How long till they find Dad?
Closing his eyes, he focuses on his father’s face, blood like a crimson mask, red stains. Joey is scared. If death comes for him, how will he know it? Will it be painful, like the look on his father’s face, or will he simply fall asleep and never awaken? Or will it be this never-ending blackness? He wonders when it will happen.
Joey wants to scream but shouldn’t. In the movies, if you scream they kill you. In the movies, you are scared but can’t show it.
Joey hears the music. Immediately he shies away from it, a gut reaction.
But it’s only the radio, only the sound of violins. Classical music. The man is quiet.
Joey slams his feet against blackness. Sudden wrenching pain, like a firecracker, dull aching that goes through ankles, shins, thighs.
Grunting, Joey tries once more, crashes his feet into his makeshift prison, harder this time, sucking for air as he hits.
The SUV brakes hard, swerves, stops. Violins stop playing, hollow footsteps coming closer. A metal click in the lock, just above him. The latch releases.
In that instant, he’s going to die. He’s sure of it, fiercely conscious of his own mortality. Closing his eyes, he imagines flying high and away from this.
The trunk opens, light flooding in.
Joey’s afraid to open his eyes, look up, but he does.
The calm voice, not as soft as before, coming from above. The man stands before him, shirttails out, raincoat billowing around his body so he looks bigger than he is. The air is cold. Something glimmering in the man’s hand catches the sunlight shafts filtering through clumping, gray clouds. Joey knows instinctively what it must be.
He wants to control his rapid gasps but can’t.
The man looks different in sunlight. Eyes light and unmoving; balding, shaven head; an odd twitch to his right cheek.
The man comes headlong at him through the opening, though Joey is still squinting into the brightness.
He can see the whole face now, like a sun that fills up his horizon too quickly.
He feels the sharp tug at his hair. A violent, jerking motion that snaps his head back into an unnatural position, exposing his face to a cool wind above the field. He cannot bear to open his eyes, instead keeps them tightly closed, waiting for the pain that will signal his end. There is no pain, only the horrible sound of the voice. A demonic voice that goes to the very heart of him, fills him with terror. Joey’s shrieks are carried on the wind, out into the greenness for no one to hear. Joey stops.
Acrid breath on his face, the man’s stench. “You do that one more time, I’ll slit your throat.”
There is no anger in his words, just a sure confidence.
Joey leans back, small hands clutching tightly to carpeting, nodding.
“I’ll hurt you,” the man says.
Joey lifts up, just inches, to get a glimpse of his world. His last look, he’s sure of it. Yet he will not go to heaven without knowing.
“Who are you?” Joey asks, his words barely a murmur.
“Consider me a friend of your mother’s,” the man says slowly, laughing a wicked, low laugh that crackles out into the molten sky.
The man’s hands aren’t big, but he is rubbing them together like they are cold. One is swollen, red. Dried gray and brown dots on it. As the man touches it, he winces.
“My mom doesn’t have friends like you,” Joey says, sitting up further. Only now, he can see they’re on an unfamiliar two-lane highway, cornfields to his left, husks barely taller than the man blowing in a growing breeze from the direction of the setting sun. No other people in sight. The rain has stopped.
Realizing what the boy is doing, the man laughs louder. The kind of laughter that rolls out, sweeps over the landscape. Joey shivers.
The man reaches in his front pocket, takes out a hard pack of Marlboros, lights one up. Joey can see the side of his face, only now realizing: I know this man.
“You’re the one that was watching me?” he asks.
The man takes one puff of his cigarette, throws it on the ground, stomps it out, and grunts. “I’ve been watching you for a long time.”
With that he pushes Joey down and slams the metal thing over him. In the pain of darkness again, Joey listens to the motor turn over, gears shift, the SUV rolls onto the highway. These sounds will be Joey’s personal hell. He knows that although he wants this demon to go to hell, he is not ready to go live with the angels.
TWENTY-NINE
You can do very little with faith but you can do nothing without it.
