The Bramble and the Rose

by Tom Bouman

  “We’re going to walk,” said Mr. Alan. “If I see either of you, I’ll kill you. If you follow us on the road, I’ll stop, and I’ll kill you.”

  “You got it wrong,” said the left-hand man. “I’ll shoot you like a dog.”

  “Keep steady,” said Mr. Alan to Ryan, whose gaze had strayed. “If either one moves, shoot your man where he stands. It’s you or him.” Ryan pressed the rifle’s stock into his shoulder and got ready to pull the trigger. They all stood there. The wind picked up. “All right, then.”

  Ryan and Mr. Alan backed away from the trailer, slow. Once they were down the slope and out of sight, Mr. Alan turned Ryan around with a rough hand, pointed in a direction, and whispered, “Run till you see a little green car.”

  Ryan ran, still gripping the .270 tight, whipped and torn by branches. The woods were a blur until a dirt road took shape beneath him, and there was the green car. A black king-cab pickup was parked nearby. He approached the car from behind, tapped on the driver’s window, the soul of politeness. As he did so, several gunshots snapped in the distance behind him. He yanked open the rear door, got in, and put his head down with the trash and empties back there. A young woman with a hard, pocked face turned to him from the front seat, then looked uneasily to the hill where he’d come from.

  “What am I supposed to do with you if he doesn’t make it?” said the woman, a girl, closer to Ryan’s age than Mr. Alan’s. She started the car.

  Two shots, up close.

  “There he is,” the girl said. “Shooting their tires.”

  Mr. Alan got in. “Go,” he said. The girl drove away.

  The girl’s name was Nicky. Ryan never got her last name. It was silent in the car but for Mr. Alan’s commands—turn right here, faster—and Ryan had no idea where they were going. At a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, Nicky parked and they traded the green car for a blue hatchback with rust on its doors. As Nicky pulled out, Ryan noticed the road ran parallel to a set of train tracks. Something like sapphires glinted among the trees—little glass globes in rows on falling-down electric poles.

  Silence, then Nicky said to Mr. Alan, “How does it feel sitting up front for once?” To Ryan, who had only just allowed himself to peer out of the window, she said, “Usually he’s like you, lying down in the backseat. He never drives.”

  Mr. Alan lowered himself and seemed to hide beneath his hat. “Quiet,” he said.

  “You taking me home?” said Ryan.

  “Quiet.”

  They drove into the hills, into the woods, and left the car a short way up a logging trail. There were no houses anywhere. Mr. Alan held a hand out for the rifle. Ryan took a couple steps back.

  “Bud, it’s over. You give it to me.”

  “It’s not yours, though.”

  “I’m not going to keep it.”

  Ryan stayed quiet. They stood there, looking at each other. “If you point that at me or her …” Alan said, shaking his head.

  “No,” said Ryan. “But I don’t know you.”

  Mr. Alan laughed softly. “If you don’t know me by now.” He pointed down the road and said, “You first, Farrell.”

  “It’s Conkins.”

  “After you, Conkins.”

  NICKY HAD GONE OUT the back door and up the hill to the ladies’, as there was no working plumbing in the house. Ryan stayed quiet as Alan explained his version of events, skirting certain truths. The boy broke in to say something here and there. Alan claimed that the other two men had asked him up to the freight trailer to put the fear of God in an upstart dealer from north of the border. Not to kill anyone, least of all a boy. If I was going to accept Alan’s help, there would be other lies, and meanings that changed in the light.

  “Who was it asked you there?” I said to Alan.

  Alan said nothing. Then, “Conkins, go stand guard on the porch.” Once Ryan had left the house, Alan said, “It’s not me you’ve got to worry about now. They can’t run me, and they know it. I might have done a thing or two for them in years past, but never a kid. And not one of our own,” he said, looking at me with meaning. “You’re close. They’re panicking, and people are getting killed. They wouldn’t have taken the boy in the first place if they’d been thinking straight.” He shook his head. “They finally caught on that I’m safer dead. Evidently that’s what they think about you, too. Time to disappear.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” I said, knowing very well.

