Oasis

by Brian Hodge

  Back home, my final two weeks shot by at light speed. Phil and I quit our jobs a week before leaving, to give ourselves a little screwing-around time. I spent some extra time with Aaron, as well. We took in a couple movies, did some swimming, and I beat him at a game of miniature golf.

  This was the first summer I could recall Aaron actually looking forward to going back to school. His status would be improving, true, since he would be a junior now, but it mainly had to do with his eagerness to get away from Chuck Wagon Steak House. He’d drawn a countdown calendar for his bulletin board, illustrated with Aaron himself in various acts of rebellion, like bulldozing the salad bar into rubble and taking a fire extinguisher to the grill and lowering Maurice into the deep fryer. Each night before bed, Aaron cackled and gleefully rubbed his hands together and marked off another day.

  He made me laugh more that week than I ever thought possible, and I wished I could haul him up there with me.

  College. Running away, that’s how it had once seemed to me. But was that such a crime? Even the greatest military minds in the world are worthless unless they know when to retreat.

  And surely no more should be expected of me.

  Chapter 20

  I had only a couple days left at home.

  I suppose my one real regret in leaving was that in order to get away from the summer and from Tri-Lakes, I had to put distance between me and my family, as well. I found it anything but fair, like collateral damage in a war.

  And so when Dad wanted my help after he got home from work that day, I was happy to give it to him.

  He’d left work early that afternoon but came home later than usual. He’d gone somewhere afterward where this old guy had a fallen tree in his backyard. My dad doesn’t know what it means to pass up free firewood, so he’d taken his trusty Husqvarna chainsaw over to the man’s house and made short work of the trunk and the bigger branches, and loaded them into the bed of his Datsun pickup.

  We headed out after supper to take care of the load. Our woodpile sat behind the carport, between the tool shed and a clothesline pole that hadn’t been used for at least a decade, now a rusting T-shape.

  “Need to get this built back up,” Dad said as he tossed aside the protective tarp. “It’ll be fall before we know it.”

  “I guess so.” I had to stretch to imagine that, under the scorching August sun. But maybe, just maybe, splitting the firewood would be the magic ceremony to hasten the advent of autumn. Cooler weather, longer nights … burying the summer. The sooner the better.

  “You want to unload or split?” Dad asked, slipping his gloves on.

  I hefted the maul. “Split.”

  Dad climbed into the truck bed and began lobbing out the wood. The first couple he aimed directly at my feet, grinning as I hopped out of their way. Just like the old westerns: Dance, pardner.

  I swung the maul again and again, bringing it down in an arc to cleave log after log in two with a dull crack. Bark and splinters filled the air, scattered on the ground. Sweat began to roll, and sawdust speckled my arms and torso. There’s no feeling quite like slowly demolishing a tree. Put a splitting maul in my hands and point me toward a woodpile and I become invincible.

  Still, I was starting to get winded by the time Dad hopped from the empty truck bed.

  “You want me to take over for a while?” He put his fist around the maul handle before I even answered. “You can start stacking.”

  “Sure,” I said, relinquishing the maul. “But if your old arms can’t take it, let me know.”

  Dad flashed a lunatic’s grin and angled toward me as if to split my head open, then laughed and brought the blade dead center into the log. The two halves popped neatly apart. “Not bad for an old man.”

  I clapped, the sound muffled by my work gloves. I began to stack the wood, arranging the freshly split halves and quarters next the old logs.

  “You’ll miss lighting the first fire of the year,” he said. It had been one of those family traditions. No one could remember how it had gotten started, but ever since I was a little kid, I’d been the one to set a match to each autumn’s premier fire. “Have you thought of that?”

  “It’s crossed my mind. Maybe Aaron can take over.”

  Dad nodded, wiped sweat from his forehead and left a gray smear of dirt. “Like passing on the torch.”

  The steady thud of the maul, Dad’s occasional grunt…

  “You know, Chris,” he said slowly, “this college business has come up so quickly. I trust you, that you know what you’re doing. But…” He shook his head. “But I wouldn’t have minded a little more time to get used to the idea.”

