Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  But I had a helluva time steeling myself to walk into that dim kitchen where Shane Valen was perched on a ladder-back chair without his face, a short-barrel twelve-gauge on the floor next to him, and the back of his head blown against the far wall and that window, and the biggest goddamn rattler I’d ever seen coiled in his lap, shaking its tail when I walked through the door.

  May 23, 1991

  Dear Mom,

  I been well, Dad too. He bought another section of land in order he’s raising more horses. People said to him you aint never going to make a go of it raising arabians here but Dad said what its less rain here than in arabia? If you can raise arabians in arabia why cant you raise them in south dakota? Maybe we need to import some sand is that it? And I guess he proved right. We got people from places like france and new york come out to buy dads horses. Them colts sure is cute. Long skinny legs cant hardly stand but you ought to see them run. You wouldnt hardly beleive it. Aint nothing more peaceful of a evening than watching them mares and colts and the sun setting and the grass so green and some of Dads coffee and pie. He added onto the house maybe I told you that already last year or before and sometimes people will stay with us buying horses and all and Dad will just invite them to stay overnight so well sit on the deck and watch the sun go down and its about the finest thing they ever seen they say. And Dads been everywhere buying horses and he talks about them places and its something to hear him talk. Anyways thanks and I hope your well.

  Shane

  Check the date on that letter. First, Shane’s writing more often, ain’t just waiting for his birthday thank-you note in July. Second, Rodney’s been dead fifteen years—and look at him, by God, still making pies but now traveling around the country, too, raising horses, entertaining guests, adding onto his goddamn house. He sure as hell started to live the good life after he died. And every single letter’s like that—Rodney rescuing people stranded in snowstorms and speaking up at public meetings. Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill rolled into one. Shit, in one letter he even learns to speak some goddamn Japanese.

  Ralph must’ve built that house right next to a rattlesnake den. He was in such a hurry to get away from the memories of his old man he didn’t even bother to look where he was going. I suppose for a long time they battled the sonsabitches and kept them down, but somewhere in there that started to seem like a lot of work. So the snakes eventually come back to their old den and by God they see it’s been added on to, so how about that?

  It was a mess getting her out of that car, with them damn snakes everywhere. We opened the doors and poked at them with sticks. Noisy as hell, all them rattles going off. But we finally got them out. It was me, I’d have had guys with shovels smacking the damn things, but news of Shane and Sarah had made it to Rapid, and the county commissioners was afraid the Rapid City Journal or the AP’d show up and report a rattlesnake massacre. And then, who the hell knows what’d happen? Get them goddamn PETA freaks out here holding up signs and telling us rattlesnakes have rights, too. So I had orders: No bad press, just get them sonsabitches out of the car and get this whole mess over with.

  Which is what I would’ve done hadna been for them letters. Once we got her body out we started going through her stuff, a single suitcase was all she brought, and there at the bottom were them packets tied with ribbon. By now I’ve got her ID’d and have figured out Shane murdered his own mother. But them letters—they’re all in the original envelopes—all neatly slit open—all addressed to her, with Shane’s return address. I throw them in an evidence bag, but I ain’t thinking I’m going to have to produce them for any trial, since I didn’t know then that Shane was bringing people back from the dead and might could resurrect himself.

  The whole thing’s at first so goddamn clear. Not a shred of doubt what happened. She comes, he shoots her, shoots himself. And since there wasn’t going to be a trial, there didn’t have to be a motive. And there wouldna been if I’d left them letters alone. But once Rodney come back to life, I couldn’t quit. Shane’s bragging about Rodney started to piss me off, just like when any dumbshit brags, Bill Lipking, say, bragging about his golf score, though Bill’s been doing less bragging since he come back from Tucson and found Lorraine gone to who knows where. In fact, the last time Bill bragged about golf was at Ruination when he made a big deal about shooting a 68 and Miller Freeman had just plain heard enough and leaned over and asked him whether that impressed Lorraine. Of course Bill’s still alive and Rodney was dead, so the comparison ain’t quite accurate, and I maybe should’ve ignored Shane’s bragging on Rodney’s accomplishments. But Rodney Valen, dead or alive, raising Arabian horses? Japanese businessmen sitting on his deck—a deck he didn’t even have? It was too much. I kept reading to find out what other bullshit Shane would invent, the sorry sonofabitch.

