Flesh Wounds, page 16
Life is a circle, Grandfather promised.
But Grandfather was dead and gone. Hawk had learned the basics of geometry in school: a circle has no end points. Tell me, Grandfather, what kind of a circle terminates in a white man’s graveyard?
The river ran swift here, frothing over barren gray rocks as it swept past Goat Island. This side of the island, this close to the falls, the current was so strong that even the staunchest of swimmers might fail to reach the bank. But in the dreams sent by Thunder of the Water, Hawk was not swimming. He was a weighted corpse, tumbling end over end like a dead catfish along the river bottom, torn on gravel and dead limbs, caught up with broken bottles and rusted beer cans, born by the fierce current past whitewater and boulders, swept inexorably toward the falls, gathering speed for that grand leap over the 165 foot precipice to plunge into the depths of the basin below. If an extremely observant tourist were watching from the Cave of the Winds behind the falls, he might see the body tumble past... but it never happened. Not in all the times Jason Sparrowhawk had sent someone over Horseshoe Falls.
Below, at the base of the falls, the turmoil would pull the body up from the depths and send it down through lofty canyons where limestone and slate had yielded to the inexorable passage of the river, leaving water-scarred cliff faces towering three hundred feet high. Three miles below the falls, the body would sink into the whirlpool where Niagara turned sharply to the east. The waters there surge and boil as if tossed by subterranean titans. The corpse would spin and whirl, pirouetting in an unappreciated underwater ballet, sinking ever lower until at some depth the exit current would catch it again and rush it through the narrow channel that led to Lake Ontario, where the body, weighted, would sink at last, forever hidden, forgotten to all save Hawk and Thunder of the Water.
He felt that if they found the hat, they might find the bodies, and somehow, using their white man’s magic—forensics, they called it—they would trace the murders back to him.
He had to get the hat.
Ahead, there lay a natural jetty of limestone thrust from the island some ten or fifteen feet out into the river. Hawk dashed ahead of the hat, hoping to reach it from the rock.
Iroquois legends say the Thunder Gods were once strong enough to take their own sacrifices. The Europeans invented the Maid of the Mists legend; the Indians never gave more than simple gifts, small offerings of corn and tobacco. But every year people would disappear, victims to the insatiable gods of the river. The white man changed all that with his pollutants and poisons, corrupting the river with sewage and industrial offal. PCBs and lead accumulated in the river’s sediment like time-capsules of doom. Five hydroelectric power plants, situated on both the American and Canadian side of the falls, crippled the gods by siphoning off their life force. Most of the gods fled. Thunder of the Water went deep, hiding, waiting, certain that the white man’s reign would pass.
When Hawk realized that Thunder of the Water was no longer capable of collecting his victims, he set himself the task of delivering them. Well, maybe that wasn’t how it started...
On his belly, the limestone cool and wet where his shirt had ridden up, Hawk stretched for the passing hat. His hand fell short, but for a brief second he managed to hold the hat docked against the tip of his index finger. In that second he surged forward, certain he could reach that one inch further.
He slipped on the mist-coated rock and plunged face first into the cold water.
Hawk came up sputtering and gasping. He twisted in the frigid water to grasp the rock behind him. His clawing hand slipped in the muck that clung near the waterline. The swift current caught him, pulling him past the limestone extension, and Hawk suddenly found himself several yards from the shore.
Don’t panic, he ordered his racing heart. He struck out, clutching great handfuls of water and drawing them in, but no matter how hard he pulled, how hard his feet kicked, Goat Island retreated.
Terror gripped him, twisting about his stomach, constricting his throat until he wondered if he’d suffocate before the inevitable happened.
Carla Denning must have felt this same terror before he pulled her from the river last year. Luckily, Hawk carried a rope in his pickup and he’d seen her in time to run back for it. It had taken several minutes and three throws to get the rope to her, but he’d managed to pull her to safety.
Carla had stood there shivering; it was early morning and summer was fashionably late. Her teeth were chattering and her lips were blue. The Niagara glistened on her tanned, lightly-freckled shoulders. Her paper-thin halter top was soaked, translucent. She gave him some silly story about wanting to throw herself over the falls because the college boy she’d been dating had dumped her. He laughed at her, delighting in the anger that flared up behind her emerald eyes.
“Oh! What do you know about anything anyway, Jason Sparrowhawk?”
“I know I would never leave you, Carla.” Hawk had long nursed a secret love for Carla Denning—no different than that of a hundred other boys who watched her cheerleading on the basketball court, at gym in tight white shorts and t-shirt, on Friday and Saturday nights in her dad’s Mustang convertible with the top down and the wind teasing her cinnamon hair...
It was her turn to laugh at him. “What the hell would I want with a hair-lipped Indian in moccasins and cut-offs who couldn’t even afford to take me to McDonald’s?” She said it all in one breath as if her mouth were afraid her mind would intervene given time. “Your own mother didn’t want you, Jason; I heard she ran off with some engineer from the power plant. Your father’s an alcoholic. Your—”
It was no different than what they’d been saying about him in school for years, though usually whispered behind his back—never so low that he couldn’t hear it, but at least they maintained the pretense. Coming from her, after he’d just saved her life... it was too much.
