Smothermoss, page 2
She reaches for a jar and stops, hand in midair. What if the dead family have booby-trapped their supplies? She takes a deep breath to steady herself. Cocks her head and listens—but hears only her own breath rasping in her ears. That and the faint boom of guns and explosions in the next valley over. She doesn’t have time to be careful. She closes her eyes, grabs a jar, and sprints for the exit.
Safe outside, she hunkers behind a boulder to shelter from the toxic wind. The cold of the half-frozen ground soaks all the way through her jeans and panties to numb her bottom. Panties: what an awful word. Angie cringes at the shape of it in her head. So childish, not the name for something worn by the brave survivor of a radioactive wasteland.
Angie doesn’t know what the men and boys on the TV shows wear under their jeans and overalls, but it isn’t panties. And what do those men have under that? Something on the outside. Something they stick inside you. She unscrews the jar of spiced pears. She can’t get distracted. She has to eat to keep up her strength in case she has to run for her life. A gang of bandits could be over that hill, creeping silently in her direction, ready to overrun her. To take her supplies, strip her body, and kill her. Eat her, even. The world has gone crazy with cruelty, and anything is possible.
Angie tips the jar to her face, slurping the sweet juice and gulping the pear halves, their gelatinous weight slipping down her throat like oysters; sugar and clove instead of sand and brine.
She knows oysters from the before, from a late night when a cousin appeared with a glass jar of them and a sack of boiled shrimp, and the adults all sat around the table covered with newspaper, cracking shells and drinking beer after beer, their talk growing louder as smoke filled the kitchen and her mom wobbled to the stove to make coffee. When Angie looked into the milky jar and saw a colony of gray boogers and asked what they were, they gave her one. Her mom said it was wasted on her, but an uncle showed her how to dip the giant booger in peppered vinegar and toss it back into her mouth in one gulp.
The adults watched, holding in their laughter. She bit down on an explosion of warm mud, and she knows her eyes bulged, but she wasn’t about to be their joke. She swallowed the oyster without crying or gagging or any of the things they were hoping she would do. After it was gone, she thought it wasn’t so bad after all. She asked for a second, but her mom tossed her a loaf of store bread and told her to make a sandwich.
The clack of voices in the distance brings her back to the present. A flash of bright nylon flickering between the branches of the just-leafed trees, signaling the uneven bob of hostiles traveling along the old hiker’s trail. Angie flattens herself against the ground, inching into cover behind a log.
In this blasted world, Angie is on her own. Her only advantage is that she knows this land. She doesn’t fool herself that the rocks and trees are on her side, doesn’t expect them to provide some hidden aid, smooth her passage, or stumble her pursuers. But she knows the flow of the water, the best places to hide, the tactical advantages. The others are city people, town folks, farmers. The mountain is not their place. This is her only advantage, and she must use it.
SOME DAYS THE old woman in the back room doesn’t talk, barely makes a sound, and Angie wonders if she is already dead.
The old woman is not her grandmother, though she is some sort of relation. Angie sometimes wonders how they got her, if she is a quirk of the house like the cupboard door that swings open when you walk by and the mildewed scraps of clothes in the attic and the rusty-toothed trap in the tractor shed.
“We had to go somewhere when we got away from your dad,” Sheila says, scouring the burnt-on grease at the bottom of a pan. “Thena took us in.”
“But who is she?”
“She’s your granny’s sister! Don’t you ever pay attention?”
Angie slides a finger through the water slopped on the counter. Sheila always acts like she knows everything.
“You don’t remember.” Sheila tips the pan onto a towel to dry. “I used to tag along after her in the woods. She had a cane with a handle that opened into a seat, and she would sit on it when she got tired and tell stories.”
Angie doesn’t believe it. Not about the stories—Thena still tells those sometimes—but about her traipsing through the woods. The old woman is bent and hunched and drags one leg peevishly behind her when she comes to the supper table. She used to have a plate of startlingly pink-gummed teeth she kept in a cup beside her bed, but she doesn’t bother with them anymore. Angie saw her once, sitting on the bed pulling on her stockings in the morning, and her legs were bald like a baby’s, but her hair there was gray and wispy like an old man’s beard.
