On the Free

by Coert Voorhees

  “I thought you said your stepdad was awesome,” Amelia says.

  “I never said that. I said he was the most badass attorney in Colorado. I said he would sue the shit out of Jerry. I never said he was awesome.”

  Santi says, “So he’s not awesome?”

  Victor squeezes his eyes closed, and suddenly he’s thirteen years old again, and he’s waiting in the living room. Waiting up because his mom is on her first date since his dad left, and he’s still awake even though she told him to remember his bedtime.

  She’s not even mad when she opens the door and sees him. She doesn’t even say anything at all. She just laughs. She just tosses her purse onto the chair by the door and walks through the living room and into the kitchen, where she opens the freezer and takes out a pint of cookie dough ice cream and grabs a pair of spoons on her way back to him.

  “Wow,” she says as she plops down on the couch next to Victor.

  He smiles and accepts one of the spoons. “How was it?”

  “If I ever try to marry a stockbroker, please shoot me right in the forehead.” She spoons out a tremendous lump of ice cream and licks it like the scoop on a cone.

  “Stockbroker doesn’t sound too bad,” Victor says. “I bet he was rich at least.”

  “Oh, honey, he was fantastic. Rich, smart, good looking.” She glances at Victor with a twinkle in her eye. “Just ask him. He’ll be the first one to tell you.”

  And they laugh together and they talk, and when the ice cream is finally gone, Victor leans his head on her lap and lets her scratch his head until he drifts off to sleep.

  Victor opens his eyes now and shakes away the memory. He grabs the bottle from Santi and takes a mouthful. He doesn’t even taste the liquid this time. Goes down like water. The clearest, cleanest water he’s ever had, just like the tap water from the cabin. He stumbles back but catches himself, no problem.

  “I’m fine,” Victor says, waving them away. “I said I’m fine.”

  He screws the little metal top back on the flask and crawls back over to his spot. He’s not going to puke. He knows that much. Maybe some spins when he lies down, but he’s not going to puke.

  Oh, God, the spins. He’s on his back, and he closes his eyes, and the spins come, slowly at first, and when he opens his eyes again, he’s not sure how much time has passed. The fire looks the same size, but they could have put another log on.

  “Gold got too expensive to mine,” Victor says. “Price of gold goes down, easy gold is already ripped from the mountain. Simple economics. The miners all left. Supply and demand.”

  It’s Amelia who says, “What are you talking about?”

  “Supply and demand,” Victor says again. He closes his eyes and buries them in the crook of his elbow, but that makes the spinning worse. At least his chest doesn’t hurt anymore.

  There’s no such thing as drifting off to sleep when you’re wasted. You fight the spins as long as you can and then you’re gone.

  25

  His mom’s face had lost its expressiveness in the years since her remarriage—the wrinkle-free forehead, the smoothness where the crow’s feet had once been—but the eyes gave her away. No amount of Botox could have hidden the fear.

  “Tell me it wasn’t drugs,” she said.

  Victor pressed a cold pack against the reddened left side of his face. The bruising would start soon. He’d never had a black eye before, and he wondered if he’d look like a badass—if he was going to get kicked out of the scout troop for fighting, the least he could do was go out as a badass.

  More than anything, he hoped that Davis Higley would end up looking worse than he did.

  “It wasn’t drugs—”

  “Drinking, then? Because I can’t think of any other reason. If you had been thinking clearly, you never would have—”

  She was almost hopeful. Drinking or drugs would be an explanation in itself, but without alcohol to blame, she’d have to consider that he, alone, with no chemical alteration, was capable of this.

  “Mom, I—” Victor sat on the edge of his bed and looked around his room. It was spotless. Everything filed away in cubbies and drawers. His old action figures posed on the top of the bookshelf like they were in some sort of museum. “I don’t know what happened, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “What do you think Winslow is going to say?”

  “We don’t have to tell him.”

  “He’s your stepfather. He’s my husband.”

