Harmless (15 page)

Joseph couldn’t get up. He stared into the black woods and pressed the swelling behind his ear, making the world bend and keen like a tune played on a saw blade. He had to find Franny, and to find her he had to catch up with Alex. He got to his feet and turned on the smaller flashlight, its soft yellow beam seeming out of place, as if he’d turned on
his bedside lamp to find himself in the wilderness. He stepped off the path, following the yellow beam like a golden thread as it led him between the trees and deeper into the forest. Soon the trees thinned out enough for him to risk jogging. The coyotes yapped in the distance, and Alex’s flashlight sparkled far ahead and then disappeared. Joseph pushed his body, ordering it through the forest, dodging the brightly lit trees that tumbled out of the night like blocks of scenery falling from the back of a moving truck. He jumped over a boulder and went careening into a thicket of saplings, their springy trunks rebounding him back to his feet. The beam of Alex’s flashlight showed in the distance again, and soon the chase took them up an eroded hill face, tree roots protruding from the ground like the ribs of a whale, patches of exposed rock trying to sweep his feet out from under him. The pounding in Joseph’s head had started again, and when he reached level ground he stopped to rest his spasm-riddled legs and to drag air into his lungs. How did he get so out of shape? Did he really think he’d never have to put his body to use for anything but fifteen-minute city walks and twenty-minute fucks?

Once he was able to stand straight, he saw Alex about a hundred feet away. He was in front of a cluster of tall evergreens, the flashlight hanging at his side, throwing a skirt of light around his legs.

“They chased him into that grove,” he said, pointing the light down one of the even rows of trees, likely the legacy of a reforestation scheme. Alex strutted into the trees expecting to be followed, the flashlight’s beam bouncing ahead of him like a hound on a long leash.

How far off course had they gone? Joseph didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to consider why they’d left the path the girls were following to chase Tyler through the bush. It was not the time to second-guess Alex. He was a former soldier. He’d been trained to read maps, assess dangerous situations, survive behind enemy lines. If he said that Tyler offered their best chance of finding the girls, he must be right. Tyler was a dog. He would track Rebecca through any peril if his master so commanded.

Master
—there was a comforting word! Joseph could use a master right now, someone to unburden him of his autonomy and put him in the service of finding Franny. Never mind the price at night’s end.

He stepped into the grove and followed Alex, the air quickly closing in on him, the treetops swaying in the steady breeze that did not reach his face. Soon a silhouette appeared in front of him. Alex had turned off his flashlight and was straining to hear something. The grove was quiet, save for the blood racing to Joseph’s head. The sharp scent of tree resin collected in the back of his throat like a paste, making him want to spit.

A shrill canine howl erupted not far away, answered by that bloody, gleeful yapping. The fear seemed to follow a cable up Joseph’s legs into his bowels, raising every hair on his body. He started backing up, but Alex stood his ground.

“They’re killing him,” Alex said. “Let them know we’re here!” He started shouting—“Fuckers! You fucking assholes!”—in a savage military bark and ran toward Tyler’s howling, hurling his invective into the dark.

Joseph turned on his flashlight and followed, shouting the familiar schoolyard sex words, wishing he had a store of more blasphemous language to hurl at the coyotes. The ground was sloping, and as he raced between the trees the downward momentum tugged at his legs, dangerously stretching his stride. Alex let out a volley of Finnish before careening into the lower boughs of a massive blue fir tree that had escaped the loggers’ saws. Joseph tried to stop but only slowed enough to take a running leap over Alex into the branches. Tyler was shrieking, or maybe it was one of the coyotes. The sound wrenched the hope from Joseph like a bone from its socket. The two men rolled from side to side, trying to gain purchase in the springy branches, Alex refusing to let go of the rifle or the flashlight, as if a point of pride was at stake. Eventually, he got to his feet. Joseph couldn’t see his face, but Alex’s sagging shoulders and the lowered rifle told him there was no point in hurrying. Alex stared down at the flashlight in his hand as though it were a baton with no runner to pass it to. Joseph stood up, trying to fight a fresh rush of panic.

“Alex, we’ve got to find Tyler.”

Alex started walking. “It’s too late.”

