Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 20
The security guy brightened. "For Channel 5, right? Finest kind. Just sign here, please. The big hangar there on your right."
It was so easy Ludi was caught off balance. The Volkswagen puttered slowly forward, crossing an immensity of concrete before rolling into a parking area whose hundreds of spaces held only half a dozen vehicles, including the dun-colored Range Rover. Ludi parked a short distance away, took a breath and thought, Go for it.
The hangar door, which you could have slid the Glassport Public Library through, gaped open. Ludi stepped into a dim, echoing cavern. Huge strips of black nonskid rubber marked out the places where the strategic bombers used to go. On the walls were arrows, stripes, cryptic military acronyms and fire hoses. Ludi's All-Stars made a squishy noise on the concrete floor.
Not quite all the way across, she heard voices. One side of the hangar was divided by fireproof concrete partitions into a series of offices. The voices were coming from one of these, but it was impossible to tell which because of the perversity of the hangar's acoustics. She listened at one door and then another, and finally she took a deep breath and more or less lunged in through the next one.
Eugene Deere stood sideways to her, looking away through a miniature rain forest of fat green leaves, extravagant blossoms, whiskey barrels bursting with bromeliads and ferns, vines climbing through fluorescent fixtures overhead, and what appeared to be a mature marijuana plant. Somewhere in the depths of this, Sefyn Hunter sat cross-legged on his desk. He noticed Ludi and froze in place. By the time her eyes got past the outrageous purple-and-orange sexual apparatus of a bird-of-paradise flower, Sefyn was beaming at her with his #5 (Friend-of-a-Friend, But Not a Close Friend) smile.
"Well, as I live and breathe," he declared, bringing his arms down to rest on his hips, "it's Lovely Ludi."
"Hi, Sefyn," she said, pronouncing it like seven, which Guillermo had told her was linguistically correct. Sefyn was one of the guys in Guillermo's men's group.
This cost her time. Gene Deere turned to look at her and was not quite as astonished as she would have liked him to be. Still, he seemed pretty surprised. He turned to face the door with his mouth closed and his clear brown eyes open, wasting no effort grasping for something appropriate to say. Which left it all up to Ludi.
She came another couple of steps into the office.
"Have you two met?" asked Sefyn. He sounded eager to hear, either way.
Gene said, "We, ah—"
"I threw some food in his lap," said Ludi. She turned to Gene. "I guess I should say I'm sorry. But I'm not sure whether I really am or not."
"Why, isn't that wonderful," said Sefyn. He hurried over, brushing aside the trailing air-roots of a Monstera deliciosa with big white splotches, like some Victorian disease. "I had no idea such things were still being done. You know, everything's gotten so impersonal nowadays. You just flame each other over the Net and so on. Please, tell me more."
Gene looked studiously at Ludi. She was thinking of how to bring up the matter of Tex's pendant; but Gene surprised her by addressing Sefyn: "If Chas calls looking for me, tell him I'm out visiting one of the work sites."
Sefyn nodded in a discreet, all-knowing way. "I understand perfectly,'' he said. He gave Ludi a wink.
Gene motioned toward the office door—he still hadn't spoken a word to her—and Ludi started to move that way in a basically instinctual response. Then she stopped; she looked at Sefyn.
"If Guillermo calls looking for me," she said, "tell him he better come up with some gas money."
Sefyn took a quick breath, processing these developments as rapidly as he could. "My, my," he said. "I better jot down some notes."
"So where are we going?" Ludi asked Gene, out in the empty shell of the hangar.
He smiled at her. His skin was very smooth, but it formed small wrinkles around his eyes, as though they were just a little older than the rest of him. His collar was crooked and his hair, which could have been charmingly unkempt, was instead choppy and askew. Portrait of the science nerd as a young adult, Ludi thought.
Gene said, "I thought since you've come all this way—for what reason I can't imagine, but I guess you'll get around to telling me—I might as well give you a little tour. Show you what we're doing out here. Prove to you, perhaps, that we're not all demons. Or did you have something else in mind?"
