Takaashigani

by Justin Hunter

  They had money. They weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but they were used to living off of two nice incomes and moving to one would be a lifestyle change to say the least. The money issue wasn’t the biggest life change that Harv had in mind. He wanted a family. Ava liked children. Other people’s children. She enjoyed her nieces and nephews, but liked playing with them, giving them gifts, then sending them back to their parents when they were misbehaving or off to sleep. She didn’t like the stories of sleepless nights, the non-stop noise and everything else that went along with being a parent. It sounded a lot like working twenty-four hours a day, and Ava liked having downtime. She liked going to fancy restaurants and taking her time while browsing through stores. She liked the freedom of not having children. Now her husband, who had never really talked about having children before, wanted them. Ava thought this might have been nice for him to bring up when they were dating, or at least some time during the last five years. He was set on it and time had taught Ava that Harv could be pretty stubborn about things. It was one of the personality traits that made him so good at his job.

  Ava relented. She was getting older. At almost thirty-five years old, she knew that she would soon be unable to have children of her own. She didn’t really want children, but she thought that if she could grow to love Harv, then maybe she could grow to love her kids. She loved him enough to give it a chance. The relocation was also Harv’s idea. He didn’t want to raise children in the city, a place where she loved to be. They owned an expensive loft, which was above boutique shopping centers, great culinary restaurants, art studios and trendy bars. It was loud. There was traffic going all the time. Ava loved where she lived. It felt like she was living in the heart of things; where everything pulsed with life, people, and fun times. She felt like she belonged there, but Harv had eventually talked her in to moving. He reasoned that having children meant that they would want a yard for them to play in, neighbors who had children so that they could have friends and quiet. Children were few and far between where they lived. The lofts were full of young professionals like them. No kids; just careers, advancement, money and whatever whim passed their way. Ava was happy that her boss was okay with her working remotely. She could still feel her love of the city from a distance, but it was a hard thing for her to give up. The land that they wanted helped. It was, she had to admit, beautiful.

  It was close to the ocean, just recently zoned for private purchase. There was a small sandy beach which broke slowly to a nice pebbled and grassy lawn, with woods beyond that. There weren’t as many families around as Harv had wanted, but there were several quaint small towns close by and they reasoned that their children would have many friends in no time. After all, that was how small towns worked, right? They bought it right before some locals did and they paid dearly for it. It was quite the bidding war, and one they didn’t expect. There was someone, or a group of people for all she knew, that seemed to fiercely want the property as much as they did. It almost cost them triple what they had expected it to, but Harv was stubborn and he kept bidding until he must have exhausted their coffers. The land was theirs.

  They parked their new BMW just off the road and got out. Ava immediately started swatting at mosquitoes, both real and imagined. This was something she didn’t like having to get used to. One of the best things about living in the concrete jungle of the city was that it cut down on nature; which is usually uncomfortable at best.

  “We’ll probably have to buy a truck,” Harv said.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Ava said. “Just what I’ve always wanted.”

  “Better than being stuck along the side of the road with all the locals laughing at you,” Harv reasoned. “I’m not even sure we can get the Bimmer out of the soft shoulder we have it on now.”

  “I don’t think it would look too out of place to keep it,” Ava said. “You can have a truck, but I still want my car. Did you notice the vehicles we saw on the way here? Even the people who live here have nice cars. I wonder how they afford them.”

  “We’ll have to ask,” Harv said. “Some of those jobs, like carpenters, make good wages. I’ll bet there’s tons of work around here.”

  “We’ll see. The economy doesn’t agree with you there. I want to keep my car. I’ll have to drive into the city a few times a year for my job and I don’t want to have to try and parallel park some monstrosity. If you think people were staring at us while we were driving up here, think of the crowd I would have around me then.”

  “Keep the car,” Harv said, his voice trailing off. He was finished with the conversation and was long into studying the land. Their land. He walked into the woods and touched every tree he passed. Ava knew he was thinking about their future, their new house and the children, his children, that would be playing there, growing up and fulfilling his new dream of what life should be. Ava walked behind him, thinking of her upcoming OB-GYN appointment where she would find out if the possibility of her even having children was a reality. She felt a sense of dread for the appointment. There had been so much change and so fast. If she wasn’t able to have children, she was scared at what Harv would do. She wasn’t worried about him becoming violent or anything like that, she was worried about his mental state. Everything that had happened since the change was going well so far. The situation seemed almost charmed with how smoothly it was going. The fact that something Harv wanted wouldn’t be able to happen was uncharted territory, and she didn’t want to tread there. Not if she didn’t have to. Still, something had to go wrong. Something always did in life, in anything that a person tried to do. Usually it was a small thing that could be worked through, but nothing had yet. It was like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop and crush all their plans. Whatever it was; cynicism, woman’s intuition, PMS, whatever, she felt something inside her that this was all wrong and that something terrible was going to happen. Ava tried to ignore these feelings and followed her dreamy husband through the trees and onto the sandy beach.

