The Totem 1979 (17 page)

“Warren, can you tell us how it happened?”

He turned toward the doctor, trying to remember what the plan was.

“Yes, the glass,” he told them slowly.

“In the barrel?”

“Yes, I cut myself.”

His father clenched his fist. “I’m going to sue that old man.”

“Harry. Please, not here,” his mother said.

So I got away with it, Warren thought.

“Warren, let me tell you what I did for you,” the doctor said. “You have to make sure you keep the bandage on. I sewed you up. I gave you stitches. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, like Mommy when she makes a dress.”

They smiled a little.

“Something like that,” the doctor said. “You were cut too deeply to let the wound heal on its own. I took some string like this, except it wasn’t string. It’s more like what we used to call a piece of catgut, and I sewed the cut together.”

“Will the string stay in there?”

“No. A week or so from now, I’ll take the stitches out, and you’ll be like before, although you’ll maybe have a scar,” the doctor said. “But you’ve got a lot of growing to do, and most of the scar will disappear. What you’ve got to understand is that you can’t put much weight on your hand. If you try to pick up heavy things or make a fist or anything like that, you’ll risk the chance of pulling out the stitches too soon. Take things easy. Let your mother or your father do the lifting for you.”

“Will they make my bed for me?”

“You bet we will,” his father said. “And I’ll still pay your full allowance.”

Warren grinned then. Yes, he’d gotten away with it, and he was wiping at his tears, trying to sit up.

“Here, let me help you.” His mother held him.

“He’s going to be all right, I think,” the doctor said. “Take him home. Here are pills for when the local anesthetic wears off. Call me if there’s any trouble. But I think that all you’ll have to do is bring him in a week from Monday.”

“What about the bandage?”

“Change it every night. The first few times you ought to soak the bandage before it’s removed. I don’t want any dried blood tearing at those stitches.”

“Dressing?”

“Anything you have around the house. First-aid cream is fine. I gave him an anti-tetanus injection. I don’t see any problems coming up.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m just pleased that you got him here so quickly. He was bleeding quite a lot.”

More talk, but Warren didn’t listen. He looked around the room, at the cabinets and shiny metal objects, and abruptly he was dizzy. He almost toppled off the table.

“Here, young man. I think we’d better get you home.”

Despite an itching, burning pain along his hand, Warren couldn’t stop from feeling happy. He had gotten away with it. All night long, he’d tried to figure how to hide the bite. His hand had swollen so much that it scared him. At breakfast time, his mother had come in to wake him, but he’d snuggled in the sheets as if he wanted to keep sleeping. He had stayed there until he knew that she would surely come to wake him. So he’d listened until he heard her in the living room, and he had managed then to dress himself. The pain had been so bad that he shook. He had slipped and smeared some blood across his sleeve. But he had figured what to do by that time, and he’d snuck outside to reach the barrel over there. The worst part had been leaning in to let some blood drip onto the glass. When he had pulled the bloody rag off, he had seen the swollen throbbing ugly cut, caked with dirty blood. He’d shivered, reaching down to touch his hand against a broken bottle. That had been his plan at least. But he had lost his balance, and the cut had burst, not from the glass but from the pressure. He had never felt such shrieking pain. He couldn’t stop his screaming.

Chapter Twelve.

“Okay then, sure, why not?”

And Slaughter turned up onto the loggers’ road. “I’ve heard so much about this place I guess it’s time I had a look myself.”

He hadn’t planned to do this until tomorrow, but he didn’t like the thought of Dunlap’s staying any longer than was necessary. It was fine for Parsons to instruct him to be friendly. “Give him all the help he needs.” Parsons had been clear on that. But Parsons didn’t have to babysit this man. Parsons didn’t know about the trouble that was going on.

There wasn’t much that Slaughter had to do in town, regardless. He could sit and wait for calls to come in on the police station’s two-way radio. Or he could drive out, troubleshooting on the streets. But hell, the compound wasn’t even ten miles down the road from Bodine’s place, halfway from the ranch to town, and he was out here, going past it. He might just as well drive up and get this nuisance finished. Slaughter saw the road and made his choice, and this would help take Dunlap’s mind away from what was happening in town.

