A ruffling sound. A flap opened, and on the other side I briefly saw only darkness, but I heard the sounds of the forest, almost washed out by the generator. Then the woman came in, and though I didn’t mean to, I recoiled.
“Oh, shut up,” the woman muttered. “I’ve brought you a meal.”
I didn’t know what to think. She produced an old metal hot plate from a cardboard box under the little table, and connected it to the generator, and put a dented metal can on top. The lid was peeled back, and after a few minutes I heard tiny bubbles and smelled a familiar old smell.
“Thank the old ones for pull-tops,” she said.
It was pork and beans. The smell filled the little room. She surprised me by producing an actual bowl — chipped but otherwise in fine shape — and a metal spoon. She used the flap of her jacket to take the can off of the hot plate, then poured it into the bowl.
She held it out to me. “Eat half of it. Save the rest for me.”
She stared at me while I ate. I tried to stare back, but the food consumed me, and I finished off the entire bowl without thinking. She didn’t complain, and then I realized that I’d eaten her share as well as my own.
“I —“
“Stow it,” she said. “I’m a big girl.”
It was my turn to stare now, and she held my gaze, unflinching. Her skin was scabbed and deeply tanned, with a flush of burnished red beneath her cheeks. Her lips drew thin across cracked and missing teeth. Her hair had been hacked short without regard for appearance, its ends uneven and split and dark. She was cast in stark shadow, the light of the bulb turning her hollows and slopes ominous and black.
But her eyes captivated me. They were set deep in her face, shrouded in darkness, tiredness. They were vibrant brown, almost golden, and I could see orange flecks sparkling in her irises even from a few feet away.
“Enough,” she said, and looked away.
She was remarkable.
I leaned forward and grunted at the stabbing pain in my leg. “Fuck,” I said, wincing. I remembered, then, and shot an accusing gaze at the woman. “You shot me.”
She nodded, unmoved. “Only in the leg.”
“That’s enough to kill someone,” I said.
“You’re well enough.” She jerked her thumb towards a bag beside the generator. It was torn and old, but I could see through the open zipper that it was stuffed with bottles and packages. Bandages. Salves.
I looked down at my leg for the first time, pulling the flap of the sleeping bag away. My pants had been cut away — torn away, judging by the ragged strips of cloth — and my leg was packaged tidily in brown wrapping, like something that might have arrived at your doorstep in the mail, back in the old days.
She was still staring at me when I looked back.
“You shot me,” I repeated. “And — you bandaged me.”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Why did I shoot you?” she asked. “Or why did I save you?”
I thought about this. “Both.”
“You’re one of them,” she spat.
I didn’t answer. I knew what she meant.
She glanced at the book with the leaf in it, then back at me. “But you had that.”
“It’s a book,” I said.
“I never saw one of them interested in books before,” she said. She turned over a flap of her weatherbeaten coat to show me the knife underneath.
My knife.
“I took it as a sign,” she went on. “That maybe you might be different. Maybe you ran away. Maybe you had enough of the killing and the raping. Maybe.”
I stayed quiet.
“But I haven’t stayed alive and alone this long because I’m a fool,” she added. “So if I’m wrong, it won’t trouble me none to open you up.”
“Even after you already patched me together,” I said.
She nodded slowly.
We sat like that, quiet, for a while. The generator filled the space with a throaty sound. Finally she said, “I’m going to tie you down now.”
She switched the generator off after strapping me to the creaky cot. The lightbulb faded to a soft cinder, then puffed out in the dark. The quiet was unnerving after the persistent rumble of the generator. It took a long time for my head to clear itself of the sound, but it did, finally, and I heard the sounds of the world swim up softly from outside.
She was silent in the dark, except for the tiny groan of the wooden chair when she shifted.
“You sleeping?” I asked after a time.
A long pause, then: “Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Put yourself in my skins,” she said. “Would you sleep if you had a killer in your house? Tied up or no?”
“That’s what this place is?” I asked. “Your house?”
“Close enough.”
“Where are we?”
“Show you in the morning,” she said. “If you go the fuck to sleep.”
I lay still in the pure black, then said, “Did you like the book?”
She took her time answering.
“It’s good,” she said, almost begrudgingly.
“I read another by her once,” I said. “Long time ago now. Found it.”
“I liked her version better,” she replied. “Of the end.”
I shifted a little, and felt her tense up in the dark.
“Easy,” I said. “I’m just stretching my good leg. It’s cramped.”
She was still, and I imagined her gripping the knife in the dark, wondering how close I might get before she knew I was up and moving.
“Easy,” I said again. “I’ll keep talking as long as you want me to. So you know I’m still over here.”
She didn’t answer.
“What did you mean?” I asked. “When you said you liked her version better.”
“The book. Her end of the world.”
“Liked it better than what?”
“Than this,” she said, and I heard an ache in her voice.
She woke me hours later. I couldn’t remember falling asleep.
