Eric took a long swallow. They were two-thirds of the way through the bottle now. He clambered to his feet, stepped across the clearing, a little unsteady in his gait. He bent, picked something up, then came teetering back toward them. He had the bottle in one hand; in the other, he was holding the knife. Amy and Stacy both stared at it. Amy didn’t want it to be there, but she couldn’t think of anything to say that might make him put it down. She watched him spit on its blade, try to clean it on his shirt. Then he waved the knife toward her. “You can sing it at the end. When you’re the last one left.”
“‘The last one left?’” Amy asked. She wanted to reach out and take the knife from him, tried to order her arm to rise, to move in his direction, yet nothing happened. She was very, very drunk, she knew—and so tired, too. She wasn’t equal to this.
“When everyone else is killed off,” Eric said.
Amy shook her head. “Don’t. That’s not funny.”
He ignored her. “The Boy Scout’ll live—he’s the hero; he has to survive. You’ll just think he’s dead. You’ll sing your song, and he’ll pop back to life. And then you’ll escape somehow. He’ll build a hot-air balloon out of the tent and you’ll float away to safety.”
“I’ll die?” Stacy said. She seemed alarmed by the possibility, wide-eyed with it. She was beginning to slur her words. “Why do I have to die?”
“The slut has to die. No question. Because you’re bad. You have to be punished.”
Stacy looked hurt by this. “What about the funny guy?”
“He’s the first—he’s always the first. And in some stupid way, too. So people will laugh when he goes.”
“Like how?”
“He gets cut, maybe, and the vine pushes its way into his leg. It eats him from the inside out.”
Amy knew what he was going to do next, and she raised her hand, finally, to stop him. But she was too late. He was doing it—it was done. He’d lifted his shirt, cut a four-inch slit along the base of his rib cage. Stacy gasped. Amy sat with her arm held out, uselessly, before her. A horizontal line of blood crested the lip of Eric’s wound, swept downward across his stomach, soaking into the waistband of his shorts. He watched it, frowning, probing at the cut with the point of the knife, prying it farther open, the bleeding increasing.
“Eric,” Stacy cried.
“I thought it would just come tumbling out,” he said. It had to be painful, but he didn’t seem to mind. He kept pushing at the wound with the knife. “It’s right under here. I can feel it. It must sense me cutting, somehow, must pull back into me. It’s hiding.”
He felt with his left hand, pressing at the skin above the wound; it looked like he was about to cut himself again. Amy leaned forward, snatched the knife from him. She thought he’d resist her, but he didn’t; he just let her take it. The blood kept coming, and he made no effort to staunch it.
“Help him,” Amy said to Stacy. She dropped the knife into the dirt at her side. “Help him stop it.”
Stacy looked at Amy, openmouthed. She was panting; she seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. “How?”
“Pull off his shirt. Press it to the cut.”
Stacy set down her umbrella, stepped toward Eric, started to help him out of his T-shirt. He’d become very passive; he lifted his arms like a child, letting her tug the shirt up and off him.
“Lie down,” Amy ordered, and he did it, on his back, the blood still coming, pooling in the tiny hollow of his belly button.
Stacy balled up the T-shirt, held it to the wound.
Things had gotten bad again, and Amy knew there was no way to alter this, no way to force the afternoon back into its false air of tranquillity. There’d be no more mimicry now, no more joking, no more singing. She and Stacy sat in silence, Stacy leaning forward slightly, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. Eric lay on his back, uncomplaining, strangely serene, staring up at the sky.
“It’s my fault,” Amy said. Stacy and Eric both turned to look at her, not understanding. She wiped at her face with her hand; it felt gritty, sweat-stained. “I didn’t want to come. When Mathias first asked us, I knew I didn’t want to. But I didn’t say anything; I just let it happen. We could be on the beach right now. We could be—”
“Shh,” Stacy said.
“And the man in the pickup. The taxi driver. He told me not to go. He said it was a bad place. That he’d—”
“You didn’t know, sweetie.”
“And after the village, if I hadn’t thought of checking along the trees, we never would’ve found the path. If I’d kept silent—”
Stacy shook her head, still pressing the T-shirt to Eric’s abdomen. The blood had soaked all the way through now; it wasn’t stopping. Her hands were covered with it. “How could you’ve known?” she asked.
“And I’m the one, aren’t I? The one who stepped into the vines? If I hadn’t, that man might’ve forced us to leave. We might’ve—”
“Look at the clouds,” Eric said, cutting her off, his voice sounding dreamy, oddly distant, as if he were drugged. He lifted his hand, pointed upward.
