“Jesus, Vernon. What round made this hole, a .223, someone’s Bushmaster? What’s a nice lady doing with this rifle?”
“She ain’t so nice.”
“Must’ve gone through some shit before it found you, or else the thing’d be in your lung or heart right about now.”
“The window and the seat.”
“Damn lucky. Don’t look like it hit anything important. It’s not that deep, far as I can see.”
“It’s in the bone. You have to pull it.”
“We gotta clean it first. We need vodka for this. Wait here.”
“I don’t need vodka.”
“For me, man, I need it. Shit.”
Slone checked the shotgun and slid it beneath a pillow, then put a rifle in the bathroom, another behind the door. He filled the pistol’s clip and watched for Shan through a tweed curtain. Shan soon returned with a bag of clean clothes and a prescription of painkillers, rattling them in the bottle for Slone to see.
“These babies are why I’m in trouble with the cops, man, these here. You can’t get this shit anymore. They’re practically heroin pills. Here, take one now, because this ain’t gonna feel too pretty at all.”
He downed a pill with vodka as Shan stood at the sink and scrubbed the engine filth from his hands with a wire sponge and turpentine. Slone emptied his bags onto the bed for the peroxide, the needle-nose pliers, the razors, sewing kit, bandages, fishing line. Hunched at the edge of the bed, he held the pliers in the flame of a barbecue lighter. Shan unscrewed the shade from the lamp for better light, then laved Slone’s upper back, the peroxide like an ember on the wound.
“Christ, sons of bitches sure like shooting at you, Vernon. What’re these two scabs here, in your neck and shoulder here? You get these over there, where you were?”
Slone said nothing. They both drank again from the bottle and Slone winced against the burn of booze. Through the wafer wall he could hear the TV in the next room—a laugh track, a man’s words about someone’s wife not satisfying her husband, more laughter.
“I used to look for you on the news,” Shan said. “Whenever there was a news report from there, about soldiers or whatever. But I never saw you. I thought I did one time, but it wasn’t you.”
“We used to look for you too. Cheeon and me. Whenever we were in town. But we never saw you either. After you left, we never saw you again.”
“I never got into town much,” Shan said. “Still don’t.”
“Nor back home much either.”
Slone kept the pliers in the flame until they began to shift color and he felt the heat in the rubber handle.
“Those things gonna be long enough, man? I got longer ones in the garage, good ones.”
“The longer you wait, the sooner it’s infected. Pull it,” and he handed him the pliers over his shoulder.
“You feel that pill yet?”
“I feel the bullet.”
“Yeah, I would too. You want something to bite on? A belt maybe? Isn’t that what they always use? A belt or a bullet? Though I’m guessing you don’t even wanna look at another bullet right now.”
“Pull it.”
Slone sweated from his armpits and forehead as the pain knifed up to his neck, into his eyes, then a wider pain lashed down through his intestines and groin. His tears dripped onto the knees of his jeans. Shan grunted, trying to grasp the lead. “Stubborn son of a bitch,” he said, and Slone could feel the blood spilling fast now along his back, could hear the grind of pliers on lead and bone. Saliva seeped, then spilled from his lips and chin. Twice he fought back the migraines of a fainting blackness.
“Jesus, stop bleeding, Vern, would ya? I can’t see shit in all this mess you’re making.”
He poured vodka to rinse away the blood and then drank from the bottle. Slone’s pants were pink in places, damp red in others. Shan handed him the bottle for his own gulp and then began grasping again. His mumbling sounded to Slone like the mocking prayers of a comic.
“You gotta move closer into this light, Vernon. I simply cannot see shit here, man.”
Shan dragged heavily on a cigarette as he leaned on the wall and mopped sweat from his face with a towel. Slone moved down the mattress and bent to hug his knees, to curve his upper back, the wound ripping, bleeding more. Shan put his cigarette into Slone’s mouth and doused the wound with peroxide this time. He gave Slone a minute to smoke, to breathe again. To find some brace against this. Slone focused on the boot-stained carpet and felt the liquid spill from his shoulders and nape.
