The taller girl, Patty, looked up, squinted, crinkled her nose. “Hey, Rose. We were coming to get you.”
“What is that?” she said, nodding at the thing dead in the road, pretending like she didn’t notice or care that fucking Patty had given Henry her name.
“Squirrel,” the shorter, dark-haired girl, Gina, said.
“What’s so goddamn interesting about a dead squirrel?”
“It ain’t dead,” Gina said. “Just smashed.”
“Oh,” Rose said, and then she slipped out of the truck before Henry could stop her. “Let me see.”
It was a sad sight, that squirrel.
The back half of it had been flattened into the pavement by someone speeding down the two-lane road, but the front half of it was still moving, had managed to pull itself a good two or three feet. At that moment, it seemed to be taking a break. Then its front paws started moving again, and she tried to imagine it pulling itself across the road. Tried to imagine the pain — did squirrels feel pain? — and the effort. The confusion, maybe, of having just recently had back legs that worked, of once being quick and acrobatic, able to climb trees and jump branch to branch, terrorize blue jays and mockingbirds, taunt cats and dogs.
And now this.
Where did it think it was going?
Gina and Patty were chatting about something behind her and maybe one of them asked who was that driving her around and another one might’ve asked what had happened to her shoes, but she didn’t pay them much attention, or rather, she listened to them just enough to know they were dead interested in who she was with and what she was doing driving around with this strange man, dead interested, in other words, in her, which was part of the point, wasn’t it?
Making people dead interested?
The squirrel’s chest beat rapidly, and Rose wondered if the beating was its lungs struggling to take in breath, or its heart struggling to pump blood into parts that were leaking that blood straight out again. Watching how fast its chest was beating, she felt that they should do something.
Then she heard the truck door open and slam and she turned to see Henry walking toward them. He was carrying a small hammer in his left hand. He nodded at Gina and Patty, and Patty smiled back because that’s how Patty was and Gina took a slight step back because that’s how Gina was. Henry got up close to the squirrel and said, more to the squirrel or to himself than to the girls, “What have we got here, buddy?” He dropped down into a squat. He pressed the hammer to the squirrel’s head and Rose, suddenly sure of what was about to happen, sure and unhappy about it, said, “Hey, wait,” but before she could say anything else, he drew the hammer back and tapped it sharply on the squirrel’s forehead — if squirrels even have foreheads, Rose thought. The tap wasn’t too hard, just hard enough that the squirrel collapsed and the rapid movement of its chest slowed and then stopped. Someone, Gina or Patty, gasped behind her, and she imagined the two of them flinching, turning their heads into their shoulders.
Pussies, she thought.
Henry gave a small smile, more of a grimace, and said, “There you go.”
“How in the fuck,” Rose said.
He shrugged. “Just a matter of where you hit it,” he said. “Find the right spot,” he said, “squirrels, birds, dogs, cats.” He shrugged again, as if this were common knowledge, that there would be one spot on the skull just vulnerable enough that knocking that spot with a ball-peen hammer would do a thing in. “People, even,” he said.
“Where?” she asked, standing up again. “On a person. Where would you have to tap a person like that?” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “Well.” Henry smiled at her. “Everybody’s different, you know.”
She knew where, though, knew exactly where you’d have to tap a person on the head in order to send him on his way. Or where you’d have to tap her, in any case. There’d been a spot on her own head that had been itching to be touched, deeply touched. She could feel where it might be with her fingertips but the spot that urgently needed pressing against was too deep inside her, covered by layers of skin and bone and whatever else it was that was held inside her head. She’d been feeling this for the past couple of days and had tried pressing hard against her head with the palm of her hand, and when that didn’t work, had pressed her head against the warm glass pane of her bedroom window, and then the sharp corner of the headboard of her bed, and against her bedroom wall. She’d pressed the eraser points of pencils and the blunt end of a pair of scissors there, too, all to no avail.
She’d never considered the dull tip of a hammer, though.
“Right here?” she asked, pointing to that spot on her head, just at her hairline, straight up from the bridge of her nose.
He barely looked at her, where she was pointing, and then, flustered, focused his attention on the squirrel flattened on the road, and said, with a bit of a hitch in his throat, or maybe that was Rose’s imagination, “Maybe, I guess, I don’t know.”
Then he said, “It’s dead now, anyway.”
Looking at Gina and Patty behind her, he said, “You want me to leave you here with them, then?”
Rose looked at the squirrel and then at Patty and Gina and then at the truck and Henry. She knew the right thing to say to the strange man who’d picked her up on the side of the road and had just killed a squirrel with a hammer. Yes, go on ahead, I’m fine now. But she was drawn. She wasn’t sure what she was being drawn to but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than what she’d be left with if she let him go.
Gina, who’d been studying Rose out of the corner of her eye, spoke up. “She’s fine with us,” she said. “Right, Rose?”
But Rose shook her head. “Actually, you mind running me to the store? I told my momma I’d pick something up for her and I lost my flip-flops back there and don’t want to walk barefooted.” She said this and didn’t look back at Gina or Patty, sure she knew what kind of look she’d see on their faces, Gina’s anyway.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. And then as they pulled away, Rose looked back at Gina and Patty still standing next to that dead squirrel, Patty waving limply until Gina noticed this and grabbed her arm and shook her head, and then the truck turned a corner and Rose couldn’t see them anymore.
5
Rose had gone too far down the shaft. She didn’t know how far too far, but too far, she could sense it.
Should’ve taken that left back at Albuquerque — that was her dad’s saying, although Christ if she knew what the hell he was ever talking about. Whatever, though. It was Henry’s fault, somehow, his fault for distracting her and maybe her fault just a little for being so easily distracted.
She pulled herself up, hand over hand, ten feet, fifteen, twenty. She was beginning to wonder when she’d get back to her turnoff, just how far below it she’d lowered herself, when she came to it, the opening — if it had been a snake, it’d have bit you, which was another one from dear old Dad — and Christ, how could she have missed it?
She swung herself to it, close enough to grab hold of the ledge with one hand. She was going to let go of the rope with her other hand, climb into the new shaft branching off to the left, and be on her merry way, but she stopped. She couldn’t say exactly why she stopped, but she did.
Something felt… off. Told her, Hold on, now, what’s wrong with this picture?
But then something else told her, Nah, this is it, go, go, you’ve got shit to do.
Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.