Soul Survivor

by G. M. Ford

  About the time we started up the Southcenter hill, she turned the laptop in my direction. “This is from your home security cameras. Their first attempt,” she said.

  Northwest corner of my yard. The darkest corner of the property. First one guy climbs on top of the wall. Looks like he’s getting a push from below. Outside guy hands him something. Twice. First guy helps second up onto the top of the wall. Guy two climbs down into the yard. First guy hands something down to him and then something else. First guy climbs down too. They get three steps across the grass, when they trip one of the motion sensors and the place lights up like Safeco Field.

  Rebecca stopped the tape. Camo coveralls visible in the stark black and white. Ski masks. Each with an assault rifle hanging around his neck, like SWAT team macho men. The lights paralyze them for a few seconds; then one of them says something to the other, and they sprint back to the wall, where one boosts the other up to the top. They pass the weapons up, pull the second guy to the top of the wall, and disappear back out into the neighborhood.

  “Go back to the beginning, when the first guy climbs over,” I said. “Can you make it slo-mo?”

  First one hand appeared on top of the wall. Then another. “Stop,” I said.

  I pointed at the screen. “Look at the other hand.”

  She leaned in close. “He’s got a glove on one hand,” she said.

  “Why would somebody wear a glove on one hand?” I asked.

  “Michael Jackson impression,” Gabe threw in.

  “Maybe he was trying not to leave prints,” Rebecca suggested. “Or maybe he had some reason to take the other glove off.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Gabe was right about the second pair too. Different guys. They’d tried to climb over the gate instead of the wall and set the system off in about two seconds. Both of them were noticeably shorter and stouter than the first pair, which probably explains why they chose the gate. Same guns, though. Got a real good look at them during the gate incursion, when one of them laid the weapons on the driveway as he helped his buddy over.

  “Joey called your security company. They’re going to be checking your place twice a day . . . armed security . . . on foot.”

  “Thanks,” I said to Rebecca. “For everything.”

  If I was hoping for a tender moment, I was ripe for disappointment.

  “Nancy called,” she said.

  Took me a bit to process. “Oh yeah . . . the lawsuit.” Amazing how your brain automatically prioritizes things when the shit hits the fan. I had a pair of lying skunks suing me for three million bucks, and I hadn’t thought about it once.

  “What’s up with that?”

  She almost smiled. “We should have known,” she said, shaking her head. “The world is a selfie. Five different demonstrators filmed the scene on their phones from five different angles, all of which, according to Nancy, show that you never laid a glove on either of them . . . with the possible exception of when you spiked the wife over your shoulder . . .” She waggled a hand. “But to make a long story short, Nancy has everybody’s footage in hand. She had a powwow with the complainants’ lawyers, and they’ve withdrawn their suit.”

  “See? The righteous shall prevail.”

  “She wants to know if you want to countersue for damages. She says it’s a slam dunk. You can get them to pay your end of the costs.” She held up a finger. “But I gotta tell you, they had a sixteen-year-old son shot and killed on his way home from the junior prom in Chehalis last spring. That’s what got them into the movement. So . . . if I were you . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve had about all I can stand of being the big bad wolf. I’m thinkin’ I just wanna let this one go.”

  She didn’t say anything. Went back to fiddling with her laptop instead. I kept picking up Gabe’s eyes flicking back and forth between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. Wondered what was so damned interesting back there but couldn’t twist around far enough to see for myself.

  “We got company?” I asked.

  “Just Marty and Ken,” Gabe said. “They’re driving two cars down so’s they can leave us one to use and they can bring the ambulance back to the city.”

  “Down where?” I tried again.

  “Hoquiam.”

  “Jeanette’s place.”

  Jeanette had been Joey’s half sister. Different mothers, same father. Ten years older than Joey and a drama queen of monumental proportions. I’m a kind of an under-the-radar guy, so suffice it to say, we never got along very well. Or at all, maybe. Ten years ago, just to get her crabby ass out of town, Joey had bought her an oceanfront home over on a desolate stretch of the Washington coast. I’d heard she’d died a while back. Some sort of cancer.

