The Snowfly (54 page)

I slept against my pack and drifted in and out of an odd dream. Gillian and I were sharing a smoke on the roof of my place in Saigon.

“Truth is a much overrated commodity, darling. There's no way to know if you have your hands on truth or just what you want to be true.”

“Facts are truth.”

“Yes, but in what
order?
”

It was a bizarre dream, too vivid for comfort. She had said one other thing in the dream.

“If you find love, Bowie darling, don't leave her. Not ever.”

I woke up regretting that I had not left Ingrid a note. I knew I should not be chasing Raina. What was Ingrid thinking now? What the hell was wrong with me?

The wolf came up from the tag alders at sunrise with water dripping from her snout.

“Anything you'd like to say on behalf of your gender?”

She tilted her head and snapped her jaws several times.

I went to retrieve my wire. Harkie had clumsily tried to convince me that Raina had gone downstream, but my gut said up. I was homing in on something. What that was remained an open question.

 

•••

 

Betsy abandoned me during the next night. Another time, in another place, a soldier pointed to a distant copse. “Bad guys,” he said. I did not know his politics, rendering the reference ambiguous. But boundaries we can't see can be as real as those that bend light.

 

•••

 

My warning system worked. Toward morning I heard the cans jingle, immediately dumped the lead shot out, and got cautiously to my knees to see if I could spot what had tripped them. I heard steady footsteps, careful, furtive strides crunching twigs and dry duff. Cat and mouse, and this time I was the cat. There was a partial moon. I got to my feet and began stalking.

Fifty yards in from the river there was a clearing. I saw a silhouette move along the edge, switched on my flashlight and yelled, “Hey!”

At that moment I was hit hard in the right shoulder and knocked left. I stumbled under the force, frantically trying to recover my balance, but the ground gave way beneath me and I dropped.

The landing was hard and knocked the breath out of me. I heard a demonic laugh above me.

“Asshole!” I half grunted, half shouted.

The answer was a gunshot above the hole, the muzzle flash momentarily lighting the opening. Nearly simultaneously, something splatted on my head. I recoiled, trying to brush it away. My hands groped around for it. Cloth. From a spirit hole to a trap, I thought, but this time I was not feeling contemplative.

“Best put that on your head,” a voice cackled from above. “While you still got one.” It was Harkie.

“Fuck you,” I shouted angrily.

A second gunshot lit the hole again and I quickly pulled the cloth over my head. It was a bag. I was afraid but not paralyzed. If Harkie wanted me dead, the deed would already be done.

A rope slapped me on the shoulder. “It's looped. Put it around your waist and be quick. We ain't got all night.”

I obeyed, felt the rope tighten and reached up with my hands to get a grip. He had said “we,” not I. He had help.

As the rope helped me swim over the lip of the hole into a bed of damp ferns, a foot pressed on the back of my neck. My arms were roughly pulled forward, almost elbow to elbow, and my assailant began to wrap me in rough rope, working fast. My arms were lashed together then pushed against my chest. More lashings were wrapped all the way around my body. You don't know how much you use your arms for balance until you lose the use of them. I was a mummy in hemp.

My arms secured, another rope was looped around my neck and cinched tight.

“Told you to go downriver, didn't I?”

Trussed
is a term of degree. Like tied up without wiggle room. Skewering is pinning a dead chicken's wings to its body. I was not technically skewered, but just as helpless.

I was jerked to my feet, then pulled, and away we went, with me stumbling continuously, knocking against things, barking my shins. We walked for what had to be hours. Several times I fell down, only to be hauled up. Eventually I began to smell smoke and later, when we finally halted, I felt heat from a fire. I was tired and sore and working too hard for air inside the bag.

A poke in my back sent me lurching forward; I tripped over something and fell face-first.

 

•••

 

A voice said, “Every situation has inherent inelasticities. That which cannot be remedied must be endured. Believe it, dickhead.” I heard whispering voices, which grew into angry shouts. A debate was in progress.

