She stood there, her head craning right and left trying to see into the darkness. She could make nothing out beyond the oval-shaped area rug just beyond the door. She took another step closer to the open front door.
She was close enough now that she could smell the musty, aged dust odor inside the cabin. That smell mingled with the fragrance of varnished wood and the even fainter smell of old fires from the fireplace.
Angie was only one step from the doorway into the cabin.
Her left hand came up and touched the doorframe.
She leaned her head forward and slowly stuck it through the doorway in order to see inside the cabin. Everything was dark.
She said far less firmly than before, “Charlie Rutledge?”
Suddenly, the lights came up, and Angie just about fell over with a heart attack. The lights were crazy bright after peering into the darkness so intensely, and she was blinded and staggered backward.
“Angie!” John shouted, and he ran up the porch steps to her.
John and Robert thought she’d been hit. She was holding her hand in front of her eyes. John grabbed her.
“Are you alright?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, squinting. “The light’s blinding me.”
They both looked inside the cabin. And they saw a note attached to the recliner where Charlie had been sitting.
Robert came up behind them and saw it, too.
The screen door slapped shut with a smack, and all three stood there on the porch looking inside at the recliner across the living room. The note was attached to the chair byway of a nine-inch hunting knife that was stuck through it.
• •
John went for his cell phone. It was packed in a pocket on the right side of his backpack, which stood over by the kitchen. Angie and Robert cautiously approached the note that was pinned to the chair. Both kept looking up over the chair toward the two bedrooms at the back of the cabin and up toward the upstairs loft and the two bedrooms at either end of the loft.
“There’s no signal,” John said.
He held his cell phone out in front of him.
Robert looked at him; Robert was standing in front of the recliner and the note.
“No,” he said. “We’re too far out. I’ve never been able to get a signal up here. I’ve never been able to even get a phone line up here. There just aren’t any lines.”
“How about your cell, Angie?” John said.
Angie knelt down and looked at the note on the chair. In crazy scrawled handwriting, it said:
Go home, Tree Huggers, before you get killed.
The word “killed” was underlined twice.
“Pleasant,” Robert said.
He walked back toward the two back bedrooms at the back of the cabin, and he saw the open window in the bedroom on the left. He crossed to the window and closed it.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we know how he got into the place.”
John was still trying to get a signal on his cell phone, walking around the front of the cabin, holding the thing out in front of him like a remote control for a toy airplane.
“There’s no signal,” he said, growing desperate.
Robert said, “I’m telling you, John, you’re not going to be able to get a signal up here, man. The nearest friggin’ road is forty miles away.”
“And you don’t have a phone up here?” he said.
“Is that some kind of accusation?” Robert said. “Because it sounded like an accusation.”
John looked at Angie for help. “Angie,” he said. “We’ve got to try yours.”
Angie frowned. “It’s in my pack,” she said.
John was already over her backpack. “Where?” he said.
“I think it’s the front pocket,” she said.
John unzipped one of the front pockets on her backpack and removed her cell phone. He activated it and then looked at the little signal meter. The signal was at the absolute lowest. He pressed 9-1-1, hit send, and held the phone up to his ear.
There was nothing.
“There’s no signal,” he said. He sounded hysterical. “You mean we’re stuck up here? Until when?!”
“Dave Baker will be back in seven days,” Angie said.
“Six days, now,” Robert said.
Angie tilted her head a little and nodded. “Well, yeah.”
John got control of himself. He said, “And in the meantime, we’ve got a mountain lion the size of a Buick out there. And some nut with an ax popping in and out of the place to say ‘hi’!”
Robert said, “Well, the mountain lion might have a bullet in its back left leg.”
Angie said, “And we don’t know about this nut. Maybe he just wants to scare us.”
She tore the note from the chair and held it up in front of her.
John said, “And maybe he wants to throw you on the ground and make you squeal like a pig!”
“We don’t know what he wants, John,” Angie said.
“Well, what the hell?! Do you think he wants milk and cookies? He was sitting in the chair with an ax across his chest! Not a friendly, Angie. Hello, Angie? Earth to Angie! Do you need it written in blood? The guy had an ax!”
There was a flash of lightning outside, and the glass in the window frames shook with the powerful thunder. The rain continued to pound the cabin.
Angie crossed over to the bathroom. There was a little whicker hamper right outside the bathroom door, and on top of the hamper there were about a half dozen clean, neatly folded bathroom towels. She picked one up and tossed it across to John.
“Well,” she said. “We can’t do anything about it right this moment. So you might as well dry off.”
“Dry off?” he said.
