The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  * * *

  After dinner, Timmy asks John to read him a book. John wants to say, That’s not really my thing, but Jenna shoots him a hopeful look, so he says, “Sure.”

  The boy takes him by the hand and leads him into the living room. John sits on the futon and says, “Whoa,” when Timmy climbs onto his lap.

  “What?” Timmy says.

  And John says, “Nothing.” He isn’t sure what to do with his hands, so he lets them flop to his sides. “What are we reading, anyway?”

  The boy shows him the book: Good Night, Gorilla.

  “Never heard of it,” John says. “But okay. Let’s give it a shot.”

  He clears his throat and cracks the cover. But there are no words. He turns to the next page, then the next. Nothing there either. The whole thing consists of illustrations tracking a gorilla who escapes his cage and then the zoo but then, instead of going wild, he chooses to help the other animals, busting them all out. “Well, you don’t need me for this,” John says and Timmy says, “Yes, I do. Read it.”

  “How can I read it? There’s no words.”

  “You have to make your own words,” the boy says. “You have to write your own story. And you have to make it good.”

  John does his best to make it good.

  Soon, the sky is black over Northfall. A bottle of merlot is empty. The dishes have been washed and placed in the rack to dry. The Garth Brooks CD has repeated itself five times. Timmy is asleep on the couch, curled in a tight ball, with Good Night, Gorilla clutched against his chest.

  “This has been fun,” Jenna says.

  “Yeah,” John says and nods toward Timmy. “He’s a good kid. You’ve done a good job.”

  “I can’t imagine life without him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s something about having a child.”

  “And what’s that something?”

  She keeps her eyes fully on the boy and chews at her lower lip, nibbling away the dead skin. “I’d do anything to keep him safe, give him a good life.” Now she turns her eyes to him. “Kind of funny to say, being married to a cop, but . . . I didn’t feel safe . . . before.”

  There is a long silence between them. John is thankful for the stereo then. Without it, he feels like Jenna might have been able to hear the thoughts churning around in his head. He understands what she’s implying. That she feels that he—John—will always shield her, protect her, which is true, but also that he is some kind of hero, which is not. She treats him with the same pathetic hopefulness that she does this house—prettying up his potential when, really, he’s a wreck.

  He can think of nothing but the Gunderson boy. He has thought of little else since leaving Northfall. Sometimes flinching. Cursing himself. Even punching himself for what he had done.

  That night five years ago, John had drunk his way through a bottle of whiskey and snorted enough oxy to topple an elephant. The poker game was held in an old horse barn. Black flies and moths swirled in the light. Two men with holstered pistols stood in the shadows, monitoring the table. John had lost over thirty thousand dollars. And Henry Gunderson hoped to hustle more out of him. He kept filling his glass, kept pushing more money to the center of the table, fattening the pot. When John tried to fold, saying he was tapped out and had better call it a night, Henry offered to let him keep going on credit. “I know who your family is. I know how deep those pockets go. You put up some collateral and we can keep on playing. I can’t be on a hot streak forever. Soon enough your luck’s bound to turn.” But it hadn’t.

  John doesn’t remember a lot about that night, just flashes. An overturned table. Drawn pistols. A fist to his gut that knocked the wind and bile out of him. A car chase that ended up with him spinning out into a ditch. His eventual arrival at Gunderson Woods. A shotgun blast, another shotgun blast. Screams that eventually went silent. A house that seemed to warp and wheel in circles as he tore his way through it, trying to avoid the sight of the bodies on the floor.

  But he does remember the boy. He remembers tripping down the stairs of the back porch and landing in the dew-soaked grass and looking up and finding Hawkin before him. Huddled in the sandbox. Was he in third grade then? Fourth? Old enough to have heard and understood everything that happened inside.

  John was desperate. He’d wanted only to retrieve what he felt had been stolen from him, even if he himself was responsible for its loss. And he had gone too far. He was drunk and he was high and he had been awake more than forty-eight hours, but that didn’t excuse him. He felt only more disgust for his weakness. There was a chain of stupid, regrettable, reckless decisions that bound together his mother’s death and the blood spilled that night. He had achieved what he thought he’d deserved all along: the very summit of disgust and guilt and culpability.

  It wasn’t the murder that bothered him so much—Henry Gunderson was worthless—it was the erasure of a family. He had ruined that boy’s life. Stripped him of his childhood. And now he only wants to give that back. If Hawkin was indeed in some basement lab, then John may as well have locked him up there. He can’t go back in time, but maybe he can repair the future.

  “I’m going to put him to bed, okay?” Jenna says, and John says, “I’m sorry?” and then, “Oh, okay.”

  When she bends over and pulls the boy into a hug, Timmy mumbles in his sleep and brings a tiny fist to his eye and she says, “Shhh.” Her feet whisper when she carries him away.

  John rises from the futon and paces a half circle. He doesn’t know what will come next. He wants Jenna and feels like he doesn’t deserve her. She’s always thought he was someone he wasn’t, isn’t. He feels like he’s settled into something both familiar and alien, an alternate timeline in which he doesn’t belong. He picks up his wineglass, stained purple, and knocks down the dregs of it. Then he hits the power button on the stereo. Instead of silence, he hears laughter. Drunken whoops. Aerosmith. Across the street, at the apartment complex, the party is still going. He has a feeling it never stops.

