The Truth Against the World, page 23
“Yes, well.” Hecht probes his mouth with his ring finger, loosens something from a tooth, spits. “Nobody’s perfect, bucko.”
Overmarch turns toward Na’ura. “What about her?”
Without looking, Hecht says, “That’s the Injun’s department.”
He rises to his feet. Overmarch joins him. They stare down at me.
After a moment, Hecht says. “Thanks, ragger, for finding our horses.”
So that’s how they’ll tell it. Should anyone bother to ask.
Hecht heads off into the darkness, returning a moment later with a leather saddlebag, from which he removes a razor, a cleaver, a bone saw, coughing all the while. He places the blade of the cleaver in the fire, then crouches beside me again.
“It’s said the true test of one’s humanity lies in the capacity not just to endure suffering—a beast can manage that—but transcend it. I’m not sure I subscribe to that view. But I do believe it warrants testing. Truth through experiment, that’s my creed.”
Cosimo and Overmarch plant themselves within the fire’s circle of light, sitting down to bear witness. The Pawnee nudges Na’ura with his boot, kicks her for good measure, to make sure she hasn’t bled out.
Meanwhile, using the razor, Hecht cuts through my pant leg just above the knee, exposing the skin, then removes his blue wool jacket, rolls up his sleeves, collects the bone saw.
“Then again, this could just be a waste of time. Worthless in terms of science, I mean. Given the state of your spine. Who knows, you may not feel a thing.”
But I do—a lightning strike, white and scalding and total, the pain. I’ve watched field surgeons operate like this on men struck down in battle—and wonder if Hecht has as well, or performed the procedure himself—but there they had chloroform, ether, whiskey, a leather strap to bite. Here, now, despite centuries of self-mastery, I’m grateful to have lost the capacity to scream.
Time drags, seconds turn to hours, especially once the saw blade passes through muscle and digs into bone. For whatever reason, the mere effect of concentration perhaps, the man’s cough subsides. To keep me from bleeding out, he lifts the cleaver, red hot from the fire, and cauterizes my arteries with the searing flat of the blade. I can smell my own flesh burning.
“Looks good,” he says, studying the singed stump. “If I do say so myself. Really shoulda kept up with school.”
As he works on the other leg, I begin to hallucinate, thinking I can hear the moon scraping across the night sky, feel the stars vibrating.
“Hurry,” Cosimo snaps, a slight whistle due to missing teeth. “Sunup’s soon.”
“Stop worrying,” Hecht tells him. “There’s plenty of time.”
Indeed, there seems to be nothing but time as the torture continues.
When at last Hecht rises from his work, specks of blood darken his shirt, his face, his glasses, his teeth—yes, he is smiling. He wipes his hands on a rag.
“Normally,” he says, “that’s just to make sure you don’t go anywhere. But like I said, the truth matters, the truth about who we are. So tell me—what do you make of your transcendence? Worth it overall? I know you can’t talk, a nod or a wink will do.”
I’m trembling all over from shock. And the cold, or what feels like cold, grips me like death itself.
“Guess we’ll just have to chalk this one up as inconclusive.” He looks east to the horizon, glowing faintly with daybreak. “Good news? You’re still breathing. Means you get to watch Cosimo work his magic.”
In the part of my mind not blinded with pain, I’ve been holding out hope they’d forget Na’ura, gather up the horses and all the rest and leave us both for dead. But cruelty is an appetite only gratified by escalation.
The two deserters arrange themselves near the fire. Overmarch lights his stub of a cigar. Hecht folds his hands, placing them over his mouth to muffle the hacking rasp of his cough.
Cosimo first builds a new fire of four logs arranged with ends touching to form a cross, pointing in the four directions. Next, he forces Na’ura onto her feet—when she almost collapses, Overmarch steps over to assist, propping her up—and strips her naked, cutting her buckskin away so he needn’t remove her bonds. Her shoulder is caked with blood from the gunshot wound. Her black skin glistens with sweat. The whip scars crisscrossing her back all but glow.
Producing a small clay jar from a satchel, Cosimo smears a reddish paste over the right half of her body, murmuring incantations, his continuous singsong once again accented by the soughing toothless whistle, after which comes some kind of ritual purification with smoke from the fire before he and Overmarch drag her to the oak tree and lash her to the trunk.
Cosimo places his knife blade in the fire and lets it heat to glowing as he scours the night sky for the Morning Star, which in Pawnee lore means Mars, not Venus. Once he locates the small red planet, pointing with reverence, he intensifies his chant, bows in each direction, then retrieves his red-hot knife.
As he presses the blade into her armpits and groin, she begins her death chant in a shuddering whisper, which her torturer ignores. He then collects her bow, shoots an arrow into her heart, then cuts her chest open and smears his face with her blood.
Na’ura’s death chant fades into silence, though her chest continues to tremble from ragged, shallow, unconscious breaths.
