by Taylor Brown
A scrape again. He ran for the window. He was afraid now, truly, like he hadn’t been in a long time. So afraid he forgot his shirt.
***
He should have seen it coming, the storm. He knew, but he didn’t think. They’d rode out at dawn, as was their custom, and he’d brought up the rear of the column, as he always did. They rode in file through the woods, old to young, and sometimes he wondered if that was his future there before him. His evolution. They rode lower in the saddle, the older they were. The sadder. At least the ones he cared for. The ones like him.
He’d already felt it inside him. The way it haunted him. The nameless hurt, like a poison in the blood. Like your body rejecting it. Your mind. It was something you couldn’t get out.
But now, but now he had this. This hope in the satchel. Because he wasn’t only going to give them what they needed for the baby. He had been to the edge of it, to exile. The night before he had. And now he was going to choose it. He was going to be part of them. They would want him. He knew the woods, he was good with a gun. And he wouldn’t have to be this anymore. This thing. He would be free.
When the trail forked at the old snowed-under schoolbus, where they could choose to hunt north or south, the column went south. Gilead, he went north. It would take them some time to notice. Too long. He would be away. They would backtrack, but it was starting to snow now. His tracks would be gone. He would have simply disappeared. No one would mourn. His parents were gone, of course, long gone. Maybe one or two of the girls, the ones who made eyes at him and came to his room at night. But he didn’t want them. He wanted the clear eyes, the unbroken heart. He wanted to be like the snow. That’s why it was so pretty. It was pure and it was clean. Not like him.
He was a mile down the north road, toward the cabin, when he realized his mistake. The snow was falling heavier now. When he stopped the horse he could hear the whisper of it in the trees, on the road. It was telling him something. That it wasn’t going to stop.
But he kept riding. The world beginning to close down on him. He might have turned back. But he knew he couldn’t. He could feel it. Something he’d felt before. That he was being followed. Shadowed. He looked over his shoulder, twice, expecting dark shapes in his wake. In a world gone white, ghosts must be the color of shadow. But there was nothing. Just the snow coming down slantwise and slow. He thought it must be his nerves.
So he kept on.
“We’ll make it,” he told Camo. “Don’t worry.”
It got worse. The snow coming down in curtains now, ledges. He was so happy for the blighted wood. It meant they weren’t lost. He rode to the edge of the ridge and looked down into the valley of the cabin. It was nearly obscured in the wind and snow, just a dark hulk—a shadow—in the bottomland. One second you could see it, the next you couldn’t.
He rubbed Camo’s neck.
“We made it,” he told her.
Just then the world erupted. Shots and screams, bulb-like flashes in the snow-laden air. Ambush. The battle swirling behind them, around them, violent shapes rearing suddenly out of the miasma. Tway, staggering, holding his gut. A red patch flowering under his hand. In his other, a pistol. He looked up at Gilead.
“Betrayed,” he said.
He raised the pistol.
Camo wickered and reared. Gilead was thrown from the saddle, crashing softly, strangely, into the down-like layer of newfall. Then he was up and scrambling, falling, rolling down the ridge into the valley.
They’d followed him. They’d known. He didn’t know how. But he could hear the Navy man’s big gun booming through them. Killing them.
He surged through the snow, knee-deep, toward where the cabin should be. Swinging his arms this way, that way, battling the snow every step. The world blown sideways now, all white. The shots and screams muffled strangely, distorted, whipped in and around him, beside him one moment and faraway the next.
In all this, in all this there was still one good thing he could do. He had the satchel clutched close to his chest.
For him, he thought. For him.
He broke through the cabin door. It came down with him, and then he was up again, in the dark room of a day before. She was there, in the bed, the baby swaddled heavily now against the cold.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He held out the satchel. She started to reach for it, but froze, her head cocked, her hand shaking in midair.
“No,” she said. “Oh no.”
And then he heard them. Dogs. So many of them, their barks and yelps all come together like a single guttural thing, a giant beast roaring through the woods untamed. Unkillable. You could hear the blood-shrieks of the dying. The men, the horses.
