The Croning (11 page)
Saturday was also Don’s day to walk the dog around the tree farm on the other side of Misty Villa. He dressed in sweats and a windbreaker and pocketed a can of pepper spray as a precautionary measure. The packs of roaming neighborhood dogs were unpredictable and vicious, thus a circuit of Schneider’s Tree Farm was as potentially fraught with peril as stuffing ham sandwiches into his backpack for a hike across the Serengeti. Don knew this because he had seen them cruising the byways and the unfenced yards—a border collie, a poodle, a beagle (although Don suspected the beagle was just along for the ride) and two or three mixed breeds—and, more succinctly, because the pack had once chased him from the mailbox to his front porch.
The quarter-mile walk went slowly, Thule hell-bent on sniffing every bush in the ditch and then hiking his leg for a squirt.
The subdivision was arrayed around the streets of Red Lane & Darkmans like a body on a crucifix. The biggest and boldest house in the neighborhood belonged to the Rourkes, half a block in. Barry Rourke was an executive for AstraCorp (and thus one of Don’s current bosses), his wife a semi-retired cellist and fulltime gadfly who played with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and their home was very old and ponderously stylish; a Victorian number raised months after the First World War. Then Red Lane and Darkmans were the
only
lanes, and made of good, honest dirt. The woods had lain even deeper and darker in those days when wolves roamed the forest, and black bears and cougars from the hills, and according to the coots at the Mud Shack, the occasional escapee from Wharton House, the old asylum that got shut down in the ’90s. The wolves were long gone, the feral inmates shipped off to Western or wherever, but coyotes still laired in the woods; deer, and of course the packs of dogs that swelled with the inevitable wave of abandoned pooches each frantic tourist season and encouraged people of wisdom and prudence to arm themselves for the daily stroll.
The Rourke manse and environs had history, all right, were fairly steeped in it like an old blackened tea bag left to wither at the edge of a saucer. Don had several occasions to venture inside the house during the late ’70s and early ’80s—Kirsten Rourke threw frequent and lavish parties and because Don was a minion of AstraCorp at the time, Michelle was invited into the Friday afternoon pinochle club for awhile, and of course, Rourke invited Don over periodically to indulge his impulse for slumming with the help. The place was imposing and decorated in a museum-quality fashion that discouraged touching a blessed thing on pain of arousing the housekeeper’s ire.
One could scarcely move in a straight line without tripping across metastasized lumps and growths in every cavernous room, the benighted accretion of ineffable superiority through breeding and fortune: Circassia walnut Victrolas dredged from the wreckage of East India Company outposts; Flemish oak paneled armoires brought West in the face of marauding red devils; wicker baskets threaded by the cracked fingers of villagers long subsumed unto the dull gray chalk that collects as a mantle over everything everywhere; oil paintings from estate sales and private auctions; Ming vases and Tiffany lamps; Kirsten’s million-dollar shoe collection, an affectation she’d contrived after following the exploits of Imelda Marcos. Rourke collected Western European medieval art—swords, shields, ragged banners and a library of withered books behind glass. Rourke knew a bit of Latin and recited Olde English poetry when he got drunk, or, as Don suspected, when he pretended to be drunk.
Rourke had been an affiliate member of the John Birch Society; an amiable elitist, a masterful badminton player with a savage left-hand serve. He subscribed to
Foreign Policy
and a clutch of peer-reviewed journals pertaining to historical research societies of which Don had scant knowledge.
Back in the day when everyone was young and busy, sometimes Don had seen one of the Rourkes in passing when he walked down his own long bumpkin drive to fetch the mail or the paper from the roadside mailbox, the old star route, as the postal workers dubbed them—Kirsten cruising in her Jaguar, squiring the two-point-five children (twins Page & Brett, and Bronson Ford the adopted boy from a village in Angola) to or from recital (soccer, ballet, gymnastics, chess club, etc); or Rourke, in his mega-sized diesel pickup, which sounded like a piece of industrial equipment idling in the yard on blustery mornings—and he would wave or nod in greeting. If the elder Rourkes weren’t too preoccupied they’d usually return the favor. The platinum blonde girl had regally ignored him (her brother, also a blond, died tragically; Don never heard the particulars), although Bronson Ford sometimes turned in his seat to stare through the rear window, impassive as a totem mask.
The dry breeze quickened as Don trudged by the Rourkes’ iron gate. When had he last spoken to them? Ages—Kirsten was shriveled as a prune. Don chuckled wryly.
