“We need to put our books farther away, so we won’t have to grab them,” Susan said, trying to have some input.
“Good idea.”
When Taylor didn’t move, Susan grabbed the strap of his backpack and scooped up her own stack of books. She toted them a few yards away against the fence. She put hers some distance away from Taylor’s.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Why would we be standing together out here?” she said. “You can say you came to ask me if my mom could give you a ride home. Since you missed your bus.” It didn’t seem strange to either of them to be thinking about explaining Taylor’s presence when they were planning on killing their teacher.
They waited behind the tree, Susan clutching the Zippo and Taylor gripping the dynamite. Neither had a watch. At last someone came out, one of the seventh-grade teachers. She climbed into her car and pulled away without a glance in their direction. Next came familiar footsteps. The children didn’t look at each other. They watched the car from their meager concealment. The car door unlocked and opened, and the seat squeaked a little as Miss Fondevant got in.
Susan took a sharp, frightened breath, fired up the Zippo, and touched it to the dynamite. Taylor stepped forward and rolled it under the car, and they both took off running. There was a terrible count of four while nothing happened, and then the world rocked from side to side.
Susan screamed, she couldn’t help it, and she crouched with her hands over her ears, too late. Taylor sprawled to the pavement beside her. Hot bits of things shot past her, one landing in her long hair and burning. She reached up, clawing to get it out, and it tinkled to the pavement, a sound she could barely hear. It was bright and glittery in the sun, and she found herself reaching down to pick it up.
It was Miss Fondevant’s ring. Clutching it in her hand, she turned around to see the smoking ruin of the prim gray sedan. Something alien and unrecognizable had flopped out of the place where the driver’s door had been, something smoking and flaking in the sunlight. As she stared at the thing, Taylor turned over, groaning, blood running down his cheek from a cut on his head.
“What happened?” he said. “Is that her?”
The smoking, flaking thing twitched.
Susan screamed again, but the sound was so tiny, so faint, that she wasn’t sure she had heard it herself. She took a step closer, then another, though she could hear Taylor shout, “No! No!” She watched her own loafers cross the pavement, arrive at a streaked and blackened area, keep going. She looked down at the twitching thing.
She could tell it was Miss Fondevant. And she understood after a second that the dynamite hadn’t killed her, but the sunlight was. The explosion had blown off Miss Fondevant’s fingers and one of those fingers had been circled by the ring. The finger was gone. The ring remained. In Susan’s hand.
Susan did something previously unthinkable. She bent over Miss Fondevant to say, “Look, bitch, I got your ring.”
And what was left of Miss Fondevant smiled. Smiled. Before she crumbled away to nothing.
And then there was just lots of screaming and shouting, and the sounds of the ambulance and the fire truck.
Mr. Kosper was so relieved no one else had been killed or hurt that Taylor’s explanation for his presence was easily digested. He and Susan were in the same classroom, so it only made sense to an adult that Taylor would ask Susan’s mom for a ride home after he’d missed the bus. To the other kids, that didn’t seem feasible, and good-girl Susan and bad-boy Taylor underwent a lot of teasing, after the horror had worn off. To Susan’s own surprise, she just laughed when kids accused her and Taylor of being in loooooove, and gradually the teasing stopped.
It wasn’t just Susan’s cool reaction to the teasing but the fact that Taylor stayed as far away from Susan as he could that finally squelched the jokes that had been flying around. No one would ever have suspected Susan and Taylor of conspiring to do anything, they so clearly did not want to be in each other’s presence.
As Taylor had expected, his father didn’t even seem to remember that he’d ever had a stick of dynamite. He never accused his son of stealing it.
The police found the explosion very suspicious, of course. And the fact that both students present were from Miss Fondevant’s class made the situation even more questionable. But Susan was where she was supposed to be, and Miss Fondevant was following her own routine, and both were above reproach. Taylor and his dad were questioned very carefully, but there was no reason at all to suspect either of them had a reason to kill Miss Fondevant. In fact, Taylor’s dad had never even met his son’s teacher. That made him a crappy dad, but it did not make him a murderer.