Slaughter knew the turnoff, although as he had said he’d never taken time to go up it. There had never been a need to, never been an interest. Back in the sixties, he’d seen freaks enough to last a lifetime. They could smoke dope up here until they couldn’t tell their ass from grass for all he cared.

He angled up the loggers’ road, if “road” was what it could still be called. No one had come up here for some time. There were bushes in the ruts, pine needles, fallen leaves, young trees growing in the mound between the ruts, and branches dipping down from all the large trees on each side. The place was shadowy, cool, yet strangely humid. Slaughter suddenly was worried that, if he got stuck, he wouldn’t have the room to turn around, that backing down would be a problem, given all the ruts and bends, and several times he had to squeeze around some young trees that he couldn’t just drive over, narrowly avoiding large trees at the side. He wished he hadn’t been impulsive. Hell, I need a Jeep to get up in here. Why’d I do this? But he had no choice now, and he eased his foot off the gas pedal, slowing, bumping, working up this god-forsaken lane to nowhere. “What kind of place is this to build a commune anyhow?”

“I asked myself that several times,” Dunlap said.

Slaughter glanced at him. “Not too happy where they sent you, huh?”

“I’ve had a little trouble. But I’m working on it. This is what you’d call my penance.”

“I can see that from the way your hands are shaking.” “It’s a bumpy ride.” “But wouldn’t a beer go good now?” Dunlap stared at him. “I said I’m working on it.” “Hey, I don’t mean to rile you. I’m just making conversation.”

Dunlap’s stern gaze weakened. “All right, I apologize.”

“It’s my fault. I was mixing in your business.”

“But the fact is, you’re right. I shouldn’t be so jumpy when somebody says the truth. You really like it here?”

“Love it.”

“I find that baffling.”

“It’s simple. Back east in Detroit, things got out of hand. I got so I couldn’t keep control. My wife divorced me. I was fed up with my work.”

‘You were a cop?”

“That’s right, and finally I simply quit. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t keep doing what I had, however. So I spread a map out on my kitchen table, and I asked myself where I’d rather be.”

“And you chose here?” Dunlap looked incredulous.

“Sure. Because I’d never been here. I was having daydreams. Mountains. Horses running free. I’d never really seen those things, never been around them. What they represented were the things I wanted, though. I knew that much. So I came here.”

“Just like that.”

“I left the next day, and I loved it. Oh, I had some hard times at the start. I tried my hand at raising horses, but I made a mess of it. The next thing I was in police work again. But I was talking earlier about control, and that’s the point. My life here is exactly what I want to make of it. Things aren’t so complicated that I have to give in to them. I have freedom.”

Slaughter looked ahead and eased the cruiser past a clump of bushes. He didn’t see the pothole just beyond them and felt the cruiser jolt down into it. “Now it’s me I’m being personal about. I’d better watch it.”

Dunlap rubbed his forehead. “I think I’ll soon be divorced as well.”

“Who wants it? Her or you?”

“Oh, she’s the one who’ll do it, I suppose.”

“Is that why you drink so much?”

“It’s that obvious, is it? No, I started drinking long before. It could be I caused the problem with her. But you know, a person has ambitions in his work. He wants to prove how really good he is, and I just never lived up to my expectations.”

“Or you maybe liked the booze so much that it distracted you.”

Dunlap shrugged. “The chicken or the egg. What difference does it make? I ended here. No matter how it happened, I know where it got me. Nowhere. Nothing personal.”

“Well, why not just give in then? Maybe settle in a place like this?”

Dunlap started laughing.

“No, I mean it,” Slaughter told him. “Things could be a whole lot worse. Sometimes we end up exactly where we should be.”

“Or deserve to be.”

Slaughter gave up trying to convince him.

“They were all idealists,” Dunlap said.

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Quiller and the others up here,” Dunlap said. ‘They truly thought that, if they left the world and went up in here, they could live the kind of life they’d always wanted. They were fools.”

“It’s worked out fine for me.”

“I wonder how it all worked out for them, however,” Dun-lap said. “This Quiller. Do you know about him?”

‘Just from talk I pick up now and then.”