  “There’s a lot that’s happened this summer that I’m still getting used to. It just seemed better this way.”

  He paused long enough to smile at me, and I hadn’t seen my dad smile in such a way very often. So warm, so caring, so loving. As fathers go, he’d always been more of a pal than a fountain of overflowing emotions, but he made a smooth transition with that smile. I think there were so many things he wanted to tell me then, everything he’d learned in his forty-four years and especially the last eighteen. But he didn’t need to utter a word. That smile said them all.

  It took us another half hour to get the job done, and when we were through I noticed that Dad looked considerably more pale than when we’d come out. He frowned, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said, doing some frowning of my own. Nobody likes to think of his father as being anything less than that all-powerful giant who could banish childhood’s monsters with but a single word. “Are you okay?”

  His eyes were far away, gazing someplace far beyond our backyard, someplace I could not look to. Then he came back with a little jerk and chuckled self-consciously. “Sure, fine. I just pulled a muscle.” He smiled reassuringly, but his eyes seemed tired and droopy.

  “That’s it?” Why don’t I believe you?

  He dropped the maul and flicked a couple of jabs my way. “Come on, bud. Son of mine. Do your worst. “ Another jab.

  I took him by surprise, and I’ll never forget the look in his tired eyes.

  I walked over and hugged him.

  Chapter 21

  Classes were scheduled to start on August eighteenth, a Monday. I’d decided to head up the Friday before and give myself the weekend to settle in. Phil would be going up a few days earlier for part of New Student Week, but I decided to pass on that.

  I began packing and some preliminary loading of my car on Thursday. That afternoon I stretched a hanging bar across my back seat and loaded in clothes and boxes of junk deemed vital enough to take. It was nearing four-thirty when an unfamiliar car pulled up to the curb out front. A Vega, silver, sort of. Under the dust, it looked to crave some bodywork for a few spots.

  The driver emerged, squinted at our house number, checked what must have been a scrap of paper in her hand. She appeared startled when she saw me staring back from the other end of the driveway, before the carport. Then she began walking toward me. She wore dark blue slacks and a light blue blouse with long sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her hair was a honey-brown and fell past her shoulders except for feathered bangs that brushed her eyebrows. I couldn’t help but contrasting this face with Valerie’s. This face could easily be called pretty, but it was less sensuous, more thoughtful. Quiet. Serious, as if she’d done a lot of hard thinking recently. She wore glasses with large plastic frames, which emphasized this look of intelligence. As she drew nearer I could tell that she looked to be a few years older than I, maybe mid-twenties.

  “Hi,” she said, a bit hesitantly, though it didn’t seem to stem from shyness. “Are you Chris Anderson?”

  I nodded, curious. “Yes.”

  “My name is Shelly Potter.” She put her hand out and we shook. Her grip was pleasingly firm, a business handshake. “I work at the Sentinel.”

  I turned to see to some boxes that suddenly needed rearranging in my back seat Curiosity had quickly degenerated into mistrust, and ma
ybe downright annoyance. I saw her shoes slide a half-step closer.

  “I’d like to talk to you about your friend. What happened at Pleasant Hills.”

  I pulled out of the car and cocked one arm onto the roof. “That happened six weeks ago. It’s not exactly news anymore. And if you’re looking for some human-interest angle, then look somewhere else.”

  The only reaction I got from her was a slight arching of her narrow eyebrows. No doubt it would take considerably more than a flat-out refusal to offend her. Which I didn’t want to do, really, but I did want to be left alone.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I’m sorry if I came off that way. But all that with Rick is in the past. I don’t understand what happened, and if I can, I just want to put it behind me. Lick my wounds and crawl away.”

  Shelly nodded, but held her ground. With her hands reached around and thrust into her back pockets, she looked at me straight-on until I almost turned back to the car. She had one penetrating gaze. Finally she offered a crooked smile, ironic and sad. “You guys up there,” she said. “You weren’t the first.”

