The Bone Parade (36 page)

“The water,” she whispered.

Kerry helped her to her feet, and as Lauren straightened she saw the glorious trickle. It proved surprisingly bountiful when she pressed her parched lips against it.

She drank for minutes without stopping. Then, as if in another ugly dream, she heard Kerry’s soft words,

“He’s up there.”

A footstep, then another. He, too, had paused by the oddly shaped section of cliff. The two women stood as still as the rock that held them. Lauren wondered if he’d have the temerity to lower himself down, and if he took a tumble, as she had, if they’d be able to use his momentum to push him off the outcropping.

But why would he bother, she asked herself. He must have water, and only water could have made them stop. Water
and
fear, she corrected herself, the one so scarce and the other so abundant; but she realized that if either of them had been denied her, she might be dead. Her greatest fear had been him, and it had driven her here, to her greatest need, water.

His footsteps continued, then stopped. He was walking back. They heard him sit down.

Lauren eyed Kerry, and used her hands to make a pushing motion. Kerry understood immediately. Had any plan to murder been hatched and agreed upon so quickly? Lauren doubted it.

Kerry leaned forward, and drank silently from the trickle. Below them they heard the river, but Lauren no longer found the sound torturous. Indeed, she found it comforting, and decided that water, like so many other things, could make you magnanimous, once you’d had your fill. But how then, she wondered, do you explain him? Stassler had achieved more success than any other living sculptor. In the eyes of some critics, he’d already risen to the exalted ranks of Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. But Stassler wasn’t big-hearted. Stassler was a stone-hearted killer.

A pebble struck her head. Another fell on Kerry’s shoulder. Like a child, he was rolling pebbles down that steep slope.

Like a child? Maybe not. Lauren thought it likely that he was listening for their report, to see if there was an impact, or if they fell soundlessly into the canyon so far below.

Now a rock the size of a golf ball fell. Lauren surprised herself by catching it and tossing it on. Kerry appeared puzzled. Lauren whispered,

“He’s trying to figure out—”

Kerry’s finger rose to her lips. She understood. Both of them stared at the cliff edge several feet above them.

A rock the size of an orange came next. Kerry fumbled it, but managed to deflect it over the outcropping.

He’s incredibly methodical, thought Lauren. They’re getting larger.

And larger still: one the size of a grapefruit rolled angrily off the cliff. Lauren smoothly—so smoothly it shocked her—half caught and half heaved it toward the river.

She feared he’d roll a boulder that would crush them. But his game stopped as suddenly as it began.

They listened to him climb to his feet and walk away. This time he didn’t return. Lauren’s mouth had dried, and they spent the next half hour taking turns with that trickle. Each time she pressed her lips to the wet rock, she thought of Ry.

When they could drink no more, they sat with their backs to the wall. Lauren experienced a dreadful flush in her groin as she looked out and saw nothing but air between them and the opposing cliff, a sensation worsened by the reality of the sparse space she shared with Kerry: with her right side pressed against the girl, she still had only two inches of empty ledge to her left. She wanted a mile, would have taken a yard, and felt as thoroughly undone as a windowpane in a hurricane.

“Okay, Spider Woman,” she nudged her student, “what now?”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN
my life, I’m forced to consider the unthinkable. Even now, I try to find hope as I look over the darkening land; but simple-minded optimism is nothing more than denial in its shabbiest guise, and I have always taken just pride in my unwillingness to seek such cheap deceits. Her Rankness and nympho media whore have escaped me, and the implications are enormous. When they show up, wherever they show up, it will mark the end of my life as a sculptor, at least for the foreseeable future. There are actions I can take, actions I
will
take, but nothing can stop them from harming me in the short term. This appears as likely now as the setting of the sun, whose cusp is losing its weak hold on the horizon.

I sniff the air, sage and juniper, though where these scents originate I have no idea; there’s so little that lives on this rock. Perhaps these are merely olfactory memories, the first of my senses to long for the loss of all that I’ll have to leave behind.

