ROBIN COULDN’T stay on her feet. She and her father weren’t ten minutes off the hiking trail, and for the third time she was down in the undergrowth. The vines and creepers got under her Gore-Tex. Robin came up with her machete. She laid into the brush around her, whip whip whip, till she wore herself out against her pack-straps.
Her father turned, drawn up to full height for the first time since they’d left the truck. He had the heavier pack. He wore the real camouflage, greasy jungle-issue synthetics, rain gear older than Robin herself. Dale looked every long inch the renegade. Deliberately he tasted his cigarette. Her own coat was burgundy, a catalogue item, and under its sleeves she itched from the wet touch of the plants.
“I know, I know,” she said. “We’re not supposed to leave tracks.”
“Do you want to quit?” her father said. “In two hours we could be back in front of the VCR.”
Around her the cut branches dangled by their winter skins, their exposed pulp like new stars sewn into the drizzle. This was a designated Wilderness Area, above the Willamette River valley. The timber here had gone so long unharvested that there were stretches of primary forest, easy travelling. But Robin and Dale had to stick with the ground cover. They had to think about the county sheriff, the men who’d like to find her father’s crop. Dale grew high-grade marijuana in these hills. He’d warned Robin, this wouldn’t be like one of her senior-class hikes. No trails, no creek beds, and up at the “hole” they’d have to do the planting. So early in the year, putting in the seeds was bound to be ugly. Only after that—only if it was safe—could her father show her where he’d hid the money. The cash was sealed in a coffee can, buried and camouflaged.
“I want to go on,” Robin said. “I want to see.”
“Well, I’m not insisting.” Under his hood he softened, grinning. “I’m not forcing you.”
“Dale, I want to.” She worked the machete into its sheath. “I mean,” Robin went on, “this isn’t the kind of thing I do with Mom.”
He swung off again through the undergrowth, leaning into his pack-straps. He was carrying the rock phosphates. Dale had that great outlaw stride, almost a swagger. Nonetheless he must be thinking about her mother; one mention was all it took. His walk had some stomp to it. Robin could hear the mulch crackle under him even through the white noise within her hood. And her father began to gab. “Well honey, your mother’s still down in the valley. She’s down in that mind-set, she’s one of the office mice.” He knew those office mice. “That’s why I keep my ill-gotten gains in the woods, you know. Put it in a bank and those mice can get it.”
At a low scrub oak, feisty but webbed with lichen, Dale crouched to stub out his cigarette.
“Robin, listen. Have you ever come up on one of them like, unexpectedly?” Elbows on knees, he made claws of his hands. “Have you ever like, surprised a mouse in its lair? Man, it’s a terrible thing to see.” He took out the Marlboro box, an eye-catcher, vivid against his camouflage. “They show you their teeth. They show you their claws, oh yeah. They’ll fight to the death for the burrow.”
Robin allowed herself to laugh, scratching under one cuff.
“They believe in the burrow, Robin. They actually think they’ve got the good life.”
She laughed, refastening the Velero at that wrist.
“Man oh man. The things we let our children see.”
“Oh Daddy. Come on. You work in the valley.”
Dale tucked his butt into the Marlboro box. He snapped the bright thing back into his pocket. “Okay, I’ve got a title on my desk. I’ve got a billboard on the highway. But I’m keeping my dope money in the woods.”
He strode off again, in a sudden wash of sunshine. Robin kept her eyes down; she couldn’t let him see how he got to her.
In her father’s voice Robin picked up echoes of his record collection, half a hundred lowdown singers with baggy black faces and knockabout teeth. Plus he was scamming, talking trash, and that got to her too. In these woods, scamming came as a relief. On Robin’s hikes with the senior class, just the opposite, everybody got into that hippy-dippy granola goop. Everybody started waving the flag for “the wilderness” and “the planet.” Robin’s boyfriend, Anu, didn’t like the hippy-dippy stuff either; he said it was a chemical reaction to the landscape. Anu said that anyone who grew up in Oregon had to be permanently stoned on the highway overlooks. Oh Anu. Robin’s father was the only other man she knew with such a smart mouth.
Except Anu didn’t always come back to the same damn thing. “Yeah,” Dale was saying, “I can just see your mother.”
Come on, Dad. Get off it.
“Robin, I mean, your mom has bought the whole fantasy, the office and the good life. Your mom’s a believer.”
