Half Wild (2 page)

My father's a logger, my brother a builder of houses, my husband a real estate man. Our lives are tied to the fate of trees the way some people's are tied to money, others religion. But my father believes there is an insurmountable distinction between logging and real estate. Logging, he says, can be done tastefully, with heart, so that a year later no one knew you were there, so that the trees left standing have a chance to thrive. Real estate, he says, can never be done well. He has called my husband a carpetbagger, a rich bastard, and a flatlander all in the course of an evening, which means he doesn't come to our house anymore. It means when I want to see his glistening angry blue eyes and catch the familiar earthy whiff of hemlock sap and cigarette smoke and clean sweat, I get in my car and come here to the Stonewall on Route 100, where I know he'll be sitting in the afternoon light across from Rita at the far
end of the bar, drinking the finest Scotch they carry, the kind they keep in stock just for him.

And I can tell you the name of every other person here as well—Joe Maise, Terry Miner, Rich Miller, Jay Cole Jr. They nod to me as I walk in, these people from my past, but they don't offer to buy me drinks. They all know my husband is the one with the shiny slew of white pickup trucks that all say his name—
RON BATES
—trucks that drive around these towns buying up cheap and undeveloped acreage, parceling them off into four-acre lots, selling them at a profit. Or if he doesn't sell them, Ron hires my father to clear the land (he still shows up for the cash), my grandfather and cousins and uncles to mill the wood, and my brother to build spec houses on the land: houses that invariably sell. They are good-looking houses for the young professionals who work ten miles downhill in Nelson at the hospital or the nuclear power plant or the car dealerships. We've done well for ourselves—better than the Maises or Miners or Coles—which is why when I enter the bar they simply nod at me, the girl they went to school with, the one with the red hair, the one some of them made out with in the front seats of cars back when we were young.

My father offers to buy me a drink, though, and I accept, even though I live in a six-bedroom house with marble tiles in the front entryway and he lives in the same Tyvek-covered two-room cabin where I was born.

“Sure, Dad,” I say, while Rita pours me a glass of Glenlivet and I sit down on a stool next to him, our elbows almost touching. “How are you?”

“Upright and breathing,” he mumbles into his glass. His lips turn up in a sly grin. “You, Sally?”

“Good,” I lie. “Things are good,” scraping the toe of my boot against the barstool rung.

When I was young I was his favorite. “Sally Mae, Sally Mae, prettier than the green of May,” he would half shout, half sing when he came home in the evenings in his green Dodge truck. In the summer he would put me on his shoulders and take me out into the woods, teach me the names of trees, how to strip sassafras bark for chewing; in spring, how to tap a maple. “The woods are something to be grateful for, not shit on,” my father would say. “So be good to them.”

I tried to be.

“You eating well?” I shout into his right ear.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Keeping good company?”

“Not good enough till Rita here will come home with me,” he says, setting his glass down on the counter with a little click to get Rita's attention, winking at her when he does.

She shakes her head lovingly, an old friend. “Oh, Calvin, go find a woman half your age.”

I don't like to admit it, but I'm jealous of Rita each time I come here. Rita, fifty-eight years old, five foot three, 160
pounds, with undyed hair, is beloved in my father's eyes, while I am nothing but an embarrassment, a sore.

Like my mother. Who hated our house—its outhouse and small rooms and drafty windows and lack of electricity or neighbors. “Woods,” my father said, nodding toward them, as if that made us rich. She used to ride in the truck when he delivered wood for the Scandinavian wood stoves of summer people and doctors in Nelson just so she could look at and admire their big, clean houses, their bright lights shining.

But enough of the past. I sip my drink, breathe, pull my shoulders down, look around the dim room: pine walls, wooden booths, neon Miller signs. Behind the bar a tenpoint buck stares quietly. To my left a stuffed bobcat leaps out from the wall, amber eyes aflame.

Terry Miner stands up from his end of the bar, goes to the jukebox, and slips two quarters into the slot. Alan Jackson starts to sing. For a moment I watch Terry's skinny jeans, the cracked leather of his boots, and the sun-bleached and thinning waves of his hair—then turn back toward the bar and stare into that buck's still eyes.

