I took the lid off his drink and finished it. The ice cubes hurt my throat as I drank them. I left his truck on the road and walked into the woods.
The air was colder up here. Cold and dry, thin in my lungs. The moon was out. A half moon and it shed light enough to see the path I was on. I was surrounded by trees. I heard only the soft crumble of pine needles and branches popping underfoot as I walked.
By dawn, fog had settled in. It clung low, a vapor lurking among tree limbs. I had veered off the path. I stepped over logs, edged sideways along a ridge, dipped down and across a hillside, where I came upon a tree whose trunk was the width of about ten trees. Or twelve. Or twenty. It was the size of a small house, with huge gnarled roots, like lions’ paws, that spread out at its base. Thick vertical lines of red bark wrapped up its trunk like strips of velvet. Mist was caught in its branches, which started high above me, halfway up the tree. Most of the tree was limbless bark, and way up there, in what could have been sky, a city of branches. I made my way around the base. On the other side was an opening. This giant tree was hollow inside. There was another giant-sized tree across from it. They had grown here, together.
I could see other huge trees as the fog lifted and thinned, and a brightness showed through, the forest revealing itself in day. Now that I knew the scale, that such a tree was possible, I spotted other giant trees on this hillside. I had walked right past them, and not known. They had been camouflaging themselves by their hugeness. So many times wider than any other tree. Secrets in plain sight.
I stepped into the tree’s cavern. It was tall inside, with a roof where the tree closed itself, up above me, out of reach. The inside walls had dripping washes of black sap running downward, shiny and thick. I touched the sap, expecting it to be sticky. It was smooth and cool as glass. There was red sap, too, also glasslike. And yellow sap. Sometimes a redhead is considered a blond. They called him Güero and told me it meant blondie but Jackson’s hair is light brown.
The floor inside the cave was covered with tiny pinecones. This huge tree made baby cones. I needed water and food. My leg hurt. Maybe I had a fever. I didn’t feel right. They were surely after me. I had left the truck at the split. Walked all night. I lay down and slept.
I woke to a humming. Not far, but close.
I got up and stepped out of the tree. The humming was louder, but near the trunk, like the tree itself was making this noise. The sun was up, its beams painting the upper part of the tree gold-yellow. The sound was bees. I saw them, like dust motes, floating in and out of the sun’s rays, which flooded the high branches. They lived up there. Their sound was traveling down the trunk, making everything hum, even the ground.
From inside the trunk, the bee’s hum was the tree’s hum.
The tree’s sound was silent, so the bees spoke for it. Their sound was its sound, the one it had me hear.
I heard another sound, a clip-clip. A family of birds scuttled past on the ground. The little ones poured over a steep embankment like Ping-Pong balls, following the large ones. They ran under a bush and stayed there.
Both trees had charred areas around their trunks, inside and out, wood burned black and dry, fractured into a geometry of crackles. Probably the trees had been hit by lightning. Whole forest burning up around them, and they had lived on because they lived on. Because they could. Maybe they were a thousand years old. Two thousand years old.
To the tree, that might not be so long. Just life. Like life to a human is life-length. There were other scales of life. The tree was so tall I could not see up it, only to the baby arms, the small branches that began high, sky-height, tall enough that this tree stretched to another world, or to the end of this one.
The future lasts forever. Who said that and what did it mean. The tree arrowed upward, to the time when Jackson would be a man, and beyond that, well beyond it. Would have his own child. Die.
I heard a new noise. A drilling sound, quick, short. Are they here? What are they doing? Then again that sound, a drill. It was a woodpecker doing its lonely work. They were not here yet.
You run until you find a safe place and that tree was mine.
The forest at night is true dark. I had to feel my way out of the tree. Outside, I was under a glitter of stars. I heard a rustle, from wind. I heard those little birds settling down under the bush, or doing whatever they do.
I saw the thick path of the Milky Way or what I guessed was it above me. I’d never seen it. Or had I? I knew what it was. There were bright stars among the scatter of dimmer ones. The sky is junked with stars and if you live in a city, you don’t know. If you live in a prison you do not see a single star, on account of the lights. Here, I was halfway into the sky. Where people are gone, the world opens. Where people are gone, the night falls upward, black and unmanned.
Light beams crisscrossed the forest.
They were here.
I heard a helicopter overhead. Jerky searchlights swept the ground.
Grandma’s closet, the kids used to say. That was what they called a wind shelter where you retreated to light a joint. Under the stadium stairs or in a bus shelter. The piss-stink shelter at Forest Hill. Grandma’s closet. Any place could work.
All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.
The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.
I wish Jackson could see these trees. I never took him here. I didn’t know this place. That it was. Is. He saw redwoods at Point Reyes. These are the other kind, bigger, stranger. Do people know these trees are here? He might see trees like this or something else—like this—in being not known, and not expected, either.
There are some good people out there. Some really good people.
The helicopter came low. A voice echoed, like from the PA on main yard.
Hall. You’re out of bounds, Hall.
The life is the rails and I was in the mountains I dreamed of from the yard. I was in them, but nothing stays what you see from far away when you get up close.
Yes I think I’m special. That’s on account of me being myself. I have no one else to regard except Jackson, who I regard. Believe me. They called him Güero but he wasn’t a blond. They called him Güero because they loved him. They didn’t love me and they didn’t have to. There was no need for it. They loved him, and I loved him.
The damp from fog, like now, it’s inside me. I’m safe from it. Doesn’t even make me shiver. That kind of cold forms the deepest layer of my memories, from growing up there, treeless streets built on sand and the bad ocean, the broken bottle ocean with its big curve of concrete wall. Fatal Drownings Occur Here, the signs said on each stairwell down. Stairway to bonfire, to spray paint, to fistfight. Grandma’s closet at the beach was any car. Or behind a car. Or depending on the wind, in those stairwells. Fatal drownings occur here.
We swam in our clothes. We never once worried about drowning. Death was not in our future. No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that.
Hall, we have you surrounded.