Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (21 page)

Maybe the last night would have gone differently if nobody had told on the Honeyvine girls. Carly's bunkhouse was the one the boys used when boys came, and on Thursday morning, the two littlest Honeyvines washed their hair in a urinal, just seeing they were shiny things, porcelain and white. Somehow Dr. Maxine heard, and when she did, she blew her whistle and assembled the whole camp into that bathroom and gave them a lesson on what urinals were. Then she went further.

Smiling, she told a 4-H girl to fetch a washcloth, and when the girl got back, Dr. Maxine used her as a model for how to take a proper shower. Dr. Maxine instructing the counselor, fully clothed, to scrape the soap in the washcloth, then run the washcloth over different body parts. The milk-blue counselor, obedient, shamed horror in her rabbit eyes, rubbed the dry washcloth under her arms, and Carly's stomach curled. In the front of the crowd leaned the Honeyvines. Shadows like thumb-pressed bruises under their eyes.

After lunch, the Piedmont girls, lounging on top a picnic table, smoothing lotion in their knees, started telling about the special soap.

Got in that robe pocket a plastic box with a germ-killer soap,
said one.

It's green,
said another.

Every time she gets too close to one of us, sneaks back in her cabin and scrubs herself
.

Carly remembered the feel of Dr. Maxine's hand on her upper arm at lunch the day before.

Then it was afternoon rest period, everyone back in their coops. The aroma of antiperspirant over teenage girl sweat, and Izzie lying in wait like some lunatic zoo animal, working terrible her green-apple gum. At the end of the building, the oldest girls held counsel on three pushed-together beds, their voices like bees, each painting all twenty nails the color of blood. Carly slid off her bed. Slipped towards that climate of tampons and turquoise eye shadow, the bed bars cool in Carly's hands. If Izzie really wanted to scare you, she'd sit and stroke her stub. Shaping the air where the finger was not. Carly sidled up on the older girls before they could see. Heard something dirty about Dr. Maxine. Something about Debbie and Royal she couldn't quite make out.

Carly
.
How old are you?

'Leven
.

Go on
.
You're too young to hear this
.

Back beside Carly's bed, the Honeyvines knelt on their mattresses in a train and brushed each other's long slick hair, that hair no color at all but dark.

“Guess where she went last night?” The one with the glasses pushed them back up her nose.

Carly shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“She don't just have dreams,” the glasses said. “She is one.”

Carly climbed onto her own bed and pulled her sleeping bag around her shoulders. Cowled it over her head.

After supper, Carly and the next-to-the-biggest Honeyvine leaned against the propane tank across from the director's cabin. The Honeyvine pulling petals off a daisy in a he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not, the mildest rise in her tube top where the breasts would come. Then Debbie and Royal burst out of Dr. Maxine's cabin door, stumbled down the steps, Royal bent forward with her hands fisted, her skin
blaring red from her forehead to her chest, and when Debbie touched her shoulder, Royal swung. But it wasn't at Deb.

Then Carly felt herself creeping. Felt herself slinking past the cabin steps, into the ivy and weeds strangling up the cabin wall. Stealthing back to where she knew the director's bathroom would be, and although the window was above her head, Carly could hear the sink. It gushing hard, and the squeal in the pipes when the spigots turned high, and Carly saw the soap. A green turning in Dr. Maxine's hands. But then she was just against the propane tank again, the Honeyvine still beside her mumbling love and not. Carly only brave enough to make the trip in her head.

It was tradition to stay up late that last night and have a dance. “We Will Rock You” and the Bee Gees and “Desperado.” The slow songs, little girls dancing with little girls, Izzie dancing with herself, and the Honeyvines wallflowered up in the folding chairs. But it was the fast songs that counted. Knee-pitching, arm-cocking, they danced like they were skewered on wires, frantic windup and hurtle their bodies just short of relief, their bangs matting on their foreheads and kids punching each other in the water fountain line. Royal and Debbie danced with a half-dozen girls at a time, more girls circling off those girls like moons off moons, they hammered the floor with the soles of their feet like they could make the building split. Until, drenched, Carly threw herself outside, felt the night air on her, and twanged in her chest.

