The Marsh King's Daughter, page 24
He shot a second time. Another warning shot, because if my father had wanted to shoot me, he would have. I realized then that stopping was a mistake. But I couldn’t go back. If I did, my father would most certainly kill my mother and possibly me. But if I disobeyed and drove away, a bullet through my back would kill us both.
My father shot a third time. Rambo yelped. I jumped off the snowmobile and ran back to where Rambo flopped and ki-yied in the snow. I passed my hands over his head, his flanks, his chest. Saw that my father had shot my beautiful dog in the foot.
Another shot rang out. My mother screamed and fell across the handlebars, a bullet hole in her shoulder.
The Remington held four cartridges plus one in the chamber. My father had one shot left before he would have to reload.
I stood up. Tears streamed down my face. My father hated to see me cry, but I didn’t care.
But instead of mocking me for my tears as I expected, my father smiled. To this day I can see his expression. Smug. Cold. Unfeeling. So sure that he had won. He pointed the rifle at me, then at Rambo, then at me, and back at Rambo again, toying with me the way he had with my mother and The Hunter, and I realized it didn’t matter which of us he shot first. One way or another, my father was going to kill us all.
I dropped to my knees. Gathered Rambo into my arms and buried my face in his fur and waited for the bullet that would end my life.
Rambo trembled, growled, pulled away. He struggled to his three remaining feet and started limping toward my father. I whistled him back. Rambo kept going. My father laughed.
I jumped to my feet and spread my arms wide. “You bastard!” I shouted. I didn’t know what the word meant, but my father cut the word into The Hunter’s chest, so I knew it was bad. “You asshole! You son of a bitch!” Spewing all the words I could remember. “What are you waiting for? Shoot me!”
My father laughed again. He held the Remington on my struggling dog as Rambo limped ever closer. Rambo bared his teeth and snarled. He limped faster until he was headed for my father at an almost-run, baying like he was about to tear into a wolf or a bear.
I understood. Rambo was distracting my father so that I could get away. He would protect me, or die trying.
I sprinted for the snowmobile and jumped on and reached around my mother and opened the throttle wide. I didn’t know if my mother was alive, if we would get away, if my father would shoot both her and me. But like Rambo, I had to try.
As we raced across the frozen marsh, the wind dried my tears. From behind came another gunshot.
Rambo yelped once and fell silent.
—
THE GUNSHOT REVERBERATED in my head long after the real echo was gone. I drove as fast as I dared, blind with tears, my throat so tight I could barely breathe. All I could see was my dog lying at my father’s feet in the snow. Cousteau and Calypso and The Hunter and my mother were right. My father was a bad man. There was no reason for him to shoot my dog. I wished he had shot me. I wished I had waited longer after he went into the marsh before I started the snowmobile, driven faster, not stopped when he told me to. If I had done any of these things, my dog would be alive and my father would not have shot my mother.
My mother hadn’t moved or spoken since my father shot her. I knew she was alive because my arms were wrapped around her and her body was warm, but I didn’t know for how much longer. All I could do was drive—away from the marsh, away from my father.
Toward what, I didn’t know.
I was following the trail The Hunter had left because that was what he’d told me to do. What I really wanted was to find Cousteau and Calypso. The real Cousteau and Calypso, not the ones I made up after I saw that family. I knew they lived close by. I was sure their mother and father would help.
I had long ago left the marsh and was now driving through trees—the same trees I used to want to explore when I stared longingly toward them on the horizon. It was very dark. I wished The Hunter had told me how to turn on the snowmobile’s headlight. Or maybe he did and I’d forgotten. There was a lot to remember: Keep the throttle high when you’re pushing through deep powder. If the snowmobile pulls right, shift your weight left. When it pulls left, shift your weight right. When you drive up a hill, lean forward and shift your weight to the rear of the seat so the snowmobile doesn’t flip. Or you can ride with one knee on the seat and the other foot on the side rail. Lean back when you go downhill. Shift your weight and lean into the curves. And on and on.
