by John Hansen
“Are you lonely?” Brooke asked.
I thought for a moment. “Sometimes, yeah. But I was in Georgia, too.” I smiled at her and removed the melting marshmallow with two fingers, and then popped it in my mouth.
“I have met some folks up here.” I hesitated yet again as I sensed the conversation possibly heading to Alia’s death. Why did I resist it? To Scott, of all people?
“I bet,” Scott said again.
“But are the people here nice?” Brooke asked.
“Yea, there’s some good people here…” Then I figured what the hell? If I couldn’t tell a guy like Scott about Alia, a guy who I trusted the most in the world, then who could I tell?
“There was this girl... too.”
“Ahh, of course,” he said, grinning, apparently taking my meaning wrong. “You replaced Holly already?”
“No, nothing like that. This girl was special, man, and her name was ‘Alia.’”
“Alia.” Scott tried the name on for size, saying it slowly. “I like that.”
“Was?” Brooke asked, always one to pick up on important details, as women so often can. “Where’d she go?”
“She didn’t go anywhere. She’s dead.”
They both stared at me for a moment.
“Dead?” Scott finally broke the silence. “You didn’t kill her, did you?” he said, with a smirk.
“No… But the local cop in charge thinks maybe I did, now that you mention it.”
“What?” Scott asked, his smile fading. “The cops think you killed somebody?”
I sighed, it was too much – this is why I avoided talking about it. “I don’t know, man.” I shook my head. “I really don't know anymore. I’ve been running around since she died trying to find out what happened to her, and all I've learned is that nobody aside from a couple of people know anything more than I do. Nobody cares.”
I then told them the whole story, from the first time Alia came into the store with her friends to the visit to Clayton’s and my talk with the old neighbor lady. I found, however, that once I got over the initial hesitancy, it felt good to tell Scott, someone I trusted, the whole tale. Here was someone who wouldn’t judge Alia because he wasn’t prejudiced against Browning like others. Here was someone who had known me for years, and someone who could actually see the whole thing from my angle.
“This whole thing,” Scott said, shaking his head after I was done, “it sounds like it has taken over your life here, buddy.”
“You think so?” I asked.
“I wonder,” Brooke interjected, “what would your life be like if that hadn’t of happened – if she hadn’t had met you?”
I wasn’t sure I could even picture that. What would it be like if I had never met Alia at all? Just working the store, hiking around the mountains, hanging out with Ronnie and his steady harem of hook ups, maybe even hooking up with Katie, which would have been a mistake, but, overall just existing and living.
“I can't even imagine,” I said.
Scott said he understood, and after I had answered some of his and Brooke’s questions about the murder and what I had found out – which didn’t take long – Scott went on to tell me about things back home.
“You know that magazine you worked for shut down,” he said, causally.
“It did?” I was shocked.
“Yeah, it was taken over by Garrett Publishing; and they moved the operation out to California.”
I assumed Linda and John Jeffries must have been let go then; companies didn’t usually relocated editorial staff – too easily replaced.
“I guess you got out while the gettin’ was good,” Scott mused.
“How did you know about the magazine folding?” I asked.
Scott and Brooke looked at each other as if sharing a secret. “Well,” he said, “thing is, Brooke and I are moving out to Cali soon… as a matter of fact.”
"California?” I asked. “You are?”
“To LA, actually, and I saw some news about the magazine opening up there in some trade publications that I’ve been scanning for ad sales jobs.”
I looked at Brooke. “What are you gonna do, Brooke, what about school?"
She shrugged. “Just get back into school out there. I’m thinking about transferring into film school, actually.”
Jesus... Scott not in Georgia pretty much changed Georgia for me for good.
As if reading my thoughts, which he had always been able to do even in his boozy past, Scott said, “You’re better out of Atlanta, Will. The whole scene is a sewer.”
