Flight Behavior Read Free Page B

something dark loomed from a branch
over the trail. A hornet’s nest was her first thought, or a swarm of bees
looking for a new home. She’d seen that happen. But the thing was not humming.
She approached slowly, hoping to scoot under it, with or without a positive ID.
It bristled like a cluster of dead leaves or a down-turned pine cone, but was
much bigger than that. Like an armadillo in a tree, she thought, with no notion
of how large that would be. Scaly all over and pointed at the lower end, as if
it had gone oozy and might drip. She didn’t much care to walk under it. For the
second time she wished for the glasses she’d left behind. Vanity was one thing,
but out here in the damn wilderness a person needed to see. She squinted up into
dark branches backlit by pale sky. The angle made her a little dizzy.
    Her heart thumped. These things were all over,
dangling like giant bunches of grapes from every tree she could see. Fungus was the word that came to mind, and it turned
down the corners of her mouth. Trees were getting new diseases now. Cub had
mentioned that. The wetter summers and mild winters of recent years were
bringing in new pests that apparently ate the forest out of house and home. She
pulled her jacket close and hurried underneath the bristly thing, ducking, even
though it hung a good ten feet above the trail. She cleared it by five. And even
so, shivered and ran her fingers through her hair afterward and felt childish
for fearing a tree fungus. The day couldn’t decide whether to warm up or not. In
the deep evergreen shade it was cold. Fungus brought to mind scrubbing the
mildewed shower curtain with Mr. Clean, one of her life’s main events. She tried
to push that out of her thoughts, concentrating instead on her reward at the end
of the climb. She imagined surprising him as he stood by the shack waiting for
her, coming up on him from behind, the sight of his backside in jeans. He’d
promised to come early if he could, hinting he might even be naked when she
arrived. With a big soft quilt and a bottle of Cold Duck. Lord love a duck, she
thought. After subsisting for years on the remains of toddler lunches and juice
boxes, she’d be drunk in ten minutes. She shivered again and hoped that was a
pang of desire, not the chill of a wet day and a dread of tree fungus. Should it
be so hard to tell the difference?
    The path steered out of the shadow into a bright
overlook on the open side of the slope, and here she slammed on her brakes; here
something was wrong. Or just strange. The trees above her were draped with more
of the brownish clumps, and that was the least of it. The view out across the
valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie. From this overlook she
could see the whole mountainside that lay opposite, from top to bottom, and the
full stand of that forest was thickly loaded with these bristly things. The fir
trees in the hazy distance were like nothing she’d ever seen, their branches
droopy and bulbous. The trunks and boughs were speckled and scaly like trees
covered with corn flakes. She had small children, she’d seen things covered with
corn flakes. Nearly all the forest she could see from here, from valley to
ridge, looked altered and pale, the beige of dead leaves. These were evergreen
trees, they should be dark, and that wasn’t foliage. There was movement in it.
The branches seemed to writhe. She took a small automatic step backward from the
overlook and the worrisome trees, although they stood far away across the thin
air of the hollow. She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped.
    A small shift between cloud and sun altered the
daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The
forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for
help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world
because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree,
passing its warmth