Lunatic Fringe (10 page)

“
Those hairy fucking
femi-nazis? Christ.” Brian scowled as though smelling something
rank.

“
Briiiiaann!” Anna
responded with flirtatious, mock-offense.

Lexie bit her tongue, the heat rising
up the back of her neck to prickle at the fine hairs behind her
ears.

“
You can’t be a lesbo,
Lex.” Brian leered. “You’re too cute for that shit. It’d be a
waste.” His eyes scanned her as though the truth of the matter was
hidden beneath her shirt. “Lexie the Lezzie. Hah. That’s too
easy.”

“
What are you doing here,
anyway?” Lexie crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“
Anna,” he said. “Scraping
the bottom of the barrel, admittedly, but a man’s got his needs.
Sometimes you just don’t want them to put up a fight, you
know?”

Anna giggled warily and Lexie
grimaced.

“
Fucking tree didn’t let me
get it done, either. My woody is stuck behind my waistband, and
it’s starting to chafe. Unless. . .” he included both girls in his
leer, raising his eyebrows as means of suggestion.

Lexie flushed red with rage. She wished
the Pack was here to deliver the cutting rejoinder she was
incapable of coming up with herself.

Brian laughed. “I’m just joshin’.
Lighten up, Lex.” He slapped her shoulder and squeezed
it.

Their standoff was interrupted by the
loud beeping of the crane as it rolled into place through the thick
mud.

The crane jerked into action and the
chains clinked with the burden of the tree, silencing the onlooking
crowd. Lexie stepped away from Brian and Anna just as a hefty
copper-colored pickup truck cruised onto the lawn. A woman stepped
out of the truck. Stunning and strong, she was clad in work boots,
blue jeans and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. She reached into the
bed of her truck and lifted out a large chainsaw and a pair of work
goggles. Her hair, an earthy chestnut brown, grazed her shoulders
and hung partly in front of her face. Mirrored sunglasses hid her
eyes. Lexie found herself wondering what they looked like. Unable
to see them, Lexie had trouble parsing the rest of the woman’s
face, as though knowing her eyes would solve some important mystery
of her ethnicity, relations, or role in this small town.

As the woman approached and Lexie ran
through the possible permutations of eye color and shape, a claw of
pain raked across the inside of her abdomen. A wave of nausea
flooded through Lexie, like the first realization of food
poisoning. She doubled over, hands braced on her thighs. Her blood
ran hot, flooding her body with queasy tingles. Strange pings of
pleasure roiled within the discomfort. Saliva pooled in her mouth,
and she swallowed hard as her muscles fought her bones. The spell
passed swiftly. Damn cramps. She pushed herself upright, stretching
past the tension, negating the pain. Breathing deeply, she wandered
back to the crowd, hoping to find some solidity in the distraction
of other people. Standing among them, though, Lexie kept glancing
over her shoulder at the strange woman.

The crowd cheered as the tree was freed
from the building like a thorn wrenched from a beast’s paw. Looking
up, Lexie felt a second pulse of shame as the inside of her room
was exposed to the sky. Her bed was made, the closet was open, and
books shone in the white daylight on her desk.

Bits of plastic and glass
rained down onto the grass, shaken loose from the dangling tree. It
felt perverse, this crowd gaping at her private existence, as if
she was being forced to undress before them. As the crane levered
the tree out of the dorm, Lexie spied gobs of color adhered to it,
tangled within the branches.
Oh
God
. A blue t-shirt clung to the fine
branches at the edge of the tree’s corona of twigs and, more
damningly, a pair of underwear dangled from a burr in the tree’s
bark. Lexie felt the overwhelming urge to flee, or vomit, or both.
Brian laughed aloud.

“
Cute chones, girl. I
didn’t know you had a penchant for polka dots.” He elbowed her in
the arm, and it felt as though the simple touch could send her
careening to the ground.

