He shouldn’t have done that.
With what Donovan figured might be the last move he would ever make, he pulled in his foot and then smashed it into Shouldice’s right leg. The man toppled over, stumbled to regain his balance, and then stood, his arms flung out to either side. Another lightning strike revealed his horrified face, his wheeling arms. He was standing on the very edge of the precipice. Their fight had brought them to the brink. The leopard was there one moment and then gone, leaving only his scream behind.
He was back in his father’s apartment. He closed the door behind him. Undid his shoes and parked them on the rubber mat by the door. Dumped his cleats there as well. He could hear his father and someone else. Rolly. Drinking. He lined up his cleats next to his chucks. Listened to them laughing.
What did they possibly have to laugh at?
You don’t live here, he told himself. You are a visitor. You are only passing through. You won’t ever live like this. You know that. You are not better than him, but you are better than this.
Then somehow he was bringing his Louisville Slugger down, again and again on bowls and bottles and the whiskey glass he’d bought his father for his birthday — had his father’s initials engraved on it. The irony of it.
He smashed and smashed and smashed, but when he came out of this frenzy there was only broken glass. Not a man with a broken face — a pulverized face — a face reduced to pulp. A dead man. He had not done that. He knew it deep inside his bones. If nothing else in the world made sense, this at least did.
He was cold. Colder than he could ever remember being, as if the rain had turned to snow after all, and he was buried in it. He had to move or he would freeze to death. He shook his head slowly, back and forth, back and forth, hating the pain and yet craving it — making it come again and again. You could only feel pain like this when you were alive.
He had not killed his father. Al’s wretched ghost had lied to him. Big surprise! They could not pin that on him. He felt the revulsion grow inside him. Felt it like a wave shuddering up from his gut, rising in him until he burst awake, flinging his body sideways just in time to puke. The vomit erupted from him, splashing on the wet rock. All that food he had eaten so ravenously, flying out of him, again and again until finally it was over and he lay back down on hard, wet bedrock, his breathing shallow, aching all over, but still — miraculously — alive.
He wiped his face of splatter, barely able to hold up his arm. Then he lay there, letting the wind feel him up, tearing at his shirttails. He lay there and let the rain spit on him.
The storm was moving on. The rain only came in gusts now. There were trees on the clifftop and trees below him so that if he closed his eyes it was as if he were suspended in a place that was somewhere between the earth and another earth.
He forced himself to sit up again. Felt woozy for a moment and hung his chin on his chest. When he had the energy, he lifted his right hand and tentatively explored the back of his head. His hair was matted with blood. He winced with pain as he touched the wound and then, holding his hand close to his eyes, tried to see if the blood was fresh, attempting to see whether he was draining away or whether the hole in him was closing, scabbing over. The rain made it hard; everything was wet. He had no idea how long he’d been out.
What he did know was that he’d been hit by a truck — or felt like it anyway. The thought made him dizzy, even lying down. He felt the way a really bad hangover made you feel, lying in your bed with the room helicoptering around you, out of control.
He clambered to his feet, groggy as hell. It took him several efforts. He hustled himself, as best he could, away from the ledge. He found the boulder he’d sat on earlier, waiting for the police to call, a call that could not reach him now for the simple, earth-shattering reason that the man he had just pitched over the cliff had taken Donovan’s cell phone with him. He sat down heavily. Then he leaned his head on his folded arms and started sobbing.
Eventually, he climbed down off the cliff. Backed down mostly, lying against the rough slope, letting himself slide, stopping himself with a foothold here, a handhold there. Until the steepness tapered off and he found himself at last standing on level ground, his arms numb, his back on fire, shredded. He stood, still dazed, deep in the shadows of pine trees and cedars, on the grassy trail that had led him around the cliff. He looked up dizzily and saw the top of it black against the less dark sky. Clouds scudded in the wake of the storm like nosy spectators following a riot at a safe distance. Where the clouds parted, he caught the odd glimpse of a renegade star. Then he looked down the trail, back toward Hippieville, Lower Limbo — whatever the place was called. Somewhere along there he’d find the leopard, if his fall had brought him all the way back down to earth. He might be caught on some ledge, bent around some tree branch. He might be alive. Doubtful, but then anything like certainty had taken quite a workout in the last twenty-four hours. For all Donovan knew, the leopard might have flown away. This island seemed a place where leopards might fly.
He found him, wingless, fifty yards later. It was so dark that he almost stumbled over the body. It lay spread-eagle, facedown. One of his legs was bent the wrong way. Donovan squatted and reached out to touch the man’s back. If he discounted his father at the gambling table and then the hideous specter of him at the trash heap, he’d never seen a dead man, let alone felt one, but he knew — his fingers knew — that the man was no longer of this world.
