He turned sideways to cast a glance back. She just stood there in her bandanna and rolled-up dungarees, frowning, with her pale, skinny little arms crossed tightly against her blouse. She was quite put out with him, it seemed, or else she was making her mind up that he was crazy as a loon--one of the two. It made no difference either way to Garnett Walker.
"Oh!" he said suddenly, for he'd nearly forgotten the whole business. He turned back toward her again, tilting his head a little to the side. "I'm afraid your No Spray sign landed somewhere down there in the weeds at the bottom of the road cut."
Her glare dissolved to a happy beam he could see plainly, for it lit up her face like sunshine on Groundhog Day. "Don't you worry, Mr. Walker. The spray truck went by at seven o'clock this morning."
{7}
Predators
Hey there," he said, as if Eddie Bondo himself standing in the trail were no more unexpected a find on this warm afternoon than the cluster of puffball mushrooms she'd paused just a minute before to admire.
"Hey yourself," she answered quietly. As if her heart were not pounding at its cage like a sudden captive. "How'd you find me up here?"
"I sniffed you out, girl. You're a sweet, easy trail for a man to follow."
Her abdominal muscles tensed. He might have thought he was joking, but she knew some truths about human scent. She'd walked down city streets in Knoxville and turned men's heads, one after another, on the middle day of her cycle. They didn't know why, knew only that they wanted her. That was how pheromones seemed to work, in humans at least--nobody liked to talk about it. Maybe excepting Eddie Bondo. "I'm fertile, that's what got to you," she said frankly, testing him out, but he didn't flinch. "Just so you know, this is the day." She laughed. "That's what called you down from Clinch Peak."
Eddie Bondo laughed, too, shining that high-beam smile at her through the late-morning drizzle. Could she pretend not to rejoice? How could she not want him back?
"How can you know a thing like that?" he asked.
"What, that my body's talking to yours?" She stomped her boot down on the puffballs, releasing a cloud of spores that rose and curled like golden brown smoke, glittering in the sunlit air between them. Sex cells, they were, a mushroom's bliss, its attempt to fill the world with its mushroom progeny. "Or how can I know about my timing? Which do you mean?"
He stomped the puffballs, too, squashing the leathery white skins like empty baseballs, releasing more puffs. The supply seemed endless. Deanna wondered if these tiny particles would cling to their damp skin or enter their bodies on an inhaled breath.
"Both, I guess," he said finally.
She shrugged. Was he serious? A woman knew both those things if she was paying attention. Deanna turned and headed up-mountain, confident he would follow. "I sleep outside a lot," she said. "I'm on the same schedule as the moon."
He laughed. "What are you, a were-lady?"
She stopped and turned to look at him. It amazed her, the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind. "Any woman will ovulate with the full moon if she's exposed to enough moonlight. It's the pituitary gland does it, I guess. It takes a while to get there, but then you stay."
Eddie Bondo seemed amused by this information. "So back in the old days, when they slept on the ground around the fire, wrapped up in skins or however they did, then what? You're saying all the women in the world came into heat at the same time?"
She shrugged again, not really wanting to talk about it if he thought it was funny. It felt like betraying a secret. "Convenient, if you think about it. Full moon, plenty of light."
"Damn," he said. "No wonder that sucker drives men crazy."
"Yep." She turned uphill again, feeling his eyes on every muscle in her long, rain-slick thighs and calves, her gluteus maximus, and the small of her back as she mounted the slope. She was wearing cutoff jeans, a thin cotton shirt, and no bra. She'd had no thoughts of Eddie Bondo when she dressed that morning, only a rush of spring fever and, evidently, a body that wanted to be seen.
"Where you going?" he asked.
"Out for a walk in the rain."
"It's just about let up," he contended. "Finally."
"Don't get used to it. We're in for more."
"Don't tell me that. How can you tell?"
How? About six different ways: first, a wind just strong enough to make the leaves show their white undersides. "I don't know," she said aloud, shutting that door out of habit. Although it occurred to her that this might be the one man she'd met since her father died who would be interested to hear all six.
"You hillbillies around here must have gills like fish. Last few weeks I've been thinking I was going to melt."
