The Mars Room(87)

He reached for his cane, the closer one. She went toward it, like she was going to hand him the cane. She picked up something else, looked like a crowbar. It made a heavy clink on the concrete as she lifted the thing, whatever it was. It was too dark for him to see much.

“I told you to go. To leave me alone.”

“Hey!”

She had whacked him with it. She did it again.

Checkers, he saw. A black and white pattern. Patterns. He heard a loud buzzing in his ears. Pain flooded over his head. The concrete floor of the porch slammed up at him. Blows came again from this heavy iron bar.

Stop! He screamed. Stop!





V





32


There were no towns, just dense woods I carved into with the truck’s headlights. I was in the high mountains when I reached a crossroads. Locked metal gates blocked both directions. Closed for the winter, the signs said. If I turned around and went back down toward the valley, cops might have the road blocked by now.

I took the lid off his drink and finished it. The ice cubes hurt my throat as I drank them. I left his truck on the road and walked into the woods.

The air was colder up here. Cold and dry, thin in my lungs. The moon was out. A half moon and it shed light enough to see the path I was on. I was surrounded by trees. I heard only the soft crumble of pine needles and branches popping underfoot as I walked.



* * *



By dawn, fog had settled in. It clung low, a vapor lurking among tree limbs. I had veered off the path. I stepped over logs, edged sideways along a ridge, dipped down and across a hillside, where I came upon a tree whose trunk was the width of about ten trees. Or twelve. Or twenty. It was the size of a small house, with huge gnarled roots, like lions’ paws, that spread out at its base. Thick vertical lines of red bark wrapped up its trunk like strips of velvet. Mist was caught in its branches, which started high above me, halfway up the tree. Most of the tree was limbless bark, and way up there, in what could have been sky, a city of branches. I made my way around the base. On the other side was an opening. This giant tree was hollow inside. There was another giant-sized tree across from it. They had grown here, together.

I could see other huge trees as the fog lifted and thinned, and a brightness showed through, the forest revealing itself in day. Now that I knew the scale, that such a tree was possible, I spotted other giant trees on this hillside. I had walked right past them, and not known. They had been camouflaging themselves by their hugeness. So many times wider than any other tree. Secrets in plain sight.

I stepped into the tree’s cavern. It was tall inside, with a roof where the tree closed itself, up above me, out of reach. The inside walls had dripping washes of black sap running downward, shiny and thick. I touched the sap, expecting it to be sticky. It was smooth and cool as glass. There was red sap, too, also glasslike. And yellow sap. Sometimes a redhead is considered a blond. They called him Güero and told me it meant blondie but Jackson’s hair is light brown.

The floor inside the cave was covered with tiny pinecones. This huge tree made baby cones. I needed water and food. My leg hurt. Maybe I had a fever. I didn’t feel right. They were surely after me. I had left the truck at the split. Walked all night. I lay down and slept.



* * *



I woke to a humming. Not far, but close.

I got up and stepped out of the tree. The humming was louder, but near the trunk, like the tree itself was making this noise. The sun was up, its beams painting the upper part of the tree gold-yellow. The sound was bees. I saw them, like dust motes, floating in and out of the sun’s rays, which flooded the high branches. They lived up there. Their sound was traveling down the trunk, making everything hum, even the ground.

From inside the trunk, the bee’s hum was the tree’s hum.

The tree’s sound was silent, so the bees spoke for it. Their sound was its sound, the one it had me hear.

I heard another sound, a clip-clip. A family of birds scuttled past on the ground. The little ones poured over a steep embankment like Ping-Pong balls, following the large ones. They ran under a bush and stayed there.

Both trees had charred areas around their trunks, inside and out, wood burned black and dry, fractured into a geometry of crackles. Probably the trees had been hit by lightning. Whole forest burning up around them, and they had lived on because they lived on. Because they could. Maybe they were a thousand years old. Two thousand years old.

To the tree, that might not be so long. Just life. Like life to a human is life-length. There were other scales of life. The tree was so tall I could not see up it, only to the baby arms, the small branches that began high, sky-height, tall enough that this tree stretched to another world, or to the end of this one.

The future lasts forever. Who said that and what did it mean. The tree arrowed upward, to the time when Jackson would be a man, and beyond that, well beyond it. Would have his own child. Die.

I heard a new noise. A drilling sound, quick, short. Are they here? What are they doing? Then again that sound, a drill. It was a woodpecker doing its lonely work. They were not here yet.



* * *



You run until you find a safe place and that tree was mine.

The forest at night is true dark. I had to feel my way out of the tree. Outside, I was under a glitter of stars. I heard a rustle, from wind. I heard those little birds settling down under the bush, or doing whatever they do.