Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

I tell the adventure to Rocky Friday night after a hot and heavy session on the Eklutna Flats. The neck brace is history and I’m looking fly, so we’re on again. It’s cold and he lets the engine idle. Stars are embedded in the steamy glass. Every passing set of headlights on the highway illuminates the interior of the Iroc with a spangled glow.

  “Toilet water?” Rocky says. “Sounds like a laugh riot. Bet your parents lost their shit. Eric Michaels told me Steely J’s dad and Zane Tooms’s parents are asshole buddies with a whole slew of Chinese investors. They fund illegal hunting expeditions in Africa and Siberia to snuff endangered animals and drive up the prices of sex drugs and diet pills. The Asians think powdered rhino horn will get their shit hard. Anyway, these guys are betting that once a bunch of animals go extinct, their market share is gonna pay big bucks. Pretty cold, huh?”

  I agree it’s pretty cold.

  “I hope you didn’t pay for the Steely J con.”

  “What else was I going to do?”

  “Tell him to blow it out his ass. You owe him dick.”

  “Nobody crosses Steely J on a debt.”

  “Yeah, but the punk didn’t come through as promised. No deal.”

  “I don’t know, Rock. He came to the house and did his routine. Technically, we’re the ones who pulled the plug—”

  “Screw that noise.” His hair is mussed and sweaty. His shirt is unbuttoned. He reeks of me. He sets his jaw with gung-ho stubbornness. “What’s going to happen is, you’re receiving a refund. Right now. We’ll roll up to his pad and get him with the program.”

  I don’t bother to argue. Rocky has the brains of the aforementioned blood-crazed rhino and there’s no point. “It’ll keep until tomorrow. How about we go another round, champ?”

  “Another round.” He glances at his crotch with a flicker of doubt.

  “Ding-ding.”

  And that’s how I start along a path that teaches me there are worse things than calamitous domestic scenes or getting accidentally knocked up.

  * * *

  Rocky cruises by my place the following afternoon. Mike Zant idles behind him on Mike’s dad’s Kawasaki motorcycle. Mike is varsity fullback, totally hot, and a lunkhead among lunkheads — exactly the type of goon you bring along when you’re planning something stupid. Rocky dares not approach the front step (he is familiar with Dad and Dad’s knife). He honks until I get it together and walk over to see what he wants. He tells me to hop in. After some back and forth, I do.

  And we’re off to see Steely J with intentions of malice. I spend the next twenty minutes half-heartedly trying to convince Rocky this is a bad idea. I stole the hundred dollars from Jackie’s sock drawer, she doesn’t miss it, and so on. Nothing doing. He clenches his jaw and presses harder on the gas. Eventually I hunker in my seat and get quiet. Lots of hairpin turns on the road up the mountain to the house of J.

  Lunkhead Mike won’t wear a helmet over his majestic afro. The way he’s laying the bike over on curves trying to match Rocky’s pace, I’m worried he’ll miss one and crash among the spruce.

  Much as I protest against this trip, the cruel bitch inside of me hopes Rocky and Mike have to slap Steely J around. He embarrassed me in front of my parents and I’d love to have the money I stole from Jackie back in my hot little hand; there’s a shoe sale on at the Dimond Center Mall in Anchorage.

  The house lurks at the end of a steep drive (rutted and broken pavement), eighty or ninety feet off the main road. It might have been tits a decade ago, but the place is going to hell fast. Funky shake roof and siding peel from the house. Mother Nature rules Alaska. Lower floor is a daylight basement wedged into the hillside. Cruddy brown-yellow curtains are drawn. Trees everywhere. Last mailbox I noticed is a mile back, at least.

  Steely J’s Toyota is angled next to a state trooper cruiser on blocks. The cruiser may have been in a fire. Smashed in windows and busted light bar. Nearby, a rotting doghouse, but no dog. Reminds me how much I miss mine. Spruce branches, shorn by the last few windstorms, lie tangled in the dead grass. A raven perches on a splintered, disconnected telephone pole and gives me a knowing eye.

  I pretend the hood of the Iroc is a piano and lounge atop it (awkwardly) while Rocky and Mike move up the driveway, climb a flight of rickety stairs, and knock on the front door. The door opens and they step inside. The door closes and they’re gone.

