by B. E. Scully
As suddenly as he’d begun, the Hound stopped digging. He pulled the pistol from his coat pocket. “I can’t do it. No Iceman. No more Great White Aliens. No Bone Man. Can’t disturb any more earth.”
The Hound edged out of the cave and sat down about twenty feet from the pile of rocks, clutching the pistol in both hands.
“Some earth has to be disturbed, Hound,” Shirdon said. “No bones lie undisturbed forever.”
She went over and began digging at the rocks. Martinez and Mickelson joined her, but the Hound stayed put, watching their every move.
As they dug, they unearthed a small bone or two, and then several larger ones mixed among the rubble and animal-overturned earth. Once they’d removed most of the rocks, each grabbed a thick piece of branch or sharp-edged stone and started on the soil beneath the rocks. It was as soft and pliable as the Hound had promised.
As the late afternoon light gave way to early evening, a thick, cold mist crept through the forest, engulfing the trees and rocks like a ghostly battalion.
And then, at the head of what the detectives now knew to be a grave, the rictus-grin that had so defined Morris Falten in life was the first thing to emerge in death—Mickelson cleared away a pile of dirt and there it was, the dirty-white skull of what could only be his former partner, leering up at him as if to ask, “What the hell took you so long?”
If there was any doubt left about who had been consigned to the shallow grave beneath the basalt rock wall, it vanished as the three detectives cleared away more dirt and caught the flash of something gold jumbled among the bones—the handle of a pistol that, Mickelson knew, would be inscribed with the words “Rough Rider,” a tribute to the volunteer Calvary regiment of roughnecks, adventurers, and cowboys that Teddy Roosevelt led in the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
“The Bone Man,” the Hound whispered.
When the detectives turned to look at him, they saw that the Hound no longer had the pistol clutched in both hands. Instead, he had it pressed against his right temple.
The thick, ancient air stirred to life in anticipation of the coming night. The mist battalion began a slow advance up the mountain.
“Hound,” Shirdon said, standing up and taking a step toward him, “why don’t you give me the pistol? It’s over now. It’s all over.”
“All over for the Bone Man,” the Hound said, but he didn’t lower the weapon. “All over for me, too. After Manlike Woman disappeared, I went north, stayed off the highways, moved only at night. It was warm, dry summer by the time I reached the state border, and Manlike Woman was right, just like she always is. In the forest I found D.B. Cooper. Gave me enough bills to get to Arizona. Enough to get out of the rain once and for all. But I hadn’t counted on the sand. They came and found me on the sand, just the same. That’s when I knew that eventually, Bone Man would find me. And he’d make me kill Twin Skeleton if he could, because I was his sworn deputy. I took an oath—only I didn’t know I was working for the Great White Aliens. Manlike Woman knew. I should have, too. But they hide it so well!”
He looked up at Shirdon and met her eyes. “I killed a man—prevented him from finishing his story. So now it’s time to finish my story. It’s only fair, don’t you think?”
Shirdon shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“Why not?” The Hound swung the pistol in Shirdon’s direction. “A story for a story. A life for a life.”
“Because sometimes it’s not as simple as that.”
While the Hound and Shirdon talked, Martinez had slowly maneuvered himself opposite to where the Hound was sitting. He had a clear view of the trail at the top of the embankment, and a clear view of the Hound. Shirdon had seen Martinez pretending to fuss with his torn pants while actually transferring the pistol he’d stashed in his leg holster to an inside coat pocket. He looked at Shirdon, and she gave him a nod: rusty, dirty pistol or not, mental health issues or not, if the Hound made even one unexpected move with that pistol in his hand, he would soon become one more “use of deadly force” statistic for the media to go crazy over.
Mickelson emerged from the cave and stood beside Martinez. Shirdon took another step toward the Hound, but he tightened his grip on the pistol in response.
Shirdon knew he was no longer listening to a word she said. She also knew that back-up was probably halfway up the mountain by now. “Hound, you like stories, right? Can I tell you a story? One from my own life that might answer your question better than I can?”
