Ghouljaw and Other Stories (28 page)

Earlier—following a pre-dawn breakfast of sloppily swallowed vodka, and a cheerfully vague e-mail addressed to his family and acquaintances—Paul’s journey to the clearing had been a forty-mile blur of taxis, gas stations, and hiking along the snaky feeder roads fringing the outskirts of the massive forest preserve.

He’d been making headway, but, once inside the woods, walking felt more like wading as he slowly progressed through the dense terrain of gullies and undergrowth. As intended, Paul had given a wide berth to any sort of conventional trail, avoiding main thoroughfares, lest he cross paths with a hiker or, worse, a ranger doing some routine snooping. This place had a reputation for people executing this sort of thing, even more incentive to forge ahead and find his own special place, even more incentive to put distance between himself and himself—everything that made him ashamed to be Paul Dawson.

On any map of the state, the Marion Shaekel Wilderness Area was a 13,000-acre inkspill of dense forest, intertangled with 39 miles of trails and campgrounds. Instead, Paul followed his gut, guided by the intrinsic sense that he’d
feel
it when it was right, intuiting his way into the overgrown innards of the forest.

And this was the spot. Now, as Paul appraised the clearing, surveying the open pocket with quiet contemplation, a memory emerged. He was a kid, must have been twelve or thirteen, a summer night in the small town where he’d grown up—the town he’d never left. He was with a group of flashlight-toting boys, vaulting the low, wrought-iron fence crookedly framing a church cemetery on the farmish outskirts of the town. They called it, simply enough, the graveyard game. The boys would stand along the fence, their backs turned and their eyes closed, while a single member selected the name and date on a tombstone. When the name was announced the boys would scatter, flashlight beams dancing and darting from marker to marker. The idea was that when the name had been found, the winner would yell, “Grave robber!” But instead of rushing, Paul would simply stroll up and down the aisles, calmly reading the names etched in stone, changing course when the inexplicable urge moved him, sort of
feeling
where the name would be. More often than not (and barring one of the neighbors or the caretaker hollering threats of calling the constable) his flashlight beam would settle on the selected name.

“Grave robber,” he said softly. Paul lingered in that memory a moment longer as he considered the clearing before him, a peaceful spot wreathed by a rim of trees, their remaining rust-colored leaves laced together by dark branches. Paul exhaled a short-lived puff of visible air, savoring the cemetery stillness, the hauntedness of this place.

A huge tree had fallen and now lay stretched across part of the clearing. Paul approached the tree and casually placed his duffel bag on the enormous moss-covered trunk. His hand was shaking slightly as he unzipped the bag and withdrew the silver revolver.

Paul went back, seven years earlier, to the day he’d acquired the weapon. It’d been Father’s Day, and Steve Spencer—Paul’s former father-in-law and Molly’s retired-cop dad—had jabbed a heavy bow-wrapped box at his son-in-law. In his thirty-one years, Paul had never fired a gun. Astonished, Paul had followed Steve out behind the house, across a stretch of property to an impromptu firing range. Following Steve’s gruff instructions, Paul braced, aimed at a coffee can placed on a hay bale, sighted, and—his mouth dry—squeezed. The recoil from the revolver caused Paul to flinch violently, the gun nearly bucking out of his hands. His father-in-law was laughing, his meaty hands spread over his generous belly. Despite this, Steve encouraged Paul to keep the gun—“for home security,” he’d said—but henceforth eyed his son-in-law with what Paul believed was a mix of disappointment and disgust, and the older man never failed to slap Paul heartily on the back when he mentioned the incident each Father’s Day. And each Father’s Day Paul had constructed his own list of barbed responses. But Paul did what he’d done for so many years—with his father-in-law, with his wife, with his bosses. Paul cooperated. He kept his mouth shut and swallowed his pride.

Paul clicked open the revolver’s cylinder and looked at the six unblinking eyes of the bullets’ brass primers. “What are you staring at?” he mumbled, his voice sounding weird in the quiet clearing. Speaking now to no one, Paul wondered if he’d been more vocal, if he’d been more assertive, if his mind and his mouth had had a better relationship, then some of the problems in his marriage would have never emerged. “You have no imagination,” Molly had said during their final fight, the one resulting in her packing up and shacking up with a guy from her office, the guy who was now her new husband.

