Impasse

by Royce Scott Buckingham

  It was early, but he was hungrier than he was when he skipped breakfast at home. The tube of disgusting soy paste hadn’t filled him up—it only promised to keep him alive at one day per tube. He’d give fishing another hour, he decided, then try something else. Edwin’s had other suggestions for food.

  Fishing had just sounded so easy. It should have been relaxing and fun, too. It always was on the TV fishing shows. He’d grown up one hundred miles inland in Hartford, and his accountant father had only taken him fishing once, when he was seven. An ocean charter. The crew had rigged the lines, and he’d merely sat in the chair. He caught one, a sea bass—a dark spiny monstrosity from the cold depths that he was scared to touch. They bludgeoned it in front of him, laughing while it gasped for breath, and then they “cleaned” it, slicing it open and spilling its blood and guts all over the deck, a lot like Stu imagined Marti Butz must have gasped for breath while being strangled, and how she had her entrails spilled out on the deck of the Iron Maiden. He’d wanted nothing to do with eviscerating living things as a boy after that, and didn’t like it any more as a grown man.

  Saddled with that image for the remainder of the hour, he was almost grateful when there were no more bites, or even phantom bites.

  He drank deeply from the lake until he couldn’t drink any more. The water was ice-cold and crystal clear. Then he loaded up his one-liter and began his trip back up the mountain.

  He had no watch. Clay had forbidden it. He could check the time on his cell phone when he returned to the cabin. It was back in the bottom of his bag. He’d had to turn it off to save the battery. No use leaving it on without reception. Judging from the sun, it was still before noon.

  The walk up was painful, harder than the walk down. He limped, picking his way through the trees and underbrush. It was a trudging chore, and he stared into the hill, purposefully placing every step. Halfway, he stopped to rest and looked back at the lake through the foliage. The view of the calm water nestled in the bowl of the mountains was breathtaking. It was a bit like looking back at his youth; his perspective was better now, and he appreciated the beauty of where he’d been, but he was moving away from it, the path ahead was uphill, and it hurt to keep walking. The wilderness wasn’t helping him relax or rejuvenate, he decided. It just reinforced that he was getting old.

  Forty sucks, Stu thought.

  Forty had not arrived suddenly. The date on the calendar had, but the feeling of swimming through unflavored oatmeal had been building through the last years of his thirties. It wasn’t the sharp, severe depression he’d experienced after Butz, but a dull, longer-lasting version of the same thing. Struggle. Failure.

  And a throbbing foot.

  Clay had helped him through Butz. Katherine had too. He had both of them to thank for his current life, though it was not the one he’d chosen or one he embraced. He wasn’t the type to develop a drug problem or burden others with his issues. Instead he’d checked out. He buried himself in his work. No more fund-raisers. No more hand-shaking or meeting important people. America’s Unsolved had returned like ghouls to broadcast the death of his career to every friend and complete stranger with a cable subscription—rising star to fallen star in one season of reality television. They seemed delighted; couldn’t have scripted it any better. For a time even a trip to Market Basket was painful. He imagined everyone eyeing him with either disgust or pity.

  The guy who let the murderer walk.

  He’d hoped that as long as he kept his head down and worked hard, it would pass. But it didn’t pass. His head stayed down. He handled cases that didn’t take him to court where his former colleagues would see him and have to shake his hand awkwardly. He wrote wills and trusts. Contracts. No litigation.

  He sent Katherine to her parties alone, begging off sick or busy with files he brought home. She’d pestered him at first; then she’d given up. She couldn’t argue with hard work. Arguing with a lawyer was difficult and tedious on any topic, but trying to tell a man not to focus on his job was a difficult position to take while also wanting him to be ambitious. But he wasn’t ambitious. He was treading water, hunkered down and defensive and doing nothing to change his tarnished image. She didn’t like it. Nor did she complain, particularly. She just kept trying to push him.

  Not push, you idiot, support.

