by Bill Gaston
Emerging from his tent, deliberately not doing up the bug zipper, he sees Kim at the picnic table, red-faced, stiffly repositioning the clean dishes, his pinched and painful smile.
Tyler hates only his mother who, not looking at him, hums a tuneless song. Tyler walks past her, close, hitting her hair with his elbow. He bends at the cooler and grabs three cans of beer. Two he stuffs in his pockets and the other he pops open.
“Tyler could go fishing,” Kim says helpfully to the dishes.
Tyler tilts the beer can back as he walks away. He doesn’t know why he does it, but he pats Kim’s SUV on what would have been its fat ass.
Aside from the one to the fishing spot there are no real paths, so Tyler strikes out along the vehicle track that will eventually reach the logging road. This narrow track is only two ruts for tires, with stiff grass and shrubs growing two feet high in the middle, which, as they drove in, loudly brushed the underbelly of the SUV, making Kim close his eyes and hiss, “Yes, there! Ohh yes!” and so on, wriggling in his seat as if this was where all the scratching was taking place.
Walking, sipping beer, Tyler decides that slapping the SUV is exactly something his father would have done. He has never met his father, and hardly thinks of him — well, how can he? — except when he does something slightly surprising. Grabbing these beer was the father-in-him too. When Tyler used to bring up the subject of his father, his mother wouldn’t speak of him except in the vaguest generalities — he was unstable, he was too serious, he was very thin. It was this suspicious lack of detail plus a certain stricken look in her eye that told him his mother possibly wasn’t sure who his father was. So Tyler stopped asking. In fact, not asking is exactly how his father would have handled it. Sometimes, when Tyler is this angry at his mother, like now, he imagines this is how his father felt about her too and is why he didn’t stay.
The forest is dense and the sunset’s light is more dark than dappled. The road is narrow and not ditched and the trees are close — if he walks like an arms-out Jesus, Jesus with a beer can in each hand, Tyler can almost touch leaves on either side. He likes the idea, the threat, of a predator. A predator keeps you alert. The lack of man-eating predators in England is partly what’s wrong with the overall character of the English, a favourite author of his wrote. Getting attacked is less likely than getting hit by lightning, but truly there are bears and cougars here, perhaps twenty feet away, watching him walk. As far as cougars go, he knows not to make quick or skittery movements. In other words, don’t act like prey. In the same way that, sleeping in a new bedroom in another artsy old house they’ve rented, he sometimes dreads yet wants to see a ghost, he now half-wills a mountain lion to make itself known to him. He would love to see its calm face.
Tyler reaches another logging road and turns left, which is uphill and not the way they had come. He wants to see what lies beyond. He walks and walks. He thinks of nothing he’s left behind him. For a while, he visualizes himself very tall, which changes the road’s gravel to huge boulders, and he is a Tree Ent, his strides huge and ungainly, his style of walking not just mind over matter but wisdom over matter. As another beer can empties, he places it upright in full view at the side of the road.
He hasn’t cried and he won’t. He knows he’s really all she has in her life. He has just realized that she truly doesn’t know what will hurt him. That’s how naive and trusting she is — she thinks he is that mature, that above it all. That’s how stupid she is — she thinks he is that smart.
He’s a few miles from Kim’s ass-tickling road when he turns another corner and there, with a driveway of sorts leading to it, is a log cabin. The cabin’s roof is so thick with moss that at first Tyler sees it as thatch, the quaintly rounded English kind. Behind the house a shed of equal size looks ready to collapse in on itself. The wood of both buildings is unpainted, perhaps never-painted. There is no car. No lights are on. Tyler sees no electric wires leading to the house, then remembers he has been walking for miles without seeing power poles at all.
Tyler looks around him, sees only trees and hears only the wind in trees higher up the slope. No cars passed him all evening. He really is very alone here. He is in no danger whatsoever so there is no reason to be afraid of anything at all. He has had five cans of beer. He doesn’t bother to walk quietly as he approaches the cabin. Why should he? He walks up, cups his hands over his eyes, leans against the glass to look.
