Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  Opening my eyes again, I whimpered, “I keep wanting Daddy to come back and help me.”

  Kitty put a strong arm around my shoulders and hugged me to her breast. “There’s not a woman alive who doesn’t have just a tiny bit of that little girl in her. Hang in there, kid, you’ll be amazed how much you can handle without your old man. As you begin to remember, you’ll be afraid like whatever it was that scared you is just happening now, but as you acknowledge it, you lay it to rest. After that, it may still hurt, but it’s out in the open where it can’t run your life anymore.”

  * * *

  THE MORNING OF New Year’s Eve, the last business day of the old year, Kitty made an announcement to me and Frida: “Listen, you two, I like to leave things where they belong, like in the past. And I prefer an attitude of wellness around me. To prove my goodwill, I’m springing for mud baths for you both. There’s no mood so black, and no snot so thick, that a mud bath in Calistoga can’t lift it.”

  We knew better than to argue with Kitty.

  Aunt Frida and I drove over the hills to Calistoga under gunmetal skies. Having elected to take Kitty up on her offer, we summarily left her behind. “I don’t mind adjusting my attitude,” Frida growled, as she wound the F-250 fiercely around the curves of Mark West Creek Road, “but I’m damned if I’m gonna let Little Kitty Wise-Ass gloat while I’m doing it.”

  Stifling a cough, I tipped my head back and looked at her out of the corner of one eye in appraisal.

  “Yeah,” she continued, “you can take the old hag out of Wyoming, but you can’t take Wyoming out of the old hag. Sometimes, Em, I think Ms. Kitty’s grown mildew between the ears living in this here loony bin all her life.” When I began to laugh, Frida added, “Aw, hell, it’d happen to anyone.”

  Calistoga lay in a narrow valley between craggy hills, eroded remnants of a gang of volcanoes that had been born and died a few million years ago. They were steep and dark, coated with oaks and madrones. Volcanic heat still smoldered at their roots, heating a collection of springs and geysers into steam. One such geyser puffed and belched away at Indian Springs Resort.

  We cruised through Calistoga, giving all the hip vacationers our best slack-jawed Wyoming hick smiles, passing shops full of chichi coffees, tourist gimcracks, and resort wear, before turning in at Indian Springs.

  Kitty had signed us up for the works: mud, mineral bath, steam, showers, and a massage each. Frida had argued with her, saying that there was no way in hell she was going to get buried before her time, and I’d allowed as how I wasn’t sitting up to the neck in no water. We had settled on a compromise: mud for me and the mineral bath for Frida. When we presented ourselves at the desk, an attendant led us down a hallway and into a white room fitted with lockers and low benches, where she handed us big white flannel sheets. “Please remove all your clothes and wrap these around yourselves,” she whispered. “There’s filtered water here for you to drink. I’ll be back for you in a few minutes.”

  Okay, strip naked; I can do that. It was a pleasant room, all light and serene, and I was still half-stuporous from my flu. So Frida and I politely turned our backs on each other and got into our togas, then stood there making faces like we thought this was pretty silly.

  There was a bowl of quartered oranges for us to munch on, and as we waited for the attendant to return, we got to seeing who could squirt orange juice the farthest. The flannel sheet was soft and comforting against my flu-ravaged body, and I found myself smiling in spite of my best intentions to remain ornery.

  Soon the attendant returned and took Frida away. I poured myself a cup of water and took a seat on one of the benches. The water tasted of cucumbers. I liked it.

  The attendant returned for me. “Your mud bath is ready, Miss Hansen,” she said, beckoning me farther into the soothing recesses of the spa. We walked down another white hallway and into a room that had four low cement troughs full of black mud made from volcanic ash. A tiny woman with thick black hair pulled back into a heavy braid was working at the second trough, bending to spread fresh ash and scalding it with water hosed in straight off the geyser. She was dressed all in black, the sleeves of her dark turtleneck shirt pushed up her narrow arms to her elbows. She stirred the mud with a short-handled rake, using long, smooth gestures that spoke of reverence and a deep familiarity with her task. The rhythm was mesmerizing. The attendant guided me into a shower, murmuring that the woman with the braid would help me into my mud bath when I was ready.

