He couldn’t just stand here. He went to the lock, held it in his hand, yanked at it to see whether it might open. He had no idea where the key might be. Rusty old lock, much bigger than needed, thick steel.
Galen looked in the toolshed for the key. Along the small shelves and ledges built into the walls, added to over the years. His grandfather a kind of pack rat. And the problem was not in finding a key. The problem was that there were too many keys, dozens of them, on chains and lying individually in the dust. So he collected them all and brought them back to the bay door, set them carefully in the bottom of a furrow.
Rusty, dirty keys and a rusty, dirty lock. Even if he found the right key, he might not know, because it wouldn’t go in easily. The lock so hot in this sun it was burning his hands, but he tried key after key, finally went for cotton gloves from the toolshed, then tried more keys.
I haven’t decided anything, he told her. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just seeing if I have the key.
Then he thought of WD-40. That would help tremendously. He walked past all the crap scattered in the dirt, everything he had thrown out of the toolshed, and didn’t see a blue and yellow can. He stepped inside the toolshed and let his vision adjust, knelt and searched along the lower wall under a slanting roof and found half-used cans of paint, grease and engine oil, and finally the WD-40.
Galen sprayed the keyhole in the lock, leaned away from the smell, sprayed the pile of keys in the dirt. He needed a rag or something to clean them, but he had only the cotton gloves. So before he tried each key, he wiped it, both sides, on the glove of his left hand, on the palm, the fingers still curled in pain, that hand turning into a club.
A few of the keys were the right size and went partway in, but not one of them went all the way in.
How is this possible? he asked. A million keys and one lock. How could I not have the key here? Where’s the key, Mom?
Not one of them fit. He walked around to the lawn, to the pile of crinkled photos and crap from the drawers. He took the glove off his right hand and sifted for keys, found dozens more. It didn’t make any sense that there were so many keys, as if his family had owned all the world. What did they all unlock? What was left? All the illusions everywhere in this life, and we were left holding a pile of keys to nothing. This is perfect, Galen said. This is exactly how things are.
He carried them all back to the lock, and he knew none would fit but he tried them anyway, one at a time, in what felt like a ritual, nothing less than sacred. I honor this, he said. If a key fits, you’ll go free.
Light-headed from the WD-40 vaporizing. Light-headed from the sun, from living in this incinerator. A grasshopper landed on the lock and he let it stay there and watch. A husk of a body, something that could be threshed like wheat. Good bread of grasshopper, something Galen might try.
When the last key failed, he let the lock fall back against wood and the grasshopper launched. Galen on his knees in the dirt, burning. He didn’t know what to do next.
His mother was dying on the other side of this door. There was no point in hiding that. He hadn’t made any decision. He had never made a decision to let her die, but she was dying anyway. It was her own fault, something she had done to herself, but he was responsible too. She had made him responsible. Damn you, he said.
Our actions controlled beyond what we could know. Galen could never have seen any of this, and yet this is what he had been given.
He felt like he would die, too, if he remained kneeling here in the dirt and sun, so he rose, his legs stiff, and walked around to the fig tree and the spigot and opened the water wide, drank gulp after gulp. He could try to get some water to her, put the hose through a gap in the wall and let it run. He might have to do that. Or let her out. But he didn’t see how he could let her out. She had left him with no options. Thanks a lot, he said.
Galen walked into the wilderness on the other side of the lawn, into what was supposed to be his grandmother’s garden. Thistle and dry yellow grass to his shoulders, his feet falling out of sight, rattlesnake and lizard. He didn’t care what happened. Live oak, its leaves knit up in spiny points, scratching all along his bare skin, through his shield of dirt. A thicket of them, and he pushed his way through, liked the awareness that came with all the cuts. A forest for flaying. The leaves only half alive, half green, the trunks thin and numerous and hidden in shadow. His head still exposed to the sun as he pushed between them, short trees without real shade.
This wilderness extended, stretched on and on, thistle and grass and live oak. His thighs and stomach caught by the thistles, his feet pierced by thorn and branch and rock. He held his arms out when he could, to catch more thistle and oak. A shallow dry sea he was wading through, merciless sea, his eyes stinging, the taste of salt, and he the only man to wade here.
Chapter 28
Manzanita. This was what Galen found in that wilderness. He didn’t see it coming, didn’t know it could grow here, thought it grew only on hills. And then he was standing before it, red bark thin as paper. Smooth trunks almost iridescent, the shaded sections pooling light into turquoise and the shimmer of eyes. The trunks swollen, obscene red limbs, round and full, bursting the skin where it fell away in scrolls. He reached out to pluck a scroll, left a rip that showed a lighter white-green, the flesh not red.
So little to hold in his hand, this curl. Nothing at all once it was separated from the tree, from its becoming. He dropped it and heard no sound. The leaves bright green and hard, firm teardrops no bigger than an inch across, velvety and improbable in this heat, among everything else so dry.
The manzanita seemed to have its own source of water, hoarded and secret. A dozen trunks all curved outward in a kind of basket, fending off and creating space. Galen imagined a taproot, something that reached farther down than the others would ever know, but he wasn’t sure that was true. It might be drifting shallow on the surface.
He wanted to honor the manzanita but didn’t know how. All this time, and he hadn’t known it was here. He crouched down and crawled in close but couldn’t get to the center. A kind of cage to keep him out.
Galen crawled away from the manzanita, liked moving on hand and knee, liked seeing the ground and having the dry grass rise high above him. So much better not to have blank air above. The way his body moved in a crawl, catlike, and his awareness increased. Sound and vision in close, and a sense that other things watched him. He wanted to come face-to-face with a rattlesnake, wanted to feel his heart leap.
He imagined his mother down close to the ground, lying on her side, conserving. Hidden away in the shade of the shed, near the walnut drying racks, seeking cool earth. He imagined her skin thinning like paper, like the manzanita bark, drying.
Thistle in close a kind of fortress rising in layers, broadest at the base. Waxy green and thick, with white milky veins, and the purple flower far above made of tassle, of silk. Thistle and manzanita could hold color as the others dried and went yellow and brown, but thistle the more lush, that white milk pulled from nowhere.
Galen crawled toward the base of a live oak, into greater shade, the spines writing along his back in thin cuts. Fallen leaves cutting his hands and knees. Ants everywhere, red and black, living in deadfall. Galen lay down among them and waited. Lay here as his mother lay there, sharing the same ground.
These are the true things, Galen said. My mother might be dead. Or she’s dying. And I’m not helping her. I didn’t bring her water, and I’m not helping her now. I’m lying here in dry grass and live oak, and I’m waiting for her to die. That’s what I’m really doing.