I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (20 page)

“Sure.”

“That's all I'm saying. Why does everyone have to be scared all the time? You're scared and I don't know why. I know your husband isn't here. That's fine. I'm checking on a guest. I live here, ma'am.”

“I know,” she says. “Sorry.”

“You know?”

“No. Please.”

“Please?” he says. He lifts his hands to his face. He covers his eyes. “My God. I'm sorry.” He leans back and takes a step away. The smoker sits on the pavement.

“Okay.”

“Have a great night,” he says, shaking his head as he starts his walk away. “There's a deadbolt on the door if you have issues.”

Kristen closes the door and presses her body against it. She finds the deadbolt and twists it locked and backs up against the door. Her mind whirls and she grabs her purse and sits on the bed. She turns off the lamp and reaches into her purse for her phone, but remembers she's left it in the car's glove box and says, “Fuck.” Narrow strips of blue light leak from the bottom of the curtains onto the AC/heater unit. She picks up the room's phone and hears the dial tone, then puts the receiver down. She stands and walks to the curtains and draws them back and peers out. She sees her car and the unmoving parking lot. Near her knees the AC kicks on, and she jumps back. Quickly she reaches into her purse and grabs her car keys, steps to the door, unlocks the deadbolt and handle lock, opens the door, and looks around. Nothing. In the distance the sound of brakes from Highway 101, and in front of her a deserted parking lot.

From her car's glove box Kristen snatches her phone and a bottle of pepper spray. Back in the locked room, she sits in the darkness, surprised to find herself here, on this bed, in this room, confused that she isn't bound for another place. She sets the pepper spray on the bed next to her and turns on her phone and studies the background photo while the phone searches for reception. Three missed calls and five texts from Wintric, two texts from her mother. She places the phone on her chest and tries to relax.

The cool air from the AC reaches her legs and she hears a car door shut outside. She grabs the pepper spray and stands.

From outside, a woman's voice: “One seventeen. No, one seventeen.”

Kristen tries to remember her room number, but nothing comes to her. She edges to the curtains and stares out. Outside, a woman stands near a car holding a sleeping child. She enters the room next to Kristen's. Kristen hears the woman's movements through the shared wall. A man waits for a moment in the parking lot, then reaches into the back seat and brings out a baby in a car seat and a large bag and follows the woman into the room. Before she closes the curtains, Kristen hears the short beep and sees the headlights flash as the car locks.

Back on the bed, Kristen listens to the family settle in the room next to hers. She retrieves her phone and opens the first text from her mother:
Okay? Worried. Call ASAP. Love you.
From the next room, the rising cries of the baby and the muffled reaction of the parents. The infant unleashes a full-blown wail as Kristen types a text to her mother:
Drove to coast. Need deep breath. I know weird. All okay. Home soon. Help with Wintric. All okay. Love.
The baby screams, then quiets, then screams, and Kristen realizes that Dennis may have put the family next to her as some sort of punishment, but tonight the noisy family and thin walls comfort her. They'd hear if someone knocked on her door. They'd hear her if she called out. Kristen rereads her text to her mother—
All okay.
She hits Send and keeps her phone on but in silent mode. The AC kicks off, and though she's still hot, she stays on the bed, guessing it will turn on again soon. The baby cries, and Kristen wonders how young the child is, if it's a boy or a girl. She grabs the pillow that Wintric would use if he were here and clutches it to her chest.

In the morning, about half a mile from the motel, Kristen slides five dollars into a slot in a yellow shack beneath a handwritten sign that reads
$5 FOR CARLOAD. PUT MONEY IN THE SLOT. WE TRUST YOU
. Guiding her car up a steep road just behind the shack, she comes upon the Tour Thru Tree so fast that the scene instantly surprises and disappoints her. A green car is parked halfway through the massive tree and two teenagers stand nearby, taking photos with their phones. Kristen stops and glances around, but there's only this small clearing with the massive, holed tree and a thin paved road looping through. Somehow she's already here. She rolls down her window and hears a group of Harleys on 101 and one of the teenagers saying, “Humboldt.”

