The Axman Cometh (25 page)

In his free hand he has another of Shannon's drawings of Don, which he holds cannily propped against his breast like a door- to-door salesman.
Getcher
Time\

Donald B-for-Burnside Carnes, Man of the Year.

A tingling in Don's right arm, as if he has plugged the toy sword into a wall socket.

"It won't work," Don tells him, the flare- up of bravado like a torch in the cellar dimness. "Also, frankly I think your music stinks. It's not original. You never had any talent and you never will."

Axman begins slowly to crumble the page, enjoying his mastery. Don feels a contraction of gut and muscle but doesn't flinch and the sensation ebbs. The Taiwanese sword is twitchy, like a cat at a
mousehole
.

Shannon slowly lifts her head in hazy wonder.

Axman tosses the half-wadded drawing to the floor and takes a step back, raising in a smooth effortless lethal motion the prodigious ax. It has never failed him. Glowering half-moons that throw off death like radium. Shannon trembles in her wilting wedding gown. The house above their heads cracks like a brittle walnut shell. The wind flies in, filled with dust from an opened grave. Her face is parched by the draught, her rouged lips look stark as graffiti on a church wall. Don stands firm as the Axman cometh, blades
windmilling
fancily to trim his flesh and dress him down to his humble bones.

The Axman gloating over his catch.

"Finished! Finished! Finished!"

"Damn right," says Don, and the little sword flies up,
marvellous
in its dance, in the precision of-its mathematics—flies against the trajectories of the ax and bewilders them, undoes the equations of butchery by splitting the ax through the handle and to the wrist, leaving fingers here and fingers there on the floor and a gout of blood on Axman's frilly wedding shirt. Don's sword leads him adeptly by the arm, pointedly taking inventory of vital spots, support columns and various low joints while Axman writhes and screams in obligatory partnership, until there are only stumps of him left to do the dance, his eyes are blind as belly buttons, his hair a hive of hardened grave dust.

And at last they rest, while the gathering of Axman by the stellar wind goes on, his pieces distributed according to laws of celestial mechanics Don is too bushed to ponder. Nor can he reckon yet with his own situation.

He's in Kansas. There's a Kansas-size wind blowing, the stuff of tall tales. And Shannon lies on the floor pale as a twisted soda straw, naked as January.

He crawls to her, grateful for even that much locomotion. Gathers her in his arms. Kisses her shriveled lips back to a sweet redness. Her young breasts bloom beneath his hand. At last her eyes open.

"Oh, Shannon. Let's just get out of here. But which way?"

Puzzled, she studies his face as if it is a road map in Cyrillic.

"Thank you. I don't think I need any more help. I can make it the rest of the way."

"Shannon—it's Don. Wake up!"

"I am awake. Well, sort of." She smiles. Her eyes seeing past him, as if trying to focus on the shimmering edge of a faded, rainy dream, an ice palace in a desert. "But I want to go back to sleep. There's plenty of time. It's Saturday, isn't it? I don't have to get up so early on Saturday."

"Shannon. What's going on? You don't know what I—what we've been through!"

"I don't even know who you are," she says, and yawns contentedly. "But that's okay. I know you won't be here when I wake up again."

"Stop it! Listen to me! He's gone for good now! You're rid of him, Shannon. You never have to think about him again. So there's no reason why we can't be happy—"

Her eyes have closed.

"I'm very happy," she murmurs, begging off. And then, not looking at him, she puts her lips to his cheek.

'"Bye."

"No—no, you can't! Shan, I love you! We're going to be together now! We have to be, that's what this was all about! I saved you from the Axman. Wake up, please, come back! It's me,
Donald!
You've got to
wake up,
beauty!"

The wind is loud and strong. But Shannon lies unruffled in his arms, fair of skin in the strong cocoon of Time, glistening newly like lightning in a bottle. She will smile forever, but no longer for him.

Tears in his eyes. He is lost and knows it. Lost in goddamn Kansas, with nowhere to go, and all the magic he might have expected as his due is worthless, inert, as flat as week-old beer.

The least he can do is put her back in her own bed. He weeps at the thought.

His tears falling on her face as he carries her lightly up the cellar stairs. The toy sword thrust into his belt. But he can't swagger, there is no freebooter in him, only an ice cave, a lonely heart like a pebble covered with snow.

Her room, and he receives a shock. It is pretty much as he imagined it would be, from crime-scene photographs he once looked at. Another shock: there is a body lying curled in pajamas on the floor, wrapped in a chenille spread pulled from her bed. He steels himself, expecting horrors, more blood. But the boy is unharmed. He snores gently, with a slight rasp.

Don lays Shannon on her bed. He dresses her in clean pajamas and
smoothes
the rumpled hair with her own brush, but he knows nothing will wake her as long as he is there. Should he stay until he is blind from cataracts and deaf to his own heartbeat, she will sleep and have no thoughts of him. They will all sleep.

When he pulls the sheet up to her breasts
Elefunk
tumbles out of the folds, one white felt teardrop dangling from a doleful, thickly lashed eye. He puts
Elefunk
in the crook of Shannon's arm and thinks he sees the slightest change in her expression, a deepening of contentment as she slumbers on.

Chap stops snoring but doesn't wake up when Don lifts him into the bed beside his sister.

