“That was blood, Josh.” She doesn’t say it, but she thinks it: It was as if the island was bleeding.
“We need to stay calm.”
“Bullshit.” She swings the stick—to smack him—and he holds up his own, and they clack together. “What’s wrong with you? This isn’t a YouTube stunt. There’s no bungee cord to stop us when we fall. Be crazy!” She swings her stick again and again, and he blocks her each time. “There’s a part of you that’s enjoying this.” He gives up on defending himself against her, and her stick prods him right in the chest, over the heart. “Admit it. You’re enjoying this?”
She pushes hard with the stick, and it shoves him back, and he follows the momentum, hiking away from her. That’s how they belong. Separate from each other. He likes dirt and she likes to get rid of it. She likes things zipped up and double-knotted and he likes to let it all hang out.
The feeling seems to be mutual. He curses as he shoves aside a branch, kicks through some ferns. She waits a moment, not really wanting to follow, but knowing she has no choice. She passes a wide-waisted tree—with a hollow in it the size of a dinner plate—and she feels a puff of cold air come from it, as if it were breathing. Maybe she would see a dark shape hidden within the hole, if only she looked a little closer.
Instead she hurries to catch up with him and says, “Wait.”
“You promise to lay off.”
“I promise to try.”
She catches up with him on a knobby rise. He points and she can see the shoreline through the trees. “Think we’re getting close.”
“That spit of rock up ahead,” she says. “We swept past it when we first came up.”
She hears a strange sound then. A birdy chatter. A clacking of beaks. A rustling of wings. “Do you …,” she says and he says, “What?”
“Sh.”
They look around curiously. Bright red berries grow on a bush. A slug oozes along and its eyestalks rise from its head like horns. And then they hear more of it. A clacking and rustling and hissing and garbled honking, a sound that makes no sense.
They push through a thicket—and look up. Here is a massive wooden cage. Built high between two trees and bound together by ligaments. It is crammed with geese. Maybe thirty of them. They flap their wings and claw their feet and hiss with their thin pink tongues out. They bite one another, snatching out clumps of feathers that snow down.
“I don’t …,” she says, but never finishes.
The plane. Just like what hit the plane. She backs up—shaking her head no—with an ugly calculation whirring through her head. “Someone put them there. That means someone let them loose.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he says. “That’s impossible.”
She backs up, and her foot catches against something. What at first appears to be a root. But it stretches and lifts and rattles. A chain.
She nearly falls but catches herself. And then looks up to see where the chain leads.
To a wolf. The color of charcoal. Fifteen feet away. In the shade its eyes are the bright gold of candle-flames. It wears a collar. Linked to the chain. Linked to a tree.
The wolf lowers its triangular head. Its back bunches into a hump. Its muzzle wrinkles and reveals the needled teeth nested in candy-slick gums. A growl boils out of it, shivering the air. Its hindquarters tense—and it surges forward.
“Run!” she says, and together they sprint away from the wolf.
It closes the distance quickly and leaps, its jaws widening. In the air, its leash catches, the chain at its end. And the snarl is caught short and gives way to a yip.
The wolf falls. Then immediately springs up again. Testing the length of its chain, straining against its collar, and clacking its teeth.
There is a moment—a brief moment—when Michelle and Josh clutch each other and think they’re safe. But then a rattle comes from behind them.
They spin around to see another wolf charging toward them. They trip over stumps and nudge into each other and duck beneath branches as they race away. Changing direction, again and again, as wolf after wolf leaps after them.
Just as one is caught short by its leash, another appears. It is a gauntlet. Every wolf has its own territory—the radius of its chain—with none intruding upon the other. They make a terrible noise, all of them barking and yowling together.
Whether this is a trap or some elemental alarm system, Josh and Michelle don’t know. But they’re nearly bitten twenty different times, jaws snapping shut inches from their hands, their ankles, their necks. Spittle flecks them.
Josh knocks a white wolf back with his walking stick. Michelle spins on one foot, a clumsy kind of pirouette, to avoid another wolf with an eye scarred shut. In this way, they stutteringly progress through the woods.
