by Jon Cohen
Amanda and Oriana did not, of course, share their thoughts with each other. They both simply agreed that Harry needed some “alone time in the forest to get settled,” as Amanda put it. They left him alone, but kept a close eye on him. Actually, Amanda did more than that. Over the nearly two weeks that Harry climbed his trees, she sneaked off several times to leave food on his kitchen table. Fresh-baked sourdough bread. Beef stew, a slice of homemade carrot cake. She was compelled to attend to him because she knew what he was going through. They were in the same club. He was making such an effort, it was only right to sustain him. It’s what any nurse would do for a patient. Nutritional support, attention to the body and its needs.
He left a note for her one time. “The cake was delicious. You don’t have to, you know, but thank you.”
Of course, I have to, thought Amanda. You need to keep your strength up. Can’t have you falling out of trees.
The note he found when he got back that night: “You’ve climbed seventy-six trees. That’s a lot. Just saying. A.”
Confirmed—they were watching him.
He’d felt their presence in the forest but never saw them. He turned and looked toward Amanda’s house. On the second floor, two lights were on. The one on the left went out. He guessed it was Oriana’s bedroom. An hour and a half went by before the light went out in Amanda’s bedroom. He knew this, because every few minutes he went to the window to check.
That there was someone out there who kept an eye on him. And someone he was keeping an eye on. The stir of human life. Amanda’s light was out, so he turned out his own.
* * *
At the top of a sweet gum, Harry thought of his father. Harry scratched at the thin bark at the tip of a yearling branch, which had begun to leaf out. The tiny leaves were soft green jewels. Watery sap seeped out of the bark. Harry bent the branch toward him and sniffed deeply. His father wore aftershave, and it smelled just like this.
Harry’s father never hugged him. Although Harry could definitely remember, on one occasion, his father placing an arm around his shoulders. The two of them were posing together for a photograph. But that’s not when Harry would have smelled the aftershave with such intensity.
He sniffed the clear sap again. What am I remembering? he thought. And then he knew. Whenever he got into a car with his father, the car held the smell of him. A lemony, gingery, slightly cinnamon scent, hermetically sealed in the car.
Of course the strongest smell of him would be in a car. His father sold cars. His father drove away from the family in a car. A car noxious with aftershave.
Harry felt dizzy. He climbed down from the sweet gum. He had not reached the top, and he did not climb another sweet gum, although there were several in the forest.
* * *
For two weeks, he climbed; he went for morning runs; he carried larger and larger rocks back to the tree house and stacked them to the side of the spiral stairs. He drank gallons of spring water. Usually, he slept through the night. But some nights he couldn’t breathe because he missed Beth so terribly. He’d get out of bed and sit in the Adirondack chair, lean back and look up through the skylight into the branches of the beech. Each night, the waxing moon got a little brighter. The spring peepers sang, the owls hooted and tree after tree was coming to life. All of this helped, although not always. Sometimes the sadness didn’t go away even when dawn came. But at dawn, he put on his cap and climbed. He never knew exactly what a tree was going to bring him. But he knew where it would take him: up—even when up was down, as it so often was.
* * *
Way down, when a tree provoked a memory of his father. Or Wolf.
Sitting a third of the way up a white oak, Harry thought of the time Wolf had trapped a neighborhood kid, Kenny Watlinger, in a white oak. Kenny had run from Wolf, which everyone knew was a mistake, because it just prolonged the inevitable—Wolf was going to get you—and it gave Wolf time to think up an even more disconcerting torture than the one he’d originally intended. All he planned to do to Kenny was pelt him with acorns. It was a beautiful fall day, acorns were abundant, and all Wolf wanted was to fire a few at somebody. It’s why acorns were invented. Kenny happened by, so it would be Kenny. It would’ve just lasted a minute or two, the pelting, but Kenny panicked and bolted up the white oak.
Coming home from school, Harry witnessed all this. He crept closer and closer, hiding behind wide street trees, peering at the scene. He was three trees away from Wolf and Kenny.
“I’m going to start counting,” Wolf called up to Kenny, “and whatever number I reach before you come down here, that’s the number of acorns you’re going to eat.”
