Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  “They don’t have a father?”

  “Oh, they have a father.” She smiled. “He is the father of others, as well. But let us speak of something else.”

  I sighed. “Maybe you can tell me about the Abenaki. I’m thinking that Jeremiah’s death could somehow be tied to his defense of the tribe.”

  Sylvia stared at the floor. “The Abenaki were good members of the family of life, a long time ago, before Europeans came.” She looked almost as if she were drifting into a trance. “They could teach your people much. They suffered greatly under the French and the British. Then the Americans hunted them because some of them had allied with the French. Not many are left, but they have wisdom. They would not endanger all life as you do.”

  “Me?”

  “I mean your people. You are of your people’s spirit. You carry that spirit. I don’t mean you as an individual. You are not like so many of them.”

  “That’s because I’m a mongrel,” I told her. “My mother’s grandfather bought his wife—my great-grandmother—as a slave and then took her as his wife. She was part Irish and part Indian, though she was taken very young and no one knows what tribe she was from. On the other side, my grandfather’s family came from Northern Europe in the late nineteenth century. They were from Scandinavia—explorers and pirates. None of them fit in very well with proper European society.”

  “It is not just blood,” she said softly. “I sense a deep sadness in you. You have known great loss, and you have spent much of your life in the gray shadows, where there are no clear boundaries between right and wrong. You have empathy for others, a rare quality among whites. You share that with the Abenaki. I doubt you could hear their story without weeping.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve read that some Native Americans weren’t the good stewards of the land they’re portrayed as being. Some tribes slaughtered buffalo just for their tongues, burned forests to drive out game, destroyed rather than refrained from interfering.”

  “That is true and it is not,” she said. “You must understand that cultures have their own lives, their own cycles. Not just humans, but all forms of life. It is true some tribes were wasteful and thoughtless, but in their cycle things were different. When there are many, many rabbits, the foxes have larger litters. More foxes the next year means fewer rabbits, and the year after, foxes grow thin and their litters become smaller. Eventually they reach a balance.”

  “So the wasteful Native Americans were really just part of a cycle.”

  She looked at me then, a speculative expression in her brown eyes. “Ten thousand years ago, when the mountains of blue ice were melting northward, the ancestors of the Abenaki first came here. Then food was abundant, and they killed wantonly, as their people had for centuries while they crossed the continent. They and others hunted whole species to extinction: the giant ground sloth, the glyptodont, the woolly mammoth. Animals here were easy prey, for they had not learned to fear man. And so the early people flourished, had large families, and believed they were in paradise.”

  “But they reached a limit?”

  She rocked gently and nodded. “They overfished and over-hunted. They fought each other for food during a time when winters were harsh and summers short; they killed each other. It was a time of great violence, some thousands of years ago. They had learned a bitter lesson that others all over the world have learned, to their cost: when the balance was tipped, there would not be enough for all, so they fought over what was left. Those who stole or saved the most food gained power during the times of hunger.”

  “Something similar happened in Europe during a climate shift we call the Little Ice Age,” I said.

  “It has happened many places, many times. All growth takes its own pace. And this was a time of great misery, when a few had much and most had little. Violence and hunger ruled. Yes, the people awakened, but slowly. Generations passed before the last of the … cannibals? Before the last cannibals were seen as so insane that the people no longer allowed them to seize power.”

  “Cannibals?”

  “Wétiko,” she said, emphasizing the first syllable. “It means those who live by taking life from others. It is what many native people called whites many years later. No, they don’t literally eat other people, but they take slaves, they take the fruit of others’ work, and so in a sense they eat the lives of others.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Those who were to become the Abenaki learned from Grandmother Groundhog, who taught Gluscabe and rejoined the cycle, the one that always comes when rabbits are many and foxes few, and then reverses. Your people need to understand this. They need to know that eating the life of Earth is like cannibalism. You used coal for a long time, and now you use oil and gas as well. It poisons the world, and yet every year you consume more and more of it. If you do not wake up from your dream, when the world is poisoned and things begin to die, then the time of terror, the violence, begins, on a larger scale than ever before.”

  She looked very sad. “It is here, the time of killing,” she added softly. “Since I last saw you, millions of lives have been taken by humans. Twenty thousand have died of starvation. The terror has already begun.”

  “Can we end it?”

  “If you awaken. If not, the time of terror is very near for America, for China, for many other greedy nations. You are like the fat men who hoarded the food in the time of the Abenaki troubles. You must awaken, or you will suffer with the rest of the world.”

  I said, “Yes, but if we could master fusion or learn how to efficiently harness solar power—”

  She got up, went to the stove, opened it, and put in some wood. I felt a yearning for her, not a desire for casual sex, but the primal need to know this woman completely, in every sense of the word. She returned to the chair and said, “Did you see what I did?”

  “You put wood in the stove.”

  She shook her head. “I have set the sun free.”

  “Oh. The wood captured sunlight through photosynthesis and stored the energy, and when you burn the wood, the energy of the sun is released again.”