  But then I read myself right into wondering about her coming back. I mean, twist this thing around and look at it from her view. She mighta believed every one a them letters. Years of bullshit piling up, but she don’t know it. Her memory of Rodney’s not strong enough to fight off the Rodney Shane’s inventing. So when she comes back to visit, who’s she coming to see? Hell! Her little Shaney and her breeder-of-Arabian-horses-and-pie-making husband. A goddamn dream, that’s what. A goddamn world that ain’t and a person who never was.

  And when she gets here? Shane looks just like his father. Both got that stare like their old ancestor’s, you can see it in Bea Conway’s county history. There the old guy is, staring out, dressed in his best clothes, surrounded by his wife and the kids that lived—Ralph and a couple sisters who married far away—Old Joe in black and the family in white like they’re froth floating up on the surface of something dark. Of course, like I say, Bea doesn’t say anything about him whipping his wife to shreds or the kids who ain’t in the picture. Bea claims she’s a careful historian, and them are the kinds of things she’s careful to ignore. But all I’m getting at is Rodney and Shane both got that Valen look, you could mistake one for the other if you forgot one was forty years older.

  And them letters of Shane’s could make you forget. If anything, Rodney keeps getting younger after he dies. More and more the man Sarah must’ve wanted him to be in the first place. Like time stopped for her. She looked in the mirror every day and saw, sure enough, she was getting older. But them damn letters were making Rodney younger. Like a goddamn fairy tale, near unbelievable—except people believe in fairy tales all the time as long as they ain’t written down and called that. So what’s she thinking when she pulls up to that dry-rot house out there?

  It ain’t nothing like the horse ranch she’s been imagining. Worse than when she left. But Rodney himself steps out the door—and time just crushes itself, and what the house looks like don’t matter. Because he looks like she remembers. Maybe dirtier, but he’s a working man—all them Arabian horses to take care of. There, by God, he is. All these years she’s been half-guilty and wondering what would have happened if she’d stayed. Wondering if Rodney would have been the man she first drove out here for, the man them letters made him into. And now here he is, walking out of the house, holding a twelve-gauge.

  Wasn’t till I had to figure out who the place belonged to that I started to make sense of it all. End of the Valen line, so where’s the land go now? How deep do I have to dig to find the uncles or cousins who got as far from their past as they could but who still had rights to the place? I knew something was up the moment I went in to see Orley Morgan. It ain’t like some high-class lawyer is going to come to Twisted Tree to advance his career, but Orley got even shiftier than usual when I asked him about the Valen estate. Didn’t know a damn thing. Shit no! Jesus! That was so long ago when Rodney died, how the hell could Orley remember?

  I ain’t said a word about Rodney, I pointed out.

  That shut Orley up long enough for me to say: I ain’t testing your memory. Just check your records. You keep records, I suppose?

  Orley started babbling then. He’d been in charge of the Valen estat
e when Rodney died. And Rodney and Sarah hadn’t never got around to divorcing. One a them things just never got done, like cleaning behind the refrigerator. So they were still legally married when Rodney up and spilled that beer in the Ruination bar. And who do you suppose estate law gives damn near the entire estate to? The surviving spouse, that’s who.

  Orley explains this to Shane. And ain’t it odd how every goddamn letter Orley writes to Sarah Cornwall Valen comes back addressee unknown? She musta moved agin, is what Shane tells Orley. Goddamn movingest mother I ever had. And then, shit, seems Sarah Cornwall Valen spends half her time out of the country. She’s in Europe. She likes that kinda thing. Orley couldn’t keep track of all the places Sarah traveled. Every phone call he made, the number was disconnected or someone else answered the phone. Moved agin. Even the goddamn phone company can’t keep up with her. And Orley, of course, is just lazy enough to want to believe it all. He ain’t going to buy much Glenlivet off what he’ll make handling the Valen estate anyway.

