The Witch Tree, page 2
Yeah, that would be Old Man Debundunk’s idea of how all this should end, what it would come to. Only, it wouldn’t be the way Sister Seraphim would want him to go out, no way, not ever.
“Michael,” she’d told him, at his Christening, “You’ll see, God will write straight yet with the crooked line that you are.”
“Where you hiding, you old liar?!” he shouted into the trees, pines heavy and white with snow and that incessant, lethal ringing in his head. “Show yourself, old Master of the Worms!”
He’d been going somewhere to help Eli. He had to get to him, he thought, then sobbed, suddenly. Eli, dead? No, Bear was dead, at which thought, he stopped, leaned into the hill.
Took one last, careful step, and his boots shot from under him, as if yanked out by Paugook himself, the road hammering him all the way to the bottom, where he sat, dazed, collecting himself.
In the wind was a high, crazed laughter, and he shouted, “Go ahead, laugh, Old Pus Breath!” then realized he was the one laughing.
3
The wipers wouldn’t clear the windshield, and she could barely make out the road, the snow skreeking under her tires and the car meandering, as if afloat. It was hot in the car, but the seats and doors were still cold – and the wheel, too, which she gripped tightly, terrified that she might go off into the ditch while she was still running from what was behind her.
Outside, her lights bore into a vast marshland of sinkholes, there ducks and geese turning in cold, miserable circles. It occurred to her that she’d made a mistake leaving the cabin as she had. She had nowhere to go, and, worse yet, she could feel it coming on, her nerves. So, she tried singing to calm herself, an old tune about a hammer and a bell and, the car dancing over the crown of the road, she steered through a series of turns, barely avoiding a wheel-barrow-sized pothole, and she all but slid into the ditch, only recovered, at the last second.
“Easy, easy,” she told herself, “you can do it.”
Gripping the wheel, she leaned into the windshield, tried her high beams, but that only lit the snow so she couldn’t see beyond the whirl of it, as if she were in some crazed snow globe.
She reached for the bottle under the arm rest, and the car swerved, and she turned the wheel opposite the direction of the skid. But she’d gotten it wrong, and the car lunged for the ditch, and she turned the wheel the opposite direction, and the car yawed violently, then slid roughly across the shoulder, snow hurtling over the windshield, raking the glass, battering the door.
And just like that, the car jerked to a stop. Snow fell over the windshield; the motor had died.
She sat for a moment, then opened her door and got out. Stood in the bitter cold. The car had come to rest along the shoulder, almost as though she’d parked it there. Some luck, she thought. She slapped her arms, took in the road, one pocked and broken, afraid to try to move the car. What if she were stuck? There were chains in the trunk, but she had no idea how to use them.
She turned her face to the sky. The falling snow was cold and burned across her forehead and cheeks.
If the worst happened, and she was stuck, there was a blanket in the trunk and half a tank of gas. She could run the heater. She was wearing a quilted jacket, had dressed for the weather.
Overhead, the sky was dark and seemed to go on forever, the snow corkscrewing down through it.
It felt good to stop, though, she thought, lifting her face, the snow lighting there, in each flake a burning, awakening touch. All autumn she’d fought it, her world falling apart yet again, but everything she’d feared had come to pass – her boyfriend, Dwight, had become impossible, so she’d had to find her own place, and then she’d lost that too, so had stayed at home, until college stress, or so it had seemed, brought on panic attacks and, with them, the threat of a full-on, debilitating bout of chittering anxiety; and, now, tonight, her father had threatened that if she didn’t commit herself to St. Kate’s, he would, they couldn’t have her at the house, going to pieces.
No, she thought, she wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t. Go there again. To St. Kate’s.
Lifting her arms, she turned a slow, freeing circle. She hadn’t taken her medication in days and felt, in that, a kind of delicious destruction. She reached into the car for her bottle, took a tug from it.
God, alcohol, how she loved it, how she felt real again, un-afraid when she was drinking.
Dr. Daher, her therapist, had told her intoxicants were dangerous, they could intensify her attacks, but worse yet, set her back, and just now when they were getting to what was making her sick.
She had to “look at it – see it,” he’d said. This… thing that had “arrested her development.”
As if! That dark, leathery bat-winged horror in her, it wasn’t a thing, it was the inchoate essence of her sickness.
“Here’s one for you, Dr. Daher!” she said, lifting the bottle and knocking back a mouthful.
God, but it felt good, being free! Of Dwight, and her mother, but, most of all, her father.
All autumn at her parents’ place, she’d been a bird in a gilded cage, and something so fraught between her and her father that, if she wasn’t stoned out of her mind on her meds, he’d had her crawling right-the-fuck-out-of-her-skin, at the dinner table, or in the rec room, watching TV, and always around him that bat-thing unfurling it’s wings, trying to fly, clattering up her spine into her head.
“Sally,” Dr. Daher’d promised her, “it’ll show you what it is, when you’re strong enough to let it.”
Only, her father’d fired him, “Useless as bicycle pedals on a wheel chair, ‘talk therapy,’” he’d said, and after there’d just been Dr. Lerner and his meds.
