“You don’t have to give me squat.” I shut off the burners. “I’ve worked out a way to get it all by myself. All you have to do is say okay.”
Without the heat, Aidan cooled off quickly—the whole trailer did. The flesh tones leached from his body and his joints stiffened.
Cold bit into me too. Oh, I’d hibernate, all right. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I was yawning as I brought the truck up to the camper door and stretched the waterproof tarp tight over the back. I pulled out a crate I’d filched from Vitaly (passing up the temptation of his cupboard full of cash) and made Aidan a cozy nest of inert, safe Styrofoam peas. As it got colder and colder, I put on a sweatshirt, then a sweater. My swamp man was moving slowly, as if he’d been drugged. I chugged water; the worse I needed to pee, the less I wanted to sleep.
He sat at the tiny dining table with that look on his face; he was scared.
“It’s going to be okay,” I promised. “We’re gonna get away with it, Bonnie.”
“You’re Bonnie,” he said. “I’m Clyde.”
I kissed him, keeping a space between our bodies, withholding my body heat. “Look,” I said, showing him Vitaly’s import papers. “Item: statue. Description: Leda and the swan. Value: nine hundred dollars U.S. Here’s his tax number and exporter permit and here—”
“…is a blank line.” He nodded.
“See? We aren’t gonna bother trying to fake you a passport.”
“I’m goods,” he said, bitterly amused. “How much am I worth?”
“More than nine hundred,” I said.
“Nine hundred and one?”
“We don’t want to look cute. Let’s put…Item: statue. Value: nine-fifty.”
“What do we say for a description?”
“Classic man?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re crossing the border with your pants off. How’s that for bold?”
“If they do catch us, it’ll save ’em time when they strip search me.”
“They’re not catching us. How about: Adam in the garden?”
“Because I’m so innocent?” His words came out syrupy; he was getting colder.
“Do we have to capture the essence of your being on the forged smuggling form?”
That got him; he laughed. “We should get me a wine barrel and suspenders.”
“Holy shit. My dad totally had one of those statuettes in his office! Yours too?”
“My uncle. It was gross. The big barrel came off, and—”
“Sproing. There was a smaller wine cask on a spring attached to his crotch. So very hilarious.”
“Maybe the world is ending, but at least the seventies ended first.” He got to his feet, stretched, and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Write Michael—it’s my middle name.”
With that he lay down in the crate and I sat beside him, my hand on his, until he lost consciousness, until he glazed and froze. When he was completely immobile, I took his glasses off and kissed his lips, one last time. Then I packed his limbs ’round with garbage bags, as a last defense against the rain, and nailed down the lid of the crate before opening the camper door.
The bog had other ideas about my grand getaway plan.
The swamp hadn’t been content to rain down a few birds with a guilt-trip. The truck and trailer had sunk farther within the growing puddle, and the birds were doing what they could to help, sitting atop the tarp and the roof of the cab.
“Heeetchchch…” Dozens of goose beaks, shoe-black, opened to hiss, revealing bubblegum-colored tongues. They smelled of fresh meat and the promise of a long winter nap.
It wasn’t just birds. Six squirrels were jumping up and down on the roof of the truck, and a row of small brown bats dangled on the tailpipe. The sight of a patrolling skunk gave me pause—getting sprayed would get me noticed at the border. A blacktail deer was standing in front of the truck, giving me the damn doe eyes. The coyote dug methodically at the sand by my front tires.
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re all staging a sit-in?”
They’d learned this from him, I suspected—Aidan had said he’d been arrested in some logging protests, way back when he was an idealistic student.
“You don’t need his brain back,” I told them. “You learned all you could. You’re doing fine without him.”
The animals stood firm, letting a second defiant hiss from the spokesgeese make the swamp’s position clear.
Go on, they seemed to be saying. Throw him in the back, see if you can pull out of the mire and run over that doe before we tear off the tarp and get a few salmonberry runners into Aidan’s leg.
It damn well loves him too, I thought.