“Pull it,” he said.
He was only half conscious when minutes later Shan withdrew the lead and showed it to him in the teeth of the pliers, grinning as if he’d hooked a halibut. From the pill and drink and pain Slone fell sideways onto the bed in a shallow dark as Shan worked fast to sluice the wound once more, to cross-stitch it closed with a beading needle and fishing line. Slone woke fully and asked if the round had fragmented.
“Negative,” Shan said. “I got it all.”
“You have to sew down through all seven skin layers.”
“I’m way ahead of ya, Vernon, just lay there. Jesus, you act like this is the first bullet I ever pulled from a man. I had to pull that .22 round from Cheeon’s calf when we were nine or ten. You shot your good buddy aiming for a rabbit. You started off a pretty bad shot, Vern. I been told you got better, though. Lay still.”
The TV in the adjacent room was off now. They heard the couple there, the unoiled bedframe, uneven squeals that sounded half animal.
“How about that?” Shan said. “Good ole Roger is having a time with a rent-a-gal from town. Sorry for the walls. My pop cut corners where he could. They’re nothing but a sheet of plasterboard on each side, no insulation even. Just enough studs to hold them up. You want another pill, Vern?”
But he was gone again in that depthless dark. Aware of the room and the hurt. But unmoored, skimming somewhere without human sound or any verge he could see. Just the purl of a streamlet somewhere beneath him.
Shan bandaged the spot, trussed it tight, then wedged off Slone’s boots, helped to clothe him anew, wrap him in quilts that smelled of stale cold. He left with Slone’s bloodied clothes to burn them in the furnace. In his partial darkness Slone felt for the shotgun on the pillow, felt into his coat pocket for the T-shirt that still held the scent of his son.
Shan returned minutes later holding a spoon and steaming tin pot. He sat on the bed near Slone.
“Sit up, man. You gotta have soup, Vernon. I’ll help ya.”
“Soup.”
“Hell yes, soup. You know of anything soup can’t fix? You need to eat some soup.”
“What kind is it?”
“Vernon Slone. I just pulled a bullet from your back and every cop around is hunting you and you wanna know what kind of goddamn soup it is? It’s Campbell’s chicken soup. You know of a better soup than that?”
“I like tomato.”
“I like tomato. Jesus Christ, you are something. Eat this soup, man.”
* * *
In his sleep, inhaling his boy’s T-shirt, Slone remembered it:
A tardy cold that autumn, the mornings finally below freezing in late October. Slone and Medora sixteen years old, setting out at six a.m. hand in hand through the hills outside Keelut. Plodding over footpaths they’ve known since childhood, miles down into the dale, across it to where the screes and crags slope up sharply from the plain. Avenues through cities of rock, scattered pine, and tufts of short spruce seen by only a dozen eyes before.
They wear packs with sandwiches and water, towels and candles. Every twenty minutes they rest to see the scape beyond. They kiss there against cliffs, soft at first and then harder. They touch conifer cones like infant pineapples that have shaken off rain. Two hours in and the temp has risen enough for them to remove their coats, to trek in sweaters and hats. At last they squeeze through crevices in the shadow-stroked crags, then track around to the cave, the steam exhaling from its entrance.
“Yes, that’s it, hurry,” she says, and smiling she pulls him along, up and around the rock-ribbed path to the cave.
Standing at the entrance on the slanted table of shale, with the sun strong at their backs now, they can see down into the hot spring. Steam in a steady hover on the surface of lucent water. She bounds smoothly over rocks into the heat of the cave, down to the rim of the pool. He follows her in. They erect candles in cracks around the pool, the steam aglow in a dozen small flames.
Their bodies are damp with sweat beneath their clothes. They strip bare, smiling at one another, Slone stiff already at the sight of her breasts in full weight, her blond patch of hair. Her velvet tongue tastes scantly of sugar. An inner writhing of excitement and need, at her touch a threshing all through him.
