“Hey, Frank. What are you thinking?” the bartender muttered as they were leaving. He was Jimmy, one of the Kelly cousins who’d known Frank forever. “Go home. At least you have the option.” Jimmy handed over The Blackwell Herald. Brian Link, René’s husband, had been killed in Vietnam, buried on the previous Monday.
A few days later Frank went to pay his respects to René. She was living with her mother and her little girl in the house where she’d grown up. When Frank knocked at the back door, René looked over her shoulder and stopped what she was doing in the kitchen to slip outside. They stood in the shade of an oak tree. Frank thought he remembered coming here to pick her up when they were young. He’d sit in the car and honk rather than come up to the door.
“I just wanted to say how sorry I was,” he told René.
“For what? Breaking up with me?” René had a catch in her throat.
“For Brian.”
“I killed him,” René announced.
“No,” Frank said. It was so preposterous he nearly laughed.
“Do you think it’s funny to destroy someone?” René asked.
“No. I don’t.”
René was wringing her hands. She hadn’t slept in a week. “Before he left I gave him a rabbit’s foot for luck. It’s what killed him.”
“Rabbits don’t kill people, René. War does.”
“I gave him a black rabbit’s foot. I think it brought him bad luck.”
“It didn’t,” Frank said evenly. “I don’t know much, but I know that for certain.”
René’s mother was at the screen door, watching. For a while they just stood there, until René’s mother went back to the stove.
“I hear you’re not the same man anymore,” René said then.
“That’s what they say,” Frank replied.
“Well, that’s too bad,” René remarked before she went back into the house.
THE FARM FELL into disarray that summer. It came apart just as quickly as it had begun one stoned night in a bar near Penn Station when Simone mentioned she’d come into some money due to the death of her grandfather. The first sign of bad luck was when Pete stumbled into a thicket of poison ivy and had to be admitted to the Blackwell Hospital. It was such a bad case, the doctors thought he might go blind. After Pete’s parents drove from Manhattan to claim him, the Farm began to falter. Romance was the cause, or maybe it was only thoughtless desire. Rattler started sleeping with Rose as well as with Jenna and all hell broke lose. People stopped talking to each other, and then there was a week of rain, which put everyone on edge. They sloshed around in the mud, grumbling, the sexual tension turning to despair. One night there was screaming and fighting, all of which Frank ignored as he cooked lentil stew over the fire. He hated scenes and shows of emotion. He heard car doors slamming and wheels spinning in the dirt. When he went to investigate, the only person left behind was Simone, who was sitting cross-legged on a blanket, crying. He drove her to the bus stop in Blackwell the next morning and waited with her on the bench until the bus pulled in. They held hands because they’d been through something together, not that either one imagined they’d ever see each other again. When Simone got on the bus, Frank realized that he didn’t know her last name. He’d never bothered to ask.
PEOPLE THOUGHT HE would move back into his parents’ house then, or rent a place for himself. He’d get a job, be the person he’d once been. But he continued to stay away. A couple of his old friends drove up to the Farm late in July. They figured they’d ambush Frank and give him a good talking-to; they’d set him straight. There were coyote pups yelping somewhere close by, and the sky was bright with the last of the day’s light. The guys from town found a lot of trash strewn around, and the half-built log house, abandoned now, but no sign of Frank. His friends shouted his name, but nothing came back. Just an echo and the lulling sound of the Eel River, slower now that it was midsummer.
It was said Frank was sleeping in the caves, where there were known to be bears. Some kids in a Scout troop camping up there had seen him. They thought they spied a ghost, or maybe a bear, but it was only Frank, wearing jeans and an old leather jacket and the cowboy boots, cutting down firewood. Leo Mott went out searching for his son soon after. He didn’t find him, but when he came back to his parked truck, there was a note stuck on the windshield, the message scrawled on a brown paper bag.
I’m fine, Dad, Frank had written. Don’t worry about me.
FRANK TOOK EVERYTHING worthwhile that had been left behind at the Farm. A tent, some pots and pans, blankets, matches. He had a rifle that Rattler had bought, but he had no idea how to use it. He was sleeping in the tent, spending his days converting one of the smaller caves into a house for the coming winter. He insulated the walls with ferns and grass, then covered the insulation with planks of wood. He had the saw and toolbox from the Farm and was fashioning a hole in the top of the cave. He planned to rig up an exhaust system for smoke to escape, which would allow him to keep a fire going all winter. He’d build a door, a bed, a table, some chairs. He was growing marijuana in a pasture between the highest cliffs, a place of great beauty where he spent his afternoons. He thought he lived the way most people dreamed. In slow motion, in the dark, alone.
One day he heard a truck straining to get up an old logging road that cut through the mountain. The road was nearly impassable and not many people knew about it. Frank was in a section of the woods where there was a litter of fox pups he liked to watch. The foxes had gotten used to him and mostly ignored him, but they too heard the truck and they scampered away. Frank climbed down to an overlook, rifle over his shoulder, careful to ensure that no rocks would roll down into the road. If you could even call it a road. It was more of a trail, seeded with ferns, and moss, and young birch. Down below there was a Jeep, stuck in the mud.
