Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (20 page)

Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish

“
You’re nuts,” my husband told me.

“
Land is always a good investment,” I said. “Here, I’ll send you the link.”

I messaged it to him and there was silence while Jonah clicked through the pages on his laptop.

“
This is in Utah,” he finally said. “It’ll be swarming with Mormons. Or there’ll be some sort of religious cult living just down the road.”

“
By purchasing this land for a mere 350 dollars,” I said, “I have doubled our property in the world. We are landed gentry now. I think that means we can be knighted.”

“
A quarter acre.”

“
No, I got a better deal by buying two lots, so it’s a half acre.”

Our legal holdings now consisted of one decrepit, Key-west colored condo beside Lake Sammamish, a boat slip, and a half acre of property in Box Elder County, Utah. The deed, when it arrived a week after Paypal payment, read “The West third of the North three fifths of the Southwest Quarter of Section 13, Township 6N, Range 16W, S.L.B. & M.”

I pinned it up on the bulletin board over my computer.

“
Who pays the taxes on that?” Jonah said, glancing up at it.

“
We do, but this year’s are included in the purchase price,” I said.

“
Huh.”

I paid him no attention and kept on working through the Ebay auction list. I couldn’t see what was on his screen, but I could hear the game music shift as he stepped off the zeppelin and into the base camp in the jungle.

“
Are we planning on going to see it?” he said.

“
Sure, we can go camp on it.”

“
And get shot.”

“
You’re just jealous of my real estate genius.”

He snorted.

“
Mark my words, that land will make us money someday,” I said. “Land isn’t a renewable resource.”

“
That’s what you said about the condo,” he said.

“
And I was right, too,” I said. “It’s gone up 50k in two, what, three years?”

“
Yeah, yeah. You said that when you bought all those Thai sapphires a couple of years ago too.”

“
Poophead.”

“
You too.”

I didn’t think much more about the property at the time. The summer went on and we continued about our business: I made a living selling Ebay items for people, and Jonah went off to work at untangling web issues for his company on a daily basis. We barbecued and watched the eagles fish in the evenings beside Lake Sammamish.

In September, a letter arrived about the Box Elder property. The Morton-Thiokol Corporation was offering me $3,000 for it.

“
Whoot,” Jonah said. “Not a bad return on your money.”

“
I wonder why they want the land,” I said. “I mean, not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything.”

“
That’s exactly what you’re doing, though, looking a gift horse in the mouth,” Jonah pointed out.

“
Yeah, well, it just seems a little too good to be true. It’s a corporation. They’re not offering me money out of the goodness of their heart.”

Jonah Googled around that evening. “Sounds like they’re building a research facility,” he said. “Lots of funding, special names, a fancy opening ceremony with that singer Ivory and that guy from that one show.”

“
What show?” I looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that one. Huh, fancy model.”

“
Three thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Jonah pointed out. “It’s your investment and all, but maybe you want to cash it in and get us a trip to Paris or something.”

“
Paris?”

“
I’ve always wanted to go to Paris.”

“
Well, we’ll see,” I said.

“
You could sell the condo. Write up a fancy description of it that sells for the same kind of return. Do it.”

“
Live beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish in Washington State, beneath the shadow of Douglas firs and cypress,” I said. “This quirky condo features good feng shui and its own boat launch.”

“
No wonder we like living here.”

“
No wonder.”

Since there was no immediate deadline on the check and since I am a procrastinator by nature, I put it aside. Six weeks later, another letter arrived from Morton-Thiokol, this time with an offer of $30k.

“
Holy crap,” Jonah said. “That’s so rad.”

“
We have to go check it out.”

“
Gift horse. Mouth.”

“
Oh, come on. You’re curious too. What could be there that’s worth $30,000?”

We packed the car with Trader Joe’s goodies, sleeping bags, and my old camping gear.

I never minded traveling anywhere with Jonah. We’d burn a few CDs worth of music and bring the iPod. Sometimes I’d read something aloud and we’d work our way through a book of short stories or a horror novel. This trip we got all the way through the first half of a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales.

“
They’re all so dark,” Jonah said. “People with their feet stuck to loaves of bread, stuck down in a bog of toads and snakes. Look at the poor little match girl—she just freezes to death.”

I closed the book and put it in my lap. “Grimm’s the same way. Everything is death and people get bits chopped off them. Very un-Disney.”

“
I wouldn’t read them to my kids,” he said. Then, realizing what he’d said, he gave me a quick, worried glance. I pretended not to see it, just stared out the windows.

We were on I-90 on our way across the pass. I watched a black pool pass on my right. It was ringed by pines, filled with ghostly stumps of trees protruding up through the water and glimmering like streaks of coal pencil on the silvery surface. It was polluted. Barren.

