The Woodsmen - chapter 1 (free version - preview) (Patreon)

The bearing in Hank's heater fan squeals every time the front right tire hits a washboard rut. Terrence is talking about a boat motor. An Evinrude. He bought it off a guy in Sandpoint last month and the water pump is shot and he can't get the casing off to replace the impeller. I'm pressed against the passenger door. My right knee aches from the angle of the footwell. Hank's truck is an F-250 but with four grown men in heavy canvas work pants and wool and insulated boots it feels like a tin can.

"I tried soaking the bolts in WD-40," Terrence says. He's looking at the back of Hank's head. Hank's driving, both hands on the wheel at ten and two, eyes on the road. "Left it for a whole weekend. Still stripped the heads. Now I gotta drill them out. But the housing is aluminum, right, so if I slip with the bit I punch right through the water jacket."

Nobody says anything. Hank adjusts the rearview mirror.

"Should have bought a Yamaha," Walt says from the back.

Terrence turns around in his seat. "A Yamaha? You price out a lower unit on a Yamaha lately? I'm not spending two grand to push a fourteen-foot aluminum hull across Sullivan Lake to catch stocked trout."

"Then you drill out the bolts," Walt says. "And you shut up about it."

Terrence goes off on how well stainless steel holds up. I look out the window. The rain stopped two hours ago but the Douglas firs on either side of the road are still dripping heavy drops onto the gravel. The water sits in the potholes, milky brown.

I pull my knife and the wood out of my coat pocket. The piece is alder, three inches long, from a deadfall on the last contract. Supposed to be a bird. I've been working it a month of evenings. Head rough-shaped, body close, wings still inside. A curl comes off the underside. The shaving falls onto my jeans and I brush it away.

"You still doing that, Briggs," Terrence says.

"Still doing it."

"Hank's going to give you shit again about the curls on the floor."

Hank, driving, doesn't look over. "I gave you shit twice. I do not give shit a third time."

Walt looks out the side window at the firs going past.

The block is steep. Lots of dead standing timber, gray trunks bleached out against the green understory. Three weeks of it. Camp is three trailers on a gravel landing at the bottom of the unit. The state graded the landing five years back and abandoned it. No cell service there, no bars halfway down the mountain.

We cross a cattle guard, tires humming on the steel grates. The vibration goes up through my boots. My stomach feels a little off. Loose, watery. I figure it was the gas station coffee we bought in Colville.

Dana Kessler is already at the landing.

Hank parks the Ford next to her white Tacoma. The air outside is cold, smells like wet dirt and crushed pine needles and the hot diesel exhaust. My legs are stiff from the four-hour drive. I stretch my back and it cracks twice, loud. Dana's leaning against her tailgate and I walk over.

The topo map's rolled out on the tailgate, weighed down with a dented Stanley thermos, a spare tape measure, a half-empty box of chalk, and her radio. She's wearing the usual green forestry jacket. Cuffs frayed. Caulked boots on already.

"Briggs," she says, still looking at the map. She's drawing a hard line with a blue ballpoint pen along a topographical ridge.

"Dana." I stand next to her. The paper of the map is damp from the air.

"Road up to the north ridge is washed out," she says. "You'll have to hike in from the spur. Adds twenty minutes to the morning. I flagged the detour with pink ribbon but the elk have been eating the ribbon so just follow the draw."

"Hank knows?"

She nods and taps a place where the lines run close on the map. The ink bleeds slightly into the damp paper. "This section here. It's a mess. Rot in the roots. Don't trust the lean on anything over twenty inches. I marked the keepers with blue paint. Honestly, if it looks dead just drop it. I don't need a top coming off on somebody."

"You bring the good coffee?" Terrence walks up. He drops his canvas duffel bag in the mud. It makes a heavy, wet sound.

"Instant," Dana says. "In the mess trailer. Bottom cabinet next to the stove."

Terrence groans and kicks a rock. "Three weeks of instant. I'm putting in a grievance." He walks away toward the trailers.

