Ordinary Bear, page 23
“Where to, Farley?”
“Just take her away from here. Away from him.”
“I said don’t fucking move.” The Ferryman pulled the gun from his pants and waved it at Wayne and the girl.
That changed things. Farley considered his next move, but every line of action led to the same result—he could not outrun The Asshole, and he couldn’t just hand over the duffel bag without him figuring out he’d been shorted. He knew there was still a chance that Lissa would show up, and if she did, her presence would only complicate things. Seeing her might set Olive off, and her tears might garner some sympathy—but he thought it just as likely that seeing her would set The Ferryman off and inflame the situation further. He tried to focus over the pain, to formulate a plan, but it felt like trying to tune a distant radio station with a broken antenna. Too much static.
Another set of headlights appeared on the zoo road. They all watched as it turned into the parking lot and approached, the lights rolling across the scene hypnotically.
“What the fuck is this now?” The Ferryman said. “Better not be fucking cops.”
The car—a small SUV, Farley thought, maybe a Honda—stopped a hundred feet away from the BMW, its windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, back and forth, back and forth against the rain. One of the back doors opened. Lissa all but flew out, running toward the other car.
“Olive! I’m here, love!”
“Mom!”
“Stop.” The Ferryman pointed the gun at her, and she came to an abrupt halt, raising her arms over her head and stumbling forward, off-balance. At the sight of the gun, the Honda’s driver hit the gas and peeled out of the parking lot. “Your friend is a chickenshit.”
“It was an Uber,” Lissa said.
“You should have gotten a Zipcar.”
“Stay there, Lissa,” Farley said. “Wayne, take Olive to her mother.”
“The fuck you will, Wayne.” The Ferryman waved the gun between them.
“I have your money,” Farley said. “Right here.” He held the duffel in front of him.
“What are you talking about, Farley?” Lissa said.
“Deal with me.” He shook the bag. “Not her.”
“Just everybody shut the fuck up,” The Ferryman said. When he pointed the gun at Lissa again, Farley took a step toward him to get his attention. He swung the barrel back toward Farley. Seeing him handle the weapon, Farley could tell he had not been trained and did not have any useful experience. He knew guys who could tell the make and model from fifty yards, guys who romanticized firearms, elevating them to a state of taxonomical worship like a lepidopterist with butterflies, but he couldn’t tell the caliber, just that it was a semiautomatic with a clip. From what he knew about Dolly, he could assume it was a cannon, but it didn’t much matter—even at forty feet, The Ferryman had a pretty good chance of hitting such a big and slow-moving target.
“Tell us a joke, Wayne,” Farley said, trying to buy time to think.
“Really?”
“Just one. To lighten the mood.”
In the darkness he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw The Ferryman roll his eyes. He waved the gun as if to say, Go ahead, get on with it. Wayne scratched his head, maybe thinking of the best joke for a hostage situation in the parking lot of a zoo.
“OK,” he said finally. “Lemme ask you something. What’s the difference between a hippo and a Zippo?”
“Jesus Christ. I have no fucking idea.”
“One is really heavy,” Wayne said, “and one is a little lighter.”
The Ferryman spit on the ground in his general direction. “There’s something fucking wrong with you,” he said.
But Farley looked at Wayne like an oracle. “You’re a beautiful genius,” he said to Wayne, and then to The Ferryman, “Hey shitbird—pay attention.”
Wincing against the effort, he bent down and unzipped the duffel, took out the big bottle of hand sanitizer, and poured it all over the bag and its contents. Then he took Sister Isaiah’s Zippo lighter from his pocket and spun the wheel to produce the flame, hoping like hell the rain would not put it out.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I told you, I don’t trust you. Let the girl and her mother go, or I torch your money.” He held the lighter closer to the bag. “There’s no other way out of this, Asher.”
“How about I fucking shoot you? How about that for a way out?” If the use of his given name bothered him at all, it didn’t show.
“See what I mean?”
“What?”
“That’s why I don’t trust you.”
“Shut the fuck up. Back away from the money or I’ll blow a fucking hole in you.”
“You can’t shoot us all.”
“I don’t fucking have to. I just have to shoot you.”