  Jesus Christ, Orley, I said. You never got suspicious he was handing you a line?

  Dammit, Greggy, he named cities in Europe. Named buildings. Described them, even. Described what she said was inside them. Named people she was seeing. With foreign names.

  Guess those are the same people who came to visit Rodney later, I said.

  He ignored that, too much for him to process. He picked up this paperweight on his desk, one a them water and fake-snow things that are supposed to make you think there’s a whole world in there. He looks at it like maybe there actually is, then gives it a shake.

  It’s just, he said, Shane didn’t have that kind of imagination. Did he?

  Well, ain’t that the question right there? Shane never once let on he didn’t want Orley to find his mother. Just the reverse. Gave Orley so much help he wore him out. Had him writing letters all the time and all over the place, till Orley’s the one arguing why don’t they just wait. And pretty soon the Valen file gets covered up with other files, and then one day I suppose Orley come across it and just kind of put it in a cabinet to keep from being reminded, telling himself he’ll get back to it when Sarah settles down, and congratulates himself for that decision with a drink. And Shane rents out enough of the ranch to pay the taxes on the whole, and there you are: he gets to live out there and no one around here likely to go out and ask him how that works.

  Seems Shane had more imagination than about anyone here, and enough left over to keep us thinking he didn’t have none. And once he discovered he had it, he couldn’t put an end to it. He’s worried someone’s going to figure out what he done, and he gets more paranoid every year, imagining his mother out there somewhere, antennae up to sense Rodney’s dying so she can come and snatch that land away, which is all he’s got. Without that land, he’s nothing. Hell, he’s still bothered his grandfather sold land before he was even born, so what’s it doing to his head to think about his mother taking away what he’s living on? He imagines her so goddamn hard he resuscitates his father and imagines him, a counter-imagination to keep his imagined mother at bay. Jesus Christ! And all that time alone, sitting in that pickup or taking his naps somewhere, and no one to bring him back to reality, tell him, Shane, the garbage is starting to stink. He mighta started to believe his own bullshit, mighta half thought his father was actually alive. Except it gets even weirder than that.

  For one thing, there’s missing letters. Can’t prove it, of course—like proving there ain’t space aliens or intelligent Democrats. But like I said, weird has its ways. So when Shane writes letters for thirty-four years, faithful as a grandfather clock chiming on his birthday and three or four more a year besides and then in 1997 don’t write for damn near a year and then starts up again, something’s going on. I can’t imagine a guy as goofy as Shane, once he got going with something like that, stopping, and then starting again. It ain’t like someone deciding to take up cross-stitch and then getting too busy for a while. So, if he wrote them, there’s a year of letters she didn’t bring back, who knows why. Not much you can make of evidence that ain’t there, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time trying. But it does make a guy curious, wondering what was in them letters or, if he quit writing, why.

  But even that ain’t the strangest. It’s the direction them letters took once he started writing them again. Course I might not a noticed the gap if Rodney’d just kept his mouth shut—stayed at least that dead. But when the sonofabitch started talking again, in 1998, it kind of made me sit up straight and listen.

  Here’s maybe my favorite from before Rodney found his voice:

  May 19, 1995

  Dear Mom,

  How are you? Were fine. Its spring like I suppose its spring where you are too aint a lot of difference between here and there far as springs concerned I guess. The colts is wobbling around following there mothers like colts do and the meadowlarks is singing how they do I aint never been sure whether its a bell or a whistle they got in there throats. And the swallows and the hawks is flying. National park service people been out talking to Dad about the black-footed ferret I think I told you about that once. Dad got to studying about them ferrets and by god if he didnt up and make himself a expert on them critters. He convinced them national park guys they ought to put some ferrets on our land and you oughta see how Dad watches and mothers them things. They was having trouble with some they put in the badlands so they come out and talked to Dad to see what they was doing wrong. So Dads been gone some this spring off in the badlands with them national park guys keeping them ferrets alive. Ferrets eat prairie dogs maybe you know that and prairie dogs sure make a mess of the grass aint hardly none left for cattle. Theres some people think prairie dogs is endangered now what sense does that make? Like rats should be endangered. Anyway, Dad likes them ferrets so much he says thats how we should be controlling prairie dogs not with poison. But poison now that stuff kills them. Theres times Dads ideas go a bit screwy far as Im concerned but maybe hes right you get enough ferrets they could handle the job. But that manyd be as bad as prairie dogs.

