Wounds

Part One

Prologue

Vincent slammed the door of his 1979 Jeep J10 and stubbed his cigarette out on the frame. Red sparks floated into the night and disappeared. Like so many hopes and dreams, he cringed at his own sentimentality. Cringed at the lie. He’d never had hopes or dreams. Just survival instincts and nightmares. He flicked the butt into the truck’s bed. The cream-colored pickup had been handed down through three generations of Cliftons now and her exterior showed it. Rust, burns, dents, scratches, peeling paint, the old girl had scars. But her insides were clean. Vincent did all the repairs and maintenance himself, had done since he was fourteen.

Deprivation and poaching were the two other rust buckets he’d inherited. What he poached, burls, weren’t exactly the stuff of legend. Weird lumps that grew on trees that artists paid top dollar for. To get them, he had to chainsaw them out of the giant redwoods, which the rangers didn’t like. Weakened the trees or some shit. The ancient venereal trees or whatever they called them. Forests should be cleared, what his granpop and Pop had drilled into him. The Cliftons had been loggers before the government killed the industry and plunged them and the region into poverty. Save the trees, my ass, Man above all, should live, let all the other crap die. That one was his grandpop specifically.

Vincent shouldered his backpack, then slung his chainsaw over that. He’d fashioned a strap for it out of an old flannel and some couch stuffing. Dog was always tearing at the couch. Why he hadn’t gotten a new one, even though Maril kept asking. Well that and money. It never really got to be a priority, the couch, not more than food and a roof over their heads. “Sofa,” Maril called it, said it sounded better. Vincent could hardly find it in himself to care what Maril called anything, much less change his own vocabulary to match. Wasn’t really the matchy matchy couple type. And Maril was usually more trouble than she proved worth. No sense in changing because of her, her presence not being immutable and all.

Thunder boomed in the distance and he pulled his hood over his head. Was gonna be a long, cold night, but the storm would help mask the sound of the chainsaw, so collecting had to be done tonight. Rangers had wired the forest up with what they called Guardians, AI sensors that could recognize hundreds of different sounds, from insects, frogs, and birds, to trucks and chainsaws, and report back to the ranger station. If it heard a chainsaw, it sent an alert with GPS coordinates, then law enforcement and their dogs were dispatched. But if the rain and thunder were loud enough, it had trouble separating those sounds from the chainsaw. So Vincent harvested during storms. They had trap cameras too, in some of the more common places, but he moved around enough that he didn’t worry so much about the cameras.

Fucking hassle. Pop and Grandpop never had to worry about this shit. And they never stopped complaining about how hard life was. Vincent spat into the dirt and breathed in deep. Better off for them they were dead, all this hardship would’ve killed ‘em. It hadn’t started raining yet but Vincent could already feel the tang of it at the back of his throat. The scent of vegetation opening up to the sky, ready to accept the deluge. He grunted and patted the truck, then turned to the forest.

Is he ready?

Almost

He hiked quickly, used to covering a dozen or more miles a night. The walk to the collecting spot was the easy part. The hike back with a hundred pounds of wet wood, or more, was harder. And he had to go deep if he wanted to avoid detection. It was easy to get into a rhythm, hypnotically placing one foot in front of the other for hours. Not thinking about much, losing track of your surroundings.

Until a tree creaked in the wind. Vincent sucked in a breath. His pop had taught him a sort of cat-like readiness. Aware but not engaged. He stopped and shone the flashlight into the trees. Could be a bear, probably wasn’t. Wasn’t going to be able to see it in the dark anyway. Granpop had told him once about a bear that attacked a camper with a baggy of snow in his windbreaker. Bear had gone berserk and ripped through a campground, eating three kids before rangers shot it. Could be coked up bear. But probably not. He focused on his GPS. Grandpop would have rode his ass for using it, but Grandpop also got lost at least a dozen times that he remembered and had to be tracked and brought home by Vincent and Pop. Some things just make sense.

He stopped for water, just a sip, and listened to the wind, howling now, through the trees. Always sounded like voices to him.

“What are they saying?” Maril had asked him once, hands on her hips, that duck pout she did when she was irritated with him. Which was always.

He’d told her the truth, she’d scoff no matter what he said so he may as well, “Some ask if I’m ready yet. Others say no. They say I don’t feel the Mother Love yet. And before you ask, I don’t know what any of that means.”

She’d raised her eyebrows and shaken her head, “You are so weird.”

Why Grandpop had told him long term girlfriends were an albatross, they grew critical as they grew out of love. “Eighdeen months, tops! Kick ‘em to the curb afta that. Get a new one. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. You’ll always be tired, but ya never be lonely,” then he’d slap Vincent on the back and whoop with laughter. His own father had ignored that rule and married Vincent’s mother. He didn’t remember her though, she’d died when he was a little over a year old. His sister remembered her, six at the time, she’d told him everything he knew. How she smelled, what kind of cookies she baked, how she kissed his toes to make him giggle, but they were secondhand memories, worse than all the secondhand clothes he’d grown up in. Vincent had twinges now and then, some warmth would wriggle through him that he thought might be a memory of her touch or her scent. But he would never know. Had no way of knowing. Pop had thrown out all her pictures and things after she died. Damnatio memoriae, a thing the ancient Romans did to their worst emperors. What his pop had done to his mom. It meant condemnation of memory and it’s what Pop did to his mother. Not a motherfucker, a mothereraser.

Thunder crashed, closer now. The wind had picked up, too. Vincent pulled his hood drawstrings closed around his head and pressed on. He still had a long hike ahead of him. And he needed to get home before sunup. Assuming the sun rose. Assuming this storm wasn’t the Earth’s end riding in.

“Fucking stop it,” he muttered. This forest always twisted his thoughts to apocalypse. Two-thousand year old trees, anything that old was bound to carry heavy energy. Branches whipped around above him, snakes in their ecstatic death throes. Was that his thought? Did he know those words? He felt the chainsaw blade hit the back of his leg where it was slung over his shoulder and breathed deeply, grateful for the grounding steel. He was here to hurt the trees, not the other way around.

Something else his grandpop always said whispered through his mind in the old man’s gruff, two packs a day wheeze, don’t look up. The redwoods, some as tall as three-hundred and fifty feet, were too tall, too alive. Grandpop used to tell him horror stories of people climbing the trees to poach bird eggs and never coming back down. Said the trees kept them. You look up, you’ll see their faces. Lose your damn mind. Vincent still had nightmares about redwood roots coming unmoored from the Earth and stomping him to a chunky wet smudge on the forest floor. He’d see his dream remains colonized by colorful fungus and carried away by big black ants. The forest would rumble underneath his squashed body, like the land was laughing.

Almost

Part Two drops next week!