Robin almost wished he’d brought his gun. Dale had some serious iron, a square and colorless .45. Even in her day-dreams, My Father the Outlaw, the gun had always made her nervous. But now Dale was just another grumping old hobo bent under a pack. The sun had gone back behind the clouds, and he was carrying nothing but farm tools and fertilizer.
“I can see her, Robb. As plain as if she’s here.”
According to Robin’s mother—she preferred to be called Roy—the breakup was a done thing as soon as they’d moved West. Back in Philadelphia she and Dale could kid themselves that the trouble was money. Dale had fallen just short of promotion, her mother’s people just short of the contract that would make the agency. The scholarship that had carried Robin through sophomore year at the Park School had lost its funding. Meantime out in Tangent, Oregon, a former nobody in Dale’s office was doing seven thousand a month designing solar homes. Her father hadn’t stopped talking the whole way West. Robin honey, try to understand, people like Dale and Roy aren’t that old. People like Dale and Roy still have dreams. Then that same September, her mother had heaved the coffee pot through the glass panels in the alcove.
Tangent is right, her mother had screamed.
“I just wish your mother could meet Sharonna or Flo,” Dale said now. “One of the younger women I’m seeing.”
They were sidling through brambles and hip-high stands of fern. “It would be good for Roy, I think.”
Right, Dad. Good for Roy. Dale might as well have been pointing at the sky with one hand and reaching for her purse with the other. Nothing about the divorce got to Robin like that, like she had to cover up and get tricky. Of course there’d been hard places for her. Eating alone had been the worst, jar after jar of Paul Newman Spaghetti Sauce while Roy was on job interviews up in Portland. But she’d talked it all out with Anu, the whole soap opera of the last year and a half, and she’d only started crying once. These days, when she visited Tangent she was happy about it, happy for the change. In the mornings the louvers in her father’s skylight lit up in stripes.
What was the problem with the adults? God, the way Roy had carried on when she’d learned about Dale’s buried money (Robin’s mother had some outlaw contacts of her own, through a coffee shop in downtown Salem). Thousands of dollars! Roy had screamed. Thousands! Enough to move back to Philly! Robin had taken in the tantrum with hands on hips, concentrating. Likewise last night, when her father had invited her to come see his hole, Robin had nodded, avid, squinting. In both cases, it wasn’t just the money that had her hooked.
She could use the money. She’d be eighteen in July, and she and Anu had plans. But more than that, she had to learn this stuff. She had to learn what made these two poor diseased creatures tick. Robin liked to read murder mysteries, the more hard-boiled the better, and in them she always looked forward to the scene in the morgue. She always enjoyed the conversation with the coroner, a doctor with an attitude, a death-pro making wisecracks over the victim. These days, Robin figured, she had to be the coroner. She had to get smart and icy, with the dead marriage on the table before her.
Last night, Dale had kept warning her that the trek to his hole wouldn’t be easy. He’d said he would leave behind his .45, but there might be other trouble. Robin at last had fallen back on an old family line, something Dale had picked up from a movie: I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble. And the fact was, she wanted trouble. Not that she’d told Dale, oh no. If she’d learned one thing about keeping control, it was to let him do the talking.
Since they’d left the trail, he’d been taking her in spirals. Robin couldn’t be sure if, overall, they were moving uphill or down. Occasionally there’d be breaks in the forest, but the view left her confused. So early in the year, these woods offered a dishrag beauty, rumpled green and grease. The wrinkles of clear-cut and growth kept shifting, dreamy under the rain. The only clarity in the landscape was either a thousand feet down or a thousand feet up. Above, the sunshine now and again opened a wound in the clouds’ beard, exposing red and blue bloodlines in the puffy upper reaches of the cumuli. Below, one time, they saw the fringes of a town.
A town? A mock-up, more like it—the sort of thing her mother did for the Bureau of Tourism. A sprinkling of geometry in the lowlands. Robin tried to pick out a landmark while Dale turned away and squatted. She heard him searching through the small leaves.
“Yep,” he said. “Yep. Come and take a look.”
His old suit stank, a human mulch. Bent beside him, Robin saw the broken ivy and pine cones, the gravel trod into the ground. Yep. It looked like more than one person, too. Half-legible boot prints lay in a V of aboveground roots.
“It’s got to be the sheriff,” her father said.
