Alligator - Lisa Moore [25]
By the time Colleen reached the clear-cut it had begun to grow light. A gleam appeared along the edge of the river at the base of a very long hillside that had been scraped of vegetation. A dawn light showed the tips of the trees against the sky. There was a streak of bluish green at the horizon and the indigo darkness was turning a softer blue. The bulldozers, in silhouette, looked like prehistoric animals, majestic and slouching.
She had already climbed up into the first bulldozer, had opened her knapsack and taken out the bread and cheese she had packed, when the door of the plywood shed at the edge of the clear-cut smacked against the wall.
A man in a plaid shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of the hut and began to piss. When he was finished she could hear him moving around inside, pouring water, and there was a clatter of dishes. She stayed crouched inside the bulldozer for a long time.
Finally she took a zip-lock bag of sugar from her knapsack and found her way to the top of the machine where the lid to the diesel tank was. She unscrewed the lid, keeping her eye on the shed.
She thought about what she was doing. She closed her eyes and imagined the sugar falling into the guts of the machine, working its way through all the pipes and gaskets. She thought of the surprise and consternation all the men would feel when the five machines cut out almost in unison.
She could hear a radio. There was no way to know when it was safe to move without being seen. Not getting caught required a telepathic vision of the future and an ability to somehow manipulate it, the power of positive thinking, or dumb luck.
She heard a sudden slap and it was the man tossing a bucket of water on the rocks beside the shed. She waited and then she moved to the next bulldozer.
The noise of the pouring sugar, a loud, erotic gushing, caused the hairs to stand up on her arms.
She moved under the window of the shed and tripped over an enamel cup and it clattered against a rock and she ran for all she was worth. The man yelled at her. But she was running and she heard him running behind her. She got over a hump in the path and she ducked into the woods and he ran past her. She stayed where she was and once he was out of sight she dug her way back through the woods so that she was sure she could not be seen. Her neck and wrists were bitten by blackflies and they were burning. She felt a bite between her toes and she tried to rub it against the weave of her cotton sock and couldn’t wait to scratch it until it bled. But she stayed perfectly still. The man came back over the road and passed her again. She waited for an hour and then crept out of the bushes and ran as fast as she could.
What she’d felt when she reached the highway was elation. There were fifty pine martens left in this forest. She had not saved the pine martens of course. The clear-cut would continue. But it would take a few days to replace the machines. There would be men who would be paid to sit around and do nothing.
VALENTIN
VALENTIN AND ANTON sat in opposite chairs, each with a row of seven shot glasses in front of him. They were methodical about drinking, taking very little pleasure in it. They were not talking to each other. Once, Valentin, the older man at forty-five, put his fist against his chest because the alcohol burned on the way down. Anton stood and shrugged himself into his leather jacket and headed for the bar.
Valentin was a steady drinker who never slurred or swaggered, but when he drank his face became softer. He was a brutal man and drinking made him decisive and composed. Even the scraggly, bleached-out, delicate women who always gravitate toward nasty men were shy of him when he was sober. Drinking made him resolute in a dangerously attractive way.
Often, he had the bartender send a drink to a woman who interested him. He’d watch while she scanned the room and when she found him he’d tip his glass in her direction.
There was nothing