by Alan Russell
I followed her down the hall. We progressed slowly toward the living room, Mrs. Dozier making sure of each step. “Would you care for coffee?” she asked, not bothering to turn her head, or not daring the effort.
“No, thank you.”
“Thank God. It probably would have taken me half an hour to walk to the kitchen. I woke up stiff today. I’m not sure whether it’s the illness or the medication. Between one and the other, I have my symptoms du jour.”
She seated herself on a black leather chair with a grateful sigh. I found a place on the matching sofa. The living room was made up of contrasting blacks and whites, almost a checkerboard motif: black baby grand Steinway piano atop thick, white carpeting; white porcelain lamps resting on black inlaid art deco tables; black wrought-iron sculptures bookending a white marble fireplace.
Mrs. Dozier looked at me expectantly. My eyes are gray—not in keeping with the decor. That might have been why she noticed them.
“You have unusual eyes, Mr. Winter. Not quite hazel, and not quite green.”
“Gray,” I said.
“An uncommon color.”
“For eyes, maybe.”
“They become you. But I imagine they change color in different lights.”
“Just like people.”
She half-laughed and half-coughed behind her hand. “Cynical.”
“No, curious. Right now I’m trying to find out if the Green Man changed colors.”
“You’re direct. I like that. I can especially appreciate that nowadays.”
She didn’t appreciate it enough, though, to comment any further. “You know I have cancer?”
“I’ve heard about it from your daughter, and your husband.”
“Same cancer,” she said, with that coughing laugh of hers.
“I don’t know if they’d agree.”
“They wouldn’t. The only thing they would agree on is that I shouldn’t be talking with you.”
“But you’re talking with me anyway.”
“Why not? Illness offers you the opportunity to act with impunity. It’s brought me a freedom I never had before. Isn’t that strange?”
I nodded.
“We’re both investigating death, aren’t we, Mr. Winter?”
I didn’t say anything, wasn’t sure how I should respond. She didn’t want pity, and I didn’t want to give her the kind of honesty she demanded. Investigating a death is easy. Investigating the living is where most of us stumble.
“My husband and daughter treat my illness very differently. Harold thinks that if neither one of us talks about it, my cancer doesn’t exist. Ashe is just the opposite. She wants to talk everything through, thinks that together we can lick it. She’s big on the holistic and homeopathic approaches, and is always bringing me some new age healing process, everything from visualization to extracts of yarrow and foxglove. You name it, she’s suggested it.”
“Paclitaxel.”
She sighed. “Yes. But miracles don’t come easily, do they? It was difficult accepting that there weren’t enough old yews. I pressed my husband to help me get my magic potion. It was a difficult time. I was in my denial and anger stages then.”
“I still am.”
She gave me a little smile, then drifted away to other thoughts, spoke more to herself than to me. “I used to say it over and over again like an incantation: Yew. Harold must have thought me mad.”
I didn’t interrupt her reverie. “Yew,” she said again. “It wasn’t a word, or a tree, with which I was familiar. But then someone reminded me that Robin Hood’s bow was made of yew.”
She looked at me, remembered my presence. “Your Green Man wasn’t an archer, was he?”
“Not that I know.”
“I keep thinking it was an arrow they found in his head, but it wasn’t, was it?”
“No. It was a branch.”
“That’s right. A widow-maker.”
She had brought up his name again, so I brought up my surmise. “Did he meet with your husband here?”
“I don’t know if I’m quite ready to give you my deathbed confession, Mr. Winter. Let’s wait a few minutes, shall we? But do be clever in the meantime, and tell me why you suspect what you do.”
She closed her eyes. I didn’t have a bedtime story. I didn’t even have very much in the way of cleverness. “Your husband was very careful to tell me that the Green Man only visited his office one time,” I said. “Later, I thought about what he had, and hadn’t said. I call it listening for echoes. He implied they hadn’t met in other places at other times, but he didn’t preclude that possibility.
