Chapter Three
“Where did you get the bones, Honey?” I asked him when I finally tracked him down in the greenhouse he likes to call the baby farm. It’s where we start out the seeds. I put some older plants in there to give the little guys encouragement. Harlan rolled his eyes at that, but didn’t try to stop me.
“I can’t tell you that, Sweetheart.” Harlan said without hesitation. “You’re not worried I had anything to do with them, are you?”
“Of course not. They’re too old.” That last bit must have come from some whisper in my brain because it wasn’t common knowledge, yet.
Harlan gave me that look, he gives me when I know something I shouldn’t know.
“Can you tell me anything about them?” I asked.
“They were up on Van Bibber’s clearcut,” he said. “That heavy rain we had last week eroded the hillside up there by the old logging road and brought those bones to the surface. I can tell you that and I will tell that to the sheriff and anyone else who asks.”
I could see the hillside as he described it. I’d been there before with Harlan. He wanted to show me the clearcut. Small trees have begun to grow among the silver stumps. There are wild grasses and wildflowers and deep cuts in the ground where run-off has made tracks. Back when the Van Bibber Company was logging the area, there were no rules about replanting, and this particular area wasn’t national forest, it was Van Bibber land. Different rules.
Harlan has his secrets and I don’t try to dig them out. Now and then he’ll say things like, “Shit happened in ‘Nam and nobody who wasn’t there can ever understand.” I’m sure he’s right. I feel the same way about my life. Don’t tell me you understand, because you don’t. You can’t. What Harlan and I can understand about each other is that we each have these ripped apart places in ourselves with patches on them, which hold together well enough most of the time that we can get up everyday and go outside and even talk to people and do the things we need to do to live and get along. There are times when I think that neither one of us would be able to make a life with someone who wasn’t damaged. We’re smart enough not to have children together.
I mark time from events, not from dates. There is the time Momma and I lived in the house and the time after when we moved from apartment to apartment. There was the time when Armando was living with us and there was the time after when there was a new boyfriend every couple of months. There was the time before I ran away and the time I lived on the streets. There was the time before heroin, there was the time of heroin. There is now, the time of recovery. Time before Ned (the Loser), time after. Time before Harlan, the now with him. I know there will be a time after Harlan because he is about twenty years older than me. But I don’t look at time ahead. Even so, I knew deep down that The Bones were one of those events, one of those turning points. Time before The Bones and time after.
I didn’t press Harlan any further about where he got the bones. I know he didn’t find them himself or he would have just said so and I expect he would have call Sheriff Sweet to get them himself. The last thing he would have done was put them in a gunny sack and dump them in the sheriff’s lap. That night was the first night I dreamt about running through the woods. Feeling my breath coming in jagged hurting lungsful, my legs aching and rubbery, trees crashing and I’m running through the pine forest, leaping over downed logs, then I’m in a jungle and leaves are slapping my face, I’m stumbling and I fall. For a moment so brief that thinking back, I’m not sure was really in my dream, I see myself only it isn’t me, it’s a man curled up under a bush making himself as small as he can. The image was clear, not dreamlike, the most vivid image from the dream and it stayed with me for days. His face was obscured by his long, wild hair and his beard and because his arm was shielding it.
It’s the wildman I thought. The one people in Germaine scare their children with like the bogeyman of old. The Wildman of the Ochocos–you’d better be good or he’ll get you.
I’m not the only person in Germaine who marks time by The Bones. The uncovering of those bones changed lives in Germaine forever. It changed Harlan and it changed me. Rockie took up residence in a corner of my brain and started playing wild saxophone riffs. Close my eyes and I would see her dark brown fingers running over the keys like water over Multnomah falls–a stream of constant movement. I’d see her lips hugging the mouthpiece and tears cutting down her cheeks mingling with sweat. Sweet, sweet music, wild cacophonous music. Get up and dance you fool music. I was glad to have her back.
Not that she had been gone. Not since I got clean. Rockie had been with me, but not like this. After The Bones, Rockie was with me just about everyday. She was so strong, I had to watch myself to keep from talking out loud to her when other people were around.
