A Short Time to Die

by Susan Alice Bickford

  Marly inched to the edge of the woods. The cloud cover over the moon thinned to reveal the black shapes of the two men, now in retreat in the mud. Zeke fell twice and groaned.

  She risked a quick inspection of her left leg with her flashlight. Streaks of blood flowed down to her knee from a long crease, but far less than she had expected. She wrapped her scarf around her thigh and pulled it tight.

  On quaking legs, she paralleled the progress of Del and Zeke but kept to the fringe of the woods as she edged back down the hill toward the dirt road. She narrowed her distance to the two men and hoped they wouldn’t look back.

  At the lower edge of the field, Del slipped and fell to his knees, taking Zeke with him.

  “Shit,” Del said.

  “Help me up, Del.”

  “I can’t breathe.” Del spat. “Tastes bad. That’s blood!”

  Marly could hear an unfamiliar high-pitched quaver in his voice. Fear?

  “I’ve been shot! It went in under my arm. You shot me!”

  Zeke’s mumbled response was too faint to hear.

  Marly peered into the gloom as the two black shapes merged and gave birth to a new, four-legged, misshapen creature. Del must have helped his father to his feet. The unified mass lurched forward again. Their voices had dimmed to growls and grunts now. No more shouting.

  She counted to one hundred and counted again. Her mind traced their slow trip back to the truck.

  Now they’d be through the trees . . . Now they’d be on the road . . . Now they’d be at the truck.

  Thanks to lack of coverage in these parts, their cell phones would be useless, flashy toys here. They would have to drive to the Rock to call 911. At that point, the cops and EMS trucks would come, and Marly figured she would throw herself at their mercy. Witness protection seemed inevitable. She couldn’t see any other way. Sooner or later, Zeke and Del would recover and relay instructions. She’d be dead.

  She heard the faint sounds of the truck. Bright flashes filtered through the trees from the headlights signaled Del had turned the truck to start the return trip to the main road.

  Marly eased herself through the sapling break, down onto the dirt road. Farther on, she crossed back into the field and retraced her steps up the hill with her flashlight. She was crying so hard she almost missed it, but she found her right running shoe, one yard off the path, halfway up the slope. Her foot still hurt, but at least walking was easier.

  With no sign of the truck, she risked using the flashlight in the sumac, but could find no sign of her bag where she had cut through to the field. Her little purse was in there with her money, her driver’s license, her school ID. She felt naked.

  She sobbed in earnest and headed toward the paved road. Del must have reached the Rock by now. Help would be on the way.

  And that would be the end of her life, one way or another. A mere half an hour ago, she was on track to be the first person in her family to graduate from high school and to have a shot at college and get the hell out of Charon Springs. Now she would have to leave her family and never see her sister Charlene’s kids grow up.

  Lost in mourning for her future, she rounded the next bend and saw the truck taillights. Startled, she jumped to one side into the bushes, her tears stifled.

  She remained frozen for several moments before it dawned on her the truck was not moving and the taillights slanted to the left.

  She inched up on the truck from behind. The massive vehicle had run off the dirt road and come to rest against a thick cluster of sumac. The fuzzy branches and brilliant red leaves caught the beams from the headlights and threw them up into the air.

  She could see the heads of Zeke and Del, silhouetted against the windshield. Zeke still wore his distinctive hat—a silly affectation. This was Central New York and Zeke rode herd over petty criminals, not livestock or kangaroos in the outback.

  Zeke was leaning left, against Del’s shoulder. Del’s head rested against the driver’s-side window. Neither man moved.

  Marly crept up along the passenger side. The light reflected by the sumac bathed the inside of the cab in a ghoulish red glow.

  Zeke’s pale gray eyes looked at her. The look of a dead man, she decided. She had never seen a real dead man, but in the movies dead people stared like that. She turned on her flashlight to take a closer look inside. His face was a pale blue. His eyes blinked and she dropped her flashlight. She picked it up and looked again.

