Smothermoss, p.1
Smothermoss, page 1
For my mountain
IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN.
Snow melts, the crust of frost cracks and heaves. Water sinks belowground, swelling channels. Sap rises. Wild garlic sprouts, arbutus creeps, and bloodroot quickens. Curved shoots of spotted skunk cabbage thrust toward the light.
Beetle larvae wake and gorge. Red-tailed hawks wheel and shriek. Gusts sweep a fledgling from the nest, hard smack on the ground. The countless populations that call this mountain home are waking, but the seeds of decline are already sown. Eggshells soften, limbs fail to form, leaves wither and curdle, water roils brackish and sour.
Overhead, the stars, distant cold brothers who knew the world before the mountain was formed, revolve unmoved. Redness flares. Scabs multiply, membranes stretch thin.
That’s the moment when unpredictable things seep in.
ONE
The Tangle of Rabbits
SHEILA KNOWS SHE IS SUPPOSED TO LOVE HER SISTER. But it’s hard when Angie is snoring into her stinking bedclothes in the room they share under the uninsulated eaves. Sheila’s side is threadbare and neat, the quilt on her bed stitched from scratchy pieces of men’s suits: charcoal, slate pinstripe, and February sky.
Angie’s side—but that’s the problem, because Angie doesn’t keep to her side. She sprawls like a dog flopped in the mud on a hot summer day. Like the poison ivy twining through the blackberry canes and spreading all over the shady side of the house. Cut down the tangle and in six weeks it will grow back twice as thick.
Sheila, though, likes to know where things are. That if she needs to, she can walk into the room with her eyes closed and put her hand on the thing she wants. There isn’t much you can count on in life, but most of the time, things stay where you leave them. Things don’t get into fights at the Skyline Inn and draw a knife on the bartender when he tells you to settle down or get out and then get taken away in handcuffs and sentenced to three years in the penitentiary upstate. They don’t die in a motorcycle accident before you get to know them. They don’t haul you off to live in town with some man who smells like smoke and sweat and gasoline and get pregnant with a sister you will never understand only to sneak you all out in the dark one night with only the clothes on your back and creep back in with the old woman on the mountain where you were born. No, things are reliable.
Angie doesn’t have a quilt. Her clothes are mixed with her blankets and her shoes and the comic books she steals when she is sent to buy milk at the store in town. Her pillow is tumbled on the floor with the stuffing leaking across the tattered rug, the whole mess scattered with the dog-eared pack of index cards Angie keeps bundled in a rubber band and is always taking out and shuffling and drawing on.
It’s no wonder the kids at school call Angie dirty and a liar and a thief. She is dirty. And she is a thief. She will stand there with something of yours tight in her fist and look you in the eye and tell you she didn’t take it, you’re crazy, she’s never seen your locket, lunch money, felt-tip pen.
Sheila definitely doesn’t love her sister when Angie takes the last pancake at breakfast, the one that is Sheila’s by any standard of decency since Angie already ate four and Sheila only two. Sheila is eating slow so she can pretend they don’t live like animals, so she can practice chewing one bite at a time, not like the dogs falling over themselves when she brings out the stew pot and dumps the last dregs on the ground behind the porch.
Sheila is eating like she imagines a person in the city might eat. It’s almost working. Her stomach is warm now, and she isn’t ravenous anymore. She has beaten her hunger, defied it, and takes every bite slower than the last. Maybe she isn’t going to eat that last pancake, but she is going to enjoy sitting at the table and staring it down. Slowly but surely outlasting it, winning by being better and stronger. Then Angie grabs the pancake with the fingers she has just licked grape jelly off of, and folds it into her mouth.
Sheila can’t do battle with an empty plate. She can’t show the space where a pancake used to be that she is better than it. When she glares her hate across the table, Angie says, “What? You weren’t going to eat it.”
It’s true; she wasn’t. But that’s not the point at all. That’s what Angie will never understand.
