by Dennis Yates
“I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about them!”
“Who?”
“The goddamn Russians. They’ve landed here in Traitor!”
Burns took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose. He counted to ten. It didn’t quite take, so he counted again. Retirement had demanded less daily practice. “Cuke Burns” was not known for losing his cool, unless he caught one of his students smoking cigarettes. He searched for tell-tale signs of madness, but nothing had swum to the surface of Dawkin’s lumpy white face. The poor man’s head looked as if it had been used as a soccer ball. Had he been on one of his benders again, got mouthy with some other fellas while off duty? Why didn’t he have his own guns?
It wouldn’t be the first time Cuke had seen Dawkins in trouble. One had to wonder if he went out in search of it sometimes. He was just lucky the county was forgiving, always came through for him during election season. Cuke lifted the bottle halfway to his mouth and glanced down its throat at the golden mash winking back. He changed his mind and set the bottle down.
“Did you just say what I thought you did?” Burns asked.
“I did Cuke. The Reds are here. But they haven’t stormed our beaches like in the movies. They got here by taking the goddamn highway!”
“I’ve got to be honest with you Dawk. You’re not on drugs are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you telling me the Russian army is invading Traitor?”
Dawkins drained his glass. He glanced around the room at the framed sports photos and shelves of trophies gathering dust. His face was up there on the wall too somewhere. “I’m talking about the mob, Cuke. The Russian mob is here in town and they took Mitch and me hostage along with a couple of kids. They’re looking for some money they say is theirs.”
“How’d you get those marks on your wrists?”
“They cuffed me with a plastic band. There was no other way to free myself. I pressed them against a wood stove until they melted enough to pull apart.”
“Jesus,” coach whispered. “Should I go get my first aid kit?”
“No. I’ll be okay. There’s no time for it anyway.”
“No time for what?”
“To stop them before they leave Traitor.”
Cuke shook his head. “That’s not possible Dawk. All the phones are still out, even the cell phones. They say Traitor is cut off from both sides. There’s an overturned truck on bay bridge and up north of town it’s a total mess. I heard a piece of highway a half block long slid down and almost took a lucky trucker with it. There’s heavy equipment on the way, but it can’t go nowhere until the bridge is cleared.”
Dawkins held out his empty glass. His eyes seemed to be staring inward. “One more hit Cuke and I’ll be on my way. Now please go get me your guns.”
“No one’s asking you to be a hero, Dawk.”
“I know that.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“Look at what they done to me. I’ve got to go see if I can find them.”
Cuke got up from the table and walked stiffly toward the back bedroom. “Son of a bitch.”
“What’s that?”
“You heard me.”
Dawkin’s mind began to drift while he waited. Cuke’s whiskey had warmed him up nicely. The hot anger he’d felt had passed and he was glad for it. If you wanted to do things right you needed to stay focused on what had to be done.And once you get them out of the way you’re going to need to find those kids that left you, kicked you upside the head and left you behind in that stinking shack …
Ten minutes later Cuke returned with a gym bag and set it on the table. He’d gotten dressed. The sheriff noticed he was armed with a.45 in a holster.
“What do you think you’re doing, Cuke?”
“We can get the rifles from the truck. I’ve got two pistols in that bag and plenty of ammo.”
“You’re not coming with me.”
“Like hell I’m not.”
Chapter 31
As soon as he reached town, James headed for a vacation home development he remembered being mostly deserted during the winter. Wealthy city people loved their big trophy summer houses. But when it came to hammering storms and the idea of having to rough it without electricity, most chose to stay close to home where cell phone service and an operating Starbucks were guaranteed.
His clothes were soaked through and his slow-moving limbs had gone numb. It felt as if he were a hundred years old. He was disappointed but not surprised to see that the power was still out, the rows of identical houses all dark and quiet. He’d hoped to find some electric heat to warm his bones for a while. There was no time to build a fire.
In the back of the house he’d lifted a hefty specimen of beach coble and smiled at the flowery, hand-painted “Welcome” before throwing it through the slider window. Instead of rushing inside he stood quietly on the new redwood patio and listened for sounds of neighbors stirring but heard none. He’d been right about no one being around. And even if there was, what would they do, with no cops or phones to call them with?
Wrapping himself in a thick quilt he found draped over a couch, he proceeded to search bedroom closets for dry clothes, found a hoodie and a wool cap to change into, but no pants. Unless he soon found better alternatives, he’d have to wear what he had on for the next several days. His pants had shrunk some and the cold.38 tucked under his waistband dug painfully, but wasn’t going anywhere either.
In the kitchen he threw open cabinets until he found a bag of chocolate bars, presumably leftovers from last Halloween. He immediately unwrapped several and shoved them into his mouth and chased the stale glob down with an orange soda he’d found unopened in the refrigerator. While he finished his drink he looked around the house. He checked the phone but it was dead.
