A Single Eye (38 page)

“Okay,” I said, relieved.

I breathed in as shallowly as possible, to avoid the smell of the earth and the leaves, as if they were girding up for one last desperate go at me. I focused on the climb, silently describing each intended move: Now grab this branch, pull, now this one. Brace your foot, push. At some point the words stopped and I was just climbing, hand over hand, foot bracing for foot. After a couple minutes the path leveled off, still steep, but a walking path.

Panting, Amber turned back to me. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I said, still looking down at the damp safe earth. Now that we'd stopped I could hear the wind snapping the leaves. If I looked up I would see trees. I stared at Amber's shoes.

“It's a switchback from here on,” she said, shifting her feet to turn.

She started up the path, pulling herself by branches. I followed, feet sliding, head down. I climbed, reaching for steadying branch after branch. I looked only ahead, zeroed in on Amber's back. I climbed but I didn't look up. Someone had made steps from old railroad ties. Some were firm, some were not, some were gone entirely. By the time we got to the top of the mountain it was nearly dark.

The fire tower stood like an erector set creation, a square room atop long support legs, reached by a staircase three stories high, one that did not inspire confidence.

“Oh no,” Amber said, “I'm not going up there.”

“Why not?”

“I'm just not.”

“What? Afraid of heights?”

“No!” Which meant yes.

“Here. Sit on the step. And listen, thanks. Thanks. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

I moved around her and started up the steps. They were wide, planks that turned at right angles at the corners of the structure. I kept my eyes aimed up at the small square room as I climbed eight steps, turned, eight steps turned, thirty-two steps per story. It was almost dark and I had to concentrate on the steps, seeing nothing but them as I climbed, but I was relieved to be out of the woods proper and on man-made stairs, even decrepit ones that creaked in the wind. I climbed and turned, my breath coming faster. The moon was already out and for a while I thought that it was reflecting off the tower window, but as I neared the top of the stairs it was clear I was wrong.

I stopped with three steps to go. “Dammit! Dammit to hell,” I muttered inadequately. Then I climbed the last three steps.

The lookout room here was a square box, three yards long, three yard wide, windows on all sides to let the watcher spot a fire in any direction. There was no chance of a surprise visit. For the person inside, no chance of hiding. I peered in.

The first thing I saw was a candle flame.

The second was a skull.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

“A
eneas?” I gasped, staring in through the window.

On a low cabinet a candle flickered next to the dry white skull. The light twitched its cheekbones and winked through the holes where eyes once had gazed.

Wind smacked my back as I stood on the widow's walk surrounding the tiny room. High up here, unblocked by trees, the air current was cold and sharp. It shook the whole structure. I braced myself, hands flat on the glass and peered inside the ten-foot-square room. In front of the cabinet and the skull was a black mat and cushion but no one was sitting cross-legged on them. Meditating on the skull of the dead is a revered practice in some Buddhist sects. It is a reminder of the brevity of life and the importance of the moment. But it's not a Zen practice. And certainly not appropriating the skull of a dead friend.

What kind of people had they become here? I thought for a moment I was going to throw up. But I just stood with my roiling stomach and the biting cold. My hair slapped my face. Curly strands stuck on my sweaty skin, and I stood peering as through a hurricane fence, shivering. The door was halfway down the walk; the knob was stiff, but it did turn. I stepped inside the room.

Then I saw her.

Maureen sat clutching knees to chest, her back to the wall by the door. Her fine blond hair hung so limp her ears stuck out, as if the hair could no longer be bothered covering them. Her bare arms rested on her knees and despite the muscling of years of gardening the skin seemed to hang as limp as her hair. Her gaze was straight ahead; no part of her body was moving. She didn't look up.

For a moment I thought she was dead. But when I touched her shoulder she turned toward me, slowly, as if she'd forgotten how to move. The wind rattled the windows and slithered through holes in the molding and the boards. In here it was barely warmer than outside and I was glad of my sweater and jacket. But despite her thin T-shirt and goose-bumped arms, Maureen didn't shiver. The first time I'd met her she seemed impervious to the chill wind, but she was racing around then. Here there was nothing to keep the cold from pooling in her marrow.

“Maureen?” I squatted beside her and waited for her reaction to tell me what I was dealing with. She didn't move. Instead of me drawing her out, I felt as if I was being pulled into her stasis. Had the cold seeped into her organs, her brain?

“You've got to walk around, warm up.”

She seemed to consider replying, but didn't.

I planted my feet, grabbed her arms, and pulled her up. She was so light and limp the momentum sent her past my shoulder and I had to brace my legs to keep us both from sailing into the windows behind. She was standing, but shakily. I shifted behind her, pulled her against my warmer body, and held her icy hands in mine. She felt like clothes held up by memory. I don't know how long we stood like that, she leaning into me, me braced against the window, the windows thinly separating this bare room from the cold bare darkening sky. When she took a step I released her, unzipped my jacket, pulled off my heavy green sweater and held it out. “Put it on.”

“I don't need—”

“I brought it for you.”