The crane spun the tree ninety degrees,
swooping over the students’ heads. Lexie’s panties dangled over the
crowd like a polka-dotted pinata. Snickers and giggles sprang up as
people noticed and pointed them out. The cops hustled forward, arms
spread wide, herding the crowd out from under the shadow of the
great beast.

Just beyond where the students and
workers reassembled, the crane eased the tree to the ground as
gently as lowering a lover into bed. The wood heaved and creaked as
the tree’s weight settled, then stilled. The subsequent silence
triggered a cascade of action and conversation. Dr. Fern, nodding
into the cell phone she cradled against her ear, beckoned with her
notebook for the students to gather around her. Various civil
servants drove away or began filling out clipboards of paperwork.
Some people snapped pictures with their cellphones.

While the rest of her dormmates waited
for Dr. Fern to explain the next steps, Lexie pressed up against
the thin, yellow barrier of the police tape. The strange, dark
woman ducked past the perimeter of police tape, tucking a stray
lock of hair behind her ear with her free hand, while holding the
chainsaw in the other. She strode to the tree, her swaying hips
counterpoised to her shoulders. She moved as though an extension of
the ground itself, solid and unwavering.

Discovering the bits of clothing
tangled in the tree, the woman put down her chainsaw and extricated
them from the branches. Clothes in hand, she scanned the crowd of
students for the steward of the laundry. Lexie’s ears grew hot. The
woman walked to Lexie and wordlessly handed her the offending
garments. Lexie snatched them away and stuffed them into her bag.
In the lenses of the woman’s sunglasses, she saw her own discomfort
reflected. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the woman’s shrouded
gaze, praying that her ears weren’t as red as they felt.

“
I’m sorry about your
room,” the woman said. Her voice was low and even, formal in its
clarity.

Lexie shrugged and twisted her mouth in
a moue of powerlessness. “How did you know?” she asked.

The woman’s reply was a crafty grin.
Her skin was the color of arid fields and her hair that of
fire-licked bricks, a brown belying red revealed only by sunlight.
She picked up her chainsaw.

“
What are you doing with
the tree?” Lexie asked, desperate to dispel her anxiety with a bit
of small talk.

“
I’m here to take care of
it,” the woman replied, removing her sunglasses and hanging them on
the collar of her shirt, revealing particolored eyes. Even if Lexie
had guessed a color, she would only have been half
right.

The woman’s left eye elicited a memory
of Lexie’s childhood: her mother’s birthday, when Lexie had been
only six. Her father had presented her mother with a small white
cardboard box, within which was a smooth, translucent golden rock.
It was rare, he said, to find such a thing in this part of the
world. Lexie had laughed when he said it was called “amber,”
because that was the name of their neighbors’ golden retriever.
Now, looking at the impossible color of this woman’s left eye,
Lexie found herself wondering whatever happened to that
stone.

Stranger still was her right eye, the
shade of the jagged slate cliffs overlooking the ocean thirty miles
to the west. The light caught the woman’s iris like the moonstone
embedded in the hilt of Lexie’s new knife, as cool and fragile as
ice melting in spring. The overall effect was disconcerting, like
looking at two faces superimposed over one another.

“
Whoa,” Lexie
breathed.

“
Pardon?” The woman tilted
her head, that rebellious lock of hair again sliding
free.

“
Oh, nothing. Just. Um.
Your eyes are . . .”

The woman lowered her head and
scratched her eyebrow with a small chuckle.

“
Sorry! I’m sorry,” Lexie
stammered. “I’ve just never seen eyes like yours before.” She
paused, searching for some way to salvage the doomed
conversation.

“
It’s called
heterochromia,” the woman said. Her mauve lips curved into a
cheshire grin.

Lexie glanced past her to the tree. Its
massive trunk bisected the lawn while bored utility workers smoked
and texted, kicking at the mud with their boots.

The woman held out her hand to in
greeting. “I’m Archer.” Her palm was warm and strong, smooth from
work, radiating heat like a sunburn.

“
Lexie.” Her father had
taught her how to give a good handshake, but now her arm struggled
to hold firm as Archer jerked it. Archer eyed Lexie curiously
before stepping away to the tree trunk, lips moving without sound
as her eyes scanned and evaluated the protruding
branches.