IN SPRING IT is mushroom time. The sisters go out into the woods where, only the week before, the rocks were glazed with frost and tiny fortresses of ice heaved up from the mud on the banks of the stream. They roam under the sycamores, carrying paper grocery bags and staring at the ground. Sheila tries hard, but she is distracted by everything—by snail shells and moth casings and thumbnails of green piercing through the dead leaves. Angie blunders, her big feet tripping. But at the end of the morning, it’s her bag that is full.
Sheila wants to accuse Angie of cheating, but there’s no way she could have. They are out here alone together. The gap where the Appalachian Trail crosses near the farthest edge of the property is empty today. There are no flashes of bright outdoor clothing, no conversations carried on the wind, no scrape of hiking poles on slippery rocks. No one else could have picked the mushrooms for her. Even if Angie had found them on a different day and stockpiled them behind a log to scoop into her sack today, it was still she herself who had sniffed them out from the leaves and twigs and the corncob fungus that looks the same as a morel but can’t be eaten.
Angie drops onto a moss-furred rock with her full bag at her feet, waiting for Sheila to catch up.
“Why don’t you ever have a boyfriend?” Angie asks, picking at a scab on her arm.
“Who says I don’t?” Sheila thinks she sees a mushroom half buried under a lacy maple leaf, but it’s only an old walnut gone black and mushy.
“Don’t you want one?”
This isn’t a question Sheila wants to answer. She feels cold. Or maybe she is hot. Whatever it is, it’s not a nice feeling. It’s raw, and she wants it to go away. She crouches and pretends she has spotted something extremely interesting near a rotting stump. But she doesn’t have to worry, because Angie doesn’t want to talk about Sheila. Angie wants to talk about Angie.
“I want a boyfriend,” Angie says. “Like Troy.”
“Mmm,” Sheila says, like she doesn’t know what Angie is talking about. But she knows perfectly well. Troy is three years older than Angie and two years younger than Sheila. He is on the baseball team. At lunch, he sits with the most popular boys in his class. He is loud. He talks back to teachers. He bullies younger boys and kids who wear glasses. He calls Angie “lesbo” and holds his nose when she trudges by, waving his hand at an invisible stink.
“He’s not very nice to me,” Angie says. “But that’s just because he has to act that way. In front of the others.”
So she does know, Sheila thinks. Why would you do that to yourself? How could you want someone who so clearly despises you?
“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if he asked me to the prom. Or homecoming. When we showed up together, everything would be different.”
Sheila used to imagine scenes like this too. Before she realized that nothing ever changes. Or if it does, things only get worse, not better. In her own dreams, when she tries to imagine other places, other futures, the picture won’t come clear. Her view is blocked by a dense white fog. Beyond that thick smear is the place she wants to get to. She doesn’t know where it is or what it looks like. Only that it’s not here, and not this.
They go back to the house and dump the contents of their bags into a bucket, and Sheila pumps water over them. Angie runs into the house for salt and pours it in. The water is cold on Sheila’s hands as she swishes the mushrooms around, the bugs crawling out to die. Leaf mold and dirt sinks to the bottom.
“They look like brains,” Angie says, leaning over Sheila’s shoulder.
Sheila watches her own hand, strangely blue in the water, and the bugs struggling to find a way out.
“If you eat enough of them, maybe you’ll get smart,” Sheila says, and whatever feeling had been between them in the woods is gone.
“You’re not the only one who’s smart. You’re just good at following the rules. I know stuff you don’t know. I know things you’ll never know,” Angie shouts and lopes away toward the rabbit hutches, stirring up mud behind her.
TAKING CARE OF the rabbits is Sheila’s job. The rabbits live in a crooked hutch leaning against the western wall of the house. When Sheila brings an old bean can full of pellets to the cage and unlatches the wire door, they crowd into the gap, all soft whiskered noses and liquid brown eyes. Harmless, helpless.
Sheila hates the rabbits. Hates them for being so stupid and so trusting. For making her want to pet them and love them and hold them cradled against her cheek. Hates their whisper-soft fur that feels like love against her skin. She swats at them, and they skitter away. But they come back and crowd around her with their sleek necks and inquiring noses.
