Should I have seen it in the way he guts his fish? Johnny wonders. In the way his filleting knife flashes through skin and slices lengthwise? Do his eyes change at the sight of blood?
Johnny dreams of cornucopias that spill money bags onto his grey-streaked living room carpet. Since his living room is also his bedroom, he watches as money reaches the edge of his bed. It is an unending supply of money. No more security guard’s uniforms hanging in the envelope-sized closet. No more lint brushes for inspection day. No more plastic food, at work or at home. And there is frowning Charlie, drowning in the rising level of money, trying to reach a piece of furniture. But he can reach neither the table nor the bed, or the armchair, all of which are sinking in any case. Foreboding black lines slice the dream vertically and scramble the picture until it makes no sense.
Johnny tosses. He rolls himself in his bedclothes until he awakens, trussed and immobile and sweat-slick. His dreams are disturbing, peopled with dead-eyed Charlie clones and incessant cornucopias spilling blood-spattered coins into his wretched life. He tosses again, trapped somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
Images.
Mere images.
In the morning, unrested, he knows that he cannot afford to become involved in Charlie’s scheme. The risk far outweighs the opportunity in his mind, and he cannot squelch the voice of what he has come to believe is his better sense. And he does not want to.
It might ruin everything, and Johnny isn’t ready for that.
Charlie holds his anger when Johnny tells him his decision. He appears suspicious at first, then simply disinterested.
“That’s okay, Johnny-boy, we can’t all be perfect. I got that other guy.”
Johnny nods.
“Send you a card from the Alps, hey?” His features suddenly contort then stiffen. His eyes are dead - he seems to radiate cold. “Confidence is confidence, right? We do understand each other?” His lips curl slightly. A smile? Johnny doesn’t know.
Johnny nods. It’s no business of his. And Redman International deserves a kick in the balls. But not from him. It’s not his style, and he knows it.
What is my style? he wonders as he does whatever security guards do while they wear their polyester uniforms.
*
Seven days later.
Johnny does not see much of Charlie, who has requested and received a change of shift. It doesn’t matter to Johnny, by nature the proverbial loner - he eats his plastic cheese sandwiches alone. He wonders idly whether or not Charlie is still contemplating his little heist. Whether it’ll succeed. And he smiles.
*
Ten days.
Johnny opens his Boise Sun and reads that Charles Lawson (also known as one Sammy Colburn in three other states) and an accomplice have been arrested while in the process of emptying RI’s cash safe. “One of Boise’s largest robbery attempts in over a decade, at least since the Bonner assault of a Brink’s truck in 1986.”
Charlie couldn’t resist - he went for the record. It was like him to have thought so big for so little a man.
The paper continues, mentioning that - if convicted
- Charlie will find himself residing in Bearpaw Correctional Institute and Penitentiary, located in the North Woods.
Johnny smiles. It’s one of Charlie’s favorite places. The North Woods. A chunk of heaven.
Now Johnny frowns. The Sun also states that the arrest was made as the result of an anonymous phone call.
He prepares his lunch mechanically. There is only the plastic cheese and stale bread, but it will have to do. As he wraps the sandwich amidst the emptiness of his grimy kitchenette, he eyes the drawer just below the stained Mr. Coffee-pot. It is like a magnet, the drawer, and his eyes continue to roam in its direction. His hands shake as he places the sandwich inside an oft-used lunchbag.
The large Webley revolver his father kept after the war is inside the drawer, still covered with grease since the last time. His father owed his life to that revolver, having pried it from the stiff fingers of a dead British infantry officer in time to shoot and kill a German paratrooper before an MP-40 could be brought to bear and cut him in two. Johnny has inherited it, and has always hated the fact that it allowed his father to die an old and bitter man, rather than as a confused teenager less than fifty miles from the Normandy beachhead.
In that, Johnny thinks, it is symbolic.