The Hound nodded. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but Shirdon thought his grip on the pistol relaxed just a little.
Shirdon closed her eyes. She pictured a girl in a purple sweatshirt, a girl with the lean, restless build of a runner and hazel eyes with a gold ring around them, like a planet ready to supernova.
She pictured Julia Kempson. And then she opened her eyes and told her story.
“I was in college then—junior year. It was May and the end of the semester was coming. The weather was finally warming up, and everyone wanted to be outside. I had a good friend named Rachel whose family owned a charter fishing boat company near Tillamook Bay, and they said they’d let us take a boat out for the weekend. Another girl came along with us. Her name was Julia—Julia Kempson.
“We set out on a Saturday morning. The weather was sunny, and the water didn’t look too bad. A bit choppy, but nothing Rachel hadn’t seen before. She’d been going out on the water, helping her family with the business, since she’d been old enough to walk.
“When we headed out that morning, the waves were only maybe three to five feet high. Then out of nowhere an eight-footer hit. It knocked Julia right off her feet, and after that she went and sat by the center console, soaking wet and shivering cold. I could tell she wanted to go in, but she didn’t want to ruin the trip for the rest of us.” Shirdon shook her head. “I wish more than anything it would have been ruined that way instead of what happened next.”
“It was past noon when a radio report came in from the Coast Guard saying conditions were worsening, telling people to come in off the water. Rachel had already started back to shore when this giant wave loomed up out of nowhere, this giant mass of water. Rachel gunned the boat and crested the wave before it broke, but another one was right behind it—a twelve footer that hit seconds later. The boat capsized and everything went into the water.
“Rachel had managed to get her life jacket on before the boat went over, but Julia and I hadn’t. When I surfaced, I grabbed a life jacket floating by, but it was a child’s jacket. It was so small that it pinned my arms like a flapping bird, but I kept it on anyway. Rachel was about ten feet away from me in the water, and we swam over to the capsized boat. The surf was slamming it around like a bathtub toy.
“Rachel somehow scrambled onto the hull, and that’s when she saw a head bobbing in the water about fifty feet away—Julia. Rachel shouted at her to swim for the boat, but a wave broke on top of the boat and both of us went into the water again. The waves were enormous now, coming one after the other. It was all we could do to catch our breath before the next one drug us under.
“After about the fifth time of making it back to the boat only to be knocked off again, I kind of gave up. I just let myself go, just gave up to the water. I accepted that I was going to die, and surrendered. Then, as I sank farther and farther down, I got scared. Then I got angry. I thrashed to the surface one more time.
“I was about forty yards from the boat, which by now had started drifting south, toward calmer water. I could see Rachel clinging to the edge, trying to get back onto the hull, but she was struggling now just to stay afloat.
“At first I didn’t see anything but these seething waves. Then I saw Julia’s head still bobbing in the water, about twenty yards behind me. Julia cried out—she cried out to me, because I was right there, the closest to her—she cried out, ‘Help me, Cass—I’m bleeding, I’m dying!’”
Shirdon closed her eyes again, but the hazel eyes with the
golden ring sought her out just the same, forced her to open her own eyes and face the truth for the first time in seventeen years.
“The water around Julia was stained dark red. She must have injured herself when the boat went down, and she was really struggling. I felt myself going down, too, back down into the water. I dove below the surface and pulled off both my sneakers. Even so, it felt as if I weighed a thousand pounds. The water was freezing cold—I remembered Rachel telling me that it stayed somewhere around fifty degrees, and that a person could only survive in water that cold between four to eight hours.
“Julia said, ‘I’m not going to make it!’ I kept saying, ‘You are going to make, you are!’ But I’m not sure I believed it. At that point, I don’t think I believed either one of us would.
