Our Lady of the Forest (34 page)

They did. Right away. Nothing. They were gone. Junior sat up, breathing hard. A telltale irritating sickly wheeze. Dad, he'd said. Was that all right? They were messing with Jack, Tom said to him. You don't let anyone mess with you. You put 'em on their heels when you have to.

The boy had talked about it all the way home. He'd brought it up in Butte and again near Spokane. What if they'd had their own guns? he'd asked. What if they hadn't gone away? What if there was an argument? Tom said, Stop worrying it. You point the business end of a shotgun at somebody things generally go your way. But you weren't going to shoot those guys, were you? said Junior. Not just over Jack, right? Don't you like Jack? Yeah—I like him. Shouldn't we protect him? I guess, yeah. Isn't it our job to protect him? Because he's our dog? So we've got to protect him? I don't know, said Junior.

Tom had told that story to Kruse, who'd argued Junior was probably right, unless you were actually willing to shoot people just because they were teasing your dog you probably shouldn't push the stakes so high right off the bat. I
was
willing to shoot them, Tom had answered. Now he wondered again why he hadn't heard from Kruse, who'd disappeared after Junior's accident. Tom could guess. For the same reason he would have disappeared himself if a tree fell on someone else's son. You put some money in the can, said you were sorry a couple of times, maybe offered to help with something, but then, after that—what next? Dwell on it? Let it in? How could you go on with logging that way? Didn't everyone prefer that you go about your business and let the miserable have their misery? No, thought Tom, I don't blame Kruse. Things are bad enough around here without me spreading grief.

And that was right. Why make people uncomfortable by showing up? They couldn't concentrate with Tom around, Tom could see that without much effort, how his walking into MarketTime was highly upsetting, just his walking in was nerve-wracking, made people jittery, uncomfortable. So fine. He knew how to go away, not show up, travel through town like a shadow. And at least other loggers knew what was up, knew what he knew about things. They all knew—accidents happen. Some poor fool has to be aggrieved. You had to hold up your end of the bargain and let other guys walk away from you when bad luck took over your existence. Because other guys had work to do. And what was left over at the end of the day? Just enough to straggle in, lay on the couch, and work up the energy to get the garbage out. Maybe now and then give lip service to caring about the chance calamities of others because women demanded it and it was easier to pretend you gave a shit than to tell the truth: that you didn't.

And that was the truth: he didn't. What could he say? He didn't. Instead he enjoyed killing animals. Fish, deer, grouse. He liked having a freezer full of meat. He liked to get laid as long as it wasn't either too complicated or too simple, which meant he thought about it way more than he did it. He liked knowing he could beat the shit out of most other men. He liked to work and at the same time hated to work and wished he didn't have to—but then what? Did the things he liked mean indeed he was twisted, as the boy at the prison had asserted? Tom didn't think so, but he believed other people would. Any marriage counselor or psychiatrist would charge him plenty to call him twisted yet he considered himself normal and the men he knew were the same. Though he didn't know many men these days. At a certain point he'd stopped wanting company. He liked things exactly the way he liked them and that meant accommodating no one. So of course Kruse was gone. Kruse probably wanted to hunt by himself too. It wasn't any sort of falling-out. Eventually they would see each other and nothing, so what, as if they had never stopped hunting together, stopped carrying on their friendship. Because there was no friendship to carry on; women didn't understand that.

Tom slept fitfully, in the throes of morose reveries. At four he thought he'd put a twilight hour into tracking blacktail and laced his boots, loaded a rifle, poured water into a canteen, polished the lenses of his binoculars, ate beef jerky, and all these preparations felt purifying. He worked down the unit to the bank of Ford Creek where he washed his face in the swirl of an eddy, laid out over a rock. No breeze. The water gave him a headache. He immersed his face twice. He boulder-hopped and hiked upstream staying out of the brush, his walking covered by stream noise, thinking this was one of the problems with Kruse, the guy was just too noisy on the move. Tom had said to him Just think about it Kruse, if I can hear you then they can hear you, but that didn't change the way Kruse did things until finally they hunted separate canyons and just spent camp time together. He snuck up on Kruse once silently and broke a branch at twenty yards and when Kruse turned bringing his rifle up Tom called, See what I mean, Greg? You heard that, didn't you. That was me stalking you like you were a buck and when you heard the branch, you were on to me. And they've got better ears than you do.

