The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  The car slowed, coming to a stop. I gripped the wrench in my right hand and prepared to lunge out of the trunk. I would surprise Lockwood and kill him. But the Accord began to move again, turning right and accelerating until it reached an aggressive speed.

  I tried the worm screw on the wrench again. It turned, tightening the jaws of the wrench until they closed on the first hex screw. I held the wrench between the palms of my hands, my fingers curled and wilted by the cold. I had to concentrate my effort as if I were a small child attempting some feat far beyond my abilities, my arms shaking so badly that merely lining the screw up with the jaws of the wrench took forever.

  By the time I got the third screw out, my body had stopped shaking. Whether the calm came from my effort and concentration on completing my task or from entering a new stage of hypothermia, I didn't know. As the last screw fell, the trunk opened a crack. Now, the only impediment to my opening the trunk was a wire that connected the trunk latch to the trunk release lever beside the driver's seat, a wire that I could remove with a simple tug from my pliers.

  I pushed the trunk lid up a few inches and the interior light of the trunk turned on. I quickly closed the lid. I had forgotten about that light. I waited and listened to see if my mistake had caught Lockwood's attention, but he didn't change his speed. I removed the bulb, covered the other taillight bulbs, and opened the trunk again. The highway passed under me at about sixty miles an hour, disappearing into a darkness that held no other car light, no house lights, no glow of city lights. I wanted out of that trunk, but I didn't want the pain of hitting the pavement at that speed.

  My shivering returned, tearing at the muscles in my calves, arms, and back. I needed to act soon or I would be too frozen to do anything—or dead. I tore the grease towel into three equal pieces, folding two of them into rectangles roughly the size of my feet, moving carefully to attach the rags to the bottoms of my feet using the duct tape, wrapping it around and around to make shoes. I wrapped the third section of the grease towel around the handle of the crescent wrench in a wad big enough to choke off the exhaust coming from the tailpipe. I quietly ripped off another piece of tape about three feet long, tying one end to the hole in the trunk lid where the lock used to be. I replaced the taillights so that no light would seep from the trunk as I opened the lid. Then I cut the trunk release wire with my pliers, holding the lid shut with the tape. I tested my escape hatch, pushing it open a few inches with one hand and pulling it back down with the tape in the other. It was time to escape.

  I let enough tape loose to allow the trunk to open a foot or so, enough space that I could ease my shoulders through, but hopefully, not so much as to draw Lockwood's attention. I slithered head first over the backside of the car, holding the lid down against my back with the duct tape in my right hand, the towel-wrapped wrench in my left. The frigid air took my breath away.

  I shoved the wrench into the tailpipe with all the strength I could muster, the rag stopping the flow of exhaust, the carbon monoxide backing up into the manifolds and heads. I held the stopper against the pressure of the exhaust until the car sputtered, coughed twice, then died, rolling silently toward the shoulder of the road. When it had slowed to a crawl, I leapt from the trunk and ran as fast as I could in my duct-tape shoes, heading for the woods on the side of the road.

  As I reached the tree line, I heard the car door slam shut. I kept running. Branches ripped at the flesh of my arms. I kept running. Another few steps and Lockwood yelled something unintelligible. I couldn't understand the words, but I understood the rage. I kept running. A few feet more and I heard the first crack of a gun being fired.

  I had never been shot at before. And with the night I was having—getting strangled into unconsciousness, chained to cinder blocks, and nearly freezing to death in a trunk—it never occurred to me that things could get worse. I lowered my head and serpentined as I ran, charging blindly through the woods. The first bullet ripped into the bark of a jack pine ten yards to my right; two more bullets split the cold night air above my head. I looked over my shoulder to see Douglas Lockwood in the glow of the taillight, his right arm raised, pointing a gun in my direction. Before I could worry anymore about bullets, the ground dropped from under my feet, and I tumbled into a gully. Dead branches and scrub brush tore at my frozen skin. I jumped to my feet, clutching a sprig of birch for balance and listening as another gunshot sent a bullet well above my head.

  Then silence.

