THE COPS ARRIVE on the landing of Douglas Pavlicek’s tiny efficiency in East Palo Alto just before breakfast. The actual police: a nice touch. What you might call realism. They charge him with armed robbery and read him his Miranda. Violations of Penal Codes 211 and 459. He can’t help smirking as they frisk and handcuff him.
“You think this is funny?”
“No. No, of course not!” Well, maybe a little.
It gets less funny when the neighbors come out on their balconies in their pajamas as the cops perp-walk Douggie to the waiting squad car. He smiles—It’s not what you think—but the effect is mitigated a little, what with his hands cuffed behind his back.
One of the officers shoehorns him into the back seat. The rear doors have no handles. The cops call in his arrest on the radio. Everything very Naked City, although this perfect Central Peninsula August and the thought that he’s getting paid fifteen dollars a day brighten the sound track. He’s nineteen, two years orphaned, recently laid off from his job as supermarket stock boy, and living on his parents’ life insurance. Fifteen bucks a day for two straight weeks is a lot of dough, for doing nothing.
At the police station—the real police station—he’s fingerprinted, deloused, and blindfolded. They throw him back in the car and drive him around. When they remove the blindfold, he’s in prison. Warden’s office, superintendent’s office, and several cells. Chains on his legs. All very well thought out, convincing. He has no idea where he is, in real life. Some office building. The people running the show are improvising, same as he is.
All the guards and most of the prisoners are there already. Douggie becomes Prisoner 571. The guards are just Sir, with clubs and whistles, uniforms and sunglasses. They’re a little too liberal with the sticks, for hourly volunteers. Getting into their roles, pleasing the experimenters. They strip Doug down and put him in a smock. They mean to hit his pride, but Douglas preempts them by having none. There’s a “count”—roll call and ritual humiliation—several times that evening. Sloppy joes for dinner. It’s better than what he’s been eating.
Around lights-out, Prisoner 1037 gets a little truculent at the overdone theatrics. The guards smack him down. Clear already: there are good guards, tough guards, and crazy guards. Each slides down a grade when others are present.
As soon as Douggie—571—manages to doze off, he’s ripped out of bed for another gratuitous count. It’s two-thirty a.m. That’s when things turn weird. He gets the idea that the experiment isn’t about what they claim it’s about. He realizes they’re really testing something much scarier. But he only needs to survive fourteen days. A body can take two weeks of anything.
On day two, a tiff over dignity in Cell One blows out of control. It starts as a shoving match and escalates. Some prisoners—8612, 5704, and a couple of others—barricade themselves in the cell by swinging their beds sideways against the door. The guards call in reinforcements from the night shift. Young males shove each other and grapple over the bedframes. Someone starts to scream: “It’s a simulation, dammit. It’s a fucking simulation!”
Or maybe not. The guards crush the uprising with fire extinguishers, chain up the leaders, and throw them in the hole. Solitary. No dinner for the rebels. Eating, as the guards remind their captives, is a privilege. Douggie eats. He knows what hunger is. Number 571 isn’t going hungry for the sake of a little amateur theater. The others can all go nuts, if that’s how they want to pass the time. But nobody’s keeping him from his hot meal.
The guards set up a privilege cell. If any prisoner wants to say what he knows about the insurrection, he can relocate his bunk to plusher quarters. Cooperators can wash and brush their teeth and even enjoy a special meal. Privilege is not something Prisoner 571 needs. He’ll watch out for himself, but he’s no snitch. In fact, none of the prisoners takes up the privilege cell offer. At first.
The guards begin routine strip searches. Smoking becomes a special privilege. Going to the bathroom becomes a privilege. It’s shit buckets or hold it, for the next two days. There are grueling, hours-long, pointless chores. There are late-night counts. There’s cleaning out other people’s slop buckets. Anyone caught smirking must sing “Amazing Grace” with his arms flung out. Prisoner 571 is forced to do hundreds of push-ups for every little trumped-up offense.
