Vanishing Act jw-1

by Thomas Perry

  Then, some evening in September the sky would turn iron-gray and there would be frost on the ground in the morning. It might be a quick bullet in the head while she was still sleeping—tied up to sleep, he had said. More likely it would be a knife across her throat, the way he had done Harry. Winter would be coming and he would have to leave the mountains. Maybe he would explain it to her first: You have to understand. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t set a woman who hates me loose in the world.

  Then she saw the beam of his flashlight stab into the darkness. It was incredibly bright, racing quickly across the expanse of forest. Wherever it passed, the trees lit up and threw huge shadows behind them that moved. She ducked down again and pressed her face into the dirt.

  In a moment the beam passed and went out. She kept down, not daring to move. After a long time she heard his voice again, this time from farther away along the rock shelf. "Jane! I know you can hear me! I don’t want to hurt you ..."

  Slowly, she crawled to the edge of the thicket, slithered out on her belly, and rose to a crouch. There was no way she could run through these woods in the darkness, so she began to walk. She had lost her compass, but now and then she could see the sky through the trees, and at some point the clouds would clear and she would be able to find the north star. She walked through the woods, not sure of the direction she had been going, not planning now, just covering ground. She knew that he would not give up. He had no reason to stop looking until he found her body. He could keep tracking her for weeks. She could be dead in two or three days.

  The clouds didn’t clear. Instead, the cold wind penetrated her light shirt, bringing with it big icy drops that slapped the leaves and exploded into mist. After that, the body of the storm arrived overhead. The rain came down in an avalanche of water, plastering her wet clothes to her skin and making the trail muddy and the stones slippery.

  She walked into the wind because it usually came from the west or the northwest, and because she knew that this was one thing that would be as hard for him as it was for her. She went on for hours. She was shivering, and her hands began to feel numb. At last, when she climbed onto a flat place in the middle of a grove of tall, thick trees, her foot slipped out from under her and she fell.

  The ground was wet and spongy, but it didn’t feel cold anymore. She rolled over onto her back and lay there. It felt good. She hadn’t known how good it was going to feel. She knew she was going to have to get up, but not now.

  This time when she dreamed, she felt her mother’s lap again. She wanted to stay there on the soft, smooth fabric, feeling the hands petting her to sleep. But then she heard something. It was a voice, harsh and hoarse. She looked up and saw, far above her in the sky, the tiny shape of a man falling. He was hundreds of feet above her, turning over and over as he fell, and he was screaming. She said, "No. No, not this." She closed her eyes tightly, but it didn’t make any difference. Her eyelids were clear.

  Her father was plummeting downward at incredible speed, but the distance was so great that he just kept falling, minute after minute. She watched him, trying to will him to stop, to make the air under him thicken and hold him, but it didn’t work. It never worked. She was as terrified as he was, looking down at the ground and feeling his sensation of falling. She held her breath as he came faster and faster.

  Now she could see him clearly. He was the way he always had been, dressed in a soft, worn red cotton shirt and a pair of washed-out blue jeans. He was coming head-first, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open. He seemed to be looking into her eyes as he fell. Jane went rigid, pressed her fingers over her eyes, and braced herself for the impact.

  She could hear the wind now, hissing past him and making his clothes flutter and flap. Something strong forced her hands apart as it always did, to make her see him die. Just as he was about to knife into the weedy plateau where she lay, the sound of fluttering seemed to increase, and he swung upward again, so close to her that she could feel the wind in her face.

  He soared up into the sky, and she could see that he was changing. His arms were outward from his shoulders, and they were black and had long feathers. He flapped them, and it made the same wind sound, and he shot upward as quickly as he had fallen. He rose higher and higher until she couldn’t see the red shirt and the jeans anymore. He was just a black shape against the bright sky. He gave a loud cry, not a word but a shout, as though he were calling to her.

