The Language of Trees (12 page)

“You can't see anything,” Grant tells him. “Even if I am a goddamn shipwreck, so what.”

“Ha, I knew it. You're a crazy motherfucker.”

“So what if I am.”

“Look, whatever. We're not even. You saw me take a fall. I was helpless, you know. Now you got power over me. So now you got to tell me something. Confess something.”

“What do you think being even is going to get you?”

Lion looks hopeful. “You never did anything bad? It'll make me feel better.” As the edges of clouds peel back, honeyed rays fall along the bare patches in the lawn where the oaks have made the soil so acidic, it's work to keep any grass growing. Lion writes his name on the window and won't look at Grant.

“Lion, I know how it feels—”

“You don't know shit about me.”

The silence passes in a wave between them.

Lion leans in and breathes on the window, the fog refining his name. “I keep thinking about that spider language. His design shows what he feels. You know his feeling if you know his language.”

“Wish it were that easy with human beings,” says Grant,
noticing Lion's large bloodshot eyes, and pierced right ear with a tiny silver skull earring.

“You ever been sleeping next to someone, you're lying in the dark but you can feel they're awake, like you can feel them thinking?” asks Lion.

Grant nods.

“Sometimes at night, when I'm lying next to Mel, she covers her head with the pillow and faces the wall, but I know she's awake. It's like she wants to be swallowed up by the dark. I'll say her name but she won't answer. She pretends to be asleep. In the morning, her eyes are all red and she'll stay in the house all day wearing one of my ratty sweatshirts. And I know she's thinking about Luke.” As he says this he pictures the little boy's face again. He blinks hard, trying to will it out of his mind. “She thinks that she caused it, you know? I know she's trying to figure out what happened, that it's in her subconscious or whatever. She's trying to figure out if it was her fault or if it was Maya's. Or if either of them could have saved him.”

“They were just kids.”

“I tell her that. She says it was her idea to get into the canoe. But she lost the paddle. She says something in the water ripped it out of her hands. Some
thing
in the water.”

“She was just a kid, of course she'd think that,” Grant says. “It was the waves.”

“I can't make her believe that,” says Lion. “I've tried. I'd do anything for her. It's scary what I would do for her. I scare myself.”

Grant leans back, guarded. “I have some experience with that.”

“Right,” Lion scoffs.

“When my mom was dying of lung cancer. The only thing she asked for was her cigarettes.”

Lion stares at Grant, silent.

“It made her happy. It was the only thing.”

“Man, how did you deal with that?”

“I was broken. So was she. That Polynesian restaurant, the Aloha, on Monroe Avenue? They had a cigarette machine in back. I'd run the whole way and back, like a man on fire.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your dad, he saw?”

“My father wasn't a big talker. If he saw he never said. It was like it was going to be him or me that had to do it.”

“He couldn't do it. It had to be you.”

“Yeah,” says Grant, staring at Lion.

“You hated him,” says Lion, folding his arms. “For making you do it.”

“No. Only myself.”

“No way, man. I would have hated him.” Lion shakes his head. They are both full of guilt, but for different reasons. Guilt is a magnet for bad health, Lion thinks. People refuse to let it go even when they get mysterious addictions.

Grant runs his fingers across the carpeting. “When I was a kid, I had this crazy stutter. Could hardly say my own name. So one day before school, I'm twelve, I think. Out back on the playground. I'd always get there early enough to run around the track a few times. Some tough kids are in the bleachers, yelling, teasing me, and I don't stop running but look right at them as I pass. Then I stop. I give them the finger. I just stand there, holding my hand up. Six of them and I'm there alone. Then before I know it, they're kicking the crap out of me…. I wanted to get the crap kicked out of me.”

“Yeah. I can see it.”

“I didn't move. Didn't do a thing. You know how when you're a kid, you know you should run but you don't? You just stay in one place, daring yourself to see how long you can last?”

Lion nods. “Know all about that.”

“She thanked me. My mother was lying in bed, coughing up blood. And I lit her cigarette.”

