High Horse

By Trampas Smith

Farming trees is a slow business, so in the meantime Will has a job delivering pizzas. He doesn’t make extra talk with customers nor even eye contact, but he makes more in tips than any other driver. Had he known that the cab of his pickup would smell like pizza even when he wasn’t working, he would not have taken the job. When he ends up with a leftover pie after a shift, he gives it to a bum or sells it for five dollars to people smoking outside a bar.

A tree farm was his uncle Ted’s idea. It seemed to offer all the upside of agriculture without the long hours. Pecans and peaches were Ted’s retirement plan. Will thought of the mulberries. As a child, he had eaten from a mulberry tree in his back yard: laddered up among the scratching branches like some egg-thieving varmint. Mulberries begin as tiny, bitter green kernels in leafy buds. They whiten as they swell, fade to pink and then fatten blood red. These are good, but mulberries are best, Will learned, during their final change, as dark rotting purple begins to creep over them. It is during this brief coexistence of firm and soft, of sweet and sour, that a mulberry becomes special, even perfect: his eyes shutting as the juice spilled over his tongue and into his throat. Once he brought his mom a hubcap filled with these. She bit one in half. ‘Um, that’s good. Thank you baby.’ But she didn’t eat any more of them. Later he washed out the purple soup with the water hose.

He doesn’t remember eating from that tree after that, because then she was gone and they stopped living in that house.

Things were better before that.

Before his dad started buying guns, made plans to go hunting, but never did. Before a blood clot broke loose somewhere in Will’s granddad and stuck in his heart, and his land was divided between his two sons. Before Will’s dad left the country, supposedly to South America, and before his uncle Ted sold his half—ninety acres of mature forest—and spent most of the money within a year on things like gambling in Shreveport, a bass boat, a ‘72 Chevelle, crystal meth, and finally a trip to a place called Moldova. That left Will feeling completely alone, until his uncle returned with a wife. Ted, who had never shown interest in travel or even geography, came home to Southwest Arkansas with nothing good to say about Paris, where he had spent a day between flights, or about the cold and impoverished little ex-Soviet republic where he had found his bride.

‘Well, say hi to your aunt Silvia,’ he said on the day of his return, seemingly irritated, rocking a little too quickly in his recliner and sipping from a can of  beer as he ogled Silvia, who sat across the room from him, at the opposite end of the couch from Will, who looked from one to the other. Silvia looked at the floor, hands in her lap, smiling with her mouth but not with her dark eyes. ‘I got the best they had,’ Ted said, too loud. ‘The better end of this deal for damn sure. She didn’t know she was marrying a poor boy.’

Silvia looked at him, squinting as if from poor eyesight. ‘What you are saying?’

‘I said I can see where this is going,’ Ted yelled, as if volume were the problem. Then he pointed at her. ‘You. Up in the penthouse.’ His fingers climbed a tiny invisible ladder beside his head.

Will wished he would stop talking. Silvia looked at the floor, black hair hiding her face, which was squarish and pale with wide-set eyes and thin curling pink lips, which sort of smiled. She got up and walked into the kitchen. She was tall and strong. Ted winked at Will, but he flinched when the screen door clapped shut. ‘She’s just going out to smoke,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back.’

Will looked at him.

‘Well,’ Ted said. ‘Say something.’

‘Is she really my aunt?’

Ted’s smile turned to quiet laughter. The laughter grew louder, then stopped abruptly. ‘As much as she is my wife, I guess.’ He watched his hands twist and crush the beer can. ‘In all seriousness,’ he said, ‘I don’t plan on fucking this up. I have changed, man. I really have.’

Will would have to take his word for it. About a month ago he had found Ted accidentally, and the man hadn’t looked good. Will was delivering the last order of a night to a location near the Red River. Following the map on his phone through dense fog, gravel crunching under his tires, he grew anxious that the place did not exist—that he had warped somehow into another dimension.

Will read a lot of science fiction.

