Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  When Brock kissed her, she felt better—better, almost, than if she’d never seen the snake. He’d do this for her. But a year went by, and he never went to the draw. Occasionally she would be startled to be looking out the living room window and realize she was seeing a snake out there on the rocks. She’d shut the drapes, and they’d stay shut until Brock opened them with a comment about light.

  Brock began hinting at having children. They’d both assumed they would, and Angela didn’t understand her resentment when he brought it up. She deflected the discussion. She said she wasn’t ready yet. Brock didn’t pressure her. He agreed that there was time, and she was the one doing the hard part. But after a while his patience got on her nerves. It felt like prediction—as if he knew she’d come around and do what was expected. It made her more adamant in her refusal. She wanted to have a full-blown fight over it. But she never got beyond irritation. Every time, just when she was ready to get angry, he’d nod and say: OK. It ain’t me having em. But think about it, huh?

  In spite of her fear, Angela was determined not to be trapped in the house. She had to do something on those long afternoons when time ticked in the clocks and the soap operas droned on. Brock suggested she learn to drive a tractor or ride an ATV or horse. He said he could use the help. But she couldn’t even imagine herself doing those things. She walked. Nothing moved—maybe a jet lazing city to city, or a bird, or a jackrabbit erratic and pogo-sticking. A faraway coyote once, maybe. She moved, but she could hardly tell. It wasn’t like she went blocks, something she could mark and count. Wasn’t like she went past houses or parks, or even had somewhere to actually go. It was all just land.

  But her second encounter with a rattlesnake was close-up, and when she heard its electric buzz coming, seemingly, from the ground right at her feet, like a thousand cicadas gathered into a tight, resonant ball, she was jolted into a stillness so profound the earth’s basalt and granite seemed to shift between her heartbeats. When she came out of that stillness, through no conscious choice, she saw the snake ten feet away, mottled brown in the brown grass: the muscular coiling, the glittering points of its eyes, the thin tongue raking the air: a singular thing, distinct, but an evocation of the world, too: almost just grass, but starkly and awfully not. She stood there, stood there, stood there, until the snake finally seeped away like liquid coiled into a shape that lost that shape and was gone, soaked into the ground. Even then she stood for long minutes before finally backing up, keeping her eyes on the place the snake had been, then finally fleeing. On that run back to the house she distrusted every footfall. Once inside, she locked the door. But light leaking under it betrayed a thin crack.

  It was worsened because she’d been daydreaming. She’d let her mind go. She’d been imagining finding an old toy of Brock’s lying in the grass—a tiny metal car with flaking paint, a plastic horse bleached by sun, a marble so scuffed it had turned opaque: her own hands picking up what his small ones had once dropped. She imagined holding it, bringing it home and putting it under the bed where, when they made love, she could let her hand drop down to touch it.

  The snake’s rattle ruptured the dream, then compressed the space the dream had expanded. It was suffocating, claustrophobic, insisting she pay attention only to where she was: her next step, the shadow there, right there. Don’t think, don’t lose yourself. When Brock came home he jiggled the doorknob. She let him call out several times before she rose from the couch and went to the door, a pillow clutched to her chest.

  What’s this, Ang? Locking doors? This ain’t the city.

  He swept her into his arms, pillow and all, laughing, but she was so rigid he released her.

  I almost stepped on a rattlesnake today.

  Before Brock could ask what almost meant, Angela cried out: How could you be a child out here? Running around with snakes like that?

  He didn’t hear the real question, the implication, the future.

  You got me on that one, Ang, he said, laughing. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again, I swear.

  You promised.

  It took him a moment to realize the conversation’s shift. He spoke softly and urgently.

  Where’d you see this snake?

  Down by the stock pond.

  There’s no way a snake by the stock pond came from the draw past the house, Ang. They’re a half mile apart. And that draw’s the only thing we ever talked about. And I never said I’d clean em out. You just thought I did. That draw’s too steep for cattle, so they ain’t a problem there, and they ain’t coming out of it up to the house. I can’t get rid a every snake on this ranch. They’re part a the place. Always have been. Wear those boots I got for you when you go walking, and keep your eyes open. That’s how you deal with snakes.

  She’d never heard him this impatient with her. She felt exultation. He was barely holding his anger in. She pushed harder, eager now.

  I’m not going walking anymore.

  Brock stared at her. But instead of arguing, he lifted his hands and took a half step back.

  Fine, he said. That’s a solution, too.

  She watched him turn away to wash for supper. She found herself alone in the living room, with her arms crossed, and nothing more to say.

  After that she began to take regular trips to Twisted Tree. Brock thought it a good sign. She was getting out, doing something. He didn’t realize she was following through—leaving the ranch to walk asphalt streets in town and the gravel pathway along Red Medicine Creek.

