“Is he dead? Billy, is he dead?”
He sighed. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” His lips were blue; his teeth had begun to chatter.
She looked beyond him, into the moonlight, at the trees and the mountain. She could not see high enough to see the moon but she knew it was up there, bright and whole.
The room was growing cold but she didn’t feel it. She was burning up. Her heart was punching at her wasted ribs.
“Billy,” she said. She grabbed his boot and shook it. “Billy.”
He opened his eyes. Glassy, drowsing eyes struggling to focus.
“Billy, you said the sheriff was coming. Is that true? Is he coming?” He winced, and she realized it was his ankle and eased her grip on it.
He wagged his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “My phone.”
“Yes?” she said, “yes? You have a phone? Where? Where’s your phone, Billy?” She reached out toward him.
“Not here,” he said. “Down. In the car.”
She stared at him, disbelieving. “Why would you leave it there?”
“You go,” he said. “My car.” He shuddered. His gloved hand lifted from the floor and stabbed at his jacket pocket and at last found its way in. She heard the sound of keys and he brought out his fist and held it out to her. She could just reach it. Her hand touched his bloody glove and she had the keys.
“My tracks,” he said. “Down the mountain. Understand?”
She nodded. She clutched the keys. They were not the set of keys she wanted and he seemed to know it. Such sadness in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shuddering. “Can’t chop. Anymore.”
“It’s okay. You rest. I’ll get you some water.” She’d begun to stand but he raised a hand to stop her. He wanted to speak again.
“Do you know,” he said, “what timezit?”
She turned and looked instinctively for the coin of light on the floor but it wasn’t there.
“Ten,” she said. “Maybe ten thirty.”
He nodded.
“Your people,” he said.
She looked at him. She held absolutely still.
“Your people,” he said again. “Down there still,” he said. “Still looking.”
She bowed her head. She placed her hand on his boot again. Her thin small shoulders shaking. After a moment she wiped her face and looked up again and said she would get him some water.
She dragged the chain into the bathroom and collected the quarter-full bucket, the last of her water, and returned to the outer room, and stopped short, and set the bucket down, for she could see from there that he was dead.
Outside, the wind blew in the pines. A flurry of snow seethed over the floor and settled alongside his leg. She looked behind her at the dark stove, the last small chunk of firewood next to it. Then she looked beyond him, out into what she could see of the world in the corridor of door and moonlight.
“Come on if you’re coming,” she said, and stood holding the ax.
60
She’d never used one before but the shape of the handle and the weight of the head told her how it must be done and she took her stance over the chain, raised the ax as high as the ceiling would allow and with all her strength brought it down. Sparks leapt and the axhead twisted and the handle convulsed from her hands like something alive. The effort left her panting and dizzy and furious with her body. She bent and gathered the chain in her hands and found no sign of the blow and only a scrape of raw steel in one tarnished link, the link itself unharmed, and she understood at once a combination of truths: the chain was too strong, the ax too dull, her body too weak. In the air was an acrid, ferric smell, like the smoke of sparklers that burns in the nose on the Fourth of July.
She took up the ax again and this time aligned herself over the bolt plate in the floor, over the half hoop that was conjoined with the final link of the chain, that perversely enduring union that had defied her every effort to break it. She raised the ax and brought it down and the axhead did not twist but merely rang out a flat note and bounced back into the air, having struck the face of the plate an inch from the hasp.
Dizzily she raised the ax again and brought it down again and the blade glanced off the hasp but she held on. She knelt to feel the hasp and the link but they remained bound to each other as ever. She turned the ax and drew her thumb along the nicked and blunted edge. Despair rose in her and she fought it down. She looked at the door, the thick wreckage of it, and she looked at the floor around the bolt plate. Having swung the ax she now understood what it had taken to break through the door, and what it would take to do the same to the floor, and she knew she could never do it.
Cold air spun about the room. Snow continued to drift in and collect at Billy’s leg, a climbing dune. She knelt there watching it, shivering.
What are you doing? said the girl—the strong one, the one she thought had abandoned her.
“I’m thinking.”
I hope you’re thinking how you’d better stoke this fire and get in that sleeping bag.
“Fuck that sleeping bag.”
The girl said nothing.
Caitlin held the ax, listening. Then she said: “Do you think he’s coming?”
Who?
“Either one.”
The girl was a long time answering and Caitlin knew what she would say.
I think what I’ve always thought. There’s no one coming. There’s only us.
Crystals swam in the air and landed cool on her face. Billy’s keys where she’d left them on the floor glinted blue in the light. Follow his tracks, that’s all. Get to the car. That’s all. She remembered snowshoes, the deep powder and her pounding heart, the Monkey in pursuit and no fall, no fall . . . He had bagged it all up, snowshoes and boots and jacket and gloves, took it away without a word. Bad girl.
She held the ax. Her heart clocking away the seconds, the minutes. Now that she’d let the faces of her family into her mind she could not get them out. Faces of the life before. And they were down there still, he said, still looking. Still looking and what will they find?
She listened for the girl—listened for anything. But there was nothing. Wind. The snow whispering along the floorboards.
She got to her feet and opened the stove gate and with the last length of firewood prodded the length that preceded it, now nothing more than a smoldering black bone of itself which at first touch fell into glowing red cubes. Flames arose and she placed the new wood carefully atop them and closed the gate incompletely so that the air would draw and the wood would burn more quickly and intensely. She set the bucket of water next to the stove and the ax next to that, and then she went to the cot and picked up a flannel boy’s shirt, once red now gone almost to black, and she put this on and buttoned it to her throat. Lastly she got down on her hands and knees and reached far under the cot until she felt what she was looking for and dragged them out. They were dusty and gray and shrunken, like creatures who’d crawled under there long ago and died together side by side. She took one in each hand and clopped them sole to sole and the sound and the feel of this nearly made her sob. She clopped them and the red dust of the trail and the gray dust of the years fell from them like snow.
There were no cans of food or snack bars or child’s boxes of juice or anything at all on the larder shelves and she dippered her hand into the bucket and drank three cold handfuls of water.
She looked at the man named Billy on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she took him by the ankles.