Possession (28 page)

He was relieved to find no blood, no claw marks on the foodbag, nothing at all in the abandoned camp itself that indicated the bear had found her. Her sleeping bag was not here nor was her backpack, although he found Danny's pack behind a log. She had to be alive, but he could not imagine where in this morass of wilderness she crouched hidden— or how much longer she could survive.

The cold came with sunset, and he was aware of his body again. He gathered wood mechanically and lit the fire, but only for her, a signal she could see and know that it was safe to come out from her hiding place. He watched it burn and tried to work through the complexities of what had happened.

She had been in this camp, and she had tried to hide from ... something ... in the tree. There was physical evidence of that. Danny had been a few hundred yards away, but for what fucking purpose? He wasn't hunting; he wasn't armed for hunting. If he'd been fishing, he'd have gone toward the lake—not the trail out. If he'd foreseen trouble, he wouldn't have left Joanne alone.

Danny's death scene spun around in his head, a film reel playing over and over, but he could never get a fix on a frame that made sense. He could not keep the two separate: the dead man with the livid, swollen face and the live Danny—laughing, waving goodbye to him.

And he grasped only one thought. Nothing would ever be the way it had been again.

He had not meant to sleep, but exhaustion crept over him where he sat and his head dropped on his chest.

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When he woke, it was dawn and nothing had changed. No one had come seeking the fire's warmth. He called for her for hours, until the answering silence was so heavy with futility that he knew he had to seek help.

He took nothing with him but his canteen as he headed downtrail. He looked straight ahead as he caught the corpse odor from below the path, and concentrated on putting one foot ahead of the other until the air grew fresh again. He called out to her occasionally, knowing that the chance she could hear him grew less and less as he neared the fork in the trail and turned down the last route to the ranger's station. She would surely understand when he came back with help that he had not been able to find her by himself, alone.

He drove himself without let-up, feeling no jolt or shock when he slid and fell with the loose shale on the downward inclines, unaware of the tears that coursed through the deep crevices of his face.

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He was not sleeping well. She thought that he was recovering, but almost as soon as the sun disappeared, he had stopped answering her questions and slept, his bad arm held gingerly away from him. She was careful not to bump it; even the wind across it made him whimper in his sleep. She tried to sleep too, but his groaning and tossing woke her again and again. During the stealthy games he had been all right, but now he was delirious.

She wanted to say his name to comfort him and found it so odd that she did not know what it was. She had known his name, and now she didn't. She wet a rag from her canteen and stroked his forehead, and his eyes opened but they would not look at her.

"Are you O.K.?"

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His good hand darted out and gripped her shoulder, hurting her.

"Damn it. Damn it, you bitch. You're trying to kill me."

"No ... oh no—you're sick."

"Open the window. There's no air in here."

"We're outside. There are no windows. You have a fever."

"I said open the window or I'll—"

His head dropped back and he seemed to sleep again, but his hand held her shoulder fast and she could not pry herself loose of him. She touched his face and his skin was hot, taut, and papery.

She didn't know what to do.

"Listen!"

"What?"

"They're coming to kill us again. Lock the door, Reenie."

"There is no door . . ."

"I said lock it!"

"All right."

"You brought them here on purpose. You've been fucking around with all of them and I told you and told you—"

"No. I didn't—"

"You lying bitch." His sick arm rose up, and then fell back onto the ground and he cried out. "You're so fucking dumb, Reenie. Now, you've gone and killed us."

His fingers slipped to her breast and clutched there and she thought she would faint from the pain. She began to cry.

"Don't cry, Reenie. I forgive you. I always forgave you. I won't let you die forever. I'll find you. You belong to me. I own you." She could not remember what she had done that had to be forgiven, or why he called her the other name, but she knew she had done something despicable, and that she had killed him—them. No, just him. She poked at the fire, trying to make it warmer; he thought he was burning up, but it was really so cold.