Oh right. It couldn’t be anybody except the sheriff. But while he and Robin fell into step again, corkscrewing away from the overlook, Dale kept insisting that the tracks were the worst kind of trouble. The troopers, Robb.
His proof seemed to be based on the cycle of the seasons. “In the woods,” Dale said, “you don’t measure time by the weather, the way you would back East.” He took her into thicker brush, ropy salmonberry. “Here it’s just, some days are a little colder and wetter, some are a little warmer and dryer.” And so, he explained, a grower measures his year by people and their movements. “Like September first, Robb. That’s a key date, that’s when hunting season starts.”
Or had he said October first? What kind of trash was he talking? “Robin, I’ll tell you. You don’t want to be in here when there’s men walking round carrying guns.”
Then: “See, Robb. See there!”
Dale dropped into a squat, his cigarette-arm stiff behind him. “See the cuts?”
Her itching flared up again. Her father gestured across cuts in the greenery, broken branches, plainly the work of a machete. Whoever had done it, Robin couldn’t blame them. The way was blocked by a holly tree, a thorny red-speckled miracle. The exposed pulp had already gone dark and sapless, and underfoot the runoff had reduced the prints to a jumble.
“Doesn’t look too recent,” she said.
“You wish.”
She worked her hands under her sleeves, her fingernails cold against the rubbery veins.
“Listen, little girl.” Dale was picking through the grass beneath the holly. “In the woods it’s easy to see what you want to see. It’s like the ’Nam that way.”
“Give me a break, Dale. You were at Penn State the whole time.”
No response. He fingered something off the ground. “Yep, yep,” he said finally. “It’s the troopers.”
Facing her, he held it up: a black chip about the size of his palm. At first she thought that whoever had come through here had lost a piece of their machete.
“Candy bar,” Dale said.
It had to be the cigarette that made him look so fierce. Certainly his find was nothing to get worked up about. Nothing but the little dark cardboard sheet from under a Mars Bar or a Three Musketeers.
“Come on,” she said.
His face lengthened. “Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking.”
Robin scratched more seriously.
“You’re thinking the old man’s a little paranoid. Right? You’re thinking the old man’s seen too many movies.”
“Well I mean Dale, even if these were the cops—“
“if these were the cops? If? Robin, weren’t you listening when I told you about the seasons? The point is, at this time of year nobody else should be around.”
Oh Dale. So lost in space that he didn’t see it—what could the sheriff do to them? What, even if these were the cops? Dale didn’t have his plants in yet. Nobody had their plants in yet, it was only February for God’s sake, and Robin would never have come out here with him if she’d thought she could go to jail for carrying seeds. As of now, Dale and Robin were just a couple of hikers with an idea.
“Robin, hey. This is the lore of the woods.”
She kept her mouth shut. Anu had a name for what her father was into: the Transmit-Only Mode.
“These days, how often does a father get a chance to pass on the lore of the big woods?”
Transmit-Only, software for adults. Dale was back on his haunches, his pack-straps in his elbows. She checked her watch. Past ten-thirty, and it would get dark by four. When would they have time for the money?
“Robin, I know that sheriff.” He leveled the cardboard at her; she thought of his .45. “It’s not paranoia.”
“Roy’s the one who thinks you’re paranoid,” she said.
Dale lowered the paper gun. His mouth opened, then shut. He lowered his head and fished out the Marlboro box.
“You know Roy,” Robin went on, more quietly. “You know how she talks. She’s always saying what a pothead you are.”
He got his feet back under him. He showed a lot of knuckle, folding the black thing and tucking it away. And Robin was sorry for him, him and his nic-stained hands, so helpless since she’d learned where to poke him. But Dad—somebody had to carry the iron, on this trip.
Still Dale kept playing the desperado. Every dozen paces or so he would crouch and peer hawk-like around the edges of his hood. When he lit up another Marlboro, he hid the flame. Stalking the wild Butterfinger? Robin, waiting over him, couldn’t help but think of Anu. Her boyfriend was Vietnam for real, raised in the canals; he could tell her father something. In fact both her folks should spend a few hours with Anu—listening, for once. He could tell her mother how the Communists had impounded his family bank account. They’d taken the luggage, the bicycles, the shoes. Robin would like her mother to hear about that. She’d liked to see if there was any more whining about Dale’s stash in the woods, after that.
