As they turned back onto Tennessee Avenue, where a small group of townsfolk were covering bodies with blankets, Weldon got on the radio again, interrupting Peter’s chain of logic. “Where the hell are them ambulances?” he snapped.
“Sent ’em a half hour ago,” came the reply. “Shoulda been there by now.”
Weldon cast a grim look at Peter and Sara. “Try ’em on the radio,” he told the operator.
A few minutes later the report came that none of the ambulances were answering their radios. Weldon told his people to stay put, that he’d check it out himself. As they turned off Tennessee Avenue onto the Nantucket road, the sun broke through the overcast, flooding the landscape in a thin yellow light and warming the interior of the car. The light seemed to be illuminating Peter’s weaknesses, making him realize how tense he was, how his muscles ached with the poisons of adrenaline and fatigue. Sara leaned against him, her eyes closed, and the pressure of her body acted to shore him up, to give him a burst of vitality.
Weldon kept the speed at thirty, glancing left and right, but nothing was out of the ordinary. Deserted streets, houses with blank-looking windows. Many of the homes in Madaket were vacant, and the occupants of many of the rest were away at work or off on errands. About two miles out of town, as they crested a low rise just beyond the dump, they spotted the ambulances. Weldon pulled onto the shoulder, letting the engine idle, and stared at the sight. Four ambulances were strewn across the blacktop, forming an effective roadblock a hundred feet away. One had been flipped over on its roof like a dead white bug; another had crashed into a light pole and was swathed in electrical lines whose broken ends were sticking in through the driver’s window, humping and writhing and sparking. The other two had been smashed together and were burning; transparent licks of flame warped the air above their blackened husks. But the wrecked ambulances were not the reason that Weldon had stopped so far away, why they sat silent and hopeless. To the right of the road was a field of bleached weeds and grasses, an Andrew Wyeth field glowing yellow in the pale sun, figured by a few stunted oaks and extending to a hill overlooking the sea, where three gray houses were posed against a faded blue sky. Though only fitful breezes played about the squad car, the field was registering the passage of heavy winds; the grasses were rippling, eddying, bending, and swaying in contrary directions, as if thousands of low-slung animals were scampering through them to and fro, and this rippling was so constant, so furious, it seemed that the shadows of the clouds passing overhead were standing still and the land was flowing away. The sound of the wind was a mournful whistling rush. Peter was entranced. The scene had a fey power that weighed upon him, and he had trouble catching his breath.
“Let’s go,” said Sara tremulously. “Let’s…” She stared past Peter, a look of fearful comprehension forming on her face.
The wind had begun to roar. Less than thirty feet away a patch of grass had been flattened, and a man wearing an orderly’s uniform was being lifted into the air, revolving slowly. His head flopped at a ridiculous straw-man angle, and the front of his tunic was drenched with blood. The car shuddered in the turbulence.
Sara shrieked and clutched at Peter. Weldon tried to jam the gearshift into reverse, missed, and the car stalled. He twisted the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered, dieseled, and went dead. The orderly continued to rise, assuming a vertical position. He spun faster and faster, blurring like an ice skater doing a fancy finish, and at the same time drifted closer to the car. Sara was screaming, and Peter wished he could scream, could do something to release the tightness in his chest. The engine caught. But before Weldon could put the car in gear, the wind subsided and the orderly fell onto the hood. Drops of blood sprinkled the windshield. He lay spread-eagled for a moment, his dead eyes staring at them. Then, with the obscene sluggishness of a snail retracting its foot, he slumped down onto the road, leaving a red smear across the white metal.
Weldon rested his head on the wheel, taking deep breaths. Peter cradled Sara in his arms. After a second Weldon leaned back, picked up the radio mike, and thumbed the switch open. “Jack,” he said. “This is Hugh. You copy?”
“Loud and clear, Chief.”
“We got us a problem out in Madaket.” Weldon swallowed hard and gave a little twitch of his head. “I want you to set up a roadblock ’bout five miles from town. No closer. And don’t let nobody through, y’understand?”
