Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  He put his arms around her.

  But she shuddered.

  Brock felt it and stepped back. He picked a magazine off the end table, collapsed on the couch, opened the magazine, and stared at the page.

  People can’t see through headlights, Ang, he said. You’re making threats where there ain’t none. Anyone else here’d brag if they caught Shane. What’s going on with you?

  Four years into their marriage, still childless and starting to believe he always would be, Brock walked into the house one afternoon and heard the telephone buzzing. He called out for Angela but got no answer, then looked in the garage to see if the car was gone. He stared at its solid presence, wondering why he would think the phone off the hook had something to do with the car. Then he realized he’d imagined it gone for good. He’d never considered Ang would just pick up and leave, but there the thought was, as if it came out of the garage itself or out of the angry, insistent buzzing of the phone: a vision of the car gone and the house empty, and he staring into the drawer where they kept the can opener, figuring out the business of supper.

  The vision, brief as it was, frightened him. He tried to shake it from his mind as he walked through the entryway. He went to the kitchen, saw the phone hanging from its coiled cord, and replaced it in the cradle. When the buzzing stopped the house was completely silent. He thought he might hear her breathing somewhere. He walked into the living room and was startled to find her staring out the window, her back to him. She didn’t turn around.

  She’s telling me she’s leaving, he thought. They stood in the colloidal silence.

  Speaking in a monotone to the window, Angela said: Roberta called. Mom had an aneurysm. She’s gone. Just like that.

  Oh—my God, Ang.

  That pause: He’d almost said thank God.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen, she said. I can’t believe it.

  He saw her shake her head, as if trying to dislodge other words. He stepped across the room. He thought she’d turn to him, but she didn’t, so he put his arms around her from behind, put his head over her shoulder, his cheek against her hair. In the window’s faint reflection their hair blended together so that he couldn’t tell hers from his.

  Her body didn’t change under his touch. It wasn’t a time for disappointment, but Brock was disappointed. He wanted his body, right now, to mean something to her. To have at least the power of comfort.

  I’ll call Stanley Zimmerman to do chores, he said. We can leave in the morning.

  If she had turned and folded herself into him, if her limbs had loosened, the conformations of her body changed against him, he might have said things less pragmatic, less tuned to action and solution.

  Her shoulder blades stiffened even more.

  Look at those snakes on that rock, she said.

  Her mother had just died—and here she was, with this old argument. Brock couldn’t see anything on the rocks, and as far as he knew, his eyesight was good. He opened his arms and stepped back.

  Actually, the Zimmermans just had that baby girl, he said. You give birth in a car, you oughta get a break from doing chores. I’ll call Richard Mattingly.

  On the way to Sioux Falls the next morning, when Brock saw the small wayside rest along the two-lane road they were taking east, he pulled over. He didn’t need a restroom. He just needed to be alone. He didn’t understand the depth of the silence in the car. He pulled up to the unmowed lawn that bordered the area, parked parallel to it, and got out, stumbling over a rock hidden in the crabgrass and nearly touching the bottom of the door frame. He left the door open and made his way to the cinder-block restroom. In the stale semidarkness, he leaned against the concrete wall and looked at himself in the mirror over the enamel sink. It was an old mirror, wavy and water-spotted, and it made his face saggy.

  The night before, he’d gone out after supper to make sure things were in place for Richard Mattingly. When he returned to the house he found Angela sitting on the couch, her eyes swollen, her face red. He had a guilty, uneasy feeling that her grief was out of proportion: he got along with her mother better than she did. But it wasn’t fair to judge someone else’s grieving, and he sure couldn’t ask her why her mother’s death bothered her so much.

  Ang, he said gently, you packed yet?

  He went to her, held out his hand.

  You got to pack, he said.

  She let him pull her off the couch, and he took her to the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed while he pulled things from the closet, and if she nodded, he put them in a suitcase.