It can wait, she thought.
«Wait for what?» thought Molly.
But wait for what? Ludi wondered.
"We can take my car, if you like," Gene went on.
"No," she said. "Let's take mine."
There was no cloud in the sky. High up, a formation of Canada geese was changing direction, the classic V-shape broken into something resembling a question mark.
WORKING FOREST
Past the gate, Gene pointed her onto a secondary road heading north, through the unincorporated township of Applemont. Ludi stopped for gas at an Irving Mart, where a banner advertised a 3-for-2 deal on Marlboros.
"Why don't they just give up?" Gene said, while Ludi turned the car off and wondered who was going to get out and pump. "Who smokes anymore?"
"People in Applemont," said Ludi. She opened her door and stuck a foot out.
"Want me to pump that?" said Gene, bestirring himself.
"No. I just want you to pay for it."
She was amazed by how that came out—not at all funny; even angry, somewhat, though whatever anger she felt now was probably meant for Guillermo.
Gene laughed. "How about if Gulf Atlantic pays for it?" he said, offering her a credit card.
She took it through the window and their eyes met.
"Can I turn on the radio?" asked Gene.
"It's on," she said. "It never goes off. The button's broken. You just turn the volume up."
"Blaupunkt," Gene muttered.
By the time she paid for the gas and a 6-pack of Fruitopia and a bag of chips, he had changed over to Maine Public Radio, which was playing an Impressionist piece for small chamber orchestra. Tuneless, Ludi thought.
"This is great," said Gene, pointing at an imaginary midpoint between the two speakers. "The Kairn of Koridwen. Charles Tomlinson Griffes. A weird little micro-symphony that was only performed a couple of times and then everybody forgot about it. Now somebody's finally recorded it, and listen, it's like hearing a brand-new piece, only it's 80 years old."
To Ludi it sounded like mediocre Debussy. Should she say this to Gene Deere? Why did it matter at all—let alone to such an extent that she decided to keep her mouth shut?
The road was in bad shape. They bumped through an unremarkable countryside of hayfields and blueberry barrens and patchy woods and mobile homes. After several miles the electric line came to an end at a taxidermist's place called the last stop. Ludi didn't mind driving, but she would have liked some conversation. She had nothing to say, herself, and Gene's contribution consisted of announcing the titles of movements.
"I think this is 'The Wrath of the Priestesses,' " he would say, or "Listen—it's 'The Gift of the Sacred Berries.' "
"Do you know this by heart or something?" asked Ludi.
He looked at her, maybe surprised by her tone. "I've got it at home," he said. "And I've always liked programmatic titles. It gives you something to relate to. Otherwise music's pretty abstract. Like theoretical physics. That's probably why Einstein was into Mozart."
Ludi steered around a pothole large enough to bury an Irish wolfhound in. "You've got this same record at home? How come you're so excited about hearing it, then?"
Gene looked puzzled. He looked away, out at the road. "I don't know. I guess it sounds a little different now— you know, hearing it with somebody else."
Ludi wondered if she had been giving him a hard time. Not that she hadn't meant to.
Gene went on, "It makes it fresh, don't you think? As though you're experiencing a thing from someone else's point of view."
She nodded. "That's interesting," she said.
He pointed at the radio. " 'Carmelis Prophesies for Mordred,' " he announced.
"What?"
"Take this next right. Now, now!"
Ludi spun the wheel and the VW skidded around a turn, onto the shoulder, off the shoulder, back on again, and finally to a halt at a 45° angle from the axis of the road. If you could call it a road.
"Don't do that," she told him seriously.
"You handled it fine," he said, patting her shoulder.
"Where are we?"
"Nowhere yet. Listen, it's the final Dirge. Very tragic ending. Typical Celtic stuff. You want me to drive?"
"I can drive," she said. She turned to look at him. "So, what did you want to show me?"
Gene waved his hand around. "Take a look," he said. "Look at the countryside."