“What’s happenin’ out there, Chief? Alice Cuddy called in and said somethin’ ’bout a freak wind, but the phone went dead and I couldn’t get her back.”
“Yeah, we had us some wind.” Weldon exchanged a glance with Peter. “But the main problem’s a chemical spill. It’s under control for now, but you keep everybody away. Madaket’s in quarantine.”
“You need some help?”
“I need you to do what I told you! Get on the horn and call everyone livin’ ’tween the roadblock and Madaket. Tell ’em to head for Nantucket as quick as they can. Put the word on the radio, too.”
“What ’bout folks comin’ from Madaket? Do I let ’em through?”
“Won’t be nobody comin’ that way,” said Weldon.
Silence. “Chief, you okay?”
“Hell, yes!” Weldon switched off.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” asked Peter.
“Don’t want ’em thinkin’ I’m crazy and comin’ out to check on me,” said Weldon. “Ain’t no point in them dyin’, too.” He shifted into reverse. “I’m gonna tell everyone to get in their cellars and wait this damn thing out. Maybe we can figure out somethin’ to do. But first I’ll take you home and let Sara get some rest.”
“I’m all right,” she said, lifting her head from Peter’s chest.
“You’ll feel better after a rest,” he said, forcing her head back down: it was an act of tenderness, but also he did not want her to catch sight of the field. Dappled with cloud shadow; glowing palely; some quality of light different from that which shone upon the squad car; it seemed at a strange distance from the road, a view into an alternate universe where things were familiar yet not quite the same. The grasses were rippling more furiously than ever, and every so often a column of yellow stalks would whirl high into the air and scatter, as if an enormous child were running through the field, ripping up handfuls of them to celebrate his exuberance.
“I’m not sleepy,” Sara complained; she still hadn’t regained her color, and one of her eyelids had developed a tic.
Peter sat beside her on the bed. “There’s nothing you can do, so why not rest?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I thought I’d have another go at the combs.”
The idea distressed her. He started to explain why he had to, but instead bent and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you,” he said. The words slipped out so easily that he was amazed. It had been a very long time since he had spoken them to anyone other than a memory.
“You don’t have to tell me that just because things look bad,” she said, frowning.
“Maybe that’s why I’m telling you now,” he said. “But I don’t believe it’s a lie.”
She gave a dispirited laugh. “You don’t sound very confident.”
He thought it over. “I was in love with someone once,” he said, “and that relationship colored my view of love. I guess I believed that it always had to happen the same way. A nuclear strike. But I’m beginning to understand it can be different, that you can build toward the sound and the fury.”
“It’s nice to hear,” she said, and then, after a pause, “but you’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”
“I still think about her, but…” He shook his head. “I’m trying to put it behind me, and maybe I’m succeeding. I had a dream about her this morning.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“It wasn’t a sweet dream,” he said. “She was telling me how she’d cemented over her feelings for me. ‘All that’s left,’ she said, ‘is this little hard place on my breast.’
And she told me that sometimes it moved around, twitched, and she showed me. I could see the damn thing jumping underneath her blouse, and when I touched it—she wanted me to—it was unbelievably hard. Like a pebble lodged beneath her skin. A heart stone. That was all that was left of us. Just this piece of hardness. It pissed me off so much that I threw her on the floor. Then I woke up.” He scratched his beard, embarrassed by confession. “It was the first time I’ve ever had a violent thought about her.”
Sara stared at him, expressionless.
“I don’t know if it’s meaningful,” he said lamely. “But it seemed so.”
She remained silent. Her stare made him feel guilty for having had the dream, sorry that he had mentioned it.
“I don’t dream about her very much,” he said.
“It’s not important,” she said.
“Well.” He stood. “Try and get some sleep, okay?”
She reached for his hand. “Peter?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you. But you knew that, right?”
It hurt him to see how hesitantly she said it, because he knew that he was to blame for her hesitancy. He bent down and kissed her again. “Sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
He closed the door behind him gently. Mills was sitting at the table, gazing out at ’Sconset Sally, who was pacing the yard, her lips moving, waving her arms, as if arguing with an invisible playmate. “That ol’ gal sure’s gone down these last years,” said Mills. “Used to be sharp as a tack, but she’s actin’ pretty crazy now.”