“Take him,” she said.
He looked down. She was holding out the baby.
“What?”
“The roof,” she said. “It’s the only place.”
He was holding the baby before he knew it.
“What about you?” he said.
“The meds were never for him,” she said.
And that’s when he saw it: her leg. She’d pulled the covers back, and he almost couldn’t look. The teeth-marks were clear, on the inside of her thigh, crowned in discolored bruises and oozing darkly, blackly, and stretching outward from the bite the infection, the sick cloud of it under her skin, green-rotted and foul. He could smell it, it was so strong.
There was a shotgun too, a wingshooting double-barrel sawn short for close-in work. He realized she’d had it on him every moment.
“Go,” she said. “You have to go.”
He did. He went out of the door and around the house to where there was an old barrel that had once held whiskey or water. He held the baby close, as he had the satchel, and climbed first onto the barrel and then onto the roof, kicking the barrel over as he did. He wasn’t sure if the old rafters would hold, but they did. Seconds later the dogs appeared out of the snow, a dark mass of them like a tide. They were of a color, as he remembered them, ash gray, but the pack had grown, multiplied, so that they flooded the valley. They went through the door and he heard the first barrel, the second.
She didn’t scream.
And then they wanted the roof. They crowded the walls, leaping and snapping. A sea of them, red-mouthed, their wolf-teeth bared. They had been pets once, he’d been told. These killers. Sedate on their leashes and in their crates. Heeling when told, shaking hands for kisses and treats.
The cabin shook with their fury, shuddered, a hundredfold moiling of beasts throwing themselves into its walls, rib-boned and desperate. How long could the rotted old timbers hold?
He held the baby close. It was so warm, and it didn’t cry. He could feel something emanating from it, not just warmth but something else. A power, like something atomic. He could feel it go into him. Into his blood. Deeper. Down into the meat of him. The core. The eyes looked up at him, and he looked back, clear-eyed. Full of wonder.
He was still looking when the first shot from the big .308 came streaking out of a tree on the ridge and brought down a dog on the edge of the pack. Immediately the others descended upon it, tearing it limb from limb, and by then another had been picked off, this one farther from the cabin. Then another, another, and before long the dogs were far out into the valley, devouring themselves in a red hysteria, like a great wound in the snow.
Gilead came down off of the roof and began making the long walk to the trees out of which he’d come. He clutched the baby close against his chest, and he could feel it pulsing, pulsing, as if it were his own heart.
RIVER OF FIRE
The roar of outboards broke the marshland hush, throttles to the stops. The “No Wake” sign hung slightly crooked from a barnacled post in the marina, the red letters smeared by years of salt water but still readable. Hunkered over a flat tire in his shop by the river, Hector Francis could identify the boat without looking: MVP, a tournament kingfish boat helmed by the big league pitcher who lived two miles up the co
ast. Built on a 36-foot offshore hull, the boat was propelled by dual straight-six engines, 300 horsepower apiece, the throaty howl of them unmistakable in the otherwise still afternoon. The boat boomed full song through the No Wake Zone without slowing, whipping whitecaps from tidal blackwater.
Nobody bats an eye, thought Hector, shaking his shock of red hair. His own 13.5-foot sea kayak could cut silently through the water, sleek as a minnow in aquamarine blue. To each his own—but the breakage bothered him. The ballplayer, however, had become the pride of Hampton Island. His very presence elevated the price of real estate and lured tourists to the riverine resort that supported the income of most residents. So people kept their mouths shut, Hector included.
He’d had but one encounter with him. The pitcher had twins, girls, and at the beginning of summer, they had come to the shop to rent bicycles. They were eight or ten years old, Hector estimated, and quite cute—much cuter than their progenitor. Despite his seven-figure contract, the big-leaguer had balked at the posted price of rentals. Called them criminal. Hector, who’d inherited the bicycle shop two years prior, adjusted prices according to inflation, no higher. To insinuate otherwise was just short of fighting words. Not that Hector himself was a fighting man—far from it.