Susan’s mom was horrified by the whole thing. When Mr. Kosper asked her to marry him six months later, she said yes faster than you could ring a dinner bell. Mr. Kosper gained a pleasant bedmate who smiled often and enjoyed her meals, and a stepdaughter who was bright and pretty and well behaved.
Susan needed time to recover from the mortal fear she’d felt back on that day, and she needed time to understand that last smile Miss Fondevant had given her.
Miss Fondevant was never nice, not even a little bit, so her smile could not have meant anything good. And Susan had told her that she now had the ring.
So the ring must be bad.
Consumed with curiosity, Susan read more about vampire lore than a girl her age, of any age, should ever read. Susan’s mother, absorbed with being Mrs. Kosper, figured this vampire craze was just an adolescent thing Susan was going through. She made the wise decision not to ride Susan about it. It would die away in time when Susan found something more interesting to obsess about, as adolescents did.
In some of her deeper reading, Susan discovered legends that suggested that energy-sucking vampires have to stay out of the light, just like regular blood-sucking vampires did. Unless they had a magical talisman, which sounded like it was something from a game. It was clear, even if you were dumb (which Susan was not), that the gold ring with the roses was Miss Fondevant’s talisman.
And now it was Susan’s. She’d earned it in combat. She kept it in a secret place, and pulled it out from time to time to admire the dull gleam of the gold and the three pink roses. The ring had given Miss Fondevant a terrible ability.
Susan wondered what else the ring could do.
What power it could give her.
IN A CAVERN, IN A CANYON
LAIRD BARRON
Husband number one fondly referred to me as the Good Samaritan. Anything from a kid lost in the neighborhood to a county-wide search-and-rescue effort, I got involved. If we drove past a fender bender, I had to stop and lend a hand or snap a few pictures, maybe do a walk-around of the scene. A major crash? Forget about it—I’d haunt the site until the cows came home or the cops shooed me away. Took the better part of a decade for the lightbulb to flash over my hubby’s bald head. He realized I wasn’t a Samaritan so much as a fetishist. Wore him down in the end and he bailed. I’m still melancholy over that one.
Lucky for him he didn’t suffer through my stint with the Park Service in Alaska. After college and the first kid, I finagled my way onto the government payroll and volunteered for every missing-person, lost-climber, downed-plane, or wrecked-boat scenario. I hiked and camped on the side. Left my compass and maps at home. I wanted to disappear. Longest I managed was four days. The feds were suspicious enough to send me to a shrink who knew his business. The boys upstairs gave me a generous severance check and said to not let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Basically the beginning of a long downward slide in my life.
Husband number three divorced me for my fifty-fourth birthday. I pawned everything that wouldn’t fit into a van and drove from Ohio back home to Alaska. I rented a double-wide at the Cottonwood Point Trailer Park near Moose Pass, two miles along the bucolic and winding Seward Highway from Cassie, my youngest daughter.
A spruce forest crowds the back door. Moose nibble the rhododendrons hedging the yard. Most fo
lks tuck in for the night by the time Colbert is delivering his monologue. Cassie drops off my infant granddaughter, Vera, two or three times a week and whenever she can’t find a sitter. Single and working two jobs, Cassie avoided the inevitability of divorce by not getting married in the first place. Wish I’d thought of that. Once I realized that my nanny gig was a regular thing, I ordered a crib and inveigled the handsome (and generally drunken, alas) fellow at 213 to set it up in my bedroom.
On the nanny evenings, I feed Vera her bottle and watch westerns on cable. “Get you started right,” I say to her as Bronson ventilates Fonda beneath a glaring sun, or when a cowboy rides into the red-and-gold distance as the credits roll. She’ll be a tomboy like her gram if I have any influence. The classic stars were my heroes once upon a time—Stewart, Van Cleef, Wayne, and Marvin. During my youth, I utterly revered Eastwood. I crushed big-time on the Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Kept a poster from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on my bedroom wall. So young, both of us. So innocent. Except for the shooting and murdering, and my lustful thoughts, but you know.
