Thalo Blue (44 page)

With cold feet inside shoes that felt like hard blocks of plaster, he lost grip on the patchy track-laden snow where forms of footsteps from weeks before had congealed to icy ridges. He collapsed to the snow, kicking up crystal-white powder, and feeling the sting of it on his face and hands.

As a clamor rose from beyond the walls of the house he thought he would pass out for certain. Malin had not made it to the corner of the yard. The kitchen’s door stood closed.

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When Malin had announced by e-mail to her childhood friend, Alexa, that she had gotten a position with a division of the Houston Police Department, Alexa had sent her friend a package by airmail. A congratulatory card outlining several lewd uses for a prophylactic was accompanied by an absurd and ridiculous collection of gifts more suited to a ladies’ stagette than a new position with the police. But that was Alexa’s style. Her sense of humor could be considered, at best, off-color.

Every item in the present, however, had a relevance to their friendship. Alexa and Malin had a running in-joke through high school that each of them would lope off and marry a handsome police or naval officer and the gag grew into its own living being, getting carried further and further away. Eventually, as if to top its own hilarity, the story was that both girls would be so engrossed in their work that they wouldn’t have time to date that tall dark and handsome man in uniform. Once they found a suitable candidate—which, in itself seemed laborious and impossible—they would have to settle for ignoring the usual courtship, cuffing him, reading him his Miranda rights, and having an ordained man of the cloth paged to begin the ceremony by way of a forced signature from the groom.

In Malin’s box of loot from dear Alexa was a petite set of official police handcuffs with a note attached reading,
Go get him, girl...
in Swedish.

And for some reason, Malin—who was not so much fearful as she was distantly wary of being accosted in the dark streets of downtown Houston—had tossed the metal cuffs into her purse. And there they had stayed. Under the leather wall of it they sat now, beneath the cell phone, and beside a can of once-tried pepper spray. A girl has got to look out for herself.

As the Druid came through the mouth of the west hallway like a train jumping a set of tracks, Malin was near the entry to the kitchen. She let fly a pungent stream of the spray can directly into his face, just as the comprehension of what she was holding became clear to him. The bellow of pain, as it streaked through his eyes and in his nostrils, united with his false steps to fashion a forward blind stagger in the direction of where he thought she was still standing. In his confusion and maddeningly loud cry of anguish, the heels of his hands went directly to his eyes in search of relief from the burn and sting. He hit the wall to his left, bashing a hole in the dry wall, and as a flailing wrist went instinctively to his face she managed to clasp one loop of Alexa’s handcuffs around it. She dragged him by the solitary hand, closed-eyed, tearing and red in the face, three steps forward into the kitchen. He stumbled and fell forward, still shouting at her.

She clacked the second loop of the cuffs around the stove’s handle, where a tea towel dropped to the linoleum. The Druid fell to the floor, banging against the front surface of the fridge with a thump. The fall forced his braced leg to bend, something it shouldn’t have done. There was a crunch and his face became even more reddened, a scrunched up ball of suffering. He howled again, a long bay of torture, and his yells collapsed along with his wind to become a harsh mix of pained muttering and vulgarity. He reached out towards Malin who by now had her wits reclaimed and her lungs filled with mostly hospitable air. But his left arm, the one without the cast, was unable to come forward and grab hold of her. It was chained to the stove. She wanted to say something witty about that but was badly out of breath and could still taste the exhaust in her throat and her nose. She needed to get out of that house. She moved back from him, out of the kitchen, pulling two sets of keys from their homes on a hook by the telephone’s empty bracket.

He wailed in frustration.

She told him to get his fingers out of his eyes. If he didn’t it would only make it worse.

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Barely sound, Zeb and Malin found themselves in the backyard, safe and panting. He was freezing cold, kneeling in the crunchy snow, and she had finally warmed up. The throb at the base of his neck had returned but it felt unusually good. Lengthening shadows held a tint of cayenne but he didn’t shrink back from them. From her pants pocket she nabbed the cell phone and hit the two necessary numbers to call the police.

With waning voice, he said that she hadn’t kept her promise.

She said that she knew that but that he wouldn’t have let her go otherwise. She was right. As he started to regain his breath, sucking in the cold and ill-temperate oxygen and nitrogen from the yard, they fell into each other. It was an embrace that signaled the understanding of how seriously bad the situation had been. They both fought back tears and would not let go of the other.

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The sun in the sky shone canted shafts just as a late afternoon in January should allow. The world was alive and well outside the walls of the dark garage, just on the other side of a time when it seemed like that world had shriveled up and abandoned Zeb and Malin. Only a few minutes past the ordeal, the two stood in the front yard. They had placed Zeb’s case of clothes and painting supplies in the trunk of the Ci coupe which was idling in front of the house. All of its windows were open and the sunroof was a gaping wound staring towards the sky. The rental sat behind it also still running. The garage doors stood open, both of them like giant wooden hands playing peek-a-boo, askew on the snow and ice of the drive.

She was insisting that he go. He was telling her that he should stay. From the house they could still hear the wails of the Druid and it made a nasty shiver run down the middle of Zeb’s back. It would do no good, she was telling him. This was her area of expertise, not his. He needed to go. And as the police cars rounded the curve in the distance, silent but with red and blues flashing, he finally agreed. Staying here to answer questions, going back to the hospital to get checked out again, for both of them it was pointless. She needed to get Fairweather into custody and then she would find him at Charlemagne Lake. He needed to begin again. As soon as possible.