  “We could say I quit. We could say I didn’t want to jump through all the stupid hoops just so I could call myself an Eagle Scout.”

  “Your face, Victor—”

  “We could say that I fell. We don’t have to tell him.”

  But of course they had to, and they did, with Victor sandwiched between Winslow and his mom on the couch. Victor confessed but kept it simple. A quick disclosure of the facts of the case. There had been an altercation. Punches had been thrown. Blame had been placed. Consequences had been suffered.

  Winslow said nothing.

  Victor had nothing more to say.

  Mom got up. She kissed Winslow on the cheek and said to her husband, “I’ll be in the kitchen, honey.”

  Maybe it was over? Victor was halfway to the door when Winslow’s voice stopped him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To bed—”

  “Sit down.”

  “But—”

  “I said sit your disrespectful ass down. Right now.”

  Victor froze at the cool menace in the man’s voice. The living room was dead quiet but for the sound of water in the pipes. Probably his mom in the kitchen. There were dishes to be done, after all. Marble counters to be wiped. Victor sat his disrespectful ass back down on the couch.

  “When I was your age—” Winslow stopped. “Your mother and I. We’re trying, but you’ve got to help us.”

  Victor winced at the word us, but still he kept his mouth shut.

  “What do you expect us to do?” That word again. Another pause as Winslow clenched and unclenched the fists resting on his knees. He said, simply, “Eagle Scout.”

  Victor stared at his feet.

  “You’re going to make this right, Victor. You’re going to make this right, for me, for your mom, for yourself.”

  Victor’s mouth opened.

  He knew he shouldn’t say anything. Just let the man rage at him until he got tired of it. Even though Victor’s silence sometimes made Winslow angrier in the moment, it was always better in the long term. You don’t put another log on the fire unless you want to keep it burning.

  But he couldn’t help himself. Victor focused on the cuff poking out from the sleeve of the man’s pinstriped suit. Circular golden cufflinks embossed with the image a hawk or an eagle or something. Winslow’s stupid initials monogrammed on the sleeve of his tailored dress shirt.

  “What kind of an asshole wears cufflinks without a tuxedo?”

  Victor braced himself, but Winslow surprised him. There was no fury. Just a low, flat, devastatingly soft statement of fact.

  “The second you graduate from high school, you’re out of here, do you understand me? No money, no house, nothing. Not from me. I promised myself that I would get you that far. That I’d stick with you, no matter how hard you make it for me. I owe your mother that much.”

  A week later, Victor knocked on the door of Winslow’s home office and entered without waiting for an answer. His stepdad was on the phone. Victor ignored the hand-waving and marched straight to the desk.

  “I’m sorry. You were right.” He forced himself to say the words, and Winslow put the phone to his chest and smiled a victory smile that made Victor hate the man even more. “I’ll try to do better,” he continued, swallowing his anger, faking remorse. He placed a completed enrollment form for the Bear Canyon Wilderness Therapy Program on his stepfather’s desk. “I think I could learn from this.”

  26

  Victor’s tongue sits in his mouth like a filthy sock. His head throbs with
every step. At some point in the middle of the night, thank God, he puked the tequila out, but what little Advil they still have is going toward Amelia’s arm, so there’s no relief for him there. He’s desperate to collapse in the shade, chug one of their two remaining water bottles, and put his head between his knees. He can’t, though, and only partly because they’re still rationing the water.

  It’s already early afternoon, and they have to keep moving.

  He’s dehydrated and hungover; his shoulder and ribs still hurt from the mudslide; but most of all he’s pissed off. Pissed off and ashamed.

  The feeling of stupidity, all-consuming: the tightening of the chest, the sinking of the stomach, the heat at his temples. The same feeling that would paralyze him in school as early as kindergarten. I’m so stupid, I’m so stupid, over and over.

  He had told them about the cabin.

  Nobody was supposed to know. Nobody. That was the whole point. And now this. Now they know. The secret is out, and it’s his fault because he’s the stupid one who can’t keep his goddamned mouth shut, who can’t execute a plan after all, who has no business being out here.

