The sock made a gluey sound, like a strip of ancient duct tape coming off cheap upholstery. Translucent webs of fluid pulled away from the pink blister on my heel; it was as big around as the mouth of a teacup, peeled down through several layers of skin, edges curled up like the caldera of a volcano. A puck of milky skin was stuck to the inside of my sock. There was another deep blister on the pad of my foot, but the worst were my toes. The skin over the phalanges was an ulcerated, shiny red; higher up, the flesh had sloughed away to disclose my nail beds. The skin near the tips had a crystallized, wooden look, like a slab of steak forgotten in a deep-freeze. The end of each toe was black—not blood-blister black, but a terrifying withered black that indicated the flesh was past the point of regenerating.
Four toenails had fallen off. I touched the one that remained on my big toe. The nail sank into the flesh. A substance resembling blood-strung Vaseline oozed around the nail, which slid easily out of its bed—no less shocking than if I’d reached into my mouth and effortlessly pulled a tooth out. I brought the toenail to eye level, stuck to my fingertip, studying it with horrified wonder.
“Don’t bother looking at the other foot,” said Duncan, propped up on his elbow.
After shaking the toenails out, I put the sock back on, which was far more painful than pulling it off. Duncan cut vents in the sides of my brogans so I could slip my swollen foot inside. He cut swathes from the skidoo upholstery and lashed them round my shoes with duct tape. When he was done my feet looked as if they’d been dipped in pewter.
“You look cheery,” I said.
“I feel a hell of a lot better. Sure, it’s weird—a spike of metal skewering me like a moth on a pin, but I can breathe almost full.”
“Should we risk it?” I said. “We could stay here, keep the fire going. We’ve got all day to gather wood. You have to assume someone’s looking for us by now, right? A search helicopter’s sure to spot the smoke.”
“What about food?”
“We might be able to kill something. Anyway, I heard a body can go awhile without food. A week at least.”
Duncan didn’t disagree in words. He simply packed up our meagre supplies and crossed beyond the guttering fire.
“It can’t be that way,” he said, pointing towards the steep incline we’d crawled down the night before. “And it can’t be anywhere that way, either,” he said, gesturing to where the van’s hood was pointing. Eventually he pointed east, where the whitened crest of escarpment merged into the cloud-strung horizon. “That way.”
“Okay, Dunk. But how far?”
“Four hours? Six? We can make it out before night falls.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Such confidence! You’re an odd one, Duncan Diggs.”
“Odd as a cod, Owen Stuckey.”
We set off through the morning silence, boots crunching through the hardpack. The wind pushed gently at our backs. Our bodies were damaged, but the pain was manageable. We walked for half an hour before stumbling upon Drinkwater’s bivouac.
At some point in the night, with darkness falling and the snow swirling, he’d found a huge oak snapped in half. Its insides had been eaten away by termites and dry rot, leaving a hollowed-out bowl. The wood inside the bowl was scorched in spots. We sniffed the mingled smells of charcoal and urine.
“He … he slept in here?” Dunk said. “Holy shit.”
I doubted Drinkwater had slept. He’d probably scooped out the snow, hunkered down and capped himself in. He’d waited out the storm inside a tree trunk. He must be carrying a butane torch; he’d obviously set fire to the termite-softened wood.
“Look at this,” Dunk said.
A firepit lay ten feet from the tree, its coals still warm. A gutted carcass lay nearby. The smell gave it away.
Duncan said, “You ever hear the phrase ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a skunk’s asshole’? Drinkwater actually did.”
One of the skunk’s back legs was snapped and gored. Had Drinkwater found it in the fox trap he’d set for us? If so, that meant he’d carried it around for hours, trudging through the snow with a dead skunk strapped to his back.
Drinkwater’s tracks set off in a direction opposite to where we were headed. I considered: Drinkwater was exhausted, cold, probably injured. Depending on the freshness of that skunk, he might have food poisoning. Was he delirious? Did he even want to escape the woods? Maybe he wanted us to follow him like dogs chasing a coyote, running us in maddening circles. Was he happy enough to die if it meant killing us, too?