  She heard another voice answer him. It was harsh and hoarse like his, and it seemed to be coming from overhead. She opened her eyes, and it was daytime, and her father was gone. She looked up at the crow. He was big, perched on a limb near the top of the tree maybe sixty feet above her head, riding on the leafy end of a branch as it bobbed up and down in the morning sunlight. He called, "Gaw," and another crow flew in, his wingspan at least two and a half feet. The sun shone on their feathers so they looked as though they had been combed with a viscous oil that put blue-purple-yellow highlights over the coal-black. She must have heard them in her sleep and invented a dream to incorporate the noise.

  The crows looked friendly to her, benign. She watched them without moving until she could tell them apart. She sat up slowly and glanced around her at the other trees, and saw more crows above and streaks of white crow shit on some of the tree trunks. There were bits of wet, downy feather here and there in the weeds. She had managed to stumble into the middle of a rookery in the night. They had found her there and decided she was not a threat.

  Crows posted sentries higher up than she could climb, with eyes so sharp they could see a leaf move from a thousand yards off. That was what her two friends were doing up there. If the killer came anywhere nearer than that, the cry would go up. She stood up slowly and quietly, so the sentries would not be alarmed by the prone figure popping up.

  She said quietly, "Thanks, Daddy," to the crows, not because they would magically know what she meant, but because it would help them get used to the fact that she would be making sounds and moving around.

  Jane now saw things with a mad clarity. So much came into her mind that she could only acknowledge that it was there, and not go over it step by step. She had been trying to fight against the enemy and the woods at the same time. She had accepted his terms of battle: that they would go deep into the wilderness and bring with them the equipment of civilization—guns, tents, boats, and compasses. Whoever brought the most and the best had the advantage. He was bigger, stronger, faster. He had all the food and the warm clothes. He had let the journey use up everything she could carry, and let the chase wear her down to nothing.

  The crows had reminded her. She didn’t have to think like a frightened, half-starved white girl lost in the woods. She didn’t have to invent a way to escape, or invent anything at all.

  She spent a few minutes under the tall trees collecting a handful of coal-black wing feathers, ten inches long, that had fallen to the ground from the limbs above. Then she went for a walk, looking around her for the right kind of tree. She found one at the edge of the next clearing. It had that special smooth, grayish bark that had always reminded her of an elephant’s legs. When she touched the trunk it was hard and cold like granite. It was definitely genus Carpinus: ironwood. She stepped back and stared up at the limbs. She found the right one in a few minutes. It was ten or twelve feet up, and the wind had broken it off at the joint and the knot had come with it. The limb was at least four inches thick and fifteen feet long. She looked around for a way up, but there was none.

  Jane remembered a night in Los Angeles years ago. She had been driving along a freeway at two o’clock in the morning, and she had seen a boy climbing up a metal signpost beside the pavement so he could spray graffiti on the exit sign. He had put his belt around the pole, held both ends in his hands, and walked up. Jane took off her belt, slung it around the smooth trunk, and tried it. She was up in a few seconds, touching the limb. She got her hands around it and walked herself along it, hand over hand, until she had bent it to the ground
. Then she patiently pushed and pulled and walked with it until it tore off and fell at her feet.

  It took her half an hour just to carve through the limb with her knife. The wood was incredibly heavy, close-grained and hard. But as she worked she got better at it, and learned to split off long strips at a time from the handle of her ga-je-wa. The knot at the end she carved into a lump about four inches in diameter, and she had curved the handle in toward it a little, tapering the handle slightly and flattening it like a blade.

  After two hours of carving, it was a little over two feet long and looked like a slightly cruder version of a war club she had seen in the New York State Museum in Albany. She tested it by thumping the ground a few times, then practiced swinging it. The shape gave it a kind of hammer force, and it was rock-hard and heavy. She stuck it in the back of her belt as the Nundawa warriors used to carry theirs. The ga-je-wa would not make her Martin’s equal, but it would make close combat a different kind of experience for him.

