Chapter 2 Marc #2
She nods and strides ahead out of the store. ‘We’ll pick up food,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘To soak up the bourbon you’ve got on board.’
‘What did you say to her?’ Marc asks. ‘How did you get her to let us have that?’ The road snakes ahead in the low light. Kimble hasn’t said a word since she got behind the wheel.
Kimble bites her thumb. ‘She gave me a note to give to her son.’
‘Ok.’
‘He ran away four months ago. She thinks they took him, or he joined them – the Nowhere children. I told her we were making a documentary about them, that we were going up there.’ Kimble shrugs.
‘So I said I would give the note to him, if we found him.’ Kimble’s hands tighten on the wheel.
Her face is calm, you wouldn’t know she was upset unless you were paying very close attention, or knew her really well.
Marc can see the simmering in her, the anger in her skin.
‘And?’ he asks, neutral.
‘I’m not going to do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘She told me how to identify him,’ Kimble says.
‘It was by his scars. None on his face, his stepdaddy was careful.’ Kimble takes the note out of her pocket.
‘He had a head injury as a child so he’s slow, she said.
The kid was always making trouble so his stepfather had to keep him in line.
It got out of hand, sometimes, the discipline.
’ Kimble crumples the note in her fist. ‘She defended him, the stepfather.’ She rolls her window down and lets the crumpled paper fly out.
‘I’m not doing anything for that woman.’
They pass the rest of the trip in silence.
It’s a relief to go up towards the peaks where things are less complicated.
They drive up and up. They don’t see another car on the mountain.
Once a herd of deer, glimpsed to the left, melts out of view, startled into forest shadow.
This road, like every road around here, feels like you’re the first to travel it.
Kimble and Marc drive until they find a turnout overlooking a green valley meadow.
There’s a dented sign with a scratched campsite logo leaning hard to the left.
They pull over and sit on rocks to eat the burgers.
It’s difficult to shake off the day – Annie, the cashier from Mountain Foods and Goods, all the rest of it. The grass waves like silk below.
‘Merde,’ Marc says, absent.
Kimble nods, grim.
Marc screws up his burger wrapper. ‘Mountains give me the creeps.’
Kimble breathes deeply. ‘I’ll ask again. You ok to go on with this?’
Marc realises that the cigarette in his hand has broken in two.
Flakes of tobacco fall through his fingers in a gentle shower.
He watches with intense regret. It’s the last in the pack.
He wishes his eyes could set the tobacco alight, turn it to smoke as it drifts.
He’d lean in, suck the smoke right out of the air. A dragon taking back its own breath.
‘It’s a filthy habit,’ Kimble says.
‘I know,’ he says.
‘We’re just a couple of ridges over.’ Kimble points at the rise beyond the meadow, which is dark with pine and spruce. ‘It’s somewhere over there. Nowhere.’
‘You can’t know that,’ he says, exasperated. ‘It all looks the same. Forest, forest, mountain, mountain.’
‘Don’t be so French.’
‘I’m Canadian,’ he says, mindless.
‘Then this should feel like home.’
‘It gets to me. The Nowhere children, all that urban legend.’
‘Urban legends tell us who we are, and what we fear.’
Marc kicks a rock like it’s the rock’s fault.
‘I was busy while you were drinking,’ Kimble says. ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you.’ She picks up the burger wrapper Marc has dropped. She looks out over the hills, in the direction of Nowhere. ‘It seems to happen less often than it did. But it’s always the same. They’re taken, and they are bled.’
‘No access,’ he says. ‘No corroboration.’
‘Patience,’ Kimble says, turning her direct gaze on him. ‘Lizard tail, Marc.’
It’s their rule. Once they have a story by the tail they have to hold on at all costs. Lots of times the tail detaches and the lizard slips off into the dark. But sometimes, it doesn’t. So if they get a hold, they cling. They made the rule long ago and it’s a good one, most of the time.
‘It’s gross.’ His fingers tremble on the rolling paper and he makes an ugh of frustration. ‘Leaf Winham didn’t die.’
Kimble’s face goes hard as it does when she’s confused. ‘He did, Marc.’
‘He’s a virus. Every time someone watches one of those movies, he spreads a little more. We’re keeping him alive by doing this.’
Kimble nods. ‘It’s terrible,’ she says, emotionless. ‘But it’s our job to look terrible in the eye. You know that. And you owe me.’
Marc inhales. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says, distant.
‘The hell you don’t.’
‘Have you heard from Margot recently?’ Marc asks, polite.
Kimble gets up and takes the burger wrappers to the trash can. In the glimpse he catches of her face he sees that she hates him. Just in this moment, though. He’s sure that it’s just in this moment.
