by Barr, Nevada
A loud final-sounding “Ooomph!” puffed from the darkness beyond the stone.
The dude lay by the fire, his back to the boulders. If he was awake, he ignored the noise. Reg, standing ramrod stiff, back to the fire, winced. His shoulders relaxed. Heath wondered if he, too, thought it might be over, and was glad of it. Reg, who would have killed her as casually as he would swat a fly, who refused to kill an injured dog, was terrified of wolves and disgusted by the rape of a child. Vile as he was, he was human. Somewhere, somehow, someday, there could be redemption for Reg.
Not so the dude.
After the orgasmic “Oomph” came the single howl of a wolf. It seemed to descend from the skies. The windigo, the cannibalistic spirit of the north woods that flew on the storm, was loose this night. At that moment, Heath’s faith in misery and death made the demon as real as those who guarded what was coming to feel like her tomb.
The howl passed overhead and died away. The woods went silent, but for the crackling of the fire. Sean did not reappear.
“It’s over,” Heath breathed in Leah’s ear. Leah did not cease her voiceless screaming. Like Heath, she probably thought Katie was dead.
Seconds crawled by. Heath’s head, already pounding, felt ready to fly apart with the intensity of her listening.
Reg paced from one side of the fire to the other. His eyes were wide and scared. The wolf—or wolves, or windigo—was near. Yet he never looked in the direction Sean had taken Katie.
Despite the great big gun, Reg was a coward, afraid of unseen predators. Heath despised him. He hadn’t the courage of the two girls he let his buddies savage.
Just when she thought she would shriek like a banshee from sheer nerves, and Leah’s heart would explode through her rib cage, Katie’s screaming cut into the tight-stretched stillness.
“Get off me! Momma! Get off me!” and then hysterical wordless wailing.
“Katie!” Leah cried out. Scrambling, her feet striking Heath’s already damaged legs, Leah reached the mouth of their cramped cavern only to be kicked back inside by Reg.
The dude rose from his place by the fire, fluid and deadly.
Airy, scratchy, a sound nearly identical to the scuff of leaves, yet with the rhythmic beat of iron wheels on railroad tracks, sang through night branches. Katie? Singing to herself? Sean doing something unimaginable? Heath couldn’t even be sure the sound was human. Ancient horrors rose in her throat and made the skin on her scalp shrink.
Katie half stumbled, half fell into the light, whispering to herself, each step awkward. Her trousers were pulled up but unzipped and sagging.
Wordlessly, Leah held out her arms. Wrists tied together, she resembled a beggar asking for alms. Staggering frighteningly close to the fire, Katie tottered, then fell into her mother’s lap. “Itwasjimmyitwasjimmyitwasjimmy.”
That was what the child was chanting. If blood could, in fact, run cold, Heath’s did. Ice pervaded the part of her that was sensate, and a memory of winter took the bones of her legs.
Reg stepped into the entrance to the shelter. Leah dragged Katie with her as she retreated to the farthest limit of the crack, again smashing Heath’s legs in the process. No matter, Heath thought. A small price to pay. Elizabeth moved so she was between the Hendrickses, and the thug in the doorway. Heath grabbed her arm, trying to force her back. Better Reg take Katie again, better anything than he take Elizabeth.
“Take me,” Heath croaked from a dry throat. “I’m still … whole.”
Reg shoved his face inside their space. In the shadows, his black skin was the same as the black of the narrowing stone chimney above: noseless, eyeless, faceless, the lightless vacuum that artists used to depict the visage of the grim reaper.
“What’s that kid sayin’?” he hissed.
Leah looped her arms over Katie’s head and forced her daughter’s face against her chest in a bear hug.
“Nothing,” Heath said.
Reg pulled the silvery gun from his pouch. In his large black hand it appeared to float in midair, catching reflections of firelight from the rock. Like magic the muzzle moved itself to Elizabeth’s temple.
“What’s the kid saying?” Reg asked again.
“It was Jimmy,” Heath answered so quickly it humiliated her. There was no reason he shouldn’t know what Katie said, but in an insane universe one couldn’t tell a hand grenade from a lime.
