Wilderness

  He went to McDonald's. The coffee was hot and nasty. He hated going to McDonald's. He pulled over and got out and took a piss in the place -- it was the least he could do for recompense. He drove on with his old-lady-burning coffee and gunned it around the corners per his custom.

  Ahead, brake lights.

  He slammed on the breaks and shifted down to first. The crap coffee exploded all over his dash and he found the strength to swear then. His truck was sideways across both lanes by the time it stopped, the cars circling to make a clearing around a typically quiet bend in the road. He backed his truck up so that it crested the peak and turned on his hazards and put on the parking brake.

  Walking down to the circle of cars, he saw a bunch of morning commuters standing around something awful. It was Jerome, dead on the pavement, his spine crushed -- blood as a result, but not as cause of death. The chewing tobacco tin had been flattened a bit under the weight of something, as if stomped on or as if a fridge had been dropped on him. But there was no fridge. Had the Cyclops woken and stomped him flat? Had the sphinx or Jack's giant pounced on his bones? And what could he -- Ebur, the detective retired to the cattle yard -- do in the middle of such death? He looked around: the biker bar, the hanging cabins, a doctor's office. Nothing else, really, but the tall grass and trees off to the side. There was the fish fry joint, but Gary couldn't hurt a flee judging by the number of them he let cover that mangy hound of his.

  Ebur pulled his phone and saw Mark's number in recent calls, but Mark might be the one crushing them. And Ali's number, who was on break. But if she was on break then... He scrolled and called Thomas.

  "We called 911," one of the ladies said. "We didn't know what to do."

  "You did the right thing," Ebur said, though maybe the inconvenient thing overall.

  "Yellow."

  "Thomas, get down to Gary's."

  "What happened?"

  "Jerome."

  "Like Brady?"

  "I need you here to see where I was when I arrived."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm the one that found Brady."

  "Oh..."

  "Thomas?"

  "Okay, I'm on my way."

  Thomas lived not too far away he'd be there in a few minutes. Ebur walked around and comforted some of the women and advised they park a car on the other lane like he'd parked his in order to keep people from getting hurt. He got most of them up to the railing on the ledge by the biker bar, still so that they could see if they needed but out of harm's way of another truck.

  That crashed into his truck by the time they were up there. It was Thomas. Ebur ran up to him to see if he was okay. The guy's forehead was bloody, but he was fine. "I see where you were when you arrived," he said.

  "Some alibi," Ebur said and looked at his truck. The tailgate was curled over like a severely tucked lip, curled in such a way that a child might make a fort out of it, hiding away from the big bad wolf. It hurt him, but he was more pleased that Thomas was okay.

  Thomas walked out and took the lay of the land and lost his breakfast when he looked at Jerome. They asked questions of the people together, piecing together who arrived first and questioning that person hard. From what they could tell, Jerome had been dead for almost half an hour before he was found, lying out in the middle of the street like that. Shame.

  Ali showed up soon after that, helped first get the papers sorted out between the men and their cars. When she looked at the blood and the way the little man's spine was crushed, she glanced at Ebur and that look of dread returned.

  And he looked back and did not turn away.

  #

  IX.

  Later that morning, Thomas called him. "I've been thinking: what if it's not what you think?"

  "Ali?" he asked. She had just bragged about donut breaks, though the crushing presented a different problem, one that suited--

  "Or Mark. There are people that have access to stuff that can mangle a body both those ways. Kallie, for instance. Or Clemente."

  "Like regular carpentry tools?" Ebur asked. "And what's that noise?"

  "That's the dolly going down the stairs pretty hard. Making my deliveries."

  "How you talking on the phone?"

  "Wireless headset, old man."

  "That like a Walkman?"

  "For your phone."

  "Okay. For your phone, okay."

  "Yeah, Kallie has those big tools in her lab, heck she's got those headdresses made out of animal teeth and claws, and the fine cutting tools too. Clemente's got more than regular carpentry tools. He's got big-toothed saws, hammers with big claws on the back like big old bear-hunting pikes."