Dana rolls up the map. The paper makes a loud crinkling sound in the quiet morning air. She secures it with a thick rubber band. She looks at me. Her eyes are brown and the skin around them is pale from the winter.

"You look tired, Joel," she says.

"Didn't sleep much." A bad sleep. I kept waking up feeling like the room was too hot, throwing the heavy quilt off, then freezing ten minutes later and pulling it back up. My sheets were twisted around my ankles by morning.

"Get your gear," she says. "Hank wants saws running by nine. We lose the light by four-thirty."

I walk to the back of Hank's truck, drop the tailgate and grab the familiar Husqvarna 572 XP, a dense fifteen pounds of engine and bar. The orange plastic is scratched white along the sides from pushing through brush. I grab my chaps, my helmet with the wire mesh visor, the tool belt with the wedges and the heavy sledgehammer. The leather of the belt is stiff from the cold. I buckle it around my waist.

We hike up the spur road. Walt walks ahead of me, boots slipping a little in the wet clay, Stihl 462 over his shoulder. He plants his toes first when he walks. Always has. The incline is steep. It follows an old creek bed that dried up in August and never came back over winter.

By the time we reach the first flagged unit my breathing is heavy. My thighs burn. It's the normal burn at first, first-day-back-on-the-hill burn. But then it goes deeper, into the marrow.

I set my saw down next to a marked fir. It's a dead standing tree. Maybe eighty feet tall. The bark is sloughing off in large gray plates, piling up around the root collar like broken dinner plates. A stress fracture runs vertically up the trunk starting from about shoulder height. You have to watch trees like this. The rot in the center changes how the weight sits. If the wind hits wrong the top comes off before you've finished the cut. 

I check my bar oil, popping the cap and looking inside. It's full, a thick sticky red fluid. I check the gas mix. Full.

I pull the starter cord.

My grip slips. The plastic handle snaps back and cracks against the housing.

The leather glove is wet from the brush. I wipe it on my pants and grab the cord again. Pull. The engine catches, a two-stroke scream that drowns the wind in the canopy. It smells like burnt oil. 

I step up to the tree and read the lean. It wants to fall downhill toward a cluster of small vine maples and a limestone outcropping. I aim for a gap just to the right of the maples and bring the saw up to make the top cut of the face notch.

The vibration goes up my arms. Usually it dies at the elbows. Today it climbs all the way up and buzzes in my collarbones. My teeth rattle. The saw feels heavier than yesterday. Like it’s filled with wet concrete.

I make the cut. The chain bites into the wood. The sawdust is brown and wet. Rot. It throws a fine muddy powder that sticks to my chaps.

I pull the saw out and make the bottom cut. The wedge of wood drops out onto the toe of my boot.

I move to the back of the tree to make the felling cut, rev the engine, and sink the bar in level, aiming for the hinge wood.

A sudden ache catches in my lower back, hollow. It sits right at the base of my spine, below the belt line. I shift my weight to compensate and my left knee wobbles. Just a slight tremor in the joint.

The saw binds.

I let off the throttle. The chain is stuck. The tree has settled backward on the bar. The kerf closed up faster than I anticipated. The rot in the center of the trunk threw off the weight.

I swear under my breath, step back, and unclip the sledgehammer and two yellow plastic wedges from my belt. The first wedge goes into the cut behind the saw bar. I swing.

The hammer twists strangely in my grip. The balance is off. My swing is weak. The metal head hits the plastic wedge with a dull thud, barely driving it in half an inch.

I swing again. Harder this time.

My hand slips on the rubber grip. The sledgehammer twists mid-air and glances off the side of the wedge. I overbalance and stumble forward, catching myself with my left hand against the rough bark of the tree. The bark bites into my palm through the glove.

My chest is heaving. Sweat is pouring down my face underneath the helmet. It stings my eyes. I'm hot. Hot enough that the cold air under the trees feels useless.

Walt is working about fifty yards away. I can hear his saw idling. I look over. He’s watching me. He isn't doing anything, just watching, his visor flipped up.

