“I’m Ricky,” I admitted. I kept my back against the snack machine for balance.
Now he stooped so we could look at each other directly. I hadn’t felt this small since I was a child. Was he my escort, or was I his meal? I gripped my duffel bag tighter so I could use it as a weapon. Treat this like a shark attack and bop him in the nose if I had to.
He said, “My name’s Lake. I have orders to drive you north.”
WE CLIMBED INSIDE
his enormous silver pickup. Warmth filled the cabin when Lake started the engine. Heat blew through the vents so hard it sounded like rushing water. Lake put both hands on the wheel. His Gore-Tex gloves swished against the cold plastic. We pulled out of the station. Lake puckered his lips and jutted his chin, and I watched him.
“We’re on Pine Street now,” he said. “And we’re headed to Williston Road. From there we take the interstate about an hour. In case you were wondering.”
I realized I was carrying my bag in my lap, like a child, a vision that made me feel vulnerable. I dropped the duffel between my knees.
Lake inhaled deeply. His chest was so thick that the brassy buttons of his jacket brushed the horn. He exhaled and yawned, licking his lips. From this angle, the hair surrounding his face looked like a mane.
I said, “How did you know about Cedar Rapids?”
“Iowa?” he asked.
“Come on, boss.”
Lake stared into his rearview mirror as another truck rolled up behind us. It practically chomped on our bumper, but Lake didn’t accelerate. He drove steady.
“Mr. Rice, how many bosses pick people up from bus stations at four
A.M.
?”
He had me there.
I jammed my foot into my duffel bag on the floor of the cab, digging into its side.
“So you don’t know anything about Cedar Rapids?” I asked.
Lake said, “I know they make a lot of cereal there.”
I leaned back, rested my face against the cool window. I’d slept on that bus, but not well. It had been like napping inside a steamer trunk. Lake’s truck felt more like a sleeper cabin, so I slipped into a quiet stupor. And in this way I watched us get on the highway.
Lake stayed as good as his word. One hour on the interstate. Then I figured we were there. But I was wrong. We had another half hour on Vermont’s back roads. They weren’t paved streets, just snow on top of ice and ice on top of mud, a three-layer cake.
Must’ve been five-thirty by the time we reached those roads, but the sun hadn’t crept up an inch. The sky remained blue-black, and in places the stars hid behind cloud cover. Snow stopped falling, but the wind continued, blowing so berserk that the top of every tree shuddered.
Despite my weariness I got scared again. Or maybe because of it. It’s one thing to get in the car with some burly mountain man when you’re still in a city. But when he gets you out into the country, well, there’s too many tales about this going badly for a guy like me, and I couldn’t help but ponder the possibilities. Dragged to my death, hung from a tree, kept prisoner in a shed for days. So the nervousness charged me up again, though Lake hardly seemed to notice. How could he? He was too busy driving.
His pickup was the kind you see in television commercials, where they hitch a blue whale to the back and the truck hauls that Magilla up a hill. But even this truck had trouble on these roads. The ruts were so deep that Lake weaved from one side of the road to the other. We weren’t driving at this point, just surfing. I bet we would’ve flipped over if it wasn’t for the surrounding forest, which stopped the wind from smacking us directly.
Then my anxieties spilled over. I pulled at the handle of my door instinctively. Lucky for me the damn thing stayed locked.
“What are you doing?” Lake said, though he didn’t look away from the road.
“I don’t know who you are!” I shouted. “You’re taking me out here for some wild shit, admit it!”
“Calm down, Mr. Rice.”
“Cut all this ‘Mr.’ business. I’m from New York. You don’t want to mess with me.”
Lake tapped the gas with his foot, and the truck bucked forward, moving with all the grace of a horny bull. Outside, the trees sobbed and groaned. Some bent so far I thought they would snap, and in fact some had. I could see them deeper in the forest wherever the moonlight grasped through the cover. Trees that had crashed, from the wind or the weight of the snow, and landed at painful angles.
“I’m a black man, you hear me? We don’t play! I will knock your ass out! Pull over, motherfucker. Pull over!”
Lake ignored me. I wondered if I sounded tough or terrified. I felt both. I worked at my door handle again. Reached down for my duffel bag so I could break the window open. I’m not saying that was a good idea, just my only one.