And he was right: clouds were building to the south, thunderheads, their undersides ominously dark, heavy with the promise of rain. Back in Cancún, at the beach, they’d be gathering their things, returning to their rooms. Jeff and she would make love, then slip into sleep, a long nap before dinner, the rain blurring their window, an inch-deep puddle forming on their tiny balcony. Their first day, they’d seen a gull sitting in it, partially sheltered from the downpour, staring out to sea. Rain meant water, of course. Amy knew they should be thinking of ways to gather it. But she couldn’t; her mind was empty. She was drunk and tired and sad; someone else would have to figure out how to collect the rain. Not Eric, of course, with his blood rapidly soaking through that T-shirt. And not Stacy, either, who looked even worse than Amy felt: sunstruck, shaky, all dazed behind the eyes. They were useless, the three of them, with their silly stories, their singing, their laughter in a place like this; they were fools, not survivors.
And how was it possible, with such little warning, that the sun had sunk so low? It was nearly touching the horizon. In another hour—two at the most—it would be night.
When did it first begin to go wrong?
Afterward, the next morning, whenall of them suddenly meant one less than it had before, Eric would spend a long time trying to unravel this. He didn’t believe it was the drinking, nor even the cutting. Because things were still manageable then—unmoored, maybe, a little out of control, but still endurable in some essential way. Lying on his back like that, with Stacy pressing the T-shirt to his wound, struggling to staunch the flow of blood, while the clouds built in the sky above them, Eric had felt an unexpected sense of serenity. Rain was coming; they weren’t going to die of thirst. And if that was true, if they could so easily overcome this most pressing obstacle to their survival, why shouldn’t they be able to overcome all obstacles? Why shouldn’t they make it home alive?
There was the need for food, of course, hiding just behind the need for water—and what could rain possibly do for that? Eric peered up at the sky, puzzling over this dilemma, but without any success. All he managed to accomplish by focusing upon it was to rouse his lurking sense of hunger. “Why haven’t we eaten again?” he said, his voice sounding far away even to himself—thick-tongued, weak-lunged.The tequila, he thought. And then:I’m bleeding.
“Are you hungry?” Amy asked.
It was a stupid question, of course—how could he not be hungry?—and he didn’t bother to answer it. After a moment, Amy stood up, stepped to the tent, unzipped the flap, slipped inside.
Right there,Eric would decide the next morning.When she went to get the food. But he didn’t note it at the time, just watched her vanish into the tent, then turned his attention back to the sky again, those clouds boiling upward above him. He wasn’t going to move, he decided. He was going to stay right there, on his back, while the rain poured down upon him.
“It’s not stopping,” Stacy said.
She meant his wound, he knew. She sounded worried, but he wasn’t. He didn’t mind the bleeding, was too drunk to feel the pain. It was going to rain. He was going to lie here and let it wash him clean. Clean, he’d find the strength to reach inside himself, into that slit he’d cut below his rib cage, reach in with his hand and search out the vine, grasp it, yank it free. He was going to be okay.
Amy returned from the tent. She was carrying the plastic jug of water, the bag of grapes. She set the jug on the ground, opened the bag, held it out toward Stacy.
Stacy shook her head. “We have to wait.”
“We’ve missed lunch,” Amy said. “We were supposed to have lunch.” She didn’t lower the grapes, just kept holding them toward Stacy.
Once again, Stacy shook her head. “When Jeff gets back. We can—”
“I’ll save some for him. I’ll put them aside.”
“What about Mathias?”
“Him, too.”
“What’s he doing?”
Amy nodded toward the tent. “Sleeping.” She shook the bag. “Come on. Just a couple. They’ll help with your thirst.”
Stacy hesitated, visibly wavering, then reached in, plucked out two grapes.
Amy shook the bag again. “More,” she said. “Give some to Eric.”
Stacy took two more. She put one in her own mouth, then dropped one into Eric’s. He cradled it on his tongue for a moment, wanting to savor the feel of it. He watched Stacy and Amy eat theirs; then he did the same. The sensation was almost too intense—the burst of juice, the sweetness, the joy of chewing, of swallowing—he felt light-headed with it. But there was no satisfaction, no diminishment, however modest, in his hunger. No, it seemed to leap up within him, to rouse itself from some deep slumber; his entire body started to ache with it. Stacy dropped another grape into his mouth, and he chewed more quickly this time, the swallowing more important than the savoring, his lips immediately opening for another one. The others appeared to feel a similar urgency. No one was talking; they were chewing, swallowing, reaching into the bag for more. Eric watched the clouds build as he ate. All he had to do was open his mouth, and Stacy would drop another grape into it. She was smiling; so was Amy. The juice helped his thirst, just as Amy had promised. He was beginning to feel a little more sober—in a good way—everything seeming to settle a bit, to coalesce around and within him. He could feel his pain, but even this was reassuring. It’d been a stupid thing to do, he knew, digging into himself with that knife; he couldn’t quite grasp how he’d found the courage to attempt it. He was in trouble now. He needed stitches—antibiotics, too, probably—but he nonetheless felt strangely at peace. If he could just keep lying here, eating these grapes, watching the clouds darken above him, he believed that everything would be all right, that somehow, miraculously, he’d make it through.
