Into The Fire jb-4

by David Wiltse

  "Goddamn," said Tommy, feeling strangely disappointed that Aural hadn't actually set the man aflame.

  "Watch your language there, preacher," said Kershaw, grinning. "You got to set a good example for the young'uns. Can't go round saying shit and damn. Next thing you know, everybody be talking like that."

  "I'm a healer," Tommy said, not knowing exactly what distinction he was trying to draw. He wanted to tell Kershaw to keep his opinions to himself, but the man looked so rawboned and mean that he decided not to.

  He looked like the kind of man who would hurt you just for practice. It was hard to see how a tiny thing like Aural could have managed to handle a man like that. Or why.

  For just a moment, Tommy had a flash of understanding that led to an even briefer feeling of sympathy for the plight of women, but it all faded immediately.

  Kershaw stripped the cellophane from a toothpick and pushed the tip through a gap between his two lower incisors. He wiggled it up and down with his tongue so that it looked to Tommy like the jerky, exploratory motion of the antenna of an insect. As if Kershaw had just popped a giant bug into his mouth and not yet swallowed it all.

  Feeling disgusted, Tommy turned to look through the plate-glass window at the street. A man was passing by with a large bag of groceries on one arm, a pair of nylon blankets still in their plastic wrappings on the other.

  "So what's your bright idea, preach?" Kershaw asked but then he stopped so abruptly that Tommy turned back to look at him.

  Kershaw was staring at the window, his mouth open, the toothpick drooping. "Fuck me," he said and ran for the door.

  Swann heard the runnin footsteps behind him and was half turned backwards to look when he saw the first blow coming at his head. He ducked enough to take it on the shoulder, but it was still hard enough to knock him off balance and Swann stumbled as the second blow hit him in the chest. The third blow caught him grazingly on the top of his head as he was falling. He landed so hard the wind was knocked out of him and he lay on the ground, gasping for air that he could not seem to capture in his lungs.

  A man loomed over him, fists clenched, face in a snarl, but Swann couldn't concentrate on anything else until he finally caught a breath.

  When he realized he would live, he made no effort to get up. He lay where he had fallen on the sidewalk, canned goods and candles spewed out around his head, the blankets covering his feet as if someone had taken the trouble to tuck him in.

  "You don't have to get up," Kershaw said. "I can stomp you even easier laying there."

  By now Tommy had joined Kershaw, but he stood apart from him, making just one of the spectators who had gathered around as quickly as if warned in advance of some coming excitement. This was not urban America, where people gave violence involving someone else a wide berth and a studied indifference. In towns like Elmore, men still gathered to see a fight, not worried that it would reach out and kill others at random.

  They also gave it a chance to play itself out before intervening. There were always the peacemakers, but never in the beginning. Even the peacemakers wanted to see a little action.

  "Where is she?" Kershaw asked.

  Swann looked puzzled, shaking his head.

  Kershaw kicked him on the hip. The crowd gasped, neither approvingly nor disapprovingly. They were withholding judgment until they better understood the conflict.

  Too much punishment of a downed opponent would have to be stopped eventually, but an exploratory kick seemed tolerable.

  "Ain't going to help you to act stupid," Kershaw said.

  "I'll pound on you till you tell me where she is."

  "Who?" Swann asked.

  "You know who."

  Kershaw drew his foot back again and Swann covered his face with his hands even though his attacker clearly was not aiming there. The boot caught Swann in the side and he cried out.

  The crowd murmured again, this time as much in disapproval as sympathy.

  "I don't know who you mean," Swann said as soon as he could talk. He rolled his eyes to the crowd, looking for help.

  "Aural," Kershaw said. "Where is she, you little peckerwood?"

  Kershaw stepped on Swann's shin, holding his foot down until Swann jerked into a sitting position, holding out his arm.

  "Least let him get up," said a voice from the back of the crowd of men.

  "I ain't keeping him from getting up," Kershaw said, looking angrily around him to locate the protester. "Peckerwood stole my woman."

  A collective "ah" escaped from the men as understanding came to them all. Woman stealing, a vague but threatening concept, shifted the sympathy back towards Kershaw.

  "I don't know her," Swann said. "I didn't steal her, I didn't steal anybody."

  "Shit," said Kershaw in contempt for Swann's story.

  "You better tell me, 'cause I ain't afraid to kick you to death if I have to."

  "You've got the wrong man," Swann said, sounding as pathetic as he could manage. He rolled his eyes towards the crowd again. He knew that eventually some of them would intervene, and he was grateful that Kershaw had not encountered him someplace secluded. Swann knew he would have to wait out the torture-he had done it before more than once-and the only question was whether he would be able to walk when it was over.

  "I got no use for your woman," Swann said, playing the only card he had.

  The crowd sucked in their collective breath at the seeming insult.

  Without warning Kershaw stooped and smashed his fist into Swann's face.

  Stern murmurings rose from the men. Hitting a man when he was down had its limits and Kershaw was fast approaching them.

  "That's about enough," another voice offered, but no one moved forward yet. Moral persuasion would be tried first.