He hit her. Not hard. Just a sharp, open-handed slap. She stumbled backwards and her heel caught on a rock. As she fell her halter top slipped, exposing one beautiful, milk white breast, tinged blue from exposure to the river. Hawk followed her to the ground. His hands seemed to tangle in her halter top of their own violation. A second later the flimsy garment lay to one side in the dirt.
She screamed. “Get off me you filthy bastard!”
He realized what he’d done. He would have gotten off her—at least that’s what he told himself later—but she kneed him in the groin. Even then, he hadn’t wanted to kill her. He just wanted to hit her, pay her back for kneeing him. He slapped her once, twice. Then he got his trembling knees back under him so he could stand up.
And she ripped the hunting knife from its sheath on his belt.
He bellowed as the sharp steel left a wet red line across his forearm. There were a few seconds then that he couldn’t remember, not even later when he came to accept what had happened. His next clear image was her pallid, lifeless face, the green witchfire fading from behind her eyes. The knife was thrust hilt-deep in her chest, handle still quivering with the final spasm of her severed heart. Blood welled up around the hilt and warmed his trembling hand.
Hawk tentatively felt the lingering warmth of her breasts and found that he wanted her even then. He took her, there among the rocks and brush on Goat Island. She didn’t call him any names. She didn’t mind his hair-lip as he kissed the soft down behind her ears or suckled at her breasts. She didn’t mind his red flesh as it slipped into her white.
When it was over, the sun was a lofty, bright orb already beginning its descent. He lashed the corpse to the spare tire from his truck, using his knife to let out the air, and gave her to the river. He sat on the bank, his mind wrestling with the horror and the beauty of this revelational day. The drone of the falls lulled him to sleep there in the sunshine, and Thunder of the Water came to him for the first time.
Grandfather had told Hawk the legend, but until that day Hawk hadn’t taken him seriously. In the dream, Hawk followed Carla’s corpse on its journey to Lake Ontario. He was accompanied by Thunder of the Water. The river god whispered promises. Hawk would have everything he wanted. Hadn’t his most passionate desire just been fulfilled? Niagara had given him Carla Denning, prom queen and carhop beauty, object of a score or more aggravated wetdreams, every red man’s secret desire. And what’s more, no one would ever have her again. She lived now only in Hawk’s memory and Niagara’s cold gullet.
After Carla, he took Sheri Barnes and Brenda Downing, Carla’s cheer-teasing friends. Then a young mother who brought her kid to the island for a picnic, a college girl he found at the laundromat, two girls at a softball game (his first double header!), a blonde from behind the counter at Arby’s, a little girl from the playground...
It was necessary to weight the sacrifices before tossing them in the river. Spare tires and nylon rope were expensive. Cinder blocks were cheap but tended to roll around in the back of his truck and draw unwanted attention. By experimenting he learned the best way was to gut his sacrifices like deer, then fill them with rocks. A generous wrapping of duct tape and they were ready for Niagara’s icy tomb. Scavenger birds quickly cleaned away the mess he left along the bank.
Thunder of the Water grew stronger with each offering, calling for more in dreams that found Hawk every time he so much as dozed.
The river had never been this cold in his dreams. Hawk snatched up the hat trailing him through the water. It was torn where that tourist woman had bitten it and, despite the cleansing Niagara, it still bore stains of blood and bile.
Today, for the first time, he’d savored a living, breathing woman. When she’d screamed, he’d shoved her hat down her throat. Then, while her arms flailed at him and her legs kicked in the loose rocks, he had cut away her clothing and taken her swiftly, knife held against her throat so that when he came, she went. One easy stroke and she was gone. A live woman! She’d been better than that first time with Carla Denning, better than all the others put together.
But he’d forgotten about the hat.
It must have come out of her mouth when she sank... or slipped through the spacious gash he’d left in her throat.
The falls were coming up fast. He thrashed about, searching for a boulder, a half-submerged tree limb, anything. There was nothing within his reach, but near the very precipice there was a cluster of white-rimmed boulders, slick with green algae and slime.
He stuffed the hat in his pants and began to kick fiercely on a course that would line him up with the rocks. If he could make the rocks and hang on, someone would eventually find him. Someone would get help. Some 911 operator would radio for a rescue team. They’d probably send a helicopter and he’d have to climb one of those rope ladders. Hell, he might even get on television.
Kicking and stroking so hard his muscles threatened to seize up, Hawk brought himself in line with the rocks. They came up incredibly fast. It was all he could do to keep the current from sweeping him around the rocks and carrying him over the falls. He struck his forehead. Bright blood gushed into his eyes. A second later the frothing water washed the blood away and all that remained was sharp pain and the nagging feeling that the skin above his brow was flapping open to the hairline.
He clawed and dug at the smooth sides of the rock, fingernails scrapping through muck till they grated on stone. His hands found purchase even as the river swung his legs about. He hung there for a moment, feet in the turmoil sweeping over the brink, face down in the water that swept about the boulder. Then he struggled upwards and found stable, passably dry grips higher on the rock. He got his head and shoulders above the water.
