Crowded Lives, page 7
The woman picked up her suitcase and followed Tree back inside. “Thanks,” she said.
“Forget it,” Tree told her. He studied her for a moment. She was, he guessed, an old twenty-five. There was no telling what her true hair color was; bottle blonde with black roots was what he could see. Too much makeup. A well-used but still good body. A bimbo, he thought. Like Grey Sky had said. The kind who’d take a free ride with two losers in a five year-old Caddy.
“What time’s the next bus through here?” she asked, uncomfortable under Tree’s scrutiny.
“Friday,” said Grey Sky.
“Friday! This is only Sunday. Are you kidding me?”
“I never kid about anything as serious as bus service. Just once a week the bus comes over the mountain. Rest of the time it follows the Interstate around the mountain.” Grey Sky looked over at his friend. Tree was staring at him, the realization having just dawned on him that the roadhouse owner was right. “Didn’t think about that, did you, Galahad?” asked Grey Sky.
“Where the hell am I going to stay until Friday?” the woman asked in a half whine. “I don’t have money for a motel.”
“That works out just fine,” Grey Sky said, “’cause there’s no motel anyway.”
“Well, what am I gonna do!” she shrieked.
Tree looked at his friend. Grey Sky held both hands up, palms out.
“Not me, bro. I got my wife, four kids, my wife’s mother, my unemployed brother-in-law and his wife and two kids—all in a two-bedroom, one-bath house. Sorry.”
“Could you let her sleep here, put a cot in the kitchen—?”
Grey Sky shook his head. “My insurance don’t allow overnight occupation of the premises. If she accidentally burned the place down, I couldn’t collect a nickel. You’re going to have to handle this good deed yourself, Galahad.”
Tree glared at his friend. Grey Sky was obviously enjoying himself.
He could hear the woman panting as she trudged along behind him, lugging her suitcase with both hands. “How—much—farther—is it?” she gasped.
“Not far.” Carrying the burlap bag of supplies on one shoulder, the sack of animal food on the other, Tree deliberately kept his pace slow to allow her to keep up with him. But when he saw that she was falling too far behind anyway, he stopped to let her rest.
“How come you live up in the mountains anyway?” she demanded. “You anti-social? Don’t you like people?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” he said, “very much.”
Now it was her turn to study him. She was not sure whether she liked what she saw. Those eyes of his didn’t seem to have even a degree of warmth in them. “What’d that fellow down there say your name was? Galahad?”
“He was just trying to be funny. My name’s Tree O’Hara.”
“Tree? How’d you get a name like that?”
“My mother’s family name. She was Indian. I’m one-quarter Minnetonka.”
“Oh. Well, my name’s Violet. I was named after a flower. You can call me Vi.”
He nodded. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go on.”
After one more rest stop, they came to the edge of the pines where Elk waited. As they approached, the mare snorted and pawed the ground edgily. “She smells you,” Tree said. “She knows you’re a woman. She’s jealous. Come on, easy, baby,” he said to Elk, putting an arm under her neck.
“Sure is a funny looking horse,” Vi said. “Looks like the front of one and the back of another, stuck together.”
Tree threw her an irritated glance. “This happens to be an Appaloosa. It’s one of the most intelligent breeds of horse in the world, as well as one of the fastest. This horse has more stamina and endurance than any other breed you can name. It is the best stock horse, the best show horse—”
“All’s I said was it was funny looking,” she interrupted. “I’m sorry, but that’s my opinion. Personally, I like Palaminos. Like Trigger, you know?”
Tree turned away in disgust. He felt as if he might be sick. Trigger! A Hollywood horse. Great spirits!
Tree lashed the two sacks one on top of the other just behind the blanket roll, then helped Vi into the saddle. She had to hike her skirt far up on her thighs in order to straddle the horse’s back, but it did not seem to bother her. Tree noticed that her legs were well-rounded, fleshy; in fact, all of her was well-rounded and fleshy; she wasn’t skinny anywhere, a fact that Tree approved of. He did not care for overly slim women; they always looked too fragile, like stickwood. Elk was of a different mind, however; the mare did not like the woman at all, and showed it by shuffling around skittishly and snorting loudly through flared nostrils. Tree finally had to cut up an apple and feed it to her so they could be on their way.