  Swann spit out some of the blood that dripped into his mouth, then ran his hand under his nose, which was bleeding profusely. He thumbed a tooth as if it were loose although the blow had not hit his mouth. He made no attempt to rise. He would lie there and take it like a punching bag if he had to, but offering resistance or even giving the appearance of being a fair opponent would be disaster.

  "I meant I got no use for women at all," Swann said, trying to finish the ploy that Kershaw had thwarted by hitting him so fast. "I'm queer."

  That split the crowd about evenly between those who thought he had proven his case and those who thought he deserved the beating on general principles, but the real victory was over Kershaw. It was one thing to stand over a fallen man and kick shit out of him because he stole a woman, quite another to administer punishment to a victim who was so fundamentally weak that he even admitted to the ultimate perversion.

  Kershaw hit Swann in the eye, then again for good measure, but the second blow had the halfhearted enthusiasm of a man who knows he has already lost.

  The crowd helped Swann to his feet as Harold Kershaw walked away. Tommy Walker deliberately walked in the other direction. After a few minutes Swann managed to convince everyone that he didn't want a doctor, and he was in his car, heading out of Elmore. He watched in his rearview mirror for several miles to be sure he wasn't followed.

  When he was sure he was safe at last, Swann pulled over to the side of the road. Now that the adrenaline was leaving his system, he began to feel dizzy from the last two blows to the eye. Vision out of that eye was poor, and when he looked at his reflection in the mirror he saw that it was nearly swollen shut. He had been beaten worse in his time, Cooper had nearly killed him in the first few weeks of breaking him in to his role as compliant concubine. This time no bones were broken; he could move; he could travel. He didn't look very good, but no one was going to see him for a while other than Aural McKesson, and it didn't really matter if he was presentable to her or not, did it?

  The only thing that worried him was the dizziness that wouldn't go away.

  He laid his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The car seemed to swim about him and he snapped his eyes open again, looking for something to focus on to stop th
e spinning. The tree he looked at moved and then he was moving, swinging wildly back and forth and the light flickered and went out.

  Swann awoke, aware that he had passed out, and. panic swept over him. It was not his health that concerned him most, but his security. He had managed to survive all this time, both in prison and before, by being constantly on the alert. He sometimes thought of himself as a mammal in the age of dinosaurs, a small and poorly armed animal that evaded its enemies by its cunning and superior intelligence. Living in the cracks of a world dominated by the huge and stupid, the mammal had persisted, laughing silently at the giants all around as it slipped stealthily between their legs. In time it came into its own destiny, outlasting the monsters, lifted to the top of the heap by its natural superiority.

  Swann liked the analogy; it pleased and comforted him to think of himself as surviving on guile and craft while the slow-witted ones stumbled about, hunting for him in vain.

  The price for such elusiveness was constant awareness, and if he lost that, he was lost. He needed a place to hide now, he needed someone to care for him. A doctor, a hospital, was out of the question. He could not afford to be restrained; his safety depended on a mobility — that equated to anonymity. If he was never in the same place twice, he left no impression, there was no one to remember him, no way to connect him to anything, or anyone.

  He could not understand how that cracker halfwit had recognized him in the first place. What kind of incalculably bad luck was it to have been shopping in the same place at the same time? The town was twenty miles from the campsite where he had found the girl. What was the man doing there, and how could he have identified Swann? The man could not have gotten more than a glimpse of a shape in the car. It was night, Swann hadn't even been facing the man. Had he? Could he have had that good a look at him? Or was it even bad luck? Had Swann been careless, was his vigilance slipping?

  Frightened in a way he had not been since his first few days in prison, frightened for his life, Swann knew he had to find someone to help him until he recovered. There was only one person who could do it and be trusted implicitly.

  He forced himself to drive on, struggling for his equilibrium.

  Aural had never known a darkness like this, not on the blackest night of her life, not with her eyes closed, never.

  Even the blind see more light than this, she thought. This was the darkness of the grave, total and unchanging. It was not a question of her eyes getting used to a lower level of light; there was no light at all, nothing to get used to, no gearing down or gearing up, no widening of the lens would make any difference.

  It was not entirely silent as she had thought at first, however. For one thing, there were her own noises, her breath, the rasp of her clothing against rock, the sound of swallowing. Every sound was magnified and the louder ones echoed back and lived on for seconds longer. But beyond herself there was the noise of water. Somewhere in the distance a creek ran over rocks, the familiar splash could be heard as if filtered through hundreds of yards of darkness. And closer at hand, if she remained still herself, Aural could hear water dripping, very softly, with long intervals between drips, but steadily, with the regularity of a clock. She tried to count the interval between drips and determined it to be 180 seconds long, assuming that saying one-thousand-one in your mind actually took a second. Three minutes. She had a drip she could cook an egg by.

  How many drips had he been gone? How many before he returned? How many before her real ordeal began? she wondered. She didn't know what this guy had in mind for her, but it seemed a pretty good guess that it wasn't to just leave her alone. Beyond that, she didn't allow her mind to speculate. There was no point in getting scared ahead of time. No point in doing his work for him.

