by Ivan Blake
The coyote was not fazed by the lumbering yellow beast on the road below and didn’t move a muscle until it was out of sight, then its attention returned to the scent of the deer, and it moved silently across the trail and back into the forest. Blood would be spilled that day.
* * * *
Chris hiked through the morning. Melting frost made the trail muddy. The wood was silent and dark, the air damp, and the sky ominous. There would be freezing rain before nightfall, maybe even snow. The hike to the top of the hill should have taken no more than thirty minutes. After an hour, however, Chris still had some distance to cover because he’d meandered all over the trail. He wasn’t planning on visiting Mrs. Holcomb, especially since the police had told him not to. No point antagonizing them needlessly. Instead, he thought he’d hike along the ridgeline from one peak to another, enjoy the solitude and the views over Adinack Bay, maybe make a fire, and try to snare a rabbit with his bootlaces the way his dad had taught him.
Years ago, when things had still been good in the family, he’d loved to camp with his dad. He knew everything about surviving in the wilderness, and Chris had loved to watch him set up camp, find food, make chicory coffee, even roast a partridge over an open fire or maybe make a rabbit stew with sorrel, white mustard and fireweed gathered in the forest. Once, they’d spent a night in a lean-to, in a snowstorm, and had an amazing time. In the morning, his dad said, “I really believe you could handle anything, son.” God, how long had it been since Chris had thought about camping with his father?
A shot resounded across the hills; then another.
Chris dropped to the ground and listened. No voices. No more gunfire. The shots had come from up the hill, near Mrs. Holcomb’s place. Was she in trouble? Had the kids terrorizing her come back with guns?
Chris wasn’t going to charge into danger like a madman. He wasn’t going to run away either. He crept forward carefully, first to the edge of the wood, and then out into the meadow, and finally on toward the old lady’s cottage.
The hilltop was still; not a soul anywhere. “Mrs. Holcomb?” he called softly.
Closer to the cottage, he called a little louder, “Mrs. Holcomb, it’s Chris Chandler. Are you all right?” Again no reply. Die Bitch was scrawled in red on the cottage door.
Chris slipped and almost fell. The grass underfoot was wet, greasy. His shoes were red—everywhere, red. Blood and lots of it. A trail of blood led across the grass to the old lady’s shed. What the hell had happened? He moved silently to the building and looked around the corner.
“You here to rape me?” the old lady yelled. She held an enormous knife in hands that were soaked in blood.
Chris stumbled backwards, almost fell, and cried out, “No...I...I was just...”
Then he spotted the deer, a young buck with its throat cut and belly opened, hanging from a hook on the wall, and the hunting rifle propped up against the shed.
The old lady roared with laughter, then realized Chris had been badly shaken. “You okay?”
“I...would never...you know.”
“Oh, I know. I was joshing you. Maybe a bit of wishful thinking, eh?” Again, she laughed.
“I heard the shots. I thought you were in trouble.”
“No, quite the opposite. Don’t customarily get my deer until later in the month, but this big fellow came strolling up to the house, like he was saying to me, ‘I don’t want you to have to work so hard for your winter meat this year, so take me,’ and so I shot him. I was starting to dress him when you showed up.”
“I thought you might be having trouble with kids again.”
“You mean it wasn’t you who painted my door? I was so sure….”
“No, I swear.”
“Oh, I know, you silly boy. I’m just pulling your leg again. Still, your wallet was on my porch, right by my front door like somebody wanted the police to find it, and blame you.”
“Yeah, Chief Boucher came to our house. Said I had to stay away from you.”
“That man doesn’t like you much. How’d you get him so riled?”
“Not sure I know.”
“Well, help me dress this deer, and then maybe we can talk over some beans and brown bread. Oh, and some beer I just made. Sound good?”
“Okay.”
“I take it you’re skipping school today?”
“Kind of.”
“Right, you pull the leg to the side so I can clear the chest...”
