30. Sacha #2
That animal hid in a hole while a woman he outweighs by thirty pounds took a man's wrist apart with a fire iron, and I have never loved anything so useless in my life.
I set the lamp upright on the floor behind the stove where its light could not reach a window, and I looked at her properly for the first time. Here is where I made the second mistake of the night, and it was far worse than the first.
There was blood up the front of her sweater and across the back of one hand.
"You are bleeding."
"It isn't mine." She was looking at her own hand as though it belonged to a patient. "It came off the window frame. Sit down on the stool and let me see your neck."
"It is glass."
"Sit down. You have three of them in you and one is somewhere I do not like." She got the tweezers out of the tin on the shelf and stood between my knees and worked in the lamplight with that sweater still wet on her. Her hands were absolutely steady. That is when it started.
The shaking came up through her about ninety seconds in. It is a thing I have seen in men who have just been very brave and have run out of the chemistry that made it possible. She got the last piece out, set the tweezers down, and took hold of both my shoulders. Then her whole body went.
"Sit," I said, and put her on the stool, and got her head down.
Then she got up off it, went to the door, and was sick in the snow outside her own kitchen.
I stood in the door with the rifle in one hand and the other on the back of her neck.
That is the adrenaline coming out of her, I thought.
She is a nurse and she has watched a man die on her own floor tonight, and she is entitled to every part of this.
I brought her water. She drank about an inch of it, and then she spread one hand over her own stomach and held it there.
I read it as nausea and nothing else. Every piece of it was in front of me by then, and I did not assemble a single one.
Then she stood up in the doorway with her mouth full of snow water and tried for the third time.
"This will not keep until morning. I am not sure it is fair to hand it to you tonight, and I am going to hand it to you anyway."
"Then look at the bed first."
I do not know why I said it that way. I wanted her to understand what we were leaving and why there would be no argument about it.
I took the lamp over and held it up, and we both stood there and looked at what somebody had done to the place where the two of us sleep.
There were six holes in the mattress and two straight through the pillow on her side, and the feathers were all over that floor like the end of an afternoon in a slaughterhouse.
Whatever she had built up to say went out of her all at once. I watched it go. Her mouth closed and her eyes did something I have not seen in them before or since, and she stood there and looked at that pillow for a long moment.
"Those two are on my side," she said.
"That is not what it means."
"Do not do that to me. My head goes there."
"It means somebody sold a drawing of this house to a man who has not once stood inside it. Nobody out there knows a thing about you." I put the lamp down. "None of it matters if we are gone inside the hour."
"Then we go."
"Get your boots."
And that was the whole of it. There was no argument in it and no bargaining, and not three minutes spent persuading a woman that her life had ended for the second time in a month.
She got the duffel onto the table and packed the way she has packed in every rented room of the last two years, fast and always in the same order.
"You have nine minutes," I said. "Take the coat, the boots, the bag, and nothing that can be bought again."
"Where are we going?"
"We walk the creek bed down to the culvert, and the truck is already sitting there."
"You moved it this afternoon."
"I put it down there this afternoon, and then I walked the route back up twice, once at my pace and once at yours."
"That is what the walk was." She stopped with a boot in her hand. "He is watching the road."
"He is watching the lake." I put the last magazine in my coat. "I have spent a week teaching him to watch the lake. He is one man, and one man cannot be on the ice and on the road at once. That is why we are walking out of here tonight instead of digging in to wait for the rest of them."
She did the thing then that undoes me. She stopped in the middle of that wrecked room with her arms full of a dead woman's camera and looked at me across it.
"You said you had something for me as well."
"Mine can wait for the truck."
"Can it?"
"It cannot, and I am going to say it anyway once we are moving." I took her coat off the hook and held it open for her. "It will make you angry. You may be angry at me the whole way to the county line."
There was blood on her sleeve and feathers in her hair and a man under a blanket six feet from her boots, and she still very nearly laughed. Then she put the dog's bowl in the bag with the rest of it, since that is who she is.
I searched both of them before we left, because anybody who leaves a body unsearched gets surprised a second time.
There was cash on both of them and one telephone between them.
Neither man carried papers or a name or anything else that anybody would be sorry about later.
In the breast pocket of the younger one there was a folded strip of paper with a square drawn on it in pencil, four lines and a mark in the corner.
It took me a moment to understand that I was looking at my own house from above, with an X where the bed is.
I put it in my coat. I did not show it to her, and that was the third mistake, and they were beginning to accumulate.
We went out through the pantry into the cold with the dog going ahead of us like an idiot pony and the lake lying flat and white and empty on our left.
She stayed a stride behind my right shoulder the whole way down and never once asked me to slow.
Twice I put a hand on her back to steer her around deadfall, and both times she was breathing harder than that walk had any right to cost her.
The woods were not safe anymore. Neither was the cabin, or the town, or any hole I have ever crawled into in three years of crawling. I got her out into the dark with my hand pressed flat against her back, and I still did not know that I was carrying two of them out of that house instead of one.