by Joe Hill
Out
THE YARD WAS SO OVERGROWN IT WAS LIKE RUNNING THROUGH A tangle of wire. The grass made snares to catch her ankles. There was really no yard to speak of, only an expanse of wild brush and weeds, and forest beyond.
She did not so much as glance at the garage or back at the house, and she did not run for the driveway. She didn’t dare test that long straight road, for fear he might be parked along it, spying for her. Instead she ran for the trees. She did not see that there was an embankment until she was going over it, a three-foot drop to the forest floor.
She hit hard on her toes, felt the back of her right thigh grab with a painful force. She crashed into a drift of dry branches, struggled free of them, and dropped onto her back.
The pines towered above her. They swayed in the wind. The ornaments that hung in them twinkled and blinked and made flashing rainbows, so it was as if she had been lightly concussed.
When she had her breath back, she rolled over, got on her knees, looked across the yard.
The big garage door was open, but the Rolls-Royce was gone.
She was surprised—almost disappointed—at how little smoke there was. She could see a steady gray film rising from the rear of the house. Smoke spilled from the open mouth of the front door. But she could not hear anything burning from here and could not see any flame. She had expected the house to be a bonfire.
Then Vic was up and moving again. She could not run, but she could hurry in a limping jog. Her lungs felt baked, and every other step there was a fresh ripping sensation in the back of her right thigh. She was less aware of her innumerable other hurts and aches: the cold burn on her right wrist, the steady stabbing pain in her left eyeball.
She stayed parallel to the drive, keeping it fifty feet off on her left, ready to duck behind brush or a tree trunk if she saw the Rolls. But the dirt lane led straight and true away from the little white house, with no sign of the old car, or the man Charles Manx, or the dead boy who traveled with him.
She followed the narrow dirt road for an uncertain period. She had lost her usual sense of time passing, did not have any idea, then or later, how long she made her way through the woods. Each moment was the longest single moment of her life until the next. It seemed to her later that her staggering escape through the trees was as long as all the rest of her childhood. By the time she saw the highway, she had left her childhood well behind her. It smoldered and burnt to nothing, along with the rest of the Sleigh House.
The embankment leading up to the highway was higher than the one she had fallen down, and she had to climb on her hands and knees, grabbing clumps of grass to hoist herself up. As she reached the top of the slope, she heard a rat-a-tat buzzing sound, the whine and blast of an approaching motorcycle. It was coming from her right, but by the time she found her feet, it was already past, big guy in black on a Harley.
The highway ran on a straight line through forest, beneath a confusion of stormy clouds. To her left were lots of high blue hills, and for the first time Vic had a sense of being somewhere high up herself; in Haverhill, Massachusetts, she rarely gave a second thought to altitude, but now she understood that it wasn’t the clouds that were low but herself that was high.
She reeled out onto the blacktop, chasing the Harley, shouting, and waving her arms. He won’t hear, she thought; there was no way, not over the rowdy tear of his own engine. But the big man looked back over his shoulder, and the front wheel of his Harley wobbled, before he straightened out and swerved to the side of the highway.
He didn’t have a helmet on and was a fat man with beard on both of his chins, his brown hair curled at the nape of his neck in a luxuriant mullet. Vic ran toward him, the pain stabbing her in the back of the right leg with each step. When she reached the motorcycle, she did not hesitate or explain herself but threw one leg over the seat, getting her arms around his waist.
His eyes were amazed and a little frightened. He had black leather gloves with the fingers snipped off and a black leather jacket, but the coat was unzipped to show a Weird Al T-shirt, and from this close she could see he was not the grown-up she had first taken him for. His skin was smooth and pink beneath the beard, and his emotions were almost childishly plain. He might’ve been no older than her.
“Dude!” he said. “Are you all right? You been in an accident?”
“I need the police. There’s a man. He wanted to kill me. He trapped me in a room and set fire to his house. He’s got a little boy. There was a little boy, and I almost didn’t get out, and he took the boy with him. We need to go. He might come back.” She was not sure any of this made sense. It was the right information, but it seemed to her she had arranged it poorly.
The bearded fat man goggled at her, as if she were speaking to him frantically in a foreign tongue—Tagalog, perhaps, or Klingon. Although as it turned out, if she had addressed him in Klingon, Louis Carmody probably would’ve been able to translate.
“Fire!” she shouted. “Fire!” She stabbed a finger back in the direction of the dirt lane.
She could not see the house from the highway, and the faint wisp of smoke that rose over the trees might’ve been from someone’s chimney or a pile of burning leaves. But it was enough to break him out of his trance and get him moving.
“Hold the fuck on!” he cried, his voice cracking, going high-pitched, and he gave his bike so much throttle that Vic thought he was going to pop a wheelie.
Her stomach plunged, and she squeezed her arms around his gut, so the tips of her fingers could almost-but-not-quite touch. She thought he was going to dump it; the bike weaved dangerously, the front end going one way, the back end going the other.
But he straightened it out, and the center white line began to flick by in machine-gun staccato; so did the pines to either side of the road.
