A lot of people have it worse, I always told myself, even when I couldn’t stop crying.
* * *
Ned’s most secret expeditions took place when Shot was in town, and Ned used to nudge our father to suggest getting drunk in town to Shot. It didn’t take much.
Sometimes, as Ned’s adventures seemed to get more frequent and organized, I wondered if he had actually found a giant salamander. Maybe that’s why he took the risk. Maybe that’s why he seemed not to mind Shot so much. Even if I wasn’t sure that made any sense.
I remember that night, too, because I’ll never be able to forget it. Not a day of my life. It’s there, peering over my shoulder, and I can’t push it away. The only difference is, over time, so many other things peer in at you. The weight shifts. The weight leans on you a little less.
* * *
Shot had gone off in spectacular fashion, like a hundred bottle rockets exploding too close, and we were both in our separate rooms vibrating from the aftermath. The way your bones feel the abuse even if your bones aren’t broken. So you’re both numb and humming, both angry and cold.
I don’t remember particulars; they were always so banal. They say a trigger can be anything. Shot’s randomness gave me so many triggers, they began to cancel one another out. He had been out of sorts over something about the crops, or some arrangement Father had made with a neighbor, and it just escalated until things were thrown at walls—and then I was.
The usual. But this time I’d seen Ned’s lip tremble, and it was getting to him more than normal. Like maybe having been stoic all those other times had used up too much of himself. Why that day, I couldn’t ever figure out, though. What else had gone wrong? That he couldn’t share.
We’d been punished, as if we’d started it, and sent to our rooms, while Mom and Dad sat at the kitchen table, among the dirty dishes, arguing—but softly, so Shot wouldn’t hear. Shot was out on the porch demolishing a rocking chair and randomly taking potshots with his hunting rifle at things in the backyard. The chickens had scattered.
I would’ve gone in to talk to Ned anyway, but I heard him moving around with purpose, which alarmed me. So I snuck over and saw he was packing a knapsack.
“What’re you doing?” The thought had struck, hard, that maybe he was running away.
“Shhhhh! Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing.”
I felt the gash in my heart again. Without Ned, I wasn’t sure I could stand things. I mean, I know now I could, but I was a large, powerful child who thought she was weak and puny.
Ned smiled in the rough light of the lamp by his nightstand.
“Not leaving, if that’s what you think. Just an expedition. I’ve got a good lead. I’ll be back by morning. Promise.”
It had begun to rain, hard, and Shot had decided to start taking out his anger on random stuff in the barn. We could hear him shouting over the rain.
“The ravines will flood if it keeps up,” I said. At the very least they’d be too muddy. “How’re you going to see?”
“Saved up. Look.” He took a miner’s headlamp out of his backpack.
At the time, I thought it was cool in a mysterious expedition way. Brave. Now it just seems sad, pointless. Anyone at all could have seen him coming.
The rain became a squall, hit the windows with a rattle and slap.
“Don’t go,” I said.
Ned took the measure of me. I remember that. He stopped, took my “Don’t go” seriously. Maybe because I hadn’t said it before. It wasn’t premonition. It was common sense.
“I have to,” he said.
Have to? But I thought I knew what he meant from the quaver I’d seen. That feeling inside that if you don’t escape, even for a little while, you’ll start screaming and you won’t stop. That there has to be something better, so you try to get somewhere better. Even if it won’t last.
I relented, or gave in, nodded, and said, “Okay, but you’ll tell me what you find when you get back? Wake me up. Promise?”
Ned smiled in the way that felt like a hug. “Yeah, I’ll tell you.” But he never would.
* * *
When I told someone Ned’s story, like my husband, or parts blurted out of me drunk at bars … I knew it came out drenched in sentiment, lingered on some rough edges while sanding off others. But it was my story, and it was true. Or one overlay of the truth, depending on the day, the month, or the things that you remember that swim up unbidden or that you try to dredge up, afraid you’re going to forget forever. And you become someone else again, and the story changes yet again.
