by Earl Emerson
“He hit you, didn’t he?”
“It was what you might call a mutual love fest.”
“How do you get into a fistfight on your first date?”
She walked into the room and sat heavily on the sofa across from Zak. As more light blanched her pale face and it became even more obvious that Stacy had been crying, Zak thought of several things to say, but discarded each as it came to mind.
“Life is full of disappointments,” she said. “Some just a little uglier than others, but it’s not the end of the world. In the morning I’ll get up, have my coffee, and go to work.”
He felt like driving to Kasey’s house and beating the crap out of him, but all that would get him was a night in jail, maybe more.
“Zak? I know you think you have to take care of me, and I love having you for my brother because of that. What I’m trying to say is I’m grateful for your concern, but I only need so much help.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t, Zak. You found yourself a good job and you’ve stuck with it and you’ve got a house that’s going to be gorgeous when you’re finished. You haven’t made any major mistakes with your life and I don’t guess you will. I’m just saying I love you and I know you love me, but don’t wait up for me again.”
“I told you I had a nightmare.”
Stacy gave Zak a tiny beauty-pageant wave and proceeded upstairs, where he heard the bathroom door close. The nightmare was bad enough, but seeing his sister step out of Kasey Newcastle’s car had put him into a black mood. That they’d gone someplace and had sex, or something like sex, before slapping the hell out of each other was almost too much to think about. He had no doubt she’d given as good as she’d gotten, though. His sister had a temper and was incredibly strong.
He was eleven when Charlene died at sixteen; Stacy was fourteen. Once again, sitting in the dark, he knew he would give anything to be able to go back and replay that night, that he would give anything if he could erase those thirty seconds of cowardice. It didn’t matter how many times he told himself he’d been a child, because the assurances never dissolved the cold, hard kernel of fear he’d cached away in the pit of his stomach, the fear that reminded him almost daily that his family’s implosion was all his doing. They all knew Charlene would be alive today if not for him.
They’d lived in Tacoma. It was raining that night. Zak was in the front seat next to Charlene, who’d only been awarded her driver’s license a month before. Stacy was in the back, a fact that probably saved her life. She’d been battling her older sister for some time and refused to sit up front. They were about to drop Zak off at a chess club meeting, driving up Sixth Avenue toward the library, when a truck in the oncoming lane blinded Charlene with its headlights, crossed the centerline, and hit them head-on. Zak didn’t remember the initial details, only that there was a loud noise, that Charlene said, “Oh, shit,” and then they were spinning in the road. There were more loud noises, and then Zak was crying. He’d broken his wrist. Stacy escaped relatively unscathed and got out of the wreck on her own. The car was upside down, and Zak managed to get his seat belt undone, which dropped him onto the crumpled roof of the car. Charlene, still hanging upside down, said, “Zak, help me. I’m stuck.”
It had been a simple request, delivered in a tranquil voice, and Zak would remember her calm resolve for the rest of his life, making it a model for everything he did. The smoke began to grow worse, but Zak crept toward her and then reached up and tried to manipulate the belt mechanism with his good hand. As he fumbled with it, he felt a searing heat and without thinking, slithered out of the car backward. The smoke flared up until he almost couldn’t see Charlene. Just as he cleared the car, a young man he’d never seen before knelt and began to squirm into the smoke until one of his friends pulled him back.
“Zak?”
Hearing her voice and realizing he still had time to get the seat belt loose, Zak crawled back in. Nobody pulled him out; nobody tried to stop him. He never did figure out why. Crawling on his belly, he reached his sister and began to fumble again with her seat belt. And then, without the heat becoming appreciably worse, without his sister coming free, without anything changing, he was once again overwhelmed with panic. The earlier terror had been a mustard seed compared with this. He didn’t know it was possible to have so much adrenaline in his body or to be so single-minded about saving himself.
