The Pines (8 page)

“Hell.” Doris went after the brachial artery in the upper arm with her fingers.

Siggy wrapped the pressure bandage tighter. “Uh…Doris…it’s still not clotting.” The fresh gauze was already saturated, and their fingers were wet with the warm fluid.

“Christ, this kid’s a regular fire hose, got to be a bleeder. You know how to do a tourniquet?”

Larry hesitated. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to…Could lose the arm that way, couldn’t he?”

“Look at it this way—it’ll sure cure him of sucking his thumb.”

To show he wasn’t shocked, he laughed and with trembling fingers felt around in the kit for a length of rubber tubing. Wrapping the cord around the boy’s forearm, he jerked it tight, tighter, crushing blood vessels and tissue. The blood gave a strong spurt and then slowed to a darker ooze, finally stopping. The skin of the arm turned waxy, and the boy grunted in agony. His breathing evened out slightly.

“What do you think, Sig?” Doris winked. “I for one think he’s going to work out fine.” She beamed at Larry, now almost as white as the boy. “We get lots of fingers blown off around this time of year,” she went on. “Goddamn homemade fireworks. Usually they can be reattached—we put them in saline solution. See these? We had a couple of kids in here on the Fourth—half a dozen little jars.”

Larry shook a bit, the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. “H-How can you tell whose finger is whose?”

She gave him a big smile. “It helps if they wear signet rings.”

“Shut up, Doris,” groaned Athena. “You’ll be making him sick in a minute.”

She snickered. “How we doing, ’Thena-honey?”

“May beat the storm.”

“Which way we heading?”

“Out the pike to the Med Center,” Athena called over her shoulder. “Probably the fastest.”

“Right.”

Siggy made a clucking sound. “Uh, I thought you told me they, uh, didn’t want us there…anymore.”

No one paid any attention to him, and the knocking in the engine grew louder.

Lumbering on the highway ahead, an overloaded vegetable truck emitted smoke as black as the sky. Two children ran along the side of the road, and Athena switched on the siren, put the headlights on low. She glanced up uneasily. If this storm came on as hard as they sometimes did out here, there’d be no choice but to pull over.

“Christ, that siren’s really on its way out. Turn it off, honey—we’re clear.” Doris climbed up front. “Listen, are you meeting Barry-boy to night? I only ask because…”

As the first fat drops splattered against the windshield, Athena switched on the wipers, and the blades began a halting, squeaky movement, pushing sharp grit. Rain glittered in the headlights.

Lightning, a single bolt, speared the ground. Line squalls swept the woods, their noise drowning out the snapping of thin trees that splintered in the lashing winds.

Deep within the woods, a broad shallow marsh heaved and shuddered like a miniature sea, and long-bladed grasses flattened under a wind that churned thick water into brown waves with caps of foam. The waves licked and bit at a peninsula of firm soil that reached to the center of the marsh, eating away clumps of grass.

But here the earth supported more than grass: a dozen dwarf firs surrounded a dark, squat box of a hut. Soft and pulpy, pocked with wormholes, the windowless timber walls stood firm against the assaulting wind, and the attacking rain bounced off the clapboard roof.

Reflected lightning shimmered in the water. Through the marsh there struggled a hunching form. Slushing, half-submerged, its quavering body blurred by the moving shafts of rain, it towed a limp burden, something that bobbed easily though water but had to be wrestled over humps of harsh grass.

Reaching the shack, the crude shape disappeared down a burrow under the wall, and for a long moment its discarded burden—the headless, limbless corpse of a child—seeped red. Thick fluid mingled with the rain. Then the torso jerked. It moved again. Then it disappeared down the hole, while the muddy walls of the burrow gave off a sucking sound—deep and obscene.

Rain beat on the walls of the shack.

Wednesday, July 22

Over the woods, an airplane boomed, invisible, the snarl muted, fading through the white haze of the sky. The hikers looked around in stunned disorientation. The pines, here unmixed with any other species, grew to an even height of four feet. “This makes me feel exactly like a giant!” Sandra’s voice went shrill.

