by David Wiltse
Into The Fire
( John Becker - 4 )
David Wiltse
David Wiltse
Into The Fire
After setting fire to Harold Kershaw, Aural decided it was wise to leave town, the better part of a display of independence being the surviving of it. Harold was a vindictive man when he had a score to settle, not to say just plain stone mean when he was in a good mood. Aural decided to scoot on out of Asheville while the score still read plus one in her favor.
She caught the bus to Richmond, paying full price for the ticket-she had taken the prudent measure of emptying Harold's wallet into her pockets before adding it to the conflagration-but got off in Statesville and hitched her way to Elkin. In Elkin she boarded a bus to Galax, Virginia.
Harold was certain to come after her. Aural was afraid of being caught, but she didn't think that Harold had a real chance of actually catching her since sleuthing was not at all in his line of work. In the first place, Harold would be required to ask strangers for information. In her experience, Harold didn't talk all that much or all that well. Certainly not to her. What he excelled at was grunting and opening beer bottles with his teeth-the advent of screw-on caps had done nothing to discourage this propensity-and, when the mood was on him, chewing glass.
He was also good at pissing contests, or so he claimed.
Aural had been forced to witness only a few and declined further invitations to watch. It was one of those pastimes like golf, she figured: fun for the participants, maybe, but of less than nominal interest to spectators. But Harold was so proud of his urinating skills that he contrived to demonstrate them without the excuse of a contest.
His favorite display was to stand in the back of his pickup as it raced through a neighboring village such as Swannanoa and Pee for the entire length of the main street. Aural liked those stunts better than the contests-at least she got to drive.
Once or twice-towards the end of her relationship with Harold-she had tried to bounce him out of the truck bed, but he had surprisingly good balance for a man who was drunk enough to piss his way through town. She had succeeded only in making him wet himself which was hardly lethal.
The one time made him mad and the other time made him laugh.
After spending the night in Galax, Aural engaged the motel owner in an elaborate conversation she knew he was going to remember in the morning as-it did from a pretty Young thing such as herself. Even then, Aural had taken the precaution of leaving her blouse about half unbuttoned to insure she got the man's attention. She let it drop that she was heading for Kentucky, where she had kin. No sooner had she left that dump than she took the first ride for West Virginia she could flag down where she didn't know a soul.
That was enough covering to throw off Harold. Someone who knew what he was doing could prob ably find her, but Harold didn't and he was too dumb to think of hiring a detective. He certainly Wasn't going to go to the police. She knew that setting him alight was Probably against the law in some circles, but to-Harold it would seem more like a breach of faith. A matter to be dealt with personally. His dealings with law had always been on the wrong end of it, and he would not turn to them for help now.
Hitching a ride was no problem not for a woman who looked like Aural. At twenty-eight she looked more like eighteen. She had the type of face that bespoke perpetual innocence with the land Of virginal glow that belied her experience, which, she thought was beginning to tote up had the kind of lithe beauty men liked, a fawn. Aurala had a hand on one denim-clad hip, the other thrust jauntily outwards in a model's pose her whole form seemed to be saying, "Go ahead and try." It was only when the cars and pickups ground to a halt and the drivers got a closer look at the face as pure as a girl's in her white Confirmation dress that confusion set in. Aural played on the confusion for as long as the driv took.
She was not particularly worried about the alleged dangers of hitchhiking. She was an expert at manipulating men, especially men of a certain brutish stripe-which, her experience, included most of them-and if she couldn't keep them in control with her wits, there was always the utill knife secure inside the top of her boot secured by a strip of Velcro. The knife was her idea, a sort of primordial legacy from a long line of McKessons who had never been without a weapon. Aural had had a blade with her since she was ten. The Velcro strip was a refinement she got from Jarrell Robeaux, a Cajun of intemperate inclinations whom she had spent a few months with in Bi loxi. It was the only thing worth keeping that she got from him if you didn't count the little scar just behind her righ ear where he had clipped her with his metallic Stanley Powerlock tape measure.
On route 52 in Welch, West Virginia, Aural caught a ride with a fat man who didn't want to talk but kept his eye turned on her the whole ride as if he had just seen something on television about the dangers of picking up hitchhikers. It didn't take her long to realize that he wasn't being paranoid, he was simply ogling, and with that knowledge Aural relaxed-she was more than comfortable being ogled, she had been ogled by the best of the for years-and took advantage of the silence to reflect on her latest adventure.
It was Harold's boots that had been the death of the relationship, she mused. He had taken to slinging, them at her as a matter of course, almost absently, the way he might pick up a stick and keep tossing it for a dog to retrieve. The insouciance of the gesture bothered Aural.
She didn't particularly mind if her mate slung something her way now and then-she'd never had one who didn't-but it seemed to her the throw ought to at least be done out of anger. She could understand anger, she had hurled the odd object at Harold, too, not always in.self-defense. One time, she remembered, she had flung a soup pot at him; it wasn't exactly full of hot soup at the time, but it wasn't precisely empty, either.
