Author: S.L. Harris

S.L. Harris

The boy in his Sunday clothes stared at the pelicans scattered blackly on the shore like slick and globous stones, right where the monster had left them. He remembered them flying in great lines above the oil rigs at dawn, dropping singly into the ocean like Saint Peter in his doubt and then floating fishful and satisfied, as though everything had been resolved.

That was before the monster.

The oil rigs were quiet now, and it was rare to see even a single pelican, and the fishermen who still went out in desperation from time to time caught things that were not good to eat. The beaches here, then there, were covered in the traces of the monster’s forays: dead fish in their thousands and sands coated bubbling black. Even people had disappeared into the shining ooze, but no one from Mikey’s town, at least no one anyone talked about.

So they all stayed and prayed and shut their eyes and said the monster would go some other place, until it came, and then they said that it wouldn’t strike the same place twice so soon. And now when they saw that it had, they would say something else. Mikey clambered down the rocks and drew near to one of the pelicans. A creature from another, nighted universe, a photonegative world. The eye, steely blue and stark against the tarred feathers, stared up at him. He knelt and put his head close to its face to see. The bird suddenly shuddered and Mikey jumped back, surprised and terrified in his hopes.

He saw then that many of them were breathing, some trying to move, some even standing, trying in vain to extend their sticky, heavy wings. He thought of Ezekiel and the field of bones, the stirring, groaning army of the dead, one of those Bible stories that haunted his nightmares. Like the flood, rising and carrying the bad people away, and he knew he wasn’t one of the good ones. Like Leviathan, God’s laugh at doubters—and he knew he was a doubter—or Jonah’s whale, God’s punishment for the disobedient—and he knew he was one of them, too. Like the monster, creeping along dark waters, coming to shore by night, swallowing more and more of the world and of everything they lived by.

Mikey thought of the pelicans flying. He thought that if they were not to fly again that it might kill him, as sure as the monster might—as sure as the monster would. He stared for a minute at the dying bird beside him. Then he ran home, half an old documentary in mind, snuck quietly in the back so as not to disturb the Bible study, and returned to the beach with a bucket and a couple of towels and the big bottle of dish soap. He drew near to his first bird. As he reached out, the beak snapped up suddenly and scratched his arm. He jumped back, tears in his eyes. But then he bit his lip and went to the bird again. It seemed this effort had exhausted the bird, and Mikey ignored the little trickle of blood on his arm as he gently rubbed the oily remnants of the monster’s touch away. Once he pressed his face to the bird’s bad-smelling down and felt the trembling heart, and he didn’t have a word for it but home.

All day he was at them. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, really, and he paid for it with more cuts and scratches and a few near misses at his eyes. But slowly he got the hang of it. He held their bills shut, and if he gripped them just so, they stayed still as statues as he worked the oil out of them. Most of them were too tired to fight their salvation.

In his memory of the documentary, they came out clean and fresh and recovered in some special room, and then, somehow, the film cut to a shot of them flying like nothing had ever happened. That wasn’t what happened with his birds. Despite his best efforts, patches of the oily black stuff still clung to them. When he released them, they often just flopped back down on the beach. Sometimes they managed to stand and ruffle up their half-cleaned feathers. None flew.

It was afternoon, his towels black and soaked, his arms and coat and slacks a ruin of oil and mud and scratches. His eyes stung where he had tried to wipe away sweat and tears. And then he saw it. Maybe it was that first one. He wasn’t sure. But its wings beat and it made a halfhearted little turkey flap across the beach. Some big stone in his heart went with it, and he found himself yelling for sheer joy Oh Jesus yes.

“Michael!” His mother’s voice, anger, shock, shame, and the big stone crashed right back down.

“Oh sweet God have mercy,” she screamed across the beach, in a voice that had in it no mercy at all. She did not run to him, but only stood, her face pale, and as he approached, dragging the towels, she turned her head and called back, “Abe, what are we going to do with him?” He felt his jaw going tight and hard, and out of the corner of his eye, he watched his pelican flop down onto the beach again and lay sprawled there, one wing out.

“How could you,” she said, as he came near her. “Ah! My towels! What’ll we do with you, what’ll we do with you, I just don’t know . . . .”

