ODD? (13 page)

Read that again. Disappeared.

They didn’t die, leave or get arrested. They just disappeared. Moth, Juice, Goo and Josh. Sounds like a goddamn band. All four of those heads just
vanished
the same spring, my second hiding out from everything I was hiding out from, doing everything I was doing, everything I would miss and still miss now . . .

Everyone had a theory. Everyone had a weapon. Everyone had a grudge, a pet beef, a sick hole shining through the set-up . . . which Aeolus was really starting to look like. But the bare fact was that we were being picked off by an unknown factor out in the middle of nowhere, and we couldn’t call anyone. No one cared. We’d cut ourselves off from society, and now reaped our cry of Wolf.

There were a lot of malenky homeless tweakers denning in the blackberry brakes and living out of Burleigh trailers and mountain bikes by Johnson’s Creek. Often, those wayfarers bashed each other bloody over a teener of meth or a half-rack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. We gave them food when they came by the farm, food and short shrift and very little else.

In pondering the Procrustean bandits of the Springwater Corridor, I feared the worst in my 20/20 rearview. Deuce stalled on getting the cops involved, though we were all residents of the land, and paid taxes from all the enterprises we had out there to keep ourselves from getting Waco’ed. (Hell, we had two sustainability grants from Mayor Katz, and one from the Governor!)

But Deuce kept whining through his black beard about our Rights, how the Cops would Take Away Our Rights, and we have Rights to do Something About It Ourselves, and We’re Gonna Post A Watch, and the next night I heard Goo screaming All. Night. Long. Under the ground. All. Night. Long. And no one . . .

People started leaving in droves, and the ones that stayed were the bottom of the barrel. We all kept to ourselves, did what we had to do, bared our fangs and popped our claws. Me the most of all.

No one believed Cassandra, either, when she foretold wars, and rumors of wars. No one believes the cursed prophet who can’t keep his nose out of the home brew, or his running mouth from running down everyone, himself the most of all. Blind Tiresias here didn’t play well with others, you see. Blind Tiresias came to the land to forget.

I was drunk, and in a blackout for most of the afternoon. I was laid up drunk in my hut. I heard him screaming under the ground. I couldn’t sleep, but didn’t want to move. It makes me panic, when I get like that, when I
drink
like that, panic and lock up and I could
hear
Goo, I could
hear
him calling out for his Momma and praying to God the Father Son Anna Holy Ghost O My God I Am Heartily Sorry Fa Havin Offended Thee . . .

I tried to tell them, the next day, with predictable results. “Smoke a bowl,” AJ told me. “You got the DT’s. Take some ibuprofen from the First Aid kit in the
falé
. Shit, I’ll cook youse a steak, if ya hang out for a minute. Yeah, pack that bowl up. And drink some water, like,
now
 . . .”

I stood watch all night long, stoned and hooty owl-eyed, with A.J.’s bolt-action .30-06 laying across my knees. The woods were lovely, dark and deep, and I cursed every ROADWAY NOT IMPROVED sign down the chugging, thundering potholed way there over Foster Road and half the weird little side streets without a name in Multnomah County that shriek in fear at some incorporation date.

AJ took the Jeep into town once a week for provisions to trade weed or salvia or ten other herbs we grew down at the co-ops in Southeast and Sellwood. We had one computer that ran off a solar panel, and a Honda generator for this, that, and the other. With two whole gallons of gas. Go, Us.

I waited for the night to end, and drank coffee from a metal Goodwill percolator on a wood rack across the fire. (Big Scott made that rack. His oddly small hands had the feel for wood.)

Eventually, the sun rose and dispelled the vague, irrelevant mist of fear above the stream that wended through the farm.

Mountain Grrl never gave me a reason to want to stick around. Pandora did.

Pandora was a true crone-in-training, and I loved her. She went without a shirt when it was warm, and climbed around in the canopy trying to find the spots with the best echo to play this bamboo flute she had. That night was her six months’ anniversary at Aeolus, and she still never ran out of surprises.

Behind us in my hut on the last night of that world, the Coleman lantern hissed out its firefly glow on the PGE wire-spool endtable. She brushed a shock of blonde dreadies out of her face and whaled out this Ziploc bag of weed that looked like a throw-pillow.

