by Paul Pen
In the living room, Rick was leafing through the sketchbook. A grimace disfigured his features. He wiped his tears and nose with the bandage on his forearm. Rose’s stomach turned at her seeing a stranger observe her family like that.
“Put that down.”
She entered the living room with the shotgun to one side, down her leg. Rick blinked, not sure of what he was seeing. He gripped the sofa, his shoulders tense.
“My mother said you can tell a lot about a man from his shoes. She even used it as an argument to explain why she never liked my husband. His were too clean, she said, too shiny. As if it was something bad, as if she thought it was more honest to show the dirt and couldn’t understand why Elmer was intent on hiding it. My mother might’ve liked your shoes, with all that dirt. But there you have it: there’s nothing honest about yours. Yours lie.” Rose gestured at them beside the sofa. “Those boots back up your story, you must’ve prepared them well. Dirty as they are, with the soles almost coming off, the laces frayed . . . They’re a hiker’s boots, no doubt about it. Did you buy them off someone? Or take them from a garbage dump at the last stop on your route?”
Rick didn’t answer. Rose enjoyed his agitation.
“Your boots lie,” she said again, “but your feet don’t. I’ve had them in front of me all morning, and I almost missed it. Clearly you didn’t quite go far enough to make your story believable. Look at them. Look at your feet.”
Rick lowered his head. He moved his toes.
“Not a scratch, not a single black or broken nail, not even a blister. Not even a long toenail,” Rose went on. “Those feet haven’t walked for twenty-seven days straight. I bet they haven’t even walked for one.”
Rick looked at her with glassy, rage-filled eyes. A shock jolted his body, activating his muscles. He leapt toward her.
“Don’t even try it.” Rose wielded the shotgun, aiming it at his face.
Rick halted. His eyes flicked around the room: window, floor, shotgun, door, ceiling, other window.
“Don’t try anything.” Rose caressed the trigger. “I welcomed you into my home. I tended that arm as if it belonged to one of my daughters. But I won’t hesitate to shoot you in the head, twice, if I consider it necessary.”
The young man swallowed.
“Tell me who you are,” Rose demanded. “What are you doing here?”
Rick didn’t answer.
“Tell me who you are!”
“I’m just a hiker who was looking for some company.”
Rose took a step forward, treading on the rug.
“Stop lying.” The shotgun’s barrels were now just a few inches from Rick’s forehead. “You’re not just a hiker.”
His face tensed, his expression sharpened.
“And you’re not the mother of those girls.”
Rose flushed red in front of him, her features contorted. Her eyes filled with tears. The words had been like a slap in the face.
Her finger tensed over the trigger.
Rick grabbed the weapon. He flung it aside, unbalancing Rose. The rug she was standing on made her slip. A gunshot exploded near Rick’s head. He saw the hole in the ceiling as a deafening boom penetrated his ear. Plaster rained onto his shoulders and over Rose, who was stamping her feet on the floor trying to get up. Her body’s violent jerking expelled her apron pockets’ contents. When he saw his notebook, Rick understood what had happened. Rose opened and closed her mouth, yelling something that was silent to him. He could hear nothing other than the ringing. He scoured the floor in search of the shotgun. He saw it under the armchair.
Rose’s hand landed close to the butt. Rick stepped on it. He got hold of the shotgun, jumped over her body, and fled the living room. From the front door, he saw his backpack in the kitchen, as well as his boots by the sofa. He thought about retrieving them, but Rose was regaining her balance. The trembling in his hands prevented him from even operating the bolt on the screen door. He slid it from side to side, unable to make it work. The ringing in his ears began to subside.
“Mom!” Iris yelled from upstairs. “What’s going on?”
“He shot at me!” Rose said.
