Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

Randy Schoof glanced at her assessingly. “I’m not late to pick Lisa up yet.” He looked out the window. “Why here?” he asked, his head turned away.

“This is where my dad has his logging equipment. I need to inventory it for insurance purposes.” She turned into the road.

“Come again?”

“The trucks and feller-bunchers and all are insured against damage or loss. Like your motorcycle and your truck.” It occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t like his motorcycle and truck. It wasn’t hard picturing him as the sort who maintained his insurance just long enough to register his vehicles, then let it lapse.

“Oh,” he said. Then, “Okay.”

She swung her car onto the dirt road. It was wide and hard-packed, a road meant for log-heavy trailers and dump trucks full of pulpwood, navigating through the icy depths of winter. It was made wider by the dead zones on either side, gullies wiped bare of life by the heavy concentration of salt washed off the road. Another damning aspect of logging her father would not allow.

She bumped maybe a half mile uphill and then shut down her car.

“What’s up?” Randy said. “We’re not nearly there yet.”

A childhood of traveling into the woods with her father had taught her that you never drive up an unmarked Adirondack road unless you have four-wheel drive and a winch chain. “I didn’t want to get stuck in a boggy spot or burn out my bushings trying to climb the mountain,” she said, grabbing her purse before getting out of the car. “You can wait here for me. I won’t be long.”

She started the long uphill slog. She had friends in Albany who would be aghast at her leaving her car and keys in possession of a man she had just met, but this was Millers Kill. In twenty minutes, without his even saying much, she knew his name, his wife’s name and where she worked, and where he had his motorcycle fixed. They probably had a dozen acquaintances in common. Not to mention her father.

At the thought of her father, her stomach clenched. She had sworn to herself she was going to act like, and be treated as, an adult this visit. Instead, she had been reduced to a level of discourse with her father no better than “You can’t make me!” “Oh, yeah? So there!” Punctuated by storming out of the yard without saying good-bye.

The echo of a slam cut off her self-recrimination. Must be Randy, bored with the view through the windshield. She didn’t wait for him, pressing upward against the bright cold sunlight, looking past the tenacious brown weeds, clinging to the poisoned soil, to the forest vaulting up on either side: heavy, dark hemlocks, the ghostly remains of birch trees, mummified blackberries caged inside their briar tombs.

She could hear the clearing site before she could see it. There was something about a large open space amidst all the trees-a nonsound, a negative space in the thick mass of the forest, a pause in the breath of the woods. The road curved, leveled, and opened up into the expanse of a battlefield. She winced at the enormous gash in the forest’s face, the battlement of stumps that had been chained out of the ground and discarded, the crackle-dry heaps of brush and junk wood piled like funeral pyres to the sky. The place, even abandoned, pulsed with a kind of energy, lingering ghosts of men ready to muscle miles of board feet and tons of pulp out of the raw wilderness. Machines waiting only for the overnight frosts to become a good hard freeze before tearing into the barricade of trees all around them.

They were all here, just as she remembered them from her childhood: the crawler tractor, the skidders, the bulldozer, the loader, the trucks. Back when she was a kid, her dad had tied and staked tarps over the equipment, protecting the heavy machinery from rain and leaf fall. Now he used pop-up portable shelters, which gave the machines the appearance of a herd of dinosaurs on a camping trip.

Becky sighed and dug into her purse for her portable camera and notepad. She flipped the notepad open and wrote No. 1: bulldozer. She walked around the dozer, snapping pictures from the front and back and sides, trying not to envision riding on her dad’s lap on the thing as he leveled out a new access road.

Will you name the road for me, Daddy?

I sure will, sweet pea.

Sure enough, he had bought one of those sign kits at the hardware store, and the access road for that winter’s cut was Becky Avenue-“avenue” because she thought her dad’s suggestion, Becky Lane, sounded like an actress’s name. That had been when she thought making her mark on the forest was the way to show how much she loved it.

She hissed, impatient with her own sentimentality, and moved on to the next vehicle. No. 2: skidder.

Randy Schoof appeared over the rise where the road met the clearing. He waved, and she waved back before raising the camera and capturing a side view of the skidder for posterity. Randy strolled past her as she jotted down a description of the skidder’s condition, glancing at the feller-buncher and the dump trucks, resembling nothing so much as a Sunday shopper on a car lot.

We’re not nearly there yet. He had said that, when she parked the Prius. She went around to the other side of the skidder. “Have you been here before?” she called out.

He stopped. “Uh. Yeah.” He took a few steps toward her. “Actually, I work for your dad. I mean, I did. Before he decided to pull the plug.”

Great. She was up here with a disgruntled former employee. What if he decided to goof up one of the engines to get back at her dad? “It’s not really his decision,” she said in a loud voice. “Once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation takes control, logging’s going to be forbidden on this land.”

He looked at the slumbering giants all around them. “There’s still work if you’re willing to go for it. Travel farther up north for the cutting. Or harvest small private wood-lots. You know, fifteen acres here, fifteen acres there.”

She crossed to the feller-buncher and started taking pictures. The sooner she finished up, the sooner she-they-could get out of here. “Fifteen acres here and there won’t pay my dad’s costs.”

“Yeah, but what about just a few guys, throwing in together?”

She looked at him sharply. “What were you seeing my father about earlier?”

“I wanted to work something out to, you know, keep the business going. Like, pay him over time for the equipment.”

“It’s pretty valuable.” Becky tried to keep the skepticism from her voice. “I don’t know if he can afford to take back a note on it.” The young man’s blank face indicated he had no idea what taking back a note was. “Sell the equipment to you on credit and let you pay the loan back on time,” she explained.

“So he’s going to sell all this.” He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and rocked back and forth on his boot heels.

“Yeah.” She moved to the front of the crawler tractor and took another picture.

“Man, all I need is one break. I know I could make a go of it.”

She forced herself to keep her eyes on her notebook as she wrote down the condition and VIN of the crawler tractor.

“I mean, what if a couple machines went missing? Your dad wouldn’t be hurting. He’d get the insurance money.”

Was he suggesting what she thought he was? She lifted her head. Randy was staring past her, past the crawler tractor, into some limitless future that existed only in his mind.

She brought the camera back up and snapped off a shot of him.

“Hey,” he said.

She took another. Then another. Stepped to one side so she could center him in front of the feller-buncher.

“Quit it. What are you doing?” He took a step toward her.