ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE
Between the cabin and the outhouse, he passed a hand pump and spigot, two garden plots full of vegetables and herbs enclosed in chicken wire, a cord and a half of stacked firewood, and a muddy four-wheeler. He would have liked to admire the garden longer but the urgency in his bowels pushed him straight to the outhouse.
When he exited the little building five minutes later, Cat was waiting at the hand pump. She held up a bottle of dishwashing soap and said, “Give me your hands.” He cupped them in front of her and she squirted soap into his palms, which he then rubbed together vigorously, then held his hands under the spigot while she pumped icy water over his fingers and wrists.
“This is a sweet setup you have here,” he told her. “It must’ve taken a lot of hard work.”
She said, “Do you believe what he told you?”
He shook the water from his hands, then fanned them through the air. “I can’t think of any reason he’d lie. Not at this stage of the game.”
A few moments later he said, “I am wondering, though. Why did he change his name?”
“Didn’t want a thing to do with the government no more. Didn’t want them finding him. Asking questions. Poking at him. Figured he could take better care of hisself than any of them was doing.”
DeMarco nodded, did not say what he was thinking. He was thinking that he had felt the same way at one time. Like little more than a meat puppet trained to kill. Cheated. Betrayed.
Cat said, “He used to be a pretty good guitar player once. That’s where he got his name. You know ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’?”
DeMarco quickly ran through the lyrics in his mind. “‘Virgil Caine is the name,’” he quoted.
“But who sung it?”
“That was…Levon Helm. Of course. Virgil Helm.”
“Used to write his own songs too, Emery did.”
“I wish I could have heard them.”
She looked out across the ridgeline then, the hills blue and soft in the distance, the sky as bright as the inside of an enameled bowl. And then she sang, her voice soft and pitched low. “‘I have a story to tell but I don’t know where to start. The beginning and the ending are about a broken heart. Somewhere in the middle it all falls apart. It ain’t a very happy story but it’s the only one I got.’”
She paused then, blinked once, and said, “That’s the first verse. Only other one he wrote is the last.”
“Do you know it too?”
She nodded. “‘So I guess I’ll sharpen my knives and polish my sword. The night falls down, and I’m already bored. I wish I had a pretty woman to hold my hand. I’m gonna die a lonely man.’”
There were tears in her eyes when she stopped singing.
“My gosh,” DeMarco said. “Emery wrote that?”
“He never got to finish it.”
DeMarco took a chance and laid a hand atop her shoulder. She flinched momentarily, but then relaxed. She nodded, sniffed once, and turned to face him.
“Get yourself situated inside that four-wheeler,” she told him. “We got some riding to do, and you still have some walking left.”
She picked up the dishwashing liquid and returned to the cabin.
A part of him felt almost giddy with his survival and the notion of returning to Jayme and a soft bed in an air-conditioned room. Another part of him was reluctant to leave this sanctuary high above the rest of Kentucky, this Shambhala of birdsong and solitude.
He worked himself awkwardly into the passenger seat of the four-wheeler, sitting with only his right shoulder against the backrest, stiff left leg extended out the open door. He left the cane leaning against the outside of the vehicle.
Cat returned with a red-and-black bandanna held in both hands, a length of rawhide cord hanging from a belt loop. She whipped the bandanna through the air in a circular motion, forming it into a tight band two inches wide. He saw the bandanna and knew what was coming and did not resist, but leaned toward her so she could more easily secure the blindfold in place.
“I wanted to ask you about that cage you had me in,” he said. “It’s a fascinating piece of work.”
“Bear cage,” she told him. “Hold out your hands.”
He clasped his hands together and offered them to her. “You don’t need to tie me up. I promise not to lift the bandanna.”
The rawhide cord went around his wrists, circling it several times, tightening. “I know you’ll send somebody up here,” she said. “No reason to make it easy for you.”
“If I did, it would just be to get Emery some medical care.”
“He don’t want that,” she said as she doubled the knots. “Wouldn’t do no good anyways.”
He considered his response, but could think of nothing to say, no argument stronger than her own. So he said, “That’s the most elaborate bear cage I’ve ever seen.”
“They had them on the big estates over in Germany when my grandpap was a boy. He’s the one built all this.” She picked up the cane and stuck it inside against his leg. “Hold on to this,” she told him.
“It’s Emery’s, right? I don’t want to take his cane.”
“He don’t need it,” she said.
Then in his blindness he felt her walking away from him, heard her footsteps on the wooden stairs. A minute later she returned, threw something heavy into the back of the four-wheeler, then came to the front and settled into the driver’s seat. He smelled her smoky, earthy, but still womanly scent, then felt the small explosion as the engine came to life, the machine vibrating and the engine noise booming and painful in his ears. He spoke loudly, nearly shouting. “Thank you for doing all this!”
She sat motionless for a moment, then turned to face him. “Thank him, not me,” she said. “I’d’ve buried you in the woods if it’d done him any good.”
