When he climbed up from the car the rain had stopped. The woods were as calm as his heart was. No sounds of Swanson or his tracking dogs. That was better. His reason was clearer for it. There was only the unrestrained anger of the river. He edged down, neared its flailing tongue.
He stepped in. The waters wrapped around his body, shuttled him toward the dark downward curve. Trusting its force and his purpose, he did not cry out.
TIME WAS no friend. Mason had learned these uneasy rhythms long ago, the waiting, the deferment of due purpose, but this was different. He tightened his hands to the shotgun stock, felt it become more a part of him. For several minutes he had heard nothing, but now that nothing began to turn, to become something beyond reach. Had there been a cough or idle shuffling from the rear of the store that would have given depth to the moment, measure. But there was no dimension to what he knew must come. Taking a life seemed so simple, considered at a distance. How many times he’d played it through his mind while he was in prison. In defense or as some means of intimidation. A way to kill fear. He had murdered so often in his dreams that the mental simulations were not so different than memory. Only that it had never actually happened. But that seemed a thin distinction when the thought had so completely locked its arms around him.
He took one long stride out. Lifted the shotgun and waited. The man did not stir. Seconds ached by and still nothing. Mason knew the man’s eyes were open, watching him, but no part of his body sprang toward action. He moved forward, kept the barrel trained on the deputy’s soft chest. Artificial light slit the bright organs of his eyes.
“Why didn’t you try to draw on me?”
The deputy’s voice was small, quaking. “I can’t move.”
Mason circled around, the closed distance making the portrait clearer. The deputy was geriatric, stricken with a pallor that involved no trick of the evening light. Mason stood for a moment, letting himself warm to the advantage of the situation. He set the shotgun on the counter, leaned over and relieved the old man of his sidearm, stuck it in his own waistband.
“Guess you lost some of that swagger when you got to sitting in here alone and thinking, didn’t you?”
“I don’t want you to shoot me.”
“No? Well, you’re in luck. I don’t much want to shoot you either.”
Mason hunted around for some rope, but in the dark all he could find was twine. He tore off the cardboard binding and wrapped it around and around the old man’s wrists. There he was, trussed up like a kid playing prisoner of war, weeping softly. Having nothing to say, he said nothing to him as he walked out of the store.
The rain had let when he came back to the edge of the forest and parked. The quietness of the woods was no solace, but he had expected none. He gathered little, only the shotgun and shells. He needed no compass. He could find the old man, knew that he could be headed for only one place, the mountaintop he’d taken him to so many times as a boy, horizons free of plastic civilization. He had prized that place, and its value had carried down through the years to Mason. The difference in their lives, their personalities, could not forfeit the land they shared. The rocks, the ridges, the gorges, told their own history, a history that owned lessons of abiding violence. There had always been tremblings beneath the ground, divisions against the generational stone. That was what gave the earth its shape, told its apparitional lie. No poem or philosophy could protect men from belonging to such a place. The beauty they perceived in the ongoing war of formation was their best defense against permanent madness.
He put memory away, gave himself to the path, moved like he belonged to a larger migration. That was what the better part of him was: a process, a dispossession. He had tried to do everything in his power to stop, to root himself, but his life had become without pause or foundation. Even in prison there had been no abeyance. That had been only another way back here, the farthest point of transit before coming inevitably around. Cast back to a world he knew well enough to map without eyes.
Dogs yowled somewhere, though not close. He climbed in the darkness, hands stumbling over rocks as he made for some chancy view. The moon suggested itself in the overhead murk but supplied no reliable aid. His breathing staggered. He stopped to rest, to rest and listen.
A memory, this. Coming through the woods, down a long path, his father in a suit, he a boy. They both wore hats turned down against the slapping wind. His father had taken him on foot to see the grave, the place where he claimed his mother had been buried.
“When did she die?” Mason had asked.
His father had not answered, simply pointing to the small blank headstone in the family plot. It was the only marker that had been erected. A simple cross, the transept greened by weather. All the others stones were flush to the ground, matted with carpetweed.
“What was her name?”
“I never knew her real name. People around here knew her for a short time as Marilyn.”
Mason waited for a long time to hear the rest. There had been flurries, scattering through the air like shreds of breath. The sun was trying to defeat the cold but having no luck.
“She was sick. She lived out here in the woods. There was a well house. She’d come in, stumbled across it somehow. Brought you with her. Less than six months old. She must have been out there three, four months before I knew anything about it. Somehow she’d got herself a singleshot .22 rifle and was feeding you both off squirrels, rabbits and whatever she could tear out of the ground. When she needed more, she came down, asked me for money.”
He stopped talking. He seemed to be listening to the tree limbs rattling.
“I helped her. I was lonely. She wasn’t with me long, but I loved her in a way. She had no people, nowhere to belong. So I took her in, cleaned her up. Maybe some people would say I took advantage of her, but she knew what she wanted as much as I did. Lonely people shouldn’t have to explain themselves to anybody. She wasn’t ever my wife, not in any paperwork. But we lived that way for a few months, made the best of what we could given the situation. She was sick already, and before that summer she was already dying. She’d been that way for a long time, knew it was coming. When she died, she had written out that she wanted me to have everything, including you. That’s not the kind of gift you can turn aside from. I might not be your daddy by blood, but we belong to one another, you and me. We both come to where we are because of your momma.”