A titan shame settled across his shoulders. But a little Satanic voice in him said that they were only towels, only clothes, that the birds had to fly again and they would have died and maybe they still would die, but at least he tried, and he started to say it aloud when Dad came snarling out of the house. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he snarled. “What are you doing, down here, ruining your good clothes like that? You got a brain, don’t you?” And then, “What if that thing had gotten you?”

He thought he would try to explain, that the monster would get them all, that if it had gotten the birds, it would get all of them no matter how tight they locked their doors and shut their eyes, and that the birds had to fly again, they had to, but he couldn’t explain, and he yelled, “I hate you! I hate you!” He threw the towels down and felt all the hot tears coming that he couldn’t control, and he hated that too.

Mama shook her head and sighed heavily. “Michael, no.” And Dad at the same time, “Quit crying. What were you thinking?”

And what are you, what are you thinking, what kind of thing are you, banged around his ears and his head like a gong as he followed them home and as he pulled his clothes off and threw them into the steel bucket his mother had put on the porch and went shivering, shamed and almost naked into the house.

When he came down his mother was waiting.

“Your father went out for more soap so we can do the dishes tonight. And I want you to kneel down and ask God to forgive you.”

“For what,” he mumbled.

He could see rage bubbling under the skin of her neck, the vein of her forehead.

“Your fourth and fifth commandments, for starters. Say them.”

He glared at her.

“Say them.”

He mumbled honor father mother Sabbath holy.

“Kneel down.”

He got down on his knees, white rage in his chest, thinking of the pelicans flying, and then all of a sudden his heart sinking and the rage turning in on himself, blazing hatred at the monster he was. The stupid, disobedient kid he was. What kind of thing, what kind of person goes down to where the monster made its kills? What kind of person goes in his Sunday clothes and plays with dying birds? Tears again, hating the tears too, hating himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

His mother knelt down next to him and took his head in her hands. He felt it again, the home feeling, and he tried to think how the one could be right and the other wrong.

“Think, next time,” she said. “Think.”

“I’ll be good,” he said quietly. “I’ll be good, I just . . . .”

“What are you doing?” came his father’s voice. “He doesn’t need any of that. He needs to learn consequences. Up. Up to your room. And you’ll stay there through dinner. Cost of those clothes means you’re out a meal tonight, and that’s getting off easy.”

The white rage came back, but then the desire to be good, the feel of his mother’s hands around his head settled over him, and he nodded and walked slowly up to his room. He felt dirty inside, wrung out like a rag, angry and tired, the feeling that nothing would be clean again.

The vision of the dead and dying pelicans would not let him go. He saw their oil-spotted feathers. He saw them flying in popcorn ceiling of the room, and thought in his parents’ voices disaster, disaster. You’re a disaster. This is a disaster.

He heard them eating their dinner downstairs, sometimes their voices rising over what to do with him. He thought now, while they are busy, now, I will sneak down and finish the work. But the Satan voice put courage in him. I am not wrong, said the voice. They have to fly, and if they don’t it will be the monster killing us all.

“I’m going back out,” he announced as he came downstairs into the kitchen with an armful of bath towels.

Dad froze with his food halfway to his mouth.

“You go out that door, you aren’t coming back in tonight.”

His mother said, “Abe.”

“I mean it. Up to you, Michael. Up to your room or this isn’t your home tonight.”

“Abe, the monster,” said his mother. They were talking as though he wasn’t there. He opened the screen door to the porch and picked up the bucket and the dish soap, and stood there watching them decide his fate.

“Thing won’t come back. Was just here. It rolls around the Gulf,” he grunted. “Anyway, what’s he going to do, sit there and let it eat him? Boy’s got no more brains than that he deserves it.”

Mikey was thinking why is he doing this, he hates me, and I hate him, and I will stay out all night, and if it eats me maybe it should, and then you’ll go to Hell because you killed me. But under that another thought persisted, that he had to get to the pelicans, that there were so many of them, and that maybe some of them might fly, and that would be the one good thing he could do.

He slammed the door behind him, spilling suds from his bucket. He heard it lock behind him, and his mother’s voice raised saying, “Oh, sweet Lord, help us.”

