Stoneskin's Revenge

by Tom Deitz

  “Seven,” Brock supplied, then lapsed back into silence.

  “Right. Well anyway, Mom was your basic housewife, and Dad worked for the city. But one day Mom went out shopping, and…” She paused, sniffed, then went on, “…well, basically, this Cuban kid raped her. She didn’t say anything to us about it, but then one night we heard her crying, and I asked Dad about it the next day, and he asked Mom what was up, and she told him, and he went looking for the kid, ’cause Mom knew who he was—the son of the woman who cleaned for us sometimes. And Dad found the kid and was gonna beat him up—maybe even kill him—except that…”

  She hesitated again, and Calvin knew she was having a hard time. He wondered suddenly what it must have been like to have a father you loved.

  “The kid’s brother came in on ’em and shot Dad in the back,” Brock finished.

  “Jeeze!” Calvin whispered.

  “Yeah,” Robyn echoed, her voice stronger now. “Well, the outcome of that was that we moved to Jacksonville, where Mom was from, and then Mom met this guy there…and married him. Things were fine for a while, and the guy was actually pretty decent to me and Brock, but then…well, I think what began it all was that Mom never told him about what had happened, and she never really liked to have sex after she was raped, so that eventually they just quit doing it. But our stepdad was a lot younger than she was and didn’t understand, and when he finally found out, it messed him up good, ’cause he wasn’t gettin’ any on the one hand, and ’cause Mom had kept stuff from him on the other, and ’cause he couldn’t stand the idea of what he called ‘damaged goods’ on the third.’

  “That was when it really hit the fan,” Brock inserted.

  “Yeah,” Robyn sighed in agreement, “I reckon he just got mean. And since he couldn’t stand the idea of sex with Mom anymore, he got to messin’ around, only that made him feel guilty, so he started drinkin’, and that made him mess around more—you can see where this is headin’, can’t you?”

  “’Fraid so.” Calvin nodded. “I bet one day he got drunk…”

  “And raped me,” Robyn whispered, her voice once more aquiver.

  “Shit!”

  “Oh, Brock tried to stop him,” she went on, “never mind that he was only about eleven, but the guy knocked him around and hurt him, and made us swear not to tell. But Brock had to tell Mom, ’cause the guy had nearly broken his arm, and then the shit really hit the fan, and after that it was hollerin’ and fightin’ all the time, and Mom takin’ us off and our stepdad comin’ back to get us, and court, and lawyers, and social workers, and all.”

  “And all the while he was still…well, you know,” Brock put in.

  “Both of you?”

  Brock shrugged uncomfortably. “Like I said, he never did anything but look at me funny—unless you count beatin’ the crap out of me ’bout once a week. Man, I couldn’t do anything right.”

  “I know the feelin’,” Calvin confided. “But you still haven’t told me how you actually ran away, like how long you’ve been on the road and all.”

  Robyn took up the tale again. “We planned it a long time, but didn’t act until last week. I was kinda lucky in a way, ’cause by the time things had really gotten messy, I’d got old enough to be on my own, though I hated to leave my little bro, so I just stayed gone a lot: slept over at my girlfriends’ houses and stuff. Even ran off once before, but came back after three days ’cause I got worried about Brock.”

  “Who had meanwhile learned how to dig and hide and fight,” Calvin guessed.

  “Yeah.” Robyn chuckled in spite of herself. “Kids kinda tended to get down on us ’cause of our folks. I don’t know which of us spent more time takin’ up for the other.”

  “You did,” Brock volunteered instantly.

  “But anyway,” Robyn continued, “last week we just couldn’t take it anymore, and when Brock’s final grades came in and weren’t the straight As our stepdad wanted, he just flipped, and that’s when we decided to head out. We stole his credit cards and charged up a bunch of camping gear and stuff, and stashed it with some friends, and then just walked out last Sunday and said we were goin’ to a movie, and never came back. Had a friend was gonna take us to Savannah, but it was rainin’ like a son-of-a-bitch by then—and we had to stop along the road ’cause we flat couldn’t see, and then when we tried to start the car again, it wouldn’t go, so he had no choice but to call home for help, and we had no choice but to hit the road.”

