McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Oddly enough, before her sight had begun to fail, she had already been turning from the intense colors she had worked in for so many years—colors she had learned along with the techniques, in Guatemala and Rajasthan—to stark black and white. Almost as if her mind had known that the world of sight was about to draw in on her. Last year, she had produced a series of all-black or all-white pieces, with subtle patterns emerging from the tactile qualities of the thread. An astute gallery owner had dubbed the pieces Weaving Darkness, a couple of important critics had commented on the interesting things Suze Blackstock had to say concerning texture and about color-in-colorlessness; to her considerable surprise, Suze was on her way to becoming famous in the weaving world. She “saw” the growing piece with her fingers as she was weaving it; fully sighted people saw it in a slightly different manner when it was hanging on the wall. A gallery in New York wanted her pieces for a one-woman show in the fall, there was talk about an article in Time, the Smithsonian had written about acquiring a hanging.

  Suze was not unaware of the irony of her success.

  Today she was working on a white piece, a glowing expanse on her vision where the sun poured through the south window onto it. She could as easily have worked at night, and occasionally did with the black pieces, but the sensation of brightness seemed to emphasize the sensations in her fingertips, and make the piece more of a whole. She barely noticed when Courtney left for town; was surprised, when the girl returned, to find she’d been at it for an hour and a half.

  When Courtney asked her from the kitchen if she wanted tuna fish or turkey, she told the girl to choose, and went to wash her hands. She and the girl usually ate lunch together; she thought it made Courtney feel noble to think she was providing company to the lonely old lesbian instead of just cleaning her floors and buying her groceries. And in fact, although she didn’t care much for being the object of Christian charity, Suze didn’t mind eating with the girl, even though the conversation was sometimes hard going.

  Courtney had chosen tuna, and set it out, as always, four-square, with the glass a precise two inches from the plate’s one o’clock mark. The glass held iced tea, as usual. When Suze had suggested a beer one warm day, the girl had gone silent. Courtney was willing to overlook the irregularity of her neighbors’ relationship, would dutifully run her dust rag over the bottles of gin and scotch on the sideboard (replenished periodically by odd-job Andy), washed up without complaint the glasses smelling of Suze’s nighttime sins, but even if she’d been old enough to buy the stuff, Suze knew that she wouldn’t ask her. Drugs, too, even when they were by prescription, could fall under Courtney’s disapproving gaze: Twice, the girl had failed to bring Suze’s bottle of sleeping pills back from the drugstore. Her parents were probably alcoholics.

  She was, Suze had to say, scrupulous about bringing the drops and pills that kept down the intraocular pressure. It had, of course, occurred to Suze that cannabis was a specific for her type of eye degeneration, but she had instantly dismissed the possibility of asking the girl for the phone number of one of the high-school potheads. Sooner or later, the ophthalmologist would decide the standard medications weren’t keeping her IOP low enough, and they’d start the rounds of medicinal pot. In the meantime, she’d just have to wait— with the way her luck had been going lately, the first person she asked about buying grass would turn out to be a narc.

  Courtney might look askance on a lesbian relationship, but she was dutiful at her Christian goodwill, and as she sat down to eat, she asked, “Any news on Janna last night?”

  “Much the same. That new nurse suggested I bring some music when we go on Sunday.”

  “You want me to help pick some out?”

  “I’ll do it,” Suze said. Then, hearing the shortness in her answer, she added, “If I have any problems, I’ll ask for help.”

  “We prayed for her in youth group last night. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Suze did, but what could she do? Tell the girl to stop? “Of course not.”

  “My friend Lin’s grandmother had a stroke last year; she’s a lot better now, just a small limp and she slurs certain words.”

  “Good for her.”

  “I only meant—”

  “I know, Courtney. I’m just finding it tough to be upbeat.” Five weeks of limbo; at what point should she think about getting on with her own life? And maybe she should let the girl choose the music; Courtney probably knew more about Janna’s taste than Janna’s whirlwind lover did.

