Mendocino Fire (19 page)

Rick is a tattooed sea urchin diver who has custody of his eleven-year-old daughter, and Maddie and Finn share a pink room looking out over unmown fields and patchy woods to the barn that still has its old copper running-horse weathervane. On Maddie's laptop they research sex and try what they find out. In a cinderblock room they're forbidden to go into, she and Maddie run their hands over sleekly wrapped bricks of cash and fit their index fingers into triggers. From a FedEx box slithers a dream of a dress and Rick tells Mary try it on. Bare-legged she spins around and he says what's it like wearing five thousand dollars on your back. Finn squints from down below: daylight rays through bullet holes in the horse's chest. Inside the barn, down the lengths of parallel benches, the long-fingered leaves bask under metered lights, in rainforest warmth, to the music of Mozart. Music Finn can't believe Mary has known about all along.

Finn's hair turns pink. A friend's older brother gives her the Earth First! shirt she wears under a baggy old-man cardigan, whose pockets hold crusts for sparrows wintering in the woods behind the school. Fall of sophomore year she writes a history paper on the FBI's involvement in the attempted assassination of Judi Bari. That spring Finn hides the rats from another student's science fair project in a pillowcase under her oversize hoodie and saunters from the school. When she stops to peer in, they're scrambling and clutching, whiskers vibrating with fear. Finn kneels in the woods. She holds the first at eye level, his hind legs scrabbling, and checks the petal of chest under the albino fur. “Hello after all these years,” she tells it. “You thought I wouldn't
come back to save you?” A heart batters against her thumb.
Live! live! live! live! live!
thuds the heart. You've been asleep, Finn! Half as alive as this rat! Dreaming, while death after death streams out from your existence like ripples when a finger touches a river. Fed from a slaughterhouse, Finn, educated with cunning lies, your clothes stitched by enslaved children. Mr. Hahn seeks her out. Nobody's accusing her. It's not as if anyone saw who took the rats. But, hypothetically. Hypothetically, even if one student holds extremely strong views, other students are entitled to do projects for the science fair. Right? Can she accept the fairness of that? She likes Mr. H, his unfunny jokes and love of zombie movies, the surfboard on top of his Jeep when the sets are good. He wants her to assure him that for the duration—meaning till she graduates—she will respect others' property.

“Living beings can't be property.”

“Have you thought about college?” Mr. Hahn says.

“My family couldn't afford it.” In general the word
family
suffices to fend off intrusiveness.

But it doesn't deter him. “Trust me, Finn, it can happen,” he says. “Bright mind like yours. All you have to do is want it.”

Jared's black hair goes unwashed week after week, Jared buys his
Scarlet Letter
essay off the Internet and argues he deserves more than a B+, in the boys' locker room Jared holds a lit match under the tick in his armpit, then wears it in a glass phial around his neck till it withers into tick dust. His dad is the foreman at the lumber mill, and when he was eleven Jared was supposed to have talked someone's little sister into taking off her underpants at Abo's company picnic and to have been caught by her older brother and beat up pretty bad. Finn's outward appearance—
kohl eyeliner, slip dress, combat boots—isn't what moves him. This goes way deeper. When they share a match—his cigarette, then hers—his world is rocked by her presence, her being, the Finn-ness of her eyes and nose and mouth and hard-beating heart, she can tell. Her skin can tell. No part of her doesn't love him, nothing holds its tongue. God, that he is alive! While she was in the woods he was playing
World of Warcraft
on the flat-screen TV in his room. If only she could go back and tell her little kid self
Hold on because your soul mate exists, you just have to live long enough to get to him.
Bliss, this is what they mean by bliss. Or it would be if she could forget the death awaiting the two of them and all living beings.
Everything for me's not all melting arctic ice, Finn, not all dead birds falling from midair and viruses spread by monkey rape
, he says.
I'm not you. Sometimes I need it to be a sunny day with no problems.
What won't go away is one sentence.
I'm not you.
That stops her in her tracks. What is wrong with him that he can say
I'm not you.
They spend a night in zipped-together sleeping bags with stars transiting the gap between redwood spires and he says
Tell me again how you made up the wolves and their names and what they said.
For as long as it takes to tell him about the wolves, she's not lonely.

