Our Lady of the Forest

  It happened again in Wyoming. Friends, he said. I just meet friends. I got friends in these little old places and we like to get together privately.

  This time Ann caught a glimpse of the friend, a woman in a royal blue windbreaker and those unwalkable platform shoes left over from the disco era. That’s Linda, her grandfather said afterward. We have a mutual interest in racehorses.

  Her grandfather was ticketed for ignoring the pay scales on Interstate 80 in Nevada. At Winnemucca they turned north and came home via Klamath Falls and Medford. Her grandfather met another friend in Grants Pass, a woman with an interest in deep-sea fishing. Ann stole cigarettes from the cab of a truck and sat in the weeds to smoke them furtively and masturbate languidly. She had started masturbating as a child of six and it had been since then a source of comfort, free of charge and equal in satisfaction to most candy bars. The barest little shiver left her warm and consoled. A little death, a placid tremor.

  At home she was not supposed to hear it but sitting on the toilet she heard it anyway, her grandfather in the kitchen saying to her mother Never again with her riding shotgun, driving’s bad enough without your love child badgering me for soda pop ever fifteen miles. She’s not that bad, her mother answered. You get a job, said Ann’s grandfather. Then you can have an opinion.

  Sleepy Jane moved in as soon as Ann’s grandfather embarked on his next trip. It was August and a series of parties ensued. They played The Band on the stereo, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Chambers Brothers. There was a fight in the doorway involving beer bottles. A man with a silver hoop through his eyelid stayed overnight with them, off and on, for ten days. Ann’s mother cried inexplicably. There was a hookah and wine bottles on the coffee table. It was the nineties but no one seemed to notice that. A group of drummers descended on their apartment, a duplex with its own patch of lawn in front. They were drumming on the grass—Sleepy Jane and another woman dancing with no Caribbean finesse—when Ann’s grandfather pulled up. He got out of his tractor-trailer and asked if he could try a drum and when they handed him one, a homemade conga, he threw it into the street.

  Ann began to go to school. It was too embarrassing. She used her inhaler in toilet stalls and doubled her antihistamine dosage, which deepened her school malaise. She started wearing her sweatshirt hood all the time in public. There were some boys who called her Carrie after the Stephen King character. She met other girls who were castoffs as well, diminutive like her and tangential. They were like mice together. They nibbled and stayed in the corners. One girl, Tara, developed breasts early and supplemented by falsies stuffed with toilet paper they constituted her ticket out. She became more popular. Ann didn’t develop. She couldn’t read and when the school found this out Ann’s mother received a letter from the superintendent threatening a child-neglect suit. But there were other students her age who couldn’t read and they had all gone to school. So who was neglectful? said her mother. Ann was put in a remedial class where she was taught to read by a computer. She kept sunflower seeds in her sweatshirt’s kangaroo pouch, pulled the salty kernels from the left, stuffed the wet husks down the right. There was no money for dope at first but she traded magic mushrooms, which she knew how to find. The dope made her cough at first, then alleviated her respiratory symptoms. She got caught stealing rolling papers from a convenience store a week after she got caught cheating on a math test.

  Then she was thirteen. They moved and she went to a different school. Ann wore flared jeans low on her hips, brass buttons rising from her pubis. A boy asked her if she wanted to get stoned and in the woods he unzipped his pants. Touch me, he said, but she refused, apologizing. In class the next day she was minding her own business when the girl behind her whispered slut. She wore the hood and her nickname at this school was Holmes said with emphatic irony for reasons she didn’t understand. It was code for homely, she found out. Soon she was accused of eating her own boogers. She had three friends in the same category. She showed them where and when to find mushrooms, which they froze in Baggies and sold. With the money they bought dope and went to a roller skating rink and again she went to get high with a boy and this boy too unzipped his pants. She used her hand like sandpaper rolled to smooth a dowel, employing a regular, detached piston stroke, and afterward he wrote down her phone number. This boy was named Evan. He was tall and approximately pear-shaped, spongy. They spent afternoons in the basement of his house with soft drinks and pornographic magazines. Blow me, he requested finally. So she knew what it was about now. She put her lips around him in resignation and used a slower stroke than her hand stroke but every bit as regular. It wasn’t worth it, Ann decided, even while she was at her work, but she took the job to its conclusion anyway, gagged up his seed, and stopped seeing him. There were consequences. Evan spread the rumors of the spurned. A girl called Ann a whore at school. His friends showed their tongues to her.