Also in that it is the same pistol Johnny used to kill the hateful old man. It is symbolic that way, too. That the same weapon which once saved his life and sentenced an unborn son to a wretched existence would one day take his life from him.
Johnny often thinks in symbolic terms, so he smiles.
Near the heavy-framed revolver lies a semi-rotted cardboard box labeled CALIBRE .455 BALL AMMUNITION. He can hardly read the words now, through the fading threadbare carton, but he knows what they are because he has read them many times, as a boy. He also knows exactly how many are missing and how many remain in the box, how many tiny messengers of death. Or of life, as the case may be.
He remembers thinking, as a boy, that he would like to shoot his father. He remembers the temptation of the grizzled grey hair sticking up from the back of the recliner from which his father ruled their twisted household with an iron-mailed fist and little regard for the feelings of son, daughter, or wife. Especially wife. He remembers the fantasies, the thoughts, the plans.
He remembers the act, and the motion that followed.
Motion purifies.
Now he takes the pistol and the faded box out of the drawer and sits on his one kitchen chair, thinking. He knows that some day it will come to this.
Again.
*
Seven months.
Page nine of the Boise Sun. A minor, sketchy paragraph squeezed in between the obituaries and the auto classifieds, flanked on one-side by garish two-color advertising.
“Convict Flees Med-security Pen - Police begin Manhunt.”
Johnny does not bother to read carefully, or to call in sick. He packs his camping gear and stows it in the trunk of his ancient Ford Cortina. Then he opens the kitchen drawer, where the Webley sits now wiped clean of grease. The pistol calls to him, much as it did once when he was twelve, and has it has once a year since.
Johnny often thinks in symbolic terms, so he smiles.
It’s a chilling smile, he realizes while glancing in the mirror on the way out of his empty apartment.
But, then, it’s a chilly day. Johnny knows the North Woods will have turned by now - maybe they will be bare and cold. He whistles as he packs his trunk.
Motion purifies, and it is time.
*
It was a damp night and the jet-like roar of the nearby stream, a large tributary of the fast-moving Salmon River, was joined by the grumbling of thunder still far off.
He looked up at the night sky and saw faint flashes over the jack and white pines. It’ll be here long before morning, he thought as he waited for his coffee to heat. The fire had died down to a red glow, and the inside of the shelter was warm enough for him to not bother with his down sleeping bag yet. He stuck his hand out and felt the dampness in the air.
Soon. The thunder was an omen in the night. He smiled at himself - that was nice, an omen in the night.
He drank coffee from his canteen cup, relishing the aluminumy taste it gave the strong liquid. His evening’s meal of smoked pork and beans, beef jerky, peanuts, and Snickers bars sat heavily in his stomach. He ventured out of the shelter. A quick search of his pack, which he’d hung from its frame on a pine just outside the tarp, and then he was pouring a sizable dose of dark rum into the coffee, luxuriating in the smell. As he drank the laced coffee, he watched the lightning approach in its inexorable, methodical way.
As soon as it’s over, he thought, Seattle. Get a government job there, maybe. Somehow he knew that things were rushing to some sort of end, that it would be over soon.
He ducked back into the shelter and drank.
The storm was approa
ching much faster than he had thought. He first noticed it when he heard the hissing of rain droplets as they splattered on the coals. There were only a few droplets at first, but a drizzle soon developed. It hadn’t rained at all during his hike through the woods, but now he enjoyed the sound of rain bouncing off the rubberized tarp like a crazed percussionist’s pointless fill. He also enjoyed the electricity that filled the air, and he watched as the lightning and thunder finally coordinated their light and sound show into a single entity.
This is what it means to be alive, he thought. And I am that. He crawled into the sleeping bag and watched as his fire died and sent a final wisp of smoke into the wet sky.
He awoke sometime later.
It was raining steadily, but it was not the rain that woke him. He lay still and listened carefully, noting the pattern of sound made by the rain and trying to separate it from any other sound that did not conform.
There. Footsteps. Through wet undergrowth.
