Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (21 page)

“What are you going to do out here?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Lou. I suspect I’ll just be taking nature in.”

“But it’s raining.”

“Yes, Lou. I’ve noticed.”

He still seemed reluctant to leave, so I waved him off: “The other cripples await you, Lou, they need you to take them to the mall. Come back at four. I’ll be all right.” Reluctantly he got back in and backed down the dirt road. I sat there waving him off until the HandyVan disappeared.

The river ran behind the cabins, a few of which had been fixed up by other people who must have had real houses for themselves in town. A few more had slipped over the brink of feasible repair. And then there were the desperation rentals, people eking out the winter underneath their mossy roofs, waiting for the flood, the muddy yards studded with broken plastic toys that would be swept away. These cabins showed no signs of life but for the drone of radios buzzing like bees trapped in their windows. The golden oldies. Music for somebody with no place to go except the past.

I stuck the key in the lock and panicked a moment when the knob would not turn — a healthier wife could have kicked the flimsy door to splinters. Stopping to assess the outside of the cabin then, I realized that Daniel had not given much thought to its adornment. No wind chimes had been strung outside, not even a deck chair on the deck. It was as if the cabin had no patience for these distractions, as if it were single-minded in its intent.

Finally, after I backed out the key a smidgen and pressed my thumb to it, the tumblers settled and the door flopped back. Straightaway the scent of mildew slapped its glove across my face. Inside, I found the living room sparsely filled with furniture that must have come with the cabin: a card table with two rickety chairs and a dusty plaid sofa. The shotgun lay on a shelf above the sofa, too high for me to reach.

In the room’s kitchen portion I opened a cupboard and found a variety of tins: asparagus, baked beans, cocktail franks. It was not the kind of food I pictured people eating after making love. When I tried, I saw a man and a woman sitting up in bed, spearing beans out of the can, its ragged lid like a miniature sawmill blade sticking up.

Onward, I said, but for a long time did not move.

Out the window, I could see the rain falling. And what tells you it is rain? It’s only an aberration of the light. You try to get a fix on a single drop, but as soon as you think you’ve captured something, it dissolves into the collective glisten. This is a game you can spend a good while playing.

The bedroom door was a vinyl accordion, calamine-colored, screaking reluctantly along its track. Once through, I saw that Daniel had painted the paneling white, the cracks filled so that at first glance the walls appeared to be smooth. Such a funny desire, I realized then, to want smooth walls. That the smoothness makes a difference.

And still, if you studied them for any time at all you could tell that they were only paneling in disguise, the plaster lumpy in the cracks. I wondered if this depressed Daniel, the small ways that his cabin could not help being tinged by sadness, no matter how many gallons of paint he encrusted it in. But then I thought: if you dwelled on sadness you’d never get even one foot out the door. What was sadness, after all, but the fibrous stuff out of which a life was woven? And what was happiness but a chemical in the brain?

Strange what makes you giddy, how similar the feelings of giddiness and fear. When I launched myself, the chair skittered backward through the doorframe of this room too small for anything but a bed. For a split second I was airborne, and when I touched down the mattress swallowed me deeper into it than I expected. The quilt was old and moldy and mossy and limp, made from the underpelts of who knows how many birds — a dozen? a hundred? a thousand? — that obliterated whatever musk could have been left behind by a mere two human bodies when I climbed under it and drew it like a napkin over my head.

Light trickled in through the stitches, but still it took some time for my eyes to adjust. When I looked through the quilt, it seemed as though I were seeing a mass of gray birds in the sky, so thick there were no gaps between their wings. And I was sailing under them, so close their feathers brushed my skin, my arms and legs spread-eagled, my body supported by narrowest of strings. Filaments, I guess you’d call them. Looped around my ankles, neck, and wrists.

I can see that it is Daniel who flies in the lead, but I also know the point bird must keep switching before exhaustion sets in. Soon Lou the driver will take his turn, then Daphne the neurologist and Julie the carpenter. And Julie’s lover and her Lucy, flying like Wonder Woman as her braces fall to earth. And even the president of France is with us as we migrate through the clouds, trailing his mistresses like a kite’s tail of rags. Even Aldo Leopold is here with us as we fly with the tiny ortolans and his long-necked sand hill cranes.

So it wasn’t rain on the roof I heard but the sound of my gray flock, each bird rustling against the others, vying to claim a scrap of skyscape for her own. Despite our scrambling we all flew on, wing to wing, lifted by the collective draft and borne along by each other’s wake as we massed in such great numbers that our feathers dimmed the sun.

The slash burners burn the slash to prepare the mountains for replanting. All week they pile the mess of sticks and stumps that last year’s logging crews left scattered in the clearings. They build long snaking piles that stand taller than the heads of the tallest men, though here the hillsides are so steep that when they stand on the uphill edge of the pile the top is at their feet. Then they clear a swath of bare ground beside it with their Pulaskis, a tool that has an ax head married to a mattock. At the end of each week someone has to run alongside the pile to torch it with the drip can, which holds a mix of gas and diesel. There’s a wick in the spout that lights the drip as each one falls. Then the slash burner runs along the whole pile’s length while flames are born around his feet. His feet, her feet, as the case may now be.

THE SLASH BURNERS have always been uniformly young men, though the time has come for them to add some women to their ranks. So this year three have joined the returning five of last year’s men, plus two new men who’ve come from back East. Women, men, it sounds strange to call them this, but what is the alternative? Most everyone is a college student, except for one ski bum and one surfer. It adds up to a crew of ten. The government likes a good round number.

UNDERSTANDABLY, the women are nervous, wondering if they will measure up. They sleep in a trailer that’s been trucked into the clearing where the men’s bunkhouse has always stood, next to a power pole that is the endpoint of the wire scalloping across the mountains. What has crossed more than a few minds among them is what will happen this summer if any romance sparks. Will they subject their roommates to the creak and groaning of the bunk beds? Will they make the flimsy walls of the trailer sing? Or will they pitch their tents by the creek and let their noises mix with those of the forest, whose own limbs groan softly all night from beyond the edges of the clearing?

THESE ARE by and large hypothetical questions, because among the women there is only one obvious erotic object. Throughout the day, blond strands detach from her braid, mix with sweat, and tangle with the hoops that she wears threaded through her ears. Another of the new women is short, her hair close-cropped to show the muscles in her neck. And then there’s Marie, who is knock-kneed and slight, the only slash burner to wear glasses. She’s also the one who jumps at the first snarl of the chain saw. Her brown hair she wears in a helmet like Joan of Arc’s, but unlike Joan she would not choose to go willingly into the flames. Yet she has chosen. Here she is.

SLASH BURN. Field crew. Coastal mountains. Washington. Marie sent off the application for these words alone, never even inquiring how hard the work was, how much it would rain, how little it would pay. She had a vision of herself as someone in a depression-era photograph, instead of just another skinny cartoon kid from the suburbs. On the application they had posed many questions: could she lift fifty pounds, could she perform CPR. Of course, Marie had lied and answered all their questions yes.

THOUGH THE SLASH BURNERS are newly arrived in camp, already the dampness has caused a strange fungus to grow between their toes. So far they’ve made and torched just one slash pile, the surfer, their crew boss, taking his turn first. He ran alongside the pile while the flames licked at his tall boots, into which he had tucked his green pants that were made from some unnatural substance that does not burn. Off the side of his one foot the hillside rose and disappeared into the still-standing trees. His other foot surfed on the edge of the slash, which was neither solid nor air but a mesh made of both. For him, the trick to running along a slash pile lay in staying fluid, never coming to rest anywhere with your full weight, not letting your knees lock while the drip can rains its baby flames.