  The hot water drummed against my aches. I dawdled awhile, watching the woman rake the ash. When I stepped out of the shower, she came to me and looked up into my eyes with a sweet, welcoming tenderness. Her own eyes were dark as basalt, and her face was lined with age, yet peaceful and open as a child’s.

  That was enough for me; I would have been happy just to stare into her eyes awhile longer and go home figuring Kitty’s money had been well spent, but she gently pulled my arm. I followed. At the trough, she spoke with her hands and a few words of Spanish-accented English, indicating how to settle on the edge and then swing my legs into the bath. I lay back onto the soft, warm mud.

  “You okay?” The woman smiled. “Is not too hot?”

  I shook my head, the motion dampened by the softness beneath me.

  Then she turned toward the wall and raised her hands in supplication, and I recognized a practice I hadn’t seen since my travels into the distant villages of Mexico: a devout Indian, praying at the start of work.

  I felt blessed, anointed by God. I looked down along the winter whiteness of my form, seeing it for that moment as She might, admiring the slight rounding of my breasts, the sharpness of my shins, my hip bones.…

  The prayer ended. Turning back to me, the woman bent to her work, dredging up great double handfuls of the warm black mud and stacking it quickly over my legs, my arms, my body, and then ever so gently against my cheeks, ending with a careful smoothing of a lock of hair that had come to rest across my brow. Then she went away to leave me to the embrace of Mother Earth.

  * * *

  FOR A WHILE I gazed upward at a frosted skylight in the white ceiling, watching steam condense into great hungry drops and fall lazily to the mud. Then I closed my eyes and let the warmth be all.

  Minutes melted like chocolate, running through my mind, breaking the congestion in my lungs, drawing it away into the mud. My nose itched, making me smile.

  Mud, I thought. All these years, I’ve thought it was the lowest thing on earth. How ignorant I was. Mud is wonderful! Maybe Kitty’s right; I feel my body healing. Mud! I fell into a rhapsody of mudness. I smiled at the memory of drumming and the visions it had brought, and felt, for the first time in many months, whole.

  Mud. I sang a mental hymn to colloids great and humble, and got to playing with its peculiar qualities, jiggling it with my fingers, now quickly, now slowly.…

  Ashes to ashes, mud to mud, ashes to mud. Oh, thixotropy, receive now your daughter.… I laughed, tickled at the thought of that scientific term in these surroundings. Thixotropy, that quality of mud that makes it firm until jiggled by the shock of earthquake or the movements of a bather’s fingers, whence it turns to liquid. Thixotropy. Once a geologist, always a geologist. Put a sick geologist up to her nostrils in hot volcanic mud and what do you get? A superannuated child lost in the blissful play of discovery.

  In my mud-induced stupor, I recalled those stories of San Francisco earthquakes, of the ground heaving as fill soils turned thixotropic, of buildings sinking, of water shooting up in fountains. The idea of the earth receiving some things and expelling others tickled my mind, freeing it to think in any direction it pleased.

  And just like that, I knew where Sonja Karsh had gone.

  37

  Aunt Frida argued with me all the way back to her ranch. “You can’t really believe that, can you, Em? Matthew Karsh killed his own sister? What kind of a monster would do that?”

  I wanted to scream. “Why can’t anyone see this but me? What kind of a hu
man being ever kills another human being but a monster?”

  Frida didn’t have an answer to either question. “But his own sister! If I’d had a daughter, my boys would have protected her, or if they’d harmed a hair on her head, I’d—but not—Jesus, Em! Under the tank? How do you know that? That’s disgusting!”

  I kicked the dashboard in fury. “Don’t you get it? That’s why they don’t want the damned tank pulled. All this time I thought it was because Val Reeves wanted his damned construction loan, but he knew he could get that money from Weather-All right along. They’d probably been courting him since he filed his plans with the County. And that’s why Senator Pinchon’s antennae were up.” The irony made my head spin: Janet had told Reeves about the tank to try to block construction, but all she’d managed to do was drive him into business with her father’s patrons.

  Frida rolled her eyes. “Em Hansen, sometimes you analyze things to death, and you quit makin’ any sense. See here, this Karsh woman would have just said, ‘Take the money from Weather-All and let’s get on with it.’”

