Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “Pick him up,” a voice said.

  “He’s not a light guy,” someone said, and then hands grappled me again, pulling me up and leaning me against the side of the truck. I started to buckle and someone pushed me upright, the metal curving against my back.

  “The hell’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sandoval. He was next to me. He hooked my arm around his shoulder, and I felt another person do the same on the other side. Shane.

  “Did you shoot him?” One of the American voices.

  “No, we didn’t shoot him. Shit. We should.”

  “What’s that hole in his face then? He’s bleeding like hell.”

  In front of me stood a black-clad man with a great black bowling ball of a head and two ragged eyeholes cut out. A balaclava. Just like Sandoval had wanted to wear. There were three of them, three men wearing masks on this dark stretch of road surrounded by nothingness. No other vehicles here besides Shane’s truck. Just three black phantoms following us through the woods? I turned my head and said to Sandoval in a ragged, dusty croak I didn’t even recognize as mine, “I saw them. The lights. The dead soldiers.”

  My head rocked back—someone slapped me—and I started crying like a little kid with the pain of it. There was a scuffle, Sandoval and Shane loosening themselves from me, and I staggered forward and was pushed back again.

  When I opened my eyes, one of them had a hand against Shane’s chest and a hatchet reared back above his head. A little camping hatchet, something used to chop licks of kindling off a log.

  “We’re good,” Sandoval said, his hands up. “Okay? Everyone’s good.” His breath plumed the chill air.

  Someone lit a flashlight. I squinted, held out my palm, and the light lowered, lit the pebbled, glittering surface of Road Seven. I saw that all three of the men in front of us held hatchets.

  The one with the flashlight played the beam under his jaw, drew the mask into something grotesque. I saw the traceries of red veins in his glittering eyes.

  “You are entire worlds away from good right now,” he said. Their voices volleyed through the fog I was living in. Even with an ax dangling over him, I felt the reassuring weight of Shane’s hand at my back as he said, “Cool, sorry. We’re gone. We’re leaving.”

  And maybe it was because of my head, and that cowardice that roiled inside me for years. Maybe it just was the arrogance inherent in these men. The brash fuck-you Americanness of strong-arming us out of here. Maybe it was just because, failures or not, we’d been asked to come. We’d ridden across the island on bicycles too small for us; we weren’t an invading force with sniper turrets and bombs and manned gates. We hadn’t stayed for seven decades.

  Someone had asked us for help, and we’d come.

  “You know what?” I hissed, leaning forward, taunting and jolly and contemptuous through the red haze in my skull. “No. We were asked to come here, and we’re staying.” I was yelling. “You hear me, Lieutenant? You hear me, Curtinson? You chickenshits?” I spat in the man’s face and felt an ugly, savage triumph rip through me.

  “Stupid,” Shane muttered under his breath, almost admirably, right before the fight started.

  Six guys grappling in the scant moonlight. The flashlight went rolling right away, dimly lit up a piece of the woods across the road. Limbs, grasping hands, everyone lurching against each other. I grabbed an arm that was like concrete with fabric pulled over it. “Hold him,” Shane gasped, and someone’s hand ran across my throat, scratched my bleeding cheek with a fingernail. I punched a mask that felt like a stone, then punched harder. It was like running my knuckles into a house. I heard the clatter of a hatchet fall to the pavement and for a moment saw Sandoval in his coat starfished on the ground—Shane’s stupid tape was going to kill us all, you could see every goddamn thing we were doing—and I hooked my arm around someone’s throat and jumped on him. He staggered, huffed, backpedaled me into the passenger door of the truck. The back of my skull connected against the window, and I bit my tongue in what felt like two pieces. Someone said “fuck” and then Shane told me to move and I staggered out of the way, and he ran a black-clad head into the door of the truck. The guy bounced off, fell back onto the pavement and rolled around, clutching his skull. The other two pulled him up and they ran across the road, swallowed by the darkness in seconds. A single hatchet lay on the tarmac, and Shane growled like an animal and hurled it into the trees after them.

