Fallen Land (30 page)

As a boy, his van to school always drove past a store called
GUNS & AMMO.
It was brick, one story, had bars in the windows, and looked like an Old West version of the local jail. His father never went there, always acquiring his ammunition at an outdoor leisure warehouse with high ceilings and large windows and walls covered with hunting trophies, but when Paul thought of guns and ammunition, he could only see the old redbrick building on a corner of a once respectable neighborhood across the street from a municipal golf course. He never saw anyone go into or come out of that store, and the lights were never on, but it must have done business. It has been closed for years, the windows boarded up with plywood painted offal-red, the bars across the doorway locked and chained.

He has no hunting permit and too little money to acquire one. Already outside the law in a fundamental way, going after an animal that exists in such large numbers it is considered a pest does not seem like a serious offense. Hunting at dawn and at dusk will reduce the risk of being detected by enemies, who are consistently expanding in their numbers until it seems that anyone encountered can only be an enemy: the possibility of friendship, even of tactical alliance, is dead. His mother might still be a friend, but he is unsure if he can trust her. He has not been in touch since he last went to see her for lunch, walking back and forth across town. The messages that appear on his phone when he emerges from the bunker into the woods are always from his mother, asking if he is okay, if he could call her back
just whenever you have a minute, you know, okay chiquito, bye-bye
. The
chiquito
gets on his nerves; it started when he was small, because he
was
so small, and then turned into a joke when he became anything but
chiquito
.

With the phone silenced and resting in the pocket of his camouflaged hunting vest, he climbs a tree and waits for the deer to come, and if not deer then turkeys, and failing all else then the lower links of the woodland food chain, the rabbits and squirrels and beavers that might be skinned and gutted and stuffed into his chest freezer, the gophers, mice, and voles. The first evening there is nothing, no animals of any kind except robins and sparrows, crawling beetles and buzzing flies, but before dawn the next morning he spots a doe and cuts her down with a shot to the head that she never hears. As his father taught him, he guts her, hidden in a sheltered thicket of fir trees. Before the sun is up he is back underground, the young doe’s carcass on the concrete floor of the hallway where he saws off the legs, skins the body, and cuts it into pieces he can freeze.

The butchering and cleaning takes the better part of the morning and with the hours remaining he goes back to inspect his obstacle, deciding to paint the wooden walls and passageways black. Before his retreat he left cans of paint in the basement of the house. He will wait until night, when the people have gone to bed, and retrieve the paint, which he is certain will be there in the corner where he left it. Before he can attend to the paint he returns to the woods with his rifle and subsonic ammunition, his suit of camouflage, suppressor, and knife. He climbs a tree to wait and in the passing hours he tries to phone his wife. He calls every cell phone number for her he has ever known, since they first met. All have now been reassigned: he talks to young men and old women, to black people and white people, a woman who speaks only Spanish, a man who shouts into the phone and threatens to call the police, an order of nuns, a gas station, a liquor store. He dials directory assistance as he has on countless occasions but there is no listing for his wife or her parents anywhere in the country. Knowing he will be unable to find them, they have nonetheless done everything possible to keep him even from speaking to his boys. Amanda is no longer the point. He understands there is no hope of recapturing her, but he might yet be able to save his sons. As soon as I have a thousand dollars, I will leave this place to find you, making my way on foot if I have to. I will sell myself to survive: if not my labor then my body. I will march across country to find you, boys, and I will bring you back to this house where we will live out our days.

Just after sunset they appear: a buck and a doe. They are cautious, their noses raised, perhaps already scenting his body and the threat of the rifle. He takes the buck first, and though the doe startles, he catches her before she can flee. The moon is no longer full but it is bright enough that he can manage the gutting in the dark. He hauls the buck into the bunker and returns for the doe, but by then he is too exhausted to skin or butcher and goes to bed, still dressed in his camouflage, remembering only in the middle of the night his plans to paint the obstacle. Shaking himself awake, he crawls from bed and out into the hallway, then up into the passage that will take him through to the containment door. By now he has learned how to move through it quickly, knows the turns he must take, when to duck his head, when to lunge over the trap door that opens to a drop of eight feet. At the containment door he listens and checks his watch. Satisfied that the house is silent, he swings wide the door and edges open the hatch, finding the basement on the other side in darkness.

