9 Tales Told in the Dark 3 Read online

  Like the phone, the gun seemed to glow with a special significance, as if everything else in the world other than these few totem objects had been drained of its color and importance. I kept the gun for bears and moose that wandered too close to the place. All I’d ever done was fire it into the air a couple of times and on rare occasion go target shooting, but it was loaded.

  I’m not stupid. I knew there was no way to pick up the rifle, point it, stand up, and fire without getting killed. Not a chance. The moment my head rose above the countertop, the stranger would turn it into a canoe. It would know. Might even know the run of my thoughts right now, although I was certain it was not overfamiliar with bars and the weapons their proprietors kept under them. But I might be able to stay down here and shoot it through the pine slab. In the gut. Or whatever it kept in that part of its body. Then, if I had to, I could come up and shoot it again.

  One of the first things to strike me about this idea was that I’d never know where it’d come from or how it had been outcast or stranded here. I probably wouldn’t know those things anyway, but shooting down something I’d never – that maybe nobody living had ever – seen before struck me as unbelievably barbaric. History wouldn’t remember or even believe that it had walked in here with a loaded gun.

  And it wouldn’t work anyway.

  As I squatted there, I could only think that it knew. Right now it was calculating my every thought and movement, just as it had the young man it had already shot. It had known everything even though it had seen nothing. It wasn’t psychic. It just knew.

  I would remember the gun, but I stood up again – slowly – without it this time.

  I placed the wire rack with the condiments to one side of the stranger. An asinine move if I ever made one. Watt and his friends must have thought I’d lost my mind.

  I said, “I’ll go and fix you something.”

  Its eyes rolled vaguely in my direction, then away again, as if I were a homely girl at a dance.

  I took the keys from the narrow shelf beneath the cash register.

  When I began walking toward the swinging kitchen door on the side of the bar opposite the phone (why hadn’t I put the godforsaken phone in the kitchen?), the stranger let me go. It didn’t watch me but instead watched that kernel of killer awareness inside itself, at the center, the part that could shoot without looking or thinking. I thought that if the troopers did somehow make their way here, they’d swear they were in a shootout with John Wesley Hardin.

  Because I was moving slowly, I saw the stranger’s hand as I went past. At first I only noticed it from the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t help taking a look at it. I told myself I wouldn’t stop, that I would look but keep on putting one foot in front of the other. But I nearly stopped anyway.

  It was the stranger’s left hand, the shooting had that was on the bartop. It sat there, relaxed but poised and ready, like a lizard on a rock. Two fingers longer than any human digits were flanked by four shorter ones. The shock of seeing the hand was fresher than the jolt of seeing the face, and it sent electricity throughout my body. I felt like I’d been zapped, and it took a determined effort to keep myself moving.

  What I really remember, though, is the strong, simple green thumb with the ordinary-looking thumbnail, trimmed to the cuticle. There was a touch of a infection in one corner, staining the nail a darker green. There was a glossy callus. A working man’s thumb on an alien hand.

  I still think of that damned thumb and always will, and it makes me feel sorrow.

  As I kept going, I wasn’t sure whether I intended to actually cook something or just go into the kitchen and try to think of a plan. Probably both. I’d start something up just in case, and as I went, I’d try to figure something out. Just as I got to the door, I heard something and turned.

  The young hunters had all stood up at once. Not quickly, but as though a bailiff had asked them to please rise. They looked from me to the stranger’s back and then sat down again. I tried to look a message at them: ‘Sit tight, I’ll be right back.’

  ###

  I floated through the swinging door into the kitchen. Sweat broke out all over my body. Pots, pans, and utensils hung from a long rack at head height almost all the way around. A pair of knives lay on the butcher block. The white ceiling reflected the light coming in the window of the back door. I felt numb and as if my feet were miles below me. Now that I was alone, a wave of hysteria worked its way up from my bowels, ending in pigeon titters that never quite left my throat. I didn’t know whether I was more amazed or more horrified. After a minute I touched a hanging pot, knocking it into its neighbor just so they’d hear me moving around in here.

