Enemy Closer, page 7
“You’re giving me whiplash.”
“Come again?” I asked his back, as he was leading the way to whatever destination he’d picked; I hadn’t even asked.
“Your mood swings. It’s hard to keep up.”
So he’d noticed the pendulum effect, too.
“Yeah, well—” I started to answer, tripped on a rock, and caught myself on a tree. I stopped to pick bits of bark off my palm, inspecting a minor scratch, and finished, “It’s hard to suppress the survival instinct. It comes and goes.”
He stopped too and turned around. “Why are you suppressing your survival instinct?”
I could hear in his voice that my words had somehow managed to put him on guard. Hoping to gloss over the moment, I shrugged and asked, “What other option do I have?”
“You could’ve shot me. Could’ve set Dude on me. Hell, you could’ve jumped in your truck and made a break for it while I was asleep last night.”
“Dude’s not really an attack dog. And where the hell would I go?”
“Fine, and the first thing?”
“You really want to know why I didn’t shoot you?”
“Let’s hear it.”
For something else to look at besides his openly dubious expression, I watched Dude snuffling around under a pine tree. “I felt sorry for you. I thought you were a crazy person. I’m not sure I could even kill a non-crazy person, let alone—well, you wanted to know,” I finished lamely. He crossed his arms, and the movement made me tear my eyes away from Dude to rest on Alan again.
“Thought?” he asked. “As in, past tense?”
“I guess. I think maybe… there’s a chance you’re not crazy. You don’t seem crazy. But yeah, fight or flight still crops up every couple of hours.”
He studied me for a moment, then his gaze wandered to a point over my right shoulder. Finally he asked, “You have that magazine on you?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“If we run into anything dangerous, I’m gonna need it.”
“I’ll toss it to you. If we do.”
“Fair enough.”
We got moving again. As my thoughts began to wander to what sorts of dangers we might encounter, I started to feel deeply uncomfortable about going unarmed. I asked Alan’s back, “Are you a good shot?”
“Decent. Are you?”
“Um… no, not really. I miss a lot.”
“Is that why you carry a hand cannon?”
I sniffed disdainfully. “It was a gift.”
“From someone who’d seen you shoot, I assume.”
“Screw you.”
“I’m just trying to figure something out. You’ve got a big, powerful truck; a big, powerful dog; and this large, excessively powerful caliber. I’m thinking you’ve either got a massive inferiority complex, or you’re from Texas.”
“Guess it’s bound to be one or the other.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“No thanks.”
With that snub, I earned myself the peace and quiet of a conversation-free hike. Alan was leading us uphill, but not directly toward the summit. We passed three of my cairns and then turned more northwest, still gaining altitude but very gradually. After forty-five minutes, we reached a derelict barbed-wire fence.
“I assume you have no objection to trespassing,” he quipped.
“Oh that’s rich,” I shot back. I stepped on the lowest wire and pulled up on the middle one, creating a decent-sized gap in the fence. “After you.”
He ducked under, then did the same for me; Dude had already army-crawled under the fence and was waiting for us at the edge of a steep gully that ran parallel to it. We then followed the gully straight uphill at a punishing grade that had me out of breath within minutes. As I refused to ask him to slow down, I was gasping for air when we finally came to a stop fifteen minutes later. Abandoning pretense, I plopped down on the ground to catch my breath. I was getting angry with myself. I was acclimated to the altitude, and I was in incredible physical shape—or so I thought—so why was this still so taxing?
“This part’s tricky,” Alan explained. “The gully keeps going for miles before it’s narrow enough to jump across. This deadfall is the closest thing to a bridge we’ve got.”
“Have you ever crossed it?” I asked warily, studying the pinion that had fallen across the gully. It wasn’t very sturdy looking, and the roots were clinging to the very edge of the gully on the other side.
“Yeah. It’ll hold, but if you’re not a fan of heights…”
I leaned over the edge of the gully to see what he meant. My stomach squirmed with discomfort; it was significantly deeper than I’d guessed. I glanced east, then west, confirming it stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction.
“Uh… is the thing we’re hiking to worth this?”
“One way to find out.”
“Okay… well… you first.”
He climbed onto the tree and started across the twelve-foot gap, going carefully but otherwise outwardly unaffected by the possibility of plunging to his death. The tree didn’t move at all, which was a good sign. I pegged him at 230 pounds easily, making me 100 pounds lighter (give or take a few pounds). Alan gained the other side and turned to me.
“Is this the part where you run away?” he asked.
“I should, shouldn’t I?”
“Afraid I’ll catch you?”
“Not before someone else does. Be as scary as you want, I’m still safer here with you than I am out there.” Turning away from his bewildered expression, I looked down at Dude. “Sitz. Bleib,” I told him. He sat, wriggling a little with impatience. I climbed onto the tree, and two small steps forward brought me away from solid ground with nothing but the bottom of the gully to catch me. It was at least twenty feet deep. I paused, took a deep breath, and moved forward two more steps.
“Don’t look down, dummy,” Alan chided from the other side.
“I’m not!”
“You were.”
“Shut up.”
