Chapter 32
Have I died? What’s happening to me?
The drugs James had ground up and put into the whiskey flask were not wearing off. Ann imagined she was turning the pages in a child’s picture book and witnessing ink sketches of herself, of helpless Ann drifting through a series of worlds where she became smaller and smaller until night began to seep in from the edges and the pages themselves turned black. By then she was blind and bumping around in the dark, like a glob of oil inside a seafaring tanker’s belly, until at one point she felt herself being lifted up into someone’s arms and carried, recalling that pleasant sensation of being asleep and having her father haul her to the car after a long night of visiting relatives.
The ground below her stilled and Ann thought she was now in one of the secret glades she’d discovered while picking ferns. Lying on her back she stared up at a jade membrane shielding the sky, veined leaves of ancient maples whose lichen-crusted limbs were clothed in loose sweaters of green moss, learned associates of a timeless symposium. After a while she began to hear loud crackling sounds, followed by the smell of wood smoke. The membrane above peeled away and she saw the night sky, the comforting presence of the Big Dipper.
Invisible hands took hold of her body again and rolled her gently to her side and when the warmth came it was like having the sun suddenly pressed against her back. Fingers briefly pried open her eyes but her vision was too blurry to make out anything but a large peeled root sprouting thick hair. And yet if she tried to concentrate, a single eye began to come in and out of focus from the pale flesh half curtained by dark wet roots. The eye had a telescopic intensity, as if it were glassing on her inner landscape from a great distance.
She felt a calloused hand slide across her belly and her ribs. The roughness stung her skin, fired up nerve endings that shot to her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably. She wanted to scream at the person who was touching her to stop.
“You’re alive,” said a man she did not know. She assumed it was the peeled root who was speaking to her, who was now pulling down her shirt. Who the fuck did he think he was? His voice had reminded her of how green logs hissed when you threw them onto a fire. Her pulse raced inside her, a hummingbird trying to find its way back through an open window, the room shrinking fast and a surprised cat waking quickly from its nap to stare. Ann could hear her shuddering breath. An icy fear clamped around her heart. She imagined the severed arm with the Cyclops tattoo, its blue fingers tightening its grip.
Root-face backed into shadow, sensing the stress he was causing her.
“You must rest now and let the fire do its work.”
The man rose up and walked away. She wanted to talk but her mouth failed her as if it had been shot full of Novocain. For a moment she wondered if it was someone else’s mouth she was trying to speak through, that maybe her mind had found its way into a stranger’s body and was slowly wiring itself into its mainframe one nerve at time. She’d just spent hours outside of her body, so why should she believe she even still had one? She had no proof, other than the fact that she now felt pain where she’d been scratched deeply by the tree branch.
It’s going to take time to thaw. Time I don’t have to spare.
Embers shot into the night sky like paper wasps defending their nest, trailing up in dense formations and scattering with the wind. Ann watched them drift down the beach and go out. There was the smell of meat again, of something being roasted over the fire on a stick. The man came back several times to dump armfuls of driftwood on the fire, building up a thick bed of glowing coals. She felt his course fingers touch her shoulder one last time and then he was gone.
Chapter 33
Ann had hidden the money next to the seven buried sailors.
According to town lore, a father and son had gone out clamming at low tide when they found the bodies of the sailors washed up on Traitor’s shore. The dispute over their origin was never resolved but it was agreed that the men were not American, that their remains would not last long. A group of townsfolk loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and began the task of laying the bodies to rest in a strip of scrub woods near the beach. Hacking out the shallow graves among thick cables of roots and stubborn rock had been time consuming, and as night fell some of the volunteers did shifts guarding the corpses from scavengers. When the last sailor was finally buried, a small ceremony was conducted by a priest who’d ridden in from Buoy City. Afterwards, local children were invited to plant a sapling above each mound, and over a hundred years later the trees had grown into a cathedral of wind-contorted pine.
He found the money where Ann had told him, between the sixth and seventh sailor. When he first tried to pull it from the hole the wet mud had held it possessively. The white leather felt gummy and came off in his hands like an old skin. As soon as he freed the bag from its miserable grave, he dropped it onto dry ground and moved back, reminding himself to breathe. His mind had begun playing tricks on him and for a brief moment he’d imagined the bag was a shrunken torso. When he finally got the courage to see what was inside he found a garbage bag stuffed with bricks of money, many with rubber bands that had almost rotted away.
James was overcome with joy and began to tremble uncontrollably. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who, so he thanked whoever it was that had crushed Duane’s skull in prison because he knew he wouldn’t be holding fat stacks of money in his hands if Duane was still around to do something about it. Sure, it hadn’t been a cakewalk even with Duane out of the way but that was just the sort of luck James was accustomed to. Nothing good ever happened in his life without something coming along to fuck it up.
He transferred the money into a suitcase he’d stolen from the dentist’s house, stood up and tossed the leather bag out into undergrowth. He wanted to shout, even if only to the ghosts of sailors watching him from the dark grove of trees. But he thought better of it.
Remember, you’re only halfway down the mountain now. The rest is going to take everything you’ve got…
He closed his eyes and thought ahead to some nameless motel in Twin Falls Idaho, set back from the dusty interstate. A place far enough away that he could enjoy the luxury of sleep, if sleep would ever come again. He’d studied a map and decided it would be the farthest he’d have to run before he could stop worrying for awhile. Twin Falls. Would he be able to hear them from his bed? Would they drown out the sounds of someone coming? Not now. Don’t think about it yet. This is the time you must run. Nothing else matters now.
While he packed the suitcase in the trunk he heard the moan of the buoy coming from the mouth of the jetty. It made him think about Ann. He could see her as he’d left her on the rock-a dark haired, drugged siren. He recalled a dream she’d once told him about when they were young, a dream about being out on a rock, of losing herself while wandering through rooms full of fascinating objects, of not realizing that the tide had come in and stranded her out at sea. How ironic, he thought. He didn’t know what that word meant exactly, but decided it might be something Ann would understand.
He sat in the Skylark and smoked. Being in the old car relaxed him and that was good because he was going to need to keep his cool for the next few days while he made his escape. He wondered what kind of effect the car had on the dentist, what he got out of it. Did he sometimes wear his old letterman’s jacket when he drove? James smiled. He’d be sad when it came time to dump her. A car like this would just draw to much attention anyway. She’s going to turn heads wherever she goes.