He crunched an empty coke can and tossed it into the fire. “That’s sort of why we’re out here. We’re going to visit LA for a few weeks, get acclimated, look for a place to live; and we thought we’d drive out and see you on the way.”
I nodded, staring into the flames, processing it all. The end of the summer had just taken on a new color. As I sat there I realized that I had always subconsciously knew that, worse comes to worse, I could just return to my old life in Atlanta if I absolutely had to, if I didn't end up getting some job out here in the winter. Now moving back seemed impossibility.
Who would I have there? Dad? Not near enough, I thought.
“You know Will,” Scott said, staring into the fire. “You’re really out here, doing it man, whatever the hell you like – just like the Bandit.” He smiled at me and then looked over at Brooke.
“And I think that's why we were able to finish things in Atlanta, it was just time, man. You leaving was the last straw. It was past time, really. I had reached a breaking point, just like you. I just looked at Brooke and asked her to go, outta nowhere I asked her. And you know what she said? She said: ‘No fucking way!’” He laughed. “It took some convincing...”
“My parents are still horrified,” Brooke said.
I nodded sagely, and looked at Scott. “You should of asked her: ‘Haven’t you ever done anything just for the hell of it?’”
Under the sky which soon cleared of dark clouds and revealed a star-pregnant vault, we sat and laughed and talked and ate marshmallows, and it was the most enjoyable night I had yet experienced in Two Med.
Thirty-Two
After eventually taking leave of Scott and Brook and making plans to see them the next day before they left, I returned to the store around 10 p.m. I noticed, as I walked up to the rear porch to enter in through the kitchen’s back door, that all the lights inside were still on, which was unusual at that hour.
I stepped in through the screen door quietly, and was greeted with a weird scene. Larry was sitting by himself at the big kitchen table, with nothing in front of him but a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey (which we sold in the store) and a glass, full almost to the brim, with the smooth, brown swill. He had taken off his glasses and I saw that his face looked much different without them on, partly because his eyes were much smaller without the coke-bottle lenses, and made him look kind of like a large, puffy mole. But it was looked strange too because he was not a frequent drinker, and the whisky had made his face saggy and bright red – as it can to rookies.
I walked in cautiously, and looked past him into the store to see if anyone else was around – no one was. “You ok, Larry?”
He looked up at me darkly, seemingly trying to focus his beady eyes on me. He didn't respond but reached down and put on his big glasses again, and then looked down at his glass, as if silently pondering whether to take another drink.
I watched him with a concerned curiosity. Given his increasingly erratic antagonism of late, I wondered if he had finally gone off the deep end, and would maybe try to kill us all in some drunken frenzy. This remote store was just the kind of setting for something that, wasn’t it?
I quietly went over to the large fridge to get some water, giving his smoldering and silent presence a wide berth, like you would a sick bear.
When he suddenly spoke, his voice sounded lower, gravelly, like he hadn't spoken in years and had just picked it up the habit again. “When I was a lumberjack
in Alaska, up in the Yuke’, they used to always give me the toughest jobs to do.”
He sluggishly took a small sip from his whiskey glass. It stood by the fridge, holding the handle, watching him. If it was another lumberjack story, it was certainly sounding different that all the others he has brayed about that summer.
“I could down a two-foot cedar tree in three cuts.” He paused, nodded his head slowly three times, as if reliving the vigorous ax-swinging in his mind. He took another sip of the whiskey.
“Three Cuts,” he murmured. “That’s what they used to call me. Used to always give me the roughest jobs, the toughest woods. We had a competition… who could fell a tree in three cuts…”
Suddenly he raised his voice, and it was jarring to hear him heave out the ragged, slurred words in the quiet kitchen. “Three Cuts!’ they used to call me,” he shouted. “Large truck fouled in the brush? ‘Three Cuts?!’ Chainsaw fouled fifty feet up in the air in the canopy? ‘Where’s Three Cuts?!’ Stump won't budge with the backhoe? Three Cuts!’”