“Come on,” she said.
The flap I’d seen her come through the night before was open, and cold gray daylight speared into the dark of the room. I looked around, seeing it better in the light. It looked like a beaver dam to me — the walls really were mud, clumped up and dried fast around a skeleton of twigs and rocks and pine cones and leaves. The floor was earth, brushed clean of pine needles and debris, and for the first time I saw a hollow in the center of the floor. It was full of ash and ringed with stones, and I looked up to see a tiny hole of daylight high above me.
“The hell is this place?” I asked, struggling to get up. I put my palm on the wall to steady myself, and she leaped forward, batting at my hand.
“Careful!” she fairly shouted, grabbing my wrist. “It’s not that sturdy.”
I looked down at her hand, then up at her dirty face.
“Sorry,” I said. I put out my hands. “Help me up.”
She took my left hand in her own, gripping it hard and strong. I held out my right hand.
She held out a stump.
Her eyes were unashamed and fierce.
“Jesus,” I said. “How did you—“
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she grunted, thrusting her stump into my free hand. I gripped her forearm, and she pulled me to my feet.
The pain was sharp, like electrocution, and I almost fell. I would have, if she hadn’t grabbed me around the waist.
“We’ll find you a crutch,” she said.
I nodded, gasping at the fierce pain.
I hopped next to her, and she bent me over, helping me through the short doorway, and the world spilled over me in a rush. I heard the rustle of trees in the dead wind, felt the chill of morning. She came out beside me, and I saw her bright for the first time, and realized that her skin was dark-complected beneath the dirt. She saw me notice, and set her jaw, hard.
“You don’t see many black girls,” she s
aid.
I shook my head. “In my —“
She stared hard. “In your what? Your tribe? Your gang?”
I swallowed. “Clan,” I said. “That’s what they call it, the clan.”
“Appropriate,” she said, and I could feel anger burning beneath her like magma.
“Grant says to kill them,” I said. “He only lets the men have —“
“White girls,” she finished. “Is that right?”
I nodded, hollow inside.
“Yeah. Starting over never felt so much the same,” she muttered. She let go of me and I fell over, scrabbling for something to hold me up, coming up with nothing.
“Shit,” I uttered, my leg alight. I rolled onto my back, and froze.
Her house rose up like a wasp’s nest, an impressive, industrious achievement. It was pale and dust-colored, bleached the same rotten gray-white as the trees, and I guessed that from a distance it would vanish into the forest like a mirage. It was spackled together with mud and twigs on the inside, but on the outside, large broken branches were affixed to it.
She noticed my appreciative stare.
“Surprised?” she asked. “Ever seen a white girl build anything like that?”
“I don’t think white or black has anything to do with it,” I grunted, sitting up in the dead leaves. “I’m just — it’s fantastic. You built it?”
“Course I built it,” she said. “You think someone just left it here for me? Big ‘For Rent’ sign on the tree?”
“How long have you been out here?”
“Year,” she said. “Maybe more. I can’t tell any more.”
I studied her in the pale wash of light. She wasn’t pretty, but she was alive, her eyes urgent, her body tense. She had somehow survived in these woods for a year, all by herself. What’s more, she did it with only one hand.
“You got away,” I said. “How did you do it?”
She regarded me calmly. “I killed a man,” she said. “And then I killed three more. And I ran.”
We talked throughout the morning. She made me sit inside her nest — that’s what she called it, the nest — and she sat outside with the flap open. If someone came along, she explained, I was too weak to get inside quietly and quickly. I asked if people came along often, and she shrugged.
“Every few weeks, maybe,” she said. “These woods aren’t deep in the mountains or anything. You saw what’s just out there — fields, farms. There’s an old Wal-Mart a half-mile away, if you go that-a-way. Sometimes someone cuts through the woods. Sometimes people hunt here. Ain’t nobody around here permanent, though. They’re always passing through.”
“Like our clan,” I said.
“You’re the biggest group I’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “Since I went on my own, I think.”
“I thought that cutting off hands was Grant’s own invention,” I said, nodding at her stump.
“Guess not,” she answered.
Her hand was gone below the wrist, and the stump was dull-looking, like the burl of a tree.
“Cauterized,” I said.
She nodded.
“I can’t imagine.”
“Wasn’t the worst thing I ever felt,” she said. “Wasn’t even the cutting-off part.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I did.
“It wasn’t even his cock,” she said, staring into the distant trees. “I expected that to be the worst, like someone taking a hot poker to me. It was bad, real bad, but the worst —“
She trailed off, and I let the quiet swallow us up. We listened to the rattle of leaves in the breeze. There was nothing else — no animal sounds, no traffic noises. The world was a boneyard, and we were ghosts.
“It was his kiss,” she said, finally. “He told me not to bite him or he’d split me open like a peach. Those were his words. Like a peach. Then he kissed me like a man kisses his wife.” Her eyes were empty. She touched her chin absently. “I didn’t kiss back. He broke my jaw and knocked out my teeth. I didn’t care. It meant he wouldn’t kiss me again.”
