Wolf Point (20 page)

“What is it, T?”

T heard her voice coming from someplace behind him. He didn’t know why he had called out for her. He was sweating, and the walking was making him nauseous. “Can we stop a minute?” he said, and he tried to stop, but Lester tightened his grip around his waist and almost lifted him off the ground as he pushed him along.

“You be all right,” Lester said. “You the man, T Walker.”

T thought he might throw up. He concentrated on quieting the roiling in his stomach as Lester half carried him down the hill. A gust of wind picked up and then blew hard for a minute, sweeping over the ground, blowing leaves and small twigs against his calves and up his pant legs, and it felt good on his face, tousling his hair, and it helped him somehow to see more clearly the backs of the cabins passing to his right and the boulders and scattered rocks to his left along the narrow trail down the steep hill to the river. It was a beautiful windswept night, with the moon laying down a long, bright trail across the dark water so vividly T thought he might walk along it over the Saint Lawrence off into the horizon. For a moment he was filled up with the beauty of the place and the night, and
then he remembered he was about to die. That was a hard thing to hold on to, that notion. He didn’t really believe it. Why would he? It was out of his experience, as it always was with the living. He didn’t believe it. He knew it was in the realm of possibility, he knew it was something that could happen, but he didn’t think it actually would. Or at least part of him didn’t. Part of him did, but part of him didn’t. Lester might change his mind. Jenny might stop him. Lester might have a change of heart. The hand of God might descend and part the waters, and Lester might walk away into the depths. Only he didn’t know that he actually believed in such a God, which he thought might be something he should be thinking about now.

“How are you doing?” Jenny said. She came up alongside him and touched his arm. She was carrying the guitar case like some kind of musician off to a midnight gig. To Lester she said, “He’s sweating bad. Look at him.”

“I’m all right,” T said. “I’m a little dizzy.”

“Lester,” Jenny said. “Please, honey…”

Lester said, “Don’t bother, Jenny. Ain’t a thing bad ’bout to happen.”

“For Christ’s sake, Lester,” she said. She lowered her voice. “He looks bad,” she said. “What if he dies?”

Lester laughed. “What you think, Jenny? I shot him by accident?”

“I think you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I told you,” Lester said. He stopped. They were at the
bottom of the hill, nearing the boulders where the boat was tied up. Water slapped against the shore and wind blew white wounds over the surface of the river. “I told you I’m perfectly clear,” he said. “I’m high, but I ain’t out of it. I’m inside it. Ain’t that ever happen for you, Jenny? Where you know you seein’ things the way they are and not the way you always dreamin’ them? You know what I’m sayin’?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I don’t. You’re not making sense.”

“I’m making sense,” he said. He shook T slightly. “How you holdin’ up, bud?”

“Will you listen to me?” Jenny urged. A breeze roughed up her hair and she pushed it back off her face. “Think, Lester,” she said. “When’d you ever kill anyone before? That’s not you, Les. You’re not a killer.”

T said, “Are you going to dump me in the river, Les? Are you going to murder me?”

“Is that what you thinkin’?” Lester lifted T and continued along the trail to the boat. “Dying ain’t nothin’ to worry ’bout,” he said. “There’s no there there. There’s no you here. That’s all. But—” He stopped in front of the boat and looked over the scene. The stern tie had come loose, and the boat banged against the shore and rocked in the wind. There looked to be an inch of water in the bottom of the boat. “But we just going night fishin’, T,” he said. Then he added, “We got water in the fuckin’ boat.”

“Aren’t you cold?” Jenny said to Lester. She laid the guitar down and sat on it.

“I’m not cold,” Lester said.

T dropped suddenly toward Jenny, and he realized Lester was lowering him onto the guitar case. He sat down and leaned against her. He hadn’t realized the degree to which he had been relying on Lester to hold him up until he had put him down.

Jenny put her arm around T. She looked up to Lester and laughed. “This is so absurd,” she said. “Will you look at us? Will you look at this?”