  When they’d both returned from the restroom he asked if she could drive. He wanted to escape her silence. If he stayed awake, it would wear him down, or he’d have to probe it, and that would wear him down, too. He crawled into the back seat and fell almost instantly asleep.

  Angela stared into the low, rising sun. Dozens of times last night, while Brock was outside, she’d tried to call Caleb. When she’d heard Brock open the door she’d burst into tears, then gone to the couch and tried to compose herself. Again this morning she’d tried, then remembered Caleb was in Rapid City, out of touch. The astonishing fact of it left her numb. Events were sweeping her along, way, way beyond her control, and the one person she had to talk to she couldn’t.

  Ten miles down the road she felt a touch of low breeze on her foot. She shifted her leg away from it, but in a few moments the touch came again, harder, sensuous. She unlocked her eyes from the light before her and leaned over and peered through the steering wheel at her feet. For a moment she could see nothing, could only feel, not even a touch—a pressure—on her ankle. Then the sunlight still blinding her faded out of her eyes like a surface breaking up, and the dim floor of the car took shape underneath it. Her breath was jerked from her chest. A rattlesnake thick as her forearm lay under the clutch and brake pedal, its blunt, triangular head touching her ankle softly as air.

  She tried to speak, but her throat closed around Brock’s name. The snake moved. It flowed past her feet, long and easy in the dim light near the floor, its body looping against her. The muscles were like waves of stiffened water, the scales smooth and cool. It could have been silk. It could have been nothing. It eased itself under the brake pedal and paused, loosely stretched out, its head upon her sandal, its tongue flickering. She heard a faraway moaning, growing until it penetrated the blanket of horror that enveloped her: a semi’s air horn. The greater danger pulled her eyes up, the horn devastatingly loud. She was in the left lane, a great, blunt square of chrome and painted metal fifty yards away. She jerked the wheel to the right, her foot still frozen to the accelerator, as if the top and bottom of her body were disconnected. The car yawed into the right lane, bouncing on its shocks, just as the semi’s left wheel crossed the centerline, moving to avoid her. She could see the driver’s startled eyes as he pulled back, a young man her own age, wearing a baseball cap, and then they were sliding by each other, a foot away, the trailer flickering as sunlight careened off it.

  And then the trailer, in the mirror, swaying and diminishing, its brake lights glaring red—but she was going, she was nonstop, alone, the empty road. In the back seat Brock stirred but didn’t wake. The snake’s tongue and the underlying fangs, folded back, were inches from her foot. If she moved or spoke, she was sure it would strike. But she had to see Brock, had to know she wasn’t alone. Brock had once told her to move slowly around animals. She remembered that and let her hand drift off the steering wheel, as if the air were lifting it, to the mirror. She slowly rotated it down until she could see his face in its oblong circumference—his closed eyes, his mouth that seemed to be half smiling though his face was vacant, the white tips of his teeth. She touched his face within the mirror, as if to wake him there. Then she let her hand return to the steering wheel and willed her own paralysis.

  The snake’s tongue probed the air. It curved along the floor of the car, its scales scraping the plastic mat, its head moving away from her foot. Then it doubled back on itself, relapsed into stil
lness as if removing itself from the world. Miles and wind and light pouring down. Then movement again, complete and at once, and its chiseled face returning. She was wearing shorts, and she knew what the snake was about to do.

  And though she prayed that it would not, it did. Though she prayed to God to kill it, it remained alive. Its head moved forward. Its tongue, light as an insect, brushed her bare ankle. Then it raised its head. It lay the bony underpart of its jaw on her instep, rested there a moment, then glided up onto her, the flex of its body pushing against her bare skin. She could feel the muscles working beneath the scales, and for a moment the animal was staring into her face through the spokes of the steering wheel. Its mouth, under the heat-sensing concavities in its face, was slightly open. The white fangs were curled back against the roof.

  It moved, farther up: the scales cool, pushing. It came onto her lap, hung its head over the air toward the door. The thickness of the thing gripped her skin.

