The Upright Man

by Michael Marshall

  Tom opened his mouth but realized there was too much to say and none of it made any sense. He raised his arms, not in surrender, but in a kind of mute entreaty. Strangely, the deputy seemed to understand. He nodded, said no more, got back in his car and drove away. Tom walked home to the motel, padding slowly down the middle of the main street through the steady, meditative blink of traffic lights with no cars to direct.

  Next morning he thought it through. His options were limited. There was no gun store in town, and he didn’t want to drive until he found one. Even assuming they let him have one, guns were scary. Jumping off a cliff, supposing he could find one, was also out. The idea was self-evidently counterrevolutionary. Even if his mind was determined, his body could simply overrule—in which case he’d have a long walk back to the car feeling like the world’s biggest fool. Yes, I was going to throw myself off, that’s right. No, it didn’t happen. Sorry. Nice view, though. Mind your step. Tom didn’t want to end up as something distended or smashed, something to be found, photographed, and shipped home. He didn’t want to be broken, he wanted to be erased.

  On Sunday he was picking at a huge Reuben in Henry’s, the town’s more friendly diner, when he heard something that put the final piece in place. A local old-timer was taking delight in worrying a pair of Winnebago retirees about the scope and impenetrability of the woods. Tom’s attention was drawn by the repetition of a number. Seventy-three. The local said it several times in a row. Seventy-three—how about that?

  His audience was looking at each other and nodding as if quite impressed. Then the male of the pair turned to the local with the air of a man who’s spotted a flaw in another’s argument.

  “Big ones, or little ones?” he asked. “The planes—what kind of size were they?”

  His wife nodded. No flies on her husband. She’d always said so.

  “All sizes,” the old geezer said, somewhat tetchily. “Big ones, little ones, civilian, military. Planes go down all the time—matter of fact, many more than that have ditched around here. My point is that of all the planes gone down in the Pacific Northwest since the war, seventy-three have never even been found.”

  Is that right, Tom thought.

  He pushed his sandwich away, paid his tab, and went to buy as much alcohol as he could carry.

  HE WASN’T PREPARED FOR HOW QUICKLY IT GOT dark. He was stumbling more than walking, the muscles in his thighs and calves turned to lead. He’d still only gone maybe eight miles, ten at most, but he was exhausted. It occurred to him that if he’d spent more time in the gym he’d be in better shape to die. This made him laugh until his mouth filled with warm saliva and he had to stop walking and breathe very deeply to avoid vomiting.

  He was now about as drunk as he’d ever been. As he rested, bent over with hands on knees, watching the floating spots before his eyes, he considered what to do next. He was already very lost. Getting lost could be ticked off the schedule of tasks. The ground had been getting more mountainous all afternoon, steep and slip-slidy and treacherous. When it got properly night, it was going to be very dark indeed, the kind of darkness that would swallow up and deafen a city boy. He took the backpack off and felt for the flashlight. When he flicked it on he realized it wasn’t just the quality of the light that was changing. A mist was gathering. It was also unbelievably cold. For the moment it was just sweat turning to frigid water on his skin, but when it got into his bones it would be hard to bear. Which meant he had to keep moving.

  He rotated his ankle to warm it up a little, made a slight turn, and kept plowing onward. The forest was very quiet now, noisy birds having cawed their fill and gone off home to roost. He wasn’t sure about other animals. He had already spent time not thinking about bears. Tom didn’t think he looked like a threat to any large mammal he might happen to chance upon, and he had no food to attract them, but maybe that was all crap. Maybe they lay in wait and attacked people for the fun of it. Anyway, he didn’t want to think about the matter, so he didn’t. He kept not thinking about it at regular intervals. The flashlight had two settings, bright and not so bright, and he soon stuck to the latter. As the mist thickened it bounced more of the light back in his face, making his head whirl. Also, the light made the shadows worse. Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent’s big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you’re nervous in the dark. Night forests say “Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you.”