Sheila doesn’t have to kill them. Her mother and the old woman do that. But she does have to feed them. To fool them. To keep them alive long enough to die. To make sure the possums haven’t dug up the bottom of the hutch and carried them away. Other kids eat Lebanon bologna and Hamburger Helper. Sheila and her family eat rabbit and squirrel and deer.
In summer, the rabbits stretch out, feet splayed, panting in the heat, their long ears limp. In winter, they huddle together, crouched behind a wind block of old hay and newspaper in the farthest corner, trying to coax a few nonexistent degrees of stray warmth from the house wall.
Angie loves the rabbits, but that’s because she doesn’t know any better. The events of the real world seem to slide off her as if she’s been greased. Angie’s not dumb. She knows what happens to the rabbits, only it doesn’t seem to affect her much. She squeals when she greets the rabbits. She squeezes them roughly and names them all. The one with the white spot above her nose is Sally. The one with the ear that falls crookedly to the side is Jack because he’s a pirate. And when she stabs a fork into slices of them on her plate, she doesn’t seem to know.
The sign fixed at the bottom of the lane is a weathered piece of plywood, nailed to a stake and driven into the ground next to the rusty mailbox. Strokes of red paint spell out “Rabbits $5.” But no stranger ever comes up their long, rutted lane. They only ever trade with neighbors. The rest of the rabbits go into the pot. Into stew in the winter with a carrot and turnips, in summer sliced cold into sandwiches on potato rolls with margarine. Sheila’s mother likes them with baked beans; the old woman prefers them with dandelion.
But there is one gray doe, Pearl, who knows better. She hunches in the far corner, chin resting on folds of fat at her neck. Her eyes are small and distrustful. If Sheila stretches out a hand, Pearl crouches even lower, flattening her ears against her back, and growls.
THERE IS A scar on Sheila’s neck. On her throat, really. It is thick and pink and goes right around the front like a necklace. She doesn’t try to hide it. Doesn’t wear collared shirts buttoned to her chin. Doesn’t pull her hair forward so the ends fall like cloaking ivy. Doesn’t flutter her hands like birds to distract when she talks, saying look over here not there. She doesn’t offer anything but a flat, challenging stare.
Sheila thinks she remembers the hospital, from somewhere in that mixed-up time after they fled Angie’s father. The white lights and the voices of the doctors. The squeak of thick-soled shoes on tiled floors. Everywhere metal, gray and shining. A long hall with a blinking light at the end. Lukewarm pears in a cup dripping with syrup. Gripping the handrails in the bathroom, the hospital gown coarse against her skin. The cold shiver along her spine.
The doctor leaned over her, his nose hairs like winter briars in her close-up vision. The nurse had pimpled arms, and her breath smelled like coffee. In the daytime, they looked like a doctor and nurse, but at night by the light of the beeping machines, Sheila could see them for what they really were.
They told her to relax, and everything went blue and green, like opening her eyes underwater. She lifted her arms to fight them off—or thought she did—but her hands stayed at her sides. The doctor pulled up his mask and looked to the nurse, who nodded, her long ears flopping. They were the rabbits from the hutch, and they were wearing white coats. Their eyes gleamed red, and their tails stuck out the backs of their surgical gowns.
Sheila wanted to say, “Didn’t I bring you dandelion? Didn’t I smash the ice on your water when it froze?”
But the rabbits knew she hated them. They said, “Didn’t you peel back our skins and hang us by our hind legs? Didn’t you break our bones and put them in your pot? Didn’t you season us with salt and pepper and mop us up with bread?”
Even as she tried to deny it, Sheila remembered the smell of the pot simmering on the stove, deliciously rich and meaty. Her stomach rumbled, and the rabbit doctor twitched his whiskers. “We know what you are. We’re going to cut it out of you.”
The nurse stroked Sheila’s hair, her hand calm and soothing. Just like Sheila when she visited the hutch. The nurse had a dark spot on the back of her hand, just like Norma, the rabbit that pushed to the front to get the most dandelion. The one that would step on her brothers and sisters to grab a huge mouthful and lunge away to chew as fast as she could and come back for more.