Donovan felt the man’s back pocket. He tugged out a wallet from his drenched jeans. He couldn’t see anything, but he could feel his way to a few bills. He might need them. He had killed the man; he somehow didn’t think robbing him would land him any deeper in hell when he got there. He was in no hurry. Then he heaved the man over, shocked at the dead weight of him, and felt his front pocket — had to be the left one, because it was his right arm that had snagged Donovan by the neck. He recognized a familiar shape, fished his hand in, and dragged out a cell phone — his cell phone. It was cracked but still lit up to reveal Bee smiling in a life he scarcely found possible to believe he had once lived. There was Italian blood in her on her mother’s side: the thick fall of dark hair, the hint of coffee in her skin. There was just enough juice left in his cracked cell phone to see her. He kissed the screen. There were no bars, no chance of another call down here at the cliff’s base, and no energy to climb up there again. Not ever.
He pocketed the money and the phone. He took a deep breath. He had to get away from here. He had to get out to the highway, get home. He had let Jilly lead him, too tired to resist. It had seemed right somehow. Not now. Not anymore. She had made it seem as if he had to do her bidding. How had she done that? Why had he trusted her? Well, it made no matter. She had abandoned him, and he felt no qualms about taking off — the sooner, the better. He looked back along the trail; presumably it would find its way around the cliff and on the western side there would be another river or the other arm of the same river. He had no idea how far it would be — how wide the island was. Better to stick to what little he did know. So he stepped over Oscar Shouldice — very carefully — and headed toward Charlie’s place and the sandy wheel-rut road down to the river crossing. Looking back a few paces along the trail, the carcass was already lost in shadows.
After another hundred yards or so, he heard music. Not strumming and fiddling anymore but electric guitar, smashing drums, and a tectonic bass that seemed to come from somewhere down inside the earth. Stepping out into the clearing, he could see that the party at the meeting hall was in full swing. He passed the sleeping shed, Charlie’s octagonal yurt, and walked down the hill they had walked up that morning. There were lights on in the woods here and there, and there was the blaze of light from the meeting hall. He hoped most everyone was there, dancing up a storm; that or safely tucked in bed at home. He didn’t want to run into a single soul. Doubted he had any fight left in him, should it come to that. He had one very simple plan. Didn’t think he could come up with a plan B or any kind of e
vasive action. He walked in long strides, letting gravity pull him back toward the river.
“Donovan?”
The voice came from behind him, soft, barely distinguishable from the breeze in the trees and the underbrush. He stopped.
“You haven’t forgotten me, have you?” said the voice, a woman’s voice. And then a woman’s hand was on the small of his back, flattened, rubbing gently up and down, soothing the skin grated on his rock-slide escape down from the cliff. He closed his eyes. What the leopard had not been able to do to him might be accomplished by this soft hand. An arm curled quietly, soothingly, around his middle. He felt her lay her head against his back. He was groggy, tilting forward and back, forward and back, ready to fall if it were not for the delicate arm around his waist.
“I have to go,” he said.
“You can’t,” she said.
He knew who it was. And now her other hand slipped under his shirt and caressed his right flank, making him flinch at first from the abrasions there, then calm down again, settle into her hand’s touch for it was cool, so cool.
“I have to get back.”
“No,” she said. “Shh,” she said. “You are here now.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said plainly, without any attempt to convince him — as if it were merely a statement of fact. “There is such a long time ahead of us. It needn’t be spent alone. The waiting . . .” She stopped and he felt her body press against him, but not hungrily as she had done that morning. It was more a desire to hold on to something, as if he might support her just as he felt she might support him. “The waiting doesn’t have to be without tenderness,” she said.
She kissed him between his shoulder blades. He heard the sound of her lips, felt the shape of them through his sopping shirt. Then she must have taken the material of his shirt in her teeth, for he felt it pulled away from his skin. He thought of the vermin on her, the things living in her mouth.
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Please don’t.”
Her teeth let go but her other arm snaked around him, reached up until it cradled his right cheek, where the leopard’s fist had landed. He let his head lean against her hand, hold him. It was heavenly and awful.
“Who are you?” he said, though what he meant was “What are you?”
“You knew me,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. Matter doesn’t matter.” She laughed gently, then smothered the laugh in his shirt. “You are dead, Donovan. You can’t grasp it yet, but —”
“No,” he said.
“When you do get it — give into it — things will get a lot easier.”
He wanted to argue. The leopard had told him he was alive. But he had no strength in him to fight this woman. He listened to the night: the band playing a ballad muffled by the trees and the wind and the water lapping. Water. The river was nearby. He had to get to the water, get to —
“You must be dead,” said the woman, “because I am, and we are talking together, you and I. Holding each other —”
“No, only you are holding —”
“Don’t,” she said, and pressed herself against him, her fingers massaging his skin so that he cried out in pain, which she smothered with more shushing and kisses on his back. And her hands grew tender again, coaxing him to relax, to give in, to stay.
“I killed myself,” she said.
He was caught off-guard by what she said. “Why?”
“Why doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does.”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“How could you not remember?”
“Do you?” she said. His head hurt. What was she saying? “Let go of your pain,” she coaxed him. “Let go of caring. It’s too heavy a burden. Be with me. There is so much I can teach you about forgetting.”