The old woman complains about everything. She complains that it is too cold, and then she complains about the smoke when Sheila opens the stove door to put on more logs. She complains that the food doesn’t taste like anything: Sheila can’t cook, there isn’t enough salt, the meat is tough. She complains that Sheila is too quiet and Angie is too loud.
“I still don’t see why we’re the ones who have to take care of her,” Angie says.
“We’re her family. We don’t have a choice.” Sheila says, stacking dry dishes in the cupboard. “I don’t see why you’re complaining. It’s not like you do any of the work.”
“She’s so mean,” Angie says.
“I guess you’d be mean too.” Sheila spoons instant coffee into a mug and snips off the end of a bag of milk and pours it into a pan to heat on the stove. The old woman is the only one who drinks milk. Their mom brings it home just for her, the bags stacked like ghostly pillows in the sweating old icebox.
It is for Thena that they go out and cut dandelion shoots with a black-handled knife and bring them back in a crumpled paper bag. Then into a pot go the bacon ends, vinegar, an egg fresh from the chickens, the yolk as yellow as the school bus that ferries them an hour through hell every weekday at 7:30 and again at 3:00. The whole mess, sweet and bitter and sour, is poured over the wilted greens with their jagged leaves and offered to the old woman like she is a queen or the president.
She tastes it, and she blames them. What have they been feeding the chickens? Because the egg doesn’t hardly taste at all. It’s like it came from the store. What did they have to go and cut such tough leaves for? Didn’t they know they were only supposed to collect the smallest ones, fresh and tender and new? If she had her good leg, if she had her health, she would show them the right way to do it.
But she doesn’t have her good leg or her health. Both are gone into the past and are never coming back. Angie and even Sheila don’t know what that kind of loss means. They are twelve and seventeen, and everything they see looks to them as if it has been fixed that way forever. Change, to them, is vague and abstract: The year before they were in that grade, and now they are in this one. The store in town used to be called Hartzell’s, and now it’s the IGA. Their brother used to live in the house, and now he doesn’t. To them, people don’t change who they essentially are. Imagining Thena as young and capable goes no further than putting a wig on her gray head and surrounding her hunched back with teenagers, where she looks preposterously out of place.
ANGIE’S INDEX CARDS are slightly yellowed with faint blue lines, the pack held together with a rubber band. She draws monsters on the blank backs of the cards with felt-tip markers. She knows the creatures are monsters because they have too many eyes. Their necks are too long, and their legs are too short. She used all of her red marker and the orange one too, drawing the blood that drips from their fangs.
She writes their names thick and black across the tops of the cards, the letters squeezed against the edge where she runs out of room. She sits on her bed cross-legged and deals them out in front of her like she has seen her mom do late at night with the poker deck when she is off shift, drinking sassafras tea and listening to Loretta Lynn on the radio.
Angie deals the Dustman onto the quilt next to the bird thing with the black scribbles in its guts and twisted forks for legs. The Broken-Backed Turtle next to the Twins with Too Many Teeth. She says their names aloud when she lays them down. Saying the names is power, like knowing a secret.
Some monsters stay for weeks after they pour out of her pen onto a card, content to doze in the pack among their fellows. Others seem to kick the moment they arrive, demanding release into the wider world. When a card wants to be free, it weighs down the rest of the pack. Angie shuffles the cards through her fingers until she can feel the one that is heavier, slower, more real, more rounded.
She stops.
Yes, this one.
On the card, the Tangle of Rabbits are knotted together. Rabbits stand on rabbits, half devoured by other rabbits. Rabbit legs thrust in all directions—a foot into a face into a stomach into a tail. The rabbit made of rabbits crouches in the briars, hiding from its enemies, quivering and trying to survive without being seen. The briars weave around it, snaring its hind legs and tangling around its neck. Thorns tear its tender ears.