The trip to the cabin took another two hours, Tree leading the horse and rider while carrying Vi’s suitcase in his free hand. He did not mind the walk; in fact, he was glad to get the exercise because he knew he was about ten pounds overweight. For the first couple of years after he had gone into hiding, he had made a point of exercising five days a week; calisthenics, weightlifting, jogging through the woods. That, along with chopping wood and pumping water out of his cistern, had kept him nicely in shape. But for the past three or four years he had grown lazy: sleeping late, not watching his diet, lying around like a much older man. He had become complacent in his mountain hideaway; he felt safe there; only rarely did he feel threatened anymore. After six years, he figured they had stopped looking for him.
Probably.
Maybe.
Tree and the woman arrived at the cabin just at twilight. It sat on a small clearing at the six-thousand-foot level, in the Beaverhead Forest, just east of the Continental Divide. When the clouds were high, Chief Joseph Pass could be seen from the porch; if they were very high, one could regularly see the moon and the sun at the same time, in different parts of the sky. The natural beauty of the place was indelible. The woman did not notice the scenery, however; she was too acutely aware of how isolated it was.
“Look, before we go in,” Vi said, “I think we ought to get something straight. I had a falling-out with those other two guys because they had some weird ideas about how I should pay for my ride. I hope you’re not thinking along those same lines as far as room-and-board goes.”
“I’m not,” Tree told her.
He said it a little too quickly to suit her. With a little too much determination. She hesitated on the porch, not following him into the cabin.
“Listen, no offense, you understand,” she said, “but you’re not—well, peculiar or anything, are you? I mean, living up here all alone—”
Tree returned to the doorway and faced her. “Why don’t you lighten up?” he said. “You’ll be safe here. But if you don’t believe me, hike on back down the mountain and make other arrangements.”
“A girl can’t be too careful, is all I mean. I have this problem in that men usually find me very attractive—”
“I don’t,” Tree assured her. “My taste runs to darker women. When I get lonely, I ride down to the Salmon River Reservation. Lots of nice Nez Perce and Shoshone women down there. They like me because my skin’s light. I stay for a few days and then come back home. I was just down to the reservation last week, so I’m settled for about a month now. Like I said, you’re safe.”
Turning, he walked away. When she finally came into the cabin several minutes later, she found her suitcase on the bed in the tiny bedroom. Tree had decided, he told her, to sleep on the couch. Not because he was such a gentleman; he just didn’t like the idea of leaving her out in the main room alone all night. The main room—which was a kitchen-living-room combination—was where he had the television, short-wave receiver, his books, magazines, guns, ammunition: things he didn’t want her fooling with. Sleeping on the couch, he could keep an eye on everything.
After Tree took care of Elk, rubbing her down briskly and putting her in the one-horse lean-to stable he had built onto the rear of the cabin, he came back into the cabin just in time to hear Vi, in the bedroom, say “Damn!”
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“My cosmetics bag! It was in the back seat of the car! I don’t have any makeup!”
“Tough break,” he said indifferently.
He went into the kitchen, unpacked his supplies, and began preparing supper. Presently Vi came in to join him.
“Listen, I can cook,” she said. “Really. Why don’t you let me fix supper?”
“I’ll do it,” he replied. “I know how I like things.”
Vi shrugged. Strolling, she looked the place over. “Got enough books,” she commented. “All the comforts of home, too: radio, TV, everything. How do you manage it’way up here?”
“I manage,” was all he would tell her. He was not about to share any confidences with her. For electrical power he had illegally tapped into a main power line running across the mountain. For water he had a cistern next to the cabin. For television, a microwave dish which he had assembled on the roof, and which stole signals from the sky. For short-wave, a simple antenna wire strung up a high tree. For backup, a battery-operated generator, constantly charging off the tapped electricity.
