Blood Will Out

by Jo Treggiari

  Her shoulders were deeply bruised but she welcomed the hurt. It reminded her that she was alive and still fighting.

  When Sourmash came back, he’d have to climb down to her. Could she hide beneath the leaves? Leap on him and brain him with the bone? She crawled over to where she’d thrown it. It was big, about the length of her forearm, with a bulbous lump at one end. She stowed it nearby.

  She rubbed her freezing fingers together and blew on them, then tucked them into her armpits to warm up. How had she gotten here? There was no way she’d go anywhere willingly with Sourmash. Had he kidnapped her? Roofied her? How much time had elapsed between her last memory and now? How long had she been unconscious? And what about Lynn? They’d been together, so where was she now? Going for help? She was still missing a huge chunk in the interval between shopping and waking up at the bottom of the cistern. There was a key, lost somewhere in the depths of her brain, that might unlock everything. What had happened after the shopping trip?

  Lynn. She summoned up her friend’s face, using it as an anchor to situate herself in the past—to fan hope and find courage.

  She remembered standing by the truck, holding her dress bag, willing her legs to move. Lynn had come back, pinched her sharply just below her elbow and yelled, “Ari, run, goddammit.”

  Ari slid her moist hand into Lynn’s and they didn’t stop running until they were safely at the far corner. Just before they rounded it, Ari looked back. Sourmash was yelling at Rocky through the truck window. His hands twisted in the air as if he had Ari’s neck between his fingers.

  She followed Lynn onto the next block, which was filled with pedestrians and cars and shoppers. Here was where everyone was. Someone elbowed her as they went past but she stayed where she was in the middle of the sidewalk, Lynn pressed against her side, and let the calm settle around her like a cuddly sweater.

  It seemed as if her heart had stopped beating for those long minutes and now it was scrambling to remember a regular rhythm.

  “Did you see the dead deer?” Ari said.

  “Yeah, I caught a glimpse.” Lynn’s lips turned down in distaste. “He just rocketed up to the top of my shit list.”

  “Wow,” Ari said, feeling how dry her mouth was. She clutched her purse to her chest; the dress bag swung from her shoulder. “I totally stood up to that psycho. I thought he was going to kill me. Or eat me.” Adrenaline was surging. It felt like lightning in her veins.

  They left the main street and walked along the chain-link fence that bordered the park, a familiar route their feet took automatically. Little kids were playing in the sandbox and on the slides. Their happy laughter wafted in the air. Eventually Ari’s pulse slowed. The whole scene had taken on an unreal aspect, as if it had been a bad dream. A car with a gunning engine made them both jump, but it was just a boy in a souped-up Corolla.

  “My lights!” Lynn yelled suddenly, flinging out her arms like an overzealous actor.

  Terror dissolved into giggles.

  “You don’t think he’s going to call the cops, do you?” Ari asked, clutching her aching stomach, when she had breath again for speech.

  “Never going to happen,” Lynn said with faux confidence. “What about the still? What about the meth factory? You noticed his junkie buddy in the car?”

  “Those are just rumors though.” Her heart lurched as she flashed on the deer. “He does like to butcher his own meat. Shades of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “He kind of reminded me of Horace—sound and fury signifying nothing.”

  “The Roman poet or the L.H.?” They’d done a poetry course in their final quarter, starting from the dawn of time and working their way up to present day.

  “The Little Horror, of course.” Lynn’s three youngest siblings were Horace, the Little Horror; Meryn, aka the Little Monster; and Ben, aka the Little Bother. The others were the triplets: Mark, Nelly and Christina, now aged ten, and known collectively as the Shits. Lynn’s mom had had them all two years apart, except for Lynn, who was seven years older than the triplets, ensuring, as Lynn often said, “that I will be an indentured babysitter for as long as I live under that damn roof.” Ari mainly referred to them all as “hey you,” except for the L.H., who really was in a reprehensible class of his own.

  She took a deep breath. She still felt unsettled, but if Lynn wasn’t worried, maybe she could relax.

  “Seriously?” she said.

