Gargoyles (3 page)

He's well into the bush now. He has been stabbed in the ribs by a broken branch and yelled because of it. He has tripped twice but is hardly on the ground before he is full speed again. He's not sure his father ran. He leaps a small creek and, absurdly, seeing a hint of depth wonders if it might hold small trout. He lands beside a pale skunk cabbage and smells its garbage smell. He hesitates long enough to hear the crashings behind him. Maybe they are more distant.
No
, he hears crashing to his right now too. Tyler goes left, dodging trees, plunging through vines, more trees, saplings caught under his armpits
and scraping them. He sees the light of a clearing and heads for it — maybe he's faster than them on open ground. He hears the men shouting at each other or maybe at him. He plunges into the light of the clearing and he instantly goes down choking as a ghost gets him sharp by the neck and ankles both.

Tyler lies thrashing, unable to breathe. He doesn't think he's dying. He can breathe a little now, and a little more. The low sun is in his eyes. He doesn't care about the men any more, though he hears them coming, walking now, crunching underbrush, breathing hard.

“He went right through the deer fence,” one says.

“He
broke
the deer fence,” the other adds.

“Did he get a shock?”

“I don't know.”

“Hey,” one of them asks, louder, almost on him now, “did you get a shock?” The voice sounds concerned but also just curious.

Two pairs of legs are at his head. Tyler manages to sit up. He rubs his throat and coughs. No one touches him.

“What the fuck, man?” one of them asks, and Tyler looks into the setting sun.

The other voice laughs insincerely and says, “Well, I guess he found it.”

Both men, standing over Tyler, catching their breath like him, seem mostly nervous now.

The generator is down so they sit in the soft light of strategically placed candles. “Welcome to black mass,” one of them, the ponytailed one, said as he began lighting them. Tyler is no longer afraid. He is used to this one's humour — on the walk back he joked about both
Deliverance
and cannibalism — all
supposed to put Tyler at ease, he could see that. He also joked about Tyler being the skinniest cop they'd ever seen. Early on they told him their names, which Tyler only half-heard. The ponytail one was Bob, Ben, Burt, something, and the other's was longer. When talking to each other they didn't use names. They seemed very close.

The non-ponytailed one is almost fat and has long hair too, and a moustache, an old-fashioned, biker kind. Both men wear really good sneakers, maybe that's how they kept up with him. They look forty or maybe even older.

“Another warm one?” the fat one asks, wincing an apology as he asks it.

“No thanks.” Tyler has barely touched his first. It's in an unmarked green plastic bottle and, though he's never had homemade beer before, he can taste that that's what it is.

“The tea's pretty close.” The fat one lifts the kettle from the woodstove, as if in doing this he can assess how close it is to boiling. Well, maybe he can, Tyler sees, maybe he can feel water-roil through the handle.

“Man, we really need another screen,” the ponytail one complains. Only one window has a screen, and with the wood-stove on he'd wanted to open the door for a cross-draft, but at night apparently the bugs are awful.

Out the windows, it's completely dark. Tyler pictures his mother and Kim with insects awful around them. His mother refuses to use repellant. They will have a fire going by now.
Natural light
. Tyler is all they are talking about. They are a mix of afraid and angry and repentant. They know he has no flashlight and beyond their little fire all is dark. His mother, of course, is mostly afraid. How will little Tyler get back from his
little walk
. He remembers her face as she said this, as she said it
not looking at Tyler but at Kim, her face pink with beer and naughty, shitty fun.

He's been here in the cabin for at least an hour now. His ribs feel better. The fat one's salve is amazingly soothing. His “famous elf balm” he called it, and Tyler didn't want to let him try it on him but he was still afraid of them then. The fat one said it was made of wild beeswax and sap from Douglas fir and chocolate lily, something his sister made and sold.

“Sorry,” Tyler asks now. “What are your names again?”

“Bab,” says the ponytail one, pointing to his chest. “And that's Lawrence.”

“It's . . .
Bab
?” Tyler asks.

“One of those jokes that sticks,” Bab explains.

