Chapter 29 Gus
Gus
It affected how he dressed for the day, although not that much.
He still wore mostly the same old stuff—his steel-toed work boots, Carhartt pants, insulated flannel overshirt under his reflective vest—the get-up that Somer used to tease him about, calling him a Montana hick.
And when he’d dropped her in Santa Monica, leaving her to go to the community college, she asked him to not wear a flannel shirt and boots—even though the ones he’d brought weren’t his work pair—on the day of the orientation.
Now, when he thought of that metropolis, his stomach lurched. It was all he could do not to vomit. Instead, he packed his box lunch, poured the strong coffee he’d made into his thermos, and headed out for the day before the sun rimmed the eastern mountains with rose-gold streaks.
The Benz Lumber logging roads were on the north end of the valley, not far from the ski resort.
They were rutted out and filled with standing water, but he and his men would plow through it.
They had a lot of work to get done, and they’d already taken too many breaks on account of late-season snow followed by torrential spring rains that made the soil prone to rutting under the heavy equipment.
One of his men got a skidder stuck in the mud, immobilizing work for days.
Plus, there was a clause in the Benz’s contract with the state that if any topsoil was disturbed enough to affect Whitefish Lake, all operations needed to cease until the soil dried and became stable enough not to filter sediment downslope.
The area hadn’t been logged in some time because of these issues, Benz opting instead for the heavily forested areas they owned farther away where there were fewer hoops to jump through and the clear-cutting and demolition of swaths of trees didn’t horrify the snowflake tourists or stir up a political hoo-ha in town.
But now, there was no choice left. Developments were pushing deeper into the woods, the ski resort was expanding, and fires were getting worse each summer, so the head of Benz Lumber decided it was time to clean the woods up, harvest some of the old-growth ponderosa that made the company money.
Gus would meet Danny and the others at the entryway to the Benz logging road, where they’d parked all their equipment—the skidders, fellers, bulldozers and harvesters—for the night.
Gus made a stop at the gas station to fill up his cans because some of the guys had quit early the previous week when they ran out of fuel.
They hadn’t obeyed the rule of making sure they always came out into the woods with extra.
Help these days. He’d eventually have to bring in TP so he could wipe their asses for them, too.
In the old days, his men never would have showed up without all the necessities.
But that was another lifetime ago. Everything was another lifetime ago for him now, demarcated by the before and after the very moment he got word that Somer had gone into that coma and solidified two weeks later when she passed.
His existence since felt foreign and blurry, like a bad dream that would never end.
The trouble wasn’t only the amount of mud on the road or how wet the soil was.
He’d been logging for twenty-plus years.
He never once flipped a feller, even on the steepest slopes.
No, the trouble was these black holes of thought he tumbled into, these all-consuming reveries where he would lose time.
Sometimes he’d go blank for a few minutes, but other times, a dark rage of fantasy would envelop him.
Like, really black. First, the edges of the forest would go murky, like a burning photograph, and into charred view would come he, himself.
And in that scene, he’d be repeatedly striking the men who’d left her outside the hospital with a Pulaski axe, the kind he’d wielded when he used to fight fires straight out of high school.
He’d swing down on their skulls, cracking and crunching their bones into pieces.
And the wet red-and-pink mixture of bones and brain matter would fill up his mind and erase his pain and memories of her and how those men—the “unknown assailants,” as the police officers had called them—left her outside the ER with an ungodly concoction of drugs pumped into her system.
Whoever they were, they’d had the foresight to remove the license plates on their vehicle before pulling up to the hospital.
But somehow, in his fantasies, he’d tracked them down and exacted violent revenge.
And when he was finished with them, he’d also hunt down that bitch at the school who was supposed to help students, not deliver them up to the scum of the earth.
He had no proof to give the police about this woman, but Somer had told him how she had recommended that doctor.
Somer was excited about him, told her dad he was brilliant and kind.
Said she trusted him. Gus hadn’t even warned her to be careful about any of them, because why would he?
That woman was a school counselor, and the man was a psychiatrist. Somer would be in good hands, he had thought.
He mentioned those two to the cops, but they’d seemed more focused on the men who left her at the ER—understandable on one level, but not on another.
It was the people behind the scenes making bad things happen that should pay.
The reverie was in full bloom while he cut through some thin-diameter lodgepole pines until he felt a tipping sensation.
He snapped out of it at the part where he was down on one knee with the axe raised high behind his right shoulder, getting ready to swing it another time into the man’s broken skull.