The guard who all the prisoners call John Wayne says, “What if I told you to fuck the floor? Five seventy-one, you’re Frankenstein. You, 3401, you’re the Bride of Frankenstein. Okay, kiss, motherfuckers.”
Nobody—not the guards, not the prisoners—ever breaks character. It’s insane. These people are dangerous; even 571 can see that. All of them, out of control. And they’re laying him low along with them. He doubts that he can make it two weeks, after all. Sitting in his efficiency reading the want ads with the lights turned low starts to seem pretty luxurious.
Some small incident during a count and Prisoner 8612 loses it. “Call my parents. Let me out of here!” But that’s not possible. His term must last two weeks, like everybody’s. He starts to rave. “This really is a prison. We’re really prisoners.”
They all see what 8612 is doing: feigning craziness. The bastard wants to escape the game and leave everyone else to shovel shit for however many days are left. Then the act becomes real.
“Jesus Christ, I’m burning up! I’m fucked up inside. I want out! Now!”
Doug has seen a guy go crazy once before, back in high school in Twin Falls. This one is number two. Just watching scrambles his own brain.
They take 8612 away. The warden won’t say where. The experiment must stay intact. The experiment must extend itself. There’s nothing 571 wants more than to get out himself. But he can’t do that to the others. His fellow inmates would hate him forever, as he now hates 8612. It’s sick—symptom of a little pride he didn’t think he had—but he wants to keep 571’s reputation intact. He doesn’t want any university psychologist, peering through the two-way mirror and videotaping, saying, Ah, that one—we got that one to crack, too.
A priest comes to visit, a Catholic prison chaplain. A real one, from the outside. All the prisoners must go see him in the consultation cell. “What’s your name?”
“Five seventy-one.”
“Why are you here?”
“They say I committed armed robbery.”
“What are you doing to secure your release?”
The question sinks down 571’s spine and settles into his bowels. He’s supposed to be doing something? And if he doesn’t—if he fails to figure it out? Could they keep him in this hellhole beyond the agreed-on term?
The next day is shaky for all the prisoners. The guards play on their distress. They make the prisoners write letters home, but they dictate the words. Dear Mom. I fucked up. I was evil. One of them tears into 819 for being hapless, and the guy breaks down. The authorities have had it out for him since the barricade, and now they throw him in the hole. His sobs carry throughout the prison. The rest of the inmates are called out into the hallway for a count. The guards make them chant, Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did, my shit bucket won’t be emptied tonight. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Because of what he did . . .
A new prisoner, 416—8612’s replacement—organizes a hunger strike. He gets a couple prisoners to join him, but others slam him for stirring shit. When there’s trouble, everybody suffers. Five seventy-one refuses to choose sides. He’s not a joiner, but he’s no Kapo, either. Everything’s falling apart. The prisoners are turning on each other. He can’t afford to get involved. He tells everyone he’s nonaligned. But there is no nonaligned.
John Wayne threatens 416. “Eat the damn sausage, boy, or you are going to regret it.” Four-sixteen throws the sausage on the floor, where it rolls around in the filth. Before anyone knows what’s happening, he’s shoved into the hole, the dirty sausage in his hand. “And you’ll stay there until it’s eaten.”
There’s a general announcement: If any prisoner wants to give up his blanket for tonight, 416 will be released. If no one does, 416 will spend the night in solitary confinement. Five seventy-one lies in bed, under his blanket, thinking: This isn’t life. It’s just a fucking simulation. Maybe he should fight back against the experimenters, screw with their expectations, turn into a holy Superman. But damn it: no one else does. Everyone’s waiting for him to sleep cold tonight. He hates to disappoint them all, but he’s not the one who told 416 to pull his dumbfuck stunt. They could all have bored each other to death for two weeks and everything would’ve been fine.
