by Joe Hill
She lunged to her side, going for the kitchen door. But Anshaw was already moving, launching himself at her, driving his boot into her right knee. The leg twisted in a way it wasn’t meant to go, and she felt her ACL pop behind her knee. Anshaw was right behind her by then, and he got a handful of her hair. As she went down, he drove her forward and smashed her head into the side of the dresser.
A black spoke of pain lanced down into her skull, a nail gun fired straight into the brain. She was down and flailing, and he kicked her in the head. That kick didn’t hurt so much, but it took the life out of her, as if she were no more than an appliance and he had jerked the power cord out of the wall.
When he rolled her onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back, she had no strength in her to resist. He had the heavy-duty plastic ties, the flex cuffs they used on the prisoners in Iraq sometimes. He sat on her ass and squeezed her ankles together and put the flex cuffs on them, too, tightening until it hurt, and then some. Black flashes were still firing behind her eyes, but the fireworks were smaller and exploding less frequently now. She was coming back to herself, slowly. Breathe. Wait.
When her vision cleared, she found Anshaw sitting above her, on the edge of her father’s bed. He had lost weight, and he hadn’t any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottoms of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s case, the leather pebbled and handsome.
“I observed you while you were running this morning,” he began, without preamble. Using the word “observed,” like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. “Who were you signaling when you were up on the hill?”
“Anshaw,” Mal said. “What are you talking about, Anshaw? What is this?”
“You’re staying in shape. You’re still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signaled someone. Tell me who.”
At first she didn’t know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Anshaw unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a Taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vise. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.
Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shriveled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clue about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.
Anshaw selected the heavy-duty shears.
“You went up the hill and signaled someone this morning. And tonight you came back with a lot of money. I looked in the envelope while you were in the shower. So you signaled for a meeting, and at the meeting you were paid for intel. Who did you meet? CIA?”
“I went to work. At the bar. You know where I work. You followed me there.”
“Five hundred dollars. Is that supposed to be tips?”
She didn’t have a reply. She couldn’t think. She was looking at the thumbs mixed in with his mess of tools.
He followed her gaze, prodded a blackened and shriveled thumb with the blade of the shears. The only identifiable feature remaining on the thumb was a twisted, silvery fishhook scar.
“Plough,” Anshaw said. “He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They’d fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with my field glasses, and one day I saw Plough at the controls of a radio-station traffic copter. I didn’t even know he knew how to pilot a bird until then. He was wearing a black helmet and sunglasses, but I still recognized him.”
As Anshaw spoke, Mal remembered Corporal Plough trying to open a bottle of Red Stripe with the blade of his bayonet and the knife slipping, catching him across the thumb, Plough sucking on it and saying around his thumb, Motherfuck, someone open this for me.
“No, Anshaw. It wasn’t him. It was just someone who looked like him. If he could fly a helicopter, they would’ve had him piloting Apaches over there.”
“Plough admitted it. Not at first. At first he lied. But eventually he told me everything, that he was in the helicopter, that they’d been keeping me under surveillance ever since I came home.” Anshaw moved the tip of the shears to point at another thumb, shriveled and brown, with the texture and appearance of a dried mushroom. “This was his wife. She admitted it, too. They were putting dope in my water to make me sluggish and stupid. Sometimes I’d be driving home and I’d forget what my own house looked like. I’d spend twenty minutes cruising around my development before I realized I’d gone by my place twice.”
He paused, moved the tip of the shears to a fresher thumb, a woman’s, the nail painted red. “She followed me into a supermarket in Poughkeepsie. This was while I was on my way north, to see you. To see if you had been compromised. This woman in the supermarket, she followed me aisle to aisle, always whispering on her cell phone. Pretending not to look at me. Then, later, I went into a Chinese place and noticed her parked across the street, still on the phone. She was the toughest to get solid information out of. I almost thought I was wrong about her. She told me she was a first-grade teacher. She told me she didn’t even know my name and that she wasn’t following me. I almost believed her. She had a photo in her purse, of her sitting on the grass with a bunch of little kids. But it was tricked up. They used Photoshop to stick her in that picture. I even got her to admit it in the end.”
“Plough told you he could fly helicopters so you wouldn’t keep hurting him. The first-grade teacher told you the photo was faked to make you stop. People will tell you anything if you hurt them badly enough. You’re having some kind of break with reality, Anshaw. You don’t know what’s true anymore.”
“You would say that. You’re part of it. Part of the plan to make me crazy, make me kill myself. I thought the thumbprints would startle you into getting in contact with your handler, and they did. You went straight to the hills to send him a signal. To let him know I was close. But where’s your backup now?”
“I don’t have backup. I don’t have a handler.”
“We were friends, Mal. You got me through the worst parts of being over there, when I thought I was going crazy. I hate that I have to do this to you. But I need to know who you were signaling. And you’re going to tell. Who did you signal, Mal?”
“No one,” she said, trying to squirm away from him on her belly.
