The Pines (25 page)

In erratic bursts, the radio warned that power lines, downed by the storm, remained potentially deadly, and a phone number kept repeating through the static. “Fat lot of good that number’s going to do,” Doris muttered, switching it off. “Damn phones are down too, lot of places.” She kept turning to look at Athena. Through the rearview mirror, Athena watched the police car that followed them; she imagined she could make out the faces behind the windshield, imagined she could hear their voices.

“I handle all emergencies well, don’t I? And I don’t cry. Did you know this? I never cry. Not even as a child.” When finally she began to talk, her words rambled uncontrollably. “And my aunt used to tell me my mother wouldn’t nurse me, that she said it hurt too much.”

“What, honey?”

They reached the metal bridge, and the tires moaned across the grating, the water high beneath them. Athena glanced down. Black and skeletal, a grove of dead trees rose from the river, and scattered patches of high ground had become islands. She faced front again: distant and engorged, low hills swelled with evergreens.

“’Thena, I want you to understand this. If you ever need anything, you just have to call me.” Singing tires threw water, and the water threw a mist behind them, and a whistling rattle pounded through the rig when she dropped the clutch.

“It’s not my fault.” The words bolted out. “God help me, I’m relieved he’s dead. That’s all I feel. Relief. But I didn’t want him to die.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I didn’t! It’s me. Don’t you see? It’s me it’s after.”

“What are you talking about, honey? What’s after you?”

“It’s just letting me know it sees me, trying to hurt me through them, to get me to stand still and face it. At night. I’ve always known that. I’ve felt it.” She seemed to be having trouble breathing. “What’s wrong with me? I don’t even feel sad. My husband’s brother. Everything they always said about me is true. I can’t even feel. I think I heard him cry out. God, I think I heard him in the storm. Just at the end. When he died.” Turning around in the seat, she faced into the rig. “Two of them back there. Right behind us. Look.”

“Stop it now.”

“Two corpses. Did you see them, Doris? Did you see how they looked?”

“I saw.”

“When it didn’t get me, it had to go after somebody else. But why…if it already had Lonny…?” She watched the road for a moment. “Maybe now it’s rained, the murders will stop.” Her eyes glittered like jagged bits of glass. “Maybe now it won’t need blood.”

“Athena.”

“I’m going to kill it. What ever it is. I am.”

Doris only nodded. Collapsing barns began to pass in fields, yellowed from the recent heat, now thickened and sodden, and the matted grasses at the sides of the road could have concealed lions, whole prides of them. “You poor kid. Talk it on out, honey. Go on.” But Athena had apparently lapsed back into silence. The distant, mournful thump of gunfire drifted across the meadow. They skirted a ragged group of children who stood in the road to gawk at Asian workers laboring in a flooded cranberry bog. “Funny how things change,” said Doris. The children turned to stare at the rig, a few even giving chase. “I’ve been seeing workers get off the farm-labor buses for twenty years now. Used to be all blacks they brought in. Then Puerto Ricans mostly. Now are all you see is Vietnamese or Cambodians. I guess they’re right at home out there.” She glanced at the woman beside her.

“I wonder what’s happened to Barry and Steven. I can’t see them anymore.” She turned to Doris, shocking her with the sharp emptiness of her eyes. “You have to help me. I know you’ll help me. You always do.” She pointed back at the strapped and sheeted mounds. “The one from the car. It’s the same. The same as Lonny. Everybody is going to blame it on dogs. I’ll need evidence. When we get to the hospital, I want you to be the one to examine the bodies. You understand? Will you do this for me?”

The dirt road had emptied onto a paved one, slick and puddled, but Doris drove no faster. “There are a few markers I could call in, I guess. I guess it depends on where I take you. Which hospital. Maybe I could at least observe some preliminaries.”

Everything on the road changed; now beautiful homes alternated with hovels. The ambulance crept along, and Athena stared out the window. She watched a slanting shack go by and noted the absurd debris that littered the yard: old washing machine, bits of farm machinery, giant plastic squirrel. And everywhere the rusting cars. Then a mansion with smooth lawns and unbreached walls slid into view. Another hut sagged open, roof flopping, one wall having caved in beneath the weight of garbage that spilled out like entrails. “Isn’t that funny?” Two-lane blacktop, recently resurfaced, ran clean and straight. “It’s almost like seeing two centuries at once.” Her voice gentle and wondering, Athena jerked her head from side to side. “Don’t you think? Like different times overlapping. So many layers.” She caught her breath, as though from a sudden pain. “I thought it was Wallace, you see. Just for a second. On the ground. Like before. I guess I never noticed how much alike they looked.”

They passed another ruined structure. A blank fabric, the sky jealously absorbed all light, suffusing little on the earth, but the burning gray reflected, caught on the splinters of a broken window. “Look, Doris—a blind house. Eyeless.” She twisted around to watch it pass. “It could be my house. In a few years.”

Saying nothing, Doris increased the pressure on the gas pedal. As the rig went by, a ram in a makeshift corral stared after it impassively. Beneath curving horns, its slitted eyes gleamed yellow.

The face under the mud.
The difference in Lonny’s coloring had been hidden beneath slick grayness.
How am I going to tell Pamela?
Like Wallace dead all over again, dead and on the ground.