She pulled the gearshift down and the vehicle bucked forward, lurched bull-like toward the cabin only to turn sharply, first throwing him against Cat and then with another turn nearly spilling him out onto the ground, finally speeding away on a subtle decline, bathing DeMarco’s face in a flood of coolness and the freshest, most redolent air he would ever inhale.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR
After a torturous hour or more of switchbacking and bouncing and nearly falling out a dozen times, he felt the four-wheeler climbing uphill again, and with its ascent he wondered if he had been tricked, was about to be driven to a cliff, pushed out and over the side. But then the vehicle slowed and bucked to a stop. The engine went quiet, the vibration ceased.
She climbed out. And soon stood beside him, her hands at the back of his head, undoing the bandanna. She pulled it from his eyes and stuffed it into her hip pocket.
He sat there blinking and squinting as if through eyes new to light, the sky vast and achingly blue, a verdancy of field and then, a quarter mile distant, trees impossibly green rising into mountains. The four-wheeler was parked atop a low hillock of knee-high scrub grass. He became aware then of a loud droning noise, and thought at first that the rumbling inside his head had returned. But then he recognized it as the roar of distant traffic.
He turned at the waist, faced the opposite direction. Laid out below the hill was a strip mall half as long as a football field, and just beyond its asphalt parking lot a two-lane highway, cars and pickup trucks coming and going.
She lifted something from the rear of the four-wheeler and tossed it down to his right: his pack. “You can pick the knots out of that cord soon as I’m gone,” she told him.
He squinted to find her in the sunlight’s glare, and when he did, she was surrounded head to feet by an aura of tiny golden sparks in a thousand radiating streams, motes of pollen or dust in unceasing and hypnotic motion.
She said, “Now get up on your feet and move away from my ride.”
The nausea hit him again when he stood, an
d he nearly crumpled to the ground. She did not move to assist him. “Why you think I give you that cane?” she said.
He remembered it then, seized it with both hands, and planted it against the ground.
“It’s all still there in your pack,” she told him, “whatever you come with. We don’t take what’s not ours.”
“I know that,” he answered, standing lopsided now. “Thank you.”
Still blinking and squinting, he looked around. Trees and high grass. A narrow two-wheeled track of flattened grass beneath his feet.
She nodded toward the highway. “Down there’s a place to get that leg looked at. I wouldn’t try getting there too fast if I was you.”
He knew there was something more he wanted to say to her, but the feeling would not form itself into words.
She climbed onto the four-wheeler, sat there with her hands on the steering wheel. “Letting you out there in that bear cage,” she said, “I shouldn’t of done that. I hope I didn’t make your leg any worse than it was.”
He said, “What if we could get a helicopter up there to him…”
She shook her head no. “Just let him be. That’s all I’m asking you. He’s been through more’n enough already.”
She sat for a few moments waiting for his answer, but he had none to offer. How to tell her what he was feeling when he could not explain it to himself? The physical pain he had endured; this moment’s relief. The desire to give up and die; the decision to push on. The taste of her soup; the living corpse of Emery Summerville. The huge sun hanging low to the west yet still bright and hot on his skin.
He smiled. Nodded.
A moment later the four-wheeler’s engine roared into gear and off she went, wheeling around and through the tall grass, down over the hill, back toward the line of enveloping trees.
He watched until she disappeared from sight, then longer still until the engine noise was swallowed and only the dull hum of the highway remained. Then he lowered himself down onto his good knee, then onto his buttocks. He laid the cane aside and raised his wrists to his mouth, used his teeth to pull and pick the knots from the cord.
He rested for a few moments, smiling, disbelieving. Then he wound the cord into a small coil and shoved it into a pocket. He pulled his pack close and worked a strap over his shoulder. Then reached for the cane, and pushed himself up.
Wincing with every movement, he turned to face in the other direction, saw the highway and the strip mall below, the low buildings with their flat roofs, the rectangular air conditioners and round vent fans atop the roofs, the line of mountains receding northward, verdant green melting into a distant blue. It was then he felt something wash over him and through him, something powerful and warm and bright, a wide, surging something that made him want to laugh and take it all in and fill himself with it forever.
Then he pushed himself forward and limped down off the final prominence, one lopsided step after another.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE
DeMarco left the urgent care facility with a new compression bandage wrapped from the base of his toes to midshin, a metal crutch adjusted to his height, a prescription for Vicodin for pain and amoxicillin for infections, a set of X-rays revealing his torn ligaments and subtalar joint trauma, and a sheet of instructions intended to limit his perambulatory activity for the next several weeks. He had been tested for concussion and almost passed, received twenty stitches to close the gash that ran from above the outside of his left ankle to midcalf, was anointed in eleven places from head to ankle for scratches and abrasions, had four butterfly bandages applied to deeper lacerations not yet scabbing, and was chided by a petite red-headed physician’s assistant half his age for venturing into the woods so “ridiculously unprepared.”
She guided his wheelchair out to the parking lot, where a taxi waited to convey him back to the RV. “People are supposed to get smarter as they get older,” she told him.
