Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  - The whoring aside, Scott, I think I’d prefer to see you back at The Roanoker.

  - Don’t ever say that I don’t take you places, Jules.

  - Where have you been? What’s been going on in that head of yours in the last 24 hours?

  - Nothing. Been trying to keep out of it as much as possible, actually.

  He got out and leaned to the hood, between the bright headlights. He squinted to see into the deep contours of the mine beyond their beams, as he fished the Pall Malls from his pocket and lit one up.

  - I see you’re reneging on our Dupars pact too. Is nothing sacred?

  - Seems not. Just continuing the trend you started. You left me, remember?

  - God, when you say it so… simply, so savagely, that doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  - But that’s about the height of it, right Julianna?

  - Yes. It is.

  - You didn’t want me any more. Whatever your reasons, most of which I still haven’t even begun to fathom, I was no longer what you wanted.

  - That’s not true, Scott.

  - It’s the only truth in the whole mess of questions. And even if I got answers to each and every one of them, it’s the single fact underpinning all of them.

  - If I could only tell you, explain it to you properly—

  - But you can’t! You didn’t even stay to try. You just left. I’m not crazy. I know you aren’t here to defend yourself. You’re just the wall I have, to bounce my hurt and anger off of. It keeps coming back at me—I keep hurling it back at you. I don’t even know why I do this to myself.

  - Because I’ve given you no other recourse but to do this.

  - Thanks for the permission slip to be insane in the membrane for old times sake. Let me tell you, it’s no fucking consolation to me thusfar.

  - Maybe, in time, it will prove to be.

  - Time, Jules? Was that so much to ask for? I know I fucked up but if you’d just given me time to know how to fix it.

  - No.

  - Yes! If you’d truly wanted it, if you really believed, at least you would have let me try.

  - I did try.

  - Really? How’s that? Enlighten me. You’ll have to forgive my secretary but I think she mislaid the memos you sent me about trying to save our marriage!

  - Screw you, Scott! You’re too pig-headed and wrapped up in your own wallowy pissy pool of hurt to believe that I did nothing. Do you think everything comes with an operating checklist? Well, do you? Just because you followed the troubleshooting procedures, don’t stand there and play dumb that I wasn’t trying just as hard, feeling just as frightened, hurting just as much as you ever did.

  - You never let on, Jules. You never told me we were that far gone.

  - Just back up a second, Mister. I wasn’t the one constantly drawing lines in the sand, making such authoritative pronouncements as, ‘If this continues, I don’t think we’ll be able to endure it for too much longer.’ Or how about this classic? ‘I’m afraid that anything I try only makes things worse and I can’t take it getting any worse. I can’t imagine it any worse but I’m afraid it could still get worse.’ What the fuck does that mean in any language, Scott?

  - I was trying to air things. I was trying to make you see how much I wanted to fix this.

  - Or what about, ‘I don’t know how to communicate with you anymore, Jules. I want to but every time I try and express myself, it just seems to make you angrier. It makes me scared of what I should do or say next so I end up saying and doing nothing, to be on the safe side.’

  - It’s how I felt. At least I spoke up about it.

  - What you did was merely make me more edgy about where my place was with you, Scott, and whether or not you truly believed we had a future.

  - Jesus. Did you think that I was the one who was about to leave you?

  - What was I supposed to think sometimes?

  - Never! I would never, ever have left you. I swear to you, I would never have done that, no matter what.

  - So, what then? Just stay? No matter how bad it got, just hang in there like a trooper?

  - Is that what you did? Did you leave to leave first, pre-empt me by getting your retaliation in early?

  - It doesn’t matter who leaves, Scott. Someone has to. There’s never an equity in it; never an equal love, an equal hate. Someone always gets handed the villain’s mask to wear. Or villainess. Someone’s the sinner and someone else is the sinned-against. One of us has to be made to feel like the victim here. I think we can all agree who’s grabbed that role with gusto.