“
You’re taking care of it?
Why?” Lexie asked.

“
Suzanne Fern called
me.”

Archer stepped away, attention focused
on the tree. Lexie rocked back and forth on her heels, pressing her
belly against the police tape, then withdrawing, over and over
again. What could she do to pull the woman’s attention back to
her?

“
Help?” Lexie squeaked,
uncertain of the language she was speaking, but certain she needed
to say something. The word sounded odd on its own, so she rushed to
qualify, “You want . . . Help? Any?”

Though Lexie felt quite certain she
sounded like an idiot, Archer didn’t seem to notice.

“
Are you comfortable with a
chainsaw?”

Lexie took a deep breath and nodded,
pleased that this was all that would be asked of her. She threw a
glance back at Dr. Fern.

Archer waved off her concern. “Don’t
worry about Sue. She’s cool.” Archer replaced her sunglasses,
handing the goggles to Lexie to wear. They shared a brief smile as
Lexie ducked beneath the police tape and followed Archer to the
felled beast.

After twenty-five minutes of
ear-searing noise, the tree lay in rough, thick discs and the bed
of Archer’s truck was open with two planks of wood ramped to the
ground. They had worked the tree from both ends, Lexie taking care
of the branches while Archer attacked the trunk, working her way to
the core. Lexie and Archer rolled the larger pieces up the planks
to the truck bed, which sagged beneath the weight. Archer was not
much larger than Lexie, but she was shockingly strong. Not even
several trips carrying the disks of tree back to her truck had
broken her breath.

The utility men cleared the rest of the
wreckage and wheeled in a wood chipper as police officers escorted
the students to their rooms to gather their necessities. The
students would have to stay the next night scattered in other rooms
throughout campus until the structural integrity of the building
could be verified, after which they could return to their rooms
with some slight reshuffling and double-occupancy
demotions.

Satisfied that the first phase of her
plan was working, Dr. Fern turned her attention to Lexie. “Ms.
Clarion!”

While Lexie suspected Dr. Fern would
prefer not to have to deal with the complaints of thirty-five
displaced students, she also couldn’t help but notice how this
problem-solving invigorated the president. Dr. Fern’s eyes
brightened as she tied up each loose end, nearing the finish line
after which she could return to her slippers, weekend crossword or
whatever else it was school administrators did on the weekend. It
seemed that even though beckoned from bed because of extensive
property damage and a student’s brush with death, Dr. Fern was
enjoying herself, if in an odd, exasperated way.

She laid out a plan that involved
overnight bags, deferred homework assignments, an optional meeting
with Lexie’s father, and double occupancy in German House until an
alternative could be arranged.

“
But I don’t speak German,”
Lexie said.

“
You don’t have to,
Alexis,” Dr. Fern replied, making a note in a leather-bound
planner. Satisfied with her proposed resolution, Dr. Fern snapped
shut her planner and turned her attention to Archer.

“
Archer, it’s wonderful to
see you. It’s been too long.” A broad smile opened on her face,
revealing deep, cozy wrinkles around her eyes and forehead. She
embraced Archer like an old friend. “I had heard you were
back.”

Archer returned the hug. “Hard to keep
a secret in this town.”

“
I do keep an ear to the
ground. When did you get back?”

“
About six weeks ago. I’ve
just been at the cabin, sweeping out the cobwebs.”

Dr. Fern placed her hand on Archer’s
shoulder. “I hope you’ll be sticking around then.”

Archer smiled open and warm, unlike the
shrouded smile she had given to Lexie. It was strange to witness
such different personas displayed by the same woman. “Thanks for
the tree,” she said.

“
Thank you. She’d end up in
the wood chipper if not for you,” Dr. Fern said. “I hope you can
breathe new life into the old girl. She’s older than all of us.”
She chuckled. “Well, close enough.”

Lexie asked, “What do you
do?”

Archer grinned. “I’m a
carpenter.”