He grabbed her hair and wrapped it around his fist, to keep her from going anywhere. She felt a tearing along her scalp. He pinned her with a knee in her back. She went still, head turned, right cheek mashed against the nubbly rug on the floor.
“I didn’t know you were married. I didn’t notice the ring until just tonight. Is he coming home? Is he part of it? Tell me.” Tapping the ring on her finger with the blade of the shears.
Mal’s face was turned so she was staring under the bed at the case with her M4 and bayonet in it. She had left the clasps undone.
Anshaw clubbed her in the back of the head, at the base of the skull, with the handles of the shears. The world snapped out of focus, went to a soft blur, and then slowly her vision cleared and details regained their sharpness, until at last she was seeing the case under the bed again, not a foot away from her, the silver clasps hanging loose.
“Tell me, Mal. Tell me the truth now.”
In Iraq the Fedayeen had escaped the handcuffs after his thumbs were broken. Cuffs wouldn’t hold a person whose thumb could move in any direction . . . or someone who didn’t have a thumb at all.
Mal felt herself growing ca
lm. Her panic was like static on a radio, and she had just found the volume, was slowly dialing it down. He would not begin with the shears, of course, but would work his way up to them. He meant to beat her first. At least. She drew a long, surprisingly steady breath. Mal felt almost as if she were back on Hatchet Hill, climbing with all the will and strength she had in her, for the cold, open blue of the sky.
“I’m not married,” she said. “I stole this wedding ring off a drunk. I was just wearing it because I like it.”
He laughed: a bitter, ugly sound. “That isn’t even a good lie.”
And another breath, filling her chest with air, expanding her lungs to their limit. He was about to start hurting her. He would force her to talk, to give him information, to tell him what he wanted to hear. She was ready. She was not afraid of being pushed to the edge of what could be endured. She had a high tolerance for pain, and her bayonet was in arm’s reach, if only she had an arm to reach.
“It’s the truth,” she said, and with that, PFC Mallory Grennan began her confession.
The Devil on the Staircase
I WAS BORN IN SULLE SCALE the child of a common bricklayer. The village of my birth nested in the highest sharpest ridges, high above Positano, and in the cold spring the clouds crawled along the streets like a procession of ghosts. It was eight hundred and twenty steps from Sulle Scale to the world below. I know. I walked them again and again with my father, following his tread, from our home in the sky, and then back again.
After his death I walked them often enough alone. Up and down carrying freight until with each step it seemed as if the bones in my knees were being ground up into sharp white splinters.
The cliffs were mazed with crooked staircases, made from brick in some places, granite in others. Marble here, limestone there, clay tiles, or beams of lumber. When there were stairs to build my father built them. When the steps were washed out by spring rains it fell to him to repair them. For years he had a donkey to carry his stone. After it fell dead, he had me.
I hated him of course. He had his cats and he sang to them and poured them saucers of milk and told them foolish stories and stroked them in his lap and when one time I kicked one—I do not remember why—he kicked me to the floor and said not to touch his babies.
So I carried his rocks when I should have been carrying schoolbooks, but I cannot pretend I hated him for that. I had no use for school, hated to study, hated to read, felt acutely the stifling heat of the single room schoolhouse, the only good thing in it my cousin, Lithodora, who read to the little children, sitting on a stool with her back erect, chin lifted high, and her white throat showing.
I often imagined her throat was as cool as the marble altar in our church and I wanted to rest my brow upon it as I had the altar. How she read in her low steady voice, the very voice you dream of calling to you when you’re sick, saying you will be healthy again and know only the sweet fever of her body. I could’ve loved books if I had her to read them to me, beside me in my bed.
I knew every step of the stairs between Sulle Scale and Positano, long flights that dropped through canyons and descended into tunnels bored in the limestone, past orchards and the ruins of derelict paper mills, past waterfalls and green pools. I walked those stairs when I slept, in my dreams.
The trail my father and I walked most often led past a painted red gate, barring the way to a crooked staircase. I thought those steps led to a private villa and paid the gate no mind until the day I paused on the way down with a load of marble and leaned on it to rest and it swung open to my touch. My father, he lagged thirty or so stairs behind me. I stepped through the gate onto the landing to see where these stairs led. I saw no villa or vineyard below, only the staircase falling away from me down among the sheerest of sheer cliffs.
“Father,” I called out as he came near, the slap of his feet echoing off the rocks and his breath whistling out of him. “Have you ever taken these stairs?”
When he saw me standing inside the gate he paled and had my shoulder in an instant. He hauled me back onto the main staircase and cried out, “How did you open the red gate?”
“It was open when I got here,” I said. “Don’t they lead all the way down to the sea?”
“No.”
“But it looks as if they go all the way to the bottom.”
“They go farther than that,” my father said and he crossed himself. Then he said again, “The gate is always locked.” And he stared at me, the whites of his eyes showing. I had never seen him look at me so, had never thought I would see him afraid of me.
