Harmless (26 page)

He half-limped until he reached the top of the hill with about a fifty-pace lead on Derek. He stood behind the biggest tree he could find and waited. The trunk was still dry, the bark against his soaked skin a reminder of the warm, dry life waiting for him if he got home alive. Derek would reach the top of the hill in a few seconds. This was it. Moral indignation was not going to grant Joseph the strength of ten men, and he could replay every fist and kung fu fight he’d ever watched onscreen and be no closer to defeating Derek. Joseph was not a small man, a fact easily forgotten while seated at his desk for ten hours a day, his active body parts narrowed to two eyes and ten fingers. Why had he never learned to defend himself? All the martial arts courses in the city—had he enrolled in one? Had he learned to build a house or sail a boat or read a compass or start a fire without matches? No—he’d watched movies, half-read a thousand books, talked in bars and restaurants, fucked.

Derek came over the hilltop, drenched like a wet dog, stripped of taunts and speeches. He wanted to end this, to kill Joseph and leave Franny without a father. Joseph clenched the knife and wiped his eyes on a damp swath of shirt. Derek was less than twenty feet away. When he turned to his left and pointed the flashlight, Joseph stepped away from the tree, set his back and shoulders to the task, and ran straight at his opponent, gaining speed with each step, feeling every raindrop that touched his face, a feeling of protective tenderness toward Derek unexpectedly rising in his chest. Derek turned just before impact and raised his arm, deflecting the knife and grazing Joseph’s left shoulder with his elbow as their bodies came together with a slap,
Joseph’s head slamming into Derek’s chest. The men stayed upright as they careened toward the slope, arms entwined, legs kicking for purchase, like a four-legged beast trying to run in two directions at the same time. Joseph pushed against the bigger man, the posture familiar from childhood fights against his older brothers. Derek got his knee up, filling Joseph’s mouth with the taste of pennies and warm milk. The knife was gone from his hand. He snapped his head up, catching Derek on the chin, and then they were weightless, holding on to each other, their bloody mouths almost kissing as they went tumbling down the hill, accelerating with each rotation of their locked bodies.

Joseph awaited the final impact. He saw Franny’s face, really
seeing
it this time—her shy but curious eyes, how she used to pinch her lips together when she drew beautiful dresses for the ladies of the court and armour for the knights. He wished he’d paid more attention to the stories she wrote in the margins.

This is Sir Joseph, liege to the King and Queen
.

His bottom front teeth broke.

The sound of impact, of breath exploded from lungs.

A thunderclap, this time inside his head.

H
e couldn’t see. His head hurt. A new gap in his bottom teeth. Raw, tender gums. The taste of copper.

“I know you, man!” It was Derek, far away. No, not far away. Standing right over him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Bright light stung Joseph’s eyes. This was going to be bad. When they shine lights in your eyes, you’re in trouble.

“I fucking know you!”

“I can’t see,” Joseph said, pushing the words through the space between his teeth. He spat out blood and a piece of tooth, feeling shy about his newly exposed gums.

Derek lowered the flashlight. Joseph raised himself up onto his elbows.

“You can just keep hugging that ground, bro,” Derek said. He still had the gun.

“Your partners didn’t see me.”

“I gotta take care of this, man. This isn’t the fucking schoolyard.”

Always the speeches.

“They didn’t see me,” Joseph said. “They couldn’t have.”

“They’ll want proof that I’m a player.”

“I’m Alex’s friend.”

“I know who you are. What you’re doing here is my business.
You’re
my business.” Derek stepped closer. “I didn’t think you’d pull something like this. I knew you were slick the second I saw you, but
dude
.”

Derek’s need to deliver the send-off speech was buying Joseph a little time to craft an appeal to the reasonable, misunderstood gentleman behind the villain’s mask.

Dr. Blood, you can’t be mad enough to go through with this …

“I was lost.”

“Late-night hike?”

“Alex thought—”

“Alex?” The name added weight to one side of the scales squeaking up and down in Derek’s head. “Where is he?”

This was it: Joseph could tell the truth and implicate Alex, handing him over to the bikers while trying to strike a bargain for his and Franny’s safety. Or he could tell Derek he’d lost Alex hours ago, ensuring Alex’s well-being a little while longer.

