Journal

by Craig Buckhout

  But luck, fate, whatever, was with me. There was nobody else, and I heard the kid whisper, “Are you the one I saw today? Were you the one up by the trees? Help us. Please help us get away.” Suddenly there was a hand on my forearm which made me jerk back like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket.

  But he said “us,” not “me.” Us who? Us how many?

  His name is Gabriel Sanchez, and he was talking fast, whispering it out in one long rush, close-up, so his breath felt like little fingers on my ear. From what I could hear, he and his mother had been kidnapped somewhere in southern Washington by the people who then held them. After the abduction, they walked for a long time, days, and along the way encountered two separate groups of people who their kidnappers killed so they could steal their food, and after that, they walked some more.

  The one with the ponytail is the leader. He is also the one who was hurting Gabriel’s mom. He didn’t explain how this man hurt her, but I really didn’t need an explanation. A lot of that had gone on in Reno as well. They had been at the farm for about a week and kept him separated from his mother so neither of them would try to escape and to get each of them to do what emotional connection soed and their kidnappers wanted. There were four altogether, three men and another woman, who was just as bad as the men. From what he could determine, Mr. Ponytail slept in a room with Gabriel’s mother while the other three shared the living room of the house. They had two pistols, a small rifle, and a shotgun.

  Finally, he said what I hoped he wouldn’t but knew he would. He asked me to help his mother escape. He said he wouldn’t go unless she went with him.

  My reaction was, “No way. It’s impossible. It’s too dangerous. It would be complete suicide.” There was no way I could get past the lookout, get into the house, and get her out without being discovered. If there was shooting, and there most surely would be, no telling how it would turn out. His mother could even be injured or killed. Once more I told myself that I don’t know Gabriel; and (now) his mother. For all I knew, they could be thieves and murderers themselves.

  After that, Gabriel was quiet for a moment, and I was sure that in his silence he was crying. I could even picture the tears wetting his cheeks as he stifled his sobs. But that wasn’t the case at all because in a calm, steady, resigned voice he said, “It’s OK mister, I understand.” He thanked me for trying and told me not to worry; he would think of some way to get his mother away from them. I could go, and he assured me he wouldn’t tell anyone I had been there.

  At the time, I thought what else could I do? I felt bad for him, I really did. I didn’t want to leave him, but what sense did it make for her, or him, or me, or all three of us to get killed on such a hopeless mission? It would be four guns against one. In my mind, I convinced myself that I had done all I could, that my intentions were good, and I wasn’t a coward. I had to be realistic about the situation. It just wasn’t going to happen.

  So I shook his hand and told him I was sorry. I also wished him luck and tried to reassure him that things would turn out all right. But as those puny words tumbled from my mouth, they sounded just like the easy lies they were. I can only now imagine what he was thinking at that moment, about his mother, about his own future, and about me. I slipped out of the barn and headed back.

  I worked my way toward my stowed gear without being seen. Along the way, I kept reassuring myself that I had done the smart thing, that there was no other reasonable alternative, and that I had nothing to be ashamed of. If I tried and failed, what good would come of it? I’d be dead, and they would still be prisoners. Who would be the better for it?

  Of course my conscience would have none of it. With each step I took, I felt more and more uncertain about my decision to abandon Gabriel, and more and more uncertain about myself.

  As much as I tried not to think about it, his words pounded their way inside my skull. He told me …me not to worry. He was just a kid for chrissake; a kid who was being beaten, used as slave labor, and kept as a hostage so Mr. Ponytail could continue to rape his mother without her resistance, and he tells me not to worry. Oh, the names I called myself, first for getting involved emotional connection soed and and then for not finishing what I started. I felt ashamed of myself.

  But reality was not to be denied either. There was no way I was going to win against four armed people who had already demonstrated a willingness to kill without remorse. Still, I tried to come up with a workable plan, some way I could redeem myself.

