In a Distant Valley, page 16
Stu lives alone in a cabin out on a dirt lane not far from the mill. He built it after Aunt Dolores left him nearly ten years ago, and he likes to brag that no broad will ever set foot in the place unless it’s one of the lady EMTs come to collect his dead body. It’s a man’s house, the walls dressed in antlers and hides of dead animals. No seashell-shaped soap in the bathroom; no ruffly curtains or potpourri.
At the card table is a sampling of Tommy’s twisted family tree: Stu, his mother’s half-brother; Daryl, his father’s uncle; and Rick Sturgeon, who’s screwed enough women on both the Wilkins and Merchant sides that he’s considered an honorary cousin.
Tommy hasn’t felt this at home in years. Finally, he’s among men who don’t apologize for being men. When one of them needs to belch, they belch; when someone comments on Mellie Martin’s tits, they all chime in with examples of better racks around town. The cabin is filled with the smell of cigar smoke and beer, which Tommy is drinking only because it would look pretty fucking weird if he didn’t drink around these guys. It should be safe—not like they’re going to tell on him to Rose.
“Why don’t we see more of you?” Daryl asks Tommy. “You been like a ghost since you got back to town.”
“His baby mama’s a ballbuster,” Stu mumbles around his cigar.
“Like a bitch prison guard,” adds Rick.
Ignoring a weird urge to defend Rose, Tommy joins in with their laughter. “You know how it is. If I don’t pretend to play her game, she’ll try and take away my boys.”
“Those kids are lucky to have you,” says Stu. “Imagine if it was just her raising them. She’d turn them both into faggots.”
His sons’ faces flash across Tommy’s brain—Brandon’s gap-toothed smile, Adam’s hazel eyes, so much like his own. No one should get away with hinting that his boys might grow up to be queers, and he has an urge to clock his uncle across the jaw. But these are the men who helped raise him, and lifting a hand against them would be more than disrespect. It would be a sort of betrayal.
“I’m doing what I can,” he says. “Showing them what they need to know.”
“Good for you, man.”
They play for a while. Tommy wins one hand, then two, then three. He feels good, the beer is cold, and when he lands a full house, it’s like the whole universe has finally turned in his direction.
“So, I heard something interesting,” says Daryl after losing another hand. “I got Phil Lannigan talking over to the bar the other night, and he let it slip his wife called the fucking brass in because she’s been seeing a truck out near their place. Parked on the tote road, you know.”
“Molly might be fuckable if she’d wear a bra and brush her hair once in a while.”
“Shut up and listen,” says Daryl. “I got Phil talking over to the bar the other night, and he let it slip she called the fucking brass in because she’s been seeing a pickup out near their place. Parked on the tote road, you know.”
“Probably just poachers.”
“Seriously,” says Tommy, counting his chips—if things keep up like this, he could walk out of here with over a hundred bucks. “Who cares?”
“I think you should care.” Daryl points to the window, through which they can see Tommy’s Chevy parked in the driveway. “Seems like we found our poacher.”
“Half the town owns a truck like that.”
“That’s why it’s the perfect crime. You’d blend right in.”
“I got nothing to do with it.”
“It’s okay, man, we’ll keep your secret. Just get us some deer meat so we don’t have to wait till fall.”
“It’s not me.”
“Don’t get hysterical, sweetheart.”
As they laugh at him, rage builds inside Tommy. A minute ago, he was happy, everything was going his way, and now these men are mocking him just like his father used to do. Shit, if his old man were here, he’d be laughing, too, telling Tommy to untwist his panties, plug a tampon up his hole. Not that his mother would be any better—that I’m-smarter-than-you gleam in her eyes she used to get whenever she caught him stealing change from her purse. She looked at him the same way as she sat in his kitchen the other day.
He has two choices: Fold or fight.
With his father, it was only ever fold. But he could often shut his mother up with one hard stare and a few choice words. You’re just like your daddy, Sprout. Built out of nothing but mean bones.
“You’re a bunch of assholes,” says Tommy, laying down his cards. Four of a kind. “And you suck at this game.”
Then Daryl reveals his hand. Royal flush. He’s still laughing when he reaches across the table and scoops all the chips away from Tommy, claiming them as his own.
A couple hours later, he drives alone with the windows down. Snow flies into the cab and slaps him on the face. His wallet is empty and he’s floating on three or six beers, plus the vodka he drank before he left the apartment.
Think we found our poacher.
Probably the whole town believes Tommy is the one who’s been parking his truck in the woods at night, waiting for deer or moose to step out from the trees. For all he knows, the poacher really is somebody from his family. But it isn’t him.
He turns down an unmarked path that follows the border of a potato field. He drives about a quarter mile, then parks and turns off the truck. His ears are ringing. There’s a beer in the cupholder; he should cut himself off, but it’s too late; he’s past that now. He reaches for the gun behind the seat, feeling something settle inside him as soon as he grips his hand around the wooden stock.
Tommy finishes his beer and steps into the swirling snow. A guy could die in cold like this, curl up in a snowbank, close his eyes and sleep forever. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, buried out here under the sky. Nothing but mean bones.