"You didn't, I see."
"Turns out I'm not made of sugar."
"Turns out." She smiled to herself.
"So. Where you going?"
"Nowhere--a place I like to go."
He laughed. "That sounds mighty unambitious."
"No, I mean, nowhere important. From a wildlife-management point of view." From anybody's point of view, probably.
"Well now, pretty lady. Does that mean you're off duty?"
She caught her breath, wondering at his power to manipulate her desire. She wanted to stop and tear him apart on the trail, swallow him alive, suck his juices, and lick him from her fingers. "It's just a place I like," she said evenly. "More a thing than a place. It's right up here at the top of these switchbacks."
The trail was extremely steep from this point on to where it lay, the great old friendly hollowed-out shelter she was headed for, a hundred more feet up the mountain. She could hear his footsteps and breathing right behind her, synchronized with hers.
"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" he asked.
"Vegetable. Dead vegetable. Since way before we were born."
"Is it...a big old hollow tree?"
She froze but didn't turn around.
"About ten feet long and yea tall, so you just have to duck your head when you walk into it? Nope, never seen it."
She wheeled to face him, her braid flying. "That's my place!"
"Don't you think a few other people might have run across it? It's been lying there about a hundred years."
"No! Nobody else ever comes up here." She broke into a run, but he overtook her from behind, a little faster than she was at an uphill sprint. With his hands on her hips he pulled but mostly pushed her, and before she could dodge him they had reached the tunnel tree, there was no turning back from it now. There it was, and lodged in the shadows inside of it, stashed neatly away from the rain, were his things: his pack, his tin cup and coffeepot, his whole Eddie Bondo life.
"I can't believe you've been here," she said, still denying it to herself.
"Lots of critters been here, don't you think?"
"No," she said, and nothing more because his mouth was on hers and his body was pushing her inside. He moved his pack aside, moved her backward into the delicate darkness toward the tunnel's very center, the safest place.
"It's mine," she whispered.
"Who cut it down, then?"
She could see nothing but his face, feel nothing but the exquisite grain of his skin against her cheek and his hands on her buttons. "Nobody. It's a chestnut. Blight killed all the chestnuts fifty years ago."
"Nobody chopped it down?"
She knew it was possible. Her dad had told her how people had watched the chestnuts mysteriously dying and rushed to take what was left standing since they needed the lumber so badly. But no, if somebody had gone to that trouble he'd have taken the wood, not left it lying here for dead. She started to say this, "No," but found she couldn't form the word against Eddie Bondo's lips. It became nonsensical beside the fact of her naked back pressed against the soft black crumbling curved inside wall of this womb she had never shared with any twin. He held her breasts in his two hands, looking down at her. She couldn't bear how much she loved that gaze and that touch, those palms on her nipples and those fingertips tracing her
ribs and enclosing her sides, pulling her against him as if she were something small and manageable. He kissed her neck, then her collarbones. Stopped briefly then and stood up on his knees to fish for the crinkling packet in his jeans pocket, that premeditation. Of course, he knew she was fertile. He'd be careful.
She sat curled with her back to the wall and her chin on her knees. The tunnel was wide enough that he could kneel in front of her, facing her, to untie her boots and slide off her shorts and his own clothes. It was warm enough for nakedness, a rich, dark warmth full of the scent of sweet old wood. He pressed his face against her knees.
"The full moon?" he asked, against her skin. "That's the secret of everything?"
She didn't say yes or no.
His hands climbed her like a tree, from ankles to knees to waist to shoulders until he cupped her face and looked into her eyes like a Gypsy trying to read the future in tea leaves. He seemed so happy, so earnest. "For that, men write stupid poems and howl and hold up liquor stores? When all they really want is every woman in the world, all at the same time?"
She held his eyes but couldn't speak to tell him how far she'd left all that behind her, so far that even her obedient ovaries sometimes failed to be moved by the moon these days, these years in her middle forties. Some months, no heads turned. She'd been so sure that was what she wanted. How could this be, Eddie Bondo looking in her eyes, taking hold of her braid, and wrapping it around and around his wrist until he had her cheek pinned to his forearm and turned gently away from him? She lay facedown with her head on her hands and the full length of his body against her, his penis gently pressing her solar plexus and his lips touching her temple. Between the skin of her back and his chest she could feel small, prickly islands of chestnut dust. "Deanna," he said in her ear, "I wanted you all the way from West Virginia. I was going to want you from here to Wyoming if I didn't come back."