Around midnight, I wake from a nap on the couch to Vera’s plaintive cry. She’s in the bedroom crib, awake and pissed for her bottle. The last act of High Plains Drifter plays in bad 1970s Technicolor. It’s the part where the Stranger finally gets around to exacting righteous vengeance. Doesn’t matter that I’ve missed two rapes, a horsewhipping, Lago painted red and renamed HELL . . . all those images are imprinted upon my hindbrain. I get the impression the scenes are always rolling down there against the screen of my subconscious.
I am depressed to recognize a cold fact in this instant. The love affair with bad-boy Clint ended years and years ago, even if I haven’t fully accepted the reality. Eyes gummed with sleep, I sit for a few seconds, mesmerized by the stricken faces of the townspeople who are caught between a vicious outlaw gang and a stranger hell-bent on retribution. The Stranger’s whip slithers through the saloon window and garrotes an outlaw. I’ve watched that scene on a dozen occasions. My hands shake and I can’t zap it with the remote fast enough.
That solves one problem. I take the formula from the fridge and pop it into the fancy warmer Cassie obtained during a clearance sale. The LED numerals are counting down to nothing when it occurs to me that I don’t watch the baby on Sundays.
The night in 1977 that my father disappeared, he, Uncle Ned, and I drove north along Midnight Road, searching for Tony Orlando. Dad crept the Fleetwood at a walking pace. My younger siblings, Doug, Shauna, and Artemis, remained at home. Doug was ostensibly keeping an eye on our invalid grandmother, but I figured he was probably glued to the television with the others. That autumn sticks in my memory like mud to a Wellington. We were sixteen, fourteen, eleven, and ten. Babes in the wilderness.
Uncle Ned and I took turns yelling out the window. Whenever Orlando pulled this stunt, Dad swore it would be the last expedition he mounted to retrieve the “damned mutt.” I guess he really meant it.
Middle-school classmate Nancy Albrecht once asked me what the hell kind of name was that for a dog, and I said Mom and Dad screwed on the second date to “Halfway to Paradise,” and if you laugh I’ll smack your teeth down your throat. I have a few scars on my knuckles, for damn sure.
Way back then, we lived in Eagle Talon, Alaska, an isolated port about seventy miles southwest of Anchorage. Cruise ships bloated the town with tourists during spring, and it dried up to around three hundred resident souls come autumn.
Eastern settlers had carved a hamlet from wilderness during the 1920s, plunked it down in a forgotten vale populated by eagles, bears, drunk teamsters, and drunker fishermen. Mountains and dense forest on three sides formed a deep-water harbor. The channel curved around the flank of Eagle Mountain and eventually let into Prince William Sound. Roads were gravel or dirt. We had the cruise ships and barges. We also had the railroad. You couldn’t make a move without stepping in seagull shit. Most of us townies lived in a fourteen-story apartment complex called the Frazier Estate. We kids shortened it to Fate. Terra incognita began where the sodium lamplight grew fuzzy. At night, wolves howled in the nearby hills. Definitely not the dream hometown of a sixteen-year-old girl. As a grown woman, I recall it with a bittersweet fondness.
Upon commencing the hunt for Orlando, whom my little brother, Doug, had stupidly set free from the leash only to watch in mortification as the dog trotted into the sunset, tail furled with rebellious intent, Dad faced a choice—head west along the road, or troll the beach where the family pet sometimes mined for rotten salmon carcasses. We picked the road because it wound into the woods and our shepherd-husky mix hankered after the red squirrels that swarmed during the fall. Dad didn’t want to walk if he could avoid it. “Marched goddamned plenty in the Crotch,” he said. It had required a major effort for him to descend to the parking garage and get the wagon started and pointed in the general direction of our search route. Two bad knees, pain pills for said knees, and a half-rack-a-day habit had all but done him in.
Too bad for Uncle Ned and me, Midnight Road petered out in the foothills. Moose trails went every which way from the little clearing where we’d parked next to an abandoned Winnebago with a raggedy tarp covering the front end and black garbage bags over the windows. Hoboes and druggies occasionally used the Winnebago as a fort until Sheriff Lockhart came along to roust them. “Goddamned railroad,” Dad would say, despite the fact that if not for the railroad (for which he performed part-time labor to supplement his military checks) and the cruise ships and barges, there wouldn’t be any call for Eagle Talon whatsoever.