Everything was going to be alright now. His god had thrown him a lifeline.
Something clammy and cold, with multiple appendages like the legs of a crab, wrapped about his right shoulder. Hawk shrugged, thinking it must be a tree branch, but it remained. He cocked his head to look and his heart stopped.
There was a hand resting on his shoulder. A hand! Attached to an arm that disappeared beneath the water. It was a woman’s hand: long delicate fingers, slender knuckles, finely manicured and painted nails. The flesh of the hand was pale, ghostly. It was wrinkled, like a child who’s played in the tub too long.
Hawk looked away, blinked fresh blood from his eyes, looked back. The hand was still clenched about his shoulder. The fine, long muscles in the pale forearm tensed, accentuating fallow blue veins, pulling at his shoulder as if to tug him from the rock. Hawk released the rock with his left hand, screamed as his right nearly slipped, and batted away the pale hand. It vanished beneath the water.
He regained his grip and strained to pull himself further up on the rock. The hand returned, this time on his right forearm. He reached to knock it away and another clamped about his left shoulder. He tried to shrug it off, but it dug like a vise in his shoulder muscles. Another, nails painted violet, gripped his right wrist and pulled. A hand reached up and clamped down on the nerves along the left side of his neck. One wrapped claw-like about his collarbone on the opposite side.
Another clutched his hair and pulled back his head while a child’s hands wrapped themselves about his throat.
Something grabbed his legs and pulled.
Arms encircled his waist.
Remembering his hunting knife, Hawk reached down through the water to get it, but hands caught his arm and twisted it cruelly behind his back. Hawk screamed again, tossing his head against a hand that caught his lower jaw and pulled his face down in the water.
His right hand slipped free. He fell back. Down. Falling and tumbling... subsumed by water and feminine hands that squeezed unmercifully tight... until all he knew was the thunder of the water.
The Scissor Man
When the green field comes off like a lid,
Revealing what was much better hid—
Unpleasant:
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove;
Outside the window is the black remov-
er’s van:
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the hooded women, the hump-backed surgeons,
And the Scissor Man.
–W.H. Auden
Because there was nothing more they could do to ease Maggie on her way, and because he insisted so, the hospital allowed David Hunter to take his wife home to die.
Oddly enough, the same ambulance and paramedics that had transported her to the hospital took her home. It was a different ride. No lights, no sirens. No one taking vital signs and phoning them ahead to the hospital. The driver, who on that previous ride had spoken comforting words of encouragement to David, was solemn and quiet. No more “Everything’s going to be fine, Mr. Hunter,” or “We’ll have her at the hospital in a jiff, sir; they’ll know what to do.” This was a different ride, at the end of which there waited no battle for life, no army of veterans in white masks, no miracle cure, no experimental drugs, no treatments, no therapy, no hope, no life.
This was retreat. This was surrender. And the only surgeon waiting for Maggie was Death himself.
The paramedics took her in the house and made her comfortable in her bed. Just as well that they’d brought her home, for David could have never carried her up the stairs of their tiny apartment. She weighed next to nothing, but after two weeks sleeping in the hospital waiting room or a chair by her side, David was beyond exhaustion. At sixty-two he felt himself an unfit opponent for the stress of Maggie’s illness. It would have been better if he’d gotten the cancer. Dying, he could have dealt with. Watching her go was another matter altogether.
Either the ride home had tired her or the familiarity of her own bed was too much to resist, for Maggie dropped into a sound sleep before David had even shown the paramedics out. Tenderly, he covered her frail body with the comforter she’d made the summer before, her last comforter as it were. Then he went down to the kitchen to fix himself a sandwich and check their stock of soup for when she awoke. His mother used to swear by Campbell’s Chicken Noodle. There was no sickness, she’d claimed, immune to the goodness of Campbell’s. David remembered days as a boy curled up on the sofa watching television. The flu or an ear infection or some equally dreaded malady had kept him home from school. He’d drank the soup from a mug, the warm broth coating his sore throat, the noodles slipping effortlessly from mug to stomach as if there was nothing between but a giant water slide. He remembered the lazy warmth of a full stomach of soup, the bloated, happy comfort that would lull him to sleep there on the couch.
I hope death comes for her like a bowl of soup, he thought. I hope it’s warm and dreamy and as soft as that old sofa. Remembering the smell and the taste of death on Maggie’s lips, he added, I hope that death tastes like Campbell’s soup. I hope—
A knock at the back door startled him. Through the lacy mauve curtains Maggie’d hung, he saw their neighbor Carolyn looking anxious and concerned. Setting aside the knife he’d been using to spread mayonnaise, he went and let her in. P.D., their Schnauzer, dashed into the kitchen, barking and leaping frantically until David picked him up. “Hey, fella,” he said, accepting several licks on the nose. “Did you miss me? Were you a good boy for Carolyn?”
“I called the hospital,” Carolyn said, wringing her hands, “just to see if you needed anything. I was, you know, thinking I’d bring you some things when I came to visit this evening. But they said... they said Maggie’d been discharged.”
David pushed the door closed behind her. “Yeah. They let me bring her home.”
