by Jack Ketchum
He’d never felt that kind of fear again. Not even in Korea under ferocious assault, among the dead and those who were soon to be dead. It was as though he’d seen and recognized his mortality early on when he was just a boy, pressed his frail flesh tight to the great and lethal unexpected, as though he’d seen the face of death in the cave that day.
Death was the inhabited dark.
Compared to then he walked in sunlight now. Under a moon hidden by clouds.
At least he could see his hands.
The moon was a Janus moon, hidden behind the clouds.
Janus. The god of doors and gates.
Through these we pass.
He saw what in reality he had never seen but only darkly and painfully imagined, Mary at the door of their house, rushing out through the doorway, flames about her like shimmering blue-yellow waves in which she was drowning, saw her roll across the dewy grass and smelled the smoke and the smell of her flesh burning, saw her rise again and hurl herself back through the door one final time in futile hope, in instinct, in love and agony, reaching out for her young.
It wasn’t fair, Mary, he thought. God it wasn’t fair.
He walked on.
The night had grown cooler. He could feel the breeze along his face.
Pain slid through him like the blade of a knife through soft butter.
After a time the moon appeared again.
He realized that he had no sense of time. The clouds might have hidden the moon for minutes or for hours. He didn’t know.
He felt the weight of the gun shift in his pocket and he reached down and felt its shape outside his pants. He remembered how the gun had come to be there. The gun had seemed to call to him from the forest floor. He’d stooped and picked it up.
He saw the house in the distance, pale stark white atop the hill. It looked like a church set on the hill the way it was, a church without a steeple but he knew it was not a church but a place which had almost brought death to him and to which he had brought death himself, carried in his arms.
The inhabited dark.
He approached at the same dogged pace.
His feet scuffled across the hard-packed earth. He listened to the sounds he made in the world and knew what he’d come to do.
Thirty
He saw the boy sitting alone on the porch steps in the dark. The boy was smoking a cigarette and, when he pulled on it, Ludlow could see his face in its glow and thought for a heart-stopped moment that it was his son Tim he was looking at. Tim all grown up now. But it was only Harold, the boy who said he was sorry and lied to his brother about the flies.
The boy saw him and stood abruptly on the path and crushed the cigarette out beneath his foot. He looked around, scared-looking, watching Ludlow as he approached and then looking around again. Then he seemed to make some kind of decision and stepped out to meet him.
‘My god,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I came back for my dog,’ he said.
‘You what?’
‘I came for my dog.’
‘Oh jesus.’
‘I left him here. Up on the porch.’
‘They’ll kill you for sure if they find you. Christ, they thought they already did kill you!’
‘I only want the dog. That’s all. I asked your mother if she’d cover him up for me.’
‘For chrissakes, mister, he’s not on the porch anymore.’
‘No?’
‘Why the hell would they leave him on the porch?’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘They threw him around back. Into the woods.’
‘They did?’
He felt the hot tight anger in his chest. They’d thrown the dog into the woods. Animals would get to him. Gnaw his bones. They couldn’t care less.
He felt a wave of dizziness.
‘It’s evidence, for god’s sake. You understand? The dog’s evidence of what they did to you. For god’s sake we had cops up here before, Mr Bridgewater and another guy, asking questions about last night. The dog shows that you were here too. Mister Ludlow, please, you got to leave. Right now.’
The boy kept fidgeting, looking back over his shoulder at the screen door. At the windows.
‘Take me there.’
‘Look at you. You’re hurt bad. You don’t know what . . .’
‘Take me back where they threw him.’
‘Oh jesus. Oh god.’
He reached out and gripped the boy’s arm and looked him in the eye.
‘Don’t you worry about god. Just take me there.’
The boy gave him a defeated look.
‘You’ll go? You’ll get out of here if I do?’
‘That’s right.’
He glanced at the door again behind him and then back at Ludlow.
‘You’ll get me killed for this.’
Ludlow waited.
‘All right. But real quiet, okay? Please?’
‘Sure. Real quiet.’
Still the boy hesitated. Ludlow released his arm and stared at him.
‘Jesus. All right. Come on.’
They walked back across the long broad lawn in the moonlight. Where the grass ended a narrow dirt trail began, cutting between two young stands of beech and maple before leading into the woods.
‘Hope I remember where it is,’ said the boy.
‘You’ll remember.’
The trail cut north into thicker forest. Here the light was dimmer. They moved more slowly. Ludlow smelled pine, damp fallen hardwood leaves and raw cooling earth. It would not be a bad place for Red to lie, he thought, were it not for the McCormacks, the ones who’d put him there.
He remembered in bright static flashes, one fast upon the other.
The truck going over, tumbling, tumbling.
The log in Danny’s hands coming down on him as he opened his eyes.
The shotgun by the river, the dog’s head suddenly gone.
Carrie Donnel climbing naked out of bed.
The living and the dead.
‘Harold!’
It was McCormack, calling from the porch.
Harold froze in front of him.
‘Hey, Harold! Where the hell are you at, boy?’
‘Go on,’ Ludlow whispered. ‘Keep going.’
