One of my hands reached upward and dug deep into the char opposite me. My other hand joined it, and I hung there, gradually climbing the shaft of the tree, toward the fading splash of sky. Rebecca was not here.
They dragged the dog out of the tree, the beast yammering, tearing at the soil. The ax blows resounded, and now there was a new pitch to each blow, splintering wood. Far below, at the base of the interior, a hand reached and missed, and tried again. The hand found a grip and with a great heave a section of the tree broke free.
I dug my fingers into the ancient charcoal, and thrust my head and shoulders through the top of the tree. The redwood was still alive, despite its hollow core. They were killing it, and I knew as I teetered there that Rebecca was in trouble. I couldn’t see her, but I could tell.
Richard—help me.
Joe Timm’s face was gaunt, his eyes searching the ground with nothing of his old self-assurance. Two hundred miles out of his jurisdiction, he was not in charge of these people, but stood among them with natural authority as lights were switched on so the saws could finish their work.
Joe was unshaven. He wore a hunting jacket that hung loosely. He touched his mouth and rubbed his bristled chin, a habitual gesture, nervous. He put one hand on his hip, where a handgun, or a flask, offered him some security.
How is your wife?
Joe did not look up, but he took his hand away from his hip and stood like a man looking off the edge of a cliff. He bunched his fists. And then, only after a long moment, gathering strength, did he look up again.
The others saw me at the same time he did. The saw fell silent raggedly, sputtering, stalling. The dog saw me, too, and cringed, whining, circling, his handler struggling.
Joe Timm gazed up at me, and a sad smile creased his face. He shook his head. Compassion for Joe stilled me, so I was unprepared for the blast of the shotgun. Buckshot ripped past me. Joe spun to seize the barrel of the gun. The dog sniffed frantically, searching the ground, looking up, demanding. When he saw me the dog leaped in my direction, his chain a taut, straight line.
Then I saw her.
She was in the branches of a nearby tree, human, clinging. The branches shook. She hung on tightly, her face pale with the effort.
“Come away,” I whispered.
She shook her head.
I stretched my arms, reached my hands, letting my fingers regain that scope they had come to know, and I toppled forward. The air supported me, and I rocked to avoid a branch. My lips could not form a word. I swam upward, glided, then scrambled, fighting, winning the treetops.
Follow me I called.
To the west a great wave broke, silent at this distance. To the east Highway One meandered, a string of emergency vehicles, police units, and what I guessed to be a forestry service bus. My inhuman eyes registered this, and I made sense of it only as I circled, my flight always half-broken, one wingbeat away from plummeting.
Below, branches crackled. Heavy feet broke brush. More people were hurrying toward the site. Could she hear me calling her name? Could she guess what had become of me, where I had escaped? I sailed wide over the place I had last seen her.
Treetops are a supple green, bright, half-air. In this night sky I saw what I wanted to see, as though my eyes were the source of illumination. There was no further sign of Rebecca.
What was it I dreamed of being as a boy? Did I want to be a racecar driver, a fireman, a soldier? Surely, all of that. The policeman, the Marine. I was no different than any other boy. And if I dreamed of flying, it was with a cape, or with the wings of a hawk, not like this, a winking, leather span.
But more than anything, I had dreamed of being a hero. In my childhood I had only the slimmest sense of what this amounted to, but I saw now that my adult experience had not made me wiser. All I craved now was to love, and to keep my love from harm.
There was still no sign of her. I hovered in place like a falcon, beating my wings. The bones of my wings ached with the effort. I hated bodies, not this mutant shape, and not the human body, but bodies in general, all bodies. Each one was a trap.
We don’t have much time.
But the flight that would imitate mine did not take place. Something in Rebecca’s character would not let this happen. I nearly fell, and fought hard to stay where I was. I had seen this, too. I had seen this, and known it was coming. I whirled, a brown leaf.
I heard her. Rustling, fluttering.
Branches swayed below, parted. Something struggled upward. A treetop shook, needles raining. A pair of wings escaped the trees.
47
We found ourselves on a cliff overlooking Highway One. There was a sheen on the two-lane road below, drizzle, heavy dew. Sky glowed in the distance, redwoods backlit by spotlights. Was it a helicopter or a low-flying aircraft, those lights circling, that engine sawing back and forth to the north?
Our perch was a log so old the bark was loose, shaggy with moss. Foliage sheltered us, young trees. Redwoods can reproduce like this, new trees towering from the fallen parent. Water dripped from a stream on a rock behind us, roots as fine as eyelashes.
She was aglow. She kissed me, and I could feel her heart. No, it’s not a dream.
“They’re right,” she said.
Don’t question yourself too closely, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her to enjoy this, and not be too curious.
She studied her hand, ran a finger along her palm, her lifeline, the ball of her thumb. She looked at me. “I don’t blame them.”
Her acceptance of our condition surprised me as much as her compassion for our pursuers. But before I could respond she put a finger to my lips and said “Look!”
There was a row of them far below. A car approached along the highway and scarlet came to life, the outlines of the barrier picked out in jewels.
“Reflectors,” I said.
“They keep cars from driving off the cliff?”