“Okay if I look at these old magazines?” she asked, standing in front of the bookcase where he kept them.
“Sure. But do me a favor first. Step around back and make sure I closed the lean-to-door, will you? I don’t want Elk to be in a draft.”
While she was out of the cabin, he went quickly to the bookcase, took a small scrapbook from one of the shelves, and put it on top of the bookcase out of her sight and reach. Then he returned to the kitchen.
They shared an uneasy supper, both telling whatever lies they felt necessary to project or protect their respective images. Tree told Vi that he had originally come to live in the mountains to avoid the Vietnam draft, and had not gone back because he did not relish the idea of steady employment. He said he worked down at the roadhouse restaurant during tourist season to earn enough to live on the rest of the year. Vi told Tree that she was a model on her way to Chicago for a job at Marshall Field’s. Because she was not due there for another week, she had accepted a ride with the two guys in the Cadillac. She had thought, she said, that they were legitimate businessmen, traveling salesmen or something, and had been very surprised to learn they were just a couple of petty hustlers.
Because each of them was lying, neither Tree nor the woman asked any questions of the other. They kept conversation to a minimum. After supper, Vi found that she was extremely tired. It was the climb and the altitude, Tree told her. “Your blood’s thinned out. Better go to bed.” She did, and fell into an immediate deep sleep.
When he was sure the woman was sleeping soundly, Tree slipped into the bedroom and got her purse. He brought it into the main room and searched it. There was an expired Illinois driver’s license, a faded Social Security card, an address book containing no names that Tree recognized, an unmailed postcard with a photo on it of Harold’s Club in Reno, and twelve dollars.
A loser’s purse, for sure, Tree thought. He put it back in the bedroom.
Later, Tree fed Elk, opened his nightly bottle of beer, chewed a little peyote, and watched an old John Garfield movie on some channel he was pulling in from a satellite. When the movie was over, he spread his sleeping bag on the couch, stripped, climbed in, and went to sleep, the .45 lying loaded and cocked on the floor just inches away.
The next morning, Vi found him out back of the cabin with his wild things. She stood out of sight around a corner of the cabin and watched him feed them from the sack of pellet food he had brought back. Vi was amazed at the number and variety of the animals. Some of them she could not even identify; others, like the rabbits, squirrels, and small deer she knew. Tree knelt right in their midst and fed them from his open hand. The sight of it was a wonder to her.
“You can come around and watch if you want to,” he told her without looking around. “Just don’t make any sudden moves.”
Vi eased around the corner but stayed well back from the menagerie. “How’d you know I was there?” she asked curiously.
“This little mule deer told me,” he said, scratching the middle forehead of a somewhat scroungy, unattractive deer. “I saw its nostrils flare; that meant a new scent was close by. Mule deer have very poor eyesight; they have to depend on their sense of smell for survival.” He looked at her over his shoulder and grinned. “Plus which, I saw your shadow.”
“Oh, you!” She moved a little closer. “What in the world are all of them? What’s that reddish one with the yellow belly?”
“Ermine weasel. Turns pure white in the winter. That’s when the trappers go after them.”
“And that one, by the deer?”
“Pronghorn. It’s a kind of bastard antelope.” He stood up and started pointing. “That’s a wolverine over there: baby wolf. This big guy with the mark on his forehead is a badger. My mother’s people named him. They called the white mark a ‘badge.’ Bet you didn’t know ‘badge’ was an Indian word.”
She shook her head. “No.”
Tree smiled. “Most cops don’t either.”
“What’s that one, with the partly webbed feet?”
“That’s the one the ladies like: she’s a mink. Next to her there, the big, shiny animal, that’s a marten.”
From a nearby limb came a clipped, scolding bird call. Tree looked over at a long-tailed black-and-white bird chattering noisily.