* * *
The next morning, I woke up to the light, the storm over. I hadn’t slept at first, but then had slept like I was dead. I was worried. Ned wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t in the kitchen. My parents looked at me blankly when I asked if they’d seen him. Shot was dead drunk, asleep somewhere.
Ned wasn’t in the barn or the backyard. But when I went down to the creek behind the house, I found him. Lying there, curled up, on the sandy bank.
I remember all the air went out of me and I fell like a sack. I fell, and kept falling. But then I thought maybe he was still alive, and I got up and ran to his body.
He was soaked by the storm, face slack, one hand reaching out. Later, the autopsy would find water in his lungs.
Those blue eyes were open, but dull and staring off into the distance. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t do anything. The grief was ripping through me, tearing me into pieces.
But even then, there by the creek, my first thought was Shot. That Shot had killed him.
Which is why, two years later, I murdered Shot.
PART 3
SALAMANDER
LIFEBOAT
[68]
A handful of months after I jumped off the balcony of Silvina’s apartment, I sat on a stool in a dive bar somewhere remote down the coast, my cane hanging from a hook by my knees. Remote the way your phone doesn’t always get reception and places are called towns, but it’s mostly a gas station and a convenience store and maybe a kiosk that’s the police station. Something you could run over in a pickup truck.
I sat at the bar—a bar, any bar—and drank, knowing I could never return to my home. The wound I couldn’t solve with painkillers. My daughter would grow up and forget me. She would actively try to forget me. And it would be easy because I’d made it easy. My husband would remarry, move on with his life. He would find someone the exact opposite of me, raise another family. I wouldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d be dead by then. Tracked down by Vilcapampa’s men or a capricious “Jack” or Langer. Or maybe I’d die before all of that, from the accumulation of injuries.
I sat there, feeling the burn on the back of my neck despite the vodka shots. That throb. The flat smoke aftertaste on my clothes, the soft stale reek of that, and I drank more. They might’ve taken Hellbender’s gun from me, but I’d acquired another easily enough. Concealed carry, no permit. I called it my “Fusk” because I’d gotten the same type he’d pulled on me. A lifetime ago.
What concerned me most: keeping my hands hidden under the bartop to obscure from the bartender the way I couldn’t stop my fingers from moving. A limp folks thought understandable, familiar. They’d seen it before. Grandparents. Veterans of foreign wars. But bartenders, I’d found, took spider fingers as a sign you were unstable or alcoholic … and unstable people were trouble. Fears over pandemic and the vagueness of that, of how little was known about its spread, made spider fingers even less attractive.
My fingers were like creatures in search of a piano, but maybe the better lie was that they could never stop trying to work, as if they felt the rest of me would stop functioning otherwise. And, somehow, they were connected to the condition of my left leg. The more my fingers wandered, the more the leg hurt.
I never drink (except I do). I don’t like bars (except I do). I just needed to be someone else for a while (except I need to be someone else all the time). Besides, you might overhear
something useful in a bar. You might even get to show the bartender an ancient photo of an Argentine woman or a more recent one—a newspaper clipping with a group shot that had “R.S.” in it.
Seen this one? How about this one? Nope. No. Never. Mostly I showed Silvina’s photo to old people who said they’d never lived anywhere else. Vain hope. But it passed the time.
Alcohol was my only available health care. Mixed with a furtive duck into a clinic, if it was far enough out in the sticks.
Always, every moment, I kept wondering about Silvina, even as I hated her for what she’d let happen to me, or done to me … if Silvina would know what to do next. If Silvina would’ve been better at putting the pieces back together.
Some bars, I’ve found, people rarely leave you alone for long. Under the squint and crinkle and shadowy rubble of bad lights, a shadow approached me, like a swaying statue, as I downed another shot.
