“Yeah, one of them. You know, sometimes you give me the willies.”
I opened the dog pen and reached in and got hold of Switch’s collar and said, “Good dog.” I pulled him out. I could feel his muscles bunching at the smell of all these strangers.
“Whatda you doing?” Soldier said.
“Getting him out of the way so I can dig,” I said. “Leonard, hold him.”
Leonard reached over and held him and took a step backwards and pulled the dog after him, stuck out his free hand and touched Soldier’s shoulder and said, “Ow!”
It was all Switch needed, thinking Leonard was hurt. He twisted in Leonard’s grip and Leonard let go and Switch leapt straight into Soldier and Soldier dropped his umbrella and threw up his arm. The dog had him hard as a mallet, teeth flashing.
I had already started toward the group with the shovel cocked, and when Switch hit Soldier and Soldier yelled, Angel and Paco turned their heads, and I brought the shovel around with all my might and caught Angel on the side of the neck with the edge of it and it was like hitting a concrete piling. She went down on one knee and her gun arm dropped to her side and her neck split open and lashed a band of blood into the cold air and rain.
Leonard stepped behind Soldier and the dog, pivoted on his left foot and spun around, fast, and his right leg went up, and at the same instant Paco raised his gun and leveled it, Leonard’s foot caught him in the back of the head, low, and Paco snapped forward and the gun went off but didn’t hit anyone. Next instant Paco was face down on the ground with his butt humping like a worm trying to crawl.
Leonard’s heel kick had broken Paco’s neck.
Switch had Soldier down and his teeth buried in Soldier’s arm. He was dragging him backwards on the muddy ground, gnawing as he went, tearing jacket and shirt and meat beneath.
I brought the shovel around again and hit Angel solidly on top of her head and she dropped her gun and went down on her hands as if to do a push-up. I started to go for her gun but Soldier managed to put his automatic to Switch’s head and pull the trigger. Switch jerked, then was on the ground thrashing. Soldier was getting up on one knee now, his hat was gone and his glasses dangled from one ear.
He gritted his teeth, lifted the .45, and pointed it at Trudy.
Trudy hadn’t moved through all of this, but I was moving. I grabbed her around the waist, jerked her to the side and the bullet went by us. As I turned, I saw Leonard sprint behind the dog pens toward the creek and saw Angel scramble for her gun. I got hold of Trudy like she was a sack of potatoes and ran zigzag toward the creek.
Trudy was too much for me and I dropped her. There was a sudden sensation as if someone punched me in the right side with the end of a fence post. I went down on one knee and yelled, “Run!” Then I was up again, and Trudy was already moving, long legs flying. She went over the creekbank and into the water just ahead of me. There was another snap of gunfire, then I was in the creek right behind Trudy, splashing water, running for all I was worth. The brush on the sides of the bank grew thicker as we headed into the greater woods.
Back toward the house I heard several shots and a dog yelp and Soldier yelling. I was surprised they weren’t on us right away, and wondered if they had gone after Leonard.
As I ran, pain crawled inside me looking for a place to live.I felt as if my very soul were easing out of me, falling into the water, washing away.
But when I looked down, I saw what was oozing out of me into the water was not my soul.
It was blood.
27
I wasn’t exactly making the best time in the world, and Trudy wasn’t much of a runner to begin with. I could hear Angel and Soldier thrashing through the water behind us. They sounded some distance back, but they were gaining rapidly. Angel had the constitution of a horse and a head like an iron skillet. Soldier had popped poor old Howard half as hard and only once, and he hadn’t survived.
I caught up with Trudy and grabbed her by the elbow and pointed to the bank. We climbed out of the water and crawled into a mess of leafless brambles and through that and into a grove of pines and sweetgums.
We hadn’t gone far, when I had to sit down. I found a sweetgum and put my back against that and eased myself to my ass. Trudy, breathing heavily, squatted beside me and looked at my side. My coat was bloody and I could feel the blood cooling and sticking my shirt to my skin.