  “You know.”

  “They’ll kill you if they can. Why protect them?”

  “Oh, I’ll not protect them. I’ll kill them. If they come for me, it won’t be me to blame.” Alan’s voice rose above a murmur, and his words came a little faster. “I don’t pay no taxes. I don’t have a driver license. I don’t know what my social number is. I live a certain way. If I start doing things different, who knows what kind of shit I’ll get into. I trust my way. You think I trust you?” He shook his head. “The men looking for the boy and me now, them I trust to do as expected.” Alan began rolling a cigarette.

  “We need to get the boy to safety. Then I can help.”

  “What’re you waiting for?” he said.

  “The state police think I killed somebody. I didn’t like the way it looked, and I ran. I can’t go back until I sort it out. I don’t know who to trust myself.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry about Shelly. She had spirit.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Alan peered at me over the top of his glasses. “She didn’t mean anything to you?”

  The question slipped in like a needle. “She did.”

  “She never meant much to that husband of hers.”

  “Clearly.” I watched Alan perfect his cigarette and light it. I said, “Did you do the work?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “Can you take the boy to my father?”

  Alan laughed.

  “Can the girl?” I said.

  “She’s my ride out of here. How about your wife?”

  “No.”

  “I understand. She’d be followed anyway. Your old man knows the place, and he can handle himself. Give him a call. Better: call my old man, have him meet yours. The cops may be listening to your phones.”

  By this time, Nicky had returned and was standing by the kitchen door. Like always, her cell phone was in her hand to fidget with. I asked her to borrow it, and she looked alarmed.

  “I’m not going to look through it.”

  “Hand it over,” Alan said, and she did. Alan gave the landline number for his parents, and I made the call. Bobbie picked up.

  I said who I was, and asked that if Mike was free, could he call over to Aunt Medbh’s place where my family was, and, using their old names for hunting spots, tell Father where we were?

  “The boy, too?”

  “He’s with me.”

  “Blessings.”

  “If you could get word to my wife that I’m all right …”

  As we spoke, the phone lit up and came alive in my hand like a fish. I nearly dropped it, finished the call, and handed it back to Nicky.

  “They should be on their way,” I said. “We have some time.”

  As we waited, Alan looked up at the ceiling and smoked. “I came to Tiernan’s Gap in a gray van,” he said. “The home was a couple gray boxes on a gray hill. At that time I still thought they could get me out. That’s the only way I had of getting by. It wasn’t going to be any long time, it was a mistake and I’d be home. They processed me in and threw away my shoes.

  “The first day I don’t think I said one word. I just watched. The nail-biters, the loons, they had their own hallway at night. Nobody was trying to teach them, nobody was trying to correct them. They were just there. Sometimes they’d get wild, but usually not in hate. It wasn’t personal. You just had to watch for it.

  “The everyday kids were … some, you wondered why. You could see their real lives—the kids they really we
re at home—cowering inside them. I’ve come to think that the more you showed your real self in that place, the sooner somebody’d beat it out of you. Some were violent, like it was a thing they did. Some kids in there were violence itself. It was what they were. Black, white, brown, whatever. All in there together, separated out by tribe, oil and water.

  “What do you do when you’re scared all the time and catching beatings? I mean there were kids who’d probably killed over a corner to sell crack-rock from. You catch a beating, and if you talk, the next time maybe your arm is broke, maybe worse. You don’t bring it to some caseworker who can’t get a job teaching gym. How many beatings can you take before the kid you were is gone? You go back to your tribe, to safety in numbers. But I was raised that my only tribe was my family. Don’t trust nobody else. So I got in with the loons during the day and tried to ride it out. That was one way to do it.

  “By the end of the first week I’d had enough. I just walked out the front door; it wasn’t hard. How I was going to get all the way back home in my slippers, I didn’t know. It was coming on winter. What I was going to do at night to stay warm, I didn’t know. I had no food. I just … saw the door and went. Around back to the trees and gone. The cops caught me hitchhiking that same afternoon.