Uncle Ned lifted himself from the backseat and accompanied me as I shined the flashlight and hollered for Orlando. Dad remained in the station wagon with the engine running and the lights on. He honked the horn.
“He’s gonna keep doing that, huh?” Uncle Ned wasn’t exactly addressing me, more like an actor musing to himself on the stage. “Just gonna keep leanin’ on that horn every ten seconds—”
The horn blared again. Farther off and dim—we’d come a ways already. Birch and alder were broken by stands of furry black spruce that muffled sounds from the outside world. The black, green, and gray webbing is basically the Spanish moss of the Arctic. Uncle Ned chuckled and shook his head. Two years Dad’s junior and a major-league stoner, he’d managed to keep it together when it counted. He taught me how to tie a knot and paddle a canoe, and gave me a lifetime supply of dirty jokes. He’d also explained that contrary to Dad’s Cro-Magnon take on teenage dating, boys were okay to fool around with so long as I ducked the bad ones and avoided getting knocked up. Which ones were bad? I wondered. Most of them, according to the Book of Ned, but keep it to fooling around and all would be well. He also clued me in to the fact that Dad’s vow to blast any would-be suitor’s pecker off with his twelve-gauge was an idle threat. My old man couldn’t shoot worth spit even when sober.
The trail forked. One path climbed into the hills where the undergrowth thinned. The other path curved deeper into the creepy spruce where somebody had strung blue reflective tape among the branches—a haphazard mess like the time Dad got lit up and tried to decorate the Christmas tree.
“Let’s not go in there,” Uncle Ned said. Ominous, although not entirely unusual, as he often said that kind of thing with a similar laconic dryness. That bar looks rough, let’s try the next one over. That woman looks like my ex-wife, I’m not gonna dance with her, uh-uh. That box has got to be heavy. Let’s get a beer and think on it.
“Maybe he’s at the beach rolling in crap,” I said. Orlando loved bear turds and rotten salmon guts with a true passion. There’d be plenty of both near the big water, and as I squinted into the forbidding shadows, I increasingly wished we’d driven there instead.
Uncle Ned pulled his coat tighter and lit a cigarette. The air had dampened. I yelled, “Orlando!” a few more times. Then we stood there for a while in the silence. It was like listening through the lid of a coffin. Dad had stopped leaning on the horn. The woodland critters w
eren’t making their usual fuss. Clouds drifted in and the darkness was so complete it wrapped us in a cocoon. “Think Orlando’s at the beach?” I said.
“Well, I dunno. He ain’t here.”
“Orlando, you stupid jerk!” I shouted to the night in general.
“Let’s boogie,” Uncle Ned said. The cherry of his cigarette floated in midair and gave his narrowed eyes a feral glint. Like Dad, he was middling tall and rangy. Sharp-featured and often wry. He turned and moved the way we’d come, head lowered, trailing a streamer of Pall Mall smoke. Typical of my uncle. Once he made a decision, he acted.
“Damn it, Orlando.” I gave up and followed, sick to my gut with worry. Fool dog would be the death of me, or so I suspected. He’d tangled with a porcupine the summer before and I’d spent hours picking quills from his swollen snout because Dad refused to take him in to see Doc Green. There were worse things than porcupines in these woods—black bears, angry moose, wolves—and I feared my precious idiot would run into one of them.
Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amid the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs.
“Help me,” he whispered.
I trained my light on the injured man; he had to be hurt because of the limp, contorted angle of his body, his shocking paleness. He seemed familiar. The lamp beam broke around his body like a stream splits around a large stone. The shadows turned slowly, fracturing and changing him. He might’ve been weirdo Floyd, who swept the Caribou after last call, or that degenerate trapper, Bob something, who lived in a shack in the hills with a bunch of stuffed moose heads and mangy beaver hides. Or it might’ve been as I first thought—a tree stump lent a man’s shape by my lying eyes. The more I stared, the less certain I became that it was a person at all.
Seize the Night Page 17
