American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE




Neither Mona nor Gracie moves. Nothing moves. Everything is still. No wind, no rustling of leaves or needles. No nothing.

Gracie begins whimpering and trembling. Mona gently places one hand on Gracie’s mouth. The girl stops. That gesture alone was too much movement, but Mona could not risk her making more noise, nor could she make any herself by telling her to be quiet.

Mona listens for footfalls, the scrape of branches, the sound of tiny rocks tumbling downhill.

There is none. Whoever attacked them has not yet moved, she thinks.

Slowly, terribly slowly, Mona hauls herself up until she is close to Gracie’s ear. There she whispers, “Stay here. Stay down. Do not move.”

To her credit, the girl obeys, but she cannot stop herself from trembling. That’s bad—even that slight amount of movement will be visible against this barren backdrop. That means Mona will need to work fast to keep Gracie from winding up like Parson, who now lies in a finger lake of red among the rocks. And of course Mona herself could get shot at any time.

They aren’t shooting like crazy, though, which would give away their position. That means they aren’t stupid. Which is bad.

What to do, what to do.

Okay. So:

The flash came from the right side of the canyon mouth. Which means they are to the southwest of her and the canyon. And if they haven’t moved, then that means they can probably see only the eastern inner wall of the canyon.

So the best vantage point would be the top of the western wall.

That sounds great in her head, but she would be outrageously vulnerable up there: she’d essentially be sticking her head up over a wall at them, much like a puppet at a kid’s show, an invitation to a bullet.

Mona starts crawling, estimating when she’ll be out of their range of vision.

I will figure all this out, she thinks, when I need to figure all this out.

When she feels safe, she pops up and silently walks (she does not run) to the western wall. The walls of the canyon are fairly shallow here, and aren’t hard to climb. She swivels the rifle so it’s on her back, and begins climbing.

Halfway up, she stops.

Someone is talking on the other side of the canyon wall. The speaker sounds either mush-mouthed or drunk.

Someone else shushes them. Then it is quiet.

That’s interesting. There’s more than one of them, that’s for sure. And it’s hard to gauge where they are by what she’s heard, but it sounds like they’re in the same area. And if what she heard is correct, someone over there is either sloppy or unpredictable or both.

And Mona is pretty sure none of Parson’s brothers or sisters are among their attackers, because she doesn’t think they need to use guns. If they wanted her dead, she would be dead.

She keeps climbing until the top of the canyon wall is just above her.

Okay. I’m here. Now what to do.

Mona thinks. She thinks for a long time.

She doesn’t want to poke her head over and look. Just that twitch of motion would be enough to bring attention to this stretch of the wall. And if she’s going over it—and she’s reasonably sure that’s a smart thing to do—then she needs it to be a total surprise. But how to keep that element of surprise while also getting a good long look at what’s out there?

There isn’t a way, she thinks. I’m all the way up here and there’s no way over the wall. Not a chance, not a way, no sir.

Then she has an idea.

It is a very dumb idea.

Okay, she admits reluctantly. There’s a way.

Every muscle in her body is still as she considers it. She is panicking at the very idea of it. Her blood is trying to beat its way out of her veins the more she considers it, as if it knows better and is trying to abandon ship.

Am I really, really, really going to do this?

The rifle swivels around again until it’s in her hands. Her legs start to bend, readying to spring up.

I guess that’s a yes, she thinks. Well. It was fun being alive for a while.

Mona jumps.

Well, she doesn’t jump so much as dive up and over, and she completely overestimated the power it would take because she actually does a f*cking flip right when she’s about to come down on the other side. The stars spin above her, and just before she comes crashing down on the ground a stretch of trees below her lights up with flashes. Hot tunnels of air open up on either side of her. It sounds like there’s a chain gang all along the slope cracking open rocks.

Mona thinks: F*ckf*ckf*ckf*ckf*ckf*ck

Yet at the same time, she thinks: Watch—and remember.

She sees:

A flashing light beside a large tree trunk.

Large enough, she thinks, for the top of the tree to poke up above the others—remember that.

Someone is crouched there. Two, three feet off the ground.

Still shooting at where she was.

Remember remember remember

Then her tailbone makes a solid connection with the ground, and she starts sliding down, rocks scraping her back and shoulder. They are still shooting, thinking she is hunkered down at the top, trying to hide from their fire.