The red-and-white bull’s eye on his screen pulsed gently, until the little blue dot of himself converged and subsumed it, where he looked out his windshield at what must have been reality: a low, glowing farmhouse, several pickups around it and, looming darkly behind these, some sort of vehicular farm equipment vanishing into the fog.

He knocked lightly on the door, though the music inside was very loud. It was one of those songs where the singer rhymes too fast to keep up with, like a rapper, only about things like tractors and fishing. Will did not want to go in, but this was his job. Feeling the music in the knob, he cracked the door. The entire interior was visible to him: the walls replaced with drill stem and I-beams. Only men were inside, most of them at a card game on a sheet of plywood nailed to sawhorses, one of these whistling sharply, waving him over. Dirty hands swarmed into the box, Will accepted a wad of bills without counting it and made for the exit. But there was Ted: alone at the bar in the corner in a haze of smoke, which changed colors with slow-blinking Christmas lights. Will only saw his back, but knew it was him. Legs crossed twice, Ted was watching a little TV behind the bar. As a kind of joke, Will sat on the stool beside him and looked silently up at the TV. It was a competition to determine ‘The World’s Strongest Man.’

Ted turned to Will with peeled-open eyes: white circles and black dots. He exhaled, looking disappointed. ‘I come here,’ he said, ‘so I won’t run into anybody I know.’

Will wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not.

‘Are you off?’

‘I’ve got to take the money back.’

Ted nodded toward Will’s flacid pizza-warming bag. ‘How’s business?’

‘Okay,’ Will said. ‘There’s a special right now, on meat lovers.’

‘No shit?’

‘Yeah. I can give you the coupon.’

Ted waved him off, looking back to the TV. ‘I’ll just get the code off the internet.’

‘You can’t do that anymore. I think too many people were doing it.’

‘People like that meat lovers.’

‘Yeah,’ Will agreed. On the TV, a man threw stones that Will knew he could not even pick up. He thought of something else to say: ‘A guy last night got really mad about the coupon thing. He said he was going to call his lawyer.’

‘Who knows. Maybe it’ll go all the way to the Supreme Court.’

‘Probably not,’ Will said.

‘Well. I guess you hadn’t heard from your daddy.’

‘No,’ Will had not. It had been six months since his dad had left the country, and no word whatsoever.

‘I guess he must have found something he liked.’ Ted winced. ‘Or something that didn’t like him.’

The yellow eyes of a panther glowed in Will’s mind’s eye. He looked to the TV, where a massive, quivering man in spandex held a car up by its bumper and trundled it along before a cheering crowd. Ted seemed to despair as he watched, as if the car contained everything that mattered to him and was headed for a cliff. On the way to the bus station in Texarkana, six months ago, Will’s dad had said to watch out for Ted. ‘He’s back to messing around with that bathtub dope again. Watch out for him.’

Will still didn’t know, as he watched his uncle watch the TV, whether his dad had been asking or telling—whether ‘watch out for him’ had been a request for care or a warning to keep away. About this dope, he understood vaguely that it could make you into a different, more dangerous person. A guy he worked with had told him about a cousin who shot at a mailman. Will had never sensed any danger from his uncle, but since hearing about the dope—and especially now, in this cloud of alternating colors—Ted had seemed somehow less than actual: like a hologram, or an interloper from another dimension.

‘When you’re out delivering,’ Ted said. ‘You ever have a lady answer the door in her underwear?’

‘No,’ never. In the beginning, Will had almost expected to find love, or at least sex, on the job. But such a thing no longer even seemed possible. They watched another man wheelbarrow a car.

‘Did you know we used to date, me and your momma?’

Ted still looked up at the TV, light pooled in the pits of his eyes. Will’s throat constricted.

‘For a minute, back in high school. She was closer to my age, but your daddy, he had this bad-ass black Chevelle with shag carpet, and his own apartment. I stopped by with her one evening. Delivered her like one of your pizzas.’ Ted snorted and finished his dark drink.

