Shadows & Tall Trees (3 page)

In “Dronning” the writer had texted the girl. He found the story in the box and skimmed it. The number was right there on page three. Phone reception was spotty but outside he had one bar and a wavering second. Halfway through the bottle he left a voicemail letting her know he’d made it to the cabin and was about to crack open her latest opus in the lonesome bunched wilderness. He told her if that didn’t get her up here he’d eat her words.

He sat at the edge of the porch in a splintered rocking chair. The sky spread and wide stars punched through to glimmer down at him. Trees gathered in the dark. Already the cold was deep, the first of November crawling down the mountainsides. He got up and slipped a hooded sweatshirt over his head and sat back down. His phone lay mute against his thigh.

My love, I hunched on the roof. The whisper of my hands rasping above on the shingles. Splinters in my palms. Beyond the streaks of the windows mountains sharpened toward you in the starred black. The world leaned in to see.

I had to leave you those years ago. I sought my home. My husbands and at last my sleep. But I woke old as earth with you in my nostrils. I woke in a new and ready season. You spoke my name and I had never filled your heart more.

“Dronning,” you said, and the sound was ripe, your chin wet with drool and blood. You listened to the vacuum as I took the split moon into my mouth and the stars tipped in behind it and the sun struggled up above the peaks. You slept and the windows filled and opened.

You will be my son. Remember the nights in your child-bed.

Late morning he set off into the wild blur of color. Spruces and pines and oaks. He thought of the girl not calling back. The journal was in one back pocket, her latest pages folded into the other. He searched for a first sentence of his own but kept circling back to the opening words of “Onanon.”
I put my tongue inside you, Adam.
He bent over waiting to vomit. The sun beat almost summer-hot through the foliage. He sat down in the dead leaves and tried to read the first paragraph over and over. The words swam away and sank into his stomach where they soured. It was hours before he looked up and saw the humps of the mountains were cutting the light.

His phone buzzed on the table when he came back. A text from Meli, “did u read it.” He smiled though he didn’t want to and thumbed out “I’m trying. Where are you?”

The whiskey bottle cast sweetened light onto the table. He watched it shifting then went out on the porch instead. Opened the journal and licked the tip of his pencil like some old grizzled novelist and stared at the lined page.

An hour and he’d written,
Honeybees coated the hill
. He tapped the words with the pencil. He stood up and went inside and came back out with four fingers of whiskey in a plastic cup. Dark swallowed the cabin. He sat on the warped boards of the porch and listened to the crackle of movement in the trees.

After fitful sleep Adam woke to another “did u read it” on the screen of the phone. His head felt like shards rubbing against one another. He got up and noticed a photograph pinned to the floor under the night table. A shot of the cabin, framed so that the trees all reached toward it, giving the scene almost the effect of a fisheye lens. The image was washed out with a smudge of black on the roof. He rubbed at it with his thumb but it was part of the picture.

He tossed it onto the bed and found some aspirin in the cardboard box. Eggs wouldn’t stay down but he wished he had them anyway. He chewed on a granola bar and texted Meli back. Circled the cabin and sat on the porch with the journal open on his lap. Noon came and the mountains felt redder than yesterday. He hadn’t added a thing to the four lousy words about the bees.

He snapped the pencil in two. Left the journal behind and took “Onanon” into the woods. Against the scabbed trunk of a pine he nodded off then lurched awake to the sound of leaves breaking deeper in the trees. He heard someone laugh in a high voice. A bird strangled a cry in the distance and quiet rippled out from it.

I coupled behind stars
, the first page began. At least he thought that was what he read. Earlier it had been something different but he couldn’t be sure. “Dronning” was simple enough; it was strange but it was made of words. This new one made his eyes ache. Like reading worms instead. The things on the page wouldn’t stay still.

On the second page he managed to read a paragraph about the mother burying her teeth in the dirt beneath a cabin before returning to her family. To ready her son and herself. Looping migraine phrases. He found himself weeping and the sun halved the sky and the letters on the page changed.
A hive swarmed and you opened your mouth. When you were a boy I folded myself into your bed and suckled you. Sowing your blood and murmuring songs of home. The time to leave was nearing. Mountains mossed red yellow gold called from their roots over the horizons. I paused, humming, and fed my saliva between your lips.

