“Bitch!” Caleb yelled, much closer now. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”
Bring those balls, she wanted to yell. Bring them here because I’ve got my shears!
She fell onto her side laughing and rolled against a lush evergreen tree that seemed to vibrate in the night as if it were an angel. An angel tree come to watch the great Mad Woman Mercy chop some balls.
Her laughter was a torrential deluge on The Kentucky Derby of Pain. All the horses had gone back to their stables and just as Head Pain was about to pull off the upset of the season.
In her rolling fit of laughter, Mercy knew this apparent lunacy was panic borne from exhaustion and genuine fear. Even so, it was kind of funny to be laughing when you were about to die. People probably wouldn’t accept such a reaction as genuine but not everybody knew what it was like to be raped and hunted like an animal. Laughter might be the sanest response.
For a quitter maybe, a new voice said in her mind. Not just any voice, though. It was Mommy again. I never had a chance, she said. But I still fought. If you give up, I might as well have never fought to live as long as I did. I should have just killed myself.
That stopped the laughter as if it were water flowing from a spigot that had finally been shut off. She could laugh about this all she wanted. But not until later. Perhaps in some psychiatric ward. So be it.
“Fuckers,” she hissed and got back to her feet.
The horses were coming out of their stables again.
She started back up the path and stopped. The evergreen was glowing like a cutout set before a flood light. Not a floodlight, though. It was the moon.
She went to the tree and then pushed through its branches into a luminescent world where angels might actually tread.
FORTY-THREE
Victor’s mother loved playing hide and seek. It is the earliest memory he has of his mother. She would sit in the big red chair in the living room, the chair she called ‘Your Highness’ because it looked like something a Queen might use, and count to thirty. He would run around the house until there were five seconds left and then he’d jump into the bathtub or squirm under the bed or cram himself in the back corner of his closet. Then she’d come find him.
She would stand right where he hid, on the other side of the shower curtain, beside the bed, or right outside the closet and wonder aloud where her little man had gone. He’d start giggling and then she’d reach in with her long arms and drag him out and he would be laughing hysterically even before the tickling began.
This went on for years. Sometimes she would hide and he’d have to find her. He found her once in the bathroom, completely naked, her body pale and spotted with red blots as if she were allergic to something. When he ran away, she called him back but he didn’t want to see his mother like that. He couldn’t help his eyes from taking in her drooping breasts and the dark patch of hair between her legs. The image would be with him forever.
Yet that was only the beginning.
She went after him. Found him in his closet, reached in with her sinewy arms and pulled him out, one hand gripped in his hair, the other on his wrist. Face to face with his naked mother, he kept his eyes shut and begged her to let him go. “First you have to do something for mommy,” she said. “Then you can go hide again.”
Then she started her lessons on the importance of being charming. Of seduction.
For years afterward, hide and seek meant Mommy needed something only her darling little boy could give her. By the time Victor was a teenager, he could give her what she wanted without trying to run away and hide. He knew how to send his mind somewhere else, off into a place he thought of as Elsewhere, while his body did what had to be done. While he gave Mommy her “prize.”
Mommy had been a bitch but he’d been too cowardly to do anything about it. Eventually he’d wizened up. Now, Mommy was playing a game of hide and seek where no one was ever going to find her.
Mercy was playing the same game, only she didn’t know it. But when he found her, Victor would not need to go to Elsewhere to do what had to be done. He would stay right here in this world and let that stupid bitch get what she had coming.
The flashlight dangled in his good hand. The white spotlight was a ghost orb keeping pace with him over uneven terrain. He didn’t need the light to find his way up the trail. The moonlight tinged the treetops silver and revealed much of the path, but he could track her on a cloudy night. This was his mountain, his refuge, his sanctuary. She had no hope. Just as Mommy knew every corner of the house and every place little Victor could hide, he knew this mountain and every dark corner where trees or bushes might lend her some comfort.
How surprised she would be when his arms emerged from the dark and seized her. She would think the very night had come alive to kill her.
FORTY-FOUR
People stranded in the desert, dying from thirst, suffered the most vivid hallucinations of distant water-filled paradises. Such a far off oasis galvanized the person ever forward until they sapped the last of their strength and collapsed into the sand, arm outstretched toward a magical world where all their ills could be healed. A world that they would never reach, regardless of whether it existed or not.
Mercy thought of a man dying in the desert with the impossible heat boiling on him not because she was thirsty (she was) or because she was exhausted (she was) but because what she was seeing could not possibly be real. It had to be a mirage, her personal version of an oasis in this forest of hell.
Past the evergreen tree was a small clearing not much larger than her bedroom. Trees ringed it on three sides like a wall to rest against when you stared off the side of the mountain into an enormous world where the moon was a gigantic, floating orb, an almost magical power hovering almost within reach. Even from the far end of this cliff, the view far surpassed the lookout where her father and she had stopped earlier, what seemed like days ago.
The small town lay farther away. Its miniature, twinkling lights were a minor pulsation on a heavy black curtain. A tractor trailer was traveling the road that went past the diner. Mercy almost laughed at how fragile it looked, as if it were nothing more than a toy.
While this view was more than enough to take away her breath, it was not why she at first felt like she had stepped into a mirage, perhaps even a dreamworld her traumatized mind had manufactured to save her sanity.
The white moonlight vibrated along the tips of every outstretched evergreen branch and as the branches swayed in a breeze she could not feel, the light flickered like thousands of candles. Thick, lush grass filled the clearing.
But she could hardly see that grass because of the crows.
It had seemed at first that the cliff began immediately and if she dared take one step, she would slip right off the edge and plummet into darkness. That darkness was not the distant ground, but tons of black crows picking at the evening ground. There could be as many as a hundred of them, maybe more, jammed into this little clearing, each one pecking at the soil with the smallest of intrusive noises.
The few closest to her flapped their wings briefly as if in annoyance at her presence. The rest, however, paid her no attention. There was no where to walk that wouldn’t put a crow, or her foot in harm’s way. She could try to skate the edge but the birds were pushed all the way to the wide trunks of the surrounding evergreens.