Angie barely remembers drawing this one, it was so long ago. Before their brother left, she thinks. Now it wants out. Sometimes finding the right place is quick, an impulse that calls the card from the pack to its destination in an instant.
Other times, like now, it’s slow. Angie trails through the house, feeling the tangled rabbits in her hand, listening for their homing signal. In the kitchen, she pulls out a chair and climbs onto the table and slips the card into the shade of the light that hangs above them every night while she and her mother and the old woman and Sheila eat.
Angie is just putting her foot back down on the chair when Sheila’s voice cracks out of the darkness.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Angie’s foot slips off the edge and the chair topples, bringing her crashing to the floor.
“I turn my back on you for one minute and you break something.” Sheila’s voice is flat, accusing.
“It’s not broken.” Angie rights the chair and shoves it under the table before Sheila can notice that one of the legs is wobbly. “I’m not hurting anyone.”
Angie stoops to pick up the other cards that have spilled in the fall. As Sheila watches her sister crawl across the scarred wooden floor, the rope cinches tight. She feels like someone has stuffed a sock down her throat. She wants out of here, somewhere there is more air, where she can breathe.
But where is she going to go? Out there is only the mountain, as familiar as the planks Angie scrabbles across, the battered table with its mismatched chairs, the faded curtains, the chipped plates drying beside the sink. As familiar as the finger marks on the walls, smooth and shiny from generations of hands touching the same places, year after year after year.
Angie collects the last card and gets to her feet. In the dim light, shadows shift across Angie’s cheeks, uncovering the imprint of their family. Sheila can see their mother Bonnie’s face in there, and Thena’s too. The long line of women stretching endlessly back into the fog of time. And ahead. Forward, into the future.
Feeling Sheila’s scrutiny, Angie rolls her shoulders defiantly. “What?” she demands.
“Nothing.” Sheila turns away and climbs the stairs to their attic room, dragging the rope behind her.
THREE
The Diseased Fox
MANY FEET ROAM THE MOUNTAIN, AND THE MOUNTAIN knows them all as they track across her skin. The three toes of turkeys, the split hooves of deer that gouge her mud, the bear that turns over logs and scrapes the broken leaves for grubs. The bare feet of Sheila and the heavy tread of hikers passing through. Every step is a breath, a tickle, a pinch, a sigh. The mountain sleeps through most of them, no more than the twitch of a spider along her unconscious rib.
Two pairs of feet trip along a bare shale spine. Their thick-soled boots dislodge shards that tumble down her slopes as they climb. The creatures tread in tandem and pause often. They breathe the mountain into their lungs and breathe themselves back out. Their hearts beat against her. They are not of her; they smell of northern granite. Of cities and exhaust and a salt-tang whiff of the ocean far away east. Still, their pores are open, and they take her in. They nibble her leaves and pick her berries. Rub her moss between their fingertips and spin her quartz in the sunlight like jewels. They treat each other with the same careful wonder.
These creatures smell like humans, but they must be rabbits because they are stalked by a fox. Unlike real, watchful rabbits, they don’t know how to protect themselves. Don’t know to circle among the briars, white tails flashing, and scoot safely into an underground warren. They are too far from home.
They come to a stream and crouch to drink from the mountain’s neck. They sip her water, and the mountain slides inside them, exploring their contours, knowing she will be back home to herself first thing in the morning, if not before. They stand and stretch and walk on.
The fox climbs behind the rabbit women, masking his breath, concealing the giveaway blaze of his eyes behind a shaggy hickory. The mountain doesn’t like the way the fox smells. Not just starved for a meal but diseased, blighted, wrong. The fox pants not with hunger or need but with fury. It’s in the acid of his sweat, the way he crawls and mumbles, the vile words that drip from his lips like tainted drool.
As shadows fall and the birds hush, the rabbits lie down and curl against the mountain’s side, tucked into the crook of her elbow. They take off their heavy boots and cuddle and groom as rabbits do. They press their noses together and smooth each other’s fur. They chatter under the stars in their temporary nylon shell. Warm and doing as rabbits do.
