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The Ballad of Pinewood Lake

Forge

Excerpt

Four hours out from Los Angeles I drove into nothingness. I was surging up to seven thousand feet above sea level, out of my element, driving a huge rented truck through a snowstorm that turned the winding road white, blotting out all the lines, cutting off the definitions of the terrain like a sheet thrown over an albino landscape.

The ski white snow coming down fast, a big white shroud between us and Pinewood Lake, tire chains grinding into the road, the flakes pouring into the open window like dwarf stars sucked into one of those black holes of the interminable universe.

Heart trying to get back to pumping up the long white winding road.

Sixty-five dollar chains bought for one day for a rented U-Haul truck. Up to Pinewood Lake, that snowy day, to a new home, a new place to live, to write, to find the earth again. Let it snow, let it snow, let the big tires skid on the slippery curves. This is the revenge of about a hundred thousand lawns against a flatlander trying to live high on the mountain.

It would be easy to go to sleep on this road like the old pathfinders who found peace in the cold, the white bed of the subzero winters. I drive in a state of hypnosis, gulled by the falling snow, heart driving to get me up there where the air is even thinner, but less toxic. In my mind I am spewing out tons of coal-like objects, freeing my lungs, gearing up my body for the altitude where breath can sear but not pollute. I am a happy man, so delirious on the journey to the sky I don't even care if I drive off the mountain.

I don't leave the road, however. I make it and then have tons of furniture and personal possessions to unload into my new home. Angela is following in the old Cadillac with Colin, our young son, and when she gets there she'll find mattresses and records, manuscripts and chairs, lamps and groceries piled in the empty living room of our new home. She'll also find that tons of snow have fallen on the walkway where we were led by the real estate agent just a month ago as he held out the papers for signing.

The ground we bought is invisible.

Yet it is very precious, even so.

I have chosen this name for my wife because she is more pure than the earth will allow her to be.

I have created her out of her own image and it is pleasing to my eye.

She looks across the room at me with a handclasp. I take her in my mind under the night of my smile.

She is Angela and I brought her here to Pinewood Lake for a reason. She is to be my woman.

I am to be her man.

There is nothing that cannot be created out of this relationship. We will have a green garden. We will build a home and an Eden. We will look at pines and fall in love every day. We will raise Colin in this place on the mountain where he can feel the sun and smell the fragrances of these trees. He will fish in the lake and catch trout, bass, and catfish. Angela and I will show him how to cook his catch, taste him as he smiles and speaks his excited onomatopoeia.

Angela and Colin.

I'm glad I met her, married her, brought her to this place. I'm glad we had a son who will live in the mountains.

He is so much like her, she so much like him. All of us so much like each other.

We are a trio of many things: winding roads across the United States crimsoned by Arizona sunsets and west Texas sunrises, treks through Baja looking for lost gold in lizard gullies, sails across blue-green waters with silver spray freezing on our faces, salty, sweet as candy at a carnival.

We are together, at first, and we are incongruous.

The three of us: surreal creatures in an amniotic sea of the cosmos, trying to find each other, trying to find the sea we saw in the lake near our new home. No matter.

The lake will find us, eventually.

I have chosen my wife, her name. Our son has chosen us and we will live in this pine land together.

It is a matter of looking and seeing. It is a matter of finding.

We will find what we have to find here.

We will find many things. Many things will find us. I will find Angela. She will find me.

Shortly after I first met Angela, she was widowed.

I didn't know the details of her husband's death. He was young. He died while skydiving from an airplane south of Perris over Lake Elsinore.

Angela didn't talk about her husband much. Nor her past, in fact. She had begged him not to go skydiving that day. He had been injured once before, apparently.

"Why did he go, then?" I asked her.

"He wanted to test himself. He was afraid."

"He was afraid of skydiving?"

"He was afraid of a lot of things. He always did them anyway."

"But was he a good sky diver?"

"No. I don't think so. I didn't go with him."

"What happened?" I was trying to get at something that Angela was keeping from me.

"I got a call from one of his friends. I knew what the call was about even before I picked up the phone."

"You did? How?"

"You just know. I did. He wanted to die."

My scalp prickled when she told me this. I could see her husband suiting up, pulling on the chute he packed himself, going up in the plane, jumping out, floating out there thousands of feet above the earth, spread-eagling his arms, face flattened by the wind, eyes burning through goggles. Drinking it all in, a last look at life, the earth. Then ...

"What happened? Didn't he pull his rip cord?"

"He pulled it. His chute tangled up. I don't want to talk about this anymore, Johnny."

But I was angry.

"He pulled his rip cord, then? All right. He had another chute. Did he pull that one, too?"

Angela nodded, but she was far away. She kept these and other things to herself. All the time. It made her mysterious, but it also made her exasperating to someone who wanted to find out about her, about how she thought.

So, both chutes fouled up.

Something haunted her, then. Did he commit suicide? Was that what bothered her? It bothered me. If he did commit suicide, then why? Why? Angela didn't want to talk. I didn't want to think.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Ballad of Pinewood Lake by Jory Sherman Copyright © 2002 by Jory Sherman. Excerpted by permission.
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