  She’d tried to help him, and his self-imposed malaise made it impossible. He hadn’t wanted to burden anyone, but he’d burdened his wife, he realized, as he stared out across the pristine lake. He hadn’t quite thought of it that way before, and the clarity with which it struck him here in the wild was astounding. He suddenly felt guilty for it—crushingly guilty. His disinterest in life was something he had to fix when he got home, he decided, and not in the way a man fixed a sink or the lawn mower. He needed to find the spark in himself that Katherine married him for. Not so that she would love him more, but so that she wouldn’t have to keep digging through his bullshit pouting to recover it herself.

  Stu nodded. Fixing intangible things was something he could do. He fixed complex contracts. He fixed invisible boundary line disputes. He fixed controversies between neighbors who absolutely hated one another. I can damn well fix myself. With that resolved, he turned to continue up the hill.

  The five-foot-tall animal stood motionless about twenty yards from him, partially visible through the brush, but only an instant from disappearing if it so chose. For now it only watched him. Stu froze too. A deer? That was his first thought. But a set of great, arching, rust-colored antlers curved skyward like leafless branches another three feet high above its head. If it was a deer, it was the most spectacular or malformed rack of antlers a deer had ever grown. A small moose? Its blunted snout and hanging bib were mooselike, but that wasn’t quite right either. The horns were narrow and tall, not thick and wide. Caribou! he realized finally, though he’d thought they lived in the open plains and ran in herds. Stu glanced about nervously, but he didn’t seem to be surrounded by an angry pack of the big beasts. I’m the hunter, he reminded himself. With his lame foot he didn’t feel like a hunter. In fact, if the thing charged, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to hobble out of the way before it gored him with its formidable set of miniature spears.

  Stu unslung the Browning from his back, keeping his movements slow and smooth. The caribou watched him, curious but not bothered. Stu hesitated. The Europeans called them reindeer. It made Stu think of Santa Claus. I’m about to shoot Prancer. He held the gun loosely against his shoulder, but tightly with his hands, not wanting to make the same mistake he made with the rat. He sure as hell wouldn’t let go this time.

  He drew a bead on the animal, which was easy at this modest range, once he had his eye the right distance from the scope, but he didn’t know whether to shoot the animal in the head or the torso. His recollection was that people usually shot big game in the body. Probably so they didn’t spoil the trophy head. But he just wanted the meat. He trained the rifle on the head, and the animal’s eyes suddenly filled the scope lens. It stared at him through the glass with shiny black orbs, like a big trusting dog. Its nonchalant stare reminded Stu that he didn’t have a lot of experience killing things. Bugs as a kid. More recently a rat. But never a big mammal. When their dog needed to be put down, he hadn’t even gone to the vet with his parents.

  The caribou was munching foliage now. It even dipped its head and disappeared from the scope for a moment. Then reappeared. Very comfortable for something in a gun sight.

  What if the thing comes to this spot every day? Stu wondered.

  Perhaps this was its vacation spot. If they could coexist for the week, he might make friends with it. When he was a kid, he’d seen a movie where a farm boy went out hunting, but instead of shooting a moose tangled in barbed wire, he’d set it free. Later the moose had saved the boy’s life.

  Stupid!

  Stu scolded himself. What was the caribou going to do? Climb up on his roof and nail in a few shingles while he warmed himself by the fire with a cup of coc
oa? He settled the sight on the caribou’s head again, directly between its big innocent eyes.

  I don’t have a license for this, he realized.

  He wondered what the rules were. Caribou weren’t endangered, as far as he knew. There was probably an exception for starvation, but he wasn’t technically starving yet, and it was more meat than he would need for one person. The responsible hunter only killed what he was going to eat, he remembered. Stu wiped his brow. How to prepare the meat once he bagged the caribou was another problem. Edwin’s had a chapter on slaughtering large game. Field dressing, they called it, maybe because slaughtering sounded so awful. He hadn’t read that chapter yet, but the diagrams made it look difficult and gory. And how would he carry an animal that big up to the cabin? He had no idea how much it weighed. More than a large man, certainly. More than two men, from the look of it.

