The Woodsmen - chapter 7 (with images) (Patreon)

The rain starts on Tuesday night and doesn’t stop.

It comes over the saddle in heavy wind-blown sheets and the gravel landing fills with standing water. Milky brown. The state graded this landing without drainage and walked away. The water just sits. It pools in the deep ruts left by the skidder and floods the space under the trailers. The drops hitting the tin roof of the bunkhouse sound like handfuls of gravel being thrown against the metal.

Hank calls the shift at six in the morning on the fourteenth day. You can’t run a seventy-cc chainsaw safely when the bark is slick with water and the ground is liquid mud. We are confined to camp.

The mess trailer is a twenty-foot aluminum box. There are three grown men and me inside it.

The air is a physical weight. The propane heater pumps a chemical heat into the room and the moisture from our clothes fights it. The space smells of wet canvas, unwashed bodies, stale grease, and boiled coffee.

Sitting by the door, my boots flat on the cracked yellow linoleum, I don't cross my ankles. Shoulders rolled forward, elbows tucked tight against my ribs.

I wear a green flannel on top of a gray hoodie over a thick thermal. Underneath that, the breasts rest heavy and hot against my chest wall. The sheer volume of them is impossible to ignore in the static environment of the trailer. When I’m working the line, the movement of the saw distracts my brain from the weight. Sitting still, the weight is all there is.

The soft flesh pools slightly outward. The deep valley between them gathers sweat in the suffocating heat of the room. The skin is itchy. The nipples are swollen, rubbing constantly against the waffle-knit cotton of the thermal every time I take a breath.

Terrence sits on the seat across the folding table. He’s restless. He rubs his thick thumb over the plastic handle of his fork. He has been doing it for ten minutes. He looks at me. The disgust is a physical thing in the small room, vibrating. His eyes go to my smooth jaw, the bulky gray hoodie, my hands resting on the table.

I look at the coffee pot on the stove.

"Pot's empty," I say.

The sound stops the room.

It's not my voice. Something happened in my throat over the last couple of days. The deep gravel in my chest is gone. The words come out clear and high. A stranger speaking from inside my own throat.

Terrence drops his fork. It clatters loud against his plastic plate.

He stares at me. The skin around his mouth goes hard and white. He stares at the place on my neck where an Adam's apple used to be.

Walt is sitting next to him. Walt stops chewing his toast. He looks at the floor. He hasn't looked me in the eye since the shed three nights ago.

Hank is at the sink. He turns the water off. The silence is sudden and toxic. The only sound is the rain hammering the roof.

I try to swallow. The muscles pull at strange angles, not the way they used to.

Terrence is a few feet away. A large step across the linoleum. Size twelve Vibrams. He drags his right heel when he pivots. I watch his boots under the table, watch the way his weight shifts on the chair. Eighteen inches from my left hand to the door latch.

Walt is heavier, slower from a dead stop. We got into it outside a bar in Sandpoint four years ago over a damaged saw bar. He knows I hook left. I watch his shoulders, the clearance between his chair and the stove.

Dana comes into the trailer.

Freezing rain follows her in. She slams the door shut and shakes the water off her jacket.

She walks past Terrence, takes the empty glass pot from the stove and starts running water into it at the sink. She moves through the suffocating air of the trailer with a practiced, deliberate ease. She takes up space. She bumps Hank's hip with her own to get him to move down the counter.

"Road's washing out below the second switchback," she says. Her voice is loud. "State's going to have to bring a grader up here before we can get the lowboy out."

Hank grunts. "Mud holding on the landing?"

"Barely."

I watch her do it, the absolute certainty of her movement. She knows exactly where the men are looking and she doesn’t care. She sits down right next to Terrence. Their heavy canvas pants touch at the knee. She doesn't pull away.

The day drags. By three o'clock, the claustrophobia is a physical ache in my skull. Terrence starts pacing the narrow aisle between the table and the stove. Walt sharpens his chainsaw chain at the table, the metallic file scraping loudly against the steel cutters.

I pull the vine maple and my knife out of my coat pocket. The piece has been with me for a week and a half without much progress. I work a curl off the back of it. The shape is starting to come. The curve of a back, the set of a neck, the suggestion of legs. I take another curl off the shoulder.