The men collect what they’ve claimed from our belongings, then douse the fire with fistfuls of dirt. As Cosimo and Overmarch mount their horses, Hecht takes a moment to come to my side.
One last look at his handiwork. One last time, that smile. The lenses of his spectacles flare in the midmorning sun.
“Whole goddamn territory’s at a fever pitch, and you’re out here playing bronc-buster with your half-breed whore. What in the name of God were you thinking?”
Over and over, those words hammer themselves into my mind, even as, come nightfall, the wolves descend, without malice or scheme, and finish the business off.
Na’ura, "someone found”—I meant to free her, save her. Instead, I end up ensuring a grotesque and hideous death.
What sort of fool—or monster—does such a thing?
In the Shadow of Mountains
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a
clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—
they say—God, when he walked on earth.
―Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”
—51—
“You okay?”
Georgie’s voice—she’s kneeling before me on the ridged rubber flooring of the Starliner. The fog of memory melts away, the antique bus assumes shape and form—we’re moving, the engine throbbing in some middling gear.
“I’m fine, sure. Brilliant.” I pull myself up from a drowsy slouch, shrug meaningfully, wondering if we’ve left Kansas behind. And all that Kansas means. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
She’s staring straight into me. “You seemed, I dunno . . .”
Her face looms before me like a worried moon. She’s all made up again—a whole new look, call it the Merry Concubine: ruby lips, eyes done up like peacock feathers, red dot cheeks.
I clear my throat. “Never felt better.”
Dutch sits at the wheel, glancing down at me queasily, as though he’s just watched me thrashing about in a seizure.
“You were muttering,” Georgie says.
“Not even.”
“Oh yeah. It sounded angry.”
Beyond her, the nearest pair of Foonies pretend to be entranced by their handheld doojiggers despite clearly listening in.
“Like you were talking in your sleep. Except your eyes were open. And you were moving your head and shoulders a lot, kinda like this.”
She imitates something that could readily be mistaken for a blind man trying to ward off an airborne chihuahua.
“Get out.”
“I’m serious. It was spooky.”
She takes my hand, laces our fingers together. “This is different.”
“I’m not following.”
She tilts her head, as though trying to be sure of something, a fresh perspective. “For once, you’re the one who could use some looking after, not the other way around.”
A short time later, we enter the Rocky Mountain rain shadow. The distinctively stark, massive, snowcapped peaks loom in the distance, while pristine clouds sail like schooners across a glassy blue sky. The Foonies draw back the curtains on their windows and stare.
The thing they’re unlikely taking in properly—the parched grassland sprawling in every direction, a desert in all but name. Starvation Trail it got called by settlers who managed to cross it. If only those who want to resurrect the Wild West were even half-aware of what they’re wishing for.
And with that I drift back into my reflections, sinking even deeper into the backlands of my mind, sensing a difficult truth just beyond reach.
In time, the pattern emerges. The woman in the Okinawa pottery shop, Na’ura—these aren’t mere random flashes of remembrance, conjured by rain on the one hand, Kansas the other.
I’ve observed this often in certain vets, the ones especially shattered by what they’ve seen, what they’ve done. A kind of dark sacrament of memory. Returning over and over to the same tragic situation, the same brutal mistake, hoping to work out the destructive logic. Hoping to heal. Or it simply becomes irresistible, the need to lance the scab, watch the blood ooze up from below, feel it again—the horror, the danger. How else to know for certain you’re still in fact alive?
Back at the horse barn last night, Georgie asked what she means to me, if she’s nothing more than someone to save. I answered no. I meant it. But I’m seeing the lie in that now. She’s wiser than she realized. I’m using her. To see if it all comes out different this time.
“You’re doing it again.”
I’ve utterly failed to notice her kneeling once more by my side, closer this time, studying my face like I’ve broken out in welts.
“What’s going on? It’s like you’re daydreaming, except, I dunno, worse. Nightmaring?”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine. Lost in thought, is all.”
“Promise?”
“Swear on a stack of bible salesmen.”
She plops down by my side. Stretching her legs out into the step-down well, then leaning in close, she speaks only as loud as necessary to register over the engine, wanting no one to overhear, not even Dutch.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Okay.”
“About Reggie.”
“Ah.”
“It’s no big surprise that he’d steal from me if it meant getting famous. If vanity were cancer, he’d be in his tenth round of chemo.”
“Fame changes people, or reveals them for who they are.”
“But then why step away from the spotlight?”
“Maybe he got sick of the charade. Or the fear of being found out got to a point—”
“No.” A coltish headshake. “I think you were right before, what you said back in Philly.”
“Remind me?”
“He’s trying to get away. From his publishers, whoever else is making money off him. He’s not strong enough to stand up to people like that.”
“Not a point I’d argue.”
“He’s as much on the run as we are.”
She goes on to describe what she intends to say once we finally meet up with him—an offer of forgiveness, laced with a demand.
