As they laid Sam’s body onto the ground amidst the thick undergrowth, Diego saw something that gave him a start. One leg of Sam’s walking shorts had crawled up his thigh. So had the leg of his boxer shorts beneath. A thin slice of adhesive peeked out from beneath the gathered material.
“What’s that, Yong?” Diego asked, his eyes fixed on the slender strip of adhesive.
Yong shook his head.
Diego lifted the ruffled fabric. Beneath it was Adriana’s pain patch. Diego raised the material and inspected Sam’s other thigh. It too bore a Z patch.
Yong looked at the patches and then at Diego. “Are those…?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know, I swear,” Yong said.
“Christ,” Cutbirth muttered, eying the two pain patches.
Sight of the patches caused Sissy to moan, and she began chewing on a fingertip.
“I asked him if he’d taken them,” Diego said. “He told me he didn’t. I believed him.” Diego felt like a fool.
“I didn’t have a clue,” Yong said in a bruised and defeated voice. “I am so sorry.”
“Not nearly as sorry as my wife.”
“I’m speechless,” Yong said, a thick pall of surprise and sadness in his voice. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said. How could you not know?”
A flash of anger lit Yong’s eyes.“You think I should know because queers fondle one another 24/7?”
“Exactly.”
“I misjudged you, Diego,” Yong said. “I thought you were different, but you’re not. You’re just like every other garden variety gay basher. Your kind is all the same. You think it’s all about sex with gays. You don’t understand that it’s about so much more. It’s about love and respect and trust and building a life together. Your kind thinks it’s all about sex.” In a high-pitched voice and a limp-wrist wave, he said, “Oh, those gays surely do enjoy their sex. I mean, it’s nothing but sex. Morning, noon, and night. Sex, sex, sex.” Yong uttered a sarcastic laugh. “It might surprise you to know, Diego, that Sam and I haven’t been intimate in more than three months.” Yong paused, and then looked at Diego with intensity. “You’re a bigot, Diego Sanchez, and you don’t even know it.”
Yong pushed past Diego and climbed out of the ravine.
“You had to know!” Diego repeated.
Yong disappeared over the lip of the sumac-invested ravine.
Diego looked down at Sam’s body and the Z patches glued to his thighs. He wanted to spit in Sam’s stone-dead face.
***
At a little past noon they ascended the gentle slope of Bear Mountain. The face of the mountain was covered with black oak and hickory trees and a jungle of gnarly hazelnut shrubs, and they struggled to push through it. Diego noted that the knee-high weeds were as closely-woven as the mat of hair covering Arnold Cutbirth’s body. There were no trails, no worn animal paths to follow—it was so thick, so dense, that Diego wished they’d had machetes—and five minutes into their climb they were forced to rest. Exhausted, they removed their heavy packs, collapsed to the ground, and drank from their canteens. The sun was directly overhead and the summer air was roasting hot.
Sissy and Emily staked out a place under a leafy ninebark shrub. Their mouths were open and they were panting. The rare disease of the immune system that Emily carried, Chronic Granulomatous Disease, left her susceptible to infection, and Sissy was constantly examining Emily for thorn pricks or cuts. Sissy would first clean the tiny wound with water from her canteen, dry it with her handkerchief, dab it with an antibiotic ointment, and then cover it with a bandage. Emily sported three band aids on one leg, two on the other, and one on her left forearm.
Henry shared the same bush with Sissy and her daughter. He sat on the ground with his legs spread and poured water from his canteen over his head.
“I’d save that water, if I were you,” Cutbirth said. He was standing nearby on the shady side of a thick black oak, his backpack and gym bag at his feet.
“Piss on it!” Henry gasped. He emptied the water from his canteen onto his head, and then shook his hair like a wet dog might do. Seated next to Henry, Emily didn’t seem to mind the brief, cool shower.
Diego and Adriana sat under the ivy-green umbrella of a white oak. Diego studied Adriana’s face for the umpteenth time. It had changed somehow. Tired, yes, but it was more than that. It had taken on the guise of a hollow-eyed survivor of some World War II Nazi death camp. She was wasting away before his eyes.
“How’s my girl?” Diego asked.
“Hot.”
“Once we get into the cave…”
Adriana drew a short breath. “Once we get into the cave you will be a basket case.” She closed her eyes and rolled her head. “Neck’s stiff.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I haven’t had an attack…well, since the MRI.” Diego had already decided to cross that paper-thin bridge of claustrophobia when he got to it. “I found your Z patches,” he told her. He was waiting for the right moment to share the awful news, but there didn’t seem to be any right moments.
