Джо Горес - Dead Man

“Understand? The wind probably will die down through the night, but the waves won’t fall off until tomorrow sometime. If we try to cross before they do, we’ve got a damned good chance of capsizing and drowning. That’s why we’re making camp with three hours of nominal daylight left.”

Maxton began in a congested voice, “We’ll try now, god—”

Inverness just turned away. “Give it a rest, Maxton.” He knew goddam Dain was alive, and that belief filled his mind, left him nothing with which to worry about the girl. “You’ll get her. She can’t run and she can’t hide — not from me.”

Vangie leaned back by the light of the hissing pressure lantern, and patted her tummy. If she’d been alone she would have belched. There was just a heap of discarded shells and claws on each of their plates. At their elbows were thick white ceramic mugs of steaming coffee.

“Dain, we can’t stand and fight. We have to run!”

Dain’s face became stubborn, almost mulish.

“We run, we die. We stay and fight, maybe we live.” “Without weapons against four armed men?”

He jammed a finger against his temple, suddenly angry. “We’ve got these.” He swung an arm around the room. “We’ve got everything here.” He pointed at the door. “We’ve got everything out there. I want to—”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? What you want.”

“It’s what you want and need, too, Vangie,” he said.

“Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.”

As she sloshed off the plates, Dain sighed and started to clumsily take off his pants one-handed, almost immobilized by his own thoughts. Vangie was now at the door, shoving it open a crack as if to assure herself the storm was real. Rain poured through the narrow opening, Dain could hear the howl and rush of the wind. She let it slam again, turned to him abruptly.

“All right, goddam you, I’m in.”

Jesus! He was doing it again! Doing to her what he had done to Marie with his bland, big assurances all would be well...

Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.

That was the trouble, he was always so goddam sure about what the women he was involved with wanted. They were never real to him as human beings until it was too late, until he had fucked them up. Only then, when dire results from his actions had destroyed them, did they become real. Only when they were icons that he could worship.

Did he have that much hostility toward, fear of, some constant “they” out in the real world? Five years ago, playing games — chess, detecting games on the computer and out in the field — while nurturing his fears and grudges behind a mask of geniality. But it was the women who paid, because he led the “they” right to the place where the women were either trusting... or hiding...

His game had always been practicing his form of worship of those unreal icons. But outside this profane religion of his they had been real enough, his ladies — real enough to die, to be threatened now again with death.

He had done it to Marie, now he held her dead body up like a crucifix between him and Vangie so he could keep Vangie unreal, too, until it was too late.

But she was real. Right here, right now... Getting undressed with the lack of self-awareness about her body that most dancers and athletes end up having. Dain, until that moment as unconcerned as she about stripping off his shorts, stopped dead, caught by her beauty.

She stopped also, feeling the full weight of his intensity. There was a sudden unexpected tension between them. All of a sudden, Dain couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She turned to look at him, then released the pressure in the lantern. As it hissed out, the light began to fade. She crossed to him instead of to the other bunk, cupped his face with her two hands, looking down at him in the dimness.

And he was real to her, too. Whatever, whoever he was.

“Jesus, Dain,” she said softly, “I don’t even like you! But tomorrow we might both be dead.”

In a hoarse voice, he said, “Or they might.”

Because he felt sudden, blinding, total lust, as he had so often and just as suddenly for Marie — and had not felt even once in the five years since her slaughter. He could not make of Vangie an icon as he had of Marie. To do so would be to destroy her also. No! She was real, here and now. Real...

He pulled her hot, naked body against him almost roughly. She gasped as he began licking one already erect nipple. His body jerked as if from a jolt of electricity when her hands cupped his scrotum and closed around his distended member.

As the lantern died, they became lovers in the night.

Dawn filtered through the thin mist drifting up off the water. By its light a young marsh rabbit hopped out of its burrow between the roots of a big fallen oak tree near the water’s edge. The woods were wet, but the rain had stopped. As soon as the sun was up, the swamp would be steaming.

The rabbit began scratching its ear with a hind foot, the leg audibly thumping the ground with each movement. The vibrations raised the spade-shaped head of a five-foot cottonmouth that was just sluggishly stirring on the far side of the fallen oak. It was nearly a foot in circumference and was a slate-gray color that blended perfectly with the bark of the tree. It bunched into a tight coil almost experimentally, then slithered slowly forward, tongue darting to get the news.

Dain and Vangie walked down the meandering track her father had cut through the undergrowth and saplings during dry weather so he could put out setlines and crawfish traps from his boat during the spring floods. Dain’s arm was in a sling Vangie had made from an old pillowcase, but his color was good and he moved well. They were walking side by side but not close enough to touch one another.

“I figure twelve hours before they get here,” she said.

“Good. Gives us twelve hours to take inventory, plan, pick the killing ground...”

“You’re so damned... casual about it...”

“Live with death long enough, you get casual about it.”

“Especially someone else’s,” she said in a neutral voice.

As she spoke, the cottonmouth’s arrow-shaped head shot forward between the roots to bury its fangs deep in the rabbit’s shoulder, just for an instant. It drew back, re-coiling, waiting. The rabbit writhed, stiffened, jerked, died.

Why did he kill it, Mommy?

I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living, Albie.

Could he kill me?

There’s nobody around big enough to kill you, Tiger.

If the rattler in the desert three years ago had struck Dain when he danced with it, Vangie’s parents wouldn’t be dead. Jimmy Zimmer wouldn’t be dead. Minus wouldn’t be dead. But Albie and Marie still would be. To avenge their deaths he had trained, planned, shut down every other aspect of his life. Until last night with Vangie.

Vangie was watching, mesmerized, as the snake glided forward, unhinging its jaws to open them amazingly wide. The inside of the snake’s mouth was an absolute, dead white, which had given it the name cottonmouth. It was swallowing the dead rabbit whole, walking its distended jaws up around the body as if the rabbit were entering a tunnel.

For those moments there was nothing else in the world for her. No love last night with him; no dead lover, no dead parents, no men bent on their destruction a few scant hours away across the marsh.

Suddenly it seemed to Dain that for five years he had been willfully evoking certain emotions — pain, the feeling of loss, the need for revenge — mainly for the pleasure of satisfying them. And telling himself he was being true, being steadfast to holy memories. To the icon he had made of Marie.