by Dennis Yates
“You did good Ann,” he’d said. “Real good.”
Ann had watched him reach down and nudge the pistol further under the car seat. She didn’t think the cop had bought her act at all. Yet for some reason he hadn’t turned it into a big deal. Maybe he wasn’t expecting to see her when he’d pulled Duane over for speeding so late on a school night, in a town where they didn’t even live. Perhaps he’d just felt sorry for her.
“You said you’d take me to Dairy Queen. And that was two hours ago.”
A smile had ruptured below Duane’s straggly moustache. He’d still had most of his perfect teeth then, was fanatical about flossing. When Duane smiled like that she knew he was thinking about other things. He could talk to her while seeming unaware of her, as if she were as invisible as all the others he’d begun talking to when he thought she wasn’t listening.
They’d watched as the cop came by for a final pass. Ann had reached for the door. She’d made up her mind that she was going to flag him down and confess everything-that she wasn’t sick, that Duane sometimes made her wait in the car all by herself late a night.
“Please darling,” Duane had told her. He’d caught her wrist roughly. His fingers had burned like rope. “You don’t really want that man coming back to talk to me.”
He’d watched the cop cruise by and laughed. Ann’s wrist was reddened after he let it go. She’d slid away from him as far as she could while he started the Camaro, salt worn and more the straw color of piss than the canary yellow it had once been. The ocean air ate away at everything she’d thought, including some people’s minds. She hated the hoarse sound of the engine when he revved it, how he always loved to leave behind a patch of burning rubber as if he was some kind of badass and not a bottom-feeding drug dealer. She could see that he was worried. His face was a sheen of sweat and he stank like fertilizer and it made Ann gag. She’d had to lower her window for some air. I won’t have to fake being sick, I’ll be sick.
“You’ve got to hold it just a little longer, Ann. We need to get on the freeway before that cop comes around again.”
“He’s not coming back. You say that every time.”
“I swear I could almost read what he was thinking when he went past. Couldn’t you?”
“No, Duane.”
“I guess we’ll find out little girl. But I still think there’s something in his gut that isn’t sitting right and I bet you he’s trying to come up with a reason to pop my trunk.”
“He’s gone,” Ann said. “He doesn’t care …”
Duane drove fast when he thought he was being followed, which was usually most of the time. Closer to Traitor Bay he knew the cops and they mostly left him alone. But Portland was always too big for Duane. He felt exposed, couldn’t maintain his 360- degree vision without a couple bumps up the nose to keep him alert. Lately the stuff had started to show its side effects. It made him think he was clairvoyant.
Chapter 26
Sometimes they’d meet people in an all night restaurant or a bowling alley and Duane wouldn’t make her stay in the car. If he was trying to impress, he’d make a show of spoiling her-of buying her all the chocolate shakes or fries she wanted or handing over money for arcade games without complaining. To Duane Ann’s face blindness made her the perfect partner in crime. He took comfort in the fact that if the police ever made Ann stare at a book of mug shots they wouldn’t have much luck.
Before James and Ann moved back from Portland, Duane had sold the house and was living out of a cheap motel along 101 with an addict girlfriend who would one day sell him out. Ann was living with her aunt and helping with the store, trying to bring some stability back to her life. She didn’t have much to do with Duane but it still hadn’t stopped him from coming by the store to try and talk to her. The town was growing weary of him too. He owed a lot of people money and the interest was costing him in teeth.
Despite Ann’s warnings, James began hanging around with Duane and his girlfriend Traci, mostly because he didn’t have many friends left in Traitor Bay and Duane always had plenty of pot to share. Traci was well known by the Traitor police for disorderly conduct but was never charged. They usually drove her back to the motel or called Duane to pick her up. Sheriff Dawkins warned Duane that he didn’t want to see her doing it anymore so on the nights that he went to Portland he made sure he left her heavily sedated.