  The car pounded down the road. Even her prayers had stopped. She had never been so isolate: all calling out contained, her skin a border defining her in opposition to the world.

  Brock stirred. In the mirror his eyes remained shut, his face calm and glowing, ardently oblivious, the face of a stranger in another realm.

  The snake curled its head back toward her, hesitated, then laid it on her thigh. She felt the loops of its body tighten momentarily, and then the muscles under the scales relaxed and went still. The lidless eyes remained open, but she knew: it had gone to sleep.

  It had put an infant’s claim on her. Had curled up on her lap and gone to sleep. It had made of her stillness a stillness of care.

  Brock stirred again. He struggled, as if trying to remain asleep, then sat slowly up. His foot bumped her seatback.

  She could no longer feel the snake against her legs. It had borrowed her warmth, her skin its skin.

  Where are we? Brock mumbled. How far we come?

  She couldn’t answer. She glanced in the mirror to find him, moving only her eyes, but she’d turned the mirror down and his face was gone from it, nothing there but an empty pillow with a depression in the center.

  Ang? C’mon, now. You gotta start talking. I’m just asking where we’re at.

  Then he sensed a new depth in her silence and pulled himself forward.

  Ang? You sleeping at the wheel?

  She could feel his breath in her hair, could smell the tang of sleep in it, and the sweat on his skin. Then he put his head over the seat, and his breathing stopped.

  Jeeee-suss Christ, he whispered.

  All those s’s moving in her hair, meeting her ear: not just sound but touch: a tiny, connective thread, words that were barely words, coming to her far under the louder sounds of tires and road seams.

  She felt the seat move backwards as Brock slowly pulled himself forward. She knew he was peering sideways into her face, though she didn’t turn her head to him, didn’t do anything that would wake the sleeping creature in her lap. Brock’s breath came out in a long sigh. She wanted to lean into it, and she wanted to jerk away from it, but she did neither, and for a moment her stillness protected everything.

  Then in a movement so swift Angela was never able to re-create it, Brock’s right hand shot around the seatback under her arm and clamped onto the snake just behind its head. It erupted to life, writhing in the air as he jerked it up and hauled it out, its coils striking her shoulders and chest. Its rattle went off, filling the car. She felt that rattle for a moment vibrating, hot as a brand, against her bare thigh. The mouth in front of Brock’s fist opened wide with curving teeth.

  Stop the car, he yelled.

  The snake thrashed. Its tail looped around her right shoulder and arm, clinging, the rattle near her ear like delirium, like light, a bright thing in her brain, and for a moment she couldn’t see the road. She might have blacked out. Then the highway was unwinding before her again, and the snake was gone, the rattle shrilling behind her, and over it Brock yelling at her to stop.

  But she couldn’t stop. She was paralyzed and fleeing both, and in the rearview mirror she saw the pillow, and on it the snake’s wizened head, and accusing eyes: it had slept on her skin. In time she would speak to Brock of this, but he would shake his head and tell her it was just being a snake, all along just being a snake, just confused by the vibrations and heat of the car, it couldn’t even distinguish her. That’s all that had happened. Nothing more. She even probably could have called to wake him, snakes can’t hear, it would’ve been just another vibration added to the chaos.

  The air pressure inside the car changed as Brock opened the rear window.

  No, Brock, she cried.

  Except she didn’t. The words would have given him pause, but she never spoke them.

  In the side mirror the snake twisted in the car’s false wind, awkward and out of its element, an antithesis of bird, a deformity of wing. It hit the road. It rolled like a hose. But its rattle still filled the car. Then she realized her scream had replaced it, language degraded into anarchy, blanketing the words she’d held inside. She felt Brock’s hands on her—in her hair, against her shoulders, rubbing hard into her, and she heard his calm voice in her ear.

  You can stop now, Ang. Just go ahead and lift your foot. You know how to do that. Go ahead and lift your foot.

  But her feet were rigid and far away, her body was far away, and she was fleeing it.

