The Woodsmen - chapter 3 (with images) (Patreon)

It’s quiet on the ridge. No wind in the firs. The cheap coil heater pops in the corner of the room.

My skin is dry. The fever that sat in me for two days is gone. The sheets aren't tangled around my ankles. I take a deep breath.

A sharp, tearing pain flares across my chest.

It’s shallow, sitting just under the skin. I exhale slowly, letting my ribcage drop. The pain subsides into a dull, hot ache and I push the wool blanket down to my waist. The cold air of the room hits my torso. The skin tightens. The ache spikes again, focused in the center of my chest, in two places.

I reach up and press my left pec. The muscle is still there, thick and flat against the ribs. I move my fingers toward the center.

The nipple is swollen. Sensitive enough that the pad of my finger alone is too much. Just brushing the dark skin around the nipple sends a sharp shock through me. I wince, then press down slightly.

There’s a lump under the skin.

It feels wrong immediately. A small hard knot buried behind the nipple. Dense. Tender. I touch the right side. Same thing there too.

I stop breathing for a second.

My fingers go back automatically, pressing again like I misunderstood what I felt the first time. The skin is hot. The swollen tissue shifts under my fingertips and a sharp electric pain shoots through my chest hard enough that I jerk my hand away.

No.

I sit there staring down at myself in the dim room. Bare chest. Flat muscle. But not flat anymore. Not completely.

I press again, slower this time, tracing around the edges of the lump with shaking fingers, trying to understand the shape of it through the skin. The nipples are swollen enough to look different even in the weak gray light coming through the window.

This is real.

My body is spending calories building breasts while I sleep.

I hunch forward on the edge of the mattress, elbows on my knees, palms hanging useless between them while the heater ticks in the corner. Every movement of my arms pulls at the soreness under the skin. Even breathing makes the ache throb.

I don’t know how long I sit there before the cold finally forces me to move.

I pull the thermal top over my head, drop it on the linoleum, and sit in the freezing dark, bare-chested, afraid to move my shoulders.

I have to get dressed. Hank wants us at the spur road early.

I sort through the small stack of clean clothes in my duffel before I get out of bed. There are two pairs of underwear. One has a damp ring across the front from yesterday. The other is the pair I slept in and the inside is stiff in the crotch where something has been leaking all night. I pick the damp pair, turning it inside out first to see the difference. The inside is worse than the outside.

The choice is between yesterday's sweat and last night's leak. Then I see the compression shorts Dana gave me in the side pocket of the duffel. The damp boxers peel off and I step into the black shorts. Synthetic blend, cold against my thighs, tight enough that I have to hook my thumbs in the waistband to drag them over my hips. They snap into place against my stomach and the relief is so complete my knees almost give.

No center seam. No fly. The elastic holds everything flat against the pubic bone. The swollen flesh is held still. I take a step toward the dresser. The fabric glides against itself. Nothing rubs. The friction that tortured me all day yesterday is gone.

I let out a long breath.

Then I look at the gray thermal top on the floor. I can't put it back on. The waffle-knit is too rough. I open the top drawer of the cheap particle-board dresser and dig past the heavy wool socks and the flannel shirts. An old white cotton undershirt I bought at a gas station two years ago. It shrunk in the hot wash at a laundromat in Spokane. It’s two sizes too small.

I pull it over my head, forcing my thick shoulders through the armholes, and drag it down over my chest.

It’s tight. It flattens the muscle and pushes the hard, sore lumps behind my nipples straight back against my ribs. The compression hurts. A constant pressure. But it holds the skin still. The fabric doesn't move when I breathe. It doesn't drag.

A heavy gray shirt over it, buttoned to the collar. The stiff canvas work pants come on next, tight now at the hip. I've got to pull them up harder than I used to. The denim crushes against the compression shorts, but the protective layer holds. I buckle my heavy leather belt. The belt has run out of holes on the close side, so I use the next one out. The waistband sits looser there but the hips fill the canvas. I grab my boots from the hallway. They feel loose around my feet.

The walk across the gravel landing is cold. The sky is a flat, iron gray. The mess trailer windows are fogged.

I open the door. The heat of the propane heater hits me. The smell of stale coffee and fried meat. Hank is at the stove. Terrence is already at the fold-down table, eating oatmeal from a plastic bowl. Walt is pouring coffee.

I walk to the counter and grab a plate. Hank slides three thick pancakes onto the plate. A small pitcher of warmed Karo syrup is on the counter.

I turn to the table and look at the chairs. I don’t take the far chair. Stepping over a chair would pull the canvas pants tight in the crotch, and I don't want to test the compression shorts yet. Instead I pull out the folding chair at the end of the table.

