14. Davis

Davis had no idea why he had sent that email, but, once again, what was sent through the internet was done and out in the world.

Jeremy—

You’ve been out to the forest the last two meetings. I’m happy to head down to Vanberg for our next meeting. I need to pick up some things down the mountain anyway.

Davis

Again, he felt himself over-explaining his reasons for wanting to be down in the city, as if he needed something custom ordered. When Davis went shopping in the city, he usually ended up buying a piece of gear he didn’t actually need at an outdoor store or another blanket for his couch. This time, he had marked a few pet stores that specialized in outdoor gear for dogs. He thought Mary Anne needed a backpack for their adventures. He wasn’t exactly sure what a dog would carry in a backpack, but the photos on the website were too adorable for reason.

The reality, other than making his dog look like an L.L. Bean model, was that Davis was interested in seeing Jeremy in his element, which was very clearly not the national forest. While he had been polite about it, it was obvious in the way that Jeremy twitched at every small insect landing on him and aggressively ducked at every branch that poked out across the short loop around the visitor center they had walked on last week.

So he wanted Jeremy to feel more at ease. Which was a very normal, perfectly standard thing to do with a new work friend. Work person. Colleague? Just two bros hanging out, talking about exhibit design.

When Jeremy had finally responded to Davis’s email after a day— a time frame that seemed absurdly long, like the first weeks of quarantine— he had emailed an address for Davis to drive to. Davis, who wasn’t super familiar with Vanberg other than grocery stores, a mechanic, and the outdoor store, figured they’d meet at a coffee shop. Probably some place that handwrote their signs in ornate cursive, which made it harder for Davis to read, so he would just order whatever Jeremy did and hope it would taste okay. However, he pulled up in front of a gorgeous house painted in a dark red with deep green and white accents and ornate stonework on the porch. He first assumed he had typed the address wrong. It wouldn’t have been the first time when transferring numbers from one message to another. But even as he double-checked, this was correct. And it was confirmed when Jeremy opened the front door, a mug in his hand, waving.

He was wearing a short-sleeved knit button-up shirt paired with loose linen pants. Davis imagined that he would be more at home sipping from his mug on a balcony in Paris or a patio in Mykonos than in Colorado, where there were still gray piles of slush in every parking lot. Davis glanced down at himself and groaned. He had worn his standard Carhartt pants, broken into the perfect level of comfort, paired with a West Virginia State Parks T-shirt that most likely had a hole in it somewhere. Probably in the armpit. Why didn’t work shirts have reinforced armpits? Seemed like something the government should address, right after the seven thousand other issues that were probably more pressing.

With another groan, Davis grabbed for his backpack, which contained his behemoth of a computer, and got out of his truck. “Mornin’,” he said, waving at Jeremy.

“Welcome to Casa di Rinci,” Jeremy said, waving the mug at the ornate lamps that framed each side of the large door. Oak, Davis guessed, based on the pattern of the wood grain. He focused on the wood instead of the way Jeremy rolled his last name around in his mouth.

“Italian?” Davis guessed. He knew basic Spanish and a touch of American Sign Language, but he struggled enough with English as it was.

“Si,” Jeremy replied, grinning. “My dad’s family was from Milan.”

“Ah,” Davis replied. Most of the Italians he knew back in Western Virginia had been descended from immigrants that came from southern Italy or Sicily, darker complexions and thick dark hair. “I wish my background was a little more interesting, but it’s just ‘hillbilly.’”

“There’s a lot of beautiful outsider art from Appalachia”— Davis was impressed by Jeremy’s correct pronunciation— “and a strong legacy of pottery in West Virginia especially.”

Now this, Davis knew. “Fiesta Ware,” he said, following Jeremy through the front door. The natural light in the living room was warm, though the couches and chairs looked less like they should be sat on and more like they belonged in a museum. “The older stuff is radioactive.” Could he sound any more like a dumb hick?

“Can I get you anything?” Jeremy said. “I don’t drink coffee, but I have some for, um, guests.” A faint blush appeared on his fair skin. “I’ve got mountains of tea, and water, and wine, if you’re into that this early.”

“Tea sounds lovely,” Davis said, following Jeremy to the kitchen. He pulled open two drawers, and Davis was astounded. This was a mother lode of tea, with every flavor he could dream of. His eye caught on a familiar flavor, and Davis felt a tingle in his chest. “You have sassafras tea? Here?”

Jeremy’s eyes twinkled. “Don’t narc on me to the government.”

“Why? Because you have tea that’s illegal in some countries because of some chemical compound? Tea that was cultivated by Indigenous communities until White growers took over most of its native range?” Davis could taste the distinctive flavor from the sassafras tea his aunt made when he had a cold or too many mosquito bites.