Shit, Farley thought. He’s right.
“You shoot me, I drop this lighter into the bag and all your money goes up in flames.” He held the Zippo closer to the duffel. “You going to shoot the fire out too?”
Indignant—and starting to panic—The Ferryman put his hand to his head, thinking, waving the gun barrel as he went. Clearly, events were not going as smoothly as he’d pictured, and his drug-addled brain was beginning to short. After a few strenuous seconds, he pointed the gun at Olive.
“Fine. I’ll just shoot the girl. That would make us fucking even.”
“No!” Lissa screamed. Farley could hear the fear in her voice, could feel it, not just how it shook and broke but the desperation in it too.
“Didn’t you just tell me you wouldn’t hurt a kid?” he said, and The Ferryman pointed the gun back at him.
“You don’t have to shoot anyone,” Lissa said, her voice frantic. “Please. Just let my daughter go. She didn’t do anything. Please.”
“Hey, you can’t hurt the girl, man,” Wayne said. “She didn’t do anything.”
“They’re right,” Farley said. “Nobody has to get hurt. Just come get your money. But first, let the girl go or I torch it.”
The Ferryman swung the gun from Farley to Wayne to Lissa and then back to Farley.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “Just everybody shut the fuck up so I can think.”
The flames were beginning to heat the metal of the lighter, and already Farley found it uncomfortable. Soon it would be unbearable, impossible to hold.
The Ferryman swung the gun back at Olive. “Put out the lighter and step away from the bag or I shoot the fucking kid. Final offer.”
“No!” Lissa said.
“Mom!” Olive yelled.
“You can’t do that, man,” Wayne said. “You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Shut. The fuck. Up,” The Ferryman said.
“You can’t hurt a kid, man. You said you wouldn’t.”
“I also said to shut the fuck up.”
The lighter had begun to burn Farley’s fingers. He watched Wayne step in front of Olive, turning his back to The Ferryman so that he faced her. He reached down and lifted her into his arms.
“Trust me, man,” he yelled over his shoulder. “You don’t want to hurt a kid. You don’t want to do that.” Keeping his back to The Ferryman, his own body between the gun and girl, he walked sideways toward Lissa.
“Put her down, you crazy old piece of shit.”
“Good job, Wayne.” Farley could smell the flesh on his fingers burning, and it took a deep-reaching stubbornness not to let go of the lighter.
The Ferryman held his hands to his head and pounded his forehead with the butt of the gun.
“Would everybody please just shut the fuck up already?” he screamed. “I can’t even hear myself fucking think.”
Lissa paused for a moment. Then she began to run toward Olive and Wayne. He reacted quickly and pointed the gun at her.
“Stop. Now.”
He took a few steps her way.
“Put the kid down, Wayne, or I’ll shoot her fucking mother.”
“Mom!”
Farley yelled for his attention and dropped the hot lighter into the bag. The vapors from the hand sanitizer caught fire immediately, even in the rain, and a cloud of blue flame appeared, devouring the oxygen in front of him and singeing his eyebrows and the hair on his hands and arms.
“Fuuuuuck.” The Ferryman began running toward him, gun raised. The flames turned yellow and orange as the clothes in the duffel caught fire, the heat already intense and unpleasant. Farley grabbed it by the handles, burning his hand. He shifted his weight to his good leg, pivoting on his heel like a chewed-up, ungainly compass tracing unsteady circles on the blank page of the parking lot, and spun once, twice, three times. Timing his release as best he could, he let go, launching the bag as far across the parking lot toward the zoo’s gate as he could. His momentum and weight and unhappy legs and gravity all conspired against him, and he fell, landing hard on his side on the pavement.
The Ferryman raced past him toward the flaming bag.
“Get them out of here, Wayne,” Farley yelled. “Go. Take the car.”
But Lissa, moving with adrenaline, with a mother’s instinct, had already snatched Olive from Wayne’s arms. Farley watched as she rushed her into the BMW’s back seat like a presidential security detail. She held the door open and yelled to them, to Farley, to Wayne.
“Get in!”
She circled around the car to the driver’s door. Wayne looked unsure about how to proceed. He looked at the car and then back at Farley, lying on the ground, and then back at the car.