He lies there warm all night, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t turn off the thoughts. He wonders: And if this were all real? If he were put away for two years, or ten, or two hundred? Locked up for eighteen years for manslaughter, like the drunken junior high teacher back in Townsend who smashed into his parents’ Gremlin while they were coming back from line dancing? Put away behind bars, like the invisible millions across this country who he’s never thought twice about? He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.
Next morning brings a hasty meeting. The warden and superintendent are summoned by the higher powers. Some big-brained scientist in a position of authority at last wakes up and realizes people can’t do this. The whole experiment is fucking criminal. All the prisoners are to go free, pardoned early, sprung from a nightmare that has lasted only six days. Six days. It doesn’t seem possible. Five seventy-one barely remembers what he was, a week ago.
The experimenters debrief everyone before turning them out into the world. But the victims are way too keyed up for reflection. The guards defend themselves while the prisoners go apeshit with anger. Douggie, too—Douglas Pavlicek—jabs his finger in the air. “The people who ran this—the so-called psychologists—should all be locked up for ethics violations.” But he didn’t give up his blanket. He will now, forever, be the guy who wouldn’t take sides and didn’t surrender his blanket, even in a tame little two-week playact experiment.
He comes up out of the dungeon into the brilliant, beautiful Central Peninsula air. A sweet little breeze smelling of jasmine and Italian stone pine goes down his shirt and ruffles his hair. He knows where he is now: the Psych Building, on the robber baron’s campus. Stanford. Land of knowledge, cash, and power, with its endless tunnel of palms and the intimidating stone arcades. That fat-cat monastery where he has always been afraid to walk, or even run an errand, for fear that somebody will arrest him as an imposter.
They give him his check for ninety bucks and drive him back to his efficiency in East Palo Alto. He holes up in his private bunker, eating Fritos stewed in Pabst and watching television on a tiny black-and-white with crumpled tinfoil horns for antennae. It’s there, three weeks later, that he sees a broadcast about the hundred-some U.S. helicopters lost in a bungled operation in Laos. He didn’t even know the U.S. was in Laos. He sets his can of beer on the spool table and has the distinct impression that he’s leaving a water-ring stain on someone’s pine coffin.
He stands up light-headed, feeling like he did the night 416 spent in the hole. He runs his fingers through the lush curls that will decamp from his skull early and en masse. Something is distinctly fucked up in the status quo, and that includes him. He doesn’t want to live in a world where some twenty-year-olds die so that other twenty-year-olds can study psychology and write about fucked-up experiments. He’s perfectly aware that the war is lost. But that changes nothing. The next morning, he’s out in front of the recruiting center on Broadway when they open. Steady work, and honest at last.
TECHNICAL SERGEANT DOUGLAS PAVLICEK flies two hundred–plus trash hauler missions in the years following his enlistment. Loadmaster on a C-130, he balances up planes with tons of barrier material and Class A explosives. He puts ordnance on the turf under mortar fire so thick it froths the air. He fills outbound flights with deuce-and-a-half trucks, APCs, and pallets full of C-rations, loading up return flights with body bags. Anyone paying attention knows that the cause tanked long ago. But in Douglas Pavlicek’s psychic economy, paying attention is nowhere near as important as staying busy. As long as he has work to fill his hours and his crewmates keep the radio on R&B, he doesn’t care how late or soon they lose this pointless war.
His habit of blacking out from dehydration earns him the nickname Faint. He often forgets to drink—in the daytime, anyway. After sundown, in quadruped crawls down Jomsurang Road in Khorat or the sex mazes of Patpong and Petchburi in Bangkok, City of Angels, the rivers of Mekhong and vats full of Singha flow freely enough. The hooch makes him funnier, more honest, less of an asshole, more capable of holding expansive philosophical conversations with samlor drivers about the destiny of life.
“You go home now?”
“Not yet, my man. War’s not over!”
“War over.”
“Not for me it isn’t. Last guy out still has to turn off the lights.”
“Everyone say war over. Nixon. Kissinger.”
“Fuckin’ Kissinger, man. Peace Prize, my flaming ass!”
