Jackal, page 23
Up ahead, I smell flowers. Not wildflowers. They smell familiar. I must be imagining a comfort before I end. Breathe.
A massive, wild blue rhododendron bush stops me in my tracks. A staple of suburbia in the middle of the woods. There’s a flash of silver behind it. Silver and white. I see a trailer between the branches. It must be Chris’s. I sprint toward it.
When I get to the door and pull it, it opens. I throw myself inside. A crash lets me know I’ve woken him up. I press myself against the floor, still afraid of bullets.
Chris stumbles toward me. “Liz?”
I can’t catch my breath. “Man—outside—GUN!” is all I can get out.
He grabs a shotgun from his closet and heads out the door. He cocks it, looks to his left and to his right.
“Asshole, this is private property. If you show your face, I will shoot you!” His yell echoes in the morning.
Silence answers him. He waits. He looks. And looks. He closes the door and locks it behind him.
I’m shaking on the tile floor in both fear and relief. As my adrenaline falls, my mind races. The person chasing me had to be the younger one in the pair. Chris said his dad had a broken foot. He definitely couldn’t pursue me through the trees like that. It’s not him. I was so convinced I was alone. I do have one last person I can trust. Chris.
In the comfort of his home, I start to feel my injuries. My feet burn.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” he asks.
I can’t answer, I just show him my hands. They are scratched and muddy. He grabs a towel and starts dabbing them. He runs to get hot water and soap. I’m still arriving in the moment. He kneels and cleans my bloody hands and feet. His back curves like the other night when he loaded the deer into his truck. His body is organized to the task at hand. Saving me. I can’t remember the last time someone saved me.
I kiss him.
After the initial shock, he kisses me back. Then, before either of us can stop it, we fall into each other.
I don’t have healthy sex. This is not that. This is the closest thing to what I think sex should be. I don’t try to play things out three steps ahead in my mind. I’m in the moment and in this moment, I want him. When I’m met with an equal passion, I lose myself. It’s a strange attraction and repulsion. The blood and mud shouldn’t be arousing, but it is. Being this close to him should terrify me, instead, it calls me.
We are all touch and tongue and sweat and fever. There are no tricks or moves or impressing. It’s animal satisfaction. My mind doesn’t understand it. It doesn’t get to understand it. I don’t think Chris knows what this is either. Yes, we are familiar with the physics. I know what I’m doing, he knows what he’s doing, what we are doing. The difference is us. We’re together. There’s not a leader or a follower or a giver or a taker, it’s all need. Any sort of control has given way to abandon. I’m naked because I need his skin against mine. He is inside me because he needs to feel the depth of me. I’m shocked at how fast I come. It’s a natural progression. No, it’s a peak, and another one is coming. This. I have dreams about sex like this. I’ve longed for this overwhelming desire to show myself to another and for them to show themselves to me. He is beautifully open. I don’t feel selfish asking him for what I need. He wants to do it, every part of him wants to give me what I want. Before I can think of the time it takes or how I look or smell, he digs himself deeper into my flesh, and I welcome him. I want to see him undone like this. I need it. I need to see that I can make him feel the way I do. So, so painfully present.
How long do we last?
How does it end?
How did it start?
I don’t know. I do know I’ve never fucked like this before.
Now I’m terrified I’ll never fuck like this again.
TWENTY-FOUR
I wake up satisfied for the first time in my life. Finally full of something, my mind is quiet. I’m too tired to think. Instead, I tend to my body. I catalogue my new wounds. My hands, feet, shins. All are peripheral to a new energy that lives in me. Glow isn’t the word, it’s more of an awakening.
Chris doesn’t open the curtains, he doesn’t want to let the light in on an act that feels more suited to night. He feels for me in the darkness of his bed instead. That’s not where I am. I watch him reach for me and then move out into the rest of the trailer. Hunger groans in my belly.
I head out to his kitchen. Looking through the fridge and cabinets, I find some eggs. Pancake mix. Milk. I start cooking. After the smell of breakfast fills the air, I hear footsteps.
“I see you found food,” Chris says with a smile. I don’t look at him and keep cooking, moving through the motions with a slow familiarity. Needing to touch me, he wraps himself around my back and kisses my neck.
“Morning.”
We eat naked and with our hands. We’re quiet and content to sit in silence because we don’t need words. A peacefulness finally enters my head. That’s why I tell Chris the truth the moment he asks me the question.
“Why were you all the way out here?”
“I had a dream. I walked,” I confess.
“All the way from your house?”
I wait for the answer to bubble out of me, like before. It can’t. I haven’t put it together for myself yet. Right now, all I want is to stay in this bliss for a moment longer.
I eat more pancakes. Sticky with syrup, I lick my fingers. The metallic tang of blood cuts through the sweet syrup. The wounds on my hands are painful, but not deep. The taste of my own blood makes my feet ache. Pain is starting to come back.