“Well, he was evidently something. Six foot eight. Thin beyond grotesqueness, and that maybe helped him. Newsmen who were near him said he wasn’t real. You know, as if they couldn’t quite believe that he was there. It’s like he radiated something holy. Charismatic like the best of that type, and those newsmen saw the best, believe me. If this way of life had any chance, Quiller was the man to do it.”

“He was rich, I hear.”

“An understatement, and that money would have helped as well.”

They squeezed up past a fallen pine tree. Its needles were dead, dried and scattered across the road, the branches skeletal, and Slaughter looked up past them toward a wall of vines and bushes, slats of brown that showed through, and he knew that they were almost there. He slowed around a curve and, before he even stopped the cruiser, said to Dunlap, “See if you can budge that gate.”

But Dunlap only stared ahead. “I said-“

“I’m going.” Dunlap stepped from the cruiser. First he viewed the wall of vines from several angles, took several photographs; then he left the camera in the cruiser, and he walked up to the weed-shrouded gate.

Slaughter watched him through the windshield. With the filtered sun, the frame around his windshield, Slaughter sensed that Dunlap was much farther than he really was. Sitting here, the motor idling, Slaughter was abruptly conscious that there weren’t any other sounds around him in the forest. Sure, the noise we made has frightened everything away, he guessed.

He watched as Dunlap stopped and looked at all the vines and weeds that wound around the gate posts. Dunlap reached out. Then he brought his hand back.

“Poison ivy?” Dunlap called.

Slaughter laughed. “A city boy. No, I don’t know exactly what they are, but they’re not poison ivy.”

Dunlap nodded. Then he turned back to the vines and almost touched them before looking at him again. “You’re sure?”

“For Christ sake.”

“Never mind. I’ll do it.”

Dunlap tugged some vines away. He did it cautiously at first, and then he used more strength against them. He was pushing at the gate.

“We’ll maybe have to clear the whole bunch,” Slaughter leaned out, saying.

“More than that. We’ll have to break the lock here.”

“What?”

“A rusted chain and lock.”

“Tug at it. The chain might be so old you’ll break it.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing.”

“Hell, I thought that was more weeds.”

“You’d better have a look.”

Slaughter thought about all the time they were wasting, thought about the town, and shut the motor off. He stepped from the cruiser, walking toward the gate. “I should have known they’d have fixed the gate once Wheeler drove up through it,” Dunlap said.

Slaughter didn’t understand the reference.

“I’ll tell you later. But they fixed it, all right. Christ, they really did. Just look at those thick timbers. They’d stop any pickup truck.”

The two men stood in the shadowy, cool, yet humid forest that was close around them, grass and fallen pine tree needles underfoot, and they were silent for a moment.

“Here, let me try it,” Slaughter said. He put his full weight against the gate and pushed, but nothing happened. Oh, a little creaking in the wood and some slight movement as the chain went taut, but nothing else, and Slaughter felt the awkward pressure in his shoulder, stepping back and rubbing at it. “What about the hinges?” he asked.

But although rusted, they were large and solid, and the screws were sturdy in the timber.

“Well, that does it,” Slaughter said.

“You don’t mean we’re leaving.”

“No. I came up this far, and I don’t intend to waste time coming back. We’re going to have to climb the fence and walk.”

They looked at one another.

“Wait a second while I get my camera.” Dunlap went down to the cruiser for it. When he came back, Slaughter waved for him to climb up first, and Dunlap put his shoe on one thick timber, grabbing at another timber, easing over. Slaughter climbed up just behind him, and they stepped down into the compound, on the edge of Quiller’s fifty acres. “Something wrong?” Slaughter asked. “No, I’m just shaky,” Dunlap answered. “You were right. I need a drink.”

“Well, you’ll be done with this before you know it.” They walked along the next part of the loggers’ road, which was as overgrown as the first part. Slaughter heard a noise in the bushes and turned, but there was nothing he could see. He kept walking.

“Are there any people up here yet?” Slaughter wondered.

“I meant to ask you that myself. Parsons says there might be two or three.”

“Oh, swell. Some commune.”

“In its day, it was,” Dunlap said. “I read that Quiller started with a couple thousand. Then he cut them down to just five hundred.”