down the trail, glad he'd shut the flatlanders up enough so he could listen to the trees.
Because the trees were whispering, and the language was soft and slushy and strange. He picked up speed as he headed downhill, leaving the two men to make their own way back. But they must have experienced the same uneasiness, because they stayed at Chester’s boot heels until the trio reached the forest’s edge.
Chester breathed a sigh of relief when they stepped out from the canopy of the woods into a meadow. He looked at his farm spread out below, at the dark buildings and the barbed-wire stitching that marked off the fields. Under the stars, it was a beautiful, peaceful place. Except for its unwanted visitors.
The evening dew soaked into Chester's boots, making his feet heavy. He dug into the pocket of his overalls for his moonshine. DeWalt stepped beside him, breathing hard.
'Let me warn you about him, Chester,' he said, low enough so that the trailing Emerland couldn't hear.
'Shoot, pardner.' Chester screwed the lid off the jar. He hoped DeWalt didn't launch into his tree-hugger bit. He glanced back at the mountain. He could just make out the green glow in a pocket between two ripples of black land.
'You know that song ‘This Land is Your Land?’'
'Sure. Learned it in third grade. My last year of schooling.'
'Well, there's a new version. It goes”-DeWalt drew in a breath and sang in an off-key bass-'This land was your land, this land was my land, now it belongs to… that bastard Emerland…'
Chester chuckled. 'You couldn't carry a tune in a galvanized washtub. But I get your drift.'
'What's that, gentlemen?' Emerland called.
Chester stopped and lifted the moonshine jar to his lips. “Oh, just talking about you behind your back, is all.”
“Don’t believe everything DeWalt says. He’s only protecting his own interests. We’ll top his offer by twenty percent.”
“Don’t matter none,” Chester said. “I ain’t selling. And I got other problems at the moment.”
“Mister Mull, we’re talking a high six figures here,” Emerland said. “Maybe bumping seven. And our development will be ergonomically designed to fit the environment and protect the viewshed. The impact on the natural beauty will be minimal. My architects-”
“You can shelve the twenty-dollar words, Emerland,” Chester said. “Won’t make no difference.”
“Chester, his idea of ‘low impact’ is a truckload of dynamite,” DeWalt said.
Chester had lifted the jar for another sip but stopped with the jar inches from his lips. “What’s that?”
“Emerland likes things that go boom.”
Chester took the delayed swallow, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and said, “Dyn-ee-fucking-mite.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” DeWalt said.
“Yeah, but probably in plainer words.”
“Blow the fucker back to hell?”
“Can’t get no plainer than that.”
Emerland's eyes shifted back and forth.
Probably wondering how he ended up with such a pair of fruitcakes on a cool Appalachian mountain under a grinning moon. Chester grinned.
'Hey,” Chester said to him. “You got some dynamite over there at the construction site, don't you?'
'Huh?' Emerland's clean-shaven jaw dropped.
'Ka-blooey stuff. TNT. Instant avalanche.'
'You're insane.' Emerland raised his palms in protest. 'That stuff is seriously regulated. It has to be double locked and every damned piece has to be accounted for-'
'Locked, huh? And I reckon you got the keys, Mister Big Britches?' Chester let his few teeth catch the moon in what he hoped was a crazed grimace. He pointed the shotgun at Emerland to complete the lunatic image. He was pleased to see Emerland gulp frantically.
'You can't do this. Why, this is… it's against the law.'
Chester cackled. He’d discovered that pretending to be insane wasn't much of a character stretch. 'There's a new law in town, stranger. And it ain't wrote by the likes of us. Now, get on to the house.'
He let the barrel of the gun flash under the moonlight for emphasis. DeWalt held his arm out like a doorman, indicating that Emerland should go first.
'Lead on, MacDuff,' DeWalt said.
'Who the hell?' Chester asked.
'I'll tell you about it someday, after this is all over.”
But as they walked under the seemingly endless night sky, Chester wondered if it would ever be over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Driving yourself crazy.
What else could you call it when your car almost seemed to steer itself, when the road beneath the wheels was predetermined, when God’s skyhook towed you toward an unknown destination?
No. Tamara wasn’t heading toward craziness. She was either already there or miles from it, saner now than she had ever been. The green light on the ridge above her grew stronger as she approached, and though the curving dirt road often took the glow out of her sight, the electric throb in her head was constant, more intense with each heartbeat.
She’d slammed some breezy, take-it-easy Jackson Browne into the tape deck, as if mindless melancholy were the proper soundtrack for this unwanted mission. As she ascended, and the road grew more rough and rutted, the forest had taken on a dark look, the canopy hiding quick shadows. The houses had grown sparser along the way, here and there tucked in little glens, gray outbuildings warped with age amid pastures worn low by diseased-looking cattle.
Tamara downshifted and cut around a particularly steep curve, and for a moment the world fell away at the shoulder of the road, and she could see Windshake below, brick and wood blocks with some sunset lights already on, the uneven highway leading away from town like a black river. Jackson sang something about not being confronted with his failures, as if the mirror didn’t do that to every human being on earth. Then she was between the trees again, and the creeping insistent voice tickled the top of her spine.
Shu-shaaa tah-mah-raaa.
The Gloomies were around, floating, seeping, flowing. If she couldn't come to them, they would come to her, or perhaps they would collide with each other. She hadn’t dreamed this part. Or maybe this was a waking dream, one where her own life was the centerpiece, not her father’s or her children’s. This was the forest of night, the oaks surreal and the pines undulating their branches, the tint of the leaves slightly off-kilter, as if viewed through a smudged kaleidoscope.
She took another curve, skidding on the moist stones where a ditch leaked spring water across the sodden road. The tires spun and caught, but as she straightened the wheel to head deeper up the cut of the mountain, the bank on the far side gave way and a gnarled giant oak fell toward the Toyota.
She swerved, but the thick branches batted the side of the car in falling, cracking the windshield. The weight of the tree nudged the Toyota into the ditch, bottoming out the car and leaving the left front wheel hanging suspended. She shifted into four-wheel drive, but the mud, the tangled grip of the tree branches, and the grounded oil pan kept the Toyota from doing anything more than quivering in place.
After a minute of revving the engine, Tamara tried to open her door. It was pinned by a splintered branch as thick as her arm, its new leaves pressed against the glass in greasy smears. Up close, the leaves looked as if they had turgid blue veins, like the varicose veins of an old person.
She crawled across the seat to the passenger door, opened it, and wriggled out. She stood and looked at the oak, with its gray bark and dark knotholes that seemed to be watchful eyes. The exposed roots, thrust up from the soil, undulated like white worms.
No. The tree isn’t alive, not in THAT sense of the word.
She looked past the fallen oak to the forest beyond, which was pocked here and there with granite
