Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

Mary is still asleep inside. At the table of recycled redwood near Kafka’s trailer, Finn is fed tea and slice after slice of toast dripping with honey by Kafka, fresh from her shower, the mown contours of her crewcut pinheaded with glisten, all six feet of her clean and slender and unbothered in cargo pants and a white wifebeater that exposes the zoo sleeving her forearms. Ocelot, macaw, monkey, winding vines. From this intricacy Kafka’s hands emerge naked and in need of something to do. A near-drowned bee orbits the bowl of Kafka’s spoon. Does Finn know about bees? “Because this is some ominous shit. By far the most important pollinators on the planet, disappearing. Flying away, never coming back, hives empty . No one knows why. So now, if I see a bee floundering around in my teacup, I’m like, ‘Sister Bee, just you take hold of the tip of this spoon, just you rest a while, calm down, dry your wings.’” Since Kafka keeps talking, Finn’s confusion plays out exclusively within her own head, where it can’t complicate the good impression she hopes to make. In case they’re staying.

Rick is a tattooed sea urchin diver who has custody of his eleven-year-old daughter, and Maddie and Finn share a pink room looking out over unmown fields and patchy woods to the barn that still has its old copper running-horse weathervane. On Maddie’s laptop they research sex and try what they find out. In a cinderblock room they’re forbidden to go into, she and Maddie run their hands over sleekly wrapped bricks of cash and fit their index fingers into triggers. From a FedEx box slithers a dream of a dress and Rick tells Mary try it on. Bare-legged she spins around and he says what’s it like wearing five thousand dollars on your back. Finn squints from down below: daylight rays through bullet holes in the horse’s chest. Inside the barn, down the lengths of parallel benches, the long-fingered leaves bask under metered lights, in rainforest warmth, to the music of Mozart. Music Finn can’t believe Mary has known about all along.

Finn’s hair turns pink. A friend’s older brother gives her the Earth First! shirt she wears under a baggy old-man cardigan, whose pockets hold crusts for sparrows wintering in the woods behind the school. Fall of sophomore year she writes a history paper on the FBI’s involvement in the attempted assassination of Judi Bari. That spring Finn hides the rats from another student’s science fair project in a pillowcase under her oversize hoodie and saunters from the school. When she stops to peer in, they’re scrambling and clutching, whiskers vibrating with fear. Finn kneels in the woods. She holds the first at eye level, his hind legs scrabbling, and checks the petal of chest under the albino fur. “Hello after all these years,” she tells it. “You thought I wouldn’t come back to save you?” A heart batters against her thumb. Live! live! live! live! live! thuds the heart. You’ve been asleep, Finn! Half as alive as this rat! Dreaming, while death after death streams out from your existence like ripples when a finger touches a river. Fed from a slaughterhouse, Finn, educated with cunning lies, your clothes stitched by enslaved children. Mr. Hahn seeks her out. Nobody’s accusing her. It’s not as if anyone saw who took the rats. But, hypothetically. Hypothetically, even if one student holds extremely strong views, other students are entitled to do projects for the science fair. Right? Can she accept the fairness of that? She likes Mr. H, his unfunny jokes and love of zombie movies, the surfboard on top of his Jeep when the sets are good. He wants her to assure him that for the duration — meaning till she graduates — she will respect others’ property.

“Living beings can’t be property.”

“Have you thought about college?” Mr. Hahn says.

“My family couldn’t afford it.” In general the word family suffices to fend off intrusiveness.

But it doesn’t deter him. “Trust me, Finn, it can happen,” he says. “Bright mind like yours. All you have to do is want it.”

Jared’s black hair goes unwashed week after week, Jared buys his Scarlet Letter essay off the Internet and argues he deserves more than a B+, in the boys’ locker room Jared holds a lit match under the tick in his armpit, then wears it in a glass phial around his neck till it withers into tick dust. His dad is the foreman at the lumber mill, and when he was eleven Jared was supposed to have talked someone’s little sister into taking off her underpants at Abo’s company picnic and to have been caught by her older brother and beat up pretty bad. Finn’s outward appearance — kohl eyeliner, slip dress, combat boots — isn’t what moves him. This goes way deeper. When they share a match — his cigarette, then hers — his world is rocked by her presence, her being, the Finn-ness of her eyes and nose and mouth and hard-beating heart, she can tell. Her skin can tell. No part of her doesn’t love him, nothing holds its tongue. God, that he is alive! While she was in the woods he was playing World of Warcraft on the flat-screen TV in his room. If only she could go back and tell her little kid self Hold on because your soul mate exists, you just have to live long enough to get to him. Bliss, this is what they mean by bliss. Or it would be if she could forget the death awaiting the two of them and all living beings. Everything for me’s not all melting arctic ice, Finn, not all dead birds falling from midair and viruses spread by monkey rape , he says. I’m not you. Sometimes I need it to be a sunny day with no problems. What won’t go away is one sentence. I’m not you. That stops her in her tracks. What is wrong with him that he can say I’m not you. They spend a night in zipped-together sleeping bags with stars transiting the gap between redwood spires and he says Tell me again how you made up the wolves and their names and what they said. For as long as it takes to tell him about the wolves, she’s not lonely.

Rubber bullets have been fired, five protesters seriously injured, two others dead. Rumors tremor through the group of nuns in the van with Finn, who bends forward uncomfortably, her bound hands wedged against the small of her back. River and Trespass and the others were muscled into a different van, leaving Finn the only Earth First!er among nuns. The crush of ambulances and police cars and rescue vehicles allows no exit from the bridge, and for an hour after the doors are slammed on them they swelter and wait. Marshaled on the tech plate of the van’s floor, eleven pairs of practical black lace-up oxfords and one set of dirty red high-tops, the chorus line of black skirts and fawn stockings interrupted by Finn’s filthy jeans, a tear exposing her banged-up left knee. Her wrists aching, Finn makes small talk with an elderly sister whose gaze is magnanimously fond behind cat’s-eye glasses, and whose upper lip sports a wispy Frida Kahlo mustache Finn finds endearing, the righteousness of the calm white superior face undercut by this roguish touch of androgyny. She’s never been this close to a nun before, and is worried about giving offense, not by saying something inappropriate, because she means to keep a close watch on that, but merely by being dirty and young and an anarchist. The cat’s-eye nun’s inquiries break the ice, and soon Finn is the object of their concerted attention. It is a van full of mothers, Finn thinks. It’s nothing to do with today’s protest, but she ends up explaining the threat to the last remaining old growth in Mendocino County and confesses that she believes a treesit is her destiny and there’s some redwood, as yet unmet, she was born to save. Neat coiffed heads, dark or graying, nod benignly. The van rolls a few feet, and the women sigh in approving relief, but then it jolts to a halt, and a nun says, “Oh, nuts.” Finn closes her eyes, thinking that when she tells River about this, she will report, The worst expletive they allow themselves is “nuts.” One of the nuns sneezes repeatedly, but nobody can offer her a tissue since their hands are locked behind their backs. The van jolts forward again, and Finn is thrown against the cat’s-eye nun, and rests close against her a fraction of an instant longer than she needs to, for the skin-and-bone kindness of the woman — to take that in.