He raised his head up to the ceiling and uttered his last cry with vehemence, and then his face broke into a tragic and gnarled smile, with tears in his eyes. He chuckled to himself crazily and took another sip. I heard his bedroom door open from the other side of the store, and I could hear Phyllis’ hesitant steps down the creaky staircase. This was what that poor woman had to deal with, I thought.
Larry looked back down at his glass, then at me. “You don't know what life is like. Not yet… You don't understand what my life is like.”
He trailed off as Phyllis came into the kitchen, a stricken look on her face turning into a fresh fear as she saw the half-empty bottle.
“Oh my dear! What happened?” She sounded so mournful that it seemed to jar Larry back into the moment, as if arousing the last wisp of take-charge blustering that Larry could muster. The man-in-charge-from-Kansas reemerged, and roused the drunken man and drunkenly rose to his feet.
“Nothing’s happening,” he grunted. “Just making sure Will locked up tonight. Lock up, Will.” He staggered back and then caught himself in the doorway leading out of the kitchen. Phyllis glanced at me with a worried expression, but didn’t say a word.
My last view of Larry that evening was his bulky form walking unsteadily with his arm over little Phyllis’ shoulders, as she stepped slowly and awkwardly under his weight towards their room.
“So much for ‘Three Cuts,’” I whispered to myself. I switched off the lights and headed to bed.
Thirty-Three
The next morning I woke up and went downstairs to get the kitchen prepped for the day’s customers. After a little while, Scott and Brooke came in and sat at one of the tables for customers in the snack shop area. They spread out a very European-looking early lunch: a loaf of French bread sliced in small pieces, with grapes, cheese and crackers. Brooke was drinking a dark red wine and Scott was sipping Coke.
Ronnie was on cooking duty with me on the cash register, so I was able to sit with them a while as I watched for customers that late morning. The sun was streaming through the large skylight overhead, stabbing down through the dusty air of the store onto the concrete floor. As I sat with them at the table, I watched through one of the large windows the clouds roll over the lake and push up against the peak of Mount Sinopah like smoke from a fire.
Scott and Brooke planned on hiking up one of the higher trails that afternoon, and I decided to go with them. It wasn’t easy since it left Ronnie on his own, but I asked Phyllis to help me out, explaining that I had friends from out of town, and she agreed. It still wouldn’t have worked if Larry had been downstairs, but he hadn’t come out of his room that day yet at all, and I knew why. He was surely feeling the whiskey and hunkering in bed, partly out of shame I was sure.
Soon, the three of us, Scott, Brooke and I, were crunching along a rocky dirt path up through the trees near the lake. After some time we eventually climbed into the higher parts of the trail. As we climbed even higher, the trees began thinning out and the patches of flowers and grass grew thicker in the spread out places, where sunlight reached them more. We were bathed in heavy, warm sunshine, actually, during our hike, and within an hour we were high enough to see the entire lake, with a miniature store resting at the far end opposite of our side.
As we stood there and took in the view, Scott looked around and suddenly noticed a patch of brown in the distance behind us, way up in the higher, treeless, rock-strewn sides of the mountain.
“Bear!” he called out, just shouting the one word and pointing up at the small brown patch.
Brooke and I turned around and shielding the sun from our eyes with our hands tried to spot the beast. I had seen a couple of bears before during the summer there – it wasn’t hard to notice them because a crowd of campers and tourists would inevitably gather down by the lake or by the store and start pointing way up into the hills at a tiny speck of brown. Some eagle-eyed patron would first spot it, and then slowly a crowd would form to watch the oblivious bear meander around high above.
Larry mounted a telescope onto the back porch of the store earlier in the summer, and we used to watch the bears from that too. The bears I saw were always alone, a single bear now and then and always very, very far off. I never saw them come down near the store, despite all the food and garbage stowed away near the kitchen. But even so far, just brown patches on the hillsides, they were grizzlies, and that was special.