T closed his eyes and took a brief vacation from the moment. Lester and Jenny continued to talk, but he didn’t bother listening. He was tired, and things were so completely out of his control, it didn’t seem important to pay attention. At least for a moment. He could take a moment’s vacation. When Maura was a little girl she used to come into his bed in the morning to play with him. She’d wake up early, the way children do. Her mother was gone. Brooke had left them. Brooke left. He bought a house on Long Island. Huntington. Huntington, Long Island. In his house on Long Island, Maura woke early and climbed into bed. “Daddy,” she said, “I’m a tiger, Daddy! Pick up your knees!” When T picked up his knees the quilt became a cave and tiny Maura, three-year-old Maura, climbed into the cave and became a tiger in the morning while T slept on and off, waking and sleeping, and Maura growled ferociously and leaped from the bed and came back dragging a stuffed animal in her mouth. Where was he then, sleeping and dreaming while Maura played? He was thinking about the day to come. Take Maura to Mom’s, leave for work. Pick up salary
checks. New hires. Chemicals, more stuff. Put the child away and go to work, Maura, Maura. Take her to Mom’s, the little girl, the sweetheart. She was the cutest thing.

“T,” Jenny said. “Come on. Get up.”

T looked up into the moon behind Jenny’s head. It was pale and white and huge. “Is that a full moon?” he asked.

Lester and Jenny both turned to look.

“See, now,” Lester said. “Look at that. Full moon.” He seemed to appreciate it. His eyes lingered on it a long moment.

“Looks like it could be a full moon,” Jenny said. She knelt in front of T and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the hem of her dress. “T,” she whispered, “you got to keep it together. He’s hell-bent on going fishing.”

Behind them, Lester had waded into the water. He went about untying the bow line and pulling the boat up onto the shore.

T said, “Please, Jenny.” He gazed past her, to the water, where he could see Lester’s back moving toward him, the tiger in the trees in the moonlight. Lester wrestled with the bow of the boat, pulling it up toward the rocks.

“I can’t talk him out of it,” Jenny said. “He’s so fucking high he thinks he knows everything.”

T said, “You’ve been dealing with stupid men your whole life, Jenny.” He touched her leg and then leaned forward to rest his head on her knee. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “He’ll finish me off and dump my body in the river. You know that. You know that’s what he’s going to do.”

Jenny said hurriedly, “I don’t know what he’s going to do.
Shit,
he
doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Look, what I know is something about being around guys who’re wrecked. Anything can happen. Trust me on this.” She glanced quickly behind her. Lester had worked the boat up halfway out of the water. He shook the river off his arms and legs like a wet dog. “There might still be ways out of this,” she said. She kissed him, a quick peck on the forehead. “Come on.” She offered him her hand.

When T tried to lift himself to his feet, the buzzing came back into his head, deafening him. He saw that Jenny was saying something; then Lester came up and said something too. He shook his head, trying to let them know he couldn’t hear them. Lester leaned down and put his arm around T’s waist, and the touch, which wasn’t rough or hard, produced a jolt of unpleasantness in T that reminded him of touching an electrified fence, that dull, powerful heartbeat of something bad banging into him. “Wait, wait,” he said, but Lester lifted him from the ground and carried him to the water the way a man would carry a child, one hand around his waist, the other under his legs. T went blind, the green mosaic occluding his sight. He couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear, but he knew that he was being carried, and then he was wet. He was sitting in water with his legs outstretched and his back against metal.

The water felt good. He was hot and water cooled. He didn’t like water soaking his pants and shoes but otherwise it was good, cooling. After a minute the mosaic subsided and he saw that he was in the boat and that Lester and Jenny were on shore. He was in the bow of the boat. The current pulled the
boat away from the shore, out to the wide river that was black under moonlight and white where the wind played on the surface. Lester and Jenny were talking on the shore while Lester held the stern line in his outstretched hand. T felt like a kid being pulled along in a wagon. The buzzing in his ears diminished and disappeared, as it had before, but the wind blew away whatever Jenny was saying to Lester and Lester to Jenny, back and forth, the wind blew it all away. He heard only water smacking the boat and rocks on shore, and wind over the water and through the trees.