  So he kept himself mist-blind and smacked his brain with vodka and kept moving. All of the crunches and rustlings he could hear were of his own making, he was sure. There were no shapes in the mist, only the movement of the moisture itself—that was also certain. You could take all of it to the bank, leave it there, and keep on walking in utter safety and only moderate discomfort: walking until it was totally dark and time itself seemed to flatten out, until each thought became hard to distinguish from the next, until fear twisted back on itself and swelled and he started moving faster and faster to escape from something he carried within himself.

  HE HAD NO WARNING OF THE FALL. HE’D BEEN shoving aggressively through a long trench of midlevel bushes, yielding to a third bout of head-snapping hiccups, when all at once his leading foot had nothing to come down upon. His body was tilted forward, the better to shove branches aside, and there was no way back.

  He was suddenly skidding down a sharp incline, legs apart, arms thrashing. Acceleration was halted by a full-body collision with a smallish tree, at which point he lost the flashlight and his bottle and was twisted and spun onto his side to slide the rest of the way via every rock in the ground. It was over quickly, and ended with him landing smack on his face with a crunch that knocked every last breath out of him.

  He groaned, a low and desperate sound. When he could, he shrugged off the pack and rolled over onto his back. The pain in his chest was so intense he let out an involuntary whistle. This hurt a lot more than the fall from the car. His right side felt as if someone had poked a spear in it and was encouraging a child to swing off the end. His balls ached too, pain rising to a hot little hollow in his lower abdomen.

  After a little longer, he sat up. He ran a tentative hand down his side, not looking, just in case, but didn’t find anything sticking out. He saw the flashlight lying ten feet away, glowing dimly in undergrowth, and crawled through cold mud to retrieve it. His vision was slightly doubled, but this had been the case for the last couple of hours so he wasn’t unduly worried.

  Retrieving his light source felt like a step in the right direction. It seemed he’d fallen into a wide rocky gully, designed to hold a decent spring-thaw stream but now home to a thin trickle, which he could hear from ten feet in front. Otherwise it was quiet. Very quiet, and very cold.

  He decided he’d gone far enough. Tonight would do. There didn’t have to be a tomorrow after all. School’s out a little early, that’s all.

  He pushed himself backward until his back was against rock. Then pulled the pack up between his knees and opened it. At least one of the remaining bottles had smashed—the bottom of the bag was soaking and sharp, and the smell smoked up around his face. He shone the light and saw there was no way he could just shove his hand in. He upended most of the contents out onto the ground instead. It took a while, but he found the packs of sleeping pills.

  As he laboriously pushed each pill out of its individual foil pimple, laying them in a pile on a useful nearby leaf, he swam through an internal checklist.

  Lost, check. Drunk, check. Christ yes. Great big check, in red.

  He’d paid his motel bill, mentioning in passing that he was heading back up to Seattle. Check.

  Anyone out hiking when it was this cold would have to be out of their fucking mind, and it was midweek, out of season, and he’d headed away from known trails. Check.

  Push, another pill. Push, another pill. He peered at the pile. Was that enough? Better make sure. He k
ept pushing. An overdose wasn’t weak if done the way he was doing it. It was manly.

  Oh yeah.

  The car would be spotted tomorrow, perhaps, and in a day or two someone would investigate. Not on foot but from the air, most likely, a desultory grid pass at best. On his last day in Sheffer Tom had bought clothes and backpack in autumnal colors, to make it even less likely that some passing plane or helicopter would be able to spot him. If he’d shelled out for some proper hiking boots too then his ankle wouldn’t hurt so much, but it hadn’t seemed worth it. Just went to show. Always get the proper equipment.

  Anyway, a check in general. Checkety check.

  As the pile of pills grew, he was surprised to find that he didn’t feel afraid. He’d thought he might, that the proximity of the act itself might make him panic, that he would fight death as she had. He found he merely felt very, very tired. Somewhere in the journey from the car to this random gully he’d lost any remaining sense of his life as a process. It had become simply an event; this event, in this place, now. It was dark, and getting late. It was for the best. It was okay.

