Minus Tide (17 page)

The ground below her stilled and Ann thought she was now in one of the secret glades she’d discovered while picking ferns. Lying on her back she stared up at a jade membrane shielding the sky, veined leaves of ancient maples whose lichen-crusted limbs were clothed in loose sweaters of green moss, learned associates of a timeless symposium. After a while she began to hear loud crackling sounds, followed by the smell of wood smoke. The membrane above peeled away and she saw the night sky, the comforting presence of the Big Dipper.

Invisible hands took hold of her body again and rolled her gently to her side and when the warmth came it was like having the sun suddenly pressed against her back. Fingers briefly pried open her eyes but her vision was too blurry to make out anything but a large peeled root sprouting thick hair. And yet if she tried to concentrate, a single eye began to come in and out of focus from the pale flesh half curtained by dark wet roots. The eye had a telescopic intensity, as if it were glassing on her inner landscape from a great distance.

She felt a calloused hand slide across her belly and her ribs. The roughness stung her skin, fired up nerve endings that shot to her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably. She wanted to scream at the person who was touching her to stop.

“You’re alive,” said a man she did not know. She assumed it was the peeled root who was speaking to her, who was now pulling down her shirt. Who the fuck did he think he was? His voice had reminded her of how green logs hissed when you threw them onto a fire. Her pulse raced inside her, a hummingbird trying to find its way back through an open window, the room shrinking fast and a surprised cat waking quickly from its nap to stare. Ann could hear her shuddering breath. An icy fear clamped around her heart. She imagined the severed arm with the Cyclops tattoo, its blue fingers tightening its grip.

Root-face backed into shadow, sensing the stress he was causing her.

“You must rest now and let the fire do its work.”

The man rose up and walked away. She wanted to talk but her mouth failed her as if it had been shot full of Novocain. For a moment she wondered if it was someone else’s mouth she was trying to speak through, that maybe her mind had found its way into a stranger’s body and was slowly wiring itself into its mainframe one nerve at time. She’d just spent hours outside of her body, so why should she believe she even still had one? She had no proof, other than the fact that she now felt pain where she’d been scratched deeply by the tree branch.

It’s going to take time to thaw. Time I don’t have to spare.

Embers shot into the night sky like paper wasps defending their nest, trailing up in dense formations and scattering with the wind. Ann watched them drift down the beach and go out. There was the smell of meat again, of something being roasted over the fire on a stick. The man came back several times to dump armfuls of driftwood on the fire, building up a thick bed of glowing coals. She felt his course fingers touch her shoulder one last time and then he was gone.

Chapter 33

Ann had hidden the money next to the seven buried sailors.

According to town lore, a father and son had gone out clamming at low tide when they found the bodies of the sailors washed up on Traitor’s shore. The dispute over their origin was never resolved but it was agreed that the men were not American, that their remains would not last long. A group of townsfolk loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and began the task of laying the bodies to rest in a strip of scrub woods near the beach. Hacking out the shallow graves among thick cables of roots and stubborn rock had been time consuming, and as night fell some of the volunteers did shifts guarding the corpses from scavengers. When the last sailor was finally buried, a small ceremony was conducted by a priest who’d ridden in from Buoy City. Afterwards, local children were invited to plant a sapling above each mound, and over a hundred years later the trees had grown into a cathedral of wind-contorted pine.

He found the money where Ann had told him, between the sixth and seventh sailor. When he first tried to pull it from the hole the wet mud had held it possessively. The white leather felt gummy and came off in his hands like an old skin. As soon as he freed the bag from its miserable grave, he dropped it onto dry ground and moved back, reminding himself to breathe. His mind had begun playing tricks on him and for a brief moment he’d imagined the bag was a shrunken torso. When he finally got the courage to see what was inside he found a garbage bag stuffed with bricks of money, many with rubber bands that had almost rotted away.

James was overcome with joy and began to tremble uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who, so he thanked whoever it was that had crushed Duane’s skull in prison because he knew he wouldn’t be holding fat stacks of money in his hands if Duane was still around to do something about it. Sure, it hadn’t been a cakewalk even with Duane out of the way but that was just the sort of luck James was accustomed to. Nothing good ever happened in his life without something coming along to fuck it up.

He transferred the money into a suitcase he’d stolen from the dentist’s house, stood up and tossed the leather bag out into undergrowth. He wanted to shout, even if only to the ghosts of sailors watching him from the dark grove of trees. But he thought better of it.

Remember, you’re only halfway down the mountain now. The rest is going to take everything you’ve got...

He closed his eyes and thought ahead to some nameless motel in Twin Falls Idaho, set back from the dusty interstate. A place far enough away that he could enjoy the luxury of sleep, if sleep would ever come again. He’d studied a map and decided it would be the farthest he’d have to run before he could stop worrying for awhile.
Twin Falls
. Would he be able to hear them from his bed? Would they drown out the sounds of someone coming?
Not now. Don’t think about it yet. This is the time you must run. Nothing else matters now.

While he packed the suitcase in the trunk he heard the moan of the buoy coming from the mouth of the jetty. It made him think about Ann. He could see her as he’d left her on the rock—a dark haired, drugged siren. He recalled a dream she’d once told him about when they were young, a dream about being out on a rock, of losing herself while wandering through rooms full of fascinating objects, of not realizing that the tide had come in and stranded her out at sea. How ironic, he thought. He didn’t know what that word meant exactly, but decided it might be something Ann would understand.

