The switch was still there. It had opened, now that the train had passed. The signal station, three hundred miles away, had automatically closed the circuit and opened the switch.
There was something clumped in the metal where the switch had closed and reopened. It looked like a bit of crushed meat. Actually to me it looked an awful lot like the smoked meat slices you get in a those plastic boil-a-bags, only with a lot more ketchup.
I didn't want to look any closer.
"Well you got to hand it to Tyree," Irvin said. "He sure knows how to make his mark."
That did it. I shoved Irvin hard. While he was catching his footing I clocked him with the butt of the Luger, getting a good swing on it and putting my weight behind all of it. The Luger might have gone off, I suppose, but right about then I was pissed.
Irvin went down on one knee. I pointed the Luger and cocked it like a pro as if my hands suddenly knew what they had to do. I felt the spirit of a German SS Hauptsturmführer moving through my arm, hungry for a revenge-by-proxy on the verdammt Allies who had stormed over his homeland and eaten all of his bratwurst and sauerkraut.
I stared at Irvin. There was blood leaking from his scalp, but he didn't seem to mind that. He was staring just as hard as me. Something had changed between us. Right then and there I knew that whatever else went on tonight that Irvin and I just weren't ever going to look at each other the same way we used to.
"You want me and Donny to look away for a minute or two while you try real hard to go and fuck yourself, Irvin?" I asked, only this time I meant it.
Irvin kept staring at me, like he was committing every detail of me to memory. I kept the gun pointed straight at him, just in case he took it in his head to take a swing at me. Luger or not, Irvin was still nobody I wanted to fuck around with. Even on a good day he was a bad man.
"Where'd Tyree go?" Donny asked.
"Either that switch took his hand off at the wrist, or the train did," Irvin said. "It looks to me like he crawled that way."
"Maybe he yanked himself free," Donny said. "That switch closed on his hand awful hard."
I tried to picture that. Tried to wrap my head around the kind of desperation it would take to rip your own hand off.
"Maybe the train ripped it off," Irvin suggested again, like he was trying to talk himself into it. "It looks like he crawled that way."
He pointed to the left of the track. I looked where he was pointing, turning the gun. He could have jumped me then, I suppose, but the two of us were busy staring at a path of blood glinting in the starlight.
There's always a trail if you look hard enough for something to follow along with.
* 11 *
Tyree must have crawled a long way into the darkness. Irvin, Donny and I had followed the blood trail for a good twenty minutes, stalking him down like a wounded deer but there was still no sign of him but the long drag of burnt vermillion.
We kept at it. I wouldn't stand for anything else. We had to put this thing to a finish.
"There's no way he could have crawled this far," Irvin said. "We've missed him for sure."
"There's no way to know that for sure," I said. "You're just guessing."
"There's a lot of that going around." Irvin said.
Donny didn't say a thing. He just kept walking along with us, occasionally gingering his fingertips across his jaw line, right about where Irvin had hit him. Funny, how that was. You face a truck wreck, hand wrestle a bear to death, stage an execution and it's your best buddy who really leaves the mark.
I felt the dirt and debris crushing beneath my feet. Every step we took out here killed something. A leaf, a bug, a fern, it was all fair game. We stomped it all down flat, like a steamroller road crew from hell.
Nobody said a word. We just kept walking into the darkness, three not-so-wise-men stumbling through the black of the forest hunting down a trail of blood. I might as well have been a shadow of Irvin, him walking in front of me and me following blindly behind pointing the gun so that I felt in command of the whole situation. Donny trailed the two of us like a lag-along echo-ghost.
How far had Tyree crawled? Why hadn't he bled out yet? There's a hell of a lot of plumbing and pipe work in your average wrist. How much blood was there in one man?
I didn't know. I was only guessing.