  Farther uphill, Amelia and Santi are almost out of eyesight, side by side, Amelia holding the compass and Santi gesturing to the map as if he has any idea what he’s pointing at.

  The forest thins out with every foot of elevation gain. Fallen trees almost outnumber the living ones, victims of avalanches or beetle infestations of years past. Ahead, two ridges meet at a peak in the center, creating a bowl above them, treeless and scree-filled. Deep red tailings from some abandoned mine ooze down the barren rocks like blood from a stab wound, the red widening downhill. He’s close enough now that the terrain is starting to look familiar. Maybe he knows that basin? Maybe he’s seen those tailings before?

  At least the sky is relatively clear. At least his clothes are relatively dry.

  Maybe he can convince the others to leave him alone, to go downhill without him. Santi and Amelia don’t even need the map, not really, not if they head straight down. Eventually they’ll run into a stream or valley they’ll be able to follow to a road.

  “Let’s go, Eagle Scout!” Santi calls back to him. “We don’t have all day here!”

  Victor finally catches up to them next to a fallen tree. Years of rot have eaten away at the inside of the splintered trunk, and he half-considers tucking himself into it. Amelia looks okay now, but was she faking the injury or is she faking the recovery?

  Santi taps Victor’s chest with a light backhand. “Tequila not your beverage of choice?”

  “Not all of us are born Mexican.”

  “There he is!” Santi says. “Our little racist is back. We were worried about you.”

  He’d meant to lean against the trunk for support, but a wave of nausea hits him, and he sits instead on the rotting wood and hunches forward, staring at a moss-covered rock between his feet. The weight of the backpack pushes his elbows into the meat of his thighs. “You guys must not have gotten as drunk as I did.”

  “We didn’t have much of a chance,” Amelia says, her tone thick with judgment. “Not the way you took it down.”

  He can’t shake the fog from his brain no matter how hard he tries. What, exactly, did he tell them? Maybe they’d played him for the fool he is—maybe they were just pretending to drink last night, taking little sips and letting him drink himself into oblivion so they could get a little privacy for some backwoods action.

  Stupid. So stupid.

  “I think we’re pretty close,” Amelia says. “You want to take a look?”

  Victor leans farther forward, centering his weight above his legs, before he stands up with a groan. Deep breath. Eyes closed. Another breath. He stares at the map, but for some reason, none of it makes sense, like it’s a piece of modern art, all lines and shapes and colors. He looks up and around, trying to orient himself, searching for some hint from the land. “Where are we?”

  Santi smirks. “They don’t teach map reading in Boy Scouts?”

  “It’s called orienteering, and shut the hell up.”

  Amelia points to a small space above the thick 12,000-foot line. “Here’s where you said the cabin is.” Her finger travels down below the 11,000-foot line, just east of what looks like a ridgeline: a Florida-shaped peninsula, topo lines nestled closely to show drastic elevation gain. “And here’s where we are.”

  “That ridge right there,” Victor says, pointing to the formation above them. Rock spires rise from the top like the edge of a bowie knife. “You can see the other side of it from the cabin.”

  “You sure?” Santi says.

  “I’m either sure or I’m not. No going back now.”

  “What’s the deal with this cabin?” Amelia says. It’s an innocent enough thing to say, given their situation, but something about the way she says it—the tilt of her head? the squint of her eyes?—makes him uneasy.

  “It’s nothing,” Victor says, dismissing her with a flick of his hand.

  “A cabin at 12,000 feet doesn’t sound like nothing. Especially one with a satellite phone.”

  Satellite phone? This fog in his head. Too thick. What did he tell them last night?

  Victor steps forward as if to continue the hike, but Santi and Amelia are in the way, and it would be too aggressive to go around them. Like he’s avoiding them, like he has something to hide.

  “Of course it has a satellite phone,” Victor says. “You think the phone company’s running wires all the way up here?”