  I won’t bore you with all the idiotic schemes I considered and rejected, but suffice it to say that all of them ended with somebody getting killed, most probably me. Eventually, though, an idea came to me. There was a way …maybe. It wasn’t foolproof or guaranteed to avoid a confrontation, but it was the best of the lot. Up to a certain point, I also could still back out if I wanted to. I liked that part of it.

  It took me a good forty-five minutes or so to get back inside the barn. When I did, all Gabriel said was, “You came back. I knew you would.” And I believed him.

  I quickly explained my plan to him and told him to gather his belongings. While we waited, I fashioned a raincoat for him out of a discarded trash bag, since the drizzle had by then turned to a light rain. A few minutes later, the right opportunity presented itself when we saw the man with the ball cap slouch down in the seat with his head barely visible. We once again reversed my route out of there, with only one difference; we made plain our direction of travel. I even had Gabriel drop his knit cap on the ground behind the barn so they would be sure to see which way we went.

  ____________

  We picked up my gear from under the flatbed and ran south maybe three-and-a-half, four miles, making ourselves obvious all along the way. At some point, we turned east for another mile or so until we reached Highway 97. Once on a hard surface, one that would be difficult to track on, we ran back the way we came, north, past the farm by a good half mile. Finally, we re-approached the farm and found a good place to wait and watch. We had essentially made a big, looping one-eighty, and were now watching the farm from the exact opposite side of our departure. Somewhere during this time, April first turned into April second.

  While we waited, the kid fell asleep. It was really my first opportunity to get a good look at him. My impression now was that he was older than I thought. He also wasn’t as fragile as he first appeared. He was lean, not skinny (there’s a difference), and by the way he kept up with me, he had stamina enough to do what was needed. He had straight, black hair as thick as straw, that, at the moment, was plastered to his face, a long nose, thin lips that would make him look cruel if he wasn’t careful, and a scar at the tip of his rounded chin. I had to wonder at that point what kind of a man he’d turn into after all he’s gone through and all that was, no doubt, to come.

  About three hours before daylight, Mr. Ponytail switched places with the guy in the baseball cap, who hurried inside. As the sun began to show itself, I woke Gabriel, and we repositioned ourselves a little to provide a bit more concealment.

  With the sun in full bloom, I could tellwotMr. Ponytail got down from his perch, peed on the ground, and walked to the barn. Just before entering, I heard him yell, “Wake up you little turd.” A minute or so passed before he emerged looking madder than a Reno drunk who wakes up to find his pockets turned inside out. He stepped to the corner of the barn and looked all around before he finally spotted the knit cap lying on the ground. He picked it up, examined it, and looked in the direction of our escape. He had to see our path because I could see it, even from where I was. He took a couple of steps in that direction but stopped, reversed himself, and hustled back to the house. As he mounted the porch, he yelled, “The fucking kid ran off!” Once he was inside, I could hear more yelling but couldn’t clearly hear the words.

  About ten minutes later, the man in the baseball cap, who was still carrying the shotgun, Mr. Ponytail, and a woman with a butt the size of Nebraska, exited the house and followed the trail we’d left for them. I gave i
t an hour and told the kid, “go ahead.”

  Gabriel circled around, just in case anyone was looking, went into the yard, and stood next to the barn. Once I gave him the high sign he yelled out, “Hey, where is everybody?”

  It took about two seconds before the man with the limp ran out the door yelling, “You little shit, where you been? There’s going to be hell to pay now.” He walked his way to the barn and grabbed Gabriel by the arm.

  At the same time all this was happening, I worked my way to the corner of the house with my rifle in hand and pointed it in the man’s direction. I hadn’t ever done anything like that before, so I have to admit I was scared, scared enough that I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like somebody was smacking me with a framing hammer. When I yelled at him to get his attention, I sounded as if I were going through puberty all over again.

  For a guy with a bum leg he spun around pretty quick, bringing up a pistol as he did. So there we stood, me pointing my rifle at him and he pointing his pistol at me. At least I was somewhat protected by the house. He, on the other hand, was completely exposed, that is until he pulled Gabriel in front of him. I didn’t have a plan for that one. In fact, I once again began that familiar argument with myself about the wisdom of doing this in the first place.

