Harmless (16 page)

Alex shifted the rifle to get a better grip on the barrel, muttering just loud enough for Joseph to hear: “Can’t turn back.” He started to lift the gun, his back and shoulders squared, the weapon seeming to weigh hundreds of pounds.

He was going to shoot himself.

“Wait, we’ll find the girls!” Joseph said. “We have to stay focused. Keep our heads up.” He didn’t even know what that last line meant. Probably something he’d heard in a movie. “I just wanted to say …”

What he wanted was to finally tell the truth, to get it all
out in the open and hope for clemency. Maybe Alex would shoot him in the foot and call it even, knowing that every footstep would remind Joseph of his act of betrayal. Joseph was okay with that. Just let them find Franny.

“It’s just …” What could Joseph possibly say? “It’s …”

“What?”

“Jane is going to be okay.”

Alex stepped back as if he’d been punched in the chest.

“I just meant …” What
did
Joseph mean? Why bring up Jane
now
? Why of all people
Jane
? “She’s a survivor,” he said, his tongue a fat, dry snake in his mouth. He saw what he was doing here: offering Alex a moment of intimacy as penance for withholding the truth about the girls’ disappearance, as though they were tradable commodities. But to drag Jane’s name into it?

Joseph stepped toward Alex, arms outstretched, eyes so fixed on the rifle that he failed to see the gopher hole. His right foot dropped into space and came down hard, buckling at the ankle and throwing him forward at Alex’s feet. He lay on the ground, his ankle throbbing from deep inside the joint, shocked at how close he’d just come to giving himself away. This wasn’t the time to try to set things right between them. They had to find the girls, and he needed Alex more than Alex needed him.

Joseph waited for a helping hand, but Alex didn’t move, his expression hard and assessing, eyes half-hidden beneath a ridge of shadow.

“I can get up,” Joseph said, needing to assert his basic usefulness. He stood and tested his injured ankle. The pain was vivid, unnecessarily intensified, as if the joint had been
injected with a thick, cool gel that pressed against his bones and tendons, but his foot held. He tried more weight, wishing he had something to support him, then took a tentative step, bargaining with the slow, powerful throb in his ankle.

Just hold out until we find the girls
.

Alex hoisted the rifle against his shoulder and walked around Joseph, the darkness flowing up and around the blasted tree trunk like ink pumped into a glass chamber.

“We’re going back to the big path,” Alex said.

Joseph reached into his pocket and ran his fingers over the egg’s smooth shell, then took out Mike’s iPhone: they’d passed out of signal range, the batteries were almost dead, and there were no new messages. He looked up in time to see Alex step into the bush, pulling the flashlight beam with him as if Joseph didn’t deserve his portion of light.

B
ack on the big path, Alex and Joseph trudged deeper into the woods, Joseph handling flashlight duties, finding no clues, only litter and old
ATV
tracks, even a bike hanging from a tree, one rusted wheel protruding from the greenery like the fuselage of a crashed plane. They walked up and down low hills, skirting ravines and marshes, thickets of scrub, and patches of old growth, the boundaries of the path repeating like a wallpaper pattern of leaves and branches. Occasionally the pattern varied, evergreens replacing maples and birches, so that to Joseph’s tired eyes it was as though they were passing from one narrow, wallpapered corridor to another without ever reaching a proper room. Through it all, his mind replayed reels of shrill interior voices, self-defeating memories, and violent images until they became as monotonous as the passing landscape.

Eventually the path led them to a barren plateau overlooking miles of black treetops rolling out to the horizon to merge with the night sky. The sunset was long over but a luminous glow pulsed in the west, as if the forest extended
to the outskirts of a shining city just out of view. Above them the sky was crowded with stars, clustered so thickly that they looked, to Joseph’s city eyes, like diamond brooches mounted on a velvet backing. It must be the Milky Way. God, if only Franny were here with him, on a camping trip, the two of them contemplating the stars, bonding in the silence far from the city. Never mind that he hated camping. For her sake, he’d learn to like it. Just give him the chance. He turned around to take in where they’d come from. The sky there was solid black, the stars cancelled out by banks of clouds that were following their trek into the wilderness like a silent flotilla.