“That’s the general idea,” I said.
In an instant she was no longer beside me. I slid, somersaulted, and flew briefly, a drifting stocking. I joined her on the shoulder of the highway.
A pale orange sign leaned beside the road. There was a black puncture in it, a bullet hole. The black arrow on the sign did a swivel-hipped dance. Rebecca put her hand on the metal sign, feeling the hard edge. Danger, I knew the sign meant Curve. The aluminum began to glow again as another car approached.
“They’ll see us,” I said.
It was too late. Like a figure frozen by a flashbulb, Rebecca stood, her fingers splayed across the gleaming goldenrod surface of the sign. The skirt of her gown fluttered as the car gusted past. And the sign was all but colorless again.
The brakelights brightened. The driver’s hesitation was plain by the way the car slowed, almost pulled over. Did you see that? The car was around the curve, the sound of tires receding. A woman, the driver was wondering. Or something else?
Eddies of air carried us. The black chocolate of the forest, the wrinkled whey of the Pacific—it was all below us as we plummeted into the sky.
All day there was wind in the trees. All night there was stillness. Usually we explored second-growth, new trees half a century old growing out of the blackened, forested stumps. Sometimes a dirt road slashed the woods, until the ferns closed in around it and the road ended at a shed of tools, or a shed of nothing, empty, with bare, rusting coat hooks. When it was not yet night I would stir and smell the woods, the remains of redwood generations.
She wanted me to climb, swim, following her lead, and I did. Bright orange slugs, a variety of gastropod, escaped their hiding places each night, and this lowly animal was a prize, a creature like a human organ blessed with ugly immortality.
Such tentative eyes they had, these slugs, on stalks that shrank from touch, from breath. Rebecca loved these night creatures. She cupped moths in her hands, the tremulous, chalky wings that broke into flight at our approach. Mushrooms elbowed from the sides of trees.
One night a bat riffled through
the air, making both of us stop involuntarily before we caught ourselves and laughed.
His squashed, delicate face seemed to drift above us with more than casual curiosity. His voice painted us, gilding our outlines. A particle of lint wafted upward and in an instant the bat shoplifted it from the air, before our eyes could recognize the prey, a minute moth.
When we shrugged upward, winged, we were not met with any ultrasonic cry of fellowship. His voice fell silent. The flutter of our wings was met with a scrambling, scratching tumult in the interior of a tree.
They spilled from a hollow branch with a noise like rustling silk There were no more than a dozen. They eddied around us, pages blown from a desk, drifting, and our attemps to find a place in their circle was met with mild confusion. Our wingbeats rocked them, and they spun away. We settled on a branch, wings folded around us, and hung upside down, calling.
There was no answer. An odor stayed about the tree, a rodent-pungent lair that smacked of instinct and dumb trust in darkness.
There was a source of hot water somewhere in the mountains, and verdure marked the passage of the warm water below the ground, a belt of green. The warmth welled into the pool. We stripped off our clothes and bathed, the chime of the water as it spilled slowly through stones tranquilizing, hypnotic.
The next night we stood at the bat tree, calling playfully with our ordinary, human voices, paying them a visit, a page from a children’s book, The Solicitor Visits Mr. and Mrs. Bat. But nothing stirred in the tree.
They were gone.
Late one night I heard her calling my name and I hurried to see her crouching on a path. A crumpled wad of silver, the size of a coin, lay in the dirt. “I know what this is!” she said.
“Buried teasure,” I said.
“A gum wrapper,” she said.
It was paper with a silver backing that could be, with care, peeled off into a sheet of fine foil. I had not paid attention to gum wrappers in years, although there had been a time in fourth grade when I specialized in making hard metallic pellets out of such stuff and throwing them across the classroom. I sat with Rebecca while we carefully separated the airy, silver-bright membrane, and then buried it like the first coin of what we knew would be a hoard.
People—we were more fascinated by human beings, even by fragments of their litter, than by all the grandeur of nature. I knew what this implied—but for some time Rebecca did not.
She was intrigued by water, the dripping sphagnum of the spring, the creekbed with its spent logs and rounded boulders, the stream ladling from shelf to shelf, step to step. And I knew, even if she did not, what attracted her to this flowing water, these standing pools of fingerlings, fins and slender bodies combed in one direction by the creek.
We can imagine the pond, the mirror, empty after we step away. But it has to be imagined. Living people never actually see an empty mirror when they stand before it. When she crouched and shivered the surface with a hand she was reawakened to herself, her own nature, and mine.
We bled deer for nourishment spiced with chlorophyll, letting the deer free when we had taken what we needed. We hid in the trees, and with the arrival of each night we found our way higher in the mountains. And I knew that it could not go on for much longer. I could feel the colors fade in my vision, my strength dim.
Mice awoke when we did, the forest taking on a new range of sounds, a hush that was only superficial. Every night was vibrant, and we did not feel banished to darkness. We were liberated into it, and relished every hour.
But as Rebecca came to know her own power, and came to understand what she could do, I found her talking more and more of the people she had known, her parents, her brother, even Eric. And I knew why.