A taper of smoke still rose from the butt of Doris’s last cigarette in the ashtray. She’d followed a man in a green surgical gown down the hall just a short time ago. Athena squirmed on a vinyl sofa in the waiting area, her body clenching and unclenching, while she mouthed the paper cup of flat Coke that was supposed to settle her stomach.

The way Doris acts on the rig
—
sometimes it’s easy to forget she was a professional. I guess I make a lot of mistakes about people. They aren’t what they seem.
Her head hurt.
No, it’s that people don’t seem to be what they are. Or that…
She let the thought go.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what Doris would tell her. She sat, fighting nausea…and waiting.

PART THREE
THE HUNT

The summer woods now, green with gloom…where even at noon the sun fell only in windless dappling upon the earth which never completely dried and which crawled with snakes—moccasins and water snakes and rattlers, themselves the color of the dappled gloom….

William Faulkner

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden….

Herman Melville

Friday, August 7

From deep within its shelter, it called. The cry echoed in the flesh.

No response came.

It waited. It called and waited, an aching monster, sated but alone.

“But these dogs are killers! We can’t just sit back and hope they go away.”

“Come off it, Steve. They already canceled all the camping permits. Stopped all the canoe rentals, even. Goddamn—just what the fuck else do you want?” The corners of Barry’s mouth curled down in sneering exasperation.

Red-faced and sullen, Steve didn’t answer, just stared through the windshield. Both sipped from quart bottles of beer. Lazy with the heat, a yellow jacket flew in a side window and buzzed against the glass before finally settling on the dash. Barry’s hand shot out, smashing it flat. “Finally got one of the suckers.”

“Can’t understand you.” Steve shook his head in chagrin and bewilderment. “I mean, why you’re taking his side. I know I usually don’t say anything, but I can’t see what’s so damn threatening here.” Their boss, Frank Buzby, had officially opposed the idea of the stateys launching an all-out hunt for the dogs and even now worked every connection he had in an effort to squash the project.

Barry’s face went hard as he coolly threw the bottle at the trunk of a dead tree. The bottle splintered and fell, leaving a trace of foam on the gray wood. To end the discussion, he started the engine, slammed the car into gear. Worn tires dug, leaving twin furrows. “Just can’t figure it out, can you, detective?” he smirked. “Never stopped to think maybe ole Frank and me know some guys who wouldn’t be too crazy about a search party. Or maybe we got some stuff of our own hidden we don’t want nobody messing with.”

“You going to start that crap about your fancy mob connections again?”

Barry snorted contemptuously, and they rode for a time without speaking. Then, casually, he asked if there had been any interesting bulletins lately.

“Yeah, a good one. Maybe you should read them once in a while. I mean, just for entertainment.”

Barry stopped humming. “What the hell’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

Determined not to answer, Steve gulped from his beer, but the angry silence couldn’t be maintained against the heat and the stale swim of alcohol in his brain. “They brought in some woman, just about dead from exposure—bulletin said—found her deep in the woods. Practically catatonic at first.”

Barry watched the road, frankly bored.

“Then she started babbling about how her and her daughter’d been camping with some friends and got attacked by some guy who came out of the woods. They’re still trying to figure out when the hell all this is supposed to have happened. Nobody knows how long she’d been out there. Or what direction she came from.”

“Shit, Steve, she could’ve just been on drugs or something and got lost out there.” Abruptly, his face took on an uncustomary expression of interest. “Say, did they ever catch that guy? You know, the one got away from the asylum?”

“Putting one and one together like that.” His partner nodded. “Dangerous lunatic escapes. Campers get attacked. Might be a connection. Regular steel trap, that mind of yours. Ought to be a cop or something.”

“Well, us country boys can’t think too good. Shit. Know what I’m talking about? Not like you big city officers. Shit. I suppose you’re gonna tell me dogs did this too? Look, Frank’s got us working on it, don’t he?” He lowered his voice to what he considered a persuasive tone. “What in hell more do you want?”

“Yeah, great job he’s got us doing, too.” Steve held up the map Buzby had given them, a topographical chart marked with red
X
s and circles. “For crissakes, spreading traps and poisoned meat over half the county.”

“Reckon that should do it for the dogs, don’t you? Easier than sending a damn army out here.” Barry smirked again. “Probably get that loony too.”

Steve watched the trees go by. “I hope they catch him soon,” he muttered. “Starving—that’s no way to die. And this heat. Dying of thirst must be like burning to death, only slow.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you’d know all about thirst.” He took his hands off the wheel, cracked his knuckles and grinned. The car veered rapidly toward a wall of trees. Smiling broadly at Steve’s sharp gasp, he settled his hands back on the wheel and wrenched the car back on course.

Again, Steve tried not to speak. He took a deep breath, imbibing the musty pine smell. “Poor Athena. Must’ve been quite a shock for her yesterday. Finding him like that.”

“Shit, she ain’t all that upset.”

Matty lay at the rim of a hollow: smooth contours suggesting the foundation of a vanished house, only a smear of white in the lichen to show where the frame structure once had stood. Small cacti grew in the loose soil. He knew of many such places in the woods.

The boy played with some pebbles, rolling them down the sloping sand, his voice a constant gentle murmur. Dooley sniffed about him, then plopped down in the sand and studied a grasshopper that made its way across the turf. Sunlight ran warm across them, and wind rattled in the dry weeds.