“You look like you—”
I reached out and, swiveling on the stool, pulled him close by his jacket. I punched him hard in the stomach with my other hand, closed in a fist. I felt my knuckles hard and already raw against the flab of his paunch and punched him again. Gasped at the flash of agony running up my leg from putting all my weight on it. Stupid. Forgetful.
Then I released him, as the putrid expulsion of his breath washed over me, and he was rolling there on the floor, along with the barstool he’d taken with him. Entangled with some short mop or other cleaning implement that’d been leaning against the bar. Almost like there was an undertow.
“Why’d you do that, woman?” he whined. “Why?”
Maybe because I was weary of being called “woman.” Or weary of being talked to while I drank or because my fingers needed something to distract them. Maybe because I was a mean person or because channeling Shot was, irony, self-preservation in these post-balcony times. Not getting to the gym wasn’t great for my mood, either.
I grabbed my cane from the hook, brandished it as I brought my stool to the far corner of the bar, so I could see everyone and everything, including the bathrooms and the front door.
The bartender was a bright owl staring at me motionless. He looked like he’d seen something new after a month of only the usual. I guess he expected me to leave, but the “bar” was hardly a business and at the end of a dirt road in a forest of strange, gnarled trees with a milky-looking bog beyond. I didn’t think the place had a license, and I had more than just one gun on me, actually. Along with two knives, one in an ankle sheath and one stuck in my money belt, under my dull-red lumberjack shirt. I’d left most of my weapons back at the houseboat.
I asked for another shot. He poured it, and the man on the floor receded, maybe said something more or maybe he didn’t. But I still didn’t care, and maybe the three men in the corner playing a clumsy game of cutthroat pool snickered at him or maybe they didn’t. Main thing was, they didn’t come near me the whole rest of the night.
* * *
In the car later, under a contaminated gray-green sky, my back ached, but my shoulders were worse: that brittle shooting stab that, like random veins of lightning, wandered places unexpected and new each time. Sitting was worse than standing for my leg, something wrong with the nerves, like someone had run an iron rod through it, but leg pain I was more familiar with by then.
You never know every part of yourself because you never encounter yourself in all situations. But I’d come closer. I was a wounded beast. A creature that hurt all over. The pain cascaded, reached crescendo, lowered to a murderous hum and shudder, but never left. I could not contain it and had to live within it. I saw through it, worked through it, because I had to, because I thought I still had a purpose.
Maybe I could blame the pain for how I was a different person since the warehouse, since the balcony. Maybe not. But I wanted to kill someone. Anyone who came across my path and looked at me the wrong way.
Back in the old days, they claimed salamanders were born in fire, born to fire. That if you touched one, you, too, would be consumed by flames. But unlike the salamander, you wouldn’t survive the encounter. That a poison lived in the conflagration.
I was so much on fire all the time, I should’ve died.
[69]
Even in pain, even in a kind of limbo, I knew what felt right. I knew I felt right. More myself, even if I couldn’t define “my self.” Why should I be more comfortable in grubby diners or bars in the middle of nowhere? Did it seem more authentic than my life before?
No, it was more that all the things I thought I’d enjoyed … I hadn’t. Not really. Stripped down, I saw I’d enjoyed almost nothing and, in the end, needed so much less than I’d had. How the idea of “husband” faded, even if the idea of “daughter” didn’t. How I couldn’t tell if that was due to different kinds of guilt or just a frank admission. I wasn’t a dandelion. He wasn’t a bear. We just called each other those things in hopes the sentiment was true.
All these gray back roads that called to me, how doubling back and the walk to the houseboat I lived in now weren’t chores or a difficulty. The hawk on the wire. The deer staring from a vacant field. The mink staring at me from the side of the road, juxtaposed with dull clay and tall grasses. It wasn’t the idea of nature as Silvina saw it. Not the connection with an invisible world. But it meant something to me, moving through the wilderness. Maybe because I knew it would’ve meant something to Ned, too.