  “No doubt. He’ll drink another bottle of paint thinner and forget about the whole thing.”

  “Are you going to tell your mom?” Ari asked. Lynn’s dad had taken a job out west a few years ago. Well, that was the story put out there, but everyone knew he wasn’t ever coming back. Her mother worked crazy hours up at the school and fueled herself with bottomless cups of coffee.

  “Probably not. I don’t like to worry her any more than I have to. You?”

  Ari thought about her newspaper-editor dad and his tendency to mount protests, call meetings and assemble concerned citizen groups. And her local-coffee-shop-owning mother was even more grassroots organizational. It would be like unleashing a tsunami on a bathtub duck.

  “Nah. I can just avoid him,” she said, with more bravado than she felt.

  “I guess,” Lynn said. “Besides, he only comes to town once a month or so anyway to stock up on Vaseline and baby wipes.”

  “Thanks so much for that visual.”

  “No prob—” Lynn’s voice cut off and she stopped walking.

  They were passing a telephone pole plastered with flyers. Ari followed her eyes. “Oh, honey,” she said.

  Tallulah, Lynn’s ancient beagle-mixed-with-smelly-doormat, had been missing for three days.

  Lynn attempted a nonchalant shrug, but Ari could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

  “She’s old and confused,” Lynn said. “She probably got lost. You know she wanders off around the neighborhood. One of the kids left the gate open.” Someone had slapped another missing pet flyer on the pole, which partly covered Tallulah’s. Lynn pried it loose, muttering threats against people who used industrial staple guns. Tally’s morose, black-lined doggy eyes looked back at them from under a banner announcing: “I am friendly, though incontinent, and much-loved!” Underneath and all around were dozens of old, faded flyers with photos of Mister Socks and Snoopy and Tiger and Tofu Wiener Dog. Ari had never noticed how many there were.

  “She was wearing her collar, right?”

  “Yeah, the butch studded one from the punk store in the mall.”

  Ari found a smile for her friend. “Bet she comes waddling back as soon as she remembers that she likes your tummy scratches best.”

  “Sure.” They’d reached the corner of Fox and King. Ari’s house was two down on the right; Lynn’s was three down on the left. If Ari leaned out her window she could just about see if Lynn was upstairs in her room. When they were little they’d tried to communicate using semaphore flags and Navy code but it had been too complicated. Now they just each had a pirate flag that meant “Meet me on the corner now!”

  They paused for a moment and then hugged. “Love you,” Ari said. “So much.”

  “Ditto, bitch goddess,” murmured Lynn into her shoulder. Ari gave her one more squeeze and let go.

  She watched Lynn walk home, looking into each yard as she passed. Lynn complained about having to clean up Tally’s messes all the time, but Ari knew her friend was worried about her dog. Her mom had given her the puppy when she was four and still an only child, in case she got lonely. “Lonely” was not part of Lynn’s vocabulary anymore, though “beautiful silence” was. Ari wondered what it felt like to live in such a noisy, bustling house.

  The lights were off at home—par for the course when you had two workaholic parents. Ari felt nervous and wasn’t sure why, only that the curtained windows looked blank, secretive in some way. She switched on both the overhead and table lamps and sank into the couch.

  It was the whole Sourmash encounter, she realized. It made everything familiar
look unfamiliar. She couldn’t get it out of her head. The deer. The smell of fresh blood. That raw anger that had just poured off him like sweat.

  She thought about what Lynn had said about the man. Her friend had seemed so sure about his relative harmlessness, but she hadn’t seen the rage in his eyes; she hadn’t been close enough to feel his spit hit her cheek. Ari didn’t think he was so harmless. She thought that, maybe, he was insane.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Most kids shoot rabbits, songbirds, gophers, water rats, anything that moves. I was not most kids. It wasn’t only about blasting something out of existence. It was so much more than that.

  Naturally, I was somewhat trigger-happy at the beginning. I loved the hot smell of the gun when it was fired; I loved the way the bullets reshaped themselves like squashed stars after they had traveled through wood, bone or flesh; I loved the kick against my shoulder, the bruise it left, the aftershock of the explosion buzzing in my ear, the smell of kinetic energy.

