36
The snow swarms about her, thick and white as in a snow globe, a white dust that dazzles the eye and promises a painless fall but that holds for the girl trying to keep on top of it nothing but the terror of the fall and the suffocating struggle of climbing out of it, of getting upright again while the Monkey comes on, sure-footed, step by step.
Childhood days of snow angels and snowmen were wasted. Days on the lake with Dudley were squandered opportunities—the two of them out on the frozen lake in very old snowshoes, clumsy wooden things with cane-bottom decking and tired leather bindings.
But these! These are like a sprinter’s trackshoes; they move as she moves, their tails snapping up smartly with her heels. They do not wobble or stray and they are narrow enough that she doesn’t have to hold her legs apart uncomfortably yet broad enough that they keep a good float on the snow, as the Monkey promised they would.
She’s been watching him, listening to his breathing, and she knows that with a good lead she can outrun him. Outlast him. Not running, exactly, but moving fast enough in her careful striding to keep her lead and even to improve it. This snow is his snow too and he will not want to make a mistake either, will not want to risk a fall, the time and energy to climb out of it, but will count on her panic, on her inexperience and the weakness of her body, all her time of doing nothing in the shack, to bring her down. He was counting on it when he decided to buy the snowshoes and take her out. When he allowed her to go behind the spruce without him.
And now he would find out if he counted correctly.
HER BREATHS BURST WHITE before her and when she passes through them she hears No fall, no fall, and each successful footfall is rejoiced and praised, and the landing leg dares the trailing leg to do it even more cleanly, even more impressively, and she does not look back but only listens, the way she listens on the cinder track, and for a long time there’s nothing but the no fall, no fall of her breaths and the quieter cadence of the snowshoes meeting the powder, and she knows that even if he sees her up ahead in the distance, a glimpse of her in her snowy globe, he will be too far away and there are too many trees between them.
For what?
For the pistol.
Sweat has come to her chest, her back, wetting her shirt under the jacket. When the temperature drops and she stops to rest as she knows she must, she’ll be cold. There are stick matches in her pocket, with the headlamp—but no, what you need is darkness, and distance, and stamina, and no fall, no fall, no fall . . .
She attempts to unzip her jacket on the fly, trying to collect the metal pull in her gloved fingers, glancing down to locate it, and in that distracted instant the snowshoes collide with a sharp clack, her right foot fails to come forward, and she pitches downhill in the onset of a head dive. Yet even as her hands reach out for the snow, her legs react to keep her from it, pushing against the forward crampons so that she leaps altogether from the snow and draws the snowshoes forward in a kind of leapfrog, separating the frames in time to land downslope again with a deep whump. But in landing she pitches too far back and is falling again, backward now, all her weight on the tails of the shoes, arms pinwheeling, momentarily skiing down the slope before the tails begin to sink, and she slows, and her body swings forward and she takes a stumbling step, thighs howling, and is stable once more on the shoes and You did not fall, you did not fall.
She stands on the snow, sucking the cold into her lungs, her heart pounding. Reflexively she raises her wrist but the training watch is gone. It lies at the bottom of some gorge along with her phone.
She unzips her jacket and sweeps the cap from her head. Behind her, upslope, nothing but trees, falling snow, her tracks. Enormous repeating tracks unbroken, unmissable. Foxes, and maybe other hunted things, know somehow to backtrack. But she does not understand how the instinct to backtrack can override the instinct to go forward, always forward, to keep as much distance as possible between you and the thing that wants you.
Water. You need to drink, Courtland. She takes a fast swallow and returns the bottle. Glances upslope once more and then lifts the left snowshoe against the dumb reluctance of her muscles, against a punishing gravity, and then the right, and she is moving again, going down again.
37
He awoke to a man’s loud hacking and sat up in the buzzing yellow light. He put his fingers to an itch on his chest and was confused by the buttons on his T-shirt until he looked down and saw the denim jacket.