Before I could get the bag into my hands, there was an astounding scream, wailing carried on the wind, as a thirty-foot tree snapped and fell across the road.
It landed just ahead of us. So close that its limbs raked the hood. Bark sprayed the windshield hard enough to cause a crack. The front of the truck bucked, the wheels lifting from the road. That tree probably weighed more than Lake’s pickup.
We could only gasp and stare.
As we idled, the strong lamps of the truck illuminated the midsection of the tree, and from this close it looked unrecognizable, monstrous. The needles on its limbs became poisoned quills, and its bark an invulnerable hide. What lived out there, hidden in the dark?
I recovered and looked at Lake triumphantly, as if I had orchestrated this.
“I told you not to fuck with me. It’s bad luck.”
Lake looked across the seat. His eyes were so red! It was the first moment I considered he must’ve sat in this truck for hours because of all my snow delays. But I didn’t sympathize, not just then. I scrunched my mouth into a satisfied smile and said, “What you gonna do?”
Step outside, apparently. Lake left the truck, slammed his door, then went to the back. Heard him fussing around, but I didn’t pay too much attention because the man had left the keys in the ignition like a fool.
I slid toward the driver’s side slowly.
Then this big bastard stalked right past the window, didn’t even look in at me. I was halfway across the bench when he did this, but stopped moving. He carried a hatchet, two wood blocks, and had a length of heavy chain wrapped around his right shoulder.
He walked to the tree. It was the first thing that made him look small. Nature asserting its own scale. And this wasn’t even that big a tree. Not a redwood, just a black spruce.
Lake slapped the bark the way you affectionately slap a dog on its side. Then he got down on a knee and placed one wood block against the tree. Got up, lifted the hatchet, and used the blunt end to knock the wood block under the tree like a shim. He did this again, about a yard lower. Then he slid the length of chain under the tree and ran it all the way round.
This was my last chance. He’d attach the chain to the truck, then reverse
until he’d nudged it far enough for the truck to get past. Then we’d be back on our journey to my demise.
So I slid the rest of the way until I sat behind the steering wheel. All set to put the truck in reverse, but my feet couldn’t touch the pedals. This guy had his seat back far. So I was looking for the button or the bar, whatever that damn truck used, when I saw Lake climb over the tree and drop down onto the far side.
Now I could only see the upper third of him. You could’ve mistaken the man for bigfoot at this angle. A beast of the wild. He didn’t attach the chain to the truck. He wrapped it around himself. Then he stepped back a few feet. From the motion I could tell he was kicking at the ground, digging in.
Then he pulled.
This white man is insane. That’s what I thought.
Boy was he straining. Enough to make my shoulders hurt. Lake’s mouth snapped open, and he made this sound, like a long, low rumble. If I hadn’t been looking at him, I would’ve checked for storm clouds.
He kept pulling. Leaning backward. Screaming with effort.
Until, yes, that tree shook.
Just slightly. Hardly anything. A quiver. It resisted, but Lake would not relent.
The spruce scraped toward Lake now, an inch or two this time. The tree limbs on his side snapped in sharp protest. The big man kept shouting, and, rather than drive off, I rolled the window down, I stuck my head out. I kept blinking, wiping the snow off my eyelids. In the heat of astonishment, I didn’t even feel the cold.
That’s some old mountain man trick, I thought. Maybe the road was at more of a slant than I knew. Plus, he’d used those wood blocks. I tried to come up with an explanation, anything to feel less awestruck. But I was really only thinking one thing: this bastard moved a tree.
Lake stepped farther back and finished.
When the tree had been moved enough, just enough, for us to get by, Lake stopped pulling and leaned against it, severely winded. He heaved so hard his face touched the bark. He looked like he was mourning.
After gathering his things and dropping them in the truck bed, he got back inside the cabin. I’d pushed his seat all the way back again and taken my place by the passenger window. I didn’t look at him, only at the body by the side of the road. But Lake didn’t start driving, so I finally turned.
To find him staring at me. A challenge in the tight set of his lips.
I said, “Well, if we’re going to get there, let’s just get there.”
Lake nodded and drove deeper into the hushed woods.
“WAKE UP
, Mr. Rice.”