She extends both feet out, flexes her knees, prays for something to stop her.

That something comes, but it comes only to her right foot, which catches a stone shelf with enough force to make her ankle ache. But her left side keeps moving, and there’s an unwelcome pop! from the right side of her groin, and she grits her teeth and searches with her left toe for something, anything, please…

Her toe finds a tree root. She stops herself, rolls onto her stomach, brings the rifle swinging up.

They’ve stopped shooting. She can hear one of them asking something.

She puts her eye to the scope, scans the tree line, finds the tall tree, follows the trunk straight down. It is too dark to see anything clearly. She takes her eye away to watch.

Wait. Wait. Just… wait.

Four seconds.

Do not waste the shot.

Five seconds.

Someone shouts. They are looking for her.

Do not give away your position.

Six seconds.

Time is a knife easing into her rib cage, seeking her heart.

Wait. Wait. Wait…

Then the sky bursts blue with lightning, and the queer electrical light filters through the forest.

She sees a pair of hands floating in the shadows beside the tree trunk.

She puts the scope to her eye, brings the crosshairs in, and thinks, all in one second:

Slight breeze from the north—cold barrel—will dance right if I fire in this wind—wait I’m close enough for that not to matter—forty yards—arc will be negligible—just drop a touch—if this f*cking thing is sighted right—is he moving—am I really going to kill him—instinct will be to get low—just—just—will I really—fire already—fire—fire—pull the trigger—f*cking do it do it—just

Fire.

Boom.


It is a cannon. A howitzer. It is world-shatteringly loud. At first Mona only thinks: F*cking tinnitus. I am deaf for the rest of my years.

Then she dives to the right, away from her attackers. Because now they know exactly where she is.

The world is so silent as she falls. Is she really deaf, or was the shot so loud it has deafened all the world?

But as she slides down away from her roost, she learns she is wrong, because the woods light up with screams.

She has heard screams like this only once before in her life, when she had her vision of the past in the lightning-struck bathroom. Only those screams, screams of such blind terror and agony, can possibly compare to what is echoing across the valley right now, screams so loud and so terrible she cannot understand how a human can make that noise and keep making it, not without breaking his own throat.

Well, she thinks. I got him.

A second voice shouts: “Jesus! Jesus Christ!”

As if it has its own agency, the rifle barrel swings back up, nosing out the shouts and screams, hungry to lay the burden of its crosshairs on fresh meat.

Then a third voice, the mush-mouthed voice: “I know that… that’s my Mossberg. That’s my… my motherf*cking Mossberg!”

She recognizes this voice. It’s the cowboy from Coburn, the one whose face she caved in.

“You f*cking bitch!” howls the cowboy. “You f*cking goddamn bitch!”

“Stay down!” shouts the second voice. It’s older, and it sounds a lot more clearheaded.

“I’ll kill you, you f*cking slag!”

He starts shooting. A large pistol, it sounds like—he must have gotten a replacement for his Desert Eagle. She can see flickering lights on a group of tree trunks at the base of a hillock, but she cannot spot more than this.

The cowboy shoots his gun empty.

“Quit your firing, goddamn it!” growls the second voice. “And stay the f*ck down!”

The screams persist. Someone rushes to them through the undergrowth, but she sees no movement: it is too dark.

Then the second voice: “Oh… oh f*ck.”

The third: “F*cking cunt!”

“Dee, are you just gonna sit there and mouth off or are you gonna come help me?”

“F*ck you, Zimmerman! That cunt stole my f*cking rifle, my f*cking truck!”

“Norris has nearly had his foot blown off, and you have sand in your ass over a truck? Kindly shut your f*cking yap and stay down, at least!”

Dee, who she guesses is the cowboy, has given up on coherent threats altogether: “F*cking… skull-f*ck you! Cut your… f*cking bitch!”

The screaming is slowly turning into whimpering. There is the tinkling of what sounds like a belt buckle in the darkness. Then a thwip as the belt is pulled tight around what she presumes is her victim’s femoral artery.

Two left, she thinks. But really only one to worry about.

She does not hear any more movement. Dee, her failed paramour and kidnapper, must still be hunkered down in the same place. She fixes her sights back on that spot.

