The Current

by Tim Johnston

  “Stay outta trouble, Danny.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and he turned then and found Billy Ramos watching him, and he said, “See you around, Billy,” and Billy said in his rubbery voice, “See you around, Danny,” and Danny stepped from the office and nodded to Jones—who nodded back and stepped into the trailer while it was still rocking and shut the door behind him.

  31

  The old dead tamarack had been there long enough, stopped in its fall by the lower boughs of a balsam fir and doing the balsam no good either, so he gathered his gear and walked to the site just a few paces into the woods and broomed the snow from a crook in the branches of the tamarack and wedged the chainsaw there and broomed off the rest of the tree. Then he took up the snow shovel and cleared a path along the fall line, and when that was finished he fetched down the chainsaw again and stood studying the tree. Like a man saying last words, though saying nothing. No other sound but his own smoky breaths. Finally he looked up into the branches overhead for widow-makers and seeing none he pulled the choke and jerked the cord. The engine came to life and he worked the throttle trigger to keep it running. Cold gray Sunday morning and these woods his church. The revving saw the only sermon he cared to hear.

  He lopped off the limbs, then dropped the tree into the path, and he’d begun bucking it into lengths when there was a flash of light in the corner of his vision and he stood to watch the white sedan pull into his drive and come to a stop. His heart pitching strangely because he knew the car—had seen it dozens of times around town, on the roads, in the time since Sutter had retired and gone civilian. The driver’s door opening now and a figure stepping out wearing Sutter’s sunglasses and Sutter’s canvas jacket, and where was this, where was he, was he dreaming? He removed the fogged safety glasses and looked again and as he did so Sutter turned his head and Gordon saw the dark ponytail and his heart swung back to its place and he shook his head at himself—old fool, what did you think?

  He held still, watching her through the trees. She looked at the house and she looked at the outbuilding, and then she turned toward the woods and looked right at him and he realized the saw was still running, puttering low but puttering all the same in that silence. She raised a hand to him, then began making her way toward him through the snow. When she reached the woods where the snow was not so deep she paused to kick her boots one against the other as you would at someone’s doorstep, then she took off the sunglasses and continued on to the small clearing where he stood beside the fallen tamarack.

  Her mouth moved and he cut the engine and set the saw down on the tree.

  “Say again?”

  “I said, Mr. Burke?” She was winded from her walk through the deep snow and trying not to be. Bright pink blotches on her pale face.

  “I am.”

  “I’m Audrey Sutter. Tom Sutter’s daughter?”

  “I know who you are.”

  The girl nodded. Looking right at him, her face so smooth and young but with Sutter’s blue eyes.

  He said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for coming to the service.”

  “Well. Wanted to pay my respects. He was a good man.”

  “Thank you.” The girl standing there with both hands in the big pockets of that jacket that made her look so small. Young, pretty girl. Look you in the eye. Looking to see did you mean what you said, so don’t look away, give the man’s daughter that much, at least.

  She stepped up for a closer look at the tamarack. As if to inspect his work.

  “Will you burn all this yourself?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “You won’t sell it.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  She looked up into the branches overhead. A male cardinal landed on an upper bough, sending a small avalanche of powder falling without a sound. The bird whistling for its mate.

  “You should have something on your head,” he said.

  “I know.” The girl nodding, looking all around. She wanted to say something, had driven out here to say something, but he couldn’t help her say it and he didn’t know that he cared to hear it anyway.

  “You like trees?” he said finally, and the girl looked at him.

  “Do I like them?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I like them,” she said.

  “All right then, follow me,” he said. And he turned and began down a path through the trees, holding the boughs so they wouldn’t whip back on her, she following close behind in his tracks.

  He pointed to the trees as they walked and seemed to give them their names: Jack pine. Black spruce. Balsam fir. Hemlock. White pine. He told her his old granddad was a logger from the old days and knew everything there was to know about trees. Signed up when he was fourteen and worked every job there was, you name it: Chokerman, chaser, high climber. Faller. Bucker.

  “He’d show you his scars,” he went on. “Just everywhere. His face. Showed me one time where a one-inch jagger—that’s a sliver of cable wire—went into his hand one summer and where it come out the next on his thigh.” He held a wing of black spruce for her until he was sure she had it.

  “Funny thing is, I do believe a tree was the most beautiful thing in the world to that old man. When he looked at one he saw a hundred things all at once. Logging put clothes on his kids’ backs, food on their plates. That’s all there was to it.”

  He stopped and she came up beside him in a place that looked like every other place in the woods: the boughs of the trees with their burdens of snow, the shapes of fallen limbs under the snow and sometimes the branches reaching up like hands. Tracks of creatures everywhere.

  “There it is there,” he said, and she looked where he was looking. Trees and more trees. He pointed. “That one there.”

  She looked again. “Is that a white pine?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The tree rose straight and bare until about her height, then opened like an umbrella in gray-green boughs, soft-looking boughs, then came to a point high overhead.

  She looked at him, but his eyes were up in the tree’s branches. He said, “She asked me one time how fast did a tree grow and I said I don’t know and she said was it faster than a little girl and I said I don’t know but there’s one way to find out. So out we come and she walked around and around till she found this one. Just her height back then.”