The clock says five thirty; Ron will be getting home any moment, which means I should go, heat up last night's dinner in the microwave, open a bottle of Bordeaux, but instead I linger. He will lean in to smell the heat of liquor on my breath and ask where I've been. But so what if I've come to slip momentarily into the old ways of my life, to
get a little tipsy and sit by my aging father listening to country tunes. What harm is there in that?

My father orders another drink and pulls another Marlboro out of his pack. I let the secondhand smoke fill my clean lungs; he leans toward me and nods at my glass. “Another?”

I think for a moment of Ron, then catch the glint of that bobcat's eyes on the wall and Terry Miner's body in the corner. “Why not.”

“Oh good,” he says, facing Rita and grinning. “She is a McLean after all.”

“I've always been one,” I say, my voice caught in my throat. “Just changed my name. You know that.”

“Changed more than that.”

“Don't pick a fight with me,” I say quietly, sliding my glass toward the edge of the counter so that Rita can see.

How many years will I have to walk this line—trying to prove myself in both worlds I belong to?

“Not the kind of man to pick fights, right, Rita?” My father winks at Rita and nudges me with his elbow. She refills both our glasses, and I wonder how many my father has had already.

“Thank you,” I say as she slides my glass across the counter.

Rita nods at me but doesn't smile.

I've disassociated myself from this town in most ways: the car I drive, the clothes I wear, the places my husband and I go for dinner.

You can't get rich in this place without accumulating spite. Ron buys land from old ladies and broke farmers and single women. I work for the business two days a week; it's my job to find out who's having hard times, who's likely to sell. It's my job to go to their houses, knock on their doors, ask sweetly how they are doing. The Coras and Violets and Hazels and Annes.

Like today, at the house of Alice Tucker. A two-hundred-year-old Cape with broken slates and rotten sills sitting on two hundred acres of prime land. She opened the door in a lilac-colored housedress, smiling, her false teeth loose in her mouth. I caught the scent of skin powder and cat litter and wood smoke. She didn't invite me in, so I just stood out there in the driveway in the hard sunlight.

“Alice. It's me, Sally. You know, Calvin's daughter. Sally McLean,” I said, catching the soft look of recognition in the impoverished old lady's eyes.

Keep business local, Ron and I say. Keep it in the family. Land isn't something you can hold on to forever. There have always been real estate people, tax sales, down-and-out folks desperate enough to sell. And we give them cash, these old ladies and hard-luck farmers, cash like they've never seen before. Cash they go out and buy new pickups with or double-wides, cash they use to fly themselves to Florida or the Bahamas. I see the smiles on their faces.

“You need help with the car insurance this month?” I shout toward my father. Because of three car accidents in
the last two years, his insurance has reached astronomical highs. I don't know why he hasn't yet lost his license. I assume he knew the boy in the cop car who asked him to say the alphabet backward, who declined to smell his breath.

“Nope.” My father is clearly embarrassed to be having this conversation here in front of silver-haired Rita, but we have no choice. “Should be fine.”

“Well, you know where to call.”

“Yep, I do,” he mumbles, staring at the bottles behind the bar.

On winter nights when I was young our driveway was impassable, and so he would carry me up the hill on his back, and I have a clear memory of the sound and rhythm of his heavy breathing and regular steps through the snow, of the delirious and sleepy sensation of being transported safely through the dark and cold night. He's the same man, I know, and I'm the same girl, but who is taking care of who has reversed direction.

Terry Miner gets up from his seat and goes back to the jukebox. Again he pulls two quarters out of his front pocket and puts them in the slot. This time Waylon Jennings starts singing about honky-tonk angels in heavenly flight.

“Hah!” My father grunts. “Heaven!”

