing with the neighbor boy; her father, the buffalo rancher. My father’s so into those buffalo, she told Mary. OK, fine. I mean, if that’s his thing. But he hardly even thinks of anything else. ☹ ☹ Like he’s going to save the world by raising buffalo? lol You bet!

  His mind contains so much.

  Speaking of cooped up, he says, I’ve been driving all day. And this place—he nods roundly at the store—gives me claustrophobia.

  Memorial Park’s close. You could take a walk there, maybe.

  Perfect—her suggesting it on her own. He looks at her quizzically, and she hurries on, as if she’s paid to advertise the park’s attractions: The Berlin Wall’s there. Part of it. It’s nice. The park I mean. The wall, it’s just cement and stuff.

  The Berlin Wall? he asks.

  The words slip out. He can’t stop them. He’d just got everything back together. And then, something he doesn’t know. His stomach churns. He’d like just once to get it perfect.

  But he corrects himself. Wait, he says. My wife and I were there a few years back. Didn’t know that stuff was the Berlin Wall. Looked like a bunch of rubble. Figured it was art.

  Brilliant. It’s like riding a bicycle on top of a garden wall, charging ahead faster and more dangerously because it’s safer than slowing down.

  Well, she says, that’s what it was.

  Don’t need to see that again, he says. You know, though, I wouldn’t mind going back to Dinosaur Park. Took my daughter there, long time ago. Back when she was—

  He pauses, reminiscent.

  She loved those dinosaurs, he says.

  The Ana brushes her forehead with a finger, tucks a strand of hair behind an ear, though it’s cut too short to stay there and falls back along her temple. He prides himself on noticing. All the little signals.

  We used to go up there, she says. Our neighbors had a boy my age. The triceratops was our favorite. We’d pretend we were riding it.

  My daughter loved the triceratops. But you know what she really liked? This big tree up there. Big roots like fingers. She’d sit in them and pretend it was a great big hand holding her.

  I sat in those roots, too!

  She’s told Mary about it. Too much coincidence should raise suspicion, but it doesn’t work that way. People will insist on meaning—in falling stars, rolls of dice, any kind of randomness. It makes so much possible. She lets her arms drop to her sides: open, easy, waiting. He goes on.

  Yeah? I guess kids are all the same. She was like a thistle seed. I’d look at her and think she could blow away. Had to keep myself from holding on to her.

  And then it’s not the daughter he’s made up he’s seeing, small and healthy and streaked with dirt, but this Ana, pre-Ana, a child held by tree roots, he’s the one watching her, protecting her. Contempt, cool as lemonade and almost as delicious, bubbles in him, for the father who didn’t watch as carefully as he would have.

  Her face is as narrow as the light on the edge of a splinter, and almost as stressed. She’s remembering herself, he knows it, a little girl clinging to a running, three-horned beast. There are names for winds, the Mistral, the Harmattan, the Haboob, the Chinook, the Barber, the Diablo, and the hand has opened and she’s being blown about.

  Now she’s grown and gone, he says. And I can’t even remember how to find the place.

  It’s wistful, sad, and she wants so much to help. A man could spread happiness just by going through the world asking directions. She becomes animated: Go two, no, three blocks. Anyway, it’s called Skyline Drive. There are signs, with brontosauruses on them.

  But he mixes left with right, then north with east, until he confuses even her, and she stops and looks around for someone else who might describe the route. He shakes his head and holds up his hands, his heart a falling leaf cut out of tin inside his chest.

  It’s OK, he says. I appreciate your help. But you’ve got work to do.

  But she stays with him. It’s happened: she needs him to find the tree, and his memory of his daughter.

  It’s not that hard, she says. Really. How about this—go back—

  But he shakes his head, waves the sundress in surrender.

  I’m sure it’s easy as pie if you were raised here, he says.

  I wasn’t raised here.

  No? Where’d you grow up?

  Twisted Tree.

  Twisted Tree? Really? I know a rancher from there. Name of Mattingly.

  Richard Mattingly?

  That’s him. Met him at a stock show a few years ago. Good guy.

  Wow. His son, Clay—he’s the one—when we went to Dinosaur Park.

  How easily coincidence adds up to normalcy. If he just doesn’t push it now, if he just lets her arrive.

  Crazy, he says. But you know, I better go. I’m taking all your time. Don’t want to get you in trouble with your supervisor.

  He knows how much she hates her supervisor, Reva is her name, and Reva’s the Wicked Witch, I swear she times you if you go to the bathroom. And the clothes. If you hang them up and they’re not perfect, you’d think the world just ended. ☹

  I don’t care what my supervisor thinks, she says.

  The knot. The strands. Threads of her life he’s coiled. He lets her tighten it, lets her pull the loops.

  Still, I better go, he says. Just follow the brontosauruses, huh?

  He waits, giving her time. It’s easier when they think of it themselves.

  You know what? she says. I’m off in fifteen minutes. I could just, you know, show you how to get there.