Her hand pumps him slowly there in the steam at the edge of the pool as they sit with their shins submerged. His fingers are gentle in her wet, his mouth on her breast, the skin of it almost liquid in its softness.
They enter the spring, its heat a whip on them at first, she in his arms as they spin laughing through the pool, as they go under together and hold, hold their breath, holding one another. When the heat swells they ascend to the mouth of the cave for October air to cool them. In the sun her blond nakedness seems the source of light, for an instant a halo about her matted crown.
This is a vision he will die with. The jolts and twitches deep within him, his arms around her in this morning chill, her breasts cradled in his hands. Soon they return to the warmth of the steam.
On a tabletop of rock above the pool they unroll towels. They lie enlaced and sweating. He’s far inside her now and she claws a fistful of his hair and draws his face down to hers so she can breathe into his mouth, whisper her love into his throat. His left hand is pinched in her right, fingers linked, locked. Her white skin has turned rose from this twofold heat, a rash fanning from her breasts to neck. He waits for her to quiver and tense and when he empties inside her they both go limp.
And when Slone woke at Shan Martin’s place, he knew where Medora was.
X
From his motel room’s window Core saw the weak sun between a dip in the range, its warmth nothing to the ferns of frost smeared on the glass. His sickness had finally gone during a medicated sleep of eighteen hours. He was hungry now for chocolate and cigarettes. With a mug of coffee from the motel’s lobby, he smoked at the window of his room as the sun glumly ascended, ice particles suspended in the air like mists of glitter, the cold a living thing—a willful thing with mind and lungs. He spat gobs of hardened phlegm into the bushes of snow beneath him. The engine above was a Cessna with skis cutting its way eastward and north to taxi men to their hunt. He planned to shower and leave this place, leave for the city to see his daughter.
But on the television a local news program, a female reporter in the village of Keelut, the microphone clouded by her breath. Core could not find the remote to unmute the sound but he read in blue ribbons at the bottom of the screen all that Cheeon had done there. Photos of the men he’d gunned down, a panning shot of Keelut—the water tower, generator shack, sled dogs, rows of cabins, those hills looming above. Another reporter at the morgue in town, shots of the parking lot behind it, Donald Marium being interviewed, looking bothered by the microphone so close to his mouth. More photos, the two cops Core remembered from the morgue, the coroner, the words “Vernon Slone,” and Core felt an unsnapping just below his chest.
In the shower he leaned against the tiled wall, the overhot stream on his scalp, hair long enough to touch his mouth. He felt filthy from days of illness, filthier still after seeing all Cheeon and Slone had done. He’d packed a towel in the space under the door of the bathroom and the steam swelled there around him. The water off now, he sat holding himself in the tub, addled by a dread he fought to understand, newly disgusted by his body hair. He could recall Medora Slone scrubbing herself in the tub, how he’d peeked on the night he arrived in Keelut. He reached for the razor in his bag, ran the faucet, and with a circle of motel soap he spent the next hour shaving his body, unbothered by the many nicks that dripped blood in the water.
When he finally rose he wiped the mirror clear, and with scissors he clipped away his beard and hair, sweating still. Soon the sink filled with wet clumps of white. He shaved his face, his throat. The exposed skin felt bloomed, seemed to exhale after decades of held breath. He stood studying himself for a long while and for a moment he recognized the new father he’d been at twenty-five.
A red square flashed on the telephone but he was hesitant to hear whatever news this message brought. Perhaps his daughter, his wife, someone calling him to return home. But no one knew he was here. He sat on the unmade bed and looked at the pulse of light. It was Marium’s voice saying he needed to meet, his office number, his cell. When Core dressed, his newly shaven body was cool and naked-feeling beneath his clothes, sensitive, strangely alive against flannel and denim. The sensation felt like a secret.
