a Night Too Dark (2010) (15 page)

“What matter with that dog, Katya?” Auntie Vi said irritably, eyes fixed on the grill. “She want her fish raw or what?”
“Mutt!” Kate said.
Mutt looked at her and barked again, looking exasperated.
Then Kate heard it, too, a not-so-distant crashing through the brush beyond the clearing. Kate and Old Sam had heard that same sound just a month before.
“Bear,” Old Sam said. “Must have smelled the fish.”

Nine

Everybody inside!” Kate said. “Mutt! Guard!”
She ran for the house and the .30-06 in the gun rack next to the door. She was back on the deck before anyone else had hit the stairs. Old Sam, who didn’t hold with outmoded notions like chivalry, was well in the lead.
“Mutt!” Kate said. “To me!”
Mutt ignored her, ears back, half crouching in the center of the clearing, barking ferociously at the increasing noise from the brush, which was loud now and getting louder.
“Mutt!”
Mutt gave one last warning bark and loped to the stairs, took them in a single leap, and in another leap was at the railing at Kate’s side. Her mane was standing straight up, her ears were still back, and a low, menacing growl issued steadily from her throat at a volume that by rights should have frightened off every living being within half a mile.
Inexplicably, it did not. Branches crashed and cracked beneath the onslaught of whatever creature was advancing on the homestead. Kate planted her feet, worked the bolt on the .30-06, and raised it to
pull the stock into her shoulder. She sighted down the barrel at the tiny bead welded on the end. It steadied on that section of brush from which came the approaching noise.
All of this was happening again all too soon. Behind her she could hear murmuring, and between clenched teeth she said, “Get. Inside.”
How much damage it would do would depend on if it was black or brown, how large, and how either pissed off or hungry it was. Someone had once likened a bear moving across the ground to a lightning bolt shooting sideways. When they got going they were hard to stop, and when they were pissed off they were even harder to calm down. Most of the time they’d make a false charge, and back off. Most of the time.
Empirical experience recently obtained had proved beyond any doubt that “most of the time” didn’t count in the Park. If this was one of those years for close encounters of the bear kind, Kate wanted to make sure it was two for two for her side.
A branch snapped. Brush shuddered.
Unless it was a moose. If it was moose, it was running from something, and barring obstruction or human interference it would just gallop through the clearing and keep on going out the other side. Probably. Of course, whatever had startled the moose might be right behind it. She couldn’t think of anything else that would make that much noise coming through the woods, but whatever it was it had to be big to be that loud.
Just before the edge of the clearing the lowest branch of a spruce caught on something, jerked free, and flapped wildly. A piece of wood broke with a sound like a gunshot.
Big and clumsy. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
“Kate, no!” Old Sam’s shout came at the same moment as the approaching menace smashed into the clearing.
Very, very carefully, Kate unbent her forefinger from around the
trigger. She lowered the rifle with stiff arms. The tiny click of the safety was audible to everyone.
For a very long moment there was no other sound in the little clearing, all participants frozen in shocked silence.
Then behind her Holly Haynes made a noise, Auntie Vi exclaimed in horror, and Old Sam swore. Kate let go of the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Mutt looked up at her and gave a soft whine.
The apparition stood on two legs, all right, but they were clad in jeans that were torn and shredded to above the knee. The legs beneath were a welter of bleeding scratches and oozing wounds. These matched the ones on his arms, bare beneath the fragments of what once had been a dark blue Goretex jacket and a T-shirt so ripped and stained the logo was illegible. His right foot was bare, wrapped in what was probably one of the sleeves of the jacket. The other foot was clad in the remnants of a boot, leather laces wrapped around the sole to hold it in place.
His face looked like something off the cornice of Notre Dame. One eye was swollen shut and sealed by a rusty brown flow of blood that had cascaded from a crusty slash that had opened his forehead from between his eyebrows to the hairline on his left temple. The other eye was the merest slit, through which he peered around him as if he were shortsighted.
He was bearded and filthy and so emaciated it was impossible to tell his age. He could have been fifteen or fifty. They could smell him from the deck. Mutt, recovering her composure, streaked down the stairs and halted in front of him on stiff legs, head between her shoulders, ears flat, her patented threatening growl issuing from deep in her throat. Kate heard Auntie Vi suck in her breath. She said, keeping her voice low and soothing, “Mister?”
He’d been backing away from Mutt’s growl. Now he jerked around at the sound of her voice, tripped over one of the buckets of brined salmon, and almost fell.