  I kept venison and beef in a plywood locker attached to the back of the building during wintertime. I moved past the sinks and counters noticing things as if I’d been away on a trip to the Lower 48 for two weeks instead of up front in the restaurant for thirty minutes. I popped the pin out of an eye hook and opened the screen door lined with heavy plastic sheeting. The wind ripped it out of my hand and whacked it into the siding. I swore and almost tripped over a Folger’s can I kept on the porch for cigarette butts as I stepped out. The wind was a nest of snakes. The winter wilderness spread before me, and I knew that I was free if I wanted to be. I might not live long, but then again I might find a way. It had been a few years since I’d spent much time hiking or hunting in the area, myself, but I had a good memory. I might make it. I even had a halfway decent coat hanging from a peg just inside the kitchen door. My feeling was that the stranger wasn’t interested in me, might not try to stop me even if it knew what I was doing.

  Most years I’d owned this place, I wouldn’t even have been here now. I used to close up completely in winter until two years ago, spend the winter on the coast. I couldn’t afford the property taxes on the house anymore though, so now I stayed on. I’d worried a lot the first two seasons, wondering what if I ran out of fuel, what if the weight of snow stove the old place right in on top of me. This had been the first year that I felt the rhythm of the winter a little more and worried a little less. Funny.

  Instead of heading into the storm, I fumbled the keys out of the pocket of my apron.

  I knew something was wrong when I looked at them. There were a dozen or so on three keyrings linked together. They’d been alright when I put them away last night, but now one key stuck through the two other rings like a magician’s trick, and I couldn’t pull it out. It was hard keep my eyes focused with all the blowing snow. Then I quit tugging on the key and stitched it through, and it came out easily enough. But someone had been handling those keys.

  I slid keys around one of the smaller rings until I pinched the tiniest one between my thumb and forefinger, then stuck it into the Hale padlock on the meatbox. I pulled the chain out through the holes.

  I lifted the lid.

  First I was confused. Then afraid. I believe I also experienced a brief but sharp twinge of real horror before the remorse.

  The creature with the Y-shaped face had been shot through one eye and looked like it was asleep. It had been stripped naked and cut into six or seven pieces that lay stacked like a pile of firelengths inside the locker. Arms, legs, head. Body in two pieces. Otherwise it would’ve needed to be folded triple to fit inside. I held my breath. The creature’s face looked up at me, expressionless and almost serene. I looked at the roughly severed limbs piled with such warehouse efficiency and hated that this had been done. I really did.

  And I knew something with complete certainty. I stood up and looked into the wind, feeling my eyes start to freeze. I looked at the skirls of snow bending the tops of the trees that were blue, grey, and black in the failed light, my mind placing the mountains farther out, and all the trackless miles up to the top of this world. And I knew this was the only other one like the stranger. Here in my meatbox, the only other. Anywhere on the planet. I saw its face in my mind, its small teeth gnashing, the hopelessness and resolve. I saw the tattered animal hides, the old scars.
The years.

  I looked back into the box.

  It had not been planned, I felt sure of that. They hadn’t expected to find it in the wintry woods…when? Yesterday afternoon? They hadn’t known what to do. Of course not. They had argued, and acted, then continued to argue.

  The frozen gray face stared into the winter sky.

  ###

  I took no meat with me when I went back inside, only a feeling like an eclipse of courage and dread. I thawed myself out in the kitchen for a minute, rasping my hands together, then returned to the bar. I opened the swinging door slowly.

  The three remaining young hunters half stood again in that all-rise way as I came in, hanging on my every movement. I saw the stranger sitting there over his bottle, staring and scraping his teeth, drinking. He’d held them all in place with his presence. I thought of it now as a he.