  It’s much cooler here. Sunlight slants through the canopy, feeble as a candle in a huge, wrecked mossy cathedral vault. Too chilly. I huddle in the car for a while. Problem is, Rocky took the keys and now my feet are totally freezing. Worse, no tunes.

  This drags along for an unbearable while until Dee Dee’s number beeps on my cell phone. Bored and vengeful, I answer. Just the twat I want to ream. She asks if my dad enjoyed the show at the Gold Digger and I tell her to cram it where the sun don’t shine. She’s genuinely taken aback — Say what? Why you trippin’? and like that. I thank her for the false info, and ruining my dad’s birthday, fuck you very much.

  “Whoa-whoa — I didn’t feed you any bullshit.”

  “You said your pal was in the know about Clifton. Only the guy was never scheduled to appear. Nice, real nice.”

  “Julie, Julie, calm down. I told you, it was a private show. Clifton played — 10PM sharp. My parents went. Dude’s an asshole. Everybody loved it. Dad got an autographed photo. You’re really spun, girl.”

  I tell her to blow a goat and end the call. Oh, dear dog, my wrath toward Steely cocksucker J has reached a crescendo. Murder is a possibility. The conniving bastard failed to secure tickets and concocted the whole performance to cover himself and charge me double. Fuming and plotting, I glance toward the house and notice the door has swung open again.

  Somebody yells my name. The muffled cry doesn’t repeat. Leaves me guessing. My imagination runs wild — Steely J’s fat face getting knocked in by Mike’s fist; Steely J’s nads getting kicked around like a hacky sack. This is a pleasing fantasy, except…What if the boys go too far? What if they beat him to a pulp and forget to collect the loot? This situation practically begs for a woman’s touch.

  My knee is better every day. Rage makes a beautiful painkiller. I ascend the grade and climb the steps with less difficulty than I’d feared. Gets my heartrate going is all. Gawd, the house, though. Steely J carved something, maybe a crescent moon, into the wooden door panel. Inside, Lemon Pledge partially masks an underlying dankness. I wander around a dim maze. None of the light switches work. Doors are nailed shut except to the kitchen and a half bathroom. Both rooms are Spartan and neat. Reminds me of his car.

  Anger deserts me the way sweat evaporates, and leaves me clammy and flustered. Why would a person nail doors shut inside his home? Why haven’t I heard any commotion? Why don’t I call to Rocky and Mike? To this last, I can only say that the last thing a person does when exploring a semi-abandoned building is draw attention to one’s self. It’s a survival trait culled from inhaling enough slasher flicks. No fucking in an empty room and no calling out, anybody there? as you sneak around in your Nancy Drew shoes.

  Thump-thump-thump goes my rubber-tipped crutch on floorboards in a long hall. I am a girl and instantly notice the lack of photos, paintings, or any form of decoration. Shit ain’t right. At the end of the hall are stairs heading down into the basement. Of course, I hear Rocky’s voice. He chuckles and so does someone else.

  I get to the bottom of the steps and push through a heavy rubber sheet. Okay, creepy. The basement is a box and it’s hot as a greenhouse. Afternoon light dribbles in at the edges of the curtains and there’s a desk lamp glowing from a distant corner. TV monitor with the sound muted. Comedians are performing. A rich, earthy reek gets into my nose and gags me. Fertilizer, shit, dead leaves, wet copper, and green growing things. A squirmy smell. The J family used to summer in the Amazon. They brought some with, apparently.

  Furniture is totally Steely J. An aquarium, or terrarium, not sure which, except it’s economy sized. Two hundred gallons or more, pushed aga
inst the far wall. Racks of the sort you find in hospitals are positioned opposite one another and strung with IV tubes and baggies of what surely must be blood and other, clearer stuff. I’ve seen plasma; it’s plasma. Wonderful.

  Rocky squats in an inflatable pool near the terrarium. He doesn’t acknowledge my appearance. He’s in a zone. His jacket is unbuttoned. He’s not wearing a shirt or pants. I linger on this image: Shirtless. Pantless. Unbuttoned jacket. Squatting in a kiddie pool of water. An object sticks to his breastbone. Fat as a big old rubbery turd from a novelty catalog. Grayish-brownish-black, and shiny-slick. Attached at his left nipple, it trails to his belly. Vaguely familiar, possibly a specimen I’ve seen in Mr. Navarro’s biology class. My poor brain will catch up real soon. The lighting is bad, but the passing seconds improve my vision and I’m sorry. More reverse-C crescent moons are spray-painted in white on the curtains and the walls.

