Desert Places

  “On the plastic,” he said. When I hesitated, he took three steps in my direction and pointed the Glock at my left knee. Immediately, I moved to the plastic and knelt down. “On your stomach,” he said, and I prostrated myself as instructed. I smelled the leather collar as he slipped it over my head and cinched it around my neck—the scent of misfortunate strangers’ sweat and blood and tears and spit. I felt a terrible, intimate kinship with those doomed souls who’d worn this putrid collar before me. We were blood now—Orson’s hideous children. Papa dragged the stool out from the corner and perched on it, just out of reach.

  Shoving the Glock into the waistband of Walter’s jeans, he took the sharpening stone from his pocket and began drawing the blade across it: schick, schick, schick. Watching him work in the dim, jaundiced light, candles surrounding the plastic, I grew sensitive to the cuffs that dug into my wrists.

  They were mine. I’d owned them since a Halloween party in 1987, when a friend presented them as a gag gift to me and this woman I was seeing, Sophie. It embarrassed us at first, but I cuffed her to my bedpost that night. I’d tied up other women with these cuffs and allowed them to shackle me. I’d bound Orson. Now he bound me. Fucking durable metal.

  I sat up, facing him. Desperately and discreetly, I tried to pull the cuffs apart, and when my hands turned numb, I strained even harder. A man-burner named Sizzle in The Scorcher breaks the chain between a pair of cuffs while sitting in the back of a police car, and goes on to slay the arresting officer. Still pulling my hands apart, I recalled that deft little sentence: “The chain popped, O’Malley’s neck popped, and Sizzle climbed behind the wheel and shoved the officer into the wet street.” It’s that easy. So break.

  “You’re wasting precious energy,” Orson said offhandedly as he studied a ding in the blade. “I couldn’t break them when you held the flame under my eyeball.” He resumed stroking the blade, and his eyes fixed now on me. “A guy does favor after favor for you, and this is how you repay him. This betrayal.”

  My mouth ran dry; I had no spit.

  “I don’t know what your definition of favor en—”

  “It was all for you,” he said. “Washington. Mom. We could’ve been amazing, brother. I could’ve freed you. Like Luther. I held the mirror up for him, too, you see. Showed him the demon. He didn’t spit in my face.” Orson began pinching his cheeks and scraping the skin off his face with the knife, as if amused with the lack of feeling in his brittle epidermis. He bled in several places. “You came in my house,” he continued. “While I slept in my bed. Tortured me.” He stared into my eyes. “You scare me, Andy. And that should not happen.”

  “I swear—”

  “I know—you’ll never come after me again. Andy, when a person knows their death is imminent, they’ll say anything. I was carving this guy up once, and he told me his grandfather had molested him. Just blurted it out between screams, like it might change something.” He laughed sadly. “You gonna talk to me while I open you? Nah, I’ll bet you’re just a screamer.”

  Orson stepped down off the stool. The largest candle in the shed was a red cinnamon-scented cylinder of wax with the girth of a soup can. It sat on the shelf beside the back door, and he laid the knife blade over its flame and pulled the Glock from his waistband.

  “Pick a knee,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Disablement. Torture. Death. In that order. It begins now. Pick a knee.”

  An extraordinary calm enveloped me. You will not hurt me. I came to my feet and found his eyes, invoking that irrevocable love that was our entitlement.

  “Orson. Let’s talk—”

  The hollow-point bored into the meat of my left shoulder. On my knees, I watched blood drizzle across the plastic. I smelled gunpowder. I smelled blood. I blacked out.

  I stared up into the rafters, flat on my back on the plastic, hands still cuffed behind my back. I attempted to move my feet, but they were tied crudely with thick, coarse rope. One hundred and eighty-five pounds crushed into my ribs, and I moaned.

  Straddling me, Orson took the knife off the red candle, which now oozed wax onto the plastic. The carbon blade glowed lava orange, and the metal secreted smoke.

  I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a shabby burgundy sweater. Starting at my waist, the blade cleaved easily through the layers of scorching fabric, all the way up to the collars at my throat. Then splitting the garments, he exposed my bare torso, the chest hair swaying in the tiny drafts effected by candles in this icy shed. Above the thudding of my heart, I thought I heard something on the desert, a distant whine, like mosquitoes behind my ear.

