—We all end up in the fire, anyway. This friend of mine told me a story. He was raised in Kansas on a farm. He told me his older brother met Satan. Billy Bob was riding his tractor one miserably hot afternoon and the Devil was sitting on a stump at the end of a row. Fire engine red, horns, tail, pitchfork stuck in the ground. The Devil said,
Hi, Billy Bob.
—And? I’m on the edge of my seat here.
—I dunno. My pal couldn’t get anything else from his brother. His bro was one of those sullen, salt o’ the earth types. You, know, the kind I despise. He only mentioned it when he was drunk as a skunk and preached the Rapture.
—Probably didn’t know what came next because he’d cooked his brains sitting on the tractor one too many summers. Now full darkness was upon them and they were two lumps of shadow, side by side.
—When I saw the horn, kinda peeking out of the dirt, ants swarming over it, this feeling, a shock, hit me. A moving picture, a sick, sick black and white movie, clicked on in my mind. I wanted to sit in the dirt and keep replaying it. This morning I watched you sleeping and the movie started again. For a few seconds I got why our cult friends went to the nursing home and went wild. I really, really understood.
He couldn’t see her face. He didn’t know what to do with her, so he pretended not to hear. —My father was a woodsman, he said. —After Mom died, he disappeared into the Olympic National Forest with a backpack and his dog. He made a ramshackle camp in the heart of the forest and lived there about eighteen months. He had cancer and he didn’t want to go on without his wife, so he did what the mountain men used to do. He went into the wilderness to die. Animals ate him. Only the bones were left.
—That’s a beautiful story, she said. —My dad’s fat as a cow and farts his way through CNN and tournament poker sixteen hours a day. I wish a wild animal would eat him.
The buck, the knife. Him trudging across the ice, in the distance a steel-gray wall closing fast. There wasn’t anything left to say, so they sat as if shackled to their chairs until the full moon floated to the surface of the sky like a corpse buoyed and bloated by its decomposition. The moon was yellow as a skull. He imagined it resembled the skulls of any of the people who’d ended their days at the bottom of a hole on this ranch. The skull moon resembled their own future selves, he was certain.
It rained hard for two days and they cooped in the module, she entering reports into the computer, he descaling the live traps and foothold traps he’d left hanging outside from a rack. The climate was harsh and limescale built quickly. She didn’t say much, didn’t come into his compartment again. She’d gone cold. Her eyes were strange and she sat for hours staring into the monitor, hands motionless on the keyboard. He realized he’d become afraid of her. This paranoia was exacerbated by flu symptoms, the sense of terrible vulnerability. His muscles ached, the strength drained from them. He spent hours on the toilet, bowels convulsing. The damned pilot had obviously brought them the gift of plague from town.
On the third morning, the weather cleared and he slipped away and lit out for the hills without saying goodbye. Crows roosted in the trees, and they alighted on the wet earth as he passed. The birds hopped from bush to bush in dreadful silence, following him in a dark train. He plodded directly to the coyote den, tranquilizer gun in hand, his mind mostly blank. Coyotes had been in the vicinity; their sign was sparse, but recent. He leaned against a tree and concentrated on blending into the scenery, willing one of his furry friends to make an appearance. His brain itched for a cigarette and he bought himself time by promising to smoke at least two if he remained stoic for an hour, three should he strike gold and nail his quarry.
It wasn’t like him to fidget, to chafe at the sweat on his neck, to twitch at every gnat bite and mosquito prick. Dad taught him better, taught him to sink into himself and leave the body an insensate shell, a blind within a blind. He was going to pieces. Inside of twenty minutes his nerve endings were on fire. A coyote appeared, moving unhurriedly, nose to the ground. He raised the gun without hesitation and fired. The coyote yelped, jaws snapping at its flank where the dart penetrated. He chambered another round and the little beastie was gone, fled like smoke into the shadows of the trees.
—Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He leaped to pursue, charged into the underbrush, and this too was contrary to a lifetime of character. Branches gored his arms, drew blood from his cheek. He shouted more obscenities, roared like a bull. The coyote had vanished, and after half a kilometer, he stood on the edge of a prairie, lungs burning, sparks pin-wheeling across his vision. He bellowed at the sky, seized the gun by its stock and hurled it with all his might. The gun arced, end over end, like a tomahawk, and smashed to pieces against the hard ground.