He keeps talking: “Bitch! I will… I will goddamn f*ck you up something good! I will…” Little brass bells tinkling—bullets in the palm of his hand? Reloading? “Can’t believe this sort of thing could ever, ever… do you hear me? Do you hear me?! F*cking answer! Say something goddamn you!”

Mona does not oblige him.

“Do you know what I will do to you?” he screams. “Do you understand what’s going to f*cking happen?”

Zimmerman, who must be tending to whomever it is she shot, stays silent. She now feels that he is the real threat. She gets the impression that he’s had actual training, and he’s been quiet for a long while.

Dee is active. She has a feeling he will soon make himself a very good target. But while she could definitely take a shot at him, that would give away her position again for Zimmerman, who she now guesses is the guy who tagged Parson.

There’s another cry of pain.

Unless, she thinks, he’s busy with the guy I hit.

There is a twitch in the branches where Dee is hiding.

She thinks: F*ck, I hope there aren’t any more of them I didn’t see.

“You bitch!” says Dee. “Won’t even…”

The big pistol starts going off again. The rounds hammer the slope above her. Some of them are rather close: little shards of rocks rain down on her shoulders and hair. But Mona does not move.

“She’s dead, ain’t she?” says Dee. “She’s dead already. I got you, didn’t I! I got you!”

The branches move a little more.

“We got you! We shot your f*cking ass!”

And then Dee’s head, swollen like a rotting pumpkin, pops up into view. His cheek is clearly defined by the moonlight; she can see exactly where he is and what he’s doing.

Right now, he is screaming at her. Mona is so far inside herself that she cannot hear his words. She does not put the crosshairs in the middle of his face, but just above his right eyebrow, at the very edge of his skull; she does this thoughtlessly, as a well-oiled machine would.

She can feel the impulse running down her arm to her finger, telling it to fire.

As it does, she thinks, You know, I haven’t really killed anyone yet.

But this is followed by, Well. He’s a good one to start with.

She is so in the moment she does not even register the sound of the gun; she feels it kick, sees the scope spin, and brings it back just in time to see a curious halo swarm up to surround Dee’s head, which is not snapping back but is staying perfectly still; the halo dissolves; Dee appears to look down and to the side, as if he sees something in the grass; then he falls from view.

He does not shout again.

Mona starts moving, rolling farther down the hillside. She goes about thirty yards, then finds a new roost.

She expects another salvo. None comes. There is just silence, and sometimes a whimper.

So, just like when she hunted, she waits.

And waits.

And waits.

Which is most of any action, really. Be it hunting or fighting, the most important part is the waiting.

The minutes stretch on.

Killing, thinks Mona, is such a goddamn boring job.

Then there’s a shout: “Hey, lady!”

Mona’s rifle swivels to the north as she tries to guess where it came from.

“Hey, listen, lady.” It is the second voice, Zimmerman. “I know now might not be, uh, the best time to try to appeal to your better nature, what with us having shot at you and all, but… this kid here is really hurt, and he’s had a bad string of luck for a while and I think it’d be a shame for him to have to die up here. You agree?”

Mona does not answer.

“Okay… well. I am going to come right out and say what my plans are. I plan to pick this kid up and carry him back down the hill to my truck. Then I will drive him out of this f*cking town to a hospital, where he will be treated. Please observe that absolutely none of that—none of it—includes me taking more shots at you. Okay?”

Mona is silent.

“Okay. Because there might be a lot of reasons worth dying for, but I just don’t think this is one of them, and I really just want to go home. So I’m going to pick this kid up, and stand up, and leave my gun behind, and… well. I guess you can shoot me down if you want. I don’t have a lot of say in that. But… that’s what I’m gonna try and do. I don’t think you’ll shoot me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve talked enough for you to draw a bead on me”—which is true, Mona notes—“but, well… I don’t know. Whatever you gotta do, I guess. Okay?”

Mona says nothing. She hardly moves.

“Yeah,” says the man. “Yeah. Okay.”

There’s a grunt. Then she sees a bulky figure rise up and begin hobbling down to the road.

She follows him with the scope every step of the way. She can see limbs lifelessly swaying in his arms. She feels kind of bad about that. But she just keeps following him. She follows him until she can’t anymore.

