Harmless (22 page)

Alex should have pointed a gun at him years ago.

“There was that crazy experiment you tried when you were a kid,” Alex said, already laughing. “I’d call that idealism.”

Joseph couldn’t help it: he was flattered that Alex remembered the story. “I thought I’d figured out the secret to time travel. I just had to repeat my movements in the exact reverse order. If I walked ten steps across the room while swinging my arms, I would travel back in time by walking the same ten steps backward—same arm-swinging motion, same distance between steps. If I could just master my bodily movements in reverse, I’d move back in time to the original starting point, like rewinding a videotape.” Joseph spoke in a self-mocking tone, but he was proud of the ambitious boy he’d been. “The theory fell apart at the dinner table, when
I couldn’t work out the metaphysics of un-cutting my meat and rolling the peas back onto my fork.”

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d stuck with the plan?”

“If I’d figured it out, I’d start walking backward right now.” Joseph bit his lip, tearing the thread of conversation before it unspooled any further. “I tried to rewind time, but you actually joined the army,” he said, obeying a strong urge to flatter. “You weren’t messing around, man.”

“The army turned out to be just another
dick
thing. I liked parts of it—the discipline, the travel. I loved being in those old halls and barracks and pissing in a washroom the size of a three-bedroom apartment.”

“The officers must have liked you. They wanted you in the special forces.”

Alex didn’t answer.

“When you went on that survival retreat.”

“Of course. It was crazy: they wanted me to shoot a dog.”

Now Joseph knew why Alex’s story about the
C.O.
in the wilderness had sounded familiar—it was lifted from a movie. He couldn’t remember the title, but there was a platoon of soldiers on a special-ops training mission in the wilderness, and the hard-assed officer ordered the protagonist to shoot a dog. The soldier couldn’t pull the trigger, and so failed the test. Later, the platoon was attacked by werewolves.

What about Rebecca’s earring then? She might have deliberately dropped it as a signal, like that hobbit in
The Lord of the Rings
, but what were the chances of finding it in thousands of square miles of forest? Alex had probably
picked the earring off the floor that morning and put it in his pocket, and seeing Joseph weeping on the logging road, put it to work. Why hadn’t Alex just shot him at the logging camp? It was as good a killing site as any. No, for some reason he’d needed to keep Joseph moving, so he dropped the earring on the path, feigning curiosity when his flashlight beam picked out the shiny trinket, and then joy when he pretended to recognize it, rehearsing the story he was about to tell Joseph. Not that he needed to—Joseph had bought into the Hollywood Revenge Drama shtick from the first word. He was desperate for the call to paternal sacrifice, because what father doesn’t want to risk his life for his child? Dying for a child was easier than raising one.

Alex stopped to examine a rusting beer can. What would he pretend to find next? A shoe? Broken teeth? Maybe he hadn’t seen any war vets at all. Then why the
show
? Why the two-men-against-the-world speech? Why the gun?

Alex stomped down on the can, crushing it to the thickness of a coaster.

Joseph stopped as suddenly as though he’d bumped against a wall in the dark.

That’s when he knew—that’s when he knew
everything
.

It was Alex, not Rebecca and Franny, who’d watched Joseph and Jane fucking in the clearing. Alex who’d snapped a branch as he fled the scene.

Joseph’s calves went rubbery. He forced himself forward on locked knees until he could walk normally again.

“Are you all right?” Alex said.

“Just a little dizzy.”

Joseph saw how it must have happened: Alex fleeing
from the site of Jane and Joseph’s betrayal, tearing at the air like King Lear, riding a tsunami of rage across the fields. One type of man, catching his wife of sixteen years fucking a family friend, would have killed the lovers on the spot. Another—like Joseph—would have slunk back to the farmhouse and gorged on righteous anger and self-pity until Jane returned, then berated her with belligerent questions that built to a thundering guilt trip:
I’m so disappointed, Jane, this is so beneath you, so beneath us
. If that didn’t make her cry, his next move—the theatrical smashing of a family keepsake—surely would.

