Logging
by Norm Hendricks
Later, Lacey Reneaux fixed on the starting point of the trouble. The men in the logging crew she had hooked on with began their strange behavior when they came across the big hollow trunk of a dead maple, broken off about twelve feet from the ground and run through with bees. The bees nested so completely into the bole, Lacey could see runners of honey dripping from the open wounds where branches had rotted and fallen loose. The heavily muscled lumbermen gathered around as they finished their breakfasts and joked about the dripping trunk being something like the forest’s erection. Then they grew agitated, at first hitting each other on the broad shoulders playfully and then donuts began to fly. Eventually, they worked it out by turning their buzzing, itching nerves on the old man.
Lacey liked the old man so she burned quietly when the workmen in the logging crew picked on him. Her slow simmer flashed red-hot when they used the peach picker on him. Their fun complete, the map grid established, and the old man in a heap on the far side of the pulp snag, the work crew moved out. Artie, the only other woman in the crew, and a friend to the old man, knelt at the geezer’s side, attending to his wounds.
“He’s just a mascot these days and they like to remind him,” Artie said, dabbing a green bandana into a stream of blood leaking from a cracked, wrinkled lip.
Just out of earshot, Lacey watched as Artie called Meagerson, the foreman, over to complain about the latest incident involving the old man. Meagerson diverted the solid woman with a wave of his gloved hand. Boys will be boys, his gesture said. Lacey’s jaw set until its tension threatened the success of expensive retainers she wore as a teenager.
“The peach picker,” Artie said as Lacey came to the old man’s side. “That just crosses the line.”
“Hush,” the old man gasped. His long, ragged hair clung to his cheek where it was tacky with blood. Artie used her rough-gloved hand to wipe at a run of blood streaming from the craggy corner of the worn mouth. “As Marlowe would say…”
I jumped on the opportunity to distract him from his injuries.
“Right,” I said. “You were a professor of…Native American studies, or something?”
He chuckled and Lacey flinched at the bit of pink foam flecking his lips.
“Fuck that,” he coughed. “Just because I’m Iroquois don’t mean I’m not human enough to relate to the humanities…”
“You ain’t no Iroquois, Nestor. You got a spot of Haverstraw and a whole ‘lotta Euro bullshit in you. You’re a bookworm. You don’t have to justify reading nineteenth century English fags with a fake Indian pedigree.”
Nestor coughed. “Don’t make me…laugh…uhhugh.”
Lacey winced. Around the trio heavy equipment roared to life, the centerpiece being the peach picker. The imposing grapple rod with a huge Peterbilt, a giant truck sporting a long boom. At the end of the boom there swung nearly a ton of steel shaped into a claw large enough to lift an acre of pulpwood and sharp enough to rip the bark off of hundred-year-old pine. The peach picker was a woodsman’s obedient monster.
“You’re both a couple of half-breeds nobody gives a shit about. Let’s move so we can collect a dollar. What d’ya say?” Lacey asked.
Artie smiled.
“Right, whitie, a pay check is all the religion we got.” Nestor grimaced, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet.
The women guided him into Lacey’s jeep and followed the crew north. Their initial camp had been a day’s ride into the Adirondacks. Now they followed the flatbeds ten miles deeper into the uncompromising tree line. Each hour took them into older cuts until, at the point where the forest beat the road to a path, the flatbeds could not squeeze through the encroaching timber and had to release their payloads. Each flatbed hosted a Trail Cat, powerful miniaturized versions of backhoes and bulldozers. Lacey knew the one-man crafts well. They were designed to be able to tug a half-ton of logs or push over a one-story house. Freed from the flatbeds, workmen in hardhats drove the skidders wildly up the muddy conduit into the old growth like a diesel-powered beetle infestation. Next, the massive Peterbilt pushed through. Its powerful engines could not be denied passage into the primitive green. Behind them, Lacey followed in her jeep.
Several times the skidders had to be refueled and the Peterbilt had to be freed by chainsaw where a particular ancient pine proved too tough to bully. All the while, the jeep knocked along over deadfall and small boulders. With every bump, Nestor roused enough from what Artie thought was a likely concussion to repeat a single phrase.
“Gone too far,” the old man mumbled.
“They sure as hell have,” Artie said.
“Bastards,” Lacey grumbled and then sucked in sharply as the Peterbilt died a few feet before them.
“What the…?” Artie stiff-armed the dashboard to keep her face from smashing against the windshield.
“Gone too far.”
