In the Pines

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don't ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

In the Pines

All that day, the mist clung to his windshield like a stubborn ghost, and Arden, on the cusp of pissing himself, kept missing exits because of it. In Oregon, he could have pulled over and walked deep into the pines and relieved himself there, but he was a superstitious man, and you never knew what could be buried there. Besides, the light blue Toyota pickup with its engine cut and lights off seemed to vanish behind the crouching clouds like the pale sky above. He might get lost. He might get hit by a sixteen-wheeler. 

He’d spent the night at a Motel 6 in Springfield, and rather than eat the grayish scrambled eggs and stale bagels, had drunk one too many cups of shitty drip coffee- mostly because it was free. The woman behind the front desk picked at her chipped French tips and glared at him suspiciously through lashes thick with clumps of purple eyeshadow. She was ten more minutes pretty- as in, if God had spent ten more minutes on the girl’s face she might have made the cut- the sharp upturned tip of her nose, which quivered when she spoke, gave her the appearance of a small rodent. She reminded him of the little Vietnamese girls, curling their toes inside their fabric shoes when they saw him approaching, their features delicate as calligraphy, wrinkled in distaste at the bubblegum he offered them. Ungrateful little bitches. His father had taught him that trick; offer them a piece of chewing gum. It supposedly worked on girls everywhere. “Everyone likes gum,” his father had said. Not the Vietnamese girls though. They’d look at him like he’d pissed across their path, crossing their arms over their nipples when they caught him looking between the buttons on their thin, damp blouses. Women never tell you what they want-- you have to guess. At night, he would lay on his pack in the mud, pretending the damp, milky stars were bullets shot through their dark, silky heads.

He spent a long time looking at the girl behind the counter. He was transfixed by her long, wrinkled neck, from which an inhumanly high-pitched voice emerged, startling the three old men sitting in the lobby of the motel. Arden’s palms, hot and moist from holding the scalding coffee cup, itched to reach for it, to press the folds of skin back and pick her up by the nape of her neck, as one would hold a kitten. He imagined her rheumy eyes widened in innocent terror, the crackling sound of choking and the damp, animal smell of her hair. She rested her elbow on the concierge bell and yelped when it rang, looking around the room for permission to laugh. No one looked at her besides Arden, and she caught his gaze for a moment, then frowned and looked away. She giggled softly and narrowed her eyes at the fuzzy blue screen of her old computer. Stupid bitch. Stupid, self-centered bitch.

Willing her to look at him--to acknowledge him at the very least--he sat there forty-five minutes longer than he had intended, drinking damp paper cups of burnt coffee, until the other men had left and the girl disappeared behind a metal partition. He’d sat alone there for a long while, trying to calm himself down, touching each of his fingertips to his thumb as his case worker had taught him to do. She thinks you’re a fag, his father’s soft, cruel voice came to him quick as a winter chill. He wanted to protest;  he wanted to cry out for her to come back, but when he heard the patter of her approaching footsteps, he leapt up and out the door before realizing, too late, that he’d forgotten to use the bathroom.

And then, back on the road, and suddenly he could breathe again. His father’s voice dimmed and then petered out. He was a man, free and intrepid, his bold figure projected on the silver screen. He was free. 

He was nearing the California border, where surely there would be a gas station. He narrowed his eyes and peered out into the fog, as if by concentrating he could compensate for his failing vision. 

“You’re getting old,” Moose had said to him long ago, on the day before he disappeared. And Arden knew it was true.

He lifted his foot from the gas pedal - the roads were empty and he wasn’t pressed for time- and turned the radio down as one inexplicably does when navigating difficult terrain. Nothing but tall, lonesome trees like winter shadows disappearing into the filmy sky. The hollow sounds of woodpeckers in the woods; the dog, panting and pacing in the cargo bed, agonizing over the foregone pursuit of passing smells. 

The dog. 

He didn’t love the dog. 

He also did not believe in spoiling animals. But he could appreciate her company when the long, dark nights unfurled over open sky country like black satin. He was grateful for her slow breathing when he woke up to use the bathroom, for the clacking of her claws on the linoleum motel floors. 

He hadn’t meant to keep the dog. He’d never had a pet before. She came to him in Portland on a rainy day, begging for scraps of his shitty Cuban sandwich. He didn’t give her anything, but she kept on following him around the city and into the parking lot where he paid an old Black man fifteen hundred dollars for the pickup truck. And when she jumped into the truck after him, he didn’t put her out. 

The man tapped on his window with one long fingernail like a gnarled root and said “you better be careful widdat dog. They be jumpin’ out on highways sometimes.” His eyes shone like a secret, buried carelessly. 