The trail kept snailing out in front of us like a taunt. I wondered if somebody might not have been dragging him. That was possible. Might be it was just one of the track crew, or just some wandering woodsman who happened to be out for a two a.m. stroll through a moonless wooded stretch of jack pines. Might be it was a bum or a really big family of raccoons. Might be they'd found what was left of Tyree and were dragging him home for a game of one-handed crib. Stranger things had happened.
The mosquitoes were thick around us, their buzzing a constant hum, like power moving through the darkness, whirling nits of electrons swinging around some dark atom of guilt. I could hear something following us in the darkness in the woods beyond my sight. I could hear it pushing the branches aside and parting the shadows and snuffling through the underbrush. Whatever it was it sounded god-awful big. Maybe the bear had a buddy, only this sounded bigger than a bear. Bigger even than a moose.
Fuck. I was losing it. I needed some sleep. I needed a drink.
I needed to finish this.
I hung harder onto the Luger, welding my fingerprints into its machine-tooled grip. I told myself I could take care of everything. The memory of the SS trooper assured me that it was all right to just simply follow orders. I damned near believed it.
And then we found Tyree.
He was crawling through the woods, hauling himself along through the brackle and the underbrush, using his one good arm like he was attempting to swim the sidestroke through the dirt. His hand was completely torn off and he looked like he'd lost a hell of a lot more blood then he should have had in him in the first place.
"Holy fuck," Donny swore.
Irvin giggled. Right then and there I would have cheerfully shot the son of a bitch, except there was something hiding out beyond the darkness and the silence that I didn't want to wait for all by myself. I didn't think Donny or Tyree were going to be much of a help if whatever that was decided to come out of the darkness. Irvin, bastard or not, was a tough fuck-nut and I wanted him handy if something went down.
I knelt down beside Tyree, like I was kneeling beside a cocked-open bear trap. I could feel some kind of dark energy emanating from him, like the humming you feel in your bones if you stand too close to a power generator.
"You're okay," I said. "We're here."
I don't know how comforting that particular sentiment was, considering that we were the three assholes who had put him in this predicament in the first place but I just had to say something.
"I can't find my hand," Tyree said. His voice sounded like something inside of it had broken, like glass and those little tin ringer-thingy bells that you see on tricycles and little kid's bikes. "I've lost it somewhere."
I hauled my shirt off. The mosquitoes were going to have a fast food feast-out on my belly meat, but I didn't give a good goddamn. I tried to wrap the shirt around Tyree's wrist stump to bind it up. He kept waving the arm around, like a branch shimmying in the wind, flailing around like all of the bones in his arm had gone to rubber. It was like trying to splint up a broken Stretch Armstrong action doll with a couple of soggy popsicle sticks.
"Damn it, Tyree. Damn it. I'm so sorry."
I kept wrapping the shirt around the wound, but the damned thing kept coming loose. You couldn't really call what Tyree had a wound, anyway. It was something way bigger than a wound. It was like a door into his life, and everything was running out, and we were the three fuckers who had opened the door in the first place.
I felt somebody beside me. I looked around. It was Donny, kneeling like an altar boy at prayer.
"I'm sorry too, Tyree. I'm sorry we killed you."
He took out what he'd saved from the bear and p
ushed it onto Tyree's stump. I heard the bear meat suckling onto the wound like the pucker of a fat man hickeying onto a well cooked spare rib.
"Here," Donny said. "Take this. It'll give you strength."
I wasn't sure how that was supposed to make sense, but not a whole lot of this night was making much sense in hindsight. Of course hindsight was only good for looking out of your asshole and wasn't much of a replacement for a good pair of field glasses.
I wrapped the shirt around whatever Donny had torn from out of the bear and given to Tyree's arm, and it seemed to stick the shirt on solid, like the best kind of Crazy Glue. I felt the shirt moving in and out in my hand, like the wound was breathing through the bit of bear.
"Here," A voice grumbled from above the three of us. For a moment I thought it was the bear, come back from the dead to set things right.
I looked up. Irvin was standing over us. He was holding out a pack of cigarettes like he was getting set to offer a smoke.