“Yes. Fuck Le Duc Tho. Everyone go home now.”
Douggie no longer quite knows where that might be.
When not working, he gets high on Thai stick and sits for hours playing bass riffs along with Rare Earth and Three Dog Night. Or he’ll prowl around the ruined temples—Ayutthaya, Phimai. There’s something about the blasted chedis that reassures him. The toppled towers swallowed up by teak and ruined galleries left to crumble into scree. Jungle will get Bangkok, before too long. L.A., one day. And it’s okay. Not his fault. Simple history.
The monster bases with their fleets of carpet bombers are closing down, and the thousand piggyback cottage industries of an addicted economy turn violent. All Thailand knows what’s coming. They’ve been forced into this pact with the White Devil, and now it seems they’ve backed the wrong side. Yet the Thais Douglas meets show nothing but kindness to their destroyer. He’s thinking of staying on when his tour and the endless war are over. He’s been here for the good times, he should stick around and pay back, in the coming bad. He already knows a hundred words of Thai. Dâai. Nít nói. Dee mâak! For now, though, he’s the shortest of short-timers, crewing the most reliable transport ever built. It’s job security, for a few more months, anyway.
He and his crewmates prep the Herky Bird for yet another daily commute to Cambodia. They’ve been running resupply into Pochentong for weeks. Now resupply is turning into evacuation. Another month, maybe two—surely no longer. Cong are overrunning everything, like the summer rains.
He buckles himself into the jump seat and they’re up, routine, above the still lush and verdant world, the patchwork rice terraces and encircling jungle. Four years ago, the route was still green all the way across the rivers to the South China Sea. Then came the shitstorms of rainbow herbicides, the twelve million gallons of that modified plant hormone, Agent Orange.
A few minutes into Rouge Land they’re hit. Impossible; all their instruments had them clear the whole way into Phnom Penh. Flak rips into the cabin and cargo compartment. Forman, the flight engineer, catches shrapnel in the eye. A shell fragment slashes open the flank of the navigator, Neilson, and something warm, moist, and wrong comes spilling out of him.
The whole crew stays eerie-calm. They’ve queued up this particular horror one-reeler in their dreams for a long time, and here it is at last. Disbelief keeps them efficient. They fall in, attending to the wounded and inspecting the damage. Thin twin greasy black smoke trickles out of two engines, both starboard, which isn’t good. In a minute, the trickles thicken into plumes. Straub swings the plane into a wicked bank, back toward Thailand and salvation. It’s only a couple hundred clicks. A Hercules can fly on a single engine.
Then they start to drop, like a duck homing in on a lake. Smoke licks out from the back of the cargo bay. The word evacuates Pavlicek’s mouth before he knows what it means: Fire! On a plane packed to the hull with fuel and ordnance. He fights his way back toward the spreading flames. He must get the pallets out of the bay before they ignite. He, Levine, and Bragg struggle with the tie-downs and the releases. A bleeding air duct, ruptured in the blast, pisses molten steam on him. The heat scalds the left side of his face. He doesn’t even feel it. Yet.
They manage to jettison all the cargo. One of the pallets explodes on the way out of the plane. Shit detonates as it falls through the air. Then Pavlicek, too, is floating down to earth like a winged seed.
MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.
Hatched, the parasite larvae fed on the insides of this inflorescence. But they stopped short of laying waste to the thing that fed them. The males mated with their sisters, then died inside their plush fruit prison. The females emerged from the fig and flew off, coated in pollen, to take the endless game elsewhere. The fig they left behind produced a red bean smaller than the freckle on the tip of Douglas Pavlicek’s nose. That fig was eaten by a bulbul. The bean passed through the bird’s gut and dropped from the sky in a dollop of rich shit that landed in the crook of another tree, where sun and rain nursed the resulting seedling past the million ways of death. It grew; its roots slipped down and encased its host. Decades passed. Centuries. War on the backs of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs.
