by Jim Nelson
"You're too old—"
"I'm twenty-nine," she said.
"Hagars don't—"
"Don't what? Don't live to twenty-nine?"
"Hagars don't love children," he said, mouthing a common sentiment Ruby had heard throughout her adult life. "They hate their families," another common sentiment.
"Oh, Kyle," she said. "I wouldn't be here if that was true."
"Then why did you do it?"
"I have to live with my decision," she said. "But it was my decision. Not yours, not anybody's."
She reached to take his hand. He recoiled a step, his walking stick clanging against the foot of the couch. She recoiled too, face burning.
"Here they come." He nodded toward the curtains.
Two men in armor vests and camouflage pants and military boots stepped down from the truck's cab. The three riding in the bed of the truck leapt down to the dirt with rifles strapped across their backs. They began their march up the dusty hill.
Fifty-nine
Ruby would not allow any of this to reach Henry. She would surrender to the wolf pack, tell them she had tricked Kyle into letting her stay, and she would go peacefully. She must not allow Henry know any of this. Dr. Benford was right. If he were to learn the truth, it could harm him in any number of ways. She could not allow any harm fall on Henry.
Perhaps she could run upstairs and hug Henry goodbye—hug him a final time. Certainly she would not be returning. There was no bail to be set, no plea bargain to be made. And Kyle certainly would not welcome her in this house again. From the long bus ride to Torrance to Pismo Beach to Angels Camp, she had gambled and rolled well. Now she was played out.
She glanced down at the rumpled paper tossed aside on the sofa. How quaint of her to think she could find a legitimate job in town. She'd lived a Hagar's fantasy for the past three months. The bill was due.
Peeking out the windows, she knew she could not make it up to Henry's room and back down in time. She had to meet them before they reached the front door. To do otherwise gave them an excuse to enter the house. Their waffle-boots caked with mud must remain outside. She would not allow them to bring inside their semiautomatic rifles and handguns and pepper spray canisters holstered to their utility belts. All of their equipment was private issue. They were volunteers, and they had volunteered a bit too eagerly to be trusted.
She tenderly set her hand on the front door's knob. Thinking twice, she realized she had to surrender with care. Better to warn them first of her exit, then emerge with hands up. Exiting without warning would give them an excuse to open fire.
She swallowed and cleared her throat. With her nerves rattled, she wasn't sure she could manage to speak. Her mouth was dry.
She turned to give Kyle a goodbye. He hated her, but she would at least say goodbye. He was not in the room. She'd not heard him leave. She felt the heat of shame. He'd abandoned her. She took another deep breath and tried to swallow. She began to call out her surrender.
Adrenaline had energized Kyle. He hobbled in without his walking stick. He carried a short-bore rifle with a blond wood stock and an army-green woven shoulder strap dangling from its bottom. With a determined damn-it-all expression, he slapped a clip into place.
"No!" Ruby rushed at him. She pressed up against him, hands on his arms. "No guns. Think of Henry."
"I'm doing this for Henry," he said.
"You're not thinking."
"Dammit, woman," he said. "I'm not letting any militia come in here and march off with you or Henry or anybody." He glared down at her. "I know these numb-nuts. Two of them tried to hire me for a hunting trip, but I don't take jack-asses. Hell—" He jounced a hand toward the window. "These are lightweight amateurs. They're trespassing and they're gonna hear about it."
"No guns," she pleaded. "We don't do it this way."
"It's my house and home—"
"It's my life," she said.
The tension in his arms relaxed. He softened.
"They're gonna kill you," he said. "They would've sent the law if they planned to arrest you. This is different."
"That's right," she said. "It's different. Don't do it this way."
He scowled and shook his head in disgust. With practiced dexterity, he pulled the clip from the rifle's housing. He pumped the action and verified the chamber was free of a round. He set the rifle in a corner and the clip on the side table.