She looked at him with red, puffy eyes. “Who took them?”
“Sam. He was wearing them under his boxer shorts,” Diego said.
“Both of them?”
“Yes. One on each thigh. I thought about ripping them off, but I didn’t think—”
“I wouldn’t have worn them,” Adriana said. She closed her eyes and rolled her head again. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
Diego didn’t say it, but he was also pleased by Sam’s passing. Anyone that cold didn’t deserve to live.
God, what have we become? Diego thought.
Diego looked back down the mountain. Yong had lagged behind, and through the clutter of trees and brush, more than 50 yards away, Diego saw him. Yong wasn’t walking, he was shuffling. Head down, he was dragging his backpack by one strap. It bumped along the ground.
“Cutbirth!” Diego said, nodding his head in Yong’s direction.
Cutbirth looked down the slope. “We may have to leave him. He’s lost his spirit.”
“I don’t think we should leave him,” Sissy said, gazing down the mountainside. She had removed the space blanket from her backpack. She had folded it into a two-foot square and was fanning Emily and herself. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair has nothing to do with it,” Cutbirth said.
“What then?” Adriana asked.
“Our survival,” Cutbirth said. “Remember my Buffalo Theory?”
“How could we forget,” Diego mocked.
“This God-awful heat…” Henry muttered, his head pushed back onto his bony shoulders. The chick could be heard chirping from inside his shirt pocket. “I never dreamed the heat could be so—”
“Shut up, Henry,” Diego said in a calm, quiet voice.
Henry looked incredulous. “What the hell did I say this time?”
“Just shut up,” Diego repeated.
Looking down the mountain through the trees, Cutbirth said, “We’ll wait for Yong this one time, but this one time only.”
They watched Yong shamble up the side of the mountain. He would take two or three steps, stop for a few seconds, then take two or three more steps. It took him a full two minutes to cover the 50 yards to where everyone sat waiting. He slumped to the ground on his knees. Diego knew that Yong was with them in body only. He had left his soul in a heavy patch of sumac at the bottom of the mountain.
“I hope the bounty hunters don’t find Sam,” Yong said, speaking to no one in particular. Yong’s eyes had the vacant look of total despair.
Diego didn’t care if the bounty hunters found Sam’s body or not. He almost wished they would.
They were preparing to continue their climb when the faint buzz of a helicopter once again drifted through the forest. As the sound grew stronger, Cutbirth said, “Back!” He scanned the forest canopy and motioned eve
ryone deeper into the shade. They formed a tight circle around the thick trunk of the black oak.
Yong hadn’t moved. Seated on the ground at the edge of the patch of shade—he seemed not to care if he was seen or not—he absently craned his head and looked skyward. Diego rushed over to where Yong sat, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him deeper into the shadows.
“Fulfill your death wish on your own time, Yong,” Diego said.
Everyone squeezed together around the base of the tree as the murmur grew more intense. The powerful vibration from the rotor blades pounded in their chests as the National Police helicopter appeared in the cloudless eastern sky. It flew directly overhead at an incredible speed. The sleek twin-rotor aircraft made a wide 360 turn above the summit of Bear Mountain, and then flew south. It was soon out of sight.
“Think they saw us, Cutbirth?” Henry asked, his eyes cast skyward. “They were pretty low. They might have seen us.”
“We’re in the Demarcation Zone,” Cutbirth said. “If they’d spotted us, they’d have opened fire. The boys with the National Police don’t take kindly to rabbits, especially ones accused of murdering one of their own.”
“I don’t want to die, Mr. Cutbirth,” Emily said. Her face was as red as her hair.
Cutbirth said, “Not to worry, kid, but no more crying, okay?”
“Okay, but I wish I was with my dad,” Emily said. “I wish I hadn’t come.”
Sissy looked at Cutbirth with a crooked smile. “She doesn’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do, Mom. I wish I was in Dad’s backyard swimming in his pool,” Emily said. “Dad lets me invite friends over for pool parties. I wish I was with my friends and we were diving for pennies.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that, Emily,” Sissy said. “Do you have any idea how much time and effort went into—”
“I don’t care,” Emily said.
Her voice rising, Sissy said, “Do you want to die from that disease?”
“I don’t care,” Emily repeated, holding her mother’s gaze. “I’m going to die anyway. We’re all going to die anyway.”