He breathed on the skin beneath her earlobe and her back arched like a reflex, like a moth drawn helpless to a flame. She had no words, but her body answered his perfectly as he slid himself down and took the nape of her neck in his teeth like a lion on a lioness in heat: a gentle, sure bite, by mutual agreement impossible to escape.
By late morning the rain had stopped completely, setting free a moment of afternoon sun. It stretched into the tunnel's mouth to lap at their naked feet and ankles as they lay side by side. The sensation roused Deanna from where she had been drifting, someplace near sleep but not quite in its full embrace. It was late, she realized with a start. She opened her eyes. This day was going. Was gone already, she might as well say it: to him, her time and all the choices she thought she'd made for good. Her gut clenched as distant thunder rumbled and echoed up the hollow, threatening more rain.
She stared at the man who lay flat on his back beside her, sleeping the untroubled sleep of a landlord. Flecks of soft wood and crumbled leaves, shreds of her forest, clung to his body, freckling his cheek and shoulder and even his limp penis. She filled up with loathing for his talkative cockiness, those placid eyelids and the dead careless arm slung across her, heavy as lead. She threw it off of her and rolled away from him, but he moved from sleep to partial wakefulness and reached to draw her back to him.
"No," she said, shoving him, hard. "Just no, get off me!"
His eyes flew open, but Deanna couldn't stop her fists from lashing out hard at his chest and shoulders. A bile rose up in her gut, a rush of physical rage that might have branded him black and blue if her arms had found the strength for it before he gathered back his hunter's wits. She nearly spit in his face when he restrained her with a grip like handcuffs on her forearms. This fury had taken her like a storm and left her trembling.
"God, Deanna."
"Let me go."
"Not if you're going to kill me. God, woman!" He held her forearms upright on either side of her face and studied her like a bad mistake. Like some mountain lion he'd accidentally caught in a leghold trap for squirrel.
"Just let me go," she said. "I want to get my clothes on."
Carefully he opened one hand, then the other, watching her arms as she moved away from him. "What?" he asked.
"Why did you come back?" She spat the words.
"You seemed pretty happy about it an hour ago."
She shook her head slowly, breathed out through her nose, pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.
He persisted. "You didn't want me to come back?"
She hated that, too, his not knowing. She couldn't look at him.
"Christ almighty, Deanna, what?"
"I didn't need you here."
"I know that."
"You don't know anything. You never saw me alone."
"I did, though." There was a hint of that grin in his voice.
She turned to face him with an animal glare. "Is that it? You were watching me like some damn predator and you think you have me now?"
He didn't answer this. She turned her back on him again. "I was just fine here before you showed up. For two years, while you were doing whatever you did all that time, I was right here. Not missing people or all the chitchat about the stuff they think they need to have or wear or make happen. For sure not pining for a boyfriend."
He didn't respond. A scarlet tanager broke the silence with his song. She thought of the bird hidden in leaves somewhere, unseen by any human eye but nevertheless brilliant red. Nevertheless beautiful.
"And then one day you're here, Eddie Bondo. And then one day you're not. What's that supposed to mean?"
He spoke slowly: "It's not supposed to mean anything."
"Damn straight it's not."
"I'm gone, then, no problem. Is that what you're saying you want?"
She grabbed her shirt and put it on, dusting damp sawdust from her skin and feeling angry and pathetic. The shirt was inside out, she realized when she tried to button it, so she tied the tails in a knot instead and quickly pulled on her shorts. She hoped to God he wasn't looking at her. She tried to slow down her breathing and remember what she used to be. She crawled to the end of the tunnel and sat there at the edge, facing out, right on the margin where old chestnut wood dissolved into leafy forest floor.
"Deanna. I said, do you want me to go?"
"No. And I'll tell you straight, I despise you for it."
"For what?"
She still didn't turn around to look at him, didn't need to see that face. Spoke to the woods instead. "For shit. For me wanting you to come back."