Vic dared one look back. She expected to see the old black car lurching up out of the dirt road, but the highway was empty. She turned her head and pressed it into the fat kid’s back, and they left the old man’s house behind, riding toward the blue hills, and they were away and they were safe and it was over.
Above Gunbarrel, Colorado
THEN HE BEGAN TO SLOW DOWN.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
They had traveled less than half a mile down the highway. She looked back over her shoulder. She could still see the dirt road leading up to that awful house.
“Dude,” the kid said. “We, like, need to get us some help. They’ll have a phone right in here.”
They were approaching a pitted and cracked blacktop lane, leading off to the right, and at the corner of the intersection was a country store with a couple pumps out front. The kid ran the bike right up to the porch.
It died all of a sudden, the instant he flipped the kickstand down; he had not bothered to put it in neutral. She wanted to tell him no, not here, this was too close to the guy’s house, but the fat boy was already off and giving her his hand to help her down.
She stumbled on the first step going up to the porch and almost fell. He caught her in his arms. She turned and looked at him, blinking at tears. Why was she crying? She didn’t know, only knew that she was—helplessly, sipping at the air in short, choked breaths.
Curiously, the fat boy, Louis Carmody, just twenty, a kid with a record of stupid crimes—vandalism, shoplifting, smoking underage—looked like he might start crying himself. She didn’t learn his name until later.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. You’re all right now. I’ve got your back.”
She wanted to believe him. Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is that when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t, so she decided to kiss him instead. Not now, but later—later she would kiss him the best kiss ever. He was chubby and had bad hair, and she suspected he had never been kissed by a pretty girl before. Vic was never going to be modeling
in an underwear catalog, but she was pretty enough. She knew he thought so, too, from the reluctant way he let go of her waist.
“Let’s go in there and bring a whole mess of law down here,” he said. “How about that?”
“And fire trucks,” she said.
“That, too,” he said.
Lou walked her into a pine-floored country grocery. Pickled eggs floated like cow eyeballs in a jar of yellowing fluid on the counter.
A small line of customers led to the lone cash register. The man behind the counter had a corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth. With his pipe, squinty eyes, and bulging chin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man.
A young man in military fatigues stood at the head of the line, holding a few bills in his hand. His wife waited beside him, baby in arms. His wife was, at most, only five years older than Vic herself, her blond hair held back in a ponytail by an elastic loop. The towheaded infant in her arms wore a Batman onesie with tomato-sauce stains down the front, evidence of a nutritious lunch by way of Chef Boyardee.
“Excuse me,” Lou said, raising his thin, piping voice.
No one so much as looked around.
“Didn’t you have a milk cow once, Sam?” said the young man in fatigues.
“It’s true,” said the guy who looked like Popeye, punching some keys on the register. “But you don’t want to hear about my ex-wife again.”
The old boys gathered around the counter erupted into laughter. The blonde with the baby smiled indulgently and looked around, and her gaze settled on Lou and Vic. Her brow furrowed with concern.
“Everyone listen to me!” Lou screamed, and this time they all heard and turned to stare. “We need to use your phone.”
“Hey, honey,” said the blonde with the infant, speaking directly to Vic. The way she said it, Vic knew she was a waitress and called everyone honey, or hon, or darling, or doll. “You okay? What happened? You have an accident?”
“She’s lucky to be alive,” Lou said. “There’s a man down the road had her locked up in his house. He tried to burn her to death. The house is still on fire. She only just got out of there. The fucker still has some little kid with him.”
Vic shook her head. No—no, that was not exactly right. The little kid was not being held against his will. The little kid wasn’t even a little kid anymore. He was something else, something so cold it hurt to touch him. But she couldn’t figure out how to correct Lou, and so she said nothing.
The blonde looked at Lou Carmody while he was speaking, then back, and when her gaze returned to Vic, it was subtly altered. It was a look of calm, intense appraisal—a look Vic knew well from her own mother’s face. It was the way Linda sized up an injury, judging it on a scale of severity, settling on the appropriate treatment.
“What’s your name, darling?” the blonde asked.
“Victoria,” Vic said, something she never did, refer to herself by her whole first name.
“You’re okay now, Victoria,” said the blonde, and her voice was so kind that Vic began to sob.
The blonde took quiet command of the room and everyone in it then, all without raising her voice or ever setting down her toddler. Later, when Vic thought about what she liked best in women, she always thought of the soldier’s wife, of her certainty and her quiet decency. She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone. She wished for that certainty herself, that grounded awareness, that she saw in the soldier’s wife, and thought she would like to be a woman such as this: a mother, with the steady, sure, feminine awareness of what to do in a crisis. In some ways Vic’s own son, Bruce, was really conceived in that moment, although she would not be pregnant with him for another three years.
Vic sat on some boxes, to one side of the counter. The man who reminded her of Popeye was already on the phone, asking for an operator to give him the police. His voice was calm. No one was overreacting, because the blonde didn’t overreact, the others taking their emotional cues from her.
“Are you from around here?” the soldier’s wife asked.
“I’m from Haverhill.”