But what of it? She was free of it, and she spun a circle in the road, imagining herself Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music amid snowcapped, Austrian mountains.
She lifted the bottle and downed what was left in it. What… joy! To be alive again!
A hole had opened in the clouds, and the moon soared magisterially through it, the snow tumbling down, sparkling.
“Star light, star bright,” she chanted, “I wish I may, I wish I might, get the wish I wish–”
And there appeared where the road met the sky, as if she’d summoned him, an enormous, towering figure, backlit by the moon, and now come bolting at her, arms flailing.
As if that dark, bat-winged thing itself.
He beat at the windows, then yanked at the door handle, and she hit the starter, terrified. He’d nearly gotten to her before she’d slung herself into the car, and the engine coughed, then roared, but then faltered, and died, the starter whirring, and whirring, and whirring.
It groaned, rrrr-rr, rr-rr… rrrr…. Then stopped altogether, and something death-rattled under the hood.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, Mother Mary, dear Jesus, in our time of need, please, please, please see fit to–
The bulk of him at the window, deep-socketed eyes and a wide-bridged, aquiline nose, and square forehead, she waited. It had to be flooded, or whatever. She knew she had to wait. Then couldn’t. Hit the key again, and the engine caught, roared mightily, and died.
He was shouting something, thumped his fists on the roof. “Turn your lights off!” That was it.
She did that. Then hit the key again, the starter whirring. “Oh god please, please please please just please GOD HELP ME PLEASE GODDAMMIT START GODDAMMIT!”
The engine coughed, then roared, and she yanked the car into drive, and the tires whirred – spun on the icy road, the car swinging sideways toward the ditch – then caught and pulled the car out into the road.
There was a loud hammering on the trunk, and what she’d been trying not to scream, all winter, she was screaming.
“Help me, please please please please please, dear God dear Jesus Mother of God JUST – HELP ME!”
Pulling away, the car accelerated sharply, up and around a turn, and she looked into the rear view mirror, expecting to see him perched, like some gargoyle, on the trunk, but – behind her was just an open stretch of road, snow drifting across it, as if none of it had happened.
She slowed the car, then stopped, rolled down her window and put her head out and, just when she thought she’d imagined it all, here he came around the bend in the road.
“Hey!” he shouted, waving his hands over his head.
She swung the car up the road and stopped, opened the door and looked back, but he’d turned around, his hands in his pockets, was walking in the opposite direction. His shoulders were broad, his blue jacket plastered across them, and in gold letters there – Indians. He stumbled, then caught himself on his knees like some penitent, his head bent low.
It made her angry. Drunken – Indian – son of a bitch! What was he doing out in a… fucking snowstorm, and dressed like that?!
She pulled her door shut, rolled down her window and stuck her head out, put the car in reverse and eased back until she was even with him. The car, idling, moved faster than he did, and she went by him, until, at what she thought was a safe distance, she slid to a stop.
He was wearing a shiny belt buckle, and it reflected brassily, like a star, in her headlights. Snow had frozen in his hair, and his eyelashes were white with glittering rime. He struggled to his feet, then stumbled toward the car, and she backed up again, and he all but fell and caught himself, put his arms out for balance.
He came on slowly, blinking in the glare, then went around the car, and fell in the snow.
She hit the wheel with her fists. What – was he doing out here in a snowstorm, dressed like that?
In all her years up north, she’d never seen anything like it. She backed up and stopped the car alongside him, her window open. He had to be drunk. Or something. What was it? But it seemed he would rather die now, than give in, and that touched something in her.
“Get in,” she told him.
He tossed his shoulders and went past her. “Just leave me alone,” he said, “I’ve got somewhere to get to.”
He slipped and fell onto his back, made an angel in the snow, laughing, or was it crying? No, it was definitely crying. He got to his feet, and she backed around him and threw her door open, cut him off.
“What do you want?” he said, blinking at her.
In the last year, upsets had triggered her sickness, brought up the bat-winged thing. It was what she’d feared above all else. The attacks, and the possibility of it escalating, taking her.
She got out of the car, all the while shocked at herself. Wasn’t this what the stupid girls did in movies?
Said to him, “I need you to get into the car.”
He’ll turn on me and kill me, she was thinking, he’ll kill me and take the car. And just like that, she skipped up behind him and took his arm.
“You’re getting in,” she told him. “No arguing.”
And to her surprise, he did.
4
Driving, she beat out a cadence on the steering wheel, something she did when her nerves were raw, the ring on her hand rattling. The big Indian, shaking himself, cleared his throat.
“How are you?” she asked, and glanced over at him.
“A little cold.”
He struggled out of his jacket; his arm shooting by her head, arthritic, and all of him, now, shuddering. The jacket catching so she had to pull the elastic band over his hand.
At which point, he sat back. Said, “Thanks.”
“What is that… like a jacket from the fifties? Like from a bowling team or something?”
“Got it in one of those… bottle tosses at a fair.” He made a practiced motion, as if pitching. “Like that, you know? Just got it out of mothballs, since it’s good luck and all.” He laughed, grimly.