Walt looks over at what's in my hands, then goes back to the file.

Every scrape sends a spike of irritation straight into my jaw.

My body hurts. The hips are settling into their new, wider alignment, and the joints ache with a dull, throbbing pressure. The damp air makes the bruised feeling in my breasts worse.

I stand up. My chair screeches on the linoleum. Terrence stops pacing.

I don't look at him, just pick up my hard hat, open the door, and walk out into the storm.

The cold rain hits my face. It feels good against the smooth skin. I walk across the landing. My boots sink four inches deep into the milky brown mud. The suction pulls at the heels. I walk toward the equipment shed. It’s the only place in camp where the men won't go on a rain day.

I grab the iron handle and pull the heavy wooden door open.

The rain hits the tin roof so hard you can barely hear yourself think. The shed smells of wet metal under the gasoline. The carburetor parts are laid out on a blue shop towel like organs.

Dana is inside.

She sits on the edge of the wooden workbench, cleaning a brass jet with a thin piece of wire. She doesn't look up when the door opens.

"Shut it," she says.

I pull the heavy door shut behind me, sealing in the tight, dry air.

I stand near the metal storage locker at the back. Water drips off the hem of my flannel onto the dirty concrete floor, making small dark circles in the dust.

Dana keeps working the wire through the small brass hole.

"My first season," she says.

Her voice is flat. It carries easily under the noise of the rain. She isn't looking at me. She's talking to the carburetor.

"Down in Klamath. State land block."

I listen, leaning my shoulder against the cold steel of the locker.

"I bought a used Tacoma," she says. "I bought canvas work pants that were too stiff. I cut my hair short, dropped my voice. I didn't smile for three months."

She sets the brass jet on the blue towel. She picks up a needle valve.

"I stood exactly where the crew boss told me to stand," she says. "Didn't complain about the cold. Didn't complain about the mud. Didn't make jokes, didn't ask questions. I just ran the saw and kept my head down until they stopped looking at me."

"It takes about six weeks. Six weeks for a crew of men to decide you aren't a threat and you aren't a target. Once you're in the middle, you disappear. That's where you want to be."

She puts the wire down and wipes her hands on a clean, oily rag. She finally looks at me.

She looks at my smooth jaw, then at the bulky layers of clothes hiding the breasts.

"You don't have to hide in here, Joel," she says.

"I'm not hiding."

"You sat by the door all morning. You watched Terrence's boots for three hours."

"He's unpredictable."

"He's an idiot," Dana says. "But he isn't going to hit you in the mess trailer in front of Hank. You're giving him too much power in your head."

Dana slides off the wooden workbench. Her boots hit the concrete. She walks over to me.

She stops just a foot away. The damp wool sweater. The sharp tang of instant coffee on her breath mixed with the heavy smell of the gasoline. I don't move back.

"You're tracking the door," she says quietly.

I look down at her. Her eyes shine in the harsh light of the bare bulb.

"I don't have a choice," I say.

She reaches out, pressing her hand flat against the center of my chest, through the flannel, through the hoodie. Her palm finds the dense heavy mass of the tissue underneath.

I stop breathing.

The response is instantaneous. The nipple hardens against the fabric. A violent electric shock runs straight down my spine and pools hot in my pelvis.

I reach up and put my hands on her waist, grabbing the heavy canvas of her work pants.

I push her backward. Her shoulders hit the metal storage locker. The thin steel bends inward with a loud pop that echoes under the sound of the rain.

She reaches up, grabs the collar of my flannel and pulls it open, dragging the hem of the gray hoodie up.

The cold air of the shed hits my bare chest. The breasts fall heavy and pale in the dim light. The dark skin around the nipples tightens.

I press my chest against hers. The soft flesh crushes between us. The wool of her sweater drags rough against the swollen nipples and I grit my teeth. The pain feeds straight into the ache in my lower stomach. 

She reaches down between my legs, finding the thick elastic waistband of the black compression shorts. She hooks her thumbs deep into the fabric and drags them down my thighs til I’m nude below the waist.

The freezing air wraps around the slick skin between my legs. I take off her sweater, strip her naked on the workbench. She touches the clit. My knees buckle before I know they will. The sound that comes out of my throat doesn't sound like me.

