A Blind Eye

by G. M. Ford

  He’d stemmed the flow of blood by packing his nose with snow. He stuck his arms into the car and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. On countless afternoons she’d watched the rippling of his thick muscles as he’d worked on the boat. On countless nights she’d reveled in the controlled power of his embrace as they’d made love in the dark cabin below. She knew he was strong, but nothing like this. He groped around until he had his hands under her arms and then plucked her from the car as if she were a child.

  Next thing she knew, she was sitting on the side of the Ford. Snow and her hair swirled around her head, obscuring her vision. She shuddered, pulled her cape tightly around her shoulders, and looked around.

  The Ford was lodged against a tree, about fifty feet down the incline. The muted purple glow of a street-light was visible above. Below, the incline seemed to steepen before disappearing altogether into blackness. Above the roar of the storm, she could hear Corso breathing raggedly through his mouth. He reached over and took her hand.

  “Let’s go” was all he said, before stepping off the car onto the hillside, dragging her along in his wake as he struggled up the hill, using bushes and trees to pull them upward toward the light. Halfway to the top, he fell heavily to his knees and began to slide back toward her. It seemed, for a moment, they might slip backward into the void below, but he dug in with his feet, stopped his slide, and then began crawling upward, until he disappeared over the guardrail, where he again turned back and reached for her. She gasped as he ran his rough hands over her breasts, feeling around until he found her upper arms and lifted her to his side. “Jesus, Corso…” She waggled her shoulders and brushed at herself. “If you wanted a feel, all you had to do was ask.”

  “I’m blind,” Corso rasped.

  “What?”

  “My vision’s all screwed up. It’s like I’m cross-eyed or something.”

  Before she could reply, the sound of breaking glass rose above the roar of the storm. They stood on the snow-covered road, wincing as they listened to the Ford bouncing off trees and boulders as it made its way toward the black silence at the bottom of the ravine.

  Shaking in the cold, Dougherty reached over and fastened the five buttons on Corso’s overcoat. “We’ve gotta find shelter,” she said. “We’re not gonna last very long out here.”

  “Down,” Corso said. “We keep going down.”

  His words seemed to anger the storm. Above their heads, the trees swayed like frenzied dancers. The snow seemed to thicken, nearly obscuring the overturned pickup truck forty yards away. She poked a hand out from inside her cape and took him by the sleeve. He pawed at his face, trying to clear his vision, shook his head twice, and then followed her down the slope toward the ghost truck.

  They skirted the wreck on the high side. The under-carriage was a solid layer of dirty ice. The open door rocked slightly in the wind. She pulled Corso around the front, bent, and wiped the snow from the wind-shield with her bare hand. The truck’s windshield was completely iced over from the inside. No way of telling if anyone was there. “I can’t see anything,” she shouted above the locomotive wind.

  Corso pulled her back the way they’d come. He groped around on the undercarriage with his hands and then stepped back a pace and kicked at the ice. Four times, until a block of dirty ice fell on his boots, revealing a rusting muffler and exhaust pipe. Corso let go of her hand. He grabbed the open door-frame, put his right foot on the exhaust pipe, and pulled himself upward until he could look down into the cab.

  He blinked and rubbed at his eyes, trying to put his kaleidoscopic vision back together. An old man lay at the bottom of the cab, squashed against the window. Stone dead. Frozen white and partially covered with snow. Corso levered himself upward, resting his belly on the doorframe. He used his right hand to brush at the frozen driver, as if removing the snow would somehow bring him back to life. He could hear Dougherty’s voice chattering with cold as she called his name, asking what was inside.