Then a wolf with a narrow face nicks Josh’s leg—and tugs and tears his pants. He falls just out of its reach, and it snarls and grinds at its chain. His calf bleeds, a chunk torn out of it. Perhaps she’s imagining it, but she thinks his voice might shake when he speaks: “Maybe there’s a tribe here. Or maybe they’re survivalists. Maybe they can help.”
“No one is supposed to live here. This is the edge of the middle of nowhere. And are you not seeing what I’m seeing? A logjam to keep planes from landing. Goose cages and wolf traps? Whoever’s here is not interested in helping anyone.”
Still he doesn’t look afraid. He looks upset and determined and a bit crazed when he brings his hands to either side of his mouth and cries out, “Hello?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Is anybody there?”
“Stop. Josh. No.”
He waits another long beat before chucking his walking stick in frustration. It spears the air and stabs a cluster of ferns. There is a sharp cry and someone springs up. A girl with long hair decorated with burrs and fir needles. Maybe ten years old. She bounds away from them. And while Michelle knows it makes no sense, she can’t help but think: I know her—that’s me.
Josh grew up in the suburbs of Beaverton, but his parents always wanted another life. They tilled their lawn and replaced it with apple trees and raised vegetable beds. They anchored solar panels to the roof and posted a wind turbine in the backyard. They built a chicken coop and installed bee boxes. His father harvested most of their meat, and the neighbors would sometimes complain when he hung a deer from the maple in the front yard to skin and butcher.
His mother made their clothes. Their basement was shelved with the pickled beets and applesauce and salsa and jams and spaghetti sauce she canned. She read her way through the Foxfire books and compared what she learned in them to advice on online forums about sustainable living. She took notes on the same yellow legal tablets Josh’s father used in court. He was maybe the only defense attorney in Portland who grew a beard halfway down his chest and drove a rusted Dodge pickup with a retooled engine that ran on french fry grease.
Josh and his sister, May, enjoyed the weekend trips—hiking and hunting and fishing in the Cascades—but they complained endlessly about their parents’ lifestyle choices. They wanted to eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger every now and then, for God’s sake. Their clothes were embarrassingly free of logos. Why couldn’t they own a television and a computer and a phone like everyone else? Who cared if antiperspirant had carcinogens in it—they’d rather have cancer than stink.
Then came the decision to quit it all. That was the phrase his parents used. “Let’s quit it all and get back to basics.” They bought a hundred acres in eastern Oregon—in the foothills of the Ochoco Mountains. His father would retire from his law practice. His mother would homeschool the kids. They would live in a yurt while the cabin was under construction. They didn’t consider themselves survivalists, but off-gridders, back-to-the-landers.
“No,” Josh told them. “Just no.” His parents were making a selfish decision. They couldn’t steal his life from him. What about his friends? His hopes for college? It was another year before he graduated from high school. Seven for his sister. Coul
dn’t they wait? They had a weird life now, but this would destroy any semblance of normalcy. His aunt Libby lived in Portland and he begged to move in with her. “I cannot do this,” Josh told them. “I would rather die.”
He got his wish. They were on their way to the property—Oasis, they nicknamed it—when they spun out and crashed through the railing and spiraled down the embankment. May was eleven when she died.
And now—but it can’t be?—now his sister is running ahead of him. With the same long, dirty-blond hair. In the same stupid homemade clothes she had been wearing that day. Brown corduroys and a green T-shirt, only dirt-stained, split-edged. Like something that had been buried and dug up years later. He knows it’s impossible, but he chases her anyway. “Wait!”
The girl wears a mask. A deer skull with two short horns has been fitted over her head with leather straps.
The bite in his calf throbs. Bushes scratch his legs and tree branches swat his face and boulders and logs trip his feet. But the girl races through it all without pause. A blur, a phantom riding the wind. He can’t keep up with her—and Michelle can’t keep up with him. For a time he can hear her calling after him, but then her voice ghosts away.
“Stop!” he yells, his chest burning with the hot wind of his breath. “Please! I promise not to hurt you.”
Finally, against a thick cluster of cedars, the girl spins around, and he skids to a stop, only a few yards away. He can barely make out the eyes inside the girl’s mask. Are they blue? They look blue.