Outside dusk was falling. He found a set of keys near the door to the garage. In the garage he found a car covered by a tarp and whistled at the shining ’63 Skylark sleeping beneath it, all powder blue and silver as if it were meant to be flown across a cloudless sky. He recalled seeing the car before he’d left for the navy, driven around town by a dentist who’d recently bought the place. None of the locals could stand the man who expected to be treated like visiting royalty, who frequently drove intoxicated, but always seemed to be somewhere where the sheriff wasn’t.
Everyone wondered why the dentist had wanted a place in Traitor anyway when they were forced to listen to him brag about his latest golfing trip to Hawaii or drunken gambling junket to Las Vegas. But by the end of the summer the town began to put the pieces together when they started seeing him riding around with a young woman who clearly wasn’t his wife. The tryst didn’t surprise them in the least. For many men like the dentist, Traitor Bay was a convenient place to stash one’s current fleshpot.
James packed the trunk with a shovel and other supplies he thought he might need. He was still cold and anxious to see if the Skylark’s heater worked. As quietly as he could he pulled up the garage door and looked up and down the street. Night had dropped fast. There was still no sign of life in the other houses, but closer to the highway where the locals lived he could hear the grind of gas generators.
The Skylark started right away. James liked the throaty voice of the engine, the smell of the newly upholstered leather seats and the old-time dials and an AM radio with push buttons. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t for keeps, that there’d soon be a time when he’d have to give her up for new wheels. But for now she was all his.
Chapter 32
Have I died? What’s happening to me?
The drugs James had ground up and put into the whiskey flask were not wearing off. Ann imagined she was turning the pages in a child’s picture book and witnessing ink sketches of herself, of helpless Ann drifting through a series of worlds where she became smaller and smaller until night began to seep in from the edges and the pages themselves turned black. By t
hen she was blind and bumping around in the dark, like a glob of oil inside a seafaring tanker’s belly, until at one point she felt herself being lifted up into someone’s arms and carried, recalling that pleasant sensation of being asleep and having her father haul her to the car after a long night of visiting relatives.
The ground below her stilled and Ann thought she was now in one of the secret glades she’d discovered while picking ferns. Lying on her back she stared up at a jade membrane shielding the sky, veined leaves of ancient maples whose lichen-crusted limbs were clothed in loose sweaters of green moss, learned associates of a timeless symposium. After a while she began to hear loud crackling sounds, followed by the smell of wood smoke. The membrane above peeled away and she saw the night sky, the comforting presence of the Big Dipper.
Invisible hands took hold of her body again and rolled her gently to her side and when the warmth came it was like having the sun suddenly pressed against her back. Fingers briefly pried open her eyes but her vision was too blurry to make out anything but a large peeled root sprouting thick hair. And yet if she tried to concentrate, a single eye began to come in and out of focus from the pale flesh half curtained by dark wet roots. The eye had a telescopic intensity, as if it were glassing on her inner landscape from a great distance.
She felt a calloused hand slide across her belly and her ribs. The roughness stung her skin, fired up nerve endings that shot to her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably. She wanted to scream at the person who was touching her to stop.
“You’re alive,” said a man she did not know. She assumed it was the peeled root who was speaking to her, who was now pulling down her shirt. Who the fuck did he think he was? His voice had reminded her of how green logs hissed when you threw them onto a fire. Her pulse raced inside her, a hummingbird trying to find its way back through an open window, the room shrinking fast and a surprised cat waking quickly from its nap to stare. Ann could hear her shuddering breath. An icy fear clamped around her heart. She imagined the severed arm with the Cyclops tattoo, its blue fingers tightening its grip.
Root-face backed into shadow, sensing the stress he was causing her.
“You must rest now and let the fire do its work.”
The man rose up and walked away. She wanted to talk but her mouth failed her as if it had been shot full of Novocain. For a moment she wondered if it was someone else’s mouth she was trying to speak through, that maybe her mind had found its way into a stranger’s body and was slowly wiring itself into its mainframe one nerve at time. She’d just spent hours outside of her body, so why should she believe she even still had one? She had no proof, other than the fact that she now felt pain where she’d been scratched deeply by the tree branch.
It’s going to take time to thaw. Time I don’t have to spare.
Embers shot into the night sky like paper wasps defending their nest, trailing up in dense formations and scattering with the wind. Ann watched them drift down the beach and go out. There was the smell of meat again, of something being roasted over the fire on a stick. The man came back several times to dump armfuls of driftwood on the fire, building up a thick bed of glowing coals. She felt his course fingers touch her shoulder one last time and then he was gone.
Chapter 33
Ann had hidden the money next to the seven buried sailors.
According to town lore, a father and son had gone out clamming at low tide when they found the bodies of the sailors washed up on Traitor’s shore. The dispute over their origin was never resolved but it was agreed that the men were not American, that their remains would not last long. A group of townsfolk loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and began the task of laying the bodies to rest in a strip of scrub woods near the beach. Hacking out the shallow graves among thick cables of roots and stubborn rock had been time consuming, and as night fell some of the volunteers did shifts guarding the corpses from scavengers. When the last sailor was finally buried, a small ceremony was conducted by a priest who’d ridden in from Buoy City. Afterwards, local children were invited to plant a sapling above each mound, and over a hundred years later the trees had grown into a cathedral of wind-contorted pine.