“It’s as though we’re the first ones on an alien planet.” Alan sounded awe-struck.

“Are you people crazy?” Jenny had just about decided she hated backpacking. “I am not walking through this!” Everything seemed backward—the trees reached only to her shoulders, but some of the ragged weeds stretched above her head. Just trying to maintain perspective gave her a headache. She sighed loudly. This was only their second day out, but the frictions inherent in the group had already begun to spark and smolder, and the summer day stretched long ahead of them. “Couldn’t we rest for a while? This might be fun if it wasn’t so much like a forced march.” The playful whine in Jenny’s voice went sour as she tried to brush grit off her neck. She’d also about had it with these group vacations—the mountains last year had been bad enough, but Casey kept insisting it was a tradition. Now here they were in this awful place. “Something’s bitten me! Look how it’s swollen up already.” She ignored the look the others exchanged. “Aren’t you tired, Amelia?” Jenny peered at her daughter. “Don’t you want to rest?”

The child shuffled her feet.

“She’s all right.” Casey smiled at the little girl. “Aren’t you, babe?” He adored Amelia, although she was Jenny’s by an ex-husband.

“Man, this is nothing,” Sandra put in, trying to keep the peace. Before Jenny could contradict her, she added, “I could walk like this for hours yet.”

Trying to sound downright jaunty, Alan voiced his (strained) agreement.

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Jenny snapped.

“I notice she never asks Amelia if she’s tired unless she wants to rest herself,” Sandra whispered. Shiny with perspiration, she pushed stray blonde hair out of her eyes. The two couples had been friends for years, but Jenny’s temperament had always been a problem. Sandra put up with her for the sake of the guys, who’d been close since college.

Sweat glistened even in the black hairs of Alan’s mustache. He started to say something to Sandra, then noticed Jenny glaring at them, that martyred look on her face again. “You! Case! Wait up, will you?”

Reluctantly, Casey stopped and stood with his back to the rest of the group.

Waiting, he stared at the stunted pines, at trunks that writhed and twisted in serpentine knots. When the others had almost reached him, he started walking again, his boots silently crushing the mat of needles and twigs.

Amelia picked up one of the pine twigs, but when she tried to snap it, the stick bent like rubber. She dropped it and hurried to catch up to the others as they stepped one at a time over a black fallen tree.

“Then why does she stay?” Sitting in the car, Steve slurped beer from the can while sweat trickled down the sides of his face. He winced—his headache renewed its series of stabbing attacks. He was just tired, he told himself, rubbing at blood-veined eyes. He didn’t sleep so well anymore. Running a hand through his hair—and suddenly remembering how badly he needed a haircut—he tried again to organize his thoughts.

If not for the puffy weariness around his eyes and the beginnings of a slight paunch, Officer Steven Donnelly would still have resembled a recruiting poster: the evenly formed features, the blue eyes, the blond crewcut. But even his hair was scruffy now. And his crumpled shirt, like all his shirts, sported the faint outlines of ancient coffee stains. “Why?” he repeated. “I mean, if she hates it so much.”

Ignoring the question, his partner exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke that filled the car. “Yes sir, Athena’s got it all out over my wife.”

Another twinge of pain shot through Steve’s head. Not listening, he felt nauseated, and beer dribbled down the front of his uniform. No, he didn’t sleep so well anymore, not since…He winced, trying not to complete the thought, and he tossed the beer can and watched it skid, rolling lightly over the sand. There hadn’t been enough time, he thought. His eyes, always pale and watery, brimmed now, and turning from his partner, he gazed into the parched woods.

Just off a dirt road, their car rested in shadows. Letters on the side of the vehicle proclaimed
TRIBOROUGH POLICE
in red on white. Triborough was an independent operation—just two cars—serving the Marston-Chamong-Hobbston area. Duties were simple enough: patrol the little towns, don’t disturb property owners, hustle out undesirable transients—mostly kids traveling to and from the shore—and stay alert for the invasions of African-americans and Hispanics that their boss, Barry’s father-in-law, assured them was coming.