Kristen searches amid her building frustration for preconceived images of this place, but there's only a residue of expected wonderment. Whatever it was, what she hoped this moment would bring, it was never this tourist trap, this huge redwood practically on the highway, these two teenagers posing in front of her. It wasn't Dennis or a crying baby or a glass-of-milk-and-potato-chip breakfast or two days in the same clothes. It wasn't alone.

She doesn't want to curse herself for driving here. What if she'd driven home and handed Wintric Dead Rising? She leans her head back on the headrest and watches the young men move around the tree to the back of their car and snap more photos. One jumps up on the trunk of the car and gives two thumbs-up to the other. After several more photos, their show is over and they pull away, circling back the way they came in, waving to Kristen, who ignores them.

Kristen eases forward, and by the time the nose of the car enters the tree she's almost numb. The car fits comfortably, engulfed in the redwood. The tree's darkened innards sport horizontal scratches and carvings from side mirrors and knives. Scattered graffiti dot the upper reaches of the cutout. Kristen looks to her left and reads some of the inked messages: “Amy and Brett 98,” “alien tree,” “Calvin Hobbes Me.” She wonders if the other drive-through trees are marked up like this, and she lets herself think they are in fact worse—spray-painted inside, with long lines of cars and a ten-dollar entrance fee. Outside the tree a light rain begins, and she stares right and reads “CA sucks.” Suddenly she understands she'll learn nothing here.

She reaches for her bottled water in the front cup holder and drinks. In her rearview mirror a truck with a thick deer guard pulls in behind her. She peeks at the windshield and thinks she sees Dennis at the wheel. She squeezes the water bottle and turns around to get a better view, but the rain beading on the truck's windshield distorts the man's image. Blood rushing, Kristen waits for the wipers to wipe, but they don't move. She presses the lock button, but the doors are already locked and all she gets is a weak reminder click. She's kept the car in drive, and she lets off the brake. The car moves, slowly at first, emerging from the tree into the rain. She circles around and tells herself not to look, to drive away from this place, back to somewhere she knows. Still, she glances at the truck, hoping for a view of the driver, but the truck has already entered the tree, so all she sees as she exits is the bed and rear tires and the illuminated brake lights.

Kristen isn't sure what caused her to swerve off 101 only an hour into the trip home—maybe the funny name on the sign,
Lady Bird;
maybe the lure of a final choice and the hope of not walking through her front door in Chester empty-handed—but here she stands in a dripping redwood forest halfway into the 1.3-mile Lady Bird Johnson Grove Trail outside Orick.

Alone on the dirt path, she hugs herself and takes in this other world: the trees monstrous and time-warped, the lichen fluorescent and the moss dark green, the forest floor covered in flattened ferns, billions of needles and insects seeping into the dark soil. She's lived within Lassen National Forest her entire life, but it's nothing like this, this place where there's no medium growth, only the world-aged giant redwoods, a few pines, and the ground cover.

Her shirt is soaked through along her shoulder line, and she closes her eyes and inhales the thick air. All around her the light impact of things falling—water, leaves, feathers. She opens her eyes and the immensity of the woods rushes at her, but there's no fear, only a sense that she's finally discovered a place worth finding.

Kristen walks the trail, and the spreading wetness trickles down her shoulders to her arms. She considers what she'll tell Wintric when she gets home. The lines she rehearses all have
redwoods
and
I needed
in them, and these words, so absurd and amazing, repeat in her mind. She moves down this trail, and then, without warning, off to her right she spots an enormous mound, a circular darkness just past the first line of forest. Surprised, she stops and raises her hands and focuses on this mass. She takes a couple more steps and studies it, this felled redwood. The tree exposes its huge base, a twenty-foot tentacled wall of roots and dark earth. The stunning displacement has cratered the ground.

Moving off the trail and ducking under a few damp branches, she stands on the edge of the bowled-out earth. She checks the area, but there's no sign of violence: no other felled trees, no signs of wind or fire. And before her, on this tree, no lightning or chainsaw marks. Up the trunk green needles flare from the branches and she knows this is recent, that this tree is not dead but dying.