Rubber bullets have been fired, five protesters seriously injured, two others dead. Rumors tremor through the group of nuns in the van with Finn, who bends forward uncomfortably, her bound hands wedged against the small of her back. River and Trespass and the others were muscled into a different van, leaving Finn the only Earth First!er among nuns. The crush of ambulances and police cars and rescue vehicles allows no exit
from the bridge, and for an hour after the doors are slammed on them they swelter and wait. Marshaled on the tech plate of the van's floor, eleven pairs of practical black lace-up oxfords and one set of dirty red high-tops, the chorus line of black skirts and fawn stockings interrupted by Finn's filthy jeans, a tear exposing her banged-up left knee. Her wrists aching, Finn makes small talk with an elderly sister whose gaze is magnanimously fond behind cat's-eye glasses, and whose upper lip sports a wispy Frida Kahlo mustache Finn finds endearing, the righteousness of the calm white superior face undercut by this roguish touch of androgyny. She's never been this close to a nun before, and is worried about giving offense, not by saying something inappropriate, because she means to keep a close watch on that, but merely by being dirty and young and an anarchist. The cat's-eye nun's inquiries break the ice, and soon Finn is the object of their concerted attention. It is a van full of mothers, Finn thinks. It's nothing to do with today's protest, but she ends up explaining the threat to the last remaining old growth in Mendocino County and confesses that she believes a treesit is her destiny and there's some redwood, as yet unmet, she was born to save. Neat coiffed heads, dark or graying, nod benignly. The van rolls a few feet, and the women sigh in approving relief, but then it jolts to a halt, and a nun says, “Oh, nuts.” Finn closes her eyes, thinking that when she tells River about this, she will report,
The worst expletive they allow themselves is “nuts.”
One of the nuns sneezes repeatedly, but nobody can offer her a tissue since their hands are locked behind their backs. The van jolts forward again, and Finn is thrown against the cat's-eye nun, and rests close against her a fraction of an instant longer than she needs to, for the skin-and-bone kindness of the woman—to take that in.

She's been warned against it—subjected to detailed lectures on safety—but on her third day Finn abandons the ropes that are her only insurance against a fall. She free-climbs into the vaults of this aerial brazil, gardens of licorice fern, couches of moss, single boughs as grand as reverend oaks, thickets, hidey-holes, moths indistinguishable from bark till they flutter away, dewy arboreal salamanders insinuated in crevices, forest after forest ascending this five-hundred-year-old tree whose lightning-charred pinnacle, visible only when fog melts away, looms far above. Finn wants to climb that spar, but decides to practice more before attempting it. The sun slants
thus
across a continent of cloud, igniting its upper verge in flaring platinum, streaking through space, silvering the drops beading a cobweb wide as a bedsheet, so that the spider legging it down the shining strands is forced to step high. A satellite blinks across the gray chasm between two cloud summits.

About dealing with the human threats, there have been other lectures, equally detailed.
How you conduct yourself reflects on the movement. Defuse aggression, don't feed it
, Trespass told her.
Try to connect.

They are Smoke River boys, the fallers, they catcall, invite her to get naked, accuse her of being a dyke, ask how long since she's had a bath and how bad she smells, unzip their pants and urinate on the tree, promise her pizza if she comes down, say hey why don't we all just go out for a beer, say they'll marry her if she cleans up good. And why not come down and get it over with, this tree's gonna die one way or the other, either rotting out from sheer age or because they cut it down, and why shouldn't they get the wood while it's still worth something.
Finn answers according to the doctrine of nonviolence, hanging out over the platform's edge or walking barefoot down the tree as she leans back into her ropes, trying for rapport, smiling twelve stories down with her hair falling every which way around her face, her smile slipping at
Fuck you, cunt, I'm just trying to feed my kids.

The original treesit, improvised from salvaged and secondhand finds, has mostly disappeared, supplanted piecemeal by newer, safer, higher-tech materials. River says it's like the ax in the fable whose handle gets replaced three times and head gets replaced twice but is still the same ax. Still the same treesit, the fallers thwarted for going on two years by a series of sitters. Within, the shelter is clean-swept and orderly, the medley of jars comprising Finn's garden of alfalfa, lentil, and sunflower sprouts positioned to catch the sun, her climbing gear stashed, sleeping bag aired out and lashed tight, lanterns, laptop, cell phone, radio snug in the waterproof locker, clothes mended and folded
like the housekeeping of an Amish control freak
, River teases over brown rice with goat cheese and shiitakes on his next visit, adding, when Finn doesn't laugh, “This is what comes of raising a kid around a bunch of potheads, right? This kind of rage for order.” He licks his chopsticks clean, studying her tattered shirt. “Why ‘Fire'?”