  I saw Sandoval sitting on the ground, leaning against the rear bumper. The fingers of his left hand drummed an impatient beat in the gravel.

  “Mark?”

  “Present,” he said irritably. I stood over him. He frowned down at his splayed legs with the look of a guy who’d noticed his license had expired and was dreading the upcoming hours in the DMV.

  A hatchet was buried in his shoulder, bisecting perfectly a piece of that stupid reflective tape.

  “Guy chopped me,” he said. His eyes burned up at me through his ashen, pale face.

  I didn’t say anything, just stood there with my mouth open.

  “I’ll admit it,” he said. “We probably should’ve left a while ago.”

  6

  We slalomed through the darkness of the álagablettur.

  As always, it was more forgiving as we retreated.

  I sat with Sandoval in the back of the truck. The hatchet jutted from his shoulder like some crazy juxtaposition: like a wolf with running shoes on, or a hat made of smoke. That was Sandoval. The wind whipped my eyes, brought tears. The moon broke through a ragged patchwork of clouds. Every time we hit a curve, Shane’s toolbox scraped from one side of the bed to the other. Sandoval was loosing these quick little breaths that puffed out his cheeks. We could hear Shane cursing in the cab, loud enough to be heard through the glass, over the machine-shop snarl of Decimated Rectum, or whatever it was.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Sandoval huffed. “What, apart from the ax-inside-me part?” We hit a spot in the road and he pulled his teeth back and gasped. I ducked as branches raked the top of the truck. “I’m stellar. Where the hell are we going?”

  “We’re not going to the base,” I said. “Thank God.”

  “Yeah, forget that.” He turned to look at the hatchet, the rubber handle nearly touching his chin. “Holy lord. That is a trip.”

  I rapped my knuckles on the window and Shane waved his hand at me, shooing me away. “I think we must be going to the hospital,” I said.

  Sandoval’s hand locked around my wrist. “I have to tell you something,” he said. These big punched-in gray hollows beneath his eyes. “It’s important.”

  “Hold on,” I said, and rapped on the window again.

  Shane leaned back and opened the window without taking his eyes from the road. “What?” he barked.

  “Where are we going?” I said. “The hospital in Kjálkabein? There is a hospital there, right?”

  “Sit your ass down, Brian. We’re not going to the hospital, you kidding? ‘How’d your pal get a hatchet in his arm? Oh, three men in the woods, you say? Ah, wearing masks? Oh, okay. Well, let’s call the cops and get this straightened out.’”

  Hours of interrogation. Coupled with the whole “finding a severed arm on the farm” thing? We’d probably be arrested. Definitely questioned. Indefinitely, maybe. Clearly the last thing that our new friends the Balaclava Fun Time Trio wanted. Or whoever had told them to go out there and meet us.

  “Where are we going, then?”

  “Just sit down, man,” Shane said. “We’re going to Karla’s house.”

  “Well, I mean, is that really a good idea?”

  Shane shut the window.

  The woods thinned once more, giving way to the buttes and low-slung ditches that braced the road. Finally the Hauksdóttir house shone spectral and washed-out in Shane’s headlights. Beside Karla’s truck the
re was a silver car in the driveway—I had a flash of dread that it might be Keller’s BMW—and gravel pinged the undercarriage when we screeched to a stop behind it.

  Shane stepped out, put his hands on the side panel of the truck, and peered at Sandoval.

  “You know what,” he said quietly. “I’m gonna clean this wound, then stitch him up. And then you and the circus act here need to get to the airport.”

  I pointed at Sandoval. “That’s a hatchet. Like, in him. In his body. You want us to fly from here to Iceland to the States with him like that?”

  “I have some stuff in my bag that’ll relax him.”

  “That’s not really what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “Dude, they told you to go.” He drummed his fingers on the panel of the truck. “You just gotta go. This has gotten too big. I’ll stitch him up while you pack. Deal?”