  Her mother’s new boyfriend was named Mark Kidd. He lounged in angular, precarious trajectories across their furniture, shirtless and barefoot, dangling a beer bottle by its neck, swinging it a little like a pendulum and looking at the television, or sitting on the floor with his back against the couch and around his neck a Saint Christopher medal, blond hairs on the shanks of his toes, blond hairs on his legs like a surfer’s. He had a rocky, bumpy sternum, a goatee, the same eyes Jesus had in The Last Temptation of Christ. He looked like Brad Pitt only goofier. Ann watched him shoot up, at which he was expert in a dull way. His tracks were attractive. The veins in his arms were like a nest of undulant worms. He seemed primed to pop. There might have been too much pressure in his eyeballs. At first he was playful and wrestled with her and held her in his lap against his erection. He knew passages from the Bible by heart. A woman of valor who will find? he said. Or, And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. Can you suss that? he asked. Can you dig it? When she tried to get away he put his hand between her legs. Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, he said, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Let’s get it on. She tried to get away again. He had a way of keeping his fist so deep in her hair she couldn’t move without suffering. Death is swallowed up in victory, he said. As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. Then he turned her over. The side of her face was against the floor. I love it how you look like a guy, he said. There’s nothing there. No curves. Just your sweet and beautiful little ass. He pressed a palm against her upturned temple and laid into her with a snakelike lunge. What I dig, he said, is just to stay in you, all the way up like this. Mmm. Way in. Mmm. In. We just hold like this and after a while you’ll beg me for it. Oh. Good. But I won’t give it up until you ask. You have to want me, oh.

  He shot up while he lay on top of her, in her, demonstrating a relaxed dexterity. She didn’t feel anything but his weight. And in the sixth month, he said, the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the Virgin’s name was Ann, baby, oh yes it was, and then he started to grind.

  When he cried beside her deep in his throat with tears that dropped from his jaws to his neck she considered springing to her feet propitiously and making a dash for freedom. But he kept one hand in her hair while he threatened her. Jerry Lee Lewis loved a child, he said, and they crucified him for it. So did Elvis have his Lolita. Every guy digs fourteen-year-olds, they just can’t do nothing about it no more. Not in today’s society. All these guys with their wrinkled old ladies pretending they don’t want fresh little girls to bust their cream against! You think your Indian and your African didn’t stay busy hosing fourteen-year-olds out on the prairie and getting down and dirty in the jungle, getting it on, breaking their nuts, snakes, vines, buffalo heads, all that shit like that? Little fourteen-year-old tight clean pussy was what the warriors wanted, Ann. Savages didn’t never give a damn, they did whatever
their manhood commanded so they could walk through the valley of death undaunted when they battled other tribes. Damn, he said while inside of her, this is as good as it gets.

  Young girl get out of my mind, he sang, in a horribly off key whispered tenor directly in her ear. My love for you is way out of line. Then it became a medley with his eyes shut. The younger girl keeps a rollin cross my mind, no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to leave her memory behind. Girl, you’ll be a woman soon, soon you’ll need a man. Little sister don’t you kiss me once or twice and say it’s very nice and then you run, little sister don’t you do what your big sister done.

  He would cry right after he came, then laugh. It was part of his post-ejaculatory chemistry. You tell your mother and I’ll kill you, he said. So go ahead and tell her if you want. But if you do I guarantee there’s gonna be a moment between when the cops are at the door and you’re like hiding in your closet. And that’s when I’ll cut your throat, bitch. Just before they cuff me.

