Robert B. Parker

by Wilderness

  Karl turned and ran. It was no more than a walk. Newman was fifty yards from him. He turned toward the trees, but the banks here had eroded away and formed a flat dirt face eight feet high, laced with the exposed roots of the trees that perhaps next year would topple into the lake. Newman was closer. Karl turned and ran toward the lake. He splashed into it thigh-deep, heading straight out toward the center. Newman came in behind him in a thundering cascade of spray and footfall, driving through the water. He was five yards away. Karl stumbled forward in the water and went under. He came up gasping and Newman was beside him. As Karl’s head broke water, Newman shoved the small nickel-plated gun into Karl’s face and held it. Karl could see his face with the eyes widened as far as they would and the mouth open and the nostrils flared. Newman’s chest heaved steadily as he drew in air. There were welts across his face and chest where branches had slapped him and brambles had torn. He was, aside from the movement of his chest, absolutely still with the gun barrel pressed into the bridge of Karl’s nose. Karl, half out of the water, sank back and sat on the bottom. The water came to his chest. He stared up at Newman as if he were in a stupor. He gasped for breath, short gasps, one after another. His face was scratched and bruised and stung. There was blood and sweat and dirt on it that the plunge into the lake had not washed away. The wet hair was thin. A lot of scalp showed through. Dimly through the rust-colored lake water the faint glint of the useless .45 showed, still clutched in Karl’s right hand, resting against the bottom of the lake. High above them a fish hawk circled in the sky, slowly, in narrowing circles, without haste, as if time were of no consequence and the present would last forever.

  31

  Neither of them spoke. Karl stared up at Newman from his sunken eyes without expression. He was shivering. Newman felt the steady thump of his own heart and the sense of blood moving swiftly through his body. Karl made no move to avoid the pressure of the gun barrel. He made no move at all. Neither did Newman. The fish hawk widened out his circle again above them, searching, drifting on his angular six-foot wingspan. Somewhere in the ringing silence a fish broke water and the hawk swerved and dropped. Karl leaned slightly backward in the water and very slowly got his feet beneath him and inched up out of the water until he was standing. Newman’s gun had followed him as he rose, the barrel still pointed at the space between Karl’s eyebrows. Karl backed away a step. Newman didn’t move. The blankness began to ebb from Karl’s face. He was still shivering. He still held the empty .45 in his right hand. Water dripped from it as he stood. Karl’s breath was less frantic. His eyes were bloodshot and watery. He took a step to his right, Newman moved the gun, keeping it on Karl’s face. Karl took another step. Newman moved the gun. Karl leaned forward. Newman bent his elbow and brought the gun back toward him slightly. Halfway across the lake behind them the fish hawk rose with a smallmouth bass in his talons, banked toward the west, and flew down the lake and disappeared into the trees.

  Karl swung his empty .45 at Newman’s gun hand and hit it, and both weapons, one still loaded, skittered across the lake top and sank. Newman’s right hand hurt. It was a numb pain. Karl lurched forward through the water and tried to knee Newman in the groin. Newman turned in time and took the knee against his thigh. Karl clawed at Newman’s face with his left hand. With his right he hit Newman in the throat. Newman made a choking noise and staggered away from him. Karl punched him again and Newman half-turned and staggered away another step. Karl jumped at him and landed on his back and wrapped his arm around Newman’s neck. The impact made Newman drop to his knees. Newman tucked his chin in and Karl couldn’t get his arm under Newman’s jaw and against his throat. With both arms Karl squeezed.

  Newman felt the pressure build in his head. His sight glazed red. He heaved himself upright, Karl still hanging on. With his feet spread, knee-deep in water, Newman reached up and pried one of Karl’s fingers free and bent it backward until Karl let go of his neck. He made a massive shrugging motion with his shoulders and back and dumped Karl into the water. His heart was pounding and the blood thumped in his head. Karl stood up. Newman got hold of his neck with one hand and his shirt front with the other and began to bend him backward, pulling on the shirt front, pushing on the neck. Karl was a big-boned, angular man. But he was exhausted and he was out of shape. Newman bent him backward slowly. Karl tried for Newman’s groin again but was off-balance and struggling and there was no force to the knee. Again Newman took it on his thigh. His right hand squeezed into Karl’s neck. He could feel the cartilage and tissue move under his fingers. He dug in. The bench presses were paying off. The years of repetitions with two-hundred-pound barbells–ten reps, wait, ten more reps, wait, ten more reps–had left him with strength that Karl couldn’t match, and here, desperate and frightened and bursting with anger, the strength finally mattered. His pectoral muscles bulged, the triceps indented at the top of his arms. The muscles of his forearms were rigid against his skin, his neck was thick with effort. The trapezius muscles swelled his shoulders.

