Drowning In The Shade

She comes down from Washington, where the logging camps stand out like scars on the skin; she learns her tarot cards and learns about men. Star is searching for something more than what she knows, something more than hard work and constriction — some college classes, some man, some babies, some shitty job, and all the special shine of life washing away day by day down the kitchen sink with the dishwater. But she can’t live this way, either — she thinks of Los Angeles or Las Vegas, where the strip stretches out forever — she hitchhikes from Seattle down to Portland for better luck.

She walks along the shoulder for a while, trying to get her bearings. The hems of her skirts scrape the ground, and her sandals pinch into her heels, second-hand shoes from some sister or cousin that are falling to pieces yet still not broken in. A man rolls down the window on his truck and asks are you working?

Sick of the cold and in search of summer — the money he gives her is too much, but she folds the bills up tight inside the waistband of her skirt and buys a ticket for the hot salt coast

*

The three of them sit in a platform of branches. The crowns of the trees are thick and clogged with moss, and her hands come away wet when she reaches down. Michael looks around with curiosity, maybe fear, as though the scaffold of green growing things will give way and send them down to earth.

Star lets her legs dangle, feeling the beaded hem of her skirt knock against her ankles. The perfume of the redwoods is bright and heavy, the perfume of the earth and the air and the stirred-up footprints through the underbrush — far below them earthworms are pushing their way between tangles of roots, the heat of the sun is fading away into night, the smell of water is all around them, and nowhere the smell of blood.

Laddie loves his new mother, and that’s good. Lucy knows everything there is to know about mothering scrubby little boys, and Star has been demoted to his older sister. She’ll have to find him something nice, a toy license plate or a piece of petrified wood. Lucy Emerson will be a mother forever, but she will never be a wife or a grandmother or a teacher. She will never be anything other than the matriarch of a squat house full of clove-smoking vampires. Even Laddie smokes; his baby fingers are too little and fat to work a Zippo, so David used to strike matches for him and put them out between his palms. Not a father, a deadbeat big brother.

“I always wanted to go here,” Star says against David’s shoulder. “I wanted to see the trees. it would be different in the daytime.”

She was supposed to go save the redwoods — to save the seals, the sharks, the whales. Look how that turned out.

David snorts. “They’re not that great. All the old ones got cut down, and this is what’s left. They chopped them up into barrels to haul lime in.”

“Were you around for that?” Not alive, surely.

“Somebody told me about it,” David says with a flare of defensiveness, but Michael lays a hand against his side and quiets him.

What does she have to be afraid of? She can fly. She can fly now, like something out of a dream — they can do things other people can only dream of. Sleep all day and never get in trouble. Party all night and never get tired. Float here in space with nothing to fear, without a tether, without a rope. The trees draw water out of the ground like the squeeze of a giant’s fist. These trees are ancient, they will last forever unless somebody kills them — unless somebody burns them, saws them down, poisons them. The three of them will live and live forever.

“Hey, Star. Do you trust me?” Michael says as he takes her hand. She can feel his weight shifting on the boughs beneath her legs.

“Sure, I trust you.”

Star laughs. Michael’s face is dappled with moonlight, bloodless and lit up with love. David grabs a hold of her wrist. They fall, and fly.

 

*

The earth beneath their feet is full of life, full of dead things turning over.

“So where are the rest of us?”

“There aren’t any,” David says with dry certainty. “There’s only Max.”

“You don’t know that.”

“There’s only us.”

Down below in the roots and mud, there is a woman’s skull, a woman’s body half-buried in a slip of plastic sheeting. It is a woman’s skull, with a bristly peel of hair and a single blackened earring lapping against the brown bone.

Star can feel the plastic crunching under her bare feet.

David is looking to Michael for cues — Michael is shaking his head, no, no. But what does that mean? He’s a killer, but he doesn’t want to see a dead body?

“We should go.”

*

The three of them bed down in the scrubby grass — Michael has a Boy Scout sleeping bag unrolled like an open book, David won’t even take his jacket off. On the pebbly sand, down by the cold cold water, David tugs the white tee shirt over Michael’s head — Michael tosses the hair out of his eyes and David grins at him like a gargoyle

The moonlight casts white tracks over Michael’s bare skin, his naked chest. Star can’t look away from him, can’t keep herself from touching, and when David’s hand rises up to cover hers and to clasp it against Michael’s skin she can almost imagine that it is warm.

Star kisses Michael on the lips, and David watches them. She can feel his eyes on her, just the same as she feels Michael’s mouth open under hers.