I pick up the sledgehammer and wrap my thumb over my index finger to lock the grip. The first wedge drives in. Then the second on top of it. The tree creaks. A loud popping from the center of the trunk and the kerf opens around the bar. I pull the saw, rev it, finish the cut. The tree groans, the hinge breaks, and the trunk falls heavily through the canopy. It crushes the vine maples and lands on the limestone outcropping with a concussion that rolls through the draw.

I hit the kill switch on the saw. The silence rushes in, filling the space the engine just left. My ears ring.

My stomach clenches. A sharp gnawing right below the ribs. Hunger like nothing I get on the job. My mouth waters. I swallow. If I don't eat I'm going to sit down in the dirt and not get up.

I check my watch. It’s ten forty-five.

I leave the saw by the stump and walk down to where I dropped my pack. I sit on a mossy log. My legs feel loose in the hip joints. The bone doesn't sit tight in the socket.

I pull out my lunch. Three thick ham and cheese sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil. Two apples. A bag of almonds. A large thermos of water.

I unwrap the first sandwich. The bread is squished. Four bites and I haven't tasted the ham. The second one comes out of the foil before I've swallowed the first, warm mayonnaise, the last crust pushed in around what's still in my mouth.

Opening the bag of almonds, I tip it back and pour a handful straight into my mouth, crunching them down, eating the whole bag. The apple goes the same way. Down to the core.

Terrence walks by with a red plastic gas can in each hand. He stops. He’s breathing hard.

"Pacing yourself, Briggs?" he asks.

I look up at him with a piece of apple skin stuck between my front teeth, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. "Didn't eat breakfast."

"Right," Terrence says. He looks at my lap. Three empty foil wrappers, an empty nut bag, and I'm holding the second apple. He shakes his head. "Don't puke when you bend over." He keeps walking up the hill.

I eat the second apple. My body is burning fuel at a rate I can't understand. I feel like a furnace with the draft wide open. I drink half a liter of water. It hits my stomach and sloshes around with the food.

The fever hits at noon.

It starts at the back of my neck. A flush of heat that spreads up into my scalp, making my hair prickle, and then travels down my spine. The heavy canvas of my chaps feels like it's made of cast iron sitting in the sun. The flannel shirt I'm wearing rubs against my skin like sandpaper. Every surface suddenly has texture. Every time I turn my head the collar of my shirt drags across my neck and I wince. The seams of my underwear feel like wire against my hips.

I spend the afternoon bucking, sectioning the trunks into twenty-foot lengths so the skidder can drag them out. I keep my head down. My arms are weak. I've got to rest the saw on my thigh between cuts. The heat radiating off the engine block makes the fever worse. I'm sweating constantly. My shirt is soaked through. The sweat runs down the crack of my ass.

Around three I drop a wedge. I'm trying to pull it from my pouch and the fingers just won't close. The strength is gone out of my hand. I pin the wedge against my leg with my wrist to drag it out.

Hank blows the air horn from the landing at four-thirty. It echoes off the ridge. The light is turning gray.

We walk back to camp in the dark. The mud on the spur road is frozen into hard ruts. The temperature drops fast once the sun goes behind the mountains. I stumble twice. My boots catch on exposed roots. Walt catches my elbow the second time. His grip is iron hard.

The hand stays a half second longer than the catch needs.

"You alright?" he asks. His voice is quiet in the dusk.

"Fine, I just tripped." I pull my arm away without looking at him.

Dinner is in the mess trailer. The trailer is a twenty-foot box with a fold-down table bolted to the wall and aluminum folding chairs. The propane heater in the corner is ticking. The air smells heavily of boiled meat and wet wool.

Hank made chili. Two steel pots of it going on the propane stove. Venison, canned kidney beans, too much chili powder. I fill a plastic bowl to the brim. The ladle clanks against the metal. I take a quarter loaf of white bread off the counter and sit at the end of the folding table, closest to the door.

I eat two bowls, tearing the bread into chunks to soak up the grease at the bottom. Back to the stove for a third. The heat of the chili makes the fever worse. I'm sweating through my clean shirt. My face is flushed. I can feel the heat coming off my own cheeks.

