When my dad picked me up, he did not come to the door. He got out of his Jeep, sat at the bottom of our steps, and waited. He lit a cigarette. Probably didn’t want to hear from my mom how he was killing himself. I kissed my mom goodbye, took the steps two at a time, and threw my duffle in the back of the Jeep. My dad stubbed out his cigarette. Neither of us spoke as we pulled away.
I had turned eighteen and graduated high school. This trip was for old times’ sake, a chance to patch things up. But there were no old times. There was nothing to patch up. My dad and I had no words to say.
To occupy my mind, I decided to count. My mom’s trick. I had learned from the best. I counted the mileposts that measured either my escape from the city or my hurtle toward something dark and unknown. Depended on how you looked at it. And by dark and unknown, I mean the forest of the coastal mountains. So much forest, you could get lost in there and never come back. All the more reason to count the mileposts. I needed something to hold.
My dad noticed me as I mouthed the numbers. He said, “Sitka spruce. Western red cedar.”
“Good to know.” I lost my count.
“Old growth, like hundreds of years old. The rings tell you exactly how old.”
I said, “I know that. Everybody knows that.”
He said, “You have to kill the tree to determine the age. Kind of a paradox. A paradox is when—”
“I know what a paradox is.”
English class.
“In my day, a paradox was called a catch-22.”
“Good to know.” I started over.
We were driving to my dad’s property on the Siletz River in the coastal mountains of Oregon. The last miles were a twisting, narrow road. We dodged logging trucks roaring to get out, twenty five trucks—I counted them—grinding through their gears, shouldering loads so long and rigid they could barely make the turns. Where the road pinched to a neck, we pulled the Jeep into the brush—salal and sword fern, I later learned—pitched toward the river below. We let the log truck pass.
My dad said, “You want the see the world, right?”
“What?”
“I was eighteen once. I remember how it was. To see the world.”
I was good for a “Yeah.” My body was rammed against the passenger door because we were pitched so hard. My heart was hoping we didn’t tip and roll, ending in the river below. The river was black, slow as molasses. The roar of the logging truck seemed just as slow. The heavy smoke hung above the road, but as it cooled it slid down the slope to the water.
We pulled back onto the road. My dad said, “Listen. The Siletz river is like a whole world. The headwaters start just a couple hundred yards from the ocean, a stone’s throw, but it flows away from the ocean, twists like a snake, points every direction, and after—I don’t know—fifty or sixty miles, it empties into the ocean very near where it started. So it describes the whole world like—”
He coughed. He didn’t have the breath for anything more.
“It brings you home,” he said with a gasp.
“It’s an allegory,” I said.
English class.
“Crazy as fuck is what it is.”
The last of the logging trucks bore a single massive log, a giant’s corpse on a caisson. My dad pointed to the orange X sprayed on the log’s side, and in his rumbling voice he said, “You see that mark? That mark means everything. Who lives, who dies.”
I constructed a second allegory in my mind, that there was only one way out of this forest, and it was on the back of a log truck. A catch-22! I didn’t tell my dad. The truck rumbled by.
My dad’s property was ten acres carved from the Siletz Indian Reservation, with a cabin on a cutbank above the river and a jeep road into the backcountry. It was old-growth forest, Sitka spruce and western red cedar, as I had learned. My dad said the property had been his playground as a child: camping, hunting, fishing, swimming. He had even given names to the tallest trees—Beatrice, Tall Chief, Marilyn, Captain Cook—and he and his brother had stood behind them for hide and seek. After the road entered the property, he pointed them out to me. I whispered the names. Better than counting.
We parked at the cabin and got out. The trees blocked the sun. They blocked the sound of the ocean. They blocked my thinking. “Obstinate as concrete.” My mom’s words. She had used those words to describe me.
My dad parked himself on the steps of the cabin and lit up a Lucky Strike, clearing his throat with rumbling coughs. Then he rummaged through his duffel and pulled out a purple felt Crown Royal bag. From this he took out a revolver. He began to polish it with the felt. He did not look up from this task.
“Jesus!”
What the hell was I supposed to do? The forest was dark, cold, bleak, and the time was only mid-day. I did not have to wonder what my dad was planning. His father had done it. His brother had done it, right here on the property, the story was. My mom had gotten out of the marriage before anyone else could do it. I was on suicide watch. I resolved to steal the gun and take it with me when I got away. And I would get away. I was fine with the rupture I would create. What was holding us together anyway? That was how I solved any problem. My mom had gotten us away. I learned from the best.
My dad looked up from polishing the gun. A long look. He must have known what I was thinking. He said, “Yeah, I was eighteen once. You can work in the woods this summer. Cruising timber is easy. Put some good money in your pocket. See, you got to stick around before you can get around.”
I said, “I’m taking the gun.”
He looked at me.
“You know, for bears.”
“Two-legged snakes is more like it.” He held it out. I took it. I knew which end was which, but little else. The gun was heavy, and I felt the power of holding it.
