Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  The urge to yell out was growing stronger. If Ebon yelled, she’d turn, and he could see her face. The woman’s hair was red enough to border orange, and he felt sure she’d have bangs hanging over a pale forehead that would be strangely devoid of freckles. Red-blushed cheeks, bright-red lips. She’d look like a sunset at Redding Dock, where Ebon used to go to be alone, where the island’s colors always seemed brightest.

  But she turned onto Raymond Street and vanished from sight. There was a thick clutch of vacation cottages down that way, plus a small canal with a bridge over it that, on a map, appeared to chip a piece of Aaron off into the ocean. Homes wound along the canal, along Raymond Street, and extended their boat houses and tall docks into the water. For Aaron, it was a dense area — practically a maze. If she got too far into it before he caught up, he’d lose her for sure.

  Ebon thought again of stopping, seeing himself from above.

  This is crazy. You’re chasing this woman. Other people are probably watching you do it too, knowing you’re unfamiliar, calling the police.

  But Ebon didn’t stop. He didn’t want to. Something had unhinged inside, probably because of Holly. He was distraught. He could walk into the liquor store right now, drink his fill without paying, and throw up all over the place and the local law would say, Poor guy just lost a wife who was cheating on him. Found dead with her hand on her boyfriend’s throttle, she was, just like Casey Jones in the Wreck of the Old 97.

  Ebon ran for the corner. No pacing, no speed walking. He made it at nearly a sprint.

  Go back to Aimee’s, said a sensible voice inside him. You’re delirious. You’re stressed. You held yourself together on the ride in and on your first night with Aimee (well, not with her; that never quite works out, does it?), but now you’re untethered and starting to break. You’re in shock. You can’t experience infidelity, betrayal, and violent death all in the same day without snapping. You never mourned. You never grew angry. You sat like the passive, worthless, spineless lump of shit you are, because she always cheated on you; she never stopped; she fucked Mark and that guy Charlie from her journal and probably the mailman, while you sat back and let her, never being the man she wanted or needed, never stepping up, never …

  Ebon reached the corner, body-checking the corner of a curiosity shop called Rapunzel’s Tower more or less intentionally. He wasn’t here (on the island, and certainly not in pursuit of a beautiful red-haired woman) to think about Holly. He was here to forget. To walk the beach and rest. To stroll without worry and smell the salty air. To rekindle something that had almost been in the past, but had been broken by something (someone) that could no longer harm him. Or perhaps to chase women he was sure he knew from somewhere, if need be.

  The woman was ahead again once he could look down Raymond, but only for a second. Then she turned left, the red flag of her dress winking out of sight as quickly as it had appeared. The rows of houses were dim and plain in its absence. With the red gone, it was as if someone had turned down the saturation on the world’s TV.

  Ebon ran again, still very aware of what this must look like to anyone watching.

  Now he was committed. You couldn’t chase a strange woman and not catch her — not after such a display. One way or another, he had to stop her and say something — anything — to break the tension. The people who were surely watching and about to call the police (such that Aaron had any) needed to see the dark-haired stranger catch the voluptuous redhead to prove that he merely wanted her conversation. That’s all Ebon wanted too: to reach the woman, nab her attention, and apologize. He wanted to save face by telling her that he’d thought she was someone else. Because if he quit now, he’d have to admit (to himself if to nobody else) that he might be losing his head, chasing a girl like that. He’d done too much running now to abandon his pursuit. He had to look the woman in the eyes and say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone from my office.”

  Except that he was simultaneously quite sure he wouldn’t say that when she turned, because he did know her. She’d look back, and he’d see that she had green eyes, full cheeks, and a way of smiling that was almost a sexy kind of smirk. A girl he knew from … from …?

  Another corner. Another flash of red. Then gone. As if she knew he was behind her, and was leading him on a seductive game of follow the leader.