  “But Reeves didn’t tell Mrs. Karsh about that money until that night I happened by. That’s what all his notes were about. He’d given up on getting a bank loan, and he was pitching her the deal with Weather-All. Anyways, I’ll bet Janet caught her unprepared, coming to her and telling her the bank would want that tank pulled. Mrs. Karsh couldn’t afford to have Sonja found. She panicked and called in her monster.”

  “Sure, the whole damned family’s kept their mouths shut for over twenty years. Uh-huh.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t all have to know. Just—damn it, Frida, she knew her daughter’s body was under that tank. Her darling boy killed her, and Jaime Martinez helped bury her. That’s why they’d already put the gravel ballast in place that morning the tank was installed. It all fits!”

  Frida swerved to miss a slow-moving truck. “You’ll recall, Em, that we don’t even know she’s dead. All you know is she hasn’t been seen in close to twenty-five years. She could be anywhere. She could be a stockbroker in New York or a whore in New Orleans for all you know.”

  “They never found her, and the police would have looked,” I muttered. “Or at least until they got bored. And the lawyers. They would have hired a tracer to find the heir on her twenty-first birthday.” I considered this. “Or maybe not. They sure didn’t hurry up and finish probating that will.”

  Frida went on. “Maybe she’s no longer going as Sonja Karsh. Maybe she got a new name as—hell, these things can be bought, Em.”

  “She was only sixteen when she left; you think in all those years she’d never show up once or even phone her best friend to say happy birthday?”

  “Or maybe she died in a bus accident in Spain five years ago, or—”

  “Damn it, you just don’t want to think a boy could have offed his sister,” I seethed, my voice beginning to shake. “You’re just like everyone else!” Now my hands began to tremble, and that feeling of terror began to rise in a wave.

  Frida sighed with exasperation. “Em, even if it’s true, how are you going to prove it? You gonna dig up that tank yourself?”

  I stared out at the blackening clouds. I had an idea how I could force the truth to rise.

  * * *

  BACK AT THE ranch, I settled myself in the office with the telephone book. Mrs. Karsh was listed and answered on the third ring. “Happy New Year,” I said. “This is Em Hansen. I know about the underground tank by your father’s barn. Your man Martinez has been pouring oil and solvents into it for twenty years.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sure you do. And Janet told you to pull it, didn’t she?”

  Another pause. Nice ladies don’t lie, they just don’t answer.

  I sighed theatrically. “Well, it’s an environmental hazard, ma’am, and if you won’t do anything about it voluntarily, I’ll tell County Health you have an illegal tank and they’ll force you to pull it. But I’m a nice person, and I’ll give you twenty-four hours to report it yourself.” The illogic of our interchange delighted me. I was certain it would make perfect sense to a woman who lived by her rules. “Well, goodbye.”

  Hanging up the phone, I gave them an hour’s lead, then got into the F-250 and began to drive. It was almost dark.

  When I reached the turnoff for Ferris Road, I parked the truck and started hoofing it through the trees.

  The rain had briefly ceased. A dim, foggy twilight enfolded me as I dodged through the thicket of oaks and followed the road from a safe distance inward. Under the trees, it grew darker and darker. I looked at my watch. Almost five o’clock. The sound of a heavy engine coughed into life by the barn.

  I hurried through the brush and trees, racing to get as close to the barn as I could without being seen. Making it to within fifty yards, I could just see the shape of a backhoe lifting its claw.

  A backhoe, right on top of the tank site. And a flatbed truck, its stakes pulled from one side, waiting.

  I slid in behind an oak, pressing myself up to its damp, mossy bark.

  The claw dropped, gouging at the ground just next to the barn. Matthew Karsh sat at the controls of the backhoe. He worked hurriedly, ripping at the soil, scooping it up, and sloppily shifting the spoils. Jaime Martinez waited nearby, pacing and gesturing. He was shouting something at Matthew, something I could not hear over the grind of the engine.

  Sprinting back to the truck, I climbed in and dialed the cellular phone. When a voice answered, “County Health,” I asked for Lucy, saying it was an emergency.

  She was there. “Lucy,” I said, “I’m glad I caught’ you.”

  “Who is this? I’m just leaving.”