  Corso began to pull himself from the cab when he noticed the odd angle of the dead man’s right arm. Held upward and away from his body. He brushed away the snow covering the hand and arm. His breath froze in his throat. The old man had spent his last moments trying to warm himself with a yellow Bic lighter, which now lay frozen in his stiff dead fingers. A voice deep in Corso’s head wondered if such an ignominious and futile gesture might not be a fitting metaphor for life. Candle in the wind and all that. And then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, Corso reached for the lighter. The old man held it fast in his icy death grip. Bringing his other hand into the cab, Corso pried the corpse’s fingers back one by one. The frozen fingers unfurled with a sound like crackling cellophane, until the lighter dropped into Corso’s palm.

  Corso wiggled himself from the cab, found footing on the undercarriage, and then dropped silently to the ground. Dougherty stood, hopping from foot to foot, pushing buttons on her cell phone. Her hair was completely covered with snow.

  “No service,” she shouted.

  “There’s an old guy inside. Frozen solid.”

  She pocketed the phone. “That’s whaaat weee’re gonna be if weee don’t get out of heeere.”

  As if to give her comfort, Corso offered the ice-covered lighter. She grimaced.

  “Jesus, Corso,” she said. “You must have busted something loose in your head. What goddamn good is that gonna do? Come on.” She snatched the lighter from his hand and began pulling him down the hill.

  After a quarter-mile and three hairpin turns, the road began to level. They walked shoulder to shoulder, shuddering together in the arctic wind. Half a mile more and they were on the flat, stumbling along beneath an arched cathedral of bare trees, when Dougherty began to falter, to stagger slightly, and finally dropped to her knees in the snow. She looked up at Corso. “My legs,” she stammered. “I can’t feel them anymore.”

  Corso picked her up and set her on her feet again. “You gotta keep walking,” he said. She nodded. Took a single step forward and pitched facefirst into the snow.

  Corso dropped to one knee, scooped her into his arms, and then struggled back to his feet. Holding her in his arms, he began to trudge forward, one slow step at a time, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as he made his way down the narrow road.

  Dougherty went inside of herself. To the place where the rest of the universe didn’t exist. The world where the voice in her head was the only sound and the pictures the voice painted were the whole of creation.

  She kept imagining the old man in the truck. Wondering how long he’d held out hope. Whether he’d finally had a moment where he knew he was going to die. Had he taken that last instant to bark out his defiance to the universe? Or had he gone meekly into the frozen reaches of the night? She wondered about hope. About how it was the only evil left in the box after that silly girl removed the lid. She was wondering about how hope had risen from final evil to state of grace when another sound began to intrude.

  “Can you see it?” the voice said. “The purple light? Over there.”

  A hand pushed her chin to the left. “See it?”

  “It’s a house,” she said. “Put me down. You can make it. Get the people. Come back for me.”

  Instead he boosted her upward with his knee and again began staggering forward down the road. His ragged, frozen breath burst out before him as he fought his way forward. They were at the driveway now. All she could see was a single light and the shape of a house through the swirling snow and ice.

  “Put me down. Go get the people,” she was pleading, but instead he lifted her higher and began to trudge through the knee-deep snow of the driveway. Every step was an exercise in agony. She was beating his chest and screaming. Crying. “Oh, god, Corso,” she was yelling. “You gotta put me down. Something’s broken inside your head. You’re bleeding to death through your nose. Please. I can make it on my own. Really I can. We gotta stop the bleeding. Please, Corso, please.”

  Corso was making a noise now. A low keening sound, almo
st a chant, as he forced himself forward, his puzzle-picture vision growing dimmer and dimmer, the pleading voice fading to silence as he moved onward. Then he stumbled and fell forward, pitching her out onto something hard.

  4

  First time Corso opened his eyes, all he could see were flames dancing across a stained ceiling. The only sound to reach his ears was the groan and crackle of the fire. Unable to raise his head, he experienced a moment of doubt, wondering if perhaps he hadn’t died and gone to hell. He was still pondering this possibility and trying to move his extremities when the ebony wings folded around him and again the world turned black.

