Lovers and Lawyers

by Lia Matera

  That was the other side of it: Pat was fun, and he let me have control. If I said let’s go, he said okay. That means everything if you spent twenty years with a stick-in-the-mud.

  “You come here a lot?” she asked.

  “No. This was a special trip.”

  “It was supposed to be,” Pat fussed.

  I added, “Our beaches down south are nice, but we’ve been to them all a thousand times.”

  “Mmm.” She let me refill her cup. I had more too. Pat didn’t seem to be drinking.

  “Now, the sea lion is a strange one,” she said. “There’s little it won’t eat, and not much it won’t do to survive, but it has no guile. It swims along, do-de-do, and has a bite whenever it can. It doesn’t hide or trick. It’s lazy. If it can find a place to gorge, it’ll do that and forget about hunting. It doesn’t seem to have the hunting instinct. It just wants to eat and swim and jolly around. Mate. Be playful.” She broke off another piece of salmon, holding it in fingers with silt and sand under the nails. “Whereas an eel is always lurking, even when it’s just eaten. It never cavorts. It’s always thinking ahead, like a miser worrying how to get more.”

  “Until it leaves home and washes into the sea lion’s mouth.” I concluded the thought for her.

  “What the eel needs”—she sat up—“is a way to say, Hell no. Here it is, the smarter, stealthier creature. And what does nature do but use its own instinct against it. Favor some fat, lazy thing that’s not even a fish, it’s a mammal that lives in the water, that doesn’t really belong and yet has food poured down its gullet just for being in the right place.” She pointed at the sea lion heads bobbing in the waves. “Look at them. This is their welfare cafeteria. They do nothing but open their mouths.”

  Pat put in, “You could say you’re like the seals. You’re out there with those steel-pronged things, spearing eels.”

  I wanted to hit him. It seemed a rude thing to say.

  “The Yurok are like the eels.” She removed her hat. Her dark hair, flattened on top, began to blow in the wind coming off the water. “The Yurok were king because the Yurok knew how to blend in. The Yurok thought always of food for tomorrow because Yurok nightmares were full of yesterday’s starvation. The Yurok were part of the dark bottom of history’s river, silent and ready. And they got swept out into the bigger mouths that waited without deserving.”

  She leaped to her feet. She looked majestic, her hair blowing against a background of gray-white clouds, her arms and chin raised to the heavens. “This is where the ancient river meets the thing that is so much bigger, the thing the eel can’t bear to understand because the knowledge is too bitter.”

  Behind me, Pat whispered, “This is weird. Look at her friends.”

  On the beach, the Yurok men raised their arms too. They stood just like the woman, maybe imitating her to tease her, maybe just coincidence.

  “Where the ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger, and the eel can’t understand because the knowledge is too bitter,” she repeated to the sky.

  Pat was poking me now, hardly bothering to whisper. “I don’t like this. She’s acting crazy.”

  I smacked him with an absentminded hand behind my back, like a horse swatting off a fly. Maybe this was too much for a software engineer—why had I ever thought I could marry someone as unlyrical as that?—but it was a writer’s dream. It was real-deal Yurok lore. If she quit because of him, I’d push Pat’s unimaginative damn butt right off the rock.

  She shook her head from side to side, hair whipping her cheeks. “At the mouth of the river, you learn the truth: Follow your obsession and the current carries you into a hundred waiting mouths. But if you lie quiet”—she bent forward so I could see her bright dark eyes—“and think passionately of trapping your prey, if your hunger is a great gnawing within you, immobilizing you until the moment when you become a rocket of appetite to consume what swims near—”

  “What do they want?” Pat’s shadow fell across the rock. I turned to see that he was standing now, staring down the beach at the Yurok men.

  They’d taken several paces toward us. They seemed to be watching the woman.

  She was on a roll, didn’t even notice. “Then you don’t ride the river into the idle mouth, the appetite without intelligence, the hunger that happens without knowing itself.” Pat’s anoraked arm reached over me and plucked the paper cup from her hand. “You better leave now.”