  One way or another, he’ll find a way. He’s waited outside apartments in the dark. But it’s so much more exciting when it’s this, when everything he knows, even the time of day, matters. They’re dancing. Approach and retreat, step forward, back. He’s made her pleased with her own generosity, and he swings gently on it, they’re moving together, even their breathing (he imagines) mirroring the other’s.

  That’s kind of you, he says. But it’s not necessary.

  But I’d like to see it again. Now that I’ve thought of it.

  He lifts the sundress, contemplative, doubtful, finally gives in. Fifteen minutes, huh? Well, why not? My wife wants me to pick up a few kitchen things. I suppose I could do that and meet you. Out that door? I’m driving a big blue Continental. I can bring you back here or drop you off wherever, after.

  She hesitates. He picks it up so smoothly it’s not even a missed beat.

  Or you can drive yourself, and I can follow. I’ve got to come back this way, anyway, but—

  He holds it all, balancing embarrassment and ease, chagrin and acceptance. Then silence, not turning away, letting the moment lie trembling between them.

  I guess it doesn’t matter.

  She smiles an apology—that she’d thought to mistrust him.

  You’re sure? he says. Because either way—

  He knows it will reassure her. She nods and smiles to say that everything is fine.

  OK, then. I’ll see you in a bit.

  As soon as he’s out of earshot, he releases a blast of sulfurous gas, an immense relief. He glances around, then turns down an aisle stacked high with men’s jeans.
He’d like to keep the sundress, have her wear it, then post a photo of it somewhere, part of the scatter of things that form the history and archaeology of all he is, if others could trace the connections. But it’s too risky. Begone, begone. He won’t be tempted. Reverently, he folds the sundress, then parts a stack of jeans and places the dress under them, tucking it in.

  His car has turned into a furnace. He’d like to open the doors and stand outside while it cools down, but someone might remember him, so he gets in and shuts the door. Sweat pops from his pores. It gathers, runs, crawls around under his clothes, flylike, ticklike. He tries to distract himself by watching shoppers come and go, but it doesn’t help. He could start the car and run the air conditioner, but instead he lets himself slide into disgust at his body, how it excretes and exudes, until he’s in a haze of discomfort and rage, the stiff boots pinching his toes. When the girl appears in the door of the store, he doesn’t move. She glances around, and he thinks she sees the Continental, but her gaze goes right past it.

  He bangs the heel of his hand so hard against the steering wheel he bruises it. He slams his head against the backrest. Then he opens his door and stands. He doesn’t call or wave, just waits for her to see him and sinks back inside and watches her slip between the parked cars, so thin she never even turns her hips.

  His anger dissipates. He looks at himself in the rearview, fixes a strand of hair snaking onto his forehead, then reaches down to touch the knife tucked beside the seat. The Rochester Ana came out to say she’d changed her mind. He hates revealing himself before he’s ready. It ruins the sense of the avatar awakening in him, to the real world. He had to press the knife against the Rochester Ana’s neck. It was stupid, she could have screamed, but he was furious. Change her mind? After all he’d done for her?

  The Rapid City Ana, still several cars away, meets his eyes through the windshield and smiles tiredly. He releases his grip on the knife, overwhelmed by sorrow. Mayan priests lifting hearts on the tops of pyramids, Hawaiian priests lifting bodies over their crater, Catholic priests lifting cups of blood: it’s always been the lonely work of blood and adoration, and Ana is no different.

  His mother used to tell him he had to learn to sacrifice. He’d pretend to give up sweets during Lent but hide candy bars under his bed and smuggle the empty wrappers out inside his schoolbooks. He’d release them to the wind, then lick chocolate stains off the pages, leaving dull brown smudges. During Stations of the Cross, he’d feel his weight riding Christ’s shoulders: a man stripped of flesh with a fat boy riding him. His was the sinful weight Christ bore up the hill, that crumpled His knees, drove Him to the dust. Still, he went on eating, smuggling, lying—triumphant and wracked with guilt.

  Then one day he saw Karen Carpenter on TV. Ethereal, glowing, she didn’t look strong enough to hold the microphone, yet when she began to sing, he felt weakened by her power. He stared at that skeletal body from which came the most mournful and resonant voice he’d ever heard, and his loins, biblically, stirred. He followed her every appearance after that, watched her fade, and he sensed some great thing happening, a public martyring, a thin and ascetic saint like those he was never able to imitate. When he came upon the pro-Ana websites he had his revelation. He was chosen, called. He saw what no one else could see: Ana as a force, a god, universal; televisions as stained-glass windows transmitting Ana’s image, and women in supermarket checkout lines Her communicants shuffling past Her iconography on the covers of magazines. He knew Ana triumphant, militant, evangelical, in Her endless resurrections, which he saw everywhere, emaciated and lovely as Christ, taunting him with their superior female wills.

  The girl opens the passenger door and slides into the car and puts her seat belt on. Such an endearing little act of faith and in consistency, saving herself from randomness while killing herself more slowly. It arouses him.

  Where to? he asks.

  Go there. She lifts her finger into the light banging through the windshield: the translucent nail, the turgid knuckles. He takes the road curving around the mall, and she settles into the seat. At the stoplight she tells him to go left.

