by Lynn Cesar
Just to stand out here was a kind of paradise! Her hand not a tape-bound torment, but sedated in a fresh white plaster cast, its trauma in the past, contained and treated. And this place, these trees— other than and elsewhere from Jack Fox’s orchard of nightmares. What a balm to be here, watching a different sun approach a peaceful setting. Just down the highway, a path branched up a hillside. She followed it up through tawny grass, past blackberry vines with a few late fruit, all gilded by the slant sun. A nice view of the rolling hills opened out.
A sneaky sweet feeling of nostalgia came over her… and she identified its source: sunny afternoons with Mom in her canning corner came back— the smell of blackberry compote simmering on the stove, the light on ruby jars of strawberry jam freshly sealed in wax, the gems of other jars so warm and solid when Mom let Karen take them in her small hands.
She looked at the hands she had now: usefully callused, neatly sinewy on the backs and wrists. Mom had always trusted tasks to her hands, letting her take hold of her world. She remembered picking those blackberries, greedily reaching on legs not yet quite firm enough and falling into thorny disaster. Remembered Mom hugging her grief away, Mom’s comforting smell.
Karen sat on the grass, watching two oak trees ripple in the amber air. For all the terrors in her life, did every life have such sweetnesses as hers had also held? She supposed not, so luckless were many lives. Tears sprang to her eyes. Rising up on her knees, she stared disbelieving at the rippling oaks above her. In their sun-and-shadow dapple the leaves, like Pointillist brush-strokes, held the unmistakable image of Mom’s face! The breeze did not destabilize her face, but rippled it with life. There was a special secret glint of brightness in her deep-set eyes and a tender hesitation around her lips, as if she just might speak if she could choose the words.
Karen closed her eyes and shook her head, looked, and saw Mom still, the features crumbling in a stronger gust of wind, but the woman even more piercingly coherent within that commotion. Was Mom there? Or only in Karen’s own heart? So piercingly real. Look at her eyes— grief in her eyes and joy within the grief!
And then the sun was down. The trees were only trees, alive with wind.
For the first time in many days, terror was at bay. Karen remembered only sweetness and love and felt only sorrow. She knelt there in the grass and let the tears come freely. “Oh Mom… sweet precious Mom… Oh Susan… poor sweet Susan… ”
The stars were coming out when at last she wiped her eyes and got to her feet. To cry like that! It came so hard to her and seemed to drain her strength so utterly. And yet such relief and something like strength were in its aftermath. She thought of all that had been happening to her and found she could look at it and see it clearly for what it was, despite the fact what she saw was madness itself.
A man had broken her hand while almost raping her. She had killed the man, undressed his corpse, and buried that corpse on her own property. Simple facts, which would simply end most lives, destroy most people’s worlds. And yet these facts were not the worst.
Worse was poor Susan dead in a long steel drawer, only her lovely face eerily intact. But looking out of that dead lovely face— Karen saw it suddenly as a mask for another.
Or Wolf’s face as he chewed noisily on one of Dad’s peaches while, from behind the glaze of the man’s own brainless malice, something alien, something murderous looked out.
Worse was herself sticking Dad’s gun muzzle into her mouth and touching her own blood, still wet on a yellow dress stained a quarter century ago.
There was something in Dad’s earth, something in her own home ground, and it stared out at her from the eyes of the dead. It had killed Susan. It had killed Wolf, using Karen as its cat’s-paw. It had tried to kill Karen’s spirit, through her unripe body, decades ago. And it had tried to blow her brains out, mere days ago.
A monster in the earth. It was sanity to face it and insanity even to think it. She needed something— and it surprised her to realize it was not a drink she needed. No, somehow that had been buried in the compost heap in the dead of night. What she needed, she realized, was to hear the voice of a friend. A voice to pull her mind up out of this monstrous darkness.
There were no phones in the rooms of her dirt-cheap motel, only a pay phone next to the check-in desk. Needing to be alone with her call, Karen staggered down the trail and back onto the highway.