Dana comes into the trailer holding a metal clipboard. The door bangs shut behind her, bringing in a draft of freezing air. She walks over to the stove and pours herself a mug of the instant coffee. She talks to Hank about the daily tally. She stands with her weight on one leg. I watch her hands. She has long fingers. Her fingernails are cut short and clean. She taps her pen against the edge of the clipboard while Hank tells her about a section of cedar that had heart rot.

"Briggs ate half the pot," Terrence says. He's leaning back in his chair, balancing on the back two legs. He's picking his teeth with a wooden matchstick.

"Leave him alone," Walt says. Walt is eating slowly. He cuts his bread with a pocket knife.

"I'm just saying. He was hungry. I saw him eat a whole apple up on the ridge in just a few bites. Looked like a horse."

I put my spoon down. It clicks loud against the plastic bowl.

I stand up. My center of gravity is wrong, and I sway slightly before catching my balance, my hips looser than usual. I take my bowl to the sink and wash it. The water coming out of the tap is freezing cold. It numbs my fingers.

I leave the trailer and walk to the sleeping quarters. It's a long bunkhouse split into four rooms by thin plywood walls. Mine is at the end. The electric heater hums steady, the kind of hum you stop hearing after a minute.

I sit on the mattress and pull my boots off. The laces are caked in dry mud. The stiff work pants and the flannel come off next. No shower. I don't have it in me. Down to my gray thermal underwear.

I lie down. The blankets are heavy military surplus wool, but I'm shivering. The fever is spiking. My teeth chatter lightly.

The sleep is fractured. I dream about the sound of the saw binding. The high-pitched whine of the chain trapped in the wood, the smell of burning metal and sap. I'm trying to run down the spur road but can't lift my feet. They drag through the mud and won't come up. I wake sweating, the thermals clinging to my skin, and throw the blankets off. The cold air hits the sweat-damp skin and I start shivering violently. I pull the blankets back up. Fall back asleep. Wake up again.

It’s 9:14 PM.

I lie in the dark. The camp is mostly silent, the crew gone to bed, the generator humming in the background for a short while longer.

I shift on the mattress. Something doesn't sit right between my legs. I figure I twisted in the sheets. A deep, tearing ache radiates through my pelvis.

It's different from the muscle soreness of the day. It feels like the bones themselves are moving. A dragging sensation deep in my lower abdomen, radiating down into my groin. Like a massive bruise throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

I need to piss. The pressure in my bladder is intense.

I sit up. The room spins. The dark shapes of the dresser and the window frame blur together. I put my feet on the cold linoleum and wait for my vision to clear, grab a heavy black plastic flashlight from the nightstand, and step out into the narrow hallway.

The bathroom is a separate small trailer hitched near the mess hall. I open the outer door of the bunkhouse and walk across the gravel landing. The air is freezing. The temperature must be below thirty. The sharp stones bite into the soles of my wool socks. There's no moon.

I open the flimsy door to the bathroom trailer, step inside and flick the light switch. The fluorescent bulb overhead flickers twice, buzzing loudly, before casting a harsh pale light over the room. The floor is cracked yellow linoleum. There's a fiberglass shower stall in the corner and a single white porcelain toilet. The room smells strongly of chemical bleach and damp mildew.

I step up to the toilet and reach down to pull down the front of my thermals.

My hand brushes against nothing.

I freeze. My fingers find the inside of my own thigh where they shouldn't. Like reaching for a doorknob in the dark and finding empty air. I look down.

The gray thermal fabric is flat against my groin.

Nausea hits the back of my throat, sudden and violent. I swallow hard, tasting copper, then grab the waistband of the thermals and my cotton underwear and push them down to my knees.

I look.

My dick is gone.

The balls are gone, too. Thirty-eight years of weight, just not there.

In its place there's a slit. Swollen, raw.

I stop breathing. The silence in the bathroom is total except for the hum of the fluorescent light. I can't hear my own heartbeat. Nothing in my head. I can't feel anything. I just stand there.

My thighs are thick and muscled. Between them everything's wrong.

The skin is bruised dark along the edges. Two outer folds, darker than the rest of my thighs. They're thick and they hurt in the cold air of the room.