The bole of the fig put forth branches, and branches built their drip-tipped leaves. Elbows bent from the larger limbs, which lowered themselves to earth and thickened into new trunks. In time, the single central stem became a stand. The fig spread outward into an oval grove of three hundred main trunks and two thousand minor ones. And yet it was all still a single fig. One banyan.
. . .
LOADMASTER PAVLICEK belly-flops through the blue, faultless air. The whoosh perplexes him. Disaster floats high above him in the cloud, no longer needing to be solved. He wants only to forgive the world, forget, and fall. The wind takes him where it will, halfway across Nakhon Ratchasima Province. As the earth rushes up to meet Douglas, he revives. He tries to steer the chute toward a rice terrace, topped with water and stippled in green bundles. But the toggles tangle, he overshoots, and in the mad collapse of the last hundred feet a sidearm strapped to his thigh discharges. The bullet enters below his kneecap, shatters his tibia, and tears out through the heel of his Leather Personnel Carriers. His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.
Branches slash through his flight suit. His silks tangle him in a shroud. Between lacerations and burns, the gunshot wound and his pulverized leg, the airman passes out. He hangs twenty feet above the Earth in friendly territory, facedown and spread-eagled in the arms of a sacred tree bigger than some villages.
A baht bus full of pilgrims comes to pay devotion to the divine tree. They walk through the colonnade of aerial prop roots toward the central trunk, the trunk that crept down around a foster parent it choked to death ages ago. Set into that meandering bole is a shrine covered in flowers, beads, bells, prayer-covered papers, root-cracked statues, and sacred threads. The visitors parade toward the altar through the mazy pergola of spreading limbs, chanting in Pali. Their arms are full of joss sticks, stackable lunch tins filled with gang gai, and garlands of lotus blossom and jasmine. Three little children run ahead, singing a lûk thûng song as fast as their lips can move.
They draw near the shrine. They add their garlands to the rainbow of offerings already spidering across the branches. Then the sky falls and a missile crashes into the foliage above. Joss sticks, garlands, and lunch tins scatter at the impact. The shock knocks two pilgrims to the ground.
Chaos clears. The pilgrims look up. A giant farang hangs above their head, threatening to crash through the branches and fall the last short stretch to the ground. They call up to the foreigner. He doesn’t respond. A debate begins on how to reach the man and cut him loose from the stranglehold of fig and parachute. Technical Sergeant Pavlicek wakes to several Thais standing on benches and prodding him. He thinks he’s lying on his back, bobbing in a pool of atmosphere, while inverted people lean down and snatch at him from under the mirror surface. The pain from his leg and face crushes him. He coughs up a trickle of red spittle. He thinks: I’m dead.
No, a voice near his face corrects. Tree saved your life.
The three most useful syllables from his four years in Thailand bubble out of Douggie’s mouth. “Mâi kâo chai.” I don’t understand. With that, he blacks out again and resumes the long, cyclic task of falling. This time, he keeps on tumbling as the Earth beneath him opens wide and takes him in. He falls deep underground, a long, luxurious drop into the kingdom of roots. He plunges beneath the water table, downward toward the beginning of time, into the lair of a fantastic creature whose existence he never imagined.
THE LOCAL CLINIC won’t touch the leg of an American soldier. A staffer drives him to Khorat in a coral-colored Mazda with a Buddhist Wheel flag flying from its antenna. The car sounds like a choking khlong boat and trails a similar cloud of oily fumes in its wake. Pavlicek, drugged to the gills in the back seat, watches the green kilometers slide past. The low, lush landscape, the rolling hills. In the waters there are fish; in the fields, there is rice. The entire region will sink like a banana-leaf boat in a typhoon. Charlie will be sunning himself at the Siam Intercontinental, this time next year. A tree saved his life. It makes no sense.
When the injection from the clinic begins to wear off, Pavlicek begs the driver to kill him. The driver waves fingers around his mouth. “No Angrit.”