“That's crazy. Damn. But it doesn't matter what you did. You were her son. You were messed up.” Lion wipes away his name on the window pane.

“I couldn't look my old man in the eye after she died. I went pretty crazy.”

Lion looks at Grant, his eyes filled with compassion. “Damn. But you did what you had to. Doesn't matter what anyone says. You did it because you were her son and she needed you to do it.”

“Yeah.” At once, they are equals, and it is better this way, just as Lion had said. A few moments pass. The rain is gone. Grant is watching the sun's rays reaching through the porch screen and into the house. Within seconds, it's so bright out, even the kingfishers look frightfully pale, their blue tufts of feathers appearing a hollow gray. The trees are now only hazy reflections of themselves in the water. Grant blinks hard. The wolf has now stretched out in the middle of the lawn, looking relaxed and incredibly big. “My mom was a pretty strong person. But she wasn't a happy person. I wish I could remember her being happy.”

“Melanie sings when she's happy.”

Grant smiles, grateful for the distraction. “That's great. What does she sing?”

“She turns up the radio loud. She thinks she's singing along. But she makes up her own words. It's pretty funny. She doesn't even realize she's doing it, making dinner, or painting, or whatever. I always try to hear. She gets mad when I laugh at her, though. I run out of the room sometimes I'm laughing so hard.”

Grant's hands are burning. He turns them over, staring at the blistered palms.

“Go ahead,” Lion says, blinking hard. “Ask it.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Ask it.”

“Why?”

“Say it.”

“Is she at Two Bears' Cave?”

“Fuck, man. You didn't have to say it. I knew you didn't believe me.”

Everyone knows Two Bears' Cave on the East Side of Loomis Hill, on the other side of the hill from the Iroquois longhouse. At one time, the Cave was a sacred healing place, revered for its power, and hidden to all but a few that had been healed there but never spoke of it. So people made up stories of magical stones and herbs and animal skulls stuck on posts, of spirits cloaked under the wings of bats that hung from the ceilings. Now the Cave, with its large fire pit and shelves carved into the walls, is littered with old bags of food, empty bottles, and used needles, a hangout for drunks and general itinerant traffic.

No one can tell just who's hiding out at the place at any given time, or when the spirit of a Seneca healer called Two Bears will appear to those in a drug-induced state. The local cops stay away, content to let the vagrants have their space. Better there, out of the way, than the marina, where they'd make real trouble. Two Bears' Cave is part of the local culture, like O'Connell's Feed & Grain or Kelley's Bar.

Two Bears had a reputation in town back when he was alive. A giant, a hermit, they say, staying mostly to himself, fiercely private. He only came into town at night to buy supplies from O'Connell's Feed & Grain. Some reported seeing him at night, treading the woody trails to gather herbs. Mostly, he just kept
company with the Indians who traveled from far-off reservations seeking his cures. Not many other people had seen him, although the story was that he was seven feet tall, with hair to his waist, hands the size of cabbages, and skin pocked from the lit embers of healing ceremonies. Some people said he could hold his hands in a fire for an hour unscathed.

“What do you know about the Cave anyway?” asks Lion.

“It's not someplace I'd like to vacation. There's no point in talking anymore about it. If she's not using, she's not there.”

“Wish I'd have learned,” Lion confesses, “how not to hate the water.”

“Look, don't be ashamed. People learn to swim at all ages.”

“I didn't plan on moving to a lake. I was just, you know, a drifter, kind of lost. California's home. But I never touched the Pacific Ocean. Not even with my little toe. I know lots of people who grew up looking at the ocean but never swimming in it. But then one day I just washed up here like a piece of junk, or an old candy wrapper.”

“Fear's a strange thing. It's a magnet. Sometimes you find yourself running toward what you fear most. You can't stop yourself, right? Heck, it's happened to me.”

“That's what happened with your mom, right? Why she kept smoking.”

“Something like that.”

Lion pulls the blanket tighter around him. “Well, I know it was all meant to be, anyway, me coming here,” he says, nodding. “I wouldn't have met Melanie. Wouldn't have my son.”