He called Franny’s name, hoping against reason that she was close enough to hear him. He remembered her at eight years old, just before he’d moved out, arranging her foreign-coin collection on the kitchen table, as absorbed in her work as a composer, placing the coins inscribed with animals in one pile, those with buildings in another, one-offs in the centre. She’d looked up at him, her face expectant as she waited for him to surrender his complete attention to her, but even there he’d failed her. He should have shared with her everything he’d learned as an obsessive stamp-collecting boy, flooded the room with that boy’s enthusiasm, but his attention had been distracted, racing between the romanticized past, unsatisfactory present, and bright future. Had he ever given his full attention to Franny and Martha, even for an entire day? He’d read to Franny at bedtime, then comforted Martha after another grinding day at the legal clinic, but that barely added up to two hours. Why was his attention so precious that he needed to
keep a portion in reserve? It wasn’t like he put it to noble ends. It brought him no deep, lasting joy, and yet he protected it from the world as though it was a princeling—imperious, needing constant stimulation and novelty.

When the path brought them back to level ground, Alex took out a compass and held it up to his flashlight.

“Does it work at night?” Joseph asked.

Alex stared at him with a bewildered expression, as if he couldn’t figure out how they’d ended up in the same place. “You don’t know how to use a compass?”

“No.”

“You weren’t in the Scouts?”

“They didn’t have them in my neighbourhood.” He wasn’t going to tell Alex he’d quit Scouts because the weekly meetings conflicted with the airing of his favourite sitcom.

Alex shook his head. Poor guy, stuck with a partner who was good for nothing but magazine-style commentary and ironic riffs.

“I know where we are.”

Good for Alex. That left Joseph to focus on his scorecard of sins: getting so high and drunk that his daughter had disappeared from his care like a passenger over the side of a ship; his lusty idyll in the bushes, sending her and her best friend fleeing into a forest filled with crazed war vets; getting Tyler killed.

Impressive. Talk about following your bliss.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“To the commune. Where the vets live.”

“You think the girls are there?”

“Maybe. This path ends very close to there, so either way …” Alex put the compass away, the indignant expression reclaiming his features. No wonder he was so angry—why was he, who’d always tried to do the right thing, being put through the same crucible as a chronic fuck-up like Joseph?

Joseph fought back a groan. What if the girls weren’t at the commune? How would he and Alex find them in this endless forest?

Alex was already walking down the path, forcing Joseph to strain his wobbly ankle to catch up. The flashlight beam moved from one side of the path to the other like the arm of a pendulum, sweeping past the same pattern of dirt and branches. A few minutes later the light seemed to disappear into a gap in the woods not far ahead. As they got closer, Joseph realized the gap was an old dirt road that intersected the path, creating a lonely crossroads hemmed in by thick vegetation. Joseph turned on his own flashlight, picking out sinkholes and tall grass that nearly obliterated the road in places.

“Logging road,” Alex said without enthusiasm. “Stopped using it in the late fifties when the logging companies pulled out.”

“Where does it go?”

Alex pointed to Joseph’s right. “That way probably joins up with another logging road.” He motioned to the left. “Down there’s an abandoned work camp.”

Joseph pointed his beam in the camp’s direction. The gravel on the road was scuffed in places, and there was a line of slightly bent grass going down the left side.

“Someone’s walked there,” he said.

“I doubt it. The camp is a ruin. The townies use it as a party site sometimes.” Alex sounded irritated, like a child forced to suddenly change plans.

Joseph turned to face him. The men stood a few feet apart, their lowered flashlights throwing their upper bodies into deep shadow. It was like staring into a mirror that distorted Joseph’s silhouette, masculinizing it by adding a couple of inches to his height and to the width of his shoulders. Above them, the moon dived into the mounting cloud banks before coming up briefly for air, losing the fight against the approaching storm. Joseph felt the coming of rain in the air as the wind set the branches rustling, rain that would fall on the girls, adding to their misery.

“If the girls found this road, why
wouldn’t
they explore it?” he said. “And a camp is exactly where they’d hole up for the night.” It was a long shot, but so was everything that had happened since sundown. The odds had to go in their favour eventually.

“It’s a waste of time.”

