by Tim Poland
“Ah,” he said. “Do any good?” Sandy could see he had worked through the struggle of the morning. He was better now, clear-eyed and at his ease.
“Little bit,” she said, smiling, for they both knew better.
Sandy tugged off her fishing vest and dropped it on the porch by her rod. Her hands were cold again, so she tucked them to the last knuckle into the waistband of her waders and stepped to the front of the porch. “I wonder if she’s there. If she’s home,” she said.
“Home? Who?” Keefe asked.
“The mountain lion. I saw tracks in the snow.”
Keefe gazed out across the clearing toward the cave, a kind of bottomless longing in his eyes. “Lovely,” he said. After a long pause, Keefe continued. “And so, from these tracks, you’ve determined our new neighbor is female?”
“Smart-ass.” Sandy chuckled as she spoke.
“I beg forgiveness,” Keefe said.
“I know, it’s silly. But, well, it just feels like she’s female. I don’t know. It just does.”
“Suits me. Female it is. Shall we name her?”
“Oh, please no,” Sandy said.
“Excellent,” Keefe said. “We’ll restrict ourselves to the female pronouns. I’ve got more than enough names to keep track of as it is.” He began back down the steps from the porch. “A couple more loads should get us through the night.” As he came off the steps and started back toward the woodpile, the telephone rang inside.
“I’ll get it,” Sandy said. Her announcement was superfluous. Keefe never broke his stride as he vanished around the corner of the bungalow.
When Sandy answered the call, the sound from the caller’s end was so faint and garbled she could make out next to nothing, typical of the weak cell signal in the ravine. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the caller identified himself as J.D.
“J.D.? Hello?” she said, the receiver pressed to one ear, her finger jammed in the other. “J.D.? Is that you? Hello?”
The only word she could decipher from the other end was padlock before the signal deteriorated further and the line went dead.
The front door of the bungalow still stood ajar, letting in the cold air. Sandy closed it, then went to where her purse sat on the kitchen counter. Digging into the little canvas purse, she pulled out a spool of tippet and her case knife, laid them on the counter, and retrieved her cell phone. If it had been J.D. calling, she thought she might look up his number there and try to call him back, but the battery of her cell phone was utterly dead. The phone she’d taken the call on, an old touch-tone phone on the wall by the refrigerator, was useless for such things. Her own cordless phone would have at least had a display to show recent calls, but it was packed in one of the cardboard boxes still stored at the house on Willard Road. She was fairly certain the charger for her cell phone was packed in the same box.
She heard Keefe’s footsteps coming up to the porch, followed by the loud clattering of an armload of firewood being dropped there. Stink raised his head, startled by the sudden, percussive thud, but quickly curled back to sleep on the sofa. “Just another load of firewood,” Sandy said to her dog.
Setting her useless cell phone on the counter, Sandy just then noticed she still wore her waders. They were still wet, caked with mud and silt, bits of leaf and debris, and she’d left a trail of this river muck across the pine floor. She slipped back outside to strip off the waders. As she pulled the door shut behind her, she saw immediately Keefe’s last load of wood scattered carelessly across the planks of the porch. Stepping over a split chunk of wood, she looked up and quickly saw also that Keefe was out in the snowy clearing, striding rather briskly across it toward the stream. He carried his walking stick, not as an aid to his movement, but at his side, like a club. Sandy looked beyond Keefe, in the direction of his projected course. On the far side of the river, a man crept down the rocks separating the clearing pool from the one beneath it and dropped into a crouch. He wore dun-colored coveralls, with a hood pulled over his head and heavy boots. What looked like an old ammunition belt was cinched around his waist. A heavy, dark beard and black-rimmed glasses covered his face. In his hands, at the ready, he held a rifle.
For a long time afterward, whenever she thought back to this day, Sandy marveled at how suddenly the scene before her had been reset, how quickly and decisively it had all unfolded. There had been no way to alter the arrangement or slow the tempo. Time revved to a pace at which no choices could be made, no decisions could be deliberated. She had been swept instantly into the irrevocable progression of events, as if cast into the torrent of a flood and washed relentlessly downstream. And yet she could still recall each distinct moment—each word, each movement—with precise clarity, like selecting a single card from a full deck and scrutinizing it closely and carefully. She could see Keefe striding across the snow-covered clearing as if she were examining a painting, one executed in muted but evocative watercolors, entitled something like “Winter Landscape with Man and River.”