  “So you’ve been hikin’…?”

  “Since Monday night. Found this place yesterday. Gotta move on tomorrow. We’re afraid to hitch,” she added. “Cops are probably on the watch by now.”

  “So what happens after you get to Savannah?”

  “We hop ship for Europe and get as far away from our stepdad as we can.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “We’ll write her when we get the chance, but not till we’re safely out of reach.”

  “Wish we could have brought her with us,” Brock mumbled sleepily.

  “Yeah,” Robyn affirmed wistfully. “She was a really neat lady.”

  “Was,” Brock yawned back.

  Robyn was looking at Calvin expectantly.

  Calvin slapped at one of the mosquitoes that had begun to plague him. “My life’s not been real great either,” he admitted.

  “We’re waiting,” Robyn replied pointedly.

  Calvin shrugged uncomfortably. “There’s not much to tell—not that’s interesting. Mom and Dad were both Cherokee, but Dad was only half, and city-bred in the bargain, and she was born on the reservation up in North Carolina.”

  “I’ve been there,” Brock piped up.

  “Hush!” This from Robyn.

  “Yeah, well, Mom died when I was born, but right from the start her folks and Dad disagreed on how to raise me. Dad said I’d only be unhappy if I tried to be an Indian in a white man’s world, and Mom’s folks said I had a right to my heritage, and should be exposed to both sides, and make my own choice. Her dad was their main advocate, I guess. He was a kind of—you’d call him a medicine man—and I started spendin’ summers up there when I got old enough, and he started teachin’ me things, and so I just naturally got interested in that side of the family. Eventually Grandfather tried to adopt me, ’cause the descent goes through the female line in Cherokee. That was when the real trouble with my dad began. I was tryin’ to find out everything I could about my people, and Dad was tryin’ every way he knew to stop me. He kinda had a point, I guess, ’cause I really do have to live in the white man’s world, and just then—I was maybe fifteen—I wasn’t doin’ real well there. My grades started slippin’, though fortunately I stayed away from drugs and booze; I’ve seen too much of what they can do. Anyway, Dad finally laid down an ultimatum and told me I could do whatever I wanted to do Cherokee, as long as I also did what he wanted me to do, which was to make good grades, and play sports—white men’s sports—and go huntin’ with him, though even that was the white man’s way: with dogs and stuff. And he wanted me to date only white girls, by which I mean very white girls, like live in Chamblee and Sandy Springs and all. Finally I just couldn’t stand it any longer, and then Grandfather died, and I went to the funeral, and I decided then I was gonna follow my heart.”

  “Which was?”

  “To soak up as much of the real world—of my people’s world—as I could. See, white people don’t really think of themselves as a part of nature; they think of themselves as apart from nature—and apart from history too, I guess, to judge by what some of the preachers say. Basically, what this meant was that I dropped out of high school and bummed around a bit, spent a while up at the reservation, and then last summer started hikin’ the Appalachian Trail, and then…that’s when things really changed.”

  “How?”

  “Met a girl, for one thing,” Calvin replied, oblivious to the glimmer of disappointment that clouded Robyn’s features until it was too late. “Uh, actually, she’s twenty-five,” he
added awkwardly. “Her name’s Sandy, and she teaches physics in a high school near Sylva, N.C., and has a real neat cabin on a mountaintop near there.”

  He paused to poke the fire again, noting how the ruddy light made Robyn’s too-pale skin seem to come alive.

  “Like I said,” Calvin went on, “that was last summer, and a couple of months after I met Sandy I went on down to Georgia and ran into some really sharp folks—first folks I’d met who were really into the things I’m into.”

  “Like magic?” Brock suggested a little too eagerly.

  “Yeah,” Calvin grunted, wishing the kid wasn’t so quick. “Like magic.”

