My limbs were covered in dried blood, and as I stretched out naked in the tall grass, it chipped off like a layer of skin. I breathed in deep, coughed, and then smiled. I got up off the ground, using the tree as support. Once I was on my feet, I realized which tree it was. There, carved into it at shoulder level, were the names Johnny and June, surrounded by a carved-out heart. In the upper right corner of the heart was a hole. That was where my shot from the rifle had ended up. Ten yards past the tree was the shack, its one window blasted out, and its door slightly ajar. I walked over.
The wood door cried on its hinges, revealing a ten-by-ten room completely painted in blood. It was on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. It was so thick in some places that it had seemed to dry in layers—dry at the bottom and wet at the top. The photos along the walls were ruined, but there was a bag in the corner that I hadn’t noticed the night before. It was probably loaded with photographs that had made it safely through the crimson rain. I went over and opened it, and sure enough, it was. Bundles of photographs. I didn’t want to look at them, and I didn’t have to. Everything the Rose Killer had ever done was in my head now, and would be until the day I died.
I stacked the pictures on a fairly dry spot on the floor, being sure not to leave big, bloody fingerprints on the edges, and took the bag. I would need it. Next, I righted the chair I had been tied to the night before and set the bag on it.
Shredded meat littered the floor like confetti, maybe a third of what it would take to make a man. Resting in the far corner, one stacked on top of the other, were a pair of human legs, untouched, as if the wolf had wanted no part of them.
A fly landed on my hand. I blew it away. “Come back later,” I said.
I rummaged through the ankle-high mess and came up with the keys to my house, but that wasn’t all I was looking for. There were some things in that room that I needed to take with me—the definite signs that I had ever been there in the first place.
I picked up the bloodied clothes that had burst off of me the night before and found my skull-and-crossbones belt buckle under my torn-up pair of jeans. It was caked in blood, but still in one piece. I’d had the belt buckle for years, and truly dug it. It was coming with me. Everything else was reduced to rags. Everything went in the bag, like the busted handcuffs and my wallet and the pictures I’d carried around so long in my back pocket, but not the rifle, which went over my shoulder. I took the tape out of the video camera. It had been a long time since I’d seen a good show.
Last, I found John Raynor’s torn pair of pants and went through the pockets. God was smiling down on me, because his cigarettes were dry. I lit one up, and then fished out his car keys.
I ran across Old Sherman Road in all my naked glory and got in the Mach 1, then drove it as deep into the woods as I could. I emptied out the trunk and everything from the backseat, and dropped it all just outside the shack. When I was done, I used my old pair of underwear to wipe down the doorframe and anything else I might have touched. My blood was technically all over the place, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Having everything in one spot was my good deed for the federales. I was only sorry I couldn’t wrap a bow around the whole fucking building. I lit another cigarette, got in the car, and took
off.
I got home just short of six o’clock in the morning. I was half expecting to see a cruiser parked outside the place, but the coast was clear.
I made a pot of coffee and jumped in the shower to wash away the blood. As I combed my hair in front of the mirror, I touched my chest. The night before there had been two bullet holes in it. Not anymore. I wondered where the bullets went.
Over a bowl of cereal, I watched the tape that John Raynor had filmed the night before. When the strip of old rug came off the window, I saw myself change. I’d never seen it before. Now I was not only seeing it on film but I was reliving the Rose Killer’s perception of it as well. I wasn’t just getting a show; I was getting a double feature.
Anthony got off the floor as the wolf took its first lumbering steps toward him, and he tried once again in vain with the latch on the door. The wolf threw a clubbing blow into his back, and he doubled up. The camera tipped over. The wolf then swatted him against the wall, and he sank to his knees. As he screamed, the wolf pinned his arms against his chest and proceeded to gnaw slowly at Anthony’s face.
Before long, the killer passed out, and it was at that point, in which he no longer had a face to enchant with, in which his eyes hung like shining ornaments from their ruined sockets, in which he was no longer responsive to pain but lost somewhere up in his primordial brain someplace just short of death, that the wolf went on and took him apart.
Once he was dead and scattered about like the rags of my clothes, the wolf sauntered up to the camera, crouched down, and looked into the lens. With a deep breath it fogged up the lens, then roared, as if to say, “There you go.”
It then raised its hand beyond the scope of the camera’s eye, and turned the machine off. Watching that, I smiled. It was good to be a team again. But I destroyed the tape all the same.
After I finished my cereal and coffee, I put the bowl and mug in the sink. I would not have the chance to wash them. I went through the house gathering up my most treasured possessions—Doris’s night-light, the one picture of her I had left, the eagle feather my mother had given me and which was my burden to carry for the rest of my days, my old leather jacket, the naked-lady ashtray, clothes, the Proust I hadn’t finished reading—and loaded the trunk with them, then put the trunk in the backseat of the car. There was nothing else in the world I possessed.
I dressed in a clean set of clothes—jeans, cowboy boots, and an old flannel shirt—and locked the door behind me. I no longer had a home. And I no longer had a name. It was time for me to disappear. It’s what I was good at.
I remember leaving home like it happened yesterday. I remember pounding on my mother’s front door, begging her to let me in. She finally did. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, not since I left in a huff and moved into that fleabag motel on the other side of town. Doris had come over to my room the night before with a travel bag. In a couple of days we were going to get on the bike and head out west toward the ocean. We were going to get married along the way.
My mother answered the door in her bathrobe, her graying hair up in a bun, bags under her eyes the color of bruises, like she hadn’t slept since I came back from the war. I was hysterical, shaking, crying, and she carried me over to the couch and sat me down.
In a calm voice, she asked me what happened. I told her. “Doris is dead,”
I said, weeping.
My mother lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“You blacked out, didn’t you?”
“How do you know?”
“By any chance,” she said, “did you see the full moon last night?”
I saw an image of hell flash across her eyes. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Son,” she said, a tear sliding down her face, “you should have died over in that godforsaken war.”
“What was Dad supposed to tell me?”
She started it off with, “Well, Marlowe, you’re not like other boys,” and it went downhill from there.
She told me about my bloodline, how my great-grandfather had been a bounty hunter, how he had gone after an Indian who was called “the Mad Wolf.” The Indian was said to be deranged and possessed of supernatural powers. He had left whole villages in ruins. My great-grandfather killed the Indian, but his life was cursed from that day forward. When he died, his son inherited the curse. Down the line it went, till it got to me. She told me why Dad went away once a month the way he did—so he wouldn’t kill his family.