“Can’t blame her,” said Peter, sitting down across from Mills. “I’m feeling pretty crazy myself.”
“So.” Mills tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “You got a line on what this thing is?”
“Maybe it’s the Devil.” Peter leaned against the wall. “I don’t really know, but I’m starting to think that Gabriela Pascual was right about it being an animal.”
Mills chomped on the stem of his pipe and fished in his pocket for a lighter. “How’s that?”
“Like I said, I don’t really know for sure, but I’ve been getting more and more sensitized to it ever since I found the combs. At least it seems that way. As if the connection between us were growing stronger.” Peter spotted a book of matches tucked under his sugar bowl and slid them across to Mills. “I’m beginning to have some insights into it. When we were out on the road just now, I felt that it was exhibiting an animal trait. Staking out territory. Protecting it from invaders. Look who it’s attacked. Ambulances, bicyclists. People who were entering its territory. It attacked us when we visited the aggregate.”
“But it didn’t kill us,” said Mills.
The logical response to Mills’s statement surfaced from Peter’s thoughts, but he didn’t want to admit to it and shunted it aside. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said.
“Well, if it is an animal, then it can take a hook. All we got to do is find its mouth.” Mills grunted laughter, lit his pipe, and puffed bluish smoke. “After you been out on the water a coupla weeks, you can feel when something strange is hard by…even if you can’t see it. I ain’t no psychic, but seems to me I brushed past this thing once or twice.”
Peter glanced up at him. Though Mills was a typical barroom creature, an old salt with a supply of exotic tales, every now and then Peter could sense about him the sort of specific gravity that accrues to those who have spent time in the solitudes. “You don’t seem afraid,” he said.
“Oh, don’t I?” Mills chuckled. “I’m afraid. I’m just too old to be runnin’ ’round in circles ’bout it.”
The door flew open, and Sally came in. “Hot in here,” she said; she went to the stove and laid a finger against it. “Hmph! Must be all this shit I’m wearin’.” She plumped herself down beside Mills, squirmed into a comfortable position, and squinted at Peter. “Goddamn wind won’t have me,” she said. “It wants you.”
Peter was startled. “What do you mean?”
Sally pursed her lips as if she had tasted something sour. “It would take me if you wasn’t here, but you’re too strong. I can’t figure a way ’round that.”
“Leave the boy alone,” said Mills.
“Can’t.” Sally glowered at him. “He’s got to do it.”
“You know what she’s talkin’ ’bout?” asked Mills.
“Hell, yes! He knows! And if he don’t, all he’s got to do is go talk to it. You understand me, boy. It wants you.”
An icy fluid squirted down Peter’s spine. “Like Gabriela,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Go on,” said Sally. “Talk to it.” She pointed a bony finger at the door. “Just take a stand out there, and it’ll come to you.”
Behind the cottage, walled off by the spread of two Japanese pines and a toolshed, was a field that the previous tenant had used for a garden. Peter had let it go to seed, and the entire plot was choked with weeds and litter: gas cans, rusty nails, a plastic toy truck, the decaying hide of a softball, cardboard scraps, this and more resting upon a matte of desiccated vines. It reminded him of the aggregate, and thus seemed an appropriate place to stand and commune with the wind…if such a communion weren’t the product of ’Sconset Sally’s imagination. Which Peter hoped it was. The afternoon was waning, and it had grown colder. Silver blares of wintery sunlight edged the blackish-gray clouds scudding overhead, and the wind was a steady pour off the sea. He could detect no presence in it, and he was beginning to feel foolish, thinking about going back inside, when a bitter-smelling breeze rippled across his face. He stiffened. Again he felt it: it was acting independent of the offshore wind, touching delicate fingers to his lips, his eyes, fondling him the way a blind man would in trying to know your shape in his brain. It feathered his hair and pried under the pocket flaps of his army jacket like a pet mouse searching for cheese; it frittered with his shoelaces and stroked him between the legs, shriveling his groin and sending a chill washing through his body.
