She made the two-hour drive crying, furious with herself.
At home she transferred everything from the cooler to the fridge. She threw her bedding in the wash with shaking hands. She poured herself a drink to calm herself down and took out her phone to post the photos with a caption that painted the overnight in the positive light she’d counted on. She opened her photos and understood.
She saw the selfie in front of the fire and the video of the s’more. She remembered trying to capture the stars.
But she saw three more photos she hadn’t taken herself: the boots outside the tent in the dark, her sleeping body inside, and then a close-up of the bottom half of a man’s face, grinning.
2
Pipeworks
CHAVISA WOODS
Sometimes, trees look like men. In the dim light of dusk when they sway in the wind, from a distance, the white trees especially stand out against the forest edge. They appear to be a slim man watching and waiting for something unknown so that he can begin his brutal work.
When I was very young, I used to see things that no one else saw. One of the things I saw often was a faceless man with a head of bushy white hair. He watched me through windows. I thought he was a real man following me around, just to stare and disappear.
I saw many things that other people didn’t see. I also heard things that other people didn’t hear, and sometimes, I heard things that other people did hear, but I interpreted them very differently than others would have.
I was five years old when I discovered the Deep Smoldering Pipeworks. My mother and I were living with a woman named Susan whom my mom had known since high school. Susan lived in a small one-bedroom trailer in the next town over from mine. She had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and she was an alcoholic, as was my mother, but Susan was sloppier about it than my mom. She was a very violent and argumentative drunk.
In her one-bedroom trailer, Susan had a queen-size bed boasting an ornate metal headboard and frame. When she got drunk and started arguing with the people she often had over for drinking and arguing, I would go into the bedroom, crawl up in the bed, cover one ear, and press the other against the metal headboard. By pressing my ear against the metal poles, I could hear it. The sonorous metal poles produced a mournful and straining racket that sounded like a combination of an old ironworker’s shop and a torture chamber.
The fairy-tale movie Legend, which I loved, included many scenes depicting an upper level of Hell where trolls and demons lived in a nightmarish factory just below the earth, where they were constantly hammering metal and grinding steel and burning coal and torturing the creatures they caught and dragged down and imprisoned in their metal cages. I thought I was hearing this sort of thing—that in some supernatural dimension, the poles of Susan’s bedframe led all the way down to a horrible, mythical pit in the earth, some deep, smoldering Pipeworks, where weapons were being forged from flame and iron, and people were being raped and burned and pulled apart limb by limb, skinned alive; boiled in giant metal cauldrons, and branded with Satan’s irons.
One night, when I was staying with my mother, Susan went out to the bars with some friends of hers, and my mother and I stayed home to babysit Susan’s two-and-a-half-year-old son. We had a nice time that evening, passing many hours playing games and eating snacks.
My mother, myself, and Susan’s young son were sitting on the floor of the trailer, and Susan came in slurring and wobbling and talking loudly. She smiled at us and asked if we’d had a good time, then sat in a chair near me, and held her arms open to her baby boy. “Come here,” she said, “give Mommy a hug.” The boy squealed and threw his hands out, laughing, and ran, not to her, but to my mother, Gina. He crawled into my mom’s lap and turned back to his mom. “No!” he squealed, still giggling, “Gina!” Then he hid his face in my mother’s chest, and laughed like a cartoon baby who was being ornery. He was obviously trying to play, but Susan’s response was brutal. Her expression dropped suddenly. Her eyes became dark. Her mouth, a stiff line.
“You love her more than me?” she asked, not playing in any way. “You want her to be your mom now? Is that it?”
She grabbed him out of my mom’s lap and sat him in the middle of the floor. The boy began crying. My mom told her to calm down. “You’re just drunk. He knows you’re his momma. We’ve just been having fun, that’s all,” she pleaded.
She walked around and sat on the floor across from my mom, with her son sitting in between them. She looked at that two-and-a-half-year-old boy who still wobbled when he walked, and she told him, “You’re gonna have to choose. You want to go to me or her? You fucking choose who you love more. You hear me? You go to who you love more!”
“Susan, stop it. This is sick,” my mom demanded.
I crawled up onto the chair and curled my knees to my chest.
“You better choose right, boy,” she told him menacingly. “Now, call him.” My mom sighed deeply and a sorrowful look took over her face. She shook her head and remained silent. “Come here!” Susan shouted. “You better get over here, boy! Come to your fucking momma!” Susan was screaming at this point, so, of course, the child was terrified, and even though she wasn’t even calling him, he went as fast as he could back into my mother’s arms.
And then Susan stood, grabbed the toddler by his arm, and gave him three very hard smacks in