In a moment of clarity, he thought that if he could stand and get to the stern, he might be able to yank the rope out of Lester’s hand, and then he would float away. He could feel the current pull at the boat. The water was moving fast. He didn’t think Lester would be able to swim out to him; the water moved too fast. The current was too fast. He could feel it pulling the boat out to the wide river, river like a rippling black sheet under the still white moon. He considered his situation. He might be able to do it. If he could yank the rope out of Lester’s hand he’d float away and Lester couldn’t catch him. Lester with his tigers: the one on his back, the one the girls had given him. Jenny and Lester on shore arguing in moonlight. Then they stopped arguing. Jenny threw her head back and stared up at the sky, sad, frustrated, a beautiful child made to stand in the corner. Across from her, Lester slumped solemn and unhappy. Together, they looked like a pair of ragged, rebellious children tired of being punished. The boy pulled a red wagon.

Winter is coming, window filled with frost. Words of a song came to T.
Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost.
He was remembering pieces of lyrics from a song that seemed, far as he could see, apropos of absolutely nothing. “Hey,” he called out, and Jenny and Lester turned to look at him. They seemed absorbed in their thoughts, his call a momentary distraction. They turned back to each other and resumed their argument.

T settled back in the bow. His pants were soaked. He wished he could go back in time and upload that single image he had so disastrously downloaded, send it back through the digital ether, return it to the hard drive from whence it sprang. He could draw a direct line from the moment he clicked on the make-believe button that said
download
to this moment when he was sitting in the bow of a boat in the dark bleeding to death. Though he didn’t think he was bleeding anymore. He looked down at his chest. All he saw was a blue shirt cut away over his heart where a makeshift bandage made of towels was awkwardly taped to his chest and shoulder. He touched the bandage and looked at his fingers, and there was indeed blood on them. But he didn’t feel like he was bleeding anymore. He felt numb over there. By his chest. By his heart. He felt numb. If he hadn’t downloaded that picture, he wouldn’t be here. That was certain. Imagine if he could have known at that moment what the consequences of such a simple, innocent act would be. It
was
innocent. He only wanted to look at a picture. How much more innocent can you get than wanting to look at
a picture? It was a child-like act. It wasn’t about lust; the lust was all in their corrupt minds. He found the picture interesting. Here was a girl feeding herself to a beast. He did look like a beast, that hairy back hunched over bulky and heavy, weighty like a beast. She was beautiful. She was perfect. And she was giving herself. In between was the woman, who was a mediator, a priest. She facilitated the offering. They wished it was rape. They wanted it to be rape. They denied what was in her eyes. They explained it away, making her pure victim, but she found her way into that trailer with that man and that woman the beast and the priestess and they seduced her or she let herself be seduced or whatever, what the hell did T know about it, what did any of them? It was a moment in time, a transaction. It was a picture. He would have liked to have figured it out. There was something in it that spoke to him about desire and beauty and innocence and experience. Maybe it was a horror. He had never denied that. Everyone wanted. The girl wanted. The man wanted. The woman. They wanted and were willing to transgress, all of them. He didn’t know. T didn’t. But there was such desire, such ecstasy of desire that the moment was incandescent. That he did know. That he could see. But for the most part he didn’t know, he almost never did, and the ones who were sure, they had descended on him.

On shore, Lester took Jenny’s chin in his hand, kissed her on the forehead, and then turned to the river and pulled the boat in. T had slumped down while waiting, and he pushed himself up with his good arm. He tried to sit up straight.

Lester pulled the stern of the boat up to the rocks before wading into the water and turning the boat around so that he was standing alongside T. “How you holding up?” he asked.

“Been better,” T said.

“Bet you have,” Lester answered. He seemed to be amused by T.

Jenny climbed out onto a flat rock, leaned over the boat, and put the guitar case down in the water at T’s feet. “He looks like a man ready to go fishing,” she said to Lester, and then she climbed into the boat and straddled the center thwart, situating herself so that she could see both Lester and T.

Lester pushed the boat off from the rocks and jumped into the stern. He primed the engine and started it on the third pull, and a moment later the boat was cutting through the water, driving away from the shore and out to the center of the river. Then suddenly he cursed and cut the motor. From the stern of the boat, near the engine, something rattled. It sounded like a chain slapping against the transom.