Nestor moaned and coughed up a little more pink. Meagerson appeared in the driver’s side window. Lacey expected they had reached the desired map grid and she would be ordered to mark choice older trees for a seed cut.
“Come on,” he said. “We need you college types up front.”
“We need to get Nestor to a hospital and you’ve taken us too far,” Artie said.
“By my map, we’re five clicks into protected timbers,” Lacey retorted. “We’re miles off the prescribed logging roads – probably lost. If he dies, you’ll be responsible.”
“You’re the ones who drove him.”
The two women looked at each other nonplussed. There had been no question of continuing with the crew north. Now they looked away, ashamed.
“Come on,” Meagerson said, popping the door with a metal creak.
Lacey had heard the chainsaw working up ahead and was not too surprised to see men in hardhats felling trees as old as the republic.
However, half the crew lapsed in their work, gathering around a stone outcropping to the left of the growing clear-cut. They were not supposed to clear-cut, it was illegal for state lands but there were ways around this. Lacey figured centrally into how the crew transfigured a clear-cut (illegal) into a seed-cut (legal). Instead of selecting certain choice specimens of white pine to receive stays of execution, the crew cut wildly, skipping random trees and having Lacey mark the leftovers, leaving them to spread their seed across the newly created field of mud and stumps. Forestry jobs were hard to come by.
“Someone has to look after Nestor,” Artie said.
“You look after him,” Meagerson said, signaling to a couple of stalled chainsaw wielders. “Carry him.”
“You can’t…”
“You wanna bet I can’t?” Meagerson ripped open the half-moon jeep door. “Any of you geniuses lookin’ to get paid for this gig or what?”
Mountain ridges of flannel bulging beneath yellow hardhat peaks grabbed Nestor’s small, limp frame from the narrow backseat of the jeep. Lacey gasped, wincing as Nestor’s head lolled horribly to the side.
“Gone too far,” Nestor grumbled.
“A little further, old man.” Meagerson grabbed the old man’s hardhat and followed the lumberjacks up the muddy wake of the Peterbilt.
Lacey and Artie exchanged worried glances, quickly gathered up their gear, and slogged up behind Nestor’s abductors.
Coming around the blocky steel edifice of the big truck, Lacey lost the men behind the imposing presence of the mammoth grapple – the peach picker. Artie came up behind her, urging her on beyond the great saurian claw dangling from the Peterbilt’s boom. They marched through four inches of mud around the enormous chassis of the Peterbilt. Lacey felt the need to keep her eye on the enormously cruel looking peach picker. She caught Nestor’s boots between muscular columns of plaid, the cadre entering a strange stand of paper birch.
“That shouldn’t be,” Lacey said.
“Nestor’s always been a target, Lace.” Artie shouldered her pack beside Lacey.
“No, the birch. Look at ‘em. A whole thicket of shiny white, but all short.”
“Undergrowth,” Artie said.
“Well you got it right in terms of the pine surrounding. But that’s one thick canopy. Nothing but hemlock should grow underneath.”
Artie said nothing. They scrambled over the large, naked roots of the big pine, entering the ghostly columns of birch. Up ahead, the boys headed for a rock formation.
“What the hell?” Artie said.
Lacey had been right about the rock but horribly wrong in her assumptions concerning natural formation. As she breached the birch guard, what lay before Lacey was clearly a stone stage, or more appropriately –
“A dais,” Lacey whispered.
Artie shot Lacey a glance, moved to continue her protective pursuit of her shanghaied friend, then did a double take. Lacey noted Artie’s reaction but could not drag her attention from the unfathomable construction before her. The dais was made of pink marble, some of the colored bands darkening to a fevered crimson. The blanched templar birches surrounded the square stage. Strangest of all, almost too much for Lacey to account for in a rational universe, from each corner of the stage, like a petrified boxing ring, sprouted great metal stanchions. All four of these were a sickly green, being heavily smelt with copper or brass. From each of these stanchions looped a length of black iron chain like the kind Lacey remembered seeing securing the immense anchor of a cruise ship she once took to the Caribbean. At the end of each chain rested a gigantic iron manacle – big and round, chain-gang style.
“Your glasses,” Artie said, half-reaching for the partially fogged lenses.
“Yeah, I guess I’m used to them being cloudy.” Lacey removed the metal frames to give them a wipe with her t-shirt. Artie grabbed them from Lacey and held them backward at eye level so that Lacey looked at the reflective glint of the glass. At first she was confused, but then, squinting, Lacey caught the reflection of the bazaar marble dais and focused on the key difference between the actual object and its reversed self. When looking at the salmon-colored stage directly, the huge manacles piled loosely on the marble. In the reflection, the elephant cuffs hovered in the air, pulling the cruise ship anchor chains tight.