It’s her. It’s May. He can’t quite bring himself to say her name. And now that he’s caught up to her, he doesn’t seem to know what to do. He pats his pockets until he finds what he’s looking for. “Here.” He pulls out a Ziploc bag. “You want some trail mix?”
He rips open the bag, scoops out an M&M, pops it in his mouth. “I only eat the rest of this junk to get to the chocolate.” He offers the bag to her—and when she doesn’t take it, he tosses it her way. With one hand she snatches it from the air.
“It’s good,” Josh says, the sweetness still in his mouth. “Try it.”
A stick snaps behind him, and he turns, expecting Michelle. But it’s not. There is only the woods. And when he returns his attention to the girl, she, too, is absent. No branches sway where she passed by. No moss sponges upward, freed from her weight. It was as though she was never there.
“Dammit.” He tromps around, circling trees, peering into a cavitied log, stomping through ferns. “She was here.” He swipes a hand through the air, as if the cobwebs of her might linger, something to catch with his fingers. “She was right here.”
Michelle isn’t a runner. She prefers yoga and a brisk daily walk. When Josh goes tearing off into the woods after the girl, she does her best to keep up with them. But the trees are so thick and the ground slopes and is tangled with brush. It doesn’t take long for her to lose sight of him. She leans against a tree and the bark roughs her cheek. “Josh,” she says, knowing he won’t hear her. But his name makes her feel a little less alone.
She takes in her surroundings. The canopy is thick and even at noon only a few blades of sunlight could knife through. Now it’s evening, and darkness smokes the air. A hill rises nearby, banded with rock. She can see a clearing of bear grass not far away. A beetle scuttles across a log. A conk fungus bulges from a stump. A long line of ants stitches the forest floor, one of them lumbering under a leaf ten times its size. She follows their direction and sees something. Something she can’t quite make sense of. Her chin trembles. Her hand settles over her heart.
She pushes through a bony tangle of manzanita bushes and finds herself looking around, in wonder, at what might ordinarily pass for a junkyard. But not here. Here it’s a graveyard. She is surrounded by dozens of wrecked boats and planes. Some old and quilled with pine needles and mudded with wasp nests. Others are newer. Their hulls are broken. Their wings are snapped. Metal weeps rust. Cracks zigzag through plastic. And the farther she walks, the older the equipment. The more vine-tangled and dirt-buried.
Michelle’s hand lingers on a canoe with a Rorschach test of rust or blood staining it. There are others. Who have come here and never left. And now she is among them.
In the center of it all, there is a tree. Or the tree. The biggest she has ever seen outside of the sequoias. She has to crane her neck to the limit to take it all in. The bark is gray and rough and plated like an elephant’s skin. Scored through by lightning strikes. Burled and hollowed, so that it appears to be knuckled and jointed and eyed and mouthed many times over. Its branches, some bald and some thickly needled, could be a forest of their own.
She can feel a panic rising in her. A knee-jellying, lung-deadening panic. But it stills suddenly, as if a valve has turned, when she notices something impossible. On that same tree. Amid the thick tangle of roots. The scales of bark stitch together into the shape of a door. And not just any door. But a white, six-panel slab with a gold handle. With a map of the world tacked to it.
Her door. The entrance to her childhood room. The closer she comes, the more perfect and crystalline the illusion grows, solidifying before her.
A part of her wants to run in the opposite direction, screaming. But another part of her feels comforted by the promise of what waits inside. She reaches for the handle.
…
Josh bursts out of the woods onto the rocky beach and slides to a stop and crouches with his hands fisted. All the way here, he ran, certain something was right behind him. Or above him. Or even below him. Just certainly near, its fungal breath in his ear.
But nothing pursues him. His eyes dart between the trees—with the terrible faces carved into them—as they sway and whisper in the wind. “Todd?” he says after a long few seconds. “Lester?” He can feel his pulse in his bitten calf.