Harold had done nothing particularly egregious to deserve it, as far as Aural could remember. She had simply looked over at him where he sat at the kitchen table, his features blurry with hangover, his belly swelling over his belt with the beginnings of a paunch, his hair sticking out from his head at all angles like he'd been sitting in front of a fan while applying moosse. He was picking his back teeth with his finger and coughing as if about to throw up. He was unwashed, unclean, and generally unsavory, and Aural had had the penetrating insight that her standards had fallen to an unacceptable level. Also, it was hot as hell and so humid they might have been underwater. They were fixing to eat soup because it was all that was in the house and so Aural had let fly with the pot, hoping, perhaps, that it might lead to Harold's self-improvement.
So it was not exactly the fact that he tossed his boots at her so much that towards the end he had taken to slinging them at her head. Her face was her fortune, her mother had always told her, and Aural believed it although she had yet to see a penny from it. Rather than have her fortune damaged by size eleven Dan Perkins, Aural _had taken her incendiary leave.
Harold was the sixth man she had lived with in the last eight years, each one worse than the other, as far as she could tell. The embarrassing part was that no one had forced her to associate with any of them. Aural never lacked for options when it came to the male population.
She had chosen the selection of roughnecks and shit kickers all on her own. It was enough to make her wonder if she actually liked being cuffed and sworn at and kicked around. Not that she didn't usually give as good as she got. Aural would never consider herself abused. She was free to leave at any time, and eventually she always did.
It was more the question of why she was always lying down with swine, as her father would have put it. He used to have a quote he would offer in that line, but then he had a quote for every line of disappointing behavior Aural could come up with. She couldn't remember most of them.
Co
uld it be, she wondered as they pulled into a burg called Bald Nob and the fat man made signs of making his move after all, could it be that she actually liked men who were mean and stupid and no earthly good for her'? Now that was just plain sad.
When the fat man reached for her thigh she caught his I he screamed. He manhanded her and she bent his fingers back until the side of the finger touched his wrist. He used the good hand to swerve to road and slow down just enough for Aural to hop out on the dusty road from the vehicle. She was left standing on the far side of Bald Nob, looking back towards a tent they had passed just moments ago when the fat man Overreached himself. it looked to Aural like a fine place to spend a day.
Nimble as a goat, lithe as green willow, his body not much longer than the coil of rope strapped to his pack, the boy scampered up a rock face with the insouciance of youth, He never thought of danger, had no fear of falling, indeed had only the fuzziest grasp of the concept of mortality as it applied to himself. Standing above on belay, his hands taking in slack, his leg braced to absorb the shock Of any fall, John Becker watched young Jack climb with a mixture of envy and apprehension.
A good climber had no fear-or at least he never thought of it as fearbut he always had a healthy respect for the perils presented by any ascent.
At ten, Jack was simply'too young to recognize the hazard presented by,the unremitting, unbreakable law of gravity.
Jack attained the ledge where Becker stood, virtually springing up on it, his face smiling with accomplishment.
Becker remembered his own labored breathing as when he had hauled himself up after the long pitch. Jack looked fresher than when he had stood at the base of the rock. Galileo had it wrong, Becker thought.
Gravity does pull harder on some bodies than on others.
"Well done," Becker said.
Jack's smile split his face. "It was easy."
"Uh-huh."
Jack turned and looked back down the rock. Becker resisted an instinct to grab him by his belt. "That wasn't very high."
"Yeah, well, we'll work up to Everest gradually. Not till next week at the earliest."
The boy waved at his mother who stood at the base, looking anxiously upwards.
"Your turn," Becker said, wiggling the rope.
Jack laid out the line as he had been taught, took a braced position, then called out, "On belay!" Becker smiled at the seriousness in his attitude.
"Christ, I hope so," his mother muttered to herself.
She stared upwards but could no longer see his face over the ledge.
"Climbing!" she called and took her first foothold on the rock. She could feel the rope tauten subtly, allowing her freedom of movement while still suggesting security.
Behind Jack's back, Becker took his own anchored position, ready to serve as instantaneous backup if the boy should fail.
Karen climbed slowly but steadily, with a workmanlike approach. She had come to climbing only recently, under Becker's tutelage, and although her body was strong and her reflexes as sharp as any other trained FBI agent's, her mind was reluctant to surrender to the arcane pleasure of embracing stone.
The problem with opting to spend your life in a primarily male society, she thought, was proving that you could do it. And proving it and proving it and proving it.
The testing never stopped. As Associate Deputy Director of Kidnapping, she was as high as any woman had ever been in the Bureau, and she had gotten there a lot younger, too. But even so there was the constant nag of having to demonstrate again and again that she deserved to be there, that she could be as macho as any of them if the occasion demanded. And somehow or other, the occasions seemed to be always cropping up. Not that Becker doubted her, she knew that. He had no desire to turn her into a man with softer parts. He liked the femininity of her mind, was as fascinated by it as he seemed to be fascinated by so many things that were not his by nature.
