42
Spring comes, even there. Or perhaps false spring.
Snowmelt dripping from the shedroof and ringing faintly on the floors of tiny wells in the snow, frail airholes to the earth. Note upon hollow note. The shingled roof, bared to the sun, flexes and cracks like something coming awake. When she puts her nose to the peephole in the wood over the window, she can smell the heated sap of the pines beyond the glass and she aches with the feeling of spring after the long Wisconsin winter. The cinder track rising through the snow like a hot, primordial ring. She listens for the sound of water running, of snowmelt finding its way in thin cascadings, meeting, gaining mass and speed, churning for the far valleys, for the great rivers to the sea. But which sea?
He is staying away longer. Days, sometimes. The food runs out. The wood runs out. She hoards her water. In the dull little mirror is the shape of her skull. No one is there.
SHE KEEPS AT HER work, her diminished body pitched against the length of chain, milling halfway around and then back again, listening to what the links are telling her. On the surface of the steel plate, spanning the two thick welds of the ringbolt, lays a tiny field of dull glitter, winking and changing visibly every few passes with the addition of some new and sizable granule of steel or rust. The largest of them fall at the moment when the mated crooks of the bottom link and the ringbolt grind and fight and give way in a sudden twangy jump that makes her heart jump too with the momentary loss of resistance and the feeling, as on that long ago swing set, that the link has broken and she is about to go sailing, free, into space. Again and again, that deception.
After one such twang so profound she must take a hop for balance, she stands in dismay when she finds the chain still taut, still unbroken at the ringbolt. Something breaks within her then and she begins to haul wildly at the chain, and it’s her own noise, she understands later, the torrent of curses upon the tormented chain, that causes her to miss the sound of footsteps outside in the crusted snow.
The first she hears of him is his voice.
Hello? he calls, freezing her.
She drops the chain. Her heart slamming.
It comes again: Hello? Someone in there?
It’s not him. It’s some other man. Close, and not close. Well back from the door. Keeping his distance, according to some law of mountain etiquette. Or fear at what he heard, her wild thrashing.
Her throat constricts, her jaw opens, and a voice she does not know calls out, Hello? Is someone out there?
Hello, the man calls. I saw the smoke. I thought it might be a fire.
She takes a step toward the door and her right leg halts painfully in midstride and she looks back in confusion at the length of chain on the floor. The leather-wrapped cuff at her ankle, the big padlock with the word Master at its base. Her own naked foot, filthy and alien.
She turns back to the door. Are you the police?
He doesn’t answer. Then: Who are you? And she knows he is just a man. Not the police. No gun. No dogs. No walkie-talkie. No helicopter on its way. No father no mother no brother.
Who are you? he says again. Are you all right?
She puts a hand to her throat and feels the words in her fingers as they come up, as she says her own name for the first time in so long. Her family is looking for her, she says. The police are looking for her. A man has been keeping her here, please help.
The snow crunches and the man is approaching.
All right, he says, all right. Take it easy. Did you say Caitlin? Close now. On the other side of the door. She hears the padlock shift. Hears him tug on it. Caitlin? he says.
Yes?
Where is he?
I don’t know. He left me.
How long ago?
She shakes her head. Two days? She swallows down her climbing heart. Please help me. She can hear him breathing hard in the thin air. There’s an ax somewhere, she says. Do you see it?
He takes a step back from the door. No.
It’s out there, she says. She can see it so clearly. I hear him chopping all the time.
The man takes a few steps away, then comes back.
Is there another way in? A window? he says, and she says, On the other side, but it’s locked too, and his footsteps move away from the door and grow faint as he makes his way around the shack.
She drags the chain across the floor and steps onto the cot and puts her eye to the small burning hole in the window board, stopping the coin of light.
Incredibly, he is already there—exactly there. Dark shape of him in the white nimbus of vision. Dead-centered like a figure posed in a lens not yet focused. There he stands before her, and yet the sound of his footsteps reach her through the wall to her left. He is standing still and he is walking around the shack, both. She blinks in the tearful light and the figure in the peephole clarifies, taking its true form, and a blade comes into her chest to halve her heart like an apple.
The footsteps progress around the corner and grow louder, nearer, and then they halt, short of the window, short of what she can see of the world, and she hears the man say Jesus. He makes a sound like a kind of laugh. Where’d you come from, buddy?
Same place as you, I reckon. The Monkey smiles and his face begins to turn toward the window and she drops like loose bones to the cot.
I saw the smoke, the Monkey says. Thought there was a fire.
So did I, says the man. But there’s somebody in there. He takes two steps and stops. There’s a girl inside.
Slumped against the wall, knees hauled to her chest, she hears them as though they stand in a tunnel, voices tubing along the stone walls toward the opening.
I know, I heard, the Monkey says. Heard her say a man’s been keeping her up here.
These words roll and die in the tunnel.
You wouldn’t be that man, would you? says the Monkey.
Hell no, says the man. And nothing else.
They are silent, the world silent, until a crack detonates in the roof timbers, relaying in the wall where her shoulder touches it and jolting down through her.
Pretty funny the two of us arriving at the same time, says the Monkey, and the man says, I saw the smoke.
You said that. The Monkey sniffs. You don’t look like a ranger.
I’m not.
You’re not?
No.
What are you then?
What am I? Hell, I’m just a hiker.