A few more steps, and I was across. I scrambled over the roots, and as my boots finally hit solid ground on the other side I felt, or imagined I felt, the ground shift ever so slightly under my feet. My stomach squirmed again, more insistent this time; but if I hadn’t brought it down, Dude wouldn’t.
“Komm!” I called. Dude loped gracefully across the log, leaping over the roots to land behind me. I crept toward the lip of the gully again, glaring suspiciously at where the roots were twisted into the earth. When Dude had jumped, it had definitely moved.
“What?” Alan asked, coming up behind me. “Something down there?”
“No, I just thought—”
The distinct sound of a large rock tumbling down into the gully cut across my words. With a deep groan, the root end of the tree slipped, tearing the earth all around with it. Closest to the tree, I felt myself sinking as the soil crumbled, at least until Alan grabbed me around the waist and hauled me backward. I twisted out of his arms immediately, but I was too shocked to complain about the unwanted contact. The tree hadn’t slipped far, only a few feet, before the sloping edge of the gully caught it again. I wouldn’t have been injured, obviously, but the adrenaline rush was real all the same.
I laughed shakily. “That was a thing. Think we can still get across?”
“Probably. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
I laughed again, enjoying the sensation of panic subsiding. “I see what you did there.”
“Yeah. Sorry for…”
“No, it’s fine,” I said in a rush, eager to dismiss the moment. “Let’s see what’s at the end of this trail, already.”
Another forty-five minutes straight north brought us there: Tucked into the side of a steep slope, mostly obscured by trees and tumbled rocks, sat another wooden building even more dilapidated and neglected-looking than Alan’s shack. Its roof was formed by long, wooden beams driven into the hill, supported by a frame of vertical logs. Whether it had never had walls, or they had simply rotted away, I couldn’t tell. Peering into the interior of the structure, I saw it extended deep into the side of the hill, the back of the building lost in shadow. I found my flashlight and shined it inside, gasping. The interior wended away at least fifty feet into the side of the mountain, its terminus lost around a sharp, left hand turn.
“How far does it go?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t gone too far inside. It doesn’t seem very stable. But look.” He ducked under the roof, which was no more than five feet high, and crouched down next to a pile of rusted metal. “I think this was a still. And there are broken bottles everywhere.”
“Bootleggers?”
“Yeah, I bet. This building is at least a hundred years old.”
“Holy shit. Cool.”
“Worth it?”
“Yeah.”
I ducked inside too, toeing curiously at the detritus. Dude paced back and forth in front of the building, unwilling to venture inside. I stood with my back to the tunnel-like interior for about four seconds before some instinct forced me to turn around and shine my light into it again. It was undeniably creepy, the way the light sputtered out, the tunnel still receding, its depths unknowable. Did something live down there? Was it asleep?
“Do you think… maybe bears live back there?”
“Maybe,” he said, unconcerned.
It occurred me that as unnerved as I was by the tunnel and the possible bears, I was totally at ease with Alan. I watched him picking through the remains of the still, wondering why, and recalled something I’d once read in a book about fear and intuition: Dogs were credited with being better judges of character than humans, but the author posited that they merely reflected their owners’ unacknowledged intuition. If a stranger creeped me out, Dude would sense my emotion and behave accordingly. I’d notice his dislike of the person before I was able to acknowledge my own. I wasn’t that wary of Alan because Dude wasn’t, because I wasn’t. It didn’t really explain much.
“Is this where you go when hunters come?” I asked.
“Hell no. Too easy to find, and I’d never be able to sleep with that behind me,” he jerked his thumb toward the tunnel. “There’s a real cave, farther up the mountain.”
“Can I see it?”
“Maybe tomorrow. What do you think this is?”
He passed me a long, rusted tube of metal. It was about ten inches long and slightly bigger around than my thumb. One end was flakes of rust, the other a neat if entirely rust-covered embrasure. I pointed it at him.
“It’s a rifle barrel. Twenty-two. Nice.” I passed it back to him. “I wonder where the rest of it is.”
We both started looking, but we gave up after a few minutes. There was too much organic matter—leaves, pine needles, and loam—to really hope to find anything. Alan sat back and studied the barrel, obviously pleased with his find.
“I bet there was a shoot out here.”
“Come on, it was probably just for squirrels.”
“Ugh,” he frowned, “Squirrels. God I hate them.”
“As… food?”
“As anything. Did you bring anything to eat?”
We sat down outside the distillery to share a lunch of energy bars, jerky, and water. Though I at first sat with my back to the building, within a minute I pointedly moved so I was facing it.
“Pretty freaky, huh?” Alan asked, smirking.
“Yeah. I swear I could feel cold air coming out of there just now.”
After lunch, rather than exploring farther into the distillery, we decided we’d had enough of the place. Alan led the way back to the gully, where we found to our dismay that the tree had slipped even farther. It was now plainly suicidal to attempt to cross that way, so after a brief debate we decided to follow the gully uphill until we found another deadfall or a point narrow enough to leap across.
Thanks to that detour, which added nearly three hours to our hike, we didn’t get back to the cabin until just before sundown. Exhausted, cranky, and starving, I flopped down on the couch as soon as we got inside. Over the sounds of Dude noisily satiating his thirst at the water bowl, I heard the shower come on. I heaved myself off the couch and knocked on the bathroom door.
