51
T
hey had driven less than three minutes from the scene with no one capable of speaking a word until Ellie said, “Pull over. I'm gonna be sick.”
Gany pulled the Caddy onto the shoulder of the wooded highway. The moment the car stopped, Ellie was out the door and hurrying into the trees. She got only about five yards before she bent forward and vomited in the grass.
David got out of the car and joined his daughter. When he reached her, she had finished retching, but remained bent forward, hands on her knees, staring off at the dark, intersecting branches of the trees. David rubbed her back. He didn't say anything.
“I'm sorry,” Ellie said. Then she spit on the ground several times.
“Feel better?”
“I guess so.” She turned her head and looked up at him. Her face was beet red, her eyes bleary. A trail of saliva hung from her chin. “It was a lot to take in.”
“I guess it was. Were you trying to save her life?”
“I'm not sure. I don't know what I was trying to do. But she died, anyway.”
“Yes,” David said, still rubbing her back. “But much more peacefully than she would have, I think.”
“I took it all out of her and helped her get over,” Ellie said.
“It was very brave,” he said. “Very stupid, but very brave.”
She began to cry.
“Aw, hon. Come here.” He hugged her tight. “It's okay.”
“I'm sorry,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest.
“Shhh,” he told her, squeezing her more tightly. He looked back toward the Caddy and saw Gany standing outside, leaning against the hood and smoking a cigarette. Watching them.
“What are we gonna say to her?” Ellie said. She was looking at Gany now, too.
“I'll handle it. You okay to go? Feel better?”
Swiping the tears from her face, Ellie nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Let's roll.”
When they got back in the car, David expected Gany to hit them with a barrage of questions. But to his astonishment, she said nothing. Not a word. It made him uncomfortable, so he cleared his throat and proceeded to fumble through some sort of explanation that was somewhere between a half truth and a complete fabrication.
“Hey,” Gany said, interrupting him. “Listen, man. You guys don't owe me an explanation. As far as I'm concerned, your girl back there's got a big heart and was trying to help someone in need. We can leave it at that.”
“All right,” David agreed. “Let's leave it at that.”
In the backseat, Ellie fell quickly asleep.
* * *
By the time Gany left the highway and pulled onto a narrow ribbon of blacktop that wound through acres of bare-branched forest, Ellie was awake again. She stared out at the trees, not talking. All conversation had pretty much died after the highway incident.
“This place is a retired chicken farm,” Gany said as she navigated the unwieldy Cadillac along the serpentine twist of roadway. “Tim's been out here for about a year, I guess. Previous owners sold it to him for a song. Not much use for a chicken farm when there aren't any more chickens.”
“What exactly does he
do
out here?”
“Whatever he wants,” Gany said. “He's always been a bit of a recluse, only now it's trendy.”
“But what does he do for money? Does he have a job?”
She looked at him. “You guys are brothers, right?”
“Well, stepbrothers. We haven't spoken in a long time.”
“So, are you one of those guys who only reappears when he needs something?”
The question jarred him. About a million responses shuttled through his brain, but none of them seemed adequate enough. He opened his mouth to speak, but Gany cut him off.
“I'm just screwing with you, man,” she said, smiling at him. She had a bit of an Elvis curl to her upper lip.
“I just don't want to get him in trouble,” he said. Then added, “Or you.”
“Tim's no dummy. He looks before he leaps.” She glanced sidelong at him. “I'm no dummy, either.”
After about ten minutes, the blacktop gave way to packed earth. The trees crowded in closer to the car, and a few bare branches reached out and scraped twiggy fingers along the Caddy's roof. David got the sense that they were driving gradually uphill the whole way.
The dirt road eventually emptied out onto a small sunlit glen, at the center of which was the farmhouse. It was comprised of natural, untreated wood, with a slouching cantilevered roof, green and furry with moss. A series of antennas jutted straight up from the center of the roof, forming a semicircle around a satellite dish. Running the length of the house was a wraparound porch that sagged beneath a shingled alcove. The windows were all shuttered, and there were
NO TRESPASSING
signs posted to the trees every few yards. A silver Tahoe was parked around one side of the house, decorated in splatters of mud.
“A deer,” Ellie said. “See it?”
David looked and saw a large doe standing motionless among the foliage to one side of the house.
“It's a fake,” Gany said. “A phony.”
Ellie said, “Huh?”
“It's made of rubber. There's a camera in its head. Wave, gang. We're on CCTV.” Gany stuck her arm out the window and waved to the deer. The deer's head swiveled mechanically, following the vehicle's progress around the side of the house.
“You're kidding me,” David said. “What's that all about?”
“Precaution,” Gany said.
“Precaution from what?”
Gany eased down on the brake and shifted the car into Park. “You should really speak to your brother more often, man,” she said.
They got out of the car, feeling the cool, unblemished breeze on their skin, and inhaling the scent of pinesap in the air. There was an ax-head wedged in a tree stump and a few archery targets fixed to bales of hay. A rusted artesian well jutted crookedly from the earth, looking like something that had landed there after dropping off the fuselage of a 747. Also, there were the bugs: Out here, halfway up a mountain and in the middle of the wilderness, the air was teeming with tiny, flying insects. Larger things catapulted out of the grass. Glancing around, David saw a number of gauzy webs strung up in the forks of trees. He thought of the gigantic spider on the lamppost back in Goodwin, Kentucky.
Gany pulled her hair back and tied it behind her head with a rubber band. “It's beautiful out here, isn't it?”
“The air feels thinner up here,” David said. They had driven halfway up a mountain, the height nearly dizzying. He could feel the change in elevation in his bones.
“Cleaner, too.” The voice was male, booming. David turned to see his stepbrother standing on the porch, a cigar parked in one corner of his mouth, his big arms, blue-gray with tattoos, folded over the porch railing.