“It hardly seems worth—”

“Maureen, put on the damned sweater.” I smiled to cover my fear and frustration. She didn't return that smile, but she did don the sweater. It was only then that I glanced around the now-dark room. Fire towers are always sparsely furnished, but this one held only a nylon sleeping bag, wadded in one corner, an office swivel chair that must have been a bear to get up here, the low cabinet, and the skull.

“Aeneas?” I asked, returning to my original question.

“Oh no,” she said, and uttered a sound that could almost have been a laugh. “I don't know who she was. She was a woman.” She walked, still shaky, across the small room and stood in front of the cabinet, which I now realized to be an altar of sorts, and looked down at the skull as she might have at a favorite aunt with whom she'd spent a lot of time. “There are differences in a male and female skull, the ridge over the eyes, for instance. She was a Caucasian. I wanted a Caucasian . . .”

“Because?” I prompted.

“I wanted her to be as much like me as possible. So I could never delude myself by thinking she had died in a massacre in a foreign land that would never happen to me or from Ebola I'd never be exposed to, or malaria I could handle with quinine.” She was talking half to me now, half to the skull, almost-animate in the flickering candle light. “I wanted to—I have—thought that she sat in a room like me, probably here in California. They said she was in her forties. I've thought she walked along an unpaved road when she was thirty-six like me, never imagining that in ten years she would be dead. Never picturing a truck racing over a rise, the driver drinking a beer and arguing with his girlfriend. Or the doctor saying, ‘If you'd only come in sooner.' Maybe never imagining things would get so bad she'd pick up a knife and draw it across her throat. Never dreaming she . . . would cease to be. Never imagining . . .”

Beyond her, beyond the skull, a wisp of cloud drifted east. Silently I mouthed the possibility she couldn't bring herself to consider: Never imagining the teacher she'd trusted would be like the ballet director she'd just escaped, at her door wanting a piece of ass.

I didn't dare bring that up, not here. Break the mood, that was it. I moved beside the chest into her line of vision.

“But really understanding you're going to die in a short time gives you a whole different take on life, don't you think? I mean, if you're only going to live another year or ten years or even twenty years, you'd better enjoy things now, ‘cause there's not going to be much more.”

She looked at me, appalled, as if I'd suggested we take the skull out to hit the hot clubs with us.

“We need to walk. Circle for circulation.” I reached for the sleeping bag, draped it around her shoulders, and started us on a slow circumambulation of the room. Anyone who hadn't spent thousands of ten-minute periods in the slow half-steps of kinhin would have balked, but when I slipped my arm around Maureen's waist she moved compliantly.

“Maureen, if this skull isn't Aeneas, then where is he?”

She shifted unsteadily foot to foot as if they had frozen into rounded knobs. The nylon bag swished and our feet clacked stiltedly on the wooden floor. I couldn't decide if she was considering my question or was unwilling to answer. Finally I said, “You were planting the red maple. You buried him, didn't you?”

She gasped, her little intake of breath almost lost beneath the rustling of nylon and the clattering of the currents on the window panes. But she didn't deny my accusation. I wished she had. I didn't want Aeneas's killer to be her. I hated to think of her being a killer, having been a killer all these years.

“Why?” I forced out.

“What else was there to do?” Her tone was both plaintive and defensive. “It was the only place. The Japanese roshis were due to drive past . . . Fitting in its way. The maple was a gift from the Japanese roshis.”

I struggled to keep my tone neutral, to reveal neither my shock nor sorrow. “Did you bury him by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“It must have taken a long time.”

“Yes. The robe, it was silk, it kept slipping; I had to keep wrapping it around his body, so the dirt didn't get on his face. The soil's very hard.”

“And no one offered to help you?”

“Who would have? Only Roshi.”

“Leo?” I stopped. She took another step, and the sleeping bag slid off her into my hands. I moved in front of her. “Leo! Why?”

“After he killed Aeneas.”

Leo? I dug my fingers into the slick fabric of the bag. It couldn't be Leo. Not Leo. Finally, I pulled myself together enough to ask, “What makes you think Leo killed Aeneas.”

“I saw him.”

“You
saw
him kill Aeneas?”

She looked like I'd slapped her. It struck me that this was the first time in all these years that she had heard aloud the accusation which must rarely have left her consciousness. I had thought it was the melding of the ballet director and Leo that had paralyzed her, but it was this.

Softly, I said, “Tell me what happened.”

She stood a moment, reedy body outlined by the wispy cloud passing behind her. Then she motioned me to the single chair. I held out the sleeping bag but she shook her head and began to pace, walking to the south windows by the skull, back past me to the north window, and back south. The room was ten-foot square. She moved slowly, placing a foot, pausing, and moving the other, an unsteady thin figure made thinner, shakier by the flickering candlelight. The dark beyond turned the windows to dim mirrors and her spectral shape glided like a soft echo beside her. I was about to ask again when she sighed deeply, and I realized that rather than reconsidering her decision to explain, she was relieved to be forced to talk about the secrets she had protected all this time.

“Where to begin?” she mused as she paced. But her steps were firmer, as if she was already relieved of her burden. What she was about to tell me was old news for her. It was not she who was quivering with shock now, but me. I was desperate to ask about Leo, to exonerate him, but it only made sense to start at the beginning.

“You came here because Barry wanted to?”

“Mmm. You know about the chocolate contest?”