* * * *
They had a wonderful day. Chris couldn’t remember when he’d had a better time. They dressed the deer and wrapped each of the cuts in newspaper for the old lady’s freezer. By noon it was filled to the brim. They got covered in blood and had to scrub down out on the porch in the bracing November wind. Each took a bucket of hot water to opposite ends of the porch, and with their backs to one another, they stripped to the waist and scrubbed the blood from their arms and hands. “Now don’t look,” the old lady called. “I know how you boys can get all hopped up on hormones, and me, so vulnerable.” She roared with laughter again. Chris had half a mind to peek, just to give her a thrill, then thought twice of it.
Towelled dry, they put on matching plaid shirts. Chris’s had belonged to Mrs. Holcomb’s husband; heaven knows how long it had been packed away. They rinsed their bloody clothes in buckets of fresh water and hung them on a line strung across the porch. The November wind would dry them quickly, if it didn’t snow first.
Chris stoked the fire while Mrs. Holcomb—Felix, she insisted he call her—heated beans and buttered thick slices of brown bread. Later, by the fireplace, they ate and drank and laughed. Felix told marvelous stories about her privileged childhood in the Hamptons, wayward youth in New York City, and whirlwind romance with a woodcutter from West Mountain, Maine. Then she talked about his death, and her loneliness, and her art, and her few remaining friends, among whom she still counted the Willards.
Chris talked about his happy childhood in Wisconsin, and love of books, history, and the outdoors. Then he described the family’s slide into loneliness and resentment and his own struggle to keep things together for just a few more months. And finally, he told Felix about his dreams of travelling, of writing and of one day accomplishing something, anything, so long as it gave him back some sense of self-worth. It had been a long time since Chris had felt any pride in who he was or what he was doing with his life.
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Felix said with a huge laugh. “You’re far too young to worry about what you’re doing with your life. You don’t need to make sense of life or find meaning in anything when you’re just a child. You just have to live. Your job is to find joy, joy in your heart. Joy can only be found in the moment. You need to stock up on joy for the lean days to come! You don’t need to worry about meaning. Meaning is something you only discover in a rear-view mirror.”
“Not sure I’d know joy if I tripped over it.”
“Joy is the immediate experience of something, a laugh, a look, a flower, a star, a kiss. Someone once said joy is the one emotion that connects us directly to God. I like that.”
“Right now everything seems really shi...crappy, whether I look forwards or backwards.”
“Even sitting here? Let me tell you, sitting here like this, warm fire, good food, chatting with a new friend—this fills me with joy.”
“Yeah, I guess, me too, sort of.”
“There you go.” Felix smiled.
For a moment, they sat without speaking, enjoying the crackle and the glow of the fire, the wind whistling around the cottage, and the warmth of their newfound companionship.
Felix broke the silence. “I wrote to my brother Nigel about you.”
“Me?”
“I told him about the handsome young man who lives at the foot of my hill, and who, in spite of everything else he’s going through, seems to be quite thoughtful and kind. Faced with some nasty people in these parts, I wrote, you still seem to be true to yourself. Heroic, that’s how I described you.” Chris coul
dn’t help thinking the conversation was coming around to Mallory Dahlman. “So, don’t make a liar out of me.”
“Floyd Balzer killed himself,” Chris said.
“I heard that.”
“Some people blame me.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sure, but I do wonder if I could have done something to stop him.”
“Poor Floyd was crushed between two soulless forces, his father...and Mallory Dahlman.”
“You know about his father?”
“I know Ed Balzer is a bully and a drunk. Not a stretch to figure he had something to do with his boy’s death.”
“Did you know Floyd had broken up with Mallory Dahlman right before he died and I had started seeing her?”
“I’d have been surprised if at some point you weren’t ‘seeing’ Mallory.” Felix made quote marks in the air. “What red-blooded young man wouldn’t want to? The test of your character will be how long it takes you to ‘see’ right through her.”