“All right,” he said. He stepped out of the center of the wild things, closing the bag, and came to where Vi stood. From a wooden storage box, he removed another bag and scooped out a handful of its contents. “Bird seed,” he said. He took her hand. It felt good. “Come on.”
She let him lead her over to a low aspen and watched him hold out his open hand to feed the bird. “It’s a magpie,” he told her. “Biggest nag in the woods. Never gives you a minute’s peace if he’s hungry.” After a couple of minutes, he closed his hand. “That’s enough, Porky. I named him ‘Porky”cause he’s such a pig.” He bobbed his chin toward another tree, a spruce. “Want to see an owl?” They walked over to a low, heavily-leafed limb where a small, unpleasant looking owl was hunched. It’s oversized head seemed to comprise half of its body, and its big, direct eyes and hooked beak gave it a definite aura of hostility.
“Is it mad?” Vi asked, holding back tentatively.
“No,” said Tree, “just sleepy. He’ll burrow down into the leaves and go to sleep in a bit.”
Tree fed the owl, as he had the magpie, from his palm. Then, with the last of the seed, he led Vi to a small, flat boulder jutting up from the ground like a fist. He sprinkled the rest of the seed on the flat of the rock and drew Vi a few feet away from it. “Now you’ll see my favorite wild thing,” he said quietly.
As they watched, a glossy black bird with wild yellow eyes swooped gracefully onto the rock and, after a cautious look around, began eating. As it ate, it honed its already razor-sharp talons on the rock.
“That’s Midnight,” Tree told her. “A raven.”
“Won’t it eat out of your hand like the others?”
“Not yet. He doesn’t trust me enough yet. Someday he will. In another few years.”
They walked back to the rear of the cabin. A few of the wild things were still there. Vi shook her head in wonder. “I didn’t know animals were that friendly.”
“They aren’t, as a rule,” Tree said. “That wolverine there, she’s a natural enemy to the mink, the rabbit, and the marten. They’re usually her prey. And the badger generally goes after the ermine weasel when he sees one. But they know I don’t allow any fighting here in the clearing. I chase them off if they start fighting. It doesn’t take long for them to learn that not fighting is best. Animals are a lot smarter than people.”
“You really love them, don’t you? These animals?”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” Tree admitted. “It makes me feel good when I bring two natural enemies together and get them both to eat out of my hand at the same time.”
“Too bad that can’t be done with people,” Vi remarked. “It would stop all the war and killing in the world.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Tree said quietly. “People would still kill, for sport. Man is the only animal that kills for sport. You’d never stop that. Man will always have to kill. It’s his nature.”
Vi stared at him. As he spoke, his eyes seemed to grow colder.
*****
The next morning when Vi came out of the bedroom, Tree was at his short-wave set listening to an English-language broadcast from Moscow. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I am totally out of makeup and I look awful.”
Tree did look at her, and liked what he saw. “You look fine to me,” he said. “Nice and scrubbed.” He switched off the radio. “Want to go fishing with me?” he asked. He did not want to leave her alone in the cabin.
“I don’t know how to fish.”
“I’ll teach you. Or you can just watch. We can take some food and have a picnic.”
Vi consented and together they packed a knapsack with lunch, Tree got his lines and bait, and they trudged up-mountain several hundred yards toward a narrow stream of cold snow-water coming from high up.
“How come everything’s always uphill?” Vi complained, taking his hand so he could help her. “Isn’t anything ever downhill?”
“Nothing worthwhile,” Tree replied matter-of-factly.
Vi started to debate that with him, but changed her mind. He had said it too naturally; somehow she knew that he meant it.
They walked along the stream and Tree showed her how to set fish lines without poles or other apparatus. “Poles scare off fish,” he explained. “They cast a shadow over the water.”
When he had the lines set, they walked on to a point where the stream bed dropped six feet, creating a low waterfall. There the water rushed and formed whitecaps, and occasionally they could see a mountain trout swimming upstream, actually jumping up the falling water. They found a place to open the knapsack and eat. While they were there, Vi told him about herself.
