The Forest Prime Evil

by Alan Russell

  Red didn’t say anything, but his eyes did. He’d lost that gleam. Now, he almost looked worried. Remembering about a wild woman was one thing, but there was another memory he wasn’t as fond of. Finally, half to himself, he said, “We saw something.”

  “What?”

  “It was dark.”

  He had just finished giving me details a gynecologist couldn’t have known; now he claimed it was dark.

  “And?”

  “And we left after we saw it.”

  “It?”

  Mumbled, out of the corner of his mouth: “Bigfoot. Maybe.”

  It wasn’t an answer I had expected, and not one he wanted to talk about. I pressed him. They saw something, Red said, that stood “seven, eight feet tall and was dark.” According to him the creature packed quite a wallop; it had managed to get their attention by pounding its huge fist against a tree.

  “Made a fucking redwood shiver,” he said.

  Red wasn’t far from a shiver himself. That was probably why I believed him. His reluctance to tell the story was another reason.

  “We left the bar shit-faced,” he said, “and we did us some sipping and smoking on the way. We figured it’d be better not to say anything. They’da just called us liars or drunks. We figure we’ll do our talking when we go back and hunt Bigfoot down.”

  I was willing to bet that wouldn’t be any time soon. Red wasn’t able to give me a better description of the Sasquatch or of the woman. He couldn’t tell me her age or her hair color. He imagined plenty but knew nothing beyond her passionate screams and colorful vocabulary. Cinderella testing was clearly out.

  For another half hour, I plied him with questions. He and his friends had arrived at River Grove around ten o’clock. The location of the Green Man’s goosepen was no secret, but, drunk as they were, it had taken them awhile to reach it from the road. Their return trip, according to Red, “only took about thirty seconds.” He hadn’t noticed any other parked cars but said in those woods a division of Mack trucks could easily be hidden away.

  “We did see another car, though,” he commented offhandedly, “just as we were about to leave.”

  I made a circular motion with the gun, encouraging him to provide the details of the sighting.

  “We figured it was the cops for sure. There we was, out of breath from running, not more than a second or two inside my car, when we saw these lights a-coming up the road. But the car must have made a U-ey, ‘cause the lights suddenly disappeared.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Couldn’t see.”

  “Do you think the driver saw you?”

  “No way. My old Forester was pulled pretty far off the road.”

  They had left spooked, or, as Red described it, “in a rush.” But they never caught up with the car they had seen.

  I had Red go over his story several times. He started to sober up, which didn’t help the telling. He began to whine, said that his mouth hurt and that he was bleeding. His lost tooth became a drama of epic proportions. He wanted compensation, he told me, before he said another word. I reached down among the alley’s garbage, found what I was looking for, and tossed him his tooth.

  “Ask the tooth fairy,” I said.

  17

  I GOT ON 101 and started driving north. Earlier in the day I had admired the open space of the area and been glad for the paucity of restaurants and motels, but now I was tired and wanted the convenience of a bed. The dilemma of the human race: wanting it both ways.

  I didn’t figure Red and his friends would be looking for me, but, just to be sure, I passed a few exits before seeking a place to sleep for the night. I chose a turnoff that advertised lodging and was directed along by a faded billboard that seconded that promise, but, after driving in the darkness for several minutes, I wondered if it was only a seasonal offering.

  The light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t much more than candlelight. There was a vacancy sign that flickered desultorily. By all indications, the resort’s hibernation time was near. Some of the cottages had already been boarded up. Of about forty cabins, only two had cars in front of them. The inn wasn’t expecting anybody and wasn’t dressed up for visitors. The area probably exuded a rustic charm during the summer, with kids running around, wienies being roasted, and Ma and Pa sitting outside in lawn chairs, but summer seemed a long way off.

  What the hell, I thought. I’m here.

  There was a reception area outside the manager’s cottage, but it was locked. Through the window I could see the flickering light of a television. Handwritten instructions told me to BUZZ FOR MANAGER. I tried. The buzzer didn’t work. My hand did.