Douglas’s shinbone is cored. A doctor at the base in Khorat patches him up and ships him to Fifth Field, Bangkok. All his crewmates have survived—thanks in large part, the after-battle report says, to him. And he—he owes his own life to a tree.
. . .
THE AIR FORCE has no use for gimps. They give him crutches, an Air Force Cross—second highest medal for valor they hand out—and a free ticket back to SFO. He gets thirty-five bucks for the medal at Friendly’s Pawn on Mission. He’s not sure whether Friendly is helping a wounded vet or ripping him off blind. Nor does he much need to know. So ends loadmaster Douglas Pavlicek’s efforts to help preserve the free world.
The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below. Now and then words come trickling up the trunk for Douglas, like he’s still hanging upside down in the air: Tree saved your life. They neglect to tell him why.
LIFE COUNTS DOWN. Nine years, six jobs, two aborted love affairs, three state license plates, two and a half tons of adequate beer, and one recurring nightmare. With another fall ending and winter coming on, Douglas Pavlicek fetches the ball-peen hammer and smashes a row of potholes into the somewhat surfaced road that runs past the horse ranch and down toward Blackfoot. The goal is to slow people down so he can stand by the fence and see their faces a little. Come November, it may be some time before he’ll have that pleasure again.
Douglas makes a Saturday of it, after the horses have been fed and read to. The scheme works. If the car slows down enough, he and the dog jog alongside until the driver either opens the window to say hello or pulls a gun. Couple of nice conversations that way, real give-and-take. One guy even stops for a minute. Douggie is aware that the behavior could appear somewhat eccentric, from the outside. But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.
In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.
He has tried this idea out on others, without much success. But a bit of steel floating near his L4 vertebra, a small war chest of kiss-off pension, an Air Force Cross (pawned), a belated Purple Heart the back of which reminds him of a toilet seat, and the ability to make things with his hands all entitle him to strong opinions.
He still limps a bit, as he swings the hammer. His face has grown long and horsey, in unconscious imitation of the animals he tends. He lives by himself for seven months out of the year while the ranch’s elderly owners make the circuit of their other hobbies and houses. Mountains hem him in on three sides. The only TV reception he can get is the ant races. And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of. And still he spends the second Saturday of October working the road in front of the house, hoping a good-sized pothole will slow folks down.
He’s about to bag the checkpoint for the day and head back to the barn to talk Nietzsche with Chief Plenty Coups, the Belgian draft horse, when a red Dodge Dart crests the rise at somewhere near the speed of sound. Seeing the stretch of craters, the car slams into an admirably controlled skid. Douggie and the dog start their lope. The window is down by the time they come up alongside. A substantially redheaded woman leans out. They have much to talk about, Douglas sees. Destined to become friends. “Why is the road so messed up, just here?”
“Insurgents,” Douglas explains.
She rolls up her window and speeds off, axles be damned. Not even a look. Game over. It takes something out of Douglas. Yet another last straw. Not even enough élan vital left over to read the next bit of Zarathustra to the horse.
That night the temperature drops into the teens, with sandpapery snowflakes scouring his face like the whole great outdoors has turned into a California exfoliation parlor. He heads to Blackfoot, where he lays in a month’s worth of fruit cocktail, in case the drifts come early. He ends up at the billiards bar, dispensing silver dollars like they’re aluminum extrusion slugs.
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame,” he tells a fair chunk of the clientele. Thus speaks former prisoner 571, who will forever have to say that he didn’t give his blanket to a fellow inmate when he should have. He comes home after eighteen rounds of eight ball with more money than he left with. Buries the cash in the north pasture, alongside the rest of the nest egg, before the ground gets too cold to dig.
Winter here is longer than civilization’s running tab. He whittles. He builds things out of his pile of antlers: a lamp, a coat rack, a chair. He thinks about the redhead and her glorious, unattainable kind. He listens to the animals doing calisthenics in the attic. He makes it through The Portable Nietzsche and continues with The Complete Nostradamus, burning it page by page in the woodstove as he finishes each one. He grooms the hell out of the horses, rides them daily by rotation in the indoor ring, and reads them Paradise Lost, since Nostradamus is too upsetting.