“Go, Wayne,” Farley said, but Lissa was already on it.
“Get in the fucking car,” she yelled, an angry mother’s tone that said she meant business. Without further hesitation, Wayne sprinted to the BMW and dove into the back beside Olive.
“Farley!” Lissa yelled. “Come on.”
Unsteadily he climbed to his feet and began limping toward her, toward the car, as fast as he could. But his legs had nothing left—furious, broken, a betrayal in wet fatigues—and he fell again. He looked at Lissa.
“Go,” he said.
Behind him, The Ferryman screamed a protracted curse with enough heat to boil water.
“Fuuuuck.”
Three more followed it, each successively longer.
“Fuuuck. Fuuuuuuck. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.”
He’d reached the duffel; maybe he’d put out the flames or had seen the burnt laundry inside. It didn’t matter now. Farley did not turn around to look. As he got to his feet again, he did not take his eyes off Lissa.
“Farley?”
“Go,” he said again. Even with the distance between them, in the misty darkness, he saw the alarm on her face, saw how her jaw and brow tightened in unison, saw the tears in her eyes as she raised a finger and pointed behind him. Rising slowly to his feet, before he could even turn to look, he felt the bullet rip into his lower back. A fraction of a second later, he heard the gunshot. Though not long, the gap was enough to confuse him.
He did not feel pain. Not exactly.
Momentum, maybe. Brute force. Like being clubbed by a canoe paddle. A board.
It felt more like something blunt than a bullet’s surgical entry. When it hit, he stumbled forward, legs like cast iron. Inflexible. Heavy. But he did not fall.
Not at first.
Lissa’s voice broke as she screamed his name. She doubled over as if the bullet had hit her instead of him. She tried to scream again but seemed unable to find her breath, panic and fear confounding her. Farley took a step toward her but could not finish it. Falling again to his knees on the wet, rocky pavement, he looked down at his hands, at the blood covering them, and at that moment the pain arrived, as if the bullet had moved faster than the sound of the gunshot and the sound had moved faster than the pain it caused.
He could hear Olive crying from the open car.
“Farley?” Lissa said, her voice desperate.
“Go,” he told her one last time.
The sky chose that moment to open up. Rain poured down on them like a building collapsing. In a chaos of limbs, Lissa got into the car and gunned the engine before she’d even closed the door. The BMW’s six cylinders roared like a planet being born, and the car spun in a tight arc, the unlatched door swinging open and slamming shut as the car whipped around, the halogen headlights carving a sweeping path across the nearly empty lot. When it turned for the exit, Farley saw Olive’s face at the back window, saw the whites of her wide eyes. Then Wayne put a hand on her head, pushing her safely out of sight. He raised his other hand to Farley, who tried to raise his own in response but could not.
It felt like the muscles had been disassembled and reassembled incorrectly. He took a wincing, pained breath. His chest burned. He’d suffered a lot of pain in his life. Inordinate amounts of it. Today alone he’d added to the aggregate, as if he’d set a goal of finding the boundaries of punishment his body and mind were capable of withstanding and exceeding it. But the day was not over yet, and he had a feeling that a lot of hurt still lay in store for him.
The car swung a hard left onto the exit road, tires squealing like a wounded animal. All he saw were taillights vanishing. The sound of the engine vanished with it, and then only silence remained, as if the car had sucked all the ambient noise and the air out of the night and carried it with it, trailing it all behind like a vapor trail fading to oblivion. The silence brought a moment of calm as surprising as it was necessary.
The Ferryman broke it first, shattering the night once more.
“You stupid fucking asshole. You fucking stupid, cut-up, ugly piece of shit. I’m gonna fucking kill you. This could have been so easy. All you had to do was give me the fucking money. Now I’m gonna fucking kill you. And then I’m going back to that bitch’s apartment.”
Farley tried again for a breath. This time it came a little more easily, the pain still there and no less intense, but no longer a shock.
Expected. Familiar. A comfort, almost.
