“We lived peacefully in the ocean for years,” he said. “Then one day my family got scooped up in a net and ended up in a tank in a seafood restaurant near the wharf.”
I tried not to laugh. October listened politely, her chin in her palm, elbow on the table.
“I watched my family get picked from the tank and cooked alive.”
“I’m sorry . . .” October said.
“I prayed for death,” Finster told her. “I wanted to end up on a plate too. I wanted to get chewed up and turned to shit like them. Instead I got rescued by a militant vegan who drove me back to the ocean and set me free.”
That time I laughed out loud; October shot me a look.
“A few days later I got snagged by a fisherman’s hook.” Finster curved his index finger into the shape of a “J” and hung it from his mouth to demonstrate. “Mort.”
With obvious trepidation, October touched the man’s hand, and I saw her flinch when her fingers made contact, like whatever she felt was not good.
“We should go,” I mumbled.
October said she needed to wash her hands and wandered off to the bathroom. While I waited, Finster stared at me with deranged scrutiny, and I imagined he could see in me what I saw in him—blackness.
“You miss her,” Finster said.
“Who?”
“Your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Don’t worry, she’s coming back.”
“I know she’s coming back. She just went to the bathroom.”
October’s sketchbook was still open on the table. Finster looked at the drawing and said, “It’s you. Without the rage.”
“Excuse me?”
“Where’s your rage come from? Daddy? Mommy?” He sniffed the air like a dog. “I can smell it.”
I shut the sketchbook, stood up, and began to bus our table. Before I took the dishes away, Finster grabbed what was left of October’s egg sandwich and shoved it into his mouth.
As we were leaving, Finster pulled on October’s sleeve and said, “Your sweatshirt is nice.”
She was wearing her oversized gray hoodie. There was nothing especially nice about it, and October took it off and gave it to the guy.
“What are you doing?” I said. “What if it gets cold later?”
“I have a sweater in the car.”
“He’s not a lobster,” Finster said to October, pointing at me as we were walking out the door. “You can’t catch him.”
The redwoods along the highway start to get noticeably bigger after Willits, and October kept leaning her head out the window, trying to see their crowns. “Look at that one,” she would say, and I’d remind her that these were still the small trees.
As we approached Avenue of the Giants, she asked to see the mushrooms. I reached behind my seat, grabbed them from my backpack, and handed them to her.
“Wait,” she said. “I was literally expecting a bag of dirty mushrooms. These look like candy bars.”
“My buddy Len isn’t kidding around. This is his art. He melts down high-quality chocolate, chops up the mushrooms, mixes it all together, and makes those by hand.”
Each bar was a two-inch square, individually wrapped in metallic foil, with pretty paper labels on top. The labels had images of Hindu goddesses printed on the front and a Hunter S. Thomson quote on the underside that read: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
“The one in the pink wrapper is dark chocolate with dried cherries. The gold wrapper is milk chocolate with honey. And Len wanted me to mention that he uses all organic ingredients.”
October looked sideways at me, playful and flirty. “There’s two. One for you and one for me.”
“We’ll see.”
“We’ll see,” she repeated, mocking my deep, humorless tone.
She smelled the bars and said, “I call the milk chocolate.”
The “Welcome” sign near the entrance to Humboldt Redwoods State Park has a John Steinbeck quote on it, something about how the trees are ambassadors of another time, but October said it felt more like a prehistoric place where time stood still.
“If a triceratops walked past me right now, it wouldn’t seem weird,” she said.
The air smelled of dirt, bark, and moss, and inside that miasma I could taste the ocean. It was in the wind that blew over the hill from the Pacific and kept the earth soft and damp under our feet.
We had decided we would hike around for a couple of hours, visit the specific trees we’d been talking about, and then find a motel where one or both of us would eat the chocolates. If all went well after they started to kick in, we’d go back