  Ava didn’t enjoy nature, not really; but she loved to feel sand between her toes. They had taken a lot of vacations where the sand was gold and sticky or dry and white—she liked it all. Maybe, she thought as she slipped off her shoes and scrunched her toes in the stony sand, she could learn to love this. She watched the soft foaming of the ocean as the small waves kissed the shore and fell back only to come again. She smelled the salty air. It felt good in her lungs.

  “Do you think we should go with cedar siding on the house?” Harv asked.

  “Whatever you want,” Ava said. “If you choose cedar, though, you’re going to be the one to stain it every couple years. I had an uncle that lived in a cedar-sided home and he did nothing but complain about the upkeep. It was beautiful though.” Harv nodded and paced the sand, counting off his steps as if to mark the property, even though someone had put in wooden stakes to mark out their land. It wasn’t much, only a couple of acres. The rest of the land surrounding them didn’t have any properties on it. Somebody had the deed to this small parcel of land that his great-grandfather had bought generations ago. Somebody else owned the rest of it. Whomever did must have been waiting on closing the gap in their ownership, because it had cost them so dearly. She wondered if she would ever meet the person that tried to buy the land out from under them. She heard it was a local. The money that the other bidder put up, along with the nice cars she saw in the towns and on the road on the way here made her curious. What did the people around here do for money?

  “What is the main employment around here?” She asked.

  “You still on that?” Harv said. “Maybe they’re all selling drugs. I don’t know. Who cares? It’s not like we need to find work.”

  “It’s just odd,” Ava said. Harv shrugged and kept pacing. Ava turned and looked back to the woods. She tensed. There were eight men standing at the edge of the trees. Their clothing was rumpled, stained and torn. Their faces unwashed and grizzled in various stages of facial hair growth. They held farm imple
ments in their hands.

  “Harv?” Ava said, her voice faltering. Harv turned around. He didn’t seem worried in the slightest. His face broke out in an immediate smile. He began walking toward the men with his hand outstretched in greeting. He went to the closest man and they shook hands. Ava watched their impassive faces. A couple of them were spitting on the ground with regularity, their lower lips bulging with snuff. Ava wished they wouldn’t do that. It was their property and she didn’t like them spitting on it. Some of the men were looking at her, but she couldn’t make heads nor tails out of their expressions. They made her feel vulnerable, like they were a sort of predator, she was prey and they were deciding if it was worth their energy to spring down the beach and eat her. One of the men spit again. A long string of brown saliva trailed down his chin and stuck to his shirt. He didn’t wipe it away.

  “Nice to meet you guys,” Harv said. He shook another couple hands but then stepped back. The men didn’t move from their spots. “You guys from around here?”

  “Yes,” the man in the middle of the pack said. He was the one that Harv first shook hands with. He was older than the rest, probably by a couple decades at least. His hair was silvery under the layer of dirt and his skin was deeply wrinkled and taught at the cheekbones. Ava felt an urge to touch it. It looked like it would feel like leather.

  “My name’s Harv. This is my wife, Ava,” Harv jerked a thumb at Ava. Ava’s mind went back to the fancy dinner parties at their friend’s lofts. She would wear an evening dress and shoes with high heels. Her husband would lead her through the crowd of beautiful and successful people, his hand on the bare small of her back. He would introduce her like she was a queen. He never jerked his thumb at her then. She hoped this wouldn’t become common practice.

  “I don’t know if you guys know this,” Harv said, “but we just bought this land a couple weeks ago. We’re planning on building here. Just a house, nothing too fancy, and starting up a family. This place looks perfect for raising a family.” The men didn’t respond. Harv looked a bit at a loss of what to say next. Finally the lull was too much for him. He had to speak. “We think we’ll break ground within the next couple of weeks. You guys have any recommendations of any locals who might want the work?”

  “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?” the older man of the vagrant looking crew said.

  “Excuse me?” Harv said. Ava took a step backward.

  “I told you to shut the fuck up,” the vagrant said. “You do know that you’re about to die, don’t you?”

  “Die?” Harv said. His mouth hung open. Ava almost laughed. He looked like a sheep who became jaw locked mid bleat. Ava took another step backward. She felt the icy ocean water lap at her heels.

  “Yeah, fucking die,” the vagrant said. “What the hell did you expect to happen? You’re not wanted here. We tried to make it plain to you. How much money did you expect us to lay down for this land here?”

  “We bought the land fair and square,” Harv said. He too was beginning to retreat toward the ocean. “I didn’t know that there would be trouble. Honest.”

  “That’s the problem with you city folk. You think that you can throw your money around and just buy whatever you feel like. We have money here too. We could have just kept bidding and brought you out and shown you what a pathetic piece of shit you are, but you pissed us off so much that we thought we would settle it this way.”

  “What is going on here?” Harv said. “You guys can’t be serious.”

