Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The greens were so various, so fresh, though. Seen through the rain-smudged window. Reduced to textures. I put the window down a crack and let in the same clean smell I remembered. That unique dead leaves, new growth smell.

  By the time I pulled up in the driveway and parked next to the house, I was both restored and hollowed out. But the house defeated me all over again. Everything had a sheen and sense of being well maintained that felt off.

  The barn freshly painted a deep red with white stripes. The house a dull yet feisty blue, also with white trim. The roof gray and in perfect condition, except for leaves and small branches from the storm. A few chickens pecked in the gravel and weeds, enjoying the rain. Off to the side, past the oak tree, an enormous white tent had been set up. For what purpose, I couldn’t guess.

  I got out, holding my cane, but not bothering with the extra struggle of an umbrella. The people who lived here hadn’t been downtrodden, surely. It felt like an exhibit or a model home. Made me doubt my memories. A stranger who came upon this place wouldn’t guess a madwoman had lived here, an abusive grandfather.

  A cheery light shone butter yellow from the kitchen. The door had a piece of driftwood nailed to it with the words “Peace in the Lord’s Home” painted on.

  It felt so unreal, I wondered if I’d died, jumping off the balcony, and all the rest was purgatory or hell. That would explain a lot.

  I knocked anyway, sure a stranger would answer. Leaning on the cane. Trying to compose a smile that wasn’t a wince.

  The door swung open and Shot stood there.

  * * *

  I stepped back sudden, lost my footing even with the cane, went sprawling on my back, one hand out, fallen to the wet gravel.

  Shot had been smiling, but now he looked concerned, said my name, came out to help me up. And I let him, because it was my father, not Shot. He had just grown into, or shrunk into, Shot with age. Couldn’t figure out which. My father wore one of those same wool plaid shirts Shot favored. His beard grown long and wispy-white like Shot’s. As if my father had made a kind of disguise out of his own father.

  But the eyes were different. The hard glint, the cold, black reflection, wasn’t there.

  Imagine you expect the House of Usher.

  Imagine you’ve steeled yourself for rot and decay and dysfunction.

  Imagine you brace your will against that door opening. And when it’s all different. When it’s different, it’s like the weight you were fighting against dissolves into mist and you fall because there’s nothing left to lean against. And you wonder about all the other things that prop you up.

  Silvina, is that part of what you wanted me to know?

  [90]

  Inside, they sat me down at the kitchen table. I could feel every one of my injuries screaming at me. I’d put too much strain on my body. Thought my strength made me invincible. Now I would pay, and keep paying.

  The kitchen table was different. A remodeled kitchen. “Bright and cheery,” like one of my husband’s real estate listings. “With a chipper blue backsplash and stainless steel stovetop, along with light rosewood cabinets.” The smell of lemons too antiseptic to be real.

  I preferred to look at the kitchen than at the bird-like woman who brought me coffee and a day-old chocolate donut “from the co-op.” “Bird-like” meant “alarmingly tall and stork-like.” Not an unfriendly bird, but wary. How could I blame her, even as I blamed her fiercely. A giant lump of black sheep daughter, sodden, had come unbidden through the door. A burgeoning arsenal hidden in her car, trailing a wake of carnage. On a quest that could not be explained with ease or confidence.

  She was my father’s wife. “Lorraine,” let’s call her, after a pinch-lipped Lutheran I once knew. I guessed the Bible quote was hers. Lorraine and Lawrence, as if meant to be. Or some other consonance. Did I begrudge my father a new wife? Or was it more that I begrudged him some form of success, as it had clearly come to him after so much failure.

  How could this place coexist with a burning houseboat? With a gunfight in a car lot? With a warehouse full of death? But the trick of the world was to contain all things.

  Lorraine had picked up my cane and restored it to me. Lorraine had brought in Shovel Pig and my little bag full of fresh clothes. The guns were all in a locked box. While I just sat there, on a different trajectory, like an injured space alien crashed to Earth.

