Spores

by Ike Hamill

  Marie closed her eyes but Tyler still didn’t get the point. It had taken all this time for him to really come out of his shell. Now that he had, she wondered if there was a way to get him to go back in. Nelson always kept Tyler quiet by insulting him. He seemed to really enjoy bashing the kid. Nelson never appeared to realize that he was the only person laughing at his mean jokes.

  One time he had asked Tyler for his opinion on a reading.

  Tyler, nervous to take a stand in front of Nelson had said, “I can’t say.”

  Nelson immediately asked, “You can’t say, or you can’t pronounce it?”

  It was those little jokes at Tyler’s expense that always flustered the young man until he could barely speak.

  “Marie?”

  “Sorry?” she asked. She opened her eyes.

  “They’re asking if you’d like a drink?” Tyler said.

  “Definitely.”

  Chapter Nine - Cabin

  (Renting)

  THE TRIP FROM THE airport was quiet. As soon as they reached the equipment shop, the men decided to stay in the vehicle. Marie walked up to the place alone—she was used to it. Whenever they had to rent equipment or rooms, they always let her do all the negotiation. They were allergic to interacting with strangers.

  Marie eyed the place as she walked up. On the phone, the young woman had been completely professional. Marie had imagined a warehouse of rental equipment with a small, neat office attached. The building she approached looked like a falling-down barn that happened to house a bait shop. As she got closer, hand-lettered signs plastered to the front of the place promised scuba lessons, gun safety classes, fishing charters, and cannon fuse. When she pushed through the door, the store was a warm combination of earthy smells. Marie remembered her uncle in Ireland, who burned peat and always had a pot on the stove for tea.

  The door swung shut and an electronic speaker rang, announcing her arrival.

  Marie picked her way through the cluttered store. Most of the gear seemed to be devised for hunting, either in the air, on land, or water. But they also had a section for beads, an area for candles, and a display of bird-themed throw pillows. Marie didn’t care about any of that. She only wanted to find the person responsible for rentals and then get back to finishing her final fungal research mission. With a slow turn, Marie started to think that she wasn’t even in the right place.

  “Hello?” she called.

  She heard a cough and a voice.

  “Hello?” she asked again. When he responded the second time, Marie was able to triangulate and she weaved her way through the shelves and display racks. The sign above his window said, “Rentals,” amongst other things. Marie put her hands on the back of one of the barstools and smiled at him. He was a dead ringer for a grizzled character actor that her mom had liked. Marie stood there, trying to place the name.

  “Yes?” he asked. The way he stretched out the word, it sang with annoyance.

  “Sorry. I talked to…” her hand reached for her phone to check her notes, but the name popped into her head before she could pull it out. “Christie!”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “About a rental?”

  He didn’t move. This time she did pull out her phone. She opened the receipt that Christie had emailed to her. Marie imagined that they had someone out back whose responsibility it was to hand carve emails and tap them into some kind of telegraph machine to transmit to the rest of the internet. The man in front of her was from a time before computers and emails.

  “Yamaha!” she said, finding the email. “Two ATVs on a trailer?”

  “Ah,” he said. He pulled out a red binder and let his finger click down to the correct tab. When he flopped it open, the smell of an old library wafted up. “You’re the Yammerhaw person. I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine.”

  “Oh?” she asked when he trailed off. “You don’t have the rental?”

  “No, we’ve got it, but you can’t have it.”

  He looked up and pinned her with his basset hound eyes.

  Marie’s mood dropped down into a lower gear. She squared her shoulders and prepared to change the tone of the conversation.

  The grizzled character actor cut her off before she could.

  “Because of the snow,” he said.

  “There’s snow?” she asked. They had landed in Bangor—no snow—and driven hours to the rental place without having seen a flake.

  “Christie said you were headed up past Asukulapetok Lake. They got about a foot up there last night. Nobody knows why that area gets so much snow when the rest of us are dry. You take my Yammerhaws up there, you’ll get them stuck and I’ll never see them again.”

  Marie was already shaking her head before he finished the first sentence. She didn’t even understand the name of the lake that he had mentioned. The name was just a bundle of half-swallowed consonants.

  “No. I must have misspoke. We’re headed to the hills north of Awasos Lake. It’s about fifty minutes northwest from here.”

  He put up his hand to stop her.

  “Fifty miles northwest of here. It’s a hell of a lot longer than fifty minutes. The roads are fine this time of year—hunters keep them good—but you have to take the long way around if you’re towing a trailer.”

  “To Awasos Lake, or the place you said?”

  “Same place. Some folks call it Asukulapetok and some call it Awasos. It just depends on which side of the river you grew up on, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” Marie said. She folded her arms across her chest. The basset hound eyes had landed there, like he could see right through her thick jacket, sweater, and shirt. “Well, I guess we don’t have to take the long way around if you’re not going to rent us your ATVs.”

  “You can’t have the Yammerhaws. You can have the Ski-Doos. Those are snowmobiles. Easier than riding a bike—I’ll give a quick lesson when we load them up.”