“I buy from ethical suppliers,” Jeremy added quickly. “The tea shop in town gets these for me, and my friends have researched their sourcing practices.”

Davis smiled. “I’m kidding, Jeremy,” Davis replied, still feeling uncomfortable using his first name. He talked to people with names all the time. Why did this feel odd? “I’m descended from folks who made and still make moonshine. This is nothing.”

“And now you.” Jeremy waved at Davis’s bag after turning on his kettle. He looked down and saw his USDA backpack. Ah yes, now he worked for the federal government.

“Yeah, yeah, but the Department of Agriculture isn’t exactly the ATF.” Not that certain family members of his hadn’t been furious when he joined the state government and began to remind them of hunting regulations, especially during archery season.

“How do forest rangers feel about hunting?” Jeremy wondered as if he could read Davis’s mind. Davis opened his mouth to begin to explain the long and tangled history of how sport hunters were intertwined with early preservation and conservation movements and his complicated feelings on Teddy Roosevelt, but he was interrupted by Jeremy again. “Never mind. You can tell me over a drink after we finish working. You’ve been sending me a lot of amazing information. What’s your latest idea about the exhibit?”

Davis rolled his shoulders back and opened his computer. As the kettle whistled, Davis entered his password, then entered it again when he clumsily mistyped it. It was annoying how the government made him change his password so often. He ended up writing it down on a Post-it, defeating all the extra firewalls and magic that the IT department put on his brick of a computer so that no one stole whatever information was contained there.

“Uh, wi-fi password?” Davis asked as Jeremy walked back over, holding two mugs of steaming tea. Jeremy set the red mug near Davis, and Davis tried to ignore the fact that it was his favorite color. The exact red of a maple leaf during autumn in the Appalachian mountains.

“Courier New, twelve point,” Jeremy replied, typing away at his own sleek laptop. It was fancy and high tech and out of Davis’s price range and tech ability, he was sure.

“Could you write it down?” Davis asked, a bit embarrassed. He knew that he would need to refer to it again, plus there was always the annoyance of capitalization and numbers in these things.

“Sure,” Jeremy said. He grabbed a mechanical pencil from a cup on the table and scratched away on a notepad. Davis studied the wood, running the tip of one finger over the grain. Pine, he guessed. He thought about how bourbon barrels needed only virgin white oak and what a waste it was. He thought about how his attraction to a man like Jeremy would have made him reach for a glass or three of bourbon a decade ago. He thought about how he wanted to share both of these facts with Jeremy.

People usually reacted in one of two ways when Davis told them about his sobriety. One was overcorrection. They asked if he could be around alcohol, acted like they had to pretend that the entire liquid category of booze didn’t exist for them. That wasn’t great, but what was worse was pity. The way they looked at Davis like he was broken, or like he had crawled out of some gutter. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that there was no grandiose story, no dramatic stint in rehab. Just a cold West Virginia night and an uncomfortable realization about himself, then a regular series of meetings with a counselor, a southern woman who called him sweetie and shared her own sobriety story as he unraveled his reasons for drinking. He needed to call Mabel, who took checks in the mail as payment and still acted as his counselor when he needed a session.

As for coming out? The one time he had done that hadn’t gone well, and he kept his business to himself. After that, the men he had been with had been able to pick it up from context clues. Namely, Davis’s tongue down their throat.

“Here,” Jeremy said, passing Davis the note. Couriernew12point, it read. Davis typed it into his computer, activated the firewall or VPN or whatever Eric had explained to him during his tech orientation, and then he was on.

“Sorry that took forever,” Davis said.

“Drink your tea.” Jeremy smiled back. Davis took a sip, the familiar burn of the sassafras singeing his throat. He remembered his aunt and mom making this type of tea every winter to prevent colds. That and Vicks VapoRub were the majority of his medical care growing up.

“Tastes nice,” Davis said instead of unspooling his history with Appalachian folk medicine. His document finally up, he pointed to the screen. Things were easier when he spoke about ecology. “So the phrase that I think should guide the exhibit design is think like a mountain, from my hero, Aldo Leopold. We can’t talk about the trees of the forest without thinking about the water that allows them to grow, and we can’t think about the water without thinking about the animals that drink from streams and rivers, and their food chains. We humans like to separate. A mountain doesn’t, but embraces the whole complex web.” Davis took a sip of tea, looked up to see if Jeremy was still listening. His right hand was moving, alternating between sketching and drawing on a pad of paper. It seemed like he was engaged, so Davis continued. He spoke about the ways that Leopold had listened and changed his field but also didn’t shy away from some of the criticism he had learned. How the idea of wilderness being a place without cars was what one podcast had called “pathetic nostalgia” which “ignored how White settlers had already reshaped Native life.” How horses were seen as a fine introduced species but dogs weren’t. Davis almost mentioned Mary Anne, how when he got to see her run on trails, he felt more in touch with some primal part of himself, feeling more human than he ever did in the city.