I could have said no to all of this. I could have said I had plans. Community college is big plans. But my dad had promised me easy money. Already, first day in the woods, with a gun in the mix, I felt alive. Forget the future: I could feel myself shifting to the here and now. I could already hear my dad’s voice telling me the error of youth was to feel the urgency of the future, that I was in too much of a hurry. Live for the moment. My dad took back the gun and said, “You know, time is the one thing you truly have.”
How had he known?
He said, “Are you hungry?”
“You bet!”
“There’s a roast chicken in the blue cooler.”
“Do we have tv reception?”
“What do you think?”
“VCR at least?”
“If you like Steve McQueen movies.”
I hardly remembered my dad. My mom had taken us away when I was very young. A fight in an apartment, I remember. A green sofa where I played with toys and watched television. My mom carrying me out. My dad did not follow. His heart wasn’t in it. Wasn’t in anything, my mom said. She never spoke of him; of her reticence, she made clear, I was not to ask. Breaking a link in a very long chain, was how she said it. You kept going. Distance was time. Count your steps. So I took that summer job on the Indian reservation, but for my own reasons. It put me in the woods. Put money in my pocket. Put distance between my dad and me. Put me on my way to something better. Like my mom said, you kept going. I applied at the tribal headquarters in the town of Siletz, a double wide prefab among a few store fronts and motor homes. They gave me topo maps and cans of orange spray paint, and they took my information. Was I an Indian? The pretty girl at the reception table asked. I said no. She didn’t look Indian either, all pale skin and soft round eyes. Back in the cabin, I found an old rucksack and a holster for the gun. My dad and I watched Steve McQueen in Bullit. We did not talk. Old times sake.
Every morning, I made a sandwich and I packed apples, five or six of them. I packed the gun. While my dad spent his days on the steps, measuring time with smoky breaths and cigarette stubs, I spent mine in the backcountry, marking trees for sale. I walked miles of unbroken forest and saw no one. I walked in the shade of the tallest trees I had ever seen, would ever see—spruce and cedar so tall the forest was as dark as night, so cool the dew, combed from the wet air by a million branches, was ever falling. The gun went cold and wet with condensation. If anyone else had been in the woods, I would have seen them. The only noise, the only disturbance, was my can of spray paint, hissing as I marked the trunks of trees for the crews who would cut them down. The crews could drop a tree flat as a dead deer. Hoist it onto a truck. Who lives, who dies: that responsibility was mine.
Some days, I heard the ocean. Somedays, a silence aching and forlorn. Gunfire once. My heartbeat. Ravens on a hot day gulping warm air in a sun I could not see, a heat I could not feel.
I spent every day in darkness, and my irises must have become wide as saucers, for I came down to the river, its jagged slice of sky, squinting from the sun. There were clearcuts here, stumps of cedar in long swaths, heaps of slag, and brilliant sun off the slow black water. The timber company was already clearing the forest of its darkness.
Marking the trees with orange Xs, I did not count them.
One day, in the heart of the forest, I came upon a tree more majestic than its neighbors, a giant, the base of its trunk adorned with satin ribbons and eagle feathers. It was a tree sacred to the Siletz people. The ribbons and feathers were offerings. Far above, flecks of sunlight, tiny as the blinks of stars, cast long needles of light that sparkled in the mist around the tree. The forest was a church. I wondered if such a tree, like the trees on my dad’s property, had been given a name. But the artifacts around the tree seemed old, as though no one had come in ages. I did not mark the tree for cutting. I moved on.
I came home to my dad on the cabin steps. I wanted to believe he was wiser than when I had left him. All day, he had been thinking, right? Pondering. Whatever problem occupied his mind, surely he had reasoned it from A to B. I handed him the revolver. He wiped off the dew and put it in the Crown Royal bag.
There were logging trucks on the highway, saddled with fresh kills, but there was also a caravan of cars. A casino had opened on the rez a year before, and the money was flowing. Every day meant another cityslicker, drunk on watery mai-tais from the casino, taking a wrong turn down our road. We had to turn his SUV around. And newbie fishermen came down, towing gleaming trawlers, hoping to put in where the property touched the river. We warned them about the cutbank and turned them around too. Fat-cheeked timber men in dual-axle pickups rolled by, windows down, ogling the timber, cooing to my dad to sell. They left empty-handed but vowed to be back. We did not tell them the trees had names. Sometimes an old Indian man paced our border, trying to remember where Indian land ended and white began. You had to let him. He carried a breechloader—my dad said it was a .45 caliber, and hell yes you let him. My dad had gotten the property from his dad, and he from his. I wondered if the land had been swindled from an Indian for a blanket and some beads, but I never asked, and my dad never invited the question. One final summer. Keep going.
Sometimes, a pair of black limousines appeared. They wanted up the jeep road into the backcountry, and you let them. I asked my dad who they were. He said better not to know. I asked were they in the mafia. He nodded. And? He said there was no and. When the limousines returned, their side-panels spackled with mud, you let them pass. […]
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Evan Morgan Williams has published over forty short stories in such magazines as Witness, Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, and Antioch Review. A collection of Evan’s stories, Thorn, won the Chandra Book Prize at BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). The book later won the gold medal in the IPPY award series. A second collection of his stories, Canyons, won the gold medal in the Next Generation Independent Book Awards.