Flight Behavior (2 page)

Her betrayals shocked her. It was like watching
some maddened, unstoppable, and slightly cuter version of herself on television,
doing things a person could never do with just normal life instead of a script.
Putting Cordelia down for early naps while Preston was at kindergarten so she
could steal a minute for making intimate bargains with a man who wasn’t her
husband. The urge to call him was worse than wanting a cigarette, like something
screaming in both her ears. More than once she’d driven past where he lived,
telling the kids in the back seat that she’d forgotten something and had to go
back to the store. She would say it was for ice cream or bullet pops, to shush
them, but even a five-year-old could tell it was not the road to the store.
Preston had voiced his suspicions from his booster seat, which allowed him a
view of little more than the passing trees and telephone lines.

The telephone man, as she called this obsession—his
name was too ordinary, you wouldn’t wreck your life for a Jimmy—“the telephone
man” was barely a man. Twenty-two, he’d said, and that was a stretch. He lived
in a mobile home with his mother and spent weekends doing the things that
interested males of that age, mixing beer and chain saws, beer and target
shooting. There was no excuse for going off the deep end over someone who might
or might not legally be buying his own six-packs. She longed for relief from her
crazy wanting. She’d had crushes before, but this one felt life-threatening,
especially while she was lying in bed next to Cub. She’d tried taking a Valium,
one of three or four still rattling in the decade-old prescription bottle they’d
given her back when she lost the first baby. But the pill did nothing, probably
expired, like everything on the premises. A week ago she’d stabbed a needle into
her finger on purpose while mending a hole in Cordie’s pajamas, and watched the
blood jump out of her skin like a dark red eye staring back. The wound still
throbbed. Mortification of the flesh. And none of it stopped her from thinking
of him, speed-dialing him, making plans, driving by where he’d told her he would
be working, just for the sight of him up the pole in his leather harness. A
strange turn of fortune had sent him her way in the first place: a tree that
fell on a windless day, bringing down the phone line directly in front of her
house. She and Cub didn’t have a landline, it wasn’t even her problem, but a
downed line had to be reconnected. “For the folks that are still hanging on by
wires,” Jimmy had told her with a wicked grin, and everything that came next was
nonsensical, like a torrential downpour in a week of predicted sunshine that
floods out the crops and the well-made plans. There is no use blaming the rain
and mud, these are only elements. The disaster is the failed expectation.

And now here she went risking everything, pointing
her little chin up that hill and walking unarmed into the shoot-out of whatever
was to be. Heartbreak, broken family. Broke, period. What she might do for money
if Cub left her was anyone’s guess. She hadn’t been employed or even exactly a
regular to human conversation since the Feathertown Diner closed, back when she
was pregnant with Preston. Nobody would hire her again as a waitress. They’d
side with Cub, and half the town would claim they’d seen it coming, just because
they thrived on downfalls of any sort
. Wild in high school,
that’s how it goes with the pretty ones, early to ripe, early to rot.
They would say the same thing she’d heard her mother-in-law tell Cub: that
Dellarobia was a piece of work. As if she were lying in pieces on a table, pins
stuck here and there, half assembled from a Simplicity pattern that was flawed
at the manufacturer’s. Which piece had been left out?

People would likely line up to give opinions about
that. The part that thinks ahead, for one. A stay-at-home wife with no skills,
throwing sense to the four winds to run after a handsome boy who could not look
after her children. Acting like there was no tomorrow. And yet. The way he
looked at her suggested he’d be willing to bring her golden apples, or the
Mississippi River. The way he closed his fingers in a bracelet around her ankles
and wrists, marveling at her smallness, gave her the dimensions of an expensive
jewel rather than an inconsequential adult. No one had ever listened to her the
way he did. Or looked, touching her hair reverently, trying to name its color:
somewhere between a stop sign and sunset, he said. Something between tomatoes
and a ladybug. And her skin. He called her “Peach
.
”

No one else had ever called her anything. Only the
given name her mother first sounded out for the birth certificate in a doped
anesthetic haze, thinking it came from the Bible. Later her mother remembered
that was wrong; it wasn’t the Bible, she’d heard it at a craft demonstration at
the Women’s Club. She found a picture in a ladies’ magazine and yelled for her
daughter to come look. Dellarobia was maybe six at the time and still remembered
the picture of the dellarobia wreath, an amalgam of pine cones and acorns glued
on a Styrofoam core. “Something pretty, even still,” her mother insisted, but
the fall from grace seemed to presage coming events. Her performance to date was
not what the Savior prescribed. Except marrying young, of course. That was the
Lord’s way for a girl with big dreams but no concrete plans, especially if a
baby should be on the way. The baby that never quite was, that she never got to
see, a monster. The preemie nurse said it had strange fine hair all over its
body that was red like hers. Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were
both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that came in its red
pelt of fur was a mean wild thing like her. Roping a pair of dumbstruck
teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them
stranded. Leaving them trying five years for another baby, just to fill a hole
nobody meant to dig in the first place.

Something in motion caught her eye and yanked her
glance upward. How did it happen, that attention could be wrenched like that by
some small movement? It was practically nothing, a fleck of orange wobbling
above the trees. It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill
dropped steeply from the trail. She made a face, thinking of redheaded ghosts.
Making things up was beneath her. She set her eyes on the trail, purposefully
not looking up. She was losing the fight against this hill, panting like a
sheep. A poplar beside the trail invited her to stop there a minute. She fit its
smooth bulk between her shoulder blades and cupped her hands to light the
cigarette she’d been craving for half an hour. Inhaled through her nose, counted
to ten, then gave in and looked up again. Without her glasses it took some doing
to get a bead on the thing, but there it still was, drifting in blank air above
the folded terrain: an orange butterfly on a rainy day. Its out-of-place
brashness made her think of the wacked-out sequences in children’s books: Which
of these does not belong? An apple, a banana, a taxicab. A nice farmer, a
married mother of two, a sexy telephone man. She watched the flake of bright
color waver up the hollow while she finished her cigarette and carefully ground
out the butt with her boot. When she walked on, pulling her scarf around her
throat, she kept her eyes glued to the ground. This boy had better be worth it:
there was a thought. Not the sexiest one in the world, either. Possibly a sign
of sense returning.