“Holy shit,” David said. He couldn't help but smile. “It's like looking at a ghost.”
“Maybe you are,” Tim said, returning David's smile. He had a gruff but warm face, with sharp blue eyes beneath gingery eyebrows. His hair was long and tied behind his head in a ponytail. When he stood upright off the railing, the top of his head nearly touched the sagging lip of the roof. “Maybe we're all just ghosts floating about through the ether, occasionally bumping into one another.” He turned and looked at Ellie, who stood near one of the hay bales, one hand around the shaft of an arrow ready to pull it out. “My God, is that you, El? Smokes, you're a goddamn woman!”
The smile that came to her face was enough to brighten her entire being. Something within her seemed to swell. “Hi, Uncle Tim!”
“Come and give me a hug, El.”
She trotted across the yard and mounted the creaking porch steps. Tim met her halfway, snatching her up off one of the risers in one muscular arm and swinging her against him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he hugged her back. Before letting her go, he kissed the side of her face. It had been years since she had seen him, yet she went to him with familiarity. With trust.
“I thought you said kids were lampreys with legs,” Gany said.
Still smiling, Tim jabbed a finger in Gany's direction. He made his way down the stairs and ambled over to David. As he approached, the smile on his face transitioned to a sympathetic firmness of the lips. His eyes softened.
“I'm sorry about Kathy,” he said.
David felt something loosen inside him. Before he could embarrass himself, Tim snatched him up in a bear hug that lifted both his feet off the ground. The crook of Tim's neck smelled like cigar smoke, his flannel shirt like marijuana. David felt tears spring from his eyes; it was almost as if Tim was squeezing them out of him.
“Thank you,” David said once they'd parted. “You have no idea what this means, letting us come here like this. You probably saved our lives, Tim.”
Tim tucked the cigar back between his lips. He asked Gany if they'd had any trouble.
“Smooth sailing,” Gany said, though her gaze darted briefly in David's direction. “I tossed his cell phone right after I picked him up.”
Tim nodded, pleased. “Why don't you take Eleanor to see the rabbits?”
Ellie looked at her uncle, wide-eyed. “There's rabbits?”
“Bunnies,” he said. “Newborns. A whole brood.”
“Come on,” Gany called to her.
Ellie went halfway down the steps, then paused and looked at David.
“Go on,” he said.
Smiling, she rejoined Gany on the lawn. Gany took hold of Ellie's hand and they proceeded to trot around the side of the farmhouse.
“She's beautiful, David.”
“She looks like her mother,” David said.
“Come inside with me.” Tim slung an arm around David's shoulderâit was like hefting a log onto his backâand led him up the porch and into the house.
David was surprised to find the interior of the farmhouse clean, organized, meticulous. The absence of personal flourishesâthere were no pictures on the walls, no bric-a-brac on shelves, no homey touchesâmade the place seem more like a
facility
than a home. As Tim talked about how he'd purchased the property for a song, David followed him through a series of rooms that all seemed to serve their own very specific purposeâa room filled with computer equipment and two laptop monitors with activated screen savers; another room serving as a library, where hardbound books climbed the walls; a room overflowing with various ferns bursting from hanging pots lit by a regiment of solar lamps while misters breathed vapor into the air. Music issued from hidden speakers and followed them from room to room, some instrumental jazz heavy on the electric bass. The tour ended in a screened-in porch that overlooked a field of brown grass bisected by a narrow wooden structure that looked like a series of miniature boxcars shackled together. Beyond the field, a curtain of fir trees wreathed the base of a mountain range. There was snow on the peaks.
“It's beautiful out here,” said David.
“Sit, sit,” Tim said, waving his hands around at a group of wicker chairs. “What happened to your nose?”
“Got in a tussle with some hillbilly zealot in Kentucky.”
“Broken?”
“I don't think so.”
“How about your arm?”
“I cut it on some glass.” David sat, the Glock jabbing him painfully in the small of his back. He withdrew it and held it out toward Tim. “Think you could stow this away somewhere?”
“Christ, man. And they say some people never change.” Tim grinned, plucking the Glock from David's hand and shoving it down in the rear waistband of his own pants.
David sighed. Above his head, more potted ferns gently swayed in the breeze that came through the screens. There were birdhouses hanging from the porch on the other side of the screens, but these looked about as vacant as the houses with the
X
's on the doors back in Goodwin.
“Let's have a look,” Tim said. He knelt beside David and proceeded to unwrap the bandaging.
“What were those aerials on the roof for?” David asked.
“I rigged them up myself. I've got a ham radio and some closed-circuit monitors in the basement. The place is outfitted with security cameras. Some other junk, too.” Tim removed the bandage from the wound, then made a disapproving face. David glanced down and saw that the wound was still bleeding. He felt woozy just looking at it.
“I thought you were off the grid.”
“Most grids,” said Tim. “How long ago did this happen?”
“Yesterday morning, I think. I've lost track of the days.”
“It's reopened. It needs stitches.”
“I can't go to a doctor.”
“You won't have to. I can do it here.”
“Jesus,” David said, looking away.
Tim squeezed the back of David's neck. “It'll be fine. Ain't my first rodeo.”
Tim got up and sauntered into the next room. David heard him rummaging through drawers. Glass bottles clinked together.
Out in the field, Gany and Ellie trudged through the tall brown grass on their way to the wooden structure that resembled a series of boxcars. David guessed they were the old chicken coops that had been modified into rabbit hutches.
“I don't understand what you're doing out here,” David said.
“I'm living,” Tim said from the next room.
“What happened to Kansas City?”
“I felt stifled there. It was always just a layover for me, anyhow.”
“Every place is just a layover for you.”