  Strong rapping didn’t bring the manager. There was probably a car chase scene on the tube. My fist went to work again, sounding like a precursor to a huffing, and puffing, and blowing the house down scene. That roused someone. He didn’t look like a graduate of the Cornell School of Hospitality. He was about five foot five inches tall, and about that wide. I think his T-shirt was clean, but it was hard to tell with all the holes in it.

  “Your buzzer’s broken,” I said.

  He had thick, black glasses on, the kind Clark Kent used to wear. But even Clark never wore a nose guard.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Are you open?”

  He nodded.

  I was assigned to a cabin just one down from the manager’s unit. The focal point of the room was an old mirror hanging above a ramshackle chest of drawers. The glass had been imperfect to begin with, its edges giving off fun-house kinds of distortions. Not helping the reflection were at least twenty-one years of bad luck, three cracks running through it. But you can’t always blame the mirror. I was a mess. My hair looked like a gridiron contest had been held on it, and there was blood on my face. I tested it with my tongue, found a tender spot on my lip, and wondered if it was a result of the passion or the fight. I didn’t feel particularly good about either.

  I took a shower, mostly to wash away the blood. It was cool enough to help me forget about passion too. The bath towels were about the size and thickness of washcloths, but, when you’re next to godliness, you’re forgiving. I put on some fresh clothes, slicked back my hair, and faced the mirror again. It didn’t announce I was the fairest one of all, but neither did another crack appear.

  Some people have teddy bears they go to bed with, and others have rituals of warm milk, or reading a chapter in a book, or going to sleep depressed after the late-night news. I have Miss Tuntland. I called her number, and immediately complained about the lack of lodging “in this neck of the woods.”

  “What neck brought you to that neck of the woods?” she asked.

  “Speaking of necks,” I pleaded, “isn’t it a little early in this conversation to be going for my jugular?”

  “Avoiding the question won’t help, Mr. Winter.”

  “How about if I ease into it?”

  She let me do my telling in my own way. There was a lot of ground to cover. I recapitulated my day, and Miss Tuntland took notes. I finished with the revelations of what had happened at River Grove the night the Green Man died.

  “Hardly sounds like a remote spot,” said Miss Tuntland. “Just think how many people were there that night: Red and friends, the Green Man, the woman, and that mysterious car which pulled up at the end.”

  “Don’t forget Bigfoot,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Sasquatch. Are you going to add him to your suspect list, Mr. Winter?”

  “Why not? The more the merrier, right?”

  Miss Tuntland doesn’t like it when I pity myself. “I can’t reach my violin,” she said.

  “That’s not appropriate forest music anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “A power saw.”

  I didn’t digress for long. Miss Tuntland didn’t let me. We went over the case, tried to figure out what we knew and what we didn’t.

  “Shepard would have been walking his lover back to the logging road,” said Miss Tunt
land. “Her car would have been parked there. That’s why he was naked, and away from his goosepen. That’s why he was out in the wind.”

  “The wind wasn’t the only thing that was up that night,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Josh is hiding something. Everyone is.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “On different occasions when I asked him about events of that night, he went from amnesia to total recall. There’s something nagging at me, but I can’t quite place it. Something . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Something that involves Sasquatch.”

  This time she didn’t laugh. “It will come to you,” she said.

  “Maybe if I hit my head like Red said he hit the tree.”

  “Don’t push,” said Miss Tuntland. “What else isn’t right?”

  “The relationship between the Sawyers. Something’s wrong there. I’d like to know where they met and how long they’ve been together. I’d like to know about him, and I’d like to know about her.”

  “I can find that out,” said Miss Tuntland.

  Miss Tuntland would have made a good spy. My legwork is nothing compared to her finger-work with a search engine.

  “Strangely enough, I’m also curious about a Don McLellan,” I said. “It’s probably a childish curiosity, some mental urge of mine to get away from it all like he did. McLellan was a hermit of sorts who lived in these woods in the late nineteen fifties. Lived in the goosepen of a redwood, if you can believe it.”