Her cerulean eyes sparkled. I could see a pack of rolling papers stuffed into the top, just beyond the yellow-and-blue-make-green of the seal.

“This is my headies, from before.” she told me. “I was saving it.” She reached for something in the front pocket of her too-long corduroy overalls. “‘Cos this most definitely is a rainy day.”

I looked toward the stretched canvas flap of the door. “Should I—” She rapidly shook her head, moving closer to me with her eyes on the seal of the bag.

One soft black anorak-clad shoulder brushed mine. She snagged the papers and peeled off two. “I still owe you, D.K.”

I sat down on the mass of sleeping-bags and Army blankets that was the bed, goggling up at the tin ceiling, sealed with cedar pitch boiled from the sap of Large Marge, Moth’s waggish name for the thickest tree whose trunk was the right corner of this room.

Pandora was incuriously bending up a massive joint with two of the papers. Eventually, she popped a match on one scrimshaw thumbnail, fired up the fireplace and passed it on down.

We hooked up off-and-on, Pandora and me. Out there, the usual bounds of a relationship were blown wide. We were all friends. She was her own woman. But I noticed every time anyone else got friendlier with her than the huggy sort of group mind would allow, they were gently but emphatically rebuffed. Things happen on their own clock in the woods.

I barely remember what we talked about while we got high. Before I knew it, we were giving each other shotguns, mouth-to-mouth hits of warm sweet smoke that ended the way a shotgun usually does between a boy and a girl, or one sex and some other thing. . .

I remember she roached the joint with less than a third to go in that round, and pushed me back onto the palette, murmuring: “I’m cold,” as she peeled off her anorak and silenced me with another long, wet kiss.

I remember her sucking me off for what seemed like six hours of near-orgasm . . .

Then the air horns were screaming on all sides of us like Hell with the lid off—

(AJ brought them from an RV store when he first joined our little Ewok band, and rigged them to tripwires around the perimeter. If anyone or anything got too close, we’d hear a “WHEEEAAA—” and either go down and shut off the horn, or make ready. One or two of them played a solo sometimes when a varmint or a branch tripped the switch.)

—all screaming at once and we were UP! UP! UP! and charging out into A HIGH, ULULATING WARBLE THAT HOWLED DOWN FROM THE WOODS, LOUDER THAN THE AIR HORNS,
and no Person As I Understood the Definition Was Making That Sound, Yet The Throat Was Sentient . . .

We could no longer deny Reality. Reality was colder than the fifth ring of Tibetan Hell. Reality was swirling, smacking branches and mad screams. Reality was dark, hunched shapes clambering and loping all around with glowing clubs and terrible purpose, clubbing villagers like baby seals.

Outside, AJ and Moth were fighting them off with crowbars. Moth had a hatchet, too. He didn’t have it long, but he got it back fast right through the back of the neck.

AJ looked like a green ghost in a big Army field jacket with a hood, hanging with rattlesnake rattles and cowrie shells, long black hair in his face, nose sticking out like the cowcatcher of a locomotive. He still held a tallboy of hoarded beer in one hand.

Behind them were scared bangs and thumps from the two nearest huts. Someone threw a firecracker out the window, but its noise was lost in the wind. Green-black shapes clambered along, across, around the trunks, chittering like chimps. They were yanking on everything, trying to pull it all down.

“In the old days, in Africa,” I heard Pandora say behind me in a very small voice, “They’d sacrifice one virgin a year to the Monkey God, so that the tree children, the leaf-doctors, would leave them alone for another year. But . . .”

Out in the clearing, AJ whirled right. I bellowed something. A big black claw that looked like a set of mossy lineman’s spikes whickered down from an overhanging branch. AJ’s tallboy of PBR disappeared. So did his hand at the wrist.

I got in front of Pandora, making myself into a human shield, and gestured for her to stay behind me. She did, but returned too quickly. “God damn it, I—” The spite in her eyes spoke tomes.

I waved her off, pulling the Velcro on my Leatherman and popping the big blade out. I was scared sober. Pandora put one hand on my shoulder. “I am perfectly capable of defending myself, you sexist p—”

My eyes suddenly grew to the size of fear itself. I put a hand over her mouth and gestured at the loop-hole in the door.