As I stood there squinting besides Scott, I thought I could detect movement from the brown spot, now probably about thousand feet away. Often, bear sightings were just rocks or dead pine boughs matching the cinnamon color of the grizzlies and moving in the shimmer of heat; but this looked like the real deal to me.
“I’m going up for a closer look,” Scott suddenly announced. “Who’s with me?” He fumbled in his pack and brought out a camera, looking at Brooke and me with eyebrows raised.
“Are you serious?” Brooke asked, squinting up at the bear. “Is it safe, Will?”
“No,’ I said. “But he can get up closer and not really cause any trouble. It’s so far off it’ll be ok.” I set my pack down and sat in front of it, resting my feet out in front of me. “Bears usually high-tail it when they see humans coming, anyhow.”
“Some mountain man you are,” Scott said sarcastically, and began tromping up the slope, walking perpendicular from the path. He stepped around tall grass tufts and the thick huckleberry bushes that dotted the area – “bushwhacking” his way up the slope.
After a minute of watching him, Brooke sat down beside me and took a deep breath, taking in our view. The lake was a deep cobalt blue, and a small boat was cutting through the very middle of it, leaving being a perfect, white, V-shaped wake. Brooke’s dark hair was lit by the sun and moved in the breeze that brought with it the smell of warmed earth and sugary flowers.
She scanned me with a thoughtful expression. “You seem different, Will.”
“How so?”
She nodded and studied me, as if assuring herself. “You’re more serious, quieter, but somehow… I don’t know…. More steady.”
I looked back out over the lake, and then across it to the mountains stretching into the hazy distance. “Steady...” I mused over the word. It was an odd term and I wasn’t sure if it fit me.
The sun warmed our backs as we heard Scott tramping up the hill behind us. I turned my head and looked back up the slope and saw him standing next to a boulder, resting his camera on it to steady his shots of the bear, which had already moved off away from us towards the far side of the slope.
Brooke suddenly reached over and felt the beads wrapped around my wrist. She didn’t ask about it, and I liked that. Brooke had always been a thinker rather than a “sayer.” She viewed the world through her own lenses, I had learned, and she made internal notes as to what she saw. I liked her because she made sense of things around her before speaking about them.
She let her hand drop from her eyes and looked at me. �
��Scott wasn’t sure we should come visit you on our drive out to Cali. He said you might not want us here.”
“Really?” I looked back and watched him in the distance. “Actually I’m really glad he came, and you too – you’re both like family to me. And family is the one thing missing.”
“I know, Scott says you’re his brother. But I think he was talking about you being out here in the wilderness, and that you may not want us up here ruining it – you know, reminding you of the past – Georgia and everything.”
“The past can’t ruin this place,” I shook my head. “It’s too much a place of its own.”
I looked at Brooke, trying to put my feeling into words. “There’s a… uniqueness to this place, Brooke – maybe you see it, a savage beauty… that I’ve never seen elsewhere. I like the hugeness and… permanence of the mountains, immovable, you know? And I like the strangeness of living and working in that store – believe it or not.”
I thought further beyond Two Med, to the oddness of the tourists, to Browning, to the pride and also hopelessness of some of the Blackfoot, to the strip club, VFW and cops.
“It does seem to be unique.” Brook said, interrupting my thoughts. “But what about this Alia girl, Will? You said you fell for her and she then was killed up here. Didn’t that change it for you?”
“Alia?” I said back to Brooke, at her face hidden in shadow behind the sun. “She actually defined this place for me. She made it more real than any…. than any mountain or town.”
I pictured Alia walking up to me along the rocky lake shore when I was fishing in a cloud of mosquitoes. “She was actually all those things combined, now that I think about it – beautiful, strange, sad, proud… and savage and desperate too.”
Brooke nodded. “I told you that you seem different, and now I think maybe it was because of her. She’s done something to you, I think?”
I glanced at Brooke for a second but then looked away back over the lake. “I think so.”