“We stick to our line,” I said.
The sun charted a course behind banks of iron-grey clouds. Though not especially bright, the day was unseasonably warm. The snow lost its glitter and took on a gleaming quality: long bands of light ran across its surface the way light fills the slack water between ocean waves. A booming crack rolled across the earth as dead timber split under a weight of heavy snow. A low pattering filled the air as clumps melted and dripped off branches.
I craned my ear over that pattering, searching for the thucka-thucka of helicopter blades. I desperately wanted to believe a search party had been dispatched. At the very least, surely Silas Garrow would have wondered about us by now? Or Dunk’s parents, when he hadn’t come home?
Quicksilver shapes fled along the periphery of my vision. At first I figured they were chimeras born of sleeplessness and frayed nerves, but I focused and saw the wolves were back. Had they ever left? Loping a few hundred yards to either side—the two smaller ones, probably females, on the left, the big male on the right. Ghost wolves, I thought.
We reached a meandering creek. The snow had melted along its banks to expose dark brown mud. I wondered if it was the same stretch of water where Dunk had held a thrashing mudpuppy in his palm years ago. We navigated the frozen creek bed, boots whispering over the ice. I scanned for signs of human intervention: fence posts, trail markers, a moonshiner’s still. Nothing. Even the rusted pop cans and plastic bags—tumbleweeds of the modern world—were buried under the snow.
As the day entered afternoon, a rifle crack carried out of the woods. Both of us ducked instinctively, but my heart leapt. Could it be a hunter or trapper who knew how to get to a road? Next a hollow scream rose above the trees. It wasn’t a human scream but the sound of a creature dying in agony or fear.
“What the hell was that?” Duncan said.
This was followed by a wild sobbing howl: a sound made by a human, yes, although the voice box must’ve been nearly torn apart from the strain. The howl fled into the icy sky, climbing steadily before dropping, only to climb again: the vocal equivalent of an air-raid whoop. It was the howl of a madman, and it belonged to Drinkwater.
“You figure he’s following us now?” I said.
“Could be.”
A gassy, fetid stink rose out of the earth. The ice took on a sickly yellow tinge. Duncan put his foot down. The ice cracked; water surged through glassy fissures. It was the hue of an alcoholic’s piss with webs of blackly rotted matter suspended within it. My mind made a terrifying leap: could this be the same miserable grey muskeg we’d walked through as kids, the one that sucked the sneakers off our feet?
There are plenty of muskegs out here, I told myself. It’s low country. Water collects at the bottom of the escarpment.
And I believed this, at least partially. That is the greatest trick of survival: making yourself believe the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case scenario that you were doomed. I breathed shallowly, trying not to vomit. The stink rising off the ice was nauseating. I couldn’t afford to lose whatever precious nutrients remained in my stomach.
“Hold up a minute,” I said, leaning heavily on a tree. My gorge throbbed against my Adam’s apple. The tree snapped, and I clutched desperately at the rotted trunk as I fell, splinters driving under my fingernails. My knees hit the ice, which spiderwebbed under my kneecaps. Rancid water seeped through to soak my trousers. A gas pocket ruptured
, bubbles popping lazily through the ice. The stink was indescribable. Black dots swam before my eyes. I vomited helplessly into my mouth. It took every ounce of self-control to breathe deeply through my nose and swallow it.
“You okay?” Duncan asked.
Dark slivers lay under my fingernails. My knees were soaked with reeking water. I’d thrown up and swallowed stomach acid.
“Let’s just go.”
We left the muskeg and its sad shattered trees. The sunlight was fading and the snow took on a granular, slate hue. The chill crawled back into our bones.
The outline of a radio tower carved against the horizon. We progressed towards its lacework of man-made angles. Maybe it’d have a telephone or at least an emergency switch to pull … but no. It was only criss-crossed metal escalating to a cell-phone dish. Why would it have an emergency phone?
I slumped at the base of the tower, racked with an exhaustion that was almost comical. Maybe Duncan could roll me up like an old carpet and carry me over his shoulder.
