Hilda stepped between us. “Let the man speak his piece.”
“What the hell for?”
“He’s funny. He gives me kicks.” She was looking at me like a lost soul out of hell.
“You’ve had your k-kicks.” He smiled at her malignly.
“What’s on your mind? Are you taking Adelaide with you instead of me? I wouldn’t put it past you, mother lover.”
One of his sudden rages went through him like a hemorrhage. It drained his face of color. “D-don’t call me that. You want to d-die, too?”
“Christ, you’re the one that’s kill-crazy. You better give me that gun.”
“I wouldn’t trust you with it.”
“Hand it over, little man,” she growled. Her breasts were thrust out under her shirt, aggressive as nose cones.
“D-don’t give me orders.”
The gun wavered toward her. She reached for the muzzle. Gaines looked horribly torn, ready to faint. He raised the gun and struck her with it on the side of the head. She went to her knees like a supplicant.
I stepped around her and hit him in the soft place below his ribs. He opened his mouth to grunt. I smashed it with my right fist. He ran rapidly backward across the room and slammed into the wall on the far side. The gun clacked on the floor and skittered away into shadow.
I went after Gaines. He didn’t come to meet me. He stayed against the wall, gasping for breath, until I was almost on top of him. Then he moved very quickly. His fist came out from under his windbreaker with a blade projecting upward from it.
I rushed him and got both hands on the arm behind the fist. We were face to face for an instant, static and straining. Before the instant was over, I knew that I was stronger than he was. The knowledge made me grin.
He struck and scratched at my grin with his free hand. I concentrated on the wrist behind the knife. I forced it up to the level of my chest, ducked under it, turning, and twisted it with the whole torque of my body. Something gave. The knife fell between us.
I picked it up, but it did me no great good. The woman was crawling away from the light into the deep shadow. She found the gun and sat on the floor with it. Resting the barrel between her pulled-up knees, she sighted along it and fired.
The bullet hit my shoulder, turned me, and set me in motion. She fired again, but I felt no second wound. I didn’t need one. I waded to the doorway in the floor’s dissolving surface and fell slack. My head must have struck the door frame. I dropped across the threshold of consciousness.
chapter 25
INTO THE LANDSCAPE of a hundred dreams. I was out in the orchard sailing chips in the creek. The rolling hills on the far side supported white cumulus clouds. Above them the sun soared, brightening. It blasted my face with heat. The creek dried up. I covered my eyes. When I looked up again, the sun was red; the hills were black as lava, except where barns were burning. The apples turned black on the trees and dropped in the black grass. I went into the house to tell my father. “He’s dead,” said an old brown woman I didn’t know. “They flit by the window, and what’s become of Sally?”
The thought of her took hold of me and jerked me out of dream country. I felt floor against my face, hot air on the back of my neck.
“There’s a Santa Ana blowing,” I said. “Somebody left a window open.”
No one paid any attention. I lifted my head and saw the firelight dancing on the wall. It was a pretty sight, but it annoyed me. With the desert wind blowing, it made no sense to build up the dying fire.
I rolled over and sat up. One side of the room was alive with flames. They fluttered toward me like ribbons in a fan draft, and toward the woman lying on the floor. I thought with something approaching awe that Gaines had included her in his plan of destruction. Her clothes were disarrayed as though she had put up a struggle. A blue bruise spread from her temple across one eye.
I started to crawl toward her, and discovered that my right arm wasn’t working. Before I reached her, a tongue of flame licked at her outflung hand. Her fingers curled up away from it. Her whole body stirred sluggishly. She wasn’t dead.
Which meant I had to get her out of there. I scrambled to my feet. Fire flapped like flags around her. I twisted my good hand in the tails of her shirt and heaved. The shirt tore and came away from her body.
She was becoming very important to me. Holding my breath against the heat, I caught hold of her limp wrist and dragged her into the hallway. It was like a wind tunnel. Air poured through the open front door. I pulled her out into the blessed night.
The fire was beginning to sing and surge behind me. In no time at all it would be a roaring furnace. I looked for my car. It was gone. I maneuvered the unconscious woman to the edge of the veranda, hauled her up to a sitting position, crouched in front of her, and lifted her by the wrist across my good shoulder.
Somehow I got my knees straightened out under her weight, and started down the driveway. I had a fixed idea that I must get her as far as the road, in case the trees caught fire. It wasn’t likely, after the winter rains, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly.
The trees on either side swayed mystically in the moonlight. I swayed not so mystically. My faint and hunchbacked shadow mocked my movements. The soft burden on my back seemed to increase with each step I took. Then it began to slip.
Before she slithered from my grasp entirely, I went to my knees at the side of the drive and let her down carefully. We were still under trees, a hundred feet short of the gate, but this would have to do. She lay like a marble torso fallen from its plinth, waiting for someone to lift her back into place.
I sat down heavily in the weeds beside her. I couldn’t have been so very far gone, because her bare breasts disturbed me. I got my jacket off and covered her with it.
The right side of my shirt was dark and clammy. I felt the dark goo with my fingers and only then recalled the shocking image of Hilda sighting across her knees and firing. With my left forefinger I found the hole she had made, just under my collarbone. It was wet and warm. I balled my handkerchief and held it against the wound.
The woman whimpered. Faint coppery lights were moving on her face. I thought for an instant she was coming to, then realized it was the fire’s reflection. The upstairs windows of the house were rectangles of twisted orange and black. Black smoke boiled up toward the moon in clouds whose bellying undersides were flame-lit and peppered with flying sparks.
The Forest Service would be sure to sight it or get a report of it. They were probably on their way now. I might as well relax until help arrived.
It arrived sooner than I expected. A single pair of headlights fanned up the winding road, turned in at the gate without pausing. I got up onto my feet and stumbled into the middle of the driveway.
The headlights stopped a few feet short of me. Behind them I recognized the bulky shape of an ambulance. Whitey and his partner Ronny climbed out on opposite sides of the cab and converged on me.
“You got here fast, boys.”
“That’s our job.” Whitey looked me over in the glare of the headlights. “What happened to you, Mr. Gunnarson?”
“I have a shoulder wound that needs attention. But you better look after the woman first.”
“What woman?”
“Over here,” Ronny said from the side of the road. His voice was vaguely familiar, though I didn’t remember hearing him speak before. He switched on a flashlight and examined her, turning up her eyelids, sniffing her breath.
“She may be under drugs,” I said.
“Yeah. It could be an overdose of morphine, or heroin. There’s needle marks on her arm.” He indicated several dark pinpoints in the white flesh of her upper arm.
“She was talking and acting as though she was high on something.”