  Marly wiped her hands on her skirt to remove the mud and blood and eased open the door. The smell of alcohol and excrement wafted out. Stifling a gag, she reached in with a shaking hand to touch Zeke’s neck. She couldn’t find a pulse, but he blinked once more.

  “You killed Beanie. My dad. You tried to kill me. Fucker,” Marly said. She wanted to say much more, but her tongue froze and clicked with fear—Zeke’s gun was still nestled in his limp right hand.

  Even a bad shot like Zeke wouldn’t miss at this distance. Marly’s pulse pounded in her right temple and she stepped toward the back of the truck. She waited until she was certain Zeke wouldn’t move. She reached in for the gun, but her movement jostled it out of his hand and it slipped between his legs to the floor and out of sight. He made no move to retrieve it.

  All the while, Marly had been keeping a careful eye on Del. Sitting on the other side of Zeke, lit by the dome light of the cab, Del leaned against the driver’s-side doorjamb, his face turned as if there was something interesting outside his window. His silence raised the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck.

  Marly’s bag sat at Zeke’s feet. She tugged it toward her until it snapped free. She pressed the passenger door closed until she heard the soft click of the latch.

  She eased around the back of the vehicle to the driver’s side, where she could see the truck had come to rest in a precarious position. The left side of the dirt road gave way to a deep, narrow ravine. The truck was balanced along the edge, stopped by the sumac on the right and a pile of rocks on the left.

  She pointed her flashlight inside the cab. Del’s eyes were open a slit—enough to see them glitter with the bright blue she knew so well. Red foam covered his mouth, chin, and upper chest. She tapped on the window. He didn’t blink.

  She moved back to the right side and checked on Zeke. No more blinking.

  Marly sat down on the running board with the two dead men sitting inches away.

  She should run to the village and call 911 at the Rock.

  What would be the point? Del and Zeke were dead. Nothing would change. There would still be a big fuss. She would still have to go into protective custody.

  Or she could just leave. There might be some evidence that could point to her—shoe prints, a little blood—but not much.

  Marly moved back to the side of the ravine and used her flashlight to see what lay below.

  The ravine was at least fifty feet deep at this point, but less than twenty yards across. A stream ran along the bottom. The usual sulfurous odors wafted up from the depths. In the spring, when the snow melted, the stream might rise about ten feet and would continue to carve down through the fetid layers of rock and soil.

  The truck groaned and strained, still in gear, in search of its new destiny at the bottom of the ravine.

  Marly eased open the passenger door again. This time Zeke’s eyes stayed closed when she pressed down the lids. She started to close the door for the last time when a metallic flash caught her attention. Zeke’s key ring dangled from his belt loop above his right front pants pocket.

  The magic keys.

  Zeke always carried those keys. Even Rosie, his wife, wasn’t allowed to have copies of them. Marly knew those keys unlocked secret places. Places with money, hidden deep in the twisty hills and old limestone quarries. Beanie, her father, had shown her some of them long ago. She had also found some on her own.

  The truck gave a lurch.

  Marly reached in and pulled on the key ring clip. She slid back the sliding bolt on the clasp, but the opening wou
ld not come free of Zeke’s belt loop. With one foot on the running board for leverage, she pulled on the keys with both hands. The belt loop gave way and Marly stumbled back, the trophy in her hands. Seconds later, the truck door slammed shut.

  The truck shuddered from the blow, gave one final jerk, tilted left, and tumbled down into the abyss.

  Lights from the truck now lit up the interior of the ravine. Marly inched forward and peered over the edge. Would the truck catch on fire? Would anyone notice the lights?

  If so, she had better be far away.

  The truck was almost invisible, even with the lights on. The bank of the ravine made it impossible for anyone to look straight down. A number of sumac bushes and a few maple saplings had been sucked over the edge to cover the truck on its way down to hell.

  Marly released a sob. Del had been wearing his seat belt. Was it habit or fear that had prompted a dying man to buckle in?

  Hobbled by the pain in her right foot, she gathered her bag and the keys. The pain in her left thigh had subsided and throbbed with a dull ache. Guided by her flashlight, she headed back up the potato field and ducked into the woods toward home. Her watch showed eleven forty-five. Barely thirty minutes had passed since Claire had dropped her in the parking lot at the Rock.