“Our rules are clear. No conscripts. A man walks in on his own, or he don't walk at all.”

“This is my business,” a woman answered. Raina Chickerman's voice!

A different voice intervened. “Give 'im the bag. That's how it's always been.”

“Don't be ridiculous. He's mine,” Raina's insisted. Where was Harkie?

The toe of a boot or shoe kicked me in the ribs. “On your feet, you sad sack-a-shit. Lettin' yourself be taken by a woman.” The speaker made an exaggerated tsk-tsk sound. “You should be ashamed.”

I heard sniggering around me, on the periphery.

“The fuck we want with a dude gets took by a woman?” someone asked.

“The fuck we 'spose to do with you,
man!
” the first male voice shouted into my ear.

Purely rhetorical, I judged, and elected to remain silent in an effort to collect brain cells and my wits. I was still breathing hard from the long hike, and sweating. I was not afraid as much as curious.

“Reasons aren't important,” Raina said. “I brought him, which makes him mine. Nobody has a say in this but me.”

A gestalt: My quarry had become my captor. She was working with Harkie. I had heard his voice.

“We have the rules,” someone said.

“There it is,” another voice said.

“
Your
rules, not mine.” Raina had modulated her tone to near-­sweetness, but I knew there was steel backing it up. Buzz had been right. But if he was so worried about Ingrid and me, why had he told me? He could have kept quiet and I would never have known. Another puzzle.

“Out there, you can do what you want. But you're here and it's our book. That's how it is.”

I heard the slide of a firearm work. “I do what I want, wherever I am,” she said. It was Raina, all right.

The main voice softened. “Maybe we'll have to take care of both of you.”

“Then make it a threesome because you'll be going with us.” No give, no fear.
Definitely
Raina Chickerman. I almost told the voice to believe her. I did.

“Let her keep him,” a different voice said from the shadows. “Couple of days, she'll get tired of him.”

“Rules are rules,” the main voice said, insistent, but less stridently. “Walk in on your own. We all have to choose to be here.”

“She'll whack your ass,” another voice called out. “She'll do it, Red.”

The main voice was in my ear again. “What's your name?”

“Key.”

A hard blow knocked me backward. So much for testing them. “Gotcher wallet, shit-for-brains. Says Rhodes.”

“It
is
Rhodes. I swear.”

“Ain't polite to swear,” somebody called out. I heard fragments of laughter.

“You the law, Rhodes? Fish cop? Forest service puke, maybe?”

“I'm nobody.”

“That fits,” somebody shouted.

“Let me through,” a voice demanded. I heard scuffling.

“
Bowie Rhodes!
”

I blinked at the familiarity of the new voice. “Yes?” My mind was spinning. Another familiar voice?

“Have you fucked Chairman Brezhnev's wife lately?”

“Valoretev?”

He slapped my back. “
Da!
”

“Val?” Was this possible?

His hand was on my shoulder. “I know this man. He has courage and he is my friend.”

The main voice barked, “Both of you can take responsibility, but he's not one of us. Teach him how we do things here.” Both. Valoretev and Raina Chickerman. Had I slid into
The Twilight Zone?

I was being led again, stumbling along. “Dammit, Punky, get this damn thing off my head.”

“What is this Punky?” Valoretev asked.

“It's okay,” Raina said.

The bag was whipped off and I gasped for fresh air. It was evening, still light, the sun almost below the ridgeline to the west. I wasn't uncovered more than a few seconds when I saw a face I recognized and felt a rage explode inside me. I didn't think: I lowered my head and bulled my way forward, smashing the top of my head into the man's face with a sickening crunch. We both went down. My sudden move had ripped my leash away from Valoretev. I struggled to my feet and knee-dropped the man on the ground, trying to drive my knees through his head, but a shoulder knocked me sideways.

“Hold him,” Raina said calmly.

My adrenaline burst was not yet done. I looked over at the man, screamed, “Nick Adams!” and tried to crab-crawl on my side to scissor-kick him, but again I was restrained.