“We went miles out of our way to chase a dog.” Joseph tried not to sound peevish. This was about finding Franny. “A ten-minute detour to check a potential resting place isn’t going to make a big difference.”

Alex’s face bunched up like a cramping muscle, then just as quickly relaxed. “Okay. Ten minutes.”

Joseph took the lead, his ankle holding up to the ruts and potholes. The garbage on the road collected into larger patches as they drew nearer to the camp—shoals of broken beer bottles and faded cigarette packets, condom wrappers
and gutted snack bags. He saw, stacked beside a ratty suitcase, a pile of yellowed paperbacks so bloated with rainwater they wouldn’t catch on fire even if someone still cared enough to burn books. On top of the pile was a mould-spotted staple of his family’s single bookcase: Erma Bombeck’s
If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?
He remembered his mother passing the tome of folksy wisdom to her sisters as if it was a family talisman, each hand-off increasing his shame at his mother’s passive acceptance of her narrow reading, her narrow life. He picked up the bloated book, now feeling protective of what it had represented to his mother, a dutiful housewife and part-time accountant who’d placed her hopes on him, her brightest son. He even smirked at the title’s now viciously ironic subtext. When he opened it the spine cracked, accordioning the pages and loosing their cargo of potato bugs and silverfish. He dropped the book and jumped back as though it had moved in his hands. A high screech sounded from the trees, remarkably similar to Tyler’s dying cries, as if all mammals sounded alike while suffering a violent death. He felt the trees push closer, cutting off his escape routes, and the moon slipped behind the clouds, deepening the darkness outside his flashlight beam. He stumbled backward, bumping up against a hard point that pressed into the fatty flesh around his kidneys. It was the barrel of a gun.

Joseph turned and blasted a man’s face with the flashlight. It was an awful sight. The man’s features were grotesque in the yellow light—like the face of a creature that had evolved in a cave—pale skin, protruding lips, lidded-over eyes.

“Jesus, Alex. Are you okay?” Joseph said.

Alex pushed the flashlight down and lowered the rifle, his hands shaking.

“Of course I am. Are you?”

Joseph stepped away, his instincts warning him to keep his distance. “I was just …” He pointed down at the paperback. “My mom swore by that book. It was like the family Bible.” Why was he explaining himself to Alex? He’d sworn to stop doing that years ago, but here he was, in the ruins, once again justifying his actions to stern, admonishing Alex.

“The camp’s just up there,” Alex said, as if each word cost him in flesh. “Let’s make it quick.”

The road ended at a wide, almost-treeless area pockmarked with old firepits, barbeques, tires, and other relics from the camp’s second life as a party site.

“What happened to the camp?” Joseph asked.

“Once the forest’s assets were plundered, the company abandoned it to the elements and to the townies.”

The loggers were probably all dead, their post-industrial Dionysian heirs well past their flat-stomached primes and locked into awful service jobs, in town or far away. Men had lived and died here, their bones interred in the earth, where young townies later fucked and partied away the best years of their lives in the picturesque ruins, all that desperate life passed from memory into the numbing forest solitude.

Joseph walked through the central area, sweeping the flashlight across the ground and nodding after each pass, a rhythm he was soon afraid to break. There was no point in calling Franny’s name. No one had visited this place for a long time. The elements had stripped the beer cans, bottles,
and wrappers of their bright retail colours, and there were no footprints or other signs of recent human habitation. Further into the camp he found the foundations of several buildings reverting to an organic state, compost for saplings and ferns. He glanced back at the road, where Alex waited, refusing to waste energy proving what he already knew—the girls had not come to this place. Why did he have to be such a smug prick about it? If he was so sure about the girls’ movements, why were they no closer to finding them?

Joseph’s flashlight picked out the camp’s single standing structure, a wide log-and-plaster building with no front door, its windows picked free of glass, the moss-covered walls sagging under the weight of the collapsing roof. A massive black iron stove was tipped on its side in front of the doorway and spray-painted with a pot leaf, a double-initialled heart, and an ejaculating penis. There was also a smaller symbol—four crossed lines forming a diamond, with a squiggle in the centre and topped by a crude human eye—an obvious bit of occult nonsense that still menaced his nerves.