The snowmobile was very heavy. Driving was harder than The Hunter had made it sound. The Hunter said that where he came from, even children drove snowmobiles, but if this was true, then Finnish children must have been very strong. Once I drove off the trail and got stuck. Twice we almost tipped over.
I was very afraid. Not of the woods or of the dark. Those things I was used to. It was fear of the unknown, of all the bad things that might happen. I was afraid the snowmobile would run out of gas and my mother and I would have to spend the night in the forest without food or shelter. I was afraid I would drive into a tree and wreck the engine. I was afraid we would end up as lost and desperate as The Hunter.
I was afraid my mother would die.
I drove for a very long time. At last the trail came to an end. I navigated down a steep hill and into the middle of a long, narrow clearing and stopped. I looked left and right. Nothing. No people, no town called Newberry, no grandparents searching for my mother as The Hunter had promised there would be.
Four tracks ran the length of the clearing, two on one side and two on the other. I couldn’t tell which were The Hunter’s. I worried about what would happen if I went the wrong way. I thought about the guessing game my father and I used to play that had two choices. Perhaps it didn’t matter which way I went. Perhaps it did.
I looked up into the sky. Please. Help me. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.
I closed my eyes and prayed as I had never prayed before. When I opened my eyes, there was a small yellow light in the distance. The light was low to the ground and very bright. A snowmobile.
“Thank you,” I whispered. There were times when I had wondered if the gods were real, like when my father put me in the well and they stayed silent, or when he beat my mother and The Hunter and the gods didn’t intervene, but now I knew the truth. I promised I would never doubt again.
As the snowmobile came closer, the light became two. Suddenly there was a terrible honking, like a goose, only louder—like an entire flock of angry geese.
I shut my eyes and clapped my hands over my ears until at last, the honking stopped. There was a banging like a door had opened and closed, then voices.
“I didn’t see them!” a man shouted. “I swear! They were sitting in the middle of the road with no headlights!”
“You could have killed them!” a woman yelled.
“I’m telling you, I didn’t see them! What are you doing?” he yelled at me. “Why did you stop?”
I opened my eyes and grinned. A man and woman. Cousteau and Calypso’s father and mother. I found them.
—
WHEN THE POLICE FOLLOWED the trail I had left to rescue The Hunter, my father was gone. The Hunter still hung from the handcuffs in the woodshed. Everyone assumed that my father had killed him, because why wouldn’t they? No one would think for a second that a twelve-year-old child could have done such a thing. Not when they had a kidnapper and rapist to pin the murder on.
Once the idea that my father had killed The Hunter was established, I was okay with letting it stand. I may not have been wise in the ways of the outside world, but I understood enough to know that confessing to The Hunter’s murder wouldn’t change anything except ruin my own life. My father was a bad man. He was going to jail for a very long time. Everybody said so. I had my whole life in front of me. My father had forfeited his.
That said, I guarantee I’ve paid for my crime. Killing a person changes you. It doesn’t matter how many animals you’ve shot, snared, trapped, skinned, gutted, eaten. Killing a person is different. Once you’ve taken the life of another human being, you’re never the same. The Hunter was alive, and then he wasn’t, and mine are the hands that did it. I think about this every time I comb Iris’s hair, or buckle Mari into her car seat, or stir a pot of jelly on the stove, or run my hands over my husband’s chest; I look at my hands doing these normal, everyday things and think, These are the hands that did it. These hands took another person’s life. I hate my father for putting me in the position where I had to make that choice.
I still can’t understand how my father can kill so easily and without remorse. I think about The Hunter every day. He had a wife and three children. Whenever I look at my girls, I think about what it would be like for them if they had to grow up without their father. After we left the marsh I wanted to tell The Hunter’s widow that I was sorry about what had happened to her husband. That I appreciated the sacrifice he made for my mother and me. I thought I could tell her when I saw her at the courthouse the day my father was sentenced, but by that time she’d filed a lawsuit against my grandparents for her share of the money they were making off our story from the tabloids, so my grandparents wouldn’t let me. She won a big settlement in the end, and that made me feel better. Though, as my grandfather grumbled, all the money in the world wasn’t going to bring back her husband.