  “I play D&D some,” Brock volunteered eagerly. “I’ve got a tenth-level cleric who—”

  “Not now, Brock,” Robyn told him, but with more sadness than hostility.

  “No, not now,” Calvin echoed. “Maybe sometime, though. I promise.”

  “So how’d you wind up here?” Robyn asked finally. “I mean, if you don’t mind telling.”

  “I can’t say,” Calvin replied wistfully, “’cause I don’t want to lie, and if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try us.”

  Calvin shook his head. “Not yet. Suffice to say I was takin’ care of some stuff with my buddies, and we finished it up, and I asked them to let me off here, ’cause I found out a bunch of things while we were doin’…what we did, that really kinda weirded me out, so I wanted to just hang out in the woods for a while and get my head straight.”

  “And then we came long and messed it up,” Robyn finished.

  Calvin shook his head. “Not you, the cops. Them—and the death of my father.”

  “They think Calvin killed him,” Brock supplied.

  Calvin rolled his eyes in dismay. That was the last thing he needed.

  Robyn’s eyes narrowed, but she kept her cool. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “This afternoon.”

  Her voice softened, though it retained a note of apprehension. “Wanta…talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  A pause, then: “No to that, too.”

  “Life’s a bitch.”

  “And then you die,” Brock concluded.

  “No,” Calvin countered, “life’s great, it’s people not bein’ straight that screws you up—that, and people who won’t wake up and smell the roses, who wanta make the world into their image of it ’stead of what it really is.”

  “Like your dad did?”

  “Yeah.”

  They talked for several more hours—or Robyn and Calvin did; shortly after it became full dark Brock rolled up in his sleeping bag and, in spite of his best efforts to the contrary, was soon snoring softly. Most of what they discussed was fathers, and though Calvin was reluctant to elaborate at first and recounted his encounter with the sheriff in the sketchiest possible terms, he discovered that Robyn was almost as easy to talk to as Sandy. Eventually she began to open up as well, and after a while Calvin realized they’d both sort of regressed to their childhoods, were exchanging tales of small family doings before crises had hit. Robyn spoke of going to Disneyworld with her folks, and how her dad had enjoyed the rides as much as she had, and had insisted on going on all the E-tickets twice, never mind her mom’s protests.

  And then Calvin told about his dad sneaking off from work to watch Calvin play in Little League, and how he’d comforted him when they’d called him names. It was catharsis, Calvin decided, for both of them. Maybe that was what the omen had meant: that by staying here he could get the sort of outpouring of grief mixed with relief that would otherwise be slow in coming. By the time it was over, both of them were misty-eyed and Robyn’s nose was running. She wiped it daintily. “So much for being a tough broad, I guess.”

  “We’re all soft in the center,” Calvin told her gently. “Either that, or we have no center.”

  “Yeah,” Robyn yawned. “And tomorrow’ll come whatever.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin echoed. “Guess it’s time we turned in.”

  “Guess so.”

  The fire had burned to embers by then, and neither of them had any desire to poke it up. Robyn unzipped her sleeping bag and slid inside, fumbled for a moment, then dragged out her jeans, which she rolled into an untidy cylinder and handed to Calvin with the single word “Pillow.”

  “Thanks,” Calvin murmured. He slid it under his head, then stretched out on the ground where he was, arms folded across his bare chest, staring at the sky. Brock was a small lump beside him, his back snuggled against Calvin’s side, his legs drawn up like a tiny child.

  Silence for a while—except for the sounds of the night.

  And then Calvin felt a soft touch on the hand he’d cupped around his left elbow. A glance down showed him Robyn’s fingers; a shift of his gaze further left revealed her reclining on her elbow looking at him. Their eyes met, and she lifted the flap of the bag a fraction. “There’s room for two.”

  “I can’t,” Calvin whispered, but she did not withdraw the hand from his.

  *

  But the hand was gone when Calvin awoke sometime later—near midnight, to judge by the position of the moon and the stars. The sky was clear, though the wind still held a hint of rain, and Calvin could just make out the Cygnus corner of the Summer Triangle. For a while he simply lay where he was, wedged between Brock and Robyn, almost as if they were family. It was strange, too, for he’d been sleeping soundly, dreaming something about swimming in Galunlati, and then abruptly he was awake. But what had roused him?