He stood before the bowl, then bent over the basin and splashed the cold water on his face and ran it through his hair and scooped it into his mouth and scooped more of it despite its taste of old pennies. When he stood again the man in the adjacent cell was watching him. The man lay on his bunk propped against the concrete wall, his white-stockinged feet crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed over his stomach. He was a skinny dark-skinned man with a skullcap of wiry silver hair. He stared at the boy and said with a graveled throat: “Is there something I can help you with?”
“What?”
“What?” said the man.
The boy held his gaze, the glassy, red-stained eyes.
“I said,” said the man, “is there something I can help you with.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then why are you eyeballing me?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Hell you wasn’t, motherfucker.”
The boy went to stand by the bars of the door, as if doing so would compel the door to open and release him. You saw it in the movies and on TV but none of that gave you any idea of what it was like to be caged, to be kept against your will and against reason and against the truth for even one hour of your life.
The man in the other cell got to his feet and stepped to the bars separating the two cells and stood watching the boy, his wrists draped over the crossbar, his hands hung into the boy’s space.
“Hey,” he said.
The boy turned and the man showed his teeth, large and white, as if smiling. “I was just messin with you.”
“Ah,” said the boy.
“Just taking your temperature, my man.”
The boy nodded and looked away.
“Hey,” said the man.
The boy looked back at him.
“Name’s Jonas.” He held his hand out for shaking. Held it there.
The boy stepped over and took it. Cold and thin and raspy as the hand of an old woman. He said his name and stepped away again.
“What they got you in here for, Sean?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” The man watched him. Then he said: “What do they think you did, Sean?” and the boy said without turning, “They think I raped a girl.”
The man gave a low, portentous whistle. “White?” he said.
The boy looked over.
“White * or dark?” The man laughed and said, “What am I saying? Pussy ain’t got but one color, ain’t that right, Sean?” He laughed until he dislodged something from his throat and turned and spat in the direction of the stool in his cell.
“Hey, Sean. Sean,” he said. “I can see you ain’t no rapist, my man, shit. I’m just messin with you.”
The boy stared out into the corridor.
“You talk to your lawyer man, Sean? Or lady? Half the time it’s a lady nowadays.”
“No.”
“What’s this? You ain’t talked to no lawyer?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s nothing to talk about.”
“ ’Cause you didn’t do nothin.”
The boy was silent.
The man peered at the boy’s profile and said, “How old are you, Sean?”
“Eighteen.”
“No you ain’t.”
The boy said nothing. The lights buzzed.
“Eighteen. God damn, I got a daughter oldern you.” He hung his head. Then he raised it and said: “Boy, do you even know what kind of trouble you’re in?”
“I got an idea.”
“It must be a pretty poor idea or else you wouldn’t be here chatting with me, you’d be talking to your motherfucking lawyer.”
He turned away as if he’d finished with the boy. He walked to his bunk and stood staring down at it. Then he came back to the bars, his hands back into the boy’s cell.
“Where your folks at?” he said. “They know you’re in here? They know the shit you’re in?”
“No.”
“You ain’t called them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not their problem.”
“Not their problem.”
“No, sir.”
“You they son?”
“What?”
“Are you their son?”
“Yes.”
“Blood son? Born to them some eighteen years ago? Born to them and to no others?”
“Yes.”
“Then motherfucker you are nothing but their problem. And you are always gonna be and I’ll tell you something else, Sean. The judge and the jury might set you loose in the world again but set you loose to what? Loose to what? You understand what I’m saying?”
The boy turned and looked into the man’s bloodshot eyes.
“Boy, look at you. You a young man, but you already on a road that don’t go but one way.” His hands rolled in space and he drew the air into his flared nostrils in the manner of a man gathering in the aroma of some exquisite dish.
“Mm-hmm,” he said, “I can smell it. I can smell it on you like shit on a dog’s ass.”
Luske was waiting in the same room, at his chair, hands on the file. He now wore his jacket and he had shaved and the room smelled of shaving cream and coffee. When the boy was seated and they were alone, Luske pushed one of the two large coffees across the table, the smell of it rich and darkly delicious. A smell of the normal, the free world. Luske rooted in his jacket pocket and reached across and unfisted onto the table a pile of packets and cream containers.