Ah, but haven’t we all?
Too late to speak with Rourke now, anyway. The smug bastard had vanished in the Olympic Mountains years ago. Very mysterious circumstances. There were rumors of banking scandals, embezzlement, a Cayman Islands account. A number of folks agreed Rourke probably parachuted out of his loveless marriage and collapsing business empire and ran out the clock on a tropical beach.
Don scrutinized the lengthy gravel drive, the looming outlines of the house and the dazzles of glass and metal through the hissing trees. Shadows rose and fell like inhalations and a man, probably a gardener, in a shiny red shirt flickered briefly across a swath of razor-precise green lawn and vanished when the shifting branches clasped leaf to leaf.
Don and Thule continued down to the cul-de-sac and its trio of pedestrian homes. A footpath curved into the shallow copse of alders and termite-bored stumps of fallen pines and a man had to watch his step for the all the mounds of dog- and horseshit. About two hundred yards farther on, the trail intersected a dirt road, a combination of rutted gravel and mucky sand, that divided and divided again like the spokes of a wheel and cut numerous paths through the many acres of tightly packed dwarf evergreens; none crowned more than eight feet tall; a veritable forest of Christmas trees.
The farm had been around since forever; it was a formidable enterprise bordering a stretch of the distant Yelm Highway and sprawled inward from there in the shape of an irregular fan some four miles wide at the junction of its service road and the path from the Misty Villa Home Owners Association. The road was popular with joggers, dog owners and rowdy teens on dirt bikes. Dirt bikes, four-wheelers and the like were expressly forbidden, not that such edicts ever discouraged kids hopped up on testosterone, and drunken rednecks who’d achieved the adult instar stage, from roaring around the track after dark, tearing up the place and leaving beer cans everywhere.
A wooden sawhorse with a peeling gray placard was jammed upside down into the teeth of a row of trees near the entrance. The placard shouted in huge, black letters,
KEEP OUT! THIS AREA
HAS BEEN SPRAYED WITH PESTICIDE!
DANGEROUS TO PEOPLE & PETS NEXT 14 DAYS!
YOU ARE ON PRIVATE PROPERTY!
The sign migrated about the perimeter of the farm and had done so perpetually for several years.
A yellow lab trotted past and lifted its leg to hose a baby Douglas fir before moving on, snout to the earth. Thule strained at his leash and whimpered excitedly. The lab’s owners, a couple of yuppie kids in matching polo wear, ambled along a few dozen yards behind Don, placidly oblivious to the cryptic sign or their wayward pet. Far off, somewhere beyond pickets of greenery, a saw whined. Everything smelled humid and bittersweet and gnats danced in his hair.
The workers who tended the farm were around this morning. A crew of seven or eight arrived every few weeks to clean the undergrowth, trim the branches and remove any diseased specimens. The laborers were uniformly male, organized by a patriarchal countryman with a barrel chest and a frightful scowl. They wore coveralls and wide-brimmed hats and swung machetes with the casual efficacy of butchers.
Don assumed them to be Hispanic because he’d heard them conversing in Spanish, albeit overlaid with another language he couldn’t identify. He’d never spoken to the workers, just nodded in passing; a friendly smile or wave, which was always reciprocated. His Spanish was bad to nonexistent. That last detail aggravated and mystified him in equal measure since the day last winter he’d rummaged through some long-lost files and discovered journal notes he’d written entirely in
Español
during his youth. These were field notes he’d taken while surveying a cave system in the Aleutians during the Nixon administration. Long time gone, but god… How did a man forget a language? How did a man forget he’d even once
known
that language? Wracking his porous brains, he couldn’t dredge much detail regarding the expedition either. Darkness, a cavern, him suspended by a line above an abyss, his headlamp beam not touching anything solid, the drip and gurgle of water everywhere…He blinked and shook himself as Thule did after coming in from the rain, and kept moving. Moving forward from a past that became more the realm of a shadow life every day.
Today, he spotted a couple of the younger men near the road, and instantly knew something was different, wrong somehow. Thick and broad, their coveralls caked in dust and sap. Flat, sallow faces already alight with sweat, they muttered and hacked at dead limbs, dropped them into wheelbarrows like tangled stacks of deformed arms and legs. Yes, there was a difference in their movements, a queer, vaguely inimical aura radiating from them and their half smiles that resembled sneers. He glanced down and noted that Thule’s fur was ridged and ruffled as when he was pointing toward a threat such as a hostile dog or an unknown critter in the bushes.