Again he scooted out backward. There was still time, he thought, as he lay whimpering on the ground beside the car looking on as his sister tried to unloosen the seat belt herself. There was still time to venture in and try again. The worst thing about cowardice, he later realized, was that in even the most egregious cases, there were often multiple opportunities to redeem oneself, opportunities one could look back on in future years with something a lot worse than mere regret. “Zak? Zak are you still there?”
Zak didn’t answer. He could have, but he didn’t. While he waited for Charlene to save herself, the car’s interior burst into flames with a whooshing sound. Having already been escorted to the far side of the street by a middle-aged woman, Stacy screamed when the fire broke out. Zak didn’t budge. He didn’t scream and he didn’t move, not until somebody took him by the shoulders and moved him.
The fire department showed up a minute later and doused the flames, but it was too late. On the day of the funeral, Zak got dressed, went downstairs, and, after a long, tearful struggle, made the family leave him alone in the house while they went to the service. When they came back four hours later, he was still in his Sunday suit, sitting in front of the television, which he’d turned on only moments before, fearing they would find out he’d been staring at a photo of Charlene and crying the whole four hours.
“Are you having a good time?” said his mother, with sarcasm she was never to repeat quite so openly, though for the rest of her life he would know she blamed him for her eldest daughter’s death. If Zak’s father blamed anything on him, he never let on. Nor did Stacy. Still, during the next few years his mother reminded him of it by the way she tiptoed around the topic of Charlene, always with a brief look directed his way when she mentioned her dead daughter, always subtle enough that nobody noticed but Zak.
Since that night on Sixth Avenue, Zak felt in his heart that he was responsible for Charlene’s death, his parents’ divorce, Stacy running away from home, his mother’s pill-popping and religious binges, all of their financial woes. If he’d been a man instead of a baby, he would have worked that seat-belt buckle loose, Charlene would have crawled out of the family car, and they would have gone about their lives with an interesting yarn to spin about the time the three kids were involved in a car wreck. The tragedy so dominated his thinking that there were times when Zak believed the only reason he’d joined the fire department was to prove he wasn’t a coward.
Zak was never far from the panic of that night, and it had a way of coming back, tormenting him in the form of a recurring nightmare. He daydreamed about it on the freeway when he least expected it. House fires, shootings, heart attacks, suicides he could handle as casually as posting a letter, but car wrecks turned him into a frightened boy. Outwardly, though, he never let it show, and his determination to handle every car wreck in a manly way was what gave him a rep in the department as being some sort of car-wreck guru. And now he was falling in love with a woman he’d met in almost identical circumstances to those in which he lost his sister.
Nadine. What did the two of them have in common except their competitive instincts? She was religious, and he was not. She was from a family of wealth and privilege, and he was not. She was headed for a college degree, which he had no interest in achieving. She was from a loving, tightly knit family, and he was from a home that had shattered into a thousand pieces. The best part was that she thought he was a hero. When you put it into perspective and thought about how Charlene had died, he couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something Freudian and ultimately twisted and scarred and maybe a little bit scary abou
t his attachment to Nadine.
The afternoon after Stacy’s date, Zak found himself on the front porch of the Newcastle estate in Clyde Hill, having been asked by the Hispanic woman who answered the door to wait outside for Nadine. During the few moments the front door was open, Zak heard shouting inside, one voice that was distinctly Nadine’s, another just as distinctly her father’s.
Moments after the maid closed the door, Kasey Newcastle exploded out of the house and stomped over to his Porsche, picked up a garden hose, and began spraying the windshield. If he noticed Zak, he didn’t let on. Zak couldn’t help noting he had a black eye.
Finally, Kasey spoke without looking at him. “Nadine used to collect lost pets. We had a stray parrot in the house for almost a year. She grew out of it. She’ll grow out of you, too.”
“Where’d you get the shiner?”
Newcastle reached for his eye. “Caught an elbow playing basketball, if it’s any business of yours.”