“Uncle,” Kate said in a soft voice. When he came to stand beside her she handed him the rifle. “Cover me.”
“All right, girl.”
She came down the steps very slowly, talking all the while in a low, nonthreatening voice. “You been lost in the woods, mister, right? You’re okay now. You’re found. We’ll take care of you.”
He let her get within ten feet before he flung himself backward again. He tripped over a pile of alder kindling, scattering it everywhere, and this time he did fall. He landed hard, then pulled himself into a fetal position, hands over his head, uttering a high, thin, continuous cry.
“Jesus,” Kate heard Old Sam say. She glanced at him and saw that he looked as unnerved as she felt. In itself that was almost as shocking as the sight of the apparition in front of them.
Mutt had stopped growling. Mutt was a better threat indicator than Homeland Security. If she had ceased to perceive their uninvited guest as dangerous, then he wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t like she wasn’t still on alert, ears flattened, lips drawn back, drawn up on tiptoe and ready to protect and defend.
Kate took small, slow steps forward, continuing to speak in a husky and she hoped soothing monotone. “Mister, it’s all right now, it’s okay, you’re back in the world. We’re going to take care of you. You’re cold, and you’re hungry, and you’re tired. We’re going to take care of all that.”
She continued to croon, scarcely knowing what she was saying, as she knelt next to him. A tentative hand on his shoulder caused him to shriek. Everyone jumped, and Old Sam swore again.
“It’s okay,” Kate said, “it’s all right.”
He lay there on the ground, a quivering knot of misery, unwilling or unable to look at her. She wasn’t even sure if he could hear her, but she kept talking, and began to pat his shoulder, accustoming him to
being touched. Close up, his wounds looked far worse. Some of them were infected, others well on their way. The putrid aroma of decomposition made her swallow hard, but his eyes were fixed on her face, wide, unblinking. For the first time in her life Kate thought that a working cell phone system in the Park might not be such a bad thing.
“Can you stand up, mister? Come on, let me help you. Let’s get you inside so we can help you clean up. You must be hungry. I bet you’d like something to eat. We’ve got fresh salmon. Did you smell it cooking? Would you like some?”
He seemed to calm down again. Kate continued her un demanding patter as Old Sam went back to the house to rack the rifle and returned to help haul the man to trembling legs. He was taller than Kate but shorter than Old Sam. He moved in an awkward and disjointed fashion, with no sense of balance, so that he would lurch from Kate to Old Sam and back again, walking as if his feet hurt him. From the look of them Kate thought they had to. There didn’t seem to be a square inch of any part of him left whole.
Together the three of them navigated a careful path to the house. The stairs were negotiated with the maximum amount of difficulty. When they got him inside they found that Auntie Vi had been busy. She’d covered one of the dining table chairs with a sheet and directed them to ease him down onto it. She’d found some leftover moose stew in the refrigerator, pureed it in the blender, and poured it into a saucepan to heat. She thinned it with some instant beef broth and poured it into a mug.
She brought it steaming to the table, where Kate and Old Sam had been working with clean sponges and a bowl of warm water to clear some of the crusts from the man’s more serious wounds. “This guy needs the docs,” Kate said.
Old Sam, lips compressed in a grim line, shook his head. “He needs an emergency room.”
“He maybe not make it that far,” Auntie Vi said. It was what they were all thinking.
It wasn’t just his eyes, his whole face was swollen, and as they cleared away the blood and the dirt they could see hard angry lumps on his arms and legs as well. “Jesus, the mosquitoes really got to him,” Old Sam said.
The man made a sudden swipe with his hand and Kate ducked to avoid being hit.
He slapped again, and this time Old Sam caught his hand in a firm grip. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Calm down. You’re fine. No bugs in here.”
The man opened his mouth and made an effort. “Aaar,” he said.
Kate’s eyes met Old Sam’s. For some reason, the man’s inability to speak shook them both more than anything that had come before.
“Maybe we should just put him in the tub,” Kate said.
“Only get him into tub one time,” Auntie Vi said. “Clean off first much as we can.”
“He’s in shock,” Old Sam said. “Should we get him wet?”
“Clean feel better,” Auntie Vi said. “Half the battle.”
Holly Haynes wasn’t much use. Every now and then Auntie Vi would give her a chore, like go get another sponge or warm up some more broth, but mostly she hovered and got in the way. She might have been hell on wheels as a geologist but she wasn’t much for first aid. Kate, looking up once, saw her face. She looked frightened, and sick, but then they all felt like that.
