He staggered up and started toward the house. Probably going to suck some crystal and sleep off his hangover, duck out of the heat that was rising from the ground now, hard as it beat off the sun. The hazard winds were picking up, too. Dust storm coming.
“Keep it clear, Mister B,” Frost yelled as he wobbled away. “Keep it clear.”
I’d no idea why Frost would want a gap in the middle of his forest, but I paid it no mind. Once I’d got the wagon full of juice, I could charge up the tools. And when the skies cleared, I’d start cleaning the metal and making it shine.
Pop said trees didn’t just use to look pretty and grow food for eating. They didn’t just give shade and break up the wind. They cleaned the water and held the soil together, and they made the air feel good for those breathing. Just stories now, though. Even my grandfather hadn’t seen a real one. People date the Darkness more than a hundred years back.
So they’re just stories and statues. And that’s what I’d be building. A forest of metal and plastic, velvet and lights. Trees I’d seen my father build and that his father built before him. Trees I’d seen in photographs or scratched in pencil. And trees I’d made up all on my own, named after words I loved. Names like Ponderosa Pear. Or Angel Leaf.
I’d create a whole stand and then build the tree tattooed on Frost’s wife. A tree I’d not seen built before, nor seen drawn or once heard described. But a tree I’d no doubt had once stood breathing. You couldn’t make up something that looked so right.
Next day I had the understory pretty much nailed. I’d learned to leave tall stuff till last. Build the canopy right away and they end up wanting to skimp on the details — guy like Frost couldn’t care less about the details, I guarantee. So I’d laid a load of old tire I’d cut up nice and jagged, and it gave a good squishy feeling underfoot. Out of that, I’d rigged plastic mesh to look like grasses, planted up some metal shrubs I’d been piecing together.
Up north, I’d come across a fleet of carts folk used to wheel around markets the size of a village. I’d de-wheeled every one of those carts, and now I hung the wheels on bent piping so they spun if the breeze caught right. Might not look much in the daytime, but you get some LEDs blinking and those wheels turn real pretty. Those are the kind of details you get if you build from the ground up. Your forest comes alive at night.
I had that understory looking good and was laid out on the rubber, gluing strips of wire, when the girl from the window came right up, snapping pictures of me. She had an old world camera that clicked and buzzed and spat you out a copy of whatever you were looking at. A real fancy bit of salvage.
I could barely see the girl, sun was so bright. She stood above me, a skinny shadow, and the weight of the sky hammered down above her, frying me up and making the rubber melt sticky on my clothes. I wiped the sweat and dust off my face and I strained my head up, shielding my eyes.
She just stood there, one foot lifted and tucked behind the other, flapping her pictures around and watching for the colors to appear.
“Never said you could take my picture,” I told her.
“Never asked,” she said. “These are my trees. I can take pictures of them all day long.”
“Your trees?” I said, going ahead and sitting up. “Well, I got news for you. These ain’t trees, they’re flowers.” I nodded at a spiky mound. “Bushes, some of ’em. But not a damn tree in sight.”
She glanced at her pictures, blew on one of them. “Then you’d better get back to work. You’re supposed to be building trees.”
“Hell,” I said, staring up at her. “Between you and the watcher, anyone would think this is a rush job. Only one seems in no hurry is the guy that’s footing the bill.”
“Frost?” the girl said, her voice losing its swing. “You’ve no idea.”
“He gonna get mad, you talking to me?”
“Of course.” She fixed me with the same kind of look her mom had used when I’d been staring at that tattoo. “If he gets back and catches me out here.”
“How long you got?”
The girl shrugged.
“Long enough to show me your pictures?”
She slumped down next to me, covering her mouth as the dust curled around us. Then she tucked the photos into her hip pocket. Out of sight.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Zee.”
“Mine’s Banyan.” I reached out my hand like we might shake or something. But Zee just glared back at the house.
“Ever seen the ocean, tree builder?”
“The ocean?” I said. “Yeah. I seen it.”
“Know how far it is from here?”
I thought about it. Journey gets steep in places. “Two hours in the wagon. Three coming back.”
“Take me to see it,” Zee said, as though this were the kind of request I got most days. “Take me there and I’ll show you my pictures. All of them.”
I laughed, but her face stayed stony. I started to say something but she shot up, began walking back toward the house.
No thanks, pal. That’s what I was going to tell her. No way in hell. Risk my neck to go look at the Surge? Some rough roads out there and the coast’s a whole lot rougher. And Frost wouldn’t approve a damn bit. She was crazy. And I’d be crazy to go.
But then I saw the photograph she’d left on the dusty rubber beside me, just sitting there in the little dent her body had scooped out.
One photograph. A single picture.
I snatched it up and stared at the image.
Trees.
Whole stand of them.
Trees that bent in the wind, rolling beneath a pure blue sky. My heart beat hard in my chest, my head spun. The trees were twenty feet tall at least. White bark and yellow leaves. Like Frost’s tree. The tattoo tree. Only these trees were living. These trees were alive.
I’d seen photographs before, of course. Trees in photographs. Smudged images, cracked with time. But the picture in my hand was recent. Had to be. Because there, slumped on the forest floor, bound with metal chains against a tree trunk, was a man dressed in rags. A man with hair like mine.
A man with a face that was all my father’s.
I staggered up on stiff legs and peered at the house, studying the windows for sign of the girl. Her mother. Hell, I’d have taken the fat kid at that point. All I wanted was to scream at someone till there were no words in me. But the house just stood there, every window blank.
I’d been sweating all day and now I was thirsty, my whole body buzzing in the heat. I stumbled across the sticky rubber and grabbed water from the wagon. The sun was dropping and with it the wind started to settle and the dust eased up. All I wanted was to look at the picture again. See the trees and my old man’s face. I sank down so my back was against the front of the wagon, the metal hot on my skin.
Across the lot, my understory looked crooked and clipped, nothing like the forest in the picture. I stared at the photograph. Leaves shaped like petals, branches outstretched like wooden fingers. And I stared at Pop. Arms bound behind his back. A faraway look in his eye.
It was him, all right.
I felt a churning in my belly. Whole load of feelings I’d thought I was too tough to feel. My old man had been taken. Snatched away from me in a dust storm. For months I’d looked for him, and for almost a year I had feared him dead. But now here he was, frozen in a photograph. Strapped to the things he’d spent a lifetime trying to forge.
Pop always told me there was nothing left. No forests but what we built. No flowers or moss or vine. Don’t go believing in fairy tales, he’d tell me. Don’t go kidding yourself.