The last part of the trail was the steepest, as far
as she could recall from her high-school frolics up here. Who could forget that
ankle-bending climb? Rocky and steep and
dark
. She
had entered the section of woods people called the Christmas Tree Farm, fir
trees planted long ago in some scheme that never panned out. The air suddenly
felt colder. The fir forest had its own spooky weather, as if these looming
conifers held an old grudge, peeved at being passed over. What had she been
thinking, to name that hunting shack for a meeting place? Romance felt as
unreachable now as it did on any average day of toting kids and dredging the
floor of doll babies. She could have made things easy on herself and wrecked her
life in a motel room like a sensible person, but no. Her legs were tired and her
butt ached. She could feel blisters welling on both feet. The boots she’d adored
this morning now seemed idiotic, their slick little heels designed for parading
your hindquarters in jeans, not real walking. She watched her step, considering
what a broken ankle would add to her day. The trail was a cobbled mess of loose
rocks, and it ran straight uphill in spots, so badly rutted she had to grab
saplings to steady herself.

With relief she arrived on a level stretch of
ground carpeted with brown fir needles. But something dark loomed from a branch
over the trail. A hornet’s nest was her first thought, or a swarm of bees
looking for a new home. She’d seen that happen. But the thing was not humming.
She approached slowly, hoping to scoot under it, with or without a positive ID.
It bristled like a cluster of dead leaves or a down-turned pine cone, but was
much bigger than that. Like an armadillo in a tree, she thought, with no notion
of how large that would be. Scaly all over and pointed at the lower end, as if
it had gone oozy and might drip. She didn’t much care to walk under it. For the
second time she wished for the glasses she’d left behind. Vanity was one thing,
but out here in the damn wilderness a person needed to see. She squinted up into
dark branches backlit by pale sky. The angle made her a little dizzy.

Her heart thumped. These things were all over,
dangling like giant bunches of grapes from every tree she could see.
Fungus
was the word that came to mind, and it turned
down the corners of her mouth. Trees were getting new diseases now. Cub had
mentioned that. The wetter summers and mild winters of recent years were
bringing in new pests that apparently ate the forest out of house and home. She
pulled her jacket close and hurried underneath the bristly thing, ducking, even
though it hung a good ten feet above the trail. She cleared it by five. And even
so, shivered and ran her fingers through her hair afterward and felt childish
for fearing a tree fungus. The day couldn’t decide whether to warm up or not. In
the deep evergreen shade it was cold. Fungus brought to mind scrubbing the
mildewed shower curtain with Mr. Clean, one of her life’s main events. She tried
to push that out of her thoughts, concentrating instead on her reward at the end
of the climb. She imagined surprising him as he stood by the shack waiting for
her, coming up on him from behind, the sight of his backside in jeans. He’d
promised to come early if he could, hinting he might even be naked when she
arrived. With a big soft quilt and a bottle of Cold Duck. Lord love a duck, she
thought. After subsisting for years on the remains of toddler lunches and juice
boxes, she’d be drunk in ten minutes. She shivered again and hoped that was a
pang of desire, not the chill of a wet day and a dread of tree fungus. Should it
be so hard to tell the difference?

The path steered out of the shadow into a bright
overlook on the open side of the slope, and here she slammed on her brakes; here
something was wrong. Or just strange. The trees above her were draped with more
of the brownish clumps, and that was the least of it. The view out across the
valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie. From this overlook she
could see the whole mountainside that lay opposite, from top to bottom, and the
full stand of that forest was thickly loaded with these bristly things. The fir
trees in the hazy distance were like nothing she’d ever seen, their branches
droopy and bulbous. The trunks and boughs were speckled and scaly like trees
covered with corn flakes. She had small children, she’d seen things covered with
corn flakes. Nearly all the forest she could see from here, from valley to
ridge, looked altered and pale, the beige of dead leaves. These were evergreen
trees, they should be dark, and that wasn’t foliage. There was movement in it.
The branches seemed to writhe. She took a small automatic step backward from the
overlook and the worrisome trees, although they stood far away across the thin
air of the hollow. She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped.

A small shift between cloud and sun altered the
daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The
forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for
help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world
because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree,
passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with
light. Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave,
like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze.
“Jesus God,” she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned
to fire, a burning bush. Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words from Scripture
that occupied a certain space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight,
if they ever had.
Burning coals of fire went up and down
among the living creatures.

The flame now appeared to lift from individual
treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a
campfire when it’s poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel
clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky. In broad daylight with no
comprehension, she watched. From the tops of the funnels the sparks lifted high
and sailed out undirected above the dark forest.

A forest fire, if that’s what it was, would roar.
This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence. The air above remained
cold and clear. No smoke, no crackling howl. She stopped breathing for a second
and closed her eyes to listen, but heard nothing. Only a faint patter like rain
on leaves
.
Not fire, she thought, but her eyes when
opened could only tell her,
Fire
,
this place is burning
. They said,
Get out of here
. Up or down, she was unsure. She eyed the dark
uncertainty of the trail and the uncrossable breach of the valley. It was all
the same everywhere, every tree aglow.