Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

Donald groans and clenches his teeth and grimaces with cracked, bloody lips. The groan stretches out, becoming a sob. Tears stream down his face.

Ian picks up the finger, rolls it in paper towel, and sets it among the other digits. The ice is beginning to melt, making a bloody soup in which pieces of Donald float. Ian thinks of going to the fair when he was a kid, of bobbing for apples. His stomach clenches.

Turning back around to Donald he says, ‘Did you try that one on the police, too?’

Donald doesn’t respond. He simply glares at Ian through bloodshot eyes.

‘Do you want to try again?’ Ian says.

‘You’re no better than he is,’ Donald says between labored breaths as tears stream down his face from bloodshot eyes. ‘You’re no better than he is.’

‘Then you know what he is.’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘He’s a piece of shit.’

‘What are you?’

‘I’m a man trying to get his daughter back.’

Donald actually laughs. Taped to a chair, toes hacked off, fingers on his right hand now gone too, naked in a pool of his own blood-he laughs. ‘You think Henry doesn’t have justifications for what he’s done? You’re everything he is.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ve done nothing. I’m just a man protecting his brother.’

‘Then you made your choice too.’

Ian brings the hatchet down on the left arm of the chair, taking off the two middle fingers on Donald’s left hand. Donald clenches his teeth. Blood merely oozes from the wounds. When Ian began this thing there was much more bleeding, but now most of the blood is already on the outside, and what little Donald has left is hesitant to leave him. Each new wound bleeds less than the one before. Donald is pale. Weak and pale. He’s already momentarily lost consciousness once. Ian doesn’t know how much longer the man can hold up. But he’ll find out.

Donald glares up at him, defiant.

‘Tell me where he is and I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘Don’t try to lay what you are on me.’

‘What?’

‘You motherfucker,’ Donald says. ‘You relentless, heartless motherfucker. Don’t you try to lay on me what you are. Saying I made my choice. I didn’t choose for you to come in here with a hatchet. I didn’t choose to be bound to a chair. I didn’t even choose to have Henry for a brother. At least admit what you are. You’re. .’ he stops talking, breathing hard, and his chin drops briefly to his chest before snapping up again, ‘you’re no better than he is. You’re just as willing to. . just as willing to hurt. . I hate. . Fuck you both.’

Donald’s chin drops to his chest again, but just as it drops his head snaps up once more. For a moment his eyes are lost. Then they find focus, and Ian, and Donald glares at him.

‘I’m not the same as your brother,’ Ian says.

‘You’re no different.’

‘My daughter is an innocent. All those little girls were innocents. You’re no innocent. You might try to tell yourself you are, that you never did anything, but we both know different. You know what he is. You probably have always known. But you never stopped him. You could’ve stopped him but you never did. That makes you an accomplice. He stole my daughter, my life, and you knew. You knew and you did nothing. Every day I saw you and you said nothing-for years.’

‘That doesn’t make you right.’

‘I don’t care if I’m right,’ Ian says. ‘I want my daughter back.’

Donald’s eyes flutter and start to roll back in his head, but he manages to hold on to consciousness. Just barely, by all appearances.

‘I gave her books. I even gave her lessons when I could. History, math. I checked on her. To make sure she was okay.’

‘But you didn’t do what you should have.’

‘I did what I could without betraying my brother.’

‘I want her back.’

Silence for a long time, then: ‘Fine.’

‘Fine what?’

‘I’ll tell you. He doesn’t. . he doesn’t deserve to be protected from the consequences of what he. . I’ll tell you where he’s headed, but you have to tell me some-’ He stops here a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing. ‘You have to tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?’

Ian is silent for a long time, in part because he is not certain of the answer. He knows he told himself he would only go this far if he absolutely had to, but he doesn’t know whether or not he was lying.

You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?

He licks his lips, and after a while he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says.

Ian is on the road before first light. He lay down last night after he was finished with Donald, after he had gotten what he needed from the man; he was exhausted and in pain and did not have any choice in the matter, it was lie down or fall down, but he set the alarm for four o’clock and is after Henry before the morning sun breaches the horizon.

After the first five minutes on the interstate, during which Bulls Mouth lies to his left like a pile of tangled Christmas lights, most of which are broken, the town is history and he sees little more than the gray strip of asphalt that is the road rolling out before him. The lights of the small town are replaced by a vast flat nowhere decorated occasionally by scatterings of trees that can barely be seen in the darkness. Fireflies dot the air here and there, and Ian drives through them. They splatter on his windshield, and his wipers leave glowing streaks smeared across the glass. He cannot see much of anything beyond the road. It is pleasant to drive that way. It shrinks your world to nothing but the road in front of you: everything there is is what your headlights splash across. Everything before you is comprehensible. The drone of the tires is pleasant: a song to send you to sleep. There are no other cars on the road.

He drives this way for some time, time itself nonexistent. Time means nothing when every moment is like the one that just passed. He stops for gas at a Citgo in Schulenburg at some point, but as soon as he’s back on the road, it’s as if it didn’t happen, like a dream after waking. Then, around six thirty, with the sunrise on the flat line of the horizon behind him splashing into his rearview mirror, something to signify that minutes and hours have gone by, he arrives in San Antonio, passing the Shady Acre Tavern, Lone Star Truck Equipment, Southern Tire Mart, and a couple dozen other businesses that skirt the city. He finds a Denny’s on Frederickburg and eats a Grand Slam Breakfast and drinks five cups of coffee. When he is done he tips his waitress, Doris, twenty percent.

By just past seven he is back on the road.

Maggie sits on the ground behind the house, Beatrice beside her. They silently watch Henry cover Flint and Naomi with dirt. It took him a long time to dig the hole into which he dumped them, grunting and levering out hard chunks of earth, but the filling of it goes quickly. His shirt is off and tucked into the back pocket of his Levis, and he’s covered with an oily layer of sweat and dripping with it. His face is red. He digs the shovel into his pile of dirt and dumps it over the bodies, one load of dirt after another.

Maggie feels sad. She could not bear to watch Henry dragging Flint and Naomi to the hole; to see how Flint’s arm flopped lifelessly as Henry rolled him into it; to see Naomi stare blankly with one eye, the other covered in blood from a knife wound in her forehead; to hear the potato-sack thud-thud of the bodies hitting the bottom of the hole. She has seen so much death lately. She never wants to see it again. And she liked Flint and Naomi. They helped when they didn’t have to. You don’t repay someone who helped you by killing them.