He lay down in the leaves and watched the cloudless sky through the trees.

A second photo, creased with time, waited on the night table. A young Adam sleeping, posters on the wall of his first bedroom, the blood leached from his face in the slight overexposure. He had to squint to be certain but there was an insect spreading its wings beneath one eye and another bridging his lips. The vantage point looked down from a high angle above the head of the bed. His arms were tucked at his sides under the blanket and a shadow draped across his chest, trailing out from something tubelike just reaching into the left side of the frame.

He crumpled the photo and let it fall. A few minutes of furtive searching turned up nothing creepy or crawly in the eaves or along the edges of the walls. The old hive hung full of dust above the stove.

Two days up here and he was moving in circles. He took a fresh bottle of Bushmill’s out into the falling cold and saw three more photographs taped to the porch posts.

In the first he was a boy again, even younger than the picture back in the cabin, cradled in his bed by a mass of black. He saw vague arms holding him, a dark blur reaching toward his mouth, but whatever it was hadn’t translated through the lens.

He tore the second photo down and saw his father lying tangled in sheets and the limbs of a woman. A film of sudden sweat made him shiver. It was Meli. She should have been a child when his dad was alive, but right there was the same too-pretty face, the same spill of black hair, the same blood spotted on the sheets. Her arm lifted toward Adam, holding the camera in a lovers’ self-portrait.

He peered at the last photo, his nose almost smudging it. After a moment what he was seeing clicked. Bees covered a figure seated in a wooden chair. There was enough in the frame to recognize his mother’s room in the nursing home. The figure’s face, openmouthed and entirely coated in the bees, was turned to a closed window.

Beyond the porch the trees gave up nothing as he scanned them, listening for the rustle of footsteps. Silence clustered and he thought of shouting Meli’s name into it.

Instead he sat and wrote about his mother and father. This time he didn’t embellish. He wrote of a boyhood that had always felt like a grey smear. No family portraits, the three of them smiling off toward the photographer’s hand. No beach trips. Just school years and few friends and always being tired. He remembered a telescope he still felt guilty about seldom using. He chewed on a new pencil but couldn’t dredge up anything so disturbing from before the day his mother climbed out her bedroom window and disappeared.

She was gone for seventeen months. He’d watched his father give up hope, not quite understanding the hope himself. His parents had done little more than live in the same house. He was thirteen when she returned one night, her clothes stained and hanging off her as she stood swaying beside his bed. She’d lost all her teeth. Two days later she was taken to the home.

A half hour drained along with the late afternoon light as he sat and tried to remember why she’d been sent away. For her own good, Dad had said. So she could feel better.

Memory became hazier still then. He remembered a woman, or women, haunting his home at night, faces reluctant to swim to his recall. Now Meli’s face plugged itself in. His father had receded from him, greyed and shriveled until the week after Adam graduated high school, when he succumbed to heart failure in his sleep. Adam had spent a few more months in the house before selling it and moving to the city. He’d started writing. After only a few years his stories began to appear in journals, culminating with
Harper’s
in ’05 and
The New Yorker
the following year. Inevitably, he published a collection that many admired but nobody read.

He scratched this all in the journal. Even the rehashing of his lost glories eased him. But nothing both specific and profane in his memory bobbed to the surface.

He hugged himself and wished he’d brought a jacket against the chill. Meli’s words were making him sick. That had to be it. They were in his sinuses and tingling in his fingers like pine needles. He went inside and found a lighter in the cardboard box. He pulled “Onanon” from his pocket and sat on the porch steps. The million trees whispered around him now.

He scraped the wheel of the lighter and held it to a corner of the pages. The words or worms twitched on the paper.
Sleep in the dirt under the floor. Dream and remember. Hear the sound of your mother loping over roads and creeks and up into the mountains. From my dry and waiting mouth the proboscis emerges.

The fire ate it all and in the last corner he read,
Stars swell in their bed. You reach over the mountains for them as a child for Mother’s jewels. A moth or a magpie. I am come and you will be my son.

Heat reached his fingers and he dropped the pages. Charring bits swirled into the yard and winked out. The skin on his fingertips blistered. He put his head in his hands and bit his tongue. Dark fell at last and he burned “Amanda” and “Dronning.” He pulled the battery from his phone and lay in the bed and stared up into the corner.