  When Courtney drove away, as always, Suze felt a great relief. With, as always, a sense that the cabin was terribly remote.

  Some evenings, after her ritual call to Janna’s nursing home, Suze turned up every light in the cabin, setting the small world to blazing, giving form to the uncertainty in which she lived. Other nights she settled into the darkness as she would have stepped into a woodland pool, slowly, half apprehensive of encountering some slippery creature underfoot, but intimately aware of the rich sensations to be gained by allowing the cool water to rise around her, submerge her, transform her into one of its own.

  Tonight was a night for darkness. For one thing, she was nearly finished with the piece on the loom, and tomorrow or the next day she would cut it off, put it aside for finishing, and prepare the warp for the next one. The next piece would be black, and she needed to think about it for a while, in the darkness.

  The night was cool. She poured a glass of whiskey and picked up the thick alpaca-and-silk blanket she had made for Janna, her first piece off the new loom, finished just days before the stroke. She curled into the deck chair on the porch, wrapped in warmth, sipping the drink, shaping the weaving in her inner eye. It would be a big one, as wide as this sixteen-harness loom would take. And for once, she would incorporate color—although even the sighted would only be aware of it peripherally, as a texture in the darkness. She had once, several years ago, worked with a glossy, seemingly black thread that in fact had a few, a very few infinitesimal threads of intense color spun into it, turquoise and coral and emerald, invisible from more than a few inches but adding an emotional richness to the final black. She’d already had the spinner do the yarn for her, knew it would be precisely as her memory held it, knew that if she blended it on the loom with the same unrelieved flat ebony linen as the warp threads, it would give her a strong contrast while appearing monochromatic. The mind, she reflected, often saw things the eyes did not perceive.

  The glass emptied, the night felt its way through the soft wool, and Suze was about to throw the wrap off and go inside when all her senses rose as one: a digging sound. She’d forgotten all about it, thought it was a dream, but here it was again. What kind of animal made a sound like a shovel in the soil? A burrowing creature, raccoon or opossum, maybe? Not a skunk—she’d surely smell it.

  But this was not the scurry of claws in the earth; the chink of metal against stone, the purposeful rhythm, the size of the thing in the night were those of a shovel. Suze’s first outlandish reaction was to wish she’d brought her cell phone out with her, followed instantly by anger, good and clean and scouring away the timidity.

  The noise persisted for ten minutes or so. By the time it stopped, she had eased herself down from the porch and crept softly down the gravel drive, far enough to get a rough idea of the source of the digging, two hundred yards away, past the first curve. She knew the drive intimately, an easy stroll when she didn’t feel like risking her ankle on an unseen hole or her skin on a stand of poison oak; by now her feet knew the road’s hazards as well as they knew the cabin floor. But her mind could not make an image of what was happening out there.

  When the digging sounds ceased, she stayed where she was, head down and concentrating. She couldn’t quite tell, but she didn’t think the sounds had stopped completely: nothing distinct, but the audial impression of footsteps, the sensation of clicks and taps, once a sawing noise that lasted for perhaps twenty seconds. This went on for a quarter of an hour; then the digging noise started up again,
although the pace was quicker and it did not go on as long.

  Then silence. This time the night settled into a more profound quiet, like a lake of darkness after the ripples passed, placid and undisturbed. A cricket buzzed; a horned owl called; Suze was alone again. She made her way back to the cabin, where she reluctantly— resentfully—checked to be sure all the doors and windows were locked before going to bed.

  The next day was Wednesday, not one of Courtney’s days, but already Andy, Janna’s ninety-year-old odd job man (actually only seventy-three, but his complaints were those of a geriatric) was due in the afternoon. She ate her breakfast, listened to the morning news, dismantled the white warp threads from the loom, and began measuring the black linen on her warping mill, all the while waiting for the sun to brighten and reach the proper angle for illuminating the drive.