“What?” came the guarded response from inside.
“Leave some hot water this time, please.”
“Oh—yeah, I’ll make it quick.”
I returned to the couch, intending to start a movie, and went out like a light.
* * *
When I woke up, thoroughly disoriented, night had fallen. I glanced at my watch: 10:30. The movement caught Alan’s attention at the same time he caught mine. Rather than dislodging me from the couch, he had chosen to sit on the floor to watch Armageddon. The movie was about halfway over.
“I made macaroni and cheese,” he said, probably in answer to a very loud grumble from my empty stomach. “And I fed Dude. Didn’t want to wake you.”
I groaned a “thank you” and staggered upstairs to fetch my pajamas. One quick, very hot shower later, I felt up to cramming some food in my mouth. I carried the half-full pot of mac and cheese to the couch with a spoon and went to work, which was unfortunately timed to coincide with a vomit-inducing, tender love scene in the movie.
To drown out the dialog, I announced, “Know what we should do?”
He jumped a little, startled by my too-loud voice. “What?”
“We should take all the movies they have here and try to line them up in a chain. You know, Kevin Bacon style. I bet we can do it.”
“Kevin Bacon style?”
“Sure, you know: Peter Stormare is in The Lost World and Armageddon. We’ve got Con Air, which also has Steve Buscemi, and Gone in 60 Seconds has Nick Cage… get it? All of these movies probably have either William H. Macy, Sam L. Jackson, or Danny Trejo, so it can’t be that hard to match them all up.”
“Would that… be fun for you?” he asked, bemused.
Seeing that my babbling had gotten us through the love scene, I set back and concluded, “It would be something to do.”
“All right, I’m game.”
He pulled the entire VHS library, which was substantial, out of the TV cabinet and laid each movie out on the living room rug. He lined up Jurassic Park, the Lost World, the empty Armageddon box, Con Air, and Gone in 60 Seconds.
“Okay, now what?”
I mused for a moment, then said, “Save Jolie for later. We’ll need her for the newer movies. What about something with Malkovich or Cusack?”
After much re-shuffling, debate, and compromise, we had only arranged thirty of the forty-six titles in an unbroken chain. Alan insisted he was too tired to carry on, so around midnight I took myself upstairs with all three Lord of the Rings books and nodded off sometime after two in the morning.
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Hesperus, Colorado
Thanks to the unplanned, five-hour nap, Sunday morning started early for me. I stayed in bed for a half an hour, fighting it with all my might, but I couldn’t get back to sleep.
There was nothing for it but to get up and get to work. After over a week there, I hadn’t done any laundry or cleaned much since that first de-spidering. I started a load of laundry, then tackled the kitchen. At first I tiptoed around, trying not to wake Alan; but after I’d dropped the macaroni pan on the floor without waking him up, I figured there was no point in trying to be quiet. While I scrubbed the dishes, I mentally shuffled those last sixteen movies, absurdly enthusiastic about such a silly task.
I was up to thirty-seven, totally lost in thought, when someone knocked on the door.
Dude, who’d been asleep in his chair, exploded at once into earsplitting barks. Deeply asleep as he was, Alan had no hope of snoozing through that. I whirled around as he sat up, both of us looking automatically through the window in the door; but whoever it was stood to the side, just a shoulder visible through the window. Dude got in the way as he bounded against the door, still sounding the alarm.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed. “No, don’t hide,” I added, seeing Alan shrinking toward the bookcase in the far corner. “They probably already saw you. Just walk to the bathroom like it’s not a big deal.”
“How do I walk like it’s not a big deal?”
“Just go, jeez.”
I waited until he was out of sight, then banished Dude to the back yard. In the interim, the person at the door had moved in front of the window, either spying inside or trying to identify herself. I opened the door on a tiny, white-haired old woman who looked both startled and abashed at the chaos she’d provoked. She gave me an uncertain smile.
“Abigail?” she asked.
“Yes—hi, are you Doreen? I didn’t expect you for a few more days.”
“Oh yes, we had to come back a little sooner than expected. I’m sorry to come so early, but I needed to speak with you as soon as possible. May I come in?”
I stood back, acutely aware of Dude still raising cane in the back yard. “Of course. Do you want some coffee? Sorry about the mess, by the way. I just got started cleaning.”
“Don’t worry about it. I won’t be long.” She glanced at the couch, which she had almost certainly seen Alan vacate, and then at me, the question unspoken.
“Tinder date,” I said, grinning. “Picked him up in Durango. Don’t worry, we didn’t break anything. I’ll get him out of here soon.”
“Oh. Um. Very good. Lovely… lovely town, Durango.”
I barely contained a giggle at how put off she was, covering over the moment by saying, “Yes, it’s a fun place. What brought you back from Ireland early?”
“We have someone who’s interested in seeing the cabin, actually.”
“Oh.” My smile faded at once. She had warned me, when my boss was renting the cabin, that it was for sale; but she hadn’t gotten any offers, or even any interest, in six months. I didn’t think it was worth worrying about. She seemed appropriately apologetic about my reaction.