  “Wow. Look how fast your heart’s palpitating,” he said, placing his hand on my shuddering chest. He tapped my breastbone. “I’m gonna saw through that now. Anxious?”

  When the knife point met my left nipple, I chomped my teeth and flexed every muscle, as though the tension might thwart the penetration of the fiery blade.

  “Easy,” he said. “I want you to relax. It’ll hurt more.” Orson moved the knife two inches to the left of my nipple and inserted the blade an eighth of an inch. The metal was brutally cold, and I shivered as I watched him slit a sloppy circle, four inches in diameter. Blood pooled in my navel, and Orson spoke to me while he carved, his voice flowing psychotic peace.

  “Two-thirds of your heart lies to the left of your sternum. So I’m giving myself an outline to work with.” He sighed. “I’d have taught you this, you know. On someone else. Look at that.” He held the tip of the knife under my eye so I could see my blood sizzling on the amber blade. “I know you don’t feel anything yet,” he said. “That’s the power of adrenaline. Your pain receptors are blocked.” He smiled. “But that won’t last much longer. They can only mask so much pain.”

  “Orson,” I pleaded, on the brink of tears now. “What about the gift?”

  He looked down at me, puzzled; then, remembering, he said, “Ah, the gift. You nosy bastard.” He put his lips to my ear. “Willard was the gift.”

  He braced his left hand against my forehead and gripped the knife in his other. “Sometimes I wonder, Andy, what if he’d picked you?”

  Someone knocked on the back door. Orson stiffened. “I want you to say something,” he whispered as he stood up. “Swear to God, I’ll keep you alive for days.” Setting the knife on the stool, he walked to the door and drew the Glock.

  Percy Madding’s voice came through the door: “Dave, you in there? You all right?”

  I strained to sit up on the plastic.

  Orson fired eight shots through the wood at waist level. Looking back at me, he smiled. “That, Andy, is what you call—”

  A shotgun report blasted through the door, and Orson’s chest caught the full load of double-aught buckshot. It knocked him off his feet and slammed him on his back as if a man had thrown him. Orson struggled to his hands and knees, stunned, staring at me as sanguine globs dropped out of his chest onto the concrete. Percy burst through the door and kicked the gun out of his hands. My brother crawled toward me, then eased back down onto the concrete, hissing shoal, sputtering breaths.

  Leaning his double-barreled shotgun beside the door, Percy approached the plastic and squatted beside me. From the shallowness of his breathing, I could tell he’d been hit. He looked strangely at the pole, the leash, the sheet of plastic, the ragged bloody circle in my chest.

  “He got the key to these cuffs on him?” he asked gruffly, twisting his snowy mustache. His voice was strong, but his hands shook. When I nodded, he walked over to Orson and dug through his pockets until he found the key. He told me to roll over, and then, after unlocking the handcuffs, he unsheathed a bowie knife from his belt and cut the rope that bound my feet.

  “You hit?” I asked. He touched his side. Down mushroomed out of a hole in his camouflage vest.

  “Just a graze, though,” he said as I unbuckled the collar. “I see you took one in the shoulder. Them hollow-points, ain’t they?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “
Then it’s still in there.” Percy walked over to Orson and pressed two fingers into the side of his neck. “This your brother?” he asked, waiting on a pulse. I nodded. “What in holy hell was he doing to you?” I didn’t answer. “Reckon we better get us to a doctor.”

  I came to my feet and, starting for the back door, said, “I have to get some things from the cabin first. Would you mind helping me?”

  “You bet.”

  Leaving Orson’s vacant eyes open, Percy took his shotgun as he followed me through the obliterated door, back out into the snow. He yelled something about my friend, but my panting drowned his voice, and I didn’t stop to ask what he’d said. My shoulder burned now.

  A snowmobile idled in front of the cabin. When I reached the front porch, I glanced back and saw that Percy lagged fifteen feet behind, holding his side with his left hand, the shotgun in his right.

