by Susanne Beck
And still I waited, blind and frozen like some immortal statue. Waited for the wind to cease its unending fury. Waited for the rain to part its opaque curtain.
Waited for a vision my eyes could not see. A vision my soul could not forget.
As if drawn into the clearing by the force of my unvoiced plea, still more cars came, their churning tires flinging muddy fans into the air. Their powerful headlights broke through the cloak of mist, illuminating the scene I wished so desperately to see from my frozen perch on the porch of the home I’d helped to build.
A home, a dream, that I would willingly leave, never stopping once to look back upon it, if only someone would take these scales from my eyes.
If only.
She stood there straight and tall, backlit by the artificial lighting; my lover, my heart, my soul. Proud back unbowed, head held high, eyes blazing fire.
Proud, yes. But helpless.
Not against the arms which held her, nor the cuffs which bound her strong arms, nor even the guns that pointed at every vulnerable spot in an otherwise invulnerable body.
No, not that. Never that.
Helpless, instead, against the weight of a past which had, once again, come home to roost.
Helpless against the weight of a love she had sold her very soul to nurture and cherish.
The look in her eyes is something I’ll take with me to the grave. A grave that, God willing, will not be long in coming.
Anger at her past for intruding. Rage at the arms which held her, at the guns which nudged her with their hollow silver noses. Sorrow, that the chance we had had ended much too soon.
And love.
Always love.
Her full lips parted, and I strained to hear her words over the storm’s redoubled fury. But even they were taken from me, just as surely as she would be, drawn away into the mist from which only endings came.
But still, I watched as those lips formed words only my heart could hear.
I love you.
And then a word came which shattered my soul.
Goodbye.
"No!" I screamed , bolting up and grabbing at my chest as the breath gusted from my lungs. My heart beat rapidly against fingers which trembled from the intensity of emotion welling up in me.
I blinked my eyes once, and then again, my pupils dilating to accept the feeble light from the window. Managing to relax the panic-induced lock of my muscles, I turned my head slightly, taking in the warm familiarity of the room around me. Oh, thank god. It’s just a dream. Just a dream.
Nestled, sleep-warm, beside me, the object of my terrified thoughts mumbled, yawned, and stretched slightly, pale eyes blinking fuzzily open. "Are you ok?"
A smile rose unbidden to my face as I lowered my hand to stroke sleep-tousled hair. "Yes," I whispered. "It was just a dream."
Burrowing closer, she lifted a hand and lay it against my thigh, resting her forehead against my hip. She cleared her throat. "Wanna talk about it?"
I reveled in the warmth of the simple contact and slowly shook my head. "No. I’m fine." I didn’t have the heart to tell her that this same dream, which had haunted my sleep for the last year or more, had become nearly a nightly occurrence, tearing at my soul bit by merciless bit and leaving me drained and aching every morning. "Just go back to sleep, love. I know how tired you are."
Blue eyes narrowed, their gaze sharpening as she inspected my expression.
Consciously softening my face, I reached out and gently grasped her hand, my thumb tenderly rubbing against the harshly chapped flesh so stained with oil from her labors that it seemed it would never be clean again. Blinking back fresh tears, I somehow managed to keep my expression unguarded and relaxed.
She saw right through my attempt, and pulled her hand away from mine, reaching up to capture a tear on her finger. "Why are you crying?"
The answer to that was easy. "Because I love you."
She looked as if she were about to argue the point, but the weight of many nights of little or no sleep caught up to her and she yawned once again. "Love you too," she mumbled, her heavy eyelids already drifting down over her stunning eyes. "My angel."
I caught her hand once again as it drifted down from my face and brought it to my lips as I gave my tears permission to fall. "I love you, Morgan," I whispered around her warm flesh. "More than you will ever know."
Placing her hand back into my lap, I turned my gaze to the rain-speckled window, watching with idle interest as fat raindrops heralded yet another mid-summer storm. My vision trebled with my tears as I thought back over the rapidly fleeing remnants of my nightmare, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time if it was just a subconscious reaction to stress, as my dreams often were, or if it served to portend something infinitely more ominous.
