As Harold told him, he saw the shadow of Marcus’s face waver. “That’s fucking bullshit, isn’t it? He’d never let me go.”
“I think he thinks he might. He can justify killing me because I betrayed him. But you didn’t do anything but be in the wrong place. He hasn’t said so, but I think you remind of him of the son he lost. He was about your age when he died. In the end, though, I don’t see how he can let you go. You know who he is. He’d be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life. Marcus, I . . .”
Harold’s voice broke. “I should have never.”
“It’s okay.”
“I was a fool to ask you to come on the trip. If I’d had any idea.” His voice faltered. “I’d give up my life if I thought—”
“It’s okay. We’re here now. We just have to figure out what to do.”
Harold heard the words, the calmness in the tone, and it came to him that their roles had switched. Harold, always looking forward, one plan fails try another, never giving in to doubt—now that was Marcus’s role. Part of it was Harold’s infirmity. Besides his ankle, he was weak from malnutrition. And the periods of delirium had become debilitating, robbing him of his spirit and resilience. It was hard to be Harold when you couldn’t keep thoughts together or bridge gaps in your memory.
“I don’t remember anything between here and the river,” he told Marcus. “I remember hearing your voice and Cochise dancing around the fire and you were there, and then the next thing I was here in the cave with a weight in my head. When I opened my eyes I was seeing two of everything.”
“You had a concussion, Dad.”
Dad? It was the first time Harold had ever heard Marcus call him that. No, that’s what he’d called out when Harold saw the fire. “Da . . . ,” the final consonant drowned out by the echo.
“Where’s Cochise?”
“Job said he ran away, but I don’t know. He was hanging around the cabin for a couple days. I could hear him shuffling and pawing at the door, and then nothing. Maybe he did run away. I hope so.”
“Did they chain you up with a combination lock?”
“Yeah.” A short laugh. “A bicycle lock. Four numbers. It took me like a couple minutes to roll it. He must have figured I was such a good kid, I never stole a bike before. I would have got away, too, but when he left me that time he forgot something, and when I opened the door, he was standing there. Man, when I pulled that chain out, I almost passed out. After that he put on a key lock I couldn’t pick.”
“What was the combination on the lock you picked?”
“Six five five four.”
“Six point five by fifty-four. That’s the caliber of his rifle.”
“So is that what you have, a combo lock?”
“Yes.”
“You try the caliber numbers?”
“No.” Harold began to shake his head and caught himself as the pain sharpened. “I haven’t been thinking too straight.” He shuffled over to the cave wall where the chain was locked to the iron ring.
“Can you see the numbers?” Marcus asked.
“No. It’s too dark. Could you teach me how to pick it?”
“Be pretty hard unless you read Braille,” Marcus said. “But once it gets light, we could try it. Maybe he bought a two-pack and programmed in the same combo.”
Once it gets light they’re going to take you away from me, Harold thought.
He said, “Sometimes I think I can hear the river running. Can you?”
Marcus shook his head. “But I don’t think we’re too far from the water. After we were walking, I started counting steps and got up to about eight hundred before we climbed to this cave. I used to run the eight hundred in track. That’s about the same in yards, so you figure a yard a stride, that’s a half a mile, give or take. And then maybe three hundred more feet up to get here.”
“What’s this look like on the outside?”
“The cave? It’s sort of a comma shape. You have to duck in and then there’s a passage that angles back and gets wider. Job cut some little trees to hide the mouth. It’s not easy to see until you’re standing in front of it.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. I’d hear planes going overhead and once I thought I heard a jet boat. But nothing for days now.”
They fell silent. Harold breathed slowly, the weight of hopelessness hanging on his shoulders. When he tried to speak, no words came out.
“We’ll get out of here, Dad.”
Again, that word.
“You’re my son,” Harold said simply. He stretched to the length of the chain and held his hand out. When Marcus did the same, he grabbed the boy’s hand and squeezed it.
“I didn’t mean it,” Marcus said. “When I told you the only reason I came was to see the canyon. I just wanted to see you. I’d heard so much, you’re the big success and people admire you. I thought when my uncle told you about my mom that you’d deny it. Say you never met her. But you owned up right away. It’s just hard putting myself out there, so I act like a hard-ass.”
Silence. A slight ticking of the bats.
“Most of them are still out hunting,” Harold said. “But the little ones are practically hairless and they can’t fly yet. I thought about catching one to eat.”
“I guess maybe you have enough hot sauce to choke it down.”
They listened to the bats making their small clicking sounds.
“That’s called echolocation,” Marcus said. “I read that most of the sounds they make are like two or three times higher pitched than humans can hear.”
Harold thought, In a little while it will be dawn, they’ll start flying back to the cave. Three hours, four at most, and he would never see his son again.
“If I had a knife,” Marcus said, “I could cut my way out like that guy did in Utah. The one who got trapped by a rock and cut off his hand with a multi-tool.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That guy. You don’t know?”
“I remember something about it.”