I reach a hand down. My right hand is shaking. The knuckles are scarred white from a decade of logging. There are thick yellow calluses on the palms and the pads of the fingers. Dirt is permanently ground into the cuticles.

I grab the edge of the sink with my left hand to keep from falling.

I pull my right hand back as if it might get bitten.

I stagger backward. My back hits the fiberglass wall of the shower stall. Both hands on the edge of the porcelain sink, I look up at my face in the mirror.

Exactly the same. Short dark hair, slightly greasy. Three days of heavy stubble. Thick neck, sunburned in a V at the collar. The scar through my right eyebrow. Wide eyes, the whites shot through with red from no sleep.

I'm a man. I look like a man.

Down again.

It hasn't changed back.

The space between my legs is empty and flat where it shouldn't be. The draft from the cracked window hits a place that has never been exposed to the air before. The cold is piercing.

I'm looking at a woman's parts where my own used to be. My brain keeps rejecting the image like it’s a mistake in the light.

My eyes keep trying to turn it back into what was there before.

I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet and put my head in my hands. The calluses scrape against my forehead. The nausea rises again, twisting my stomach. I dry heave. The sound bounces off the trailer walls. My abs lock up. Nothing comes up. Just stringy saliva onto the floor.

I look at my hands again. The thick wrists. The dark hair on the forearms.

Touching myself again, tracing the shape, it hurts. A deep bruised ache pulls up into my stomach. The skin is hot. I realize, suddenly, that the agonizing pressure in my bladder hasn't gone away. I still need to piss.

I don't know how to do it.

Out of pure muscle memory I stand up and aim, in front of the bowl waiting for the release. Then it hits me that it won't work. The angle is wrong. The equipment is gone. The stream would just run down my legs.

I sit back down, open the plastic lid, and lower myself onto the cold seat.

I stare at the door. The white paint is peeling at the bottom.

I try to relax. It takes a long time. My whole body is locked up. Then something lets go. The piss flows out.

It runs down the inside of the lips and drops into the bowl. The sound is different. Lower. Broader. There’s nothing to direct anymore. It just spills out. I feel messy. Exposed to the air. The hot urine warms the freezing skin of my thighs for a second before dripping away.

When I finish, I sit there for a moment, the lips damp. I reach for the toilet paper on the metal roller, pull off a wad and reach down and wipe. The paper comes away wet, but clean. The raw flesh stings slightly against the dry paper.

I drop the paper into the bowl and reach back to push the heavy chrome handle. The toilet flushes with a loud roar.

I stand up and pull my thermals up. They fit differently now. There's no bulk in the front. The fabric lays flat against my pubic bone. There's extra room in the crotch of the pants that sags slightly.

As I walk to the door, the fabric rubs against the new anatomy. The friction is a constant, unavoidable reminder. The swollen inner lips catch slightly against the cotton weave of my underwear. My thighs touch together higher up than they used to. There's nothing between them to keep them apart.

I turn off the light, push the door open and walk back out into the cold night.

The gravel crunches under my socks. The cold is a relief. It grounds me. The trailers are dark, blocky shapes against the black tree line.

I walk back to my room, shut the door quietly, and lie down on the bed.

I pull the heavy blankets up to my chin, the fever still burning. My stomach still has the ravenous ache. The pain in the pelvis throbs along with the heartbeat.

I don't think about what to do. I don't wonder how it happened. No thought fits this. There's no explanation.

I lie on my back and press my thighs together. The soft, unfamiliar flesh sits trapped between my legs.

I stare at the ceiling in the dark until the generator turns off for the night. The only sound is the wind moving through the tops of the firs on the ridge. A heavy, rhythmic rushing sound like the ocean.

Hank wants us at the spur road by six thirty. Fifty more acres of dead standing timber to bring down. I need to sharpen my chain before breakfast.

I close my eyes and wait for the alarm to ring.

The Premium version of this chapter includes images of Joel at the landing with Dana, in the woods with Walt and in the bathroom after the first changes have occurred, as well as more explicit copy.