The look on Kenny’s face. Acorns. I’m going to have to eat acorns. I’m going to die.
Harry had seen the look on so many kids’ faces. Harry didn’t know how to save Wolf’s victims, any of them. But sometimes he could help a little. Kenny, of course, would be assuming acorns were poisonous to humans. They had to be, if Wolf was requiring you to eat them.
“One,” began Wolf, smiling up at Kenny.
Behind Wolf, Harry signaled to Kenny, whose eyes flicked. Harry put his finger to his lips. Don’t speak, or we’re both dead. He held up a half-peeled acorn, picked out the white flesh and ate it, nodding up at Kenny. See? Not lethal.
Kenny dropped from the tree when Wolf got to seven, and began peeling acorns like shrimp and chewing them as fast as he could. The satisfaction for Wolf was fleeting, and he walked away, bored. He passed the tree Harry had been hiding behind, treading heavily on bits of acorn shell without noticing.
* * *
Beth came to him in twenty-three trees. Sometimes she said hello, but mostly she said goodbye. Hello, goodbye, her voice always fainter, her memory-image thinning to light-pierced fog.
Seven trees provoked thoughts of Wolf. His father turned up only once, in the sweet gum. His mother once, in a pin oak. In an eastern hemlock, staring back in time, Harry listened to a chain saw cutting down the eastern hemlock that had stood outside his office window.
Sometimes, he was simply a forester, a scientist in a tree. He examined a dangling brown linden leaf—still holding on from last fall—for leaf spot and nectaria canker. He ran his fingers along the black scar of a lightning-strike high up in a red cedar. Lightly touched the sticky new leaves, neon green at the tip of an alder branch.
Foresters call dead trees “snags.” He climbed one, a silver maple, a gray-white skeleton teeming with life. Raccoons rustled inside their hidden nests in jagged knotholes; a dark-eyed opossum crawled upside down along a leafless branch; a male downy woodpecker drummed on the hollow wood at the broken top of the maple to claim its territory, as an impressed female flitted nearby. A bear had climbed this tree. Harry fingered the dotted claw scratches (bear ascending) and beside them the longer scrawls indicating the bear’s descent.
Climbing, Harry often thought of Oriana. Climbing, he thought of Amanda.
* * *
Atop a very tall, craggy sycamore, Harry could see over the crowns of most of the surrounding trees—the tented peaks of the conifers, the oval spread of the maples, the columnar towers of the dark-limbed poplars. And a half mile northeast, he could see into a clearing, in the neat center of which stood Amanda’s house, its red metal roof gleaming in the sunlight. His eyes lingered on the geometric, orderly red in the emerging sea of spring green. He could not see Amanda or Oriana. The house was too far away.
What would Amanda think he was doing, day after day, in the trees? What did Oriana imagine?
Because it had taken Harry fifty-three trees to understand what he was doing. And now, high atop tree number 127, the sycamore, he was as ready as he was ever going to be. He turned from Amanda’s house, toward the tree house nestled in the five great branches of the immense American beech.
* * *
“Oh shit,” Amanda said, looking through the binoculars at H
arry in the canopy of the sycamore. They were standing on the back deck of the house.
Oriana had been adding “sycamore” to their list. Harry had climbed well over a hundred trees now. Oriana stared at her mom. Mom never used that word. And she looked frightened, which frightened Oriana.
“Mom? Mom, what?”
Amanda lowered the binoculars. Numbly took the list from Oriana’s hand. Stared at it. “It’s not the number he’s climbed,” she whispered. She took a breath. “And it’s not the types.” Amazingly, she said the curse word again, “Oh shit, Harry,” and looked toward the sycamore again.
“Mom.”
“The pattern. Why he chooses them. It’s about how tall they are.”
All along, she’d noticed it without noticing at all. Every tree he climbed was taller than the one before. The climbing, the running, lifting the stones. Harry was getting in shape. All this time, he’d been getting ready. He was a man with a plan.
They didn’t need the binoculars to see the tallest tree in the forest. Both of them turned and looked at the American beech, not yet leafed out, but on the verge. It towered above all the others.
