Terminal Island

Chapter Thirty-One

THE ISTHMUS



She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…she’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…she’ll be comin’ round the mountain, she’ll be comin’ round the mountain, she’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…



Blood in paradise. Red drops flecking dusty gravel; lush color amid crinkly brown leaf-litter; blood and sweat watering arid desert rocks. Blood and sand.

Henry tastes blood too as he scrambles on all fours like an animal up the steep slope, crawling through dense underbrush, hands and face cut to pieces. The rocks and sticks are sharp, but he stopped feeling pain some time ago; in extremis the body girds itself against such nuisances as pain…or grief. He had read about this phenomenon but never experienced it; now here it is, how weird.

If he could see himself he would be amazed: clothes all torn, coated with dust and filthy black tracks of blood, one eye caked shut—where is the guy who just days ago was panicking over running out of conditioner? Who refused to drink water from the tap?

The morning is filled with white noise, the hiss of locusts maybe, or the ringing conch of his own skull, but within that deafening roar he can hear the horses. Horses and the jingling of chains.

Too soon, too soon…

Yes, definitely horses, climbing the old goat trail. They are very close.

Come on, come on, you’ve got to move faster if you’re ever going to reach the top.

That would be fine if he had anything left, but by now Henry’s limbs are rubber, his body a machine stuck in first gear. He’s at the mercy of his own physical limits; he should have worked out more.

Up there, the sky. Catch a breath and look at it, so blue and clean. There will be a long, clear view at the top, a plateau from which to see and be seen, and after that it’s all downhill. It seems at least possible that they will not follow beyond that crest, in full view of the outside world. He clings to this notion like a lifeline as he claws upward once again.

Hooves clacking, clattering against raw stone. Chipping pebbles loose that spatter right behind him. The bristling sound of twigs as riders and mounts breast the thicket.

Oh no…

Now they are here, two of them. He doesn’t look back, but can feel them watching him, their cool appraisal, as if they have all the time in the world. I must look pitiful, Henry thinks. Perhaps they have pity, he prays they have it, at least enough to last a few more seconds. It’s not the pity but the seconds that count—f*ck their pity.

Summoning the dregs of angry defiance, he drags himself over the top, bolting upright to run for his life on the windy plateau—Yes, you bitches, yes!—

And stops short.

Garbage. Henry is surrounded by garbage, up to his knees in it, a reeking, smoldering field of trash. The place is familiar from when he was a kid. Yes, he’s been here before—this is the town dump.

Beyond the dump is the broad pane of the sea, incongruous Aegean blue. Far across the channel Henry can see the hazy rind of Los Angeles. There is a scattering of boats in between, impressionistic dabs of white as tauntingly out of reach as the gulls shrieking in space.

You’re trapped, boy. The desolate ridge on which he stands is a dead end, with a vertical drop of several hundred feet. Directly below the eroded cliff face is a rubble of jagged boulders washed by the tide.

Out of the corner of his eye he catches the gleam of gold. Oh God, here they are.

Two fantastic and hideous masks bob into view, rising like phantoms out of the trash: identical golden baby-dolls, horned and serpent-haired.

Gorgons, that’s the word. Buffalo-gal Medusas, their freakish heads flashing in the sun. By now Henry knows what it all means and it still doesn’t make sense. The black cavities of their eyes show pure indifference: callow, anonymous cruelty. Detached from all humanity.

As the horses bear them forward, Henry can see that other than their masks the Medusas are all but naked. Their skin is covered only with peeling alabaster, so that they appear to be living statues—statues splashed with dried blood, their arms dark red to the elbows as if dipped.

They are young, athletic and whipcord-tough. Their left hands casually control the reins while their right grip those bronze-tipped javelins—pig-spears specially made to hunt wild game from horseback. Now I’m the pig, Henry thinks wildly, the squealing prey. They trot forward, spears raised.

“You can’t get away with this!” he shouts, though they already have. For a very long time.

They’re on him, passing so close on either side that he is nearly trampled. He fully intended to dodge or deflect the first lance, pictured himself pulling one of them down and taking control, but it’s all too quick and the smooth blade plows in before he can even think, splitting ribs. Henry gasps in breathless incomprehension at the sickly feeling of something punching through him and out the back. That cold, rigid pole in his chest, a lever to twist his heart. He can’t even scream.

The heel of a gold sandal kicks him off the spear and Henry goes down hard. Huge hooves paw the stinking trash by his ear. The pain is unbearable—he gladly blacks out for a moment…

It’s not over. He reluctantly comes to, choking on blood, with them looking down on him, those terrible gilded suns. There are others now, different ones: a dozen or more toadlike spectators in white robes, with hammered copper gills and great goggle eyes—no, not toads, fish. Hideous fish wearing garlands of kelp. Robed fish-people lining up to watch the coup de grace.

But the spears don’t fall, remain poised over Henry’s face while the riders dismount. Why don’t they get it over with? And all the time more are joining the masquerade, coming up the road: some on horseback, some on foot; all drunken, masked revelers singing together.

She’ll be ridin’ six white horses when she comes…she’ll be ridin’ six white horses when she comes…she’ll be ridin’ six white horses, she’ll be ridin’ six white horses, she’ll be ridin’ six white horses when she comes…

One of the horned riders, perhaps the leader, walks up and straddles him. Workmanlike, she quickly cuts off his clothes, tossing them aside. Please, he tries to say. He cannot move, cannot speak, cannot imagine what these people are doing to him. Or maybe he can.

Struggling for breath, Henry stares into those eyeless black pits, trying to make contact with the human being inside. With his murderer. Fading, he sees only himself in that metal cowl, distorted chrome yellow.

Perhaps sensing his yearning, perhaps only to see better, she tips up her mask as she works. Motes of sunlight swirl between them as she glares intensely out of her metal bonnet.

“Try to relax, Mr. Cadmus,” she says. “This will be over in a minute.”

It is the taut brown face of Sheriff’s Deputy Tina Myrtessa.

Now she is fastening shackles to Henry’s wrists and ankles, deft as a cop making an arrest, cinching the cuffs so tight it shocks him almost alert. When he tries moving his spread-eagled limbs, he find that they are dragging lengths of chain—chain that hangs slack between him and four white horses.

The horses are jumpy, nickering; maybe they know what’s about to happen. One of them urinates in a hot gush, the wind causing it to splatter him. As the deputy finishes and stands away there is an electric pause, a sense in the air of anxiousness and welcome fruition. A job well done.

The masked crowd has fallen back to the field’s periphery. Only Henry and the four horses and riders remain. The deputy murmurs instructions, gently aligning them all just right, then raises a big silver revolver in the air. She slowly turns around so that all can see her, sensuous and monstrous in the sun, pubic hair clotted white.

Pointing the gun out over the sea, she cocks back the hammer and averts her face. “Ready…set…”

This is it. Staring up at her, Henry finds himself involuntarily, painfully making a sound that only a moment before he would have thought unimaginable: he is laughing. A dry, burning husk of a laugh.

“To Serve and Protect,” he rasps, hurting his punctured lung. “I get it.”

Bang.