“If I had a knife or a sharp rock, I could cut through the Achilles tendon and get the chain off. But it looks like they swept this place pretty good. You can’t even find a pebble.”
Harold felt the scratching against his thigh, where the pieces of sharpened bone dug through the fabric. He drew them out, the two scapulas not much bigger than soup spoons, the femur ground to a point.
“What do you have there?”
Harold told him.
“A fox, huh?”
“I think he probably brought food here before and just panicked when he saw me.”
“No, he gave that rabbit to you. He knew you’d see me again and I could cut myself free. He knew the bones were magic. Give them to me. I can do this.”
“No. Best if I do it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it right away. I wasn’t thinking beyond weapons.”
“Can you even reach your ankle?”
“Maybe.” Harold sat and drew his left leg as close to him as he could. “Barely.” He spoke through gritted teeth.
“It has to be me,” Marcus said. “And you’re too weak. You couldn’t go for help. I can.”
“I don’t know how much pressure you can put on a leg with a ruptured Achilles.”
“Better than us sitting here waiting to die. Let me try. If I get free, I can get a jump on them. I can push one off the ledge and kill the other. I can go for the rifle.”
“Don’t even think about it. You’ll die for nothing. No, if I give you the bone, you have to promise me you’ll get as far from here as you can.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“You can. You have to. I would only drag you down. What did they do with your canoe?”
“They stashed it in the bushes. They were planning to go back for it, but I don’t think they did. If I can get across th
e river and find it, I can float down to the bridge in one day.”
“No, that won’t work,” Harold said. “Once they know you’ve escaped, they’ll find another access farther downstream. They’ll pick you off from the cliffs. They can cover country faster in a truck than you can in a canoe.”
“Then I’ll only float far enough to find the first road or house. Or maybe somebody will be on the river.”
“The river’s shut down. Or was.”
“I’ll find something. I’ll get help for you.”
It would come too late, Harold knew. But at least Marcus would have a chance. He lay down on the cave floor and stretched his arm out, his fingers clamped on the bone.
“Promise you’ll go,” he said.
“I promise.”
He felt Marcus’s hand clasp one of the scapulas.
Marcus took off his shoes and sat cross-legged. He placed his left ankle on top of his right thigh and poised the scapula over the raised ridge of the tendon. Harold saw him bite with his upper teeth at his lower lip.
“You’ll bite right through your lip. Just clamp your teeth together,” he said. “And don’t shut your eyes. It focuses the pain and makes it worse.”
“You got any other advice?”
“Find a way to get away from yourself. Get your mind out of this cave.”
“Maybe I should wait until a spirit animal comes to me, like your fox. Or maybe dream of a woman like that one at Indian Springs. The one who needed a shoulder to lean on.” His voice was jittery. He was just talking, stalling.
“Whatever works,” Harold said.
“I’ll try thinking about Cochise, see where that takes me.”
* * *
—
The first cut was shallow, a black smile forming as the scapula sliced across the back of Marcus’s ankle. Harold watched as the smile grew pregnant, then the quarter moon was obliterated as Marcus cut down harder and the blood flowed freely.
“Come on, Marcus,” Harold heard his son mutter. “You can do this.” His face contorted with the effort as he bore down on the scapula.
He sat back, panting.
“Just do it,” Harold heard him say. Again he pressed with the blade, sawing now, his face a mask of pain and his jeans black with blood.
“The fox isn’t working.” His sharp laugh rang off the cave walls. A small cloud of bats lifted from the stalactites and ticked in the darkness.
“Aaaugghh!” And again. “Aaaugghh!” The air was suddenly filled with bats.
“Are you through?”
“Not yet.”
“I thought I heard a pop. Are you sure?”
“No, goddamnit. I’m not through. Give me the other blade. Maybe it’s sharper.”
Harold stretched out his hand with the second shoulder blade.
Marcus’s entire body began to shake. “I don’t know if I can do this.” But then his outline stilled, and Harold heard Marcus breathe in once, then once more. He pressed down with a grunting effort, and when the tendon ruptured, his leg sprang from his thigh and jumped around as if in the throes of a seizure.
Marcus grabbed his knee and squeezed it to his chest. Gradually, his body stilled.
“I’ve still got to pull the chain out through the cut. God, it’s going to hurt.”
“You can do it,” Harold said.
“Let me breathe a minute.”
“Yank it through. The longer you wait—”
“I know. I have to turn the chain so the link is flat. It has to come out sideways. Okay, okay, I’m ready.”
When he yanked on the chain, his prolonged scream echoed on the cave walls.
“Are you okay?” No answer. “Are you okay, Marcus?”
“No.”
After a while: “That’s one way to get rid of a bunch of bats. Huh, Dad?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Stardust of Heaven
“Your dog wants out.” Inside the tent, silence. “He wants out. Should I let him out?”
“So he’s my dog now?”
“Make a decision.”
“Sure then.” Sean’s voice was muffled by his sleeping bag. “How much trouble can a three-legged mutt get into?”