—Samuel Butler, Rebelliousness, in Notebooks
Rain was falling when Cat got there four hours later. It was a cold, irritating rain that dampened her spirits. Sky the color of slate, a kind of sky that conjured visions of Armageddon, as if Satan himself would descend from the clouds. Three months later, and these clouds would have brought a blizzard. Nature had a way of choosing her own course.
Cat got out of the cab and stood silhouetted against police cruiser headlights, hands stuck deep in her raincoat pockets, looking through a sea of heads for McGregor’s.
Like her, he’d taken the first flight out.
Yellow crime scene tape fluttered, slicked shiny by rain. She bowed under it, willing her legs to keep moving. In front of her, Mark’s house, a place she once called home. Gray siding reflected blue, yellow, the red of the crime scene van’s lights. Everything and everyone was dripping wet. A kidney-shaped bed of dark petunias she’d never noticed seemed beaten down by rain.
Guys with FBI jackets everywhere, block letters emblazoned in bright yellow across their backs. She caught one of them by the arm, his face reflected in an ugly blue flicker from one of the squad cars. “McGregor?” She couldn’t bring herself to get the word out with much force, but the stone-faced man understood.
Turning, he pointed in the Chevy Yukon’s direction, its passenger door gaping open.
At this point, she did not know what had happened. Only that something had happened to Mark and Joey. With Mark’s truck sitting there, both front doors splayed open, Cat couldn’t bring herself to comprehend the worst.
Like a shrill cry from inside, suddenly she knew what it all meant. A singular note of confusion catapulted through her. Like a crescendo, it brought her down. McGregor was moving toward her, his face motionless, evasive.
“Dear God, no.” She couldn’t find any air, couldn’t see what was ahead.
She wanted to hold back this despair, make it go away. But it flooded her, taking all her sanity with it. She focused on McGregor’s face; he was in a full run now, moving faster through the crowd, wearing a worried expression.
Cat heard a hopeless cry that seemed to come from afar. She realized her mouth was hanging open. It was her cry.
In that instant, she wondered if she would ever be all right again.
Was it possible that God had taken both of them? It could not be so. It could not. She simply would not allow herself to believe it.
She crouched down, shivering hands in the rainwater, touching the blacktop, though it seemed so far away. With effort, she wiped water off her face. Crickets, the screeching of bugs louder. The air suddenly thicker, icier.
It felt like everything was falling down. A clap of thunder in the distance; twenty seconds later, a sudden brilliant flash of light.
Find the strength. One foot in front of the other. You have done it before, she told herself. But her legs would not respond. McGregor was there now, his arms around her. Simply holding her. Cat could feel his heartbeat.
“Let it go, Cat, it’s all right,” he whispered. “Let it go…”
She shuddered.
“Mark’s gone, Cat.”
She watched the coroner remove Mark’s body. Mark, this man she’d known well, with whom she’d shared hardships and rewards, a man she’d grown distant from. There were so many opportunities left unfulfilled, things she’d never be able to say, words of forgiveness still to convey. They’d come so far, but
there was still a long way to go with Joey.
Pushing back from McGregor, her eyes searched his for hope. Cat identified little there but pity. She needed to know, even though she could not bear the thought. What about Joey? Inquisitiveness overcomes any need for self-preservation. Where was her child? Watching the zippered body bag, she blocked any thoughts of her butchered child.
She closed her eyes, fought a terrible yearning to know. Finding strength, she performed the simplest of miracles and opened them. Repugnance at bay, she scanned the Yukon’s inside, ghastly blood soaking the driver’s seat.
McGregor was cradling her. Her legs failed and he slowly brought her up. Resting her full body weight on him, Cat inched forward. Blood splatters covered the inside windshield, the driver’s-side window displaying a circular crack. Red soaked a six-inch puddle in beige, matted carpeting. Even with this carnage, she could see her little boy was not there.
Euphoria.
But not yet. Cat would not allow herself to feel it yet.
Her eyes scrutinized the interior once more, eagerly this time. For verification. No other blood, no other signs of a struggle.