“Oh, Hap,” Trudy said.
I put a finger to my lips. I could hear Soldier and Angel splashing water in the creek. They went past us and kept splashing.
When I thought they were reasonable out of the way, I spoke softly. “Your hand. How is it?”
“Numb,” she said. “Mostly it’s shock. But that’s passing some.All things considered, I’m all right.”
“Well, I’m not. Help me up.”
She got her good hand under my arm and I pushed up and leaned on her a minute. “We got to make the Robin Hood Tree.”
“What?”
“Trust me.”
It wasn’t far from where we were, but it felt like a mile. My side had little feeling in it at first, but now it was as if someone had heated up a jack handle and was sticking it into me, stirring it around.
We went through deeper woods and promptly broke into a clearing, and there in its center was the massive oak that Leonard and I called the Robin Hood Tree. Sitting down, his back against it, was Leonard.
We walked up to him and he opened his eyes and looked at us. “If you’d been Angel or that other geek, I’d be dead.”
“You’re hit?”
“Caught me in the back, low, to the right. Came out the side of my leg here.” He touched his right thigh gently. “Bone turned the slug, I guess. It was Angel shot me. Bitch is good. I was well on the run, ahead of you two, going into the woods along the creek. Thought I had it made.”
I squatted down beside him, wiped cold sweat off his forehead with my fingers, rubbed it on my pants. “It’ll be all right, Leonard.”
“Damn right it will,” he said. “I been worse … Shit, man, you’re hit too.”
“High in the side, came out the front here,” I said. “I’m scared to look, but—”
“You been worse,” Leonard said.
“Right.”
“Trudy,” Leonard said, “you’ve had yourself quite a time playing revolutionary, haven’t you?”
“I believe what I believe,” she said. “None of this changes anything.”
“This,” Leonard said, “isn’t over. But I got to hand it to you, had it been me and Soldier had brought out that hammer, I’d have sang like a parakeet.”
A freezing rain came slanting through the trees from the north and hit the clearing, then the oak and us.
“We stay here, we’ll freeze,” I said.
“Can’t we go through the woods?” Trudy said. “It’s got to stop somewhere.”
“It stops, all right,” I said. “Several miles later. As cold and close to dark as it is, I don’t think me and Leonard could make it with these wounds.”
“Trudy maybe could make it,” Leonard said. “Get some help.”
“I don’t know the woods,” Trudy said. “I’d be going in circles before I was out of sight of this tree.”
“Doubt we’d survive till you got back anyway,” I said. “If Soldier and Angel didn’t find us, we’d most likely freeze or bleed to death. We can go wide to the main road, or back to the house. Chance Soldier and Angel being gone right now. Get Leonard’s car and haul out.”
“It’s got to be that for me,” Leonard said. “I go too far in any direction, maybe even back to the house, and I’ll be growing grass over me come spring.”
“We might wait them out,” Trudy said.
“We’d be icicles first,” Leonard said. “And besides, I got a rifle in the trunk of the car, a target pistol in the house. They could be some insurance.”
“Then it’s settled,” I said.
“Hap, break me off a limb,” Leonard said. “Got
to have a crutch.”
I had to go easy, but I walked until I came to a sweetgum at the edge of the clearing, got hold of a two-inch limb and pulled on it. I felt as if my guts were being wrenched out, but I kept at it until I heard it crack, then I swung on it until I got it so I could twist it off. It had a couple of whispy limbs on it, and I managed to break those off underfoot. It wasn’t going to make a comfortable crutch, but by hooking it in the crook of his arm, it might do. It had a kind of point on the end too, where I had twisted it off, and I thought that would be good, something he could push into the ground.
Trudy helped me get Leonard up. He got the stick positioned and tried it and it worked well enough.
“Don’t wait on me,” he said. “One of us has got to get back to the house and the car, get some help.”
“It’s all or nothing,” Trudy said.