He kept walking, tears stinging the scratches on his cheek, matting his beard. The chopper had crashed behind a hill in a shallow ravine. He recognized the vehicle instantly. There hadn’t been a fire and it was largely intact. Crows perched on the bent tail rotor, and the mangled struts, pecked and preened among the glittering bed of shattered safety glass. The cockpit was empty. One of the flight seats lay a few meters from the wreck.
He uncapped his canteen and drank, then screwed the cap on again and dialed HQ. He reported the accident to an anonymous functionary who advised him law enforcement would be apprised and rescue personnel dispatched directly. He closed the phone and walked away from the crash site. The crows stayed.
He tracked his own footprints toward the mountains. The pilot’s tinted glasses twinkled where they hung from a sage bush. He stuck the glasses into his shirt pocket and kept moving, hardly bothering to glance down now; instinct dragged him forward. He came to a low rise. The ground was trampled. A long, sloping slab of carved rock dominated. A strange misshapen skull was transfixed on a wooden pole; the skull of an impossibly large ram missing a horn.
Two men stood at either end of the rock. The pilot’s flight suit was torn and grimy. —Give those back. The pilot pointed at the glasses. In the near distance, a column of deadly black storm clouds mounted vertically, its interior shot with brief flares of lightning.
The other man wore a toga open at the chest. His flesh glowed blue-white like the wings of a moth. The man looked at him and said, —Hello, Billy Bob.
He awakened, cross-legged, the bole of a pine digging into his back. Red, evening light filtered through a scrim of clouds. The coyote den remained silent, lifeless. His canteen lay beside him, open so that most of the water had leaked and made a small, mucky depression. He poured what remained over his cracked lips, then spat, stomach recoiling at the acrid taste; bitter grains he couldn’t identify lingered on his tongue. A beam of light illuminated the canteen so that it fractured like a prism and continued along his optic nerve and into the recesses of his brain where something turned over. A crow’s shadow flitted and fluttered, and danced away.
—You crazy bitch, he said, staring at the canteen with mounting horror. This couldn’t be happening. He dropped the canteen, then with bleary resolve, retrieved it and hooked it on his belt. He’d need evidence.
The module glistened red and orange, then winked out, a blown match head, as he walked into the yard. Simon and Garfunkel sang about darkness, their old friend, on the intercom. She was in a far better mood. She hummed while industriously clacking away at the keyboard, occasionally stirring a spoon in her tin cup. He stowed the tranquilizer gun, undressed, then went to the toilet, pushed his fingers down his throat, and retched. He clutched the sides of the toilet and listened to her chuckle in the other room. She sounded like a witch, he thought. Cackling and rubbing her knuckles as she plotted his doom.
He eventually emerged from the stall and took a can of beans from the shelf and cleared a space at the table. He sat, head in his hands, gazing numbly at the can of beans, realizing he’d forgotten the can opener, a plate, or a spoon.
—Want me to fix you something? she said. —You look weak as a kitten.
He licked his lips and smiled until they cracked and bled. —Don’t worry about me. I jogged three kilometers after a coyote. I’m winded, is all.
—Know what my favorite story is?
The Landlady
, by Roald Dahl. Great story. My sister read it to me when we were kids. Scared the shit outta me, but I loved it. It stuck with me. Do you know the story I’m talking about?
—Sounds familiar. He flicked his tongue over his lips, tasting the blood. —I feel as if I should recall because it’s famous. Like Tyson and Holyfield.
—Hee, hee, that’s so funny. You have a hell of a sense of humor, lover boy.
—There’s a dog that doesn’t move. A bird sitting in its cage. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Bitter almonds. The acrid silt at the bottom of his canteen, burning his throat.
—The old lady was into taxidermy. Once you figure that part out, you know what a train wreck is coming. Not one drop of blood is spilled and it’s the creepiest, ickiest story ever. Dahl was the shit.
—Why are you angry? he said. —This is about what happened with us back when, isn’t it? My God, girl, it wasn’t a thing. He had difficulty enunciating. —Not worth this. Not worth this.
—I’ve spiked your water for two weeks. O mighty hunter that you are, it’s pathetic. I thought it’d be so much harder. I almost feel guilty; it’s like strangling a child.
—Not worth this, he said.
—Do you even know what this
is?