“We got separated,” he said.
So this is what it feels like to be virtuous
. Not that different, really, but better. His mind felt less crowded. “I took the wrong fork in the path hours ago. I saw the light at your … camp … and came looking for help.”

Derek blew out a gust of air. “You saw those dudes back there. You know what this is about.”

“They didn’t see me.”

“Stop saying that!”

The gunshots, coke, and villain’s catcalls hadn’t completely turned Derek—he might have swallowed the idea of murder, but he clearly hadn’t digested it yet.

“Take them my teeth,” Joseph said. “Tell them you beat me so hard that I’ll never get within a hundred miles of this place. It’s true. You’re not a killer. It’s different when you
have
to kill. Like back there, when you thought I was a threat. You could live with that. You could walk back into your life, sit down to breakfast with your wife and daughter.”

Derek’s face was slack, his expression inward, but he was listening.

“If you shoot me here lying in the mud you’ll be crossing a line. You’d be deliberately taking another man’s life and orphaning his daughter. Nothing would ever change that. You could save a busload of kids from going over a cliff, but you’d still be the guy who shot a defenceless father. You’d be on the other side of humanity.”

“Maybe I want to be on the other side. There’s not a lot to recommend this one.”

“Do you want to risk that?”

“Maybe I’m already on the other side.”

“You’re not. I’ve seen you with your daughter.”

Derek was laughing again, hamming it up. “This is
great
, man. You got a gun pointed at your head and you’re, like, talking to me,
really
talking, and I’m standing here listening. It’ll be like I always imagined: you’ll say something beautiful, something poignant, and it’ll be like,
bang
, I shoot you.”

Derek’s life highlights had been lived on a stage in front
of hundreds of adoring people and in front of a camera—who could blame him for wanting to make his first murder as cinematic as possible?

“It’s just business,” he said. “A guy changes his supplier, another guy loses his job and his kids don’t get a visit from Santa.”

“You have a daughter. I met her. She wants to be famous, like her old man.”

Derek shrugged. “
No man lives unless he is famous
—Edgar Allan Poe.”

Joseph saw him lean forward and lower the gun. He shone the flashlight in Joseph’s face again.

“Holy shit!” Derek said. “You’re Dylan Shaw! I told you I’d recognize you by the end of the weekend.”

Dylan Shaw? Host of
This Week in the Arts
? The guy weighed at least 225 pounds.

“Guilty as charged,” Joseph said.

“You spotlighting any new bands in the fall?”

“I’m always looking for pitches. You’ve got me at a disadvantage.”

“Got your full attention do I?” The joshing frontman was back.

“I hear you guys are doing bluegrass. No gimmicks.”

“Right,” he said, smiling. “And Old Time Country. None of that Nashville shit.”

And then he sang in that wavering, lonesome-road voice:

“How came this blood on your shirt sleeve?

O dear love, tell me
.

It is the blood of the old grey horse

That plowed that field for meee …”

He was good. He could have been singing inside a boxcar crossing the lonely plains.

“Drop the gun!”

A dim flashlight flicked on in the trees behind Derek.

“I said drop it! Now!”

Derek squared his shoulders and ran a hand through his thick wet hair, the command pulling him back into the Bad Guy role.

“Derek, don’t,” Joseph said. “It must be the cops.”

“It’s not the cops.” Derek lifted his arms without dropping the pistol and nodded as if to say,
You think our talk was cinematic—watch this
. He turned to face the flashlight. “All right, cowboy! I’ll drop the gun if you do. If you even have a fucking gun.”

“Drop the gun or I’ll put a bullet in you!” It was Alex. His voice had changed in the last half-hour. The change scared Joseph.

“Come on man!” Derek called back. “Don’t shit me.”

“Drop it, or I’ll drop you.”

Joseph fumbled in the mud and found a good-sized rock. If he could get up and hit Derek on the head he might stop the terrible thing that was about to happen.

Derek stepped to the right, brought his arms together, and fired three white blasts at the flashlight, which didn’t waver. Derek’s head cocked like a dog’s as he wondered how the man holding the flashlight could still be standing. He fired again, but this time his shot was answered by a burst of light that exploded a few feet to the left of the flashlight. Derek was lifted into the air as though he’d been pulled backward by a giant spring. His kicking feet came to rest beside Joseph.