  What she had to do was prepare herself as best she could for his return.

  Since her hands were cuffed in front of her body, getting the knife from her. boot was no problem, but she didn't know what to do with it after that.

  Hobbled as she was, she would not be able to maneuver.

  She would get one chance at best and even then she didn't know what to do. Say she cut him, so what? She couldn't then run away while he contemplated his wound. All he had to do was step away from her, bind himself up, then attack at his leisure. Or just leave her alone again while he went away to get a weapon. Wounding him, scaring him, would do nothing for her because she couldn't get away. Which meant she had to kill him.

  First of all, she told herself, she didn't know if she was up to killing anyone. It was one thing to threaten with a knife, which she had done several times, and the threat had always been sufficient to buy her enough time and space to get away, but to kill with one was something else again. And suppose she did manage to summon the courage to kill him, what then? Unless she knew where she was, or how to get away, she'd not only still be lost, but she'd have a corpse for company. This place seemed enough like a grave already without adding that touch of realism.

  One thing she did know was that she couldn't keep the knife in her boot.

  Whatever else he had in mind for her, if this guy was like every other man she'd ever known, eventually he was going to want to have her clothes off of her. Which probably included her boots, which meant he'd find the knife unless she already had it in her hand.

  On her knees, Aural felt around for a hiding place in the rocks. The rock was moist wherever she touched. And smooth-everywhere she put her fingers it was smoothas if water had been running over these rocks forever.

  With her hands stretched out in front of her, Aural stood and inched slowly to one side. At first she counted her steps so she could return to her starting point, but then she realized that there was nothing to distinguish that point from any other. The only place she needed to mark was the spot where she put the knife.

  Walking was awkward on the uneven floor and it was difficult to maintain her balance with her legs so closely constrained. She fell once on the slippery floor and landed hard, unable to break her fall. She started to cry from the shock of the fall, but then wept out of self-pity. She wept a long time, giving full vent to her fright and unhappiness, and her cries filled the vaulted room and reverberated back and forth until she seemed to be in the center of a crowd of moaning, wailing women.

  At the end, Aural laughed at herself, pouring some of the same hysteric energy into the laughter so that the stones resounded again. This time it sounded as if she were in a crazy house at the fair, one of a nest of cackling lunatics.

  That was okay, she said to herself Do it once, get it over with, nobody around to hear you make a baby of yourself, except yourself, and you knew that much already. Just do it when you're alone, if you have to, but don't give it to him. That's a reward you must never give him.

  She proceeded, half-crouched, feeling the uneven surface first with her hands before inching forward with her feet. When she paused to listen, the running water sounded closer, though still far away, and the drip of her clock was getting harder to detect.

  She found a spot at last, her fingers slipping into a recess in the rock that was large enough to hold the knife.

  Feeling it with both hands, she tried to picture the geometry of the rock. Would it be visible when he brought the light back? She checked each angle of vision in turn, straining to imagine how it would look if someone could see. Even a speck of visibility would be too much-the knife might reflect the light more than the,rocks, glint and flash and call out its presence. The hiding place seemed to curl in on itself like the edge of a snail's shell. He would see the opening only if he put his eyes where she had her fingers, which she didn't think was possible, and even then he would see only the hole. The recess itself was behind a curve, the knife completely out of sight.

  Aural put the knife in the hiding place, took it out again, worried about it, put it back. It was the best she had found.

  It would have to do, at least until she came up with something better.

  She practiced getting her hand into the hiding pla
ce while standing up, while sitting down, even while lying on her back. The surfaces of the stone became familiar; she memorized the contours until it was no more difficult than finding a water glass in the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  The difference was, she could always find the bathroom. She now had to be sure she could find this spot.

  Aural removed her boots and placed them so that if she sat with her feet where the boots were, her back would rest in the perfect place to give her immediate access to the knife.

  She moved slowly to her right, counting steps, feet and hands feeling ahead of her into the darkness, searching for a different kind of niche in the rock, something big enough to hide herself. After fifty restricted steps she decided to return to her boots and try another direction, but when she came to what should have been the proper spot, her bare feet did not encounter the boots.

  An icy panic gripped her. She had lost her way, mis placed her only weapon in a vast cavern of empty darkness. She had given herself over, defenseless, out of her own stupidity. With an involuntary cry of anguish Aural dropped to her knees and groped along the slippery rock with her hands.

  Was she too far or too short? Had she already passed the boots in the darkness, slipping past them on her way back? Or had she not yet gone far enough? How far would she have had to be in the pitch black to miss them? An inch? Half an inch? She needed only to have misstepped by the narrowest of margins to have missed them completely, because if she didn't touch them, they were as far away as the moon. How could she have been so stupid?

  This wasn't like fumbling around in her room with the lights off; there were no landmarks here, no familiar furniture to bump into, no walls to rebound from.

  At first she flailed wildly with her bound hands, patting and pawing in all directions, praying for a touch of leather against her fingertips, but when she started to crawl forward, she stopped abruptly. Think, she adjured herself Think. You can't be that far away now, a few steps in any direction at best, but you must be basically on-line.