  “What is your problem, Patrick?” I jumped to my feet. Big damn kid, Jesus Christ. Scared by legends, by champagne talk on a beach. “Mellow the hell out.”

  My words wiped the martial look off his face. A marveling betrayal replaced it. “You think you’re so smart, Maggie, you think you know everything. But you’re really just a sheltered little housewife.”

  I was too angry to speak. I maybe hadn’t earned much over the years, but I was a writer.

  His lips compressed, his eyes squinted, his whole freckled Scot’s face crimped with wronged frustration. “But I guess the Mature One has seen more than a child like myself. I guess it takes an Artist to really know life.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake!” I spoke the words with both arms and my torso. “Are you such a white-bread baby you can’t hear a little bit of Yurok metaphor without freaking out?”

  He turned, began to clamber down the rock. He was muttering. I caught the words “princess” and “know everything,” as well as some serious profanity.

  I turned to find the Yurok woman sitting on the blanket, drinking sedately, her posture unabashedly terrible. I remained standing for a few minutes, watching Patrick jerk along the beach, fists buried in his pockets.

  “He doesn’t want my friends to join us,” she concluded correctly. From the look of it, he was marching straight over to tell them so.

  The men stood waiting. A hundred yards behind them, desperate eels wriggled from their sand pits like the rays of a sun.

  I had a vision of roasting eels with the Yuroks, learning their legends as the waves crashed beside us. What a child Pat was. Just because we’d fought a bit in the car.

  “I know why he thinks I’m crazy,” the woman said.

  I sat with a sigh, pulling another paper cup out of the old backpack and filling it. I handed it to her, feeling like shit. So what if the men wanted to join us for a while? Patrick and I had the rest of the afternoon to fight. Maybe the rest of our lives.

  “We came out here to decide if we should get married,” I told her. I could feel tears sting my eyes. “But the trouble is, he’s still so young. He’s only seven years older than my oldest daughter. He doesn’t have his career together—he just got laid off. He’s been moping around all month getting in my way. He’s an engineer—I met him when I was researching a science fiction story. All he knows about politics and literature is what I’ve made him learn.” I wiped the tears. “He’s grown a lot in the last year, since we’ve been together, but it’s not like being with an equal. I mean, we have a great time unless we start talking about something in particular, and then I have to put up with all these half-baked, college-student kind of ideas. I have to give him articles to read and tell him how to look at things—I mean, yes, he’s smart, obviously, and a quick learner. But fifteen years, you know.”

  She nibbled a bit more salmon. “Probably he saw the van on the road coming down.”

  “What van?”

  “Our group.”

  “The Yurok?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “No. They’re up in Hoopa on the reservation, what’s left of them. They’re practically extinct.”

  “We assumed you were Yurok. You’re all so dark. You know how to do that whip-spear thing.”

  “Yeah, we’re all dark-haired.” She rolled her eyes. “But jeez, there’s only five of us. You’re dark-haired. You’re not Yurok.” Her expression brightened. “But the whipstick, that’s Yurok, you’re ri
ght. Our leader”—she pointed to the not-Yuroks on the beach, I wasn’t sure which one—“made them. We’re having an out-of-culture experience, you could say.”

  Patrick had reached the group now, was standing with his shoulders up around his ears and his hands still buried in his pockets.

  “How did you all get so good at it?”

  “Good at it?” She laughed. “The surf’s absolutely crawling with eels. If we were good at it, we’d have hundreds of them.”

  “What’s the group?”

  Patrick’s hands were out of his pockets now. He held them out in front of him as he began backing away from the four men.

  “You didn’t see the van, really?”

  “Maybe Pat did. I was reading the map.”

  I rose to my knees, watching him. Patrick was still backing away, picking up speed. Up here, showing fear of a ranting woman, he’d seemed ridiculous. Down on the beach, with four long-haired men advancing toward him, his fear arguably had some basis. What had they said to him?

  “The van scares people,” she said. “The slogans we painted on it.”