Will had nothing to say.

‘Which was fine.’ Ted ran his hand across the bartop as if flattening a bedsheet. ‘I’m just saying, it all goes back to her. He was never right before he had her, and he was never right after.’

Will watched a man spasm before faltering short of the goal line, but his mind was drifting elsewhere—he could not help it—to a place he did not like to go. To stay the drifting, he did the math. It had been over ten years. More than half his life had passed since he had gone with his parents to the beach at Lake Millwood for the Fourth of July. Lots of other people swam in the warm cove, but his mother was the only one to get Meningitis. Which, a doctor would later explain, was a microscopic bug that had crawled up her nose and into her brain. Like a nanorobot assassin, it had been working on her while she smiled up at the fireworks.

Ted got him to drink beer that night and he ran over an armadillo driving home. Thunk, was the sound it made against the underside of his pickup. He kept hearing it until the next time he saw his uncle (two weeks later).

In the meantime, apart from work, he read a series of books set on a planet with significantly less gravity than earth. The planet’s inhabitants do not, of course, appreciate the relative ease with which they move about, and do not complain about living under a constant light shower of meteorites, which are the number one cause of death. The smaller ones, whistling down almost silently, claim most victims—despite ubiquitous, and often stylish, fireman-like hats—but people rarely acknowledge them. The poor roam a vast wilderness, hunting weird wild game and gathering fallen stars to sell for the ore. The rich live under sharp-angled titanium roofs, but outside they stand as much chance as anyone of obliteration. There are places, like shopping malls and subways, where anyone can be free of the danger, but it is a truly stunning planet, with bottomless canyons, towering trees and rampant vegetation, including many delicious fruits and vegetables, so only the very neurotic avoid the out of doors.

All of this is just background and matters little to the plot (except that the hero begins the saga as a contract carpenter for an insurance company, remodeling homes struck by meteorites: an occurrence not considered, as on Earth, an ‘act of God’), but it was what Will would mainly remember from the books. Nearing the end of the final installment, which took place in a forest, he drove out to his dad’s land, for which he had been left the only key. It was near the end of March. On a rutted path through the woods, he sat on his tailgate. Under the tall trees, he couldn’t stop feeling like a trespasser. He opened the book and immediately felt better.

There was a chase and a showdown in the forest. The villain, the Emperor, got what was coming to him, but not before admitting, before a hidden camera, that he had started the planet’s devastating war under false pretenses for his own financial gain. It was a pretty good ending, though Will had seen it coming. He closed the book and looked around. Most of the trees were speckled with bright green buds and shoots. His dad had told him that these woods had never been cut, which was rare anywhere but extremely so in a state more than half owned by timber companies. Some were wrapped in vines like giant constricting snakes. A squirrel chased another to the sagging tip of a limb, where they collided and fell, tumbled slowly all the way to the ground, thud-thud, and dashed for the nearest tree one after the other, chittering in a spiral back into the canopy.

Will could not tell if they were at odds or only playing. He took out his phone and looked again at the dating website. He had begun filling in his profile a few weeks ago, but still had not submitted it. There were several questions he did not know how to answer. What was the difference between ‘sometimes’ and ‘often,’ between ‘often’ and ‘usually’? The more he thought about the word ‘always,’ the less it meant. As for, ‘How important to you is religion?’ he did not want to lie, and did not know how to tell the truth. ‘Do you usually make the first move?’ Well, signing up on this website: isn’t that making the first move? Few of the questions made any sense to him at all. He put the phone away. The woods were noisy, when he listened. His dad had not said anything to him when he handed over the key to the gate, but he had squeezed his hand for a moment. Now, Will realized that he had been given this land, at least as long as his dad was away. Meaning what? Did the dirt, the trees, the animals belong to him? It was strange. They would never come to him, the animals. Not unless he lived among them all the time. Probably he would have to feed them too, and even then they would not love him. He slipped off the tailgate and started walking. Under the half barren trees it was erratically cold in the shade, warm in the sunlight. He came alongside an unmoving creek. A turtle, submerged to the neck, stared at him. On the far bank a black snake lay draped over an exposed root, the tip of its tail wafting ripples on the gray water. The woods grew louder. He walked on, his shoes collecting mud, heavier with each step. He worried about getting lost, but another part of him wanted to get lost. It would be something.