28
We eased forward, wide of the creek, broke through the woods and out into the clearing where the house was visible through the ever-thickening slants of icy rain. To make matters worse, the wind had picked up and was driving the rain against us as if it were frozen needles. I felt feverish, and as if something important had broken inside me. Everything was a little surreal. I was still losing blood.
We huddled together, me and Trudy on either side of Leonard, helping him along. He looked like something for a pine box and six feet of dirt.
I thought about Soldier and Angel, realized that if they had come back by the creek, they could already be at the house, waiting. But if we could get to the car and get it started … That was thinking too far ahead.
Keep walking. One foot in front of the other and this fever is the heat of the sun and it’s mid-July and the fish are biting and the grass is going brown and the trees are wilting like overworked washerwomen. Yes sir, it’s not cold, it’s hot, it’s hot, gimmea left. Left. Adaleft, left, left, adaleft, left, had a good home but I left, left. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t have fought the draft. I had the march down. Then I realized I was talking out loud, and I shut up and zeroed in on the dog pens and made for them, tried not to think about Soldier and Angel or that they might be waiting for us to come into range so they could spray the place with our brains. It would be quicker and better than dying slowly in the woods from the wet cold.
Next thing I knew we were at the dog pens, and I understood why we had gotten as much of a head start on them as we had, saw what all that shooting we heard was about. Leonard’s dogs. In his fury, Soldier had killed them all.
“That motherfucker,” Leonard said. “I ever get the chance, half the chance, he’s a dead cocksucker. Dead.”
Paco lay where we had left him. He was face down, on his knees, his head bent under him, as if folded. That had been some kick. His false teeth lay over in the mud near Soldier’s open umbrella, mashed porkpie and the shovel. Trudy turned Paco over to see if his gun was still under him, but Soldier, though stupid, wasn’t that stupid.
“I wasn’t on this stick,” Leonard said, “I’d go over and kick that fucker till he came back to life.”
“Go straight for your car,” I said.
We did. The car was parked at the side of the house, near the front porch, where it had been left when brought out by the Ice Birds, as Leonard called them.
Leonard worked the keys out of his pants pocket and Trudy opened the car door and Leonard slid in and tried to start it. Nothing. It didn’t even click.
I went around and opened the hood. Doing it made me feel as if my intestines were falling out of me, but when I looked inside, I knew our problem wasn’t the weather, and I understood Soldier’s and Angel’s delay in pursuing us even better. They had taken the distributor cap. I limped over to the mini-van and looked under its hood. Same thing. And the Lincoln. And the Volvo. I thought about checking the Volkswagen in the barn, but I couldn’t believe they’d leave it undone, not after taking time for the others. Besides, I didn’t feel as if I could make it to the barn.
“The rifle,” Leonard said.
I got his keys and limped around there with Trudy, and was about to unlock the trunk, when there was a crack and the back glass of Leonard’s car exploded in to jagged stars. I saw Soldier and Angel coming up over the bank. They were covered in mud from the feet to the knees. Their faces were red and limb-whipped. Not happy campers. They were still a good distance away and not moving at top speed due to the cold blasting rain, but those guns gave them a lot of reach.
I whirled to run and there was another shot, and Trudy, who was slightly in front of me, threw out her hands and went face down. I grabbed her by the coat collar and started yelling for Leonard and there was another shot, small caliber, the .38. Then I was dragging Trudy toward the front porch of the house, my wound making my insides jump hard against my bones, and Leonard was limping behind. I heard him let out a grunt and I glanced back and saw him go down on one knee and saw blood flowing out of him to be washed across the cold ground in a dark wave; saw too that Soldier and Angel were coming on hard and fast.
Leonard scrambled for his stick and screamed himself up and yelled something at me that the pounding rain took away, and then I had Trudy pulled up on the porch and my shoulder took a bullet and I grunted and opened the door and hauled her halfway inside and staggered back for Leonard.