  He was already very cold, his fingers thin and unmanageable. He started taking the pills, a couple at a time, washed down with more alcohol. He fumbled a few, but there were plenty. He took a lot, muttering in the dark. Bye-bye, Sarah, go find someone else. Bye-bye, William, bye-bye, Lucy. You’ll hate me for this, I know, but you would have come to hate me soon enough.

  At some point he seemed to accept he was into the realms of fatal dose, after which it all became more relaxed. Everything seemed easy, in fact. The forest got a little warmer too, though it was possible he just wasn’t feeling his extremities anymore. Everything went fuzzy and liquid as he sat and swayed in perfect darkness. He was cold and not cold, bone weary and awake. Fear circled in the bushes but stayed just out of reach, until he was barely aware of anything and didn’t bother to keep putting things in his mouth. He sobbed briefly, then couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking about. Trying to follow thoughts was like walking alone down a deserted street where the stores were closing one by one.

  When his eyelids began to flutter he tried to keep them open, not with any sense of desperation, but as a child might ward off the sleep he knew could not be fought. When they finally closed it seemed lighter in his head for a moment, and then began to fade into slate gray and beyond. He expected, insofar as he had any expectations left, that this process would continue until everything became black and silent. A brief dreaming moment, as if tilting slowly backward, and then not even that. Good-bye.

  He wasn’t expecting to wake up in the middle of the night, still drunk, wracked with whole-body shivers. He wasn’t expecting to be alive, and in thirty kinds of pain. He certainly wasn’t expecting to see something standing over him, something big, something that smelled like the scent of rotted meat carried on a cold, cold wind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE RESTAURANT WAS A BIG ROOM SPLIT UP INTO different areas, with a section of tables in the center and booths around three sides. Small lanterns hung at the entrance to each booth, but they didn’t work anymore. The walls had been done out in big retro-style murals, lots of powder blue and pale pink and scratchy black lines. The scalloped double-height windows at the entrance showed a parking lot blown drab with old leaves, and I watched as a cold wind played with them awhile. I was in my usual spot, one of the booths in the back of the room. I liked it there. The bench wasn’t too close into the table, so you didn’t feel hemmed in. The menu was riddled with cunning puns and full of stuff like burgers, burritos, big old chef salads, and chili (Cincinnati- or Texas-style, “Hot, Hotter, or W-W-Watch Out!”), which is very much my kind of thing.

  All in all it was a perfect place for dinner, aside from one thing. The service sucked. I’d been waiting a long time now and no one had bid me welcome, reassured me I was in the system, or given me ice water I wouldn’t drink. And actually, it wasn’t just the waitstaff who were slacking. When I first arrived I saw someone had knocked over most of the chairs in the central portion of the room, which looked messy. I’d put them back up, tucking them neatly under the tables, but that really wasn’t my job. It wasn’t my job to replace the lightbulbs either. I considered going back into the kitchen, but I knew it would be pointless. It was even quieter back there, and darker.

  I leaned forward on the table, wondering what the hell I was doing there. Three days is too long to wait for a bowl of chili, no matter how damned good it is. Even I was feeling ready to bid farewell to Relent, Idaho.

  I KNEW A LOT ABOUT TOWNS LIKE RELENT BECAUSE that was where I’d spent most of my time in recent months. I had wandered directionless across a great many miles of backwoods and prairie in the country’s least glamorous states. Initially I’d been staying in motels, then one afternoon I’d gone to an ATM and found there was no more money. It’s amazing the difference a little brightly colored rectangle makes to your well-being, to your sense of identity and belonging. You only really understand the card’s importance when the machine coughs it back out again and tells you “No,” and that word means not now, not later, not ever; when you are suddenly reminded the card was never some magical gold-producing chalice but just a piece of plastic you didn’t even legally own. I stood in a parking lot in New Jersey turning mine over in my hands until a woman with an SUV and three fat kids told me to get the hell out of the way. She had her own card ready and every confidence it would perform its function. I envied her for that. Though not for her kids, who were ugly as sin.

  I walked back to my car and climbed in. Sat and looked out through the windshield for a while. I had eighteen dollars and change, plus less than half a tank of gas. Nothing else. At all.

