Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  Stanley stood upright. He’d been distant and preoccupied but was suddenly alert. His blue eyes bored into Richard.

  Purple? he demanded. Purple how?

  There a how to purple?

  Pinkish purple? Lavender? Look a bit like juniper? Yeah, I guess.

  He’d been checking cattle out where Red Medicine Creek formed the border between Shane Valen’s land and his own. He’d noticed the bush’s purple flowers on Shane’s side of the creek and had a vision of Shane gardening, with kneepads on, and a trowel, and the greasy cenex cap he always wore. Richard had laughed, that’s all, and gone on.

  Stanley took off his gloves, laid them together, wrapped his finger and thumb around them, and squeezed them into a tight neck of leather.

  Sounds like salt cedar, he said.

  Salt cedar?

  Tamarisk. Christ! That’s one I really hoped wouldn’t make it here.

  If it’s on Shane’s land, it’s Shane’s problem, Alysha said.

  This stuff could dry up the creek, Richard replied. It’s everybody’s problem.

  Stanley tell you that?

  Richard nodded.

  Alysha turned back to mincing chives she’d brought in from the herb garden she tended along the house’s foundation.

  I suppose he’d know, she said.

  Richard spoke to her back: He says in New Mexico whole lakes have been dried up by this stuff. One plant’ll take two hundred gallons of water a day. And its leaves are salty. When they drop, they poison the soil. Nothing else can grow.

  And Stanley thinks you should save us from it.

  She chopped with quick chuk chuk chuks of her knife, her shoulders moving in tight spasms, the smell of chives gradually filling the kitchen.

  He was right about fireweed. And leafy spurge. And he was warning about Canada thistle before anyone even knew of it.

  I don’t like you on Shane’s land.

  Asking Shane to do something’s a waste of breath. Meanwhile, this thing’s flowering.

  What do you plan to do?

  Burn it.

  That’ll take care of it?

  It’ll come back. But it’ll keep it from seeding. For now.

  Why not just cut it down?

  It’ll sprout two shoots from the one you cut off.

  She turned around, surprise and disbelief on her face.

  Richard! You’re describing a monster. Is Stanley exaggerating, maybe?

  He knows this stuff, Ally. Better’n anyone.

  I know he does. It’s just—

  He says about the only thing worse than salt cedar is giant knot-weed. Says it makes Canada thistle and fireweed look like dandelion.

  Alysha gazed at Richard soberly. Every summer she spent hours spraying Canada thistle, patches of it like living accordion wire in the draws and fence lines. And fireweed was already growing resistant to herbicides, a tangled mess at the edges of stock dams.

  OK, she said. But sometimes I wish Stanley didn’t have a name for everything.

  A few days later Richard rode the four-wheeler to his west pasture. Cresting a rise, he could see Shane Valen’s land to the south and Stanley Zimmerman’s north, and the big stock dam on his own land where Clay and Hayjay fished, a narrow triangle of water bright as a mirror in the sun, with cattails ringing it. He dropped down to the creek. A few hundred yards beyond it, Shane’s place was backed up against a hill—the barn swaybacked as a hoofshot horse, with a rusted galvanized mounting on top that had once supported a weathervane. The house’s paint was molting, and between the house and barn Shane’s rattrap of a pickup squatted, sunlight glinting in a crack in the windshield. In one of the house’s windows a bare light bulb burned, but Richard assumed Shane was sleeping; it was common knowledge he spent his nights grocery shopping, with a rifle.

  Following Stanley’s advice, Richard had fenced his cattle away from the creek. The two banks were entirely different, the vegetation lush on his side, chopped and staggered on Shane’s. He pushed down the wire and swung his leg over, then jumped the narrow band of water onto the eroded bank Shane’s cattle had trampled, where the tamarisk bush had taken root. Richard grasped a group of the blossoms. They were cool and silky in his hand. Stanley had said the thing would put out a half-million almost invisible seeds with tiny hairs that rode wind or water. Richard rubbed the flowers and felt them liquefy, then opened his palm and breathed in the scent.