Again the house feels different, colder, and as he turns on the lights he sees that, like the rest of the house, the basement has been painted white, floor to ceiling. He looks for the plaque he mounted on the wall and discovers that, although still there, it has been painted over as well, the recesses of the engraved letters clogged with paint, words legible but only from an angle. It is dustless and sterile and no longer feels like a basement. Other than the woman’s workshop space, the room is empty, and this emptiness, as so much else about what these people have done, fills him with dread. There is no place to hide. On the far side of the basement, where his cans of paint should be, there is a large metal cage, five feet by two feet by three feet high, made of heavy-duty steel mesh and secured with a padlock. Inside are the cans of paint he left behind before retreating to the bunker, as well as the leftover paint from the work done by the new owners. He was a fool to leave anything behind in the house.

Panting, his clothes soaked with sweat, he follows the light of his headlamp back through the obstacle but after only a foot or two the lamp goes out and he has to proceed in darkness, trying to discern any hint of light from the other end. There is a groaning and clunking in his ears, a rushing like water through pipes, throwing him off the path he made until, before he knows it, he is in the field of broken glass, his hands lacerated and bleeding, spreading a stickiness that keeps pulling him back into a suction lock with the wood beneath him. In retreat, he crawls backward, tries to remember how to escape from the field of glass, forcing himself to recall which turn to make, whether to go up or down at the fork: he goes up, pulling his body along the plywood surface, sniffing the air ahead in search of his own scent. As he climbs, a catch picks at the back of his mind, and then, as the memory rips itself open, he feels the wood give way beneath his weight: a whoosh and a judder and his head banging against boards, the wind pushed out of him, a fall of eight feet before he knew he was falling, but the fall itself is interminable, the boards and joists and timber passing him, all the detail of his construction visible, the poorly finished nails, the hurried carelessness of his work, the shoddiness of the materials, a sticker of a rocket ship on a board that was once part of the bunk beds intended for his boys. Wheezing great gasps, drowning, he rears back, hitting his head against a two-by-four beam. The headlamp flickers, bringing the tunnel into view, and he sees a familiar section, knows he must go forward, turn right, double back, take the first left, climb again, take the second left, the third right, and then prepare to descend the ladder into the bunker hallway.

There is a fault in his memory. He thinks he has made the correct turns but finds himself back at the beginning after what feels like an hour of crawling in tunnels scarcely wide enough for him to pass. He turns on the light above the containment door, removes his clothes, examines himself. The cuts on his hands are deep, the shards of glass may have severed tendons, his clothes are heavy, soaked with blood and sweat. Without the clothes he will move faster. It is impossible to traverse the obstacle without starting from the uppermost of the two possible entrances. The earth around them has been packed and repacked, the roots, twigs, leaves, and stones now settled into their places: holes in the ground, holes in the earth, nothing about them appears man-made. That was his mistake, not starting through the topmost entrance. He pulls himself up and into the darkness. Naked he can move faster, concentrating on turning in the right direction, remembering when to go up and when down, left or right, and then, after no more than five minutes, he is back in his hallway, sweat cutting camouflage through the coating of blood and dust that encases his skin.

I
N SLEEP HE DREAMS
OF
leaving the bunker by the rear exit, walking through the old stone storm cellar, up the stairs, into the woods, and as he steps onto the woodland floor his clothes fly from his limbs, the cotton shredding in a sudden wind that scrapes the hair from his body, scouring him until he is hairless, his skin withering, aging all at once under the force of the elements, his body declining, bones becoming brittle, spine shrinking and curving in on itself until he can no longer stand upright but must crawl, always on all fours, sniffing the ground, unable to raise his head high enough to see the path in front of him, and as he crawls, head swaying left and right, his nose to the ground, he turns to look back at the burrow entrance where he sees a great dark shadow approaching through trees, shifting, elongating, plunging through brush and down stairs, discovering his retreat.