The pair gradually became aware of Don’s presence and ceased their labors to study him and converse furtively. One called out in a shrill, fluting voice to his brethren hidden among the deep rows and the eerie cry was immediately returned from several, widely scattered locations.
His mouth, my God!
Don gasped and averted his gaze from the man uttering the strange bird cry; the fellow’s mouth shuttered like an iris, a toothless hole as big as a fist. The other man licked his lips and slid his machete against his pants leg in the manner of a barber stropping a razor.
Don nodded with a sickly smile, pretending obliviousness of this most palpable unwelcome and ambled onward as fast as dignity permitted. Their deadly obsidian eyes swiveled to track him until a curve of the road intervened. He spasmodically gripped the pepper spray in his pocket. His teeth chattered.
Too many joints in their necks. He hadn’t noticed that during his previous encounters with the crew. Both of these men had possessed the same deformity, and a crazy, paranoid thought occurred to him—the pair were actors, doubles in a film who stand in for the name actor, always filmed from behind, or in soft focus. Put a uniform on someone and that person could pass as your best friend from a distance. Crazy and paranoid in spades. Who the hell would bother to impersonate migrant laborers on a country tree farm? Why did he have a sneaking suspicion he’d seen them before under different circumstances?
They watch. They watch you, Donald. They love you
.
The impingement of this unbidden whisper from his subconscious galvanized him even as he crammed it back down into the cellar with his childhood fears of spiders and the boogeyman. He trotted all the way back to the house, racing the storm, the devil.
5.
A pot of coffee later, Thule growled and headlights turned into the driveway. Don squinted at his watch,
Here they are
.
Kurt and Kaiwin arrived in a rental car. Kurt owned four cars, including a Lexus and a classic, fully loaded Mini Cooper that formerly belonged to a B List action star; but as he once remarked, it’d be a cold day in hell before he’d risk one of his babies on the back roads around Olympia. The sky had brightened by inches, outlining the soft shapes of the barn, the trembling magnolias. They emerged from the car and splashed through a mud puddle and burst into the kitchen.
Kaiwin was dark-eyed and slender, delicate, yet wiry, like a dancer. She dressed simply in a peach summer dress and sensible shoes and no makeup and appeared much younger than her likely age. Her purse was transparent plastic, the current affectation of trendy metropolitan girls and girlish women everywhere. She stood nervously, wiping raindrops from her eyes. Her eyelids were painted a delicate butterfly-wing blue.
Thule sniffed her warily, and then wriggled and frantically kissed her hands. Don, who beyond a short conversation at the wedding reception, hadn’t chatted with the lady, accepted her then and there sans reservation. Kurt’s judgment was suspect. On the other paw, anyone good enough for Thule was A-okay in Don’s book.
“Pop. We made it. A real shit storm out there.” Well into middle-age, Kurt was nonetheless tall and bronze and built like a power lifter; he’d played ball in high school and college, a first team linebacker at the University of Washington. He might’ve been on his way to a business meeting, such was the elegance of his hand-tailored suit, the slick blue-black sheen of his three-hundred-dollar haircut; the kind of haircut the governor himself might’ve favored. “This is Winnie.” He put his massive arm around her fragile shoulders. She nodded and smiled a bright, superficial smile.
Don had to wonder exactly how fluent her English might be. He gave her a kindly smile and told them to hurry up and grab a seat. He took their coats and poured more coffee, although it developed Winnie wasn’t much for coffee, tea being her preference, and in that case, Kurt no longer drank coffee either.
More for me
, Don said, and scrounged in the cupboards until he unearthed a rusty tin of herbal tea that likely gathered cobwebs before the kids ever left for college.
Once Kurt and Winnie were sipping their tea, Don washed potatoes and started peeling them, a task he’d become rather adept at over the years, if only as a matter of self-preservation. Michelle was many things, but a cook wasn’t one. He made small talk, noting Kurt’s expression of mild boredom; the lad drummed his fingers when his attention began to wander. Don had always harbored the suspicion his son suffered from attention deficit disorder. Michelle disagreed, noting that Don wasn’t a sparkling conversationalist and an appreciation of rural life certainly hadn’t trickled down through the paternal genes. Nonetheless, he’d always wanted to try Ritalin on the boy in the interest of science. He inquired about his son’s job as the vice president of operations at an aerospace contractor in Seattle.