Fuck you, said Kruse. I almost shot you.

Tom wasn't really hunting now. He was just out walking with a deer rifle for the hell of it. And looking for sign along the creek aimlessly. And staying out of the open places where there were long views a buck could use while descending toward feed and drink. Tom sat for a while doing nothing on a slope of mountain blueberry. He'd passed a lot of time like this watching does pull the horsehair lichen from tree branches and browse fir needles and twigs. Now the light was lower. The November twilight was tangibly brief. He lay back and let his rifle rest across his hips and stared up through the interstices of the blueberry into the dark branches of the trees. Eleanor, he said out loud. He recalled one of their blueberry expeditions, driving back into town for cream, eating the blueberries and cream in bed, eating them from her breasts at first, then from the triangle of hair between her legs, he felt a transitory urge to jerk off which he suppressed in favor of moving upstream again where he saw a red-legged frog on a rock and collected a handful of chanterelles. He hadn't shaved in four days. He would need to shave before work tonight, which he could do in the rest room of the minimart in town. Things had come to that.

He didn't worry about the dark. He wasn't afraid. He had an unusual ability to see nocturnally. Where other people tripped and led with their hands, he saw well and easily. All it took was the last of the sun or a little moon or starlight and he was perfectly capable of finding his way to wherever he was going. He boulder-hopped and walked downstream to the lowest corner of Unit Two and stood on the first scorched stump inside the fireline with its fringe of dead fireweed and bracken. There'd been a tailblock somewhere down here and he looked for its telltale markings. Unit Two had cleared him, he recalled, something like four thousand dollars. If you didn't count interest payments. For sixty acres of trees.

There were no deer. He hadn't expected any. There were no stars; thick cloud cover. Tom shouldered his rifle and fired at the clouds. The sound of it rippled over the hills. The sound of it ripped a hole in the heavens, albeit a small hole. But a hole nonetheless. Joy nonetheless. His thunderstick was powerful. He loved the magic of it. A man making a loud noise and wielding death from a distance was surely more than nothing. Or could pretend to be. To himself and to the world, but not to God of course, because God knew the difference. In spite of that he fired again, a shot nearly as gratifying. The only thing he knew as pleasurable was felling a large tree perfectly. Back when Cross Logging was a viable entity he'd sought perfection as a matter of course, as if there were no alternative. He'd made his back cuts and his finish cuts with art, as if his saw were a scalpel. One delicate row of fiber at a time. As much holding wood as physics would allow. There would come a point of no return and he would shut his saw down, beat his retreat, crane his neck, and tilt his hard hat while the tree creaked, poised, a slow death. He could raze a whole forest for that satisfaction and never have enough of so doing. He'd liked it all, the ride to earth, the litterfall, the new shaft of sunlight riddled with gnats, the tree on the forest floor. He'd liked directing the fall of trees, guiding them into their resting places. It was what he knew and it was useless now.

He drove toward town on Forest Service roads sinuous and hypnotic in his high beams. The rain had slowed to the merest steam, a mild carbonated mist. It seemed rather to condense on his windshield than to fall out of the sky. There was no right speed for the windshield wipers, which demanded sporadic attention. Tom pulled over when he came to the South Fork to stand by the river with a cigarette in hand and watch the rain strike the current. The fishing would not have improved yet, he thought. The rivers were all high, out of shape.

