Fever

by Sean Rowe

  I sat down on the dirt floor of the stable, seeing myself in a memory saying, “You remind me of someone I used to know.” Pull over, she had said, there’s something—something she had needed to tell me. I held the paper in my hand until it started to blur and I couldn’t make it out anymore. I knew at some point I was going to have to stand up again, so after another minute I just went ahead and did it, taking a step forward and then another, walking out of the stable, still holding the piece of paper in my hand.

  I spent the rest of the morning putting the cash in garbage bags and burying it in the woods near some big rocks about a hundred yards from the house. When I spread pine needles over the spot it looked just like everywhere else, and I figured it would do until I thought of a better idea.

  The two handguns were still under the sink where I had hidden them, but she had taken my uncle’s hunting bow with her. For a while I sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window. It was very quiet. I got the bottle down from the shelf and poured a drink. Something moved at the edge of the woods, and then a medium-size doe stepped out into the sunlight with her fawn. I sat still and watched them nuzzle around in the grass and walk back into the trees, taking their time.

  While I walked down the mountain I looked for deer tracks, and there were plenty of them. I noticed some others that might have been coyote. Tomorrow morning I would split the rest of the wood, but right now I was hungry, and I also wanted to see about a car. There was a restaurant in town, Scotty’s Spot, that served a mean steak. Scotty’s Spot was a thousand miles from Florida, but one of the items on the menu was Key lime pie. You can have anything in this country if you want it bad enough, something my old man used to say. I tried to imagine him standing at a crossroads mining camp called Etna Furnace and actually believing that.

  It was five miles to town, and by the time I got there I had stopped crying and begun to wonder if there was a place in the world for someone who wanted to split white-oak blocks all morning and look for coyote tracks in the afternoon. Then I laughed at all that and cussed for quite a little while, and before long I heard a pair of birds calling out to each other, and soon I began to sing a bit myself.

  BUT YOU KNOW how it is. I got down there, and they had run out of Key lime pie. I ordered a slice of lemon chess instead, and while I was eating it I thought about the coyote tracks, and then I was thinking about a guy I arrested one time in a lemon grove. I didn’t know a lot about animals, but I had learned some things about people, how they move and behave, how to track them. I had been pretty good at that.

  She wouldn’t leave a credit-card trail, and she would be smart enough to stick to secondary roads. I thought I knew what direction she had taken: west, the way so many skips did, and had, for so many years, maybe from the early days of the country. There was something about it; following the sun, I suppose.

  I took my time walking through town and picking out a five-year-old Chevy at a car lot. The guy seemed happy enough for me to pay in small bills. On the way out of town I stopped to gas up and clean out the car a bit.

  I started thinking about the money, the money under the ground. I already had a shopping-bag-full stashed in the trunk. But I started thinking it might not be enough. What if I didn’t catch up to her in a few days? What if it was a month? It might be smart to take some more money, because there was no telling when I might get back here. I had nothing but time, after all. There was no reason to be in a hurry. That’s what I was thinking.

  That’s what I was thinking when I looked across the street from the gas station and saw a blue van sitting there with its engine running. It was the kind of van that has a bulky contraption rigged up to the back of it for someone who’s handicapped, someone who needs to get around in a wheelchair. A dark guy was in the driver’s seat looking at me, his hands on the wheel. And the way the van was parked, the way the street was laid out at an oblique angle to the gas station, I could see the shape of someone beyond and beside him, a smaller shape sitting next to the driver there in the passenger seat, not moving but waiting, her hand playing with a crucifix on a chain.

  And right at that moment Julia pulled up to one of the gas pumps in the Buick, got out and unscrewed the gas cap, and then saw me and smiled and started running toward me. She bent her head down through the window and kissed me on the lips.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran. I was scared. But I’m back. I came back. Everything’s all right now.”

  The blue van sat there. No one had gotten out. The man in the passenger seat watched us. I looked at the Buick and saw the trailer was missing.

  “Julia—where’s the trailer?”

  She looked hurt for a moment. “Don’t worry. I hid it in a safe place. I thought it was better than driving back here with it.”

  “Good,” I heard myself say. “That’s very good. I’m glad you did that. It was very smart to do that.”

  “Did you get what I left you?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. Then I did—the piece of paper in the envelope. The birth certificate. I nodded.

  “I thought you’d like to have a little evidence after your conversation with Jack,” she said.

  “Let’s wait and talk about it after a while.”

  The guy in the van took his hands off the steering wheel. He lay his left arm along the open window and looked at me.

  “Hey, are you OK? You’re shaking.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just so happy to see you. But look, I need you to do something —”

  “Matthew,” she said. “You did talk to Jack, didn’t you? In the motel room? Back in Miami?”

  I tried to think. “There was something he said he wanted to tell me, but we didn’t get around to it.”

  She was starting to cry.

  “There’s more than what you know,” she said. “It’s about Jack. Your wife and Jack. They had something going once. They had an affair, a long time ago. In 1976.”

  “What?” I didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “You asked me what I was to him. He’s—he was—my father. Not you. Your name’s on the birth certificate, but he was my father. Why do you keep looking over there?” She turned and looked past the gas pumps at the van on the other side of the street. Then she turned back, worried.

  “Did Jack tell you all this?” I asked.

  “No. She did. Before she died. I saw her in the hospital. Jack took me to see her.”

  She was still standing outside the car window. I put my hand on her arm. She tried to laugh, touching my cheek and saying, Don’t cry, baby. I’ve never seen you do that. It’s going to be fine now. We’ll do everything together.

  I was trying to think as hard as I could, think how it was going to be fine, and the only thing I could think of was half a plan. I had to separate them, and I thought I knew how.

