No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “Yes ma’am,” Melanie said.

  She looked from Melanie to Marty and back again, as if her eyes were calibrating with her mind, making sure she wasn’t making this whole thing up.

  “You get out of here,” she said. “You take that filthy camera and that trailer of yours and you go right back the way you came.” She cut the air with her hand. “There’s nothing here for you. You get out of here now.”

  Undaunted, Melanie took another step forward, proffering the microphone as she spoke. “Mrs. Green, we were hoping you could . . .”

  Doris Green pushed the microphone back in Melanie’s face. Then she began to shout. “A story. All any of you want is a story.” She waved both arms. “I’ll give you a story. I’ll give you a story about a man with too much honor for this world. A man who did his duty. A man who served his country only to have some whore . . . some filthy whore . . .” Her face was red. Her lips flecked with foam. She rocked unsteadily on her feet and brought an arm up to wipe her mouth with her sleeve.

  She got most of it. A single piece of spittle still clung to her upper lip when the first sign of distress appeared on her face. A quizzical look. Not so much of pain as of confusion, as if she’d forgotten what she intended to say next. She brought one hand to her breast, then the other, almost like she wanted to guard against something escaping her chest. And then, as if a giant had grabbed her by the shoulders and thrown her on her back, she went down in a heap, looking astonished in the seconds before she hiccuped once and froze in place with her eyes closed and her mouth wide open.

  “Mrs. Green, Mrs. Green . . .” Melanie’s voice was the only sound in the night air. She stepped forward and looked down at Doris Green for a second, as if trying to decide if this was really happening, then dropped to her knees. She looked up at Marty.

  “She’s had a heart attack or something,” Melanie shouted. “Oh God,” she wailed. “I think she’s dead.” Tears began to run down her face. “Oh God. What do I do? What do I do?”

  Corso hopped down onto the ground and loped around to where Doris Green lay stretched out on her back among the leaves and bracken. Her limbs were stiff; her face was ashen. By that time Marty had left the camera whirling away on the tripod and was beginning the initial sixteen compressions of CPR. He looked up at Corso, without losing his compression rhythm.

  “There’s a satellite phone in one of the camera cases. Call 911.”

  Corso turned and sprinted for the phone.

  37

  Driver sat on the edge of the bed watching TV with the sound off. He was getting ready to leave. She could tell by the way he was breaking down those precious guns of his and wrapping the pieces in towels from the bathroom.

  “Pleeeease,” she whined. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”

  He looked up at her with those hooded black eyes.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She crossed the room and knelt at his feet like an apostle. She leaned hard against his leg, hoping the feel of her breast would kindle a flame in his loins. No such luck.

  He looked down at her. “Anybody see you kill anybody?”

  “What?”

  “In your travels with Harry . . . did anybody see you kill anybody.” He zipped the bag on his left.

  “I never . . . ,” she stammered.

  He cut her off. “I don’t give a damn whether you did or you didn’t kill anybody, girl. I just want to know if anybody still alive saw you grease anybody, or even point a gun at anybody, anything could make you look like you were going along with the program of your own free will.”

  She thought it over, trying to decide whether he would prefer she’d killed somebody or not. “Only person I killed was that old woman in the drugstore. Only person there was her old man and Harry shot him a bunch of times.”

  “Well then,” he said. “Here’s what you do . . .” When he looked down, she was lost in her own thoughts. “You listening to me?” he asked.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “Room’s paid up through noon tomorrow,” he said. “You get yourself a good night’s sleep. In the morning you call up the desk and tell the lady there you need to see the cops. You tell her you’ve been kidnapped. Tell ’em I left sometime during the night. Soon as you saw I was gone you called the desk. Right?”

  She batted her blue eyes and nodded.

  “It’s important that you make the call. You don’t want to get caught by the cops. You gotta turn yourself in. You understand what I’m telling you here?”

  She said she did and began to rub his leg with the flat of her hand.

  “You tell that story and you stick to it. No matter what anybody says or what any lawyer says to you, you tell the same damn story. You were kidnapped from the beginning. Harry murdered your father and dragged you off kicking and screaming. He did all the killing. You were there against your will. After Harry was dead, it was Kehoe and me. We kept you captive after that. Tell ’em where to find Kehoe. Show ’em where Harry lies. Anything you can do like that will work to your advantage.”

  She stopped toying with his zipper for long enough to ask, “You think they’re gonna believe that?” she asked.

  “They’re gonna hate the idea,” he said. “There’s a bunch of cops dead, so they’re gonna want a fish to fry for sure.” He held up a finger. “But . . . you tell that story long enough and loud enough and you’re going to attract the attention of women’s groups, of victims’ rights groups, of groups neither you nor me ever heard of. Big-time attorneys are going to come out of the woodwork, fighting each other for the right to take your case. All you got to do is help the cops and stick to your story and you’ll make it hard for Texas or anyplace else to convict you of anything.”

