It’s unusual to see them eating out. The quarters Ray provides for his temporary workers are spare but include a fully functional communal kitchen. From what I hear, Puebla can really cook.
The booths around the guys are empty, so I slide in a bench behind them. “Night out on the town?” I ask.
“Rogelio found out his wife gave birth today. He’s got a new baby boy back home,” Chato says.
“Congratulations, man!” I slap Honduras on the back, and when they all start laughing, realize my mistake and do the same to Jalisco.
This double name crap is the pits.
“You guys going out to have a drink after dinner?” I ask, motioning across the street to the bar. “That news is worth at least one beer.”
They look uncomfortable. Finally Chato says, “Well, Boss … they don’t really like us to go in there and drink.”
“They serve you, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” Chato says, “But as soon as we’re done with the glass they smash it on the floor so no one has to drink from the same one.”
“You’d think they’d use paper cups, then. Less expensive,” I say, a little stunned. I’ll have to ask my friend Kurt who bartends there if he does it too. And thump him if he does.
Chato grins. “Paper doesn’t sound nearly as good when it breaks.”
The others all look embarrassed that Chato’s told me, and I scramble for anything to shift the mood. “Plans for the weekend?”
They get really animated. Seems Chato’s taking them to a hockey game, and though none of them knows a thing about hockey, he’s told them it’s a bit like soccer on ice. I wonder if he’s also told them that the noise of skates cutting ice, bodies slamming into glass and pucks winging off hard surfaces takes some getting used to.
“Except Oaxaca isn’t going,” Salvador (Chema) says, rubbing his thumb against his index and middle fingers to indicate money.
A couple of the inks give him the kill sign, but I pretend not to see and reach for my wallet.
“No, Boss,” Oaxaca says. “I don’t want to go. Honest.”
“Tell you what,” I say when I realize insistence would further strip his pride, “why don’t you come up to the cabin for dinner tomorrow instead? My brother-in-law will be up for the weekend so my wife’ll cook enough for a giant. Which he is, by the way.”
He smiles, but I’m not entirely surprised when he declines. Inks seem to be keenly aware of class and social status. Even though I’m no higher in the carpeting hierarchy than Chato, the fact I have no tattoo and claim friendship with Ray makes all the difference. They’ll be unfailingly amiable, but they won’t socialize with me.
When I get home with the wine, our guests are still M.I.A. I go to the easel that’s set up near the cabin’s large south window and fiddle with paint tubes while I stare outside. The light is still extraordinary. It plays on the surface of the snow, muting the glitter of icy particles to the softer sheen of talc. There’s also a pattern on the surface.
I rummage in a pack basket for binoculars and return to the window.
“Tracks out there,” I say.
“What kind?” Cassie asks.
“Human.”
I hear her chair scrape against the floor, and feel her come to stand at my shoulder. I hand her the binoculars. She looks for a while, then passes them back.
“Fucked up,” I say. “People trespassing.”
She laughs and kisses me on the forehead. “It’s just land. Don’t be so possessive.”
As she walks back to the table I turn to my canvas.
It’s an odd landscape I’ve been painting. In the upper right quadrant are a couple of black morel mushrooms – depicted as realistically as I’m able – but the bulk of the painting focuses on the mass of interwoven hollow threads that feed the mushrooms underground.
I lose track of everything when I start mixing pigments. It always happens this way. The color is like a portal to the rest of the painting, and once I’ve stepped through, I won’t emerge again until I hear an inarticulate call, the now, step back, look at what you’ve done of the paint itself.
This time I step away just as the sound of a vehicle chugging through snow fills the cabin. I drape a cover over the wet paint I’ve mixed, wipe my brush and set it down with a pang. Like the land, painting is one of the reasons I live where I do. Art feeds off this particular solitude and quiet, which is really neither since it teems with energy and the clamor of millions of unseen lives. It always takes me a while to adjust back to the simpler and louder ways of human interaction.
As Cassie and I step out on the porch, I can see Sarai hanging half out the car window, squealing, and waving at us while Finn tries navigating the hulking car around a sizable but partially snow-obscured woodpile. As soon as the SUV slides into the spot we’ve left clear for it, I head out to help unload the car.
I shake hands with Finn as soon as he comes around to the cargo door. The big guy doesn’t look out of place here and at least he’s dressed for the weather, which is more than I can say for the terminally hip but already shivering Sarai. Allison climbs out of the back seat a moment later and nods in my direction. She and Sarai haven’t been a couple for very long so I hardly know her, but she makes me feel scruffy in the way Finn makes me feel short. I’m neither really, except by comparison.
“Nice place,” she says. “Cassie says you built it?”
“I added rooms onto the cabin my maternal grandparents lived in,” I answer, grunting while I try to hoist a large cooler out of the car. “What did you guys pack in this thing, stones?”
“I’m paying for our weekend with bourbon,” Sarai pipes up from the porch.
“God help us,” I mumble.
Finn hears me. “Yeah, you’d think at least she’d have the decency to make it Jamesons.”
He smiles at me but his eyes stay sad. As they’ve been for the past six months, ever since a woman none of us had met disappeared from his life.