  “Who are you?” I asked her, eyes still locked on Patrick.

  “I was going to say before your fiancé huffed out: What about the sea lions? They get fat with no effort, just feasting on the self-enslaved, black-souled little eels. Do they get away with it?”

  The sky was beginning to darken. The sea was pencil-lead gray now, with a bright silver band along the horizon. Patrick was running toward us across the beach.

  Two of the men started after him.

  I tried to rise to my feet, but the woman clamped her hand around my ankle.

  “No,” she said. “The sea lions aren’t happy very long. They’re just one more fat morsel in the food chain. Offshore there are sharks, plenty of them, the mightiest food processors of all. This is their favorite spot for sea lion sushi.”

  “What are they doing? What do your friends want?” My voice was as shrill as the wind whistling between the rocks.

  “The Yurok were the eels, kings of the river, stealthy and quick and hungry. But the obsessions of history washed them into the jaws of white men, who played and gorged in the surf.” She nodded. “The ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger, the thing the eel can’t bear to understand because the knowledge is too bitter.”

  She’d said that more than once, almost the same way. Maybe that’s what scared Pat: her words were like a litany, an incantation, some kind of cultish chant. And the men below had mirrored her gestures.

  I knocked her hand off my ankle and started backward off the rock. All she’d done was talk about predation. She’d learned we were alone and not expecting company, and she’d signaled to the men on the beach. Now they were chasing Patrick.

  Afraid to realize what it meant, too rattled to put my shoes back on, I stepped into a slick crevice. I slid, losing my balance. I fell, racketing over the brutal jags and edges of the smaller rocks we’d used as a stairway. I could hear Patrick scream my name. I felt a lightning burn of pain in my ribs, hip, knee. I could feel the hot spread of blood under my shirt.

  I tried to catch my breath, to stand up. The woman was picking her way carefully down to where I lay.

  “There’s another kind of hunter, Maggie.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “Not the eel who waits and strikes. Not the seal who finds plenty and feeds. But the shark.” She stopped, silhouette poised on the rock stair. “Who thinks of nothing but finding food, who doesn’t just hide like the eel or wait like the sea lion but who quests and searches voraciously, looking for another—”

  Patrick screamed, but not my name this time.

  “Looking for a straggler.” Again she raised her arms and her chin to the heavens, letting her dark hair fly around her. Patrick was right, she did look crazy.

  She jumped down. Patrick screamed again. We screamed together, finally in agreement.

  I heard a sudden blast and knew it must be gunfire. I watched the woman land in a straddling crouch, her hair in wild tendrils like eels wriggling from their pits.

  Oh, Patrick. Let me turn back the clock and say I’m sorry.

  I looked up at the woman, thinking: Too late, too late. I rode the river right into your jaws.

  Another shot. Did it hit Pat?

  A voice from the sand cliff boomed, “Get away!”

  The woman looked up and laughed. She raised her arms again, throwing back her head.

  A third blast sent her scrambling off the small rocks, kicking up footprints in the sand as she ran away. She waved her arms as if to say goodbye.

  I sat painfully forward—I’d cracked a rib, broken some skin. I could feel it. Nevertheless, I twisted to look up the face of the cliff.

  In the blowing grass above me, a stocky man with long black hair fired a rifle into the air.

  A real Yurok, Pat and I learned later.

  Destroying Angel

  “Destroying Angel” was first published in Sisters in Crime 2, ed. Marilyn Wallace, Berkley Books, 1990.

  I was squatting a few feet from a live oak tree, poison oak all around me (an occupational hazard for mycologists). I brushed wet leaves off a small mound and found two young mushrooms. I carefully dug around one of them with my trowel, coaxing it out of the ground.

  I held it up and looked at it. It was a perfect woodland agaricus. The cap was firm, snow white with a hint of yellow. The gills under the cap were still white, chocolate-colored spores hadn’t yet tinged them. A ring of tissue, an annulus, circled the stipe like a floppy collar. A few strands of mycelia, the underground plant of which the mushroom is the fruit, hung from the base. I pinched the mycelia off and smelled the gills. The woodland agaricus smells like it tastes, like a cross between a mushroom, an apple, and a stalk of fennel.