Kristen looks up to the circle of sky that was once blotted out by this tree, then reaches out and touches one of the gnarly roots. She closes her eyes and smells the damp soil. This place is real. She is here. Everything seems so slow around her, the scattered and patient dripping, the turning earth.

When she opens her eyes, she's leaning on the tree, unaware how long she's been gone. Above her the gray sky, and somewhere down the trail voices calling out and, closer, the low bark of a dog. Kristen hurries back to the trail and glances around her. In the next moment she finds herself running, striding out long and fast, unable to recognize the force that propels her forward. Her heart pounds in her ears and her arms swing wildly; she runs and leans into turns, now outside herself, beside herself; the forest speeds by, the straining legs and heartbeat someone else's.

She arrives back at her car and the deserted parking lot faster than she guessed she would, and she bends over, hands on her knees, gasping. She waits for her mind to return to this body.

Inside the car she removes her sandals and leans back and feels her drenched shirt on her skin. She takes it off, drapes it over the passenger seat, and starts the car. Her right quad starts to twist and she rubs at the pain. The insteps of her right and left feet are rubbed raw, and she knows that she'll suffer blisters. Breathing through her nose and out of her mouth, she waits until she can no longer hear her heartbeat.

She turns on the stereo, puts on Modest Mouse, softly at first, then cranks the volume and sings. It's then, among the thrashing thoughts of driving home, of this mad dash, of her wet and blistering body, as she breathes in to attack the chorus of track two, that she realizes she's not nauseated.

Inside the idling car Kristen turns off the stereo, reclines her seat, and slides her drying hands inside her shorts and over her lower belly. She pushes her belly out and feels the pressure against her hands. She wishes now that she hadn't told her parents so soon, at least not until she figures out what she wants. If she has the child, it'll have a March birthday. It seems so far away: 2007. Spring. There's still snow in March.

Kristen sits up and levers the seat upright. She punches the stereo button and track two comes alive. She runs her fingers through her hair and looks up past the nick in the windshield and sees the way home.

10

N
ICHOLLE, DAX'S NEWLY MINTED
serious girlfriend, hails from southern Alabama. The first time he meets her family, her brother, Sim, chauffeurs him to his swimming hole. They hike on a narrow path from the car through a blanket of kudzu and pockets of honeysuckle, dodging large bees. Moments before they splash in the muddy stream, Sim slaps Dax's back and says, “Watch for moccasins and snappers.” Soon they're neck-deep under the hazy summer sky, and just as Dax's body relaxes he spots a black snake slithering down the bank and entering the water. Dax isn't sure what a moccasin looks like, and he throws up his arms and calls to Sim, who appears unfazed.

“Army didn't teach you 'bout snakes?”

“Just to stay away.”

Birds sound above them and something rustles in the branches.

“Sim, I don't see it. Sim?”

“Splash a little.”

Dax tries to go onto his toes, but he sinks into the soft stream floor. An echo from his army training:
Never get caught in the water. You're helpless in the water.
He examines the slowly moving water along an imaginary line between the snake's entry point and his half-submerged stomach, then splashes the water in front of him.

“I was kidding about the splashing,” Sim says. “Jesus, stay still.”

“Shit. Shit.”

“If you see white in its mouth, that means it's a moccasin. Everything else is okay. You're a big guy. They don't want to mess with you.”

Dax doesn't hear the last sentence. He imagines the possible biting scenarios—
a big guy,
so much surface area to choose from: the moccasin attached to his face (
can it jump?
), the moccasin attached to his dick (
can it submerge?
), the moccasin still attached to his blackening arm at the ER (
do they let go?
), and he pleads with himself to stay calm, but the mash of all these possibilities overtakes him.
Helpless in the water.
He hurls himself toward the bank with lumbering steps, his thick legs sluggish through the stream. With yards to go to dry land he peeks back, and every ripple grows a tail and fangs. He hears a high-pitched whine coming from his mouth and, somewhere beyond, Sim's laughter.