As the wail diminished into the distance, destined for open water, Hector stuck his tire tool back between the rim and rubber of the bicycle he was repairing, one of his rentals. A one-man operation, his establishment rented bikes to tourists from the big resort that fronted the river. His were big pondering bikes of lugged steel; they hummed quietly down island bike paths, greased to run without creak or clatter.
Hector liked that, the quiet. Thin as a reed, waif-like, with skin the translucent hue of a milk carton, he’d always found the world of senses intrusive. Sunlight cut through him like shallow water and loud noise addled him right to the bone, scattering his thoughts like a school of baitfish. Internal combustion was the worst. So he preferred human-powered locomotion. That seemed only logical for an island not ten miles long, not five miles wide.
Lucky for him, most of the tourists thought the same.
He heard the bell jingle and hastened back to the storefront, assuming position behind the register. In walked a family of five. They looked around at the bikes, mouths agape.
“This the yacht club?” asked the father.
Hector got that question a lot.
“No sir,” he told them, “it’s right around back.”
“Oh,” said the man, “thank you.” He and his family fumbled out the door backwards.
The yacht club inhabiting the other half of the building shared the same square footage as the bike shop: not much. It was not a yacht club at all in the traditional sense, but an office that offered fishing trips and nature rides to guests of the resort. No fancy dinners or cigar rooms, though it did sell knit shirts with an embroidered shield of arms.
Hector went back to the shop and began prying the tire off the wheel with a pair of steel-girded levers. Inside, the tube was fully flat. He pulled it free, reinflated, and then began to brush the long black tube along the sensitive skin of his cheek, slowly, until he felt the tiny whisper of leaking air. He saw by the slit-shape of the puncture that it was only a pinch, the tire itself not compromised. He patched the tube, placed it back inside the knobbed rubber, and kneaded the tire back onto the rim by hand.
Afterwards, Hector attempted to bolt the wheel right back onto the front forks but failed, putting the wheel onto the truing stand instead, his head hung low in resignation. It was a habit he couldn’t shake. Spinning the rim, he peered along the black tread for the slightest quiver of warping. This one wobbled faintly, a millimeter’s breadth. The imperfection was hardly enough for the most discriminating French racer to notice, let alone an overweight Virginian riding off the previous night’s shrimp and grits. But Hector saw it.
Turning slightly on his stool, he opened a drawer behind him, no need to look, and got out his spoke wrench. If nothing else, his two hundred rental bikes gave the truest ride of any in the county, every one of their alloy wheels made straight through long hours of balancing each and every 10-gauge spoke to unquivering perfection. When the bell rung to announce the next set of customers, Hector did not even hear them, sunk as he was in the nature of his work.
The next morning was Saturday, the week’s mad rush of weekenders. Hector filled out hard paper tickets for each set of riders, the same analog system perfected three decades prior. Then he doled out the bikes one by one, sizing inseams to frame geometries, fine-tuning by seat height adjustment. Test rides were taken; extension of leg at nadir of pedal stroke analyzed. Hector had once hired local high schoolers to assist him, boys three-fourths his age, but they had no regard for fit or trim. So it was just him, his exposed flesh lathered with sunblock, his hands strong upon adjustment levers and hand tools. The two o’clock lull gave him time for lunch, a brown bag of sandwich, apple, and cookie he’d made himself. He made six on Sundays, saving one day for lunch out. The phone rang. On the other end was Alfred, king drunkard of the yacht fleet.
“Hector, you ain’t even gonna believe this.”
“Believe what?”
“I been around the water a long time, son, and I never seen the likes of this.”
“Of what?”
“You ain’t even...I swear.”
Hector scratched his head. “Well,” he said, “give her a try, why don’t you?”
“Damn—I got customers. Just go out to the dock and see for yourself. Over the edge near the fish trough. Gotta go.” He hung up.