  “If my landlord keeps raising my rent,” she said, “I might consider that option myself.”

  Miss Tuntland asked me to stop talking for a minute so she could write some things down. She took my musing seriously, more seriously than I usually did.

  “Questions everywhere, Miss Tuntland. Who was the money behind the posters? I haven’t even answered that yet. And is Ashe O’Connor only being the dutiful daughter, or is there another reason for her visits? Then, of course, there’s the relationship between Ashe and her stepfather. That bears exploration. Bull Dozier’s been silently influencing a lot of goings-on around here. There are even rumors about Shepard and Trans-Miss. I’ll have to look into those.”

  I sighed. “He’s everywhere, Miss Tuntland, The Green Man. He keeps playing peekaboo among the redwoods. I hear his laughter, but he doesn’t show himself. Why did he read from the Song of Solomon? He certainly wasn’t religious in any conventional sense.”

  Another sigh. “I can’t even tell if he cared about the redwoods, or whether his only motivation was the Green Belt. He had this compulsion to plant, a drive as strong as anything I have ever heard of. Almost sexual, I’d say. That makes it difficult to judge whether he was an innocent or diabolical.”

  Miss Tuntland let me ramble some more, even challenged me a few times to think aloud. When I finished with most of my questions and doubts, I tried to conclude our conversation with more pleasurable recollections, tried to tell Miss Tuntland about the great and mighty groves I had visited. I saved the best for last but thought my description fell short—short by a redwood, which is a very large verbal miss. Miss Tuntland was glad at my attempt anyway. She hadn’t yet visited the redwoods but said that it was on her life list of things to do.

  “I empathize with trees,” she said. “I’ve often thought, if there was such a thing as reincarnation, that’s what I’d like to come back as. I’d enjoy having birds nest in my ears, and squirrels racing along my arms, and me just observing the world and setting down deep roots.”

  “Redwoods don’t have deep roots,” I said.

  “No?”

  “That surprised me too,” I said.

  I considered that odd pairing for a few moments, all that height and no depth, and what eventually resulted from it.

  “Are you still there?” asked Miss Tuntland.

  “I was thinking about how redwoods die.” I had already told her about Scotia, and the mill. But that wasn’t a natural death. That was man’s taking the trees before their time. On their own terms, redwoods die in an unusual way, different from other trees.

  “You’ve probably heard that trees die from the top down,” I said. “But that’s not the way with redwoods. They die when they fall over. Usually, right up until the day they fall, redwoods appear healthy and vital. Most scientists say that they topple over because their root system isn’t extensive enough to support them.”

  It was her turn to be quiet. Then she asked, “Were you really thinking about redwoods?”

  The woman was too wise. “No,” I said. “I was wondering how the Green Man died. Was it like other trees? Did he age, and weaken, and become corrupt? Did he decline from the top down? Or did he just topple like a redwood?”

  Unsaid between us was the same muse: or did someone chop him down?

  Miss Tuntland knows how I get obsessed with cases, knows I start living and breathing them, sometimes to my detriment. “It’s late,” she said. “Time for you to count some sheep.”

  I promised her that I would try. But, when I did my counting that night, it wasn’t sheep. It was tree rings.

  18

  FOR A WHILE, “Do you dream in color?” ranked right there with “What’s your sign?” and “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” as a pickup line. It would seem a pretty straightforward question, but it wasn’t one I had ever been able to answer definitively. My dreams aren’t like films or television shows. They’re otherworldly, feelings more than colors. But when morning came I could finally answer it without an explanation, could honestly say, “Yes, I dream in color.”

  Or at least one color. Green.

  What I like best about dreams is that you can be mad as a hatter for all the while you sleep and not have anyone lock you away. Sometimes I travel through a lot of Daliesque landscapes. Problem is, often the view doesn’t change when I awake.

