Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“You smoke?” she asked, and nodded at the ashtray on the table, near Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. It was half-full of butts and ash, because I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of days.

“Yeah, well. I was quit, you know, but now it seems like I’m not so quit anymore.”

“So you don’t mind if I smoke?”

“No, I don’t mind in the least,” I replied, and she fished a pack of Camels out of the bulging leather shoulder bag she carries for a purse. The Camels and a pink disposable Bic lighter, and she offered me one of the cigarettes, which I gladly accepted. She lit it for me, and then sat staring silently out the kitchen window for a minute or so. It was a silence that was beginning to grow uncomfortable, when she said, “I like your books. The novels. Your short stories are better written, though. But, I never would have guessed that you wrote any thing on something like that,” and, with her cigarette, she pointed at the antique typewriter. Suddenly, I was flustered, disarmed, whatever you want to call it, left feeling as though I ought be simultaneously thanking her for the compliment (as it happens, I like my short fiction better, too), apologizing for the old dreadnaught of a typewriter, and explaining that I normally work on a laptop. Instead, I just nodded and took another long drag on my own cigarette.

“We don’t have to talk about it, Sarah, not if you would prefer not to,” she said.

“Well, then,” I replied. “In that case, I would prefer not to, thank you.”

“I know how it goes,” she told me, and sort of half smiled. “Or, how it doesn’t come, as the case may be.”

“So, you drove all the way from Los Angeles?” I asked, changing the subject, though I’d already asked her that same question outside, and she’d already answered it. And never mind that Blanchard had told me she was driving; it was something to say, words to fill in empty space, misdirection, and the only thing I could think of.

“I like to drive,” she said. “I hate planes. Even before 9/11 and all this security crap, I hated planes. When I go somewhere, I want to see where it is I’m going, all the places I pass through on the way there. You know what I mean?”

I told her that I did, even though I suspected I actually didn’t understand, at all. I’ve always despised long drives, ever since I was a kid and it was my father’s idea of Sunday afternoon recreation. Just driving. Driving nowhere at all. Back before the oil crisis in ’73, when gas was, what, thirty or forty cents a gallon. Constance Hopkins smoked her cigarette and watched the window, watched the bright, shimmering summer day outside the window, and I smoked mine and watched her, trying hard not to be too obvious about it. Trying not to stare. Trying hard. I asked her how it had gone, the drive from LA, and she shrugged and smoke leaked from her nostrils.

“Fine, except for the fucking breakdown in Gary.”

“Indiana?” I asked, immediately wishing that I’d said nothing at all, becoming all too acutely aware that my questions and replies were suffering from my unexpected fascination with this woman whom I’d expected would be nothing but an inconvenience.

“Yeah, Indiana. Only Gary I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Car blew a head gasket or cracked a cylinder or something of the sort, and there was a mix-up getting a replacement. Added an extra day, waiting around while they sorted it out.”

“But otherwise?”

Constance looked away from the window, those drowsy red-brown eyes shifting towards me, and she nodded. “Fourteen states in less than a week. My second grand tour of Flyover Country. May I never, ever have to do it again.” She crossed herself, then smiled and took another sip of her beer, before setting the bottle down on the table. And, turning back to the window, as though the unexpected had become the order of the day, she said the very last thing I was prepared to hear.

“So, I suppose you know all about that old tree out there?” and she smiled again and jabbed an index finger towards the kitchen window. I laughed out loud, a nervous, somewhat unsettled laugh, I suppose, and realized that my bottle was empty, and my mouth had gone very dry.

“Not like it’s some sort of big secret,” she said, sounding amused. “Just part of that whole local legend scene, the crap you know by heart cause you grew up hearing it all the time. Well, if you grew up around here, I mean,” and she paused long enough to tap her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. “Mercy Brown and the plague of consumptive vampires, all the phantoms, witches, ghost towns, shunned pastures, the haunted cemeteries, and whatnot. The usual New England spookfest. Hell, there’s even supposed to be some sort of swamp monster lurking about in a bog up around Gloucester or Chepachet.”

“Chepachet?” I asked, and she shrugged.

“Sure. Not all that far from here.”

“Well, okay, but the tree was news to me . Want another beer?” I asked her, and she glanced at her bottle, still almost a third full, but gone warm, and she nodded. I stood and walked across the room to the icebox.

“Old man Blanchard didn’t bother mentioning it, before you signed the lease?” she asked.

“No. Must have slipped his mind,” I said, opening the bottles and returning to my seat, handing one to her. “I had no idea I’d rented a house on a haunted farm. Or that the last tenant here was writing a book about the tree, then went and hung himself from it.

”“Ah, yeah. That would be Chuck Harvey,” Constance said. “Took a couple of classes from him, when I was an undergrad at URI. Again, not exactly a big fucking secret. I always did think the dude was, you know, sort of out to lunch.”

I let my eyes stray towards the window, towards the huge green canopy of that tree moving slowly in the afternoon breeze, recalling my walk the day before and how I’d found absolutely nothing the least bit out of the ordinary about the oak. How I’d almost dozed off on that big flat stone at its base.

“He was writing a book about it when he died,” I said again.

“Really? I never heard that part of it. I don’t think it made the news.”

“So this happened before you moved out to LA?”

“Yep,” she nodded. “I only went out there late last summer, near the end of August. No idea what I was thinking, really. I knew someone from college who wanted to split the cost of an apartment in Silver Lake, and there really wasn’t anything here tying me down. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I swear to fuck, Los Angeles is the worst . It’s like someone decided to build a concentration camp for ass-holes or something, hoping the earthquakes and wildfires would clean up the gene pool.”

I told her I’d never been very fond of the place myself, and she started in explaining to me about the friend from college, another painter, and how this girl had gotten mixed up with a heroin dealer, how it turned out the roommate was a junkie herself. After all manner of drug-related Sturm und Drang, Constance had decided it was time to get out, and so here she was, drinking Narragansett Beer with me at the kitchen table. “I think they’re all probably in jail by now,” she told me. “In jail or dead. I’m just glad to be away from there, clear and free of that bunch of jerk-offs and needle freaks. Maybe now I can get back to work.”

And here she stopped and squinted at me through a gray veil of cigarette smoke. “So, he was writing a book, yeah? About the red tree? I wouldn’t have guessed there was enough material there for a whole damn book.”

I shrugged and pointed to the manuscript box. “Well, he seemed to think so. I found it in the basement. Rather, I found what there is of it. He died without finishing it.”