I had one of those hot, three-year-old tantrumy bursts of emotion. Dammit, I want what I want, give me what I want. I’ve lost so much, you’re not stealing him away…And it was the big rage, all the long-contained anger and fear in my half-bear heart, spilling out as I drew my first full lungful of air since the fire, pulled it deep into my lungs without the faintest hint of a cough or stabbing cramp, pulled it in and let out a frustrated…
…Well, if I’d meant it to be anything at all, I suppose it would have been something like: “Aarrrgh!”
What came out was a sustained, ursine bellow. Here I was, crossed by a bunch of damned geese and rodents. I’d lost my job, my friends, my faith in an orderly world where you worked hard and didn’t complain and somehow were taken care of. My humanity itself was in question.
I’d found one thing, one, that more than paid for it and I wasn’t going to lose True Fucking Love to a rain cloud and a bunch of edible, honking birds.
The sound of all that anger, roaring out of me, vibrated my eyeballs. It smacked in to the geese like a physical blow—their little beaks clicked shut, and they recoiled in sync. The coyote shot away from the tire and took up a stance ten feet away, coiled to spring farther if I came out swinging. The skunk vanished into the brush with a pungent fart. The squirrels jumping on the truck froze in midbounce with “Holy shit!” expressions on their faces.
“He’s. Not. Yours,” I shouted, with the last of my breath.
The echo of my voice was coming back at me from across the lake. My throat was raw, and I was hungry, so hungry. The burgers I’d eaten were all burned up. I thought about seizing one of the geese and making a violent sashimi example of it.
Instead I reached back inside the camper, grabbed my crate, and slid Aidan under the sagging tarp, beside Vitaly’s statue of Leda. I bellowed again as I leapt into the six-inch-deep mud beside the truck. The flock burst upward, blasting the air with a hundred wings and leaving behind a slime of half-digested grass plugs. I kicked water at the coyote and it bounced back another five feet, growling.
I stomped to the front of the truck and grabbed the slippery, rain-soaked deer by its unresisting torso.
“Go on, start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I dare you,” I said. I’d never been good at sustaining anger; I was starting to think this was funny, and that was bad, because I hadn’t won yet.
Still, I couldn’t wait to tell Aidan about all this.
I dragged it all the way into the bush and wrangled it so we were nose to nose. “You’re fast, Bambi’s mom,” I said. “You can beat me back to the truck. But if we have to do this twice I am duct-taping your neck to this pine tree here, and you can strangle yourself trying to get loose.”
With that, I stomped back to the truck, engaged the four-wheel drive, and drove myself out of the pocket swamp, spraying water as I fishtailed onto the desert highway.
The rainstorm followed me for sixty miles, past the border—where an indifferent blond Amazon in uniform squinted at the customs paperwork and my passport for all of a nanosecond before waving me through. It chased me past the delivery address, where I left the first statue in the shelter of a half-built replica of a Greek temple whose columns were made of cinder blocks. It poured buckets on me and on the state wilderness area I was fleeing through, sluicing down the windows,
gushing along the narrow, twisty roads, overflowing the banks of the shallow ditches. The wind gusted so hard that I could feel the truck rocking on the switchbacks.
I cranked the stereo, found West Side Story, sang along loudly—“I like to be in America, okay by me in uhMAAAREica”—fought to stay on the road, and tried not to think about how hungry I was.
Then I crested a hill and before me and below, through a break in the trees, I saw a little town that had been fixed up so the storefronts all looked like something from a Wild West movie: hitching posts, old-fashioned saloon doors, the whole nine. It was maybe a mile ahead, and there the sun spilled on to the road like gold, a clear demarcation between danger and safety, the nice clean line Aidan said didn’t exist.
Magic, I thought, driving out of the deluge and into summer heat. The hood of the truck steamed.
Warmth was good—it revived me—but I was almost faint with hunger. I checked myself in the mirror, finding no overt signs of bear. I did look a little desperate, capable of eating the first thing I saw; every random smell of things edible, fresh or rotten, even the trash bins, was driving me to tears. I hit a gas station with a car wash and bought a box of Twinkies. Golden sponge cake and crap cream filling; bad nutrition. I knew I should have meat—eggs, fish, beef—but the box had practically screamed at me when I went inside. Sometimes my inner bear, she liked her junk food.