  “Joey just had it all fixed up so he could sell it,” Gabe said. “Had people come in and stage it too. And then this shit storm came up. Seemed like a natural.”

  Somewhere between Olympia and Elma I fell asleep.

  As promised, Marty and his buddy arrived in time to lift me out of the ambulance and roll me inside. They did a quick sweep of the house and grounds, and then Marty jumped into one of the white GMC Yukons they’d driven down, the other guy took over the ambulance, and, within about twenty minutes, they were gone.

  We moved into the big bedroom on the ground floor. Gabe and I both would have preferred for Rebecca and me to be upstairs, but there wasn’t any feasible way to get me up there short of a block and tackle, so we set things up the other way.

  They’d leased a hospital bed from some medical supply place in Aberdeen. I was fiddling with the controls, sitting myself up so I could see, when Gabe came back into the room with a shotgun and a small black semiautomatic.

  Gabe put the handgun and a box of ammo on the sheet next to me, leaned the shotgun between the bed and the wall, then looked over at me and grinned. “Mossberg 500 Home Defense Pump Action Shotgun, 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel. Five rounds. Synthetic short stock. Matte black finish. Bead sight.”

  “I’ve got one just like that,” I said.

  “Then you know it’s big, serious water buffalo shot. Got five in it. Safety’s on. All you gotta do is get close. Whatever you hit ain’t coming back.”

  I looked down at the handgun lying next to me.

  “Looks a lot like my little Smith & Wesson too.”

  “Amazing how these things work out.”

  I didn’t bother to ask how they’d gotten into my gun safe. Didn’t imagine I’d like the answer a bit.

  The first two weeks, Rebecca was there full-time. Whatever it was we weren’t saying to one another hung over us like a shroud. This wasn’t her kind of thing at all. She was strictly a straight-ahead, by-the-book kind of person. Things like hiding out in the hinterlands were foreign to her sense of propriety and order.

  Since Gabe had no intention of leaving me at the house alone, Rebecca had to do the legwork. Locating a drugstore. Finding the nearest hospital—just in case. She was that way. Finding a supermarket in town. Doing serious shopping. Enough stuff to keep us going until she could get back down here again. Filled up the Yukon from floor to ceiling. Maybe thirty or forty bags of food and drink.

  Next night, she changed the dressing on my chest, and I got my first look at the artwork. She got all the tape loose and looked me hard in the eye. Her serious face.

  “I want you to understand something, Leo.” She sucked in some air. “Whoever did this . . . they didn’t just cut you . . . They carved something in you the way you’d carve something in the bark of a tree.”

  She paused, making sure I got what she was telling me. “They took out some of the flesh.”

  “Feels like they skinned me,” I said, trying to lighten things up.

  “I had Harry Townes look at it while you were still out of it.” Harry was a plastic surgeon friend of hers from med school. “He said your surgeons did a good job but that you’re more or less going to have to live with the scar. It’s going to fade over time, but short of
a couple of years of skin grafts, that scar is going to be with you”—she hesitated—“mostly forever.”

  The curtain went up. I was peering down at my chest in disbelief. Four arrows of scab. One pointing up. One pointing down. One left, one right. Sonovabitch had carved Vs in me. I nearly burst into tears.

  Then I felt like maybe I was gonna puke. I’ve been shot. Beaten up more times than I can count. Left for dead. But this . . . this affected me in a way I’d never experienced before. I felt like a defiled synagogue or something. Like somebody had violated me in a way I’d never even imagined possible, and I was never going to be the same, no matter what I did. Not ever. I lay back in the bed and closed my eyes while she buttoned me back up. That was the moment. Right there. The back-breaking straw. I didn’t know it at the time, but a great deal of what was to follow was a direct result of that moment, when I realized what it was going to take for me to get past this. I yearned for that wonderful blue morphine button.