  She didn’t tell anyone. She believed him, his threat; she was afraid Mark Kidd would kill her. So Ann left in September when the air was still dry and the wind still hot and inviting. The first night she camped in the landing of a clear-cut, curled up on the mildewed backseat of the car she’d saved her money for, a machete and a hatchet nearby. The mildew made her sneeze again and her inhaler cartridge was empty. She blew her nose and took antihistamines. She picked a few truffles, some huckleberries. There were Cambodians in the woods who spoke no English. There were also out-of-work loggers. She came across two men cutting cedar bolts who were nervous, she decided, because they had no permit. That’s right, bitch, keep right on walking, one of them called when she turned away. Out of their sight she began to run. Before long she turned to thievery. She was bold about it and stole in daylight: a can of gas, a generator, a cooler, a boom box, a backpack, a case of beer, a raincoat, a spare tire, a car jack. In Eugene she sat on the street with a sign PLEASE HELP ME I’M SO POOR AND NEEDY and hustled pocket change. When she thought she had enough cash on hand, she went to a medical clinic. A deep caustic burning between her legs, coupled with a strange discharge. Yeast infection, it turned out, and on top of that, herpes simplex. Mark Kidd’s calling cards.

  In a campground rest room she found a pocket Bible and stuffed it in her sweatshirt’s kangaroo pouch. She read it by her evening campfire, wiping her nose with a handkerchief. It passed the time and in small towns, on rainy days, she sat in libraries and read it. She stole a copy of the catechism from a library. In one town was a Christian Science Reading Room. The man there gave her a copy of the Gospels. She began to feel worse about the abortion she’d endured the year previous. The baby Mark Kidd had planted in her, murdered before it had drawn a breath, was in a state of permanent limbo. Ann read a book called Letters from Medjugorje and at a secondhand bookstore found the 1986 1986 Catholic Almanac and a book on Christian healing. In October she camped near Crescent Lake and picked white matsutakes. The money was good, but it went into the car, which needed first a water pump, then an alternator. She found that if she cultivated silence and wore her hood consistently like a shroud she didn’t have to worry about males. It helped to be offbeat, incommunicative. Ann began to understand witches. She hacked her hair short to deepen her strangeness. She sat close to her fire every evening. She wrote a postcard home that said Mark Kidd is a deseased rappist mom get totaly away from him.

  She took psilocybin at least once a week. Her hallucinations now had a religious cast and were sometimes rimmed by halos. The car burned oil. Oregon lay poised between two choices, but she felt drawn northward, called. California seemed dangerous, Washington soothing. The deeper the woods, the better she felt. In Washington it rained more often than not, a soft comforting veil. Ann camped for a week by the ocean and read The Confessions of Saint Augustine and Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. A college student tried to talk to her on the beach. He said he went to Pepperdine but was taking time off to travel. She was reading and he wouldn’t go away. She knew what sort of person he was. Very sincere, attended class and thought about his future, this trip to the beach was a nature lark, he was probably hauling around a new surfboard and for sure hoping to get laid. He was away from home and feeling rough and ready, but his earring looked fake and temporary. When he put his arm around her shoulder she turned and said Beelzebub and stared into the backs of his eyes, where she noted the slightest tremor. Beelzebub, she said again, and then he got up and walked away.

  Invoking the devil successfully worried her. She went into a Catholic church in the town of Aberdeen—birthplace, she remembered, of Kurt Cobain. She remembered being on-line at school, she was supposed to be doing library research for a paper on Edgar Allan Poe but instead she read Cobain’s suicide note: There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. Ann knelt in a pew. The body of Christ hung over the altar. She went up, touched it, and put her fingers in her mouth. They tasted salty, like seaweed. God, she said, save me from my sins. This was during a psilocybin binge, part of its crescendo. Ann put her fingers between her legs and touched herself absentmindedly. It was private, comfortable, and reassuring; it involved no one else. She pulled off her hood and lay on the floor. Sun flooded the stained-glass arch. She felt warm and had a dreamer’s vision, three women pushing her through a door with a stone lintel, a tribe of dogs running lathered through a forest, a ponderous search for shelter, too late, from a heavy, cacophonous rainstorm. Afterward, this was all she remembered. It didn’t add up to a story with a theme. Nevertheless she believed that the forgotten parts would have coherence if her memory could capture them. There was a residue of meanings, no images, but meanings on the cusp of her discernment. She carried what she couldn’t recall as a deepening disturbance. There was a fold or field around her now and she knew how to sustain it. A protective cloak of her own devising. In the church foyer she gathered leaflets and pamphlets. Can Anyone Be a Good Enough Catholic? A Radical Change in the Sacrament of Penance. Moral Issues of Human Life. How to Pray the Rosary. She kept them on the seat of her car. She bought a set of rosary beads and hung them from her rearview mirror. She bought a dashboard Jesus, too, one that turned a luminous amber as the evening darkness deepened. And she thought she remembered some trippy lyrics, in stereo, from one of Sleepy Jane’s wine-and-dope extravaganzas—I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus. Though it could have been something else.