  She resumed her walk, listening to the birds for the right kind of call. The one she needed was different from the deep-woods birds’. Those all made some metallic, low-register thunk or vit or whit. She walked and listened for a warble. When she heard it she walked toward it, and came out into a mountain meadow. The thrushes, birds like the robins at home, might eat a lot of things, but right now they would be looking for the first berries. She walked the margin of the meadow until she found them. There were wild strawberry plants growing in a patch on the east side of the meadow, where the sun was the strongest. It took her some time to find enough that had turned red, but she ate the green ones too. They were hard and tart, but they wouldn’t kill her. She found rain water collected in some of the lower parts of the meadow and drank from the puddles.

  As she crossed the meadow to look at some bushes that might be blackberry plants, she almost stepped on the antler in the weeds. It was big—what hunters called an eight-point rack—but this was only half of it. When she picked it up, she could imagine the scene. The snow was probably still on the ground when mating season started. Two bucks had fought here until one of them had broken this antler. The other had gotten the does, and this one had gone off to sulk and grow a new one. She stuck it into her belt with the war club.

  The blackberry bushes were something else she couldn’t identify, and whatever they were, they didn’t have berries, but beyond them she found the stand of hickory and maple trees. She took a great deal of care looking for saplings of the right size. She needed ones that had grown straight because they were out in the sun and not stunted or interfered with by their overarching parents.

  When she found some, she took out her knife and began to cut, strip, and shape them into ga-no. They needed to be three feet long and so perfectly round and straight that she could roll them between the palms of her hands without detecting a shimmy in the tip. When she had prepared fifteen of them, she set them aside and went to work on the wa-a-no. It was a hickory sapling an inch and a half thick, with a slight natural bend. She made it four feet long and carved bits of it off until she could just bend it with all of her weight. Then she started to work on the bowstring.

  Inside the handle of the survival knife were some fishhooks and two hundred feet of monofilament line. She cut three lengths of the fine, transparent fishing line, tied them to a standing sapling, and braided them the way she braided her hair, because it was the only way she knew. When she had braided three strands of three, she braided those three braids, ending up with a nine-threaded string that had a little thickness and body. It took all of her strength to string her bow.

  She stopped to listen to the crows in the rookery, and after a time she was satisfied that Martin was not close enough to hear her work on the antler. She found two heavy rocks and used one as a hammer and the other as an anvil to break it. Then she found that by using the knife as a chisel and the war club as a hammer, she could chip pieces from the base that were sharp and roughly triangular, then carve an indentation on each edge. If she split the tips of the arrows a little, she could slide the arrowheads in and tie them in place with the fishing line.

  She took the crow feathers and cut them along the quill so the wider side came off in one piece. She feathered her arrows in the Seneca fashion, two lengths of feather tied on with a spiral twist, so they would spin in flight. The trick was to glue both sides in place with a little sticky pine sap so they would stay put while she tied them with the fishing line.

  Jane stood up, nocked the first of her arrows, pulled back the string of the bow, and let it fly at a big maple across the meadow. It revolved in flight like a rifle bullet and sank deep into the bark. When she was in college, she had thought how odd it was to give young women physical-education credit for practicing the way Stone Age men had killed bears. Now it seemed odd to her that she had not really known how to use a bow until a Japanese-born instructor had taught her. She had told people she had chosen archery because the only other class that fit her schedule was golf. Now she admitted to herself she had known that it was because the bow reminded her of her father, making her little arrows and letting her play in the back yard with them when she was about ten. She had missed him all the time in college, and it had helped her to feel close to him.

  Jane walked to the tree and tried to tug her arrow out, but she found it was in deeper than she had expected. She took her knife and dug it out, then went back to put a new bone tip on it. She was a lot better at this than she had imagined. The old wa-a-no had been made with such a strong pull that most European men who met the Iroquois couldn’t bend them without practice, and probably no woman at all could have done it. But she had made hers a foot longer and more supple than the old ones in the museums.