Not Alex. Back at the farmhouse—stoned, drunk, and blind with anger—he stalked through the kitchen pondering the important business of revenge. He noticed that the girls weren’t home. Maybe Rebecca did leave a note, passively sarcastic, informing the adults that she and Franny were at a party or in town with friends. Seeing an easy way to punish Jane, her lover, her good-time stoner friends,
and
his own ungrateful daughter, he dropped the note behind a cupboard or under the fridge, creating a believable miscommunication no one could trace back to him. Then he waited at the back fence, where he lobbed the news of the missing girls at Jane and her guests like a hand grenade, enjoying the sight of his betrayers spiralling into panic when the misplaced note went unfound and Franny didn’t answer her cell phone, all too happy to play an array of enabling roles—accuser, voice of reason, pot-stirrer—to accelerate the momentum.

Had more luck ever dropped into an angry man’s lap in one night?

Alex had been lying all along. The girls hadn’t gone missing: he’d made the whole thing up.

Joseph stopped putting the pieces together long enough to affirm the essential thing: Franny was not lost in the woods. She hadn’t been abducted or raped. She didn’t see her father fucking her oldest friend’s mother.

She was safe—precious Franny—safe,
unbroken
. This madness had not touched her.

Joseph shut his gaping mouth, smothering the mumbles of joy. He now knew what it meant to want to fall on his knees and thank God, for sparing his daughter and for granting him a second chance. To show Franny how much he loved her. To build on that knowledge every day.

He just had to get out of the woods alive.

Joseph faked a stumble, grazing the rifle at Alex’s side. If he got hold of the gun, he might get off one shot. If he missed, Alex would have no choice but to kill him. Joseph was a desk jockey with a patchy attendance record at the gym; Alex made heavy wooden furniture with his hands. The odds were bad.

“Do you need to rest?”

“I’m fine,” Joseph said. “We have to keep up the pace.”

He wondered if he sounded convincing, or if it even mattered anymore. His eyes fought to see into the moonless gloom beside the path. Large humps of quartz loomed into the light and there were boulders between the trees, the record of powerful and pointless geographical forces in flux millions of years earlier. The land was flat and rocky, the rocks suggesting the ruins of stone temples and sacrificial altars.

Wind whipped the treetops, making a noise of leafy tides, an atmospheric backdrop for the final stanzas of Alex’s “Appalachian Revenge Ballad.” The amorality of Alex’s plan, its petty, narcissistic cruelty, fell within Joseph’s imaginative powers, but his resolve to see the plan through was the stuff of song and legend. To silently watch as your wife fell apart, then abandon her to lament her firstborn child while you took her lover out to the woods to shoot him—to think that such men still walked among us!

Joseph was probably giving him too much credit. Somewhere in that first hour the plot had slipped from Alex’s control. Franny didn’t pick up her messages, Derek’s phone went unanswered, and after panic tipped Jane into a breakdown, the cops were called to search for two girls who weren’t really missing. Alex was looking at jail time and a wife who’d never forgive him.

Leave it to Joseph to call for a search of the woods, presenting Alex with an exit from the crime scene
and
an isolated location for an honour killing. When Alex dropped in the sighting of the war vet, Joseph ran with the implications and begged Alex to bring along the rifle. Perfect: he could accidentally shoot Joseph and they’d still call him a hero. You can lie on a couch for five years drinking beer, but risk your life to save a child and the world anoints you a great father. Only Julian had sensed, with a druggie’s rewired radar, that something didn’t add up. No wonder he’d told Joseph to keep the knife to himself.

Joseph dared a glance at Alex—his clenched, heavy jaw in profile, his bottom lip quivering like a leaf straining under the weight of raindrops. What was going through
his head? Did he have his own internal chorus of voices?

You should have shot him when you had the chance—he fucked your wife. Be a man!

You can still walk away from this. You haven’t reached the point of no return
.

They were passing through a stretch of trees, stunted by an infestation of wild grapevines as thick as ship’s rope, the trees bent and twisted as if collectively frozen in the midst of a violent attack. The trees were dead or dying, held in pose by the coiling vines, the branches fluttering against Joseph’s body like protuberances guiding him toward some acid-filled digestive sac. He wondered what everyone was doing back at the farm. They too had been locked tight inside Alex’s story, playing the roles he assigned them until the arrival of the girls set them all free. Franny was safe—she had to be—back at the farm drinking cocoa in her pyjamas, the cops long returned to the station.

Joseph could feel the words sliding into place like boxcars behind a powerful engine, a full cargo of confessions:
I fucked Jane. I know about your plan and don’t blame you for putting it into play. Can’t we just go home?