Reg bolted upright, struck his head against the rocks, swore, then backed out of the crack. Circling the fire, his back to the flames, he scanned the woods through the gun’s sight. When he reached the side of the boulders where Sean had vanished with Katie, he stopped.
“Sean, what the fuck? Sean, man, get your ass out here.”
There was no response. Reg peered into the dark beside the boulders but didn’t step away from the comfort of the fire. Instead, he set his back against the rock and froze, holding the gun across his chest the way police on television do when waiting for a perp to pop out of a doorway.
The dude surveyed the camp area, took in the space between the boulders, the fire, Reg standing guard.
“Sean didn’t come back,” Reg said.
“Maybe he’s sleeping it off.”
“The kid said it was Jimmy.” Reg’s voice was calm and neutral. Trying to keep the dude from going after him again for seeing ghosts, Heath guessed.
“The kid said Jimmy raped her?” The dude laughed. “Maybe we’ll have a virgin birth in nine months. A ghost did it. Haven’t heard that one in a while.”
“She keeps saying ‘Jimmy did it’ over and over, and Sean ain’t back. It’s too cold for him to be sleeping it off out there,” Reg insisted.
“Sean!” the dude shouted.
No answer.
“Go get him,” the dude ordered.
“No. I ain’t going to,” Reg said. The gun on his chest jumped an inch or two. Heath hoped there’d be a shoot-out. The dude stared him down.
“Jesus Christ,” the dude said, as he walked to where Reg stood frozen to the rock. “Sean!”
He grabbed a branch from the small pile of remaining firewood and thrust one end into the fire. “The middle of nowhere is too damn dark. Can’t see two feet. You’d think somebody’d put up streetlights.” When the torch caught, he eased it from the coals. Walking carefully, lest it blow out, he went to the edge of the light. Then Heath couldn’t see him anymore, only Reg in his statue-of-a-gunman pose.
In less than a minute, the dude stalked back into the firelight. The burning brand was gone. Brushing by Reg, he knelt in the mouth of the women’s shelter. “Give me the child.” He held out his hand. Leah hugged Katie more tightly.
Leaning her upper body between E and the dude, Heath planted her knuckles on the ground so she wouldn’t fold up like a cheap jackknife. The dude slapped her back against the rock so hard she lost sense of what was happening. Before she could recover her wits, he’d filled his hand with the front of her coat, she was out of the shelter, facedown, her right shoe smoking and stinking of burned rubber where it rested on hot coals. Elizabeth was close behind her, moving of her own volition. She snatched Heath’s foot from the fire, then crouched beside her. Heath wanted to push herself up but hadn’t the strength. “Run,” she whispered to her daughter.
Elizabeth helped Heath roll onto her back, then worked her leg under her mother’s head as a pillow. Heath reached up to put a hand to either side of her daughter’s face, the burn on the back of her arm glistening wetly in the light. “Run into the dark,” she whispered desperately. “They are going to kill me anyway. Please. I have to know you’re safe.”
Elizabeth shook her head.
Heath could feel tears dripping from the corners of her eyes and running over her temples into her hair. “You’ll find a way out. As soon as we don’t show up where we were expected day after tomorrow, they’ll start searching. Go now! Run. It’s too dark for them to follow.”
Mulishly, Elizabeth shook her head. “You’d be bored without me,” she said.
With that, the moment was gone. The dude backed out of the space between the boulders, dragging Katie by one arm. Leah wasn’t screaming or fighting. That meant she was probably dead or unconscious.
“What do you mean ‘Jimmy did it’?” the dude yelled. This was the first time he’d raised his voice. Heath had thought him incapable of losing control. Now she hoped that was true.
Katie didn’t answer directly. She’d gone rag doll and hung limply from his hand mumbling, “Itwasjimmyitwasjimmyitwasjimmy,” like an idiot. The dude shook her the way a ratter will shake a rat to snap its back.
The little body was jumping, the head flopping on the slender neck. “Stop it!” Heath cried. “Stop it! You’re killing her, you dumb shit.” The dude dropped Katie to the ground. Regaining her skeletal structure, she re-formed into a whole child, then skittered back between the stones.