They emerged into a large clearing and edged forward, sweeping their flashlights in wide arcs, illuminating old tree stumps and patches of chest-high evergreens. Ahead of them, a swarm of fireflies glowed and faded, clustering around a high, solid block, its outlines barely visible in the moonlight. Alex let out a soft grunt. This wasn’t good. As
the men drew closer, the block slowly revealed itself, first as a black slab at least fifteen feet tall, then its true form: a massive tree trunk scarred by shredded bark and burrow holes, piles of fallen branches forming a jagged ring around its base. Alex moved his flashlight beam up the trunk to the tree’s crotch, which had been blasted by a lightning bolt that shattered the rack of branches, cleaving the charred boughs like the halves of a 3-D Rorschach blot. What power had visited this place? Joseph imagined a giant axe smashing through the branches to split the tree, the mangled stump left standing to warn interlopers, and his mind connected the image to earlier that day, when Alex had split the damp log with a single blow of his axe. A feeling of violence frozen in time permeated the atmosphere, a crystallized catastrophe, and he smelled copper and an under-odour of shit.

The beams of their flashlights played over the tangled, leafless branches until they converged on a patch of dark liquid beside a small mound. Joseph looked away before his eyes could process the details. Not Alex. He staggered toward the mound and fell to his knees, letting out a low groan. Joseph took a deep breath. He had to see for himself. A dog-sized body lay crumpled in front of Alex, who nodded his head with eerie regularity, reconfirming the same brute fact: the coyotes had completely gutted Tyler, strewing his intestines as far as the organs’ length allowed. The husky’s head was wedged against one of the knobby tree roots, his eyes locked on the bright stars, mouth lolling. Worst of all was Alex’s face—he was devastated but also confused, as if he couldn’t place this slaughter within
a believable storyline. Tyler might as well have been torn apart by a werewolf.

What was the proper reaction to this? Joseph didn’t know, so he followed the trail of blood splatters away from the scene. So much blood. They say blood is actually blue, that oxygen in the air makes it red, but he didn’t believe it—why didn’t your cheeks blush blue? He pondered this riddle, trying to block out Alex’s hiccuping sobs. A man loses his dog and weeps—classic stuff, but why did the sound make Joseph feel even more numb? He had to keep moving. He ran his flashlight over the downed branches, following one contorted bough up and over his head, where it bent into a jagged arc spiked with sharp stumps, like a monstrous tentacle rising from the wreckage.

Just step away
, he told himself.
Move your legs
. He obeyed the order and stepped onto a yielding mass that sent up a gagging gust of blood and shit. It was another casualty of Tyler’s Last Stand, a coyote with its throat torn out. This time Joseph couldn’t stop staring. The coyotes had gone for the soft spot below Tyler’s ribs; Tyler attacked their faces. The coyote’s sensitive black nose was almost entirely chewed off—muscles and tendons showed in places, and a tube protruded from its throat like a pipe clogged with grease, as if someone had frantically torn it apart searching for a misplaced object. Its wide-open eye was almost serene, an expression of submissive wonder imprinted on the filmy lens like a watermark, as though the animal had welcomed death at the end.

Alex came up beside him and pinned the dead coyote under his powerful flashlight beam.

“Fucking cocksucker,” he said, in full dialogue with his rage. Joseph envied him. Anything was preferable to the numbness that had scattered his emotions. Alex’s flashlight found the hollows and rises in the coyote’s body and
it
became
he
—the pack alpha, now shrunk by blood loss and deflated lungs, stripped of whatever essence had made him fierce in life. Alex swept the beam along the corpse, from head to haunch and back again, creating an eerie illusion of bristling movement. He did it again, accelerating until the dead body seemed to flex and ripple like a monster in a stop-motion movie, the coyote reanimated long enough to answer for Tyler’s death. He homed in on the coyote’s mangled head. There was something brazen, almost pornographic, about the exposed tissue, the molars, and pink gums naked in the light. Alex pushed the rifle barrel against the exposed mouth, forcing the coyote to smile.

“I’m having a great day,” he said in a bouncy voice.

Again, Joseph’s nerves ordered him to run. He had no words for this.