He sat in the Skylark and smoked. Being in the old car relaxed him and that was good because he was going to need to keep his cool for the next few days while he made his escape. He wondered what kind of effect the car had on the dentist, what he got out of it. Did he sometimes wear his old letterman’s jacket when he drove? James smiled. He’d be sad when it came time to dump her. A car like this would just draw to much attention anyway. She’s going to turn heads wherever she goes.

He heard the buoy again and this time it sounded more insistent, like a woman’s muffled scream. I’m officially losing it, he thought.
She’s going to be okay. As soon as you’re out of town you’re going to make an anonymous 911 call and tell them she’s on the rock. And then you’re going to forgot you ever had a life here.

Cold sweat trickled down his back and he shivered. He reminded himself that there was money in the trunk and a new life waiting for him. If he didn’t take it now he might as well curl up next to some dead sailors and stop bitching about his messed up life.

He thought he saw a flash of light on the trees, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror he saw headlights coming up the road.

Chapter 34

Cyclops glanced at his pocket watch. He sat on a wooden bench in front of the store that hadn’t opened all day. The snack and beer advertisements taped to the windows were making him hungry. He removed a copy of the local paper from its salt-ravaged steel box and glanced over the pages until a story about Sheriff Dawkins caught his attention. Dripping with praise, the article described how the sheriff’s no bull attitude kept the bad elements from even attempting to spoil his beloved county. He was even presented an award for outstanding service, an idea that set in the Cyclops stomach worse than the half-cooked elk liver. There was a shot of a perky high school girl in a short dress handing him a brass plaque, and while the sheriff kept his eyes humbly lowered, it wasn’t difficult to notice that they were stealing a glance at the girl’s shapely brown thighs.

Cyclops laughed. He dug a hand deep into his overcoat and smiled when he felt the elk heart against his palm, soft and still warm from being cooked over a blazing fire next to where Ann lay. He wrapped the organ with a sheet of newsprint and raised it to his mouth. Taking a deep bite, he felt the blood jam pour into his throat and seek out his soul. The heart made for a good dessert, he decided. There was gentle sweetness in the middle, unlike the liver which seemed to draw up the bile and try to turn the eater’s body against itself. He knew this was how the wildness in things often behaved. It had tricks up its old sleeve that we could only dream of understanding.

He’d never trusted Duane from the moment they’d met. The sheriff had said he was alright, but Mikhail only saw a liability.

“It’s his wife Sarah I’m worried about,” Dawkins had said.

“His wife?”

“She’s unhappy. And she knows too much.”

At the time Mikhail was living in Seattle, in the process of setting up a chain of operations on the west coast. The disfiguring accident wouldn’t happen until he moved back to New York a few years later, but up until then women had found him handsome and exotic, and unlike the men he knew that preferred to pay for their female companionship, Mikhail enjoyed the thrill of the chase, of often topping off his seductions by reading from a slender book of Pushkin’s poems that he kept in his pocket.

He’d stayed in a motel next to the highway while he met with Duane and the sheriff to work over the details. Invariably they would go to the local bar afterwards and drink and later Mikhail would wake up in his cheerless room thinking that Duane was still going to get them all into big trouble some day.

The next night after the bars closed, Duane had no clue he was being followed home. He was too drunk and shouldn’t have been driving, Mikhail thought. It was a bad sign. When he’d driven past Duane’s house he’d seen Sarah in the window. Their eyes had briefly faced and a frame of time seemed as if had been to jarred loose from its river of continuity, her image suspended in a flash of white light that seared itself permanently into his mind and did not weaken with time.

Earlier the following evening he’d walked to the house, while Duane and the sheriff had only begun to work through another round of drinks at the local bar. Mikhail had stood quietly under the trees and watched the woman and her young daughter sitting in front of the blue glow of a television. Her face was much like Ann’s now, reminding him of rare bloodlines and pale flowers up in the alpine slopes of mountains. Yes, he guessed that he was that kind of man when it came to women. He’d watched as they got up to refill glasses and microwave popcorn, let their cat in and out the back door. It wasn’t until they glanced out the window that he began to see their fear, how its weight seemed to pull down whatever happiness they’d allowed themselves to feel.
Was it me? Did they sense they were being watched?

His answer came soon after the bars had closed and the girl had been tucked into bed, when Duane had come roaring up to the front of the house, stereo kicking out an ugly bass that shook window panes. Mikhail had watched him stumble from his car, unzip his pants and piss in the flowerbox. Not long after he’d gone inside, all the lights had come on. Shouting followed, and he’d heard sharp thudding sounds like someone punching drywall with their fist. When he’d heard the woman cry out, he’d wanted to go inside and save her.

And you did save her
, Cyclops thought. He took another bite of the elk’s heart and chewed slowly, gazed at the wet highway before him, a spooled out reel of film.

After all their arrangements had been made, Mikhail had checked out of his motel and said goodbye to the sheriff. For the next few nights he parked his car in front of Duane’s house and kept watch while bad thoughts charred in his mind. One night before Duane had come home from drinking, Mikhail was surprised to see Sarah emerge from the house carrying a suitcase, a dark bruise smudged across her cheekbone. He followed her from a distance down to the Greyhound bus stop, couldn’t tell if she’d seen him park beneath some trees, and shut the lights.