The driver got out, pissed. He was a tall, handsome blond man, wearing jeans and a suede jacket. He had on expensive cowboy boots, handmade. He had a noticeable limp.
“Fuck this Jeep,” he said. “I thought it could go over anything. What a rip-off.”
A woman with long pale hair stepped out on the passenger side. She was the most beautiful woman ever seen on Hightop Mountain, the kind who could make men stupid with longing.
“I told you not to drive up here,” she said. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked warily at the shadows cast by the trees. “We’ll probably be eaten alive.”
The man went over and linked his arms around her. After a while, the beautiful woman backed away.
“Did your mother know she was naming you after outlaws?”
“I’m not such an outlaw,” the man said, sheepish.
“Not you.” The woman laughed. “Your brother.”
THAT NIGHT FRANK thought about the man who was clearly his brother and who hadn’t seemed familiar in the least. Frank had been doing his best to try to learn the constellations and he lay outside in the tall grass staring up. There was an awful lot they didn’t teach you in school, important things like how to survive. He thought he’d be ready to be sent overseas if he was drafted now, not that the army would ever have him at this point, not that he wanted to go. All the talk that people at the Farm had tossed around about getting back to the land was actually true for him. He felt wrapped up in Hightop Mountain, a part of it, as if the cells of his body had expanded to include fir trees, foxes, streams of green water. He had no plans to go anywhere.
He heard the Jeep again a few days later, honking its horn, driving up another logging road that wound even higher into the mountain. It was startling to hear so much noise in the deep quiet of the forest. The Jeep stopped and the driver got out. Frank could see his brother clamber on top of the roof. He started shouting Frank’s name like a madman.
“I know you’re out there,” Jesse called.
Frank said nothing. He knew how to wait. After a while, Jesse went away. Then it was quiet again.
The third time Jesse came searching for Frank, the beautiful woman was with him
again. She was wearing shorts and hiking boots and a white shirt. They got out of the Jeep, slamming their doors. Birds took flight. The sky was filled with sparrows.
“You know where you’re going, right?” she said.
“I grew up here,” Jesse told her dismissively. “Of course I do.”
Frank followed them at a distance. They were making a loopy circle through the thick part of the woods.
“Did you ever think he might not want to be found?” the woman said.
The couple kept walking, annoyed with each other, getting scratched by brambles and bitten by flies. Before long even they could tell they were getting nowhere. They were utterly lost. There’d been a murder up here once, but Jesse didn’t mention it. They sat on a log, backs to each other.
“Fuck,” Jesse said. He looked over his shoulder. “There are bears up here.”
“Well, great, Jesse,” the woman said. “Perfect.”
It was late in the day. The sky was ashy. The woman was so beautiful she was like a magnet. Frank stepped out of the woods. He seemed like a shadow and then like a man. His own brother didn’t recognize him, so on that point they were even.
“What do you know!” Jesse crowed when he realized it was Frank who’d found them. “It’s you.” He leapt to embrace Frank, and Frank allowed himself to be hugged. Jesse took a step back, grinning. “You’re a fucking mountain man.”
The woman came over and stuck out her hand for Frank to shake. “Tia McCorry,” she introduced herself. “Thank goodness we found you. We are so lost.”
Jesse grabbed Frank by the arm. “They’re telling me you don’t remember me. That’s total bullshit, right?”
The blond man had green eyes. He was smiling at Frank, but he had a puzzled look under his smile.
“Total bullshit,” Frank said.
Jesse let out a whoop. “I knew you were shining them on. You weren’t going to forget me.”
As Frank led them back to their Jeep, Jesse told of his exploits in California. He’d hitchhiked out and that had been a blast.
“Making sure to fuck every woman he met,” added Tia. “You know your brother. Ultimate ladies’ man.”
“Yep,” Frank said.
Jesse had hung out in San Francisco for a while, then decided to hitch down the coast for a weekend. When he wound up in L.A., he was broke. He’d been there ever since, working at a nightclub, managing a few bands. That’s how he’d met Tia, who was a singer—or at least she planned to be. Several of his bands had broken through. He was making a ridiculous amount of money at this point.
“You’ve got to come with us,” he said to Frank. “I told you this town is nowhere.”
It was growing dark. Frank had good night vision, but it was difficult going for the other two. They stumbled over rocks and their clothing snagged on thornbushes. When they reached the car, the sky was inky. Jesse reached for his keys, but dropped them in the underbrush. “Fuck,” he said.
“Your brother’s a city boy,” Tia murmured to Frank. He noticed she smelled like vanilla. Perfume drew mosquitoes to you. It was hot and buggy, and Tia raised up her length of blond-white hair in one hand and fanned her neck. Frank felt dizzy looking at her.
Jesse was still rooting around in the tall grass for the car keys when Frank heard the bear. He was used to quiet, so he took notice of the sound of the bushes being flattened as the bear headed their way.
“Get on top of the car,” he told Jesse and Tia.
“If I had a lighter, I could see,” Jesse complained.
Tia was looking at Frank.
“Do it now,” he said. “Be quiet.”
Tia scrambled up.