I press her against the locker. The thick muscles of my forearms hold her hips against the bent steel. I push two fingers inside her. She’s wet. The heat grips my rough skin.

We breathe in short, harsh gasps. The smell of spilled bar oil mixes with the smell of warm skin and sweat.

It hits deeper than the groin. A tearing ache that pulls through everything below my belt. Muscle contractions hauling against my pubic bone. I lean my weight on her shoulder. My chest is heaving. The breasts sway against her skin.

We stand there in the shadows for a long time. The rain hammers the tin roof. The bare bulb flickers once.

She opens her mouth like she's about to say something.

Then she doesn't.

She steps back and pulls her clothes on, then wipes her hands on the thighs of her canvas pants. She looks at the carburetor on the bench.

She walks to the heavy wooden door.

She opens it and walks back out into the rain without looking back.

I stay in the shed, leaning against the dented locker, and pull the black compression shorts back up. They settle hard against the pubic bone. I put the sweatshirt and pants on. I wait ten minutes before walking back across the muddy landing to the bunkhouse.

The rain breaks sometime during the night.

The fifteenth day is a slog. The ground is a slick mess of wet moss and deep mud. We hike the spur road in silence. Terrence walks ahead. Walt walks behind.

I run the Husqvarna. The physical work is harder now. The loose hip joints change my balance on the steep inclines. The breasts pull at my chest with every swing of the saw. The heavy, wet brush soaks my canvas pants to the knees.

Dana usually checks my cut before lunch. Today she stays on the opposite side of the slope, remarking the boundary because the elk ate the pink ribbon again.

She walks past my unit twice.

The first time, she stops ten feet short of me and reties a strip of pink ribbon that's already tight.

The second time, she cuts uphill around a blown cedar instead of taking the direct line past my saw.

She doesn't stop. She doesn't speak. She never looks directly at me.

We just work the line.

I wake up on the morning of the sixteenth day. The bunkhouse is freezing cold. The electric heater ticks.

I lie on my back on the narrow foam mattress. Heavy wetness between my legs. Different from the slick I've gotten used to. This is thicker, heavier.

I sit up on the edge of the mattress and push the heavy wool blanket down. Hooking my thumbs in the waistband of the black synthetic shorts, I pull them down to my knees.

I touch the outer lips. My fingers come away covered in a thick, clear fluid.

I hold my hand up in the yellow light. The fluid stretches between my thumb and finger. It pulls out two inches and doesn't break.

My stomach drops. Something inside me has changed again. Some duct or gland started leaking in the night. The friction of the canvas pants finally tore something internal.

It doesn't smell like an infection. It doesn't smell like anything. But there's so much of it. It coats the inner folds. It runs down the flat skin between. It keeps coming out of me.

I grab a heavy wool sock from the floor and wipe the slick fluid away aggressively. The skin underneath is fine. It just keeps producing the thick mucus.

I pull my clothes on fast, skipping the mess trailer, and hike the spur road alone before the crew leaves.

The mud is frozen in deep, jagged ruts. I carry my Husqvarna on my right shoulder. The dense engine presses into my collarbone.

I find Dana at the bottom of the first flagged unit. She has the heavy topo map rolled out on the stump of a massive cedar. She's drawing a hard blue line with a ballpoint pen.

I walk up to her carefully. She keeps her eyes on the topo map until I'm standing beside the stump. I keep my distance from the rest of the crew. Walt is running his saw fifty yards up the hill.

I stop next to the stump and keep my voice low. The female alto pitch still sounds wrong to my own ears in the open air.

"Something’s wrong," I say.

She looks up from the map. She tracks my face. She sees the tension in my jaw.

"There's fluid," I say quietly, not looking at the map. I look at her chest. "A lot of it. Clear. Thick. It stretches like an egg."

I watch her face, waiting for the practical answer. The medical explanation. The grounded certainty she gave me in the equipment shed when the chafing started on day two. I wait for her to tell me how to clean it, what it means.

She stares at me too long before she schools her expression flat.

She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it and looks down at the topo map. She traces a contour line with her thumb, then looks back up at me.

"I don't know," she says.

I frown. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I don't know, Joel." Her voice is tight. "I'll talk to you after the shift."