  "And Jerome's crushed spine? His midsection was jelly."

  "Trucks could do that, couldn't they?"

  "It was pretty precise," Ebur said.

  On the other end of the phone call came a great sound like the roar of the final trumpet, the cry of the chimera. It made Ebur freeze. Had Thomas thrown his phone and dropped his dolly? No, he said about the headset. Ebur heard gurgling.

  "Thomas?"

  The gurgling tried to form words.

  "Thomas, I'll be right there. I'll be right there."

  #

  X.

  It took walking through several alleys near the burrito joint before he found the dolly at the edge of one of the stone stair sets, its canned contents scattered everywhere -- it would have made a great crash. He looked up the stairs and saw his friend. And it was a matter of walking slow. He didn't want to miss any of the details. He looked behind him at the parking lot, at the bank, at the grasses and leaves and bare trees hiding the houses on the ridge. Any man could have escaped up that hill and hidden in a house. Could still be there.

  He looked forward. The body of his friend waited. In the street at the alley's fountainhead, people walked by unaware that anything had happened. How had they missed that crash? Had it been that vacant only ten minutes prior?

  He threw up his hands, a competent grown-ass man rendered impotent.

  Realizing his friend might still be alive, he ran to Thomas. The man had a jagged slit across his throat and his body had been mangled as well, but the throat was the biggest thing, almost like a great knife or some dragon's razor wings had been dragged across him, the shock on his face. It called to him, the body of Thomas, called out to him: 'tis life we may live, 'tis death we may die. It called him to become what all men become and to face that. It wasn't that Ebur wanted life. It wasn't that Ebur wanted death. He wanted drums. The words of Edwards came to him then, one of those many resolutions that used to sit on his father's desk in the upstairs study back when his dad pastored that little parish out on the countryside.

  Resolved: to think much on all occasions of my own dying and of the common circumstances which attend death.

  Common circumstances. He laughed a vain and dark laugh. Common. And then some other quote from some other of his dad's old saints: that on the spectrum of possible deaths, he would get only one, so why worry about them all? Not life. Not death. He wanted drums. His heart began to beat again: thrill for the hunt. The drums, the drums they called to him as if he were on a safari, as if some of Kallie's ancestors had come along with some tribal dance and had summoned his inner Kong.

  Ebur called Clemente. He switched the phone from his good hand after wincing from the wound.

  "Que pas' amigo?"

  "Cleme," Ebur said. "Where are you? Thomas is dead."

  "Woah, man, woah. How you keep finding them?"

  Ebur seethed. He didn't know. "Need you here."

  "I'm not off until like dusk. On this house right now, working on the walkways for the city tonight."

  "Fine."

  "Call Alison, man. She's the one that fixes."

  He swore. "Fine."

  "What's wrong with you, man?"

  "Three of my friends were brutally murdered just a couple of days after we all played poker together." It wasn't
anger he felt when he said all of that. The anger had masked that other thing that was forming tears at the ends of his eyesight. And he was trying to stop that, trying and failing.

  After a pause, Clemente said, "I didn't mean it like that. We're all..."

  "It's fine. It's fine Cleme."

  "Kay, man, be good. Call Ali." He hung up.

  Ebur called her.

  She didn't answer.

  He called her again.

  She didn't answer.

  He called her a third time and prepared to leave a message.

  She answered. "Couldn't wait to get ahold of me?" she said. There was sadness back behind the playfulness, something deep and unending.

  "No. Thomas is dead."

  "WHAT?!"

  He hadn't expected genuine surprise. It was hard to fake that kind of shock. Perhaps it wasn't her?

  Her voice started trembling. "Where is he? Where are you?"

  "I'm here with him," he said. "With his... body."

  She hung up on him. She never hung up on him.

  #

  XI.