One afternoon James talked Ann into going trout fishing with him and Duane far up Traitor River. Ann agreed so long as she could drive her own car. She didn’t trust Duane on the hairpin mountain roads, never knew if he’d be too buzzed to drive safely. She could tell she’d hurt Duane’s feelings but he’d said nothing. James rode with her and for several miles they followed the yellow Camaro on roads leading away from the river and cut past empty cow pastures and old barns being torn apart by blackberry vine. Where the sagging barbed wire fences ended the county land began-crisscrossed with forest roads knifed down to the clay substratum that recorded a tapestry of deer and tire tracks. Duane smoked his tires at this point and roared on ahead, passed a camper trailer with two dogs gnashing their teeth and disappeared around a sharp bend in the road where the rocky shoulder was marked by wooden crosses and kitschy shrines of plastic flowers and deflated balloons.
The river reappeared again at the bottom of a steep embankment, narrow now and shimmering like silver coins flowing from an upended sack. Light penetrating through rifts in the thick canopy showed pale green water braided with pearl foam. After the road climbed higher and leveled out, the river spread open again and moved slower. On a treeless acre they saw a cedar shingled building sitting near the edge of the bank, a cloud of wood smoke curling between the vehicles parked in the graveled lot. Two pickup trucks sat with drying crusts of mud, a tan Cadillac with mildew-blackened roof rot they knew belonged to an ex-minister who’d fallen on hard times. Duane’s Camaro was parked there too, fishing rods poking out the backseat window.
Ann had immediately pulled onto the next shoulder and stopped.
“Shit. I didn’t agree to this …”
“It’s going to be okay,” James said. “A couple drinks first isn’t going to hurt nobody.”
“I didn’t want to go fishing with that fool in the first place. I was only trying to be nice. Thought I’d surprise Kate with some rainbows for dinner.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on him. We’ve all got our problems to deal with.”
“Well I’m glad to see the two of you have grown so close. Maybe he’ll give you a job as his lookout and you’ll actually get paid.”
“I know it was wrong what he did back then. But I think he’s really sorry about it. I know he wants to patch things up with you.”
“Give me a break. Duane is a classic narcissist. In his world we’re nothing but paper cutouts and you know it.”
When they’d walked in he was already holding court. A double shot of Cuervo glittered in front of him while he sucked at a Marlboro. His captive audience pretended to be attentive, on the off chance that Duane was flush and would soon be buying drinks for the privilege. What they didn’t know was that Duane was expecting them to spot him a few. The bartender, a big sullen man whom Ann had seen walking his dog on the beach while she was running, took little effort to hide his wariness. Well informed of his customer’s sketchy behavior, he’d seemed readied at first to punish Duane for the slightest infraction. But it was Sunday night and the bar was dead, would be until ladies night on Tuesday-not that there were a lot of women willing to make the trip out here. So long as he pays his tab, let the guy bullshit as much as he wants.
When it didn’t look like Duane was going to stop drinking, Ann and James left for a well known fishing hole less than a mile away. They’d still managed to catch some plump hatchery trout before it got too dark. Not a lot of flavor, but if you dusted them with enough salt and fried them in butter you could eat them with their crunchy skins on.
Duane had showed up close to sunset, chain smoking and shaky, his right e
ye swollen shut and a bleeding incisor hanging askew. He’d apologized for not coming with them to fish, but business was business and you couldn’t pass it up when it dared to fall into your lap. As he’d leaned against the Camaro for support he told them he was going to be late for some appointments in Portland if he didn’t leave soon. There’d be no time to go back to the motel to check on Traci and he’d asked Ann if she and James would mind checking on her, it would really help him out. He’d tried to give her some money to go out somewhere nice for dinner and she’d pushed his hand away.