  Such a short time to die.

  She had walked through these woods thousands of times, but this was the longest passage. Every step aggravated the ache in her left thigh, and her right foot released a sharp jab. Potato-field mud clogged her shoes and caked her legs and arms.

  Marly threaded her way past the pools of stagnant water and the hidden patches of quicksand. Stinky water smelling like bad farts percolated up through the rocks.

  There were no lights from the house aside from the blue throb of the TV in the living room. Her mother would be asleep or drunk or both, waiting for Del.

  Inside their dilapidated barn, Marly hid the keys deep in a bag of grass seed where they would escape casual search. She stripped and put all of her filthy clothing into a plastic bag and hid it behind an old suitcase. Few items would be worth saving. As a last step, she used the hose to wash off the terrible mud and blood.

  She eased her naked, dripping body through the back door to the kitchen. No one roused. Grabbing a towel and her gym sweats from the pile of dirty laundry, she slipped into the lavatory off the kitchen. Wrenching her gaze away from the wraith in the mirror, she dried her body, careful to avoid her left thigh. She pulled on her sweatshirt, wrapped her hair in the towel, and sat down on the toilet to clean the long, thin crease with copious wads of toilet paper. Most of the bleeding had stopped.

  Marly recalled when Del asked her to help with a long cut sort of like this after he’d been in a fight.

  Del. Shit. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against the cool surface of the sink until her nausea passed. With shaking hands, she poured peroxide on her wound and grimaced with a quiet scream. She applied butterfly bandages from an old package in the medicine cabinet and wrapped gauze around her leg several times. That would have to do.

  The tremors had spread to her entire body, hitting her in waves punctuated by calm spells. She scrubbed the bathroom with more toilet paper and flushed the evidence away.

  Marly’s mother sat sacked out in her recliner at the front of the house. A sour smell of gin and sweat permeated the room. Marly threw a moldy blanket over the sleeping form and turned off the TV.

  She tiptoed upstairs to the room she shared with her sister Charlene’s two older children. Soft snores came from the bunk beds where Mark and Pammy slept, oblivious to her presence as she crawled into her twin bed, squeezed in under the window.

  Marly tilted her chin toward the moon, which had peeked out from the clouds, framed in the white, naked branches of a birch tree outside. The window provided a fuzzy lens, covered by the plastic protection Del wrapped around the house each fall.

  Her body shook violently, paused, and shook again. She counted her breathing, one to ten, then repeated the exercise until her shaking subsided.

  One more time.

  Before she reached five, she fell asleep.

  2

  Marly: Alone

  October 28, 2000

  “Why are you still in bed? It’s time to get up.” Charlene, Marly’s older sister, stood in the bedroom door. Her baby, Alison, screamed and thrashed in her arms.

  “She needs changing,” said Marly.

  “You need to get up. All of you. It’s nine o’clock. You are so lucky Del hasn’t come home yet. He’ll be furious if he finds you still in bed.”

  Charlene and Alison disappeared, leaving a trail of screaming baby and ammonia vapors behind.

  Marly sat up. Her chest filled with a mixture of relief, confusion, and dread. Del isn’t home. Is it possible he really was lying in a ravine with Zeke? She peered out the window to assess the weather, but the plastic winter covering masked all details and rendered the outside world as a collection of fuzzy gray shapes.

  Marly rousted Charlene’s two older children, Mark and Pammy, helped them dress, and made them brush their teeth. After shooing them downstairs, she stripped their beds for the weekend wash.

  Dressing was a habit she had stepped in to enforce for Charlene. No pajamas downstairs. Del zeroed in on vulnerability the way a lion noticed a limping gazelle. Kids in pajamas were vulnerable.

  Ah. But Del isn’t coming home.

  She took her time in the shower. It was amazing how many small cuts she had accumulated. Each and every one of them stung. Thanks to the fall weather, clothing could cover most of the evidence. Her right foot seemed improved, but the gunshot crease on her thigh was swollen and sore, and it wouldn’t tolerate the hot shower. Still, she didn’t think it was infected.