He closed his eyes, daring to imagine what that might be. He could turn around in her arms and hold her. Find out. But he resisted the temptation. His head tilted forward, his chin to his chest again, as if the whole night was one of resignation that never quite took. He wrapped his arms around her arms so that he drew her as close to him as he could, loving the feel of her body against his back, wanting this embrace, letting it charge him, give him the energy to go on, regardless of what she was saying. He must go on. He could not stop now.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
“Then you’ll stay?”
And now he unwrapped her, like tenderly taking off an article of clothing. He turned, and taking her arms, he gently pressed them to her sides and stepped away from her. There was a light over the doorway of a cottage in the trees nearby. There was an overgrown and mossy path down to the rickety broken gate where they stood. He wondered if this was where she lived. In the light he could see her clearly. She had seemed so huge looming above him this morning on his bed, but she was really not so tall. She was dressed in a simple black shift, the hem of which wavered around her knees, pulled at by the wind. Her legs were like birch saplings, white even in the semidarkness. Her feet were bare, her hair was a tangle, her face beautiful with hope, her hair glinting red.
“I’m not dead,” he said. “Not yet.”
Her face fell. But when she looked up into his eyes, there was no rancor, no resentment in what she told him. “That’s what they all say.”
She backed away from him, not out of fear but out of surrender, defeat. There was sadness in her eyes. She rubbed her lips with the inside of her wrist, and he saw even in the dim light from the porch the marks that had brought her to this place between worlds. He took her wrist in his hand and kissed the scars. He did not fear her anymore but only felt a deep sense of sorrow. She left him, and passing through the broken gate, she walked up the path to her house. It made him think she had abandoned hope before this; it came so easily to her. He almost called her back — out of pity, not longing. But the door closed on her without a look back.
There’re paths . . . Trails you gotta take. Shit you’ve still got left to do.
He took a deep shaky breath, turned, and headed down to the river. It was around the next bend, if he remembered correctly. Yes, there it was. There was the faintest glimmer of light on the surface from who knew what source. Maybe a river at night could make its own light. This river anyway.
He looked up into the sky. There was no moon. Perhaps it was too early. But a part of him wondered if there was no moon on this side of the river. All the more reason to cross over.
Back at the social club, the band launched into some hard-edged rock song from the sixties or seventies. Neil Young, maybe. Distorted guitar. Right, he recognized the riff and the lyrics came to him. “Hey hey, my my.”
He found Charlie’s boat in the long grass, just where they’d left it, but now the grass was battered down by the rainstorm. He climbed aboard into a half foot of water. The boat rocked, the water sloshed. He climbed back out and stood looking down at it. There was as much river in it as there was for him to cross. Too much to bail. He’d need to tip it over. He grabbed the gunwales and started to tip it, but — oh, it was heavy. A wooden boat. A long wooden boat and he was such a long way from being at full strength. The water slopped from side to side, splashing up at him. He wiped his face. Stood up and crossed his arms, stuck his hands under his armpits for warmth. In the background the band was rocking out.
Exactly!
He pressed down hard on the gunwales and then lifted — Rock it out! Again and again, feeling the equilibrium shift. It was like pushing a car from a snowdrift, putting your shoulder into it, letting it fall back. Push, lift, push, lift. And now lift with all your might — with all the might that made you still something of the earth and not some phantom dweller on this island in the middle of Nowhere.
And the boat tipped. At its highest point, he felt it begin to fall away from him and he let go. The weight of water did the rest. Over it went with a loud whoosh, followed by a flat, hollow thunk! only he could hear, thanks to the grunge coming from the party.
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When he had righted the boat again, he gathered the oars from the grass, placing each of them as quietly as possible into the oarlocks. The guitarist was on a wild, cascading fuzz-box solo; nobody would hear a boy on a riverbank unless they were within a few paces. He stopped for a moment, looked around. Then he climbed in, hurrying now, and immediately slipped and fell down hard on his backside.
His flailing arms managed to dislodge one of the oars, which clattered in after him so that the quiet was shattered. He didn’t stop to listen. As quickly as his aching body could manage, he found his seat, restored the oars to the locks, and then . . .
His head drooped. He was still on land. Too much on land to shimmy the heavy vessel into the water.
This was not going well.
He climbed out again and headed to the prow, lifting it with a grunt that seemed to come from his very toes, and the boat slipped into the water so quickly on the wet grass that he fell again and almost lost hold of it, grabbing the painter just as the bow smacked the water’s surface. He held on to the rope as if his life depended on it. The river had other ideas. It tugged the boat south. Which, when he thought of it, was the direction everything seemed to be going.
The current he’d sensed rather than seen that morning was strong now, fed by the gusting wind, the river heavy with the storm, flooding its banks, its powers renewed. With both hands, he hauled the boat back to the shore and slithered into it, shoving off as best he could, holding on to both gunwales as the boat spun lazily counterclockwise, finding the flow, rocking from his shifting weight, bucking a bit, settling in. He sat and applied his arms to the task of turning the boat to face the far shore. He pulled and pulled on his left oar and somehow managed to bring the boat around. Then he planted his feet firmly on the cold floorboards, bent deeply at the waist, and plunged both oars into the water, pulling for all he was worth to fight the river’s authority.
The Ruinous Sweep Page 14
