Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  When they were packed and leaving to go wherever they went, Alvin, already in the car, shook his hand and asked him to take care of the grave, letting his eyes drift in this direction. My father murmured reassurances: he wouldn’t let her grave remain unmarked.

  Yet he did. I’m trying to understand the integument that holds us together in whatever proper ways, and I measure his love for her by his failure to follow through. He could bury her. He had to. But he couldn’t complete the loss. A grave that isn’t marked is more there than one that isn’t.

  And so I have no way to find my older sister. Nothing here helps me regain her—no off-color in the grass to suggest an extra grave, no out-of-place smoothness or unevenness in the ground. I’ve walked up and down these rows of stone, fence to fence to fence to fence, tree to standing tree. There’s nothing. Yet she’s here. The elm leaves clatter. It could be speech. It could be filling lungs.

  Delayed Flight

  STANLEY GREW WEARY OF the smell of grief. He smelled it when he entered the bedroom at night, having waited, doing other things, until he knew Kris was asleep or pretending to be. It was as if she’d breathed in her own tears until they’d salted the inside of her lungs. Even after a shower there was on her skin a musty and bitter-almond scent that blamed him. She didn’t blame him. But her grieving did. The smell of the bedroom did. The way he’d come into the kitchen and realize she’d been crying by the way she stood at the counter with her back to him, her hands doing nothing.

  The smell of the herd was something else entirely. Within its aura of dung and humid air he didn’t have to remember all those events he wasn’t there to see: his daughter getting into the car, the long ride she took, the fat stranger sitting next to her, the knife, and everything else that could be reconstituted from the evidence—and so much could be reconstituted, including her need for him, the strength in his arms that could heave a fence post fifty feet or grip a neck if it had to and crush a windpipe just like that.

  The bison shit and stand and eat. They give birth. They flow up and down the hills like a slow brown current, like water moving in another edition of time.

  On their little wheels jets rolled out of the snow, and the snow reclaimed and engulfed them. All flights out of O’Hare were canceled. For the third time the announcement came, and Stanley still sat, watching through the plate glass windows the remaining planes arriving like immense animals lost in the weather and dazed by their former speed. He would have to call Kris, and she would tell him he should have come home yesterday, the weatherman had warned them, and now there was nothing he could do.

  Nothing he could do. Stanley rose from his chair. Outside the window the storm seemed to thicken precipitously. Then it coalesced into the shape of a jet, so close he backed away.

  He thought of this weather sweeping over the old Valen house, the utter isolation there, and the buffalo calm and unconcerned, turning their heads into the wind and letting the snow collect on their coats, and then beginning to drift, the whole herd moving with the lead cow toward the source of the storm. They would come, before they reached it, to the fence he’d built, and there they would gather, baffled but untroubled, everything in the world as it was, and only he, imagining them, desiring the fence gone so they could continue onward toward high pressure twenty or thirty or fifty miles away. Lightless night and snow and the black animals within it. How much they fit.

  He wouldn’t get back to them today. Or, if this storm kept up, tomorrow. They were as indifferent to his care as to the weather, but he thought how good it would be to see them. Not to be among them, they didn’t allow that. But to stand at a distance which they defined and watch.

  The first four motels he called were full. When the fifth had a room, he took it, though it was spendier than he cared for. The taxi driver, an immigrant from some African or Caribbean country, drove as if he’d never seen snow, skidding and spinning and keeping up a cheerful, broken-English commentary while the wipers chugged and the heater blasted air. Hey, tanks, mon, he said when Stanley handed him two twenties for the twenty-eight-dollar fare. Stanley had been going to ask for six dollars back, but the man was so pleased that Stanley said, You’re welcome, and stepped into the swirling cold.

  A bellman ducked out to hold the door, and then Stanley was inside the warmth and enclosed light of the lobby, and everything was calm and ready, and he went up the brass-doored elevator to the eighteenth floor and a room like a tiny kingdom. He dropped his bags and flopped onto the bed. A little refrigerator hummed, and air moved through metal vents, and the bed creaked gently with his breathing. He shut his eyes and let despair leak out of him.