Hector held the dead phone away from himself a moment and examined it, pursing his lips. The he shrugged and grabbed his keys from their hook under the counter.
A white gate, barred prison-like, guarded entry to the marina, but it was wide open at this hour. Not far beyond it hovered the tin box of the fish trough, irrigated by a garden hose. A clear sluice of water ran glistening down the center groove, channeled for clearage of guts and blood, and cascaded over the edge in a clean arc to the shallows. Hector stuck his hands in his old khakis and peered over the edge, ten feet down. There in the shallows, in hardly three feet of water, lay a manatee floating belly up, her ponderous side fins keeping her mouth positioned right under the falling stream of hosewater, her mouth slurping open and closed, drinking.
“Sweet Jesus.”
Sea cows, they were often called, and the Conquistadors had thought them mermaids. Hector had never comprehended that belief, big and bloated as they were. Never had he been so close to one. She was more than ten feet long and must have weighed close to a thousand pounds. Her wide-set eyes were black and friendly, her dog-like snout bristly and jowled, her massive body haloed in concentric rings of surface water. No spout like that of a whale or dolphin, Hector watched her nostrils flare wide, breathing in the familiar fashion of a land mammal.
Not really pretty enough for envy, he saw, and not quick enough for meanness, she floated there in the tidals like God’s very own idea of innocence being fed, the garden hose giving suck as if mankind made pap of his ingenuity. Hector felt as if he could stand there on those wooden planks and watch her for the rest of his life, his world silent but for the low murmur of running water and the hush of their common breath.
But then the manatee rolled slightly to keep the flow, and in doing so revealed a pink worm of scar—fresh—that curled snake-like around her body. Then she rolled still more fully, letting the cold current run down her back, and Hector could hardly keep down a hot bubble in his stomach. The wound was so fat, the girth of a boa constrictor at least, and it raked her humped back as but one of countless scars, chalk-white cravats of churned flesh. Tears stung in his ducts, trembling in saline fury.
Hector looked out at the river, a faint rippling surface that belied what universe thrived beneath. Organisms of alien design, jellied and luminous of tentacle, jetted through the depths by strange modes of propulsion. The jelled grotesqueries might be built for eternal
darkness, but not the manatee, a sea mammal evolved of prehistoric land mammoths with four legs. Like him, she saw in color, and Hector worried how she could find her way in the brackish obscurity of marsh water, the world of sight but a foot-length of green-brown submersion chock-full of tidal minutiae, weedgrass, and six-hole soda can binders of white plastic. Hector had not been victim to the squeeze of sweet-panged talons for more than a decade, but he was now. His heart pounded like a bloodied fist, his throat constricted to the tiniest jet of air, and he was gripped by an insane urge to vault the railing into the blackwater beside her.
Just then he heard the squeal of children’s voices. The pitcher’s twin daughters, prepped and dressed identically in pink sundresses, came barreling toward the dock, skirts billowing like blown roses. Alfred and their mother followed behind. The pitch of their happy shrieks made him cringe, shrink, and Hector was drowned suddenly in the righteous flood of his own possession. Backing away to give them right-of-way, he bumped into the fish trough. His hand, steadying him, groped the flat handle of the fillet knife left there for charter captains. With no thought of why, he gripped the hardwood, either side screwed to a long hone of slightly curved steel. Behind him it gleamed like a scimitar, though his body blocked sight of it. The children would never have noticed anyway, enthralled as they were by the swelling proximity of the sea mammal.
The two of them leaned far over the water between slats of deckwood, chattering in voices strange to him. Hector thought he might be able to decipher the shapes of their words should his mind allow it, but he did not listen. Instead he watched their splayed fingers grope toward the animal. He was not going to use the knife—never—but the blade lent him the full swell of guardianship—enough to share his bounty.
Alfred and the girls’ mother—the pitcher’s wife—arrived.
“There she is, Mrs. Slocum,” said Alfred, pointing as if she did not readily notice the phantasm of marine biology floating right beneath them.