To have sacrificed so much, to have come so far, only to leave it all in the hands of the Philistines is an insult whose force I could hardly have anticipated. I can’t even afford to mourn, not now. If I don’t move quickly, they’ll figure out my methods and seek to discredit the entire body of my work. They’ll refer in headlines to the methods of my madness, coining the term anew ad nauseam, and all because of that nympho media whore, though I recognize that I do share some blame. I should never have let that dog on my land. I should have shot him on sight as I have every other dog that ever wandered up. I should have let her go screaming to the authorities. Whom would they have believed? That miserable wench, or me when I said the beast tried to attack me? Rottweilers are biters—don’t I know—and she would have gotten nowhere with her complaint.

It’s all so bitterly ironic that she, in her bumbling, has brought all this down. The greatest sculptor of the last several hundred years forced to run into the night like a refugee because a hack like her happened upon my life.

Isn’t that always the way it is, the humble seeking to enslave the proud? It’s my very definition of democracy.

To dwell on her demise, the exquisite means by which I could dispatch her slowly, is my greatest wish; but I can no longer afford such self-indulgence. As I head back, I need to review all that must be done. I consider, for example, that blowing up the mine might be my best course of action. It would seal the graves of dozens, along with the faces, the real faces of all whose lives I’ve taken. I would grieve this loss deeply. After my death, I did want those faces to look out on the world, but they must be buried too. It is the only hope for my possible return.

I’ve planned my artistic doomsday carefully, though I would never take my own life, only the lives that have already been left in my hands, entrusted to me by fate, you might say, to be their master. I will have to carry the bone parade up from the cellar and over to the shaft. This could take hours, but in the end they’ll all join Brilliance, who joined so many others.

The mine will become a wasteland, but once I’m done the physical evidence they could use against me will be destroyed. No sheriff will authorize hundreds of thousands of dollars to excavate a mine cave-in when there’s no knowledge of its treasures. No one alive knows of them, certainly not nympho media whore and Her Rankness. They know only of the cellar, the cage. Let the authorities make of it what they will. There’s no crime in owning a cage, and I imagine that more than one law enforcement official will admire its rugged construction.

And then I’ll wait, as the coyotes out here wait. I’ll wait years, if necessary, to see how it all plays out. There’ll be the angry words of those two wretched women, their statements to the sheriff and the press, but without the corpora their words will gather dust. As the months turn into years, and the attention of the press and police turns to the thousands of others who are routinely murdered in the most wasteful ways, I’ll have my say with those two, and they’ll experience the deep suffering and death each of them deserves.

The tabloids will remark upon their sudden absence … perhaps … but again there will be no suspect in sight, only the notable disappearance long ago of the renowned sculptor. The sheriff, whoever he is by then, will make his measured pronouncements that the case remains open, but privately he and his investigators will know that with no bodies and no witnesses, statements given years earlier will not be terribly useful.

So within a decade I think it’s likely that I’ll be able to resurface. I’ll still be a young man. I’ll tell the world that the horrors of that era drove me to seek solitude, and given the constructs of contemporary culture, I expect I’ll not only be forgiven but I’ll be more sought after than ever before. There’ll be rock bands named Stassler, and my sculpture will sell for several times its original price. I’ll be welcomed back because such is the nature of commerce. I’ll work again in the medium of flesh, and next time it will be with infinitely greater care.

This is the solace that soothes my bruised spirit as I start the long hike back. But these are also the consolations afforded a man prudent enough to have paved any number of possible futures. I don’t need a great deal of time. I expect I’ll make it back to the compound by midnight when I can begin to close down my life there. I have all the identification necessary for a new one, and more money stashed away in foreign banks than I’ll ever need. Yes, I’ll have ample time to grieve in the days ahead, and to plan the means by which those two will eventually die.

The sky splinters to the north, far above the La Sal Mountains, and I hear the thunder many seconds later. It’s true, thunder
does
sound like bricks tumbling down. I look up at the night sky, pleased that I can still take pleasure in its simple beauty, its random boisterous wonder, that my joie de vivre has not been unduly blunted by the most unpleasant events of this unfortunate day.