She turned and looked at me, her beautiful eyes haunted. I could see the slant of her jaw now, the way it didn’t quite close like it should. The way it pushed out the right side of her face where it hadn’t healed properly.
“Sometimes the things that are supposed to be nice hurt the worst,” she said.
I thought about touching her hand.
I didn’t.
That evening she asked me about the book.
“I don’t see your kind with books,” she said.
“My kind.”
“Killers. Marauders. Thieves.” She pulled out the hot plate and cracked another tin can. More pork and beans. “Your kind.”
“I —“
I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t. She wasn’t wrong. I was a killer. I did steal.
I sighed. “The first book I ever took was in an apartment,” I said. “I squatted there, right after — right after. Whoever lived there didn’t need it any more.”
“They had books.”
I shook my head. “No, not books. A book. Just one.”
She peered into the can, then stuck the bent spoon inside and stirred gently.
“What was it?” she asked.
“I can’t remember,” I answered. “It’s been too long.”
“But you remember that’s where you first stole a book,” she said.
I nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t think much of it. I considered it home, or as close as I had to home. All the stuff inside was someone else’s, once, but then it was mine. I didn’t really steal the book. It was mine.”
“So you’ve stolen more books.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How many?”
“Just one or two, now and then. As many as I could carry without getting in the way.” I sniffed the air. “Smells good.”
“You don’t get first bites this time,” she said, and then she smiled, a crooked, half-cocked smile that warmed me, broken teeth and cracked lips and all.
“Okay,” I said.
She poured the contents of the can into the bowl. There were still bits of yesterday’s pork and beans stuck to the sides, but it didn’t matter to her, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me, either. I was certain that she’d eaten right off the ground in the last twelve months, and I sure as hell had, too. We could have reminisced about dishwashers and frozen dinners and fresh vegetables, but why rub salt in the wound?
“What did you do with them?” she asked. “The books.”
“I kept them, if I could. If Grant let me,” I corrected. “He didn’t take kindly to my collecting things that weren’t warm enough to fuck or strong enough to take a punch.”
She was unfazed by my words. She spooned beans into her mouth, then passed the bowl to me.
I took a small bite, and passed it back.
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded and kept eating.
“I read them, when I could,” I said. “We were always moving, so I only had time to read before nightfall, if we stopped early, or maybe before we packed off in the mornings. If we stayed in one place more than a day or two, I could find some time.”
“You kept it secret,” she said. “Didn’t you.”
“Yeah. Secret as I could, I guess.”
She handed the bowl over again.
“What was your favorite book?” she asked. “Before.”
I chewed thoughtfully, then said, “I didn’t have one. I didn’t read unless I had to.”
“Sports?” she asked.
“Sometimes. Video games. TV.”
“You were lazy.”
“I was a teenager.”
She took the bowl back and scraped the last bit of the food into two small mounds. “One for you, one for me,” she said.
“You eat them both,” I demurred. “Please.”
She didn’t protest.
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you have a favorite?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Childh
ood’s End,” she said. “It was my dad’s favorite, and he used to read it to me, before I was old enough to know what the words meant.”
“What was it about?” I asked.
“The end of humanity,” she said. “Sort of. It was about losing your power.”
“Prescient.”
“Now there you go,” she said, cracking that smile again. “I bet your overlord Grant doesn’t know a word like that.”
I laughed, maybe for the first time in years.
“You have a favorite now?” she asked.
I thought about it. “I read most of a book called A Prayer for Owen Meany,” I said.
“Most of?”
“It was wet. Some of the pages had come apart, some were torn out.”
“You read it anyway,” she said, nodding. “That’s a man hungry for knowledge.”
She leaned forward onto her knees, putting the bowl aside.
I leaned forward, too, close to her raw, woodsy smell, to her eyes like amber in the bulb light.
“I got a thought about you,” she said. “I got a thought that you aren’t a killer.”
I looked down and away.
“No,” I said. “I am.”
She put her hand on my knee. “I know you’ve killed,” she said. “But I think maybe you’re not a killer.”
She kept me for a time. The days blurred into weeks and months, and I don’t know how much time really passed. Walking wasn’t getting easier for me, so she would leave me in the nest for hours, sometimes overnight, and vanish through the woods, moving soundlessly over leaves that should have crackled under her feet. She would return carrying books, and she would read to me, and we would talk about the past, and wonder at the future. Neither of us really saw much of one. She thought that humanity would multiply and regress, roving the American wastelands like packs of wolves, its population unchecked. She thought that we would evolve in a different way than before, a stupider way. She told me she could see mankind coming to a place, one day, where it didn’t see the ruined buildings and houses and roads as part of its own history, but just part of the world, something accepted but never investigated.
Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything Page 3