“We could chuck rocks at the dish,” I said at last. “Maybe there’s a sensor that trips an alarm when it’s wrecked.”
The dish was over a hundred feet up. Could either of us heave a rock even halfway? Duncan hacked wetly; blood burped out of the needle. “Come on, Owe,” he said.
I barely heard him. I was thinking about the plastic vent on the side of my childhood house, the one that connected to the clothes dryer. In the winter, I’d come home after tobogganing and see white plumes coming from the vent. Crouching beside it, I’d rub my hands in the warm air. It smelled the way my mother did in dreams: of fabric softener and dryer sheets. The basement window sat next to the vent. One time I’d seen Mom hiding Christmas presents above the heating ducts, something that had made me sad: I hadn’t believed in Santa—Bovine had spilled the beans about the jolly fat man on the playground, ruining everything—but still, I wanted to believe.
“Get up,” Duncan said roughly. “We got to keep going.”
“In a minute.”
“No minute, man. Now.”
“Jesus Christ, Dunk.” I hated the timorous, whiny sound of my voice. It reminded me of when we were younger, how I’d always buckle to Duncan’s subtle commands. “I’m not fucking ready, okay?”
“If we don’t keep moving we’re going to seize up. Do you want to make it out of here today or not?”
“Where the hell are we? You said we’d be out of here in a few hours.”
“I said four, maybe five.”
“You see that swamp? Pretty sure it’s the same one we dragged our asses through as kids! Weren’t you thinking the same thing?”
“It could be a different one.”
“Oh bullshit, man. Bullshit. Look, I’m not putting this on you—”
“Really? ’Cause it’s sorta sounding that way.”
I stood. If this was going to happen, I needed to be squared up, looking my old pal full in the eye.
“I’m not putting this specifically on you,” I said. “The decision to leave the van, I mean. If we’re miles from safety—and yeah, I think we are—well, hey, that’s on me, too. I made that decision with you. But the fact that we’re here in the first place …”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t give me the fucking thickhead routine, Dunk. I’ve sweated out smarter guys than you. I’m saying this whole thing with Drinkwater. This vendetta you’ve got against him.”
“I’m sorry? Weren’t you raging about having to bury his dog?”
“I want him, yeah. But you’ll chase him to Siberia.”
Duncan held his hands out as if presenting me with a fragile gift. “Don’t I have good reason, Owe? Eight years, man. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it. And this whole thing—you helped set it up!” He fixed me with a baffled, pleading expression. “How is this not both of us?”
“Because it wasn’t both of us, was it?” I said, my eyes feeling hard as stones. “Never has been. You make it out like there’s some kind of equality between us. Maybe you even halfway believe it. But the order’s always been pretty clear: first you, then me.”
I knew I was charting dark territory here—old resentments burbling up. “What was your big idea, Dunk? Hop on the skidoo, chase Drinkwater down and what, drag him back to the sheriff? We fly off into the night, driven by your all-consuming need for … for what? Justice?”
Duncan ran his hand through hair that was oily-slick, matted with the residue of burnt radial tires. “Just … fairness, man. That’s it.”
“Fairness? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Fairness? What world do you live in? Doesn’t the situation we’re in right now—doesn’t the sum total of your life—hasn’t it taught you that there’s no such thing? Fairness and luck are for other people, man.”
“You’re wrong, Owe. I’ve been very lucky in my life.”
I could only stare at him, gape-jawed. “Oh, really?”
“Not as lucky as some, but … we got lucky the last time we were out here, didn’t we? We’ll get out this time, too.”
“And that’s just it, isn’t it?” A terrible calm settled over me. “You’re always just so … so fucking sure of yourself.”
Duncan said, “You didn’t have to come, man. You could’ve stayed put. I wouldn’t have blamed you. So why come?”
My pulse beat in every broken inch of me. This was the deepest part, wasn’t it? The part I could hardly bring myself to contemplate, let alone voice.