The thing that made me chuckle cleaning the Fusk or just staring at the half-burnt salamander: even as dysfunctional as it had been, I’d thought I’d needed some semblance of office camaraderie. I thought I’d needed small talk by the watercooler. The drunken Christmas party with the splayed-out table of miniature, perfectly plated appetizers.
No threat of that now. None of that was real. None of it now felt like it had ever been real.
But the growing sense of betrayal, looming—that was real.
For example, once you looked for a connection between Vilcapampa and Langer, you found it almost right away. Shell companies that colluded on both sides. The way Langer companies gave over to Vilcapampa companies’ resources Silvina couldn’t find otherwise. Most of these companies weren’t the ones Silvina had run, but some were. The way Silvina sold out Contila but let Langer slip away from the authorities. Or someone did.
I bought burner phones like they were breath mints. Tedious work, covering my tracks. Each new connection made me sadder, but also more suspicious. Silvina had needed Langer. Silvina had drawn Langer in. Vilcapampa had said she’d blackmailed him. What did that mean? Vilcapampa had meant it as proof Silvina was corrupt, but how could he be sure? Effective tactic: to accuse your enemy of the crime you had committed. Politicians did it all the time.
I settled on a scenario like a thesis, intending to poke holes in it. What if. What if Silvina got to stay in the U.S. because she gave up Langer’s organization to the authorities? Even as she played both sides because Vilcapampa Senior also engaged in wildlife trafficking? Or had at one time. And, during that period, Silvina had a desperate need to acquire or steal wildlife contraband and resell it to fund her own secret project because her family had cut her off.
Which brought me back to a question I couldn’t quite answer: Why, exactly, had Langer tried to kill me? Because of the past or because of the future?
[70]
The hardest thing—no, second hardest—I ever did was get up from beneath Silvina’s balcony. The agony of it, the painkillers Vilcapampa’s men had given me wearing off. The bullet wounds burning eyes that stared out from my body. Every time they blinked, I winced. And they wouldn’t stop blinking.
The way I landed, half in the bushes, half on concrete, bruising ribs, destroying my shoulder, some weakness in one ankle. Fractured fingers. I felt like a corpse trying to rise. Like the ground was pulling me down again.
Yet I did rise—and quickly. I ducked or rolled under the awning to the walkway, so they’d have to come down to end me. Helped that they stood up there for a while t
rying to get a bead on me. It was dark. I’d bumped my head, and my night vision was for shit. A wash. A blur, like I needed glasses. I tried to remember the area, headed in the direction of a wooded park.
The fall had gotten me free of one restraint, but the other had gotten twisted into the snapped-off plastic arm of the chair and looked like a weird, gangrenous bone dangling from my wrist.
My ankle wasn’t right. I kept tripping, feeling something give. I didn’t yet know how bad my leg was, or maybe what did the deed was walking on it after. I remember thinking these might be my last moments. Panicked that there was no time, no time left.
A person jogging past ignored me. I remember that, too. The utter banality of it. Was I clueless or was he? Except only one of us was a hulking, shambolic figure awkwardly clutching a dead salamander.
“Drunk,” I muttered to ward off evil. “Drunk,” I kept muttering when someone appeared on the sidewalk. I didn’t look back, kept waiting for a bullet in the back of the brain.
I reached the park. Heard sounds of pursuit, but something else had happened. Sirens rose, but not for me. No, of course not. The police weren’t looking for me. Yet. Vilcapampa’s men were. But I heard nothing that sounded like they were closing in. Even confused, disoriented, I found that odd. Hillman didn’t seem the type to give up like that.
At the back of the park was a shallow, overgrown creek littered with plastic bags and bottles and used needles. A sharp smell like chemicals. I followed it until the onrushing pain caught up and I lost consciousness.
I woke at dawn to a stray cat licking my face. I nudged it away, so thirsty I drank the rancid creek water. I knew I needed medical help. That parts numb felt as bad as the parts I knew were going to kill me. Soon enough, I’d be bruised all over.
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