  Second time he opened his eyes, dawn had begun to trickle in the side windows. He was able to raise his head far enough to prop it with his hand. His head felt as if someone were driving a sixteen-penny nail between his eyes, with measured rhythmic strokes, driving the point deeper and deeper into his brain. He was unable to breathe through his nose but remembered where he was. The old house with the No Trespassing sign tacked onto the door with roofing nails. Deserted. Front windows boarded over. He recalled Dougherty kicking in the door. Recalled her half dragging, half carrying him inside. And then lying there on the frozen floor and the candle in the darkness. The single flickering flame and the empty room. And then closing his eyes to make the hammering in his head go away. And then…

  The third time he opened his eyes, he sat straight up and winced as a brain-tumor headache nearly threw him back to the floor. The fallen snow reflected halogen-bright through the side windows, and then he remembered it all. How Dougherty saved his life. He looked around. She lay at the other end of the fireplace, huddled in a heap beneath her cape. He remembered how she’d used the lighter he’d found to make her way through the deserted house looking for something to burn. How she’d found long empty drawers in the kitchen still lined with fancy paper. How she’d leaned the drawers up against the hearth and stomped them to splinters with her boots. He could see the violent shaking of her hands as she lit the crumpled paper and waited for the splinters to catch fire. And then the larger pieces of the drawers and then the kitchen cabinet doors, and then it started to get warm. And how he’d tried to get up but couldn’t and her soothing voice telling him to stay on the floor. How they were going to be all right. After that, things got spotty.

  The fire was now reduced to a glowing bed of ash. One segment at a time, Corso levered himself from the floor, until he stood unsteadily on his feet. The air was warmer at the top of the room. His head reeled, and for a moment he thought he might pass out and crumple back onto the cold boards. Unsteady, he staggered over and put a hand on the brick fireplace. To the right of the fireplace opening, several thick brown boards lay stacked and ready, their ends splintered and spiked.

  Moving slowly, Corso pulled back the rusted screen and piled the remaining boards onto the glowing embers in a crisscross pattern. For a moment nothing happened, and Corso feared he had smothered the fire. The new material did nothing but smoke and hiss. Then the thick, dusty smoke began to swirl up the chimney and, after an anxious moment, a single yellow flame poked its head from among the boards. A couple of crackles and, with a whoosh, everything caught fire at once. Corso closed the screen.

  At his feet, Dougherty stirred but did not waken. Using the wall to steady himself, Corso made his way around the corner into the kitchen, where it was noticeably colder. His breath swirled about his head as he looked around. She’d burned everything that could be torn loose and fed to the fire. All that remained was the frame of what had once been a modest set of kitchen drawers and cabinets along the north wall.

  Sliding his hand along the countertop, he crossed the kitchen to the back door. His reflection in the wavy glass upper panel of the door stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t recognize the face that peered back at him. A seeping green bruise ran completely across his forehead like a bloody headband. His eyes were blackened and nearly swollen shut. Everything below his nose was a solid sheet of thick coagulated blood. He pawed at his nose and was rewarded with a jolt of pain. He rested his forearms on the countertop and bowed his head, breathing deeply, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, until a voice from the other room startled him. “Corso,” it called.

  He had to clear his throat three times before he could rasp, “In here.”

  “You need to lie down.”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “You’re nowhere in the vicinity of okay,” she insisted.

  As if to prove her wrong, Corso pushed himself off the countertop and staggered back into the front room. She was kneeling on the floor with pain in her eyes, rocking slightly, as if the repetitive movement might somehow distract her from her suffering. Corso sat on the hearth, bringing his face close to hers. “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded, without meaning it. “Except for my hands,” she said, bringing them out from under the folds of her cape. Her hands looked like they’d been boiled. Swollen and red, they seemed to have a life of their own. “I froze them last night. They burn like hell.”

  “Keep them warm” was all Corso could think to say.

  “You should see yourself,” she said through her teeth as she slipped her hands back under the cape.

  “I have.”

  She started to get up, but Corso put a firm hand on her shoulder.

  “You saved my ass,” he said.