  The caribou’s eyes disappeared from the scope. He lowered the gun. It was beginning to wander off. Stu had stood so still for so long that it seemed to have grown bored. He raised the gun again quickly, held his breath, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He examined the gun. The hammer was in the safety position.

  “Dammit!”

  Stu drew the hammer back and held the gun up again. The caribou’s flank was just visible through the trees; at least, it looked like a flank through the scope. He fired. The gun boomed and kicked, as it had before. This time he held on, and it slammed into his shoulder instead of his eye. The report echoed through the peaceful valley like an amplified version of his profanity, a more violent expression of his frustration.

  Stu groaned and rubbed his shoulder. The caribou was no longer visible. He limped into the thicket where it had stood. No body. It was gone. He’d missed. No, it was worse than that—he’d hesitated.

  The ground was soft under his feet. Stu looked down. His boot was mired in pile of damp steaming pellets. The caribou hadn’t been bored. It hadn’t been relaxing in its favorite shrub hideaway where it would return each day. And it certainly hadn’t been connecting with him. It had been taking a dump.

  CHAPTER 14

  Stu awoke to throbbing pain. He reached down and found his ankle swollen to the size of an orange. The trip down to the lake and back up the hill the previous day had done wicked things to it. His skin was purple, and there was no way he’d be able to wear his two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar TQ Extremes. The fact that he’d had no ice pack when the injury occurred hadn’t helped.

  Stu rolled over and looked up through the ragged skylight. For the second day in a row his discomfort had awakened him before the sun had had its chance. It hadn’t rained during the night, thank God, so he was dry.

  Food.

  The thought was singular and compelling. It immediately displaced the pain in his leg as his number-one concern. The gnawing in his belly was profound, so bad that he almost wanted a tube of disgusting paste. Almost. He’d eaten two already. The third needed to wait until he was dying, he decided.

  Dying.

  For the first time he thought seriously about the possibility that he could die. He’d kidded himself about the cliché ways in which he might perish in the wilderness—death by bear or plane wreck were the two most popular. But he hadn’t considered that he simply might not be able to provide for himself. Stu stared at the wasp hole in the log wall for a time. The concept of his week had changed. Survive for four more days. The plane would be back then, with that idiot Ivan asking him if he’d had a good time.

  He rose and faced the day with his clubfoot and a tender cheek. At least the swelling from the wasp sting had gone down. Had he been allergic, he’d be dead already. Had his coat and sleeping bag not been high quality, he’d be near frozen at night. Though there’d been no rain in the night, there had been cold. The dramatic drop in temperature was unmistakable. Not only could he see his breath, but his hands quickly grew numb. He donned gloves to start his fire in the pit. It could snow, he thought. And for some reason this thought scared him more than any other, short of a bear. His matches were at an end, and so the fire needed to stay lit, or else he’d have to learn to use the flint and steel.

  He gathered wood and his wits for the first hour of the day, keeping an eye out for the edible grasses that Edwin’s suggested he could eat. He tried a couple, but without a cooking pot in which to boil them, they were woody, bitter, and difficult to swallow. Nor did they seem to fill him. He ate just enough to make him want some real food.

  Edwin’s also touted the food value of various bugs that were easy to catch—worms, grubs, maggots, slugs. He couldn’t find worms, of course. If I could find some goddamned worms, I’d be eating a tasty fish. He wasn’t sure what a grub looked like, and Edwin’s seemed to assume that everyone knew, because it didn’t have a photo. Maggots were too disgusting to contemplate, considering he’d have to raid the rotting rat carcass to get them. Which left slugs.

  He’d seen several sizeable black slugs on the shady side of the cabin, and they weren’t exactly built to elude him. An easy answer to his little food problem, according to Edwin’s.

  It didn’t take long to locate a fat one, which he plucked from the rotting wood with two fingers. It was a sleek animal, almost a half foot in length, jet black and shiny, with a delicately textured mantle and deeply grooved tail. Two smooth antennalike protrusions with bulbous end caps forked from its head. A beautiful animal, really, he told himself. And big. A mouthful. He talked himself into thinking that it would taste like oysters or, if cooked to firmness, maybe clams. Without a pan in which to fry them, he decided to go with the oyster image. Just let it slide down your throat. He wondered if he could also imagine a bit of cocktail sauce.