  “What do they do on that base? What in the hell have we stepped in here, Shane?”

  And I’d have had to be a fool to miss the cloud that walked across his face at that. Everyone here was weighted with some secret.

  •

  The children were crying in the living room. They and their mother formed a frieze on the couch, Karla framed by her son and daughter, a half-dozen eyes reddened and puffy. When they took in Sandoval’s pale face and then the hatchet jutting out of his shoulder, they shrieked and the children started weeping again, louder.

  “My God,” Karla said, standing up.

  “It’s a mess,” Shane agreed.

  Gunnar yelled, “We didn’t want you to leave!” He rose from the couch and reached for me and stopped; my proximity too close to Sandoval and his wound. His hands fell to little fists at his side. “We wanted you to stay! We were having fun! And then we were going to do the band! I’m sorry!” He turned and ran to Karla, pressing his head against her waist and sobbing.

  “We’ve got to get this taken care of,” Shane said wearily, gesturing at Sandoval. It was a stark difference between the frenzy and panic that had surrounded me and my run-in with the tree. It felt safe to say we’d worn out our welcome in Hvíldarland.

  Karla ran to a closet in the hall, came back with towels. “The kitchen?”

  “No, let him lie down,” Shane said. “I’ll go get my kit from the truck.”

  “The children found an arm,” Karla said and Shane froze at the front door, his hand on the jamb.

  “Um. Okay,” he said.

  And then Brooke walked into the living room.

  She took in the scene—me, Shane, gray-faced Sandoval sitting on the couch with a hatchet stuck in his shoulder.

  “Brian,” she said. “Do you have any idea—I mean any clue at all—the kind of trouble you’re in?”

  7

  “An arm?” Shane said, laying gear out on the coffee table, his tackle box spread open before him. Quieter, he said, “Like an arm arm?”

  Sandoval kind of sagged across the couch and Karla walked the children up to their rooms. Gunnar’s eyes were wounded and pleading as he marched with his mother up the stairs—he stared me down the entire time, tears spilling down his cheeks. “What did he mean,” I said, “that he was sorry?” Brooke got right in my face and put the fingertips of her hand against my chest and said, “I need to speak to you in the kitchen.”

  “I think Shane might need my help.”

  “I’m just gonna pull this thing out,” Shane said. “It’s not brain surgery, believe me.” Sandoval groaned.

  We walked into the kitchen, the window a flat black pool that reflected our faces back at us. Sometime in the past few weeks, she’d cut her hair. Her pink bangs were gone. Her skull was shorn to blonde fuzz. The kind of blasé annoyance I was used to receiving had been superseded by a kind of flat rage that Brooke usually reserved for our dad.

  She pushed a paper across the island to me. A printout.

  This, it seemed, was happening to me a lot.

  It was the email response I’d been waiting for from Biosearch Industries.

  “When did this come?” I asked. “How did you get this?”

  Brooke tapped the paper with a glossy fingernail. “Who is Vaughn Keller?”

  “How did you get this, Brooke?” I picked up the paper. It didn’t take long to read the results.

  “I am going to be asking questions, Brian, and you are going to answer them. I have not slept in two days. You are in serious shit. I don’t even think you know how serious.”

  “It’s crazy that you’re here,” I said.

  Brooke ran a hand over her eyes and then drummed her fingers on the tabletop. All these minute changes in such a short expanse of time: she’d gotten new nails, green and white. Aliens? Dollar bills? I sat down on one of the kitchen stools, resisted the urge to lay my face to the wood and just succumb. Just sleep forever. Be done with it all.

  “Are you missing a tooth, Brian? What happened to your face?”

  “I ran into a tree,” I said.

  “Can you sit up, please? I don’t even know where to start. Do you have any idea what is going on with Mark Sandoval?”

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  “Keep my voice down? He’s wanted for questioning in Portland for a murder, Brian. For a hit and run. They think he fled here to avoid it.”

  “Who?”