The confession passed, and once he was able to speak again it had never again been mentioned. Details never satisfied. His father who was not his father. Like so much else. The resident silence and formlessness that had become its own kind of substitute living. Never one common word of peace. Nothing so uncommon in that, he supposed.
He moved down through some rhododendron, heard a sudden crash and fluster of movement. Two whitetails bounding, kicked from their beds. Adrenaline chilled him. He’d never hunted, but he remembered friends who went on weekends with their fathers. The closest he had come was when he had once helped dress and butcher a spike buck a boy named Cal had shot on the edge of the national forest, just a couple of hundred yards from the cabin. He and the boy’s father had come through, asking for a hand so they could haul everything out to the road without drawing too much attention. It was a weekend past the close of the legal season and if they were caught by the warden they’d likely part with their guns, their vehicle, and in the case of the father, a little portion of his immediate freedom. Mason knew the boy from school, though not well. Still, even then, he was no easy friend to the law.
They dragged the deer up around back and hung it head down from the lowest big limb they could find. Mason watched while the man and boy worked together, divesting the carcass of its organs in a neat, slick pile.
“You eat the heart?” the man asked.
“Nosir.”
The man shook his head. “Boy, that’s the best part. That and the backstrap. Go on and bag it if he don’t want it, Cal.”
He watched as the boy snapped open th
e short blade on a pocketknife, passed it through the connective tissue, placed the heart in a plastic grocery sack. The man and his son worked efficiently in tandem, cut the hide free for scraping and salting. The hanging body became a disassembly, an anatomical sketch of the muscular system. The complexity under the skin fascinated Mason. It was a pure wonder.
They needed his help when it was time to quarter. Mason held the cool knotty haunch while the bow saw crunched down the backbone in even strokes. Then the body just came apart, cleanly as split cordwood. As simple as that. Mason brought out some butcher paper from the cabin and the man and his son wrapped one of the hams and gave it to Mason.
“For your trouble. You earned it.”
Mason thanked him and helped them carry the rest of the venison to their truck. Once they had gone he took the bundle inside and washed the meat before he set it down in a cast iron pot and let it stew, slicing in carrots, onions and potatoes. His father was out teaching. He would have something ready for him as soon as he came home.
Late that evening his father arrived, paused at the threshold.
“What is that smell?” His voice had an immediate edge.
“Stew,” Mason answered, took down a bowl from the cupboard. “I made it.”
His father lifted the lid, cast it into the sink where it clanged like a struck bell.
“Get rid of it. It stinks. I can’t eat venison. My father made me eat it as a child. Like you, he never asked me if I liked it.”
His father hung his hat on the peg in the hall, slapped his leather gloves once against the counter, disappeared into his study, where he would join his piles of books, his unsorted papers upturned like dumb gazes. Mason waited for a while to see if he would change his mind, but he did not. Once the broth cooled he carried the pot out behind the cabin and dumped everything onto the ground, raking out the thin sediment with the edge of a fork. Steam rose. He remembered how the blood and viscera had left the body of the deer. The smoke rising from its death. What lost fire could cause something like that?
And still, this was the man he must find. Despite the years of injury, his father was part of him, a cauterizing fact. No amount of wishing or forgetting could ever change that. No road would lead away from him and the mountain where they both belonged.
Mason pressed through the brush until he came into a ledge overlooking the cresting river. Even by the dim light, he could see wreckage troubling the whitewater. A huge stuttering movement that surpassed ready knowing. That was what was called a river, though what a river was remained another question. A place, remembered, converted from impressions. A geography that could change, that had changed. A tail wagging softly down slow eons. A name given to something that moved, that was lost as soon as the name was affixed. But it had one advantage. Water could carve a trench into the earth to defend against what a simple thing men might try to make of it.
He was at its edge, held by the roar of its passage. Downed limbs galloped by. At this distance, the current was a riddle, an illegible message. He watched it run until he became dizzy and backed away, holding his head.
Farther on, something not part of the river. He came down to it, the huddled shape. A drowned man, facedown. Mason squatted a few feet from him, looked over his trousers, khaki shirt, plastic shoes. One of the deputies. Out searching for him, likely. Killed for no justifiable reason other than the pride that had drawn him out to hunt for another man like he was something worthy of cornering. He reached forward, patted his pockets to see if anything useful might yield itself. The man groaned. Mason snatched his hand away.
It was like watching something be born, the slow wrangling of weight, the awakening to pain. The heaves between breaths. The deputy rolled over, faced him.
“I knew it. I knew it would,” he said. “I knew the river would bring me to you. I knew it.”
The deputy reached down, yanked his Beretta up, fired the same moment Mason pulled the trigger of the shotgun. Concussions ripped. The deputy’s head snapped back, opened like an ugly flower. Blood welled beneath Mason’s fingers where he pressed his hand to his side. He staggered back, fell. The ground was soft from so much rainfall. He laid his head against a slick stone and waited for death, but death wasn’t interested.