  She tried to elbow his hand from her shoulder, but he held firm. “You gotta lay down, Corso. You got something busted up in your head. For a while there I was afraid you were gonna bleed to death on me.”

  “You saved me,” he said again.

  “We saved each other’s asses,” she said. “You carried me half a mile through a blizzard.” She winced at the memory. “Craziest damn thing I ever saw. All I did was start a fire and keep it going.”

  As if on signal, the fire in the hearth collapsed upon itself with a rush of sparks. “Where’d you get the boards?” Corso asked.

  “There’s a barn outside.” She shrugged her shoulders. “There was nothing left in here to burn, so I decided to try out there. I fell through the floor. That’s when I froze my hands. Ripping up the old floorboards and dragging them inside.”

  Corso got to his feet. “We gotta keep the fire going. That’s how somebody’s gonna find us.”

  Dougherty began to protest and get to her feet.

  “Stay still,” Corso said. “I’m a little fuzzy, but I’m okay.”

  He brought one hand to the top of his head, as if to keep it in place, and then eased across the room and pulled open the door. The bright white reduced his eyes to slits. He stood in the doorway gulping the frigid air. The storm had passed, leaving behind a wind-whipped blanket of white reaching nearly to the tops of the fence posts lining the driveway. He stepped out onto the porch and drew the door closed. His shoulders shuddered inside his coat. He rubbed his hands together.

  For as far as the eye could see, the only marks on the surface of the snow were a ragged trail of footsteps leading to a leaning barn thirty yards north of the house. He walked slowly, lifting his knees high, trying not to jostle his head. Above him, boxcar clouds raced across a bright blue sky. The air twinkled with wind-blown snow crystals.

  It was more of a shed than a barn. No more than a dozen feet across. Listing heavily to starboard. A rusted split rim and a broken rake hung from the right-hand wall.

  She’d burned almost half the floor. Corso stepped inside and grabbed the broken end of one of the boards. The rotting wood crumbled in his hand as he forced it upward, pried it loose from its ancient nails, and then tossed it out into the trampled snow.

  Wasn’t until he tried to kick the nearest full board loose that he realized the other half of the floor was newer. No dry rot here. Just solid lumber nailed on two-foot centers along its length.

  Corso stepped carefully over the exposed floor joists, reached up over his head, and grabbed the rusted split rim hanging from the wall. Heavier than he’d imagined, the rim fell
nearly to his knees before his muscles stopped its descent. A thick layer of rust crumbled in his hands as he retraced his steps. With a grunt he raised the rim above his head and brought it down on the nearest board. The board broke in two. Corso stepped to his right, repeating the process as he moved along, breaking the wood into two-foot lengths. By the time he’d worked his way to the rear of the building and back, his head was reeling and he thought for a moment he might pass out. His nose had begun to bleed again, sending an intermittent drizzle of blood down onto his shoes.

  He dropped the rim to the floor and was bent at the waist, waiting for his vision to clear, when he first heard the sound. An engine. The blat of a diesel maybe.

  Carefully he picked his way across the maze of broken floor and made his way outside. Shading his eyes from the glare, he scanned the horizon. Nothing. He stood still and listened, but the sound did not repeat itself.

  After several moments he heaved a sigh, stepped back inside the shed, and continued tearing up the shattered pieces of wood, throwing them outside onto the pile. While the far side of the floor had covered nothing but dirt, this side was lined with black plastic.

  As he worked his way toward the front of the shed, he began to realize that the black plastic was not a single sheet of material but instead a large folded package held together by long lengths of silver duct tape.

  Curious now, he used the flat of his hand to press down on the upper layer. Beneath the black, something brittle shifted with a dry clack. Instinctively Corso pulled his hand back and peered into his rust-covered palm. Then he heard the noise again.

  This time he was positive. The sound of a diesel engine at work sent him hurrying back outside. Out on the road, a bright yellow road grader sent a black plume into the sky as it moved along, pushing the snow before it.