by Brad Ashlock
Until dusk, Naumkin went back and forth from his den to the living room and to the window in the guestroom overlooking the field. Before retiring for the night, he called Dudley again. Meeko had yet to be found. Police and DNR were combing the woods for her. They had found her tracks leading from one of the backdoors, around the house, and then they seemed to just disappear. No one could explain it; it was as if the wind had just picked her up and blew her away like a fallen leaf. She could be anywhere out there in the cold. The December night would not be forgiving.
Naumkin guiltily pulled his blanket up to his chin and closed his eyes. He heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime eleven times. He hadn’t stayed up this late since the night Jenny had died. He slipped into sleep. He was lying on a grassy hill above a deep green English countryside. The clouds overhead moved like sped up film, gray with internal flashes of purple lightning. The wind felt young yet cool, like air from spring and winter blowing together. He heard someone climbing the hill toward him from behind. He didn’t turn around; he waited for the person to come into view. It was the squaw (as he imagined her) from Warpath. He sat up and turned to face her. He could see himself, now, too. He looked young again. His hands were smooth and steady. He looked up to the squaw and asked, “What do you want?”
When she spoke, she did so with Jenny’s voice. “In the pines,” she said, pointing at him before revolving around to aim her finger down to the countryside, “where the river dies.”
With her last word, the countryside instantly transformed into the area of dead trees and hanging vines in Dudley’s woods where Naumkin had meditated. The squaw was gone, but Naumkin was not alone: there was the powerful odor of pine wafting from the east beyond the hill, and there was a man standing between two rotten trees surrounded by five bullmastiffs. He was dressed in a black suit with a white tie that almost made him look priestly. His feet were shoulder-width apart and his hands came together in front of him on a cherry cane topped with a bronze falcon head. He stared down at Naumkin with pink eyes that burned with hate beneath the cocked brim of a derby.
“I’m here,” the albino said.
“Here to what?”
“Destroy you!”
Naumkin sat bolt upright in bed and clutched his chest. His heart seemed to be missing beats. He couldn’t catch his breath. He sat in the dark panting, wiped the thick sticky layer of sweat off his brow and, finally able to breathe, turned on the lamp on the nightstand. The radio clock beside the lamp read 11:42. Perplexed, he squinted his left eye and cocked his head to the side. He was amazed he could have such a vivid nightmare in such a short time. He had fallen asleep a few minutes after eleven o’clock (at least). It hadn’t even felt like a dream; it felt like going to sleep in a snug bed and awakening instantly in a slaughterhouse. What was it the squaw had said? It was a pseudo-rhyme…yes: In the pines where the river dies. The squaw had spoken with Jenny’s voice. The combination of the clichéd fictional character and his late wife’s voice felt perverted and dirty. The voice had been so clear, so full of angst and purpose. Why couldn’t he see her, too? It all would have been worth it—even the albino and the bullmastiffs—if he could hear and see his Jenny again.
Naumkin got out of bed and traipsed to the bathroom. He dug his heart medication out of the cabinet against the wall mirror, popped a pill into his mouth, and took a gulp of water directly from the faucet. He wetted his face with a washcloth, and returned to bed. He hoped he wouldn’t have any more nightmares; he hoped the little girl would be found; he hoped he’d see and hear Jenny again, soon.
* * *
Over the next few days, Naumkin followed the newspaper reports about the missing Dudley girl. The current Governor owed Gordon Dudley a few favors; Dudley cashed them in. The FBI were doing footwork, interviewing all recently released pedophiles in all cities surrounding Rogue. An army of private detectives worked behind the scenes and a two million dollar reward for any information leading to Meeko’s safe return was posted in all major area newspapers.
Because of the upcoming holidays, Naumkin wouldn’t be meeting with Cal Burgess or Jeffrey Hore for the next couple of weeks. If anyone deserved a vacation, it was the Burgess kid. Cal’s father, Alec, was an ex-marine officer who had gone bonkers in the Vietnam War. Patriots frightened Naumking. People could kill over flags: Old Glory, the Hammer and Sickle, and even the silly Don’t Tread on Me banner.