She waits. Then a horn honks twice from somewhere way down the slope. There’s the sound of wheels spinning—He’s spinning them because he wants me to hear him leaving—and then only silence.

She waits. Again. And she keeps waiting.

She waits for over forty minutes, not moving, hardly breathing.

There might be others he’s left behind—any ones who are waiting on her, in turn, to move or speak and tell them where she is. Yet with each blaze of lightning she peers through the dark forest, and she sees nothing.

Finally she begins to crawl down the slope to where they hid.

She sees bent branches, spent rounds twinkling in the grass. She sees footprints and disturbed stones and, eventually, blotches of blood.

Not much else.

That is, until she finds Dee. His ostrich-skin boots, which have been so impeccably shined, gleam brightly from underneath a bush. Mona goes to investigate.

She peers around the bush, and grunts.

She hit him in the mouth. Square in the roof of the mouth.

Jesus.

She looks at him for a long time. She has seen dead bodies many times before but the causality of it—I did this, I made this happen—escapes her. She cannot link that desperate, cold moment at the bottom of the hill, when her whole world was reduced to the dark spotlight of her scope, to this dead man lying on the forest floor.

She wonders who told him to be here. Did they come to kill her and Parson? From the way the second one, Zimmerman, acted, he was surprised to find her. Hence why they shot Parson first, and why Zimmerman was so willing to abandon it after she wounded Norris and killed Dee. They must have been here for some other reason.

She sees there is something silver below Dee’s body.

She squats to see. It looks ornamental, a clasp to a box—and the rest of the box is underneath him, as if he fell on it.

Wincing, she reaches forward and pulls it out. It is covered in the man’s blood, but she can see it is a very nice wooden box with a silver clasp; yet evidently the owner didn’t think this was enough security, for it’s also fastened with string and tape of all kinds.

She holds it up to one ear: she hears no ticking.

She shakes it: it sounds hollow, but something is rattling around in there. It’s not a bomb, then.

She looks back up at the canyon. Were they simply bringing this box here? Why?

Mona unties the string, which is now quite sticky from the blood. Then she flips up the clasp.

She wedges her finger into the crack, and slowly eases it open, certain she is about to be ripped apart by an explosion.

It never comes: the interior of the box is simple red velvet, and resting in its corner is a very strange item that is certainly not a bomb.

It is a skull. A little rabbit skull.

Mona stares, and shivers. Because she is uncomfortably familiar with rabbit skulls, and the mere sight of this one sends old, gray memories howling up the hallways of her mind.


When she was in junior high, Mona, like a lot of kids in her country-ass school, participated in 4-H. While most kids preferred the larger animals, the ones they’d learned about since kindergarten—pigs, cows, etc.—Mona instead opted to raise meat rabbits for a judging competition, mostly because she’d assumed it’d be easier, because what were rabbits besides slightly larger, cuter guinea pigs?

She only did it the one time, for she found the whole process to be one of the most awful experiences of her young life: not only did many of her rabbits die—an experience she was unprepared for, and she is still quite angry at her father for not warning her about—but the first of them was intentionally killed by its mother. There had been something wrong with it—something twisted in its neck and front leg—and in the evening its mother had pushed it out of the nest and allowed it to starve.

Mona knew she should remove it from the rabbits’ pen. But when she first found the baby rabbit, with lines of ants marching to it across the barn floor in a gruesome little pilgrimage, and its tiny, rotting eyes swarming with blackflies, she was so horrified she could only bear to kick it into the corner. And she forgot about it until many days and many dead rabbits later, when the whole horrible thing was over and she removed the straw from the pen, scraping it up with a pitchfork, and with one scrape a desiccated, eyeless little rabbit body popped up from the straw, scraps of fur still clinging to its tiny bones, and it stared at her accusingly, as if to say: You forgot about me. You wished me hidden and so I hid, but I was never gone.

She had nightmares that night, and for the rest of the week. How she wished she had buried it, respected it, given it the love no one else had—it was as if she had chosen to kill her own child.

It is so strange to find a rabbit skull now, in this bloody red velvet box. Mona almost wonders if they were trying to send a message to her. The mere sight of it fills her with unexpected guilt.

Frowning, she reaches out, and picks it up.

“Where did you come from?” she asks it.

And then the lights go out.