  I brushed leaves off the other mushroom and dug it out of the ground. It resembled the first mushroom. It had a white cap, white gills, an annulus. But a fleshy volva covered the bottom third of the stipe like a small paper bag. It was all that remained of a fungal “egg” from which stipe and cap had burst; characteristic of Amanitas, not Agaricus. The volva was the reason I’d dug so carefully around the base of the mushroom. I had to be sure I’d dug the whole thing out. If I’d left the volva in the ground, the mushroom would have been virtually indistinguishable from the woodland agaricus.

  The mushroom was beautiful, pristine, stately, reputedly delicious (though you wouldn’t live to eat it a second time).

  But it was a deadly Amanita, a destroying angel, and I left it on the carpet of duff.

  I filled my basket with woodland agaricus and I littered the ground with discarded destroying angels. A flock of birds swooped out of a tree and startled me off my haunches and onto my back, and I decided to call it a morning.

  I walked the three or four miles back to the road, rubber boots squelching through mud. I watched mist float over manzanitas, drift along horizontal branches of live oaks, drip through mosses, mute the evergreen of firs and redwoods. The air smelled of loam and wet leaves and pine sap. Woodpeckers tapped, squirrels scrambled, and birds drank from curled bark. There were mushrooms everywhere, tiny brown ones no one had bothered to classify, fuchsia-colored russolas, bits of orange chanterelles peeking out of leaf mounds. Most people don’t see anything but leaves and pine needles when they look at a forest floor, they don’t recognize the subtle patterns. But then, most people are content to see nature from a car window, to do their hiking in a shopping mall, to settle for flavorless mass-produced fungi.

  Not me.

  The museum was ready for the annual Fungus Fair. We’d carried the stuffed coyotes and pumas and the trays of butterflies and beetles down to the basement. We’d wheeled the waterfowl displays into the gift shop. There was still an occasional otter or egret peeking out from behind a table, but we’d managed to clear most of the main room.

&n
bsp; We’d covered several tables with sand sculpted into gentle hills (two days work), and we’d covered the sand with duff (another whole day). We had a hundred and twenty-seven species of fungus scattered over this ersatz forest floor, all labeled with Latin and common names and descriptions of their properties. Some were edible, some were medicinal, some glowed in the dark, some bled colored latex, some were used for dyes, some were used to make rocket fuel, some were poisonous. All were fascinating. To me, anyway. But then, I write mushroom field guides. I teach mushroom identification classes.

  “Looks good.” James Ransome, the museum curator, glowed with satisfaction. James has a square pink face, rimless aviator glasses, and wavy black hair. He’s fortyish with a little potbelly under his inevitable button-down shirt and sweater vest. I like James a lot.

  “We should move the knobcone pines,” Don Herlihy grumbled. Again.

  Don was doing me a favor, helping out with the fair. He helps every year. He’s a botanist and an ornithologist; like me, not affiliated with a university. He gets by landscaping, specializing in drought-resistant native plants. He’s a friend from a dozen college botany labs, and he throws a little landscaping my way when he’s got the extra work and my museum classes aren’t paying the rent. I wish Don were more than just a friend, but he always goes for the angora-sweater type. I keep hoping.

  “They’re going to fry when the sun shifts.” Don didn’t think we should bring in potted trees at all, but James wanted “atmosphere,” and it was James’s museum.

  I didn’t care much about atmosphere, but I cared less about the knobcones. I just wanted peace between my two best friends.

  I said, “You know what I found this morning?”

  Don continued scowling at the scraggly pines. “They’ll get knocked over—if they don’t fry first.”

  “We need them to screen the tide pool tank.” James was calm, knowing he’d get his way, as usual. “Last year, we found it full of Dixie cups and plastic forks.”

  “Woodland agaricus,” I continued. “I’m going to sauté it this afternoon as part of the tasting.”