Her chair squeaked as she rose, and her bare feet scuffed on the floor as she crossed the space between them. —I wondered where you went all day. You’ve been doing some heavy thinking at long last, haven’t you? But I’m sorry to say, it’s too late, motherfucker. Too late for you.
He looked up and saw she was holding the tin cup. She pinched her nostrils between thumb and forefinger, smiled and twitched her wrist, and dashed the contents of the cup into his face. He knew it was muriatic acid from the smell. He blocked with his left arm and twisted partially away, lurching from the chair, but some went into his eye and reality was eclipsed by a sudden blizzard of white.
—Oh, honey, are you okay? she said. —Did you get any on you?
Meanwhile, his eye bubbled into its socket, cooked like an egg white. He punched her with the can in his fist, not aiming, not thinking, because the acid was searing him, eating him alive, flesh and thought alike. The can smashed edgewise into her temple, and the tremor reverberated through his arm as bone gave way. She stepped backward, then sat abruptly in one of the plastic chairs. He threw the can at her, but his remaining vision flickered wildly and he couldn’t see whether he struck her or not. His lungs began to burn. Pain was a clothes hanger twisting into his soft gray matter. He shrieked and plowed through tables, chairs, a wooden partition; he tripped and sprawled on his belly. He curled into himself, writhing and retching, and slammed his head against the floor until he lost consciousness. The agony followed him down.
The Sierras team had camped near a hot spring and everyone leaped in naked and shouting. Someone brought booze, someone else a bag of grass, and it was a hell of a party beneath the full moon. After the others had drifted to their tents, drunken and singing, rough-housing and playing grab-ass, he took her on a flat white rock by the light of a dying fire, slick from the water, steam boiling from them as they clinched. An owl screamed as she screamed and dug her heels into his ribs. Two weeks of smoldering glances and glancing touches had led to this apocalyptic moment.
They took a vacation that began in Kenya and rambled south. He wanted to see the lions. Six weeks of safaris and relentless fucking in every hostel and two-star hotel along the Barbary Coast. She was recently divorced from a fellow geologist who worked in Washington D.C. as the head of a department in a small, but respectable museum. She described her ex-husband as a soft, lovely man. She was on top of him when she said this, hands flat on his chest, nude but for the thick belt she wore on her hiking breeches. The buckle scraped his belly as she fucked him. He wasn’t listening. His head hung off the bed and he stared through a set of billowing curtains at the clouds.
He found the puppy, an orphaned mix, in an alley in Denver. He took the pup to the vet for shots and worming. While he stood at the counter, bemused by his impulsiveness, one of his long-lost contacts, a buddy from college days, called with a job offer; a nine-month gig in Alaska. He said yeah, and put the puppy in a box and took it to her apartment. She fell in love, as he expected. He asked to her to watch it for him during the Alaska trip. They had dinner at a French restaurant, stumbled home high on a bottle of Chablis, and made sweet, tearful love while the puppy whined and scratched at the door. The next day she drove him to the airport and told him to write. He didn’t write, not once in nine months, didn’t speak to her again, and a couple of years later he heard she was dating some guy who snuffed fires on oil rigs. The guy died in one of the fires, but whoever told him didn’t know what she was doing or where she lived.
Sometimes, especially when he was very drunk, he’d awaken and smell her scent on the pillow. He’d think about her and the dog. Eventually, he didn’t.
She was still sitting in the chair when he regained his senses. Her head lolled and her legs splayed crudely, the way men often sat, crotches exposed. She’d pissed herself. A fly preened on her thigh.
The module was full of red shadows, or his head was full of red shadows. His left eye was gone, a crater leaking gelatin. He felt it sliding around. His forearm and hand were blistered; they resembled microwaved hamburger. The flesh of his cheek seemed to be sloughing, and when he touched his head, a hank of hair came free. The interior of his mouth was spongy, and his throat felt as if she’d dragged a rusty fork down his esophagus and then stabbed his lungs repeatedly. Pain broke over him in waves and when he coughed, blood and mucus shot forth. He gibbered and rocked with his head in his hands until finally he regained enough sense to find the first aid kit and take a half bottle of aspirin and a shot of morphine. Through it all, she watched him, one eye slightly higher than the other, the corner of her mouth downturned. He went to the radio, afraid to turn his back on her, but there wasn’t much choice.