  Steely J reclines upon a bench seat torn from a truck. He’s naked as a Greek statue. His eyes roll back and forth, white to black. Leeches, that’s what my brain was trying to say. Leeches of varying length hang from his neck and his man-tits. One, swollen to the heftiness of a kid’s arm, gloms onto his groin, its bulk flopped across his thigh like a nightmarish wang. Makes sense — femoral artery runs through there. A prime tap. He slurps from a mostly deflated bag of blood, his expression dreamy and fucked up. In with the fresh, right? Those are Mike’s boots poking from behind the bench seat-couch, for sure.

  Another stark-naked man rises from behind the couch and moves around the side. He kneels and gently detaches the leech from Steely’s groin. Cheeks gleaming sweat, the stranger glances at me and smirks the dopey, amiable peasant smirk that has enthralled nightclub audiences since 19-fucking-74. He tenderly lays the leech on a towel and sticks it with a horse-needle syringe. Pulls the plunger and draws creamy black blood into the barrel.

  Steely J rouses himself. His marble gaze rolls to me. “Hi, JV. What can I do for you?”

  “Never mind.”

  I turn and head for the stairs. No keys for the car. Mike’s motorcycle is beyond my capabilities. Town is a major hike for a girl with a bum leg. Too afraid to look over my shoulder. Swear there’s heavy movement behind me, though. The universe and its bullet-fast molecules slow to a crawl.

  First things first. I have to make it out of the house and call for help (that should be an interesting conversation). What are the odds I’ll make it? Everybody knows that when seconds count, the state troopers are minutes away.

  The TV volume kicks in. A laugh track swells and booms and fills my ears.

  II: Swift to Chase

  Ardor

  —Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, February, 1975

  What is it Pilot John says right before we drop from the sky?

  Where is Molly’s body? No, that’s my own voice haunting me on account of someone else’s ghost, someone else’s guilt.

  The pilot’s head inclines to the left, slick as any disco floor pro. He gasps and takes the good Lord’s name in vain. There’s a quality of terror in the sharp inhalation that precedes this utterance. There’s rapture in the utterance itself. His words are distorted by electronic interference through the headset. The snarl of a lynx wanting its fill of guts.

  Obligingly, the world rolls over and shows its belly—

  —I come to after the crash and call Conway’s name the way I sometimes do upon surfacing from a nightmare. In this nightmare he is kissing me but his left eye is gone and I can see daylight shining all the way through his skull. He says hot into my mouth, This wound won’t close.

  Now I’m awake and alive. Hell of a surprise, the being alive part.

  Snow trickles down through a hole in the fuselage and crystallizes in my lashes and beard. The last of the daylight trickles through the hole too and the world around me resolves into soft focus. Buckets of white light saturate everything until it’s all ghostly and delicate. I’m strapped into the far back seat of the Beaver. I close my eyes again and recall low mountains rising on our left and the shadow of the plane descending toward an ice sheet that seemed to stretch unto the end of creation.

  Our particular jag of beach lies south of Quinhagak, not that that helps. In the summer, this is a vast circulatory system of bogs and streams on the edge of the Bering Sea. Ptarmigan and wolves, bears and fish dwell here, feast upon one another here. In the winter, it’s one of God’s abandoned drawing slates. The temperature is around negative thirty Fahrenheit. That’s cold, my babies. The mercury will only keep dropping.

  “Conway’s in Seattle,” Parker says. “He’s safe. You’re safe. Who’s your favorite football team?” His breath is minty. He thinks I’m slipping away when I’m actually slipping back into the world. Sweet kid. Handsome, too. Life is gonna wreck him. That’s funny. He grips my shoulder. His mittens are blue and white to match the stripes on the plane. “C’mon Sam, stay with me. Who’d you root for in the Super Bowl? The Vikings? I bet you’re a Vikings man. My cousin met Fran Tarkenton, says he’s a gem. Can’t throw a spiral, but a hell of a quarterback anyhow.”

  “Cowboy fan.” I’m remarkably calm, despite this instinctive urge to smack the condescension from him. He means well. His eyes are so blue. Conway’s are green and green is my favorite color, so I’m safe, as Parker keeps saying.

