I missed on purpose, scaring the buck to safety.
Mr. Gorsky said it happened to everyone; next time I’d have more luck. Jack called me a sissy. Then it was Jack’s turn. I watched him shoot a fawn right between the eyes while the doe watched her baby die.
The next time they invited me to tag along I said I was sick. It wasn’t long before Jack was sent to juvie for threatening a teacher with his father’s pistol.
I’m driving down County Line Road, just past Trout Lake Road when it hits me: I could keep driving. Straight past Grand Marais, out of Minnesota and onto the Rio Grande. I’ve got the girl tied up. There’s no way she’s getting out of there. No way she can call the cops and snitch. Even if she got her hands untied, which she won’t, it would be hours before she could walk to civilization. By then, I’d be in South Dakota or Nebraska somewhere. The cops would put out an APB, but all the girl knows me as is Owen, so unless she got a good look at the license plate I might just stand a chance. I toy around with the idea in my mind, the notion of abandoning that crappy cabin and running. But there are about a million things that could go wrong. Chances are by now the cops know I’m with the girl. Maybe they’ve figured out my name. Maybe there’s an APB out on me already. Maybe Dalmar turned me in himself for revenge, retribution.
But that’s not the only thing that keeps me from going. I see the girl, tied to the bathroom sink, in the wilderness, off season. No one would find her. Not until she starved to death. Not until springtime, when tourists returned, drawn to the cabin by the smell of rotting flesh.
That’s one thing that keeps me on track. One of many that make it impossible to cut and run, though I want to. Though I need to. Though I know that every day I stay is just another nail in my coffin.
I don’t know how long I’m gone. Hours at least. When I come back, I slam the door shut. I appear in the bathroom doorway with a knife. I see the girl start to panic but I don’t say a thing. I drop down beside her and cut the rope. I reach out a hand to help her to her feet. But she pushes me away. I lose my balance, reaching for the wall. Her legs are weak. She runs fingers across a rope burn on each wrist, raw and red.
“What did you do that for?” I ask, grabbing her hands for a closer look. She sat there all day and tried to get out of the rope.
She pushes me as hard as she possibly can. It isn’t much. I grab her by the arm and block the blow. It hurts, I can tell, the way I seize her and don’t let go.
“You think I could just leave you here?” I ask. I throw her away from me. I’m already walking away. “Your face is all over the TV. I couldn’t bring you with me.”
“You did last time.”
“You’re famous now.”
“And you?”
“No one gives a shit where I am.”
“You’re lying.”
I stand in the kitchen, unpacking. The empty paper bags fall to the floor. Firewood. She eyes the new fishing pole that’s leaned against the door.
“Where were you?”
“Getting all this shit.” I’m short. I’m getting mad. I slam the canned food into the cabinet, bang the doors shut. And then I stop. I stop unpacking long enough to look at her. It doesn’t happen often. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. There’s a lake out there close to freezing. They wouldn’t find you until spring.”
She looks out the window at the frigid lake in the afternoon haze. It makes her shudder, the thought of her own lifeless body submerged below the surface.
And then I do it.
I reach into the cabinet and pull the gun. She turns to run. I grasp her by the arm and force the gun into her hands. It surprises us both. The feeling of the gun, the heavy metal in her hands, immobilizes her. “Take it,” I insist. She doesn’t want it. “Take the gun,” I scream. She holds it in her shaking hands and it nearly drops to the floor. I grab her hands and bind them around the gun. I force her finger onto the trigger. “Right there. You feel that? That’s how you shoot it. You point it at me and shoot. You think I’m lying to you? You think I’m going to hurt you? It’s loaded. So you just point it at me and shoot.”
She stands, comatose, with the gun in her hands. Wondering what the hell just happened. She raises it for a second, the weight of it much heavier than she ever expected. She points it at me and I stare at her, daring her. Shoot it. Shoot the gun. Her eyes are skittish, her hands wobbly on the weapon. She doesn’t have it in her to shoot that gun. I know that. But still, I wonder.
We stand like that, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, maybe more, before she lowers it before herself and walks out of the room.
Eve