Her eyes wild with a sudden anger, Sissy said, “You take that back!” Sissy drew back her hand as if she intended to strike Emily across the face. Then she slowly lowered her hand and looked at Adriana with a stunned expression. “I almost struck my own child.”
“We’re all on edge,” Adriana said in a motherly voice.
In a quiet voice, her bottom lip pooched, Emily said, “Mom, I didn’t mean to….”
“That’s okay, baby.” Sissy enveloped Emily in her arms, and then looked at Yong with an odd smile. “You and Sam voted to throw Emily and I off the bus, didn’t you, Yong?”
Yong looked up, surprised.
“Don’t deny it,” Sissy said. “I just this moment realized that if Sam would steal Adriana’s pain patches he’d also vote to throw my daughter and me off the bus. You would have voted with Sam. But why?”
Yong shook his head. “No, we didn’t.”
“Be a man, Yong,” Sissy said. “Admit it.”
Yong looked at Sissy with sad eyes. In a broken voice, he said, “Yeah, we did. We were afraid Emily might freak out and put everyone in danger.”
“But it wasn’t Emily who freaked out, was it?” Sissy said. “It was Sam. He freaked out. He put everyone in danger.”
Yong heaved a sigh. “Yes.”
“Please don’t talk to Emily or me during the remainder of our trip,” Sissy said. “There is nothing you could possibly say that would be of interest to us.”
Yong nodded.
***
They were ready to resume their hike a second time when something caught Diego’s eye in the distance: far below on the Meramec River, a single canoe—a flyspeck on the water. It was traveling upstream toward the Mark Twain campground.
“Give me your binoculars, Cutbirth,” Diego said.
Cutbirth dug a set of binoculars out of his backpack and handed them to Diego. “What is it?”
“Don’t know.” Diego brought the powerful field glasses up to his eyes, and then focused them. It was Uno and Mr. Mustache. “Our bounty hunters,” Diego said. They were beaching their canoe. The place looked familiar to Diego. “They’ve come ashore. It looks like the same place where we camped last night.”
“Must have picked up our scent,” Cutbirth said.
The binoculars pushed against his eyes, Diego continued to monitor the bounty hunters. One moment Uno was pulling the canoe onto dry land, the next she, too, had a pair of binoculars at her eyes. She was looking up Bear Mountain. Diego wondered if she had spotted them. He watched Uno lower the binoculars, point up the mountain, and hand the glasses to Mr. Mustache. He promptly brought the binoculars up to his eyes.
“I think they’ve spotted us,” Diego said, a fear clutching his chest.
“There’s no way they could spot us in this thick foliage. Besides, it doesn’t matter, even if they have,” Cutbirth said. “Once we’re in the cave, they’ll turn back.”
“What makes you so sure?” Diego asked.
“They’re not dressed for 56-degree temperatures.”
“Maybe they brought warm clothes,” Henry speculated.
“Why would they have brought warm clothes, Henry?” Cutbirth said. “They had no idea our ultimate destination was a cave. Don’t be stupid.”
“Maybe you were followed when you bought all your gear back in the city,” Henry said. “Maybe they figured out that you’ve been crossing under the border through a cave. Maybe the bounty hunters have warm clothes.”
“Too many maybes, Henry,” Cutbirth said. “I stand by my statement. They had no idea our ultimate destination was a cave.”
“Fifty-six degrees isn’t that cold,” Diego said. “They might not need warm clothes.”
“Fifty-six degrees inside a cave where there is no sun, but lots of humidity might not seem cold at first, but after a couple of hours your body will revolt without the proper clothing,” Cutbirth said. “You can actually develop hypothermia when the temperature is in the 50s. No way the bounty hunters can pursue us inside the cave without warm clothes.”
“I hope you’re right, Mr. Cutbirth,” Sissy said. She was chewing on another fingertip.
19
Cutbirth and his exhausted clutch of rabbits reached the crest of Bear Mountain at a little past one that afternoon. They paused from behind a thicket of elm trees to gaze down upon the border, which was located two miles to the north. Cutting a wide swath through the forest, the fortified perimeter stretched from horizon to horizon. Guard towers rose above the forest canopy intermittently along either side of the broad strip of barren ground. The towers resembled rooks on a colossal chessboard.
“That, my friends,” Cutbirth advised softly, “is the infamous 38th latitude.”
They all stared at it. Emily clung to her mother, eyes wide.
“I feel the same way I did when Sam and I saw the border in Utah,” Yong said, the grief thick in his voice.
“What did you feel?” Sissy asked.
Latitude 38 Page 23