  Ann used too much psilocybin and passed out on the altar of a church somewhere—what town she was in, she didn’t know. The priest there found her and called the police, who delivered her to a medical clinic where Ann came to the next day. A doctor, a woman, listened to her story, which she told while blowing her nose into Kleenex. I’m too tired to argue, said the doctor. But I still wish you wouldn’t just lie to me.

  I’m not lying.

  Whatever you say.

  My allergies are really bothering me.

  It’s dust mites, I’m guessing. This time of year. She got up, slid open a drawer, and pulled out a Sample-pak of antihistamines. This stuff, she said, is Phenathol. It’s one pill every six or seven hours. I can give you half a dozen, dear. Enough to get you home to Mother.

  Great.

  The doctor shut the drawer and washed her hands. You go home to your mother, she said. Right away. Pronto.

  I am going home.

  You said that, said the doctor. She crossed her arms and squinted at Ann. She wore thick glasses; her hair was in a rope. If I was smart I’d call in a counselor, she said. Someone who can deal with a runaway.

  Ann took one of the Phenathol pills. I don’t really need a counselor, she said. But I do need a ride to my car where I left it parked up by the church.

  It’s only three blocks to the church, said the doctor. But right now rest. For an hour or so. When you’re feeling ready we’ll sign you out of here and if you need it someone will walk you over. I’m guessing you’re as
thmatic, too, given that wheeze I’m hearing.

  No, said Ann. I used to be. But pretty much I’ve outgrown it.

  It can come back, the doctor said, if you don’t take care of yourself.

  When she left Ann lay with her head on the pillow and let the Phenathol work. It did. Quickly. Its efficacy surprised her. Her sinuses cleared, her torment subsided. She pulled open the drawer of pills, took all the packets of Phenathol samples, and stuffed them in her sweatshirt pouch.

  As anticipated by certain environmentally aware pilgrims, the maple bottom, the copse of alders, the labyrinth of blowdowns, the thicket of Oregon grape and salal, and the dank mossy forest of the Marian apparitions were all poorly served by the mass of travelers, who stormed through them like Roman legionnaires. Much was flattened. And indeed one pilgrim was detained by injury at the site of the crossing of Fryingpan Creek, a woman with excessive fear of heights who convinced herself prior to making the traverse that Mary and Jesus were sure to guide her if she shut her eyes and let go. She fell and broke two bones in her left wrist and badly bruised a hip. Someone else turned back because of a surge of anxiety brought on by disorientation. A third traveler with chronic vertigo was halted by a bout of stumbling and returned to the campground with assistance. And a man in therapy, rendered vulnerable by the forest, retreated when a minor social gaffe impaired his sense of self-worth. There were other digressions like battery-operated children’s toys flailing in the corners of rooms. Dead ends. Marital crises. One couple who had fallen behind found themselves oddly eroticized by the lush density of the ancient forest. Finally they stopped to embrace and kiss. The man laughed gently and put his hand under his wife’s shirt so as to run his fingers along her back and next he descended into her underwear which prompted her to say, Your hand is cold. Mother Mary, the man said. I didn’t expect her to lead us to the sacrament of woodland fornication. Let’s do it, he added. I’m serious. We can’t, his wife answered, not out here, are you crazy? Please, he said. For once let’s not be so Catholic about this. I’ll lean you up against a tree and take you from behind, okay? It’s not okay. I don’t like that. But why not? Come on, let’s do it. Wait until later, she said to him. Wait until tonight in the motel. We have to catch up to the others.