But the worst of it was that Eleanor got involved, had to put in her two cents, coddle him, keep Junior from growing up. She had to have her say about everything, make Tom pay, wound him. You always protect him, Tom would tell her. Even when he’s wrong you take his side.
No I don’t.
Yes you do.
Don’t tell me things about myself. I know who I am, Tom, what I think. I’m my own person, I have an opinion. A legitimate, important opinion.
You take his side no matter what. And that’s something I really don’t get. Because I’m only trying to help him.
Right.
Otherwise why would it be worth my time? I have better things to do than deal with him. But I do it, okay? Because I want him to grow up. I want him to turn out all right.
You do it because you’re messed up, Tom.
You always let him drive a wedge between us. You let him get between us, ruin things. I—
I just can’t let you abuse my son.
That’s bullshit.
Good night, Tom.
That’s just completely bullshit.
So see? It cut into his sex life all the time and forced him to pretend, lie, in order merely to get laid by a woman he didn’t even really like. There was no way to win and it angered him. So when the boy went through puberty, got a little stronger, Tom took him out to do some falling, as always hoping a leaf would turn, that metamorphosis was imminent, that it was possible the boy would be transformed, by hormones maybe, or just by the work, suddenly the boy would become someone else, but Junior turned out to be who he was, he couldn’t figure out what was going on, he was passive and didn’t absorb anything, couldn’t learn how to sharpen the chain saw, didn’t want to focus on trade secrets, technique, on undercuts, back cuts, felling against the lean, side notching or using the dutchman. Then he was constantly ruining good timber by fucking up on the simplest bucking and getting into the same kind of top bind over and over, a hundred times, even though the physics at work had been explained to him repeatedly, the god damn weight of this whole entire log wants to ride down right against your saw blade as soon as you start releasing the tension, just take a look and think about it, try to project yourself into the future—if you make this cut what’s going to happen?—and the boy made noises like he understood and proceeded to another top bind. You dumb fuck, Tom would say, and wedge or cut him out again, and the boy would stand there, watching. What he wanted to do was just stand there. Not get the job from the inside, feel it, understand what had to be done and do it without ever having to be told, he couldn’t think for himself and contribute to the program, he had to wait to be shown everything and even then he fucked it up, he wasn’t going to be a logger. He wasn’t going to be one. All you could do was order him around, tell him to go do this or that, then listen to his whining and complaining. Go back to the rig and bring me both jacks. All the way back, do I have to? By myself? What kind of pussy shit is that? Jesus Christ you little fuck you ought to be proud to bring the jacks and not say a single word about it just get them here pronto without a word and let that action speak for itself not this whining shit you give me when I ask you to do one simple little thing you little fuck you shithole.
He always went, Junior. Tom could make him go. It reminded Tom of dog training. You beat the dog down just enough to make him heel or retrieve a stick and the dog stayed with you long enough to keep from getting more of a beating, as soon as you were out of sight he dug a hole or chewed up something unless you attached to that, too, more unhappiness.
Usually, Tom felt bad. The boy was so easily cowed. What a pathetic drip his son was, you had to feel bad for him. Thanks for bringing the jacks, Tom would say. He meant it too, sort of, maybe. So what was Junior supposed to think? That his father was one confusing bastard, a puzzling son of a bitch? Sometimes Tom just didn’t make the gesture that meant he wanted to apologize, he thought it better to be consistent, even consistently an asshole. But wasn’t the answer right there in the Bible? How many times did God the Father get so pissed he killed men in droves, wiped them out and then changed his mind, here, have a city or a fertile valley, sorry I murdered a bunch of you, I’m feeling a little calmer now, wrathful carnage is a great cathartic, God’s ambivalence was so familiar, and wasn’t man made in God’s image? And when you thought about it even merciful Christianity with all of its talk of a forgiving God had this disturbing mystery at its heart: that God gave his only Son to murderers and had him crucified. Had him nailed through the hands and ankles, then stabbed in his frail gut. Where was the Father’s mercy in that, where was the Father’s love? It was a boon for everyone on earth but the Son, the Son who was the ultimate victim in a history fabricated by—who else?—forefathers. Fathers of yore who understood their yearnings. Who needed that story to quell their dark thoughts. To kill one’s son was unnatural, probably, but also, probably, an instinct. To blindly wipe out the competition was to blindly obliterate your own bloodline but also an immediate animal urge that didn’t require thought. The ultimate taboo was the ultimate symbol in the Western World’s ultimate religion as formulated by bearded patriarchs. God couldn’t love until his hate was purged. A man was finally civilized by guilt, tamed by his own transgressions. And what was the worst trangression possible? Kill your own son, like God.