Sudden elation sprang in her, like a sweetness she’d never known. Sheer jubilation.
Joey’s gotten away, she thinks. He couldn’t save Mark, but he has gotten away. He is safe. He’ll come back when he realizes it is safe here. When he sees me. Her mind was reeling.
Cat turned away, leaning against McGregor less now, starting to find her legs. Magic was etched in each pore of her face, a look McGregor had never seen before. As abruptly as it came, the look was gone.
Cat’s eyes gazed past clusters of officers to a few men standing down the street, about three hundred feet away. They were stooping over something, picking it up gingerly off the wet pavement. Others stood looking on. It appeared they were talking, consulting. One scratched his head.
She froze, feeling her knees start to buckle. “Please, please, please, oh God, no…” The words came in silent prayers, like her screams, as she got closer to the men huddled. They gestured to her to stay back, McGregor’s hands on her, but she thrust forward. One of the men, wearing a tweed sports coat, stepped to the side, dark bags like painted circles under his eyes. His face was solemn. He walked toward her, charity in his eyes.
She could see inside the streetlight’s circle of light.
Cat exhaled quickly, furiously, as if she had been punched in the gut. She froze, features carved in thick stone, holding her breath. There was a pounding in her head. Unexpectedly, street odors—rain, pavement, oil, smoke—took on a life on their own, overwhelming her. There was another smell. Musty, savage. At first she could not identify it. It was her own sweat. Although the air was cool, she felt heat in her chest.
A permeating heaviness pierced her breast. Cat was uncertain when it first came, the numbing sense of loss.
It was the last thing she saw before collapsing, an image stuck indelibly in her mind.
Joey’s ragged, scuffed sneakers.
THIRTY
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
A clicking sound and the metal is gone. Then a grunt. Joey turns, feels the man’s presence there, the man with the soft movements, even softer voice. Today his motions are even more subdued in the otherwise still air. The stale smell of the Cadi’s trunk gives way to fresh air.
In almost total blackness, Joey listens to the sound of leaves, imagining the rhythm of the land.
Raising his head, he strains through a tiny flood of light under his left eye.
From the duct tape’s corner, there is sunlight, just a glimmer of it, and Joey twists slightly to the left, just a millimeter, to get all of it he can. Enough to get a glimpse of a strangely rounded head, the close-cropped scalp.
Shoes scrape on blacktop, a dark, elusive shadow over him. A quick rustling of leaves, cool breeze against his cheek, the babble of a brook. All these things are out of sight, but he knows where they are.
Just as he knows where the man is. Coming headlong at him, he sees a large, wild shadow. It is vague, silent, ominous. Though Joey holds his breath in the open trunk, the odor of the man overwhelms him. The smell of old sweat and whiskey lingers, overtaking the good clean smells of nature.
Another smell too. He tracks the smell to the man, clothes damp and wet, combined with the animal smell of leather, Joey supposes, coming from the car’s seats.
Joey, terrified and dazed, can’t make out any features, only this man’s vague malevolence directed at him, which seems to rise and fall like a cascade of misdirection with each passing second. Unwittingly, Joey realizes the man’s hatred is directed not at his kind—not at boys in general, not that at all. Rather, it is that he is a particular boy, someone’s son. That is the reason he’s been taken.
In this breakthrough second, Joey Powers knows he is just a boy, but this demon sees him as so much more than that. To this man, he is deliverance and meaning, all rolled up in one. At the same time, finding his breathing in cadence with the man’s shallow respiration, Joey knows he is hated for everything this man has never had—love, kindness, innocence.
Joey is dimly aware that his chest is moving to the tempo of the man’s breathing. The sun feels warm on his face, and he turns to soak up what remnants of it he can before the detectable gloom of night forces him back into darkness.
An obscured figure casts darkness before the sun.