“Your husband also mentioned that Ashe knew what hours he worked at the office, and that if she visited during them she could be reasonably sure of not seeing him. He qualified his statement with that one word, but I didn’t pick up on it at the time. He didn’t say he never saw her, just made it clear that they tried to avoid each other.
“And finally, though neither your husband nor your daughter tried to hide how each felt about the other, I’m not satisfied with either’s reasons. I think something escalated their feelings, something recent, and something that I suspect involved the Green Man.”
She opened her eyes, turned them in my direction. “So who are you asking me to betray, Mr. Winter, my husband or my daughter?”
“Maybe neither. Maybe both.”
“That’s a lot to consider,” she said, “and there’s already so much to think about.”
Mrs. Dozier closed her eyes again. For a minute I thought she had gone to sleep. When she finally started talking, her eyes were still closed.
“Lately, Mr. Winter, I’ve had to think of what comes before alpha, and after omega. You’ll think me odd, no doubt, when I tell you that I’ve started to imagine myself as a seed almost ready to be planted. I know that with the right rain, and the right earth, I’ll bloom again. Maybe not in the same form. Maybe not as anything recognizable. But I feel as if I’m now going through a great metamorphosis.
“I think of nature’s examples of rebirth, of frogs that bury themselves in the ground for many years awaiting a little rain, and seventeen-year cicadas, and the unseen life that exists in the dryness of a vernal pool. I think of tardigrades that can lie dormant for so long, and the seeds left with mummies for millennia, seeds still ready to germinate. And I think of myself, and know there’s a vibrant part of me that’s alive, that’s full of secrets. No one sees that part anymore. They see a worn vessel that’s not really me. I know that something else, something greater, is waiting to come out. Can you understand that?”
“Yes.”
She opened her eyes again, looked at me to see if I really did understand, and was apparently satisfied by what she saw.
“I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore, Mr. Winter. I’m not sensible like I once was. I think that’s what upsets Harold the most. I say things that he doesn’t understand. And I do things that make him angry. Or will make him angry. Like talking with you.”
“And giving me answers?”
“Offering a few seeds, perhaps.”
“Did the Green Man visit this house?”
She breathed, and decided. “Yes.”
“Did you meet him?”
“No. I was in bed dozing and awakened to voices. One of them was Harold’s. I called to him, and he came upstairs and told me he was meeting with a business client.”
“How long did they talk?”
“An hour or two. I’m not sure.”
“Did you hear what they said?”
“No.”
“So how did you know your husband was talking to the Green Man?”
“It was Ashe who announced that to the world. When she walked in on them, she screamed ‘Christopher!’ And after that a lot more screaming ensued.”
“Whose?”
“Ashe’s mostly.”
“How long did the shouting go on?”
“For five or ten minutes.”
“Did you hear what was said
?”
“I heard the tone of what was being said. It wasn’t pretty. It never is when Harold and Ashe get together, but this was worse than I’d ever heard them before.”
“Did you hear the Green Man speak?”
“I heard him try and speak a few times. But Ashe was beside herself. She wouldn’t let him.”
“Did you come downstairs?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Getting between a dog and a cat usually only gets you scratched or bitten.”
“But eventually you got an explanation?”
“Two explanations.”
“I’d like to hear them.”
“After the confrontation, Ashe came upstairs. She said that Christopher had sold her out.”
“Do you know what she was talking about?”
“No.”
“What else did Ashe say?”
“She didn’t stay very long. She was upset. She said he was a traitor. She said that thirty pieces were still thirty pieces, no matter how the counting, and how the justifying, was done. And then she left.”
“When did you get your husband’s version?”
“Not until later. He had gone back to his office. When he came home, he wasn’t very inclined to talk about what had happened. He just said that part of business was cutting corners, and saving money where you could.”
Two explanations. But I was still short the Green Man’s.
24
I STOPPED AT a diner in town and ordered the Lumberjack’s Breakfast, which consisted of three eggs, hash browns, three pancakes, and three links of sausage. While cutting up the pancakes and sausage, I looked for spikes but didn’t find any.