On open shelves sit colourful rows of canned goods, and boxes of herbal tea and tins of this and that. A good, or at least big, stereo system sits in the corner. He sees electric light fixtures. Maybe there’s a generator in the shed. Tyler wonders if there’s indoor plumbing. He will look in other windows. Passing the door he puts his hand on the knob and it turns. Why not? His father would look around too. He is one step inside when he hears . . . The black pickup is new and quiet enough to have been muffled by wind in the treetops and by Tyler’s criminal excitement. It rolls up and turns into the head of the driveway before Tyler can move. He can hear shouts inside the truck even before the passenger door opens and a second later, though the truck is still moving, the driver’s side opens too.
Tyler is running. No decision, he is instantly behind the house and into the trees. Maybe one of them looked a little fat. Maybe he saw tattoos, maybe he didn’t, but they are the type. One shouts a single Hey, that’s all, and he wishes they were shouting at him from a distance but God he can hear the crunching twigs and the grunts not far behind him.
He’s well into the bush now. He has been stabbed in the ribs by a broken branch and yelled because of it. He has tripped twice but is hardly on the ground before he is full speed again. He’s not sure his father ran. He leaps a small creek and, absurdly, seeing a hint of depth wonders if it might hold small trout. He lands beside a pale skunk cabbage and smells its garbage smell. He hesitates long enough to hear the crashings behind him. Maybe they are more distant. No, he hears crashing to his right now too. Tyler goes left, dodging trees, plunging through vines, more trees, saplings caught under his armpits and scraping them. He sees the light of a clearing and heads for it — maybe he’s faster than them on open ground. He hears the men shouting at each other or maybe at him. He plunges into the light of the clearing and he instantly goes down choking as a ghost gets him sharp by the neck and ankles both.
Tyler lies thrashing, unable to breathe. He doesn’t think he’s dying. He can breathe a little now, and a little more. The low sun is in his eyes. He doesn’t care about the men any more, though he hears them coming, walking now, crunching underbrush, breathing hard.
“He went right through the deer fence,” one says.
“He broke the deer fence,” the other adds.
“Did he get a shock?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey,” one of them asks, louder, almost on him now, “did you get a shock?” The voice sounds concerned but also just curious.
Two pairs of legs are at his head. Tyler manages to sit up. He rubs his throat and coughs. No one touches him.
“What the fuck, man?” one of them asks, and Tyler looks into the setting sun.
The other voice laughs insincerely and says, “Well, I guess he found it.”
Both men, standing over Tyler, catching their breath like him, seem mostly nervous now.
The generator is down so they sit in the soft light of strategically placed candles. “Welcome to black mass,” one of them, the ponytailed one, said as he began lighting them. Tyler is no longer afraid. He is used to this one’s humour — on the walk back he joked about both Deliverance and cannibalism — all supposed to put Tyler at ease, he could see that. He also joked about Tyler being the skinniest cop they’d ever seen. Early on they told him their names, which Tyler only half-heard. The ponytail one was Bob, Ben, Burt, something, and the other’s was longer. When talking to each other they didn’t use names. They seemed very close.
The non-ponytailed one is almost fat and has long hair too, and a moustache, an old-fa
shioned, biker kind. Both men wear really good sneakers, maybe that’s how they kept up with him. They look forty or maybe even older.
“Another warm one?” the fat one asks, wincing an apology as he asks it.
“No thanks.” Tyler has barely touched his first. It’s in an unmarked green plastic bottle and, though he’s never had homemade beer before, he can taste that that’s what it is.
“The tea’s pretty close.” The fat one lifts the kettle from the woodstove, as if in doing this he can assess how close it is to boiling. Well, maybe he can, Tyler sees, maybe he can feel water-roil through the handle.
“Man, we really need another screen,” the ponytail one complains. Only one window has a screen, and with the wood-stove on he’d wanted to open the door for a cross-draft, but at night apparently the bugs are awful.
Out the windows, it’s completely dark. Tyler pictures his mother and Kim with insects awful around them. His mother refuses to use repellant. They will have a fire going by now. Natural light. Tyler is all they are talking about. They are a mix of afraid and angry and repentant. They know he has no flashlight and beyond their little fire all is dark. His mother, of course, is mostly afraid. How will little Tyler get back from his little walk. He remembers her face as she said this, as she said it not looking at Tyler but at Kim, her face pink with beer and naughty, shitty fun.