It all felt like a distant recollection made falsely grandiose by the passing of time. Illogical and meaningless, like it had not unfolded this way at all. How do you react? What do you say to someone beside whom you have just stared down the inevitability of death? What do you do when your life is held in a grain of sand for the second time? He wanted to make sure she would be all right. That was what came to mind first. And she gave him a look that said if either of them was going to be just fine it would be her.

Somewhat reluctantly, as the two cruisers made their way closer, he conceded. He got into his father’s car. And he drove off.

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Return to your life, the doctor had said. Recovery can be quick but healing takes more.
Return to your life.

And Zeb intended to do just that.

Underneath the tang of lingering car exhaust, he smelled exhilaration. Though everyone was gone, he felt alive. Like standing at the gates of hell once hadn’t been enough of a wake-up call. Zeb had needed to do it twice. Everyone he had ever counted on in his life was simply gone. But he wasn’t. He was here—wherever
here
was. Malin had helped see to that. He wondered, in a brief second, what he would have ever done without her inside this very car just a short time earlier. And what he would have done without her there in the hospital when he came back to earth. There was feeling in every extremity now. That kind of vivaciousness you sense after a long run across an open field on a glorious day. He had been tested and it was clear to every sensory receptor, both physical and non, that he was a thriving, existing being. He was
the living
. And he was never happier for that than he was this moment.

In the Ci’s rearview mirror he saw a smooth, crystalline vision of Malin talking with the officers as they materialized from inside the cruisers. Behind her was the profile of his house. It sat back on its haunches casually, knowingly. Relaxed. Composed. Though he would see it again—soon even. With a contractor, maybe, to sort out new doors and windows, some carpet. To clean it out, to walk through it perhaps with a realtor, and discuss its features: the cramped yet useable garage; the kitchen-dining split where meals and sociability could share a moment; the dividing line of the basement stairs.

That sentient oak towered overhead, with a thousand outstretched and pleading arms. They curled across each other in the flat plane of his backward vision as would dark streamers suddenly frozen in a torrent of wind and ice. He said goodbye then. And he realized that what he had been doing was saying goodbye for the last twenty-five years.

Getting past things was easy when there was finally something visible on the other side of them.

Nevermore is what’s in store.

His life still ran warm in his veins.

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Three
: THE SOUND AND THE VALUE;

Drawing Blue Velvet Curtains

The universe appears to conspire on our behalf.

But it does so unknown to us.

-
Drawing Lines in the Sand:

A Way of Life
,

DAVID R. G. LANGTREE

The only time I feel lost is when I stand on the edge of where I know I’m supposed to be; we all have to step out of ourselves at some point.

-THE BOOK OF THE DEAD,

September 24

Thirteen was a mixed age for Zeb. Nine dealt the biggest blow but thirteen offered the widest range of them. That year found Jackson, his first real friendship. That year he saw his dead aunt lying in a phantom motel room on the other side of his midnight window. And that year, he discovered a heap of old yellowing photographs that made Sadie all the more beautiful in his memory.

And then there was the thing with his dad. Entirely dissimilar to what happened with that burn on his arm a few years before, this time Oliver wound up and hit the boy. This time there was no mistaking it. This time he drew back his open hand and let it come forward against Zeb’s cheek and jaw.

The horrific look in him then, one which made it apparent how unhinged he had actually been in the last four years, bled away. And he only stared with sadness at his equally sad son who then ran off bawling to the solitude of his multi-colored walls and his blue bedspread. The boy stayed there for three full days, only creeping out at intervals when Oliver was at work, to take food from the kitchen back to his room where no wooden fan spun on the ceiling above his bed.

I. Lamentation Sky

Sebastion Redfield tore away from the city under an electric blue sky. The motor hummed solidly and without compromise. And the roadway was not as slick as he might have imagined it would be. The tires of the silver steed gripped it and made the exit seem simple. On the in-dash CD: Manic Street Preachers chanting
Intravenous Agnostic
from the
Know Your Enemy
album.

Ahead, the strip lay uncoiling, and overhead the sky blazed with a fierce coolness. The sun, knowledgeable, sat in a flat pane of Thalo blue. Thalo mixed with Cerulean.

The night previous, Zeb had stumbled onto a hotel bed, kicking off shoes. The shock of what had happened in his garage, perhaps sharing some space with all the other atrocities, vied to take control. Even with the windows rolled up again, the sunroof sealed tight and the Ci’s heater pumping warmth on every extremity, he was shivering by the time twenty minutes of road had been swallowed. The impending night made it seem like a full drive north to Charlemagne Lake, no matter how much it felt like he needed to go, would not happen that soon.

His body was filled with aching again. The tender skin of his bruises stood in less horrific hues but they throbbed. And so he downed more pills.

That pain eased as he stood in the room’s shower, letting the warmth comfort. And he crawled into one of two double-sized beds, though he had only paid an off-season rate for a one bed room. But he could not get warm. His eyelids were pulled in on themselves, and he curled with knees nearly at his chin. The shivers would not stop.

Into the hot shower he went again. But to no avail. He pulled the blankets and sheets from the other bed on top of himself and finally found sleep.

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Just before he drifted, while still in that hazy half-alive, half-held-in-dreams portion, he caught glimpse of himself. It was a shard of glass reflecting his pupil, reflecting his eyebrow and part of his cheek. As though he had been standing before a mirror that shattered and sent pieces of itself outward. The glimpse was that moment before the staggered and jagged sections of reflective glass would have struck his face, digging into him.

His mind cycled towards those real moments when he had been faced with himself, those moments in time when he had stood in front of reality-inducing mirrors.

There was the scruffy view in a hospital bathroom when he traced pieces of his father’s face in his own. There was tonight’s at the hotel, a brief and unholy look as the steam rose from the sink and threatened to wash the look of his face completely away in white.