  Beside him, Brock stirred and whimpered and frowned in his sleep.

  Somewhere to the west a dog barked—far off, but clear. Calvin started full awake at that, and could have kicked himself. He’d been an utter fool. Of course a dog had barked—he was a fugitive, after all. No way they’d just let him run off in the woods and not look for him. But white men were lazy, were sorry trackers, so they’d naturally use dogs to do their dirty work, and in a little county like this, they’d probably have to bring ’em in from outside. Only…didn’t they usually use bloodhounds for stuff like that? And weren’t they usually silent? Calvin strained his hearing and caught another set of distant, excited yips. Those certainly didn’t sound like bloodhounds. Beagles, then, like the ones his dad used to chase rabbits? Except that it was night, which made that unlikely, though not impossible—and they didn’t sound quite right to be beagles. More likely it was somebody out ’coon hunting. Only it wasn’t season, unless somebody was just out running their hounds to hear them sing; he’d known plenty of people who did that.

  He sat up to try to catch the bays and bells more clearly, and made out the deeper, more resonant tones of a treeing walker. ’Coon hunters for sure, he decided; keeping their hounds in tune.

  But maybe he ought to investigate, anyway. No telling what’d happen if a bunch of hunters stumbled on him and the runaways. For an instant he thought to rouse his companions and have them abandon their sinkhole hideaway, but something told him no, that the cries were too far away to pose much threat.

  And then something else caught his attention. He could not tell for certain if it was an actual sound or merely a vibration in the ground, it was so low-pitched. Like rocks sliding together, maybe; like the earth muttering to itself as it cooled. But then he noticed something far more troubling: the crickets and the birds—the chuck-will’s-widows—had all fallen silent, as had the frogs in the swamps nearby. So had the dogs. Even the mosquitoes had ceased to buzz.

  That did it; something was up. He had no choice but to investigate.

  Sighing, he slid out from between the siblings, using the smooth, silent movements in which he took so much pride, and indeed he made no sound at all as he crept across the depression and snagged his sneakers—dread of what he might step on in the dark overriding his fear of noise. He made no move to put his shirt on, though, and the moonlight laid blue shadows across his body.
>
  Moonlight was his friend, as was the night.

  Still soundless, Calvin pushed through the bushes that fringed the camp and entered he forest.

  It enfolded him like a brother, and he had a sudden urge to halt dead in his tracks and simply stand among the starlit trees while he slowly cleared his mind until there was nothing left but self, until he had no body and could simply drift away on the rising wind.

  Almost without thinking, he found himself gripping the scale, and wondered, suddenly, if he could use it to achieve exactly that—abandon shape entirely, and become pure, mindless consciousness. But after a moment good sense got the better of him and he moved on, tiptoeing barefoot until he was out of range of the camp, then leaning against a maple to slip on his shoes. He was one with the night now, and from then on he knew he would make no sound.

  He strained to catch the cries of the dogs again, but could not. The thrumming continued, though, like something drumming in the earth—no, it was more as if something bowed the ground, drew on its very structure to play a long, slow fiddle tune. There were almost words, too, a sort of sighing on the wind, but Calvin could not make them out. They had a direction, however—north-north west—and he followed them, slipping among the trees, letting the moonlight catch and blend their shadows with his own, sliding across his hair and down his shoulders, teasing him alive with light and wind.

  He ran, then, as softly and nearly as swift as the deer he had recently been. On and on he trotted while the thrumming got fainter and fainter and finally faded away entirely. For a moment he halted, at a loss as to which way to continue, then shrugged and continued on, more or less the way he had been heading. He had slowed to a jog, though, ears ever alert for a resumption of the thrumming—until, quite suddenly, he found himself on the edge of a stream—very likely a tributary of good old Iodine Creek. At least the width looked about right, and there was the same sort of bank.