Lithodora laughed when I told her and said my father was old and superstitious. She told me that there was a tale that the stairs beyond the painted gate led down to hell. I had walked the mountain a thousand times more than Lithodora and wondered how she could know such a story when I myself had never heard mention of it. She said the old folks never spoke of it, but had put the tale down in a history of the region, which I would know if I had ever read any of the teacher’s assignments. I told her I could never concentrate on books when she was in the same room with me. She laughed. But when I tried to touch her throat she flinched. My fingers brushed her breast instead and she was angry and she told me that I needed to wash my hands.
After my father died—he was walking down the stairs with a load of tiles when a stray cat shot out in front of him and rather than step on it, he stepped into space and fell fifty feet to be impaled upon a tree—I found a more lucrative use for my donkey legs and yardarm shoulders. I entered the employ of Don Carlotta, who kept a terraced vineyard in the steeps of Sulle Scale. I hauled his wine down the eight hundred odd steps to Positano, where it was sold to a rich Saracen, a prince it was told, dark and slender and more fluent in my language than myself, a clever young man who knew how to read things: musical notes, the stars, a map, a sextant.
Once I stumbled on a flight of brick steps as I was making my way down with the Don’s wine and a strap slipped and the crate on my back struck the cliff wall and a bottle was smashed. I brought it to the Saracen on the quay. He said either I drank it or I should have, for that bottle was worth all I made in a month. He told me I could consider myself paid and paid well. He laughed and his white teeth flashed in his black face.
I was sober when he laughed at me but soon enough had a head full of wine. Not Don Carlotta’s smooth and peppery red mountain wine but the cheapest Chianti in the Taverna, which I drank with a passel of unemployed friends.
Lithodora found me after it was dark and she stood over me, her dark hair framing her cool, white, beautiful, disgusted, loving face. She said she had the silver I was owed. She had told her friend Ahmed that he had insulted an honest man, that my family traded in hard labor, not lies, and he was lucky I had not —
“Did you call him friend?” I said. “A monkey of the desert who knows nothing of Christ the lord?”
The way that she looked at me then made me ashamed. The way she put the money in front of me made me more ashamed. “I see you have more use for this than you have for me,” she said before she went.
I almost got up to go after her. Almost. One of my friends asked, “Have you heard the Saracen gave your cousin a slave bracelet, a loop of silver bells, to wear around her ankle? I suppose in the Arab lands, such gifts are made to every new whore in the harem.”
I came to my feet so quickly my chair fell over. I grabbed his throat in both hands and said, “You lie. Her father would never allow her to accept such a gift from a godless blackamoor.”
But another friend said the Arab trader was godless no more. Lithodora had taught Ahmed to read Latin, using the Bible as his grammar, and he claimed now to have entered into the light of Christ, and he gave the bracelet to her with the full knowledge of her parents, as a way to show thanks for introducing him to the grace of our Father who art.
When my first friend had recovered his breath, he told me Lithodora climbed the stairs every night to meet with him secretly in empty shepherds’ huts or in the
caves, or among the ruins of the paper mills, by the roar of the waterfall, as it leapt like liquid silver in the moonlight, and in such places she was his pupil and he a firm and most demanding tutor. He always went ahead and then she would ascend the stairs in the dark wearing the bracelet. When he heard the bells he would light a candle to show her where he waited to begin the lesson.
I was so drunk.
I set out for Lithodora’s house, with no idea what I meant to do when I got there. I came up behind the cottage where she lived with her parents thinking I would throw a few stones to wake her and bring her to her window. But as I stole toward the back of the house I heard a silvery tinkling somewhere above me. She was already on the stairs and climbing into the stars with her white dress swinging from her hips and the bracelet around her ankle so bright in the gloom.
My heart thudded, a cask flung down a staircase: doom doom doom doom. I knew the hills better than anyone and I ran another way, making a steep climb up crude steps of mud to get ahead of her, then rejoining the main path to Sulle Scale. I still had the silver coin the Saracen prince had given her, when she went to him and dishonored me by begging him to pay me the wage I was properly owed.
I put his silver in a tin cup I had and slowed to a walk and went along shaking his Judas coin in my old battered mug. Such a pretty ringing it made in the echoing canyons, on the stairs, in the night, high above Positano and the crash and sigh of the sea, as the tide consummated the desire of water to pound the earth into submission.
At last, pausing to catch my breath, I saw a candle flame leap up off in the darkness. It was in a handsome ruin, a place of high granite walls matted with wildflowers and ivy. A vast entryway looked into a room with a grass floor and a roof of stars, as if the place had been built, not to give shelter from the natural world, but to protect a virgin corner of wildness from the violation of man. Then again it seemed a pagan place, the natural setting for an orgy hosted by fauns with their goaty hooves, their flutes and their furred cocks. So the archway into that private courtyard of weeds and summer green seemed the entrance to a hall awaiting revelers for a private bacchanal.