But in the case of Jesus there was resurrection, proof that God had grown, was merciful, whereas Junior suffered on. Junior was permanently crucified. And whose fault was that anyway? Who was responsible for it? Tom remembered his words from the time, less than a minute before Junior’s “accident,” they’d been logging a steep knoll for the state highway department, taking out an S curve. You god damn pussy piece of shit, I wish you were never born. You fuck, you girl, you faggot little fuck. You finish the job or go fuck yourself. You finish dropping that tree you fuck. Don’t talk to me until you’re finished with it. I want that tree on the ground you fuck or I’ll cut your god damn dick off.
A day of hot sun, addled flies, litter fall, wood chips in Junior’s hair. But there was very little else to see, most of Junior was pressed into the ground, just a part of him visible beneath the tree, his legs twitching, splayed. Tom and another man cut Junior out and with his saw Tom recognized dead wood. The nine men present on the job got together and lifted the freed piece of snag off Junior. Then they knelt or stood in vigil. Don’t move him, said one man. It’s liable to make things worse. They listened at his mouth and felt with their fingers. Breathing a little. Still had a pulse. But Junior was mangled. Flattened unnaturally. His tongue hung out, his face was dark. One man stood with his radio crackling and stayed in touch with the medics from town. But Junior was squashed like an ant, ruined. Jesus, Tom had said. Save Tommy. Please! He was trembling and making a fool of himself. He heard the siren far down the road. Get ahold of yourself, said another logger, who stood watching Tom and smoking a cigarette. It isn’t going to help anything for you to fall apart.
Tom gave up spying on his family’s house and drove down Broad Street and north over Main, which on this Sunday morning appeared to him sullen, leaves turned to mire in the gutters. The surrounding hills were a patchwork of clear-cuts that had not been burned or replanted. Like an incidental bombing run—ravages no one cared about. Here was all this devastation, thought Tom, this foolish disregard for the view, and still the town leaders spoke of tourism as if it were salvation. A proposal with serious clout behind it called for dressing the loggers as loggers and arranging them jauntily around their trucks in red LOGGERS WORLD suspenders. Tom, flabbergasted, had asked the town’s hired tourism consultant—a Jew with slick hair named Appelbaum, from Seattle—if the loggers were meant to sing in chorus once the tourists were comfortably in their chairs or get drunk and pretend to break things. Which was it, he wanted to know—were they extras in a musical production or extras in a Western bar brawl? Appelbaum had described an hour-long program to unfold in something called the Old Forest Fire Pit with tourists seated on split-log benches und
er a cedar-shake faux-mossy roof while Pete Schein showed them how to sharpen a Stihl or fell a tree using the dutchman. The tree would be held together with hinge pins, and Stihl would be advertising. It was the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in Prague with the loggers starring as Indians. Schein’s stagged jeans would be stagged so high he might be wearing knickers on the Disney Channel. A props crew would invent the creases in his neck and his caulk boots would be made by an effects company specializing in distress.