It was after ten when they found Traci running barefoot down the middle of 101, hysterical and soaked to the bone. Somehow they’d talked her into getting into Ann’s car and they’d driven her back to the motel and on the way she’d told them where Duane hid his money, how she’d followed him around the back of his mother’s house to the wooden tool shed where he kept it stashed in empty varnish cans. When they got her back in bed James had rolled her a joint to calm her down, hoping she would fall asleep. But Traci kept talking non-stop as if she were in a trance, telling them secrets about how Duane would sometimes cooperate with the police when he got caught, give up names so he wouldn’t serve any time.
They’d first waited a week to see if Traci would remember what she’d said to them, if she’d told Duane about it-and yet she could only recall running barefoot down 101, how a few cars had slowed next to her and asked if she needed help and when she’d peered inside she’d seen that the cars were packed with the very demons whom she’d heard trolled highways in search of souls. When James arranged to met Duane to buy some pot for a few friends, Duane only thanked him for checking in on Traci and never brought the night up again.
Knowing Duane, it still wasn’t any guarantee that Traci hadn’t said anything to him or that he wasn’t suspicious. James began to imagine it might be a trap or that Duane had simply moved his stash elsewhere and for several weeks they tried to forget about the whole thing until one night Ann had seen Duane and Traci come in to buy snacks at the store, headed to Portland so Traci could see her kid.
They’d waited until his mother was asleep. The shed wasn’t even locked, and the money was exactly where Traci had said it would be.
Chapter 27
Mikhail never rode in cars again after an accident outside of New York City, when his young driver had panicked on black ice and sent them careening down a sharp ravine. The driver had died on impact, and Mikhail had remained trapped until the following morning, held in by his crushed legs. Wedged sideways between granite boulders several feet above ground, the door below him had popped open during their descent, allowing a bone chilling wind to work its way inside. Water leaked from the trunk and turned to icicles. It smelled chlorinated, as if it had come from a swimming pool.
He was certain he’d lost an eye, had detected a narrowing of vision and a stinging wetness, but could lift neither hand to his face since both arms appeared to be shattered at the elbow. Shock must have drawn a protective shroud over his body because he hadn’t felt much pain, was thankful for nature’s mercy. There was nothing to be done but wait for help to arrive, and for several hours he drifted in and out of consciousness-not the same as finding oneself dozing on and off on a warm park bench, but something grander and more terrifying, as if he were on a train traversing a vast night plain and coming to only when he heard the harsh cry of its whistle. He hadn’t known the train was real, not until the hammering light of morning when he was being loaded into an ambulance on the road above and heard it a final time, saw the brown-blur of it passing behind a stand of birches with peeled bark ruffling in the wind like pages of ancient text.
During the night he’d also heard dogs howling in the distance, and when he’d glanced down through the open door he saw an old Russian woman he once knew gazing up from below. She’d died years ago, but Mikhail still had tender memories of her, of when he’d sit next to her in the park, listening to her talk about Russia while she fed pigeons as plump as first year turkeys, some of which wound up in her stew pot when money was tight. While Mikhail waited for help in his leather upholstered cocoon-there was no hope of ever freeing his legs and much less crawling out of the ravine-the old woman built a pillow of dried leaves and got comfortable. Soon a trio of scruffy coyotes appeared at her side and sat also.
He wasn’t surprised to see the coyotes. Half suspended in the cold air, he thought he must have resembled a young elk hanging in a tree, remembering a time when he was a boy and hadn’t awakened to greet his father who’d returned late from hunting. He’d gone outside early in the frosted morning and had played below the tree without noticing the rigid corpse above, hadn’t even thought to look up until the body shifted forward and showered him with cold blood. And yet he’d calmly walked back into his house to run a bath while his mother nearly collapsed in terror, convinced that seeing the boy covered in blood had been an omen, a sign that her beloved Mikhail would one day become a cold killer.
It had begun to snow. The coyotes never broke off eye contact with him, and when they began popping their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, the old woman bent forward and swatted them on their behinds like they were insolent children. The dogs lowered their heads and whined.