  She became one of a small number who took regular walks along the creek. The young Catholic priest, Father Caleb, was another. When they passed each other one day, they spoke a few words. She’d always gone to church but had never really talked to a priest, and it was a novelty to stand near the creek like that and speak of ordinary things. She liked the way he listened to the simple pleasantries she spoke, about the weather and the light, as if they mattered. She liked how he waited for her to finish her sentences. The rhythms were right, of speech, of pauses, and of considerations and continuations. A few days later she saw him again, in front of her, going the same direction. She liked to walk fast, to feel the blood pumping in her temples. She debated: slow down to stay behind him, or catch up?

  He turned when he heard her footsteps.

  Angela again, he said. Hello!

  Angela Again? she asked. Are you renaming me?

  He laughed: Part of my job.

  He opened the pathway to her with a sweep of his hand.

  You’re moving faster than I am, he said.

  I’m finished.

  They fell into step with each other.

  The creek gurgled beside them, and from somewhere in town came the steady sound of hammering, drumlike, on a roof. Between them, silence: just their steps in unison. They were passing a small wetland near the footbridge that led over the creek to the school. Angela was about to comment on a redwing blackbird swaying sideways on a cattail, when she saw something so startling she stumbled and bumped into the priest, and he stumbled, too, and they clung to each other.

  Look at that, she said. Look at that.

  On the flat bottom below them, a crow, iridescently black, one wing smoothed into its body, the other ragged, half-out, was pecking at something in the grass. It lifted its head as if to show them. In the black beak was a marble, a tiny globe. As the bird brought it up the sun struck it in such a way that the marble turned to pure light, hardened and brilliant, a moment of angles and coincidence that turned them breathless and grasping each other: great bird and held sun with, deep inside it, an encased helix of green light.

  Then the crow sprang into the air. They realized they were still holding each other and stepped back. They looked at their own hands, then at the empty place the crow had been.

  That was pretty amazing, he said.

  The way the light?

  Yes. The light.

  It was just a marble?

  Their eyes met.

  Just a marble? he asked.

  They f
ell into step again, closer than before, a small, warm space between them.

  Red Medicine Creek ran at an angle through town, so that streets and alleys dead-ended at it. She had parked at one of these dead ends. As she approached her car, a sudden silence broached her daydreaming. The hammering that had been a metronome in the background had stopped. She looked up and saw a man standing on a half-shingled roof, watching her. He was middle-aged, barebacked, muscular, thin-waisted, shining with sweat, his arms hanging loosely, one hand holding a hammer. He balanced on the roof like a ship’s captain on a deck.

  Hey, he called down to her.

  Hey, she said back.

  Been walking?

  She looked at the pathway she’d just left and shrugged.

  You like that?

  It’s exercise.

  He placed the hammer in the wire loop at his belt without taking his eyes off her. Don’t mind exercise myself, he said.

  I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Angela Morrison. Brock Morrison’s wife.

  Oh, hell, I know. Ol Brock.

  She opened her car door.

  Figured I’d meet you sometime. Didn’t know you were as pretty as they said.

  She shut the door, but his voice, laughing, came through the closed windows: Don’t mind it myself, Angela. You think about it.

  Over supper she told Brock about it, without going into detail. He stopped eating.

  What’d he say specifically? he asked.

  He made a pass at me, she said.

  What’d he say?

  He made a pass.

  Brock waited. Then he picked up his fork. Shingling, he said. Hadda be Sid Ervin. He’s married himself. Got a stepdaughter, even. Always was a jerk. All mouth, though. You don’t need a worry about him. But I’m sorry it happened.

  Yeah, she said. Me, too.

  So, Angela Again, why do you drive ten miles just to walk?

  I’m a city girl, she said.

  Twisted Tree’s certainly a city.

  She heard something in his voice—a desire to be elsewhere, maybe. He was making a joke, but not only. It made her honest, or as honest as she could be.

  Out there—she lifted her chin in the general direction of the ranch—kind of scares me.

  Scares you? Why would it scare you?

  Specifically? Rattlesnakes.

  And unspecifically?

  The question disconcerted her. But he nodded as if her silence were an answer. Brock doesn’t understand, he said.

  That shook her. He’d leapt through barriers she’d not even known she’d erected.

  I didn’t say that.

  Sorry.

  No. You’re right. Brock was raised here. He hardly notices them.

  I grew up on a ranch myself. Out toward Lone Tree.

  You were raised on a ranch?

  That surprise you?

  Maybe.

  She took two steps, then said, Yes, it does.

  It was exciting to be precise in that small, quiet way.

  Why’s it surprise you?

  You’re not like Brock.

  It was so simple, and so simply said. She liked the way she kept accusation out of her voice, the way she just answered the question, gave the bare reason for surprise.

  He laughed.

  Why are you laughing?

  The idea that being raised the same way would make people the same.

  Are you OK with snakes?

  I wear boots.

  That silenced her.

  He told you to wear boots, didn’t he?

  She nodded.

  He laughed again. The man is right, he said.