  Lying around in bed all day didn’t suit me much, so about a week later, Rebecca drove into Aberdeen and came back with a walker and a wheelchair so’s I could roll myself around the house and out onto the front porch.

  Things went like that until the second Saturday night. Marty was coming down the next day to pick up Rebecca and bring her back to the city. Gabe had retired upstairs to another rollicking night in the middle of nowhere. We were lying down, but not together, as our beds were at opposite ends of the room. Felt like I was living in a convent or something. I was ruminating on the infamy of the situation when Rebecca finally managed to spit out the pit she’d been rolling around her mouth for the past couple of weeks.

  “This is the last time, Leo.”

  My first instinct was to stall, ask for a clarification, do the old Whatever do you mean? routine, but I managed to regain my senses and stifle it.

  “I didn’t go looking for this one,” I said.

  “You have a knack for finding trouble whether you’re looking for it or not.”

  Couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t bother. Good thing too. Even from the other side of the room I could feel her anger, crackling like unseen lightning on a muggy summer evening.

  “This isn’t how I want to live my life,” she said. “I assumed—silly me—that when you came into your dad’s money . . . I just assumed that would be the end of this sort of thing. Now . . .”

  She stopped herself. All I could think of was more excuses, so I clammed up.

  “Didn’t mean to put you through this,” I said finally.

  “I know,” she said, and then rolled over and faced the wall.

  I was sitting on the front porch in my wheelchair, watching Marty and Rebecca drive off into the sunrise, and feeling about as conflicted as I ever have. Much as I loved and admired the woman, it was a relief to be out from under a constant cloud of recrimination. On one hand I felt bad about feeling that way, on the other I felt like an upright freezer had been lifted from my shoulders. I’m not good with ambiguity.

  Fortunately, Gabe didn’t give me much time to think about it. About the time Marty and Rebecca drove out of sight and the dust settled back onto the swamp grass, Gabe walked out onto the porch, set the brakes on my chair, kicked up the footrests, and extended a big, rough-looking pair of hands in my direction.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not sure I can stand on them.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  I took the hands, wrapping my fingers around the thick wrists. Gabe started to pull. I pulled back and began to stand. Hurt like hell. My legs felt like a giant bruise as more of my weight began to press down on them. In the second before I was upright, I thought I was gonna lose it, but Gabe muscled me out of the seat like a handful of popcorn.

  “Ooooooooooh,” escaped from my mouth as I stood there, on my own two feet for the first time in months, wavering in the morning breeze like a dried-out cattail.

  Gabe let my hands go and checked the time. “Let’s see how long you can stand there.”

  It was seven minutes before my legs were shaking like a polio victim’s. I gritted my teeth and hung in there for another minute or so before plopping back down into the chair, covered with an oily sheen of sweat.

  “Not bad,” Gabe said. “A little longer every day.”

  “Nice to have something to look forward to,” I huffed out.

  I was sitting out on the front porch catching some rays and researching signs and symbols, trying to find an exact match for the divots on my chest. I’d found any number of similar arrow-based signs, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe the guy hadn’t just carved something at random. Frustrated, I pushed the button and snapped the iPad shut.

  Later that afternoon, Rebecca called to say she was buried at work and wasn’t going to make it down that week. I sympathized robustly but was secretly grateful. Gabe and I had a good routine going. I was feeling better than I’d felt in a long time. Not only was I now able to stand for long periods of time, but I’d graduated to the walker, which I could shuffle along behind as soon as we rolled up all the throw rugs. Problem wasn’t my legs. They were getting livelier by the day. It was my back, where they’d given me a bone graft on my spine. About as sore as sore could be. Every step, even with the walker, felt like I was gonna dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

  But we kept at it. Gabe kept me moving every day while I used the downtime to burn up the Internet looking for a match to those arrows. Couple of months went by. I discovered that a walker doesn’t work worth a wet damn on the beach. Rebecca came for another couple of romantic weekends of living alone together . . . except, of course, for the genetically ambiguous gun monkey in the upstairs bedroom and the various and sundry firearms stashed here and there around the house. I think it’s safe to say that both of us were grateful by the time Sunday afternoon came around and she took the two-hour drive back to Seattle.

