Winter Study

“I told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody, you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and laughed.

Anna wished she’d changed the subject before he’d gotten to the “fat fuck” part. Choking on the insult, his throat puffed the way a frog’s will before it sings. In a second, he would realize he’d told Anna about it and thus been twice shamed.

“Not literally,” Anna said, drenching her voice with scorn. “Figuratively. Literally you hung up on her. Literally you did nothing. Literally you showed what a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man you are.” The impromptu cowl fell from her shoulders, sliding down to pool behind her and in her lap. She made no attempt to stop it or retrieve it this time. “You don’t rape women. That’s way too scary for little Bobby, isn’t it? You rape unconscious women. Whole different thing, Bobsie. Whole different thing.”

Anna was finding it extraordinarily easy to go off on Menechinn. She didn’t have to waste a moment’s time thinking up horrible words to say, words she hoped would cut all the deeper for being true. Bob’s face shook minutely, the way she’d seen it do each time a woman had the unmitigated gall to awaken him from his happy coma of Bobness. The miniature tsunami made him look young for a brief second – very young; the face of a toddler the first time Mommy punches him or Daddy burns him with his cigarette – and, for an even shorter second, Anna felt pity for him.

Not him, she told herself. That little boy.

To Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so obvious. Expert. Lord! You’re a whore, Menechinn, a prostitute; you screw whoever hands you a dollar. This time, Homeland Security; next time… well, anybody with a buck and a quarter. You’re not even a good whore. You can’t get it up personally or professionally. You’re a limp dick.

“Your raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t literally kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You literally do nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chinned fat fuck, you’re going to have to do it personally, because, unless you do, I won’t die.

“I. Won’t. Die.”

That was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was a damning and disdainful manner, she settled the last of her strength in her wrists and waited.

Through the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.

She realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark, but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet Anna couldn’t have reported the color with any more accuracy than that. They were the color of old water moccasins, the thick, unpretty snakes that took on the greenish brown shades of the muddy water of the Mississippi ditches where they thrived. Like the moccasin’s eyes, Menechinn’s had a flatness. In the snake, Anna knew it to be myopia and dullness of mind. In Menechinn, she wasn’t sure what it indicated but doubted it boded well for her continued good health.

Time wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and Anna watched Menechinn’s face for a moment, then an hour, then a heartbeat. She waited for the look of sly craftiness to take it the way it had before he’d gone into a berserker rage and stomped the life out of the National Park Service’s tarp. She waited for it to grow still and raw-beef red as it had when he’d walked over to slap her on the cliff top. She waited for the gleam of joy and triumph to come into his eyes as it had when he hefted the wrench to smash her ankle.

She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.

Bob Menechinn’s face crumpled and tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. They froze before they’d traveled halfway down his face. His jaws yawned wide, rows of teeth bleached too white by the dentist’s art appearing false in the black of his mouth. He ducked his head and brought his forearms up to hide his face like a child ashamed of its tears but too broken to keep them from falling. Maybe he had regressed to a childhood state, when he’d been abused. Maybe he’d had a psychotic break and thought Anna was his dead puppy, Spot or Toughie or whatever.

A better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as Anna was concerned, whatever hell he was going through was way too good for him.

Then he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her. Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.

Anna went over like a stone, Bob’s weight pinning her knees to her chest, her hands trapped between thighs and breasts. Air gusted from her lungs and she couldn’t get it back. Bob’s hands scrabbled at her head, trying to work under the layers to her throat to strangle her. Hot blood or snot or spittle hit her face. Moans and grunts, expelled on breath like sulfur, burned her nostrils. Like a trapped animal, Anna howled. Then she bit. Catching his nose between her teeth, she clamped down and hung on. Bob roared and thrashed, his fists pummeling her head. But for the hood, she would have been knocked senseless. Salty liquid filled her mouth, streamed down her throat, but she didn’t unlock her jaws. With a jerk, Bob freed himself. A chunk of his nose was still in her mouth. She spit it into his face. He reared back and her knees were free; her hands were free.

The flares were still clutched in her fingers. Striking one against the other, she heard the hiss of red fire and pushed them up into Bob’s gut. The down of his coat took the flames, then he screamed high and wild as the fire cut into his body. Anna pushed them deeper. He rolled away, pawing at his middle. Then he was up and running. Crazed with the fire in his belly, he crashed into the trunk of a tree several yards away, then fell. Screams turned to cries and cries turned to silence. Finally the only sound was the hissing of the flares, ships’ flares designed to burn underwater, under blood and flesh.

The smell of it sickened her. For a long time, she lay where she was, curled up like a sow bug, the taste of Bob Menechinn in her mouth and her mind. It was hard to remember why she lay like this, where she was and who she had killed. Presumably killed. Her eyes drifted closed and she began to fall. Through the rush of the canyon walls flashing by in her brain, she heard a growl. Bob had come to his feet, a human torch; he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, fire streaming from his hands.

With a lurch that triggered the pain in her shoulder, Anna came awake. Bob was where he had fallen. She’d gone to sleep. If she fell asleep again, she would freeze to death. More out of the habit of surviving than a force of will, she bunched her legs under her and, using the tree trunk, climbed to her feet.

Menechinn was dead. There’d be no last-minute rising from the jaws of death to make one last stand for the final scene. “Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna muttered. He lay on his side, his hands hidden in the melted, blackened ruin of his coat where they’d clawed at the fire consuming his insides. The front and back of his parka were tarry messes of bodily fluids and goose down and synthetic fabric.

For a while, Anna stayed, looking at the wreck that had been, at least nominally, human. The sight of the damage she’d done didn’t please or displease her. It had taken time and pain to hobble the few yards to where he’d finally collapsed, and she hadn’t the energy to move away. She spit and spit again, not from disrespect – once one killed a man, there was little point in lesser forms of malice – she wanted the taste of him out of her mouth.

She also wanted his coat to keep herself warm, but hadn’t the strength to wrestle the garment off the body. Much of it would be melted to his skin. Its value wasn’t worth the calories it would take to harvest it. A story she’d read when she was a teenager flitted into her mind. To keep from freezing to death in a blizzard, a man had killed his horse, cut it open and crawled inside.

“Gross!” she said. She left coat and corpse unmolested. His radio had been melted, the leather case burned away, the buttons a mass of plastic still hot to the touch. Anna made her way painfully back to the Bearcat. Beyond hurting or thinking or much caring, she rolled herself in the army blanket, then the blue plastic tarp, leaned back against the snowmobile and let the winter coalesce around her.