Michael loves her easily and foolishly — if it weren’t for her he might never be here at all. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t know David. David is cold and distant and rueful but sometimes whatever is inside him has to come up for air and he is beautiful, reckless, outrageously loving. He never kisses her in front of the other boys, and maybe they’d jeer and whistle if he did, but when they are alone he kisses her heated and hard, sweet enough to make her bare feet arch and twist — when he kisses her like that something sparks off in the pit of her like a cigarette lighter. Something like that is happening to her now.

And David loves Michael, that is too certain and true to escape — he will never tell him, never say it, but it shows. Michael loves Star, loves David, loves the two of them together. Star is in-between, and more than in-between.

Michael kisses her mouth; David lowers his head to mouth at her shoulder, her collarbone, the crease at the base of her throat like the first time he took blood from her. Her blood, his blood, running together. She has a rag of twisted silk wrapped around her shoulders — David slides it down and catches her breast in the crook of his hand. Star lets her head drop back, lets her body part for him, for both of them.

David holds her against himself, her back against his broad chest, and lets Michael part her legs — she can feel his attraction to both of them throbbing like a drumbeat against her body. She’s been the one to hold him before, and to feel his electrifying shape in her arms as she clings tighter on a motorbike or some stupid boardwalk ride — when he holds her from behind his hands follow the shape of her body, and he mouths at the cloud of her hair. His arms, her arms; his legs, her legs, the flat of his pelvis and the flat of her lower back. They are one, they overlap.

Michael kisses up her bare leg, past her knees and up her naked thighs. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, whether to touch or not touch, the muscles of his back are live and stark and the brush of his dark hair against her inner thigh makes her whole body go tight. The softness of his hair, the hardness of his mouth — there are teeth in that mouth, there is strength in the hands that are holding her knees apart and in the boy who holds her here like a sacrifice. There is a strength in her too, in the core of her, and she can feel it coming out.

*

They lie in the dark for a little while after that, not sleeping, simply still. They will never sleep again, at least not at nighttime. Where will they go, when they’re not flitting from shadow to shadow? There have to be other caves in California, other chasms, other cliffsides.

There are footsteps in the sand. She can hear them as loud and clear as bootfalls in fresh snow.

“Somebody’s out there,” Star says. “Michael, somebody’s out there.”

Michael bristles, rising up. “Hold on.”

“Let her go,” David says flatly. “Star, you have this.”

She’ll never be frightened again. What can there possibly be, out there in the dark, to scare her? All her life it’s been this or that or something else, burglars or dogs that bite, men in cars that slow and crawl along the pavement, going hungry and going broke and losing touch and getting boring and getting old. Now all that’s stretched out in front of her seems infinite, wide-open, flying — never growing old, never dying.

There is a man moving in the dark, a heavy-set shambling man with a faint little mustache she can see as clear as day through the pre-dawn darkness. He thinks she can’t see him — he is frozen like a rabbit, taut and brimming with anticipation — and he is wrong. He is a hunter, here to hunt girls. Normal living human girls, asleep under the sky, but Star is awake.

“Who’s there?” Star’s voice is silly and piping. Her jaws are beginning to itch.

The gravel shifts under her feet as she steps out into view — she can hear that too, and the sound of a man’s busy breathing.

The man moves for her in a lunge that is strangely graceful for such a big man. His forearm yokes around her throat, hard like iron, but Star’s flesh is iron too and she laughs like a lunatic at the dumb meaty sound of his exertion, at the smell of chewing-gum on his breath and the dull arousal throbbing off him in waves. He jerks tighter, trying to cut off the flow of her laughter, and Star twists around in his grip to sink her teeth into his forearm.

Long sharp teeth, like a mountain lion — distorting the bones in her face when her bite sinks down. The man howls stupidly. She can feel the hairs on his arms under the pad of her tongue. Star brings him down to the ground like a dog.

What does he have in his pockets — a knife, a rope, a piece of wire? Not a gun. Bone cracking, flesh tearing, and the red blood — Star swallows hard, and calls out, “Michael.”

The two of them creep out like wild dogs coming around — not only Michael but David too, hanging close to him until they both drop down in the cold sand. The man is no longer struggling; he will be a dead man very soon. Star lets him drop, and plants a bare foot on him with pinioning force. Her skirts cling to her legs.

Star kisses Michael on the mouth, she kisses the blood away from David’s fingers — he buries his mouth against Michael’s throat, growling with good humor, and Michael embraces him. The dead man is an afterthought. In the night before the morning, there’s only Michael and David and Star, spattered with blood and red and happy.