  Audrey looked at the tree again. At its highest it just caught the sun, and the whole tree seemed an elaborate structure for lifting that highest, palest point into the light.

  “How old was she?” she said. “When she found the tree.”

  “Seven. That tree was just four foot tall back then and it’s grown twelve inches a year ever since, give or take, so I put it at right around twenty-six foot tall.”

  “Was she disappointed?”

  “About what?”

  “About how much faster it grew.”

  He shrugged. “Tell you the truth she didn’t have much interest after that first year. It was me who kept coming out to measure. Until it got too tall and I got too old to be climbing trees anyway.”

  Audrey swept at her cheeks with her fingertips, both sides with both hands, and Gordon Burke, watching her, said, “I didn’t see that cast till just now.”

  She held out the purple cast as if she’d not noticed it herself.

  “That other girl,” he said, “who was with you . . .”

  “Caroline.”

  “Was she a good friend of yours?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  He nodded, then shook his head and was silent. The silence of the woods all around them. Dead silence. Not even a bird.

  “I missed her funeral because of this,” Audrey said, raising the cast again.

  “I expect she won’t begrudge you that,” he said, and when she said nothing he added, “No disrespect. Just saying, under the circumstances.”

  “I still need to go down there, though,” she said. “I need to see those people. Her
family.”

  He looked at her, then looked up into the trees again. “Looks to me like you’ve got your hands full where you’re at. And it’s none of my business, but it’s my guess those folks could use some time on their own.”

  “That’s what Dad said.”

  He stood looking up into the trees. Then he said, “Well,” and turned as if to head back.

  “I guess you’ve heard about what he did,” she said, “down there in Iowa,” and Gordon Burke stopped.

  “No, I can’t say that I have,” he said.

  And so she told him. About the boys at the gas station. About the backscratcher and about the mechanic with the scratches on his face and the new bullet hole in his right hand, Gordon Burke all the while listening, watching her, and when she was finished he looked away and shook his head.

  “Be damned,” he said. “Just be God damned.” He turned back to her. “Did he get the right man at least?”

  “I don’t know. I looked at a photo line-up but I couldn’t say.”

  “A photo line-up?”

  She told him about Ed Moran and his deck of mug shots. “He’s the sheriff down there now, where it happened.”

  “I know he is.” Gordon Burke shook his head again. He looked up into the branches of the white pine. “And you still alive even,” he said. “It just beats all.”

  “It wasn’t all about me.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “What he did down there. Or about Caroline either.”

  He raised a hand to stop her. Something flashing in his eyes. “We’re not gonna talk about that.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry, just—” He dropped his hand. Turning away from her. “I’ve talked my limit for one day, that’s all,” he said. “More than my limit.” And he turned to go then, and she turned too and they went back the way they’d come, following their tracks to the fallen tamarack, and there they said good-bye, and before she’d opened the car door the chainsaw chugged back to life and she turned for a last look at him, a man in his woods, bent over in the smoke and the noise and the woodchips flying all around him.

  32

  It was Saturday afternoon before he got on the road—before he got his room and the little bathroom cleaned, before he got the truck packed up, and before he got his deposit from the old widow who owned the house and who believed only in cash—and he’d planned to drive all night, but after nearly drifting into the median just outside Kansas City, he pulled into a rest stop and spent the next four hours shivering under a packing blanket while the big diesels geared down and hissed and rumbled all through his broken dreams. Around dawn he gave up and drove on, and he didn’t stop again except for gas and coffee.

  When he turned at last into the drive and there was no car and no sign of anyone around, he thought in his exhaustion that she’d moved somewhere and hadn’t told him. Or that she’d told him and he’d forgotten. But then he saw the time on the dash, 5:15, and it was what, Sunday now, and she and Marky would’ve gone into town for groceries, and so he parked the truck and got out and stretched, and stood looking over the farmhouse and its outbuildings. The shapes of abandoned machinery under the snow; Great-Granddad’s old Massey-Harris, flat-tired and snow-heaped and the red paint all gone to rust—a miracle that that old Swede didn’t come back from the dead to raise holy hell. The coop yard where he told Marky to go make the chickens fly and Great-Grammy Olsen coming out with her broom and Marky flapping his wings away from her as she cussed him in a foreign blue streak.

  They had liked playing around the farm but they did not like that kitchen. Did not like sitting around that table.

  Why on earth not? she’d wanted to know, staring them down.

  Just don’t, Ma.

  Why?

  It smells Momma. Marky spitting it out.

  What do you mean it smells?

  Shrugging his shoulders. It just smells Momma.

  He means it smells like them. It’s hot in there and it smells like them.

  Smells like them?

  Yeah, Ma. Don’t you smell it?

  Putting her hands to her hips, looking from him to Marky and back. You know what that smell is? Do you? That’s the smell of working people. Of hard work all your life. Of never having money for yourself but making sure your kids are fed and have shoes on their feet. The kitchen smells! Shaking her head. Next time we’ll just have Grammy throw your food out to you in the yard like a couple of dogs. How will that be? Raising her finger and pointing it at Danny’s face. Don’t even think it, wise guy. Just keep that smart tongue of yours still for once, OK?