“Drink this,” Grant says, pushing a cup of coffee toward Lion. Lion takes a sip. He seems almost peaceful, as though the water has taken all the fight from him, which is probably why he has always feared it.

“Hey,” says Lion. “I miss my boy bad. You ever had a kid?”

Grant shakes his head.

“'Cause I didn't see any pictures around. You ever have a wife?”

Grant stares at the faded line that is disappearing from his finger. “Yeah, not too long ago.”

“Where is she?” Lion asks, repositioning the blanket. He sits cross-legged. He puts his hands in his lap.

“She left.”

“Why she leave?”

“She said she didn't think I loved her enough.”

“Was she right?”

“There're all kinds of love.”

“Nah, man, there's only one kind of love.”

On their first official date, Lion had taken Melanie on a drive through Naples. It was snowing like crazy. He didn't know about the deadly black ice, which sometimes looked like a huge crow had spread its slick wings over the road. He didn't know that some lakes never freeze over entirely because of their constant current. He hadn't paid attention to the two cars up ahead, owned by ice fishermen Squeaky Loomis and Joseph O'Connell, who, bundled in layers of down, had pulled over a mile back to wait out the storm. If he'd seen them, maybe he'd have turned around, but he was so taken with listening to her describe the colors of snow that he just kept driving, faster and faster.

When they hit black ice, his car skidded off the road into a bank. After the shock, even though she hit her head, Melanie had started to laugh. She didn't even make him feel stupid for not pumping the brakes like he was supposed to. He cleaned up her cut and got out to push the car, and she jumped out, too. He told her to get in but she took one of her gloves off and put it on his hand. And he didn't want to send her running for her
life by telling her how pretty she looked and that he'd never felt luckier. He just went with it, sliding in rubbery soles and getting soaked in the snow.

Snowflakes covered her hair like a veil, like a beautiful bride who was just laughing and laughing, her eyelashes turning powder white. Then he saw it, what she meant, because when he looked up, her eyes were a color he'd heard of but never seen: ice blue. She didn't care about the cold or the wet or his ineptitude. She said she was having so much fun it was all worth it, that they were making memories. He never knew memories were something you could decide to make, rather than the results of things that just happened to you.

Grant leans back against the counter. “Look, I have time, if you need help. I mean, I could drive around. Try to find her.”

“Why you want to help me so bad?”

“Why were you drunk instead of looking for Melanie?”

“I had to cool down. But you. Nah man, there's something about you that's not right. Keeping a wolf. Keeping a ghost.” Lion waits, daring Grant to ask what Lion saw in the water. Lion squints at Grant, peering at him as though they are both standing in the darkness of a coal mine.

“You've got a good imagination,” Grant scoffs, glancing at the living room. He gasps. Soot marks have reappeared across the carpet. “I'll take you home now,” he says nervously.

“I'm making you uncomfortable, right?” Lion asks. “Answer my question. Why do you want to help me?”

“You really want to know?” Grant looks up.

Lion nods.

“Fine. Maybe I have nothing better to do,” Grant says.

Lion hesitates, rubbing his head. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“All right. That's all I wanted to know. I got a plan to find
her if she's not back already. I don't care if no one believes it. I know her. She's not on drugs again. She's good at being a mother. She says it's the reason she was put on earth. You believe me, right? She wouldn't do anything to hurt Lucas.”

Grant pauses. “I believe you.”

Lion has barely any energy left. His limbs feel like one-hundred-pound weights. “Yeah. She's probably back by now. I'm her rock and she's mine. You know what that does to you when you have to be someone's rock.”

“Can't say I do,” Grant tells him, remembering how Susanna's sadness had weighed him down, and how his mother's illness had torn him apart.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think you do.”

As Lion walks through the living room toward the front door, he notices a line of tiny black footprints leading across the room to the basement door. He won't go near that door. He needs to get the hell out of here. Waiting on the porch for Grant to get his keys, he glances at the metal sections of dock. He sees a splash of water kick up, even though there are no waves.