Rick broke open the screen door with the butt of the weapon and split the frame’s crosspiece in two with his knee. He pushed himself through the metallic mesh onto the porch, scraping his arms. His bandage tore. He leapt down the steps. Landing on the sand scraped his feet. Something dug into his heel. The shotgun found its way between his legs, making him trip. He managed to brace himself with his hands to stop his fall. The wound under the dressing reopened from the effort. The bandages turned red. He cast the shotgun aside. When it hit the ground, it went off. Rick protected his head, but the shot hit glass behind him, a window on the house. Without slowing down, he looked over his shoulder. Rose was coming down the porch steps, trying to reach him. He trod on a spine-covered shrub and screamed. He changed direction toward the dirt track that he’d used the night before, to avoid sharp stones and cacti. He followed the wheel marks, trailing bloody footprints.
He wasn’t going to let himself get caught.
The second time he looked over his shoulder, the distance between him and Rose was much greater. He let out a deranged laugh: he was going to make it. He was going to reach his car with his feet ruined, but he would press hard on the gas to escape from there. And he’d call Mom from the next village. At the speed he was running, the tears that appeared at the corners of his eyes when he imagined speaking to her were flung backward.
Rick looked behind him again.
Rose was just a distant smudge.
Relief, excitement, impatience filled his lungs.
All at once they emptied when in front of him he discovered Elmer’s pickup.
Elmer squeezed the steering wheel, his fingers white from the pressure.
Rick was there in front of him, barefoot. He was breathing with difficulty, grimacing with pain as he opened his mouth. His arm was bleeding the way it had been when they found him lying under the faucet, near the cactus. A terrifying thought struck Elmer—that the blood wasn’t the kid’s.
He revved the engine to make it roar.
Rick escaped off to one side of the dirt track. He ran, dodging cacti, jumping rocks. Elmer followed him in the truck. The cab shook from side to side, jolting his body. He hit the roof with his head, the steering wheel with his knees. Metal screeched when rocks scraped the undercarriage. Sparks flew from the truck body. He avoided the cardones with sudden turns that made the wheels skid. A blow bent the side mirror toward the window.
Rick began to stumble. It took him several attempts to jump over a grouping of rocks in his path. The irregular arrangement of the cacti seemed to be disorienting him, because he was turning around and backtracking, as if lost in a maze. Elmer overtook him to the left, cornering him against a wall of cardones as thick as pillars. Penned in, Rick tried to escape by scaling a rock formation taller than himself, but his feet slipped on the stone. He turned to face the truck, his eyes frenzied. His forehead was knitted with panic, his mouth twisted with pain. When the engine roared under the command of Elmer’s foot, Rick begged for mercy. He showed his empty hands, a sign of his defenselessness.
“Please, I just want to get away from here.” He held his palms together in front of his mouth as if praying. “Please . . .”
Elmer squeezed the steering wheel. If only he could just let the kid escape. He’d drive to the gas station like he did every morning and be back by sunset so the twins could welcome him with arms around his legs. If he could, he would travel back in time so that this day never had to happen. So that he never opened his home to a stranger. So that the brown folder that he had on the passenger’s seat never existed. And so that he was not here now, his foot on the accelerator of his pickup, charged with stopping this boy from destroying the most important thing he’d built in his life.
Rick walked sideways toward the only free space between two cacti. With each little step the relief on his face grew, as
though he was gradually confirming the reprieve he hoped Elmer would give him. As though the truck were a wild animal that had decided not to eat him. If he reached the opening, he could escape. He took another step.
The tension in Elmer’s arms made a muscle pull in his back. He was going to let the kid go. He managed to convince himself that it was what had to happen. He and Rose had feared this moment since they’d started a family, and they had to be prepared to face the consequences of their actions.
Now it was time for them to pay.
Rick had just three steps to go to reach his way out of there. He moved his hands and made a hushing sound, as if soothing a rabid dog.
Elmer closed his eyes.
He stepped on the gas.