  I stood in front of him not looking at his complicated hand — except for a glance at the thumb — and said, “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t react. Rather I sensed that something inside him stirred in recognition, but he did nothing and did not look up at me. He did that only once, come to think of it, and I’m glad that was all. I don’t want him to remember me and confound me with his sorrows.

  He drank. I watched.

  Beneath the eyes and around the slits of the nose were patches of blue crosshatched skin killed by the cold, the razor scars of cutting wind and clear dripping snot and tears, same as those on the dead one. Trailing on my bar were the raggedy ends of clothes he’d made himself, years before from the look, cut off the nameless alien bones of caribou and wolf.

  I looked at him differently now and felt it in my eyes. I knew something about him. I knew what he was, and he knew that I knew. It was all on the table now, because of what had happened. How many years had he hidden? Or how many decades? He didn’t care anymore.

  I wagered he’d gotten lost. Had an accident. The one he’d lost yesterday had been his sole companion. In the eyes I could see brewing the heatless flames of the Last Battle: the one fought not between right and wrong, but between Something and Nothing. His reason for living had been taken away.

  For all that, he still couldn’t do it sober.

  I reached out, slowly, and took my bottle back.

  The little teeth stopped moving. The jaw clenched.

  ###

  It took me a minute to work up to it, but I said it again. “I’m sorry. Do you understand that?”

  The stranger took his time and then made a small noise with his upper lip. It sounded like a dismissal. Its eyes watched the bottle, subtly, without moving too much.

  I said, “This can’t happen here. No.”

  He didn’t respond.

  I pointed at the door. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I said, “I want you to go.”

  The next thing I knew, our arms were almost touching. They crossed between us, like we were practicing martial arts. We were elbow to elbow. I still pointed at the door. The muzzle of the big six gun touched edge of my jaw, near the joint on the right side.

  A few seconds later I felt myself swoon back away from him, my arm up over my face, until my heels touched the base of the liquor shelf. “Okay. Alright. Alright.”

  I waited to be shot. Wondered what it would feel like, whether there would be any feeling at all or just lights out. I’d hear the blast for a fraction of a second, like a record player toppling over at the start of a song.

  What felt like a long while later, I lowered my arm. The stranger had lowered his gun and stared straight ahead again.

  So he didn’t deal only in absolutes. But he had a few.

  I put the whiskey bottle back on the bar where he could reach it. I set my hands on the shelf behind my waist and just breathed. Then I decided. I just needed another half a minute to recover my wits.

  I looked out over the room. I couldn’t get greedy and try to save the whole lot. That was the key. If I tried that, everybody might get killed. The melee situation I saw in my head was one where the hot shells were still rolling on the plank floor while he reloaded, the chamber spinning, the rounds moving fluidly in his long fingers like a card trick. Then nothing moving.

  I stood up straight. I had to save who I could. And I thought maybe I could save a few – maybe even myself – since I believed the stranger and I both knew who’d destroyed what was left of his life. And who hadn’t.

  Looking at him, I thought that perhaps the stranger was as frozen as everyone else in the place, in his way, unable to act. But he would get around to it. And if the wrong thing happened before he got around to it, he would get around to it a lot quicker. I’d have to be careful.

  I leaned against the bar opposite the stranger and didn’t look at him. He became a blur out of the corner of my eye.

  I looked across the room to Watt and his three friends, and their eyes glittered uneasily. I licked my lips and cleared my throat. I did not know whether stranger comprehended English, or any earthly language. So far no one had spoken to anyone else. Only myself, to the stranger. I looked over at them and knew that trying to say too much with my eyes might be as dangerous as speaking, so I might as well.

  “Could you boys,” I called, “Come help me with something? Out back?”

  I took a step toward the door, and I felt the stranger tracking me with increased interest. I didn’t like it, but he never moved, and I sensed that the heavy feeling had moved on to him, and he couldn’t pick himself up just yet. Everything was just too heavy. I had never seen a man so ripped up and torn apart.