“Something’s in there,” Artie said.
Replacing the glasses and nodding numbly, Lacey stiffened. She had heard it in Artie’s voice and she felt it too. Fear.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Lacey said.
“Nestor.” Artie started toward the dais where the workman balanced the old man on shaky legs.
“What does it say?” Meagerson pointed down at the nearest striped edge. Lacey and Artie walked up behind the men. Writing etched the edge of the stone from one end to the other, wrapping around the corner. Most of it was written in symbols Lacey did not recognize. The letters in the middle she knew but only in terms of taxonomy.
Birch: Betulaceae
“Latin,” Nestor said.
“Yeah,” Meagerson said. “What does it say?”
“How about I just give you a quick lesson in Latin. Uck-fay, oo-yay. Let’s start there.” Nestor laughed, his eyes spinning in their sockets.
Meagerson, more flab than muscle, but quite large, grabbed Nestor and threw him roughly to the marble. Things started happening quickly then, Lacey catching them in fits and starts as adrenaline soaked her nerves and slowed her perceptions.
It began to rain; large, pregnant drops beat against the bill of Lacey’s hardhat, nearly toppling it from her head. Her glasses fogged. She wiped them and when cleared, she saw the rest of the logging crew filter through the guardian birch.
Betulaceae, the family name for birch.
Mior alieno was carved into the crimson-run stone. More words too: non scio. The rest of that section – the one using a recognizable alphabet – was obscured by Nestor’s tormentors.
“What does it say? Huh? Ah, this is useless. Some of these birches are worth taking. Let’s get some marked for harvest.”
Lacey took it in as it happened. The brute on the left kicked Nestor. Nestor moaned. Blood dripped from his mouth to the marble. The marble moved, the colored stripes jerking. A workman bent and picked up a large twig that turned out to be the rack of a whitetail deer stag. He pointed. The marble dais was ensconced within a nest constructed of antlers. Artie reached for Lacey’s glasses.
“Better unknown, or forgotten, or something…who knows,” Nestor said, spitting red. “Probably built by the Jesuit Mission of sixteen…wait. That’s a funny one.”
“Huh?”
“Beatus, something, something, can’t make it out – facere. It’s a reference to beatification.”
“Be a fat what?”
The marble bands moved again, jerking and seizing like writhing corn snakes.
“I know this. This thing was made by Kateri Tekakwitha, an American Indian woman recognized by the pope as a saint. You shouldn’t fuck with stuff made by saints.”
“Bullshit, popes and saints don’t write in Cyrillic or whatever that other writing is,” Meagerson said. “Let’s get some saws.”
A slightly foggy Artie wiped at Lacey’s lenses with the tail of her shirt. The fat drops made a loud hollow sound on Lacey’s hardhat. Artie shielded the glasses from the rain with her hand, urging Lacey to look. Lacey looked and saw what Artie was excited about but couldn't make the scene click.
“What does it mean?”
In the reflection of the dais, the chains and manacles were now flaccid as when they had first entered the unearthly clearing and looked at the marble stage directly.
“It means something got loose. Let’s grab the old man and go.”
Lacey replaced the glasses. On the far end of the dais in the forest among more birches a fox stood in the rain. He gave Lacey a long look, like one exchanged with someone you know when you spot them on the opposite subway platform waiting for a train in the opposite direction. The fox looked right at her and then fled into the pines. Artie clung to her, urging her toward the dais. Lacey let herself be drawn forward despite the deep apprehension growing in her stomach.
“Anything could be in this forest,” Nestor said between ragged breaths. “Like the tourism ad says: The Adirondack national forest can fit Yellowstone and Yosemite inside of its borders and still have room for Rhode Island. There’s spots in here fucks like you never touched with your chainsaws and peach pickers.”
“I told you,” Lacey said. “All this timber is forbidden, virgin.”
“Well,” Meagerson smirked, “the trees are the only virgins I can see.”
Lacey clicked her tongue in disgust. Artie shouldered Nestor.
That’s when the Peterbilt started up. They were all there in the clearing, the whole crew, but someone had started the big truck. The men stiffened, the rain driving loudly but not nearly hard enough to cover the roar of the enormous engine or the creak of the boom.
“Come on!” Artie plugged along beneath Nestor’s arm. Lacey threw a hand into his other armpit.
“Gone too far,” Nestor said.
“Not far enough. We gotta get outta here, now!” Lacey shrieked. They entered the birch as the peach picker made its first strike.
