When Lucius disappeared inside, Sunrise waited a long moment before silently standing and following. She walked slowly toward the cabin and they all looked at her go, even the boy’s father, even the chicken and the dogs, and no one said a word.
After a while the boy and Arlo left Wendy and her chicken and walked to the hill overlooking the main house. The two sat on the slope, leaning against scrub trees, and waited. Sunrise had told them about the sessions in Lucius’s office. Lucius would make her hit pillows with a baseball bat, shout and scream and vomit and cry.
“Is—it—fun?” Arlo once asked about the sessions.
“It’s not supposed to be fun,” said Sunrise. “He says he’s trying to help me remember.”
“Remember—what?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t need his help, now would I?”
On the hill overlooking the house Arlo picked at the sparse grass, putting the blades between his thumbs and trying to create a whistle. He mostly failed. The boy scratched designs into the dirt with a stick, little crowns and curlicues, smoothed the dirt with his hand, and scratched something more. Together, like brothers, they felt no pressure to do anything in each other’s presence. The minutes passed like the clouds floating above, slow and quiet.
“Waiting on your girlfriend, boys?” said Victor from the bottom of the hill. He was holding a shovel.
“You’ll be a while,” said Hugo, a little shorter than his older brother but with longer hair.
Hugo and Victor were a few years older than the boy and had perfect teeth. Their mother, Fire, had family money and they saw a dentist in Colorado Springs. The two were rough and liked to give orders and when the boy was around them he would clamp his lips closed and refuse to smile. Both brothers wore boots, where the rest of the children went barefoot. The buckles on their boots were shiny, like their teeth.
The boy picked up a rock and threw it at the two brothers, missing badly. The brothers laughed.
“We saw you up at Crazy Bob’s cabin,” said Hugo. “Did he give you any caramels?”
“No,” said Arlo.
“We’re digging for gold in the hills. Flit told us where to find a lucky strike. You want to come? We’d let you do the digging if you want.”
The boy shook his head.
“Suit yourselves. But we’re not sharing when we get rich.”
“There’s—there’s—nothing—”
“Spit it out,” said Hugo.
The boy threw another rock that got a little closer.
“Well, ask Sunrise when she gets out of her little powwow with Lucius,” said Victor. “She might want to help.”
“If she’s not too tired,” said Hugo.
The two brothers went off, snickering. The boy threw another rock that skipped at their feet. They didn’t even turn around.
“Ignore—them,” said Arlo.
The boy just shrugged. That’s all he ever did, ignore the two of them, but his lips still covered his teeth.
A while later Sunrise left the main house and headed to the reservoir. The boy and Arlo followed. She was already swimming when they reached the water. They took off their clothes and joined her and no one said anything. After a while she climbed out of the reservoir and put her shift back on and headed to the juniper at the mouth of the drive.
That night the boy was sleeping in the big bed, drugged by the warmth of his mother’s arms and her breath, by her heartbeat, when he was startled awake by the loud hoot of an owl in his dream. Or he only dreamed it was in his dream, because when it came again in his awakening he knew it for what it was.
The boy crawled from his mother’s arms, slipped off the bed, and ducked around the curtain. He put on his pants and tunic and slipped outside. The moon was bright. When the call came again, he followed the sound. Arlo was hiding in the cornfield. The boy grasped the hands of his friend. Arlo’s skin was dark and sticky and he was crying.
“I—need,” Arlo said between deep sobs. “I—need.”
The boy hugged Arlo and let Arlo’s sobs shake his heart. The boy could feel the trembling, the fear, and it made him afraid.
“I—need—you . . .”
The boy nodded, took one of Arlo’s damp, sticky hands and let himself be led across the farm. The cows stood silent as ghosts but the chickens were all aflutter inside their hutch. There were still coals glowing in the fire pit surrounded by a ring of rocks and logs where the adults sat at night, but the yard behind the house was empty and the back door was open.
Arlo stopped abruptly by the dying fire. He wouldn’t go forward no matter how hard the boy pulled. So the boy went by himself, creeping up the wooden stairs to the ranch house and then slipping into the open door. In the dark corridor he leaned his back against a wall and listened.
The sound, when it came, was slight and strange, so soft it barely registered. The boy closed his eyes, listened: a pulling, a slurpy snarl, with something fast and halting beneath them both. He wasn’t sure from where the sounds were coming, but when he started sliding down the corridor, silently, on bare feet, the noises grew louder, just the tiniest bit, then the tiniest bit more.
A door was open. It led to a private room that the boy had never entered. He had wandered most every inch of the farm, including within the ranch house, but that door had always been locked. Lucius’s dakhma, he had been told, was used for meditation, therapy, work, prayer, and was absolutely private. But now the door was open, and the sounds were growing louder. As the boy drew closer, a scent like rotted peaches in cow dung encircled him.
He hesitated at the doorway, his own breath growing shallow, his own little heart beating faster, before he stepped inside.
