by Doug Lawson
But Chundo was fired up. He stood up and paced back and forth. “If we don’t, who will?” The dragon on his neck grinned at us. “And they’ll serve these, you watch. The flavor will be worth the risk. Late rains this year; it’s probably just out there waiting for us. I mean, how many times do you get a chance to make history?”
“He’s hard to argue with,” I said to Laurel.
She rolled her eyes. “The rest of us seem to manage,” she said, and then sighed. “Sorry, the little beast was particularly intense today.”
Deke yawned, turned around on my lap, and reached for his hat. He seated it firmly on his head. “Does it have eggs, Chundo?” His voice was full of sleep. “The Amanita?”
“Mushrooms don’t lay eggs,” I said. “They’re not chickens, little beast.”
“Actually, these do have an egg form, kid,” Chundo said, nodding at Deke. Deke’s sleepy face lit up. “You can slice it from top to bottom and see the outline of the whole mushroom inside—the mushroom the Amanita will become.”
“Like an embryo, I guess,” I said.
“What’s an embryo?” Deke looked up at me.
“Like a baby mushroom.”
“It’s not like a baby mushroom. It is a baby mushroom. It’s got the cap and the gills and the stalk all in there, right, Chundo?”
“Inside every boy is the man he will become.” Chundo nodded. “Of course, if we go out after it, it’ll mean doing some deep hiking for the next few weeks. Might not be able to keep up with the cash crop . . .”
Laurel studied me in the dim light.
“There’s the rent and all,” Chundo said.
“It’s OK,” I said after a minute. “I can carry us for a little bit.”
“The Chez will totally come through, Barn. And when it does . . .”
“It’s all right,” I said. I looked at Laurel. “It’s OK.”
She shook her head and looked away.
The bank of fog rolled uphill like an avalanche in reverse, wrapping us in a damp, eerie quiet. Chundo and Laurel hissed at each other, arguing quietly. They argued a lot. “Come on,” I heard Chundo say. “Don’t be that way.”
I might have drifted off for a bit. I woke to Deke pressing his finger into my cheek. “I can see the future with my hat on,” Deke whispered in my ear.
I nodded over-enthusiastically, the way you do with kids.
“No, really, I can,” he said.
It was late. The fire was lower. Maybe it was a lack of sleep, but a shiver went up the back of my neck and my scalp crawled.
“Tell me something that happens in the future,” I said.
“In the future,” Deke said, “I am the best mushroom hunter in the whole state of California.”
I could feel his warm breath on my face. “I bet you will be,” I said.
“Like Chundo,” he said.
We could see Chundo’s silhouette moving around the fire, adding logs. “Like Chundo,” I agreed. A small tremor wobbled the ground, but no one else seemed to notice. A tiny spark jumped from Deke’s fingertip to mine. In the distance, three owls were calling to each other across the ridge. Chundo turned and cupped his hands around his mouth and called back to the owls, and one of them came in to check us out. It perched on a naked branch of madrone, just outside the shrinking circle of the fire.
“Oooooh,” went the owl. “Oooh-oooooh.”
“Oooh,” said Chundo. “Ooooooh-oh.”
“What are they saying?” I whispered to Deke.
But he was asleep again, his cheek pressing the hat into my chest. I watched as Chundo reached out his hand, and the owl came in to perch, sitting on his arm and studying him closely like an old friend.
Part of me was amazed, the part that was always amazed by Chundo. Part of me wondered if he was going to ask the owl for money, too.
The next morning I took Deke into Santa Cruz and got gear. The kid was really intense, I’ll give them that—just like the Chundo I remembered. Always talking. Always in motion. He was intensely interested in everything he saw, and it was as though his small head was so full of specifics he’d explode if he didn’t let them all out. One day it had been the particulars of the ships that were used by the Romans when they invaded Britain in AD 43. Another time it had been the anatomy of sea urchins, how they had jaws and intestines just like people. He talked fast and low, details spilling out so close together it was hard to understand what ampullae were, exactly, and how they related to the bireme, which was evidently entirely unsuited to the waters of the English Channel. A creature? A ship? I didn’t know. I liked it for the same reasons I’d liked Chundo as a kid. My dad had never been a talker, and without my mother our house had always been pretty quiet.