  He senses his heart rate jacking up. Over the past few years, he has made every effort to detach himself from emotion, to contain himself, to choose restraint, but something about tonight has made his feelings stir up and spill out. That old rage. But something else. Something like sadness mixed with needy optimism.

  He goes to the front door and opens it and lets the noise and the cold night air play over him. He looks back into the warm orange glow of the living room and hesitates, but only for a second. The darkness calls.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, after Jenna gets Timmy settled, she cleans up in the bathroom and opens another bottle of wine and carries it into the living room and says, “Now, where were we?”

  In response the front door swings open with a chill autumn wind. She can see a fire burning across the street. And she can hear someone crying out in pain. Her grip tightens around the bottle when she steps onto the porch.

  When she was nine, her father left. He was one of those men who rarely shaved and never cleaned out the gutters. The only thing he took care of was his car, a blue Firebird. The sound of rattling ice cubes, to this day, makes her think of him, because he was always carrying around a thermos full of rum and Coke. He worked for Frontier Metals, driving a loader. He was always either sweet or silent to Jenna, but he hurt her mother. More than once. It was never something Jenna saw until the next morning. An arm in a cast. A lost tooth.

  Summers, Jenna used to paint on an easel she kept in the front yard. One day, while she was working on a storm cloud that rained hearts and smiley faces, she realized that her father was leaving and maybe for good. He was tromping back and forth from the house to the driveway and shoving his clothes, a lamp, a bowling ball into the car’s open trunk. She dipped her brush into the red pot of paint and hurried over to his Firebird and painted a heart on the bumper. She thought maybe, when her father saw it later, he would remember his love for her and return home.

  He didn’t return home, of course. But yea
rs later, when she was fourteen, in downtown Northfall, she saw the blue Firebird with the faded red heart on the bumper roll past and she raced after it, thinking her father had finally come back to her. While it waited at the stoplight, she hurried up to the open window and peered in, and a man younger than her father had been when he left grinned back at her and said, “Hey, girlie.” It was as though he had returned to her changed.

  At first she wondered if the same would be true of John. He dressed differently. He talked differently, every motion and word like a tensed muscle, a clenched jaw, as if he were trying constantly to keep himself locked and knotted up. Was his familiar face just another bumper with a faded heart on it? But now she knows—for sure—that he is the man she fell in love with, the man who would always protect her.

  He didn’t say goodbye when he left Northfall five years ago. And he didn’t say goodbye tonight, but he left her his own kind of gift. Across the street, at the apartment building, tires are slashed and windshields broken. The engine of one truck is alive with flame. An inky-black smoke makes the air taste like burned plastic. Bottles of beer have been shattered and their foam bubbles along the gutters. Men lie on the lawn and sidewalk. She isn’t sure whether they are alive or dead, but they are quiet except for a keening wail that comes off one of them.

  “Good night, Johnny,” she says and smiles and hugs her arms around herself.

  26

  * * *

  The first thing Victoria thinks when she wakes up—blinded by a flashlight beam in her face—is It’s him. Thaddeus Gunn. He’s come for her. She thought she would be safe by keeping quiet, by writing out her plan to Wade on a pad of paper instead of speaking to him, but the surveillance caught her nonetheless. Maybe there are cameras nested in the light fixtures or behind the mirrors.

  Sleep is so rare for her. She has trouble falling into dreams but even more trouble rising out of them. Exhaustion pulls at her hard now, and she muddles through the confusion of this waking nightmare.

  She scrabbles back against the headboard, convinced she sees Thaddeus grinning at her from the shadows even as another voice says, “Don’t scream.” A deeper, rougher voice than Gunn’s. “And don’t move.”

  Wade cries out and lurches for the baseball bat he keeps under the bed. But the man is already on him, as swift as a shadow, backhanding her husband across the face and shoving him hard into the mattress. “I said don’t move.”

  He keeps the flashlight swinging from Wade’s face to hers and back, ruining their night vision. She throws an arm up and squints through her fingers. “I’m not going to hurt you as long as you do what I say,” he says. “I just want answers.”

  Now she is fully awake, a headache gnawing at the space between her eyes. “Answers to what?” she says.

  “About the work you’re doing for the DOD.”

  Wade continues to struggle and calls out, “Help!” But the word is cut short as the man strikes him again, this time in the stomach, silencing him.

  Wade gags and retches as he tries to inhale through the pain. It is a muddy sound. Then he thrashes again and the stranger bashes him in the ear with the flashlight’s butt. “You’re trying to be the hero, but there’s no point, old man. All you have to do is let your wife talk to me and I’ll leave.”

  “Wade, honey,” she says. “Stop fighting. Stop! Wade!”

  Wade listens to her. He always does. He goes still. His throat whistles raggedly as he tries to find his breath.