There were few enough Black men in Portland back then that one noted their presence with curiosity. Arden always noticed them. He looked for the telltale scar, ribbed over warm, brown shoulders. He looked for the eyes, dark and deep as mineshafts. 

He was looking for Moose. 

Of course Moose wasn’t really his name, but Arden couldn’t remember what it was, and Moose was what he’d always called him. 

He would find him one day, and then bury his father for good. 

Moose was the only Black kid in his rural town-- the only kid for miles in fact. He was the schoolmaster’s son, and he knew how to read long before Arden did, which his Daddy said was “a damn shame.” 

His mother was educated too- she’d been to college- and she knew how to remove splinters without using a needle. She was dark and beautiful, and had eyes green as the promise of spring. She grew roses and tulips in a little garden behind the house, as the mothers in fairytales did, and from her garden, Moose picked flowers to give to him. It was a secret they kept between the three of them, and for a long time it brought them all joy. 

Moose’s father taught him how to read and write when his own father took him out of school to help around the ranch. At first he hadn’t wanted to learn, but the man was gentle and kind, and his hands were soft over Arden’s as they traced the words together on the page.

When Arden slept at Moose’s house he always woke before him, and watched him sleep, though he would never have told him so. Moose slept quietly, the length of his breath rippling down his smooth, brown body. And just when Arden reached out to touch him, his eyes would flutter open and they’d both laugh, their faces very close together. 

When Moose got his driver’s license, they borrowed Arden’s father’s Buick and drove to Folsom Dam to go fishing. They spent the day sitting on slippery, purple rocks, skipping stones and eating barbecue chips, laughing at the silver minnows nibbling on their ankles. Moose taught him how to whistle. That was before the war, before everything with Angelique and the drugs, and Moose, teaching him to whistle over the whispering sounds of the water, was his anchor to the wide and wondrous world. 

“I guess I’ll teach you a song, so you can whistle when you fish alone,” Moose said. 

“I hope I’ll never fish alone,” Arden answered in a flush of uncharacteristic tenderness.

He reached for his friend’s hand and they whistled together an Appalachian tune from long ago, something about the darkness of pine trees and shivering winds that he couldn’t remember now. 

When the shadows came dancing over the roiling brown water, and the cicadas murmured their summer songs, they pressed their bodies close together, warm and taught from swimming in the Western sun, and shivered as they passed, together, into the realm of the pines, where it was only them and the bitter-sweet smell of the trees.

Although the man who sold him the car looked nothing like Moose, he had a scar like a long white worm that ran down the length of his shoulder, and for a moment, Arden was still as stone. 

But it wasn’t his shoulder, and it wasn’t his scar. It wasn’t him. 

He often thought of that wound, what it had looked like when the flickering switch, slithering through his father’s fingers like a charmed snake, first wrapped itself around Moose’s shoulders, those same warm shoulders into which he had collapsed, shuddering with joy. 

Though he kept his eyes closed the entire time, Arden could still remember the hot, brassy smell of blood and the hiss of the switch splitting the air. 

A truck horn bellowed behind him. 

Fucking asshole. 

He slowed the car to a crawling speed, relishing the sight of the flushed, gesticulating bald man behind the wheel of the truck. 

Some people need punishing. 

In the dim distance, he saw the faint flicker of a panel advertising the latest gas prices. As he pulled the car into the gas station, the truck accelerated brusquely and nearly grazed the flank of the little blue pickup. Arden rolled down his window.

“Fucking asshole!” 

He grinned. 

The truck disappeared into the folds of the heavy mist with a low rumble like thunder. He pulled into the empty parking lot of the gas station and opened up the truck bed. The dog leapt into his arms and he stumbled backwards into the gas pump. 

“Get down dog,” he mumbled, but he kept the dog held tight in his arms while it licked the sharp stubble on his face with enthusiasm. He took its paws in his hands and gently lowered it to the ground. He motioned towards the brown patches of grass behind the gas station bathroom. 

“Go pee.” 

The dog looked at him stupidly then sauntered away. It seemed to him a sad animal, bound to him by its insatiable need for affection, so pitifully grateful for Arden’s touch. It’s blind loyalty was unsettling. This, he knew, was the quality that people seemed to like most about dogs. Probably, this said something about him, though he couldn’t fathom what. Or maybe it said something about everyone else.

Inside the store, he spent some time feigning interest in the candy bars and stale packs of gum before asking for the bathroom key. Not that it mattered to the girl behind the counter whether he bought anything; she looked to be about sixteen years old and disinterested in all but the little scabs that ran the length of her arms like beetles, which she picked off one by one and flicked onto the floor. 