  - No one forced you to leave.

  - No one begged me to stay!

  - Ok then. If I find you and ask you—beg you—then I can accept whatever response I get, because, one way or the other, the marking time will finally be over.

  - What marking time?

  - The clock in my head since you left. I can’t keep counting the days and the hours and the minutes. It’s been seven days since I saw you. It’s been five since I read the note. I can’t handle the clock that’s been ticking in my head since then. If I find you and this… this… separation is for real, I can’t face the mechanics of it thereafter; lawyers’ offices, courts, you and me coming and going to empty our house, our home, of everything we had, everything we were. Every time, every fucking time, I know I’ll just reset the clock and start marking the time between the milestones all over again, just like I did when I was counting the seconds til I got to come see you every week in LA. Cause you know what?

  - What?

  - Every second that you exist away from me is a second closer to seeing you again, in one of those horrible situations. As long as I think that there’s a chance I’ll see you again, I’ll just keep marking time—years, decades if I have to—until I absolutely, finally know that I’m never to see you again.

  - So that’s what you want? A definitive end to… us?

  - Yes! I want you to look me in the eye and tell me, ‘This is it.’ And then I won’t have to count the time. I just don’t want you to leave me in this limbo. I need to see you one last time, speak to you one last time, so I can make that the last time for me. That’s the only certainty I can hope to find now and that’s the only thing I’ll beg you for.

  - Don’t do this, Scott.

  - Only thing is, I’ll never stop loving you, Jules, no matter how badly I did it sometimes. I won’t stop that.

  - You’re not allowed to, Scott. Not now, not ever.

  - I know that now. I finally get it.

  - Neither can I. No matter what I did, what we did to each other, I am wedded to you. You are in me as much as I pray I am in you.

  - But to leave? That doesn’t make sense.

  - It doesn’t make any sense to me either, Babe. I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t seem to have ever made any sense to myself this whole time.

  - You made sense to me, Jules.

  - No Scott, you made sense of me. That’s the gift I can never return, the thing you can never unmake.

  - So I’m stuck with you, even if I never have you again?

  - Do you see that crater there?

  - Yes.

  - If that crater was filled with the entire teaming, wanting, longing length and breath of humanity, and I stood up here and gazed down, do you know what I know with absolute certainty?

  - What?

  - I would see you, Scott. I would find you in amongst all of them. Only you. You could drag me to this spot every night and I would see you, no one else but you. You were made for me, built for no other purpose than to make me love you.

  - And I’m down there and you’re up here and I can’t get to you.

  - Yes. You’re down there with the rest of them. But you’re not the one alone. I am. That’s my penance, not yours; every night, Scott, to see you.

  - And not be able to reach me?

  - No. For you to not care or want to reach me. The consequence of the choice I made, without even knowing it myself at the time.

  - Then you mad
e that choice for me too, Jules, and I didn’t even ask for it.

  - I know. And I am so sorry. And do you know what my ultimate punishment will be, some day?

  - No.

  - Some day, I’ll come to this spot, and even though I’ll still see you, you won’t be able to see me. You won’t think to look up. There’ll be someone else in there. She’ll have your heart then. I’ll be left only to remember the piece I once had. I’ll still have to watch you though, and know, and not be able to do anything about it.

  - Never, Jules. That won’t happen. I can’t do that. I know that now.

  - Then, Scott, I am truly, truly sorry. I’ve loved you more than I ever thought myself capable of. I didn’t ever want to leave you this way.

  - Then don’t! Let me take you home and make it right. We’ll put it in the past and move on.

  - My beautiful, brilliant man. You didn’t deserve any of this. But the past is set. I’ve known that for the longest time. You saw it, in the pictures.

  - I saw you. And you saw me. I know you did. You wanted me to.

  - Scott. Listen to me. There isn’t much time. And this is important. I forgive you for the things that happened, you know, the…

  - Sshh. No, Jules. Don’t.