Barry’s yawn slowly molded itself into a smirk. “I had a rough night last night.” He flicked his cigarette out the window. “Athena wanted me to—”

“I got to take a piss. You should check in with Frank.” Steve started to get out the passenger side but banged his head. Hard. The pain staggered him. Knees buckling, he feared he might black out and leaned heavily on the car.

“You all right?”

He mumbled a reply. Face averted, he moved unsteadily away, recoiling from the blinding heat, a heat that seemed to melt the lines of thought, send them blurring one into the next, blotting into memory.

“Watch out for snakes,” Barry called after him, laughing.

Swaying on his big feet, he stumbled, and a sober corner of his mind churned with self-loathing. He needed to walk, to find some air, to find…He knew Barry was watching him stagger. Only the middle of the day, and the worst part was that he badly wanted another drink. As he stumbled farther into the trees, he could still hear Barry’s laughter.

He’d loved Barry once. Really loved the guy. Looked up to him, seeing his faults but rakishly grinning at them. Barry could do no wrong. When Steve and his wife had first come out here, Barry had instantly become his anchor. Only his heavyset partner had made life bearable, providing his sole link to past realities. So he’d buried himself in police work and this new friendship while his wife slowly…

Perhaps it was her death that changed the way he perceived the older man. Whatever the cause, Barry sensed it. More than sensed it. Knew and resented it. Yet the outward signs of the relationship had not altered. Only intent changed. Barry’s boorishness had become malicious. Steve’s silent admiration had become a numbed tolerance, beneath which lay the certainty that somehow he had failed Barry, that this too was his fault.

He stepped over a dead pine that lay rotting in the sand.

Lost somewhere in his cramped house was an old photograph. The officer in that photo smiled broadly, his uniform creased and spotless, the young man muscular and lean. He’d only been married a short time then. So short a time. It seemed to him he’d seen this photo recently, glass cracked, gold paint flaking off the frame. It lay somewhere amid the sad clutter, the debris of a life with Anna that filled his house, preserved in a perfect state of disorder, like a museum collection waiting to be cataloged.

Dark spots spread under his arms. He drew the dusky smell of the pines deep into his lungs, and his head cleared a little. He had to cut down on the drinking. Then he snorted in self-derision and looked around at the emptiness, feeling he’d been deposited here by an outgoing tide of booze.

When they’d known for sure that his wife was dying, he’d resigned from the Trenton Police Department and brought her out here…because they’d always said they would retire to the country. A hideous mistake, and from the start, she’d known it, keeping silent for his sake. In a desperate flurry of activity, he’d uprooted her, dragged her away from her family and friends. Trapped her in that awful little house with only her disease for company. And the house was awful, tight as a coffin, hardly the rambling country place they’d dreamed of. She’d accepted the arrangement, as she’d accepted everything. In all their time together, she’d never complained, not even at the end when the pain must have been…

A branch snagged his pant leg, and he bent to free it, rancor welling up in him like bile, his clenched eyes stinging with perspiration. There hadn’t been enough time. Straightening, he unzipped his fly and relieved himself against a sapling, then headed back toward the car. Though still in his early thirties, he’d lately come to think of himself as an old milk horse, the sort that made its rounds until it dropped. He thought of his wife as he plodded on, of how little she’d weighed near the end, of how he’d smothered her with petting attentions, both of them knowing the pain he tried to assuage wasn’t hers, touching her constantly, as though somehow…

Something squelched under his shoes. Coagulated leaves almost covered the patch of bog, and blueberry bushes grew sparsely in the soggy ground. Sodden branches lay scattered, some laddered with shelf growth, the fungus flowing over them in weird, garish colors. He stared down blankly. He must have walked in the wrong direction. Stooping, he picked up a hunk of cedar wood, his vision clouding as he smelled the dampness. He held the log to his face, feeling sick with the heat as he squeezed. We t and rotten inside, it crumbled in his hand and dribbled back into the mud.