The sun has retreated to a red line on the horizon. The last of its light burnishes the wing of the plane, half-sunken in the mud. The tide is starting to roll in, creeping into the inlet with a lapping froth. This is the place. He saw his friends swim free of the plane and this is where they must have come to shore. But the beach is empty. “Cliff?” he says, his voice skipping off across the water. “Guys! Yo! Where are you?”
Then he catches a whiff of smoke. Wisps rise from a dying fire in an alcove. He approaches slowly. “Michelle?”
Here is a giant pile of stones. A cairn, he realizes. Like the ones he builds before every stunt. But this one is nearly as tall as him, a kind of pyramid. And a boot is visible at its base. Stained, saltrimed leather, square-toed, maybe a size fourteen.
Josh begins to remove the rocks. Hesitantly at first, then faster, shoving and clawing them away. They bruise his shins and clatter around his feet. He knows what’s inside, but he still looks away when he confirms it. Not wanting to believe what he sees.
Cliff’s hair is full of dirt. A few rocks still balance along his shoulder and bury his arm, but Josh can see that his belly has been sliced open like a smile. A mass of pebble-specked innards bulges out of him. Three red lines track diagonally across his face. From a knife? A pitchfork? A claw? Before Josh can process what he’s discovered, a tiny voice calls out, “Help.”
At first it seems like Cliff is talking, though his mouth doesn’t move. “Josh,” the voice says, his name spoken so quietly, it’s barely noticeable. “Please.” He spins in a circle, hunting for the source.
“Lester?”
“Please.”
“Lester! Lester, where are you?”
Out on the mudflats. Josh follows the messy tracks that lead to the plane. His body has sunk into a sloppy crater. He lies flat on his back, his head buried up to his ears. A single hand motions to Josh, the fingers weakly trembling.
Josh scrambles to the top of the alcove for a better view. In the failing light, it’s hard to see, but he can make out his friend—the oval of his face—but he appears cut and swollen. Only one of his eyes is open, the other a purpled mound. “Josh,” Lester says. “Here.”
At that ve
ry moment the tide rolls in and covers him with a gurgling wave.
Lester has always been good at math. Calculating the SCR of a scuba dive, the speed at which to hit a ramp, the tax deductions when filing as a corporation. He doesn’t have to force his mind to see the numbers: they’re always there, announcing themselves. A shaft of sunlight falls at a sixty-degree angle, a stoplight takes three seconds to go from yellow to red, it will take him two and half miles at a four-miles-per-hour pace to burn off the 563-calorie Big Mac he ate. That kind of thing.
So he’s been carefully listening to the water’s approach, as it rolls forward and pulls back, steadily closing in on him. He believes that when it finally hits, he’ll have to hold his breath for thirty seconds. He’s not in the best shape, but he knows he can go sixty seconds or more without feeling strained.
The roaring coldness of the water surprises him. His left ear feels stabbed by the force of it. It worms up his nose and seeps into his mouth and threatens to make him gag and cough. His neck pops. The mud moves around him, readjusting with the current, pulling him down an inch farther, maybe more.
How Josh survived, he doesn’t know. Maybe he’s hallucinating. Or maybe they all died in the plane crash and this is some kind of hell and a ghost is taunting him from the shore. He can’t see anything—except a grainy swirl—and he can’t hear anything beyond the rumbling hush. It reminds him of static. Of a television caught between stations. And a memory comes rushing to the fore of his mind.
He was a boy who built things. Model planes. Tube radios. A lamp. Even a television from salvaged parts. His bedroom was a mess of wires and circuit boards and soldering irons and spice jars packed with screws and nails and washers. His older brother, Ike, wasn’t like him. He was wasp-waisted and broad-backed with interests that didn’t seem to extend beyond girls and the ball field. He called Lester a robot-loving faggot. He shouldered past him in the hallway, knocked his cereal bowl from his hands, dropped his toothbrush in the toilet. And that day—the day of the static—he took a baseball bat to the television set Lester had spent over a month building. He cracked the screen, snapped a leg, bent the antenna. The caveman cartoon that had played perfectly a moment before warped and fuzzed over and gave way to ghosts. Lester cried out, “Why would you do that? Why do you hate me so much?”
Suicide Woods Page 17