Already, Tom recalled, a diorama under glass in the museum depicted a high-lead logging operation. The loggers were handmade painted lumps, about half an inch in height, resembling Lego figurines. Someone had earned a few dimes making them, along with the Popsicle-stick trees. Now there was talk of a Dead Logger Memorial, but was that too morose? A sculptor from Seattle made a presentation but the dead logger he wanted looked too much like someone from the hammer-and-sickle department, a barrel-chested guy with the jaw of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a proletariat hero. He died so tourists might have houses. He died delivering newspapers, literature, and most of human thought. Overblown and sad, some suggested, but what if it got tourists buying the myth long enough to stay around for a hamburger at Smitty’s and a souvenir chain-saw key ring? That was the yes argument in a nutshell; the no argument favored the denial of death and plenty of saltwater taffy. Still there were those dreamers who declared that Tourism A and Tourism B were really neither here nor there, the only future was with high-speed cable and Internet start-up companies. Loggers with thumbs de-soiled, thought Tom, pounding away at the return and shift keys, hauling laptops around in their pick-ups—did that make any real sense? The governor thought so and had come to town to describe North Fork’s e-destiny. What North Fork needed, he said with a fist raised, pounding a lectern in the high school gym, was more consultants, community college night classes in programming, and a vision that went beyond cutting timber. Then don’t put a Christmas tree in the Governor’s Mansion! somebody had duly shouted. There was an interim devoted to loggers at the microphone, the governor blinking and scratching his head: We don’t want to be computer geeks, I’d rather be poor and look like me than have to look like Dollar Bill Gates, You ought to be serving spotted owl to those guys in the legislative cafeteria, What do you think you’re doing up here, you’re a god damn liberal-Democrat governor, why don’t you climb into your tax-paid helicopter and get the hell out of Dodge? Oh hopeless, hapless, helpless, said the merchants. Oh dull, misinformed cretins. Naturally, North Fork had screwed up royally in its best self-destructive logger’s manner—or so asserted the president of the Chamber of Commerce at an emergency City Council meeting—the loggers always wanting to break things or to toss someone through a window. It was true, thought Tom. Loggers gone wild. His cohorts were doing their ghost dance now, thinking that if they stomped around long enough, revving their chain saws and gumming their snoose, the tide of jogging-shoed, tree-hugging, latte lovers would disappear into Puget Sound, taking their cell phones with them to fifty fathoms, their stacks of Helly Hansen catalogs and their World Wraps fast-food outlets. The grandfathers of loggers would rise again to cut all the trees in the national parks and the buffalo would return. It was a future that demanded considerable drinking by those present in these bad times—but how else to get to the world of dreams, where the future was always the past?
Tom pulled up to the minimart pumps and was standing there rubbing his temples and coughing when Jim Bridges pulled into the adjoining bay and waved at him through his windshield. Tom opened his truck’s hood so as to fend off requisite gas pump socializing, but Bridges, once his gas was started, called out, hoarsely, I’m basically bad hungover this morning there’s no other way to describe it.
I second that, answered Tom.
I went to Tacoma yesterday: traffic. There’s a girl I see every now and then. Twenty-seven. Dishwater blonde. Works out. No makeup. I found her through an escort agency. And get this—her career goal is, she wants to be a counselor to other whores.
That makes you research material, Jim.
She can use me for that it’s okay with me.
You can tell her you’re doing research too. Get the nonprofit discount.
Bridges laughed with silent blue mirth. That’s good, he said. I’ll use that on her. Professor John’s nonprofit discount.
Bridges popped open his truck hood. He pressed his glasses to his nose with his middle finger and stood there examining his engine.
Get this, Bridges said. You heard about this mushroom girl? Well Bridget went up in the woods with her to look for the Virgin Mary.
Bridget went?
Day before yesterday.
Bridget’s in with the mushroom girl?
Bridget’s one of her followers now. She’s dropped everything else.
Tom worked the pressure off his radiator cap. I wouldn’t have thought it, he said.
Well Bridget loves this kind of stuff. Television psychics, hypnotists, séances, ghosts, horror movies, the works. She cried all through The Sixth Sense—did you see that? Bruce Willis as a dead guy? Bridges shook his head and released a sigh that was meant to suggest the idiocy of the world, then gently pressed his hood shut. The mushroom girl—get this, Tom—the mushroom girl mentioned Lee Ann.
What?
She’s up there where we lost Lee Ann.
How did she know about Lee Ann?
She told Bridget the Virgin told her.
The Virgin knew about Lee Ann?
She said Lee Ann went to heaven, which is good. She said Lee Ann passed on in the woods. In her sleep. Or the Virgin said it.
