hand, which reminds him of a lizard’s webbed foot. He stanches the wound with hydrogen-peroxide-soaked cotton, wraps it with gauze, and tapes it. From a jar in the cabinet, he pours into his mouth half a dozen aspirins, chews and swallows them. He looks at himself in the mirror, slaps his cheek with his good hand, and quietly tells himself, “Think, son of a bitch!”
On the deck, he finds Waylon sitting on the chaise longue, facing the mountain, the unconscious Abbie, gagged and blindfolded with two handkerchiefs, reclining between his legs. Waylon’s got his knife pressed to her throat. “How far up’s my money, John?”
“Five hundred yards give-take.”
“Is it with the truck?”
“Near ’bouts. Gon’ have to dig it out from ’neath a rock.”
“Drop your pants.”
“What?”
“Get ’em down.”
John unbuckles his jeans and yanks them down to his knees.
“Turn around.”
John twirls a slow circle on the deck.
“Okay, get ’em up.”
With his uninjured hand, John pulls up his pants and buckles them.
Waylon puts the knife blade next to Abbie’s left kneecap and makes a sawing motion. “Stay in sight long’s ya can, John. Right?”
John nods.
Waylon glances down at his watch, then scowls up at him. “Nine minutes fifty seconds, woodchuck.”
He finds it least painful to run with his bandaged hand tucked like a football against his stomach. Even so, with each jarring step he takes, the missing finger throbs as if being severed anew. Seeing his full-throttled approach, Diablo rears up, then gallops across the road, into the woods there.
At the meadow’s north edge, John plunges into the bushes and scrub pine, where, for another hundred yards or so, until the trees get thicker, he is still visible from the deck. As the forest gets denser, the grade steepens and he is forced to walk, but at least now he is hidden from Waylon. He follows a deer path several hundred feet east through a stand of sugar maple, then again veers north, scrabbling up a leaf-slick berm underlaid with patches of granite and bluestone, where, for purchase, he grabs with his good hand at saplings and grapevines. Seventy-five yards from the giant boulder behind which the pickup is concealed, he stumbles on a root and catches himself with his injured limb. The pain is so severe he howls. A moment later, he hears echoing up through the woods Waylon’s emotionless shout, “Seven minutes, John, ’fore I start playing mumblety-peg!”
Heavily panting, his body drenched in sweat, John starts toward the truck again. He tries emptying his mind of all thoughts except getting there, but he keeps envisioning a glistening knife blade against Abbie’s throat, and eyes as black as the interior of the quarry cave where the dead girl once rested and he knows that, in those eyes, Abbie is already dead and, if he returns with the money, so is he. As he scrambles around the west base of the boulder, where the bushes that had earlier fed him dig at his face and arms, and into the oak glade, he fights a strong desire to keep on running. Suddenly he views his inability to be as conscienceless as Obadiah Cornish or Waylon as an exploitable weakness, for had Waylon not surmised that John possessed what Waylon did not, he would not have sent John alone into the woods. He understands that John will return with the money, even realizing it will cost him his life, and for that, Waylon surely considers him a weakling.
After scrabbling to the top of the boulder, John peers through the trees to the trailer deck. From this distance, the two intertwined figures in the lounge chair are indistinguishable. They might not be alive except that John can see one of them—probably Waylon—waving something over his head. Even with the use of his normal shooting hand, John, sighting through the high-powered scope of his .308, would have to fire a near-perfect shot to hit either of them. Below the boulder, though, his view to the deck would be blocked by the trees, and past the trees, in the rock-and bush-laden field, Waylon would see him. “I’m gettin’ nervous not knowin’ where you’re at, John!” Waylon yells. “Give me a holler, something!”
John leans forward on his knees and puts his hands to his mouth. He knows he’s not visible from the deck because he’d looked for the boulder from that same spot earlier. “Yo!” he calls out. “I’m at the truck!”
“Ya got the money?”
“Gotta dig it out first! Take me a few minutes!”