He’s the reason for the invite that’s mucking up all my favorite weekend routines but, suddenly, I don’t have the heart to hold it against him.
* * *
I’m at the easel while the others linger over dinner. Between the daylong slow cooking of the stew and the woodstove cranking out BTUs, we’re all basking in warmth and even have one of the windows cracked open.
“Ah,” Finn stretches his long legs, pushing his chair away from the table. “Why do any of us choose to live in Hastings when this is just three hours away?”
“Bekamian’s Pastry Shop,” Allison says.
“The oyster bar at Genessee Station.” Sarai.
“East Street Market’s cheesecake. I actually have dreams about it still.” Cassie says.
Finn raises an eyebrow, “Do women always think with their stomachs?”
“And what organ is it, exactly, that men think with?” counters Sarai.
Finn points at his heart, which makes Sarai and Cassie razz him in concert.
“Help me out here, Del, I don’t think they believe me.”
“You’re on your own, man,” I say, waving a brush at him. “My favorite organ’s the eye.”
He laughs. “Now that’s just fucked up.”
“Speaking of fucked up,” Cassie says, “Mom sent me a beautiful little christening gown last week. Antique, I think. No note, no explanation.”
“Grandkids,” Finn says. “She wants them. Tick tock.”
Cassie smacks him. “Hey, we’re doing our best. Hurry up and get married and give her some yourself.”
I confess as an only child I don’t really understand the thrust and parry of sibling interaction but I wince at her comment.
Finn reaches for the open bottle of Maker’s Mark then thinks better about it. “I’m going out for a walk.”
The cabin’s quiet after he leaves.
“O-o-o-kay, then,” Allison says. “I’m following him out. As far as the porch, anyway. I’ll give him a smoke trail to follow back to the cabin.”
“Well, shit,” Cassie says after Allison’s left. “He can’t still be harboring any thought that Mari’s going to return, can he? It’s so unrealistic.”
“I think it’s sort of romantic, actually,” Sarai says.
“Because it’s impossible, you mean? For all he knows she’s dead. Or with somebody else.”
“I think maybe he just knows, somehow, she’s not,” I say.
Cassie rolls her eyes.
Sarai gets up and stretches. “I can’t imagine having someone I love disappear practically out of my arms.”
“Yeah, like you haven’t ditched any of your lovers,” Cassie says.
“Finn didn’t ditch her,” Sarai says. She walks over to the iPod dock, scrolls through the menu of songs. “It’s different.”
“Not if it ends the same way.”
Sarai turns to her. “Cynical, much?”
Cassie laughs. “Am not. It’s just that I know my brother, and I’m telling you, he’s feeling endebted to memory. And that’s no way to live.”
As soon as Allison comes back in and the smell of cigarette wafts in with her, my own craving for a hit of nicotine kicks in. I head outside. But I don’t stop to smoke on the porch. I cross behind the cabin, down to where the stream has nearly iced over. Up the steep bank roughly parallel to the cabin’s south window I start scanning the ground looking for the tracks I spotted earlier.
Moonlight pools in the glade as I squat down to them. I put one hand on the footprint, digging into it until my fingers hit ground, and close my eyes.
It is a slide I take, down to the chambers of my heart. I can count the seeds slumbering in this piece of land, and the fiddleheads curled under snow waiting for a distant wake-up call. My blood can course along the sappy viaducts of birch and oak, the resinous gullies of hemlocks. And deeper still, I can hear the molten buzz of a mantle perpetually in motion.
And the footstep? The land lets me know where its owner headed from here, and how long ago.
It is my secret, this dialogue with my land. It started when I was ten. Until then, land had been land; any patch of it fulfilled my temporary desires: a place to play ball, run around with my dog, dig for nightcrawlers. But the summer after my mother died it all changed.
I camped out at the cabin with my father for weeks, his way of avoiding the need to go through her things and admit she had truly died. He sat inside, I wandered. I turned my dungarees clay-brown from scrambling up the gorge walls to reach cave openings that looked like sad, downturned eyes. My father’s eyes.
But up close, the caves were more sinister, like open mouths.
I elected to explore the largest which narrowed quickly to a tunnel. On my belly in the dark, I pulled myself forward on scabby elbows. The journey ended with sharp rock protrusions – I always picture them as the incisors of a colossal carnivore – clamping down around my shoulders. I couldn’t go forward, I couldn’t go back.
For the first ten minutes I was okay. Then, I began to hear things. The scratch of claw on stone. Skittery movement. Something inhuman vocalizing in human tones. I thought I felt the touch of something and my ankles prickled as if tiny sharp teeth were grazing them in advance of clamping on.
I’d dislocated a shoulder to get out, my father told me later, but I don’t remember that. Only the shocking Prussian-blue sky I emerged to, and the phthalo-green sea of clubmosses that were there to cradle my body. That’s the day I started to believe my grandmother’s stories. And picked up a paintbrush.
A strong north wind kicks up, swirling snow up to my knees as I make my way back to the cabin. Cassie stands by the door, arms wrapped around her body.
“You’ve been gone forever. You okay?”
“Of course,” I say. “Don’t waste worry on me, Finn’s the one who doesn’t know his way around this joint.”
