Death Qualified (8 page)

    It would be like this until it was over, until he had come and gone again, this time for good. Resolutely she put the doll on the couch and looked around the living room, cluttered with the children's stuff, messy. She decided she didn't give a damn about the mess and walked outside.

    She did not go toward the big house this time but headed into the woods in the opposite direction. At the margin of woods, huckleberries thrived, and blackberries, and where the sun reached the ground unimpeded, a carpet of alpine strawberries grew luxuriantly. But within a few steps, the trees took over, and now it was fir trees, and deeper and deeper silence as the voice of the river faded and vanished.

    The river was like her own heartbeat, a sound she was so accustomed to that she rarely heard it; she was always startled at the silence when the river noise failed.

    The trees were mossy. Fallen branches, fallen trunks, rocks all were moss-covered; the effect was like being underwater where even the light was tinted by the ubiquitous green. She kept to a trail that climbed steadily, with many twists and turns, sometimes around boulders, around fallen trees too massive to step over, too mossy and slippery to climb over. And always upward. Chunks of lava poked up from the ground here and there, irregular brown shapes, sharp and pitted, or gleaming black and rounded.

    Orange lichen thrived on the lava; ferns edged close to some of the bigger pieces. At a fork in the trail she kept to the right; this section became steeper and rockier, and then the land flattened in a clearing one hundred fifty feet across, forty feet deep, strewn with rocks, boulders, and lava up thrusts The clearing had been bisected by a waterway Century after century the tumbling water had carved out the rocky ledge here until now there was this clearing on one side of a ravine and, twenty feet away, another somewhat smaller similar clearing. The waterfall was two hundred feet back from this point now, neatly slicing the mountain into sections. The other fork of the trail led upward, to the head of the waterfall, but she rarely went up there. This was her destination. There was too little soil here to support more than a few straggly vine maples. The southern exposure heated the rocks, and the mountain rising behind the space sealed off all noise; even the wind was denied.

    For several minutes she stood surveying the clearing, checking the fallen tree trunks that had rolled down the mountain to come to rest here, checking the boulders that she knew so well, checking the vine maples, checking for intruders, for candy wrappers, beer cans, any sign of outsiders There were none. No one else ever came here.

    Finally she squinted and looked at the nearly perfect globe of a rock that rested against the face of the cliff that made up the northern side of the clearing. It was exactly where it should be. Behind the round boulder was a deep cave, cut into the rock by water action in centuries long past.

    She used to bring her lunch this far and stash it in the cave where it would stay cool, dry, and safe. The rock was untouched. She nodded in satisfaction and only then approached her own place^.

    Her seat was a smooth gray boulder with streaks of blue agate running through it, and a shallow declivity that she had never outgrown. She sank down onto it now, tilted her head with her eyes closed, and felt the sunlight on her face. Her grandfather's seat was a log backed by another pale boulder. Best two seats in the house, Grampa always said.

    He had brought her up here when she was a child, and later, after he could no longer make the climb, she had come alone. Her private place, alone in the world, with a view of forest and sky that included nothing of human kind. The river was not visible, no building, no wires, no roads. There were only treetops below, falling away like plains of hummocky green, sun-drenched today, often misted with rain, or in frozen silence, and the sky without limit. Now and then a hawk or an eagle appeared, magical creatures sailing the sea of sky effortlessly.

    A place of magic. Up here she could say anything. The year she had found this out, she had been twelve; she had come up here with Grampa, only to rail and complain about some injustice.

    "God damn it," she had said, and then had stopped breathing, waiting for his reprimand.

    Instead, his quiet voice had said reflectively, "Seems to me like everyone ought to have a place where they can say what they're thinking. Seems only right for this to be a place like that."

    She had not turned to look at him; his seat was well behind hers, but she had known he was smiling. His voice had been smiling.

    When the sun became too warm on her face, she turned' away, facing west, away from the falls, away from Grampa's seat. In a low voice, almost a whisper, she said, "The world's turning shitty again."

    "Well, it does, you know, from time to time," he said in that reflective way he always had up here.

    "Why don't you tell me about it?"

    She didn't turn to look at him any more now than she had done at the age of twelve. Looking would destroy something. She began to talk, almost in a whisper, saying things up here that she couldn't say anywhere else. About the body in the river and her horror at its having been dragged over rocks. About Lucas. About the men who had come to cut down the tree.

    "You shot a beer can? Surprised you could hit it. How long's it been since you put in any practice?"

    She shook her head, now surprised that she had hit it.

    He had taught her to shoot up here, shooting across the waterfall at another fallen tree trunk on the opposite side.

    She would bring the rifle up and practice, she decided.

    Tomorrow. She hadn't done any shooting since before Carol was born, and now it appeared that she might need to keep in practice.

    SEVEN

    saturday morning Doc called, and she snapped at him.

    "I'll call you," she said and hung up. She talked to the children, now at the ranch east of Pendleton, three hundred miles away. She felt they were as distant as the moon.