  Now just keep going straight, she says.

  But at the freeway entrance he swings the car onto the ramp, going east, the centrifugal force pushing her away from him, against the door. Her hand rises to the dash, he feels her eyes wide on him, he floors the accelerator to gain speed quickly.

  No, she says, more confused than alarmed. You were supposed to stay on Haines.

  Oh. I thought you meant—His larynx is a dry reed in the desert of his throat.

  Take the next exit. LaCrosse.

  He doesn’t even slow for it.

  They all react differently. The Bozeman Ana turned around in the seat to watch the road she wanted to be on recede behind her. The Spokane Ana hit him around the shoulders and head until he swerved and frightened her. The Missoula Ana—his lovely bookstore Ana—pled repetitively and sweetly, like the cuckoo clocks she loved, Pleaseplease, Pleaseplease. His Rapid City Ana looks down at her hands. That’s all she does; she twists her fingers in her lap, doesn’t protest, just twists her fingers and finally asks: Where are you taking me?

  It excites him, her submission. Where you want to go, Hayley Jo, he says. Where you’ve always wanted to go.

  Home?

  It’s so plaintive and innocent it pierces him.

  Yes, he says. I’m taking you home.

  A semitrailer passes, crowding the centerline. He grips the steering wheel, he hates the feeling of the slipstream pulling at the car, the feeling of a force he can’t control. Then, at the edge of his vision, he sees her mouth open, her face turn to him.

  How do you know my name? she asks, awestruck.

  You know me, Hayjay.

  Name and nickname both, and still she doesn’t recognize him. They never do. His mother used to wrap her arms around him in church when he grew restless, as if she were merely holding him, then pinch him on his stomach where people couldn’t see, and whisper in his ear to pay attention, God was right here, right now. He learned to stand still and pretend nothing was happening. When he got ready for bed he’d see the black marks spotting his soft, white flesh, like deformed, obverse stars, none of them constellated, forming no pattern at all.

  But now he’s so much wiser. His mother felt God’s presence only because God was, after all, invisible. If God had actually appeared before his mother—a ball of light, a beggar—she wouldn’t have recognized Him. Faith is stupid: God would lose believers if He showed Himself. Proof would ruin Him. The Anas are the same. They believe in Mary only when she’s words, dots of glowing light. When she appears in the flesh, they don’t believe her. And when they do believe—and they always, finally, do—she’s no longer Mary, they won’t let her be.

  The trick and lie of faith: it’s never joy and welcome when the Anas realize who he is, never happiness that here at last is their friend. They see his pudgy hands, the hair growing from his knuckles, his double chin and balding head, they smell his vinegar smell. And they turn away. He lets his anger swell.

  We’re good friends, he says. Don’t you know?

  The silence hangs in the car as Box Elder rushes past, a collection of trailer houses. When he first saw the name on the map he thought of bugs, and now he thinks it looks like a nest. A sound of thunder startles him, the car shakes, he panics, thinking lug nuts have loosened. Then he sees a shape filling the air—a B-1 bomber from the air force base passing over him. Involuntarily he steers away from it onto the shoulder, then recovers and cranes his neck, staring upward through the windshield. The plane appears again, in the right-hand window, and arcs away, an avenging angel out of Revelation. Then it’s only a needle, a glint, then lost in some mission in the sky, and he finds the road again, and the girl beside him, her hands still in her lap. Her makeup is too thick, to hide the acne her starvation causes. He gazes tenderly at her. That human need to present a face to the world—it makes him want to take her in his arms. He loves her
for her wish to be only herself, her perfect self, cut off from desire and need—a BuddhaAna, a ChristiAna—having a relationship with Ana and Ana only, to become independent, boundless, nirvanic, sculpted down to the mantric I, immortal, invisible (except for the bones), inaccessible, angelic (if it weren’t for the bones), soaring.

  The irreducible bones and the breath that on its own partakes of the world. One can slow the breath but can’t stop it. Not even the Anas can do that. Except for the true martyrs, the gnostics, the Carpenters. The others, in spite of their faith and their superior airs, which cause them to avert their eyes from him, need a priest.

  Don’t you know who I am? he asks.

  The girl is sitting almost demurely as the Continental hurtles over the plains that begin immediately past the air base. She shakes her head. Her dry-grass hair scrapes against her collar.

  I’ve never met you, she says. She watches the ball of her thumb rub her knee. In a weak, little-girl voice she won’t let become a plea, she asks: Are you really taking me home?

  Yes. I’m taking you home.

  You’re going to kill me. Aren’t you? You’re the I-90 Killer.

  His breath catches. None of them has ever said it like that. They’ve pled, screamed, cried, fought—but none has ever simply named it. All the time Mary spent talking to her, and still he had no idea she was capable of abandoning illusion like this. It’s as if he’s breathing blood when he answers, his tongue thick, his saliva paste.

  I’ve come to help you. To give you what you want.

  I don’t want—

  She can’t finish. He’s a little disappointed.

  It’s what Ana wants, he says, his voice hardening. You want what Ana wants.