His clothes were soaked through and his slow-moving limbs had gone numb. It felt as if he were a hundred years old. He was disappointed but not surprised to see that the power was still out, the rows of identical houses all dark and quiet. He’d hoped to find some electric heat to warm his bones for a while. There was no time to build a fire.
In the back of the house he’d lifted a hefty specimen of beach coble and smiled at the flowery, hand-painted “Welcome” before throwing it through the slider window. Instead of rushing inside he stood quietly on the new redwood patio and listened for sounds of neighbors stirring but heard none. He’d been right about no one being around. And even if there was, what would they do, with no cops or phones to call them with?
Wrapping himself in a thick quilt he found draped over a couch, he proceeded to search bedroom closets for dry clothes, found a hoodie and a wool cap to change into, but no pants. Unless he soon found better alternatives, he’d have to wear what he had on for the next several days. His pants had shrunk some and the cold.38 tucked under his waistband dug painfully, but wasn’t going anywhere either.
In the kitchen he threw open cabinets until he found a bag of chocolate bars, presumably leftovers from last Halloween. He immediately unwrapped several and shoved them into his mouth and chased the stale glob down with an orange soda he’d found unopened in the refrigerator. While he finished his drink he looked around the house. He checked the phone but it was dead.
Outside dusk was falling. He found a set of keys near the door to the garage. In the garage he found a car covered by a tarp and whistled at the shining ’63 Skylark sleeping beneath it, all powder blue and silver as if it were meant to be flown across a cloudless sky. He recalled seeing the car before he’d left for the navy, driven around town by a dentist who’d recently bought the place. None of the locals could stand the man who expected to be treated like visiting royalty, who frequently drove intoxicated, but always seemed to be somewhere where the sheriff wasn’t.
Everyone wondered why the dentist had wanted a place in Traitor anyway when they were forced to listen to him brag about his latest golfing trip to Hawaii or drunken gambling junket to Las Vegas. But by the end of the summer the town began to put the pieces together when they started seeing him riding around with a young woman who clearly wasn’t his wife. The tryst didn’t surprise them in the least. For many men like the dentist, Traitor Bay was a convenient place to stash one’s current fleshpot.
James packed the trunk with a shovel and other supplies he thought he might need. He was still cold and anxious to see if the Skylark’s heater worked. As quietly as he could he pulled up the garage door and looked up and down the street. Night had dropped fast. There was still no sign of life in the other houses, but closer to the highway where the locals lived he could hear the grind of gas generators.
The Skylark started right away. James liked the throaty voice of the engine, the smell of the newly upholstered leather seats and the old-time dials and an AM radio with push buttons. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t for keeps, that there’d soon be a time when he’d have to give her up for new wheels. But for now she was all his.
Chapter 32
The drugs James had ground up and put into the whiskey flask were not wearing off. Ann imagined she was turning the pages in a child’s picture book and witnessing ink sketches of herself, of helpless Ann drifting through a series of worlds where she became smaller and smaller until night began to seep in from the edges and the pages themselves turned black. By then she was blind and bumping around in the dark, like a glob of oil inside a seafaring tanker’s belly, until at one point she felt herself being lifted up into someone’s arms and carried, recalling that pleasant sensation of being asleep and having her father haul her to the car after a long night of visiting relatives.
The ground below her stilled and Ann thought she was now in one of the secret glades she’d discovered while picking ferns. Lying on her back she stared up at a jade membrane shielding the sky, veined leaves of ancient maples whose lichen-crusted limbs were clothed in loose sweaters of green moss, learned associates of a timeless symposium. After a while she began to hear loud crackling sounds, followed by the smell of wood smoke. The membrane above peeled away and she saw the night sky, the comforting presence of the Big Dipper.
Invisible hands took hold of her body again and rolled her gently to her side and when the warmth came it was like having the sun suddenly pressed against her back. Fingers briefly pried open her eyes but her vision was too blurry to make out anything but a large peeled root sprouting thick hair. And yet if she tried to concentrate, a single eye began to come in and out of focus from the pale flesh half curtained by dark wet roots. The eye had a telescopic intensity, as if it were glassing on her inner landscape from a great distance.
She felt a calloused hand slide across her belly and her ribs. The roughness stung her skin, fired up nerve endings that shot to her brain. She began to shake uncontrollably. She wanted to scream at the person who was touching her to stop.
“You’re alive,” said a man she did not know. She assumed it was the peeled root who was speaking to her, who was now pulling down her shirt. Who the fuck did he think he was? His voice had reminded her of how green logs hissed when you threw them onto a fire. Her pulse raced inside her, a hummingbird trying to find its way back through an open window, the room shrinking fast and a surprised cat waking quickly from its nap to stare. Ann could hear her shuddering breath. An icy fear clamped around her heart. She imagined the severed arm with the Cyclops tattoo, its blue fingers tightening its grip.
Root-face backed into shadow, sensing the stress he was causing her.
“You must rest now and let the fire do its work.”
The man rose up and walked away. She wanted to talk but her mouth failed her as if it had been shot full of Novocain. For a moment she wondered if it was someone else’s mouth she was trying to speak through, that maybe her mind had found its way into a stranger’s body and was slowly wiring itself into its mainframe one nerve at time. She’d just spent hours outside of her body, so why should she believe she even still had one? She had no proof, other than the fact that she now felt pain where she’d been scratched deeply by the tree branch.
Embers shot into the night sky like paper wasps defending their nest, trailing up in dense formations and scattering with the wind. Ann watched them drift down the beach and go out. There was the smell of meat again, of something being roasted over the fire on a stick. The man came back several times to dump armfuls of driftwood on the fire, building up a thick bed of glowing coals. She felt his course fingers touch her shoulder one last time and then he was gone.
Chapter 33
Ann had hidden the money next to the seven buried sailors.
According to town lore, a father and son had gone out clamming at low tide when they found the bodies of the sailors washed up on Traitor’s shore. The dispute over their origin was never resolved but it was agreed that the men were not American, that their remains would not last long. A group of townsfolk loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and began the task of laying the bodies to rest in a strip of scrub woods near the beach. Hacking out the shallow graves among thick cables of roots and stubborn rock had been time consuming, and as night fell some of the volunteers did shifts guarding the corpses from scavengers. When the last sailor was finally buried, a small ceremony was conducted by a priest who’d ridden in from Buoy City. Afterwards, local children were invited to plant a sapling above each mound, and over a hundred years later the trees had grown into a cathedral of wind- contorted pine.
He found the money where Ann had told him, between the sixth and seventh sailor. When he first tried to pull it from the hole the wet mud had held it possessively. The white leather felt gummy and came off in his hands like an old skin. As soon as he freed the bag from its miserable grave, he dropped it onto dry ground and moved back, reminding himself to breathe. His mind had begun playing tricks on him and for a brief moment he’d imagined the bag was a shrunken torso. When he finally got the courage to see what was inside he found a garbage bag stuffed with bricks of money, many with rubber bands that had almost rotted away.