We got back close to lunch, and I could tell there had been a pretty bad argument while we were out. Chundo’s face was cold and set, the way I’d seen it get before when things got bad. His eyes looked tired. Laurel looked like she’d been crying. Deke followed them around, telling them about all of the things we had bought, but both of them barked at him and sent him off. Subdued, he sat down with me to help get all the wrapping off of everything, to get the sleeping bags stuffed and tied on and the backpacks filled.
We locked up the shack and set out that afternoon along the ridgeline. Chundo had a specific search pattern, he said, that would take us back and forth across the wilderness areas. None of us could make much sense of it. Chundo walked up front, setting a hard pace. Laurel trailed along reluctantly in his wake. At first Deke ran around between all of us, but he soon wilted in the heat, so I got him up on my shoulders and tried to keep up.
From the top of the ridge we could see from Monterey all the way up past Santa Cruz, the whole curve of the bay. Sailboats undulated just offshore, tacking and luffing. Whales rolled up and blew steam. Then we dropped down into a canyon that was thick with pin oak and madrone, going off trail. The deeper we got, the larger everything seemed—the trees were wider and incredibly tall. The plants loomed over us and blocked out the sun. I had the sense they were watching us as we trespassed deeper into unknown country.
We camped that first night beside a dry stream, in a cathedral of redwoods, a giant fairy ring. Deke and I cooked noodles. Chundo and Laurel drank vodka. They walked off into the gigantic trees and started arguing again, with Laurel’s voice carrying over the hissing of the propane. I couldn’t hear Chundo’s replies, just his tone. It was something I’d heard a lot from him around previous women, always near the end of things.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Deke said. He was trying to catch a lizard that had emerged from a pile of rocks.
“What doesn’t bother you?”
“I was reading your mind.” He turned to me and pulled the welder’s goggles off his face. His eyes were startlingly green in the shade of his hat. “Mom and Chundo.”
“Oh,” I said. I stirred the pot.
“They argue a lot, but I don’t care.”
The noodles were done. I turned off the stove, and suddenly we could hear Chundo’s voice clearly. “Then give the fucking kid back so you can get a goddamn life!” he shouted.
“Maybe I will!” Laurel shouted back. “You asshole.” She turned and stormed away into the woods.
Deke stared at me for a minute, and then put the goggles back on. His skin looked even paler.
“He’s not my father,” he said, quietly. He turned back to the lizard, which hadn’t moved.
“Deke, you can’t let . . .”
He reached out quick and grabbed the lizard. Holding it in his fist, he lifted it up to his eye level and studied it. “Sceloporus graciosus,” he said. The lizard studied him back. “You’re not either, you know,” he said, as if he was talking to it.
I watched as Deke tightened his grip around the lizard. The set of his jaw reminded me of Chundo, that night when we’d told him to get out, or that night I’d tried to keep him from cutting himself after a girl had dumped him, and he’d cut me instead. Deke’s face was expressionless. H
e squeezed the lizard and it struggled, whipping its tiny head back and forth and flailing a tiny arm.
“Deke,” I said. “Dude. Step away from the lizard.”
He looked at me. I shook my head.
“It’s just a Sceloporus,” he said, but he opened his fingers. The creature lay limp and seemingly lifeless on his small palm. “It’s just a stupid lizard,” he said, and tossed it back onto the rocks. In the air, the lizard flipped, landed feet first, and ducked quickly into a crack.
Chundo yelled for Deke. And like I would have when I was younger, Deke jumped up, grabbed him a can of beer, and went running to his side.
“We’re getting close,” Chundo claimed. The ostriatus would just be over the next rise, glowing green in the dim light of the woods, he was sure. He painted a brilliant picture of it, and even Laurel seemed to get caught up when he talked. It would just be one more short climb out of the brush, up toward the top of the ridge again. Once we got there, he said it would just be down in the next canyon, waiting by the stump of a redwood. Down where the fog would be keeping it damp.