  I couldn’t quite look Lorraine in the eye, just as my father could not look at me.

  “How long?” I asked.

  My father looked confused, so Lorraine answered, showing me the wedding ring. “Five years. We met at a church dance.”

  The Church of Bewildered, Lonely Failures?

  “That’s nice,” I said. A sense that they’d been together much longer than five years.

  How could I find fault? I did then, but, now that the hurt has passed, how could I blame my father for being successful, for having a new wife? He had lived with an abusive father and had had an absent wife for a companion.

  “We rent out the three cabins on the property,” Lorraine said. “We also sell wild honey and candles and soap. People come for riding lessons sometimes. Your father has done a good job of diversifying.”

  Diversifying.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  So it went. Fifteen minutes later, a torrent of heavy rain like bullets on the roof woke me up. I realized I was being lulled. Into small talk, into normalcy. Mostly by Lorraine. And I couldn’t afford that. It was too much like being back in my house with my family. Everything I’d put aside. I didn’t have the armor for that. I would lose my mind staying here too long, in this alternate reality. This false place.

  “I need to talk to Dad,” I said, interrupting Lorraine on the subject of jam.

  Lorraine gave Lawrence a protective look and then a look toward me that was open to interpretation. A welcome with an end date and a warning both.

  “I have chores and a phone call.” She went past the kitchen into the back. Maybe even into what used to be my room.

  But my father was not a talker.

  “A long time,” he said. “Such a long time. Too long.”

  I had not come to my mother’s funeral. I had not written or called. I had two early letters from him I’d never opened and then I’d changed addresses, left no forwarding information. Thought that was the only way. A rage that you never lose.

  After another awkward pause, a nod, a vague exchange of what might be called “catching up,” I could only feel relief. No way to reconcile. No way to find within my father the things I had needed from him—because they had never been there. Not withheld. Never present.

  Kinder to us both to consider him an eyewitness and move on. Safer.

  I pulled out a slightly damp photo of Silvina.

  “Do you know her?”

  “Yes. Of course.” No doubt. No hesitation.

  I sat back in my seat, chest tight. “Of course?”

  He still wouldn’t look at me. “She lived up on the ridge for a time when you and Ned were teenagers.”

  “What?”

  “Yes—in that new development. New back then. They kept to themselves. Never came down to the farm.”

  I don’t think I had a single thought in my mind for a second, or five seconds. I wasn’t numb. I was nothing.

  “How did you know her?” My voice felt distant, thready. My mouth was dry. Was it the physical toll or the mental? I couldn’t keep taking shocks to the system. Yet I did.

  “Her family hired Ned. He did … odd jobs … for them.”

  “I don’t remember any of this. This isn’t true. It’s not true.”

  He shrugged, gave me a thin smile. And I realized.

  “You hid this from me. You hid it.” Worse, Ned had hid it. All those expeditions to places that weren’t safe for me.

  “It was illegal, what Ned was doing. We needed the money. I didn’t tell anyone. Your mother didn’t know. Grandpa didn’t know. I wished I didn’t know.”
/>   “What kinds of things?”

  “Poaching. Courier for … what they were growing the other side of the ridge.”

  I tried to absorb that.

  “And I never knew any of this.” Searching my memory for any hint, any clue, other than Ned’s disappearances.

  “Ned specialized in salamanders.”

  “What?”

  “A big demand in China for salamanders. Other places, too.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Ned would never do that.” Silvina would never do that. Langer and Vilcapampa, though. In business together. They would do that.

  My father shrugged. “It was a long time ago. You idolized your brother. What would I have told you? It just would have hurt you. Shot was already hurting you.”

  “While you did nothing!”

  I shouted it.

  Lorraine came back into the room.

  “Get out of here,” I said, murder in my voice.

  Instead, she retreated to the doorway.