  “So, Bobby, what are we going to do now?”

  Bobby didn’t answer, because he was dead. He’d been my best friend, one of the few people whose long-term fate I’d cared about. He’d died up at a place called The Halls, as we tried to catch a psychopath who called himself the Upright Man, and who happened to be my brother. The Halls had been blown to kingdom come, vaporizing Bobby’s body along with them. Bobby had become an unpredictable conversationalist since. Sometimes he said what I needed him to, telling me yes, Ward, maybe this was a good town to stay the night, or yes, I most likely did need another beer—and yes, we’d done our best to find the people who murdered my parents and it would be stupid of me to feel guilty about everything that had gone wrong, up to and including the fact that he was dead.

  Then he’d go silent for a long while. Weeks. I don’t know where he went during these periods, what change took place in my mind that meant I didn’t feel I could hear him. And it was only in my own head that I heard him. I knew that. He wasn’t actually there.

  In the end I drove out of the bank parking lot and found myself a job washing dishes and cutting potatoes three towns away. The Ecuadorean fry cook let me sleep on his floor for two days, after which I had enough cash to get a room of my own provided I didn’t mind sharing it with bugs and dust and noise, and that I didn’t eat. Working in kitchens is good for people in that position, though you become heartily sick of the cheaper food groups. Relations between the Ecuadorean and myself broke down a week later when I tried to get him to share the small coke-dealing business he had going among the other staff and a few young and not-so-young locals who’d turn up round the back some nights. I wound up driving the hell out of town in the small hours, bleeding profusely and feeling like a fool.

  The next morning I was taking a rest outside a Burger King in West Virginia, still bleeding, though less steadily, when a voice finally came into my head and answered a question from nine days before. I cleaned myself up in the BK’s washroom, treated myself to a globalized breakfast of foodlike materials, and drove straight down to Arizona. Once there I located a residence in Flagstaff, which took a while because I’d been there only once before, somewhat drunk, and had since lost the address. I watched the place carefully for twenty-four hours before getting out my otherwise use
less rectangle of plastic, which I used to break in.

  And so for five days I lived in Bobby Nygard’s house.

  FIRST THING I DID, ONCE I’D HAD A GOOD LOOK around and established that if anyone had robbed the place they’d done so very tidily and without being tempted by tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer and surveillance equipment, was get online. I hadn’t done this in a while. I was semiconvinced that any attempt to trace personal information would be noticed somewhere and have people coming after me. Among the things Bobby had been expert in was the obfuscation of internet trails. I knew that if I used his home system I’d be safe, at least for a little while.

  Bank accounts were my first stop. I soon established that my account had been closed, its contents AWOL. Not closed, but empty, was another account with a different bank. This was where the money from my parents’ estate had been transferred. Someone had cleared it out, leaving credit of a single cent.

  I logged out and sat back, light-headed. I wasn’t surprised, but it still qualified as very bad news, and the leaving of the penny made me want to find someone and hurt them. I went through to the kitchen and found a saucer to use for an ashtray and stood looking out on the street. I heard Bobby talking then alright. He’d always been at me to stop smoking, and in my head had evidently retained the opinion. I finished the cigarette anyway. It was nice to hear someone’s voice, even if it was bugging me, and even if it was my own.

  I stayed in the house. It seemed safe there, and I was tired of moving. I lived on the cans in the cupboards so I didn’t have to go out. I spent a lot of time reading Bobby’s notes and manuals, and I searched the house from top to bottom as respectfully as I could. I found a cache of false identities and took them, knowing Bobby would have bought them from someone he trusted. I also came across a little under six thousand dollars in cash, hidden in a computer box in the basement. I sat and looked at it for a while, feeling bad for finding it and even worse for what I was going to do. Bobby had a mother. I’d tracked her down a month before to pass on the news that he was dead. She had been drunk, and had thrown things at me, though it was not clear whether this was in response to the news—they had been far from close—or just a general policy. Probably the money should go to her, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was highly likely it was dirty, and I believed in my heart that Bobby would approve of me taking it. That’s what was going to happen, regardless.