As he turns to leave the room his gaze lingers on a framed photograph on her vanity. A good-looking, dark-haired boy in a football jersey. Not just another jock, perhaps. There is a sensitivity about the eyes Don finds appealing. He has inscribed the photograph
To Shannon: the best and the most at Emerson High
and finished with a quotation:
This hour I tell things in confidence/I might not tell everybody/but I will tell you.

He can't leave the house without checking all the bedrooms. Just to be sure.

So it's Dab and Ernestine first, in rudimentary nightclothes, finishing this night together as they have finished the nine thousand- nights that came before, not decorating their bedposts like horrendous Toby mugs.

Allen Ray breathes peacefully but not through his throat, where the only mark is insignificant, from his own razor.

Now Don has overstayed; he is walking around and around in a museum where he knows all the exhibits by heart.

He no longer hears the wind. Perhaps it is too close to dawn. The house has settled on its old foundation, nails and mortar snug, the refrigerator humming its familiar buzzy song.

He leaves by the backdoor, and it is like passing through an airlock.

Japanese lanterns like multiple suns dangle from the trees in the backyard.

There are no houses beyond the back fence. The neighborhood ends abruptly there, in empty sky and prairie, gold on this windless morning. It is Kansas, or it is not. But there is no other way to go. He does not trouble to look behind him.

He has walked a mile when things begin to look both different and familiar. The chrome yellow of
wheatlands
is giving way to green thickets, orchard bush. He sees thorn trees in yellow flower. He crosses a clear stream. On the bank the red mud and reeds are heavily trampled. Animal dung covered with camel flies steams in the cool air, not unpleasantly. That, and the tang of game, excites his nostrils, his sporting blood.

Don rubs a hand across his lower jaw. Growth of whiskers there. Almost a beard. Another few days. Then he will shape it. He always knew he had a good face for a beard, but of course they had rules back there, in the actuarial department of New York Life.

His stride lengthens. He's not surprised to find that he's wearing crepe-soled walking shoes suitable for the bush. Also high socks and shorts and a short-sleeved safari jacket from those perennial expedition outfitters Abercrombie Fitch. He's unarmed, except for his small toy sword, which no man dares make fun of. He has knocked a few men down for daring. The sword will always go with him. It will never be far from his hand at night. No matter what his women have to say about that.

The sun is higher. From his
musette
bag he takes a bandana, cocks the brim of his Stetson higher and knots the bandana around his head below the hairline so that perspiration won't mist his glasses. The wind is from the west and in his face, swaying almost noiselessly the tall grasses all around him. The game trail is cut like a shallow winding trench through the grass, but smooth and shining like
mudpies
patted tirelessly by small hands and left to dry in the sun. This is a good country, not too broken, some tough climbing but nothing that will wear a man down.

Ah. He hears one now.
Simba's
cough, deep and full of anger. Somewhere over the next shaded ridge. His hands tingle. He is walking quickly but making no sound. Even the vanguard of Somali
gunbearers
jump when they realize he's joined them, and grin in relief. It is only
Resase
modja
.

Papa, crouching, the .256
Mannlicher
in his right hand, looks back over his shoulder. So does the white hunter beside him.

Papa says in a low voice, "You made excellent time. Baron Blixen, this splendid- looking bastard is my good friend Donald B-for-Burnside Carnes."

Blixen offers his hand. "I've heard so much about you. Delighted you could join the hunt."

"My pleasure," Don says, and kneels. He thrusts out his left hand, and almost immediately his own weapon is there. He senses the nerves of Abdullah, his
gunbearer
, knock- kneed in flimsy khaki shorts, and touches the black man reassuringly. Then he opens the breech of the Springfield and is satisfied. Clean as
a
hound's tooth and loaded with five solids, the 220-grain bullets. Power hitters. But he and Papa will need only one shot apiece. They are the best.

"
Cotsies
are bloody restless," Papa murmurs. "Also they've winded us."

"When they come," Don says, studying the
maned
lions that are just barely visible at seventy-five yards in the
donga
grass, "they will try to flank us like the good soldiers and hunters they are."

"I wouldn't care for this situation at all," Blixen says thoughtfully, mopping his brow. "If I were with any but you chaps, what?"

"I am highly complimented," Don says, not breaking his concentration. And then he realizes, with the superb hunter's instinct, that the lions are going to charge. Perfectly synchronized, he and Papa cock their rifles. For a moment their eyes meet. They smile.

The
gunbearers
, brave in their own right but weaponless, have retreated before the anticipated charge. A shout goes up. The grass undulates as if tornadoes are snaking through it. Don returns his attention to the beast surging within his sights. A large male, four hundred pounds or more, capable of breaking a buffalo's neck with a single paw-swipe. Papa's lion is equally large. Such speed and beauty, Don almost hates to pull the trigger. His pulse is racing. His heart is full. He is where he was always meant to be.

"Now!" he says, and the two guns crack as one; birds fly from the dark branches of the baobab trees. The shouts of warning and fear turn quickly to ringing cheers.

Author's Note

Almost all of Perry
Kennold's
italicized lovelorn musings are from Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass.

This one is dedicated to the Brothers Grimm.

And, of course, it's also for Papa. Who, one likes to think, would have been amused.