  Ever since his daughter’s death the sense of something imminent had plagued him—the sense that outrage lay just under the crust of normal order and could erupt at any moment, and no structure he had built around himself could withstand its force. But the snow outside, striking quietly against the windowpanes and piling up, suppressed the possibility of happening, of event. He let the expanse of the feeling take him.

  The sound of loud snow woke him—hard snow striking the window with a strange insistence. The room had gone dark except for the illuminated switches on the wall, and a pale strand of light where the drapes were slightly parted. The scratching continued, and Stanley thought he saw—it seemed like a dream he was so barely awake—a shadow transit that narrow strand.

  He rose softly from the bed, reminding himself he was eighteen stories up in the middle of a blizzard. Even so he approached the window sideways. The scratching came again. For a moment he felt the unreason of fear before he calmed it and knew: it was pigeons. He pushed the drapes carefully apart.

  And stepped back from what he saw. A falcon was perched on the window ledge, pressed against the glass, snow resting on its shoulders as carelessly as a cloak. Beyond it, the storm resided, so thick that across the street another motel was nothing but a pile of obscure lights. Snow falling, and the bird. Its hard, startling eye. He didn’t know if it had seen him or not. He hadn’t turned the room light on. He stood a foot from the window, and it stood a foot from him, and snow came down and lay weightless on its feathers, and he knew somehow it was female and young. He closed the drapes to protect it from his eyes.

  When he bought the place he’d removed all the rundown, rotting fences the Valens had built and gathered them into a tangled pile of rust and barbs and dry-rotted posts. He’d scraped a hole in the earth with his front-end loader, pushed the pile into it, and covered it. He drove the tractor back and forth to pack the dirt down, wondering how many centuries it would take for the wire to rust away and turn the soil red.

  Then he built the buffalo fence around the boundary of the ranch—eight feet high, posts as thick as railroad ties, and wire strung so tightly it sang on touch. The interior of the ranch he left completely open. The herd had its own definition of space and allowance, but he gave them what he could.

  He didn’t remember how he got there, that night he found out. The miles were erased from his mind. He could remember the first words of the argument that would come to define their lives: Kris, coming back from the bathroom looking like a ragged, half-deflated balloon moved by random currents of air, saying: We should have known. We must have known.

  We didn’t know, he said. You can’t let yourself go there.

  Already they were fossilizing, already locking in to the views each of them needed, and useless to each other.

  She quit rodeo, Kris said. Way back then. It must have started way back then.

  He felt his head like an iron weight swinging, torsioned on refusal.

  No, he said. If you didn’t see it then, you can’t remember it now.

  Greggy Longwell had told them their daughter was targeted because she was anorexic. She’d hidden it from them, or they’d let her hide it. Once they heard the term they understood some things—but that didn’t mean they knew before.

  Other people came, the Mattinglys and Morrisons and Thompsons, and Stanley had gone outsid
e and had kept walking, to his pickup, but there were no miles in his memory, he was just, suddenly, in a deeper darkness, hearing the herd shuffling, waiting to see if he was going to betray the distance between them. He realized he’d been walking toward them, and he stopped, and their smell rammed into his lungs. He sat down in the grass. The herd didn’t move away.

  Stanley stood in the motel shower for a long time, at the edge of scalding, the water pulsing like needles. By the time he shut the water off, he felt formless and spongy. The bathroom was a contained cloud, his body in the fogged-up mirror a pink slab. It helped: he felt hungry. He dressed and was about to leave the room when he turned and went back to the window and parted the curtain. The peregrine slept, its head under its wing. Snow swept in long lines through the window’s light. If a wind surged down the canyon of the city’s towers strong enough to blow the falcon off the ledge, it would wake from whatever dreams it dreamed to nothing under it—and, element of air, calmly unfold its wings.

  He was studying the menu when a waitress appeared at his elbow. She had dark brown hair, cut short, a wide, full mouth, a young and open face, green iridescent eye shadow. Jade blue-green earrings, carved like small alligators or crocodiles, with tiny jewels for eyes, hung from her lobes. They reminded Stanley of the Mayan art he’d seen the day before at the Field Museum of Natural History. She smiled. He realized he was staring at her.