The young man’s high-pitched scream ended in a guttural groan. Elmer didn’t let up on the pedal. There were mechanical noises as the engine revved. Tire rubber burned, glass shattered. He wanted to attribute the organic sounds to the cardones breaking up as they gave way. The truck shuddered as it drove over the obstacles, until it crashed into something. Elmer could smell gasoline and steam. He’d hit another cactus. He sat there for a few seconds with his head resting against the steering wheel. He breathed. While he tried to muster the courage to get out, he saw Rose appear in the rearview mirror. She was carrying the shotgun.
Elmer climbed out with the brown folder. Together they observed the aftermath of the collision. Several cacti had collapsed. On top of them, impaled on their needles, lay Rick’s body, the limbs bent like those of an articulated cutout. Elmer bit his fist. Then he vomited. Rose stroked his back until he recovered.
“It was all a lie. He had a car four miles away.” Elmer wiped his lips. “I found this.”
He showed the folder to his wife.
“More information on us?” she asked.
“More?”
Rose took the notebook out from her apron.
“I found it in my truck. He was onto us.”
“Did he hurt you?” Elmer studied his wife’s face as if conducting a medical examination. “Are the girls OK?”
“They’re all fine. But he told me something terrible, he said something terrible to me.” Rose hunched her shoulders, covering her ears as if trying to block out the echo of some bad memory. Then she fixed her eyes on Elmer’s. “What if you hadn’t come back? If you hadn’t discovered his car? You saw how far ahead of me he was, he was about to get away. He could’ve gotten away and ended every—”
Rose burst into tears.
“It’s all right, it’s all right.” Elmer kissed his wife’s sweaty temple. “He didn’t get away, he’s right here, dead. And we have the documents. He can’t do anything now, nothing’s going to happen.” He looked over Rick’s battered body and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Now we have to think about what we’re going to do. We have to think really hard about what we’ll do.”
In the twins’ bedroom, Iris poked one eye above the bottom corner of the window. That was how she witnessed Rick fleeing with the shotgun, unable to find an explanation for it. She saw him throw it on the ground, how it went off—the twins screamed when the glass smashed in Melissa’s room. She saw Mom pick up the gun and run after him. Iris spotted the dust cloud that approached along the road before Rick came face-to-face with Dad’s pickup. She also watched Rick escape. And she saw Dad corner him against some cacti and then run him down.
She made for the door.
“Where’re you going?” asked Daisy.
“Where’re you going?” asked Dahlia.
The twins were clutching Melissa, the three of them cowering in a corner of the room.
“I can’t see anything from the window,” Iris lied. “I’m going to find out what’s happening. It’s OK, stay here.”
“Be careful,” Melissa said.
Iris ran down the stairs as if her feet were wheeled. She found the screen door in pieces. In the kitchen, she saw Rick’s backpack and felt an urge to inspect it, to know more about him, but she went out onto the porch without stopping. She felt every little stone through the soles of her slippers, as well as the heat from the ground. That night she’d slept in Rick’s T-shirt, but when Dad appeared in her room in the morning, she’d used the sheet to cover it up before changing into her usual nightgown. That nightgown now got caught on a cactus. She just pulled on it, tearing the material. She dodged around more of the spiny plants and more rocks, guided by the plume of smoke and steam that marked her parents’ location.
When she spotted them from behind through the forest of cacti, she ran toward them. The sound of her footsteps alerted Mom, who turned around just before she reached them. Her mother stopped her with an arm at belly height.
“Get out of here.”
Mom pushed her back—away from Dad, from the truck, and from Rick. It was the first time she’d used such force against Iris, which worried her even more.
“What happened, Mom? Tell me what happened.”
Iris dug her heels in, putting up resistance. She struggled to hold her grip in such flimsy slippers.
“You get out of here, or I’ll drag you to your room by your hair.”
Mom spat the words out through clenched teeth, spraying saliva. Her mother had never spoken to her like this before. An attack of rage made Iris’s blood boil, and she gathered all her fury in her stomach and shoved Mom to one side, making her stumble. Free of her, she ran to the scene of the collision, dodging around Dad, who could do nothing to prevent her from seeing the catastrophe.