  By the time he’d finished talking, she’d eased his fly all the way down and had begun the somewhat contorted process of extricating his manhood from the confines of his briefs. Just as it seemed she might actually pull it off, his hand reached over and grabbed her wrist. He began to remove her hand from his crotch, when, all of a sudden, he seemed to lose interest, dropping her arm and grabbing the remote control from the bed. Sensing an opening, she used both hands to free her quarry. As the TV volume began to rise . . . “We’ve been following your son’s story. We were hoping . . .” she slipped him into her mouth. The TV got louder. “I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you on the television,” screamed the first voice. “Yes ma’am,” bellowed the second. Within seconds, her efforts began to achieve the desired results. Even with his attention diverted by the television, the natural laws of anatomy and physics began to take over. Thus emboldened, she fell into a regular rhythm. “You get out of here,” the first voice cried. “You take that filthy camera and that trailer of yours and you go right back the way you came. There’s nothing here for you. You get out of here now.” And then, a moment later, she sensed something had gone terribly wrong. The voice coming from the TV screamed of terror.

  “Oh God,” the second voice wailed. “I think she’s dead. Oh God. What do I do? What do I do?” Despite her best efforts to maintain control, he shifted his hips and extricated himself from her mouth with a wet pop. Before she could regroup, she felt a cold oval of steel press against her lips, felt the front sight bang against her teeth as the barrel slid into her mouth. She looked up. Men liked it when you looked up. The expression on his face sent a wave of fear through her body. He was crying as he used his thumb to release the safety. She closed her eyes. It took Melanie Harris three tries to dial the number. She brought the receiver to her ear with both hands. Brian answered on the third ring. His voice was husky with sleep. “ ’Lo,” he said. She flicked her eyes at the bedside table. The digital alarm clock read three fifteen. Five-fifteen in Michigan.

  “Brian,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Hello,” he said again.

  “It’s me.”

  The bumping and groaning at the other end told her he’d dropped the phone on the floor. She was waiting for him to get everything
organized when she heard the woman’s voice in the background . . . plain as day. Except it wasn’t daytime.

  “Who is it, Bri?” the sleepy voice asked.

  She heard his breathing again as he righted the phone.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Melanie used her thumb to break the connection and replaced the receiver. She drew several ragged breaths . . . rubbed her nose with her arm . . . thought she was going to cry . . . but the tears never came. Instead, she lay back on the bed and stared at the cheap light fixture on the motel ceiling. She brought her legs up onto the bedspread, closed her eyes and the events of the past eight or nine hours flashed across her mind’s eye like a bad movie in fast forward.

  It had taken an aid car just under an hour to reach Doris Green. The county police arrived five minutes later. Marty and Corso had traded off CPR for the whole time before being forced to give up the ghost. Even after her lips had become blue and cool to the touch, they’d maintained their faith they could breathe life back into her. It took the arriving EMTs to convince them there was nothing more to be done. By that time, Marty was so exhausted, he could barely raise his arms from his sides. When the time came to leave, Corso had to help him back to the RV. Once the excitement was over and Doris Green had been carried down from her mountain, they’d backtracked seventy miles to a town called Jenner Peak, an alpine hamlet close enough to the Mountain West ski area to support half a dozen cheap motels, a pair of which stayed open year-round. Since ten-thirty, they’d been holed up in rooms three, four and seven of the Ski Chalet Motor Inn.

  She’d been too cold and hollow to sleep. Spent the night pacing to the bathroom and back. Now . . . now she was something else. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since Samantha’s death. That feeling of disconnectedness, of being alone on the planet in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of people and things equally singular. She wondered how she’d come so far toward cynicism as to make her call to Brian insufficient cause for tears; and then, in the same instant, she knew the answer. It was because whatever it was they had to lose had been lost a long time ago, flung facedown in that frozen ditch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the rest of her hopes and dreams. It was as if her life, from that moment on, had become little more than a holding action. Nothing more than a leaking boat and a mindless need to stay afloat.

  Again she tried to cry and again she was unable.

  38

  Corso was wide-awake when the knock came. He’d nodded off a couple of times but had not been visited by anything resembling restfulness. Funny too, because the vagaries of life and death generally rolled off him rather easily. Too easily, he often thought in his more reflective moments, when he wondered if his capacity to move forward in the face of tragedy was not somehow an indictment of his inability to feel. When others found themselves numbed by the moment, and unable to do anything more than question the universe, Corso had always been able to take a deep breath and move on. In his more self-indulgent moments, he attributed his resilience to the horrors he’d witnessed as a reporter, but in his heart he knew better, knew that he’d been that way for as long as he could remember. Remembered way back when he was nine and watched his grandmother’s funeral, standing amidst the wailing and the handwringing, clear-eyed and detached, wondering if he should join the chorus of sorrow and knowing, with certainty, that something in his makeup made such expressions impossible.

  He levered himself from the bed and padded to the door in his bare feet.

  “Yeah,” he said through the door.

  “It’s Melanie,” the voice said.

  “Melanie who?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Just a sec,” he said.

  Corso pulled his jeans from the back of the chair and slipped them on. His shirt was hanging in the closet at the far side of the room. Too far for four in the morning. He was still bare-chested when he walked back to the door and opened it. Melanie Harris. Black cashmere overcoat, no shoes. She stood, holding her coat closed at the throat, shivering in the wind. Corso stepped aside and motioned her into the room.