  Bet you’re stuck here, she said cheerfully.

  Her words came out in clear little syllables that seemed to define a private space and to enclose the moment: he was here, now. Inside a storm that wouldn’t let him go. He had a little menu thing to decide, and that was all.

  It was so small. He experienced a spurt of lightness—a feeling he hadn’t known for a year and a half—and with it, gratitude.

  The waitress’s name, pinned to her black uniform above her left breast, was trace. He stared at that name, then, with a little start, said: Yes. The airport’s shut.

  Bummer, huh? I bet you could use a drink.

  I could. A whiskey sour.

  Got it.

  No. Make it Scotch.

  He always ordered whiskey sours. But the feeling of being cut off from everything had overtaken him, the sense that he could free himself, for this little time, from himself, even from his own tastes and preferences.

  Neat?

  He stared.

  Or on the rocks?

  Oh. On the rocks.

  Got a brand?

  He knew the names of Scotches and could have supplied one, but he hadn’t expected this question either. He just wanted to be someone different, a man who drank Scotch instead of whiskey sours. He hadn’t thought to be a man who drank a particular kind of Scotch.

  Surprise me, he said.

  She strolled unhurriedly away between the tables, swinging her hips to miss them. In a few minutes she returned, bringing the Scotch on a tray, amber and dewy, reflecting in its deep interior the candles in their red glass bulbs. Her smile as she came toward him seemed half-devotional, as if the glass were a sacred object, and she bent to a ritual. She set it down, leaning close. He smelled skin and musk perfume. A stone crocodile or alligator swung toward him as she rose, almost nipped his cheek, then swung back and snapped at her smooth jaw line.

  Ready to order? she asked.

  He felt so unburdened even speech seemed new: the way her r’s rolled off her tongue like a foreign language.

  My name’s Stan, he said. It’s good to meet you.

  He wanted an introduction to mark this little time. He’d always been two-syllable Stanley, and he almost said the second syllable. He felt his tongue touch the inside of his mouth above his teeth for the L, but he stopped and let it fall, and with it so much.

  Stan, she said. Her tongue, he noticed, didn’t even seek the L. It was gone completely.

  I’ve never met anyone named Trace, he told her.

  She looked down at the nametag, then looked back up, jubilant.

  You still haven’t, Stan, she said. It’s Tray-see.

  Oh. Tray-see. I see.

  She laughed at the rhyme, and Stanley, hearing it then, laughed with her.

  They make us wear these stupid nametags, Trace said.

  Then she leaned forward and spoke in a mock-conspiratorial tone.

  Want to know a secret? Even Tray-see’s not my real name. They make you wear a nametag. But it doesn’t have to be your real name. All they care about’s the tag.

  She stood again, triumphant, crocodiles’ jeweled blue eyes winking in the various lights.

  So, what is your real name, then?

  She wrinkled her nose pleasingly. In here, she said, Tray-see’s as real as it gets.

  Wind blew against the window a few feet from the table. Stanley flashed to the falcon high up somewhere—he couldn’t locate the direction of his room—plummeting, and its unperturbed waking.

  But Trace’s quiet, meaningless conversation brought him back.

  What brings you to Chicago?

  A convention.

  Where you from?

  Rapid City. That’s where I fly back to.

  He wanted to avoid this infringement of fact but couldn’t think fast enough to steer the conversation away, or to make up a different answer. The truth was just there, saying itself. But the effect of the truth was like the lie he wished he’d told—as if he’d named a place exotic and impossible.

  Rapid City? she exclaimed. I’ve always wanted to see Mount Rushmore.

  It’s pretty grand. It’s—

  But you’re just flying to there. Where are you really from?

  Twisted Tree. It’s a little—

  What a great name. Twisted Tree.

  Her lips wrapped around the syllables as if they were physical things she shaped. But Stanley didn’t want to remember Twisted Tree. He suddenly saw the town as he imagined she would, with its graveled side streets and single café and stoplight, the hulks of reservation racers on cement blocks in dusty front yards, and the stone-pitted ranch pickups banging down the highway.