Or my dog. Sometimes, I start to cry—which as you probably know by now is something I rarely do—and it’s because I think of Rambo. I’ll never forgive my father for shooting him. I’ve replayed the events that led up to that day more times than I can count, trying to see the places where I would have done something differently if I had known how things were going to turn out. The most obvious is when The Hunter asked for help the morning after my father handcuffed him in the woodshed. If I had done as he wanted me to before my father beat and tortured him until he was too weak to leave, most likely he would be alive today.
But The Hunter’s death wasn’t my fault. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same as anyone who gets killed in a traffic accident, or a mass shooting, or a suicide bombing. The Hunter was the one who decided to go snowmobiling while he was drunk, not me. He was the one who got lost and then made a series of decisions that ultimately led to our ridge: turn left here instead of right, go around this clump of trees and not that one, drive into our yard to ask for help after he saw the smoke from our cabin. Certainly when he decided to hit the trail after he’d been drinking with his buddies he didn’t have any idea that he would pay for that decision with his life. Yet it was his decision.
Likewise when my mother and her girlfriend decided to explore the abandoned house by the railroad tracks. As she and her girlfriend ran around the empty rooms, I’m sure she had no idea that, by the end of the day, it would be fourteen years before she saw her family again. Naturally they would have played somewhere else if they had known. But they didn’t.
Likewise I doubt that when my father took me to see Tahquamenon Falls he had any idea he was setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to the loss of his family. Just as when I decided to leave the marsh, I had no idea how badly things were going to turn out for my mother and me. I honestly thought that leaving would be as simple as driving away. I didn’t anticipate my father would shoot my mother and my dog. That the last thing I would see before I drove into my uncertain future was Rambo lying motionless in the snow at my father’s feet.
If I had known all of this before it happened, would I have done things differently? Of course. But you have to accept responsibility for your decisions, even when they don’t work out the way you wanted.
Bad things happen. Planes crash, trains derail, people die in floods and earthquakes and tornadoes. Snowmobilers get lost. Dogs get shot. And young girls get kidnapped.
27
Itake off running. Solid ground becomes wetland. Wetland becomes marsh. I shield my eyes against the rain and scan the opposite side of the pond. There’s no sign of my father. Whether I managed to get out ahead of him or he’s already at my house is impossible to tell.
I turn west into the marsh, heading for a thicket of tag alders near the end of the trail where the deer like to gather. I move quickly, jumping from grassy mound to grassy mound, keeping to areas of dry peat that are strong enough to hold my weight. A person who doesn’t know the marsh as well as I do wouldn’t be able to see the dangers that to me are as obvious as street signs: areas of fine silt that look solid enough to walk on but act like quicksand; deep pools of water that can swallow a person in an instant. Great black bubbles rose up out of the slime, my mother’s fairy tale says, and with these, every trace of the princess vanished.
When I come to the alder thicket, I drop to my belly and crawl the rest of the way using my feet and one elbow. The ground is wet, the mud crisscrossed with tracks. None of them recent. None of them human. It’s possible my father left the trail when it got boggy and cut out cross-country. It’s possible he’s already at my house, sneaking in through the back door because the house is never locked, creeping down the hallway, forcing Stephen to hand over the keys to the Cherokee so he can go after our girls, shooting my husband when Stephen refuses to tell him where they are.
I shudder. I push the images away and lie down in the muddiest place I can find. Roll until every inch of me is covered, then wade through knee-deep water along the trail so I don’t leave footprints while I look for the best place to set my ambush.
A moss-covered log lying across the trail looks big enough to hide behind. The way it sags in the middle tells me it’s mostly rotten. My father will know better than to step on it. He’ll have to step over. When he does, I’ll be ready.