At the highway he turned north and pulled in at the minimart, where he stood in line for coffee and two hot dogs. All of the burritos, fried chicken, bundles of kindling, gallon cans of white gas, toilet paper, and motor oil had been sold. There was mud on the floor and a line at the rest room, lines of cars at the gas bays, and a line of campers at the propane tank. The clerk at the cash register, Suzanne Rhoades, said I guess all this craziness is good for business but Tom what's it doing to my peace of mind? and handed him his change without touching his fingers or looking him in the eye. Tom ate sitting at the wheel of his truck and decided to come back at eleven to shave because right now shaving in the minimart rest room was a selfish proposition. By eleven—maybe—things would be different. So that gave him evening hours to kill. He drove down Main behind a throng of cars, splashed into a mud-puddle parking spot at Gip's that opened fortuitously while he'd circled for parking, and checked his post office box. Health insurance bill, therapy bill, lab bill, electric bill, collection agency threatening letter—the one piece of mail he felt compelled to open—bank statement, and three advertising circulars. Tom stuffed all of it back in the box as if to make it disappear that way and walked with his plastic garbage bag of laundry and his nearly empty carton of Borax toward the Korean laundromat. Its name had been changed under the current proprietors from North Fork Laundry to Kim's. Why? What was wrong with North Fork Laundry? What private sentiment or business principle had inspired Kim to make the change, which after all must have cost money? Was it pride and defiance, like the Jews? Anyway the place was cleaner, he'd have to give Kim that. The grime was gone from the windowsills and the lineoleum floor had been waxed. Tom had seen Kim himself only once, a small neat man collecting his coins before sweeping the place with a push broom. Tom had pretended to read a magazine while noting Kim's high-strung Asian efficiency when it came to sweeping a floor. The little man had shuffled near wearing his squinty-eyed poker face until finally they traded expressionless glances and then both looked away rapidly. Otherwise Kim was invisible. He might have lived in Timbuktu. An absentee profiteer, probably busy with a chain of laundromats. Or maybe, Tom thought, he and Mrs. Kim and Pin and Jabari played mah-jongg together on Friday nights and discussed new ways to appropriate the town while drinking ginseng tea and smoking opium from a hookah. Who knew? Maybe they all got naked together and did the positions in the Kama Sutra, The Pancake Flip, The Foul Ball, Camel With Three Humps, Around The World, Tiger About To Pounce.         .         . .

Kim's was crowded. Everyone there doing laundry was a stranger. The locals had retreated into their rat holes. There were no good-looking women present. Tom liked glimpses of damp bras moiled up among other laundry as it was moved from washer to dryer. He liked to hear the catches of bras clanking against dryer drums. He associated the smell of newly washed laundry with the promise of sexual activity because Eleanor had habitually showered at night and come to bed in a clean nightie, smelling washed. Back in the old days, in the olden times, when there was plenty of that married good stuff. But every woman in the laundromat now was fundamentally unappealing. There was no one he could even work himself up to. Tom found a machine, poured in quarters, and started a load of whites. Kim's getting rich tonight, he thought. Then he checked his watch and walked down Main to the Big Bottom.

He could have one or two. Three at the outside. He had to be straight for work at midnight. Tom thought the Big Bottom might be a haven but even it was full of strangers. Mother Mary's followers, apparently, needed drinks as much as anyone. And Monday Night Football. Was that a sin? The Raiders led the Broncos by two touchdowns and a field goal. Some of the Mother Mary people were cheering after tackles but locals held down both the pool tables, a minor depressing triumph. Tom took a chair and waited for Tammy Buckwalter with lascivious anticipation. For some reason, he was needy tonight. He would not have predicted feeling this way but you could never predict such a thing, he'd found, it happened whenever it happened. He watched Tammy working the tables, plump and delectable inside her jeans, attractively disheveled and out of shape. She ignored him, he saw, intentionally, pulling beers and laying them down, wiping tables and collecting money as if she didn't know he was there. Which was telling. It meant she
did
know. A sense of professionalism must have finally kicked in because at last she showed up with a tray in hand and an expression of exaggerated disdain. He noted her midriff hanging over the waist of her jeans which he had to admit was sexy. Carnal memories have their own kinetic energy, their own internal impetus, and he felt he wanted to do Tammy again, but this time more languorously, really go with it. Tammy, he said. I'm a loser, baby. You heard that song? My daughter listens to it. She gets in the truck and puts it on. I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me.

Okay.

Go ahead and do it. Kill me.

On second thought it's too much trouble.

I'll make it easy for you this time, Tammy.