He left the water running, fired up the Porsche, and roared out of the driveway, narrowly missing Zak’s van. Moments later Nadine appeared and chirped, “Have you been waiting long?”
“Not long at all. I was having a nice little chat with your brother.”
Nadine walked over and turned off the water faucet. “He’s been in a foul mood all day.”
“I thought I heard arguing inside.”
“Yes, you probably did. Everybody’s in a bad mood. I won’t dance around it. My dad and I were fighting. Daddy doesn’t want me going out with you anymore.”
“Why not?”
“He thinks we’re not right for each other. How would he know? He hardly knows you. Plus, he thinks you’re after my money. I don’t even have any money.”
“You will have.”
“But that’s not why you’re going out with me.”
“No? Why am I going out with you?”
“Because you like getting slaughtered at tennis.” She laughed at the look on his face, and after a few moments he laughed, too.
“You still want to go out with me?”
“Daddy says he doesn’t think you’re good enough for me and that any other guy in your position would bow out politely. He said you simply don’t have the common sense to select yourself out. He thinks life is this Darwinian thing. Well, it’s not worth talking about, because I don’t listen to him anymore. Of course I’m going out with you.”
30
August
Zak felt something whir past his ear and then heard a sonic-boom crack open the morning; it was a moment or two before he connected the events. Somebody was shooting at them, and the bullet had passed so close he wondered why it hadn’t ripped through the back of his brain at two thousand feet per second.
After the first shots resounded, Giancarlo sped ahead as if scalded, and so did Stephens. Muldaur was already in the lead, which gave Zak the number four position on a road that cried out to be ridden single-file: steep, barely negotiable, full of loose rock and off-camber grades on either side. Without hesitation, he tried to pass Stephens, who now was slowing him down. Out of some sense of fair play, he took the worst part of the track and left the better section for Stephens, but Stephens felt him coming and swerved in front of him, rubbing Zak’s front tire with his rear. For a moment Zak was on the verge of crashing.
Regaining his balance, he tried to move up once more, but again Stephens swerved in front of him until it became obvious that his plan was to hold Zak back. Although Zak was the stronger rider, he was being forced to linger behind Stephens, who didn’t want to be the last man in line and the first target any more than Zak did. Apparently it wasn’t strength that would decide the last man, but dirty tricks.
After they rounded the bend, they continued to press on at a rapid pace, knowing that this next stretch through the trees was steep and straight for almost an eighth of a mile; if the Jeep people got motivated, they might sprint up the road on foot in time to pick them off one by one.
As the road opened, Zak pushed harder on the pedals until he pulled alongside Stephens, who gave him a leering grin, and then alongside Giancarlo. Both were breathing hard, maybe too hard.
Zak knew he wouldn’t catch Muldaur, at least not on this first stretch—he was already fifty feet in front—but he tried anyway. He felt sick to his stomach, both with the effort and the thought that his friend Giancarlo was now last in line and in the first position to take bullets. Devil Take the Hindmost was the informal name of a race on the bike velodrome. The last guy around on specified laps had to drop out. This could turn into the same game, except here the last guy might be dead.
By the time they’d ridden the long straight stretch, Zak realized they were probably safe for a while. “They think we have guns. That we’re waiting for them.”
“That’s why they’re not rushing us,” said Muldaur, from up in front. “If I hadn’t set off those firecrackers, we’d be dead now.”
As the road climbed to the right, the surface turning into hard-packed clay, Zak took a quick look behind him. He saw Giancarlo and, tight on his tail, Stephens, who was trying to edge him out the same way he’d edged out Zak.
“Okay,” said Muldaur. “We’re out of sight, so it’s time to slow down. Riding like this screws up your system.” Muldaur had dressed as Hugh once again, the helmet loosened so that it rode low, the sunglasses askew, false teeth in place. They carried water packs on their backs, enough to drink for at least a couple of hours in this heat, the plastic feeding tubes dangling near their cheeks. Their pockets bulged with gel packs, Clif Bars, small bags of raisins and dates. The three slowed their pace and pedaled more or less as a trio, while Stephens steamed up the road ahead of them and around the next bend.