It came as a bit of a shock to realize that—abruptly, without any apparent warning—the bag was almost empty. There were only four grapes left; they’d eaten all the rest. The three of them stared at the bag; no one spoke for a stretch. Pablo continued his ragged breathing, but Eric had reached the point where he barely even noticed it anymore. It was like any other sort of background noise—traffic beyond a window, waves on a beach. Someone had to say something, of course, to comment on what they’d done, and it was Amy who finally shouldered this responsibility.
“They can have the orange,” she said.
Stacy and Eric remained silent. There’d been a lot of grapes in the bag; it ought to have been easy enough to set aside allotments for Mathias and Jeff.
“I have to pee,” Stacy whispered. She was talking to him, Eric realized. “Can you hold your shirt?”
He nodded, taking the T-shirt from her, maintaining the pressure against his side. He could feel the vine again, shifting about inside him, just beneath the pain. It had gone away after he’d cut himself, but now it had come back.
“Do I have to use the bottle?” Stacy asked Amy.
Amy shook her head, and Stacy stood up, moved across the clearing. She didn’t seem to want to venture into the vines. She crouched with her back to them, and Eric heard her begin to urinate. It didn’t sound like very much, a brief spattering, and then she was rising again, pulling up her pants.
“They can have some of the raisins, too,” Amy said, but quietly, almost as if she were speaking to herself.
Stacy returned, sat beside Eric. He thought she was going to resume holding the T-shirt against his wound, but she didn’t. She picked up the plastic jug of water, uncapped it, poured a little on her right foot. Eric and Amy stared at her in astonishment.
“What the fuck’re you doing?” Amy asked.
Stacy seemed startled by the sharpness in her voice. “I peed on myself,” she said.
Amy reached, snatched the bottle from Stacy’s hand, recapped it. “That’s ourwater. You just poured it on your fucking foot.”
Stacy sat for a moment, blinking in a theatrical way, as if not quite understanding what Amy was saying. “You don’t have to swear,” she said.
“We’ll die without that—you know? And you’re just—”
“I wasn’t thinking, okay? I wanted to clean the pee off my foot and I saw the jug, and I—”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Stacy. How can you be so out of it?”
Stacy waved at the sky, the gathering clouds. “It’s going to rain. We’ll have plenty of water.”
“So why didn’t you wait?”
“Don’t shout, Amy. I said I’m sorry, and—”
“Sorry doesn’t bring the water back, does it?”
Eric wanted to say something, to stop or distract them, but the right words weren’t coming to him. He recognized what was happening, what was starting here. This was how Amy and Stacy fought, in sudden, intense eruptions that seemed to arrive out of nowhere, little flash floods of rage that would come and go with a violence matched only by their brevity. A single inadvertent word could set them off—more often than not when they’d been drinking—and within seconds they’d be flailing at each other, sometimes literally. Eric had seen Stacy slash Amy’s cheek with her nails, deep enough that she drew blood, and he knew that Amy had once slapped Stacy so hard that she’d knocked her to the floor. Then, inevitably, at the very peak of their ferocity, these encounters would collapse upon themselves. The girls would look at each other in mutual bewilderment, wondering how they’d managed to say all they’d said; they’d beg each other for forgiveness, would embrace, begin to cry.
And now here they were again, sprinting down that familiar path.
“Sometimes you can be so stupid,” Amy said.
“Fuck off,” Stacy muttered, barely audible.
“What?”
“Just drop it, okay?”
“You’re not even sorry, are you?”
“How many times do I have to say it?”
Eric tried to sit up, felt a tearing sensation from his wound, and thought better of it. “Maybe you guys should—”
Amy gave him a look of pure disdain. He could see her drunkenness in her face, exaggerating her expressions. “Stay out of it, Eric. You’ve already caused enough problems.”
“Leave him be,” Stacy said. Both of their voices were too loud; it hurt his head to listen. He wanted to get up and leave them to this, but he was still bleeding, still in pain, still quite drunk; he didn’t feel like he could move.
“If he fucking cuts himself again, I’m just gonna let him bleed.”
“You’re being a bitch, Amy. You realize that?”
“Slut.”
Stacy looked astonished by this, as if Amy had spit on her. “What?”
“He’s right—that’s who you’d be.”
Stacy waved this insult aside, struggling for an expression of detachment, aiming for the high ground, but Eric could see it wasn’t working. They were approaching the scratching stage, he knew—the slapping, the kicking. “You’re drunk,” she said. “You’re making a f
ool of yourself.”
“Slut. That’s who youare. ”
“Can’t you hear yourself slur?”
“Shut up, slut.”
“Youshut up, bitch.”
“No.You shut up.”
“Bitch.”
“Slut.”
“Bitch.”
SSmith - Ruins Page 29