We were four days out now, and in another one or two we’d have to turn back unless we wanted to live on mushrooms alone. Fires were burning over near Boulder Creek, and in the mornings our sleeping bags would be covered with a thin layer of ash. But the deeper we went into the backcountry, the more energy Chundo seemed to have. He began to look the way he always had on stage—leaping about, barking lyrics into the microphone, hammering on that old Ibanez. He powered up hills, his gaze skimming the landscape. He’d call out and gesture, and at first I’d see nothing but leaves and fallen branches. Then he’d pounce and conjure a large bouquet of Craterellus cornucopioides out of nowhere, like a magician pulling black flowers from a hat. He pointed out hidden beds of chanterelle, candy caps, milk caps, and even morels to me until I started getting the eye for them. We found chicken of the woods, logs full of oysters, old man’s beard growing on the sides of slopes, sawtooths and slippery jacks, pink Russulas. They were from all different seasons, he said. We shouldn’t have been finding them, and yet there they were. Deke’s face glowed, rosy as the Russulas.
I remember thinking we were all of us small creatures, resting on the back of something immense and alive. I imagined all of those mushrooms stretching feelers out underground like broad subterranean creatures, white and blind, reaching out along the interconnected webs of tree roots that stretched for miles. Maybe they were all just different parts of one great, restlessly sleeping beast. Here were some black trumpets of ears, listening to the sound the wind made through the naked branches of the madrone. Here was the shaggy mane of a tongue, licking the salt out of the ocean fog. Thousands of little brown mushrooms were eyes watching the sea, the sky, the sun passing over. Watching us pass by, too, like faint stars caught on long-exposed film. I imagined I could sense its thoughts, even without Deke’s hat. They were thoughts so slow moving and primitive that words to capture and convey them were useless. Language was nothing but the passing murmurs of ghosts.
That evening we set up camp on a low rise above the distant lights of a town that Laurel thought might be Corralitos. Though we hadn’t found the ostriatus, we had several pounds of other mushrooms. Using the little camp stove and the small set of knives I’d brought, we sliced them thin and dredged them in garlic. We dropped them into what was left of our olive oil and tossed in tiny pieces of bacon. We had chanterelle and oysters, black trumpets and candy caps and butter boletes. We had morels that were red, blue, and black, and a chicken of the woods that wasn’t anything like a chicken.
Afterward, Chundo and Laurel sat next to each other on the ridge, not speaking. Deke was awake and quiet for once, and the air was full of static. We watched the auras flickering around us, blue-green, white, emerald—the colors of the sea. The sun went down and the October sky went purple and brooding scarlet from the fires. Stars exploded here and there in gaps between the roiling towers of smoke that streaked up and westward toward Japan, toward the burgeoning moon.
“I know it’s out here,” Chundo said, convincing himself. “We’ll find it tomorrow, for sure.”
Deke nodded sleepily, complete faith written across his face. Laurel wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Chundo looked over at me. He looked old, then, and I realized that the Amanita was more than a mushroom.
Beneath us the mountain rumbled. The next morning, Laurel was gone.
Her sleeping bag was empty and at first we thought she’d gone off somewhere to pee, but when she hadn’t come back for an hour we started calling. From the rise we could see in all directions. There was no sign of her.
Deke looked pale and scared underneath that hat of his. Chundo looked even worse. He looked shocked, as though the idea of her not being there had never really occurred to him. The ends of his relationships had always been a surprise, always hit him hard, but Laurel’s leaving seemed to hit him harder. This time he completely folded in on himself. He stood beside the stove for a long time, and his face took on that coldness, his jaw setting down into that angle that always made me wary. He looked smaller. The dragon tattoo seemed to bloat and fade.
Deke paced in circles around us, repeating the same questions, lifting up and checking under things. Where did she go? When did she leave? Where could she have gone? Could a mountain lion have taken her off? They were known to pull deer up into trees. Maybe she’d be up in a tree somewhere? Maybe we should look there? She’s not under the sleeping bag. She’s not on the other side of the hill? Then he stood in one place, shaking. He sat and pulled his hat down tight, clenching his face and trying to hear her thoughts.