  “The cops!” she hissed. And then her face crumpled and for a moment I saw that young girl that I’d grown up with—overwhelmed, scared, a child fiercely holding on to the skin of the world as best she could. She put a fist against her mouth and her shoulders trembled. “And you have a fucking brain tumor? Are you kidding me with this, Brian? What are you doing here?”

  I sat up. I slid awkwardly off my stool to go and comfort her, to take her in my arms and salvage some meager vestige of our love, our shared familiarity. My sister. I reached for her, I did, and then Karla came into the kitchen, filling the room with her own sense of urgency, and I let my hands fall to my sides.

  “The children wanted you to stay longer,” she said, leaning against the refrigerator, folding her arms in front of her. It was a gesture of protection and insulation I’d never seen from her before. She let out a long, shaky breath. “They told a— They lied. They took some old costume jewelry of mine. I didn’t even think to look for it. It should’ve been obvious to me.”

  “Brooke just showed me the results,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Karla said. “Nothing about it is okay.”

  Brooke rapped her knuckles on the island and we turned to look at her. “Who is Vaughn Keller?”

  “He’s a family friend,” Karla said.

  I said, “He’s a . . . data analyst. I think. Maybe. Probably not.”

  “He sent me that,” Brooke said, and tapped a finger against the Biosearch Industries report that noted the sample Sandoval had sent consisted of 100%, entirely organic, all-natural Hvíldarlandic horse shit, sythentic glitter, and costume jewelry. “That and your CT results, Brian, and plane tickets, and a thing from the police about your boss in there.” Her face warped again, then drew back to normalcy. “And then there’s something about an arm? This woman here said you found a severed arm out there today? What is going on here?”

  “Keller sent you all of that? He sent you a plane ticket?”

  “He did. For both of us. Okay? Get your stuff.”

  I was always so far behind. “But Vaughn sent you plane tickets? How did he get your address? How does he know who you are?” I turned to Karla. “If this was fake, did you fake the video, too?”

  “Of course not!” Karla said, her hand at her throat.

  In the living room, we heard Shane say, “Dude, that’s not a good idea,” and then the sound of the front door closing, footfalls diminishing down the porch steps.

  Shane walked into the kitchen. He had a fresh smear of blo
od under his eye. To Brooke, he said, “Who’re you again?”

  “I’m his sister.”

  “What the hell happened?” I said. “Where’s Sandoval?”

  He walked to the sink and began rinsing the red from his hands. “I gave him a painkiller and started to stitch him up, and then he left.”

  “He left?”

  Shane shrugged and made a flitting motion with one hand, spattering the counter with pink droplets. “He heard you talk about the horse shit and how it was fake—and I would very much like to talk to the kids about that, Karla, because that is some devious, manipulative shit they pulled. And then he just stood up and walked out, man. Gone.”

  5

  petitions

  “My mind at first refused to acknowledge the matted fur, the yellow and unblinking eyes. The fetid, heaving breath that sent leaves rippling, that made dust cloud the air. I didn’t want to be witness to what was in front of me.”

  —Mark Sandoval, The Ghost in the Dirt

  1

  There had been no fear the first time Sandoval had heard them call his name.

  It had happened almost immediately after Brian had gotten hurt, had crashed into the tree. And it hadn’t been the least bit frightening. It had been a harmony, a sweet ache. And he was rewarded with that same ache, that sense of envelopment and love, every time he walked into the woods that braced Karla Hauksdóttir’s farm. There were times when he simply stood out there and listened to the quiet ebb and flow of voices around him. A chorus of voices that hummed in the bones—in his very bones, it was true. This quiet joy. This rapture.

  He’d gone out some nights with his NVGs and tried to see them, to see the coruscation of lights that wavered among the tree limbs—they should have shone like stars in the viewfinder of the goggle, like flares. Like the eyes of God! But there’d been nothing there. But when he took the goggles off, they appeared again, blooming around him. He took comfort in them, and with the lights rose that blessed cyclone of voices that was also one voice: