Authors: Wayne Wightman
“As long as they knew we were here, they were a danger. Now they're not.” Natalie's face became grief-stricken. “Jack... please don't....”
“You lied to me.”
“You knew I was lying.”
Jack walked in a tight circle and pressed his hands against his face. “I did know.”
“I'm not going to let bad things happen to us because I've extended kindness to psychopaths. We let that one live and she came back. She was too stupid to live.”
“I watched you just lean over and... whatever you did, you did it easily. Do you kill everyone you meet out there and take their stuff? Is that why we have so much? How many people have you killed?”
He hadn't seen this face before: she was grieved, nearly desperate: “I tried to talk to her, even though my bones told me it would be useless. She threatened us. I wasn't going let her go and see if she was bluffing.”
“When all three of them were here, they had us cold, they had you bleeding — but I wasn't in any danger? Really?”
“No, you weren't.”
Jack let himself fall back on the sofa.
“You weren't. You needed to see what you could do.”
“That was for my benefit? We were nearly killed — I
thought
we were nearly killed — as an educational experience?”
“We weren't nearly killed. Consider who you were before and who you were after.”
As roiled as his thoughts were, he knew she was right. He was different afterwards; he felt stronger, more competent. He took a breath.
“The woman out there today — your bones said it wouldn't do any good, but you talked to her anyway. Why? Because you knew I'd be watching? Because it would make a better impression?”
Natalie said nothing.
“If you knew I'd be watching, did you know we'd have this conversation? How does it turn out? How much do you know? Do you know if I'm going to leave? Do you know when? Tell me.”
She was shaking her head.
“How many people have you killed?” He didn't want to ask it but that was what he most wanted to know.
“Don't ask me that.” Natalie turned away and held her face with her hands. “Don't ask me that.”
He went over to her and turned her by her shoulders to face him. She was hot and smelled like the desert when it had just started to rain. He loved her. He didn't understand himself.
....
In the night, they lay together on their backs. Moonlight turned the curtains white. Between the curtains, the window separated them from the stars.
“My bones tell me a lot. Not everything. Big things I see right away, but everything else is glimmers and hints, some stronger, some weaker. Some things seem more likely. I don't know everything, but I knew today was going to be terrible and you were going to be disappointed with me, horrified even. I knew I wasn't going to give that woman a second chance with us, but what I didn't know was what else to do.” She was quiet.
They may have dozed. Since they had been lying in bed, the stars had turned across half the window.
“If I had to do it over, I’d do it again, exactly the same way. If I dispose of a crazy person to protect you, and you leave me for it, at least I’ll know you’ll leave me alive. I’ll never be a willing victim. I’ll never put my safety where it’s free for the taking. Except for you, Jack. Except for you. You've had my heart since the first day. Can you still love me?”
“I can. I do. But when I think of that pathetic woman out there—” His mind locked up and wouldn't give him the words he needed.
She took his hand and held it to her cheek.
The stars turned.
“Your mother wouldn't approve of me.”
“You saved my life. She'd approve of that.”
“Tomorrow I’ll gather up all the traps except one or two. If we don’t have anything to trade, we’ll go hungry like everyone else. But I will try as best as I can, just like you, like your mother would approve of, to be a nice guy.”
“You'd do that?”
“For you, yes. And I'll be creative about it.”
She rolled on her side to face him. Behind her, stars faded and disappeared into her black hair. “This morning I wanted to stare at you and remember how you looked at me before any of this happened. Stay with me,” she said. “I'll try to be who you want me to be.”
He believed she meant it. He wanted to believe it was possible. He couldn't believe it was possible.
....
Jack wandered through the scrub, hands in his back pockets, turning his face to the sun to bathe in the mid-spring warmth. The snow had visibly drawn back up the mountainsides. Blue and yellow flowers speckled the desert.
Yesterday, Natalie had come back from the highway with three ratty paperback books and a packet of flour. Today, after he did a patch on a windmill water pipe, he was going to sit down, like a gentleman of leisure, and read a book. He couldn't remember the last time.
This morning Natalie told him she would be several miles east on the highway to meet two travelers; she wanted to barter with them before they met others.
He turned to go back to the house when he heard the slightest
snap
. It had been carried on the wind or he wouldn't have heard it. He knew his desert sounds; it was a sound someone or something had caused.
He waited and listened, scanned, and breathed in air for unusual smells. Finally, another
snap
,and he had the direction.
A dozen paces and he heard a crackling noise. He went further, another dozen steps and he caught the smell of Natalie's cologne. She had picked it up a month earlier and used it every day. He went closer, more slowly.
Twenty yards away, he saw Natalie squatting with her back to him. He could see her arms moving muscularly in front of her... skinning and gutting the animal, he thought. Then he realized he was hearing the sounds of chewing and snapping bones. She was eating.
He could see only her arched back and the wilds of her black hair. He saw her drop a stripped bone to her side.
Suddenly, she stopped, froze, then leaped to her feet, spun around, and faced him, eyes to eyes, set for full defense. Her hands were bloody past her wrists, her mouth and chin smeared red.
Jack couldn't read her expression. Anger, threat, fear, surprise?
He turned toward the house and walked back as though it were a normal day. He considered that it probably was. For two months, as far as he knew, she had killed only three rabbits for trading. They had rarely put dead things on the table for themselves.
Nearing the house, Jack realized two things: First, he was no longer thinking, “If I leave....” It was “When I go....” And second, if he knew when he was going to leave, her bones would also know. The best he could do was nothing at all, and then, on a whim, without planning, run. It would be the best he could do.
....
Same day, Jack sat on the upper deck with one of the paperbacks.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, life in the 1960s. It wasn't anything he would want to go back to. He could understand the depravity, but there were so many references to things that no longer existed that couldn't keep his focus on it. He kept looking up at the Sierra Nevada, at the snow pack.
He heard Natalie come in behind him. She came out on the deck and pulled a chair around to face him.
“I tried to be what you wanted me to be.”
“For several months. I probably shouldn't have agreed.”
“You never asked me to change. I wanted to try. I wanted to try to be a nice guy, so you would stay.”
It was the closest he'd seen her come to tears. He put his hands on hers. The troubled sadness left her eyes.
“The worst thing,” she said, “would be if you stayed only because I wanted you to.”
“I wouldn't do that, to either of us.”
“I love you as much as ever, if that counts.”
“It counts for everything. Wherever we end up, whatever happens, I'd never, could never forget how much you count in my life.”
“That almost sounds like goodbye.”
“You keep waking up in the morning and I'll keep being there.”
She kissed him like it was the last time.
....
The sun had set clean and white behind the mountains. The air had started to cool.
Jack sat at the counter, paging through a magazine she had brought in a few days earlier. Natalie came in carrying her jacket, already in her boots. She stuffed gloves in her back pocket.
“There is a trap over in the ravine I need to bring in.”
“That's quite a way to go this late in the day.”
“Piece of cake,” she said with a confident smile. “And then I'll swing down to the highway and meet a traveler. I should be back in two or three hours.” She came over and kissed him. “Warm my side of the bed for me.”
“It'll be warmed for two.”
“Back before midnight.” And a dozen steps later, she was out the door, it was locked behind her, and she was gone.
Jack turned another page. Hand lotion. Take a vacation to Disneyland.
He'd been feeling slow and lazy all day and was looking forward to going to sleep, waking up in the morning and trying a new day. Another page. Bake special brownies for your kids. Take a cruise. The picture showed an immense liner on an even more immense blue ocean. He had never seen blue water, but pictures always showed the ocean as bluer than the sky. He couldn't imagine it.
Jack listened to the silence.
The ravine was a good five miles east.
Jack tore through the house, digging his old pack and his canteen out of the closet and then put on his walking boots. He put three days' worth of food in his pack, filled the canteen, and strapped it on.
On a piece of paper, he wrote,
“I love you but it's time for me to go. Maybe someday”
He was stuck.
Then he wrote,
“Forgive me.”
He stared at it, considering what else to add, whether he should throw it away...
“My god,” he said, slumping. “What am I doing?” The idea of leaving Natalie was unthinkable.
Five seconds later, he went to the front door, almost at a run.
“Artie!” he called from the front step. In front of him was the row of flowers he had planted. They were a foot tall and had two early blossoms. With his pocket knife, he cut the stems, hurried them back inside and left them across the note.
“Artie!” he called again from the step. “Artie! If you're out there, we're moving on.”
He pulled his ragged knit cap down over his ears. Except for being shaved, he now looked like the old Jack. Just before he rounded the hill he stopped and took a long last look at the house where he had been brought back to life. Now it was goodbye.
“Artie!” He listened carefully. Nothing.
Then he moved on into the gathering dark, toward the highway, then toward the west, to the fading horizon of the Sierra Nevada. After ten minutes, he slowed to catch his breath — and then he stopped. He cocked his head and listened.
“Artie?” He walked across the ruined highway and back. “Artie?” And then he heard what he'd only thought he'd heard.
“Meah.” That was Artie. He never put much effort behind his meows.
Jack sat down on the ground the instant he saw Artie, not much more than a shadow, coming up the highway behind him. First thing, Jack put his face next to his, asked him where he'd been and raked trash out of his fur.
“You were there all the time, hiding out from us and the dogs. I can see how you might have been nervous around the queen predator.”
Artie managed a slight purr.
Jack lit a small candle between his knees to check him over better. Fur was rough. No scabs, no lumps. Most of his front left paw was gone. The biggest pad was there, but the toes were gone and the wound was healed.
“Snagging food out of her god damned traps cost you, didn't it.”
Jack took a towel out of his pack and knotted it in a loop. “Here's the deal, pal. We’re going to California, to the ocean, and you’re not going to have to walk one foot of the way unless you want to... the least I can do.”
Artie understood the drill and let himself be placed in the sling. Then Jack was off at the fastest pace he thought he could maintain for the next ten hours.
The moon rose behind him and gave him good light. The conditions were better than he'd expected.
“Palm trees, Artie. Beaches. You're going to love the size of the sandbox. Babes in bikinis. Lady cats in skimpy fur coats. Just over the next couple of mountain ranges.”
Jack realized he had slackened his pace and picked it up again. Distance. He pumped on. He needed distance.
“Jack.”
He screamed, spun, and leaped backward.
Natalie stood quietly beside the highway, as she had stood beside the highway when he opened his crusty eyes so many months ago. In that liquid green silk sheath, the impossible high heels, her hair its perfect absorbing black... right out here in the middle of the night. The moon was behind her — she should have been silhouetted, but she stood there as though in early twilight with her mona lisa smile, holding some shapeless thing in one of her hands.
“I didn't mean to frighten you.”
Jack staggered back. This couldn't be... again.
Artie hissed viciously from the sling.
“I'm not here to stop you. I knew it was time, and the night would be fair. I didn't want to make it hard for you. Here. This is the coat I've kept for you, and the extra canteen, filled. Think of me when you're thirsty. When the coat keeps you warm, think of me.”
His heart ached.
Jack hesitantly stepped close enough to take the things. He wanted to say
Thank you
but he couldn't get his air and voice to work together.
The instant he had the two things, Artie launched himself at Natalie and seized her hand, gutturally yowling and with claws and teeth ripped and chewed at her hand. Natalie appeared undisturbed. She held her arm unnaturally straight out in front of her, with the ten-pound animal savaging her. She observed it with unexcited interest.
Jack recoiled, unsure what to do — to grab at Artie? But Natalie stood there without particular expression.
After a quarter of a minute, Artie dropped to the ground and Natalie moved her bloody hand behind her back.