Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“Fine,” I said, because I could see she was scared, and I know I was getting scared, and nothing was going to be accomplished by arguing about the hurdle of vines and rotting white pine blocking our route back to the house. “But how long have we been walking, Constance? How long have we been following that creek, with the tree not getting any closer?”

She looked at her wristwatch, and then looked towards the oak, and then looked back to me.

“I’m guessing at least half an hour, right?” I said, and, before she could reply, I continued, because I really did not need or want to hear the answer to my question. “And even if you take into account the time needed for us to climb down to the stream and back up here again, and the few minutes we spent by the water, talking about salamanders and tadpoles and shit, even if you take all that into account, why aren’t we at the tree? How the hell does it take half an hour to walk three quarters the length of a football field?”

“We’ll clear it up later, I’m sure,” Constance said, turning away from the deadfall and towards the tree. But the way she said it, I was left with little doubt that she’d prefer I never even mention the matter again, much less try, at that safely unspecified, but later, point in time, to puzzle out what we’d just experienced.

She started walking along the narrow path, and because I had no idea what else to do, I followed her. All around us, the trees were alive with fussing birds and maybe a chattering squirrel or two. I still have a lot of trouble telling angry birds and angry squirrels apart. There was a warm breeze, and, overhead, the branches rustled and the leaves whispered among themselves. Constance walked fast, and so I had to move fast to keep pace. Before long, she was almost sprinting, her footfalls seeming oddly loud against the bare, packed earth of the trail.

Five or ten minutes later I was breathless and sweating like a pig, and I shouted for her to please stop before I had a goddamn coronary. And she did stop, but when she looked back at me, there was an angry, desperate cast in those brick-red eyes of hers. Those irises not unlike the tannin-colored water of the stream.

“ Look at it,” I gasped, leaning forward, hands on knees, gasping for air and hoping to hell I could get through the next couple of minutes without being sick. “Jesus Christ, Constance, just stop and fucking look at it.”

And she did. She stood there in the muttering woods, while I struggled to catch my breath, while my sweat dripped and spattered the dirt. She stared at the red tree, and then she asked, “Why doesn’t it want me to reach it? It let you, but it won’t even allow me to get near.” I am moderately sure these were her precise words, and I managed a strangled sort of laugh and spat on the ground.

“Let’s go back,” I said, doing my best to conceal my own confusion and fear. “Like you said, I’m sure it will all make sense later. But I don’t think either of us is in any shape to keep this up.”

“What if it’s me, Sarah?” she asked. “What if doesn’t want me getting close?”

I stood up, my back popping loudly, painfully, and I took her arm. “Let’s go back,” I said again. “It’s just a tree. It doesn’t want anything, Constance. We’re hot and confused and scared, that’s all.”

She nodded slowly, and didn’t argue. I held her arm and softly urged her back the way we’d come. She took a bottle of water from the canvas tote bag, twisted the cap off, and when she was finished, passed it to me. The water was warm and tasted like plastic, but it made me feel just a little better. I remembered the sandwiches and apples and all the damned granola bars she’d packed; if we were lost, at least we wouldn’t starve right away.

“Come on,” she said, returning the water bottle to the tote. “I don’t want to be out here anymore. I need to be home now.”

“That makes two of us. But, please, do me a favor, and let’s not try to make a footrace of it, alright?”

“Fine. You go first,” she replied, and the tone of her voice, her voice and the circumstances combined, there was no way I could not think of some adolescent dare. An abandoned house, maybe, a door left ajar, hanging loose on rusted hinges, opening onto musty shadows and half light. You go first. I dare you. No, I double-dog dare you. I was always a sucker for dares.

“If you keep your head, when everyone about you is busy losing theirs,” I said, and began walking south again, following the trail back to the house.

“Who said that?” she asked, and pulled her arm free.

“I’m paraphrasing,” I replied.

“So who are you paraphrasing?”

“Rudyard Kipling,” I told her, though, at the time I was only half sure it was Kipling and not Disraeli.

“The same guy that wrote The Jungle Book ?” she asked, and I knew Constance was talking merely to hear her own voice, to keep me talking, that she was busy trying to occupy her mind with anything mundane. “Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “But my favorite was always ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. ’ My favorite story by Kipling, I mean. You know, the one about the mongoose and the two cobras—”

“I never read it,” she said. “But I saw the Disney movie when I was a kid. I don’t remember a mongoose.”

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi wasn’t in the Disney film.”

“I never read it,” she said again.

And the conversation went on like that for a while, I don’t know exactly how long. Kipling and Disney and what the hell ever, until she stopped and checked her watch, and I stopped and waited on her.

“So, where’s the deadfall?” she asked, and laughed a brittle, skittish laugh, looking up from her wrist and staring down the trail winding on ahead of us. “We should be back to it by now.”

I didn’t answer her, and I also didn’t ask how long it had been since we’d turned back towards the house. I didn’t need to ask to know that we should have already reached the deadfall. I glanced off to my left, and the fieldstone wall was exactly where it ought to be, sagging in upon itself with the weight of all the centuries that had passed unnoticed since its construction, the long decades since the last time this land was farmed and anyone had bothered with the wall’s maintenance. I could hear the little stream mumbling coolly somewhere beyond it.

“Well, we’re going the right way,” I said, peering up through the dappled light, checking the afternoon sun to be sure we were still walking south.“Maybe the trail forked somewhere back there, and we were talking and not paying attention, and we went the wrong way,” she said hopefully, and I nodded, because it was a better story than whatever was running through my head.

“Maybe,” she said, “we went left when we should have gone right, or something like that.”

I looked again at the stone wall, those moss- and lichen-scabbed granite and gneiss boulders, and I could feel her eyes following mine.

“So maybe there are two streams,” she said, and now the brittleness in her voice was edging towards panic. “And those goddamn stone walls are everywhere out here. That doesn’t mean anything, Sarah.”

“I didn’t say it did,” I told her, knowing perfectly goddamn well it was the same wall, and that I was hearing the same stream. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it, though,” she said. “Don’t lie to me, because you’re standing there thinking it.”

“You never told me you were fucking clairvoyant,” I said. “Why is that, that you never bothered to say you could read my mind?” the words hard and mean and out before I could think better of it. And probably, at that juncture, I was somewhere past caring, anyway. I had my own apprehensions to worry about, and I was tired of coddling her.