Fellow Mortals: A Novel

by Mahoney, Dennis

  “Any idiot can know there isn’t a wise old man with a bucket of lightning, but a lot of people stop right there. Their grammar-school beliefs weren’t enough. They think it’s more adult to throw them off. And they’re right. You can’t keep thinking like a child when you’re grown.”

  “I hate it when you talk this way,” Joan says.

  “I didn’t mean you,” Nan whispers.

  “I don’t see what’s so complicated about it.”

  “I wish it weren’t complicated,” Sam says. “It’d be so much easier if God were obvious.”

  “He is,” Nan says. “It isn’t.”

  “I’d like to talk about something else,” Joan decides, and then they’re briefly at a loss, staring at the traffic lines, following the last few turns toward their neighborhood. Wingnut’s finally relaxing in the back. Sam sees him in the mirror, panting from his earlier excitement on the drive, his crooked tail seeming more broken than deformed.

  Snow glitters in the headlights, hours old but still pristine, eddying in fine blown patterns on the blacktop. The cabin feels lost, far behind them in the dark, and the meal is like a memory from early in the week.

  “So what do we do for Ava?” Sam asks.

  “Whatever we think is right.” Nan sighs.

  “But how do we decide?”

  “Sam,” Joan says, with an air of disappointment. “How often in your life do you really not know?”

  27

  Ava cleans dishes in a black rubber trug. The water from the pressure tank is painfully cold—she wonders how long Sam can keep it unfrozen this winter—and she heats it by the kettleful and adds boiling water as she goes. She lays the washed dishes and utensils on the table, emptying the trug at intervals and starting with a fresh round of suds. Her hands are raw but it’s satisfying work, reminding her of holidays with Henry when the dishwasher filled and they would stand together, elbow to elbow, finishing the rest with a towel and a sponge, Ava washing, Henry drying and asking every ten seconds: “Where’s the ladle go? Where’s the yellow pie dish go?”

  She notices a hairline fracture in a plate. The quiet and the nearness of the fire make her woozy. Thirty minutes, he’ll be back, then … what? She thinks of riding out in the dark—unfair of her, she knows, forcing him to make a whole second trip—and how she didn’t leave the porch light on, didn’t leave any of her lights on at home. She’ll make a lot of noise opening the door, sending Wing in first to run around the rooms, but turning on the lights will only make it emptier.

  She takes her shoes off, rubbing on the arches of her feet. Embers settle in the stove and the windowpanes tick. In the drafts from the walls, she can almost smell winter. But tomorrow she can start to plan Christmas with the Finns.

  There’s a knock. Ava jolts, more inwardly than outwardly. She would have heard the ATV along the trail and it was definitely a knock and not an animal or branch. The door is unlatched. Ava tenses on the chair. Then she’s up like a shot, reaching for the lock, but the door swings open and she moves back fast.

  “Hello?” a man says, hesitant but clear.

  Billy Kane steps in, twisting at the knob.

  The cabin has a fluttery reality about it, like a film with a gap in every other frame. Billy looks at her and grins—sheepishly, it seems. He’s wearing boots and a barn coat, corduroy brown, and his knuckles and his cheeks are cold-bitten red. Ava doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t speak. Billy stands at the threshold, patient and polite, as if he wouldn’t dare cross without a formal invitation.

  “Ava?” Billy says. “Hey, it’s me. It’s only Billy,” waving at her face as if he’s found her on the floor. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “What do you want?” she asks, dampening his smile.

  Billy says, “I know it’s weird showing up like this,” as if it isn’t really weird and she’ll forgive him just for saying it. He’s talking too slowly and enunciating words.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here,” he says. “Where’s Sam?”

  “He’s around. He’ll be back in a few minutes. Wingnut’s here … my dog. He’s right around back.”

  “Your dog was with the Finns. Maybe Sam didn’t tell you,” Billy says, leaning on the doorframe and blank behind the eyes. “I just wanted to check on him. Holidays, you know? I’m sitting home alone—my wife’s divorcing me, I told you some of that … I figured we could all use some company tonight. I stopped at your house, too. You weren’t home. I mean oviously,” he slurs.

  “This isn’t my house,” Ava says. “I can’t invite you in.”