  At half past noon, he walked down the steps towards her car in the lot, he found his mind shifting, sifting through things, groping about as if civil society itself had unleashed him and left him to roam the wondering wild, a detective without papers, a detective without tools, a detective without a bureau or a force, without friends -- or with friends who kept dying, a detective with nothing but his own raw manhood to find answers.

  It was a comforting thought.

  It was a disturbing thought.

  He walked her way and she sat there finishing her early-morning donut. Finishing. She was back on duty. Not that she couldn't kill someone on duty, but the likelihood, especially with that car camera... he doubted she could have gotten to Thomas. But Jerome seemed a real possibility. Something wasn't fitting into place. Perhaps it was completely unrelated -- some drifter, someone with time on their hands. And yet... the killings seemed so connected to Sunday's poker table. Could nature itself kill so discriminately? Could random deaths like these align? Surely they needed some will behind them.

  She hit the unlock button. He climbed in.

  "You want to tell me what happened?" she was stuffing her face. Comfort eating.

  "I was talking to him about Jerome and I heard him cry out."

  "Why were you talking to him about Jerome?"

  "Because we're racing and sharing my findings would give you an advantage."

  She smiled weakly. "I think we're past that."

  He said nothing. This life untamed would suffer no explanation: he remained competitive because he remained skeptical and on the job. Until the solution arose, there was no rest from the problem.

  "Is he up there?" she asked.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "I'll call it in, but you gotta give me something."

  "Wrong place, wrong time."

  "Thing about coincidence is sometimes it's intentional."

  "You think someone's screwing with me?"

  "I'm saying providence is kind." She gave him a look as if waiting for a confession, kid caught completely inside the candy jar.

  "I don't see the kindness in any of this."

  "Maybe you're just getting there a second too late." The dread, there on her face.

  "That's cheery."

  "Sorry," she said. "Cherry donut?"

  He shrugged and grabbed the chocolate banana pudding one instead.

  "I was saving that," she said and slugged his arm.

  It hurt, but not much. "For me," he said and smiled. He looked up the hill and his expression darkened.

  "I got an idea this morning, looking at the truck bed how it was all bent over like a little hideaway. What if we skipped town? Peter can come."

  "He's legally bound to his mom."

  "Last I checked, there's nothing out on that front in the courts."

  "I wouldn't do that to her."

  "Let's say you got brave and took an adventure with me and took Peter along. And let's say she pressed charges. We could fight her easy in Eureka."

  He thought about it. The adventure part sounded nice. Of course, he didn't really want to leave G.G. And what would that do to Peter in years to come? He looked at her. She was gorgeous. She wore a regular police uniform as if it were a roleplaying costume. He knew it was the rigorous workout regimen she forced herself to abide by -- minus the donuts of course. Wouldn't want to disrespect the badge. He said, "I just can't, Ali. It's not right."

 

  "What's wrong with me?" she asked.

  "I'm not even asking for her arrangement anymore. I'm just wanting to take you away from this place forever. We don't have to do it her way. We could always do it my way."

  "And that's what she's asking."

  "What?"

  "For a way other than ours. I, as a man, don't fit into the picture frame either of you have hammered together. What you call adventure, I call docile and pedestrian and boring and damn inconvenient. You really just want me to do your bidding like her. You want my manhood and she wants my mind, but neither of you want me."

  "That's not fair."

  "Not it's not," he said and he grunted as he got out of the car. Before he shut the door he said, "When was the last time you used that knife of yours?"

  She cocked her head at him. "Last fall when I field-dressed that deer, why?" She squinted. "You don't think I..."

  "I don't know what I think. He's up the hill. I need to take a walk."

  #

  XII.

  Ebur let her go to him and took off the other way along the parking lot. He noted how she watched him go and then moved on. He called Clemente.

  Clemente did not answer.

