Ballard levered another shell into the chamber. I told that fool, he said. Didn’t I tell him? I don’t know why people don’t want to listen.
The girl looked at the boy and then she looked up at Ballard. She was holding her hands in the air as if she didn’t know where to put them. She said: What did you have to go and do that for?
It was up to him, said Ballard. I told the idjit.
Oh god, said the girl.
You better get out of there.
What?
Out. Come on out of there.
What are you goin to do?
That’s for me to know and you to find out.
The girl pushed the boy from her and slid across the seat and stepped out into the mud of the road.
Turn around, Ballard said.
What are you goin to do?
Just turn around and never mind.
I have to go to the bathroom, the girl said.
You don’t need to worry about that, said Ballard.
Turning her by the shoulder he laid the muzzle of the rifle at the base of her skull and fired.
She dropped as if the bones in her body had been liquefied. Ballard tried to catch her but she slumped into the mud. He got hold of her dress by the nape to raise her but the material parted in his fist and in the end he had to stand the rifle against the fender of the truck and take her under the arms.
He dragged her through the weeds, walking backwards, watching over his shoulder. Her head was lolling and blood ran down her neck and Ballard had dragged her out of her shoes. He was breathing harshly and his eyeballs were wild and white. He laid her down in the woods not fifty feet from the road and threw himself on her, kissing the still warm mouth and feeling under her clothes. Suddenly he stopped and raised up. He lifted her skirt and looked down at her. She had wet herself. He cursed and pulled down the panties and dabbed at the pale thighs with the hem of the girl’s skirt. He had his trousers about his knees when he heard the truck start.
The sound he made was not unlike the girl’s. A dry sucking of air, mute with terror. He leaped up hauling at his breeches and tore through the brush toward the road.
A crazed mountain troll clutching up a pair of bloodstained breeches by one hand and calling out in a high mad gibbering, bursting from the woods and hurtling down the gravel road behind a lightless truck receding half obscured in rising dust. He pounded down the mountain till he could run no more nor had he breath to call after. Before long he had stopped to buckle his belt and he went lurching on, holding his side, slumped and breathing hard and saying to himself: You won’t get far, you dead son of a bitch. He was halfway down the mountain before he realized he did not have the rifle. He stopped. Then he went on anyway.
When he came out on the valley road he looked down toward the highway. The road in the moonlight lay beneath a lightly sustained trail of dust like a river under a mantle of mist and for as far as he could see. Ballard’s heart lay in his chest like a stone. He squatted in the dust of the road until his breathing eased. Then he rose and started back up the mountain again. He tried to run at first but he could not. It took him almost an hour to make the three miles back to the top.
He found the rifle where it had fallen from the truck fender and he checked it and then went on into the woods. She was lying as he had left her and she was cold and wooden with death. Ballard howled curses until he was choking and then he knelt and worked her around onto his shoulders and struggled up. Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog.
BALLARD WATCHED THEM from the saddle in the mountain, a small thing brooding there, squatting with the rifle in his arms. It had been raining for three days. The creek far below him out of its banks, the fields flooded, sheets of standing water spotted with winter weeds and fodder. Ballard’s hair hung from his thin skull in lank wet strings and gray water dripped from his hair and from the end of his nose.
In the night the side of the mountain winked with lamps and torches. Late winter revelers among the trees or some like hunters calling each to each there in the dark. In the dark Ballard passed beneath them, scuttling with his ragged chattel down stone tunnels within the mountain.
Toward dawn he emerged from a hole in a rock on the far side of the mountain and peered about like a groundhog before commiting himself to the gray and rainy daylight. With his rifle in one hand and his blanketload of gear he set off through the thin woods toward the cleared land beyond.
He crossed a fence into a half flooded field and made his way toward the creek. At the ford it was more than twice its right width. Ballard studied the water and moved on downstream. After a while he was back. The creek was totally opaque, a thick and brickcolored medium that hissed in the reeds. As he watched a drowned sow shot into the ford and spun slowly with pink and bloated dugs and went on. Ballard stashed the blanket in a stand of sedge and returned to the cave.
When he got back to the creek it seemed to have run yet higher. He carried a crate of odd miscellany, men’s and ladies’ clothes, the three enormous stuffed toys streaked with mud. Adding to this load the rifle and the blanketful of things he’d carried down he stepped into the water.
The creek climbed his legs in wild batwings. Ballard tottered and rebalanced and took a second grip on his load and went on. Before he even reached the creekbed he was wading kneedeep. When it reached his waist he began to curse aloud. A vitriolic invocation for the receding of the waters. Anyone watching him could have seen he would not turn back if the creek swallowed him under. It did. He was in fast water to his chest, struggling along on tiptoe gingerly and leaning upstream when a log came steaming into the flat. He saw it coming and began to curse. It spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.
Git, goddamn it. Ballard shoved at the log with the barrel of the rifle. It swung down upon him in a rush and he hooked his rifle arm over it. The crate capsized and floated off. Ballard and the log bore on into the rapids below the ford and Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him.
He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
When he reached the willows he pulled himself up and found that he stood in scarcely a foot of water. There he turned and shook the rifle alternately at the flooded creek and at the gray sky out of which the rain still fell grayly and without relent and the curses that hailed up above the thunder of the water carried to the mountain and back like echoes from the clefts of bedlam.