    When she could not stand the house any longer she walked out to the walnut grove. The trees were tall and straight, the canopy so thick that no sunlight penetrated, the ground beneath them resilient with leaf mold. The air always smelled astringent under the walnut trees; it was always cool and damp. The squirrel population was high;

    jays and thrashers were everywhere, chickadees and warblers darted. Grampa's father had planted the grove, planning for the future, now; in three years the first of the trees would be cut. But already the saplings she had planted were growing tall, reaching for the sky. Each new planting consisted of three young trees in a triangle, one to stay for the next seventy or eighty years, two nurse trees to be thinned out at twenty-year intervals. They grew better, faster, and stronger if they had company. She touched a tree trunk here, walked on, touched another. The squirrels chattered at her, flicked their tails in warning, raced madly along branches overhead watching her every motion.

    When Lucas came home the last time, they had walked hand in hand among the trees, and then a few days later he had brought Clive Belloc out.

    "Talk to the old man," Lucas had said.

    "Just talk to him. Clive says it won't matter that much if you start cutting now or wait a few more years. You're both sitting on a couple of million, just waiting for the saw. They were planted to be cut, damn it!"

    While they fought over the trees, Clive had stood in the driveway looking mortified. Clive had never mentioned the grove again. She never had learned the exact number he had quoted to Lucas, but it was a lot, she knew. An awful lot.

    That night, after Grampa had gone to bed and Travis was sleeping, they had sat down on the little beach.

    "You never used to want money like this," she had said slowly.

    "Why now? What for?"

    "Not for me. No fancy cars, no boats. It's the project.

    Emil's grant is running out, and he doubts he can get another one. He just can't show the kind of progress they expect."

    Emil, she thought with icy fury. Emil Frobisher had taken Lucas away, had changed him, made him a stranger, and now sent him begging. "I thought he was all set up with the famous Dr. Schumaker. I thought someone like that could get all the money in the world."

    "He could, if Emil could just produce some real results.

    Emil is bringing in another scientist, a psychiatrist, a specialist in perceptions, something like that. She'll swing some weight, too, but they still need something concrete to show."

    Nell had thrown rocks into the river as hard as she could.

    "And your degree? How much closer are you to it now?"

    He had muttered something.

    "Nowhere near it. Isn't that what you mean?" Her arm ached with a fiery pain, and she dropped the rock she was holding. Not looking at him, watching the play of moonlight on the flowing water, she had said, "They're using you. Don't you understand that yet? Have you even got the bachelor's degree yet?"

    He was silent.

    "I thought not. And now a psychiatrist. Maybe they'll give you a degree in psychology and you can become a shrink. Or is it still mathematics? Or computer science?

    Why don't you wake up?"

    "You never had any faith in me, in anything I did," he had said sullenly.

    "Nothing changes, does it?"

    "That's not true," she said in a low voice, still keeping her gaze on the water. "We were happy. I had faith enough to move mountains. And then Emil Frobisher came along and pretended you were something you know you're not.

    You have something he can use, a way of seeing that he needs, and that's all he wants you for. That's what I saw three years ago, and that's what I see now. You don't know any more about mathematics than I do. If I had more money than you could count I wouldn't help you buy a degree with it, not for Emil Frobisher's work."

    "You don't know anything!" he had snapped.

    "If we can bring this off it'll change the world. That's how big it is. And I'm part of it. I'm the one who said we need to work with younger subjects. The psychiatrist Emil's talking to just wrote a book about the perceptions of children before puberty, and the effects of the changes of puberty, the way they solidify perceptions. If she comes in, we'll be able to persuade Schumaker to stick with it a few more years. By the time Travis reaches puberty, five or six years, the whole thing will be ready. His generation will be the first to benefit. What good will it do me? We'll all get Nobel Prizes! Every one of us!"

    She had stopped breathing. Travis!

    "If it's all so cut and dried, why are you here now? Why are you trying to raise money?"

    "If we can show matching funds, it's easier to get grants and backing. And if I can come up with it, they can't ease me out. Don't you see, even if they never give me the degree, they can't ease me out!"

    "Don't you hear what you're saying?" she had cried then.

    "You know they'll kick you out as soon as they decide they don't need you any longer." Before he could say anything, she added, more quietly, "Explain to me what the project is, Lucas. I asked you before and you said you couldn't. I'm asking you again."

    "I know I couldn't. It's too .. . complicated."

    "Do you mean I wouldn't understand? Is that it?"

    "Yes. Exactly. You wouldn't understand astrophysics without a lot of background, you accept that. Why can't you accept that I 'm involved with something just as complex?"

    "I'm having trouble with the idea that there's anything you could explain that I would fail to grasp," she said coldly.

    "You can't explain it, can you? You don't understand what they're doing. Can't you admit that?"

    He was silent for a long time, and the voice of the river was the only sound. When the wind blew a certain way from the west, going against the grain, Grampa said, it sometimes created a new river voice, like a half-heard lullaby.

    She listened to the murmurous, soothing rhythm without words, and waited for Lucas to speak again.

    He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close.

    "Let's drop it for now," he said.

    "We're both beat. Let's go to bed. I've missed you so much."

    She shook him away and stood up.

    "You know what they'd call me if I did what you're trying now? Prostitute.

    Whore." She started up the path.

    "Harlot. Call girl. Cunt.

    Gold digger."

    He caught up with her and grabbed her arm, pulled her to a stop. She glared at him in the brilliant, indifferent moonlight.

    "Isn't it funny how many names they have for women selling the only thing they have to offer? How few for men."

    He had shoved her arm away from him and pushed past her, running. The next day he had left again.

    Nell reached the edge of the grove; from here she could see both houses through the trees. James was tinkering with his station wagon. Restlessly she started back down toward her house.