  They say time heals all wounds. I don’t know about the “all” part, but things surely get better. Slowly . . . but better. I could ride into town now, catch a bite with Gabe at the pizza parlor. Go along on the shopping runs. Hell, I could even be left alone.

  I remember the day we drove over to Hoquiam High School and took laps around the track at a brisk pace. We’d been heel-n-toeing it for over an hour when Gabe looked over at me and asked, “You notice?”

  “Notice what?”

  “You ain’t limping anymore.”

  Oddly, my first urge was to protest, but I had a sudden spasm of lucidity and swallowed it. Gabe was right. I was as close to being my former self as I was going to get. But . . . something was missing. I could feel a cold uncertainty hovering at my center that I’d never felt before.

  Gabe found a gun range over on the far side of Aberdeen. We went several times a week for several months. Killin’ time, you know. Gabe was deadeye Dick. Never missed by more than a couple of inches. I’d always been mediocre at best when it came to marksmanship. Always made it a point to be armed with something where you only had to come close, like a shotgun or something on full auto, where I could spray it like a garden hose. Like anything else, though, practice makes perfect. By the time we’d blown off a thousand bucks’ worth of ammo, I was better than I’d ever been in my life.

  We hadn’t seen Rebecca in nearly a month. She and I talked on the phone a few times a week, but lately it had taken on the air of an obligation rather than a conversation. I could feel both of us waiting for this phase of our lives to be over and neither of us being at all sure what came next.

  Gabe went back to Seattle every couple of weeks for a day or two. Marty drove down and took over babysitting until Gabe got back.

  Around the middle of May, spring washed over the Hoquiam River valley, and almost before I’d gotten used to the idea, summer showed up. Steam rising from the marshes with the morning sun. Wedges of waterfowl, veering in, veering out of tidal bays. The herd of deer that came down to the estuary every evening at dusk. After a while, seemed like Gabe and me tromping aroun
d the Hoquiam’s tidal flats blended into the natural rhythm of nature.

  Funny thing, though. While my body was telling me that I was ready to rumble, my mind didn’t seem to be quite ready for the bell to ring. It felt like I was standing outside a door and couldn’t muster up the courage to push the bell. I was telling myself that part of me loved the quiet simplicity of my present life, which had a nice bucolic ring to it . . . except that I knew better. And to make matters worse, Gabe thought I was ready to go too. I could tell. For the past several weeks I’d sensed a bit of impatience where there had been none before, but Gabe wanted me to make the decision on my own, which is how I’d have played it were our roles reversed.

  On the sixteenth of July, the universe made the decision for me. Gabe and I were hopping our way through a marsh, jumping from tuft to tuft, trying to keep from falling down into the deep black tidal mud, when Gabe took a misstep and went down hard, with the left leg wedged between a couple of tufts of swamp grass. I heard the ankle go. Sounded like somebody’d snapped a dry stick.

  Took me the better part of an hour to get Gabe and myself back to the road. By the time I’d hauled Gabe’s big ass up onto the road grade, my back was threatening to go into lockdown, and I was shakin’ like a hound dog passing a peach pit. I caught my breath, walked back to the house and got the car, and then drove Gabe over to Grays Harbor Community Hospital, where my diagnosis was confirmed by prominent medical authorities. Broken ankle. Sure as hell.

  I was sitting outside the ER while the folks inside put Gabe back together, when for the second time in a single day, fate reached out and slapped me in the head. Weird thing was, after all the hours I’d put in trying to identify the symbol on my chest, when I found it, I wasn’t even looking. I was reading the Google news when I saw a picture of some sort of riot somewhere in the Midwest. Two groups of demonstrators going at it. I clicked the photo twice. It got bigger. And there it was.

  On a white paper placard one of them was waving. Four arrows. Just like the ones I was carrying around. The guy next to him carried a sign that said WHITE POWER. Seemed like all the signs on that side had something to do with race.