  For the first couple of hours that first blissful day, I fired without thinking, alert to any movement. Leaves falling, butterflies drifting, hyperactive squirrels—I shot them out of the sky. Exciting, but the bullets reduced their bodies to mush and left me nothing to play with.

  I learned something about myself. It was this: I wanted to kill something big, something that would fight me hard for its life. And I wanted to feel what it was like when that life was extinguished. Get close, lie down next to it and feel its last breath caress my cheek, the wild thumping of its heart under my palm until finally that too was stilled, the cloud fogging the bright eye. I wanted to climb into its skin to feel the exact moment of death.

  I kept my promise to Pa, in a way. I only used one or two shots for each animal, but I didn’t kill them outright. I wounded them, usually in the hind leg or the shoulder above the scapula, and then, when they were too helpless to drag themselves any farther and exhausted from thrashing around in the dirt, I brought out my knife. I tried to feel every last, precious moment.

  But I couldn’t.

  This numbness in me remained. The part of my transformation I had not yet mastered; the lesson still unclear; the eternal mystery, so dark and perfect.

  For a time I concentrated merely on the execution of my art—the tableaux I created afterward. What would bring about an ideal result? How could I recreate the lovely pictures I saw in my mind? My sketchbook was my haven, but this was even better. With the tableaux I could engage all my senses, sink into them, inhale them into my body.

  I would try to prolong the moment of death but the blood always overcame me. The iron scent, the color of it, rich and intoxicating, washing over the dry brown leaves, soaking the ground until it appeared black, and then the skinned flesh, a pale silvery pink like a wild rose. Once skinned, with their heads, tails and feet removed, you couldn’t tell what animal it had been to start with. I amused myself by staging small scenes, posing the bodies around tree stumps as if they were enjoying a tea party, hanging the heads from branches like paper lanterns or curling them around one another like sleeping puppies.

  The deer were different though. Like all large mammals there was something almost human about their cadavers, the musculature of their haunches, the thick layer of meat over the rib cage. And I always marveled at the size of the heart.

  The intestinal tract and stomach I dumped in the woods for the coyotes, but the lungs and liver, brick red, juicy and warm, I ate raw, feeling that potency flood into my veins. Did you know that lungs were called the “lights” in Victorian England? Did you know that in the original tale of Snow White, the evil queen demanded that the hunter bring back the girl’s lungs and liver after he had killed her so the queen could devour them and reclaim her youth?

  There is power in these organs.

  The hearts I preserved in white vinegar—we always had plenty because Ma Cosloy used it in the laundry and to clean and disinfect the floors and countertops. First I hid the jars under my bed. I’d lie there counting them, sprawled on the rough wood-planked floor, dust from the underside of the straw-filled mattress tickling my nose, while Ma Cosloy yelled for me out in the yard. But then there were so many I dug a trench in the woods and covered them with branches and earth. Tiny crow hearts like Valentine cinnamon candies. Bunched-fist deer hearts like presents wrapped in red ribbon. The deep-crimson velvet of a fox heart. Each one gave me something more and for a time I thrived, fed by my secrets, the biting hunger sated, until I realized that dumb animals are no challenge. Truly, I never saw more than abject fear and sweet confusion as they died. It would be different when I killed something that knew it was going to die and begged me with words and tears not to kill it. Something that could tell me the meaning and flavor of pain.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Her body registered the passage of minutes, but barely. It had been dark. And then it was not so dark. She was cold and then not so much, although her feet and hands were freezing.

  Thirst was another constant. She’d licked the wall a few more times and crawled around looking for something that would catch the dew. Could she pee into her cupped hands? Possible? She’d found more bones scattered under the leaves, a whole rib cage thick with the stink of rotting flesh. How hungry would she have to get before she considered…? She kicked it away, huddled back into her nest like a hibernating mouse. Tried not to think of ice-cold water, coffee, pancakes, bacon, comforters, hot baths, movie nights with Lynn, doing the Sunday crossword with her dad, frosting fancy cupcakes with her mom.