Sheila always shoved Norma away, heaping the greens on the other side of the pen from her. She tried to make sure the other rabbits got their fair share. But now greedy Norma was in charge. Sheila was on her back and couldn’t move. Greedy Norma laid a paw on Sheila’s forehead.
“There, there,” she said, and Sheila saw her teeth, long and square but still somehow sharp.
Norma pushed Sheila down into the bed on the trolley. What had seemed to be hard steel now gave way like spring mud. Sheila sank back as it oozed around her arms and legs, burying her strength to kick and fight. The rabbit doctor lifted the scalpel. His whiskers tickled Sheila’s face as he leaned over her to make the cut.
The blade wavered in his unsteady paw, tufts of brown fur sprouting from his gloved hands. Sheila struggled and shrank, trying to squirm away as the scalpel drew closer. A scream clotted in her throat as Norma held her head with soft fur fingers.
The slice of the blade was ice and fire, a slippery unzipping of her throat. Air whistled against her opened skin.
Sheila fell down inside herself, plummeting into a dark well.
When she woke, it was late afternoon, and she reclined in a room that smelled like applesauce. Voices murmured in the background. She could hear someone breathing nearby, underneath the applause from The Price Is Right playing on the television mounted in the corner. Her head felt huge, and her throat was raw. Her tongue lolled thick and useless in her mouth.
No one came to visit her. That night, Sheila lay in the bed with rails, clutching the spoon from her supper tray that she’d concealed beneath the sheet. When the rabbits came again, she would be ready. But they never came. Every squeaking footstep turned out to be a nurse. A regular, real, human nurse, wearing lipstick and smelling like Aqua Net hairspray. Sheila never saw the rabbit nurse or doctor again. Never saw greedy Norma.
Ever since, Sheila’s throat has been on fire. It burns and itches. She knows that it looks to everyone else like a scar. A remnant of something that once had been but now was gone. But Sheila knows different. The mark on her throat is not a reminder of the past but a clue to what is still there: a rope. A rope around her neck like she has been lassoed.
It started as a single thread that she hardly seemed to feel at all. But another thread soon appeared, winding around the first. Then another, and another, twisting together. By fifth grade, the twined threads were as thick as a shoelace. Now, in her senior year of high school, all those fine accumulating fibers have braided themselves into a rope strong enough to hang a man. Or woman.
No one else can see how the rope trails down her back, how it floats out behind her, how it catches on classroom chairs and other people’s waving arms. How it snags on branches and slops in the mud. How sometimes, whoever or whatever holds the other end draws it taut and gives a vicious, reminding yank.
TWO
The Twins with Too Many Teeth
Angie thinks a lot about the end of the world. About globe-destroying mushroom clouds and how to survive when everything she knows has been blown away. About how much better that would be, to have the world erased and to be forced to rely only on her own wits.
She takes down her brother’s hunting jacket from the hook on the back porch. When she puts it on, his dog Sue whines and thumps her tail at Angie’s feet. The coat is too big, the sleeves too long, and Angie rolls back the cuffs at her wrists.
The boys in the movies always have a bandanna tied around their heads, but Angie doesn’t have a bandanna. She finds a worn-out towel in the kitchen, washed almost to holes and the cloth thin enough to fold, and ties that around her forehead. She checks her reflection in a window. Her bangs are scrunched under the cloth. She pulls them over the top of the towel and finger-combs the strands until they drop over her brow. Better.
Then she is outside and on her guard against the roving gangs of survivors, the mutants, and the Russians. It’s a dangerous world, and every day is a struggle for survival. First, she must find clean water. Angie takes off into the woods, jumping over logs, dodging from tree to tree, crouching behind boulders, heart hammering in her chest. When she reaches the spring, clear water trickling from the cleft in the hillside, vibrant green plants growing at its edges, she rejoices. She is saved. She will survive another day.
Angie cups her hands and slurps the cold water from her palms. Water achieved, food is her next mission. She zigzags commando-style back to the last house she passed, checks over her shoulder, and ducks into the root cellar. The people who live here are all dead. She has seen their decayed and blistered bodies in this abandoned house. They won’t need these jars of fruits and vegetables lined up on shelves against the stone wall. They won’t mind if she takes them.