“Hey, at least we’re not stuck out there in the woods,” she said. “It’s pouring down rain. The temperature’s gonna drop down near freezing by midnight. At least we found the place. At least we’re safe from that cougar. Get a hold of yourself. This is the situation, and we have to deal with it.”
“We’ve got three guns,” Robert said.
Angie tossed a towel across to him, too, and Robert started drying himself off.
“We’ve got wood on the back porch,” Robert said. “We can build a fire.”
“If that lunatic comes back here,” Angie said. “We’ll confront him. We’ve got the three guns.”
John said, “Yeah, but one gun doesn’t seem to work, Angie, and none of us can shoot worth a damn.”
• •
John was convinced that they needed to go. It wasn’t that he was afraid so much as it was that reason had taken over his mind, and nothing seemed more unreasonable than staying in the cabin, isolated from the outside world for another six days. He hobbled back and forth in the living room.
Robert Gonzalez was bent over the fireplace, trying to start a fire. Angie was across the cabin at the kitchen table; on the table in front of her was her rifle, which she had completely taken apart in order to dry, clean, and oil. Robert had cracked a Duraflame starter log in half, placed it in the center of the fireplace, and stacked three split logs around and on top of it. The split logs were damp, but they were not soaked. He kept his woodpile on the front screened-in porch, and even there it was covered with a plastic green waterproof tarp.
He struck a match and lit the paper corners of the starter log. He stood up and watched as the log took fire. There was no electric or gas heat in the cabin; there was only the fireplace, and the cabin felt like it was about fifty degrees. Both he and Angie had changed over to dry clothes. John, however, was still in his wet clothes and seemed intent on refusing to accept the idea that they might have to stay there another six days.
“You say there’s an ATV,” John said.
Robert looked up. “Yeah,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“John, man, I think you need to settle down,” he said. “If I was you, I’d check on that hip of yours.”
John glanced at his hip where his jeans w
ere torn.
“I just want to know where the hell the ATV is,” he said.
“What difference does it make, man?” Robert said. “It’s not like you’re gonna get on the thing and be able to drive down the mountain, in the storm, in the middle of the night.”
John didn’t seem to have heard any of this. He said, “It’s in the shed out back isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s in the shed,” Robert said. “And there’s just enough gas in the tank to make it down the mountain, to make it down to Grapevine.”
“Well, then that’s what we need to do,” John said. “We take the ATV down to Grapevine, and we call for help.”
“John, Grapevine is nearly thirty miles as the crow flies,” Robert said. “There is no road down to Grapevine. The only way to get to Grapevine is to take backcountry trails not unlike the one we got lost on today.”
Finally Angie said, “Come here, John. Let me look at your hip.”
“Screw my hip,” he said. “We need to get out of here. I’m taking the ATV, and I’m gonna drive it down to Grapevine.”
“You’d get lost before you were a mile away from the cabin,” Robert said.
“And you’d leave us stranded,” Angie said. “I think you need a drink. I think you need something to take the edge off.”
“What edge?!” he shrieked. “You guys are nuts!”
Robert said, “John, do me a favor, man”—he tossed a red first-aid kit at him, and John caught it—“Go in the bathroom and clean up your cuts. Just do that. Then, we’ll maybe talk about taking the ATV down to Grapevine.”
John held the first-aid kit in his hands. He looked from Angie to Robert and just shook his head.
“This is a conspiracy,” he said. “You guys are a couple of fanatics! You’re so screwed up in the head with mountain lions, you’re willing to risk our lives to stay here!”
Robert and Angie looked at him calmly. He was hysterical. He looked like he was about to explode, and he stormed across the cabin toward the bathroom, grabbing his backpack along the way. He slammed the door shut.
Robert stood there flabbergasted. He looked from the slammed bathroom door to Angie at the kitchen table. She was calmly reassembling her rifle.
He crossed to the kitchen table and said in low tones to Angie, “What the hell is going on?”
Angie held the partially assembled rifle in her hand. She looked up at him. “He’s losing it. I think he needs to settle down. The earliest we could take that ATV down, if that’s what we were gonna do, would be tomorrow morning.”
“Is that what you want to do?” Robert asked.
Angie whispered, “I don’t see any reason why we have to. I mean it looks like his hip is gonna be alright. I thought he had seriously injured it.”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Robert whispered.
They both glanced over at the bathroom door.
“I mean he’s got some scrapes,” Angie whispered. “But it doesn’t look like anything’s broken, you know?”
Robert nodded his head.
• •
Inside the bathroom, John looked at himself in the mirror and winced. He looked a little crazy. His eyes were wide and manic looking. His shirt was soaked. His hair was all over the place. He had mud and dirt on his hands, face, and arms. And his jeans were ripped open on his left hip.
