Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

Anything.

The wind blew up, showering the car with leaves as I paid the attendant for pumping his gas. He was a man my age with a deep scar that changed the shape of his chin. Everything and everyone was damaged. I gave him an extra nickel as a tip.

“Thanks, young man. God bless.”

The attendant did not recognize me as a peer because Dora had made me shave my grizzled beard last night. My face felt naked in the cold wind.

I went around the corner of the building, past a table where a slightly cross-eyed girl was selling Indian artifacts I suspect she made herself, to find Dora.

She sat against the wall next to the pay phone with coins spread next to her as if they were seed for birds to come and feed on.

“I love that awful coat on you,” she said, looking at me with moist eyes.

“Did you call? Are you alright?”

She shook her head.

“Are you cold?”

“That nice young girl changed a dollar for me, but I hurt myself. Frankie, I can’t touch the coins. Just the pennies.”

“Eudora.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“Do you want me to dial?”

She was crying now, shaking her head.

“It’s all real.”

“It was for them. Maybe not for you. Maybe not away from there.”

“My jaw hurts. My joints.”

“You were shot.”

The Indian artifacts girl had good ears. She turned around at that and I glared at her until she faced the road again.

“They said it would hurt. That it would take a long time the first time and that it would hurt.”

I helped her up.

“They said the longer I lived the easier it would get, until I could do it whenever I wanted. That I could even choose not to when the moon was full. Like Martin. Poor Martin. He never changed anymore, never wanted to. Just got sick when the moon came. But that took years and years.”

“Just give me a minute to think. Please. Do you want me to help you dial your father?”

“We can’t go there. I can’t.”

“Let’s at least get to Lexington.”

“I won’t make it that far. It’s soon. I’m so scared. ”

I held her against me while sobs shook her frame, her hands small and white against my lapel. A man in a fishing cap came around the corner to use the telephone but thought better of it and went away.

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t think I would be able to open a strong door. A strong, locked door. We never saw them do that.”

She looked up at me with heartbreaking love in her eyes. She always said it was unfair that I was so tall; that I was framed by sky when she looked up at me but that she always had the ground as a backdrop.

“What are you saying, then? Lock you up?”

I felt her nod against my sharecropper’s coat.

“Where?”

“I don’t know, Frankie. Find us a place. Lock me up tight and don’t look in no matter what you hear.”

“This won’t happen. Not to you.”

“Then we’ll have a good laugh in the morning, won’t we?”

THE SYCAMORE TOURIST Village was the one that fit the bill. The property was just south of Somerset, Kentucky, offering SOLITARY CABINS, NEW FLUSH TOILETS!!! and DAILY BUSSES TO BEAUTIFUL CUMBERLAND FALLS. I checked in under the name Zachary Taylor, at which the clerk did not raise either of his caterpillarish eyebrows. I asked to be away from neighbors.

“Why’s that?” he said.

I didn’t say anything so now he looked up at me.

“Well… we’re newlyweds,” I finally offered.

He chuckled and nodded his head at that.

“You kids want a radio? Five-dollar deposit.”

I paid him. He filled out a slip and handed it to me, along with the door key on a carved wooden sycamore leaf that bore a number. I handed it to Dora.

He went in the back room and came back with a badly scratched and cigarette-burned tombstone RCA radio.

“Is that a six or a nine?” Dora said, examining the key.

“Nine. Stem goes down. I keep meanin to underline em. Yer next neighbor’s in five, but sometimes they come late, so no promises.”

WE COULD SEE our breath as we walked from the car to cabin nine. The smell of autumn was heavy here with its undertones of smoke and rot. I set the radio down just outside the cabin and Dora handed me the key. We looked at each other as I fit the key in the door, but then I let the key hang and took both of her hands in mine. I looked down at the stump of my little finger, the badly healing ring finger. The ring was still on. Hers was, too. She took a deep breath in and out. Everything was going to be different soon, and we both knew it. I looked up again and let myself swim for a moment in her gorgeous, mismatched eyes, letting where we had just been and what we were now headed towards fall away. For just that moment she was my true wife and I was in love with her and the door was not yet open.

THE CABIN ITSELF was almost perfect; the separate bathroom had a sturdy door with a real lock on it. The only drawback was a window in the bathroom, above the clawfoot tub. It didn’t look big enough for one of them to get through, but it was hard to be sure. On closer examination, it proved to be painted shut. Yes, this just might do.

She shuddered.

“Oh, that’s bad. That feels really bad. The light’s getting weak,” she said.

“I can’t believe I’m about to lock my wife in the toilet.”

She hugged herself cross-armed and paced the floor.

“God it hurts. Would you draw a bath for me, Frankie?”

“Hot or cold?”

“Hot for the joints, cold for the skin. I don’t know. You pick. Hot. Please. No, cold. The skin’s getting worse than the bones.”

“Dora, I should get you a doctor.”

“You know better. Hurry, Frank. God it itches.”

She took Samma’s dress off so roughly that one button popped off and rolled across the wooden floor.

I started the bath.

“Where’s your gun?” she said.

“In the car.”

“Make sure you get it.”

“No,” I said, turning the spigots on.

“Frankie, if I get out you have to shoot me. You have to.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“You’ve seen what they do.”

“I know.”

“I want to do those things, too. Somewhere deep in me, but it’s rising. I want to hurt. I want to eat something that’s still alive. And if I do, I can’t go back. I’ll like it too much.”

She went into the bathroom then and I locked the door behind her.

“Don’t open it, no matter what you hear. Promise me!”

Not completely her voice. A hint too low.

I pulled the key out and looked through the hole. Her eye met mine.

“You can’t look at me like this. You can’t let me out. Even if I tell you to. It won’t be me. Promise!”

“I won’t open it.”

“Swear it!”

“I swear.”

“Go away.”

I left.

I went into the bedroom.

I thought I heard groaning.

I heard water splashing in the tub, or maybe the memory of that sound from before my ears were hurt. I felt insane.

I paced the room, jamming my hands in my pockets, thinking how like some grotesque of an expectant father I was. I went to the east window of the cabin and parted the curtain to survey the horizon. No sign of the moon yet, although the sky had gone pink and lavender where the sun’s last gasp lit the clouds from below. I could barely make out the individual shapes of trees. How the last yellow leaves clung here and there as if an artist had used a fine brush to hang them. A hint of Naples yellow against all that grey and umber.

I opened the window and let the cold air jolt me. I watched the tree line where I thought the moon would rise and I waited for it. As a child I had loved to go to the docks and watch it rise as if born from the waters of Lake Michigan. My brother had always claimed he could see it move, but I would correct him, explaining that one could almost see it move. Before I lost my religion, I thought of God that way. A presence one could nearly but not quite verify.