Chris’s phone chirps and he’s drawn to it. As he reads what’s there he starts to cover his nakedness. He offers me a shirt. Piece by piece, we both clothe ourselves and come back to humanity. Chris plugs in my dead phone and I look around. Chris has a nice trailer. Lived in and definitely not as clean as his truck. The crayon lodged in the back of the bed flashes in my mind. I didn’t ask him that night. I need to now. I still don’t know what kind of man he is.
“Do you have crayons?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Why?”
“I saw a pink crayon in the back when we were loading up the deer.”
“Oh! That.” Chris hunches over his phone again. “I was helping my sister move. Box burst. Some of her kids’ stuff spilled everywhere.” He looks back at me.
I consider his response. I stay silent.
“I don’t have kids, if that’s what you’re asking…” He’s trying to figure out the leaps my mind is making.
So am I. “Do you know someone who would hunt people—girls—in the woods?”
The question stuns him for a moment. “No. Just animals.”
“You ever meet any strange men in the trees?”
Chris drifts back into his memory. “One time, Dad and I came across another father and son. I was young. I didn’t recognize them. The dad looked like a dad. But the kid? He was bad news. You could tell there was something off about him. He was beaten, probably. Looked like the type of kid who shot cats, or something.”
“How could you tell?”
“His eyes. Even though he was young, they looked empty. He looked cold inside.”
I try to picture the face in my mind. I’m met with the many faces of men whose eyes have chilled me throughout my life. All sparked the same feeling, but none of them stuck. No face belongs to the figure from my dreams or the man in the woods.
“Remember the shadows rhyme we talked about?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“I looked,” he says. “After I left your place, when I was getting rid of the deer. I saw something right on the edge of my vision. And ignored it for a good long while. Then I remembered what you asked me about seeing impossible things and the shadows. I looked. Real quick.” Chris’s breathing rises from his stomach to his chest. “I saw a woman. Too far away to make out anything specific.” He breathes. “There was a little girl with her. A Black girl. She looked rough. And she rushed her away like…she was upset with her. I didn’t even think of the search because this girl had someone with her.”
“Where did you see them?” I pull up the map on my charging phone. I show it to Chris.
“Off these back roads, here, leading to the field.” He squints and starts to move the map around, approaching from different angles.
“What?” I don’t notice when he grabs my phone to get a better view. Caroline is alive.
“Your map is wrong,” he says. He points to The Rounds. “Follow that, you’ll end up twirling around in circles.”
“The Rounds are crazy.” Looks like Doug and I have something else to fight about. Caroline is alive!
“But there’s a reason to them,” Chris insists.
My brow furrows. “I was told this map was good.”
“Simple mistake.”
“You saw her at night?” I ask.
“Yes.”
That would be the best time to move someone through that area without drawing attention.
Caroline is alive and in the woods.
I am going to get her out.
CAROLINE
June 2017
I’m going to try and explain my relationship to fear to you. I will fail, but the attempt is important. How do you know what you are if you don’t know what you’re not? Little strings can come in to complicate things and attempt to gray this binary. When you are afraid, it’s clear. Light and shadow are each defined by the absence of the other.
The First Night
Liz finally came back.
She was early.
I needed to get her to stay.
Caroline assured her survival just as much as I did. She wasn’t for consumption. She wouldn’t be eaten or used as fuel. I needed her alive. This meant I couldn’t study her heart, her dreams, or her hopes. I’d get to know her from the outside. I had to leave this place. To do so, I needed to fish for all my missing pieces. Caroline was bait.
I hid the last thrown candle with shadows. When Liz left, I revealed it. The moment Caroline saw it flickering in the dark, she needed to retrieve it. A few steps into the woods and back out. The moment she stepped in, mud invaded her shoes. From the expression on her face, it’d gotten deep between her toes. The squelch of her steps reverberated through the trees like rain.
She moved faster, intent on running in and then right back out. The candle in the bush cast lashes of light into the branches, making long strands of darkness. Caroline approached the candle. She clasped it in her hands. In the prison of her fingers, the light illuminated the blood under her skin. I saw her fixation. Caroline was a girl who sought out shadows.
Snap!
She turned and let her eyes focus on the sound. When Caroline saw me, she didn’t scream. She didn’t run. Instead, she looked at me. Watching her see me, I saw her fear. Something more elusive lurked under it. What I longed for: unshakable belief.
The Fellow always brought their hearts to me dead. I never saw the Girls. The great muscle in their chests was how I learned who they were. The texture. The taste. The strength.
“Caroline,” I said. I never got to do this part. The actual hunting was too dangerous for me. Unlike the Fellow, I had to earn my flesh and fluid. My body had few points of strength and large spaces of weakness.
“Yes?” she answered.
Poor child of technology. No one warned her about the woods and what to do if she heard the distraction of someone calling her name at night. She got the story her mother wove instead. A story of curious shadows, which wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Mommy—!” I wrapped myself around her. Careful. This was dangerous for both of us. It does not take much strength to suffocate and it takes even less to tear.