And she tried to think. It was like building a bridge without enough lumber to go across, but she searched her mind for the pieces she was sure of. She knew they were on a

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mountain, but she did not know where it was. She had come up here with someone, not him, but someone else, Who? Danny. Thinking about Danny made her feel sad, because Danny had left her. Then he had come to take care of her. Because she belonged to him, because he knew her, because they were meant to be together. He could have killed her. Why? Why would he kill her? She couldn't remember why she had been afraid that he would. But he hadn't. She was grateful for that. Since she knew he possessed her life and that he had chosen to allow her to breathe and to live, she was very grateful.

He knew that she was someplace near him, but the fever drugged him and kept him in his deep sleep where the nightbirds' cries echoed down fiery corridors and he could not hold onto her. It took tremendous concentration to waken. He was weaker than he thought possible, his blood clattering through his veins, hot as steam pipes, his infected arm throbbing almost rhythmically.

He closed his eyes and dove under the pain again, asleep but not resting.

She caressed him awake, her hands cool on his penis. Too late. She had come to him of her own accord just as he had known that she would, asking for it without any prompting, and it was too late. He was too goddamned sick.

He watched her, naked over him in the first daylight. Her breasts swung close to his mouth, and her fingers were insistent on his cock. He was incapable of any response beyond his hard-on.

"What should I do? Tell me what to do."

"Kiss it."

He had ordered her to kiss his cock before, and she'd turned away, gagging. She'd told him she'd never gone down on a man. Now she bent over him eagerly and took him deep into her mouth. He was the first. She was his.

He could trust her completely now. She would not jar his arm or humiliate him or leave him behind. She mounted him and slid herself so gently onto him. He could feel that

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she was like oiled silk, so moist and cool where he burned. She moved herself back and forth over him, and he possessed her, this butterfly caught on his shaft.

He left the pain behind, or perhaps it vanished inside her. He rose to meet her climax and clutched at her shoulders with both of his hands, pressing her down against him so that her breasts and belly flattened on his chest.

He came in a shattering spasm that submerged everything else, and he did not feel the bursting in his hand, the stretched skin opening over its thinnest points. Neither of them felt the viscous stuff that poured out.

A long time later, they looked at his hand and saw that it had spilled its poison, leaving a pale torn glove of a hand, but no longer deadly. She brought water and washed herself and then him. She watched over him while he slept the morning away, his face serene.

She heard nothing, not the slightest fragmented sound in the thin air washing down from the other side of the peak. She heard no one call her name.

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The head ranger, his brother who ran the lodge, and both their wives sat with Sam in the restaurant section of the bigger building at a table next to the window, their coffee cups on the red-checked oilcloth sending plumes of steam onto the glass and obscuring the view of the dock beyond. One of the women was cooking behind the counter, cooking for him because he needed to eat, although he wondered if he could. They were all nice people, really nice people, quiet now in shock and sympathy for him, but Sam found it impossible to speak more than an occasional word now and then, and they were silent too. Waiting. Waiting for the Explorer Scouts and the Chelan County Sheriff's deputies, and Ernie Gibson, who was flying dogs in as soon as he

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could locate containers. Hopefully, too, a helicopter from Chelan County. All of them summoned via solar-powered radio to deal with disaster in paradise. From time to time, the door opened and someone stepped in and whispered to the ranger or his brother, the college kids in their last week of temporary forest service, or one of the pretty girls who cleaned the cabins.

Sam sensed they found him inappropriately cold and contained in the face of the loss of his best friend. He had barked out his orders of who to send for, what he wanted done, and when—"immediately." He had accepted coffee, a shower, a change of clothing from the tall, lanky college boy from Indiana, and a shot of whiskey from the ranger's brother, but he discouraged any sympathy or small talk. His face and neck ached from the strain of remaining expressionless.

He reached for a cigarette and found the pack empty already. Before he could move to the counter to buy another, the ranger's wife placed a pack in front of him.