“Seriously, we could feature you in a video,” Jeremy said, and Davis felt embarrassed and a bit frustrated.

“No, I said before. I don’t think we need a White man telling visitors what to think,” Davis said curtly.

And immediately, Davis was worried again that he had overstepped. God damn, he had hired Jeremy to be the expert in exhibit design, and here Davis was, interrupting him and telling him he was wrong again. But, dammit, Davis knew he was right. He didn’t know much, wasn’t worldly in any way that would matter to people like Jeremy and his friends down in the city, but this he knew. “I mean, another White guy telling people what they should learn?” Davis let out a laugh that he hoped didn’t let Jeremy know how nervous he was. “I had enough of that growing up, and I’m pretty sure everyone else did, too.”

“One of my best friends, any time she encounters something that doesn’t work, likes to blame whatever straight, White man invented it, which, statistically, is probably correct,” Jeremy said, and Davis didn’t bother to correct him. This wasn’t the time. Probably, there would never be a time where he would ever need to tell Jeremy about himself, which was perfectly fine. “I think I’ve been going about this all wrong,” Jeremy continued, and Davis had a moment of fear that he was going to quit the project. Say that Davis was too difficult of a client to work with, or too stupid or something. Something that voice in the back of Davis’s mind liked to whisper when he couldn’t sleep, the one that often had him sending a text to Mabel, asking for a small reminder.

Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody but unbowed, Davis reminded himself. Even if Jeremy quit, Davis could bounce back and find a new consultant.

“How so?” Davis asked.

“I don’t know if this has been truly collaborative,” Jeremy explained, closing his sketchbook and setting it to the side. Davis braced himself to hear the words this isn’t working out, but instead, Jeremy asked, “Let me grab some Post-its.”

“Huh?” Davis asked. Jeremy returned with a giant pile of brightly colored Post-its. Super sticky ones, he imagined, not the shitty pale-yellow ones the government could afford that barely stayed on a flat table, let alone on his computer monitor.

“This is how one of my best friends likes to plan exhibits,” Jeremy explained, tossing him the bright blue stack. He took the green for himself, leaving the pink and purple on the table. “We’ll chat about ideas, put them down on the table, and start to group them together as themes and patterns reveal themselves.”

ThisDavis could understand. “This is awesome. I would do this when planning papers in college.” He had a class in high school called “Research Paper,” where students had an entire semester to write one paper, and the first half had been dedicated to just an outline. Davis remembered being in his bedroom, hot and angry tears falling down his face because his brain did not understand why he had to use this format. Roman numerals here, then capital letters— that’s not how Davis understood information. It was bad enough that everything in that class was based on written sources. That had been before he knew about speech to text, back when books on tape meant packages of cassettes for grandfathers who read thrillers or books about old boats.

Surprisingly, community college had been what opened Davis’s mind up. He was in a remedial English course, something that had embarrassed him at first, until his professor— a noted poet in the area— had told the class on the first day that he had spent his entire elementary, middle, and high school experience in special education. “I’m not stupid,” the professor had said. “I just didn’t learn how they taught.” That professor had proceeded to toss out dozens of strategies for reading and writing to the class, telling them to take what fit and leave the rest, which was kind of how Davis had grown up attending church. Once he figured out that there was no requirement to use any one format, that it was just one approach, that the arbitrary rules he was taught in high school were just that— made up and made to be broken— he had succeeded more than he had ever dreamed.

“I like this,” Davis said, scratching the Aldo Leopold quote on a Post-it and setting it down in the center of the coffee table that Jeremy had cleared off.

“Okay, well, here is everything I’ve written down from your last two lectures,” Jeremy said, flipping open his notebook. The way Jeremy said lectures made it sound more like a compliment, rather than a sneered joke at how Davis could talk too much when he was nervous. He decided to accept it as such, because Jeremy had listened and written down more things than Davis remembered saying. “If we transfer all these to Post-it notes, you can sort them in the ways that make sense to you.”

Davis nodded and picked up a pencil and wrote the question Who does the forest belong to? on a bright green pad. “Sounds excellent. If you can read my writing, that is.”

“Davis, I can read your writing.” And a part of Davis wished he had said Davis, I can read you.