“You sure you don't want a ride back?” Lawrence asks, lifting the tea kettle again.

“Not yet. A while maybe.”

“You don't think they're worried?”

Tyler shrugs and says nothing.

“How's the leg now?”

“It's okay.” Tyler lifts his right leg for them and twirls the sandaled foot, which hurts to do, maybe enough to make him limp. He doesn't remember hurting it. Maybe when he jumped the creek. Maybe when the deer fence got him.

At the marijuana field, after they'd helped him to his feet, their main concerns were, one, that he might come back and steal their plants, or, two, that he'd tell the Vietnamese and they would “Hang our balls from trees,” Bab had joked. Tyler was convincing in his apologies and also in his assurances that he didn't smoke pot, or know anyone who even knew anyone who was Vietnamese. He was only here camping with his mother. This fact seemed to sum him up for them because both Bab and
Lawrence quietly exhaled, Ahhh, at ease now. Tyler went on to say that he'd gone walking, got sort of lost, found their place, and was looking for a phone to call his mother's cell. Both men said Ahhh again, and they didn't seem angry any more.

Getting to their cabin, putting a warm beer in his hand, Lawrence had gone for the elf balm and a wash cloth while Bab came up with an idea to keep Tyler quiet about their farm. He had tried, for a minute, to act tough.

“Okay,” he said as Lawrence appeared with damp cloth and the flat tin of salve, “I want to see some I.D.”

“My I.D.?”

“Let's see some.”

Tyler took his wallet out and Bab told Lawrence to get him a pen. Bab found Tyler's social insurance card and library card and Lawrence handed Bab a pen. Bab sent Lawrence back for some paper.

“Okay,
Tyler
,” Bab said, reading the name, serious. “We know who you are and where you live.” In the background, Lawrence snorted at this. He opened the flat tin of balm, smelled it, poked a gentle finger in, and then rubbed some on his sunburned nose.

“So if we see any plants missing, we know who. And we know where. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And if, and if the cops come, we'll know . . .” Bab looked around, stumped, a smile breaking out.

“We'll know who to yell at from prison,” Lawrence offered.

“That's
right
,” Bab told Tyler, smiling, stab-pointing at his face.

“I'm really not going to tell anybody,” Tyler said.

“Look,” said Bab, folding the piece of paper and putting it in his shirt pocket, “we're being
nice
to you, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean we're just all good humans here so just don't tell anyone, 'cause we'll get hurt, okay?”

“I really won't.”

“Good. Thanks.” Bab looked at him closely. “How old are you anyway? Fourteen?”

“Sixteen.”

“You want a ride back to the lake?”

“No, not yet. I can't. Quite yet.” Tyler hesitated then told them why, and they laughed, but not unsympathetically. Lawrence gave him a little squeeze on the shoulder, and then Frisbeed the tin of balm onto his lap as he walked past.

When Tyler asked if they lived here all the time, he was told it was their “summer residence,” and that they farm — their word — here in the summer and tour in the winter. Lawrence then explained that “toured” sounded grandiose, that actually it was more travelling than touring, meaning playing music and getting paid for it. They always went to warm places. They'd recorded an early independent album and in the last decade two CDs but, no, there's no way Tyler would have heard of them. But Bab passed him a CD case and there they were on the cover. They were “Jones.” No, they weren't brothers. It was a name, said Bab, “that seemed cool eighty years ago.” All this led to Tyler saying he'd love to hear their music, but with the generator down a CD was impossible, which led to them rooting around in back for what instruments they had there and, after apologizing that this wasn't their good gear, they began to play. First they gave him a CD to keep, he has it here under his hand and he keeps picking it up and studying it. Bab and Lawrence are younger on the cover, but it's them.

Tyler figures he's been gone a few hours now. Bab and Lawrence are into their second song when Tyler decides that these two are the kindest men he has ever met. They seem genuinely to like that he's here. Bab plays guitar and Lawrence a mandolin, the sound of which Tyler describes to himself as rows of tiny angel bells. First they played “Turn, Turn, Turn,” harmonizing beautifully, softer and gentler than in the old Byrds' song, and Bab's guitar — he explains — is tuned to sound like a twelve-string. This second song is their own composition and it also forefronts their harmonies, which they love to perform and which are truly sweet. One of the lines in the sad chorus is, “Just another waya prayin'.”

