Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight

by Cat Rambo

  Jonah Googled around that evening. “Sounds like they’re building a research facility,” he said. “Lots of funding, special names, a fancy opening ceremony with that singer Ivory and that guy from that one show.”

  “What show?” I looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that one. Huh, fancy model.”

  “Three thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Jonah pointed out. “It’s your investment and all, but maybe you want to cash it in and get us a trip to Paris or something.”

  “Paris?”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” I said.

  “You could sell the condo. Write up a fancy description of it that sells for the same kind of return. Do it.”

  “Live beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish in Washington State, beneath the shadow of Douglas firs and cypress,” I said. “This quirky condo features good feng shui and its own boat launch.”

  “No wonder we like living here.”

  “No wonder.”

  Since there was no immediate deadline on the check and since I am a procrastinator by nature, I put it aside. Six weeks later, another letter arrived from Morton-Thiokol, this time with an offer of $30k.

  “Holy crap,” Jonah said. “That’s so rad.”

  “We have to go check it out.”

  “Gift horse. Mouth.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re curious too. What could be there that’s worth $30,000?”

  We packed the car with Trader Joe’s goodies, sleeping bags, and my old camping gear.

  I never minded traveling anywhere with Jonah. We’d burn a few CDs worth of music and bring the iPod. Sometimes I’d read something aloud and we’d work our way through a book of short stories or a horror novel. This trip we got all the way through the first half of a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales.

  “They’re all so dark,” Jonah said. “People with their feet stuck to loaves of bread, stuck down in a bog of toads and snakes. Look at the poor little match girl—she just freezes to death.”

  I closed the book and put it in my lap. “Grimm’s the same way. Everything is death and people get bits chopped off them. Very un-Disney.”

  “I wouldn’t read them to my kids,” he said. Then, realizing what he’d said, he gave me a quick, worried glance. I pretended not to see it, just stared out the windows.

  We were on I-90 on our way across the pass. I watched a black pool pass on my right. It was ringed by pines, filled with ghostly stumps of trees protruding up through the water and glimmering like streaks of coal pencil on the silvery surface. It was polluted. Barren.

  Descending into eastern Washington, I glimpsed black and white magpies along the fence rails and watched the landscape shift from pines and firs besieged by blackberry vines to scrub trees, leggy beeches, and red-capped sumac, before we dipped further south into Utah and the landscape grew dryer yet.

  Past Willard Bay, we saw hundreds of high voltage power transmission lines, metal lace against the snow-covered Raft River Mountains. Shadows cracked the ground at the foot of each metal construction.

  I shivered as we passed under them.

  “What’s up?” Jonah asked.

  “Long time ago I read a book about power lines distorting magnetic energies in our bodies. They said ghosts hung out around them and people ended up with shorter life spans because of the energy changes.”

  “Poppycock,” Jonah said. “You read too much crackpot stuff.”

  “Yes, but we do have magnetic fields in our bodies.”

  “Hippie.”

  “I know you are, but what am I?”

  The bickering went on till the northern tip of the state, near the mountains. The car’s GPS unit led us along a dirt and rut road to the precise location, bordering a hill crested with short, stubby trees.

  Scrambling out of the Vehicross and stretching, I looked around.

  “These must be box elders,” Jonah said, nodding at the trees that surrounded us. “Hence the name.”

  “I always thought these were maples,” I said, stooping to pick up a stout purplish green twig. It held a drooping cluster of parallel wings, each a thumb width long, rustling hollowly as I shook it.

  “You’re the biologist in the family,” Jonah said. “You do realize that camping means no toilet or hot water in the morning, don’t you?”

  I shouldered a pack and the tent’s bundle and did not deign to reply.

  We made our camp near a stand of older trees ridged with grayish-brown bark.

  “What the hell is on this?” Jonah said, unrolling the tent.

  “I haven’t used it in years,” I said. Hand-painted ivy leaves and blue flowers stretched across the dark green surface. “I painted those on before I took it up to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. People liked the way it looked.”

  “This is a hippie tent,” Jonah grumbled as he stretched the fabric over the tent poles. He tossed our sleeping bags inside.

  “I’m going to go get the rest of the stuff,” he said. “You might gather some wood for a fire.”

  I nodded, but instead I sat down on a log and watched the light gleaming on the upper sides on the mountain near us while gray clouds shaded the stands of pine further down. A trickle of sunshine danced on the tent flap.

  Something rustled among the trees but I looked up too late to catch anything but a dark limb sliding in among the foliage. I blinked and looked again, but could see nothing.

  Jonah returned with an armload of sleeping bags and the cooler. “Where’s the wood?”

  “I saw an animal.”

  “A big animal? What was it?”

  “Pretty big.”

  “A bear?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Are bears pale brownish? I thought they were black. It didn’t look very hairy.”

  “Bigfoot.”

  “Piss off, unbeliever.”

  “It was a dog. I bet it was a dog.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  We built a fire and roasted hotdogs and marshmallows while watching milky moonlit clouds scud overhead, touched with the red sparks of our fire.