The black beach was peaceful as the grave. The moon gone skinnydipping in the dark waters lit the oily lumps that were the birds.

Mikey went to work. He was rougher than he meant to be, and he kept telling them, “It’s for your own good,” as they pecked and clawed and flapped at him. But once he had them in the hold, they were quiet, and as the night went on, both he and the birds grew calmer. It was hard to see, but it seemed like the monster’s oilstuff was coming out better.

Little by little, as the moon got smaller and higher, the brown and bedraggled bird-shadows on the beach began to outnumber the slick black ones. Alright, he said. Alright, something. But still the birds did not fly. They stood, like dumb things, like shocked things, like things that did not know what they even were anymore.

But he kept at the work. The towels he had taken were soaked and black again. He took his shirt off and used it, and then his pants, and then tried his best to rinse the towels in the waters of the Gulf.

The moon was climbing down exhausted; his skin now was stained and cut and his arms beyond exhausted. Barely able to hold the beaks and bodies of even these exhausted, dying things. He collapsed at last, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But when he sobbing got up and began walking along the beach like a night orderly in a field hospital, he realized that he had finished. Every bird that lived—and there was one dead one for every two he’d gotten to in time—had been cleaned.

Not cleaned completely. All of them bore the marks of the monster and the water and his own crude handling. Feathers askew and smears of black. But touched, at least, by someone trying to help, pulled free at least a little from the thing that was killing him.

He found himself sobbing, with exhaustion and relief and despair all at once. They were all just there, not a one of them flying. Some were starting to walk. That was something. But they had to fly. If they wouldn’t fly this was all for nothing. The monster would come back. No one would say it, no one would believe it, but of course it would come back.

The one he’d cleaned first was just about where it had landed when his mother arrived. He thought, this one. It can do it.

He went close to it and shouted. It blinked at him. He ran toward it, and it raised itself and hopped away. “G’on,” he said. “Fly, will you.”

It waddled along the beach and he ran after it, but it would not fly, not really. When he drew close it would do its little turkeyflap at an angle to get away from him, hit the ground again, then moved clumsily away as he chased it across the stones. He felt like an idiot, in his underwear, chasing the bird around the beach.

“You stay here it’s going to get you,” he said. “Stupid bird.” The bird regarded him.

He yelled, “G’on! G’on!” but the bird just looked at him. At last, with a roar of rage he circled around behind the bird and began chasing it toward the dark water. “G’on!” he yelled. The pelican wobbled its way toward the sea. A fierce smile fell over Mikey’s face and he charged.

The bird ran down to the water line and the boy rushed after him, and the bird looked for a minute as though it would just walk into the water unconcerned, but all of a sudden, as its feet touched the water, its wings spread, and it flew. Not the jerky turkey squall that it had done, but flying, real flying, the graceful thing that Mikey remembered. It took off and was out into the dark night, a weightless shadow in the moon.

The boy crashed into the edge of the water himself and fell down heedless of the stones on his naked belly, relishing the sting of saltwater on the many cuts the birds had gifted him, laughing and laughing and laughing, yelling “G’on! G’on! G’on then!” The pelican traced a line and was gone, and as the boy threw his head back he saw more of them taking wing, as if they’d just been waiting for the one to show them, and he laughed and laughed and laughed, feeling that rock in his gut being lifted and tossed a hundred miles away.

Then the monster came.

It slid shiny black and silent over and out of the water like an enormous puppy being born, like the thing after. It seemed slow and fast at once, like a gentle wave getting ready to cover the world. The boy gasped and got to his knees, staring stupidly for a second, then tried to scramble up on the beach. Gently, without any effort, the monster took him, and he fell.

It swept over him greedily, coating him in an instant like a second skin. Mikey gave a choking gasp and then it was over his face and the moon went out. He struggled with his hands and pulled it away from his mouth long enough to take another breath, then felt it slide over his mouth again. He felt it moving into his mouth, coating the insides of his cheeks. When he tried to scream, he choked and gagged in his dark caul, and he felt the monster oily and slick working its way down into his throat.

