My head burned with pain and when the trauma room doctor shined his pen light in my eyes I thought my skull might literally explode.
“You’ve got a textbook concussion there, Mr. Weiler,” said the doctor. “We’ll get you something for the pain, do a scan to make sure it’s nothing more serious, and we’ll keep you here overnight.”
I was in no shape to argue with the man. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten there and wasn’t a hundred percent sure of how I got concussed. The last thing I remembered was being on my belly in the snow behind a log and thinking about how scared I was.
“I’ll let your wife come in while I arrange for your scan and get a nurse to bring you something for the pain.”
Renee came into the examining room. She was red-eyed and shaking.
“The doctor says you’re going to be okay in a few days, but you have to stay here tonight,” she said, her voice brittle.
“What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Some of it, but not how I got hurt,” I said.
“Stan threw a big rock that landed over your left shoulder. When you got to your knees, he came up behind you and … and … ”
“And what?”
“He shot you in the back of the helmet from about twenty feet. The round got between some of the padding and the helmet took almost all the impact. If it was one of those old metal helmets … I told the doctor you fell off a ladder.”
“Did anyone do anything about it? Did Jim?”
“We can’t. It’s against the rules. You get into this and you take the risk. Anything else would ruin the whole idea of it,” she said, her heart not in it.
I knew. Jim had told me a hundred times. Didn’t mean I had to like it.
“I’m going to kill fucking Stan. I’m telling you, Renee, I’m going to kill him.”
“Who are you going to kill, Mr. Weiler?” It was a nurse, a small cup in one hand and a larger cup in the other.
“My landlord,” I lied. “If he had repaired the porch like he was supposed to, I wouldn’t have been up on that ladder.”
“Here,” she said, “take these. They should help with the pain. And please try not to get agitated.”
When the nurse left the room, I repeated, “I’m going to kill that cocksucker.” And I swear I almost meant it.
Twenty-Two
This time we met at 4:00 A.M. not at the chapel and not at the old berry farm, but at a long-abandoned logging camp about five miles east of where Jim and I shot in the woods.
Here, the surrounding hills were not so steep nor as prevalent, and whole swathes of forest had been logged into submission in the years before anyone had heard of Earth Day. At this point in its travels, the Crooked River ran a straighter, wider course and whispered in comparison to its roaring by the falls.
Renee had been sullen and silent as she drove my car up into the hills. She hadn’t said so, but I knew she’d wanted me to stay home. I was feeling much better, though I wasn’t quite over my concussion symptoms. We both sensed it wouldn’t take much to send me backsliding. You have no idea just how awful concussion headaches are until you experience them. Considering my once prodigious consumption of cocaine and alcohol, I’d had some formidable headaches, but the ones I suffered through in the wake of Stan’s shot to the back of my head were titanic. Legion were the joys of concussion because the headaches weren’t the worst of it.
In the days following Cutthroat, I became depressed and disconnected, lost inside my own head. My internal voice was drowned out by a cloying and constant ringing in my ears and there were moments I found myself thinking life wasn’t worth living like this, that it wouldn’t take much more of it to send me following in my father’s footsteps. A bullet through my brain, I thought, couldn’t have been much worse than what I was suffering through. I suppose if the predawn festivities were just one more trip into the chapel for ashes and bullets, I would have stayed home, but the rush of something new pushed me to go. Even so, my head was a little cottony. I felt a beat too slow, a step behind.
Getting gingerly out the passenger door, it struck me that my red Porsche seemed completely out of place there among the pickups in a clearing above the river. It gave me pause, reminding me that in spite of all that had transpired since late September, I was just as out of place among these people as my car was among their trucks. It gave me pause, but didn’t stop me. I’d crossed a line the first time I walked into the chapel and there would be no stepping back now.
The fog shrouding the treetops and crawling a few feet off the ground felt like it was pouring right out of my head. Whether it was the early hour or that the ride along the bumpy dirt road had worn me out, I couldn’t say. What was obvious to me was that I was falling back down the well I’d only just crawled out of. I couldn’t quite focus on the words Renee spoke to me as we trudged up a low hill to where the others were seated in a circle on old tree stumps around a small campfire. Everyone I’d ever seen at the chapel was there, Jim giving me a slight nod of hello. I was glad to be able to rest on a stump as an unwanted and familiar throbbing began in my temples.
Laid out by the fire was one solitary protective suit, the Colonel’s duffel bag, and the can of ashes. I waited. We all waited for someone to come forward and when someone did, I was caught completely off guard. It wasn’t Jim who stepped to the fore, but Renee.
“This is Fox Hunt,” she said, looking everywhere but at me. “One fox. One suit. The rest of us are the hounds. Some of us have done this before, but I will explain it for everyone else. The rules are simple: The fox gets a fifteen-minute head start and we can’t watch where the fox goes. The fox can go anywhere, hide anywhere, and use whatever tricks it has to to survive, but the fox has no weapon. After the fifteen minutes, the rest of us have until sunup to kill the fox. The hounds will have only one round in their weapons. If the fox eludes us, we all have to swim across the river and back as punishment. Then we will meet this Friday at the chapel and burn our shirts in a fire. All but the fox will be worthless once again, all of our blood erased. Those who are not original members may never be invited back in.”
She nodded at the guy from the copy center who handed us neatly folded pieces of paper. That done, he retrieved the can of ashes and went around the circle, dipping his fingers into the can and touching them to our foreheads.
“If there is a mark on your paper, pick a weapon and walk down to the river, facing the water. Spread out far from each other. In fifteen minutes or so, a shot will be fired and then it begins.”
There was a slash across my paper and as I rose off the stump to get my weapon, I wobbled slightly. Jim grabbed my arm to steady me and whispered in my ear, “When it starts, stick by me.”
I was glad he made the offer, because as I moved down by the riverbank the fog only got thicker. The headache was worsening and I could feel myself retreating into that isolated place inside my own skull. Time lost all meaning as I stared into the black water. Then I thought I heard something and the world went crazy. People were running everywhere, but I was frozen. I looked for Jim, for Renee, to no good end. I couldn’t make sense of anything.
Suddenly, I was being pulled away from the riverbank and saw that it was Jim who had me by the wrist. He was speaking to me. I could hear that he was saying things, but his words were just jumbled sounds in my ears. I kept tripping over things, falling over, and sliding back toward the river on the slick ground. Jim was good, never letting me lose sight of him, never abandoning me, but it was just no good. Once we got out of the clear-cut section of the forest and into the trees, I lost Jim. I thought I heard his sharp whispers cutting through fog. Yet I could not