  “The sunlight that now comes from your stove fell to Earth during the time of your father, or maybe even within your own life. But the sunlight that runs your car fell to Earth millions of years ago. You cannot speed that process. When the oil is gone, it is gone—for the next four hundred million years, at least. You are like foxes during a time of many rabbits now, but the abundance will end. Your people’s arrogance destroys too much life, threatens the world, threatens your people and mine.”

  “Why tell me this?”

  “Because you are not afraid to interfere.”

  “You said interference was wrong.”

  “And killing is wrong. But sometimes killing is necessary.” She looked miserable. “This is what you do. This is who you are. You move in shadow, where the boundaries are faint. It takes a man or woman like you.” She was silent for so long that I got up from my chair and began to make my dinner.

  She watched as I built the salad in my big yard-sale mixing bowl, watched as I drizzled olive oil over the greens and tossed them. “Are you sure you won’t have some?” I asked. I brought the bowl over. She tilted her head, looking at the salad. She reached tentatively, plucked out a leaf of romaine lettuce, and shook the oil from it. She took a nibble, then greedily pulled the whole leaf into her mouth and chewed.

  Impulsively, I knelt beside her, picked out another piece of lettuce, and held it to her mouth. She took it from my fingers with her lips. I found the ritual oddly touching, and I hand fed her until she had finished the bowl. My own hunger seemed to have dissipated. I put the empty bowl in the sink and wiped my hands with a towel, then gently patted her lips with it.

  “You are extraordinary,” I said. I traced the line of her lips with my forefinger, and she very tentatively touched my skin with her tongue. I cupped her face between my hands and kissed her forehead. She smelled of forest and leather and tasted faintly salty. She turned her
head, took my little finger into her mouth, and sucked on it. That aroused me instantly.

  Then she pulled away, releasing my finger, eyes wide and nostrils flared.

  I backed off. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  She lowered her head and I heard her sniffle. “You and I are too different. We cannot be close. There are stories of how your people and mine sometimes mated. They are tragic.”

  “But one of my ancestors was a Native American.”

  “You don’t understand. I belong there.” She waved toward the door, indicating, I supposed, the forest.

  “Isn’t it dangerous out there?” I asked.

  “Grandfather is nearby to protect me.” She saw my puzzled look and said, “The Grandfather of the forest. You call him bear.”

  “But bears hibernate,” I said.

  “These are grave times. The weather has changed. The world is dying. Grandfather and others protect me, so I can speak to you.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “I have to awaken you. You must know, must understand that the myths of your people are myths, no matter how well-intentioned. You must know that all the easy stories are wrong. The truth is larger and more encompassing. You must learn the wisdom of Earth, that all living things must live in harmony, that when some are tempted by abundance then disharmony and death result.” She glanced over at my bed, where the files lay. “Above all, you must know that writing words down is not capturing wisdom. You may record knowledge, and others may profit from it, but wisdom comes not from words, but from life. And the clever, the manipulative, mistake knowledge for power.” She said, “Jeremiah Smith knew this. It led to his dying.”

  “How?”

  A sob escaped from her. “Don’t you feel how important it is not to interfere?”

  “But you just said I had to, that you were sent to ask me to interfere.”

  “Yes. And I hate myself for it. I am asking you to do that which I fear to do myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked away and in a miserable voice said, “If a person went to the place where a man was tied to a tree, went early in the morning, and stood against that tree and faced the sun … if he raised his right arm straight by his side, pointing straight to his right, and then walked in that direction, he would find … something.”

  “Walked? How far?”

  “Until he found it. He would know.”

  “What will I find?”

  She stood up. “I must leave.”

  I got out of my chair and stood facing her. I reached out and put my hand on her arm. She was trembling. “Sylvia—” I began, and then my cell phone rang.

  She jumped back two feet, knocking the chair into the woodstove. It fell sideways with a clatter. She righted the chair as I answered the phone.

  “Tell me you didn’t shoot up Darryl’s car,” said the voice. It was Wanda.

  “Let me call you back,” I said.

  “What, you picked up another waitress?”

  Sylvia had backed away and stood giving me a head-tilted look. I conveyed my apology with my eyes, and she looked down at the rug, but she stayed where she was. I said into the phone, “Wanda, I’m sorry. I was an asshole. I should have stayed in touch.”

  “Yeah, like I’d want you to.” But her sarcasm lacked sting. “Look, Gina Berkof called me this evening and wanted to know what was up with you. And I heard from the wife of the guy who lives right across from Darryl’s place that Darryl and somebody with a Jeep were firing off shots at each other’s cars.”

  “He started it.”

  Wanda gave me a mama-snort. “Darryl’s in trouble,” she said. “And I think you are, too, Oakley. What’s this about?”

  “It’s about some trees he was burning in back of his house.”

  “I don’t believe you. That’s supposed to make sense?”

  “What makes you say he’s in trouble?”

  She took her time before answering: “I thought I loved Darryl at one time. He’s really a decent person, deep down inside. He’s got that whole dumb act that got him through his childhood, but he’s really pretty smart. Lately he’s changed, though—he’s secretive, he’s throwing around money that he shouldn’t have, and he’s tangling with you.” She paused again and then said, “Is it true that you used to be in the CIA?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Bernie at the bookstore. He’s reading some book about your old partner. Says that Lincoln started a private practice with an ex-CIA agent.”

