Mendocino Fire (18 page)

He knew enough not to go after them. He knew enough not to go after them yet.

One time in the library in town a boy has a rat inside his shirt. Its head pokes out under the boy's chin, its clawey hands clinging and whiskers quicked forward. It is as if Finn has never wanted anything before: this,
this
is her destiny, to be a girl with a rat inside her shirt. Wherever she goes the rat will hang on, the alert small subject of her gigantic solicitude.
How long do you think a rat will last in the woods against foxes and ravens and owls and hawks.
But if I was really careful and kept it in a cage and was really careful.
Do you think a rat wants to be your little Gitmo prisoner, or do you think a rat wants to be free like you are.

Nights when the fog holds off they laze around the illicit summer fire, smoking and telling stories and feeding twigs to the flames
for the love of seeing small things burn, story after story, and there is Finn, almost seven, riding the high end of a canted redwood log in the dark. Mary, too, tells stories. Whenever Mary tells how Finn was born, Finn feels both beloved and ashamed, her helpless, ridiculous baby-self held up for them to dote on. That story ends with Mary crying in ever-renewed astonishment:
Finn you were so beautiful!
Finn works her arms from too-long sleeves and pulls her knees to her chest under the sloppy tent of Goodwill sweater smelling of the grown man who gave it away. Who smoked. Who was not her father, because she's asked and Mary shook her head. The baggy sweater hem covers the boots so only their toes show, and she evens the boot toes so neither is ahead, neither is winning, not the left, not the right, old black boot toes in a setting of moss and fingerlength ferns and upthrust mushrooms whose caps are pale, pushy, tender, mute. A boot toe edges into the gang of mushrooms. One is uprooted and maimed by the slow back-and-forthing of the toe of the boot. Then she is sorry. Finn shuts her eyes and fills up with sorriness.

That is
killing
, Finn.

For a while she is absorbed in accusing herself, then blame loses its electrical charge and if she wants that absorption again another mushroom will have to die. Boredom nudges her boot toe close to another cocky little button of rooted aliveness.

What is that like: not to be able to move out of the way.

Another night, that summer or the summer after. If firelight flashes high enough there's laughter, first because it's a freaking
face
up there in the dark, then because it's a
little kid
. Now and
then Finn has come down when coaxed, and that was a mistake. They may not intend it thus, but their solicitude is an oblique condemnation of Mary. Finn resents this even if her mother doesn't.

Aren't you cold in just that sweater and your poor legs bare? And Jesus look how scratched up.

How long since you seen chocolate?—I think I got some somewhere.

My little girl is your age just about and she can say her ABCs, can you say your ABCs?

In this full-moon circle there's a stranger, though the grown-ups don't at first know that, each person assuming the lean bearded dude with the hostile vibe arrived with somebody else. Afterward no one will own up to having told him about the circle, but that could have been from remorse at showing the kind of piss-poor judgment that fucks up everyone's night. Finn who can go a long while unseen has been found out: he has noticed her. He has called, “What's your name?” and gotten no response. The wiry dark shrub of his beard parts again, the teeth asking, “What's your name?” Finn's hesitation lasts long enough to offend him down there in his bared-nerve world and he shouts, “Don't answer then you autistic little shit, not like I give a fuck.” Finn is being, for the first time,
hated
: her nerves memorize the shock. And him: she memorizes
him
, this shirtless shaven-headed hater, brows heavy and meaningful in contrast to the round gleaming exposure of his forehead, and, inked on the left upper slab of his chest, a tattoo, a spiral, big as her handprint would be if she left a handprint on his bare, slightly sweating, hard-breathing chest.

“Hey,” someone, not Mary, commands gently. “Hey, come on now. Hey.”

Another voice says, “Way disproportionate, man, going off on a kid like that.”

Someone else says, “Look, she never answers.” Adding, “But it's not autism.”

Someone says, “Maybe, man, you should apologize to Finn.”

He says, “Finn.”