‘We can’t—’
‘Yes, you can. Just be quiet about it’
They made a turn between two tall pines. The path narrowed. Briars clutched at Ludlow’s pant legs. A few moments later it opened up into a small clearing bright beneath stars and moon and overgrown with tall still meadowgrass and then it narrowed down into woods again. They went a few yards. Then Harold stopped.
‘It’s right around here someplace.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know, right around here somewhere, off left here. Damn it! I wish to god we had a flashlight.’
‘Okay. Sure. You got one,’ McCormack said.
He heard a click. The light spilled out over and behind them and they turned. The light was on Harold’s face first and he could make out the dark shapes of the two boys flanking the man. Then it went to his own face.
‘Good flying jesus,’ McCormack said.
Ludlow squinted into the beam.
‘I said to myself, no way. Can’t happen. The guy’s dead. But here you are. Here you goddamn well are. You don’t stay down, do you old man? You’re fucking unbelievable. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I came back for my dog.’
‘For what? For the dog?’
‘Yes.’
He laughed. ‘You want your dog?’
‘That’s right.’
The light moved off him and into the brush a few feet behind him. Then it settled. Ludlow’s eyes stayed with McCormack. He saw the .44 in his right hand and saw that Danny held a rifle. Pete Daoust seemed to have no weapon. He thought about the .38 in his own pocket and wondered did it show, was there any way for them to know he had it there?
He saw Pete Daoust shift
uneasily behind him and wondered if he wished he had a gun on him too. Or maybe not. Or maybe he had one tucked away somewhere like he did.
‘There’s your goddamn dog,’ McCormack said.
Ludlow turned and looked where the beam of light was pointing. The dog’s body was lying on a flat rock beside a beech tree. The blankets were wrapped over him again. He guessed that would be the woman’s doing. That she’d done as he’d asked her to do.
‘Tomorrow we were going to bury the damn thing. I guess now we got to do the same for you. You know, you make a whole lot of trouble, old man. You want the dog? Well, he’s gonna be all yours. For all fucking eternity. You stupid son of a bitch.’
‘Dad—’
The beam of light moved onto Harold again.
‘Jesus, Harold, get the hell over here, you damn fool. What the hell is wrong with you, anyhow? Why didn’t you just call me, the old man shows up here?’
Harold shifted uneasily behind him but didn’t do as McCormack told him to. He stayed where he was. Ludlow wondered why. He thought the boy had a lot of nerve standing up to McCormack even this much.
‘Dad, come on, isn’t this enough? Can’t we just quit it here? Look. We can explain that he came here and that then he came back here and we—’
‘And we what? Run him off the road and then tried to cave his head in? You got no more sense than he does.’
‘Dad’s right,’ Danny said. ‘Enough with this old fuck. It ends right here, right now.’
In the moment the light shifted off Harold toward Ludlow he went to his knees and turned to the side to make a smaller target and dug in his pocket for the gun. The beam went over his head and then found him and Ludlow fired twice rapidly into the light. His second shot shattered the flashlight as something pounded into his side and spun him down rolling and suddenly there were shots coming from everywhere, McCormack’s .44 roaring and rifle fire and Ludlow shooting again nearly blind into the sudden dark at the dim moving figures and bright flashes of muzzle-fire and he fired a fourth time and saw somebody fall screaming to his knees while he rolled again and came up against something soft and moving and wet, smelling of blood.
Harold’s chest, shot open, bleeding hard, heaving against his cheek.
There was silence. And moaning in the silence. He heard Harold sob beside him.
He smelled cordite rich and thick in the still air.
He looked around.
No one standing. Not one of them.
It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. When they did he saw three shapes lying in front of him a few feet away. Two of them were moving in the moonlight where they’d fallen, feet scuffling the trail.
A third lay still.
The moaning continued. He could not tell whose voice it was over his own labored breathing.
Beside him the boy sobbed again and sighed. After that his chest moved once and then went still.
Ludlow rose on one elbow. Ahead of him somebody was trying to stand. He decided he’d better do that first if it was possible.
When he got to his knees he felt something bite deep into his left side just above the hip. His face was suddenly burning. He felt clammy with sweat No you don’t, he thought. You don’t pass out. Not now.
He felt his side for the wound. He found the entrance wound which was small with not much bleeding but the exit wound in his lower back was another matter. It was soft and raw and he could feel a chip of rib bone at the surface like a jagged broken tooth poking out of him.
He put his hand to the cold damp ground and got one foot on up under him and then the other and, with great difficulty, finally managed to straighten his knees. His head swam.
Whole left side of me’s a disaster, he thought Broken head, broken ribs.
He staggered to where they lay.
The one trying to get up was Danny. He was lying on his back trying to make it to one elbow the same as Ludlow had done. Ludlow-looked him over and saw the wound and saw that the rifle was well out of reach. He looked him in the eyes. He saw that the hardness in the eyes was gone. He saw only fear and pain.
‘You’re gut-shot, boy. Stay still. I’ll send somebody.’