He unbuttoned his jeans and carefully pulled them down over his hips. The cuts were pretty bad, but they were nothing life threatening. He turned on the sink, dampened a washcloth, and began to clean the wounds. Next, he used rubbing alcohol and toilet paper, and he dabbed the wounds with alcohol-soaked paper. The alcohol burned pretty badly, but he gritted his teeth and got it done. At this point, he could see exactly what the mountain lion had done.
There was a strip of claw marks on his left hip. They were about six inches long and a quarter of an inch deep at their deepest. He held a wad of toilet paper below the wound and carefully poured the rubbing alcohol over the claw marks.
Then, he threw all the mess into the garbage can, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and pulled his jeans off. There was a shower in the bathroom, but he knew that they had no hot water, and as such, the thought of taking a freezing cold shower was not appealing. Instead, he stripped down completely naked and stood up in front of the sink.
There was a bar of soap adjacent to the sink, so he just washed himself with the washcloth and soap.
Screw it, he thought. And he turned around and turned on the shower. He realized that he was just too filthy to wash himself at the sink. He put a clean towel on the commode seat where he could quickly reach it, and he stepped into the shower.
He almost howled it was so cold, and his body immediately began to tense up from the cold. He ducked his head under the showerhead, wet his hair and quickly ran some soap over his body. It was so cold it was almost unbearable, but he made sure to cover every square inch of his body with soap, and he watched the dirt run down off of him and into the drain.
“Jesus, that’s cold,” he said. And he killed the shower.
He reached out and grabbed the towel and just tried to wrap himself up in it to warm up. His nipples were like two tiny prunes, and his body was doing a whole-body shiver. He climbed out of the shower and dried off.
He pulled out a pair of clean long johns from his backpack, a pair of wool socks, a thick thermal long-sleeved shirt, and he got dressed. He stood up in front of the sink and combed his hair. He dabbed his hip down with the towel and made sure that it wasn’t bleeding, and then he rubbed some Neosporin ointment from the first-aid kit onto the cuts.
It felt good to be clean and dressed in warm thermals and a pair of wool socks, even if the cabin felt like it was about fifty degrees. He brushed his teeth, combed his hair once again, and got all of his stuff together over in one corner of the bathroom.
That was when he looked out the bathroom window and saw the shed back behind the cabin.
The bathroom window was only about twenty inches wide, and it was about three feet tall. And John could see that it was still pouring down rain outside. But he could see across the backyard to the little aluminum shed beyond the back of the cabin.
An excited feeling rushed through him. It was the realization that the ATV was inside that shed. The shed was cream colored, and John could see that the roof of the shed was covered in pine straw. A single door stood five feet wide on its front; it all began to make sense to him. It all began to take shape in his mind. He could roll the ATV out of the thing, get on it, and drive it down the mountain.
He could make it to Grapevine, and he could call for help. Angie and Robert were too obsessed with this animal to see the picture clearly, the way that he was seeing it right that moment. Someone needed to take charge and call in extra help.
They thought he was crazy, that he was losing it, but it was Angie and Robert who were crazy. They were the ones that wanted to stay up here in the middle of nowhere Arizona without phones. They were the ones who wanted to hunt this mountain lion with darts. They were the ones throwing caution to the wind, when there was a lunatic with an ax who had come into their cabin and sat himself down just as pretty as you please.
And they couldn’t be reasoned with.
For a moment, John gave himself over to dark thoughts that Angie had wanted to see him lose it like this. She’d been riding him ever since they’d started dating, but it was she that had the job, the money, the television spots, the newspaper articles, the chief of police as her buddy. It was a sick game she played, John realized. She pretended to be all calm and kind and thoughtful, but it was all just a game and ultimately she wanted to see him fall flat on his face because that was what all the men in her life had ever done: they’d let her down.
And she had come to expect it—even wanted it to happen—so that she could play the victim and earn everybody’s sympathies, and then get more money, more friends, TV shows, fame, fame, fame. Another Porsche, maybe. Another hillside home.
“The
bitch,” he muttered.
And Robert? That little asshole had wanted to bang Angie as long as he’d known him. He was one of those university types that walk around with a canned smile on his face and plenty of flowery language while nursing an erection for every woman in the Biology department. Why I ought to go out there and beat the hell out of him, John thought.
Probably wouldn’t surprise me if he’s already banged her, he thought. All those field surveys, academic symposiums, nights in tents, nights in the cold. And suddenly John became furious at the thought of Angie and Robert fucking one another in a tent. He was sure it had happened!
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