Mary, at last: “You know her name.”

“Finn,” he calls up to her. “Finn, man, I'm sorry, I lost it.”

The others wait for an utterance equal to the scale of his offense. He too, for reasons of his own, seems to want to say more. He calls, “You not telling me your name, it just hurt my feelings, I lost it.”

At this skewed sincerity they laugh, and he sits down and reaches to accept the joint, and everyone in the mended, redeemed circle relaxes. Finn is almost asleep when she hears his voice again: “You know what I saw on TV last night. This bear. Polar bear. It teeters on this little dwindling
raft
of ice and it can't stay where it is and it can't go because there's no other ice in sight, it's swimming and swimming, this small, like a dog's, polar bear head in a world of water, forever and ever water, this bear swimming hard against the drag of its fur with nowhere to swim to, nothing to climb out onto, ice gone, ice melted, and it's despair, what he feels, what we feel,
that
is despair and
we all know it
, you think Mendocino is different, your safe hole to hide in, well wake the fuck up, they're coming for the last scraps, who stops them? Us? Have we stopped them from screwing over the planet? Let me tell you their ideology. Want me to tell you their ideology?
Take take take take take take take. Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.
” When he says
kill
they hear not only
fucked up and pissed off
, there's a personal element, some provocation an ordinary
person could tolerate, which he, being crazy, can't endure. “What's coming should terrify us. Tell me this. Why aren't we fucking
terrified
. Why don't we do
a fucking thing
to stop them.” He gets to his feet. “Now it all falls on
children
.” He tilts his face up but the fire has died down and Finn doubts he can make her out against the darkness. He says, “She's gonna see—,” and means
her
. He's forgotten her name.

He tries again. “She's gonna live to see—”

He's forgotten the end of the sentence.

With soft concern, the kind that doesn't presume to insist, someone drawls, “Come on, man, sit down, why don't you sit down”—and other voices, fastidiously soft, tug at him. “Come on, it's all right, sit back down, good, that's good, don't cry, it's a beautiful night, you're among friends, there's the moon.”

Finn has things to fix—terrors, gaps in knowledge—that wolves can help with, and for a time, alongside her love of Mary, her passion for her mother's weather-roughened fair skin and the wealth of her never-cut hair and her habit of rubbing a leaf between thumb and forefinger and asking the plant
What's wrong here? Am I missing something?
and her woodsmoke, damp wool, and patchouli scent and her voice and the millet-flour pancakes she makes in their cast-iron skillet when she's in a good mood with wild blackberries that burst and bleed inky streaks through the batter, alongside all of that Finn's love of wolves runs parallel. Protective yellow-eyed posse: Agnes, Bone, Donedeal, Moody, Sid. Slipsliding through the woods with her. Finn can't remember mentioning their existence ever, so how does Mary know? Mary says
Sometimes it's like that, beloveds from the life before stick with the child into the child's new existence, and ignorants call them
imaginary.
Because they regard human doings with supreme contempt, there are limits to what the wolves can teach Finn. And one day Mary says
Outgrow the fucking fairy tale, Finn. There are no wolves. There never were.