If they all think he’s out here shooting, he might as well do it.
Tommy holds the gun close to his heart and waits until his breathing settles—his father taught him this, the importance of stillness before you pull the trigger.
Once his pulse has slowed from a gallop to a jog, he aims the gun toward the edge of the field, the start of the forest, and starts shooting at it all.
The snow.
The trees.
The dark.
ON A SNOWY EVENING
When Angela picks up Greg at his house that night, he walks through the falling snow toward her truck. Seeing him in the beam of her headlights, surrounded by all those swirling flakes, Angela feels one of her bursts of disorientation, as though she’s been picked up, spun around, and tossed down into another dimension.
“You look nice,” says Greg as soon as he’s in the cab. “The red jacket, I mean. It’s a great color on you.”
Angela senses that if she doesn’t say something back, he will worry he’s crossed the same kind of line she did the other night with all her misguided attempts at flirting. It’s not hard to think of what to say to him, sitting here in a green sweater under an unzipped blue coat. His hair is slightly damp, as if he’s just taken a shower.
“You look good, too. Nice shirt.”
“Better than the band tees I used to wear?”
“So much better. You’re like a real grown-up now, Greg.”
He laughs and clicks his seatbelt before asking what she has in mind for the night.
“Do you trust me?”
“As long as you don’t drive like your mother.”
Careful to avoid the hedges, she backs out of the driveway and heads down High Street. Where the sidewalks should be is a sweep of clean snow. The road crews haven’t been out with the sand and salt for a while, and the pavement is slick, but with her winter tires, Angela feels safe.
It was such a relief when she picked up the phone earlier and heard his voice on the other line. He said he was sorry, but what happened the other night is her fault, and it was an even bigger relief to admit this to him. Even though she couldn’t see him, Angela knew everything between them was okay again. Maybe the world hasn’t given her much grace, but Greg always has. The day she slipped through the ice into the river, the first thing he did after pulling her from the water was to tell her not to worry about it. He made it sound like it was as easy as breathing for him to keep her safe, to drag her, mostly unharmed, away from the edge.
Angela drives out of town. On Route 11, they follow a snowplow for a couple miles, its orange lights illuminating sleeping farms and snow-topped fields. Approaching the Lannigan property, she slows, squinting through the snow until she finds the turn-off onto the logging road.
This is her favorite place to go, easy to access but seemingly untraveled by anyone else—all the nights she’s parked out here, she has never seen another human soul. It’s as if this spot in the woods only materializes when Angela comes near it. Like it exists just for her.
And now for Greg, too.
The road is unplowed, but less snow has fallen here under the canopy of trees, and she’s able to maneuver the truck about half a mile into the forest. Greg cranes his neck to watch the woods slowly envelop them.
“You still trust me?”
“Trying to.”
She parks, turns off the ignition, and cranks down her window. “Go ahead,” she says. “You, too.”
“It’s a little nippy.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Once his window is down, Greg turns to look at her with a what now expression on his face. Maybe he’s expecting her to break out some weed so they can smoke a bowl. But Momma smoked the last of Angela’s stash this morning, claiming it was good for the cold that hit her hard and fast a couple days ago.
“What are we doing out here?”
“Just listen.”
And that’s what they do. They sit together, close enough to touch but not touching, and they listen to the silence of the forest—which isn’t a silence at all, but a sort of singing. Groan and rattle of tree limbs, swish of wind, tinkle of snow through branches.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” he whispers after a while. “A place like this living right up against ours.”
He doesn’t have to explain for her to understand. She has often thought the forest is more than a different world—it might be the only real world. Here, life goes on as it should, in a cycle, in a rhythm. Here, animals take only what they need and nothing more; the only hurt they inflict is if it’s necessary for their own survival.
“Did you know I was in rehab last summer?” Angela holds her breath, unsure if this is too intense a conversation to have now, here.
“I heard rumblings,” says Greg. “But I don’t put a lot of stock in rumblings.”
“You’ll never guess who I ran into there.”
“Who?”
“Annette Frazier. You know, Bridget’s mom.”
“So that’s where she went after she set fire to all those things on her front lawn.” Greg shifts so that his arm is slightly closer to Angela’s. “Nate was sort of vague about it when I’d go out to his house to work on the garden.”
“Like he was embarrassed?”
“More like he didn’t seem to think it was his story to tell.”
Angela doesn’t know what to say to that idea. She wonders if there is a definite line separating one person’s story from another’s, or if it would be more accurate to say that everyone’s stories, everywhere, are constantly overlapping.
“So what happened?” asks Greg. “With Annette, I mean?”
“She didn’t remember me. I thought she was pretending at first—you know, the hoity-toity rich person thing—but after a while I realized she really had no clue who I was. Like we’d never even met before, let alone lived in the same town. She was so far gone.”
By then, though, Angela was the same way. She clung to the name Dawn during rehab, but that time it was a way to remain anonymous. She didn’t want to be there, and Annette clearly didn’t, either—she barely talked to anyone, spent most of her time watching the eagle nest outside her window. She wrapped her grief around herself and strutted around wearing it like a cashmere sweater.