Hell,
Paul thought.
Nothing I said or imagined could have saved us
.

Now, framed by the black borders of exhaustion and half-drunk desperation, Paul saw a jittery home movie of his family as it had been, still intact, still in one piece, during one of their first vacations together; and he saw his girls as they had been—two kids on the beach, building a sandcastle, achingly brilliant sunshine highlighting the rippling water.

Again Paul steeled himself against these sentimental phantoms. In this world, it was what was
real
that mattered. Things—
money
things—that Molly clearly found more reliable than anything Paul could offer, and it was
real
.

Paul slapped the revolver’s cylinder shut and inspected the remaining contents in the duffel bag.

He pulled out a plastic baggy containing several critical pieces of information—Social Security card, account numbers—to help expediate his identification someday. Years from now, he hoped. When his girls were older. He paused a moment on his driver’s license. “This is who I am, folks,” Paul said.
No,
he thought,
this is who I
was. He gave a morose smirk at the organ donor designation on his driver’s license before withdrawing several lengths of bungee cord. The plan was simple: Secure the bungees to the lower bole of a tree and wriggle into them, snuggly strapping himself in place, still somewhat concealed yet readily available for scavenging denizens. Paul looked up at the overcast sky between the thinning, interlaced branches, and closed his eyes.

The gunshot made him flinch. With breathtaking abruptness, a single shot exploded across the forest. Paul’s eyes went wide, reacting as if his own revolver had inadvertently discharged; but no—the report, now wavering to a dying echo, had come from somewhere nearby.

Wide-eyed, he scanned the clearing, already abandoning his plan. The most important thing right now was getting the hell out of here. But before he could get moving, Paul was frozen by another sound—a rhythmic twig-snapping and leaf-crunching, something big steadily cleaving its way through undergrowth. And then he saw a dark shape bouncing, swiftly separating from the crowded backdrop of tree trunks.

A massive deer bounded into the clearing, its powerful legs stabbing at the leaf-peaty earth as it charged ahead. He stammered and staggered backward, but ceased his retreat as the deer inexplicably faltered and stopped, its body going rigid and its black eyes locked directly on Paul.

The ginger-colored animal was panting, each snorting huff sending ghosty streamers into the air. Paul too was breathing in panicky puffs as his gaze flicked back and forth between the deer’s eyes and its formidable crown of antlers, the multi-pronged rack branching out on either side of its head. Paul glanced down at the deer’s torso, to the dark red smudge near its ribcage. The gunshot, the wound, and the deer’s sudden presence made sense, but those thoughts collided with something dissonant:
Why did it stop?
Paul focused on the deer’s black eyes and stopped blinking, stopped contemplating what was happening.

The clearing began to change. Light was fading, dimming, as if a curtain of coal smoke were drifting up from the forest floor. Shadows began blending together, turning everything into a dark canvas behind the deer, which stood motionless—staring, bleeding, panic-stricken, yet somehow . . . proud.

Paul was seized with an overwhelming sensation that he was moving in two directions: being dragged forward—his consciousness magnetized toward the buck’s black eyes—and sinking backwards, as if gently floating on his back.

And then he thought about his mom.

Thirty-three summers before, when Paul was five, his mom had taken him to a local pool for swimming lessons. He was a nimble kid, eager, energetic, and when it came to swimming he was a natural. But he dreaded floating on his back. The combination of touching nothing and hearing his respiration coming in amplified gasps evoked a sort of reverse claustrophobia, causing him to splash and thrash upright, desperate to find purchase on something stable, something tangible.

Paul was experiencing this precise sensation now—pressure overtaking him from beneath, surrendering to the buoyant embrace of water.

As the last of the light dimmed from the clearing, he began enduring a flashbulb barrage of images, memories.

