Twisted: The Collected Stories (27 page)

“I guess,” the little girl said, though she wrinkled her nose at the thought of actually eating fish. But Alex could see some relief in her blue eyes.

When she’d wandered off to play on the computer Alex helped Sue with the dishes. “She’s fine,” he said. “We’ll just have to be more careful about what she watches. That’s the problem—mixing up make-believe and reality. . . . Hey, what is it?”

For his grim-looking wife continued to dry what was already a very dry plate.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just . . . I never really thought
about you going off to the wilderness alone before. I mean, you always think about somebody getting mugged in the city but at least there’re people around to help. And the cops’re just a few minutes away.”

Alex hugged her. “This isn’t exactly the Outback we’re talking. It’s only a few hours north of here.”

“I know. But I never thought to worry till Jessie said something.”

He stepped back and shook a stern finger at her. “All right, young lady. No more TV for you either.”

She laughed and patted his butt. “Hurry home. And clean the fish
before
you get back. Remember that mess last time?”

“Yes’m.”

“Hey, hon,” she asked, “were you really in a fight in high school?”

He glanced toward Jessica’s room and whispered, “Those three rounds? They were more like three seconds. I pushed Pat down, he pushed me, and the principal sent us both home with notes to our parents.”

“I didn’t think you and John Wayne had anything in common.” Her smile faded. “Safe home,” she said, her family’s traditional valediction. And kissed him once more.

Alex turned off the highway, snapped the Pathfinder into four-wheel drive and made his way along a dirt road toward Wolf Lake, a large, deep body of water in the Adirondacks. As he progressed farther into the dense woods, Alex decided that he agreed with his daughter: The monotonous countryside needed
sunlight. The March sky was gray and windy and the leafless trees were black from an early-morning rain. Fallen branches and logs filled the scruffy forest like petrified bones.

Alex felt the familiar anxiety twisting in his stomach. Tension and stress—the banes of his life. He breathed slowly, forcing himself to think comforting thoughts of his wife and his daughter.

Come on, boy, he told himself, I’m here to relax. That’s the whole point of it. Relax.

He drove another half mile through the thickening woods.

Deserted.

The temperature wasn’t cold but the threat of rain, he supposed, had scared off the weekend fishermen. The only vehicle he’d seen for miles was a beat-up pickup truck, mud-spattered and dented. Alex drove fifty yards farther on, to the point where the road vanished, and parked.

The airy smell of the water drew him forward, his tackle box and spinning rod in one hand, his lunch and thermos in the other. Through the white pine and juniper and hemlock, over small, moss-covered hummocks. He passed a tree with seven huge black crows sitting in it. They seemed to watch him as he walked beneath their skeletal perch. Then he broke from the trees and climbed down a rocky incline to the lake.

Standing on the shore of a narrow cove, Alex looked over the water. Easily a mile wide, the lake was an iridescent gray, choppy toward the middle but smoothing to a linenlike texture closer to shore. The bleakness didn’t make him feel particularly sad
but it didn’t help his uneasiness either. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean air. Rather than calming him, though, he felt a surge race through him—a fear of some sort, raw, electric—and he spun about, certain that he was being watched. He couldn’t see a soul but he wasn’t convinced that he was alone; the woods were too dense, too entangled. Someone could easily have been spying on him from a thousand different nooks.

Re-lax,
he told himself, stretching the word out. The city’s behind you, the problems of work, the tensions, the stress. Forget them. You’re here to calm down.

For an hour he fished with a vengeance, casting spoons, then jigs. He switched to a surface popper and had a couple of jumps but the fish never took the hook. Once, just after he launched the green, froglike lure through the air, he heard the snap of a branch behind him. A painful chill shot down his back. He turned quickly and studied the forest. No one.