  “Ahh,” Billy says, dismissing her excuse. He bumps the trug with his boot, splashing water on the floor, and the door falls shut behind his back. “I know Sam. He’s my neighbor.”

  “Please go. I don’t mean to sound rude. I just…”

  “I’m not a burglar,” Billy says. “I could steal a piece of that, though,” looking at the pie half eaten on the table and appearing to remember some better Thanksgiving. He looks at Ava’s body with the same dull gaze, moving up slowly from her knees to her stomach.

  All the while she’s remembering the time before he came, how many forks and plates she washed, how many minutes since Sam drove away.

  “Remember at the drugstore?” he asks. “I think you took that wrong, like I might have asked you out. I’ll be honest, I was nervous. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, you know? And afterward I thought of what to say and it’s been sticking in my head ever since. Listen … being honest, right? So you can trust me? I didn’t come to see Sam. I came to see you. I figured you were here. I know you come here a lot. See it’s this,” Billy says. “We’re the same. We’re a fit. You don’t see it yet, the crazy kind of sense it all makes. Listen for a minute, let me talk it out. Your husband wrecks my house, right? Everything’s a mess. My marriage falls apart. All because of him. And then he dies, and neither one of us can see it for a while. One day Henry owes me everything, more than he could ever pay me back, and then”—clap!—“he leaves it all behind.”

  Billy shuts his eyes and wobbles very smoothly.

  “I understand what you’re doing out here,” he says. “I understand it. But with Sam—and I don’t mean anything against him—but sometimes a person’s too broken up. If you’re taking care of him, who’s taking care of you? You see what I mean? You’re gonna make me say it.” Billy smiles at her, timidly but acting like he’s doing pretty well. “I understand what you’re going through. You lost your husband. I lost my wife. But Sheri didn’t die. I’m not a wreck like that. I’m standing on my own two feet. Not like Sam. Not like Sam. All I’m saying … I don’t know,” he says, pausing in a swoon. “We’re like a phoenix from the ashes. You and me. We’re a phoenix.”

  He watches her reaction, shivering and tense. When she doesn’t say a word, he looks deflated and confused.

  “I’m rambling like an idiot,” he says. “I’ve never been good at this sort of thing. You can think about it. That’s cool. I don’t need a major answer right here. Just know I’m always here. I’m always here. Come on, come here,” he says, summoning her over with his hands.

  “Please leave,” she says.

  “Ava…”

  “Get out!” she yells. “Get out of here, go!”

  “Hey hey hey.”

  Billy staggers up and hugs her round the waist. The stubble on his chin catches in her hair.

  Ava flails, hitting Billy with an accidental uppercut. He grunts and backs away, feeling at his teeth, and then he grabs behind her neck and says, “What’s the matter with you?”

  Ava falls against the stove and scalds her arm, crying out and shoving at his jaw. Billy pulls her down and kneels on her stomach, pinioning her wrists and twisting at the burn. His eyes look swollen and his cheeks billow out, everything about him melting and disfiguring. A thin line of spit dangles off his lip. It glistens there, stretching down closer to her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Billy pants. “I’m sorry. Calm down. T
ake it easy, calm down.”

  Ava glances at the door but doesn’t hear a sound.

  “I want to let you up,” he says. “I want to talk this out.”

  “You’re hurting me,” she whispers.

  “Where?” he says. “How?”

  “My wrist. I burned it on the stove.”

  Billy lets her go but keeps kneeling on her gut. He takes his coat off and throws it on the floor, rolls a shirtsleeve up and peels a bandage off his arm.

  “I’m hurt, too,” he says. “You want to squeeze it? I’ll let you do it if you want to.”

  Ava doesn’t move.

  Billy stares at her and says, “I’ll let you up. We can talk. I’m trusting you—I wouldn’t trust Sheri like this. Just stay calm, all right? Everything’s okay.”

  Ava lies there, looking at the shadows in the rafters. Eventually she stands, shaky on her feet. As soon as Billy turns, she shoves him over a chair. He falls sideways, reaching out and swatting at the floor, and hits the corner of the stove right above the ear. His neck goes rubbery and awkward when he slumps.