“Sean’s over there with his head bashed in,” the dude said, his eyes boring into Heath.
“Sean is dead?” Heath asked. This was too good to be true. “You aren’t kidding? Trying to cheer me up?”
“Sean’s face was smashed to jelly by a rock,” the dude said. A glint of something, perhaps gallows humor, livened his matte eyes for so brief a second, Heath might have imagined it.
“Wow.” Heath shook her head. “Katie couldn’t have done it. How could she? Her hands are tied. She can’t weigh eighty pounds. We were all here. All she’ll say is ‘It was Jimmy,’ so I’m guessing Jimmy did it. Don’t kill her. Please.”
It was a bitch having to beg from a supine position. Heath’s aching neck refused to hold her head up, and she found herself staring at the sky. A star stared back. “Look,” she said. “It’s clear. The plane will come back. One more day, and we’ll be money. One more day. Please.” She ran out of breath and out of words.
The dude got to his feet, spit into the fire, then went back to the far side and lay down.
Refusing Elizabeth’s help, Heath made it to the mouth of the stones and braced her back against one side. She was furious at her daughter for not running into the woods when she’d been told to. Heath was her mother. If she wanted to sacrifice her life for her child, no little teenaged twit should be allowed to challenge that.
Elizabeth went into the crevice. She settled with her back to the opening, and to her mother. Heath closed herself inside her mind and fumed until anger changed particle by particle into pride. Elizabeth was amazing. Heath prodded her gently. “Let me in.”
Obligingly, Elizabeth turned. “Are you okay, Mom?”
“Never better,” Heath said. “Is Katie okay?” Heath hated the feeble words, hated that Katie would never be okay again, or not the same okay as she was before Sean had hurt her.
“She is,” Leah murmured. “Her panties aren’t even torn. She says Jimmy killed Sean, then fell on her, and tried to make her go into the woods with him. When she began screaming, he got off of her, and she ran.
“She said Jimmy whispered in her ear,” Leah said.
“What did he whisper?” Heath asked.
“‘It’s me, don’t be afraid,’” Leah said.
“Anna,” Heath said.
“Anna.” Elizabeth said it and smiled.
THIRTY-NINE
Katie had run from her. Anna had been powerless to stop her. The flow of energy that had lifted her from her and Wily’s nest, and propelled her down the side of the rocks, was gone as well.
Moving more like an earthworm than a vertebrate, Anna inched up the broken stone steps to the top of the boulders. Wily lay curled, nose to tail, around the sapling. His eyes were alert. When he saw Anna, his tail whisked quietly over the stone a time or two in welcome.
The dude’s shouting at Katie rose with the smoke. Anna and Wily listened to the awful ripping scream as he tore her from her mother.
“Jimmydidit.”
Katie’s voice was distorted and broken. The dude was shaking her.
“I tried, Wily. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I tried to tell her it was me, to not be afraid, not to cry out, to come with me. She was so scared.”
Wily licked at the fingers recoated with blood. Old and helpless and frightened, Anna stared into the night unsure what she was. Cold and damp had weaseled into her bones, rusting the joints. Tears threatened. She wanted to die with her friends in the warmth of their company and the fire.
“My arm gave out,” she told the dog. “Opened up again. I was lying on Katie like a rapist, like Sean, and she couldn’t hear me. I’d forgotten I had on Jimmy’s hat and coat. Like Reg, that’s all she saw. He’s going to kill them, Wily, all of them.”
Wily stopped lapping and looked up at her with an ancient liquid gaze.
“Right,” Anna said. “We’ll think about it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. After all … Never seen Gone With the Wind? I don’t believe that.” Too tired to do else, she curled down around Wily, folding him inside the coat next to her, her hands warmed by his fur.
Paul spooned her that same way. Never had anything made her feel so safe and valued as snuggling into the embrace of Paul Davidson. The thought of her husband broke a dam in her brain. All that was loving and desirable about the human race rushed through the breach.