“Do you need something,” she said, more like a statement than a question. “Cigarettes here are about as cheap as you’ll get ‘em.”

He glanced at the price: $6.89. So he was back in California then. The girl, without looking up at him, seemed to read his mind. 

“You’re about three hours from San Fran and then everything gets hella expensive. You won’t believe what they charge for a pack of smokes.”
He shook his head but still she did not look up. 

“No,” he murmured, “just the bathroom key please. I’ll pick something up on my way out.” 

She looked at her fingers when she handed him the key; chewed raw at the tips and swollen. 

I should offer her a piece of gum to chew on instead. Hah. 

She lifted her gaze then and stared at him blankly, her pale brown eyes moist and red-rimmed. She was probably high. Girls were like that when they took to drugs: existing someplace far outside of themselves where nothing but shadows could reach them, limp as laundry drying in the wind. He took the key and walked out and around the building, where the dog was digging a hole and panting profusely. In the dense fog, the silhouettes of the gas pumps loomed like motionless mechanical beasts. Scraps of dirty toilet paper and honey bun wrappers tumbled across the desolate landscape. 

When he turned the key in, the girl was picking at a piercing in her pale, pock-marked nose. Someone’s daughter, Moose said about the ugly and pretty girls alike, and Arden would seethe, knowing all the time that he would lose the one he loved to a creature he could never become. 

He bought a bottle of water for the dog. He bought a tall boy for himself. And he bought a bag of sour gummy worms because the girl told him they were on sale. When he offered her one, she gave a vague, absent smile and turned to look at her reflection in the window, blackened with exhaust. 

“No,” she said, “I’m on a diet.” 

For a moment, he imagined cupping the back of her shaved head and slamming it into the window, shards of glass puncturing her blue powdered eyelids, filling her mouth like ice.

 “Have a nice day,” he said on his way out. 

He had been driving again for awhile, listening to Lenny Bruce going on about Catholic statues and burlesque dancers, when he saw the boy with the sign. He was about as tall as Arden but fuller, healthier looking, with densely freckled cheeks and a smile that spoke of warmth and water and days spent in the sunshine. The sign said Need a ride to Los Angeles. Will pay. Arden had been a hitchhiker once, in the seventies when he’d returned from Vietnam, pretending to know peace and haunting festival grounds like a ghost in the bardo. He’d been to a few concerts- the Bee Gees, Paul Darcy. The bands held no significance for him- his father had successfully impressed upon him the danger of rock music-  but it was a good place to take a girl on a date. He was always accompanied by some faceless hippie girl who wanted to marry a soldier turned pacifist. It always ended badly, his knuckles raw and skin crawling. 

He drove slowly past the boy, who stooped to pick a bunch of yellow flowers by the side of the road. 

Looks like a fairy to me. 

His father’s pale, silver eyes, cold and unnaturally bright. Rose petals crushed in his clenched fists. And the letter-- his letter-- melting in a mess of water and broken glass. 

Love, Moose. 

Love: for the first and last time. 

The freckled boy looked up and waved. Arden drove on. Around the next bend, a girl balanced her weight on a fallen log, holding a sign of her own. The sign read I need YOU to drive me to L.A. and was decorated with hastily drawn hearts and misshapen stars. On the radio, a girl told Lenny Bruce she wouldn’t go home with him. He pretended to cry. The dog barked twice. 

Arden slowed the car to a stop next to the girl and rolled down his window. 

“Say, you’re going to L.A.?” 

The girl pointed to the sign with a smirk and nodded exaggeratedly. 

Right. The sign.

He hated her. 

“Is that your friend back there?” He looked into the pale blue moons of her eyes, the pupils shrinking visibly as the sunlight seeped over the distant hills. 

“Yeah,” she answered tentatively, “we’re together.” There was dark defiance in her gaze, sharp and glinting like a knife. Her hair was long and wild, tied in a copper knot on top of her head, tangled with twigs and little leaves and flowers. Her high cheekbones shone like plums and gave her the appearance of a storybook villain, beautiful and cruel. She jumped down from the log and crouched next to her dirty yellow backpack. She seemed to be avoiding eye contact now, and began to pull at the loose threads on the worn straps of her bag. 

“So... you’ll take us?”

“Sure, I’ll take you as far as San Francisco. Or maybe Sacramento even. Hop in.” The girl looked up at him, a strange sadness carving out her features. She didn’t move. Her eyes were those of a caged animal set free, frantically assessing its newfound position on the food chain. She was a pretty girl, beautiful even, but looked worn somehow, like she’d been dragged across the desert by the Santa Ana winds. She couldn’t have been older than 16, maybe 17 years old. Her face was indecently beautiful and bare, as though she’d been wearing a veil suddenly removed. 