  “No need,” Marie said. “We’re quite familiar with operating snowmobiles.”

  It was only a partial lie. She had ridden a snowmobile several times. When she was growing up, her father had liked to ski down the hill behind their house in Montana. It had been her job to shuttle him from the bottom of the slope back up to the top. Marie didn’t like skiing, but she loved riding the whining machine through the fresh snow. The lie was about Tyler and Nelson. She doubted that either man had even laid eyes on a snowmobile in person. They were smart. She could teach them.

  “We will need a trailer or something, for the equipment,” she said. “We were counting on the cargo area of the ATVs.”

  He nodded and assessed her.

  “I believe I’m going to need an extra deposit on your credit card,” he said after a moment.

  “You think you can take advantage of me just because I’m not from around here, is that it? We can hike to our site, you know. The rental was just for convenience, so don’t assume you have me over a barrel.”

  She regretted the implied imagery as soon as the words left her mouth. Marie didn’t like the way the man’s eyebrows went up when she said it.

  “I’m not assuming anything. I just want a deposit because I have the sudden feeling that I’m never going to see you or my Ski-Doos ever again.”

  Marie frowned.

  “How much?”

  She ended up negotiating with him and made him write down that the amount would be completely refunded in a week when they returned the machines. They sized each other up as she handed over her card. When he swiped it through his machine, presumably so the digits could be printed out and attached to a carrier pigeon, she realized that it wasn’t the deposit that annoyed her. She was annoyed by his assumption that she would never return the snowmobiles and that it was fine for him to say it right to her face.

  “I’ll see you in one week,” she said.

  “Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “I have insurance. By the way, you might want to browse that rack there. If you go buzzing around those woods without some blaze orange, you’re
likely to be shot.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “We’ll pull around back so you can attach the trailer?”

  He blinked his basset hound eyes and then nodded.

  * * * * * * *

  (Traveling)

  “Those things run on bare ground?” Tyler asked.

  “No—at least not well,” Marie said. “Mud can get into the works and cause damage.”

  “Then what are we going to…”

  Up ahead, the dirt road leveled off and Tyler saw the answer to his question before he could finish it. As soon as the road crossed over the ridge, the grass was dusted with snow. The farther they went, the deeper it became. Descending down the backside of the hill was like entering into another world. Marie stared through her window at what must have been at least six inches covering the ground.

  “We’re camping in that?” Tyler asked.

  “Yes and no,” Marie said. “We have a cabin where we will set up our base. It’s supposed to be stocked with food and ready to go. For the farthest study, we may decide that it makes more sense to spend one night in a tent, depending on how long the commute takes.”

  “I’ve never camped in the snow,” Tyler said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nelson said from the back seat. “It will be no worse than Oregon.”

  Marie doubted that what he was saying was true. Oregon had been cold and rainy, and they had lived in the elements for several days with no more than a portable heater, but it was much colder here. On paper, the idea of spending a week of November in Maine had sounded almost quaint. It was easy to imagine fall colors and a little creek winding through the center of a rustic town where the diner would serve maple syrup collected from local trees. Instead, they had crossed a hill and entered a world with a foot of fresh snow. Oregon might feel like a spa trip compared to this.

  “We’ll check the weather,” Marie said. “If it’s going to be too cold, we won’t try to camp. Right, Nelson?”

  “On what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “We’re going to check the weather on what? Did you bring a weather satellite with you?”

  Marie thought for a moment. Based on his smug attitude and the device in his hand, she fished out her own phone and looked at it. There was no signal of any kind. Back at the rental shop, she had shown a bar of signal. Here, the cell service had dropped to nothing.

  “Actually, yes,” she said. She put her cell phone away and dug around in her bag. The device was down near the bottom. Marie held it up when she found it, smiling triumphantly. “This is a satellite phone, mostly for emergencies. It has a button here if we get into trouble. But, it also has…” she said, scanning the buttons and trying to remember. “Here! It has a way to get weather information. You hold it still for about a minute and it gets weather for your location.”

  Nelson didn’t respond.

  Tyler nodded and kept his eyes on the road. “And how cold is too cold?”

  Marie shrugged. “We’ll come up with a rule, I’m sure. Personally, the temperature doesn’t bother me all that much, but I don’t want to wake up under a fresh foot of snow, you know?”

  “This might be the wrong trip for you then,” Nelson said. “To our west, Lake Kezabzimek features unusually warm water. When dry wind travels across the surface, it picks up the moisture and dumps snow all through this valley, all the way to Lake Awasos. More than likely, it’s the reason why our fungus has taken up residence here.”

  “The man at the shop said that nobody knows why there’s so much snow here,” Marie said.

  “I’m sure they don’t,” Nelson said.

  Marie folded her arms and was reminded of the same feeling that she had experienced back in the shop. It only took a second for the feeling to build into something that she couldn’t ignore.

  “You know what? Tyler, stop the vehicle.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s find a place to turn around and stop. He’s open until six. Let’s return the snowmobiles and go back to the airport. I’ll get us on the first flight back west.”