The bowl of water turned dark with dirt and blood. While Kate changed it, Auntie Vi tried to get some of the soup into him. Some made it down his throat, although it seemed to hurt him to swallow. The rest trickled down his neck. His first cry had been his last. After that, he remained silent, staring into space, taking no notice of their efforts.
At least he wasn’t fighting them.
Kate brought more clean water and Auntie Vi and Old Sam started in again. Kate found some clean clothes belonging to Jim, measured them against the stranger’s frame, and exchanged them for some of Johnny’s instead.
Kate ran Johnny’s tub full of warm water, thinking hot might be too much of a shock for him. The man came alive when they tried to remove the remnants of his clothes, until Old Sam lost his temper and said, “You two broads get the hell out of here.”
Kate and Auntie Vi retreated to the kitchen. In the bathroom Old Sam swore. Auntie Vi made coffee with hands that seemed less deft than usual.
Kate watched her for a moment, and then remembered. “Oh hell,” she said, and went out to find the king filet burned to a crisp on the grill. She put the lid down and closed the dampers and went back inside. Water was gurgling out of the tub, and the faucet was turned on again full bore.
“That boy plenty dirty,” Auntie Vi said. “Old Sam changing the water.”
Kate hoped the well held out.
They drank their coffee and felt better. Kate bundled the disgusting sheet the stranger had been sitting on into the laundry room. She knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Give me his clothes.”
A bundle of rags was thrust at her, and she took them outside and put them in the burn barrel. They had no identifying marks on them, Levi’s jeans, Jockey underwear, what proved to be an All Gone Dead T-shirt, a JCPenney blue plaid shirt, a North Face jacket. Nothing that couldn’t have been purchased from any of a hundred catalogs or department stores.
She put it all in the barrel save the remaining boot, squirted it with lighter fluid from the barbecue, and torched it off. If the guy never spoke again, she would get serious shit from Jim for disposing of
evidence that might help identify him, but the clothes were filthy and crawling with livestock and she wanted them gone.
The boot looked as if it had been well made, sturdy construction, thick soles. It had a steel toe, too. That she kept.
She went into Johnny’s room and cleared the twin bed by the simple expedient of lifting up the mattress and letting everything on it slide to the floor: clothes, books, CDs, headphones, copies of
Maxim
and
Outside
and
National Geographic
, a half-empty bag of Doritos, a plastic sleeve with one remaining saltine cracker, a bowl that looked like it might once have held a generous portion of Cherry Garcia ice cream, and a thumb drive. She rescued the bowl, although cleaning it would take a hammer and chisel, and the thumb drive and swept the rest into a pile and put it in a trash bag which she stowed on the back deck. Either Johnny would never miss it all or he’d look until he found it. If he didn’t find it Kate would cart it out to the dump west of the house. Kate didn’t usually clean up after Johnny, as had been agreed when he moved in. The most she was willing to do was limit the chaos by closing the door on it. These circumstances, however, were extraordinary.
She remade the bed with clean sheets and came out of the bedroom to find the bathroom door opening. The stranger shuffled out, Old Sam holding him up with both hands. The man was dressed in jeans that were two inches too long and a T-shirt from Johnny’s Kanye West period. He had about as much mass as a scarecrow and the clothes hung on him. Old Sam had threaded a double strand of what looked like dental floss through the belt loops of the jeans. It was the only thing keeping them from sliding to the floor.
“In here,” she said.
Old Sam laid him down on the bed, and Kate covered him up. He stared unblinking at the ceiling.
“Mister,” Kate said. “Who are you?”
He said nothing.
“Can you tell us your name? Your family’s bound to be worried. We could call them, tell them you’re all right.”
The man stared past Kate and his face twisted. “Aaaah,” he said, starting to shake again. “Aaaaaaaaaaah.”
“It’s okay, buddy,” Old Sam said. “You’re all right. No bogeymen here, just us.”
Old Sam’s rough voice seemed to calm the stranger more than Kate’s raspy monotone. He quieted.
“You’re safe here,” Old Sam said. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
The man’s eyes closed, perhaps lulled by Old Sam’s litany.
There was silence. “He’s not dead, is he?” Kate said.
“Sssshh.” Old Sam put his gnarled hand down gently on the man’s chest. After a moment, it rose and fell with the man’s breathing.
“He’s sleeping, right?” Kate said in a whisper. “Not in a coma, or anything?”
“Jesus Christ,” Old Sam whispered back. “Of course the man’s asleep. He’s been lost in the Bush for what looks like the hell of a while, he’s clean and fed for the first time in who knows how long, you’d be sleeping, too. Go on, get out of here.”