Chapter 7
Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes. The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes. ReKill is the second book in the series that started with ReWire
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Jack helped Mike build his house a few years back. He would fly in on a Friday night to land at the strip in Weaverville before the sun went down. Mike picked him up in his old Land Cruiser. They’d work until midnight or so under lights. He worked through the weekend to fly out Sunday evening.
It was a strange pleasure picking up a log two normal men couldn’t carry. He’d lift one end with a clean and walk under it. Then it was balance it on his heavily padded shoulder and power up the swaying plank to set the log down with hardly a bounce. Then it was match the chalk line, check and check again, pound the big spikes down with the sledge, check with the level, and then pound again. The days were hot and dry even under the canopy of pine and fir. When they had enough of the house built they strung tarps to keep off the worst of the sun. The only time they were really cool was in the deep shadow of the big oak.
Mike, knowing him well even then, invited him up to heal after a serious mistake in judgment. The exhausting effort had been the perfect thing at the right time to keep his body too tired to let his mind race away. He wondered how many laborers used brutally hard work as self-hypnosis, tiring themselves into non-thinking sleep. Eight weekends had been enough to see him through his rough patch. On the infrequent trips to visit Mike he felt like he had equity.
The house was three stories with a roof that was deeply pitched and shingled. The shingles looked like wood but wouldn’t burn even soaked in gasoline. The deep pitch to the roof wasn’t usually justified by the local snowfall, but it looked good among the rock outcroppings and trees. You really never knew about weather. Back in 1950 there was over 75 inches of snow one month and the winters were certainly colder now.
THE forests farthest from the settlements of men had an open almost landscaped look that felt healthier than the ones under man’s dominion. When John Muir walked through the Sierras in 1869 he wrote of their “inviting openness.” That openness was because fires burned out dead growth and underbrush. The same fires killed the Bark Beetles. Many forests in this area had the same landscaped look because it was nearly impossible to get firefighting resources in.
A little farther west were the tallest trees in the world. And south and east the most massive, but here were great trees too. Lodgepole Pine, Ponderosa Pine, White Fir, California Red Fir, and the occasional hardwood like a California Black Oak, or Valley Oak dotted the open forest that backed Mike’s house. A little farther down toward the river were Dog Wood, Quaking Aspens, and more Valley and Live oak. Where it opened out a little, there was Manzanita. The forest surrounding Mike’s house was mostly Ponderosa Pine.
Mike left everything in as close as he could and still be to code on fire. He didn’t worry about fire insurance because he self-insured. He didn’t trim back one particular tree, but instead moved the site for his house. He had fallen in love with an old Valley Oak. The tree was so big it felt like it should have a name like Treetopia or Oaklandia or some such. Jack climbed it and sat within twenty feet or so of the top most of a night, filling his mind with silly little ceremonies to keep from feeling. He asked Mike how tall the tree was.
Mike said, “There are a lot of things I don’t measure and this old tree is one of them. It’s just big and beautiful.”
He had to know how tall that tree was. Next time he climbed the tree he took a ball of string. The ball of string was one hundred feet long. Jack had thirty-one feet of string in his hand when the weight on the end touched the ground. He was maybe ten feet from the top. He walked around the tree, measuring it with that same piece of string. The tree was twenty-eight feet around. Mike brought in an arborist to care for that tree. The arborist guessed the tree was somewhere between 600 and 800 years old. The tree could have been around since the time Temujin became Genghis Khan.
AS he stepped out of the car he could barely hear the sounds of electric guitar, before the sound stopped and turned into the squealing streak that was Heather. He hadn’t seen Heather other than in pictures or in the background of the occasional videoconference in more than a year. She had turned from a little girl to a girl who would soon have to think about becoming a woman.
Heather let go of Lee long enough to say, “Hello Jack. Dad will be out in a minute.”
She turned back to her friend to continue machine-gun paced, pre-teen speech. He picked up every third word or so. Music and clothes seemed to be the major subject of talk. Apparently there was a boy named Todd who gave Heather a bad time at school. He breathed in the clean air scented with pine needles, pitch, and the musty smell of mildew in the near-permanent shade around the denser canopy of trees. As he walked toward the house, moving from deep shadow to dappled sunlight to open sunlight, temperature varied by twenty degrees.
Mike stepped on to the stoop and walked down the steps to greet them. Mike was only three inches shorter than his little bit over six feet so he could look straight into Mike’s steady brown eyes. His eyes were clear above a crooked nose left over from a long-ago amateur boxing career. His teeth were crooked too, and snowy white. His grin was as easy to come by as his words were hard to get.
Mike told him once he’d never broken the hundred sixty pound barrier. He was lean and strong from the miles he hiked through his beloved Trinities. The ubiquitous 49rs cap covered what was left of his gray-black hair. His hair thinned unevenly so he wore the cap. It was easy to forgive a man as good as Mike of one vanity. Besides, he didn’t require his friends to be perfect.
His left-handed grasp of Jack’s forearm was strong as he said, “Thanks for coming. Let’s get you settled.”
Lee laughed as he packed for the trip, telling him his paranoia was showing. He acted like he didn’t know what she meant. His bag was heavy with hiking boots, running shoes, cold-weather gear, work out clothes, and casual clothes. A long ago shrink said it was a carry-over from childhood’s scarcity mentality. Lee’s bag was half as big as his-a carry-over from a childhood of abundance.
The upstairs bedrooms opened onto a deck that looked down on the great room that was the living-sitting-family area. Each bedroom was a small suite with fireplace, bathroom, sitting area, and mini-kitchen. Mike liked the energy different people brought to his home. He was perfectly comfortable with the same guests needing solitude. The snap-crackle of the fire in their room kept away the chill of altitude and spring. The big bed, under the down comforter, called out nap, but they hung up, put away, and walked down stairs.
The great room was bright from the sun shining in the clear sky and warm from the fire in the big stone fireplace. The logs gifted them with a crackling pop. The flue drew well so there was only a hint of the happy making smell of wood smoke. The off-white, overstuffed couches and chairs curved around the hearth in a rough U. Mike poured cups of warming green tea. Heather went to her room to ‘do homework.’ Lee and Jack sat and enjoyed the quiet until silence filled the room.
“What’s up, Mike?”
“They are going to build a prison two miles from here; a big one. I live on a section of land I own that backs up to a fifteen thousand-acre Bureau of Land Management parcel. The rest of the land, except some riverfront, is private. My access road, the one you turned off on to this track, is the same one they’ll use for construction.”