I smile. He was never one to believe in heaven. When I was eight my mother found religion and tried to change my father's ways, but he refused to go to church. Sunday
mornings we would come home, dressed and clean, to find him at the kitchen table or, in summer, in a chair at the edge of the woods, his blue eyes glistening. “How was God?” he would shout to us across the clearing, grinning. My mother would walk stiffly toward the house, refusing to look in his direction, the pressed cotton of her dress swishing against her thighs. My brother and I stood frozen in the clearing, unsure of which way to turn.

When Terry Miner turns back around he catches me looking at him, and I am surprised to find him walking toward me, his hand stretched outward.

“Dance this one?” he says.

I feel my father's and Rita's eyes on me. My palms start to sweat, and I think for a moment of Ron, at home in front of the TV, waiting, but I say yes. Why not? I'm not in these heels, these jeans, this blouse, this bar, for nothing. I think back to a night when we were eighteen, a circle of friends drinking beers by Sunset Lake, of the way I had watched Terry that night, lighting off fireworks at the edge of the shore, of the way I had, some hours later, stripped my clothes off and slipped into that cool, dark water.

We start to dance, and his grip is firm on my arm and lower back. He smells like beer and diesel fumes. Terry is married to Louise, a girl we also went to school with. They have three blond, beautiful children. I close my eyes and will the faces of those children to disappear. But Terry's grip is tight on my arm.

“Heard you went by Alice's place today,” he says in my ear. His voice is not friendly.

“Yes,” I say.

“She's my great-aunt.”

“I know that, Terry.”

“I grew up fishing on that land. My boys ride four-wheelers there.”

“I didn't know that,” I say.

I look up then at his blue eyes ringed with lines, and he nods at me. “Just so you know,” he says, his eyes cold.

I look back at him without blinking. “Now I know,” I say.

We are quiet for the rest of the dance, our limbs awkwardly colliding, our heads swaying to the three-quarter rhythm. When the song ends he grins at me briefly, then gives my arm a hard pinch. “Always a pleasure,” he says, and I nod, and we go back to our places.

My father has turned back toward the bar, though I know that he, like everyone else, was watching us. People don't dance in bars around here. I take another sip of my Scotch.

We're not dumb, Ron and me. We saw early that if you're going to survive in a place like this, it won't be by milking heifers from dawn to dusk or burning your neck all summer trying to grow hay. Trees are what grow here: west of the Connecticut River valley, east of the Adirondacks, in the low, wooded hills of southern Vermont.
They are what pay our dental bills, buy us our pickup trucks, secure the loans on our SUVs.

“Tell you what, Sally,” my father says, turning. “You should come back with me tonight. Got something at home to show you.”

I haven't been to our old place in years, its half-sided walls, its clearing full of old tires and rusted chairs.

I look down at my hands for an instant, then into the yellow eyes of that dead cat on the wall. I think of Terry Miner's hands on my arms, of the weight I felt there. Of that near bruise humming under the skin. “Okay,” I say. “I'll come.”

“Rita, one more shot for the road,” my father shouts.

Outside I walk toward my Lexus, but my father shakes his head. “Take a ride,” he says, so I climb instead into the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old GMC.

He drives fast along the back roads, taking corners too quickly, spinning out on the gravel edge. He passes me a Miller from the well below my seat, and I pop it open, drink. It's not far, I think to myself, watching the blurred trees and beyond them the deep blue fields, and it's not. Soon he's pulling up the dirt track, the truck lurching up the steep bank, and then we are parked in front of his cabin, the place I lived when I was young.

I haven't had this much to drink in I don't know how long, and my head spins, but I feel strangely giddy as
well. Ron will be wondering where I am, forehead furrowed, and the thought somehow thrills me.
I'm back in the woods, Ron.
The voice in my head is saucy, irreverent, unlike my own. Is it my husband or my dead mother I'm talking to?
Back where I came from. Trash still.

I think of Alice Tucker's housedress. The paper-thin skin of her arms. I think of that cat's amber eyes on the wall above the bar.

My father opens the kitchen door, and I follow him inside. There are clothes thrown over the back of the couch, a chainsaw taken apart on the living room rug. He starts toward the back door to take a piss.

“What did you want to show me?” I call out.