Marc finds an old grill pit in the undergrowth and makes a fire. Kimble gives him one of her long looks. ‘You nearly dropped the ball back there, during the interview with Annie.’
‘Bad day, I guess.’
Kimble leans in close. She smells like detergent, clean hair, healthy skin. ‘You nearly lost her. Don’t mess with me, Marky Mark.’
‘I was waiting to call Silvie,’ he says. ‘I waited all day. It stole my focus.’
Kimble breathes long and slow. She’s trying to push it out with her breath – the anger.
‘And?’ she asks.
‘It’s not good.’ He is startled to realise that this is the truth. It’s just not all of it. Kimble nods. She probably knows he’s holding back but she won’t push him. She’s giving him privacy again. Or maybe Marc has exhausted her, emptied her of the power to care.
They met in Wichita, interviewing a man who had been a serial killer’s dentist. He wanted to talk about the serial killer’s teeth and his eyes, about how they looked up at the dentist from the chair, red-rimmed, over the serial killer’s pink straining cave of a mouth.
About how often the serial killer visited the dentist, gums bleeding with hours of brushing – because of the stress of avoiding capture or the pleasure of killing, whatever story Marc decided on in the edit.
The dentist was small and mild. He spoke quietly and precisely, gave them answers any dentist would give. Marc started to wind up. It wasn’t worth wasting any more time on it. What had he expected from an interview with a dentist, anyway?
‘Last question.’ Marc didn’t really have another question but it’s a good rule, always, to ask more than you need. ‘You can see stress in teeth, can’t you? Grinding, clenching …’
‘Sometimes.’ The man began to shake. ‘There was nothing like that. But once there was this thing – I wondered what he had eaten.’ Marc felt the camera operator next to him tense.
Sometimes Marc gets the interview so right that it feels wrong.
It feels like debriding flesh, breaking bone to reveal the chest cavity, the heart where it hides like a little naked animal.
‘What did you think he had eaten?’ Marc asked.
‘During one check-up I found a thing in his teeth,’ said the dentist. ‘I thought it was tomato, then I thought it was a sliver of carrot.’
‘And?’ Marc’s hair rose slow and gentle off the back of his neck.
‘It was just a little sliver,’ the dentist said, pleading. ‘It could have been any kind of flesh.’
Marc turned to the camera operator to signal to her to get out from behind him, get coverage. She was already moving.
‘What was it, in his teeth?’ Marc kept his tone gentle.
‘He came to that appointment the day after the third woman disappeared.’ The dentist’s voice had dropped to a whisper.
‘The one he—’ Marc said. ‘And you think …’
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘I wonder every day.’ He buried his face in his hands.
Marc wanted to tell the DOP to make sure to stay on the dentist, not to cut just because he’s not talking. But then he felt her, silent and attentive at his side. She was getting all of it.
Afterwards, out on the street, Marc and the camerawoman took deep breaths, almost in unison.
‘You were good back there,’ she said.
‘You too.’ He offered her a hand. ‘Marc.’
‘Scheherazade.’
He laughed at the resignation in her face.
‘My parents smoked a lot of weed.’
‘Let’s get something to eat,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve got a job coming up in New Jersey next month.’
Marc calls her Kimble because of her many ways of being. Like Richard Kimble in the old TV show, or the movie with Harrison Ford. Kimble seems equipped for every circumstance. Her real self is fugitive.
‘I’m ok,’ Marc says to Kimble now. ‘Really.’ The firelight cracks and dances. ‘Don’t worry about me, Scheherazade.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘But it suits you so well.’
She snorts.
‘They’ll only buy this if it features him.’ Marc feels the rising pressure of anger and takes a deep breath. ‘Leaf Winham.’
The fire spits and they both jump.
‘Maybe,’ Kimble says. ‘It’s part of the story, after all.’
‘I hate it.’
‘Not everyone’s like you, Marky Mark.’
‘What am I like?’ he asks. Sometimes it’s better when other people answer this question for you. It means you don’t have to do it yourself.
‘Blank. It’s relaxing.’
‘I am not blank,’ he says, irritated. ‘Anyway you’re so back and forth. You go away behind a camera, and then you come out and make people like you and then you go away again. You’ve got no centre.’
‘Au contraire,’ Kimble pokes up sparks from the fire with a stick. ‘I’m just showing you all of who I am. I have layers.’
‘I have layers too.’
‘But your layers are all the same,’ Kimble says. ‘All the way down.’
‘Wow.’
‘It’s not a bad thing. There’s just no nuance to you. No complexity. You’re kind of simple—’