“Why aren’t you afraid of them, Misha?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The wild dogs.”
The old woman laughed. “What’s there to fear? You know them as well as I.”
“What do you mean? Wild dogs all look the same to me. Starved and desperate.”
“Look closer Mikhail. At their faces. You know them better than you think.”
Mikhail worried that the old woman had lost her mind. It saddened him to see her like this. “I don’t understand, Misha… How are you feeling? Are you sure you should be out here in the woods?”
“Don’t be silly, my dear. I go where I want to now. Can you believe my bones no longer hurt me when I walk?
“That’s wonderful, Misha…”
“Yes.”
The coyotes stood up and began to pace around the old woman. It was obvious they were growing impatient. Misha grabbed them by their tails and pulled them toward her. They whimpered but did not struggle to get away.
“Now look closer at their faces and you’ll recognize them. These are the three men that took you away from your mother, from your homeland.”
“But Misha… This is foolishness.”
“Just look.”
Mikhail did as he was told. The longer he stared at the coyote’s upturned faces he realized that the old woman was right and he’d felt his heart race. Gradually their human faces became superimposed over their canine ones, like floating masks, exactly the way he remembered them from years before. Dmitri, Ivan and Viktor-he thought he’d never have to look upon those devils again. Not only had they convinced him to leave behind everything he knew, but they were also responsible for the death of his father.
Misha let the coyotes go and they began pacing around her again, baring greenish teeth. Some pissed dark holes in the fresh snow. The smell wafted up and burned his nostrils.
“What do they want Misha?”
“To tear you to pieces of course. They are still angry for what you did.”
“But they murdered my father. My mother warned me and I didn’t believe her. I thought it was only one of her tricks to get me to stay.”
“I see,” Misha said. “You must tell me what happened.”
Mikhail waited for a wave of dizziness to pass. Was he still losing blood from his right arm? He’d felt it collecting in his sleeve. He thought he could see a scattering of drops on the snow below.
“We’d been celebrating since dawn, when we first caught sight of New York. That night someone would help with our passage onto shore. I wasn’t used to drinking so much and passed out behind some crates. But when I awoke I overheard them talking, saying what an ignorant fool I was and how they were planning to make me do the most dangerous work, that they looke
d forward to turning my life into a living hell. Who’s going to care if he dies, Dmitri had told them. I hope his KGB dog of a father is watching from hell.
“I was terrified and didn’t know what to do. I lay there and cried while they listened to American music on a portable radio, laughing and drinking bottle after bottle of vodka, bragging about who would become the richest of the three. I was still terribly drunk and before I fell to sleep I prayed to my mother. Begged her forgiveness and asked her what I should do. I had a dream she was standing outside our house. Her eyes were sunken though ringed with silver tears, she’d lost a lot of weight. She refused to speak to me, or maybe she was incapable of speech and I watched as she floated past me to the tree I used to play under, saw her reach up and snap an icicle off a branch and hold it before her. I noticed then that the ice was in the shape of a knife and there was blood frozen in it. Her message was clear. When I awoke I crept out onto the deck and waited, holding the very knife my father had used for cutting deer meat, the one gift she’d carefully wrapped and hid in my pack before I’d left with my father’s killers. She’d made sure I was prepared.”
“And how did it feel to kill them?” Misha asked.
“It was easier than I thought it was going to be. They were too drunk to see it coming. One at a time they stumbled up on deck to urinate in the bay and I let them have it, slit their throats and pushed them overboard while they were still holding themselves. Before the captain came down that night to tell us when we’d have to be ready, I’d had plenty of time to clean up the mess. When he found me I pretended to be dead drunk. He seemed curious about what happened to the others but I acted as if I knew nothing and he wrote me off as a slow-witted boy. Fortunately he’d already been paid for our passage and didn’t make a fuss about it, just took a couple of bottles of vodka for himself and came and got me that night when it was time to jump ship. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know a single soul in New York.”