Holding his pack atop his lap, cane and crutch across his knees, he said, “I’ve heard that’s true.”
“Can’t prove it by you, though, can we?”
“Not yet anyway. Maybe from here on in.”
She opened the taxi door and allowed him to scoot inside. “Just to be safe,” she said, “don’t go hiking alone again. And if you do…” She let the rest of the sentence fade. Then added, after a look at his sheepish smile, “Just don’t.”
He was surprised to learn he was only four miles from where he had parked the RV. After starting the engine and air conditioner, he dug his cell phone out of the pack and plugged it into the recharging cable.
There were nine texts and five voice messages from Jayme. The gist of the early ones was Where are you? Are you okay? The later ones relied heavily on synonyms such as selfish, inconsiderate, thoughtless, unthinking, self-absorbed, and egomaniacal.
After retrieving a fresh bottle of water from the fridge, and chugging a third of it, he called Jayme.
Her hello was, “Where the hell have you been, Ryan?”
Lead with the injury, he thought. “I tore some ligaments, have a stress fracture on my left tibia, a wrenched ankle, and lots of bruises, and a mild concussion, very mild, but—”
“What the hell!” she said. “What did you do?”
“Accident in the woods,” he told her. “I’m sorry, I—”
“What woods? Where are you? Do you need me to come and get you?”
“I’m in the RV now. Should be back in six hours or less.”
“Six hours!”
“Probably less.”
“You can’t drive with a concussion!”
Everything she said came with an exclamation point. He felt each one like a knuckle rap to the tender spot on the back of his head. “I’m okay,” he told her, and felt suddenly very tired, but happy too, happy enough for tears.
“You are absolutely not okay, Ryan! You are not!”
“I know,” he said. “I love you.”
He heard only silence. Then her voice again, softer, hoarse and breathless. “You can’t drive in that condition.”
“My right leg’s fine,” he told her. “I’m on my way. Can you stay on the phone a while? I’ll tell you everything that happened.”
Again, a silence. She sniffed, cleared her throat. Said, “You are so, so stupid all the time.”
“I know,” he said. He put the phone on speaker then and laid it on the dash. Reached for his sunglasses, fitted them on. Buckled his seat belt, looked both ways, pulled the gearshift into Drive, and once again drove into the sun.
V
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.
—Pablo Neruda
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX
For their first two hours together they lay on Jayme’s grandmother’s bed, both voices softened by their absence, every movement restrained and tender with regret. They kept the windows open for the evening birdsong, the overhead fan spinning for its cooling breeze. He told her again all he remembered about the previous three days, though this time in greater detail than he had on the phone. He held nothing back, not even the dreams.
“You knew it was your boy?” she said. “Even though he was older now?”
“No doubts. I mean I didn’t think ‘That’s Ryan,’ I just… I don’t know. I just took it for granted. I dreamed about him the night before I left too. He looked the same in both of them.”
“Do you think it was real?” she asked. “That he really came to you in your dreams?”
“All I can say is that he felt real. So did Tom. As real as you do right now.”
He paused for a few moments, watched the blurred blades spin. Then said, “Maybe it’s all real and maybe none of it is. Either way, we still have to live, don’t we? Whether we’re real or not.”
She ran her hand up
and down his chest. “What are you going to do about Virgil Helm?”
“Never met the man,” DeMarco said.
“No? You never told me about him?”
“About who?”
“Okay. So I guess you what—wandered around in the woods a while? Got lost? Something like that?”
“Tried to find him,” he told her. “Looked everywhere there was to look. The man’s a ghost. Then I got careless, tripped and fell. Lucky I didn’t break my neck.”
“Okay,” she said. “And you feel all right about that story?”
“Top of the world,” he said.
She smiled. Kissed his chest. “I visited both of McGintey’s girls,” she told him.
“Oh yeah? How did that go?”
“Neither one would admit to any violent tendencies on his part. No physical abuse whatsoever. No unusual sexual practices, other than the three-ways and four-ways, which they both claim are perfectly natural and beautiful, unlike all of our bourgeois morality crap.”
“I’m sort of fond of our bourgeois morality crap.”
“Me too,” she said. “As long as we don’t get too bourgeois.”
“Please let me know if I do.”
“Oh, you can count on that.” She hooked her naked foot under his leg. “The DA has charged Chad with deviant sexual contact with a minor, and the older girl with corruption of a minor. He’s considering charging the older brother with the same thing, which would allow the police to search the entire place.”
“And bring down some serious drug charges. Unless Lucas hasn’t cleaned things up already.”
“Precisely.”
He lay there smiling and smelling her hair and the newly bathed, still-soapy scent of her skin. Sooner or later she was going to touch him in a certain way, and he would touch her in a similar way, and then they would get undressed and the world would implode and then coalesce again. But for now and maybe forever he was perfectly content just to breathe her in, just to hold her hand in his, their legs and shoulders pressed against each other.
Walking the Bones Page 30