“Julia began to drift farther away from me—farther away from the boat. She reached out toward me…reached out with her fingers splayed open in the water. I remember thinking how they looked like bone white sea algae, waving in the water. I also remember thinking how that was a hell of a thing to be thinking, considering the circumstances. Julia kept saying ‘Help me, help me,’ but I didn’t know how. Julia was a strong swimmer—stronger than me, normally. But she was injured, she was in shock, she didn’t have a life jacket…I didn’t even know if I could get myself back to the boat, let alone her.”
“We floated there a while, me looking straight into her eyes, her looking straight into mine. Finally I said, ‘Julia, we have to swim. If we swim, we live, if we drift, we die.’”
“She kept looking at me, but she dropped her hands back into the water. I don’t know how long we would have floated there, looking at each other and drifting farther and farther away from the boat until we both disappeared beneath the waves for good. But then I turned away. I turned away from her and started inching my way toward that boat with whatever energy I had left.
“I don’t know how long it took me. At one point, a water bottle I recognized as my own floated past me, and I thought I was hallucinating. When I finally reached the boat, Rachel had made it back onto the hull, but she was just lying there, collapsed with exhaustion. It took the last of both of our strength to haul me out of the water, too. We lay up against each other to get warm, and when we both finally sat up, we didn’t see Julia anywhere.
“We sat there, shivering against each other, saying how we could take turns going back in to look for her, how whoever stayed with the boat could give up her life jacket to give to Julia…but we both knew neither one of us could even think about getting back in that water. We also both knew we had to at least try and save Julia. We had to—but we just couldn’t do it.”
Shirdon shook her head. “You always think that if the time ever comes, of course you’ll be a hero. Or if not a hero, you’ll at least try to do the right thing. You’ll at least risk your own safety to save one of your best friends. But like I told you, Hound, it’s not always so simple. Sometimes—oftentimes, actually—it’s messy and terrifying and confusing, and by the time you even figure out what’s going on, your survival instinct has taken over completely, and staying alive is all that matters. But even if you do survive, you can’t think of yourself quite the same way afterward. You know too much of yourself—you’ve been all the way down, to places most people never go, and you’ve seen what’s there. And it’s not what you thought it would be.”
“And what happened to your friend?” the Hound asked. “The one left in the water?”
Shirdon saw Martinez look up sharply toward the trail. He glanced at the Hound, but the Hound was somewhere lost at sea, somewhere in the water with Julia Kempson. Shirdon saw Martinez shake his head and make a hand signal to someone at the top of the embankment—someone who no doubt already had a rifle scope aimed directly at the Hound’s chest.
It looked as if back-up had finally arrived.
Shirdon kept talking. “Rachel and I stayed clinging to the hull, debating what to do. If we stayed on the boat, we would die, but we’d never make it if we tried to swim to shore. Rachel’s parents had taught her that in situations like this, you always stay with the boat. So that’s what we did, rubbing each other’s legs, arms, and backs to stay warm. Rachel said that when she didn’t come in after the bad weather report, her parents would send someone out for us. In fact, she told me they probably already had. All we had to do was stay alive until then.
“The fog came in, and soon we couldn’t see more than a quarter mile in any direction. Sunset wasn’t until eight p.m., but we could already see storm clouds gathering in the distance. Rachel had a survival knife that she’d kept hold of when the boat capsized, and we were already planning out goodbye messages to our families that we could scratch into the hull when we saw the Coast Guard come barreling through the wake to take us home.
“Except Julia. They kept searching for her until the storm got too bad to stay on the water, and they went back out at dawn the next day. But they never recovered her body.”
“Lost at sea,” the Hound said.
Shirdon nodded. “And do you know why I’m telling you this now, Hound?”
The Hound shook his head.
“I’m telling you this because every morning for almost a week now, Julia Kempson has been standing across from my apartment, staring up at my window. And every morning until this one, I refused to admit it was Julia Kempson, because of course it couldn’t be Julia Kempson. Julia Kempson was lost at sea. She’d been dead for almost twenty years. But I saw her just the same.”
The Hound nodded. “I knew it. I knew you’d killed someone. Or at least seen them die. I knew you had someone’s story to finish.”