A shiny new barbed wire fence stopped him. It marked the boundary to what had been, for a short time, Ted’s land. Clipped to the top wire was a small, square sign bearing the timber company’s logo. Will thought of all the money his uncle had gotten in exchange for the land: money long gone, with little to show for it. He thought about his dad saying, ‘Watch out for him.’

It was less than a mile from the gate on the highway to Ted’s house, which was a manufactured home on half an acre, bracketed by woods. Ted’s truck was there. Will knocked and waited in the yard. He was turning to leave when the door opened. Ted wore a towel and an undershirt, his hair wet from the shower but combed. He seemed sober and not particularly happy for the visit. ‘Well, come in,’ he said. ‘I got a few minutes.’

His house was cleaner than Will had ever seen it. There was an open suitcase on the kitchen table, starched shirts and Wranglers hanging from the table’s edge. Ted moved into his view and began folding the hanging clothes into the case. ‘It’s just something I’ve got to do,’ he said. ‘Little jaunt overseas.’

He seemed sad about it, while Will was devastated. Apparently his dad and Ted had made secret plans to meet up. Apparently brotherhood was stronger than fatherhood. Will felt like a collapsing star, overwhelmed by his own gravity, but managed to say, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Well,’ said Ted, folding the arms of a shirt as carefully as if it were a corpse in a casket. ‘Don’t go telling nobody. It’s called Moldova.’

Will thought the name was probably made up. It sounded like a misty planet ruled by a mind-controlling overlord. He had spent hours looking at a map of South America and had never seen any Moldova.

Of course it turned out that Ted was only embarrassed to say what he was going to do. Which turned out not to be embarrassing at all, once he returned with Silvia.

Only one single woman was a regular customer. She remained on her couch, which sank to its center as if filled with air, while he placed the pizza on her coffee table and picked up her personal check, which always included a five dollar tip. She seemed happy.

A pretty girl from his senior year English class answered the door one night. They had worked as partners on an assignment once, but she either pretended to have forgotten him or really did not remember. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

 In school, there had been girls everywhere. He hadn’t talked to them, but they had been there. Now they were all somewhere else.

Will’s dad has been gone almost two years now, and he hasn’t received even a cryptic postcard. He is often convinced that his dad is dead, where he seems to feel the man’s absence, not just from Arkansas but from the earth entirely. But sometimes Will imagines him in a hammock beside a palm-shaded shack, eating some exotic fruit while a dusky woman sweeps the yard with a frond.

‘We just get one life and it’s a big world.’

Those were his dad’s last words to him before he boarded the bus, bound eventually, he claimed, to a still-undecided locale in South America. He would step on a plane in winter and step off it in summer. The idea had been conceived, Will was fairly sure, a few months earlier, when the two of them had watched a show on an educational channel about a serial killer who had roamed from Chile to Columbia, murdering and carelessly dumping bodies, and nobody had even tried much to catch him until he took the daughter of some coffee baron. When it went to commercial, Will saw that his dad had a bloodshot, wondrous look.

‘It’s like the old West down there,’ he said, like that was a good thing. ‘This country ain’t getting any richer, son. Back when your mom and I had the ski boat, and the motor home. It’ll never be like that again. Not for regular folks. . . . I’m not sure I’d have any kids if I was you. Next thing you know they’ll be ten billion of us. Machines are taking away more jobs every day. You watch. When it gets down really low in this country, people are gonna panic. Down there, they’re used to it. They’re ahead of us, really.’