That wouldn’t cut it with Alex. He’d come to the end of what a man of conscience can accomplish with words. What had any of them done since they were sixteen but talk? And why would Alex trust Joseph with a secret that could destroy his reputation and his marriage? Without Jane and his kids, Alex would live out his days with the bluffers and conspiracy theorists who crowded his store on Friday nights. But if he walked out of the woods alone and stuck to his story, no one would ever know the truth. His
alibi was sound, and the cops, knowing Alex from town as a man’s man, would believe him. Those same cops did not read Joseph’s column.

They took a fork in the path that led them beside a marsh, the air buzzing with frog noise and loud plonks along the murky edges. Every few minutes Alex turned on his fading flashlight to sweep the area, revealing scenes too primitive to believe: pools of stagnant water emitting tendrils of mist; waterlogged trees that resembled the masts of sunken ships; hillocks rising from the muck like the backs of sea monsters. A cloak of self-consciousness had descended upon the two men. They’d gotten ahead of themselves, presumed too much of an old friendship struggling back to life in inhospitable terrain. Or so Joseph hoped as they passed into a stretch of spindly trees and massive rock faces. Were they still pretending to search for the girls? What about the commune—was it now a discarded prop? Alex was giving nothing away. He looked almost serene, as if he wanted them to step into the final act like gentlemen—
no hard feelings, old boy, the whole thing couldn’t be helped
.

“Alex, where are we going?”

“I want to show you something,” he said. The gun hung freely at his side, bobbing like a kid’s hockey stick. “We’re almost there.”

Was this how it would end: Alex pulling the trigger while Joseph took in a site of natural beauty? He’d been so open with Joseph a little while ago, like in the old days. Was it all a con to get Joseph’s guard down? Alex couldn’t be that good an actor.

Something caught Joseph’s eye. He turned on his flashlight and pointed it at a mound the size of a small house not far back from the path. “What’s that?” he said.

Alex stopped, his flashlight hovering on what appeared at first to be a pile of moss-covered boulders. Details emerged as they got closer: the boulder pile was actually a steep hill, and built into its base was a disintegrating wooden frame filled in with branches, boards, and other debris.

“It’s an abandoned mine,” Alex said. He sounded strangely shy but eager, like a boy revealing his trove of toy trains or science-fiction collectables to a new friend whose mutual enthusiasm is not guaranteed. “Probably a two-man operation. Semi-precious gems. There’s a lot of them around here, all closed up.”

Alex turned off his flashlight and rested the rifle stock on the ground, keeping one hand on the end of the barrel as he pulled a board free from the entrance, releasing a draft of cold, damp air that smelled of minerals.

Put the rifle down
, Joseph mouthed. He slipped the knife from his pocket, concealing it at his side. He’d go for the throat if he got a clear path, the stomach otherwise. Stab and withdraw, stab and withdraw. Rip off a few more boards, push Alex into the mine, leave him to bleed to death. They’d never find the body.

Joseph’s mouth was dry, the rush of blood in his ears louder than the wind in the trees. Could he kill a man? He had to, for Franny’s sake. He had to get out of here alive.

Alex raised himself onto his toes to peer into the mine, his fingertips the only thing holding the rifle up. Joseph gripped the knife harder and took a step forward.

Alex turned around and, seeing something in Joseph’s expression that either embarrassed or frightened him, carefully picked up the rifle, keeping the barrel pointed at the sky.

“Better get moving,” he said, making his way back toward the path. “We’ll be there soon.”

Joseph let a deep breath escape as he slipped the knife back into his pocket. He didn’t know why, but he believed Alex. This was all going to be over soon.

T
here was no commune, no country road, just another wall of trees, this one bordering a field of weeds and saplings, many growing out of stumps scorched by an old forest fire. They were close to the end. Joseph sensed it in Alex’s resolved posture and in his own straining nerves. He couldn’t wait much longer. He’d been pushed so far past any previous experience of exhaustion, shock, and physical pain that every thought and sensory impression glowed with hallucinogenic lucidity. Beneath this bright procession, a tremendous internal pressure forced his emotions to the surface with such force he felt them trying to escape through his skin. It was like trying to sweat stones. He was desperate for release. He wanted to talk to Franny—about the books they used to read together, about the cool, bleached-out techno music she loved, about anything she wanted. He would listen and ask the right questions.