Through his meager light shaft, Joey can see the man is coming even nearer, just an inch away, looking closely into his eyes for a long time. He dares not move, watching the knife come up through his tiny portal, the man pressing its sharpness against his throat. Moving the blade down, it touches Joey’s clothes but doesn’t pierce the nylon fabric of his jacket. Lower now, on his chest, between his ribs, down to his stomach. He is sure the man can feel his small chest heaving in quick, short gasps.
He closes his eyes and is oddly aware of the cold pressure of the blade on his abdomen, pressing through blue jeans. It seems to last forever, fear and anticipation beyond anything Joey has ever known.
Joey tries to move away from it, to break from the paralysis the knife has spun over him. Suddenly, it is as if something hard is holding him, the feel of cool metal encircling his wrists, a clinking sound, then a snap.
As he moves his arms painfully, the unnerving clink of chains. Can only go so far before the metal circles restrict him. Handcuffs.
Maybe, maybe, the legs would move further. Stretch out one leg, just a little. He is careful not to move his abdomen against the knife’s pressure. Through the deafening beating of his chest, Joey is aware that the man’s breathing is gone. Where is he? Is he looking? No. He can barely make out the man’s head. He is staring out at the horizon, not this way.
Stretch, oh God, pressure there too on his ankles. Same coldness; that smell.
Hand shackles and leg shackles tight.
Unerringly, the blade hasn’t moved. The air seems to take on a life of its own, seems to throb, constricting in his lungs. Seconds later the blade’s coldness retreats and Joey feels the sharp tip behind him, slipping between his wrists, his ankles, cutting the electrical tape, releasing him from his bindings.
Anger seethes through every muscle in his body. To be released only to be imprisoned in something more restricting. Cold, heartless hatred directed at this indistinct figure. The man’s head is turning now; he is looking this way maybe. Can’t tell. Then Joey can feel the man’s eyes on him, raping him of his dignity with a stare.
It all seems to continue without end.
Joey does not know how long it has been, how many days.
By the time he is aware of the man being gone, pitch blackness surrounds him like a shroud, whiskey stench no longer sickens him, violins are playing, and he is exhausted, empty, and alone. In the darkness.
Fluttering her eyelids open, to the pain from bright lights ov
erhead, Cat wondered how long she’d been here, even where she was. The smell of antiseptic lingered as she stared past the light to the square perforated ceiling tiles. A dull ache all over.
A beep, beep, beep she recognized as a monitor. Turning her head from side to side, she could see her right wrist was wrapped in tape, an IV administered via a Hep-Lock. From the looks of it, they had recently drawn blood.
Momentarily, she searched for fragments of memory, trying to put the pieces together. She could remember only a hint of time, standing in front of a gray Cape Cod house. More vividly, she recalled the Yukon, its interior splattered with blood. Tiny white and blue tennis shoes.
“I’ve got to get out of here.” She threw the sheets back, the IV stand lurching jerkily behind her swinging arm.
“Now, there will be none of that,” a heavyset nurse, half her age, said, trying to get her back into bed.
The tiles were cold on Cat’s feet, but she just wanted to get her clothes. “You don’t understand,” came her automatic response. “I’m a doctor.”
The nurse looked exasperated, apparently unimpressed. “I don’t care who you are, now get your ass back in the bed. You’re being released soon anyway.” Her voice had a smoker’s throatiness to it.
“Soon’s not good enough.”
“Look, missy, I don’t give a damn what you think. I’m calling a doctor, getting you a sedative.” She hacked a cough, then intercommed the nurse’s station to have Dr. Barker paged.
“Dr. Barker, he admitted me?”
The nurse nodded.
“You’ve got to get him in here, he’ll understand. He knows what I do for a living. He’ll see what’s going on.” Cat waited for some of this to register on the expressionless face, but nothing did. Not even a shrug of her shoulders; it was as if she were a robot going about her business.
She held Cat’s arm still, pulled out the IV, covering the spot with clear tape and a white gauze wad. Cat noticed for the first time that her right arm and shoulder were black-and-blue.
“Now you get up on this bed till the doctor gets here.” Dark pupils flashed at her. Cat did as she was told.
The Burning Man Page 21