One of them was grinning down at us from the overhanging tree just outside. I could smell him. It didn’t appear to be a social call.

Pandora reached in one overall pocket for her flute, a pale faery thing, delicate as a collarbone. “Shakespeare, college boy.” she whispered. “For music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

And right there, behind that door, she started in on a tune of her own composition, a thing of bright summer days and the weird butterflies that only live in the canopy, of wild imaginings and nothing in the way.

A lump grew in my throat, but died at the loop-hole . . . Pondering common ancestry and abandoned reactors, breathing through my mouth against the savage terrific stink. . .

Its face was swollen, toothless, mongoloid. The beard began at the eyes, patchy and straggly over pink, puckered radiation burns whose like I’d only ever seen on my father after weeks of visits to the Oncology lab.

Its hairy body and head were green, wound with symbiant moss. Those horrorshow claws were mirrored where it should have had toes, its legs as thick as young oaks, its eyes . . .

Human. Flatly, undeniably human.

“Where’s
your
co-op?” I whispered to it, feeling insanity lifting me out of myself. The critter remained perfectly still, confused by the sound of the flute, looking like it was trying to remember something.

“How long you guys been out here? Is . . .” I swallowed. “Is anybody expecting you to come home any time soon?” I suddenly felt two inches tall, needing to back up and learn more, try again . . . And I knew that, even though Man’s scent was planet-wide, the woods were very dark and deep indeed.

I should never have distracted it.

The next thing I remember after that was coming out of the blackout. Or whatever it was. When I hove out into the clearing, swaying three hundred and sixty degrees as I walked, a scream started trying to come out as I looked around.

There were lights, bobbing up and down, everywhere in the woods. Different fire, like fox-fire, like phosphorous. But phosphorous isn’t
blue
 . . .

Fungus-lights, something mucky gobbed on the ends of long clubs. Moth was standing in front of me, leading a line of slumped shadows that walked mostly on all fours. He looked strangely gray. There was dirt and cowshit on his face and hands, like he’d been digging for something. The seat of his Carhartt overalls was bloody.

Toward the back of the line, I saw Deuce, his black eyes hellishly alight, muttering to the shadows in low tones. Deuce, in his old green L.L. Bean coverall, with his wavy hair tied back in a ponytail, barking like the shadows, barking, barking with the shadows, egging them on . . .

Speaking their tongue.
Then he looked straight at me, his voice the low, carrying sibilant hiss of a stage magician.

“My family’s owned this land for a hundred and seventy-five years,” he shrugged. “The Ancestors are like bears. Okay, smarter than the average. You just have to know when to talk to them. And when to feed—”

At that point, the lower half of him walked away from the upper with a splat/flap/SLAP and the thing that had leaned in leaned back up with the side of meat, the haunch, in its claws, and I just disconnected entirely, until—

I came out of it again. “Yeah, just like bears, all right,” I agreed. I blinked twice, and found me there on the cold hill’s side overlooking the sauna.

Across from me, Josh was running a hand through his graying crewcut. He must have just gotten off late shift down on the water front. He always biked the twenty miles back. Josh was a dock-walloper, and tough. You should have seen him bale hay.

I remember. I do.

“How did I get here,” I said to Josh. It wasn’t a question. He guffawed, his lined face looking very much like a younger version of the actor William H. Macy. He offered me a hand-blown glass pipe and a black Bic lighter.

“It’s Alive,” he said in his rolling TV-announcer voice. “What were you drinkin’, dude, that apple-jack you were makin’?”

I nodded, having forgotten that everyone at Aeolus knew everything about everyone else, most of the time. Like the exuberant dogs he sometimes owned, Josh plowed on ahead with a big dopey smile, “Was it any good?”

I groaned. “I don’t know. Tonight’s all a blur. You know, this farm’s over a thousand years old? There are parts of it that are really cool. It just needs some love. I heard it used to be a Funhouse. In Dante’s time. It . . .”

“How long since you got a good night’s sleep?” Josh asked me sagely.

“That’s a good question.” I had to think on it. “Something usually wakes me up. Either a dream to which I am fleeing, or without strength I come, and need to swim the hell up on out of there no matter what . . .”

I spun one hand, tired and starting to feel it, searching for words. Josh beat me to it. “Where the hell is everybody? I just got back.”