He’s been here in the cabin for at least an hour now. His ribs feel better. The fat one’s salve is amazingly soothing. His “famous elf balm” he called it, and Tyler didn’t want to let him try it on him but he was still afraid of them then. The fat one said it was made of wild beeswax and sap from Douglas fir and chocolate lily, something his sister made and sold.
“Sorry,” Tyler asks now. “What are your names again?”
“Bab,” says the ponytail one, pointing to his chest. “And that’s Lawrence.”
“It’s . . . Bab?” Tyler asks.
“One of those jokes that sticks,” Bab explains.
“You sure you don’t want a ride back?” Lawrence asks, lifting the tea kettle again.
“Not yet. A while maybe.”
“You don’t think they’re worried?”
Tyler shrugs and says nothing.
“How’s the leg now?”
“It’s okay.” Tyler lifts his right leg for them and twirls the sandaled foot, which hurts to do, maybe enough to make him limp. He doesn’t remember hurting it. Maybe when he jumped the creek. Maybe when the deer fence got him.
At the marijuana field, after they’d helped him to his feet, their main concerns were, one, that he might come back and steal their plants, or, two, that he’d tell the Vietnamese and they would “Hang our balls from trees,” Bab had joked. Tyler was convincing in his apologies and also in his assurances that he didn’t smoke pot, or know anyone who even knew anyone who was Vietnamese. He was only here camping with his mother. This fact seemed to sum him up for them because both Bab and Lawrence quietly exhaled, Ahhh, at ease now. Tyler went on to say that he’d gone walking, got sort of lost, found their place, and was looking for a phone to call his mother’s cell. Both men said Ahhh again, and they didn’t seem angry any more.
Getting to their cabin, putting a warm beer in his hand, Lawrence had gone for the elf balm and a wash cloth while Bab came up with an idea to keep Tyler quiet about their farm. He had tried, for a minute, to act tough.
“Okay,” he said as Lawrence appeared with damp cloth and the flat tin of salve, “I want to see some I.D.”
“My I.D.?”
“Let’s see some.”
Tyler took his wallet out and Bab told Lawrence to get him a pen. Bab found Tyler’s social insurance card and library card and Lawrence handed Bab a pen. Bab sent Lawrence back for some paper.
“Okay, Tyler,” Bab said, reading the name, serious. “We know who you are and where you live.” In the background, Lawrence snorted at this. He opened the flat tin of balm, smelled it, poked a gentle finger in, and then rubbed some on his sunburned nose.
“So if we see any plants missing, we know who. And we know where. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And if, and if the cops come, we’ll know . . .” Bab looked around, stumped, a smile breaking out.
“We’ll know who to yell at from prison,” Lawrence offered.
“That’s right,” Bab told Tyler, smiling, stab-pointing at his face.
“I’m really not going to tell anybody,” Tyler said.
“Look,” said Bab, folding the piece of paper and putting it in his shirt pocket, “we’re being nice to you, right?”
“Right.”
“I mean we’re just all good humans here so just don’t tell anyone, ’cause we’ll get hurt, okay?”
“I really won’t.”
“Good. Thanks.” Bab looked at him closely. “How old are you anyway? Fourteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“You want a ride back to the lake?”
“No, not yet. I can’t. Quite yet.” Tyler hesitated then told them why, and they laughed, but not unsympathetically. Lawrence gave him a little squeeze on the shoulder, and then Frisbeed the tin of balm onto his lap as he walked past.
When Tyler asked if they lived here all the time, he was told it was their “summer residence,” and that they farm — their word — here in the summer and tour in the winter. Lawrence then explained that “toured” sounded grandiose, that actually it was more travelling than touring, meaning playing music and getting paid for it. They always went to warm places. They’d recorded an early independent album and in the last decade two CDs but, no, there’s no way Tyler would have heard of them. But Bab passed him a CD case and there they were on the cover. They were “Jones.” No, they weren’t brothers. It was a name, said Bab, “that seemed cool eighty years ago.” All this led to Tyler saying he’d love to hear their music, but with the generator down a CD was impossible, which led to them rooting around in back for what instruments they had there and, after apologizing that this wasn’t their good gear, they began to play. First they gave him a CD to keep, he has it here under his hand and he keeps picking it up and studying it. Bab and Lawrence are younger on the cover, but it’s them.