“I think they’re over by the tire,” Jesse said, still searching through the brush.
Frank leaned close to his brother. “Shut up and get on top of the car.”
The intensity of his tone made Jesse get on top of the Jeep, fast.
Frank had his gun, but he didn’t want to use it. He’d shot at squirrels and practiced with targets. In the winter he’d have no choice but to go after rabbit and deer, but he’d never entertained the notion of shooting a bear. There was something wrong about that. Something unmanly. He stood with his back against the Jeep and watched the bear amble along the logging road. There were overripe blueberries and wild raspberries. The bear was an old male, big. He was so close they could hear him grumbling to himself, the way some folks hum when they’re going about their business.
It was true twilight now, darker by the instant. The mosquitoes and midges were something you had to get used to on the mountain or you could easily be driven mad. The bear looked at Frank standing there. He made a deeper growling noise and stopped. He moved his head back and forth the way bears sometimes did before they charged. Frank could hear Tia making little sobbing sounds even though she was covering her mouth with her hands.
“Shoot it,” Jesse urged in a whisper. “Go ahead, brother.”
The bear smelled like leaves and mud. He was so close that his musky scent was already clinging to Frank’s clothes. The bear hadn’t seen the other two, flattened against the Jeep’s roof. He was just looking at Frank.
Frank thought of the way the snow had been falling when he was walking down the road before the car spun out and hit him. He thought of how the cold water in the Eel River had been such a shock to him when he dove in with Simone and Rose, floating in dreamtime. He felt ready to be over with something, although he wasn’t sure what that something was. All at once, there in the buggy twilight, he felt intensely awake.
“I know this place is yours,” he said to the bear. “I’m just passing through.”
The bear stayed on for a moment, then went in the other direction, rambling up toward the meadow, where there were dozens of honeybee hives in the fallen oak trees. Frank waited in silence for several minutes, then he climbed onto the roof of the Jeep. The three of them looked up at the sky.
“Los Angeles, here I come,” Jesse said.
Tia and Frank didn’t say anything. They watched the stars appear. Frank took out a joint, which they shared, and afterward Jesse fell sound asleep.
“He talks about you a lot,” Tia said. She was lying between them, her arms crossed behind her neck, cushioning her head. “He says you’re the good one.”
“He’s wrong,” Frank said.
Tia raised herself on one elbow and kissed him. It was the most delicious, hot, crazy kiss Frank had ever experienced. He felt as if he could fuck her right there on top of the car. He wanted her so much he felt certain he’d become the victim of temporary insanity.
Soon, though, he pulled away.
“He’s right about you,” Tia said. She kissed him again, but it wasn’t as good the second time because they both felt guilty.
They slept on the roof with Tia sandwiched between the brothers. In the morning, Frank found the keys in the grass. Tia and Jesse were covered with bug bites. They couldn’t get out of the woods fast enough. Frank drove into town with them. When they got to the house, his mother cried and hugged him and his father took him aside and told him he was glad Frank had gotten it all out of his system and had snapped out of it at last. Frank took a shower and let his mother wash his clothes. He was sitting at the desk where he used to do his homework, staring out the window, when Tia slipped into his room. She came to sit on his lap even though he was naked and the whole family was downstairs. They kissed for a while. They did things they shouldn’t have done. It seemed like a dream and then it didn’t.
Frank told her to wait, he’d be right back. He went downstairs and got his clothes from the dryer. He dressed right there in the laundry room, then went out the back door. He remembered that his brother always stole his best clothes. It was easy enough; they’d been the same size. Frank had never cared; he’d felt honored that Jesse wanted something he had. That was back when they were brothers. Now he walked three blocks and made a left on Main Street. He kept going until he got to the house where René had grown up, and as fate wo
uld have it, she was waiting at the door.
THE RED GARDEN
1986
BLACKWELL HAD ALWAYS HAD A PROBLEM with flies. They appeared every spring, swarms rising up from the cold water of the Eel River and the rushing eddies of Hubbard Creek in such great numbers that some of the women in town covered their windows and doors with garden netting during the first two weeks of April, the kind you throw over blueberry bushes to protect the fruit from bears.
Louise Partridge didn’t remember that there’d been so many while she was growing up. Living away from home for a few years had changed her perception of just about everything—animal, vegetable, and mineral alike. Louise had come home from Radcliffe in her junior year to nurse her ailing mother until Mrs. Partridge’s death that past winter. Louise hadn’t really liked Cambridge, all those know-it-all girls, the smart-aleck pot-smoking boys who thought no one had ever had an original idea before they came along. But she missed the libraries, and the classes, and the bookstores. She missed Cambridge, as a matter of fact.
Louise was a fixer; she didn’t throw up her hands when confronted with a problem, she took charge. She got to work on her grandmother’s ancient sewing machine and made a hooded cloak out of mosquito netting. She had decided to replant the back garden, the half acre of land her mother and great-aunt Hannah had always told her was of no use. They’d always insisted that whatever was planted there would grow into the opposite of what anyone expected, almost as if the earth had a mind of its own. But the old garden was on higher ground, and the blackflies weren’t as plentiful there, so Louise decided she would find out for herself.