  Standing erect, I could see over the bevel of the gully. My car was fifty yards away, its high beams casting a cone of light up the highway. Lockwood aimed his gun toward the sound of my fall, unsure of where I was. He waited for another sound, a breaking twig or the crackle of dead leaves, to hone his aim. He listened; but I stood still, my body shaking violently from the cold now that I had stopped running. Lockwood looked at the back end of my car, bent down, and pulled the wrench from the tailpipe, throwing it into the woods.

  He headed for the driver's-side door. With the stopper gone from the tailpipe, the car would start. He had headlights with which he could flood the countryside. I scrambled out of the gully, running deeper into the woods, dodging what I could dodge, and getting scraped and whipped by sticks I could not see. By the time he turned the car around, I had put a hundred yards of thick forest between us. Barely any light from the headlights seeped through the thicket. I skated down a small hill, and the headlights disappeared behind the horizon.

  He would search the wood—at least that's what I would do. He can't let me live. He can't allow me to make it back to civilization to tell what I know. I kept moving, spikes of pain shooting up from my toes with each step, my eyes adjusting enough to the darkness that I could avoid the fallen trees and branches in my way. I stopped to catch my breath, listening for footsteps. I could hear nothing. He had to be out there, somewhere. As I strained to hear, I became dizzy, my thoughts disjointed and thick. Something was wrong. I tried to grab a sapling, but my hand refused to obey my command. I fell.

  My skin felt hot. I had learned about this in school. What was it? That's right. People dying of hypothermia will feel hot and shed their clothes. Was I dying? I needed to move, to keep moving, to get blood flowing. I needed to stand up. I pushed against the ground with my elbows, getting on to my knees. I could no longer feel them. I could no longer feel the frozen earth against my skin. Am I dying? No. I won't allow it.

  My legs wobbled like a newborn foal, but I got to my feet. Which way was I running? I couldn't remember. Every direction seemed equally foreign, equally foreboding. I must move—or die. The wind had been at my back, hadn't it? I chose a direction and walked—the cold wind pushing me on. For all I knew, I could have been walking right back to Lockwood. It didn't matter. Death by bullet might be preferable to death by hypothermia.

  I didn't see the land fall away again, and I fell down a steep grade, bouncing like a gunny sack full of potatoes, landing in the middle of a cart path, two parallel tracks worn bare by truck tires. The sight of the path filled me with resolve. I rose to my feet, randomly stumbling in the direction I faced, my knees buckling and shaking, threatening to give way with every step. When I thought my body had reached its limit, when I got to a point where I could do little more than fall forward, I saw a glint of reflection a few feet ahead of me. I blinked to clear my eyes, believing that my muddled brain had thrown a final taunt at me. But there it was again. A sliver of moonlight piercing the clouds had sailed to Earth like a well-aimed arrow, ricocheting off the dirty glass window of a hunting shack: the promise of shelter, maybe a blanket, or—better yet—a stove.

  I found a reserve of strength I didn't know I had, a final gasp of life. I dragged my feet along the cart path. The cabin had a metal door that was locked, but the window next to the door would break easy enough. I found a rock, but my fingers were useless nubs on the ends of my arms, so I picked the rock up using my wrists and forearms. I threw the rock and my body against the glass, shattering a small corner of the window. I
slid my arm through the hole, reaching in, trying to grip the door knob firm enough to turn it. My hand flopped impotently against the knob. I was so close to rescue, yet if I could not get in, it meant nothing.

  Dizziness washed over me again. My right leg snapped, and I fell against the hut, my left leg struggling to keep me upright. I tipped my head back and drove my forehead into the window, breaking the glass into shards that cascaded to the floor. With my elbows I punched the remaining glass fragments out of the frame and lunged through the opening, falling to the floor, pieces of glass hooking and tearing my stomach as I fell.

  I crawled on my knees and elbows across the floor, taking inventory of my new digs as much as the pale moonlight would allow: a sink, a card table with four chairs, a couch, and…a wood-burning stove. Jackpot! The hunters had left a small stack of jack-pine logs near the stove, and beside the stack of wood I found an old newspaper and a canister about the size of a soda can with two long-stem matches. I slid a match through my gnarled fingers and struck it against the side of the cast-iron stove. My shakes caused me to drive the head of the match into the stove with such force that it snapped the stick in two, its head falling into the darkness.