The scent turned into a stink and the sounds were louder, closer. His feet touched a wetness on the floor, something thick and alive. The shades were drawn and all the boy could see in the darkness were shadows. All he could smell was the sweet, sickening rot. All he could hear was the halting breath and the pulling and the growling. All he could feel was a sense of something evil.
And then the pulling quieted and the faint impression of two yellow eyes, low and hateful, turned on him.
He retreated into a wall, reached up for the light switch. Found it, flicked it.
Light flooded the room and the sight seared his eyeballs. He couldn’t take it in, all of it—the colors swirled crazily about him: the red across the floor and bed, the walls, the pale flesh of the naked girl on the floor with her back to a wall, the white baseball bat with blood on its barrel, the scraggly gray of the coyote’s fur, the mauled and smashed head of, head of . . .
He couldn’t take it all in; it was too much to process. But some actions don’t need processing.
A Hominis bestia lives on instinct.
When the coyote with a missing tail turned toward the boy and exposed its bloodstained teeth, the boy lurched for the bloody bat. He grabbed the bat’s handle, recognized it as his own, and raised it high with two hands. He growled loudly, growled again, and then took a step forward, swinging the bat through the air.
Swish.
The coyote squinted its eyes for a moment, before lowering its muzzle.
The boy kept the bat raised and his gaze hard on the coyote while stooping by the naked girl. It was Sunrise, his Sunrise. She was sitting with her legs pulled up tight and her head buried in her knees. He took a hand off the bat and tugged gently at her arm.
“Go away,” she said.
He tugged again and she lifted her face and he turned his head to stare at her. She was bruised and bloody and as close to him as his own heart. When she saw it was him in that hellish room, the girl widened her eyes.
He stood again and pulled at her arm and she stood with him, raised by the power of his very presence. Together, slowly, with the bat held before him in one hand and his other hand grasping her arm, the boy backed out of the room, taking the girl with him.
In the corridor, he growled once more before tossing the bat at the coyote and bolting toward the o
utside door, pulling the girl along. He slipped once from the slick on his foot, his free arm wheeling to maintain his balance, but he kept pulling Sunrise, until they reached the outside door.
He gently led her down the stairs to where Arlo waited. Without letting go of Sunrise, he grabbed hold of Arlo’s hand with his own bloodied paw.
And then they were cracking the whip on their way across the farm, the boy holding tight, pulling the bigger children on each side along with him. They raced straight across the farm to the stable where the boy had been sleeping just moments before.
He stopped and gestured for Sunrise and Arlo to go inside, to sit safely with his mother, who was the safest thing in the entire world. When he was sure Sunrise and Arlo had stepped through the door, the boy took off toward the mouth of the farm.
As he sprinted alongside the road, he let his instinct take control. There was so much he didn’t know about what had happened in the dakhma, but he knew enough. He knew Sunrise and Arlo were too gentle, each of them and both together, to have used the bat on Lucius’s head. And he knew who Lucius had been touching more and more around the farm, and who could make the coyotes follow her when she wanted, and who had asked him just that afternoon to borrow his baseball bat.
Past the fields and the row of cabins, running in the moonlight, his feet kicking up dirt and leaves as the high grass whipped his legs, the boy ran like a coyote himself, until he reached the cabin closest to the juniper and the road, just across from the vegetable garden with its neat rows glowing dully in the moonlight. There was so much love in the boy just then, and hurt, and sadness, and fear, but no uncertainty. He would do whatever was necessary to protect those he loved, whatever the price. And he knew who would do the same for him.
He didn’t knock, just barreled up the stairs and barged through the door and rushed to the bed, where a man and woman slept together like a knot. He shouted out as he pulled at his father’s arm.
“What, what?” said Oliver.
“Who is it?” said Gracie.
“I don’t know,” said Oliver as he switched on a light. “Fletcher?”
Oliver Cross sat up, naked, staring at his boy, who was marked with blood on his arms, his chest, his feet. Overcome with the sight and some fierce emotion, Oliver crushed his son in a hug.
“What is it, Fletcher?” he said. “What?”
“Daddy, Daddy, a coyote killed Lucius,” said the boy. “There’s blood everywhere. And it was the coyote. Notail. Daddy. I saw him. It was the coyote, I swear. I swear. I swear.”
28
BLACKBIRD
When he finally leaves the truck and stands beneath the ragged old juniper, Oliver Cross can sense the anxiety his presence stirs.
The old lady sees a stranger with something familiar in his eye and undoubtedly realizes that a dark force has returned to the farm.
Frank Cormack sees an avenging demon come to make him pay for his sins, because that is what he has been searching for in the rearview mirror during his entire run west.
Erica Cross, the only one certain of Oliver’s identity, is perhaps most alarmed as she sees, coming for her, the man who killed her beloved grandmother.
“Oliver?” says the old woman. “Is that you? It is, isn’t it?” She puts the trowel down on the chair and picks her way toward him through the rows of vegetables. “My Lord, what a surprise.” She glances back at Erica. “Well, maybe not a total surprise.”
Gracie. Her long, loose dress flows with her movements, and her hair streams silkily out of her straw hat, just like old times, but not like old times. Her body now is thick, her face lined deeply by the sun, the hair streaming behind her is gray and thin, and she walks with a hitch that raises her elbows with each step.
