A different variety of fern luxuriated under these tall trees, a larger, metallic fern, with serrated edges. “You miss your parents,” I said.
“And the piano. Very much. And everything else. Ordinary things. I miss being a person.”
I had trouble saying it, but I managed. “So do I.” I was quick to add, “But maybe you’re right.”
It had been a long time since any people had made it this far into the woods. There was the deer path through the underbrush, the earth indented with the fine prongs of hoofprints.
“What is it you’re not telling me?” she asked.
One night when I woke I could not remember my mother’s face. The names of the people I had known were wooden beads, worn, colorless. Matilda, Connie. What did they sound like, these people, when they laughed, when they said good-bye? What sort of man had I been, one of those people who say good morning, or simply hello. Or had I been the type of person who never spoke at all, always in a hurry? Had I defended killers? Had I been an expert at maritime law, or perhaps sports law, when a football player can ask for a new contract? What sort of lawyer had I been?
This had been developing hour by hour. I had wanted to keep it secret. I had been out of touch with humanity too long. I could not remember. I had no judgment. My mind was dying.
It was early the next evening.
A deer crashed through the ferns, falling. We hurried to its side. The deer backed away and reared up, trembling. He could not command his forelegs. His eyes were wild, his breath hard, red mucus bubbling at his nose.
She embraced the creature, calming it with a whisper.
There was a hole in the deer’s side. It was oddly bloodless, and I could smell the sulphur, the lead. The deer fell into a slumber, one leg kicking, its eyes unfocused.
Rebecca already knew what to do.
She sliced one of her fingers with a single bite, and let the blood flow onto the shivering tongue of the young buck. “Someone shot this deer with a pistol,” she said, anger in her voice.
She shifted the deer so the blood streamed freely into his mouth. I had never heard her sound like this. “Who hunts with a handgun?” she said.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” I said, suddenly afraid.
“Cruel,” she said, her voice trembling. “It’s vicious.”
“This deer is going to be perfectly fine,” I said. I didn’t want to add what I thought, that the nine-millimeter had passed through both lungs.
She said, “Because of my blood.”
I didn’t like the way she sounded. “Things like this happen—”
“I can’t let them get away with this,”
I was afraid of what she was about to do. “They didn’t mean any harm.”
She gave me a look. I had never seen her like this. “They’ll never do this again,” she said.
I wanted to tell her to wait. I wanted to tell her that revenge was tempting but unwise. I wanted to urge her to forget. I wanted eloquence, but all I had was silence.
She was gone.
The buck woke, kicking, lifting his head. He scrambled to his knees. And when he looked up at me I felt the keen, wordless life at the center of him.
The deer jerked to his forefeet, and then at last stood on his four hooves. He stood like a marble deer, a statue, graceful, nose to the wind. He shook his head like a dog, his tail a quick blur.
He took a step. He trotted, and vanished.
As I hurried through a scrim of young redwoods I knew what Rebecca was about to do.
49
A shot, several shots, a string of them. The reports echoed unevenly, the last shot louder than the others.
When I reached the scene it was peaceful. A hatchet lay on the ground, dark with old sap, and a few chunks of green firewood scattered where someone had dropped them. In a clearing a tumble of belongings spilled in all directions, sleeping bags and cooking implements, and a small stove with a shiny blue canister of butane. A yellow Bic lighter was half-tucked into a packet of Drum cigarette tobacco. A backpack with a two-liter bottle of Jose Cuervo leaned against a stump.
A man sprawled with his arms outstretched, watching for meteors, studying the constellations. He wore jeans and a thick sweater, the wool pilled and baggy. The cleats of his hiking boots were clogged with mud, his electronic wristwatch set to display a game, what looked like a tiny football field blinking off and on.
He was not breathing. He had no pulse. He was warm, and I touched the wounds in his neck with affection, even reverence. He clutched a packet of freeze-dried chicken in one hand, preserved meat the consistency of mixed nuts. The fire gave forth blue smoke, two or three slivers of flame struggling, snapping. In the backpack tossed onto a blue plastic ground cover was a box of bullets, torn open, the copper shells glittering.
I heard it out there in the darkness, a steely click, a ratcheting sound, the gun being reloaded.
I could smell the male sweat, hear the labored panting, the heavy step. He was watching. There was a gagging sound, retching, nothing coming up.
“Don’t—” he said. His voice caught. Don’t move, he meant to say.
“I swear to God don’t move.” His message and his actual choice of words did not quite match, but I understood him.
He was in deep darkness, but the firelight glittered off the gun. The weapon was pointed at me.
I’m not real.
He stayed where he was. I didn’t blame him at all for surveying the fuming kindling, the wind snatching the edge of the ground cover and turning it, at one corner, like an invisible housekeeper. I took a position opposite him, at the edge of the clearing.
You can’t see me.
We can tell by silence what a person will not do. This man was waiting for the next important event in his life. He kept still. He was telling himself he would stay like this all night, until daylight.
I am not here.