"Thanks." He looked at the blank window and rubbed at it with his hand, exposing a circle of view. The boardwalks were empty of people, the lake and the mountains beyond all the same metal gray, the show for the tourists over and the serious business of winter begun. Sam tried to remember the heat in Natchitat only—when? Yesterday. The day before maybe. He hated it, but now he wished it existed here; it would help to keep Joanne alive until they found her.

He spoke to no one in particular. "Saw a rattler yesterday."

"That so." The ranger looked up, obviously eager to encourage any thread of conversation to lift the pall. "Big one?"

"Maybe four, five feet. Maybe he just seemed that big."

"Pacific rattlers don't usually run much over three feet. It takes them a while to coil. They can't jump and they strike less than their own length."

"The guy seemed amiable enough."

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The ranger chuckled, a strange sound in their long quiet wait. "I wouldn't call any snake amiable. Probably getting too cold for him to feel frisky. I still wouldn't try to shake hands with one."

"The bear—" Sam said it aloud for the first time in an hour. He plunged on. "You think it could have been a grizzly?"

"I won't say absolutely that it couldn't be—but, like I said, the last verified sighting around here was in 1965. It's not like Glacier Park. Grizzlies were wiped out here a long time ago. It's possible that one could have come down from Canada, but I can't figure it, nobody catching even a peek of one all summer. We had thousands of hikers this year."

"They didn't see any bears?"

"Sure, some black bear in the upper valley. The usual stuff—trying to make off with food, pestering. One sighting of a she-bear and her cub up by High Bridge at Coon Lake in July. Woman tripped over the cub and the she-bear reared up and growled, but she didn't attack; she let the hiker take off and she skedaddled up the trail. You just about have to corner them before they'll attack."

"It had to have been something huge. He didn't shoot. His wounds were . .. terrible."

"It was pretty dark last night. You might not have seen everything clearly."

"No, I saw."

The ranger reddened and looked away. "You'd know best." For the first time, Sam could identify with the "220s" he'd hauled in to Harborview Hospital in Seattle to be locked away on the fifth floor. The woman who lived in her car with twelve cats, the old men who refused to be moved from condemned buildings, the black girl who screamed obscenities on the corner of Third and James, and Herbert Pyms and his daughter, Violet, who crashed every society party in Seattle in their matching outfits Violet sewed of funeral ribbons and T-shirts. In their world, in their minds, they made perfect sense. Well, he had seen what he had

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seen, and it didn't compute with what was supposed to be. He was going to raise hell until he found out what was wrong.

He thought of Joanne's little hands and the way she hunched her shoulders when she felt threatened, remembered her kitchen and the jars of jam waiting for her to put away, and felt a stab of pain behind his eyes.

"How the hell long does it take them to get up here?" he demanded.

The ranger looked at his watch. "An hour and a half. They'll be rounding that last bend in the lake any minute. The kids here have got a crew started up already, and Ernie's bringing in two bloodhounds."

"I want the helicopter. I want to bring her down right away and get her to Wenatchee to the hospital."

The ranger looked down.

"What's the matter?"

"Deputy—Sam—you've got to be prepared that... she might have . . ."

"What?"

"If we've got a renegade bear up there . .."

"You do! Dammit. I told you it killed my partner."

"She might be gone, too, Sam. She may be dead."

"No. I'm going to bring her down."

"You're exhausted. Let the search party go up."

"I'm going with them."

"O.K. But eat that. It's going to be a long night."

He looked at the plate before him. Steak and eggs and hashbrowns, the meat rare and bleeding into yellow yolk. His stomach balked, but he dug into it, wanting to ask for beer instead. They wouldn't let him pay for the meal.

The food hit the bottom of his stomach and bounced, but it stayed down. He didn't feel exhausted; he felt steely anger and frustration at the wait for the Chelan County deputies who seemed to be taking their sweet time responding. By noon he had made up his mind to head up alone when he heard the distant buzz of a motor, growing louder until the launch appeared. Just behind it, Ernie Gibson's