  That’s about the time I saw this crazy woman, her dark brown hair flying all over the place, arms outstretched, run from the house right at the pair of them, screaming Gabriel’s name. It was a sight to see, I’ll tell you that.

  As soon as he saw her, Gabriel spun, pulled away from the man, and ran toward his mother. It was all happening fast now, faster than I could almost even process. I next saw the man point his pistol right at them.

  I’d like to say that at that point some calm, rational thinking process took place where I weighed my alternatives and considered the gravity of our situation and all the attendant moral implications, but I can’t. I just fired, simple as that. I didn’t think about it or give him one more chance to put his gun down; none of that. I just took the shot. I don’t even know where I was aiming when I pu the “safe place”an whateverlled the trigger, or even if I was aiming at all. And he fell down. Just like that, he crumbled to the ground, his throat a mass of torn, bloody tissue.

  I’ve never killed anyone before. You know, now that I’ve just written those five words, “I’ve never killed anyone before,” and I look at them on this page, they seem such an odd thing to say. They almost make it sound as if I’m deficient somehow, behind the curve. Meaning that by now, by my age, I should have killed at least three or four people; just laid them right out there, one, two, three, four. Maybe, given the times in which I live, where if you’re not predator, you’re prey, that may be true. But if so, well I guess I’m good with that because I gotta tell you that when I was standing there, looking down at my bloody damn work, I felt like the lowest, most despicable person on the face of the planet. What the hell did I do?

  And that’s what I did right after, stood there staring down at what used to be a breathing, walking, talking human being and tried to make sense of it. I didn’t want to kill that guy. I swear I didn’t. At that moment, I truly wished I’d followed my first instinct and just left the kid behind to solve his own problems. Why didn’t you just mind your own business Alan? Was it pride? Did I kill that guy because I needed to prove to myself I wasn’t that mouse? Where’s my humanity now, Claire Huston, huh?

  As I was thinking those things and others, too, I became vaguely aware of someone yanking on my sleeve, but I didn’t respond, so deep were my thoughts. Not to be ignored, she stepped in front of me and gave me a good, hard, one handed shove on my chest and said, “Hey, don’t just stand there. He’s dead.” She next bent over and picked-up the dead guy’s pistol before running into the house.

  After she was gone, Gabriel yanked on my sleeve again and said, “Come on mister, we gotta get out of here. The others will have heard the shot. They’ll be coming back.” He said it quiet like, as if he understood what I was feeling. He next pushed me gently in the direction of our hiding place where my pack and food bag were stashed.

  At that point, I have to say that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with these people. I just wanted to be out of there and away from them. I’d done what I’d set out to do. The boy wanted help, and I helped him. I did my good deed and then some. I was done with them. But I also knew that the dead guy’s friends, companions, whatever, were probably on their way back. We had to get out of there. We had to get as far away from them as possible, in the shortest amount of time. That meant going in the opposite direction, north, which also meant the three of us were going to be together for a while.

  Gabriel’s mother caught up with us while I was throwing on my pack. Her name is Anna, Sanchez I presume, and she is Mexican without an accent, so maybe second generation at least. I have to say she’s an attractive woman, around thirty years old, with very dark brown, almond shaped eyes, and a mouth that seems just a little too wide for her face. Her dark hair has those little, squiggly curls in it, like a sheet of paper balled up and then flattened out. She’s also maybe five foot five or six inches tall, and weighs in at about a hundred and twenty pounds, if she’s lucky. But for emotional connection soed and a small woman, she definitely has a pushy way about her. That’s probably her most salient characteristic.

  The first thing she said to me was, “Hurry it up or we’ll go without you.” I was thinking a thank you would have been nice. Wisecracks aside, it did kind of irritate me that she didn’t acknowledge the extent of my sacrifice. And that makes me recall something else Claire Huston had written in her journal.

