The Pines (19 page)

“Whose turn is it?”

“So anyway, between us and the cops, we bust down the door.”

“Yours.” In the ambulance hall, the crew sat around the card table.

“And there’s this fat guy laying there, and you could see he’d been cold awhile. You know how you can tell, right? He’s on his face with all the liquid pooled in his gut. You know, all sort of blue the way it gets, and the rest of him gray-like.” Showing off, Larry talked too fast, alternately smiling at Cathy Hobbs and blushing. “So anyway, I knew soon as we tried to move him that skin was gonna split and it’d come spilling out, so…”

“Listen to him, couple weeks on the rig and he sounds like a pro,” interrupted Jack. “Come on. You gonna play or what?” He leaned toward Cathy with an astonishingly intimate grin. “More coffee?”

Cathy was kind of cute, Athena supposed, looking her over. Little on the plump side, too much blue eye shadow. But why were the guys giving her the treatment?

Both Larry and Jack reached for the coffeepot. Jack won.

“Yuck,” observed Cathy, getting a whiff of the blackness he slopped into her cup.

“I keep telling everybody not to let Doris make the coffee.”

“So anyway,” Larry went on, “what we did was, we slid a sheet under him and lifted from the corners.”

Experimentally, Cathy brought the cup to her lips, grimaced. “This is awful strong. I’m surprised it doesn’t melt through.”

Before Jack had a chance to think of it, Larry tossed her a couple packets of sugar, then fumbled with a bag of plastic spoons.

“Now those will dissolve,” said Athena, breaking the silence she’d slipped into half an hour before. Cathy glanced at her, and Athena returned her eyes to her cards. She’d never been sure about how much Cathy guessed about Athena and her husband.

“No, thanks”—Cathy waved away the spoons—“I’ll drink it black. So, anything else been happening?”

Matthew waited around a turn in the road, and Pam caught up to him.

“Tha’ sonafabitch.” Her hands shook. “That bad man, did he bother you, baby? What was you doing over here all by yourself? Just playing like a good boy? Don’t you let him bother you. If he ever comes round here again, you just come get me. You hear? I’ll show him.”

“Says…he says…sumthin’ ’bout a old man.” Dark bars of shadow leaned across the road, and the boy couldn’t look away from them. “Inna woods. I seen…”

“Now, don’t you pay no attention a him. I don’t know what he’s talking about anyways. Don’t even know hisself. Everbody knows his father just run off.” Seeing how he stared down the road toward town, she stopped.

“Sumthin’ might be…gonna happen a him.” The empty brilliance of his eyes held a dark wonder. “Sumthin’ bad.”

“Nothing much,” Jack was saying. “Couple cases of heatstroke.”

“Looks like you’re in for more of those.” Cathy fanned at the neck of her blouse, then sighed and looked around the hall. “It’s been so long since I’ve been over here. Oh, is it my turn? Rummy.”

“Shit.” Larry tossed his cards down. “I quit. Look at this hand,” he laughed. “Cathy? Look at what I’ve got.”

“Yeah, Cath, it’s been a while since you came by. You should stop around more often.” From behind his glasses, Jack’s eyes studied the thin material of her blouse.

“Oh, you know.” She shrugged, adding up her score. “Doris doesn’t like it. I sure wish she’d let me run again. I go crazy in that house.”

Athena laughed, a small explosive noise that cut off when they all looked at her. “I was only…trying to imagine sitting around the house.”

“How many points you got stuck with, man?”

“You saying that house of yours is still standing, ’Thena?” Jack winked at Cathy as she gathered up the cards and began to shuffle. “I’m telling you, you should get in touch with the historical society.” Taking off his glasses, he massaged the bridge of his nose. “Besides, ain’t you scared of that dog pack way out where you are? I heard they killed somebody.” With an elaborate gesture, he got up and flexed his muscles. “Sitting so long makes me all stiff.” He smiled at Cathy.

“Who’s winning?”

The bay door, shut against the mosquitoes, trapped the heat and boxed in the steady drone of the fan. Picking up her cards, Athena played mechanically, trying to ignore the conversation, only occasionally glancing up at the other woman. From time to time, she caught Cathy looking back at her.

“You guys still running to fires with those old Indian pumps?” Cathy snickered. “You’re going to get your asses fried.”