Then there was a sudden searing pain on his forehead, and the lights came back on. Everything was confused. He felt something cut his cheek, and then he could breathe. He felt hundreds of darts stabbing him, hundreds of tweezers pulling at has skin, and finally he could see what was happening.

The pelicans were all around him, stabbing at the monster, pulling it away from his flesh. Hair and arms and legs were all agony as they did it, but they were making him free. He managed to stand and started to struggle painfully up the beach. The monster was trying to follow, but the pelicans harried it, drove at it, and when it reached up to grab them, they flew.

They flew.

The sight of it gave Mikey’s quivering legs new strength. He charged away from the water and gained the high place above the beach. He turned and watched the pelicans in their relentless assault. Some of them were too slow, and the monster dragged them under. But there were many, and they seemed wholly unafraid, and though the monster was huge, it did not seem to want to push past the throng of assailants.

He was covered in patches of black, sticky film, but the stuff on him was dead, no longer moving across his body. He dropped and vomited. When he looked up, the pelicans were still at it. More of them were being dragged under and he yelled “No! No! G’on! G’on! Get out of there!” And at last, the remaining pelicans took to the air, and the monster slid back with the waves into the night waters.

He sat shivering and shocked, watching the line of birds winging its way into the night sky, and then he fell down.

He woke with a flashlight bright in his eyes, and the hands and arms of his father and mother around him, anxious voices and tears, tears even from his father, and I’m sorry even from his mother, and everything so strange and warm as they wrapped him in a towel and carried him gently home through the unlocked door and the hot bath.

As they hovered over him and washed his hair and body as though he were a little child he didn’t know what he thought. Only maybe that he was glad they had come. Only maybe that they didn’t want him to hurt after all. Only maybe that he had done a good thing, and they had been wrong. Only maybe that there was something between them now, thin and impenetrable as the oil slick on his skin had been, that there was another home for him now, and it wasn’t here. Only, maybe, the thought of flying, light as anything, over the dark and haunted waters, into some other world.

S.L. Harris

The last goodbye Simon had to say was to the tree. It had been a while, but he knew where to pull off the mountain road and knew where to walk sure as a dog going home. The old hills rolling without a spot flat enough to set a dinner plate, the twitching sounds of birds and squirrels, the sky the color of old jeans tossed over the June canopy: leaves of maple, basswood, and the ash. When you knew what to look for, the tree was hard to miss: white ash, split down the middle twenty-four years ago and bound back together. Simon set his hand against the scar. Smooth and pale and tall as a seven-year-old child. He felt, as he always did when he came here, a twinge in his legs. A memory not of pain but of absence. The question came to him again, as he traced his fingers up and down the scar, of whether a tree remembers, and what, and how.

Thinking of memory, he thought of Georgie, who had already soaked up half of his goodbyes, and would keep needing them, he was sure, long after Simon was gone. The tree, at least, would have nothing to ask.

His hand crept spiderlike away from the scar, to the rest of the trunk, the deep diamond grooves, and he was struck with the sense that these too were scars, that everything, after all, was a wound healed over.

Simon had said: “Now, Georgie, you take your medicines, you listen to your sister, you’ll be OK. I’ve got your prescriptions at the CVS up in Buckhannon. And you have my number. She has it too. I can talk to the pharmacist if you need, you hear? Any time you’re feeling poorly, you just give me a call.”

And Georgie, filmy-yellow-eyed uncomprehending, Georgie who’d lost one too many and now simply refused another loss, answered, “But you’ll be here, won’t you, Simon?”

“No, Georgie. I told you. Healthways is closing. I’m moving. I’m going back to school.”

“Good for you! What’s your course of study?”

Simon sighed, and told him again. “Nursing.”

Georgie told the same joke. “Ha! Ha! You gonna get one of those white dresses?”

Simon pretended to laugh, again.

As he left for the last time, Georgie said, “See ya next time.” And Simon said nothing at all.

His hands continued to walk the trunk, slipped on something, paused. He bent his head closer. Little holes. Capital D’s, like the multi-mouthed smileys that Jen, the secretary at HealthWays, would send in her text messages—Got another laundry call for you 😀 D D D.