  “I need you to do something,” I said. “I need you to leave here right now, pay for your gas and just drive out of town and keep going as fast as you can go. I’ll meet you in L.A. next week. I’ll be right behind you. There’s a hotel near the big pier in Santa Monica, the Loews. You check in and wait for me.”

  “Who’s in that van, Matthew? Who is it? Please.”

  “It’s nobody, just an old friend who’s going to set me up with a few things we’ll need later on.”

  “Another disguise?” She laughed.

  “Maybe,” I said, winking. “Maybe some of your favorite white powder, too. The thing of it is, she’ll get nervous if you’re involved. She’s already wondering what’s going on over here. Please, just do this for me. You drive away first, and I’ll follow right behind you. You’ll see me turn off at the house, but you keep going. Keep going, and we’ll have plenty of time later to talk about everything. I can’t explain any more. You have to go now and do it just like I said.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “I know that. It’ll be fine.”

  “Look me in the eyes,” she said. “Promise me you’ll be in L.
A. next week. Promise. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  I looked in her eyes, pale gray with flecks of gold around the pupils.

  “I promise.”

  I let go of her, and she went inside and paid for the gas. She came back out, not looking at me, and got in the Buick and pulled out of the gas station. I moved into the street right behind her.

  She drove slowly out of town and then gained speed when the town fell away and the land opened up. I stayed close on her, watching the van coming along behind me in the rearview mirror a few hundred feet back.

  We got near the side road that turned off the highway. I put my turn signal on and started slowing down. There was a moment when she touched her brakes, but then she kept going, picking up speed again and finally disappearing around a curve.

  I turned onto the gravel road. Sweat had come up on my hands and face. The road climbed steadily up to a bench, giving me a good view of the highway back behind me. The van had slowed down and stopped at the turnoff. Then, very slowly, it started moving onto the side road, leaving the highway behind and coming along on the wet gravel up through an old apple orchard.

  I drove back up the mountain to the house, parked, and walked into the woods to the big rocks. I got all the way there and realized I’d forgotten the shovel, so I walked back and got it and started digging. After a few minutes I took off my shirt and lit a cigarette, and when I’d smoked it, I started digging again.

  I turned when I heard her rack the slide on the shotgun. She was between two big pine trees, sitting in the wheelchair with the dark guy standing behind her. The next thing was the blue morning air exploding, shattering. Then I was sitting down. At first I couldn’t breathe, and then I could, and I could feel my heart beating fast. She wheeled herself out of the trees with the man’s help and came to within fifteen feet of me. Her eyes were always the same—the same two black stones sunk in her fleshy face. Two wet black stones in a mountain stream. She didn’t look angry or hateful at all, just curious, waiting.

  There had been a buzzing sound inside my head, and now it became a roar. My hands were gently touching at the wet stuff in my lap. I looked down at them until they seemed like someone else’s hands. I couldn’t make them stop playing and poking at what was there in my lap and spilling onto the ground. Gutshot, I thought, but the word didn’t seem any more real than what I was looking at.

  I thought about my wife, and then I thought about her, Julia. I had been pretty sure she would go west and that I could pick up her trail. Get to her and explain things before—before what? And what things?

  I had an image of myself driving cross-country at night, the desert country I hadn’t seen in years. It had rained, and I could smell sage through the open window. I was happy because I was going to find her. Then I had another image: two cars stopped beside the road, me walking toward her in starlight. Then she was in my arms, and I was holding her, telling her everything would be all right.

  But maybe I never would have found her. Maybe what had happened was all that could have happened. Anyway, I felt like I had been figuring things out pretty well there at the end. Starting to, at least. I had gotten the fever back a little, the old forward motion, going toward something.

  Then all at once it felt like the whole world had stopped moving. Of course, I knew it was only me.

  I must have been gone and then come back, awake, hearing a twig snap, or what I thought was a twig; the slap-crack of great tension held for a long, long time and suddenly released. I looked up and saw the dark guy turn and stagger to one side, both his hands clutching the stick that had grown from his chest. He moved in a slow, sleepwalker’s circle, his mouth open to the sky, and I had the odd thought that if it started raining, his mouth would fill up with water. He came back to where he had started his shuffling dance and fell on the ground, bringing his knees up to his chest. But I wasn’t looking at him anymore. I was looking at Miriam Benages. I watched her eyes turn to one side and then the other in a wondering sort of way, then finally look up at the aluminum shaft that stuck out a foot and a half from the center of her forehead, the four blades of the broadhead forming a perfect cross.

  Julia moved up through the woods toward the wheelchair with the longbow in her hand. The winter light fell down through the pines and lit up her eyes, and I heard the thrum of a woodpecker somewhere nearby and high up. Then it was the way I had always felt watching my wife walk through any doorway. It was like watching the sun rise over a landscape I had never known. Her gray eyes looked straight into mine, and I was rising now myself, getting one foot under me and trying to come up, fighting. She didn’t smile, but I could imagine her smiling again somewhere in the times to come, walking along a street or standing in a marketplace, maybe in another country. She had a third arrow nocked against the bowstring, just in case we needed it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Wherein the author advertises gratitude for his three favorite lit chicks: Christine Tague, first reader, ace copyeditor, and loyal friend; Judy Clain of Little, Brown and Company, editrix extraordinaire; and literary agent Sarah Burnes, without whom I would still be sleeping in my truck.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sean Rowe has been a reporter for the Miami Herald and senior writer for the Miami New Times. He lives in North Carolina, where he is renovating a turn-of-the-century farmhouse and working on his next novel. Learn more about the author at www.sean-rowe.com.