Ludi saw nothing unusual. They were in the middle of woods that had been logged heavily a couple of years ago. Tall trees were sparse, and some of the slash or unwanted scrap timber lay in piles here and there, pushed out of the way by someone's bulldozer. You could see trails where the skidder had run, dragging the big logs out. A new growth, primarily birch and alder, stood about shoulder-high.
"It's a mess," said Ludi. "It's ugly. I hate it when the woods look this way."
"It is a mess," said Gene. "Whether it's ugly or not depends on whether you're the fellow who did the cutting, I guess. So drive up ahead a little further."
The Kairn of Koridwen was over and there was a program announcement about an on-air debate over bringing back the native timber wolf.
"I wish they would do it," said Gene. "I'd like to see one."
"You would? I think I'd be scared."
"So would the wolf. That's why it's a silly debate. People are afraid of wolves because they grew up hearing about Little Red Riding Hood."
"I kind of imprinted on Peter and the Wolf," said Ludi.
"You did?"
Ludi nodded. "But isn't there more to it than that? I mean, aren't there farmers who are worried about their sheep, and so forth?"
Gene shook his head. "That's just a rationalization. It all comes back to Little Red Riding Hood."
"I think it comes back to people being afraid of Nature, period. It's this whole Western thing about control. There was a bounty on coyotes here a few years ago."
"Really?"
The radio announcer slipped on some Rosemary Clooney.
"Show tunes!" said Ludi, in a quiet, joking way.
Gene surprised her by laughing. The first song was "You with the Stars in Your Eyes." Ludi loved this song; though where could she have heard it before? Maybe such things are communicated to you in utero.
The two of them looked at one another and Ludi was not sure what they were talking about. She thought about Tex's pendant again. But as usual, the time did not seem right.
Gene said, "The thing about woods like this is, they're managed on basically a cash-and-carry basis. What I mean is, some private citizen owns the land, and he does nothing with it for 15 or 20 years except let everything grow, and then one day he decides he needs something—money, firewood, something to do, I don't know—so he comes out here and does some cutting. Then he skidders the logs out, then he disappears again."
"So?" said Ludi.
"So—it's a pretty brainless way to manage a potentially productive forest. There's no control over what grows here, for one thing. That's just left to chance, to whatever happens to seed itself and fend off competitors most successfully. Plus, there's no effort to thin the woods so that a few selected individuals get optimal sunlight, so they can grow straight and strong. And then there's no effort to do the harvest itself in any kind of efficient way. Some trees get cut but not utilized because they're the wrong size or wrong species. Lots more get killed by soil compression, followed by root necrosis. They seem to be alive when you drive away, but almost immediately they die in place. Of the trees that are taken out, up to half the wood mass may be left behind to rot when the limbs are slashed off. So you're left with something like this." He pointed out the window. "It's a mess. Economically as well as biologically. And it's ugly."
Ludi knew there was something wrong with this, but she couldn't get a hold of it right away. "People have been doing it this way for hundreds of years," she said.
"Not much more than 150," Gene said. "Not around here. And even in that length of time, they've seriously degraded the resource."
That's what it is, she thought. It's words like resource, when what we're really talking about is Nature. The living Earth.
"Who says," she asked him, "that the woods have to be managed? I mean, you're talking like it's a choice between these little small-time woodlot owners and big efficient corporate operations like you guys. Why not just let the woods alone?"
Gene smiled and nodded his head. Like he knew, and was hoping, that she would get to this. "What do we have here?" he said, reaching down and scooping the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer off the floor of her car.
"It's messy, I know," said Ludi. "I just keep it there in case I get lost. You'd be surprised how handy it comes in."
"It's paper," said Gene. "It's part of the millions of tons of paper that are consumed "in this country every day. Do you know that to print just one Sunday edition of the New York Times takes an amount of wood pulp that is equivalent to 540—"
"Stop it." Ludi winced. She tried to close her ears. "I hate statistics like that."
"Right. Everybody does. Everybody would much prefer not to think about it. But they go out and buy the newspaper anyway, or they get their coffee in take-out cups, or they heat with a woodstove. Or they keep road maps in their cars."