Will thought it was just another temporary obsession, but before long everything save the land had been turned to cash, which his dad stuffed into the bottom of a duffel bag. The man had never been a regular drinker but spent his last few days in America buzzed on light beer, quiet and smug, it seemed, in his coming adventure, his bravery. The night before he left, fully drunk, he promised to scout locations and get something set up—a ‘hacienda,’ he called it—and send word should Will wish to join. It was the first suggestion of this kind and Will was quietly thrilled, as much by the prospect of keeping close to his father as by that of going to a strange distant land. If he met a girl, they would not speak the same language. They could teach each other to understand.

The next night, in the buzzing blue glow of the bus station, his dad, bony shoulders outlined through his windbreaker, seemed small and frail and, for the first time, old. He had not spoken since the drive into town, when he had told or asked Will to watch out for Ted. At the hospital across the street, a helicopter took off and flew directly overhead.

‘I’ve been living here my whole life, son. Either I was smart or I was just scared. There’s only one way to find out which.’

‘You can always just come back,’ Will said, as if he was comforting his dad and not himself.

Then his dad did something strange, something he had never done: he punched Will in the arm: a stiff jab that left a sting. Boarding the bus, his dad turned back and said the thing about it being a big world and people getting only one life, which struck Will as a bit too much philosophy: it was starting to sound cheap. But that gave him hope, as the door closed, that the old man’s commitment was weak, so that his trip would be short.

Half a year later, with Ted gone too, there wasn’t much hope left. Will was driving the lunch shift when he got a call from Ted’s number. He pulled into a parking lot to answer.

‘Well, I’m back,’ Ted said. ‘Why don’t you come over. I got something to show you.’

His tone was all happy, sly suggestion. Will felt sure somehow that this something was someone, and didn’t even consider who else it could be. He broke the speed limit, a never-to-be-delivered pizza on the seat beside him, opened the front door without knocking, walked in and found: Silvia. All six feet of her. He had interrupted her arranging pink roses in an EZ Mart cup on the kitchen table. They looked at each other with almost the same expression: an awkward mixture of thrill and disappointment. She wore jeans and a blank white t-shirt, no bra. Silky black hair curtained away half of her pale face. Shaking her hand, he felt like a child.

A bit later, while the brand new American was in town at the grocery store, Ted and Will sat on the rotting deck in back of the house. A cow pasture opened up beyond the near fence, overgrown despite a small herd of grazing heifers. Pine woods loomed to either side. Ted sipped from his can and stared into the trees. ‘I tell you, bud. I’m thinking long-term for once. . . Assuming she doesn’t just keep driving, that is.’

He smiled. Will did not.

‘Daddy told me before he died, said, “You got to quit being such a fuckup, Ted. Think past the next five minutes for once in your life.” And that got to me, you know.’ Ted tapped his sternum softly. ‘Eventually it did. Course I didn’t want to listen to him when he was alive. But now that he’s dead and doesn’t know what I’m doing, and now that I’ve got somebody depending on me, and my brother’s off whoring in Mexico or wherever, now I can see the old man was right about certain things.’

A flying squirrel hissed overhead to another tree like a lost shadow.

‘Like, I shouldn’t have sold that land, man. I think he wanted me to have it for a reason. I’ve been thinking about a tree farm, maybe. Something I could watch grow. Pass on to my kids. Steady income and all that.’

It went from there. Will didn’t care if the whole spiel had been to coerce him into offering up the land: he was glad to have a project, and a partner. They sold ten acres, trees only, to the timber company, and used the money to rent a dozer, have a well drilled and install a drip irrigation system. Will thought of the mulberries.

The first seeds were planted in June. Mounding dirt and patting down, Will hadn’t been as satisfied since he was a kid, in the tree in his back yard. Silvia sat on the tailgate in the shade, flipping through celebrity magazines, drinking vodka and orange juice. She had put on some weight, but not in the legs. Will snuck a few looks at them: dangling barefoot from short shorts. He knew it was wrong to look, but couldn’t help himself. She wasn’t overweight, but she probably outweighed him. On a blank page in the back of a book, Will had recently written, ‘Looking at her is like looking at the sun.’ Then, reading what he wrote, he had torn out the page and stuffed it into a used box of Chinese food.

