David Means: Hystopia

* * *

Acting as a second to Rake, Hank prepared the duel site on the beach by sweeping the sand smooth and flat and putting one of MomMom’s white hankies at the center and pacing each man back. Meg paced Haze and Hank paced Rake, who seemed sober in his seriousness, rock solid and steady.

This is about honor, he said. This is about making amends for a lack of honor on the part of Haze. I’ve been waiting to do this my entire life.

The switch-out of ammo went smoothly. Hank palmed the empty clip against the inside of his sleeve and let it slip down and put it into Rake’s gun, letting him see it slide in, holding it out to him. They presented the guns and watched as the two men stood back to back and then counted paces east and west. Hank waited for the wind to die to pull the string, to move the hankie, to start the duel.

(“Had to risk it, man. You see, I thought maybe Rake would freak and demand that they switch guns, become suspicious, something like that. In that case, I figured he’d switch and then freak and switch again, but he was unusually calm. Hearing the name Billy-T did something to him, I think. He was killer-calm, and he put his trust, such as it was, in me as his second. I’d fed him a line about the seconds being the only ones to get the guns ready — that’s their job, man, I told him. Seconds are duty-bound to make sure all the conditions are correct. I know how it sounds, hearing it from me. The plan was drawn from my gut, from a sense of whatever it was that had been enfolded, maybe.”)

* * *

As expected, Haze seemed to open fire first but they’d never know who got the first trigger-squeeze. Maybe there was a hollow click as Rake squeezed in frustration, realizing that his gun wasn’t kicking, that his clip was empty. Maybe not. Across the empty space between the two men in that split second everything seemed to freeze up. Haze fired until his clip was empty, stepping forward with the shots until he was over Rake’s body aiming down into it and then his clip was empty and he continued to press the trigger, clicking until Hank had his own gun to the back of Haze’s head.

Hank held his gun against Haze’s neck and told him he’d done the honorable thing, fighting Rake. You’re going do the next honorable thing, now. You’ll start walking down the beach to the east and you won’t stop.

His gun jammed or something, Haze mumbled. What makes you think I’d start walking?

The fact that I’m saying it makes me think you’ll do it, Hank said. The fact that I’ll shoot you now and bury you in the sand is another.

Rake owed me some cash, Haze said.

I’ve killed for the hell of it, but killing you would be for fun. Now, killing you because you mention cash, that would be priceless, but the only reason I’m not going to do it is because I don’t feel like digging a hole and I’d rather watch you walk away from me with that good eye working. I’d rather watch you make a run for it, but you’d better be quick because believe you me every single fucking man who was betrayed by Rake will be after you as soon as the word slips out that he’s dead. You understand me? They’ll start tracking you because they’ve built up in their minds that he’s some kind of figure in history and that’s part of the price you pay as his sidekick. Rake’s a mythic figure out there and so are you, my friend.

Haze staggered away down the beach. They watched him until he was out of sight.

Now’s the hard part, Hank said, holding Meg. Now we have to go into whatever strength we still have and use that part of ourselves that we’d rather not use to burn him and take him downstate. We’ll go to the house and get the wheelbarrow and we’ll put him in it and then I’ll build the fire and I’ll put him in while you stay inside and pretend it’s not happening. I’m sorry you even had to see this. I’m sorry it had to be done this way.

That night, after the fire — he put the body on it, leaving it to burn — it began to rain and they lay in bed listening.

I’m tired of this, she said.

I’ll leave in a few hours. You stay here and take care of MomMom. Nobody will know until the Corps sends someone up here, or word gets here from Flint. They’ll see his body and report it and then it’ll have to go through a vast network of bureaucratic bullshit before they identify. They’ll see what they want to see.

Out in the yard, a few hot coals still hissed. He went down to check it, casting the flashlight beam onto Rake’s face. His mouth curled back into a leathery smirk. The rain had passed and clouds scuttled across the moon. He caught the scent of honeysuckle and trees happy in the rain. The body seemed almost weightless as he moved it onto a blanket. He went back to the fire and put the dog tag into the coals and let it sit there for a while. Then he rubbed it with ash and, lifting Rake’s head, drew it around his neck. He patted it once, gently. He carried the body to the car, put it in the trunk, and went back to the house for his bag: a gun, some food, a grenade just in case. When he left around three, the trees hung with wetness. Tendrils of fog threaded across the road and through his headlights. He had the radio on, and when the state forest signal came in he scanned for music and, finding none, settled for a talk show out of Canada. They spoke of the spillover riots that had somehow crossed the Freedom Bridge to Sarnia before subsiding into a tense peace. A caller spoke of the potential for long-term peace. There was hope in the air, she said. She had a wonderful Canadian tartness to her voice that reminded Hank of his mother before she had gone mad.

He got to the bridge before dawn and pulled over to scan with his binoculars. The bridge lights were out and in the twenty minutes he sat looking only two sets of headlights went over, both heading from south to north. The water in Lake Michigan sat leaden. He resisted the familiar urge to go down and take a swim. Instead, he thought of Meg lying in bed, her hair pooled around her face. Her beauty seemed to him the only thing that could save him from himself. His mother would be asleep, too, snoring and then snorting and settling into that breathless silence that was near death. The weakness apparent by day in her weirdly unfocused eyes was even more apparent in those silences. He took a deep breath and shook his head and listened to the tense fuzzy hum of blood against the thin membrane of his eardrums.

* * *

He crossed the bridge and found the side street leading to Fort Michilimackinac. The body in the trunk, charred to feathery lightness, bones and shrunken skin and the grimace of teeth, shifted slightly, curled fetal in the blanket. He imagined he could feel it.

At the fort he parked on the far side of the lot and scanned with his field glasses. A man was asleep in a folding chair, a glint of badge silver on chest. His head rested against the log wall of the fort, which was a fake, a reconstruction for tourists, but in the predawn darkness looked real. Hank got out of the car, lifted the bundle of blankets from the trunk, and dragged it to the curb. An old oak had been violently pruned away from the entrance driveway. It had a long scab, a scrape on its trunk bleeding down to the roots. He touched the sap and took a sniff. Then he unfolded the blanket.

You’re dead now, he said to the corpse. You’ll be dead in five years, he said to the tree.

He lifted the body, again noting its lightness, and set it down carefully into a crook at the base of the tree. He silently thanked the tree for providing a nifty seatlike structure. For years the roots had clutched and changed direction, piling up against the concrete curb, bulging and pushing to form what he needed, a place to enshrine the body of a man who had done the same thing in his own way, struggling against forces invisible to him, responding instinctually, cell by cell, seeking nourishment in poor substrate. He adjusted the dog tag, pulling the chain straight, and wiped ash from his hands on his jeans.