Chris was embarrassed to admit he was still involved with Mallory. “Well...we haven’t exactly broken up yet...”
“But she troubles you.”
“I guess.” In truth, she scared the crap out of him.
“You should be troubled. She’s dangerous.”
“You know, Mallory believes the same religious stuff as her father out in Asia,” Chris said. “She believes her gods expect their believers to cause people pain, as a kind of offering.”
“That’s just bull. Mallory Dahlman causes people pain because she likes to. I don’t care how she rationalizes it. I don’t know whether it’s because of her screwed-up life or because she’s a bad seed, but she’s a nasty piece of work.” No one spoke for a moment. Then Felix asked, “Could she have stolen your wallet?”
“Why would she? I haven’t done anything to make her mad at me, not yet anyway.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have to be mad at you to want to hurt you.”
“So, was she the one who came up here the other night?”
Felix shrugged. “You saw the paint on my door, and you can’t imagine what happened to my poor cat Tinker.” Her voice broke. “Know anybody else that sick around here? Doesn’t change anything though; she’s not going to force me out.”
Night was coming on. A few snowflakes fell against the windows. The glass rattled in the stiffening wind.
“Is that what she’s trying to do, drive you away?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Not leaving.” Without asking whether Chris was staying for dinner, Felix went to the kitchen and started making sandwiches.
“The last time I was here, I got the feeling you’d be happy to leave,” Chris said.
“Oh, I don’t like what’s happening to people round here. The slow death of their town and their fear of the future, it’s made them small and nasty. Still, I love Maine, my mountain, the wildflowers, the woods, I love the smell and the wind and the sea.” She arranged lettuce and tomato sandwiches on a plate as she spoke. “When I die I want to be buried right here, alongside my Harold. This place gave me Harold, and it brought me back to life after I lost him. So, in return, my body should nurture this place when I’m finished with it.”
Felix put the plate of sandwiches on the floor between them, handed Chris another glass of homemade beer, and sat back down by the fire.
“I don’t understand,” mumbled Chris with a mouthful of sandwich.
“It’s like the deer we dressed. I’m going to leave what’s left of it to rot away, right where I shot it, because that’s where it foraged and frolicked and fucked. That’s where it belongs—and this is where I belong. Come to think of it, I guess this mountain top is where I foraged, and frolicked and fucked.” She laughed mischievously.
By now, Chris was used to her salty sense of humour. “You think it matters where we’re buried when we die?” He took a long swig of the warm beer: strong and slightly bitter, with an orangey aftertaste, unlike any beer he’d ever had before.
“To anyone else, maybe not, but it matters to me. All my life I’ve been part of this place, and I don’t want that to end just because I’ll be dead.”
“I read somewhere,” Chris said, stretched out on the floor in front of the fire, eyes closed, “that our spirit suffers in paradise if our grave is disturbed.”
“Not sure I believe in paradise, or even in God, at least not the gods I hear people preaching about on TV. This,” she said, sweeping her arms before the window, “is all just so amazing, that no god I’ve ever heard of seems adequate. As if a god who could put a hundred billion stars in each galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in our universe would care about the day of the week we worship or whether we eat this or that or let our hair grow or cover our heads or wear certain symbols or bow or chant or love the same sex or let women lead prayer. Petty gods dreamed up by petty minds.”
She got up again and asked, “Want another glass of my beer? Like it?”
“Love it,” he mumbled. With the warmth and the beer and the food in his stomach, Chris felt quite drowsy, so replied no to another glass.
Felix refilled her own glass from the pitcher on the kitchen counter, stoked the fire, and returned to the seat.
“I’m sure the God who created all this only really cares whether we respect her creation and care for each other. Beyond that, I expect we’re pretty much on our own.”
“Trying to see God has made some people do some pretty amazing things, you know, like painters and composers and stuff…and people who help the poor.”