“And you were right,” Shirdon said. “And see, once I finally admitted that somehow, it was Julia Kempson standing across from my apartment—or at least something I was seeing as Julia Kempson—the first thing I thought to ask was, ‘What do you want?’ Because I figured she must want something from me. And since I had turned around and left her in that water—I had saved myself and left her to do the same—I thought she wanted vengeance, or at least to remind me of what I’d done.” Shirdon shook her head. “And then when my partner and I interviewed you at that station, after you came in to warn us about the Bone Man, I got to thinking about what you said about some people not finishing their stories. I never told anybody the story I told you just now, and maybe Julia Kempson wanted me to finish her story. For seventeen years, I’ve been trying to forget that story, and my part in it. But what I really should have been doing was remembering.”
“And forgiving,” the Hound said.
Shirdon nodded. “And forgiving. Because you know what else, Hound? Two and a half years earlier, my kid sister killer herself. I knew the reasons were bigger than just me—of course they were. But I also knew that it hadn’t helped any that I’d gone off to college and pretty much left her behind, even though we’d been super close ever since childhood, and even though I knew she was going through a hard time. And so first I lose my sister after not being there for her, and then I lose one of my best friends after not being there for even more directly. And I told myself a million times not to blame myself, to forgive myself—all that stuff which is true, and is necessary in order to go on. But it didn’t help one bit. You know what did help, though, Hound?”
The Hound shook his head.
“Running away. Something you also know all about. You ran physically—to the forest, to the desert. But you also ran away in here,” Shirdon said, tapping the side of her head, “and I don’t just mean because of the schizophrenia, although in your case that just added to the pile. But I ran away the same way, up here. I ran away from everyone and everything—it was all about work, and everything else just filled in around that when necessary. And you know what else, Hound?”
The Hound stood up. Martinez slipped his hand in his coat pocket, glanced up at the embankment, and gave another signal to the officers Shirdon knew were up there waiting: Not yet.
“I don’t think I’ll see Julia Kempson o
utside my apartment window anymore,” Shirdon said.
The Hound nodded. “Because she’s finished her story?”
“At least that part—that day on the water, when she died. But that doesn’t mean I’ll forget either her or her story—and not just the boat accident, either, but all that came before it. The good things. Because people aren’t just one story, Hound. People are a whole lot of stories, good and bad. And you know, I think I’ll be able to remember all of the other stories—the good ones—even more now.”
“And forgiving?” the Hound whispered, his eye fixed intently on Shirdon. “Will you be able to forgive yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Shirdon said. “But I’m going to try. And what about you, Hound? Can you forgive yourself?”
The Hound nodded. “I think I can try, too. I hope I can try.”
“The Bone Man got to finish his part of the story, Hound. You finally finished it for him. So maybe now it’s time to give Bone Man a proper burial—to get him out of this cave and return you and Manlike Woman’s sacred spot to the way it’s meant to be.”
“I wish Manlike Woman were here,” the Hound said.
“Maybe she could be, once the Bone Man is gone.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” the Hound shouted. Martinez took a step toward him, but the Hound was speaking calmly now, almost reverentially. “Did you know that ‘yes’ is the secret password for the entire universe? It’s true! Nineteen-sixty-six. John Lennon at an art installation in London. What Lennon called the ‘anti-everything’ art was getting him down, until he sees one piece with a ladder and a spyglass way at the top. He climbs the ladder, looks through the spyglass, and sees the word YES. And of course the artist was Yoko Ono.
“In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the very last words of the book, spoken by Molly Bloom to Leopold Bloom, are ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’ The key to the universe,” the Hound said, gazing up at the darkening sky.
“Hound,” Shirdon said, speaking quickly now, “one of my all-time favorite books is As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner. One of the main characters, Darl Bundren, is kind of the spokesperson for the whole book. He suffers from mental illness, and when Faulkner was asked if Darl’s madness was why he spoke more beautifully than anyone else, Faulkner’s one-word answer was, “Yes.’”