In the corners of her boyfriend’s face (the Asiatics she’d known weren’t so sleek, so fine), Robin had found a toughness beyond her parents’ wildest dreams. In the bucket seats of her mother’s Nissan, where she and Anu had to kiss over the gearshift, there were evenings when they floated free of the knobs and latches by means of eye contact alone. There were long uprushes of staring during which Robin could also somehow look down on this girl in the driver’s seat, this tomboy jammed sideways behind the steering wheel. She wouldn’t have believed her eyes, her mind’s eyes, if Anu hadn’t told her he’d seen it himself. And then he’d let her in on his secret plan for getting ahead in this country.
So-o-o tough. Most senior transfers were still trying to learn their way to the cafeteria, and Anu had a plan for getting ahead. In this country, he’d told her, you and I can truly rise above.
Her mother had noticed, because Robin had bought those cowboy boots with the four-inch heels. But Roy had only lectured her on the side effects of the Pill: Honey, I had a hangover every morning. And Robin had gone to Dale, she’d gotten him to rent a video history of the war. But her father too had wound up talking about himself. She doubted if either of her parents knew her boyfriend’s full name, Anu Sher Wud. Certainly neither of them realized that now she and Anu had a plan. No fantasy, a real plan. They were going to elope.
Anu had a chance to hook on in Hollywood. A cousin there had steady work as Gaffer and Best Boy. If you’re from Vietnam, Anu had told her, the family really looks out for you. If he could take her down the coast—and soon, while the job pipeline was still open—by the end of the year they could both be in the union. She’d seen the letters from his cousin, on studio letterhead, with characters like columns of wigwag pennants. That was why she’d come into the Wilderness Area. She had a gold mine down the road. Once she and her father got into that buried can, Robin shouldn’t have any trouble getting him to fork over a couple of thousand at least.
Dale would stop and squat anywhere, once even in a patch of skunk cabbage. Were they actually making headway, between these ticking, faraway stares? They seemed locked into a corkscrew approach, first upslope, then down. Her father’s rap took them nowhere new either.
“So your mother calls me a pothead,” Dale said. “You know it doesn’t surprise me, Robb. That witch sold me out a long time ago.”
Robin frowned. Did they have to get nasty in order to move on? They were past the skunk cabbage but the smell had left her dizzy. She fumbled over moguls in the undergrowth.
“Happens all the time,” Dale went on. “Every day, Robb, somebody sells out their family for a Macintosh.” His voice grew more smoky. “Hey, what do we expect, in this country? It’s called career mobility, right? I mean a person goes to college in one city, and then there’s grad school somewhere else, and after that they take the best offer they can find. Am I right? For the rest of their lives, they go on taking the best offer. Mobility ever after.”
Was he talking or singing? The slashes of her father’s camouflage, up ahead, jogged like follow-the-bouncing-ball.
“Career mobility, Robb. It’s the great American scramble. And every day, somebody else decides that a family’s too big a load to haul.”
He dropped again, the cabbage-smell rising off him as he arranged his joints. She had to clear her head. “Every day,” Robin tried, “somebody else joins the office mice.”
Dale grinned but went on checking the near slope. Beaten down by the drizzle, his smoke drifted across his stare. “Well it’s no joke, honey. It’s some mean business, we’re talking about.” Even in the woods, Dale whispered, you found people who’d caught the career disease. “Oh yeah, Robb. I know some guys around here who’ll cut their own grandmother if they think she’ll hurt the crop.” Dale knew growers who set bear traps round their holes. “I mean, a bear trap’ll take a man’s leg off.” Or had she ever heard of punji sticks?
“Daddy, come on.”
“It works like this. First you dig a pit—“
“Daddy.” She yanked back her hood. “Are you putting dope in your cigarettes again?”
A lame move, a dumb joke. And she’d been way too loud, she’d silenced the winter birds. But the look her father showed her was sheepish.
“Well well, little girl. Is it that obvious?”
His grin was hard to get a fix on, a pointed thing in flight.
“Robb, I’m asking. Is it obvious?”
“You mean you are? You’re smoking pot right now?”
“Just a taste. It gives me like an infra-red scope.”
“But I thought, I thought…”
With her ears bare, the drizzle seemed very cold. Dale remained sideways to her, half an eye on the woods. Robin bit her lips and shook her head.
“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “If the Man’s going to bust you for seeds, he might as well bust you for smoking.”