She spoke of her favorite music, how easy the best pieces were to play, the sonata, the etude, how six-year-olds could master Mozart. And how difficult they were, how false this simplicity turned out to be. “Not what it seems,” she said. “Simple like living,” she said.
How many nights did we have, four or five, or more? There was no seam between them. The segments, night and day, were not barriers. Each night we came to life higher up in the mountains, deeper in the woods. We could imagine ourselves to be the beginning of creation, not fugitives from one.
“I think Mother came to accept my blindness,” said Rebecca one night. “She said I would be a proof of God’s love, and inspire people to, as she put it, ‘carry their own crosses.’ My parents believe. They have faith.”
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“A simple faith, like a whisper,” she said.
Your faith will become even more simple, I thought.
On waking one evening we could hear them. Quiet voices, a crackle of paper, the sound of a zipper being tugged, snagging. It was across the forest, at the edge of audibility, but at times like this there was no sense of distance. An engine started up, and a transmission whined as a vehicle jockeyed back and forth in a road. We pursued the sound. They were easy to find, and when we made our discovery we sank into the ferns, watching.
Joe Timm folded a map, creasing it with great care between his fingers. He nodded, and one of the men, wearing an orange parka, spoke into a transmitter. A Jeep idled on a fire road, the beams from its headlights knifing the woods.
“You can’t keep doing this,” one of the men was saying.
Joe Timm shook a flask, examined it in his hand appraisingly, and then unscrewed the cap.
“It’s not going to help her, Joe.”
Joe didn’t answer.
“We’ll find them,” said another one of the men. “If they’re here they’re ours.”
Joe Timm nodded, smiling wearily.
“No question,” said the man in the parka.
Joe Timm drank from the flask. He was the last one to climb into the Jeep, standing with one foot up on the chassis and the other one rooted while he gazed at the trees. I could see the intelligence, the need. He knew he was close.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said.
The man in the parka stiffened, about to disagree.
“They can be caught. There’s no question about that. But we’re making a fundamental mistake.” He did not move like the Joe Timm I had met in the halls of power, a man who met friends with a hug not so much out of warmheartedness as out of his need to be possessive, commanding. He eased himself into the backseat of the Jeep, a man uncertain of his movements.
“He was a friend of mine,” I said. “In a professional way. The husky man with the gray hair.”
“I liked him. He had sad eyes,” she said.
We stood in the road, in the fresh ruts torn by the four-wheel drive. “He’s ambitious,” I said. “But I know what you mean. He’s more complicated than I used to think.”
“They’ll be back,” said Rebecca.
An earwig struggled in Joe Timm’s bootprint, pressed into the soil.
48
If the hunt continued it was silent and invisible. This made us more fearful. Were satellites searching for the infrared hue of spilled blood? Were listening devices aimed into the woods, keyed to the sound of a heartbeat, a drop of moisture falling to the forest floor?
I grew to believe that they had some new computer, each tree mapped out, each sapling with its own bar code. The old scripture about every hair being numbered, every sparrow’s fall known, was a source of despair, not of hope.
Each daybreak we secreted ourselves a little farther into the woods.
“Maybe they changed their minds. They don’t really want to catch us,” Rebecca said one night as we followed a deer path.
“That’s not the impression I have,” I said. Old speech patterns sound reassuring. I could not help sounding like someone sitting at a polished teak table, signing a document with a fountain pen.
“They’re following procedure, that’s all,” she said. “Maybe they don’t really care. They’re just going through the motions.”
“It’s possible.”
She stopped and g
ave me a searching look. “That’s what you told me about cops and banks. You said it was all the same—just a matter of procedure. Don’t you remember?”
We left the trees, and crossed a clearing. “Of course I remember. It all seems too far away,” I heard myself say. Rebecca took my hand, recognizing the disturbance in my voice.
Ahead was a group of trees grander than any others we had seen. Two of them were hollow, lightning-charred, but still very much alive. The sight of these trees awed us, and it made us feel conspicuous, self-conscious. We had reached a bare crest in the mountains, much of the distant summit naked magnesium, inhospitable to grass. This stand of mammoth redwoods was a final colony, and beyond was the beginning of a more sun-punished land, rocky, oaks in the folds of canyons.
Everything will be fine as long as we don’t think.
A bird twittered in a low shrub, a junco disturbed in its sleep. Rebecca made an answering trill. The bird squeaked, a query. She answered it, reassuringly.
“That’s very good,” I said. “If nothing else we’ll be able to play Vegas.”
“I think you were going to be a judge some day, on the Supreme Court.”
“Some day my name was going to be in lights.”
“We can stay like this, Richard. For as long as we want.”
Few other trees neighbored these giants. They were not rust-dark like the younger, second-growth trees, but stone-gray. “We can live on the blood of chipmunks,” I said, hoping the conversation would turn into verbal badminton, a game I could win. “And slugs. Is that what you’re saying?”
But she persisted, “You know we don’t have to hurt anyone. You know it, Richard. We have everything we need here.”
I didn’t want to say anything more.
“Don’t you feel it, too?” she asked. “We belong right here.”
The Judas Glass Page 24