  In the middle of the night, I roused to pee. Outside in the starry night, I groped my way to a safe spot. A scuffling came from the side of the car, and I clicked on my flashlight’s beam and sent it there.

  She crouched near a tire, her head barely topping the square of the gas cap, a bag of marshmallows in her dirty hands. Twigs and leaves filled her hair. Her face was narrow as a fox’s, inhuman as she blinked at me.

  “It’s okay,” I said, directing the beam to the ground between us.

  She stuffed another marshmallow into her mouth and watched me, chewing. Her feet were bare and black.

  “You can have those,” I said. “There’s some hotdogs in the car, too.”

  She swallowed. “Really?” Her voice was higher-pitched than I expected.

  I nodded. She crouched beside the remnants of the fire. “Make it hot again?” she said.

  I dragged more wood onto the fire and sparked it alight before threading a hotdog onto a skewer.

  Once she was holding her meal out over the flames, the marshmallows a lump inside the coarse hide of her vest, I felt more comfortable asking questions.

  “I’m Stacie,” I offered. “What’s your name?”

  “Deirdre.” Her gaze stirred past my shoulder. “I like your tent.” Her voice had a lilting burr to it, a slowness that marked each statement, as though she searched for words.

  “Yeah, I do too,” I said. “So do you live around here?

  “Right here,” she said. She nodded at the thicket of trees.

  “Out here in the country?”

  “Yah,” she said.

  “Seems like that would be lonesome.”

  “There’s been people that have lived here,” she said. “There was a house over there, a man and two little girls.” She pointed with her chin at a nearby ridge.

  “Doesn’t look like much there.”

  “Befo
re that, a while before, there was a Shoshone camp,” she said. “They all moved along.”

  I studied her. Sunlight was creeping up over the ridge, slowly moving the leaves from haze to clear definition. I tugged more wood into the fire and began to make coffee. She watched me, placid and accepting.

  “Who was the man with the two little girls?” I asked.

  “Reverend Kingsley, Algernon Kingsley. Algie. And his girls, Amalfa and Lulu.”

  She sounded wistful.

  “What happened to them?”

  “The Shoshone came through here, hunting for a pair of horses they’d lost,” she said. “They killed them all. Cut their throats in the middle of the night.”

  I stared into the heart of the fire. “Seems like it would have been lonely since then,” I said.

  “It has.”

  I heard Jonah stirring inside the tent and looked towards it. When I looked back, she was gone already. He came crawling out of the tent, ready for coffee.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  We watched the sunrise come up over the hills in sleepy companionable silence, drinking the coffee laced with the small carton of milk that had been in the car.

  “What are you grinning at?” Jonah asked me.

  “It’s been a weird morning,” I said. “And it’s still pretty early.”

  We drove into Brigham City so I could check the courthouse records. I told Jonah about Deirdre along the way.

  “It’s not April Fool’s,” he said. “so why are you messing with me?”

  “I swear this is true. Honest.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Seriously serious.”

  “No shit, cross your heart and die?”

  “Anything you want to name.”

  “Holy shit.” He lapsed into silence, staring at the road. “That’s so rad. You’re pulling my leg, right?”

  In Brigham City, in a basement underneath the courthouse that smelled like pine cleaner and tinny fluorescent lights, I looked up Reverend Kingsley and his children. Lulu’s actual name turned out to be Lucille. They’d died in 1890. There were no pictures, just the Reverend’s spidery brown signature on the deed to his land, the Northernmost three fifths of the Southwest Quarter of Section Thirteen.

  “So?” Jonah said.

  “So they existed at least, and she’s probably not a mental patient.” We stopped at the QFC and I picked up several bags of marshmallows. “I want real coffee,” I said. We went into a Denny’s where a surly waitress named served us gritty lattes that tasted of burned grounds. At a nearby table, two men in blue coveralls and another in a business suit were making their way through identical portions of Moons Over My Hammy.

  The badges on their coveralls read Morton-Thiokol in poisonous green cursive.

  “Well,” the one in the business suit said, coming up for air from his hash browns. “I want the soil tests started today.”

  “Don’t have all the tracts signed off on,” a coverall man said.

  “Just start testing the soil. No one will chase you off if you happen to get a little too far over. There’s only that one tract left, I think, anyhow.”

  I caught Jonah’s eye and tried to make a “Listen to the people at the other table” face but he only stared at me blankly.

  “What?” he said.

  I mouthed “listen” at him and rolled my eyes to the right but he just stared.

  “I’d like my biscuits boxed,” he told Jolene. And to me, “Did you want coffee to go?”

  At our campsite, I set a bag of marshmallows out and gestured Jonah to a seat on a toppled log.

  “Deirdre,” I called. “Got more marshmallows for you.”

  “Holy shit,” Jonah said as she seemed to materialize, walking out of the heart of the thicket. She ignored him, moving over to tear open the bag of marshmallows and pop three down in quick succession before looking at the two of us.

  “Hi Deirdre,” I said. “This is my husband, Jonah.”

  She nodded at him as he managed a feeble wave.

  “We want to talk,” I said. “Do you know why someone would want to buy this land?”