  The stranger steps back, the flashlight held before him. His voice sounds young, brash, with a bite behind it. Like a pit bull barking at the end of a chain. She can’t quite see him, but there’s a misshapen quality to his silhouette that makes her believe he’s wearing pantyhose over his face. “I know your name, Victoria Lennon, and I know your CV. But I don’t know what you’re doing in Northfall. I don’t know what you’re doing working for the Department of Defense.”

  She brings her finger to her lips.

  “What?” he says. “Are we playing charades?”

  She cups a hand to her ear and then points to the ceiling and then returns her finger to her lips.

  “Oh,” he says, “you think they’re listening. You’re right to be paranoid. This place has got more alarms and surveillance on it than your standard bank. But not to worry. I clipped the power and overrode the security system on the way in.”

  She gapes at him another moment before saying, “Whom do you work for?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Everybody works for somebody.”

  “I work for me.”

  “Have you been hired by another country? Or a private company?”

  “Did you hear me?” the stranger says. “I work for me.”

  “Why do you want to know, then?”

  “Because from what I hear, you’ve got a kid named Hawkin Gunderson locked up in that facility outside of town.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “People talk.”

  “No one talks. Not at this level of classified.”

  The stranger waits another beat before responding. “There are other ways of hearing.”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to ​—”

  “Do you have Hawkin?” He kicks the bed frame. “Do you? Answer the question.”

  “Even if we did, why do you care? What do you want out of this?”

  There is a moment of hesitation before the voice says, “I want to get him out of there.”

  “And what then? You deliver him to whoever’s paying you?”

  “I told you ​—”

  “You work for yourself. Yes, yes, yes.”

  “I’ve got my reasons, and I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

  “Sorry.” She crosses her arms. “But I’m frankly old and exhausted and embittered enough that your threats and bullying don’t really mean anything. If you expect me to give you something, you’re going to have to give me something.”

  The stranger blasts out an impatient sigh. “I want to save him. Okay? I’m going to save him.” He says this with plain sincerity, as if it’s obvious, as if no other possibility is imaginable.

  There is something about his tone. She tries but can’t not believe him. Her mouth jerks into a smile. She takes a steadying breath and reaches out and finds Wade’s hand. Their fingers knit together and she squeezes.

  “What if I told you,” she says, “that I wanted that too?”

  27

  * * *

  It is the smell that makes Stacie’s paddle go still. The smell of rosewater that has turned. A faint rot. Her father asks her what the matter is, and she says, “Do you smell that?”

  “What?”

  “That.” But it’s already gone.

  They are on a small lake, maybe ten square acres, ringed by jack pines. Her father takes a deep series of sniffs and the canoe drifts for half a minute, zippering through the water. “I don’t smell any ​—”

  “There!” And again, she catches a whiff, stronger now than before. Heavy and moist. She is reminded of the time she opened a cabinet full of potatoes so rotten they sat in a puddle of gray slime. Or the time a possum ate poison and crawled underneath their porch to die.

  “Yeah,” her father says, “Okay. I’m with you. Whew.”

  They change course and align with the breeze, trying to find the source of the smell. The canoe eventually scrapes bottom and they set down their paddles and climb onto the rocky shore. Somewhere within the thickly shadowed stand of pines, crows cackle.

  “If memory serves,” her father says as he tents his undershirt over his nose, “there’s a trail near here. A five-miler that runs between three campgrounds and tracks back to Battlecreek Lane.”

  Stacie pulls a sleeve of Starbursts from her pocket and offers him a yellow square.

  “What’s that for?” he says.

  “There’s a reason a lot of coroners chew gum. I’d rather smell something sweet than something rotten.”


  “No, thank you.” He waves it away. “Always thought that stuff tastes like you’re sucking on a clown.”

  She unpeels the wrapper and pops the candy in her mouth. She lets it soften on her tongue a moment before licking her upper lip. She can still smell the rot, but it’s at least hidden behind a sugary tang.

  “Something’s sure dead,” he says. “But probably it’s just a deer. Maybe a coon.”

  “Yeah,” she says as they start into the woods and enter the cool shade of the trees. “Probably.”

  Twigs snap. Brush clings. Branches swat. In a small clearing up ahead, the crows hop and flutter in trees like impatient shadows. Their croaking grows louder as Stacie grows nearer. Finally they take wing and depart with a rusty kak-kak-kak of complaint.

  Here they find a four-wheeler, its bright red detailing dirtied by bird shit and fallen pine needles. “Well, this isn’t allowed out here,” her father says. “No ATVs permitted in the BWCA.” As if he is going to issue a citation.

  Stacie says she thinks that’s hardly a thing to worry about right now.

  “No?” he says. “No, maybe not.”

  She circles the ATV. The fireweed remains roughed and flattened behind it, the trail maybe a few days old, leading off into the woods. The front left wheel has sunk into a depression and the metal of the front guard is dented, bent, caught on a log. The smell here is profoundly ripe and she gags more than once.

  A fly lands on her arm and she shakes it off. Another grazes her cheek and she blows at it. More and more of them orbit her head with a buzz. They should be mostly dead at this time of year, but these ones have managed to hold out, unable to give up on the feast. She hears the whirring of many wings and locates the source. “Oh dear.”