Paul saw—and saw
through
—his child-self propped up on a pillow in his bed, running a fierce fever, his mother rushing into the darkened room and placing a cool washcloth on his forehead—the boy-Paul feels the sudden urge to vomit, and suddenly he is a college student, throwing up in the toilet at his apartment, too drunk for his own good, and then Molly is there in the bathroom, appearing disappointed but amused as she cleans him up, helps him to bed, and then Molly is on his bed—
no
—Molly is in a
hospital
bed, Paul is next to her, clutching her shoulder and stroking her forehead as she pushes their first child into the world.

Paul felt something scalloped loose from his mind.

He was unaware of the tears that had begun to stream from the corners of his unblinking eyes as he continued to be bombarded by half-forgotten memories and emotions; and then it was all blurring together—he was a child, boiling with fever; he was a college kid, regretting his irresponsibility; he was a man grateful for the ordinary and significant opportunity to be called
Dad
. And while a portion of Paul’s mind was experiencing all this, the other part continued its descent, falling backward, fathom after fathom, into amniotic blackness. And then Paul imagined the warm scene of his daughters building a sandcastle on the beach, his youngest daughter jumping up, running toward him, crying, mumbling something about a sting, a red, blossom-shaped blotch on her leg. As if to grasp those phantoms, Paul unconsciously raised his arms, reaching out.

The concussive stutter-crack of gunfire filled the clearing.

Paul—the
seeing
part of Paul that had been drifting toward the deer—was instantly yanked back now; but before that conscious presence could fully return to his body, he felt a punching thud pierce his upper chest. He had time to watch the deer twitch, stagger, then both he and the big buck fell, Paul collapsing to one side of the moss-covered log.

He was staring up through the branch-knotted canopy, at the shards of gray sky between the boughs, yet somehow he could still see himself down there, lying on his back on a bed of damp dead leaves. In an almost adrenal rush of awareness, Paul began to understand that the seeing thing, the thing seeing him, hovering in the clearing had a shape—a formation of sensate dimensions. Paul initially registered a sort of giant, all-seeing umbrella. But that wasn’t quite right. Now his mind desperately clung to something that had nearly gone into mental atrophy: his imagination. As inexplicable as it was, Paul surrendered rationality, and the indistinct thing floating in the clearing rapidly took the shape of a massive black jellyfish.

The giant bell-shaped hood glistened in the gray light, its long black tentacles dangled beneath it, whipping languidly as it floated contentedly over the clearing. He could see everything within the jellyfish in a dome-shaped panorama as it narrowed its attention to the far side of the clearing, where the deer was thrashing and making choking noises, its antlers whipping at the air, its black eyes electrically alive with terror. There were now several large wound-smudges along its torso.

Now there were voices, and the jellyfish rotated its awareness again. A man came jogging out from the far side of the forest, swatting at the tangled foliage; he was toting a large machine gun, what—with Paul’s help—the jellyfish coolly recognized as an assault rifle, an AK-47.

The man was dressed in dark clothing—ball cap, camo sweatshirt, camo pants—and he was wearing a backpack. He was a youngish guy with a narrow, clean-shaven face, tall and thin, what some people might call lean and wiry; but upon closer inspection, the man’s eyes were underlined with dark crescents, and his sallow skin was stretched too tight over his cheeks and chin, things Paul associated with poor health or meth use.
An undertaker’s apprentice
.

Another man emerged now, breathing heavily, clearly trying to keep pace. This one was wearing a logger’s jacket. Unlike his partner, he was wide and burly, and had what looked like a week’s worth of whisker-stubble on his too-fleshy jowls. He reminded Paul of a cruel Bassett hound.

“Goddamn it, Roger,” the younger one said. “Thought I had him on the first shot.”

The bigger man, Roger, panted as he spoke. “Don’t . . . make no sense,” he said, slinging his own rifle over his shoulder. “Why the hell was it just standing there?”

The slim one was already shaking his head. “Don’t know. Don’t matter.” He paused, caught his breath and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Maybe it knew it was as good as dead.” And then he raised the machine gun to his shoulder and marched over to the dying deer.

“Don’t shoot the fuckin’ thing again, Blake,” Roger said wearily, “unless you want to send out another goddamn invitation.” The bigger man walked forward. “Just get it over with—quietly. Or I’ll leave your ass out here to carry the whole thing back to the jeep yourself.”