I sit down carefully. Spine straight. I pull the chair in but leave maybe four inches of clearance between my chest and the hard plastic edge of the table. If I lean forward to eat, the tight undershirt will bind against the sore lumps. I keep my back pressed against the cold aluminum.

I bring the fork up to my mouth and lean my neck forward instead of bending at the waist.

"You look like you swallowed a broom handle, Briggs," Terrence says. He points his spoon at me.

I swallow a piece of pancake. It's dry. "Back is stiff."

"You need to adjust your sleeping pad," Terrence says. "Those bunkhouse mattresses are just foam over plywood. I put a folded wool blanket under my hips. Changes the whole alignment."

I take another bite. "I'll try that."

The door opens and Dana steps inside. The door brings in wet cold. She's wearing her frayed green forestry jacket. She walks to the counter and pours a mug of instant coffee. She turns around and leans against the wall.

She watches me eat without staring.

She just tracks my movement. She watches the way I hold my elbows close to my ribs, the rigid posture of my spine. She takes a sip of her coffee. She looks at Hank and starts talking about the log tally for the north ridge, but her eyes flick back to my chest for a second.

We hike up the spur road at six-thirty. The mud ruts are frozen hard.

The climb is steep. I carry my Husqvarna on my right shoulder. It presses down on my collarbone. The tight white undershirt restricts my breathing and I can’t expand my lungs fully. I have to take short, shallow breaths through my mouth.

By the time we reach the flagged unit, sweat is pooling under the tight cotton. The sweat gets trapped against my skin. The salt in the sweat hits the swollen nipples and a chemical burning starts. It's a constant heat.

The block we are clearing is a dense cluster of dead standing timber and tight second-growth fir.

I set my gear down next to a marked tree, check the bar oil, the gas. I pull the starter cord. The engine catches, two-stroke scream cutting the cold air. It smells like burnt oil. 

I step up to the trunk and bring the saw up.

The vibration travels through the heavy plastic handles. Normally the vibration is just a background hum. Today the tight undershirt's like a drum skin, sending the buzz right into the sore lumps. It buzzes inside them. My stomach turns. I grit my teeth and sink the bar into the bark.

The morning is a slow grind. Felling, bucking, clearing brush. The compression shorts work perfectly. My lower half is secure. But my chest is a cage of tight cotton and trapped heat.

At ten-thirty, the pressure in my bladder becomes unavoidable.

It's the same low, forward-sitting pressure as yesterday. I hit the kill switch on the saw and leave it by a stump.

I walk away from the cutting line, downhill, pushing through a dense thicket of vine maples. The bare branches whip against my heavy pants. I keep walking until the sound of Walt's saw idling is just a faint rattle in the distance.

I find a small depression in the ground behind a grove of trees. They form a high wooden wall, surrounded by ferns and wet, spongy moss.

I drop the tool belt in the ferns. Unclip the chaps.

I stand there a moment and listen to the wind. The crunch of gravel. The snap of a branch. Nothing. Just the massive quiet of the forest. 

I undo the brass button of my pants and unzip the heavy denim.

The compression shorts are built to stay in place. Pulling them down is difficult. I have to hook my thumbs deep into the thick elastic waistband and drag them down over my thighs. They snap tightly against my skin. I push the denim and the black synthetic fabric down to my knees.

The freezing air hits the exposed flesh between my legs.

The bruising is slightly better today. The deep purple color along the edges has faded to an angry red. The Aquaphor did its job. But the tissue is still swollen. Thirty-eight years old. My forearms are thick with muscle and dark hair. My hands are scarred. Between my legs is a pussy.

I bend my knees and lower my weight into a squat. The joints in my knees pop loudly. My thighs burn from holding the position.

The stream runs down the inside of the lips and splatters onto the ferns between my boots. It makes a loud, rushing sound. I stare at the ground, watching the milky brown water sitting in a nearby puddle. A few fine drops of warm urine splash back onto me.

I stay squatted when the stream stops, reach into the left pocket of my shirt and pull out the flat package of unscented baby wipes Dana gave me.

The plastic package crinkles loudly in the quiet woods as I pull one wipe out. It's freezing cold.

I reach down. The angle is awkward. My thick bicep presses against my knee. I wipe the damp skin. Front to back, exactly like she said. The cold wet cloth against the raw skin makes me shiver violently. I drop the used wipe onto the moss, then I pull another one and dry the surrounding skin.

It feels like cleaning a saw bar. The hands do it. The rest of me is somewhere else. The body accepts the routine faster than my head does.

I stand up. My knees ache as I pull the compression shorts up. They snap back into place, pulling the soft tissue tight against the bone. The canvas pants come up next, zipped. Tool belt buckled. I kick wet moss over the used wipes, then walk back up the incline.