  It was in January, 2050 and she and her husband had encountered a man of “most miserable appearance,” as she put it, sitting on a curb near her house. Her assessment of him was that he was starving and close to collapse. Over her husband’s objection, she gave the man a plastic bag of cooked rice. It was their meal for the day, all they had with them. The man grabbed it from her hand and ran off without so much as a grunting acknowledgement. Later, in her journal, she wrote of the man’s apparent ungratefulness. She simply explained that, “giving is receiving because the very act of charity opens your mind to the suffering of others and that in itself is a most precious gift.”

  Now I suppose I get that. The act of giving is its own reward because it makes you a better person, just as expecting something in return, like a thank you, makes it not a gift at all. In this case, though, I just killed a man so Gabriel and his mom could escape. That’s my burden now. Some acknowledgement of that would have been the right thing to do, and it would have made me feel a heck of a lot better about doing it. I wanted to believe I’d done the right thing. I don’t know, maybe I’ll never be the person that Claire Huston was.

  Back to what happened. Without waiting, Anna started off going the wrong direction, southeast, but Gabriel stopped her. He told her that we couldn’t go that way because we might run into the dead guy’s friends. That’s when Gabriel gave the dead guy a name. I wish he hadn’t done that. It was Harvey.

  They both glanced at me and waited. I just pointed north. Anna gave me a look that could only be described as annoyed and stomped off in that direction with a blanket fashioned into a sling tied across her back. I just ignored her attitude, though. I killed Harvey. He had a name. A name somehow made it worse. That’s what I was thinking.

  As we walked and occasionally trotted, I kept my rifle in my hand in case they caught up with us. It’s an old lever action my grandfather gave me, and it shoots the same bullets my pistol uses, .357 magnum. As I moved along, I was making a loose plan in my head on how to avoid the people from the farm. I figured we’d first walk north for a couple of days. It would be tough going, no roads and mountainous but so much the better. They weren’t as likely to follow us in that case.

  After that, Gabriel and Anna could go wherever they wanted. But me, I would turn east and pick up either Highway 153 or 97 and turn south again. I might even go as
far east as Highway 155 because that would put me well away from the farm. I’d play that part by ear. I had an old roadmap I’d found taped to the window of a Spokane charging station. It showed enough detail it would help keep me oriented along the way. My goal was still to find family or one way or the otherged and a community where I’d be safe. Being by myself is a depressingly lonely existence.

  As we traveled, there wasn’t much conversation between us. Well let me rephrase that. There wasn’t any talk between Anna and me, and only a little between Gabriel and me, which was OK as far as I was concerned. I didn’t feel much like talking anyway. On the other hand, I was aware of Anna and her son talking quietly on several occasions, keeping their voices low so I couldn’t hear. If I had to guess, I’d say they weren’t in total agreement on whatever it was they were discussing, either.

  One thing I did get from Gabriel, though, was that Mr. Ponytail’s name was Eric, and he had been in prison. When it came to killing, he was the one who did most of it. The guy wearing the ball cap was Sid, but Gabriel didn’t know much about him. He kept to himself and didn’t say much. The woman now, her name was Nora. He thought there was something mentally wrong with her because, for no reason and at random, she would hit him or throw something at him and then laugh. It was nice to know their names I suppose, but I just hope I don’t have any reason to speak about them again.

  We walked all that first day until nightfall, through what used to be a national forest, rich green and silent, except for our footsteps; a place that under different circumstances would have caused me to linger and enjoy my surroundings. There was no time to appreciate such things, though. We were walking with our thoughts on the people behind us. It was tough going, too, considering that the rain never stopped, and the terrain was steep. We were wet, cold, and tired.

  When we did finally halt, I don’t think we had gone much more than fifteen miles, the walking had been that hard. We set up in a flat spot, which was an exception to the area, where a tree had uprooted and lay in such a manner that a lean-to was easily constructed using branches and a ground cloth I carried. It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep us dry through the night.