  “The first to what?”

  “To run into something that seemed a little hard to understand.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said, remembering the day when White Trash Joe took me on a long walk down a dusty road. “I know what a tough time the workers had up there.”

  She nodded and hit me with that chilling smile again. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  This time I didn’t say a thing. I don’t even think I want to hear what she’s talking about. I just want this to be over.

  “Look, if it makes any difference,” she said, “I’m not looking to write one word about it, about you, about your friends. I don’t care about writing a story on this.”

  Nothing about her seemed to indicate she was lying to me. She was too firm, too serious. And maybe, deep down, she seemed a little sad. Or scared. A couple of emotions I’d certainly been in touch with lately.

  “Then what’s your stake in this?” I finally asked. “What’s it to you?”

  “Does it matter that much?”

  “If you want me to relive that night Rick disappeared, then yeah, it matters.”

  Shelly grinned, sort of. Then it disappeared, and she was back to business again. “Fair enough. So is it a deal? We trade stories?”

  Guarded … if anything, she was that. She wasn’t turning loose of anything more than she had to. And in a sense, I guess I was much the same. I couldn’t honestly say I wanted to run things over for her amusement or her concern. But neither could I say I was willing to walk away from this town without knowing what had happened to Rick. He deserved better than that. As a friend, as someone I admired. As someone I loved like a brother.

  If I could, I wanted to know. About Rick. About the Viking-like image I’d seen at Tri-Lakes. In time, it would eat me alive from the inside if I never found out. But at the moment, it wasn’t like I had the time to get into it.

  “I guess we trade,” I said, and there was no look of satisfaction, of winning, to cross her face. “But I’m pretty busy right now. I’m leaving for college in the morning.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Whenever you make it back here. I can wait.”

  I sighed, leaning even more heavily against the car. She hurts, too, I thought. She’s not in this for kicks. Which made us, as I suddenly began to realize, an unlikely pair of allies.

  “How about Labor Day weekend, on Saturday?”

  Shelly nodded without hesitation. She tugged a little notebook from a back pocket and a pen from her shirt, scratched something out on the top page, then ripped it free and gave it to me. “If I’m not working that Saturday, this is where I live. And my number. Call first. Okay?”

  I nodded wearily, wondering in the back of my mind how she’d managed to cross paths with Tri-Lakes. We exchanged goodbyes and she moved back down the driveway toward her car. I watched, feeling as though I could never truly manage to distance myself from Tri-Lakes. That it was always going to be a part of me.

  That it always had been a part of me.

  The next morning brought a bright hot sun and high humidity. Perfect conditions for a four-hour drive with no air conditioner. Dad postponed going into work until he’d seen me off. He and Mom and Aaron helped me carry the last few odds and ends to the car, and then came the final awkward moment in the driveway. I hugged each of them in turn, receiving my final instructions, advice, whatever.

  I stood before them a moment longer, feeling oddly like an outcast being banished from some tiny kingdom.

  “Don’t rent out my room,” I said, then climbed behind the wheel. A tight fit — my car was filled to bursting, with barely enough room left for a driver. Rick’s guitar shared the front, where I could reach over and touch the case if I felt the need. I backed down the driveway, we exchanged final waves, and I was rolling down the street.

  I took Route 37 north out of town. After twenty or so miles, I’d cut west at Salem and pick up Route 51. After that, sheer monotony, unless I’d unknowingly developed a thing for cornfields.

  The town slipped away from me and surrendered to the countryside as I glided along the gentle curves of the highway. The sun climbed higher in the sky, burning hotter. Then I realized what lay ahead: county road 1250N.

  And Tri-Lakes.

  But I’d known it all along, hadn’t I? Sure. Maybe one more look, maybe a lingering moment of gloating before I escaped it and left it behind. And maybe, if I was lucky, I could stop and feel Rick’s presence in the air, because I was starting to think of Tri-Lakes as Rick’s final resting place. A crazy idea.