“Maybe because of … I don’t know, my anger at you all these years, that I thought was buried … Maybe I let you hang yourself that night on the river.” It was my turn to hold my hands out, a wretched, out-of-place smile on my face. “I can’t say for sure, Dunk. I mean, how well do any of us know ourselves? You paint a picture of the man you hope you are and pray that circumstances never challenge it. And I mean, if I did, if I let you walk right into it and did nothing … what does that make me? You’re my best friend.”
“It wasn’t on you,” Duncan said after a long pause. “Over the years I thought about it and I followed it back, too. You gave me fair warning. You painted the picture. I just didn’t see it, or didn’t want to.”
“If your friend’s got his neck in a noose, you don’t kick the chair from under his feet.”
“I kicked it myself.”
Suddenly I was flooded with immense gratitude. I wanted to reach out and touch Dunk’s face. But it was impossible—impossible now to find the effortless touch of our twelve-year-old selves who’d slept with our bodies pressed tightly together, spooning like young lovers, perhaps on this very spot.
“Want to know what I was thinking about?” I said. “The dryer vent at my old house. I used to crouch beside it on winter nights. It was warm, smelled nice. This one time I saw my father smoking in the basement. He’d promised Mom he’d quit, right? He smoked with quick little puffs, waving madly at the smoke, then dropped the butt down the flood drain. It was strange seeing him so worried, so rabbity. It was my dad, y’know? The toughest man in my little universe. But now every time I see him he looks older, frailer.
“There’ll come a day when he slips in the shower and won’t be able to get up. He’ll be ninety, I hope to God, but it’ll happen. And it will shock me, because I’ll remember him in times when he was so strong. And all that strength will be gone, and he’ll probably be angry and confused about it. So I’ll need to be there for him. I owe him that. Mom, too. I’ve got to be there to pick them up when they’re too weak to do it themselves, like they did for me all those years ago when I fell on my butt as a baby.”
I shouldered the shotgun. “We’ve got to get ourselves out of this, you get me?”
“I get you,” Dunk said.
The daylight held out longer that evening. The sky was low with a hazy sheen, the sun buoyed by heavy clouds. It hung above the horizon, a diffuse orange ball, edging the trees with a persistent mellow light. Every so often a noise bubbled up from behind us: the stealthy crack of a stick or a dista
nt crazed holler. Drinkwater was back there somewhere, tracking us.
Just before dusk the heavy throb of helicopter blades washed over the landscape. The sound swelled, swelled … then steadily receded. It was probably the sightseeing helicopter that lifted off from the roof of the downtown Hilton; the Falls were especially beautiful at dusk, although I’d never seen them from the air.
The forest thickened. The land sloped upwards and narrowed to a natural bridge of sorts, thirty yards wide. The trees below were thin and bone-white, the tusks of enormous buried mammoths. We charted the incline and came upon a massive deadfall: a fallen oak with the smaller tusklike trees piled over and around it. The oak had fallen directly across the path; the rock drew steeply down on either side into a forest of those bony trees; if we fell, chances were we’d impale ourselves on them.
Small saplings grew out of the oak. It was a nurse tree: as it rotted, it provided nourishment for smaller trees. But it was a poor nurse: the tusks grew up from the dead oak only to topple over, dead. Their limbs lay at splintered angles, making the deadfall all but impassable.
Duncan said, “Turn back?”
I chided him. “You of all people.”
Duncan clambered onto the oak. The bark collapsed under his boot and his leg punched into the rotted tree. He clutched his chest. I wondered if the impact had jarred the needle loose. He pulled his leg out, brushed petrified wood off his thigh and peered into the hole. “Huh. Could be easier to just go through.”
A solid few kicks broke a hole. The insides were hollow, wood pulp glittery with frost. I pushed my shoulders inside the tree, inhaling a fusty sawmill smell. Chains of fibrous wood hung down, clung with insect chrysalises that looked like translucent seeds; it felt like being inside a pumpkin. My skull brushed those fibrous chains; a few snapped and fell down my neck, cold as icicles. I reminded myself it’d be far worse in the summer, the tree alive with squirming insects. I pushed at the far side of the dead tree. My palm broke through with ease. I cracked the bark away in jigsaw sections, opening a hole big enough to crawl through.
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