Alec Burgess wanted his boy to be as strong as he thought he himself had been. Naumkin thought the boy was stronger. War was a last recourse, an actual failure that couldn’t be won, only salvaged. He remembered Sun Tzu: “All war is based on deception.” It’s not just based on it, it is deception through and through, from the bullet-tattered flags, heads blown off bodies, and children burned alive, it is a pack of lies and deceits. It’s a deception that war serves sane ends. How could any idea remotely sane produce such horrors as war? Justifications were deceptions, propagandas were deceptions, and patriotisms were deceptions. Of course, one had to defend one’s homeland. That was sane; it was the Invasion that was insane. The Occupation was madness. The Installation of Puppet governments was lunacy, and the masking of words like greed by words like freedom, psychotic. Alec Burgess, Naumkin mused, thought chess was sharpening Cal’s mind for battle in the business world. The Game of Kings, to Mr. Burgess’s way of thinking, was a tool, not a thing in and of itself worthy of dedication.
Chess was a model for war. Two armies collide until peace is secured through domination or attrition. Was Naumkin a hypocrite, hating war while simultaneously mastering its strategies, wielding in miniature its deceptions? He had to admit, despite his disdain for war, deep down, he was a warrior. He had to survive by its deceptions, by its crooked paths that lead to life for one more day, one more hour, one more moment. He was a survivor because he knew the art of war. It was hardwired in his brain. He was a warrior. He hated war.
The paradox whirled in his head as he drove the ATV up the pile of boulders and down into Dudley’s woods. He parked at the edge of the creek, dismounted, and put his gloves and balaclava in his coat pockets. The dog paw prints from Saturday had melted away, but there were new tracks, human boot tracks. Searchers for Meeko Dudley had been here this morning or yesterday. It was a warm day for Christmas, but at least there was still snow on the ground. Where was that little girl? The papers had said she was only eight years old. Naumkin shook his head and sniffled before climbing the steep hill.
He remembered the dream he had had three days ago: the squaw in the English countryside cutting to an albino in the area of dead trees in Dudley’s woods. He had thrown Warpath into the garbage for giving him nightmares, and now he would avoid the area of rotten trees, dangling vines, and the heavy pine-sticky air. He stuck to his usual route, and cut through the woods in a westerly direction until coming to a clearing where power pylons hummed along the edge of a half-frozen marsh. Dead cattails stuck straight up from the surrounding weeds. To the left and right of the power pylons, dipping hills scarred by dirt bike treads rolled on and on like the back of an enormous dragon.
He trudged up and down several hills before meeting a young man and woman walking toward him. The woman had been crying. The man greeted Naumkin somberly. His nose, cheeks, and ears were red. His brown unwashed hair was matted to his head as if he had been wearing a hat for a long time.
“Hello,” Naumkin replied.
The young woman cocked her head on hearing his accent. “Are you my father’s neighbor? The chess teacher?”
Naumkin affirmed that he was and told them his name.
“I’m Laura Russell.”
“John Russell,” her husband said.
So the missing girl had brought her parents together again, at least to search for her. “I’m so sorry for you. Every few hours, I look out my back window at the field, and try to find her red coat.”
“Thank you, Tigran,” Laura said.
He nodded. “Have you learned anything new? I’ve been following th
e paper.”
John said, “Nothing new. There’s no way someone nabbed her from her bed. They found her footprints. If she was out in the woods, someone could have grabbed her, but who would be out there waiting for a girl to come along?”
“A chance encounter with an opportunistic criminal,” Naumkin said. He watched the mother’s face become distraught, so he quickly added that he didn’t think that likely happened; Meeko would be found. Maybe she hitched a ride to Grand Rapids, or even walked there. Naumkin said she’d be found in a few days.