  “The Cowboys! No kidding? Seattle doesn’t have a club. One more year, right?”

  “Dad is from Galveston.” I haven’t thought about my father in an age, much less acknowledged him aloud. Could be a concussion.

  “Where’s your accent? You don’t have an accent.”

  “Dad does. Classic drawl.” I hesitate. My tongue is dry. Goddamned climate. “How are the other guys?” The other guys being pilot John, regional historian Maddox, and our wilderness guide extraordinaire Moses.

  “Don’t worry about them. Everybody’s A-okay. Let’s see if we can get you outta here. Gonna be dark any minute now. Moses thinks we need to be somewhere else before then.”

  His voice is too cheerful. I’m convinced he’s lying about everyone being all right. Then I catch a glimpse of Pilot John slumped at the controls, his anorak splashed red. His posture is awkward, inanimate—he’s a goner for certain. The engine has to be sitting on his legs. Snapped matchsticks, most definitely. The windshield blasted inward to cover him in rhinestones. I lack the strength to utter recriminations. Abrupt stabs of pain in my lower back suggest my body is coming out of shock. It isn’t happy.

  Parker strips free of a mitten and there are pills in the palm of his hand. He feeds me the pills.

  I clear my throat and say, “Somebody will be along. The posse can’t be far.” Lord, the aspirin is bitter. A slug of lukewarm coffee from Parker’s thermos helps. “John got a Mayday out, didn’t he?” But what I recall is John with both hands on the wheel while the rest of us yell and pray. Nobody touches the radio in the eight or so seconds before it all goes black. “Sonofabitch. Tell me it’s working.” I know it’s not working, though. The radio was smashed on impact along with Pilot John’s body. That’s how this tragedy is unfolding, isn’t it? After making a career of fucking over others, finally we are the ones getting the screw job. O. Henry or Hitchcock should be on the case.

  Parker says, “I wonder if you can walk.”

  While he struggles to extricate me from the ruins of the plane, I’m thinking not only is it a damned shame Pilot John failed to transmit a Mayday, he didn’t even file a flight plan that accounts for our detour to this wasteland of tundra and ice. We’re at least two hours southwest of the original destination. That potentially lethal blunder is on me. I’d gotten greedy and tried to squeeze in an unscheduled stop. Thanks to me we are all the way up shit creek.

  A storm is moving in off the sea. Blizzard conditions will sock in search and rescue craft at Bethel. That means three, possibly four days of roughing it for us. If we’re lucky. How lucky we are remains to be seen.

  I cough on the raw taste of smoke.

  “Heck.” Parker glanc
es over his shoulder. “Guess she’s on fire.”

  Yes, Virginia, we’re in trouble—

  —Professor Gander invited me to lunch at the Swan Club in Ballard and laid it all on the table. Entrusted me with a withered valise stuffed with documents and old-timey photos. He endeavored to explain their significance through suggestion and innuendo. Two things I dislike unless we’re talking romance, which we weren’t. I disguised my fascination with a yawn.

  He lighted a cigarette and set it in the ashtray without taking a drag first. “The papers were written by RM Bluefield, allegedly a mysterious Victorian fellow whom Stoker based the Renfield character upon. Bluefield was an avowed mystic, a fascination he acquired abroad in Eastern Europe and Asia. He possessed medical training…was obsessed with the concept of immortality, but then, so were many others of that era. His particular interest lay in the notion that it might be obtained through certain blood rites or the consumption of animal organs. Stoker, it is thought, perused the fellow’s papers and then mocked in print Mr. Bluefield’s eccentricity.

  “The journals changed hands, most recently belonging to an actor from the 1950s and ’60s named Ralph Smyth. Where he acquired them is a matter of conjecture, although it’s of scant consequence. For our purposes, we simply need to locate Smyth himself.”

  “Ah, the royal we. There’s a booster, I presume. Got to love those guys. Richer than rich if he’s going through you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cope. I represent a patron. One with very deep pockets.”

  “God love ’em. And what does this patron want with Smyth?”

  “You will locate him and ask a single question. Return with his answer, whatever that may be.”

  “A question?”

  “One question. I’ll even write it down for you.” He produced a fancy pen and indeed did write it on a coaster. He also wrote his home address and a set of numbers that represented the payment on offer. A nice plump round figure, to be sure.