  Upon entering the cabin, I closed the door behind me. In the perfect gloom, I could see nothing. Neither will Percy. I peered out the window, watched Percy wading through the snow, his body illuminated by the snowmobile’s single headlight. Receding into the shadows so he wouldn’t see me, I thought, I’ll just knock him unconscious. There’s food here, and he isn’t badly injured. Someone will come for him. There’s no other way. His boots thumped up the steps.

  I inched back toward the hinges of the door so I’d be behind him when he entered.

  “Dave!” he yelled as the front door swung open. “What was you saying about—”

  Ammonia.

  Warm breath misted the nape of my neck.

  I turned and faced Luther, smiling in the darkness.

  LUTHER greets the morning with a smile.

  Climbing out of bed, he dons jeans and two sweaters and walks into the living room, smiling at Percy’s frozen burgundy puddle on the stone.

  While the coffee brews, he steps out onto the front porch. Large snowflakes drift lackadaisically down from the overcast sky.

  “Howdy, boys.”

  Orson and Percy don’t answer. They sit in their rocking chairs on opposite sides of the door, still as sculptures, their open, unblinking eyes staring into the desert, into nothing. They’re upset with him because he made them stay out all night in the cold.

  Sitting down on the steps, he listens but doesn’t hear it yet. That’s all right, though. It’s only 10:45. He is not anxious. Beyond the shed, a brown speck darts through the snow—a coyote, foraging. It woke him last night, crooning to the moon.

  He hears an infinitesimal drone. Standing up leisurely, he stretches his arms above his head and fetches Percy’s twelve-gauge from the breakfast table. Setting it beside him on the front porch, he sits back down on the steps to wait.

  The snowmobile streaks across the desert, a black dot skimming the snow.

  Percy’s wife pulls up on her SnowKat and parks beside her late husband’s snowmobile. In her umber bib and black parka, she removes her helmet and dismounts, the snow rising above her waist. Her face is robust and wizened like Percy’s, and her hair sweeps long and gray behind her shoulders. She smiles at Luther and leans against the SnowKat to catch her breath. He can see two cabins in her sunglasses.

  “Hi, there,” he says, chipper. “Pam, is it?”

  “Yep.”

  “It was kind of Percy to bring me over here last night. I was very worried about my friends getting stranded in the storm.”

  “Well, I appreciate you boys keeping him company last night. I brought your toolbox, Percy, so maybe we can fix your Kat good enough to get home. I always told him I’d kick the shit out of him if he left without a cell. What do you say there, Perce?” She glances at her husband, on Luther’s left.

  “You report him missing to anyone?” Luther asks, staving off another wave of light-headedness. Pam steps forward, her head curiously tilted at her husband. Luther takes two shells of double-aught buckshot from his pocket.

  “Not since I got you on the horn,” she says, but she’s not looking at him. “Hey, Percy!” She removes her sunglasses, squints at her husband, then at Luther, befuddled. Blood runs over the tip of Luther’s left boot into the snow. “The hell’s wrong with him?”

  “Oh, he’s dead.”

  She smiles, as though Luther’d made a joke, and comes a step closer. When she sees Percy’s throat, she looks at Luther, then at Orson, and screams. A raven launches out of the snow beside the shed, croaking bitterly. Pam turns and bounds back toward the SnowKat.

  Luther breaks the breech of the shotgun and slides the shells home.

  Three hours later, he unwinds on the front porch, sipping from a mug of black coffee. He is not void of kindness. He has allowed Pam and Percy to sit side by side, and even arranged Pam’s hand to rest in her husband’s lap. They will freeze together. That is not altogether unromantic.

  “I’m going to bring you guys a new friend,” he says. “How would you like that?” He looks over at Orson and slaps him on the back, an arctic slab of stone. “Don’t talk much, do you?” Luther guffaws.

  He believes now that he is the perfection of Orson, and he burns with ecstasy.

