The Space Between Trees (2 page)

The Sunday after I found out that the Whisperers were obsessed with Jonah Luks, I found his truck and waited by it until I spotted him coming out of the woods at the edge of the neighborhood, at
which point I dumped all my newspapers onto the ground in front of me. This was something I’d seen a woman in a movie do once with the contents of her purse, and it seemed like a good strategy until I’d actually done it. I hadn’t thought about the moment after the dumping when I’d have to stand there with papers piled up to my ankles, feeling as stupid as possible. I bent down and tried to shovel the papers back into my satchel as quick as I could, but Jonah got there before I was done. And, the thing is, the trick from the movie
worked
. Jonah knelt down next to me and started picking up papers without a word, like it was simply the next task on his to-do list. And me, I knelt next to him and pretended that I wasn’t watching his hands grab those papers, his palms blackening with ink. His hands were much larger than mine, much larger than you’d think, even, judging from his own wrists—it was like they really belonged to another, bigger person.

When we’d gotten all the papers in the bag, I stuck out my own little hand and said, “Hi, I’m Evie,” which nearly took all my breath and definitely all my nerve.

When Jonah said his name back, he smiled a little, not to me really, but more to himself. And I got the feeling he’d known all along that I’d dumped the papers out just so he’d help me pick them up.

“Sorry about the ink,” I said. He looked puzzled until I showed him my palms, all smudgy gray, too. “On your hands.”

“Better than possum blood,” he answered.

I screwed up my face and said, “
Possum blood?”
And that was the first time I made Jonah Luks laugh.

Every Sunday after that, I’d wait and catch Jonah coming out of the woods. I’d circle around him and his sled, chattering at him so
that he wouldn’t have a chance to tell me to go away. With no one else to talk to, I found that I had a lot saved up to say, and poor Jonah got most of it.

During these near-monologues of mine, I’d pick out a little something to build on. Maybe he’d say a few words or move his hand—now, this was valuable material to be remembered, reworked, and relayed to the Whisperers during lunch. One time, I told this story about how Jonah reached past me to grab a length of rope, and I told it like he was trying to hold my hand but then was too shy to do it after all so he pretended like he was just getting the rope. And the so-called Whisperers? They
shrieked
when I told them that story. People at other tables looked over at us, they were so loud.

Jonah’s job is to get rid of the animal carcasses in the woods around Hokepe Woods so that the people who live there won’t stumble upon, say, a dead deer when they take a walk through the trees behind their house. He gets a deer every couple of weeks, and smaller stuff—rabbits and woodchucks and such—almost every time.

No one knows where all these deer are from. The woods only go back a couple miles so there shouldn’t be so many of them, but somehow the deer keep coming—cropping the neighbors’ gardens, bedevil ing their dogs, launching themselves in front of their teenagers’ cars. In fact, Jonah told me about how last summer a deer jumped over the back fence of one of the houses and landed right splash in some family’s swimming pool, and during their little girl’s birthday party, too. Luckily, at that moment, all the kids were inside doing presents, and not in the pool, like they’d been earlier. I can imagine it—the splash, the kids running to the back windows just in time to see the deer surface and kick up a foam, its black eyes bright,
before their mothers led them away. The fathers claimed that the deer, a full-grown buck, had tossed its head, and they couldn’t get close enough to pull it out. One of them managed to lasso its antlers and nearly got yanked in with it. By the time they called Jonah, the deer had put its head down and sunk to the bottom. When Jonah got there, he asked them why they didn’t drain the pool. They hadn’t thought of that, they said.

After he goes into the woods, Jonah usually walks among the trees nearest to the houses because the dead animals there are the ones people are most likely to find and complain about. If I listen hard, I can hear the sound of his sled runners on the ground, and I can walk along at his pace, both of us working our way around the edge of the neighborhood, him through the trees, me on the sidewalk. When I get to a house where I have to deliver a paper, I go do it and then hurry back to catch up with the sound of Jonah’s sled. When Jonah stops to take a look at something or tie his boot or pull out a smoke or whatever he does, I wait on my side until the sled sound starts up again. Then I keep walking with him.

On this morning, I deliver papers for about half an hour, walking along with the sound of Jonah’s sled. But then, after coming back from one of the houses, I can’t hear the sled runners anymore. I jog up a block to see if Jonah has gotten ahead of me, and then I walk back slowly, listening. Nothing. I decide that Jonah must’ve walked deeper into the trees where I can’t hear his sled anymore, so I turn away from the woods and go deeper into the neighborhood, because I still have half the houses in the middle left to do.

It takes me about an hour to finish in there, and by the time I’m done, the sun has made it over the horizon and is cutting right through the houses, lighting up their rooms, waking up their people. I pass some smug joggers, a boy pulling on a jowly dog, and a lady in her bathrobe standing barefoot in the middle of her front lawn. Each of these people waves at me, which is a funny thing that’s true about delivering newspapers: Everyone waves as if they like you. I still have all the rest of the border houses to finish, and I’m thinking and hoping that I might run into Jonah again. In fact, I’m walking along, listening so hard for the sound of Jonah’s sled that I almost miss Jonah himself standing right there on the front porch of my next house.

Jonah has told me before that he isn’t allowed to talk to the residents of Hokepe Woods. In fact, his boss, Mr. Jefferson, has very particular rules about this. That Jonah is not allowed to speak to residents is the first and most important rule. If a resident speaks to Jonah, however, Jonah must wave back, not nod or say good morning—he’s got to wave. This second rule hasn’t been tested out yet, though, because none of the people who live in Hokepe Woods have ever even said “Hi” to Jonah. “They don’t want to think about me,” he told me, one of his longest sentences to date.