She said with some suspicion: “Is that the way you were going?” She took a few steps back. She was waiting for the boy.. She wouldn’t climb into the truck without him. 

Arden lit a cigarette and forced himself to look away. A deep vacuum stilled the honeyed summer air. There was the lazy humming of bees in the wild mulberry bushes, the pattering of lizards across the shimmering hot cement. The fog had lifted now, replaced by the warbling haze of heat rising up from the dry, cracked soil. Everywhere else people were waking up and going to work, sending their children to school. Was it the month of May already? He wondered where the girl went to school, and if she was missed from the place she left behind. 

The boy came around the bend, jogging as if in slow motion, his freckled cheeks flushed a violent pink and streaming with sweat. His sandy hair and large brown eyes gave him the appearance of a stuffed animal, soft and complacent. They were a strange pair. 

“We’ve been camping in the mountains for a week now,” the boy said, “but we ran out of food and we’re trying to get to a music festival in Southern California.” He laughed; a warm, resonant sound that shook the bees from their reverie. “So we took a half a tab and hoped for the best.” 

So they were on drugs. Arden looked at the girl, her pupils blown out like the wilted blossoms his father had cast on the kitchen floor. She smiled again, as though courting his jealousy.

Arden had taken plenty of LSD in the years leading up to his departure for Southeast Asia. And he had done it once when he’d returned, with Chance Lerman and Billie Yardlow, who were cousins and lived across the street from him in Sacramento. They’d all met up in San Francisco and gone to the beach. Arden, caught in a timeless loop of memories, had spent the day under a blanket. “You need to let go of your ego,” Billie had said. And Arden tried, desperately, to let go of whatever it was keeping him tethered to that fateful day in March, had begged the pale, moonlit ghosts to leave him be, had squeezed his eyes shut against the low moaning sounds of the wind on the water, in which he heard whispers of that alien language, the soft sighs of those women from underneath him, their small, wriggling limbs that left him shivering. The tugging feeling of reaching for something so far in his past it might never have happened at all. He never spoke to Billie and Chance again.

“How fun,” he said at last. “Well I hope you won’t mind my old dog here. She’ll keep you company in the back of the truck. She keeps to her own business most of the time. Can’t seem to shake her so I keep her around.” 

The girl raised a dark eyebrow.

“Not at all,” the boy said. “My name is Dash by the way- it’s short for Dashiell- and this is Carmen. We’ve been travelling awhile, so we’re grateful for whatever. Does the dog have a name?”

Moose.

“No,” he answered simply, taking a sharp drag from the cigarette. “But my name is Arden. You can just call her ‘dog’. That’s what I've been doing.” 

Carmen let out a small, sharp sound like laughter. 

 “Hop in,” he said again, and this time the girl climbed into the bed of the truck. The boy rushed to offer her his hand. 

Arden could tell that this was their pattern; the girl led the way, all sparkle and shine, and the boy followed blindly, bathing in her wake. She hardly seemed to notice the way that he looked at her, the way he cupped his hands to hoist her more comfortably into the truck, their mutual understanding that he could sit close to her, but not too close. For a moment, Arden felt pity for the boy. Most likely, she’d been on the road, eluding him for years, and he’d finally caught up to her. And most likely he would lose her again, somewhere along the way to Southern California, and would return home with his pockets empty and a few bittersweet memories of the smell of her hair in the sunshine. 

The boy settled into the bed of the pickup truck and untied his shoelaces. The dog curled itself up into a question mark at Carmen’s feet, and began to fall asleep in the hot sun, whispers of steam rising from its thick, black coat. She caressed it with the tips of her fingers.

He sucked at the last of his cigarette, looking back at the blue hazy peak of Mount Tamalpais. He had been there only once, on a camping trip with a manicurist whose name and face he couldn’t remember- a truly miserable weekend spent getting lost in the rain. They had come across a bathtub deep in the forest, filled with thick, green water and silver insects, and a few weathered rubber ducks. He wondered if it was still there.

When he started the car again, his two passengers yelped with surprise and the dog began to bark again. There was laughter, clear and sharp as Easter bells, the only sound for miles and miles. He tried hard to remember the last time someone had made him laugh. On the radio, the rushing sound of a live audience filled the air like a chorus of whispers. Women were shouting We love you Lenny! The special was over. He turned the radio off. 