  He unscrewed the cap on the diesel fuel can he’d brought and saturated the plant, then threw the empty can across the creek and lit a match. A curlicue of black smoke rose. Then the flame gained momentum and engulfed the bush. Through the haze of heat, Shane’s house seemed to float off the ground. Richard wondered if he’d see the door open and a figure emerge to walk toward him, wavering. Inside the fire, wisps of lavender flower, like another genus of flame, shimmered, then charred and lifted. Escaping moisture gave off a thin whine, which the popping bark syllabified into something akin to speech. Richard waited until the flame died and the bush was a blackened skeleton, then crossed the creek and fence again.

  As he neared the house, Clay emerged from the door, something glittering above his head. He reached up, waving his hand in circles. Then he pulled, and the glittering straightened into a vibrating line as he jabbed the hook into the cork handle of his fishing pole and turned the reel handle. Richard parked beside him and killed the ATV’s engine.

  Me’n Hayjay are going fishing, Clay said. It OK if I take Blue-boy?

  It’s all yours. Think this is the day?

  Clay was thirteen, Hayjay fourteen, but when they were nine and ten they’d returned from the big stock dam with a story of hooking a huge bass. They’d maneuvered it into the shallows, but when they tried to bring it to the net it had lurched and snapped the line and churned away, looking back at them with a yellow eye. Richard had smiled when they’d told this story, and Clay had cried indignantly: It was yellow, Dad. And it looked at us!

  Behind him, Hayjay had nodded, and for four years they’d remained loyal to the memory. Now Clay shrugged. Never know, he said.

  He put his pole into the pipe Richard had fashioned on Blueboy for that purpose, straddled the engine, and set off.

  A little over an hour later, Clay returned. Richard, sharpening a sickle, lifted the angle grinder as Clay drove Blueboy through the open machine shed door. The high scream of the angle grinder’s motor wound down and died at the same moment that Clay killed the ATV’s engine. The machine shed expanded in the silence. Clay plucked the fishing rod from its holder and headed for the door. Richard pushed his goggles onto his forehead.

  You’re back soon, he called.

  Clay turned just outside the door. Richard was taken aback by his expression.

  Something wrong? he asked.

  Clay moved his wrist, and the tip of the rod rose a foot, then dropped to the cement. He marked a furrow in the dust.

  How’re we supposed to fish when there’s no water?

  His despair puzzled Richard. There’s plenty of water in that dam, he said. It takes more than a few dry years to do in Yellow Eye.

  Clay’s face twisted. That was just a stupid fish, he said.

  Richard removed the goggles and flipped them onto the welding table. They clattered. He looked at them tangled around themselves.

  I don’t get it, he said. You’ve been after that fish for years. Now you just give up?

  Then he saw that Clay was desperate to hold back tears, and he was struck by an overwhelming sense of his son as a person mysterious and absolute unto himself. Richard felt profane before him, seeing through to something he ought not see. He averted his eyes, and they stood for a while.

  Then Richard raised his eyes again. Behind Clay’s head a cloud of tiny insects hovered, so swollen with the light of the low sun they were bright, minor planets tracking random and impossible orbits against the sky. Then a larger movement coalesced at the corner of Richard’s eye, and a pale, blue-gray butterfly took shape as if forming from scraps o
f cloud. It flew into the gnats, and they shaped and made visible the turbulence of its wings, tumbling in curlicues and funnels. Then the butterfly was gone, and the sun descended another fraction, and the gnats dimmed and turned to gray bits of matter that disappeared against the graying sky.

  Clay’s face shone. Hay. Hayley Jo. Isn’t fishing anymore, he said.

  Isn’t fishing? Richard asked.

  But he knew: Clay was in love, and it was over. It didn’t matter that he was only thirteen or that he might not have a name for his feelings. Richard gazed at his son’s face and felt flayed.