Could they get busted for seeds? Could they, after all? Doping and its complications were still new to Robin. Dale hadn’t started growing his own till after she and Roy had moved out, and she’d only occasionally seen him smoking, while firing up a barbecue or watching the Phillies on cable. Cigarettes like these he called “half-and-halfs,” pot and tobacco. He’d told her he didn’t enjoy them, didn’t “appreciate the high.” Yet here he sat, who knows how many dark miles into the woods, grinning over a trick Marlboro. He’d never seemed more like a bluesman.
“We could still go back,” he growled. “We could turn around right here.”
The best answer—the toughest—was to show him her watch. Put it right under his nose.
The next time they stopped, Dale actually hit her. He got her a stiff poke between the breasts, shoving her back. Robin wound up against the trunk of a pine, under the branches. A smell of cinders, a sore spot where he’d jabbed her. If he was this hyper they must be close to the hole. During the last stretch of hiking their spirals had hooked inward more often, and Dale had laid off the smokes.
Around her, the dangling needle clusters were whisk brooms, green and medieval. Beyond that the forest looked harmless. The most dangerous thing out there was her father. Down on the balls of his feet again, he scoped it out, trembling. The dangling tips of his pack-ties shivered. Bitterly Robin thought of her murder mysteries, the coroner’s steady hands over the corpse. Dale’s hands couldn’t stop. He fingered the moss at his feet, the sapling by his shoulder; he reached crookedly behind him, up beneath the pack and under his jacket. Robin glimpsed a bit of black, maybe metal. Or no—no maybe about it. Not after how he’d fooled her with the half-and-halfs. The thing under the back of her father’s coat had to be metal. He must be packing a gun after all.
The sun reemerged, brightening the underside of his wrist. The birds kept up their idiocy.
Slowly, Dale’s hand withdrew from beneath the rain gear. Robin lost sight of the extra load, the black. And she was talking to herself, when had that started? She was rehearsing the letter for him and Roy, the explanation she’d leave when she took off with Anu.
“I am only seventeen years old,” she whispered, “but I know that the Willamette Valley is not the end of the world.”
“Oh man,” Dale cried. “Oh man man man oh no.”
He was up, his hands empty. He strode towards another stand of brush.
“What were you thinking?” he wailed. “Oh man. You crazy, heartbroken motherfucker, what were you fucking thinking?”
“What?” she said. He usually stayed away from language like that when she was around. “Daddy, what?”
“It’s just a hole, you crazy motherfucker. It’s just a goddamn fucking hole. Were you really thinking it was safer than anybody else’s?”
She shouldered out from under the pine. Relieved just to move, aware again of the machete at her hip. Dale stood with his ear on his shoulder, and in the sunshine and drizzle the brush round his legs appeared somehow off. The plants sat too close together for their size, out of kilter. Her father’s noise was even stranger. He’d stopped screaming at himself. Instead he choked, he snorted, and it had nothing to do with smoking.
“What is this?” The sore spot in her chest expanded. “Are you…Daddy, are you crying?”
He turned his back, kicking aside a fern bush. Talk about out of kilter—Dale kicked the plant over. The stem-bottoms poked up, slashed and pulpy. Someone had laid into the greenery here. What they couldn’t chop, they’d trampled. Vines zigzagged across the floor’s growth impossibly, and a berry bush had been ripped out by its roots. Humping up beside her father, Robin found mountain-boot tracks, ovals crisp at the edges (Dale’s old L.L. Beans left softer indents). The attack had included a spade or hoe. It was five or six square yards of devastation.
“The sheriff did all this?” Robin asked.
Dale turned away again, pulling his hood together over his sobs. Dad.
But at least while he was like that she could see his hands. And Robin might have been halfway to tears herself, suffering flash after flash of troopers breaking from the nearby woods, of gunfire erupting. One bad flash after another, brought on by her father’s grounds, a manmade pond surrounded by places to hide. The water lay at the center of the ruined brush, a brief deep rectangle alive with scum and insects. Two or three rat-like creatures floated, drowned, at the hole’s rim. The rim itself glittered here and there with traces of slick plastic, greeny-black, tent material or a heavyweight garbage bag. A lot of work. It must have taken hours to set in this rain-catch, this buried tarp or whatever. That same day, Dale must have transplanted the ground cover. In the middle of the woods he’d built a self-contained irrigation system, weatherproof and landscaped. And hidden.