She gave him a wary look, not sure if he was pulling her leg, or if there was some truth in what he’d said. He had to be… forty or so, but a rawboned something in him – still graceful. And – god, but he was big! He was so broad across the shoulders, theirs were nearly touching.
“I should take you to a hospital,” she told him.
His left ear had swollen, the top of it a waxy gray. It was not funny, but she found herself wanting to laugh. When she got revved up, laughter came easily and at the wrong times.
“No hospital,” he said.
Lights flickered off in a gas station to the side of the highway and she glanced down at the gauge; they’d have to stop later.
“What’s your name?”
His face went though a series of transformations, eyes narrowed, then a grimace, after which he pursed his mouth.
“Michael,” he said.
“‘Michael’ what?”
“Fineday. It’s what’s on my driver’s license, and…. Only, I go by ‘Buck,’ all right?”
“That a nickname?”
“Sure.” And there he stared into the windshield, flummoxed. Wouldn’t go further into it.
She gave him a look that was meant to be, first, companionable, then understanding, and finally reproachful.
“What, are you wanted by the police or… something? You have so many names?”
“I am large, I contain multitudes,” he replied, and laughed. “Whitman. He stole it from me.”
“He did not. He’s been dead–” And there they said it together, as if in some duet, “–forever.”
“You’re differnt,” she said.
“Yeah, diff-ernt. Not your usual near-dead frozen Indin’, right?”
From the wheel, she glanced over at him, a hurt in her. “Now, you know that isn’t fair, is it?”
They rode in silence for some time, but it was uncomfortable, and all that with her anxiety circling.
“Well,” she said, and fumbled with the radio, trying to get a station, trying to bring herself back, “you were out there too long.”
“Car broke down,” he told her, “that’s all there is to it. So don’t make anything more out of it, all right?”
A snowmobile roared by in the ditch, then veered off into the woods, its taillights red smears in the snow.
“You look sick.”
She reached across the seat and touched his ear, and he flinched.
“Don’t do that,” he said, and asked, “So, what’s your name, since we’re getting friendly here?”
“Sally. Sally… Engle- ‘b- r- e- i- t,’” she said, then shot him a look, to see how he took it.
“Sure,” he said, “Sally Bright Angel.”
“Well, it is,” she said, indignantly, “and why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well, Sally,” he said, “that is a very deep subject–” And here he turned and mock-grinned at her. The nerve of it! “Or–” he added, “it’s a very long one laid lengthwise.”
“Oh, aren’t you just so very clever,” she said, only, sure enough, he’d unnerved her.
She was pestering him with questions again. They came at him as if out of a fog. It had to be the hypothermia, or was something truly wrong with her? She’d gone from talking about college – at Augsburg, and how she’d failed for nerves – to why she’d stolen her father’s car – something having to do with her having lost her apartment “right near school,” and her father trying to have her committed. And there’d been Seattle, too – right, her… “brother, estranged from the family,” had called from Seattle, had heard, “probably from my mother,” that she was living at home and not doing well, and her brother trying to get her to leave the house and, now, well, she thought she might just go, if – or, really, when – she could get herself together to do it.
“So what’s keeping you?” he asked, and she shrugged and turned away, mumbled something about having to live on the street, until she could come up with the gas money to go and–
“I can’t hear you,” he sang out.
“I said, I’m… trying to collect my thoughts, and….” She shrugged. “Do I look crazy to you?”
“No more than anyone else,” he replied, “and, anyway, crazy and sane are relative terms.
“So, why can’t you go?”
“Because, I get–” she didn’t want to say it, but then did, “Since last year, I’ve been getting these…–” she stared off, as if at something awful “–panic attacks, and then I – I can’t function.”
“So, don’t get them,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, and laughed. “Don’t I wish….”
She turned to him – sleek, auburn hair, oval face, moss green eyes – young for her age, a child, really, something… arrested in her, Sally a pretty girl trying to be brave. Only he could smell alcohol, too. He knew alcohol, and to some, like himself, it was no friend.
“Honest? I look okay? I’m not… totally… wackadoodle?”
“‘Wackadoodle’? Who says that?”
“My dad, he’s been saying it since… since I went ‘off.’ ‘There goes Wackadoodle Sally,’ ‘Crazy is as Sally does.’ He says I’m ‘psychotic.’ That I make stuff up.”
She steered the car with her knee, drumming on the dashboard. “So are you Mexican then, or what?”
“Mexican?”
“You told me you were an ‘In-between.’ Not all Indian? Remember, ‘I contain multitudes’?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “No, I’m metis, see? This nose here is my French part.” It was a joke he made with guests at the lodge, but Sally didn’t laugh. And, anyway, it was true.
He stared into the dashboard. On it, the Virgin glowed in something like translucent alabaster. A rosary swung from her feet, as if in some Cocteau nightmare he was having.
“So, you were saying you weren’t the funny one, your… brother, he was. So, what’s he do?”
Had he said that? He reached out and placed his hand over hers, to stop her drumming.
She had lovely hands – her fingers tapered and sensitive. She was a very pretty girl, all right, but with a bird-in-a-cage something about her. Or, rather, was it that the cage was in search of her?
