“But,” Brett says, “but, dude! She is not, like, responsible for her intelligence in any meaningful way. That’s shallow, dude.”
“She isn’t responsible for her blindness, either,” Jacob says, disgusted.
“Unless she plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage.”
“You’d date a girl who plucked out her eyes in a fit of rage?”
“You know she’s feisty. You just know it.”
“That feels like an understatement.”
“Dude, bring it. I’m all about it.”
“I bet she has a wicked temper.”
“Girls have to start spunky, Jacob, or ninth grade grinds it out of them.”
Turtle lies in the brush, the sight laid first on Brett’s forehead then on Jacob’s, and she thinks, what the fuck? What the fuck? They recline on their rug, ripping off strips of focaccia. Brett gestures to the view. “Gods,” he says, “but I wish we had some more Easy Cheese.”
When they are done, the boys help each other up and trudge bantering along the jeep track into the redwoods. Turtle rises and stands there for a moment and then slips into the trees after them. The road is hardly better than a streambed. Gangly brown roots stick out from the cut bank. They walk for hours and climb finally into a clearing with a cottage built from scrap lumber. It is unlit and the door stands open. Turtle squats behind a burned-out stump, coal-black, eaten by fire into a helix laddered by mushrooms with flat brown tops and bottoms like frogs’ throats. It is shading into early evening. Everything is painted in deep green and sumptuous purple. She watches the boys walk out into the clearing. The clouds look like candles that have burned down to tiered pools of blue wax.
Brett says, “Dude, dude, what if you go in there—and there’s just, like, one deformed blind albino child on a rocking chair with a banjo?”
Jacob says, “And he takes us prisoner and makes us read Finnegans Wake to his peyote plants?”
Brett says, “You can’t tell anyone that my mom made us do that. You can’t.”
Jacob says, “Why Finnegans Wake, do you think? Why not Ulysses? Actually, why not just read The Odyssey? Or—or The Brothers Karamazov?”
“Because, dude—you read fucked-up Russian bullshit to your peyote plants, you’re gonna have a bad time.”
“Okay, so: To the Lighthouse. Or—you know what?—people die in subordinate clauses in that book. Maybe D. H. Lawrence? For a passionate, make-love-to-the-gamekeeper kind of high.”
“Dude, with your voice you are like, ‘Look at all these books I’ve read,’ but with your eyes you are like, ‘Help me.’”
“You know what would be good, actually? Harry Potter.”
“Well, I guess we’ll never know what’s beyond that door,” Brett says.
“We already know, Brett.”
“We do?”
“Adventure,” Jacob says. “Behind every door lies adventure.”
“Only if by ‘every’ you mean ‘some’ and by ‘adventure’ you mean ‘sodomical hillbillies.’”
“Nah.”
“Dude. It could be dangerous. Actually and in reality dangerous.”
“It’s fine,” Jacob says, and goes up the steps and in through the door.
“Physically perilous, Jacob,” Brett calls after him, “in an entirely real, entirely not-hilarious way.”
“Come on!”
Turtle follows the edge of the forest around the back of the cottage, slipping through the brush. She thinks, stay calm, stay easy. She steps up onto the creaking back deck and stands looking out into the woods. There are big black coils of irrigation hoses and heaped fifty-pound bags of organic fertilizer at the foot of the deck. There are clipped hoses and coupling links lying beside an overturned bucket with a coffee-can ashtray. The deck has an outdoor bathroom with a toilet and shower, the drain cut crudely into the redwood boards with a PVC pipe running to a sump hole. There’s a PBR can beside the toilet and when Turtle picks it up she can hear the ticking of its carbonation. She sets down the beer and opens the door and steps into a bare kitchen. Now she is in the back of the house and the boys are in the front, separated from her by a dividing wall and a closed door. She can hear them.
“Dude,” Brett says, “I don’t like this.”
“You think someone lives here?”
“Dude—obviously someone lives here.”
“They’re reading The Wheel of Time.”
“Probably to their peyote plants.”
“That’s so epic. Just read them, like, all thirteen books, drop a bunch of peyote buttons, and then, like, hold on to your hat.”
She walks through a kind of living room. There is a worktable with hand loppers and garden shears and a copy of the collected essays of Thomas Jefferson. Unopened boxes of Hefty garbage bags are stacked beside a six-foot-tall wooden Quan Yin, ornately carved. The ceiling is crisscrossed with white cotton clotheslines. She goes into a bedroom with a large four-poster bed and a dresser with a mason jar of bud, a stack of Robert Jordan novels, and a copy of Overcome Your Childhood Trauma.
She returns to the back door and slams it behind her to startle them, and it works. She hears Brett whisper, “Shit! Shit!” and she can hear Jacob laughing. They scramble out of the house. She looks into the forest with the gun in her hand.
The road does not continue beyond the cabin and the nervous boys take off south, going cross-country down into the river valley. She listens to the silence of the clearing for a long time. Then she follows them. They walk along a high hedge of thimbleberry in a clearing of velvet grass and sweet vernal grass. Turtle goes quietly among the stumps of old trees. She stops at a large concrete circle in the grass, and beside it, the form of a pump, covered in a tarp.
She can hear the boys, but she isn’t listening to them. She thinks, stop and look. She goes in a half crouch, moving swiftly through the high grass, thinking, oh god, for christsakes, you two, stop and look. She sees them ahead, beside a stream at the border of the forest, the stream half overgrown with bracken.
She opens her mouth to call to them, but then she sees a man on the far side of the stream, wearing camo pants and a Grateful Dead shirt, a woven-hemp necklace with silver wire twining a large amethyst, a lever-action twenty-gauge shotgun slung on his back. He’s a small man, with a big rotund belly and a bright red face turned to leather with years of sunburn. The tip of his nose is waxy and bulbed, with little red veins standing out of it. He’s got a lemon-echinacea juice bottle in one hand. Turtle swings the Sig Sauer up and at him, placing the front sight over his temple, thinking, only if I need to, only if I need to.
“Hello, boys,” he calls out. “How you do’en today?”
Brett straightens and looks around to locate the man. Jacob spots him and calls back, “We’re good, a little lost, how about you?”
Turtle goes through the weeds, thumbing back the hammer. She thinks, easy does it, easy and slow, you bitch, and don’t fuck this up, just do this, every part of this, exactly fucking right, every moment of this; do exactly and only what is necessary, but you do it well and you do it right, you slut.
“Where you boys from?” the man