Blood Is the Sky

by Steve Hamilton

  I walked the last mile. The trail opened up to the cabin site.

  There was nobody there.

  “Ah, horseshit,” I said. “I knew it. They went off somewhere else. Now what the—”

  I stopped. There was no plane at the dock.

  I stood there for a full minute, trying to make sense of it. I had heard the plane in the air, had heard it land. I went over to the cabin and looked on the porch. The note was just where I had left it. I went to the dock and looked out at the lake. It was calm and empty. There was no sound at all. No wind. Nothing.

  “What the hell?” The lake bent around to the right—maybe they had seen something on the far shore, and had landed the plane over there. I remembered the trail that Maskwa and I had explored the day before and how it had followed the curve of the shoreline.

  I found that trail again and began walking. I moved fast. I wanted to find that damned plane so I could stop wondering, so I could get rid of this prickly little ball that was forming in my stomach. I flashed back on the way Maskwa had to muscle that flimsy old plane into the sky, how he just barely cleared the trees, how half the instrument panel fell right into his lap.

  I moved faster. I was running now, trying to see through the trees. “Be there, God damn it. I want to see that plane.”

  How old was Maskwa, anyway? He was Guy’s grandfather, so he had to be what? Sixty years old at least? Closer to seventy? And that plane, hell, for all I knew, it was just as old.

  The trees opened up. I went up over a rock and landed in the shallow water. I didn’t even think about how cold it was on my feet. Where was that plane?

  Guy got his Grandpère to fly us all the way up here in his tiny little airplane. They were the only people on this earth who even knew we were up here. And today …

  I waded out into the lake, until I was standing up to my knees in the freezing water.

  Lake Agawaatese was empty.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The water was so cold, my feet were already getting numb. I came back to the shore, climbed over the rock and landed on the trail. I had two wet boots now to go along with all the rest of my problems.

  My problems, hell. If Maskwa and Guy went down in the woods—

  I tried to replay it in my head. I had heard the plane above me. It seemed to circle and head back south, which meant it would have approached the lake from that direction. Which was more or less the exact direction I was walking. I hadn’t seen anything. I sure as hell hadn’t heard anything. Wouldn’t a crash make some sort of noise? Or would the trees just reach up and … God, catch them?

  I headed back to the cabin site, squishing my way down the trail in my soaking boots. At some point, I’d have to make a fire and dry them out. Right after I found Maskwa and Guy sitting there on the porch of the cabin, having a good laugh. They had hidden their plane, just to play a joke on me.

  Yeah, where’d they hide it, Alex?

  “Holy fuck,” I said. “Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.” I started to run again. That little ball of dread in my stomach, it felt like it was spreading through my entire body. I could feel it burning in my intestines, squeezing my lungs, and tightening all the muscles in my back.

  When I got back to the cabin, I was fighting for breath. “Get a hold of yourself, Alex. You’ve got to think.”

  Water, that was the first thing I needed. Get some water in your body, and then you can think straight. I went into the cabin. It was exactly as we had left it. The big pot was still on the propane stove. We had boiled our water there in the morning and covered it with a lid when we left. I picked the lid up, dipped a coffee mug in, and drank. I took a deep breath and then drained another cupful.

  Okay, I thought. That’s good. That’s just what you needed. Now what?

  Now you go out and start looking for that plane. It can’t be too far away. They may both be alive. They may both need your help, very badly.

  Vinnie. I’ll go back up the trail. I’ll get Vinnie, we’ll come back down here, and we’ll find them.

  Vinnie will need water, too, I thought. I looked around for something to carry it in. A canteen, a water bottle. Anything.

  There was nothing like that. Just a few pots and pans, and a lot of garbage.

  Plastic Coke bottles. That’s what I needed. I went back outside and grabbed two empty liter-size bottles from the cooler. I came back in and filled them. Okay, I thought. I’m ready. Let’s go.