* * * *
On Bushmill’s quiet little main drag, she found a gas station and behind the counter of its mini-mart, a big country kid with pale eyes who wordlessly made her change for the ancient pay phone in the corner., He then sat there watching her as she fed in the quarters, watching her as if he’d never seen this done or that there was nothing else in his world to think about. She turned her back to him.
Someone answered with a single word that didn’t sound like what Kyle had written: “Hello. I’d like to speak to Kyle, please— I think he just took a room with you today.” It stunned her that she didn’t even know Kyle’s last name, that he hadn’t provided it. Didn’t know his last name, his age, his origin, though such intimacy lay between them, though she could still see his muscled arms laying a naked corpse in her steaming black compost. A complete stranger had brought a killer into her life. She had killed the killer and he had laid the killer’s corpse in her native ground.
“Who?” The voice sounded like an old man, an old man blurred and husky with drink.
“Kyle. He’s a big guy, black hair with some gray. Muscular… . “There was a mumble at the other end and she thought she heard the phone set down. She had just described a phantom to a phantom. Despair embraced her like rising black water. She looked around and the kid’s pale eyes were still adhering to her, so fixed that they seemed inhuman.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” The kid didn’t twitch, didn’t even blink. Gave the tiniest shrug, turned sluggishly on his stool, and faced the window behind him. The window was filled with the interior’s bright reflection and he resumed staring at her mirrored image.
She stared at it too, a shadow-Karen, gaunt-faced and wild-haired, a woman almost gone, eaten away to near-transparency by the night, by the dark earth…
The mumbly voice came back. She thought she made out the word message. “Please tell him Karen called. K-a-r-e-n. I’m in Bushmill. B-u-s-h-m-i-l-l. Will you please tell him? I’m at the Bide-a-Nite Motel.”
There was only what sounded like “… tell ‘im,” and the man hung up.
She walked back through a town that appeared utterly empty, though it couldn’t have been later than seven or eight. It seemed she was walking the seafloor under miles of water crushing down her shoulders. Each step sank her deeper in exhaustion, till she felt her walking was an illusion and that she was still bent shoveling black muck, digging a bottomless grave. Stepping at last into her room, closing the door… there was the letter on the desk. Let it stay. She would not look at it yet.
Her clothes fell from her. The bed… a safe place down at the very bottom of the universe. She dove in.
* * * *
She sat up in the dark as a vast uproar shook the walls. Her windows had grown larger, lost their blinds and— right outside them, in a flood of moonlight— blown branches surged against the panes. Deep within the tumult someone cried to her, a woman’s frail voice that pierced her heart. Karen saw Susan, pale, naked and storm-tossed in the leaves.
She sprang up and leapt to the door… no more than turning the knob when the door was snatched into the gale. Running into the slippery turmoil, she was a leaf blended into the blizzard with the rest. She ran through black and silver jungle after Susan, who twisted to reach her, but was pushed always onward— grass-like cold fur under their feet, cold leaves licking their nakedness.
They erupted into emptiness. Earth vanished under foot and they fell and fell into a vast black pit from whose floor far beneath glistened a huge reflected moon. It seemed they had endless time in that long fall, time to swim the rushing air and
reach at last each other’s arms. Susan’s breasts cold against Karen, the uprush numbing their skin. But their limbs locked at last, at last rejoined, their love snatched back from the night. And thus re-knit, they crashed against and sank beneath the liquid moon.
In their drowning, the moonlight showed them to themselves so clear in the liquid dark, so pale in the perfect black.
They were deep, so hopelessly deep, falling together when an upthrust of seething black roots enclosed Susan and tore her from Karen’s arms. Karen screamed for her, desperate to reach her, to pull her from the muck below. She fought, entangled in the roots. She could not lose her again!
Powerful arms dragged Karen upwards. Hot arms burning her, showing her that her own skin was cold as death. Arms and legs doubly clamped her, seared her till the lift and the warmth of them won her will and she became frantic to feel their warmth and rise back to the air.