“Hi, Charlie,” he said as the large shadow crossed the open shelter-front. Sporadic flashes and a generally lightening sky formed a growing alloy of light and dark and shadow.
“What the fuck are you doin’ here,” Charlie said. His eyes widened in recognition. He said the words as a statement, a man beyond questions. His thin hair was wet and tangled, and his prison clothes were muddy, stuck to his skin. A small rucksack, probably belonging to some unfortunate hiker, adorned his back. His large frame shook as if feverish, but his eyes had lost none of their hardness.
“When I read you’d broken out, I decided to come and help you,” Johnny said with a forced smile. “I’ve been hiking for a week. I knew you’d head for this place. Our chunk of heaven. So I thought I’d be waiting. It took you a while.”
“Big woods.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t think I’d make it, you know?” Charlie stood awkwardly in the rain. “Still not sure I’m home free.”
Johnny dug the rum flask from beside the sleeping bag. “Want a slug?”
Charlie grinned crookedly and held out his hand. He caught the flask and twisted off the cap. He smelled it and smiled a cold smile.
“I didn’t know you like rum, Johnny-boy,” Charlie said, as he raised the flask to his lips.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Charlie-boy,” Johnny said as he shot Charlie once in the chest. The blast spun him around, limbs flying, and the Webley boomed twice more, its mechanism clicking happily. Charlie was flung ten feet from the shelter, where he crumpled into a shapeless lump. Blood mixed with rum and turned the spongy grass black beneath him. He still held the emptying flask, and he still grinned. Though more crookedly, as if in embarrassed bewilderment. For a second, it was Johnny’s father, lying at the bottom of the stairs, streaks of red on the wall behind him. And all the others, all exactly a year apart, all in different cities. No pattern, except they were all his father, in one way or another.
Charlie had been vindictive and ice-cold, like Johnny’s father.
“Did you think I’d let you hunt me the rest of my life?” Johnny asked the corpse. “Just so you could have your lousy revenge?”
He paused.
“And you would have, wouldn’t you? You knew it, and I knew it. Well, no way, Charlie-boy, no way.”
He spit into the wet firepit.
“And I never did like you calling me that name.” Maybe he would never have made that call, if only Charlie had respected his wishes and called him by his name.
He whistled to himself as he dug a shallow grave with the folding shovel he’d brought just for this purpose.
He wished idly that he’d played along with Charlie, back when he’d been approached. It might have worked. But there was always the chance that Charlie would have wanted it all, not to mention the risk that his motion would be impeded. No, sir, it was much better this way. Problem solved, and now time for motion.
Maybe he’d stay another week in the woods. After that he could hit Seattle and start over.
Again.
He wondered if there were still jobs in the submarine pens, or if they’d been closed in the budget cuts.
He knew, whatever happened, that he’d keep moving.
Motion purifies. He liked the symbolism.
Smiling, he tossed away spadefuls of damp earth.
* * *
MAKE A STONE OF YOUR HEART
I
And so it was that Ethan Keller found himself unhappily negotiating strewn trash and overturned garbage cans on his way to the nearly hidden doorway tucked almost inside the alley that bordered Jefferson and Fourth, an alley he knew wasn’t marked on any roadmap, but which he had been advised to enter at exactly 13:13 p.m.
Barely a few seconds past the appointed minute, and he wasn’t sure but the doorway did seem to just shimmer into his view, but then he realized that it was only a trick of the light, as a lonely beam of muted sunlight shifted and eliminated the grey shadow of the opposite building, revealing the doorway.
He paused to listen. Yes, the scraping footsteps were there, buried next to the sounds of traffic from the faraway street. They stopped. The footsteps often stopped when he did, but once in a while he was able to trick them for a second, stopping before they could. But they would move when he moved again.
He stepped gingerly over a crushed paint can and headed for the doorway, his pace hurried and his heart fluttering as the scraping footsteps picked up again and followed.