Valoretev sat on me, laughing raucously, then hoisted me up by the armpits and pushed me along. I tried to pull away several times to get at the man who had misled Ingrid and me in Key West. But Val was too strong and moved me steadily away. I had to take consolation in the blood cascading down the fingers of the man holding his face. It felt good to strike out.

I was certain that everything was about to fit together, but how?

It was a short walk to a small cabin built under huge, sagging white birches. There were no windows and the place was dark, with vertical logs, in the old French
coureurs de bois
manner, thick chinking aged dark by soot. Dark blue-green moss covered the roof and outside walls.

The floor was made of planks that sagged and squeaked under our weight. I felt the leash soften and watched Raina moving around me. Light flickered from a match and a lantern hissed to life. I looked around the room. Val was no longer with us. There was a table with two chairs, each painted a different color, small beds in two corners, a woodstove in the middle, clothing hung on wall pegs, animal skulls tacked to a beam overhead, a dented metal tub in the corner. There were several fly rods on pegs along another wall. Expensive stuff, split bamboo, shining pink in the shimmering light. One wall was stacked nearly to the ceiling with wood. The ceiling was open to the roof above rough-hewn square-planed beams. The scent of pine and cedar was heavy in the air.

“That was an exceptionally childish display,” Raina Chickerman said, pushing a chair over to me and holding my shoulder to steady me as I sat.

My anger had not entirely abated. “That asshole drugged an old man in Key West.”

Raina seemed to measure her words. “By that standard, every surgeon in the world should be popped in the nose. The old man wasn't hurt. He simply got a longer nap.”

“You knew!”

Raina Chickerman was small, not up to my chest, with short black hair and dark skin. She wore camouflage fatigue pants and a black T-shirt.

“Does knowledge invariably imply culpability? I didn't have anything to do with it,” she said, turning away to light a wood fire in the small stove.

“Bullshit!”

“You don't argue any more effectively now than when we were children. Volume still doesn't equate to logic.”

“You've been dogging me for years.”

“Coincidence is not a precursor of theorems,” she said.

She boiled water, poured some into two mugs, and filled them with small, aromatic red-green twigs, which she swizzled around. I smelled sassafras.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

“Drink,” she said. “It's hot and maybe this will help disabuse you of your Ptolemaic perspective.”

“I have a right to know.”

She looked across the table at me. Her normally blue eyes were intense and seemed to change color from blue to green.

“Do you?”

“Why?” I repeated.

“Fate,” she said. “Now drink.”

I held up my wrists. My arms were no longer pinioned to my chest, but they remained bound to each other.

She sighed unsympathetically. “Make the best of it.” She sipped from her cup and relaxed against the back of her chair, watching me. It was the same look she had fixed on me when we were children.

I tasted the bitter liquid. “This tastes like shit,” I said.

“So much anger,” she said.

When we had finished, she guided me to one of the beds. “Yours. It'll be warm in here tonight.” She crossed to the other bed and lay down. “You were meant to be here,” she said, her last words of the night.

I was tired and too sore to argue but had a difficult time sleeping. What the hell had I gotten myself into? What were these people doing out in the forest living like this? What was Raina's connection to them? What would Ingrid think if she saw me like this?

 

•••

 

Valoretev came into the cabin at daybreak. I had hardly slept and ached from the previous day's exertions. There was no sign of Raina; I had no idea when she had left the cabin. It had been the same when we were children; she could come and go like a thought.

“You are a crazy bastard, my good friend Bowie Rhodes,” Val said with his infectious grin. I took a good look at him in the morning light. His hair had grown long and his beard and mustache were starting to gray. His eyes were sunk deep and dirt was ground into his skin, which shone like grease. He carried a carbine, slung tightly across his chest; a huge knife was upside down in a scabbard on his left leg. We walked to the bank of the river. He took a pack of my own cigarettes from his pocket and lit one for himself. I hadn't thought about my gear since being knocked down two days before.