“How long were you at the hospital?”
“Probably not long enough.”
One day, Angela got so pissed off about Annette’s shitty attitude and group therapy that didn’t fix anything and recurring nightmares filled with the sound of crickets that she packed her bag and simply walked out of the hospital. It wasn’t a locked ward. She’d gone there of her own free will, and she was allowed to leave that way, too.
It wasn’t long after that the creep in the mall parking lot scared her enough to convince her it was time to give it all up and go home—so maybe in a screwed up way, rehab actually did work for her.
“Do you think,” asks Greg, “you’d ever want to tell me why you went? The whole story?”
Angela stares at the snow, letting it blur her vision, and considers. This is already more than she’s told anyone else, even her mother. Greg is a safe place; he won’t think less of her for the drugs or anything like that. But what happened on the riverbank . . .
“Maybe,” she says.
“Okay.”
They sit in the singing silence until they can’t stand the cold any longer, then they roll the windows back up. Angela turns the ignition on to get the heaters running.
“So you tell me something, Greg. Who decides the names of trees?”
“Shit. That’s a huge question. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Try.”
It’s a precise system, he begins, an intricate history of identification. But when you get past the science and the bureaucracy, he says, here in the wild, words have no meaning. Names are nothing. None of these trees, or any trees anywhere, care about whatever names humans have assigned to them. Trees don’t call themselves or each other anything. They just keep growing, centimeter by centimeter, toward the sky. Maybe someday they’ll reach it, or maybe the true nature of trees is not to care if they ever do, but to simply keep on climbing.
III.
NATURE
NIGHT SHIFT
Never again, thinks Nate as he pours himself a cup of coffee under the fluorescent lights of the police station. Never again will he ask Bruce for a favor if it means trading one day off for three night shifts in a row.
It’s disorienting to work in the dark and sleep in the light. Not exactly a healthy schedule for a kid, either, so Sophie has been staying at her grandparents’ house since Thursday—an arrangement more difficult for Nate than for her, who has been loving all the movie marathons with Bampy and baking lessons from Mimi.
“We watched Lion King and ate cookies,” she announced when Nate called her after supper. “I got some eggshells in the dough, but Mimi says it happens even to the best chefs. Maybe I should be a chef when I grow up.”
“What happened to whale doctor? Or zookeeper?”
“There are no whales here, Dad. Or zoos.”
He had one of his familiar heart-bursting moments, caught between wanting to tell his daughter she doesn’t need to confine her future self to this town and begging her to never leave here. Never leave him.
Hard to believe that conversation belongs to another day entirely. It’s nearly 3:00 A.M. now; all the world sleeping. Nate doesn’t trust nights like this, when everything seems so still and quiet. It reminds him too much of the night Bridget died, the airlessness in the house when he opened the door to hear Sophie crying from the nursery. No baby cried like that unless something was deeply wrong. No mother was silent like that unless she was no longer there to make a sound.
Nate finishes his coffee and settles back down at the desk, where he has spent the past several hours reading old reports in an effort to stay awake.
Even without looking at the names of the assigned officers, he can tell by the handwriting and language who jotted down each note. Dyer always gives too much detail: On Tuesday, October 18, 1994, at approximately 5:56 P.M., I, along with the Fire Department, responded to a report of an unusual odor at 12 Linden Street, belonging to Larry Briggs. After a thorough investigation, odor was traced to corpse of raccoon under the back porch. Bruce, unconcerned with grammar or spelling, gives only the facts, with an occasional attempt at humor: Sun 7-11-93 just past noon fender bender corner Main & High H. McGreevy on the loose again suggest new glasses or showfer.
Every time Nate’s eyes tire from staring at the pages, he glances at the window to watch snow drift down under the streetlights. Bert Junkins has been plowing sporadically all night; each time he comes down the street outside the station, Nate sees the orange lights flash off the hardware store a few seconds before the plow itself comes into view.
Ten to four.
In two hours, Chief Halstead will relieve Nate from his post, waiting for a phone that hasn’t rung all night—and that’s a blessing, this drawn-out boredom, because it means no one in Dalton has needed any help. Nothing terrible has happened.
To ease the strain in his back, Nate gets up and paces around the station. Coffee counter. Lobby. Closet-sized bathroom, where he refills the toilet paper and gives the sink a scrub because someone should, and he can. He avoids the break room, where the on-call EMTs and firemen often spend their night hours playing cribbage. Not a bad way to waste time, but Nate doesn’t want to stray too far from the phone. Just in case.
On his fifth lap, he pauses to stand at the window. He could fall asleep here, forehead pressed against the cold glass. He misses Sophie. He’s craving some of those cookies she and his mother made. He wishes he could pick up the phone and call Rose—something tells him she’s awake right now, sitting at her kitchen table in a fluffy yellow bathrobe. He’s not sure if she actually owns a fluffy yellow bathrobe, but it’s easy to imagine. Her hair is mussed; her eyes still starry from dreams already melting away from her memory.