“Well now,” says Helen. “She’s surely aged well.”
“Be nice,” says Oliver.
“Why?”
“Oliver,” says the old lady standing now in front of him. “My God, look at you.” She puts a hand to his cheek as she stares, as if she is staring into his sadness, and then wraps him in an unwelcome hug. She smells of sweat and pollen and tiger balm.
“You’ve come home,” she says. “How long are you staying?”
“Not long.”
She lets go, steps back, tilts her head, and widens her eyes. “We’ll have a party for you tonight.”
“Don’t,” says Oliver.
“Everyone will be so happy to see you, at least everyone who’s left. Crazy Bob came back, can you believe that? And Toby never left. Flit too. And some others. We’ll have a homecoming celebration.”
“I need to talk to my granddaughter,” says Oliver.
“Of course. Erica told me about Helen. She was a heavenly light, Oliver, pure and bright, and we all loved her.”
“Tell her to piss off,” says Helen, sweetly.
“I’m so sorry, Oliver,” says Gracie.
“Everyone’s sorry,” says Oliver.
“And how it ended was so horrible. I can’t imagine you in prison.”
“Neither could I,” Oliver says, “and then poof. I need to talk to Erica.”
He turns away from Gracie and walks toward his granddaughter. Erica flinches at his approach, and the instinctive rebuke pokes at his heart. It hurts to be so close to her. She is something precious that vanished from his life when Helen died, and now she looks so much like his dead wife, so much like the young woman for whom he changed his life, that he has to look away.
“Funny seeing you here,” she says.
“I was in the neighborhood,” says Oliver.
She laughs. “No one’s in this neighborhood. But I knew when I went to Mr. Finnegan, someone would come. I’m supposed to hate you.”
“It’s a big club,” says Oliver, “and I’m a charter member. Let’s take a walk.”
Oliver strides along the dirt path toward the stable that had long ago been his home. Erica hesitates for a moment, but when Frank takes a crutched step forward, as if to offer his protection, she puts a hand out to stop him and follows her grandfather. As Oliver passes Frank he gives the boy a stone stare and then looks at the dog.
“You happy now?” says Oliver to Hunter.
The wagging tail would be answer enough, but the little bastard has to shift his hind legs back and forth, too. Just to rub it in.
Oliver stifles a bark at the dog and moves on. He and Erica walk quietly together, grandfather in front and granddaughter trailing like the teenager she is, past a row of cabins in various states of disrepair, weeds like a plague all around.
“Be gentle with her,” says Helen. “Tell her you love her.”
“That would go over well,” says Oliver.
“What’s that, Grandpop?” says the girl from behind him.
“Nothing,” he says, staying quiet even as Helen keeps hectoring him on how to play it, how to be the kind, loving grandfather she needs.
Now, before the old bleached stable on the edge of collapse, Oliver and Erica stand side by side, looking at the ruin. To her, he knows, it is just a ramshackle heap of wood and iron, but to Oliver it is a living, breathing thing, with its foundation buried deep in the land and its smoky tendrils reaching out to latch on to his heart.
“That’s where your grandmother and I lived with your father when he was small,” says Oliver to the girl.
“High living, Gramps.”
He thinks of defending the old stable as if the structure represents the very life he and Helen chose, but the reality of the thing chokes off his defensiveness. Strips of tin have fallen off the roof, leaving the exposed purlins to rot. The old portico roof is half-collapsed, and two of the barn shutters have fallen off their rusted hinges. The windows Oliver put in all those years ago are now just shards of glass in peeling frames.
“It was collapsing back then, too, before I went to work on it,” he says. “Your mother was worried about you when you ran off. Your grandmother too. I told them both I’d find you and see if you were okay.”
“Yo
u promised Grandmom?”
“I still talk to her.”
“Isn’t that, like, weird?”
“That’s not weird. That she talks back is weird.”
“Are you trying to be hurtful?” says Helen.
“I brought her ashes along hoping it would finally shut her up.”
“Oliver!” says Helen.
“Grandpop?” says Erica.
“If I scatter them here, on our old homestead, she might finally be happy enough to leave me alone.”
“Don’t count on it,” says Helen.
“They didn’t belong in your father’s creepy stone monstrosity anyway,” says Oliver.
“Okay, so you found me,” says Erica. “Now what?”
“Are you okay?”
She hesitates a bit. “I think so. I don’t know.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s gotten confusing.”
“It tends to do that.”
“But yeah. I’m okay.”
“Good.”
“I remember you talking about your run west with Grandmom. It sounded so romantic.”
“Only a fool takes me as a role model.”
“Maybe that’s my problem. You brought Hunter.”
“I went to Cormack’s apartment looking for you. The dog was there, hungry and covered in shit.”
“Frank said he arranged for a friend to pick him up.”
“I suppose he says a lot of things.”
“Yes, he does. How did you even find us?”
“I made like Marlowe and played detective.”
“Who’s Marlowe?”
Freedom Road Page 23