“Susan!” she cried. All the sorrow on earth in her voice.
She sat up, alone in the dark. Outside, only a moonlit wind moved through the trees. Once again, she’d failed to hold her, to protect her. Karen lay curled in a ball then and wept bitterly. The arms that had saved her in the dream, that had saved her from Wolf’s tomb… a thousand years ago, seemed for a few seconds more to be holding her still.
Unanchored and strange to herself, she sat up in the bed and saw, under its cone of light on the desk, Dad’s letter. There would be no good time to slip her mind into those pages, another black tarn though it lay in the light. She stood and slipped on the jeans and canvas coat, regretting the .357s absence from its pocket, and sat down to the document at last.
My Beloved Emily,
A friend will mail this for me, probably from Mexico City. You must have the truth from me, while I am still resolved to tell it. I want to hide nothing from you.
Something in this jungle has found me and entered me.
We were on a “counter-terrorist” mission, meaning we were neutralizing, or rather killing, impoverished native Mayan insurgents.
I was with two operatives I will call Black and Jack, Company Men, smug because they “had kills.” CIA kills, nine out of ten, are inserts with full back-up. Ambushes. These spooks were dry-gulchers and, perhaps because I was Special Forces, they had to keep boasting of their exploits.
The true horror began when we captured two insurgents. One young, the other old, both wiry brown men as lean as coyotes. We put them in shackles. And then Black came out with the inspiration he’d been secretly gloating over, the way to achieve “maximum negative effect” on the morale of the insurgents. I call the younger spook “Jack” because he reminded me of myself when I first went to Nam, not particularly evil, just young and ignorant. But Black, ten years older, had a pouchy face with a half-hidden glee in it that liked killing.
Cenotes are natural wells in the limestone sub-floor of these jungles. The Maya used them for human sacrifice and there was a big one just a few days from where we had taken our captives. We should, Black said, weight and drown one in this cenote and free the other to spread the tale.
I had resolved to free them both on my watch, then kill Black and Jack. Night after night, I took the night rotation and watched all four men in their sleep, but did not act.
Because, from the moment of my picturing the deed that Black proposed, it was as if I stood already there, at the rim of that big watery grave, which held a thousand years of dead in its silty bottom. It was as if I stood there already and I felt its cold green breath welling up around me. More than this, felt in that breath, a consciousness, an awareness of me. As if some huge living thing within the cenote summoned me.
Do you see the strangeness of it? I had only to hear Black’s description, a word-sketch of a bizarre homicide, and I was seized— heart, spine and mind.
I’ve told you how I love our acres, how the feeling of my father’s land beneath our feet seizes hold of me sometimes, as I walk between the trees at dusk. I have always felt it in our soil, a kind of sleeping earthquake of life-to-be, a might and majesty older than Man.
Our last night-march brought us to the cenote just before midnight. With every step, I felt that I moved already through the giant’s flesh, that every leaf of this jungle was a nerve of him, and the very darkness was his blood.
The dank smell of trapped water reached us long before the sight of that great gulf opened suddenly to our eyes: a yawning stone throat, an eighth of a mile across, its black water seventy feet below the rim. Stepping to its brink was stepping into an awe as old as Man.
We advanced onto a narrow limestone shelf overhanging the abyss. Perhaps it was the ancient platform of sacrifice. I knew only that to stand here was to stand outside myself and, though the private plans I had made for this moment were dim and vague, I executed them ecstatically, flawlessly. Moving back from my partners’ position on the rim, I touched my automatic’s muzzle to Black’s nape and my machine pistol to Jack’s. Saying, “Dead still, boys. Not a twitch.” And to the prisoners I said in Spanish to take the key, unshackle themselves and go. The old man seized it and the pair of them fled.
The instant the jungle had swallowed them, I said to the great black floor of water far below us: “Take my offerings!” And squeezed my two triggers.
The brief thunder of the rounds hid the report of snapping rock, but not the fact that the shelf we stood on had broken and that I, too, was falling with them into the cenote.