Down by the tree line, I found something that was almost a trail. It led roughly downhill, off toward where the town might be. It was probably nothing more than a deer path, but Deke jumped up and ran down it at top speed, hands in the air, calling her. I yelled after him, but he either didn’t hear or ignored me, and crashed headlong through the brush.
“We should get him,” I said to Chundo, meaning he should go.
He looked at me strangely, as though I were a ghost. “What? Why?” He shrugged. “Maybe he’ll find her.”
“Maybe he won’t.”
He shrugged again, turned away, and started putting random things into his backpack. He looked up at the ocean and then down at his hands. “He’s not mine, you know. She told me that.”
I shook my head. “Look again. He is you, Chundo.”
He didn’t turn. I went down the path, and found Deke after half a mile, huddled on top of a charred redwood stump. His hat hung in shreds. His arms and legs were dirty and covered in welts. It looked like he’d fallen and split his lip. He watched me warily from behind his goggles.
“Come on,” I said. I brushed him off. “We’ll get Chundo and head back. She’s probably gone back to the house.”
“I’d know it if she was.”
I knelt and looked at him. “Your hat’s all broken,” I said. “It might be hard to tell.” I took his hat off and set it on the stump. When we got back to the camp, Chundo had packed up his things and was already heading down the far side of the hill, away from where we’d come.
“Chundo,” I called. “Don’t you think—”
He looked over my head. “I know we’re close, Barn.” He ran his fingers over his stubble. “I’ve got to finish this thing.”
I studied him. I didn’t actually think I knew the way back.
“Deke,” Chundo said, snapping his fingers. “Let’s go.”
Deke looked up at me, and then back at Chundo. He didn’t say anything for a minute. I couldn’t read his expression. Then he let go of my hand, picked up his sleeping bag, and took it over to where Chundo was waiting. Chundo nodded. The two of them set off toward the next ridge.
I watched them go. Then I packed up the camp. There wasn’t much, but it took me a long time. It took forever to pick the slugs off my sleeping bag and get the bag into the stuff sack. I considered packing Laurel’s, too, but decided agains
t it. There was a little bit of propane left, so I made coffee, and then there was a small tremor that sent ripples across the surface of the cup. A helicopter beat across the horizon, carrying a load of water toward where the smoke still billowed. I heard crashing in the brush and thought it might be a mountain lion, but it was only a squirrel chasing after two other squirrels. I imagined I could hear sounds coming up the canyon from the town. Car doors shutting, people and kids talking, laughing, and it sounded so clear to me—maybe it was a trick of the acoustics; maybe not.
Eventually, I stood up and went after them. Their trail wasn’t hard to follow, down the steep side of the canyon and around a bend. Nearer to evening, I could see them in the distance sitting together, on the steep side of a hill beneath a cluster of oaks. When I got closer, I could see that they were eating, or at least Chundo was. Deke was staring down at something in his hand. Something green.
They watched me approach. “You came,” Deke said. He looked like he’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Chundo held up a green mushroom in his hand. “Nothing. We got it!” he said. His eyes were wide and had that manic stage gleam to them. He popped the mushroom into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, and then reached down next to where he was sitting and pulled up another one. There was a large fruiting of them there, where he’d cleared away the leaves. He handed one to me. “They’re delicious, Barn. Save them for The Chez though, OK?”
It was greenish-white, with a wide smooth cap and bright white gills underneath the head. It shone somewhat metallic in the late afternoon sun. It smelled like dirt to me, or maybe like a raw potato, just cut.
I looked over at Deke, who shook his head. “They’re not ostriatus,” he said. “They’re not!”
“The legendary Amanita ostriatus!” Chundo said, frowning at Deke. “These taste incredible!” There was a tone in Chundo’s voice I recognized. He was working hard to convince himself of something.
Deke looked back at the mushroom, and looked up at me again. He looked strange without the hat. Pale, like a capless mushroom himself. He whispered something I couldn’t hear.