Terrence is standing near the edge of my unit. He has his helmet visor flipped up. He's holding a red plastic wedge in his left hand. His Stihl saw is buried halfway into the trunk of a tall fir. The engine is off.

"Briggs," he calls out. He waves the wedge at me.

I walk over. My chest feels tight. The sweat is cooling under the undershirt, making me shiver.

"I got greedy," Terrence says. He points at the trunk with his scarred thumb. "Thought I could beat the lean. The kerf closed up on the bar before I could get a wedge in."

The tree is a leaner. It wants to fall back up the hill, but Terrence was trying to drop it downhill toward the landing. The weight of the canopy shifted backward, pinching the steel bar of his saw inside the cut. It's stuck tight.

"You need the sledge?" I ask.

"Yeah. And a second wedge. I try to pound this one in with an axe head, I'm just going to shatter the plastic."

I unclip my heavy sledgehammer from my belt, pull a yellow plastic wedge from my pouch, and step up to the tree right next to Terrence.

We are standing close. Our shoulders are almost touching. He smells strongly of cheap deodorant, old sweat, and the sharp tang of bar oil. He reaches out and points to a narrow gap in the cut, just behind his trapped saw bar.

"Slot it right there," he says. "Drive it straight in. I'll lift on the handle."

I slot the yellow wedge into the gap and grip the sledgehammer, thumb wrapped over my index finger, then I bring the hammer back.

The tight undershirt restricts my shoulder movement. The fabric bites into my armpits. I swing. The metal head hits the plastic wedge with a solid thud. The tree groans.

"Again," Terrence says. He grabs the rear handle of his saw and pulls upward, using his body weight for leverage.

I swing again. Harder. The vibration of the impact travels up the wooden handle of the sledge, into my arms, and straight into my chest. The hard lumps behind my nipples flare with a sharp, spiking ache. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.

"One more," Terrence grunts. His face is red. The veins in his thick neck are standing out.

I swing a third time. The wedge drives deep. A loud pop echoes from the center of the trunk. The wood fibers tear. The kerf opens up a fraction of an inch, and Terrence yanks his saw free.

"Got it," he says. He sets the saw on the ground.

He turns to me and claps me hard on the left shoulder. Heavy, open-handed.

The hit jars my upper body. The tight undershirt drags across the swollen nipple.

A white-hot bolt of pain. My breath catches loud enough that he hears it. My jaw locks. I take a fast step backward.

Terrence drops his hand. He frowns. "You OK?"

I turn my head away from him and stare at the rough bark of the fir tree. My eyes are watering. The pain is radiating outward from the nipple, a throbbing burn.

"Yeah," I say. My voice is tight. "I pinched a nerve in my neck yesterday. Swung too hard."

Terrence nods slowly. He doesn't look convinced, but he doesn't press it. He picks up his saw. "Watch your swing, then. We got three more weeks out here."

He turns his back and starts the engine. The loud scream of the two-stroke drowns out anything else. I walk back to my own unit, keeping my left arm pressed tight against my ribs for the rest of the morning.

The camp generator cuts off at ten o'clock. Not quite time yet. The electric heater ticks.

I'm exhausted. The muscles in my lower back are locked up. My thighs ache. I pull the heavy shirt off, grabbing the bottom hem of the tight white undershirt and dragging it over my head.

The release of pressure is dizzying. I take a deep, full breath. My ribs expand properly for the first time in fifteen hours.

I reach over and turn on the overhead light. The weak yellow bulb casts long shadows across the small plywood room.

There are red indents pressed into the skin where the seams of the undershirt dug in all day. The hair on my chest is matted with sweat. I look at the nipples.

They're undeniably changing. The dark skin around the nipples has spread. It's darker now, a bruised purple from the constant friction. The tissue underneath is swollen, pushing out from the flat muscle. The hard lumps inside are the size of large marbles.

I lie back on the mattress and pull the compression shorts off, naked in the cool air of the room.

I rest my right hand flat on my stomach and look at the ceiling.

My hand goes lower, touching the skin between my thighs. The swelling has gone down. The tissue feels less alien than it did the first night. That realization scares me more than anything.

I trace the outer edge with my thumb, parting the outer folds. The skin inside is slick and smooth.

I move my index finger upward, finding the small nub at the top.

I brush my finger across it light. The heat hits before my hand pulls back. My hips rock up off the mattress a fraction of an inch and I didn't tell them to. My breath catches, the skin flushes hot. It's like crossing a hot wire in a breaker box. It feels like the body wanting on its own and not asking me first. 