  Instead of calling back as he had, he took off walking through the city's streets. It felt like New Orleans or some other French city had been dropped out of a toy box onto the hill country of the Ozarks and wherever the pieces landed, the people settled and had to build bridges and walkways and stair sets in order to reach one another. As if it were a struggle for civilization to germinate in that rocky soil. As if a prophecy promising that when Christ returns on the clouds, the world really will come to be a city in a garden: the city bewildered but not destroyed, the wild humanized but not colonized. He walked those walkways, eyeing a mural here and a closed coffee shop there -- things in Eureka seldom had the stamina to stay opened all day long. The city's life roamed in shifts: first the coffee joints (he winced thinking of that), then the lunch and dinner joints, then the drinking joints, then the hotels and their breakfast joints and so on. The sun set. It was unremarkable since its marks hid behind the hills.

  The cold had set in again and he could tell it would not be letting up. It began to snow and he smiled because that would give him something to work with, something other than these naked trees and tall grasses and crunchy leaves.

  Clemente called back. "Yo ese."

  "Cleme, you working the walkways tonight?"

  "Later tonight, yes. I like to do it when people aren't out shopping as much."

  "It's winter."

  "It's habit."

  "Alright, well--" there, on the planks of the walkway, not far, distance-wise from where he'd found Thomas, another. Another. Another. Would they ever quit?

  "Ebur?"

  He walked up and found her -- Ingrid -- laying face-up like he'd found Brady. Horror on her face, midsection mangled like the rest. But the face. The face was purple as if the life had been suffocated out of her as if the giant squid or a dementor had sucked out her soul. And how could a mere man stop such a thing? Was he still a man anymore after the way G.G. and Ali had treated him? He looked closer.

  "Ebur are you okay?"

  "Give me just a minute, Clemente." By her cheeks, piercings like miniature spears had gone through and held some sort of bag or suffocation device to her face. Almost like tent pegs and a tarp. Construction tool
s. "Clemente, where were you this afternoon?" Clemente had strong arms. He could suffocate a man. Or a woman. The mangle -- it could be done with any tool. But this one. It's almost like pieces of her were missing. Had the others looked like that? Jerome had the least blood, but even in his crushed spine, his body had born those piercings. "Clemente?"

  "Don't tell me."

  "Clemente where were you?"

  "Don't tell me, man, please."

  "You need to tell me where you were."

  "I was at the Heck mansion."

  "Okay. Doing what?"

  "Stonework with the decorative concrete guys."

  "So concrete."

  "So concrete. Stamps. Stains. Did you...?"

  "Ingrid."

  "Oh God, no, abuela. Oh Jesus and Mary."

  "Can you get to the walkways?" He always worked the walkways. He could have been here. He was on his way here. He might already be here.

  "Which one? I'm up near the top of the hill right now."

  "Down by Mudstreet."

  He was there quickly. He stared and stared at Ingrid's body. Had he been the killer, he'd want to return to the scene anyways. And had he been the killer, he couldn't do anything worse to her, could he? Ebur called Ali.

  "Ingrid."

  "On my way."

  "I didn't tell you where," he said.

  She said, "Well wherever it is I'm on my way."

  "Walkway by Mudstreet. I'm leaving Clemente here."

  "Good," she said. "I want to talk to him. Stay there."

  "I got a lead," he said. "I'm taking it."

  #

  XIII.

  G.G. called as he pulled out his truck with the curled lip. "I need you to watch Peter tonight. I have to run some errands."

  "I can't," he said.

  "What? You never tell me no. Not to taking Peter to work."

  That was true. He hardly saw the boy.

  "Don't you want to see your son?"

  "It's not safe," he said.

  "Oh don't tell me she roped you back into detective work."

  "It's not like that."

  "Oh that's just great. You're going in the wrong direction, Woodham."

  He didn't want the boy along for safety reasons, but it was one of the best things for a son to experience work with his father. That's the way apprenticeships and walkabouts used to go. Kids in history died for less in route to manhood. And the ones that lived carried on strong and vibrant lives. It would be the best way for him to teach the boy. A savage and fierce training, but a training nonetheless. "I'll take him."

  "He's staying here."

  "No. He's not."

  She was silent.