Bridges walked around his truck. Tom could see how he felt about the subject. Bridges stood reading his gas pump receipt. I bet she wants money, he said.
Maybe, said Tom. But who doesn’t?
I’m going to take some aspirin, said Bridges. And sit on my ass watching football.
Don’t hurt yourself.
Okay, said Bridges.
You’ve got it pretty hard, said Tom.
He went into the minimart for breakfast. The place was busy for a Sunday morning; three of the four tables were occupied. He poured coffee into a plastic cup, bought a donut and a maple bar, and sat down with a will to eat in expeditious solitude, but boredom seized him immediately and he ended up listening to the talk at other tables for its entertainment value. Someone had rented a trailer to Indians: Their six hundred cats shit on everything so I had to pull up the rug.
You can call a guy to take carpet away.
If you can get him to show up before you die of old age. I took it all to the transfer station. Pad and everything. Gone.
Sometimes you do that but it’s more expensive.
Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t ever rent to Indjins.
I don’t have nothing to rent, Ken.
Leave it like that if you want to stay happy.
Why don’t you give me one of those smokes? Your Indjins can get you new ones at discount. Don’t they like to barter?
What are you talking about? I’m all through with them. Jim Billy, you know that guy? Indjins have those names like that. There was one I knew named Dick By The Fire. We called him Roasted Weenie.
Dick By The Fire.
That was his name.
How’d you like to be Dick By The Fire?
Jim Billy. He was the guy. The cat master. The cat chief. I had to kick him out last week. The whole bunch of them. Out of there.
They left to pursue their untrammeled lives, full of ordinary problems. Their spots were taken by what Tom discerned were a newspaper reporter in a Gore-Tex jacket and a photographer in a complicated vest. At first they talked about someone named Slagle whom apparently they both despised, a colleague in their office. Then they talked about the mushroom girl and the Virgin Mary sighting. Who the hell knows? the photographer said. It’s probably too much psilocybin. On those you’d see Tiger Woods in the woods. Or George Bush in the bushes.
Forest Whitaker lolling in
the forest.
Tree Rollins up in a tree.
Kate Moss down in the moss.
Stop right there. Let’s stick with that one.
Let’s try nature names like Ethan Hawke.
You mean bird names like Robin Williams.
I mean water names like Johnny Rivers.
Doc Rivers.
River Phoenix.
Okay. Harrison Ford.
Harrison Ford? What’s with that?
A river crossing. Ford a river. River Phoenix, Harrison Ford?
That’s incredibly lame.
Try Linda Lovelace.
Monica Lewinsky.
Monica on Hanukkah.
Lewinsky. Stravinsky.
Sikorsky.
No more-ski.
I also have to put in Nijinsky.
What about Nastassja Kinski?
What about Slagle eating your bagel?
What about Slagle reading Hegel?
What about Slagle doing Denny Neagle?
What about Elton John?
They stopped talking and sipped their coffees. Tom kept his head down and shut his eyes. These fucks were living on a different plane. Their lives were not like his at all. They could laugh and talk about trivial things. Play rhyme games in order to pass the time. A date with a virgin, he heard one of them say. Sounds excellent to me.
Tom skipped church and drove toward the campground. He passed a sale he’d shovel-logged in the fall of ’87; the reprod had not been properly thinned and all these years later there was still evidence of windrowed slash that hadn’t burned and there were rusted cables about. The sky was low among the trees; it had a metallic cast. The wind beat against the high branches. The puddles of standing water looked dark. A case of Budweiser had been tossed from a car and the broken bottles littered the road shoulder, some held partly together by their labels. The river ran close to high water, green with glacial till.
Tom turned east at the campground junction. There was a driver too close in his rearview mirror—a teenage boy in a Honda sedan—and that made him seethe. Tom considered rolling down his window and giving the little asshole the finger, but instead he slowed to fifteen, taking pleasure from that. The boy turned off at the river road, spinning out as he took the grade, and Tom rolled down his window then to give him the finger while stopped in the junction, honked his horn and yelled Fuck you you little piece of shit!