  In high school Richard had been skinny and unathletic, his body a series of disconnected juttings and angles. He clumped around the halls, his heels whumping the ground like announcements: Klutz coming. Every time Bill Lipking called him Bigfoot or asked him whether those were boots or skis he was wearing, Richard spent the afternoon in a sullen rage, wishing he could cut his toes off. Only when he was acting, absorbed in a role, did he feel lifted away. On stage he felt free of himself. But always, at the end of a play, even as the audience applauded, he felt the churning uneasiness of the real world and himself within it. He might never have been on a date except that Stanley, even then his best friend, bet him he wouldn’t ask Sophie Lawrence out.

  In grade school Sophie Lawrence had been so quiet Richard couldn’t remember her at all, but when she developed a body she turned sullen and flaunty, her sexuality both taunt and weapon. She fascinated and frightened the boys, and they called her a slut and a whore to cover up their fear. She didn’t go to dances or football games, didn’t drive up and down the streets with her windows open. There were rumors she’d been seen with married men in Rapid City. The idea of dating her was as alien to Richard as living on a houseboat, but once the idea took root in his mind he couldn’t let it go: to have her mascaraed eyes notice him for the moment it took for contempt to form and for her to speak what she would surely speak.

  He played it as a role—wrote the lines and memorized them and went up to her and projected loudly enough for the eavesdroppers slouching near. And he almost accomplished it, almost lost himself in the role as he always did on stage. The mere act of speaking boldly and of having an audience almost made him the person who could speak the way he did. But in the silence after his words, Sophie’s feral eyes regarded him, and he felt his coming abasement thicken in his throat and rise in his groin. Her eyes flicked to his snickering friends.

  Then magically she turned from a woman, formidable and contemptuous, into a girl. It was as if she folded time back. She reached to her forehead and pushed her hair back and bent her head down, and quietly said: All right. Sure. I’ll go out with you.

  He had to fumble through arrangements then, without lines, a fool. When he went to pick her up, he parked at the curb with the engine running, and when she didn’t come down the sidewalk he almost drove away. But he’d never live his cowardice down, so he went to the door and knocked and endured her mother’s flutterings and exclamations while her stepfather slouched in an armchair, holding a longneck beer, sullen eyes staring at Sophie.

  You take care a my little girl, he said as Richard turned to the door.

  He tipped the bottle back, under hooded eyes. Sophie met his gaze and shifted her weight. The floor creaked. Richard had the feeling that if she opened her mouth the house would erupt.

  Then her mother said: Now, Sidney—

  But Sophie turned her eyes on her mother, and her mother went silent, and then Richard was being pulled through the door, out of the house’s smells of machine oil and asphalt and into the dry smell of fall grasses blowing off the prairie.

  The evening was nothing like the horror he’d expected. Sophie was quiet and thoughtful. At the movie he spilled soda, and she dabbed at his shirt with a Kleenex so naturally he was able to laugh at himself. When he took her home, she asked him to park the car a block away, and she leaned toward him and said, Good night, and when he turned to reply she raised her hand to his cheek and brushed her lips against his and said, Next week again? and then opened the door and went, while he sat there electrified.

  The next week he was surprised to find her standing at the curb before he reached her house. She waved as if afraid he wouldn’t notice her, or as if she were hailing a stranger. He stopped, and as he reached across the seat to open the door, she pulled the handle out of his grasp. He barely had time to straighten before she was inside the car. She was panting slightly, and she pulled the door shut and stared straight ahead through the windshield. The car was suddenly crowded. He’d been thinking about her all week, and now he didn’t know what to say. He looked at the smooth plane of her cheek, the shadow under the cheekbone.

  Go, she said.

  Go?

  Put the car in gear. Press the accelerator.

  Her tone numbed him. He didn’t say a word until they were on the highway. Finally he managed, Is everything—

  I don’t want to talk.

  He stared at the faded, intermittent lines of the highway coming toward him.

  What should we—

  If you want to talk, talk.

  You just want me to—

  She reached over and snapped the radio on.

  There, she said. OK?