She rolls the map up fast, the paper crinkling loud, and walks away toward the trucks. Her boots slip on the wet moss.

I stand by the cedar stump and listen to the idle of Walt's saw. The heavy, slick wetness between my legs is a constant physical reminder. I turn around and walk back to my cut line.

Evening. The mess trailer is empty. Hank and Terrence are at the equipment shed fixing a busted skidder chain. Walt is in the bunkhouse.

Dana's at the table, jacket unzipped, both hands locked around a mug of instant coffee, staring at the window.

I walk in and sit in the aluminum chair across from her, keeping my hands on my thighs.

The propane heater ticks. The windows are dark.

"I've never had one."

She looks at the plastic grain of the table. She rubs her thumb over a deep scratch in the surface. She won't look me in the eye.

"I've never had a period," she says. "I don't know what it feels like. I know what I read in books."

She looks up at me. Her eyes are hard.

"I took pills every morning that made me sick to my stomach just to get a B-cup."

She takes a slow, shaky breath. She points a finger at my heavy gray sweatshirt.

"You came up here to cut timber," she says. "And you got it in a couple of weeks. Bone structure. Internal organs. Whatever else. It just happened to you."

She doesn't cry.

I think about the shed during the rain. The weight of her against the bending locker. The wet heat. The friction. Her body against mine.

And for one ugly second I hear Terrence’s voice in my head. The kind of shit the crew says when they're half-drunk and trying to outdo each other.

I feel the thought hit me anyway: What does that make me now?

It lands cold in my stomach.

Then I look at her hands wrapped around the coffee mug hard enough to shake it. At the anger she's trying to hold still. At the fact she's been more honest with me than anyone here.

The thought curdles into embarrassment almost immediately. Not at her. At myself.

I don’t offer pity. Pity is an insult on a crew.

"Doesn’t change what I had my hands on," I say.

Dana looks at me. The tension in her shoulders drops a fraction of an inch. She lets out a long breath that clouds in the cold air.

She takes a sip of her coffee, nodding silently.

Later, I’m alone in the bunkhouse. I lock my door and turn on the overhead light.

I strip off the heavy canvas pants. The denim is stiff with dried mud. I take off the black compression shorts and pull the sweatshirt over my head, dropping it on the linoleum floor. I pull the thermal shirt off.

I lie back on the narrow foam mattress in the yellow light.

The air in the room is freezing. The heavy breasts settle against my ribs. They pool slightly to the sides, resting in the shallow hollows of my armpits. The soft, dense flesh is still foreign, but the panic that accompanied it for two weeks is gone. They're a permanent, undeniable mass. I don’t want to cut them off anymore. I just want to understand how they sit.

I reach my right hand down. My fingers find the slick, wet tissue between my legs. The thick egg-white mucus is still there, coating the inner folds.

I trace the outer lips. The smooth skin. I touch the clit, heat rushing to my pelvis.

The wrongness and anger are gone.

I slide two fingers inside. The tight muscle grips the rough skin of my calluses. The deep, throbbing ache radiates through my lower stomach. I move my fingers slowly, feeling the rough skin of my own hand and the pleasure deep inside me.

The body knows the rhythm. It doesn't argue. It doesn't ask.

I work my fingers slowly inside myself. The heat builds. The breasts settle against my ribs with each rise of my chest. The wool blanket bunches at my hips and I don't pull it up.

I move my other hand to my cunt. The skin is slick. I trace the edges I mapped twice before in panic and once with my hand pulled back. This time I don’t pull back.

I learn the small folds, the place where the response lives, the hardness of it under the slick skin, the way the touch has to be just to the side and not directly on top or it's too much. I find the angle that makes the breath catch in my throat.

The first wave comes through the pelvis. The whole area draws in on itself and lets go. The breath I’ve been holding leaves me in a single sound I don’t recognize as my own.

My fingers keep working without my asking them to.

The second wave is harder. It pulls up from the pelvis into my abdomen. My thighs lock. The heels press into the mattress. My head goes back into the pillow. The sound that comes out of me is small and torn.

Then the body lets go.

I lie there with my hand still where it is. My thighs are wet. The blanket is twisted under me. My breath slows.

I haven’t come like this. Not once. Not in thirty-eight years.