He couldn’t describe what looking at her was like. She made him nervous, but he always felt better when she was around. Having her there on the tailgate was no small part of the satisfaction he felt while planting the seeds. He glanced at her painted lips sipping her screwdriver. She turned a page, smiled, shook her head slowly. She looked at celebrities like she looked at him: with plain amusement. Back in Moldova, according to Ted, she had worked in a restaurant and done laundry. Here she was a landowner.

‘That girl can put away the liquor,’ Ted said, twisting his garden spade, dropping in a peach pit. ‘But she don’t ever get drunk, far as I can tell.’

Will didn’t have anything to say to that. He got drunk on one beer.

‘What say we take her down to the river after we finish here,’ Ted said. ‘Punch some holes in the water.’

Will didn’t know what that meant, but he said okay. He always liked to see the river.

They stopped and picked up Ted’s guns—most of which he had inherited, and surely would have pawned had he not found Silvia—and drove through a bean field until they ran out of road. It was about fifty feet down an orange clay bluff to the river, which slid away to their right like a milk chocolate slab. Ted handed Silvia a big silver six-shooter. She stared at it laying across her open hands. ‘It’s okay?’ she said. ‘We can just shoot?’

They could, and they did. Ted took out garbage from the bed of his truck for targets: aligned various receptacles upon a prone log, tossed a few milk jugs over the bluff to the muddy river and sent an empty beer keg tumbling down. Then they traded potshots. Ted, holding a  military-looking rifle with a long curved clip, riddled the keg—piano sounds mixed with the gunfire—and sent it to the bottom. Silvia took the rifle from him and went after the milk jugs. They skated on the surface like dust motes, and seemed to try to avoid getting shot. She popped them like balloons.

Will feared the violent buck of the pistol, and the whining it would leave in his ears. He had once read about little robots that beckoned on a subconscious wavelength for a human host. They could not operate themselves, but they could get people to do pretty much whatever they wanted. Following Silvia’s lead, he picked up a couple of empty shells and twisted them into his ears. He hefted the pistol and squinted until his right eye saw fuzzy through the lashes. The sight-knob quivered ever-so-slightly. His finger drew back hard on the heavy trigger with the weight of decision. The recoil charged through him and a can of spraypaint leapt into the air, spiraling a jet of bright orange gore. His heart doubled in size and he felt, for an instant, like a god casting thunderbolts. Silvia laughed like crazy, sprawled and grabbed his shoulder for support. Another recoil charged through him, less visible than the first. She swooped in and kissed him on the neck, near the base on the right side, just above his collar bone.

‘Give it to me,’ she said urgently.

He turned, terrified. Her hand was open. He placed the quivering pistol upon it.

She canted her hips and started picking off items from the log—a coke exploded, a gutshot bleach bottle fell slowly—and with each one Ted said ‘Yeah baby’ with a little more intensity. Her fourth and final bullet tore through a can of hairspray, whose final selfless act was to strengthen the surrounding weeds against the wind.

‘You’re fucking incredible,’ Ted said as he stepped to her. They embraced and Ted buried his face in that black hair until he found her neck. She held to him as much as he to her. It seemed impossible, but there it was. And why not? How was Ted so different from other people? Will had to be happy for Ted. An idea came to him: he would ask Silvia if she had any sisters who might like to join her in America. He would say it like a joke, when he got a chance. Maybe she would say yes, and it wouldn’t be a joke anymore.