Ethan felt his pulse race. This was his last chance.
Was that the hushed gasping of breathing? Rhythmic, regular. Secretive. No, not gasping. Eager, hungry, or perhaps simply labored. He couldn’t tell. Whenever he made up his mind, it seemed the sounds changed or he heard them differently. All he knew was that he had been followed now for months, his mind pushed to the limits of paranoia and his sanity pushed to the brink of nonexistence. All he knew was that he was willing to take anyone’s advice, and that - after the police, three therapists, one private detective, one tarot card reader, and numerous former friends, coworkers and acquaintances -
Ethan ducked his head and made straight for the door, suddenly aware that the footsteps were closer than they had been for a long time, closer even than they had been on the day after the fire, when they’d first come.
The footsteps faded under the sound of his own steps and his gasping as he tried to suck enough air into his lungs. The doorway was just feet away and yet he felt almost as if he stood on a treadmill taking him away from it - at least until his outstretched hand smacked onto the glass pane set into the door, rattling it in its frame. He grasped the door’s old-fashioned handle and twisted this way and that, finally hearing the snap of the mechanism and nearly tearing his arm out of its socket in his hurry to explode into the shop. The door closed behind him even as he felt their breath on his neck.
Hot and ragged.
Sour.
Ethan gasped, refusing to turn around and look at his pursuers. Safe in the knowledge that they would not follow him here. Or anywhere inside. But they would wait for him outside, as they always did.
Embraced by the sudden feeling of safety, temporary though it was, he let his eyes adjust to the dimness and examined his surroundings. Immediately apparent was the fact that there was nothing much to see. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but it wasn’t this. The space was about average for a storefront - a laundry, say, or an accountant’s. Three styleless chairs. A low end table with faded, dog-eared magazines strewn over its scratched top.
A wrought-iron stand offering up a sand-filled ashtray with one lonely butt poking up like a rocket fallen onto a parched desert planet.
Brown-stained light Linoleum flooring peeled back in one corner, where bare wood was visible below. A belly-up cockroach or a shadow in that shape stood out on the scratched wood. A counter, topped with chipped Formica in faded orange, stretched from one end of the room nearly to the other, where a low gate hung slightly askew on less than sturdy hinges. Behind the coun
ter and off to one side was a single doorway holding up a plain wooden door with an old-fashioned ornate knob that had been painted over along with the door, as so often seems to be the case with older properties.
There was nothing else to indicate the sort of business done here, or the sort of clientele, or indeed to indicate anything at all.
Behind him, the door crashed in its frame as a body slammed against it and then rattled the knob furiously. Ethan shrank from the door, backing up until he felt the dusty counter behind him. The shadow behind the glass seemed to waver, bloating, multiple insectoid arms making karate-chop motions as their extremities slid over the glass and over the door with the sound of wet meat smacking a butcher’s block.
Ethan’s hands went to his face and he cowered helplessly until the sounds abated and the shadows seemed to melt away.
He turned and stared at the counter. As his breathing rate slowly returned to normal, he felt a warm glow suffuse his features. Wondered if there were a hidden camera to record his sudden embarrassment. Could he have been set up for some sort of elaborate joke? The whole situation - the advice he had taken, desperately - smacked of Twilight Zone episode craziness, the sort of thing that couldn’t happen outside the confines of a television show. Couldn’t happen because if it did it would test the boundaries of sanity.
But the boundaries of Ethan’s sanity had been stretched already, years ago, so he shook off his embarrassment and turned toward the counter. He noticed that it wasn’t completely bare - there was a metal bell for customers to notify clerks of their presence. Was he a customer? Was that how he would describe himself? He felt flush, painfully aware of the doorway behind the counter and the doorway behind him.
There really wasn’t any choice now. He could still hear them outside, their swirling and hovering, their eagerness to latch onto him again, their voices tearing into his brain. This was the final choice, really, before opening his father’s elegant rosewood case and cradling its cold contents in his hand.
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