  Finally, she could wait no longer. She went back to the lean-to where Janna kept her gardening tools, locating a trowel more by memory than by sight. She stuck its handle into the back pocket of her jeans, and set off up the drive.

  Janna’s road was dirt, graded and graveled when the ruts became too deep, with concrete only on one brief steep stretch near the main road. As Suze approached the first curve, she found that she was deliberately scuffing her boots through the loose rock as if to warn intruders. She made herself stop, and pulled the trowel from her pocket, holding it in her hand like a weapon. Not that she expected to find anyone there—whoever had come by dead of night would hardly hang around to see what came along in broad daylight. Still, she wanted to get some idea of what had happened here before Andy the builder came—he was elderly, but he was a male, and his immediate instinct would be to take control. And although Suze might have got herself bogged down in a morass of cowardice and indecision, she did not wish to be taken control of, thank you very much.

  At the curve, she stopped, letting her eyes give her what fuzzy information they could, which wasn’t much. So she closed them and went on, allowing her other senses to come into play. The soft patch of ground underfoot here was as usual, the odor of the oak trees, the faint underlay of wild mint, and the single eucalyptus someone had planted decades ago, fading as she walked on. Soft earth gave way to gravel again where the bulldozer’s blade had cut into the slope to the right last year. Fragrance rose from underfoot at the bay tree where Janna used to pause, pulling off a fragrant twig—Suze caught herself: where Janna would soon again pause, to strip the leaves and breathe in their clean, acrid smell. Gravel now, then the crunch of deeper gravel, and the moist air rising from the streambed, carrying with it odors of redwood and ferns and the sound of water—a muscular rush when she’d first come here, now reduced to a trickle. And in a few more paces, her feet would hit the hollowness of the old culvert that contained the stream. But before that, a change: Where normally the gravel thinned under her boots, today she felt the stiffness of fallen leaves.

  Puzzled, Suze squatted to let her fingertips play along the ground. Yes, as she’d thought, the roadway was littered with the distinctively prickly leaves of the live-oak tree. But the next one of those was around the bend, and it hadn’t been at all windy; how then had they gotten here?

  Standing, she peered at the vague patches of light and dark. She was too early; the sun was still caught in the branches of the redwoods that rose from the streambed. She stuck the trowel back into her pocket and went to sit on the railing over the culvert, counseling patience as she listened to the murmurs of the stream.

  A squirrel spotted her, and coughed irritably for a long time in the branches overhead. A distant plane vibrated the sky, vague bird-shapes ducked across her vision, and the brightness slowly crept toward the relevant patch of ground. Suze got up, brushed off the back of her pants, and walked forward.

  Darkness and light, textures rather than objects. She had a pair of glasses thicker than cut-glass tumblers, glasses so heavy they made her whole face ache, but all that weight only brought objects into greater contrast, not clarity. So—typically—she’d gone to the other extreme and begun doing without them, allowing the sides of her vision to interpret shapes, seeing with her mind, not her retinas. As now she saw a swath of pale texture against the darker background of undisturbed leaves.

  The path stretched down from the road at the same angle as the stream. There was, Suze knew, a rough deer track along the bank, clear of the poison oak and blackberry tangles that demanded greater sunlight. It had been one of Janna’s favorite moonlight walks. She remembered the dampness against her face, the tickle of the ferns against her calf. Remembered, too, Janna, pressed between Suze and the padded bark of a massive redwood; Janna’s mouth.

  It would happen again, Suze told herself fiercely, and knelt down with the trowel in her hand.

  Her fingers found disturbed soil underneath the scattered leaves, soil her trowel dug into with ease. She mounded it on the gravel road, excavating one, then two lengths of the trowel blade. Her fingers probed the soft, dry earth, seeking for she knew not what. Buried treasure? In these mountains, more likely a buried body part.

  At this thought, her fingertips cringed back from their seeking. Jesus; what would it be like, to encounter dead flesh with her own warm hands? Would she ever be able to scrub the sensation away? Gingerly, she lowered her hand again, delicately fingering the soil where she had been pushing. But it was the trowel blade that found what she was seeking, when it hit something and slid to one side.