A few of the pieces were starting to come together. Finally. I tried to line my dominoes up in place. Ecotage was on my mind. There had been much made of EverGreen’s participation in Sequoia Summer. They had agreed to forsake their guerrilla activities for passive resistance. I suspected that as the summer passed and the old trees continued to fall, it had become more difficult for the EverGreeners to bridle their passions and exercise restraint. Among them were those who were adept at taking out heavy logging equipment with salt, or dry rice, or Super Glue, who knew how to make logging roads impassable with spikes, and metal punji stakes, and caltrops.
I believed a clandestine ecotage campaign had been organized on the night the Green Man died. None of the campers wanted to talk about what had gone on that night, or they conveniently couldn’t remember. There had been no Circle planned. There were also the matters of Bigfoot and the clay.
When I had first walked into the Sweetwater camp, the potter’s wheel, and the clay, and the propane kiln, hadn’t made much of an impression on me. Only in my subconscious had I recognized them as something not quite as innocent as a Coleman stove, something just a little out of place. You expect campers, especially young campers, to play with mud and clay, and most of those participating in Sequoia Summer were only a few years removed from their summer camp days. I should have noticed that there were no misshapen mugs or droopy vases sitting around, should have wondered why I never saw any artisans hunched over the potter’s wheel. But then it’s easy to overlook clay. It’s benign. It’s earthy. Fire it up, though, and you can make ceramic pieces that rival the firmness of metal.
Over the last decade, the threat of tree spiking has prompted many sawmills to examine their logs for metal debris. Some even go so far as to routinely scan the wood with metal-detecting equipment, making the old sabotaging standards of sixty penny nails and bridge timber spikes ineffective. To counter such measures, ecoteurs began crafting ceramic pins. In addition to being undetectable, the bits are durable enough to turn most saws and blades into scrap. With a cordless drill, an adept ecoteur can insert hundreds of ceramic pins into hundreds of trees in just a few hours.
I had read enough accounts of ecoteurs going out on night missions to know that they often darkened their faces, or disguised themselves with ski masks or watch caps. Loose, dark trench coats were said to be the garb of choice, because they could conceal both figures and equipment. Three drunken men had seen Bigfoot smashing his hand into a tree. I suspected what they had really seen was a coated ecoteur wearing gloves and wielding a three-pound hammer. Or perhaps what they had really seen was a murderer.
Before getting on the road, I walked over to Lofield Hardware and bought a thirty-foot extension ladder. Ecoteurs like to conduct their spikings above eye level, the theory being that the higher the spike, the less likely it is to be discovered. With the ladder, I could better look for the holes in the theory.
When I turned on to the logging road, the trees blotted out the sky. It was just the forest and me. My pickup’s motor strained as I pushed it along the rough road. There were no other vehicles, nothing but ancient woods. To my untrained eye, there was a sameness to the forest. Without any man-made landmarks, I had difficulty getting my bearings. I stopped half a dozen times, thinking that I had arrived, or that I had gone too far. Then I saw the trinity of trees that Evans had pointed out, that signaled the Green Man’s shrine.
I took a deep breath. The stillness around me was overwhelming. The great trees were all-encompassing, and shrouding. I felt like Adam, alone in his Garden.
I thought of the ancients who had gone out to the groves and asked questions of the oracles who lived among the trees. They had asked questions and gotten answers. It was time for me to do the same.
The sibyls didn’t immediately speak up. Nothing about the redwood under which the Green Man had died appeared out of the ordinary. But I wanted to go the whole nine yards—literally. I grabbed the extension ladder and set it up. Fully extended, the ladder barely tickled the feet of the giant. It struck me that looking for signs of a spiking in a redwood would be much like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. There was so much area to cover, and so much to look for, that the task was daunting. The immense girth of the tree was such that I figured it might take as many as half a dozen positionings of the ladder just to fully scout around its circumference, but I started my search anyway.