“You did all this?” Robin said.
His answer was a mumble, soppy, full of pain. Dad…
She tottered around the hole’s edges, open-mouthed, tasting the drizzle. She’d had no idea a person could do so much damage just by tearing away the camouflage.
At one corner of the pool, where the stomping and chopping looked worst, someone had driven a stake. A simple garden stake, frail and waist-high. Tacked to the top was a white laminated card:
N.T. Hingham
COUNTY SHERIFF
Please call at your earliest convenience.
She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. The thing was an arrow in the ground, with white unnatural feathers.
“Do they…boy. Daddy, do they always do this? I mean, I can’t believe it. He left his card.”
Dale’s eyes emerged, eggy above his loosening fists.
“Daddy,” she said then, “I can’t believe it. I thought all this stuff about the troopers was a fantasy.”
What? Robin jammed her thumbs back under her pack-straps. Hey, enough talking for one day. First she gets all fluttery over his smoking, now she gives away another secret—enough. She knew better than to let a few tears throw her off. She’d seen that iron under his waistband. Robin brought her knuckles together, across her breasts, and she wouldn’t give in to her itch. Control, control. Anyway her father was coming out of it, yanking back his hood, unbuckling his pack. Once the thing was off his shoulders Dale just let it drop, ka-wransh-shh. Rock phosphates.
“It’s okay, Robb,” he said finally.
She kept her knuckles together, her face composed.
“It’s okay, really. Baby, the fact is, you were right. It was a fantasy. Your crazyman father has been walking around in a fantasy.”
She frowned. “I don’t see any fantasy here. This was some place.”
“Oh.” Dale flapped a hand. “Robb, the hole is nothing.”
Nothing? Then what was he crying about?
“Man,” he was saying, “what was I thinking? What was I thinking I—“
“Dale.” She gave it a beat; this had to sound strong. “You better not have been lying about the money.”
He didn’t understand. Squinting, he massaged one shoulder.
“The money in the can, Dale,” she said. “That better not have been one of your funny stories.”
His eyes widened again, differently. “Oh my baby,” he said. He raised his face to the half-lit sky and she noticed his height, a head taller than her still.
“I guess I’ve still got a little mouth to feed,” he said.
Robin waved away a bug. Or she waved, anyway; she needed something to do with her hands. If only Dale would act like a man with a gun! But her father wore a Sunday face, unshaven, battered, and his half-and-halfs had taken a toll. When he assured her not to worry, he threw her off that much more. “The money’s real,” he told her, “eleven hundred and ninety dollars.” He lingered over the syllable breaks. “You’ll get your cut, don’t you worry.”
Every slow word threw her off. Eleven hundred and ninety? She was getting a cut of eleven hundred and ninety?
“I’ll take you to the can,” he said. “I realize you didn’t come into the woods just to play the pioneer girl.”
She dropped one hand to the handle of her machete.
“Dale, I don’t get it. What’s going on here?”
“Lost in a fantasy, honey. A hand-me-down fantasy.”
“Yeah, well, so? So why were you bawling like that?”
“I was lost in a fantasy, and I dragged you along too.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I used you,” he said.
There was the rain, static in the signal between them. Once more Dale’s eyes changed shape. “See,” he said, “I heard my hole was in danger. I heard the sheriff might be on to me. I mean, the Man gets his coffee the same place I do.”
In the strengthening sun, his renewed tears were bits of aluminum in his stubble. “See, I wanted you for my cover. I have to tell you; if I’m not going to be a rat, I have to. In case we got caught, Robb, I—I wanted you for a scam.”
The dead forest rats stank, way too close. Between her and her father, Robin didn’t have room to relieve her itch.
“I mean, no way a grower ever brings a kid along. No way, Robb. The job is cut-throat, in here. But see, I was even meaner than the rest of them: I figured out a way to use my own daughter. See, I brought you along and I brought a couple other things, a couple other tricks. I had a way where I—I figured I was covered.”
“You were covered.”
Chin up, chest up, he nodded. Robin realized she hadn’t just repeated his words, she’d echoed his voice. She’d sounded spongy, wobbly. Out of control.
“Robin, that’s not the worst. The worst was, I kept kidding myself that the trip was for you.”
