Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

Sully doubted there was a way back from that.

Outside, he watched his shadow as he walked, moving through the grass, his feet snapping stems. No need for the flashlight. Her directions had been approximate but there was so little out here in the way of landmarks that he should still be able to find the family plot.

The moonlight glittered on the pond. He walked past it, a good twenty yards off, the water flat, save for a snake making its way, the head the only thing visible above the surface, leaving a narrow ripple in its wake. Sully, skittish, looked behind himself, but there was no one, nothing. Just the wind. Just him.

By the time he reached the copse of trees, he was beginning to chide himself. Elaine, what, she put on her serious Indian Woman Face and gave him bollocks about native burial rituals and shotguns and dead sons. Hokum story for the White Man from Elsewhere. Selling it to him to see if he’d print it and then laugh her ass off the next day at work, White folks will believe anything. How! Shoulda sold him dream catcher for big wampum.

But when he walked into the trees, into the shadows, when he flicked on the flashlight, the fallen-to-the-side tombstones were in front of him in a small clearing just like she had said, granite stumps in a world of dirt and wood.

“Ah, man,” he said, the voice escaping his lips.

He knelt in front of the first, then the second. The engraving had faded. Nothing, just gray and mottled and spots of moss. Switching the flashlight to his right hand, he opened his left hand like a fan, tracing all five fingers over the face of the marker, as if communing with the dead underneath. The rough touch of the stone, the lines and circles and dots that had been chiseled into it, gave themselves up to his fingertips, but not in any shape or pattern. Was that a “B”? An “8”? No way to tell. The names and dates and Beloved s were lost, gone, too faint to be read except perhaps by Braille, by etching on paper.

“Dust to dust,” he said softly. “Granite be damned.”

He swung the flashlight this way and that, slowly. Five, six headstones. None more than two feet high. One had cracked and was falling forward. The others canted backward, as if beseeching God above for a second chance, or sideways, as if they were in some slow-motion midstupor stumble.

Pushing himself up, he stood. Okay, stars. Copper stars, iron stars, some kind of metal stars, nailed onto tree trunks. Where were these? He flicked the light from trunk to trunk, up and down, too rapidly at first, but he was jumpy-standing on top of dead people gave him the creeps-and it took effort to slow it to a methodical search.

The wind stirred. It moved the leaves above him in a restless fluttering. They rose on the wind and then fell without it. His footsteps were loud. Then, without even looking, he caught a glint off to the right. He snapped the light back to it. There. The side of an oak.

Two steps and his left hand was on the rough edges of the bark. A five-pointed metal star, big as his palm, nailed deeply into the tree, waist high. He bent to look at it. The bark was growing over the edges, the metal mostly black and corroded, hard and rough under his fingers. No writing, nothing at all, at least that could be seen now. He looked down at his feet. Was one of them, father or son, buried just below? Couldn’t be. The roots would have been too thick to dig through. But a few feet away? Yes. There was an opening between trees, almost in the clearing with the gravestones.

“Well, blow me sideways,” he said softly, the wind taking the words away.

The second star. Now. Was there a second star?

Twisting the ring at the top end of the flashlight, he expanded the beam from narrow to wide. The clearing emerged in a slow arc, following the beam. The orb of light illuminated branches heavy with thick green leaves, scrubs trying to take hold. The clearing was roughly circular. When he finished the circuit, there was nothing. Back again. Then he started going trunk to trunk, skipping the undergrowth and the saplings, looking out for snakes at each step now, the wooded, grassy thatch at his feet.

“Come on, come on.” The urgency was at the base of the neck, in his fingers. How long ago had he parked the car? He’d forgotten to check his watch, and now time seemed to be an amorphous thing. It could have been anything from twenty minutes to an hour. How long had he stood in the house, outside, looking-

Glinting, a small flash in the darkness.

– wait, take the light back-his fingers swept along the bark of another oak, not as big as the first but still sturdy, and here, at belt-buckle height, was another star. Not as deeply nailed in. Shinier. Not so rusted. Not as old. Hammered in last year, at Russell’s death. His palm covered nearly all of it.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Elaine, forgive me, for I have doubted.”

The words had no more left his lips than footsteps came from deeper in the trees. The steps were light but hurried.

Adrenaline shot down his spine. He dropped to one knee and swept his arm forward, the beam going to the right, trees and limbs and bramble flashing across his vision and then two red glimmering dots appeared thirty feet to his right.

He swung the light back to it. He saw the snout and the laid-back ears of a coyote. The teeth were bared and the beast lowered its head toward the ground. The fur was matted and dense.

Exhale, exhale , he thought. Bulbs of sweat popped out of the pores along his scalp, his spine. He palmed his left hand across his forehead and down his face.

“Fucking asshole,” he said, then shouted “HA!”

He leapt forward. Before the word was out of his mouth the animal flicked to his left and was gone, through the woods and across the open field, sprinting, its back bunching and elongating with each gathered and released stride, galloping until it was just another shadow moving across the grass.

Sully clicked off the light. He leaned over, putting both hands on his knees. Pulling on his lungs for a full breath, heart trip-hammering. His hands shook now that it was over. Goddamn. Goddamn .

“Nerves,” he said. “Got to do something with the nerves.” The image of his half-empty fifth back at the hotel danced across his mind. Time to go. Time to get the fuck out of here.

He came out of the stand of trees and looked back toward the house and there was the car, a hundred yards beyond. Moonlight reflected off the hood. Its low curves and confident mechanics looked modern, polished, secure, like civilization, and not at all like dead bodies buried beneath bronze-age metal stars nailed into trees. He started walking that way. He put a quicker hitch in his giddyup, trying not to break into a run, but feeling some desperation to get away from the bodies of Terry and Russell Waters sleeping their eternal sleep beneath the plains of their ancestors.

While he was walking, he looked up at the sky once more. If we are all so insignificant , he thought, why did settling the accounts of the dead matter so much?

“YOU WANT MEto go dig up Terry and the old man?” Sully, flat on his back in the hotel, tossing his pillow up in the air and catching it, the lights off but not the television, a bourbon on ice next to him on the nightstand. His second. Could be the third. “I mean, you think she made it up on the spot? That’s a hell of a story to dream up when you see a white man pull up in front of your country-ass house.”

R.J. was taking the call at home, flat-footed. Elwood, his partner, was talking in the background. Sully couldn’t tell if it was on another line or if there was someone else there. A little after eleven on his clock, a little after midnight in D.C.