He approached the fire haltingly, the pistol in both hands, elbows locked, arms straight. The weapon aimed perfunctorily at one thing and then another, as though the barrel of the gun was his organ of vision. The gun pulled itself upward, aiming at the stars, aimed down at the backpack, back at the fire.
Only then did he kneel beside his companion, touching him on the arm, on the forehead, crouching beside his friend. He scrabbled on the ground for some dried spines of redwood needles, and tossed them onto a last, resurgent flame. The flame died, the flame returned. The smoke spun upward, and the man began to reason with his memory, telling himself a new version of what had happened, already becoming a bad witness.
Why did it continually surprise me, the warmth of living flesh?
When I was finished with him I felt it all return, all my memories. Of course I remembered my mother, the articles on child psychology she had picked out on the old Underwood, “How We Know that Infants Feel Pain and Joy,” an article I had forgotten completely until then. And my father’s pride in these articles. He would make photocopies of them from the Contemporary Education Journal, the words in white, the background black, my mother’s name—Eleanor Campion Stirling—in letters of perfect porcelain.
I tasted the last moments of Richard Stirling, sunlight on the sidewalk, broken glass.
I did not find her that night. I called for her, but I believed I knew what she was experiencing.
When the next night began and there was still no sign of her I began to doubt.
If I had a child I would want him to learn this difficult truth: fear is what we have to accept. We will never be completely unafraid, and the best among us will learn to wear the fear like jewelry, fine points of color.
I knew Rebecca would come to me again. But I also knew that if I was not really Richard Stirling, then Rebecca was a stranger, too.
She came to me sometime after midnight. She stood across the warm pool from me, a woman wandering off from a soiree. Her posture was tentative, apologetic.
Then she hurried into my arms. “They’re coming,” she said.
Her step so close
to the pond made it tremble. I was fully clothed, waiting there because I expected her to return to this place where we had been happy. It was the thing in the woods that most resembled a mirror, and I knew we were both drawn to it, the way a unicorn in the old tapestries is captured by a looking glass in the hand of a virgin.
“They aren’t dressed like the other men,” she continued breathlessly. “They’re soldiers.”
“What is that noise?” I said. There was a diesel racket in the distance.
“Richard, don’t laugh. They have machines.”
I was so delighted do be with her again, the news struck me as wonderful, a celebration about to begin. “Tanks?”
“And machine guns. It’s been so wonderful, Richard. I’ve been so glad to have this.”
I knew what she was about to say next. But we have to end it.
I picked my way across the water on the dark stones, leading her by the hand. Mist swirled on the surface of the pond, and a frog downstream splashed across the running water.
She tugged my arm, turning me to face her. Her gray eyes met mine. “We have to go back.”
I sighed: that’s impossible. But even as I made the sound I was aware how forced it sounded. I was trying to hide from both of us how angry her words were making me. Back. Back where the best moment a human being has all day is a hot shower and a carnal spasm of bliss just before falling asleep. Back to that?
She put her hand on my cheeks, my lips, as she had when greeting me in our first evenings together, seeing with her fingertips. “I can’t do it again, Richard. I can’t take a life like that ever again.”
I surprised myself. I parted my lips to argue that of course she could. She could get used to it. She could learn what I had learned.
“You’re telling me we should go back,” I heard myself say, “to the mirror.” It was another tactic that I had found effective. When all else fails pretend to be ignorant.
“Connie knows where it is.”
“But I thought you said there was nothing inherently special about it. That what happened to me had to do with my own nature.” I wanted to ask why, just once, she couldn’t fail to get the point. Why couldn’t she be mistaken? Why did she have to be so right.
Her eyes told me she knew something, a secret.
Then she shifted her gaze, a mannerism of sighted people. We can talk with our eyes, and we can hide. Was she learning to tell half-truths, the worst kind of lie? She smiled. “You forget—we may not be able to find the mirror at all.”
It sounded uncomfortably like something I might say. “You’re proving my point. It won’t work.”
She said, “I have something to show you.”
“The cops have to react. They will react. It’s a system—dutiful, joyless plodding. The whole world gets up in the morning. But we’re more real than these people.” Did I believe this?
She put her hand on my arm, a gesture I had always found lovely. But for a moment I felt she was telling me how wrong I was.
She said, “There’s someone I want you to talk to.”
50
“You told me he was a friend,” said Rebecca.
A generator nearby fell silent. In the sudden absence of sound the chuff of the surf was clearly audible, and the electronic buzz of the Vacancy sign across the highway. Redwoods sheltered a strip of buildings, sweet alyssum flowing from a windowbox, the Bud sign dark. Adjoining the diner was a motet, a small office with a Coke machine and a row of cabins. Several military vehicles were parked among flowering acacias. The tires had cut tracks in the drifts of yellow pollen.
“Go see him,” Rebecca urged.
A few low clouds drifted across the sky. Was it my imagination, or was Orion beginning to dim? I said, “Joe Timm is not going to be one of our benefactors.”
She leaned against me, her breath at my ear. “What harm is there in trying?”
Even then one of my mental flashcards spoke for me. “Don’t ask a question when you don’t know the answer.”
“You’re afraid.”