Pushing the thoughts as down deep as possible, I leaned my head back against the wall and gazed out at the winter landscape, allowing my mind to go where it would. It chose a simpler time, where the scope of our world was narrowed down to just one word.
Survival.
* * *
I stooped behind Ice’s broad back, desperately needing to pee, my muscles stiffened by the cold, mountain air and the need to stay absolutely still, my teeth chattering away like castanets in the hands of an insane Spaniard.
The sun was setting to the west, stealing the last feeble warmth from the early spring sky, and the wind redoubled its efforts to slip inside the painfully thin jacket I’d donned that morning.
Ice had sold her bike to a friend of hers earlier, leaving her with a small wad of cash which, when added to my own pitiful sum, didn’t amount to much. We’d made a quick trip to the local thrift store to stock up on meager supplies, painfully aware that the money we had would be all we had to live on until God knew when.
We’d walked from there, carefully keeping off the main roads, even when the urge to hook an easy ride from a passing trucker seemed almost overwhelming, especially given the screaming of my irritated and quickly blistering feet.
It was hours later before we finally made it to what Ice pronounced as the border. I didn’t ask her how she knew, a map most definitely not being one of our meager purchases. It wouldn’t have done me any good anyway. Ice was never the most talkative woman in the world, and I was sure her mind was occupied with far weightier matters than my simple, if nagging, curiosity.
At least that’s what I told myself when my fifth question in a row was answered by a low grunt and a gesture to ‘hush’.
So, I kept quiet and contented myself with memorizing our route as best I could, my mind’s eye already in some warm room somewhere jotting down the day’s adventures in the journal I was determined to keep writing in.
If I had expected some grand pronouncement, a sign, perhaps, announcing that we were leaving the ‘land of the brave’ and entering the ‘home of the Canucks’, I was sorely disappointed. The stretch of thickly wooded forest was much the same as the hundreds of others we’d passed on our journey to freedom.
But when Ice suddenly halted and pulled me down behind a thick hedgerow, I realized that we were probably close to our destination.
And so we waited as the sun blazed out its last in a riot of color. We waited as the moon rose and the stars came out to watch over us, no doubt wondering, as I most surely did, exactly what it was that we were waiting for.
All I knew was that the stillness, the waiting, and the cold were not doing kind things to my bladder, and I was at the point where we either moved, and quickly, or I was going to do something I hadn’t done since I was two.
To take my mind off my rather urgent need, I turned my thoughts to other things. Like this wonderful feeling called ‘freedom’ and what it meant to me, even this far out in the middle of nowhere. I was still in that blissful honeymoon phase, I think, where even the most annoying of circumstances seemed to be viewed through a pair of those proverbial rose-colored glasses.
Everything around me seemed so impossibly vast and open without the constant specter
of bars to mar the view and remind me where my place was at any given moment. To remind me that society considered me beneath contempt; unfit to make even the smallest decision for myself.
Even such a mundane task as needing to pee took on a whole new meaning when one realized that you could simply ...well ...do it, without having to ask permission from anyone but your own body.
I was shaken out of my quiet thoughts by what appeared to me to be oncoming headlights. I stiffened, placing a hand on Ice’s back and peered over her shoulder, determined to face what was coming, be it friend or foe, with as much courage as was mine to possess.
Moments later, my suspicions were confirmed as several pick-up trucks, blazing with lights, bounced over the rugged terrain and into my view. I could easily hear the shouts of drunken men over the roar of the engines. Several large deer were tied down to the hoods of the trucks.
The trucks pulled to a stop some yards from our hiding place, and one of the men jumped out, resplendent in his ‘hunter orange’ vest and cap. He drunkenly weaved his way over to a tree quite near us, his breath huffing out in frosty plumes, and proceeded to do what I’d been needing to for the past several hours.