  Shane

  Ain’t that something else? It’s not just Rodney’s a goddamn expert on ferrets, and it’s not just Shane’s making up letters he didn’t goddamn write—he never once before so much as mentioned ferrets, so he’s making stuff up about making stuff up and packing twice the bullshit in per sentence—but now he’s even inventing what Rodney thinks and then, Jesus Christ, arguing with him! It’s just layers and layers of bullshit. And Sarah’s getting this stuff year after year, and she couldn’t have been all that much in touch with reality if she married Rodney in the first place. And she’s guilty about leaving little Shaney, she’d never imagine her little boy could lie. So hell, yes, she believes this stuff, maybe she even gets so mixed up she starts thinking she actually remembers Rodney being the kind of guy Shane’s bullshit’s making him into. So she ties those letters up and forgets what’s in them, except not really—she remembers it as memory. Remembers it as memory: that’s the kind of mumbo jumbo Shane’s got me talking. All I’m trying to get at is, Sarah maybe got to where she couldn’t tell the difference between what she remembered and what she read.

  And like I said, to come out here and marry Rodney in the first place, after meeting him in a bar—if Rodney was telling the truth about that—she had to be one of them women believes love’s a goddamn abracadabra that whooshes the past away to some neverbeen and leaves only the goddamn shining future, unattached, like some Santa Claus gift. And who the hell’s going to tell her she’s stepping onto pockmarked land and a family strange as a three-dollar bill? Love’s a magic act, all right, but that kind of thing don’t fingersnap away. It’s like the elephant that disappears. Only an idiot actually believes it went anywhere.

  So one day her son blasts a weathervane rooster off the barn, and she sees eight years of elephant dung she’s been refusing to notice. Poof! She’s gone. But that don’t erase anything any more’n love did. Elephant just goes on eating and crapping,
whether you see it or not. And then, in Shane’s letters, by God! the Rodney she came out here to marry shows up, the cowboy who’d take her away from whatever she didn’t like about her life or herself and give her everything pure, green grass and big skies and horse rides in the sunset. It ain’t like Shane creates someone new for her. He justifies her falling in love with Rodney in the first place.

  And then, like I said, this starts:

  September 7, 1998

  Dear Sarah,

  I hope you have been well. It has been far too many years since I wrote. Our son tells me he keeps you informed about our lives here. I dont hold nothing against you I hope you will believe that. I know you always liked the city life and when you went back it didnt surprise me. Its a hard life here even if weve done right well. I fear our son may paint a better picture then it always is. But its right for us like where your ats right for you. Im writing not for anything in particular. Just times gone by. I know when our son writes he tells you things I dont know about. And thats all right. But you cant believe everything he tells you. Hes a good boy but sometimes he dreams things and then wakes up and forgets it was a dream. Im glad hes been writing to you and all, but things arent exactly like he always says. Anyway I hope your well.

  Love,

  Rodney.

  Love, Rodney—ain’t that sweet! And that our son stuff. And that oh-so-subtle convincing her to stay in Minneapolis. But the best is how he damn near tells her it’s all a bunch of bullshit. Maybe them missing letters had gone too far, and he had to figure a way to pull things back, and the only way he could think of was to let Rodney argue the other side. Or maybe he said something so outrageous about Rodney even she knew it was bullshit, so she threw them away, and it was only when Rodney himself woke up to make the correction that she decided there was enough truth to start keeping them again. It just twists your head around thinking about it. After that, it’s sometimes Shane and sometimes Rodney writing, and half the time they’re arguing with each other, and neither one of them telling the goddamn truth. He had her spinning so fast she thought she was seeing straight.