Not long after Dr. Maxine's lights-out whistle, they heard a strange noise not from the woods. Carly raised up on her elbows to listen. Dozens of dull ringings, muffled, and girls started to murmur. At least one started to cry. But not until the howling started did Carly understand what the ringing was: the beating of sticks on bed-frame bars. Now girls surged to the door to see, Carly swept along, the howls an orange funneling, a come-here and a fright, and Carly heard them not people, people, not people, people, and all along, the underbeat of
sticks on bars. Big girls, the counselors, too, jammed the doorway, suspended over the stoop they were forbidden to cross, and a couple littlest kids crawled through their legs to see, but Carly could not. Izzie plunged up and down on her mattress, intent and twirling, her eyes run off someplace else. Carly wheeled back to her bed and hung out the window, the Honeyvines at her heels,
what? what? what?
and then she saw the orange flame in the howling, the flame tattered and thready and thin. The girls throbbed in the doorway, four or five deep, the girls throbbing, the howl a blood-orange come-here spiral, the girls piled, arms thrown across backs, heads over shoulders, and everyone quivering against the rule. Throbbing. They never broke it.

Come morning, they found that the other coop had tried to burn their bunkhouse down. Got it going with toilet paper, empty half-pint milk cartons, and a poster of Peter Frampton. It didn't amount to much, though, but a couple scorched mattresses and a whole lot of hollering. But Debbie and Royal were gone. Dr. Maxine, no longer smiling, ordered everyone to sit cross-legged in a pack on the front field while the sheriff's department searched the woods. They got Debbie by noon, but when the school buses showed up at 2:30 to take the campers home, Royal was still missing.

It was an hour later, on the bus, most kids nodding off after all the excitement, that the littlest Honeyvine told. She was curled up in the lap of a bigger Honeyvine and all of them such a tangle, arms, legs, heads, you couldn't tell what or whose. But she told.

Told how she'd been there, around 4
AM
, when Royal fell asleep in wet grass. Told how she stepped through a door into Royal's head, then she felt a changing. Said she watched her own hands stiffen and web, felt her back hump. Saw the hair on her arms glisten into scale. Then she flashed up on her tail, struck out with a fin. She punctured the dream, and she fish-flew away.

THE FOLLOWING

I
CROSSED THE PARKING
lot in one of those Northwest drizzles so fine I could see it only as beads on my sleeve. Ducked into the cedars, the hemlocks and firs, of the forty-acre city park where I went almost daily for its little bit of raw. Once I got under those limbs, got my feet off asphalt and on dirt, I knew now I was not just knowing, but following. I knew it was carrying me, the sweet eerie draw. I knew, too, what lay at its end, so that the following, the finding, at least when I was in the middle of it, had nothing to do with me and had nothing at stake. And if for a second my head broke in and a stake did rise, the lightness of the following extinguished it like wind on a match.

That was the March day before I flew to Pittsburgh. I'd felt it as soon as I stepped out of the car. The knowing that was not mind-knowing, that had been the single knowing I could remember before this other knowing had arrived six months before. The new knowing came through my chest and I could describe only in paradox: weightless presence. Silent thrumming. Untethered balance. And if I tried to name the emotion of the knowing, the closest I could come was paradox again. Uncharged euphoria. Ecstasy without edge.

Now I was clipping along a muddy side path, scrambling over trees fresh-fallen from the weekend storm. Straddling puddles as wide as the
trail, and once, on a rain-slicked slope, my right boot skidded, but I did not fall, buoyed by the blunt bliss of the following. I stopped under a leafless big-leaf maple, the moss humps along it like blind animal heads, and I knew to veer onto an even lesser-used trail. Although arced licorice ferns wet me to my chest, still, when earlier than I expected, the over-here tugged, I nearly held back, not wanting the feel of the following finished so soon.