They drove past vast meadows of alpine lilies and groves of redwood trees, solemn as quiet sentinels, up and over the bare flanks of wind-swept hills and over little wooden bridges. They drove beneath ominous outcroppings of serpentine rock, little bits of gravel bouncing off of the windshield like bullets of hail. They drove up the hot and dry manzanita slopes, casting clouds of dust the color of dried blood, and down into cool and foggy ocean-facing valleys, where the tall redwoods and Douglas firs seemed to suck the sounds from the air. And all that time Arden kept the radio off, so that he might hear their laughter again.

But the boy and girl were quiet now, taking in the warm, comforting smells of oak and pine, of sage scrub and decaying leaves. And as the truck burst out from beneath the fog line, into the warmth of wide coastal prairies, they fell into a gentle stupor, lulled by the humming of the engine and the sounds of the sea below. Carmen closed her eyes against the white glare of the cloudy sky and appeared to be thinking very deeply about something.

Arden peered at her in the rearview mirror, searching her smooth, vacant expression. The boy gazed at her with stupid adoration. Girls like her were dangerous, unforgiving. They took what they could get and ran away without ever looking back. He imagined her running swiftly on long, white legs, hitting the ground with a dull, thumping sound, those pretty white teeth smashing like so many chips of ice, the smell of blood beating beneath her pale, blue skin. He imagined her skinned knees knocking together, a rising tide of helplessness filling her eyes like cold, dark ocean water.

 His father had always told him that women were becoming too bold, too angry for their own good. Though he hadn’t been with a woman himself until after his return from the army, Moose had had many girlfriends, and he’d hated them all. They were Black girls mostly: with glossy, pillowed lips and figures that filled their clothing like warm dough, rising. Sometimes there were Mexican girls, shy and almond-eyed. They looked at him like they knew what he wanted. They knew what they had. 

The last time he saw Moose, they went on a fishing trip with Tessie Hammond. Tessie was a small, spindly girl who moved like a spider and rarely spoke. Arden tried many times to dissuade her from coming- he’d known it was a bad idea from the start. But the girl insisted, and then spent the entire day in the shade, sitting on a picnic blanket, eating strawberries and drinking milk and calling intermittently for Moose to come over and sit on her lap. All that day, Arden remained quiet. On the drive home, when she thought he was asleep,Tessie told Moose Arden was “creepy.” They fought about it all the way home. He begged his friend to make her leave. But Moose slammed the door with Tessie smiling smugly beside him. Arden could hear her passionate shrieks from inside his own house. He crept into the fathers’s empty room, silent and still as a museum, and wept for the very first time. 

At last they reached the mouth of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Arden slowed the car down to a stop, searching frantically for change. He held his breath until he’d collected enough money to pay the toll, the rattling of the coins conjuring in his mind an unpleasant memory. 

The woman in the tollbooth had a dark, waxy face that dropped like she was melting in the late springtime heat, and she insisted on returning his change, which he didn’t want because it was just pennies. The dog barked at a passing truck. He threw the pennies at it and drove on.

They gathered speed and rode into the sharp Pacific winds. He looked into the rearview mirror again and watched the girl open her mouth and let out a scream sucked silent by the rushing air. The boy rested his hand on hers and she let it sit there for a moment. Her mouth was open and her sharp little teeth glinted in the light. She gently removed her hand from beneath the boy’s and crawled to the end of the truck closest to the water, leaning dangerously over the edge, looking down into the dark water. Arden remembered something then about the bridge; how so many people had jumped there that they’d had to install telephone booths that dialed in directly to crisis hotlines, and nets to catch the falling bodies below. There were those who survived the fall with gruesome, disfiguring injuries and chilling anecdotes of what it was like to change one’s mind halfway down. The girl had taken her hiking boots off and was throwing the pennies into the water, her laughter harmonizing with the howling wind. 

When they pulled over at a gas station on the very tip of the San Francisco peninsula, the boy and girl began to cheer. Their faces were raw and pink and their lips cracked at the corners. The girl looked so young. Arden was reminded of Tessie Hammond drinking milk and blowing bubbles with her straw. And of Moose, reaching out a warm brown hand while they walked in silence, side by side. 

When Arden returned to the truck, the flatbed was down. The remaining pennies were neatly stacked atop one another. Dried flower petals fluttered in the wind. The boy, the girl, and the dog were gone. 

He knew somehow they wouldn’t return. He had felt something shift in the girl once they drove onto the bridge, had seen her assessing him intently in the rearview mirror. He imagined her running with the boy in tow, back to the bridge, over to the very edge, her hair spreading like blood on the water. He climbed into the truck and turned the radio on. The song was “Sail Away,” by Styx. The sound was muffled by the groaning of the engine. The road was empty before him. Arden rested his head on the steering wheel, and cried for the second time.