Cammy. The stick girl. The pretty-face. The child. She’s as rangy and lean as one of his greyhounds, but she comes at him so fast he can’t even get his hands up to protect his face. Her fist is a projection of her will, stabbing at him three times in quick succession till he catches her wrists and she clenches her face to spit at him. “You,” she sobs. “It’s all you — you killed her. You!”
Josh’s voice seems to be caught in his throat. “Hey,” he says. Just that—“Hey,” soft as a leaf falling.
What are they fighting over? What’s the use of it? What’s the use of anything?
Cammy subsides. He releases her wrists. The night drops down. The corpse at his feet seems to swell and grow till it sucks in all the available light. The faces of the two people in front of him blur so that Josh could be Cammy, and Cammy, Josh. A squadron of bats materializes from nowhere to ricochet through the emptiness overhead.
“What we have to do,” he says finally, because he’s rational now, they’re all rational, they have to be, “is get her out of here. I mean, wrap her in something”—and though he’s wet through and numb in his fingers and toes he’s already pulling the slicker up over his head—“and carry her back to the boat. And then we’ll see what we can do about, you know. . whatever it takes. .” he trails off.
But it’s not as easy as all that. While Toni and Suzanne work their way over the hump on the far side on their own — and it’s a minor miracle no broken bones come out of that — he and Josh wrap the body in their rain gear and try to secure the ends as best they can with the strap cut from his daypack and an extra pair of shoelaces. The footing is unsteady, the load awkward in the extreme, Josh on one end, him on the other, Cammy in the middle. What’s inside — the shuttered flesh, the pooling blood — keeps slipping, loosening, readjusting itself, and to get it — her — up atop the pillar of rock takes all the strength he has in him. There’s a suspended moment, each breath a kind of choking for release, and then he’s easing her down the far side to where Josh stands barely visible beneath him. “Careful, now, careful — you got her?”
Voices in the dark. The rush of the water, the pounding of the waves. Now he and Cammy are down there too and the three of them form a six-legged monster lurching through the sand, every step impossible, but they manage to haul her to the crest of the beach, just above tide line, and set her down as gently as if she were alive still and sleeping her hurts away. Toni Walsh and Suzanne emerge beside them suddenly, faces floating peripherally in the darkness. Oh, my God, Suzanne is saying, over and over. He leaves them there, their voices grating like the rasp of dried-up leaves. The night is absolute. He can’t see the boat. He wades into the surf and risks calling out. “Wilson! Wilson, you out there?”
Nothing. There should be a light, at least. He strains to see, looking for the faintest pale faded green hint of the running lights, thinking he needs a flashlight to signal and will anybody have thought to bring a flashlight, any of them? Suzanne, maybe. She thought to bake cookies. She was the one who had the coil of rope neatly braided at the bottom of her pack, the spare laces, gum. He’s about to turn back, the waves slapping at him and the shiver running through his body like an electric current, when he thinks he spots something there in the near distance, a deeper, blacker hole cut out of the night. What he doesn’t yet realize is that he’s fooling himself, because there’s nothing there to see, nothing at all.
El Tigre
The morning after the concert — Sunday, thankfully Sunday — she can’t quite understand what’s happening to her. To push back the covers, to swing her legs to the floor in the stillness of dawn, to feel the carpet alive under the grip of her toes and catch the rich roasted scent of the coffee her mother’s already brewing in the kitchen downstairs and then feel that vacancy in her core, that probing deep down that drives her to the bathroom, to her knees, to vomit for the second — or no, the third — day in a row, is wrong, deeply wrong. It can’t be a hangover because she had only the two glasses of wine and that wouldn’t account for the previous day or the day before that when she’d had no more than two or three sakes with her mother and Ed, just to be convivial. Is she becoming hyper-sensitive to alcohol, is that it? Or is it the flu? And then a lyric from one of Micah Stroud’s covers pops into her head—I got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu—and the next thing she knows she’s pulling on her shorts and a T-shirt and heading down the stairs as if nothing’s happened at all.
“You look tired,” is the first thing her mother says to her as she shuffles into the kitchen. Apparently Ed isn’t up yet, but there’s a place set for him at the table — coffee cup and saucer, orange juice, half a grapefruit glistening pinkly under the glare of the kitchen lights, which are up full, and the newspaper laid out beside it in offering. “Did you have trouble sleeping? Because personally I don’t think I slept more than five minutes — it’s the noise of that freeway. I don’t know how you put up with it.”
Alma’s at the refrigerator, staring without enthusiasm at the milk and juice in their bright cartons, a block of cheese rippling with plastic wrap, something on a plate going brown around the edges, too exhausted suddenly to respond.
“If you want to know the truth, you look like you haven’t been getting enough sleep — it’s the job, isn’t it? It’s wearing you down. You always were a worrier, even as a little girl, in way over your head, as if you could personally heal every sick animal on the block and, I don’t know, save every mouse and lizard the cat dragged in.”
Her mother — a pair of brown-shelled eggs have appeared in her hands and she’s separating them over a mixing bowl — doesn’t really expect an answer. She’s just talking to hear herself, awake and moving around her daughter’s kitchen at a lonely hour on a gray-shrouded morning.
“Is this for Ed?” Alma asks, settling into a chair at the table. “The juice, I mean?”
“I can make you eggs — you want eggs? You do eat eggs, don’t you?”
“No,” she says, irritated suddenly, “I don’t want any eggs.”
“You don’t have to snap at me.”
“I’m not snapping at you—”
“Yes you are.”
“No,” she insists, and she reaches across the table for Ed’s juice, sliding the glass to her with a soft whisper of friction. “It’s just that I’m not hungry, that’s all.”
The eggshells are on the counter. The clock on the stove reads 6:17. Her mother sets down the whisk deliberately and turns to study her. Three steps in her clogs and she’s hovering over her, laying a hand on her forehead and peering into her eyes. “You feeling all right?”
It is then, just as she’s about to confide that in fact she’s not feeling all right because she’s just been sick in the toilet upstairs and her head feels as if it’s about to lift off her shoulders and float across the room, that the truth of the situation comes home to her, the obvious conclusion any biologist who’s studied the life processes for the past decade and a half would have drawn in an instant.
“Mom?” She speaks her mother’s name aloud, but her voice seems elastic, stretched-out, pulled like taffy. The truth — the fact — is surging up in her in an uncontainable rush but the words to express it seem to be stuck fast in her throat.
Her mother just stares at her. “Yes?” she says. “What?”