  Ava runs out, looking for the ATV, and when she doesn’t see a thing, she pauses in the dark. Her phone is in the cabin but she hears him getting up, vigorous and guttural, knocking into chairs. She doesn’t trust herself to run the quarter mile to the street, not with Billy right behind her, following the trail. She darts across the clearing to a thick stand of trees and hides behind a trunk.

  Ava sees him at the door, working things out, a crooked silhouette leaning on the frame. He notices her prints in a line across the clearing, but he totters and he still seems addled from the fall. Eventually he’ll find her—even now he’s looking over—so she runs to keep ahead of him and heads toward The Reacher.

  She’s freezing in her dress and isn’t wearing shoes but if she concentrates, remembering her way around the sculptures, she can lose him in the dark, circle back, and get away. She hurries through the snow. Billy crackles up behind her. He can follow but the woods are all hers, so familiar, and the statues seem to look at her and guide her on the way.

  * * *

  Billy’s vision blurs. He tries to walk and finds he’s already moving, tries stopping and he can’t for several seconds. Whenever he falls, it’s a banged knee or scraped knuckle that alerts him. It takes him too long to get back up, and when he does, he finds the footprints and wonders what they are, where they’re leading him, and why it’s so important that he follow.

  He keeps touching his head. It isn’t bloody but he checks every time, sometimes remembering the fall against the stove, other times feeling only pressure and a pulse. Thoughts stab through, causing him to wince, until eventually it comes to him—Ava in the cabin. Only where’s the cabin now? He doesn’t see it through the trees. Something dark pools in, confusing him again, and so he staggers on ahead, frantic and afraid.

  There’s a body right before him. Billy jumps backward in the snow, legs kicking wild, staring at the figure with its arm raised to hit him. It’s a man, or rather half a man, rising from a trunk. He isn’t real, Billy thinks, and yet he isn’t quite sure—it’s skeletal and twisted as a long-dead corpse and yet it looms there and really seems to menace when he flinches.

  He escapes and rushes on, crashing through the branches with his hands out before him, and he’s scraped, jabbed, and tangled up from unexpected angles, almost like the woods are reaching out to get him. He can feel her up ahead, barely out of sight, and then he comes upon another dark figure in the trees. Bearded and colossal with its arms spread wide, it tries to grab him and he pushes it away, saying “No,” feeling dizzy and surrounded, reeling as he goes.

  He sees a log near a brook and swears it has a mouth. He sees an arm in every branch, things swaying overhead, congregations in the shadows and a hundred other forms. Little creatures out the corners of his eyes and at his ankles, faces in the bark, faces in the snow. A man with crooked antlers, and a serpent, and a bear, all with human features and a snarl, and a leer. He finds a woman on her back, beautiful and nude, writhing in the feathers of a terrifying wing. He thinks of Sheri on the bed and Ava on the floor, lepers in a cave and bodies in the ground. There’s a figure with a blade, carving at his thigh, and a girl with no expression being eaten by a spider. Now the forest is evolving into fire, into webs. Billy huddles in the dark to overcome his nausea but he vomits and the night feels infinite around him.

  He sees her up ahead, clinging to an oak. The footprints lead directly to the trunk. He’s caught her mid-climb and yet she freezes when he comes, her only covering a dress and the glitter of the snow.

  “Ava,” Billy says, crying when he sees her.

  He’s tired and his body feels gray and unclean, as if the cut along his arm has putrefied his veins. There isn’t any motion in the pines or on the ground, but the quiet’s like a rumble in the bottoms of his feet. He stands awhile, panting and admiring her hair, wishing he could touch her but afraid, too afraid.

  “I’m sorry,” Billy moans, ears building to a roar.

  He charges headfirst directly at her back. At the moment of embrace, there’s a great black flash.

  He lies for several minutes, bleeding in the snow. Then he rolls and lurches off, forgetting who he is until he stumbles to his hands, puzzled by the blood, and starts to worry that he’s done something very, very wrong.