This didn’t seem to relieve much stress from Laura’s face, but she smiled just the same and said, “You’re a kind man.” Her husband nodded and they continued down the pylon-speared hills.
Naumkin continued in the opposite direction for a mile before nearing a farmer’s property, and cut northeast through the woods again until coming to the barbed wire fence and the field of white and brown. He had to take this slight detour back to the ATV when he followed this route because the shortcut through the woods was too thick with brambles. He walked along the tree line to the pile of boulders, went around that, and approached the four-wheeler.
There was a handful of pine needles on the seat. He stared at them in astonishment and looked around into the woods, not knowing what for: the lost Dudley girl playing a prank, fairies, bullmastiffs, a squaw and an Albino? Was he dreaming now? Had he ever awoken from the first nightmare? He brushed the seat with an angry sweep and winced in pain. A couple pine needles stuck from his palm. He plucked them out, leaving tiny red dots in the meat of his hand. He quickly checked for odd tracks around his ATV. There were none.
After donning his gloves and balaclava, he started for the ATV and bolted up the rock pile and out of the woods. For the first time, he pushed the ATV to forty miles per hour. The white and the brown blurred beneath him. Now a good quarter of a mile away from Dudley’s woods and the accursed pine needles, Naumkin relaxed his thumb on the throttle and coasted down the path that led back to his house. After he parked the four-wheeler down in the pole barn, he made his way back up to the garage only to hear a car coming up the drive.
Sissy and her two daughters, Veronica and Leslie, stumbled from the car.
“Merry Christmas!” Sissy said, arms wide. Naumkin embraced his stepdaughter and then her children. They had brought a honey baked ham, a dish of deviled eggs, and a card. Naumkin opened the envelope. Inside the card was an inserted picture of Sissy and her girls; the front of the card depicted a deer leaping amid tinseled, star-topped pines.
They stayed about an hour. It was a nice visit, but Naumkin had trouble playing host. He was distracted by what had happened to his ATV. There weren’t any pine trees anywhere near the creek, and the needles had been thoughtfully piled on his seat. Could a bird have done it? That was nonsense; birds made nests, not piles. And if they did pile pine needles of all things, they certainly wouldn’t do it on the seat of an All-Terrain vehicle. Someone had put those pine needles there. A terrible thought struck him. What if there weren’t really any pine needles there? What if he was finally losing it? His mind was turning inside out. It was shot full of Alzheimer’s and dementia, making him so confused he didn’t know what was a dream and what was reality.
He swallowed hard and looked at his palm. The two little red needle pricks seemed to glow against his white flesh. It was real, it had happened, strange and inexplicable as it was, it had occurred. Two little pricks like eyes that knew no lies…to the pines where the river dies. He wrung his hands together, a worried smile dancing across his face. He remembered the Ukrainian firs. Naumkin bowed his head and felt hot tears stream down his cheeks. To the pines where the river dies, and the father dies, and the child dies. Rust colored trunks, the bark flaky and oozing with sap, had seemed to burgeon from the earth, from the snow and dirt, from the white and brown only to mock what happened below them on that harsh winter day in 1941. He remembered the silence between the pines, that incessant sap-laden silence. He had shattered that maddening quiet. He had pulled the trigger.
He wiped his eyes of tears now and sat back in the divan. He fumbled for the remote control and turned on the television. He flipped through the satellite stations absentmindedly for an hour. There was nothing on. He wished he had a L’Amour western to read. Oh, what the hell; the squaw had been the only good part of his strange dream. It was a waste to just toss it out. He got up, went to the trash under the kitchen sink, and retrieved Robert Montgomery’s Warpath. Naumkin, after wiping jelly from the cover, returned to the divan, flipped the brittle, musty pages to Chapter Six, and began to read.