  The side door was not locked, was never locked, and when he stepped into the kitchen he thought the old smell was still there, faintly. Then he thought it might be the smell of old Wyatt who’d had his nest of blankets near the stove. Who did not raise his head now at Danny’s entrance, or come hobbling in from the living room, wagging his old tail. No sound of his dog tags rattling, his ears clapping as he shook off sleep. No sound at all in the house, not even the refrigerator running its compressor, though when he opened the door the light came on and the jug of juice he picked up was cold.

  He went back out the way he’d come in and stood looking at the Minnesota sundown. Bright bands of red and pink in the west, but dark winter clouds overhead. Near the middle of the yard the snow had been disturbed—excavated, and darkened with what looked like soot, and he knew what it was before he reached the edge of the site.

  The fire had melted back the snow and left sharp fins like rock formations, and down in the pit lay the upturned earth, the dirt patted down with the back side of a shovel. At the head of the grave, or the foot of it, stood the rusted iron T-post, rising from the snow at its tilt like a ship mast—just the right height for boys to swing from, one to each side, making the bedsheets shimmy on the lines . . . until one day the post shifted down in the turf and they felt it going and Oh shit oh shit, they dropped and ran for their lives.

  No idea then that they swung their sneakers over the future grave of their dog. No idea they’d ever have a dog. How many times had they asked her? Begged her. Promised to take care of it, to feed it, she wouldn’t have to do a thing. No, no, and no, she said, I know how that story ends. But then one day you take off to the tracks, the forbidden tracks, and The train is coming Danny, Marky says, hurry! and you center the penny on the rail and jump back down the bank and into the trees so the conductor won’t see you, and it’s then, the train growing big and your hearts beating, that Marky says, Danny there’s a dog.

  And you look and look before you finally see it in the weeds and shadows. Hardly recognizable as a dog at first with its shabby, mud-brown coat, every kind of burr and thistle in its low-slung tail. Big animal in any case, though starved almost to death: ladder of ribs and caved-in stomach and hunched, bony spine. Dark lips drawing back to show its teeth, and the train keeps coming, shoving air and sunlight before it.

  The engine roars by and the boxcars follow, clack-clacking over the seams of the rails while no one moves, boys or dog, and over that steady clatter you say loudly but calmly: Marky, don’t even think about petting that dog, and Marky says, It’s all right Danny he’s just hungry that’s all . . . and then you know you have to go first, before he goes to the dog himself, and the dog looks spring-loaded, so you go—one hand out, knuckles up for sniffing, and you know Marky has fallen in step behind you by the sound of his excited, open-mouthed breathing.

  The dog’s eyes are a golden color and they watch you and you only, your every movement: Your hand going slowly into a pocket. The hand coming out again. The thing you hold in your hand now, a Snickers bar, your lunch.

  And you were halfway home, the dog wobbling along behind you, before you remembered the penny, and by the time you and Marky were in the driveway you’d sworn off the penny altogether—it had already done its work, hadn’t it? You’d always wanted a dog, always, and now here he was! And if she said no, if she tried to say no, y
ou knew already what you’d say to make her say yes . . .

  And it wasn’t Wyatt down there in the hard ground now; it was just his body, just the organic remains of what he’d lived in while he was on the earth and the rest of him, the most of him, had gone back into the world. Because life was organic and that was one kind of energy, ashes to ashes, but there was also energy between living beings, currents that traveled between them outside of biology, and that energy could not be buried, and neither could it fade into nothing, because energy never just ended, it transformed and recycled and you felt it even if you didn’t believe in it. Souls. Spirits. Whatever you called it there was a current and you were in it always and you couldn’t bury it.

  He heard the sound of tires on packed snow and gravel—then slamming doors, then boots stomping up the front porchsteps before he could call out, “Back here, I’m back here,” and the boots stomping back down again and then stomping through the snow, and it was no boy coming around the corner of the house but a full-grown man in blue jeans and his blue mechanic’s jacket with the Wabash Auto patch on one side of his chest and his name stitched in red on the other. Marky hustling up the path in the snow, grinning and his arms out, and Danny opening his own arms and bracing for it, but the two of them nearly falling backwards anyway onto the little grave. Righting themselves and holding each other at arm’s length to look at faces grown a little older—two years gone by since his last visit—but still at twenty-nine more alike than unalike.

  “How you doing, buddy?”

  “We saw your truck Danny and Momma said whose truck is that and I said that’s Danny’s truck and she said how do you know and I said I just know and I was right.”

  “You were right. How do you like that truck?”

  Their mother was making her way up the path, smiling at the sight before her: two boys, not one. Wiping her cheek with gloved fingers.

  “That’s a Ford F-150 XLT four-by-four two thousand and one,” said Marky. “V-8 or V-6 Danny?”

  “V-6.”

  “Four-point-two-liter engine. Wyatt died Danny. Momma buried him right here so you could find him when you came home.”