"There's got to be tobacco if you're making medicine with the dead."
He shook the cigarettes loose and crumpled them one by one, making a broken kind of circle about what was left of Tyree. I saw a fleck of the tobacco spackle onto the left of Tyree's lip. A part of me wanted to flick the damned thing away, but another part that knows enough not to whisper in church or whistle at a funeral told me to keep my hands the hell to myself.
"I'm sorry for killing you too, Tyree," Irvin said, and it felt like he really meant it.
Tyree's eyes sort of half-focused up towards Irvin. I could feel something between the two of them, like the two of them were chained in thin air.
"I didn't do it," Tyree whispered. "I didn't kill your brother, Irvin."
"I know you didn't," Irvin said. "I just wanted somebody to blame so bad that I looked around for anything in sight."
"It's all right," Tyree whispered. I had to lean closely to hear him. "Shit happens."
That last bit hit Irvin hard. It might have been easier if Tyree had just sworn at him or spit in his face. But letting go like that, letting go and not showing any sign of anger hit Irvin harder than a sixty car train wreck.
"Give me that pistol," Irvin said, taking it from me.
I don't think I could have stopped him if I'd wanted to. It was kind of irrevocable. It just had to be, you know what I'm saying? It was kind of like gravity and rain falling down. That gun just left my hands and passed into Irvin's, like it was something that just had to be.
I looked up at him, standing there over the three of us – me, Donny and Tyree. He could have shot us all, if he'd wanted to. He might even have been able to do it with one bullet, we were bunched up that close together.
Only he didn't.
He raised the pistol up towards the air.
"Goddamn you, God," He said low and gravelly, and then he fired three more shots straight up into the air. I don't know if he was trying to hit something or not.
"There's magic in threes," Irvin said. "There are three fates, and three sides to every story, and three stooges, depending on how you count."
I don't know if Irvin was conjuring or cursing.
"Give me that Luger back," I said.
Irvin looked at me. "You scared I'm going to shoot you?"
"I want to shoot one, too. For Tyree."
He handed it to me, butt first. "There are only two shots left."
"One's all I need," I said.
I held the Luger up to the sky. It felt heavier than it ought to, like it was freighted down with something a little more than bullets. Then I fired it, just once.
It seemed louder than before. Maybe my ears were just hearing it better.
It seemed to take forever for the sound of the single shot to fade away.
When the echo had vanished, Tyree had stopped breathing. I set the Luger down beside him. There was nothing there but the three of us standing in the darkness, listening to the mosquitoes buzz.
"We got to eat some of him, too," Irvin said.
I didn't argue. I lit a fire. Donny just watched.
Irvin got his hunting knife out.
"You want something from his leg?" He asked.
"I sure don't want rump roast," I answered.
Irvin finished carving. The whole proceeding had a kind of ceremonial feeling to it, like a last supper or a midnight church picnic. "Let's take our time and build us a good bed of coals and cook this up right."
"Daylight's coming soon," I pointed out.
Irvin just looked at me.
"I seen the light," He said. "Are you going anywhere too soon?"
I shook my head.
Irvin looked at Donny.
"Why don't you go on home, Donny. Somebody needs to get that truck back to the shop."
Donny stared.
"I want to stay and eat with you."
Irvin shook his head.
"We'll eat some for you," Irvin said. "You run along now, and get that truck back, before I get pissed at you."
"You're always pissed, Irvin."
Irvin grinned at that.
"Not anymore," He said.
Donny wandered off. I watched him walking away. A part of me wondered if maybe he hadn't set the hotel fire. He hadn't really said that he didn't. You never could tell with Donny.
I'd be fucked if it mattered that much to me anymore.
"You think he'll find his way back to the truck?" I asked.
"If he doesn't he can follow the track. One way or the other it'll lead him somewhere."
The fire was growing.
"Do you think he did it?" I asked. "Started the hotel fire?"
Irvin shrugged. "It doesn't matter that much, any more."