"Let me try to reason with them," he said. "Now I'm talking nonsense." He peered out the window. "These guys aren't here for reason."
Sixty
Henry came running down the stairs at Kyle's call. Kyle issued orders to him in a low, even tone.
"Grab a pack and get Ruby up the hill," he said. "Her name's Ruby now, so get used to it. Keep low and out of sight. You know where I want you to take her. Now get."
Kyle peered down at Ruby. She wore a pair of old jeans and a light tee for working around the house. She was in socks.
"Grab her shoes," he called to Henry, who was already mounting the stairs. "Then get down here pronto and get going."
Kyle took Ruby by the arm and pulled her toward the rear of the house. Behind them came three hard thumps on the front door. There would be no more warning.
"You do everything Henry tells you to do," he said, pulling her along. "Whatever happens to me, follow his direction."
"Let me turn myself in," she said. "Please, do not fight this."
"I am not letting them just come in here and take you away." They reached the hospital bed. He stabbed a finger at the flag on the wall. "That's not what we're supposed to be about. We're supposed to be better than that."
Henry jumped down the stairs two steps at a time wearing an all-weather backpack. He gave Ruby her sneakers. She pulled them on standing up. She stood on one foot, then the other, to tie them in quick, mad knots.
The men shouted through the front door. A banging sounded. The cheap lock would not hold them for long.
"This is what they've been doing since the separation," she said to him.
"This is different," he said. "The others they went after, the illegals—"
"It's not different," she said. "You're just seeing it up close now."
He yielded. "It's different because it's you."
His arms drew her in and pressed her against him. His body was warm. His arms and chest cocooned her.
Kyle released her. He said to his son: "Now disappear."
Sixty-one
Ruby followed Henry out the sliding glass door opposite the bed. They ran hunched low across the rear of the property, which was simply more of the tan dirt and the overgrown dried-up weeds. They reached the chain link fence running along a dry creek. Henry helped her over it and down to the creek bed.
She struggled to keep up with Henry's pace. Even crouched in the trench, he ran like a sprinter. His feet seemed to bounce off the river rock and water channels cut into the sun-packed soil. His rubbery legs seemed capable of adapting to every surface and angle they met. Ruby stumbled along behind him. When Henry got too far ahead, he stopped and turned around and urged her on with a wave of an arm.
Ruby felt they'd run six miles, but when she followed him up the other side of the gully, the house stood not far south. He began ascending the mountain's incline with the ease of a mountain goat. His progress was slower than the relentless pace he'd maintained in the dry creek, but Ruby had as much trouble keeping up with him as before.
Only when they'd climbed in elevation did Ruby appreciate Henry's route. The pines and firs were thicker here than on the mountainside directly behind the house. The incline was also steeper here. From their vantage point, she could see the scene unfolding on the property below. The wolf pack trucks and their cherry lights remained where she'd seen them before. The five men she'd seen advancing from the highway had disappeared. After a moment, one emerged from the front of the house. He whistled and windmilled an arm to the trucks. The other wolf packs pulled to the front of the house.
"We can
't stop," Henry said to her. She was stunned he was not out of breath. She was heaving. The phlegmy rasp in her lungs had returned. "We must keep moving," he said.
She held up a hand requesting one more moment of rest. The moment turned into a full minute as she watched events progress on the property.
Three men emerged from the house surrounding Kyle, who hobbled along between them. They helped him into one of the trucks and drove him off the direction of Angels Camp. Ruby, depleted, discovered there was still something within her that could be drained further. Kyle was a sick man. He needed his rest. These apes were going to hurt him in so many ways by doing whatever they planned to do—question him, incarcerate him, or worse. She swore at herself for trying to phone her mother in Folsom. That was how the wolf packs had come to find her, she was sure of it.
Henry was tugging on her arm now. She waited for the rest of the wolf pack to leave the house. There were only so many rooms to search, and like most homes in California, it had neither a basement nor an attic to speak of. Once the wolf packs drove off, Ruby reasoned she and Henry could return and plan their next move, although she was confounded what that might be.