"That's printed on recycled paper," said Ludi. "I checked."
Gene didn't want to hear about that. "And remember, there's more people in the world every day. More people that need toilet paper, and TV Guides, and wood to build their houses. So don't kid yourself. The lumber is going to get harvested, and large corporations are going to supply the vast majority of it. And with good reason, too. Here's the good reason right here."
They had entered a whole new territory. The road was freshly topped with gravel and the scrappy woodlands were gone. In their place was a wide, sharply contoured landscape covered to a uniform height in something with dark green needles.
"This is a professionally managed tree plantation," said Gene. "These are black spruces, about six years old. They'll be ready to harvest in another nine or ten."
Ludi let the Volkswagen ease to a stop. It was kind of awe-inspiring, to be honest. It reminded her of the Pine Barrens down in New Jersey.
"Now out of this land," said Gene, "you'll get up to five times—five times—the return in wood mass that you get from a haphazard small-scale tract like the one back there. Which means that you can build that many more houses, or print that many more copies of the Times, or do that much more of anything, in the same amount of land, and in a lot less time. See: the demand for wood is the same, one way or another. It's all a question of how much of your limited resources do you want to devote to meeting it."
"Maybe it ought to be a question of how much we can reduce our wood consumption. And aren't there other things to make paper out of? Guillermo was telling me—"
Gene waved these objections aside. "That kind of stuff is just nibbling around the edges. Sure, we might as well do it. It'll certainly help somewhat. But all these dreamy Live Simply fantasies overlook the fundamental nature of the national psyche, which is very much a more-is-better proposition. I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying it's bad, either. I'm just trying to deal with the situation as it actually exists."
Which did, Ludi thought, set him apart from most of the people she knew. Because the people she knew
#1, probably did not understand the situation as it actually existed, by reason of their being perpetually spaced out, living in Maine, disdaining the concept of the Real World, et cetera; and
#2, to the extent that they did understand what the Real World was like and how it operated, they were wholeheartedly committed to changing it right away, from top to bottom. And in the meantime,
#3, they just got high and
#4, talked a lot.
So she would have to say that meeting Gene Deere, in this respect at least, was actually kind of a trip. "So," she said, "that's what you do, huh?" He smiled at her. All of a sudden he looked a bit unsure of himself, perhaps self-conscious about talking so much.
Ludi wanted to tell him that it was okay, that the Better Living Through Forestry rap had been quite informative. Like getting up close and personal with a green guy from Mars. Only this one had brown eyes and was cute. In his dweeby kind of way.
"I'm actually just a biologist," he said. "I do research. I make proposals. All this—" (waving out the window) "—that's done by somebody else. Like my boss."
"The Antichrist," said Ludi.
Gene looked taken aback. Then the little smile came back. "Ah," he said. "You've got a good memory."
"It wasn't that long ago."
"No, but—" He looked away. He acted like he was lost, way out here in the woods. Maybe he wasn't used to having people pay attention to him.
"So," said Ludi. "You work with Sefyn?"
"He's my A.A. Unusual fellow. Is he a friend of yours?"
"He's a, um—" She looked straight at Gene and just stepped into it. "Look, I noticed back at Dan Dan's that you were wearing a thing around your neck. Like a pendant. Actually it was a skull, a carved bone thing. You were wearing it on a shoelace. And the reason I wanted to—I mean, it looked like something that belongs to someone I know. And I wanted to ask where you had gotten it."
Gene touched his sternum, through his Oxford-cloth shut. He reached into the front of it and fished around. Finally he opened the top two buttons. "Here it is," he said.
There it was. Tex's little grinning skull. It stared up at her eerily, as it always had. Behind it, a few dark brown hairs and a smooth, well-formed chest.
"Is this it?" said Gene. "Did your friend lose it or something?''
"I don't know. I mean yes, I'm pretty sure it's the same one. But I don't know if he lost it. I, um—I haven't talked to him for a few days."
Gene thought. "About a week?"