  “I saw your light,” she said as they passed in the doorway.

  “I haven’t had much luck getting to sleep,” he admitted. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. “Looks familiar,” she said. Corso laughed. “Yeah . . . I’m thinking of booking this one for my next winter vacation.” He lifted the plastic armchair from its nook beside the nightstand and set in on the floor next to the bed. Before sitting down, he crossed the room and slipped his shirt over his shoulders, without bothering with the buttons. By the time he worked his way back around the foot of the bed, Melanie had stretched out a bit, putting her hands on the bed and leaning back on her arms.

  “So . . . ,” he said tentatively, “what can I do for you at this ungodly hour of the night.”

  “Actually, I think it’s morning.”

  “At this hour of the morning,” he amended with a smile. She looked away, embarrassed. A silent moment passed before she said, “I didn’t want to be alone. I kept seeing that old woman’s face.”

  Corso nodded his understanding. He sat in the chair and ran his hands over his face. “She’s going to be with me for a while too,” he admitted.

  “I can’t help thinking we were responsible for her death.”

  Corso was shaking his head. “You give us too much credit,” he said. “We may have had a part in it, but there’s no way we were what I’d call responsible. The way I see things, each of us is responsible for himself. We each forge our own relationship with the universe and take our chances from there.” He put his feet up on the bed. “There’s a lot of luck involved. It’s like something I heard Driver say while he was babbling about fish. Some are destined to make it all the way back to the spawning grounds, some are destined to fall victim to bears, some to eagles and others just don’t have the juice to complete the journey. They just melt back into the water and feed the algae.”

  “I don’t want to feed the algae,” she said.

  “Nobody does.”

  They were silent for a while. It was comfortable.

  “You check out the tube?” Corso asked finally. She shook her head. “I haven’t had the stomach for it.”

  “We’re everywhere,” he said. “Live at six o’clock.”

  “Somehow it doesn’t seem important right now.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “And?”

  “Might be one of those times we weren’t careful enough about what we wished for.”

  She let herself slip down onto her back. “We weren’t careful at all,” she said. “We . . .” She waved the thought away, then used the hand to cover her eyes.

  He heard a quick intake of breath and, before he could be certain, the noise of an eighteen-wheeler, low in its gears, laboring over the summit, overtook the sound in the room. When the roar had faded and nothing could be heard above the wind, the sounds of her crying became audible. Corso sat quietly, staring down at the cigarette burns on the wooden arms of the chair. Her measured tears came in fits and starts; angry and aggrieved, they escaped from her eyes like reluctant refugees.

  Corso waited for a lull. “Anything I can do?” he asked. At first she shook her head. And then, in a voice he’d never heard before, she said, “I think maybe I need a hug.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  A moment later they stood by the side of the bed wrapped in each other’s arms. The solace gave Melanie Harris the strength to let it out. Her body shook with sobs; the tracks of her tears coursed down Corso’s bare chest. Corso hung on and waited for the storm to subside. Seemed like she had a lot of tears stored somewhere inside her, so it took a while. More like she ran out of energy before she ran out of tears. By the time she stopped shaking, Corso reckoned he’d been hugging her for longer than he’d ever hugged anyone before. He whispered in her ear. “You know . . .”

  “No,” she said, disengaging slightly. And kissed him, full on the mouth,
a kiss whose intent filled the air like a rising note. He pushed her back to arm’s length. “You sure?” he asked. She kissed him again and they were both sure.

  “I thought you were spoken for.”

  “It’s algae food,” she said, stepping closer, running her hands inside his shirt, caressing his back as she pulled him closer. “We’ve fallen by the wayside.”

  Before he could respond, her fingers had the overcoat halfunbuttoned. Corso saw it coming. The point of no return. He opened his mouth to speak, but it turned out the overcoat was the only thing she was wearing. The sight of her naked body froze the words in his throat. He felt the hot rush of blood and knew some things never changed.

  Ray Lofton made this run every Saturday morning rain or shine. Being low man on the seniority totem pole just naturally got him the weekend work. On a good day he could be back at the office in three hours flat. When it got snowy he’d have to chain up. Took all damn day in the snow. This year, summer had lingered, sending the slanting rays of Indian Summer down onto the alpine meadows well into October, making Ray’s life way easier. Company he worked for had the contract to pick up the trash on the west side of the divide. Once a week they had him take the ancient International Harvester garbage truck up to the summit and pick up everything on the way down.

  Mary the dispatcher told him to do it that way . . . from the top down, when he first started on the route, but Ray, never being one to follow orders, figured as long as he was driving by he might as well pick up whatever was there. What he discovered was that the old truck wouldn’t pull the grade unless it was empty. He’d had to go down, dump out, then go back up to the summit. Didn’t get back till dark and don’t think he hadn’t taken a ration of shit from every damn person in the company. The grade was always steeper than it looked. Ray Lofton shifted down into third gear. The old truck roared its disapproval; the windshield shook until it made a noise like a tambourine. The guy in the passenger seat reached out and put one hand on the dashboard like he was trying to prevent the rig from shaking itself to pieces .