Before Sandy could even begin to move from the porch of the bungalow, Keefe had reached the riverbank. The man with the rifle, as he stalked slowly to the mouth of the cave, showed no sign of having noticed Keefe’s approach. Sandy could see Keefe raise his walking stick, gesture with it. She could tell that he spoke to the man, but the sound of his voice was beyond the reach of her ears. As Sandy came down off the porch and began to move across the clearing, the man with the rifle turned toward Keefe, assessed his presence briefly, then turned his attention back to the cave, without speaking or altering his stance. Sandy was still several paces from the bank of the stream when Keefe stomped across the shallow shoal at the tail of the clearing pool and continued on toward the man with the rifle on the far side.
“You there,” Keefe said as he walked to within a couple paces of the man with the rifle. “I said stop. You’ll not do this here.”
The man with the rifle held his stance, but looked back at Keefe. He released his grip from the rifle’s trigger and held one finger out, half raised, half pointing, as if issuing a warning to a child or a dog that it was about to cross a forbidden line. “Shhhhhh,” he said, and returned his gaze to the cave before him.
“You’ve no right.” Keefe took another step toward the man with the rifle.
“I’m a country and an age. I make my own right.” Though he spoke more quietly than Keefe had, Sandy could just make out the man’s strange words from the opposite bank as she started across the stream.
Keefe seemed to pull up, taken aback, and gazed off upstream, beyond the man before him.
“The cat is in there, old fool. I’m taking it, and you got nothing to say about it.”
Keefe paused for only a moment longer, then appeared to grow incensed. “Here? This? No.”
Sandy had reached the opposite bank and walked up behind Keefe. “James?” she said softly. “Wait. Don’t.”
Keefe showed no awareness of Sandy’s presence. The man with the rifle took one stealthy step ahead, positioning himself by the stone ledge at the cave opening. “Listen to your bitch, old man,” he said.
“No.” Keefe’s voice rose along with the walking stick in his arm, but Sandy caught his arm on the upswing and pulled back.
“James, don’t.”
Keefe whirled around, tugging his arm free of her grasp, the walking stick still raised. His eyes were ablaze with fear, outrage, confusion. Sandy had seen the look before. He had no idea who she was. And she had only that one second to realize that Keefe was lost to her. He swung the walking stick in a tight, upward arc. The thick, heavy end of the staff slammed hard into the side of her head, catching her most forcefully from her jaw to the ridge of bone behind her ear. She stumbled backward, tumbling over a rock outcropping along the bank, and landed with a thud on her back behind the hump of stone. Even as she fell, she glimpsed Keefe turning back to the man with the rifle, his walking stick raised again. Stunned by the blow, Sandy struggled to rise to her feet.
“James, no.�
� Her throat felt as though she spoke the words aloud, but she would never be certain.
The man with the rifle appeared oblivious to Keefe and Sandy, so intent was he on the cave and the prey within. Keefe’s staff came down hard on the man’s shoulder, knocking him off balance, loosening his grip on the rifle. He spun quickly, regaining his balance, snapped the rifle back into position before him, drew back on the barrel end, and rammed the butt of the stock into Keefe’s abdomen. Keefe dropped his walking stick and collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath, leaning on one hand. The man held the rifle to his side with his left hand. With his right, he reached into one of the pouches on the ammunition belt and produced a small pistol. Sandy was never able to erase the look in his eyes. She could see, dazed as she was, the gaze behind the heavy eyeglasses—flat, emotionless, reptilian. Without haste or any sign of agitation, the man took two steps toward Keefe, brushed aside the brown fedora, pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the top of Keefe’s head, and fired one round into his brain.
The dull pock of the pistol induced the sensation of a hammer blow to Sandy’s chest, knocking the wind from her lungs as she fought to right herself, gripping the ridge of the stone she’d fallen over. She tried to scream, to propel her voice into the ravine in some way, but only a faint, brittle rasp of air managed to escape her lungs.