Though a public statement of contrition is owing, she’ll require no such thing. Rather, they’ll team up, combine efforts from here on out, publishing their collaborations under the name of Rory Fitzgerald, fine, but choosing a whole new publisher, a fresh approach, returning to the brilliance of the first book . . .
I’m hearing her out, taking heart from the fire in her eyes, the strength of her voice. But what I’m seeing is a woman left for dead on the floor of her pottery shop. A woman tied to a tree, an arrow piercing her heart—waiting for the wolves.
—52—
“Slight change of plans.” Dutch is eyeing his handheld GPS. “Traffic’s jammed up on I-70 this side of Denver. So heading back to the interstate from here makes no sense. Instead it’s recommending we head due west to I-25, then turn north.” He glances up from the device, stares out through the windshield at the dusty road. “I hope that’s acceptable.”
There’s a hitch in his voice. When he turns toward me, his eyes retreat into a kind of fearful abstraction, as though he thinks I might not just object, but lash out in some way.
“Anything the matter, Dutch?”
“I just want to make sure the detour doesn’t . . .” His voice trails off.
“Doesn’t what?”
“You’re okay with it, then.”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“No, no, I’m just . . .” He swallows nervously. “Okay, please. Don’t take this wrong. But the way you were acting a little while ago.”
“My daydreaming, as it were.”
“Pretty aggressive daydreams, to be honest. If that’s what they were.”
“And?”
“It worried me. A little. You know me, I’m a worrier. I just wondered. If something was, well, troubling you.”
He’s not the world’s best liar.
“Nothing beyond the usual.” I’m wondering now if maybe a bit of worrying on my part wouldn’t be wise. “Sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
He takes a moment to ponder that. “I don’t know these roads.” He glances sidelong at me, the distant fright now tinged with shame. “I don’t know what to expect, I don’t want to get us lost. But it seems, once we get beyond Wild Horse, if we take 94 due west, it’s basically a straight shot to Colorado Springs.”
“You’re wondering if we’ll be safe.”
“It’s the middle of nowhere. Just a lot of . . . emptiness.”
“You’re asking my opinion?”
“I guess.” He closes up the GPS. “But it seems, even though it takes us out of our way, this route still saves us almost an hour.”
“Seems you’ve made up your mind.”
“It’s all right, then?”
“You’re sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me?”
“No. Of course not. Nothing. Here comes the turn, excuse me.”
He flips on his signal, slows for the left-hand turn onto another two-lane road, this one heading straight for the mountains.
I position myself just behind him in a half squat, half crouch, peering through the scummy windshield at the endless wasteland. Nothing anywhere stands higher than a fencepost. Airborne dust turns the horizon into a giant smudge.
A half hour goes by, nothing of consequence transpires, so I settle back into my usual place, looking backward at the parallel line of bunks, all the Foonies battling their boredom.
We pass through a place called Punkin Center, in reality nothing but an intersection marked by a pair of hardscrabble huts of rust-stained tin.
One of the young ones in the back calls out, “Hey, check it out. Two bikers just pulled out behind us.”
Everyone crowds the back windows to look. Dutch stares straight ahead, barely bothering to glance in his side mirror.
In short order another pair of bikers appears, these two taking up position ahead of the Starliner. We have a formal escort now. To where?
Their leathers bear a distinctive patch: dark blue wolf’s head in a white circle, the eyes a pair of blood-red slits. The words American Nightwolves appear on the upper rocker, with Sangre de Cristo Nomads along the bottom.
It’s a Russian motorcycle gang, transported here, tied to the American Cossacks.
I lean down close so no one else can hear. “Something you’re wanting to tell me, Dutch?”
He swallows hard, grips the wheel. “I told you I was worried.”
Not worried enough. “Where are they taking us, Dutch?”
“I don’t know that they’re taking us anywhere, they’ve just shown up out of the blue. Maybe it’s all just for show. They’re taunting us.”
I lean in even closer, so my lips all but kiss the middle of his ear. “I’m many things, Dutch. Blind, deaf, and dumb aren’t among them. Now don’t compound being a liar with being a coward. Tell me the truth. What are me and Georgie looking at here?”
He stares straight ahead, but his eyes glisten. Tears of guilt, of fright.
“They made contact last night.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. First, a text came in, when I was trying to sleep. It said the phone was going to ring shortly and I should pick up. So I did.”
“And who was on the line?”
“A woman.”
“Describe her voice.”
“Husky, slight British accent.”
Not Georgie’s stepmum, unlikely a Philly cop—then who? “Go on.”
“She said there were cameras at the truck stop outside Kansas City, they caught the two of you boarding the bus. She tracked down who it belonged to and got my cell number. She says she’s concerned for Georgie’s welfare. She may seem strong right now, but that won’t last. She needs her medication. She needs care.”
“Yeah, and these fellas on the motorbikes, they’re nurses no doubt.”
“Nothing was said about that. About them.”
“Boy, there’s a stunner. And then there’s me, Dutch. This woman, the one with the accent—what might she have planned for me?”
“Listen, I really don’t—”