Felix sipped her beer. “So maybe the Great Big God who made everything and is far grander than we could ever possibly imagine, she does let some people see a tiny part of herself.”
“Kind of like letting people see only one scene of a movie...or one corner of a painting?” Chris asked. “Not sure whether that’s kind or cruel.”
Felix smiled. “That’s God for you. We only get to see the part of God we deserve to see, because we couldn’t handle the full picture.”
“Okay, so, then maybe, all the kind and forgiving believers in the world get to see the loving face of God.” Chris was half asleep. “And all the cruel and bitter believers, they get their vengeful, nightmarish version of God?” He paused for a moment and then chuckled. “So I guess Mallory Dahlman will get the gods of pain she’s hoping for.”
“And may they bring her all the suffering she deserves.”
“So what sort of god do you deserve?” Chris asked.
“Me? I guess I’d like a God that’s a good conversationalist and an art lover, oh, and has a sense of humor. My husband always said you just know God has a sense of humor when you see all the bald men in the world with hair growing out of their ears.”
“And their noses,” Chris added, and they both had a good laugh.
“Anyway, I do like the idea that God—if we deserve one—cares about our resting place because I care about mine,” she said, staring into the fire. “I want mine to be here with my Harold. And if God, at the end of time, wants to take us to some place even nicer, then she’ll know where to find us.”
Chris sat up, looked out into the night, and then back at Felicity. For a moment, in the firelight, he glimpsed the beauty she must have been. Then he shuddered. Someone had just walked across his grave. The fog cleared from his brain.
“Dr. Meath,” he started to say, then hesitated. Why bring Meath up now?
“What about him?”
“Well...you know why he was expelled from chiropractic.”
“Sure, something about experiments.”
“I think he’s still doing them.”
“Experiments? What makes you think that?”
No, he shouldn’t get Felix mixed up in this. He had to deal with this himself. Hero, she’d called him. Crap.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Felix said, “you asked me to tell you if I saw Ronald at your house again. Well I did.”
“Yes, he dropped off some magazines a couple of days ago.”
/> “No, I saw him coming out of the Willards’ cellar just after dawn this morning.”
What the hell? Must have been right before Chris left the house. Meath had been in the house all night? Gillian said she’d block the cellar door, so how was Meath getting in? And why? What the hell did he want?
Chris told Felicity he had some homework assignment to finish, which was probably true even if he couldn’t remember what it was. Felix offered to drive him down the hill. He insisted on walking, however, because at the speed Felix drove, he’d get home faster on foot.
In the doorway, Felicity thanked Chris again for all the help with the deer and for a wonderful day, and Chris blustered something about having had a great time. She said not to worry about her husband’s shirt, and that she’d return his own when it had dried. They hugged and Felix kissed him on the cheek...and he did the same to her. Her hair smelled of pine; her skin was soft and scented with wildflowers.
She whispered, “You’re welcome here anytime, my hero.”
He grinned and ran off into the night.
The wind was raw and the snowflakes were falling more steadily now. In the plunging temperature, the muddy ruts carved by the old Buick were hardening to rock. The pools of water were already crusted over with ice. Chris tried to run, but he could hardly make out the trail. From time to time, a sliver of a moon shone between the heavy, black clouds and provided a glimpse of the track. Most of the time, however, Chris careened blindly downward. Only the trees, silhouetted on either side of the trail, let him know he was still on the right course. He slid on patches of ice, and tripped over clods of frozen mud. His knees were bloodied, he had a graze on the face that stung like needles, and his hands inside sodden mittens ached with the cold. He pushed on all the same.
The living room light was on in the Willards’ house. Should he knock and ask for Gillian? No, better to check first; and sure enough, he found the cellar door padlocked, as Gillian had assured him it would be. So how had Meath managed to get in? There it was, the answer: pins in the two hinges had recently been oiled. Meath had pulled the pins. Chris found a boulder in the grass, and used it to crush the hinges and make pulling their pins impossible.