The bullet had punched a fist-sized hole, pooled with black-red blood, in Derek’s chest. It made a bubbling noise, audible over the rain. Derek’s beetling eyes were confused, darting in their sockets as if trying to escape the narrow confines. Then they locked on a point somewhere in the murky sky, peering intently through the falling rain. The life left his eyes, replaced by an expression that was as beautiful and meaningless as patterns of breath crystallized on a window in winter.

Alex stood above them, clutching the rifle to his chest. He shook his head, disowning the lifeless body as he delivered his epitaph: “What an
asshole
.”

T
hey buried Derek at the bottom of the ravine, scooping out earth and clay with their hands until they hit rock; then, without speaking, they laid the body in the hole and covered the grave with rocks and a rotting birch trunk, as if disposing of an enemy’s body was an innate skill. Death had radically redistributed Derek’s body weight—his limbs were as light as Styrofoam while his torso felt stuffed with ball bearings—but otherwise he could have been any aging party boy sleeping off a wild night, oblivious to the cruel joke his buddies were playing on him.

Joseph and Alex were now walking along a raised bed of packed gravel—all that remained, Alex said, of an old rail line that once connected the national park to the local towns. Its rails and ties were long torn up, the sparkling coal pebbles dotting the gravel the only reminder of its former use, but the rail bed elevated them above the marshy ground, making Joseph feel, for a few blurry moments, like he was riding a locomotive, barrelling through a rent in the wilderness to reach town in time for breakfast. The rain
had finally tapered off, the mist rising from the ground promising another hot day. Joseph’s knee was stiff and numb, supported by sticks and cloth strips torn from Alex’s jacket, and his ankle was locked into place by the swelling. Only his torn fingertip, wrapped in a cloth bandage caked in mud from Derek’s grave, still registered pain.

The rail bed was easing into a wide turn when Alex stopped. “See that?”

Joseph had to squint away the mist to see the mound, its vine-draped edges too uniformly straight to have been formed by nature. Alex limped toward it, his injured knee also done up in a makeshift splint, and stepped into the undergrowth, before turning to wait for Joseph to catch up.

“This was a storehouse,” Alex said, his mood lightening as he pulled aside a curtain of grapevines to reveal an empty doorway set in a wall at least thirty feet wide and fifteen tall. “Come on.”

Not much remained of the building. Most of the roof was gone and sections of the support walls had caved in or had been picked apart, the bricks and pipes and boards stacked in orderly piles against the one complete wall, suggesting a hallowed tradition of vandalism passed down through the generations. They passed into a small, partially intact office where a metal desk was encased in scattered file folders and papers hardened into papier mâché waves, the rain-swollen walls sprouting sprays of black mould that flowed and reformed in the faint, wavering light. Alex ignored the office, trudging purposefully to the building’s buckled front doors.

What now?
Joseph thought, but he followed Alex, emerging into a canyon of birdsong and vegetation, the sounds and damp, organic smell so thick they trapped the air in place. It was a ghost town—these places actually existed. Everywhere was life—birds, insects, trees, bushes, wildflowers—hemmed in by parallel rows of ruined buildings, which seemed to emerge from the misty forest like elephants congregating by a creek bed. They walked down the main street, stepping between the saplings and lustreless weeds that pierced the asphalt as if driven from below by a hammer. Through empty shop windows Joseph could see the ruined labours of each building’s final tenants: a barbershop chair bent completely backward on its base; a dry riverbed of rusty water spreading from the doorway of a gutted hardware store; a catastrophe of shelving inside what must have been the general store. A few of the buildings were tagged with fading graffiti, but there were no signs of the nihilistic hedonism that had obliterated the logging camp.

Alex was smiling, refusing to hide or mute his obvious love for this place. “I hike out here every chance I get,” he said.

Joseph could picture Alex exploring the ghost town, his imagination reconstructing the stores and warehouses and the humble community that supported them. Maybe it was the closest he got these days to articulating a utopia—a self-sustaining community that rewarded participation, hard work, and sacrifice. Life lived on a human scale, following the rhythms of work and the seasons; a life of sustainable pleasures and acceptable hypocrisies, surrounded
by neighbours you could rely on without having to necessarily like.