  “Don’t talk to her that way,” my father said. It was the most aggressive sentence I’d heard from him. He’d half risen from his chair. Now he looked at me and I couldn’t take it.

  “Ned wouldn’t do that,” I whispered.

  “You just didn’t want to know,” he said. “You were always so smart. But you didn’t want to know. So you didn’t. You forget all the things that happened. I felt at times like you made your grandpa too important. I loved Ned, but he was manipulative. He was petty. He knew he was handsome and he used it. He wasn’t an angel. Not even toward you. You just don’t want to remember.”

  “Not true.”

  He hesitated. I recognized the look on his face. Pity. The same look I’d given him so many times.

  Then he said, “Your brother made fun of you behind your back. He made jokes about you.”

  Silence. I just shut down for a time. Staring out across the kitchen. I wish there had been something out the window to distract me. There was nothing.

  Why had I wanted the farm to be in ruins? Why had I wanted my father to be dead or some pathetic, lonely hoarder, no more lucid than my mother? It struck me that only after our whole family was gone had my father been able to be happy.

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “If Ned didn’t tell me, it was to protect me.” Already constructing a reality of a noble Ned, making money for the family. Necessary, but not liking it.

  My father sighed. Lawrence sighed. It was like he’d not breathed for so long that it came out all at once in this prolonged sigh of disappointment, of loss, of whatever the things were he felt that I couldn’t feel, or couldn’t recognize, coming from him.

  “To protect himself. You don’t realize how angry you were back then, how violent. Toward your mother. Toward me.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said, but even as I replied I knew it was true. Could see it now. Could remember it. Not like I’d repressed it, but like I’d told a different story for so long, it had eclipsed the truth.

  Lorraine remained frozen in the doorway. Who knows what I would’ve done then, if not for what my father said next. A shouting match. Smashing things. Making my mother cry. Raging through the barn, destroying tools, smashing shelves.

  “She came here,” my father said. “She left something for you.”

  I didn’t need to be told who “she” was. The truth of it. The yearning. She had left something for me.

  “What did she leave? When did she leave it?”

  “About eight months ago.” A month before her death.

  He placed an envelope on the kitchen table between us. So, he’d been prepared. He’d known I would be coming at some point. He’d kept the envelope close. Or had it been there the whole time, collecting dust in a kitchen drawer? An afterthought.

  I knew I was looking at it like it was radioactive. Wanted to open it. Didn’t want to open it.

  “She said you’d understand. She said it was important to her that you knew.”

  No point in asking why he hadn’t called. I’d cut him off. Disowned him. But he could have found me. He could’ve reached out.

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand how you could keep all of this from me for so long. I don’t understand why you keep lying about Ned.” I felt like a child. I was a child. I could blow things up but I couldn’t put things back together.

  “You were twelve pounds six ounces at birth,” my father said. “I saw you in the hospital and you were the biggest baby there. Like a giant. Mother said you’d be trouble. I said I didn’t care. But both Ned and you were trouble.”

  “Don’t say his name again!” I screamed. It felt like blasphemy. I could feel my self coming apart at the seams.

  “I know you killed my father,” he said, flat tone. Unforgiving. “You killed him. For nothing.”

  For nothing. For something. He had known. Of course he had known.

  That was enough, I guess. Lorraine had heard enough.

  She swept in, gave me the focused murderer’s look a heron gives a frog or snake. She was almost as tall as me. Her hands had nails like claws.

  “Enough! Enough now. Quite. Enough. Your father’s a sick man and needs rest.”

  Like something rehearsed. In case the black sheep ever came home and baa’d too loud.

  “I don’t think this concerns you,” I said, with as much control as I could muster.

  “Lawrence, go lie down a bit,” she said, ignoring me.

  He stood and with a wincing look that admitted no apology he walked off into the rooms beyond the kitchen.

  That would be my last sight of him, ever. Stooped shoulders. Walking slowly away from me. Framed by the hallway and then turning into shadow. Just as I remembered him, finally, from childhood.