In the spring, he takes a .22 out into the brush. But he can’t pull the trigger, even on a lame hare. There’s something wrong with him, he is aware. When his employers return in early summer, he thanks them and quits. He’s not sure where he’s going. Since his last flight as a loadmaster, such knowledge has been an impossible luxury.
He wants to keep heading west. Trouble is, the only strip still west of him feels like going east again. And yet he’s got his used but solid F100, new tires, a fair amount of coin, his veteran’s disability, and a friend in Eugene. Beautiful back roads lead through the mountains all the way to Boise and beyond. Life is as good as it has been since he fell out of the sky and into the banyan. The truck radio drifts in and out through the canyons, like the songs are coming from the moon. High lonesome blending into techno. He’s not listening anyway. He’s trancing out on the miles-long walls of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. He pulls off onto the shoulder to relieve himself. Out here on these ridges, he could pee on the highway’s center line and humanity would be none the wiser. But savagery is a slippery slope, as he has often read to the horses. He steps off the road and into the woods.
And there, flag at half mast, eyes toward the wilderness, waiting for his bladder to lift the lockdown, Douglas Pavlicek sees slabs of light through the trunks where there should be shadow all the way to the forest’s heart. He zips and investigates. Walks deeper into the undergrowth, only deeper in turns out to be farther out. The shortest of hikes, and he pops out again into . . . you can’t even call it a clearing. Call it the moon. A stumpy desolation spreads in front of him. The ground bleeds reddish slag mixed with sawdust and slash. Every direction for as far as he can see resembles a gigantic plucked fowl. It’s like the alien death rays have hit, and the world is asking permission to end. Only one thing in his experience comes even close: the patches of jungle that he, Dow, and Monsanto helped to clear. But this clearing is much more efficient.
He stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees, crosses the road, and peers through the woods on the other side. More moonscape stretches down the mountainside. He starts up the truck and drives. The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state. The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry. The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York.
He stops at a gas station to tank up. He asks the cashier, “Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”
The man takes Douggie’s silver dollars. “Shit, yeah.”
“And hiding it behind a little voter’s curtain?”
“They’re called beauty strips. Vista corridors.”
“But . . . isn’t that all national forest?”
The cashier just stares, like maybe there’s some trick to the question’s sheer stupidity.
“I thought national forest was protected land.”
The cashier blows a raspberry big as a pineapple. “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”
Well—education run amok. Douglas makes it a practice to learn something new every day. This little datum will last him for some days to come. Anger starts to boil over, somewhere before Bend. It’s not just the hundreds of thousands of acres that have vanished on him from one morning to its adjacent afternoon. He can accommodate the fact that Smoky Bear and Ranger Rick are socking away pensions paid by Weyerhaeuser. But the deliberate, simpleminded, and sickeningly effective trick of that highway-lining curtain of trees makes him want to smack someone. Every mile of it dupes his heart, just like they planned. It all looks so real, so virgin, so unspoiled. He feels like he’s on the Cedar Mountain, from that Gilgamesh, which he found back in the ranch library and read to the horses last year. The forest from the first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world. You could drive across the state and never know. That’s the fury of the thing.
In Eugene, Douglas converts a hefty tower of silver dollars into a ride in a small prop plane. “Just take me in the biggest circle you can make for the money. I want to see what down here looks like from up there.”
It looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow. Back on the planet’s concealing surface, Douglas spends three days on his buddy’s couch, mute. He has no capital. No political savvy. No golden tongue. No economic sophistication or social wherewithal. All he has is a clear-cut in front of him, whether his eyes are open or closed, haunting him all the way to the horizon.