“He’s been back for a while. I don’t think he went very far. Just far enough to get past his desire to beat the crap out of me.”
She laughs a little. “Apparently I’m such a bitch it’s a wonder you put up with me at all.”
“He doesn’t mean it, he’s just hurting. And it’d be different if you’d ever met his girl. I think it’d seem more real to you ”
We stand for a while together outside until I can’t hug away her shivers. Inside, the great room of the cabin is empty and quiet.
“Everyone’s gone to bed, thank God,” Cassie says. “I’m beat.”
“I’ll be up in a while,” I tell her after kissing her.
I move the dock near the easel, set the music to shuffle, then loosen my shoulders. I start with fresh colors, mixing powdered pigments with oil on the old enamel palette. When I’m happy with the color – always the most time-consuming part of my process – I pick out a broad, flat brush and slash across the painting’s surface, covering it with long strokes of thin, oily paint. After a moment I put the brush aside and work the surface to translucence with my fingers. Then I switch to a thin brush, with three or four squirrel hairs, and move in to add detail.
Los Lobos are playing when I step back from the work, pausing to dig a cigarette from a smushed and tatty pack.
“Cassie’s going to kill you when she smells that inside,” Finn says as I light up. He gestures to the Morris chair. “Do you mind?”
I shake my head as I watch him try to fit himself comfortably in it, which might be impossible.
“Painting always makes me want to smoke,” I say. “Like somehow whatever I’m tapping into needs fire to focus it.”
“Vices. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Want some of mine?” Finn waves a half-empty bottle of bourbon. When I shake my head again, he adds, “Good, because I don’t want to have to get up again to get you a glass.”
I grin as I move around the easel. We maintain a friendly silence until I wipe my brushes with a filthy mop-up cloth, upend them in an empty jar, and go sit on the floor by the woodstove.
“You okay?” I ask.
Finn tips his head to rest on the back of the chair, closes his eyes. “Does pissed off at my sibling, my mom, my life count as okay?”
“Sometimes I think that’s the definition of okay in your family.”
He laughs. “You’re part of my family.”
“Yeah, I’m doing okay too.”
He grins at me, but soon enough his face reverts to its new melancholy set.
“I’m just going through the motions. I haven’t written a single story worth spit since… well, since. And words were always what moored me. Now, I’m flotsam.”
“Hey, as long as you’re floating you’re one up on most folks.”
“Ha.”
“So, I know why you’re pissed off at Cassie, and your life, but why your mom?”
“She’s more or less okay that Mari’s gone. Penelope and Odysseus is what she calls us. Epic is how she describes what’s happened. Two people kept apart by the vicissitudes of gods and tides and political machination. As if it were a heroic journey.”
“So maybe it is.”
“Yeah. Except I’m Penelope in this recasting. Holding on to what I can’t touch or see, only remember.”
“Thing is, sometimes I don’t want Mari to come back. I’m terrified of her story. I’m terrified of all the inks’ stories. Which is why I can’t write about them anymore. Just mall openings. And new fees for trash pickup. And plans for highway bypasses.” He falls silent for a moment. “And then I feel guilty for feeling that way, because nobody else is writing about them either.” He looks at me, then away again.
I stare at the toes of my workboots. “You know, we’re never going to get it anyway.”
“What?”
“What it’s like to have to wear the tat.”
Finn fiddles with the cap of the bourbon bottle, but doesn’t take another drink. “Hey, did you finish your painting?”
“No. I’m stalled.”
“Can I take a look?”
“I guess.”
He looks at the
whole composition first, then ducks down to look at the mycelium more closely. “Freaky,” he says, straightening back up. “All those little beings tied to each other.”
He makes me look at my work again. He’s right. Somehow, the interwoven web beneath the mushrooms has gone from fungal to human without my noticing.
* * *
When I wake up and make it out to the great room, Cassie is seated alone at the table, sorting through bills.
“Where is everyone?” I ask after I get my coffee.
“Out snowshoeing,” she says. She pushes the stack of bills away. “I need to talk to you anyway.”
I get a second, maybe two, before she plunges. And, it’s not like I don’t know what’s coming. Even with her job at the library, we’re hardly making ends meet. That’s the price of living where pay and pittance are synonymous.
“This is no way to live,” she says.
“I love our life,” I answer.
As I say it, I see the very nature of who my wife is reflected in the intelligent and beautiful face in front of me. There’s something missing from her face, I don’t know what to name it, imagination perhaps. Or daring. But I think it’s a quality that skipped her to reside more fully in her brother.
“Look,” she reaches for my hand, which telegraphs that the worst part of this conversation is about to come out of her mouth. “If we move to Hastings and sell this place we’ll have enough to travel, to put money away and feel the kind of security we can’t even imagine right now.”
“I don’t know who I’d become without this place,” I say.
“So, okay, maybe we wouldn’t have to get rid of it. We could come up here for vacations. But we’d be making enough money in Hastings to actually take some.”
“There is no guarantee I’d get anything better paying in the city.”
“I would,” she says. “Allison’s made me an offer already. The law firm is looking for good researchers. Librarians are at the top of their list.”
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