Somehow that seemed to calm the boy though Ludlow could not imagine why it would, the promise coming from him. Ludlow could just as easily leave him where he lay. He’d be damn well justified in doing so and the boy would know that. Maybe the boy was tired finally of hauling around that much baggage of manly responsibility and wrongheaded virtues. Maybe it was good to hand the burden of his life to somebody else. Even to him. Even at the cost that Ludlow might be lying to him.
The moment he saw the father’s face he knew he had only a few moments left to disgrace the earth he lay on. Ludlow looked him over. From what he could see, McCormack appeared to be shot twice, once in the chest just below the shoulder and once lower down near the lungs. He lay face-up, half on his side, with his gun arm pointed out toward Pete Daoust who lay sprawled on his belly beside him.
Half of the back of Pete Daoust’s head was shot away.
Brain matter glistened in the moonlight and oozed down his neck and pooled at the back of his collar.
Ludlow couldn’t possibly have done that with the .38.
McCormack had kept on firing even after he was down. Firing wild.
The boy had been in the way.
Ludlow saw he’d been right, that Pete hadn’t been carrying a weapon.
McCormack’s eyes flickered.
Ludlow kicked the .44 out of his hand, just in case. You could never tell what was left in a man or a snake. The gun skittered down the trail. He reached over to McCormack’s head and turned it to the side, pointed it towards Pete Daoust.
‘You see what you did?’ he said.
He let the man look, saw him blink and thought he saw comprehension there but only that.
‘And somebody, either you or Danny, shot your boy Harold too. I don’t think it matters which one of you. Do you?’
The eyes flickered up at him.
‘You had yourself quite a day.’
He stood and threw down the .38 well away from the man and limped slowly back the way he’d come. He passed Harold and, as he did, leaned over and closed his eyes. He thought that the boy hadn’t been half bad and that this was a damn shame. He thought that sooner or later Harold would probably have gotten away from his father and his older brother, might have even made a life for himself. And that Pete Daoust probably didn’t deserve this either. For all the mouth and swagger on him.
Guns didn’t give a damn, one way or another.
He walked back into the bushes and a moment later found what he was looking for.
He lifted the dog up into his arms.
He felt very weak. He hoped he had strength enough left in him to make it to the house and to the mother to tell her about her boy still alive back here and not instead go wandering off the trail, delirious with shock and loss of blood into the deep woods. Which today seemed to want to claim him somehow.
He lifted the dog and, for a moment, felt a strange clarity of thought and feeling wash suddenly over him, its access striking him just as the phantom pain had struck him on the way to this place. He knew-then what would only be confirmed by others many days and weeks from now, that something was happening inside him he had not forseen, that in a way he and the dog were one flesh now, one spirit, alive yet not only alive, dead yet not only dead, part of a process decreed by earth and flesh that was fierce and steady and implacable, beyond all knowing of life and all of human reason. He knew that the only counter-measure to this was gentleness and he was content with that.
She met him in the clearing.
He saw her and sunk to his knees. All the strength gone out of him.
The clearing spun. His arms felt cold and hollow. He closed his eyes. It seemed he could see himself from the height of one of these tall old oak trees that surrounded them, there on his knees in the moonlight in the clearing facing a woman who had once been pretty he fe
lt certain but who now looked only horrified and anguished at the sight of him, at Ludlow holding the dog out in front of him like an offering as though she were the mother of earth and of the tall waving grass he knelt in, the sad broken mother of creation.
‘Help me,’ he said.
Part Four
GENERATIONS
Thirty-One
The day he got out of the hospital his daughter was waiting for him with the wheelchair. He didn’t want it. Ten days lying on his back was plenty of inactivity, he thought, but Allie was insistent. Ludlow yielded. It was a small enough thing to do for her and Allie had flown in from Boston and sat with him every day for hours on end doing crossword puzzles and talking since the morning after they admitted him.
Ludlow thought that the only good to have come out of this was getting to know his daughter again.
She wheeled him out into the bright afternoon sunlight. Halfway across the tarmac she told him she had a confession to make. She said that she’d been holding out on him.
‘What do you mean, holding out on me?’
‘I’m pregnant, dad.’
‘You are?’
‘Uh-huh. I’m two months gone. You’re going to be a grandfather.’
Ludlow had all he could do to stay in the chair.
‘That’s wonderful, Allie.’
‘We sure think so.’
‘Pregnant. Hell, I ought to be pushing you.’
She laughed.
‘Really, that’s wonderful, Allie.’
He reached up and gripped her hand on the wheelchair, gave it a squeeze.
‘I was waiting till you got out to tell you. I didn’t want to be telling you in some hospital. I wanted it special. I wanted it out here in the sunlight.’
‘You’re damn right it’s special. Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?’
‘We don’t want to know. We’ll be happy either way.’
‘So will I. I only wish your mother could’ve known.’
‘Me too.’
They’d talked a lot about Mary over the last few days once he’d recovered from the concussion and then got off some of the pain-killers, about how she and Ludlow had met and courted and married. It helped pass the time and it served to draw them together. They talked about Allie’s childhood and Tim’s.