  “They come and look at the plants all the time,” Deirdre said.

  I couldn’t tell much difference between the trees here or further off. Perhaps a little healthier, a little greener? I wasn’t really sure.

  “They want to cut it all down and grow new trees,” she said. “I heard them talking about clearing it all and setting out new lines of trees.”

  “What will happen to you if they do that?”

  She shrugged fatalistically. “I won’t be able to live here any longer.”

  “Can you move to a new tree?” Jonah said.

  She looked at him for the first time, and I felt a flare of jealousy at the warmth in her face. “If I move quickly, within a day or two.” She patted the bole closest to her, a little larger than its fellows. “I have lived here for many years.”

  He looked at me. “Plenty of places within a day’s drive. Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish, for that matter. Marymoor Park is pretty close.”

  “How long have you been here, Deirdre?” I asked.

  She shrugged again. “Many years.”

  “How did you come here?”

  “I grew here.”

  “With no parents? Who gave you your name?”

  “I awoke to sunlight and rain; I don’t know how long ago that was. I have never seen another like me. Algernon said I was a dryad, a tree spirit. He named me for one.”

  A pair of voices came from the road. It was the two men in blue coveralls.

  “Hey,” one shouted, and waved as they came over to us.

  “Camping, huh?” he said, looking at the marshmallows.

  “Yeah,” Jonah said. “What are you guys up to?”

  “Testing the soil all along here.”

  “Oh, yeah? Some kind of government project?”

  They exchanged glances. “Yeah, our company’s testing all the soil, building a research facility along here,” he said. “You folks own this land?”

  “Yeah, just figured we’d come up and say goodbye to it before selling it,” Jonah said easily. “You guys want some marshmallows?”

  They shook their heads and moved along.

  “We need to get her out of here,” I said to Jonah. “They’ll find her and dissect her or something.”

  “You always assume the worst,” he said.

  “It’s a corporation. Remember?”

  His eyes dropped. “You’ll never forgive them, will you?”

  “Thirty years ago a corporation—a big corporation, just like Morton-Thikol—decided burying chemical waste was fine, and then didn’t say anything when someone decided to build a playground on the site, managing to twist the genes of every child that played there. I can live with that, Jonah. But I won’t let them take someone else’s future away.”

  “I don’t want to get out of here,” Deirdre said. “I’ve lived here all my life.”

  “It’s that or be dead,” I said. “I don’t know what you believe as far as life over death goes, but I find the former preferable.”

  “I know it’s unfair,” he said to her. “Sometimes the world is unfair. But you don’t need to be one of the tragedies. You don’t need to be one of the fairytales with an unhappy ending.”

  She wavered, looking between us.

  “It’s your land,” she said. “That’s what those men were saying, weren’t they?”

  I gestured around myself. “Even if we don’t sell the land, the machinery will come and be all around you. And it’s a corporation—you never know when they’re going to do something like come chop everything down and then go ‘Whoops, our bad’. Or get the government to use eminent domain to grab something for a project that will bring a lot of money to this area?

  “We can offer you someplace to think about what you want to do next,” I said. “A respite.”

  She stared at me, searching my face, before she sighed
and nodded. Sunlight slanted across the clearing, and the trees whispered in the breeze. She went across to the clump of trees and laid her hands on the bark, bowing her head to it. Jonah watched her. His eyes were sad. I hadn’t seen that look in his eyes before, even on the day we found out we’d never have a child, and it made my chest hurt, a hopeless, hard ache.

  I filled a paper grocery bag with dust and dirt and tree branches and laid it on the floor on the passenger sidee.

  Deirdre insisted on sitting on my lap, saying that she did not want to touch the seat. She was surprisingly light, like holding a sack of leaves. Her long toes coiled down to the sack of dust, nestling into it.

  She lay in my arms and I cradled her. I laid my cheek atop her head for a moment, and the fierce wild green scent of her filled my lungs, pushing them outward. Jonah touched the radio into a dim and drowsy music. We talked quietly, but her answers grew drowsier and drowsier as the afternoon’s warmth filled the car. I let her sleep, figuring it was the state in which she’d most easily take to transportation.

  The day was flat and sunny hot.

  “Do you think she’ll do okay by the lake?” Jonah said.

  “I think so. Plenty of trees around there. Enough people to keep her entertained watching them. And with the park, she won’t have to worry about her tree getting cut down.”

  “What do you think she is?”

  “I dunno. A dyrad maybe. Or something entirely different. Maybe an alien.”

  “What do you think she would have done if no one had come along?”

  “Lived there for centuries more, maybe. Her and her memories of the Reverend Algernon.”

  The road dipped and we came into the flatlands. Up ahead lay the desert of wind sculptures and power lines, gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight like knives of incandescence lacing the sky.

  As we approached the host of power lines, Deirdre stirred in my arms.

  “She’s waking up,” I said. Her eyes opened, then rolled up in her head. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s kissing the air, gasping for life.

  “Deirdre, what?” I said. Then, urgently as we passed under the first interlacing of power lines, their intersection a mathematical bird’s nest above us, “Jonah!”