When this day started, she'd been content. Finally, after fifteen days of heart-race and butterfly-stomach over any crackle in the woods that might have been his footstep, she'd stopped listening. She was sure of it. She could recall the even-keeled pleasure of hiking up the trail alone, thinking of nothing but this log, trying to picture how the forest had looked back when chestnuts were the dominant tree of the eastern forests. It was something she could see in her mind's eye. This giant would have been the tallest, most immortal thing on its mountain--until the day a fungal blight stepped off a ship in some harbor, grinned at America, and took down every chestnut tree from New York to Alabama. A whole landscape could change, just like that.
She sat still, ignoring her own body and the one that breathed behind her. Out in the light she could almost see the calm air beginning to gather itself for the afternoon, the oxygen burgeoning between the damp leaves. These trees were the lungs of her mountain--not her mountain, nobody's damn mountain, this mountain that belonged to scarlet tanagers, puffballs, luna moths, and coyotes. This shadowy, spirited world she lived in was preparing to exhale. It would be afternoon, and then it would be evening and then night. It would pour down rain. He would share her bed.
She wiped tears from the side of her face with the back of her wrist and reached out with her other hand to press her fingertips into the soft, crumbling wood. She touched her fingers to her upper lip, breathing that earthy smell, tasting the wood with her tongue. She had loved this old log fiercely. It embarrassed her to admit
it. Only a child was allowed to love an inanimate thing so desperately or possess it so confidently. But it had been hers. Now the spell was gone, the magic of this place that had been hers alone, unknown to any man.
{8}
Moth Love
Lusa stood on the front porch, watching rain pour over the front eave in long silver strings. The gabled roof of the farmhouse--her farmhouse--was made of grooved tin that shunted the water into channels running down its steep sides. Some of the trickles poured over as clear filaments, like fishing line, while others looked beaded, like strings of pearls. She'd put buckets on the wide steps under some of the trickles and discovered that each string of droplets tapped out its own distinctive rhythm in its bucket. All morning, the rhythm of each stream never changed--it only grew softer as the bucket filled, then returned to its hollow rat-tat-a-rat-tat-tat! after she emptied the bucket.
She'd set out the buckets to collect a drink for the potted ferns on the porch, which were out of the rain's reach and turning brown, even in this soggy weather, as brittle and desolate as her internal grief. She'd meant to return to her work, but the rhythms arrested her. It was a relief to stand still for a minute, listening, without anyone giving her pitying looks and ordering her to go lie down. Hannie-Mavis and Jewel had gone home finally, though they still came up several times a day to "check" on her, which mostly meant telling her to eat, even what to eat, as if she were a child. But then they'd go away afterward. Lusa could stand on her own porch in a pair of jeans and Cole's work shirt and watch the rain and let her mind go numb if she felt like it. If she hadn't had a gallon of cherries to pit and pack into canning jars she could have amused herself all morning out here, setting a bucket under each downspout and making up a song to go with it. Her grandfather Landowski's game: he used to tap out unexpected rhythms with his fingertips on her bony knees, inventing mysterious Balkan melodies that he'd hum against the beat.
"Your zayda, the last landowner in our line," her father used to declare sarcastically, because his father had had a sugar-beet farm on the Ner River north of Lodz, and he'd lost it in the war, fleeing Poland in possession of nothing but his life, a young son and wife, and a clarinet. "Your great zayda who made a name for himself in New York as a klezmer musician, before leaving his wife and child for an American girl he met in a nightclub." Lusa knew, though it wasn't discussed, that with his young mistress the old man had even sired a second family, all of whom perished in a tenement fire--her zayda included. It was hard to say which part of the story Lusa's father held against him--most of it, she supposed. When they flew to New York to witness the burial of the charred remains, Lusa was still too young to understand her father's feelings and all the ironies of the loss. Zayda Landowski hadn't visited her mind for many years. And now here he was, in a syncopated string of water drops on a farmhouse porch in Zebulon County. He'd started out as a farmer before bending the rest of his life around loss. What would he have made of a rainy day in this hollow, with its rich smells of decomposition and sweet new growth?