Selecting a different lure, Alex glanced down at his perfectly ordered and cleaned toolbox he used for tackle. He saw his spotless, honed fishing knife. He had a fleeting memory of his father, years ago, pulling off his belt and wrapping the end around his fist, telling young Alex to pull down his jeans and bend over. “You left that screwdriver outside, boy. How many times I gotta tell you to treat your tools with respect? Oil the ones that rust, dry the ones that warp, and keep your knives sharp as razors. Now, I’m giving you five for ruining that screwdriver. Here it comes. One . . .”

He’d never known what screwdriver the man had been talking about. Probably there wasn’t one. But afterward, Alex the boy and now Alex the man always oiled, dried and sharpened. Yet he knew that his father’s approach was so wrong. He could teach Jessie-Bessie the right way to live without resorting to losing his temper, without beatings, without screaming—all those traumas whose aftermath lasted forever.

He’d calmed for a while but thinking of his father made him anxious again. He recalled the conversation he’d had with his daughter earlier—about fighting, about school-yard bullies—and that made him anxious too. Alex knew he kept everything bottled up. He wondered if he had actually spoken back to his father, face-to-face, then maybe he wouldn’t feel the tension and stress as painfully as he did now. Alex tended to take the easy way, avoiding confrontations.

Fist fights . . . a new self-help concept, he laughed to himself.

He halfheartedly cast a few more times then hooked the lure into the bail of his reel and began walking along the shore, heading east. He stepped from rock to rock carefully, looking down the whole time, mindful of the slippery rocks. Once he nearly tumbled into the cold, black water as he stared at the reflections of the fast-moving strips of clouds, gray and grayer, in the oily water near his feet.

Because he was gazing at his footing he didn’t see the man until he was only ten or twelve feet from him. Alex stopped. The driver of the pickup truck, he assumed, crouching at the shore.

He was in his mid-forties, dressed in jeans and a workshirt. Gaunt and wiry, his face was foxlike, an impression accentuated because of a two- or three-day growth of beard. His right hand held a galvanized pipe over his head. His left gripped the tail of a walleye pike, holding the thrashing, shimmering fish against a rock. He glanced at Alex, took in his expensive, designer-label outdoor clothing, and then slammed the pipe down on the fish’s head, killing it instantly. He pitched it into a bucket and picked up his rod and reel.

“How you doing?” Alex asked.

The man nodded.

“Having any luck?”

“Some.” The fellow eyed the clothes again, walked to the shore and began casting.

“Haven’t caught a thing.”

The man said nothing for a minute. He cast, the lure sailing far into the lake. “What’re you using?” he asked finally.

“Poppers. On a twelve-inch leader. Fifteen-pound line.”

“Ah.” As if this explained why he wasn’t catching anything. He said nothing else. Alex felt his anxiety flutter like the crows’ wings. Fishermen were usually among the friendliest of sportsmen, willing to share their intelligence about lures and locations. It wasn’t as if they were competing for the only fish in the whole damn lake, he thought.

What the hell’s so hard about being polite? he wondered. If people behaved the way they ought to, the decent way he’d told Jessie that they behaved, the world would be different—no hate, no anger, no
scared little girls. No boys afraid of their fathers, no boys growing up into anxious men.

“What time you got?” Alex asked.

The man looked at the combination compass/watch hanging on his belt. “Half past noon. Thereabouts.”

Alex nodded at a nearby picnic bench. “Mind if I have my lunch here?”

“Suit yourself.”

He sat down, opened the bag and pulled out his sandwich and apple. His hand touched something else—a piece of drawing paper, folded in quarters. Opening it, Alex felt a rush of emotion. Jessica had drawn him a picture with the colored pencils he’d bought for her birthday last month. It was of him—a square-jawed, clean-shaven man with thick black hair—reeling in a shark about ten times his size. The fish had a terrified expression on its face. Beneath it she’d written:

Fish beware . . . my daddy’s out there!!!

—Jessica Bessie Mollan

He thought fondly of his family once more and his anger dissipated. He ate the meat loaf sandwich slowly. Then opened the thermos. He was aware that the other fisherman was glancing his way. “Hey, mister, you like some coffee? My wife made it special. It’s French roast.”