As Keefe’s body crumpled into a heap, the man returned the pistol to the ammunition belt and spun back toward the cave. His movements remained precise and composed as he whipped the rifle back into position and planted himself directly before the cave opening. He pushed his eyeglasses up to the bridge of his nose. Sandy could see his chest rise and fall in a series of sharp, deep breaths. Sandy’s jaw and head throbbed with pain, her gait wobbly and uncertain, but she started to move. To Keefe? To the man with the rifle? She didn’t know. She made no conscious choice or decision. She only moved.
Keefe’s body, a lifeless heap, lay only a few inches from Sandy’s boot as she stepped past. She did not look at it. She knew what was there. She picked up the fallen walking stick, which lay in her path, steadied herself with it, and continued on toward the man with the rifle.
“Upright and vital.” His voice hissed as he spoke into the cave.
“No,” Sandy said. Her lungs could push out little more than a whisper, but she had made an audible sound. The man remained locked in position, but his eyes darted momentarily toward her then back to the cave opening. Again he shifted the rifle to his left hand, reached into the ammo belt with his right, raised the pistol, and turned his gaze back to Sandy as she brought the heavy end of Keefe’s walking stick down hard into the middle of the man’s face.
It always seemed to her later that the two sounds had occurred simultaneously, the crunch of the walking stick smashing the man’s nose and the report of his pistol, but there must have been at least a brief instant separating them.
Sandy felt a searing pain in the flesh on the rim of her armpit, but the adrenaline rushing into her blood kept her in motion. The man had been knocked flat, and the rifle had fallen from his hand and landed a few feet away on the riverbank. The pistol lay a few inches from his fingers. His eyeglasses had been knocked off, and blood gushed from his nose into his beard, but he was still moving, clumsily groping for the pistol. Sandy raised the staff over her head and brought it down into the man’s face with what felt like the last of her strength. Once. Twice. Three, four, five times. Blood seeped from his eye sockets, nose, mouth, and ears. A large flap of flesh was torn loose and hanging from his forehead. And he lay still, no longer moving.
Her lungs gulped greedily for air, and she pressed her arm to her side as if to contain the pain burning there. She coughed as she gasped for air, and felt a moist warmth running down the side of her torso.
Now she could turn back to Keefe, could look upon the remains of what she had lost. He had collapsed forward, one arm buckled beneath him, one flung out to his side. The wound on the crown of his head had bled profusely, painting a dark red stripe through his white hair as his blood drained into a pool on the stony ground in front of his crumpled body. The blood infused with the life and love of the headwaters, the blood rich with the world that could draw the word love audibly from Sandy’s lips.
She let the walking stick fall away and dropped to her knees beside Keefe. Her vision was beginning to fade, and she could no longer move her left arm. With her right, she slid her hand into the collar of Keefe’s jacket and pulled him up and back, leaning his head against a rock, as if resting it against a pillow. The body was beginning to stiffen, but she was able to push his legs out in front of him and drag his arms to his sides. A seam of congealing blood rimmed the top of his forehead at the hairline. His eyes were flat and cloudy, the eyes of a fish lying dead on the bank. Sandy extended the first and second fingers on her hand and pressed the eyelids shut. She fell to her side as she reached for the brown fedora, but she was able to pinch the brim in her fingertips, drag it to her, and push herself back up with her elbow. Once she had pressed the hat down onto Keefe’s head, covering the wound, covering the eyes and blood-rimmed forehead, he looked like nothing more than an old man taking a streamside nap, resting himself and the waters of the pool before having another go at the fish holding in the current there.
The sun had topped the ridge behind them. Across the clearing, its light had begun to creep down the slope behind the bungalow. The snow was already melting. Soon it would be gone. Sandy’s head dropped to Keefe’s rigid chest, not as a final act of affection but because she could no longer hold it up. As her vision began to fade and constrict, she thought she saw something that might have been the mountain lion slink from the cave and disappear in the dense brush up the slope. Her eyelids fluttered involuntarily as, across the clearing, J.D.’s green government SUV rolled down the driveway, the light bar across its roof flashing. The vehicle swerved around the two other trucks parked there and skidded to a stop at the fringe of the gravel apron. Through the trees more flashing lights moved along the fire road above. After that Sandy saw nothing, felt nothing, heard only the faint cry of Stink, barking inside the bungalow.