  “I tried it a couple more times. By then they had a guard to grab me by the ear if I put a toe out of line. Sometimes I’d make them chase me, shut the whole fuckin place down. I was fast too. They started adding weeks onto my placement. Punishing the whole crew for shit I did alone. My folks came to beg me, just stay put and finish up. Danny and Jennie came. The boys had things to say about my family. I swallowed it.

  “What really ended all that was, they had a small gym with a couple basketball hoops. It had one of those dividers that folded like an accordion, you know? I hid inside the housing. There was a place where I could stand straight. By nighttime, they had the whole building turned out, they had the cops out looking, all the kids had to stay in their rooms. My plan was, there was a bay door in the back of the home, where the kitchen and storeroom was. If I could get there, I’d just press the green button and go. It started to quiet down just when I thought I couldn’t stand no more. They probably thought I’d made it out by then. So out I go, my legs are dead. I get to the bay door, didn’t think I would, press the green button, door goes up, alarm goes off, I run, but I get tackled.

  “The next day, they call us all in and say because of what I did, nobody can use the gym for a month. That didn’t put me in good with anyone. A little later I get caught in my room and beat. The staff was nowhere. I thought I might die. Kids was standing around. When I say beat, I mean stomped. I could feel the head shots knocking the light out of me. I started drifting off somewhere new.

  “The first boy who stepped in and threw a punch for me was a kid who’d gotten sent there for … I think fighting, assault. John Blaine. In comes Nate Hancock, some others. One of those kids surprised me, one who I thought brought his home with him. Joshua Bray. Not the likeliest kid. It took all the staff and real cops to sort that one out. But I fought, and after that, I survived.”

  “So you owe them?”

  “For that, and for something down the line, something out in the world I had to do for the family. At first I owed them, then it was something they had on me. Not no more.” He let silence fill the room, then, “I don’t feel good about what happened today.”

  “My nephew’s alive because of you.”

  “That’s what I mean. We got away too easy. We ought to be dead.”

  Ryan stepped into the kitchen. “Quiet out,” he said.

  “What kind of quiet?” Alan asked.

  Nicky lurked by the door, flipping her cell phone open and shut.

  “Honey, what you standing there for?” Alan said. “Step in.”

  She stood there trembling, said, “I’m sorry,” and ran.

  Alan dropped to the floor. A shot knocked through the empty window where he had been and puffed into the opposite wall. I dove to the floor, and so did Ryan.

  “Let’s get upstairs,” said Alan, crawling past me to the living room. “Henry, you go,” he said. “Let’s see if they’ve got a view in.”

  For an instant I thought of sending Ryan up first, then saw reason and went myself, scrambling around rotten places to the landing. No shots followed me.

  “Go, boy.”

  Ryan was slower, and a line of semiautomatic fire tapped into the wall above him. He moved quicker then, and reached the landing.

  “Alan,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’ll make that trip,” he said. “You two set up front and back. If you miss them, I got them.” Then, to himself, “I wish they would come in.”

  From what I’d been told, there were two men after us. The shooter with the semiauto had been trained. I took a post in a front room where I could see from the empty window frames. Ryan, I set up in a back room with two windows looking out over the tangle of apple trees and multiflora rose below. I told him not to take a shot unless he was sure of himself. Better to leave them guessing.

  I tilted my head out of the window and felt a group of bullets pass all around me. It was so precise in the dark that I had to think night scopes were in use. If they had thermal, we’d be dead before long. I fell to the floor as another six or seven shots thudded into the rotting wall that had been my cover.

  “Ryan, down!” I said. “Don’t move.”