  “That was all a lifetime ago. I’m long since retired.”

  “Spies don’t retire.”

  I felt a weary kind of embarrassment. Everybody knows what spies are like—blend together bad TV shows, James Bond movies, and sex fantasies and you have a spy. That’s not the truth. “I’m not a spy or a private eye now, Wanda,” I said.

  “Then Darryl’s not working for you, for the government?”

  “He’s not doing anything for or with me.”

  “Then why did you go to see him?”

  “To ask what he was doing on my property this morning. He and Bill Grinder showed up with rifles.”

  “They must have been rabbit hunting.”

  “So they said. What did Gina Berkof ask you?”

  “She’s single, you know.”

  “Wanda, I—”

  I heard her sigh. “Sorry. That was a cheap shot. We’re over, Oakley, that’s all. I have a daughter who I love. The last thing I need is some half-crazy spy raising hell and shooting at people.”

  “It won’t happen again, and I’m happy if we can just be friends. What did Gina say?”

  “She told me to ask you to call her at home. She has news about a car. You need her number?”

  “Shoot.”

  She rattled off the number, and I wrote it down. Then Wanda said, “Look, leave Darryl alone, OK? There’s no harm in him. Whatever you’re up to, keep him out of it.” She hung up.

  I looked over at Sylvia, still planted in the same spot. “I need to make a call. Will you wait?”

  She did not respond, and I took that for silent assent. Gina Berkof answered on the third ring. I identified myself, and she said, “Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I lost your number, so I called Wanda. Anyhow, I got a look at the police logs. I checked with North-field and Montpelier, and neither had anything, but there was a dark blue Subaru wagon stopped by state cops on Route Eighty-Nine, heading into Burlington. They stopped to check for drunk driving, but the guy tested sober, so they checked his license and let him go.”

  “Who owned the car?”

  “Discount Rentals at the Burlington Airport.

  “And the driver’s name?”

  “Frank Lauser.” I stiffened.

  “I called the rental car company, too,” Gina said. “I told them Lauser had left some papers in a booth at a restaurant, and I had picked them up and wanted to return them. Looked like a deed, I told them. They were nice as anything, gave me his address. Ready?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Address is listed as PO Box 72434, Newark, New Jersey, and the girl couldn’t make out the Zip. Is this the guy who creamed Jerry’s grandpa?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Did you happen to get the car’s plate number?”

  “I didn’t. Should have written it down. I do remember they were Vermont plates, registered to the car agency, but that’s all.”

  “Thanks, Gina,” I said. “That’s a big help.”

  “I actually sort of enjoyed it,” she said with a laugh. “Made me feel like a real reporter again instead of a space-filler for a poky little weekly. You know, when I was straight out of college I worked for the Boston Globe.”

  “What happened?”

  “I did a story on a major corporation that wasn’t exactly flattering. The editor didn’t want to run it because I couldn’t get an inside source, making her wary of a lawsuit. So I fired myself before they quit me.”

  “I didn’t know you were a
n activist.”

  She laughed again. “I wouldn’t call myself that. I’m a rationalist. OK, so the Supreme Court says a corporation is a person. So I say when a corporation is guilty of a capital crime, it should get the death penalty.”

  “Lethal injection?”

  “No, but states can pull the charters of corporations. It never happens, though. States can execute individuals, but individuals can’t put politicians in office, and corporations can—one hand washes the other. Hope I’ve helped, Tyler. See you around.”

  I hung up and walked over to Sylvia. I took her hands in mine, surprised at how rough and strong they felt. I slipped my arms around her waist and drew her to me. She stood rigid for a moment, and I felt her breasts flatten against my chest. She sighed and leaned into me, her temple against my cheek. Then she put her arms around me and pulled me tight against her, as though she were trying to melt into me, and I felt her hands stroking my back.

  I tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away. “Sorry,” I muttered, feeling clumsy and brutish.

  She caught my right earlobe in her teeth and tugged it, and I moved to hold her closer.

  But Sylvia trembled, then slowed her breath and relaxed, still holding me, still moving against me. Her hand moved around my thigh, to my hip, to the small of my back.

  “Stay with me,” I said huskily. “Spend the night.”

  But then she withdrew, pushed away from me, ran to the door, threw it open, and bolted into the night.

  19

  I walked to the open door. The night air felt like a wall between two worlds. The moon lit the forest with a faint glow, but I could see no detail in a landscape painted with gray and the eggshell-white of moonlight. Nothing stirred—not Sylvia, not Grandfather Bear.

  I thought again of Wanda and the night we’d spent together, all the laughs and touches, the sidelong glances, the way we’d talked through our terrible bowling games. It had been a dance of life, with perhaps each of us using the other, the way people do, a night of sweetness and release. Once we had been to bed, the geography of our lives shifted subtly, took away our pretended innocence, our excuse for playing. We could either make it something serious after that, or we could let it sour and darken into pretend fun, curdled love.