She heard it coming, and though part of her knew no human directed the monstrous machine, Lacey expected the giant claw to operate with the same loping gentleness Meagerson’s men used on Nestor. To her shock, the titanic grapple didn’t even open but drove down like a pointed fist. The first victim of the claw crumbled beneath it like a flannel-covered melon thrown from the roof of a five-story building.
Screaming filled the air. Lacey was not aware one of the voices was hers until Artie pinched her.
“Owww!”
“Come on. This is bad stuff.”
“No shit!”
More screaming – a pair of thick work boots drifted past Lacey’s head, brushing aside feathery birch branches. Meagerson hung from the three-appendage pinch of the grapple. A scrolled tube dropped from the foreman’s grasp, splashing into a puddle before the escaping women and their senescent bundle. Meagerson howled into the driving rain.
Artie bent and picked up the paper.
“Map,” she said.
Meagerson dissolved into the glare behind the downpour. He quickly reappeared, flying into the natural fence of birch, breaking the narrow boles of several trees and landing with a muffled thump, sliding all the way back to the base of the strange marble dais. His arms were bent behind him at sickening angles. He did not move.
“How far are we off the main logging roads?” Lacey asked.
“Plenty,” said Artie, folding the grid map and snatching up her backpack as the three gimped through the stalled caravan.
The next to go was one of the jeeps. The mammoth picker plucked up the vehicle, the Peterbilt’s hydraulic pistons releasing a dragon hiss.
“You bring food?” Artie asked.
“Lunch,” Lacey replied, tracking the arc of the jeep through the air and into the birch grove.
“Loose now,” Nestor’s head swung limp beneath gray-streaked, lank hair. “A saint locked it up but it’s loose now. Gone too far.”
“Yeah, Nestor, too far. Grab his pack, too,” Artie ordered.
Artie already had Nestor twenty yards up a rock ridge when Lacey returned with the bags. Nestor’s felt heavy and clinked as Lacey traversed the muddy roots to the rock ridge.
“Booze,” she said aloud.
The bottles clinked and the rain pattered on Lacey’s helmet. The footing on the ridge got slippery where jagged shale gave way to slick swells of speckled granite. Lacey caught up with Artie on a shelf in the ridge. It was a little clearing with beaten ferns. Ahead, a game trail continued up into a shadowy mountain. Below, the ridge curled around and offered a grandstand seat to the action occurring around the marble dais. The rain slowed. Men flew like ragdolls above the misty tree line. Screams echoed in the valley bowl.
“Let’s see his bag,” Artie said, dropping Nestor onto a soft bed of ferns and flipping her legs over the ledge. She sat looking down on the screaming men like she was at a ballgame. Artie accepted the ragged pack from Lacey, her thick hands dipping into its contents. She extracted a bottle and patted the ledge next to her. Lacey sat down. In the valley, a booted leg spun out of the mist. The sound of crunching metal bounced up the ridge. Lacey looked away. Artie unscrewed the bottle, took a hit, and smiled down at the violence below. Her smile said boys will be boys. She handed the bottle to Lacey. The whiskey burned on the way down.
“Hawthorne,” Nestor grumbled. “It’s all so Hawthornian.”
Lacey ignored him.
“You think Nestor can find us a way out?” she asked.
“Nestor?” Artie snorted. “Why, because you think he’s part Indian? He’s no more Indian that Kevin Costner. I been workin the ‘rondacks since I was a teen. Me and the foreman’s map will get us out.”
“‘…he was signifier of his race, a one time totem…’” Nestor said. Lacey thought this might have been a quote from Hawthorne.
“Perhaps we could try for the jeep?” asked Lacey.
“What d’ya think?” Artie indicated the valley. Lacey’s jeep crashed through the trees. The sound of screaming followed it. “Nah, it’s a long hike out but hoofin it ‘sall we got.”
The bottle passed. The show played out in the valley bowl. The rain stopped. A thick fog moved in as the sun drew behind the old, worn mountains. Lacey’s legs ached at the thought of walking out. They were in virgin territory – a long way from nowhere. The bottle came back to her.
“Hey, college co-ed,” Artie said. Her eyes looked slow now. She slurred a bit when she talked. “I mean, Lacey, you ever kiss a girl?”
“‘…they knew now the faun looked down on them and laughed…’” Nestor quoted.
In the forest, an early owl hooted a sonar pulse call. A scream answered from the valley.
“You have a strange sense of timing,” Lacey said. The whiskey burned on the way down.
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