He found the money where Ann had told him, between the sixth and seventh sailor. When he first tried to pull it from the hole the wet mud had held it possessively. The white leather felt gummy and came off in his hands like an old skin. As soon as he freed the bag from its miserable grave, he dropped it onto dry ground and moved back, reminding himself to breathe. His mind had begun playing tricks on him and for a brief moment he’d imagined the bag was a shrunken torso. When he finally got the courage to see what was inside he found a garbage bag stuffed with bricks of money, many with rubber bands that had almost rotted away.
James was overcome with joy and began to tremble uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who, so he thanked whoever it was that had crushed Duane’s skull in prison because he knew he wouldn’t be holding fat stacks of money in his hands if Duane was still around to do something about it. Sure, it hadn’t been a cakewalk even with Duane out of the way but that was just the sort of luck James was accustomed to. Nothing good ever happened in his life without something coming along to fuck it up.
He transferred the money into a suitcase he’d stolen from the dentist’s house, stood up and tossed the leather bag out into undergrowth. He wanted to shout, even if only to the ghosts of sailors watching him from the dark grove of trees. But he thought better of it.
Remember, you’re only halfway down the mountain now. The rest is going to take everything you’ve got…
He closed his eyes and thought ahead to some nameless motel in Twin Falls Idaho, set back from the dusty interstate. A place far enough away that he could enjoy the luxury of sleep, if sleep would ever come again. He’d studied a map and decided it would be the farthest he’d have to run before he could stop worrying for awhile. Twin Falls. Would he be able to hear them from his bed? Would they drown out the sounds of someone coming? Not now. Don’t think about it yet. This is the time you must run. Nothing else matters now.
While he packed the suitcase in the trunk he heard the moan of the buoy coming from the mouth of the jetty. It made him think about Ann. He could see her as he’d left her on the rock-a dark haired, drugged siren. He recalled a dream she’d once told him about when they were young, a dream about being out on a rock, of losing herself while wandering through rooms full of fascinating objects, of not realizing that the tide had come in and stranded her out at sea. How ironic, he thought. He didn’t know what that word meant exactly, but decided it might be something Ann would understand.
He sat in the Skylark and smoked. Being in the old car relaxed him and that was good because he was going to need to keep his cool for the next few days while he made his escape. He wondered what kind of effect the car had on the dentist, what he got out of it. Did he sometimes wear his old letterman’s jacket when he drove? James smiled. He’d be sad when it came time to dump her. A car like this would just draw to much attention anyway. She’s going to turn heads wherever she goes.
He heard the buoy again and this time it sounded more insistent, like a woman’s muffled scream. I’m officially losing it, he thought. She’s going to be okay. As soon as you’re out of town you’re going to make an anonymous 911 call and tell them she’s on the rock. And then you’re going to forgot you ever had a life here.
Cold sweat trickled down his back and he shivered. He reminded himself that there was money in the trunk and a new life waiting for him. If he didn’t take it now he might as well curl up next to some dead sailors and stop bitching about his messed up life.
He thought he saw a flash of light on the trees, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror he saw headlights coming up the road.
Chapter 34
Cyclops glanced at his pocket watch. He sat on a wooden bench in front of the store that hadn’t opened all day. The snack and beer advertisements taped to the windows wer
e making him hungry. He removed a copy of the local paper from its salt-ravaged steel box and glanced over the pages until a story about Sheriff Dawkins caught his attention. Dripping with praise, the article described how the sheriff’s no bull attitude kept the bad elements from even attempting to spoil his beloved county. He was even presented an award for outstanding service, an idea that set in the Cyclops stomach worse than the half-cooked elk liver. There was a shot of a perky high school girl in a short dress handing him a brass plaque, and while the sheriff kept his eyes humbly lowered, it wasn’t difficult to notice that they were stealing a glance at the girl’s shapely brown thighs.
Cyclops laughed. He dug a hand deep into his overcoat and smiled when he felt the elk heart against his palm, soft and still warm from being cooked over a blazing fire next to where Ann lay. He wrapped the organ with a sheet of newsprint and raised it to his mouth. Taking a deep bite, he felt the blood jam pour into his throat and seek out his soul. The heart made for a good dessert, he decided. There was gentle sweetness in the middle, unlike the liver which seemed to draw up the bile and try to turn the eater’s body against itself. He knew this was how the wildness in things often behaved. It had tricks up its old sleeve that we could only dream of understanding.
He’d never trusted Duane from the moment they’d met. The sheriff had said he was alright, but Mikhail only saw a liability.
“It’s his wife Sarah I’m worried about,” Dawkins had said.
“His wife?”
“She’s unhappy. And she knows too much.”
At the time Mikhail was living in Seattle, in the process of setting up a chain of operations on the west coast. The disfiguring accident wouldn’t happen until he moved back to New York a few years later, but up until then women had found him handsome and exotic, and unlike the men he knew that preferred to pay for their female companionship, Mikhail enjoyed the thrill of the chase, of often topping off his seductions by reading from a slender book of Pushkin’s poems that he kept in his pocket.