“Wow,” Oriana said. Because if Harry climbed a tree like that, he could do anything.
16
Just like Harry, Wolf was up a tree. The tree was not in a forest, however, but in Harry’s backyard in Waverly. It was not a towering tree, but a measly dogwood that barely supported Wolf’s bulk.
Harry, Wolf thought, as the dogwood swayed back and forth, if I fall from this tree and snap my neck attempting to break into your house, I’m holding you personally responsible. And you know what that means, don’t you? Wolf frowned. Well, it won’t mean anything, if I can’t find him, will it?
Interesting, that I could die falling out of a tree. Like Mr. Forestry set a tree trap for me. But that’s not like my Harry, thought Wolf. Whatever it is you’re up to, it’s not about me. Though, it is about me, because you’re pushing my buttons. And that’s why you ran with the money, because you knew I wouldn’t stand for it. All your life, you never pushed back, and now you’re pushing. Why?
Wolf did not like mystery and conjecture. He was a beeline kind of guy. And what kind of guy are you, Harry? Good guy, bad guy or guy who’s lost his grip?
Doesn’t really matter because you’re the guy with four million dollars, and that four million dollars exists because I took you to that ambulance-chasing lawyer. I put a winning ticket in your hand. You won, and you didn’t even want to play. Through you, I played Lawsuit Lotto and won.
I want, Harry. Wolf wants his winnings. And more to the point he needs them. His divorce, nearing its brutal endpoint, his third goddamn divorce—Harry, I’m going under. You are not giving that money away to strangers. Goddamn it, we’re fucking brothers. It’s always been you and me against the world.
Wolf stepped onto the second-floor roof. There was just enough light from the security light on the garage next door so he could see what he was doing. Harry’s house would have no security. The Waverly police patrol car had made its lazy drive-by, the neighborhood was asleep and quiet. Wolf broke a windowpane with a pop of his knuckles, reached in and undid the latch.
Inside the house. What was he looking for? A clue into Harry’s state of mind. Had he been thinking at all rationally? Did he have a plan?
This was the question Wolf had put before Bob Jackson earlier in the day. Wolf had taken the day off work and driven up from Virginia.
Wolf went up to the third floor, where Harry used to work. He was directed to Bob Jackson.
Bob was sitting in Harry’s old cubicle. He looked like he wanted to cry. On his desk, thick files in teetering stacks: rangeland management, forest resource utilization, inventory and analysis, development and evaluation, ecoregional protocol monitoring.
A shadow darkened Bob’s desk. He swiveled in his chair. Looked up. And up.
A gigantic hand reached down. Bob shrank back from it. Oh, the hand’s not going to strike me. It wants to shake. Wincing, Bob offered up his own moist, trembling little hand.
Wolf squeezed as he introduced himself. “Hi, Bob. My name’s Wolford Crane, but please call me Wolf. Got a second?”
Dizzy with adrenaline, Bob nodded to the wolf, vigorously in the affirmative.
Wolf explained who he was and why he was there. Bob liked this development. Although Wolford the Wolf was terrifying and took up most of the space in the cubicle, Bob had a glimmer of something positive: maybe this huge man would drag his brother back to work.
Harry had sent Irv Mickler his resignation, but Wolf looked like a man who could change minds.
“Are you going to make him come back?” Bob said.
Wolf was a very quick study. Mountains of paper on Bob’s desk, thanks to Harry. Bob himself, with the air of the office shirker. “Did Harry betray you, Bob?”
“Well, that’s a strong word.”
“But he did, didn’t he?”
“I had seniority over him.”
“And now this dump job.”
“Will you bring him back?” Bob said. Because Wolf looked very much like one of those bounty hunter guys you see in movies. Bob wondered if Wolf had a gun. Harry Crane delivered at gunpoint back to his cubicle—Bob would welcome the sight.
Wolf thought, Yes, I will bring Harry back. To his senses. “What I need from you, Bob, is a description of Harry’s last moments. You said he just stood up and walked out of the office. Brushed right past you.”
“Yes, and he looked very weird. Weirder than usual, I mean.” Bob lowered his voice. “Never the same since the wife thing, you know.”
