12
She took the turn and he didn’t call out to stop her and she ran on down the unpaved road, forty, sixty yards before looking back, and then running backward a few strides and then stopping and running in place, hands on hips—and she’d taken two steps back toward the road when he came laboring out of the shadows, heaped over the handlebars, and he didn’t call out and she turned and ran on and did not look back again.
The light grew thinner here. The forest lusher and wilder the higher they climbed. As if they were entering a peculiar kind of wildness that thrived on altitude and lack of oxygen. It must have occurred to her to wonder what purpose such a road served and where it might lead. The instant before she stepped on it a lizard the size of a man’s finger twitched from the red silt and slashed away into weeds.
Afterward, she would believe she’d known it was coming. She would believe she’d seen and not seen something back in the trees. Heard the low breath of it, or smelled it, or merely sensed it back in there, just out of view. Or maybe it was only that it seemed, later, like the sort of thing that would have to happen on such a road, in such woods. In any case it came, monstering through the trees at an incredible speed, crushing deadfall, the whip and scream of branches dragged on sheet metal and then the suddenly unobstructed roar that made her wrap her head in her arms, the sound of tires locking and skidding and the thing slamming into what sounded like the sad tin post of a stop sign and then the meaty whump and the woof of air which was in fact the boy’s airborne body coming to a stop against the trunk of a tree.
A haze like atomized blood rolled uphill and beyond it sat the car—or truck or jeep-thing—come to rest perfectly broadside to the road like a barricade. Completely still and soundless.
Sean was not in the pink haze of dust. Was not on the road anywhere. She saw the bike, the incongruent orange of it far back in the green and she knew the boy was there too because of course he would be where the bike was. But then something moved in the foreground and it was an arm, lifting as if in lazy hello from the scrub growth at the base of the tree, and she went to him with a barb of irritation in her heart—you are ruining my run—and then she said, Oh, shit, and dropped to her knees beside him, the pink haze all around her like the tinted air of dream. When she saw his leg her heart slid coldly. The purple balloon of knee and the lower leg folded at some exceptional angle.
Shit, she said, shit.
But no blood that she could see, no flowing blood anywhere for her to stanch with her hands or tie off with her top. He began to lift his arm again and she said Don’t. Don’t move. Lie still. Did you hear what I said? There was a stink in the weeds, as of some animal marking territory. Then she looked at him again and the stain she thought was sweat in his shorts had spread and was spreading and she placed her hand on his shoulder and said, Oh, Dudley.
Don’t, he said, and she withdrew her hand.
Sean? Can you hear me?
His eyes were hard shut. A claw mark on his face had begun to weep scarlet beads. The helmet strap was sunk in the fold of his chin. The helmet was on his head. It seemed to nod.
Don’t do that, she said. Don’t move your head. Don’t move anything, okay? She laid her hand on his shoulder again and with her other hand she unzipped and rooted inside the pack until she felt her phone. The feel of this small familiar thing, undamaged, poured relief into her heart. Just relax, she told him. You’re gonna be fine, and she thumbed the keypad and she watched the little window for the signal.
It won’t work, said a voice behind her, and she gave a small hop and a cry, there on her knees, like a crow.
He stood just behind her. Having arrived without sound. Inhumanly large, in that first view. Rubbing his neck one-handed like a man who’d been working long hours and had taken a break to come check on them, this girl and this boy by the side of the road. The movement of his hand on his neck made a fleshy, intimate sound, and part of her mind dwelt on that. On the fact that she could hear it so clearly.
There’s no reception up here, he said. There never is. He raised his other hand and showed her a small black phone, as if this were proof.
She peered at her phone. She redialed and watched the screen and watched the man at the same time.
I came out on the road and there he was, he said. Right in front of me like a deer. I didn’t believe it. A kid on a bike, up here. Son of a gun. What are the odds?
He took a step and dropped to his haunches all in one motion, and this new position—or the sudden, easy way he achieved it—changed him from an upright giant to a man with a much lower center of gravity, one for whom squatting was perhaps the more natural position, like an ape. He sat studying the boy through yellow lenses.
How you doing, little brother? he said, and she nearly said, Don’t talk to him. He smelled of pinesap and gasoline and sweat, and his existence took something away from her. After a moment of only feeling this, she knew what it was: it was her sense of herself as the eldest. The strongest. The one in charge.
And yet . . . he might be an expert on injury, on proper mountain procedure. It was his outfit: the pressed and tucked-in khaki shirt, the glossy black belt, the new-looking blue jeans and good hiking boots and the clean tan baseball cap. She looked more closely at the belt for gadgets and pouches, at the shirt and cap for insignia. She looked beyond him at the car or jeep-thing blocking the road but nowhere found any sign to tell her not to watch him, not to be ready.
You got knocked pretty good, didn’t you, little brother?
The boy didn’t move. His eyes were shut. The inflamed red of the scrape on his cheek had spread to his entire face and neck. It was the color he turned when he was very angry or embarrassed.
I think he’s out, said the man.
Sean, said Caitlin. Sean, open your eyes.
The man said, Let him sleep. His body needs it.
She gave the boy’s shoulder the smallest shake. Sean, open your eyes.
I wouldn’t do that, said the man.
He’s my brother, she said flatly, without looking at the man.
All the same, he said. He squat-walked one step forward and from there reached and pressed two fingers into the flesh of the boy’s throat.
His heart’s going like crazy, he said. After his hand was back out of view it occurred to her that he wore a gold ring. He’s just traumatized, said the married man. Help me get him into the truck.
No, she blurted, don’t touch him.
Okay, he said, okay.
His neck could be injured. She turned to him. Do you have a blanket or something?
A blanket?
Something we can cover him with? In case of shock?
Shock? It seemed a new word to him. He didn’t move. Then he said: I’ll go look.
When he was gone she tightened her grip on the boy’s shoulder and pressed her free thumb to the keypad again. Come on, God damn you. She shook the thing. She held it at arm’s length in every direction. She raised it high over her head.
Go, said the boy.
What? Sean, what did you say?
A door slammed and the man’s boots came gritting back toward her. How had she not heard that, his boots in the dirt, earlier? He carried a thick square of cloth, military in color, and when he snapped it from its folds it released a rich kind of animal smell. He floated it down and got into his monkey-squat again to help her tuck it around the boy.
Wait. She peeled back the blanket and reached into the pack again and found the boy’s phone and brought it out and pressed it into his palm. The fingers closed slowly around it like a dying spider. Sean? she said. Nothing. His eyelids were shut but not at rest, the delicate skin busy with minute twitchings. As if he were a small boy again and she were watching him, waiting for him to talk in his sleep (so she could tell them at breakfast, them trying not to laugh and the boy burning red).
The man stood behind her, a little to the left, and after a moment Caitlin pushed up from the dirt and began to brush fine pebbles and grit from her knees. She continued brushing after there was nothing but the red impressions in
her skin.
Okay, said the man. We best get going.