“I thought we were going to slow down,” said Zak.
“Don’t ask me,” Muldaur said. “He wants to blow up, that’s his business.”
Giancarlo came up alongside them. “What was with all the pushing and shoving?”
“He gets like that if there’s any competition,” Muldaur answered.
“Or if somebody’s shooting at us?”
“I should have warned you.”
“I was on the verge of smacking him,” said Giancarlo.
Two minutes later they found a tree down across the road, Stephens sitting on it, his hands shaky when he pushed the CamelBak tube into his mouth. The tree hadn’t been down when Zak and Muldaur traversed this road the day before, and it confounded Stephens. It confounded Zak, too.
Muldaur dismounted, lifted his bike over the tree, and continued to pedal up the mountainside at a measured pace. “I left it attached to the trunk, so they’re going to need a saw or an ax to get it loose.”
“You did this?” said Stephens.
“Yesterday when I took that ride by myself. I had a feeling they were going to haze us for the whole trip, and this was one way to stop them.”
Zak knew even with the aid of a truck and ropes, the tree was too big and too heavy to move. He doubted Kasey and the others had a chain saw, though most locals would probably carry one. Muldaur had taken them on this route because he knew it was the only direction where they couldn’t be followed.
“Any more roadblocks?” Giancarlo asked.
“As many as we have time for,” Muldaur said, pulling a folding camp saw out of his jersey pocket with one hand and waving it. Zak and Giancarlo lifted their bikes over the log and remounted. Stephens, who appeared too tired to get up, said, “So this is why he said to slow down?”
“You should have listened,” said Giancarlo.
“Yeah, well, uh, he should have explained himself. I thought they would get their trucks and be on us any second. I figured the last one in line—”
“We know what you figured,” said Zak.
“Well, wait, uh, wait a minute. Aren’t you going to wait for me? I need a breather.”
A few minutes later they were climbing through trees so dense they could no longer see the contours of the mountain. The road surface w
as smoother, almost like a clay tennis court, and from time to time Zak saw the sunlight glinting through the branches of the Douglas firs to the southeast as they traversed another of the switchbacks. Zak knew that after they reached Lake Hancock there were two separate and very long climbs above it, one south of the water and one north. But they wouldn’t reach the lake for another twenty or thirty minutes. “So what’s the plan?” asked Zak.
“To get up this mountain and out of range of those rifles,” said Muldaur. “After that we’ll figure out something.”
“You want to ride as slow as you can and still stay ahead of them,” Zak said, directing his words at Stephens. “You start filling your legs with lactic acid, you’ll be a goner. That means you need to keep your heart rate as low as you can.”
“I was keeping it low,” Stephens said, defensively.
“No, you weren’t. Listen, the body produces lactic acid in everything it does. Under normal conditions your body clears the lactic acid, so it doesn’t accumulate. But when you’re working out, you can go past your lactic threshold, which is the highest point at which your pumping heart is able to clear the poisonous by-products. Above that point your muscles produce lactic at an accelerated rate, and the buildup retards your ability to transport oxygen from your bloodstream to your muscles. You rapidly get weaker. When you stay below the threshold, you can maintain most of your strength. Once above it, I’d guess you’ll have twenty minutes, after which you’ll be worthless.
“I know you don’t have a heart monitor,” added Zak, “so just try to go hard, but not so hard that you can’t carry on a conversation. You get to that point, you’re overdoing it.”
“I’ll try,” Stephens said. “Thanks for the pointers. And I’m sorry about getting pushy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The hills were beautiful this morning, Zak thought, as he caught a sliver of a view out over the valley cradling the towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie, and as he felt the warm winds wafting down from Snoqualmie Pass forty miles distant. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, but the temperature was in the high eighties.