  CCR was singing about the rain. Richard felt heat rise through his body. His feet felt like blocks. Last week had been a setup, and now she was going to hurt him, and there was nothing he could do about it. Even if he turned around and took her back, he was already shamed, and sorry he was who he was.

  Then she said: Turn here.

  They were approaching the gravel road that led to Lostman’s Lake.

  The lake? he asked.

  You don’t like water?

  We’ll be late for the movie.

  Well. If you don’t want to be late for your movie.

  It triggered all that he hated about himself. He jerked the wheel onto the turnoff so violently her head swayed, and he fishtailed up the gravel road and past the lake, and when she again said, Turn here, and pointed, and he saw nothing but the shallow borrow pit and the prairie, he turned anyway, while her finger was still lifted, and saw her head nearly smash against the side window, and he hit the accelerator and the car jolted over the uneven ground, banging and hunching, springs creaking, the headlights spraying the sky, their heads nearly hitting the roof, while the Eagles sang of peaceful, easy feelings.

  Then she said, Stop, and he slammed on the brakes and her neck snapped forward and she nearly hit her nose on the dashboard before she caught herself, and then the car was sitting in dust above the lake’s steel, moonlit surface.

  Well, she said. Aren’t you something?

  She reached over and turned up the radio and opened her door and got out.

  He twisted the key. Silence crashed.

  No! she said.

  He jumped.

  Keep the radio on.

  Her tone chilled him. He snapped the key to the accessories position. Music sliced back into the night. He pushed open his door, rose, slammed it. He was so sick of his body, sick of being made fun of. She’d let him feel something for her. He strode toward her, he meant to stop and scream at her, though his hand was raised as if to strike and he could feel tears rising, but before he stopped or opened his mouth, she was on him, he never expected her to move toward him, and her mouth was pressing against his so hard he cut the inside of his lip, and he was crying outright, and shame and brutality and anger and desire became one and all mixed up.

  He lay on his back, exhausted. She stood naked above him. He felt he would never be the same. It was only when he said, I love you, and she merely gazed at him the way she might look at the foundation of an old house covered in grass, jutting up from the prairie—it was then that he understood they hadn’t traveled or arrived together. But he said it again.

  I love you, Sophie.

  Yeah, she said. Richard loves Sophie. Carve it in a tree. Put a heart around it.

  He stumbled up, his foot catc
hing in the grass, then realized he didn’t have his glasses on. They’d been taken off or he’d taken them off, he couldn’t remember. The thought of hearing them crunch like bones under his bare foot, and her eyes directed at his clumsy feet—to be cut by the glass, blind and lame and completely at her mercy—it hollowed him out. He managed to stand, frantic, looking around like some featherless bird, feeling more naked without the glasses than he did without his clothes—naked in the helpless way of baby mice discovered, or grubs.

  He drew himself up, acting: his sole recourse. He straightened his shoulders and lifted his head and looked directly at her as if he could see the pupils of her eyes and not merely dark shadows, as if he could see the points of her nipples and not merely a gauze of possibility, and her navel and her pubic hair, and the moonlight as a blade instead of a sheen on her clavicles.

  I will, he said. If you want me to.

  It came out as pitiful and humiliating, and challenging and demanding, and it stayed in the air between them, and she didn’t have a response. Then she shook it off.

  Jesus, she said.

  No, he said. No.

  You got what you wanted. You and your friends?

  He was trying to hold her eyes, though they were too fuzzy to be held, while also searching for his glasses; he was fractured and bifurcated, if touched he would dissolve into powder and shards. It was more than he could endure, and words rushed out.

  You were supposed to say no! he cried. You weren’t supposed to be nice!

  Her eyes, vaguely in his vision, widened, the shadow there softening until he thought he might, even without his glasses, actually see the round definition of her corneas. The shining shape of her body slumped. Then he saw moonlight caught in the edge of a lens and took two steps and snatched his glasses from the car’s roof (how had they gotten there?) and slapped them onto his face and pushed them up and found her, defined and desirable, and was afraid that in another moment they would be visibly in different worlds. But he managed to focus on her face: its surprise, its brokenness.