  - Yes, I brought it on myself. You handled it all the best way you could. You have to forgive yourself. Whatever understanding you have left, whatever reserves of giving remain, give them to yourself. What we were can never be destroyed, only what you can be from now on. Don’t ever let that happen, ok? Or I swear, I will come back from the beyond and haunt you for real.

  - Jules…

  - Don’t ever forget me.

  - Jules!

  - Jules?

  - Jules?

  Chapter 36

  - Scott. They’re coming for you. Don’t fight them.

  “Huh?”

  The droning of the blasthorn snapped Scott awake. Its urgent metallic wail cut through the misty dawn air, like the cawing of some monstrous bird nested on the mine face beneath him.

  He pulled back the coat covering him where he lay crooked on the back seat. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and yawned. It was almost full light and the car windows were condensed from his sleeping breath. He opened the door and stepped into the damp Virginia morning. The air tasted faintly of wet wood and sulfur, like chewing on a fresh matchstick. He spat the bitter chalky aftertaste of it and saw the vast expanse of the ravaged mountain for the first time.

  “Jesus wept.”

  As far as his eye could see, the terrain was a uniformly cropped and flattened stonescape. From the tops of the cleaved stumps which were once peaks, the mine-scarred slopes fell down into a series of deep craters, a canyon of bowls which wound around the broken back of Appalachia. Gray and white rock face showed like bone. Here and there, the stubborn remnants of trees and shrubs clung to the higher ridges, tiny swathes of green like the one he stood within now. Everywhere else was dead, ossified and extinct. No critter crawled on the ground. No hawk hunted overhead. Up here, Scott might have been the only living thing to see the day in.

  The blasthorn’s motorized lament continued from deep in the bowels of the ravine. It echoed around him, coming back from the far-off peaks, as though distant members of the same imaginary flock answered the call of the fantastical creature Scott pictured making the source sound. He could easily picture what the mythical guardians of this man-made hell looked like; angular and mechanized, riveted sheet steel for wings, grappling claws for talons, eyes like cockpit windows, and a beak like the nose of the Concorde jet plane. The image took full hold of his imagination now—the supersonic goliath come alive—because when he saw it as a boy at JFK, that’s what Scott thought: it had been engineered to hunt and eat, the most beautiful and terrifying thing he had yet seen. An army of them was stirring in their eyries in the peaks around him now; nests of nuts and ratchets and tangled girders, bedded with iron filings and steel shavings; the one now calling out the rest, urging the pack to hurry, to hunt and feed, because Scott was the only morsel moving.

  Standing on the edge of the ravine, the blasthorn baying all around, Scott felt irrationally, primordially exposed. The whole scene was unnerving. But he was rooted to the spot, unable to tear his eyes from the carnage of the view.

  Abruptly, the blasthorn died. The absolute now-stillness fanned out across the landscape. Scott took a tentative step toward the cliff edge, curious to see if maybe he wasn’t imagining it. He half-expected to hear the deep subterranean whoop-whoop of rising wings, the cawing thing lifting its colossal bulk out of the valley to meet him.

  He almost took another step, as the first explosion let rip. A mile across the ravine, a large outcrop of rockface erupted in a fast-rising finger of dustplume. The jarring crack of it reached his ears a second after. Another eruption shot skyward, another boom. In rapid sequence, 12 tight blasts along the same line punched upward, a dozen narrow rising columns of smoke and sand. Pieces of rubble spewed from the lower portions of the plumes and rained down into the recesses of the valley floor. The 12 dust towers slowly merged into one dense wall. It began to drift west and dissipate, revealing the rockface gone, only the stub of a hill remaining, an ugly amputation.

  Scott realized what he was seeing, thinking, comparing and it sent a shudder through him.

  If they could have leveled Manhattan, this is how it would have looked after.

  He climbed back into the car and set off hurriedly for the way out, keen to be rid of the wretched memory of both worlds.