A sudden rush of coolness chills my skin, as if I’d just cracked open the cabinet that leads to the mine. Her hand had settled on the false door when she toured the foundry. I’d been ready to fillet her right then. But she’d stepped away, and my hand strayed from the pocket where I keep my knife. I read the emptiness of her eyes and knew how little I needed to worry.

But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Wrong to overlook her insistence, and the blunt-nosed curiosity of her dog. How many dogs have I killed, both on the ranch and during my forays, like that Border collie that I used as bait? Two dozen? Three dozen? Each one a pleasure, I assure you. And along comes as dumb-looking a brute as I’ve ever seen, and he slipped right past me when he got in the barn. Or perhaps she’d planned it that way. Kept him out of the house, out of the foundry, and when my guard was down let him wander past those doors. But no, that’s giving her too much credit. She did no such thing. The beast was in a barn; it was appropriate, I suppose from her eyes, that he should be free to roam around. I never gave him a thought myself until he began his burrowing.

I have other regrets, deeper ones. It’s impossible not to second-guess myself now. I should never have taken the time to clean that noxious wound. I should have grabbed my gun and run. Better to have risked infection than the chance of their escape. But what chance, I thought then. What chance did they have? I had them in sight the whole goddamn time. It was only after I ran down the stairs and back outside that I lost them. Even then I expected them to flounder, perhaps even to die out here. Any reasonable man would have thought the same. I didn’t expect them to make it to the rock and use its impenetrable surface to hide their tracks. It’s even possible that they are racing back there now, in which case I’ll simply have to flee without any hope of destroying the mine, and thereby someday resurrecting the career of one of history’s greatest sculptors.

The storm veers ever closer. Lightning brightens the land like beacons, bleaches it white for stuttering seconds, and then the bricks tumble once more.

The wind hits me, and I suck it in, smelling the ozone. Rain will soon follow. With every illumination, I see vast sheets falling to the north. Rain brings the desert to life, a hoary beast rising to its legs. The rock on which I stand will shed it like the wings of water fowl, spilling the flood onto the parched land that surrounds my compound, filling the dry streambeds with brown roiling currents of water and sand and mud. It will lap at the boulders and drain into the beds of quicksand that have lain as dormant as the spadefoot toads, those ugly cat-eyed creatures that bury themselves in the dirt until the rains lubricate their furious urge to procreate.

All manner of the desert will soon surge to life with its own fierce face. These nights are a madness, a glorious insanity, and if the storm is strong enough, and this one feels unrepentant, it can shake the sky, rattle the earth, and rip the rootless from the land.

I peer toward the compound, the many miles I have endured. I study the flanks of these hills and wait for the lightning to come again. I could be struck by a bolt, but I don’t believe this will happen. Isn’t that odd, at my most vulnerable moment to feel so supremely protected?

Long white crooked fingers claw open the darkness, throwing shadows and brilliance over the hills, a chiaroscuro worthy of Caravaggio. I stand amazed by the depths to which perception can lead, grateful for this unbending moment in time. And then I see them. It’s as if this godless, barren universe is saying, There they are. Take them. Take them both. They are yours. You deserve them. You have earned them with your anguish, your unfeigned despair.

They are not five hundred feet away. Two females fleeing across the rock. I turn my face to the sky and my arms reach out to embrace the growing fury. The first pregnant drops splash against my cheeks. Thunder barrels past me, swept by violent gusts of wind. The rock on which I stand shudders, and I scream an unrepealable oath, a sound so pure and primal that it can mean only one thing: murder and survival, the one born of the other. Both born of blood.

T
HEY’D RESTED ON THE COFFIN
-shaped ledge for more than an hour, though not long enough for Lauren to grow comfortable with her uneasy roost. Eternity itself was not up to that task. She’d remained in absolute awe of Kerry’s easy willingness to stand and drink from the trickle of stream without, apparently, giving their chancy circumstances much thought.