Simon frowned walked around the trunk, looked up and down. They dotted the whole tree, except the smooth skin of the scar. D D D D. As he stared at one of the holes, something moved inside. Then a tiny green jewel emerged, iridescent. The insect slipped out of the little hole and unfolded itself into the world, emerging as Simon had himself emerged, all those years ago, from this very tree.

When he was seven, pins and needles in his legs had turned to weakness, then numbness, then nothing. The doctors in Charleston couldn’t figure it. His dad, God bless him, had wanted to take him up to Cleveland and “get it all worked out,” Medicaid reimbursements be damned. His father, born in the woods ’til he knew every tree, the fix-it man, the know-it-all. Yelling at the doctor, the nurses, the Medicaid office, because there was nothing broke that couldn’t be figured and fixed if you just looked into it long enough. But his mother was of the opinion that there were things that just couldn’t be understood or repaired, that the world happens and keeps happening, and you make the path you can. So it was she who made plans to change the house, to get the wheelchair, to call the used car lot every week. And it was these acts, much more than his father’s assurances that they’d “get to the bottom of it,” that made him feel that it would be alright.

But then Aunt Barbara, his mother’s sister, had heard. Crazy Aunt Barbara, who exploded in tears and laughs at every visit and made every sentence a shout or a sermon, so that she would have crowded his early memories even if it hadn’t been for the miracle. Aunt Barbara said that when her husband—God rest his soul—was a boy he’d had the Polio and they’d done what the old-time people did and opened up an ash tree and passed him through it, and then they’d closed the ash tree up and he got better too. The old-time people knew what they were doing, she said, and she was no doctor, but she was just telling them, just saying to them. “There’s always ways,” she said.

His mother had shaken her head and said that they weren’t going to toss Simon through a tree, and Barbara had asked how the hunt for a van was going, and Simon’s mother had retreated to the kitchen.

That night they went out in the woods under the big moon and the haunted trees, looking for the young ash. His father at Barbara’s direction took a sharp saw and carefully split the tree top to bottom. Then he pushed the split sides of the tree apart and pulled him through. Three times, they told him later, for three nights, but it all ran together in his memory: the young tree split and straining, the hands pulling him through, the night sounds, the stars.

When they were done, they tied up the tree with twine and mud plaster, according to Aunt Barbara’s direction, and his father said, “What now?”

Aunt Barbara, serene, confident, answered, “We wait. The Lord provides.”

So they waited. He noticed everyone’s feelings in the house but his own. His father’s anxious pacing. Aunt Barbara taking up residence in their house, like an unruffled cuckoo, and his mother, exhausted and annoyed, saying to him after hanging up on one of her calls with the school board about getting a ramp installed: “Sweetie, it’s not you that needs fixed, it’s the world.”

Every night his father would go out to the ash tree, try to see it healing, try to see some sign. Sometimes he would take Simon on his back, the chair no good in the woods. No good in the mountains, really, Simon thought, even now: the steep-grade gravel driveways, the double-wides with four stairs up to the front door, the narrow doors, nothing built to fit.

Now he knelt by the ash tree that had given them the miracle his father had wanted, that had knitted itself back together, healed over the seasons until only the scar remained, while little by little feeling and then motion and then control returned to his legs. He saw that the bark had come away in patches, and beneath, on the flesh of the tree, there were traceries like flung spaghetti, the wrinkles of a brain.

And with the thought of a brain came Georgie again. One of his first patients for Healthways when he came back from college. College, where he’d shot himself like a rocket fueled by rage after hearing a teacher grumbling about wasting all this time on a ramp they didn’t need anymore. And then, instead of nursing school, he came back here, that same rocket fuel burning itself out inside him. Simon drove people to appointments, did laundry, made meals, checked blood pressure, made sure they took their medicine. Georgie was a big guy, the kind of guy about whom everyone’s first statement was, “he’s a worker.” His kidneys had gone bad when Simon first met him, and he hadn’t been quite able to understand what it was to have a chronic condition. “How long ’til I’m back on my feet again?” he’d asked. And Simon, fresh on the job, trying to explain, feeling embarrassed because after all, he’d gotten away with something, thanks to tree magic or whatever it was. “It’s about management,” he said. “No cure. It’s just not giving up.”