Finn, who has never been sure why, doesn't answer.

“Be mysterious then.”

He lights the joint, draws the smoke in and holds it, slouching into a more restful pose against Tara's trunk, and so embracing is his well-being that Finn breaks the fundamental law of her private universe, taking the joint from between his fingers, sipping the smoke, angling her head back to rest against Tara's
bark alongside his, slipping into the dream he's in the middle of, the dream Mary was continually dreaming, the dream Finn swore she'd never get sucked into, but she's been lonely in this tree whose life depends on her, and he is the lover who's come to spend the night, his closeness so
right
, his company so easeful it makes her want to laugh—she would laugh, except he's talking again. “Interesting being alive. So far it's interesting, though there's been what you'd call long stretches of despair. I forget about them when I'm with you. You're like the anti-despair angel, the way you've held on. The commitment. One hundred forty-three days,” he says. “The doubters said you wouldn't last two weeks.”

He's older. Emotion has had its way with River's face, strenuously so, inscribing brackets at the corners of the witty mouth. An earring in the ear toward her, a silver lightning bolt visible only when he drags hard and the ember sparkles. Flannel shirt, mussed dreadlocks with the prized loofah-like gnarliness. When she waves it off he smokes the joint down, pinching it out and tucking the tiny burnt tip into the pocket of his jeans. With most visitors she remains covertly vigilant for the clumsiness or oversight that will jeopardize either the guest or her precariously cobbled-together shelter; his meticulousness soothes her. They sit side by side, backs to the tree, no movement in the forest stretching away below them, no wind bothering Tara's branches, the world asleep as far as they can see.

Finn says, “I dreamed I came down and there was this horse waiting for me with a look like
Come on, get on
, and I did and rode it out of the woods into a city with miniature people in it, who came up only to the horse's knees and kept saying
Hurry! hurry!
like I was late.” Finn refrains from saying
Late for something wonderful
, though that was how it had seemed in the dream,
and why this shyness about
wonderful
, does she think he'll think
wonderful
means him? Such is her trepidation—she's beginning to concede she's in love—that what she says next is equally likely to mislead. “We can't have children, can we? People like us, I mean. Who think, who are aware of what's coming. Who wouldn't want a child to live through that.”

River says, “That would keep me up at night, I guess, if I'd ever wanted a kid. But I haven't.”

Sounds like you might, though.

Some risks are worth running.

Things she wants him to say, that he doesn't say.

He says, “What do you think, can you get through the winter? They'll mostly leave you alone in the winter. Spring's when they try stuff like siccing the sheriff's department on us, like sending in Climber Dan up in the dark to catch treesitters asleep. Spring is when we worry.” River straightens and stretches before saying, “All treesitters dream about the ground. Once you're on the ground you're gonna dream about the tree.” After a while he says, “‘Fire.' Whoever wore that shirt before wanted to save live things from fire.”

Last night the rain came down so hard a bird couldn't fly through it, literally. You think a bird won't make any sound when it hits, but it cracks like a baseball against the plywood and lies there flattened out with its wings spread wide, so when I picked it up I had to fold its wings in, like wet paper fans that might tear. When it warmed up in my hands, to my complete amazement it wasn't dead. The thing has a heart the size of a dime, you'd think it would make the softest little bumps. But no. The body was so light, but inside it was earthquakes. It's called a fog wren around here, though its right name is marbled murrelet, and it's almost
extinct, since what it needs is the sheltered horizontal branch of an old-growth tree. About this it's very particular, it's not capable of adapting to forests devoid of old growth. It doesn't make a nest, just presses its tiny self down into the moss, bringing all its strength to bear, but how much strength is that? The impression it makes in the moss, no deeper than if you pressed your hand against it and counted to ten, that's where it lays its eggs. So you can guess what wind does, any wind at all, and the thing about Tara is, this wren might have wanted one of her branches because there are some nice big horizontal ones, but all her sister trees that once filtered the wind are long gone. She's all alone and gets all the wind. Wind that will for sure roll the eggs right out of any hollow pressed into moss. What else can I tell you? How we are all to blame for that bird's not knowing where to go? How I would have let her nest in my hand if I could have? How you would have too, if only you could have seen her?