  Ebon ran. And again, just as he peeked around the corner, he saw her disappear to the left. He needed to see her face. He had to know. Who was she? Why was she so damn familiar? An itch that couldn’t be scratched, like a rash deep beneath an inflexible cast. And like scratching that itch under a cast, Ebon no longer cared if he had to cut himself to reach it.

  He saw her again, and again she vanished to the left. A swoosh of bright red fabric, a tantalizing side-rear view of large breasts, then nothing.

  “Hey!” Ebon called out. “Excuse me, Miss?”

  The blocks in the maze were short; she’d have to hear him. Except that the woman didn’t know him and wouldn’t think to stop. If she thought anything, it would be to run.

  He made the next corner. Saw her vanish again to the left.

  Left?

  “Miss!”

  Ebon was nearly out of breath from the running, the exertion, and the anticipation. He’d become a strange brew of nerves, thrills, and arousal. But despite her ability to easily outpace him, whenever he saw the woman, she was walking casually as if gathering shells on the beach. She seemed to vanish from one corner and appear at the next without running the space in between. And, Ebon realized now, she’d taken at least four left turns in a row, more or less going in nonsensical circles.

  “Miss! Excuse me!”

  Another corner. Another flash of red. Again: left.

  “Miiiss!”

  Aware of his panting, feeling more like a stalker and a maniac than ever (and a loud maniac; this was a summer-rental part of town but if anyone was still here they’d think him mad), Ebon drew several deep, panting breaths and felt his pulse thudding in his throat.

  This was absurd. This was wrong.

  “Miiii — ”

  Ebon cut off mid-vowel, finding himself staring into a dead end. Small cottages lined each side of the narrow dirt path, but the canal was straight ahead. There was a highway railing in front of it, three diamond-shaped reflective road signs in its middle so that drunks didn’t drive right into the water. The woman was nowhere.

  Breathing heavily enough for his shoulders to heave, Ebon looked at the cottages. She must have disappeared into one of them. But he’d been so close, and she’d had only seconds. Moving as slowly and carefree as she’d been, how could she possibly have reached one of the doors, unlocked it, opened it, gone inside, and closed it behind her?

  Ebon saw no movement, nor heard a door seating home.

  You’re losing it, buddy.

  But he wasn’t losing it. Never, ever, ever had Ebon had any sort of hallucination. In movies, stress made people crazy, but Ebon, looking at the cottages, had a hard time believing that stress over Holly and her baggage could create such a vivid, nearly touchable delusion. He wasn’t lying on a bed with his head in the clouds, seeing fields of pink mushrooms and caricatures of the queen coming to life. He was standing on a dirt road with the sun slowly making its autumnal way overhead, air crisp but warming, all of his senses as alive as they’d ever been.

  This wasn’t a mind trick. She’d really been there. Strangely fast. Lost enough to keep taking left turns. And deaf.

  Ebon could knock on the cottage doors.

  But that was even more ridiculous than his pursuit had been. What was he supposed to say if she answered? What was he supposed to say if someone else was still down this way, in these non-winterized summer homes, and answered instead?

  What was he supposed to do if nobody answered, because every cottage was empty?

  Sense descended like a hammer. Of course she’d slipped into one of the cottages, and of course she wouldn’t answer now. There was a perfectly sensible reaso
n — and, come to think of it, a sensible reason for her not responding to his shouts and the way she managed to stay ahead: she’d been running away from the deranged stranger behind her.

  “Shit,” he said aloud.

  He backed up a step.

  “Shit. Shit, shit.”

  Ebon almost wanted to run out the way he’d come, but running suddenly felt like folly. He’d done nothing wrong. Did people who’d done nothing wrong run? No. Of course not. They walked, like sensible people — like the kind of people who would never chase a woman from the center of town into the cottage maze along the canal.

  He retraced his last turn, then the one before it. But still, he couldn’t help but look back, feeling rebuked. His compulsion to catch the woman had felt red hot with anticipation, and he realized now he’d been very eager to at least exchange a few words.