  A new thread of warm blood runs down his inner thigh.…

  Luther revives on his back, staring up into the ceiling of the covered porch, the spilt coffee already iced into the wool of his sweater. He sits up. The clouds are gone, the sun low in the sky, half-obscured behind that distant white bluff. Tingling specks of black have infiltrated his vision—particles of dying that will soon overtake him. A small blood puddle has frozen on the wood beneath his feet, rosy in the petering sun. He is blisteringly cold. The pain is back, but he does not respond to discomfort in the whimpering, human fashion. He is indomitable, though he should depart soon if he intends to survive the bullet Andrew Thomas put inside him.

  He stands, takes up the shotgun, and staggers back into the cabin. At the end of the hallway, he unlocks the door of the guest room and kicks it open.

  Andrew Thomas lies motionless on the bed.

  “Get up,” Luther says. He hasn’t entered the room since the previous night, when he dragged Andrew inside. With a pained exhalation, Andrew struggles to sit up against the logs. The quilt still wrapped around his shoulders, he shivers, his breath steaming.

  “Come with me,” Luther says.

  Andrew looks up at him, vanquished. “I heard the shotgun. Are they all dead?”

  “Come with me.”

  Orson’s brother looks down at the floor, tears filling his eyes. “Just kill me.”

  Luther falters. Lurching into the wall, blood dripping from the hem of his blue jeans, he tries to take aim. But the shotgun slips from his hands and he slumps down upon the stone.

  I lift the shotgun from the floor and touch my finger to one of the triggers. When I place the barrel against Luther’s chest, I can taste the madness, and my God it’s sweet. I want to squeeze the trigger, feel the shotgun buck against my shoulder, and watch him bleed out on the stone. In short, I ache to kill him, which is precisely why I don’t.

  I drag Luther, alive but fading, onto the porch and bind him with seventy feet of rope to the last available rocking chair. Then I lift the red fleece blanket I took from Orson’s bed and wrap it around Percy Madding and the woman beside him, who I assume was his wife. I want to bury them, but the ground is frozen beneath the snowpack. This is all I can do for the man who saved my life.

  When I’ve managed to close Percy’s frosted eyelids, I wade out into the snow and turn and behold the dying and the dead.

  The parting rays of a cold sun gild the spectacle of the front porch, a sight I will never be rid of: Percy Madding, his wife, Orson, and Luther Kite, each in a rocking chair, three dead, one not far behind.

  It startles me when Luther speaks. He shivers now, his teeth clicking uncontrollably. I cannot imagine him surviving the night. I wonder whether he’ll bleed to death, or if the cold will claim him first.

  “You stand there appalled,” he says. “At what, Andrew?”

  “At all thi
s blood, Luther.”

  “We all want blood. We are war. That’s the code. War and regression and more and more blood. Tell me it doesn’t speak to you.” Luther’s black hair whips across a pale, bloodless face. He awaits my reply, but I have none.

  At last, I approach my brother. Our faces are inches apart. Orson’s eyes remain open, his mouth frozen into the slightest grin. The abject violation of the Maddings and every other human being he butchered consumes me, and I scream at him, raging, my voice filling the desert: “Is this beauty, Orson? Is this truth?”

  Then, like a fever breaking, finally I start to cry.

  Eastward, I glide across the snow toward 191 under the purple immensity of the Wyoming sky, and the madness diminishes as the cabin falls farther behind. I wonder if Luther is dead yet. I wonder many things.

  The skis scrape across the pavement, and I bring the snowmobile to a halt on the other side of the road. Alighting, I unfasten the two suitcases filled with clothes and the contents of Orson’s drawer. I sit down on the shoulder. The highway has been plowed—the only snow on the road is windblown powder. All is still. My left arm throbs, but luckily, Percy was wrong. The bullet tore through—I extracted the mushroom of lead from the back of my shoulder this morning.

  The sun is gone. Ancient images of stars and planets commence filling the night sky.

  The moon crawls above the Winds at my back, and I cast a lunar shadow across the road. The empty, pruinose highway stretches on, north and south, as far as I can see.

  I’m so cold. I stand and stamp my feet on the road. Instead of sitting back down on the shoulder, I walk out into a thigh-deep drift and make a snow angel. Lying flat on my back, a wall of white enclosing me, all I can see now is the cosmos, and all I can feel is the steady infusion of cold.