“Honey, don’t . . .”
Iris knew from her books that the most powerful love stories usually end in tragedy, but not even all the words Shakespeare wrote in his entire life could describe the pain that shattered her soul when she saw Rick’s body. Over the stink of gasoline and burned rubber, Iris recognized the smell of his T-shirt.
“What have you done to him?” Her voice was no more than a whisper, almost a death rattle.
“I protected my daughters,” Dad replied. “That’s what I’ve done.”
Iris cried against the mask of fingers with which she now covered her mouth and nose.
“He was dangerous, he had a shotgun.”
“He threw it away.” Iris choked on her tears, and her mouth tasted of salt. “When you ran him down he didn’t have it anymore.”
Mom swooped in on her. Iris fell to her knees, letting herself be caught. She had no strength left to resist.
“What have you done to him?” she sobbed.
She let Mom lift her up. She even cried on her shoulder while her mother took her away from there.
“Stop being silly now,” Mom said. “A day ago, you didn’t even know him.”
Then Iris heard Rick’s voice.
At first she thought it was her mind reproducing a memory, but the way Mom stopped, with her spine erect, made it clear that she had heard it, too.
Iris turned around.
“Help,” Rick spluttered.
Seeing him move his head rebuilt her shattered soul at once.
“He’s alive!” she screamed. “We have to help him!”
Rick raised a hand. He also tried to stand up, but the change in his weight distribution made the bed of cacti under him collapse. He groaned with pain when the fall jolted his body.
Iris tried to approach. The lasso formed by her mother’s arms tightened around her ribs, suffocating her.
“Let go of me!” Iris yelled with compressed lungs.
This time her slippers suddenly lost their grip. Mom dragged her, taking her away, at times carrying her, spitting Iris’s hair out when it went in her mouth. Her mother ignored her screams, maintained the pressure with her arms. She didn’t hesitate, either, to push her with her knees, or to immobilize her head by trapping her chin in her hand. She took her back to the house in a single burst of energy. Iris tried to grab on to the porch posts, the screen door, the living room doorway, but Mom stopped her with powerful tugs. She kept going even when Iris broke a nail trying to hang on to
the banister.
Mom pushed her into the twins’ room. She landed barefooted—she’d lost both slippers along the way. The tear in her nightgown had ridden higher. Melissa, Daisy, and Dahlia gasped.
Mom slammed the door shut without saying a word.
The key turned in the lock outside.
Iris leapt to the door. She shook the handle, unable to open it.
“Help him!” she shouted with her mouth against the wood. “He’s not dead!”
He fought to open his eyes, disappointed to find himself in such a blurred world. After each blink, roots of pain sprouted from his pupils toward the inside of his head, but one after the other they helped him bring the reality in front of him into focus. A stone with eyes was the first thing he made out. He had the feeling he’d met a girl who spoke to cactuses—who stuck eyes on rocks, who gave them names. It was a vivid feeling, like a memory, but he was unable to figure out in what context of real life such an encounter would have taken place. It must have been a dream. That was it: he was waking up from a bad dream. A nightmare about cactuses that attacked him, needles sticking out of his skin, liquor with worms in it, being chased over burning earth, two identical little girls, and a basket of flowers. Cactus flowers. But also an iris. A melissa. A lily. A rose. Rose. The flower with thorns. His arm burned when he thought of thorns. His pulse accelerated. He remembered an injury, tweezers, fingers, a face. Rose. A gunshot. He heard glass break in some corner of his memory.
But it wasn’t in his memory.
Crouching, a woman was picking up pieces of glass from the floor that broke into smaller fragments when she dropped them in a bucket. The pieces belonged to a window that was above the woman. Outside, the sky was purple, and the air entered the room as hot as the desert sand. The wall opposite the bed was covered in pencil drawings depicting a large family. A happy family. The woman collecting the glass appeared in many of those drawings. Among the girls’ faces, there was one that returned Rick to the reality of the situation.