  “Huh?” Tyler asked again.

  “She’s having cold feet,” Nelson said. “I was pretty sure this would happen.”

  Nelson stopped the vehicle and turned in his seat to look at Marie.

  “What are you talking about?” Marie asked. “I’m simply re-thinking our choice to go out into the Maine wilderness for a week of digging into snow, looking for traces of some fungus. We didn’t know there was going to be so much snow—at least I didn’t—and this research is not worth risking our lives for.”

  “Our lives?” Tyler asked.

  “It’s not about that,” Nelson said with a sigh. He shook his head. “You’re afraid to complete this research.”

  “What?”

  “You took up this quest as some kind of penance for the relationship you had with Oliver. For whatever reason, you’re convinced that you have to pay him back in order to redeem yourself. But as we’ve gotten closer and closer to finishing this mission, you’ve been realizing that you don’t feel absolved of your sins and, therefore, you’re afraid to finish what we’ve started. If we finish and you’re still feeling guilty, then what? How will you move forward with your meaningless life if you don’t have any concept of what to do next to mollify your guilt?”

  “Fuck you,” Marie said. The statement rang in the interior of the rental vehicle for a moment. This was the vehicle that she had rented for this trip. They had come here with tickets that she had purchased. It made no sense that Nelson felt entitled to talk to her the way that he did, like he was the one in control.

  She settled into her seat, looking through the windshield at the frozen road ahead. “You don’t know anything about my relationship with Oliver. I don’t owe him anything. I’m finishing his work altruistically.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Nelson mattered. “I’m here for the data.”

  She turned to Tyler. “Drive. Let’s finish this.”

  The young man simply blinked at her for a moment and then his mouth started to work. He was trying to stammer out a question.

  “Forward!” Marie said. “To the cabin.”

  “Ohh-kay,” he said, putting the vehicle into gear.

  The wheels spun. The trailer behind them kept the vehicle pointed straight until the tires caught.

  * * * * * * *

  (Lodging)

  “This is better than I thought,” Tyler said. It was clear that he had been waiting for her, just inside the doorway, so he could compliment the place. “It’s not like camping at all.”

  Marie didn’t want to engage in pleasantries. She didn’t need Tyler to try to make her feel better whenever Nelson put her in a bad mood. His attempts to make peace were sad. The idea of telling Tyler that it was all his fault crossed her mind. It would be easy to tap into his guilt about his parents’ divorce, or whatever else he was carrying around. Perhaps she could transmit her sadness into him and be rid of it. That was something that Nelson would do—tear down everyone around him in order to feel a little better about himself.

  She set down the bag of equipment and gave Tyler a smile. It felt fake on her face.

  “It’s normally rented out to hunters from out of state. I booked early and got a pretty decent rate.”

  “So there are going to be hunters around?” Tyler asked.

  “I suppose. You’ll have to talk to the genius about that. He said that the land where we’re working is off-limits to hunting. We only have to be concerned when we’re traveling, and for that we’ll be on big, noisy snowmobiles.”

  Tyler nodded without appearing to be at all comforted by the information.

  “I have orange vests that I bought at the rental place,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Look at it this way—if they shoot us, we won’t have to deal with Nelson anymore.”

  Tyler didn’t smile back at her.

  Marie went back to the vehicle to fetch her bag. Outside, she paused to s
can the woods. Every single sound was sucked up by the blanket of snow. Her ears might as well have been packed with cotton. If not for the threat of being shot, it would be amazing to go for a walk in those woods. She could put on her tall boots and blaze a trail over to the pine trees up the hill. Their boughs hung heavy with the snow and the ground below them almost looked clear.

  Out in Montana, on vacation, her father had always warned her away from pine trees in the winter. He said that the snow would form a well around the trees. A person might try to take shelter under them only to find out that they couldn’t get back out, on top of the snowpack, once they were underneath. But that snow was often several feet deep—it wouldn’t be a problem around here, at least not this early in the season.

  Marie looked back to their hunting lodge. Puffs of sooty smoke erupted from the chimney. Tyler was in there nesting, trying to make everything perfect. In the beginning of the project, she imagined staying in touch with the kid after it was all over. Maybe they would get together for dinner a couple of times a year and exchange postcards when they went on vacation. Now, she was more looking forward to the day that she would forget about him entirely. He was sweet, but he had a lot of things to work out before he would be a complete person. There was every chance that he would be bitter and sour, like Nelson, before he finished growing up.

  She put the strap high up on her shoulder and trudged back up the walkway to the cabin.

  It was listed as, “Sleeps Twelve.” She couldn’t imagine packing twelve adult hunters into the place. They would have been tripping over each other every moment. The lodge had two rooms upstairs that were so stuffed with beds that there was hardly enough room to turn around. Marie took the one with the bunkbeds and the window that looked down towards the vehicle. Nelson had already taken the “Master,” which had one slightly larger bed in it. Tyler volunteered to sleep down on the pullout so he could keep the fire going all night.