He got back up, went to see what was to be done. The man looked fairly drowned already, aside from the hole in his forehead. Maybe what would be seen as injuries from a broached logjam. Reasonable to assume, especially if more water got into it, changed the architecture of the wound. But the handgun would have to disappear. A shot had been fired. Someone would notice that. He bent down and loosened the gun belt, tossed it into the river. He removed the magazine from the pistol, threw both in to the deepest boil he could see. The body was not so willing to go. A question of immobile muscle. Mason collapsed, breathed and bled.
“Sonofabitch.”
He got back up slowly and waited for the fire in his stomach to subside, but it did not. He lifted the dead man by his armpits and dragged him to the river. The shrieking of so much water was at his back. He pivoted sharply, let the weight of the man drop down into it. The body caught the surge and raced, like a figment, out of sight.
He rested. Was that the end of the event? The conclusion a matter of acting on his momentary will, to be rid of the crime that occurred with such abruptness. How was he supposed to comprehend that, other than through the body, the hole in his flesh? There was a deeper loss in the hurt than he could explain. Everything had seemed so inevitable, so impossibly relentless. Now more than ever.
He would have it all come to him, when it would come to him. But first he needed light. He shut his eyes and lay on the bank, watched the world swing round his stillness one last time before the day would bring him straight home. He breathed, the pain coming strong in his lungs. He spoke Lavada’s name once and put all such desire away.
SAM KNEW the mountain as soon as his good hand met the rising face. Of course, this was not where the mountain commenced. He had begun the movement upward in elevation some time earlier. This country was innocent of strict survey lines. He had experienced no awareness of crossing from not-mountain into mountain, but now the present challenge of stone was confirmation of the deeper purpose the land offered. It was good to touch it, to let it waken to the task he had brought to its feet. The way was well prepared.
He circled, found one of the old footpaths. He peered up at where it led, saw that it threaded crisp shelves of overhang before slighting back toward a green ridge. The depth, the movement in and along with the mountain’s body, that was good, a sign that the trail would take him where he wanted. He stepped up, grasped the knobby holds to keep himself formed tight to the edge. He would see what he had been promised.
There was little left for him now but the fleeting distractions of the visible, the whims of shallow perception. Memory was a hectic enemy—confused, ruptured. The totality of life in its fragmented and misarranged parts. No fixed collage.
He soon grew breathless. His injuries slowed him. The dim sense that it was good to be afflicted with this pain, this encumbrance. He touched his ruined hand, discovering it like something alien grown into self. That distance that he carried with him, like a dream that would never completely dissolve. Perhaps that what real awareness was, this lasting presence.
A bird flushed near, rose, winged its way sharply skyward. A hawk, his favorite bird. He had found one dying once, addled, squatting at the edge of campus next to the state highway. He had finished teaching for the day, was driving home when he saw it near the asphalt. When he pulled off on the shoulder the bird shifted nervously but did not take flight. He whistled and called to it, but there was no response. He lifted a hand to stroke its throat but backed away when the hawk inflated its chest. In some poor form of conciliation, the bird hobbled a few feet away and roosted in a sapling. He had decided that was all that could be reasonably done and left. The next morning he saw where the bird had been struck by traffic, feathers scattered and crushed flat to the
road.
But this current bird was pure exhilaration as it lifted, spun and leveraged in the sky. A quiet reverence in the air. He extended his arm, covered it for a moment with his palm, then watched it go on, breach the farther distance until it diminished entirely.
The trail thinned, became tentative. He had lost sight of the peak, though he knew it remained graspable within an hour. The accomplishment of the height had become something he could not refuse, or be refused by. The wilderness up here was different, more solitary and scorched. He felt the first warmth of the released sun on the back of his neck and between his shoulders. It rode there like a friend as he turned from the trail, edged up through the veed stone. Pebbles clattered and pitched over the thorny sheer. He watched many of them disappear through the scrub.
“Will you take me now? Will this be all?”
“Not yet,” the voice answered.
“I’ve waited patiently.”
“I know that you have. But that has no bearing.”
“Why?”
He began to weep. The old pains surged. The voice refused to say anything else. He knew it would not answer him as long as he remained and waited for it. He had nothing to contribute to the mountain now but his submission. He would give all of what remained of him, have it capture his mind like a soft impression of wax. He raised his head and saw how much farther he had to go. It was a trial, invested with hidden forms. He could almost see them, their faces peering from the absence.
He climbed.
DAY BROKE cleanly. Mason woke and hauled himself to his feet. His breathing was thin, gagging. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but the bullet remained inside him. The sky overhead burned. He realized with no sadness that he was going to die.
He followed the river for as long as he could before turning for higher ground. As he passed out of earshot from the water’s high running chuckle he listened for the dogs and signs of pursuit, but the morning was still. The land was in recovery from the storm. He was surprised at how few trees had been brought down. There was little evidence that any violence had attended at all. Nothing could please him better. To have the wreckage pass on with the small consequence of a minute hand. Just so much measurement for what would soon disappear from notice.
A Shelter of Others Page 15
