Barry could do no wrong. When Steve and his wife had first come out here, Barry had instantly become his anchor. Only his heavyset partner had made life bearable, providing his sole link to past realities. So he’d buried himself in police work and this new friendship while his wife slowly…
Perhaps it was her death that changed the way he perceived the older man. Whatever the cause, Barry sensed it. More than sensed it. Knew and resented it. Yet the outward signs of the relationship had not altered. Only intent changed. Barry’s boorishness had become malicious. Steve’s silent admiration had become a numbed tolerance, beneath which lay the certainty that somehow he had failed Barry, that this too was his fault.
He stepped over a dead pine that lay rotting in the sand.
Lost somewhere in his cramped house was an old photograph. The officer in that photo smiled broadly, his uniform creased and spotless, the young man muscular and lean. He’d only been married a short time then. So short a time. It seemed to him he’d seen this photo recently, glass cracked, gold paint flaking off the frame. It lay somewhere amid the sad clutter, the debris of a life with Anna that filled his house, preserved in a perfect state of disorder, like a museum collection waiting to be cataloged.
Dark spots spread under his arms. He drew the dusky smell of the pines deep into his lungs, and his head cleared a little. He had to cut down on the drinking. Then he snorted in self-derision and looked around at the emptiness, feeling he’d been deposited here by an outgoing tide of booze.
When they’d known for sure that his wife was dying, he’d resigned from the Trenton Police Department and brought her out here…because they’d always said they would retire to the country. A hideous mistake, and from the start, she’d known it, keeping silent for his sake. In a desperate flurry of activity, he’d uprooted her, dragged her away from her family and friends. Trapped her in that awful little house with only her disease for company. And the house was awful, tight as a coffin, hardly the rambling country place they’d dreamed of. She’d accepted the arrangement, as she’d accepted everything. In all their time together, she’d never complained, not even at the end when the pain must have been…
A branch snagged his pant leg, and he bent to free it, rancor welling up in him like bile, his clenched eyes stinging with perspiration. There hadn’t been enough time. Straightening, he unzipped his fly and relieved himself against a sapling, then headed back toward the car. Though still in his early thirties, he’d lately come to think of himself as an old milk horse, the sort that made its rounds until it dropped. He thought of his wife as he plodded on, of how little she’d weighed near the end, of how he’d smothered her with petting attentions, both of them knowing the pain he tried to assuage wasn’t hers, touching her constantly, as though somehow…
Something squelched under his shoes. Coagulated leaves almost covered the patch of bog, and blueberry bushes grew sparsely in the soggy ground. Sodden branches lay scattered, some laddered with shelf growth, the fungus flowing over them in weird, garish colors. He stared down blankly. He must have walked in the wrong direction. Stooping, he picked up a hunk of cedar wood, his vision clouding as he smelled the dampness. He held the log to his face, feeling sick with the heat as he squeezed. We t and rotten inside, it crumbled in his hand and dribbled back into the mud.
He stared at his soiled hands—rough and callused, creased and cut with lines like tooled leather. Not moving away, he wiped them on himself, leaving smears of bark rot on his pants.
“Is that a buzzard circling up there?”
“We’re doomed!”
The heavy pack caused sweat to gather in the small of Jenny’s back, and her hot T-shirt clung. A thorny, tentacular vine caught at a sneaker and tore her ankle, and every step stirred swarms of gnats from the undergrowth. The terrain never varied. “Some vacation. It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt like I was getting someplace.” She sighed. “Whose idea was this again?”
Casey plodded ahead, his heavy hiking boots clunking along the trail. Above white socks, rolled fat at the ankles, his hairy legs were thickly muscular, and above the frayed belt loops of his cutoffs protruded the graying waistband of his jockey shorts. Sweat streamed down his back and sides. A T-shirt, bunched up and stuck in his backpack, trailed out, waving to the others like a white banner.
“I see some more deer tracks,” announced Amelia. No one responded to the child—they’d all gotten pretty bored with deer tracks. “They look sort of funny though.”
Incredibly, the heat increased. Soon they passed a stand of scrub cedars, a welcome break from the pines, but the gnarled trees looked drained, blighted. Webbed with vines, they seemed to huddle together against the surrounding conifers. “Oh my God.”
Casey turned back. “What is it?”
Stretched between two cedars was a huge cobweb, a small bird lodged firmly in its center. There came the barest hint of a breeze, and the desiccated creature swayed in a sad parody of flight.
Alan leaned closer to the web. “Is anybody home? You know, I bet there could be spiders out here as big as a house.” The laugh didn’t quite come off. “What’s that noise?”
“Catalpa.” Casey pointed to a twisted tree among the pines, the source of a whispering rattle. “The bean pods are dried out from the heat.”
“They’re not the only ones,” muttered Jenny as she moved away from the web. The straps chafed her shoulders, so she slipped the pack off and sat on it. “Who’s got water?”
“You know, if that spider is really big, he’s liable to creep down and…carry off Amelia!” Alan pounced on the child and tickled, and she collapsed in laughter and squeals.
“Stop it, Alan. You’re scaring her.”
“She doesn’t look scared to me, Jenny.”
“Look, Sandy, you’re not the one that has to sit up with her when she has nightmares.”
“Well, if she has one to night, I’d be only too—”
“Say, Casey,” Alan interrupted loudly. “I meant to ask you before—I see a lot of these trees are all black at the bottom. They burnt or something?” He smiled to himself. Casey, a sort of perpetual grad student, could usually be cued to provide a safe, distracting lecture, and they clearly needed one.
Nodding, Casey turned away from the cobweb and, with a motion that seemed almost a caress, drew his large hand across a pine trunk. “Dwarfism might have something to do with fire,” he said, fingering a bit of scabrous bark. “Or it may be the soil.” His voice stayed calm and measured as he knelt in the sand. “Here—take a look.” Pinching out a piece of turf, he held it up.
As he dutifully inspected the plant, Alan saw that it grew everywhere around them—he even stood upon it— and he’d never noticed. Leave it to Casey.
“You could scour pots with this stuff.” Jenny kicked at a loose patch of lichen.
“The glands—the red spots—are sticky,” Casey pointed out, “for trapping insects.”
“I wish they’d trap some of these.”
He gave her an indulgent look. “There’s an almost complete lack of nitrogen in the soil.” Pausing for them to appreciate that, he smiled his slow smile down at Amelia as the child fearfully examined the pale bit of mossy green. At nine years old, she seemed a nut-brown miniature of Jenny, the dark eyes, now lined and nervous in the mother, adding an unusual depth to the child’s face. “That means the plants have to eat bugs to live,” he explained.
Jenny sighed laboriously at the lecturing drone.
“It’s going to be a long week,” Sandy muttered.
“This place…” A note of awe entered Casey’s voice, and he stood up, brushing damp sand from his sweating legs. “Think about it. A forest this size in the middle of the most heavily industrialized state in the Union!” He shook his head in wonder.
Grinning to see his taciturn friend so animated, Alan nudged Sandy.
“What’s really incredible is that nobody even realizes it’s out here. What do people see from their cars? Trees on the side of the road—just the tip of the iceberg! Most people have to think, a few yards in, there’s another road or some houses. They can’t grasp it! Can’t conceive of—”
“Ugly. Ugly little trees.” Jenny stood up and pinched sullenly at the sides of her binding jeans, while Alan helped her struggle back into her pack. “Trees should be pretty. You look at these, and all you’re aware of is their miserable little struggles to survive.”
“Yeah, it’s like they’re alive or something.”
“They are alive, Sandy,” Jenny sighed.