And that, Georgie understood. Even as the Alzheimer’s started and then became the very fact of his existence, he understood persistence, stubbornness, just getting along. That’s the one thing people like Georgie had.

Then they pull the rug out from under you anyway.

He went back to the road where he’d left his car and paced a bit until he had some cell reception. He waited minutes for a couple ages to load, then placed a call.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m calling about a tree.”

“Yes?” said the woman at the tree management company. “How can I help you?”

“It’s an ash tree. There’s some kind of holes in it. Looks like the leaves are dying too.”

“Oh, ash borer.”

“What’s that?”

“You said little holes in the trunk?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So that’ll be emerald ash borer. You want removal?”

“No, I was wanting to see if I could save it.”

“Sometimes that’s possible. How much of the leaf cover is gone?”

“He tried to remember. “There’s still leaves.”

“Is it a mature tree?”

“Um, I don’t know. It’s uh, at least 30 or so.”

“OK. So that could be a candidate for injection treatment.”

His hands made the motions of insulin jabs, allergy shots, Narcan. He’d tried to make sure his patients would be taken care of. Done his best. Done what he could. What was he supposed to do?

The voice on the other end of the line was asking: “Is it a high-value tree?”

“High-value?”

“We usually only recommend treatment for high-value trees. Where on your property is it?”

“Oh, it’s not . . . it’s not on my property.”

There was a pause.

“If it’s on a city street, you could call your city council. Where are you located?”

“No, it’s not on a city street.”

“OK. Are you worried about spread to your property? We could still talk about removal. Are there other infected trees in the area?”

Simon looked around. He hadn’t really looked at trees since he’d walked in the woods with his dad. For his dad they’d been were companionship, compass, calendar. For Simon, mostly, they’d become background. But just then he felt like they were holding up the sky. The little blossoms on the basswood, the light coming through the maples.

The voice was saying, “What you’re going to want to look for is those little holes, missing bark, leaves brown when they should be green.”

He started walking as the cell service faded, and he saw what he hadn’t noticed before. Exactly as the woman had said: trees stripped of bark in patches, dotted with holes like those on his. Like these woods had seen some battle that no one had noticed. He went back to the road, called back.

“Yeah, looks like a lot of infected trees.”

“OK. So do I understand right that you have a healthy ash on your property you want protected?”

“What? No.”

“Sir, what do you want the ash tree removed for, then?”

“I don’t want it removed. I wanted to see if you can help me save it.”

“It’s on public property?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“So the usual treatment is an annual injection by own of our arborists, but I have to tell you it’s not cheap, and you have to keep doing it indefinitely. If it’s on public property I’d suggest you talk to your extension service or . . . .”

Again, Simon’s mind drifted to Georgie, to all his patients: the injections, the dialysis, the physical therapy, the stained clothes, the pills heaped in their boxes organized by day. Management, mitigation, indefinitely. There’s no making things right. Some things you can’t fix.

The woman was still talking, blinking in and out of the spotty reception, talking about money he didn’t have. Simon hung up, got in the car, and began to drive, looking back once or twice through the pack of boxes and laundry, everything he owned in the back of the old Corolla. His foot got heavy on the gas, the mountain curves coming fast, and he felt pins and needles in his legs. He saw Georgie’s number flash up on his phone for a minute before service went out.

He braked hard, turned around, and went back to his pull off. No service there now. He walked back to the ash tree. He felt the scar again, saw another of the borers climbing out of its hole. He pulled it off and crushed it between his fingers. There’d have to be someone to take care of it, but he didn’t have a job anymore. The clinic was closed. He had a scholarship to nursing school. He was getting out.

His phone rang, and he saw, miraculously, two bars. He picked it up.

“Simon,” said Georgie. “Where are you? There’s someone calling me, saying I’m supposed to take my medicines, and I said, Simon gives them to me.”

Simon started to say again that he was leaving, that Georgie’s sister would get his medicines, that his neighbor would check in on him, that that was who was calling, that he and everyone were just going to have to figure it out by themselves, that he wished it were different, but it was what it was.

He plucked another borer off the tree, and said, “Alright, Georgie. Alright. I’ll be there.”