  Karl was choking. He made slight cawing sounds as Newman bent him back. The bandage on Newman’s left arm was undone and flapping. The wound had begun to seep blood and it trickled down his arm. Karl scratched and clawed at Newman’s face, trying to gouge his eyes. Newman increased his pressure. He grunted and then exhaled explosively, the way he did when he lifted weights. Karl gave way. He went backward into the water and Newman came down on top of him, his hands still locked on the throat and shirt front. He pressed Karl back against the bottom of the lake. The bleeding wound in his arm made the water near him slightly pink. Karl’s legs thrashed and his hands stopped digging at Newman’s face and went to Newman’s hands. Under the water he tried to pry Newman’s grip from his neck. He dug at Newman’s fingers, but Newman increased the pressure. Pressing down more. He could feel the swell of strength in his back and shoulders, feel the force in his arms. There was triumph in the feeling, as his muscles swelled and held. Beneath the water Karl made no sound. He arched his body, thrashed his legs, dug with his fingers at Newman’s grip. Newman remained as rigid as a boulder. Sweat stood on his forehead. He bit his lower lip with effort and it drew blood and that dripped down his chin and added its pink tinge to the water already touched with the blood from his wounded arm. His eyes were closed. In that position they held Karl’s struggles slowed. They stopped. He was still on the bottom. Newman still held him against the pebbled bottom while his arms no longer clawed but hung limp and moved slightly in the eddying water, held him several minutes after it was necessary, held him after he had died, held him as if he were unable to let go and would hold him until the lake rose in spring and covered them both. Then slowly his body began to unclench. He relaxed his hands, though he still bent forward pressing lightly against Karl’s chest. The trapezius muscles eased, the cords in his forearms smoothed. He rocked back, away from Karl’s body, and sat on his haunches, still astride him. He took in air in a long shuddering breath and let it out through closely pursed lips in a slow hiss.

  It was fifteen minutes before Newman could stand. His body shook. He staggered as he turned toward shore and began to wade. The blood trickled down his left arm and his chin. There were more scratches and gouges on his face. And five parallel red scratches on his chest where Karl had dragged desperate fingernails just before he died.

  He got to shore and found a rock near the bank and trembling sat down on the rock with his back to the bank. His wet, half-naked body was cold. There was a small breeze. It was September. He shivered. He clasped his arms around himself and sat, trembling with exhaustion, shaking with emotion, shivering with cold. He sat that way for an hour, until Janet came out of the woods and found him.

  32

  Bundled in his down vest and nylon parka, but still shivering, Newman waited in silence while Janet found the canoe. He was almost entirely inside himself as they paddled it out onto the still surface of the lake and headed straight across toward the cabin. His arm hurt as he paddled but he showed no sign of it,
and the pain barely registered. Halfway across they let the canoe drift and dropped everything but the first-aid kit and the clothes they wore overboard. The carbine was the last thing. He didn’t like to drop it. It was compact and shapely. It felt good in his hand. He held it barrel-down for a moment at arm’s-length and then let it go. It slid smoothly into the water and sank.

  “It’s funny,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “To be without a gun. I don’t feel right.”

  She smiled. “You didn’t need a gun at the end.”

  “I couldn’t shoot,” he said. “I wanted to. I knew I had to, but I couldn’t, not up close, with him looking at me.”

  “You did what you had to,” she said.

  He shifted the paddle as the canoe began to veer off course. Even with the wounded arm he was so much stronger than she was that the canoe wouldn’t hold straight if he didn’t compensate.

  “And you did it alone,” she said.

  The sun was directly overhead, and there was no wind. The lake was slick and the canoe moved over it as if without friction.

  “Without me,” she said.

  He could see the float in front of the cabin now, and the small wharf that slanted up from it. The foliage had begun to change and there were scatters of gold and red in the shoreline forest.

  “When we came back from Korea,” he said, “we came into San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge and they tied in the ship’s speaker-system to a disc jockey in San Francisco, so that before we even saw land we heard American radio, and commercials, and when we went up the bay we could look up the hilly streets into San Francisco and see American buildings and people and cars.” His voice was as flat and still as the surface of the lake. She looked back at him over her shoulder. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her at the dock. She turned back and dug in her paddle.

  They left the paddles in the bottom of the canoe when they docked. His arm hurt when he had to put weight on it to climb from the skittish canoe. On the dock they stood together. He looked back across the lake. On the far side the woods were unbroken and uniform, patches of color blotching the green. The lake remained smooth and calm. It had healed over the wake of the canoe as it had closed over the carbine, as it had closed over Adolph Karl.

  “It’s pretty,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “From a distance,” he said.