Not a road, you can't call it a road, just the dirt ruts someone would drive down when the orchard needed attention. That time, the time when these trees badly needed pruning, came and went years ago, and now thickets of water shoots, pretty much impenetrable, swarm once-elegant branches. Mary's lover, Teague, says the orchard is
asleep
. The last four or five winters were too warm, with so few chill hours that the trees—who break into blossom only after experiencing what they believe to be a whole winter's worth of cold—never wake from dormancy. They have been stranded by global warming in a kind of dream. Teague likes explaining things about his land, even troubling things that keep him awake at night.
Listen when I'm talking to you
, Teague says. Finn
was
listening. He doesn't like it when she tells him so.
Why do you have to piss him off
, Mary says, pressing a rustling bag of frozen peas to Finn's jaw. After a couple of tries, Finn perfects a listening expression. Finn has to climb several trees before finding an apple. She twists it from its twig. Where some old trees were taken out there is a shaggy clearing sheltered from rough wind, hidden from low-flying planes, perfect for Mary's little darlings. From her loft Finn hears Teague say
There's shit kids need
, and when Mary says
Like what
he says
Like has she ever had a birthday cake?
Wherever Mary goes, Teague's dog follows at a bowlegged pitbull trot.
The handsomer the man the uglier the dog
, Mary says.
Do your thing, goofball goonface
, Mary says, scratching what's left of a torn-off black ear.
Pitbull pee is the
flashing neon keep-out sign of the animal world.
As backup, tarnished spoons clink and tinsel shimmers along strands of salvaged wire strung trunk to trunk in a critter-proof perimeter, the plants leafing out in the grow-bags Finn and Mary drag into new, sunnier configurations as summer progresses.
A real secret is one your life depends on
, Mary says. The apple is as small as Finn's fist, gone in five bites. Finn has taken to counting bites.
Did you remember to feed her?
is one of the accusing questions Teague aims at Mary. If he finds out about the grow, he'll do more than accuse. It's his land, he's supposed to know what's going on. Even if he didn't know, he can still lose the land, that's the law. The bigger danger is the patch being found by accident and ripped off.
Say some new guy came to work for Teague
, Mary said,
then I'd worry.
The beauty of this semiwild sixty-acre slice of Mendocino is that it's too much for Teague to handle without help, and he puts off hiring help because he's paranoid. The downside is that in Teague's paranoia he's convinced Mary cheats on him. They can't stay.
My fucking luck
, Mary says.
Those seeds came from Afghanistan.

Dev plays guitar in a band with gigs throughout the county and even, two or three times that winter, down in the city, where Mary wears high heels and a vintage dress with pansies on it and they eat Chinese. In potholed parking lots outside bars in Arcata and Hopland and Forestville, Finn finds quarters, earrings, condoms she knows better than to touch, a lipstick whose red Mary likes, a dog collar complete with tags, a real bullet, a run-over T-shirt that, uncrumpled, says
Mendocino Fire
and was a fireman's, Dev says, and then says
We should look for a puppy to go with that collar.
Someone, a drunk, breaks the van's left taillight with a baseball bat. For no reason, Mary says. Wrapped in an old
flannel shirt of Dev's, zipped in his sleeping bag against the cold in the rear of the van, Finn sleeps alongside instrument cases and the sawdust-sweet carpentry tools of Dev's day job. All night the van is a tin drum for the rain. Most mornings she gets to school. A cough ransacks her chest and scrapes her throat raw. When the shoplifted thermometer says 104, Dev sings
If that mockingbird don't sing, Daddy's gonna buy you a diamond ring
and by dawn her forehead is cool under Mary's palm. Far out in the country a curve of road stampedes her heart and right there is the dirt drive that winds to Teague's house. She studies Mary's profile. Nothing. When Dev likes the song on the radio, he turns it up high and they all sing.

Mary is still asleep inside. At the table of recycled redwood near Kafka's trailer, Finn is fed tea and slice after slice of toast dripping with honey by Kafka, fresh from her shower, the mown contours of her crewcut pinheaded with glisten, all six feet of her clean and slender and unbothered in cargo pants and a white wifebeater that exposes the zoo sleeving her forearms. Ocelot, macaw, monkey, winding vines. From this intricacy Kafka's hands emerge naked and in need of something to do. A near-drowned bee orbits the bowl of Kafka's spoon. Does Finn know about bees? “Because this is some ominous shit. By far the most important pollinators on the planet, disappearing. Flying away, never coming back, hives
empty
. No one knows why. So now, if I see a bee floundering around in my teacup, I'm like, ‘Sister Bee, just you take hold of the tip of this spoon, just you rest a while, calm down, dry your wings.'” Since Kafka keeps talking, Finn's confusion plays out exclusively within her own head, where it can't complicate the good impression she hopes to make. In case they're staying.