  She followed the metal blade down with her left hand, encountering a shape that was unnaturally smooth and hard. Almost like a tree root, but as she rubbed at the soil, she knew that no tree could have produced a thing as smooth and unblemished as this. It was a pipe—plastic, by the feel, and when she’d dug a bit more, the sun confirmed it: white PVC pipe. She scraped the soil away, working in the direction of the road until she encountered another pipe, larger and at right angles to the first. This larger one would be the cabin’s main water supply, winding along the edge of the drive from the well and storage tank near the main road a mile away. The smaller pipe joined the main line smoothly; the faint odor of fresh plastic cement rose from her trench.

  Someone had recently tapped into the cabin’s water supply.

  Suze stared at the patterns in front of her, shades of brown with flashes of white running through it, and thought about leaving the hole for Andy to find when he came along the road in two or three hours. But without knowing quite why, she found herself scraping the dirt back over the pipe, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if she had heard the old man’s truck chugging up from the road. She scraped and tamped and scraped some more, getting up to walk the fresh mound flat with her boots. She kicked some of the leaves back over the trampled earth, and then went across the drive to the inside curve where the gravel accumulated and scooped up one trowel-load after another, flinging the gravel over the offending patch until it had obscured in her vision.

  When she was finished, she was satisfied to note that a legally blind woman could do a better job of concealment than her thieving neighbor had at night. She scrubbed at her caked hands, then climbed cautiously down the confusing darkness of the stream bank to where the water played, and washed the dirt from her hands and the trowel blade, humming under her breath.

  When Andy drove up later that afternoon, she had coffee for him, money for the two bottles he brought her, and questions. She made it seem like a friendly chat, sitting him down on the porch to talk over the projects he was near to finishing up, suggesting one or two more things that Janna might have had in mind (the roof, for one—Andy didn’t think the flat area had been done right, and was going to leak come a heavy storm.)

  Then she casually asked, “Do you have a lot of illegal building around here?”

  “What, like people neglecting to call the building inspectors when they’re adding a room? Sure.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of building from scratch.”

  “That’d be tough to do,” he said after a moment’s judici
ous thought. “Hard to hide the access road, for one thing. The neighbors might not report them, but the inspectors are up and down these hills all the time; they’d spot it eventually.”

  “What if you didn’t build an access road?”

  “Then how’d you get in and out? It’s a fair walk to town. And how’d you take delivery of building materials? Unless you’re talking about a teepee, or a cave with a bush dragged over the mouth, you’d need wood, cement, window glass. There’s only so far you can carry a sheet of plywood through the bushes. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering how hard it would be to live completely off the land in these hills.”

  “Pretty tough. Oh, there’s probably a few here and there, but I’d doubt they stay for long. One winter’d do it for any Thoreau fantasies. You haven’t been bothered by any strangers, have you?” the old man said, suddenly catching on to the gist of the conversation.

  “Oh, no. Just something Courtney and I were talking about the other day, got me to wondering. Now, about that roof . . .”

  The next night, Suze was not disturbed by the sound of digging. Nor the next, and although she knew that she should report her mysterious, water-usurping neighbor, it seemed to her that if all he wanted was a little clean water, she couldn’t really begrudge him. After all, she was living here off the goodwill of a woman she barely knew; why not this Thoreau in the woods?

  And then came the call from the nursing home, the long-awaited, nearly despaired-of call to say that Janna seemed to be waking up and alert, and maybe Suze would like to come and talk to her? In the flurry of the days that followed, in the exhilaration of feeling that limp hand finally squeeze back, in the first slurred words from the long-empty mouth, the digging noises were forgotten. The weaving was neglected for long hours at the nursing home, and Courtney’s housekeeping and shopping skills were supplanted by those of driving Suze and pushing Janna’s chair through the grounds.