Blue noon pours through her private woodland. The sun cuts starbursts in the needles’ verdigris, a thousand sconces of astral light. The great dinosaur plates of the trunks turn shades of orange, terra-cotta, and cinnamon. The QC man, who wants her job, says, “You ever smell the bark?”
“Vanilla,” the QC guy says.
“That’s the Jeffrey pine,” announces Britannica Man.
“Look who’s an expert. Again!”
“Not vanilla. Turpentine.”
“I’m telling you,” says the QC guy. “Ponderosa pine. Vanilla. I took a course.”
Britannica Man shakes his head. “Nope. Turpentine.”
“Somebody go sniff the cracks.” Snickers all around.
The QC guy smacks the table. Cards skim and pennies fall. “Ten bucks.”
“Now we’re talking!” says the punk from HR.
Mimi’s halfway to the door before anyone knows what’s happening.
“Hey! We’ve got a game going here.”
“Data,” the engineer’s engineer daughter answers. And in a few steps, she’s outside. The smell is on her before she reaches the trees—the scent of resin and wide western places. The clean smell of her childhood’s only untouched days. The music of the trees, too, tuning the wind. She remembers. Her nose slips into one of those dark fissures between the flat terra-cotta plates. She falls into the smell, a devastating whiff of two hundred million years ago. She can’t imagine what such perfume was ever meant to do. But it does something to her now. Mind control. It’s neither vanilla nor turpentine, but replete with highlights of each. A shot of spiritual butterscotch. A sprig of pineapple incense. It smells like nothing but itself, pungent and sublime. She breathes in, eyes closed, the tree’s real name.
She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering the morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body’s provinces, across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.
A woman passing by on the sidewalk sees her sniffing and wonders whether there might be an emergency. Blissed by memory and volatile organics, Mimi calms her with a look. Back in the office, her card-playing companions stand at her floor-length window, watching her like she’s turned dangerous. She leans back into the tree, falling one last time into that unnamable scent. Eyes shut, she summons up the arhat under his pine, that slight amusement on his lips as he tips over the brink into full-fledged acceptance of life and death. Something comes over her. The light grows brighter; the smell deepens. Detachment floats her upward, buoyed by the tides of her childhood. She turns from the trunk with a profound sense of well-being. Is this it? Am I there? Taped to the trunk of the next tree over is a handmade sign:
Town hall meeting! May 23rd!
She drifts toward the poster and reads. The city has declared the accumulation of dead needles and bark to be a fire hazard and the trees too old and expensive to clean up, year after year. They plan to replace the pines with a cleaner, safer species. Forces opposed to the removal have asked for a public hearing.
Come make your feelings known!
They want to cut her trees. She looks back across the way to the office. Her colleagues press to the glass, laughing at her. They wave their hands. They rap on the window. One of them takes her picture with a disposable camera. Her nose fills with a sachet beyond the crudity of words. Call it remembering. Call it prediction. Vanilla, pineapple, butterscotch, turpentine.
A MAN JUST SHY OF FORTY hands out silver dollars in the Spar roadhouse, off Route 212, not far from a town aptly named Damascus. Damascus, Oregon. “Celebration, damn it. You have to spend it on a beer.”
The request has its takers. “The hell we celebrating, Rockefeller?”
“My fifty thousandth tree. Nine hours a day, rain or shine, five and a half days a week, through every planting month, for almost four years.”
Scattered applause and one owl hoot. Everybody in the place says he’ll drink to that.
“Tough work for an old guy.”
“You replace your lumbar region yet?”
“You know they’re just gonna cut them right back down again, couple more years.”
Gratitude of roadhouse strangers, bought a drink for nothing. Douglas Pavlicek smiles and abides. He stacks twenty more silver dollars on the corner of a pool table and waves his stick with the hard rock maple shaft in