So, anyway, there I am on the sidewalk, and there’s Jonah up on the porch, where he’s definitely not supposed to be, pink-eared, sledless, with his hand raised to knock. Jonah doesn’t knock, though; instead he kind of pauses with his fist in the air like he hears someone coming to answer. Without even thinking about it, I back into the yard of the house next door and crouch down in its front garden. It’s a small plot, covered in cedar chips and planted with shrubs. The shrubs offer some kind of place to hide, even though I’m pretty sure
that my forehead is sticking out over their fuzzy tops. The cedar chips poke at my hands, and a little ant crawls across my knuckles. None of it is too comfortable, really, and I don’t know how much longer I can squat there, so thank God when the door of that house swings open. The only problem is that where I’m crouching, I can’t see who’s answered it. Jonah starts talking, but he’s too far away for me to hear what he’s saying. Then, he disappears inside, which I’m sure is against all of Mr. Jefferson’s rules.

Well, I sit around in that garden for nearly fifteen more minutes, which I count off on my watch one after the next, like papers delivered to porches. The house Jonah has gone into is the only modern one on the block—a stack of a house—and the windows are all tinted dark, so I couldn’t peek in even if I had the courage to. Sure, it crosses my mind that Jonah is having sex with the woman in that house. On my paper route, I see dozens of Hokepe Woods’ divorcees trussed up in shiny jogging suits and skinny headbands, speedwalking themselves into successful and fulfilling futures. They’re the only ones who don’t wave at me, because they’ve got their eyes set in the distance, like they’re looking for the next thing. Jonah could be their next thing.

I think about how I’m going to explain Jonah’s affair with a divorcee to the Whisperers Monday at lunch. How can I spin it? What words can I use? I finally decide that I can’t tell them anything because I don’t know how to say it, and they wouldn’t know how to understand it either. The Whisperers think that Jonah and I are in love with each other. And maybe that’s okay after all because we were in love—no,
are
in love—in the story I’ve been telling. And the story hasn’t changed, no matter what’s happening in the house.

I settle on down among the shrubs, telling myself how everything is just fine, but soon enough my throat begins to ache. And after a second, I’ve got my face pressed into my arm and I’m crying. And it’s not so good, with the ants and all. They start crawling from my arm onto my face, and I don’t even care enough to brush them off. In fact, I want them there because they make the whole thing worse with their tickling feet, and I can sort of convince myself that I’m crying about the ants instead of about Jonah. I’m crying about those ants.

When the sirens start up, I stop outright crying and settle for sniffling so that I can hear them better. I expect them to fade off like sirens usually do, but instead they get louder, which means that they’re coming my way. Then I can see them—two police cars and an ambulance, all three wailing.

Suddenly everything that was still a second ago is moving—the houses, too. Their curtains flick open, and people start to peek out; they try to stand far enough back so that no one will see them looking.

The emergency cars stop in front of the house that Jonah went into, and Jonah is out on the porch with an old lady (I mean,
ancient
old) at his side. The idea of Jonah’s affair slips away, along with all the words I could have used to explain it.

Jonah shakes hands with the officers, who are up on the porch now, and then everyone—the officers, the old woman, me behind the bush—is looking at Jonah, waiting for what’s next. Jonah presses his fist to his mouth like a drain stopper. We wait and wait, and just when it seems like he’s never going to talk at all, he lifts his head and does. The officers listen and take notes in those tiny notebooks that they have. One of them says something, which causes Jonah to step off the porch and walk around the side of the house. Most of the
officers and the ambulance workers follow him, all except one, who disappears back inside with the old lady.

I wait there in the garden for about half an hour. My papers aren’t delivered and I have to keep pulling my sleeves down over my hands to keep the cold from stinging them, but I tell myself that there are things more important than newspapers and hands. Another couple of cars pull up, and more men get out of them. These men aren’t in uniforms, but I can tell that they’re police. They say a few things into their radios and troop back into the woods after Jonah and the others.

I wait some more. Every once in a while, one of the neighbors wanders out onto his lawn and stands there swaying for a second before losing his nerve and going back inside. But no one comes out onto the front lawn that I’m hiding in, and no one bothers me in my garden; in fact, no one even sees me except for one young policeman who just happens to glance my way as he walks by. He stops and stares as if he doesn’t think I’m really there. He’s all freckled, and it looks funny, the combination of freckles and uniform, like he’s just a kid dressing up as a policeman and not a real cop at all. For a second, I’m afraid that he might order me to go away. But when I raise a hand and wave at him, he waves back, a little mystified, and then walks on.

Most of the policemen have been going into the woods along the far side of the house from where I’m hidden, so to me, they appear and disappear like actors walking on-and offstage. To pass the time, I give them stage names: White Mustache, Likes His Hat, and Little Ears. I realize that Jonah must have found something in the woods. I suppose I even know what he’s found.

Then Jonah reappears, and I’m struck by him, really struck—like a clock, like a lightning rod, like oil or gold or a glass jaw. I’m struck by the shiny hood of his coat up around his neck, by his hands in his pockets, by his silence, by the familiarity of him. He’s a comfort in that moment. In my story or outside of it, I know Jonah Luks.

So I stand up without thinking about all the cops around, without thinking that I probably shouldn’t. My satchel swings into my legs and almost knocks me flat over. I step out of the garden. Jonah stops talking and looks over at me, and the officer with him stops, too. The officer sees me and squints.

“You, girl!” he calls.

But before he can say anything else, the body is between us. Two ambulance workers are bringing it out of the woods right past me. They have it on a stretcher, but they can’t roll the wheels on the grass, so they carry the whole thing a few inches off the ground. And it must be heavy, since each of them is straining from the effort. They stare at each other as they walk so as to make their steps even, and it’s like they’re two musicians playing a duet, keeping time with the music.