  Lorraine sat down in his seat.

  “There are a lot of people coming here soon,” she said pointedly, nodding toward the tent outside. “Good people. Godly people. Why not join us in prayer before you leave? It might give you some comfort.”

  Comfort? She had done nothing to me, but I wanted to punch her.

  “End-of-the-world stuff? No thanks.” I’d no patience for evangelicals.

  “I can tell what you think,” she said briskly. “But we’re not like that. We want to save the planet from Man’s ruination.”

  Two cars had pulled up outside, with the sound of more approaching. For the revival. For the worship of Mother Earth or whatever they thought would make a difference but didn’t.

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  “Then I’ll ask you to leave for your next appointment.”

  “Not until I talk to my father again and ask him—”

  “No,” she interrupted, and I realized her hands were under the table. “No, I think not. We’re not stupid around here. We know what it’s getting like out there. I’ve got five strong, armed men outside. All it takes is a shout from me. And there’s a shotgun strapped to the underside of this table. You will leave now. And you will not come back.”

  I stared into her gray, cold eyes. I’d been wrong. This place wasn’t a different reality. It was the same place. And I had to admire her. I had to admit that, in some ways, I might’ve preferred her as a mother.

  “I could call the police when I leave,” I said. “Threatening me.”

  “You won’t. We already know you won’t.”

  “I could walk right back through that door to my father and you wouldn’t shoot.”

  “We already agreed I would.”

  Nothing about her aspect made me think she was lying. But it didn’t matter. The intent was enough to hurt me.

  I raised my hands in surrender. I rose slow, relying on the cane, walked slow to the door.

  Before I could close the door behind me, Lorraine said, “You remember that cabin halfway up the ravine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone’s waiting for you there. Been there a month. When you see them, you can tell them time’s up. They need to leave by the end of the day
. I don’t want to see them again. You, either.”

  I looked back at her in confusion. The shotgun was above the table, all messy with duct tape, and she was looking down the barrel at me. I hadn’t even registered the sound of her wrenching it loose.

  “Who is it?”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You want to see him.”

  Hellmouth Jack? Langer? The possibilities seemed limited.

  “Trust me: I probably don’t.”

  I left with Silvina’s letter shoved in my pocket, like it was meaningless. Not that it was the most important thing. Disappoint, horrify, or mean nothing.

  Even as I was cast out.

  * * *

  I read Silvina’s letter in my car, in the driveway. People were emerging from cars all around me. Dressed normal, like normal country folk dressing up for an event. Walking to the big white tent. Ready for whatever Lorraine was going to tell them. Because I knew Lorraine must be a preacher. Somehow, it just made sense.

  Wanted the words out of me. Wanted them cast out cast out cast out. Kept breathing them in anyway, like a contamination you couldn’t avoid. No mask would keep it out.

  Aware but not aware of Lorraine’s bodyguards glaring at me from the tents. I could smell each and every burning animal skin from the warehouse. I could smell them all as I read. I read and reread until the words made no sense. Didn’t want them to make sense. Immolation. That’s what it felt like. Like I was burning. Burning up all over again.

  The photo Silvina had enclosed fell out onto my lap. The tattered, folded-over photo. For the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up, to see what it was. Who was in it.

  Then I drove to the cabin.

  [91]

  Lorraine had been sharp, certain, so I borrowed that to survive. Even though I felt like I was drowning. Get through the next bit. Charge up one more hill first. Like something mechanical, just an extension of the car. With a head full of nails Silvina had put there.

  I went back to the fork that led up the ravine slope in a series of sharp, steep switchbacks. The slope had, since I had last seen it, suffered a storm or disease or clear-cutting. Every time I came out of a bend, I saw the same spill of earth and broken cedars. A snarl and mess of rotting wood and then the clear gray-green light at the top, like a tunnel that was a telescope. I felt so small.