  When I was outside, I couldn’t help looking at the lake one last time before I started back up the trail. I stopped. As if I didn’t have enough to think about, another horrible thought came to me.

  Could that plane have sunk?

  No. No, it can’t sink. It has floats. That’s why they call it a floatplane, you idiot. It can’t sink.

  I carried the two bottles of water, one in each hand. Find Vinnie, I told myself. Look all around while you’re walking. And find Vinnie.

  I hurried up the trail, looking into the shadows on either side of me. I kept expecting to see the plane. I imagined seeing it leaning nose down against a big pine tree, one of its wings sheared off and lying on the ground next to it. I imagined it so hard I made myself see it, again and again.

  Easy, Alex. I made myself slow down a notch. Blind panic wouldn’t help anyone at this point. I kept walking, a mile into the woods, over the stream, then another mile. For a moment I thought I caught the far-off sound of a bear again. It didn’t chill me to the bone this time. I had bigger problems now.

  I opened one of the water bottles, took a quick drink and recapped it. I wiped away the thin line of sweat that was running down the side of my face, even in this cold air. My feet were still wet. I kept walking.

  I finally got to the stand of birch trees. Vinnie wasn’t there.

  “Vinnie!” I yelled. “Vinnie! Where the hell are you!”

  Nothing.

  “Vinnie!”

  A bear. In the distance. Nothing else.

  “Where the fuck are you, Vinnie?” I went up the trail, trying to pick up his boot prints on the ground. I had already proven to myself just how bad I was at tracking, but I didn’t know what else to do. It turned out to be easy, because he had just been walking here within the last couple of hours, and a dozen goddamned bears hadn’t messed up the trail yet.

  The trail split off into a couple different directions. I followed his tracks left. It split again. The tracks went left again. I picked up the sound of running water. And something else I couldn’t quite make out. Probably more bears.

  “Vinnie!”

  Did I hear something then? It was hard to tell. I kept walking. The water sounds grew louder. Finally, I came to a waterfall. The water was coming down, maybe eight feet from top to bottom, and splashing on the rocks.

  I looked again and saw that there was a great beaver’s dam in the stream, raising the height of the falls. From where I was standing, the whole thing rose above my head. On another day, I would have stood there and admired it.

  Then I saw the bootprints. Vinnie had gone up the side of this stream, up this jumbled mass of rocks and dirt, all the way to the top. I followed them. There were big depressions in the ground, where he had no doubt buried his boots halfway to his knees in the mud. Mine were already a soaking mess, so I had nothing to lose. I fought my way up the incline, grabbing on to rocks and roots and God knows what else.

  I heard them. Before I got to the top, I heard the throaty roaring of the bears.

  As I stumbled onto the top, I saw it all at once. I saw the bears, two of them, one black, one cinnamon brown, all fur and teeth and nails, one of them on its hind legs for a moment, suspended in the air. Vinnie swinging a long stick in slow motion, making a wide arc that would have been graceful in any other place than this sudden hell. The ground all churned up, like a battlefield. Freshly dug dirt, all along the bed of this creek. A clearing, the sun shining down. The sleeve of Vinnie’s coat in tatters, blood on his arm.

  I saw it all for a moment tha
t lasted forever, feeling like I was seeing it from far away, out of my own body, until finally it all snapped into place and I heard the noises again and I knew what was happening.

  The bears were attacking Vinnie. He was screaming and trying to beat them off with a stick.

  I yelled something and ran forward, sliding through the muck and landing hard on my back. I clawed my way back to my feet and ran to him along the edge of the stream. The bears were on either side of him now, the ground itself a morass of black soil and stones and dead grass, torn up in strips.

  And something long and white.

  Bones. God help me, bones.

  As I came to him, I saw the bones in the dirt. A hand. Black fingers locked in a twisted claw. White fingernails. A leg. The ribs of a man, half buried in the dirt.

  This is what happened. They are dead. All the men are dead. The bears killed them and now they will kill us, too.