The black water seized us and grappled us under.
But Emily, it was not water! It was a liquid flesh, a green-black smoke of countless generations. Those living dead poured through my skin, and the giant who had taken them poured into me with them.
This machine clatters under my fingers, I am raving. I have been filled with a Titan as cold and slow as the Ice Ages, as unrelenting as the spreading jungles that have broken Earth’s stony hide and blanketed her equator time without end. In me now is that Will that seizes the sunlight and binds it to the lifeless soil and raises the hosts of life.
I have sworn to myself to hide nothing from you and I still cling to the hope you will not think I am insane…
As I climbed my slow way up those walls, I became aware of two other shapes, inching their way up other crevices. Their progress was no more halting than my own, though the moonlight here and there fell directly enough on one of them to show me that he had but half a skull, the top of his cranium a ragged ruin.
I don’t know what has touched me, but even with this horror in my mind, I long to hold you again, to hold our precious little daughter, to come back into the circle of our love, where time can wear away this nightmare I have entered. Emily, I beg you not to leave me. You are my sun and my stars, you are my open sky. Only your love can keep me from sinking completely and forever into the darkness of the earth.
Soon I will be demobilized, debriefed. Before I come any closer to home than this, I will contact you again, my precious love.
Your Jack
Under a night-sky still paved with stars, though the east had just started paling from black to indigo, Karen emerged from her room. She thought she had cried all that was in her— for her father, for Susan— but it seemed there were more tears yet… .
But there were deeper things than tears. Things stirring down in the cellar. A skull-blown corpse climbing the wall of a jungle chasm. Dad down in a crypt as garishly colored as any jungle, crushing her wrist in his fingers… Susan… Wolf.
For the first time she stood in fear of the very earth beneath her feet. For the first time, the stars had become an abyss she might fall into.
Her hand throbbed, her body and her heart ached, but she knew that she must go home. Would she find herself alone there? Would Kyle have returned?
Kyle liked sleeping in his truck bed. It was small, like his bunk in his cell, but it was roofed by the whole open sky and had wheels, 350 horses tucked under the hood. Lying in the bed of his truck was like lying in an anti-cell, curled on a magic carpet. He felt cozy, nak
ed in his sleeping bag, the restless wind now and then nosing down into his warmth.
His review had gone well. Even though the acne-scarred old mick did nothing but scowl and sneer, he’d given him a late Friday interview, so Kyle had the whole weekend free. His case file revealed the injustice of the seven years he’d done and the man saw it.
He watched the trees rock and sway. The wind was what he’d missed most in prison, the way it stirred things to life, the way it seemed to blow the stars brighter, as if they were live coals it fanned.
If only he hadn’t had to leave Karen. He hoped that right now she was safe in some motel far out of Gravenstein. What a heart she had! That soulless loser broke her hand and pinned her down and still she blew his foul life right out of him, saving her own when she did it, because Wolf would have killed her.
Kyle.
“Karen!” Bolt upright, he scanned around him, the blown trees and bushes. The blazing stars, but nothing else.
Kyle.
It wasn’t so near this time. Somewhere out among the trees her voice shaped his name. It came to him, a leaf dancing on the wind and touched his ear like a caress. A moment after, something soft and warm touched his lips lightly and vanished.
His heart was an anvil hammered by desire and fear. He stood in the truck bed. Then wind parted the dark foliage of the nearest oak and within that shadowy opening, Karen stood. Terror and desire played across him.
What was happening? He did not have hallucinations.
Her phantom roused him to anger at his rebel senses. He bent to where his jeans lay in the bed and took his knife from the pocket and slashed a cut across his forearm. The stab of pain was as real as the wind and stars, and the salt tang of his blood was no dream when he tasted it.
There— moon-white and unclothed— her hair snaking in the wind, stood Karen in the crux of the tree, its branches a riot around her, but not one leaf touching her.
“It wants to kill us, Kyle”— her voice as close as a mate’s in bed, for all the gale that blew between them. “Come and hold me and our love will break its power.”