“We had a couple good ones last month.” Jack nodded. “Couldn’t figure out what started them. Turned out Fort Dix was using the woods for artillery practice.”

They all laughed. Then the back door banged, and everyone tensed. Invisible from the table, the rear exit was behind the refrigerator. “Christ, another hot night. I swear to God, I’m not going to live through this summer.” Shirtsleeves rolled up, Doris stopped in front of the table. “What are you doing here?”

“I came over to see my friends, Doris.” Cathy sat up straighter. “I do still have friends here, you know.”

“Yeah? Well, I guess stranger things have happened.” Turning her back on them, Doris stomped toward the lockers, silence trailing after her. “You do those reports yet, Jack?” she barked. Everyone just looked at their cards while she grabbed some cleaning rags and headed for the exit.

The door banged shut behind her, and Cathy slapped her cards down.

“Hey, Cath.” Jack put his arm around her shoulders. “You shouldn’t let her upset you that way.”

“What gets me is the way she acts mad—like I did something to her. It’s the other way around. I was always her friend.”

Athena gave Larry a small smile and put her cards down. “Well,” she said softly, “so much for rummy.”

“The call came in real routine, you know, that last one I went on?” Cathy’s voice droned almost too low to hear, a self-absorbed monotone. “House hold accident, supposed to be. Nobody else was on, just me and Doris, and this guy answers the door, standing there with a beer in his hand. ‘All right.’ That’s all he kept saying. ‘She’ll be all right. Just needs a little rest.’ We found her under the kitchen sink with a drill bit broke off and sticking out of her head. While we were getting her out, he asked me if I wanted a beer.”

Athena watched her closely.

“In the rig, it started coming out again. All over the place. I didn’t know which hole to plug first.” She laughed with a sound like tearing cloth. “At the hospital, they counted seventy-one of them. And Doris kept yelling at me.”

“Didn’t you call the cops?” Jack asked. “Did your husband come?”

“Yeah, Barry was there.” She nodded, expressionless. “Me she fires, but that goddamn useless Siggy she keeps on. I know I freaked, but Doris didn’t have to be so goddamn mean.”

No one spoke. Athena wiped an arm across her forehead and got up. “I just want to see if she needs any help back there.” As she left the table, the group stayed silent.

She reached the back door, pulled it open and heard the hiss of the hose, then decided Doris would probably appreciate something cold. Letting the door slam, she turned back to get a couple of Cokes from the refrigerator.

“She gets on my nerves, that’s all.” Cathy’s voice had risen sharply. “She’s so stuck up, and it’s a joke. She thinks she’s so smart. What did she ever do? Tell me that. Far as I can see, she’s never done anything.”

Athena froze. She felt the anger harden within her, then fade again as quickly. In the shadows, she leaned against the bulletin board. Then a thin crust of sand particles whispered beneath her shoes as she moved back to the door. She closed it quietly behind her.

All the rig’s doors stood open, and the hose played across and through them. Floodlights glared from the garage roof, throwing the words “Mullica Emergency Rescue” into stark relief.

“She must know.”

“What? Oh, hiya, honey.” Doris looked up and smiled. “What did you say? Grab a rag.”

“That time of the month again so soon?”

“Christ, you’ve been hanging out with me too long.”

Things from the rig, stacked along the wall, tilted precariously, and a radio, perched on a window ledge, muttered and squawked about sending money “to help develop mental defectives in south Jersey.”

“Is that really necessary?” Doris stepped back to snap it off, then gestured toward the rig. “The old girl washes up pretty good, doesn’t she?”

“You look lovely to night, yes.”

“Oh jeez, I walked right into that. I repeat—you’re definitely spending too much time around me.”

Athena hefted a bucket of water. “You were a little hard on Cathy just now, weren’t you?”

“I don’t want her hanging around here.” She twisted the nozzle on the hose, squeezing off the water. “Besides, it’s not like I fired her. She quit on me when I needed her.” Taking the bucket, she heaved soapy water onto the floor of the rig. “She wants to come back, doesn’t she? Well, she can forget it.”

“We need runners.”

“Not like her, we don’t. What the hell good is she if she’s going to get hysterical on calls?” Doris snorted. “Got to run home and spend a week in bed.”