Blood soaked his shirt and hands. His insides felt like broken glass, muscles and limbs and nerves like metal shavings beneath the skin. Before he’d been shot, he’d been beat up, knocked unconscious, had fallen down stairs. He’d walked dozens of miles. He’d rowed a few more. “You look like you’ve been through some shit,” his mother used to say when he’d come home on leave from the army. “Let me make you a meatloaf.” Today he’d been through all the shit, all of it, with no meatloaf even to show for it. The Ferryman pointed the gun with a loose wrist and lazy hands, what his marksmanship instructor would have called “weak muzzle discipline.” But by Farley’s count, Dolly had fired twice in the crash pad, and he’d fired just once since then, which meant enough rounds remained in the clip for even a shitty marksman to do the job. Farley knew he couldn’t outrun or dodge them. But he knew, too, that he didn’t have to. He got to his feet and turned to face The Ferryman.
“You can’t kill me,” he said.
“Why the fuck not?”
Farley stood as straight and tall as his shattered body would allow, widening his shoulders, stretching his arms, cracking his neck. Taking a deep breath and locking eyes with The Ferryman so his body movement would not betray him any earlier than necessary, he lowered his center of gravity and shifted his weight to his good leg.
“Because fuck you,” he said. “That’s why.”
Muzzle blasts lit up the night as he charged. A concussion of gunshots rent the air, scattering night birds from the trees and waking the sleeping animals as the sound echoed throughout the habitats of the dark zoo. As the pain within him expanded, embracing the new pain, it gave him comfort to know that nothing else remained to do, that he would not fail in his task—not this time—and to know, too, that he did not need to survive this. He just had to stay alive long enough to see it through.
47
A GIRL, HER ARMS OPEN WIDE TO EMBRACE HIM
Farley made his way along the fence behind the zoo with one hand, using the other to apply pressure to his wounds. He left blood along the top rail and a trail of it in the dirt behind him, and the sharp wire cut his palm, but he did not feel the pain. Even in the dark, he found the gate Lissa had shown him. With some trouble, he disengaged the lock. Once inside, he stumbled and fell, and then again, getting back up somehow and moving forward each time and shuffling inexorably toward his final destination.
The rain had stopped. The sky had cleared. The moon threw enough light for him to see by, but he had walked the zoo enough times by now to know his way even without it.
The animals of the Great Northwest habitat were restless, provoked, maybe, by the sound of gunshots. Some cages were empty, their occupants kept indoors, but the animals that remained outside seemed aware of him. His presence made them anxious, the scent of a wet and filthy human, the scent of blood. The condors paced their cage, grunting and coughing, and the sea lions circled and barked in their pool, splashing water in their huffing excitations. Farley could smell what they smelled too—it was not just blood that leaked out of him, but his past. Life itself. As he went, memories of all the people he’d known spilled out of him, memories of the places he’d been. Nirva and their polar highs and lows, Abril’s birth, their fluid definition of a family. Mayor Nell spitting tobacco, her laughter echoing across the icy dump. Rebecca and Pastor John at his door with a Bible and a chess pie she’d made to welcome him to the village. Wilson Mequssuk cheating at poker, cards tucked beneath his Barrow Whalers cap. With each step he lost more, first remembering and then forgetting as his past leaked out behind him and soaked into the ground. Dolly. Edge. Sister Isaiah. Flex. Lady MacDeath. Even Skelly and Chad. The relentless darkness of an Arctic winter, northern lights shimmering over the sound. The communal joy of spring ice-out, mosquitoes the size of crows. Suffering in the South Carolina humidity as the army beat years of accumulated behavioral knowledge into him at Fort Jackson, like metal hammered in a forge. The physical exhaustion of basic, the cruel and methodical way the instructors stripped them of their identities. One by one he remembered the soldiers he’d trained with, those who’d survived it, those it had broken. Their time together and the time he had left dripped out onto the path he followed, the past and present indistinguishable, the future impossible. The further he went into the zoo, the more he remembered; the more he remembered, the more he lost. The two years he’d been stationed in Wiesbaden, the steady trauma of soldiers passing through. His mother chain-smoking cigarettes and cursing at the world and its many disappointments. His high school football coach, the classmate he shared a locker with, the goldfish he’d won at the Pendleton Round-Up. As his strength ebbed, his legs failed, and every few yards he stumbled again.