Descending into eastern Washington, I glimpsed black and white magpies along the fence rails and watched the landscape shift from pines and firs besieged by blackberry vines to scrub trees, leggy beeches, and red-capped sumac, before we dipped further south into Utah and the landscape grew dryer yet.

Past Willard Bay, we saw hundreds of high voltage power transmission lines, metal lace against the snow-covered Raft River Mountains. Shadows cracked the ground at the foot of each metal construction.

I shivered as we passed under them.

“
What’s up?” Jonah asked.

“
Long time ago I read a book about power lines distorting magnetic energies in our bodies. They said ghosts hung out around them and people ended up with shorter life spans because of the energy changes.”

“
Poppycock,” Jonah said. “You read too much crackpot stuff.”

“
Yes, but we do have magnetic fields in our bodies.”

“
Hippie.”

“
I know you are, but what am I?”

The bickering went on till the northern tip of the state, near the mountains. The car’s GPS unit led us along a dirt and rut road to the precise location, bordering a hill crested with short, stubby trees.

Scrambling out of the Vehicross and stretching, I looked around.

“
These must be box elders,” Jonah said, nodding at the trees that surrounded us. “Hence the name.”

“
I always thought these were maples,” I said, stooping to pick up a stout purplish green twig. It held a drooping cluster of parallel wings, each a thumb width long, rustling hollowly as I shook it.

“
You’re the biologist in the family,” Jonah said. “You do realize that camping means no toilet or hot water in the morning, don’t you?”

I shouldered a pack and the tent’s bundle and did not deign to reply.

We made our camp near a stand of older trees ridged with grayish-brown bark.

“
What the hell is on this?” Jonah said, unrolling the tent.

“
I haven’t used it in years,” I said. Hand-painted ivy leaves and blue flowers stretched across the dark green surface. “I painted those on before I took it up to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. People liked the way it looked.”

“
This is a hippie tent,” Jonah grumbled as he stretched the fabric over the tent poles. He tossed our sleeping bags inside.

“
I’m going to go get the rest of the stuff,” he said. “You might gather some wood for a fire.”

I nodded, but instead I sat down on a log and watched the light gleaming on the upper sides on the mountain near us while gray clouds shaded the stands of pine further down. A trickle of sunshine danced on the tent flap.

Something rustled among the trees but I looked up too late to catch anything but a dark limb sliding in among the foliage. I blinked and looked again, but could see nothing.

Jonah returned with an armload of sleeping bags and the cooler. “Where’s the wood?”

“
I saw an animal.”

“
A big animal? What was it?”

“
Pretty big.”

“
A bear?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“
Are bears pale brownish? I thought they were black. It didn’t look very hairy.”

“
Bigfoot.”

“
Piss off, unbeliever.”

“
It was a dog. I bet it was a dog.”

“
Maybe,” I said.

We built a fire and roasted hotdogs and marshmallows while watching milky moonlit clouds scud overhead, touched with the red sparks of our fire.

In the middle of the night, I roused to pee. Outside in the starry night, I groped my way to a safe spot. A scuffling came from the side of the car, and I clicked on my flashlight’s beam and sent it there.

She crouched near a tire, her head barely topping the square of the gas cap, a bag of marshmallows in her dirty hands. Twigs and leaves filled her hair. Her face was narrow as a fox’s, inhuman as she blinked at me.

“
It’s okay,” I said, directing the beam to the ground between us.

She stuffed another marshmallow into her mouth and watched me, chewing. Her feet were bare and black.

“
You can have those,” I said. “There’s some hotdogs in the car, too.”

She swallowed. “Really?” Her voice was higher-pitched than I expected.

I nodded. She crouched beside the remnants of the fire. “Make it hot again?” she said.

I dragged more wood onto the fire and sparked it alight before threading a hotdog onto a skewer.

Once she was holding her meal out over the flames, the marshmallows a lump inside the coarse hide of her vest, I felt more comfortable asking questions.

“
I’m Stacie,” I offered. “What’s your name?”

“
Deirdre.” Her gaze stirred past my shoulder. “I like your tent.” Her voice had a lilting burr to it, a slowness that marked each statement, as though she searched for words.

“
Yeah, I do too,” I said. “So do you live around here?

“
Right here,” she said. She nodded at the thicket of trees.

“
Out here in the country?”

“
Yah,” she said.

“
Seems like that would be lonesome.”

“
There’s been people that have lived here,” she said. “There was a house over there, a man and two little girls.” She pointed with her chin at a nearby ridge.

“
Doesn’t look like much there.”