When the night is thick, the fox makes his move. The first rabbit screams, and he smashes a rock across her muzzle. She falls on her side, crunched and silent. He grabs the second by her scruff and shakes her. He beats and shatters and pounds. Blood sprays and her hind legs kick. He snarls and barks, but the mountain cares nothing for his noise. Feels only the vibrations, the twitches and pain, the hearts racing in desperate, rabbiting fear. The quick kill that should be over but is not.
The second woman is limp, dead, but the first clings to life. Her mind rings in and out of consciousness, a vibrating bell. She is face down against the mountain, wedged between rocks, broken mouth pressed to the dirt, cracked teeth scraping on roots.
A small tuft of breath escapes her swollen lips. Drops of saliva mix with her blood and fall to the mountain’s soil.
Go, the rabbit woman thinks.
In her bleary, fading mind, this soft puff of life is her own self, her lover, her friend. It is all they have seen and felt and breathed since they arrived on the mountain’s side, the rabbits they saw nibbling dandelion stems around the bathhouse earlier that day. A red wave rises in her eyes, she swims and flounders, but the puff hovers above the crest, seeking the exit to this squeezing, tightening burrow.
Yes, the woman thinks. Even if I must stay here—die here, she admits—there is more to our life than this worthless end. I cannot save her. I must save something.
The rabbit woman pulls on her frayed thoughts and concentrates for this one moment. She can feel all of herself, all the parts she had never noticed or known before. She can see how she is connected by threads and gusts and trails to everything, knitted loosely in some places and in others tight.
These threads have been all around her, binding her to the world, and now they are snapped, fraying, hardly any still connected. She grasps the ones that remain, pulling them to focus on the only thing that matters anymore, the thing that she has seen the clearest now of everything in her life, and she protects it with her breath and death.
She calls to that rabbit-shaped puff floating above the red tide, and with all her hope and anguish and love and dreams denied of the life they might have had, she gathers the puff into a bubble of safety and pushes it out. Out of her, out into the air, into the night, into the earth, into the mountain.
Go, go, go. Rise up, grow claws, shake the world. Tell them, tell someone, tell anyone. Don’t let it be this and only this … as the rock falls on her again and she gulps out saliva blood breath, all her last will, and releases it into the dirt and embrace of the mountain. Her body a soft pelt, the woman is slack now, silent and empty.
The rabbit women’s blood runs along the mountain’s skin, trickles down through the rocks and pebbles, seeps along channels dug by roots to feed and paint the mountain’s ancient bones with mourning. Their blood, their grief, their innocent rabbit spirit shakes something loose.
The mountain trembles.
SHEILA STEPS OUT onto the log fallen across the rushing water. Its top is slick with spray and rot and growing soft shells of mushrooms as gray and smooth as snails. Her bare toes grip its slippery curves as she ducks under a swag of birch and edges out into the center, looking downstream as the water funnels over rounded limestone, jagged quartz, and green copper ore.
Gnats churn from the surface and buzz around her head. One dives straight for her eye, dodging the shield of her glasses. She blinks, but its body lodges tight, its wings scraping like a splinter. She pulls back her lower lid, rolling her eye in search of the invader.
Two jets from the air base scream overhead, skimming the tops of the trees, white serial numbers showing on their drab green bellies. The trees jerk, and the mountain shivers. Sheila lurches and the glasses slip from her nose. Her hand flies up, and she barely catches them. Her ankle bangs against the nub of a broken branch, and she lands hard, hugging the slimy log to keep from spilling into the creek below.
The water roars, and the smell of hot metal, rust, and pennies fills her nose. Red water pours toward her, chips of white quartz tumbling in the waves. The sudden flood is so high that the water crests the log and washes over Sheila’s back, pulling the rope with it. She tucks her dangling feet against the log’s underside and hangs on, feeling unknown shapes bang against her shins in the froth.