  “F-F-F-FUCK!” I uttered my first word out loud since I'd been hit with the whiskey bottle. The sound scraped hard against my sore throat as it came out.

  I slid the second match into my left hand, pressing my wrist against my abdomen to steady it. I touched the head of the match to the metal of the stove then jerked my torso, causing the match to strike the metal hard enough to light it without breaking it. I turned the match on its side and watched the flame grow. I lit a corner of newspaper, the flame licking the dry paper, climbing quickly toward my hand, the heat from the flame feeding me; and I consumed it with a pauper's gluttony.

  As light from the burning newspaper filled the small room, I found strips of pine bark beside the woodpile. Stacking the bark across the burning newspaper, I watched it take to the flame. Soon I had a fire with the authority of wood. The bark led to sticks; the sticks led to logs; and in a matter of minutes, I found myself squatting before robust fire, rotating my body in quarter turns, letting each side heat up to the edge of pain before turning.

  As I revolved on my imaginary spit, as my skin thawed, as my senses came back to life, the many cuts on my body found their voice. Gashes covered my arms and feet. I pulled splinters of glass from my abdomen. One particularly large scrape across my shoulder still had pine needles stuck to it. The skin on my neck, where Lockwood's belt had cut off my air, burned a reminder of how close I'd come to dying. I unwrapped the tape from around my feet, the blood chewing its way back into the capillaries and crevices of my toes, setting them on fire. I rubbed the muscles of my calves and chest and jaw where cramping from my shivering still stabbed at me like a spike.

  As soon as my joints thawed enough to stand up, I went to the window, fireplace poker in hand, to look and listen for Douglas Lockwood. The wind, which had been at my back as I ran through the trees, had grown to gale force. It whipped the gingham curtain and whistled as it swayed the pines outside. It sounded ominous, but it was a godsend because it carried the smell of smoke away from my pursuer. I saw no sign of Lockwood. I heard no footsteps. He had a gun, but he couldn't shoot what he couldn't find. I tucked the curtain into the window sash, trying to make certain that it covered every inch of the window, preventing the fire's light from bleeding through to the outside. I listened and waited. I would make Lockwood come inside the hut if he wanted to kill me. Now that I was ready for him, he would have a hell of a fight on his hands.

  I squatted next to the window for at least an hour, straining to hear footsteps or see the barrel of a gun poke through the curtain where I had smashed the window. And after an hour, I started to believe he would not find me in that hunting shack. As I peeked out to look for any sign of Lockwood, I saw the blizzard that the weathermen had predicted. Snowflakes as big as cotton balls moved sideways in the wind, cutting visibility to near zero. Lockwood would never find me now. He wouldn't be crazy enough to stay in the woods in the middle of a blizzard. I shoved a couch cushion into the window frame to further seal the hole and gave up my vigil.

  I looked around the cabin, now lit by a wonderful, blazing fire, and saw it to be a single room about the size of a boxcar—no bathroom, no electricity, no phone. A pair of chest-high fishing waders hung from a hook on the wall near the sink. I walked over the broken glass to the waders, took off my blue jeans, which were wet and frozen, and slipped into the waders, hanging my jeans above the stove on the end of a broom handle. I found two large towels and a fillet knife in a cupboard. I took off my shirt, hanging it with my jeans, and draped the towels across my shoulders, wearing them like a shawl. I picked up the knife, touching its razor-sharp edge with my thumb, holding it in my hand, thrusting it into the shadows, killing Lockwood over and over again in my mind. I had clothes, heat, a couch, and a roof. I felt like a king. I believed in my escape. I believed that I was safe from the crazy man who'd spat Bible verses at me just before he tried to kill me. Yet, as I lay on that couch, I clutched the fillet knife in one hand and the fireplace poker in the other, waiting for one more fight.