“Some people just aren’t strong enough to…”

“Then they don’t belong here! Strong! Oh Christ, I’ve heard that before. Like it’s a curse. Does that mean we’ve got to spend our lives mopping up after people that aren’t?”

“Isn’t that what we do?”

Doris shrugged. “Never thought of it that way.” She opened a first-aid kit and sorted through it. “Let me ask you something. Don’t you ever, I don’t know, kind of resent all the people who expect something from you just because you’re supposed to be strong? Don’t answer that. Where the hell are the BP cuffs? Oh.”

Athena took the hose, started rinsing down the tires. “Lonny came over the other day.”

“What?”

She turned off the water. “I said…”

“What did he want?”

“To move back in.” She dropped the hose, and it slithered, spitting on the ground.

“So the son of a bitch is out again, is he?”

“He was drunk. He looked…terrible.”

“He didn’t hurt you or anything, did he? I know he tried to get rough with you once before.”

“Doris, I know it’s weird, but I feel so sorry for him. All of a sudden. Him and Pamela. They can’t turn their lives around any more than I can.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do, honey?”

She didn’t answer.

“That’s so hard for me to understand,” Doris resumed. “I mean, I guess it just seems to me there’d be all kinds of things you could be doing. You’re so bright and all. If you w ere someplace else, there’s no telling how far you might go. Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s the truth. Christ, I mean, I’m glad you’re here. It’d be pretty stale for me if you weren’t. You know that, don’t you?”

Again, no answer.

Doris turned on the hose and played it into the rig. With a sudden smell of old blood, water washed brown from the metal to gurgle down the drain. “There was a little bit of a breeze before,” Doris muttered. She saw the look on Athena’s face and followed her gaze into the dusk. “It just keeps on getting darker, doesn’t it?” She shut off the water, and for a moment, they listened to the evening noises, to the katydids, to the hissing leak of the hose. “Just look at that big romantic moon. You know, honey, I remember stories from back home. I don’t know what’s been making me think of them lately. Stories us kids used to tell. Especially ones about a lost tribe of Indians, supposed to live way out in the Everglades. Right out of the Stone Age. Where’s my cigarettes? Great stories. Scary as hell.” Doris chuckled. “Then I got to college and found out it’s all true.” She turned toward a hint of movement. “You leaving?”

“I’m going to the diner.” She forced a smile. “Will you be around later?”

Doris tried not to sound disappointed. “Later.”

Not wanting to go back inside, Athena walked around the outside of the hall. She heard the soft whoosh as the hose came on behind her; she heard crickets in the grass and the distant clatter and whir of cicadas in the trees.

Larry and Cathy stood together in the front doorway. Really together. They jumped apart when they saw her.

Skinny little Larry and Barry’s wife?
She hurried to her car, pretending not to have noticed.
What’s the matter, girl?
Her hand shook as she stuck the key in the ignition.
Does this make it worse?
Better?
She felt shocked at the intensity of her own reaction.
What is it?
She wanted to put her head down on the wheel.
You
all of a sudden afraid you might end up stuck with Barry? Isn’t that
what you want?

Moonlight spotted the sand: jagged shards of white. Silent as cloud shadows through the trees, the beasts prowled. The humid air churned with insects from which even thick fur offered no respite.

Lean and hideous, held together with sinews and scar tissue, the bitch had learned to move efficiently on three legs, the fourth held stiffly to her ribs at an unnatural crook. The bullet wound had crusted over.

She led the pack. They moved when she moved, paused when she paused. They had to eat soon, especially the small ones that trailed behind. The dense forest offered concealment but little else. Her milk had almost dried, and though instinct told her this litter would not long survive, the imperatives of caring for them drove her forward nonetheless. The runty wild pups followed, even the one with legs that splayed at almost useless angles. Another, barely remembered, had disappeared two days ago.

She sniffed the air and made a low, whining grunt. Agitated with hunger, the brood came loping through the pines, black swift shapes converging.

Food.

Yet, she bristled and growled. There on the changing, scent-charged breeze, she found a trace of…them. And with that recognition, her crippled leg began to burn, and her bared fangs dripped saliva.

The bitch hesitated, wanting to turn back. But now the pack had caught the scent of the garbage heap, and they pressed forward, viciously jostling for position.

Sky through trees: fragments of thinner blackness. Beneath the branches, shattered moonlight flickered over the running beasts.