I turned my head away in disgust, leaning it against Ice’s back. I nearly jumped out of my skin as her voice rumbled through her chest and into my ear. "Better put that away before somebody hurts you with it," she said in a menacing voice.
The big man squeaked and spun toward our position, his round eyes the size of saucers. "Who’s there?"
"Ya got a license to be jacking deer out here, buddy?"
He paled under his thick beard, and for a second, I thought he was going to faint. Then his eyes narrowed and he took several determined steps toward us, apparently forgetting that a more sensitive part of his anatomy was left hanging, so to speak, in the breeze. "That you, Morgan?"
"Could be," came the taunting answer.
Behind her, I stiffened in surprise. These were our escorts? "Ice?" I asked, tugging at the back of her jacket.
Her head turned slowly, amused eyes meeting mine. "Yes?"
I gestured to the man still standing opposite us. "A marching band and a neon sign would probably be more subtle, you know."
She winked at me, then turned her head back around. "So, ya gonna just stand there all night with your little friend hanging out or what?"
The man’s blush was vivid, lit up as it was by the blazing lights of the trucks off to the side. He quickly reached down and attended to business, before stepping closer and reaching a hand down to pull Ice from her hiding place.
Ice raised an eyebrow and looked at the proffered hand, then back at her friend.
He cleared his throat, blushed again, and wiped his hands off on his blood-stained trousers. "Jesus, Morgan, you nearly scared the shit outta me, hiding there like that!"
Rising to her feet with a grace I envied, my partner grinned and clapped her friend on the back. "Sorry about that, Bull. Thanks for meeting us out here."
The man’s eyes widened again. "’Us?’"
Turning, Ice reached down and helped me to my feet, pulling me to stand beside her. "Us. Bull, meet Angel. Angel, this is my friend Albert. ‘Bull’ to his drunken deer jacking buddies."
This time, his blush was truly spectacular, as he reached up and snatched his cap off his head and stood, wringing it in his hands. "I’m sorry, Ma’am. I didn’t ... . Oh, God."
Grinning to ease his discomfort, I stepped forward and laid a hand on his arm. "I’m very pleased to meet you, Bull. Thank you for helping us out like this."
"Oh ...um ...it’s wasn’t anything much, Ma’am. Really. H-happy to do it."
Breaking through the man’s embarrassment in a way so typical of her, Ice clapped Bull on the shoulder once more and gestured to the waiting trucks, their drivers and passengers staring at us with open-mouthed drunkenness. "Shall we?"
After a moment, Bull dragged his eyes away from me and slapped the cap down on top of his head. "Yeah. Right this way, ladies."
And, just like that, we were in Canada.
* * *
After a drive that seemed like an eternity over rutted wanna-be roads that had my fillings, and the teeth they were attached to, rolling around like dice in my head, a small shanty came into sudden view, a welcoming curl of smoke rising gracefully from the brick chimney.
Gratefully escaping from a truck cab that smelled like a distillery, I hugged my arms to myself as the cold conspired against me again, and looked at the tiny shack that was, apparently, to be a rest stop on our journey.
It look sturdy enough, but much smaller than I had expected, hardly more than a crude lean-to with four walls and a roof to hold it all together.
I shrugged mentally. I could do ‘tiny’. I’d been in smaller spaces, after all. The green-painted walls of my cell came into my mind’s eye and I shivered, just slightly. No more of that, Angel. You’re free now. Start acting like it.
Mustering up a smile, I looked up at Ice, who put a careful arm around my shoulders and guided me into the cabin. Warmth from a blazing fire and the wonderful smells of grilling meat enveloped my senses immediately. My stomach, of course, growled its impatience, but the crowd around us was too boisterous to pay any notice.
Ice, of course, did notice, and quirked me a half-grin before turning and accepting a quick kiss on the cheek from a tall, handsome man with smiling dark eyes and a bushy moustache that almost covered his mouth. He waved a greeting to me as well before being pulled back to his cooking duties by the men who demanded food, and right now, if you please.