She then understood Henry's incessant arm tugging. The men did not climb into their trucks and drive off as Ruby expected. Instead, they unleashed the yapping and barking dogs in the back of the trucks. The dogs bounded down to the dirt with manic eagerness. The boxer in the rear of one truck leapt from the bed like a taut rubber band released into the air.
Eight armed men and three German shepherds fanned out across the rear of the property. The boxer leaped and scurried ahead of them, nose to the ground. They navigated over the rear fence and across the dry creek. They entered into the thicket of trees below them. She needed no more encouragement. She lit off behind the urging Henry, legs aching and sweat tamping down her hair.
Sixty-two
They reached a plateau overlooking the valley. The sun was descending to a horizon line of irrigated plains across the Central Valley. She could see California from here. She wondered how far past the horizon lay the coastline of cities and towns and their reassuring Spanish names.
Henry dropped the backpack on the ground. He unzipped it like tearing open a birthday present. From it, he produced a plastic bottle of water. She was lightheaded. With each breath came the rasp in her lungs. She drank greedily. Henry offered her a slim plastic pouch of pemmican. Although they'd been going for an hour, she had no appetite. Out of some weary notion of politeness, she refused it, then thought twice and accepted it. She'd never eaten pemmican before. The gritty, chewy meat strips were odd in texture but nourishing. He also offered her dried apple slices from a freezer bag. They ate sitting on wide, flat rocks near the outcropping.
"Do you think they're still after us?" she asked. The rocks, rust-colored like the soil, were comfortable at the moment. If she lay down, she might be able to close her eyes.
He went to the precipice and peered down the mountain. Half a mile back, they'd begun following a dry stream bed. The air had chilled considerably since they'd started off. She chalked it up to both the waning hour and the rise in elevation.
"I still see trucks at the house," he told her. "I hear the dogs."
"We're going to the cabin, right?" she asked him wearily.
"Yes."
"What if they're waiting for us when we get there?" The realization shook off her sleepy head. "What if they just drive right up to it?"
"There's no roads to the cabin," he said. "They don't know where it is."
"Who does?"
"Me and Dad," he said. "And my mother, before she died."
"You're sure no one else knows where it's at?"
"The cabin is for family."
"Not even Pastor Hargrove?"
"No one but family."
"Their dogs, though," she said. "They can follow us right to it, right?"
"Those are police dogs," he said. "They don't have a nose for tracking," Henry said with a tinge of disgust. "They're all over the mountain. They don't know what they're doing."
"I hope you're right," she murmured.
He returned to the backpack and rummaged down inside it. He came up with a dark blue ball of fabric compacted by two thick rubber bands. He undid them and snapped open the fabric like a magician. It unfurled into a thin Mylar windbreaker with a hood. He unzipped its middle and gave it to her.
"It's going to get cold soon," he said.
From the pack, he located a stubby flashlight with a clip on the end. He attached it to a belt loop, then began packing up the food and bags and remaining water. Out of curiosity, Ruby tried to pick up the pack. It weighed at least ten pounds, and maybe twenty.
"I should carry this for a while." She closed her eyes. "Fair's fair."
A cold, wet hand was pressed against her forehead. She came to with a start.
"You're hot," he said. "How do you feel?"
"I can make it," she said.
"We have two more hours at least," he said. "And it will be dark well before we reach the cabin." He looked down on her with a doctor's analyzing eye. "I don't think you'll make it without some rest."
Dogs barked in the distance. The sun inched toward the horizon line in the west. With each minute of progress, it grew more golden, more shimmery, more fiery. She closed her eyes and darkness arrived at once.