  Her bladder hurt but it was empty, her tongue was swollen. She couldn’t seem to rouse herself completely; she felt sluggish, as if her biological processes had slowed down. This was how death came, wasn’t it? Slowly. Organs shutting down one by one. Her kidneys would be the first to go. Did it hurt? Or would she just go to sleep?

  She had to force her brain to operate in a linear way. She seemed unable to string events together, and jumping from one to the next felt almost physical, like crossing a rushing stream by balancing on slippery rocks. Still, she fought against the cloudiness, though it made her headache resurge with a vengeance.

  “Someone will come for me soon,” she whispered. The sibilants bounced back to her and crowded her head with the hissing of snakes.

  Amidst the confusion, one belief stood strong.

  Lynn would realize right away that Ari had vanished and she would find her. A memory teased at the edge of her brain, like a fly caught in a web—what was it? Something important about Lynn’s dog…

  Tallulah.

  * * *

  It was an unseasonably humid Tuesday afternoon, four days after the Sourmash incident. And even though it was late September, it seemed as if half the seniors from school were at the swimming hole. Ari had dragged Lynn there as well, to moon over Stroud Bellows and his chest hairs. At a safe distance, naturally.

  “This time you’ll speak to him, right?” Lynn had asked.

  “Of course,” Ari had lied.

  They were sitting on the hill above the water. Ari tore her gaze away from the frolickers and relinquished the beer bottle to Lynn, who was sitting beside her with her hand out.

  “Finally,” Lynn said. “I thought you were hypnotized.”

  “Shut up. You’ve been staring at Miranda for half an hour.”

  “Not Miranda, her boobage. And mostly I was just wondering how she gets that teensy bikini top to stay up.” She chugged from the beer and offered it back. Ari shook her head. It was lukewarm, it was “lite,” and it wasn’t giving Ari the buzz she wanted right now. They’d scored the six-pack from some college guys hanging in the liquor store parking lot.

  “So do you think there’s Velcro or Krazy Glue attached to those oh-so-perky nipples?” Lynn remarked.

  “I don’t know. I hate her.”

  Miranda splashed water over Stroud Bellows and darted away laughing. He shook the water from his hair. God, it was like a soda commercial or something. Ari picked angrily at the fraying edge of her jean sho
rts. She’d been feeling good. Her new haircut had solved the frizz factor, and Philip had added some red highlights, which did something nice to her eyes and made her brows and lashes appear darker. But now she was just annoyed.

  “Why don’t you show him how to work that rope swing?” Lynn said.

  “Miranda already shimmied up it and hung upside down like that pole dancer you like so much—whatshername…” The beer might be warm and barely three percent alcohol, but it had reduced her tongue to a less than limber muscle and slowed her brainpower.

  “Jenyne Butterfly,” Lynn said. “How dare you disparage her excellence!”

  “I just meant that Miranda was doing those stripper moves.”

  “Jenyne is not a stripper. She is an athlete. It’s very misogynistic of you to speak of her that way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Lynn patted her hand. “Someday I’m going to meet her and wonderful things will ensue.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Outraged yells floated up from the pond. Jack Rourke had pushed a fully clothed girl—a freshman, Ari thought—into the deep water. She flailed until Miranda extended a helping hand.

  “You’re positively not going to go down there?” Lynn said with thinly veiled sarcasm.

  “In a minute…I just…”

  “We could have gone to Dempsey’s Maze, you know.” This was Lynn’s absolute favorite destination in the Hollow. Eight-foot walls of carefully tended bush—something Lynn loved to announce—occupying more than an acre of land and planted over a hundred years ago by Thomas Lee Dempsey the elder, one of the town’s founding fathers.

  In the long, hot summers, a riot of peach, pink and deep-glowing-red roses intermingled with the bristly hawthorn and beech hedge. The contrast between the baby cheek–soft petals and the sharp hawthorn spurs was startling, but at this time of year, when the leaves bronzed and fell and the rosehips had been pruned, the hedge was bare, the branches black against the sky. Beautiful but eerie.