He makes some inquiries. Then he hires out his one and a half good legs to a contractor, planting seedlings back into the stripped lands. They kit him out with a shovel and a Johnny Appleseed bag filled with seedlings for which they charge him a few pennies each. And for each planted tree that’s still alive in a month, they promise to pay him twenty cents.
Douglas-fir: America’s most valuable timber tree, so, sure—why not grow a tree farm full of nothing but? Five new houses per acre. He knows he’s slinging trees for middlemen to the same fuckers who cut down the primordial gods to begin with. But he doesn’t have to vanquish the lumber industry or even get nature’s revenge. He just needs to earn a living and undo the look of those cuts, a look that tunnels into him like a beetle into sapwood.
He spends his days traversing the silent, slop-filled, sloping dead zones. He drags himself across the scattered crap on all fours, losing his footing in the impenetrable slash, hauling himself forward by his claws over the chaos of roots, sticks, branches, limbs, stumps, and trunks, fibrous and shredded, left to rot in a tangled graveyard. He masters the art of a hundred different ways to topple. He stoops, makes a little wedge in the ground, stuffs in a seedling, and closes the hole with a loving nuzzle from his boot tip. Then he does that again. And again. In starbursts and scattered nets. Up hillsides and down denuded gullies. Dozens of times an hour. Hundreds of times a day. Thousands by thousands every week until his whole throbbing thirty-four-year-old body puffs out like it’s filled with viper venom. Some days, he’d saw off his gimpy leg with a file if he had one handy.
He sleeps in tree-planter camps filled with hippies and illegals, tough, lovable people too tired at day’s end to bother much with talk. A saying comes to him as he lies down at night, stiffened with pain—words he once read to his charges in his prior life as a ranch hand. If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah. Neither he nor the horses could make much of it. Until now.
The smell of the cuts overwhelms him. Damp spice drawer. Dank wool. Rusty nails. Pickled peppers. Scents that return him to childhood. Aromas that inject him with inexplicable happiness. Smells that plunge him down to the bottom of the deepest well and hold him there for hours. Then there’s the sound, like his ears are wadded up with pillow. The snarl of saws and feller bunchers, somewhere in the distance. A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
Some days, dawn breaks in Arthurian mists. There are mornings when the chill threatens to kill him, noons when the heat knocks him on his semi-numbed butt. Afternoons so profligate with blue he lies on his back and stares upward until his eyes water. There come mocking and merciless rains. Rain the weight and color of lead. Shy rain, auditioning with stage fright. Rain that leaves his feet sprouting moss and lichen. There were huge, spiked skeins of interwoven wood here once. They will come again.
Sometimes he works alongside other tree slingers, some of whom speak no language he recognizes. He meets hikers who want to know where the forests of their youth have gone. The seasonal pineros come and go, and the hard cores, like him, keep on. Mostly, it’s him and the brute, blank, stripped-down rhythm of the work. Wedge, squat, insert, stand, and boot-tip seal.
They look so pitiful, his tiny Douglas-firs. Like pipe cleaners. Like props for a train set. From a distance, spread across these man-made meadows, they’re a crew cut on a balding man. But each weedy stem he puts into the dirt is a magic trick eons in the making. He rolls them out by the thousands, and he loves and trusts them as he would dearly love to trust his fellow men.
Left alone—and there’s the catch—left alone to the air and light and rain, each one might put on tens of thousands of pounds. Any one of his starts could grow for the next six hundred years and dwarf the largest factory chimney. It could play host to generations of voles that never go to ground and several dozen species of insects whose only desire is to strip their host bare. Could rain down ten million needles a year on its own lower branches, building up mats of soil that grow their own gardens high in the air.
Any one of these gangly seedlings could push out millions of cones over the course of its life, the small yellow males with their pollen that floats across entire states, the drooping females with their mouse tails sticking out from the coil of scales, a look he finds dearer than his own life. And the forest they might remake he can almost smell—resinous, fresh, thick with yearning, sap of a fruit that is no fruit, the scent of Christmases endlessly older than Christ.
Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.