What had I been dreaming of? I had a picture of my older sister, Daphne, in my mind. From when we were children. She protected me when I was still too young to handle myself. I suppose that’s why I’d been dreaming of her. Because I wasn’t so sure I could handle myself now. Would’ve been nice to ring her up, but she stayed all the way out in Long Island, and I doubted my prepaid TracFone could reach that far.
“We’re here, Ricky.”
Lake had already parked. He stepped out of the truck, came around to my side, and grabbed the handle, but it was locked. He fussed with the handle for another moment before he realized, and I just watched him in a kind of daze. Then he leaned close to the glass, his enormous face filling the window, the hair of his beard flattened like a sample on a slide.
“Please open up,” he said quietly. “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”
He let go of the door and waited for me to do it myself. I opened the door and got out.
We were in front of a small wooden cabin, as dark inside as the sky above. I couldn’t even make out the full dimensions, only the outline against the snow behind it.
Lake pointed at it. “This is yours, Ricky.”
“I own it?”
“Sure,” he said. “And why don’t we give you a jet plane too?”
Wind blew over the pickup truck, over the cabin, over Lake and me.
Lake rubbed his face with one gloved hand. “This is yours as long as you decide to stay.”
“What if I want to leave tomorrow?”
“Then we won’t monogram your doormat.”
“There’s a doormat?”
“It’s a house, isn’t it?”
And not the only one either. There were a few more lined up near mine. Six cabins, maybe more, in a cul-de-sac. A half circle of homes. Most were dark, but one had lights on.
“Most of the others are sleeping,” Lake said.
The idea that there were other people filled me with both relief and sorrow. Nice to know I wasn’t being thrown into an isolation tank, but maybe they’d been invited here just like me. Mysterious note, one-way ticket. Maybe I wasn’t being singled out. This is the part that brought a little sorrow. How embarrassing. To be a grown man who still wishes the world would tell him he’s special.
“What is this place, Lake?”
“We’re in a part of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom.”
I waved at the cabins. “I mean all this. Who invited me here? Who do you work for?”
Lake turned to the pickup while I took a step toward my cabin. Mine. Imagine that. I still couldn’t. I’d been living in this one-room efficiency, sharing a bathroom with four sour men. I expected the cabin to disappear as soon as I touched the door handle. An illusion. A trick. A game. Can you guess that I’m a bit of a skeptic? Doubt has a long history with me.
Lake returned with my duffel bag. Hanging from his index finger, it looked as small as a fanny pack. “This is the Washburn Library.”
I reached the steps that led up to my cabin, just a few. I touched the wooden door. A brass number hung on the front: 9.
“This is a library?”
Lake set the bag down by my feet, went into his coat pocket, and gave me a set of keys. He got into the truck, started it, rolled down his window. All this while I looked at the keys in my cold hand. Lake shouted over the wind.
“Turn around!”
He drove away. Clearing my view.
There was the Washburn Library.
An enormous building. One long flat slab of sandstone set down in some of the most inhospitable sod America has to offer. It looked as long as a football field, but because of the snow, the low building was nearly buried. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t seen it right away. Maybe I hadn’t been prepared. Or willing. Now I saw it. The interior lights smoldered, and the Library glowed bleakly in the great woods. It looked like God’s gravestone.
YOU’D THINK I’D SLEEP
for twenty-four hours after that long trip, but I only passed out for five. Awake by eleven, I strolled around my cabin as if its four rooms made it a manor. Bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen. I felt pretty giddy about each one. Nothing too fancy. There weren’t mink blankets or platinum faucets or whatever the wealthy buy with their loot. Instead, the cabin felt like a cozy place you rent for a romantic weekend. Since I was alone, that meant lavishing my affections on me. I began by making brunch. The fridge had been stocked.
I stood in the kitchen beating eggs in a bowl while the bread browned in the toaster. I turned on a small radio in the living room. Found a station that played classical music. Now, I have to admit, the only thing I know about classical music is that it doesn’t have a beat, but strings and horns seemed like the proper accompaniment for my first morning. They helped to calm me down. My first instinct was to run outside screaming my questions to the wind, but I didn’t want to make an ass of myself. No one respects a panicked man. So instead I made brunch to the sounds of calming music. Like I’d become cool simply by acting that way.