When he opened the door to get more coffee, a cop in a snowsuit was standing there. “Don Marium sent me to get you, Mr. Core.”
“I just got his message, yes.”
“He’s in Keelut now. He wants us there.”
“Yes,” Core said, “I’ll go to the village.”
“I can drive you.”
“I know the way,” Core said. “I’ve been there before.”
“Let me drive you,” the cop said. “I know Don’s looking to talk with you,” and Core was irked by the way he’d said it.
* * *
An eighty-minute crawl to Keelut, half that time behind a weather-wrecked snowplow fanning salt and sand across the blacktop, the cop not eager to speak and Core glad for the quiet. He read the paper, articles about the Slones, about Cheeon, this village. A foot of new snow mantled the land, undulating up into the hills, into granite rock faces. Marium was there at the entrance to Keelut, his truck pointed at the Slones’ cabin.
He waved through the windshield for Core, the cop walked off into the village, and Core joined Marium in the cab of the truck, the air burdened with the scent of coffee and smoke.
“Took me a sec to recognize you without the beard,” Marium said.
Core stomped snow from his boots and shut the door.
“You got my message?”
“I did,” Core said.
“I was surprised to see your truck still at the motel this morning. I thought you’d’ve got the hell out of here already. It’s been over two weeks. Not had your fill of us yet?”
“I guess not. I’ve been sick. I’m two days behind on everything, I’m sorry.”
Marium poured coffee from a bulletlike metallic thermos and passed a paper cup to Core. From beneath his seat he retrieved a fifth of whiskey and added a shot to his own coffee. Core reached over his cup for the same. He bit from a chocolate bar and started a cigarette with Marium’s lighter.
“What did you need to speak with me about?” Core asked.
“Just trying to get all this figured out, Mr. Core. This mess we have here.”
“I just saw what happened. I saw you on the news. You killed that man? Cheeon?”
Marium said nothing. His face did not change.
“How’s a person do that?” Core said. “What Cheeon did here?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me that.”
“Me? How would I know that?”
Marium looked at him through the steam of his coffee.
“If you corner an animal he’ll try to claw his way out,” Core said. “But that’s not what happened here.”
No animal, Core knew, does what Cheeon did. What Slone did at the morgue.
“I read some of your book last night,” Marium said. “The one about wolves that Medora Slone had? I forget the title. Good book, though, the part I read.”
“Why’d you want to read that?”
“I was hoping to learn something about Medora Slone.” He paused. “Was hopin
g to learn something about you too, Mr. Core.”
“Learn what?”
“Why she asked you to come here.”
“And did you learn that?”
“Nope. Didn’t learn a thing. Zip. I saw that wolves remind me of some bastards I know.”
“That’s unfair to wolves,” Core said. “They have a logic some of us could use more of.”
Marium looked at him over the top of his cup. “So I need to jog your memory, Mr. Core.”
“How so?”
“You’re the last one to see Medora Slone. Last one to talk to her. You found that boy. And right now I’m wondering why you’re still here.”
Core looked away to consider the hills, knowing he had no believable answer as to why he had not left this place. Because he’d been dreaming of Medora Slone. Because he’d been ruptured since finding the boy. Because he had little to return to. Because he was beginning to fear that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being.
“I told you everything I know,” Core said.
“Why are you still here?”
“You suspect me?”
“I’m just asking. It’s my job to ask.”
“I told you everything I know.”
“I’m hoping you can tell me just a little more. That woman contacted you because she thought you’d understand her.”
“That woman contacted me because she wanted me to find the boy,” Core said.
“And that’s my question, Mr. Core. Why you? Why a total stranger?”
“I don’t know why me. She found my book on wolves. What are you implying here?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m just stating what happened. A woman kills her boy and writes a complete stranger to come go on a wild wolf chase and then find the boy in a root cellar. Explain that, please.”
“You asked me these questions two weeks ago.”
“And I’m asking them again, fourteen bodies later.”
Hold the Dark: A Novel Page 13