  “This is Em Hansen. Remember that waste-oil tank I found? The one on Ferris Road?”

  “Yes, yes, keep your shirt on, I’m working on it. I checked with Fire Services. No one ever permitted a tank there, or permitted removal, for that matter.”

  “Well there’s someone out there with a backhoe right now, trying to get the bugger out of the ground.”

  “How do you know?”

  I told her where I was calling from. “He’s digging like mad, and he’s got a stake-bed truck all ready to haul the thing away in the dark.”

  “But they can’t pull a tank without a permit to close, nor can they take it off the property without a transfer permit, not to mention proper precautions.”

  “Precisely.”

  Lucy laughed a cruel laugh. “Keep an eye on them. I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  LUCY’S A SMART woman. She showed up in a government vehicle with an escort of three big men, carrying officious-looking documents. It had taken her about twenty-five minutes to get there, long enough that Matthew had all the earth removed from the top of the tank and Jaime had a strap around it ready to lift the thing out of the ground. Matthew was giving it its first hard pull with the bucket of the back-hoe when the County Health posse arrived, bathing them and their efforts in their headlights. Matthew took one quick glance and vanished. I was amazed at how fast he moved.

  Lucy turned to Jaime. She informed him that he was to cease what he was doing and stay away from the now fully visible tank by order of state legal code number such-and-such. Jaime climbed up and shut down the backhoe and stormed off toward his house.

  As he came past me, I couldn’t help saying, “Si solamente pagas por la ventana.” If you’d only paid for the window.

  * * *

  WATER IS A powerful force.

  The ground had long since become saturated, shunting the rainfall into sheetwash. Over the next days and weeks, as one storm after another continued to pound the coast of California, the rivers began to rise.

  The waters backed up first along the Laguna, inching across the floodplain, rising drop by churning drop toward the causeway where Occidental Road crossed the once narrow stream. It was a lake now, at last living up to its Spanish name, and growing deeper. Then, as one storm b
rought six inches of rain in thirty-six hours, the Russian River swelled and leapt its banks, backing up Mark West Creek and flooding low-lying vineyards. The waters of Mark West Creek stalled backward up into the Laguna, now gorging on fast-moving runoff from the flood-control channels of Piner and Santa Rosa creeks. Passage over low-lying roads became impossible.

  As the waters continued to rise, Sonoma County became the focus of reporting on cable TV. I watched in fascination as the cable brought images of bridges and roadways awash, of National Guard helicopters plucking stranded residents from homes half-submerged in roiling, turgid waters. One particularly wet reporter spoke into a sodden microphone, reporting that, “Along the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the flood level has now exceeded the one-hundred-year level.”

  It was time to move.

  I phoned Detective Muller’s office, but he wasn’t there. I left a message asking him to meet me by the Laguna and fired up that nice, high-clearance Ford F-250 truck and drove through the slashing rain. It was a long drive through congested, storm-deflected traffic to get around the flooded roads and bridges. Instead of driving ten miles south, I had to wind eastward, then drive fifteen miles south on Highway 101 and ten west again along Highway 12 and onto Occidental Road, but that was not enough. Even before I reached the causeway and bridge, I met a sign that read, FLOODING, LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY. I inched onward, perversely needing to take a look.

  Rain fell in sheets, consuming the sky. The roadway was slick with, runoff, and here and there awash as bank-full ditches spewed muddy water onto the pavement. As the ground fell toward the floodplain, I brought the truck to a stop. The bridge and causeway were gone, deep underwater, not even Duke’s stop sign at the far end visible to mark their position. More frightening was the Laguna itself. It was a mile wide, and all along the far side it had swallowed the lower halves of trees, houses, and barns.

  I turned around and made my way southward over farm roads, crossing over Highway 12—also cordoned off, flooded above the engineered berms and into the fancy new buildings that had stood so high over the banks. I continued southward, now fetching up behind lines of other travelers inching their trucks south along the Santa Rosa Plain in search of a crossing. Miles farther south, this road, too, dipped low and was itself awash, but I drove around the barricade and crossed gingerly, the door panels of the high-clearance truck licking water. At Highway 116 I turned back to the north to begin the run along the hills to Miwok Mills.