Low branches ripped the edge of her dress and her leg. I put the candle back and pulled Caroline away.
I felt Liz approach. I saw her try to traverse the dark.
She failed.
Liz wasn’t ready yet.
The Second Night
“What did you do?” the Fellow yelled. For the first time, I broke our bargain. I poached early, messing up the annual hunt. Caroline’s friend Vicky and her upwardly mobile parents would be spared thanks to me. “What the hell did you do, Jack!” This Fellow yelled more than his father did. Young and full of hate. “Jack!” What is an accusation from a man whose voice can’t span the depth in his chest? “This one is too valuable.”
One drop in this country is all it takes. Being a Black girl is inhabiting a cruel riddle: Your beauty is denied but replicated. Your sexuality is controlled but desired. You take up too much space, but if you are too small, you are ripped apart. Despite the wash of it, that’s one thing you can always count on whiteness to do: destroy a threat.
Caroline’s white mother gave her credence. She’d get police out here. She’d get searches going. Most important, she’d make Liz stay.
“She stays,” I said. I refused to let the girl come to harm. I let her make demands. Her first one?
Crayons.
The Third Night
I watched Caroline sleep. A part of me wanted to eat her heart to learn what was in her head. I didn’t. This summer couldn’t be like the others. After years of feeding the wants and needs of others, it was time to feed myself.
She was safe with me while the Fellow kept the search, the town, and Liz occupied. The surrounding trees were silent. Shame grows in silence. Once it’s brought to light, it shrivels and dies faster than it ever took root. My shame was never so delicate.
When Caroline opened her eyes, I braced myself for her scream. She stared back at me with the fierceness of a little girl. I waited. Letting her decide about me for herself. I wondered if she noticed the food I made them bring her? The water? She didn’t. She stared at me instead. Being seen for so long was strange. When she got close to me, I could hear her heart beat. I smelled how well she’d lived.
She looked at me like I was her savior. I’ve been many things, but never that. Her belief in me differed from his. The Fellow and I had an understanding. A bargain. I fed him and he fed me. Caroline needed me. She inspired me.
The Fourth Night
You learn a lot about a man by telling him “No.”
He resented me for complicating our bargain and thwarting the power he held over me: I could not leave these trees and he could not banish me from his mind.
Caroline would not be quiet, she wouldn’t eat the food they brought, she wouldn’t stop crying. Seeing my Fellow wilt under her commands was enlightening.
If you ever acquire a partner, be sure they love you more than you love them.
The Fellow’s partner did. A woman full of fear and rage. She’d always been curious about what he did in the trees and the stories of horror he shared with her. A few whispers were all it took for her to obey. She was a woman who wanted the world to hurt the way she did. I could use that if necessary. Like the Fellow, all she needed was someone to say “yes.”
Anger lived in the Fellow in an expected way. Yelling. Clenched fists. Teeth.
Caroline’s anger was so quiet it made me tremble.
Like his father, the man craved a legacy. It wasn’t enough to kill and remain free. He wanted to ensure that his son had this freedom, and that his son’s son had the same. This way, in a world that had increasingly told him “no,” his line would remain above it and the inevitable weight of equity would never press them down.
He showed me the palm of his hand. In it was a nub of color. A crayon. Pink.
“Waste,” I croaked.
He smiled. That was good. That meant he would move on. However, he pocketed the crayon.
“She’s leaving too much behind and those dogs are on our trail.” Another smile. “Don’t you want to keep her in the dark?”
What did he know of the dark? He’d never faced it himself.
The scent of the dogs sat in the air as they tracked us. The Fellow knew how to throw off a search. The trainers instructed their animals to search for decay. So, when the smell of death was all around, the dogs wouldn’t be able to differentiate.
The Fifth Night
“The precinct isn’t half-assing things this time. Should have let me pick.” There was the accusation. This was my mistake, and he wanted me to admit it. Silence would not force my answer.
The Fellow stood his ground, waiting for my response. He shouldered that stupid rifle and stayed where he stood. The simple tool with its hot lead wouldn’t kill me, but it would slow me down. I needed all my strength for what was to come. He couldn’t stop what was already in motion. Even in his reluctance, he did my bidding, maneuvering the strings in my plan. That showed me the truth. In his heart, he loved me still.
I wonder what people in town would make of the two of us.
A madman. A murderer.
A prophet. A monster.
That’s it. He was the monster. I was his pet.
Pet.
That word worked its way inside me like a chill. It brushed my bones and left me cold. I was not made to be a pet. I was not made to serve a man. I was not made. I was conjured. Before that, I was a creature of the dark. Like him.
“Jack!” he barked. “If you cross me, I’ll keep my father’s promise. If this has anything to do with Liz, I’ll kill her.” The threat was real. He suspected what I was doing, but he had no idea of the scope. Everything he’d done, all I’d asked of him and his father over the years, was building to this moment. And to Liz.
No more supplies for Caroline. Soon they wouldn’t matter. Her time was coming and so was mine.