It sounded like a quip, a bit of mental tennis. “I’m afraid I’ll kill him.”
Something clattered among the military vehicles. A helmeted figure lay down, deliberately, yawning. The sound had been his gun, failing. The uniformed men in the shadows slumped, drowsing against the trees, lolling in the trucks.
I drifted, finding the crack in the door a passageway, folding between the door and its jamb with a surprising pleasure, straining my body through a slit.
The cabin had a pine desk, and a lamp with a green shade. The entire place was small, a small stone fireplace, and a bed with a firm, diminutive mattress. Joe Timm sat at a telephone. “I’ve been out with them most of the night. They’ve got the National Guard out of Camp Roberts,” he was saying. “Tearing up the woods. The Sierra Club is furious because a helicopter startled a nest of red-tailed hawks.”
You can’t see me.
He turned, looking vaguely in my direction. The hand that held the receiver to his ear was pink, two or three hairs on each knuckle.
He turned back to the desk, idly fingering the beaded metal chain of the lamp. The voice on the phone was faint, short of breath.
“I feel sorry for the birds, too. I feel sorry for all of us.” His eyes darted from one point to another in the room, and then he gazed hard at the knotty pine wall, as though trying to visualize his wife so clearly she actually appeared before him. “I even feel sorry for the two of them.”
The far-off voice spoke again, reassuring, soothing.
“No, I can’t sleep,” he replied. “I tried, but I just lie there thinking. How is that new night nurse working out?” He listened, the metal chain swinging when he released it. “Have her read you one of those E.F. Benson stories, Georgie and Lucia. Miss Mapp. I’ll be home in another couple of days. It won’t be long now.” There was a silence, the mosquito voice of the phone the only sound in the room. Then he said, “I love you, too.”
He hung up the phone but sat quietly, gazing at nothing with a gentle smile.
He heard my step and stiffened, his hand going to his hip. I expected a handgun, but he produced a radio, antenna wiggling.
“Put it away, Joe,” I said.
He put the radio down. It stayed at his elbow. “This is just what I deserve. A personal visit.”
“What happened to your wife?” I said.
“She’s stable. Weak, but in no danger.”
“Her heart?”
His eyes went hard. He didn’t want to talk about her, not with me. “She’s recovering from pneumonia.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I should have stopped you that first night, at the cemetery.”
“You take on too much of a burden,” I said. I liked the way I sounded.
“Do you have any idea what you have done to my career? I was on This Week in Northern California talking about how law enforcement isn’t a matter of force, it’s a matter of knowledge. I was great. It happens—you have a good day, all the words falling into place. I was casing office space for my campaign for state senator. Two days later I’m telling reporters I can’t help them with their questions.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know you’re not.” He reached into the desk drawer and withdrew a huge handgun, the biggest revolver I’d ever seen. When he put it on the desk the lamp shade trembled. “I understand that you’re impervious to bullets. I’d like to see what you can do with your head blown off.” It was only then I realized how scared he was.
“I’m impressed the way everyone keeps producing newer and bigger guns.” All these Popeyes with their various cans of spinach. “All of this has really done wonders for your spirits.”
Joe smiled like someone who’d just had facial surgery, not sure his mouth would stay in place. He had lost even more weight than I thought.
I straightened a framed reproduction on the wall, a Monet, a woman with a parasol. “Ever get those cracks in your patio
fixed?
He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and blinked. He shifted the radio to one corner of the desk, the pistol to the other. “I got some sealant,” he said at last. “Rubber-based, used that on the cracks.”
“It didn’t work very well, did it?”
“No.”
“I could ask Stella. A little legal coercion; we’ll have a new slab poured by the end of the month.”
Joe shook his head, laughing despite himself, putting one hand on his radio transmitter.
I said, “We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“That’s nice of you.”
This mild sarcasm surprised me. I had considered Joe to be one of those people who didn’t need irony, saying one thing and meaning quite another, to make a point. He had been so manly, hard-hewn.
“They’re going to finish the two of you,” Joe was saying. He did not say we. He stood with a gasp. He fished in a pocket and brought out a roll of antacids.
He did not look at me when he said, “They have those dogs they use after plane crashes, hunting for bodies. The State Forestry people made an arrangement with the FAA. These hounds can find remains in trees, anywhere. I realized we were going about it all wrong, scanning for metabolic activity from the air. You’d be surprised how many big animals there are, bears, cougars. We took quite a census. But we forgot that you two aren’t really alive.”
I waited.
He chewed the antacids, and said, “I get these back spasms. Right here, right above my butt.” He turned back to the desk, the bright circle of light. “One or two more nights, that’s all you have.”
“This is absurd.” I said this with my best conference manner, flippant, disbelieving. You act this way when the opposition proves your expert witness got his geology degree from secretarial school.
He winced. “They shipped up a truck load of Ziegler coffins, those steel containers they use when bodies might be toxic. They brought up a dozen or so. They’ll take you apart, put you in these metal boxes—”
I laughed.
He sat again. It was an effort. “You look great, Richard, except when you do that.”
The Judas Glass Page 25