  “How are you going to drop a bomb on us like that and then just pass out?” Santi says.

  “I didn’t pass out on you. I went to sleep.”

  “But you think the phone is going to work?” Amelia says.

  Before Victor can even respond, Santi has to chime in: “It makes sense now what you said to me the other day about choosing to be here. You wanted to break into your own family’s cabin, right? That’s why?”

  “He’s not my family.”

  “ ‘Mess up his pride and joy.’ That’s what you said last night.”

  This catches Victor off-guard. Pride and joy—that’s his stepdad’s phrase. Did he really say that? Why would he have told them that?

  “Let’s say you do.” Santi gives him a smug laugh. “He’s going to know it’s you, right? He has to.”

  They’re needling him, that’s what they’re doing. Taunting him. They know he feels shitty and his head hurts and they know he can’t think straight. “He didn’t even read past the title of the brochure. All he cares about is that I’m gone.”

  “Yeah, but come on,” Amelia says. “Do you actually think he won’t make the connection?”

  Victor shakes his head, which is a terrible mistake. Sharp stabs to the temple replace the dull throbbing.

  “Like he wasn’t going to notice?”

  “Shut up!” Victor says. He takes a step back to regain his balance, but there’s a rock where his foot needs to go and he twists his goddamn ankle and it’s over before he can do anything about it.

  He grabs his leg with both hands. So much pain, a burning just beneath his anklebone, and then he’s on his back like an upside-down turtle. Pathetic and hungover and screaming and stranded in the fucking wilderness with a thug and a debutante.

  “Stay away from me,” he yells when they bend down toward him.

  He unclips the belt and chest buckles of his pack and slithers out of the shoulder straps, wrenching himself up onto his hands and knees.

  “Victor,” Amelia says, the gentleness in her voice cutting through the pain. “Victor.”

  He hears the unclipping of buckles and then packs hitting the ground. A zipper. An open bottle of water appears in front of him.

  “Here,” Santi says.

  Victor wipes his eyes against his sleeves and rolls over to sit. He takes the water without looking at Santi. He drinks more than he should, but he doesn’t care. The cotton in his mouth is finally gone. He swishes some water in his mouth and spits it onto t
he ground at his side.

  “He told me I was out of the house after high school. He told me once I graduated, I wasn’t his problem anymore. He told me so many things.”

  Amelia squats down next to him. She reaches her good arm out to touch him, but stops.

  A deep growl of distant thunder causes all three of them to whip their heads up, and although what Victor sees of the sky is mostly cloudless, he knows that relief from the rain is only temporary. There’s a chill in the air.

  “We should get going,” Santi says.

  Amelia offers her hand to Victor. “Can you stand?”

  The throbbing in his ankle is still there, but he’s surprised by how little it hurts now. More of an inconvenience than an injury. He got lucky. Even so, he makes a show of testing it out, limping more than he needs to. Cringing with every step.

  Santi reaches for his backpack, but Victor swats his arm away. “I can get it.”

  “Let me at least—”

  “I said I can get it.” Acknowledging their kindness would be too much; Victor’s ashamed enough already. Pack back on, he shrugs into its weight and adjusts the buckles. “Let’s go.”

  “Your ankle’s okay?” she says.

  He nods, but once again he steps with an unnecessary wince. It feels important that they see him as injured. He’ll be less threatening that way.

  “Let’s just get around that ridge,” Victor says.

  Without another word, Santi helps Amelia into her pack, threading her broken arm through the shoulder strap and refastening the sling. Victor tries to ignore the way they look at each other. Once they’re all geared up, Santi navigates a path up through the forest. Slowly, apparently out of concern for Victor’s injured ankle.

  Victor swears not to say another word about the cabin. And no more drinking, even if the others want to dip into Winslow’s supply. No more loss of focus. It’s all going to be fine, as long as he can regain control. But how to regain control of a situation that—he has to accept—he never had control of in the first place?