The Pines

swallowed by the pines. No ghosts. Crumbling bricks and a sense of vast age yawned all around her. Yet the pines were older still. They’d ruled here before the colonials had come, even before the Indians. Only small remnants of the Leni Lanape nation lingered; only fragments of the works of the settlers remained.

She considered those people who had mysteriously stayed, pictured their huddled encampments after the collapse of the bog-iron industry. Nearly starving in the woods, they’d survived on almost nothing, becoming ever more primitive, slipping in time until their children became like the descendants of castaways. Alcoholism, illiteracy and incest constituted social norms. The South Bronx with pine trees. This was what she’d escaped to, the legacy into which she had married.

But Wallace wasn’t like that. With a smile and a shake of her head, she recalled their first meeting. She’d been a sophomore at City College, a stack of books in her arms as she hurried through the park, and this tall soldier had walked right into her, scattering her books all over the grass. He’d been so embarrassed as he helped gather them, stuttering and stumbling all over himself. He’d been perhaps the handsomest man she’d ever seen in her life. So sweet. So shy. And he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She stared again into the flooded basement holes, and a weight settled on her, the lead of great age and of sadness and failure. She thought of the pineys and hated them, hated the limited gene pool, the inbreeding that resulted in all the deficiency and deformity. She’d heard that in the old days, whole decades would go by with the only new blood coming from escaped lunatics and convicts. And now my genes are floundering in that pool. She kicked sand into water, watched circles gently widen. Cripple genes, at that. She cringed at the thought. What if Lonny were right? What if Matthew’s problems were her fault? No, she wouldn’t consider this. If she were to blame, she could never face the boy.

And do I face him? Slowly, she retraced her steps, moving back toward the woods. If only her grandmother hadn’t died before Matthew was born. She would have known how to love him. After all, she even loved me.

She looked back at the once-prosperous community of Munro’s Furnace. Generations ago, her husband’s family had owned this town, building their own house just close enough so they could sit on their front porch in the evenings and watch the bustling activity. Only this remained. And if you try to sit on the front porch today, you’ll probably go through the floor.

The heat increased by the moment. As she walked, she resisted scratching her mosquito bites. If there were ever a war, she reflected, and the big cities were destroyed, it would be as though a dam had burst. Someday the pines would pour out, flooding into New York and Pennsylvania, and the barrens would cover this part of the world.

Someday.

The heat weighed on her, and she dragged her feet, feeling lashed to the earth. The trees around her stood ragged and stark, tortured looking, like the people who lived among them.

Monday, August 3

Three hot days had passed since the rain, and again the parched ground crunched underfoot.

His hair gleaming, bronzed by the sloping sun, Matthew stooped to the wildflowers, their small heads bobbing like insects. As he picked more blooms from the clump of weeds, he sang to himself, a soft, wordless tune of his own creation. Taking a bite of the crab apple in his other hand, he imbibed the sweet-acid flavor, then chucked the core. All around him, tall grasses lay down before the wind.

From the pines, a man watched through narrowed eyes. He inched forward. “Hey, you. Boy. C’mere.” He stepped suddenly onto the path. “I wanna talk to ya.”

Only the boy’s eyes could actually be seen to change; yet his body tensed with a movement like the shifting of light.

“It’s allkay, I jus’ wanna ast you ’bout sumthin’. Don’t be ’fraid.”

The boy stood poised, ready to dart like an animal through the trees. Only curiosity held him.

“It’s awright, honest.” Wes edged closer, holding out his hand and smiling. “Your ma said I could talk to ya. You know what I wanna ast ’bout, don’t ya? Yeah, you know.” The smile twisted, became something else. “You know sumthin’. Fuckin’ loony.”

The flowers fell to the ground.

Wes lunged and grabbed the boy’s arm. “In a hurry?” They tussled. “You ain’t goin’ nowheres. You go runnin’ round in the woods a lot, don’t ya, retard? Ye r out here allatime, I hear. Ya ever see a old man?”

“You! What’re you doin’ ta him?” The blonde woman charged down the path. “You leave him alone!”

“Ah, Pam, I was just…”

She crashed into him, shoving his chest with one hand and pulling Matty away. She pushed the boy behind her. “You stay the hell away from him! You hear?” She looked ready to fly at him with her nails, her face suddenly red and swollen with anger, the birthmark standing out vividly.

“I wasn’t gonna hurt the little squirt,” said Wes. The blotch on his face matched hers exactly.

“You shut up! I don’t want you round here!”

Snickering, he slouched away from her. “Yer mother don’t mind me comin’ round.”

“You think that bothers me, Wes Shourds? That don’t bother me. I don’t care what that whore does. Matty, you go back inna house now.”

“I just wanna ast the moron a couple a questions. Ain’t gonna hurt ’im. Thought he might a seen sumthin’ is all.”

“I don’t want you bothering him!”

“’Bout a month ago,” he yelled after the running boy. “Old man with a truck. You see him?”

“Shut up! You stay away from here! Dooley!” Quickly, she stooped and grabbed a small rock, made as if to throw it at Wes. “Dooley! Come on, boy. Where are ya? Dooley!” The dog was nowhere in sight, but sharp barks came from the direction of the house.

“Whose turn is it?”

“So anyway, between us and the cops, we bust down the door.”

“Yours.” In the ambulance hall, the crew sat around the card table.

“And there’s this fat guy laying there, and you could see he’d been cold awhile. You know how you can tell, right? He’s on his face with all the liquid pooled in his gut. You know, all sort of blue the way it gets, and the rest of him gray-like.” Showing off, Larry talked too fast, alternately smiling at Cathy Hobbs and blushing. “So anyway, I knew soon as we tried to move him that skin was gonna split and it’d come spilling out, so…”

“Listen to him, couple weeks on the rig and he sounds like a pro,” interrupted Jack. “Come on. You gonna play or what?” He leaned toward Cathy with an astonishingly intimate grin. “More coffee?”

Cathy was kind of cute, Athena supposed, looking her over. Little on the plump side, too much blue eye shadow. But why were the guys giving her the treatment?

Both Larry and Jack reached for the coffeepot. Jack won.

“Yuck,” observed Cathy, getting a whiff of the blackness he slopped into her cup.

“I keep telling everybody not to let Doris make the coffee.”

“So anyway,” Larry went on, “what we did was, we slid a sheet under him and lifted from the corners.”

Experimentally, Cathy brought the cup to her lips, grimaced. “This is awful strong. I’m surprised it doesn’t melt through.”

Before Jack had a chance to think of it, Larry tossed her a couple packets of sugar, then fumbled with a bag of plastic spoons.

“Now those will dissolve,” said Athena, breaking the silence she’d slipped into half an hour before. Cathy glanced at her, and Athena returned her eyes to her cards. She’d never been sure about how much Cathy guessed about Athena and her husband.