  Driving up on It, Tri-Lakes looked as lovely and innocent as ever. The trees were bright shades of green, the grass was lush, the water reflected the vivid blue sky. No problems here.

  How deceptive. That’s how it gets you, how it lures you in.

  I parked in our old spot and stepped from the car. Five weeks’ absence made me take notice of how bad the asphalt was getting, starting to crack and crumble away here and there, as if being destroyed from beneath. Grass and weeds sprouted across its surface. Place looks like a ghost town.

  The grove.

  Unbuttoning my denim shirt to allow a breeze better access inside, I walked toward the grove. Stood at its edge. Entered.

  The biggest tree looked bigger than ever, supreme of stature and towering with confidence. And I stared at it for a minute or more before I saw what bothered me about it this time.

  There was a shape in the trunk, a few feet off the ground, a shape that bulged out from the main surface of the bark. Like so many optical illusions, you had to look hard to see it, but once you knew it was there, you couldn’t miss it. The shape had its own trunk, and two legs and two arms and a head. There was a slight depression where the mouth would be, as if caught in mid-scream.

  All instincts told me to clear out and never look back … but the need to know outweighed the need to run. So I fetched a lock-blade pocketknife from my car, then used it to dig into the tree bark, where the left hand was.

  Just as I’d thought.

  You see, it takes plastic forever to decompose. It contains nothing organic, nothing digestible, like there is in flesh and bone and cotton clothing.

  There, imbedded under the bark, was a plastic splint.

  PART III

  DOMINATION

  Chapter 22

  It’s no secret that on occasion I’ve had more to drink than I should’ve. But I pay for it. My head spins one direction while the room spins another, and self-control gradually slips through my fingers like a fistful of sand.

  I felt much the same way after discovering that horrid bulge in the tree at Tri-Lakes. I ran from the grove, flat-out ran, head swirling with vertigo, and jumped behind the wheel of my car and floored it until I was miles away. Only then did I begin to relax.

  Because what I’d just seen was impossible.

  So I drove, drove for four hours,
letting the knots inside unwind and the tension drain away like rancid sweat. And I eventually decided that the less said about Tri-Lakes, the better. It was best left completely alone, because it wasn’t natural. It defied explanation. I’d reached the unfounded conclusion that it had nothing to do with Vikings, because, after all, they were European. It had shown me a face I would understand from my own heritage, my own interests. A face whose message would sink in just that much deeper. A face that convinced me I’d be a lot happier never setting foot out there again. It had taken Rick body and soul, and that was more than enough. I hoped, I hoped, that as long as my friends and I stayed clear, we’d be fine.

  And maybe, in time, we would heal. And could forget.

  I hit Bloomington in mid-afternoon, and for the next few hours made a frenzied attempt to settle in within the ivy-covered walls of Scott Hall. To stay inhumanly busy meant that I had less time to dwell on what I’d seen at Tri-Lakes.

  But later there was nothing left to do, and once I slowed down and took a good look around, the new student’s equivalent of culture shock set in. I was an outsider looking in, a stranger in a strange land. To make matters worse, I found Phil’s room but no Phil. So I hit the sidewalks, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched against this alien society. I walked past record stores, past delis, past bars where gusts of music blew onto the streets whenever their doors cracked open. And finally I found a liquor store. Go for what you know. I bought a twelve-pack and a bag of Doritos and drank myself to sleep in my room, a Gulliver among a growing city of beer cans.

  Saturday morning brought my roommate, who exploded into the room with enough junk to open his own pawnshop. He awakened me to the worst hangover in recent memory and seemed oblivious to my misery. His name was Greg Tyler, and he hailed from a town even smaller than mine, called Taylorville. Greg was stocky, just shy of being plump, with cornsilk hair and a face whose expression went beyond amiable into what could only be described as blissfully ignorant. As he settled in, wearing Keds and a Darth Vader T-shirt and stuffing once-white-now-gray underwear into a drawer, it came as no surprise to learn that he was a data processing major. A computer geek.