He came to in time to realize he was falling off a pile of wood into a deeply rutted hole in the wet soil.
After all these years, his reaction was swift, and he turned the Tigercat off on its way down.
He felt his stomach rise to his throat and adrenaline surge through him as the Tigercat plopped into a pile of soft, wet dirt.
He sat for a moment with images of Somer flashing through his mind.
He saw Barbie dolls, broken crayons, plastic unicorns.
He saw her fuzzy, stuffed puppy dog with the chewed-up ear; he saw her stuffed seal, turtle, and monkey all lined up on her bed; he saw her dark eyes and timid smile and her yellow barrette pinning thick brunette locks; he saw tangled hair with pink bubble gum stuck in it and him cutting it out with scissors while she cried.
He felt her sitting in his lap while he rocked her to sleep until the sound of the chain saws from Danny and Henry not far away brought him back to the reality of his situation.
He tried to get out of the feller, but the door wouldn’t open.
Eventually the buzzing roar ceased, Danny and Henry running over.
“Man, you okay?” Danny called.
“I’m fine. Just can’t get the damn door open.”
Danny hopped up onto the machine and pulled at the door.
The three men stood there surveying the situation, the sharp tang of soil, pine, and fuel all around. The feller lay on its side, like a dinosaur lying wounded in mounds of mud. “We should grab the excavator,” Danny said.
Gus agreed. “We can hook the line to the side by the rim there and winch her right outta that rut.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Danny said as he headed over to grab the backhoe.
After they pulled the feller back upright onto its broad wheels, Henry got back to work, but Danny stood for a moment longer looking at Gus like he had something to say.
Gus removed his hard hat, took off one work glove, and ran his grubby fingers through his sweaty hair. Mosquitoes buzzed and he swatted at one behind his neck. “Thanks for getting me out,” he offered to Danny. “First time I’ve done that.”
“Sure.” Danny looked at Gus carefully. “You all right, though?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t paying attention.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know, with everything. I mean.”
Danny’s eyes filled with the kind of sympathy that Gus didn’t want to see. All those expressions only did one thing: They reinforced reality. Gus hoped Danny wouldn’t ask about his drinking.
“I know how hard it’s been,” Danny said. “But if you need to take more time or something, you should.”
Gus resisted the urge to grunt, I’m good.
He was afraid if he said anything, he might cry right there in front of Danny, among the mud and the dripping trees, among the new lime-colored tips of the pines that Somer used to caress between her fingers.
The freshness of it all threatened to soften his wrath and replace it with sorrow. That would be unbearable.
“You’ve been pretty”—Danny winced, seeking the right word—“distant.” He shook his head as if no, that wasn’t right, either. “I mean, I just don’t want to see you get hurt. It’s a safety thing. You know that better than anyone.”
“I do.” Gus inhaled the tangy, pine-saturated air around them. All of it so alive. How could she be gone? “You’re right. I need to focus. Sorry. Like I said, never flipped one before. Ever. Guess everyone deserves a first.”
“Sure, but if you need to talk . . .” Danny hit his own chest as if to say, I’m a good listener.
“Appreciate it, man. Right now, though, I want to check to make sure the oil levels are okay and finish out this day.”
When Gus drove home, he could feel that tipping sensation in his gut and how his heart plunged. He heard the drone of a saw in his ears. A pressure built up in his head and hammered behind his eyeballs.
When he’d hit the ground in that feller, his entire world had pitched over—and he was still falling, still hitting bottom, over and over.
But this wasn’t a jobsite accident. This was reality.
There would be no soft landing. There would be no getting out of it.
It was a black hole of rage mixed with sorrow.
He was tumbling down, crashing and falling, crashing and falling.
By the time he got to his driveway, he’d begun to weep at the thought of going in, of spending another evening alone in the house where he’d raised Somer after her mother left them.
He kicked himself again: I should have never let her go to that city, so far from home.
I should have never let her talk me into it.
After he dried his eyes, he sat in his truck and wondered, What would Somer do now, in my shoes? If she was the one left behind?
She’d google something to find a solution, he thought. He smiled thinking about how she’d grab her phone and say, I’ll figure it out. It’s not that hard when you have the entire world at your fingertips. You need to keep up, Dad.
He sat for a moment longer, staring at their little blue house, then fumbled for his phone out of his pocket and typed in one word—rage—to see where Google would take him.