  There’s nothing there, really, he said.

  Then the magnitude of its meaning ripped through him. Nothing.

  You OK? the waitress asked.

  Stanley picked up the glass. He’d forgotten he’d ordered Scotch, and the raw whiskey made his eyes water, but the effort to keep from coughing, to deal with his body’s reaction, settled him.

  I’m fine, he said.

  He looked into the girl’s face and felt grateful for her presence.

  How about Chicago? he said. Isn’t it exciting?

  She shrugged her shoulders. The alligators—alligators would be Mayan—looped and raged. She held a pen, and she lifted it like a conductor’s baton to indicate the restaurant.

  Right here’s it, she said. Trace’s life. Exciting as it gets.

  She regarded the room with such resignation that Stanley couldn’t even protest.

  I raise buffalo, he said, to shift the conversation. That was the convention I was at.

  Buffalo? You actually raise them?

  I do, he said.

  Wow! I’ve never even seen one.

  For a moment Stanley was baffled. She’d never seen a buffalo? It seemed an unaccountable deprivation, like a private extinction.

  If you ever get to Twisted Tree, I’ll show you, he said.

  I’ll remember that, Stan. I’ll hold you to it.

  You do that.

  But I better take your order. My manager’ll be after me.

  What’s good?

  She shrugged a dozen ways at once.

  Depends on what you like.

  How’s the salmon?

  He usually ordered beef, or buffalo if a restaurant had it, but he thought he’d order something else here.

  It’s good, she said. But your breath will smell like fish.

  He was just going back to his room to sleep, but she was smiling so delightfully, it was all light and good again, and he played along.

  I
sure wouldn’t want that, he said. I guess I’ll have a T-bone.

  She recommended a bottle of wine. He’d have only himself to confront in the morning, and it was pleasant to drink the wine and eat slowly and feel the immensity of the stopped world. Trace refilled his glass when it got low. He enjoyed how her wrist arched when she tipped the bottle. Then she tipped the bottle vertically, and a last drop of red liquid thickened on its lip and fell shimmering into its own small waves.

  She brought the ticket in its little black folder and set it near his elbow.

  So, you going back tomorrow?

  If the airport’s open.

  They never close an airport long. People have to leave.

  In the morning time would resume—all the schedules and itineraries, the implied commitments and promises engaged, the clock hands meaningful. A nostalgia for this evening, fueled by the wine, overcame him.

  This was nice, he said. The meal. All of it.

  I’m glad, she said.

  Remember, now, if you decide to see Rushmore—

  I’ll stop in Twisted Tree and ask for Stan.

  For a moment he let himself believe it, that she’d show up and he’d take her out to see the herd and enjoy her wonder at this good thing he could show her.

  She gave the folder a little push.

  Whenever you’re ready.

  He looked at the folder. It was time to go.

  I’ll take care of it right now, he said. Save you a trip.

  Tripping’s what I do. But OK.

  She left with his credit card and quickly returned.

  You’re set, she said.

  Thanks, Trace, he said. You—

  We’ll see you, Stan.

  Then she was gone. Slowed by the alcohol, it took him a while to figure a twenty-percent tip. But after he’d written it and signed the receipt, it didn’t seem enough. He wanted her to know how much he’d appreciated her. He reached into his wallet to give her another twenty, but looking at the money there, he had the sudden urge to empty himself—of something. He pulled all the bills out, he didn’t even know how much money it was, he didn’t feel like knowing, he just wanted to be profligate in riddance, without counting or comparing. He had more money in his suitcase, it wasn’t sacrifice he sought—just momentary lightness, the doing without consideration. He dropped the money onto the opened folder and closed it and stood. He looked into his empty wallet. It contained a plastic tab to hold two quarters, and long ago he’d put two quarters in it and forgotten them because bills had always covered them up. He dug the quarters out and laid them on the table, too, then placed his wallet in his pocket. He liked the way it felt, so thin. He stumbled, then carefully made his way to the elevators. The doors closed with their conclusive click and reconstituted him, wavy and boxed, within their brassy blur.