  Then Brock, still rubbing her shoulders, still moving his hands against her, still in the same soft, melodious chant, but lighter, almost laughing, said: No need to hurry like this, Ang. Your ma won’t be any deader if we get there a few minutes late.

  It got through to her. She lifted her foot and let Brock pull her from the car, and she went limp in his arms as he held her by the side of the road. Two days later, in her old bedroom, after her mother’s funeral, with dark falling and the lights of Sioux Falls shining dimly and without force through the gauze of curtains, and Roberta and her husband and children somewhere in other rooms, all of them aware of her mother’s absence, she left her diaphragm out.

  You sure, Ang? Brock asked. You really sure?

  She murmured and raised her arms to him.

  Because she’d learned she could be cruel. She could throw off what laid a claim to her. She could be as hard as she had to be, and as still, and as silent. What had happened never should have happened. But it had. She’d thought she was swimming in a sea of honesty, and that it was her natural state. It was a lie. She and Caleb should have been less honest from the start.

  After they returned from Sioux Falls, Brock went out to the draw with a pickax, shovel, and shotgun. She sat in a lawn chair, sipping water, listening to the clang of metal against rock, the sounds, from the distance she watched, disconnected from the movements that produced them. She saw him run to one side, then another, jabbing with the shovel. Three times he stooped for the shotgun, pointed it below the horizontal, the dust the pellets made marking the perimeter of a circle the snakes could not escape. From where she sat it looked manic and comic and awful.

  She thought how unnecessary it was. But she let him have his guilt. And when he returned to the house, blood-spotted, behind him the black smoke of a diesel fire rising, she said: Burn your clothes, too.

  In the wind the stench of burning flesh. He’d nodded mutely. She’d risen from the chair. She thought of how much a mother could protect a child. Not entirely, she thought. But some.

  She let that thought sink in, its small, redemptive hope. She pulled her eyes away from the curling smoke. Then she walked into the house to be with her husband. Within two years the snakes in the draw returned. One day she came across the boots Brock had bought for her. She took them from the closet and pulled them on.

  Looking Out

  ALL MY LIFE I’ve had a memory of movement, and of opening and shutting doors. Riding subways in strange cities, I will sometimes be convinced, as the doors hiss shut and the car lurches, that I’ve been on this same train before. Gett
ing in and out of taxis will create the same sensation. For most of my life I thought it was just a mild quirk of my brain.

  At ninety-two, my mother takes almost any death in stride, so I thought the news of Eddie Little Feather dying on the highway would be little more than an item to help me pass an afternoon with her. But she was visibly upset, and when I asked her what was wrong, she asked: You don’t remember?

  What am I supposed to remember? I replied.

  Eddie’s grandmother coming out when we owned the Valen place, she said. You were maybe five. She wanted to look for her father’s grave. We didn’t believe those stories, but what could we do? Your father took her out, and you went along. The three of you spent all day driving that ranch. By the end, you were sitting on her lap. You had sandwiches together, out near the buffalo jump. You never found the graves. But after that your father was always looking for them. Cecelia Little Feather convinced him. I’m surprised you don’t remember. You kept asking when that woman was coming back. I like that looking, you said.

  I had a flash of a long finger lifted into a patch of light, and a voice, very low, saying, Here, and a sense of jolting, strange arms holding me, the sound of doors shutting. It was all there at once, sensation more than memory, as if the past had drifted forward to surround me. I recognized it as the original of what I felt in subways.

  Maybe I do remember, I said.

  Your father really wanted to find those graves.

  I doubt they exist, I said. Bea Conway doesn’t think they do.

  Bea Conway doesn’t know everything about events. She only thinks she does.

  She’s spent a lot of time researching, Mom.

  Because a grave isn’t marked doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  I know that.

  It may mean it’s more there, even.

  More there?

  Without moving her hand, she lifted her index finger off the chair arm and held it raised, watching it, then set it slowly back down. Then she met my eyes.