Then there was the rainbow, the last straw. Robin couldn’t look at her father’s face any longer, and casting round for better she saw it in an opening between the tallest firs: a double rainbow, breathtaking, beautiful. Bent shafts of red and blue built across cumuli more white than usual for February. She couldn’t stand it, such a corny show of good news at a time like this, and the rainbow was all the harder to take for how it unwound from the tatters of the Wilderness Area.
“That was the worst,” Dale was saying. “That was where I was totally lost. See, you told me you wanted this, Robb. You said you couldn’t do this with Mom. So then I could kid myself, I could say, see, this whole runaround is really for her. Robb, I mean—when a father’s acting like a rat, he’s got some old, old lines to fall back on…”
Robin spun away and ran.
Two minutes later, breathing hard, they were down on their knees together in the forest. Busy with their hands, avoiding each other’s eyes. Robin once more fisted together her pack-straps. Dale brought out a floppy leather sack of seeds.
“For the big evergreens,” he said. “Seeds.”
The bits of pine cone glittered at the bottom of the pouch. It was like he held a mouth in his hand, a worn and thick-lipped maw, and the seeds were yellow fillings at the back. Why hadn’t she seen this sack before? Why hadn’t she seen, at least, that it wasn’t a gun? As soon as Dale had caught up with her—which didn’t take long, with this load on her back—she’d screamed at him about the gun. “You can’t hide these things from me!” she’d screamed. But when Robin had managed to face him, he’d only looked puzzled. Then she’d dropped. Where was she going to run, anyway? Where? And Dale had knelt beside her, fishing the sloppy black thing from behind his back. It wasn’t a gun.
“Seeds,” Dale repeated. “It’s for that scam I was telling you about.”
His plan, he explained, had been to tell the troopers that they were environmentalists. “You know, Robb. Just a father and daughter who care about preserving the splendor of the wilderness.” As for the marijuana, he’d kept those seeds separate, in the coat pocket that was easiest to reach. He’d been ready to chuck them at the first sign of trouble.
“Then with these pine seeds, see, the rest of our stuff would all fit. Even the rock phosphates would fit.”
Their breathing hadn’t settled yet. Robin stumped upslope, bringing her face to his level.
“We’d still be breaking the law,” he admitted.
“We’d still be breaking the law?” she said. “Dale, just for starters, we’d be breaking the law! I mean, is that your idea of a cover story? Is that your idea of how to get us out? God, an old B movie wouldn’t have such a stupid story. I mean, you talk about people trading in their family for a Macintosh, here you are trading in your family for a B movie. A really dumb B movie!
“Dale, man oh man. I mean, if anyone ever deserved to go to jail just for having an idea—Dad, listen to me. Listen like I was Mom, okay? Just listen while I do the talking. I mean, who do you think these troopers are? Do you think they’re idiots? People planting trees, I mean, they don’t even use seeds. People planting trees use seedlings. Seedlings, Dad, seed-lings. Even I know that. They come in with trees that have already started to grow!”
There he was with his Sunday face. “Are you through?”
“You must have been stoned when you thought up that one,” Robin said. “If the sheriff saw that old sack he’d laugh in your face.”
She swatted the thing from his hand. The leather went rippling through the weeds, and for a moment it looked like a mouse, some ragged brown life in a scramble. But then it stopped and collapsed.
“At least I had an idea,” Dale said after a minute. “I had a way we might get sprung.”
“Oh yeah, a stroke of genius.” Oh no—was she starting to laugh? “A legend for wilderness people everywhere.”
“Okay, okay, that was wrong. A father should never kid himself that he’s a legend.”
She was starting to laugh, laughing already. It felt like someone kept plucking a bowstring in her gut. “Seeds,” she repeated. “Seeds.”
“Well, there’s still the can.” He tried to get into the spirit, grinning, hopeful.
Oh yeah, the can. The cash. She and her boyfriend would take whatever they could get. Maybe Robin would tell Dale about it, too; yeah, okay, maybe—though no way she could manage it now. Not with this bowstring going sproing in her belly. Not while she was hooting, chirping, struggling for a half-decent breath. She was out of it. She was airborne for God’s sake. And as for her father trying to work the pack-straps off her shoulders, his clumsy attempts to make her comfortable, that was the funniest thing yet. He was trying to help, and it was hysterical. Hey, was this a father or a feather? Sproing, sproing.
Robin tried to swallow, tried to frown, she lifted her face to the cold and wet. But the rainbow was still there. Hey—shouldn’t the colors fade?