"Andre," Ice commented softly by way of introduction. "Not much of a hunter, but he cooks a mean venison steak. I think you’ll enjoy it."
I laughed. "After five years of jail food, I’d enjoy a cardboard box if it had something more than pepper on it."
My lover smiled back in wry acknowledgement as Bull once again made his presence known, gesturing around the cabin with one massive arm. "Well, this is it. It’s not much, I know. But at least it’s warm."
"And that’s more than we could ever ask for," I replied quickly, looking around the tiny shack, which was, essentially, just one large room. Bunk beds were pushed up against three of the four walls. A couch, having seen better days around the time Lincoln was President, sat off to one side. A fireplace dominated the fourth wall, with a decent sized stove and a small refrigerator completing the ensemble. A rough-hewn table sat in the center of the room, loaded down with clothing, ammunition, gun-oil, and several objects which remained mysteries to me.
At a shout from Andre, several of the men began clearing the table, grumbling drunkenly if good naturedly, while Bull walked to the only door in the cabin and pulled it open.
An unbelievably tiny room was displayed. A narrow cot sat off to one side with a window above it. A three-cornered stool, a rather pornographic lamp sitting atop it, was the only other furniture that could have fit there. Ice could have easily reached across the entire space with both arms outstretched.
Thoughts of prison came to me once again, but I pushed them away, grateful for any bit of hospitality I was given.
"It’s small, but the door closes, so you’ll have some privacy, at least."
"It’s perfect," I pronounced, walking inside and laying my backpack on the bed. "Thank you, Bull."
Blushing again, he looked down at his feet before mumbling something unintelligible and backing away into the main room.
Shaking her head in mock exasperation, Ice stepped past the retreating man and joined me in the cramped room, looking around. "Not exactly the Ritz, but it’ll do in a pinch, I suppose."
I flopped down on the bed, crossed my legs, and grinned up at her. "I’m not complaining. It’s warm, the food smells heavenly, and I get to spend all night in this tiny bed with you. What more could a girl ask for?"
She smiled that heart-stopping grin at me, then ducked down and brushed a soft, warm kiss against my lips before straightening again. "I’d give you a pal
ace if I could, Angel."
"I don’t need a palace, Ice. I just need you."
We might have gone on for years staring into one another’s eyes if my bladder hadn’t chosen just that moment to announce its final summons. I jumped up from the bed. "Where’s the bathroom?" I asked out of the corner of my mouth, not wanting to be overheard.
"There isn’t one," Ice responded in like fashion.
My eyes, I’m sure, widened dramatically. "What?!? Then where do you ... ?"
Taking pity on my desperate condition, Ice leaned over the bed, pulling the tattered window shade out of the way. "Outhouse."
"Great." I sighed.
My bladder twinged again, and I shrugged. Oh well, any port in a storm, I suppose.
* * *
Dinner was a loud, boisterous, but delicious affair. We ate pressed close together, Ice on my right, Andre on my left, the rest of the men trading outrageous hunting tales that went into the realm of science fiction rather quickly.
Though grateful for the kindnesses shown me, I couldn’t help but feel slightly uncomfortable as the night wore on. After spending five years in the sole company of women, and in addition, having a bit of a sore spot when it came to drunken males, given my past history with at least one of their species, I felt myself gradually begin to close off as a means, I suppose, of self preservation. Ice was warmly supportive, but there were still places deep within me that even she couldn’t reach, and this was one of them.
Giving my hand a warm squeeze under the table, Ice turned her head and brought her lips down to brush against my ear, sending a wonderful shiver throughout my entire body. "Why don’t you bow out? Try and relax and get some sleep. I’ll be back shortly."
That sent a great deal more than a shiver though me and I concentrated on keeping my breathing steady as I whispered back. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah. I have a couple of things to discuss with these brutes before they all pass out. Then I’ll come back and join you. Sound good?"