I break a sharp branch off a pine and stretch out along the opposite side of the log, my ear to the ground, my makeshift spear beside me. I feel my father’s footsteps before I hear them: faint vibrations in the waterlogged soil beneath the trail. The tremors are so slight, another person might think it was only their own heart beating, if they felt them at all. I hug the log closer and tighten my grip.
The footsteps stop. I wait. If my father suspects he’s walking into a trap, either he’ll turn around and leave me lying in the mud or he will lean over the log and shoot me. I hold my breath until the footsteps start up again. I can’t tell if they’re moving away from me or toward.
Then a boot crashes down onto my shoulder. I roll out from under it and jump to my feet. Dash forward and use all of my strength to jab my spear into my father’s gut.
The spear breaks.
My father yanks what remains of my useless weapon out of my hands and throws it aside. He raises his arm, points my Magnum at me. I dive at his legs. He staggers and puts his arms out for balance. The Magnum falls. I grab for it. My father kicks it into the pool of water beside the trail and plants his boot on my handcuffed hands. No hesitation—I grab that boot and lift his foot off the ground. My father crashes down beside me. We roll, grapple. I work my arms over his head. The handcuff chain presses against his throat. I pull back as hard as I can. He gasps, takes my knife from the sheath at his waist and jabs and slices backwards at anything he can reach—my arms, my legs, my kidneys, my face.
I pull harder. The Glocks in the back of my father’s jeans press against my stomach. If I could grab one, I could end this in an instant, but with my handcuffed arms around his neck, I can’t. At the same time, with me pressed tight against him from behind choking him with the handcuffs, he can’t grab a Glock and finish me. We’re as stuck as a pair of bull moose who’ve locked horns. I picture my family walking this trail days or weeks from now and finding our decaying bodies frozen in one last embrace. I pull harder.
Then a dog barks. Rambo is running down the trail from the direction of my house, legs pumping, ears flapping.
“Attack!” I yell.
Rambo runs up and clamps his jaws around my father’s leg, pulling and snarling. My father roars, stabs Rambo with the knife.
Rambo bites down harder. He rips, tears, shreds. My father screams and rolls. I roll with him. The moment my father is on his stomach I yank my arms back over his head and grab one of the Glocks and shove it in my father’s back.
“Hold!” I order Rambo.
Rambo freezes. He keeps his grip on my father’s leg, but there’s a shift in his demeanor. He’s no longer an animal tearing into his prey; he’s a servant obeying his master. It takes a special breed and a lot of training for a dog to stand down like this in the heat of battle. I’ve seen lesser dogs so overcome with bloodlust as they tear into an elk or a bear, they completely ruin the hide.
My father doesn’t move as I kneel on top of him. He knows better than to twitch.
“The knife,” I say.
He flings my knife into the pool of water beside the trail.
I get to my feet. “Stand up,” I order.
My father stands, puts his hands over his head, turns to face me.
“Sit.” I wave him toward the log.
My father does as I say. The defeated look on his face is very nearly worth everything I’ve been through. I do not mask my disgust.
“Did you really think I’d go away with you? That I’d let you anywhere near my girls?”
My father doesn’t answer.
“The handcuff key. Toss it over.”
He reaches inside his jacket and tosses the key into the pool of water after my knife. A useless act of defiance. Cuffed or not, I can still shoot.
“We had a good life, Bangii-Agawaateyaa,” he says. “That day we went to see the falls. The night we saw the wolverine. You remember that, Bangii-Agawaateyaa.”
I want him to stop saying my name. I know he’s only doing it to try to control the situation the way he always does, even though he has to know he’s lost. Only . . . now that he’s called up the memory, of course I can’t help but see it. It was sometime after I shot my first deer, but before Rambo came to our ridge, which would have made me around seven or eight. I’d woken up out of a deep sleep with my heart racing. I’d heard a noise outside. It sounded like a baby crying—like I imagined a baby might cry—only louder. More like a scream. Like nothing I’d ever heard. I had no idea what it was. Animals can make terrible sounds, especially when they’re mating, but if this was an animal, I couldn’t put a name to it.