  The older fellows stared at me for moment like a gray prairie dog village. None of them said anything. Before anyone at Watt’s table could move, the young men at the other table all scraped their chairs out.

  I had to reach deep for the words, and each one felt like dying a little. I said – being realistic, I had to say - “Not you.” I cocked my chin at the others. “You.”

  The boys were in their mid or late twenties but looked very young, like school photographs, their skin so unblemished and full of light.

  If I left them to the stranger, he might let the rest of us go. We weren’t a part of it.

  The older fellows rose and shuffled to the side of the bar and accordioned to a stop there, while the stranger reviewed them. He swallowed a nip of whiskey he’d kept pressed to the roof of his mouth. I saw the throat work. The men took it as a queue and filed into the kitchen. Everyone was careful not to move too fast. Once they were out of sight beyond the swinging door, I wondered whether they’d kept going or stopped in the kitchen. Their coats were still on the coatrack inside the front door, but no one had dreamed of retrieving them.

  Now there was only me, the stranger, and the boys.

  Their faces had turned white. One of them went to reach for something, I never knew what, and knocked over the candle in its little glass globe. He quickly picked it up again, a pure nervous reflex. They stared at me as if they were six years old. I knew it was time for me to leave, but I only stood at the edge of the bar, holding onto it like the railing of a storm-tossed ship.

  The young hunters turned up their misty, unlined faces at me, and already they had become part of the past. The color of them had already faded, and I felt horror. They kept their eyes on me. They knew that as long as they kept their eyes locked on me they could not come to an end, that I would not leave them.

  The stranger’s shooting hand lifted from the bar like a giant moth, and then it curled in on itself with a sudden intensity, the knuckles popping like pine knots in the flame.

  That was for me.

  I stood pinned in place.

  The stranger shoved the bottle away from him down the bar.

  One of the boys began to cry quietly to himself. The cords of his neck stood out as he tried to hold it back.

  The .22 was still under the counter, and still might as well have been up on the roof. It was my place. I was responsible for what happened in it and for what happened to my guests. I had a name
around here.

  I wondered if there was any chance the stranger might not be able to do it. I could pull the whiskey bottle back and pour him another. I could talk to him. I could explain that they were just stupid kids, that I was sure the young ones were just as foolish wherever he’d come from and surely he must understand about that. I’d tell him that everything he’d had in the world was gone and nothing could change that. That this wouldn’t make him feel any better. That he was damned. Empty. That everything he’d suffered was only postponing the inevitable, that his time was over and he was utterly finished. But there’s no language in the universe for telling someone that and making them accept it, except maybe the universal language of bullets. And he was the one going to be doing the talking, today.

  There would be the useless justice of those whose souls have been annihilated by grief. I know because that was when he looked right at me.

  The eyes rolled over with a peal of the mint-green membranes.

  I could only hold my gaze for a few seconds. I felt the terrible black freight of lonely days in the creaking woods and groaning blue glaciers on a strange, a far-flung, a wrong world howling at me through those black eyes. I couldn’t stand in front of that midnight-blue train. He was bigger than me.

  I saw the looks on the boys’ faces out of the corner of my eye as I went. They sagged white and flaccid as though hung from nails in the wall. There was nothing I could do for them. I tell myself that still.

  I turned and went into the kitchen. Watt and his friends were huddled near the door. They’d wrapped themselves in plastic and tablecloths, whatever they could get hold of to prepare for the cold. I grabbed my coat off the peg and joined them. We hesitated only a moment before going out.

  Next I knew we were running out the back door into the ripping wind and the blindness of snow that kept hitting my face and neck like fistfulls of coins, those old mountain men and me. I can’t rightly remember what happened during those next few minutes. I remember the ecstasy of a narrow escape and nearly giggling out loud like a girl even though I knew of no shelter we could reach before we died of the cold. Maybe, I thought, one of Watt’s friends knew about a hunting shelter not far off.