A cold spike of adrenaline makes me drop my arm to my side. My heart is hammering against my ribs. The weak yellow lightbulb fills my eyes. I don't touch myself again, just pull the wool blanket up to my chin. I turn the light off and lie in the dark and wait for sleep.

The fourth day moves faster. The mechanical routine takes over. Wake up. Compression shorts on, tight undershirt under everything else. Hike the spur. Cut. At mealtime, eat quickly.

The pain in my chest becomes a dull, constant background noise. The undershirt manages the friction, but it can't stop the growth.

By mid-afternoon, I notice the weight.

I'm bucking a large fallen cedar. I finish a cut, hit the saw's brake, and step off the trunk down onto the mossy ground. It's a two-foot drop. My heavy boots hit the soft dirt.

A fraction of a second after my boots hit the ground, my chest moves.

It's a slight, downward pull. The dense lumps of tissue behind my nipples carry their own mass now. When my body stops moving, the momentum carries the tissue downward, stretching the skin slightly, before it snaps back up.

I freeze. Stand still in the quiet woods, the saw held by the top handle. I bounce slightly on the balls of my feet.

The tissue moves again. Down and up. A distinct, independent bounce beneath the tight cotton.

The wrongness of it makes my stomach turn. This is weight that's meant to hang from a body, not like muscle. It changes my center of gravity, just slightly, pulling my shoulders forward.

I look around. Hank is fifty yards away, checking a cut line. Terrence is running his saw on the far ridge. Nobody is looking at me.

No jumping off logs for the rest of the day. I step down carefully, keep my core rigid, walk stiffly.

At five o'clock, the light turns gray. We walk down to the landing. The air is dropping fast toward freezing. I stow my saw in the back of Hank's Ford.

I look around the landing. Dana's white Tacoma is parked near the equipment shed. She's standing by the tailgate. She has a heavy topographical map rolled out, weighing the corners down with a tape measure and a thermos.

I walk across the gravel, my boots crunching loud in the quiet air.

She looks up as I approach. She's wearing her green jacket. The skin around her brown eyes is pale. She watches me stop at the edge of the tailgate, but doesn't say anything.

I put my hands in the pockets of my heavy canvas pants and look at the map. The contour lines are dense and blue.

"The shorts work," I say. My voice sounds rough.

She marks something on the map with a ballpoint pen. "Told you."

"I don't have to walk like my knees are bolted together anymore."

She nods. She keeps looking at the paper. "Keep using the ointment at night. The skin takes a week to fully adapt to the friction of walking."

I look out past the truck, toward the dark line of the fir trees. The wind comes off the saddle of the mountain, cold and sharp.

"It's my chest," I say.

Dana stops writing. The blue pen hovers over the paper. She takes a slow breath, the air clouding white in front of her face.

"There's lumps. Behind the skin. Hard as a rock. They hurt constantly."

"Glandular tissue," she says. She finally looks at me. Her expression is flat. "It comes in hard at first."

She starts to say something else, stops, looks at the truck bed. The tape measure has rolled slightly.

"The body's building ducts," she says. "Network. From scratch. It inflames the muscle around it."

"They moved today," I say.

She leans back against the side of the truck bed. She crosses her arms.

The words rush out. "I stepped off a log. When my boots hit the ground, they pulled down. They bounced. Just a little. They came down separately. Like they weren't part of me."

Dana watches my face. She looks like someone confirming a mechanical failure on a piece of heavy machinery.

"The weight," she says quietly. "You don't expect it."

I shake my head. "No."

"Men carry weight in their gut, their shoulders. The center of gravity is static. It doesn't shift when you walk. Breasts aren't static. They carry momentum. They follow you a half-second late."

"I put a tight undershirt on this morning. Two sizes too small. It holds them flat against the bone."

"That'll work for a while," Dana says. "It stops the friction. But eventually it won't hold."

"What do I do then?"

She looks at my broad shoulders, at the thick collar of my shirt. "You start wearing looser overshirts. Dark colors. Plaid breaks up the visual line. And you stop jumping off logs."

She turns back to the map. She taps the pen against the metal edge of her thermos.

"They ache when it's cold, too," she says. "The nipples contract to preserve body heat. When the tissue is new, it feels like a dull knife pressing into your chest."

I stand there. The freezing wind hits my back. Beneath the layers of flannel and tight cotton, the swollen tissue aches exactly the way she just described.

"Yeah," I say.

"You get used to it."

She rolls the map up and secures it with a thick rubber band, then tosses it in the bed of the Tacoma. 

"Go eat, Joel," she says. She walks around to the driver's side door and opens it. The interior light clicks on.

She gets in and shuts the door. I stand alone on the dark landing, then walk toward the mess trailer.