The next day, he submitted his profile on the dating website. Standing before the mirror, holding the camera in front of his black shirt, he took a picture of himself. His smile looked to him like a failure. But maybe it would fool other people. With an editing program, he tried to erase the camera from the image by smearing it over with the black of his shirt. Then his hands looked like they were holding an invisible cheeseburger. He cropped out everything below the shoulders, and darkened his skin slightly. Still, the picture did not seem likely to attract much interest. He paid his fee, but did not log on.

While the seeds sprouted, Ted went to work for a tree service company. He volunteered for polecatter, climbing the trunk with spike-toed boots when a tree had to be dismantled rather than simply felled. Chainsaw dangling from a rope on his belt, he made two more dollars-an-hour than the rest of the crew—except the boss, of course—and hardly ever worried about falling. He felt rare and intrepid in the treetops. Before he knew it, he was taking pride in his work.

By August, Will was driving at least twice a week out to Ted’s. Silvia seemed mystified by the heat. One day she came into the den sweaty in a white t-shirt and lay on the floor, on top of the air conditioning vent, with her arms strewn above her head. He could see her ribs expand and contract as she breathed. When the slow rhythm stopped, he saw that she was staring at him, smiling slightly. He did not believe it was an invitation. Not until she tugged her shirt up onto her belly and passed her hand slowly across her chest.

‘He is gone on the fur wheeler,’ she said. ‘Checking his traps.’

Will was fastened to his chair. He looked away from her. She pretended to frown.

‘No,’ she said, covering her belly. ‘I don’t think so.’

He looked at her. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

She grinned. ‘Come here then.’

He got up, hoping he wasn’t shaking visibly. She rolled onto her side. The couch was right beside her but she remained on the floor, her jaw supported in her palm, and patted the space she had made. Her breasts hung like heavy fruit. ‘You are funny,’ she said.

Will didn’t want to be funny, but he did want to get down on the floor. ‘You make me feel funny,’ he said, and smiled.

He sat with his feet together, the vent blowing cold air between them. She slid her hand behind his shirt and moved it lightly over his back. He knew that she could feel him quivering. If Ted came in, he would have his pistol with him. ‘I think—’

‘Pshhhh,’ she said. ‘There is no need to think.’

He closed his eyes and leaned down slowly against her.

A few minutes later, he was no longer quivering. He believed it had been a disaster, any way you could look at it. But he felt brand new anyway. Whatever it had been, Silvia didn’t seem bothered. After kissing him on the forehead, she went into the kitchen and made a tall vodka with a splash of juice, turned on the classic rock station and started making dinner.

Ted returned with a possum in a live trap on the back of the four wheeler. Like a man on a TV nature show, he explained to Silvia that it was a marsupial that played dead as a defense mechanism. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’

He opened the cage and it jumped to the ground. Blood red eyes. It did not run away. When Ted approached, it hissed and bared its teeth, raised onto its back legs and slashed with its little paw, where Ted went ‘Yip!’ and hopped backward. Silvia and Will laughed loudly, and they all watched the possum trot away. Before entering the woods it stopped and turned back. It seemed filled with resentment. They all laughed some more, then went inside to eat.

Seeing that nothing had apparently changed, Will was both relieved and disappointed. He was glad to detect no sign of upsetting their marriage, but he worried that what had happened would never happen again.

After dinner—pork and garlic kebabs and a sour catfish soup, which Ted raved about but Will could not swallow—Ted rubbed Silvia’s feet on the couch while the three of them watched his favorite show: a reality series about lumberjacks in the big northern woods.

Will worried lately about the power of educational television. Once he had envied his dad and his uncle for being able to make their own decisions, to shape their own lives (the low-born children who rose to greatness in his books always had destiny to thank), but he was no longer sure that was the case. These shows seemed to make them want strange things. Will worried that Ted was making too much of a career of cutting down trees, that he might take Silvia to Canada or Alaska, leaving him partnerless on the tree farm.

But of course that was the wrong thing to worry about. In Ted’s second month on the job, high in a loblolly that leaned at a perilous angle over a doctor’s hunting cabin, he reached for a higher limb and was bit on the wrist. He cursed and flung his hand, then stared at the twin bleeding holes. Eventually he answered the men on the ground that it was a ‘fucking SNAKE!’