  I crawled down the hallway toward him, and signaled for him to join me where there was more than one wall between us and the guns outside. The floorboards creaked beneath us. There was silence below, then two careful pistol shots in quick succession from different rooms in the house. Alan was still with us. Above my head, a cord hung down from an attic trapdoor. Slowly I stood, and slowly I pulled the cord, which broke off in my hand, leaving a foot of length. I jumped, took what was left, and yanked, and with my other hand gripped the edge of the door and pulled it down, along with a ladder and a rain of dust and droppings. When that cleared, I saw night sky through the house’s rafters. I took the .270, sent the boy up with the borrowed revolver, and closed the trapdoor after him.

  The shots were coming from the woods, from a distance. I could see only one muzzle as it came alive. Below, gunfire rattled into the house in neat semiauto bursts; first through the front door, then through a window. I emptied myself of thought and life, and when I saw the flash again, I sent a shot after it. There was quiet, and then the gunfire started again from a new position. I had gotten close. Maybe four shots left in the .270. I needed closer targets.

  Downstairs, Alan was being driven back. He never complained, but his pistol shots were moving steadily toward the kitchen at the rear of the house. There would be someone out there too, lying in wait. I smelled what I thought at first was gun smoke. I looked down, and saw that Alan had tipped at least one lamp onto the rotting floor and lit the oil. Lines of fire flickered, creating screens of heat and smoke around his position.

  “I’ve had as much of this as I can stand,” he said to me. “Get the boy. We’ll head down to the basement and take them close in.”

  “We got to run.”

  “They can see us in here,” Alan said. “They’ll see us out there. Get the boy.”

  I climbed the ladder. It took only an instant to realize that Ryan had left the attic, and a moment more to see he was nowhere on the roof. As I pulled my head back inside the house and fell to the attic floor, shots landed above me.

  I hoped the boy was running. I didn’t go thinking about it; I fell out of the attic onto the landing, took the stairs four at a time with splinters kicking up all around me from the rounds punching in. The downstairs rooms flickered orange. A door leading to the basement was open. Through the kitchen and out the back door I went, rolling to a stop in the overgrown yard. No shots. Ryan may have drawn the second man away. I stood and ran to where the trees grew thickest, up away from the swamp that hemmed the farmstead in, away from the gunfire. There were tw
o shots ahead and I changed course, screaming out something I can’t remember now.

  A man launched at me and I hit the dirt, already grappling for a way to end his life. The coat I wore slowed his knife down, but the blade still opened me up, dragging over several of my ribs. The knife flicked out of my chest and into my cheek, just below my eye. My face poured blood. The rifle lay useless. But I got a hand on his knife arm, at the wrist. No handgun or anything bigger I could see, so he’d probably shot all his ammunition. He got on top of me and I saw what I already knew, that it was Terry Ceallaigh. He landed one good punch to the side of my head. He wound up for another and I turned my head flat as it hit, his fist skidding across my face and dimming my eyes and ears. He fell forward, his weight to his shoulder, his arm across my face, and I got my arm around his throat. I wrenched a leg out from under him and hooked it around one of his, and held him tight to me. Gravity was on my side. My strength was failing, but so was his breath. I held on. He thrashed, then slowed, and stopped. I held on. He seized once or twice more, like a dying fly, his knife hand opened, and I threw the blade somewhere into the woods. I shoved him off of me and quickly went through his person. Two small knives and a multi-tool. I felt his pulse at the neck. I circled my hands around his throat to cut him off.

  Before Miss Julie came along, I had lost the feeling of life as an open, changing thing. It was just gone, black, like a hammer. It had been years since I knew what it was to be young, with your senses blazing in harmony with everything. And this man found a girl who had almost none of that left, and then took what little she had for himself. He took Carl Dentry away from his wife, and maybe Shelly from her kids. He wanted to take me away from my people and my light. But, for his children, and for my own child waiting, I let go of his throat, and watched the blood in his face seep back into the rest of him.

  I reached for my handcuffs; they weren’t there.

  When I stood, the slash in my side pulled open. I called out to Ryan, and heard silence. No movement in the trees around me, no gunfire from the house. I called Ryan’s name again, and he answered me from up the slope.