  * * *

  Ava pauses in a thicket, straining for the faintest sound or movement in the dark. Her shiver’s gone deep. She has spasms in her core. The burning in her lungs has settled to an ache, and she can’t feel her feet or move her toes anymore. Her adrenaline matures to a wiser kind of fear, an awareness of her ever-growing distance from the cabin. She can stay here barefoot, assuming that he’s quit, or she can hurry out now and hope he isn’t waiting.

  Ava runs, looking hard for the gully of the stream, the clearest way to go without getting lost. She finds her tracks from earlier on and freezes at the sight. She meant to loop around but now she’s here where he can find her, fifteen yards from The Climber. There’s a second set of prints covering her own; the prints veer away and Ava gasps. There he is.

  Billy’s shadowy and slumped, just a body in the snow. At first she can’t determine if he’s lying down or crouching. Several steps more and Ava sees blood. It gives her energy to run, watching Billy all the while, and he doesn’t even twitch when she crashes through a shrub.

  She’s elated that he isn’t getting up and yet it worries her. The ease of her escape, so strange and unexpected, makes it feel as if he’s tricked her—like she’s running into danger. And the blood … is he bleeding from the stove? Is it new? For a moment she’s afraid, looking all about, scared that something else is prowling in the woods.

  She pauses at a pine in the shadow of a bough, enlivened by the strong green odor of the sap. If she runs and he recovers, if she flees and Billy dies … she can’t just leave him there bleeding in the dark. She creeps toward him slowly, growing bolder as she goes, following a need to help him if she can.

  Billy’s unresponsive, lying on his face. The blood around his head has melted through the snow. Ava prods him with her foot and says his name. He doesn’t move. She rolls him on his back and marvels at his forehead, dented in the center with a wide flap of skin. Blood’s slicked through his hair, down his cheek, and to his throat.

  She checks his breathing with her hand and verifies a pulse, and then she tears her own hem to make a bandage for his head. It’s delicately tied but enough to stem the flow. Billy moans when she starts to say his name more insistently. She tugs off his boots and puts them on her feet, leaving Billy in his socks and buttoning his coat. She lifts him by his armpits and drags with all her strength, and when his head lolls back he sees her upside down, glassy-eyed and slurring, wholly in her care.

  “That’s good,” she says. “Look at me. Focus on my face.”

  Billy garbles, shuts his eyes, and grows heavy in her arms, passing out at intervals and waking up dazed. She hauls h
im backwards, rarely looking but convinced of her direction, passing by The Gazer, and The Weaver, and The Fire.

  “Billy,” Ava says. “Billy, look at me, come on.”

  “Am-sa,” he says. “Am-sa.”

  “That’s right. I understand.”

  “I’m-sa. I’m-sa. I’m sai.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  She recognizes trees and looks beyond her shoulder. There’s the cabin, gently lit. She smells the chimney and his blood. Billy stares at her and gapes, head dangling to the ground, with his mouth above his nose and his eyes long gone. When she struggles in a tight-fit passage in the briars, it’s a feeling of defiance that rejuvenates her will.

  She sees a pair of headlights coming up the trail. Billy gazes at the cabin—accidentally, it seems—and Ava’s saddened by the lantern hanging in the window, his only consolation when she leaves him in the dark.

  She has her coat and phone when Sam drives into the clearing and sees her there, bloody in the headlights. He jumps off the ATV, unable to hear most of what she’s saying now that Wingnut’s barking from the flatbed. He hasn’t yet seen the body near the cabin and he stumbles running over, falling to a knee. Ava meets him halfway and Sam’s afraid to touch her, holding her as gently as he dares by the shoulders.

  “What happened, where are you hurt?” he asks, panicked by the blood.

  “It’s Billy, Billy Kane,” she says, pulling his arm and pointing at the ground.

  “Billy … what, he hurt you? Did he hurt you?”

  “No, his head—he hit his head. He chased me out of the cabin … no, Sam!”

  She physically restrains him when he lunges down at Billy, worried Sam will harm him more severely in his anger.

  “He’s dying,” Ava says. “We have to get him out.”

  Sam looks at her with crazed incomprehension, seeming to believe her levelheadedness is shock. He may be right—she isn’t shaken, isn’t crying or relieved, only wired to the moment with a clear-cut goal. One look at Billy’s wound and Sam understands: whatever happened doesn’t matter now. They have to act fast.