  There didn’t seem an obvious way to kill the thing, so he decided to eat it as is. Better not to think about it too much anyway. With that, he popped the slug into his mouth. But the squirming gastropod quickly produced a variety of mucus that made it very unlike oysters. The meaty body slid down his throat just fine, but it left a sticky film in his mouth. Stu’s face twisted, his lip curling in disgust—he could feel the slug writhing in his stomach. Oysters didn’t do that. He took two steps and wretched into the bitter-tasting grass, vomiting up the slug and the few pathetic half-chewed greens he’d consumed. The five-inch black thing still lived, its horrid taste and texture all of the defense mechanism it would ever need against hungry humans. It slithered off through the bile- and puke-laden grass, none the worse for wear, while Stu staggered back to the cabin, spitting mucus and cursing under his breath. The realization that he had fewer nutrients in him than before he’d tried to eat the damned thing was incredibly disheartening. Then he reached into his mouth and pinched himself.

  “Aww, thit,” he mumbled. He couldn’t feel his lips.

  With that, Stu gave up on scavenging for food, and as soon as he thought his stomach could handle it, he ate the last tube of Goop. At least he couldn’t taste it, because his tongue was also numb.

  The remainder of the morning was spent limping around the cabin gathering firewood and ten-foot-long branches to lean across the roof. The walk to the lake was too far for his swollen ankle, especially without a boot that would fit over it. He cut one of his spare tennis shoes open with his knife and stretched it over his fat foot so he could walk on the rough forest floor without cutting himself on rocks or thorns.

  He drank regularly—Edwin’s advised it—and his water was soon gone. Just thinking about a trip all the way to the lake was torturous, but he’d seen a small drainage near the spot where the caribou had made its grand show of disrespect for his lack of hunting prowess. It was only halfway. He took the small pack with its water insert and hobbled down the hill.

  He was failing, he thought as he walked. And if he didn’t pull his head out soon, it would be the biggest failure of his life since … Butz. The name intruded on his thoughts. Butz was bigger. If he died in the wilderness, only those close to him and maybe a few people who read news blurbs from Fairbanks would know. Strangers. When Butz happened
, everybody knew. America’s Unsolved made sure the entire nation knew. One national news reporter had asked him how he felt about letting a killer walk free. She was smug, shoved the microphone at him, and couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old. Given his politically sensitive position as a government employee, he couldn’t even tell the pantsuited cub reporter what an incredible bitch she was. The appellate court had done their part too, publishing their opinion about the case so that the entire profession knew. The case was used as persuasive authority by lawyers all over the country. Even Stu’s death couldn’t top that sort of notoriety. Especially a quiet death in the woods.

  Stu couldn’t stop the memories, the second guesses, the regrets. He’d analyzed Butz one million times in his head, and every time the result was the same. He lost. A very efficient private attorney had taken Butz’s appeal. Stu had puzzled over that, too. The unknown lawyer used a Providence PO box for correspondence, but listed no office address. Peter Tippet was his name. Stu figured that Tippet took the case for the publicity—Butz certainly had no money to pay for private counsel—but Tippet had gone about his business quietly and without talking to the press. His only public appearance had been the day of the oral argument before the appellate court. He was brief, direct, and he stuck to the narrow legal argument presented by the corpus delicti doctrine. No esoteric crap about rights or the constitution. No fanfare. Afterward he marched out, head down, and disappeared back into the hustle and bustle of Providence. When the decision came out, he didn’t crow about it. In fact, Stu didn’t hear a word from him ever again. It was possible he practiced some mundane civil law and only took on the occasional pro bono criminal case, but Stu thought it unlikely. Tippet’s briefs and presentation hit just the right matter-of-fact note for an unsympathetic client. All law and procedure. Not one word about the ugly facts or the concept of fairness for murderers. Yep, he was an experienced crime guy.