“Is that in Colorado?” asked the soldier, whose name was Tom Priest. He was on two weeks’ leave and was due to head back to Saudi Arabia by way of Fort Hood that evening.
Vic shook her head. “Massachusetts. I need to call my mom. She hasn’t seen me in days.”
From that moment on, Vic was never able to work her way back to anything like the truth. She had been missing from Massachusetts for two days. Now she was in Colorado and had escaped a man who had her locked up in his house, who’d tried to burn her to death. Without ever saying she had been kidnapped, it became clear to everyone that this was the case.
That became the new truth, even for Vic herself, in the same way she was able to persuade herself she had found her mother’s bracelet in the family station wagon and not at Terry’s Primo Subs in Hampton Beach. The lies were easy to tell because they never felt like lies at all. When she was asked about her trip to Colorado, she said she had no memory of being in Charlie Manx’s car, and police officers traded sad, sympathetic looks. When they pressed her, she said it was all dark. Dark like she had been locked in the trunk? Yes, maybe. Someone else wrote her statement. She signed it without ever bothering to read it.
The soldier said, “Where’d you get away from him?”
“Right down the road,” Louis Carmody said, answering for Vic, who could not find her voice. “Half a mile away. I could lead you back there. It’s out in the woods. Dude, they don’t get the fire trucks there pretty quick, half the hill will be on fire.”
“That’s the Father Christmas place,” said Popeye, moving his mouth away from the phone.
“Father Christmas?” the soldier said.
A gourd-shaped man in a red-and-white-checked shirt said, “I know it. I been by there hunting. It’s weird. The trees outside are decorated for Christmas all year-round. I’ve never seen anyone there, though.”
“This guy set fire to his own house and drove off?” the soldier asked.
“And he’s still got a kid with him,” Lou said.
“What kind of car is he in?”
Vic opened her mouth to reply, and then she saw movement, outside, through the window in the door, and looked past the soldier, and it was the Wraith, pulling up to the pumps, arriving as if summoned by this very question. Even from a distance, through a closed door, she could hear Christmas music.
Sam’s Gas & Sundries
VIC COULDN’T CRY OUT, COULDN’T SPEAK, BUT SHE DIDN’T NEED TO. The soldier saw her face and where she was looking and turned his head to see what had stopped at the pumps.
The driver climbed from the front seat and walked around the car to gas up.
“That guy?” the soldier asked. “The limo driver?”
Vic nodded.
“I don’t see a kid with him,” Lou said, craning his neck to look out the front picture window.
This was met by a moment of sickened silence, everyone in the store taking stock of what it might mean.
“Does he have a gun?” the soldier said.
“I don’t know,” Vic said. “I didn’t see one.”
The soldier turned and started toward the door.
His wife gave him a sharp look. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The soldier said, “What do you think?”
“You let the police handle it, Tom Priest.”
“I will. When they get here. But he’s not driving away before they do.”
“I’ll come with you, Tommy,” said the hefty man in the red-and-white-checked shirt. “I ought to be with you anyway. I’m the only man in this room got a badge in his pocket.”
Popeye lowered the mouthpiece of the phone, covered it with one hand, and said, “Alan, your badge says ‘Game Warden,’ and it looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box.”
“It did not come out of a Cracker Jack box,” said Alan Warner,
adjusting an invisible tie and raising his bushy silver eyebrows in an expression of mock rage. “I had to send away to a very respectable establishment for it. Got myself a squirt gun and a real pirate eye patch from the same place.”
“If you insist on going out there,” said Popeye, reaching under the counter, “take this with you.” And he set a big black .45 automatic next to the register, pushed it with one hand toward the game warden.
Alan Warner frowned at it and gave his head a little shake. “I better not. I don’t know how many deer I’ve put down, but I wouldn’t like to point a gun at no man. Tommy?”
The soldier named Tom Priest hesitated, then crossed the floor and hefted the .45. He turned it to check the safety.
“Thomas,” said the soldier’s wife. She jiggled their baby in her arms. “You have an eighteen-month-old child here. What are you going to do if that man pulls a pistol of his own?”
“Shoot him,” Tom said.
“Goddamn it,” she said, in a voice just louder than a whisper. “Goddamn it.”
He smiled . . . and when he did, he looked like a ten-year-old boy about to blow out his birthday candles.
“Cady. I have to go do this. I’m on active duty with the U.S. Army, and I’m authorized to enforce federal law. We just heard that this guy transported a minor across state lines, against her will. That’s kidnapping. I am obligated to put his ass on the ground and hold him for the civilian authorities. Now, that’s enough talk about it.”
“Why don’t we just wait for him to walk on in here and pay for his gas?” asked Popeye.
But Tom and the game warden, Alan, were moving together toward the door.
Alan glanced back. “We don’t know he won’t just drive away without paying. Stop your fretting. This is going to be fun. I haven’t had to tackle nobody since senior year.”
Lou Carmody swallowed thickly and said, “I’ll back your play,” and started after the two men.
The pretty blonde, Cady, caught his arm before he could make three steps. She probably saved Louis Carmody’s life.