someone talking to you while they were awake, and sometimes you’ll even see their dreams as if they’re reading from pages of a book. But don’t take this lightly, his mother had warned. You might be told something you aren’t prepared to hear. A person asleep cannot lie to you, they only report what they see from a place that neither exists nor not exists, where birth and death mean nothing. And although he never saw her again after the day he’d left, he’d listened to his mother’s sleep-breath in his dreams. He watched her lying alone in the same old plankboard house he’d grown up in, and every time he awoke he’d be soaked in tears.
The woman below him wasn’t dreaming-the pills she’d taken before going to bed had killed any chance of it. Instead he listened to her sleep-breath tell him about her heart, of the pain and the bouts of dizziness. She sang of her raggedness of spirit and it reminded him of an old war song being sung by marchers sinking into the distance. Her song told him of how close she’d come to letting whatever wanted to take her to hurry up and do it and get it over with. Is this why I am here now? he asked himself. He decided to come back to her later, after he explored the rest of the house.
He stood in Ann’s room and examined the framed pictures on her dresser. He recognized her face in the pictures he’d been shown once by Duane. Was this child the elk worshiper he’d met earlier? Look how much she’s changed, he thought. As striking now as her mother standing next to her in the older pictures. And yet he could sense a sadness behind her eyes in the most recent picture, an imprint that gave her beauty a sharper edge than that of her mother’s. He picked up the photo of her mother and held it close to his eye, felt memory stir sluggishly like a fish below a frozen pond.
Before he left the house he visited the old woman one last time. Her sleep-breath was troubled, as if she’d become aware of his presence in the room. She needs my help, he thought. He glanced around and found a firm pillow. He picked it up in both hands and moved closer.
Chapter 17
They’d been shoved inside with their wrists cuffed. One of the men cut up pieces of electrical cord and together they set to work tying ankles. Someone had been in the shack before they’d arrived, and when the men were finished they emptied a duffle bag and turned over a table with lit candles looking for clues. Tammy watched as the candles guttered in their tin cans and went out. Soon the only light remaining in the room was the glow of the iron stove. She couldn’t believe how dark the shack had become. It made her feel like how she imagined a ghost would feel, floating around like a tuft of cottonwood down through a starless night. But she also felt the little life in her belly, and its insistent movements eventually pulled her back.
In her mind she kept reliving what had happened to her while she’d been heating up soup on the stove, feeling tired from working her shift and still worrying why Mitch hadn’t slept for two days. She’d tried to fight them off-got punched in the mouth and bled on the linoleum before they’d dragged her out of the house kicking. She thought the gap in her mouth had finally stopped bleeding. A tooth had been jarred loose, held only by a strand of roots. The raw nerve pain had been excruciating up until she’d decided to pull it herself. When they’d cuffed her she’d managed to keep the tooth hidden and now she rubbed it between her fingers as if it were a talisman meant to somehow protect her from further harm. An old fishy smell coming from the rusted sink made her feel like gagging. She recalled being in the shack years ago, when James took her and Mitch and Ann for a day of sipping beer and crabbing on the bay.
She assumed the men had gone outside to see if they could find who’d been staying in the shack, and after walking around the area with their flashlights they came back and stood outside their van. Before they left she could hear them talking in what she imagined was Russian, and when they lit cigarettes she could see their woodcut faces through a gap in the wall. They reminded her of the two men she’d seen sitting with the sheriff at the 101. But she’d been too busy to get a close look at them, had mostly heard Janet back in the kitchen, cursing and letting off steam.
“Why is this happening?” she asked again.
“Not now Tammy.” Mitch said. Although their bodies touched, his voice sounded much farther away. He still saw red pinwheels in his head, hadn’t told her that he’d been knocked unconscious after the patrol car had been plowed off the highway and crashed. He remembered shooting toward the edge of a cliff, of turning to see the sheriff unfastening his seatbelt and opening his door and then a curtain of blackness dropping down on the whole thing, certain that when he came to he’d be hitched with death.
“Then tell me one thing, Mitch. Did you think of your family before you started messing with those guys?”
“You need to kindly shut up now so I can think,” the sheriff said. He could no longer feel his hands. They’d cuffed them with those plastic things he’d seen used during riots-what you’d use to tie an end of a garbage bag, he thought. Damn if I could only get to my smokes.
“Kind of late for thinking, isn’t it?” Tammy said. “Seems to me like you’ve run out of options. And I hope you weren’t lying to them this time.”
Mitch felt his stomach spinning and sat up. “Tammy. My head is killing me.”
“How could you do this Mitch?
“I’m sorry. I did it for us. I wanted out but the sheriff wouldn’t let me.”
“You did it for
“I wanted you to be able to quit the 101 and stay home with the baby.”
“Well look where your good intentions got us now. Our house has been ransacked and who knows what they’ll do to us if they come back again. I thought you were smarter than this, Mitch.”
“It’s not his fault,” the sheriff said. “Mitch just did what any man would do if he had a baby on the way and money was tight. He’d find a means to supplement his income.”
“Well I hope you go to hell Sheriff. He was good before he started working with you. You should be ashamed but I know you don’t give a shit.”
The sheriff stared at the wood stove and sighed. The glow was already fading. Was he going to be able to move? His back was killing him. Whiplash for sure, no hope of sliding his hands under his legs so he could get them in front. He was just too fat and out of shape for that. And she was right about Mitch. He’d been as squeaky clean as they come. Always was a good kid. Never got mixed up with a bad crowd or caused him any trouble. Back then he sometimes wished he’d had an excuse to stop by Mitch’s house to have a talk with his folks, just so he could’ve gotten a glimpse of the boy’s older sister. Linda was captain of the cheerleader team and oh man did she have some curves on her.
“Hate me all you want Tammy. But you’re going to have to forgive that boy one of these days. I also know it wasn’t his idea to start a family this soon. Hell, I worked with him the same day you’d shoved that dripping home pregnancy test under his nose. Poor kid was shock. I had to pull over twice just so he wouldn’t puke in the patrol car. But you just couldn’t wait get that noose around him good and tight, could you girl? So let’s just cut the crap now and talk about how we’re going to get out of here before they come back.”
Chapter 18
Gradually Tammy’s crying began to mingle with the sibilant chorus of water being pulled from the bay. Mitch imagined fish being drawn out to the dark mouth and the crowd of lurking sea lions, the exposed sandbars loaded with clams. If you didn’t mind taking the risk of getting grounded until the tide turned, you could land a small boat on one of those sandy islands and go home with more clams than you could possibly eat.
He hadn’t wanted to go out with the sheriff that night. It was too windy and the waves at the bar were bigger than he’d seen in a while. He’d once capsized in similar weather, but it had been in the daylight and some other fishermen were quick to pull him out before hypothermia set in and the current pulled him under. On that night with the sheriff the bay had been empty and other than a watery moon far to the south, he remembered it mostly by the shapes of black waves and their echoing thunder between the rocky sphinx-arms of the jetties. He’d begun to feel uncertain that he would make it home alive, that the sheriff was having second thoughts about