We live up there.
Epilogue
The fire was consuming itself, reduced to a few flames flickering in a bed of glowing coals. Sandy shuffled from the old leather sofa to the fireplace and laid two more lengths of wood in the grate. With the poker she pushed them into a better position to catch the flames. It was a little difficult to do with only one arm, but she managed well enough. Returning to the sofa, she took a last drag from the cigarette burning in the ashtray and stubbed it out in the ash of the other two butts there. Her tea was still warm. She took a sip, then another, and set the mug back on the coffee table. The cloth sling supporting her left arm was out of position, pushed up her forearm and rumpled. She winced only slightly as she smoothed out the sling and positioned her arm more securely. Raising her legs onto the sofa, she pulled the blanket over them and lay back, resting her head on Stink’s rear haunch. Her dog emitted a faint groan at the pressure against his flank, but didn’t move. She was tired again and would rest for a while now. Margie would more than likely arrive soon. And so would the snow.
IT came as no surprise to Sandy that Margie had swooped in and taken charge afterward. As obstinately precise as her memory of the morning in the clearing remained, she could recall little of the rest of that day, or the next. She had a vague, unreliable memory of a paramedic leaning over her as she was jostled in the back of a speeding ambulance. All she could recall of it, though, was a blur of dark blue, the paramedic’s uniform, and the shine off his waxed bald head under the interior light of the ambulance. After that, there was nothing until she woke in her hospital room more than a day later. The first thing she recognized after her eyes fluttered open was Margie, dressed in her blue scrubs, slumped in the chair at her bedside, asleep. Sandy lay there for a few moments, trying to absorb her new surroundings—the fluorescent lighting, still glaring though it was dimmed, the light gr
een walls, the battery of monitors and IV tubing surrounding her. An intensive care unit, for certain. She had survived. Keefe was dead, but she had lived. When Sandy tried to reach out to Margie, to tap her on the shoulder, her left arm barely moved before a bolt of pain shot from the base of her neck to her knees. The startled cry of pain she emitted wasn’t loud, but it was enough. Margie stirred, opened her eyes, and saw that Sandy was finally conscious.
“Oh, honey,” Margie said. “There you are. There you are.” She pushed herself out of the chair, leaned over her friend, took her face gently in both hands, and pressed her cheek to Sandy’s and held it there.
After holding the delicate embrace for a few moments, Margie released Sandy and sprang into action, transforming from the worried, watchful friend to the dutiful, efficient nurse. Her eyes darted from one monitor to the next, checking Sandy’s vital signs. She removed the bag at the end of Sandy’s catheter and replaced it with a new one. Sandy grimaced with pain as the head of her bed was raised a bit, and Margie pressed the button to release more pain medication into Sandy’s veins. She trotted out of the room to call in the on-duty nurse and to tell the one at the desk to contact the doctor on call. Sandy would find out only later that Margie had been there nearly every moment, whether she was on duty or off, since Sandy was brought to Sherwood Community Hospital.
The on-duty nurse appeared and repeated the same series of checks that Margie had just done, followed shortly thereafter by the doctor, who did much of the same as he spoke softly to Sandy and checked the dressing on her incision. After they had completed their examinations, pronouncing Sandy in stable condition, they left, and Margie settled back into the bedside chair, pulled it closer, took Sandy’s hand, and began the slow process of guiding her friend back into the present. Still weak, groggy from pain medication, Sandy faded in and out, but she remained awake and aware enough of the time to keep up.
The bullet had passed through the flesh of the outer edge of her armpit, tearing the muscle and shattering a piece of her shoulder blade. She would recover fully, Margie assured her, but she might have some limited movement with that arm because of the tearing of the muscle. It would all depend on how the wound healed, on the amount of scar tissue that built up.