About an hour later, he stopped on this sentence: The Indians were bound for Pinehill Cemetery where they would make their plans about how to stop Sam Duncan. Naumkin reread the line. It was a normal enough kind of coincidence; your kid gets into Yale, so now you notice every bit of news about Yale, the world seems flooded with Yale; you plan a flight from L.A to Japan and all you hear about are plane crashes over the Pacific. So now he was noticing pines and Indians everywhere. He had had a scare, remembered some unpleasant events, and now his mind was hyper-aware of anything relating to the recent weirdness. It was an increased sensitivity, like when he meditated.
He shoved the book under the divan and went to the guest room to look out at the field. Dusk was approaching. The sky was bruising; it was blue over the field, but red and purple were creeping eastward. The wind was picking up. It bent the trees toward the field and Dudley’s woods, making them appear to be pointing that way. If that girl was still out there, she must be dead. The night had been far too cruel for a little girl to survive. That fate might be preferable from being snatched by some lunatic who could do God knew what to her. If she were dead, Naumkin prayed she had died without pain. He shut the blind, headed up the spiral staircase to his study, and worked until ten.
He went to bed and quickly fell asleep. The heavy clouds were moving in fast-forward again. They were big, lumbering cumuli charging toward the horizon like angry bull elephants. The squaw was sitting next to him on the grassy hill. In her lap was an hourglass, but it wasn’t filled with sand, it was filled with pine needles. She didn’t turn it over, she just raised it up and handed it to Naumkin. He took it and watched the pine needles flow like sand to the bottom glass. It was about halfway through, indicating what, he didn’t know. He tried to flip the hourglass over, but it felt magnetized to the ground and wouldn’t revolve.
“To the pines where the river dies,” the squaw said with Jenny’s urgent voice, pointing this time to the hourglass, then spinning around to point at the English countryside.
Naumkin braced himself for the landscape to blip to the dead trees and the albino, but instead, the squaw stood and headed down the hill. She had been sitting on a red, shiny bundle. Naumkin set the hourglass down and picked up the bundle; it was a child’s red winter coat. He spread it open and searched the cotton white lining for bloodstains. There was nothing there. He put the coat to his face and inhaled. He could smell her, a sweet little girl’s scent, peppermint candy and strawberry shampoo.
The smell faded along with the dream. He awoke that morning forgetting it all until coming downstairs and seeing the corner of Warpath peeking from under the divan. What was happening to him? To the pines where the river dies? There was no river near the pines in the Ukraine or near the pines in Dudley’s woods. Besides, authorities went over every inch of Dudley’s land. They had used bloodhounds, search and rescue choppers, and even had uninvited self-proclaimed psychics wandering the property with camera crews. The girl was gone, she was not in the woods, no, no, no, she was not in the pines where the river lives or dies, or even exists. She wasn’t there he repeated to himself.
He was afraid to go into the pines. He hated the pines and he refused to visit them again. It was too painful, too dreadful. He wouldn’t do it. He was too old. Besides, the little girl wasn’t there. Couldn’t be there. It was impossible. He was seventy-two years old, half blind from squinting at ches
smen for fifty odd years, had a bad knee, and a heart condition. He was not going to go wandering between pine trees where the local pack of feral dogs hung out in wait just for something stupid, old, and Ukrainian to pounce upon. Fear for the missing child along with general holiday stress was giving him nightmares. That was all that was happening. It was all in his head. The paw prints had a thousand rational explanations; the pile of needles on his seat, though bizarre, could be dealt with as well: on his ride to the field he had brushed against a pine tree, the hood of his jacket caught a bunch of needles as he passed the branch, and they spilled out when he got off the four-wheeler. Checkmate.
He breathed a sigh of relief. It took a little fear to start up the ol’ logic machine, but once it began crunching numbers, everything fell into its proper place. It was terrible that the girl had disappeared, but, really, what could he do about it? The recent weirdness really wasn’t that weird. Paw prints in the forest? What an amazing event! And pine needles? In a woods with pines nearby? You must be joking! Never in a million years! Tigran shook his head, smiling at himself. If Jenny could see him now : frightened by a goddamn pile of pine needles and a couple bad dreams.