Of all the men she knew, Becker was the only one that she was certain accepted herjust the way she was… Still, here she was, pressing her nose against the stone and racking what few fingernails she could allow herself to cultivate just because Becker's former wife had been a rock climber. Showing off for her man and her son. Why was it, she wondered, not for the first time, that they never felt inclined to knit her a sweater for Christmas to impress her?
Karen's ascent to the ledge was somewhat less impressive than Jack's.
She hoisted herself just high enough to sit, then leaned back, her feet dangling into space.
"Well done," said Becker.
"Pretty good," said Jack. She caught the note of condescension in his tone, but she wasn't sure if the rest of his thought was, for a woman, or for my mom. At ten, her son was already a confirmed sexist, although Becker had assured her he might grow out of it.
"Next vacation we go somewhere I can wear a skirt," she said. Becker sat beside her, snuggling his thigh against hers.
"I promise," he said. "Fair enough, Jack?"
At his silence, both adults turned to look at him. The boy was staring upwards, his attitude suddenly frozen into one of apprehension.
"What's that?" he asked, pointing.
"It's called a chimney," Becker said. "I told you about them."
I 'You didn't say they were so small, " Jack said.
The chimney was actually a vertical seain in the rock, a narrow split a few feet wide that extended upwards as if the stone had been torn by giant hands. The technique of climbing it was for the climber to use his body like a wedge, forcing his legs against one side of the chimney wall, his back against the other, and inching up as if his shoulders and buttocks were hands. Like so much of rockclimbing technique, it required a certain faith in addition to mindless resolve.
Becker had selected this stretch of mountain because although it was tiring it was not dangerous and there was a wide variety of techniques available within a small range.
"Do we have to go inside it?" Jack asked nervously.
Becker studied the boy carefully. "Not if you don't want to-" he started.
"I think you should, Jack," Karen interrupted.
"It's all right to be afraid of something," Becker said to Karen.
"I know it's all right, " Karen said with annoyance.
She was caught again in the conflict between wanting to protect her child and fearing she would injure him by isolating him from all of the risks and challenges that made boys into men. She wondered if single mothers produced the most macho of sons out of a dread of creating weaklings. "But I think he should do it. It's why we came.' "I think he should decide," Becker said patiently. Karen's eyes flashed angrily for a second.
"I think he should do it," she said.
Jack looked back and forth between the two adults.
"Couldn't I just go straight up that way?" Jack asked, pointing out a route that avoided the chimney.
"Sure," said Becker.
"But then you'd never learn how to do that," Karen pointed at the rip in the stone face. "You'll have to learn it sometime."
"Why?"
"Because life is like that, Jack," she said. "It never lets you off easy."
"We're all afraid of something," Becker said softly.
"There's nothing wrong with it."
"You're not afraid of anything," Jack said.
"Sure I am. I'm afraid of lots of things," Becker said.
"Like what?"
"Right now I'm most afraid of climbing that chimney," Becker said.
"Huh-huh."
"Trust me, Jack. I'll break into a sweat the minute I get inside it."
"Then how come you want to do it?"
Becker shrugged. "Do you know what 'counterphobic' is?"
"No."
"It means I'm more afraid of being afraid of something than I am afraid of it." Becker chuckled. "Let me try again. It means I do the things I'm afraid of. I don't want the fear to win."
"Are you really afraid of going into that chimney?"
"Honest to God. I'm scared e
ven thinking about it."
"I'm not," Jack said. He stood and started towards the chimney.
"Nice psychology," Karen said, getting to her feet.
"That wasn't psychology," Becker said, "it was the truth. I'm scared shitless."
Karen looked at him closely. His face was ashen and sweat had broken out on his forehead. Karen started to say something but Becker rose quickly and started after Jack, heading towards the chimney.
Lights out in the cellblock was like sun down in the jungle, time for the predators to emerge and for the vulnerable to hunker in hiding. But unlike the jungle where the hunters moved in stealth and silence, within the cement walls of Springville prison it was the predators who made most of the noise. And there was no place for anyone to hide.
Three cells away, the new punk was being introduced to the pleasures of prison life, and his screams excited the inmates. Cries of support rang out from the length of block as his fellow predators urged on the aggressor.
Some of the habitual victims raised their voices, too, eager to have someone else degraded. And of course a few of the victims had come to love their victimization, some to adore their tormentors. Their response was to coo sympathetically or to eye their cellmates seductively. Not that much seduction was required. The prison population is primarily young, and most of the prisoners already have too much testosterone for their own good or that of society. Sex pervades the prison like the overheated summer humidity, clinging to the skin, freighting the air.
"Get used to it, honey," said a weary voice, offering the only advice applicable to the situation. Once a punk was initiated, there was no turning back, no reversing of roles. For the rest of his term he would remain what he had become.
Cooper lay on his bunk, listening to the uproar, a slow grin building on his lips.
"Hear that, punk?"
The shape on the bunk above him did not stir.
"I'm talking to you," Cooper said. He kicked upwards and slammed his foot into the base of the upper bunk.