But I did leave the trail. Plunged into drenched salal, English ivy, Oregon grape. It led me around a nurse log high as my waist, pushing up seedlings, sloughing off rot. And, finally, with one hand in the chill of the log's soaked moss, I spotted what I'd known all along. The tiny bones of a bird. Its skeleton intact as a cage.

At the confirmation, as always, my eyes filled with tears. And just as the chest-knowing was something unknown to me before this year, these tears were, too. Just as this felt more right to me than anything had in my life, yet lacked sharp emotion, these tears were peculiarly neutral, too. After the tears, as always, the spontaneous upgush of gratitude, not exactly for the bone, but for the reassurance that the following had once again been right. And on the heels of the gratitude—this hardest of all for me to accept, to understand, yet also less ambiguous than anything else—love.

I touched the skeleton on the log with one finger. I held my finger there for a while. Then I waded back through the brush and towards the main path, the knowing already asleep again, but leaving an exquisite equilibrium as its trace. Still, later that night, balance unsettled, elation dissolved, I wondered again. What did it mean to always find bone at the end?

FOR SEVEN MONTHS
now in this way, I'd been finding them. The knowing and following given me right after I lost more at one time than I'd
lost in my life. Last June, I'd been laid off just weeks after I'd had to put down my old lab-collie mix, Shea. Shea's death nearly coincided with the end of a five-year relationship, and while losing Shea hurt sharper, I was forty-eight, and that I'd blundered at love again ignited a scarier grief.

That same spring my life was being dismantled, BP annihilated the Gulf and a coal company with a criminal environmental record slaughtered twenty-nine miners in the hills not far from where I'd lived as a child. These two disasters, of course, just the latest and most spectacular of what I shorthand-called the Great Losses of These Times—the atmosphere boiling, the Arctic thawing, oceans rising, species dying—and on my most desolate days, no matter how my conscience recoiled, I couldn't help but see my own disintegration as a microcosm of the Earth's. The world unraveling in sympathetic backdrop to my own misery—then I'd hate myself for such analogy even occurring to me.

It was the September after the layoff, in this state of mind, that I found my first bone. True, by then I was outside more often than I'd been since I was a little girl. Now I had no one to answer to but Unemployment and nothing but filling out applications to take up my time. But I'd always spent hours upon hours in woods and canyons, on mountains and beaches; I'd grown up roaming Appalachian hills and needed wild like a nutrient even as an adult. And nothing remotely like this had ever happened before.

It was hard to mark the very first one because only later, of course, did I see it as a pattern. The long, slender wing bone I found by the lake? The vertebra dropped in my yard by a crow? Most of those first bones were small; in the city, they usually were, rat or bird or squirrel, I'd only know for sure when there was enough skeleton to tell. A couple times in that early period, the bones turned up in urban coyote scat, bones shorter than my fingernails and gut-polished to delicate
pins. Once—I was standing on them before I knew—salt and pepper ashes, sloppy-scattered and clumped by rain, fragments big enough, unburned enough, I had to pray they belonged to a pet.

For as long as I could, of course, I called it coincidence. I was a practical person, reasonable, no New Ager, never a looker for signs. And I probably could have gone on dismissing it as coincidence—the beaver jaw I found near the Columbia River, the raccoon ribs behind my compost bin—except for one thing: the consistent bizarreness of how the finding of them felt.

I'd be striding along, minding my own business; if I were looking for something, anticipating something, it was not what I'd later find. When suddenly, but lightly, no heaviness in it ever, the knowing would settle over me like a transparent veil.

From that second forward, it was like I was following an invisible current already laid. Tracking without any senses I knew, leading with my chest, the whole experience completely feinting past mind. And upon finding the bone, always, the strange tears, me, always, despite myself, caught off guard. Because no emotion preceded the tears and with them came only a softening in my chest, the tears just a few degrees more personal than wind watering my eyes. And lastly, paradox again, the dead thing at my feet, while love—I simply couldn't call it anything else, I'd tried—enveloped me.