  She took the knife, cut the legs off her jeans, tied one at the bottom, and made it into a quiver to carry her fifteen arrows. Part of the other leg she made into a strap to hold the quiver on her back, and the rest she tied around her waist as a sash to hold her war club, the way the old warriors had done.

  She cut five more saplings to length for extra arrows and shoved the remaining pieces of the deer antler into the bottom of her quiver to hold it open. She looked about her for a place to preserve the last five long crow feathers. She found that the only place where they wouldn’t get bent was in the band that held her hair in a ponytail, so she stuck them in and let them hang downward at her back. She stopped and looked up at the sun. It was late afternoon now. She had spent the whole day remembering and making while the crows kept watch.

  When she walked away from the mountain meadow, she found that the forest had changed; she could see in it now. The foliage wasn’t just a green wall anymore. It was complex and comprehensible. This was the last remnant of the great forest that had covered all of the land of the Hodenosaunee and beyond. Maybe it made sense to walk in it now, to see that it was still intact, holding the seeds of the same plants that could spread and sprout again after she was gone.

  In the old times, the men had come out here prepared with a song about how they weren’t afraid. It was for when they were being tortured, to spit their last breath at the enemy so he would fear the ones who came after: "I am brave and intrepid. I do not fear death or any kind of torture. Those who fear them are cowards. They are less than women ..."

  It was as though this had been meant for her, and it made her feel light and small and weak. Killing was what men did, but she was the only Seneca in the forest and she would have to be the one.

  29

  She moved deeper into the forest below the meadow, where the glaring evening sun hit the foliage at a low angle to make leaves glow and sink shadows into near darkness. This stand of trees was old, not replanted with one species. Each kind took its small niche and grew there. The collar of pine trees at the top of the mountain merged into the birch, maple, hemlock, slippery elm, and hickory down lower. Where the dirt beneath was deep and the thousands of years of rotting leaves and the mineral water runoff from the peaks had gathered, the trees grew
tall and the taproots sunk deep. This group of maples was old and thick, this elm grove had taken hold late, the seeds maybe blown here in a storm twenty years ago, maybe carried here in a deer’s belly and dropped undigested in the right place.

  The world she had lived in before, the cement, houses, and roads, wasn’t any different from this. It was wilderness, too. The planet Earth was a place where the lone hunter made his way through the wild country. There was something out there that wanted the hunter dead, and he had to defeat it or be killed by it.

  The hunter’s name never changed. In the language that Jane knew best, the hunter’s name was "I." As she stalked through the forest, doing her best to slip between the trees without moving a branch, to step on the damp, soft forest floor where dry twigs would not crack, she became the hunter. She could not see herself, turn her eyes around and be frightened by the fact that she was only a slender girl walking alone on the deer run. She could only see where she was. What she was doing made her who she was. Her eyes, watchful, cautious, and alert, saw the trail ahead and the sky above.

  As her mind projected more and more of its will and attention outward into the hunt, she obliterated Jane Whitefield. The hunter was tall, with long, naked brownish legs made strong and quick by years, of running. The hunter’s eyes had sharp, clear vision that could detect movement beside the path ahead and ears sensitive, after so many days in the forest, to any sound that wasn’t exactly as it should be. The hunter was shrewd and had fought many times against opponents who were bigger and stronger in other parts of the wild country that didn’t look like this.

  Now the lone hunter slipped quietly through the North Woods, doubling back in a path parallel to last night’s run. Lake Nehasane was five or six hours away, and the hunter accepted the distance and traveled patiently, always thinking. The simple tactic of coming on the enemy in the woods and beating him in a hand-to-hand fight was not possible this time. The enemy had more upper-body strength than the hunter had, and a longer reach. Approaching the enemy across an open space would mean quick death because the enemy had the only rifle in the world right now.