  “We’re serious,” the vagrant said. “This place is locals only. You should have stayed in the city where you belong.” The man next to the wizened vagrant leader stepped forward at a quick trot. Harv barely moved before the man clanged a long handled spade shovel off the side of his head. Ava felt frozen from the waist down. The ocean water bit into her heels with its icy coldness. Harv fell sideways, crumpling like a lifeless doll. His body lay still for a moment then began to twitch horribly. The man brought the spade down several more times. The implement thumped wetly onto her husband’s head. The sound resounded in the air, overlapping only the steady hiss of the ocean. Ava thought about her spacious loft apartment with her walk-in closet that was filled with over two hundred pairs of shoes. She thought about the heated leather seats of her BMW. She thought about the bottles of 1998 Cabernet that were resting in a handmade wine rack she had commissioned from a well-known resident artist. She looked up at the line of men and she could see children with them. There were two of them, running and playing in the woods. Their clothes were clean. Their skin was lightly tanned, fresh and healthy. Their cheeks were flushed from their play. Their mouths were open in laughter which she could not hear. She blinked and they were gone.

  The man with the shovel walked over to her. She did not run. The man never fully stopped his stride. He swung the shovel in a sideways arc, like a baseball batter, and mashed in the side of her skull.

  Chapter - 17

  Duke was busy down in the engine hold of the stripped teal fishing boat. He cursed his luck of late. It was obviously too much to ask that the boat fire right up and take him to shore. The engine turned and there was a spark, but no fuel. Towing the boat to shore would be a pain in the neck, so the Bartelle Brothers told him that he could take a little time and try and get the engine started. Clive and Shiro protested a little at the delay, but Billy reminded them that they would still be stuck in the cave if it weren’t for them, so they could shut the fuck up and thank you very much.

  Duke felt along the many tubes that went every which way from the large boat engine. He didn’t have any real idea of what he was doing. He was no mechanic. All he could think of doing was to search along the hoses and see if there was a leak anywhere. If he found one, he would patch it and hope whatever he did would hold until he got back to shore. For what it was worth, Duke thought it was a solid plan.

  He didn’t know what to think of Clive telling them about the giant crab in the caves. Duke didn’t think the guy looked crazy, but he seemed pretty well certain of it. The diver being dead along with those three girls who were supposedly with those guys made the story seem a bit more real, but the truth was probably that they got drunk or stoned and drowned. Those guys wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the law, so they cooked up a story that went along with local superstition, at least it went with what the Bartelle brothers were looking for. Duke thought that maybe there actually was a giant crab down there. He knew that the ocean was really the world’s last unexplored frontier. Science sent a man to the moon and robots to mars, but learning about what lives beneath the waves would have been a feat greater than even space travel.

  Duke wasn’t curious enough to want to stay in town any longer than he had to. He found a thin leaky hose and it didn’t take much of a sniff to tell that it was a gas line. Duke wound the hose around with a little duct tape and stood back to observe his work. The leak was still there, but it was slower now. He hoped that it was patched enough to keep the gas flowing so that he could get the boat to shore.

  “Start her up!” Duke called. Marty cranked the engine. Nothing happened. “Keep at it,” Duke said. Marty cranked the engine a couple more times, roughly priming the engine as he did. The engine sputtered and finally roared to life with a wicked turn of gears and a cloud of black smoke. Duke hurried up to the deck and took the wheel from Marty.

  “Got her started, huh?” Marty said.

  “Yeah, I have a gift.” The crack of gunfire startled the men. Marty pulled his .38 service six revolver out of his belt and ran up the stairs to the deck. Duke followed, hoping he could get to his shotgun, which was still leaning against the bench seats at the back of the boat. Duke fell backwards down the stairs as a spray of bullets ripped up the hatchway, sending splintering wood and debris every direction. Duke looked up to see a shadow moving over the hatchway. He pushed back with his feet propelling himself backwards, ultimately saving his life as another spray of bullets ate up the floor where he just had been. Duke felt the hard eng
ine room floor scrape up his back. His vision was dotted with intermittent black spots from the hard hit his head took during his fall. He flipped over onto all fours and crawled behind the hot engine and waited. He heard more gunfire from on deck. There was more than just the automatic. The sharp bark of what must have been his shotgun could be heard above the sputtering whine of the engine. Duke pulled the knife from his boot and sighed as he thought about the many scathing sayings about bringing a knife to a gun fight. He just hoped that the shotgun was in Marty’s hands and not the attacker’s. He hoped Marty was still alive. The gunfire stopped altogether. Duke counted the passing seconds just under his breath. This wasn’t his first firefight, so he knew that time would be messed up in his head and he didn’t want to move until a full five minutes had passed. It turned out that he didn’t have to wait that long.

  He heard footsteps coming down the stairs of the engine room. Duke gripped the knife tightly in his hand and prepared to come out slashing.

  “You alive?”

  “Marty,” Duke said, relieved. “What the hell is going on up there?”

  “Fred,” Marty said. Duke stood up and saw Marty standing, holding his shotgun loosely in one hand. His other hand was over his stomach. A thick red stain was spreading over his shirt. Marty crumpled forward, falling to the ground like a limp doll. Duke stepped around the engine and took his shotgun. He nudged Marty’s body with the barrel. Marty didn’t move. Duke went back around the engine and crouched down. If Fred was the one who was shooting, Duke knew he was pretty much trapped down inside the engine hold. He was sure to get his face shot off if he took a chance and peeked out on deck. He would wait for the man to come to him.