Tyler figures he’s been gone a few hours now. Bab and Lawrence are into their second song when Tyler decides that these two are the kindest men he has ever met. They seem genuinely to like that he’s here. Bab plays guitar and Lawrence a mandolin, the sound of which Tyler describes to himself as rows of tiny angel bells. First they played “Turn, Turn, Turn,” harmonizing beautifully, softer and gentler than in the old Byrds’ song, and Bab’s guitar — he explains — is tuned to sound like a twelve-string. This second song is their own composition and it also forefronts their harmonies, which they love to perform and which are truly sweet. One of the lines in the sad chorus is, “Just another waya prayin’.”
Tyler finishes the gigantic bowl of tortilla chips in front of him. A hand-carved, clover-shaped bowl holds three kinds of dip. The bean dip is the best he’s ever had. Lawrence insisted on heating it up a little first, saying it’s three times as good warm, something about “luring out the earth in it.” Tyler also has a glass of homemade blackberry wine in front of him. It sounded good but it isn’t and he’s had only a sip. It sits beside the full beer. Lawrence and Bab have been puffing marijuana from a small pipe, Bab offering it once with raised eyebrows but not asking again. It doesn’t seem to affect them other than they’ve stopped talking much at all and sometimes they chuckle at jokes Tyler doesn’t catch. They seem to talk with their music. Once during the last song they were staring at each other quizzically, then Bab dipped his head and did a little something with a bass string, and Lawrence laughed and said, “That?” and this was the only word in the conversation.
His mother, he knows, would love them. She would. There is no doubt in Tyler’s mind that she would love these two guys. His mother would love everything in this cabin.
They are into their fifth or sixth song when Tyler se
es what he’s been waiting all evening to see. Kim’s muscular high-beams violate the whole forest with false daylight then turn into the drive and momentarily hurt his eyes.
She’s been a long time coming. He wonders how many wrong logging roads were taken, if they fought much, and how difficult she found the sporadic track of beer cans he’d left for her beside the road. He understands that his father didn’t leave any cans.
The SUV stops behind the pickup midway up the drive, a door opens and but doesn’t close and the beam of Tyler’s reading light bounces toward him — his mother must be running.
Tyler bets the candles must look pretty eerie from out there. The reading light runs nearer then slows and stops at the biggest window and there is his mother’s face, dim, pressed to the glass. She’s alone and frantic and — compared to the good things going on here in this cabin — of another world.
GARGOYLES
It’s two or three but he isn’t asleep. Propped on an elbow he peers out his window at the noise. Down on the street, under the street light whose braying he detests, a panel van has inched up to the curb. Under such light it’s hard to tell if the van is silver, or white, or even yellow. He decides to see it as white. He can tell from a sudden lack of something that the van has been turned off. Three men get out. The third one, the driver, trots to catch up to the others, his stomach jiggling in a T-shirt that’s either white or yellow. The driver carries a hammer.
He lights a candle and turns to his bedside table, the old radio and its parts spread out over the butcher paper. It’s an odd thing to have in a bedroom, but all his work now takes place here. Such a scatter so close to his head while he sleeps — he wonders if it affects his dreams. The radio is from the 1930s or 1940s, and unlike the circuit boards of today has lots of parts. Some of the screws are so small, some of the washers so paper-thin that he sees himself in a fit of hearty snoring maybe breathing something in. It’s a beautiful old radio, high deco, its shoulders — what would be its shoulders if a radio had shoulders — made of an early plastic, naively but confidently grooved, its colour an attempt at ivory. The radio’s shell and its dissembled parts flicker in the candlelight. It looks rather Frankenstein-like. He doesn’t know what else to do with this radio, how much more he can take it down. He doubts he can get the tubes apart without breaking the glass.