  She turned her head down, smiling. Without thinking she grabbed his hand.

  They were both silent. Three steps. A cottonwood seed floating by: that long.

  She let go.

  It’s OK, he said.

  But she didn’t want to be dishonest now. She wanted all gaps closed.

  No, she said. It’s probably not.

  More than three steps, then.

  A crow flew over.

  You think that’s the same crow? she asked.

  I can’t tell one from another.

  What do you think he did with that marble?

  You didn’t know crows played marbles?

  She bowed her head, laughing.

  No, she said. I didn’t know that.

  From a distance his straw-colored hair gleamed in the fall sun. He stood stock-still near the creek, his arms crossed. She stopped beside him.

  What are you looking at? she asked.

  That branch.

  A fully leaved willow limb, with two main branches, had fallen into the creek, and the water had twisted it so that one of the branches was dipping into the creek in a regular rhythm. The current caught it and pushed it away, and it snapped up, reached the end of its arc, sprang back down, dipped again, was pushed away, snapped up, rebounded, dipped back down, on and on and on, the whole limb sympathetic to the water, the leaves way at the end of the other fork shaking in a consistent rhythm that she could almost, as she watched, feel in her body.

  What about it?

  It’s a strange attractor.

  She heard strange tractor. Her mind flashed to the Case IH rumbling out of the shed in the morning. Strange indeed: like a big insect that Brock, invisible inside the cab, controlled.

  It never doesn’t dip back into the water, Caleb went on, as she tried to catch up to him. Completely regular. The creek flows straight, but the branch keeps returning. That’s called a strange attractor. The equation for it is. According to chaos theory.

  You read chaos theory?

  He smiled: It’s not prohibited.

  They turned together. She looked over her shoulder. The branch dipped, rose, dipped.

  The church needs a secretary, he said after a while.

  I had two years of accounting.

  You’ve told me.

  She glanced back at the branch again. It was still shimmering, light coming off it in discrete green packets, millions of them shaken.

  Once you start seeing them, they’re all over, he said.

  Them?

  Strange attractors. Wind shaking a stop sign, even.

  Once the days shortened, it would sometimes be dark before she left the church. One night she turned off the highway onto the gravel county road that ran, in a long series of roller-coaster risings and fallings, to the ranch she couldn’t call home. She hadn’t gone two hundred yards when she braked so hard the car fish-tailed on the gravel, her headlights swinging into the distance as if they held the car to the stars and some far force was whipping her around. Then she pushed the accelerator too hard, and stones banged the undercarriage. She stared into the rearview mirror. In it a man was watching her. He held a knife. He stood in a cloud of rising steam. The steam came from a large animal prostrate at his feet, from its opened interior, from the blood her lights had brightened into redness and that, for a moment, as her brake lights had fishtailed around, had reddened even more. Within the steam the man was a dark silhouette. She couldn’t believe that so much steam could rise from a body, could be contained there in such volume and then released: an outpouring. The man had looked right into her headlights. He had seemed about to duck, as if he could roll into a ball and bowl himself into the dark space of the opened animal, which lay with its Cervidaean head lolled back and the hose of its slashed windpipe breathlessly white. Then he straightened and relaxed and merely stared at her: lithe, young, poised on the balls of his feet, neither threatening nor cowed, merely waiting to see whether she would pass or stop. Then, in the mirror, he had bent to his task again: calm, uncompromising, guiltless.

  She had pressed the brake so hard and nearly lost control of the car because he had looked right into her eyes, as if he could see through the glare of her headlights and knew precisely what she was doing.

  Hadda be Shane Valen, Brock said. That’s like seeing a whooping crane. You go to Ruination with that story, you wouldn’t pay for
a drink all night. You actually caught him.

  Caught him?

  Shane lives with his dad. They raise a few head, but mainly he poaches. Always out there somewhere. He’ll fall asleep, and sometimes don’t wake up till morning. People’ve flushed him out of his naps. But catching him with an animal, Ang—ain’t no one done that, far as I know.

  Flushed him out of his naps?

  Think you got a deer getting up ahead of you, and instead it’s Shane getting outta bed.

  Where have people seen him?

  Wherever. Shane don’t know what a fence or a season is.

  Has he been on our ranch?

  A few times I’ve wondered why a mulie just dropped its guts in a draw and flew away.

  That’s horrible.

  Shane’s a spooky guy. But he don’t have a thing to do with people. Just does his grocery shopping a little closer to the source.

  You don’t care that he’s on our land? At night? Without our permission?

  Not enough to lose sleep over it. Which is what it’d take to prevent it.

  He saw me. He knows who I am.

  Brock looked at her, puzzled—and realized she was dead serious about something he regarded as humorous.

  Hey, he said gently. It’s OK. He’d poached a mulie and was dressing it out, and you happened along. That’s all.

  I don’t see how you can joke about it.

  I’m not saying it’s right. Just saying, it’s not you. Nothing to do with you.