“Can’t drink it. My gut.” Not smiling, glancing away. Not even thanking him. The man gathered up his tackle and walked to a tree stump, sawn off smooth about three feet above the ground, like a
table, and stained with old blood. He set down the bucket he carried and pulled a fish out. He beheaded it fast, with a long, sharp knife, and slit open the slick belly, scooping out the entrails with his fingers. He pitched the head and the guts ten feet away into a cluster of waiting crows and they began to fight noisily over the wet, sticky flesh. The man tossed the cleaned carcass back into the bloody bucket.

Alex looked around and saw they were completely alone. The only sound was the faint lapping of lake water, the caws of the mad crows. He started to take a bite of sandwich but the sight of the birds ripping apart the slick entrails sickened him and he shoved the food away.

It was then that he noticed a piece of paper on the ground. It had apparently been blown off a message board at the picnic area or been pulled down by the rain. He was curious and walked over, picked it up. Though the sheet was water stained he could still make out the words. The notice wasn’t from Fishery and Game, as he’d thought. It was from the county sheriff.

He felt a fast, uneasy twist within him as he read the stark words. The notice offered a reward of $50,000 for information about the killer of four individuals in and around Wolf Lake State Park over the past six months. They’d all been knifed to death, but robbery wasn’t the apparent motive—only a few valuables were missing. The deaths were thought to have been caused by the same man who’d killed two hikers in a Connecticut state park last month. No one had gotten a good look at him,
though one witness described him as in his mid-forties and slim.

Alex’s skin felt hot and he looked up toward the fisherman.

He was gone.

But his tackle wasn’t. The man had simply left everything there and vanished into the woods. Almost everything, that is. Alex noted that he’d taken his knife with him.

The notice from the sheriff’s department fell from his hand. Alex studied the forest again, a full circle. No sign. No sound.

Alex gulped down the coffee he now had no taste for and took a deep breath.
Calm down,
he instructed himself harshly. Calm, calm, calm . . .

“Don’t go, Daddy. . . . Please.”

He screwed the thermos back together, watching his hands shake fiercely. Was that a snap in the woods behind him? But he couldn’t tell; the sound of anxiety roared in his head. Alex started along the path through rocks that led deeper into the forest.

He got only a few yards.

His $300 L.L. Bean boots slid off a smooth piece of granite and he tumbled into a shallow ravine. His tackle box fell open and the contents scattered onto the damp ground. Alex landed on his feet but pitched forward into a rock and rolled onto his back, cradling his leg. He cried out.

Moaning loudly, he rocked back and forth. “Oh, it hurts. . . . Oh, God . . .”

Then, a shuffle of feet. The scrawny fisherman was looking over the rock at him. His face was
flecked with blood from the energetic fish cleaning. Behind him the crows cawed madly.

“My ankle,” Alex gasped.

“I’ll come help ya,” he said slowly. “Don’t you move.”

But rather than climbing down the short distance Alex had fallen, the man disappeared behind a tall outcropping of rock.

Alex moaned again. He started to call out to the man but he stopped. He listened carefully and heard nothing. But a moment later the man’s footsteps began to approach, from behind—he’d circled around and was walking toward Alex through a narrow alley between two huge rocks.

Still clutching his leg with his hands, he felt his heart pounding with the dreaded anxiety. Alex slid around so that he’d be facing the man when he arrived.

The footsteps grew closer.

“Hello?” Alex called in a gasp.

No response.

The sound of boots on sand became boots on rocks as the disheveled man approached. He carried a small metal box in his left hand.

He paused, standing directly above Alex, looking him over. Then he said, “Too bad I went to get my lunch outa my truck just now.” He nodded at the metal box. “I coulda told you these rocks’re slipperier than eels. There’s a safer way round. Now, don’t you worry. I was a medic for a time. Lemme take a look at that ankle of yours.” He crouched down and added, “Do apologize lookin’ at you like you was from outer space, mister. Since them
killings started I check out everybody comes here pretty close.”