He did not quite understand how the wind spoke to him, yet he had an image of the process as being similar to how a cat will rub against your hand and transmit a static charge. The charge was actual, a mild stinging and popping. Somehow it was translated into knowledge, doubtless by means of his gift. The knowledge was personified, and he was aware that his conceptions were human renderings of inhuman impulses; but at the same time he was certain that they were basically accurate. Most of all it was lonely. It was the only one of its kind, or, if there were others, it had never encountered them. Peter felt no sympathy for its loneliness, because it felt no sympathy for him. It wanted him not as a friend or companion but as a witness to its power. It would enjoy preening for him, showing off, rubbing against his sensitivity to it and deriving some unfathomable pleasure. It was very powerful. Though its touch was light, its vitality was undeniable, and it was even stronger over water. The land weakened it, and it was eager to return to the sea with Peter in tow. Gliding together through the wild canyons of the waves, into a chaos of booming darkness and salt spray, traveling the most profound of all deserts—the sky above the sea—and testing its strength against the lesser powers of the storms, seizing flying fish and juggling them like silver blades, gathering nests of floating treasures and playing for weeks with the bodies of the drowned. Always at play. Or perhaps “play” was not the right word. Always employed in expressing the capricious violence that was its essential quality. Gabriela Pascual might not have been exact in calling it an animal, but what else could you call it? It was of nature, not of some netherworld. It was ego without thought, power without morality, and it looked upon Peter as a man might look upon a clever toy: something to be cherished for a while, then neglected, then forgotten.
Then lost.
Sara waked at twilight from a dream of suffocation. She sat bolt upright, covered with sweat, her chest heaving. After a moment she calmed herself and swung her legs onto the floor and sat staring into space. In the half-light the dark grain of the boards looked like a pattern of
animal faces emerging from the wall; out the window she could see shivering bushes and banks of running clouds. Still feeling sluggish, she went into the front room, intending to wash her face; but the bathroom door was locked and ’Sconset Sally cawed at her from inside. Mills was snoozing on the sofa bunk, and Hugh Weldon was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of coffee; a cigarette smoldered in the saucer, and that struck her as funny: she had known Hugh all her life and had never seen him smoke.
“Where’s Peter?” she asked.
“Out back,” he said moodily. “Buncha damn foolishness, if you ask me.”
“What is?”
He gave a snort of laughter. “Sally says he’s talkin’ to the goddamn wind.”
Sara felt as if her heart had constricted. “What do you mean?”
“Beats the hell outta me,” said Weldon. “Just more of Sally’s nonsense.” But when their eyes met she could sense his hopelessness and fear.
She broke for the door. Weldon grabbed at her arm, but she shook free and headed for the Japanese pines back of the cottage. She brushed aside the branches and stopped short, suddenly afraid. The bending and swaying of the weeds revealed a slow circular passage of wind, as if the belly of a great beast were dragging across them, and at the center of the field stood Peter. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and strands of hair were floating above his head like the hair of a drowned man. The sight stabbed into her, and forgetting her fear, she ran toward him, calling his name. She had covered half the distance between them when a blast of wind smashed her to the ground.
Stunned and disoriented, she tried to get to her feet, but the wind smacked her flat again, pressing her into the damp earth. As had happened out on the aggregate, garbage was rising from the weeds. Scraps of plastic, rusty nails, a yellowed newspaper, rags, and directly overhead, a large chunk of kindling. She was still dazed, yet she saw with peculiar clarity how the bottom of the chunk was splintered and flecked with whitish mold. It was quivering, as if the hand that held it were barely able to restrain its fury. And then, as she realized it was about to plunge down, to jab out her eyes and pulp her skull, Peter dived on top of her. His weight knocked the breath out of her, but she heard the piece of kindling thunk against the back of his head; she sucked in air and pushed at him, rolling him away, and came to her knees. He was dead-pale.
The Jaguar Hunter Page 15