  Chapter 37

  Descending in daylight, the actual state of the track made Scott wonder how he ever made it up in one piece the night before. When he arrived back at the 2-way junction, he stopped caring. He was no longer alone on the mountain. The blue Lincoln Navigator now blocked the way, the only other man-made object visible in the high open country. He stopped 20 yards from where it spanned the dirt track. A coating of sand and grit peppered its bodywork, but through its now untinted windows, Scott could clearly see the three occupants who waited for him.

  The talky one—Irving—stepped from the passenger seat and walked toward the BMW. All the while, it was the figure in the rear who held Scott’s attention. Charlie looked straight ahead, oblivious to Scott’s stare. His first feeling was relief that she had been apprehended. Then he remembered how he’d been run off the road by the other two and he hit the central locking, just as Irving reached him and rapped on his window.

  Scott thought he saw the driver—Clifford—direct an unwelcome comment back to Charlie. Her head jerked forward, seeming to deliver an angry reply. Clifford’s head lolled back as he laughed and Charlie spat a parting remark, thumped the back of his head rest, and exited on the far side of the Navigator. She reappeared at the rear and stopped there, holding a compact aluminum case, wearing a smart two-piece trouser suit, her hair pulled into a neat ponytail. She appeared worlds away from the skittish woman who was almost killed by the very machine she stood behind now. Immediately, the realization dawned on Scott. He hadn’t run into her by accident after all; he had been driven to her by design. All pretence now gone, her gaze never wavered from Scott’s. She took the full furious intensity of his stare with an indifference which unnerved him.

  Stencek knocked on the glass again.

  Scott dropped the window a safe notch. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You’re blocking the road,” he said through the crack, trying to sound assertive.

  “I’m gonna ask you to come with us now, Scott,” Stencek replied. “I did warn you not to make me come get you.”

  “Who the hell are you? You’re not private investigators.” Scott winced at the whine in his voice, his apprehension all-too evident.

  Stencek stepped back from the door. “Just get out of the goddamn car, wouldya?”

  “Show me some ID—real ID: police, FBI, CIA. Blockbuster?” Scott immediately regretted his smartass comment.

  Mike Stencek had questioned enough suspects to recogni
ze the same tell. He heeded the twinge of caution it prompted. In a jam, nervous people did stupid things and someone always got bloodied; stone-cold bad guys never broke a sweat. He stiffened, took another step back beyond the sweep of an ambush door-assault. He pulled back his jacket and showed Scott the Glock on his belt. “ID enough for you?” he asked.

  “I could just ring 9-1-1 right now. What would you do? Shoot me?”

  “No. But we’d probably have to shoot the officer that responded. Plus his partner. Plus any poor bastard within earshot that came running. That would all be on you and you’d still be coming with me after. You decide.”

  “Ok.” Scott sighed. “I’m getting out.” He stepped out with slow exaggerated compliancy, turning to Stencek with his arms ridiculously high.

  Stencek closed the car door. “You can put your hands down. I’m not arresting you.” He summoned Lillian over. “Gotta search you, though. For your own safety, ya understand. Turn around. Hands on the roof.”

  Scott planted his palms across the top of the BMW. Lillian set her case on the hood. She came behind Scott and patted down his shoulders and back, feeling the loose folds of his jacket and pockets.

  “Not going to say hello?” Scott said. She continued around his belt line and hips.

  “You lied to me,” Scott hissed, as she dropped to one knee and ran her hands down one of his legs. Scott pressed his body tighter to the side of the car. “You used me. Don’t you give a damn what’s happening to me? Don’t you know?” His face was burning now.

  Lillian worked her hands up the other pants leg, and as she completed the search, she extended her fingers between Scott’s legs and gave his balls a discrete playful tickle.

  The anger exploded inside Scott. “Bitch!” he spat, as he mule-kicked blindly, catching her crotch with his heel. She squealed as she staggered back on her haunches, tried to stand, instead collapsing on her ass, doubled-over in agony.