  “Get away!” Vinnie’s raw voice. “Get out of here!”

  I screamed at the bears. I waved my arms. “Go! Get away! Go! Go!”

  The smell. It washed over me. The stench of it, God, the dead rotting bodies.

  And something else.

  Vinnie swung his stick. A sudden pain in my arm as the end of the stick hit me and broke off.

  I knew that smell.

  “Get away!” he yelled. “Get away! Get away!”

  One bear turned away, the one with the brown fur.

  “Get away! Get away, God damn you!”

  I couldn’t even tell which of us was yelling anymore. That smell.

  The black bear made his horrible inhuman noise and turned around. He looked back at us with yellow eyes and went away, toward the woods.

  Vinnie kept screaming.

  A long time ago. How many years? The same smell. The bodies in bags, zipped up tight. And yet the smell still hit me right in the face. I’m there in that same place now, as if it just happened, the way only a smell can take you back.

  That house in Detroit. That burning house.

  The fire.

  I looked down at it. I had to look down. The white bones, the flesh … Black. Blacker than the bear. Blacker than the dirt. Blacker than evil.

  They were burned. The bodies were burned. The bears didn’t do this. The bears didn’t kill these men.

  And the bears weren’t attacking Vinnie. It was Vinnie who was attacking the bears. He saw what they were doing, saw the bears digging here in the ground, desecrating this shallow grave of dead burned men. He had tried to drive them away.

  Vinnie was bent over now, with his face in his hands. There was blood all over his arm. He dropped to his knees. “Oh my God, Tom, oh my God.”

  “Vinnie,” I said. “Vinnie.” I grabbed his shoulders from behind.

  He sat back on his heels and cried. The stream went by, the bears moved through the woods. The sun went behind a cloud and it got colder. The bodies of five men were spread all around us, some piece of each man above the ground, another piece below, and some inside the bears.

  I dug into the dirt, took it in both hands, and threw it over what was once a man’s head. I did it again and again, digging with my bare hands and covering the bodies. Vinnie stayed still. I worked all around him, spreading the dirt over everything I could see. My hands were hurting, scraped raw by the rough earth. But I kept at it. It was a primitive need to bury something dead and that was all I was capable of doing.

  When I had done as much as I could do, I went to Vinnie and pulled him up by the armpits. I turned him around and held his head on my shoulder. He didn’t fight me.

  I looked at his left arm. A bear had raked a claw down his forearm, right through his coat, leaving three deep cuts. I needed to clean his arm off and wrap it up. That was the next thing I had to do. “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”

  I grabbed his other arm. He was holding something tight in his hand. “What is it, Vinnie?” I said. I lifted his hand and looked. It was a watch, caked with dirt, the crystal shattered.

  “Come on,” I said. “Come on.” I led him back down the stream. He walked slowly, staring at the ground, his eyes half closed, as if he could barely stay awake. I took him back to where the trail led down over the ledge, next to the waterfall. I tried to help him climb down, but he was moving automatically, with no thought. We both ended up sliding down in the muck until we landed hard at the bottom. I found one of the water bottles there, opened it, and poured the water into his mouth. He swallowed it. I took a drink and then put it in my coat pocket. “We’ve got to move,” I said. “We’ve got to take care of you. Okay?”

  I picked him up, helped him out of the mud and onto the trail. He finally started to resist me. “No,” he said. “No, no.”

  “Come on, Vinnie.”

  He looked behind us. “No.”

  I pushed him. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” he said. But he was too weak to fight me. He had nothing left. I turned him like a robot and pointed him south.

  “Let’s go, Vinnie.”

  We walked all the way back, three miles down the trail. I kept Vinnie’s body moving forward, but I had no idea where his mind was. I couldn’t even imagine. A good hour later, I had him back in the cabin, sitting at the kitchen table. I filled the big pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. I didn’t see a first-aid kit anywhere, so I stripped down and took off my undershirt, and tore it into strips. I threw the strips in water, and added the dish towel that had been hanging on a nail in the wall. Vinnie sat there the whole time, looking at nothing.