  That night I slept like a man on a ledge. Every crackle of the fire woke me from my fitful slumber, sending me to the window to scan the woods for signs of Lockwood. As the new day broke, the storm maintained its crescendo with the wind whipping the snow into a blinding wall of white that would make a sled dog think twice. At first light, I stepped outside into twelve inches of snow to look for a water pump. The hut had a sink with a drain, but no faucet. I didn't find a pump, so I melted snow in a pan on the stove. I had enough wood to last a couple days, and as long as I had fire, I would survive.

  I changed back into my blue jeans and shirt, both of which had dried overnight, and I spent the morning inspecting the cabin with the benefit of sunlight. The hunters stored very little in the way of food. I found a can of beef stew well past its expiration date, a box of spaghetti noodles, and a few spices—enough to feed me until the storm passed.

  I would need a coat for my trip out of the woods, so I gathered all the supplies I could find and set to the task. I made sleeves out of my two towels, turning them into tubes and stitching them using fishing line and a flattened fish hook for a needle. The towel for each sleeve ran from my wrist to my chest, where I sewed them together, leaving a collar-like hole for my head. I slid my chest waders back on, attaching the suspenders over top of the towels to hold the sleeves in place. Then I marched around the room, stretching and testing my sartorial achievement, pleased with my creativity. Part one of my coat was complete.

  Around mid-morning I cooked half of the spaghetti noodles, eating them with an odd compliment of curry, paprika, and salt, washing them down with warm water. I could not remember eating a better meal. After lunch, I started making the rest of my coat. A thick gingham curtain covered the hut's only window, its bright red checkerboard pattern reminding me of a restaurant tablecloth. I cut a hole in the middle of the curtain, turning it into a poncho. Then I pulled foam padding from the arm of the couch to use for a hat. When the time came I would fill my chest waders with pieces of cushion for insulation and tie on my hat and poncho with cords from the curtain. By the end of the day, I had a winter coat that would have been the envy of the Donner Party.

  As the sun began to set, I again checked the weather. Although snow still fell, it was not falling as heavily or as horizontally as before. I stepped out into snow up to my knees and realized that I would need snow shoes. I thought about that while I made supper, using the fillet knife to open the can of beef stew, cooking it on the stove until it bubbled.

  After supper, I sat in the light of the fire fashioning snow shoes out of one-by-eight pine baseboards that I'd pried off the wall. I used nylon cords from the guts of the couch to bind the boards to the chest waders’ boots. When I finished, I smiled with satisfaction and curled up on what remained of the couch for my se
cond night in the hut.

  In the morning, I cooked and ate the last of the noodles, cut the cushions into strips, stuffing my chest waders with the insulation, and put on my gingham poncho and my hat. I doused the fire with snow, and then, before leaving the hut, I used a piece of charred wood from the stove to write a message to the owner on the card table.

  Sorry for mess. Hut saved my life. I'll pay for damage. Joe Talbert.

  My final act was to strap the fillet knife to my hip. I could not imagine Lockwood still stalking me through the woods, but I didn't see the whiskey bottle coming either. He wanted me dead. He needed me dead. I had the ability to send him to prison for trying to kill me—if not for murdering Crystal Hagen. If he thought like me, he'd be in those woods, holed up like a hunter—rifle in hand—waiting for me to walk in front of the crosshairs.

  Although I grew up in Minnesota, where you walk on snow almost as much as you walk on grass or concrete, I had never walked in snowshoes before. And I had certainly never walked on snowshoes made out of pine boards. It took a bit of practice before I hit my stride, each step sinking in snow up to my shin, which was a pleasant improvement over the knee-deep drudgery that would have bogged me down without the snowshoes. I broke two sticks off a dead tree to use like ski poles for balance. Each step required focus to keep the timing of my step coordinated with the transfer of weight. After twenty minutes I had only covered about a quarter mile, but my arduous pace did not concern me. I was warm, the weather was calm, and the woods appeared to be devoid of Doug Lockwood. And despite the threat of dying dampening my mood, the scenery of the snow-covered forest was breathtaking.