Sixty-three
Henry said he only allowed her to sleep for fifteen minutes. It felt like two hours to her. He urged her to her feet and helped her into the mylar windbreaker. Wearing the pack, he led her by hand away from the precipice and into the thicket of trees. He applied the flashlight's beam sporadically, only using it to take a mental picture of the way forward before turning it off and pushing onward.
In the sparse evening light, she sensed they were not climbing. Henry was leading her horizontally across the rolls of the mountain. They abandoned the dry stream bed they'd been following. She was not merely lost, but helplessly lost. In the dark, she could not tell which way they'd come. He could be taking her in circles and she'd dumbly follow his every step. She stumbled forward, desperate for sleep and bleary from a feverish lightheadedness. The bays of the canines and the shouts of the men were not enough to shake off the fog.
"Here," Henry announced at last. He took her hand and pulled her toward a tree. "Sit here."
She collapsed to the ground beside the tree. He helped her sit up with her back against its trunk. Her breathing made a waxy, raspy sound. She slumped to the side, eyes closed. A thread of drool fell out the corner of her mouth.
She snapped awake out of surprise. A cold, damp grittiness was climbing up her skin. A scratching in the dirt and a crunch of leaves came from her feet. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could not see a moon, but there was enough ambient light to know the sky was clear. She was now lying on her back.
Henry was bent over her legs, scooping dead leaves and pine needles onto her legs. Her feet and shins were entirely covered. Normally, she would have felt a revulsion—grimy, grubby little insects and slugs live in these leaves—but she was too exhausted from the climb, too bleary-eyed from the sickness, and too scared of the men to complain.
"You can't move," he whispered. "You have to remain completely still."
Henry covered her with loose cover up to her neck. The stirred-up decay smelled akin to athlete's foot, the odor of a Beers House shower rarely cleaned and never disinfected.
"Are you okay?"
A chill went up her. "I'm cold," she said, teeth chattering.
"This will help keep you warm," he said. "Soon."
The cold dirt and leaves was subtracting heat from her body, she thought. She did not argue with him, though.
Then Henry was gone. With such little light, she could not make out where he'd gone off to. Certainly he was not going to confront the men, right? From the barking and their calls across the mountain to each other, they would be on them in no time. Certainly there was not a handgun tucked away at the bottom o
f that backpack, right?
She languished there for a long minute. Her febrile mind toyed with getting up and finding him and stopping him from making a youthful mistake. She never forgave Kyle for taking Henry hunting. At what age had he started hunting with his father? How old was Henry when he first fired a gun? Had he killed a defenseless animal?
Across the way, she heard a familiar scratching and the crunch of dead leaves. She attempted to twist her neck and focus her bleary eyes on the source. In the dark, if she didn't know better, she would have mistaken it for an animal rutting through the soil. Henry was laying across the clearing from her. He was doing to himself what he'd done to her, making a blanket of leaves and pine needles and damp soil. Soon he was covered as well. She darkly thought he looked like an Indian burial mound. It was the last image she grasped before she plunged into a dead slumber.
Sixty-four
She came to with a gasp of air. The men were here. They were around her. A panic seized her. Quick thinking kept her from leaping up from where she sat. She calmed herself and told herself to take a moment to regain her senses.
The soil blanket Henry had built for her remained more or less in place. The sleep had done her some good. She was more alert now and not so lightheaded. She could feel the weight of the leaves and needles over her, and the weight was considerable. The smell of rot had faded, as had the damp chill of the material. As Henry had promised, her body was warm thanks to the natural insulation. She searched the dark for Henry. She found his burial-mound body twenty feet away. He lay motionless in the faint gray moonlight.
Flashlights scanned left and right around her. The men were at a higher elevation. The barking echoed down the rolls of the mountainside. She shivered, although she was not cold. Lying back, the dogs wouldn't even have to leap upon her. They would be on her face like a bowl of butcher's scraps.
The men were fifty feet away. They were descending the mountain, not climbing it. They must have passed them in the dark. She lay still and silent. Henry was motionless.