As I moved up the rungs, I paused every few steps to examine the tree. Nothing stood out. I went higher, and kept looking, searching with fingers as well as eyes. Still nothing. I ascended to the top of the ladder, scanned fruitlessly, then descended. When I reached the ground, I repositioned the ladder and went up a second time.
Spikers say that Mother Nature is on their side, that within a few months she covers up their handiwork. I found my first hole at about the twenty-foot mark. It was mostly masked, growth already healing the scar. I pushed my pinkie inside the hole, and it bumped against something that wasn’t an acorn. I pulled out a pocketknife and started poking and probing and carving. Eventually I worked out a ceramic bit. It wasn’t alone. As I moved up the ladder, I found more holes and more ceramic bits. I couldn’t dig some of them out. They had been inserted deep into the heart of the tree, were waiting mines to a band saw. The tree spiker had meant business. But was it only trees that had been spiked?
Twenty-five feet up doesn’t sound very high unless you’re the body up there. I looked down for the first time, measured the drop. I thought of possibilities. I thought of Humpty-Dumpty.
I spent the next hour examining other redwoods near the logging road and found two more trees that had been spiked. The oracles had spoken, but I wondered if they had anything else to say. I started down the barely visible path toward the Green Man’s roost. Red and his friends had walked the same way, and I tried to follow his memory lane. When the goosepen came into sight, I started scrutinizing the redwoods not too far off the path. I was looking for Bigfoot’s mark.
About sixty yards west of the goosepen, I found the redwood. The bark was flattened and splayed, had stood up to a pounding. If it was truly Bigfoot that Red and his friends had seen on that dark night, then the creature had taken up with the radical environmental movement. Some long spike nails had been hammered into the tree.
&nb
sp; Other trees nearby had been spiked as well, but they didn’t show the telltale destruction of bark. The nails had been driven in at about the seven-foot level. I went back to the Sasquatch tree again. To get the attention of Red and company, the spiker had probably used his hammer like a mallet. I made a hammering motion at the tree, tried to gauge the spiker’s height. The indentations ranged from the eight- to the eight-and-a-half-foot level.
More ideas were beginning to rattle around in my head. The Green Man’s goosepen drew me forward. I looked inside it again, poked around its interior for a second time. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was overlooking something. But how many others had already done that same kind of scrutinizing? Deputy Evans. The detectives. Even Bull Dozier. Everyone had looked. As before, I found nothing. Not even a goose feather.
I stepped back, started examining the area around the goosepen tree. I did my surveying in ever widening concentric circles, did tree rings around tree rings. The three redwoods nearest the goosepen had been spiked, but I couldn’t find anything else out of the ordinary. My circles grew wider and wider. To identify the territory covered, I took to marking trees. At the end of an hour, I stumbled upon a second goosepen tree.
Another cave within a tree, another hole to explore. I stuck my head inside the redwood. It was dark, and I hadn’t brought along a flashlight. I reached inside, suddenly felt some fluttering and heard some high-pitched squeals. Startled, I jumped back, tripped on a root, and fell.
The bats, and my clumsiness, saved my life.
It took me a second to figure out what was happening. Half a dozen bats were flying out of the goosepen. Two things had disturbed them: my intrusion, and the bullets that were chewing into their home.
The gunfire was muted by the forest. In an alleyway, the percussion of a gun can sound like a bomb, whereas in the great woods there wasn’t much more than a popping. I rolled behind the tree, stifled the impulse to flee. The redwood was thick enough to protect me from bullets. I sneaked a few looks but didn’t see anything or anyone. The shots had been fired at close range. I suspected my assailant had gone hunting with a handgun. I peeked again, tried to make sure no one was sneaking up on me, but there were enough redwoods around to afford the sniper plenty of cover. I was safe only as long as I had the tree between me and the shooter. Half a minute passed, and I started imagining footsteps. How long, I wondered, would the sniper stay in place? How long before the advance?