Tyler finishes the gigantic bowl of tortilla chips in front of him. A hand-carved, clover-shaped bowl holds three kinds of dip. The bean dip is the best he's ever had. Lawrence insisted on heating it up a little first, saying it's three times as good warm, something about “luring out the earth in it.” Tyler also has a glass of homemade blackberry wine in front of him. It sounded good but it isn't and he's had only a sip. It sits beside the full beer. Lawrence and Bab have been puffing marijuana from a small pipe, Bab offering it once with raised eyebrows but not asking again. It doesn't seem to affect them other than they've stopped talking much at all and sometimes they chuckle at jokes Tyler doesn't catch. They seem to talk with their music. Once during the last song they were staring at each other quizzically, then Bab dipped his head and did a little something with a bass string, and Lawrence laughed and said, “
That?
” and this was the only word in the conversation.

His mother, he knows, would love them. She would. There is no doubt in Tyler's mind that she would love these two guys. His mother would love everything in this cabin.

They are into their fifth or sixth song when Tyler sees what he's been waiting all evening to see. Kim's muscular high-beams violate the whole forest with false daylight then turn into the drive and momentarily hurt his eyes.

She's been a long time coming. He wonders how many wrong logging roads were taken, if they fought much, and how difficult she found the sporadic track of beer cans he'd left for her beside the road. He understands that his father didn't leave any cans.

The SUV stops behind the pickup midway up the drive, a door opens and but doesn't close and the beam of Tyler's reading light bounces toward him — his mother must be running.

Tyler bets the candles must look pretty eerie from out there. The reading light runs nearer then slows and stops at the biggest window and there is his mother's face, dim, pressed to the glass. She's alone and frantic and — compared to the good things going on here in this cabin — of another world.

It's two or three but he isn't asleep. Propped on an elbow he peers out his window at the noise. Down on the street, under the street light whose braying he detests, a panel van has inched up to the curb. Under such light it's hard to tell if the van is silver, or white, or even yellow. He decides to see it as white. He can tell from a sudden lack of something that the van has been turned off. Three men get out. The third one, the driver, trots to catch up to the others, his stomach jiggling in a T-shirt that's either white or yellow. The driver carries a hammer.

He lights a candle and turns to his bedside table, the old radio and its parts spread out over the butcher paper. It's an odd thing to have in a bedroom, but all his work now takes place here. Such a scatter so close to his head while he sleeps — he wonders if it affects his dreams. The radio is from the 1930s or 1940s, and unlike the circuit boards of today has lots of parts. Some of the screws are so small, some of the washers so
paper-thin that he sees himself in a fit of hearty snoring maybe breathing something in. It's a beautiful old radio, high deco, its shoulders — what would be its shoulders if a radio had shoulders — made of an early plastic, naively but confidently grooved, its colour an attempt at ivory. The radio's shell and its dissembled parts flicker in the candlelight. It looks rather Frankenstein-like. He doesn't know what else to do with this radio, how much more he can take it down. He doubts he can get the tubes apart without breaking the glass.

He wonders what the men outside will think of the radio. Or the project glued onto his bedroom wall — the pocket watch, one of his early dissemblies. Every piece, almost sixty, some so small he can't see them in this light, stuck to the wall in a pattern that was his best effort at patternlessness. Now he sees fractals. To the two friends who had occasion to see this paste-up he offered the word “installation.” The friends just nodded, and he suffered a dip of dismay that they didn't know he was joking. As if at seventy-seven he had the arrogance to change careers and say he's now a visual artist. As if he'd call a childish paste-up “art.” It's tragic you can get this old and people you call friends don't know when you're joking. He wonders what the three men below will see when his dissembled watch falls under their flashlight beams — a starscape? golden snow? — or if it will register in their eyes at all.