He almost ran over me before I could get off the porch. He let out a yell and I felt a punch in my chest and I grabbed him and swung him through the door and he and his stick went sliding across the floor. I fast-limped in, got hold of Trudy and pulled her all the way inside and slammed the door and locked it and Soldier hit it with his body and yelled. I thought Angel would hit it next, take it off its hinges, but that didn’t happen. There was silence. And that was more frightening than the noise. I made my way across the room and into the kitchen, to the back door. I locked it just before the knob began to rattle and Soldier began to cuss. He fired two shots, quick succession, through the door about head high. I was just enough out of the way and the slugs slammed into the wall and picked a crock pot off a shelf and sent pieces of it all over.
I stumbled toward the living room, and as I passed the kitchen window, two more shots punched at the glass and threw up the curtains and slammed into the wall, but I was out of there and into the living room.
I avoided the window in the living room by getting low. I went over to Leonard. He was on the floor. Blood was running out of his leg and just below his ribs. That would be the shot that hit him on the porch and went through and got me too, but not bad. Leonard had taken most of that one. The ones in my right side and shoulder, those were the sonofabitches. The one in my lower right chest was just picking at me.
Leonard had taken off his jacket and pulled off his shirt and was tying it around his leg, trying to stop the blood from pumping out. He had never lost his stick, and took hold of it again, tight.
Soldier was at the side of the house yelling. “Come on out, it’s all over. Bam. A bullet in the head. You don’t come out, I’m going to take some time with you.”
I crawled around in front of the couch where poor dead Howard lay, and got a look at Trudy. The front of her jacket was a dark wet explosion where the bullet had come out. Viscera poked through the hole in the jacket. My face explained things to Leonard.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not a thing you can do.”
I tried using my hand to close her eyes but I couldn’t get her lids to go down. It seemed very important that her eyes close so I wouldn’t have to look at them, but the lids just wouldn’t do it.
Two shots whizzed through the living room window and struck the fireplace mantel and ricocheted into something I couldn’t identify. Arctic rain came through and hit my face and mixed with the tears on my cheeks. I found it almost pleasant.
“You with me, Hap?” Leonard said.
“Yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. It was as if my center of gravity had shifted.
“One time,” Soldier yelled, “I caught me this nigger trying to do me on a drug deal. I
took him out and nailed his balls to a stump and left him there. With a sharp knife. Hear me in there, nigger?”
“Just a couple of licks on him with this,” Leonard said, shaking the stick. “That’s all I ask.”
“The target pistol?” I said.
“In the nightstand by the bed. Not loaded. Shells are there in a box … Hell, Hap. I got it bad.”
“Hang on, buddy.”
Soldier was quiet out there. Not a good sign.
“Look here, now,” I said. “I’m going to get the pistol. You been worse, right?”
“Oh yeah.”
To keep away from stray bullets, I crawled behind the couch and through the open door to the bedroom. I went like that until I was almost to the nightstand, but I never made it. I stopped crawling when I reached a pair of jogging shoes. With Angel’s feet in them.
29
I looked up and there was her snubnose .38 and above it her impassive face with the right side and top of her forehead swollen all out of proportion from my shovel blows. One eye was almost closed. She looked like a Neanderthal. Behind her the bedroom window was up and the curtains flapped in the freezing wind above the bed and there were muddy footprints on the sheets.
She pulled the trigger on the .38.
It was empty.
She knew that.
Bitch.
She whipped her hand around and struck me on the side of the head with the gun, tossed it away, grabbed me by the coat and pulled me up. A network of pain went through my wounds and some new connection were found.
She kneed me in the nuts, tossed me backwards with a yell.
I hurtled through the open door and fell on my side in the living room behind the couch. Outside, I heard Soldier yell. “Angel? Angel?”
I rolled and tried to get up, but she got me by the collar and picked me up and tossed me over the couch. I rolled on my back and she leaned over the couch and grabbed Howard by his coat and crotch, and more shoved than threw him at me. He landed on his stomach across my legs.
She started around the couch making deep strides and I kicked out from under Howard and got unsteadily to my feet.