  She rewrapped her leg and put the old dressings under her mattress. She would dispose of those later. She pulled on her last clean clothes—jeans and an Avalon Central School sweatshirt—and stripped the rest of the beds.

  Downstairs, Mark and Pammy fought over their favorite cereal bowl. Stranded on the kitchen floor, the baby continued to scream. Marly’s mother watched TV in the living room, her usual spot in any crisis or upset. Charlene had retreated to the downstairs lavatory for a long sit.

  Marly let Alison cry while she forced Mark and Pammy to sit down for cereal. That settled, she changed the baby. Calm descended.

  Charlene ventured back into the quiet kitchen. “I didn’t hear you last night. What time did you get in?”

  Marly turned her back on her sister and stopped Pammy from ladling more sugar onto her cereal. Charlene might look like a carbon copy of their blond, blue-eyed mother, but one dysfunctional mother was enough.

  “About midnight, I guess. I had to walk from the Rock.”

  “What? Del was supposed to give you a ride.” Charlene sounded incredulous, as if Del were a pillar of reliability.

  “Well, he wasn’t there and Harry said he’d left, good and drunk, so I didn’t wait.”

  Charlene gave a disapproving click with her tongue. Marly couldn’t tell if Charlene’s irritation was directed at her or Del.

  Marly found the quiet disconcerting. All the ruckus had masked her jangled nerves, now exposed and raw. She busied herself at the sink as a distraction. Hell had been raging around them for years. This tiny moment of calm and safety would not last.

  Denise, Marly’s mother, entered from the living room, ready to assert her maternal authority. “We leave at ten thirty for the kids’ checkups at the free clinic in Manlius. Then we go to visit Greg in Jamesville. Marly, you got cleaning and groceries.”

  Marly had just enough time to assemble snack packs for everyone, and also stuff the diaper bag with a few extra diapers and bottom wipes. Charlene and Denise would have taken off without those little bits if Marly hadn’t placed them in a strategic location in her sister’s car. No wonder the words “Mom” and “Mother” always seemed to stick in her throat. Now that Del had vacated the premises, perhaps she would be able to ca
ll her mother “Denise” again.

  At least Marly would have her mother’s car for a few hours to take care of several critical errands of her own while handling the family shopping.

  “Say hi to Greg. Tell him that we’re all hoping he’ll be out by Christmas,” Marly said. She helped strap the three kids into the backseat. She didn’t much care for her sister’s husband, Greg Harris, but Charlene would be calmer and less disorganized once he was out of the penitentiary.

  Alone at last, Marly closed her eyes and tried to push her emotions into a thin layer surrounding her skin. She opened her eyes and scanned the dense woods. She half expected Del to lurch into the open.

  They didn’t have a driveway so much as a muddy parking spot teased out of the scrubby lawn. The two-story farmhouse sagged under its dull steel-blue asphalt shingles, a color that could have been plucked from the leaden sky that day. Half wrapped by plastic, the house stood waiting for Del to finish the job that would seal their home from the winter cold but locked them into a perpetual fog inside. Who would do that now?

  In summer, dark woods pressed in on three sides from the hills around the house, but now, with most of their leaves on the ground, the maples and birches offered a permeable gray wall, anchored here and there by nests of dark green pine trees.

  Thanks to inept planning, the town road sat higher than most of the yard. In the soggy climate of Central New York, that meant that water flowed off the road to flood their parking basin and stayed to drive rot and mold into the house and barn. It was always damp inside. Smells lingered, and bath towels often wouldn’t dry from one day to the next.

  If she ever wanted to leave this place for good, she would have to make careful choices. Once Del and Zeke were missed, the Harris family would look for culprits. Marly did not want to end up in their crosshairs.

  No one would notice whether she cleaned the house or not. She emptied ashtrays and scrubbed the sinks and toilets while the first load of laundry ran, but decided to forgo a more thorough cleaning job until later.