Without warning, the flow changed. She heard Jimmy’s breath hard in her ear as she rammed the knife home again and again, felt his warm blood soaking through her shirt at the small of her back as she carried him to the river. Specks of Sean’s teeth or brain matter were cold where they’d splattered on her cheeks. Bodily fluids not her own rendered her hands sticky. Wily’s fur clung to her palms. Her body began shaking from within. Fingers shook. Moccasined toes dug at the thin layer of soil.
Torrents of weakness drowned her. With them came a thousand thousand gossamer threads connecting her to that which was not animal but apart, the thing called humanity: Christmas carols, kisses, high school rings, private jokes, good food, laughter, bad puns, guitar riffs, clean sheets, Paul’s smile, s’mores, holding hands with her sister, winks across the room, mowing grass, feeding her dog Taco, taking out the trash, rereading Desert Solitaire, buying red silk underwear, being disappointed and amazed, lonely and in love.
Bright paper packages.
Whiskers on kittens.
It was not God who created Man, but Mankind that held itself together when God would drag it piecemeal back into the natural world of tides, seasons, and dancing to the movement of glaciers and the shifting of continental plates.
Declaring one’s humanity complicated life, made transactions more difficult. Cats ate small helpless tweety birds, and cats were okay with that. Coyotes slaughtered adorable lambkins. Deer razed old men’s tomato gardens to the ground. There was no remorse; they did not second-guess themselves, or waste time parsing motives. A bear did not wonder if she was a good bear or a bad bear, if she was fair or just or kind. A bear ate, slept, mated, defended her young, lived and died without self-recrimination. Only people did that. The past was never over; the present was lost in planning for a future that promised nothing but proof of mortality.
The disturbance from below dwindled. The dude had given up trying to shake information out of Katie.
Anna’s disintegration into humanity continued. This was a bad time for it. There were things that needed to be done, people who needed to be killed.
Breathing deeply through shudders, she let herself drain into Wily, felt the bridge from dog to wolf, breathed in the scent of the damp earth and the smoke of the fire. The ache in her wounded arm let go of anger at the bullet, fear of infection, and became merely an ache. The hunger in her belly ceased to resent the men who’d burned its food, lost the specter of starvation, and settled again into simple hunger.
Wily was warm and the fire was warm and Anna was as the fire and the dog and the boulder, cured of the burden of what the poets and the preachers called soul.
Denned beneath the stripling maple, she and the dog again slept.
FORTY
“A fuckin’ wolf
and wearing a cape like some fuckin’ superhero.”
Remembering the words, Heath smiled. She should have known. Wily was one of a kind. No one could make up a dog like Wily, especially not wearing a glowing green cape. Knowing Wily and Anna were alive and with them helped her retain a semblance of courage and optimism. It was the least she owed Leah and the girls, and, often, the most she had to offer.
Paranoid of wolf attack, Reg had the turned the fire into an inferno. Their shelter was warm enough that Heath shed her jacket and enjoyed the luxury of wadding it up for a pillow. Leah, Katie’s head on her shoulder, slept sitting up. Elizabeth lay with her feet on Heath’s thighs.
They were a sorry lot, the four of them. Aunt Gwen would have said they looked like something the cat dragged in. More precisely, they looked like something the cat played with for a day or so, then dragged in. Nothing disabling, Heath reassured herself. Nothing that wouldn’t heal. Her face would scar, but Elizabeth’s wouldn’t. That was all that mattered. Heath was not interested in men who sought external perfection.
While the others slept, she watched the wild antics of the firelight on the leaning sides of the boulders and reveled in being warm and, for the moment, safe enough. For a change, she wasn’t even thirsty. They had been able to fill their water bottles at a shallow creek they’d crossed before the weather stopped them for the night. Pain from the burn on her arm was unceasing, but there wasn’t a thing Heath could do about it, so she refused to admit it was there.
Reg threw a log as big around as his thigh onto the fire. Sparks exploded into stars on the stone above her. Heath didn’t look out. She did not want to make eye contact with the monsters who lurked beyond the portals of this chamber. Especially Reg. Reg was frightened. Frightened men were dangerous.
That it wasn’t a ghost that had terrified Reg, that it was Anna, affected Heath in a way she had not expected.
Anna was wearing Jimmy’s coat and hat; therefore Anna had killed Jimmy.