  I looked around the place while the water was heating up, on the off chance there might be a first-aid kit lying around. There wasn’t. I left him there at the table for a minute while I went outside to check the little shed by the dock. When I opened the door, I saw an outboard motor leaning against the back wall, and several life preservers hanging on hooks. Two five-gallon gas cans sat on the floor. That was it.

  I was about to close the door when a horrible thought came to me. I picked up both gas cans, shook them, and remembered that Guy had done the same thing yesterday. At the time, he had been surprised that so much gasoline was gone.

  Ten gallons of gasoline.

  I dropped the cans and slammed the door shut. Vinnie was still sitting at the table when I went back into the cabin. He hadn’t moved, not an inch.

  “Vinnie,” I said.

  He just sat there, staring straight ahead.

  “My God,” I said. “Vinnie.” It all washed over me in one moment, how tired I was, how hungry, how much my back hurt for some reason, how miserable my feet felt in the wet boots. I couldn’t solve anything else, so I focused on the small stuff. Get Vinnie cleaned up, and then get these boots off.

  The water was finally boiling. I stirred it all up with a big spoon, and then I fished out the dish towel. I grabbed the little bottle of dishwashing soap, went over and sat down next to Vinnie, and went to work on him.

  “This is gonna hurt,” I said as I put his left arm on the table, pushing the sleeve of his coat up. As soon as I touched his arm with the hot towel, he stood up and pushed me away.

  “Tom,” he said. “I’ve got to help Tom.”

  “Vinnie, get back here.”

  He went out the door and jumped down off the front porch. “I’ve got to help him,” he said. “The bears.”

  I chased him down, grabbed him around the waist.

  “The bears,” he said. “The bears.”

  “They’re gone,” I said. “Come on, Vinnie. Sit down. The bears are gone.”

  I pulled him back to the porch and sat him down on it. We were back outside in the cold air now. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head. Then I squeezed out the soap onto the hot towel and pressed it onto his arm. He closed his eyes.

  I washed him off as well as I could, starting with the cuts in his arm, then his face. The blood turned the towel pink. “Stay here,” I said. I went into the cabin and took the pot off the stove, brought it outside and put it do
wn next to him. I took out a strip of fabric and pressed it against his arm.

  “These cuts aren’t as bad as I thought,” I said to him. “It’s a good thing you had this coat on.”

  He looked at me. For the first time since I found him up there, he looked right at me. His eyes were red.

  “We’ve got another problem,” I said. I took another strip out of the pot and wrapped it around his arm. “The plane came back a while ago. It circled around a couple of times and then it landed. Or at least I thought it did. But when I got back, the plane wasn’t here.”

  With the fabric wrapped around his arm, I took two more thin strips out of the pot and tied them around the edges, tight enough to keep the bandage in place.

  “The plane didn’t land on the lake, Vinnie. It must have gone down in the woods.”

  Vinnie kept looking at me, until it finally sank in. He turned his head and looked out at the lake.

  “You can’t land anywhere else,” I said.

  As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. You can land somewhere else. There were other lakes. If you flew over this lake and kept going north, and you saw that the bears were uncovering your secret, the secret you had buried in the loose ground on the side of the stream, you would know that Vinnie and Alex were about to become your biggest problem. And so you would circle back and land your plane, but not on this lake. You would land on a different lake.

  I thought back to our trip up here, flying over the trees. The other lakes, all strung out like pearls on the ground, connected by the thin streams. There was one lake, to the south of this one. I tried to remember how far away it was.

  You land on the nearest lake. You get out of your plane. You know these woods. You know there’s a trail to Lake Agawaatese.

  You come quietly.

  “Vinnie,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I stood up and looked around, leaving Vinnie on the porch. I followed the line of trees with my eyes, all the way around the lake.

  That’s when I heard the first gunshot.