Alex adjusted the mouth to a curling frown. “I’m having a
baaad
day.” He made the coyote smile again—“I’m having a
great
day”—then frown—“I’m having a
baaad
day”—the coyote so earnestly somber, so unaware of the joke that it got funnier with each repetition, until Joseph felt a roll of laughter break through the numbness. It spread to Alex, whose dirty face was lined with tear tracks.

“I’ll show you a bad day,” Alex said. He prodded the coyote’s torn throat with the rifle, making the head loll and the tongue jiggle, then he kicked the coyote so hard its
head snapped into an impossible angle. Joseph started to applaud, the same involuntary muscles that had set him laughing now moving his hands to reward Alex’s sight-gag. Alex gave the coyote another kick, knocking the head free of its connective socket and extending the neck.

This is what you get for sticking your nose in
, Joseph thought.
You end up a piece of meat
.

Joseph kicked the coyote’s stomach, excited by how deep his shoe penetrated the soft flesh. He brought his foot down and broke the coyote’s ribs, the sound of breaking bones so much sharper than in the movies. Alex gave the body a punt that broke one of the front legs, and he kicked the coyote’s bottom jaw so hard it completely dislocated, making the battered head look like one of those deep-sea fish, all jaws and teeth and squishy eyes. Alex nudged Joseph aside and stepped into the next kick. It was decisive. The head flew off and vanished in the darkness. They heard it bounce off a rock with a wet slap.

It was over. Joseph walked back to the tree stump and pressed his fingers against the crumbling bark, craving the resistance of a solid object. He could hear Martha asking him how he could have done such a terrible thing to a dead animal. “It was surprisingly easy,” he told her. What surprised him was being spared the experience for so long, the dumb luck of making it into his early forties without having mutilated a body—canine or otherwise.

What glorious times we live in! Our grandchildren should be so lucky
.

No one made you do it
, Martha said, long immune to his pontificating.

If I couldn’t desecrate that corpse I might as well have run back to the farm. Those are the rules out here
.

Typical–fucking typical. Hiding behind words again
.

Then she was gone, replaced by an image of Franny. His breath caught and fluttered in his chest like a moth in a spider web. He told himself there was no connection between the mangled coyote and Franny’s predicament, but the more primitive part of his mind answered with a stream of terrible images: sharks killing each other in a blood frenzy; a rabbit swallowed by a snake; an animal in a trap chewing off its own leg to escape; drunken soldiers tearing a naked woman limb from limb. This was no good. He was slipping into the deep pit beneath shock. He needed to see a human face.

Alex was wiping his boots on a branch with long, slow strokes, like a barber sharpening his razor. Joseph cleared his throat, then coughed and sniffed, but Alex ignored him, slowly turning away to stand over Tyler’s body in blaring silence, the rifle hugged to his chest, the scene missing only a bronze commemorative plaque:
The Hunter Bids Adieu to a Faithful Companion
.

“I tried to give Tyler away last year,” he said. “I already miss him.”

He rested the rifle against the stump and crouched down, offering a final goodbye. His hand must have brushed the dead dog because he recoiled, the shock sending him scuttling backward, knees bent and arms extended as if he were performing a traditional dance. He regained his balance and held up his blood-coated fingers. His face was lit from below, making craters of his eyes and cheeks. He rubbed
his fingers on a branch, scraping the bark until his skin must have burned, and when he stood, the rifle slipped through his hand, the barrel pointing straight up at his head. Joseph winced, awaiting the gunshot and the splat of Alex’s brains against the burned tree. It might as well be Joseph’s finger on the trigger, Joseph’s teeth that had ripped out Tyler’s guts. He’d brought all this down on their heads.

“How did it come to this?” Alex said, his voice as denuded as the tree. “You think if you try hard enough … and then
this
.” He shook his head, holding a defiant posture against the shudders that struck his knees, hips, and shoulders as if they were the blast points of a building demolition. He scanned the bleak clearing, his face quivering with rage and bewildered shock. Was he blaming himself for letting the girls slip away on his watch? Alex believed it was a man’s duty to protect his family. Hadn’t he done that for Jane and the kids, and even for Martha and Franny, whom he’d included on every nature walk, every fishing trip, as though she was his own child? And what did he get for his sacrifice?