  It was a familiar feeling: one he’d had for a girl in college, before he’d met Holly. That girl (her name had been Kirsty) hadn’t been interested in Ebon’s affections, but he’d felt compelled to keep trying anyway. Every time he found ways to bump into her, he thought she’d finally find him interesting. Her face always twisted, clearly finding issue with his refusal to take a hint. But Ebon could never leave things on a bad note, so he’d always try again. If she was going to reject him, fine. But their last encounter couldn’t leave him feeling like an annoyance … but, of course, it always had.

  He blinked the feeling away, both summoning thoughts of Kirsty and pushing them back. That wasn’t what had happened here. And even if it was, the woman in red hadn’t had the chance to truly reject him, right?

  Ebon shook his head. Why did he care about the red-haired woman?

  His feet stopped, and he looked at the rows of summer cottages around him, most of which were already boarded for the off-season.

  And where the hell was he anyway?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lost

  EBON FOUND HIMSELF THINKING OF KUBRICK’S version of The Shining, where Jack is chasing Danny through the hedge maze, wielding an axe. Where Danny, to elude his homicidal father, retraces his footprints in the snow, following his own prints back and out, while Jack freezes to death.

  Ebon had traced his last turn, then had taken what he was pretty sure had been the previous turn. Even after only two turns, he felt unsure that he was on the right street, or the proper path back out and into the main part of town. Nothing looked familiar — while, at the same time, everything did.

  The cookie-cutter cottages were, save minor details, too similar to tell apart.

  He didn’t remember the green door on the cottage behind him, but he’d been watching the woman coming in, barely paying attention. He didn’t recall seeing the three enormous terracotta pots on the porch ahead, but he’d been in a sprint, frantic as if trying to catch the last bus out of town.

  Even if he’d remembered those details, though, Ebon suspected he’d be lost. The canal area — including everything on the slivered-off mini-island beyond it — had been purchased wholesale in the '60s by a developer and made into a kind of island subdivision. The company hadn’t paved the streets, but it had laid the place out in curved dirt roads that formed cul-de-sacs and dead ends. The area was called Canal River (a redundant name if Ebon had ever heard one), and all of the streets were a variant: Canal River Place, Canal River Court, Canal River Majestic, Canal River Magnolia. Within a few minutes of trying to extricate himself, the place had begun to feel like a Chinese finger trap: the more Ebon struggled to free himself, the more tightly ensnared he became.

  He thought about knocking on a cottage door and asking for the way out, but that was ridiculous. He was on a small island, on a smaller island beyond a canal. Who got lost a few minutes from the paint-by-numbers town center? He couldn’t accept that he was lost. There were places you got lost and places you didn’t … and this definitely was the latter.

  Despite being a small neighborhood, the roads in Canal River proved to be more serpentine than Ebon would’ve thought possible. He took Canal River Boulevard (which wasn’t a boulevard) to Canal River Ophelia only to find himself back on Canal River Beach, which he’d left a few turns earlier and which had no beach. He took Canal River Beach to Canal River Gorge (no gorge either). That seemed encouraging because Canal River Road, which he found next, sounded like the logical path to grant entry and exit to the labyrinth, but even that one somehow dead ended in both directions. There were five branches off of Canal River Road. One was called Canal River Entranceway, but it led to a trio of boat docks instead of an entrance.

  Again Ebon thought of stopping at one of the cottages, but they all looked vacant and boarded. Worse, many — in this part of Canal River anyway — looked abandoned.

  How many “parts” did Canal River have anyway? Ebon had passed its main inroad a number of times during his summers gone by and had always assumed the place was rather small. On maps, it looked like it could only hold a dozen houses, maybe twenty or thirty at the outside. But as Ebon wandered through it, the place felt sprawling. He couldn’t see the horizon enough to orient himself, and was no longer sure even of where the red-headed woman had disappeared. Cottages in that section had seemed nice, like how Aimee’s father’s home had once looked. But the shacks around him now looked like it did in the present — or even as bad he’d fooled himself into believing Richard’s place to be when he’d first laid eyes on it.