He wakes, the down comforter speckled with dried semen, blood, sweat. The pelt covering his chest and head is still there, his long eyelashes twitch, a week’s worth of beard stipples his face. There is no time to shower. Taking the dream for prophecy, he dresses, arms himself, flees the bunker. From a hiding place high in a tree, he watches the entrance to the cellar. Although he cannot remember when he last ate, he is unaware of hunger in the first hours of his watch, seeing nothing and no one apart from squirrels and birds. For a moment he stands, looking out through the thicket of branches. On a hill in a tree more than forty feet off the ground, he recognizes Demon Point, the crest where the land rears up suddenly before dropping again to the river. When the house was still his, he had been able to see the Point from his bedroom. Every year several kids, usually teenagers, would break legs sliding down its vertical flanks of loess, or be unable to stop themselves and go flying to the river, hit their heads, catch on a snag and drown, so people would say, in a way that was at least half-believing in forces beyond the visible,
the Demon got him, see, the Demon got that boy
.

When he is too tired to stand he sits again, straddling a branch as big around as his newly narrow waist, and leaning back against the trunk he is aware for the first time of hunger and thirst, of the dryness of the air after so much rain. The ground is waterlogged, the rough ridged bark of the tree still damp, a smell of wet growth and decay rising up through the branches. In the course of the first day no one comes, and once it is dark he can see so little he has to rely on his hearing. While day is a time of distant machine noises, cars and aircraft, beeping construction equipment and howling sirens, night settles into its natural cacophony of owls, winds, and the leaf-crunching movements of animals he can no longer see. Staring into the navy black ground below, listening, he keeps himself awake. An owl is close, whinnying a long descending note that makes Paul quake and hold himself. At some point he sleeps, stirring only late the next morning when he hears voices and looks down to see the child led by the Washington woman straight to the old stone steps of the storm cellar. He forgot to lock the doors to the cellar, left one of them wide open, and the containment door itself will be unlocked as well. He is as careless as his father always suspected.

“There used to be a house here, an old house, older than my house was. It burned down a long time before I was even born,” he hears the widow say.

“And this was part of the house?” the boy asks, as the two of them pull more branches away from the entrance.

“This is all that’s left of that place. Deeper in the woods, closer to the river, there’s a chimney and a fireplace, all made of stones. That belonged to a log cabin once upon a time but the walls fell down and rotted years ago. My mother would take me there and we’d sit inside on a hot afternoon because it was so cool and quiet. Deer used to come up to the window and stare at us.”

“Can we go down there?” the boy asks, pointing into the cellar.

The woman opens the other door and leans into the dark cavity. He does not breathe. If her vision is acute enough to see in the dark she will discover his lair. A moment later she comes back up.

“Better not,” she says. “The ceiling might not be safe. Come on, I’ll show you the chimney.”

He exhales as the two of them walk north through the woods, disappearing beyond his sight. The widow will have seen evidence, the marks of human presence on the floor of the cellar, on the steps, all the scratchings and leavings, smelled odors of body and breath. He waits until they return, the boy and the widow, walking up to the fence he built, placing a key in the lock, letting themselves into the backyard and locking the door behind them as if they expect the arrival of savages.

Struggling for breath he props his back against the trunk, dizzied from watching the woman and child and knowing they were never aware of him. If he could watch them, vulnerable as they were, then anyone might be watching him. Even if he managed to get back into the cellar, someone might follow him, see him enter, discover his hiding place, flush him out. All it would take is a muffling of the ventilation shaft hidden in the hollowed-out trunk that stands not twenty paces from the stairs to the cellar. They could smoke him out, gas him, force him to come fleeing into the open where there would be no choice but to present himself armed, to go out battling for his liberty.