John sees the two figures stand up, but can’t tell if Abbie is doing so of her own volition or is being assisted by Waylon; then he sees the larger figure kneeling next to the smaller one, doing something with its legs. “I’m pulling the girl’s—I’m pulling Abbie’s—pants down, John!” John sees the glint of something from the deck that might be Waylon’s knife blade reflecting the sun. “If you make like a hero—try circling back on me, whatever—I’m gon’ fillet her like a brook trout!” Congruent with the hammering in his mutilated hand, anger pulses in John’s temples. He finds himself involuntarily hissing.
“I’m comin’ ’s fast I can!” he screams.
“You got five minutes get my goddamn money and drive it down here!”
John turns from the valley, drops onto his butt, and, faster than he had anticipated, plummets down the slick, moss-encrusted side of the boulder; three-quarters down, to avoid crashing headlong into the raspberry bushes, he springs upward and out. He lands on his feet in the glade, then pitches sideways into a witch-hazel shrub, its woody fruit, like a gauntlet of blackjacks, painfully pummeling his mutilated stub. His consequent thrashing upsets a possum family, who, screeching in protest, scurry out from beneath him.
John exits the shrub and, still moaning, stumbles the fifteen feet across the glade to where the truck sits. He unconsciously reaches to open the driver-side door with his bandaged hand, sending additional pain waves through the stump and reinforcing in his mind the many tasks made easier with an index finger. The word “cripple” flashes through his mind. He thinks of Burton Doomas gripping cigarettes between his pinky and his fourth finger and the odd, rubbery feel of his three-digit handshakes. John’s internal organs tense at the thought of the human monstrosity who blithesomely commits such mutilations. Fiends are found only among men. Never in the wild has he encountered a creature as evil. If John fails in his one slim chance to rescue Abbie, Waylon, for all his jesting tone, John knows, will inflict on her body every act he has enumerated, and several more.
Pushing horrific images from his mind, he opens with his left hand the pickup door, reaches above the cab’s rear window, and takes down his .308. He leans the rifle against the truck, then, absently shoving the money sack to one side, crawls across the seat, yanks open the glove box, and takes out a carton of shells. He opens the carton, removes four bullets, then crawls out of the truck and, with his one good hand, spends more seconds than he can afford getting the shells into the clip and the clip into the gun. Afterwards, he hastily slings the rifle by its strap over one shoulder and again runs through the glade, reaching the base of the boulder just as he hears shouted up through the dense foliage, “Three minutes, John, till I have a slice!”
Several times while clambering up the boulder, he bangs his wound and curses. He’s halfway to the top when the rifle falls from his shoulder. Suddenly remembering he has forgotten to check the gun’s safety mechanism, John, as the weapon slams into the rock, braces himself for its discharge. The gun doesn’t fire, but he loses thirty seconds retrieving it. From the bottom of the boulder, he restarts his assault. Pain throbs from his stub to his right ear. John envisions the absent finger, inverted in his flesh, cannibalistically headed toward his brain. All traces of white have vanished from the gauze covering the stump. Out of the soaked dressing, sporadic drops of blood fall.
By the time he reaches the boulder’s crest, he feels feverish. He’s not sure if the flush he is experiencing is from infection or the afternoon heat. His head spins. Maybe he is delirious. In his mind the bloated image of Ingrid Banes presents his severed digit to him like a conciliatory gift. It strikes John that she views his mutilation as partial recompense for her death. Then he thinks maybe he does, too. In a body-sized indenture in the rock, he lies flat on his stomach, giving himself, through the tops of two trees, a narrow view of the trailer deck. He pulls the rifle into his right shoulder, then quickly realizes that the pain and swelling in that hand, now half again the size of its mate, have rendered the four remaining digits useless as trigger fingers. He tries reaching back with his left hand to manipulate the trigger, while steadying the gun with his right, but it is too cumbersome and impedes his aim. “Talk to me, John!” yells Waylon.
The shout to John seems inflected this time with hysteria. He envisions a new paranoid monster, more