  He looked from one cottage to the next down the row. He hadn’t thought much about it before, but now that he assessed each he found they looked ready for a wrecking ball. They would all be empty no matter the season. Besides, despite it being a sunny midmorning, he kind of didn’t want to approach the creepy things anyway.

  He had to find the water, then follow the beach.

  But the sound of water seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. He’d got past his obedient refusal to tromp through people’s yards in finding his way, but if he were to tromp to the beach now he at least had to know which direction to go. But Ebon hadn’t a clue.

  The sun rises in the east. Aimee’s father’s house faces west. Find the sun.

  He could do that, but something else was bothering him. He’d seen the stark morning sunlight coming from Aimee’s room before he’d left. From the west.

  Ebon shook it away. Summer had advanced into fall; the sun was always in the southern sky and would be more so as green trees bled to autumn’s hues. It must have been coming from the south. The house wasn’t perfectly situated on a compass grid, that was all. No question it was on the island’s west side — bay side, not ocean side — and that that was the beach where he’d heard Oasis. He had to be nearer to that beach than the other; the island was a few miles wide, and he hadn’t come far. Unless Canal River had extended beyond the canal in recent years and its expanded size — perhaps now spanning half the island’s width — was what made it feel strange.

  Find the west. Find the sun, then walk in the opposite direction.

  Ebon could see a bright area, but it was hard to pinpoint the sun’s precise location because thin clouds had obscured it and Canal River was thick with trees. He ran up and down the streets, on display for the nobodies not occupying the rotting cottages around him, trying to get a peek, closer and closer to an odd kind of panic.

  Who gets lost on a small, populated island in the middle of the day?

  And yet Ebon was lost, hungry, and thirsty because he’d run and been sweating. He had no money even if he did find a place with liquids for sale. He didn’t have his wallet or ID. Ebon was a man in cargo shorts, a shirt, and sandals on his feet. Nothing more.

  He picked a bright spot in the sky, then walked in the opposite direction, heedless of property lines, fences, and garden walls. If someone wanted to come out and yell at him, great. He could ask for a way out — to hell with feeling foolish.

  After a few minutes, Ebon encountered a swamp that he hadn’t known existed. It didn’t stretch to the ocean, so far as he could tell. It block
ed his way, but then Ebon looked back at the sun and realized that not only had he inaccurately pegged its location; he’d forgotten to account for it being southeast instead of more or less due east this time of year.

  He suddenly felt twelve years old all over again. Part of him wanted to sit in the middle of the street and cry. Another part wanted to storm through this stupid fucking subdivision in this stupid fucking part of town on this stupid fucking island, breaking things because any fucking person with a fucking brain would run streets east-west and north-south, not in loops and nonsensical whorls. Any stupid developer without an idiot’s dick for a brain would have given the place more than a single exit and would have connected a few of the streets to each other.

  Goddamn, was he thirsty.

  Ebon looked at the swamp, considering walking to its edge, testing it for salt, and drinking despite the threat of bacteria and parasites. His sensible mind reset something inside, and he again decided there was no way — no cock-sucking, dick-brained, shit-headed way — that he would be beaten for one minute longer by a subdivision.

  The air felt oven hot. Ebon felt sweat bead his forehead, and he stepped back into the shade, looking through a clutch of leaves and wondering why they hadn’t begun to turn. It felt like a summer day in bloom, and the leaves had summer’s lush. Hadn’t Aaron got the memo? Labor Day was gone; days were shrinking, and the sun was supposed to peak lower in the sky. You should be able to walk around, chasing redheads if you wanted, without sweating to death. Leaves were supposed to be turning to auburns and coppers.

  He wondered how dehydrated a person could get before mirages came to plague him.

  But that was crazy; he hadn’t been out that long. Yes, his shirt was wet from sprinting, but that didn’t mean he was dry inside. It didn’t mean his blood was thickening like sludge. You could go days without drinking.