  I didn’t mull over my green dream for very long. It answered a question, but I had more pressing concerns. In the morning light, the resort looked and felt more benign, a destination for grown-up Scouts. I did a search for the Trans-Mississippi administrative offices in Lofield, and then made a call. I didn’t expect it would be easy to get through to Bull Dozier, and it wasn’t. I was transferred from a receptionist to a secretary to an administrative assistant. None of them wanted to take the responsibility of hanging up on a serious voice whose favorite refrain was “It’s important.” I was pressed for details but didn’t reveal much other than that I had conferred with his stepdaughter and needed to speak to him on “matters of significance.”

  Dozier must have tired of his underlings interrupting him. I was listening to some very pleasant hold music, Vivaldi I think, when an extremely annoyed voice suddenly broke into my musical reverie and said, “This is Dozier. What do you want?”

  I explained who I was, and who I was representing. And then I asked him for fifteen minutes of his time.

  “Why should I give you that?” he asked.

  “Because the Green Man died on land your company owns,” I said.

  Silence. Not even Vivaldi.

  “Because I’m supposed to get answers back to those who hired me,” I said, “and, if I can’t find any tangible evidence that he was murdered, then maybe there will be less finger pointing your way, and fewer people saying the lumber companies were somehow involved in his death.”

  “Talk to our public relations department.”

  “Last night I spoke with your daughter,” I said.

  “Stepdaughter,” he said, his correction quick.

  “She didn’t like the questions I was asking about the Green Man,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “So I’m an equal opportunity alienator, and a persistent one.”

  “And that’s supposed to recommend you?”

  “Reassure you, maybe. My dogma won’t get in the way of your dogwoods, or redwoods for that matter. I’m not looking for information to match a prearranged answer. I’m just looking for informat
ion.”

  He taunted: “The last honest man.”

  “Does that scare you?”

  “Be here at ten-thirty,” he said, and hung up.

  Lofield was about ten miles northeast of Eureka, a familiar word to most Californians because “Eureka” is the state’s motto. When Archimedes discovered how to determine the purity of a gold object, he shouted “heureka,” which translates as “I have found it.” Two thousand years after Archimedes, the gleeful cry was still going strong, was in fact the catchword of early Californians seeking that big vein of gold. But Eureka’s naming wasn’t solely related to the gold fever that swept the state. It was more the result of Captain James T. Ryan’s stepping ashore on the mud flats of Humboldt Bay in 1850 and shouting, “Eureka!” Ryan rediscovered an elusive bay that had been found and lost several times over a forty-year period. His exclamation presaged the naming of the city.

  I didn’t know if the city of Eureka was still something to shout about, but Lofield clearly wasn’t. Although Lofield wasn’t officially a company town like Scotia, it was dominated by the Trans-Mississippi Lumber Company. Their mill didn’t offer tours. It was closed to the public, fenced off like a military post or a castle. It didn’t take much imagination to envision towers, and turrets, and moats, and pennons, even though the reality was cranes, and holding ponds, and flagged lumber. The gate guard didn’t ask me “Who goes there?” but it took a few minutes for me to get passed through. My name was apparently not the password of the day.

  The administrative offices were in a compound away from the noise of the mill. Almost as much attention had been paid to their insulation as to the interior decoration. The offices compared with the toniest San Francisco business addresses, with black leather, and white-white paint, and chrome, and flashy paintings with big price tags and small messages.

  I was about two minutes early, and that was how long Harold “Bull” Dozier made me wait. He wasn’t what I expected. Men with the nicknames Bull or Bear are usually big and brawny. Bull was neither. He was natty, and trim, and of medium height. Someone named Bull should drool a little, and have a permanent case of pinkeye. This Bull had a white handkerchief in his suit pocket and unsullied blue eyes. He wasn’t exactly effete, probably didn’t ask for a lime with his beer, but he wasn’t the kind to drink it out of a bottle either. Bull Dozier. Bulldozer. He probably didn’t like his nickname, but, when it fits, you wear it. Or you level it.