I sat on the back of the truck and unwrapped the first, shoving it deep into my mouth, bracing for disappointment. But the sugar sent a primal surge of pleasure through my body; it was as good as my six-year-old self remembered. It made everything better. I moaned, and the sound was deep and guttural and inhuman.
Nobody heard.
The second one broke in my hand, smearing filling everywhere. I managed not to lick it off. The burns on my hands had darkened to brown, I saw, and the damaged flesh of my palms looked a bit like the pads of animal feet.
One problem at a time, I thought, hosing the thousand plugs of sodden goose shit off my tarp. We were through the border. That was enough for now.
In the coffin-shaped crate beside me, something stirred.
I threw one more Twinkie back, went into the station, peed, and then used Vitaly’s cash to buy all their buffalo jerky and a quart of Coke. Protein and caffeine, brunch of champions. After a second’s thought, I bought a fishing rod too, a license and a can of worms.
Then I went out, patted the crate, and jingled my keys. “Hold on a little longer,” I said, sotto voce. “Gotta find somewhere discreet to unbox you.”
The road was narrow and had no passing lanes, but within half an hour I found a turnout for a campground and drove in, paying for a parking spot by a high, burbling stream under the pines.
“Okay! Either we’re clear or we’re not.” The sky was cloudless and hot. I parked in a patch of sun, opened the crate, and shoved Aidan, as gracefully as I could, so he was lying across the driver’s seat and the passenger side. He was stiff as bone; he might have been dead.
I wasn’t worried.
I chugged all of the Coke and got to work on the jerky as I fumbled the fishing pole together, trying to work out, from the instructions, how to string the line. I could smell fish in the stream, and part of me figured it’d be easier to stand in the water and grab at them with my hands. Who knew if the pole was even right for river fishing?
A meadowlark landed on a branch beside me, and I tensed. But it fluttered a little, settling, and began grooming its feathers.
I had hooked my first worm when I heard the truck door opening. World music twanged out; Aidan had turned off my show tunes.
“I bet you know how to fish,” I said, without turning around. I tossed the line in the water. If there were nuances beyond that, I didn’t know them.
“If this is the alternative, I’m willing to help you figure it out,” he replied. He had a wrapped Twinkie in one hand and a pair of green camouflage pants in the other. I’d been afraid to pack much in the way of clothing for either of us, in case the truck got searched.
I gestured at the stump across from the fire pit, inviting him to sit. “My grandma was a Twinkie fiend. She always had a box in the house. If I cut myself or scraped a knee or got upset, whenever anything was wrong, she’d shove one down my hole. Sugar first, bandage second.”
His expression was dreamy. “Mine carried butterscotch candies in her change purse.”
“With the change?”
“Yeah. Made my mother crazy, her sugaring me up that way. With ‘dirty candy,’ she’d say, as if Granny was giving me heroin.”
“I half-think that’s why mine did it, to irritate Mom.” I held out my hand so he could see the paw pads.
He put the cake in it and stepped into the pants. “Might take another box to fix that.”
“I think once I’ve eaten the last eight cakes—”
“You got six left.”
“Fine, six. I was hungry.”
“You were saying?”
“The rest of that box should take care of my psychic pain.”
He took the fishing pole from me, bracing it against the stump with an ease that spoke of practice, and said, “So you don’t need a kiss to make it better?”
I wrapped my arms around his waist, noticing that he almost felt like a man, noticing too how he didn’t quite, and not caring either way. We fit together, he and I, we were interlocked like jigsaw pieces and maybe I didn’t know why the picture we made was so complete, but I could roam now, in every direction but north, and there was no sense wrangling with why? anymore.
“Kisses make everything better,” I told him, but instead of offering up my mouth, I pressed my head to his chest and held on, listening to my caffeine-amped pulse thrumming in the pocket of air between his birch-bark skin and my ear, and knowing that that now I had what I needed to keep us both warm and dry.
Copyright (C) 2012 by A.M. Dellamonica
Art copyright (C) 2012 by Allen Williams
Books by A.M. Dellamonica
Indigo Springs
Blue Magic
Stories on Tor.com
The Cage
Among the Silvering Herd
Wild Things Page 3