‘Bullshit,’ said the dumbest of them. But the tail was now rattling over the edge of the limb. ‘Now you warn me son-of-a-bitch.’ Ted snatched the rattler and flung the snake down among them. Watching it fall like a wounded helicopter, and the men fleeing in all directions, he almost laughed, but the pain surged, his head went fuzzy and he fell against the trunk to keep from falling. He had heard of them raiding nests in the spring, but he didn’t know why one would be up here this time of year. He sucked at the holes. The venom spread with his pulse, creeping through him like wildfire. He held tighter to the tree, his cheek sticky with sap, his heart closed on from all sides: fire in his chest now. Staring into the woods, which blurred together, he felt like he was becoming part of the tree.

The job was postponed until the next day. That night the wind blew hard, six inches of rain fell and so did the big pine. No one was in the cabin, but when the crew arrived in the morning they were all still astonished at the destruction wrought by a single small creature, which had slithered off into the woods in the confusion.

Will makes passionate love to Silvia every day, though she probably isn’t aware of it. He still visits her two or three times a week. Even though she is closer to his age than she was to Ted’s, and she usually cooks for him and kisses him on the cheek when he leaves, he doesn’t get carried away with any wild ideas about the future. After Ted was buried, he had thought about Silvia—the widow in mourning, in need of comfort—and his grief had a purpose. But she didn’t need much comfort. When she seemed sad, it wouldn’t last more than a moment. He drank vodka with her one night and ended up puking off the front porch. She sat on the edge of the bed with him and held him and sang to him in her native tongue.

He can look her in the eye now, and he’s getting better at talking to her, but she hasn’t given him any more signals. The house is up for sale, the insurance money has already come through, and her English is improving all the time. Silvia doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything and Will can’t imagine what she’ll do next, though he’s pretty sure she won’t go back to Moldova.

He never visits Silvia without also checking on the tree farm, but he often looks in on the trees without stopping to see Silvia. A lot of them are up past his waist now. The trunks are spindly, but the leaves are full-size. He knows which ones he planted and which ones were planted by Ted. A few are significantly larger and healthier than the rest, though they seem to be getting the same amount of water and sunlight.

Last week, he finally looked at the dating website. He has a date tomorrow. Each time he tries to talk himself out of going, he realizes again that he has no choice.

It has been a while since he has read any science fiction. At night, he drives the pizzas. He doesn’t think he will ever get used to the smell, but he won’t have to when those mulberries start coming in. Things will change then. By the time the trees begin to produce, he should have enough saved to quit his job. This he calculated using a formula from a book in the second-hand store, a book about managing money by a successful business man. It cost two dollars but has already paid for itself.

In the beginning, he will save on labor cost by working the harvest himself. He envisions a vast system of nets to catch the ones that fall on their own, but that will depend on how much capital he has to work with. Supply and demand will work in his favor, certainly. Marketing and distribution: those he’s still not sure about. Neither is he confident anymore that mulberries taste better than anything else. There is a mature mulberry tree on the land already, deep in the remaining woods. One day last week, he went out and ate from it. A squirrel was ignoring the fallen berries, which seemed a bad omen. The more he ate, the less they returned him to the tree in his back yard, until his memory was no more substantial than the future, and he could feel a stomach ache coming on.

But he had not planted that tree.

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Had his mother not opened a little video store in the little town near the Red River in which he grew up, Trampas Smith would probably never have written any stories. Those Beta Maxes were his classical education. Later he read books, and spent too many years in school, of which the two in Wyoming with Brad Watson and the Laramigos were the only ones he really enjoyed. Now he has three beautiful kids and a smoking hot wife. He bales hay, fixes things and, with his brother and oldest friend, gradually makes a movie. As Dillinger said, “That’s where the money is.”