  “Looking back,” she said.

  They turned toward the cabin. He swayed slightly. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s just that I’m tired. Fighting makes you tired. And I haven’t eaten. And I suppose I’ve lost some blood, and I feel a little dizzy.”

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go to the cabin and you can lie down.”

  He was very slow as they walked up the path. She walked close beside him although she didn’t touch him. The side door was unlocked. They went in. It was empty and still and strange. He stood swaying in the center of the room, his teeth chattering.

  “Get out of the wet clothes,” she said. “And lie down. I’ll put a sleeping bag over you. And I’ll make a fire.”

  He nodded. She went to the bedroom for a sleeping bag. Only the three bags and the full refrigerator gave sign that they’d ever been there. Chris was careful, she thought.

  Newman with his head down, still fully dressed, stepped uncertainly toward the couch. When his shins hit the edge of it he swayed forward and fell facedown on the couch. He didn’t move. When Janet came back with the sleeping bag he was asleep with his mouth open, breathing evenly. A fire was laid in the fireplace. She put down the sleeping bag and lit the fire. Then she went to the couch. She took off his boots and socks. There were large holes in both socks at the big toe and on the balls of both feet. She threw the socks into the fireplace. She worked her hands in under his stomach and got his belt unbuckled and his fly unzipped. Then she inched the wet pants down over his thighs and finally worked them off. She did the same with his underwear. She unzippered the sleeping bag, spread it over Newman’s half-dressed and motionless body, picked up his pants and underwear, and went to the bathroom.

  In an alcove off the bathroom was a washer and dryer. She let the water run into it. When it was full she added soap and dropped his pants and underwear into it. Then she stripped off her own clothes and put them in. She shut the top of the washer and walked naked to the shower. With the water as hot as she could take it she stood under the shower. She shampooed her hair twice. She lathered her whole body with soap and rinsed and did it again. There was still grime around her ankles and she squatted in the shower with the hot water cascading over her to lather and massage them a third time. When she was through the water rinsed them clean. She stepped from the shower into the cold bathroom, shivering. She had no other clothes and she wrapped the one towel around her as best she could and walked to the living room. The fire was dancing now and the living room was warm and rich with the smell of hardwood burning. Her husband had not moved.

  She stood close to the fire naked and rubbed herself dry. She didn’t like being naked. It made her afraid. Whenever she was naked she felt people were staring at her. She looked down at her naked body. The scratches on her belly had faded. She couldn’t see them anymore. Her hair, still wet despite toweling, was in tight ringlets. When it dried it would soften. She heard the washer thump to the end of its cycle. She walked, still clutching the towel to cover her front, to the washer and transferred the wet clothes to the dryer. It was awkward to do holding the towel with one hand. But she managed. Still holding the towel she went to the kitchen. In the refrigerator there were beer and wine, in the freezer there was steak. In the cabinet there were canned baked beans and a bottle of bourbon and a loaf of rye bread, unsliced, in a cellophane sack, tied with a small green wire twist. She took the steak from the freezer. She took the bourbon down from the cabinet, got a glass, put two ice cubes in it, and filled it with bourbon. She drank half of the bourbon, shuddered, and put the glass on the counter. In a cabinet under the sink she found a casserole and got it out. She took down two large cans of baked beans with pork. There was a hand can-opener in the drawer. She got it out and tried to open the beans and hold the towel. She couldn’t.

  “Shit,” she said. She let the towel drop and opened the beans. Standing at the counter, she ate half of them cold, with a piece of bread. She put the rest in the casserole in the gas oven on warm. She left the steak thawing on the counter and took the bourbon bottle and the glass. She looked at the towel on the floor, but her hands were full, so she walked naked into the living room and sat naked in an armchair close to the fire and began to sip the bourbon. The heat of it moved through her and the heat of the fire thickened around her.

  The fire hissed softly. At one end of the nearest logs, moisture bubbled out and dropped to the coals and turned into steam and disappeared. The lower logs began to sag, reddening into coals. She got up and put two more logs on the fire. She walked over to look down at her husband. He was as she had left him. Motionless except for the slow, easy rise and fall of his upper body as he breathed. Saliva had trickled from his open mouth, and there was a small wet circle on the sofa pillow. She still had the glass in her hand, almost empty now. She made a small gesture with it and raised it slightly toward him. “Not bad,” she said out loud. He didn’t move and she drank the rest of her drink. There was a small ice cube left in the bottom of the glass. She tipped it into her mouth and sucked on it, moving it from one cheek to the other as she stood watching him sleep. Then she went back to the kitchen, got more ice, went to the living room, poured more bourbon, and sat naked by the fire looking at the coals and sipping the bourbon.