He looked at me like he was sizing me up.
"You don't have to stick around either," Irvin said. "This wasn't your idea."
I shrugged.
"I'm hungry," I said. "I'll stay and get my fill."
Irvin nodded.
We watched the fire. For a while we could hear the sounds of Donny crashing through the woods. Then, even that passed.
"Too bad we didn't bring us some marshmallows," Irvin said.
I laughed at that.
"So what do you think happened?" I asked.
"Happened with what?" Irvin asked.
"With the Hotel. What do you figure started the fire?"
Irvin looked out into the woods. I had the feeling he was looking at something, listening to it.
"Damned if I know," he said.
"Don't you even care?"
"Fuck," Irvin said. "Gilbert was always an asshole. I never did care much for him. He was just my brother, was all. He was someone I looked up to, because there wasn't anyone else around. And now there's nobody."
He stared out into the darkness, looking at something that I couldn't see.
"That's just how it is," Irvin said.
He picked up the Luger and pointed it straight at his skull, all business. "Shit happens, and then you die."
Before I could stop him he'd fired the last shot. I felt another baptismal spatter of warm jelly and bone bits slapping the other side of my face. If I'd been sitting a little closer I might have got caught by the bullet.
Irvin fell like a sack of meat with his legs still crossed Indian-style. He looked peaceful lying there, almost content.
I looked at him.
"If you think I'm eating your sorry ass, you've got another think coming," I said.
I added a bit more fuel to the fire and roasted a chunk of Tyree. I said my respects and chewed slowly. As I chewed I could hear the bear brains and Irvin's brains arguing back and forth across my skull bone, staking out their claim. I figured they each had an argument to share.
I added a few more sticks to the blaze.
The flames leapt higher, crawling out of the circle of the rocks and tobacco and into the hush of the dead pine needles.
I sat there quietly watching the flames grow, getting larger and larger until they reached out and touched everything.
Not Just Any Old Ghost Story
I have heard an awful lot of stories and I have even told a few of them myself and nearly every story I have ever heard or told was born from my dad. I guess this one is no different and why should it be? My dad has told me nearly every story that I have ever learned and twice as much as I'll ever be able to forget.
And even now I remember it all.
He has told me about snow snakes and mud trout. He has told me how dreams were nothing more than stories waiting to be born. He has told me that the ocean was made out of tears cried by a woman who sits upon the bottom sobbing and shaking so hard that the waves toss and turn in their sharing of her sorrow. He has told me how my home province of Nova Scotia once served as Glooscap's bed and Prince Edward Island was the pillow for his head.
"But Cape Breton was the old dark fooler's canoe, you bet," Dad would tell me. "Hunting or fishing, when Glooscap wanted to get himself anywhere handy to interesting he came right straight up to old Cape Breton Island."
My dad has told me how the raven stole the sun from the heart of winter and traded his song to keep it. He has told me how icicles are nothing more than snow-angel-tears wept down for all of the snowflakes that never reached a child's out stretched tongue. He even claims that the flounder got to be so ugly-faced a fish after losing an ill-planned swimming race with a fast-moving skate.
"That old flounder pulled a face in disgust and it just stayed stuck," Dad told me. "Believe you me, nothing sticks harder than regret."
And maybe that's so. We all learn to carry so much damn regret. We drag it around behind ourselves and we wear it sewn into the inner lining of our shadow. I think that the heart of every ghost story ever told is awash with the soft faded autumnal color of pure unredeemable regret.
"Why do you tell me so many stories?" I once asked my Dad.
"A man is nothing more than the stories he knows," Dad answered. "And here in Nova Scotia we grow our stories long, rambling and deep. Life isn't all about cable television, cell phones and newspaper. There are the silences that whisper between the words, those secrets not shared that linger long after any story ever told. Believe you me, mister man, there is a tale to be told for every wave that washes the shores of Nova Scotia."
Midnight Hat Trick Page 9