Kneeling, he unzipped the tent flap. The dog bolted past him into the black. Sean could make out the bed of the night’s campfire coals, a soft cherry glow. Usually, he was meticulous about putting a fire out, but in this season of rain and drizzle there was no need, and the coals would make starting the breakfast fire easier.
Martha had climbed out of her bag and was pulling on her shoes.
“Where are you going?”
“To the loo,” she said. “Where else would I be going?”
“Don’t get lost.”
Sean pulled on his shoes and walked down to the riverbank. He lifted his eyes from the stars reflected on the pool. To his east, a thin band of teal over coral. Dawn’s lie. He recalled that it was during this hour of false promise that the girl had seen the scarecrow. It was coming full circle, he thought. He could feel a charge in the air. He smiled to himself and peed into the water, the stream of urine raising a steam.
“That one’s for you, Harold,” he muttered.
Back in camp, he fed sticks to the coals and fanned them to flame. He set his pot on the collapsible grill over the fire.
Martha’s flashlight bobbed as she came back up the path.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Cereal and powdered milk.”
“How exciting. I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I’m still not sure what the best plan is.”
“Follow Cochise,” Sean said.
“I knew that’s what you were going to say, but he isn’t a search dog and too much time has passed. Even Lothar can’t follow a scent after five days. Isn’t that what Katie told you?”
“Maybe he won’t need his nose. Maybe he’ll see something familiar, find a trail we can follow.”
“Speaking of, where did that damned critter go?”
* * *
—
To his relief, the pain was manageable, if constant. Marcus could put more weight on his foot than he’d thought. He couldn’t go uphill, or come to tiptoes, but he didn’t need to do any climbing. The long swale he’d been marched up nearly a week ago, a lifetime ago, with a gun barrel in his back, offered a gentle descent to the river. There, the pearl ellipse of water seemed not to move. It was moving, though, and even if Marcus could hobble to the bank, a part of him still doubted that he’d be able to summon the strength to wade or swim to the far side.
And it was to the far side that he’d have to go to find the canoe, and, in it, taped under the stern deck with duct tape, the cheap revolver he had traded a dirt bike for when he was sixteen, and which he had not told Harold about initially, knowing he would disapprove, or a half hour ago, because he knew Harold would make him promise not to try to rescue him. When Job had taken him captive on the riverbank, neither he nor his companion, Dewey, had bothered looking under the deck before carrying the canoe well back from the bank to stash in the bushes. How Marcus would climb back up to the cave to rescue Harold, if in fact he could find the canoe and the gun was still in it, Marcus didn’t know. But get there he would, even if he had to crawl.
To his right, silhouetted against the sky, was the long ridge terminating at Table Rock. Job, during one of his soliloquies, told Marcus that he’d lain down on its rough surface, four hundred feet above the river, for two days and two nights, trading shifts with Dewey, before Harold had come by in his canoe. And then he had shot the other man by mistake. Later, he’d found that Harold had screwed with the sighting turrets on the scope. He hadn’t said this in a spiteful way, in fact the opposite.
“Your father,” he’d said, “I admire him. He’s like a cat, but he’s down to his last life now. H
e’s become mortal. It will pain me to take the ninth life from him.”
“He’ll kill you,” Marcus had replied. “The last thing you’ll see is my dad in your dying eyes.”
“You’re quite bold for a young man in chains.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Marcus had said. “You’ll die with him in your eyes.”
Job had laughed. His laughter had filled the tiny cabin. But he had not mentioned Harold’s lives to Marcus again.
Now the long grasses were paling, and Marcus hurried on. He tried not to think about Harold, who had brought him to his chest and hugged him with surprising strength before they’d parted. They had debated, briefly and coldly, whether Marcus should free Harold in the same way that he’d freed himself. Harold had argued for it, saying it would give him the element of surprise when the men returned. He could lie in wait, unhampered by the chain. He might die bloody, but he had the sharpened femur of the rabbit, and it wouldn’t be all his blood.
Marcus had feared that Harold was in such a weakened state that cutting the Achilles might send him into shock, in which case he could offer no resistance at all.
In the end, and despite misgivings, Marcus had brought the bone to bear on Harold’s ankle. The tendon was much thicker and stronger than his own, and for minutes he sawed at it, while Harold made not one sound. It was the set of his face that Marcus remembered, the look far away, as he had wondered if Harold was thinking of the woman or was running with the fox.
* * *
—
Thirty yards down the bank, the river reached its widest point before funneling into a riffle. Marcus knew that the wide tailout would offer the shallowest ford, and as he made his way down the bank, more and more of the bend upstream came into view. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a glimmer of light. The light was coming from the east bank—perhaps, he thought, the uppermost of the two Table Rock campsites. It was a few hundred yards away, and for it to be visible at this distance, with dawn approaching, it had to be more powerful than the beam of a simple flashlight. A fire? If so, whose? It would not be Job or Dewey. The compound where they slept was on the same side of the river as the cave, and at least several miles away.
A Death in Eden Page 26