Wolf twitched, reflexively protective of Harry. This guy Bob had no doubt taken advantage of Harry’s post-Beth daze. Harry wanting to bury himself in work, and this little worm milking it. Wolf stopped himself from lifting Bob to his feet and giving him a spine-snapping shake.
Instead, he guided Bob into the aisle. The other office workers were furtively watching Wolf and Bob. No one questioned Wolf’s presence. He oozed authority. And forestry bureaucrats were by nature nonconfrontational. Irv Mickler, the boss, stepped halfway out of his office, absorbed Wolf’s commanding stature and shrank back out of view. Sequoia, Irv thought. The man is a giant sequoia. No doubt FBI or NSA, but certainly, definitely, none of my business. I need not know what I need not know. Irv clicked his door shut.
Wolf stood behind Bob, leaned down to make sure his breath was hot on Bob’s neck. “So, Harry stood up, you said.”
“Yes. I was down by the elevator, there—” Bob pointed “—and walking this way. He’d just gotten off the phone. But he was still talking. As he came toward me. Talking.”
The call from Toland came in, the news of the money, all that fucking money, and it fried Harry’s precarious brain, Wolf thought. “Bob. Bobby boy, what was he saying?”
“It was hard to hear.”
“Go back in your mind, Bob. And hear it, please.” Wolf placed a hand on Bob’s shoulder. It was heavy as an anvil. Thick fingers began to knead. Bob gasped. Oh my, Bob thought, those are powerful fingers. I think something in my shoulder is separating.
It all came rushing back to Bob. There he is, Harry, he’s walking toward me, and he says something. What does he say? Speak louder, Harry! And then Bob heard Harry, loud and clear. To the trees.
“To the trees,” Bob blurted. “To the forest and the trees!”
Inside Harry’s house now, using the flashlight app on his phone, Wolf looked around. To the forest and the trees. Wolf had pressed sweaty Bob, to no avail. What forest, what trees was Harry talking about? Were Harry’s gaskets blown, was he simply a babbling forester, or was he heading to a specific patch of forest? Did he have a favorite forest, a place he might go? But the office managed a thousand forests in the Mid-Atlantic states. Bob, surely there was a special forest, a special tree? Could we look on
his computer? Click click click, but what were they looking for? Nothing stood out, it was all data and graphics. No images of special trees, not even a photo of his first love, the big beech in their childhood front yard.
Wolf made his way into Harry’s den. Disheveled like the entire house.
To the forest and the trees. Wolf reached for his phone and pulled up the text exchange from last week.
Harry: I’m not coming home, Wolf. And I am in a safe place. You got all that?
I’m in a safe place. You’re in a fucking forest with four million dollars is where you are. Always looking for a safe place, up your big beech tree, and now in your unknown forest.
I’m not coming home. And you didn’t. You got the Toland call at the office, and you didn’t even come home, did you?
Wolf stood in Harry’s bedroom. The drawers were stuffed with underwear and socks, the closets full. Of Beth’s stuff, too. In the bathroom, Harry’s toothbrush still in the holder. And Beth’s, beside it. Jesus, Harry, you haven’t moved a molecule since she died. The money came, you detonated, and you wandered off and found a safe place. Both a definitive and utterly arbitrary act. Fuck. How do I find a man without a plan? A man safe somewhere deep inside one of a thousand forests? Fuck me.
Dawn would come soon. He needed to get the hell out of here. Instead, Wolf went into the den, dropped into a leather chair and lit a cigarette. Smoked it. Stubbed it out in an empty glass he picked up in the kitchen. Lit another. And another—and on the flare of the cigarette lighter saw a small photograph, high up on a bookcase, in plain view but somehow also out of sight. Wolf got out of the chair and reached for it, brought it to the glow of his cell phone. It was a photo of Wolf and Harry, when they were little kids.
“Aw, Harry, see what I mean? This is what I’m saying. Look at us.” Just look at us. Wolf stared into the eyes of his younger self. There was no anger in them. The perpetual glare, the grimace, had not yet settled into his face. We should’ve just stood there forever, bro. Because, goddamn, look at us.